In discussions about technology, and maybe especially within climatetech, the concept of the "Faustian bargain" is common. But what does it actually mean, and is it as simple as concept as it is typically considered?
In today's special Halloween episode, Reversing Climate Change host, Ross Kenyon, intros the show by giving the necessary historical context to understand Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s Faust, and to contrast it against Christophe Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus. Get ready for a dose of Romanticism.
When the Faustian bargain is invoked, it usually means a bad deal—one with no upside except for a short-sighted one. And that may be true for Marlowe’s Faust, but Goethe’s Faust wins his bet with Mephistopheles and his soul is never damned. What does that mean for how we use the term, when persistent survival if not actual upside is reintroduced into the Faustian bargain? What if, at least according to Goethe, making a deal with the devil isn’t always as straightforwardly bad as one might think?
Today’s guest is frequent podcast alumni and multihyphenate, Daniel Backer. Daniel produces virtuosic music, writes insightful novels, and creates video content about literary fiction on both his YouTube and TikTok channels. Be sure to follow his work!
Daniel and Ross spend much of the show exploring what it does to one’s brain to take claims of high strangeness, the paranormal, and the occult seriously, and why horror films (especially those of Ari Aster) deserve a better reputation.
Happy Halloween!
N.B. Reversing Climate Change is no longer a Nori podcast, but its own show. Outdated assets will be updated if and as possible.
Full Transcript
Ross Kenyon: My name is Ross Kenyon. If you’ve never listened to this show before, I’m one of the co-founders of the Nori carbon removal marketplace, and this is no longer a Nori podcast. This podcast is now a private endeavor of mine. This is the first post-Nori Reversing Climate Change episode, and it’s a Halloween spectacular. As the expression goes, we’re talking about Goethe’s Faust and especially contrasting it against Marlowe’s Faust. The reason I wanted to do this with regards to climate change is this idea of the Faustian bargain is, it’s very common. I hear it used all the time. People mention it whenever there’s a deal that they assume is just bad, it’s a deal with the devil, and the assumption that any deal with the devil is actually just inherently bad.
That’s a cultural meme that I think is pretty powerful. But actually it depends on the version of Faust that you’re reading. So Danny and I talk about this in the show. I’m going to try and give you some context here so we don’t just throw you in and it’s too much to get a grip on. But the Faust mythology is old. There ostensibly was an actual person named Faust who was a German alchemist and allegedly made a deal with a devil named Mephistopheles and got amazing powers in return, and ultimately had to give his soul to the devil in exchange for access to these greatly enhanced human abilities.
One of the most famous versions of the Faust story is told through Christopher Marlowe, who’s, you know, a contemporary of William Shakespeare’s in Elizabethan England. And that story is a very straightforward moral parable. It tells a story of how Faust cuts this deal with the devil, gets his time to shine, and then he has to sell his soul and pay the piper and go to hell. The Faust story is actually not like this at all. Faust is written by Goethe, who comes along about 200 years later, and he is this wunderkind, polymath, and brilliant writer associated very strongly with the Enlightenment and also with the transition to Romanticism.
So this is always very clumsy. Whenever there’s big terms that describe entire historical epochs, it makes people mad. That never seemingly fails to — people are still fighting about the Dark Ages, because the Dark Ages in Europe were, you know, not to go full Coffee Talk, but they were neither dark nor an age. So Romanticism, though — let’s just, I’m just going to skip ahead here. Enlightenment, if you’re a conservative, is a hoax. It’s not actually enlightening. It’s actually this horrible step backwards where humanity has these revealed truths in Christianity and humanity is turning its back on it in favor of lower pursuits like science or deism, where God put the fundamental laws of physics into motion, but then stepped away.
And everything that we see is a result of those actions that proceed from those laws naturally working their ways out. If you’re a progressive person, it is this time when new ideas about how civilization should be governed, who should have rights, who should have a say in rule — and science is, you know, obviously making huge strides all during this time. The Industrial Revolution is also taking place concurrently. By the end of the 18th century, the Industrial Revolution is starting to pick up and it never slows down. And in the early 19th century, especially in Great Britain, it’s really starting to take off with wool and textile manufacturing and steam production and mining.
And of course this is where you have that line, “dark satanic mills.” That’s a Romantic criticism of industrial civilization. So Romanticism is a post-Enlightenment philosophy of the 19th century, which is a rebellion against industrial civilization where humans no longer work in conjunction with the seasons. They no longer follow the movement of the sun during the day. They need clocks that tell them what hour and what minute they need to be at the factory. And this process of moving humans away from the countryside and the sort of pastoral life into cities where their lives are heavily regimented and controlled. And so Romanticism is also very strongly associated with a rebellion against organization and structure.
It’s interested in individual human feeling. So if you have religious beliefs that are not affiliated with the church, if you are spiritual but not religious, if you do what feels right, those are sentiments that are quite individualistic in a way. And you can use them in ways that are for the greater good or for humanity or some collective, but they rely very heavily upon your own judgement and are thus different from accepting the revealed wisdom of text or tradition or something like that. You’ve broken away. And so Faust is a representation of this.
