After the Future

What is Beauty For?

From David Bentley Hart's essay "That Judgment Whereby You Judge: Beauty and Discernment"  in You Are Gods:

What, after all, is it that fascinates or compels us in those moments when we encounter the beautiful in its most generous expressions? What calls us to itself, away from our own small and particular interests and predilections, in a canvas by Chardin, in Bach’s second unaccompanied violin partita, in Rublev’s icon of Abraham’s angelic visitors? It is never merely some objective or concrete aspect of its composition. Nor, certainly, is it merely the neural effect it has on us, or some pleasing set of associations, or even some obvious appeal to our sentiments. Even the greatest degree of artisanal virtuosity by itself can leave us quite unaffected if there is not something in addition, something at once elusive and ubiquitous that shines through the mere craft of the work, the mere proficiency. The most polished technique can impress us, even momentarily enchant us, but it cannot truly awaken anything in us if the work itself fails to recommend and offer itself, however mysteriously, as something at once utterly inevitable in its fittingness and yet utterly needless in its existence.

If this seems somewhat vague, I am sorry for that. But it seems clear to me that the special delight provided by a genuine encounter with beauty is in great part an irreducible sense of the sheer, needless event of the beautiful in every particular, unanticipated instance of its disclosure—the gratuity with which it manifests itself, or gives itself. It is an ontological fortuity to which our disinterested appreciation corresponds, and so we see it here as we would not elsewhere. What transforms the merely accomplished into the revelatory is this invisible nimbus of utter gratuity. Works that fall into this class command our regard not by oppressing us with what must be, and certainly not by their utility or banausic value as commodities, but entirely by their freely imparted and irreplaceable contingency.

In a sense, the experience of beauty is our most privileged encounter with the difference between Being and beings—between, that is, the ontological source that cannot not be and the finite realities (ourselves among them) that might never have been but for an outpouring of grace. In a sense, the experience of the Beautiful always takes us back to that primal moment of sheer existential wonder that is the beginning of all speculative wisdom and all spiritual yearning. This amazement perhaps lies always just below the surface of our quotidian consciousness; but beauty stirs us from our habitual forgetfulness of the wonder of being, reminding us that the fullness of reality, which far exceeds the moment of its disclosure, graciously condescends to show itself, again and again, in the finitude of an event: of a mere instance. It is an experience that restores us momentarily to something like the innocence of childhood. If, that is, we have eyes to see and ears to hear.

Having said this, however, I have to add that this is only one side of our encounter with beauty. There is another, equally constant and crucial feature of any act of critical discrimination that is all too easily, and all too frequently, wholly overlooked. Every act of evaluation—this is good, this is true, this is beautiful, and so forth—is an act of rational deliberation and judgment, if only in the trivial sense of attaching a predicate to a subject and then perhaps assigning that predicate a degree—this is very good, this is partially true, this is somewhat beautiful, and so on. But, then, how can any act of judgment not be in some sense reflexive or even reciprocal? How can one judge without passing a judgment on oneself in that very act? Or, rather, without submitting to a judgment from beyond oneself? In venturing any judgment, one does not only evaluate something—an object, an act, an idea—in light of one or another transcendental standard; one exposes oneself to that same light, subjects oneself to that same standard, and thereby reveals oneself as a sound or unsound judge: either a saint or a sinner, a sage or a fool, a god or a monster, or (more typically) something somewhere in between the one or the other. That judgment whereby one judges is always also a judgment whereby one is judged. This is not only a spiritual admonition, a warning regarding the providential calculus in the ultimate balance of all things, a reminder that the eye of God is ever upon us. It is also a truth of ordinary experience and elementary reasoning. Thus, every act of judgment is to that extent an act of “moral” discrimination, if not as regards the object of our evaluation, at least as regards what we reveal ourselves to be through our evaluation of that object. (pp. 39-40)

This idea of how our judgments judge us needs more unpacking, but not today--except for a quick thought:

As a final project in one of my classes, I had my students write their philosophy as an honest statement about what was their understanding of the world and their place in it. I asked them to organize it under four headings. Epistemology, Ethics, Metaphysics, and Aesthetics, the four classic philosophical categories. The last, aesthetics, always seems to be the least philosophical for most people. Isn't beauty in the eyes of the beholder? Isn't it just a matter of subjective taste? What's beauty got to do with the truth?

Well, it depends on the nature of your encounter with beauty. I tried to convey to my students that perhaps for some of them "aesthetics" could be the experiential foundation upon which they should extrapolate their metaphysics. They should ask themselves--what is the world that such an experience of beauty is possible? And then from that, their ideas about what is true and good follow. 

Again this goes to the quantitative vs. qualitative in our judgments: What is statistically rare nevertheless has the potency to overthrow a mountain of data. No matter how miserable most of the moments of one's life, there are still those few that stand in contradiction to it. And then you have to judge: which is true? The misery or the beauty? Everything depends on the choice you make. Your judgment judges you.

Toward the Development of a Sapiential Tradition

It is probably true quite generally that in the history of human thinking the most fruitful developments frequently take place at those points where two different lines of thought meet. These lines may have their roots in quite different parts of human culture, in different times or different cultural environments or different religious traditions: hence if they actually meet, that is, if  they are. at least so much related to each other that a real interaction can take place, then one may hope that new an interesting developments may follow.

Werner Heisenberg

Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world. 

Percy Bysshe Shelley

From time to time, I'm going to indulge in a little utopian thinking. I think we need to do it if for no other reason than as an act of will to stave off the darkness that seems otherwise to be enveloping us. As I've been suggesting in recent posts, the work ahead of us is not to come up with a ten-step strategy or five year plan to a better world or even just to save democracy in the near term. Worthy as those efforts might me, I'll leave that to others.

I am more interested to participate in what I see as a multi-generational project to break free of what constrains us now and so as to enter into a more open, more deeply human, more life-giving cultural space. An important part of such a process is to frame in imagination what such an open space might look like. The goal for us now is to not worry about how to practically get there, but to imagine a place that is worth getting to. We need a north star to guide us. Navigating the storms, counter currents, and stretches of becalm-ment are for later.  

So when I recently came across this quote from Heisenberg, it struck me that it was an apt description of my Utopia diagram that I introduced some weeks ago. The two lines of thought he's talking about could be construed as what I'm depicting here as the horizontal and the vertical, i.e., the axis of praxis with the axis of transcendence. The vertical line exists in contemporary culture only on its southern limb, what we call the irrational, Dionysian, or subconscious. I think that is broadly accepted by almost all educated people.

What currently has very little legitimacy, and what needs its legitimacy to be restored, is the northern limb. In the same way that at its best science is an ongoing research project whose results are peer reviewed by eminent members of the scientific community,  so must there be a restoration of a similar form of peer-reviewed research on the entire vertical axis, north and south, by eminent members of a sapiential community.

