After the Future

More on Impeachment

Read John Dean's FindLaw article comparing the Nixon and Bush wiretapping offenses.  Some key grafs:

No one questions the ends here. No one doubts another terror attack is coming; it is only a question of when. No one questions the preeminent importance of detecting and preventing such an attack.

What is at issue here, instead, is Bush's means of achieving his ends: his decision not only to bypass Congress, but to violate the law it had already established in this area.

Congress is Republican-controlled. Polling shows that a large majority of Americans are willing to give up their civil liberties to prevent another terror attack. The USA Patriot Act passed with overwhelming support. So why didn't the President simply ask Congress for the authority he thought he needed?

The answer seems to be, quite simply, that Vice President Dick Cheney has never recovered from being President Ford's chief of staff when Congress placed checks on the presidency. And Cheney wanted to make the point that he thought it was within a president's power to ignore Congress' laws relating to the exercise of executive power. Bush has gone along with all such Cheney plans.

No president before Bush has taken as aggressive a posture -- the position that his powers as commander-in-chief, under Article II of the Constitution, license any action he may take in the name of national security - although Richard Nixon, my former boss, took a similar position.

"Security" cannot be allowed to become the issue that trumps all others. The security state is a police state. If we become a police state, then the terrorists have indeed won. 

It's not a question whether there are grounds for impeachment. If there were serious grounds for impeaching Nixon and if the trivial reasons for impeaching Clinton were grounds enough, there are more than sufficient grounds to impeach Bush. The question is whether there is the political will to do so, and there is not in the current composition of the Congress. So it is up to the American people to demand it, and the first step is the House elections next November. 

The time for polite discussion is over. What does it say about us as a people that we can get into such a lather about Clintons' escapades with Monica, and then just shrug our shoulders when it comes to this kind of abuse of power? 2006 should be the year in which we should express our outrage because our outrage is the only thing that will save us.  In my post yesterday I lay out how I think this should be the central issue presented by the Democrats in the runup to the House elections.  I've also updated it to include some other elements that should compose a Second Contract with America.

A Second Contract with America

From Chris Floyd's post "Clowntime Is Over":

Some of us have been writing for years about Bush's piecemeal assumption of dictatorial powers. We have watched in rage and amazement as the Establishment meekly accepted Bush's repeated, brutal insults to democracy. Time and again, I've quoted the words of the Emperor Tiberius, after the lackeys of the Senate grovelled to do his bidding: "Men fit to be slaves." In one sense, then, the Rubicon was crossed long ago. Yet "we live in hope and die in despair," as my father always says. In the back of the minds of many an embittered dissident, there has been a spark of hope that somewhere down the line, one of the many, many Bush outrages would somehow take hold, gain critical mass, and force the Establishment to act, to rein in the renegade, break him, box him in if not remove him from office. 

For let's be clear about this: only the Establishment -- the institutional powers-that-be -- can break an outlaw president. Millions marched in the street against Nixon and the system; whole city quadrants went up in flames in those days; but none of this was decisive in the corridors of power. (Nor to much of the American public, to be frank; after Kent State, after My Lai, after Cambodia, Nixon was still re-elected in a landslide.) It was his insult to the institutions -- the Watergate break-in of Democratic headquarters, the subsequent cover-up and subversion of the legal system, the defiance of Congress -- that led to his downfall. He pushed too far, tried to grab too much -- and the Establishment pulled him short. 

And it will have to be the Establishment that breaks Bush -- or he won't be broken. All the blogs in the world won't bring him down, no matter how much truth they tell, how much bloodsoaked Bushist dirt they expose. Yes, perhaps if we had millions of outraged citizens marching in the street day after day across America, a sustained mass movement and popular uprising for liberty and democracy, this might obviate the need for Establishment action.  But we all know that such marches are not going to happen. If there was sufficient fire for liberty and democracy in America, there would have already been a popular uprising -- and Bush would never have garnered enough public support to keep the election results close enough to be fudged. No, it will be the Establishment -- or no one. 

That's why the spy scandal is so pivotal. Because it is a direct, open and unignorable challenge to the institutional life of the American Establishment. In it, the Bush Regime is saying to the various powers-that-be, especially in Congress and the courts, but also to centers of power and influence outside government: you no longer have any power. All real power is now in our gift. Your laws, your institutions, your traditions, the whole complex infrastructure of checks and balances that have sustained society are now essentially meaningless. As in ancient Rome, we will keep the old forms, but the life of the state has now passed into the hands of the autocrat and his court. His arbitrary will can override any law -- although of course, strong law will still be applied to his enemies, and to the riff-raff in the lower orders. 

We are slowly evolving into a zombie democracy.  The form is there, but the spirit, the political will, is missing. Our paralysis and impotence is really quite remarkable in light of what we now know (and we don't know the half of it).  There seems to be nothing effective that we can do.  Another three years for this administration to do more damage without the American people having anyway to prevent him. 

As Floyd says, it's all up to the establishment, but the establishment was basically very happy to have Bush in the White House. The establishment newspaper, the New York Times, the so-called defender of the constitution and its civil rights, refused to publish the story about the wiretaps before the election last year.  It published it now only because one of the story's reporters wrote a book in which the Times complicity with Bush would be revealed. Better to out oneself than to be outed. 

There was in the mid seventies, but there is now no potent opposition to the right-leaning establishment's hold on the reins of power.  Do we really think that the establishment cares about these wiretaps? Let's face it, the "establishment" is now dominated by the same people who supported Nixon through Watergate, Reagan through Iran/Contra, and now Bush through all of what he has done. The establishment allowed and supported the  absurdities of the Clinton impreachment and made the American system appear to the world priggishly idiotic. It's this establishment that should be put on trial.

That we are so dependent on the "establishment" should bring into clear focus just how bad things are and how undemocratic, cumbersome, and unresponsive the American system is. In a parliamentary system there would have been a no 'confidence vote' and new elections. There is a machinery there that is designed to be more responsive to the will of the people in crises like the one we are now living through. We have to wait another three years--another three years for these people to further tighten their grip.  Unless . . .

Unless the American electorate removes the GOP from the majority in the House in 2006. But how likely is that to happen with the gutless, directionless mentality that now characterizes the Democratic brain trust?

If the Democrats had any backbone, they would propose a Second Contract with America. To wit: If the American citizens elect a democratic congress, it promises to impeach this president. 

What we're witnessing here is far more serious than Watergate and Iran/Contra.  Far, far more is at stake now, and there seems to be no political will to do anything about it. A Second Contract with America would require that the Democrats make an impassioned, robust case to the American people that the future of their democracy is at stake. It's exactly the kind of thing we need to wake us from this  torpid, passive acceptance that nothing is possible except to accept this inevitable drift into a police state.

Update: I think that such a contract should be clear, simple, and focus on issues that people care about. What other elements would you put in such a contract with America?  If impeachment were the first item on the agenda, here are three items that I think should follow: 

• To develop an economically sane healthcare system that is fair to providers but which puts the health and welfare of the American people first.

• To commit to energy independence by 2015 by pulling out all the stops to develop non-fossil fuel energy alternatives.

• To use American power and prestige to promote rather than to undermine multilateral solutions to complex matters of international security, terrorism, and nuclear non-proliferation.

I invite readers to suggest their own list or to improve the wording of this one to make it more politically compelling.

 

Does Christianity Have a Future?

We are all postmoderns now, and that means anything goes. The premodern, traditionalist narrative remains only a ghostly presence, and the modern Enlightenment Rationalist narrative persists merely as an old habit that we maintain for want of anything better. In such a cultural gray zone, people have shown themselves capable of believing in almost anything, and so anything goes.

And believing, I would argue, is pretty much all we've got when it comes to giving our lives meaning. Even pure rationalism is a belief system. There are all kinds of belief systems and our choosing one or the other of them boils down to what any of us is capable of believing plausible. Understanding better what makes something plausible is a big subject, but for now it's enough simply to point out that plausibility is a function of cultural legitimacy, and it's very interesting to consider why some beliefs are considered legitimate and others not.

Why, for instance, even just two hundred years ago, did most educated Westerners understand the fundamental stuff of the universe to be spirit, and why now does that same group assume that the fundamental stuff is matter? For Hegel evolution was a spiritual purposeful process, and everyone agreed. Fifty years later Darwin says it's a random, groping biological process, and everyone agrees. Maybe fifty years from now, someone will explain how it's both, and everyone will agree. Who knows, because anything goes. Whoever comes up with the most compelling narrative wins.

Whatever.

In the coming decades we will continue to live through an awkward period of cultural fragmentation typical of a decadent transitional era, not unlike the last two or three centuries of the classical period as the Roman Empire declined. Almost anything is plausible during such a time. Then as now there was a huge marketplace of ideas, philosophies, religions. And from this hodgepodge a dominant narrative gradually emerged. Standing in history around the year 100 and looking forward, Christianity would have seemed a very weak candidate to emerge as that narrative. But it did, and it reached its high-water mark of cultural influence at the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, and for better or worse, it's been receding ever since.

