The idea that the unrooted go on to unroot those around them hit hard, but I think the opposite is also true.
In the past few years I've had the good fortune to have some very kind, generous people in my life, and when I saw the positive impact they had on those around them, and on myself, I realized that things about me were magnifying the distress in people around me, and I needed to make some changes.
If you have the good fortune to be in a situation where you can work on cultivating a generous spirit, I think it could be one way to push back against the machine.
The question arises, what do you do about the Machine? How do you get roots? If you are looking for answers, a great place to start is "Braiding Sweetgrass" by ecology professor and Native American Robin Wall Kimmerer. I'm an avid reader across many genres, and this is my favorite book. Many people I know have said that this book was the most important book they've read. When I look at my own life, I can see the difference between pre-Braiding Sweetgrass and post.
Also of note, even though it was written in 2013, it is today number two on the NYTimes bestseller list, and it's been on the list for 53 weeks. A lot of people are feeling like it's time to grow roots: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/paperback-nonfict...
Rootlessness and rootedness are themes that wind through most of Wendell Berry's works as well. His novels Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow take a good look at what increasing rootlessness does to a community: increasing loneliness and isolation, but also eventual environmental destruction.
> It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet.
I've posted this before, from Emerson's self-reliance. It is describing geographical roots but the human want for short-term novelty at the cost of building on something more familiar is applicable to all sorts of aspects of life. Moderation is key, and so in circles (like mine) where people crave new experiences rootlessness seems much more common an issue than provincialism.
Which biography? I read Petrement's bio of her a long time ago (they were school friends IIRC).
Her older brother was André Weil of course. As a kid she decided she would never have the talent to be a mathematician because he was so good at it... talk about sample bias. The philosopher George Grant said something like (paraphrasing) "that family had intellectual culture on a level undreamt of in North America".
There's a lovely article about the family by André's daughter here:
"On the abolition of all political parties" is well worth the read. It paints a rather bleak picture of party politics, but when seen through 21st century eyes, it's eerily prophetic.
I think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such a plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply connected we are to the natural world and each other. It's a shame we choose to focus on our subtle differences to intentionally divide ourselves.
> I think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such a plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply connected we are to the natural world and each other.
We are mostly connected to each other via sanitized business transactions. Meanwhile, we don't even know the names of most of our neighbors.
Not knowing one's neighbours may seem like a problem to you, but it can be a great thing for others. So many young people who move from close-knit small towns or villages to big cities (especially, but not only, sexual minorities), find it liberating that no one is scrutinizing their lifestyles like back home.
Also, countries like Finland manage to be high-trust and relatively homogeneous societies, while at the same time having strong expectations for privacy in a block of flats, where neighbours might find it uncomfortable and intrusive if you tried to interact with them.
I guess it can depend from your life-stage really. As a lonely kid with different interests I really hated living in such a close-knit village, and felt great moving away from there. Yet now after years of living in the city, with a stable relationship and all, I constantly dream of moving to rural countryside and raising my future children there, in a more stable and calm environment.
I believe it's quite natural for young people to go seek new life and opportunities elsewhere from their place of birth, as many of them have always done historically. But having to constantly move in search of them, never finding a place where you could stay permanently, now that really isn't a good way of living for the vast majority of people, even though modern employment market encourages it.
As far Finnish block of flats go, I would argue that rental buildings with high turnover rate have quite low level of trust between neighbours and way more problems, while those owned by their residents have high trust and less issues. Some of it can be attributed to socioeconomic factors of course, but lack of roots and feeling of attachment to rental property is definitely also a factor.
> I would argue that rental buildings with high turnover rate ... while those owned by their residents
Note that in the Finnish context (at least in the more-populated south), this isn’t a rental/owned distinction. that is, the expectation for privacy also applies to blocks of flats where residents own their flat and may live there for decades.
True, indeed Finns tend to be fairly privacy conscious anywhere. But in owned flats people still do seem to be more mindful of their neighbours - less antisocial behaviour of all kinds. Of course it's hard to know how much of this is linked to ownership / sense of roots, and how much to socioeconomic factors.
People used to depend on neighbors - for example, they helped each other on their farms on a regular basis. Now it's no longer the case and perhaps the dynamics you're describing is the worst of both worlds, where the actual economical need for rich and frequent interactions with neighbors is gone and everything that's left is the nosiness. But, this itself is a result of modernity compartmentalizing people to the degree where they practically never need help from their neighbors.
But if you live in a successful welfare state, what need have you for help from your neighbours? The welfare state might help you even better, as it can benefit from economies of scale, and it will not demand anything in return from you except, once you are working a normal job, your taxes. Also, depictions of pre-welfare-state help from neighbours often underscore how that help was always conditional: sexual and racial minorities, women with children out of wedlock, people not members of the locally dominant church or political wing, etc. often found their pleas for help rejected.
