Kevin LaTorre and I talk about the former "it girl" of the literary scene, her New Yorker essay on climate despair and therapy, Kevin's Christian faith, and much more.
One thing that has since changed a bit on the natalism debate: the rise of Muskian pro-natalism, on terms that seem as catastrophizing and bizarre as those of environmental anti-natalists: supply the maximum number of children in a quantitative rush to save human civilization. The two extremes continue to mirror each other in a grimly comic reflection.
Very interesting convo. I was wondering if the movie “First Reformed” would come up at any point, in which Ethan Hawke plays a small town pastor and begins to despair over impending climate catastrophe and his own guilt surrounding the subject. There’s also the pro/anti natalism topic as well…pretty relevant to all the topics you cover here. Thanks for the discussion.
Good call -- that's a great film on exactly these themes, but it just didn't come up in what else we were covering. I'd say that Hawke's character, Toller, succumbs more to the anti-natal or anti-human despair than Tolentino does, since she has raised a family while he falls for ecoterrorism. (There's also the full Calvinist terror that Paul Schrader digs into through Toller.)
Hey Kevin, something you said really stuck out to me: "As a Christian, I know I'm not welcome in those spaces, and that's okay. There's no reason I should be welcomed everywhere and in all places." I had never thought of it that way before, but I 100% agree. Jesus wasn't welcomed everywhere, why should we? Strangely, I feel there is a current in culture that says "You should demand to be welcomed everywhere!" I guess I hadn't thought to question this assumption directly. So thanks!
Thanks for mentioning that section, Andrew! I'm continuing to think about this, where publishing is concerned -- if there is a Christian literary ghetto, and how not to be contained inside it.
You named the culprit pretty directly: the demand to be welcomed, which might well draw from our media's calls for cultural representation. It's a great aspiration but isn't workable or likely (from what I've seen in religious or secular spaces), especially for literary institutions with ever-higher bars of entry.
How to stay out of a Christian literary ghetto? Be Marilynne Robinson. Jokes aside, as an aspiring writer I also wrestle with this, but I do believe that if you write well enough people won't care. Also I wonder, whats so bad with being in a ghetto? Jewish, Black, and Queer writers were able to make wonderful work while marginalized in much more profound ways. Who knows, maybe some time one the periphery would be good for us Christians I wonder.
But also, there is something just a little grating about the contradiction of a milieu that professes to be 'inclusive' while simultaneously unwelcoming of a particular tradition. Not that Christians haven't done their damndest to give them reason for it, but still.
Ha -- much as I love "Housekeeping," I am learning that I don't want to be Robinson, if it requires a the Iowa-academia-teaching-proper-palatable-centrist-Democrat-politics route. And certainly, it's irritating that 21st-century inclusion rests on the unspoken but understood exclusion of certain groups, but life is too short to bean-count topical hypocrisies in this world.
Your question about the benefit of a peripheral ghetto is really rich, actually: I'm thinking about the experimentation it could afford, and the sorts of influence it could establish (if only among Christians, but that's not nothing). I'd like not to be contained because of your point about people not caring about my beliefs -- I want to write that well, and receive respect for it. But that may well be less important than pushing and writing within a smaller, sharper space.
I am something of a boomer at heart when it comes to technology and the hyper-connectedness of the world, but one great thing it does is allow access to all kinds of media and influences such that you don't need to be part of that milieu. You want access to Cormac McCarthy and John Updike and Ursula K LeGuin? Go nuts! So on one hand you can cut your teeth in a small space of more like minded individuals, all while gaining the skills to reach and resonate with those outside of that sphere.
...Huh, it kinda sounds Ideal when I write it like that...
Which means of course I am failing to account for the benefits that come from being in the milieu of the elites, financial and cultural capital and what not, but still, there is virtue in periphery.
Aug 16·edited Aug 16Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer, Kevin LaTorre
Great conversation! I especially appreciated the reflections on original sin and loving one's neighbour when that neighbour is on the other side of the world. As someone who was raised in a very Christian environment, I can't help but think in these terms, even if I no longer have faith. In the words of Julian Barnes: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."
