Spirit in Action
Failed Wisconsin Uprising - what issues & what hope?
Paul Gilk co-edited the book, A Whole Which Is Greater: Why the Wisconsin Uprising Failed, looking at the range of societal values, politics, & spiritual issues which have determined Wisconsin's course, including the failure to prevent Gov. Scott Walker's radical shift in the state. Paul lives without electricity, close to the earth, & is the author of at least 6 books, all typed on his manual typewriter.
- Broadcast on:
- 01 Sep 2013
- Audio Format:
- other
(upbeat guitar music) ♪ Let us sing this song for the healing of the world ♪ ♪ That we may hear as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ - Welcome to Spirit in Action. My name is Mark helps me. Each week, I'll be bringing you stories of people living lives of fruitful service, of peace, community, compassion, creative action, and progressive efforts. I'll be tracing the spiritual roots that support and nourish them in their service, hoping to inspire and encourage you to sink deep roots and produce sacred fruit in your own life. ♪ Let us sing this song for the dreaming of the world ♪ ♪ That we may dream as one ♪ ♪ With every voice of every song ♪ ♪ We will move this world along ♪ - Two and a half years ago, the people of Wisconsin hit the Capitol Square in Madison in unprecedented numbers, in reaction to governor Scott Walker's frightful overreach. And the most common chant was, this is what democracy looks like. The governor and the Republicans controlling the state Congress refused to back down, however, and a recall effort was amassed with incredible energy and with fairly positive results. In the end, the voting results were not quite enough. And after the 2012 elections using the gerrymandered districts and the Republicans had created, the Republicans again controlled the legislature and governor's office, passing a budget and a number of bills that took Wisconsin perhaps 50 years into the past. What happened to the astonishing turnout of the protests? What were the underlying issues and do they fit into a bigger view of historical context? Today's spirit and action guest is Paul Gilke, co-editor of 13 plus essays collected as a whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. Paul is the author of a number of books generally on environmental, cultural, historical and spiritual themes with deep and transformative analysis. Paul, as you will hear, does his share to keep his carbon and energy footprint impressively low while his intellectual and idea energy footprints are truly impressive. Paul Gilke joins us by phone from Merrill, Wisconsin. Paul, I'm excited to have you here today for spirit in action. - Thank you very much for asking me. - You're quite the writer. Have you ever written anything that wasn't profound? (laughing) - Well, we get to the jokes right away. - No, I'm convinced you write from a profound place. It's a way of life that you've adopted and that you live out wholeheartedly. When you write, it isn't for those who want something light and fluffy to just amuse their time away. It's for urging and leading to deeper wrestling with the important issues. So my question stands. Have you ever written anything that wasn't profound? - Well, there's maybe an intermediate ground here. My father died almost four years ago, this August of 2013, he died in 2009. And he died when he was 97 and had a very colorful hard physical working class rural farmer life. And well, to tell stories. So the project I did before he died was to interview him for two books. The one of which has been published called Get Poor Now Avoid the Rush. (laughing) And the second is in the process of getting published and that one is called the Windfall Homestead. And I tried to write both of these books in my father's voice. And so they contain a lot of his stories and there's quite a bit of humor in there. But somehow even with all the humor and the colorful and anecdotes, there is an underlying seriousness to both of those as well. - You know, we're gonna be focusing on your book that you co-edited a whole which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. But before we do that, I wanna follow up with something about your dad. When he died, you had a green funeral in burial. Could you talk a little bit about what that is because I think most people don't even imagine that it's an option? - Well, there were basically three of us who, I suppose they could say pulled my dad's body out of the funeral. One was my wife Susanna, another is my older brother Bill who lives in Minnesota and myself. My father was, as I said, he was a farmer. He made a little farm out of brush stumps and rocks. Starting in the early 1930s. And so Bib overalls and final shirts was kind of in the clothing that he wore. And he had no particular desire for any fancy funeral. In fact, he had antipathy for that sort of thing. He saw all the hot house flowers and the piped in music and the fancy plush and all that was, he found it offensive. So the three of us decided, well, let's just see what we can do. So we ended up never passing his body through a funeral parlor whatsoever. We discovered we could keep him at home. He was under hospice care. I should say that for one thing. So the hospice people were helpful in affirming what we were doing and encouraging us to do it. He died at home. His body was washed at home. He was dressed in the final shirts and Bib overalls. We called a wake, mostly by word of mouth. The local radio station would not broadcast it because they only take their directives through the funeral parlors and don't do it from private individuals, in case some kind of a hoax or something and they wouldn't want to be caught in a hoax. Well, people came the day after my father's death. I don't know, 100 people, 120 people filling the house and out in Milan and bringing food and chatting and people who hadn't seen each other for years. And it's kind of, I've never been exactly to an Irish weight, but I can imagine this was kind of like that. In the meantime, he had a friend with a log house builder, a good carpenter, made my father a coffin out of lumber that we had stacked in the backyard if it'd come from trees in their woods, windfall trees. And so the coffin actually appeared. The homemade coffin appeared on the day my father died. The day after my father's wake, a man came in the yard with his