While my experience has been structured as an academic, intellectual endeavor, the most valuable things I've taken from these courses has been more personal. I have delved into the anthropological debate on 'civilization' and the 'evolution' of human societies, and have come away much wiser from that process. I've also learned much about the intellectual precedents and background of Derrick Jensen himself, which has enlightened his works for me substantially.
However, the value of the courses has been in neither of those things, but in several aspects of the 'intellectual molting' (thanks Andrew, for that phrase!) it has catalyzed.
Intellectually, the courses supplied the activation energy to critically examine my beliefs. As a liberally educated person with a commitment to rigorous consideration of my beliefs and actions, I liked to think that my positions and opinions were expressed not arbitrarily, but based on thorough consideration of the evidence. Yet my near-total approval of Jensen et al.'s argument should have tipped me off that this faculty was not sufficiently applied in this case. Through both of these courses, I've come to see the flaws in his arguments, which should have been apparent to me in the first place.
This has taught me that I really can't be trusted to know when my opinions are sufficiently rigorous; or, to put that another way, I should always assume they are somewhat flawed and limited. Hopefully in the future I will be able to apply a wider rigor and delve into a thinker's intellectual context and history more thoroughly the moment I catch myself buying in to an idea too completely. In the case of an argument as broad and far-reaching as Jensen's, this is especially necessary since the systems under consideration are so vast and complicated. This is another major lesson: humility. It is vain of me to believe I can really understand the history of societal evolution in a few soundbites, and even more so to believe I have any special understanding of the future of industrial civilization.
That humility is expressed in a more personal way. My motivation in embarking on the intellectual journey Jensen largely inspired was to determine, to paraphrase a Jensen title, "How I should live my life." The implicit assumption was that, if I considered the question carefully enough, my life could become a well-placed bullet that would somehow fatally wound the source of bad things in the world (determining whether or not this was civilization was part of the investigation). This was predicated on an even vaster arrogance, in which my life somehow presented opportunities to shift the whole course of human history. Chaia Heller, in "For the Love of Nature: Ecology and the Cult of the Romantic," suggests that this arrogant presumption derives from an inappropriate trope in which nature is a sort of 'damsel in distress' who needs brilliant young environmentalists with pure souls to save her. I found that argument revealing, and I imagine there is something to it.
The realization that I can't and shouldn't view my life in this way has been hugely freeing in a subtle way. I have by no means turned my back on my responsibility to help me community in really effective ways. However, I have abandoned the presumption that I am somehow above the mundane drop-in-the-bucket tasks that are available to me, that my life is for some reason destined for some more magically effective activist work. This has shifted my perspective in an important way: I need to choose my activist path based on what I want to do and trust that this will lead me in the right direction.
Now I just need to figure out what I want to do! Or at least, what I want to try first. Fortunately, much of what I want to do fits in very well with the constructive side of the very necessary movement. I want to explore the natural world and develop a working relationship with a real community through land-health oriented agriculture. I want to share the things I discover with people who don't know about them! These are precisely the sorts of things that are supposed to be part of building just and sustainable alternatives to capitalism and civilization. So I suppose I should begin/continue doing them, and feel gratified that I'm doing my part in my own unique way.
That is, I've come to see my quest for complete intellectual rigor and completeness to be somewhat farcical, at least insofar as it has become a prerequisite for or an alternative to action. I now see that action will always be a leap of faith and that doing things with full vigor is one of the best ways to advance one's intellectual vision. I'm not sure to what extent I really held back doing things because I felt my understanding was still too incomplete, but that excuse has fallen away psychologically, at least.
While I am apprehensive about saying this because I don't want to question the need for confident action, I am somewhat uncomfortable with the way Derrick avoids embracing the uncertainties inherent in the questions he addresses. Authors like David Abram, Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, etc seem to focus on the limitations of their perspectives a bit more, to be more cautious and perspicacious with their philosophies. I can imagine that Derrick may have chosen to avoid those questions on purpose, to strengthen the indubitability of his arguments, but I feel that it ultimately weakens them, makes them vulnerable to red herring critiques in which the important messages he has are disregarded because, for instance, his anthropology is underdeveloped and misleading.
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