No such sapiential community exists now because the wisdom tradition in the West became too identified with the defense of creeds and dogmas rather than with truth and wisdom. The decisive break came after the Thirty Years War pitched Protestants against Catholics from 1618-1648. It was the most savage and devastating European War until the 20th Century. What motivated these wars had absolutely nothing to do with the spirit and wisdom of the gospels, but with tribal-credal rivalries. Nevertheless, the takeaway any sane, decent person could take away from that disgraceful period was clear: if this is the way Christians treat one another, then credal Christianity could not be taken seriously. The churches self-delegitimated, and never really recovered.¹

People are innately religious, so they continued traditional practices on the ground level, so to say, but the Churches lost the intelligentsia, and that created a situation that was unique in the West. The intelligentsia did not, at first, reject the idea of a transcendent Deity, just the Church's moral authority to say anything meaningful about it. Reason, not creeds and dogma, became the ultimate authority. But reason, as essential as it is, inevitably becomes the Emissary that usurps the authority of the wise master because the wise master has lost its institutional foundation. The fragmentation of the church into a hundreds of sects made it easy for everyone to disregard anything Christians had to say, even when they were making good sense. This is what cleared the space for the emergence of an unchecked Transhumanism and the culturally devastating effects of industrial capitalism. And it goes a long way to explain why these developments are uniquely Western in their origin.

So the Thirty Years War and the English Civil War that took place during the same period had nothing whatsoever to do with Christianity except in some primitive tribal sense. But despite the fanaticism of these warmongers, individual decent human beings have always been able to find their way to discover what is best, deepest and wisest. It's just that angry, fearful humans who happen to be Christians in name if not spirit tend to act more like mobs than like saints, and Church leaders tend to act more like turf-and-prerogative-conscious bureaucrats than like sages. That isn't unique to Christians, but it had particularly disastrous consequences for the West in the way it played out. 

So two points: First the obvious, that people who call themselves Christians are not immune from everything that is corrupting about being human and are often worse than average in their cruelty. But that doesn't mean that there are no genuine saints and sages. Because of the events of the 1600s, saints and sages just don't matter for us anymore in the way we make our decisions in the political and economic spheres, and they should.  

The second point is less obvious because of the way we have come to understand truth. Because educated people are so inured to the methodologies of the social sciences, we tend to think that the real truth about human beings lies in statistically predictable behaviors, and we reject the anomalous as noise. But on the vertical axis it's the statistical anomalies that are most representative and disclosive of vertical truth. It's the statistically few that we must look toward, rather than to the statistically average. It is what the quality of the few tell us about human possibility that matters more than what we accept as the mediocrity of the all-too-human. That's not how your typical social scientist looks at the human condition, and if we're good, educated Liberals we listen to what social science has to tell us, right? They've got the data to back up their "knowledge". No need for wisdom, and too often, no need for even a little common sense.²

We don't have a problem accepting this celebration of the statistically anomalous in athletics or musical performance, but we do in matters of the spirit. We are constrained for good reason by fears of spiritual pride, and there is a healthy democratic impulse at the heart of what's best in Christianity that wants to celebrate the everyday goodness of ordinary folk. I would love to live in a society that celebrated the sanctity of everyday life and the earthy wisdom of ordinary good folk the way our ancestors did. But that's a world long gone, and at best we have now only zombie or counterfeit versions of it in MAGAland. There is very little wisdom in the heartland anymore. It's there in some individuals, but not in the culture. The TCM has destroyed whatever was once wholesome in that. But that doesn't mean that it couldn't some day be restored. That would be an essential feature of my utopia. 

The question is how to restore something like that wholesomeness, where there is a good life for ordinary people while at the same time a gradual, lawful expansion of knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical axes that would benefit everyone. And that means that the anomalies, the geniuses, the humans with special gifts on both the horizontal and vertical axes that together in an effort to maintain a balance between them, must play an outsized role in shaping the direction of human evolution.

But this can't be left to just those working on the horizontal axis. Horizontal work if left to itself is driven by amoral, dehumanizing energies that, for instance, animate the Transhumanists. Horizontal work needs to be guided, balanced, and, where necessary, checked by a sapiential community that has earned broad moral authority. This sapiential community would be peopled by the geniuses on the vertical axis--the poets, sages, and saints that any truly healthy society would produce and recognize. 

I know that this conjures fears about Inquisitors and Ayatollahs, and for good reason. But our fear of the worst possibilities shouldn't preclude our aspiration to the best. At the very least, a balance must be restored between horizontal and vertical poles because giving the Transhumanists free rein leads to catastrophe. And in the meanwhile we need some utopian thinking to counterbalance the dystopia to which inevitability we've become resigned.

And in my utopian society, a new/old kind of participative knowledge on the vertical axis will be for most humans more interesting and rewarding, because it will be all about developing richer, deeper connections with the natural world and with one another. My utopia will be a place where people have leisure in a way that is unimaginable for most now. It will provide a trellis, a cultural framework of 'goods' that lay out practices, often very challenging practices, that will enable the cultivation of the souls of healthy citizens to grow toward their individual eudaemonic telos.

This, btw, is why I don't have a problem with tech as tech. I'm all for it if it's used to liberate people from soulless labor for something soulful. The problem now is that tech without the northern limb is more likely to produce the Last Man dystopias imagined in WALL-E or Brave New World if not the post-catastrophe, neo-barbarian world of the Mad Max movies. 

Those who become most prominent on the vertical axis will be truth seekers, not the inquisitors, political hacks, and bureaucrats as in most historical theocracies. In my utopia, work on the horizontal axis will serve the work on the vertical. In other words, the vertical will be the realm of the wise master in McGilchist's story,² the dimension where the most important discoveries are made, and the horizontal will be the emissary, the dimension where the the practical implications are worked out and implemented.

It's a start.

BTW, I'm working on an essay entitled "Rescuing Aristotle". It's objective is to unpack the First Day of Hart's imagined colloquy between the gods in his All Things are Full of Gods. This is very rich, and the challenge for me is to write about it in a way that can convey that to readers why such hi-falutin intellectualizing is relevant for their lives as individuals, but more importantly in the long run for our lives together. 

Notes

1. I am a credal Christian, but I relate to the creed not as a set of propositions, but as a portal into a deeper mystery that can only entered into with what Paul Ricoeur calls 'second naivete' and what John Keats calls 'negative capability'. 

Because the Tao/Logos that can be spoken is not the Tao/Logos. In other words, the map is not the territory. That's the mistake that dogmatists and fundamentalists make--they make idols out of propositions, rather than to be drawn into them and past them into something far more vital than a mere intellectual assent to propositions that seem on the face of it to be absurd.

2. In other words, no need for Sophia or Phronesis. See diagram.

3. This is what Iain McGilchrist in recounting Nietzsche's tale of the Master and the Emissary in the Introduction of his book of that title:

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. Why I believe so forms the subject of this book. I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary. (p. 14)

From Decadence to Dawn

The right has a clear idea of the world it wants to create, however revanchist and dystopian it might seem to its opponents. There is no similarly motivating spirit on the shellshocked left, at least outside of Latin America. Incremental change to a hated status quo is clearly insufficient, but progressives haven’t laid out a picture of comprehensive transformation that seems either workable or inspiring to most people.

Michelle Goldberg

In the the early 2000s as we were ramping up for the invasion of Iraq, I had one of those aha moments when I was reading Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present; 500 Years of Cultural Life. I'm too lazy right now to look up the exact quote, but his definition of 'decadence' was the key. He made clear that he did not consider the term as morally pejorative, but as a neutrally descriptive term describing when a society has lost any confident collective imagination of a morally progressive future. There were ups and downs during the last 500 years, but there was an underlying confidence that directed things during that time. But that confidence was shaken in the middle of the 19th century, and by the end of the Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945, it had been utterly shattered.

