Would love to see conversations like this involving indigenous folks, it feels like it would have immeasurably enhanced many points in this conversation if there had been an indigenous perspective in the mix. Overall fantastic video, just feel indigenous folks need to be involved in these kinds of conversations directly for a better grounding and wider/deeper understanding!
@@Mexie Oh yeah, def for example loved seeing two settlers explicitly and healthily expressing how open they are to correction, criticism, elaboration, etc without any self-flagellation, calmly and eagerly with smiles all around. Really excellent stuff to see modeled for an audience as big as yours!
Hm, "values vs ideology" is a framing I hadn't consciously thought of in those words before, but it instantly resonated with me. Really helped me contextualize my frustration with a lot of white leftist spaces. I'm interested in doing anarchism (specifically social ecology/radical municipalism/democratic confederalism) in ways that empower indigenous communities and promote decolonization, but I keep butting heads with theory bros who seem more concerned with enforcing some kind of orthodoxy than with actually improving anyone's material conditions. This was a really great conversation. Thanks for sharing it!
I was so surprised to see a fellow Christian on a channel like this, especially with a similar worldview to me! I so value seeing some more diverse representation, it makes me feel much less alone in the left!
Thank you both for this work! This got me thinking about a tendency toward hyper-rationality that I've noticed in the left (broadly speaking). I wonder if there is a kind of disembodiment that results from not wanting to be associated with feelings in one's discourse - a possible conflation with the feels-based, appeals to emotion of many conservatives (of course, popular conservatives would deny this). I just wonder if this possibility, based on perception avoidance, might influence the deeper connection to solidarity. It's for sure more complex than this, I just wonder the extent to which this mechanism (if it is a thing) might explain the phenomenon.
My brother helped me alot with not having the militant atheist mindset has he studies alot of Ancient Near East history and socities for a living and saw religion from a different perspective in terms of his academic work. Looking into certain religious practices also made we widen my understanding of the fuctionality of religion.
Thank you for collabing with Sadlord and giving their channel more exposure, I've been watching them for many years and their videos are amazing, I really wish more people knew about them on youtube.
My belief is that while humans aren't the center of the ecosystem we do have a unique ability to understand and manipulative the environment in ways that currently destroy the planet for the sake of profit but could be done to benefit all species. We're the gardeners 🐝
From another white settler of Haudenosaunee land who's struggling with balancing my spirituality, my politics, and everything I learned from Braiding Sweetgrass, this video gave me so much to take with me and think more about. I can confirm that there are lots of us who are thinking about these things but are unsure how to start the conversation, so thank you for doing so.
This actually answers a lot of questions I've been having in the last few weeks about my own experiences as a settler Canadian, which is... scarily timely. Although, I will say some of the things about humanism being human-centric (ironically) I found to be a bit presumptive - most humanists I know don't exclude non-human thinking entities from their moral or "spiritual" understanding of the world. There's definitely some who do, but I feel like that's simply more of a loud group who aren't engaging with humanism on good faith either.
Love this convo ! When sadlord777 said it wasn’t a ‘accountable thing to do’ to move back to the Isles at 55:55 they kinda hit the nail on the head for diaspora politics: accountability. For example, I’ve heard Philip Scott (youtuber kinda conservative but I enjoy his perspective and general media strategy) advocating African Americans having an ‘Africa Plan’ in their back pocket, typically when covering racism in America and his own experiences with ancestry/nationality and acceptance as more than a tourist when visiting the continent freedom from racism etc... I think it’s safe to say for the African diaspora there’s a functioning “who claims you” dynamic with some African countries and modern geopolitics. Like y’all said these topics are supa complicated - just came to mind and figured I’d throw in my $2
I appreciate y'all tackling this complex and large topic with so much grace and awareness. Love seeing more lefties not just embrace spirituality but also recognize its vital role in human creation and consciousness.
Ok seriously. I hate the general usage of the word "appropriate". It's not inherently bad to appropriate anything. The negative connotation comes entirely from the context. The reason appropriating native cultures (for instance) is often bad is not the appropriation in general. It's that it's rude and disrespectful to do so from the standpoint of a colonizer, exploiter and uninitiated.
British Isles is a colonial term which the Irish reject, just think it's a bit unusual to talk about about Settler Colonialism and use a term that's rooted in colonialism itself.
I usually use the term "the isles" personally, I just used the term the british isles here because it would be more broadly understood as there are many island peoples. I'm not familiar with another term that encompasses all of the isles in a specific and anti-colonial way.
My spawn points did the same at 14 when I refused conversion therapy. I was 19 when the girl I was caught kissing took her life after deciding to stay. I probably shouldn't have clicked on this video. I'll go now.
I personally think as long as a specific spiritual path is open to anyone (some aren’t) and the seeker acknowledges that they bring their own cultural baggage with them and seeks to face that and work through it, then it should be ok to seek from spiritualities that developed in other cultures, or our own ancestors from whom we are alienated. But it’s always good to try to really understand the worldview that it came from and to be mentored by someone from that culture if possible.
The left needs to untangle the relationship between ancestry race and spirituality. Because "white" gets related to a race which it is not it's a color. No one uses the world European because that's a loaded world that doesnt just contain white. We relate european which is the ancestry with white. This holds down the right wing because the Spanish along with Italians are europeans but are not all white. But in America I'm not european nor American I'm cuban Puerto rican america. And in the jim crow south I would be colored cuz I tan in the sun which is the dichotomy we use to live in the south white colored and black
But my ancestry would be Hispanic/spanish and Iberic which is all the same denotion along with european and a ancestor of the Roman empire because this is all ancestry can encompass from a biological standpoint not a spiritual
Interesting, I've made a similar path myself of understanding left spirituality and equating it with my philosophies, as an autist white amab with ideals that go towards municipalism (Bookchin kind, as technoprog as can be depending on how much of the entropic-growth curve we can keep and get going). In a nutshell, I took the path autist amabs are determined too of rationalism to materialism, and now transcendent materialism that can be equated a cognitive-help-book to any individual spirituality seen as a metaphor of the material reality. My kind of tolerant concerns with the spiritualism you defend are the end results to be pro-nature in a spiritual sence that gets mixed up with being pro-nature in the traditional idealist sense and we don't really know where is the line. With the idea that nature-as-concept isn't the core and skull of all suffering and oppressions because of some mix-up with notions like environement and biodiversity, I can feel an horizon that risk going towards less technology, automation-denial, due to some light nature essentialism and the material ideas that running complex things in small scale settings isn't possible. For exemple feeling like being in "nature" is a spiritual experience... I mean it's mostly flow, pleasure, a specific interest and molecules that move; the sence of transcendence and hubris you may feel while outside in the forest can be felt listening to music or having an orgasm or writing a long comment... calling this spiritual dives into essentialism for me. When these thoughts evolve into less and less materiality and full nature worship, new age stuff, It traditionally ends in idealist degrowth neoconservatism that brings back all the dichotomies we're struggling to fuse into scales of free-being, obviously qveerphobic and ableist first before being fascist globally at the end of the neocon road... that's why I'm weary with leftist-spiritualities that actually seem to believe in idealist concepts further than in metaphors but in actual truth. Both clichés of the small traditional village in which you work the earth all week long and of the white boomer marxist dudebro are deadends that fail to reconcile individual and collective emancipation for me. ------------------------------ There is also a very cold but I guess true (TW,: loss and trauma in general) statistical and bayesian argument of favoring spiritualities in the form of philosophies, nindos or whatever you call it that's undoubtedly metaphoric and materialist, rather than pre-existing belief systems in idealist terms; it's that humans brains are wired to find refuge from pain, trauma, mourning, loss, hardship in idealism to fill out the void in the personal-status-quo you lived in and the injustice, the pain etc... . I think your spirituality has less chances of turning immaterial if it's let's say existentialism, entropism or determinism, these philosophies have their neocon versions (like egoism, new-age-transhumanism and fatalism) but they are rarer and harder to fall in, while if you're a "cultural" christian or materialist buddhist, just lose a close one and you may end up right-wing, giving up, and secluded for the rest of your life because it was easier to cope at the moment. So stastistically the less persons are tempted to revert back to classic cults, the less they do. It's a wager against your own reduction of neural plasticity as you age.
Please feel free to be atheist, Buddhist, or whatever. You can also wear pants, a dress, do mathematics, knit, run, jump, etc without feeling shame or virtue. It's ok if you're mixed or not. You don't have to constantly apologize. It is healthy to recognize one's privilege, and we should work to repay or revisit and honor past treaties. I would support the US giving Hawaii back to native Hawaiians through some sort of transitional plan, for example. But acting like "non-indigenous people don't belong in the Americas" is a non-starter. So many people are mixed or they are not even aware of their proper ancestral lands. Also, needing to find one's "natural ancestral spirituality" is nonsense. Find whatever works spirituality or non-spirituality works for you, but they're all bullshit unfortunately. This renewed push for spirituality seems like a way to Jumpstart ideology without it simply being empathy and reason - and therefore prone to tribal power structures of control. I consider myself a leftist mostly concerned with fighting capitalism, economic inequality, and climate destruction. This over-focus on victim hierarchy is an Oppression Olympics and cis white hetero people are forced to hate themselves or find one or two Oppression Signals or triple-down on virtue signaling self hate to "regain some power" and not self-marginalize themselves as Oppression-deprived. I don't know. I just see this Oppression Olympics wokesterism as finally jumping the shark. Every normal white girl going to a liberal arts school comes out hating themselves. I'm worried.
If you watch some of Sadlord777's videos (or even this video all the way through), their analysis is a bit more nuanced than "Oppression Olympics." They don't see land acknowledgment or decolonial talk about settlers and indigenous people as about expunging guilt, but rather as simple statement of fact that is necessary to undo the mythologies of capitalism. They don't seem to hate themself and frankly seem a lot more self-confident and empathetic than most people I know their age, including myself.
Very interesting to think about spirituality through a leftist lens, especially for someone that never considered himself spiritual, but scratched that itch through other means! I am a bit icky though about this heavy empathis on ethnicity and ancestry in terms of nationality. A nation after all never has one ethnicity that defines it, it's made up of all the people that live in it at the moment. So, claiming roots and connections to a place based on genetics and lineage signals to me a kind of purist and nationalistic subtext lying beneath it, tho I know that's not the intent here! If I was born in the US say from a father that was born in Austria, but I've never set foot in it, I shouldn't be considered more included or connected than a person that has been living in Austria for a week, right?
of course - Sadlord addressed that a hyper focus on that leads to some very sketchy politics. this is about exploration and reckoning with accountability and subject positions and how that affects politics/practice, not about purity or anything like that
Great video! I have a few thoughts. First of all, the "grab bag" mentality of "spirituality" comes from Capitalism, and Neoliberalism in particular. Of course, this is pretty obvious to any leftist. The term "spirituality" is one that I do not particularly like. I especially don't like the phrase "spiritual, but not religious". It implies that we can get what we need from a bunch of self-help books, classes and thought leaders. I think that we need to reclaim the word "religion". The word "religion" may have come from the Latin "ligare" which means to bind, and then "religare" which would then mean to re-bind, or re-connect. Now, having said this, it is important to point out that religion as such... is not the same thing as faith (belief). The equation of religion with faith, is something that comes to us mostly from Christianity and Protestantism in particular. If we mean "faith" in the sense of loyalty to a community, or a set of practices, a moral code or even a taken oath, then that's another story. If we take it to mean a set of beliefs... well the problem is that many religions throughout the world aren't a set of beliefs. Haitian Vodou, for example, is a set of practices and rituals involving ancestor veneration and highly dramatic possession trance, for the purpose of healing and gaining knowledge from the spirits and the divine. Now you could say that you have believe that these things are real in order to practice Vodou, but in fact this is not the case. The religion has more to do with these experiences, which are direct, dramatic, emotional, intense, and personal... even when they occur in a group. In Buddhism, "faith" as in belief, has no place either. Even in Judaism, "faith" as belief has no bearing on the validity of one's practice of the religion, and doubt is sometimes actively encouraged. The fact is... most religions are not "faiths". When we use words like "interfaith" or "faith based" we are making a mistake, which is based on Christian assumptions. As for myself, I have zero interest in religion as a set of legal behavioral codes, or as "faith". I practice a specific tradition of French / Italian esoteric mysticism with historical ties to the radical left, the whole purpose of which is gnosis... or direct, personal experience of the spiritual and divine. I also practice other things. They have nothing whatsoever to do with "faith". They have no doctrines or dogmas, and as far as morality... only the kind that any decent human being would have, along with an encouragement to solidarity. The entire world is full of traditions which exist, and are designed in order to generate personal mystical experience. This makes "faith" utterly superfluous, and even an obstacle to personal experience. These experiences are the font from which all religion sprang. It is the direct personal experience, which destroys the illusion of separateness, and thus has the potential to inspire works of Solidarity to the greatest degree. Yoga, for example, is an authentically and originally RELIGIOUS practice, but people in the West have appropriated it, made it into a product to be sold, mostly as a form of exercise... and yet... if someone does it long enough they may have unintentional religious experiences which can be deeply uncomfortable or even represent a crisis for them since the practice and the experience are alienated from their authentic understanding and context. When you speak of the secular atheists amongst us, and the way they use an individualist and reductionist ontology, the heart of the matter is religious at it's core. By not insisting that they have faith, thereby give up their highly reasonable doubts, some of them may seek the experiences I speak of. I am a radical leftist, anti-capitalist (obviously) and I have spent my life studying religion and mysticism. From my point of view, the whole world is upside down because everyone focuses on faith, instead of experience. To me, that's why we can't get our relationships with nature and each other right. If / when I ever have the time, I'd love to create a channel where this is the main theme.
