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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 (00:04.652)
Hello and welcome to Chasing Leviathan. I'm your host PJ Weary and I'm here today with Dr. Mark Usher. He is a professor of classical languages and literature at the University of Vermont. And we're talking about his book, Following Nature's Lead, Ancient Ways of Living in a Dying World. Dr. Usher, wonderful to have you on today.
MarK (00:24.942)
Good to be here. Thank you.
PJ Wehry (00:28.131)
So, Dr. Usher, why this book? Why should we be following nature's lead?
MarK (00:34.35)
So Mark, please, I feel much more comfortable with that. Well, because we are intrinsically part of nature. And so, you know, our cues should come from our origin. And we've developed this sort of false sense of separate self and superiority that we can live apart from nature and to a large degree we can because of our capacity for
PJ Wehry (00:37.185)
Yeah, absolutely.
MarK (01:03.63)
technological innovation and whatever. But fundamentally, we need to live in harmony with nature to be able to have a right livelihood and good relations with one another and perhaps just good relations, know, feeling yourself part of the whole. So it's very much a systems view of things rather than, you know, an individualist view.
PJ Wehry (01:35.298)
And can you talk a little bit more about how we feel apart from nature? I love that you included, I can't remember who you reference, but you talk about the false dualism we have where we're like, if we can only get back to the wilderness, right? And so, and that's just, that just reinforces us being apart. Can you talk about that?
MarK (01:54.486)
Yeah, well, I mean, basically we have the capacity to to live apart from nature. And that has been something that has evolved culturally. mean, we weren't we weren't born with that. We were born, you you're born like I'm born, you know, buck naked and vulnerable and in need and and the first order of the day is survival. And, you know, humanity writ large is kind of falls that path to, you know, for
I don't know, 250,000 years of our species existence, we, survival was the order of the day. And survival is not, I mean, your thing is called Leviathan, your show is called Leviathan. It's not all nasty, brutish, or short. Survival is really what life is all about anyway, but enjoying that kind of living within nature and finding your needs met there, learning how to meet your needs.
PJ Wehry (02:38.667)
Yeah
MarK (02:53.88)
within the confines of nature, what's called the environment. That's what human beings did for a long time. I mean, the majority of our species history. So what we've been doing for this very tiny sliver of time is abnormal. It's unusual. But we, you and I, just born yesterday in the scheme of things, think it's
think it's the reality or think it's the norm and think it's, you know, we take it for granted. And, you know, I think it's good to defamiliarize those, you know, acculturated and accustomed behaviors. And so the book is a lot about looking back to the past before a lot of these habituated behaviors took hold in society and civilization to see how other people did it.
PJ Wehry (03:49.314)
Mm.
MarK (03:51.566)
other people from the past. And because I'm a classicist, my focus is on that intellectual heritage and that cultural heritage, but not exclusively so, as you probably know from the book. talk about Indigenous ways of relating to the world as well. yeah, so prima denerty is really the leitmotif that the book is about. Not so much the classical world that just happens to be my forte. It's about everything before, I don't know.
the Industrial Revolution, the dawn of capitalism, and all those things that just sort of reinforce this idea of the separate self that you mentioned before. So yes, we need to get back to it. You also mentioned this idea of the false getting back to nature, this idea that experiencing wilderness or preserving wilderness at all costs or something is the solution. I don't talk a lot about it in the book, but I do mention it.
I mean, that is just a symptom. I mean, that's kind of like just having a pet as opposed to a domesticated animal or an animal in the bush that you're hunting, right? That kind of idea of preserving nature kind of reinforces the idea that human beings have the ability to do that. I mean, we have the ability to live in harmony with nature, to respect it, and yes, to take action to conserve it, but...
The idea that we're saving it or that the wilderness is meant to be untouched, I mean, that's just not true. mean, we live in the wilderness. We're creatures of the wilderness. Again, speaking evolutionarily. So anyway, so that's why this wilderness thing is part of the problem, as it were.
PJ Wehry (05:36.608)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (05:41.41)
Yeah, thank you, Mark. That's a great answer. Just as a, I'd love to talk more about you pulling from tradition. loved the Chesterton quotes. love, I think you said it's where you, you mentioned it's your field of expertise. It's like, it's where you hoe your beans. think that's where you, I've enjoyed that. But yeah.
MarK (05:59.15)
Yeah.
That's the road, by the way.
PJ Wehry (06:08.012)
So, but the Leviathan, I actually, I'm referencing Job, and I actually like this because it feeds into kind of what you're saying. Like if you look at it from a Hobbes perspective, that we're fighting, you know, that we're fighting life being nasty, short, brutish, or versus something like in Job, where you have this majestic creature that you can't really tame. You think you can, but you can't. And I think there's something, it's really interesting that,
MarK (06:23.074)
Right.