Danny and I get into this of why now? Like, why should we be talking about witches and stuff after the Enlightenment? I think part of it is there’s a calling to go back to this simple way of understanding the natural world. If you are sympathetic to witchcraft, then you know that it is often about the interaction of humans with the spiritual world that is often at play within nature. It’s something that humans can access within this worldview, and therefore it isn’t an inherently bad thing. I think within Romanticism, it wouldn’t surprise me — actually, I don’t know about this in particular, this is speculative — it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a rebirth of interest in things like witchcraft during Romanticism.
But anyways, what’s interesting about the difference between Christopher Marlowe’s Faust, where Faust has to go to hell and pay the price — but that is not actually what happens in Goethe’s Faust. So Romanticism I associate with sincerity, and it almost matters more that you continue to strive, that it isn’t about outcome so much, it’s about sincerity and attempt and striving. And because of that, the deal that is struck in the Goethe version is that Faust can have his enhanced powers, but so long as he never stops striving for something greater — which is a deal that he’s willing to make because he actually is never going to stop striving, because the nature of humanity is to strive in this way, which is not a very conservative idea.
I’m using conservative in the sense like, think about how the hobbits are in the Shire, right? Like there’s almost no time, there’s no history in the Shire. Sure, events happen, there’s gossip about which families do what. I get the feeling that if you are an ambitious hobbit and you live in the Shire, you would face tall poppy syndrome, where your neighbours would want to cut you down to size for thinking that you are better than them and that you were trying to step out and make yourself seem above them in some way. This is actually a common problem in more egalitarian societies.
Places like the Nordic countries have a concept called lagom, which I believe is the Swedish term, but it just means sort of like average, good, fine. And there’s a tendency to drive towards this, like everyone has enough, no one’s trying harder than they need to, and we’re all just sort of content to be equal in this way. And that’s not to say the striver or the contented one is more or less good than the other. Your mileage may vary depending upon what kind of life you’d like to live, what kind of civilization you’d like to be a part of. And obviously this is going to influence your beliefs.
Like someone who’s very content is not hoping for a transplanetary, trans-solar-system, trans-galaxy future civilization. You know, they probably think that’s a bad idea, and that’s much beyond humanity’s capacity is to even desire. And in fact, desiring it may put us at risk. So this is part of the classic problem for Faust in the Marlowe version, is that this desire for capacities greater than what is natural for humans is inherently dangerous. Now, it’s a very conservative idea. And you’ll see that type of conservative thought within environmentalism too. It’s not just a capital-R Republican way of thinking, or that type of conservatism. It’s in a lot of places.
It’s one of those trans-partisan intuitions that humans have that represents itself in many different places. It’s not just a political party thing or just a politics thing. It’s a worldview orientation thing about humanity’s place in the cosmos, in the world. Where should we be? How ambitious should we be to live lives that are appropriate to our nature? Goethe thinks that actually, we should never stop striving. And because he never does, he wiggles out of this deal, never actually has to go to hell, never has to pay for his sins, and is somehow saved. He’s saved by his sincerity. He’s saved by his desire to never stop trying. Wow.
I mean, that’s an entirely different story, right? Goes from being a fable about morality and about humanity’s place in the cosmos to being an exhortation to follow your own judgement, to reach for the stars, as it were, and to just really make a go of it. I don’t actually even know what it’s supposed to say for climate people. The Marlovian version of the Faustian bargain has a very natural fitting within climate politics, because that’s a way of saying that if you mess with this technology or this belief or this policy, it’s without doubt going to lead to Mephistopheles coming and collecting your soul.
But if you are more of a — I’m freestyling here — what I would call a Goethean, an ecomodernist? You know, because in the Faustian bargain for Goethe, there is risk, and as we talked about with Danny here, it’s about probability. So there is a chance that actually Faust, you know, wearies of his increased abilities and finds that being so much better and so much more astute brings him less pleasure than when he had to work harder at it. Or that he doesn’t actually like knowing all this information, that it actually is more of a burden, in which case he would eventually trade it in and lose the deal and have to give his soul. But that actually does not happen.
But the fact that there’s risk involved actually makes me like it more, because it means, sure, there is plenty of technology within climate that is risky, because all of it’s risky. We’re pumping carbon dioxide underground and that could go poorly. There might be geoengineering that’s coming. There might be solar radiation management. There might be the spraying of materials in the stratosphere to increase the Earth’s albedo and make the planet more reflective. And that might be necessary at some point. I guess we’ll see how extreme weather events and climate change plays out. But it’s very possible that that gets deployed in the next decade or three.
I think it is a Faustian bargain, actually, in the Goethean sense, because we don’t know how that will go. It might be a bargain that humanity can win and save our souls. It could be the case that we never stop striving, by which I mean we never can stop spraying. We always have to keep striving, which is a criticism people make of this particular type of geoengineering intervention, that once you start, you can’t stop. So that’s another funny way that you can apply the Faustian bargain in a Goethean kind of way.