@@andrewmarkmusic Thanks! Actually, it's Memphis-Misraim, which is an Egyptian-Hermetic, gnostic and occult rite of Freemasonry which admits men and women on an equal basis. It is a fusion of the Rite of Memphis with the Rite of Misraim. The Rite of Memphis has such a close historical association with the radical left, that there is a ton of speculation that the original IWA was actually a project or a creation of the Rite of Memphis, seeing as the membership rolls had a very high degree of overlap, both in France, and in New York. Memphis was fused with Misraim by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1889. He was of course, the father of the unified, secular state of Italy... kind of like Italy's Washington, and also the head of Freemasonry in Italy, and he was also a leftist and a socialist. I think he used Freemasonry to a large extent for political and military reasons, to build solidarity amongst people of like mind. Catharism was a good guess though. There is actually a gnostic church from France which claims connection or at least inspiration from the Cathari, and it is loosely associated with Memphis-Misraim and other esoteric rites of Freemasonry, along with Martinism.
@@lorenmiller3797 I appreciate the reply, Loren. Although we are in agreement, in general, about the malaise of society, we’re likely in different gnostic schools. I’m a dualist through and though, and I don’t want to assume, but it be my guess that you a part of one of the non-dual schools. I just did a blog called, Mexie, where I flesh this out. You take care:)
Check out physicist Tom Campbell's, "My Big TOE (Theory of Everything)." As a nonphysical space / meditation explorer, I find that to be the most accurate model of reality atm. Also, get in touch with the "Low Entropy" community, I think they're based in Vancouver, too.
I think when it comes to the backtracing of one's ethnicity... You can label stuff... sure... But keep in mind that it's all fluent. Sadlord here for example is has cultures from what's "American white people", from Irish people, even probably (to a very small extent) from american black people, if he ever consumer like... any modern US media. You can get to a starting point by calling that "American white with Irish settler heritage"... But that's not where you should stop and go to drawing conclusions. you know... IMO
Welp, too much religious trauma from my cult raised queer butt for this conversation. I'll just dip, no shade at those in attendance. Have a great day.~😘
Couple of thoughts: What are "bad reasons" to get into other people's religions? I can imagine some, i guess... but i didn't feel like there was any details in this discussions on that. I think many people of broadly european descent both in europe especially in the US have had their spiritual traditions ... let's say... tenderized with the hammer of cristiantly, so that anything left over is no more than a thin unrecognizable paste. (unless you like your christianity, then you got lucky). It's no wonder that... I for instance cannot really connect to the Druidic Traditions of my Homeland. There's not really much left but super weird holidays.
Very interesting convo! As I spent time going to church and seeking and studying Jesus, I was also pulled to a stronger sense of justice and my views and desire for the future def skewed left. I wonder if either of you read The Long Lonliness by Dorothy Day. I’ve also been moved to live a more sustainable life.
How about maybe getting bad mouse on at some stage? - I think he'd be a good follow-up to this discussion as a British person. I noticed he left a comment about crypto-currencies in your last livestream. But, really, the British identity is a cryptic thing in itself - is Britian progressive or still entrenched in regressive practices? ...It is both at the same time (Britain is 'Terf Island' afterall - way ahead of the curve compared with the US on trans issues). I never felt more and less British when I left for a year and came back.
Hi Mexie, the end of the table of contents is broken. I think it's because in your description, there should be an extra colon (e.g. 1:00:25 instead of 100:25).
I’ve been really inspired by the Quakers.. their whole spiritual way lies in having real integrity to live according to their values, which are very much leaning towards social justice and ethical living. Their structure is actually pretty anarchist.. you sit in a circle with no one above anyone else, you seek inspiration directly from God, and church decisions are based on the collective agreeing in what inspirations have developed amongst the group.. rather than having a priest, preacher or scripture that defines belief. Actually there is a podcast by some anarchist Quakers but I forget the name.
Probably worth qualifying that there’s a pretty strong geographical split between Quakers with meetings in the United States being at least generally more evangelical exclusionary and colonising (their work in Africa is pretty fucked) while Quakers elsewhere are incredibly lose in terms of being a religion and are generally way more compatible with anarchism.
Very interesting video! I think a lot of very interesting points were brought up here that needs to be more discussed on the left. I would say, though, (as the good marxists we are) that the best critic of religion that has ever lived should have been brought up in this discussion. I'm talking about Karl Marx, of course! I think he really explains a lot of what you guys are talking about and really predicted the modern development of religion really well. Religion is, in many ways, a cry of resistance against the thankless existence we live in, "a cry of the opressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition". The role religion has played, especially in capitalist society, in making sense of the world and resisting their horrible existence. Christianity essentially preaches that the poor are blessed, and that the rich are not. The value religion has had, and continues to have, for the organizing of the lower classes really can't be overstated. Sadly though, a lot of religion, if not most, has served as a part of the ideological framework that serves to reproduce the relations of production. That the lower classes should work hard, know their place and not make a fuss. They'll get their reward in the afterlife. Marx writes that religion is tied to the misery that the lower classes live in, and their need for a way to resist it and make sense of it. He was completely right, since we now see that the countries with the highest degree of welfare has the least amount of religion. I do think, however, that you are both right in that we, especially as leftists, need some kind of philosophical framework to drive our appreciation of the planet, and all the creatures on it. I don't necessarily think it needs to be some kind of religion, though. I was an edgelord new atheist when I was 13. Luckily, I eventually grew out of this, and I see perfectly well now how much use religion has in some people's lives. It's also great to organize around. It's no coincidence that christianity and islam has been so essential for many of the great leaders of civil rights movements and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. Personally, I have found a lot of value in practicing stoicism. New atheists come from an extreme place of privilege. They think (very often) that religion and atheist is a matter of intelligence, and that some people are just too dumb to "figure it out". They don't understand that they come from a place of privilege. They have never needed religion in their lives to make sense of it. There is a reason why almost all New Atheists are privilieged cis, white people in wealthy, imperialist countries. I disagree that atheism is a religion, as Sadlord said. Atheism, in the strict sense, just tells you what that person is not. New Atheism, with it's worship of the ideal and aesthetic of "rationality", "science" and "intelligence" is definitely a sort of religious community, though. Philosophy Tube's video about this is great.
Thanks! Some great points. I don't fully agree that spirituality more broadly is tied to the misery of the lower classes, though. As we talked about, our ancestral traditions, which were earth honouring, predated class society. And re: atheism, I don't think Sadlord said it was a religion full stop, but a set of beliefs or a spiritual position that should be acknowledged in a more nuanced way.
@@Mexie So I don't think it is a one step process. Over areas as large as modern nation states, there is a huge amount of variation both geographically and temporally. That is to say that at any particular time for a specific community, there could be a fairly inegalitarian class structure, even quite a long time ago, and later (or earlier) times might have a similar cultural religious set up with a much more egalitarian distribution. In other words, for any particular small area, there have likely been multiple class societies that dissolved, either to conquest or internal revolt, and that were reconstructed after periods of highly egalitarian social systems. "Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Assessment Using Gini Coefficients and Household Size" Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 689 - 704 does a really good job going over how the increase in inequality from the Neolithic to the bronze age to the iron age is non linear and (well, dialectical). Perhaps the mot comprehensive project to date is "Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: the Archeology of Wealth Differences" 2019 www.worldcat.org/title/ten-thousand-years-of-inequality-the-archaeology-of-wealth-differences/oclc/1022763393 Much was different from what people expected. Teotihuacan, for instance, even though it was an explicit conquest state, was highly egalitarian with planned high quality apartment blocks. And there are examples of smaller scale societies with fairly high inequality. But the broader relevance here is that there is a big gap, where European and Asian Gini levels diverge significantly at a higher level from all Indigenous societies (whether state or not). There is overlap, but the tendencies are clear. And this gap emerges thousands of years before Christianity, or virtually any surviving contemporary religion.
Of course, I very much realize there were inequalities and hierarchies in many ancient societies at different times (not all), and agree that to some extent all spirituality is about making sense of the world. I also agree that the emergence of religions like Christianity did have a lot to do with class. But even as a Marxist I find the Marxist position on religion to be reductive and paternalistic, and spirituality to me is much broader than religion. To imply that people are religious or spiritual merely because they aren't privileged enough to "not need it in their lives" is extremely reductive, especially when applied to many Indigenous or other earth-honouring traditions that are aren't centred on the self, but relationship and reciprocity. The Marxist position to me seeks to rationalize and categorize people, "they think/feel this way because of ___", minimizing the breadth of deep connection/interconnection and spiritual wisdom that humans are able to tap into, and implying that the spiritual connection or worldview they hold is not really real or valid, it's just something that arises from their social position. It feels patronizing and assumes that atheism is the more rational, privileged position, when actually trying to rationalize spiritual connection completely misses the mark. The spiritual connection I had with nature/the universe as a child was of course in some sense me making sense of the world and my place in it, but also grew out of a genuine connection and a sense of interconnection that I felt and that I've since been able to foster and grow to be even fuller. The behaviours/actions that grow out of a spiritual practice based in reciprocity are crucial IMO for building a sustainable post-capitalist society. I wish leftists would engage with this stuff more openly in general.
@@Mexie So I think we are more in agreement than it seems, but I will say that explaining the conditions for the emergence of a phenomenon is not the same as explaining the true reality of it, or defining the limitations as such. “But the presence of these subsidiary forms does not exhaust the essence of the main forms in each case. One day we shall certainly ‘reduce’ thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motion in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?” These lines make clear that Engels conceived of the lower-level elements as the historical constituents of the newly emerged higher-level organization of matter. Engels agreed that the present forms of motion can be traced back to their past developmental record (reduction), but denied that higher-level emergent properties can be explained solely by the lower-level properties from which they emerge (reductionism). monthlyreview.org/2020/11/01/engelss-emergentist-dialectics/ Otherwise, I thought that the video you shared by Three Arrows made a great point. Marx and Engels should have corresponded directly with Hasanoanda or Ely Parker and cut Morgan out. More fundamentally, they should have treated The Law of Great Peace not just as a historical object, but as an alternative to be considered like the Russian Mir as a potential source for the broader transformation of society. In other words, The Law of Great Peace and Alluyu should have been considered from the beginning "really existing socialisms" that could be worked with and learned from. Certainly, places like Bolivia where this attitude is wide spread (and maybe Peru, although the direction of events seem unclear at the moment) seem to be doing much better than places where there was a split (like in Ecuador). But, to get back to the Marxist position, it is in the final analysis a question of base rather than superstructure as to whether there is a "metabolic rift" or not. Almost every tradition will say that they have (or at least used to have) an environmentally friendly and socially egalitarian element. However, people say a lot of things, and will often tell false stories. Certainly, we believe that about the Capitalists, or various other reactionaries, whatever their in tradition stories and claims (like in Economics). So you have to double check, and modern archology lets you, if done carefully, really and truly evaluate aspects of the relationship with the earth for past societies (diet, social equality, environmental impact through deforestation, and so on). And I think the evidence in the book I citied, combined with recent evidence about Indigenous Peoples protecting 80% of the biodiversity (as well as the role of Tawantinsuyu in protecting birds for Guano) shows that Indigenous Peoples talked the talk and walked the walk. Large parts of West Africa also seem to have been cooperative and ecologically sustainable. However, this evidence does not exist for most of Eurasia (outside of Indigenous groups), and certainly not in Europe. Whatever was said by people in European societies, they tended to be class hierarchies out of balance (in varying levels) with their local environments. And people who tried to change things tended to "get got" like Allende. Thomas Müntzer may be separated by a thousand years (and more miles) from Mazdak, but they were similarly executed for challenging the status quo. Especially for Europe, I'm not sure what the political value is in reviving ancient religious or spiritual practices.
