The reason I am interested in these questions is that I share a mythological image of the caveman common to our culture (whether it’s accurate or not), of him being this sort of pure unadulterated “authentic” human – someone untouched by all the poisons of later civilization, history, ideology and the rest of the detritus that we have collected as humans, the pack-rats of history.

Inherent in that vision though, I recognize the assumption that in thinking of the caveman as this “pure” form of the human being, that I see myself as an impure version. I see this as a rather dangerous assumption, the evidence for which needs only to be verified by looking at the massive self-hatred and personal destruction that so much of the world seems to be involved in. Towards that end then, my experiments in reconstructing some image of our lost caveman ancestor is not a hopelessly romantic retreat back into the past as it is a rescue mission: go back in time to retrieve a treasure that was lost to us somewhere along the way, in order to make our current lives better, in order to rehabilitate how we see ourselves and one another.

And I choose the term “caveman” knowing full well it’s awkward politically incorrect cartoonish implications, and use that as a constant reminder that what I am doing is actually a fairly distorted caricature of reality, rather than reality itself. But I also just like the image of the club-wielding animalistic brute to be the one that we build on – because part of what we’re looking for here is not only the pure or authentic human, but also that crucial difference, that strange circumstance that separated mankind from other types of animals.

Using that image of primitive man as a hulking brute then as our springboard, I like to imagine how a group of cavemen would react to the types of conversations that typically occur on my website. On a recent post over at PopOcculture.com, Ted Heistman, author of the blog “Free Range Organic Human” left a comment about primitive societies, in which he pointed out that “They don’t have celebrities or even writers.” And adding later that “To live in a primitive hunter gatherer society requires almost no ego.” I tend to agree and I think in some sense, it might be impossible to communicate to our imaginary caveman friends some of the ideas we talk about here.

Especially since so much of what we talk about has to do with such abstractions as the nature of reality and consciousness, language and even magic. Actually, magic may be one of the areas we’d have in common with them. Chances are they could teach us far more about it as well, since in my imaginary view of cavemen, the world to them was nothing but magic. Nothing else existed. Rocks, trees, rivers, animals, wind, people – all of them were magic. Today we call this animism, although anthropologists usually go into something similar to the definition we find on Wikipedia wherein animism consists of “personalized, supernatural beings (or souls) endowed with reason, intelligence and volition inhabit ordinary objects as well as animate beings, and govern their existence.” But for our purposes, I think it’s a lot easier and probably more accurate to just say: everything is magic.

From that base starting point, I know a lot of us raised in a scientific-materialist paradigm would start sweating and hyperventilating and arguing with our caveman friend that, “Magic isn’t real!” But remember, we’re not talking about what you believe here. We’re talking about our caveman, who just came home from the hunt. We want to know how he might have looked at the world. To him, everything was definitely magic. There’s no doubt about it.

But those of us who don’t think magic is real can still have a meaningful back and forth with our hairy , thick-skulled imaginary companion. If we think that magic isn’t real, and he thought that everything was magic, then that probably means that the two of us live in almost entirely different worlds. And if his world was all magic and we don’t believe in magic at all, then that means that we don’t believe in his world at all. Or, put another way, we force him to live in our world, simply because we don’t believe his could have even existed in the first place, because magic isn’t real.

Which leads me to wonder if the caveman would be so quick to dismiss the world we live in. If we brought him back to our time, sort of like in that movie Encino Man with Brendan Frazier as a thawed out caveman, wouldn’t he see our world as being filled with magic? The magic of television, of cars, or giant steel birds roaring by overhead. So it’s probably true that he wouldn’t simply drop his beliefs about the world, just as most of us are unable to drop our beliefs in the world.

The crucial difference, I think, though is that I don’t think our caveman friend would tell us that the achievements of science aren’t real. After all, I think it’s science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke who famously said that “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Except, from our perspective, magic just isn’t real.

And that leads me to one of my main questions that I’ve been pondering for several months now: to the primitive mind, to the so-called authentic human, is there any such thing as real and unreal? Can you imagine a couple of cavemen sitting around a campfire debating long into the night about the ontological substructures of the cosmos? Cause I sure can’t. It just seems absurd. But not because I don’t believe that what we think of as “primitive” people aren’t intelligent. Quite the opposite. I think they were probably smart enough and in touch with reality in such a way that they would find it not relevant or meaningful to debate it.

