Getting after the Future

I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns.  By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common with his peasant counterpart in China than than he would with French worker living today. The greater divide is not between the medieval Frenchman and Chinaman, but between the Frenchman with premodern consciousness and the Frenchman with modern consciousness.  It's not just about the cultural differences.  It's about the reality differences because the premodern social imaginary is so profoundly different from the modern one. 

The interesting thing for Taylor is not that the world changed because of scientific discoveries, but that the imagination of the world changed during the modern era in such a way that an ordered, meaningful "cosmos" morphed into a vast, empty, disenchanted "universe". In other words, he seeks to describe how and why we have become secularized moderns. And without diminishing all the important advantages that come with our having become moderns, he challenges us to recognize what has been lost and the price we have paid for those advantages. 

Although Taylor's erudition is more than I could acquire in two lifetimes, he is groping with the same themes I've been exploring here at After the Future. This past summer (check July archive posts on "Naturalism and Supernaturalism") I got into it with some naturalists with whom I argued that they were unnecessarily limiting themselves by insisting only on naturalistic explanations for everything, including religious experiences.  The more thoughtful naturalists who commented here admitted the reality of experiences that religious types like me call transcendent, but don't see how they provide proof of anything that points to a spiritual dimension that coexists or even envelops our material existence. 

I am not going to rehearse the back and forth that went on about that again.  But during those those exchanges it struck me how difficult it is for modern naturalists to stand outside of their assumptions, I think because those assumptions are still so strongly reinforced by the modern rationalist social imaginary. So as a remedy, might I suggest to open-minded naturalists to read Taylor if they are interested to get some perspective on terrain that is already very familiar to them if they are truly open to seeing this familiar territory in a larger evolving context.  For me the value of the book is to see one's own little mental world as  but an eddy in this larger, magnificent stream. I think secular moderns of the naturalist variety would have a similar experience.

So don't get me wrong, if I had to choose who to spend time with stranded on a desert island, I'd much rather spend it with Sam Harris than someone like Pat Robertson. Robertson represents what I have called zombie traditionalism--traditional forms possessed by the ghoulish spirit of jingoistic, consumer capitalism. People so possessed tend to be hopelessly ineducable. Harris, on the other hand, represents the moribund spirit of Enlightenment rationality.  It still has some kick in it, and I think with enough time I could show him that it has no future.  That the future lies elsewhere, and that the price we're paying for its benefits are no longer worth it.  When Harris and Hitchens and Dawkins talk about the horror of religious belief they are talking about the curdled vestiges of premodern and early modern religious impulses that have overstayed their welcome.  That's not what I'm talking about. I'm interested in religion in a postmodern key, which is something these atheists are for the most part unaware of or too easily and thoughtlessly dismiss.   

My argument is that these atheists are still constrained the modern cultural template that has been breaking down for almost a century now, in part because it no longer works, and we are no longer willing to pay the price for the diminishing benefits it provides.  And while we would gladly pay, and extravagantly well, for a new social imagination of the world that would offer the depth and beauty and meaning that is so lacking in our current soul-flattened world, we are not willing to pay for solutions we have reason to believe will disappoint us.  And while there are many sellers on the market promising to give us what we long for, most have solutions that don't deliver, not the least of which those proposed by the churches. But while some solutions are better than others, none have the deep, resounding collective resonance required for the transformation of the collective imagination or social imaginary, as Taylor calls it. That's because the new thing doesn't exist yet, but if it is ever presented, it will be composed of elements retrieved from premodern consciousness combined with elements developed during the modern era.

This week I met with a friend, and she said something I've been thinking about since.  She asked me how I was imagining the future, or words to that effect, and I said I was having a hard time with that, or words to that effect. Imagining next week is a big enough task for me at the moment.  Nevertheless, I took it as an important reminder about the true nature of our task: She said we have to bend our efforts to create the future in our imaginations.  We need to write novels and songs and poems. We need to create movies and plays and use all the media available to us to create the future in our imagination of it. It's not enough anymore to just point out what wrong; we have to create a world that's right, and it starts in our efforts to think about such a world and to imagine it as a real possibility.  What would such a world look like?

For whatever any of us thinks of as real is only our current provisional imagination of it.  Our modern naturalist collective imagination is a temporary house of cards, currently collapsing in slow motion. That isn't to say that there is nothing real about the cards in use now--but only that we are dealing with half a deck. In a hundred years we will have reshuffled the deck that by then, if things go well, will include cards that have not yet been discovered and others that were lost and have been found, and we will assemble them into something new. Who knows what it will look like--if things go badly we could then be looking back from the other side of technological singularity--if theh go well from a spiritual singularity--perhaps a new axial age. I don't know how this will play out, no one does. But something's got to give, and the responsibility for making the future happen, as never before, is in human hands.