I doubt that it will re-emerge as the primary narrative of the near future, but I believe that it has a latent power that should have an important influence in shaping the global fusion culture that will emerge over the next century or two. One thing is for sure, though: That while the underground springs from which the Christian mystery bubbles will always be a source of life, the Catholic and Protestant narratives are not. Both have come to represent the calcified remains of narratives that did at one time have genuine vitality. The first was the Christian narrative of the premodern era; the second of the modern era. Now we need a Christian narrative that draws life from those underground sources that are true to the mystery and yet relevant for the new era dawning.

That doesn't mean that the fundamental story is something that we just make up as we go along. It's rather that our understanding of its truth evolves as our consciousness of it evolves. The Christian mystery hasn't changed, but it has changed us--and changed us in ways we don't understand. I'd argue, for instance, that the very possibility of modernity--its ideas about liberty, individuality, and critical consciousness--depends on the transformations in consciousness effected by Christianity in the West. It's not the only influence, obviously. The Greeks were important, too. But the marriage of Jewish and Greek consciousness in the Christian West gave the world the peculiar disembedded consciousness that developed in Europe. So now having been changed by the impact of Christianity on consciousness, our consciousness of Christianity must change. (What I mean by this is outlined in Part II.) 

In other words, because the old narrative has calcified does not mean that earlier Christians were wrong or were fooling themselves--their understanding, as is ours now, was provisional. I see theirs as a form of Christianity that was appropriate for a kind of consciousness (premodern and modern) that we no longer have. Right now the churches are for the most part living off stale bread, and that's why their influence on the larger mainstream culture is so weak or downright sickening.

I understand why many people may not be thrilled by the prospect of Christianity or any other religion providing the basic framework for the primary cultural narrative of the future. But I think that their misgivings are rooted in their perception of religious attitudes that derive from the old consciousness that has overstayed its relevance. Moderns justifiably resented the church insofar as church authorities resisted the emergence of the aforementioned freedom, individuality, and critical consciousness. They saw rightly that the churches insofar as they embodied that resistance to the modern spirit were resisting something new and important that was struggling to be born, and had every right to be born--that was in fact consistent with the deepest logic of Christianity's transformative, maturing effect on human consciousness.

It's just human nature for the old to resent and to resist, often violently, being pushed aside by the new. We see it all the time. We saw in Europe during the religious wars of the 1600s. We see it it now in the violence of the Muslim world. These wars have very little to do with the spirit of the religions they were or are being waged to defend. They are about the preservation of cultural identity, about fearing the loss of a way of life that one loves, about the persistence of old habits when new habits must be learned. And, of course, there is good reason for them to fight for the preservation of the old ways because there is tremendous value in them. Precious things get lost. But history is a bitch, and it has this way of forcing the issue in ways that almost all of us would prefer it wouldn't.

But as painful as these losses are, they are, I would argue, a part of growing up, in the spiritually evolutionary sense. The losses have to be mourned, and then we have to move on. Clinging to the old when the old has become obsolete is "Lot's Wife Syndrome"--the impulse or longing to look back with nostalgia rather than to look forward with hope.  And it is this impulse which leads inevitably to the calcification of souls and cultures.  And it is that calcification that prevents so many of our intelligent contemporaries from taking religion seriously, because that's mainly what they see--the rigidity of old forms that no longer deliver life in a fresh, healthful way. But it should be pointed out that moderns have also calcified to the degree that they look backward toward the rationalist ideals of the Enlightenment with nostalgia. Stubborn modernists like E.O. Wilson are as resistant to postmodernity as the Reformation era popes were to modernity.
 
But Enlightenment rationalism is as inappropriate for our time as Catholic medievalism. That does not mean that rationality is useless. It does not mean that Catholic ritual is meaningless. It just means that how we understand the uses of rationality and ritual have to be adapted to the different circumstances in which we now find ourselves.

The mass, for instance, is a ritual that makes much more sense to premodern consciousness than it does to a modern consciousness. It has roots in archaic practices that go back thousands of years. The very concept of "blood sacrifice" is something that is fundamentally repugnant to the contemporary sensibility. And yet something trans-temporally Real is celebrated in it, and the Catholic Church, whatever happens to its faux medieval superstructure in the coming decades, provides a service to the world by every day and everywhere performing this ritual. And I believe that as we move more deeply into postmodern consciousness, we will once again develop a deeper apprehension for the significance of what happens in the mass. Postmodernity will be globally syncretistic in its retrieval of lost wisdom from the world's premodern legacy, shaped by the retrieval of aspects of lost or forgotten understandings rejected by modern rationality. If it's hard to comprehend what the mass effects now, I believe it will be easier for future generations.

Even if the main Catholic and Protestant narratives have calcified, lots of people do in fact find genuine meaning in the Christian mystery as it lives in the biblical narratives and in the subterranean streams of grace that nourish their souls in ways that they are mostly unaware. So when I speak about developing a postmodern narrative, such a thing will have practical value only insofar as it brings the subterranean to the surface and makes it more available, something easier to find and from which one can drink deeply. There are now communities of people which are like desert outposts, oases built around springs where these underground currents have broken to the surface. That's the Christian task as I understand it--to increase the number of these outposts, so that eventually the wasteland might be transformed, the face of the earth renewed.

Neither the medieval narrative nor the modern narrative, no matter how much either of these habits of mind persist in our day, meet our needs. This has been true at least since the end of World War I when the West lost its confidence in the optimistic Enlightenment narrative. T.S. Eliot's great poem in 1924 announced that we had entered "The Wasteland," and that's where we still wander. We are in a period now which is neither here nor there, neither in Egypt or Canaan. The old thing is left behind; the new thing has not yet been found. 

And it has become clear to me that the future of Christianity, because it does have a future, will have more to do with what is happening now out in the desert--at the periphery rather than what issues forth from the official center. For it is up to the rest of us to develop a  narrative that is compelling and which orients us toward Canaan, and if we do it in a way that draws truly from the depths, the official church, whose managerial class, no matter what level of false importance they give their institution-preserving agenda, is no less thirsty than the rest of us, and will sooner or later come to drink from those springs as well.

 

Have an Un-zombie Christmas.

There is probably no time of the year when the zombie traditionalism of which I speak comes more into the fore of our awareness.  It's a time during which what is meant to be a commemoration of a profoundly significant spiritual event has become the dog wagged by the tail of frantic shopping and holiday stress. We retain the form, but the spirit of Christmas has been too much replaced with the un-dead zombie spirit of consumerism.

It's a cliche to say so, but it's a cliche because it has become such a dreary feature of our lives that we are resigned to it and are tired of talking about it. It's not the whole story, of course. But it's a reality we're all too familiar with and have just come to accept as a 'given'.

If I were the cultural czar with the power to arrange the rhythm of our life as I prefer, I would retrieve the tradition of the twelve days of Christmas, those being the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany.  I would make Epiphany, the day commemorating the three kings bringing their gifts to the Christ child, the focus day of gift giving, and then reserve the advent season as a time of quiet, contemplation, and peace.  Christmas would be a quiet day, and the festivals, concerts, and parties would begin the day after Christmas--something different everyday and in which the entire community would participate. And the festivals would close with the day of gift giving on Epiphany.

But so much militates against  a quiet, peaceful Christmas.  It's even stressful to go to Christmas mass in my parish because you have to get there an hour early to have any hope for a seat. Kids just love that extra hour or church time. There's no rhythm or wisdom in the way we do things now, and I'm certainly no exemplar of doing things better or differently. 

It would be nice to live in a world in which meaning, peace, quiet were given to us.  But that's just not the way it is.  We have to make it happen somehow; we have to choose it.  We have to actively 'do' meaning, peace, stillness.  And that means fighting to create a space, even if it's only an interior space, where peace and the stillness of Christmas is possible even if for just a few moments. 

I wish you all, Christians and non-Christians alike, good luck in being able to find a place this Christmas in which that peace, the peace that surpasses all understanding, pays you and your family a visit. 

Searching for Common Ground

From Garrison Keillor's "Decoding Christmas Dinner" today in Salon:

The men who gather in the living room on Christmas this year don't have the easy common language that my uncles had. In Minnesota, you have the weather for conversation, but that's only good for an hour or so. Sports is not the common ground it used to be; nobody has the time to be a fan and develop the expertise that makes arguments possible. There's politics, of course, but that's a topic for pontificating and harrumphing, which isn't the same as conversation. We can compare laptops and cellphones and iPods, I guess, but that's really about money, which is not a fit topic. To talk about our children is rather delicate, comparisons are inevitable, and if your child is in advanced kindergarten, the French-immersion one, and mine is still figuring out shapes and colors, it can be painful. Theology is treacherous ground, and we don't discuss sex, and around Christmas we try to avoid vicious gossip, so what's left? Cars. But you can't fix cars yourself anymore unless you've been to car college, and the loyalties aren't so strong as my dad's feelings for Fords.

So we gaze out the window and we say things like, "I was reading a column in the paper today about men not having a common language anymore." Oh, really. Who wrote that? "I forget." Oh. End of discussion.

Well, there's always real estate.

Warrantless Wiretaps

I haven't commented much about the Cheney/Bush torture policy, and now this business about the wiretaps. All of this is beyond what reasonable people can disagree about.  It has come to a point where I find it all but impossible to even engage in conversation with people who would still support this administration.  It's beyond rational argument at this point. 

