[00:00:08] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs and run through currents and thriving seas, winds blowing through breathing trees and strongholds on safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
[00:00:36] Speaker B: Hello k squid listeners. It's every other Sunday again and you're listening to sustainability now, a bi weekly case good radio show focused on environment, sustainability and social justice in the Monterey Bay region, California and the world. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz. Why do humans dominate nature anyway? And why have they done so? Is it because God told Adam and Eve to be fruitful and multiply and replenish the earth and subdue it, and have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the fowl of the air and over every living thing that moveth upon the earth? Is it because capitalism sees the world in terms of scarcity and commodification and must find monetary value in everything?
Some psychologists and philosophers have proposed that we seek to overcome our fear of death by controlling that nature to which we must inevitably return when we die. This is the argument made by James Rowe, associate professor of political ecology and cultural, social and political thought at the University of Victoria on Vancouver island, who's just published radical why transforming fear of death is politically vital. In the interest of full disclosure, I was chair of James's dissertation committee when he was a PhD student in UCSC's politics department during the aughts.
Professor James Rowe, welcome to sustainability now.
[00:01:59] Speaker C: Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.
[00:02:02] Speaker B: Well, why don't we begin with some background? You know, Vancouver island is a beautiful place and even though I live in Santa Cruz, I'm jealous. How did you end up there?
[00:02:12] Speaker C: Well, yeah, I grew up in Edmonton, Alberta, which was shortly home to the largest shopping mall in the world before the Mall of America displayed. And then now I imagine Dubai or somewhere else holds that great honor. Also the city closest to the Alberta tar sands, just to sort of help situate for your, for your listeners. So, grew up there, but then moved to Vancouver island or Victoria to do my undergraduate degree and then from there went to Santa Cruz where you were a wonderful dissertation supervisor.
And after my funding started to dry up a little bit in Santa Cruz, moved back to Victoria because I knew I could get teaching work there while finishing up my dissertation. And then a permanent job opened up and the rest is history. I will say that coming to Victoria after living in Edmonton was a lot easier than returning here after five years on the California coast. But it is beautiful here as well.
[00:03:15] Speaker B: What made you choose political theory as the focus of your research, I guess.
[00:03:24] Speaker C: Part of it is around experiences in the classroom. As a young person, I would say that I kind of had a conversion experience. I took a Saturday morning philosophy class as an undergraduate, and I sort of had a bit of a feeling like the breakfast club, that movie.
But it was this, like, almost religious experience where it was the first time that I got sort of encountered with some of the injustices that shape our world, you know, along the axis of race, class, gender, species.
And I just hadn't been asked, you know, grew up as a relatively privileged middle class white guy, hadn't been sort of faced up with some of these injustices until that moment, which is kind of shocking indictment of either me or also our education system up until then.
But, yeah, it was a really sort of transformative experience to encounter these injustices in that context. And so that was very inspiring to me. And to this day, I still sort of have a fidelity to the classroom as a transformative space, given my own experience there. But just sort of encountering the power of argument and philosophical debate and its capacity to actually fundamentally transform my orientation in the world sort of helped shore up a commitment to that as a vocation moving forward.
[00:04:51] Speaker B: Well, the title of your book is radical mindfulness. And for me, the mindfulness movement really involves a focus on the individual psyche. What do you mean by the term radical mindfulness and how does your conception differ from mine?
