THE ADVOCATE V O L . 7 9 P A R T 5 S E P T E M B E R 2 0 2 1 649
ENTRE NOUS
One of our keen readers, Anne Giardini, O.C., O.B.C., Q.C.,
recently drew our attention to Greg Jackson’s essay “Prayer
for a Just War” in the latest edition of Harper’s Magazine. As
Ms. Giardini noted to us, “It is about climate change and a
need for a state of something akin to war to address it, but it is also about
alienation from nature and from each other.” She then quoted the following
passage from the piece (the emphasis is hers):
Let me tell a different story about what has gone wrong. Our fundamental
affliction is not the magnitude of our problems but our alienation from
their manifest solutions. Our tools have never made us more
powerful, yet we seem more powerless than ever to effect change. Our
primary way of interacting with the world is through a screen, and our principal
avenue to changing anything appears to be typing into or clicking on that
screen. We are alienated from the earth, from our hands, and from one
another. We appear to be part of an efficient system that has brought ever
more and cheaper goods to market, but our skills have become specialized
to the point of practical uselessness. Our ability to create and cultivate
the goods that we rely on and enjoy has shriveled to almost nothing.
There is a maddening abstraction to our reality, a virtuality to all life. We are
told that we are hopelessly partisan and polarized—patriotic or traitorous,
awake to truth or in thrall to lies—but above all we are separate: from one
another despite our mutual dependency and from the material reality on
which every aspect of our life depends. We are separate from the actions we
might undertake, and undertake together, to solve the tangible problems before
us, which do not care what brand name or party affiliation their solutions
go by. We believe hate is endemic, that we are at one another’s throats,
but we don’t know one another. We have never gotten close enough to shake
hands, much less see that the throat we mean to grab has wrinkles like our
own. We carry the burden of crushing loneliness, and find ourselves isolated
from friend and imaginary foe alike. We are trapped in the virtual amber of
our paralytic culture, where helplessness and impotence sit on the vine so long
they ripen and rot into enmity, vitriol, and rage.
If you are pondering the cover of this issue of the Advocate, you will learn
later in this magazine that it arose in the context of threats to the Advocate’s