Reality is not something that we can allow to just happen to us. If we do, then the bad guys win by default. For my friend is right: reality is a work of the imagination. Our work with the imagination, of course, has has to operate within the limitations of the cards we have to play with, but it's important that we play with all the cards, not just the ones we're most familiar with and most comfortable with. And this discovery of the new and the remembering of the old keeps the process interesting and dynamic. And because it is so dynamic and evolving, both Christians and naturalists would do well to have a lot more humility flexibility about what they think of as real.

I've been saying all along that ultimately the solution isn't political.  We have to do what we can to restrain the forces of powerlust and greed from dominating the political and economic sphere, but saying No to them, while it is a tactical necessity, it is not a long-range strategy. Changing the social imaginary is

Comments

[Mike Jones]

Some years back I read Timothy Reiss' "The Discourse in Modernism", trying to see if I could get inside the mind of the premodern. I felt like I failed miserably. While I agree with Wilber that modernity split the good, the true, and the beautiful, or as he calls it the I, the We, and the It, the book at least indicated to me that more than that happened. The split allowed each domain freedom to develop, but consciousness was radically changed in the process. Wilber tries to put things back together (his idea of integral), but I am not convinced this synthesis can capture what might be lost. I don't think that being integral will re-enchant the world.

The book sounds interesting, so perhaps I'll give it a read. If you have a general list of books that are helpful for trying to put on the mind of premoderns, I would sure appreciate the list.

[realpc]

I don't know who you mean by the "bad guys." And you make it sound like people are going to imagine the same future all together. Most naturalists and Christians are probably satisfied with their current reality.

I don't see why anyone has to create the beliefs of the future. Beliefs either result from observations or from authoritative sources. We believe things because we have reasons to think they are true, not because believing them helps us defeat bad guys or makes us feel better.

When people believe in naturalism, it's because they trust the authorities who have told them that naturalism is true. When they believe in Christianity, it's because they believe the bible and religious authorities, and their personal experiences, are correct. Or they believe Wilber, or anything else, for the same reasons.

In other words, people believe what they think is true, not what they think is good for them, or for the world, to believe.

Of course, I said people believe what they think is true, not what is true. We don't usually know what is true, for one thing. Things seem more or less true to us based partly on what we want to believe. It's a mixture of objective reason and personal preference. But we always THINK we believe things because they are true. You will never convince someone to change their mind because the new belief will make them feel better.

Naturalists like to think of the world as ultimately comprehensible and manageable. It's hard to change their minds partly because they enjoy being naturalists, and partly because supernatural reality is hard to demonstrate and communicate.

[Mike Jones]

I think most naturalists would say that supernaturalism is not an "in gear" explanation of the world, whereas naturalism is. Naturalism has been very successful in that it has allowed us to act in the world more effectively. I believe that most supernaturalists, at least the local Christians I can observer, are explicit supernaturalists, and implicit naturalists. When they have an automobile breakdown, they may pray, but they don't expect it to fix the car. They call for a tow just because it gets the job done.

Supernaturalism succeeds where ones concern is an ultimate concern, because it does not have to be in gear in the same way as ordinary life. Like the old saying, pray for God's help, but keep the powder dry.

[Jack Whelan]

Mike--

For understanding premoderns start with Mircea Eliade, particularly his book "The Sacred and the Profane." A somewhat more accessible book is Harner's "Way of the Shaman" Admittedly that's going farther back than the juncture between European medieval premodern consciousness and the modern consciousness that grew out of it, but the European medievals have more in common with shamanic culture than they have with modern culture. They weren't that far removed from the Germanic and Celtic tribal cultures which continued to shape their imagination of reality until the shift to widespread literacy occurred after the Renaissance.

McLuhan (and Walter Ong) is good on this aspect of the shift, particularly in his focusing on the the shift from orality to literacy as being a key to the shift from premodern to modern. While the causes of the shift are complex and multilayered, I tend to agree that the most important was the invention of the printing press, which spread literacy to the burgeoning middle and commercial classes. Literacy reprograms the brain. See this abbreviated essay of a longer piece I wrote on that found here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/CatholicSense.html

Regarding the naturalism/supernaturalism distinction. For me it's fundamentally a metaphysical question, and secondarily an existential/experiential one. In other words, it's a question of starting points. If you choose to start from the point of view that everything is Matter, then it follows that Mind somehow develops out of matter. If you choose to start from the standpoint that everything is Mind, then it follows that Matter develops out of Mind. If you start with Mind, as most of the great thinkers have done, both east and west, until the 17th century, everything looks very different from the social imaginary that we currently shapes our assumptions about what is real and unreal. So I agree with you that supernaturalism has more to do with ultimate concerns. But getting answers for one's prayers is hardly a test for the legitimacy or coherency of a worldview that starts with the primacy of mind. But I would also argue that it has practical consequences if not in the physical order of things, in the moral order of values. And in that sense influences the existential and experiential dimension of our lives, and provides an alternative explanation for an experience that a naturalist would interpret one way and a believer another.