[00:05:08] Speaker C: Yeah, so I think you're right about the mindfulness movement does tend to be rather individualistic. And there's also a trend of corporations and other employers seeking to sort of paper over low pay or workplace speed up with mindfulness programs for their employees. And that's something that the author, Ron Purser, calls Mick mindfulness. So that's all real, that's all happening, and all deserving of critique. There are, however, political organizations starting to use mindfulness practices to improve their collective work. And so one example that actually geographically connects us would be stand Earth, which is an environmental justice organization that has offices in the San Francisco Bay Area and then also in Vancouver, near where I am up here. They do really excellent, again, sort of climate justice and forest work, but they weave mindfulness throughout all of their work. They begin all of their board meetings and all of their staff meetings with twelve minute sits or grounding practices. And the basic premise is, if you take some time to connect with yourself, you're going to be more effective at connecting with other people, whether that's your colleagues or potentially those you're negotiating with across, across the table, potential opponents as well. And so there is more of this integration that's starting to happen. And as part of the research for this book, I interviewed over 30 activists in New York City and also the Bay Area, which are two north american hotspots for this integration of mind body practice and politics. And they reported multiple ways that mindfulness practices can support their political work. And so they shared its usefulness in preparing for direct action, where you're going to deal with a lot of stress in the streets, whether it's from law enforcement or from counter protesters, fostering resilience in the face of potential burnout, dealing with trauma, and also just improving organizational effectiveness. And that stand out. Earth example is one where they just feel like their meetings run more smoothly if they take a little bit of time to connect with themselves before connecting with each other. For the most part, though, that activists I talked to reported that mindfulness can help them relate to the effects of unjust social systems, like burnout or trauma. And my argument in the book is a little different, is that mind body practices can actually not only do that, they can do that, but they can also address some of the causes of unjust systems. And as we'll probably talk a little bit more about, I argue that existential fear, particularly fear of death, plays an underappreciated role in shaping a will to supremacy across multiple axes of power. And the simple claim is that it's easy for us to feel small as humans in the face of death, and to compensate for that felt smallness by trying to impose ourselves on others, whether human or non human. And a version of that argument is found through throughout the buddhist tradition, but also among thinkers like James Baldwin, Simone de Beauvoir. And then there's even a growing body of social psychology, terror management theory, that's generating experimental evidence supporting this connection between existential fear and dominative behavior. And so, if existential fear helps shape dominative impulses, then we need practices that can transform it in ways that conventional political forms don't like. You can't organize a protest against unconscious fears of mortality. And so for me, radical mindfulness names mind body practices that specifically address existential fear, which I think is a sort of root cause of dominative power. And I think that one reason that injustice remains so persistent in our world is that we haven't been targeting a key driver, which is these sort of unconscious pulses of existential fear. And so the hope that I have in writing this book is that social movements can keep using mind body practices to cope with the effects of dominative systems. But again, my argument is for them to begin using these practices to also address the root causes as well.
[00:09:27] Speaker B: My memory is not what it once was, but I do seem to recall that your dissertation was on a different topic. Usually, professor's first book is some version or revision of her dissertation. I looked up the title, love the earth, Nietzschean Pathways for progressive politics. What was that about? And why did you write this book instead of publishing a revision of your dissertation?
[00:09:54] Speaker C: Yeah. So the question that brought me to graduate school is, like, a really basic one that, you know, I think a lot of undergraduate students, you know, find themselves asking each other late at night with the lava lamp flowing in the background, but it's like, why do humans keep doing messed up stuff to each other? And the more than human world, like, why does this bad stuff keep happening? Why does the cycle of violence just continue ad infinitum? And so that's really the biggest question that motivated me to pursue graduate studies. And then while doing those studies, the most compelling answer that started to emerge for me was one centered on existential fear and its role in shaping, again, a compository will to supremacy. That's an argument that resonated with my own embodied experience, and it just made sense to me, and it's one that I wanted to pursue further. And so, while in graduate school, I encountered that in the work of thinkers like Frederick Nietzsche and then people he influenced, like Georges Bataille. And so that was, you know, one of the questions that I grappled with in the dissertation. But, you know, if we accept that argument, then where does it leave us politically if existential fear plays a really important role in shaping dominative systems? And that, again, conventional political forums can't do much about these unconscious impulses that are below the skin. And so that's what pushed me towards an interest in mind body practices, which, again, moves beyond the dissertation and trying to make sense of, like, okay, if this is the diagnosis, you know, what's the appropriate prescription? And so the book is an extension of the dissertation, and it brings together all the different thinkers I'm aware of who have made this connection between existential fear and domination. And this isn't a new argument at all, but it's an argument that keeps getting forgotten since we live in a culture that doesn't like thinking about or talking about death.
What is new about the book, I would say, is that it's the first time that all these different thinkers have been brought together under one roof. And put into conversation with each other. And so in the dissertation, I was focused primarily on sort of euro american existential thinkers, but in this book, I'm putting them in the conversation with indigenous thinkers, with buddhist thinkers, with black radical thinkers, all those who I've encountered who have worked with this connection that I'm interested in. And then the book is also novel, I hope, in the way that it does propose a path forward, which is to begin incorporating mind body practices into social movements that are already trying to transform social structures.
But then this way, for me, we can begin targeting all the drivers of domination, not just institutional, but also existential, because I think it's that existential piece that hasn't been attended to as much as it could be on the left to date.