MarK (06:30.754)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (06:35.462)
I think that kind of speaks to the discussion of nature a little bit.
MarK (06:39.22)
Yeah, absolutely and it's interesting too I think I'm not sure if it's the job passage or it's somewhere in the Psalms where it's talking about They that go down to the sea and ships meeting the Phoenicians probably or people who are trading so here you are in like Bronze Age civilization, right? I mean it's civilization. They've got writing they've got cities. They've got is they've got agriculture They got surplus, you know, they're starting to have it but yet they're you know
somebody is mesmerized by the prospects of going out to something that's like untamable, uncontrollable like the ocean and then seeing this wonderful creature, whether it be a whale or Loch Ness monster, don't know, it is, Leviathan, right? As like something that stands for something more than human, something that is other, other in a way that inculcates.
PJ Wehry (07:20.994)
Yeah
MarK (07:33.902)
I don't know, respect is too awe, awe is a better word. And so it's really just the setting of that reference is that in culture you step out of culture, so to speak, you get immersed in nature out in the middle of, in a boat, an artifact of culture in the middle of the sea and you see something there, Leviathan, and you're like, wow, right? This is way bigger than
My Little City or My Little Trading Venture or My Little Gilgamesh Poem. So anyway, I'm fascinated by that. I approve of the title, the reference there.
PJ Wehry (08:12.396)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (08:17.196)
Well, I appreciate it. Yeah. I, and I love that, to just kind of continue a little bit in that vein. think today, you know, you talk about our capacity to separate ourselves.
but there are still limits. I think so, one, the ocean still holds that fear for us, right? Like you could find like the lasso phobia stuff on YouTube all the time, right? People still respect and fear the ocean and rightfully so, know, Gordon Lightfoot singing, you know, wreck of the admin Fitzgerald or anything like that. But we also see this more and more with people's fascination with space, that this, the things that are more than human, things that are just far beyond our control.
And as we look at the forces that are basically ripping through the void and it's just, it's it's one the things you're like, Oh, maybe we're not as much in control as we think we are.
MarK (09:10.892)
I don't know, tell that to, I don't know, SpaceX or, know, I have a feeling, yes, maybe the ordinary person has that healthy respect for what's out there. But, you know, we live in a culture today and a society today of people who think they're extraordinary and they think they're extraordinary, I think falsely because they have this,
PJ Wehry (09:13.322)
Hahaha
MarK (09:41.11)
Wealth what is wealth? I mean, that's another whole topic, but they have this thing that makes them Powerful they think powerful Until something, you know goes wrong. I don't know. I I I hope I hope that there's still the healthy respect for the limits I think there's far less respect for limits than your and you meant I mean not not that you're saying that there yeah well, know you probably agree with me at core about that that point but the the
the ancients had a much healthier respect for limits because they were closer, they lived closer to the sources of their survival than we do. I mean, just air conditioning for crying out loud or a hot shower. I mean, the Romans had hot baths, But I mean, it was, that was a huge luxury. Who doesn't wake up every morning on planet earth, at least in the Western hemisphere and take a hot shower or at least every other day, I hope, you know, whatever. So.
It's like that is a luxury that they didn't have. So, I mean, just to live closer to the sources of your survival encourages a healthier respect for limits that we have less of, I think, today and are gonna have less of going forward unless something catastrophic happens, which I think it will, which, you know, in some ways bring it on if it puts human beings back in their place.
recalibrates the system. I don't mean dire doom and gloom sort of thing, but something that, I somebody can wake up on their own. You can just like sit under a tree and wake up and realize, whoa, I'm not the center of the universe. Or that can be brought upon you. You know, not as punishment, just by the fact of, you you exceed a boundary and you know, you fall off the edge of the earth. You know, you whatever.
PJ Wehry (11:37.568)
Yeah.
you remind me, I'm, I'm frustrated because I can't remember the name, the Australian term, but I had a Dr. Lewis Gordon on talk about his book, the fear of black consciousness, or I think it's just fear of black consciousness. And one of the things he mentioned, you talk about wealth, he's talking about just various kind of views of privilege. it's the way that people with a lot of privilege in this case, certain types of white people do not respect nature.
And I can't remember the name of it. It's a, there's certain types of still water ponds in Australia. And he was visiting Australia and they talked about, the taxi driver that was driving him said, yeah, we just had a lady die. recently, she went and swam in one of those ponds, still water ponds after midnight in Australia. And he was like, Hey, was she, was she of North European descent? And the guy's like,
MarK (12:31.267)
Night.
PJ Wehry (12:38.924)
How did you know? He's like, well, there's a certain capacity for distancing yourself from nature that gives you, mean, that's a perfect example of like, you're not getting punished. You're just outside a boundary that's like, what do you, like, the snake is not gonna recognize your prestige, your wealth or anything else. There's, you know, snake, crocodile, whatever. Like you can list a lot of things in the Australian Outback that are a problem.