[Jack Whelan]

realpc:

--Most naturalists and Christians are probably satisfied with their current reality.--

Of course they are. Most people are several decades behind understanding what's really happening to them. McLuhan called it looking at the future in the rear-view mirror. We tend to think that the future will be just more of the same until something dramatic happens to wake them up that everything has changed.

So while I don't expect you to buy into my assumptions because you perceive me as some crazed leftist, a basic assumption shaping my perceptions about what is going on now is that most people, especially if their opinions are shaped by the conventional wisdom typical of conservative and liberal thought, haven't a real clear idea about where things are moving. They complacently accept the world as it is, and go on about living their lives Hobbitlike without giving much thought to the larger forces shaping the world and the future.

They are looking at the future through the rear-view mirror. And that's why we are in the fix we're in. Things are happening driven for the most part by the crudest kinds of human motivations, namely greed and powerlust, and the conventional thinking about it is that it's normal; it's the way thing have always been and will always be.

My argument is that we're moving into a radically different kind of social reality in which humans have much more control over shaping the social imaginary. It's an era when less and less is 'given' and more and more is 'chosen' so individual moral responsibility for the nature of the reality we live in increases with each passing decade. In such a world real leaders have vision, and their vision depends on their imagining a future that is not rear-view mirror determined.

And they are struggling within the limits of the cards they are dealt to construct a new imagination of the future that has a moral dimension to it, not one that is simply left to market forces. If it reinforces your conventional sense of good order to call me a leftist, go ahead. But if you've read and understood anything I've been saying over the last three or four years, you would understand that I see the secular left looking in the rear view mirror just as much as the traditional right. I identify with neither. For me it's not primarily a question of left and right, it's more a question of common sense informed by good grasp of the facts and ordinary instincts for common decency.

So when I talk about the bad guys winning, I'm talking about the basic truth pointed to in Yeats's famous poem when he says "The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity." The worst people are clear about their objectives because they are driven by the basest kind of instinctual drives for power and wealth. The best people are confused and, as you describe them, satisfied. They don't really undestand what's happening, and if they do what to do about it. And so until somebody imagines a "best" counterscenario to the program of the worst, the bad guys win.

[realpc]

Jack,

I am not left or right either, and I am also someone who thinks about it all. I am not a "naturalist," and I believe mind creates matter. I agree with you that we have lost a lot in becoming modern.

But I have some profound disagreements with where I think you are coming from. I read some of Wilber's books, thinking great, finally someone was transcending the left-right and science-religion dichotomies. But I feel profoundly turned off by some of his ideas, especially the assumption that we are evolving towards something "better."

First of all, it implies that we can all agree on what is better. And even more annoying, some people are considered more highly evolved than others. Anyone sharing Wilber's particular preferences is of course at the most highly evolved stage. Anyone not on his wavelength is of course primitive.

I just do not agree with all those assumptions. You seem to be on that evolving towards utopia wavelength and it's just a real turn-off to me.

I think greed and lust and power have been human motivations since forever and always will be. But so have love, altruism and compassion. We are not becoming more compassionate, we have always been compassionate. We are not becoming any less greedy. Look closely at anyone you know and you will see greed. Greed is desire. Unless you're a monk in the wilderness you have not transcended desire. And if you have transcended desire you are not involved with the world.

Sometimes the most apparently selfless and altruistic are really the most egotistical and narcissistic. No one can escape the normal human passions.

We are not evolving towards perfection. We are just fine the way we are. Utopian ideas imply that we are not ok. We shouldn't be greedy and violent. Well I think we should be the way god made us. The challenge is to accept what we are, rather than constantly trying to deny it and escape it.

Yes each of us should try to treat others fairly and with kindness. But each of us should also learn how to defend ourselves from predators. We should spend our lives learning how to be better, but we will never all agree on what better is. Never. We will never see the future and where we are heading and we basically don't know very much.

It is definitely a temptation to think we have a direction and definite goals. And it's a temptation to think we share the same direction and goals. But we most certainly do not.

You think Christians are lagging behind the current reality. But that's probably just because you aren't a Christian yourself, and you like to think you are way ahead of them. But you aren't. You are different than Christians, not better or worse.

The more I understand myself, the more I realize I am not special or better. Or that all of us, Christian or atheist or warrior or pacifist, are all special and better in each of our own ways.

