After the Future

End of History?

Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition, but at the preservation of life itself in conditions where populations could not agree on what the good life was. This leaves liberal orders with a spiritual vacuum: they allow individuals to go their own way, and create only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values like tolerance and openness to compromise and deliberation, but these are not the strong bonds of a tightly knit religious or ethno-nationalist community. Liberal societies have often fostered the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification, a consumer society that is both hungry for status but never satisfied with what any given individual is able to achieve.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022, pp. 115-16

I thought this quote succinctly summarizes the problem I've been writing about over the last year, and it sets up my response to his question about whether there is an alternative. So I'm going to indulge in a little utopian fantasizing here and see where it takes us. My answer lies in making a distinction between progress made in the cultural sphere and that made in the political sphere. We tend to think that the only progress that counts is political, but from my pov it's far less important than cultural progress. The importance of politics lies in that the wrong kind can impede cultural progress, and the right kind creates the conditions for the possibilities for it.

So the problem as I see it is not that we have a Liberal Democracy--that's an unqualified good. The problem lies in that we don't the kind of cultural maturity to be masters of ourselves in the way that a healthy democracy demands. That's not the problem of Liberal Democracy; it's the problem of the kind of culture that rationalist materialism has created. Within it, there can be no consensus about how within a Liberal Democracy cultural progress or cultural maturity might be made. More than that, it creates the conditions that actively work against such cultural maturity. The problem therefore is not that we have a void in our politics, but that we have a void in our cultural life, and that void creates a destabilizing vacuum in our political life. The solution to the problem of political stability can only be found in a recovery of something lost in our cultural life. 

In Fukuyama's most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, he defends the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history and offers a quasi-defense of Hegel's proclamation that history has ended with the French Revolution because with it the ended the Master Slave dynamic that had been before the megalothymic driver of history. {See Note 1] To what degree Hegel thought that history really came to an end is not something I want to get into, but what Fukuyama argues following Alexandre Kojeve, and I tend to agree, is that Liberal Democracy is as good as it's going to get, and so the gradual establishment of Liberal Democracies throughout the world is really back fill for what has already been accomplished on the level of thought. [See Note 2] It might take a while for the world to catch up in practice with what thought already has come to understand, but from the perspective of thought, political history ends in Liberal Democracy. 

Now, if you haven't been exposed to this idea or have not had the time to think about it, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but I am inclined to believe that Liberal Democracy--if by 'liberal' we mean the freedom principle that protects the individual citizen from a coercive state, and if by 'democracy' we mean the equality principle that asserts that political sovereignty lies with its citizens--is the best possible form of political organization, and we will be at the end of "political" history when such a political regime has established itself stably throughout the world. For such stability to be achieved, there must be significant spiritual-cultural progress that would enable the great majority of the world's population to be mature and free enough enough to be truly self-governing.

This requires that individual become masters of themselves, and we've seen in recent years that huge swaths of the American population have no such mastery in that they are too easily manipulated by demagoguery. Again, this is not the fault of Liberal Democracy, but of the nihilistic culture that rationalist materialism has created, which has eroded the customs and traditions that provided a trellis for souls to grow and expand. Clearly we're not as a society even remotely close to a culture of self mastery, so the achievement of Liberal Democracy remains unstable and will remain so as long as there's no spiritual-cultural ballast to steady it and no trellis of living tradition to direct its citizens toward the achievement of euthymia [See Note 3].

But in the meanwhile, there is no evolution of the state that can get better than Liberal Democracy even if an awful lot of people haven't the self-mastery the enables them to be truly self-governing in the political sphere. So the achievement of Liberal Democracy doesn't mean the end of human history, but it would be the end of political history, which sets the freedom and equality conditions for a more important evolutionary cultural history. I think of this evolutionary process in ways that integrate Hegelian dialectic with his older contemporary Schelling's ideas concerning how the human being is the site where the evolving earth (cosmos?) becomes aware of itself. For Schelling, all of nature is the human unconscious, and the human project is to gradually make it conscious in an evolutionary project that requires bringing the deep mysteries of Being, what I call the Living Real, into human awareness. 