It was a fascinating conversation. I think at some point I've diverged from your line. I acknowledge that atheists have varying spiritual beliefs, if we frame this term more along the lines of philosophy and ideology. From this point, as an Israeli atheist (English is my 2nd language, so pardon my clumsy phrasing), I was raised to see myself as a part of the Jewish people, as well as the Zionist settlement project, but not the Jewish religion, I feel like *it'd be wrong for me to rejoin this religion with a preconceived desire to change* many of its common practices and values (unlike, say, my significant other, whose family comes from an American progressive branch of Judaism, and their late grandfather was a prominent Rabbi whose work I can truly admire). Zionism, in contrast, is a project which I'm a part of whether I like it or not, although ideologically I see myself as anti-zionist. The fact I exist here and form my communities here is a service in itself to that ideology. Hence it is my place and my responsibility to influence and disturb it in my personal and communal practices. Where I find my place is by engaging with various philosophies, at times by myself, but also with my communities. I do find certain topics in Jewish history to be particularly inspiring, like influencial Jewish anarchists and socialists, and further back to Jewish piracy and even more "mainstreamed" parts of my heritage. To some degree *I feel compelled towards connecting with those narratives* and to find what's worth preserving, because other people, non-Jews or Jews with different values to mine, won't do it for me. In a parallel sense I'd like people of all traditions to find what's worth preserving and in their ancestral narratives, and to use the amazing opportunity we have to come together and share all those ideas and values. In our contemporary context it may seem like colonialism all over again, but I'd argue we should figure equitable ways to engage with one another, and that connectedness with other traditions is in itself a worldwide human tradition as old as we.
After watching this I looked at my family name origin. warrior caste, military title. It's annoying for a softboy military abolitionist. very much meh.
Same. I was a semi-casual atheist humanist for a loooooong time. One day, after watching Stalker (And Solaris a week before)by Tarkovsky, I had this thought; What if EVERYONE thought like I do now? ANd not just in an idealized world. The REAL ACTUAL world, full of it's flaws and evil. Without ANY spirituality, I didn't see it going well. I realized... Religion was actually... good? It triggered something in me, and I realized I DID have a spiritual ideology, and I didn't actually like it very much. Yet again, old Russian philosophers changing my entire worldview! TLDR: I identify as a pantheistic pagan now (Because it's easier to convey than "Umm, I kind of worship nature but also the will of luck and also we're all nature, and BTW I believe in magic but also magic comes from within. Also, the Yin-Yang, bro.), but basically just copy-paste what Sadlord said with a little less Christianity. In a way, my beliefs hold the same amount of space as it's always in my life, even as a young quote unquote "Christian" whose parents never went to church. Not a huge amount, maybe 15% of me. But now I REALLY am sure that 15% is actually lining up with who I am and want to be going forward. It's extremely freeing no longer having to divide the world into "sheeple spiritualists" and "Enlightened philosophers", you know? (Therapy helps too! I would not be where I am without confronting my white and personal shame.) I feeler a significantly deeper connection with my environment, people, and everything. It was a long process, but finding my shrived spirituality basically cured my lifelong depression. Or at least gave me a tool to fight back and win at times. True good faith is hard to come by, but projecting it outward may be easier than it seems. PS: I recommend the book: The Patterning Instinct. It really framed colonialism and the spread of monotheism for me in a way that aided this journey.
This was suuuch a great video! I frequently encounter similar personal issues with my spirituality -- like whether something is appropriative, what it means to pursue my ancestral customs, to what degree I'm "allowed" to syncretize different elements of spirituality that resonate with me, etc. I think white people do frequently struggle with how whiteness as a racial concept has kind of "erased" their older customs (and often an enduring animism that you two talked about in the video) as a byproduct of white hegemony and absorption, and the outcome is that they often slide into appropriative shallow hippie bullshit on the one hand or they hyper-fixate on their ethnicity and become fashy neo-pagans on the other, both being seriously flawed attempts at reclaiming some sense of lost community and resonance. Neither one of those paths are good ways forward obviously. I like how Sadlord777 has reclaimed a radical connection to Christianity in their practice. I can't say for sure that's where I'll end up, but as a white Italian/Scottish/French/Portuguese person myself, my most-directly-recent ancestors have all been Christian in some capacity; it's an implicit cultural mode that has existed all around me for pretty much my whole life. With that in mind, ought I seek out radical wings of Christianity and commit to those? Maybe syncretize a leftist Christian mysticism with the animism and stories of my ancestors? A lot to think about for sure! Once again, fantastic video/conversation! Immediately subscribed to Sadlord's channel after it ended 🙂
He nexie, are you familiar with Karen Houle and her contributions to critical plant studies? I was so deeply moved by hearing her thoughts on the Acid Horizon Podcast (about “becoming plant”, CPS, and a beautiful depiction of the wasp and the orchid). If you’re not familiar, check out that episode. It was so profoundly moving and I have been obsessed with her as well as additional critical veg concepts having not even known the field existed despite being a secular Buddhist, lifelong vegan, commie, and nomad.. go figure haha. But I would LOVE to her your thoughts on her work, and even connect this emerging field to your own content more so if you do choose :) Beautiful talk though btw. Sone of the concepts Houle tackles actually tie into sone of these topics, so I was reminded and in the hopes you notice this, I feel inclined to share and get your opinion. Keep doing what you’re doing, learning, growing, sharing, healing, and praxising :)
Yeah a lot of people, even who say they aren’t spiritual or religious, have an ideology about typical being the “right” way to be, and humans being superior to other animals, and a distinction between human activities and nature, and they don’t realise these aren’t objective facts about the world, but are a culturally biased world view.
sadlord777 the shame is not you it's your ego. buddhism is a great way of managing that mexie please talk about your buddism practices more. we might actually get some leftist unity if you do. according to the anthropologist michael puett, confucious believed that humans are messy and that's okay also, read 'indian givers' by jack weatherford guys!
It was so good to hear this perspective. Mexie for voicing all the thoughts I've been having and grappled with, and Sadlord777 for bringing up so many points I'd never thought of before. Loved their perspective on being a part of the Anglican church! I'm not sure I love the phrase "becoming Indigenous to place." Don't get me wrong, I have that chapter of Kimmerer's book bookmarked and return to it regularly, but I just... think the phrase itself makes me cringe a little bit (??). For me Indigenous is more of a political category, so I'm not sure if I'm comfortable using it like that? I think the idea of being/becoming in right relationship to ourselves, our community, and the land is maybe better expressed using that term (literally, 'becoming in right relationship to ourselves/our community/the land'). I mean it's wordier but it's also more direct and less... fraught? This isn't criticism - just me publically working through what my thoughts on this are. Agreed though, it is so important for us as white settlers to talk about our shame, work through it, and work out how to be in right relationship to this place, given all the history. Thank you so much for providing the place for this conversation. This meant a lot to me.
I really loved this. Thank you guys! I share the same experience in the left, be it Anarchists or ML or other Socialists. It is so important to many how someone identifies and that they Wong work with anyone who doesn't share all of their political beliefs. And I have been a Communist for about 20 years and still am an active ML. But I was also a Christian from 20 to 29,until I became a practitioner of Hermeticism and Magick. I always had huge problems in leftist circles when I told them that I was a Christian. Today I don't even mention my spiritual practice if I'm not specifically asked about it. "Spirituality is always political" I absolutely agree. Thank you Mexie and comrade!
I found a lot of the first 30min interesting except for the part about cultural appropriation. I just find the notion utterly ridiculous! Not to harp on anyone just sharing my thoughts on this notion. Like if you have a good idea or better way of doing something it's only natural others will do it as well. Or you just like their values like what to bad you can't live their lifestyle? Gimme a break it's unrealistic and just a growing tumor of a fad. Ok I'm good now. Edit: only watched the first 30min, fyi.
A sense of awe with nature and world doesn't need a spiritual justification. Neither is care for living creatures, connectedness or a wish for safe, loving prosperous relationships among humans and to our environment. Spirituality often comes with additional weight of customs and beliefs tending to sustain hierarchical structures, the right of the stronger, essentialist separation of roles, prejudice etc. Every large religion is known for killing people based on different views. So choosing a spiritual or religious path one always chooses to do a lot of extra work of sorting out and separating oneself from all the dirt it carries along. I find it too much, it's simpler without. At least for me.
Can I just say that I am getting involved in quakerism and to me it seems like quakers have a really compatible set of values for leftists (also nontheist quakers are a thing including me) but basically the 5 central values are Tolerance, Environmentalism, Justice, Pacifism, and Simplicity. (Note that lots of quakers do not interpret protest or destruction of property as against pacifism and there is a long history of quaker activism) But anyways its a small group but very worth looking into especially if most mainstream religions really turn you off.
An add on what particularly drew me to quakerism is the focus on values over ideology. I think any focus on ideology is a dangerous path to blind faith and worse. (Descendant of holocaust survivor here)
As much as I hate that it's the case it's very true that a lotta churches and religious groups are solid centers of community, organizing, and allocating resources to those who need em most, often better than secular groups. Through the years a lotta radical secular groups I've been involved with have worked pretty closely with local religious groups. Where I'm at now we work with different religious sects for different things and they range from Catholic to Protestant to Buddhists and Hare Krishnas to Muslim to Jewish, a little of everything and given the make-up of the city there's using a progressive sect around somewhere lol Rather it's feeds, food delivery, bail and medical fund raising, coat drives, back to school supplies drives, eviction resistance, etc, different groups have different strengths and it's important to be willing to have that tactical unity to get stuff done and knowing where to draw a line so that ya aren't compromising yourself or opening yourself up to harmful groups (like working with eco-fascists for eco issues, bad move imo). But it's not new, this goes back hundreds of years. Religious/spiritual groups have long been both sources of reaction and sources of liberation. About as far back as we have human writings we see it. And even in more recent and nearby history it's the case like how we've seen aboriginal groups, anarchists, and Quakers standing together against nuclear proliferation, war, land and resource grabs, and a number of other things before anyone else got involved. One of the biggest things I've taken from post-left and Native writings has been the hyper skepticism/critical perspective of self and worldview as well as how we fit into the world as it exists and as we'd like to see it. I have no love for organized religion or magical thinking but I also don't hold to this childish idea that everyone else needs to feel that way or not falling in-line means ya lose your place in the movement or whatever. I'm an anti-humanist as well and hate this idea that humans are somehow outside and/or above the concept of "nature". While I disagree with a lot of post-left, anti-civ, and similar lines of thought I still find em valuable cause they can help to break down a lotta ideological hang-ups and make ya challenge things within yourself and broader movements in a way that can make em stronger for having answered those criticisms even if most of those thinkers have used those criticisms to abandon em all together. I just genuinely don't understand wtf we're even talking about when we say "spiritual" cause no one seems capable of defining it in a way that everyone agrees on and everyone seems to mean something very different every time they say it. Sometimes what I hear I think is fine and I can perfectly relate and under which I'd be considered "spiritual" while others I've heard are just kinda ridiculous and I see no reason to engage with and/or view as potentially harmful even if I can respect that others feel differently. Just like why is ancestry important. I'm "mixed" Sicilian (complicated) and "black" and it is important to me to a point, but what I hear sounds more like essentialist bs with no basis in reality and no real utility aside from further segregating instead of bringing together and sharing. Why does my genetic makeup have anything to do with what I may spiritually connect with? While some atheists are absolutely dogmatic ideologues, I don't see how that's always the case. I don't really engage in religious beliefs and what many call spirituality because it does nothing for me. But I do meditate pretty frequently, try to be connected to the world around me and appreciate the things in it most take for granted or view as a menace, and small things like that and I have these almost transcendent experiences at concerts, demos, chanting crowds, holding someone as they cry, helping those who need it and accepting help when I do, working with others to accomplish something, all kinds of stuff, in many ways my anarchism has been spiritual in some sense of the word. I've even tried going back through my lineage to see what they practiced, Unfortunately for Mexie "Italian" is a very modern understanding of the region that breaks down much more locally, often village by village or region by region. I've looked into some of the more ancient spiritual practices where my family came from in Sicily and several from different parts of the African continent since I can't know where exactly my family is from and they also did nothing for me. I also think there's some issue with this language and sticking labels on everybody. Initially Irish people (and some English) were brought to the so-called US against their own will and in bondage of one form or another, it's well documented despite what some like to say for whatever reason, are they settlers? What about someone like my friend who's parents came from Nigeria to the so-called US? What about me who's Sicilian family came here from Sicily fleeing poverty and Northern domination and "mixed" with the descendants of former slaves? I'm fairly light skinned and could probably "pass" but I came up in the hood and culturally I'm probably more "black" than Sicilian and even my Sicilian family doesn't identify as "white", where do I fit? One of my best friends is American Indian (his term, Cherokee and Creek) and he said he views Sicilians as a colonized people just as the Irish were only Sicilians and Southern Italians still live under Northern reign, as well as that he doesn't view Sicilians, Irish, and some other groups escaping domination and brutality the same way he does English, Spanish, and French settlers, but others disagree. I just think it's playing with the same essentialist thinking that leads to race, gender, etc, and only further divides unnecessarily if not approached very carefully. It's extremely complicated lol There are no good universal answers aside from the very obvious of which there isn't much. Even indigenous voices don't agree on what they wish to be called, much less what's to be done. We just have to keep moving, talking, learning, and pushing now. Cause way too many aren't even considering these things.
