After the Future

Edsall on The Big Lie

Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:

In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.

The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.

In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far. (Source)

This is going to play out the way it's going to play out, but it really does look at this moment as if the Delusional/Cynical Right is in control. I'm sure the Susan Collinses and Ben Sasses have persuaded themselves otherwise. I look forward to reading their self-justifying memoirs after the country goes the way of the USSR.

Because that's where we are--as everybody in the Soviet bloc stopped believing in the soviet system in the 1980s, nobody really believes in American Democracy anymore. A few do, of course, and I'm one of them. But as China is proving, technocapitalism doesn't need democracy to thrive, and in America, what technocapitalism wants, technocapitalism gets. FOX news is paradigmatic. It cares only about its profitability, not about how it contributes to the destruction of the American democracy. And because so much of technocapitalism like FOX couldn't care less about democracy, there is no constituency that does care that is robust enough to push back with strength enough to preserve it.

I fear we are about to prove the ancients right when they said that democracy was the second worst form of government because it was too easily manipulated by demagogues who turned democracy into the worst form of government, which is tyranny. We proved them wrong for almost 250 years, but the people who really care about it are too few and have been outmaneuvered by those that don't. So it appears, anyway. 

Most Americans don't really understand what it takes to be a democracy. Those who think they care, like the stormers of the Capitol, see themselves as patriots fighting to preserve democracy. That's the great irony of our moment--those who think most passionately that American Democracy is in peril are the ones who are being manipulated by those whose goal is to destroy it. Others give it lip service but care more about whether their team is going to make it to the playoffs. And as a result it's stopped being a healthy, living thing that adapts to changing realities. Like the USSR in the '80s, it has become perilously rickety and it's swaying.

Biden is an apt metaphor. Every time I watch him on TV, I fear he will collapse before he finishes. Nevertheless, I am still hoping that we can find some way to prop the old girl up to prevent its collapse, but an awful lot of unlikely things have to happen this year to prevent it. The world sees it, and they are preparing for it--some with dread, others with glee. I, of course, am in the dread camp. 

I started worrying about this inevitability when it started this blog in 2003. I was a Democrat in name only who was disgusted with Clinton's neoliberalism and psychopathy, but even more so by Gingrich and Republican rabidity. I thought of Bush as a decent, platitudinous guy Warren Harding type in way over his head. I responded to 9/11 not so much with shock as with sadness, and hoped that Americans would be smart in their response. Instead, it reacted exactly as bin Laden had hoped. If he were alive today, he would be among those watching our imminent collapse with glee.

9/11 woke me up as to how astonishingly self-deluded the entire political, economic, and media establishment had become that it could be so stupid as to think the invasion of Iraq to be legitimate. The fundamental delusional character of those elites didn't change during the 2000s or during the Obama years. Most among them can't see more than six inches in front of their noses. No wisdom, just expediency. That kind of thinking led to the crisis in 2008, to the Tea Party, and to the rise of Trump. And now some among those elite are beginning to see where it was all leading even back then, but in all likelihood it's too late to do anything about it. Delusions 'R Us. 

I remember people writing to me back in the 2000s asking me to stick with the philosophical/religious reflections, which they found helpful, but to stay away from my biased anti-Right politics, which for them was a turn off because, in their view, was overwrought and exaggerated. Well I'll let what I wrote then speak for itself, but the two things--the philosophical/religious and the political--go hand in hand. Because the former is about seeing with as much clarity as possible what's there, but also what the best possibilities might be in any given situation if people have the good sense to see and choose them.

It's becoming clearer that we've got to a point where the best possibilities or even reasonably good ones will not be chosen. For a while there I thought Biden had a shot, but alas. I might feel better if the Democrats hold the House and Senate in November. There's an outside chance that the findings of the 1/6 Committee might break through in such a way that decent but oblivious Americans will reject the Republicans whom they otherwise vote for out of habit. It's possible, but at this moment looks unlikely. Sure, none of us knows what's going to happen--surprises are always a possibility, but it's very hard to feel optimistic right now. 

I realize that the Genealogy series I'm in the midst of writing right now has little relevance for our current situation. I think of it rather as something I'm writing for my grandchildren, as something that might help to orient them when it comes time to rebuild after the current insanity plays itself out. Which it will. Reality always reasserts itself. 

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part 4A

I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10 can be found here.) Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of him or his work, but he's clearly barking up the same tree that I am. His approach is from a different angle than the one I'm taking, but he provides some critical pieces from cognitive science that I see as supporting the argument I am trying to make.  

Vervaeke is more interested in the experiential, cognitive aspects that I've been calling 'knowing on the vertical dimension'--or 'Wisdom'. I'm more interested in the Mythos aspect, which is more about how the cultural matrix shapes/programs/configures individual experience. Mythos provides the meaning framework that makes experiences on the vertical interpretable. I'm arguing that our "meaning crisis" derives from our culture no longer having a broadly accepted Mythos. I'm not sure Vervaeke would agree because he wants to develop an interpretive frame that is more social-science based. He might not agree, but I think that what he means by a 'salience landscape' is what I mean by a 'metaphysical imaginary'. Regardless, there's plenty of overlap there, and I'll get into that in "Part 4B" TK. 

