​No Ecological Civilization
without Guitars

A role for Popular Music in helping
bring about a more just and sustainable world

Photo by Matthijs Smit on Unsplash

Our experiences and relationships are the building blocks of our lives. Indeed, all living beings are composed of their experiences and relationships; even the energy within the depths of matter is a kind of experience, a kind of feeling. Among these creative interactions are pivotal moments that have the potential to make a profound difference.  The process way of living focuses on moments of experiential interaction between individuals, communities, and ecosystems. It emphasizes an appreciation of the beauty and poignancy of life and our capacities to change the world for the good, for love and justice, in service to the creation of compassionate communities and ecological civilization.

The Cobb Institute

If we want a society in which the sense of belonging is strong, people are concerned for one another, and there is strong commitment to the common good, we need a metaphysics that shows that we are in fact part of larger societies and have no existence apart from our relations to others.

John Cobb

If we want a society in which the people live with respect and care for the community of life, we need popular music: the transgressive type that enhances a sense of vitality and critiques conventional norms, and the romantic type that encourages a reverence for intimacy, both inter-personal and collective.  Music is, after all, what feelings sound like.  A metaphysic of togetherness, such as advocated by John Cobb and folks at the Cobb Institute, is a metaphysic of feeling.  It suggests that something like feeling, prehensions, goes all the way down into the depths of matter.  The point is simple.  There can be no ecological civilization - no just and sustainable and joyful communities - without guitars.  Cellos, trumpets, flutes, and pianos, too.

​Jay McDaniel

​Imagine

springboards for reflection, and songs for enjoyment,
while considering the role of romanticism in popular music.
Please note, transgression also has its place.

​

Our aim is to create an ecological civilization.​

​Pando Populus is a platform for people who care about big ideas and the Earth. Our aim is to create an ecological civilization. We’ve taken our name from the largest and oldest organism on the planet — a giant quaking aspen tree, spread over more than a hundred acres, thousands of years old, connected by a single root system.Various movements and organizations focus on one aspect or another of ecological concern. We endorse and celebrate their work.

-- Pando Populus, a popular articulation of Whitehead's philosophy

Why popular music is important​

For many people throughout the world, popular music is a primary means of identify-formation.  Indeed, in many parts of the world it is much more effective than institutional religion and political propaganda.  It provides people with worldviews, stories, emotional satisfaction, and touches of transcendence.  It helps them name their experiences and understand the experiences of others.  Of course popular music can be soporific and anesthetizing, even as it can also be profound and life-enriching.  But much depends on the agency of the listener: on what he or she does with the music she enjoys.  Fortunately, by means of such agency, and in combination with many other factors, including ideas and friendships, popular music can help people become the kinds people who contribute to a more just and sustainable world with, as it were, good vibrations.  Here "vibrations" is a synonym for modes of interaction between people that are receptive to emotional as well as intellectual connections.  The music need not be message music.  It can simply be enjoyable, and in its enjoyable quality it can elicit sensibilities of listening, wondering, caring, grieving, merrymaking, imagining and honesty to the totality of life which are essential to ecological civilization.  Without a bit of merrymaking, without honesty to life and a richness of imagination, there can be no ecological civilization.

-- Jay McDaniel

What is Romanticism? 
Eight Dimensions of Romanticism 

Imagine a world where people live authentically, in touch with their feelings, entering into mutually enhancing relationships that are loving, intimate, and respectful.  There's no patriarchy or cultural domination based on race, class, or gender.  There is a practice of hospitality: hospitality to other people and hospitality to others.  This practice is combined with a sense that everything is connected to everything else in deep ways, and that we can truly experience and respect the "vibrations" of other people, to be sure, but also the "vibrations" of hills and rivers, trees and stars.  In this world, good listening is considered as important as loud talking.  The world is filled with what Buddhists call "mindfulness" in the present moment.  And education is aimed at the cultivation of empathy, not just the cultivation of knowledge.

