Conspirituality Podcast Calls Out Eisenstein for Cribbing "the New Story" from Thomas Berry, Cites Yours Truly (Part 4)
Starting around 1 hour, 4 minutes [1:04], the Conspirituality podcast wraps up today's episode with a shout out to the analysis of our fledgling Substack here, barely a month old.
Drew Dellinger and Thomas Berry walking in Greensboro, North Carolina. (Stephan Snider)
The newest episode of the Conspirituality podcast just dropped today, and the topic is the New Trump-RFK Jr. Alliance and Charles Eisenstein’s recent essay, “Shades of Many Colors.”
In this episode, titled “RFK Jr’s Pet Guru Blesses Trump,” the Conspirituality team—Derek Beres, Matthew Remski, and Julian Walker—do their typically thoughtful job pulling apart the issues at play here, including a lot of the dynamics I’ve touched on in my recent Substack posts:
“Charles Eisenstein Endorses Trump, but Thinks You're Not Clever Enough to Notice (Part 2)”
“More thoughts re: Eisenstein and the New Trump-RFK Jr. Alliance — We have eyes, bro (Part 3)”
It’s an insightful and worthwhile listen, and I think the work of the Conspirituality podcast is incredibly important and necessary in this political and cultural moment… I mean, conspirituality thinking, and this new Trump-Bobby Jr. derp pact, is exactly the kind of ridiculous nonsense—like a butterfly ballot or a dimpled chad—that, of fucking course, would end up farce-ing us into fascism.
But what I want to emphasize is the END of the Podcast—the Last 8 Minutes.
Starting around 1 hour, 4 minutes [1:04], Matthew Remski wraps up the episode with a shout out to our fledgling Substack here, barely a month old.
Matthew Remski, CONSPIRITUALITY podcast (Sept. 19, 2024):
“The general theme is, there’s an anxiety that comes from never really having an original thought…
Here’s my speculation about how he [Charles Eisenstein] arrives here:
Somewhere along the line—between pretending to be an expert in yogic diet; to an expert in global economy; to how we should solve climate change—he, sort of, suffered a personal disaster that he may not be aware of. Which is that he was surrounded by feedback that told him he was uniquely insightful; he was a savant; he was indispensable to the human knowledge project. Like, nobody was around to inform him that he had picked up on a fairly common observation about mythic structures…
Maybe he was never in a room where someone could fact-check or peer-review him. So, either that’s luck or it’s actively avoiding that stuff. No one early on tells him that he’s full of shit, or simply banal.
But then, there’s also something weirder going on, too. Which is that there’s a cultural memory-holing going on that let Eisenstein kind of just ram himself into the spotlight as though he’d invented certain ideas.
I want to read something to you both, and you can take a guess as to where this comes from. OK; quote:
‘It’s all a question of story. We are in trouble just now because we do not have a good story. We are in between stories. The Old Story, the account of how the world came to be and how we fit into it, is not functioning properly. And we have not learned the New Story…’” (Thomas Berry, 1978)
Reader, this was music to my ears!
Thomas Berry at the Temple of Minerva, Assisi, Italy; Summer 1991 (Drew Dellinger)
Thomas Berry (1914-2009) was for me—as for many, many people around the U.S., Canada, and well beyond—a personal friend, teacher, aspirational role model, and mentor. I was blessed to know Thomas for the last 20 years of his life.
When I started posting critiques of Charles Eisenstein’s work—over five years ago; before the pandemic, and before nearly anyone else—one of my major reasons for doing so was this:
It was no longer OK with me that there was a widespread misimpression that Charles Eisenstein originated the ideas of “the Old Story,” and “the New Story,” and the concept that, culturally, societally, we are currently “between stories” in some profound sense.
And, reader, believe me when I say this was much more than the nattering of a disgruntled acolyte: ‘My teacher said it first!’
Part of what motivated me is that, not only did Charles not come up with these pivotal ideas that were causing his fawning followers to faint, but Charles’s work—as stirring as it must be to someone encountering eco-philosophy for the first time—is such a pale substitute for the galactic grandeur and numinous poetry of Thomas Berry’s cosmological vision.
