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Simone Weil and the Need for Roots
- killtimeatwork 6y agoI 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.
- seandoe 6y agoI think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such a plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply connected we are to the natural world and each other. It's a shame we choose to focus on our subtle differences to intentionally divide ourselves.
- Minor49er 6y agoAccording to the article, we are quite the opposite from being blessed, and are more disconnected now than ever before
- agumonkey 6y agoIt's a paradox of knowledge Vs knowing or know-how.
- burntoutfire 6y ago> I think we're blessed to live in a time where we have such a plethora of scientific knowledge that shows how deeply connected we are to the natural world and each other. We are mostly connected to each other via sanitized business transactions. Meanwhile, we don't even know the names of most of our neighbors.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoNot knowing one's neighbours may seem like a problem to you, but it can be a great thing for others. So many young people who move from close-knit small towns or villages to big cities (especially, but not only, sexual minorities), find it liberating that no one is scrutinizing their lifestyles like back home. Also, countries like Finland manage to be high-trust and relatively homogeneous societies, while at the same time having strong expectations for privacy in a block of flats, where neighbours might find it uncomfortable and intrusive if you tried to interact with them.
- burntoutfire 6y agoPeople used to depend on neighbors - for example, they helped each other on their farms on a regular basis. Now it's no longer the case and perhaps the dynamics you're describing is the worst of both worlds, where the actual economical need for rich and frequent interactions with neighbors is gone and everything that's left is the nosiness. But, this itself is a result of modernity compartmentalizing people to the degree where they practically never need help from their neighbors.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoBut if you live in a successful welfare state, what need have you for help from your neighbours? The welfare state might help you even better, as it can benefit from economies of scale, and it will not demand anything in return from you except, once you are working a normal job, your taxes. Also, depictions of pre-welfare-state help from neighbours often underscore how that help was always conditional: sexual and racial minorities, women with children out of wedlock, people not members of the locally dominant church or political wing, etc. often found their pleas for help rejected.
- vixen99 6y agoThe successful welfare state is the product of your neighbours who tacitly agree to maintain society in many ways including of course paying for it. It's a mistake to suppose that that stance is a given in perpetuity.
- totetsu 6y agoThis loud obnoxious Chicago Italian botanist youtuber often makes that point eloquently https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTsAFpSXj7Y
- kergonath 6y agoWe are not deeply connected to the natural world at all. Otherwise we’d have panicked about the mass extinction we are causing already and we’d do more than talking about addressing climate change. We are profiting off nature, turning it into a domesticated version we hope will be sustainable (but have no proof it will be, quite the contrary). And yet it’s true that we never understood the world around us so well. This is fantastic if you are interested in sciences. Overwhelming evidence shows that most people don’t care.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoYou have misunderstood the word connected. The parent commenter meant that we are intertwined with nature, not that we are responsible caretakers.
- kergonath 6y agoOh right. I interpreted it as connected on an emotional level. Also, I might be a bit bitter about the whole situation. In any case, connected or not, nature is about to give us a good kicking.
- kingsuper20 6y agoI 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.
- Nursie 6y ago> 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.
- kewrkewm53 6y agoI think that in the long run wider societies need some shared belief system / culture / ideas to function properly, just like all kinds of communities do in smaller scale. Essentially we are tribal animals, and nothing can really change that. Without a sense of common identity there's little solidarity, and without solidarity you'll eventually have conflict. Failed states with civil wars tend to be those which lack any kind of common identity and ideas, while more successful ones tend to have those.
- mrphoebs 6y agoThe content seemed to be talking about the fundamental common operating system for societies, not individuals. Individuals might have varying needs but as long as their needs align well with a superset of a culture's fundamental tenets the society would be relatively harmonious, or at least that's the way I see the author approaching the subject. I don't think these fundamental tenets need to have a theological basis for them, but as humans an overwhelmingly large part of our history as a people tribes, kingdoms and societies have been grounded by a shared belief in a common higher power. (I'm an atheist btw) >This just seems like unnecessary hyperbole This refutation seems to be as vague and unfounded as the thing it's refuting and doesn't provide much value. It would be beneficial to everyone reading if you can elucidate.
