At A Doomer Conference in The Catskills
Raging against the machine for two days with Eastern Orthodox hippies, philosopher tradesmen, & Catholic anarchists.
Dear Readers,
I’m writing this on Sunday afternoon while my memories are still alive and my voice is still dead (laryngitis). I love it when multiple people pen narratives about the same event because we get to see one reality through multiple pairs of eyes—and my vantage point might be quite different from yours (see the parable of the blind men and the elephant). If you also attended this conference and wrote about it, please do link your report in the comments.1
xo,
Amelia
At 6:30 a.m., I shiver, set my violin and two long, pale daikon radishes in the trunk, and turn the key in the ignition. Off I fly into the dark. The dark turns to gray, and a yellow line appears on the world’s edge, and the hills swell up around me, and the road begins to twist and turn. My car vrooms up the steep mountain roads and coasts silently into the valleys, and soon, in the Catskill Mountains, I see the two faces of fall.
Down in the valley, the world is still and dead. All is draped in a shroud of frost and shade.
Then, vroom.
On the mountaintop, I’m greeted with a blaze of red, fluttering with the breeze. The sun, still rising, shines straight into my eyes, and I try to keep the yellow lines of the road in vision, but I still can’t help but brake on and off.
On the mountaintops, my car capers like a fox. In the valleys, it floats like a ghost.
Apple bobbing in a barrel. Skeleton six feet down.
Two faces of fall in a roadtrip dans macabre.
But these fronts are illusions. Beneath the frost, the grass still lives, and later in the day, it will be green and dewy. The red leaves, however, are dead. Later in the day, they will fall. And rot.
This gives me hope. The things that appear to be alive are often dead while the things that appear to be dead are often quite alive. I guess what I’m trying to say with these fancy poetic words is just: We have reason to hope.
The Complex Flavor of Heterodoxy
When I arrive at the conference, I make a beeline through the milling men to K., a strikingly womanly figure in a male-dominated room.2 With her floorlength skirt, smooth, oval face, and level gaze, she looks like a midwestern madonna. But she’s far too energetic and down-to-earth for the comparison to last for long.
Hm. This is a tricky story to tell. There are too many characters in too short of a time, but I’ll try to give you the flavor:
Glamorous James Bond California couple. She, with perpetually windswept hair; he, terse-jawed. Leather jackets. They ride motorcycles.
Trucker towering in an outrageous leopard print cowboy hat.
Editor of a Christian magazine.
Tanned, weathered, beautiful farming family. Look like a different species than city people.
Slim, gray-haired lawyer dressed in a way that makes you realize your own clothes don’t fit particularly well. Walks, sits, gestures with care.
Two brother builders, one bright-eyed and warm, the other solemn and gray.
Children running in and out. Muffled screams and laughter from outside.
I’m sorry that’s only a small sampling, but I have laryngitis, and I’m tired and experimental tonight.
On our way to lunch, K. walks barefoot on the icy pavement. She tells me women must stop shaving. She’s consorted with the Amish, danced with men who wear dresses, and now she’s a nomad married to an inveterate hitchhiker.
I find myself alongside P., an ageless sort of man, with a wide mouth that settles naturally into a smile. Imagine him with at least one arm held out to slap someone on the shoulder, or to usher someone in. I ask P. about his surname, and he explains its Protestant Scot origins. Once, a few years back, he ran up north from Berlin and visited the family seat in the Hebrides (I think?). It was leased for a fine bottle of Scotch each year. Now, he’s a slumlord in Montana, but he hopes someday to buy his castle on the sea.
That night, in our beers, a rugged old man in a baseball cap growls to me about caves in [location censored] that the local militias have converted into gun-packed armories.
Our British guest says we should never have left the Paleolithic age. He speaks wistfully of Lascaux. If only we had kept to painting deer on cave walls.
The colloquial term for iPhone is “Satanic rectangle.”
Oh, and if you were wondering about the two Daikon radishes, I lead a workshop on kakdugi at the end of the first day. My prep cooks are a young NYC city-slicker and a California farm girl. We lick the salt off our fingers and head back to the venue for a potluck, where we play music and sing into the night. I lose my voice, and keep on fiddling.