Barzun takes pains to point out that during a decadent period people as individual moral agents can thrive; it's just that the society as a whole seems confused and lost because there is no central animating energy that inspires and organizes it. And that, of course, plays out in all kinds of toxic, chaotic ways in a decadent society's collective life.

My catch-all term for how this toxicity has been socially organized since WWII is the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. It functions as nihilist zombie culture, a bizarro opposite or parody or counterfeit of what a healthy culture should do in orienting humans more wholesomely toward a “good” future, i.e., a future oriented toward the Good. The zombie ideology of the TCM is Transhumanism. But we all accept it as normal, because what else is there that seems "progressive" in shaping our future. Tech is all about an ever-new, progressive, exciting future, right? But Good? Only in the most morally diminished sense of the word.

Again, the problem is not the tech itself. It's how humans interact with it, and at root, It's the toxic, dehumanizing, zombifying energies that are driving those humans involved in 'creating' the tech in the way that they are. They call it innovation; I call it possession.

Did you ever wonder why zombies are such a thing in the last thirty years? Well maybe that's because in our collective subconscious we all fear that we are becoming zombies--beings who look human but who are animated by energies that are anything but human, that are indeed anti-human. Is Elon Musk recognizably human anymore? Is Zuckerberg? They're like Gollum and the Ring. Ok, unlike zombies, there's a human in there somewhere, but it's being suffocated and dominated by something deeply malign.

So I could go off on a tangent here about how for so many people it's getting harder and harder to "feel" human anymore, and how this accounts for so much, but I'll keep it short today.

Read the entire Goldberg column. She shows that she understands the problem, and she’s right that what’s required is a “comprehensive transformation”, but neither she nor Ro Khanna, about whom this article is mostly about, have any real solutions. They cannot so long as they assume that something genuinely human be accomplished in our collective life within the presuppositions of the TCM, which they both accept uncritically. The Right, regressive though it might be, has a cultural political program that gets people excited. The progressive Left has no alternative that, to use Goldberg's language, is "workable or inspiring". All they got is some misplaced hope in tech.

My naming this blog ‘After the Future’ back in 2003 was largely inspired by my reading Barzun. The task as I saw it then, and even more so now, was to look forward in hope toward a new dawn. And over the years, I've tried to engage readers and students in an exercise of imagining an alternative, positive, collective, truly human future. And all along I’ve argued that in order to do that, while we cannot go native in the past, we must retrieve lost and forgotten treasures bequeathed to us from the ancestors. That's an essential part of it anyway.

Recently, I’ve been arguing that people like Taylor, Hart, and others are laying the groundwork for such a retrieval as a path toward developing an alternative positive future imagination. This is a long-term work. It's not something you hire McKinsey in to give you a plan. It requires a different order of thinking than what most people are used to or comfortable with. So over the next year, insofar as I have the time and energy for it, I'll be trying to translate what those thinkers and others are up to for an audience that is mostly unfamiliar with the Western philosophical tradition. This might be a heavy lift at times, and it will require some effort on your part. But I hope at least some of you will make that effort and work through it with me.

Navigating in the Dark

II find it ironic that so many "savvy" commentators talk now about how it was politically counterproductive to focus on how Trump was a threat to democracy. “That's not the way to win,” they say. “If Democrats just focused on anything else, you know, the so-called kitchen-table issues, they would have had a better chance of winning.” And so therefore, I guess, of indirectly saving democracy. I will admit to thinking along these lines from time to time myself: nothing mattered but beating Trump and pushing MAGA to the margins where it belongs. Once that’s done, I thought, the saner among us can argue about where we go from there. But it had to be decisive rejection of Trump and MAGA up and down the ticket. We got the opposite. And we have to face the facts about what that means.

Pushing MAGA back to the margins is no longer possible, and if that’s true, then a functional democracy isn’t possible anymore. Trump won, and because he won he has shown that most Americans have no idea about what maintaining a democratic republic requires. Since their election of Reagan and with it his dismantling of the New Deal Order, we’ve gradually become more Pottersville and less Bedford Falls.

In choosing Trump, most Americans have completed this devolution. We are now an unadulterated, unconstrained, unmitigated Pottersville, and any Liberal fantasies= of being anything else are just that, fantasies. And in their doing so, have left him free to quash what's left of any Liberal fantasies that anything truly better is possible, including a healthy, functioning democracy.

If we vote for Democrats, we do so because they run Pottersville more competently, but we see now more clearly that it’s always been Pottersville. The Democrats are a hollow party obsessed with rules and procedures that nobody in Pottersville understands or cares about anymore. They are out of tune with the logic of life in Pottersville, but they don’t seem to have realized that yet. That’s why their appeals to saving democracy didn’t work. Most Americans don’t understand or care about democracy. They just care about the price of eggs and their team winning in the culture war. 

Even if most Americans don't understand that this is what happened to us, the rest of the world understands. They are watching the U.S. now as we watched the Soviet Union's collapse in the '90s. As with it then, our collapse now has been a long time in the making. And like the USSR, I expect the U.S. to take a path very similar the one taken there and in much of Eastern Europe.

This will make more explicit what was already structurally implicit: since Reagan, we have grown into an oligarchical kleptocracy while retaining some guardrails against its worst excesses. But with this election Trump has been given pretty much carte blanche to dismantle what’s left of the guardrails, and so we move into a more unashamed, open, uninhibited version of an oligarchic kleptocracy, in other words, Pottersville.

So Trump's having won has been clarifying for its abolishing any ambiguity about what America is and what it can be. If it’s capable of being anything better, the Democrats have lost whatever credibility they might have once had to make the case because of their complicity with the oligarchs since the ‘90s.

Trump is just a more honest version of its essential corruption. He’s no longer shocking in his open transgression and subverting of norms because people have stopped believing in them. So he's the almost perfect excrescence of the basic nihilistic ideological superstructure of American techno-capitalism and the material substructure it justifies. Trump is is its essence for us to see displayed it in all its vulgar, shameless magnificence. Wall St. did back flips and entre-chats and jigged for joy when he was elected. What’s democracy have to do with us?

So while Trump might not represent what most Americans are as individuals, he does represent what we are in the collective. If Liberals are honest, they must now confront the brutal reality that what they want they cannot have in America, at least not within its current techno-capitalist framework. The system doesn’t even have to pretend to care about Liberal ideals anymore.

Some people believe that after Trump we can recover, but recover what exactly? The rule of law? A functioning legislative branch? A justly distributive economy? A color-blind justice system? A humane foreign policy? Well, they might say, we can recover “democracy”. But democracy is what has just given us Trump, and it is as such a failed democracy. The first time you could argue it was an aberration, but not the second time.

I believe democracy is the most mature form of polity because it requires the highest level of moral maturity from its citizens. If a society cannot produce a plurality of morally mature citizens, it cannot expect to survive.

Most ordinary Americans live in a dreamscape in which the poor long to become rich and famous or otherwise settle for bread and circuses, and the rich and famous long to live forever in a brave, new, soulless, transhumanist mechanopolis. Such people do not care about democracy because they have no idea about the kind of moral maturity it requires.

