I was very interested in the subject of your post this week. I myself have been thinking a lot about evil as of late, having more conversations about evil, and reflecting on how potentially constructive it might be to make conceptions of evil more practical. There are big differences in where we're each coming from, and trying to go. I have been diving into the history of the three generations of my ancestors that practiced enslavement on occupied Choctaw land in what is now known as Mississippi. This exploration of Wetiko from Rowen White has been tremendously helpful in how I find myself framing this work (https://rowenwhite.substack.com/p/witnessing-wetiko-the-destructive). She makes the point that, from the perspective of the indigenous people who made early contact with western colonizers, the behavior of the colonizers made no sense from within their worldview. The only reasonable explanation was that the colonists had been possessed by Wetiko, or Windigo in in Ojibwa, a cannibalistic spiritual virus. "It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live. Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder."
As a spiritual practitioner who is interested in the spiritual aspect of healing from and transforming the legacies of white supremacy culture, I find Wetiko to be a critical missing piece in many anti-racism conversations, ranging from the wholly ineffective, intellect-based styles of intervention, to even the most skillful, embodied, cultural, and affective containers. I'm in a whiteness space right now that is being beautifully held, and I am noticing the reliance on the frame that "white people traded our humanity for privilege." My intellectual, political self nods in agreement, and my spiritual self senses the incompleteness of this statement. I love this piece from Christian Ortiz, where he makes plain the systemic reality in which these ancestors who "accepted bribes" lived, "I am going to reframe a lie we've been conditioned to believe. People racialized as white aren't the colonizer. They too have been colonized, and we've got to talk about it...To understand racial trauma in white people today, we must stop pretending whiteness is simply privilege. Privilege exists, yes, but underneath it lies grief. Underneath the wealth of whiteness is a poverty of memory. White people were not born into belonging. They were born into an extraction machine that demanded the forgetting of ancestry, ritual, and kinship in exchange for power. The pain of whiteness is that it was never meant to nurture, only to dominate. And domination cannot nourish the soul." https://christianortiz.substack.com/p/the-empty-trauma-of-whiteness-how?r=85ch1&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
So with this in mind, I think an exploration of how evil might be at play in our current conditions, could potentially be useful in a way that cracks open some of the anti-racist transformation so many of us keep hoping for and working towards. What if our ancestors weren't devils, but people who were infected by an evil, cannibalistic spirit? How might we think about our history and relate to the inheritances of whiteness? How might we go about stopping the transmission of the virus? How might we try to heal?
I am noting that Rowen White does not use the word 'evil' in her piece. I was talking with my beautiful friend and Birmingham poet laureate Salaam Green (https://salaamgreen.substack.com) and asked if she found herself in spaces where folks are talking about evil? She said, yeah, the Black church . Elements of the Black church have long understood and related to the violence of whiteness as evil. I'm not sure of the finer distinctions between "white people are evil" and "there is evil here, and this is what it looks like, how it manifests." It strikes me as important that it is not uncommon for both descendents of enslaved folks and indigenous descendents to relate to elements of whiteness and its destructiveness as evil, or at least spiritually malfeasant. What if we, as anti-racist white people, did, too?
This! Because at the end of the day we are participating in the multiple Spider-Man meme. So many of our stories and narratives rely on a simplistic moral clarity of good vs. evil, hero/angel vs. devil. Although it does remind me of one of the lessons from the TV show The Good Place. It’s not possible to be 100 percent good because of the interconnected you see in that passage from the Grapes of Wrath. Similarly, trying to advance a politic with the devil/evil completely absent is also not possible. The way forward requires grappling with complexity and nuance with grace and care.
Great essay, Brian, for delving into this polycrisis and its full complexity.
You finished with Le Guin, I start with her "To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
A few days ago, I wrote about the quotation by Gregory Bateson that seems to join us (probably not enemies), but we dont follow its rules.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”
And I added an addendum to the above quote (the devil 😁, "One of humanity's biggest problems right now is that we're playing the good-versus-evil game, and each of us thinks we're on the side of good."