[00:12:56] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Professor James Rowe from the University of Victoria on Vancouver island. And we're talking about his new book, radical why transforming fear of death is politically vital. And we've just been basically talking about how James came to write this book. I think you've used this term existential fear and existential fear of death a number of times, and it might be helpful if you elaborate on what that means in the book. It's experienced individually, and yet it is something that's produced, I think, collectively or socially or historically. Use the term affectively, not effectively, but affectively. So maybe you can explain what it is and where it comes from, particularly in Judeo christian society, which is what we are.
[00:13:55] Speaker C: The basic argument in the book is that it's really easy for us humans to feel small in the face of this mysterious existence that will one day return us all to dust.
What does it say about us that we die? That finitude seems to bespeak some kind of weakness, fragility, incompleteness, lack. But because we're a proud creature, I think we resist these impulses that rise up below the skin. And because we can't beat death, we try to gain power over each other and the more than human world as a way of feeling the strength and worthiness that the natural world appears to deny us. And much of this happens unconsciously. It's not a rational calculation that we're making, but death can be quite terrifying. And so it makes sense that we stop making sense in the face of it. And then what I think happens is that this will to supremacy that that emerges in response to unmetabolized existential anxiety. And that's a really crucial point, which is, I think that all humanity is subject to this. But then different cultures have devised cultural resources for transforming it. And so we're not forced into compensating for these feelings by puffing ourselves up and imposing ourselves on others. Cultures have devised stories and mind body practices, ritual and ceremony to help transform these fears such that they can be morphed into an actual affirmation of a life that does ultimately end, which then can then promote more gracious, generous behavior towards others. But without those interventions, I do think that a will to supremacy is what emerges. And then that can aggregate and sediment into social structures. And so that's the kind of connection between the individual experience of existential fear. And then the aggregation and sedimentation into structure. That said, those structures come to develop their own autonomous momentum. And so I think that, like, greedy behavior is fueled by. So greediness at like, the individual level is fueled by existential fear and a compensatory will to supremacy. But then the profit motive has obviously been institutionalized such that publicly traded companies now will get sued if they don't maximize shareholder value by squeezing employees for lower wages. And so meditation alone is not going to undo greedy behavior. That's why I advocate for incorporating mind body practices into social movements that are trying to change institutions so that we can address the existential and institutional drivers of domination. And so far, the left has been really good at targeting the institutional side of things. But I think the reason that dynamics or relations of supremacy and domination continue to persist is that we aren't targeting these existential fears that just feed endless fuel to these relations of supremacy. And that's why I think we need to start targeting our energies in that realm.
[00:17:09] Speaker B: Yeah, why don't I read this? This is from Lynn White. And I wanted to come back to talk about his essay a little bit later, but he writes in this, I think it's 1967 essay, the artifacts of a society, including its political, social and economic patterns, are shaped primarily by what the massive individuals in that society believe at the subverbal level, about who they are, about their relations to other people and to the natural environment, about their destiny. How do we learn about these things? I mean, you know when you talk about transmission down through the generations in a way, right? Transmissions about how the world works, what is right, how you should behave, what you should believe. But we're born blank slates. So how is it that we acquire this existential anxiety and fear of death and learn then how, in our society we're supposed to respond to it?
[00:18:05] Speaker C: No, it's a good question. I think White was ahead of his time to focus in on that subverbal or unconscious level where there's a whole bunch of work happening that happens beyond sight and sometimes conscious understanding.
That's why I'm interested in mind body practices that can hopefully target that subverbal realm, which I think is quite determinative and important in terms of how it is that we're born into this world as blank slates and yet sort of quickly, perhaps, begin rehearsing some of the sedimented cultural patterning that comes before us. I think it's a combination of just that we're born into different circumstances where narratives are hegemonic or predominantly. They start to sort of live through our bodies, but with basic anxiety or existential fear. Like, I accept the buddhist proposition, which is that, you know, we experience this at birth and we experience it every living moment of our lives. There's a kind of discomfort in the fact that we are these fragile beings. Also, from a buddhist perspective, they would argue that the self that we create to cope with our existential anxieties is itself illusory and that itself produces its own anxiety because our very selves are not real and at some level we know it, and that also produces some anxiety. But again, this is, I think, a fundamental part of our humanity. But Buddhism is one tradition among many says that we're not fated to this. This is a habit that we tend to move towards and then sediment. But we can intervene, we can change this patterning. We don't have to be anxious about our existence on this earth. We can deploy practices like meditation that can help us make friends with a life that ultimately ends and also make friends with the fact that we aren't the singular, autonomous selves that we think ourselves to be. We are aggregates and aggregates that will dissolve back into the primordial mass that new life will then emerge from upon our own demise. And so we can make friends with the situation that we find ourselves in. But without narratives and practices to transform some of these anxieties, they will run roughshod over us. And again, I think it's both a product of cultural patterning, but also I think it is a human inheritance to feel a little bit of anxiety about this mysterious world that we have been born into.