team of perchiron horses and his wagon. And we loaded the coffin on that wagon and it was about seven miles to the cemetery where my mother is buried and the horse with my father on the wagon and six or seven or eight of us sitting on the side benches of this wagon, went over to the cemetery and we had also asked a friend of ours who placed concertina to sit on the wagon with us and play hymns whenever the spirit moved him to do so. And cars, of course, behind an old driving soul. He was a fairly hot day, so the fellow who was driving the horses had to stop every now and then and let his horses stamp and sweat and snort a little bit. So yeah, so we got it. The only thing we had to do that we didn't want to do was to buy a cement casket box. And we didn't want to do that, but people at the cemetery made us do it because they don't like ground keeping in, you know, and having to put the field dirt on the grave site and over subsequent years. So they made us do this. But no embalming. And so my father whose name is Henry, Henry got to ride to the cemetery in a box on a wagon behind came horses. - You know, part of the lens through which these essays come that have been included in a whole which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. Part of the lens is the life that you live. And obviously from the books that you've written, things like in Switzerland, the moon is always male, the kingdom of God is green, green politics is utopian, nature's unruly mob, farming and the crisis in rural culture. All of these books which you've edited and written, they're, I would say, environmentally oriented. So this book, Why the Wisconsin Uprising Failed, it includes those elements. I think that part of that lens is the life that you live. Are you off the grid or how do you, exactly do you and Susanna live? - We live in a reconstructed late 19th century log house with some additions. Back in the woods, the woods is part of the small farm that I grew up on. And we do not have electricity or running water. - So when you're writing your books, how are you doing that? - Tannen paper, that's how I write. And over the years, once I have sufficiently edited the Tannen paper business, then I go to a manual typewriter. Of course, when I began being published and they require electronic submission. So my manual typewriter pages have been transformed to computer, to the electronics. And I'm still something of a computer idiot. - Well, it probably spares you a lot of stress. So let's talk about a hole which is greater why the Wisconsin Uprising failed. It's co-edited by you, Paul Gilk and David Cast. It includes roughly 13 essays. It's got a couple of forwards and an afterword. There's a lot of material in there. I know a couple of the people whose essays have been included. I know, for instance, James Botzford and Rhoda Gilman. And I've interviewed on Spirit and Action, Mike McCabe, of the Wisconsin Democracy Campaign. So I'm familiar with some of the people and I think some of their ideas. Let's start with James Botzford, who is I guess your first submission and the first essay in the book. I'm gonna read a little passage here from his essay as a jumping off point. He says, "All the great organized religions of the world that claim to hold the literal truth are wrong, but they are all manmade and they have all been corrupted or co-opted over time due to the desire for certainty, the zeal for leadership, the allure of power, the watering down that comes with being popularized over time, the ascendancy of rational linear thinking and other human factors. What I'm saying here is not to negate the intuitive heartfelt spiritual feelings and aspirations of people from all of the world's religions. In fact, I think I'm affirming the universal validity of them in some important sense." And then he goes on to say roughly that he's saying that the trappings that were taught are inadequate. Now, this is relevant to the Wisconsin uprising because there is both a conservative and religious backing to the forces of Scott Walker, the governor of Wisconsin, and there's a kind of a countervailing, progressive, widespread spiritual malaise that's part of the opposition. Your thoughts on that? - A little bit about Batchard first. He's just retired as an adjudicare lawyer representing Wisconsin tribes. So his entire legal career, his career as a lawyer, has been in behalf of tribes first in Nebraska and then in Wisconsin. So he's, James is very familiar with American indigenous, life and American indigenous religious practice, far more than most white folks are, that's one. Earlier in his academic career, however, he was an assistant to, and an aide to, is a religious historian, Houston Smith, who wrote the first book on world religions in English, I believe, or what originally was called, I think the religions of man wasn't, but then the subsequent editions of the title was changed to take the word man out of the title. But, but Houston Smith isn't all guy in his 90s, still alive. And I think his, Houston Smith's book on world religions is still maybe the major one, still religious studies classes. So James comes from a background where he has been terribly fascinated and interested in world religions and on his own rather comprehensive study of them, including traveling to places like India where he met the Dawi Vaman, so on. So, James is not just blowing smoke when he said the things he said there. - And so, what is your sense of why this issue about religion is relevant to case of Wisconsin and the uprising here? - Well, maybe I'll answer that by jumping ahead in the essays to James Vaninga's contribution. James is, I believe he's a retired dean from the University of Wisconsin system. And when David Cast and I were talking over who we were all going to ask to be contributors to this book project. I said to David that I really wanted somebody who was familiar with the Baptists, the Allosian Walter Rouschenbusch, who was probably the most well-known person in America, speaking and writing in behalf of the social gospel. The reason I was interested in finding such a person to write on the Wisconsin uprising is that Scott Walker was raised a Baptist and as far as I know still is a Baptist. So I wanted somebody who was familiar with Rouschenbusch, the Baptist, to look at Scott Walker through the lens, through the eyes, because it were Walter