Human beings have a limitless capacity for self-justification.  People can talk themselves into anything. And people do not rise to positions of power who have not honed their capacity for self-decception and the deception of others into a highly developed skill.  They are expert seducers of the mind. And while such seducers need to be given a fair hearing, at some point the gavel has to come down. The time for argument is over.

There comes a time where a line is crossed, and you have to stand on one side or the other. For me this administration crossed the line some time ago. But now there is no excuse, given all that we know about this administration, for any one who thinks it has any moral legitimacy.  I can deal with such people now as I would someone who has joined a cult.  One can only hope sooner or later such a person will come to his senses.  But rational argument is pointless.

I always thought that Iran/Contra was a far more serious case of the government's abuse of power than Watergate, and now we are finding out that this administration is setting all-time lows for power abuse. It seems as if every time we get a Republican government in the White House, it feels compelled to outdo  previous GOP administrations in abusing our democracy. 

It's shameful.  It's so exceedingly shameful, we haven't taken the full measure of it yet.  In part it's  because Republicans are socialized to feel shame only about sex.  Greed and abuses of power?  That's just healthy ambition. That's just looking after one's interests.  And so the truth is that we're in some kind of denial that things could be as bad as they are. We're living in a fun house hall of mirrors where the perverse is distorted to seem normal and the normal distorted to seem perverse. 

The Republican Party at the national level has come to represent everything that is worst in the American character. It really has. From its slick, corporate country club elites like Bill Frist to its rapacious rednecks like Tom Delay, this party has presented the ugliest face of America to the world since the Nixon Administration. The Democrats are bad, but the Republicans are just plain scary awful. 

Three more years.  Think of it.  God help us if we are attacked again. It will be bad enough to sustain the horrors that will accompany such an attack. But even worse will be the abuses perpetrated by the operatives within this administration who long to turn our country into a police state.  They are checked for the time being.  The U.S. Senate found enough backbone to say No to torture and to the Patriot Act.  But  they will regroup, and we have not seen the last of them by a long shot.

From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen

I believe that the blind-spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand, a religion which differed form all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two. (Owen Barfield, Saving the Appearances, p. 167)

The larger narrative makes a difference.  It matters to know where we came from and where we're going.  It makes a difference whether we think that history is a random, absurd process or whether it has meaning and direction.  It makes a difference if we believe that our life on the earth is the life of an exile who longs like E.T. for a home elsewhere. Or whether we think of the earth as our home that we must work hard to liberate from its futility and bondage.

So for me the starting place for the development of postmodern Christian narrative is the work of Owen Barfield. Barfield is not well known, but is a very important thinker whom I hope will someday be more broadly recognized and understood.  I first learned about him when I came across R.J. Reilly's Romantic Religion: A study of Barfield, Lewis, Williams and Tolkien in the early 70s. Barfield was a close friend over many years of C.S. Lewis, but Barfield was by far a more rigorous thinker. His most important book is Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry.  Another very interesting book that is really at the root of his thinking about cultural evolution is History in English Words. I met him and had a chance to talk with him on a few occasions in 1974 when, at the invitation of the death-of-god theologian Thomas J. J. Altizer, he was a visiting lecturer at SUNY Stonybrook. 

He's working in the same grove as Heidegger in that he accepts that we are living in a post-Nietzschean world in which collective culture-wide transcendent meanings have been shattered, and he's barking up the same tree as Heidegger, when it comes to his way of understanding of human beings and their embeddedness in the life world around them. But he's on the other side of the tree. He's a Christian, and I think this enables him to go much further than Heidegger in seeing meanings in history that a purely phenomenological approach won't support. 

I encourage the reader here if he finds my account below compelling to read Barfield for himself and decide for himself whether he makes sense. For me he makes enormous sense, and my reading him was one of the intellectual turning points that, alas, have kind of isolated me because so few others have made that turn. I have always assumed that a basic element in the Christian understanding the world is that history has meaning, but nobody seemed to talk about it in a way that made any sense. Barfield's ideas did make sense and provided for me a frame upon which I could develop my own inchoate intuitions about what that meaning might be.

I understand and respect the Kierkegaardian rejection of Hegelianism, but I don't think that he and other existentialists have the last word on the subject. That history is meaningful seems so central to the logic of Christianity that it should not just be tossed to the side because there's no way to verify our ideas about it. We're not working in the world of 'logos' here, but in the world of 'mythos'. I think of logos as having a kind of structural role in rendering for us a world that has a kind of coherency and intelligibility.  But I see mythos, criminally neglected in the modern age, as the human capacity to work imaginatively within the Logos frame to shape a story that resonates in the life of imagination and feeling. 

***

It's clear to me, anyway, that our life here on earth has a purpose, and that the future of the earth is central to that purpose. And yet it's clear that for most Christians this history, or any sense of an evolving historical drama, has little to do with their understanding of who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I think there is a mythopoetic narrative possibility here that awaits its moment to emerge into a legitimate space that has not yet been prepared for it.

In the meanwhile, the default Christian idea about history seems to depend strongly on the "exile" model--history is jail time: we do our time on the earth following the rules as best we can so that we can get out of jail on good behavior and go to our heavenly home with God. This idea, in my opinion, has more to do with Buddhism and Hinduism than it has to do with Christianity. In such a model the earth is a prison to be escaped.  I think of it rather as our ailing, semi-conscious mother whom we must nurse back to health.

Barfield gives us a way to think about the Christian meaning of history, and for me it is very compelling. He understood the problem of modern cultural decadence in much the say way as Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of the larger historical drama.  This drama extends from what he calls Original Participation to Final Participation, from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times. From something passively given to something actively made.

The modern period is the transition era in which human beings move from a mode of passive evolution to a mode of free, active choice in shaping the destiny of the earth. This is a Christian vision that is not about just saving our individual souls, but about saving and transforming the earth and all that lives on it. And that's why politics matter, for the political sphere is the arena in which we choose the path we are to take, and it is so, so important that the choice not be left to powermad and the avaricious, which has been the default mode, for the most part, to date.

Barfield, like Nietzsche, agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of the sense of transcendent meaning as something given in the world have disappeared—transcendence is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. And he agrees that the solution must be to awaken resources in the human soul and the soul of the world, which are the same thing, in order that meaning in the world be reconstituted. The essential difference lies in that for Nietzsche this reconstituting project derives from the Superman and his will to power, whereas for Barfield it derives from the Logos who dwells in the depths of soul. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not the Superman, but the Logos bearer.

For the whole thrust of Barfield’s thought is to show how human consciousness has evolved in such a way that “meaning” has shifted from something given in the world outside to something that now lies in potentia, slumbering in the depths of every human soul, and which it is now the human task to awaken. The Logos, although it was known to the Greeks and Jews of antiquity, was not primarily known by them through their interior experience. Jesus’ announcement that “the Kingdom of God is within” was a critical turning point in the history of meaning. An epochal shift occurred then which has not yet been fully accomplished, a shift that really didn’t manifest itself broadly in western culture until the time of the renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period.

Both the Greeks and Jews played a critical historical role in helping the kind of soul that could become such a Logos bearer. Although both knew the Logos and both played an essential role in developing the kind of human soul that could hold the Logos within. This has been the essential contribution of the West to the world—the space-and-eye oriented, Promethean, restless, overcoming, speculative, exploratory heritage that comes from the Greeks and the ear-and-time-oriented sense of the profundity and mystery of the human will, of human identity, and of the meaning of history from the Jews. 

And what we have seen in the last five hundred years is the transition of our experience of transcendence from a Greek, outer-focused, spatial imagination of transcendence to a Jewish inward-focused, temporal, future-oriented imagination. Transcendence in the modern period has become more about time (before and after) than about space (up and down), more about listening than about seeing. 

For the former transcendence is an out- or up-there that shapes our life down here, for the latter it’s something down-here, within history, experienced as a hope for the fulfillment of a promise. For the Greek what is good is higher and comes from above, and what’s bad is lower coming from below. For the Jew, the good is progressive, aiming toward something better that lies in the future, and what’s bad is nostalgia, a falling back to previous stages of development. The longing to regress is symbolized by Lot’s wife in Genesis, the Jews in Exodus who longed to return to Egypt’s fleshpots, and Ahab’s regression to Baal worship in Kings.  In the Old Testament narrative, these are all instances of disobedience on one level, but at a deeper level they are a breaking of faith, a failure to trust in the promises made to them by their God. 

Barfield argues that it was the historical mission of the Greeks and the Jews to begin a process of thinking and willing that enabled human beings to extricate themselves from what had been before an ‘immersion in Being’. Barfield called this immersion ‘original participation,’ a condition of soul that all premoderns experienced to some extent, totemic or animistic peoples being the extreme case. Original participation lingered in the West, especially in rural areas, well into the nineteenth century and can still be found in rural cultures where premodern consciousness and traditions haven’t been completely snuffed out. But it began slowly to dry up in Israel after Moses and in Greece in the 5th century B.C., accelerated  at the time of the Renaissance, and culminated in the Enlightenment rationality and materialism of the 18th and 19th century. 

