Subscribe
Share
Share
Embed
Who thinks that they can subdue Leviathan? Strength resides in its neck; dismay goes before it. It is without fear. It looks down on all who are haughty; it is king over all who are proud. These words inspired PJ Wehry to create Chasing Leviathan. Chasing Leviathan was born out of two ideals: that truth is worth pursuing but will never be subjugated, and the discipline of listening is one of the most important habits anyone can develop. Every episode is a dialogue, a journey into the depths of a meaningful question explored through the lens of personal experience or professional expertise.
PJ Wehry:
Hello and welcome to Chasing the Viathan. I'm your host, PJ Weary, and I'm here today with Dr. Mary Jane Rubenstein. She is a scholar of religion, philosophy, science studies, and gender studies at Wesleyan University. She is the professor of religion and science in society. Dr. Rubenstein, wonderful to have you here today. And we're talking
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Thank you
PJ Wehry:
about
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
so
PJ Wehry:
your book,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
much.
PJ Wehry:
Astrotopia. I'm going to talk about the book, Astrotopia.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
That sounds like a great thing to talk about. Thanks so much, PJ, for having me. It's great to meet you.
PJ Wehry:
Um, so why this book? What, what made you look at this and be like, ah, I need to write something about this.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Ah, okay. So, I have tended, I think, throughout my... relative adulthood, to write projects, to write books about places that religion shows up where we're not necessarily expecting it. So at first it was kind of close to my own discipline. I was writing about sort of theological commitments in what looked like secular philosophies, like French and German stuff. And then I started branching out. I wrote about this notion of the multiverse, the idea that our universe might just be one of an infinite number of universes, which seemed to me absolutely ludicrous, but it was coming from the most respectable of physicists. And I was like, wow, this is fascinating. And I realized that physics, theoretical physics, is just sort of generating mythologies, generating theologies. even or particularly where they think that they're being as far from religion as humanly possible. So I'd like to again sort of like point out religion where it's operating, where we might not be seeing it. Fast forward past a couple of things to this one. Honestly, these projects tend to like fall in my lap. It's like I'll just be having a conversation and somebody will say something that then just sticks with me and I can't let it go. And then it just kind of keeps... at me. This one is a totally inauspicious beginning. I invited my cousin for dinner. My cousin came for dinner and he was at the dinner table and said, you know, hey, have you heard this is my cousin's one of these, you know, entrepreneur types who likes always starting new companies and doing new things. And he said, did you hear about this Japanese fashion designer, Yusuko Maezawa, who bought all of the tickets on Elon Musk's hypothetical, not built yet, BFR, or Big F-ing Rocket. Musk had said, he'd basically decided to crowdsource it. He was like, look, you can have a seat on my rocket if you give me a whole bunch of money to fund the building of this rocket. And just name your price and whoever bids a lot. And this fashion designer was like, I'll buy them all. I'll buy them all. And for some undisclosed amount, people have asked them and asked them and they've been like, it's a lot of money. It's a lot of money, we're not talking about it. It's a
PJ Wehry:
Ha
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
whole lot
PJ Wehry:
ha!
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
of money. for some undisclosed amount, this guy bought all of the tickets on this rocket ship. And when asked what he was going to do, I mean, he's only got, you know, one butt, like who what are you going to do with all those seats? He said, I'm going to give all the rest of the seats to artists, to artists of all sorts, to, you know, a video installation artist and a performance artist and a, you know, a visual artist and a sculptor and a blah, blah, blah. because my hope is that when they get into space, they'll be able to look back at the Earth from the orbit of the moon and see the Earth in such a way that furthers my actual vision. I mean, you think I wanna be a billionaire, you think I wanna make up my actual vision of promoting world peace. And everybody's like, yay! And then the press release stops. And so I started thinking about outer space as a site for these beautiful promises of human redemption. that space seems to offer different people different kinds of visions of these more perfect existences that we might have either out in space or here. And then of course once you start following the Elon Musk train you realize like oh he's trying to get us to Mars and isn't that interesting and it's the more that I read up and the more that I listen the more that I realize that he sounds a whole lot like that guy on the street who's got a sign that Repent, the end is near.
PJ Wehry:
Ha ha
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
You
PJ Wehry:
ha
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
know,
PJ Wehry:
ha ha!
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
like the world is coming to an end. Follow me and we can build, you know, we can find sort of immortality together, but you have to follow me in order to escape the coming disaster and deserve the coming salvation on another world that you've never seen, but I promise you it's gonna be great. So that's where this came from. And I started sort of like hearing these sort of religion notes sounded more and more aggressively as I stuck with it.
PJ Wehry:
It seems like you're making some movement from like physicists to and and maybe we should take You know this seriously, but there is almost more of a pop culture feel did you even like with the multiverse that my first thought was about Marvel and Do you see? Can you talk a little bit about what's that what that's like to go from kind of the? Hardcore physicist to like pop culture even for Elon Musk a lot of like you talk about him being a showman right like a lot of What he's good at is like I Don't want to say invading pervading pop culture. Maybe invading would be right. I don't know what to ask Mars when he gets there, but Can you talk a little bit about that process where These kind of hard science, mythologies become
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
pop culture mythologies and what is that transformation like?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Okay, so I think it wasn't actually as big of a leap as it might sound like from the hardcore physicists to these sort of like techno prophets. And the reason is that the hardcore physicists themselves have spokespeople among them who write these massively popular books that are called things like The End of Everything or The Beginning of Everything or like God is Dead or whatever, they're like, they have these huge titles and they're meant to sell a whole bunch of copies. to people who've known that God is dead and who want a physicist to tell them about it. So I actually, my, my, my, uh, I had one eye, I guess I only have two of them, but one of my eyes was trained at all times on the way that theoretical physics was being, is being translated for everyday readers. Everyday, you know, excited, educated readers who want to learn more about what physicists are telling us about the nature of reality. And I attended, and I still attend, to the way that physicists talk to ordinary people about what their big ideas mean and why they're important. And again, in the multiverse realm, the answer is usually, this is important because it means there's no such thing as God, which let me just say that that's not a decent philosophical statement. The multiverse neither confirms the existence of God nor disproves the existence of God. It doesn't help in any way there. But that was usually the takeaway. The takeaway was now finally physics has done away with the need for a god because we've got an infinite number of universes, so what need do we have for a god, et cetera. And the way that we usually think about it is that physics behaves in physics, which is the most fundamental of the sciences because it deals with the smallest and the largest things. deals with the rarefied language of mathematics. It makes its calculations out of necessity, out of objectivity. It just, its numbers generate numbers, and then the very adept are able to take those numbers and then translate to the rest of us in stories and tell us what that means, right? So it starts here in the real and then it gets sort of translated into stories. What I was trying to say about the multiverse stuff is that if you attend to the way that the stories are told and sort of follow that path back up to the calculations, you realize that the calculations themselves, the observations themselves, the questions themselves, the formulas themselves, are motivated by stories too. That it's stories, it's commitments, it's ideas, and it's assumptions that produce the need to run those calculations in the first place. So actually stories are kind of all the way through. We have, you know, we again have stories and assumptions that prompt us to ask particular questions, that prompt us to calculate and calculate and calculate, that then prompt us to retranslate those calculations into more stories and assumptions, that reaffirm the stories and assumptions that we were telling in the first place. The thing that I think is cool about space science is that the extent to which stories influence the work that science does is... absolutely right there on the surface. Like you don't have to dig, you don't have to say like, hey look, Jeff Bezos took James T. Kirk, William Shatner up to space because he's like, I'm only doing what I'm doing because I watched Star Trek. Like it's very clear.