I wonder if the existential anxiety around climate change is a manifestation of a general unease with the West's Faustian bargain to replace faith in God with faith in Progress. Secular humanism seems to be just as impotent as Christian universalism to prevent war and destruction. So aren't we all just looking for a bit of consolation - whether singing God's praises in a megachurch or making out with strangers in a night club, reading Dante or reading The New Yorker?
I figured that what we said of original sin and love would resonate well beyond Tolentino and well beyond me: you mention a very Christian environment in your childhood, which I'd expand to describe a sort of Christian-esque childhood for much of the West at large, one that informs our moral concepts and public priorities even as many Westerners do away with the metaphysical elements. (I'm just parroting the historian Tom Holland here to echo what may well be a common lineage drawn by other philosophers and historians.)
From that, I'd say that climate-related fear is unease with how un-sovereign our secular Progress and its systems actually are, but it's also an existential unease present in Christianity and every belief system before or since: that the core goodness we desire isn't as it should be in the world we perceive and inhabit. I'm coming to see modern environmentalism as a Christianesque heresy for materialists who still feel sinful, still see that an apocalypse is coming, and do feel purpose in that crisis. (Though you could certainly debate how materialistic modern environmentalism is, in its appeals to the sentient Earth and to indigenous knowledge). Existential threat remains fertile for human purpose, even if you blame extractive capitalism rather than the devil and his deceived souls. Oddly, there seems like a consolation in the anger against climate inaction, since the consolations you name would be considered frivolous in the face of the hyperobject of global death (so goes the harshest environmental stance: I love praise, Dante, and some of the New Yorker's long-form, personally; never enjoyed the two European night clubs I visited).
I have some intuition that the anxiety/anger/despair around climate change is part of a deep sense -- maybe Christian in its roots, maybe just human -- that there has to be a price paid for the ways in which we've despoiled the earth. That it's intolerable in some way that we could just keep muddling through, living our sinful selfish exploitative lives, raping the earth, and not pay a civilizational price that is proportional in scale to our sins. Maybe this is just another way of saying what you're saying, Kevin, "that the core goodness we desire isn't as it should be in the world we perceive and inhabit."
What's the nature of the heresy, in your view? As a Freudian, I'd probably say it has something to do with a failure to fully psychologically mature, that growing up requires some kind of acceptance, or at least movement toward acceptance, of the fundamental imperfection and inadequacy of human existence, at both the personal and societal scale. Hoping for an apocalypse, or being perpetually angry that others are not as fearful of it as you are, is in this sense a kind of arrested desire for resolution or proportionality or cosmic balance.
Definitely, the passions circling climate change would have to do with a sense of justice against our own malicious work. Maybe that's a facet of the "core goodness" note -- justice delivered to evildoers.
Your Freudian read is curious (I'll agree these activists are immature, but does your view preclude utopias altogether?). My reading of secular environmentalists as heretics is twofold: a) if they believe redemption of the earth that is possible, it's purely techno-human-controlled and not of Christ; b) they valorize or even worship the material earth, rather than enjoying it as a creation made by God (which witnesses to His work and His perfection). If I were to get harsher, I'd say that the eugenicist "Population Bomb" ideas of some of last century's conservationists are deeply antihuman, though I'll also admit with relief that they don't have a ton of sway with today's iteration.
Aug 16·edited Aug 16Liked by Daniel Oppenheimer, Kevin LaTorre
I think there is something to Dan’s Freudian explanation, noting that development can be arrested at various stages. Gurwinder wrote recently about the toddlerisation of activism, but the catastrophists have in some cases made it past puberty, psychologically speaking (even if the face of climate activism got the gig as an adolescent). Full acceptance of the fallenness of the world (which in my view does preclude utopianism if not meliorism) requires a substantial amount of emotional maturity – and is even more difficult without another world in which to deposit our hopes (or another psychological defence such as belonging to a chosen people or manifest destiny). Especially when the culture tells you that you should just stop being poor or old or sick.