[00:20:54] Speaker B: James, you've talked a lot about mindfulness and meditation and coming to awareness in the self about the nature of this anxiety and fear of death and the structural injustices, and yet it's happening only inside the individual's mind. And the structures are broad and weight bearing and heavy, and we encounter them every day. So how do you transfer this individual awareness into the outside world and into social act?
[00:21:29] Speaker C: Yeah, I think that's a great question, and I'm going to actually answer it with a story. And it's a story from the buddhist tradition itself, and it's the story of Maha Prajapati, who was the Buddha's aunt, but also his mother, given that his birth mother died seven days after he was born, he was raised by his aunt, Mahaprashupati. So anyway, the Buddha, as according to the story, achieves enlightenment under the Bodhi tree and begins teaching and attracts a number of students. And his aunt, Maha Prajapati, sees that there seems to be some genuine peace and tranquility, that these practices are yielding. And she approaches the Buddha and asks if she, as a woman, can join the sangha, the. The community that he's created. And, you know, this is four years after his enlightenment, and his answer is, nah, no, probably not a good idea for women to engage in this practice. And according to the tradition, Mahapraja PD basically engages in a forum of what we can call a form of feminist protest, where she begins following the Buddha around alongside a number of her own compatriots who are interested in joining the sangha. They follow him along as he's teaching. They shave their heads, they don robes. It's a kind of form of protest. And after multiple weeks of this, finally Mahapraji pati, speaking to one of the Buddha's attendants, is able to convince him to go speak to the Buddha. And Ananda asks the Buddha, he says, like, are women capable of enlightenment? And the Buddha says, yeah, yeah, yeah, they're totally. They are. And then Ananda says, well, like, maybe you should let them into the sangha, like Mahaprajapadi did raise you. There's all that reproductive labor that even allows you to be here. Maybe you should should let her and other women in. And so finally, the Buddha does relent. For me, that story is really powerful, because it reveals that even after enlightenment, the Buddha wasn't able to make a decision that would cut against the patriarchal grain of his time. He was born at a moment in northern India where patriarchal social relations were hegemonic. Those had already shaped his being. And despite making friends with his impermanent self and becoming a more generous being, those patriarchal relations were still alive in his organism, and that led him towards making an unjust decision. And so for me, that points to why we need to incorporate these practices or join these practices with social movement efforts that are targeting those patterns, social structures that then bear down on us on a daily basis. But the story also shows that the Buddha did ultimately make a decision that cut against some of his defensive patterning. He ended up making a good call. He had to be pressured both by political protests, but arguably some of his own self calling. Cultivation opened them up to make a decision that was actually quite contrarian to the time, to really push against patriarchal conditioning. And so for me, that story is a really effective or helpful way to clarify both the power of these practices around self individual cultivation, but also their limits, and how they have to be joined with social movement activity. Which is why, again, I make that argument for weaving these practices into movements as a sort of first step towards broader cultural change, and that I think they can actually just make movements more effective. But then also movements have long been kind of prefigurations or incubators for new social relations. And so we can make social movements a kind of prefiguration of the new culture that's able to affirm life despite its end, then hopefully that can radiate out into the political mainstream. That's the kind of theory of change that I'm putting forward.
[00:25:18] Speaker B: How does Buddhism and maybe some of the other cultural ways of being in the world deal with that anxiety and that fear of death?
