Let's Talk Faith and Justice

Boston 0:13
Welcome back to Let's Talk Faith and Justice. My name is Boston. My pronouns are he/him, one of the co-hosts.

Lyndon Sayers 0:21
And I'm Lyndon Sayers, pronouns: he/him, the other co-host. Today, we're pleased to welcome Wayne Turner, a disciple of Hannah Arendt. And we're going to talk a little bit about natality, her understanding of creating a new. Something unique to being human in opposition to something she calls world alienation and ways of domination and control that have not been great way of being in the world, but that we're prone to. Thanks, Wayne for joining us on the podcast.

Wayne Turner 0:58
It's my pleasure.

Lyndon Sayers 0:59
So why don't you start us off? It's been a while since I've read some Arendt. Not everyone has read Arendt, but a significant 20th century philosopher who also has backgrounds around theology and social sciences. Maybe you know, we're trying to stay focused on this. How would you set the scene talking about Arendt and natality.

Wayne Turner 1:31
Alright, Hannah Arendt, even as a high school student dreamed of studying philosophy and theology. She read Kant when she was probably 15 or 16, which is kind of amazing. She was Jewish-German, fled Germany in 1933 when the National Socialists took power. Fled to Paris, where she worked helping refugees. Fled Paris in 1942 to America. Was very happy to make her way to America. Saw some of the best attributes of America, in the sense of welcoming immigrants. She remained working with issues like Status of Refugees, exiles, the establishment of Israel Zionism and so on. She wrote her first most famous book called Origins of Totalitarianism, which looked at basically had three parts. Looked at racism, imperialism and then totalitarianism itself. But she's a very smart person, and she started writing more or less straightforward philosophy. I shouldn't say straightforward, but classical philosophy in the 50s. Her most famous philosophical book is called the Human Condition. In the Human Condition, she's dealing with a subject matter, the human being is essentially a historical and linguistic agent. So she is not looking at the human being in terms of a product of society or of evolution. She's looking at human beings essentially born onto the earth as a member of the community of human beings. She calls that plurality. Plurality is the precondition for having a shared reality. Many points of view are required to have a shared reality. She starts off the human condition, talking about the launching of the Sputnik satellite 1957 and she notices the reaction of the world. And it was joyous, happy, because in freeing ourselves from the earth, it revealed an attitude towards the Earth and that attitude is basically one of alienation. The Earth is something that keeps us from being who we can be. And you can think of some of those tech billionaires who talk about things like transhumanism, and that would be the kind of attitude she would be absolutely opposed to. World alienation means that the earth is seen as a prison, something we must conquer and escape from. And of course, we're very familiar in the 21st Century of how we've tried to do that, what we've done to the earth, environmentally, how we've gone to war, our technology to rocket into space and so on. So that's one of the polls I would bring out of the human condition. It's not a classical way of reading human condition, but it's a very interesting beginning point for me. It's her beginning point. Opposed to the view that the Earth is a prison and that is something to be conquered, is she finds this experience in what she calls natality. She's listening to Handel's Messiah and unto us, a child is born, and she looks at that, she thinks about Saint Augustine, who writes that creation is made in such a way, that human beings are also creators. We're not just creatures, but we're creatures that begin again, that are fundamental. Our essential attribute is our capacity to act. And that capacity to act is not really a question of of willing. It's what follows from understanding the miracle of natality, that we're born unto the earth, that we think and we breathe and we communicate, we build communities, we experience the wonder of creation. And this would be a fundamental attitude that would guide the rest of her philosophical endeavors, which were many. Some of them were straightforwardly political. Others were moral. She never stopped thinking, never stopped writing essays. Always refused to be a tenured philosopher or academic would just work as what we would call a sessional lecture. She refused to take tenure. That was almost a homage to the narrative of her being a refugee. So the experience of being a refugee is also central to the development of her perspectives and philosophy. And so that's one way of opening up the human condition for discussion and hopefully relevant to some of the current situations.

Lyndon Sayers 6:58
Yeah, that's helpful. Thank you. You mentioned Sputnik, which is in the beginning, the opening section of human condition, and the kind of critical view of that. I mean, today we take things like satellite communication just so much for granted, whether it's our cell phones or GPS, things we use. I mean, the average person probably on that doesn't see that as a bad thing, but I think it doesn't take too much thinking to see how that is like exponentially grown and encroached on our lives. So where is the dividing point in which technology is useful for furthering thought and being in the world in a healthy way that maybe encourages natality of creation, beginning again and that which is control and dominating nature. I don't know if it can be broken down that simply, but there'd be some people critical of just saying "is she just against technology?"

