Three strands run through the history of humankind: magic, science, and religion. All human societies operate on some combination of each of these; in most, some strands dominate more than others.
To live is magic, there is a science to laughter, and few knowledge-systems understand love as deeply as religion. My aim in 2024 is to braid these three human perspectives into one another, living in alignment with the deepest wisdom of each.
Live
Expanded, my resolution to 'live' means: to fully explore, and come to terms with, what it means to really 'exist'. Over the course of 2024, I want to develop a richer picture of my 'self' - to investigate the boundaries of where 'I' end and the rest of the universe begins (if there indeed are any such boundaries).
The Western philosophical tradition has led most of us to see ourselves as discrete entities, divorced from the rest of everything. We are the 'rational animal' Aristotle talks about, separate from the rest of the Earth's species; we are the 'mind' that Descartes talks about, entirely separate from our own body; we are the 'rational actor' that Adam Smith believed in, making choices based entirely on the rational, transcendent logic in our own rational, transcendent consciousness.
This isn't the way we've seen ourselves for the majority of human history. Modern, colonial, scientific rationalism is rooted in the broader project of trying to wipe out all other knowledge systems. But these alternative means of knowing the universe are not 'wrong', or 'worse' than science - in fact, their insights are increasingly being vindicated, ironically, by 21st-century physics and ecology.
The modern human brain evolved around 300,000 years ago, and for most of its existence, has understood the universe primarily through the framework of 'magic'. Here's a summary of that alternative knowledge-system:
"For the French anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss, magic was a humanisation of the universe. There is a continuity between the human will or actions and the world around us. The converse is also true: magic allows the universe to enter us, whether this be through the movement of the stars or the messages relayed by moving stones. We exist in a complex mutual interaction with the world, through shared participation. Magical practise does not just involve an intellectual understanding of the world but brings in fuller aspects of the human being through the emotions, psychological and spiritual states... Magic combines what Western thought has often separated as the physical and the... emotional realms" - Chris Gosden, The History of Magic.
This is an essential perspective on what it means to 'live': we are, all of us, deeply embedded in networks of relations - many of which are relations with vast, powerful entities beyond our control, and many of which quiver at our every twitch and blink. Think, for example, of your relationship with the solar system: your continued existence depends entirely on the constant circular movement of an enormous ball of minerals through a vacuum, around an unfathomably large nuclear reactor. You are entirely unable to influence this relationship (for now), but your whole life is regulated by it - it's literally the reason for day and night.
On the flipside, take your relationship with the billions of bacteria in your own body. You have enormous influence over this: the entire lifespan of billions of sentient creatures is directed by how you decide to treat your own body - whether you feed it well, over-work it, under-nourish it or injure it.
For me personally, to live is to live (mostly) in England. 21st-century, white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchal England. It is to navigate an embodied relationship with global capitalist distribution networks; buying a chocolate bar from the corner shop means financing child labour in Ghana. Walking down the street as a male-presenting person is to occupy a specific territory in the intersubjective reality of patriarchy; being white means continually navigating a relationship with the socially-constructed spectre of 'whiteness', whether I'm conscious of it or not.
In order to 'live' in 2024, I resolve to notice these networks, to acknowledge my embodied relationship with material reality, to visualise myself as a 'hyperobject' - not one, discrete, rational animal, but a web of relations, stretching out across the globe, across time, changed by, and changing, the world.
Laugh
What a bunch of bollocks.
When I look back on this blog at the end of 2024, I will likely chuckle at the naivety of my 2023 self; if all goes to plan, I'll have read enough by that point to know exactly what is misguided in the above paragraphs. This happens with every blog I have ever written and published on here - all of them are 'products of their time'; often I'll think to myself if only I'd read [insert book] before writing that blog - I would've known not to make that point!
The fundamental insight of the scientific method is that we can never presume to fully understand something. In fact, the life of a scientist (if they're doing their job properly) is a life of continually challenging their own underlying assumptions and putting their ideas through rigorous tests.
This continually-shifting base of knowledge is the source of so many wonderful things: not only the phenomenal levels of human development achievable through successful science, but the excitement, the curiosity that comes from treating the universe as a mystery to be investigated.
But this is also inherently unstable terrain, and could be completely paralysing if we let ourselves get hung up on the idea that we'll 'never fully understand' anything at all. That's where comedy comes in.