Rouschenbusch. And that's how we finally came up to James Vaninga who was, among other things, a religious study scholar. - And his essay was called "Can Religion Help Revive the Progressive Tradition?" That's the 11th essay in your book. Let me read a little passage from that. He wrote, "Religion historically is tended to secure the world order and has functioned as a powerful and widespread instrument, legitimating the existing social order." And skipping forward, he says, "It also recognizes that religion can shake things up, create powerful changes and bring about new values and institutions. It seems to me that what happened in Wisconsin is a clash of those two different functions of religion, legitimating the world order and shaking things up. How did that look from your point of view? - As to your question about legitimating or not legitimating the existing order, it certainly seems that Walker is very much about legitimating the existing order. That's by one means of existing order, not so much the unions in this case who got hammered, of course, of the larger financial capitalist order, the Koch brothers kind of order. That's the order that as far as I can see Walker was working to legitimate, even to make deeper there, control of political life. - You know, Wisconsin is a very interesting state. It's always had currents, both what you might consider liberal or conservative or progressive or whatever the opposite of progressive is, conservative. And it's not quite the right word. But specifically, the progressive era took roots in Wisconsin. Those of us who live in Wisconsin certainly know about Bob Lefollet or Senator Robert Lefollet and also known as fighting Bob. The progressive era from 1890 to 1920 loosely defined when Republicans were the liberals, were Teddy Roosevelt, the Bulmouth party, also progressive party, they were leading the change for revolutionizing society. And that kind of originated in Wisconsin. I don't know if that's claiming too much, but the whole fight against this side effect of the industrial revolution where wealth got more and more concentrated, again, where, you know, the richer handful of people were sucking money out that and everybody else was poor, you know, as they go into the city. That was fought largely in Wisconsin. So it's somewhat ironic that a hundred years later, the move to peel back so much of that progress was spearheaded here in Wisconsin. How outraged were you? - I'm not sure how to quite measure this one on any kind of scale that I'm familiar with. I thought it was typical of the kind of consolidation of power on the right that certainly goes back as far as Reagan. - So what I was asking about was your outrage. I mean, maybe since you see it in a historical flow, maybe you're not quite so outraged at what Scott Walker and other Republicans in the state were doing, really reversing so much of what we've held dear here in Wisconsin. So it didn't particularly, you know, make you pop your cork? - No, it didn't in the sense that I've been reading things, for instance, like Naomi Klein's "The Shark Doctrine," which is a book about how the Chicago School of Economics, the Milton Friedman School of Chicago Economics, how this was used to, I mean, I was using Chile with part of Pinochet's dictator's ship. It was used by, of all people, Bill Clinton during the 1990s to stuff a kind of capitalism down the throat of the Elton of the Russians to the point now where we have Putin and that coup, a whole bunch of rich oligarchs, an upper middle class and a huge body of poverty in what used to be the Soviet Union. So this tendency towards the consolidation of capitalist wealth, no, it didn't take me by surprise, not at all, you know, I think I saw who Walker was from the first. - Again, we're talking about the book A Whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. It's co-edited by Paul Gilk and David Cast when we have Paul Gilk here today with us for Spirit and Action. I'm your host for Spirit and Action. I'm Mark Helpsmeet. We're on the web at northernspiritradio.org because this is a Northern Spirit radio production. So if you go to northernspiritradio.org, you can find approximately seven years of our programs for listening and download. You find links to our guests. You can find lists of their books. You can find place to post comments and we do value your comments because we really treasure to a conversation. There's also a place to make donations. Your donations are so helpful for us to keep forward with this work. As I said, we have Paul Gilk here with us today who lives off the grid, does not have electricity in his home. I guess a little bit of it comes in through his phone, but that's about it. And hopefully, if you read the book A Whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed, co-edited by our guest Paul Gilk and his co-editor, David Cast, if you read that, you'll have some more of that rooting. There's a lot of history and historical trends in here. So for instance, Paul wrote a Gilman's in her article, "A View from the Greatest Generation." She kind of does this overview from World War II forward, the nuclear bomb, civil rights, civil disobedience, and thinks she was involved in a Quaker Action Group, Movement for a New Society in the 1960s, Ronald Reagan's Movement, The Greens, Climate Change, Bill McKibben. Taking that overview, I think maybe we feel a little bit less adrift, less like this moment is the entirety of our reality. Do you gain solace or does it give you a feeling of desperation to have the big historical context, to see the rise of progressive tradition and its decline over the last 30 years? - Maybe some of each. I'm not sure what's apparent is that we are, by we, I mean the entire world, the entire earth, we are in an unprecedented nexus of crises. Perhaps the single biggest symbol, though it's more than a symbol, it's a lethal symbol, for all this would be the nuclear armaments. 