Spirit(s) of Place, Part 5

Finally, some final thoughts on orenda.

At long last: the end of this series. (For now.)

I’ve wandered pretty far afield with this topic. This is the part where I try to gather up all these wayward ideas and get them safely penned up. We’ll see how it goes.

To recap:

• Part 1 was an introduction to the idea of orenda, introduced by J.N.B. Hewitt in his essay “Orenda and a Definition of Religion.”

• Part 1.5 was a brief reflection on how the promises of modernity—the technological marvels that supposedly justified the wholesale extermination of competing worldviews—are beginning to dissolve. This leaves us falling into the cracks between worlds and very much in need of a new way of being, which something like orenda could point toward.

• Part 2 was an examination of the social and cultural forces that shaped J.N.B. Hewitt’s life and career, including his complicity in the unmaking of existing cosmologies, which was built into the colonial project as the “science” of ethnography.

• Part 3 went deeper into Hewitt’s understanding of religion. Ironically, Hewitt’s disdain for the “constraining relations” of primitive superstition led him (along with the Academy that conscripted him) to unmake a more sustainable worldview, and replace it with the one that’s currently destroying the planet. Nevertheless, Hewitt’s essay provides useful tools for repairing some of the damage it inflicted.

• Part 4 examined our 50,000-year history with tobacco: how (something like) orenda helps humans maintain a productive relationship with a powerful plant, and how disrespecting that power—not recognizing its orenda, treating tobacco as “just” a plant, or worse yet, “just” a cash crop—led to a global disaster that has claimed hundreds of millions of lives.

So, finally: why does this all matter to us?

Is this something that modern people really need? Or is this just pretentious exoticism? Should we even try to relearn how “to think and feel with the elder time,” after all the crimes that have been (and continue to be) committed in the name of modernity¹?

What we’re lacking—what orenda offers—is a useful concept for describing how the world makes itself.

J.N.B. Hewitt wrote “Orenda and a Definition of Religion” because he felt that the English language lacked a word for “subsumed mystic potence,” which the Haudenosaunee people recognized as “the property of all things, all bodies… the efficient cause of all phenomena, all the activities of [their] environment.”

However, he treated this as a simple linguistic problem. The word that the Academy lacked would only define the primitive superstition of uneducated savages. Feed the word “orenda” into the reality-defining machinery of ethnography, et voilà: a whole new component of the Haudenosaunee worldview can be explained away.

But the word “orenda” doesn’t address the ontological blind spot that necessitated the term in the first place. There is no word for orenda in English because we’ve spent the past couple millennia insisting that the world is divided into subjects and objects. There is no need describe how the world continues to make itself, because there is no recognition of that reality within Western philosophy.

According to Western thought, the world has already been set in motion. Whether it was made by the blind forces described by science, or the will of the Abrahamic God, the world is full of objects. Those objects relate to one another according to natural laws. Coincidentally, these are laws that either humans or God can articulate perfectly, as the most prescient subjects in the system. There is no need to describe the “subsumed mystic potence” of an individual object like a wolf or a lake or a tobacco plant. Everything happens in accordance with God or Nature. We only need to study the logic of God/Science, and through that understanding, we can understand what everything else is doing. Individuals within this formulation are just cogs in the Great (Divine) Machine.

This worked out very well for the beneficiaries of modernity, who didn’t have to worry about everything they were erasing in order to make the world safe for exploitation. (Less so for the billions of people who were displaced, impoverished, and/or killed along the way.) Everything that was brought under the rule of modern science/religion was just an object in need of management, in order to preserve its proper functioning within the larger scheme.

Unfortunately, as we’re learning now, its logic led to some unanticipated consequences.

One problem is that the world just doesn’t work like this. It turns out that humans are spectacularly bad at transcribing the laws of either God or Science. This whole project was built on the notion that the high priests could perceive the subtle workings of the world and direct its progress toward an optimal state. Humanity’s expanding knowledge of an already-accomplished Creation would lead to ever-greater fidelity with its laws. This knowledge would inevitably produce a utopia². It’s the Big Story all over again.

Check today’s news to see how that project is getting along.

Another problem—as an increasing number of formerly comfortable people are learning—is that their “subject” status can erode over time.

The franchise of people who were permitted to act upon the world was never universal. Educated elites (those with the right class, breeding, chromosomes, and skin tone) put themselves at the right hand of God for two thousand years. Then they unceremoniously booted Him off the mercy seat and enthroned themselves in His place. For a very short time, when the imperial machinery was still humming along, a facsimile of subjecthood was extended to non-elites through democracy. This gave people a sense of agency within the societies that benefited from the spoils of conquest.

