After the Future

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The Hatred of Poetry

I am reading a book by the poet Ben Lerner entitled The Hatred of Poetry. I'll probably have more to say about it another time, but he takes on the resistance most of us feel when we see lines of verse on the page. It's a resistance I feel, as I'm sure most of you do, because it makes demands of us that we'd rather not deal with. Too much else going on, and too often too little payoff.

But I'm convinced that the hatred or poetry is really one of the chief symptoms of our being captured by the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, which has no patience with such nonsense. In coming months, at least a part of what I want to do here is to try to make the effort to overcome that resistance. So from time to time I'm going to suggest more or less accessible poems that are worth a few minutes of your time. 

I read this poem by Wallace Stevens this morning in today's Atlantic.  It was first published in the April 1955 issue:

July Mountain

by Wallace Stevens

WE LIVE in a constellation
Of patches and of pitches,
Not in a single world,
In things said well in music,
On the piano, and in speech,
As in a page of poetry —
Thinkers without final thoughts
In an always incipient cosmos,
The way, when we climb a mountain,
Vermont throws itself together.

Later this morning I was reading Taylor's Cosmic Connections and I came upon this passage exerpted below. It struck me that the two interpret one another:

“Depth”[as a metaphor] applied to experience concerns “underlying” conditions of our “immediate” perceptions, of which we are not necessarily aware.

This allows us to make sense of “deep time.” Consider the following scene. I stand at the edge of the forest at dusk in late summer; I hear the wind shaking the branches as it moves through the trees; suddenly I feel a contact not just with this immediate scene, but with the whole cycle of the seasons, how the wind in winter sounds so muffled, because only the evergreens are responding, but this rich sound will recur, next year and in all subsequent years. I am carried beyond the immediate experience to a sense of the whole cyclical movement of the seasons which is the condition of life on our planet. I am in touch with a movement at a much greater depth, and I rejoice at this connection. I am not talking simply of my knowing the fact that this rustling of the wind in the trees is part of a larger process; or even of my bringing the fact to mind. Sensing the deeper process is something more; it involves being moved by this awareness, feeling joy at the contact. As far as I can tell, a condition of my being moved by this underlying movement is that it has important human significance, which cannot be denied of this basic condition not just of my life, but of all the lives which nourish me, biologically and spiritually. (pp. 331-332).

I am trying to give snapshots here and there about what Taylor is up to. Later a more integrated interpretation. Taylor has almost nothing to say about Stevens in this book, but Stevens seems to be popping up for me lately in such a way as to mirror what Taylor is doing. 

 

Reconnecting with the Cosmos

I get the feeling when I write about Charles Taylor, some among you find your eyes glazing over, but there is no contemporary thinker who I think is more important for helping us to move through this Post-Liberal moment if we are interested in doing that without embracing illiberal alternatives. The task, as I've written before, is not to condemn Liberalism but to transcend it, that is to absorb it while moving move beyond it without rejecting its gifts. This is how I understand what Taylor is trying to do throughout his career. 

So along those lines, I think this interview in Commonweal that appeared today is worth reading in its entirety, but I found this exchange about the loss of enchantment particularly interesting:

AS: Obviously, we can’t know exactly how historical people experienced the world, but how would you characterize their connection to that order on an experiential level?

CT: It’s almost impossible for us to recover today what it felt like to live in a really “enchanted” world. But imagine being on the edge of a deep forest and sensing the power of the spirits of the wood, extending deep within it; looking at the clear sky, and seeing its adamantine beauty as the outer face of a purity unattainable on our earth; sensing on the edge of a wilderness area an immense alien power full of menace, but shot through with power from the Creator.

AS: When and how does this sense of connection and order begin to break down?

CT: We come to a breaking point in human history with the advent of modern natural science. A common understanding of modern science is that it gives the real nature of things. This invalidates all earlier understandings of the world, which we can no longer make sense of on their own terms. The whole web of metaphysical views that sustained traditional notions of cosmic order from Aristotle up to the Late Renaissance was challenged by the achievements of post-Galilean natural science. The knowledge gained in this way had a solidity and a certainty (not to speak of technological utility) that the earlier visions of order could not match. So “cosmic order” came more and more to be identified with Newton’s theory and subsequent developments and findings.

Pushed to what often seems to be its ultimate logic, the real science gives us a veridical picture of what is, but no ultimate justification of what we ought to value. So, there cannot be an authoritative standard of value, let alone one that can be shown to be an important human fulfilment.