Democracy is a “form” of government, and it cannot work if it is an empty form. Everything about the TCM works to erode and hollow out and diminish the vitality that animates the forms that make democracy possible. If we are to “recover” democracy, we must first recover the civic vitality without which in cannot be sustained. And that is a cultural project, not a political one.

We think that somehow if we just keep fighting for democracy, the vitality to sustain it will just appear out of nowhere to sustain it. But the more basic task is to develop citizens who are not hollow, and who recognize what it required of them. That is a cultural/spiritual task, and it cannot be accomplished within the political sphere.

So until that preliminary cultural transformation is effected, I just don't see what there is to "recover". Trump’s second term will be the final blow to system that has been rickety for years now, and I just don't see where there's oppositional solidarity enough based on an inspiring alternative vision of civic virtue and the common good that could possibly succeed. So the sooner Liberals realize that it's not about recovering, but about creating something very different by drawing on resources that have for the most part been forgotten in the developed West, the quicker we can pass through this dark night. I don't think this requires revolution, but rather the growing of something within the belly of the beast that over time becomes strong enough to sicken, kill, and replace it. More about that in the future.

In the meanwhile, life will go on for most as it did before. Nothing much obvious will change in the lives of most Americans. The rich will continue to get richer, and the poor poorer. Nothing new there. But life will become meaner and darker and more violent. If things get really bad, there will be the occasional Novalny who throws himself onto the spears of the regime, and for a while Liberals will be embarrassed by how their cowering inaction contrasts with his reckless courage. At least he's doing something, right? Individuals have to follow their consciences, and it is not for me to say that such gestures are meaningless, but I, for one, am not into tilting at windmills. There has to be a reasonable chance of success, and that requires preparation and building solidarity around an inspiring vision forthe future. Democracy by itself is not enough.

So what to expect in the next year? We'll go through some significant chaos. The harebrained incompetency will be comical. The meanness and cruelty will be nauseating. The lying and gaslighting will be infuriating. The MAGA world will go through continued infighting between its oligarchic wing and its populist wing, as we saw last week between Musk and Bannon. But the oligarchs will almost certainly win that fight because they almost certainly will find more favor with Trump. The J.D. Vance/Kevin Roberts theocratic faction might be thrown a bone or two if it doesn't cost the oligarchs anything.

But the theocrats and populists will have little or no influence because Trump and the mafia around him couldn't care less about the material or religious interests of ordinary Americans, whom they consider losers. Trump and his posse knows they won't be held to account, and that they have carte blanche to do as they please.

Yes, we cannot see around corners, and the unexpected is always a possibility. But we must face the facts as they present themselves to us, and they present a very dark picture.

***

Am I giving in to hopelessness?

No.

But it sure looks like it, right?

Ok. I'm going to say it: Only in the darkness can we see the stars. Like most cliches, if you chip away what has encrusted them, there's a vibrant truth pulsing in their core. Sometimes you just have to embrace the darkness rather than turn on other lights of our own contrivance that distract and pollute and so prevent us from seeing what's been there invisibly all along.

I realize that the story I've been telling about how we've lost our way as a civilization dating back to theological arguments in the 1300s seems far-fetched. Most people don't have enough knowledge of Western intellectual history to be able to judge whether it holds water. It's all academic, they think. And even if it's mostly right, what possible relevance can it have for us now? Besides, nobody else I follow online is talking about such ideas. I'll just go with the standard narrative that we learned in school: science obsoletized everything that our hidebound, benighted, superstitious premodern ancestors understood to be true. We just know better now. Sure we have problems--what generation of humans hasn't? But we're clever enough as a species to work it out. Right???

This is what I would describe, perhaps unfairly, as the Ezra Klein Liberal narrative. Klein is an honest, intelligent, insightful guy. I often learn from him. Where he comes up short, from my pov, is in his assumption that we can have a decent human future within the TCM. At the end of the day, he's just a very eloquent apologist for the Liberal Order that, whether he realizes it or not, is crumbling all around him. Nobody but a relative few among the educated elite believes in it anymore.

I'm arguing that this crumbling results from our entire contemporary civilization being built on profoundly flawed metaphysical and epistemological premises. These premises, instead of increasing the scope of our knowledge, have profoundly diminished it—and in doing so have all but sealed us off from the only sources we can draw upon to find real solutions to the lethality of the problems these flawed premises have engendered.

If I'm right about that, then at least a part of the task ahead of us is to restore a broader, richer epistemology and metaphysics to replace the one running our civilization now. Ideas matter because of the way they open up or close down possibilities. It’s not the material possibilities that our materialist presuppositions have opened up for us that concerns me, so much as what they have closed down—and in doing so have closed down a path toward something truly richer, deeper, and better.

But philosophy is the last place most people would look for a solution, and for good reason. Most of the philosophy of the post-WWII era is either an articulation of the nihilism of life lived within the suffocating encroachment of the TCM or an exercise in academic triviality. Especially in the Anglophone/Francophone world, it's mostly been the manic scribbling of inmates on their prison walls. That kind of philosophy is, of course, a symptom of the illness rather than a cure for it. But that doesn't mean that philosophy in the Socratic/Platonic tradition at its best can't offer a cure. Most people have have only superficial stereotypes about that tradition, and so have no idea about how rich and relevant that it can be.

And that's why I think what Charles Taylor and David Bentley Hart are doing is so important. Whether or not their work will break through into a larger cultural conversation, I don't know. But at the very least they're laying the groundwork for something to break through in the future. Their work is flickering starlight that I hope more thoughtful Liberals will be willing to pay attention to as the Liberal Order continues its slo-mo collapse and the darkness grows around them. (I'd love to hear Klein interview Hart.)

That's why the metaphor about seeing the stars at night is apt. We need a point of reference outside of the prison walls. This "outside" reference point was essential for every great civilization at least since the Axial Revolution. Including our civilization--until we lost it. We didn't reject what the ancestors knew because we found out it wasn't true; we simply forgot about it as we became so obsessed with our gadgets. And so now we've come to see these gadgets as created in our own image and likeness, and so reciprocally we reduce ourselves to what we see of ourselves in them. This has created a doom loop that is dehumanizing and insane, and yet we accept it as normal. So the task now is not to invent something out of nothing, but to remember what we once knew, and adapt and harmonize it with everything else we have come to know since.

The arc of history is long, and it does bend toward the light. I truly believe that. But in any given moment, you can only work with the light that is available to you, and right now we have but a fuzzy, indistinct flicker here and there. We need to build those flickers into a blaze. Nothing substantively changes until we do.

More on Civilization

[This is an expanded, edited version of a comment I wrote in response to some interesting questions and points made by Annie Gottlieb in my previous post. I recommend reading the whole conversation here. ]

Appetite is desire, and desire is good or evil depending on its object. We're always looking for love in all the wrong places, but that doesn't mean that there isn't a right place where it can be found, i.e., something that is worthy of our deepest longings and highest aspirations. "Our hearts are restless, my God, until they rest in thee," said St. Augustine. I'm not a fan of the Buddhist extinction of desire, but rather of seeking to identify its correct or lawful ends, if by lawful we mean something more like the Chuang’s Tzu’s Tao and less like the reductive legalistic mentality that seeks to reify it in a propostional code.