Wanted to say, as i said to Sadlord, re: my isolation as a non‐atheist anti‐capitalist: I've researched my ancestry back to Portugal, Norway, Libya, Mordovia, Turkey, Iraq, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, and honestly, the side from Norway by way of England and Portugal by way of Canada has been the hardest to connect to-even with the reconstructed paganisms-due to not just the colonialism, but also due to destruction of the matristic peoples of the European peninsula & islands themselves earlier. Conquest under different systems has occurred across the board, but something about the mercantile and capitalists empires & their precursors is just particularly triggering to me i guess, still living in the hegemony that coalesced because of that. I mostly stick to Tengriism in a kind of hodgepodge animistic deism these days & otherwise use a transpersonal psychological/ phenomenological lens to orient myself toward collectivity beyond my surrounding cultures' hegemonic boxes. I just... don't even know how to approach my more recent roots (Canada, England, etc) bc they've all cut me off before i even met them & i don't really wanna re‐engage bc i don't find my European side particularly edifying & have already gotten my fill of European ontology or whitewashed versions of stolen/appropriated through a colonized process and lens & it doesn't resonate with me as a neuroatypical, physically disabled, intellectually disabled, queer person. Never really has. Kinda good with just my mom tbh. She's a child of a immigrants from Canada and Holland & neither of them liked where they came from due to traumas (Catholic boarding schools & losing a child from her 1st marriage in the Canadian case, being forced to work for Nazis in the Dutch case). My dad's side abandoned my dad before i was born, so idrc about those roots. But my mom has never taught me to resonate with, enjoy, claim kinship with, or respect any of the U.S.'s or Canada's or Holland's legacies and institutions. So I'm kind of at a loss of what else i can do. I traced my genealogy to Asia and North Africa & like... idk Finland is cool i guess, but I'm a transpersonal collectivist & i don't believe in any form of atomism, so I'm just like... aside from recognizing that my skin color and facial features remind ppl of abuse and colonization that I still benefit from, I don't see what my more immediate ancestors have to teach me. It's like all that's left is accountability, and that's kind of sad, but it's not like my Turkmen & Berber ancestors have any more hold of me than my family who already cut me off financially and never had any impact aside from maybe giving my parents a relative amount of stability. So idk, i wonder if how much of the existential, cultural and psychological distance i feel to Europe is due to my family dynamic & my personal orientation toward spirituality, and how much is just finding the accountability process very alien to me in a frustrating way bc i don't feel or have any connection (outside of intergenerational resources, with no intergenerational *relationships*) to the same ancestors whose actions that colonized peoples, my current neighbors, still have to contend with & my face and skin remind them of. It's almost easier to just be like "I don't claim that" (because i don't) but that runs the risk of not claiming the stake & privilege I have in speaking and amplifying voices for justice, reconciliation, reparations, decol, etc. It's tempting to just focus on my great‐great‐great‐grandparents of the lineages I've traced to SWANA and their ancestors, and only speak on Europe and U.S. and Canada in an adversarial capacity, but i don't like that posture and how it plays out in the disposability (and carcerality) ethos of the secular left & the "terminally online" left.
I honestly liked and appreciated this video. So please don't read the following as against. Just my learning is contrary in a few ways. In my 20's I would have nodded my head to much of this. At 55 I have to share an insight that has taken a lot of time and effort to realize and notice. And when I noticed I couldn't stop. All traditions of spiritual exercise get quickly co-opted by the criminal hoarding class who then twist them to institute trauma and abuse as culture in order to create a compliant, permanent prey population of disempowered civilians they can feed off of. I am not talking about overt abuses that we currently recognize as such. I am talking about very subterranean, so-ingrained-it's-wallpaper-you-can't-see-until-someone-pulls-it-back abuses and customs. The short list: ONCE ESTABLISHED and having gathered a following... They amass small and large hoards of resources They welcome the wealthy into their bosoms Their respective histories are marriage to the power brokers of their given eras They promote poverty as inescapable and discourage accountability of the wealthy They collude in the pretense that there is some nobility in tolerating a subsistence life The salvos they offer abused civilians to soothe the torture perpetrated on them by the criminal hoarding classes must be repeated every day, every week, every month and every year. In the absence of constant repetition, the organic experience of life would reassert and that objectively flies in the face of the teachings of these memeplexes. They insert themselves into the relationships people have with their own bodies without any spiritual reason to do so. They pathologize a wide array of normal, natural human drives and impulses and pretend others don't exist. Eastern flavors are at least as bad if not worse. What social justice movements have come out of the east? No pan-asiatic women's movement, no respect for the disabled as fully human. Today, in 2021, they are still largely behind in all social justice indices. Lastly, I am not speaking from lack of personal experience. I am speaking as a civilian who no longer signs off on lies. I used to be a goddist and a very good one. It felt good for the first 35 years of my life. But I had to outgrow that dependency in order to embrace my sincere experience. I hope others can too.
Usually, leftist spirituality is grounded on what you describe, so the idea is to return the stigma and transform it into something empowering for the self and the community; also the idea of a non-metaphorical god isn't coherent with such spiritualities, and you'll really rarely find one, it's more linked with making peotry out of materilaism so to say, a framework, a culture, a lecture, an allegory etc...
@@26yd1 will you consider that "leftist" spirituality is just as exploitative of the cognitive error called wishful thinking as any other cult or tradition? Things like the secret are truly heinous drug- like memes that can stall ppl's development. This is this. Things mean themselves. The further away from that the rhetoric goes the less adult the adherents and the less ethical in my experience.
@@tahiyamarome Wishful thinking isn't an error, just like intersexuations, neurodivergence or gnenetic mutations. The concept of error doesn't exist within non-judgemental things, just like hierarchy etc... wishful thinking and cognitive bias as well as the need to fill up coherent gaps with idealist knowledge to comprenhand reality are evolutionary designs adapted for pre-civilisationnal survival. While we probably agree on the basis that the left is inherently anti-nature and pro-culture, the problem with your thoughts is that you are doing the wishful thinknig of believing that you can get rid of wishful thinking (or bias or whatever). It's not true, the way to hack nature is to fill the gaps that are supposed to be filled up with materialism instead of the expected idealism, it's optimal to use strictly no allegory and just raw description of the physical determinist causal reality, except even physics laws are transcendental and you'll want to be able to predict stuff, make bets and guesses. So your "post-spirituality" is turned towards a form of transcendent thought that stays rooted in materilaism yes, and doesn't use cosmic or natural metaphors, like bayesianism... but even then your inherent thirst for existential knowledge won't be filled up, so you're gonna turn towards more dangerous bets with Laplace's Demon and start to re-use metaphors: I sometimes post-ironically call myself an entropist, and at minima I sure do believe in a transcendent direction of history/matter/space-time and the entropic exponential progress curve, just like an upgrade to orthodox marxism, hoping to reach a social singularity = anarchism. But then tolerance is also to be able to realize that my line of thoughts is heavily influenced by my own determinism (europe + 25 y.o. millenial + autism + amab socialization + middle class and access to knowledge + specific interests on materilaism, philosophy, and social sciences = introverted queer-leaning sub-male in patriarchy's standards determined to comprend social codes and existential reality through overintellectualism and raw materilaism). People come to the left from all backgrounds, so their own ways to make sense of the world existentially are valid as long as they disrupt hierarchic structures, institutions and fascist-leaning metaphors (like a God basically). There are no hierarchy between my thought and their thoughts, and there is virtually no chance a neurotypical cisgirl is determined towards my line of thoughts for exemple. "Their" thoughts are only statiscally sub-optimal because if you use "dangerous" metaphors (leading to think via essentilaism, naturalism and idealism), you increase your chance of falling into neoreaction, BUT no one is immune to it (just like many once-materialists turned Stals, MLs and Terfs, I must be very careful to not become like Nick Land or an-cap in a couple decades with my current beliefs^^), and all spiritualities can individually avoid such traps. I guess I was pretty technical and cryptic in "pure autism" mode, but it's really tough to make such thoughts easy to understand, if you want to better get my thoughts with some more vulgarisation, you can check my original comment that's more about my problems with their framing as being pro-nature.
@@26yd1 i agree that descriptive language is less likely to invoke a lot of cultural training in hierarchy and you certainly do make the most of erudition. Have fun with it. I'm glad it feels that good to you. For my own part, as someone who works in the field of differability, i prefer more accessible SHARED language when interacting with other people. Be on guard for rebranding hyperbolic self-reference as autism. One is a clinically defined set of observable behaviors. The other is a subjective state that can fuel a pattern of progessively hostile, anti-social choices.
Something that ticked me off specifically is the "You have a spiritual thing going on whether you believe it or not" bit, I guess. Like... No? Granted, I grew up in a society that is pervaded by a certain believe system, and that has shaped my thinking to some degree, but that doesn't make me spiritual imo. Spirituality doesn't do anything for me. I'm not invested in any conception of any "higher" force or being. I despise magical thinking. How am I spiritual in any way?
@@DarkPrject I think you're conflating some things here. Namely spirituality, religion and magical thinking. They, of course, often come together, but you can also have one without the other. And it doesn't make it easier that there is no one agreed upon definition of spirituality. But how I understood Mexie and Sadlord, they're talking mainly about things like connectedness to other people and nature. And experiences one can have like ego death (through meditation e.g.). Not about magical thinking in the sense of "If you just believe enough in smth, you will it into existence", like a lot of Christians e.g. do.
@@Ocyon And that is a really hurtful conflation to people with religious trauma who want nothing to do with spirituality. Sucks, but it is what it is.
"You are spiritual, you just don't know it." "No I'm not, and I'm uncomfortable with you calling me that." "No, you just don't understand what I mean by that. If you use a different definition..." It's all so tiresome...
Would love to see conversations like this involving indigenous folks, it feels like it would have immeasurably enhanced many points in this conversation if there had been an indigenous perspective in the mix. Overall fantastic video, just feel indigenous folks need to be involved in these kinds of conversations directly for a better grounding and wider/deeper understanding!
For sure! Would love to organize that in the future. Although I think there is value in having settlers grapple with this stuff together, too.
@@Mexie Oh yeah, def for example loved seeing two settlers explicitly and healthily expressing how open they are to correction, criticism, elaboration, etc without any self-flagellation, calmly and eagerly with smiles all around. Really excellent stuff to see modeled for an audience as big as yours!
Hm, "values vs ideology" is a framing I hadn't consciously thought of in those words before, but it instantly resonated with me. Really helped me contextualize my frustration with a lot of white leftist spaces. I'm interested in doing anarchism (specifically social ecology/radical municipalism/democratic confederalism) in ways that empower indigenous communities and promote decolonization, but I keep butting heads with theory bros who seem more concerned with enforcing some kind of orthodoxy than with actually improving anyone's material conditions.
This was a really great conversation. Thanks for sharing it!