Hegel took Schelling's idea of consciousness evolution and emphasized the rational part of it rather than the irrational, and that's what people like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche objected to. And I think that Heidegger's idea concerning 'aletheia' and his phrase 'Dasein is a clearing in the forest of being' is closer to Schelling than Hegel was, even if Heidegger had no interest in Schelling's evolutionary ideas. And Kierkegaard, et al., were right to object. What makes human life interesting is not rationality--if by that we mean instrumental reason and its analytical and problem-solving capabilities, but rather the human capacity to bring into consciousness the meaning-saturated depths and heights of the Living Real.

The Living Real has both suprarational and subrational dimensions to it. Nietzsche emphasized the chaotic subrational, and Christianity and other post-Axial traditions emphasize the lawful, form-giving suprarational. The human spiritual-cultural evolutionary project is to gradually integrate the suprarational with the subrational. Both are apprehended on the vertical dimension, which rationalist materialism denies the existence of. 

So the human project through the centuries, but also within a given lifetime in whatever measure is appropriate for him or her, is to discover and then integrate what lies hidden below with what lies hidden above. [See Note 4] Not easy, but this is the solution for the megalothymia problem that Fukuyama wrestles with and, imo, fails to resolve satisfactorily. This kind of project is not primarily driven by thinking; it's rather more a practice that comes closer to what artists and monks do. The thinking follows from what shows up in one's practice. The knock on Hegel was that he saw evolution as primarily an evolution of thought, whereas it is really an evolution of awareness, a series of awakenings to higher and deeper dimensions of the Living Real.

Thinking, of course is important, but only in the way that McGilchrist presents it, which is a process subsequent to the rich data that our intuitive discoveries present to consciousness. Any "thinking" is about experience, and the richness of our experience on the vertical is equally if not more important than our experiences on the horizontal. The quality of our thinking, therefore, depends on the scope and richness of our experience. And so it follows that any thinking that a priori excludes experiences that derive from the vertical axis is poor-quality thinking. High-quality thinking integrates the broadest scope of experiences on both the horizontal and the vertical axes, keeps pushing to expand the scope oon both those axes, and articulates what is uncovered there in a coherent way that integrates it with what is already known. This is basic Thomas Kuhn, but with the addition of expanding knowledge on the vertical. 

This is a spiritual/artistic/philosophical project, not a political one, but the conditions in which such a project flourishes require a deeply achieved (anti-Oedipal in the Socratic not Deleuzian sense) human freedom which requires a political regime that won't interfere with its exploration and questing. Ideally a sapiential community, independent of any political or state control, will emerge that will discern and debate the significance of what the explorers uncover.

Such a community would be very similar to what we think of now as the role played by critics, but the culture will have shifted to a point where good criticism will be distinguished from bad by the quality of the critic's own capacities to intuit and articulate her own experiences of the Living Real. Nihilistic criticism will not go away, but it will be crowded out by a new kind of criticism that has a vitality and richness that anybody with a shred of soul life will recognize and welcome. And then, it should be hoped, that this sapiential community will have a culture-wide influence on how children are acculturated into this renewed sapiential tradition. It would require that our educational curricula teach what is known from both the horizontal and the vertical--in other words, what it used to mean to get a liberal education. 

I don't see that such a development requires confessional commitments to a particular faith tradition, but I would expect that it would be a project consonant with the deepest aspirations of all the great faith traditions, and that any faith tradition, if it is to retain (or recover) vitality, would have to in some way participate in this larger cultural project in ways that are adaptable to its own traditions of thought and practice.

The sapiential community will not therefore be an official magisterium or rabbinate, but will comprise people who emerge who prove themselves capable of communicating to the broader culture the vital, soul-enriching significance of the new knowledge that comes into awareness from the vertical dimensions. They will have the capability to integrate it coherently with what is already known on the horizontal dimension. Their legitimacy will be recognized in much the same way that any relatively well-educated person recognizes that Shakespeare and Shelley are more disclosive of the Living Real than, say, Quentin Tarantino and Taylor Swift.

