Mother Nature Returns: Allegregores I

Young Heretics

Spencer Klavan

Society & Culture, Education

4.9 • 4.5K Ratings

🗓️ 11 June 2024

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Mother nature is one of the most ancient pagan deities, and also one of the trendiest in modern times. What gives--why is a character whose name you can literally find carved into primitive rocks also being portrayed by Octavia Spencer in Apple PR campaigns? In this essay, I argue that Mother Earth or Mother Nature represents one of the most natural assumptions for humans to make about the world, transformed by the scientific revolution into something materialist, and now re-made via allegory into something very like the old pagan god. I call it, an "allegregore": a supposedly metaphorical way of talking that takes on a life of its own.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	One of these days I'm going to pick a topic. I'm going to do some research on it.
0:06.0	I'm going to record a single podcast on it.
0:09.0	And there won't be any fascinating digressions that catch my attention or threads that I pull on that turn
0:15.9	into several other episodes and it'll just be a neat, nicely contained single topic that I do and then it's over.
0:25.0	But today is not that day!
0:29.0	Ha ha! Yeah, I'm probably kidding. There's probably never going to be a day when I don't just get obsessed and fascinated with whatever I'm talking to you guys about
0:45.0	because that's kind of what makes me love the Western canon.
0:51.0	What drives me so insane in a good way is that anything I pick up to talk
0:55.0	about, any book I decide to introduce you to, any concept I want to explore with you, I
1:00.0	always find that when you turn over that rock there's just an enormous network of ideas and thoughts to share that are relevant to everything that's going on with us right now.
1:12.0	A couple weeks ago I started talking about Novellis and just wanted to tell
1:15.8	you about this one 30-page long essay that I had really been struck by and introduced it to
1:21.1	you so that you would have it in your arsenal of things you know about in the Western
1:24.8	Canon and lo and behold this sent me on an enormous journey through the history of basically
1:30.0	everything and the theory of the medieval renaissance and that's the kind of thing
1:34.8	that really just brings me joy about this show I hope it brings you joy to that no
1:41.3	element of the Western canon if if it's truly great, if it truly deserves inclusion in the canon.
1:47.6	No element stands alone.
1:49.2	It's all network, it's all connected.
1:51.6	There's not some crazy conspiracy, it really is true that all human knowledge
1:57.1	can be connected in a network and a web.
2:00.9	And that's what's happened to me now as I've been talking to you about the
	...

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