I'm assuming that anybody who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about regarding 'wisdom.'  Vervaeke is spelling it out in a social-science idiom that might make it more acceptable for people who are allergic to religious language. But clearly for the kind of metaphysical imaginary I think we need to restore in the future, its legitimacy would require that most people have some level of experiential wisdom by Vervaeke's definition--or at least respect for people who do have it. 

According to Vervaeke, research studies have found that 30-40% of people claim to have had "wisdom" or "awakening" experiences of some kind. This doesn't surprise me. Just read Wm. James's The Varieties of Religion Experience to get some sense of how common such experiences are. In the U.S. today under 10% of people are atheists or agnostics, which means, whether or not they are churchgoers, the vast majority of Americans--perhaps  90%+--are open to an ontology that includes a spiritual dimension.

The problem/question for me is why such a large percentage of the population hasn't a stronger and more positive impact in shaping the metaphysical imaginary but instead allows a materialist imaginary to be the default. As I argue in Part 1, while there are benefits to pluralism, hyperpluralism in this area of "knowledge" has the effect of dividing and conquering any opposition to the materialist imaginary. And, as suggested above and I argue in Part 3, hyperpluralism is largely an effect of there being no cultural trellis, no Mythos, to provide an interpretive frame for people to make sense of the experiences they have.

Ten people might have similar awakening experiences, but there might be ten different interpretive frames used to make sense of them, and so each cancels the other out in terms of establishing broader legitimacy. And more importantly, experiences don't self-interpret--everything depends on the kind of interpretive frame that the individual brings to his experience, and some interpretations lead to positive and others to very negative, if not insane, results.

So the insanity does not originate with the experience itself, but in the insanity of interpretation given it. There's the awakening, but the wisdom only comes when it gets interpreted correctly, and correct interpretation comes from a wisdom tradition renewed in each generation by people who have had awakening experiences and developed them in a sane, morally fruitful way. Moral fruitfulness is the ultimate test of the interpretive frame for any kind of awakening experience. Right now, there's no such sane tradition, except on the fringes of our social life. And so while I believe 30-40% of people have had such awakening experiences, I wonder how many have interpreted them in sane, morally fruitful ways. 

And so there's no broadly agreed upon criteria to sort out what's sane or insane, real or delusional, profound or superficial.  And so if a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical dimension ever emerges in the future, it will have to draw on the work of people like Vervaeke and his colleagues who are trying to develop a social science model to do this kind of sorting. More power to them.

In the meanwhile, I realize that when I represent myself as a Christian Neoplatonist, it makes no sense to almost everyone I know, including other Christians. Whatever floats your boat, they most probably would think, because they have no idea what I mean by it. And yet I'd argue that Christian Neoplatonism was the metaphysical imaginary for Western Civilization for over a thousand years because it provided what Vervaeke calls a coherent "salience landscape", i.e., a coherent, meaningful world picture in which certain things came into focus for our ancestors that no longer come into focus for us. Because they no longer come into focus, does not mean they are not there.

And this imaginary worked for the culture's most intelligent and creative people, i.e., those who were knowledgeable on the vertical or wisdom dimension. Most educated people today know more on the horizontal dimension than St. Augustine did. That does not mean they are wiser than he. Whatever the scope of his personal genius, he had an interpretive frame provided by Neoplatonism to work with that gave his thinking and his spirit scope to grow on. We don't have that now, and we need something like it. I would argue that one of the principal reasons we have so few great souls who play a larger role in shaping our social imaginary is because they have no trellis on which to expand. 

So when I talk about Neoplatonism, I am talking about an ontology that assumes that we are living in a world that we mostly don't understand because we don't really see or experience what is really real, and the goal is to to gradually improve our experience of and grasp of what is really real. This isn't a uniquely Christian ontology.  Buddhism makes similar assertions and prescribes similar cures. But Christian Neoplatonism is my tradition, and it contributes things to our understanding about what it means to be human that other traditions do not, and so it deserves to be correctly understood by more people than do.

Like most serious Christians, I see Christianity about being first and foremost about moral development, but what distinguishes me from most Christians is that I care about the ontological and epistemological framework in which true moral development needs to be understood. Such a frame is not absolutely necessary, but it provides the aforementioned trellis, which is helpful for healthy, expansive growth. I think there would be more people with a profounder degree of moral development and the 'wisdom' that comes with that if there was such a trellis. When I look around, I don't see a lot of wisdom and depth available to help people with their Christian moral development. I see mostly moralistic platitudes and pop-psychological nonsense because the only trellises broadly available are moralistic and pop-psychological. 

Each vine finds its own way on the trellis, but it helps if there is some consensus about what the best way is, and all I'm saying is that we have something to learn about that from the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism adapted for the kind of post-secular society we will inevitably become. The question concerning the human future, assuming there will be one, is not whether humans will be religious but whether their religion will be crazy or sane. And its sanity will be largely determined by whether it works with an ontology and epistemology that helps to map a way for people to more deeply participate in the Living Real. There is a lot of religion embraced by an awful lot of people right now that is insane precisely because its reality map is so deeply alienated from the Living Real. 

So while the story is more complex, and I hope to get into details about them at some point, one aspect of understanding what happened after the Reformation was that the 60-70% who did not have such "awakening" experiences asserted an alternative imaginary without a vertical dimension that supplanted the older one because this majority--whether secular or religious--became more interested in knowledge that produced results than produced wisdom. Faith, rather than being understood as a cognitive faculty that when developed led to wisdom, became instead believing in stuff that no longer made sense within an imaginary that had lost its vertical dimension. Religious fundamentalism and rigid dogmatism is "faith" for people who don't know better. 