But I think what’s interesting about it is because there’s so many versions of the story here, or ways that you can apply this key insight about what is happening to Faust, that it’s a more complex phrase to use in a climate context than maybe meets the eye at first blush. So at the risk of being absurdly pedantic and making an entire show on this topic in order to explore this idea, I hope you enjoy. Danny and I talk about a lot of topics. It goes into all sorts of fun Halloween ideas about the occult and paranormal. I hope you enjoy. You should definitely read the classics. They have so much to say. They’re still speaking now. And thank you so much for listening. Here is your show.
We just got started at the beginning here because otherwise we’re going to get too far away from it. Everyone knows about it. And the climate connection here is Faustian bargain, which is a term that people use a lot, but it’s actually one that I don’t really like very much. Why is this a book people will talk about? Can you just introduce this for listeners?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, so I mean, Faust is probably a name a lot of people have heard before. And if you’re like me, it’s not something that would be at the top of your reading list. But I was inspired to get into it because I heard a bunch of occultists talking about it on a podcast, and the way they were describing it made it sound extremely dynamic and just extremely dark and like more psychedelic than what you might expect from something that was written 200 years ago. And so it’s also just for a personal connection, I read it in my first year of teaching.
And it’s all about a guy that had kind of exhausted all the possibilities of knowledge and he found himself really no wiser than he was before, which is a direct line from Faust. And so he does what I think a lot of people would do is he turns to black magic. He’s like, [unclear]. Well, if logic and rationality and science and medicine aren’t working out for me, then yeah, let’s conjure some demons and spirits. And that’s the premise. It doesn’t even end up there. That’s kind of where things start. So it’s got a lot more genre trappings than people might expect.
Ross Kenyon: It has a lot more genre trappings than people expect. What does that mean?
Daniel Backer: Well, I guess since it’s so old, maybe it’s not fair to call them genre trappings, but it’s got a lot of stuff related to like alchemy and magic. And so like, if you’ve ever read Harry Potter before, then — if I’m not mistaken, I have to be wrong about this — but like Nicolas Flamel is referenced in Faust, Part One as an early alchemist. And if you’ve ever seen like monkeys used in connection with witchcraft, as you might see in like The Wizard of Oz, there’s a scene that will reward you for like having seen that before. And obviously this is older, so it wasn’t inspired by any of those things.
But when people think 200-year-old poetic verse, a Christian allegory, it doesn’t sound very fun. But it’s very metal and it’s very magical and kind of dark, and maybe not [unclear] fantasy, not quite into the castles aspect of it, but they’re visiting witches and there’s talking monkeys and making potions and wishing for different things and conjuring spirits. It’s a blast.
Ross Kenyon: You know, it’s a strange area for subject matter because post-Enlightenment the world is not typically considered as enchanted as it was. Renaissance sort of starts it. Enlightenment really stabs it good. So you would expect subject matter like this hundreds of years before the Romantic era in the 19th century. But why now? Like, why would it be worth talking about witches in the early 19th century?
Daniel Backer: I mean, it’s a fantastic question. And I think a lot of the answer is revealed in the framing that Goethe brought to a lot of his like scientific and literary investigation, because he really wanted to legitimize himself as a scientist. And he actually discovered or rediscovered the intermaxillary bone in the human skull, I believe. And that sounds like a very cut and dry legitimate thing to do. But the reason he found that is that he was looking for a reason why humans were different from the rest of the animals, because we are, you know, created in the image of God.
And so even though he didn’t explicitly write about his belief in hermeticism and alchemy, it is all over his fictional work. And so it’s not clear to me if he was intentionally trying to disguise it in his personal writings, but it doesn’t seem like he’s doing it just for the imagery. Like this is a guy that believed in the hermetic ideal of “as above, so below,” which isn’t just about transcendent influence on the microcosm, it’s also about how you should expect to find parallels between the sciences.
And just to be perfectly clear, this is scientifically inaccurate, but it’s wrong in this really beautiful way that like the growth of a flower should mirror the human aspiration toward God, you know. And so a lot of his stuff in Faust and also his novel Elective Affinities is about kind of creating these parallels between metals and human development, or finding these connections between different scientific processes that, again, have since been discredited. But as an aesthetic and a symbol set to work with, it is just absolutely gorgeous.
Ross Kenyon: For symbolic reasons, it’s hard to argue that that’s not an extremely useful set of tools to have in your tool chest. And obviously there’s crossover with the development of science. I associate Newton pretty strongly with the occult interest, and I don’t think you will talk about that probably as much as it might want to. But there’s a lot of alchemy in the development of chemistry. It’s in the name, alchemy. It’s like right there. But I don’t know, I think at some point this got separated and somehow occultism and alchemy has a parallel life outside of the sciences.
It was deemed no longer an acceptable pursuit of knowledge and became either associated with alternative lifestyles, rejection of traditional faiths, music that is not part of the mainstream, witchcraft, the rams, upside-down crosses, provoking suburban parents. And I don’t know, how did that even happen historically, because it was once overlapping?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, I mean, I think a lot of the more recent stuff is actually just a matter of like the Satanic panic. And one of the reasons that it’s kind of hard to research is not all of the alchemists agree on like what the symbols mean. And so it’s not like you can easily go out and like brush up on, you know, oh, the color red always means this, light always means this. It’s like a lot of them are speculating when they’re creating these framing devices.