PJ Wehry:
Right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
So you don't have to, you don't have to make that convincing. Like actually, you know, it seems like literature and the humanities and popular culture are really behind these scientific projects. When it comes to space, everybody knows it, right? Everybody knows that we're all sort of chasing those worlds that we've been reading about. So it was a little more of convincing work that I needed to do when I was in the theoretical physics world. It's less hard to make the point here. Does that answer your question at all? Does
PJ Wehry:
Yeah,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
that deal with
PJ Wehry:
yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
any of it?
PJ Wehry:
I mean, immediately I think of, I mean, man, you talk about these stories that directly influence these people who are creating these things. And maybe just as a parallel thing, Elon Musk is doing the chip in the brain thing. And I was like, I was reading science fiction with chips in the brain, like, 30 years ago, 20 years ago, you know, I mean, it's That stuff has been around for decades. And that's really... So it's not just space then. There's a couple key areas where it seems like the beliefs and stories are wrapped up.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
That's just a really interesting way to think about it. And it makes it feel more accessible too, because sometimes, you know, you're like, it's literal rocket science, right?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
You're like, oh, there's no way to know.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Right. Right.
PJ Wehry:
I think for,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
And
PJ Wehry:
go ahead.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
the thing I was going to say about the chip, the chip in the brain business is that it seems to me that the billionaire tech industry right now is showing us the limits of satire as a critical genre, right?
PJ Wehry:
Ha
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
That
PJ Wehry:
ha!
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
like these stories that we've been reading for 20, 30 years, which were, which were designed as cautionary tales, as you know, this is what could happen if we continue on this disastrous trajectory we're on. Now we're enthusiastically taken up by these rich guys who are like, wait, I can do that, we can
PJ Wehry:
Yeah
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
do that, I'm chipping the brain, let's do a chip in the brain, I read this book about a chip in the brain. Without realizing that that was supposed, again, that was supposed to be satire, it was supposed to be irony, it was supposed to be don't do this kind of tale, right? So, so it seems like those of us who are are poetic and literary and I unfortunately am not one of them, might at least take heed. Which doesn't say don't write ironically, but it doesn't seem to do the automatic work that I think a lot of folks hoped that it would do.
PJ Wehry:
This is like Elon Musk and maybe it was Bezos. I mean I've heard multiple interviews where these Silicon Valley people are referencing Skynet as they're talking about building AI and they're
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
like no no no it won't be like that and you're like
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
why not like
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
But yeah,
PJ Wehry:
it won't be.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
because it'll be great because trust me, because awesome. Yeah, there's can I can I like, can I can I be crazy and go off camera for a second? Because I've got this really cool thing to read. Hold on. I'm just going to find it. I'm going to go. So we're
PJ Wehry:
No
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
going
PJ Wehry:
worries.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
to we're going to take I'm going to take you past my door. You know, open the door for just
PJ Wehry:
I love it.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
one second. And I'm getting all right. Here we go. I'm back. There's a I have this I have this tweet printed out on my door like an old person printed out to it. Here you can even see it
PJ Wehry:
My
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
says
PJ Wehry:
grandma would be proud, yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Thank
PJ Wehry:
Um.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
you. It's a at Alex Blechman. I don't know this person. This just went viral. Sci-fi author, colon. In my book, I invented the torment nexus as a cautionary tale. Tech company, colon. At long last, we have created the torment nexus from classic sci-fi novel, Don't Create the Torment Nexus, right?