In other words, there will be a broad consensus that accepts that great art is different from entertainments. Nothing wrong with entertainments, but they shouldn't be thought of as anything more than that. Great Art is great by virtue of the scope and richness of what it discloses of the Living Real. I like the verbal challenges involved in solving a tough crossword puzzle, but it's not the same as the verbal challenge of uncovering what lies hidden in Yeats or Wordsworth. 

So, if the human project is to flourish, I hope for and expect such a sapiential tradition to emerge in tandem with great spirits and artists whose role it will be to awaken the rest of us to as yet undiscovered dimensions of the Living Real. It will enjoy a deeply felt legitimacy by the broader culture, which will support the reconstruction of a trellis that will expand the culture's knowledge both vertically and horizontally and that will pass on that knowledge from generation to generation.

I understand. Right now as we look around us such an imagination of the future seems far-fetched. Too much of the world's energies are directed in such a way that if they are not inimical to such a project, are indifferent to it. As yet there is no a robust constituency of human beings who have progressed enough in this project to legitimate it to the broader culture, and until then what I'm describing seems, understandably, to be wishful thinking. I think of it as hopeful thinking, but hope based on intuitions I have had that have been tested over time and proved resilient.

I know that there is a hunger for what I'm describing here, and I know that there are enough people who recognize the deep reality of what I'm describing as the nourishment that will feed it. It remains to be seen whether those who share in this recognition will always remain on the culture's fringes or whether at some point they will find a way to play a more central cultural role.

I, of course, don't know. As I've written in previous posts, all I see myself doing is as a dog barking up a tree, trying to call attention to something real--you can smell it, too, right?--but it's obscured by the branches and the the leaves, and if you can smell it you become interested, too, and want to stick around to see what it is. But if you can't, then it's understandable that you would think there's nothing there worth wasting your time with. But for people like me, there's no question that it's there, it just remains to be seen whether it can be brought to ground.

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Note 1: Fukuyama's book is really an extended reflection on the problem of thymos in shaping political life, Thymos is the spirited part of the soul according to Plato.(The other two are rationality and appetite or desire.), The thematic part of the soul in a spirited human being is always striving to be the best you can be, and It's the basis for healthy self-respect. But in some people it manifests in what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, the compulsion to be  be recognized as superior to others.

In fact this is the driver of Hegel's master-slave dynamic that is for him the primary social-psychological driver of history. Megalithymic humans need to dominate others and to derive therefrom glory. Megalothymic societies are usually aristocratic warrior societies.The whole point was to do glorious deeds in battle that the bards would sing songs about about through the ages. Democratic societies, on the other hand, are--or at least aspire to be--isothymic, which means that people in them want to be recognized as the equal of others.

There's a lot more to be said about this than is appropriate here, but I'd argue that isothymia is only a possibility in a society in which most of its citizens have achieved a level of maturity that few actually attain in late modern societies. You can't be recognized as a Self equal to others unless you have become one. That's not a given; it's a euthymic/eudaemonic achievement [See Note 3], And someone who achieves it has no need for glory or to dominate others or to be recognized as the best. 

I can envision a society in which superior and inferior are not important qualifiers, but instead realized or unrealized would be. The goal of a life well lived is to realize who one was created to be, and that's a unique achievement that is incommensurate with the parallel achievement of any other. And yet we recognize people who are more mature in this way and others that are not. You know them by their menschiness. Their warmth, their magnanimity and down-to-earthness, their utter lack of phoniness, fanaticism, and compulsiveness. Not flawless, but intensely real human beings, and as I said, rare. Late modern societies don't produce many of them for reasons I discuss in this essay. There's no trellis anymore for us to expand and grow on. 

Note 2: I'm not talking about one world government but about a federation of liberal democracies that are adapted to the history and culture of countries throughout the world. I don't think this is going to happen any time soon, but it would be the desired outcome. I can't be forced on any one; it has to be chosen. 

