More Than Human Power

You know it when you feel it

Photo by Max LaRochelle on Unsplash

POWER IS A STRANGE word. It’s actually a pretty minimal term; it can simply mean the capacity to do something, modify something, or make something happen. But the word, more often than not, refers to something more specific: a force or capacity that’s given, or authorized, by law. This latter use of the term is, I think, more explicitly political. That is to say, we tend to associate it with political actors and institutions. It also gives power a nastier flavor. It turns power into something that politicians are hungry for, that people wield against one another like a weapon. This is the sort of power that you might critique others for using badly, but wash your own hands of. It’s the kind of power that corrodes. 

And yet there are so many beautiful uses of power. I think most of us want to feel some kind of power inside—we want to feel empowered, not disempowered. We want power to fill us up enough to help us stand a little straighter. We can feel power when a storm rolls in across the sky. But we can also feel it emerging from small things: when a cat, or even a small baby, catches our gaze and holds onto it. 

If power is simply the capacity to do something, modify something, or make something happen then the word might be unhelpfully complex. It becomes uncontainable and indefinable. Does it even point to something real? This is part of what makes power a theological term, in my analysis. Power isn’t a deity, not necessarily. But it often functions like one: complex, abstract, uncontainable, perhaps even nonexistent. Theology, as I’ve increasingly argued, is (at its most basic) a set of theories about power and how we relate to it. And there’s plenty of talk, in theology, about the sort of power that’s given or authorized by law. But power, in theology, is never just legal or state power. It’s also something else: something that’s simply more than human. 

More than human power is something I’ve been thinking about a lot this summer. It’s somehow become the unexpected protagonist of my new book project. I was planning a second book project on underworlds, but (for complex reasons) have put that project on hold for a few months. One thing I’ve learned about book projects is that they consume you: whatever you’re writing about becomes a single-minded intellectual obsession. So, perhaps I’ve been contemplating nothing but more than human power this summer. And it strikes me now, in this moment of political crisis, just how completely American political discourse in the mainstream has lost its ability to take more than human power seriously, and to tap into it. 

IF YOU’RE INTO ecology and nature writing, you probably recognize the term “more-than-human” from the work of David Abram. I’ve been unable to trace the specific phrase to any work earlier than his 1996 book The Spell of the Sensuous, where he takes on the task of trying to get us to sense—and pay attention to—more than human lifeworlds. But, of course, this basic idea that there is an excluded and foreclosed lifeworld outside of the quasi-divinized modern figure of Man, one we ignore only at our own peril, has become an increasingly common point in intellectual conversations about ecology and politics. We could even call it a kind of new orthodoxy. 

One of the things I appreciate about Abram is that he recognizes the extent to which more than human lifeworlds aren’t just another name for nature. Rather, the more than human includes what modern western conceptions of nature have often sought to exclude: magic, spirits, and maybe even figures we could call divine. The more than human is, to borrow a term from Jacques Derrida, divinanimal—it incorporates multiple dimensions of the modern humanist exclusion. It’s messy, uncontainable, and complex. Unlike Abram, however (and to the consternation of some of my editors), I don’t like all of those hyphens that make the more than human feel so sharp, and put together. That’s why I prefer to go unhyphenated. Another point of departure, perhaps, is that for Abram, the more-than-human is a lifeworld. For me, it’s also a figure of power.

To me, more than human power is a way of speaking that points to the sort of powers that were excluded from the modern figure of Man—the figure who had an outsized role in shaping what we’ve been told it means to be human. It’s a power that’s more than human in the sense that it’s divine. And it’s more than human in the sense that it’s animal, or better, part of that realm of nature outside of culture. It’s a term that confounds the false divisions between the divine and the natural (as if God is something alien to nature, or religion can somehow be cordoned off from science). 

WHAT, YOU MIGHT now be thinking, could this more than human power possibly have to do with politics unless we’re talking about climate change and the environment? Even those of us who recognize that climate change is a massive political crisis still tend to cordon off discussions about the environment, as if it’s a special interest. To this I can only say that more than human power is what we admire, fear, and authorize when we engage in politics in the first place. Our politics are oriented around more than human powers, whether we acknowledge this or not. 

It’s easy to make this case when we think about the politics of monarchy. The monarch, in a simple and straightforward way, is authorized by more than human power. In European monarchy, this more than human power was often less animal and more divine. We can see in the ritual of the coronation ceremony, for instance, how this symbolism was performed: the divine touches down, as the crown is set in place. It’s like a kiss from God, on the top of the head. With this gesture the monarch becomes like a force of nature: exceedingly powerful and exceedingly distant.