[Matt Zemek]

Realpc:

As a columnist myself, I'm all too aware that there's a very, very fine line between making (inappropriate, haughty) moral judgments of people and engaging in lucid sociocultural analysis.

With that as prelude, Jack is and always has been rather clear in putting forth his writings as analytical, not judgmental. In fact, it's hard to find another commentator in the blogosphere with an even remotely similar level of non-partisan, above-the-fray, even-handed analysis of people, ideologies and systems.

I'd be interested in wondering why you think a lot of these writings are judgmental and not analytical.

PS--If you're upset at what you perceive to be runaway judgmentalism and arrogance here, why are you so forceful and insistent in saying a number of things that are judgmental in their own right? All in all, please explain in detail why you perceive judgmentalism here and not sober, cerebral analysis. (I'm sensitive to this because I just got my biggest batch of hate mail in 2007...)

[Jack Whelan]

realpc:

What Matt said, but also, here's a judgment: torture bad; democracy good. War bad, looking for any other way to resolve conflict, good.

As Matt points out, I try not to judge people and try rather to focus on what I think of as social syndromes. People are complex and ambivalent, but these syndromes are not, and I think it's fair to point out that people are endangering themselves and those around them when they embrace these syndromes or let these syndromes get the better of them.

It's like being an alcoholic. Alcoholics are not evil people, but they are in the grip of something we can all agree is bad. Do you see the difference?

So do you have a problem with my saying that alcoholism is bad? Probably not, but you might have a harder time with my saying that greed is bad, or powerlust is bad. I'm not saying money or power is bad; I am saying they become evils when they become compulsive syndromes that become the tail wagging the dog in individuals or in groups. There is such a thing as a culture of greed. In some groups it's worse than others. We saw a particularly bad example of it at Enron. There is such thing as a culture of power; we see it everywhere the country is run by an authoritarian oligarchy, whether in Burma, Latin America, whether the coutries are leftist or rightist. My fear which many share with me is that his country is getting rid of the checks that prevent us from becoming like these authoritarian societies, because authoritarianism is natural.

It's what all complex societies inevitably drift toward unless the people in them actively resist becoming such. That's just common sense. The founding fathers were aware of this trait in human nature and feared it would eventually destroy the republic they created.

So while I don't think any human being is unambiguously evil or good, I think you can make judgments about whether destructive syndromes have gotten the better of them. And it be clear, and easy to understand, that people attracted to places like D.C. are often the kind of people who are prone to let these syndromes get the better of them. It's what anybody with common sense would expect, and it's born out by observation and experience. D.C. is all about power and money, and the temptations it offers would require heroic virtue to resist, and some do, and those who do usually become irrelevant marginal players. People don't come to D.C with the idea of becoming irrelevant, marginal players, so they play ball, and as the olds saying goes, many come to Washington to do good, and end up staying to do well.

But the problem does not lie on the individual level, but on the group cultural level where these syndromes operate. The Democrats and Republicans both suffer from it in different ways, but in my judgment, the Republicans are suffering from it in ways that are far more dangerous to our democracy. I'm not making an argument about individuals; I'm making an argument about how individuals with power are abusing it because of these syndromes having gotten the better of them.

So it's on the level of these syndromes that I think change has to take place. They have to be seen for the dangerous, destructive things they are and repudiated. That's what I'm talking about when I talk about trying to change the imagination, because you don't easily give something up unless there is the desire for something better, and right now the best lack all conviction because there is nothing the best to offer that provides a compelling alternative to what those in the passionate grip of these syndromes are seeking to do in the political and economic spheres.

So believe me I'm not talking about imposing my imagination as if it were some program I think everyone should sign on to. I'm for freedom, and I'm against top-downism. Real change happens from the bottom up, and the politicians are usually among the last to catch on. Positive change on this level of social imagination happens because people choose it because they want it, and they want it because it's better. And it's better because it opens up possibilities for a deeper richer and more human life.

[realpc]

"authoritarianism isnatural.

It's what all complex societies inevitably drift toward unless the people in them actively resist becoming such. That's just common sense. The founding fathers were aware of this trait in human nature and feared it would eventually destroy the republic they created."

Yes I completely agree with you on that. There are evil syndromes we have to watch out for.

I don't happen to see the Republicans as worse than the Democrats though. It's just that the Republicans had too much power for too long. But the coalition between economic libertarians and conservative Christians is breaking down anyway. That coalition made sense in its time, though, and was a reaction against other evil syndromes.

I have read a lot of Chomsky, and I do not consider him an objective thinker. Everything is filtered through his hatred of power, and he often winds up being very irrational.

But yes, I can understand his, and your, distrust of power. And it's much more dangerous now because of technology.