Increasingly during the Modern period, while people continued to have awakening experiences, they were artists and mystics, and as such curiosities, rather than sources of legitimate knowledge and insight, at least insofar as it shaped public life in the real world of science, politics, and economics. And so by the mid-19th century, the vertical dimension became less accessible even for artists. An avant-gardism, as a pale shadow cast by what was more robust in Romanticism, was interested in saying No to what it perceived as bourgeois or reactionary, but it became progressively less capable of mediating the Living Real, at least in a way that broke through to the broader culture.

I don't want to oversimplify. Clearly some great art was produced until around the time of WWI, but after that, art became, mostly, something else--either entertainments whose quality was measured by their cleverness or novelty, or, more seriously, works of despair that expressed the artist's alienation from the Living Real. Waiting for the Living Real--for disclosures from the vertical dimension--became Becket's Waiting for Godot or Munch's Scream. This kind of art was sincere and important in reflecting to the broader society what had become of it in a world dominated by the rationalist metaphysical imaginary. Such art is deeply truthful because it reflects the reality of what has happened to us. But because it happened does not mean it's the final chapter in the story. And I, for one, am ready to move on. I don't have any patience for what has become a conventional nihilism. It's no longer telling us anything important.

Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture posted above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities, and so inspires us to believe that it we and the society we live in can do better. This can be, but needn't be, naive idealism.

I would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figure in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration. 

So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now, for the social transformation that we need now, as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen. 

So before continuing with what I want to say, please watch the Vervaeke lecture, and take notes about some of the technical terms he uses to explain how cognitive frames get transformed. I hope to write later this week "Part 4B", which will try to further unpack what he's saying in the light of the ongoing argument I'm trying to make here about the restoring a balanced metaphysical imaginary. 

Vervaeke's lecture is the tenth in a series that extends to over forty. It's as far as I've come, so I don't know yet where's he's going, but there's nothing he's said so far that I haven't found to be aligned with and supporting what I'm arguing, and in many ways expanding and enriching it. The crux of what I want to talk about comes in the second half of this lecture, so you can fast forward to that to see why. If you want, start around the 17 minute mark--and then go back to the beginning or to the preceding lectures to see how he got there.

Ed. Note: This post is the fourth in an ongoing series. The other parts are summarized below:

Part 1 argues that the unintended consequence of Calvinism was to pave the way for our understanding of the immanent natural world as just stuff to be used to advance human flourishing. This paves the way for capitalism which justifies itself in purely materialistic terms as producing results measured mainly as wealth and technological advancement. Wealth and technological advancement have their own ineluctable utilitarian logic that has nothing to do with the development of wisdom. People who still care about wisdom are pushed to the sidelines as poets, mystics, dreamers--people who don't understand how the real world works. The spirited young man or woman who wants to make his or her way in the world would not consult William Blake or Emily Dickinson for how to go about it.  

Part 2 argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 3 argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him.  Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. Some Christians might argue that they have Jesus so why do they need Socrates? I'd argue that there's a good chance that they don't have Jesus but some distorted interpretation of him, and that they need Socrates to disabuse them of their illusions regarding who they think Jesus really is. BTW, this is the opposite of the the 19th century demythologization project to find the true, historical Jesus, which was always ridiculously reductive. 

Part 4B TK

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part 3

Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical--or Mythos--dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West--Christian Neoplatonism--worked for so long, why it eventually failed, and how something like it might be recovered. It's not Christian Neoplatonism as it functioned then that I'm concerned about so much as finding something like it that can function for us now in the way we need it. The goal here in Part 3 is to try to begin to understand what kind of work it did and why that's important. In future posts I'll attempt a more sustained attempt to understand why later it failed. The answer, btw, is not because science disproved it. But before getting to that, some thoughts about our current predicament and why such questions matter. Why should one care about things like the vertical dimension of a metaphysical imaginary, anyway?

My concern is not with individual religious belief. Individuals can believe whatever they want, but I do think that a society to function must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary that integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos, that works in tension with the horizontal axis, or Logos. I make that case in Part 2.  Most contemporary Christians, especially if they are Protestants, don't think of their faith as a 'mythos' that fuses two post-axial traditions: Greek speculative transcendental philosophy and prophetic Judaism. Because it isn't that anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

They believe what they believe without it having to make sense in terms that the broader culture recognizes as legitimate. They may have found a personal vertical dimension, but it has little or nothing to do with the way the broader society operates, and so at the heart of their experience of the world is a fundamental incoherency, that in extreme cases results in Ontological Dizziness, aka, the absurd. As I argued in Part 2, one common strategy to avoid Ontological Dizziness is to compartmentalize: Religion is about my private, spiritual life; work and career are about my public, material life. The two have little to do with one another, and for most the former has no impact on the latter. As Eagleton remarks in Culture and the Death of God, "...it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up." The children of the compartmentalized usually don't compartmentalize. Most just get absorbed into the great rationalist materialist metaphysical void, or they join a religious cult. 