PJ Wehry:
Yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
It's just so good. Anyway, really indebted to Alex Blackmon for
PJ Wehry:
Yeah,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
making it real. Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
yes, yes. It would be, we're laughing, but we're also crying inside. So actually, and I think this would be helpful, can you talk a little bit what is, in this context, how are you using terms like mythology and religion?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm, mm-hmm, great. By mythology, I mean, I don't mean that it's that, a myth is a story. I don't mean that it's a false story. You have an advanced degree in religion, you know that I don't mean that it's a false story. What I mean is that it's an orienting story. A myth is a story that tells a particular community where they come from, who they are, and where they're going. and how they ought to behave in a world. That's how I understand the term myth. Again, it's a collectively, socially orienting story. A myth says you are the creation of a muskrat who dived down to the bottom of the sea and pulled up a little bit of mud and put it on the back of a turtle, and then the turtle allowed it, right. A myth says you are the creation of a jealous God who decided in his loneliness to create a universe. You are the creation of the earth itself that vegetated you in the early days. And as such, as vegetation, you should grow and orient yourself to the sun. So it gives you a sense of where you come from and a sense of who you are, who your people are, who your relatives are, right? Either other humans or the more than human world. and again, where you're up to. So when I say that, say the new corporate space race is generating mythologies, what I mean is that it's giving us these big stories about where we come from, who we are, who's important, who's not important, and most, perhaps most importantly in these stories, where we're headed. The scholar of religion, Jonathan Z. Smith says that, actually no, this is David Chittister. The scholar of religion, David Chittister says, that you can divide up religious communities into a lot of different distinctions. But one helpful distinction is that some religious traditions are more fundamentally oriented toward the past than the future. This is the way we were created, this is the way we should always be. That's a past-oriented religion. A future-oriented tradition says something like, yeah, we were created, but you know what? The conditions are terrible. We need to build a new world, a different world somewhere else and some other. So those are more futurely-oriented traditions. The space race, as I understand it, is much less concerned with its archaic, its primordium, its beginning than it is with its telos or the end of things or where it's headed. By religion, I mean a social... product, a social phenomenon that involves, on the one hand, myth, so you know, these kinds of stories, and on the other hand, rituals, practices that the community needs to do in particular ways over and over again to ensure that disaster doesn't come to the community. So one of the ways that I like to understand the Apollo program, so I'll say, for example, the Apollo program. is in a particular sense, if this is interesting to you and if it's not, don't worry about it, religious. And what I mean by the Apollo program is religious is that the two big symbolic things that the Apollo program did, it did, it got into literal things, it got into space, it landed on the moon, these are, it suited men up in white. The two big symbolic things that it did were that Apollo 8, as it orbited the moon. decided as it watched lunar sunrise, saw the sun sort of peeking up over the moon, recited in turn the opening book of Genesis, Genesis 1. They read in turn from Genesis, all of the astronauts up there. That is a ritualized retelling of the creation myth that they understood to be the shared creation myth of America, right, which they would call Judeo-Christian or something like that, right, because Genesis. was the book of, again, the people they understood to be the majority of Americans. So there's this sort of mythic retelling that happens with this massive thing, this massive accomplishment of Apollo 8. And then Apollo 11 undertakes this utterly significant ritual of installing a big stake in the ground, which is to say the American flag, which scholars of religion would call an axis mundia, like a long vertical structure that connects the heavens and the earth and the underworld. Myth and ritual. These are the stories you tell and the behaviors you enact. That for me constitutes one way of thinking about religion.
PJ Wehry:
I think if I'm understanding you correctly, as you're talking about all these different areas of science, what you're saying is, especially these, and I want to make sure that I'm just tracking with you, when you talk about these hard sciences, that when they are most desperate for meaning, they turn to myth and ritual. Would that be a way to kind of think about what you're saying?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
I think meaning is a really generous way to put it. When they're most desperate for meaning, they turn to myth and ritual.
PJ Wehry:
What would be an ungenerous way?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
An ungenerous way would be to say when they're most desperate for power, they turn
PJ Wehry:
Ah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
to myth and ritual. And power, you can understand, look, we have Red Foucault here, you can understand that in a productive sense or you can understand it in a limiting sense, in a good guy sense or a bad guy sense. But look, if Apollo 8 had gotten up to lunar orbit and had decided from lunar orbit to read like Shel Silverstein, it would not have had the same power as reading Genesis 1. If they had landed on the moon and they had conducted an elaborate tea ceremony, it wouldn't have had the right power. It either would have signified the UK or it would have signified China. These are the wrong things. So the... Yeah, so I think of these gestures as imbuing either the rhetoric or the behavior with power, with the ability to affect people, to say like, oh my gosh, this is really, really significant. So when Mike Pence in 2019 said, listen everybody, just so you know, it is the first priority of this administration and the next one when we get reelected, to go back to the moon. and then to go to Mars, he ended up quoting from Psalm 139 and saying, you know, because wherever we go in the universe, God's right hand will hold us fast. This is 2019, right? He needs that, and he knows that a lot of the electorate isn't being like, isn't that Psalm 139? But there's like something stirring, even for the secular citizen, about that like lofty sounding rhetoric. If he had said instead, you know, we're going to the moon and then we're going to Mars, because after all, as South Park said, or whatever, like it just doesn't have the same. kind of gravitas, right, as scripture says. So I see it as a way to, I mean, look, and this is, you probably know that the book I've just written tries to tie the contemporary space race into the long history of European-style colonialism. And the long history of European-style colonialism was entirely dependent on the Roman Catholic churches saying, have these lands, take these lands, comma Spain, take these lands, comma Portugal, for the sake of converting the indigenous inhabitants. Of course, they didn't care about converting indigenous inhabitants. The Pope didn't, the Queen of Spain didn't, they cared about the gold and the spices and the stuff and the land itself, like getting the land itself. But you need an ideological justification for it because you know. Ordinary folks are like, I don't know, aren't there people who live there? Like even in the 15th century, aren't there people who live there? Should we really take their stuff? And you're not gonna get an ideological justification that is as powerful as, well, you know, Jesus Christ gave this authority to Peter and Peter gave it to Alexander the Sixth through the long line of apostolic, and of course, Jesus Christ gets it from God the Father. So like, that's as big of an authenticating structure as you can get. And that's the role I think that religion tends to play.
PJ Wehry:
Right, and then England dominating is seen as Protestant theology winning out over Catholic theology.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
over Catholic theology, right. And then the US is understood to be God's new Israel,
PJ Wehry:
Right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
which is to say, filled with the people with whom God has made a new covenant. So it's not the Jews and it's certainly not the Catholics. It's going to be the Protestants who establish, you know, a new promised land in the space of the US.
PJ Wehry:
It can you talk a little bit about that line you draw? I'm glad you brought it up because I had
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
As I've argued.
PJ Wehry:
this written down as a question. It's perfect. Yeah The the doctrine of discovery to manifest destiny to the new space race And are they calling it that like I have not heard that term before is that something that you coined or is that like? Like a nomenclature that's like floating around like the name new space race
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Oh, so yeah, it's not, I wish it were a better coinage than it is, I wish it were. The private space corporations do call themselves NewSpace. All smushed together in what's known as CamelCase, which is to say that the N and the S are capitalized for those of the listeners who aren't graphic design people. So smushed together CamelCase, NewSpace. And I think, I don't know that I have heard anybody else call it new space race, but it's not much to get from, if you've got new space already, you just stick a race on the end of it.
PJ Wehry:
Yep.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
So I'm not gonna call it my coinage, but I, you know. Yeah, so, and I'm, you know, yeah, I'm hearing it.