I was so surprised to see a fellow Christian on a channel like this, especially with a similar worldview to me! I so value seeing some more diverse representation, it makes me feel much less alone in the left!
This was AMAZING, thanks so much for this. We NEED more convos like this on the left!!!
Thank you both for this work! This got me thinking about a tendency toward hyper-rationality that I've noticed in the left (broadly speaking).
I wonder if there is a kind of disembodiment that results from not wanting to be associated with feelings in one's discourse - a possible conflation with the feels-based, appeals to emotion of many conservatives (of course, popular conservatives would deny this).
I just wonder if this possibility, based on perception avoidance, might influence the deeper connection to solidarity. It's for sure more complex than this, I just wonder the extent to which this mechanism (if it is a thing) might explain the phenomenon.
My brother helped me alot with not having the militant atheist mindset has he studies alot of Ancient Near East history and socities for a living and saw religion from a different perspective in terms of his academic work.
Looking into certain religious practices also made we widen my understanding of the fuctionality of religion.
that's great - yeah I appreciate learning from a wide range of perspectives and beliefs
Thank you for collabing with Sadlord and giving their channel more exposure, I've been watching them for many years and their videos are amazing, I really wish more people knew about them on youtube.
My belief is that while humans aren't the center of the ecosystem we do have a unique ability to understand and manipulative the environment in ways that currently destroy the planet for the sake of profit but could be done to benefit all species. We're the gardeners 🐝
I always think of gardeners and nature conservationists as fairies with magical earthly powers
This is exactly the video I needed today! Thanks :)
love that :) thank you!
Same here!
From another white settler of Haudenosaunee land who's struggling with balancing my spirituality, my politics, and everything I learned from Braiding Sweetgrass, this video gave me so much to take with me and think more about. I can confirm that there are lots of us who are thinking about these things but are unsure how to start the conversation, so thank you for doing so.
This actually answers a lot of questions I've been having in the last few weeks about my own experiences as a settler Canadian, which is... scarily timely. Although, I will say some of the things about humanism being human-centric (ironically) I found to be a bit presumptive - most humanists I know don't exclude non-human thinking entities from their moral or "spiritual" understanding of the world. There's definitely some who do, but I feel like that's simply more of a loud group who aren't engaging with humanism on good faith either.
Love this convo ! When sadlord777 said it wasn’t a ‘accountable thing to do’ to move back to the Isles at 55:55 they kinda hit the nail on the head for diaspora politics: accountability. For example, I’ve heard Philip Scott (youtuber kinda conservative but I enjoy his perspective and general media strategy) advocating African Americans having an ‘Africa Plan’ in their back pocket, typically when covering racism in America and his own experiences with ancestry/nationality and acceptance as more than a tourist when visiting the continent freedom from racism etc... I think it’s safe to say for the African diaspora there’s a functioning “who claims you” dynamic with some African countries and modern geopolitics. Like y’all said these topics are supa complicated - just came to mind and figured I’d throw in my $2
Woah awesome! thank you for this. So excited to watch.
This video really spoke to me. Thank you for putting it into the world.
I appreciate y'all tackling this complex and large topic with so much grace and awareness. Love seeing more lefties not just embrace spirituality but also recognize its vital role in human creation and consciousness.
Personally, I would have had a far better life without it.
Tends to be so for quiverfull kids.
Very good video indeed , needed this for sure 😊
Ok seriously. I hate the general usage of the word "appropriate". It's not inherently bad to appropriate anything. The negative connotation comes entirely from the context. The reason appropriating native cultures (for instance) is often bad is not the appropriation in general. It's that it's rude and disrespectful to do so from the standpoint of a colonizer, exploiter and uninitiated.
Watched this on the other channel first, but wanted to leave a like and comment for the engagement.
British Isles is a colonial term which the Irish reject, just think it's a bit unusual to talk about about Settler Colonialism and use a term that's rooted in colonialism itself.
thanks! point taken, will pass it on
I usually use the term "the isles" personally, I just used the term the british isles here because it would be more broadly understood as there are many island peoples. I'm not familiar with another term that encompasses all of the isles in a specific and anti-colonial way.
My grandmother does all her church charity but kicked me out for being too ADHD
that's terrible, I'm so sorry
My spawn points did the same at 14 when I refused conversion therapy.
I was 19 when the girl I was caught kissing took her life after deciding to stay.
I probably shouldn't have clicked on this video.
I'll go now.
I personally think as long as a specific spiritual path is open to anyone (some aren’t) and the seeker acknowledges that they bring their own cultural baggage with them and seeks to face that and work through it, then it should be ok to seek from spiritualities that developed in other cultures, or our own ancestors from whom we are alienated. But it’s always good to try to really understand the worldview that it came from and to be mentored by someone from that culture if possible.
The left needs to untangle the relationship between ancestry race and spirituality. Because "white" gets related to a race which it is not it's a color. No one uses the world European because that's a loaded world that doesnt just contain white. We relate european which is the ancestry with white. This holds down the right wing because the Spanish along with Italians are europeans but are not all white. But in America I'm not european nor American I'm cuban Puerto rican america. And in the jim crow south I would be colored cuz I tan in the sun which is the dichotomy we use to live in the south white colored and black
But my ancestry would be Hispanic/spanish and Iberic which is all the same denotion along with european and a ancestor of the Roman empire because this is all ancestry can encompass from a biological standpoint not a spiritual
Interesting, I've made a similar path myself of understanding left spirituality and equating it with my philosophies, as an autist white amab with ideals that go towards municipalism (Bookchin kind, as technoprog as can be depending on how much of the entropic-growth curve we can keep and get going). In a nutshell, I took the path autist amabs are determined too of rationalism to materialism, and now transcendent materialism that can be equated a cognitive-help-book to any individual spirituality seen as a metaphor of the material reality.
My kind of tolerant concerns with the spiritualism you defend are the end results to be pro-nature in a spiritual sence that gets mixed up with being pro-nature in the traditional idealist sense and we don't really know where is the line. With the idea that nature-as-concept isn't the core and skull of all suffering and oppressions because of some mix-up with notions like environement and biodiversity, I can feel an horizon that risk going towards less technology, automation-denial, due to some light nature essentialism and the material ideas that running complex things in small scale settings isn't possible.
For exemple feeling like being in "nature" is a spiritual experience... I mean it's mostly flow, pleasure, a specific interest and molecules that move; the sence of transcendence and hubris you may feel while outside in the forest can be felt listening to music or having an orgasm or writing a long comment... calling this spiritual dives into essentialism for me.
When these thoughts evolve into less and less materiality and full nature worship, new age stuff, It traditionally ends in idealist degrowth neoconservatism that brings back all the dichotomies we're struggling to fuse into scales of free-being, obviously qveerphobic and ableist first before being fascist globally at the end of the neocon road... that's why I'm weary with leftist-spiritualities that actually seem to believe in idealist concepts further than in metaphors but in actual truth. Both clichés of the small traditional village in which you work the earth all week long and of the white boomer marxist dudebro are deadends that fail to reconcile individual and collective emancipation for me.
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There is also a very cold but I guess true (TW,: loss and trauma in general) statistical and bayesian argument of favoring spiritualities in the form of philosophies, nindos or whatever you call it that's undoubtedly metaphoric and materialist, rather than pre-existing belief systems in idealist terms; it's that humans brains are wired to find refuge from pain, trauma, mourning, loss, hardship in idealism to fill out the void in the personal-status-quo you lived in and the injustice, the pain etc... . I think your spirituality has less chances of turning immaterial if it's let's say existentialism, entropism or determinism, these philosophies have their neocon versions (like egoism, new-age-transhumanism and fatalism) but they are rarer and harder to fall in, while if you're a "cultural" christian or materialist buddhist, just lose a close one and you may end up right-wing, giving up, and secluded for the rest of your life because it was easier to cope at the moment. So stastistically the less persons are tempted to revert back to classic cults, the less they do. It's a wager against your own reduction of neural plasticity as you age.
Please feel free to be atheist, Buddhist, or whatever. You can also wear pants, a dress, do mathematics, knit, run, jump, etc without feeling shame or virtue. It's ok if you're mixed or not. You don't have to constantly apologize.
It is healthy to recognize one's privilege, and we should work to repay or revisit and honor past treaties. I would support the US giving Hawaii back to native Hawaiians through some sort of transitional plan, for example. But acting like "non-indigenous people don't belong in the Americas" is a non-starter. So many people are mixed or they are not even aware of their proper ancestral lands. Also, needing to find one's "natural ancestral spirituality" is nonsense. Find whatever works spirituality or non-spirituality works for you, but they're all bullshit unfortunately. This renewed push for spirituality seems like a way to Jumpstart ideology without it simply being empathy and reason - and therefore prone to tribal power structures of control.
I consider myself a leftist mostly concerned with fighting capitalism, economic inequality, and climate destruction. This over-focus on victim hierarchy is an Oppression Olympics and cis white hetero people are forced to hate themselves or find one or two Oppression Signals or triple-down on virtue signaling self hate to "regain some power" and not self-marginalize themselves as Oppression-deprived.
I don't know. I just see this Oppression Olympics wokesterism as finally jumping the shark. Every normal white girl going to a liberal arts school comes out hating themselves. I'm worried.
If you watch some of Sadlord777's videos (or even this video all the way through), their analysis is a bit more nuanced than "Oppression Olympics." They don't see land acknowledgment or decolonial talk about settlers and indigenous people as about expunging guilt, but rather as simple statement of fact that is necessary to undo the mythologies of capitalism. They don't seem to hate themself and frankly seem a lot more self-confident and empathetic than most people I know their age, including myself.
You're worried now? Hahaha. I am so glad I am mixed and racially ambiguous. I can't be identified and pin point for any stupid trivial thing.
Very interesting to think about spirituality through a leftist lens, especially for someone that never considered himself spiritual, but scratched that itch through other means!
I am a bit icky though about this heavy empathis on ethnicity and ancestry in terms of nationality. A nation after all never has one ethnicity that defines it, it's made up of all the people that live in it at the moment. So, claiming roots and connections to a place based on genetics and lineage signals to me a kind of purist and nationalistic subtext lying beneath it, tho I know that's not the intent here!
If I was born in the US say from a father that was born in Austria, but I've never set foot in it, I shouldn't be considered more included or connected than a person that has been living in Austria for a week, right?
of course - Sadlord addressed that a hyper focus on that leads to some very sketchy politics. this is about exploration and reckoning with accountability and subject positions and how that affects politics/practice, not about purity or anything like that
Can't wait to get off work and watch this
Great video! I have a few thoughts. First of all, the "grab bag" mentality of "spirituality" comes from Capitalism, and Neoliberalism in particular. Of course, this is pretty obvious to any leftist. The term "spirituality" is one that I do not particularly like. I especially don't like the phrase "spiritual, but not religious". It implies that we can get what we need from a bunch of self-help books, classes and thought leaders. I think that we need to reclaim the word "religion". The word "religion" may have come from the Latin "ligare" which means to bind, and then "religare" which would then mean to re-bind, or re-connect.
Now, having said this, it is important to point out that religion as such... is not the same thing as faith (belief). The equation of religion with faith, is something that comes to us mostly from Christianity and Protestantism in particular. If we mean "faith" in the sense of loyalty to a community, or a set of practices, a moral code or even a taken oath, then that's another story. If we take it to mean a set of beliefs... well the problem is that many religions throughout the world aren't a set of beliefs. Haitian Vodou, for example, is a set of practices and rituals involving ancestor veneration and highly dramatic possession trance, for the purpose of healing and gaining knowledge from the spirits and the divine. Now you could say that you have believe that these things are real in order to practice Vodou, but in fact this is not the case. The religion has more to do with these experiences, which are direct, dramatic, emotional, intense, and personal... even when they occur in a group. In Buddhism, "faith" as in belief, has no place either. Even in Judaism, "faith" as belief has no bearing on the validity of one's practice of the religion, and doubt is sometimes actively encouraged.
The fact is... most religions are not "faiths". When we use words like "interfaith" or "faith based" we are making a mistake, which is based on Christian assumptions.
As for myself, I have zero interest in religion as a set of legal behavioral codes, or as "faith". I practice a specific tradition of French / Italian esoteric mysticism with historical ties to the radical left, the whole purpose of which is gnosis... or direct, personal experience of the spiritual and divine. I also practice other things. They have nothing whatsoever to do with "faith". They have no doctrines or dogmas, and as far as morality... only the kind that any decent human being would have, along with an encouragement to solidarity.