But for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era these two traditions lived together in what was often in somewhat simplistic terms rendered as a marriage between Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for reason and faith. This might be understood as Athens/Reason = the horizontal, and Jerusalem/Faith = the vertical, but that would be wrong because it fails to recognize the central role that Axial verticality played in Greek philosophy, at least as it came to us from Plato and Aristotle. 

Of course the persistence of pre-Axial Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism continued to play a significant role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West especially in shaping its local customary cultures, but the idea of the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was more right than it's wrong in describing the post-Axial dimension of the Western metaphysical imaginary. The philosophical/theological framework for it was Christian Neoplatonism. It worked for those first 1500 years, with its last robust articulation in Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, and after that continued to be influential in the arts, if not in philosophy, science, or even the theology of the Reformers. 

One of the most concise and accessible renderings of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is provided in the still very readable Irrational Man by William Barrett. (See Chapter 4 "Hebraism and Hellenism".) Barrett understands Continental existentialism as the heir of the Hebrew part of this marriage, and scientific rationalism as heir to the Greek part. Yes and no. He's wrong about the Hellenic insofar as he sees the Greek contribution as significant only on the rationalist, horizontal dimension. The verticality of Greek philosophy was essential for the role in played in the Christian Mythos in its premodern form.

But he's right insofar as he sees the Hebraic as the down-to-earth, gritty, menschy, experiential dimension of faith, a faith that cares about the depth dimension regarding moral issues, if not so much about metaphysical ones. The fathers of existentialism are, after all, the Danish, Tertullianesque, anti-Hegelian gadfly Soren Kierkegaard and the Russian irrationalist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Both were deeply Christian in their commitments. But then again they still lived in societies before the disappearance of the vertical pole, aka, the death of God.

For these existentialists, the attitude was to hell with metaphysics and its systems, of the whole futile effort to make sense of things that are beyond our capacity to make sense of them. The only thing that matters is one's moral commitments. Yes, every individual human being's life is an drama that needs to be lived in this particularist, existentialist sense, but existentialism in its radical individualism gives up on the societal (civilizational?) sphere leaving it to go its merry way, and that's the sphere that is in crisis right now because the deep meaning axis in our lives has become so privatized in this existentialist sense. 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion--or vertical dimension however understood--had played in the social sphere. After Nietzsche, it becomes harder for anybody to think on the vertical dimension--at least publicly. Whatever trust there was in the testimony of people who attested to knowledge on the vertical dimension eroded with each passing generation after the mid-19th Century. Because with each generation those attestations were becoming increasingly incompatible with a materialist metaphysical imaginary whose hegemony among educated elites was becoming increasingly dominant after Darwin, the Industrial Revolution, and the intoxicating success of new technologies and discoveries in science.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to to understand it--or really, to even care about it. During this time there were plenty of religious charlatans and cranks of the televangelist or theosophical ilk, but there were also Christians and other religious figures who were still taken seriously as public intellectuals, even as late as the the decades immediately after WWII. Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich come to mind. But by the 80s they were no longer taken seriously--or maybe more accurately, there was no new generation that arose to carry on where they left off. Desmond Tutu is the last of that kind of religious public intellectual, but most people born after 1980 were probably wondering what the fuss was about when he was eulogized after his death last week. He was a mensch--a great, wise spirit. 

That kind of public figure no longer exists, and one has to wonder why. I'd argue that we experienced a shift in the country after the failure of the sixties to rebalance things. The shift was symbolized by the country's choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whatever Carter's limitations as a politician, he was a morally serious person in a way his successor was not. I'll argue this in a future post, but I think the country's choosing Reagan and the way he was lionized on Main Street America marked the beginning what I believe was an irreversible shift into a simulacral culture and in doing so left behind any possibility that American society might be led by relatively sane grownups.

Since Reagan, the country has progressively slipped into greater and more intense alienation from reality. I'm not saying Reagan is the cause, but he symbolizes it, just as Trump is not the cause of our current collective insanity, but the symbol of it. It has become increasingly difficult for people to hear or see the truth; it's become much easier to live in a world where you can customize it to meet your preferences. This is particularly acute on the cultural Right where since Reagan it looks for shallow performance artists to lead them by playing to their fantasies. Reagan was at least recognizably human in a way that Trump is not, the difference between them is the measure of how deeply the Red zones of this country has descended into ontological dizziness.

So, while the crisis became particularly acute after the 80s, it has been a long time coming--for around a thousand years. But in its current acute stage, it traces back to the mid-19th century when the truth claims of the old Mythos started to seem for many dubious or, even worse, irrelevant. Life on the horizontal was where it was at for mid- and late-century Americans on the make, and considerations concerning the vertical could be postponed to end-of-life anxieties about what comes next. The young have no time for that, or at best they give a tip of the hat on Sundays to such concerns.

Life otherwise for any red-blooded American was to be lived on the horizontal.That's where all the energy and action was. Religion was for most primarily a transactional technology that was supposed to enhance one's flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs I will prosper. That kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. The sense of the vertical in that kind of thinking about God was already very weak, and so no need to depend on him when one has the use of his wits and the strength of his will to succeed.