What they would probably do instead is sit around the campfire and tell one another stories. Maybe they would be tales of the hunt, or lessons from a particularly hard winter, or maybe a vision they had once when they hadn’t eaten for many days and collapsed in the forest, or possibly a dream they had the night before.

Which leads me to another question that I’d like to ask if I ever meet a couple cavemen someplace: if everything was magic, and there were no questions about what was real and what wasn’t (simply because everything was equally real and valid), then how did they navigate the differences between the experiences of individual humans? That is, how did they build consensus reality?

Imagine it this way: after a long night of debating cosmological philosophy, our two caveman buddies fall asleep by the fire. When they wake up, the fire has gone cold. They yawn and stretch their arms and the first caveman says to the second: “Last night I became a deer and ran through the forest.”

But the second caveman doesn’t buy that. “No you didn’t. I was up really late and I saw you sleeping the whole time. All you did was lay there and snore.”

Something tells me a conversation like this would never happen among our club-wielding compatriots. It doesn’t ring true with the little mythical image I have of primitive people in my head. My intuition says no, that this is a much later problem we developed for ourselves. My intuition suggest that after the first caveman said, “Last night I became a deer and ran through the forest,” the second caveman would say something like, “Well last night I dreamt that I was running with a pack of wolves and we were trying to bring down a deer.”

In other words, in the primitive paradise that exists in my head, no one disbelieved anyone else’s unique experience. Because everything was magic. And if every thing was magic, then every person was magic, and every person’s experience was magic, and therefore real. There was, at some point, no such thing as the unreal.

Whether or not this really holds true with what cavemen experienced, I couldn’t tell you cause I’m not a caveman. But if a caveman came up to me and told me this was the case, I would have no choice but to believe him. What I mean by that is that I have been getting better and better at respecting other people’s experiences – especially in areas which traditionally violate consensus reality: such as psychedelic experiences, the paranormal, occult, spiritual, and transpersonal or archetypal psychological events.

I have also been doing my best to try out this alleged caveman worldview wherein everything is not only always real, but everything is also always magic. A slightly more scaled-down version of this (which the industrious among you might like to try out provisionally and see how it fits) would be to re-define “reality” as that which can be experienced. It’s a very simple definition which is likely to irk scientific types who are accustomed to ranking experiences based on repeatability, peer verification and the ranking of certain states of consciousness above others. We say that a bus is real because we can all get on the bus and ride it. But we say that a dream bus isn’t real because only one of us can ride it and we like to chauvinistically favor non-dreaming states of consciousness for some stupid reason.

The re-definition of reality as “that which can be experienced” opens up some other fun questions for us to explore. What does it mean to experience something? When we touch something, is that somehow considered better or more “real” than if we only look at it or smell it? Not usually – unless maybe the something being touched is dog poop, which then it might be better not to smell it or touch it, but to look at it as we pick it up with a plastic bag. But the point is: if we don’t rank our physical senses above one another, then how come we rank them above our non-physical senses? Under the heading non-physical senses, I would include perceptual activities thinking, imagining, dreaming, feeling, intuition, etc.

We tend to draw a thick conceptual dividing line between perception and cognition nowadays though. But how fair is that really? When you imagine your girlfriend or boyfriend or your parents or kids, what is it that you imagine about them? Probably, you imagine things like how they look, how they feel, how they smell. That is, our cognition is irrevocably linked to our cognition. An even better way of looking at it might be to say that thinking, feeling and imagining are sensory processes, just like touching, tasting, smelling, seeing or hearing. All our senses are are methods of interacting with objects in the world.

There’s a nice quote I found a while back by psychedelic author Daniel Pinchbeck where he is referencing the work of mystic Rudolf Steiner, one of his heros. Pinchbeck explains that:

“Thinking, for him, is a part of reality - as much a part of reality as any physical object. He points out that we have no right to consider a plant’s ability to produce leaves, roots, and blossoms as separate from the thoughts we have about that plant. It may be that our thoughts about the plant are as much a property of that plant as its blossoms, stems, and leaves.”