The entire world is full of traditions which exist, and are designed in order to generate personal mystical experience. This makes "faith" utterly superfluous, and even an obstacle to personal experience. These experiences are the font from which all religion sprang. It is the direct personal experience, which destroys the illusion of separateness, and thus has the potential to inspire works of Solidarity to the greatest degree. Yoga, for example, is an authentically and originally RELIGIOUS practice, but people in the West have appropriated it, made it into a product to be sold, mostly as a form of exercise... and yet... if someone does it long enough they may have unintentional religious experiences which can be deeply uncomfortable or even represent a crisis for them since the practice and the experience are alienated from their authentic understanding and context.
When you speak of the secular atheists amongst us, and the way they use an individualist and reductionist ontology, the heart of the matter is religious at it's core. By not insisting that they have faith, thereby give up their highly reasonable doubts, some of them may seek the experiences I speak of.
I am a radical leftist, anti-capitalist (obviously) and I have spent my life studying religion and mysticism. From my point of view, the whole world is upside down because everyone focuses on faith, instead of experience. To me, that's why we can't get our relationships with nature and each other right. If / when I ever have the time, I'd love to create a channel where this is the main theme.
A fine post...Catherism?
@@andrewmarkmusic Thanks! Actually, it's Memphis-Misraim, which is an Egyptian-Hermetic, gnostic and occult rite of Freemasonry which admits men and women on an equal basis. It is a fusion of the Rite of Memphis with the Rite of Misraim. The Rite of Memphis has such a close historical association with the radical left, that there is a ton of speculation that the original IWA was actually a project or a creation of the Rite of Memphis, seeing as the membership rolls had a very high degree of overlap, both in France, and in New York. Memphis was fused with Misraim by Giuseppe Garibaldi in 1889. He was of course, the father of the unified, secular state of Italy... kind of like Italy's Washington, and also the head of Freemasonry in Italy, and he was also a leftist and a socialist.
I think he used Freemasonry to a large extent for political and military reasons, to build solidarity amongst people of like mind.
Catharism was a good guess though. There is actually a gnostic church from France which claims connection or at least inspiration from the Cathari, and it is loosely associated with Memphis-Misraim and other esoteric rites of Freemasonry, along with Martinism.
@@lorenmiller3797 I appreciate the reply, Loren. Although we are in agreement, in general, about the malaise of society, we’re likely in different gnostic schools. I’m a dualist through and though, and I don’t want to assume, but it be my guess that you a part of one of the non-dual schools.
I just did a blog called, Mexie, where I flesh this out. You take care:)
Check out physicist Tom Campbell's, "My Big TOE (Theory of Everything)." As a nonphysical space / meditation explorer, I find that to be the most accurate model of reality atm. Also, get in touch with the "Low Entropy" community, I think they're based in Vancouver, too.
I think when it comes to the backtracing of one's ethnicity... You can label stuff... sure... But keep in mind that it's all fluent. Sadlord here for example is has cultures from what's "American white people", from Irish people, even probably (to a very small extent) from american black people, if he ever consumer like... any modern US media.
You can get to a starting point by calling that "American white with Irish settler heritage"... But that's not where you should stop and go to drawing conclusions.
you know... IMO
This is an excellent video. Some very important ideas talked about in a cohesive and direct way. Thank you guys!
Welp, too much religious trauma from my cult raised queer butt for this conversation.
I'll just dip, no shade at those in attendance.
Have a great day.~😘
Couple of thoughts:
What are "bad reasons" to get into other people's religions? I can imagine some, i guess... but i didn't feel like there was any details in this discussions on that.
I think many people of broadly european descent both in europe especially in the US have had their spiritual traditions ... let's say... tenderized with the hammer of cristiantly, so that anything left over is no more than a thin unrecognizable paste. (unless you like your christianity, then you got lucky). It's no wonder that... I for instance cannot really connect to the Druidic Traditions of my Homeland. There's not really much left but super weird holidays.
Very interesting convo! As I spent time going to church and seeking and studying Jesus, I was also pulled to a stronger sense of justice and my views and desire for the future def skewed left. I wonder if either of you read The Long Lonliness by Dorothy Day. I’ve also been moved to live a more sustainable life.
How about maybe getting bad mouse on at some stage? - I think he'd be a good follow-up to this discussion as a British person. I noticed he left a comment about crypto-currencies in your last livestream. But, really, the British identity is a cryptic thing in itself - is Britian progressive or still entrenched in regressive practices? ...It is both at the same time (Britain is 'Terf Island' afterall - way ahead of the curve compared with the US on trans issues). I never felt more and less British when I left for a year and came back.
Hi Mexie, the end of the table of contents is broken. I think it's because in your description, there should be an extra colon (e.g. 1:00:25 instead of 100:25).
oh dang lol thanks!
My fatih has been a bash of multiple French influences (mainly from the Supreme Being deism and the revelations of Arès)
I’ve been really inspired by the Quakers.. their whole spiritual way lies in having real integrity to live according to their values, which are very much leaning towards social justice and ethical living. Their structure is actually pretty anarchist.. you sit in a circle with no one above anyone else, you seek inspiration directly from God, and church decisions are based on the collective agreeing in what inspirations have developed amongst the group.. rather than having a priest, preacher or scripture that defines belief. Actually there is a podcast by some anarchist Quakers but I forget the name.
Probably worth qualifying that there’s a pretty strong geographical split between Quakers with meetings in the United States being at least generally more evangelical exclusionary and colonising (their work in Africa is pretty fucked) while Quakers elsewhere are incredibly lose in terms of being a religion and are generally way more compatible with anarchism.
Very interesting video! I think a lot of very interesting points were brought up here that needs to be more discussed on the left. I would say, though, (as the good marxists we are) that the best critic of religion that has ever lived should have been brought up in this discussion. I'm talking about Karl Marx, of course! I think he really explains a lot of what you guys are talking about and really predicted the modern development of religion really well. Religion is, in many ways, a cry of resistance against the thankless existence we live in, "a cry of the opressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, the soul of a soulless condition". The role religion has played, especially in capitalist society, in making sense of the world and resisting their horrible existence. Christianity essentially preaches that the poor are blessed, and that the rich are not. The value religion has had, and continues to have, for the organizing of the lower classes really can't be overstated. Sadly though, a lot of religion, if not most, has served as a part of the ideological framework that serves to reproduce the relations of production. That the lower classes should work hard, know their place and not make a fuss. They'll get their reward in the afterlife.
Marx writes that religion is tied to the misery that the lower classes live in, and their need for a way to resist it and make sense of it. He was completely right, since we now see that the countries with the highest degree of welfare has the least amount of religion. I do think, however, that you are both right in that we, especially as leftists, need some kind of philosophical framework to drive our appreciation of the planet, and all the creatures on it. I don't necessarily think it needs to be some kind of religion, though. I was an edgelord new atheist when I was 13. Luckily, I eventually grew out of this, and I see perfectly well now how much use religion has in some people's lives. It's also great to organize around. It's no coincidence that christianity and islam has been so essential for many of the great leaders of civil rights movements and anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist struggle. Personally, I have found a lot of value in practicing stoicism.
New atheists come from an extreme place of privilege. They think (very often) that religion and atheist is a matter of intelligence, and that some people are just too dumb to "figure it out". They don't understand that they come from a place of privilege. They have never needed religion in their lives to make sense of it. There is a reason why almost all New Atheists are privilieged cis, white people in wealthy, imperialist countries. I disagree that atheism is a religion, as Sadlord said. Atheism, in the strict sense, just tells you what that person is not. New Atheism, with it's worship of the ideal and aesthetic of "rationality", "science" and "intelligence" is definitely a sort of religious community, though. Philosophy Tube's video about this is great.
Thanks! Some great points. I don't fully agree that spirituality more broadly is tied to the misery of the lower classes, though. As we talked about, our ancestral traditions, which were earth honouring, predated class society. And re: atheism, I don't think Sadlord said it was a religion full stop, but a set of beliefs or a spiritual position that should be acknowledged in a more nuanced way.
@@Mexie So I don't think it is a one step process. Over areas as large as modern nation states, there is a huge amount of variation both geographically and temporally.
That is to say that at any particular time for a specific community, there could be a fairly inegalitarian class structure, even quite a long time ago, and later (or earlier) times might have a similar cultural religious set up with a much more egalitarian distribution.
In other words, for any particular small area, there have likely been multiple class societies that dissolved, either to conquest or internal revolt, and that were reconstructed after periods of highly egalitarian social systems.
"Wealth Inequality in the Ancient Near East: A Preliminary Assessment Using Gini Coefficients and Household Size" Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , November 2020 , pp. 689 - 704 does a really good job going over how the increase in inequality from the Neolithic to the bronze age to the iron age is non linear and (well, dialectical).
Perhaps the mot comprehensive project to date is "Ten Thousand Years of Inequality: the Archeology of Wealth Differences" 2019 www.worldcat.org/title/ten-thousand-years-of-inequality-the-archaeology-of-wealth-differences/oclc/1022763393
Much was different from what people expected. Teotihuacan, for instance, even though it was an explicit conquest state, was highly egalitarian with planned high quality apartment blocks.
And there are examples of smaller scale societies with fairly high inequality. But the broader relevance here is that there is a big gap, where European and Asian Gini levels diverge significantly at a higher level from all Indigenous societies (whether state or not). There is overlap, but the tendencies are clear.
And this gap emerges thousands of years before Christianity, or virtually any surviving contemporary religion.
Of course, I very much realize there were inequalities and hierarchies in many ancient societies at different times (not all), and agree that to some extent all spirituality is about making sense of the world. I also agree that the emergence of religions like Christianity did have a lot to do with class. But even as a Marxist I find the Marxist position on religion to be reductive and paternalistic, and spirituality to me is much broader than religion. To imply that people are religious or spiritual merely because they aren't privileged enough to "not need it in their lives" is extremely reductive, especially when applied to many Indigenous or other earth-honouring traditions that are aren't centred on the self, but relationship and reciprocity. The Marxist position to me seeks to rationalize and categorize people, "they think/feel this way because of ___", minimizing the breadth of deep connection/interconnection and spiritual wisdom that humans are able to tap into, and implying that the spiritual connection or worldview they hold is not really real or valid, it's just something that arises from their social position. It feels patronizing and assumes that atheism is the more rational, privileged position, when actually trying to rationalize spiritual connection completely misses the mark. The spiritual connection I had with nature/the universe as a child was of course in some sense me making sense of the world and my place in it, but also grew out of a genuine connection and a sense of interconnection that I felt and that I've since been able to foster and grow to be even fuller. The behaviours/actions that grow out of a spiritual practice based in reciprocity are crucial IMO for building a sustainable post-capitalist society. I wish leftists would engage with this stuff more openly in general.
@@Mexie So I think we are more in agreement than it seems, but I will say that explaining the conditions for the emergence of a phenomenon is not the same as explaining the true reality of it, or defining the limitations as such.
“But the presence of these subsidiary forms does not exhaust the essence of the main forms in each case. One day we shall certainly ‘reduce’ thought experimentally to molecular and chemical motion in the brain; but does that exhaust the essence of thought?”
These lines make clear that Engels conceived of the lower-level elements as the historical constituents of the newly emerged higher-level organization of matter. Engels agreed that the present forms of motion can be traced back to their past developmental record (reduction), but denied that higher-level emergent properties can be explained solely by the lower-level properties from which they emerge (reductionism).
monthlyreview.org/2020/11/01/engelss-emergentist-dialectics/
Otherwise, I thought that the video you shared by Three Arrows made a great point. Marx and Engels should have corresponded directly with Hasanoanda or Ely Parker and cut Morgan out. More fundamentally, they should have treated The Law of Great Peace not just as a historical object, but as an alternative to be considered like the Russian Mir as a potential source for the broader transformation of society. In other words, The Law of Great Peace and Alluyu should have been considered from the beginning "really existing socialisms" that could be worked with and learned from.
Certainly, places like Bolivia where this attitude is wide spread (and maybe Peru, although the direction of events seem unclear at the moment) seem to be doing much better than places where there was a split (like in Ecuador).
But, to get back to the Marxist position, it is in the final analysis a question of base rather than superstructure as to whether there is a "metabolic rift" or not. Almost every tradition will say that they have (or at least used to have) an environmentally friendly and socially egalitarian element. However, people say a lot of things, and will often tell false stories.