That is the Protestant work ethic. Its origin was in a Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle class values, but there is no need for a God to practice them because there is no presence of the vertical in them. Prosperity and success are its primary motivators. Christianity ceases to be itself to the degree that it loses its ability to mediate the Living Real. If Christianity only does its work on the horizontal, it becomes Christianity in name only. It's a pseudo-Christianity that functions in the same way that Catholicism functioned for the IRA in Ireland or for the Christians Serbs in the Balkans. It easily slips into becoming a tribal cult. 

But increasingly for the larger post WWII population, the horizontal became the only thing that mattered--that's where a full life was to be found and lived. The vertical was only for people who hated life, who hated sex and pleasure and life's bounty. A kind of superficial, pop-Nietzcheanism emerges for the sophisticated to justify and celebrate the hedonism that the post-WWII consumer society not only made available, but demanded. As people become increasingly absorbed in their pleasures and their stuff, they become increasingly incapable of responding or hearkening to the vertical. New Age spirituality emerges to provide a religiosity designed for consumer capitalist society, where one can dabble and indulge one's egoism for a lifetime and think oneself profound.

So the dimension of depth became increasingly irrelevant with each passing generation from the mid-19th Century to the present day. And so starting in the late-19th Century, the most important thinkers understood the significance of the loss of depth and its consequences in diminishing the human. They started scrambling to find an alternative on the vertical dimension primarily heretofore occupied by the God of Jewish revelation. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian, for Heidegger it was the unfathomable depths Being, for Sartre it was this idea of the human as having a godlike, boundless freedom.

All in their different ways were God substitutes, and their plausibility or legitimacy was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were all in their different ways trying to find a way back to a connection to the vertical--however that might be conceptualized. For people who were attracted to these thinkers, the last place they'd look for a cure for what was ailing them was the Churches, which, in their view, were alienation factories. And to a large extent, they were not wrong. Kierkegaard certainly thought so of the churches in 19th Century Copenhagen. His experience was not exceptional then or now. The churches in their obsession to make sure that Christianity is correctly understood and practiced too often have made Christianity into something that is  misunderstood and wrongly practiced. 

The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--in whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent dimension that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.

But if solving the alienation problem was the primary concern, Nietzsche's real villains should have been Democritus and Protagoras, not Socrates and Plato. It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of rationalist materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's Mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Real men don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. 

The Socratic/Platonic program was adamantly opposed to the tendencies in Greek thought that Democritus, the proto-scientist, and Protagoras, the Sophist, represented, which was truth on the horizontal without reference to the dimension of depth. The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about being connected to the Living Real, but late-modern educated elites captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary rationalist materialists. Of course the Sophists matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers. 

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is  experience on the vertical dimension. People used to have such experiences all the time, which they recognized as experiences of the sacred. They still do, but the current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic rationalist materialist imaginary.

But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they intersect with the everyday horizontal experience on the vertical dimension of depth. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of the transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people.

So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I'm trying to articulate here.

Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, they reduce Christianity to a "mood" of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It's just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the "mood" of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there's no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. The same is true for Dreyfus and Kelly--important and incomplete.

But the point I want to make here is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who "knows", who can say, No,  that's not it. Try again. The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his development as a violinist can climb and a gardener who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul. 

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. No more Desmond Tutus. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not. 

We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. They had or have no one to teach them, but they have an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon, and I suspect it's the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off track, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it. (Apparently in the early-'30s Heidegger had no such daemon. Similarly self-proclaimed Christians like Josh Hawley haven't one either.)

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must have discovered for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

Logic is used not to reveal what's true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates' daemon doesn't tell him what to do, it tells him only that that's not it--don't go there. That's what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don't. And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only  knowledge that's truly worthing knowing, and that's why they lack wisdom. 

If you don't have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real. At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You're unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don't believe there's anything that will emerge once you've cleared a space for it. But if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical capacity to hear the answer. A 'mystic' is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It's very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days.  

Back to the Christian Mythos: The originators of the Christian Neoplatonic mythos, the early Church Fathers, were mystics in this sense--their greatness lies in their capacity to have cleared a space for something divine to fill it. Among the earliest of them were those who fled into the emptiness of the Egyptian desert where they could create for themselves more easily an interior emptiness, that aporia, that was the precondition for their encounter with the divine. The quality of their theology depended on this vertical capacity to have been emptied so as to be open to be filled in this sense.

The greatest of them were inspired and illumined by their experience of the Christian revelation, and they used Greek philosophy to make sense of the world in the light of it. The trick was to stay grounded in the vertical experience and to make philosophy, or Logos, work to serve its explication on the horizontal. Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from the vertical. That's when the Emissary usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two--Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together, but the vertical is more important because its what grounds or roots you in the Living Real. I think the early Church Fathers did it in a way that is very difficult for us to understand now, but not impossible. I'll try to do that in posts in the future. 

Ed. Note: This is the third in an ongoing series. The other parts are summarized below:

Part 1 argues that the unintended consequence of Calvinism was to pave the way for our understanding of the immanent natural world as just stuff to be used to advance human flourishing. This paves the way for capitalism which justifies itself in purely materialistic terms as producing results measured mainly as wealth and technological advancement. Wealth and technological advancement have their own ineluctable utilitarian logic that has nothing to do with the development of wisdom. People who still care about wisdom are pushed to the sidelines as poets, mystics, dreamers--people who don't understand how the real world works. The spirited young man or woman who wants to make his or her way in the world would not consult William Blake or Emily Dickinson for how to go about it.  