MarK (12:55.426)
Right.
MarK (13:07.374)
That's a good point. mean, nature is a great equalizer, you know, and that's what happens. nature, I mean, people talk about like the balance of nature, but that balance is usually a change within nature through catastrophism. I mean, so you'd have some sort of catastrophe and what comes, you know, it comes back. mean, nature comes back, but it doesn't come back the same as it was. But, you know,
Yeah, so this yeah, it's a great equalizer and so human beings are gonna they're gonna we're gonna be equalized You know, I have I've never seen that that movie equalizer. I don't even know what it's about is there but you know, we are going to be You know put in our place eventually somehow So it Yeah, so it's good it's good in my view to be ready for it to expect it
PJ Wehry (13:56.431)
Yeah, I've only seen clips from it, but yeah.
MarK (14:05.314)
you know, you know, not prepare for it in like a doomsday prepper kind of way, but just to be prudent about it, to be, you know, I think, do I mention this in the letter? Yes, I do. I mentioned Seneca's letter about the burning of the city of Lyon, and that spawned a whole kind of a modeling system of collapse by this guy named Hugo Bardi.
chemist at the University of Florence and Seneca took took away from the Leon burned overnight apparently the whole city in 64 CE and and Seneca was trying to come to terms with this and it dawned on him. says well growth proceeds slowly but catastrophe happens all at once. Ruin comes so quickly and the lesson as a stoic he took from that was like then we should we should think on all the things that can go wrong.
not because we're morbid or because we're afraid of them, but because we're prudent and it reminds us what's really important and what really matters. And we'll probably make more cautious decisions in the present, know, little decisions and big decisions, know, individual personal decisions and policy decisions. And so yeah, he says like earthquakes, fire, destruction, think on these things. It's like, you know,
It's like Marcus Aurelius talking about sex where he says like, you know, if you really think about sex, it's like some, you know, internal attrition and like the exchange of some fluids. And, you know, if you think about it that way, you're not going to make too much of it, right? You know, this spasmodic secretion of something, it doesn't sound as interesting as the human mind makes it. So again, he's not saying treat sexuality as a
PJ Wehry (15:54.958)
Ha!
MarK (16:03.342)
clinical experience or Seneca is not saying, you know, be a doomsday prepper and live your life that way, but rather put things in perspective. Think about things, you know, as perhaps maybe they really are or they could be and you won't overvalue them in a bad way.
PJ Wehry (16:24.578)
I want to clarify something here. I want to see if I'm tracking with you. When you talk about, you keep saying not like a doomsday prepper. And if I understand your argument in the book, the reason that you can't be a doomsday prepper is you're just further perpetuating what got us in the, you're further removing yourself from the system. You're again, if that, like you're again removing yourself from outside of nature in an unhealthy way.
Like if you're the person who goes down in the bunker, does not participate with anything, is that kind of, am I tracking with you right on that?
MarK (17:00.098)
Well, just to be clear, I don't talk about doomsday. I don't know why. I don't even know where that phrase came from. It's not part of my vocabulary. So it just popped into my head based on something that you said or something that I said. I don't know. So I don't talk about that at all in the book. It has nothing to do with it. So how can you prep for something that's going to happen anyway? I mean, the sun is going to implode. It's going to run out of fuel. It's going to turn into a, I don't know,
PJ Wehry (17:02.814)
You're right.
Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. But-
PJ Wehry (17:15.988)
Yes, yeah, yeah, yeah
MarK (17:29.09)
giant to warp or whatever it turns into and it's gonna get really hot and it's gonna melt the earth. So I mean, we live on a finite planet. I mean, what are you preparing for? What are you prepping for if you are trying to avert it? Well, I mean, you can invert something in the short term and it has advantages. Of course it has advantages to avert disaster in the short term. But as you I think are saying,
or suggesting that I'm saying is that it's still trying to preserve that sense of separate self in a way that, you know, symptomatic of the same kind of preservation that somebody who's really wealthy who wants to shoot themselves up to Mars and live there in a bubble while the rest of the earth burns and call it happiness. mean, that's the same impulse. And some people might say it's human nature, it's an evolutionary survival instinct.
I don't think so. think it's what the Buddha's called delusion. It's but that's just me.
PJ Wehry (18:36.246)
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and so, that's, I, yeah, I wasn't trying to say that you, you talk about doomsday preppers in the book. just, you, when you mentioned doomsday preppers, I could see that connection. Why you, why you felt any distance yourself from yes, accept nature for what it is and, be part of it. Don't like continual movement away, whether it's to Mars or let me bury myself in the earth. And, yeah, yeah, there's a couple of things there, but I did want to ask you because, you're a professor of
MarK (18:48.578)
Right.
