"Without the ultrarational hopes and passions of religion no society will ever have the courage to conquer despair and attempt the impossible; for the vision of a just society is an impossible one, which can be approximated only by those who do not regard it as impossible."--Reinhold Niebuhr
A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity -- Series The rise and fall of the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary followed by the rise and fall of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.
Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism In the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony: which is to say, open to signs
Subjects and Objects Descartes articulated the fundamental problem of modern alienation. How do we get past it?
Dying Traditions Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific.
In 2016, it certainly seemed like the Bernie Sanders-Hillary Clinton split was defining a dynamic that would last for a long time: class-focused socialists bent on dramatic change opposed by centrists who weaponized identity politics to try and stop that change. It was very common for people to assume that this would be the battlefield for the American left-of-center moving forward. I did.
But that really hasn’t happened. The socialist left has almost entirely capitulated on its resistance to the dominance of identity politics in progressive spaces. Many of the identity-skeptical leftists I knew have adopted the identity language they once mocked. Some have simply gone quiet. And I think the reason is obvious: constantly being called racist for supporting Bernie really scarred them. It turned out that a lot of them really weren’t about that life. They were used to calling people racist, not to being called racist. And all of the bluster about how much they hated Clinton faded in a world where Trump was president. 2020 sealed the deal. People saw the great social and professional cost people were paying for even the most tepid criticism of the upheaval in the post-George Floyd moment and folded, fast. This dynamic has been exacerbated by the fact that most of the socialists that have been minted since Occupy Wall Street are very low-information, people with no backing in socialist history or theory. We were recruiting thousands of converts who were long on snark but who had no history of activism of grounding in leftist principles. So there wasn’t really anything for them to give up; they had no real socialism to abandon.
...The fight now is over the attempt to mandate this pinched vision of what the left is, to make identity liberalism literally the only left-of-center position. The insistence is that there is only identity politics or conservatism.
And so it goes: The rich continue to get richer and the poor poorer. As he goes on to say--
When you treat your political tendency like a cool party where people hang out, rather than as a vehicle to prompt change, you can’t tolerate anyone harshing the vibe. I have been an activist for my entire adult life and all of my political opinions are an expression of my peculiar form of Marxism, but since I’m identity-skeptical I must be called a conservative.
This faux Left is a feckless, impotent, smug Left, which, as I said in my previous post, is playing into the hands of the reactionaries insofar as it pushes the white working class and the so-called moderate suburban moms into the hands of people like Youngkin and DeSantis. With a Left politics that has come to define the Democratic Party like this, perhaps the only thing that will ensure that the Dems hold the White House in '24 is Trump's winning the nomination and running for the office from prison.
I'm going to break up Part 12 into several components based on the conversations between Bishop Maximus and John Vervaeke that I have Posted in Genealogy Part 12A. I have postponed this follow up to 12A because I wanted first to finish watching the second half of Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, which has enabled me to understand and appreciate what he's up to much better. It's clearer to me that many of my objections, which were mostly minor, were largely unfounded because I made assumptions about his commitment to the "naturalistic imperative", which I saw as an attempt to reduce human spiritual experience into Rationalist-Materialist terms. The phrase 'naturalist imperative' needs some unpacking, but I don't think his use of it is fatal from my pov. And I wasn't crazy about his ideas about "Religion that is not Religion", which I think is impossible. (See Note 1.)
In any event, it took my watching his conversations with Bishop Maximus to get me see that Vervaeke is far more open to traditional religion when he sees that it works, and clearly it's working for someone like Bishop Maximus. It has been one of my presuppositions that renaissance--if it's to come--must come from a retrieval in a postmodern key of something understood by our premodern ancestors but forgotten by us. This is exactly Vervaeke's project, or so it seems to me.
He has opened up a new landscape for me in cognitive science about which I knew nothing, and it compliments the neuroscientific work of Iain McGilchrist about whom I've written extensively. Both thinkers are deeply philosophically literate, and they both see philosophy as a tool that must be used to integrate knowledge in other domains--cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, biology--and the arts. And both use philosophy in what I illustrate in the diagram below to be the integration of Phronesis with Sophia. The goal for both is to point the way to the reestablish a Wisdom Tradition in the West--and elsewhere, but particularly the West. This is essential for any religion that might be described as 'good religion'--and I'd argue for any society that we can call a good society.
That, too, is my central concern, and I see my task here as to function mostly as an intermediary to make the work of these and others working on these issues available to an audience that might otherwise find such a project inaccessible because they haven't the philosophical background to understand the significance of what they are doing. So that's the task for me with Vervaeke and McGilchrist going forward. Both are staking out a middle ground that integrates Sophia and Phronesis within 'Religio,' i.e., the experiential grounding of the human in the Living Real.
(See Note 2 below for explanation of this diagram)
I add content to this diagram in the Genealogy Series where I first introduce the critique of the contemporary metphysical imaginary as bereft of the vertical dimension depicted here, and about how the future of the human project requires its restoration in some way. I see both Vervaeke and McGilchrist as key contributors to this restorative task. Their work obviously depends on the work of many others, but what makes both so interesting to me is their ability to integrate and synthesize a broad range of work in ways that are so relevant to the meaning crisis late-modern Liberal thought has no remedy.
