After the Future

Is Magic a Thing?

I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted from the brain in some unexplainable way. That makes hardly any sense, and the only people who believe it are those who have a religious commitment to a materialistic ontology and those who are thoughtlessly influenced by them.

If, on the other hand, your ontology presupposes Mind as primary and that matter is something that is constituted by Mind, i.e., made of Mind stuff, then it follows that Mind should be able shape Matter, and do it in more ways than are imaginable to most of us now.

It would not surprise me terribly if in the next hundred years or so, that human minds will become more adept in using psychic powers to shape the material world. An interesting thought experiment in how this might happen is explored in the Hugo-Award-winning novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which takes place in an alternative history around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

In Clarke's imagined England, the recovery of practical magic, after a shock to an initially skeptical power establishment, becomes accepted as just another kind of technology. And the military wastes no time in finding ways to employ it to defeat Napoleon. What interested me about the book is its matter of factness about something that seems so impossible. As soon as something thought impossible becomes clearly possible, most people adapt rather easily and it becomes part of the everyday social imaginary. The public comes to see Strange and Norrell much as we see Einstein. They have no idea how they do what they do, but waddyaknow, it works. 

And so the book, among other themes, poses a question about magic, which is the same as the fundamental question about any technology: To what ends?  The problem is that we hardly ever ask this question with regard to our invention and use of technologies. We just assume that the employment of any technology is justified by a kind of Social Darwinian logic, which is that it should be used to increase our individual or collective aggrandizement. It is capable only of using a utilitarian calculus regarding how it might increase our personal  or collective power, glory, and wealth. Since we have no robust collective idea about humanity having any higher moral purposes except those as defined by such a utilitarian calculus, the Social Darwinian aggrandizers win by default.

Liberalism hasn't the resources to push back against the Social Darwinians because utilitarian logic is the warp and woof of Liberal morality. There are nice utilitarians and mean ones, aka respectively as Democrats and Republicans. But recently the Republicans have become something else, conduits for a repressed, dark irrationality in the American soul, which, if left unchecked will bring down what's left of the Liberal Order and its open society.

Some believe that the old must die so that the new might be born. Out of the chaos something new will emerge. Well that's something to look forward to only if you're ok with the 'new' looking like Russia after its suffering through the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. If you're not, and I'm not, then the Liberal "Nice" Order and its vestigial habits are the only thing that provides a bulwark against the chaos that leads to a post-truth, warlord thug like Putin. There is a basic decency in Niceness that should not be dismissed, morally shallow though it might be. I prefer overly sensitive snowflakes to Neo-Nazi skinheads any day of the week. 

Yes, the lust for power, glory, wealth is the way of the world from time immemorial. This is the Social Darwinian logic of evolution without grace.  And yes, it seems naive to think that it should ever be otherwise. I don't think it will be otherwise any time soon, but I do think that there is an alternative, nobler way of imagining the human project, and I do think it's possible that there be a more robust push back against the aggrandizers by people of good will who have a foothold from which to push. Right now they don't. It seems to me that nothing is more important in the coming decades than framing such an alternative imagination of future human possibility. My own view is sketched out in posts like this one. 

So my point here is that the truly important question is not whether humans will develop psychic or spiritual powers they currently don't have, but whether they can develop an inspiring imagination of noble human moral purpose and with it a sense of possibility to which human energies and efforts might be employed. We need a contemporary Pico moment to go viral.  

Technologies are neutral; everything depends on to what purposes humans employ them. This is where the real problem lies for the future, whether we're talking about advancements in biotech or AI or the psychic powers of the human mind. To what ends? The bad guys--the Social Darwinian aggrandizers in the private and public sectors--will co-opt any new powers unless we develop a higher sense of moral purpose to guide the human project into the future. Such nobility of human purpose is not going to supplant the Social Darwinian impulse any time soon, but it might at least neutralize it in the short run and provide a foothold that will enable an effort in the long run to transform it.

So the more important question is not whether magic is possible. If it is, it's just another technology. Big whoop. That is really inconsequential in comparison to the question whether there will be a retrieval of some cross-cultural understanding that the human project is fundamentally a moral project, i.e., something bigger and nobler than using power--any kind of power--for personal, tribal, or national aggrandizement.

I believe the human project going forward is about the renewal of the face of the earth, which is the spiritual project of redeeming evolution without grace. If this is a project that is understood as effected from as yet unrealized powers within the human soul, then that's the kind of magic "thing" I could get behind. 