Note 3: I use the term 'euthymia' in the present context with a meaning that comes close in my thinking about it to eudaemonia. Both describes states of well being, but maybe eudaemonia is better because associated with an ethical project that involves the practice of the virtues. In either case, the euthymia is the goal--

The term euthymia has a Greek origin and results from the combination of ‘eu' meaning ‘well' and ‘thymos' meaning ‘soul, emotion'. This latter term encompasses however four different meanings: life energy; feelings and passions; will, desire and inclination; thought and intelligence. Interestingly, its verb (euthymeo) means both I am happy, in good spirits and I make other people happy, I reassure and encourage. The definition of euthymia is generally ascribed to Democritus: one is satisfied with what is present and available, taking little heed of people who are envied and admired and observing the lives of those who suffer and yet endure. It is a state of quiet satisfaction, a balance of emotions that defeats fears. The Latin philosopher Seneca translated the Greek expression of euthymia with ‘tranquillitas animi' (a state of internal calm and contentment) and linked it to psychological well-being as a learning process. Happiness is not everything and what is required is ‘felicitatis intellectus', the awareness of well-being:

Happy is thus the life that is in accordance to its nature, and this is possible only when the mind, first of all, is healthy at any time; then, if it is strong and energetic, definitely patient, capable of mastering everything; concerned with the body and its belongings, but without anxiety; lover of what is life, but with detachment; willing to take advantage of the gifts of fortune, without being its slave. [Seneca: De Vita Beata, translation by G.A.F.]  (Source)

Perhaps  'eudaemonia' would work betterl, but we'll stick with euthymia in the present context. 

Note 4: Why some people are great artists and others are criminals and psychopaths raises questions that are interesting but not relevant to what I'm saying here. The bottom line is that each of us has a life to live that is incommensurate with others and all that is required of us is that we make the choices that move us toward becoming the deepest realization of ourselves. It's not for other to judge, but we rely on others for help and correction when clearly we are making self-destructive choices. I don't think this contradicts the idea of the trellis; it's just that each of us has to find our own place on it. There's no one best way to climb it. 

Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the party--the GOP-- that shelters racists than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from techno-capitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where techno-capitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control, and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, techno capitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of techno-capitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by techno-capitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but techno-capitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. But it's not grounded in reality--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, techno-capitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote. Bamboozled by the trickster spirit Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, techno-capitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence in our collective life of the profound and sublime, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale in which I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

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Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy or someone Trumpier is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods. 

Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future I hope for that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they told them seriously. 

See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".

Liberation to What?

The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe.

--Tom Nichols

Nichols' reference is to what most normal Americans fear about the religious right's threat to impose its will in the political sphere, and I think that the Shawshank prison is an apt analogue. But Shawshank is apt in a bigger way for its mythopoesis. On one level it's about how the prison keepers like Norton are just as much prisoners as those behind bars. The main difference is that the prison keepers don't know it and have no desire to escape. They think they're in control, but are completely oblivious of how they're captured by system that oppresses them perhaps even more than it oppresses their prisoners.

Norton is a perfect metaphor for the traditionalist whose identity is deeply embedded in the empty forms of traditional morality that been invaded and occupied by evil forces that could not be more alien from a true morality. His situation is worse than his prisoners because he feels no need of liberation or the desire to seek for it. He's not locked in as his prisoners are, but he choses to stay anyway.

But more importantly Shawshank is a story about what true liberation means. I've spent a chunk of time in the last several months talking about how the justice project on the Cultural Left is captured by a post-Marxist Freudianism exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) and theorized in their book Anti-Oedipus. (See here here, and here.) I've written about how I think that's a dead-end because it's fundamentally a negative project with nothing inspiring in it to which people can say Yes. One  leaves the prison behind for, you know, 'whatever', as in whatever makes you happy, which cannot get beyond the appetitive in a milieu on the Cultural Left in which the transcendent doesn't enter into consideration. "Desire" is the big thing for D&G. Desire for what? It doesn't matter. 