The first twenty-five of Vervaeke's lectures are designed to establish the historical developments that led to the meaning crisis we are currently undergoing, and the second 25 lectures are designed to show how Third Generation Cognitive Science is mapping some possible solutions. He says that all healthy societies have highly functioning Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders. All three of these have broken down in contemporary North Atlantic societies, and their breakdown needs to be addressed because we, unlike other societies that have preceded us in the West, have no broadly recognized 'psychotechnologies' to help people to deal with what he calls the "perennial problems"--the various human tendencies toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors.
By Nomological breakdown I take him to mean the prevailing sense that the cosmos is random, cruel, impersonal, and purposeless. Humans did not think this was not true two hundred years ago. But developments in science coupled with the culturally disruptive effects of industrialization have destroyed any collective sense that we live in a cosmos which is undergirded by a benevolent order. We see this reflected in prestige cultural work from Game of Thrones to The Sopranos. I think that one of the reasons that Everything Everywhere All at Once won so many Oscars this year is because it wants to depict a random, meaningless, cruel cosmos that at the same time affords the possibility for deep, human personal meaning achieved through persistent, agapic love. The fundamental intuition is correct, but deeply inadequate. It's a start, though. And there are other signs of a shift toward affirming meaning among our culture's elites who are bored with all the meaninglessness.
By Normative breakdown I take him to mean that the social order that has come to emphasize the autonomous individual can provide no coherent way to establish a broadly accepted legitimate meaning framework to ground politics, social norms/ethics, or any sense of the common good. I've been arguing for years that this is leading us to disaster because of the way we are all divided and conquered in such a way as to be impotent to confront and push back against where techno-capitalism is dragging us.
By Narrative Breakdown I take him to mean that we live in a society that derives no sense of meaning or purpose from an overarching Mythos derived from what I've been calling a metaphysical imaginary. The best we can do, as in Everything Everywhere All at Once, which exemplifies narrative breakdown, is affirm the possibility of meaning through love. Otherwise narrative meaning--true mythopoeisis rooted in Relgio--is impossible in a society where Rationalist Materialism dominates our metaphysical imaginary. We are still skeptical of embracing grand narratives. So we are ruled by default by narrative habits we can't shake, in the American case by Calvinist individualism that echoes the Horatio Alger bootstraps narrative that justifies Neoliberal meritocracy. This is a narrative that makes no sense in a world that is quickly evolving into one where the machines will be doing all the work, and where humans will have to obtain their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose, i.e., their meaning, from something other than their activities in the economic sphere.
When I talk about the breakdown of the Liberal Order, this is essentially what I mean--that Liberalism hasn't the resources within itself to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. That doesn't mean that Liberalism is or was wrong--it was enormously valuable and important for the human project--but Liberalism from the beginning has been in a tradeoff relationship between Phronesis and Sophia in allowing the former to crowd out the latter. Now it's time to reestablish a metaxis--a creative, balanced tension--between Phronesis and Sophia. More and more people are recognizing that this is necessary, but nobody knows how to do it. I certainly don't know how to do it, but I trust in the human project, and I believe that we can find a way to rebalance things one way or another.
So the new restoration that is called for is what Vervaeke calls 'Religio', which is, as I've said, what I've been calling the Living Real. For him and for me this requires getting a deeper grip on reality, and to do this requires a participative ontology and epistemology that Neoplatonism, with a little help from Heidegger, provides in important ways otherwise unavailable--or so I want to argue. Vervaeke uses this word 'transjective' to describe our relationship to the world around us as alternative to the way our imaginary is still so profoundly influenced by Cartesian subject/object relationship.
He references Martin Buber's talking about the same thing in his I-Thou relationships. This requires an ontology that is essentially different from the one we inherited from the Enlightenment, one that rejects the Cartesian I-It, and embraces a kind of intersubjectivity if we understand by that a deep, immersive interconnectedness that is in a very real sense a function of anagogic (see below), expansive Love. This is the deep truth at the heart of the cosmos, but it's a truth we have become oblivious of because of the breakdown of the three orders referenced above. And so the task is to "wake up" to it, not in some sentimental, superficial sense, but in a way that is profoundly restorative for true human flourishing. So this is not just an intellectual project, but it has an essential intellectual component. We must come to get a grip on the world and our experience in it that our current rationalistic-materialistic imaginary makes extraordinarily difficult.
For Vervaeke, (and for me, and for Bishop Maximus) such a project is agapic and anagogic, by which he means driven by an understanding of the human being as a self-transcending by virtue of his developing a deeper grip on reality that is empowered by transcendent benevolence--if we can find a way to get in touch with it again. Obviously individuals do this all the time, but can societies? That's the big question we face going forward. And I think that it goes to the restoration of Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders in ways that make sense, i.e., that are well adapted to the world that is emerging where machines will be playing an unprecedented role in shaping the world we all live in.
