The Opium of the Suburbs

The Poet W.B.Yeats coined the phrase “Science is the opium of the suburbs”.

It was, of course, a parody of the phrase “Religion is the opium of the masses”, usually attributed to Marx (actually Marx stole it from Charles Kingsley), and far truer than the original ever was.

This week we have seen, in this very weblog, a fascinating example of just how that opium works. It was provided by a correspondent named Don Knotts who came in cursing and swearing and left like a gentleman. We have no wish to prolong the debate with Mr Knotts, or to criticise him personally; but he says he will no longer visit these pages (which are, after all, intended for femmekin), so we think it is reasonable to use his comments as an example of a tendency that extends far beyond Mr Knotts himself and gives us interesting food for reflection.

The essence of Mr Knotts’s argument [read it here], once he had stopped behaving like a drunk, was to paint a (very creditable) word-picture of the vastness of space and time, as indicated by astro-physics; the catastrophic (in earthly terms) nature of long-term cosmic events and the insignificance of our current earthly life when compared to the endless vistas of light years, the death of suns, the clash of galaxies and so forth.

His challenge was that if were to take a telescope and look at the distant heavens the scales would fall from our eyes (to use a Biblical term that Mr Knotts would likely deprecate) and we should see the terrible folly of believing ourselves to be femmekin, or anything other than good suburban late-West-Tellurian cits.

The psychology of this assumption is remarkable. It is something like the way a Christian might expect worldly delusions to vanish in the face of the contemplation of Death, Heaven and Hell; but Mr Knotts, we gather, is an agnostic wedded to the “religion of science” and the comfortable, if rather anthropomorphic, idea that “science is on the side of everyday reality”.

He seems to frequent sites that spend much of their time tut-tutting (well, actually cuss-cussing) about how terrible and crazy are people who believe anything outside the cosy, suburban world of mundane materialism and vulgar cynicism, and how worrying it all is. Why it should worry them we don’t know, but it seems to be a sort of transposition of religious sentiment; a displacement of the heresy-hunting instinct, only this time not in the Name of God, but in the name of suburban dullness.

And somehow they believe (at least Mr Knotts does, and we are sure he is not alone) that they can call the very Heavens as witness to this religion of nothing-in-particular. Not the Heavens of traditional faith, of course (Darwin forbid!) but the Heavens of Professor Hawking.

He is perfectly sure that if we were really to look at those Heavens with a telescope, and ponder the mysteries of astro-physics, our belief that we are femmekin would vanish and we would see the Saving Light of Suburbia. We might even learn to use four-letter words like “real people”.

The idea simply cannot occur to such people that those same Heavens, whether or not we believe they are what the astro-physicists tell us they are (and we suspect that - on one level at least - they are, though we wouldn’t exactly bet the farm on it), dwarf the comfortable, cussing “realism” of the late-West-Telluri suburbs just as much as they dwarf anything else.

Oh no, the West-Telluri Suburbs are Reality, and Daddy Science is “on their side”.

Quite a touching faith, really.

So is it possible that anyone would try Mr Knotts’s Telescope Experiment and have the desired result? Would any Otherkin, say, gaze at the heavens and realise that all their beliefs were foolery and that the World of the Nine-o’Clock News is underwitten by the Andromeda Galaxy?

Actually, we think it is indeed possible. Many Otherkin that we have encountered do indeed live their lives around what Miss Sakura called the “Totem Pole” of Tellurian suburbanism. Their self-definition is based on their Other-ness from that. They often doubt their own sanity in relation to it. A serious look through a telescope at what Daddy Science tells them are the Real, Big Things might indeed bring them back to what they inwardly acknowledge to be “reality”.

Science - outer space - suburban materialism: three entirely different concepts that have very little to do with each other, but in the semi-educated half-religion of late West Telluria they are all tied together in a sort of comfortable - if utterly irrational - knot known, for some odd reason, as “realism”.

It is the Faith of the Faithless, the Myth of the Mythless, the Opium of the Suburbs.