PJ Wehry (19:06.37)
classical languages and literature, and you mentioned it at the beginning of the book, you choose to use the classical tradition, indigenous tradition, and part of that is because you want to do this pre-modern critique. You want to critique capitalism, want to critique those sorts of things. Aside from that particular critique, what is the value of digging into tradition? What do we owe the debt?
MarK (19:25.71)
you
MarK (19:33.454)
You mentioned, think in the beginning or before we started recording the Chesterton quote I have at the very front of the book, or not the front, but the beginning and the preface. you know, I'm not a fan of Chesterton or anything, but that quotation just really resonated with me where he talks about tradition being the democracy of the dead. So we kind of tout ourselves in this very temporary political scheme that we have called democracy that won't last forever either, by the way, that, you know, we have it.
now and we value pluralism, right? All voices come and are heard and are valued and we're, you we deliberate collectively and we make collective decisions for the welfare of all, right? That's the line almost, we all toe that line. Well, what about the past, right? So, I mean, that's a very presentist notion, but there are voices from the past, our human past.
our ancestors, call them what you want, that tradition is about listening to the ancestors, to put it in kind an indigenous frame, or heeding the ancients, or going back to the classics, or what other people thought before us. And that, first of all, that rescues us from the presentism where ensconced in and often can't see past, it provides perspective.
You know, it helps us take a long view. mean, a long view, again, relatively speaking, that long view is even teeny tiny short on the evolutionary scale of the species and the planet. That's like teeny tiny. So all the more reason actually, know, a fortiori, we should be looking to the past. Matter of fact, we should be living in the past, in the present. So there's this idea of a trajectory, I guess, that
I think studying tradition, the past, has a lot to offer. And of course, part of that trajectory is also the future. So, you know, we should be living today with a view to the future. it's this spectrum. Spectrum is a light metaphor, but you know, it's this scale, time scale, the timeline, that is not just about the point on the line, it's about the whole line to the degree that time is linear.
MarK (21:59.694)
So this is the thing that I think tradition helps us with, it helps us get out of ourselves. Just like reading a novel helps get you out of yourself or watching a film, right? You're transported to another imagination, an imaginary world or one that's realistic maybe or, you know, surrealistic doesn't really matter. It helps you get out of the limits of your own thinking to see what's possible.
PJ Wehry (22:31.226)
one, there's a lot of very tempting strands there that I'd love to move, jump on, but I do want to talk about a little bit more into your book. And we've mentioned wealth a couple of times. So I thought maybe we'd even go backwards and start with the last chapter, no wealth, but life. And, just, one, cause I want to talk about your book. Cause I know that's, that's why you're here, but also, you've mentioned wealth several times. So.
MarK (22:48.041)
All right.
PJ Wehry (23:00.768)
What do you mean when you say no wealth but life?
MarK (23:04.928)
Okay, well first of all, I didn't say it. As with most good things in that book. No, honestly, as...
PJ Wehry (23:08.481)
Hahaha!
I love all the quotes. It's great. No, no, no, it's good.
MarK (23:15.062)
I mean, it's the most unoriginal book you'll ever read because it's full of other people's ideas. That idea comes from John Ruskin. And Ruskin needs to be rediscovered for our age. In fact, if just for kicks, there's a picture of Ruskin on my wall right there. He's kind of a new, you know, whatever, person of interest to me. So.
He said that, that was the conclusion of his treatise on political economy called Unto This Last. And he concluded that there is no wealth but life. And it's really hard to summarize how he gets to that conclusion. He prints it all in uppercase letters and he was hugely classically educated. He's a Victorian, so he's 1850s, he wrote.
that book, Unto This Last, in 1862, published it in 1862. It was serialized first. He's the founder of the arts and crafts movement, a big influence, the big influence on William Morris. He was actually a big influence on Oscar Wilde, if you can believe it. Oscar Wilde worked on a chain gang with him, making a road when he was an Oxford student, and Ruskin was a professor of art there. He had all the students out building a road.
for, I don't know, public improvement or something. it was here, you know, so Ruskin gets to that conclusion that there is no wealth but life in his reevaluation of what an economy is for. And so he's writing at a time when economics as a discipline is brand new. So David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill are writing, immediate predecessor to him, writing about economy and they,
They are saying that an economy is subject to laws of commerce. There are laws to study the economy as one would study nature, right? And they're givens. And Ruskin was very critical of the so-called science of economics as a new discipline. And he was saying that there are many other factors that enter into a political economy, i.e. the way people organize themselves.
