After the Future

Lasch on Narcissism

Modern technology has achieved so many dazzling breakthroughs that we now find it difficult to envision any limits to collective human ingenuity. The secret of life itself is within our grasp, according to those who predict a revolution in genetics—in which case it may be possible for us to keep ourselves alive indefinitely or at least to extend the human life span to unheard-of lengths. This impending triumph over old age and death, we are told, is the ultimate tribute to humanity’s power to master its surroundings. The prolongevity movement embodies the utopian possibilities of modern technology in its purest form. In the mid-seventies, Albert Rosenfeld, the movement’s leading propagandist, predicted that “most of the major mysteries of the aging process” would be “solved” by the third decade of the twenty-first century. August Kinzel, former president of the Salk Institute, announced in 1967 that “we will lick the problem of aging completely, so that accidents will be essentially the only cause of death.”

In psychological terms, the dream of subjugating nature is our culture’s regressive solution to the problem of narcissism—regressive because it seeks to restore the primal illusion of omnipotence and refuses to accept limits on our collective self-sufficiency. In religious terms, the revolt against nature is also a revolt against God—that is, against the reality of our dependence on forces external to ourselves. The science of ecology—an example of the “exploratory” attitude toward nature, as opposed to the Faustian attitude—leaves no doubt about the inescapability of this dependence. Ecology indicates that human life is part of a larger organism and that human intervention into natural processes has far-reaching consequences that will always remain to some extent incalculable. Nature retains the upper hand: The very technologies designed to overcome natural limitations on human comfort and freedom may destroy the ozone layer, create a greenhouse effect, and make the earth unfit for human habitation.

Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in An Age of Diminishing Expectations, pp. 289-90). 

So in the last few weeks I've reread Lasch's Revolt of the Elties and The Culture of Narcissism (Minimal Self is next) and two things struck me. First, how much his thinking has shaped mine. And, second, how different we are. There's something missing in his sobriety. He's the best sort of Calvinist, but a Calvinist he is, and he often comes across as a cranky scold. And I fear that too often that tone is in my writing as well. The problem with Calvinists isn't that they're wrong, but that they have unrealistic expectations that everyone should recognize how right they are, and if they don't, they must be either stupid or morally corrupt--and they have no problem letting you know about it. So over the years I've had a lot of nasty things to say about Calvinism, and I think I'm right about it, and anybody who doesn't see how right I am must be stupid and morally corrupt. 

Ok. You get the point. The problem with Calvinism--and all of us as Americans are Calvinists, no matter what religion or lack of one--is how it is inflated with a delusional sense of righteousness. It lacks humility, and without humility, wisdom is impossible. Knowing that you don't know is the beginning of wisdom, and yet the world always seems to be run by the know-it-alls. It's a universal trait, but it's perhaps most annoying in Americans because they have so much power and influence. And it's why world has always found Americans so annoying. It's not that they are mostly evil, but that they are so naive and ignorant that they have no way of knowing how magnificently naive and ignorant they are.

Since WWII, they have done some good things for the world, but they have also been the bull in the world's China Shop: Vietnam, Iraq, the 2008 Financial Crisis, and now Trump and Musk. Whatever else is striking about them, it's their astonishing ignorance and their blithe, hubristic self-assurance that is most dangerous for the well being of the rest of us. There are no two human beings currently alive who more purely represent the pathologies of Narcissism. It's astonishing that such people should be given so much power, and yet it makes sense once you understand how the narcissism that drives them is the narcissism that structures our national character--especially since WWII. That was Lasch's point. He was right in his diagnosis in the 70s, and we're seeing how the disease has progressed to its moment of crisis in Trump 2.0.

Will this narcissistic fever break? Will our delirium pass? It will at some point. It just remains to be seen how violent a slap upside the head the American people need before they regain their senses. 