Fluff-Bunnies and the Totem-Pole

An interesting post from the Blue Camellia Club

I wonder if anyone else has encountered the term “fluff bunnies”. It seems to be gaining popularity in certain Tellurian quarters. From what I gather, it can be defined as follows:

“Fluff-bunny” is a term used by Tellurians who hold views that are considered odd by other Tellurians. They use it to designate Tellurians (usually broadly of their own camp) who hold views that they consider to be even odder than their own. It is sometimes a term of quite serious abuse, because the people with the “odd” opinions believe that “fluff bunnies” may harm their supposed credibility in the eyes of “normal” Tellurians.

A curious phenomenon, you will agree. I have heard it used by “mainstream” Otherkin against Otakukin. It is also used by “pagans” against “feminist spirituality” types, whom they see as “fluff-bunnies who believe in a made-up matriarchal Golden Age and fulminate against the Evil Patriarchy” (a rough quotation from a site I saw recently). Such fluff-bunnies, it is feared, may damage the good name and common-sense reputation of “paganism”.

This term interested me. Of the two communities I have seen using it - “pagans” and Otherkin - what do they have in common?

The most obvious thing lies in their chosen names. Pagan (as Miss Madonna pointed out to me) was a term used by Christians to mean “people who are not Christian”. Otherkin define themselves as being “other” than normal human Tellurians. They both define themselves by what they are not rather than by what they are.

The identity of both groups is clearly rooted in what they are not. And that is “normal” late-West-Tellurian society. Their whole self-definition revolves around this L-W-T “normality”. They define themselves by being (or at least thinking themselves to be) different from it; and they condemn others for being too different from it. Everything is a dance around it. It is the totem-pole at the centre of all their cavortings.

To an Aristasian this all seems rather peculiar. To us, L-W-T “normality” seems anything but normal. Ideas like evolutionism, equality and rationalism seem quite as cranky as Odinism, flat-earthism and the belief that God came down in a space-ship.

To an Aristasian the idea that people who hold the first set of beliefs should have the moral authority to laugh at people who hold the second is in itself laughable. And indeed they do not really have that moral authority, which is why so many wild and zany “alternatives” proliferate in the Pit.

Nonetheless, the believers in said alternatives seem anxious to return moral authority to L-W-T “normalism”: on the one hand declaring their opposition to it; on the other hand attempting to corral those who stray too far from it with terms like fluff-bunny. Why? Because they themselves lack moral authority as much as the Pit itself. In fact (in their own eyes) more so, because they lack even the pseudo-authority given by numbers. Their eyes are always on the totem-pole.

One result of this is that while these “differentist” movements spring up vaunting their difference from the Pit, they seem quickly to develop a “surburbanising” wing, whose purpose becomes the claim that they are really fully-functional Pit-Cits who look and think just like everyone else (which was often rather too true from the beginning); and who wish to suppress their own “fluff-bunny” element as being too different. No doubt there will be further revolts against the suburbanisers, and the fluff-bunnies may think of a useful name for them. Mud-mice, perhaps. But it is all a dance in and out, forwards and backwards, around the same totem-pole.

This interests me and seems relevant because Aristasians have - at least to superficial appearances - certain things in common with these groups. Many of us believe we are Exiles - that we are essentially intemorphs in a human incarnation, and while ancient Tellurian matriarchy is not of huge interest to us, we do believe in a feminine world and a feminine divinity, and most of us believe in a more feminine pre-patriarchal period in Telluria too (see The Myth of the Myth of Matriarchy for a Deanic refutation of the “Matriarchy is a Myth” school).

The difference is (well there are man differences, but the one I want to point out here is) that Aristasians define themselves by what they are not by what they aren’t. Late-West-Telluria is not their totem-pole and point-of-reference. Credibility in the eyes of the Pit’s standards of “normality” is not something we crave, firstly because we do not find it credible, and secondly because we have our own standards of moral authority and reality-judgement that are based in eternal values.

This is the difference between a traditional culture and a “modernist” one. The “modernist” or “rationalist”, culture bases its standards of judgement on empiricism, which can give differing results and is never absolute. Consequently, it is bound to give rise to continual differences of opinion. These differences are only really settled by who has the most money and power and can corral the most minds into its camp.

A traditional culture, on the other hand, judges by eternal standards of verity that are uninfluenced by the vagaries of the world of flux and change.

In the end, the soberest leaders of Pit “normality” and the fluffiest of fluff-bunnies have far more in common with each other than either has with us.