Part 2 argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 4A points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a social science basis for understanding and legitimating Axial knowledge. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B TK

A Genealogy of Our Collective Insanity, Part 2

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture.  If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos dimension. Religion, poetry, and other art forms work on the vertical dimension, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant what must happen inevitably to any society that has lost its vertical dimension, which is what connects it to the Living Real. What we have now is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humans throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and religious people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism.

Religion and poetry are consumer choices, like buying a new car. It serves our needs or it doesn't, and mostly it doesn't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion or is it the problem of the society that has made it so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people would prefer to live in a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary. 

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. The current crisis we are undergoing derives from the metaphysical imaginary of the West, and other societies influenced by the West, having developed in such a way that it rejects the legitimacy of knowledge in its public sphere from the vertical dimension. We are a society, therefore, that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two legs, which creates incoherence despite until recently its giving the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart. 

This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodians of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all. 

Roszak is saying that rationalist materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that rationalist materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis have a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real. 

A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.

A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us because it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which in some has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge.

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religions get out over theirs when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate. 

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.

Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a rationalist materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.

This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless liberal horizontality with a wisdomless illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave without understanding it is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. 

We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than America society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.

I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's educated swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.  

In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension. 

On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. But something like it is called for.

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with other great post-Axial religions.

I think there also needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring  the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic (maybe deistic) vertical and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.

As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.

My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by rationalist materialism.

All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. So be it. The main thing is that people start looking and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding. 

In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in the collective cultural sphere. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work more compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They all lack wisdom. 

As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure time. Reading Plato has the same status as reading Tolkien, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition.

***

After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass sounds like an interesting, serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am. 

At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.

The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.

But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinists. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.

We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a generation or two during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post. 

So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that rationalist materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by rationalist materialist assumptions.

How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing. 

I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. That customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.

Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the last mid-century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society. 

There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.

These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.

As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with the last two terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one. 

So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me admit quite frankly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it.

What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Living Real even existed.

A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.

But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds. 

And so the question that follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension. 

And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get. 

What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist society is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are seeking sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. 

Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon, who does understand it, seeks to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil. 

And so then the next question is what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.

Ed. Note: This is the second in an ongoing series. The other parts written so far are summarized below:

Part 1 argues that the unintended consequence of Calvinism was to pave the way for our understanding of the immanent natural world as just stuff to be used to advance human flourishing. This paves the way for capitalism which justifies itself in purely materialistic terms as producing results measured mainly as wealth and technological advancement. Wealth and technological advancement have their own ineluctable utilitarian logic that has nothing to do with the development of wisdom. People who still care about wisdom are pushed to the sidelines as poets, mystics, dreamers--people who don't understand how the real world works. The spirited young man or woman who wants to make his or her way in the world would not consult William Blake or Emily Dickinson for how to go about it.  

Part 3 argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him.  Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. Some Christians might argue that they have Jesus so why do they need Socrates? I'd argue that there's a good chance that they don't have Jesus but some distorted interpretation of him, and that they need Socrates to disabuse them of their illusions regarding who they think Jesus really is. BTW, this is the opposite of the the 19th century demythologization project to find the true, historical Jesus, which was always ridiculously reductive. 

Part 4A points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a social science basis for understanding and legitimating Axial knowledge. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B TK

Reflections on the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe that began as a ‘whirlpool of pure force’ aims at becoming a ‘whirlpool of pure intelligence’.

 --Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"

Gombrich writes that ‘the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent .’

I have used the language of transparency and translucency--of ‘seeing through’--repeatedly: because as Gombrich says of the work of art, as Jean Paul says of metaphor, as Kerényi says of myth, and as Merleau-Ponty says of the body, our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’--but neither must it be replaced by something else. It is the function of such translucent, or semi-transparent, beings to remain transparent rather than draw attention to themselves, because in doing so they achieve their goal.

. . . 

Body and soul, metaphor and sense, myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning--in fact the whole phenomenological world, is just what it is and no more, not one thing hiding another; and yet the hard thing is the seemingly easy business, just ‘seeing what it is’. The reality is not behind the work of art: to believe so would be, as Goethe put it in an image I referred to earlier, like children going round the back of the mirror. We see it in--through--the mirror. Similarly, he says, we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.

 --Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812ff)

In the Judeo-Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by what Shaw calls the whirlpool of pure force, whose stand-in at the time was Herod and the Roman Empire. Earth evolution, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the whirlpool of pure force by the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., the gradual divinization of the non-divine.

Whatever Shaw means by it, by intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I mean something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence', which suggests what's measured by IQ. I like Shaw's whirlpool metaphor because it suggests that intelligence--the Logos--is a dynamic, supra-rational, energetic thing rather than static in the way the Platonic world of ideas is usually conceptualized. Logos as creative energy comes closer to the biblical idea of this Greek word. 

The incarnation of the Logos, the birth of the divine in the human, was akin to the divine being a seed planted in humanity. Something else happened on Good Friday, which was the divine/human seed being planted into the earth. The implications of these two events, one emerging from a womb, the other from a tomb, are not to be explored here, but it's enough to say that something new became possible then in earth evolution. I think it's quite intelligible in light of Shaw's idea in the epigraph. It's a critical moment in the eons-long transformation of the whirlpool of pure force being transformed into the whirlpool of pure intelligence. This divine/human seed if cultivated by humans grows within their own hearts and as it does, humans become agents through which the earth awakens to its own deepest potentialities. The cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately presents as the material world and its energies becomes subverted. As the seed grows, it interpenetrates and transforms a fallen world. 

