Thank you, Dougald, for helping me have a better understanding (aka hypothesis) of how the world I was born into came to be . . . the creation story of my culture that was so confusing to me before I began to be able to be able to look at the truth of our current world without judging:
"All creation stories involve a prising apart of the preexistent. The sky is lifted from the waters, light split out of dark, time from space, and the world as we know it roars into being. The industrial world, the social, economic, technological, political and material realities within which the unprecedented uprooting, the great gains and the seldom fully acknowledged losses of modernity have taken place, began with such a fission: the prising apart of production from consumption, which took concrete form in the new separation of work from home."
Your words here help me to see more clearly how The Separation Problem we humans have been "plagued with" since we (or "they") began creating hierarchical cultures over the past 5000+ years has been (and is being) made much worse by the separation of work from home. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!
I've come to think of it like this: somewhere deep in our species history there was a separation event, a point at which we found ourselves "apart" from our fellow creatures in a new way. This lives in mythic memory as the Fall; in more recent tellings it is commonly located 5,000 years ago, but there are arguments that would place it rather further back. Rob Percival's The Meat Paradox offers food for thought on this, while if you want a wild ride, look up John Michael Greer's essay on the Lemurian Deviation. Maybe it was a single evolutionary event (some development in the history of the brain?), maybe it was a threshold crossed at different times in different places that brings us to a new and different relationship with the living world (domestication of plants and/or animals?), or maybe both of these explanations are stuck within the limitations of a naturalist-materialist worldview (as Gordon White describes it in Ani.Mystic). I'm not sure we could settle the matter, nor that we need to.
But on our side of this rupture, whatever it was, it has fallen to human culture to heal the wound of separation, to give it a chance of becoming a scar rather than a festering sore. You might say that the work of culture is to overcome separation, to bring us into a participative relationship with the rest of creation. I'm sure there are those who would quarrel with this way of describing culture, but I'm thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer's description of "the honourable harvest", Martín Prechtel's "The Marriage Contract with the Wild" and a remarkable essay I read a while back on the "indigenous core" of Judaism. In each of these, there are glimpses of how human cultures have found ways of overcoming separation. I emphasise this sense of Indigeneity as a cultural achievement on our side of the rupture of separation, because the Western imagination has tended to want to locate Indigeneity on the far side of that rupture, as living in a "state of nature". And it's a cultural achievement which had its counterparts here in the West. (Alan Garner's deeply researched novel Strandloper brings this into view and is also a reminder of why these cultural currents leave so little trace in the written records that form the official version of culture.)
So in the story I'm piecing together, the bulldozer of modernity/coloniality, fuelled by vast fossil reserves and slave-worked plantations and an overriding logic of extraction, has torn through the patchwork of cultural achievement by which we had found ways of being at home in the world on the far side of that original separation event (or events). This is the more recent rupture described in the passage you quote, identified (following Illich) with the separation of work from home.
I hope this is helpful. I've been mulling over these things in recent days, including with some readers of this Substack, so it's useful to try to summarise. Though I'm not sure I'm saying anything that hasn't already been said by Illich, Wendell Berry and others.
"Though I'm not sure I'm saying anything that hasn't already been said by Illich, Wendell Berry and others."
I'm glad to hear your words. I haven't heard the words of those others. Your conversation with Iain McGilchrist is what has brought me to find your words and reading At Work in the Ruins. I am not familiar with any of the people you mention, other than Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
Thanks, Tom – good to know how you found your way here! And I'm glad to be making new connections for you. The selection of Berry's writing that Paul Kingsnorth edited, The World-Ending Fire, is a good route into his work. Let me know if you'd like suggestions for where to start with anything else I've mentioned.
Big thanks, Dougald, for your specific recommendation. My local library has it and I got it on my way home and so glad to be introduced to him. I had heard his name more than a few times, but had not read or known anything about his values and wisdom.
This is a beautiful reflection on space, time, home and the unsettling of habits that is migration. I read John Berger's 'And our faces, my heart, brief as photos' some years ago and used it to capture something about my experience of migration that few others - authors, colleagues, even family - seemed to see. The question of 'home' as a cosmology of being in and with the world is critical in our times, our Anthropocene, but is hardly acknowledged in the literatures that I read. Thank you Dougald Hine.