This is not a world that the Cultural Right has any real grasp on. They feel the disruption and the ontological dizziness it causes, but they have no creative solutions. Its project is if anything profoundly maladaptive because it refuses to deal with the world as it is and as it is changing. They want simply, to use the Bill Buckley phrase, to 'stand athwart history and say No', but that is no response adequate to the enormity of what's happening. As a result its best solution is to restore a nostalgic imaginary Normative order by top-down fiat. Such an order is necessary--they are right in that--but it must emerge bottom-up out of the 'self-organizing' energies of the Living Real.
So this being my first stab at trying to write about what Vervaeke is doing is tentative because I'm not sure I understand it fully yet, but I think it's important to have this background to understand why he's so interested to have these conversations with Bishop Maximus. About which I'll have more to say in the near future.
You might also want to watch this lecture Vervaeke gave in December that is his attempt to explain why Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science are doing the same thing.
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Note 1: The issue, as I see it, is not to give up on religion but to make distinctions between good religion and bad religion, and then to find ways of protect good religion from the forces that persistently work to degrade it. What he's doing in 'Religion that isn't Religion', imo, is his trying to establish what's involved in good religion, and he's doing it in a way with which I am completely sympathetic. Good religion has vulnerabilities that often incline it to become a parody of good religion, to be sure. But even a 'Religion that is not Religion' must have its cult, code, and creed--or it just becomes another individualistic lifestyle choice like choosing to undergo psychoanalysis. There is clearly a therapeutic dimension to what Vervaeke is doing, but his ambition is to find a remedy for a culture-wide meaning crisis, and so his proposals have broader aspirations than simply to be just another individualistic therapeutic technique. In article about him he's quoted:
How do we get from these disparate groups developing these new wisdom practices to an actual culture shift? Vervaeke’s answer surprised me. “I call it stealing the culture. What I mean is something analogous to what Christianity did in the ancient world where it stole the culture from the pagan worldview. There was no political revolution and no one was proposing how to reorganize the state. Instead, there were a bunch of communities of practice and transformation that rehomed people, teaching them through agape that they could be persons whereas the existing worldview said that they were not persons. The communities started networking together.”
I've thought for a while now that something like this is probably what's going to happen, but likely to happen first within already existing post-axial religious traditions that are most receptive to it, in other words those traditions that have the infrastructure that prepare it to embrace these developments in promotion of self-transcendence. His conversations with Bishop Maximus demonstrate how this might happen. Eventually--not any time soon--a fusion religion that integrates what's most valuable in all the great post-Axial traditions in concert with developments in Cognitive Science and philosophy will emerge that works best along the lines diagramed in the figure above. I don't know that this will happen, but I hope it will.
Any religion becomes a parody of itself when the cult, creed, and code become ends in themselves rather than a means 'affording' self-transcending transformation--what Vervaeke calls anagoge. Because such 'means' have value only insofar as they "work", then when they they stop working for whatever reason, the 'wise' have to be adaptive enough to find out what does work. Vervaeke looks around him and he sees religion mostly not working in that they don't produce self-transcending, wise human beings, but rather the opposite.
So religion as it is broadly practiced seems to be more a part of the problem than offering any real solutions. But on the other hand, he certainly doesn't want to see himself as trying to promote a new religion, so it makes sense that he should come up with a way of talking about 'Religion that is not Religion' as a clearer way of describing what he's trying to do. But in the final analysis, his 'Rellgion that is not Rellgion' has a cult, code, and creed, and clearly, whatever he calls it, he hopes will be culturally ascendent.
Note 2. The diagram seeks to conceptualize what a healthy metaphysical imaginary comprises. Such an imaginary recognizes knowledge and truth on both the horizontal and vertical axes, and I'd argue prioritizes the Vertical in the sense that McGilchrist prioritizes the Master over the Emissary. Both are needed, and both keep the other honest, but wisdom is more important because more foundational, and wisdom is precisely what our current Rationalist-Materialist imaginary has no place for. Late modern societies are in turmoil because they have no vertical axis and so spin aimlessnessly with no center to stabilize them. They continue to expand on the horizontal axis but have only the most superficial utilitarian criteria to interpret what they learn. I think this is changing and it must change. Vervaeke's work is very encouraging to me for this reason insofar as he's seeking to restore a place for Wisdom within the framework of cognitive science.
In Geneaology Part 5 I introduce the criteria listed in the lower left of the chart above in an a preliminary attempt to evaluate what from my pov the health of any society's metaphysical imaginary requires. The argument to support such criteria is laid out in the development of the various parts of the series, but the crux of it is that any healthy society must have a metaphysical imaginary that comprises both a vertical and horizontal dimension as depicted in the chart. The vertical and the horizontal map different domains of knowledge and have their own criteria of legitimacy, but they must remain in metaxic, creative tension, what Vervaeke calls an opponent or trade-off relationship. I would also say it diagrams what happens when participatory knowing occurs, because knowledge on the horizontal and vertical should proceed in a way that is interactive--we are transformed as our knowledge of the world is transformed. When that interaction breaks down, when one or the other operates without being in dynamical relationship with the other, as is our current condition, the whole system becomes impoverished and dysfunctional.
The criteria that define this metaxic relationship are as follows:
Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on the world than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality. A central remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR.
Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings to be wisely interpreted.
Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.
Richness: The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be address by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis.
Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.
In a 2022 survey, A.I. experts were asked, “What probability do you put on human inability to control future advanced A.I. systems causing human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment of the human species?” The median reply was 10 percent.
I find that hard to fathom, even though I have spoken to many who put that probability even higher. Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity?
We typically reach for science fiction stories when thinking about A.I. I’ve come to believe the apt metaphors lurk in fantasy novels and occult texts. As my colleague Ross Douthat wrote, this is an act of summoning. The coders casting these spells have no idea what will stumble through the portal. What is oddest, in my conversations with them, is that they speak of this freely. These are not naifs who believe their call can be heard only by angels. They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway.
I often ask them the same question: If you think calamity so possible, why do this at all? Different people have different things to say, but after a few pushes, I find they often answer from something that sounds like the A.I.’s perspective. Many — not all, but enough that I feel comfortable in this characterization — feel that they have a responsibility to usher this new form of intelligence into the world.
A tempting thought, at this moment, might be: These people are nuts.
That we are entrusting the human future to the jaw-dropping superficiality of these proto-sociopaths is not so much a reflection on them, as on the rest of us for letting them. We really don't have enough belief in humanity anymore to believe it's worth saving. Let the bots take over the evolution of consciousness. In the meanwhile, we'll keep fighting about the really important stuff like masks and CRT.
I missed this article in The NY Times by Robert Burton when it came out in 2017. It expands how we have to understand the problem.
If conventional psychology isn’t up to the task, perhaps we should step back and consider a tantalizing sci-fi alternative — that Trump doesn’t operate within conventional human cognitive constraints, but rather is a new life form, a rudimentary artificial intelligence-based learning machine. When we strip away all moral, ethical and ideological considerations from his decisions and see them strictly in the light of machine learning, his behavior makes perfect sense.
Consider how deep learning occurs in neural networks such as Google’s Deep Mind or IBM’s Deep Blue and Watson. In the beginning, each network analyzes a number of previously recorded games, and then, through trial and error, the network tests out various strategies. Connections for winning moves are enhanced; losing connections are pruned away. The network has no idea what it is doing or why one play is better than another. It isn’t saddled with any confounding principles such as what constitutes socially acceptable or unacceptable behavior or which decisions might result in negative downstream consequences.
Metaphorically, this process is reminiscent of Richard Dawkins’s notion of the selfish gene. The goal of DNA is self-reproduction; the sole intent of Deep Mind or Watson is to win. When Deep Mind beat the world’s best Go player, it did not consider the feelings of the loser or the potentially devastating effects of A.I. on future employment or personal identity. If any one quality could be ascribed to A.I. neural networks, it would be relentless “single-minded” self-interest....
As armchair psychologists, we have the gut feeling that with enough information and psychological savvy, we can figure out what makes Trump tick. Unfortunately there is no supporting evidence for this wishful thinking. Once we accept that Donald Trump represents a black-box, first-generation artificial-intelligence president driven solely by self-selected data and widely fluctuating criteria of success, we can get down to the really hard question confronting our collective future: Is there a way to affect changes in a machine devoid of the common features that bind humanity?
The issue is not that AI is becoming more human, but that humans are becoming more like AI.
“The debate over the Ku-Klux never effectively silenced those who argued that the Klan did not exist at all,” Parsons writes. “Despite massive and productive public and private efforts to gather, circulate, and evaluate information about the Ku-Klux Klan and despite the federal government’s devoting attention and resources to the Klan as though it were a real threat, the national debate over the Ku-Klux failed to move beyond the simple question of whether the Ku-Klux existed.”
It worked because of the half-truths people are willing to swallow in order to survive with their self-perceptions intact. Reconstruction-era Republicans used the persistence of racist violence in the South as a political weapon against their Democratic opponents. Klan denial helped Democrats rationalize reports of that violence away as a partisan conspiracy to strip them of their rights. They made themselves the true victims of the narrative, preserving their conception of their own benevolence and of the evil of their political opponents. “Part of the allure of misrepresentations,” Parsons notes, “is that they can help individuals or societies gloss over their own inconsistencies and develop more robust and appealing self-understandings.” When Republican Representative Andrew Clyde went from barricading doors in the Capitol against the January 6 mob to calling the attack a “normal tourist visit,” it wasn’t because he was having difficulty navigating a complex media environment.
Serwer's larger point is that whatever the fog that enshrouds and distorts partisan contested issues when we're in the middle of contesting them, the truth eventually is established for any fair-minded person who cares to know it. I find that the only argument that I can make with those on the Right who today insist that their grievance ideology is justified is simply to say, "Come back in twenty years, and we'll see who proves right." That would have been the best argument twenty years ago this month in disagreements I had with those supporting the imminent invasion of Iraq.
Delusional thinking now will play out the way it always plays out because the more things change the more one can count on fools making a mess of things. But sooner or later reality reasserts itself.
3/13/23 Update: I encourage you to start with the 4th dialogue below, which was just posted a few days ago. A lot of it won't make any sense. But I think you'll bet a feel for why this dialogue is so interesting and important. Then you can go back and watch the first three and then, if you find those compelling, you'll want to get into Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis. Then it will make more sense. I don't know who watches these things [Episode 1 has over 537K views for what that's worth these days] or how influential they are in any broad sense, but this is the kind of thing that needs to happen.