So then, if reality is anything that can be experienced, we’ve suddenly been given license to experience reality in lots of different ways – all of which are equally real, equally magical. You might argue something like, “Well, a pink monkey riding a unicorn through outer-space, chased by angry snakes drive semi-trucks and wearing red hats isn’t real because we can’t actually experience it.” But can’t we though? As I said that, didn’t you just experience an image of it happen internally in your mind’s eye? I bet you did, but you might just not want to admit it. Because if you admit that thoughts are as real as anything else, then it might turn out that you are just as responsible for your thoughts as you are for your actual actions in the conventionally-defined “real world.” But that’s a whole other ball-game best left for another time…

So then what did we learn today? We learned that (1) everything is magic, and (2) everything is real. There’s no such thing as unreal. That belief stems from a false dividing line drawn between perception and cognition, or external senses and internal thoughts and feelings. All of it exists. We know because we can experience it. And the range of ways in which we experience things is quite diverse. And I believe that in order to have the fullest experience of life, it would make sense for us to engage reality on as many levels and in as many ways as we can imagine. Because everything that we can imagine is real. Or at least, that’s what the caveman told me…

[Listen to this piece as a podcast here]

I have been thoroughly enjoying the conversations held here lately about the crash of civilization both as a fantasy and as a potential reality, along with the many strains of thinking about how best to live through such a thing. It may seem that I have been unfairly singling out certain individuals or groups within that discussion, but it has been with the sincere attempt at inspiring a heated, open, direct and challenging conversation. I hope it has been as successful for others’ purposes as it has been for mine. It has enabled me to think through many issues (both pro and con) which I had glossed over or misunderstood in the past. I’m sure I still have a ways to go but it is heartening to see people putting such seriousness into these subjects.

Which leads me to the actual critique of civilization itself. As an art school drop-out, to me the purpose of having a critique is so that you can collaboratively communicate with an artist about their work, so as to give them outside insight to make their work better, more successful or more aesthetically pleasing. Likely it won’t surprise you that I was often one to deliver very blunt (and often unwelcome critiques), but I did so (and still do so) under the belief that it challenges people to create better work.

My goal in telling that story of my personal history is twofold. One, it’s intended to sketch in details of me as a more fleshed-out character, and two, I’m hoping to open a conversation about the nature and purpose of criticism or critique.

Wikipedia reveals that the word “critic” comes down to us from the ancient Greeks (kritikós and krités), “meaning a person who offers reasoned judgement or analysis, value judgement, interpretation, or observation.” And it further explains that “critique” has a rich history in philosophy, meaning “a systematic inquiry into the conditions and consequences of a concept or set of concepts, and an attempt to understand its limitations.” As can be seen, the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization fits very well into both meanings.

But at the same time, in my own usage of the term, you only critique something which you would like to make better. If you want to destroy a work of art, then you smash it on the floor or rip a whole through the canvas. You don’t sit the artist down and tell them in what ways their work failed and how they could improve it. In other words, I see the purpose of critique as being improvement rather than refutation. You attack in order to trigger a defense and cause something to strengthen itself (otherwise you would simply deal a destructive death blow and be done with it).

And this is ultimately the same light in which I have come to see the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization: I see it not as a practical destruction or even a philosophical refutation of civilization, but as the ultimate fulfillment of modern civilization. If you look at the goals of the modern primitivists, you will see them say that tribalization and a return to hunter-gatherer societies will enable us to be healthier, live longer, be happier, more free, and to more fully experience the richness of human experience. Though the reputation of Western civilization (particularly the American variant of it) has grown very sullied over these past few years as we have come face to face with our failures and paradoxes, it is undeniable that the goals of the even the most radical anarcho-primitivist philosopher were cribbed almost whole cloth from the now-buried ideals of Western civilization: individual expression, freedom, health, happiness, fulfillment. Anarcho-primitivists are not working at cross-purposes here; they are keeping alive the dreams and ideals upon which all of our lives are in fact founded. Hell, they are really the American Dream writ-large, are they not? They are the settler who moves West to escape repression, live off the land and learn from the Indians. They do not diminish our ideals but elevate them to a new level and offer new insights and contexts for how to think about problems that have plagued us for a long time.

Furthermore, the anarcho-primitivist critique of civilization makes use of what tools? Philosophy, economics, history, anthropology, ecology, psychology, comparative analysis, scientific methodology. In short, these are the tools of civilization. These are the fruits of thousands upon thousands of lives and man-hours spent across generations and milennia. And that is without even speaking of how anarcho-primitivists make use of the physical technology of civilization: the computer, the internet, the printing press, the written language. Some primitivist philosophers, such as John Zerzan, have notably been criticized for this apparent contradiction, that they rely on the constructs of civilization to criticize it.