Certainly, we believe that about the Capitalists, or various other reactionaries, whatever their in tradition stories and claims (like in Economics). So you have to double check, and modern archology lets you, if done carefully, really and truly evaluate aspects of the relationship with the earth for past societies (diet, social equality, environmental impact through deforestation, and so on).
And I think the evidence in the book I citied, combined with recent evidence about Indigenous Peoples protecting 80% of the biodiversity (as well as the role of Tawantinsuyu in protecting birds for Guano) shows that Indigenous Peoples talked the talk and walked the walk. Large parts of West Africa also seem to have been cooperative and ecologically sustainable.
However, this evidence does not exist for most of Eurasia (outside of Indigenous groups), and certainly not in Europe. Whatever was said by people in European societies, they tended to be class hierarchies out of balance (in varying levels) with their local environments. And people who tried to change things tended to "get got" like Allende. Thomas Müntzer may be separated by a thousand years (and more miles) from Mazdak, but they were similarly executed for challenging the status quo.
Especially for Europe, I'm not sure what the political value is in reviving ancient religious or spiritual practices.
That isn't the Babylonian creation story.
It was a fascinating conversation.
I think at some point I've diverged from your line.
I acknowledge that atheists have varying spiritual beliefs, if we frame this term more along the lines of philosophy and ideology.
From this point, as an Israeli atheist (English is my 2nd language, so pardon my clumsy phrasing), I was raised to see myself as a part of the Jewish people, as well as the Zionist settlement project, but not the Jewish religion, I feel like *it'd be wrong for me to rejoin this religion with a preconceived desire to change* many of its common practices and values (unlike, say, my significant other, whose family comes from an American progressive branch of Judaism, and their late grandfather was a prominent Rabbi whose work I can truly admire).
Zionism, in contrast, is a project which I'm a part of whether I like it or not, although ideologically I see myself as anti-zionist. The fact I exist here and form my communities here is a service in itself to that ideology. Hence it is my place and my responsibility to influence and disturb it in my personal and communal practices.
Where I find my place is by engaging with various philosophies, at times by myself, but also with my communities.
I do find certain topics in Jewish history to be particularly inspiring, like influencial Jewish anarchists and socialists, and further back to Jewish piracy and even more "mainstreamed" parts of my heritage.
To some degree *I feel compelled towards connecting with those narratives* and to find what's worth preserving, because other people, non-Jews or Jews with different values to mine, won't do it for me.
In a parallel sense I'd like people of all traditions to find what's worth preserving and in their ancestral narratives, and to use the amazing opportunity we have to come together and share all those ideas and values.
In our contemporary context it may seem like colonialism all over again, but I'd argue we should figure equitable ways to engage with one another, and that connectedness with other traditions is in itself a worldwide human tradition as old as we.
After watching this I looked at my family name origin. warrior caste, military title. It's annoying for a softboy military abolitionist. very much meh.
lol my name almost literally translates to "tower soldier" or "warrior soldier." im a pacifist
@@luisostasuc8135 I know the feeling
Needed this!
Same.
I was a semi-casual atheist humanist for a loooooong time. One day, after watching Stalker (And Solaris a week before)by Tarkovsky, I had this thought; What if EVERYONE thought like I do now? ANd not just in an idealized world. The REAL ACTUAL world, full of it's flaws and evil. Without ANY spirituality, I didn't see it going well. I realized... Religion was actually... good? It triggered something in me, and I realized I DID have a spiritual ideology, and I didn't actually like it very much. Yet again, old Russian philosophers changing my entire worldview!
TLDR: I identify as a pantheistic pagan now (Because it's easier to convey than "Umm, I kind of worship nature but also the will of luck and also we're all nature, and BTW I believe in magic but also magic comes from within. Also, the Yin-Yang, bro.), but basically just copy-paste what Sadlord said with a little less Christianity. In a way, my beliefs hold the same amount of space as it's always in my life, even as a young quote unquote "Christian" whose parents never went to church. Not a huge amount, maybe 15% of me. But now I REALLY am sure that 15% is actually lining up with who I am and want to be going forward. It's extremely freeing no longer having to divide the world into "sheeple spiritualists" and "Enlightened philosophers", you know? (Therapy helps too! I would not be where I am without confronting my white and personal shame.) I feeler a significantly deeper connection with my environment, people, and everything. It was a long process, but finding my shrived spirituality basically cured my lifelong depression. Or at least gave me a tool to fight back and win at times.
True good faith is hard to come by, but projecting it outward may be easier than it seems.
PS: I recommend the book: The Patterning Instinct. It really framed colonialism and the spread of monotheism for me in a way that aided this journey.
This was suuuch a great video! I frequently encounter similar personal issues with my spirituality -- like whether something is appropriative, what it means to pursue my ancestral customs, to what degree I'm "allowed" to syncretize different elements of spirituality that resonate with me, etc. I think white people do frequently struggle with how whiteness as a racial concept has kind of "erased" their older customs (and often an enduring animism that you two talked about in the video) as a byproduct of white hegemony and absorption, and the outcome is that they often slide into appropriative shallow hippie bullshit on the one hand or they hyper-fixate on their ethnicity and become fashy neo-pagans on the other, both being seriously flawed attempts at reclaiming some sense of lost community and resonance. Neither one of those paths are good ways forward obviously.
I like how Sadlord777 has reclaimed a radical connection to Christianity in their practice. I can't say for sure that's where I'll end up, but as a white Italian/Scottish/French/Portuguese person myself, my most-directly-recent ancestors have all been Christian in some capacity; it's an implicit cultural mode that has existed all around me for pretty much my whole life. With that in mind, ought I seek out radical wings of Christianity and commit to those? Maybe syncretize a leftist Christian mysticism with the animism and stories of my ancestors? A lot to think about for sure!
Once again, fantastic video/conversation! Immediately subscribed to Sadlord's channel after it ended 🙂
He nexie, are you familiar with Karen Houle and her contributions to critical plant studies? I was so deeply moved by hearing her thoughts on the Acid Horizon Podcast (about “becoming plant”, CPS, and a beautiful depiction of the wasp and the orchid). If you’re not familiar, check out that episode. It was so profoundly moving and I have been obsessed with her as well as additional critical veg concepts having not even known the field existed despite being a secular Buddhist, lifelong vegan, commie, and nomad.. go figure haha. But I would LOVE to her your thoughts on her work, and even connect this emerging field to your own content more so if you do choose :)
Beautiful talk though btw. Sone of the concepts Houle tackles actually tie into sone of these topics, so I was reminded and in the hopes you notice this, I feel inclined to share and get your opinion. Keep doing what you’re doing, learning, growing, sharing, healing, and praxising :)
Yeah a lot of people, even who say they aren’t spiritual or religious, have an ideology about typical being the “right” way to be, and humans being superior to other animals, and a distinction between human activities and nature, and they don’t realise these aren’t objective facts about the world, but are a culturally biased world view.
sadlord777 the shame is not you it's your ego. buddhism is a great way of managing that
mexie please talk about your buddism practices more. we might actually get some leftist unity if you do.
according to the anthropologist michael puett, confucious believed that humans are messy and that's okay
also, read 'indian givers' by jack weatherford guys!
It was so good to hear this perspective. Mexie for voicing all the thoughts I've been having and grappled with, and Sadlord777 for bringing up so many points I'd never thought of before. Loved their perspective on being a part of the Anglican church!
I'm not sure I love the phrase "becoming Indigenous to place." Don't get me wrong, I have that chapter of Kimmerer's book bookmarked and return to it regularly, but I just... think the phrase itself makes me cringe a little bit (??). For me Indigenous is more of a political category, so I'm not sure if I'm comfortable using it like that? I think the idea of being/becoming in right relationship to ourselves, our community, and the land is maybe better expressed using that term (literally, 'becoming in right relationship to ourselves/our community/the land'). I mean it's wordier but it's also more direct and less... fraught?
This isn't criticism - just me publically working through what my thoughts on this are.
Agreed though, it is so important for us as white settlers to talk about our shame, work through it, and work out how to be in right relationship to this place, given all the history. Thank you so much for providing the place for this conversation. This meant a lot to me.
I really loved this. Thank you guys!
I share the same experience in the left, be it Anarchists or ML or other Socialists. It is so important to many how someone identifies and that they Wong work with anyone who doesn't share all of their political beliefs.
And I have been a Communist for about 20 years and still am an active ML. But I was also a Christian from 20 to 29,until I became a practitioner of Hermeticism and Magick.
I always had huge problems in leftist circles when I told them that I was a Christian.
Today I don't even mention my spiritual practice if I'm not specifically asked about it.
"Spirituality is always political" I absolutely agree.
Thank you Mexie and comrade!
I found a lot of the first 30min interesting except for the part about cultural appropriation. I just find the notion utterly ridiculous! Not to harp on anyone just sharing my thoughts on this notion. Like if you have a good idea or better way of doing something it's only natural others will do it as well. Or you just like their values like what to bad you can't live their lifestyle? Gimme a break it's unrealistic and just a growing tumor of a fad. Ok I'm good now.
Edit: only watched the first 30min, fyi.
A sense of awe with nature and world doesn't need a spiritual justification. Neither is care for living creatures, connectedness or a wish for safe, loving prosperous relationships among humans and to our environment. Spirituality often comes with additional weight of customs and beliefs tending to sustain hierarchical structures, the right of the stronger, essentialist separation of roles, prejudice etc. Every large religion is known for killing people based on different views. So choosing a spiritual or religious path one always chooses to do a lot of extra work of sorting out and separating oneself from all the dirt it carries along. I find it too much, it's simpler without. At least for me.
Can I just say that I am getting involved in quakerism and to me it seems like quakers have a really compatible set of values for leftists (also nontheist quakers are a thing including me) but basically the 5 central values are Tolerance, Environmentalism, Justice, Pacifism, and Simplicity. (Note that lots of quakers do not interpret protest or destruction of property as against pacifism and there is a long history of quaker activism) But anyways its a small group but very worth looking into especially if most mainstream religions really turn you off.
An add on what particularly drew me to quakerism is the focus on values over ideology. I think any focus on ideology is a dangerous path to blind faith and worse. (Descendant of holocaust survivor here)
As much as I hate that it's the case it's very true that a lotta churches and religious groups are solid centers of community, organizing, and allocating resources to those who need em most, often better than secular groups.
Through the years a lotta radical secular groups I've been involved with have worked pretty closely with local religious groups. Where I'm at now we work with different religious sects for different things and they range from Catholic to Protestant to Buddhists and Hare Krishnas to Muslim to Jewish, a little of everything and given the make-up of the city there's using a progressive sect around somewhere lol Rather it's feeds, food delivery, bail and medical fund raising, coat drives, back to school supplies drives, eviction resistance, etc, different groups have different strengths and it's important to be willing to have that tactical unity to get stuff done and knowing where to draw a line so that ya aren't compromising yourself or opening yourself up to harmful groups (like working with eco-fascists for eco issues, bad move imo).
But it's not new, this goes back hundreds of years. Religious/spiritual groups have long been both sources of reaction and sources of liberation. About as far back as we have human writings we see it. And even in more recent and nearby history it's the case like how we've seen aboriginal groups, anarchists, and Quakers standing together against nuclear proliferation, war, land and resource grabs, and a number of other things before anyone else got involved.
One of the biggest things I've taken from post-left and Native writings has been the hyper skepticism/critical perspective of self and worldview as well as how we fit into the world as it exists and as we'd like to see it. I have no love for organized religion or magical thinking but I also don't hold to this childish idea that everyone else needs to feel that way or not falling in-line means ya lose your place in the movement or whatever. I'm an anti-humanist as well and hate this idea that humans are somehow outside and/or above the concept of "nature". While I disagree with a lot of post-left, anti-civ, and similar lines of thought I still find em valuable cause they can help to break down a lotta ideological hang-ups and make ya challenge things within yourself and broader movements in a way that can make em stronger for having answered those criticisms even if most of those thinkers have used those criticisms to abandon em all together.
I just genuinely don't understand wtf we're even talking about when we say "spiritual" cause no one seems capable of defining it in a way that everyone agrees on and everyone seems to mean something very different every time they say it. Sometimes what I hear I think is fine and I can perfectly relate and under which I'd be considered "spiritual" while others I've heard are just kinda ridiculous and I see no reason to engage with and/or view as potentially harmful even if I can respect that others feel differently.