I love your solutions with needs & a politics of belonging, I feel this is also my solution, 'needs are universal' (our belonging), but again, the devil, satisfiers are 'particular'. I've been researching human needs for a while and I feel that this is our politics/economics of belonging, but like ants are not individual, but a superorganism, we 'need' (no pun ) to break our individuality (countries) and become a big supeorganism in unity or just become more efficient on a big scale, i.e. create biorregions.
been thinking about domination and bullies, and you're right, the jump that's hard for us (due to our tribalistic instincts, perhaps) is to separate the bullying (the act of domination) from the person doing it.
describing your Devil realization in another way, it's "us vs. them" where "them" are the current bullies (people feeding the domination cycle), and our goal is not to attack them but to bring them into the "us" (help them become people who no longer seek domination) by helping them realize the "Devil" is a harmful idea that doesn't need to exist.
in practice, I'm not sure how to fight people currently helming systems of domination with belonging. I look forward to more of your thoughts!
Forgive me but I am struggling, as I agree with so much with what you write about and have made exactly the same points myself previously. Neither is this intended to be a critique of your piece but perhaps a working through of my own coming to terms. I say this as normally I would be jumping up and down shouting (to myself, at least) "Yes!" but strangely I have a more muted response.
First, I think you right. There is no Devil. I haven't believed in that concept for as long as I can remember. Duality is a little like quantum physics. You can appear to have two opposites then when you look a little closer it dissolves into something quite different and its quite possible that the act of looking was the prime factor. I have written about the political duality of left and right and how I feel that this has begun to look a bit thin as the only way to move forward becomes clear (to me) is to create a community and politics of care that doesn't require a name as it is our essence.
Iain McGilchrist's book, The Matter With Things, was a revelation and crystallised much of my scattered thinking. One of his observations was around duality and paradox and how rising to a higher vantage point than those presentations invite helps to resolve the apparent contradictions.
He also holds that the Truth is a journey in which we approach it bit by bit but never reach it and I think this may be the core of my hesitation. In naming fascism or neoliberalism or any other ill we perceive we are implicitly promoting an alternative while rejecting the perceive ill. This automatically creates a dualism. I have done it myself, often. It has a righteousness about it, a feeling that I am on the right side of the river. The bridge is a necessary accessory to this image but while we might describe the meeting in the middle what happens then? The implication is that we all go back to the 'right' side.
All this presupposes that we are land bound, that this our natural territory. What if it were not so? What if the river was our real home and we had just paused on one bank or the other for a little too long and come to mistake the solid ground as the source of our being instead of the river? That some of us had acquired a permanent tan to manage excessive sunlight on the one bank or possibly some of us lost the tan we were born with to make the most of the weaker rays in the lands we wandered into.
Difference has been the lifeblood of our burgeoning world. Not a combative difference but an expression of so many more possibilities. What if the sorry state we find ourselves in is not down to the dualism of authority and freedom, neoliberalism and communism or any other concept by which we define ourselves but the homogeneity that globalism has foisted on us.
I feel we all need to jump back into the river to find the unity of our origins and the mind-bending complexity and joy of the possibilities that it holds.
Thanks for engaging, Richard. I appreciate the grappling, and the apparent contradiction of labeling a problem (neoliberalism) with an implied solution (my way is better). For me the bridging metaphor is primarily about connecting to each other's humanity as means and ends we seek. And: I believe we can (and must!) evaluate different systems/behaviors against a core metric. Are they aligned with life? Do they build belonging? So I can empathize with the need neoliberalism is trying to solve (how do we meet our needs at scale without direct relationship) while believe that at its core in enshrines a logic of separation/domination that is ultimately self-destructive. I think we can be humble about specific solutions (I don't think socialism is the answer either; I decline to be bound by thesis/antithesis). And we can remain committed to the conditions solutions must meet. Kate Raworth has the simplest articulation of this in her coinage of "doughnut economics": meet everyone's needs without destroying the planet. THAT to me is a worthy inquiry :-)
I was very interested in the subject of your post this week. I myself have been thinking a lot about evil as of late, having more conversations about evil, and reflecting on how potentially constructive it might be to make conceptions of evil more practical. There are big differences in where we're each coming from, and trying to go. I have been diving into the history of the three generations of my ancestors that practiced enslavement on occupied Choctaw land in what is now known as Mississippi. This exploration of Wetiko from Rowen White has been tremendously helpful in how I find myself framing this work (https://rowenwhite.substack.com/p/witnessing-wetiko-the-destructive). She makes the point that, from the perspective of the indigenous people who made early contact with western colonizers, the behavior of the colonizers made no sense from within their worldview. The only reasonable explanation was that the colonists had been possessed by Wetiko, or Windigo in in Ojibwa, a cannibalistic spiritual virus. "It deludes its host into believing that cannibalizing the life-force of others (others in the broad sense, including animals and other forms of Gaian life) is a logical and morally upright way to live. Wetiko short-circuits the individual’s ability to see itself as an enmeshed and interdependent part of a balanced environment and raises the self-serving ego to supremacy. It is this false separation of self from nature that makes this cannibalism, rather than simple murder."
