Beginning Middle End

I want to continue to develop some of the ideas I was exploring in the recent piece I posted about styles of thinking. I think there's probably too much going on in diagram I used to begin the piece--and too much remains unexplained. So in the next several posts I'm going to break it down into its component parts. The most important element is the movement depicted here:

I think that there are all kinds of cultural cycles--small ones like the 80-year New Deal Social Democracy cycle in the U.S. [FDR/originating, Truman-Kennedy/articulating, Johnson-Carter/formalizing, Reagan-Bush2/dissolving] or large ones like the the two thousand year cycle of the Christian West, which I described in the post referred to above. And others bigger and smaller than these. I'm just talking about something we are all familiar with from common experience, and I leave it to the reader to judge whether this kind of cycle that everywhere structures organic life can be legitimately analogized to the life cycle of a cultures and cultural movements.

It's not an original idea, but it's not commonly considered acceptable, and one explanation is given by the figure itself--It's a style of thinking that is out of season.  It's an attempt to formalize or synthesize,which is a summer activity, and we are in the dead of winter both culturally and politically.  And I'm convinced that developments in the political will continue to devolve no matter who's in office until something shifts in the cultural sphere.

But even if the reader is unwilling to accept the analogy, it should be clear that we're in a cultural situation now in which the old forms have pretty much dissolved. That doesn't mean that they don't still exist or that for some groups or individuals that these old forms don't have residual vitality and power, but whatever life they may have for individuals, they no longer have broad cultural legitimacy. I'd argue this is true as well for science. It's soul withering job done, it's out of season as well. It still has legitimacy among liberal, cosmopolitan types, but they have devolved into a politically impotent faction with little influence on policy, especially when it comes to environmental science. Science has become just one perspective among many in a multi-perspectival pluralistic, polytheistic world.

We have a fragmented, pluralized culture in which no faction, cultural form, or mindset plays a truly dominant role. While clearly some factions are more influential than others in terms of their shaping the contemporary cultural landscape, they do so more out of old habit (Enlightenment rationality) or fear-driven fanaticism (tea-party right) more than anything that is truly robust and healthful. 

And insofar as we, in America anyway, have a shared cultural life it's a kind of weird amalgam of leveled, last-man, market consumerism on the one hand, and a celebration of uebermenschen on the other. The Nietzscheanism pervades our films and fiction, from arthouse-genre pieces like Breathless to action-hero genre pieces like the James Bond films and its copycats, to the late work of Woody Allen, and more recently films like Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill, No Country for Old Men. I don't know about you, but I find this kind of thing, even if technically interesting, predictably tedious and spent, and as having gone through its own cycle of burgeoning and decay. I found the latest Batman movie, Dark Knight, unwatchably tedious. In my opinion it was a sign that this nihilistic genre has jumped the shark. Probably wishful thinking on my part.

At this point in the cycle nothing points to the future unless it has the energy of something fresh or new. That's my argument in support of All Things Shining--it has that in a way that I found shockingly refreshing coming from the usually bleak academic precincts from which it was issued. And it's not surprising to me that it's getting the kind of criticism from the dissolving types who are temperamentally incapable of recognizing anything that has a breath of fresh air about it. But it's not the only thing going on. And I'm totlally on board with John Ebert's views that visionary filmmakers like Tarkovski, Herzog, Kubrick and some of the sci-fi genre filmmakers typified by Spielberg, Lucas,TV's Lost and Fringe have something truly fresh--something that is looking forward rather than in the rear-view window. These people are on to something.

But none of what they are on to is 'it'. They are only premonitions of whatever 'it' might be, and that 'it' will be a new cultural impulse that will play the role for the next cycle that the Buddha played in Asian societies at the beginning of the axial age, as  Socrates did for Hellenic society, the great prophets did for Israel, as Pico, Luther, Galileo, Descartes did to promote the Renaissance/Reformation/Scientific Revolution that brought us into the modern age. 

I believe that modernity's role, for all its technological advances, will be seen in retrospect primarily as dissolving the old Christian medieval synthesis to clear a space for something spiritually new. As a believing, practicing Christian I have my own interpretation of why this needed to happen, and I embrace the great dissolving of Christendom as a step forward rather than look at it as a disaster. But I am also intensely aware of the risks, because I don't believe that this earth project will automatically have the best possible outcome. The earth and its evolution is a human project and humans are responsible for any eventual outcome, whether they actively choose it or let whatever happens happen by default. 