'Cause it's my understanding reading people like Jonathan Schell, for instance, or Helen Caldicott, is that even if a significant fraction of the now existing nuclear weapons were used, we're talking about the extermination of all mammalian life on earth. So that the human race, or at least a small slice of the human race, almost all male and primarily western and white and primarily Christian, now have the capacity at their fingertips to do in all mammalian life on earth. This is a fact, this is not a fantasy. And then you add to this the global warming climate change, by which now the climate scientists, as I understand it, are saying that unless fossil fuel use and the consequent effluence, unless this stuff is radically reduced very soon, climate change is going to trigger climactic behaviors that are beyond anybody, even the best scientists, anticipation, to the point where the kind of disruptions that can happen over the entire earth are beyond anything that ever happened naturally, except maybe whatever caused the extinction of the dinosaurs 65 million years ago or something. I mean, we're talking cataclysmic stuff. So am I alarmed? Yes, I mean, to me, the three major options that the human race is now looking at are number one, a nuclear annihilation, number two, climactic disruptions of the entire planet of unknown consequence. And number three is that somehow we will undergo a political, mental, spiritual, I don't know what all words to tack on here, a transformation of consciousness that we suddenly realize what it is we're doing and that we can't keep going down this path because if we keep going down this path, we're headed towards disaster. We're headed towards disaster unless there is a fundamental mass change of human behavior and human consciousness. - I want to delve into some of those ideas. I want to remind people that we're talking with Paul Gilk. He's the author of a number of books among them. The kingdom of God is green, green politics is utopian, nature's unruly mob, farming in the crisis and rural culture, polemics and provocations, essays in the anticipation of the daughter. The current one we're talking about, a hole which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. You know, I was down for the demonstrations at least a couple times and I would say that there was great energy and excitement there. But even as I was there, I was aware of the question. The cry was, let's get these recall elections going. Even as that cry was going up while I was marching around the square in Madison, I was aware that there was a bigger question or a different way of tackling the issues that we could have taken. Instead of just saying I'm going to campaign or I'm going to vote in a certain way, we could take direct action. Now, I see you Paul as having taken direct action by living as you do. That's one example of taking direct action. I think that this government could not proceed as it does without our complicity. So what do you think is an appropriate action in face of the current currents in our society? - I'm not sure there is in any specific narrow sense an appropriate action. Certainly if climate change is one of the issues that needs and most immediate addressing, so that means to the extent that people can find their way to do this to downsize their energy consumption hugely and to be advocating insofar as we still need transportation, we need to be advocating for a really good and a really energy efficient mass transit system, which in this country would be primarily trained with the sidebar of buses. From a democratic perspective, we've seen what happens when infrastructure is owned and operated privately. It concentrates wealth in a few hands, which means that a public transportation system should be just that, it should be publicly owned. But I think the point I wanna kind of spin back to here is that a huge part of the problem with our current politics is that we have been living under the doctrine of progress for so long, so explicitly anyway, since the recent industrial revolution, which is to say in this country over 100 years, that the idea that things are always gonna get bigger and faster and better, Ronald Reagan, back in the late 1950s, early 1960s, when he was an ad man for general electric, used to say, you know, progress is our most important product. And this doctrine is so saturated into, I think, American consciousness. And its opposite is that anything that does not accord with progress deserves to be wiped out. And if we want a glaring example of wiping out something that doesn't accord with progress, all we have to do is look at the extermination of native cultures on this continent. The Indians were pushed back, they were killed, they were exterminated, they were squeezed under reservations because of their alleged backwardness. You know, they stood in the way of progress, they stood in the way of civilization. And this came from both a secular perspective as well as from a religious perspective. And Christianity is fully complicit in the extermination of the American indigenous cultures. And this metaphysical conception is deeply embedded in us psychologically, it's embedded in our institutions. You know, you can't hear any talk about, for instance, the public school system without preparing students for the technology of the future. You know, it's all about shaping human consciousness to fit the anticipated technology which is going to mess this out of poverty, it's going to, whatever it's going to do, it's always glorious, it's always grand, but it's always under this doctrine of progress. And I'm gonna move sideways here a little bit and say, this is one of the reasons why the current political labels of conservative and progressive are so ambiguous and so troubling. What does it mean to be a progressive when the doctrine of progress is part of what's been killing us? And what does it mean to be a conservative in this culture, in this political climate, when if you're a conservative, you're basically conserving nothing. It has no conservation in it. So the very terms that we use for left and right, conservative and liberal, conservative and progressive, are so devoid of semantic content that it's no wonder we're in a world of great confusion. - And we can mention that in the book A Whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed, one of the essays included is by Maynard Kaufman, it's called The End of the Myth of Progress. And he talks about some of the issues you've just mentioned, Paul. The question of whether we actually wrestle with fact or whether dogma and denial control our behaviors. To some degree, I believe that the history of humanity is an attachment to whatever our current myth that we hold on to is. Maybe the native peoples in this country, the Indians, Native Americans, maybe they did