For Barfield these changes in human consciousness have not been religiously regressive despite the secularism that has accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as the Nietzscheans have come to think. The outer world as we think of it as just a complex pattern of atoms, has lost its ability to confer robust meaning. And that is as it should be, because so long as the world outside was perceived to be the source of all meaning and human beings were seen as passive receptors of that meaning, humans were living in a world in which their freedom could not come into full development. 

As humans emerged gradually out of original participation, their capacity for freedom grew. In Barfield’s view, the modern period marks a profoundly significant turning point in human history, because the human being has come into possession of his freedom in a way unprecedented in the history of the world. Everything depends on how he uses it in shaping what is to a remarkable extent an open-ended future. And everything depends on whether humans envision that future as shaped by the values of the Last Man or if he is able to develop a new possibility for a nobler kind of human being. There are three choices (with different variations) before us: the Last Man, the Superman, or the Logos bearer.  The fundamental purpose of this blog is to show how the last is not only a plausible option, but a necessary one. 

The Jews were the "Chosen" people because they were "given" the Law on Mt. Sinai.  The law is no longer out there on slabs of stone.  For the last 2000 years it has been working its way into the depths of our souls. It is the Logos that both resides within and which is the secret song which the entire cosmos sings.  It is therefore something that is out there, but our way to it is by first awakening to it within. And as that fire burns in one heart it has the power to enkindle it in another, and eventually this kindling will return to the earth, which has all but been drained of its life, back to the luminous, radiant, sacred being that she is.

The re-sacralizing the world is not something that will be given to us. It is a work that we must choose to undertake.  We are no longer passively evolving.  The entire future of the earth and its evolution is now in human hands and its future will be a future that humans choose for it.  Everything therefore depends on how we imagine the possibilities. 

And right now the Christian imagination of the future is not very robust because it is still hamstrung by its premodern self-understanding. The exile model--the heaven as final destination model--still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is  to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations. 

There is indeed a spiritual pleroma, and it is the source of all life and all goodness, but our job is not to get off the planet and into it, but to be the infusion point through which the spiritual pleroma can be injected into the earth thus effecting its transformation.  We are the infusion points through which the Logos lives into our death and thus renews the face of the earth.

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years.  We are only beginning to fathom the massive unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this wandering in the wilderness, this cultural winter through which we are now living, is a transitional experience, and that sooner or later we will either move back into Egypt or forward into Canaan (figuratively speaking--moving forward is always a movement toward Canaan).  Nazism was Germany's neo-pagan regression toward Egypt, and that tendency is an ever present temptation for all decadent western cultures.  When you don't see a clear way forward, there is always the inclination toward calcification (dogmatism/fundamentalism) or regression (primitivism/instinctualism). 

I've written extensively about my fears that the attitudes that lie behind the political popularity of the Bush administration are are rooted in both these tendencies.  The religious right toward calcification; the neocons toward the celebration of the primitive power impulse that longs for empire. And while we seem to be entering a phase in which the country is finally realizing the right's bankruptcy, we are still very vulnerable to other experiments in calcification and regression. 

This will remain true so long as some figurative Canaan, some way forward, remains something we cannot plausibly frame in our imaginations of the future. If you don't believe history has a meaning and that you have a responsibility in shaping it, then you collude with the bad guy's propaganda narrative, which is always about justifying its greed and compulsion to dominate. 

King Kong: Modernity & Its Discontents

Talking about having your cake and eating it too, check out this fascinating piece on NPR's Sunday Weekend Edition that puts King Kong in cultural context. It fits well with what I've been writing about the past week or so. Kong is the symbol of the ambivalence we feel toward the primitive past. It also sheds light on the persistence in American culture of guns and hunting. Is this about nostalgia or retrieval?  No easy answer to that. I'll address that issue in a future post. 

Retrieval

If there is one thing that can be said for certain about human beings it’s that they are ambivalent, conflicted, and contradictory. What they think and what they do more often than not has very little to do with one another, because human beings want to eat their cake and have it too. But often enough we choose one thing and don’t realize what we’ve lost until it’s gone. That’s the story of modernity in many ways. We choose freedom and we lose tradition; we choose science and we lose our natural sense for the sacred; we choose Wal-Mart, and we lose our towns and local, community-oriented businesses. 

We choose when we think there’s something to gain, but we always lose something, too. That’s just the way it works. But if the modern period, the time roughly marked out from 1500 to World War I, was primarily about rejecting the restrictions that came with an authoritarian, theocratic, feudal hierarchical society, the postmodern period will in large part be about retrieving what the modern period rejected, recovering what the moderns thought not worth keeping. But, and this is the important thing, it has to be done without at the same time losing the great modern values of freedom, individuality, critical consciousness, and innovation.

The idea that Americans are the freest people on earth is an essential part of American identity and central to its sense of national pride. Whether Americans are indeed freer than Swedes, Canadians, or Australians might make for an interesting bar-room discussion, but the important thing is that Americans embrace freedom and choice as their most cherished value. It trumps all other values. In the mainstream public imagination anything that constrains freedom is bad; anything that promotes it is good.

But as with anything, too much of a good thing becomes a problem. As Barry Schwartz argues in his book The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less, the presumption that the more choices people have the more free they feel and therefore the happier they will be is just not true. The psyche shorts out when it is confronted with too many choices, and this creates problems that are hard to see because it just seems counter-intuitive to believe that fewer choices would be better because fewer choices means less freedom. Having more choices can’t possibly be a reason behind anyone’s unhappiness.

But the problem with freedom as Americans understand it is that it promotes social fragmentation rather than community. When people have a choice, they do what they want. All things being equal, if the typical human being is given the choice between a bowl of spinach and a bowl of ice cream, the smart money will be on his choosing the ice cream. And the same dynamic applies when it comes to choosing between being free or being restricted by traditional norms and codes necessary for traditional community life—they’re going to choose individualism and freedom over community and restriction. Americans say they value community, and long for it. But that’s not how they behave.

The fragmentation that characterizes American social life is a direct result of people feeling dissatisfied with this or that lifestyle, religion, spouse, geographical location, political philosophy, value system, etc., and moving on to choose or create another one. Such a social dynamic promotes innovation, choice, change, but it shortchanges people in their need for depth, connection, warmth. The American choice-centered lifestyle has created a social world where more and more people are feeling isolated, disenfranchised, and lost. They don’t want to give up their freedom, but they don’t like feeling so disconnected. They may join communities for a while, but at best it’s a provisional arrangement. Sooner or later “it’s time to move on.”

The research shows us time and again that few Americans belong to stable, homogeneous communities. They participate in several, moving in and out between them. The center of gravity is not the community but the autonomous individual. In traditional societies, the community always comes first. In traditional cultures one’s sense of self, one’s values, one’s entire worldview is a given, a pre-established meaning framework that the individual has no choice about and it’s a framework that resists mightily any attempts to change it. Nothing could be more different from what mainstream American society has become.

This kind of social fragmentation that comes with a choice-centered lifestyle isn’t something that just happens out there in the public social world, but right at home and within more and more American families. How many families sit down and share the same meal? It’s just assumed that it’s better if everyone gets to choose what he or she wants rather than eat what everyone else is eating. If there are other choices available, what difference does it make if a frozen lasagna or a frozen enchilada gets microwaved. Nuke them both; let people have what they want. Or chances are, when the kids reach their teens, they’ll just fix what they want to eat for themselves when they’re hungry to eat it. No need even to sit down to eat together even if what everybody eats is different, people are increasingly inclined to graze all day according to their own eating rhythm.

How many middle-income families now have more than one television that gives different family members different options to watch the show of their choice   rather than to sit together and watch whatever’s on? With the enormous proliferation of channel choices, does anyone expect anymore that the water cooler conversation at work will be about a show that everyone saw the previous   evening? Sports these days seem to be the only kind of culture-wide event that has resisted this kind of choice-driven fragmentation of interests. And yet what could be more different than the worlds of the millionaire athletes and the fans who watch them?

Freedom and individuality have always been in a precarious balance with tradition and community. People want both, but the balance is hard to find, and in American culture since the sixties, there has been a greater-than-ever emphasis on freedom and liberation from the constraints of community and tradition. But as suggested above, we want to eat our cake and have it, too. But mostly we want to eat it, and when it’s gone we miss it. And we want it back, and some of us might romanticize how wonderful it would be to live in a traditional community, but when it comes down to it, few are willing to pay the price to live in one. Traditional communities are something people live in when they don’t have other options. The restraint and discipline required to live in them are the opposite of what most Americans think they need to live freely and happily. It’s like most people’s response to public transit. Great idea, but not for me. Takes too much time, too many limitations on one's freedom.

This is not a conflict that began in the 1970s; it’s been a long time in the making, at least for five hundred years in the West, and it’s what scares the spit out of traditionalist Muslims, because they see that as soon as the choice-centered lifestyle typical of Americans and other Westerners gets a toehold in their traditional societies, goodbye tradition, goodbye community, goodbye everything that they hold sacred. Because the mullahs know that the West is offering their people ice cream, and their traditional spinach dish can’t compete. It would take enormous personal discipline or group cohesiveness to resist. No wonder they think of us as the Great Satan.