Imagine further that people in this world learn from the wisdom of others, but also trust in their own wisdom, too, unafraid to claim their inner truth.  They may draw from religious teachings, but they also learn from the natural world itself, which is a source of their own wisdom.  As they look out at the world, they sense the aliveness of all things, trying to live with respect and care for the entire community of life.  This means that they work together in practical ways to build communities that are creative, sustainable, participatory, multicultural, ecologically wise, humane to animals, and spiritually satisfying, with no one left behind.  Their practices include justice-making and merrymaking.  They enjoy music festivals but they are not afraid of hard work and the grittiness of love.  They do not draw sharp dichotomies between spirit and flesh, mind and matter, and they move past conventional binaries of sacred and profane.  They see something sacred in the ordinariness of life.

That is the dream of what process philosophy might call healthy Romanticism. It's the way of living and kind of world imagined in Imagine. If this dream is to be approximated in real life, there must be channels through which people partake of the dream and become the kinds of people who can help bring it about.  In our time, popular music is one such channel, and arguably it is as influential, perhaps more influential, than organized religion.

Of course popular music can be unhealthy as well as healthy; anaesthetizing as well as life-enhancing.  Unhealthy romanticism is overly privatized and neglectful of others for the sake of a private nirvana.  By contrast healthy romanticism is world appreciative, seeking to build a better world even as it also seeks personal fulfillment in satisfying personal relations.  

Today popular music is the primary conduit for healthy and unhealthy romanticism.  Here are eight romantic emphases -- sometimes complementary and sometimes conflicting -- found in songs from multiple genres.

1. A spiritually infused world.  Romanticism advocates a spiritual view of life in which the world is understood as a communion of subjects and not simply a collection of objects.  Something like “life” or “spirit” is found in mountains, trees, hills, rivers, animals, plants and people.  People are dimensions of, not exceptions to, nature. 

2. Wisdom through Intuition. Wisdom comes, not through the application of reason alone, but through emotion, intuition, and imagination.  Reason (including scientific reasoning) may be a useful tool, but it has its limitations.

3. Longing for an Organic Unity of People and Nature.  Longing for a beloved community with ecology included, a time when people live and share with each other in harmony with the rest of the natural world.

4. Exploring Enchanted Worlds of the Imagination.  Imagining worlds that can be and perhaps ought to be, which are filled with awe, wonder, mystery, and enchantment.

5. Inner Truth. The individual can come to know the truth about life and the world without reference to divinely revealed books (Bible, Torah) or religious authorities (priests, ministers).

6. Artistic Authenticity. Artists (musicians) need to express their inner spontaneity, originality, and "inner truth." There must be a lack of artifice, a sincere commitment to creativity, honesty.

7. Nostalgia for a Vanished Past, when the world was a simpler and more enchanted place.  This is a desire to get back to the garden (Joni Mitchell).

8.  Preference for Asian wisdom and Native American wisdom over western European or Abrahamic wisdom (Jewish, Christian, Islamic).

Modes of Romanticism

If your approach to life, or the music you enjoy, or the faith that informs your life, partakes of one or several of these sensibilities, you partake of the romantic approach to life.  Please note: you need not partake of all the characteristics.  Just a few is enough to make you a romantic.  Not a hopeless romantic.  Not someone to be dismissed as unrealistic.  After all, romanticism can be as realistic -- indeed more realistic -- than cynicism, which hides behind a veneer of sophistication in order to avoid being embarrassed by sincerity.  Romanticism is itself a form of realism, taking seriously the juxtaposition between actuality and possibility, and dwelling in the intersection between them, attentive to both.

The Contrast between "what is" and "what can be"

Usually romanticism works with a contrast between “what is” and “what ought to be.”   The prophetic imagination builds upon this contrast: contrasting a world of injustice with a possible world of justice.  As Martin Luther King, Jr., puts it: I have a dream.  The dream is "what ought to be."

“What ought to be” can be imagined as a vanished past or a hoped for future, or both.  In some forms of popular music the vanished past is childhood; or a less mechanized, agricultural society; or a world before "religion" or "communism" or "capitalism" came to corrupt things.  