Yet it should be noted that a successful welfare state exists only as long as well-doing people feel enough solidarity and trust towards the poor to pay higher taxes in support of them, and as long as those receiving the welfare benefits genuinely do their best to find employment, at least most of them.
I'm pretty sure Finland won't be a welfare state in 50 years. There's just too little left of the solidarity and common identity which helped creating the welfare state. Individualism and diversity seem to be today's trends, not community and social cohesion.
Welfare is basically mandatory charity - it's forcing everyone to chip in (via taxes) for the people who can't manage to support themselves.
What I'm talking about is something else entirely - it's a setup where for example the neighbor takes care of your cows and other animals if you go to town for a day or two. Or you help him rebuild his house after a fire. Or, the older kids of your neighbor look after your younger kid, as they play together outside all day. Or somebody is the village's blacksmith and is fixing everyone's iron equipment. Or, you give excess of apples during harvest to someone and expect some other favor from them down the line. Essentially, it's deep interconnectedness with the people around you and essentially an opposite of welfare state, in which you interact not with your neighbors, but with bored and depressed bureucrats at the welfare office and the kafkesque rules that determine whether or not you will be granted the money.
Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what if you refuse to conform to cisgender- and heteronormativity, but your neighbour is a bigot? What if you are a politically active citizen, but your neighbor’s politics are hostile to yours? (Note that the rise of the Nordic welfare states in fact helped to smooth out some political polarization that was hurting those societies in the early 20th century.) In the past, neighbourly help often was refused to people like that. And what if you are a very introverted person who simply doesn’t want to interact with people outside your comfort zone?
Also, “bored and depressed bureaucrats” and “Kafkaesque rules” is a caricature, it may not be how others perceive their country’s welfare state. Satisfaction in fact may run high.
> Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what if you refuse to conform to cisgender- and heteronormativity, but your neighbour is a bigot? What if you are a politically active citizen, but your neighbor’s politics are hostile to yours?
I don't think people cared much about politics at all before modernity. If anything, the conflicts if any in Europe were centered around religion. As for the minorities, due to people's bigotry, perhaps sometimes they are indeed better off in an alienated modern world.
> Also, “bored and depressed bureaucrats” and “Kafkaesque rules” is a caricature, it may not be how others perceive their country’s welfare state. Satisfaction in fact may run high.
It's not a caricature. There are plenty of cases of people who needed help, but for some random stupid reason the bureaucracy refused it (I think even on this forum there is a girl from Germany whose parents died when she was young and, due to a glitch in the system, she was left on her own and forced to support herself via prostitution). The paper shufflers see the pointlessness of the rules they have to obey and the misery it causes (i.e. they knew the girl should get help, but the system just said they can't help her), which is a contributing factor into their potential depression.
> Your idealistic vision sounds well and good. But what if you refuse to conform
Then you vote with your feet and move to a community that's friendlier to your values. That community will in turn have strong values of its own, which will help preserve a sense of high social trust within it. It's easy to move out to a competing community, because these quasi-tribal dynamics are inherently limited in scale to a max of about 150 individuals.
The successful welfare state is the product of your neighbours who tacitly agree to maintain society in many ways including of course paying for it. It's a mistake to suppose that that stance is a given in perpetuity.
Definitely, but the point is that society found a way for neighbours to assist each other, without requiring individual neighbours to know (and carefully maintain friendships with) their individual neighbours. Of course support for this model could possibly weaken over time, but I think many people find the welfare state superior to the old way that took more effort and would only benefit you if you conformed to expectations.
We are not deeply connected to the natural world at all. Otherwise we’d have panicked about the mass extinction we are causing already and we’d do more than talking about addressing climate change.
We are profiting off nature, turning it into a domesticated version we hope will be sustainable (but have no proof it will be, quite the contrary).
And yet it’s true that we never understood the world around us so well. This is fantastic if you are interested in sciences. Overwhelming evidence shows that most people don’t care.
I think it's time to turn your view locally. Barring larger disasters, the rest of the world is mostly a simplified model viewed through a computer screen or TV.
Given the current social direction and inertia, maybe it's best for people to begin channeling their own Saint Leibowitz.
As a lifelong nomad, living for decades on the other side of the planet from where I grew up and having studied in worked in nearly a dozen countries, I can't relate to the sentiment. I think it's quite a leap to connect belonging and this rootedness. If I am rooted in anything it'd be in the deeper continuous history and prehistory of the species, the planet and universe. Anything else seems a bit small. I really don't think we're living in anything particularly special either when we consider the bigger picture which includes things like migration out of Africa, the neolithic revolution, Roman conquest or the migration period[1] that followed. On the other hand the original book looks interesting through the lens of criticism of a lack of local community and forced displacement[2].