Thank you, Dougald, for helping me have a better understanding (aka hypothesis) of how the world I was born into came to be . . . the creation story of my culture that was so confusing to me before I began to be able to be able to look at the truth of our current world without judging:
"All creation stories involve a prising apart of the preexistent. The sky is lifted from the waters, light split out of dark, time from space, and the world as we know it roars into being. The industrial world, the social, economic, technological, political and material realities within which the unprecedented uprooting, the great gains and the seldom fully acknowledged losses of modernity have taken place, began with such a fission: the prising apart of production from consumption, which took concrete form in the new separation of work from home."
Your words here help me to see more clearly how The Separation Problem we humans have been "plagued with" since we (or "they") began creating hierarchical cultures over the past 5000+ years has been (and is being) made much worse by the separation of work from home. Thank you for sharing your wisdom!
Thanks, Tom.
I've come to think of it like this: somewhere deep in our species history there was a separation event, a point at which we found ourselves "apart" from our fellow creatures in a new way. This lives in mythic memory as the Fall; in more recent tellings it is commonly located 5,000 years ago, but there are arguments that would place it rather further back. Rob Percival's The Meat Paradox offers food for thought on this, while if you want a wild ride, look up John Michael Greer's essay on the Lemurian Deviation. Maybe it was a single evolutionary event (some development in the history of the brain?), maybe it was a threshold crossed at different times in different places that brings us to a new and different relationship with the living world (domestication of plants and/or animals?), or maybe both of these explanations are stuck within the limitations of a naturalist-materialist worldview (as Gordon White describes it in Ani.Mystic). I'm not sure we could settle the matter, nor that we need to.
But on our side of this rupture, whatever it was, it has fallen to human culture to heal the wound of separation, to give it a chance of becoming a scar rather than a festering sore. You might say that the work of culture is to overcome separation, to bring us into a participative relationship with the rest of creation. I'm sure there are those who would quarrel with this way of describing culture, but I'm thinking of Robin Wall Kimmerer's description of "the honourable harvest", Martín Prechtel's "The Marriage Contract with the Wild" and a remarkable essay I read a while back on the "indigenous core" of Judaism. In each of these, there are glimpses of how human cultures have found ways of overcoming separation. I emphasise this sense of Indigeneity as a cultural achievement on our side of the rupture of separation, because the Western imagination has tended to want to locate Indigeneity on the far side of that rupture, as living in a "state of nature". And it's a cultural achievement which had its counterparts here in the West. (Alan Garner's deeply researched novel Strandloper brings this into view and is also a reminder of why these cultural currents leave so little trace in the written records that form the official version of culture.)
So in the story I'm piecing together, the bulldozer of modernity/coloniality, fuelled by vast fossil reserves and slave-worked plantations and an overriding logic of extraction, has torn through the patchwork of cultural achievement by which we had found ways of being at home in the world on the far side of that original separation event (or events). This is the more recent rupture described in the passage you quote, identified (following Illich) with the separation of work from home.
I hope this is helpful. I've been mulling over these things in recent days, including with some readers of this Substack, so it's useful to try to summarise. Though I'm not sure I'm saying anything that hasn't already been said by Illich, Wendell Berry and others.
Course, if you're looking for 'naturalist-materialist' stories of when the Fall happened, you shouldn't forget this one: https://eartharchives.org/articles/the-secret-garden-of-ediacara-and-the-origin-of-complex-life/index.html :-) ...
Thank you, Dougald
"Though I'm not sure I'm saying anything that hasn't already been said by Illich, Wendell Berry and others."
I'm glad to hear your words. I haven't heard the words of those others. Your conversation with Iain McGilchrist is what has brought me to find your words and reading At Work in the Ruins. I am not familiar with any of the people you mention, other than Robin Wall Kimmerer's Braiding Sweetgrass.
Thanks, Tom – good to know how you found your way here! And I'm glad to be making new connections for you. The selection of Berry's writing that Paul Kingsnorth edited, The World-Ending Fire, is a good route into his work. Let me know if you'd like suggestions for where to start with anything else I've mentioned.
Big thanks, Dougald, for your specific recommendation. My local library has it and I got it on my way home and so glad to be introduced to him. I had heard his name more than a few times, but had not read or known anything about his values and wisdom.
This is a beautiful reflection on space, time, home and the unsettling of habits that is migration. I read John Berger's 'And our faces, my heart, brief as photos' some years ago and used it to capture something about my experience of migration that few others - authors, colleagues, even family - seemed to see. The question of 'home' as a cosmology of being in and with the world is critical in our times, our Anthropocene, but is hardly acknowledged in the literatures that I read. Thank you Dougald Hine.