Liberation in that milieu means mostly to be transgressive of old taboos without getting punished for it. And so Trump is the apotheosis of D&G liberation project, whether they intended it or not. If they argue he's breaking the wrong taboos, who's to say they're wrong? By what standard?  But the bottom line here is that whether we're talking about Trump or D&G, the moral frame is too often a movement from Kohlberg's Stage 1 to Stage 2, from the eight-year-old who dutifully follows the rules, to the ten-year-old who realizes the rules are arbitrary and there is nothing fundamentally "good" about them, and so he can break the rules if he's clever enough to get away with it. [See Note 1]

Our politics, but more importantly our consensus about moral norms, whether on the Right or Left, doesn't really operate beyond stage 2. Traditionalists on the Right differ from Cosmopolitans on the Cultural Left only in that Traditionalists believe that transgressors ought to be punished for traditionally deviant behavior while Cosmopolitans don't. And the Cosmopolitans of course trade in the old traditionalist taboos for trendy, new, PC ones. Traditionalists allow Trump his transgressive behavior because what really matters is his even more flagrant transgression of PC taboos. He may not be an exemplar of their traditionalist norms, but his flouting of PC taboos with impunity is more important because in doing so he gives them permission to flout them with impunity as well. 

All the energy derives in the D&G liberation project from the thrill of leaving behind the old taboos, not in where one arrives once he is freed from them. So yes, while while all that is true, D&G are half right: we are acculturated into Oedipal social-psychological constructs that imprison us to the degree that we allow them to program us both individually and as a society unconsciously. We are all prisoners of our acculturation, and we do need to be liberated from it. 

So I agree with D&G that our acculturation into oppressive "Oedipal" cultural structures is provisional and is indeed, like Shawshank Prison, an largely an arbitrary social construction designed to reinforce certain power arrangements. But I differ from them in insisting that the provisionality of our social constructions lies in that they are always under challenge by ontonormative transcendentals like Justice and Truth. This is at the heart of Socrates' subversive project but also at the heart of the gospels. The Socratic and Christian projects are both in very similar ways "anti-Oedipal". Christianity when it is truest to itself is always subversive of oppressive social constructs. But neither project is subversive for the sake of subversion, but subversive in the service of the ontonormative, i.e., of a deeper, more truly liberating, transcendental norm. 

The Shawshank prison as a social system has no relationship to the ontonormative, but what makes Andy, the Tim Robbins character, different from every other prisoner is not that he's just motivated to get out of an evil, cruel, oppressively destructive system to resume a normal life, but that he is like the man in Plato's cave that walks out into the sunlight where he can experience not just getting out but getting into the Living Real. That's what the beach in Mexico symbolizes, a state of awareness that is truly liberating because more deeply in touch with the Living Real. Leaving prison was not just about getting out, but about getting into something that was more ontonormatively "real".

From my pov, D&G describe a situation that is very much like out of the pan into the fire, from one destructive set of circumstances into another. It's the situation of Red, the Morgan Freeman character, once he's released on parole. He's free, but Is his life significantly better in the world outside? There was at least a kind of comfort and security in the old prison life, but now he's wandering in the wilderness with all the stress and insecurity that come with that. But there's wandering that's purposeful and hopeful, and there's wandering that's just being lost. And Red seems pretty lost there for a while, until there's an intervention, his finding the gift buried in the field left for him by Andy. (See Note 2). 

Finding it is his awakening moment, the moment when something truly new and liberating becomes a possibility. He left Egypt when he got out of prison and went out into the wilderness, but now that he's found the treasure buried in the field he can move to the promised land, a land he never took seriously as as a possibility for himself. Good thing that he had a friend who all along did.

Getting out of the old, constraining, oppressive structure is important, but where you go after is more important. 

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Note 1: I'm pasting in this summary of Kohlberg's Six Stages from Genealogy Part 4B. Although Kohlberg is a social scientist who eschews any talk about transcendentals and insists his work is just descriptive or phenomenological, it's not hard to extrapolate from his 'description' what I've been calling the 'ontonormative'. 

