A Techo-Prophet Who Says the Web Has Harmed Us

Back when I was subscribing to Stewart Brand’s CoEvolution Quarterly in the 1980s, Jaron Lanier made frequent appearances in its pages as techno-prophet extraordinaire.

He was the guy who was helping to invent virtual reality. He was presented as being miles ahead of the rest of us. He was, as this Smithsonian article, “What Turned Jaron Lanier Against the Web”  says, a Silicon Valley rock star.

Now he is a Silicon Valley heretic. And having seen the consequences, he has changed his mind about a number of things, including the whole “information wants to be free” mantra, which he helped to promote.

The mistake of our age? That’s a bold statement (as someone put it in Pulp Fiction). “I think it’s the reason why the rise of networking has coincided with the loss of the middle class, instead of an expansion in general wealth, which is what should happen. But if you say we’re creating the information economy, except that we’re making information free, then what we’re saying is we’re destroying the economy.”

The connection Lanier makes between techno-utopianism, the rise of the machines and the Great Recession is an audacious one. Lanier is suggesting we are outsourcing ourselves into insignificant advertising-fodder. Nanobytes of Big Data that diminish our personhood, our dignity. He may be the first Silicon populist.

“To my mind an overleveraged unsecured mortgage is exactly the same thing as a pirated music file. It’s somebody’s value that’s been copied many times to give benefit to some distant party. In the case of the music files, it’s to the benefit of an advertising spy like Google [which monetizes your search history], and in the case of the mortgage, it’s to the benefit of a fund manager somewhere. But in both cases all the risk and the cost is radiated out toward ordinary people and the middle classes—and even worse, the overall economy has shrunk in order to make a few people more.”

This is a challenging article, one that I plan to return to and absorb. Read it yourself.

Added: Rod Dreher talks about the Lanier article and how it dovetails with a lesson he learned in life: Never trust the Crowd.

Revising the Story of Christmas

It is an article of faith (an appropriate word here) for contemporary Pagans that Christianity stole holidays left and right from our spiritual ancestors, particularly Christmas.

Here Mollie Ziegler at Get Religion, a blog about the critical examination of religion-writing in the (mostly) American media, gets into some of the nuances in the process of critiquing a typically breezy seasonal piece from the Washington Post.

Yeah, well, it’s certainly true that when the calendar was standardized, there was a push for Dec. 25 as the date to mark Jesus’ birth. But was this because it was a co-opting of Saturnalia? It’s certainly a theory. But Dec. 25 was one of the many dates being used by Christians to mark Christ’s birth and maybe not for the reasons you hear.

Some historians argue — read her piece for details — that Jesus’ birth was placed on December 25th centuries before “Christmas” was celebrated. In the early church, Easter was much more important.

Now before somebody says “Yeah, and ‘Eostre’ was a Germanic goddess,” we are not talking about Germans but about the eastern Mediterranean region (and Rome) when we say “the early church.” The Germanic tribes were mostly unaware of Christianity until some converted in the fourth century, right? And complete conversion took another six hundred years.

It is the news media, not the Pagans, that keeps the “Christmas started out as a ‘pagan’ holiday” meme alive. Maybe that is more of a secularist position — taking organized religion down a notch — that provides a convenient bit of cover for the modern Pagans?

And let’s not forget another group that contributed to the Christmas-is-pagan meme — the Jehovah’s Witnesses. Just today at the laundromat I saw a one of their Awake booklets, which made that very same argument, one that they have been making for many decades.

Textbook Prices Outpace Inflation

I found this graph at the College Insurrection blog, a project of law professor William Jacobson.

When I first started university teaching, I never bothered to wander through the bookstore and see what the books that I assigned actually cost. Once I did, I was suitably shocked.

After I had taught a little more, I began to realize that, for instance, the differences between the “fourth edition” and the “fifth edition” were not exactly substantive.  They mainly existed to damage the used-textbook business, I think.

Around the Pagan Blogosphere

• I too am one who is uncomfortable with the word “faith” in Paganism because of the baggage that it carries. When I worked on a couple of collaborative projects with Evan John Jones, he sometimes spoke of the “Old Faith,” which always jarred me, even though I think that for him it was simply a synonym for “religion.” The Allergic Pagan” starts with the same discomfort and ends up defining four styles of Paganism/nature religion, which might be useful categories.

• Sam Webster starts a new blog with an opening post: “Welcome Thinking Pagans.”

• London blogger Ethan Doyle White has started a series of interviews at his blog Albion Calling.  The first one was with British scholar of esotericism Dave Evans. The newest one is with me.

• And have a look at my blogger sidebar. I try to keep all links up to date — if you encounter a dead link, let me know — and you do not have to give me money to be listed.

A Goddess-Movement Video with Something Extra

One of Fred Adams’ visionary paintings on the DVD case for “Dancing with Gaia.”