Wayne Turner 8:14
No, probably the best essay that I've ever read on technology was written by Martin Heidegger, who was Hannah Arendt studied with. He's probably one of the two or three best known philosophers of the 20th century. But he wrote an essay called "the Question Concerning Technology", and there technology is presented as not so much an application of scientific knowledge, but as a fundamental perspective or interpretation on the world and the universe. So you look at the Earth, you look at everything as susceptible to science, as susceptible to being calculated, susceptible to being exploited. It's very much a predatory understanding, but it's also extremely mathematical and quantitative, always cashed out in terms of either profits or military privilege or things like that. So she's working at that level. She's opposing natality to that. And that is to say, not the world as something to be dominated, but as something to be celebrated. And just think of an example, we get so familiar with technology, if you remember the movie that Tom Hanks starred in, called Apollo 13, and they do the bit where the television cameras are on, and the astronauts are floating through space, and turns out the television companies didn't even carry it. Because it was boring. We've seen it like 10 times. We don't even care that you're in space. It makes no difference at all. At the same time, the scope of technology also makes you very vulnerable. There's a book by Chalmers Johnson called blowback, and it's a critique of the American military presence around the world and it's interference. And he talks about satellites, and he says, "What happens if somebody sends a rocket into space filled with gravel?" He's thinking of a terrorist scenario, and explodes the gravel, you knock out the communication systems. That was a real threat for a long time. Maybe not now. Maybe we have all these redundant systems at work. But you know, the wider the technology, the more dangerous it is, in the sense of failure. We think now, of artificial intelligence, which is going to be a drain on energy 15% plus. Where's that energy going to come from? I mean, it's really a case of a singular, blind approach to reality, and everything gets subordinated to it. Of course, any kind of technology you have in particular, you may find it useful, but we just had trouble setting up here. You're also a slave to it, right? One little hitch and it all shuts down. So it also narrows your experience. Think of the wonder of discovery, of remembering, and now we don't bother with that. We just search it. We search it on our phone. We search it on our computer. What was the name of that guy in the movie? I'll look it up. The joy of remembering, the joy of discovery, is all supplanted by technology. Sohere's another way to put it. The fundamental experience of philosophy in you know, you think of Plato and Socrates, was Wonder. Just the amazement that everything works, that language, reality, perception, you know, sun-up, sun-down, that everything works. It's an amazing thing, and it needs to be appreciated. The counter to that 20th century, the fundamental experience Arendt, would say, is horror. Horror of what we've done in war, horrors of the treatment of refugees, horror we could add to that is the treatment of the environment and nature. So yes, technology is kind of like an octopus that has us wrapped up in its tentacles all around the world. But the first step is to stop and think about what we're doing, and that involves appreciating the wonder of creation, of being created, and the fact that not only can we think and understand that we can begin again. And it's with that beginning again, maybe we can take a look at technology and figure out different ways of being who we are in that context.

Lyndon Sayers 13:25
Yeah, it's helpful to think about. I mean, you mentioned Heidegger, somewhat of a controversial figure politically. I mean, we don't have time to get into that On this episode. But thinking about critique of technology, thinking about maybe diving a bit deeper, into Arendt's positive sense of natality, of beginning again, this wonder of creation. Certainly it's something recurring theme here where you talk about just the horrors, whether of war, we talk about ongoing genocide, about the horrors with democracy unraveling in the US and in much of the West, and a lot of people have been taking solace and going into nature, into creation, and to marvel at just the beauty of it, and that providing some relief from just the relentless news cycle, which we feel powerless at times to change.