PJ Wehry:
I'm tracking, I'm tracking.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
I'm hearing it from now. So yeah, so I try, I draw, okay. So what are you, what's the question? So I'm gonna try to draw a, I'm gonna try to draw a,
PJ Wehry:
So we were talking about the doctrine of discovery. Also the fact that I get to talk about like even just here at CamelCase, my day job is a digital marketer and I do coding. And so, not designer, but you said CamelCase. I'm like, I haven't heard that in a long time. No, sorry.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Look, I'm here to bring the grandma.
PJ Wehry:
A little bit of, yeah. Yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
I'm here to bring the grandma in whatever form I can bring it.
PJ Wehry:
No, no, that's no, I just haven't talked to like another programmer and hasn't come up with our designers, but I love that. No, that was a complete aside. I just
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
That's cool.
PJ Wehry:
really, I enjoyed hearing that term again. You know,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Doctrine of Discovery.
PJ Wehry:
especially as someone who has had a master's in philosophy going into the programming world and the arguments about whether you should use Pascal case, camel case, and all the naming conventions. That's a whole, I feel like you could, we could do a podcast on that, but that's a whole other
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Absolutely.
PJ Wehry:
thing. I digress.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
But the doctrine of discovery to manifest destiny to new
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
space race. If you
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
can tease that out for our listeners. I was wondering where you were going to go with the dangerous religion of the corporate space race, Astrotopia, and as soon as you mentioned like those three together, I was like, oh, of course it's that. Like, I didn't, how did I not see this coming? Like, it's so
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
obvious once I read it. Anyways,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
go ahead.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Okay, so the doctrine of discovery is this, it really has its, it's a political doctrine, has its origins in the 16th century, and the idea is that as Europe is exploring lands unknown to Europe heretofore, if it can be said to have discovered those lands, which is to say, if there doesn't seem to be anybody else there, then those lands are effectively theirs. The term no man's land, the term in Latin is terra nullius, land belonging to nobody. As long as it belongs to nobody, it can be the property of whoever finds it. Now, of course, the promulgators of the Doctrine of Discovery understood that there were human beings living in the places that were said to be empty. So there were caveats, and one of them was, well, what we mean by it's nobodies is nobody has improved upon the land. Nobody's built anything lasting there. Nobody is... changed it in any significant way. It is in its virgin state, therefore the people are more or less flora and fauna. And if that's the case, right, if nobody's built anything of worth or lasting, then it belongs to the nation that finds it. And then the nation who finds it is, you know, given full license to remake that land in the image of old Europe, right? We call New England, New England. I was talking about a moment ago about the US as a new promised land. The promised land in the Hebrew Bible is the land of Canaan. There are 20 new Canaan's in the US. There are 20 towns called new Canaan in the US. So you don't have to go far to understand that this was the idea. The idea was go find land that nobody else seems to have claim to, claim it and remake it in the image of the old country. This doctrine of discovery underwrote the seizure of the Americas, the Caribbean, and then, as you know, the early American nation state occupied more or less the eastern seaboard of North America. In the 19th century, we get an increasing number of appeals to push farther and farther west. The boundary, the frontier, has been pushing west, but there's this concerted effort. to push west, particularly in pursuit of gold. And there, the operative political doctrine is known as manifest destiny. And manifest destiny means, effectively, God wants European descended Americas to have the entire continent. That's what it means. What do the words mean? The words mean it is the destiny of these chosen people, again, the new people of God, the God with whom God has made this new covenant, to have this entire land. And we know because, gosh, those people are doing so well. Light-skinned Americans are just kicking ass, right? They're absolutely destroying everything in their path, the forests, the folks. So therefore, unlike the destiny of, say, Israel, which is always kind of a little up in the air, like, oh gosh, did God really make a promise with them? They've suffered so much, it's not really clear. It's a very hidden destiny. It's like a secret destiny. The destiny of Americans is manifest, it's clear. So it's unbelievable. It's this like real active theological bravado to say like, God is not working secretly here, God is working manifestly. Okay. Then old space race. So the frontiers declared closed at the very end of the 19th century. 1950s, Verne van Braun, the... ex-Nazi rocket scientist now working for the US, declares that there's going to be an opening of a new frontier in outer space. And this will be, he says, the last frontier, because it's an infinite frontier. And suddenly, rhetorically, the hope was... The hope was that the future of space would be a new frontier. And so, the hope was that the future of space to re-enliven post-war Americans who were weary and sad and had no future and be like, no, no, we're moving. There's a new place, there's a new place. We can reignite the American dream. We've got new frontier fantasies. And Werner von Braun himself said that it was the manifest destiny of Americans to conquer the heavens, to conquer outer space for political freedom, for scientific advancement. for military dominance and perhaps most surprisingly for the salvation of souls. Verne van Prown became an evangelical convert, a born-again Christian when he was on American soil and thought that it was America's duty to spread the gospel to nations out in people, in extraterrestrials out in outer space. Some of that language that, you know, very straightforward, sort of Christianly underwritten you are supposed to take this land because God says so and there's effectively nothing on it anyway, therefore you should take it, can still be found in say the speeches of Mike Pence in 2019 as he was declaring that NASA was going to go back to the moon and then to Mars. In Donald Trump's State of the Union address, he actually calls space America's manifest destiny very clearly. So that stuff is there, it's there, but it's not that interesting. What I find more interesting now, because the gravitas has changed, because again, when Pence appeals to Psalm 139, most of the, like the Bernie bros aren't like, oh yay, Psalm 139, like that's not interesting to the Bernie, it's not interesting to a great deal of the American electorate. I don't think that's where the gravitas and the power are. The place where the power is now, is not so much in the nation state, and not so much in this explicit Christian doctrine. but rather in the hands of these private actors, these very charismatic CEOs who are using a different tactic. And it's still what I would call a religious tactic. We still have mythology, we still have ritual, we still have... But instead, they're selling these kinds of, these like private revelations. again about the certainty of coming disaster and the promise of like an infinite future in a new land somewhere else but they're not explicitly hooking it into the destiny of the nation state and they're not explicitly hooking it into Christian rhetoric except in so far as like you're about to be destroyed you'd better get saved as Christian rhetoric but it's not you know not any more specific than that.