So all of that is to say that like even something like the Baphomet, if I understand correctly, did not originally have like a satanic implication to it. But since it’s non-Christian and outside of the mainstream, I think it was just deemed satanic because it’s not Jesus, right? And it’s scary too. It’s this hairy goat person or hairy goat man, you know. So that would be my assumption, is that it’s not mainstream and so people are going to assign some evil tendencies. But all that is to say is that Satanism is part of the occult too. So it really depends on which direction we’ll take the conversation.
Ross Kenyon: You know, some of my friends who are quite devout Eastern Orthodox Christians — the husband of this couple formerly was an occult practitioner. And so as I dove into this topic, I’m trying to wrap my head around, why is this so popular now? Because I know so many people who — like, for instance, you will hear “as above, so below” a lot. It’s like one of those occult dog whistles. Once you hear it, you’re like, oh, this is kind of everywhere. Like people say this a lot. Like it’s that and astrology and crystals and pendulums and things that you associate with what they call — they’re kind of all over the place.
This Orthodox couple, the husband was saying that he used to be really into witchcraft and the occult, and he was saying that he thinks it’s inherently anti-Christian. Well, one, he believes the Christian story is just the truth. So you don’t have to accept that if you’re listening, but in his worldview, that’s the truth. And he said that he had the strongest, most powerful occult experiences at the very beginning of his experience with it, and over time it weakened, which is the opposite of what you would expect as you get more skilled in certain applications of magic, if you think that’s a real thing that you can practice and get better at.
But he actually thought that it was a way of almost inducing a sort of narcotic effect on someone where, you know, wow, that was thrilling. We had, you know, the chandelier shook when we did the Ouija board. And every subsequent time, all the responses became just enough to make sure he never quite forgot about it, just enough to make sure he didn’t just go back to church and follow something that he thought was probably more likely to be true. So he thinks it is just more of a distraction than something powerful.
So from there, though — you’re going to love this — he also loves Hereditary. Danny and I, if you’re listening, are big Ari Aster fans. All of what we’re talking about will help you appreciate horror films much more than you ever have in your entire life. He has a hard time believing that that is real. He thinks the occult is real, but it’s more of a distraction than it is meant to be an actual — like, stuff like what happens in Beau Is Afraid and Hereditary does not happen. Or in Robert Eggers’s The Witch, he thinks stuff like that is not really a commonplace experience, but we exaggerate it and it distracts us from the true pursuit of the divine. That’s how he might frame it. What do you think about that?
Daniel Backer: You know, I mean, I sense it’s such a deep and diverse study and practice. I think that’s completely legitimate, especially if that’s what he values. Because I mean, you know me, I’m kind of a postmodernist, but I like to think of myself as an assertive postmodernist. So it’s not a nihilism sort of thing, but at the same time it is kind of secular and atheistic in the way I think about the occult, where the rituals you do are really to try to shift your mindset. And so it’s kind of like you could think of it as exposure therapy.
I could give you some examples of some like really simple rituals that I’ve done. And again, I’m coming at this not from the idea that I’m summoning a demon or a god or something, but sort of like using the power of symbolism to induce an experience for myself. And so the first one that comes to mind is, I was invited to a wedding and it was a group of people that I know pretty well, but I’m not really the most dominant person in the group. And so every once in a while when I would go out with them, I would kind of shut down and play kind of safe and really not be the most sociable version of myself.
Because, you know, not everybody wants to talk about Thomas Pynchon when we’re all drinking champagne, you know. And you can believe it. So what I did is my magic ritual, and this should resonate with any Catholics — and I’m not sure of the definition of sacraments in other faiths, but a sacrament in Catholicism, which is its own kind of ritual, is an outward visible sign that kind of bears the mark of God, right. And so it’s not enough to just have a positive mindset, like you need some kind of totem or some kind of thing in order to induce the experience for yourself.
And so mine was kind of the no-brainer: I just went out and bought this really nice suit and I kind of made that my totem, with the specific intention and specific preparation of priming myself. And I just told myself, it’s like, I’m going to socially dominate this wedding and be really on and talk to people. And it sounds silly because it’s so down to earth, but like, I kid you not, I framed that entire experience through the lens of occult magic, of me being like, I’m going to have this physical thing.
And especially an outfit is not a benign totem to give yourself — your outfit can really affect how you move and operate in spaces. And so I just like really made sure that I cultivated the mindset that I was going to be so [unclear] and I wasn’t going to shut down, and what I would do if I felt like I was kind of withdrawing. And I had a blast, you know.
And so I think if you look at it through the terms of like, you have a subconscious mind and you have emotional predispositions, and just like exposure therapy can kind of shake you out of a slump, I think magic can kind of do the same thing. That if you put yourself in a situation that you know is going to give you an emotional experience, sometimes that’s more interesting than thinking of that as exposure therapy or like cognitive behavioral therapy or something.