But the dream can also be simply an enchanted world of the imagination that never was actual and perhaps may never be actual, but which functions as a helpful critique of what is.  It is a utopia, not understood as a reality to be achieved but as a critique of what is, so that new possibilities can open up for what can be.  

“What is” is typically imagined as “the way things are today” or “the way things are thought to be by most people.”   "What is" can be a troubled state of affairs in the world (people and other living beings are treated as mere objects, catastrophes are upon us) or a troubled way of thinking (the world is a collection of objects, everything is perfect just as it is). 

Romanticism typically says, with the late Thomas Berry, the universe is really a communion of subjects, not a collection of objects.  

The Threefold Theme: Life, Death, Resurrection

The romantic impulse often unfolds in terms of a threefold theme: a stage of innocence, a fall into a tragic state of affairs filled with suffering, and a redemption from the fallen state either by a recovery of lost innocence or the uncovering of a new possibility.

In terms of the Bible, this pattern represents a fall from the Garden of Eden, a fall into an ambiguous and sometimes sin-ridden state of affairs, and the uncovering of a new hope, represented as the New Jerusalem in the Book of Revelation.  For simplicity’s sake, we can call it Life, Death, and Resurrection.

Romantic music with a protest spin portrays and critiques the Fall.  The fallen state of affairs is riddled with ambiguity and suffering, and the music communicates that reality, sometimes discovering amid the ambiguity and suffering, a hint of redemption.  It presents death in vivid form and discovers a possibility of resurrection amid death.  Other kinds of romantic music focus on the Garden and our possibility of returning to it, or moving forward into the imaginable Future.

The Song of the Universe

This threefold thematic can be articulated in deeply personal terms (a broken relationship, a new love) or in social terms (a broken society, a new kind of society).  In much popular music today, the threefold thematic is articulated without reference to a divine guide or power, but often there can be a sense that an enchanted universe, filled with something sacred, or an interconnected cosmos, filled with creativity is somehow “on the side of life” and its redemption.  It is not so much God who says “Choose Life” as it is the song of the universe which says “Choose Life.”  

In process theology these two options are not so different, since God is the Singer within the Song.  (See “A Covenant with the World: Process Theology for Theists, Atheists, and Agnostics.")  Whereas many forms of romanticism in popular music eschew biblical traditions and the idea of a personal God, process theologians believe that there is important wisdom in all traditions, biblical traditions much included.

Panentheism: God as Sacred Whole
Everything is inside God and God is more than everythi

I do not believe in the up there/out there bully in the sky. I would much rather celebrate the cosmic companion who is creating a universe in which I, and the rest of creation, am invited toward cosmos, connection, justice and love.

--Rabbi Bradley Artson, Process Theologian

One synonym for God, besides the big Three -- Love, Light, Mind -- is life. Capital L Life, life not squandered, awakened Life, as in, you-must-be present-to-win life.

-- Anne Lamott, American writer

Much popular music in the West is a critique of Abrahamic religions (especially Christianity) and the concept of God as a monarchical, agent-like being in the sky: "the bully in the sky."  Popular composers and performers prefer Asian religions and indigenous religions (Native American, African, Australian, Icelandic, pre-Christian European). They take issue, not only with the idea of God as a bully in the sky, but also with the idea that human beings are separate from creation and ordained by God to be, at best, mere stewards of the earth.  They advocate what the scholar Bron Taylor calls Deep Green Religion.

However, and significantly, a small but perhaps growing number of musicians partake of an emerging sensibility called Ecotheology which, on Jewish and Christian and Muslim grounds, advocates (1) an organic view of the universe, (2) the idea that humans are creatures among creatures on a small but beautful planet, and (3) that God is the sacred whole of the universe itself, understood as the Life within whose heart the universe unfolds.  They speak of this way of thinking about God as panentheism (everything inside God).

-- Jay McDaniel

What's the connection between popular music and western romanticism?​

In The Lyre of Orpheus: Popular Music, The Sacred, and the Profane,Christopher Partridge proposes that popular music (rock, country, folk, jazz, hip-hop, metal, electronic dance music) builds upon two impulses in the human psyche: transgression and romanticism.