Berry’s writing and teaching is among the most profound, awe-inducing, inspirational, ecologically astute, deeply sourced, and influential I’ve ever encountered.
Eisenstein’s work is… not.
But, back to today’s Conspirituality podcast episode—
The reading by Matthew Remski from an early version of Thomas Berry’s 1978 essay, “The New Story,” continued at length before concluding:
So where can we begin? My suggestion is that we begin where everything begins in human affairs: with the basic story… We need a story…’” (Thomas Berry, 1978)
REMSKI: “OK; Derek and Julian—who wrote that, do you think? … I mean, you hear it, right? … This is the opening of a small book, called A New Story, and it’s by the Jesuit [Passionist, actually] eco-theologian Father Thomas Berry. It’s published in 1978.
If this isn’t plagiarism of some kind, then I believe Eisenstein can really access the mind of Thomas Berry, who died in 2009. Maybe through the Akashic realms. Maybe he can channel him directly. I don’t know if, when you channel someone, you have to give citations.
Does anyone know about this? I was kind of flabbergasted. After all these years of looking at his work, I did not know that there was this direct antecedent.
I came across the connection in this really good critical analysis of Eisenstein’s essay by Drew Dellinger, that we’ll link to. And then I found three hits that put Berry and Eisenstein together…”
Remski describes a few online comments and posts mentioning connections and similarities between Berry’s work and Charles’s.
“Please Put Some Respect on Thomas Berry’s Name”
Remski did not have the advantage of knowing that I’ve been posting about this, every now and then, on Facebook for years, such as this Facebook post from April 2021 (screenshot below).
Or this post, from 2022/2024 (screenshot below).
The last point of connection that Remski identifies between Charles Eisenstein and Thomas Berry involves our dear friend, colleague, mentor, and fellow Berry-ite, Dr. Brian Thomas Swimme.
Remski states:
“And then there’s an interview with someone named Brian Swimme, who asked Charles Eisenstein if he is familiar with the work of Thomas Berry. Swimme says, ‘Do you know the work of Thomas Berry?’”
I remember listening to this conversation between Charles and Brian when it came out five years ago. When Brian asked this question, the historical record scratched.
Matthew Remski reads Eisenstein’s reply to Brian Swimme:
[Charles]: “‘Very little firsthand. Yeah, everyone tells me there’s a lot of resonance between my work and Thomas Berry’s.’
[Remski]: And so I scanned Eisenstein’s books in Google Books and I can’t find any clear citations of Thomas Berry.”
At this point another Conspirituality podcast host, Julian Walker, jumps in:
“Yeah, and that reference to Brian Swimme is really important, because Brian Swimme did a whole series of beautiful videos on YouTube about the New Story. Brian Swimme is deep, deep into this particular thing—about how we need some kind of mytho-poetic way forward that is infused by scientific knowledge about the universe and how incredible it is.”
Matthew Remski again:
“OK, so does Swimme pre-date Eisenstein’s work on this?”
Berry-ites, Swimme-ians, and the worldwide New Cosmology community will testify that I could be forgiven for fainting at this point.
YES!!!!!!!! By two decades at least!!!!!!!
To their credit, Walker replies, “I believe so,” and Remski muses, “I wonder if that was a poking question?”
I mean, yeah; it kinda was, which is to say, though I can’t speak for him, I believe Brian Swimme understood the import and implications of the query. But also, Brian is a gentleman and doesn’t have a mean bone in his body, so it was a straightforward and genuine question as well.
I don’t know when Charles started talking and/or writing about a “New Story” and an “Old Story.” Nor do I remember when I first started hearing a little bit about Charles and his work. I feel like it was around 2010-2012; which would make sense, given that his book Sacred Economics was published in 2011.
Brian Swimme’s cosmological masterpiece, The Universe Is a Green Dragon, inspired by and dedicated to Thomas Berry, and written after a year of intensive study with him, was published in 1985.