This passage excerpted above comes from the Afterword Lasch wrote in 1991 for his 1979 book. He wrote this and his second best known book, The Minimal Self, to correct how almost everybody misread what he was trying to say about narcissism in 1979 book. I'll have more to say about these Laschian themes another time. But the point I want to make now is that  Narcissism isn't mainly about being self-absorbed; it's about the delusions of power and the longing to control the uncontrollable. So the antidote is not to become less self-absorbed , but rather to become less hubristic, that is, more humble, that is, more earthy, that is, more connected to Reality.

And so where this hubris and narcissism are most dangerous to us now is not primarily the political sphere, but in the way it shapes something more fundamental in the American character since WWII. It's the primary driving force in structuring cultural-economic operating system I've been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix and its Transhumanist agenda. This matrix is driven by narcissistic hubris on steroids. My Cathedral Lectures were my attempt to make the case against Transhumanism and that in the long run the only cure is for a broad rejection of the Techno-Capitalism Matrix and its replacement by a new cultural operating system that has a transcendental foundation--that is, a foundation that is not founded on a revolt against God and Nature. This, I recognize, is not an argument that is particularly well timed to the moment, but it was the argument that is cognate with the one that Lasch was making in the 70s and 80s. Maybe someday it will make sense even for most it doesn't now. 

But there's another difference between Lasch and me. His antidote is far less ambitious than what I'm arguing for--

The best defenses against the terrors of existence are the homely comforts of love, work, and family life, which connect us to a world that is independent of our wishes yet responsive to our needs. It is through love and work, as Freud noted in a characteristically pungent remark, that we exchange crippling emotional conflict for ordinary unhappiness. Love and work enable each of us to explore a small corner of the world and to come to accept it on its own terms. But our society tends either to devalue small comforts or else to expect too much of them. Our standards of “creative, meaningful work” are too exalted to survive disappointment. Our ideal of “true romance” puts an impossible burden on personal relationships.

We demand too much of life, too little of ourselves. Our growing dependence on technologies no one seems to understand or control has given rise to feelings of powerlessness and victimization. We find it more and more difficult to achieve a sense of continuity, permanence, or connection with the world around us. Relationships with others are notably fragile; goods are made to be used up and discarded; reality is experienced as an unstable environment of flickering images. Everything conspires to encourage escapist solutions to the psychological problems of dependence, separation, and individuation, and to discourage the moral realism that makes it possible for human beings to come to terms with existential constraints on their power and freedom. (pp. 294-96). 

This is true as far as it goes in its humility.  Lasch's Protestant sobriety is one aspect to the antidote to the most toxic aspects of the culture of Narcissism, which is incapable of "coming to terms with the existential constraints" of human power. But it isn't enough. That spirit to transcend limitations is powerful and it cannot be repressed; instead it must be redirected in lawful ways. 

The Faustian spirit is so key to understanding what's best and worst about the striving spirit that uniquely animates the Western tradition. It's the restless spirit of self-transcendence that is intrinsic to the human spirit. That 'spirit' should not be repressed, but must rather be channeled in the right way, and in future posts I want to talk about how Goethe and other 18th century German thinkers and poets have some ideas about how to do that. They are not infallible, but they are barking up the right tree. They began something that got lost in the materialist confusion and disruptions of the 19th Century, and I believe that it will  be picked up again by the culture's intelligentsia. Charles Taylor and David Bentley Hart are, imo, harbingers of such a shift.

So as much as I feel attuned to so much of what Lasch says, I do not think that the alternative to Narcissistic Transhumanist hubris can be limited to the humble work-and-love ethos he describes above, as important as that is, but must be supplemented by a spirited exploration of the Real. The problem with the Faustian energies as they are directed within the TCM is that instead of exploring the Real, they seek to create an alternative "real" that inevitably will seal us off from what is really Real. We need more humility insofar as it's the virtue that keeps us grounded in the Real, but that doesn't require that it dampen our spirits in a way that quashes a healthy impulse toward self-transcendence.

That, imo, is what's missing in Calvinism and Protestantism in general--its rejection of the eudaimonistic ideal that comes down to us from the Greeks and the early Christian fathers. The result?  An obsession with overcoming material limitations rather than spiritual ones. Hence the TCM and Transhumanism. 

