After the Future

Thoughts on 'All Things Shining'

I've been spending some time with Dreyfus and Kelly the last two weeks.  I like what they're up to in their book, All Things Shining, and also in their respective courses based on the themes in the book, which you can find on podcast here for Kelly's Harvard seminar or at iTunes U for Dreyfus's undergraduate lectures at Berkeley.(Search iTunes U for 'Dreyfus, Philosophy 6')  While I have a couple of problems with what I see as the limitations of their approach, I see them as as allies insofar as they are struggling in a post-Nietzschean culture-world to develop a non-nihilistic way to understand the human experience in its relationship to Being.

They want to do it avoiding a monotheistic ontology, and they see possibilities for a renewed sense of the sacred in a recovery of a polytheism in a postmodern key.  They spend a lot of time with Homer's Odyssey and with Melville's Moby Dick arguing that Homer and Melville give us important clues about experiencing a world that is infinitely rich and full of meaningful distinctions. Meaningful distinctions are precisely what nihilism cannot make.

I like the basic Heideggerian project they are promoting, which is to break out of the Cartesian subjectivist bubble. From my Barfieldian Christian point of view, Heidegger is one of the key thinkers involved in laying the philosophical foundation for the movement toward Final Participation. And I see the value of what they are doing as a credible (because of their incredible credentials) translation of "Heidegerrian" into a language that non-specialists can understand.

Quote of the Day: Mark Erlich

A generation ago, non-union workers often welcomed news of improved wages and benefits for unionized employees, recognizing that a rising tide lifts all boats. But ... at a time of sacrifice and insecurity, many would prefer to sink their neighbor's slightly bigger boat while wistfully hoping for a glance at a yacht in a gated marina. (Source)

There are people who romanticize unions and the labor movement. I don't--there's a lot about the empirical performance of organized labor that really stinks.  But we're involved in a power game, and all the power is with Big Money, and they realize that the only organized force that still has the financial resources to oppose them is the unions.

It's one thing to oppose certain policies that unions support; it's another thing to seek to destroy them. And it should be clear that the Republicans and their backers are out to destroy them. They start with the public service unions, because they're more vulnerable with regard to public opinion, and if they succeed there, they'll come after every other union.

We're in a class war, and many Americans just don't want to believe it because it sounds so "leftist" or "extremist", but it's being waged by Big Money, and Big Money is quite happy to do so without any organized opposition, and the longer most Americans think there's no war going on, the longer they'll stay unorganized.  And in the meanwhile the unions are the only organized opposition it has to deal with.

There's room for legitimate debate about particular policies that unions support, but at the same time we cannot lose sight of the larger picture.  We're involved in a war here; the time for splitting hairs is behind us, and so at a very crude level it's coming down to a fundamental question: Whose side are you on?

 

History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them somewhere along the way. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--neither are we humans what we used to be.  There are opportunities, but also risks that come with this changed context in which humans come to define who they are what they are capable of. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect.   Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the traditions of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, and with that increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important, and in the final analysis all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort. It's in this sense that modernity has had a soul-flattening effect.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a globalcommercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are embraced as life's winners. Who are  the winners and who the losers, who the master, who the slaves?--that's the only thing that matters in such collective values constellation. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life force that once suffused them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away. And a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

Wisconsin

I don't have much except the obvious to say about it from my perspective. But for the record, I'll say it anyway: We're seeing the classic pattern in American politics play out there that we've seen grow in intensity since 1980. Republicans take power and aggressively seek to roll back what the rest of us thought was settled; people throw the Republicans out when their extremist agenda becomes obvious; Democrats take power, and they dither while Republicans consolidate their gains, and in doing so nauseate everyone who expects them to fight to win back what the Republicans took away; voters whose disgust with spineless Democrats is fresher than their memory of the irresponsible extremism of Republicans vote Republicans back into power; Republicans claim a mandate, pick up where they left off, and take the next step in aggressively rolling back what the rest of us thought was settled.

This is the pattern and the only sane way to break it is to take peacefully to the streets to make the case that otherwise doesn't get made because it dies somewhere in committee. The idea that somehow this is anti-democratic because the people have spoken in voting Walker and other Republicans into office is inane because it fails to recognize that the two-party electoral democracy in this country doesn't work anymore--at least for ordinary working Americans. Clearer choices have to be given to the people besides those offered by this moribund party system. And it starts with workers.

These workers doing what they're doing now in Wisconsin, which is making the case for themselves that no party is willing robustly to make on their behalf, is the first step toward restoring a robust representative democracy--if it's already not to late to do it.

Quote of the Day: Cormac McCarthy

Black: “What would you do if Jesus was to speak to you?”

White: “Do you imagine that he might?”

Black: “No, I don’t. But, but, I’own know.”

White: “I’m not virtuous enough.”

Black: “No, professor, it ain’t nothing like that. You ain’t got to be virtuous. You just got to be quiet.”

Source: From his play, The Sunset Limited

As a side note It's interesting that Berkeley Heideggerian Bert Dreyfus's and his former student and now chair of Harvard Philosopy Sean Kelly's "All Things Shining" is making something of a splash in the zeitgeist. It's Heidegger for "masses", which is about attunement to Being through receptivity and gratitude. Jesus isn't the hero of their story, though--Homer and Melville are.

I'll have more to say about that book when I have more time. 