It would appear that we're headed for the default option, which is ecological disaster or some kind of barbaric, mechanomorphic transformation of the human in some form or another of 'singularity'. It seems obvious to me that this is the current historical trajectory unless there is some dramatic change of direction. And the only way I see that happening is if there is some new 'axial' impulse that arises as a counterbalance to the coming inevitable transhuman barbarism. This discontinuity is the 'it' to which I referred above. 

I don't know what 'it' will look like or how it will come to be, but human history has produced these 'its' before, and I see no reason why it won't or cannot do it again. When that happens, we will have our originating Q1 moment for the next cultural cycle, and it will play out over time much as the last cycle did. That's my main reason for believing we're at the beginning of a new cycle because something has got to give. Either the new cycle starts as a step forward, or it starts in a new Dark Age.

 

Comments

[Peter]

Very interesting articulation of the sense of cyclical nature of human and societal progression. You say this is not original, or at the very least the diagram is not. May I ask where you first saw or who generated this particular model? Specifically, did you apply the progression of Christian thinking and development to the model (from first post) or was that from somewhere else? And insomuch as you cannot know what the next "it" is, I'd like you to explain how you see the next step in the cycle playing out for Christianity. The question this raises, I think, is whether we're locked into this cycle or if it's a cyclical progression with net change. Will Christianity return to the winter thinking of it's birth (antinomian apostolic Christianity) or will it have a "birth" along with society to something new? Certainly I would agree with you that after a moment's thought, the idea of Christianity reaching a new point of death/birth is not a bad thing as it may be exactly what the church needs.

[spark]

I think the cultural opposition to science was always there, it just got organized and active in response to perceived threats from the secular sector (legalized abortion). It's a reaction, but it will get much stronger.

Science isn't going anywhere, in fact we are living on the eve of "advances" so scary and challenging to our traditional idea of the human body, mind and society that the anti-science response we are seeing now is nothing compared to what's coming.

[Jack Whelan]

Peter--Thanks for writing. I've gotten several hundred pageviews the last several days, but you're the only one, except regular Spark here, who has written with a question or challenge.

I see this seasonal analogy as a kind of riff on Toynbee, but who reads Toynbee anymore? He summer season synthesis was pretty much savaged by the same autumnal mindsets who are attacking Dreyfus and Kelly, but my guess is that D&K might be able to resist more because what they are doing is more in season now.

In any event, this four-quadrant scheme is an idea I've been playing with since I wrote an article entitled "American Soul" about ten years ago which landed with a resounding thud. You can download its pdf here: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/american-soul.html

In answer to your other questions, I don't think we're locked in an eternal return kind of cycle, so if we don't destroy ourselves I see it as more of a spiral. I have more on it in this post: http://afterthefuture.typepad.com/afterthefuture/2011/02/history-meaning.html

The Church qua institution doesn't interest me very much but the Church as tradition does. For that tradition is the testimony of a cloud of witnesses who experience and struggles in their respective historical contexts is the real church. I also think there's a place for ritual, the mass is for me central. Everything else ecclesiastical is secondary and relatively unimportant.

[Jack Whelan]

Spark--Nothing goes away; it's mostly a question of its degree of influence. So sure, there was cultural opposition to science since at least the the time of the Scopes trial, but in the fifties and sixties, all you needed was a guy in a white clinic jacket telling you what to do and you'd do it. Time Magazine, the talk shows, the evening news was all about the latest science or what experts think because that's what you had to think That's still there, but the white jackets don't have nearly the influence that they used to, and it's remarkable how little influence ecological science has on public policy. Other competing claims have as much or more influence.

No argument from me disputing your point about the power of technology and what it will mean for our future.

[JP]

In today's metaphysical lesson, we explore the fact that life is both anabolic and catabolic.

As above, so below.

Anyhow, I prefer Spengler's civilizational model more than this Toynbee guy. I've never even read any of Toynbee.

On the smaller timeframes, I go with the interplay of the credit cycles, political cycles, and spiritual cycles. This is best explored by The Fourth Turning guys, Strauss and Howe.

Anyhow, the axial impulses come from above. I'm not worried about that.

It's just that now is a particualaly annoying time since we have to figure out what is useful and how we want to preserve it between the pages of books. Or what books to preserve?

[CalIxm]

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