Desire needs to be educated not extinguished (as in some forms of Buddhism). Our entire civilization now is based on if you feel it, do it so long as you don't hurt anybody. And of course hurting people doesn't come far behind, because why shouldn't I hurt people if I really, really want to—and if I can get away with it. J. S. Mill might be rolling in his grave, but Trump and his popular embrace by the demos is where that libertarian ethos leads.

***

As far as Christianity being anti-nature, I'd argue that the Calvinists get the most blame here, but it traces back to an arguments that Duns Scotus and Wm of Occam made that laid the intellectual groundwork for the destruction of the great Christian Neoplatonic synthesis accomplished in the 1100s and 1200s. Without going into all the details, Christians, like everyone else in the expanse from Ireland to China until then thought that the world was shot through with the divine, that the mind of God was to be found everywhere, and that natural philosophy was about discovering God's presence,, i.e., his language, i.e,, his Logos or Tao, in the natural world.

Occam and Scotus, for perfectly pious reasons, argued that the transcendence and freedom of God were so central to his being, that the natural, created world must be seen as something as radically separated from God, and so not constraining his power and freedom in any way. The Natural world, as a consequence, becomes just neutral, profane stuff. Nothing divine about it. And besides all that divine-presence language, even in Aquinas, was suspiciously pantheistic, and we can't have that.

The Eastern Christians rejected this argument, and Catholics were ambivalent about it so long as Aquinas retained some prestige. But for many of the reformers, God is not to be found everywhere throughout creation, but only in the private, personal encounter with God in faith. Luther hated the Greek philosophers. Faith alone is all that matters. Sola Scriptura. And Calvinism brought its own bizarre ideas about double predestination into the mix in such a way that led to thinking of Nature as utterly depraved as most humans were, except the lucky few among the elect who would be pulled from this cesspool, aka, creation.

So once again, I'm not saying that the deep, personal faith that the Reformers wanted to focus on was wrong, but it was unbalanced insofar as they tried to make it a social program. You can't build an adaptive, rich, expansive civilization on fideism.

Of course, in such a limited space I'm simplifying here, but bottom line: the rich Christian Neoplatonic civilization that peaked in the high Middle Ages, a civilization that provided the framework for Aquinas, Dante, Gothic cathedrals, St. Francis, the Rhineland mystics and the Beguines, Chivalric Love and the romances, the cult of the Virgin--was overthrown first in thought, and then in practice.

God no longer has anything to do with the natural world in any intimate sense. Sure, he created it, but his doing so was like the invention of the clockmaker. He engineered it, wound it up, and now it runs on its own without his involvement. It’s up to humans to reverse engineer it, and to exploit it for their own benefit. Faith becomes something private in a way that clears the public domain for both the scientific revolution, capitalism, and how the two combine in the Baconian Project, which leads to our transhumanist moment now.

I’m no nostalgist. My focus is the future, and I’m all about getting after it. I don’t want to live in the middle ages, and I don’t want to minimize its cruelties and stupidities, but I do think premodern European other premodern civilizations were more successful at providing a coherent, vital, rich meaning framework than our materialist civilization does now. Civilizations fail when the emissaries usurp their masters, as in Nietzsche’s tale after which Iain McGilchrist entitled his book. (See Note 5 in “Thomas Merton on Taoism”.)

Ideas matter more than almost everyone thinks. Philosophy in our culture is nothing more than an interesting diversion for nerdy types who have a taste for it. It has nothing to do with how the real world works. That is true of philosophy in a decadent society, a society that has lost its vital, creative connection to the Deep Real.

But whether we are aware of it or not, our society has a metpahhysics, and it constitutes the invisible OS operating in the background that is running our materialist civilization, and the lives of everyone who is acculturated into it. The Churches used to provide a counterbalance of sorts to the raw, nihilistic, materialistic energies that drove its earlier phases in the Industrial Revolution. But the churches now, in almost every way, are failing to positively influence attitudes and behavior in the public sphere because those nihilistic forces have triumphed, and the churches simply cannot flourish as an 'app' running on the nihilist Techno-Capitalist OS.

So, sure, lots of people call themselves Christians, but the loudest and most visible among them, with a few exceptions, have given Christianity a bad name. This is true especially for that kind of conservative Chrisitan who sees no problem with the political economy that Techno-Capitalism has produced. Guys like David Brooks lament the un-churching of America but don't understand its causes. They want to eat their spirituality, and have their techno-capitalism too.

[A great book for those who want to go deeper on this is Thomas Plant’s The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World. (‘Dionysian’, is not a reference to Nietzsche, but to the great, early medieval Christian Neoplatonist, Dionysius the Areopagite.) This argument is also laid out in the first of the three Cathedral Lectures, where I draw on Charles Taylor’s and Plant’s books.]

A Civilization Is Only as Healthy as Its Metaphysics

Over the next few weeks, among other things, I'll be thinking out loud a bit about Hart's arguments in All Things Are Full of Gods. Hart's book is a relativelyheavy lift made somewhat more readable by its dialogic form, but some might wonder why people should make the effort to read and understand it. Well, if you’re still reading here after about a year now, it probably means that you more or less care about what I care about, and Hart’s argument in his book is foundational for almost everything that I’ve been exploring here.

He's making the case that I believe is central to laying the intellectual framework for the the overthrow of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, if ever such an overthrow is to happen. This is not a 'religious' argument; it is a philosophical one, but one that opens up possibilities for religious thought along the lines suggested in my essay about Merton and Taoism.

As I wrote in that post, the framing of a metaphysics is a civilizational challenge for thought and imagination. It does not require faith, even if people of faith play a role in shaping it. Religious conservatives call for a return to faith, but faith is personal and private, and it cannot be imposed on those who have not been gifted with it. It's like poetry and music in that respect. You can't make people like Yeats or Bach; there has to be something alive in you that responds to them. (But a healthy civilization would naturally produce most people who did respond to them. It’s not just a matter of taste.)

And the same is true for reading the New Testament or attending a mass. It's absurd to expect people to believe in the assertions of faith, whether of the Trinity, the resurrection, or the real presence. Those things can only make sense for those who have been in some way 'initiated' into their mystery. Civilizational thought has to be a public cultural inheritance that can be challenged and evolved. People need to be able to argue about it by making arguments that appeal to reason. So you cannot build a civilization on the subjective experience of faith. As the Calvinists in Geneva and Massachusetts Bay found out, you can't even build of city shining on a hill with just faith.¹

So a civilizational metaphysics is different. It must have a rational foundation, but rational does not mean material. It means that it makes sense to any thoughtful, open-minded person who thinks about it. It making sense must be accessible to anyone with a degree of intellectual honesty who wants to make sense of the world and of his or her experience in it. For it to broadly accepted, It must be intellectually plausible and emotionally and spiritual inspiring. It must open up possibilities for people to become full-spectrum human beings. And as I've argued elsewhere, there are four criteria by which to evaluate a civilizational metaphysics:

1. It must embrace the entire scope of human knowledge. It needs to take into account the breadth and depth of everything we know, from everything that science tells us on the horizontal dimension (See diagram below.) about the mechanics of the material world, to everything that the great sages have told us about the spiritual heights and soul depths on the vertical dimension.

2. It must be coherent. It must integrate and harmonize what is known on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. The one should be enriched and deepened by the other.

3. It must have richness. It must provide practices for individuals and communities that provide plausible ways of living that lead them to the attainment of the deepest longings and highest aspirations of the human spirit. It must produce authentic exemplars of full-spectrum human beings who embody a full, richly lived life in this sense.

