2019-10-07
Gratitude: Thanks to my brother CC for introducing me to the work of adrienne marie brown, even though I got distracted from reading it for a year or two. And thanks so much to CS and LB for being great friends and re-energizing me to explore the works of both AMB and Octavia Butler.
In the past year, I’ve read two books that have offered some new angles I’m still reflecting on. The books feels a little bit like secret sisters. In some ways, they are totally not about the same things, and each author might even be offended to be put in the same basket. But it feels like they’re each getting at some common concepts, but from different perspectives.
The first book is Emergent Strategy by adrienne marie brown. The book is ostensibly about community organizing and how to build networks “an inch wide and a mile deep”. The book is filled with personal anecdotes and truly puts relationships at the centre of the message. AMB goes to great effort early in the book to clarify that she doesn’t understand lots of the science that she’s leaning on — that she’s intuiting her way around the general concepts. But as a science-informed person myself (biochemistry background), I am floored by how well she seems to put a finger down on so many subtle truths.
The second book is A Brief History of Everything by Ken Wilber. The book tries to do what it says on the tin. Speaking of which, Wilbur puts his face on the cover of most versions of the book, which feels quite relevant to the mindset of the author and how he frames his role among the ideas in the book. The book builds a well-intentioned and complex (if not overwrought) theory of how the universe works. And it is massive — both the book and theory. It goes from the subatomic to the cosmos and God. At various points, he’s been known to followers as a mystic of sorts, and you could be forgiven for thinking he aspires for that, judging by the ways he presents and centers himself.
The book has terms and language for everything. It’s over 500 pages. It’s formatted ostensibly as a conversation between two people (a Socratic dialogue), but it is in reality just Ken Wilber spending 500 pages explaining his theory. It’s an explanation masquerading as a conversation. I don’t think he mentions another person through the whole book. But while you might guess that I don’t like the tactics, the things he has under his microscope seem to ring true, just as do the ideas that AMB is dancing with.
And there’s perhaps another layer of comparison within these books. AMB gives huge amounts of credit to the wonderful sci-fi author Octavia Butler. She speaks of her as a figure of reverence, though Octavia herself didn’t aspire for that. Adrienne relates much of her own wisdom through a lens of gratitude for the insight that arrived through her reading of Butler.
Octavia Butler is an author who seemed to play around with the ideas of God and spirituality to great effect. In Parable of the Sower (which is what I can draw from, as the book I’ve read), she seemed to explore religion and God through a very feminine and relational lens. It’s like she navigated into the realm of the spiritual, took it apart, and reassembled the very nature of the spiritual, into a book. And the fabric of the book itself shared the dissassembled pieces of spirituality with the reader. I almost imagine it like she spent time to truly understand the spiritual, and then distributed that understanding to everyone.
Contrast that to another literary figure who spent time exploring the realm of the spiritual and religious: L. Ron Hubbard. You may know him as the creator of Scientology, a terribly hierarchical and oppressive religion built by a sci-fi author after he was done critiquing and writing sci-fi about it. Hubbard took the exact opposite approach to Octavia Butler. While she took it apart and shared it, he saw the power of the spiritual, and (after scorning it) then took control of it and concentrated it in a form that benefitted him. He created a system in which he could be the broker and intermediary of the power that he came to understand. He took it apart, and reassembled it into a gun, and he put it in his drawer.
I don’t yet know what to think about these observations, but it feels like there’s something underpinning it that I’m eager to be attentive to.