Starlink is a point of departure to consider the costs of the unrelenting drive toward artificial illumination, a technological development most of us now take for granted.
Thanks for this very thought-provoking piece. Incidentally, I have just recently read another title, Clark Strand’s meditation, Waking Up to the Dark, that needless to say resonates with what you’ve written. A few excerpts:
“As modern people, we have favored the lit foot ... so much that we are now effectively hobbled by artificial light. It alters our consciousness, and our consciousness reciprocally alters the world. Driven by the illusions of prosperity and progress, we walk the same sad circle from one day to the next, only to die exhausted in the end.” (echoes of Teresa Brennan’s Exhausting Modernity…)
… “Most of us believe our lives will be real when we have shone enough light on them, but that is not the case. The more light – the more focused and rapt our attention – the more we send the shadows flying, and the less we feel alive. What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to consciousness with light.”
… “Conservative social critics have sometimes lamented the loss of a religious consciousness in the age of TV, Twitter, and the Internet. But they are coming into the argument far too late in the game. That loss was already inevitable once the incandescent bulb came into common use. That was the real tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the twentieth century – from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams. For all these spring directly from the overflow of human consciousness, for which the flood of light is both the metaphor and the means.”
This leads to his bold claim (and one that in its simultaneously sweeping but also simplistic nature I take some issue with):
“The last true revolutionary act left to human beings in the twenty-first century is to turn out all the lights. Other acts are possible – acts we may call revolutionary – but they do not meet the criteria of the word as it must necessarily be interpreted today. Nothing short of turning out the lights will lead to an overturning of the endgame global system that now has us in its thrall.
… To turn out the lights is to turn over the human mind – to overthrow it, as it were, so that we can get some perspective on what we truly want and need, so that we can realize that human consciousness is not the sine qua non of reality…. I say that darkness is the last revolutionary act because it is the only act that effectively overturns human consciousness…. Consciousness is the problem underlying all others, which, if it is not addressed, will only continue to manifest further problems – one after another – until it has completely destroyed our world.”
If “turn out all the lights” was meant as a synecdoche for “stop the industrial-electrical economy in its entirety”, the tall claim might be warranted, but on re-reading, it seems like he really does mean, literally, turning lights off, mainly on an individual level, which is of course far from revolutionary.
Whether “consciousness is the problem underlying all the others” and artificial lighting’s worst effect is a hyper-charging of this restless consciousness (rather than, as he himself wrote earlier, the cause-effect relationship being the other way round, with artificial light altering, polluting, medicating the consciousness first), is yet another debatable claim. Nevertheless, much food for thought in his book.
Another worry I have with the extermination of the night sky and darkness by electrical light pollution relates to the “extinction of experience” as Robert Michael Pyle put it in The Thunder Tree, also being called “intergenerational environmental amnesia” by Peter Kahn, the so-called shifting baseline problem, where each generation is habituated and socialized into its inherited situation as the background norm, thus losing the ability to even recognize much less be worried about loss and diminishmet (of experience, of species, of diversity etc.). Arne Vetlesen writes about this in the context of species extinctions (though I think it applies equally well to starlit sky extinction and other such experiential extinctions) in his fantastic book The Denial of Nature (in a chapter called ‘Technology, encounter, and the dangers of abstraction’): “...it is not only a matter of the technological discourse preventing us from recognizing what human-independent entities are in their own right, in their depth and splendour. It is also that the longer this discourse prevails as dominant and ubiquitous, the rarer will be the entities in question, since the practices driven by this discourse cause them to be eradicated from the surface of the earth…. The kinds of entities to which the deictic discourse points our capacities for respect, protection, and awe are as such threatened by physical extinction.” As the world gets increasingly urbanized and electrified, the spectacle of a lit up cityscape at night stands as a substitute for the wonder of the star-splashed firmament, but one that deepens our “collective solipsism” (Vetlesen).
thank you so much for this beautiful piece on the night sky. I find it really moving, and to me, the last paragraph eloquently captures our modern predicament. The vision of the night sky has always been my prime example of something that simply does not allow itself to quantification.
I am reminded of an essay written by the late Ursula K. LeGuin, titled "A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to be" (maybe you remember, I already told you about it once). Reflecting on the hyperbolic notions of Utopia in the West, and applying the image of yin and yang, she writes: "Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been a big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal. …To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold."
Thus, I often wonder what it would mean to abandon our glaringly bright yang Utopias in favour of something more yin-like. Our Western obsession with vision comes to my mind, and I am compelled to believe that we would have to recultivate our other senses (that of listening, for example) in order for the night to cease being only a place of horror and danger and to become a place of comfort - and maybe even solace?