Swimme’s cosmological masterpieces, The Universe Story (co-authored with Thomas Berry) and The Hidden Heart of the Cosmos, were published in 1992 and 1996.
(True heads jonesing for the deep cuts might also want to check out Manifesto! For a Global Civilization, by “Matthew Fox, theologian & Brian Swimme, physicist,” which dates from the historical period known as “1982.” I mean, this book is so old, I wrote my name in the front as “Andrew Dellinger.”)
But this is precisely the history that Eisenstein and his fawning followers apparently missed.
The predecessors; the tradition; the community; the scholarship; the thinking; the debates; the language, ideas, phrases, and insights; the practices; the conversation; that, as Remski notes, Charles stepped into, and then took a bow.
Charles stepped into the spotlight as this dialogue was still echoing, quite clearly, around the auditorium. Charles heard those echoes, then, when the next audience came in for the second showing, shared them again and soaked up the unsuspecting applause.
During those years (the 90s) that I was learning at the feet of these cosmological giants, and the ten years prior, the “New Cosmology” and “New Story” community included not only our leaders, Thomas Berry and Brian Swimme, but also visionary thinkers like Rev. Matthew Fox, and his graduate programs; Joanna Macy; John Grim; Sister Miriam MacGillis; Mary Evelyn Tucker; Charlene Spretnak; Satish Kumar; Susan Griffin; Rev. Michael Dowd; Richard Tarnas; Rosemary Radford Ruether; John Cobb; Paul Winter; Dean Jim Morton; Sisters of the Earth (since 1994!); Green Mountain Monastery; Prairiewoods in Iowa; Schumacher College in England; the Whidbey Institute; the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), especially the Philosophy, Cosmology and Consciousness Program (PCC); the Sophia Center; In Context magazine, later YES! magazine; Creation Spirituality magazine; EarthLight magazine; and on and on.
There are so many more I could name. Even the badass, radical, anti-death-penalty nun, Sister Helen Prejean, came and got down with us. She is a hoot, and she loves Brian Swimme, Thomas Berry, and cosmology.
Thomas Berry and the New Cosmology (Twenty-Third Publications, 1987)
There is a Whole History here; so, no, we won’t be memory-holing it.
Not on my watch.
At same time, we recognize that all of these teachers had teachers, too. And each pulled from many sources and traditions.
That’s the thing: Berry reveled in his numerous sources and inspirations—from Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and religions of India; to Native American, African, and Indigenous traditions and spirituality; to Bergson, Jung, Teilhard, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, René Dubos, Marija Gimbutas, and even Alan Watts.
Thomas Berry delighted in—and delighted his listeners with—his citations. As I’ve noted before, citations; giving credit; acknowledging predecessors is a joyous process of honoring and celebrating, as well as a duty and responsibility. It weaves us into meaningful communities of thought, inspiration, influence, accountability, praxis, and relationship across time and space. What a beautiful thing!
As a last slice of summary from the final 8 minutes of today’s new Conspirituality podcast episode,
here is Matthew Remski again:
“So how does this happen, this stunning lack—Because I would equate a lack of originality with a lack of, you know, real world ideas to put forward, which is what we’ve been talking about for the last hour. Eisenstein is writing into a charismatic, unboundaried space in which failing to check sources is pretty standard…”
There’s something about also, for me at least, dropping out of college, where you ostensibly know that professors are not making shit up. And then you enter these pseudo-college spaces, and retreat centers, and meditation retreats, where people can make things up, but you assume that they won’t.
Astutely, Remski continues,
“But also there’s a generational issue here. Because whoever was reading Berry with any concentration was probably Boomer, and Eisenstein really has found his crowd with younger Gen X and Millennial readers, and I think, maybe, among people who are new to eco-spirituality as well, so he gets this self-validating feedback loop going.
