Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age

The Convivial Society: Vol. 5, No. 12

Welcome to the Convivial Society. Since the last installment a number of you have signed up after finding your way to the newsletter through diverse and sundry digital paths. You can peruse the archive to get a sense of what to ordinarily expect, but I would describe the newsletter as a place to explore the meaning of technology and its relation to the moral life. Of course, you’ll note in a moment that the description doesn’t quite fit this particular installment. There is, of course, a great deal of pressure to speak to the moment, to offer a take, to explain why things are as they are, to predict what will happen. I'll let others, better equipped to do so, take up that task. Instead, I found some freedom to post again in the idea of presenting a collection of fragments which might aid our thinking along with a metaphor or two for how to conceive of their use. Perhaps they’ll be helpful to you as well.

Cheers,
Michael

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1. Some time ago, probably three years or so, the novelist Robin Sloan sent out a short post about arresting phrases or quotations, which he referred to as amulets. I could not track down the post, but I think I’m remembering this correctly. Such phrases or fragments, Sloan suggested, were charged with a certain power. Like an amulet worn around the neck, these words might somehow shield or guide or console or sustain the one who held them close to mind and heart. I also thought of it, and continue to think of it, as a matter of these verbal amulets shaping our perception of the world. They form our thinking, our feeling, and our imagination in such a way that they transform how we see the world around us and how we conceive of the range of actions available to us. Powerful stuff indeed. I was, needless to say, drawn to the metaphor.

2. In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil offers a good example of such an amulet:

“You could not be born at a better time than the present, when we have lost everything.”

Like so much of Weil’s writing, the line is provocative. It cries out for qualifications, but none are forthcoming. I find the line haunting. It yields a dark but hopeful, salubrious energy.

3. Before Sloan supplied me with the evocative and elegant metaphor of the amulet, I would think of how Hannah Arendt once described Walter Benjamin’s historical method (and, by extension, her own). Arendt argued that Benjamin had the rare capacity for what she called poetic thinking, which “works with the ‘thought fragments’ it can wrest from the past and gather about itself.” “Like a pearl diver,” Arendt continued,

“who descends to the bottom of the sea, not to excavate the bottom and bring it to light but to pry loose the rich and the strange, the pearls and the coral in the depths and to carry them to the surface, this thinking delves into the depths of the past—but not in order to resuscitate it the way it was and to contribute to the renewal of extinct ages. What guides this thinking is the conviction that although the living is subject to the ruin of the time, the process of decay is at the same time a process of crystallization, that in the depth of the sea, into which sinks and is dissolved what once was alive, some things ‘suffer a sea-change’ and survive in new crystallized forms and shapes that remain immune to the elements, as though they waited only for the pearl diver who one day will come down to them and bring them up into the world of the living—as ‘thought fragments,’ as something ‘rich and strange,’ and perhaps even as everlasting Urphänomene.”

Arendt believed that the tradition of western thought had been, by the mid-19th century, broken. Deploying a memorable metaphor of her own, she spoke about the consequent need to “think without a banister.” “I always thought that one has got to start thinking as though nobody had thought before,” she added, “and then start learning from everybody else.” But, we need not undertake such thinking without any resources from the past. We can dive for pearls.

4. Arendt herself supplies me with another amulet (or pearl, if you prefer). In The Origins of Totalitarianism, she makes this almost passing observation:

“Ideologies are never interested in the miracle of being.”

The miracle of being invites contemplation not action, reverence rather than exploitation. To be wholly uninterested in the miracle of being is to be disposed toward the wanton and indiscriminate use of power over reality so as to bend it toward one’s own purposes.

5. To ward off such spirits, we might also don another amulet crafted by Simone Weil:

"We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them but by waiting for them.”

We know all too well how to seize, but we must remember how to receive.

6. I have of late thought much these lines from the late Czech playwright, dissident, and president, Václav Havel:

“Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world [...] somewhere at the end of the long chain of events that gave rise to the problem at issue I have always found one and the same cause: a lack of accountability to and responsibility for the world.”

This particular amulet is indispensable because our techno-social environment is increasingly calibrated to obfuscate responsibility and outsource judgement.

7. I have for many years invoked this amulet from a sabbath poem by Wendell Berry. It is perhaps the briefest statement of my philosophy of technology!

“We live the given life, and not the planned.”

Bonus amulet also via Berry: “Thy life’s a miracle. Speak yet again.” That line is from “King Lear.” It is spoken by a loyal son, Edgar, who has convinced his blind, despairing father, Gloucester, that he has survived a great fall, one which the father had hoped would end his own life. In fact, Edgar, unrecognized by his father, had only pretended to lead Gloucester to a cliff’s edge. As Berry puts it, “This is the line that calls Gloucester back—out of hubris, and the damage and despair that invariably follow—into the human life of grief and joy, where change and redemption are possible.”

8. I am convinced that the cultivation of attention is one of the essential tasks before us. The 20th century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch has helped bring me to this conclusion. Here is one fragment to that effect:

“I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality. I believe this to be the characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent.”

Bonus Murdochian amulet with profound epistemological implications: “Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”

9. Finally, I’ll leave you with one last amulet for our times. It comes from Ivan Illich, whose words are often on my mind.

“Learned and leisurely hospitality is the only antidote to the stance of deadly cleverness that is acquired in the professional pursuit of objectively secured knowledge. I remain certain that the quest for truth cannot thrive outside the nourishment of mutual trust flowering into a commitment to friendship.”

“I do think that if I had to choose one word to which hope can be tied,” Illich explained on a separate occasion, “it is hospitality.”

I invite you, if you are so inclined, to share any amulets you’ve found especially useful in the comments, which are open to all for this post.

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P.S. A few notices that might be of interest. If you’ve found your way to Blue Sky, you can find me there at lmsacasas.bsky.social. Also, I had the pleasure of being interviewed by Elias Crim and Pete Davis for their recently launched show,

The Lost Prophets Podcast

. To be clear, I am not one of the titular lost prophets! But I do write about some of these same figures, including Illich. Lastly,

Nicholas Carr

has a new Substack, New Cartographies, which I gladly recommend to readers of the Convivial Society.