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it, [and I will be punished if I disobey and am caught].  

2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school necessary for developing sense of autonomy.  Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

3. Rules matter because they define what is  "right", but personal loyalties matter more. I'll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I'll get in trouble if caught. Example: It's wrong to lie, but I'll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol--steal, scream, maim, or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission--to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital. 

4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by Athenian law. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good. 

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

6. The rules might be right 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is [ontonormatively] wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good. 

How one's moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that's the point. The rules at one level don't determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don't apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.

And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4. 

I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is when family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.

I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional, the latter what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

Note 2:  "Now Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found, and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field." — Matthew 13:44. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for the ontonormative regime that lies buried until found in every human heart. The Socratic project was to dig into the hearts of his interlocutors to see if he might unearth it. To have unearthed it is liberation from the constraints of custom and taboo in cases where custom is oppressive or unjust, but can also be restorative of the vitality of customs that were ontonormative in their origins.

See also "Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga".

Is It Finally the End of Trump?

The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as it ever was--and is there any reason to think it's not?--then Murdoch will get back in line once the base makes that they're not ready to move beyond Trump--as will all the Republican lawmakers who hate Trump but fear the MAGA base more. They will still have to deal with the base in the primaries, which means that they will still have to kiss the ring of the MAGA King. 

Trump's not going away unless he goes to jail. But are the indictments when they come that Trump faces be the nails in his coffin, or will they be incitements in MAGA world that will galvanize MAGA in support for Trump the Martyr? I don't know.

And then there's the DeSantis phenomenon. Is he strong enough to push a weakened Trump off the stage? I don't know that either. He doesn't have the "it" factor that Trump has, and if Trump runs head-to head with DeSantis, Trump will make mincemeat out of him. But DeSantis surprised me in his sound trouncing of Crist, a centrist guy whom Floridians voted in as governor before and who at least, unlike DeSantis, has a personality. But it's hard to make the case that Florida is a bellwether. If Trump runs and if I were DeSantis, I'd stay out of the race, let Trump go down in flames, then step in to save the party from complete self-immolation. 

In the next two years, unless something really surprising happens in the next week, Kevin McCarthy--or someone worse--will become Speaker of the House, and it will be interesting to see if the crazier Jacksonians like Marjorie Taylor Greene set the agenda. If so, expect endless Trump ass-kissing, expect frivolous investigations, and expect probably a frivolous impeachment. We'll be hearing more about Hunter Biden than any but the MAGAiest Americans will have a stomach for.

Will enough sane House Republicans vote No on impeachment if it comes to that? Unlikely. We all saw what happened to those who went against the MAGA mob last time. All the Republicans in the House with a spine have either quit or been voted out. 

If the crazy Jacksonians set the GOP agenda in the House, that will almost certainly insure that the Dems will take the House back in '24. Is there any reason to believe Republicans are capable of learning the right lessons from the unpopularity of their fanaticism? Doubt it, but things feel very fluid right now, and who really knows?

Along the lines of what I wrote in my election day post, I'm more worried about how irrationally the MAGA world will react if they see that the Blues keep winning elections in ways that someone in their Facebook feed tells them were rigged by Venezuelan communists using Italian satellites in collusion with the American Deep State. With or without Trump the fundamentals haven't changed. And there's no reason to believe the crazies will now become sane because they didn't win the way they thought they should. Just proves they were right all along.

Will the Dems be able to wash the toothpaste down the drain? I don't think so, but they might be able to push it to the edges of the sink. To do so would require that they distance themselves from the Neoliberalism that Clinton and the DLC branded the party with in the '90s. That's a stain that won't be easy to wash out, even if it no longer represents where most Democrats are anymore.

And then there's the cultural piece. Most everyday Dems are like most everyday Republicans. They're normies who want to be compassionate toward people who are suffering. The Dems are more attentive to the suffering of the historically marginalized, and that's a good thing, but they need to find a way to enact their compassion and their thirst for justice without coming across as virtue-signaling, sanctimonious prigs. They won't always have crazy to run against. 