PJ Wehry:
Well, when you talk about where, who, and where, right? Like where we came from, who we are, and where we're going, it is, I mean, they're Christian categories
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
when you say damnation and salvation, but almost every myth, not every myth, I would say, but almost every myth has those like, if you follow, this is what, you know, you'll either get one or the other, right? And so, especially in a Judeo-Christian context, it would make sense that those things, like that you would have those things present, right? That makes
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
sense to me.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah, it's like it's an implicitly Christian framing, but it's not explicitly Christian. Because then again, they're not quoting the Psalms, they're not reciting Genesis. Elon Musk, when he gets to Mars, is not going to recite Genesis. He's gonna read, you know what he is gonna read? He's gonna read like Stapleton and Gaiman, and he's gonna like play the Star Wars soundtrack, right? The new canon is this secular sci-fi, very male canon instead.
PJ Wehry:
Kind of an off the wall question, but we have the ocean supremely unexplored, right? Do you think there are any, and I don't think most people understand our cultural roots in what we believe about the ocean. Right? But I think that we, it is something that is in maybe our collective subconscious or whatever you want to put there for like those kind of mythic undercurrents.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
Um, do you think, uh, there are, when, when you think about why we turn to the stars rather than to the depths, is there, are there reasons for that? Why do you think that we have chosen why we, people get more excited about space and about stars than about, uh, oceans and trenches?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Okay, three responses. One, I have a very good colleague and friend, Jenna Soup Montgomery at Iowa, who writes about sea stutters, folks who are looking to set up independent colonies in international waters where nobody can reach them, and we have a very similar utopian drive there. So there are some resonances, just to say, and there are parallel. movements, parallel aspirations, absolutely. That having been said, the sea stutters just don't get as much attention as these sort of cosmic homesteaders,
PJ Wehry:
No, they don't.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
right, I mean, sea-steading isn't the household word
PJ Wehry:
Right, right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
so much, I mean, it's fascinating, these guys are very rich and they're up to no good, but it's not as, it's not as arresting an image. Why turn to the stars rather than the depths? There is the, cynical answer and a non-cynical answer. The cynical answer, which I'll start with, is as Bob Zubrin says, Bob Zubrin is the CEO or the chair of the Mars Society who has been a great influence on Elon Musk, his notion of how we can terraform Mars, that we must terraform Mars. It is Bob Zubrin, in fact, who writes this very important paper at the end of the 20th century saying that we need to go back into space because America needs a frontier. Without a frontier, America is lost and we are just doomed to sort of, I don't know, shrivel up in our own sort of wokeness. We need something to conquer and that's outer space and therefore we have to go to Mars, right? And as Zubrin says, you know, why Mars? Why not the moon? He asks his own question. You know, the moon's closer. And Zubrin says, well, on the one hand, there's more stuff on Mars. There are more elements on Mars that are harnessable than there are on the moon. So Mars has a little more atmosphere. It's like it's a it's a it's a better planet. It's a better planetary body. But the real problem, he says, is that on the moon, the cops are too close. This is a direct quotation. The cops are too close. You can't.
PJ Wehry:
That was not what I thought he was going to say, but okay, continue.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah, what did you think he was going to say?
PJ Wehry:
I did not that I wasn't sure it was going that took me by surprise. Sorry.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah, you can't have a genuinely independent civilization
PJ Wehry:
Go ahead.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
unless it's really, really, really far away and relatively inaccessible. And a sixth month trip makes Mars inaccessible for anything like, and this upsets me because it also means like the FAA is too close and any kind of regulators are too close, right? And if you may have heard this, that Elon Musk has a lot of, you know, he's got a lot of irons in a lot of different fires. But one of them is that he's got this constellation of satellites called Starlink. Every two weeks he launches 60 more satellites into orbit. And the idea is to get the fastest possible Wi-Fi for the most dedicated possible gamers. Of course this is not what he says. What he says is like I'm saving Africa by giving a Wi-Fi or something like that. But... Starlink, Starlink is still in beta testing, but you can get a dish on your house, especially if you live somewhere in the mountains where you don't get decent WiFi, and you can get WiFi service. In the Starlink contract, section, I don't know, nine or something, if you read the fine print, like the footnote to the fine print, you agree, you as a purchaser of broadband, you agree to recognize Mars as a free planet. over which no nation has any jurisdiction. So he's already proclaiming sovereignty for a planet that he's never been to. And he gets this idea, again, from Zubrin, who's saying we're not ever going to be able to do anything genuinely new, genuinely great, if we're still constrained by the old ways. Therefore, we have to go all the way. So the cynical answer. why not the sea, is that the sea's too close, Antarctica's too close, right? The sea is still subject to some kind of earthly regulations, whereas if you get six months away, there's not much they can do about whatever it is that you're up to, right? The unsynical answer is that, again, thanks in large part to the influence of monotheistic religions in the West, transcendence? Otherness, like living otherwise, other ways of being, is often understood to be, even though maybe your Sunday school teacher tells you not to think of it, but like up. God is up, right? The angels are up there, heaven is up there. And even though most of us at this point have been in airplanes, we've been in the clouds and we've been like, oh, and you don't see St. Peter there. And even though we've got tons of people who've lived on the International Space Station and have not collided with any angels, we still, I mean, just that we know of, right, exactly.
PJ Wehry:
that we know of, but yeah. Right, right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
That wasn't an angel, that was space trash, yeah. We still just rhetorically talk about the otherworldly as up, as above us, as above. So I think there is in the, and also even though we know that space, outer space isn't up there either, right? Outer space is down there and this way and this way and this way, but when it comes down to it
PJ Wehry:
built
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
and you gotta get a rocket in the sky,
PJ Wehry:
up.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
the rocket does go up. in order to get out, right? So we associate space travel and outer space itself with upness and transcendence with upness and redemption and heaven with upness. Hell is down there, hell is down there.