[00:25:26] Speaker C: As I show in the book, many cultures have recognized how unaddressed existential fear can feed into this dangerous will to supremacy. And that's why they developed cultural resources like ritual, ceremony, meditation to counter that tendency. And that can help members metabolize that anxiety into an affirmation of life. And so again, the Buddha invented meditation as a cultural technology for transforming our fear of impermanence, where if you sit and make friends with the present moment and its fleetingness, that's a way of making friends with the ultimate impermanence of life. The Haudenosaunee, or the Iroquois invented the thanksgiving address, which is this beautiful oration done before all of their important gatherings. And it cultivates gratitude for all components of life, despite the fact that this life will one day end. And so it's very attentive to the fact of mortality, but it asks us to embrace life despite that. And again, the sort of theory is that that embodied gratitude can counter existential resentment, that left unaddressed will fuel bad behavior. During my research, I interviewed the Erika scholar Michael Yellow Bird, and he told me about some rituals that were more predominant before colonization intensified in the euro Americas for his people. And these are what he called rehearsals for death, where in their community, they would, as part of the ritual, they would assign one of the community members to be deaf. They would go out into the hills and paint themselves up in such a way that would sort of resemble what people would consider death. And then they would actually come and visit the community. So death would actually be there in physical personification, and that would allow people to encounter death in full force. And then, of course, the person would leave, and then elders would engage with the community around. What was that like for you? What do you think you learned from that experience? And yellow Bird likened or connected this appreciation for with the generosity that he's encountered in his community, and that still persisted despite, again, colonial disruption. And so there's lots of different ways of metabolizing existential fear and short circuiting this will to supremacy.
I focus a lot on Buddhism in the book because it offers narrative and embodied resources that can be used, I think, with less danger of cultural appropriation. Like, it would be irresponsible for me to start doing the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address without some kind of invitation.
Obviously, hope indigenous people keep, like, resurging their earth honoring cultures, and settlers can learn from that resurgence. But in the meantime, I think Buddhism offers resources for settler folk to undo their existential fear. Buddhism is ultimately a missionary religion, even if it's less focused on conversion than is Christianity. But because it's a missionary tradition, that means that its resources are more ethically accessible in settler colonial contexts, like Canada, the US, where many of us have been disconnected from our own ancestral earth honoring traditions because of colonialism, whether it's within Europe or then being exported around the world.
[00:28:49] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm your host, Ronnie Lipschitz, and my guest today is Professor James Rowe of the University of Victoria on Vancouver island. And we've just been talking about the ways that other cultures and belief systems look at death and deal with the existential fear of death, which is an underlying theme of James's recent book. Why don't we turn to human supremacy?
One of the chapters of your book is devoted to human supremacy, and in this case, it's basically supremacy over other species and the earth more broadly. So why do humans seek to dominate nature? And maybe you could bring in Lynne White's article at this point as well, tell our listeners what he argued, and then present your analysis of this will to supremacy over nature.
[00:29:43] Speaker C: So Lin White's essay, the Roots of our Ecologic Crisis, 1967, is a crucial document in the history of environmental studies as a discipline, but also the broader environmental movement as well. His basic argument is that Christianity, he himself was a Christian, has conditioned an enduring human supremacy in the Euro Americas. And so there's the famous phrase attributed to God himself in the book of Genesis of be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it. Have dominion over every living thing that moves on the earth. And so White argued that reversing environmental damage required us to challenge our own internalized human supremacy inherited from these traditions. And I think he's right about that. I don't think, however, that he fully explained why human supremacy remains such an attractive value in the euro Americas and beyond. And so the argument I pursue is that, is that human supremacy helps to soothe deep anxieties about our ultimate worthlessness in the face of death. And not to say that we are worthless in the face of death, but I think that we have cultural inheritance that bend us in that direction. The philosopher Hegel called death the absolute master, which is to suggest that we are all slaves before it. And so, as proud creatures, we resist that, and we mount a slave rebellion. And gaining control and dominance over nature is mistaken as freedom. And for me, that perspective, I think, makes deeper sense of why human supremacy has been such a persistent force in. In the Euro Americas and beyond. And so, yes, Christianity is an important cultural set of narratives and practices that have conditioned that. But I think that there's existential fear, not only unmetabolized existential fear not only helps shape those christian stories, but it also helps make sense of why this remains so persistent into the present.
[00:31:48] Speaker B: How is this, then, addressed in these other societies?