MarK (25:41.174)
around the distribution of resources and the enjoyment and use of resources that is not just about markets and money. And in many ways, he's harking back to the pre-modernity that I'm enamored with, Aristotle and Xenophon. Aristotle says money is just, it's junk. That's what he says. It's like worthless junk. It's a token of exchange only. has no.
significance in and of itself. And a proper economy, Aristotle says, I'll get to Ruskin in a minute, Aristotle says, has to do with an economy, of course, a Greek word that means household management, literally. It had to do with managing a household, which meant like a farm and family and retainers and people that were involved with you that helped you out as running this thing self-sufficiently. He says that,
an economy is more concerned about the human persons that are part of it than of the things in it. So all the things in a household, all the resources, all the comestibles, consumables are all for the people who are in it. So persons first. So Ruskin, he doesn't quote Aristotle on that point, I kind of bring that in, but Ruskin argues that there are, you know,
disturbing elements, he calls them, in a political economy that work chemically and not mathematically, he uses that metaphor, that have to do with why people do things and that values and morals undergird an economy irrespective of how the money exchange works in markets. And he says it should be that way. So when he says that there is no wealth but life,
He's saying that resources and the distribution of resources in a society, a political economy, exists for the furtherance of the life of the members of that community. mean, it sounds like a facile thing to say, but it's a pretty bold thing to say. He's saying that, here's what he says. He says that merchants, people who are engaged in commerce, should like, I think I'm quoting Ruskin here, that,
MarK (28:06.254)
should, like soldiers, like ministers, like lawyers, like doctors, be more concerned about their patients than they are about themselves, and they should be willing to take voluntary loss in the course of conducting their business. So the purpose of trade is to actually facilitate the distribution of wealth, not the generation and amassing of it, but
the distribution of it amongst workers by paying them a fair wage, more than a fair wage, by paying them a generous wage, a living wage. He's saying all this on the cusp of Industrial Revolution. with many examples, and I'm not doing him justice by any means, with many examples and wonderful analogies and really pretty, I mean, to me, rock solid argument.
he comes to the conclusion that wealth is about serving life. And to me, that's like, yeah, it makes sense. So anyway, that's what it meant. And that's kind of what I'm talking about. And I kind of, I graph that idea of a political economy on the way that nature runs, that nature exists to perpetuate life. Also, so a political, the economy of nature, right,
PJ Wehry (29:09.729)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (29:13.954)
Yeah.
MarK (29:32.834)
the human economy should model itself on the economy of nature as an analogy, not one for one. There's no exactitude, but there's this idea, there's this principle, right? So like where does energy come from in nature, right? So we should think about that too. It's not artificially generated by, you know, taking stuff from the earth that's not replenishable for millions and millions and millions of years, oil or coal or whatever, and then burning it up really quickly.
PJ Wehry (29:38.572)
Yeah.
MarK (30:02.722)
to have, I don't know, a couple hundred years of prosperity, wealth, and whatever. It's about something more cyclical, something more regenerative, like nature is regenerative. So that's how I tie in Ruskin, believe it or not, with ecology and that notion in the book. Enough.
PJ Wehry (30:12.236)
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (30:24.704)
Yeah. And I love that. It's something that I want to meditate on more because it makes so much sense that are, yeah, the current economy. And you talk about this, like the ever expanding economy. It's a, it's a common notion that like, you can't just always expand. And this idea of a, not, not necessarily closed loop, but a loop, it's just way more, it's way more sustainable. It's something that we can.
If we owe something to the dead, we also owe something to the unborn, right? And so that we can leave something that works that like, it's like, hey, I had a great time. Sorry, stinks to be you, you know.
MarK (30:57.537)
Exactly.
Yeah, all right.
MarK (31:06.382)
So that's why I link Ruskin with a very unlikely bedfellow, George Bataille. And Bataille wrote a book called The Accursed Chair, and it's also about political economy. He calls it a treatise on general economy. But he makes this startling argument that what we need to do is learn how to waste. We need to not learn how to save, but learn how to waste because
In nature, nature generates more energy than any organism needs. Every organism in nature generates more energy than it needs. And much of that energy, I think, know, the trophic pyramid, only 10 % of energy consumed goes up to the next trophic level in biomass. The rest of it is dissipated either by waste heat or some other form of waste. So this notion of what to do with waste.
i.e. excess. What have societies in the past done with it? Well, they've wasted it on things like, I don't know, the pyramids. They've wasted it on things like sacrifice. They've wasted it on things like art. he cites many, Pattaya cites many examples. Or like in Tibet, they wasted on creating mandalas that are made out of sand and that are gone.
tomorrow if you blow on them, right? But they take like days and weeks to make, also reinforcing the beliefs of impermanence in Buddhism. But Thay says there's something to this too. Like the modern economy of the nation state also needs to learn how to waste. And what he would suggest is that we can waste well or we can waste poorly. And we do waste poorly with war and accumulation of wealth.
but we could waste wisely by distributing wealth broadly for the wealth of all. And that's the connection I see with Ruskin. mean, people will say it's utopian, it's pie in the sky, it's not the way things really are, but sorry, things were like that a long time ago in a hunter-gatherer community where everyone shared the kill of the day.