Transgression is aimed at crossing the line, breaking the rules, of social convention in order to critique an oppressive status quo and affirm an alternative -- a more honest, vital, and promising -- way of being in the world.  Romanticism is aimed at affirming and exploring that more promising possibility.  

In England the romantic impulse emerged in response to the industrial revolution and was expressed in the romantic poets: William Blake, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and George Gordon Byron.  This impulse made its way into the United States through the transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. 

Today it lives in the world of popular music, including and perhaps especially indie music, and in the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead as developed in Pando Populus.

-- Jay McDaniel

Whitehead and Wordsworth

"Admirers of Whitehead who know him best have suggested that Wordsworth had possibly a greater influence upon him than anyone except Plato.  Nowhere apparently has Whitehead admitted such an influence, as he has that of Plato and Locke and that of William James, Bergson, and Alexander among traditional and contemporary philosophers.  But he had a predilection for poetry, and attributes to the great poet’s philosophical importance.  They capture uniquely, he says, “a fragrance of experience”; and “…express deep intuitions of mankind penetrating into what is universal in concrete fact.”  As observers of nature both Wordsworth and Whitehead ascribed to animate and inanimate life a degree of feeling or satisfaction in the course of being and becoming.  Like the poet, Whitehead must have found “joy in widest commonalty spread.”  The multiplication table, he noted at one time, “…is no good to the realist.  It shuts him up with Plato’s ideas out of space and out of time” when “…like Wordsworth and the rest of us he wants to hear the thrush sing..”

It was curiously during Whitehead’s early activity as a mathematician that he was reading most intensively the poetry of Wordsworth.  No diaries or letters exist to substantiate this statement; the evidence comes from members of the family.  “He would read The Prelude,” said his daughter, “as if it were the Bible, pouring over the meaning of various passages.”  ...

Whitehead's Philosophy of Science in the Light of Wordsworth's Poetry, Mary A. Wyman, Philosophy of Science
Vol. 23, No. 4 (Oct., 1956), pp. 283-284 ​

pandopopulus.com

Good Vibrations ​

"In one sense we know that we are connected.  On the other hand, our usual ways of thinking lead us to something that falls short.  We know we are connected to our children.  We feel the connection deeply.  But when we describe it, we usually talk about emotions that remain fully within ourselves.  They don’t really explain the connection.   Do other people really make a difference in our lives, or is it only our ideas about them that make a difference?

*

Whitehead shows us the importance of what in popular parlance are sometimes called “vibes.”  Learning takes place in experience that is the synthesis of real relations — to the personal past, the body, and the wider world.  In the classroom these relations are especially to fellow students.  Often of special importance are the student’s “physical feelings” of the teacher.   These” vibes” open or close the student to new information and its real relevance.  The physical feelings, derived from this entire environment, shape the way in which ideas are incorporated.  What the student learns is no more important than how the student learns it.  In a healthy context the ideas enter into the integration, being informed by all the real relations and affecting them.  Much of the actual learning takes place below the level of clear consciousness.  And sensitive teachers relate to students according to the “vibes” they get in that relation.

Finally, it is clear that “compassion” is fundamental not only to human relations but also to the whole world.  “Compassion” is “feeling with.”  “Physical feelings” can also be called “conformal feelings.”  They are the way that feelings in one moment are transmitted to and reenacted in the next moment.  This is also what gives reliability to the physical world.  To teach “compassion” is to free people from all that blocks their deepest feelings, to open people to what is there to be felt.  It is both the basis and the culmination of teaching."

-- John B. Cobb, Jr. Are We Really Related?

Fat Soul Philosophy

"All you really have to remember about Fat Soul Philosophy is that a fat soul is a beautiful soul.  In the process world view, God is the very Soul of the world, the ultimate instance of The Fat Soul, the One who lures us and all creation toward widening circles of Beauty. God yearns for beautiful relationships of earth and sky and people and turtles.  God yearns for us to know that we are all of a piece, all deeply interwoven and wholly beautiful in our differences."