Resistance will occur here and there, but in the long run, maybe even as soon as the end of this century, traditional cultures will all but have disappeared. This assumes there won’t be some cataclysmic ecological, political, or economic catastrophe that could send us all back to the Dark Ages, but it will otherwise be a gradual generation by generation global transformation. Why the inevitability? Because choice-centered societies and tradition-centered societies are completely antithetical, and the more choices people in the developing world are given, the more quickly will their traditional way of life be destroyed. The temptation to eat something other than spinach will be too strong. In the long run these local traditional cultures merge into what looks like it will be a global fusion culture.

I think that a key theme to frame at least one aspect of the changing American lifestyle is the idea that as the developing world modernizes, the modern world   will be "pre-modernizing." This is what I mean by retrieval.  Americans, while they cherish their freedom, also feel that something is missing. This profound longing in certain precincts of the American soul to restore this “something” that has been lost is explored in an interesting way in Tom Cruise’s recent film, The Last Samurai. Cruise plays Nathan Aldren, an American ex-Civil War and Indian Wars veteran hired by the Japanese government in 1876 to modernize/westernize its army. He’s portrayed as a fearless a warrior who nevertheless feels the need to drink away his shame because of his participation in a My-Lai-like massacre of innocents during the Indian Wars.

His story is one of finding his soul and restoring his honor after spending time in captivity with the Samurai tribal leader, Katsumoto. During his captivity he was forced cold-turkey to stop his drinking and to eat his spinach; he found out it wasn’t half bad, and he chose to keep eating it. He’s someone who recognized that there were refreshing spiritual depths in this ancient traditional culture that he had been asked to destroy. So, like Lawrence of Arabia, he goes native, and  becomes its defender.

This is ultimately a story meant to contrast the nobility of the chivalric, premodern warrior vs. the mechanized, soul-less affair that modern warfare was becoming, but it’s really about so much more than that. The entire dramatic movement of the film is driven by Aldren’s longing to recover what the modern   world no longer affords, and which the film suggests can only be found in a traditional way of life. 

The film illustrates the urge for “retrieval.” Retrieval runs parallel to the historic dynamic that’s driving change in the developing world. As the developing world modernizes, people in the developing world seek to retrieve and preserve what is being lost—to "pre-modernize", but in a post-modern idiom.

People born today into traditional societies don’t have any choice about it, but as they become increasingly aware of other options available to them, most if given the choice will choose to modernize. Though cultural conservatives would like to, Americans can’t go back to a tradition-structured society in which the culture is a unified world of pre-established traditional meanings. You can't go home again, in this sense of the phrase.

A choice-centered culture cannot coexist with a tradition-centered culture   except insofar as the former tolerates the latter as subculture, like the Amish,  Hutterites, or Hassids are tolerated in the U.S. American conservatives who extol free-market capitalism while at the same time excoriating American society’s loss of traditional social norms are astonishingly naïve in their assumption that the two can go together. They never have and they never will. It’s just another case of wanting to have your cake and eating it, too. But somehow or another this is a tension that must be resolved.

Because while there is no possibility of the mainstream culture returning to a traditional way of life, the longing that drove Cruise’s Nathan Aldren to make his choice is one that resonates with many Americans. For they long for what was lost in modernity’s destruction of the traditional. The option that is still left open to Americans is “retrieval,” which is like Nathan Aldren’s choice for the traditional, but instead of going to where there is a traditional culture, you retrieve the parts of a traditional culture you admire and bring them here to where you are—you integrate elements of the traditional into a contemporary, post-modern, post-secular, choice-centered lifestyle.  And in time a consensus will develop about what is worth retrieving and what is not.

In other words, as cultures in the developing world modernize, there will be a continued and probably increasing interest among Americans and others in the already-developed world to retrieve the premodern elements in those cultures that are being lost. We see it already in the increased interest in Asian religions, martial arts, Chinese medicine, shamanic ritual, in the celebration of aboriginal art forms. I’d argue that the body piercing, tattooing, rap, raves, fight clubs, street gangs, and any number of trends popular among the young are driven by this longing to retrieve the cake that earlier generations ate. They are all driven by the longing to break out of the anonymity and isolation which a society that overemphasizes freedom has created. And they seek relief in primitive traditional forms whose origins more often than not lie in premodern cultures.

In the short run this is an eclectic, often superficial, syncretistic, trendy cultural phenomenon. But the longing behind it is real. And this blog is about exploring what it means for religious and political life. For it is, when everything lines up in the right way, which it may or may not do, the basic social dynamic for renaissance.  For retrieval is an essential social dynamic driving any renaissance, large or small.

 

Modernity & the Loss of Soul

Modernity is, among other things, the story of the gradual shriveling up of that sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The common name used to describe this story is secularization, but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred years. My goal here is not to lament what we have lost. The social conservatives’ are naive if they think we can find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice. I will make an argument elsewhere that we are moving into a post-secular era, and this movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern Age. Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing. 

But the conservative program is essentially nostalgic, and its strategies that focus on prayer in schools or other religious practices in public places will not solve the problem. Such strategies derive from a significant underestimation of how deeply secularized we have become. Yes, surely, our public institutions and political discourse have become profoundly secularized, but even more significant has been the degree to which our cognitive/perceptual capacity has become secularized as well.  Secularization has affected not just our institutions and public discourse, but also the very way we experience the world. It affects what we see or don’t see in nature, in other people, in the everyday world that surrounds us in our homes and workplaces. Our public, secular language is an honest reflection of our secular experience. Just changing the language won’t change the experience. The cultural shift into a post-secular idiom is already underway.  But we need first to understand where we are and how we got here.

It has often been noted that we Moderns in the West have developed what is fundamentally a mechanomorphic imagination of reality. The world has lost its numinous quality, its ability to enchant. We see it now as a big machine—as something interesting and complex and full of unanswered questions about how it works, but we have a very hard time thinking about it in terms other than as something machine-like. And in some quarters of the culture there is serious talk about how the human being is evolving into something evermore machinelike.  We see this reflected particularly in contemporary film. Cyborgs are everywhere.

But we moderns also believe that our mechanomorphic view of the world is an accurate reflection of the way it really is.  Any talk, for instance, that suggests that the earth is our Mother, as has become popular in New Age and ecological circles, seems dotty and overly sentimental.  And yet for people in an earlier age, this was their reality.  That the earth was a godlike being was as obvious to them as the law of gravity is to us. The gods and goddesses were everywhere inhabiting and animating the streams and forests and mountains, and the modern sensibility finds it impossible to believe this experience of the world was ever anything more than the product of the over-fertile imaginations of a primitive people still living in a dreamworld.  For moderns this is the mentality of children who have not yet awakened to the way things really are—the way the enlightened, rational modern sees them. But maybe the truth is that moderns have fallen asleep to a world that premoderns were awake in. We are hyper-aware of things and the mechanics of things, but oblivious of the kind of spiritual activity that permeates things and gives them their life.

So to say that meaning has collapsed does not of course mean that there is no meaning; it is simply to recognize that the public world into which we have been acculturated has been stripped of any possibility of there being sacred meanings. All that is left to us are the husks of things, and when we look at these husks we see only their physicality, and so our questions about them become limited to their mechanics and how they work. And so one is left with the world as a machine, and if one asks what this machine is for, the only answer that makes sense is for our economic and entertainment uses. In such a world, what is there to hope for but better bread and better circuses? 

The old religious answers to that question have come to seem incredible because the language in which they were developed was steeped in an experience of the world in which the sacred was a part of everyone’s common experience. If for moderns it doesn’t make sense to talk about the spirits who animate nature, how can it make sense to talk about the sacraments, or transubstantiation, or apparitions, or the communion of saints?  These words are labels for experiences common to the premodern consciousness. To use such language meaningfully assumes a kind of everyday experience of the sacred and of a sense of intimate connection with mostly invisible worlds. In a world that moderns have come to experience everyday as a machine, such language just doesn’t work. It’s too much at odds with our ordinary understanding of how things are.   

And so as the sense for the sacred as a common experience diminished during the modern era, so did meaning. Surely people find ways to give their lives meaning; but these meanings have no robust transcendent reference or validation. Meaning as something given from out there has progressively diminished over the last five hundred years.  Meaning has become more and more what we make it. We live in a Potemkin village of "public" meanings, for what lies behind them is simply the void.  Meaning is not "given" out there; meaning is what we project into the world from within. This is now a commonplace idea with which every Freshman in college is familiar. It's at the heart of what conservatives object to when they talk about moral relativism. But conservatives do not offer a way forward; their only answer is to look backward with nostalgia to a time when things were less "relative," when what was given by tradition was accepted without question.

This is why, in my opinion, Nietzsche is the eye of the needle through which any way forward must pass.  He didn’t persuade the culture that human existence was essentially absurd.  He simply saw with greater clarity than most others what had happened in the West, and drew out the logical consequences. I see him much as I described Gregory House in my Purgatorio Man post several weeks ago. He strips us of our illusions, and requires that if we are to move forward honestly we must do so on terms that are chosen in freedom, not given by tradition.

His absurdist metaphysical narrative is an articulation of our era's dark night of the soul, a dark night through which we must all pass if we are to mature spiritually. The mother's milk of tradition is no longer proferred. We have to stand on our own. Nietzsche's was such an attempt to walk in freedom--a failed attempt, but a noble one nevertheless. His is not by any means the last word, but it is  a word that must be heard and absorbed if we are to find an honest way forward.