Some Thoughts on Election Day

Whatever happens this week in the midterm elections, it won't be decisive. The stalemate will continue regardless whether the Red or Blue team gets the upper hand. 

America has always had a split personality: One part Jeffersonian/Jacksonian, mostly premodern in its outlook, wanting to stay close to the land and keep to the old ways, hating progress and most anything industrialized. And the other part Hamiltonian and Whiggish that has always been more about economic growth, change, development--celebrators of the creative destructive energies of capitalism.

In the first two centuries after the founding, the first dominated in the South and the second the North, but since the 1970s the split is more rural/urban whether in Texas or in Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The Republicans used to be the party of the urban Hamiltonian elites, but over the last thirty years has become the demotic party of rural Jacksonians. [See Note 1] And the Dems have become the party of Hamilton, the party of urban, educated elites and Technocapitalists. No wonder anincongruous rap musical about him was so popular in New York. 

I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.

Things started breaking apart for the first time in the thirty year run up to the Civil War starting with the Missouri Compromise, and in a similar way they've been breaking apart again in the in the last thirty years starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine during the late Reagan administration, insofar as it provided a media soapbox for the repressed grievances of Middle America through Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And so here we are in the MAGA Age when it feels as if Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and all the king's horses and all the king' s won't be able to put him together again. 

History doesn't repeat itself exactly--the particularities matter--but certain historical themes do. We're not in the 1850s now, but we're in a situation where many of the same patterns are working very similarly. In the decade before the Civil War, the authoritarian, one-party South had advantages that enabled it to win most of the big fights in Congress and the Courts, and the pattern is repeating itself now. It remains to be seen how it will play out this time around.

The mistake the South made in the runup to the Civil War lay in its obsession for control that led to its overreaching. Most prominently The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision crossed a line that forced the North, which was mostly indifferent to slavery so long as it stayed in the South, to push back. The GOP is overreaching similarly now in its obsessive need for control and in that it has made it abundantly clear that it would be quite happy with one-party rule going forward. 

Most everyday Americans aren't paying attention, or they see politics rather like sports and so without real-life implications other than the team they root for winning or losing. They can feel a passionate bond with their team, and they really, truly hate it when their team loses, and hate the other team for beating them. But the idea that one team doesn't believe in democracy anymore is for those rooting for the Red team too abstract, not enough for them to break with them, and so the real-world implications of the Red team winning are something they are going to have to feel before they understand them. Lots of Red Team fans won't care about one-party rule so long as their team wins, but most Americans will not be ok with it. They don't want the Red team running things, and they won't stand for it. 

The 1850s culminated in a war that killed north of 600K people, and while it's hard to believe that kind of violence is a possibility for us, we're in for some level of increasing violence, especially if the Blue Team finds a way to keep winning. MAGA is not going away peacefully. We're  not likely to see a territorial war, but I could see assassinations and terroristic acts that will make the 60s and the McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing seem like the good old days. And it's not inconceivable that a Red block of mostly rural states, for instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas declare a Democratic administration and Congress illegitimate, and assert their independence. 

And what's a Blue President going to do? Send in the army? Not likely for fear of pushing the border states--the more urbanized Red States like Texas, Florida, Georgia--into the secessionist camp. But if he does nothing, then other rural states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. will go "independent". Then what? Corporations and Wall Street won't care so long as they're left alone. A lot will depend on where the how many MAGA heads are in the army--not the top brass, but MAGA brigadiers, colonels, and captains, the Michael Flynn types, who command the loyalty of the MAGA lower ranks.

It could get messy. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, so to say. Who knows what kind of plotting and collusion between military and local militias is going on even now? Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't. 

On the other hand, If the Red team wins and institutionalizes a nation-wide, one-party system, and continues to stack the courts, it's not as clear to me what the Blue states would do. People will take to the streets, but Blue America has no infrastructure like Red America to support militarized resistance. If there will be any militarized violence it will come from the Red government moving in to suppress the rioting. I think it's likely that we'd become Hungary or Brazil for a while, but not China. It's unlikely that a regime that will be so fundamentally unpopular could last very long, but it could make things miserable for a while. The Hamiltonians won in the 1860s, and the smart money would be on their eventually winning again if a scenario like this unfolds, even if, as then, the early rounds go to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonians. 