Of course, the elimination of this standard does not, strictly speaking, follow from the findings of natural science, but many people respond to the findings by drawing this extra conclusion. Drawing this conclusion is the process which the sociologist Max Weber called “disenchantment” or Entzauberung. The problem with Weber’s concept is that it seems to put a whole host of different ways of thought and feeling into a single basket and declare them all invalidated. It sweeps away all religion, but also all senses of connection, which are invalidated along with different kinds of belief in magic. To be fair to Weber, his concept contains a reference to magic specifically (the Zauber in Entzauberung), but he left it open to being interpreted in a very wide sense. The new broom includes in its sweep all forms of religion and senses of cosmic connection.

A basic thesis of my book is this: Romantic poetry responds to the growing implausibility of traditional cosmic orders. How it does this is to awaken a powerful sense, a sensed experience of cosmic order, which stops short of making an ontological claim for the existence outside of experience of such an order but that leaves this question open.

AS: You say this step of disenchantment doesn’t follow, strictly speaking, from science. So why do people take that step? How do technology and industrialization and the changes they bring to human experience contribute?

CT: It is quite understandable that some people will lack the sensibility that opens us to the sense of cosmic connection, or that they can be induced to suppress this sensibility in the name of a more certain knowledge with such useful technological applications. But this suppression is not commanded by logic. In fact, many important figures in natural science have been open to the kind of reverence that a sense of cosmic connection brings (including Einstein).

There is so much more to be said about this interview, but here are a few thoughts that strike me this morning:

I read somewhere that about 40% of Americans have had what might be described as “spiritual” experiences in the William James Variety or Religious Experiences sense. This is quite a lot, but it also means that 60% have not. Assuming that this split would hold to be more or less true among the educated elites of the medieval period through the 19th Century, I’d argue that the main difference between modern societies and premodern societies is that among the elites in premodern societies, greater prestige went to the 40% who had such spiritual experiences, and these experiences provided the foundation and the inspiration for their thought. But gradually starting in the 1300s, a shift began in which greater prestige was given to the thinking and concerns of the 60%, i.e., of those who had no such spiritual experiences.

And this included theologians, especially the late medieval scholastics whose theology/philosophy became a spiritually desiccated exercise in logic and rationality. Their obsession with developing criteria for propositions that could be affirmed as certain led to Descartes and to the modern epistemological preoccupation with what constitutes truth as if it could ever adequately be formulated in clear, certain propositions. In things that really matter, such certainty and clarity is impossible1, but it was possible in science, and not only that, but scientific certainty leads to all kinds of advances that benefit humans in a purely material way.

So discourse about what really matters, i.e., matters of the soul and spirit, become unreliable and subjective by comparison, and so such discourse becomes crowded out by the prestige of the new discourse of scientific certainty and all the very concrete, material benefits it produces. In other words, the new reliable discourse dominated by the experience of the 60% crowds out the old unreliable discourse of the 40%.

This sets the stage for what I laid out in the Cathedral Lectures as the Baconian Project, which requires that the cosmos and the Natural world be understood as ontologically spirit-less, as devoid of mystery and spiritual depth, that it become just neutral stuff, so many random atoms spinning about to be remolded and then exploited for human benefit.

This is how the 60% going back at least to Democritus experienced the natural world anyway, right? And so it was easy for them to dismiss the ideas about how the world was shot through with the divine as nonsense. Before the scientific revolution the 60%would say—Sure, maybe, whatever. After—there’s technological progress (and lots of money) to be made, this is new and exciting, and those old ideas about the divine get in the way.

Does that mean that the 40% were wrong, or that they just got pushed to the side by vulgar materialists who hadn’t a clue? You know my answer.2 As Taylor points out, there is nothing about scientific inquiry in itself that requires that those of us who live in a world shaped by post-Galilean natural science see the cosmos as devoid of the spiritual, but is there any such thing as disinterested scientific inquiry?

Of course not! It’s expensive, and the people who fund it are not disinterested, and these funders have been utterly dominated by the 60%, and, sure we got refrigerators and modern medicine, but we are living in the political/economic and ecologicial hellscape that is the reductio ad absurdum of the Baconian Project, which has been from the beginning the project of the 60%. Decade by decade from the early 1600s their influence among the culture’s elites progressed in displacing the the influence of 40% among the culture’s elites. And by the mid 19th century, the 40% had no influence at all except to write novels and poems that were reduced to optional cultural entertainments for the few who had an interest in such things.