Saving Humanity = Saving the Earth

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d like to take a few minues here to relate the above reflection to the themes developed in the Cathedral talks. I think of the Fall as a real event in which humans moved from one ontological state into another, from one kind of evolutionary development into what we now understand to be biological evolution in the Darwinian sense. The condition of Original Sin is the condition of biological evolution, and its redemption correlates with human redemption. The earth is sick because humans are, and humans are because the earth is.

The Fall is a fall into biological evolution, the soul or life force of which was shattered along with the human soul because the human soul is the soul of the earth, and it is the soul of all biological evolution that was shattered longs to be redeemed.

For that reason St. Paul in Romans 8 says —

“For we know that the whole creation groans and labors with birth pangs together until now. Not only that, but we also who have the first fruits of the Spirit, even we ourselves groan within ourselves, eagerly waiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body.”

If I were to elaborate on this idea, I would draw on the naturalism of Friedrich Schelling, the philosophies of Henri Bergson, A. N. Whitehead, Teilhard de Chardin, Owen Barfield, and others. These ideas have little legitimacy now, but they have a latency that I believe will be activated in the future. I think this because they are grounded in intuitions that are fundamentally true even if they don’t make sense for the kind of thinking that is hegemonic now within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, which is, as i’ve been arguing here, at its root deeply unbalanced and aberrational.

As I laid out in the Cathedral lectures, we are living in a world that is the result of the Baconian Project run amok. While I have been stressing the crisis that AGI and other information and biological technologies that confront humanity, Baconism has also produced another unprecedented crisis—the prospect of ecological catastrophe. Baconism is driving us to a breaking point, and something has to give, and sooner or later it will, for better or worse. I think better is a possibility and that we have to actively expect it or miss the opportunities to do our part to realize it. We must expect the unexpected.

Baconism has produced an absurdly reductive and unbalanced understanding of what it means to be human and what our responsibility to the earth is, and it must be replaced with some other more healthful understanding. We must once again come to understand that the earth is not there simply for our exploitation, but as having a soul the health of which is directly correlated with the health of the human soul. Both are shattered, and both long to be made whole, and the making whole of one does not happen without the making whole of the other. Escape to other planets is just an extension of the pathology of Baconian thinking.

The events we celebrate this weekend, I believe, were not just about human redemption, but the redemption of the earth. The events on Good Friday through Easter made this redemption of the earth a possibility in a way it was not before, and so the goal is not for humans to escape the earth but rather to be local agents for its inside-out transformation, step by step, generation by generation, each of us contributing in whatever small way is required of us.

Francis and the Future of the Church

Conservative Christian politics are not everywhere and always destructive, but today’s right is more extreme than its recent predecessors. I fear that the next era of American Christianity will be about conquest and triumph rather than peace and humility, and will profligately lend its imprimatur to nationalist agendas that are hostile to the weak and the marginalized. (Vance’s invocation of the ordo amoris to justify the Trump administration’s extreme anti-immigrant politics is perhaps a preview of things to come.) And that would be a devastating development, not just because of the predictable political consequences of such an alignment, but also because the Christianity Francis represented really is loyal to the Gospels in its devotion to the people Jesus loved so much, whose fortunes are rarely of interest to people in power: the poor, the sick, the oppressed and exploited, the displaced and rejected. It was for those that Francis prayed, wrote, and spoke, and to them that he dedicated his time on the chair of St. Peter. And theirs will be the kingdom of heaven.

Elizabeth Bruenig

I don't have much to say about Church politics or its official policies. Sometimes they reflect the spirit of gospels, sometimes they don't. There are the creeds of course, and I assent to them, but nobody, including the magisterium, has any definitive or clearly precise idea what those creeds mean, or what mysteries lie behind them. The creeds are a portal into a dimension of existence about which what we understand will always be dwarfed by what we don't. The idea that there can be "clarity" about any of that creates more problems than it solves. 