I plan to have more to say about these dialogues when I have more time. My goal will be to make the technical stuff that shapes much of their conversation more understandable to people without the background to understand it.
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Several factors have stalled my continuing my Genealogy of Our Current Insanity project, but it's something I've always planned to return to. I've mentioned the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke in several of the earlier posts here, and I just came across this video in which he interviews the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus. This starts out slow, but I hope you'll stick with it. It's an excellent articulation of themes I'm grappling with in my larger project of retrieving Christian Neoplatonism in a Postmodern key. This conversation is important for the way it demonstrates the relevancy of the practice and thought of the early Christian Fathers is relevant for trends in cognitive science and Philosophy of Mind.
I'm at the end of the quarter in a course I'm teaching right now so don't have time to comment, but I hope to do so when my plate is clear. But a couple of quick things: There is a certain amount of theological distinction making in this conversation that seems to emphasize why the West went wrong, and I largely agree. I wouldn't say that Eastern Orthodoxy has "unique" resources, but I do believe that it has resources that enrich and enhance the Western Tradition, and indeed this was recognized in Catholic scholarly circles in the Nouvelle Theologie in the early 20th Century. Its focus was to retrieve the Greek Patristic patrimony that Bishop Maximus draws upon in this conversation. I am not interested in East vs. West polemics, but rather to retrieve what's best in a rich and diverse tradition that comprises both East and West.
I blame western Nominalism and Voluntarism for what became in the West the "propositional tyranny" discussed in this video. These trends in Western thought gradually closed off a more participatory way of thinking that was the dominant "Realist" mode in the West until the 1300s. Nominalism and Voluntarism provided the theological framework that was adopted by most of the Reformers, and that in turn provided the framework for western capitalism and its technological advancement. But at what price? This is all laid out in my summary of Taylor's A Secular Age. so I'm not going to rehearse all that now. But why those ideas took hold in the West and not the East is something I'd like to explore some time. I suspect there was a time bomb in St. Augustine that didn't detonate until the late medieval period. But I'm not ready yet to make that argument.
Bishop Maximus is quite right when he says that so much of that Eastern patristic tradition was unavailable in the West because so few in the West knew Greek and so little of it was translated into Latin--and wouldn't be until centuries later. So any discussion of the Christian Neoplaontic tradition in the West usually starts with Augustine, and goes through Pseudo-Dionysos, John Eriugena, the Cathedral Schools, and then culminating in the great Thomistic synthesis. My original plan was to follow that track emphasizing what is, if not unique, at least more emphasized in the West. But I have always thought that it's important to bring the Greek fathers into the story, and I haven't been clear about how to do that without overburdening the reader's patience.
The Genealogy Series is not meant to be a scholarly project but rather the far less ambitious telling of a story that talks about the trajectory of the post-Axial Revolution West to the present day in the hope of our understanding better what resources are available for us in shaping a more richly human future. Such a future is in jeopardy as it becomes increasingly clear that Liberal Order and its hegemonic rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary hasn't the resources to deal with the crises and challenges that humanity faces in the next hundred years. The idea that Christian Neoplatonism might provide such resources might seem far-fetched to almost everyone, but that's why I think watching this conversation is important. Clearly a guy like John Vervaeke sees its relevance. That's why I found this conversation so interesting. It boils things down to essentials in a way that I think any interested, reasonably well educated person might understand. But it still needs some unpacking.
After writing what's above I learned that there are subsequent conversations. Here's Part 2 that just went up about two weeks ago:
Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you know you have work to do. Though the guides recommend the use of words that are available to everyone (one suggests a sixth-to-eighth-grade reading level), their glossaries read like technical manuals, put together by highly specialized teams of insiders, whose purpose is to warn off the uninitiated. This language confers the power to establish orthodoxy.
Mastering equity language is a discipline that requires effort and reflection, like learning a sacred foreign tongue—ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit. The Sierra Club urges its staff “to take the space and time you need to implement these recommendations in your own work thoughtfully.” “Sometimes, you will get it wrong or forget and that’s OK,” the National Recreation and Park Association guide tells readers. “Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.”
The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The culture war in this country is really about who gets to impose its taboos--the priggish Right or the priggish Left. Most people in the middle couldn't care less about what obsesses either extreme, but when push comes to shove they will pick sides, and they will ally with whoever seems to resonate with what they "feel" is right. And because most people don't care one way or the other, they'll just go along with whatever the group they affiliate with requires of them. If you work at a university or a non-profit, you'll simply adapt as required. You might make a mistake, but you know, "Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.” This seems so pleasant and reasonable. What decent person would resist compliance? But why does it feel so dystopic? Is it just that I'm an old guy who is too enmeshed with the patriarchy? Maybe there's some of that. But I'm not an idiot. I know the difference between what is truly offensive and what is b.s. I know what basic human decency requires, and this is not it.