Ok, sure I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. But neither scenario is as inconceivable today as it was ten years ago. Who knows what things will look like ten years hence? Better to hope and work for the best and yet be prepared for the worst. But one way or the other, it's likely to get violent in some areas of the country, and if so, it's going to be profoundly destabilizing. How that actually plays out, nobody, I least of all, knows. But it's hard to believe that we're just going to muddle through without there being some catastrophe-generated major realignment.

I'd prefer a scenario in which we'd find a way to muddle through without catastrophe. I'd prefer a stalemate to chaos in the political sphere while we wait for a breakthrough in our cultural life along the lines of what I wrote toward the end of my previous post. But it seems that we humans only learn the hard way. But whatever happens in the short run, I don't really trust the Blues or the Reds to get us safely through the next fifty years without a restoration of the wisdom axis in our metaphysical imaginary. That might be a long shot, but in the meanwhile, better the Blues come out winners because pragmatic is always better than fanatic.

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Note 1: Jacksonians constitute the MAGA base of the GOP, but GOP elite leadershp--McConnell, McCarthy, Romney, Cheney, Stefanic, etc.--are Neoliberal Hamiltonians who often campaign as Jacksonians to remain in power. This is the coalition of Neoliberal Hamiltonian elites and Jacksonian Reagan Democrats that Reagan forged. Reagan was Barry Goldwater with FDR populist charisma. The Jacksonians (for cultural reasons) and Hamiltonians (for economic reasons) in this GOP fusion share common ground in their both wanting as little interference from the federal government as possible. But the populist/elite tension between them is real, and it will be interesting to see if the Hamiltonians in the GOP establishment will retain leadership positions in the House and Senate in coming years. Establishment Republicans are the Party of the One Percent, and its interests simply do not align in the long run with the GOP populist base. 

The Democrats, formerly the party of rural and ethnic urban Jacksonians, don't know who they are. Their establishment does not represent the interests of the Hamiltonian One Percent, but of the Hamiltonian top Twenty Percent plus rural and urban Blacks. They have have become resolutely anti-Jacksonian on cultural issues and have become instead a mishmash of Hamiltonian cosmopolitan urban and suburban coastal technocrats and technocapitalists, Blacks, feminists and LGBTQ+ identitarians. As such, the Dems have no real positive uniting vision for an American future. The only thing that unifies them now is in their being the party of anti-MAGA. But, as I've said elsewhere, they won't always have crazy to run against, and there's no future in No.

Since this is the week of the premier of the fifth season of Yellowstone, it's worth a few minutes to show how this Jacksonian/Hamiltonian tension is really the heart of the show.  Jacksonians like John Dutton are in conflict with Neoliberal Hamiltonian developers. Dutton votes Republican, but it's a safe bet that his developer enemies vote Republican too. The few Blue team types that show up are usually portrayed as naive flakes from California.

Beth and Jamie Dutton are both comfortable in the Hamiltonian world in a way that the other Dutton Ranch characters are not. Beth is acceptable to her father in a way that Jamie isn't because Beth's loyalties are beyond question in a way that Jamie's are not. Loyalty is the supreme value in the Jacksonian world. Having no loyalties except to your self is beyond contemptible.

Beth, a true loyalist, submits her Hamiltonian skills to Jacksonian ends; Jamie is untrustworthy because his education has inured him to the Neoliberal Hamiltonian order. He's no longer truly a Jacksonian, and his pursuing a career in the Hamiltonian world is, when push comes to shove, more important to him than defending his family's Jacksonian heritage. He protests that he's loyal, but his loyalty is for hire and can be bought by the highest bidder. He went to Harvard, after all, a place where you learn to be a soulless, Neoliberal, meritocratic, careerist for whom the only value is what the market determines. Ask Larry Summers.