Ross Kenyon: Oh, that’s a fun example, Danny. That’s really illuminating here. He also reminds me very strongly of — yeah, well, I think I was really interested in early American history when I was an undergrad, in the 19th century. I was fairly obsessed with it, several courses on it, and the Burned-over District of upstate New York always fascinated me. And Mitch Horowitz also is very interested in this, the New Thought movement, Swedenborgianism, Mormonism. There’s a lot of things in here that even positive thinking sounds innocuous at this time, but there was a period at which that was actually a fairly heretical, sort of occult belief system. Do you agree with that?
Daniel Backer: Well, I mean, I think that especially a long time ago, if your idea of religion is just about these truth claims, and that if something kind of falls outside of that, then yeah, it’s going to feel super radical. And especially something as like ego-driven as like getting what you want. But that’s why it’s, I think, really illuminating to think of Aleister Crowley, who I believe the main like tagline — I’m using incorrect language here — but it’s something to the effect of like, “do what thou wilt.” And that doesn’t sound that crazy.
But if it’s all about kind of responding to or contradicting the will of God and putting your will above what God wants, then yeah, that’s going to sound like really scary and really evil and really like, how dare you? How dare you like not humble yourself before God’s plan? And his whole thing was like, no, like what really makes you powerful is getting what you want. And like you can use magic just to become more assertive and to, you know, express your will.
And in a lot of ways, I mean, it kind of reminds me of what Nietzsche was talking about in Beyond Good and Evil, is that like, maybe morality actually isn’t about following these rules that are written in the sky, but it’s just about opining on things that have nothing to do with you when you’re really just too afraid to do what you want, you know. And so, yeah, I think in a lot of ways it’s going to sound evil if you think that, you know, speaking up and getting what you want is against God, you know.
Ross Kenyon: I think there’s something — well, one, it sounds capital-R Romantic. That is a very strong individualistic Romantic style of interacting with the world. You were saying there, my personal experience is the sublime thing that I am choosing to follow, not something someone else has laid before me. I will walk into the woods myself and come out with the truth on the other side. Well, the downside of this way of thinking, though, is you can think of how many people do you know of that came up with their own answers, that were not a part of the conventional. This is kind of what you do at the political ideology side of things. None of the options are very good.
You end up with Hitler, you end up with Lenin and Stalin. Or now, like, those are people who are sort of explicitly atheistic, but were saying that actually Christianity is sort of a Jewish attempt to corrupt the Aryan man, and actually it’s a way of glorifying weakness so that the Jews who rule the world can keep the Aryan man down. I’m just quoting his bad ideas. But just thinking about like, OK, I know how the world should be ordered. The world should be ordered where the proletariat should rule, and the bourgeoisie and those of their useful idiot allies should be put to death or enslaved for the benefit of the proletariat who may oppress. And that doesn’t really lead to any place worth going either. It’s pretty bad as well.
I even see that sometimes where people who don’t follow convention and don’t get married and don’t have kids and don’t go down that — there’s plenty of ways to legitimately be happy doing that, and there’s plenty of unhappy people who did do that. But you take a greater risk when you disobey the collected, passed-down wisdom from a very long, long, long time and try to do something that is unique. There’s comfort in the norm, there’s comfort in the ritual, there’s comfort in the path. And if you stray from it, you do so at your peril. Your risk of return goes up.
Potentially you might end up with a lifestyle no one else has and end up with, like Faust — like Faust has something that basically no one else on earth has, and it is by all accounts sublime. And it even works out for him, unless it’s the Marlowe version, in which case you really made a bad deal and it ended up on the bad side of the scale. The expected value is negatively infinite, is how you might say it in probabilities. It’s bad. It’s real bad. So I don’t know, I think there’s something to be said about just being that conservative person and not going over. Otherwise you’re like, you’re worshipping devils and then you’re judging people who go to church. Like, come on. Like, one of those is clearly more dangerous than the other, right?
Daniel Backer: Well, yeah. And that’s why I ultimately think that it’s really less about what’s inherently found in this belief system, which is, you know, often self-contradictory and like one author is going to tell you the exact opposite of what the other author tells you, and really much more about your disposition. And so it’s interesting because I am not really into Christianity, but I am also like a corn-fed Midwestern boy who was raised in the Catholic Church. And so as much as I as an adult kind of consciously reject some of that, I think a lot of that is in my hard wiring.
And I’m the kind of guy that my magic ritual would be to be sociable at a wedding, you know. Like, I’m not really somebody that would really use it to do something super devious. And so like, I think it is going to come down to just like, you know, if I can use the word soul, just like, what is in the soul? And if it’s about expressing your will and getting what you want, then a beautiful soul will probably just want to be a better asset to other people and use magic in order to be more on and more emotionally available and maybe take some bigger risks than they would otherwise.