As a spiritual practitioner who is interested in the spiritual aspect of healing from and transforming the legacies of white supremacy culture, I find Wetiko to be a critical missing piece in many anti-racism conversations, ranging from the wholly ineffective, intellect-based styles of intervention, to even the most skillful, embodied, cultural, and affective containers. I'm in a whiteness space right now that is being beautifully held, and I am noticing the reliance on the frame that "white people traded our humanity for privilege." My intellectual, political self nods in agreement, and my spiritual self senses the incompleteness of this statement. I love this piece from Christian Ortiz, where he makes plain the systemic reality in which these ancestors who "accepted bribes" lived, "I am going to reframe a lie we've been conditioned to believe. People racialized as white aren't the colonizer. They too have been colonized, and we've got to talk about it...To understand racial trauma in white people today, we must stop pretending whiteness is simply privilege. Privilege exists, yes, but underneath it lies grief. Underneath the wealth of whiteness is a poverty of memory. White people were not born into belonging. They were born into an extraction machine that demanded the forgetting of ancestry, ritual, and kinship in exchange for power. The pain of whiteness is that it was never meant to nurture, only to dominate. And domination cannot nourish the soul." https://christianortiz.substack.com/p/the-empty-trauma-of-whiteness-how?r=85ch1&utm_medium=ios&triedRedirect=true
So with this in mind, I think an exploration of how evil might be at play in our current conditions, could potentially be useful in a way that cracks open some of the anti-racist transformation so many of us keep hoping for and working towards. What if our ancestors weren't devils, but people who were infected by an evil, cannibalistic spirit? How might we think about our history and relate to the inheritances of whiteness? How might we go about stopping the transmission of the virus? How might we try to heal?
I am noting that Rowen White does not use the word 'evil' in her piece. I was talking with my beautiful friend and Birmingham poet laureate Salaam Green (https://salaamgreen.substack.com) and asked if she found herself in spaces where folks are talking about evil? She said, yeah, the Black church . Elements of the Black church have long understood and related to the violence of whiteness as evil. I'm not sure of the finer distinctions between "white people are evil" and "there is evil here, and this is what it looks like, how it manifests." It strikes me as important that it is not uncommon for both descendents of enslaved folks and indigenous descendents to relate to elements of whiteness and its destructiveness as evil, or at least spiritually malfeasant. What if we, as anti-racist white people, did, too?
What a tour de force Brian - bravo
I could not agree with this more!
This! Because at the end of the day we are participating in the multiple Spider-Man meme. So many of our stories and narratives rely on a simplistic moral clarity of good vs. evil, hero/angel vs. devil. Although it does remind me of one of the lessons from the TV show The Good Place. It’s not possible to be 100 percent good because of the interconnected you see in that passage from the Grapes of Wrath. Similarly, trying to advance a politic with the devil/evil completely absent is also not possible. The way forward requires grappling with complexity and nuance with grace and care.
Wow--so much in here! Thanks Brian.
Great essay, Brian, for delving into this polycrisis and its full complexity.
You finished with Le Guin, I start with her "To light a candle is to cast a shadow."
A few days ago, I wrote about the quotation by Gregory Bateson that seems to join us (probably not enemies), but we dont follow its rules.
“The major problems in the world are the result of the difference between how nature works and the way people think”
And I added an addendum to the above quote (the devil 😁, "One of humanity's biggest problems right now is that we're playing the good-versus-evil game, and each of us thinks we're on the side of good."