My point is in all this: in order to fully refute something, you must fully refuse it. You must unlearn the English language, forget all of history and culture and go live naked in the woods and never talk to anyone again. But then, you’re left wondering, how will my ideas spread? Precisely. They won’t - you will have removed yourself from the thoroughly imperialist notion that you need to colonize others with your viewpoints. However, if you’re more inclined to use the best of civilization to effect a change on the worst excesses of civilization, then by all means do so. Because that is exactly what civilization needs, not only to survive whatever comes next, but also to thrive, and even to progress (which I know is a four-letter word among primitivists). So, for those of you out there on the edges critiquing civilization, please continue. What you’re doing is very valuable and you’re raising a lot of extremely important and useful points about the paradoxes and unsustainable patterns of our current situation. And in so doing, you make all of us stronger.

God save the Queen!

[cross-posted from my main blog]

What I mean by that is that in Stross’s futuristic world, the definition of human has modulated past the point that we ourselves would be able to recognize it. Through his history of the future, he described a range of existential options from the archaic way humans are naturally, to neural implants offering pervasive internet presence, to posthumans who have evolved past the point where normal human intelligence could understand them all the way out to aliens, uploaded (and endlessly downloaded and re-downloaded) consciousnesses, simulations of consciousnesses and entire galaxies which have become gigantic thinking machines beyond all comprehension.

It is, needless to say, a dizzying view of the future. A quote by Cory Doctorow on the book’s back cover suggests that the book makes psychedelics obsolete. While that’s a bit far-fetched, it is sometimes hard to keep up with the book. Especially in the beginning, as Stross unloads terms and concepts at the reader at an incredible rate. It can make for some very slow and tedious reading as you get up to speed with the changes in the world he’s describing. Stross seems also to have gotten rather ahead of himself too, as the book is punctuated with expository passages set in a different font which are strictly there to dump data on the reader about what’s happening in the world and universe. They aren’t especially disruptive to the reading experience, but they do often read as though they were simply outline notes created for the book, which Stross was unwilling to excise from his final version.

For all the technical data and the grand scope that Stross is trying to pull off, I also feel like the characters themselves get lost in the shuffle. The actual people in this story seem far less important and interesting to the author than all the whiz-bang technology he is describing and its implications for the future of humanity and posthumanity. Despite being shuffled back and forth among various members of the family which plays the pivotal role in Stross’ future, I never really felt like I could connect with any of them, that I knew what any of them really thought or felt, or frankly that I much cared.

My main drive then to crunch through this overly long book (415 pages) was to acquaint myself with a sci-fi vision of what the Singularity will be like, and how it will impact people. Towards that end, Stross seems to conclude that escaping death and escaping the body and the universe will not allow us to escape the problems and weird foibles of simply being human. It is a moral that would have been driven home a lot stronger, however, if his characters had been portrayed as more human.

It’s hard to say if it was Stross’ own viewpoint coming through, of if he was just trying to accurately extrapolate a thoroughly scientific worldview into the future, but the book takes a rather hardline stance against religion. It seems that any time religion is portrayed, it’s done in a rather negative light, as sort of kooky or antiquated. He mentions a few times some new religions that are proselytizing in the future, but never really goes into what they look or feel like, which I think is too bad. Instead, the over-riding religion of this book is science. Mind is equated with soul, and immortality is achieved by making back-up copies of the mind ad nauseum. Consciousness and all of life is reduced to computer jargon. This passage from page 399 I think illustrated in a nutshell a great deal about what this book’s underlying message or at least worldview seem to be:

“Simple old-fashioned death, the kind that pre-dated the singularity used to be the inevitable halting state for all life forms. Fairy tales about afterlives notwithstanding.” A dry chuckle: “I used to try to believe a different one before breakfast every day, you know, just in case Pascal’s wager was right - exploring the phase-space of all possible resurrections, you know? But I think at this point we can agree that Dawkins was right. Human consciousness is vulnerable to certain types of transmissible memetic virus, and religions that promise life beyond death are a particularly pernicious example because they exploit our natural aversion to halting states.