PJ Wehry:
Right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
So you gotta, I don't know. I've got a kid who's both very excited about space and with becoming a person who discovers undiscovered sea creatures. But like. The mode that he's in when he's talking about being a deep sea explorer or a spaceman are different. They're different modes, they're different modes. And we do tend to associate down with Hades, with the underworld, with the mysterious in a kind of creepy way. And again, the vertical, the upward is somehow transcendent and different. So there's a romanticism about the stars that I think that, and it's not just upness, right? There's the... centuries, millennia of very smart philosophers thinking that it must be that the stars are made out of a totally different stuff from us. They seem to be of a different order because they're so reliable. They're so eternal. They're so unchanging, right? We know that the depths of the sea are going to be subject to the same kinds of parameters that we are, if not a little weirder, but exactly.
PJ Wehry:
Or worse. Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah. No, that's like, cause I mean, you look in a lot of our, like, you know, Leviathan for instance,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
right? Like you
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
look like, sorry, like I'm familiar with this, but like the stuff that comes from the sea is almost always bad. Like
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
it's like judgment, it's changing,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
it's
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
all those things, right?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Great. That's great.
PJ Wehry:
Though it's funny,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah.
PJ Wehry:
you mentioned, yeah. Whereas, you know, salvation is up. I mean, I love the simplicity, but also like, it's true, we still think like that. But you mentioned, it was actually what made me think of that question was my son being obsessed with watching deep ocean, like learning about giant squids and stuff. And the rhetoric around what is, honestly, we know probably more about Mars
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
than we do about the deep ocean, but we're not excited about going. down to the depths, right?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
down to the depths.
PJ Wehry:
I mean, there's like,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
All right.
PJ Wehry:
so that's what made me think of it was actually my son, like,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
it's kind of a weird thing. I tried and like limit screen time and he was literally like, can I watch another documentary? He watched like three hours of documentaries on giant squid, so I was like,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
PJ Wehry:
okay, this one's actually okay. But yeah, so that was, yeah, it's really the stories that surround even like the, like, They almost seem like from another planet, but it's not. It doesn't have nothing. I can't think of anything. You can look at a couple different examples in popular culture of what comes up from the depths, even aliens coming up from the depths, and they're always monsters.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
PJ Wehry:
Whereas if you think about from
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm hmm. Mm hmm.
PJ Wehry:
aliens coming from
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
That's right.
PJ Wehry:
the space, they're always... Anyways, it's just
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah yeah yeah
PJ Wehry:
a fascinating... It was a strange... as you're talking made me think of it.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yep, that's right. I mean, Leviathan is chief among these. The sea monsters are monsters. And what we mean by monsters is they're
PJ Wehry:
Yes.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
a chaotic concatenation of categories that ought not. Leviathan is like a dragon and a serpent and a water thing and a sky thing and whatever. All these categories that ought not to belong together and yet are mushed together in this one monstrous thing, these sea monsters are always these figures of chaos. Whereas, I mean, the word, the word cosmos itself, which means order, was initially used in Greek to refer to the order of the stars in the sky. I mean, they are the, again, like the mythic, the philosophical, the conceptual instance of order as distinct from chaos. Yeah, you never get like a, I don't know, sometimes you let my teacher the octopus or whatever write that the octo, what is it?
PJ Wehry:
Right, right.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Is it octopus my teacher, my teacher octopus, professor octopus? It's something like this.
PJ Wehry:
Yeah, something like that.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
But for the most part, yes, aliens have superior technology and superior understanding, and hell beasts from below.
PJ Wehry:
Yes, but yeah, and this is I've loved that you've done this you've given such clear popular examples You know with like Mike Pence talking this way or Donald Trump talking this way But like even like like Pacific Rim, right? Godzilla like
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
they're even when they're like they're modern stories like They're monsters from below, right?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Yeah, that's right.
PJ Wehry:
That's interesting. Sorry. I had a little bit of a sidetrack there, but once you start seeing these kind of mythical currents, they
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
do, they kind of show up everywhere.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
And they do shape so much of what we, we're kind of working through. When you talk about what are some ways of reframing this so it's not, well, actually, before we talk about how we should reframe this,
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
what are the dangers of this kind of name it and claim it space race?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm. OK. So let me do that, like, politician thing and be like, you may have heard people argue that. The argument is by Zubrin, for example. Even Zubrin, who is the most, one of the most gung-ho of terra nullius in space guys, right? There is nothing on Mars worth saving. It can be ours. We can do whatever we want to it. Terraform it. Do whatever you want with it, right? Even Zubrin will say, when somebody says, but isn't this idea, this terra nullius, there's this nobody's land and so you can do whatever, isn't that what we did half a century, half a millennium ago, 500 years ago, isn't that the doctrine of discovery, isn't that bad? Even Zubrin will say, yeah, look, okay, on Earth it was a mistake, oops. It was not, the land was not actually empty, the land actually did belong to people, but this time... This time, there's nothing out there. There's Jack on the moon. There's nothing on Mars.
PJ Wehry:
Ha!