Nietzsche was nauseated by the modern experience and by the kind of soulless human being it was creating.  A part of him was the nostalgic conservative classics scholar who wanted things to go back to the way they were in a Golden Age.  But for him the world of public given meaning as it had been defined by the Christian West no longer made sense.  And so now humans had  two choices that led to false consciousness: either to continue in religious beliefs that simply could not be held by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty; or to revert to Last-Man, bread-and-and-circus meanings.

He thought both were forms of slavishness insofar as they were founded on a fundamental gesture of the soul toward unfreedom.  He recognized that there are no possibilities for transcendence within the closed circle of the world as he felt any intellectually honest person had to see it. But he insisted that even in a world that was metaphysically meaningless, the human being nevertheless had to find a way to aspire to be something “more.”  The human being is hardwired for self-transcendence, whether we like it or not.  But toward what does that transcending point?

He saw as his philosophical task to find a way to affirm that in a world where nothing is given to him—in a world where all a human being has is his own freedom and will and the inner resources of his soul—to achieve nobility by self-overcoming.  If there is no transcendence out there, then transcendence is something that one must find within.  And so “self-transcending” becomes its own goal.  There is no heaven or future afterlife reward of any sort. The human being’s dignity and nobility lie in his refusal of such fantasies and in refusing to surrender to any meanings except those of his own making. Such a human being he called the uebermensch, translated sometimes as the ‘superman’, but more accurately as the ‘overman’.  But really what he meant was the ‘overcoming man’.

I think Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the problem was essentially correct; and his solution, while it had a tremendous cultural impact during the twentieth century for good and ill, points to a truth about human nature and human aspiration that is only part of the story. The human being is truly an “overcoming man,” and I would agree with Nietzsche and his disciple Sartre that the deepest dignity of the human being lies in his unconditional freedom, and I would agree that the assertion of this freedom is at the heart of what makes the human being in his thinking and in his willing the remarkable and unique creature that he is.  But the human being is in fact so much more.  And the absurdist narrative central to the Nietzschean metaphysics is not the only one in which such an affirmation of radical human freedom is possible. There is also a Christian possibility.

Check "Philosphers, Artists, Saints," "The Twilight of the Secular,"and  "Getting Beyond the Secular" for three other essays I've written on Neitzschean themes. 

Dying Traditions

NPR ran a story this morning about the Islenos of St. Bernard Parish in New Orleans.  They are people the Spaniards brought over from the Canary Islands in pre-Napoleonic times to settle and defend this northeastern outpost of their American empire. The report was essentially an elegy to a dying traditional American subculture. It is now moribund because the delta wetland upon which the Islenos people depended for their livelihood as crabbers and shrimpers has been gradually destroyed, Katrina being the latest blow.

They are one of those rare subcultures that found a way to maintain a living tradition as the world around them modernized. It is not yet a zombie tradition. The culture has to die first for it to become that. A culture goes zombie when people won't let it rest in peace but try to keep the body moving once it has lost its soul. To stay alive, most traditional cultures must maintain a living connection to the land or the sea. There are exceptions--the urban subcultures of Hasidic Jews come to mind--but they are pretty unusual these days in America. And it looks doubtful that the Islenos will survive for much longer. Too much works against it.

Living traditions survive in the U.S. only so long as they can resist acculturation into the larger modern American milieu. The economic pressures working to break down such subcultures are terrific. And it is more than likely that the next generation of Islenos will think of themselves as Islenos as much as I think of myself as Irish. They will have lost their connection to the land and its culture just as much as my family has done: Ireland is in my name.  It's there in the background, but it no longer has any real defining power for my identity. It has very little shaping influence in the way I live my life.

It might even be said that Ireland has very little shaping influence in the way the typical educated, urban Dubliner lives now. Other cultural influences, for better or worse, that have very little to do with Irish history, religion, and customs have severely eroded what it means to be Irish, even for the people who live there. The urban Dubliner has more in common with the urban Parisian or New Yorker than he has with the Irish-speaking farmer in the Gaeltacht. When you become a modern, you lose touch with the  living tradition--you step out of it, and you might retain some of the tradition as a matter of habit, but you no longer are sustained by the tradition as something that nourishes in a deeply satisfying way. It no longer composes the warp and woof of one's soul.

Some might argue that the Italian, Irish, Polish neighborhoods of New York, Boston, or Chicago contradict my argument. And I would agree that traditionally ethnic cultures once thrived there, but such cultures are now for the most part moribund. Take the fairly typical example of my wife's family's experience. She came from a working-class neighborhood in the Bronx that was mostly Irish. Her grandmother, however, was a Siciliana who came to Italian Harlem when she was eighteen, was matched up with a husband whose Italian dialect she could not understand, eventually moved to an an Italian neighborhood in the Bronx in which she never had to speak English, and she never did. When we romanticize traditional cultures, we have to remember that tradition has very little respect for freedom and individuality. The group comes first, and you obey the group authorities and comply obediently with its customs. There is a form for everything. There is a way that things are done, and to deviate from form is considered ignorant and barbaric, even if there are good reasons to do it.

This Italian subculture in which my wife's mother grew up still persists in the Bronx, but it's not what it used to be.  Such neighborhoods are celebrated in Martin Scorcese's films. Raging Bull, for instance, was about my mother-in-law's neighborhood when she was a young adult. She is very nice woman, but she is  someone who simply cannot operate if required to think on her own. There is a way things are done, and her job is to learn how to do it as prescribed. She still retained a tribal mentality, even though she chose a life that required that she move beyond it.

My mother-in-law is a typical of the second generation in such immigrant families--neither here nor there.  She wanted independence--she married outside the tribe--but she couldn't pull it off because she couldn't free herself from the tribal mentality of her family. Her husband, usually referred to by my mother-in-law's family as "the German," had no real individuality. He was simply someone who was "not one of us." My mother-in-law paid a price for her one, bold stab at freedom, and so did her husband, because she was never able to really cut herself off from her family, and the family never accepted him. 

Today, that neighborhood is still Italian, but it is moribund Italian. It's still a place where the kids try to find homes to live near their parents. But my wife couldn't get away quick enough. Her mother, for instance, didn't want her to go to college.  "People like us don't go to college," she told her. But what her mother really feared was losing her daughter, because once you leave a world like that by going to college, you join the "white people's world," you're changed, and you can never really come back into the older world with  the "first naivete" that is necessary to live in it unselfconsciously.

And my wife did not go back. She lived in Europe for several years, and after we were married in New York, it was her idea to move to Seattle. She couldn't put enough distance between herself and her mother. She needed the distance because the tribal pull was still pretty strong in her, too. But given the choice between freedom and the deeply felt need to live one's own life, on the one hand, and the choice to live within the restrictions of a moribund tradition, she, like most healthy, spirited people, chose freedom. Unless there is something that still lives in the tradition that nourishes the soul in self-evident ways, most normal people choose to leave rather than to stay, if the choice is open to them.

That's the problem with most European ethnic communities in the U.S. now. They are at best running on fumes and are living a twilight existence that fails to deeply nourish. I see it in my Asian students here in Seattle as well. I was talking to bright, lively Korean girl today about how conflicted she feels about loyalty to her family and her hatred of the restrictions and patriarchal customs that she has to live out because they are antithetical to the kind of American woman she wants to become.

So people like her, as my wife did, leave the comforting but restrictive womb of their families' culture to seek their fortune in the wide, wide world. But then something interesting happens. Very often, even if they were very successful in the "outside" world, they find that something is missing--that the outside world lacks soul. And so they return to the old thing, but it no longer nourishes; it can't because in most cases it’s dying. People who insist on staying in the dead thing are those who live in a kind of zombie traditionalism.

Zombie traditionalism is born of a longing for something that has been lost, and a hope that behind the forms there's a life that can nourish, but there's not. You can't go home again because there were good reasons for leaving it in the first place. One chooses to go back sometimes for lack of anything better.

So this morning while listening to one of the Katrina-displaced Islenos women interviewed on NPR, I was moved by her obvious, deeply felt pain. It was the pain of the exile. It was the pain of the Russian émigré, whose very soul withers because it has been disconnected from the soil of Mother Russia. She was like a native American being asked to move to a reservation. After Katrina, she has been prohibited from moving back to St. Bernard Parish, and like so many other New Orleanais, it's not clear when or whether she ever will be able to move back.

She spoke poignantly about how it's the only life she knows, how her parents and grandparents and all her ancestors lived and worked there. And I feel badly for her.  For here's the tragedy:  Now she has to live like the rest of us in a culture that has lost its traditional culture soul. That's a boat that's long left the dock for the rest of us. The challenge now is not to live in a culture where soul is given, but somehow, out of our own interior freedom to re-ensoul the world and in doing so to renew the face of the earth. 

Zombie Traditionalism III

What we all want is life. And this discussion about living vs. zombie traditionalism is really a discussion about how culture helps us to live or gets in the way of our living well.  A vibrant culture is one in which people are alive--deeply, richly alive. Not just physically healthy, but alive in the soul, and alive in the spirit. Is zombie traditionalism alive?  Well kind of, if being undead is a kind of being alive. But none of us looks at that as the real thing, the kind of life that we most deeply long for.