4. It must be adaptable. It must be secure enough in its foundations in the first three criteria to be able to adapt and assimilate new knowledge when it becomes available on either the vertical or horizontal dimensions.

All of the great post-Axial civilizations when they were at their flourishing peak get high marks according to these criteria. Our civilization fails miserably. I can’t think of one contemporary American public figure whom I would describe as an exemplary great soul. And if one emerged, he or she would probably be ignored.

We are in a civilizational crisis because the metaphysical imaginary of developed societies is captured within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, and insofar as we accept its limitations as the really Real, we live in an imaginary that lacks scope because of its amputation of the north limb of the vertical axis. And because we live captured in this way, we have no sense of solidarity that might give us the power to resist how the TCM is dragging us toward a future in which the only imagined possibilities for the human shrink with each passing decade so that we are becoming less and less human, and more and more machine-like.

And this is why I think that Charles Taylor's and David Bentley Hart's books published in this historically significant year are for so many reasons so important. Theirs are both efforts to restore the northern axis of the vertical pole. This is perhaps more explicit in Hart's book where the argument is summed up early on by Psyche:

PSYCHE: For what I concluded from this admittedly humble episode is that mental acts are irreducible to material causes; that consciousness, intentionality, and mental unity aren’t physical phenomena or emergent products of material forces, but instead belong to a reality more basic than the physical order; that the mechanical view of nature that has prevailed in Western culture for roughly four centuries is incoherent and inadequate to all the available empirical evidence; that in fact the foundation of all reality is spiritual rather than material, and that the material order, to the degree that it exists at all (on which we may reserve judgment), originates in the spiritual; that all rational activity, from the merest recognition of an object of perception, thought, or will to the most involved process of ratiocination, is possible only because of the mind’s constant, transcendental preoccupation with an infinite horizon of intelligibility that, for want of a better word, we should call God; and that the existence of all things is possible only as the result of an infinite act of intelligence that, once again, we should call God.

Once again, this is not the God of faith. This is simply God as a metaphysical principle, like the Tao, that establishes that Mind, not Matter is the Good and as such the living foundation for everything that exists. This position is opposed by the blacksmith/engineer, Hephaistos, who argues in defense of the metaphysics of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Responding to Psyche he says—

HEPHAISTOS: I see. The mind of God again, no doubt. [With a laugh:] Curiouser and curiouser. Well, I know that I’m in a distinct minority here, but I trust you’ll all pardon me if I remain true to my materialist convictions and continue to reject talk of God as anything more than a fantastical rhetorical resort to an explanatory cipher. And I hope you’ll also not think less of me if, despite the staggering evidence of a rose blossom plucked after deliberation from a tree, I continue to believe that the most rational and logically parsimonious explanation for the existence of all things—including mental phenomena—is that they’re the physical results of wholly material causes, operating in strict obedience to purely physical laws of causation.

EROS: I don’t always believe you’re quite as insensible to the mysteriousness of life and mind as you affect to be.

HEPHAISTOS: I assure you, there’s no affectation involved. I certainly see no need to explain life as the force of the divine mind in all things, or some spark of divine fire animating material organisms. We have no need of that hypothesis, to coin a phrase, or of any other form of “vitalism.” Organic life is the fortuitous product of unguided chemical interactions. Each species is the product of a phylogeny stretching back through time to a sea of rudimentary and barely active chemical elements, and any given individual organism is merely a kind of machine, a functioning combination of intrinsically purposeless parts, all constructed from an ensemble of largely inert chemical ingredients.

Hart’s Psyche throughout the book makes compelling arguments that such a materialist/physicalist metaphysics is fundamentally illogical. To reject it is not a matter of faith or personal preference, but of clear thinking. I’ll try to unpack some of those arguments in future posts.

Now I've been arguing all along that hardly anybody outside the culture's intelligentsia believes that human beings are machines in the way that Hephaistos describes them. And yet our whole society--our healthcare system, our politics, our educational system, our media, and almost every piece of high culture in film and fiction operates within a metaphysical imaginary that is shaped by Hephaistos's metaphysics and not at all by Psyche's.² Is there any wonder that we're in a civilizational crisis?

What? You don’t think so?

Ideas matter, and insofar as Hephaistos's ideas are the ‘code’ that runs the systems for everything that is important in our public life, we have become a civilization that for good reason feels as if it's about to crumble from its own dead weight. And there’s an increasing probability that it will unless we find a way to rebalance in some profound, fundamental way.

As a society we need to have the argument between Psyche and Hephaistos publicly aired. I know that’s a reach because it would bore most people to tears. But not everybody, and I hope some of those are among you reading this post. But if nothing else the intelligentsia here, in Europe, Asia and elsewhere needs to better understand the implications of a global society in which Hephaistos's metaphysics continues to take the field unopposed. Ideas, whether we like it or not, have real material consequences.

 

1. See Perry Miller’s Errand in the Wilderness in which he talks about the crisis that the early Puritans had when their children could not prove that that they were “born again”, a criterion of faith that was required for full church membership. Within a few generations New England was more about making money to prove you were among the elect than by having a profound conversion experience to prove it.

2. Psyche does not deny what is factual in Hephaistos’s account, but she insists those facts need to be understood within a broader richer interpretive frame.

Thomas Merton on Taoism

In the first chapter of the Tao Teh Ching, Lao Tzu distinguished between the Eternal Tao “that can not be named,” which is the nameless and unknowable source of all being, and the Tao “that can be named,” which is the “Mother of all things.” Confucius may have had access to the manifest aspects of the Tao “that can be named,” but the basis of all Chuang Tzu’s critique of Ju philosophy is that it never comes near to the Tao “that can not be named,” and indeed takes no account of it.

Until relatively late works like the Doctrine of the Mean which are influenced by Taoism, Confucius refused to concern himself with a Tao higher than that of man precisely because it was “unknowable” and beyond the reach of rational discourse. Chuang Tzu held that only when one was in contact with the mysterious Tao which is beyond all existent things, which cannot be conveyed either by words or by silence, and which is apprehended only in a state which is neither speech nor silence (xxv. II.) could one really understand how to live. To live merely according to the “Tao of man” was to go astray. The Tao of Ju philosophy is, in the words of Confucius, “threading together into one the desires of the self and the desires of the other.” This can therefore be called an “ethical Tao” or the “Tao of man,” the manifestation in act of a principle of love and justice.

Thomas Merton, The Way of Chuang Tzu, pp. 20-21

For a long time, I've felt a deep resonance with pretty much everything I've read about Taoism—more so than Buddhism1—but I've not made a serious study of it. A few years ago, I came across Merton's book excerpted above, and it provided a portal for me to go a little deeper with it. The publication of this “translation” of Chuang Tzu was kind of a big deal in 1965 when it came out a few years before his death in '68. The Dalai Lama even wrote a preface for it. And several Taoist scholars have given the translation high marks for penetrating to the spirit of this ancient text, even though Merton had close to zero Chinese.

He collaborated with John Wu, a Chinese-American Taoist scholar, who provided technical assistance in understanding the original Chuang Tzu text, and Wu came to think that Merton "got" Chuang Zu better than many Taoist scholars did because of Merton's vocation as a contemplative and Trappist monk. At the deepest level, Merton and Chuang Zu were in touch with the Tao in a way that the typical scholar or expert is not.