I recently watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of Reservation Dogs entitled "Decolonativization". It captures perfectly the nonsense factor in all of this, which is that it's based in theory that has hardly any relationship to the way ordinary, decent people--in this case the "colonized"-- live and what they care about most deeply. Watch the episode; it's pitch perfect. It nimbly and gently demonstrates that this kind of top-down programming is just another form of colonization. It demonstrates how fundamentally unrelatable it is for people who have no aspiration to be educated liberal elites. And how the people buy into it have no idea why they have bought into it except that it's what you do if you have ambitions to make it in the world of Aspen Institute Neoliberalism.
As Packer suggests, its main function is shibboleth language. Speaking it is a pre-requisite for belonging in the elite strata of the university, media, non-profit, and many corporate worlds. It justifies itself by an ideology of compassion, but is there any real compassion in it, or is it for the most part a parody of compassion, a form of cheap compassion that doesn't cost anything except the effort to conform.
And yet, the problem is that there's a truth there--marginalized people have experienced real injury. Native Americans were colonized and defrauded and betrayed over and over again, and those are truths that every decent American needs to acknowledge, and it calls for a morally adequate response. It's just that this language policing just feels so fundamentally artificial and stupid. It fails to deal with the deep particularity of the human beings who have been affected by historical injustices.
It's a gesture, maybe, and it seems harmless enough, except that it is harmful as all parodies of truth are harmful. To adopt such language gives people the illusion that they are fighting for justice without dealing with the deeper structures that sustain more intractable, truly hurtful injustices. Anybody with an ounce of decency feels the injustice. And it's rather awkward because the same decency compels us to want to do something about it. But as with consoling someone who has lost a loved one, talking too much doesn't help, and it often makes things worse.
In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were adamant in their defense of Sarah Palin. I knew these relatives leaned conservative, but I was astonished that they could even for a minute take Palin seriously. It was my first encounter up close with something happening on the Right that I hadn't yet felt the full import of, and it was the beginning of my not being able to talk politics with these relatives because subsequently the gap had become too wide and too emotionally fraught. Before then, I knew the extremists were out there, but I could not bring myself to believe they were so close as this. How had they become so radicalized?
I wrote then—
The basic question they seemed to be asking me was "Why are you siding with those kooks? Why aren't you loyal to your roots?" In other words, "It's either you're with them or you're with us." It wasn't really much more complicated than that. A big part of what I've been writing about since then has been to understand how we got ourselves into this cold civil war and about my fears that it will become a hot one.
Mathe, one of my occasional commenters in those days, saw the possibility of it becoming a hot civil war. before I did. She thought I was being too kind to try to understand things from their pov, and that the shift I was describing in the post wrote then was about something much more dangerous than I understood. Her thinking seemed to me then to mirror the kind of paranoia that I was seeing in my relatives, and so while I agreed with much of what she said, I thought then she was too alarmist. Writing now, 12 years later, it's clear she saw a threat then that I didn't take as seriously. She was talking about Middle American Radicalism before it was understood how radical it was becoming. My family is not a natural constituency for MAR, but they were enlisting. Here's the exchange that we had back then:
mathe said...
The real question is how your Sarah Palin loving relatives react if the economy really goes bad. It seems clear to me that one very real scenario is launch a systematic campaign of persecution and elimination of the "Liberals" much like the campaigns in Yugoslavia or Rwanda. There is more going on here than just a difference of world view or of "common sense" versus the insane liberal formulations. Sectors of Americans, particularly whites who call themselves middle class are being psychologically manipulated into a separate reality that in particular rejects those who have the ability to use the knowledge they have to sort out "the facts of the matter" apart from what is spooned out to them-- regardless of their politics.
They reject would be servants of the public interest like Russ Feingold , or the recent Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, or countless others. This is NOT just a liberal vs. conservative modality, but goes much deeper than that. Whatever arguments one could make for traditionalism, localism , small government or other small c conservative shibboleths have been made irrelevant by the global political crisis which alas, is just in its infancy.
As Chris Hedges argues, leftists have got to get into the conversation and present the case in forceful and courageous terms. In particular that means a clear and unblinking attack of the so-called conservatism of the last 50 years.
Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 03:00 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--
I guess my point is that not everybody who admires SP is a fanatic, and a lot of them see her for what she is, but nevertheless enjoy how she rankles liberal types. I guess I've been arguing here for a while that because the most visible Right Populists are extremists, not every one is. In fact most are not, and I still believe some common ground can be found between moderates who are attracted to the Tea Party and the economic Left who are able to bracket culture war issues.
If the economy really seriously self-destructs--which some in my family believe is inevitable--then who knows what's going to happen. Is there the possibility of a "Seven Days in May" scenario?--sure there is. Do I think it will happen? No. It really depends on how bad it gets of course.
I understand where Hedges is coming from, but I think he would agree with me that Left Liberalism is a spent force--it offers no robust alternative to Right Populism. I believe the alternative has to come from sane "believers", people who can talk to Main Street on terms they understand using biblical language and metaphors where appropriate, but which also seeks to invite people who are deeply sequestered in their right wing ideological silos into a larger, more complex world.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 12:35 AM
mathe said...