I recently had an almost perfect experience of the technological sublime. It was pre-dawn and we had just come out of our first meditation. A beautiful star filled sky (we are lucky not to suffer much, if at all, from light pollution in this part of France Profonde) and we looked up and saw a train of about a dozen of Musk’s satellites travelling across the sky from southwest to north east. What made it so moving was that they were in the backdrop of the natural dark star filled sky, but so evidently an artefact, and quite different in quality from the occasional sighting of the ISS or a high flying jet - I felt we were part of the stars, as if 2001 A Space Odyssey had become reality. But it was very much a both / and feeling, and not the concern you rightly voice here, that the technology, sublime or no, hides the reality of the cosmos from us (as all that wonderfully streamed internet garbage raining down from heaven surely will!)
Thank you for reposting this wonderful essay (I’m new to your work). I read “The End of Night” several years ago and have recommended it to friends ever since. Another book I enjoyed was Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” which explores how our culture’s loss of the night has impacted modern spiritual metaphors, especially in Christian churches. Her writing weaves together nicely with all you’ve shared here. Thank you again.
this is a very interesting piece. I remember as a boy a very long time ago looking up at the night sky on a farm in the south of Western Australia. I felt a sense of wonder and awe. Now, I spend a lot of time with electrical light. Illich sounds nuanced in that he didn't reject technology but looked at what might be its boundaries maybe?
Another point is that the night sky in the desert has its own aspect. Stars in the desert night are appealing. thank you for your indepth reflections which have started me reflecting. Rob Monks Newcastle Australia
Hi Michael, this is beautifully written! Only at the intersection of light and darkness is meaning realized, and the fight fought by previous generations to eradicate darkness (to the best of their ability) may not be our generations best strategy. We do need the calipers to measure where technology takes us.
I loved the point regarding humans replacing the naturally sublime with technologically sublime. Given that awe is often a beautiful way to energize one’s existence, fight burnout, and realize meaning, there is certainly a potential lack of higher calling given the phenomena of eradicating darkness, increasing atheism, and the Internet making us believe we can know all information without effort. On a related note, discovering sentient (especially if they are hostile) extraterrestrial life would jumpstart a revival to humans inquiring about their higher calling by way of introducing a new frontier accessible to everybody’s dreams.
I very much enjoyed this piece with all the new ideas you have introduced me to. Thanks again. Brian
I have to confess that I've never seen the Milky Way myself - identifying Orion is about the limit of my stargazing ability!
I wonder if anyone has noted the irony in the name Starlink - it does not join us to the stars, but weakens the weak link we already have. (Are we to take the satellites to be our new stars, made by man rather than God?)
We studied the Tower of Babel this week in our church small group, and it seemed relevant to me while I was listening to the main essay. The tower builders set to work out of a desire for significance and security ("so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered") - so too we light our cities as beacons, with the aim of making them safer. And God's response is to confound their efforts, because rightly we receive significance and security from God, not by our own hands. Perhaps we see the same pattern in the negative effects of electrification covered in the essay?
I did already see the tour of American accents! I thought the inclusion of people from different cultural groups was well done, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the tour! Being British, it's fascinating to learn about the diversity of North American accents.
This is the first essay that I have read by L.M Sacasas, and I do not know if it has been made clear in previous posts that humans are the only creatures to be deeply considered in “The Convivial Society”. Although I am very glad to have come across this thoughtful work, I admit (perhaps as an 85-year-old whose thinking was shaped long ago) that I am somewhat shocked that the damage to the natural world upon which we humans depend has not been included equally in the discussion.
Just as a global disruption of climate is threatening the web of life, so too is the disruption of light and dark cycles upending insect activity, bird migration patterns, predator and prey relationships. We must pay equal attention to this, if we do not wish to be eating laboratory created food in a desolate world deprived of the soul necessary companionship of other living creatures.
Thank you this eye opening essay. Yes, there are powerful links between the stars and the moral laws within our hearts. Listen to any of these videos from cultural astronomer and astrologer Dr. Bernadette Brady for a taste ancient cross-cultural communion with the stars: http://www.bernadettebrady.com/Youtube.html
The "Star of Bethlehem" as poetic narrative is especially evocative. She has brought the stars and their rich mythologies back into astrology. Dante would love her. Along with Marsilio Ficino, Plotinus, and other star literate luminaries of yore. We must galvanize all star and sky loving communities across time and space to protect the sovereignty of our stellar commons from military and other unenlightened uses now *
Thanks for this very thought-provoking piece. Incidentally, I have just recently read another title, Clark Strand’s meditation, Waking Up to the Dark, that needless to say resonates with what you’ve written. A few excerpts:
“As modern people, we have favored the lit foot ... so much that we are now effectively hobbled by artificial light. It alters our consciousness, and our consciousness reciprocally alters the world. Driven by the illusions of prosperity and progress, we walk the same sad circle from one day to the next, only to die exhausted in the end.” (echoes of Teresa Brennan’s Exhausting Modernity…)
… “Most of us believe our lives will be real when we have shone enough light on them, but that is not the case. The more light – the more focused and rapt our attention – the more we send the shadows flying, and the less we feel alive. What we do to our bodies with antibiotics, we do to consciousness with light.”