But I don’t know if it is helpful to refer to environmental extremism as a Christian heresy. I think it is at least as anti-Christian as fascism (not to imply any other similarities). And in my heretical view, that’s not wholly a bad thing. It rejects the Gnosticism still tied up with so much of Christian belief – it says: This is it! Nobody is coming to save us, we have to save ourselves! At its most benign, it’s a bunch of effective altruists with rather dicey maths.
Fair enough, the usefulness in understanding environmentalism in Christian terms may not be as helpful (those terms are the ones I speak most fluently and earnestly). It's why I can see how the acceptance of a fallen world without God on secular terms (or a doomed one, if we keep using non-secular terms) appears mature, while to me, that acceptance is a tragedy, like the suicides taken up by pagan heroes and kings. (And a note on "heretics" - I realize that saying it conjures flames and stakes, but I mean it almost as a term connoting familiarity: a heretic has some shared points of stasis with a believer. Positing that an environmentalist desires what I desire, but diverges sharply on the means and foundations, is my start of understanding them in my groping way.)
Ah, Gnosticism! Scratch the Internet, tap the concept, right? Environmental elevation of physical world seems an inversion of the gnostic hatred of the physical world, though each movement does have its place for secret, unwelcome knowledge of reality (the world is burning and it's our fault; the Demiurge deceived us but will be defeated).
I appreciate your (Chestertonian?) approach to engaging with heresies - in my view it is a useful exercise to think carefully where one agrees and disagrees with another worldview. And my reference to Gnosticism was quite flippant - you are right that in the broader sense, it seems to be a temptation that is present in many movements that might on the surface seem opposed. I guess what I had in mind was a form of Christianity that is indeed closely tied to the Internet - a bunch of Twitter anons discovering Orthodox Christianity as a more based religion than the Protestantism or Catholicism that they are more familiar with. The hatred that they express towards human society as it actually exists doesn't seem to be glorifying God's creation. But Christianity as a lived tradition is often anti-Gnostic, as with the conservation efforts that you mention on the podcast. So thank you again for a stimulating discussion!
Thanks for having me, Dan!
One thing that has since changed a bit on the natalism debate: the rise of Muskian pro-natalism, on terms that seem as catastrophizing and bizarre as those of environmental anti-natalists: supply the maximum number of children in a quantitative rush to save human civilization. The two extremes continue to mirror each other in a grimly comic reflection.
Very interesting convo. I was wondering if the movie “First Reformed” would come up at any point, in which Ethan Hawke plays a small town pastor and begins to despair over impending climate catastrophe and his own guilt surrounding the subject. There’s also the pro/anti natalism topic as well…pretty relevant to all the topics you cover here. Thanks for the discussion.
Good call -- that's a great film on exactly these themes, but it just didn't come up in what else we were covering. I'd say that Hawke's character, Toller, succumbs more to the anti-natal or anti-human despair than Tolentino does, since she has raised a family while he falls for ecoterrorism. (There's also the full Calvinist terror that Paul Schrader digs into through Toller.)
That film did come up in a recent episode of Manifesto!, where Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman discussed their new book about natalism against the film's example: https://open.spotify.com/episode/2oDxeoqtsMcEv5IHeJGp47?si=30576235f2f34857
Fantastic, I’ll give that a listen. And yes, I haven’t read the Tolentino essay yet but I can’t imagine anyone matching Toller’s level of despair.
I haven't seen First Reformed, though it certainly does sound on topic.
Highly recommend it!
Hey Kevin, something you said really stuck out to me: "As a Christian, I know I'm not welcome in those spaces, and that's okay. There's no reason I should be welcomed everywhere and in all places." I had never thought of it that way before, but I 100% agree. Jesus wasn't welcomed everywhere, why should we? Strangely, I feel there is a current in culture that says "You should demand to be welcomed everywhere!" I guess I hadn't thought to question this assumption directly. So thanks!
Thanks for mentioning that section, Andrew! I'm continuing to think about this, where publishing is concerned -- if there is a Christian literary ghetto, and how not to be contained inside it.
You named the culprit pretty directly: the demand to be welcomed, which might well draw from our media's calls for cultural representation. It's a great aspiration but isn't workable or likely (from what I've seen in religious or secular spaces), especially for literary institutions with ever-higher bars of entry.