He turns the banal into the grandiose. He somehow finds a professional garden for it. Which is not the academy. It’s not journalism. It’s not the political think-tank. But it’s the self-help workshop economy, based in post-60s retreat centers that have been gentrified into sites of, you know, neoliberal spiritual pilgrimage. These are places where the product is not knowledge, or policy, but inspiration. And experiences of mindfulness…
“So there’s a pure audience-capture aspect to Eisenstein’s product. It’s not rational. It’s never been disciplined. It’s not guard-railed. It encourages constant overreach; constant spiritualization. And it rides on super simplistic principles that can be made to apply to—and just obfuscate—any issue…
And what we’ve seen over the past year is that they’ve tried to scale this up into a political campaign and it cannot work.”
—Matthew Remski, Conspirituality podcast, Sept. 19, 2024
Dear reader, after five long years, is my work here finally done?!?!
This post is beyond breaching the boundaries of propriety, so let me wrap things up—for now.
Here’s the recap:
My platform is fairly modest. The platform, reach, and audience of the Conspirituality podcast is much, much larger. (For example, they have 40,000 followers on their Instagram account.)
So for them to pick up what I’ve been laying down—for years now,
I must say, it feels like a major My-Work-Here-Is-Done moment.
And I welcome that.
More than five years ago, before the pandemic even, I made my first posts trying to sound an early warning about some disconcerting and counter-productive aspects of Charles Eisenstein’s work—when others weren’t seeing it. Now, a lot of people are seeing it.
Five years ago, I wanted to help create a public permission structure for calling it out. Now, lots of people are calling it out.
Five years ago, I wanted to spread the word to a younger generation—that largely didn’t seem to know—that the ideas and language of “the New Story” and “the Old Story” were spread around the planet by the great, one-and-only, Thomas Berry for about 30 years, from 1978 until 2009, and beyond. Tom literally published two significant books in 2009, the year he died.
The Sacred Universe (Columbia University Press, 2009) and The Christian Future and the Fate of the Earth (Orbis Books, 2009) by Thomas Berry.
Now, Thomas Berry certainly isn’t the first to ever have any ideas like this. But his particular formulation and articulation of the concepts of the New Story, and the Old Story and being between stories—within the context of the new cosmological scientific worldview, and the ever-increasing exigencies of the Ecological Crisis and Climate Crisis (which Berry, as a prophetic figure, foresaw all too clearly) was startlingly ORIGINAL.
Tons of people said so. From all kinds of backgrounds. For decades.
It doesn’t matter to me whether or not Charles Eisenstein read Thomas Berry’s breakthrough collection of essays, The Dream of the Earth, published in 1988, and in which a slightly revised version of his 1978 essay, “The New Story,” was included.
Thomas Berry’s stunning formulation of the New Story was revelatory—original, captivating, fresh, moving, insightful, and motivating, leaving one prone to a marked increase in Awe, Wonder, and Radical Amazement.
(Speaking of the universe, the cosmos, Berry once said to me, “I think this is the most radical thing a person can think about.”)
Berry’s unique formulation and explication of “the New Story” and “the Old Story”
was inclusive of our galactic lineage; of the sacred, mysterious, creative, Earth process; of the Universe Story and the Earth Community; of our interconnectedness; of the wisdom of women and goddess traditions; of the classical religious traditions (at their best); of science and the without of things; of spirit and the within of things; of Western, Asian, and Indigenous worldviews and traditions; of the power of story, and the centrality of cosmology, worldview, myth, and narrative; of the epic of evolution and the Ecological Crisis, which is currently terminating the 65-million-year Cenozoic Period by causing a Sixth Mass Extinction of Species and devastating the biosphere and the climate writ large.
Berry was on to all that, and in a way that pre-dated many, many people who would be deeply influenced and inflected by what Thomas Berry was doing. The dude was far ahead of his time, so to speak.
During the period in which Charles was soaking up the vibe and the zeitgeist, and preparing for his career as a public speaker and writer, I can’t imagine a scenario in which the words “The New Story” and “The Old Story” would not have crossed his ears, at some point, given the circles he was presumably in.
In Charles’s response to Brian Swimme’s plain question as to whether he is familiar with Berry’s work, remember Eisenstein replied,
“Yeah, everyone tells me there’s a lot of resonance between my work and Thomas Berry’s.”