But politicians today gain authority by tapping into more than human power in a very different way. In a world where we know that politicians are just people, we know that no kiss from God will make them more than human. Instead, politicians learn to marshal the more than human power that is collective feeling. Our collective feelings are more than just human. Our collective feelings are something much bigger than us and can sometimes even feel a bit divine (think about the conflation of God and love, for instance). Our collective feelings function like irresistible, contagious, infectious forces of nature. They are bigger than us: they ripple through our little bodies, but they aren’t contained there. They radiate into us, and out of us. They become embedded in our relationships, in our social institutions, in our art, in our machines and technologies, in our food, in our agriculture, in our landscapes, in our animal companions. Politicians ride those collective feelings like waves that wash them onto the shores of power like detritus brought in by the tide.

POLITICS IN AMERICA today have become almost exclusively animated by fear and resentment. Donald Trump didn’t create these collective feelings, but he knew how to tap into them and amplify them. That’s how he rode those feelings into power. Joe Biden didn’t create these feelings, either, and he’s certainly not as good at tapping into them. But he did know how to tap into a very specific collective feeling: passionate resentment of Donald Trump, fear of more Trump power, and desire for a time before Trump. Biden rode those collective feelings like a wave, into power. But, as we can see now, it wasn’t enough. He didn’t tap into any of our other collective feelings, and we needed so much more. All he could do was remain animated—as if he were just a puppet—by the fear and resentment that have come to seem like our only public feelings here in America.

These kinds of collective feelings (fear, resentment) are the sort that, in another age, people would have comfortably referred to as demonic: they’re the powers of a malignant more than human collective feeling, one that will only corrode and disempower us, one that we should want to evade. It sounds absurd to put it that way, I know. But I think it also sounds a little true. And I think that these overwhelming collective feelings will never shift if we can’t—in some sort of massive, collective, way—tap into other more than human powers, and the collective feelings they animate. Better politicians would help. But we need bigger, more than human, help.

What are we living for? We all have some sort of deep seated (perhaps unarticulated) sense of what it is that our politics supports and aids, what it is that these more than human institutions that gather us together and organize us (and sometimes destroy us) are for: what they should exist for. What is a democracy even for? Is it to make the money that will grow a capitalist economy? Or to consolidate and wield national power? Or to teach all humans to respect and appreciate the scientific method (is this what it means to “believe in science?”) Or to help alleviate the suffering of other earthlings as we all face into the mysterious more than human emptiness of all things? Or to illuminate the beauty of earth beings for one another, so that we can build capacious and liveable lifeworlds where more than human forms of life can thrive together? The loudest and most influential answers to this question (what are we living for?) are mostly bad, in my assessment. And I don’t think that this is necessarily because most of us want bad answers. It seems as if the best ones are kept quiet. Maybe they are too embarrassing, or too difficult to simplify, or too real and raw to speak out loud. 

Analysis in the news and social media is full of the kind of “he said, she said” reports that we’ve been told is good information. “People say Trump was spared by God,” the headlines tell us. And in this way, over and over again, the only people who get to make any sort of public claims about more than human powers, who get speculate loudly about what we’re living for, are those who appear unhinged enough not to care that no one is supposed to talk about that kind of stuff anymore. They get to own those conversations because, for most of the rest of us, we’ve simply lost the sort of language to speak about our own relationship to more than human powers. If we even indulge ourselves in the audacious claim that there is power beyond the human, in the first place. We drifted away from old languages, and new ones only emerged in subtle codes that are difficult to see, touch, or hold onto: little poetic flickers, or a nice artistic flair that give us some muscle memory of that old language, but help us to avoid the shame or embarrassment of speaking it aloud.

There are countless religious people, in America today, who know that their god wants something better for us: forms of collective feeling that are aren’t fear and resentment. Or who know that their ancestors are working for something better. There are millions of dogs and cats, all across America—little arms of more than human powers in our midst—who want us to live beyond this fear and resentment they can see us caught up in. They want something better for us. The Earth—whether she be Gaia, our mother, or just this gorgeous rock spinning in space that is also us—wants and needs so much more from us. Earth needs (and can also feed) the more than human powers of compassion, tenderness, explosive joy, honest mourning. These are feelings that can make us stand up a little straighter, and feed our visions and dreams for a livable earth. I honestly think that, unless we can tap into a wild host of more than human powers—affective, divine, animal, vegetal, mineral—we will remain trapped in these demonic, malignant collective feelings. 

And yet it probably sounds unhinged, to put it that way. Because, unless we speak about more than human powers in the most tired and traditional language (unless we speak about God, using male pronouns), this sort of contemplation doesn’t seem to get much air time. This wilder, let’s call it earthier, kind of speculation about more than human powers (outside of some niche conversations that you are probably a part of, if you happen to have stumbled upon this very niche commentary) is just a weird aberration. So we are stuck together by our fear, and our resentment, and we ride them as if they are the only waves to ride. Because, in one sense at least, they are.