And then, you know, just to get back to Hitler, I believe he was an occultist. And I don’t know if he was doing it in like an atheistic way or with firm credulity in all of the gods that he believed that he was contacting or whatever. But it was really his intention that made the magic bad. And so again, I think some of the evil connotation is more of a 20th century reaction, where it’s like a lot of these guys were just scientists and they were catching stuff on fire and they thought like a weird chemical reaction where fire burned pink was — that must be God, because they had no other explanation for that. So that’s my justification. And I definitely hope it doesn’t, you know, have me burning down houses anytime soon. But hey, you’ll have to keep tabs on me.
Ross Kenyon: I mean, like, some of it, OK, some of it ends up maybe on the, oh, this is sort of like sweet old women gathering herbs and creating poultices. And I feel like a lot of the stories you hear — maybe it’s because it’s more sensational — but they end up in this, it’s grim. A lot of it sounds great. A lot of it sounds like people who dabble in things that frankly, if there are supernatural beings like this, that people engage with them in a frivolous way that is extremely dangerous, in exactly the same way that happens in Talk to Me. Which — do you like that film, by the way?
Daniel Backer: You know, I don’t know if I ever saw that. Was that another A24?
Ross Kenyon: Sure was. That’s good. It’s an Australian film, you would like it. It’s basically about teenagers who find a severed hand that is enchanted in some way and they invite spirits into their bodies and it talks through them. And that’s basically how I imagine a lot of people that engage with the occult: is, if it is real, if there are spirits out there who are interested or willing to speak with humans, it’s likely on their terms. And we don’t understand that world very well at all.
A lot of it is very transactional, too. A lot of it seems very quid pro quo. It’s like you do something for this entity, it does something for you. But it always has this like monkey paw logic to it, where it never quite comes back to you in the way that you want. It’s always like tainted. Like, none of the stories you hear are just like, yeah, I got to deal with the demon, everything worked out great. It’s always just like [unclear].
Daniel Backer: Yep. No, I mean, I think that’s a valid point of view. Because — well, on the other hand too, though, it’s like I think you’d only hear about the crazy stories of somebody who, like, you know, was possessed, or somebody like they lost their soul because they were dabbling in it too much. And so maybe the more modest, healthy applications are just not as sensational.
Ross Kenyon: That’s true. So maybe I’m being unfair then. So are there places where you’re seeing, either in your social life or other places, where people are using this in a way where you might think, wow, this might be a spiritual practice that is not inherently chaotic, dangerous, exposing?
Daniel Backer: Yeah, yeah, there’s a guy I really like named Jason Louv, who — his whole vibe is actually like, you shouldn’t really read that much about it, you should just start practicing it, and you kind of approach it as an atheist. And so you’re skeptical of everything. And then, in his words, he’s like, you just see what sticks. And so that’s been kind of my experience too. And I didn’t follow his advice because I got to him kind of later. But I’m reading The Secret Teachings of All Ages by Manly P. Hall right now, and you know, I’d say for every insightful point, he’s got a bunch of stuff that I am just immediately like, nope, well, that’s not right.
You know, when it gets into numerology, when it gets into him claiming the pyramids are 70,000 years old, it’s like, I can’t prove they’re not, but I’m just going to play it safe and kind of go with the mainstream view on that. But again, it’s like, one, I don’t think it should be the only tool in your toolbox. You know, I think you should probably hold it with a loose grasp. But then too, I’d really kind of go back to the postmodern framing, is that this is about like inducing an experience on yourself by suspending your disbelief.
And so since I go into that with that framing, I feel kind of protected because I don’t necessarily believe in spirits or demons, you know. I’ve had interesting experiences before, but I can’t really prove that they took place outside of my mind’s eye. And if I’ve had dreams before, it seems closer to me, closer to a dream than the idea that like a majestic being opened my apartment door and like sat with me for a second, you know.
And so I think you could probably lose your mind if you go into it being like, let’s create some truth claims about reality and about another dimension that we don’t have access to. Whereas if you go into it kind of like, oh yeah, maybe the fact that all of these different Greek gods have these different names in different societies, or like the Jesus story is not that dissimilar from Dionysus — then you can see that it’s not as much about the specifics of anyone’s story, but that there are these kind of trends that go through history and there might be something archetypal about them that you could benefit as an object of like meditation with, if that makes sense.
Ross Kenyon: One thing that’s difficult for me — and maybe this is psychologizing myself in a way that might help us make sense of some of my questions or why I ask the questions that I ask — is I think once you’re open to supernatural claims besides the religion that you were raised in or that you were brought up in, there’s like the first step out of that is some sort of milquetoast agnosticism where you’re like, maybe we either don’t know, or all streams lead to the same river, to the same ocean. And that’s like, it’s all a way of connecting with the divine, and they’re all somewhat valid, or many of them are somewhat valid, maybe uniquely valid if you take the stronger version of it.
But then once you start getting to more outlandish beliefs, like you have to bite the bullet with agnosticism at some point where you’re like, OK, so it’s not just that Islam and Christianity and Shintoism’s animist beliefs are correct. You also have to believe that all of the strange enchantments and demons and things that show up in horror movies might be real. This might not just be, you know, nightmares from our collective unconscious here. This might actually be a real thing, which is what I was hinting at earlier.