See also "The Coming Discontinuity".

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily,  seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home, to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one, but unlike Clinton remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whom I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever insight originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina's is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is her daughter's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre thought of himself not as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. Maybe she's right. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving.  Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving e the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there was a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

On Reading Simone Weil's 'Gravity and Grace'

I've avoided reading Weil's essays until recently because I was put off by what appeared to be her body hatred, her need to be pure, her angelism. But now that I've read her, I have to say I am strangely moved. There's something there to be grappled with, and I feel in her a kindred spirit with whom I would love to have conversed and to have befriended. If we became friends, it could happen, though, only after we spent some time arguing. 

Where is the line that separates a pure-hearted commitment to truth and goodness from a fanaticism for perfection? Not sure I know for myself, and don't think Weil found it either. But I think that the striving for moral perfection is basically un-Christian because it leads to a tight-assed rejection of the messiness of being human. Our ultimate destiny is to be perfect as God is perfect (emphasis on the 'as'), but this isn't something we accomplish by exertion of will. The testimony of the great saints is clear about that; it's something that happens to us if we're open to it, if we choose to respond and work with the grace afforded to us. Perfection is something to be achieved in time, but not primarily by the will. There is a willfulness and body-hating angelism in the young Weil that I believe had she lived would have been tempered, but it's something that has to be called out.

Our perfecting, or theosis, plays out in different ways for different people, but mostly it's not about trying to be a perfect human being but about doing what's there for us to do, which is to accept the burden and yoke of discipleship more in the spirit of St. Therese's "little way". It's the small, everyday things that build habits of perception and will that prepare us to do the big things if we are called upon to do them. But the little things are enough if that's what's given you. Most of us haven't achieved the level of humility that would permit us to go big and not to be damaged by it. 

But if Weil's angelism led to something that I think was unbalanced, that doesn't mean that so much of what she perceived and understood was wrong. And in reading Weil, I find something I haven’t encountered a long time, and it’s this feel for transcendence in a late modern key, and this way of talking about what it’s like for humans to touch it.

There is in her this sense of its subtlety and beauty, its gentleness and serenity. It is that feeling I get from time to time when in the presence of true beauty. I think that it’s what medieval Christians experienced in the cult of the virgin, but it’s something found in all the great spiritual traditions, this sense of mercy, of grace, of whatever is the opposite of force. Weil gets that and talks about it beautifully.

For instance, this sensibility is at the heart of her insight about the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. Weil is not a fan of the latter because she associates with it, I think rightly, a kind of force that had no patience for the gentle, simple beauty of the Romanesque.The Romanesque balanced masculine and feminine; it gave us chivalry and the Grail stories, Hildegard of Bingen, and the cult of the Virgin. The  Gothic that gave us those astonishing cathedrals and the control-obsessed, centralizing Church militant. 

I remember when I made my first trip to Europe thinking that the Gothic cathedrals were impressive, but the Romanesque chapels were purer, simpler. There is grandeur in the Gothic, but better is that sense of gentle beauty before which one feels not compelled but invited. The Gothic cathedral has more in common with the assertiveness of the modern skyscraper, the Romanesque chapel with the roadside shrine in an arbor. The mood for the latter is not awe so much as it is of being moved to tears. Weil understands this difference. The latter is more deeply Christian. 

Weil was respected and read by a certain kind of mid-century Christian intellectual because she was such a prodigy, but I think mostly she was not understood. Did Gustave Thibon, who wrote the Introduction to Gravity and Grace understand her? I think mostly not. But he encountered in her something that he respected, a sincerity of spirit that was rare. So give him credit for that. (Perhaps I’m too hard on him, but I found his writing style in his introduction to Gravity and Grace jarringly out of tune with the spirit of the essays he introduces.) And amazingly her essays are still in print, which means there’s still enough of an audience that, like me, is intrigued by her and even now seeks to understand what she was pointing to.