Nevertheless, there will always be people who call themselves Christians spouting nonsense in the name of Christianity, and that nonsense has to be called out for what it is. Unfortunately that nonsense has too often been spouted by official representatives of the Church, and usually such officials had little interest in peace and humility. Clearly that was not true for Francis, and for many things, but perhaps for that most of all, I am grateful for his papacy. He was a mensch.

What matters is that there is available to all humans grace, and whatever is good in the world is in some way a response to it, and that's true for everyone whether they are in or out of the church.

Nevertheless, the world needs the church as a presence that in its liturgies, customs, practices, and works incarnates and mediates that grace and goodness in a real way for all of humanity. It does so in ways that are mostly out of the public eye, but in ways that from time to time become visible. That's the lower-case 'c' catholic mission of the Church, and Francis, for all his flaws, embodied that in an important and instructive way. It remains to be seen whether his successor builds on that or retreats from it.

There are good reasons to share Elizabeth Bruenig's pessimism, but we could be surprised. If there was one thing I thought the film Conclave captured nicely was that while the people who rise to positions of power in the church are all too human, something else is at work in and through them. The question is whether in this go-round there will be a constituency among these prelates alert enough to notice and influential enough to prevail. For that let us pray. 

Reflection for Good Friday

[For Good Friday in 2015, shortly after the death of my wife, I was asked by my parish at the time to be one of the speakers on the Seven Last Words on the Cross. I chose “My God, my God, why hast though forsaken me.” I am republishing it here because of the occasion but also because it relates to other themes I’ve been developing about eudaemonia as a work of integration. The restoration of a lost integrity, I believe, is the human telos.

So in what follows is a reflection on the Genesis story of Adam and Eve’s expulsion from the Garden of Eden. This is one reading of the Fall—and it may not be the best, but it’s the one that made the most sense to me in that moment. I believe the Christian doctrine Fall points to a real “event” but whose significance can only be understood in a symbolic sense. There are no propositions about it that can be asserted literally true. We can only stand before it as a portal into something profound, ask questions, and pay attention to what is disclosed.

And the same is true for the deep significance of Good Friday as an event. Why was it necessary? What sense can it possibly make? The full significance of both these events is way beyond our ken. We approach them as saying something deeply true about the human condition.]

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God’s ways are not our ways, and it’s a good thing, too. How otherwise could we call this Friday ‘Good’? The logic of the cross makes no sense by any kind of normal human reckoning. It is a logic that is in almost every way the reverse of what we take as ‘normal’ or ‘natural’ in a fallen world.

Do you know that painting by the early Renaissance artist Masaccio called The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden?

If there is an image that better expresses human forsakenness, or of two sorrier, soul-shattered, heart-broken people, I’m not aware of it. That image of Adam and Eve is us. Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’. And so if we don’t recognize ourselves in them, then it is probably very difficult to understand the significance of the astonishing event that we commemorate today. But they knew something we don’t. They knew both the ‘before the Fall’ and the ‘after the Fall’; we know only the ‘after’, and we have come to accept the ‘after’ as normal, as natural. But that ‘after’ is not normal; it’s not what we were created for. 

Genesis tells us that we humans were created in the image and likeness of God. But in that moment of the Fall, like Humpty Dumpty’s, the human soul shattered. And so also was shattered the soul’s capacity to do what it was created for: to know and reflect the goodness of God in His fullness. After that we human beings could know something of the truth, but only in bits and pieces. We had become incapable of reflecting—or as Mary was to put it in a later age, ‘magnifying’--the fullness of the goodness and beauty of the One in whose image we had been created. And so our ways could no longer be His ways; at best our ways reflect His ways as shards of glass scattered on a desolate city sidewalk glisten in the sunlight. That’s something—it’s better than nothing—but it’s not what we were created for.

We are lucky that we know only the ‘after’ and not the ‘before’, because to know both would be unbearable. But we nevertheless long for that which was lost. All of our longings are, whether we are aware of it or not, a longing to have restored to us the fullness that was lost. Because after the Fall we humans became a soul-shattered people, and as after Humpty Dumpty’s great fall, all the king’s horses and the king’s men couldn’t put us back together again. We nevertheless long to be put back together again, to become what we were created for: to magnify in its fullness the goodness and beauty of Him in whose image we were created.