[00:31:52] Speaker C: Well, I think, again, we'll turn to practices like the Haudenosaunee Thanksgiving address, where they go through and name all the different elements of creation of the water and wind and winged creatures and creatures of the sea, and offer gratitude for all of these different components of our reality, and then also articulate a kinship relation where we're not in a position of dominance vis a vis these other beings. We're in a reciprocal kinship relations. So the term that anthropologists use to make sense of most indigenous cosmologies is a kincentric worldview, which is to say that our relationship with the more than human world is one of kin. We're on the same plane. And I think that that non supremacist relationship with the more than human world is at least partly conditioned by practices that help transform that basic anxiety or existential fear that often leads us to want to position ourselves as superior, as a way of soothing some of those underlying anxieties. But if we're able to soothe them without a move to dominance, then we're opened up to be much more generous and open and non defensive in our counters with each other and the more than human world. And so I think the fact Robin Kimmerer makes this generalization that I think holds, which he says that despite all of their differences, indigenous peoples all maintain a culture of gratitude. And that's a really important distinction, I think, from settler and euro american traditions, where oftentimes it's actually a culture of resentment and a culture of fear. And I think that sort of following suit of a number of these indigenous nations that work to this day to reproduce a culture of gratitude, and then that itself conditions relations of reciprocity with the more than human world. I think that's something that we need to be learning from.
[00:34:04] Speaker B: Inevitably, these societies do experience what we in the west call natural disasters. How do they confront or explain something like that from the perspective of gratitude?
[00:34:18] Speaker C: It's a really good question, because you mentioned earlier that the title of my dissertation was love the earth, which is a quote from Nietzsche. You could see that as being like a saccharine bumper sticker that you might see on someone's bumper sticker or someone's bumper on the west coast here that we both share. But the reality is that loving the earth is actually.
That's a hard endeavor, because the earth deals us some pretty difficult cards. There are natural disasters, there is pain, there is suffering, there is death.
And it's the same with the indigenous cultures that I've looked at, is that they understand that the conditions we find ourselves in can be very difficult and can include things like disaster. But we have to make the choice to affirm, and it's actually a really brave and strong choice. But we have to affirm this life, and we have to make friends with this life, despite the challenges that it brings forth. And so that's part of what the Thanksgiving address is all about, is that it's a recurring choice, despite the challenges that we face, to choose gratitude versus resentment. And it's not to say that there isn't a whole bunch of data before us that where it would be reasonable to choose resentment, because there is, like there's parts of the. Of existence that are really difficult, and yet we do have a choice. We have freedom to, again, pick a path of resentment, or we can pick a path of gratitude, and the latter one is going to bear more fruit, but it's not easy to do.
[00:35:52] Speaker B: Why isn't that a form of fatalism?
[00:35:55] Speaker C: How so? Explain.
[00:35:56] Speaker B: Well, in our society, there are people who say, well, God's will, or it was fated to be so. So that rather than expressing any kind of gratitude, we don't, as a rule, do that. Right. And many people say, well, it was destined to happen that way. You can't do anything about it, so you might as well suffer. How does this differ, this view differ from what you've just been talking about?
[00:36:24] Speaker C: Well, I guess maybe there I'll turn to Buddhism, which is a tradition and practice that I have more experience personally with. But, you know, part of that tradition is it asks you to. To sit in meditation and to encounter reality for yourself and see what you find out. And the narratives that you're offered is that you're going to find suffering, but if you sit with it long enough, you'll also find what the buddhist teacher Trigem trink called just basic goodness. That there's a richness to life that's coursing through our very bodies, and that even sadness, if you sit with sadness long enough, that even sadness actually feels kind of good. It's paradoxical. But there's, like, a tenderness to sadness that if you really connect it versus repressing it, it's not a terrible feeling. There's a richness to even sadness. And so the point is, is that actually just engaging with reality in its fullness. Of course you're gonna. There's darkness. There's darkness. You're gonna encounter darkness. There's nighttime, like, of course, but there's also simultaneously richness as well. And so that's what we're being asked to do, is to encounter that fullness. And then the instruction is to choose gratitude. And then, from my experience, like, from an embodied perspective, like, when you meditate long enough, like, you just start feeling good, it's sort of hard to explain exactly, sort of in terms of all the different steps, why it works out that way. But you start feeling good, and suffering begins to lessen. And so then the capacity to choose gratitude becomes a lot easier. And so, for me, I don't know about fatalism, but it's just about trying to encounter reality in its fullness. And from a buddhist perspective, reality is more good than bad.