- bittercynic 6y agoThe idea that the unrooted go on to unroot those around them hit hard, but I think the opposite is also true. In the past few years I've had the good fortune to have some very kind, generous people in my life, and when I saw the positive impact they had on those around them, and on myself, I realized that things about me were magnifying the distress in people around me, and I needed to make some changes. If you have the good fortune to be in a situation where you can work on cultivating a generous spirit, I think it could be one way to push back against the machine.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoSimone 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.
- dang 6y agoWhich 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24492000 - Sept 2020 (7 comments)
- elric 6y ago"On the abolition of all political parties" is well worth the read. It paints a rather bleak picture of party politics, but when seen through 21st century eyes, it's eerily prophetic.
- msla 6y agoMy 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.
- mrphoebs 6y agoThese 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 when the vaunted Land Of My Ancestors crapped out This too did not happen until we started settling down and consuming all the local resources until they ran dry. Hunter gatherers foraged from larger areas of land with lower population density like wolves or other big predators of today and in a more sustainable way. I'm sure as tribes prospered and grew they split off exploring for greener pastures. One could argue why they couldn't just have a conflict with their neighbours, it's because beyond a certain size tribes tend to be very violent and dangerous governing structures for their constituents. That's the reason why we don't see geographically contiguous tribes beyond a certain size and they usually move to a more chieftan structure of governance. I think all of this is a round about way of saying, I don't think there are innate, universal, roots that humans are bound by. Beyond our mammalian firmware, and human firmware, most of the rest would be a software programmed through your experiences with the world, that's why there is such an expansive manifold of how humans can live and behave for better or worse.
- BeFlatXIII 6y agoThere’s a(n in)famous mathematician who once lived in a cabin in the woods who strongly agrees with this position.
- mrphoebs 6y ago
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- wbeckler 6y agoThe 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 difference between pre-Braiding Sweetgrass and post. It is chock full of ways for people to become rooted, even from a cold start. Here's the wikipedia page about the book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braiding_Sweetgrass https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Braiding_Sweetgrass
- wbeckler 6y agoAlso of note, even though it was written in 2013, it is today number two on the NYTimes bestseller list, and it's been on the list for 53 weeks. A lot of people are feeling like it's time to grow roots: https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/paperback-nonfiction/ https://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/paperback-nonfict...
- UncleOxidant 6y agoRootlessness 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.
- senderista 6y agoObligatory classic takedown: http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm http://www.bopsecrets.org/rexroth/essays/simone-weil.htm
- dang 6y agoI wouldn't use the word 'takedown' for that because to me the word connotes internet takedown culture, which that piece long precedes. It's an interesting artifact of the early reception to Weil in the English-speaking world. It's deeply ad hominem, though (not to mention grusomely sexist by standards nowadays).
- jqgatsby 6y agoDid anyone else think this was going to be about algebraic roots? The complex numbers are famously the algebraic closure of the reals, but I find myself wondering lately if there is a related thought which doesn’t privilege them over the hyperbolic numbers or the dual numbers.
- bjeds 6y agoYou are being downvoted, but this is not as off-topic as it may seem. Simone Weil had a brother, André Weil. You may not know his name on the top of your head, but I guarantee you that you've heard of the pseuodonym he created together with some other mathematicians: Nicolas Bourbaki. I'm sure Weil and/or Bourbaki has lots to say about these topics.
- helen___keller 6y agoThe 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 anarchy because I don't live on the Italian countryside of the great grandparents I've never met? As far as the metaphor of rootedness: a plant does not wither and die upon being uprooted if it is planted in new soil in a reasonable amount of time (in fact, international houseplant shipping is done bare-rooted due to phytosanitary regulations). Upon replanting, the plant will go into shock and probably have a few weeks/months/years (depending on the size of the plant) of acclimation where you'll see no new growth. Perhaps it will die if the new environment is not offering good conditions. In the right conditions, you don't even need the full plant with original roots, you can just take a cutting off many plants and grow new roots in water or moss, then transplant to soil. In the houseplant community, propagating plants through cuttings in this way is much more common than reproduction by seed.
- mrphoebs 6y agoWhile 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.