Anybody who has traveled in a third-world country knows that, despite the poverty most of them live in, the people there are alive in a way that people who live in modern, secular societies are not.  On the physical level they are poor, but on the soul level they are rich. There is something in their not-yet modern culture that animates and ensouls them in a way that we moderns and postmoderns no longer experience. It's this impoverishment of soul that most characterizes modern societies, and our having soul or lacking soul is not something that is an individual psychological characteristic; it's a culture-wide characteristic with individual variations.

Spirit is not the same as soul. You can be poor on both the physical and soul levels and still be spiritually rich. I've been fortunate enough to meet some rare individuals whose saintliness directly correlated with an asceticism of body and soul. Asceticism is the willful deprivation of life on the physical and soul levels in order to be radically open to the spiritual. Certain rare individuals can choose it as their life's commitment. And I would also say that the rest of us have times during our lives when we need to dry out, so to speak, and a temporary asceticism is healthful in such situations. In other words, I think asceticism has its place, but it's not something you can build a culture around. 

Attempts to do so are almost always humanly disastrous. There is a certain type of pinched Christianity that has assumed that the ascetic model as socially normative for the culture at large, that your success as a human being is somehow linked to your poverty on the physical and soul levels. The kind of joyless Puritanism that prohibits dancing, alcohol, and frivolity of any sort is a form of misplaced asceticism. And enforced celibacy among Catholics is another.

I'm not against celibacy. I've known lots of people who have amply demonstrated that a well-lived celibate life is possible, but there is a tendency within Catholicism that is rooted in this idealization of asceticism that really values celibacy as the higher and more deeply spiritual calling, and that's just nuts. And it's this tendency that I'm convinced is at the root of the Church's resistance to married priests. There is no better example of zombie traditionalism in action than the attitude for many conservative Catholics who would look at married priests, if there ever were any, as inferior. No one would say that the Eastern Orthodox Churches lack spiritual seriousness, and yet they've figured this out. Celibacy should be an option that people called to it can choose as a special vocation within the orders--but the Church's refusal to budge on this with regard to the priests in parish ministry is as out of touch with the reality on the ground as Bush's policies in Iraq have been. It is the product of the kind of bubble thinking that might have some idealism in it, but has no soul life. It's obtuse on the level of soul.

But most of us are obtuse in matters of the soul. That's our dilemma. I for one don't claim any special soul qualities. I'm about as dull-souled as they come. But I think I understand the nature of the problem, and that saves me from utter obtuseness, and shedding one's obtuseness is the first step toward developing an effective solution. Because the traditionalist solution that tends toward an unbalanced spirituality is not a solution. The secularist postmodern solution, which since Freud tends toward a celebration of the instinctual life, is not a solution. 

Our instinctual life and our spiritual life are two components in what make us human, but they live in an uncomfortable tension with one another. We are neither animals nor angels; we are humans, and that means that who we are is woven out of the angel and animal parts of our being.  And the place where that weaving takes place is the soul. And this weaving, I believe, is at the heart of what the human task is, and it is a redemptive task.

***

Ernest Becker in his book The Denial of Death does one of the best jobs I know of in describing this awful tension between the spiritual and the instinctual in the human being. This has always been true for human beings, but for  historically peculiar reasons, we postmoderns suffer the tension with particular intensity at this time because we are afflicted by Missing Middle Syndrome--we're all head and genitals, intellect and instinct, and and are impoverished when it comes to the middle, connecting element, which is soul. This is the price we have paid for being modern--the drying up of the middle. 

I don't think this is necessarily a bad thing, so long as it is understood as a transitional stage, a temporary wandering in the wilderness between Egypt and Canaan. Because now soul is no longer given to us as our birth right as it is in premodern traditional cultures; it's something we have to create or weave out of the materials given to us from our spiritual and instinctual lives.

This is for me the most important thing to understand, and in my view it's the central cultural task for the coming century. This kind of thing is being done all around us without our recognizing it for what it is. My goal here is not to promote a program, but to understand what's going on, and in this I am influenced here by Owen Barfield, whose short book Saving the Appearances had an enormous impact on me early on, to a point where I don't know how much of my thinking is his and how much is mine. It was one of those books that when I read it it's as if he was telling me something I already knew.  And I have read no more plausible explanation for our current crisis of soul, nor one that is more hopeful about pointing a direction toward its resolution.   

Zombie Traditionalism II

For me the most important cultural divide is not between east and west or north and south, but between premodern and modern. In a premodern culture people live for the most part in a 'given' world and in a modern culture in a chosen world--or at least in a world where choices are forced upon them in a way they are not in premodern societies.

The zombie traditionalist who haunts modern societies is in effect a premodern wannabe. Such a one longs to live in an earlier era when the world would have been delivered to him as an indisputable given with a universally accepted cosmic order. No choices, no confusion; no fuss, no muss. In a genuinely premodern traditional society, there are no alternative cultures or "value systems" recognized as valid--we in our tribe are the "human beings"; everyone else is the "barbarian" Other.  Authority lies only in that which has been given by the ancestors.

It's no longer possible or appropriate to live in such a given world. There is no going back to it. But this kind of nostalgia for something that once was alive is the ghostly spirit than animates zombie traditionalism. This kind of traditionalism clings to the dead form of the old thing thinking that it preserves something valuable. It's like propping up the corpse of the heirless king in his throne for fear of the chaos that will ensue when it becomes known that the old regime has ended and no clear successor has emerged.

This plays out in dozens of different ways. For instance, I believe the objection of the zombie traditionalist to homosexual marriage/civil unions is not primarily a religious or spiritual issue. It has more to do with propping up the dead king. It's about their fear of moral and cultural chaos if the old order is no longer something they can rely on. The issue for them is not whether these "sodomites" are all going to hell, but whether the society is going to hell. Because if society goes to hell, then everybody goes to hell. For them the social order has to mirror the cosmic moral order. That's how it is in premodern societies. So the zombie traditionalist sees gays and lesbians as the latest agents of modernity’s campaign to destroy what remains of the social/cosmic order given to them by the ancestors.

They fear that the whole society is being dragged into hell, which is for them tabooless, normless chaos. Zombie traditionalists don't really care about the tradition; they care about social order--an order with as little real freedom in it as possible. For without a strictly normed social order, they don’t know who they are or how they should act. All of that has to be given or prescribed for them. So whenever you hear a right winger talk about freedom, you can assume that all it means to him is the freedom to go hunting, to go out and play at being an aborigine, a hunter, and not the nine-to-five drone he otherwise feels himself to be.

The zombie traditionalists feel like cornered animals whose territory in that corner is continuously shrinking. They see themselves as an endangered species, and now they are lashing back, fighting for their survival. On the subrational level, the backlash that began with the Reagan presidency represented the revenge of the zombies. And they have taken the mainstream culture by surprise because the mainstream never took them and their worldview seriously. They've been for them a laughing stock since the Scopes trial.

For the past five hundred years, especially in the West, humans have been struggling to find the balance between the individual, his freedom, and his rights on the one hand, and society, its norms, rituals, and obligations on the the other. But when forced to choose one or the other when the two conflicted, the more interesting and creative people, the culture shapers, chose the former, and so the scale in the West has always tipped toward freedom and the individual. The Catholic, premodern, group-centered or tribal mentality lingered into the modern era, but the individualist spirit of Protestantism dominated.

The cultural historical dynamic that drove the conflict between Catholics and Protestants 500 years ago is the same dynamic that characterizes the conflict between the premodern tribalism of Islamist radicals and the individualism of the West now. It's been often pointed out that Islamist extremism has little to do with Islam and almost everything to do with the preservation of tribal and cultural identity. The same dynamic is at work in the conflict between the mentality of the red and blue-districts. The second group in each of these pairings is, relative to the first, more individual and choice oriented. The first group in relation to the second is more group, authority, and ritual oriented.

Those in the second, modernist group see themselves as heroic, cosmopolitan individualists and see the premoderns as frightened, naive bumpkins. Those in the traditionalist group, insofar as they have retained some sense of the living tradition, see modernists as the American Indians saw the white man--as people who have no understanding, people who have become crazy and disoriented, people who have lost their souls because in their uprooted individualism they have lost any experiential connection to the sacred cosmos. Those few who have managed to maintain connection to a truly living tradition see themselves as people who understand the deeper interrelatedness of things, an interrelatedness that is celebrated in the rituals that the modernists judge to be irrational and meaningless. The living traditionalists see the modernists as having shriveled souls, as people who have been rendered incapable of responding to a mystery in things that is to them self-evident, beyond proving or disproving.

But living traditionalists are hard to find these days; the zombie traditionalists are more common, and they are as incapable or responding to the mystery in things as the modernists are. I'm not saying that there is no one who is a genuine living traditionalist today, even in America. But there is no future in this kind of traditionalism. It's drying up wherever in the world it might still live. We have to find another way to the sacred; it's no longer something that is just given by the culture as a gift. It's gone into hiding, and we have to search it out. The mystery in things is still there, but it's something we all as individuals have to discover for ourselves. It's not something that can be found in the traditional forms. But that isn't to say that the traditional forms have to be swept away; they have to be resurrected from the dead. But first we have to recognize that they are dead.