[00:38:15] Speaker B: Yeah. You raised this interesting point earlier, which maybe you can pursue and maybe also related to. To nature, to the rest of the world. You said in Buddhism, ourselves are not real. All right, and what do you mean by that?
[00:38:30] Speaker C: Yeah. Well, we have this. We move around with a kind of assumption that we are these sort of unitary, autonomous beings that I am perfectly distinct from you or from that crow that just flew across the sky? And again, from a buddhist perspective, that attachment to a unified, autonomous self is itself compensatory. It's an effort to sort of armor ourselves against the fullness of reality. And part of the reality is that we are actually just an assemblage. You know, we're an aggregation of different energies and forces, and we're a multitude. We're not a singular being. And we're also utterly dependent on the more than human world, whether it's the air that we're breathing, the water that we're drinking, the food, or the billions of bacteria that allow us to digest our foods. We're an orchestration more than a solo performance.
And I think we're resistant to acknowledge that, because to acknowledge it is to acknowledge our dependence on the more than human world. And to be dependent is to be subject, and we don't like that. We would much prefer to be independent and buffered from those perceived dependencies, which is why we have this, again, attachment to the unified self. And from a buddhist perspective, that sort of partitioning of ourselves all into our discrete billiard balls causes chaos, because it leads us to not recognize how enmeshed we are with each other and to not consider the common good and to instead pursue our own egoic needs and tendencies, which then again, can aggregate into all kinds of collective nastiness.
[00:40:26] Speaker B: You're listening to sustainability now. I'm Ronnie Lipschitz, your host, and my guest today is Professor James Rowe from the University of Victoria on Vancouver island. And we've been talking about how our society, our culture and other cultures regard ourselves as autonomous individuals. But other cultures see individuals as, I think, embedded in a very sort of complex set of relationships. And that, in a sense, the mind or the self is constituted by those relationships rather than by necessarily autonomous biochemical processes going on in the mind and the body. Is that a fair way of putting. Yeah, putting the argument, because, I mean, ultimately, I'm a staunch materialist, but that actually reminds me, of course, as I guess, a radical theorist. Inevitably, Karl Marx shows up in the book, and you do write about some things that he thought about that appeared in his notebooks. But how would. How would a marxian reading of all of this sound? What would it look like for Marx.
[00:41:38] Speaker C: And for Marxists writ large, like, obviously, the materialist analysis of history and the contemporary wants us to look to structure and particularly economic relations of those who hold economic power as the sort of determining force of the society that we live in and the culture that we live in. And that's a position that I completely abide by.
I don't disagree. My sort of pushback against Marx and Marxism is that it doesn't really have a robust explanation for. For bad behavior, bad human behavior. It points to structure. And it says if we just change the structure, then better impulses will arise. And that might be the case. But, you know, we also have lots of examples of efforts towards socialism sort of running awry.
And I think part of that is because we do have to attend to the human heart and we do have to attend to some of these existential anxieties that can run roughshod over our interpersonal engagements. And so that's why, again, I'm looking to combine structural or marxist analysis with work that is attentive to what Lynn White called the subverbal realm, the unconscious realm, and how some of the anxieties that live there, if they aren't transformed, and again, Marxism doesn't provide us with resources, I don't think, for that transformation, then these impulses are going to rear themselves and they're going to, for me, feed endless fuel to relations of supremacy. And so that's the tension that I'm wanting to work with. But I support the position that not only structure, but that also those who hold economic power has a massive force in sedimenting our relations.
[00:43:46] Speaker B: Well, let me pursue that just a little bit, because of course, what I am going to say to you is a sort of street Marxism rather than a very sophisticated version. But one of the elements driving marxist theory is this idea, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, that nature is a resource to be transformed into tools and used to improve the human condition. Right? So nature becomes an object rather than a subject. And you've been speaking, I think it's fair to say, of nature as subject, as not just simply something to be manipulated, but something to be appreciated, lived with, in fact, integrated with the human psyche, I suppose, is what you would say. How do you reconcile that tension?
[00:44:37] Speaker C: Well, I guess for me that's for Marxists themselves. To reconcile is to.
I'm relating to a different orientation that does, as you say, encounter nature as a subject. And of course, like Christianity itself, every tradition is polyvocal. And there's so many different Marxisms afoot and there's so many different Marx's as well, depending on whether you're looking at early Marx or later Marx. But there is definitely an inherited existential resentment, I would say alive in Marx, inherited from Hegel, and also a human supremacy that's also alive in his writings.