I think that Merton's book helps me understand my own attraction to Taoism, not so much for what it tells me about Chinese religion and culture, about which I know very little, but how it opens up an interesting point of entry into the Western Tradition, particularly the apophatic tradition that comes down to us through the ancient Israelites, Plato, the Church Fathers, Dionysius the Areopagite through Aquinas, Nicholas of Cusa, and finally the great Florentine translator of Plato and the Hermetica, Marsilio Ficino in the late 1400s.

Apophaticism is simply the assertion that the ground of all Being is utterly transcendent and beyond human comprehension. There is nothing that can be said about it, and any attempt to say anything about it is going to be more wrong than right.² And yet we can be in relationship with it. Indeed, the living relationship between what is below and what is above is essential for the health of any society.

This older, profounder way of relating to and imagining reality in the West pretty much went underground after the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. It surfaces again from time to time in the arts, but it plays zero role now in shaping our public imagination. But that doesn't mean it doesn’t remain fundamentally true in its deepest insights into what is real and important and what isn't. What we learned from science doesn't contradict any of it, rather science is—or should be—deepened and enriched by it.

This same valuation about what's most deeply true is reflected in the excerpt above in the contrast between Lao Tzu and Confucius. Confucius has his role to play, but social Taoism, what Merton calls the ‘ethical Tao’ or the ‘Tao of Man’, cannot work in the long run without its remaining in an intimate relationship with what Lao Tzu is pointing to, which is its unspeakable ground, the eternal Tao. The two work together in the balanced tension that defines the Yang/Yin dynamic. Yang radiates its creative energies, but it needs the human Yin response to be effective in the world. But humans cannot respond if they have become insensible of these energies working in their lives.

In the West, this philosophical/theological tradition that I described a few paragraphs above was an accomplishment of thought and imagination that provided the infrastructure for a civilization. This is not primarily a work of faith. Clearly people of faith played a critical role in shaping this civilizational project, but as a construct of thought and imagination, it is accessible to all people of intelligence, decency, and good sense. The same is true of Taoism. Both provided for their respective civilizations a metaphysical imagination that enriches human experience and one's sense of connection to what's most deeply, if inarticulably, Real.³ They both give a reasonable account of the world if you accept their fundamental premise that Mind rather than Matter is ontologically primary.⁴ Once one takes that step, rich possibilities open up for human possibility that are simply not available to us in our current materialistic metaphysical imaginary.

But even in societies whose metaphysical imaginaries are not hostile to the idea of an inarticulable, vital ground of Being that sustains everything that exists, the problem lies in that such societies still need rules, laws, codes, and customs--and ideally those laws are aligned with the ‘eternal Tao’. This was the Confucian project: to keep the Tao of Man, the social customs and codes, in alignment with the eternal Tao even if there is nothing that can be said about eternal Tao in itself. But even in societies where there is still some living awareness of the eternal Tao, these laws and codes can become ends in themselves, and when they do, they become rigid and lifeless, and they then begin to serve other, mostly malign purposes. The code becomes becomes an idol of the mind and a jail for the human spirit.⁵ This is how civilizations die.

Confucius knew that both the eternal Tao and the Tao of Man needed to be in a living, dynamic relationship; the problem lay in that subsequent generations of Confucians forgot it. And that's exactly our predicament in the West now. Morality degenerates into a soulless, algorithmic moralism, a fussy obsession with correct form rather than with developing a deeper, living connection to the unspeakable spirit of the Good that is its source.

Merton says that the Ju philosophy of the Confucians rigidified in this way. And so as a lived experience of the Good became less accessible for their thought, a vicious circle ensues--

...one concentrates on the means to be used to attain it [the Good/Tao]. And as the end becomes more remote and more difficult, the means become more elaborate and complex, until finally the mere study of the means becomes so demanding that all one’s effort must be concentrated on this, and the end is forgotten. Hence the nobility of the Ju scholar becomes, in reality, a devotion to the systematic uselessness of practicing means which lead nowhere. This is, in fact, nothing but organized despair: “the good” that is preached and exacted by the moralist thus finally becomes an evil, and all the more so since the hopeless pursuit of it distracts one from the real good which one already possesses and which one now despises or ignores. (p. 23)

Remember Chidi, the professor of moral philosophy in The Good Place? He was in ‘the Bad Place' for good reason.

And so the same for us. Ethics becomes all about rules and duties and calculi of utility. Morality becomes not about being or growing the good that is already in us, but about appearing good. This was what Jesus condemned when he accused the Pharisees in his time of being 'whited sepulchers'--they presented beautiful, pure white exteriors while housing a fetid, rotting, dead thing within them.⁶

But how then does one know what to do? Well one must become less self-consciously performative, and more like the child at play. This is wu wei. Merton goes on--

If one is in harmony with Tao—the cosmic Tao, “Great Tao”—the answer will make itself clear when the time comes to act, for then one will act not according to the human and self-conscious mode of deliberation, but according to the divine and spontaneous mode of wu wei, which is the mode of action of Tao itself, and is therefore the source of all good.

The other way, the way of conscious striving, even though it may claim to be a way of virtue, is fundamentally a way of self-aggrandizement, and it is consequently bound to come into conflict with Tao. Hence it is self-destructive, for “what is against Tao will cease to be.” This explains why the Tao Teh Ching, criticizing Ju philosophy, says that the highest virtue is non-virtuous and “therefore it has virtue.” But “low virtue never frees itself from virtuousness, therefore it has no virtue.” Chuang Tzu is not against virtue (why should he be?), but he sees that mere virtuousness is without meaning and without deep effect either in the life of the individual or in society. (p. 24)

I think that what Merton and Chuang Zu are pointing to here is the same thing that I was trying to get at in my Cathedral Lectures when talking about Rousseau's Savoyard Vicar in Emile and what Schiller, in his Aesthetic Education, later calls the Beautiful Soul animated by the spieltrieb or ‘play drive’. And I'd argue it's what Aristotle means by eudaemonia and the Christian tradition means by being in the state of grace. There is tremendous convergence here. The goal is not just to do the good as one's duty but to act out the innate goodness in oneself in an effortless, spontaneous, unselfconscious, and childlike way.⁷

Being childlike does not mean being childish. There is a pattern of development from childish narcissism, through a dutifully ethical ‘adulting’, to a final stage few attain—to be genuinely childlike, which is wu wei. Merton and Chuang Zu talk about what it is and isn’t, but they don't have much to say about how you attain wu wei. And let's face it, most of us, even if we have some inkling about what they're talking about, would never claim to be in a very intimate relationship with the Tao as they describe it. But we would like to be, right? But who's even talking about such a thing these days? Why isn't it a part of our moral discourse?

Because it’s so alien to our way of thinking since the 1500s. We don’t think of Goodness as something that one grows within oneself. And if in this sense it is an “achievement” of sorts, it is not achieved in the willful, Tiger-Woodsy way we ordinarily understand what achieving entails. It is attained rather than accomplished. And it is attained in stages. If we lived in a healthy culture, a society in which it would be ‘easier to be good’, it would be a natural progression for most.