Just like why is ancestry important. I'm "mixed" Sicilian (complicated) and "black" and it is important to me to a point, but what I hear sounds more like essentialist bs with no basis in reality and no real utility aside from further segregating instead of bringing together and sharing. Why does my genetic makeup have anything to do with what I may spiritually connect with?
While some atheists are absolutely dogmatic ideologues, I don't see how that's always the case. I don't really engage in religious beliefs and what many call spirituality because it does nothing for me. But I do meditate pretty frequently, try to be connected to the world around me and appreciate the things in it most take for granted or view as a menace, and small things like that and I have these almost transcendent experiences at concerts, demos, chanting crowds, holding someone as they cry, helping those who need it and accepting help when I do, working with others to accomplish something, all kinds of stuff, in many ways my anarchism has been spiritual in some sense of the word. I've even tried going back through my lineage to see what they practiced, Unfortunately for Mexie "Italian" is a very modern understanding of the region that breaks down much more locally, often village by village or region by region. I've looked into some of the more ancient spiritual practices where my family came from in Sicily and several from different parts of the African continent since I can't know where exactly my family is from and they also did nothing for me.
I also think there's some issue with this language and sticking labels on everybody. Initially Irish people (and some English) were brought to the so-called US against their own will and in bondage of one form or another, it's well documented despite what some like to say for whatever reason, are they settlers? What about someone like my friend who's parents came from Nigeria to the so-called US? What about me who's Sicilian family came here from Sicily fleeing poverty and Northern domination and "mixed" with the descendants of former slaves? I'm fairly light skinned and could probably "pass" but I came up in the hood and culturally I'm probably more "black" than Sicilian and even my Sicilian family doesn't identify as "white", where do I fit? One of my best friends is American Indian (his term, Cherokee and Creek) and he said he views Sicilians as a colonized people just as the Irish were only Sicilians and Southern Italians still live under Northern reign, as well as that he doesn't view Sicilians, Irish, and some other groups escaping domination and brutality the same way he does English, Spanish, and French settlers, but others disagree. I just think it's playing with the same essentialist thinking that leads to race, gender, etc, and only further divides unnecessarily if not approached very carefully.
It's extremely complicated lol There are no good universal answers aside from the very obvious of which there isn't much. Even indigenous voices don't agree on what they wish to be called, much less what's to be done. We just have to keep moving, talking, learning, and pushing now. Cause way too many aren't even considering these things.
watching this while giving myself an enema :) effervescent
fascinating chat. Thanks, everyone!
Wanted to say, as i said to Sadlord, re: my isolation as a non‐atheist anti‐capitalist:
I've researched my ancestry back to Portugal, Norway, Libya, Mordovia, Turkey, Iraq, Turkmenistan and Pakistan, and honestly, the side from Norway by way of England and Portugal by way of Canada has been the hardest to connect to-even with the reconstructed paganisms-due to not just the colonialism, but also due to destruction of the matristic peoples of the European peninsula & islands themselves earlier.
Conquest under different systems has occurred across the board, but something about the mercantile and capitalists empires & their precursors is just particularly triggering to me i guess, still living in the hegemony that coalesced because of that.
I mostly stick to Tengriism in a kind of hodgepodge animistic deism these days & otherwise use a transpersonal psychological/ phenomenological lens to orient myself toward collectivity beyond my surrounding cultures' hegemonic boxes.
I just... don't even know how to approach my more recent roots (Canada, England, etc) bc they've all cut me off before i even met them & i don't really wanna re‐engage bc i don't find my European side particularly edifying & have already gotten my fill of European ontology or whitewashed versions of stolen/appropriated through a colonized process and lens & it doesn't resonate with me as a neuroatypical, physically disabled, intellectually disabled, queer person. Never really has.
Kinda good with just my mom tbh.
She's a child of a immigrants from Canada and Holland & neither of them liked where they came from due to traumas (Catholic boarding schools & losing a child from her 1st marriage in the Canadian case, being forced to work for Nazis in the Dutch case). My dad's side abandoned my dad before i was born, so idrc about those roots.
But my mom has never taught me to resonate with, enjoy, claim kinship with, or respect any of the U.S.'s or Canada's or Holland's legacies and institutions.
So I'm kind of at a loss of what else i can do. I traced my genealogy to Asia and North Africa & like... idk Finland is cool i guess, but I'm a transpersonal collectivist & i don't believe in any form of atomism, so I'm just like... aside from recognizing that my skin color and facial features remind ppl of abuse and colonization that I still benefit from, I don't see what my more immediate ancestors have to teach me.
It's like all that's left is accountability, and that's kind of sad, but it's not like my Turkmen & Berber ancestors have any more hold of me than my family who already cut me off financially and never had any impact aside from maybe giving my parents a relative amount of stability.
So idk, i wonder if how much of the existential, cultural and psychological distance i feel to Europe is due to my family dynamic & my personal orientation toward spirituality, and how much is just finding the accountability process very alien to me in a frustrating way bc i don't feel or have any connection (outside of intergenerational resources, with no intergenerational *relationships*) to the same ancestors whose actions that colonized peoples, my current neighbors, still have to contend with & my face and skin remind them of.
It's almost easier to just be like "I don't claim that" (because i don't) but that runs the risk of not claiming the stake & privilege I have in speaking and amplifying voices for justice, reconciliation, reparations, decol, etc.
It's tempting to just focus on my great‐great‐great‐grandparents of the lineages I've traced to SWANA and their ancestors, and only speak on Europe and U.S. and Canada in an adversarial capacity, but i don't like that posture and how it plays out in the disposability (and carcerality) ethos of the secular left & the "terminally online" left.
I honestly liked and appreciated this video. So please don't read the following as against. Just my learning is contrary in a few ways.
In my 20's I would have nodded my head to much of this. At 55 I have to share an insight that has taken a lot of time and effort to realize and notice. And when I noticed I couldn't stop.
All traditions of spiritual exercise get quickly co-opted by the criminal hoarding class who then twist them to institute trauma and abuse as culture in order to create a compliant, permanent prey population of disempowered civilians they can feed off of. I am not talking about overt abuses that we currently recognize as such. I am talking about very subterranean, so-ingrained-it's-wallpaper-you-can't-see-until-someone-pulls-it-back abuses and customs. The short list:
ONCE ESTABLISHED and having gathered a following...
They amass small and large hoards of resources
They welcome the wealthy into their bosoms
Their respective histories are marriage to the power brokers of their given eras
They promote poverty as inescapable and discourage accountability of the wealthy
They collude in the pretense that there is some nobility in tolerating a subsistence life
The salvos they offer abused civilians to soothe the torture perpetrated on them by the criminal hoarding classes must be repeated every day, every week, every month and every year. In the absence of constant repetition, the organic experience of life would reassert and that objectively flies in the face of the teachings of these memeplexes.
They insert themselves into the relationships people have with their own bodies without any spiritual reason to do so.
They pathologize a wide array of normal, natural human drives and impulses and pretend others don't exist.
Eastern flavors are at least as bad if not worse. What social justice movements have come out of the east? No pan-asiatic women's movement, no respect for the disabled as fully human. Today, in 2021, they are still largely behind in all social justice indices.
Lastly, I am not speaking from lack of personal experience. I am speaking as a civilian who no longer signs off on lies. I used to be a goddist and a very good one. It felt good for the first 35 years of my life. But I had to outgrow that dependency in order to embrace my sincere experience. I hope others can too.
Usually, leftist spirituality is grounded on what you describe, so the idea is to return the stigma and transform it into something empowering for the self and the community; also the idea of a non-metaphorical god isn't coherent with such spiritualities, and you'll really rarely find one, it's more linked with making peotry out of materilaism so to say, a framework, a culture, a lecture, an allegory etc...
@@26yd1 will you consider that "leftist" spirituality is just as exploitative of the cognitive error called wishful thinking as any other cult or tradition? Things like the secret are truly heinous drug- like memes that can stall ppl's development. This is this. Things mean themselves. The further away from that the rhetoric goes the less adult the adherents and the less ethical in my experience.
@@tahiyamarome
Wishful thinking isn't an error, just like intersexuations, neurodivergence or gnenetic mutations. The concept of error doesn't exist within non-judgemental things, just like hierarchy etc... wishful thinking and cognitive bias as well as the need to fill up coherent gaps with idealist knowledge to comprenhand reality are evolutionary designs adapted for pre-civilisationnal survival.
While we probably agree on the basis that the left is inherently anti-nature and pro-culture, the problem with your thoughts is that you are doing the wishful thinknig of believing that you can get rid of wishful thinking (or bias or whatever). It's not true, the way to hack nature is to fill the gaps that are supposed to be filled up with materialism instead of the expected idealism, it's optimal to use strictly no allegory and just raw description of the physical determinist causal reality, except even physics laws are transcendental and you'll want to be able to predict stuff, make bets and guesses.
So your "post-spirituality" is turned towards a form of transcendent thought that stays rooted in materilaism yes, and doesn't use cosmic or natural metaphors, like bayesianism... but even then your inherent thirst for existential knowledge won't be filled up, so you're gonna turn towards more dangerous bets with Laplace's Demon and start to re-use metaphors: I sometimes post-ironically call myself an entropist, and at minima I sure do believe in a transcendent direction of history/matter/space-time and the entropic exponential progress curve, just like an upgrade to orthodox marxism, hoping to reach a social singularity = anarchism.
But then tolerance is also to be able to realize that my line of thoughts is heavily influenced by my own determinism (europe + 25 y.o. millenial + autism + amab socialization + middle class and access to knowledge + specific interests on materilaism, philosophy, and social sciences = introverted queer-leaning sub-male in patriarchy's standards determined to comprend social codes and existential reality through overintellectualism and raw materilaism).
People come to the left from all backgrounds, so their own ways to make sense of the world existentially are valid as long as they disrupt hierarchic structures, institutions and fascist-leaning metaphors (like a God basically). There are no hierarchy between my thought and their thoughts, and there is virtually no chance a neurotypical cisgirl is determined towards my line of thoughts for exemple.
"Their" thoughts are only statiscally sub-optimal because if you use "dangerous" metaphors (leading to think via essentilaism, naturalism and idealism), you increase your chance of falling into neoreaction, BUT no one is immune to it (just like many once-materialists turned Stals, MLs and Terfs, I must be very careful to not become like Nick Land or an-cap in a couple decades with my current beliefs^^), and all spiritualities can individually avoid such traps.
I guess I was pretty technical and cryptic in "pure autism" mode, but it's really tough to make such thoughts easy to understand, if you want to better get my thoughts with some more vulgarisation, you can check my original comment that's more about my problems with their framing as being pro-nature.
@@26yd1 i agree that descriptive language is less likely to invoke a lot of cultural training in hierarchy and you certainly do make the most of erudition. Have fun with it. I'm glad it feels that good to you. For my own part, as someone who works in the field of differability, i prefer more accessible SHARED language when interacting with other people.
Be on guard for rebranding hyperbolic self-reference as autism. One is a clinically defined set of observable behaviors. The other is a subjective state that can fuel a pattern of progessively hostile, anti-social choices.
Spirituality ain't really my cup of tea. Not sure what to make of this video.
Ok
Something that ticked me off specifically is the "You have a spiritual thing going on whether you believe it or not" bit, I guess. Like... No?
Granted, I grew up in a society that is pervaded by a certain believe system, and that has shaped my thinking to some degree, but that doesn't make me spiritual imo. Spirituality doesn't do anything for me. I'm not invested in any conception of any "higher" force or being. I despise magical thinking. How am I spiritual in any way?
@@DarkPrject I think you're conflating some things here. Namely spirituality, religion and magical thinking. They, of course, often come together, but you can also have one without the other.
And it doesn't make it easier that there is no one agreed upon definition of spirituality. But how I understood Mexie and Sadlord, they're talking mainly about things like connectedness to other people and nature. And experiences one can have like ego death (through meditation e.g.). Not about magical thinking in the sense of "If you just believe enough in smth, you will it into existence", like a lot of Christians e.g. do.
@@Ocyon
And that is a really hurtful conflation to people with religious trauma who want nothing to do with spirituality.
Sucks, but it is what it is.
"You are spiritual, you just don't know it."
"No I'm not, and I'm uncomfortable with you calling me that."
"No, you just don't understand what I mean by that. If you use a different definition..."
It's all so tiresome...
Pagan and mythology is the same thing