Something that this article doesn't address is that "uprootedness" is not new. Some cultures have been conquered, then conquered again, to the point where "whose god are we worshiping this particular century?" might have even been a valid question. Other cultures have relocated entirely, enough so that there is a Wikipedia article called "List of diasporas".
These cultures have been uprooted, but still have a common, shared identity, which seems to qualify rootedness. Otherwise we'd not have Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, but some single, post-USSR identity, those demonyms having failed to have any official meaning for 3+ generations.
I _do_ think, on the other hand, that modernity has led others to question more about what's around them. Others have latched onto the resulting uncertainty and fed those questioning half-truths and outright lies, definitely, but this to me doesn't qualify as uprootedness.
Deleuze - Guattari and their concept of deterritorialization is useful here. Basically, capital destroys the culture of a local area, rebuilds it, and repeats this process ad infinitum.
This is easy to observe in somewhere like San Francisco. Most traces of culture from the pre-1990 era have been erased completely or have been turned into a theme park. Contemporary SF has almost zero connection to its roots and the sociopolitical consequences speak for themselves.
The native Americans frequently conquered each other and rebuilt the conquered lands to fit their empire. It happened with the Greeks and Romans, the Persians, etc and etc.
This isn't new. Places change, and "capital" has nothing to do with it.
So you're suggesting the ancient Persians were globalizing to form markets? I mean, while ancient trade was quite a bit bigger than folks tend to give it credit I don't know I'd use the term "globalized".
There's nothing about this process that's contingent on capital, and 'capital' is a confused term anyway. The causal factors are both social (generally grouped under the broad term "modernity") and technical (since technical changes might make some forms of d18n more feasible than they would otherwise be).
I wouldn't use the word 'takedown' for that because to me the word connotes internet takedown culture, which that piece long precedes. It's an interesting artifact of the early reception to Weil in the English-speaking world. It's deeply ad hominem, though (not to mention grusomely sexist by standards nowadays).
Did anyone else think this was going to be about algebraic roots?
The complex numbers are famously the algebraic closure of the reals, but I find myself wondering lately if there is a related thought which doesn’t privilege them over the hyperbolic numbers or the dual numbers.
You are being downvoted, but this is not as off-topic as it may seem.
Simone Weil had a brother, André Weil. You may not know his name on the top of your head, but I guarantee you that you've heard of the pseuodonym he created together with some other mathematicians: Nicolas Bourbaki.
I'm sure Weil and/or Bourbaki has lots to say about these topics.
The more I re-read and think about this article, the less meaning I find in it. There's a fair bit of lamenting, but it's ultimately difficult to ascertain what exactly is the issue the cause and the consequences of this great uprooting to any further granularity than: things are different than they used to be and it's never going to be the same.
This is true, but to what end. Will we truly end in civil war or anarchy because I don't live on the Italian countryside of the great grandparents I've never met?
As far as the metaphor of rootedness: a plant does not wither and die upon being uprooted if it is planted in new soil in a reasonable amount of time (in fact, international houseplant shipping is done bare-rooted due to phytosanitary regulations). Upon replanting, the plant will go into shock and probably have a few weeks/months/years (depending on the size of the plant) of acclimation where you'll see no new growth. Perhaps it will die if the new environment is not offering good conditions.
In the right conditions, you don't even need the full plant with original roots, you can just take a cutting off many plants and grow new roots in water or moss, then transplant to soil. In the houseplant community, propagating plants through cuttings in this way is much more common than reproduction by seed.
While I see your point about the article's inability to cogently driving the reader to a deserved insight, Me thinks you've stretched the metaphor into an analogy and pulled at it until it's been "uprooted" :)
The thought provoking premises/ideas in it at-least, what ever bits and pieces that were locally consistent was some food for thought.
You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text.
> Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial.
The content seemed to be talking about the fundamental common operating system for societies, not individuals. Individuals might have varying needs but as long as their needs align well with a superset of a culture's fundamental tenets the society would be relatively harmonious, or at least that's the way I see the author approaching the subject. I don't think these fundamental tenets need to have a theological basis for them, but as humans an overwhelmingly large part of our history as a people tribes, kingdoms and societies have been grounded by a shared belief in a common higher power. (I'm an atheist btw)
>This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole
This refutation seems to be as vague and unfounded as the thing it's refuting and doesn't provide much value. It would be beneficial to everyone reading if you can elucidate.
I think that in the long run wider societies need some shared belief system / culture / ideas to function properly, just like all kinds of communities do in smaller scale.
Essentially we are tribal animals, and nothing can really change that. Without a sense of common identity there's little solidarity, and without solidarity you'll eventually have conflict. Failed states with civil wars tend to be those which lack any kind of common identity and ideas, while more successful ones tend to have those.