Taylor’s book is about the most gifted among the 40% and how they fought throughout the 19th and early 20th century to preserve a sense of cosmic connection, a connection that we now need desperately to retrieve and develop further than they were able to do.

Is it too late? Is it even possible that the 40% might actually regain some influence in shaping our public discourse?

I don’t think it’s too late, and I think it’s possible because elites3, even those among the 60% who are people of good will and good sense, realize that we need to make a shift. The 60% have had their time, and they’ve made a mess, and now it’s time to listen to other voices. Taylor isn’t a bad place to start.

Another voice is Dorothy Sayers. I just came across her book entitled The Mind of the Maker (1941), and I don’t know if there’s a clearer, more crisply written, and accessible exposition in a contemporary key of what I would describe as Christian Neoplatonism. It’s about the creative process, but more profoundly about how the human mind participates in the divine mind in such a way that true creativity, as opposed to mere novelty, becomes a possibility. She is a powerful articulator of a worldview firmly grounded in the experience of the 40%.

 

Note 1. Just to clarify: I am not a Luddite. I am not in principle anti-technology, anti-innovation, anti-entrepreneur, or anti-modern. I am anti-nihilist/materialist, and I am anti-anything that undermines rather that supports what I understand, from my Christian Neoplatonist pov, to be true human flourishing. The Baconian project, as it dominates our public discourse about the human future and our decisions about the political economy and the use of technology, is the philosophical engine that has produced and legitimates the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. And there is nothing in the history of human civilizational development that more profoundly threatens future human flourishing.

Why? Because the development of these technologies is gradually sealing us off from the Living Real—the Living Real as we experience it in our bodies, in our relationships with one another, with the cosmos and Natural World, and with the deep spiritual depth of things. It is substituting something virtual and hyper-real for all that, and we in our clueless stupidity are seduced by it because it’s the next new thing, and, y’know, I’m bored, everybody I know is bored, too, and what else is there to do?

Note 2. I am open to the possibility that a shift could originate from non-elites that would over time win over elites. That’s how Christianity spread. But that was then when there were still vital spiritual traditions and practices that shaped the lives of non-elites. It’s different now because the TCM has destroyed the vitality of non-elite traditional cultures, so it’s not clear to me that, at least in societies in the Northern Hemisphere, there is fertile ground in non-elite culture for something deeply real to emerge. Movements like MAGA seem to be more likely to arise bottom up.

So the question for me is whether there might be a shift among educated elites that would have a top-down cultural effect, the way the shift after the scientific revolution worked over time that way. What would drive such a shift? I think that it would come from a reverse displacement of the 60% by the 40% in shaping our public discourse. What would drive such a displacement? Essentially recognition that the materialism of 60% have come to a dead end. I think there’s a real openness to that already especially among young people; it’s just a question of some credible voices emerging from the 40% who can articulate what people already want but don’t find available in any palatable way.

Why Trump Will Lose

The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening. Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.

But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thing. Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype. In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful. The light-on-their-feet “FBoy Island,” “Below Deck,” “Summer House,” and “Too Hot to Handle” have paved the way for Alan Cumming’s charming “The Traitors” and Joel McHale’s “House of Villains” (which has returned Omarosa to the spotlight). “The Mole,” rebooted and airing on Netflix, is hosted by NPR’s Ari Shapiro doing a deadpan camp turn for the ages.

Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite. If Mr. Trump is still doing Gordon Ramsay, Kamala Harris is giving us Lisa Vanderpump.

Michael Hirschorn

So why's he gonna lose? Because his act is old. People are sick of it. It simply comes down to that.

If you are puzzled why Trump's popularity has been so persistent, but now seems to be ebbing, I think there is no more robust explanation.Too many people don't see Trump as a human being who inhabits the real world; they see him as TV personality in a show where they love rooting for the anti-hero, the rules breaker, the one who understands better than anyone how to beat the system that they feel oppresses them. What impact he actually has in their real, day-to-day world doesn't matter. They don’t expect what happens on the screen or in a rally to make a difference in their humdrum lives. Trump’s appeal lies almost wholly in his ability to provide an escape from that.

This is not a new idea especially for those who know their McLuhan and Postman. Many before have pointed out that Trump sees the presidency as an extension of his stint on his Apprentice shows. But I've been sending posts about politics recently not just to be another bloviator using an online soapbox to spew his political opinions, but to connect what's happening in politics to the themes presented in the Cathedral Lectures. The point of these posts is to strive to see what's happening in real time through the lens of the ideas developed there. 