Flavor. You should have some idea of the flavor now.
The Paradoxical Content of Cheerful Doom
I’m not going to even tell you what we discussed at this conference. I’m just going to give you a list of book and essay recs. Read:
Nature (yeah, like, the one outside your house)
The Spiritual World of Isaac the Syrian
Rebels Against The Future: the Luddites and their war on the Industrial Revolution
Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain
All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life
Shop Class as Soul Craft:An Inquiry into the Value of Work
The Unabomber Manifesto: Industrial Society & Its Future
The Art of Not Being Governed: An Anarchist History of Upland Southeast Asia
Zen & The Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
“The Revenge of the Sacred in Secular Culture”
“Manifesto: The Mad Farmer's Liberation Front”
“Supreme Incoherence: Transgender Ideology and the End of Law”
Okay, I give in. I’ll try to summarize the content of the talks (don’t be lazy, Amelia). The unifying thread, as I saw it, was:
An oppressive and controlling bureaucratic state coupled with a materialistic “meat lego” anthropology and the exponential rise of tech is driving our society towards an increasingly likely dystopia. (Think Brave New World.)
Cheery stuff, right?
Some of my favorite sessions included a lawyer explaining the dangers of IVF to the legal definition of the family (his talk forthcoming in essay form); an English prof dismantling dreary feminist interps of The Taming of The Shrew; philosopher tradesmen discussing the importance of honor in their work (which is threatened by surveillance and micromanagement).
Faced with the powers that be, all the speakers expressed doubts about our ability to turn the tide. But for such a doom-laden conference, people were rather cheerful. In fact, it didn’t feel like a conference at all—much more like a mix between a church potluck and Hillsdale College debate team hang-out.
A Takeaway of Service & Humility
The morning after I sped home to my family, my pastor gave a sermon on Christian service. He is a mild and jovial man, so these words stood out in flame when he spoke them:
“The purpose of Christian service is to disrupt power.”
I gawked. Pastor Steve, why, you should have been at the conference too!
By the end of the conference, the speakers had articulated a few principles of resistance. What stood out to me was the cautious humility of these conclusions. They lacked the pride and naivete of the 19th century utopian movements, early Communism, and 60’s counterculture. Each speaker was intensely aware that he could easily become the monster he sought to destroy. It was a room full of orthodox Christians; they knew their sin.
The message I gleaned was this: Doom is far less devastating when you have God, personal integrity, and like-minded friends. The powers that be can’t take those things away. Make beautiful art and sound buildings and nutritious food. Love well. Mortify your sin. Be a servant. If you’re called to it, be a voice crying in the wilderness.3
P. will eventually sell his trailer parks to buy his castle. And K. will settle down from her nomadic life to teach flocks of young women to plant radish seeds in the desert, bake bread barefoot, and forsake the razor.
The things that appear to be alive are often dead while the things that appear to be dead are often alive. Dead leaves and frosted-over grass.
That’s my take-away.
Choose life. Not death. And live.
We’re all under the Chatham House Rule, so I’m doing my best to conceal the identities of those in attendance, even where it seems unnecessary.
I should note that this was a heterodox gathering. I’m sure some people there have more specific political strategies, including trying to build a parallel society that escapes the ills of this one. Especially among the Catholics, there were monarchists and probably some Christian nationalists. But the idea of small seeds of faithful living I describe was definitely a prevalent strain among those in the room.
What a sweet, sweet remembering. Neither my husband nor I care about the privacy rules and don't care if we're mentioned by name. I the picture you painted of everything and everyone -- you're such a poet and see so much good in the world, and that shows in how you speak and write excellently!
Wonderful description! I hope you've sent it to the conference organizers-- to everyone attending, in fact-- to encourage them.
Of the list of books, I've only heard of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which indeed is good. It explained Kant to me.
I went to a conference in San Diego last week that wasn't nearly so inspired, but it was constrained by the topic, a misguided new Marxoid economics movement in law schools.