Crucially, Charles never mentions the date, even in the roughest approximation, of the first time an ‘everyone’ told him there’s a lot of resonance between his work and Thomas Berry’s.
Or if he ever once felt curious enough to follow that up and look into Berry, either the first, second, third, fourth—or fifteenth time that happened. And, if not, why not?
That’s pretty much the first thing I would do if someone (especially more than one person) told me the ideas I had BUILT MY ENTIRE PUBLIC TEACHING CAREER UPON had a lot of resonance with somebody else’s key ideas and core concepts.
Right?
And in this case, it seems to me that there is a lot one can do with just the words, just from hearing the conceptual framework of Old Story / New Story / Between Stories.
Indeed, Charles’s “New Story” work, mixed as it is with his straw-manning, both-sides-ism, false-equivalence, and, at times, even an epistemological ‘nothing-is-real; who-can-say?’ nihilism, is a pale reflection of Berry’s profundity and poetry.
So, in conclusion…
I’m thankful to the Conspirituality podcast for their shoutout in today’s episode, and for linking to Part 1 and Part 2 in the show notes.
Over five years ago I set out to make sure that Thomas Berry’s breakthrough achievement—his conception of the New Story and the Old Story—was not memory-holed.
Today, the wide-reaching Conspirituality podcast shouldered some of this lift and amplified the call.
As Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim have stated, “The New Story” is Thomas Berry’s “signature essay”;
the capstone of Tom’s forty years of reflection, study, reading, watching the wind, listening to the many translucent voices of nature, and meditation on the Earth and its detractors.
Tucker and Grim write:
“‘The New Story’ is a culmination of a lifetime of Berry’s reflections on the growing ecological crisis and what new paradigm would be essential to counteract the devastating power of extractive industries and consumer economies. This new story, he felt, could begin to break through the modern view of materialism and reductionism that had objectified nature primarily as a resource for human use.
To do this he felt we needed a coherent evolutionary story that would draw together science and religion in an integrated manner.”1
Thomas Berry: A Biography, by Tucker, Grim, and Angyal (Columbia University Press, 2019)
As for Eisenstein’s newest, even more outrageous post, “Trump and the Tempests of Hate”:
There’s not much more I could say that would delegitimize and show the nonsense of Charles’s work more than his own most recent post.
Several commenters are calling it perhaps the worst thing they’ve ever read, which seems hyperbolic, but is indicative of the passions stirred in some.
At the beginning of this series of posts, my intention was to go through, in a detailed way, the nonsense and tomfoolery in Charles Eisenstein’s article, “Shades of Many Colors.”
But, I have to tell ya, Eisenstein’s newest essay, “Trump and the Tempests of Hate,” kind of takes the wind out of my sails.
And here’s why:
I’m no longer sure if Charles is not being disingenuous in a deeper way than I thought.
Eisenstein’s flip flop, within a week, from, ‘I’m not quite endorsing Trump; aren’t I clever?’ to now, ‘OK, here’s what Trump needs to do to win; and here’s more on why he’s The Guy,’ …
It is head-spinning and brain-numbing at the same time.
It’s so ludicrous, nonsensical, and shoddy. Trying to critique it just feels ridiculous and slightly sticky, like arm-wrestling cotton candy.
Most importantly, it feels like a waste of time.
RIP, AMBER THURMAN (1993-2022), her death brought about, as Lawrence O’Donnell notes, by Presidents George H. W. Bush, George W. Bush, and Donald Trump, by appointing Justices Thomas, Alito, Roberts, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Coney-Barrett to the Supreme Court, for the specific purpose of overturning the protections and freedoms of Roe v. Wade.
And, beyond that, we have an entire society to help transform and guide toward justice, community, universal compassion, radical egalitarianism, ecological healing, and peace. In harmony with our Great Self, the cosmos, as Thomas used to say. Or as Joanna Macy, Arne Naess and others would say,
our Ecological Self:
The glowing, growing, numinous, luminous Earth.
Thomas Berry: Selected Writings on the Earth Community. Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim, eds. (Orbis Books, 2014) p. 11.