One of the primary themes I developed in those lectures was how we are all slowly moving into what Baudrillard called the "hyper-real", where what we experience on screens is more real than the real world we live in. For many, perhaps most, Trump voters, the only important thing is what happens in the hyper-real world. Most of the rest of us, I hope, are in the in-between. We  still have a foot in what until recently was broadly understood to be the real world, but we feel the pull of the hyper-real, and we spend quite a bit of time in it, and the younger we are the more so. 1

But most of us still know the difference. Most viewers of the debate were not persuaded that Trump's explanation of his Haitians-eating-pets story was legitimated by his insisting it had to be true because it was on TV. I think Trump himself sincerely believes its being on TV makes it true. But the problem is that he’s not alone. With each passing decade more people are becoming more like Trump—increasingly incapable of discerning the difference, and is there any reason to believe that without some kind of significant intervention that this trend will abate?

So I excerpted the paragraphs from Hisrschorn's article above not primarily to make an optimistic case for Trump's demise. I never thought he could win this election no matter who ran against him because the logic of his success is now the logic of his failure. Many people were dazzled for a while by his showmanship, but the illusion has been burst. The debate with Harris the other night made that clear to those who hadn't understood it yet. She was Dorothy pulling back the curtain to expose the naked wizard before nearly 70 million people. The debate was more important for that reason than I first thought. And Harris did it in a way that Biden could not have.

And I guess it's a good thing that Harris seems to be the right person for this shift in the hyper-real, where, to use Hirschorn's words, "the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful." I am not saying that Harris is just the new act replacing Trump's old one, just another showperson who understands better than he what the audience wants now. She's a politician, and to succeed as one these days means that you need to know how to navigate in the hyper-real. There are good indicators to suggest that she is also a person with genuine warmth and authenticity and that she has her feet firmly set in the real world. I do not see her as Hirschorn does as just "reality lite", but we won't know that for sure until we see how she governs. 

But here's the point I want to make here, and it's the theme that every post I send in one way or the other seeks to develop. What we see in MAGA is a warning of what is to come. Trump is just a crude, clownish beta version of more slick demagogues who are now taking notes backstage as they watch Trump fail. It's shocking that even at this early stage of the hyper-real someone so ignorant and so obviously inept could be so successful by his understanding a few basic rules about how to operate in it.

As technologies become more sophisticated in the coming decades, the hyper-real will become more the reality that will define people's lives, their values, their use of time, their sense of being embodied, their aspirations and fears, and just basically their sense of who they are and what makes them most real. People of good will, people who truly care about genuine human flourishing and not some hyper-real parody of it, need to resist the seductions of the hyper-real. And the argument I've been making here is that the only way to do that is for us to set our feet in what is most deeply real. Otherwise we won't have a foothold firm enough to prevent us from being swept away by the coming flood. 

Note 1. For those who did not attend the lectures or who would like to revisit them, I have their transcription available now in a single document that you can find here.

Note 2. This, btw, is why young people need to pay attention to old farts like me. I still remember what it was like to live in a world that was still mostly real, or to put it another way, in a symbol system that still did some important work to mediate the Deep Real. This is a world that on or about 1963 became really, really different, and we’re not the better for it. So I am unimpressed when young people tell me my ideas are outdated and unrelatable. To me that’s just a symptom of how badly such people have been captured the hyper-reality that the TCM is on hyperdrive to produce.

The Debate

I really hate these debates. I find them unwatchable. They have become important for all the wrong reasons. They function more along the lines of a sporting event or a cage match. Who wins or loses has more to do with body language and vocal tone, punches that landed and punches that missed, and we learn very little about how either candidate would actually govern. Way too much was made of Trump's debate with Biden in June, and too much is being made of the debate last night.

And I find ridiculous the pundits who complain that the candidates were not substantive or detailed enough in their plans. This is not how American politics has ever worked. We vote for the less bad choice based on general party orientation and values. Republican voters have shown time and again that they generally favor most of the policies that Democrats propose when presented in the abstract, but they won't vote for Democrats because they don't think about the party in policy terms but in terms of general orientation and values.

So the more important political task is not to obsess about policy details but rather to change the general orientation and values of the Democratic Party from Neoliberalism toward something more populist friendly. This is the only way they will have a chance to become a stable majority that will be able to stave off threats from the extremist Right, with or without Trump, that has taken over the GOP. The policy flows from that, and the details get hammered out though the legislative process, not in some inane debate format.

So hoo-ray for Harris; she won the arm wrestling contest with a senile misogynist who can barely complete a sentence. Whether this matters at all to undecided voters I have no idea.