MarK (33:30.686)
And maybe there was some honorific sharing where the killer got the, know, the person who took the animal got a little bit more on that particular day. But these things reinforce other important social bonding mechanisms for humans, which honor, love, respect, right? Duty, care. Anyway, so, Ty is really interesting in that way.
maybe less strange of a bedfellow with Ruskin than you might think.
PJ Wehry (34:03.55)
I just talked to Dr. Christopher Yeomans about the politics of German idealism, but there was a side discussion in there that I found, well, it wasn't a side discussion. One of the chapters in his book was on the German conception of property rights and how they took from, in order to really deal with industrialization, they took the Roman property rights and used them.
And that one of them was the right to waste. And they did not have that in the German society before that. So as industrialization happens, there's a lot of surplus. There's, there's a lot going on. There's so many moving parts in economy. They had to rethink their property rights, but when they were agricultural, so for the example that Dr. Yeomans used is if a farmer wanted to salt his field, which is something that
You know, today we take for granted, it's my property. can do what I want with it. That'd be stupid. But if I want to salt my field, you couldn't do that because the whole village had a hold in it or some kind of obligation that you, that you had through your field to feed the village. was your, you know, field, yours to oversee, yours to steward use, you know, really to plant what you want, but you couldn't waste it. Right. And that's obviously that's slightly different from Bataille's use of waste. Right.
MarK (35:22.126)
Mmm.
MarK (35:26.988)
light.
PJ Wehry (35:27.23)
I think I understand that. So I wasn't trying to draw a connection between two words. They just happen to kind of exist parallel there. There's definitely an equivocation there. But this idea, it's just a, I think an example of what you're talking about of that there were times where just at a cultural level, because it wasn't necessarily a legal thing. I mean, it's a it's a little bit hazy, right? Because it's just structured differently in a German.
MarK (35:35.458)
Bye.
MarK (35:49.806)
Okay.
PJ Wehry (35:55.862)
rural agricultural village, but you'd had people who they had a communal obligation for all their property.
MarK (36:04.59)
Well, mean, something that falls into that universe of thinking is like, you know, there are legal systems that actually oblige farmers or rather maybe just like agreements that oblige them to leave part of their harvest for gleaning so that other people could, so that's a form of, that's more of a Bataille notion of waste. It's not destruction.
PJ Wehry (36:26.785)
Yes.
PJ Wehry (36:33.473)
Yes.
MarK (36:34.444)
It's not destruction. It's like not leaving it alone, not using it for utilitarian purposes. And yes, it feeds somebody, you're not just putting it in the bank. You're leaving it there for somebody who might need the food to harvest and to eat. yeah, so anyway, I'd like to write more about and think more about
PJ Wehry (36:38.892)
Yes.
MarK (37:03.47)
Bataille and some the de-growthers have used him in their thinking. But no, he hasn't got a lot of traction because it's not classical economics and it's very super theoretical in one way, very French in that way. But also amazingly prescient. mean, he basically said that in 1949, he's talking about the limits of the biosphere. He's basically
PJ Wehry (37:20.446)
Yeah.
MarK (37:33.324)
He basically makes the same strong statements in that book, The Accursed Chair, about the biosphere long before the book Limits to Growth came out, long before the Gaia Hypothesis came out and all of that. So he was just a very creative thinker.
PJ Wehry (37:53.014)
Sorry, there's a couple, I wonder which way to go. There's a couple different ways to go from there. I do want to be, yes, yes. At the beginning of the book, and I think this is a good place to go, you talk about sensitivity. Can you talk about the, and I think that's a good compliment to our continuing conversation here. Can you talk about the.
MarK (38:02.614)
Always down.
MarK (38:21.614)
Mmm.
PJ Wehry (38:24.476)
notion of, I think it's Latour, use Bruno Latour, his idea of sensitivity. How does that fit into this discussion?
MarK (38:27.394)
Yeah. Yeah.
MarK (38:32.59)
Right, okay, that's good. So yes, comes from, Latour used that analogy, but he was talking in the context of system science that in nature, organisms, both evolutionarily speaking and in kind of like, you know, real present time, they need to respond with, you know, sensitivity, using all their feelers, let's just say, you know, their
morphological structure and their capacities to negotiate their environments and to be able to respond and adapt is what he's saying when he's saying we need to be sensitive. Human beings need to do the same thing. just can't ride. mean, again, this sounds trite, but hearing myself say it, it like, of course, everyone could think this and we should be doing this, but nobody does.
because there are forces greater than ourselves to do this. But we should be making decisions that are sensitive to immediate consequences, future consequences, potential consequences that we're even unaware of. And there's no reason to maximize something necessarily intrinsically. That maximization is not always, is not the best course of action.
know, organisms, I think, in nature, they take as much as they need and perhaps only as much as they need. And they're on a different time scale. They're not storing up or hoarding. mean, yes, they are in some ways, but I mean, it's just that it's it's different.