- borepop 6y agoWhen 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" to reach full Jordan Peterson status.
- UncleOxidant 6y agoI 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.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoDeleuze - Guattari and their concept of deterritorialization is useful here. Basically, capital destroys the culture of a local area, rebuilds it, and repeats this process ad infinitum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deterritorialization This is easy to observe in somewhere like San Francisco. Most traces of culture from the pre-1990 era have been erased completely or have been turned into a theme park. Contemporary SF has almost zero connection to its roots and the sociopolitical consequences speak for themselves.
- zozbot234 6y agoThere's nothing about this process that's contingent on capital, and 'capital' is a confused term anyway. The causal factors are both social (generally grouped under the broad term "modernity") and technical (since technical changes might make some forms of d18n more feasible than they would otherwise be).
- ceilingcorner 6y agoSocial changes and technology aren’t dependent on capital? I’d say it’s pretty much impossible to divorce modernity from capital.
- vorpalhex 6y agoThe native Americans frequently conquered each other and rebuilt the conquered lands to fit their empire. It happened with the Greeks and Romans, the Persians, etc and etc. This isn't new. Places change, and "capital" has nothing to do with it.
- ceilingcorner 6y agoThe concept is intrinsically linked to globalization and global markets.
- vorpalhex 6y agoSo you're suggesting the ancient Persians were globalizing to form markets? I mean, while ancient trade was quite a bit bigger than folks tend to give it credit I don't know I'd use the term "globalized".
- vorpalhex 6y agoI hate this style of writing, and it can generally be summed up as: "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to <do very vague things like find your roots> 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 specific in the ill you think your solution addresses. You should probably plainly list cons of your claims.
- agumonkey 6y agoWith a touch of name dropping
- burntoutfire 6y ago> "Don't like the current situation? Well you just need to <do very vague things like find your roots> and things will be fixed!" I didn't get the impression he said that things can be fixed.
- loughnane 6y ago> It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of Traveling, whose idols are Italy, England, Egypt, retains its fascination for all educated Americans. They who made England, Italy, or Greece venerable in the imagination did so by sticking fast where they were, like an axis of the earth. In manly hours, we feel that duty is our place. The soul is no traveler; the wise man stays at home, and when his necessities, his duties, on any occasion call him from his house, or into foreign lands, he is at home still; and shall make men sensible by the expression of his countenance, that he goes the missionary of wisdom and virtue, and visits cities and men like a sovereign, and not like an interloper or a valet. I've posted this before, from Emerson's self-reliance. It is describing geographical roots but the human want for short-term novelty at the cost of building on something more familiar is applicable to all sorts of aspects of life. Moderation is key, and so in circles (like mine) where people crave new experiences rootlessness seems much more common an issue than provincialism.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- guerrilla 6y agoAs a lifelong nomad, living for decades on the other side of the planet from where I grew up and having studied in worked in nearly a dozen countries, I can't relate to the sentiment. I think it's quite a leap to connect belonging and this rootedness. If I am rooted in anything it'd be in the deeper continuous history and prehistory of the species, the planet and universe. Anything else seems a bit small. I really don't think we're living in anything particularly special either when we consider the bigger picture which includes things like migration out of Africa, the neolithic revolution, Roman conquest or the migration period[1] that followed. On the other hand the original book looks interesting through the lens of criticism of a lack of local community and forced displacement[2]. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Migration_Period 2. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Need_for_Roots https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Need_for_Roots
- don-code 6y agoSomething that this article doesn't address is that "uprootedness" is not new. Some cultures have been conquered, then conquered again, to the point where "whose god are we worshiping this particular century?" might have even been a valid question. Other cultures have relocated entirely, enough so that there is a Wikipedia article called "List of diasporas". These cultures have been uprooted, but still have a common, shared identity, which seems to qualify rootedness. Otherwise we'd not have Russians, Ukrainians, Kazakhs, and Uzbeks, but some single, post-USSR identity, those demonyms having failed to have any official meaning for 3+ generations. I _do_ think, on the other hand, that modernity has led others to question more about what's around them. Others have latched onto the resulting uncertainty and fed those questioning half-truths and outright lies, definitely, but this to me doesn't qualify as uprootedness.