Jack,
Admirers, followers, people who agree with SP do not need to be extremist. By definition most people aren't. Nevertheless, whole populations are capable of being manipulated (or manipulating themselves) into terrible acts. The instinct to attack apparently vulnerable and unpopular minorities is present with or without a rationale. People may or may not be amenable to the "right sort of argument". There is a wide spread understanding of the fact that much of the present crisis is caused by the business and economic elite. Yet I am not convinced that a populist argument couched in the kind of moral terms you describe would be all that effective in and of itself. There has to be as you suggest some sort of common meeting ground where the conversation and possible argument can take place. Sara Robinson and others have talked about the kind of world view that people in right wing silos occupy. Events that effect them personally and over time have more weight than argument.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 05:25 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--I'm not convinced that a cross-left/right-cultural populist movement is possible either. And it certainly isn't possible with the Libertarian wing of right-wing populism, which really wants the Federal government out of everything. They may hate Wall Street, but they hate the Feds more.
I'm thinking more of the traditional New Deal constituencies--ethnic Catholics and other white blue collars, including many in the south, and white collar Main Streeters who are conventionally conservative in their thinking and tend to sway one way or the other depending on the national mood. Along with the strength that would come from enfranchised Blacks and Hispanics, who aren't particularly culturally liberal in their values either.
I think a political movement capable of taking on the power of Wall Street and other powerful moneyed interests can only come if Blue Collars of whatever tribe are at the center of it, not educated liberal elites.
Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 07:50 PM
mathe said...
The problem with the group of white conservatives or conservative sympathizers is that their desire to rule the roost unchallenged in power or worldview is that it is far stronger than their desire to challenge the economic overlords responsible for their worsening condition. I think the understanding of the class war going on now is deeper than you suggest. I think middle and working class whites understand what is really happening in that regard but they cannot confront the implication; namely that they are now just like as African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans. In fact, the cultural destruction and dislocation they sense is not unlike that experienced by these groups. It is their turn to be left behind. You say many of these people are like the Southern planters on the eve of the Civil War and that is precisely why I am very uneasy. There is a restless, violent rule or ruin emotional current that was somewhat moderated by two centuries of almost constant but largely successful warfare. Now that time is done but they and the nation they largely dominate is heavily armed.
As malleable as they are and given what we know historically and recently what will stop them from turning their rage on the groups they hate?
Let's take one group that you mentioned-- ethnic Catholics. Your argument is that many are angry about the damage modernism has brought to traditional values.The fact of the matter is much of the damage to traditional values comes not only from untrammeled and immoral capitalism which the Catholic Church occasionally criticizes but results as well from war, the preparation for war and the worship of war and the unquestioning brutal authoritarianism of the military. Many of these ethnic Catholics would reject Catholic heroes like the Berrigans and the still active anti-war, anti-torture communities they founded, or Father L.Bourgeois and other campaigners against the School of the Americas.
In his speech at Riverside Church in 1967, Martin Luther King got the nature of our problem as a nation exactly right. It was three fold, Racism, Materialism and Militarism. Yes, white working class and middle class conservatives are a little unhappy with Materialism right now because it's not working for them all that well at present-- and your argument is that this creates some kind of opening. I am telling you that it doesn't because of Racism and Militarism. The new coalition has to be one with radically different ethos than what I see in any American subgroup or ethnic group on the right. Many of the values of the new coalition--if it ever comes to fruition will be a spiritual re-imagining of democratic American values. I say spiritual but not religious. How do we engage with these people or more exactly how do you engage them without feeding their prejudices about "liberals". It's simply wrong to paint everyone on the left with the same "secular liberal" brush. It is not enough to just act as if believing in God were the issue when it is so obviously not.
Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 09:03 PM
Jack Whelan said...
Mathe--
I agree with much of what you say, particularly in the first half of your comment.
I resist, however, the idea that blue collar catholics are typified by the attitudes of cranks like Bill Donahue. I think they are more down to earth, and have none of his fanaticism. Those that do are a very small minority. But you're right when you say that they would perceive the Berrigans as kooks, but that doesn't mean that they are not on the whole decent and sane. They work with Black blue collars day in and day out, and they are no longer Other. Most were George Wallace supporters back in the sixties, but not now. I think there's more common ground and mutual respect between the blue collar ethnics and the blue collar blacks than there is between either of them and culturally left educated elites.
Southern whites, mostly Scots Irish, are another kettle of fish, and I think most of your worries about racism and military are much more a factor. But they were very much a part of the New Deal coalition, and not all of them are frightened idiots.
I don't know how long it's going to take to happen, but sooner or later it must. Real change in this country isn't going to come without blue collar Americans, whether white, ethnic, black or hispanic. Sooner or later, they will see where their mutual interests lie. They'll get organized, and cultural liberals will join their parade; these blue collars are never going to join the parade organized by the cultural left.
Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 11:14 PM
mathe said...
Jack,
I truly and fervently hope you are right about blue collar America. As a member of the "cultural left", I've participated in enough marches, spent hours in enough phone banks, where blue collar people are neither seen nor heard to see they have little interest in "us" even if we are fighting in their interests.