PJ Wehry (40:25.634)
Yeah. Well, I think what you're talking about here, something that sparked it when you're talking about sensitivity, even in the attention space that we should be attentive to everything that's happening and wanted to go back to a betai.
MarK (40:29.678)
and
PJ Wehry (40:46.582)
We waste our attention poorly as a society. And I think that might be like when you're talking about, most people are willing to go from eight to five and then afterwards they think I don't need to be paying attention, you know, maybe pay attention to what I eat. then after that, I mean, this is, it used to be TV time, but now it's it's phone and TV time. Right. And what that is, it's not that your attention isn't for your use is that you're, you feel that you can.
Because there's so much so many demands in your attention, but you are wasting your attention poorly. Is that a is that a good connection there?
MarK (41:24.574)
Well, perhaps I think that originates because we're all working for the man now. mean, we're basically, we're slaves who happen to be compensated with wages. We've lost the autonomy that, I don't know, did we ever have it? I mean, we've lost a degree of autonomy that makes you think in those ways, so that you try to carve out these little moments.
where you can do what you want to do. mean, mean, vacations, like what are vacations? It's like, I don't think they existed in pre-modernity. think, sure, people traveled, people had reason to go from point A to point B and to learn from the experience, they, whether for whatever reason, whether commerce or whether for, you know, gaining of knowledge or just other sort of interaction with other peoples and other landscapes. But,
I think that we're victims of, again, the whole capitalist system of wage labor that inculcates that kind of reaction. so we try to recover something that we think is human or our time because most of the time we don't have to ourselves.
I mean, Diogenes the cynic. talk about Diogenes the cynic in the book quite a bit too. And the cynics were great. They just said, I've had enough of this. Anything that requires me to be on the hook to anybody else, I'm not going to need it anymore. So they were homeless. They did whatever they needed to do to get their food. And they were happy with what they had. They didn't have preferences.
PJ Wehry (42:53.889)
Yeah.
MarK (43:22.456)
You know, they were, yeah, they were the first street people.
PJ Wehry (43:28.162)
Hmm. The, good. No. Yeah. Yeah. I understand. I love a good Diogenes, the cynic story. I'm, I'm not going to, I'm not going to downplay. do love. I definitely, if you're going to be a street person, you need to have a sense of humor and certainly Diogenes and cynic had that.
MarK (43:30.307)
I'm not recommending that, I'm just saying, you know, but I'm just saying.
MarK (43:51.138)
You got it. Yeah.
PJ Wehry (43:54.254)
so I just talked to someone and I read the book, are you familiar with Joseph Peeper? Catholic. Yeah. So, but, Catholic philosopher 20th century, right? The, just read his book in tune with the world, which is always great because his book's always like 90 pages. So it makes you, you know, you're like, I read the book, but it's, but, his book was on, festivals and, he contrasted the sacred time and the time that it's set apart.
just naturally through rhythms from things like work, which he's not necessarily against, like you need to have some work, but also he said like vacations are this new weird thing, which is what made me think of it. And I hadn't really thought of it in this terms. He's very obvious Catholic. So he's, he's taking this from a very theological standpoint, even though he's talking, speaking philosophy, but I, there's some interesting correlation. know, you were talking about time and
MarK (44:27.31)
Mm-hmm.
PJ Wehry (44:52.02)
and linear time with it. It was like, that's a whole basket of it, you know, like, well, a whole discussion there. But the rhythms of nature and the way that we think about time and is there something kind of going back to how you said that our time is eaten up by the man, as you put it. Is there something that we can take from nature about how we
our use of time and kind of these healthy rhythms and pauses, even as we think of like the first day of spring and everything kind of blooms and rejoices.
MarK (45:30.572)
I mean, yes, I mean, I don't know about you, but I should be the first one in line to learn the lesson. I mean, because we're always on the go, we're always trying to accomplish something, we're always trying to wrest something from life somehow, whatever it is, you know? I mean, we're doing a podcast, like why? Well, there are reasons, you you have your reasons, I have my reasons, I mean, we're willing to do it, it's a nice conversation, it's good, but...
We had to plan it, we had to set it up. It wasn't in the moment, right? and yeah, this notion of like just doing nothing, you know, I mean, there's a great book by, what's her name? Jenny O'Dell wrote, How to Do Nothing. And it's about resisting the attention economy. You mentioned that before, the subtitle is called Resisting the Attention Economy. And it's like, yeah, these sacred moments where you just,
PJ Wehry (46:02.231)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (46:05.588)
Cough
PJ Wehry (46:17.687)
Mmm.