What this character seems to be forgetting (and I don’t want to mistakenly attribute this viewpoint to the author by means of this one character’s dialogue) is that science too, by way of the vehicles of science fiction and transhumanist speculation is also a “transmissible memetic virus” which is beginning, more and more, to promise us life beyond death. Maybe not for us, but perhaps for our children. When such technology does indeed arise, what kind of “life” will that really be granting us? These are the questions posed by Stross’ Accelerando…

As we are taught by countless television crime dramas like CSI: Crime Scene Investigation, police try to solve criminal cases by looking for perpetrators who have the means, motive and opportunity to commit crime. What this means in a broader sense is that police investigators are a type of historian. They look at events in the past (crimes) and try to explain them in a meaningful way. We call the conclusions and meaning that they derive from their historical investigations “justice.” Justice is a genre of narrative or story-telling in which a person (or group) is victimized in a crime, and in which the person responsible is found and punished appropriately. If the plot points conform to this narrative within reasonable parameters, we say “Justice is served.” If not, then we worry about things like a “miscarriage of Justice.”

On most of these shows, the police go to great lengths and sometimes great personal risk to find out who and why a particular crime was committed. The intrepid investigators almost always prevail by solving the mystery and catching the bad guy. In the investigative process, we will see those concerned trying out many narratives to make sense of the situation and of the forensic evidence which they have collected. In one, the perpetrator will be the husband. In another twist, the bad guy will be a stalker ex-boyfriend. In a third interpretation of the same events, it might be revealed that the killing was completely random or accidental. But the common denominator in most of these shows is that one explanation is ultimately settled on. Whether or not it is indisputably proven or thrown out in court later, the police always end up knowing who the bad guy was and why he did it.

History in a broader sense is hardly ever as black and white as it is on television crime dramas like CSI. Crimes in real life aren’t always solved - or sometimes even properly investigated. And when no crime is committed, historians are often left with scant evidence to conduct their own investigations. They may have to rely on second, third and fourth hand accounts of events which happened hundreds or thousands of years before DNA identification, finger-print databases or blood-splatter analysis techniques were even invented.

As a result, historians too will go through countless narrative iterations to come up with a story about the past that “makes sense” to people today. When it comes to history, we may not be looking for justice so much as we are looking to understand how we stand in relation to that which has come before us. The Da Vinci Code offers an excellent example of how this works on a cultural level.

While the novel itself is a work of fiction, it has provided people with a new story (well, new for most people), a new narrative explanation concerning the life of Christ and the history of the Church and the world as a whole afterwards. Since we don’t have conclusive evidence of what happened - such as video footage, for example - we find ourselves in the position of having to reinterpret old information based on the new narrative theory. As you may have seen, a huge cottage industry has sprung up around the Da Vinci Code - either trying to refute it, to expand on it, or to offer alternative explanations. What many church groups are attempting to do, of course, is to settle on one explanation. Like the CSI investigators, they believe that “justice has already been served” and that the historical evidence has been both explained and uplifted by the commonly accepted traditional story of Christ’s life and teachings.

And yet for the rest of us, we relish the opportunity to do some investigative work for ourselves. We enjoy sifting through the forensics of history, combing over ancient documents and works of art, looking for clues that others may have missed. And really, you can’t blame us. The heroes of our pop culture in both television and movies are so often police on a quest to uncover the ultimate truth. They are teaching us about nothing unless they are teaching us about how history works, about the push and pull between theory, evidence and other forces. And they teach us about the powerful human need to “close the case” - to finally settle on one explanation and move on with our lives.

It makes for effective drama, that much is certain. But is it always an accurate reflection of life? Are the mysteries of day to day existence ever really conclusively solved? Or does their importance simply fade as we move farther away from them in time? Who says we have to ever settle for one explanation? What if no explanation ever really satisfies all the conflicting evidence of something? What if the original experience - as in the case of Christ - goes outside the realm of accepted human reality? It may be that for ordinary events, like “Who rear-ended my car?” there may be one single satisfactory explanation. But it may also be that the “why” of it all, we can never really settle. Did they mean to hit my car? Did their breaks fail? Were they stopping short to avoid hitting a squirrel in the road?