But now, as the margins get thinner, people who previously thought of themselves as subjects acting upon the world are finding themselves acted upon—as objects.

The laws of politics and economics have been added to the laws of nature. Modernity has already rendered plants, animals, waters, and mountains into mere things. Recent additions to the roster of objects include the poor and working-class citizens of wealthy societies. While their ranks continue to grow as more people topple off the economic ladder, they are now also things to be moved around—like livestock or furniture—by the People Who Matter.

Membership in the country club of active subjects has shrunk dramatically, right when the bills from all our past misdeeds are coming due. We tend to think of this as a dystopian turn in society. It’s really just ontological momentum: if we live in a world where the personhood of some things can be removed through objectification, then that sword is always resting in its scabbard, waiting to be drawn.

From that perspective, the blind spot that orenda points toward is more than just an intellectual curio. It’s a way to talk about the objectification of the more-than-human world (and a growing percentage of the human world.) Diagnosing that blind spot gives us a way to think about how to live differently. It gives us a better way of being in the world, with the world.

“Any approach that understands agency as a property of the universe which contains humans—rather than as a feature of humanity—is an invitation to right relation.”

Gordon White, Ani.Mystic

It’s a big challenge.

Hard to know what to do with it, when we’re so used to incorporating new concepts into our existing worldview, rather than letting those concepts crack our thinking apart.

Without the ontological bracketing—orenda as something “they” “believe”—we’re left with the possibility that there’s more going on in the world than we’ve recognized.

Let’s accept that agency is a property of the universe, and something like orenda is “the property of all things, all bodies… the efficient cause of all phenomena.” If that’s true, then everything is always becoming something together. The world is making itself around us. Understanding our place in a living cosmos isn’t just a matter of learning about its mechanics, from a text that’s already been written and handed down from on high. It’s a process of observing the intersubjective becoming of the place where we are: not as citizen-scientists, from some imaginary nonplace of objectivity, but as active participants.

If that sounds grandiose, it’s because our entire culture—including the English language itself—was born and raised in the shadow of modernity’s misguided worldview. Other options are available.

Now that modernity seems to be buckling under the weight of its own contradictions³, there is an opening for other possibilities.

For those with an appetite for it, there is plenty of work to be done. All our cultural institutions have been built around this central misapprehension. Art, science, religion, politics—all those things can and should be re-calibrated to work with this wider intersubjectivity. While this requires some uncomfortable (and occasionally dangerous) confrontations with modernity, it’s not about “saving the world.” It’s the work of letting the world be what it is.

But it’s not for everybody.

For the growing number of people who are just feeling beaten down by the dehumanizing excesses of modernity, the recognition of (something like) orenda is good medicine. It’s a way of developing a positive relationship with the places where we find ourselves. If orenda is the property of all things and all bodies, then there are potential sources of power all around us. We can align ourselves with the orenda of the more-than-human world to restore our humanity. We can heal ourselves from the “diseases of despair” that are currently ravaging our society. We can live better.

Crucially, we don’t have to wait around for the People Who Matter to make a decision, or force them to acknowledge that wider reality: we can do it for ourselves, right now.

With a recognition of orenda, where we live matters. How we choose to live matters. It’s not just about atoning for past sins, or living with the consequence of failed relationships, or prostrating ourselves before the angry gods that J.N.B. Hewitt imagined everywhere. We’re part of the world making itself. And we can step into that becoming whenever we choose.

“Orenda” is a made-up word. It’s an empty space in the world we’ve built. As far as modern people are concerned, orenda doesn’t exist; if it’s not useful to us, we can just continue making it unreal.

But it’s an empty space that can be a window. It’s one of many windows that other, older cultures have left open for us, despite modernity’s attempts to unmake them. If nothing else, we can look through it to gain a new perspective on the space we live in.

And if we’re willing to exert ourselves a bit—contort ourselves to fit its shape, tolerate some temporary discomfort on the way through—it’s a window that can also be a door.

1. In case you missed the disclaimer on cultural appropriation—it’s at the beginning of Part 4.

2. Or at least we would have a perfect society, if it weren’t for all those crusty jugglers.

3. Right on schedule, according to those familiar with Charles Fort’s “Dominant of Wider Inclusions.”