Like, if you — you don’t have to agree with what I’m saying, you’re not to listen to this and say Ross is clearly right. But if you’re listening to this, then what is it like to entertain for a second that there might be paranormal or supernatural experiences beyond what we typically in our everyday lives think is possible? It definitely makes horror movies much scarier. You’re like, what even do horror movies do in a universe where the supernatural and paranormal are everyday lived experiences that we’ve [unclear] and unable to see or unwilling to acknowledge? I think they become much scarier, much better films. And once I started going down this path with you, I love horror films now. I never did my entire life. And now I’m like, I love just working my way through the canon.
Daniel Backer: Well, I, you know, I haven’t seen a lot of horror movies since I’ve gotten into this, but it definitely makes me want to give Hereditary — and you know, Beau Is Afraid — a rewatch.
Ross Kenyon: I don’t know, Beau Is Afraid is like, what do you — it’s that, that film is so allegorical, I’m not even sure it knows what it’s trying to do. But Hereditary is amazing. Just watch Beau Is Afraid. I don’t want to be mean to it.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, that one, it’s like, it’s so abstract. I haven’t been too interested in any interpretations because it almost is like pure — or like pure, you know, pure archetype or something. So yeah, I definitely see it. And I can see people taking my kind of postmodern perspective as something that kind of takes the magic out of it. But I really see it as something that like, if you acknowledge that our minds are kind of bending reality and we’re not directly interfacing with the world and we’re kind of primed by our cultural conditioning and stuff, then I don’t think it does take the magic out of it, to see them just as symbols.
But at the same time, a topic that’s kind of caught my interest recently is that a lot of people in hospice several weeks before they die start to interact with their dead relatives. And that’s like not an uncommon experience. And it’d be different if it was just one-off kind of a crazy story, your uncle on his deathbed, you know, saw your grandma or something. But I think a lot of people have experiences with their dead relatives, and even different things of like not just being reminded of an ex-girlfriend, but like feeling her love again. Like, people have experiences like that, that I think, you know, to say that that’s just the construction of your mind kind of misses the point.
Is that like, no, you’re maybe struck with such grief over loss that your brain produces something for you. But I think it kind of hints to the idea that there might be this other dimension. I couldn’t prove it, and that’s not really my interest anyway. But I think that maybe I’m playing it safe by talking about it only symbolically. You know, I think it’s just easier to talk about if I say that it’s symbolism. But like, yeah, I mean, the world is a mysterious place, and maybe we just haven’t created the antenna yet that can catch that field or describe it quantitatively, you know.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, I love that. I’m very open to that possibility, more open than I’ve been in the past toward it. Do you like The Sixth Sense?
Daniel Backer: You know, I haven’t seen it since I was a kid. I remember loving it as a kid though.
Ross Kenyon: Rewatch it. It’s one of the best ghost stories that I’ve seen, and mostly because of the way it describes ghosts, which Haley Joel Osment describes them as like, they don’t know that they’re dead. They’re caught in these loops and they’re reenacting these plays and they cannot break. It’s like a very literary reading of ghosts, right? Because I think of ghosts, I think of unfinished business, you know, like they were so preoccupied with things in their life they were unable to finish. They might not even know that they’re dead. They’re trying to finish whatever task they were. They might even forget who they [unclear]. Did you watch A Ghost Story, by the way, the Casey Affleck one?
Daniel Backer: I’ve not, I know it. It’s kind of like low, low production, but like high writing and stuff like that. Is that right?
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, but it’s pretty similar to that. It’s about attachment to place and about loops and being caught in them and what is time. And there’s a lot of — there’s like some really sophisticated, smart ideas in both of these films. The Sixth Sense is more straightforward, but I love that rendering of ghosts too, where, you know, they’re caught in their own pain, they’re caught in their unfinished business and they cannot move on. And whether that’s literary, whether that’s actually how the afterlife may or may not work in reality, it’s sort of besides the point.
The reason it’s — why it’s so prolific in literature and human experience is because it’s a beautiful idea that makes us think about how we’re all going to die with unfinished business. And that’s a beautiful tragedy, probably more tragedy than anything, of what it means to have a body that will one day pass away.
Daniel Backer: Oh yeah, I mean, God, it immediately makes me think that like, you know, on one level it would be scary to die and then to be judged in either sense of heaven or hell, you know, that’s existentially terrifying. But I think even more terrifying would be to die and then have to like prove your credulity and to be like, you actually don’t get to go to heaven unless you believe it’s real, or you have to like be committal.
Because like, you know, I love ideas and reading and philosophizing and investing in the question more than the answer. And so to me, that would be my hell, of being like, you’re dead now, you have to like double down on what you think is true and that’s where you’ll end up. And I’ll be like, oh God, like that — I can’t have anything more terrifying than that, you know.