How to stay out of a Christian literary ghetto? Be Marilynne Robinson. Jokes aside, as an aspiring writer I also wrestle with this, but I do believe that if you write well enough people won't care. Also I wonder, whats so bad with being in a ghetto? Jewish, Black, and Queer writers were able to make wonderful work while marginalized in much more profound ways. Who knows, maybe some time one the periphery would be good for us Christians I wonder.
But also, there is something just a little grating about the contradiction of a milieu that professes to be 'inclusive' while simultaneously unwelcoming of a particular tradition. Not that Christians haven't done their damndest to give them reason for it, but still.
Ha -- much as I love "Housekeeping," I am learning that I don't want to be Robinson, if it requires a the Iowa-academia-teaching-proper-palatable-centrist-Democrat-politics route. And certainly, it's irritating that 21st-century inclusion rests on the unspoken but understood exclusion of certain groups, but life is too short to bean-count topical hypocrisies in this world.
Your question about the benefit of a peripheral ghetto is really rich, actually: I'm thinking about the experimentation it could afford, and the sorts of influence it could establish (if only among Christians, but that's not nothing). I'd like not to be contained because of your point about people not caring about my beliefs -- I want to write that well, and receive respect for it. But that may well be less important than pushing and writing within a smaller, sharper space.
Your response is great.
I am something of a boomer at heart when it comes to technology and the hyper-connectedness of the world, but one great thing it does is allow access to all kinds of media and influences such that you don't need to be part of that milieu. You want access to Cormac McCarthy and John Updike and Ursula K LeGuin? Go nuts! So on one hand you can cut your teeth in a small space of more like minded individuals, all while gaining the skills to reach and resonate with those outside of that sphere.
...Huh, it kinda sounds Ideal when I write it like that...
Which means of course I am failing to account for the benefits that come from being in the milieu of the elites, financial and cultural capital and what not, but still, there is virtue in periphery.
Great conversation! I especially appreciated the reflections on original sin and loving one's neighbour when that neighbour is on the other side of the world. As someone who was raised in a very Christian environment, I can't help but think in these terms, even if I no longer have faith. In the words of Julian Barnes: "I don't believe in God, but I miss Him."
I wonder if the existential anxiety around climate change is a manifestation of a general unease with the West's Faustian bargain to replace faith in God with faith in Progress. Secular humanism seems to be just as impotent as Christian universalism to prevent war and destruction. So aren't we all just looking for a bit of consolation - whether singing God's praises in a megachurch or making out with strangers in a night club, reading Dante or reading The New Yorker?
I figured that what we said of original sin and love would resonate well beyond Tolentino and well beyond me: you mention a very Christian environment in your childhood, which I'd expand to describe a sort of Christian-esque childhood for much of the West at large, one that informs our moral concepts and public priorities even as many Westerners do away with the metaphysical elements. (I'm just parroting the historian Tom Holland here to echo what may well be a common lineage drawn by other philosophers and historians.)
From that, I'd say that climate-related fear is unease with how un-sovereign our secular Progress and its systems actually are, but it's also an existential unease present in Christianity and every belief system before or since: that the core goodness we desire isn't as it should be in the world we perceive and inhabit. I'm coming to see modern environmentalism as a Christianesque heresy for materialists who still feel sinful, still see that an apocalypse is coming, and do feel purpose in that crisis. (Though you could certainly debate how materialistic modern environmentalism is, in its appeals to the sentient Earth and to indigenous knowledge). Existential threat remains fertile for human purpose, even if you blame extractive capitalism rather than the devil and his deceived souls. Oddly, there seems like a consolation in the anger against climate inaction, since the consolations you name would be considered frivolous in the face of the hyperobject of global death (so goes the harshest environmental stance: I love praise, Dante, and some of the New Yorker's long-form, personally; never enjoyed the two European night clubs I visited).