***

But now I want to argue with the Weil who wrote “Human Personality”. At first I was struck by its Buddhistic tenor. I have no objections to Buddhism--I see it as pointing to parts of the human project that Westerners need to understand much better than they do. We have much to learn from Buddhists. But Christians emphasize the individual and the incarnate in a way that is mostly not found in Buddhism and that emphasis is, imo, misunderstood by Buddhists probably because it's misunderstood by most Christians, among them Weil. I suspect that her main exposure to Christian personalism was in its cruder or more childish forms, and in reaction to them goes too far in the other direction. We see this in an anecdote told about her by Thibon when he saw her for the last time:

As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: “Goodbye until we meet again in this world or the next.” She suddenly became serious and replied, “In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life.  (Gravity and Grace, p. xii)

Of course, this is Thibon’s interpretation of a memory, so who knows how accurate it is, but it's not contradicted by what she writes in "Human Personality". There is something about the thinking of mid-century spiritual intellectuals—we see it in T.S. Eliot, as well—that is more interested in eternity than in temporality, as if we can know something about eternity and that it can be spoken about in some credible way. I resist this fascination with the “eternal” because it opposes my commitment to the idea that what matters most is what happens in time.

And I resist the idea of the “impersonal” because the whole point of Christian spiritual practice is to become more deeply a person, i.e., one's Self, i.e, the Self created in the image and likeness of God, and that this is accomplished when this Self, which starts as a seed, grows to eventually supplants/transforms the Darwinian Self, and this "supplanting/transforming" can only happen for us humans on earth over time. The Darwinian Self is the natural human being concerned with biological flourishing--spread your seed, dominate your enemies, seek glory in your achievements. In other words, get your inner Genghis Kahn (or Donald Trump or Tiger Woods or etc.) on if you have the will and wit to do it--or if you don't, bow the knee and get behind and draft on those who do. 

And I resist the idea that we shall not meet our deceased loved ones in the future as un-Christian because for Christianity the goal is communion. And communion, as opposed to Buddhistic merging into the pleromatic Unity requires a plurality of persons, that is, of realized Deep Selves. This plurality of Deep Selves is what Christians call the communion of saints. So it seemed to me this comment by Thibon suggested that Weil was more of a Buddhist than a Christian, at least in this respect.

Or at least this was my first impression upon reading this essay. But it became clear that she’s talking about something that resonates deeply with my own understanding of the relationship of transcendence to the temporal.

If I had a conversation with her, I might make the argument that the idea of eternity is a meaningless abstraction invented by philosophers as a placeholder for something they didn't really understand but embraced.  "Eternity" pointed to a dimension of reality they knew was important, something radically different and in some ways nobler and more deeply, densely real. If time = change, change = growth/decay, so the opposite of temporal is the opposite of growth/decay, which is eternity. "Eternity" became a  way to name what was incorruptible, and the essence of incorruptibility was God. So I understand that, but I'd still argue that we have no way of knowing for sure whether God is an eternal being or a temporal one, or that he himself is not co-evolving with his creation. 

That being said, it’s certainly possible that there’s a dimension of God that exists beyond Time, but, even so, that is no concern of ours. What makes a theistic conception of God interesting for humans is the fact of his relationship to us in time, and clearly that means he exists in time. All attempts by thinkers to emphasize the eternity, infinity, the power, freedom, and the absolute transcendence of God might in some way be pointing to the truth about him, but it’s not relevant to our experience of him. If you profess to be Christian, the temporal aspect of God is knowable, and we are invited to form a relationship with this God in time through his revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Ideas about his existence beyond time are purely abstract speculation, and, imo, create more problems than they solve. Better not to speak of it. This is the emphasis of the apophatic tradition in Christianity, to recognize that anything we say or think about God is wrong, and so best not say or think it. I think that there is common ground here with Buddhist non-theism, which derives from an honesty that one can only speak about what one knows.

So instead of the word ‘eternity’, I prefer the word ‘transcendence’. Transcendence points to a dimension of being that stands outside of what I think of evolution without grace, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside of time. It just exists in another dimension, a temporal dimension, that interpenetrates with the world we experience on earth. In other words, there's a temporality--and evolution--at a higher level that seeks to become intertwined with and transformative of the lower temporality of biological evolution.

So when Weil talks about there being nothing sacred in the human personality, and that the sacred in the human is only what is impersonal, it sounds at first that she is rejecting the idea of human individuality, and that the goal is to give up our individuality and to merge into a higher unity. Maybe this is what she thought. I’m not sure. But there is common ground here with what I’ve been thinking about regarding the Deep Self and Communion.