And that's just inherited from the euro american tradition that he came out of. And that's something that can be dealt with from within the marxist tradition, or it can be criticized from. From the outside. But I don't think it's a fatal blow by any stretch of the imagination to the tradition. But I do think that it's a component that needs to get addressed.
[00:45:42] Speaker B: We're running out of time, but I want to raise with you a proposition that I think is grounded in a kind of materialistic perspective, and that is that life is everywhere and death is an illusion, it seems to me, articulated in a particular way that tries to, I don't know exactly, give the psyche some role in coming to terms with that. And as I've been thinking about this, going to be 72 in July, and so I am reckoning with my own mortality. It's not that humans don't die, but that in death they return to the earth from whence they came, and they nourish new life in the soil. And that soil is being transformed from one material state to another. And this has been going on for half a billion years and will presumably go on into some indefinite future. I mean, do you have any thoughts about that? Because that doesn't really rely. It relies on how we think about death, but it doesn't rely on any kind of elaboration on that notion that death is an end.
[00:46:55] Speaker C: Yeah, no, I agree completely with that formulation. I think that death is a transformation more than a finality.
We can understand that rationally at the conscious level, but I think still holds a lot of unconscious fear and resentment. And that's why I recommend mind body practices like meditation, ritual, ceremony. There's increasing interest in psychedelics as a way of relating to some of these anxieties to begin embodying a deep affirmation of a life that will end, thereby making way for more life. And so that sort of materialist formulation that you provide, I think that that's a kind of narrative resource that can help quell some of our anxieties. But without embodied practices to speak to that subverbal realm and soothe some of those subcutaneous impulses, I think that they will persist. And so that's why I have the focus on mind body practices to engage with that deeper transformation.
[00:47:56] Speaker B: I mean, it's a sort of irrational argument, right? And it's very difficult to convince yourself that, you know, if you believe something deeply, that to believe rational arguments. So, I mean, I understand that. One last question, James. Are you being an idealist in this book?
Are you now or have you ever been?
[00:48:19] Speaker C: Well, I guess, you know, like it. It depends what you mean. If you mean that I'm forwarding a hopefully optimistic and utopian vision, then I'd say, then yes. Like calling for us in the euro Americas to move away from cultures of greed to cultures of gratitude. That's a big idealistic utopian vision.
The near term proposal, again, is for getting us to begin incorporating mind body practices into social movements so they can begin addressing both the existential and the institutional drivers for injustice. If, however, you mean that I'm prioritizing ideas as a driving force of historical change and the sort of marxist critique, I'd say maybe, but not quite like, I do think that culture and the stories we tell about the world have a big impact. And so that would be to suggest that ideas do matter. But culture lives in the body. It lives in the material body. And that's why I think mind body practices are politically vital. They can begin transforming the unmetabolized existential fear that feeds endless fuel to relations of superiority. And so I think that that focus on embodied transformation kind of begins to undo the idealist materialist binary a little bit. But there's ways that. Yeah, I think that the book could be leveled with a critique of both forms of idealism. I think that that wouldn't be entirely an unfair line of argumentation.
[00:49:53] Speaker B: Okay, well, listen, thank you, James, for being my guest on sustainability now.
[00:49:57] Speaker C: Yeah, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure and honor to be here.
[00:50:01] Speaker B: Yeah. And it's been a very thought provoking and stimulating conversation.
[00:50:04] Speaker C: Well, death is always a joy to talk about, isn't it?
[00:50:08] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:50:09] Speaker C: I guess we should talk about taxes next time.
[00:50:12] Speaker B: You've been listening to an interview with James Rowe, associate professor of political ecology and cultural, social and political thought at the University of Victoria on Vancouver island. He's just published radical mindfulness, why transforming fear of death is politically vital. If you'd like to listen to previous shows, you can find
[email protected] sustainabilitynow, as well as Spotify, Google podcasts, and Pocketcasts, among other podcast sites. So thanks for listening, and thanks to all the staff and volunteers who make K squid your community radio station and keep it going. And so, until next, every other Sunday. Sustainability now.
[00:50:57] Speaker A: Good planets are hard to find now. Temperate zones and tropic climbs, and not through currents and thriving seas and winds blowing through freezing trees, strong ozone and safe sunshine.
Good planets are hard to find. Yeah.
