🐰 Down The Rabbit Hole 🕳️

“To those who ask, ‘What can I actually do?’, he [E. F. Schumacher] said, the answer was ‘as simple as it is disconcerting: we can each of us work to put our own inner house in order. The guidance we need for this work cannot be found in science or technology, the value of which utterly depends on the ends they serve; but it can still be found in the traditional wisdom of mankind.’”

~ Paul Kingsnorth, Against The Machine, p. 99

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Greetings, dear newsletter subscriber,

Having completed our book study, I am going to continue to offer reflections on topics related to the kinds of substantial questions that lie at the heart of Gadfly Academy. This week, I’m looking at what E. F. Schumacher refers to as putting “our own inner house in order.” But first...who was E. F. Schumacher?

Schumacher was a German-born British economist and statistician who wrote the classic books Small is Beautiful and A Guide for the Perplexed. He is probably most famous for his proposals for decentralised, human-scale, and human-appropriate technologies. He is definitely one of Gadfly Academy’s favorite authors!

In the quote above, Kingsnorth quotes from Small is Beautiful. One of the great challenges with the process to which Schumacher refers, of putting “our own inner house in order” is that it is not an easy or a quick one. Not only are we surrounded by a culture that actively undermines this process, but we also have a lifetime of unlearning to address. I don’t write this to be negative or pessimistic, but to point out something that is sometimes under-appreciated by modern folk: real lasting inner change requires patience and extended effort; one could say that it is the work of a lifetime.

From birth, we have been trained by the modern world to seek (and to expect) quick fixes, but the kind of change Schumacher references requires, as he says, “the traditional wisdom of mankind.” This wisdom is the fruit of lives of patient and extended effort, and it provides insight into the right mindset one must have for “progress.” More than this however, it also requires a community to encourage and lift you up as you seek to put your house in order.

I started Gadfly Academy for a number of reasons, but one of them was so as to have a platform where I could address the kind of faith-adjacent ideas that we have been discussing. At a certain point, of course, in order for these discussions to descend to the depths that they require it is necessary to talk about more than “wisdom” in the abstract.

I do not intend for Gadfly Academy to become a “faith-based” platform (I already have one of those! If you weren’t aware, I also run Protecting Veil, where I publish books, videos, and articles in the Orthodox Christian tradition), but when appropriate I will offer appropriate suggestions based on the faith tradition that I know best. In that spirit...the most important book an Orthodox Christian could recommend, of course, is the New Testament (this will be obvious to some, less so to others(!)), followed by the Old Testament. Both of these offer more than enough wisdom for a lifetime. That said, if you’re looking for something else, while there are many wonderful books I could recommend, one of my favorites is The Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Regardless, wherever one seeks wisdom, a good rule of thumb is that it should be from those who lived in an age different than our own: all modern writers share our own modern biases, so we must seek wisdom from older (ideally ancient) sources.

As life itself, Gadfly Academy is in transition as I turn my attention toward a larger project that I hope will have a deeper impact. I will be discussing this more in the near future. In the meantime...thanks, as always, for being a subscriber!

Have a great weekend, and we'll see you again soon!

Warmly,

Herman

PS: I am awaiting my pre-release copy of Martin Shaw's new book Liturgies of the Wild, which I look forward to sharing with you soon!

PPS: This week's offerings:

👉 Read the article here

👉 Watch the "lost" video from our book study here