something different, but I suspect that they were holding on to their dogma. My sense of the big picture is that this is always going on. And it's really mainly just a question of how damaging whatever myth we're connecting to, you know, what its side effects are. - And I would agree with you. I think as far as I can tell, all cultures, all human cultures are intimately shaped by the myth that they live within and live under, and the myth that determines the nature and shaping of their culture, or however the myth comes to be understood within the people who live in that culture. So yes, I agree with you. We're living with myths, the dominant myths. These myths are leading us to disaster, and one could say there was, as recently as, say, their early 1960s, and when I was a teenager, I was influenced by the positive side of the myth of progress, you know, not totally swept up in it, but as a school kid, the future was bright, you know. There were always going to be new inventions, and life was going to be cleaner and faster and more complicated, but at the same time healthier and whatever, you know, it was always painted in positive images. But I think right now we have to realize that unleashed progress under the umbrella of our mythologies has got a lot of disaster in it, and that disaster is very quickly coming home to roost. - You know, one of the reasons I do this program, Paul, is because I want inspiration for the future to be part of what I feature. It's not hard to find things to denigrate, to look down on, to feel bad about, but I don't think that gets us anywhere valuable. So I'm looking to you for perhaps some idea, some reason we should be hopeful, or a direction which might be hopeful. So I understand that downsizing and giving up this myth of progress is part of what you think would be a positive step. Do you end up feeling differently because of the life changes you've made? - I think to some extent the answer is yes, and perhaps I can expand on this by going to one of the book titles that you've mentioned. Green politics is utopian, and over the radio, I realize people can't see this last word, utopian. So I'm going to spell it. It's utopian, typical spelling, UTOPIAN, but it has an E in front of it, it's E utopian. First of all, I picked up this term E utopian from my favorite historian, Louis Mumford. People out there who are listening don't know Louis Mumford, I would say, please go read this man. He's dead and gone at this point over 20 years, but he is a masterful, terribly wonderfully readable world historian, and two books in particular, they're kind of a back-to-back set, the first is called The Myth of the Machine, and the second is called The Pentagon of Power. And these were published in the late '60s, not later than 1970, was about the close of his career. He opened his career in the early 1920s with a book called The Story of Utopia. And in that book, Mumford creates this dichotomy of Utopia with a U and E utopia, a Utopia with an E in front of it. And he traces these constructs back in time. Basically what he says is that Utopia with a U means nowhere, it means kind of a perfection in a sense, on the one hand and on the other hand it means nowhere, it was a perfect that can never fully be realized. And the E utopia means the good place, or the good garden, it's far more of a biological construct. It's maybe we could even say Garden of Eden to hear a little bit without being too mythological, because in some respects, the term Utopia is not as mythological as the Garden of Eden, that is to say, it doesn't specify something that's perfect. In fact, Utopia, if we would use the word perfect, we would apply it to Utopia, some perfect system, absolutely perfect. Whereas with Utopia, we would be talking about something that's whole with W, W-H-O-L-E. - And that whole is related to the topic of your current book, A Whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. So the essays in this book, the 13 or so essays, they talk about this wholeness from a number of different perspectives. It's clear that there's some evolution that we have to go through if we're gonna choose of the three alternatives you mentioned earlier, if we're gonna choose one that is going to allow at least mammalian life to continue to flourish on this planet. Central to that is the question, why the Wisconsin uprising failed? I'm sorry to say that we have to talk about losses, but I'm not sure we've answered the question, why has the Wisconsin uprising failed? I don't think you can have a succinct answer to that, and I think these essays embody many answers to that, but do you have a central idea of why, or can you put in a relatively brief passage, why you think the Wisconsin uprising failed? - To some extent, and I'll focus here, at least initially on politics. That is to say, with the doctrine of progress, I think of the two so-called major parties, the party that most explicitly represents the doctrine of progress is the Republican Party, in a very hard no sense, drill baby drill. Meanwhile, the Democrats, fair number of them anyway, are recognizing they take seriously the warnings about, say, climate change. I don't know all Democrats by any stretch of imagination, but I'm under general impression that there are lots of Democrats who take seriously who are not climate deniers, who recognize that things have to change, but they're not saying much, and the reason they're not saying much is that they figure it's a political non-starter, that is to say, to address climate change means you have to address the magnitude of use of fossil fuels in this country, which means very quickly you're put in a position of advocating for a serious reduction, a fossil fuel consumption, which probably means a big hike in gas prices, coal prices, natural gas prices. It means addressing hard-nosed ways about fracking, and about this pipeline out in the prairie, and the tar sands oil up in Alberta, all that kind of stuff. And for Democrats to frankly say, we need a huge reduction of fossil fuel consumption, if for no other reason the climactic situation demands it, means that people are faced with a reduction of the standard of living, that they have associated with the term progress, and the Democrats fear, and perhaps rightly, that if they begin advocating these things openly and frankly they're going to lose even more votes to the Republicans