Humans can, if they choose, become agents in this evolutionary project. No longer exclusively acted upon, humans can become active co-creators in the project to transform the whirlpool of pure force into the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., to subvert evolution without grace by being infusion points through which Divine Intelligence awakens and transforms it. This is an impossible idea within the dominant late modern metaphysical imaginary, but it would not be if we find a way to restore the vertical dimension to the rationalist/materialist imaginary that thinks it can get along without it. 

What might this project look like if successfully completed? It's imaged for us in Isaiah 11, the first reading of the second Sunday of Advent:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
⁹ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

Humans play their role in this project to the degree that their minds become right, i.e., that they are restored in the image and likeness of the Divine Intelligence in which they were created. The goal for humans is to get into their right minds, which clearly most are mostly out of. This intelligence, of course, is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is "evolution without grace". Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent, light-filled dimension of Being by which the immanent world derives its life, i.e., to the degree that it truly lives, it participates in it. 

Computer Science seeks to mimic an attenuated, left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to transform evolution by gradually interpenetrating it with grace. 

***

Incarnation is mostly about a descent that makes possible an ascent, how the latter is impossible without the former. But I want to digress for a few moment to discuss The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino. Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism transposes the Platonic Ideas from outside of space time into space time. They came to understand that their task was to raise up creation by descending into it to discover there the mind of God embedded in it. The goal for them was to reimagine ascent as descent. The task was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., hidden, in the created world. This shift invites a new consideration of the significance of the Incarnation. The descent of the divine into all creation made possible the lifting up of all creation, not just a means to escape from it. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the tasks for both philosophy and art--and, of course, science. I could argue that science becomes a possibility now in a way it wasn't before this shift.

It's interesting to me that a central theme of the Christian mythos is that the most significant things originate in the least significant places. Why should there not be an analogy along the lines of as a barn in Bethlehem is to the violence of the Roman Empire, so is the earth to the cosmic whirlpool of force? Is it possible then to at least imagine the plausibility that the divinizaton of the cosmos, i.e.,the evolutionary process Shaw imagines by which the cosmos as whirlpool of force becomes interpenetrated by pure intelligence could therefore begin in a cosmic backwater like the earth? It's at least an interesting premise for an Amazon sci-fi series.

My point here is that the event we celebrate every Christmas needs to be understood within this cosmic context. It was the first step in the enactment of this project--the incarnation of the Divine Mind into the whirlpool of pure force that culminated in a surrender of the former to the latter on Golgotha. Pure Cosmic Love crucified in that event paradoxically created the conditions that made possible the ultimate subversion of the whirlpool of pure cosmic force--or so Christians like me believe.

And so Christians like me believe that those who claim to be Christians fail as Christians to the degree that they embrace the rule of violence and force--whether in crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, or the violent overthrow of governments. These are agents of the whirlpool of force, not agents of divine intelligence. They are Christians to the degree that they work in whatever way they can as agents of divine intelligence to subvert cruelty, violence, and force in all the ways it continues its rule in the immanent world. Yes, there is no peace without justice, but neither justice nor peace is served by the aggressive use of violence. The rule of pure force cannot be overcome by pure force. Something else is called for, and if we're Christians we should believe that 'something' became available to all humans after the Incarnation of the Divine in the human on that silent night that we celebrate on Christmas.

After that first Christmas something new became a possibility for humans, the possibility for them to restore within themselves the Divine Mind in whose image and likeness they were created. The divine descending into the human created the conditions that made possible the human ascending to the divine. The early church fathers called this 'theosis'. 

What are the implications? There are many, but one of them is cognitive, which is what the McGilchrist excerpt points to. He talks about how the artist's gift is to render what he sees in its unfiltered translucency visible to the rest of us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of consciousness. The Renaissance artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman, but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we who encounter what he made, if we are in our right mind, can see what he saw. We become capable of seeing the world in Merleau-Ponty's phrase "according to" the work of art. I'm arguing that that "right mind" became a possibility for us because of the Incarnation. 

At the time of the Renaissance, the quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies hidden or at best mostly filtered out in the world around us. In other words, great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from the awakening of a latent inner capacity. This awakened 'talent' enables him to see what was before undisclosed. The latency of the divine mind within awakens to the latency of the Divine Mind embedded in the created world. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or at best seen as through a fuzzy lens.

That these works of art were often beautiful is a secondary effect of the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy, and so their work lacked this quality of translucency because there was no light in them to shine through them. But the deeper creativity to which I point here is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not in awareness before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it. That's what the translucency discloses, an inner dimension of light that radiates out of it. It is in this sense disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Living Real that are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind. Regardless of what intellectual difficulties there might be in grasping what I'm trying to articulate here, it used to be possible for people to take what I'm describing seriously. There used to be a shared sense of the truth of it, even if there was no way to explain it that was completely satisfactory. That there is no longer a shared sense of the truth of it is at the heart of what ails us. 

