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The Ritual Roots of Animism, Drama and Sports: The Work of Jane Harrison and the Cambridge Ritualists
My friends claim that I am irreverent to the Olympian gods. My interests I am told are unduly focused on ghosts, bogies and pillar cults. I prefer savage disorders, Dionysian origins, the tearing of wild bulls to the ordered and stately ceremonial of Panathenaic processions….The gods who once mirrored human unity with nature came to […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers, Part II
Orientation Summing up Part I My purpose in this two-part article is to show how creativity can be understood not only at the micro level of the individual artist, but also at the macro level of world history. I began in Part I by describing the ways in which the individual artist is different from […]
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The Collective Creativity of Workers
Orientation One purpose of this article is to get you to think of creativity in a whole new way. Our notion of creative today is baked with the assumptions of a Romantic theory of art. These have their good points but they also limit us. In this article I want to argue that the most […]
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From Agrarianism to Transhumanism: The Long March to Dystopia
A total demolition of the previous forms of existence is underway: how one comes into the world, biological sex, education, relationships, the family, even the diet that is about to become synthetic. — Silvia Guerini, radical ecologist, in From the ‘Neutral’ Body to the Posthuman Cyborg: A Critique of Gender Ideology (2023) We are currently […]
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Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part II
Summary of Part I After briefly reviewing the theories of the relationship between religion and nationalism, I find the theories of Anthony Smith, George Mosse and Adrian Hutchinson the most compelling. They all agree that religion provides the propagandistic foundation for nationalism. But I also claim that it is a particular kind of religion, monotheism, that is […]
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The Monotheistic Roots of Nationalism Part I
Do religion and nationalism compete with each other? Do they replace each other? Do they amplify each other and drive each other forward? Do they exist in symbiosis? Theorists of nationalism have struggled with this question. At one extreme of the spectrum is the early work of Elie Kedourie (1960), who argued that nationalism is a modern, […]
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Edgar Morin and the Magical Origins of Stardom
No one who frequents the dark auditoriums is really an atheist…Whenever there is a white screen in a black room a new religion has been established…We enter into the darkness of an artificial grotto. A luminous dust is projected and dances on a screen. We cross time and space, until some solemn music dissolves the […]
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