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
There's nothing worth, right? We are worth preserving. It is not. So basically, the idea is like, it was a good idea just badly implemented, right? But now it's actually a good idea, now that we understand that these things are genuinely empty. OK. I think that there are, this is a, it's a very bad idea to apply. a tactic that has been so clearly destructive of the Earth and its peoples to other planets for a number of reasons. One, you could just say, like what is it that assures you that it's going to go well this time? Just like faith? Just, I mean, you have no evidence, so is it just faith? And people could say, you know, yes, it's just faith. Or they could say, but no, but like, come on, tell me what could actually go wrong. Tell me, there's actually nobody out there. And in fact, Zubrin also says, It's even insulting to the indigenous people of this world, of this earth to compare this adventure to the colonial adventure. After all, there are no indigenous people out there. How dare you compare the Cherokee Nation, for example, to a bunch of dusty rocks on Mars? Like that is absurd. This is not the same thing at all. Okay. One answer is if you actually talk to, leaders of the Cherokee Nation, if you actually talk to the leaders of the Ojibwe Nation, if you actually talk to leaders of the Inuit Nation, of the Bawaka people of Northern Australia, and you ask the right questions, they will often say, you know what, actually it's not the case that space is empty, that outer space is empty, and it's not even outer. It's part of a whole cosmic neighborhood that is related sort of organically to Earth. And it's also not the case that there's nobody there. Our ancestors are there, right? And for the Buaka, for example, when their people die, when their community members die, they're sent by ritual out along the Milky Way, which they call the River of Stars, and they live there. They live out in the cosmos. So they're very concerned that our sort of barnstorming approach to the universe is actually going to disturb the inhabitation of the ancestors, thereby disturbing the relationship between the ancestors and the humans, thereby disturbing everything in human culture and the human world. Again, an Inuit anthropologist once said to some, an Inuit shaman once said to a white anthropologist who said, hey, have you heard the Americans landed on the moon? He was like, oh my god, is this really the first time you've been to the moon? We're always at the moon because we always visit our relatives on the moon. That's what we do in shamanic states. We go to the moon to visit our relatives. And he says, the question isn't whether or not you go to the moon. The question is how you behave once you get there. So. So I don't think it is a foregone conclusion that there is nobody in outer space. That it is from a particular perspective, the case that there's nobody in outer space. And from other people's perspectives, actually there are people in outer space. So this could be one danger. The danger would be violating, offending, upsetting the sensibilities and even the cosmic balance of people whose worldviews do not structure the space race. If that is not compelling for you, there is another response. And the other response is taking this sort of barnstorming approach to conquering outer space is likely to... make it impossible actually to learn from these planetary bodies, to learn anything more about these planetary bodies. There may have been at some point life on Mars. There may have been, there may still be some microbial life somewhere if you like blast apart another rock or something like that. But there are all sorts of stories about the history of the solar system that Mars can tell us, but it can only tell us if we treat it carefully and respectfully. And we know all kinds of stories about... you know, nations and armies sort of blowing up archaeological sites before we could figure out what was going on on Earth. It would be a great idea not to do that to outer space by just destroying the terrain before we have a chance to learn anything about it. This is another, so you could make a sort of functionalist intellectual argument this way if you want to make a functionalist intellectual argument. You could also make an aesthetic argument and say, you know, is it appropriate, there was a story a while back that went around saying it was a, it was fake, but that Pepsi. planned to tattoo its logo on the moon so that when you looked up, you would just see Pepsi on the moon. Now this feels, I think to anybody of goodwill, like a horrifying prospect, right? We don't have the right, it feels like, to change the surface of the moon to such an extent that it would say Pepsi on it. If we mine the moon within an inch of its life, we may well... change the look of the moon so that it appears very differently, particularly to people who are used to studying the moon and to looking at it and to using it for orientation. Aesthetically, and in that case spiritually, it might not be a great idea just to do whatever we would like to the planetary bodies. Politically, look, right after space exploration became an actual possibility, the UN set forth this thing called the Outer Space Treaty in which they said... they declared and all of the major nations signed on, that outer space is not subject to national appropriation, meaning no nation can claim either a planetary body or any part of a planetary body. And the reason is they were just recovering from two world wars that were the result of the colonial enterprise on earth. And they were like, let's not do this again. That regardless of what it does to the land itself. the nations that are going after, and now the transnational corporations are going to require military enforcement, are gonna require all kinds of weapons, weaponry in outer space. The political situation that it's going to create both in outer space and here, even if there is nothing there worth preserving, is sufficiently disastrous that our ancestors in the late 60s were like, never do this again and definitely don't do it in outer space where you don't have any access to air. Like, don't do that. And then finally, I would say it's a bad idea because the relentless pursuit of profit that has led to the globalization of a particular kind of late-stage capitalism hasn't been particularly good for the people who have had to sustain it, for the laborers, for the miners who have had to... mine, the titanium and the coal and the right. It hasn't the conditions of working and living for the people who are given the responsibility of doing that extractive work have been pretty horrible and those people themselves have not reaped the benefits of those industries. So the rich get richer and the poor get poorer and the income gap just widens and widens and widens on this infinite frontier. These are, so that's what, like five, six different reasons. If any of them is of interest to you, then I think that we could find a better way to go about exploring outer space than to bring the, to declare it a new frontier, declare it open for business and just let people have at it.
PJ Wehry:
Why do you turn, it looks at the end of the book, you talk about turning to pantheism as a way to reframe this. Why do you see pantheism as a good way to approach this?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Okay, pantheism may or may not be a good way to approach it, but I think it's worth a shot.
PJ Wehry:
OK.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
I think it's worth a shot. So here's the thing. The first thing that I'm trying to do is to show
PJ Wehry:
OK, OK, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
that the suppositions, the values that are currently guiding the corporate space race are not universal values. They're not objective values. And they're not like just scientific values or just political values or just economic values. They're values that have a long mythological history in a very bad reading of Christian scripture. So they're religious in a particularly bad way. There are these bad religious stories that are giving heft to our most destructive capacities when it comes to outer space. So I want to unsettle those bad religious stories, call them out, show that they haven't done great work in the past. In fact, they've done terrible work in the past and say, let's not have them work for us again going into the future. But unlike, you know, new atheist type people who would say, you know, look, religion's been motivating us subconsciously, therefore we should get rid of religion, I don't tend to think it's possible to get rid of religion because what religion is about, again, are the most fundamental stories that we tell one another and ourselves, and we're not going to stop telling stories. We can't. Our stories are our orientation in the world. Therefore, rather than getting rid of religion, I'm suggesting, why don't we dig up some better stories? Either explicitly religious or implicitly whatever like some better myths that can help orient us and they're all over the place honestly There are better ways of reading Genesis, right? Just recently I mean like a couple days ago the Roman Catholic Church the Vatican repudiated the doctrine of discovery. They were like oops
PJ Wehry:
Ha ha ha ha!