There are many objects that present themselves as art, but they are great art to the degree that they have this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.' It's not something you get from critical analysis. Rather first there must be a 'disclosure' in the encounter with the art object, then comes some feeble, inadequate attempt to articulate what was experienced. The articulation is never equal to the experience. At best it simply points to it, and tries to understand the world "according to" it. 

My reason for digressing here about the great Renaissance artists is provide a model for something that is possible for us all. The Renaissance artists, like the great saints, were prodigies, but they image for us in their work a kind of work that is possible for each of us in more modest ways. For like them, when we awake to ourselves, we awake to the world. We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't there waiting for us to discover it. The chances of your making such a discovery are increased significantly if you are predisposed to believe it's there to be found.  

For the best of the Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into the material world to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in it. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is in an evolutionary process of being interpenetrated by the Divine Intelligence, that we humans, in whatever small way, play a central role in the advancement of this project, and that we therefore have a responsibility in whatever way there for us to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. We need to see the Good; we need to be the Good for others to see. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence, something more deeply penetrated by the Logos--its truth, its goodness, and its beauty. 

 

Part 2

The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.

--Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11566)

With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence working through human beings to penetrate the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. It's a big idea--I know. Big ideas make us uncomfortable these days. But it grows on you if you give it a chance. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove. First the experience--the insights, intuitions, vision that come by way of the dove--then some attempt to use our intelligence to understand its significance and to create cultural forms that embody or make available or enact that understanding. 

The Christian idea of incarnation, when taken seriously, awakens in us an awareness of the centrality of earth existence, that what happens on earth matters, that it is not some delusional prison from which we must be liberated, or a place of exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It emphasizes that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. We humans have always had the choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace--the whirlwind of pure force--or to resist it, and in doing so to become co-redeemers of the earth as agents of the whirlpool of divine intelligence. Humans become the latter insofar as they restore within themselves the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. The Divine became human so that the human might become divine--here on earth, in space and time, not in some other world or dimension.

So much in our late modern conception of what it means to be human refuses to countenance this possibility, and yet our survival as humans requires that we retrieve something like it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will ourselves become machines, who operate with an intelligence that has nothing divine about it and that becomes closed off from the dimension of depth where the Divine Mind seeks to awaken in us. 

"All creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God," according to St. Paul in Romans 8. That is, it awaits humans who have awakened within themselves the Logos, the kingdom within, and with this awakening the gradual restoration of their identities as created in the image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved, in part, by its awakening to its presence embedded in the created world. To the degree that the Logos awakens in us, we become the sons and daughters of God.

This is not achieved overnight. There's a reason the gospels use seed metaphors for the birth of the kingdom within, and yet as it grows, we begin to see and think more clearly as our propensity for delusion and bad judgment gradually subsides. Our feelings of alienation and estrangement subside, our love of the earth and the people in it grows.

I believe that this seed has incarnated and germinated in the hearts of all kinds of people, and being a Christian is not a requirement. Understanding is secondary; more important is to hear or hearken to a song that since the Incarnation suffuses creation. It helps to have a little music theory (or teaching), but more important is hearing the music and singing it, no matter the level of proficiency. 

As the sons and daughters of God awaken, they hear this music, this song, which is the voice of conscience, the daemon, the muse, whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of the whirlpool of violence, it can be heard and hearkened to. This is not easy to do at this critical juncture in human history. This is a project that is continuously threatened by the forces of chaos and violence whose noise currently all but drowns out our ability to hear it.

But if we hear and hearken to it, this song will come gradually to still the violence and chaos that otherwise dominates in our hearts, and we in turn become violence whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violence in our own hearts and then eventual the violence of Isaiah's cobras, bears, lions, and wolves. Wasn't this the gift of St. Francis, to subdue the tooth-and-talon violence of biological evolution to the peace and harmony of the divine intelligence that ruled so prodigiously in his soul? 

In this way we become co-creators of the New Jerusalem, an image of earth existence where violence and chaos have been subdued by the rule of Divine Intelligence and its justice, when the earth shall be full of Isaiah's knowledge of the Lord. This is an evolutionary project. It is accomplished gradually, heart by heart, generation by generation, each finding its own part of the song to sing. Each of us as individuals has some part in this chorus, some part to sing, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All that matters is that we harden not our hearts, that we hear and hearken, and do what is called for. 

 

[Versions of this post originally appeared around Christmas 2019 and 2020. I've revised it a little for clarity and added some content as it will be helpful in my attempt to develop The Genealogy of Our Insanity theme I'll be posting about in coming weeks.]

Jacobin Magazine on The Great Books

As early as 2003, a student editorialist for the Harvard Crimson complained that it was possible to graduate from that august institution without reading Aristotle or William Shakespeare. True, students bothered by this tend to be conservative little shits — but they are right to complain. More important than the decline of Harvard, however, is the need to address the structural barriers to great books for regular people, through free higher education, more equitable college preparation in K-12 schools, and a far less cutthroat economic system, in which survival is a human right and everyone has leisure time.  --Liza Featherstone

Exactly.

The 'little shits' comment is unfortunate, but you know who she's talking about: the Tucker Carlson and Ann Coulter wannabes who populate Young Republican chapters throughout our land.

And maybe there is some hope for young socialist intellectuals. 

BTW, I read Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates last month, and it's a refreshing defense of common sense about what a liberal arts education should be.