I have some intuition that the anxiety/anger/despair around climate change is part of a deep sense -- maybe Christian in its roots, maybe just human -- that there has to be a price paid for the ways in which we've despoiled the earth. That it's intolerable in some way that we could just keep muddling through, living our sinful selfish exploitative lives, raping the earth, and not pay a civilizational price that is proportional in scale to our sins. Maybe this is just another way of saying what you're saying, Kevin, "that the core goodness we desire isn't as it should be in the world we perceive and inhabit."
What's the nature of the heresy, in your view? As a Freudian, I'd probably say it has something to do with a failure to fully psychologically mature, that growing up requires some kind of acceptance, or at least movement toward acceptance, of the fundamental imperfection and inadequacy of human existence, at both the personal and societal scale. Hoping for an apocalypse, or being perpetually angry that others are not as fearful of it as you are, is in this sense a kind of arrested desire for resolution or proportionality or cosmic balance.
Definitely, the passions circling climate change would have to do with a sense of justice against our own malicious work. Maybe that's a facet of the "core goodness" note -- justice delivered to evildoers.
Your Freudian read is curious (I'll agree these activists are immature, but does your view preclude utopias altogether?). My reading of secular environmentalists as heretics is twofold: a) if they believe redemption of the earth that is possible, it's purely techno-human-controlled and not of Christ; b) they valorize or even worship the material earth, rather than enjoying it as a creation made by God (which witnesses to His work and His perfection). If I were to get harsher, I'd say that the eugenicist "Population Bomb" ideas of some of last century's conservationists are deeply antihuman, though I'll also admit with relief that they don't have a ton of sway with today's iteration.
I think there is something to Dan’s Freudian explanation, noting that development can be arrested at various stages. Gurwinder wrote recently about the toddlerisation of activism, but the catastrophists have in some cases made it past puberty, psychologically speaking (even if the face of climate activism got the gig as an adolescent). Full acceptance of the fallenness of the world (which in my view does preclude utopianism if not meliorism) requires a substantial amount of emotional maturity – and is even more difficult without another world in which to deposit our hopes (or another psychological defence such as belonging to a chosen people or manifest destiny). Especially when the culture tells you that you should just stop being poor or old or sick.
But I don’t know if it is helpful to refer to environmental extremism as a Christian heresy. I think it is at least as anti-Christian as fascism (not to imply any other similarities). And in my heretical view, that’s not wholly a bad thing. It rejects the Gnosticism still tied up with so much of Christian belief – it says: This is it! Nobody is coming to save us, we have to save ourselves! At its most benign, it’s a bunch of effective altruists with rather dicey maths.
Fair enough, the usefulness in understanding environmentalism in Christian terms may not be as helpful (those terms are the ones I speak most fluently and earnestly). It's why I can see how the acceptance of a fallen world without God on secular terms (or a doomed one, if we keep using non-secular terms) appears mature, while to me, that acceptance is a tragedy, like the suicides taken up by pagan heroes and kings. (And a note on "heretics" - I realize that saying it conjures flames and stakes, but I mean it almost as a term connoting familiarity: a heretic has some shared points of stasis with a believer. Positing that an environmentalist desires what I desire, but diverges sharply on the means and foundations, is my start of understanding them in my groping way.)
Ah, Gnosticism! Scratch the Internet, tap the concept, right? Environmental elevation of physical world seems an inversion of the gnostic hatred of the physical world, though each movement does have its place for secret, unwelcome knowledge of reality (the world is burning and it's our fault; the Demiurge deceived us but will be defeated).
I appreciate your (Chestertonian?) approach to engaging with heresies - in my view it is a useful exercise to think carefully where one agrees and disagrees with another worldview. And my reference to Gnosticism was quite flippant - you are right that in the broader sense, it seems to be a temptation that is present in many movements that might on the surface seem opposed. I guess what I had in mind was a form of Christianity that is indeed closely tied to the Internet - a bunch of Twitter anons discovering Orthodox Christianity as a more based religion than the Protestantism or Catholicism that they are more familiar with. The hatred that they express towards human society as it actually exists doesn't seem to be glorifying God's creation. But Christianity as a lived tradition is often anti-Gnostic, as with the conservation efforts that you mention on the podcast. So thank you again for a stimulating discussion!