The thing I like about the ubiquitous cop shows today is that they give us the tools and imagery to ask these questions and they encourage us to look for the truth. I believe that the most powerful lesson we can take from them though is to internalize this process of searching and explaining. Do your own research. Get out in the field and ask questions. Don’t always settle for the simple solution. Be prepared to change and grow and let go of your preconceived notions as you search and explore. And if you do finally settle on one final explanation, be sure you’re doing it because you know it’s the truth, not because your one hour television slot is drawing to a close and the audience demands a satisfying conclusion.

The level of weirdness, of impossibility, of paradox that I have allowed into my mental and personal life has reached a saturation point. I have seen firsthand and heard from others. I believe and I disbelieve at the same time. I want to know and understand but suspect more and more that I never really will, and that maybe no one ever really does. I feel comfortable now living inside the skin of a world where, “Everything is only a metaphor. There is only poetry.”

Conspiracy theory, it seems, is all about the poetry of evil. Or maybe it is the sweet spiritual semantics of those attempting to throw off despair, but who look around at the world and see only mountains of deception and danger ringing them in on all sides. But if we look for a moment at the pure poetry of evil, what makes the best metaphor? What is the most shocking and horrific image of evil which our imaginations can conjure? Predatory aliens from outer space? The dark alien perversions inside of human beings? The cold calculating inhumanity of power? A beast with seven heads rising out of the sea with a lascivious whore on his back? (Personally, I like that one!)

“Mystery, Babylon the Great, The Mother of Harlots and Abominations of the Earth.” The language and imagery change to suit the times and the thinker. It’s strange that we live in a world where we’re forced to ask: What’s more scary, the President of the United States allowed (or commanded) 9/11 to happen or that all things are empty and meaningless, and it’s furthermore empty and meaningless that it is empty and meaningless? No wonder we end up spending so much time chasing our own tails.

It’s hard for me to say anymore really, to compare two terrors and decree which is the greater. When everything becomes evil, the horrific becomes banal and boring. “Desensitization!” some might call this, placing the blame squarely on the constantly violent offerings of the media. But “evil” doesn’t thrill me like it used to. And I don’t think that’s a bad thing, because it means that I no longer hurl that epithet like a snowball at people unfortunate enough to pass by my fortress of ice.

And yet the warm transformative power of poetry still fascinates me, the ability of images to penetrate us deeply, to change our lives and our psyches for the better, for the worse, or more commonly for both. For evil, like all things meaningful and important, is a paradox. It confounds us that our myriad self-interests meet at cross-purposes. It seems impossible to us that those we consider “out to get us” might actually be there to help us (although maybe only when it helps them to do so), or that they might not even have noticed us at all. It is quite possible that to be caught in the struggle against evil is to be caught by our own hubris…

I am a victim because I am important, because I am dangerous, because I am “awake”. I fight because I have no choice, because evil must be overthrown!

Yet the battle against evil and its citizen-soldiers, like the image of evil itself, is also poetry. It is a myth that we ally ourselves with in order to draw strength from a great human tradition - a literature of freedom and resistance, of true humanity. What we seldom recognize is that both David and Goliath need each other. Those of us on the ground require “spiritual wickedness in high places” to aim our stones and arrows up towards. And those we perceive as the “rulers of the darkness of this world” need the myth of a people to rule, and of their own inner poetic emotional struggles between stewarding and protecting or manipulating and exploiting those squirming beneath their golden boot heel.

It is a dance that has continued through the ages and which will continue long after we have returned to dust and our theories to bits and bytes floating in the electronic ether. That’s not to say though, that the wiles of evil are insubstantial or that we shouldn’t resist them. Because we should; we must. Our poetry, our mythology, demands it. But if it really is poetry - if any of this is in any way accurate - then we ought to use it to uplift our spirits. For this has always been the purpose of poetry, myth and song; it’s never been intended to degrade, to diminish or to destroy. Therefore, our poetry ought to reflect the rejoicing in our hearts, our gladness that we actually have found a role to play in this life, that there really is a grand story unfolding, with a beautiful prophecy simply begging to be fulfilled. We must recognize that at the end and at the beginning of any struggle is hope. Or else, why struggle in the first place?

If it is all only metaphor, then let us pick the best ones and thumb our noses at the ones that bore us or scare us into complacency. For ours is the Kingdom, the power, and the glory forever ever. It has to be. Our poetry demands it.