I promised a kind of summary or overview of my current project on Anthropocene theology, but that will need to wait a while. This post will explain why.
I understand the Anthropocene as an era in which some human beings are effectively the gods of this world but also are profoundly disoriented by their godlike status, while other human beings languish in the kinds of misery long familiar to residents of this vale of tears. That is, I think of the Anthropocene not only in terms of the power some humans have over the animate and inanimate worlds, but also in experiential and affective terms: what it feels like to be so empowered or, equally important, to be powerless in the face of other humans’ power.
The idea of articulating a theological anthropology adequate to the Anthropocene era occurred to me when I realized that my interest in writing a technological history of modernity and my interest in writing a book about the theological implications of Thomas Pynchon’s fiction were one and the same interest. And all of these topics are explored on this blog, but of course in no particular sequence. I therefore needed some way to find a thread through the labyrinth, to put these random explorations in some kind of order. So what tools did I need to make this happen? As long-time readers know, I am deeply committed to living in plain text: all of my instruments for writing and organizing are plain-text or enhanced-plain-text apps. So my first thought was: Emacs org-mode.
Org-mode is an exceptionally complex and powerful organizational system, one that I have fooled around with a good bit over the years — but I have never managed to commit fully to it, and it’s the kind of thing that really does require full commitment: you just can’t make it work to its fullest extent without embedding those keystroke sequences in your muscle memory. And further, it requires me to commit to the Mac (or Linux) as opposed to iOS, and I have been wondering whether for the long haul iOS will be the more stable and usable platform.
Enter OmniOutliner. Yesterday I went through all my posts tagged antheo, THM, and Thomas Pynchon and copied them into one large OmniOutliner document. This was a very slow and painstaking task, since I needed to turn every paragraph of every post into a discrete row, and along the way I needed to think about what order made the most sense.
Those decisions about order were rough-and-ready, not definitive, because the whole point of the exercise was to get my ideas into a format that would allow me easily to alter sequences and hierarchies — something that OmniOutliner makes very easy, especially since the keyboard shortcuts for moving a given row up or down, in or out, are the same on both MacOS and iOS. Once I had everything in the document, and had decided on a provisional structure, I went through and color-coded the different levels so that that structure would be immediately visible to me.
So now I have an outline of about 70,000 words — goodness, I’ve blogged a lot — and will need to take some time to figure out what its ideal organization will be, where the holes in the argument are, and so on. But even with just the one day’s work, I am pleased at how the thing seems to be coming together. I think this really could be a book, and perhaps even a useful one. There will be a lot more reading and thinking to do, but as I do that reading and thinking, I have a strong outline into which I can place new ideas.
So I’m not ready, right now, to give an overview of the project. I need to meditate longer on the structure that I have and on what its deficiencies are. But I’m going to keep on exploring these issues, and some of that exploration will happen right here on this blog.
I expect you'll see this anyway, but just in case — today's "Long Read" from The Guardian is: "'A reckoning for our species': the philosopher prophet of the Anthropocene". FWIW!