who say, the Democrats have been drinking some kind of wacky weed, coolade, and you can see how absolutely absurd and creatively our vote for us, because we promise you an endless future of progress, drill baby drill. And so Democrats are hiding, I think, from this issue, they're refusing to face the issue, because they feel it's politically an expedient to address them. So we're faced on the one hand with their party, the Republican Party, which is in a state of denial about climate change. And on the other hand, we have a Democratic Party, which refuses to openly and firmly address the issue for fear of the political consequence. - That's a pretty good succinct answer to the question. Of course, it's dealt with from a number of different perspectives in a whole which is greater. You have, for instance, the essay by Eric Yanki on Fascism and Democracy. He mentions, "In many regards, fascism is the darkest "temptation of modern civilization." He also ends that passage talking about, he says, "The threat to US democracy is ultimately not "from some sudden rise of an Adolf Hitler. "The threat is from civic apathy, hyper-nationalism, "and our quest for permanent global preeminence "in the name of security." He goes on to say, "Do we value safety in order "more than defending our political liberties?" This idea that we can, maybe we already have lost our democracy to these forces and to myths that so easily manipulate us. I think it really is something to be wrestled with. And so I encourage people to read the essays included in a whole which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. There's one more portion that I wanna deal with because our hour's running out here, Paul. And that is, there's several authors who explicitly deal with the idea of religion. And it's also dealt with from other perspectives. A myth really is something that can embody specifically a religion, but it can also embody a group way of thinking which, in effect, works as a religion. What are your perspectives on religion? - It's gonna be longer than your hour allows for. So I'll start by saying, for people who want to pursue this question at greater lengths in regard to my works, the kingdom of God is green, is a good place to go. As well as polemics and provocations, essays and anticipation of the daughter. And although there is also subject matter in this regard in the green politics of eutopian, all of you published by Whips and Stock. To summarize, I guess, I was raised in the United Church of Christ, the Protestant, so-called liberal Protestant denomination. Though up in this neck of the woods appear in Lincoln County, it may have been liberal among some of its more educated members, but in fact, things like Sunday school, we were taught the Bible stories as probably all kids in virtually all denominations were taught Bible stories. These things actually happened. And so I came out of my religious training, in a sense, an implicit fundamentalist. That is to say, I absorbed and I believed the Bible stories as being a real and true history. Adam and Eve did live in the Garden of Eden, and God did create the world in six days and so on. There was a flood, there was no, there was an ark, all the animals were stuffed into it for 40 days and 40 nights of rain and so on. And nothing ever really challenged these convictions. I went to a one room for all eight grades, rural schools, the old Norman Rockwell kind of thing, maybe. But in high school where one would have expected maybe a little more complicated, challenging understanding of history, I don't remember that I got anything there and looking back at it and pondering why I didn't get anything there. A more scientific perspective, I would say, probably I didn't get it because if it had been taught in the Merrill High School in the 1960s, probably the larger community would have come down with both feet in a very angry way, you know? Teachers in the Merrill High School are teaching evolution. How can that be? You know, get rid of those people. So I suspect the whole subject was basically not discussed. Which is to say, I was in my 20s and here's step two, living in St. Louis, far away from Northern Wisconsin and found myself really missing rural life and increasingly where small farms were dying. And I asked people, I thought smarter than me to explain to me, how come small farms are dying? What's the meaning of this? What are the factors that contribute to this? And I got answers and they were trivial or at least they didn't satisfy me. And so that's at the point I began to read history, including my dear friend, Master Louis Munford. Well, in reading history, that is to say, I wanted to find the origins of agriculture. It took me way back behind the Garden of Eden. It took me back to the end of the last Ice Age. When the scholarly evidence is that the women gatherers began to develop what we now know of as horticulture. That is, the women gatherers at the end of the last Ice Age, 15,000, 20,000 years ago, began to play around with plants in a way that apparently was new. Over a series of generations, they began to concentrate certain plants that were desirable by human beings and concentrate these plants in a small area to the point where you had extensive growth of, for instance, grains, which prior to this had been widely scattered but now are becoming something that we would recognize as a garden or perhaps a small field. And I suspect the vegetables and some fruits were also involved in this food concentration process. So that we have here first horticulture and then when horticultural abundance is sufficiently great and a stable village that is to say a village that no longer has to be nomadic because the vegetable food, the grain food is sufficiently great here to allow the village to be permanent. Then we have the possibility of the domestication of animals. And I think at some point, my imagination, this is my imagination, it's not something I've read, I can imagine a young hunter who's got a girlfriend back and hunting is getting harder to do because the village population is growing and the hunters have to go farther out to find wild game. And this one guy is not much of a hunter anyway, but he manages to catch a young goat or a young sheep, maybe, and he brings it back and he gives it to his girlfriend and he says, "Here, raise this. "Maybe as a joke." And she does, she