In the Christ of the gospels we encounter the human being whose ways were always God’s ways. Jesus Christ was like us humans in all ways but sin, which means that in Him the human image and likeness of God was not shattered. It remained whole, and so He, unlike us, magnified the goodness and beauty of the Father whose will He sought in everything He did.

So then how to understand those disconcerting words from the cross—“My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” Sure, Peter and most of the other disciples had forsaken Him, but now even His Father had forsaken Him? Why? At this moment of all moments? Why? Because if we soul-shattered humans were to become whole like Him, His human soul had to shatter like ours. All his life He knew the ‘before’, and at that moment, He knew the ‘after’.

Christ’s anguished cry from the cross marks for Him His Masaccio Moment. In these words we hear echoed down through the ages the lament of Adam and Eve as they came to understand the enormity of their loss. In that moment He re-experienced as the sinless representative of all humanity the soul-shattering consequences of Adam’s sin in all of its alienating power. And like Adam, He knew the before, and He knew the after.

Jesus Christ on the cross was never forsaken by the Father, and never were the rest of us, but in this moment He knew in its fullness the anguish of what was lost. Nothing human, even this deeply experienced human alienation from the Father, is alien to Him. In this moment Christ speaks from the cross as the still sinless, but now sin-shattered representative of all broken, anguished humanity at precisely the moment when humanity’s ages-long experience of having been forsaken by God is decisively ended by God. In the Risen Christ we encounter the once shattered but then restored image of the human being in its fullness. All the king’s horses and all the king’s men had no interest whatsoever in putting him back together again, but his Father did. And so the risen Christ is the shattered us made whole. He is the image of what we were created for; He is the restored fullness of the image and likeness of God in human form.¹

 

So this is what our restoration to wholeness required: First, His movement into our forsakenness and brokenness; and, second, our movement into His restored wholeness. If we choose to make that movement, slowly, step by step, our shattered souls get put back together again, and we find, as in the lives of the saints, that our human ways become gradually more like God’s ways, and that our image comes more to magnify His fullness.

Blessed are they who are forsaken and retain hope; blessed are they who trust that even in the darkest darkness, no matter how forsaken they feel, God is there. Because Jesus Christ has been there, done that, and nothing in our human experience is alien to Him. And so, therefore, blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of God.

Forsakenness is us—that’s the bad news. But it doesn’t have to be, and that’s the good news that we celebrate on this Friday we call for good reason ‘Good’.

1.This “Vitruvian Man” image was painted by the visionary Hildegard of Bingen in the 1100s.

MAGA Maoism

I haven't much to say about Trump.2 because things have developed pretty much as I thought they would, and there's no point in belaboring the obvious. Trump's latest atrocity or idiocy isn't interesting to comment on because so predictable. Defying a 9-0 supreme court order? No biggie. Unprecendented? Kinda. But there was Andrew Jackson about two hundred years ago, and he's on our twenty dollar bill. Why should it be a problem for Trump? Only the people with Trump derangement syndrome get worked up about technical stuff like that. 

So Trump is gonna do the awful stuff we knew he was gonna do. What interests me more is how long it will take a significant strategic resistance to emerge. We're not close yet because the people who need to learn the hard lesson about their having voted for Trump haven't had their disinformation bubbles pierced yet. That will take some time, if it happens at all. Even Bill Maher is charmed by the guy. 

The other question that interests me is whether and how long the factions that united to elect Trump will stay united. I've been counting on their breaking into chaotic infighting. Some mild forms of it have broken out here and there, and who knows what's happening behind the scenes, but nothing has come into view yet to encourage much hope that a reactionary oligarchy isn't something most of "populist" MAGA is just fine with. MAGA world is ok with oligarchs so long as they are MAGA oligarchs. The class war isn't between the rich and the poor, but between the intelligentsia and the "real" Americans who hate them, and if the billionaires are MAGA, all the better.  