… “Conservative social critics have sometimes lamented the loss of a religious consciousness in the age of TV, Twitter, and the Internet. But they are coming into the argument far too late in the game. That loss was already inevitable once the incandescent bulb came into common use. That was the real tipping point that would eventually guarantee the excesses of the twentieth century – from world wars to climate change to the widespread pollution of rivers, lakes, and streams. For all these spring directly from the overflow of human consciousness, for which the flood of light is both the metaphor and the means.”
This leads to his bold claim (and one that in its simultaneously sweeping but also simplistic nature I take some issue with):
“The last true revolutionary act left to human beings in the twenty-first century is to turn out all the lights. Other acts are possible – acts we may call revolutionary – but they do not meet the criteria of the word as it must necessarily be interpreted today. Nothing short of turning out the lights will lead to an overturning of the endgame global system that now has us in its thrall.
… To turn out the lights is to turn over the human mind – to overthrow it, as it were, so that we can get some perspective on what we truly want and need, so that we can realize that human consciousness is not the sine qua non of reality…. I say that darkness is the last revolutionary act because it is the only act that effectively overturns human consciousness…. Consciousness is the problem underlying all others, which, if it is not addressed, will only continue to manifest further problems – one after another – until it has completely destroyed our world.”
If “turn out all the lights” was meant as a synecdoche for “stop the industrial-electrical economy in its entirety”, the tall claim might be warranted, but on re-reading, it seems like he really does mean, literally, turning lights off, mainly on an individual level, which is of course far from revolutionary.
Whether “consciousness is the problem underlying all the others” and artificial lighting’s worst effect is a hyper-charging of this restless consciousness (rather than, as he himself wrote earlier, the cause-effect relationship being the other way round, with artificial light altering, polluting, medicating the consciousness first), is yet another debatable claim. Nevertheless, much food for thought in his book.
Another worry I have with the extermination of the night sky and darkness by electrical light pollution relates to the “extinction of experience” as Robert Michael Pyle put it in The Thunder Tree, also being called “intergenerational environmental amnesia” by Peter Kahn, the so-called shifting baseline problem, where each generation is habituated and socialized into its inherited situation as the background norm, thus losing the ability to even recognize much less be worried about loss and diminishmet (of experience, of species, of diversity etc.). Arne Vetlesen writes about this in the context of species extinctions (though I think it applies equally well to starlit sky extinction and other such experiential extinctions) in his fantastic book The Denial of Nature (in a chapter called ‘Technology, encounter, and the dangers of abstraction’): “...it is not only a matter of the technological discourse preventing us from recognizing what human-independent entities are in their own right, in their depth and splendour. It is also that the longer this discourse prevails as dominant and ubiquitous, the rarer will be the entities in question, since the practices driven by this discourse cause them to be eradicated from the surface of the earth…. The kinds of entities to which the deictic discourse points our capacities for respect, protection, and awe are as such threatened by physical extinction.” As the world gets increasingly urbanized and electrified, the spectacle of a lit up cityscape at night stands as a substitute for the wonder of the star-splashed firmament, but one that deepens our “collective solipsism” (Vetlesen).
Dear Michael,
thank you so much for this beautiful piece on the night sky. I find it really moving, and to me, the last paragraph eloquently captures our modern predicament. The vision of the night sky has always been my prime example of something that simply does not allow itself to quantification.
I am reminded of an essay written by the late Ursula K. LeGuin, titled "A Non-Euclidian View of California as a Cold Place to be" (maybe you remember, I already told you about it once). Reflecting on the hyperbolic notions of Utopia in the West, and applying the image of yin and yang, she writes: "Utopia has been yang. In one way or another, from Plato on, utopia has been a big yang motorcycle trip. Bright, dry, clear, strong, firm, active, aggressive, lineal, progressive, creative, expanding, advancing, and hot. Our civilization is now so intensely yang that any imagination of bettering its injustices or eluding its self-destructiveness must involve a reversal. …To attain the constant, we must return, go round, go inward, go yinward. What would a yin utopia be? It would be dark, wet, obscure, weak, yielding, passive, participatory, circular, cyclical, peaceful, nurturant, retreating, contracting, and cold."
Thus, I often wonder what it would mean to abandon our glaringly bright yang Utopias in favour of something more yin-like. Our Western obsession with vision comes to my mind, and I am compelled to believe that we would have to recultivate our other senses (that of listening, for example) in order for the night to cease being only a place of horror and danger and to become a place of comfort - and maybe even solace?