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
And it's not it's actually not supported by scripture, right? So there are better ways of reading scripture that even extend up to the Vatican, right? Then this this kind of land grabby activity You can find them certainly in some of the indigenous ontologies that I was talking about. You can find them in science fiction, particularly science fiction written by indigenous futurists and Afrofuturists and feminists and queer folks and folks who just sort of like exist on the underside of history and therefore have different ways of going about things. And or you can find different ways of valuing. the world that we're part of in ontologies broadly that I think of as pantheist. And what I mean by that is that they affirm the, well, the godness of all creation. And that does not mean that like my air conditioner is god. What it means is that everything in the universe, created and uncreated, artificial and natural, et cetera, participates in the work of creating the world, sustaining the world, and unraveling and destroying the world, which are the sort of big features of divinity, that everything does that divine work. And so it seems to me that the kinds of, and there are lots of different pantheist philosophies. They come from all sorts of different places, they don't necessarily map onto each other, they don't. But if that's the, you could think of like, in a sense like bacteria or fungi as like real theological heroes of some pantheisms because like they do the work of making and Unmaking the world this is what they do, right? It seems to me that it's a good counter story to the idea that The sacred that what's really important that what's really divine is somehow outside this world or other than this world It's a way of attending to the sacrality, the significance, the importance, the divinity of this earth, for example, so that we don't make the mistake, which I think is a huge mistake, of saying we come from the earth but we're not supposed to die here, or something like that, it's just our launch pad or something like that. No, it is the source of our life and it is the end of our life. It is everything that we are. And we may or may not be able to live independently of earth, but at the moment, everything we are constituted by is of, with, and through. And I think the pantheist philosophies teach us that in a way that often these more utopian philosophies that say, you know Oh, the earth is a veil of tears and God is somewhere else They don't help us with that. In fact, they help demonize earth as something to get away from And I think that they would also help us understand the the intrinsic value of other planetary bodies so that we could ask just so we could ask the question Is it right to mine the moon? Is it appropriate? Is it appropriate to mind the moon? I don't I don't I don't know. I don't have a good answer to it. But if we were to think of the moon as having life and agency and a history that's worth respecting in its own right rather than is instrumental to human beings, at least we could ask the question. And at least it wouldn't be a foregone conclusion, right, that we can say stick a Pepsi logo on the moon or something like that.
PJ Wehry:
The Rites of Rocks, I
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
the rise of oxygen.
PJ Wehry:
love that phrase. It's really a thought provoking phrase. I was going to ask, I want to be respectful of your time, but I immediately thought of Spinoza because that's who I'm familiar
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry:
with, that's who I've read. But who are some people that have inspired you and aside from of course reading your excellent book, what are some other places people can look? to get this pantheist vision of the world that you think might be helpful for reframing.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Great. Well, I did write a book on pantheism and I began it with Spinoza, because that's where all pantheism begins. Spinoza is known for having used the phrase in a posthumous work because he was worried about publishing it during his lifetime because he had enough suras during his lifetime, of having used the phrase, God or nature. He just used them interchangeably. God and nature were the same thing. for Spinoza. So Spinoza is great, but he's very hard to read.
PJ Wehry:
Hey
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
And so I do start things there. And I end the book kind of book market with Albert Einstein, who is this beautiful, beautiful pantheist. He's one of those guys who was able still to sort of study everything. He knew his philosophy. He knew his anthropology. I mean, it was bad anthropology that he knew, but he knew it. He knew all of these different disciplines, and he was a very deep thinker who was concerned, deeply concerned, not only to get the calculations right, which we all know he did, but to figure out, what the hell they meant.
PJ Wehry:
Hmm.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
And for him, what they meant was that God is inherent to. not just like bound up with, but like is the order of the universe itself. And he's able to say this in a modern key that I think is really beautiful. So any of the essays of Einstein, there are some little collected essays. They're they're really beautiful. He actually got into a heap of trouble about being a pantheist, too. But it was basically I mean, there wasn't much that people could do to him. But but, you know, the newspapers got very angry for a few years at Albert
PJ Wehry:
Oh yeah, very, yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Einstein. Exactly.
PJ Wehry:
The old version of Twitter, yes. Yeah.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
I think you can find this kind of thinking in James Lovelock and Lynn Margulis, who are the sort of twin authors of the Gaia hypothesis, the understanding of the Earth as a set of interconnected organisms that form a kind of symbiotic system that creates. Lynn Margulis uses the term autopoetic. It basically creates and uncreates and recreates itself. and they do this in service of an ecological ethic. So, Lovelock's Gaia Hypothesis and basically any, Margulis didn't write a ton of books. I mean, she wrote one, co-authored a couple with her son, Dorian Sagan, one called What Is Life? That's actually really remarkable. So, those two I really love. Lovelock is a little more of a kind of unifier. He wants to talk about the Earth as like one big organism. Margulis is like, no, it's. Countless intertwining. She just will not capitulate to the one, but she's pretty remarkable too. The end of The Color Purple, one of Alice Walker's characters there has this absolutely stunning vision of moving from what she calls like God is a big white guy in the sky to God is everything and getting to the point where she says, and I just knew that if a tree were cut, my arm would bleed. Like I can feel this way. as understanding of God as everything. So these would be some places to go. A lot of people like to look out to Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower and God as the force of change itself. I think you can kind of find it all over the place once you start hunting for it. But those are some places to start.
PJ Wehry:
Awesome. It's been a real pleasure having you on. If you could leave our audience with one thing, what would it be? It doesn't have to be a summary, because I think that would be unfair to ask, but if there was one thing that you'd want them to walk away with this week, what would it be?
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
So N.K. Jemisin has this story. It's a kind of meditation on Ursula Le Guin's The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas. And N.K. Jemisin's story is called The Ones Who Stay and Fight. And what she says in there, she's talking about a utopian community where everybody is fed, everybody is fed. I mean, just stop with that for a second. Like everybody's fed. and everybody has a home if they want one, she says. And for people who'd rather not have a home, the benches don't have spikes, so you can sleep on them if you'd like to, and the streets are kept clean and things like that, right? And she says, this is the city, it's a city in which, it's a city whose inhabitants simply care for one another. So she builds this city, this imagined place, just on the principle of care, of just basic, basic care for one another. And at one point she's confronting the reader who is, you know, supposedly not believing that it's possible to build this kind of society. And she says like, what? How could you? And she says there are other options. Just very simply, there are other options. There are other ways to be. And I think that are the most sort of prophetic of our. our authors, our speculative fiction authors, our science fiction authors are the ones who can remind us that there are other options, that there it doesn't have to be this way, that we do not have to play this zero-sum game between human extinction on the one hand and living on Mars with Elon Musk and another there are other ways to do things and and those other stories are everywhere. They're absolutely everywhere. We just need to listen to them.
PJ Wehry:
Dr. Rubenstein, been an absolute pleasure. Thank you for coming on today. Really fascinating.
Mary-Jane Rubenstein:
Thank you so much, PJ. It was great to talk to you.