Shakespeare scholar Paul Cantor says that the difference between Shakespeare's comedies and his tragedies is simple: Romeo and Juliet follows one couple, and A Midsummer Night's Dream follows two couples. In the case of Romeo and Juliet, it's pretty easy to emotionally invest ourselves in the idea that, for the course of this narrative, the eponymous teens are the most important people in the world, and that nobody else has to struggle like they do. Stick a second couple in there, though, and give them equal stage-time - suddenly, we see lovers for the silly, soppy souls they are. How little self-awareness they have, professing love to each other as if they're the only ones in the world who've ever felt like this, while right next to them, another couple does the exact same!
What comedy brings us is a means through which to cope with our own cosmic humiliation. How to deal with the fact that we are groping for meaning every day in a vast, infinitely-expanding universe, with human minds that are totally inadequate for the task? How to process the sheer unoriginality of our life, the fact that pretty much everything we've been through, someone else has been through before?
Basically, just don't take it too seriously.
To "laugh", then, is to embrace the possibility that there's always much more going on than you're aware of; to embrace your cosmic stupidity with open arms, and have fun with it. Experimentation is key to science like play is key to comedy - I resolve to make 2024 a year of experimentation and play.
Love
The best book I read this year was bell hooks' masterwork, all about love. It will change my life (at least, I certainly hope it will!); a powerfully-argued, comprehensive treatise on the radical, beautiful, essential concept we call 'love', this book clarified for me what, if anything, is our moral purpose on earth.
We can't spend all of our time consciously navigating the complex networks of magical relations in the world, nor can we continually sustain scepticism. Sometimes, what we need is guidance. This is what religion boils down to - faith in transcendent values. Scepticism misses the point, and so does the materially-grounded relationality of magic. Religion offers us the possibility that the universe around us is imbued with specific, overriding principles. At their best, the vast majority of world religions coalesce around this central value: love.
As hooks writes, "love empowers us to surrender". To surrender ourselves to something higher, something greater than ourselves. To surrender ourselves to the possibility that things might go wrong, that we might be wrong, and affirms that, as long as we live according to what hooks terms a "love ethic", we'll be alright in the end.
One of the logical conclusions of this faith is the religious belief in the "afterlife" - the place we'll get to, where our suffering on earth will be redeemed and washed away. But hooks prefers to talk about another religious concept - 'grace' - which allows us an experience of the transcendent right here in this life.
Grace is found when vulnerability is seen as a strength. The history of non-violent civil disobedience movements is permeated with religious experiences of grace, where campaigners were able to use their vulnerability in the face of violent oppression, channel it through love, and achieve a blissful inner certainty. Absolute righteousness is the key to absolution. Grace is present in those moments where we are open and honest with each other about our mistakes, our wrongdoings, and choose to forgive, to heal, to grow.
To love is incredibly difficult, and the most rewarding thing you can do. hooks lists thirteen aspects of love in her book, all of which require immense openness, intense effort, and all of which carry the reward of grace.
Love also has material benefits for the real world - in another hooks book I read this year, Outlaw Culture, I read: "The moment we choose to love we begin to move against domination, against oppression. The moment we choose to love we begin to move towards freedom, to act in ways that liberate ourselves and others."
2024 is set to be a year of unprecedented tragedy, and is filled too with the glistening potential of utopian new worlds. It opens in the midst of a genocide in Gaza. The nature of the climate crisis is that every year will see new 'firsts' - we may even overstep the 1.5 degrees of global warming scientists have designated the maximum safe limit for humanity this year. Love is political, and so must I be.
But 2023 saw me take an extended break from the desperate activism that characterised my 2022. I spent months with a partner I love, reading, healing, working on myself, spending time with my family. I have learned from this experience just how transformative love can be, how generative it always is. I cannot afford to lose sight of those lessons.
To love religiously in 2024, I must have faith that my best efforts to love myself, and everything else, will be enough.
Live, Laugh, Love
We tend to believe that magic, science and religion are incompatible. That's because they are: each envisions an entirely different universe, with different meanings, laws, and ideal behaviours. They mutually contradict one another.
I used to think that contradiction would tear me apart. I spent my college years terrified of the notion that I might never understand 'who I am'. I spent most of 2022 zealously believing in one particular ideology of social change. I spent most of 2023 looking for the 'answer' to the question: how to preserve myself and fight for a better world?
To live, laugh, and love - as 'basic' as those concepts are - is an attempt at this 'answer'. But I realise that it asks many more questions, and provokes much more chaos, than it 'solves'.
2024 will be a struggle between these three opposing forces. Hopefully it'll be a generative one.
I hope that you, dear reader of Blogging Volumes, will find your own way to live, laugh, and love through 2024 too.
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