I recently had an almost perfect experience of the technological sublime. It was pre-dawn and we had just come out of our first meditation. A beautiful star filled sky (we are lucky not to suffer much, if at all, from light pollution in this part of France Profonde) and we looked up and saw a train of about a dozen of Musk’s satellites travelling across the sky from southwest to north east. What made it so moving was that they were in the backdrop of the natural dark star filled sky, but so evidently an artefact, and quite different in quality from the occasional sighting of the ISS or a high flying jet - I felt we were part of the stars, as if 2001 A Space Odyssey had become reality. But it was very much a both / and feeling, and not the concern you rightly voice here, that the technology, sublime or no, hides the reality of the cosmos from us (as all that wonderfully streamed internet garbage raining down from heaven surely will!)
Thank you for reposting this wonderful essay (I’m new to your work). I read “The End of Night” several years ago and have recommended it to friends ever since. Another book I enjoyed was Barbara Brown Taylor’s “Learning to Walk in the Dark,” which explores how our culture’s loss of the night has impacted modern spiritual metaphors, especially in Christian churches. Her writing weaves together nicely with all you’ve shared here. Thank you again.
this is a very interesting piece. I remember as a boy a very long time ago looking up at the night sky on a farm in the south of Western Australia. I felt a sense of wonder and awe. Now, I spend a lot of time with electrical light. Illich sounds nuanced in that he didn't reject technology but looked at what might be its boundaries maybe?
Another point is that the night sky in the desert has its own aspect. Stars in the desert night are appealing. thank you for your indepth reflections which have started me reflecting. Rob Monks Newcastle Australia
Hi Michael, this is beautifully written! Only at the intersection of light and darkness is meaning realized, and the fight fought by previous generations to eradicate darkness (to the best of their ability) may not be our generations best strategy. We do need the calipers to measure where technology takes us.
I loved the point regarding humans replacing the naturally sublime with technologically sublime. Given that awe is often a beautiful way to energize one’s existence, fight burnout, and realize meaning, there is certainly a potential lack of higher calling given the phenomena of eradicating darkness, increasing atheism, and the Internet making us believe we can know all information without effort. On a related note, discovering sentient (especially if they are hostile) extraterrestrial life would jumpstart a revival to humans inquiring about their higher calling by way of introducing a new frontier accessible to everybody’s dreams.
I very much enjoyed this piece with all the new ideas you have introduced me to. Thanks again. Brian
I have to confess that I've never seen the Milky Way myself - identifying Orion is about the limit of my stargazing ability!
I wonder if anyone has noted the irony in the name Starlink - it does not join us to the stars, but weakens the weak link we already have. (Are we to take the satellites to be our new stars, made by man rather than God?)
We studied the Tower of Babel this week in our church small group, and it seemed relevant to me while I was listening to the main essay. The tower builders set to work out of a desire for significance and security ("so that we may make a name for ourselves and not be scattered") - so too we light our cities as beacons, with the aim of making them safer. And God's response is to confound their efforts, because rightly we receive significance and security from God, not by our own hands. Perhaps we see the same pattern in the negative effects of electrification covered in the essay?
I did already see the tour of American accents! I thought the inclusion of people from different cultural groups was well done, and I'm looking forward to the rest of the tour! Being British, it's fascinating to learn about the diversity of North American accents.
I still find this piece makes me think, even after reading it a number of times over a year.
This is the first essay that I have read by L.M Sacasas, and I do not know if it has been made clear in previous posts that humans are the only creatures to be deeply considered in “The Convivial Society”. Although I am very glad to have come across this thoughtful work, I admit (perhaps as an 85-year-old whose thinking was shaped long ago) that I am somewhat shocked that the damage to the natural world upon which we humans depend has not been included equally in the discussion.
Just as a global disruption of climate is threatening the web of life, so too is the disruption of light and dark cycles upending insect activity, bird migration patterns, predator and prey relationships. We must pay equal attention to this, if we do not wish to be eating laboratory created food in a desolate world deprived of the soul necessary companionship of other living creatures.
Thank you this eye opening essay. Yes, there are powerful links between the stars and the moral laws within our hearts. Listen to any of these videos from cultural astronomer and astrologer Dr. Bernadette Brady for a taste ancient cross-cultural communion with the stars: http://www.bernadettebrady.com/Youtube.html
The "Star of Bethlehem" as poetic narrative is especially evocative. She has brought the stars and their rich mythologies back into astrology. Dante would love her. Along with Marsilio Ficino, Plotinus, and other star literate luminaries of yore. We must galvanize all star and sky loving communities across time and space to protect the sovereignty of our stellar commons from military and other unenlightened uses now *