This was still understood not so long ago. As I discussed in the Cathedral Lectures, for Friedrich Schiller the progression had three stages: the Savage, Barbarian, and then the Beautiful Soul. For Kierkegaard it was the Aesthetic, Ethical, and then the Religious. Even Nietzsche had three stages that he called the Camel, Lion, and then the Child. In the 20th century the last gasp of this kind of thinking about moral progression was found in thinkers like Kohlberg's moral development of children in three stages: Pre-conventional, Conventional, and Post Conventional. And then there’s Maslow and Jung, of course.

And I'd argue that we don't talk about human development like this anymore because there is nothing in such talk that is more subversive of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix and its project to redefine the human being as machine. And so all of our mainstream cultural institutions have become allergic to this ancient, trans-culturally acknowledged, profound idea about what the human being is and what is its good. It is utterly invisible in our culture, whether lowbrow or highbrow. This largely derives from our Calvinist heritage: there are good people and bad people, each predestined from all eternity to be good or bad. There is no choice or real moral freedom. There is no ‘becoming the good’. Moral behavior degenerates into mere performance of what appears, for the moment, to be socially acceptable.

And people in the universities and arts wonder why the humanities are no longer popular with students. Well, because there is no longer anything about what the these traditions taught about what the human being was to be found in the way the humanities are taught anymore. If these ancestral thinkers and their ideas are taught, it's as an antiquarian curiosity, not because they have any relevance for the way we live now.

But never was there a greater need to better understand these ideas and the history of ideas that has led us to this critical moment. Ideas matter because they shape the way we work in the world, and the way we work in the world in turn shapes how we think and imagine reality, which, again, recursively, shapes how we work in the world. You can see how this can lead a civilization into a death spiral.

Ideas matter. They are the code that run societies and their imaginations about what's possible and what isn't, what's true and what isn't, what's important and what isn't. And the argument that I've been making in my classes and here on this blog is that the ideas that run American society and other societies of the developed world are so profoundly out of balance because deeply out of alignment with the Deep Real, the Tao. And because this is true, the future of the human project is jeopardized in a historically unprecedented way.

Restoring the balance isn't just a fanciful idea concocted by some ancient metaphysician. It derives from a profound insight into how things work both then and now whether we are aware of them or not, or whether we believe in them or not. It's the law. We used to understand that in the West, but we rejected it for the idea that we could lawlessly bend Nature to our will and make it do as we please. And so we live in an ideas world where the Deep Real plays no role whatsoever in the way we think about the future of humanity, much less about decisions we make about the environment or technology.

So while all this might not be interesting to the average person, it is important for our intelligentsia to understand and value this tradition more than it currently does. Why? Because ideas got us into this predicament, and they will be important for getting us out. Ideas matter because they create the conditions that open up or close down possibilities for the way we relate to the Deep Real, and right now our relationship to it is completely whack.

Notes

1. But Merton points out —

There have never been lacking authorities like Daisetz T. Suzuki, the Japanese Zen scholar, who declare Chuang Tzu to be the very greatest of the Chinese philosophers. There is no question that the kind of thought and culture represented by Chuang Tzu was what transformed highly speculative Indian Buddhism into the humorous, iconoclastic, and totally practical kind of Buddhism that was to flourish in China and in Japan in the various schools of Zen. Zen throws light on Chuang Tzu, and Chuang Tzu throws light on Zen. (pp. 15-16).

2, I think that the ban here is not on the human attempt to make “raids on the unspeakable” as in poetry in its use of analogy and metaphor, but to think that any statements about God can be any normal sense propositionally true, as in the sense of ‘Today is Wednesday’. This leads to the propositional tyranny known as fundamentalism.

Apophaticism is also at the heart of the forbidding of images regarding the godhead particularly strong in Judaism and Islam. It’s a good corrective against the tendency to imagine God as a bearded, grumpy old man throwing lightning bolts at wrongdoers. When most people say they are atheists, they are saying that they don't believe in some Divine Superego figure up in the clouds, and they are right to reject such a childish, infantilizing image of God. But that doesn't mean that there isn't cosmic law, aka the Tao, aka the Logos in the West. And it doesn't mean that we humans are incapable of being in some kind of conscious awareness of how we are in relationship with it--or ought to be—and that there is a way of living lawfully that isn’t just stuff that humans make up for whatever arbitrary reason.

3. Faith is something different. It's a gift and it’s personal, not civilizational. But it makes a difference for people of faith to be able to live in a civilization that is consonant with their faith and promotes its deepening. Clearly, we're not living in such a society now, and so it is extraordinarily difficult for faith to flourish. Indeed, the presuppositions of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix are actively hostile toward it—and so it no wonder that the churches languish.

4.Arguing for the ontological priority of Mind is the purpose of David Bentley Hart’s book published this year, All Things are Full of Gods. Anybody with a philosophical bent who is not a fanatical dogmatic materialist will find his arguments compelling. It remains to be seen whether the moment is right for it to break through to the broader intellectual culture. Probably not, but it’s an important effort in laying the groundwork for a shift that I believe must happen sooner or later.

5. This is what Iain McGilchrist in recounting Nietzsche's tale of the Master and the Emissary in the Introduction of his book of that title:

There is a story in Nietzsche that goes something like this. There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted. Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he most trusted to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not wisdom, and on his missions on the master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

The meaning of this story is as old as humanity, and resonates far from the sphere of political history. I believe, in fact, that it helps us understand something taking place inside ourselves, inside our very brains, and played out in the cultural history of the West, particularly over the last 500 years or so. Why I believe so forms the subject of this book. I hold that, like the Master and his emissary in the story, though the cerebral hemispheres should co-operate, they have for some time been in a state of conflict. The subsequent battles between them are recorded in the history of philosophy, and played out in the seismic shifts that characterise the history of Western culture. At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary. (p. 14)

6. There is a difference between childish and childlike. Dickens’ man-child Harold Skimpole in Bleak House is the classic narcissist that that is clearly a form of emotional/spiritual retardation. 

Neither is the aspiration to be childlike an endorsement of an antinomianism that asserts that one should not perform his or her duties, but an assertion that anyone, i.e., almost everybody, for whom duty is a burden has not developed to the more mature stage where doing the good does not feel like a burden. In Christian terms: the yoke is easy, the burden light. In Kierkegaard, the 'ethical', the doing of one's duty in the Kantian sense, is the necessary middle stage of moral development, but not the end of moral development. I think that there’s also the implication that anyone who has attained this third stage knows spontaneously without much anguish what is his or her duty, no matter the cost, and is willing to pay it. For Kant, the more difficult and anguished the moral deed, the more morally profound. He knew nothing of this third stage.

So how do we find our way to this Way? Merton says—

The “Little Way” of Therese of Lisieux is an explicit renunciation of all exalted and disincarnate spiritualities that divide man against himself, putting one half in the realm of angels and the other in an earthly hell. For Chuang Tzu, as for the Gospel, to lose one’s life is to save it, and to seek to save it for one’s own sake is to lose it. There is an affirmation of the world that is nothing but ruin and loss. There is a renunciation of the world that finds and saves man in his own home, which is God’s world. In any event, the “way” of Chuang Tzu is mysterious because it is so simple that it can get along without being a way at all. Least of all is it a “way out.” Chuang Tzu would have agreed with St. John of the Cross, that you enter upon this kind of way when you leave all ways and, in some sense, get lost. (pp. 11-12)