Wayne Turner 14:32
Yeah, I think another way to come at it is I've been reading a scholar, John Levinson, a scholar of the Jewish Bible, and he talks about, or the book of Genesis, is about creation, but it's it's about how you establish a community that holds back some of the prime primeval myths andPsalms say would be predating the book of Genesis. This is what we're really struggling with. And we go from establishing a viable community to a people. But the search and the desire for security, to control creation, to control nature, to control our environment rebounds back on us, and it becomes disastrous. The emblem of that is, of course, Empire, over and over again, Empire seizes control of a region of a people, and often the people support it because they don't like living in a vulnerable situation. They like security. They like the Emperor to have power. They like an army. They like to think of themselves as secure but that's always over against another country, another people, over against nature itself. And so with natality comes an appreciation, not just of creation, but plurality itself. Natality goes with plurality because there are many people, many groups, many communities born on this earth, and we need them all. I mean, this is what makes us human, is dealing with all the perspectives. You think of someone like Edouard Glissant, who talks about the different cultures. He calls it Creolization, just the wonder of a different language, the wonder of another way of living. Something that what we might call Western civilization. We basically eliminate that, those other understandings, those other knowledges, those other ways of living together. We just eliminate them, time after time after time. And you can even see this in the opposition to something like renewable energy. Renewable energy is necessarily decentralized. It's necessarily goes region by region. It's necessarily democratic. It doesn't lend itself to Empire, and Empire doesn't like it. Doesn't like it a lot, and it's very much a Hebraic motif in Arendt's thinking. Yes, chaos is, is there, like the chaos of the Mediterranean Ocean, chaos of the sea on the other end. So we establish a community. We establish certain rules to live by. We establish notions of of taking care of the stranger, the orphan, of the of the widow. We establish all that for the good of the community. But it can tip the other way, where we're not just living reciprocally with each other and with nature, but then we try to dominate it. And when we try to dominate it, yeah, it will collapse back. I mean, I think of Vaclav Havel talking about communism in Eastern Europe. And he said, when communism fails, this is pre 1989, this isn't a sign that the West will win out. He said, this is a sign of what fate awaits you. And I think that was just prophetic. Is that certainly we're on the same road to collapse that the Soviet Union was on. Once again, we're going to talk about big economic projects, strengthen the economy. Everything's going to be big. Everything's going to be gigantic. We're going to have this big nation that's going to stand off against the tariff wars, right? Same mistake over and over and over again, and no sense of stepping back and thinking about what we're doing, no appreciation of creation, no appreciation of other cultures, no appreciation of of the reality of plurality, that there are many of us on this earth.

Lyndon Sayers 19:13
Well, I mean, that speaks right into a current political situation Canada, which you're referencing, that suddenly we're seeing this push back to embracing a posture toward reconciliation where we're supposed to be centering indigenous voices. And so when we're talking about these mega energy projects and they're talking about removing environmental regulatory frameworks, fast tracking, pipelines. It's all so backwards. Whether it's trans rights, indigenous rights, all these it's like we've erased the last 10 years, in the last few months.

Wayne Turner 20:00
Well, one of the things you'll see as a backlash against what you in philosophy would call post modern understanding or post metaphysical which aren't certainly was and so they don't like that. They don't like any kind of philosophical or critical stance that looks at overturning dualisms. We want to go back to when reality was structured. There was good and bad, there was male and women, or male and female, there was, you know, up and down. Everything was structured along the lines of what we call binary opposites. And if you have different categories, if you have, you know more than two choices, if you have a number of choices, people can't tolerate it. It's kind of amazing that we have to have either A or B, and we can't have C, D, E or F or G. You know, there's one way to do things grow the economy. That's it. There's nothing else can be done. And that is, as you say, that last 10, 20, years, they're trying to overturn it, even to the point of doing things like, you know, attacking libraries, climate institutes that provide data, you know, to track where we're moving. And you know, what are we going to do? Coastlines may flood. There's a big flood in Texas, heat waves. How do we prepare? What do we do for each other? How do, how does the government fulfill its obligations for consultation with indigenous peoples if there's no environmental assessments? I mean, we're just trying to roll everything back into, I don't know what decade. I think Naomi Klein talked about the rolling it back to the mid 1800s where it's just kind of a free for all and everything's a question of just let the economy go, no rules, no laws, no legislation. And the magical thinking that if you unleash the economy, there will be prosperity, but of course, not for most of the people in the world, not for the people who live on islands in the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, you know, not for poor people, not for the people in Africa, you know, Latin America. I mean, it's the same old game. It's as if the last 20 years, colonialism has distilled itself into an intense, compressed machinery going after anything. And I think it's very much like Chris Hedges said, it's the sign of it's falling apart if you have to intensify your actions, your strategies, to that kind of focus, if there's no if there's no flexibility, if there's no compassion, I mean, if there's no reaching out, if there's no planning for the future, that's not a sign of health. I mean, that's the sign of embracing suicide. And I think that's where going back to all the old dualisms, communist, you know, capitalist, free, say all that stuff by going back to all those dualisms, is something being written out on a tombstone. And, I mean, it won't take long, while it's already falling apart. Just look at the temperature. It's going up every year.