So there's a part of me that connects with the traditionalism of the first group because it points to something that we must retrieve, but it's not something we can pretend to have by imitating the traditional practices that celebrate it--that only leads to zombie traditionalism.  A living traditionalism is supple, adaptive, sacramental; a zombie traditionalism is brittle, rigid, non-adaptive--all mechanics and form, no life. 

The point is that in the U.S., and increasingly in the other developed countries, living traditionalism is increasingly rare because the social institutions--the cultural habitats--in which these traditions flourished are being destroyed. Those traditions have not been able to adapt quickly enough to the onslaught of changes that have accompanied advancements in technology and the the disorienting effects of affluence with its dizzying array of choices that increase exponentially with each passing decade.

So sure, there are still lots of people with traditional values, but they are disembodied traditional values. I consider myself to be a traditionalist in the sense of someone who knows that what premoderns know (or knew) is real and immensely valuable, even if it is for the most part inaccessible to me. But when I am with zombie traditionalists, I feel suffocated and depressed, and I look for any excuse to get away from them.

I am amused when people talk about creating “new” traditions. I know what they mean, but probably the word ‘ritual’ would be more accurate. And I think that creating new rituals is really what needs to be done. We need rituals that will en-soul our life together again. But if a ritual is eventually to become a culture-wide tradition, it cannot be arbitrary. It has to resonate deeply. It has to have a kind of “authority,” or it’s just cast to the side as soon as people tire of it or as some other behavior presents itself as more compelling.

In other words effective rituals arise in response to deeply felt needs, and they have to work. They have to satisfy the need, and they have to be more satisfying than the “unhealthy” behaviors people are inclined toward without them. So the question for me is whether in this fragmented social environment in this time in our history the creation of such “new traditions” is even remotely possible. I doubt it.

***

I don't know for sure, but for me the ideas of retrieval and second naiveté offers a clue as to what must be done. Both ideas come from Paul Ricoeur, a French philosopher of religion that I read years ago as an undergraduate. I’m not sure I’m using these terms precisely in the way he does, but I want to use them to point to an important distinction between the reality of living in a premodern traditionalist society and the development of the kind of second-naivete traditionalism that I think must emerge in a post-secular future.

In premodern societies where everything is a given, you have “first naiveté.” You simply accept uncritically the world as the ancestors have passed it on to you. With the coming of critical consciousness, (Socrates being its first significant practitioner) you start questioning the assumptions on which naive consciousness is based, and inevitably you lose your naive faith that the way things are defined as “given” is more of a social construction than what the things are in themselves. We begin to understand to what degree our experience of the world as a whole is a social construction. 

And some have concluded that it is therefore a groundless construction hovering over a meaningless void. That's not too far from the Hindu understanding of maya and what I think Christians mean by original sin. The difference between postmodernist nihilism and the post-secularist understanding of the world I'm trying to work with is that the post secularist believes that there is something behind the social construction. There is a There there, even if our perception of it is severely obstructed. And it's to that There that we all must find our way. It is no longer something given to us, we must choose to search it out. 

Modern critical consciousness is good at saying No, and Nihilism is the No taken to its extreme. But I will not accept No for an answer. This No masquerades as existential courage, but I see it as laziness, a refusal to keep looking. And so in order for it to be possible to say a deeply resounding Yes, one finds that he must go back and revisit the world as it was presented to naive consciousness, but now with “second naiveté.” This does not mean 'going native', i.e., reverting to first naiveté.  It does mean opening up to or becoming vulnerable to the There, that was self-evidently "given" to the kind of consciousness that possessed first-naivete.  The trick is to do it in freedom and without losing critical consciousness. This is the postmodern cultural challenge--rediscovering what has been lost, remembering what has been forgotten.

My hunch is, and that’s all it is, a hunch—that if “new traditions” are to be created, they will not have enough ballast or resonance unless they are in one way or another the retrieval of older, previously rejected traditions and rituals, but now adapted to our very different circumstances.

See also Zombie Traditionalism i, Zombie Traditionalism III and "Dying Traditions".

Zombie Traditionalism I

Liberation fever is not new; it's at the heart of the Modern impulse. It started with the Reformation, progressed through the Enlightenment, and ultimately manifested in the liberation movements of our own era. The modern spirit from its earliest manifestation has always been a movement to shuck off the constraints of the traditional premodern social system. The black liberation movement, the women's liberation movement, and now the gay liberation movement are all perfectly consistent within this fundamental liberationist logic of modernity.

They are all assaults on traditional constraints. And conservative establishment resistance to the demands of blacks, women, or gays has always been rooted in arguments to preserve traditional social forms and traditional morality. And these arguments were also always accompanied by predictions of social chaos if these groups were given what they asked for. But in the modern era traditional logic always loses to modern logic sooner or later. The custom ("the way we have always done things around here") argument always loses to the rights argument when basic fairness is at stake. And the fairness' argument should defeat the 'custom' argument.

But here's where it gets tricky, because many people on the right think that the culture's surrendering to the demands of blacks, women, and gays is directly responsible for the destruction of the traditional American way of life. They are not. On the surface there might seem to be some merit to this argument, but traditional America was already dead by the time any of these movements got any traction, and the liberationist left didn't kill it. Free-market, consumer capitalism did.

Consumer capitalism is the end result of another kind of liberation movement whose origins lie in the sixteenth century and are linked the emergence of the Protestant bourgeoisie as a driving force in science, politics, and commerce. This new class wanted to be free of the stultifying constraints of state-centered mercantilism. They pushed for the laissez-faire approach that would let the market dictate the direction of the economy instead of the king dictating it. The new class gradually won that fight, and in the late 1700s the enormous economic energies that produced the industrial revolution were released. And during the 1800s we saw the enormous growth of industrial capitalism and with it a ravaging of traditional social arrangements as the economic center of gravity shifted from the manor to the factory.

The American Civil War pitted the new modern forces of industrial capitalism against the forces that shaped a tradition-centered agricultural, hierarchical society. Traditional forces sooner or later always lose to the forces of modernity, but that doesn't mean that the traditionalists go down without a good fight. The Southern Confederacy showed a ferocity in defense of its culture and mores that ultimately proved futile. The recent Tom Cruise film, The Last Samurai, explores this same theme of a soulful traditionalism losing to the relentless, machine-powered forces of the new industrial state in Japan of the 1870s. The same dynamic is working now in the Middle East.

But even as late as the 1890s about 90% of Americans still derived their livelihood from farming and agriculture-related businesses. And traditional American culture was rocked by economic turmoil in agriculture that eventually led to the destructito of the family farm as the basic institution in which traditional values thrived in a genuine way. And a formidable political counterbalance to the soul-deadening encroachments of industrial capitalism came from rural America where Populism became a political force in the 1890s.

The rest of the culture benefited from the continuity of American traditionalism in the rural heartland. Whatever else may have been going on in the cities or the factories, the heartland was there as a kind of ballast for a few decades more. But living American traditionalism was destroyed by first the ravages of the Great Depression in the 1930s and the mechanization of agriculture in the 1950s, which led to the capital-intensive agriculture that gradually killed off the family farm. Without the family farm, there is no institution that preserves the genuine living American traditionalism of which I speak.

Traditions need thriving, living institutions and a way of life through which the tradition is passed from generation to generation. The death of the family farm and the traditional way of life associated with it is the main cause of the the death of a living American traditionalism. People like Wendell Berry and other Agrarians have tried to keep that tradition alive, but it's a largely futile effort, and yet a kind of not-quite-dead form of traditionalism still lingers in the red, mostly rural red districts throughout the country. I'm not saying people there don't lead decent, thoughtful, virtuous lives, but they don't do it because they are traditionalists, and they don't do it any better than urban Americans. Both rural and urban Americans are living in a world turned upside down since 1860, and I just reject the idea that rural Americans are somehow more authentic as custodians of living American traditional values. 

Preserving this kind of traditionalism in America is like the Irish trying to preserve Gaelic language. It's more of head trip than the preservation of something still living. It doesn't really live because there is no natural habitat to support it. Sure people talk about traditional values, but the point I'm trying to make is that these are zombie traditional values. They no longer inhere in a living tradition or thriving cultural habitat. The traditionalism of movement conservatives manifests in twitching, wraithe-like cultural forms and values that might provide a sense of order and meaning, but are themselves soulless.

Living tradition is in sherds in America. It was shattered by the spirit of consumer capitalism. It has been replaced by the kind of zombie traditionalism that typifies the right-wing Wal-Mart mentality, a company that spouts traditional values while at the same time destroying the habitat of small, family-owned businesses in which those values thrived.  And, yes, we need to pick up some of the pieces and use them to assemble something new, but this idea that we must preserve a traditional way of life in America is like a traditional East Indian father who insists that his Americanized daughter marry the husband of his choice when she's in love with someone else. Arranged marriages can work in a cultural habitat in which the whole society supports it, but they can't in modern and postmodern cultures where the individual and his or her freedom, for better or worse, is the paramount cultural value. More on the freedom theme in Zombie Traditionalism II