Quote of the Day: John Cole

One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. . . .

You have to understand the mindset--they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn’t enough. They want it all. Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. . . .

And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them. They’ve even created their own mythical ideology in which they are superhero Galtian overlords, and this lets a few rubes who babble ignorantly about the free market get to feel like they are playing along, when they are really just being played. It’s these guys versus all of us, yet half the people being rogered (Republicans and glibertarians and hell, half the Democrats) have been convinced the other side is a bigger threat to their well being than the people with all the power, money, and resources. (Source)

When John Cole, the moderate voice of reason, says it, then maybe this class-war narrative is really almost ready for prime time, even if not in the MSM. But will a movement arise to vigorously push back rather than just whine about it?  That's the question.

The Sacred Polity

"Was anybody else offended by...can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song.

"I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on their jersey," Beck said.

"The country that gives them the ability to...pursue their happiness in peace and safety is not worth putting your hand on the heart."  (Source)

In a secular age, it's hard for most cosmopolitan types to understand why Glenn Beck gets so upset at things like this.  I think I get it, but I'm going to give one of my long-winded explanations to provide some context to explain what I think is going on. Doing so also gives me  a platform to talk about a couple of other things as well. And in doing so I'm going to lean heavily on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, chapter 12--"The Age of Mobilization".

In the pre-Reformation Europe, the world still had an enchantment about it--some things were sacred and some very much were not. But it was a rather vertical, static sense of the sacred. The sacred was experienced in special times during the cycle of the seasons, in sacred places, and in sacred ritual actions. The sacred was sharply distinguished from the profane, and profane behavior in a sacred time or place was more than a breach of decorum--it was sacrilegious.

The Human Future

I bring up the subject of the singularity from time to time, and it usually gets ignored. But when you look ahead twenty years the challenges it poses to the idea of the 'human' dwarf everything else. Outside of science fiction that most people see as mere entertainment, not much is said or written about it in the mainstream.

I think because it's just so hard to get your head around.  We're in the habit of looking toward the future in the rear-view mirror, and we assume fundamental continuity with incremental changes. The idea of some major discontinuty shorts the brain circuits, and we choose to think instead about Obama's approval ratings or whatever we're comfortable with. But there is nothing going on in the world right now that has more importance; it will change everything. It would seem to be the kind of thing we should be talking more about.

And while Kurzweil might be mostly sanguine about the prospects, I think his 'engineer-think inclines him already to think like a cyborg, and  if it comes to a choice, it's  clear which side of the cyborg-human divide he'd prefer to be on. But unless something very dramatic changes in the spiritual makeup of humans soon (or some environmental cataclysm befalls us), the likely the human human future for all of us is one dominated by cyborgs.

We have no idea what that means, really.  But we have every reason to believe that a major discontinuity lies ahead, and that our kids will live through it.

 

And Maher's Two Cents

Quote of the Day: Greenwald

Can you believe that "in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt," private wealth translates into great political power and vice-versa?  What is it like, wonders the curious and concerned Times reader, to live in a country like that?  No wonder there's an uprising. 

How many American politicians with a national platform over the last thirty years have failed to convert their political standing into great personal wealth? (source)

How many indeed?

It's really pretty amazing how difficult it is for Americans, particularly those in the media, to look in the mirror. I guess it's just because we're so "special."  We're just not like those other creepy oligarchies--nothing like them at all. We're the world's oldest democracy where the will of the people is sovereign.

Reaching the Breaking Point

I don't have a lot to say about what's going on in Egypt, but here's what comes to mind. On one level it's complicated, but on another it isn't. It's just about people who have reached a breaking point. People in poor countries reach the breaking point more quickly than people in richer countries. The power elite in poorer countries don't have the sophisticated control techniques richer countries have, and so they have to work with more primitive tools.

The American people have no real power until they take to the streets, and they won't until they reach a breaking point. That's the great advantage now that the U.S. power elite has.  There's more of a cushion here. Lots of Americans are feeling uncomfortable, but they aren't anywhere near the breaking point. American politics is an insider game played between different factions in the American power elite. For the rest of us it's a kind of spectator sport.

What we get on FOX or MSNBC or talk radio is no different from the analysis we get on ESPN or on our local sports radio shows. It's amazing how much time, thought, analysis goes into all the sports talk. Is it qualitatively any different from the political news and analysis we get down the dial? How does any of it really affect our lives except for feeling good when our side wins and bad when it loses. But nothing fundamental changes unless it's something that the currently most powerful faction in the power elite wants anyway. The electorate has as much influence on what happens in Washington as the fans have an influence on decisions made by the NFL and its owners.

And so the power elite in this country can pretty much do as it pleases knowing there won't be any repercussions. Americans are couch potatoes, and  if I'm in the American power elite, I don't care how bad things get for these coach potatoes so long as they stay on the couch, and they will so long as things don't get breaking-point bad.

Ultimately the people who get power are the ones who have an unhealthy, compulsive need for it. And that's how things will play out in Egypt. Mubarak might be pushed out in the next week or so, but things won't fundamentally change. Too many people with power and money--within Egypt and outside of it--have a vested interest in the Mubarak system. They want stability, and the definition of stability is business as usual--the rich getting richer, and the poor, well, staying poor, but not so poor they reach that breaking point. That was Mubarak's only failure, that he let things reach the breaking point. And he will have to pay personally for that, but the system will remain in place.