Ross Kenyon: This has come up on so many podcasts I’ve been on, whenever we talk about Christianity, because the people who get the worst of it from Jesus are the people who, you know, put their hand on the plow and look back, right? They’re not worthy of the Kingdom of God. So if you once were believing, or if you’re like kind of believing but you don’t pick up your cross and follow Jesus, you’re in like literally the worst spot you can be in. The non-believers, the sinners, the publicans, like they get some free passes. But if you’re half-hearted about this, you’re bad. That’s my fear, is that it ultimately ends up being true. I am in literally the worst possible spot.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, you know, I mean, it’s definitely a question that keeps me up at night, but doesn’t necessarily occupy me during the day. You know, and I got into a lot of this stuff because I had kind of a spiritual experience when I got into teaching. And that’s given me a lot more faith, if I can use that word, because it felt very obvious, you know.
And I would say almost every other decision in my life has always been kind of rolling the dice and just, you know, seeing what happens because I suck at planning. But this felt like, oh wow, no, like you really stumbled on something. You need to pursue this for spiritual reasons. And so I found the more that I lean into stuff like that, the more belief about the details might not be as important. But again, I’m still sweating at night sometimes.
Ross Kenyon: So one thing I don’t like is whenever there’s a technology or a plan that people don’t like, or that it has undue risk or they perceive undue risk, they’ll call it a Faustian bargain. And this happens in climate, especially with things like spraying aerosols into the stratosphere to make the Earth more reflective, to reduce the heating effect of the planet. And people will say it’s a Faustian bargain, which is another way of saying you’re making a deal with the devil. And what I don’t like about this is that it implies that it didn’t work out well for Faust, but it only makes sense in the Marlowe version, where he gets his comeuppance.
In the Goethe version, as long as you spray aerosols but you keep striving and you keep trying in your heart for more and more pleasure and more fulfillment, then seemingly you get to avoid punishment. Is that a correct reading?
Daniel Backer: I’m all for replacing any Marlowe references with Goethe ones. So I like the direction that you’re going. And I don’t know, I think people are probably trying to bolster the argument by making the reference to Faust, which is not like something that a lot of people even read. So yeah, it seems like it may be a little politically charged, a little Luddite. Because I mean, I don’t know, it seems to me that technology is disruptive and I don’t think we should blindly trust it.
But I don’t know if there’s a lot of examples, especially in America, of us being like, oh guys, there might be negative consequences, let’s not follow technology. And so maybe that’s kind of cynical and pessimistic, but like it seems to me that we would probably innovate our way out of climate issues before stopping carbon emissions. Is that too heretical to say?
Ross Kenyon: I mean, people think it, and I don’t think it’s a wrong thing to think. Or plenty of smart people think that we are going to innovate our way out of it. If they didn’t think that, then I don’t know what they would be spending their time doing. They probably wouldn’t be working that much in climate, because I feel like climate work, especially climate tech, is almost inherently based on a sense that we will either stop climate change, reverse it, or at the very least slow it down and make it less bad. If you didn’t think that, it’d be hard to engage in this work with any sort of gusto, I would say.
Daniel Backer: Yeah, yeah, OK, well, that’s good. I know — I don’t know, because I mean, you’re obviously more involved in the space. And so like, yeah, I think if people are going to call many technological solutions a Faustian bargain, then it is — yeah, it’s kind of appealing to like sinfulness, or be like you’re being greedy, or like you’re looking for like a loophole. Whereas like the actual Faust story, especially the Goethe version, is much more about like, you know, the nature of desire and the nature of experience and stuff like that. And so it might be like a pithy headline, but I’m not convinced that there’s a lot of significance there, you know.
Ross Kenyon: It’s amazing that to do a podcast that’s entirely about being pedantic about a phrase that is used incorrectly, that, well, like, actually technically is correct. If you read the Marlowe, then certain technologies are Faustian bargains because they could and very well might lead to you just going to hell. But I don’t know actually, because there’s risk and weighted probabilities in this. It actually might be inherently Goethean instead. Like, maybe actually every Faustian bargain is actually Goethean because it’s all about risk and no one knows that, you know, if you do solar radiation management, we only get 20 years and then we all go to hell.
Actually, some people might make that claim. Maybe some people would claim that the input-output is one to one. So it’s a lot of show for that little insight on that climate topic. But wasn’t it fun?
Daniel Backer: Oh my gosh, it was a blast. I could do three more hours.
Ross Kenyon: Danny, we’re at the end here. Is there anything that you’d like to plug? Anything that you’re working on right now?
Daniel Backer: 100%. So yeah, I’ve been working on a novel that has some Faustian themes called The Kingdom of Liminal Space. That’s going to have a concept album with [unclear] and some other little mixed media goodies that are currently under wraps, but that’ll be coming out probably — I’d originally said Christmas, it’s probably looking more like July at this point, but yes, stay tuned for that. And also if you check out my channel, Off the Wall Novels on YouTube, and I’m Daniel Backer Author on those social media platforms, so.
Ross Kenyon: He has great videos too, very educational. Even those weird things like go to Edith Wharton’s home, which, come on, that’s not your style, Danny. You’re trying to fool with that, by the way.
Daniel Backer: You know, it’s for every postmodern, I’ve got to, you know, do some critiques of the Gilded Age.
Ross Kenyon: Yeah, keep you balanced. Thanks for being here, Danny.
Daniel Backer: Thank you, Ross.
