After the Future

Freedom's Paradox

The following is a slightly adapted repost of a piece I put up in early 2006.  It's another layer, and I want to work with it in relationship with some of the other things I've been trying to articulate about Christian eschatology.

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I think that freedom is best understood as a paradox.  We human beings are actors improvising on a stage where the possibilities truly are infinite, but as one makes concrete choices, other possibilities are grayed out; they become unavailable. So the very exercise of freedom involves a quantitative reduction of possibilities, and yet it's only by the movement out of possibility into actuality that we become truly free. Our free acts require that we become the prisoner of our choices. But restriction on the horizontal dimension of our lives creates the possibility for expansion on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth, interiority, grace and spiritual freedom.  And as vertical freedom increases, we find in it the power for a renewed relationship to what had been the grayed-out horizontal world.

Let me come at it from a different direction. Recently I saw a local production of Chekhov’s Three Sisters. It's a play that was written in 1899 about a group of interesting, decent women who have very few future possibilities, and of their desperation in being compelled to live in a small, provincial Russian town, which was for them like a prison cell. When someone has a sense of future possibility she makes plans and she acts to realize those plans. The sisters hated their provincial existence, but could not act to change it, so they had no plan. Instead they had a fantasy about moving someday to Moscow. And so they lived in the fantasy rather than in the real world that they inhabited, which was dominated by willful people, the Tom Delays in their neighborhood, who did have plans, plans that led to the loss of the little that the sisters had.  Do I need to belabor the metaphor?

Whatever the relevance of the play to our current political situation, it is on a more universal level about how fantasies substitute for actionable possibilities, and the waste of life that ensues.  Our lives take on substance to the degree than we enact possibilities, and they remain insignificant and insubstantial to the degree that they wallow in dreams, no matter how noble, not acted upon. Living in fantasy is to live in a grayed out vertical dimension. The more we act the more real we become, and the more real we become the fewer the possibilities to be something other than what we have become. The point is to act; in the end it does not matter whether it turns out well or poorly, for we are measured not by the nobility of our sentiments, but by the enactment of a certain chain of choices, and it's those choices that give the soul a spiritual density which is what makes us most deeply human. 

We cannot dither in the land of possibility for fear of losing possibilities.  We must chose, let the chips fall where they may, live with the consequences. That's what it means to be a free human being. Commitment phobia is the way this dithering plays out in our personal relationships. If, for instance, one is sexually attractive enough to have many partners, why limit yourself to one? This is the dilemma that the John Cusack character faces in High Fidelity. He’s a self-absorbed twenty-something who is made emotionally claustrophobic by the idea of having to commit to one partner, but then cannot understand why the women in his life always dump him.

The reason is clear. He’s a child who lacks substance. He is a weightless abstraction, a dry leaf tossed about by the wind, and the women in his life want someone who is real. They want him to come down to earth, to have some substance, to enact a concrete future that involves them, and that requires giving up on fantasies of other possibilities; it means making concrete choice that exclude other ones. It means moving out of a dream world into a real one. That’s how human beings become more deeply humanly real—by their choices and their commitments, not by living in a fantasy of perpetual possibility. The Cusack character finally figures that out by the end of the movie, although it's an open question whether he actually has the capacity to deeply care about another human being.

So does the graying out of possibilities mean we become less free because the fewer the choices, the more limited our freedom? That's where another dimension to the paradox lies, because freedom is not only measured quantitatively. It is measured also and more significantly qualitatively, in the dimension depth, a depth that is usually uncovered in the intensity of our commitments. Do we accept the limitations and the consequences of our choices, or do we long for the good old days when we could live in the dream of infinite possibility? Will we plunge into the murky mess or will we seek featherweight flight? Limitation on the horizontal dimension, the dimension of quantitative possibility, lived in the right way leads to liberation on the vertical dimension, the dimension of spirit. It's not easy to do, and there are few models of it that are celebrated in our culture.