Along those lines I thought Franklin Foer's piece in the Atlantic Sunday was useful for explaining how the most powerful uniting factor that binds MAGA factions is Maoist in a cultural-revolution kind of way. 

In its strange inversion of American politics, the Trump administration has come far closer to executing a Marxist theory of power than any of its progressive predecessors. It has waged class warfare, not against billionaires but against a far more ubiquitous enemy. And it has done so with a certainty that justifies terrible excesses, a desire to purge that it has only just begun to realize...

In a way, Trump is practicing his very own form of Maoism, a cultural revolution against the intelligentsia—what the Communist Party of China memorably deemed the “stinking ninth” class. Although Trump’s purges have been tame by comparison [so far], there are parallels. Like Trump, Mao wanted to create manufacturing jobs in the homeland. Defying expert opinion and shunning economic common sense, Mao launched his Great Leap Forward—a disastrously unsuccessful policy of rapid industrialization—in the late ’50s. During that period and the subsequent Cultural Revolution, he resorted to scapegoating his own PMC, especially the professoriate and other cultural elites. (“Better red than expert” was a rallying cry.) His minions subjected its members to public humiliation and horrifying violence; the state exiled members of the urban bourgeoisie to the countryside for reeducation.

This "class" being warred upon is the one that I belong to, and probably you and most people you know belong to it, too. They--we--are the experts that a complex pluralistic society needs to run its institutions. I nevertheless sympathize with this revolt against the technocracy--but more from a Left pov.  Theodor Roszak's The Making of a Counterculture (1969) and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites (1995) haven't lost their saliency, and are well worth reading if you want a thoughtful, left perspective critiquing the pathologies of the technocracy. Pretty much everything they wrote about then is true now except ten times worse. 

It's not the expertise itself that's the problem; it's the ideology that supports it--the whole best and brightest, we know better package: "We know how to run policy in the Middle East, and we know how to run the world financial system. And look at our health care system! Who could complain about that? Just shut up and let us do our job." This is a class whose principals are way too comfortable in their alignment with goals and methods of what I've been calling the TCM.

It's the world I and most of you worked in and, I don't know about you, but it was a world I found suffocating especially in the last couple of decades. And that's not the fault of the Right, but of the postmodern cultural Left that has been largely coopted by Neoliberalism and the TCM, and that celebrates what was worst in the counterculture--its hedonic, narcissistic, atomizing liberationism--and rejected what was best, its longing for something more deeply, spiritually human.

So how did we get from 1969 to now? In the '70s we started to get a trendy postmodern nihilism in the universities and in the '80s the dismantling of the New Deal in politics. In the '90s, the Soviet Union collapsed, Capitalism triumphs, and Americans started hating one another rather than Communists abroad. The rich got richer; the poor poorer, and in the '00s the churches destroyed whatever was left of their public moral legitimacy in loathsome, crippling scandals or have taken a right-wing, reactionary turn that that most sane people of good will rightly find repugnant. In the '10s, the Great Awokening pushes what was already annoying about political correctness over the top and sets the stage for reactionary blowback. And so here we are in with the reductio ad absurdum of the failure of the counterculture in the Nixon and Carter years in its gradual morphing into the postmodern, post-truth embodiment in our clown-King Donald J. Trump, hell bent now, with the help of his cronies, on turning the USA into a corrupt, second-rate, 1980s-style banana republic. He's good at it: It took him less than three months to start 'disappearing' people. 

Like many of you, I feel myself bereft, a man without a country--disgusted and ashamed by the corrupt, ignorant, vulgar, cruel, morally squalid thing we've allowed ourselves to become. And discouraged because there is no one of moral stature and broad credibility who is calling for anything that I think has a remote chance of restoring us to health. Certainly not the Democrats. 

The worst, as usual, are full of passionate intensity, and the best, as usual, haven't a clue.

And so I find myself incongruously writing essays about the restoration of a transcendent metaphysical imaginary in a attentional and political-cultural environment that couldn't care less about such a project. But, you know, whatever.