I love your solutions with needs & a politics of belonging, I feel this is also my solution, 'needs are universal' (our belonging), but again, the devil, satisfiers are 'particular'. I've been researching human needs for a while and I feel that this is our politics/economics of belonging, but like ants are not individual, but a superorganism, we 'need' (no pun ) to break our individuality (countries) and become a big supeorganism in unity or just become more efficient on a big scale, i.e. create biorregions.
To see how human needs could be our economy/politics of belonging, my last essay on Substack gives this twist... at the end of Act Three. https://theexplorerisnottheexpedition.substack.com/p/exploring-the-map-of-life-the-compass
I hear you, distant brother
been thinking about domination and bullies, and you're right, the jump that's hard for us (due to our tribalistic instincts, perhaps) is to separate the bullying (the act of domination) from the person doing it.
describing your Devil realization in another way, it's "us vs. them" where "them" are the current bullies (people feeding the domination cycle), and our goal is not to attack them but to bring them into the "us" (help them become people who no longer seek domination) by helping them realize the "Devil" is a harmful idea that doesn't need to exist.
in practice, I'm not sure how to fight people currently helming systems of domination with belonging. I look forward to more of your thoughts!
Forgive me but I am struggling, as I agree with so much with what you write about and have made exactly the same points myself previously. Neither is this intended to be a critique of your piece but perhaps a working through of my own coming to terms. I say this as normally I would be jumping up and down shouting (to myself, at least) "Yes!" but strangely I have a more muted response.
First, I think you right. There is no Devil. I haven't believed in that concept for as long as I can remember. Duality is a little like quantum physics. You can appear to have two opposites then when you look a little closer it dissolves into something quite different and its quite possible that the act of looking was the prime factor. I have written about the political duality of left and right and how I feel that this has begun to look a bit thin as the only way to move forward becomes clear (to me) is to create a community and politics of care that doesn't require a name as it is our essence.
Iain McGilchrist's book, The Matter With Things, was a revelation and crystallised much of my scattered thinking. One of his observations was around duality and paradox and how rising to a higher vantage point than those presentations invite helps to resolve the apparent contradictions.
He also holds that the Truth is a journey in which we approach it bit by bit but never reach it and I think this may be the core of my hesitation. In naming fascism or neoliberalism or any other ill we perceive we are implicitly promoting an alternative while rejecting the perceive ill. This automatically creates a dualism. I have done it myself, often. It has a righteousness about it, a feeling that I am on the right side of the river. The bridge is a necessary accessory to this image but while we might describe the meeting in the middle what happens then? The implication is that we all go back to the 'right' side.
All this presupposes that we are land bound, that this our natural territory. What if it were not so? What if the river was our real home and we had just paused on one bank or the other for a little too long and come to mistake the solid ground as the source of our being instead of the river? That some of us had acquired a permanent tan to manage excessive sunlight on the one bank or possibly some of us lost the tan we were born with to make the most of the weaker rays in the lands we wandered into.
Difference has been the lifeblood of our burgeoning world. Not a combative difference but an expression of so many more possibilities. What if the sorry state we find ourselves in is not down to the dualism of authority and freedom, neoliberalism and communism or any other concept by which we define ourselves but the homogeneity that globalism has foisted on us.
I feel we all need to jump back into the river to find the unity of our origins and the mind-bending complexity and joy of the possibilities that it holds.
Thanks for engaging, Richard. I appreciate the grappling, and the apparent contradiction of labeling a problem (neoliberalism) with an implied solution (my way is better). For me the bridging metaphor is primarily about connecting to each other's humanity as means and ends we seek. And: I believe we can (and must!) evaluate different systems/behaviors against a core metric. Are they aligned with life? Do they build belonging? So I can empathize with the need neoliberalism is trying to solve (how do we meet our needs at scale without direct relationship) while believe that at its core in enshrines a logic of separation/domination that is ultimately self-destructive. I think we can be humble about specific solutions (I don't think socialism is the answer either; I decline to be bound by thesis/antithesis). And we can remain committed to the conditions solutions must meet. Kate Raworth has the simplest articulation of this in her coinage of "doughnut economics": meet everyone's needs without destroying the planet. THAT to me is a worthy inquiry :-)
Whether one needs a Devil depends on whether one is organizing a movement for a solution or fomenting a revolution. IMO