-- Patricia Adams Farmer, novelist, What is Fat Soul Philosophy?  ​

A Collage of Songs 
scroll down for explanation

Woodstock: Joni Mitchell

​Lionsong: Bjork

All the Trees of the Field will Clap Their Hands: Sufjan Stevens

Earth Song: Michael Jackson

Mother Earth: Freedom Call

With Trees: Korpiklaani

​Across the Universe: John Lennon

​Rocky Mountain High: John Denver

I Need to Wake Up: Melissa Etheridge

​A New Tomorrow: A Friend in London

​Turtles all the Way Down: Sturgill Simpson

Mother Earth: SOJA

​Imagine: John Lennon

​At Last: Etta James

​Roll the Bones: Shakey Graves

Good Old Boys Like Me: Don Williams

The Glow: Esme Patterson

Holy Now: Peter Mayer

Last Great American Whale: Lou Reed

​Indigo Girls: Closer to Fine

Gone Green: Brad Paisley

​Reclamation: Lamb of God

Good Vibrations: The Beach Boys

​Be Kind to the Innocent: A Song for Animal Rights

​Bone Orchard: Mark Moldre

Like Smoke: Mayday ​

Nothing to my Name: Cui Jian

​River: Joni Mitchell

​Please find above and below a sample of popular songs from various genres that embody one or another of the eight dimensions of the romantic sensibility. Often they articulate the sensibility in lyrics, but sometimes in sound alone (melody, harmony, rhythm, soulfulness of presentation).  Let John Coltrane and Brian Eno be your guides.

Some of the songs are about romantic love and intimacy; some express a longing for a union of people, animals, and the earth; some lament a lost innocence; some celebrate a found redemption; and many articulate a preference for "authenticity," understood as the direct expression of passions of the heart emerging out of a simple, struggle-filled life.  

Inasmuch as music is a primary means of identify-formation today,such songs can -- in combination with other factors -- help us become the kinds people who contribute to a more just and sustainable world of, as it were, good vibrations. 

Besides that, many of them are just plain fun, which is a value in its own right.  A sustainable world that is not enjoyable is not sustainable.  Without pleasure, without merrymaking, without blues singing, without passion, there can be no fat souls.

- Jay McDaniel

​Love Supreme: John Coltrane

​Please Sparrow: Dana Falconberry

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Process and Vibrations

"Modern Process Philosophy began when Alfred North Whitehead realized that existence is primarily vibratory, not points but processes. Vibrations are best understood as sound waves, or through using auditory metaphors rather than visual ones. Our Universe is more like music than matter, but how does this help us better understand it? In this paper I use the example of the large ocean current oscillators that help drive our climate systems to reveal the more effective nature of auditory approaches. Through an auditory approach, we can better understand the ways these oscillations constrain and interact with other levels of oscillations as well as how they might be destroyed by other levels. This can then lead to us extending our ethics to the conservation of these oscillations."

Glen McClaren, Cosmos and History: The Journal of Natural and Social Philosophy, Vol. 5, No. 2 (2009)

The Soul

"I am a philosopher, let me tell you a great secret of life—a soul is not a thing, it is not something which stands untouched by the events of your life.  Your soul is the river of your life; it is the cumulative flow of your experience.  But what do we experience?  The world. Each other.  So your soul is the cumulative flow of all of your relationships with everything and everyone around you.  In a different image, we weave ourselves out of the threads of our relationships with everyone around us." 

-- Robert Mesle, A Soul is Not a Thing: A Process Relational Wedding

The Fat Soul

 "By S-I-Z-E I mean the stature of [your] soul, the range and depth of [your] love, [your] capacity for relationships.  I  mean the volume of life you can take into your being and still maintain your integrity and individuality, the intensity and variety of outlook you can entertain in the unity of your being without feeling defensive or insecure.  I mean the strength of your spirit to encourage others to become freer in the development of their diversity and uniqueness.  I mean the power to sustain more complex and enriching tensions.  I mean the magnanimity of concern to provide conditions that enable others to increase in stature."

-- Bernard Loomer, philosopher, A Soul is Not a Thing: A Process Relational Weddin