Lyndon Sayers 23:49
Yeah. I mean wildfires, coast to coast, and we're talking about megaenergy products, the projects that produce carbon, more natural gas, more oil, more coal, even Saskatchewan, Alberta. When you're talking about bygone centuries, and in that case, right, it's only the powerful forces that get ahead.

Wayne Turner 24:19
If you think about Saskatchewan, they're going to go with with coal, until we get to nuclear power. There will be some compliments of wind, but I mean that Alberta and Saskatchewan lease, I don't know about British Columbia, but there's policies and strategies in there to disable investment in renewables, and that's the plan, but you know, nuclear is a minimum, 10 years away, unbelievably expensive, the most expensive way to produce energy, by far. But you know, you're very healthy, because now, for the next 10 years at least, you get to use oil and natural gas and coal, and very proud of it. I mean these purveyors of accelerating climate catastrophe, they're proud of their stance. They fought, they've won. They're proud the fact that their climate catastrophe proponents or advocates doesn't bother them in the least and here we I go back to something Hannah Arendt once said, wrote in the book on origins of totalitarianism, and it always baffled me, I didn't know quite what she was making of this point. She said, "the surest way to control your possessions is destroy it." And I think, "what do you mean?" And she's talking about imperialism here. Why? Why is death the surest way of control, the surest way of possession? And, well, it's because nobody else can get it, nobody else can use it, right? So when you think of examples like one of the tragic aspects we've seen are the murder suicides, when someone will come home and kill their spouse or their kids and then kill themselves, that's the kind of attitude we're looking at with respect to putting the economy ahead of the environment, compromising the environment for the sake of the economy is we're absolutely willing to destroy the biosphere for our own gain. But also there's that other sense, you know, we're not going to let the oil resources go to waste. We're not going to let somebody profit off that. We're going to make sure that we are the ones that are going to profit from the situation. And it doesn't matter what happens to people now or in 20 years or in 100 years, doesn't matter at all, and perfectly comfortable with bringing on a climate catastrophe. Well, I mean, the climate catastrophe is already unfolding, but catalyzing it is not a problem. And you have think Arendt would think right now "stop and think about that. Why are we doing that?" That's the other catchphrase of the human condition, is stop and think, stop and think what we are doing, which means how we are acting. How we are acting is God's gift to us, that we have the capacity to act, and we act in such a way as to begin again, and that's where we fail. We can't do it.

Lyndon Sayers 27:53
The stopping and thinking. I mean along those lines, how do we, from an Arendt perspective, process, kind of political social currents that led to things like the convoy and far right movements that, I guess they want to kind of dominate and control worlds of locking things onto this kind of binary grid. Who said it's man or woman, it's not some other category. It's about oil. It's about coming back to being a colonial power, instead of this multicultural landscape of different voices and languages and you know, asking hard questions, did we kind of, did we just steal the land? What are we going to do about that? Is it just a rejection of asking those kinds of questions?

Wayne Turner 28:57
Yeah, people certainly. I mean, they don't even want, I should say that the powers that be don't even want to have the data. I mean, that's why they're shutting down some of those climate institutes. That's why the conservative party before you know, was willing to defund NGOs, they were getting rid of data, some of their their national institutes and so on. We don't even want to know. We're going to shut it down. The corporate control of newspapers. I don't know if you know, I've written a number of letters to the editor of the Star of Phoenix in Saskatoon. And then a month ago, I noticed no new letters to the Star of Phoenix, no new opinion pieces. And the opinion piece part of the Star of Phoenix is gone. They've been laid off. The editors are laid off. And I think the same for the leader post. So I have a concern about what's going on in Saskatoon. It can be political, it can be environmental. Can be crime. It can be I don't even have a newspaper. I can write a letter to the editor. If a pastor wants to do an op-ed, or a social scientist. Where are they going to publish it? You know, and then they forced back into technology, and you have to try to make it work with, like, with a podcast or a blog. My instinct is to head for the hills and find the nearest cave and take my book bag in and just, that's it. I'm done. I'm going deep in the cave, and Middle Ages kind of thinking. I gotta. I'm gonna, you know, think about, what can I do for future generations? But for those who are less cowardly than me, they're more like you, establish a podcast. We'll try to find an audience. We'll try to create an audience. We'll try to help people understand better. And there's always like the specific things you do in your local community, and that's all good, but the environment in which you work with, like the technological corporate environment, is very much like an octopus. It's tentacles are everywhere. And it's getting harsher and harsher. And I'm an old fella too, right? I don't know how to come up with new solutions in this kind of world, I'm kind of at a loss. I'm always walking around with my mouth open partly not because I'm more susceptible to what's going on, but I just feel more and more alien, you know?