raises it. So you have the beginning of the domestication of animals other than the dog. And within the Harbor mini-generations, you have widespread domestication of animals at which point you have agriculture proper. - And so does that lead to an evolution in religion and ideas about religion? - Yes, because the scholars of this period say that the archeologists in particular who are unearthing these very pre-civilized post-Ice Age villages are saying that the religious figurines they're finding here are overwhelmingly female in nature. So they're finding two things in particular or they're finding one thing and not finding another. The thing they're finding are these religious figurines of the female nature from which the widespread conclusion is we're talking here about a religion whose divinity was the great mother, the great provider of food. So that the period that we're talking about here, the post-Ice Age pre-civilized period was a period of great abundance, food abundance, unprecedented in terms of human evolution. And its overarching divinity was the great mother, the great provider of food. The thing that the archeologists apparently do not find in these villages is any great number of weapons which suggests that the village period here was enormously peaceful. So these people were not aggressive in the sense that hunters or nomadic peoples were aggressive. And in fact, the historians, and this certainly includes a monkard, suggest that the rise of civilization proper, when we properly use the term, the rise of civilization proper, which is comes in with kingship and a consolidated aristocracy, came when nomadic herders who were warriors, when they simply overran the agrarian villages and instead of just looting, burning, raping, and pillaging and leaving, after innumerable times, no doubt of doing that, somebody who is maybe getting old and creepy said, you know, why are we tearing the place apart and leaving? Why don't we just stay? And I suspect it's something like that that really is the beginning of an aristocracy. That is to say, when the people with the weapons move in, and they say to the agrarian villagers, you're gonna be giving us as much of your stuff as we can squeeze out of you. And if you complain about it, we're gonna stick a spear in you. So get used to the fact that we're in charge and we're gonna stay in charge. And in fact, if you look at the history of civilization, all the way from its founding, roughly 5,000 years ago in the Great River Valleys of the Mid-East of North Africa, right up until the early part of the 20th century, what you see is an explicit division of classes into a small aristocracy of 10% or less and the exploited and expropriated class, primarily the peasants of up to 90%. And that is the template for how civilization operates between its founding and the so-called democratic revolutions of depending on where you wanna date them. You know, if you wanna go back to the American Revolution or the French Revolution or the Russian Revolution or where you, but it's only recently, very recently, historically, that we've begun to talk about democratic self-governance. But the trick here is in part that, and realize I'm talking politics here more than religion, but the two overlap and interpenetrate, if that's an extent. The guiding principles for our so-called modern democracy have been, are still the guiding principles that were the guiding principles of civilization. That is to say, wealth concentration. And to the extent that the aristocracy represented a higher order of being, and in fact, they did. I mean, the aristocracy historically had contempt for the peasantry as living backward, stupid, ugly, dirty, ridiculous lives. Well, if the peasantry did live stupid, ugly, dirty lives, it was because their wealth had been so systematically expropriated for so many generations and their constraints were put on their cultural freedom. And plus the aristocracy was justifying itself by scapegoating the peasants. The peasants are so stupid they deserve to be expropriated. But when you come to the democratization, the so-called democratization of the modern period, you would think one of the things that would happen in this democratization would be the restoration of autonomy to the agrarian village, right? Because its expropriation lies at the very base of the civilized project. Civilization is built on the expropriated peasantry. That's how civilization operated for 5,000 years. So you would think that when democracy kicks in, there would be a great sigh of relief and say, ah, at long last, we no longer have to be giving our so-called surplus up to an aristocracy. But instead, what you see that the civilized values had become so normative, that instead of the liberation of the agrarian village, you have the destruction of small-scale agriculture. You have its destruction. To the point now where you have almost no small farms left, you have no rural culture left. - And so where does this take you? I mean, religiously or with your ideas about religion or maybe your practice of, I mean, you grew up UCC. I think you found that inadequate and maybe counterproductive culture for the ideas you were encountering. Where does that mean that you went? - Well, probably something of a watershed event for me occurred in the late 1970s. By that time, I was back living in Northern Wisconsin, living in a, not this building, but a different little homemade building. Oh, shack, basically. And I was reading Michael Harrington's book entitled "Socialism." And in the opening chapters of this small book on the, on "Socialism," Michael Harrington, who was then the head of the Democratic Socialists of America, was talking about what he considered to be the, the spiritual background of socialist values. Harrington himself had come through the Catholic worker movement, so it tells you something about the guy. So he was interested in this, in this subject. And one of the places he stopped in his elucidation of the spiritual values of socialism was with somebody I had never heard of. And that was the 12th century Italian monk by the name of York, Muir or Flores. And according to Harrington, and I've since read more about Joachim, this guy, as a monk, had done something novel. He had conceptually meshed the Christianity with the Old and New Testament as a construct. And by doing this, he had come to the