I think we want to affirm the same thing. What she calls the impersonal eternal is the same as what I call the Antrhopos archetype, aka, the Christ within about which St. Paul is so articulate. The Christ/Anthropos archetype is universal--it's something potentially cognizable by every human being whether they are Christians or not, and it exists in a transcendent dimension, i.e., a dimension that is nobler and more densely real, as all archetypes do. But Christians like me believe that the possibility of the Christ Self supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self became a possibility for everyone only after the events in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago.

Our theosis, our divinization, becomes a possibility only after the Divine became human. Only after the Divine has lived into human death, did it become possible for the human to die into Divine life. Only after the Old Adam was redemptively transformed in the resurrected New Adam was it possible for the rest of to become who we were created to be. The interior, i.e., inside-out, realization of the New Adam became a possibility for all humans in a way that it was not pre-Pentecost.

So what I'm calling the Christ/Anthropos archetype is what St. Paul points to when he says not I but Christ in me--not the Darwinian Self, the Old Adam, but the Anthropos, the Christ Self, the New Adam. Wouldn’t Weil be receptive to the idea that this "Christ in me" is what she calls the impersonal, but which is in fact a deeper personal, a deeper form of individuality and uniqueness?

The Christ in me is not Christ himself--he has his own embodied individuality--but his image and likeness--the Anthropos archetype--is individualizable in my ‘person’. And the point of Christ's incarnation and resurrection was precisely to restore his shattered image and likeness*, qua the archetypal human in the human being. He did this so that this archetype might in its full development make us individually substantive enough to enter into communion with God face to face. Face to face is emphatically not Weil''s idea of “the empirical self being eradicated in the unity of eternal life”.

That's why Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body--the Anthropos archetype has no body; it must be individualized in bodies. The archetype is like a seed strewn into the souls of all humans but for reasons that are lost to human memory, the human soul-soil in the Old Adam became infertile to its growth. This is infertility is what Christians like me point to as original sin. And so Christians like me believe that the possibility for the restoration in the Old Adam of the soul-soil's fertility became possible through the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection, he was the first human being in whom the Anthropos archetype became fully realized and so now its realization becomes a possibility for the rest of us.

So for each of us to realize the Christ archetype does not mean we become Jesus bots, but rather the fully actualized individuals we were created to be who are destined for communion. The banquet parables in the Gospels and the circle dances and wedding parties at the end of Shakespearean comedies are proleptic images for this longed for telos. And while these are simply images about something that is otherwise unimaginable for us, especially given the poverty of our late-modern, buffered imaginations, they give us every reason to hope that we will be in communion with, among others, those whom we came to know and love, and to think this not possible is downright un-Christian. 

Nevertheless, Weil is right to point out that whatever part of us that touches eternity or that is moved by transcendence has little to do with our everyday personality shaped by the anxieties of our day-to-day getting along in the world, which I assume is what she means by the "empirical self". And I agree with her that our preoccupation with the aggrandizement of our personalities, our constant seeking to flourish in terms defined by the Darwinian Self (her empirical self?), is more of an impediment to the part of us that is capable of being moved by transcendence.

I see her as someone obsessed with trying to extirpate her empirical/Darwinian Self as it operated in her in order to liberate the Deep Self that it would appear she does not think of as a Self but rather as just a part of the soul that seeks to merge with eternity. I suspect we’re talking about the same thing. I just think her impersonalist way of articulating it is deficient from a Christian point of view.

I would agree with Weil that the more focused we are on being affirmed in our Darwinian Selves, the less sensitive we become to hear the music, which is the movement of grace in our lives. For this reason, our lives in the collectivity, especially one so dominated by consumer capitalism, make it more difficult to be touched by transcendence and to hear its music. And I agree that it is in solitude, away from the crowd, that we are more likely to be so touched. But isn’t this need to separate from the collectivity a way of affirming the importance of our individuality? And does it preclude the idea of our having individual Deep Selves brought into fuller realization by a lifetime of openness and response to grace?

So I may or not be right about this, but I think if I were to have a conversation with Weil, I could convince her that what she and I are talking about is pretty much the same thing.

*See "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?"

See also "Quote of the Day: Simone Weil" and "On Simone Weil"

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29

I don't know Tyson. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances that his thinking is more aligned with Lovecraft's than what you'll find here. In that he a conventional intellectual. Part of what I do in this blog is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with conservatives, but it's done less with scientific materialists. For me the contradiction to work with starts with Tyson's ontological presuppositions, which I want to argue don't fit with what I believe his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos.