First, although this is not directly about “the Goddess movement,” I want to point out the blogging that Aidan Kelly has been doing, particularly about the history of contemporary Paganism in America, at his Patheos blog, Including Paganism.

Another resource is Dancing with Gaia, a video subtitled “Earth Energy, Sacred Sexuality, the Return of the Goddess as Gaia . . . a Continuum,” produced and directed by Jo Carson (82 min.)

A number of the well-known names from the Goddess movement are in, such as the Swedish artist and anarchist Monica Sjöö (1938–2005) to name just one. So it is a valuable work.

What I found particularly interesting, however, was the large amount of 1970s- era footage of the Southern California Pagan group Feraferia, founded by the Goddess- visionary artist Fred Adams and his wife, Svetlana.

Somehow the Adamses are left out of most surveys of Goddess religion. Perhaps they were too visionary, too “cosmic”  . . . and too religious? They just did not fit the narrative—except in Carson’s case.

But what you can see is home-movie footage of Pagan ritual in the California mountains that must be some of the earliest available, as well as other footage of sites in Europe, the Mediterranean, and elsewhere.

Dancing with Gaia is available on DVD for $19.95.

Celebrate Winter

Pomegranate 13.2 in Production

Pomegranate 13.2 is in its final proofreading stages. Online articles may be available this week, and depending on when I get the cover from the graphic designer, it should go to the printers (yes, there are two different printers) within two weeks.

I intend to make Ronald Hutton’s review article on revisionism and counter-revisionism available as a free download.

Contents

“A Response to Amy Hale,” Michael York

“Darna: A Lithuanian Pagan Approach to Life,” Egidija Ramanauskaite and Rimas Vaišnys

“Revisiting the Semnonenhain: A Norse Anthropogonic Myth and the Germania,” Michael D.J. Bintley

“The Heart of Thelema: Morality, Amorality, and Immorality in Aleister Crowley’s Thelemic Cult,” Mogg Morgan

“Entering the Crack Between the Worlds: Symbolism in Western Shamanism,” Susannah Crawford

“Robert Cochrane and the Gardnerian Craft: Feuds, Secrets, and Mysteries in Contemporary British Witchcraft,” Ethan Doyle White

“Revisionism and Counter-Revisionism in Pagan History,” Ronald Hutton

“Contemporary City Shaman Joóska Soós Included in the New Antwerp MAS Museum,” Tamara Ingels

Book Reviews

Michael Howard, Children of Cain: A Study of Modern Traditional Witches

John Breen and Mark Teeuwen, A New History of Shinto

John of Monmouth with Gillian Spraggs and Shani Oates, Genuine Witchcraft is Explained: The Secret History of the Royal Windsor Coven and the Regency

Secret Doings in Glastonbury

Santa showed up with a bottle of Glenlivet and Phil Rickman’s novel The Bones of Avalon.

It’s a sort of typical Rickman-ish set-up — there are places on the land where certain hidden earth-forces are concentrated and influence the inhabitants in not necessarily good ways, especially when they are awakened by those who know not what they do.

Only this time the place is 16th-century Glastonbury, when Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries has killed the pilgrim trade and sent the town into an economic slump.

Ruins of Glastonbury Abbey (Wikipedia).

The protagonist, on a mission for Queen Elizabeth I, is Dr. John Dee, the famous mystic and astrologer and maybe spy as well.

I liked this paragraph, which comes at a point when a former monk has been pointing out to Dee some of the local scryers, fortune-tellers, cunning folk and what not:

I learned that many of these seekers . . . . had journeyed here from the ends of the country, and some from abroad. When the abbey flourished, this had gone, if not unnoticed, at least uncommented on. The town was growing and always full of pilgrims. It was only after the fall of the abbey and the exodus of the wealthy and the pious that people began to notice the nature of the incomers who did not leave . . . who, in fact, began to increase their numbers, some arriving like poor travellers, living in camps and abandoned houses. Attending church only as much as was necessary to avoid prosecution, for their own religious obediences clearly belonged . . . . elsewhere.

Nothing about a music festival, however.

Pentagram Pizza: Eat It Back in the Cave

• You knew this was coming: the zombie Tarot deck.

• On cave paintings, art, and cognition.

• More old stuff: were those ancient figurines of voluptuous women goddesses . . . or toys? Don’t suggest the latter to the idol-makers of today.

• Have beautiful handwriting by Christmas. You have a whole year now to improve!

More on “Europe’s Oldest Paganism”

Following up on last July’s post about Mari Paganism, here via Forging the Sampo is another contemporary journalistic article with links.

Two of the grandmothers are less concerned, lying down in the grass in their shawls as their grandsons collect wood for the fire. “In [Orthodox] Church, you have to stand for hours. I can’t deal with that. The glade is better. Much more comfortable.”

You will find the same article linked as well as other material at the MariUver blog.