conclusion that there were three ages in human history. I mean, he was, he was like I was a Joachim. That is to say, he was, he was a biblical literalist. You know, he thought, you know, Adam and Eve were real persons in the Garden of Eden was real and so on, just like most of us did, we grew up in the Christian tradition. So he had this construct of three ages. He said there was the age of the father of monarchy, discipline, and law and correlated to the Old Testament. Second was the age of the son, which is, of course, the life of Jesus. But it ramified as love institutionalized in the church. But for the Joachim, there's a third age of the common. That's the age of the Holy Spirit, the third age. And that will be characterized as consecrated energy or holy freedom. And without going into what happened to Joachim's followers, because eventually the church realized this posed a threat to them and they began to persecute his followers. The point was, I was reading this thing and I thought, isn't this interesting? Joachim had the same kind of fundamentalist, literalist mindset growing up as I had as a child. You know, I mean, he had been taught the same Bible stories. I've been taught apparently. So he didn't know that prior to the age of the father, there was an age of the mother, which was this pre-civilized we have four ages. And then I sat there thinking about this and I thought, well, my goodness, guess what? If you have a mother and you have a father and you have a son, that makes the age of the Holy Spirit be the age of the daughter. And one of the things I had been wrestling with was trying to explain to myself to understand what it was about the modern world that had given us the women's movement. Why now? Why not 500 years ago? Why not a thousand years in the future? Why now? What's going on now that creates a social condition that gives rise to a women's movement? When all these thoughts congealed, I thought, aha, we have here a new paradigm, as it were, based or at least you can utilize the construct of the Christian Trinity, but it's expanded. It now includes the ages of the mother, which before had been obliterated and denied. And now if we recognize this pre-civilized, agrarian village period of a mother's age and tack it in front of Joaquin's construct, we realize that the age of the Holy Spirit is in fact the age of the daughter. This then gives us an understanding of the deeper meaning of the women's movement and it gives us a construct for hope, I guess, for a larger world vision that includes a path that predates Genesis, that predates the Garden of Eden story, that is historically factual, and yet can utilize the mythological language of Christian Orthodoxy, utilize it, I say, but only by expanding it, only by recognizing that something came before the age of the father and that the age of the Holy Spirit or the age of the Holy Ghost is, in fact, the age of the daughter. So this gives us a new spiritual sensibility. - And is that where you landed? - Yes, that revelation, but I'm gonna say it, it's felt to me as revelation when these thoughts occurred in my feeble head and that sense of revelation, the sense of the importance of this thought has never left me. So that's where I met. - That leads you to associate with a number of different people, I'm assuming. I don't know that there's a church of the derived Holy Spirit that you speak of. How do you live that out? Besides being in the woods, obviously. - Yeah, well, you know, I attend friends meeting and that's not to say friends. I mean, I rarely even talk about this with friends because most people who are Quakers are coming from, I think, from an explicit Trinitarian perspective and I stand like I go but more people and I'm trying to proselytize person to person, you know? I'm not a guy who stands on a soapbox in the corner and does this kind of stuff. But I guess my conviction is, if this is true, then we're going to somehow see this understanding unfold as time passes. My conviction is if we survive through all the cataclysms that human race has concocted, especially we who are white males of the Western world, this is going to be the outcome. So we've got something to look forward to. So we've been talking about the book A Whole, which is greater why the Wisconsin uprising failed. I think maybe that you, Paul, have given us one of the positive futures that we could grow into that will be actually the victory in the future. But as you've said earlier, it comes with a mind shift and obviously you've been growing for some decades towards a different view of the world. It sounds like a very positive one from my point of view, so I'll vote for it. I thank you so much for putting your viewer ideas forward, putting forward the ideas of the people who shared their essays in A Whole, which is greater. And I also thank you, Paul, for joining me today for Spirit in Action. - Well, I thank you very much for asking me. - A reminder listeners that we have a few bonus excerpts from this show, parts of the interview that we just couldn't fit into the broadcast limits. So go to nerdandspiritradio.org and get more valuable thoughts and words from Paul Gilk. And we'll see you next week for Spirit in Action. The theme music for this program is Turning of the World, performed by Sarah Thompson. This Spirit in Action program is an effort of Northern Spirit Radio. You can listen to our programs and find links and information about us and our guests on our website, northernspiritradio.org. Thank you for listening. I am your host, Mark Helpsmeet, and I welcome your comments and stories of those leading lives of spiritual fruit. May you find deep roots to support you and grow steadily toward the light. This is Spirit in Action. (upbeat music) ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will know this world of love ♪ ♪ With every voice, with every song ♪ ♪ We will know this world of love ♪ ♪ And our lives will feel the echo of our healing ♪ ♪ I'm healing ♪
Paul Gilk co-edited the book, A Whole Which Is Greater: Why the Wisconsin Uprising Failed, looking at the range of societal values, politics, & spiritual issues which have determined Wisconsin's course, including the failure to prevent Gov. Scott Walker's radical shift in the state. Paul lives without electricity, close to the earth, & is the author of at least 6 books, all typed on his manual typewriter.