So I think it starts with the broad acceptance most educated people of the contemporary cosmic imaginary, which is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. Sure there's a difference between the imaginary and what scientists actually know, and while a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way we think about our place in the cosmos.

So I get irritable around anybody who assumes that cosmos is just what it looks like, mostly empty space bespeckled with billions of gas balls extending unimaginable distances and that it's reason for existence is essentially what Lovecraft describes in the quote above. And then they find reason to get excited about that?! The two don't go together.

Of course this picture of the cosmos is true, but it's only part of the truth and the least interesting part. It's not that science affirms things that are untrue; it's about what it leaves out. Science studies the the husks of it, the mechanics of it. The cosmos given to us by cosmologists like Tyson or Sagan or Hawking is the cosmos not as it is but how it appears to the peculiar, late-modern, buffered imagination. There is an atavistic sense of awe that any human being feels when beholding it, but we experience this despite science, its methodologies and its presuppositions about what is real or unreal. 

Science  has always been a child of instrumental reason, and instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks it knows better when all it really understands is the dead mechanics of things,  and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual that bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a toxic egoism in the second. 

Do some scientists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? No doubt, and this capacity for awe points to something about the human spirit that scientists like Tyson, etc. are unwilling to recognize--that Mind and Spirit are ontologically prior to Matter. Matter derives from Mind rather than Mind from Matter. I'd argue  that the very possibility for awe requires an understanding of the nature of the human spirit that all these guys reject not because science requires it but because their scientistic ontological presuppositions do. The result is that they use something they don't believe in to admire something that in itself isn't admirable without Mind because without Mind there is no awareness of it to begin with. 

The attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling  about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing alive when we never knew either alive. it lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition ofbeauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real it purports to represent. 

So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its coarse, unfunny gags. Isn't this great? Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter how much what I really believe undermines any reason for feeling it. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a a real capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that doesn’t really yield it precisely because of how modern science has changed our way of imagining it. 

Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, and when he demonstrates it to his teacher, the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen way. I don’t remember what the bogus method was, but I guess it was technically correct without its spirit being right. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul on one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.

Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right, but the soul of their excitement isn’t. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. It's not because what they assert about the mechanics of the cosmos is wrong; it's because so much of what it insists cannot exist--is the real source of their capacity for the awe they profess. Like Herrigel, they get results, but they get at them in a soul-flattening way. It's because their methods and approaches are so soul flattening in their effects, that their professions of excitement and awe seem dishonestly acquired.

So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, more importantly has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. Someone like Tyson does not see the legitimacy of this other experience of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work. 

Another less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world, delivered to us by the instrumental reason of engineers and capitalist expediency that has progressively destroyed--crowded out--our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. So we do what we can to appreciate the work of the a run-of-the-mill landscaper who plugged in some shrubs and flowers in a formulaic pattern around the apartment buildings they built on a destroyed wilderness.

The modern sensibility wants to have it both ways, to be both scientific and romantic, but science always comes first, and has come to set a pretty low bar for what qualifies as truth and beauty.  My view is that science is a destructive force insofar as it becomes an end in itself, and justifies itself by its own inner logic to know for the sake of knowing without any reference to a larger meaning mythos. It becomes non-destructively useful to the degree that it serves some larger sense of human meaning that is predicated on a completely different understanding of what truth and beauty really are. The most important thing for the human future, and so for the future of the cosmos, is a recovery of that larger sense of meaning.

The cosmos—at least that dimension of it that we inhabit—is the human unconscious. The cosmos comes into awareness of itself through the minds of human beings and the human quest to increase its collective self-awareness. So the impulse toward exploration is an essential aspect of that, and science, of course, is a part of that. The problem isn't science as a method of exploration and understanding, but science becoming the usurping emissary, to use McGilchrist's analogy. But I think the outer path of discovery, to the degree that it is not preceded by an inner path of discovery, leads to an egregious distortion of our understanding of the cosmos rather than to a deeper understanding of it. The romance so many attach to space exploration is a parody of another kind of quest for truth that late moderns have all but forgotten about, which has been--at least since the Axial Age--to know oneself. 

So this is not a personal knock on Tyson' it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He joins them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--it's a fraud, a contradiction, that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking. If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to the undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions. 

[Lovecraft quote added 7/7/21 with some other minor revisions]