MarK (46:29.174)
It's a kind of a form of protest. I we mentioned diogeny, just like doing nothing, right? Sitting outside in front of your barrel in the sunshine, not being bothered by anybody until some powerful dude comes along and say, what can I do for you? just say, just please get out of my sun because I'm enjoying this moment. But it takes, I mean, my own shtick on that is that that takes effort.
That takes another kind of effort. It's a practice to be able to be in the moment. have to say you're going to do it. You have to tell yourself that you're going to do it. It's not like a manufactured thing, necessarily artificially, but I guess it's act of the will to say, like, I'm going to enjoy this right now. I'm going to enjoy the spring. It's beautiful, right?
In some ways, we're forced. mean, if you're a farmer, for instance, there are, and we are, my wife and I have a small farm and you are subject to the vagaries for good and for ill, usually for ill, of the weather and of the season. So you are forced to consider that. You are kind of at the behest of nature anyway. yeah, mean, our understanding of time
PJ Wehry (47:34.934)
Yeah.
MarK (47:53.196)
has become more linear because it can be now, but it was more cyclical when our needs were more bound up with the availability of resources and our dependence on nature.
PJ Wehry (48:08.396)
Yeah. Yeah. And of course that feeds into discussions of I need to have a certain type of food all the time where we used to, you know, you got excited about each season of food, you know, like because that's when the food was available.
MarK (48:21.464)
After.
Right. Yeah, I mean, another thing I do, I teach in the food systems program at my university. My only bona fides for that really is because we have a small farm and we're part of the food system by virtue of that. But there's something to be said for that. That would definitely change your perspective on a lot of things if you ate seasonally and locally. I mean, people have done this as like a thought experiment or an actual experiment.
PJ Wehry (48:46.185)
yeah.
MarK (48:53.262)
It doesn't last because it's hard to make it last. once there wasn't a choice, once that was it. There's this show, just a YouTube channel kind of show by a guy named Max. Oh, my wife would remember his last name. His last name is falling out of my head. He was a journalist in the UK, first name Max, who has a small little homestead in the UK.
Early retired, I think he's in his 50s, late 50s, and he did that for a year and he documented it. he wouldn't eat anything that he didn't grow himself or came from a very small radius, like 10-mile radius. And he ate only in season. So he ate a lot of eggs and he ate a lot of bread, a lot of cheese. He had a milk cow.
And is there something? No, his first name was Max. I'm sorry I can't remember his last name.
PJ Wehry (49:52.022)
Was it Tucker Max? Okay. Okay. Sorry. I I tried to look it up real quick. Sorry. Yeah.
MarK (50:00.289)
It's well worth seeing because he's like, he's not wearing it on his sleeve at all. It's not one of this. I mean, there's a lot of bleeding heart stuff that goes on in this this genre of living and living experimentally and stuff. It's none of that. This is just the honest to goodness guy. Really curious about can he do it and how is it going to change him to do it and how is it going to change his family to do it? And it's good Max. Anyway.
PJ Wehry (50:02.038)
Yeah.
PJ Wehry (50:29.354)
yeah. Well, yeah, I put it in like either the description or a comment under the under the video. But the I want to be respectful of your time. want to say one. Thank you, Mark. It's been wonderful to have you on. But just kind of this is a common question I ask my guests besides buying and reading your excellent book. What would you recommend to someone who has listened to this podcast, listen to
MarK (50:29.582)
That's fact that'll come to me.
MarK (50:42.445)
yeah.
PJ Wehry (50:58.242)
Talk for about an hour. What would you recommend that they do or think over the next week?
MarK (51:07.694)
MarK (51:14.582)
I don't know, question reality, question what you think is reality. Just for a moment, I mean you've seen that bumper sticker, right? I mean there's one that's question authority. Well that's easy to do. There's another one I've seen that says question reality. you know, it's a good thing to do once in a while, what you think is reality.
PJ Wehry (51:20.848)
I love it.
PJ Wehry (51:31.479)
Damn!
MarK (51:41.602)
And don't think that you're the most important thing in the world. Or think what it would mean that you are not the most important thing in the world. And by extension, your species is not the most important species on the planet. Yeah. So I don't know. That's what I would recommend. And read Ruskin. Read Ruskin. This last. It'll change your life. It's changed a lot of people's lives. Changed Gandhi's life.
PJ Wehry (51:44.246)
Mm.
PJ Wehry (51:54.05)
Hmm.
PJ Wehry (51:59.414)
Yeah, that's a great answer. Yes.
MarK (52:09.816)
Harold Attlee, first Labour Party, Prime Minister of the UK, a lot of people read Ruskin's Under This Last and said, hmm, there's something here, even if it's not all right. It's passionate. It'll change your way of thinking about what living in a world and being a homo economicus is.
PJ Wehry (52:37.075)
Mark, thank you so much. It's been a joy having you on today.
MarK (52:40.248)
Good, thanks for having me.