Nevertheless, I do experience them as busy (distracted), ill-informed and thus easily manipulated. When they finally do rise, what will be their issues aside from anger and revenge? What is to prevent new demagogues riding the emotions of the moment to power? People who have been lucky enough to have the leisure to study, think and analyze our situation need to be involved, really in educating and publicizing in ways that appeal to the mass of people. It may be that there are such people for example among the veterans groups, particularly veterans of the Iraq wars. Many of these people are working and middle class folks who could not afford to go to college and chose the military. Their years inside opened their eyes to what is going on. They have a certain credibility that "intellectuals" (that is largely what the cultural left is) lack.
However it happens, a real left, like the one that existed before the incredibly damaging McCarthy era. If the world doesn't blow up in war or blow away in a global warming catastrophe I am quite certain it will arise- it has to. Countries like Germany, and the Scandinavian countries (which by the way are increasingly multi-cultural) show that mixed economies can work. What I am less certain about is whether the US can remain one country or not as the inevitable transition mixed economies comes about.
Saturday, December 04, 2010 at 04:56 PM
Now over 12 years later, here's what I would say in response:
What strikes me is that Mathe's sense of doom was prescient, and my hope for a political Left winning over ethnic blue collars in an anti-Neoliberal coalition has proved, so far, to be disappointed. I wonder, though, what would have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Dem nomination in '16. That's a counterfactual that cannot be tested because Hillary and her Neoliberalism won, and because she did, most of what Mathe predicted proved correct in four years of Trump. But I remember arguing in '16 that unless Bernie won, then it would likely be the last chance for the economic Left, as contrasted with the cultural Left, to win the white working class. Bernie might have failed had he been elected rather than Trump, but he was our last best chance for assembling a multi-racial, working-class Democratic coalition that excited anti-Neoliberal young people, i.e, and would have broad appeal among the bottom 80%. Not everybody, but I think a majority. The Libertarian wing of the conservative movement would resist Sanders with all it has got.
The problem that too many influencers on the Left don't see now, though, is not that parts of white working class are so horrible--they are--but the degree to which Neoliberal values have infected the Cultural Left, which in turn has captured the Democratic Party and in so doing has made the Democratic Party broadly perceived in Main Street America as the party of 'kooks'. If anything that perception is worse now than it was in 2010. The cultural Left does not offer a remotely realizable political future in the American political sphere because non-elite Americans will continue to resist what seems to be its assault on normalcy. So long as Democrats’ continue to be perceived as captured by elite ideology, it will continue to push normie Americans--most Americans, including Blacks and Latinos--toward the Right.
I assume that Mathe was a Bernie supporter for all the reasons I was, and I assume that she would share with me the perception of the Democratic Party as complicit in the rise of Trump because of its surrender to Neoliberalism, not just in the economic sphere but in the cultural sphere as well. For the white working class, politics has become a culture war for all the reasons described in the post. The mistake the Left makes is being drawn into the culture wars on the terms the Right frames--normies vs kooks. That's why Youngkin and DeSantis have won in what used to be competitive states for the Dems.
Look, the cultural Left is right insofar as it promotes a policy of compassion and justice for Americans who have been marginalized for whatever historical-cultural reasons; they are wrong to the degree that they frame that support in the language of poststructural theorists they learned about at university and then get all sanctimonious about it. The Democrats have moved away from the Clinton/Obama embrace of Neoliberalism in the economic sphere, thanks to Bernie, but their Neoliberalism has gotten stronger in the cultural sphere.
As I've argued here, the justice project of the great 20th Century social justice figures like Gandhi, King, Mandela, has been replaced by a liberation project theorized by Foucault, Guatarri and Deleuze. Whatever the merits of discussing the latter in the university seminar room, any attempt to bring their theory into the American political sphere is suicidal. The problem for many on the cultural Left who aren't philosophically literate is that they have been captured by 'theory' whose deep presuppositions most don't share, but most who lean left adopt it because it feels more "compassionate".
But is genuine compassion what drives its hegemony among cultural elites? It can't be insofar as it shapes one side in a zero/sum culture war. So the debate becomes not about what is truly just and compassionate, but about whose value frame--that of the cultural right or the cultural left-- shall be hegemonic. The vast majority of Americans don't comfortably fit within the value frames of either the extreme cultural Right or Left, but they feel more antipathy for one or the other, and that defines their politics. And so Left and Right gridlock the system over cultural issues that have little to do with the real existential threats that face us. Not to mention that the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer.
From my pov, the value frames of both the Right and Left are deeply flawed--the Right because its values are a form of zombie traditionalism--form without life; the Left because its values are based on incoherent, nihilistic set of ideas that have almost nothing to do with deep, genuine human flourishing. The Right, at least, understands we're in a profound meaning crisis; the Left has no idea how it has become a cultural force that exacerbates it. The cultural Right whether its rank and file realize it or not has become captured by the aforementioned loathsome, racist ideology of the Middle American Radicalism articulated by Sam Francis, popularized by Rush Limbaugh, and normalized by Donald Trump; the rank and file on the cultural Left, whether it realizes it or not, has become captured by theory that too often leads it into becoming a self-parodying woke joke. They are two sides of the same coin. Some other currency is called for.