Lyndon Sayers 32:04
Yeah, that's, that's true. But Boston, are you wanting to jump in here at one point?

Boston 32:11
You know what? I am not super read up on Arendt so I'm learning here. I'm listening and I'm learning the time.

Lyndon Sayers 32:24
I just want to check in. We just got a few minutes left in this conversation, I think we're gonna have to have another conversation with Wayne before too long, there's so much talk about. I was gonna say, well, Wayne, you can come join us on Vancouver Island or the properties in the northern island are cheaper, you just get high enough elevation, and hopefully the sea level won't rise beyond your house. That's a game we play living on an island. Well, I can't afford waterfront, but those will be the first ones to be flooded. So there you go.

Wayne Turner 33:02
You have interesting people living out there. I mean, there's David Suzuki in Vancouver Island. But I think Wade Davis lives out there somewhere on the island maybe. I think Naomi Klein. I guess you know you have to try to find a circle of readers or interlocutors, and there's brilliant stuff being written. I'm reading a book by On Barak, who's writing about energy and you know how coal, fossil fuel, steam and it's very historical, but it's very interesting because it allows you to see things differently. And there's great things being written, but how you bring that into pressure is... I mean, the way that the right wing did it was, they did it basically after Vietnam war, they started grassroots, right? Talk radio, take them over. Education councils, you know, town councils, like they just, they went after everything, and It took them 30 years, but they did it, and they constantly promoted their point of view, and meanwhile, the rest of us just thought, well, it'll never get that bad, and lo and behold, it can get a lot worse.

Lyndon Sayers 34:38
Yeah, yeah, that's the stark reality. Maybe on the more hopeful side, you talk about grassroots. I mean, that's something we're trying to do, whether, as churches on campuses with a podcast, is never the one thing, but it's that plurality you talk about with Arendt is really about joining forces, because there's way more power among the voices who want a better world than there are among those who just want this strict binary. They have the levers of power at the moment, and so it's got to be that grassroots organizing that gets us, so there's more democratic representation of who's pulling levers of power.

Wayne Turner 35:30
On that note, Arendt has an understanding of power that's very different. She makes distinctions between power and strength and violence, for example. So strength is something the military has.Violence is an apprentice, is a tool, basically wielded by cowards. Violence is the tool of the coward. Power is always inter subjective. Power is always communal. Power isn't vertical. In fact, she advocates for a confederation form of a political entity like Canada. Because she says, the more divisions you have, the more power you have. And the reason for that is, is because the more you can persuade other people to join you and say, "this is what we're going to do with a question of the environment in your locale, or the question of homelessness or, you know, even questions of crime" and so on. The more people you persuade, the more power you have. Power is always lateral. If it's top down, that's really a question of strength, not power. Because, you know, all it would take would be for, you know, five Republicans to say no to the big, beautiful bill, and it's done right? So it takes a bit of courage, if you can persuade them, I mean, that's ultimately we're left with the word. We're left with the word that brings understanding and creates relationships and solidarity. And so you go world alienation, you go natality. How is all that expressed? How does that work? What brings that about? And it's really the word, and the word is not controllable by us. You know, in the podcast, you know, we ask our questions and we give our responses and we think about it. But how that lands, literally, God only knows. And that's kind of the good thing about it too is that you're really casting your bread upon your waters, and you're letting the word do its work. And that's comforting

Lyndon Sayers 37:57
I think that is comforting the word, and we don't know how the word is going to land in the world. We've got to wrap it up there, but we are going to have you back on Wayne, because this is too much fun. I'm having a good time here.

Wayne Turner 38:16
Oh, right on, this is my first podcast.

Lyndon Sayers 38:19
So, we got to say, thank you Wayne. We say, thank you to CFUV.Thank you to Lutheran Church of the cross, the BC Synod of the LCIC.And we got a grant with campus ministry to help get some podcasting equipment. We look forward to moving ahead with that as well. All right, catch us again on Let's Talk Faith and Justice.