Well she was a christian mystic, with Jewish parents, so its bound to be tied up with that. If you get past that even as an atheist a lot of her writings are quite thought provoking. IIRC, using spiritual thinking as a flashlight to illuminate the unknown that is outside what can be understood by reason, or, that which is divided is also connected .. and maybe some stuff about friends and separation
Weil went to a lot of trouble to avoid this kind of categorization (for which we all know the popular term these days) and is uninformative with respect to her work.
She wrote a letter to the Vichy Minister of Education in 1940, What is a Jew?. She writes 'I myself, who profess no religion and never have, have certainly inherited nothing from the Jewish religion, Mine is the Christian, French, Greek tradition. The Hebraic tradition is alien to me and no statute can make it otherwise.'
As the article points out, she was a Christian but very critical of the dominant forms of Christianity:
"Weil herself was Christian, but was scathing about official forms of the faith which had, she said, in most cases lined themselves up with ‘the interests of those who exploit the people.’"
>I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship
You do. It's just that in modern society we've substituted these for more easily digestible, commodified, manufactured replicas. Hollywood celebrities have replaced the pantheon of Greek gods. Consumerism is the new piety. Techno Utopianism and liberalism (in the classical sense) has supplanted the ancient traditions of old. The Zuckerbergs and Musks of the world are our priestly class. We still need these things, but instead of searching for them, communing with others, and engaging with our inherited body of three thousand years of western cultural heritage to find meaning, we purchase it with the press of a button on an app.
"The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this “the law of the conservation of religion”: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed."
I hate this style of writing, and it can generally be summed up as:
"Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to <do very vague things like find your roots> and things will be fixed!"
The author is of course not alone in writing this kind of meaningless content. "We simply need more Justice!", "We need to ground ourselves", "We need to rediscover God" etc etc.
If you want to write on these lines start by defining, very very tightly, your terms. Be specific in the ill you think your solution addresses. You should probably plainly list cons of your claims.
My roots are the roots of all humanity: War, pillage, xenophobia, power-grabs, jealousy and envy, and, finally, decamping to somewhere more promising when the vaunted Land Of My Ancestors crapped out. Multiple times over, given current knowledge about prehistoric human migrations, because I refuse to limit "my roots" to what a 19th Century Scientific Racist would say about them.
These roots you profess as being our core are more modern than you think in terms of our overall history as a people.
- For waring more complicated and denser societies were required than our hunter gatherere tribes of old
- For Pillaging, and power grabs, jealousy, envy individual ownership was required that didn't emerge until we settled down with farming anywhere at 10,000 bc
>decamping to somewhere more promising when the vaunted Land Of My Ancestors crapped out
This too did not happen until we started settling down and consuming all the local resources until they ran dry. Hunter gatherers foraged from larger areas of land with lower population density like wolves or other big predators of today and in a more sustainable way. I'm sure as tribes prospered and grew they split off exploring for greener pastures. One could argue why they couldn't just have a conflict with their neighbours, it's because beyond a certain size tribes tend to be very violent and dangerous governing structures for their constituents. That's the reason why we don't see geographically contiguous tribes beyond a certain size and they usually move to a more chieftan structure of governance.
I think all of this is a round about way of saying, I don't think there are innate, universal, roots that humans are bound by. Beyond our mammalian firmware, and human firmware, most of the rest would be a software programmed through your experiences with the world, that's why there is such an expansive manifold of how humans can live and behave for better or worse.
I don't think mine is a position as much as general facts about pre-history that calls into question the parent commenters position.
Now in the case of the (in)Famous mathematician, he seemed to have made a value judgement based on his interpretation of similar facts and the decay modernity wrought, and so it goes.
When an author is (1) simultaneously lamenting the loss of "roots" and "real culture" and attacking internationalism, (2) taking gratuitous shots at "wokeness," and (3) dressing the whole thing up in an intentionally vague "intellectual" wrapper that doesn't actually add anything substantive, it's not that hard to see where he's heading. All this article needs is a light sprinkling of references to "cultural Marxism" to reach full Jordan Peterson status.
I kind of see what you're saying, but it seems odd to use Weil for this kind of project since she was well known to be on the Left of the political spectrum (and also quoting Arundhati Roy). I don't see this article going in the Jordan Peterson direction, though, but more in the direction of Wendell Berry.
In the past few years I've had the good fortune to have some very kind, generous people in my life, and when I saw the positive impact they had on those around them, and on myself, I realized that things about me were magnifying the distress in people around me, and I needed to make some changes.
If you have the good fortune to be in a situation where you can work on cultivating a generous spirit, I think it could be one way to push back against the machine.