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Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

paulkingsnorth.substack.com

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Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#51

Post by UncleOxidant »

wbeckler wrote: post #15

The question arises, what do you do about the Machine? How do you get roots? If you are looking for answers, a great place to start is "Braiding Sweetgrass" by ecology professor and Native American Robin Wall Kimmerer. I'm an avid reader across many genres, and this is my favorite book. Many people I know have said that this book was the most important book they've read. When I look at my own life, I can see the diff…

Rootlessness and rootedness are themes that wind through most of Wendell Berry's works as well. His novels Hannah Coulter and Jayber Crow take a good look at what increasing rootlessness does to a community: increasing loneliness and isolation, but also eventual environmental destruction.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#52

Post by UncleOxidant »

aphextron wrote: post #37
Nursie wrote: post #5

> We need these roots. You might. I need friends and family, some community participation is nice, sure, but I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship, which these seem to be tied up with in the text. > Our culture is not in danger of dying; it is already dead, and we are in denial. This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole.

>I don't particularly feel the need for gods, ancient traditions or worship You do. It's just that in modern society we've substituted these for more easily digestible, commodified, manufactured replicas. Hollywood celebrities have replaced the pantheon of Greek gods. Consumerism is the new piety. Techno Utopianism and liberalism (in the classical sense) has supplanted the ancient traditions of old. The Zuckerbergs a…

Don't forget politics. As traditional religion has retreated Politics has taken on a greater role - politics as tribal identity. Good article here: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/04/america...

"The notion that all deeply felt conviction is sublimated religion is not new. Abraham Kuyper, a theologian who served as the prime minister of the Netherlands at the dawn of the 20th century, when the nation was in the early throes of secularization, argued that all strongly held ideologies were effectively faith-based, and that no human being could survive long without some ultimate loyalty. If that loyalty didn’t derive from traditional religion, it would find expression through secular commitments, such as nationalism, socialism, or liberalism. The political theorist Samuel Goldman calls this “the law of the conservation of religion”: In any given society, there is a relatively constant and finite supply of religious conviction. What varies is how and where it is expressed."

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#53

Post by UncleOxidant »

borepop wrote: post #32

When an author is (1) simultaneously lamenting the loss of "roots" and "real culture" and attacking internationalism, (2) taking gratuitous shots at "wokeness," and (3) dressing the whole thing up in an intentionally vague "intellectual" wrapper that doesn't actually add anything substantive, it's not that hard to see where he's heading. All this article needs is a light sprinkling of references to "cultural Marxism"…

I kind of see what you're saying, but it seems odd to use Weil for this kind of project since she was well known to be on the Left of the political spectrum (and also quoting Arundhati Roy). I don't see this article going in the Jordan Peterson direction, though, but more in the direction of Wendell Berry.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#54

Post by BeFlatXIII »

mrphoebs wrote: post #23
msla wrote: post #10

My roots are the roots of all humanity: War, pillage, xenophobia, power-grabs, jealousy and envy, and, finally, decamping to somewhere more promising when the vaunted Land Of My Ancestors crapped out. Multiple times over, given current knowledge about prehistoric human migrations, because I refuse to limit "my roots" to what a 19th Century Scientific Racist would say about them.

These roots you profess as being our core are more modern than you think in terms of our overall history as a people. - For waring more complicated and denser societies were required than our hunter gatherere tribes of old - For Pillaging, and power grabs, jealousy, envy individual ownership was required that didn't emerge until we settled down with farming anywhere at 10,000 bc >decamping to somewhere more promising…

There’s a(n in)famous mathematician who once lived in a cabin in the woods who strongly agrees with this position.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#55

Post by kingsuper20 »

killtimeatwork wrote: post #2

I tend to fully agree with the thesis. Sadly, there's nothing to return to, so I am condemned to live in a current barren wasteland of modernity.

I think it's time to turn your view locally. Barring larger disasters, the rest of the world is mostly a simplified model viewed through a computer screen or TV.

Given the current social direction and inertia, maybe it's best for people to begin channeling their own Saint Leibowitz.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#56

Post by mrphoebs »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #54
mrphoebs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These roots you profess as being our core are more modern than you think in terms of our overall history as a people. - For waring more complicated and denser societies were required than our hunter gatherere tribes of old - For Pillaging, and power grabs, jealousy, envy individual ownership was required that didn't emerge until we settled down with farming anywhere at 10,000 bc >decamping to somewhere more promising…

There’s a(n in)famous mathematician who once lived in a cabin in the woods who strongly agrees with this position.

I don't think mine is a position as much as general facts about pre-history that calls into question the parent commenters position.

Now in the case of the (in)Famous mathematician, he seemed to have made a value judgement based on his interpretation of similar facts and the decay modernity wrought, and so it goes.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#57

Post by mrphoebs »

helen___keller wrote: post #26

The more I re-read and think about this article, the less meaning I find in it. There's a fair bit of lamenting, but it's ultimately difficult to ascertain what exactly is the issue the cause and the consequences of this great uprooting to any further granularity than: things are different than they used to be and it's never going to be the same. This is true, but to what end. Will we truly end in civil war or anarch…

While I see your point about the article's inability to cogently driving the reader to a deserved insight, Me thinks you've stretched the metaphor into an analogy and pulled at it until it's been "uprooted" :)

The thought provoking premises/ideas in it at-least, what ever bits and pieces that were locally consistent was some food for thought.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#58

Post by burntoutfire »

vorpalhex wrote: post #45

I hate this style of writing, and it can generally be summed up as: "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to and things will be fixed!" The author is of course not alone in writing this kind of meaningless content. "We simply need more Justice!", "We need to ground ourselves", "We need to rediscover God" etc etc. If you want to write on these lines start by defining, very very tightly, your terms. Be…

> "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to and things will be fixed!"

I didn't get the impression he said that things can be fixed.

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#59

Post by dang »

mark_l_watson wrote: post #7

Simone Weil gets good coverage on HN. Last year I bought a biography of her after reading a thread on HN. She was an interesting character.

Which biography? I read Petrement's bio of her a long time ago (they were school friends IIRC).

Her older brother was André Weil of course. As a kid she decided she would never have the talent to be a mathematician because he was so good at it... talk about sample bias. The philosopher George Grant said something like (paraphrasing) "that family had intellectual culture on a level undreamt of in North America".

There's a lovely article about the family by André's daughter here:

My Father André Weil (2018) [pdf] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492000 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)

Re: Simone Weil and the Need for Roots

#60

Post by dang »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #54
mrphoebs wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These roots you profess as being our core are more modern than you think in terms of our overall history as a people. - For waring more complicated and denser societies were required than our hunter gatherere tribes of old - For Pillaging, and power grabs, jealousy, envy individual ownership was required that didn't emerge until we settled down with farming anywhere at 10,000 bc >decamping to somewhere more promising…

There’s a(n in)famous mathematician who once lived in a cabin in the woods who strongly agrees with this position.

Please let's not do guilt by association.
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