Dorothy Day, one such model of spiritual density if there ever was one, was fond of quoting Dostoyevski's staretz Zossima--"Love in practice is a harsh and dreadful thing compared to love in dreams."  Her life was a living testament to that kind of practical love. That's not an idea about love that is celebrated in the culture, and yet it's a love that so many Americans live, whether they've read Dostoyevski or not.  It's just in them to do it, and they do. 

Dorothy Day did, and the kind of life she lived makes no sense in the classic form of Libertarianism found, for instance, in Ayn Rand's Objectivism.  The two women represented completely different models concerning the development of the human Self. Day makes as much sense to Rand as Frodo Baggins makes to Sauron. Ayn Rand's was a view of the Self in which it was the tail being wagged by the will to power. It is a dime-a-dozen Self that is the common tool of a compulsion. Dorothy Day's modeled the developement of a different kind of Self, one that grows grows only when power is renounced and love fills in the space in the soul where powerlust and self-absorption once clogged it. 

Another remarkable model of the spiritual liberty that I'm aware of is found in the Etty Hillesum diaries, An Interrupted Life. In it one reads about the gradual growth in interior freedom of a young Dutch Jew during WWII whose inner spirit grows brighter as the world around her grows darker and more restrictive. It’s as if she took the darkness, this void that was all around her, and made of it a kind of fuel which she was able to ignite within herself, and her burning so brightly in turn ignited those around her. She could have been swept away by the darkness in despair or rage—many were. Instead she chose to take the darkness and she transformed it into something strange and beautiful. And her example speaks more deeply, more truly, more movingly than all the theodicies I’ve ever come across.

Christians are those who have been admonished to be as guileless as doves, but also as shrewd as serpents--another metaphor pointing to a central paradox.  The goal again is to live in the tension between them. For me that has meant that we need to find a way to live and operate on the horizontal level, the level of quantity, the world in which whoever has the most sex, power, and money wins, the world which is ruled by the metaphorical creature which slithers horizontally across the suface of the earth.  It's a world we all have to live in, but we can do so without being ruled exclusively by the clever, superficial (restricted to the surfaces) logic of the serpent.  This can only be done if one finds a way to be open to the vertical, the interior dimension of height and depth, which, again, is the dimension of grace and spiritual freedom.

Some people, the people who feel most at home in the world in which the surface horizontal pursuits defined by the "getting of more" are the primary motivators, are more serpentine; others, usually the kindly, warmhearted, decent folk whom, in my more sanguine moments (I do have them) I believe are the real soul of America, (as many living in red states as in blue) are more dovelike.  But their guilelessness is an impediment if it is so one-sided it leads them to trust the snakes who simply are not worthy of their trust.  They must cling to the guilelessness that is at the heart of their decency, but they must also wake up and use their faculty for shrewdness in order to protect themselves from the predations of the snakes who have no compunction about exploiting one-sided doves by using their guilelessness against them. 

If Christians were told to be only guileless, then I suppose they should just meekly suffer whatever the guile-ful impose on them, but Christians are admonished to be bi-lingual, to be fluent in both serpent-think and dove-think. And to me that means that Christians, if they are doing their job, always, always have a subversive influence in any part of the world that is dominated by serpent-think--including all too often the churches.  And insofar as Christians (and any human bewing who is genuinely responsive to the influence of grace in his life) succeed in bringing the vertical into their actions in the domain of serpent-think, they have a subversive effect.

Christianity is fundamentally a subversive spiritual impulse. And Redemption is the ongoing story of liberation, which is the gradual subversion from within the world ruled according to the logic of the serpent. Anybody who doesn't get that, in my view, doesn't get what Christianity really is.  This subversive project, I believe, is enacted  as more and more people become more densely free, which is to say more densely themselves, as described in the paragraphs above. 

An imagination of the fully densified human being is not a big bird with a dead snake in its claws, but rather a winged or feathered serpent, or, perhaps, a dragon with a bird's head.  Ancient Mexican and Chinese iconography are perhaps onto something in that regard.  Whatever.  I'm trying to emphasize the point that the goal is not some Manichean defeat of evil serpents by an army good doves, but rather of the horizontal being integrated with and transformed by its relationship with the vertical.  It's another image of what it means "to renew the face of the earth", to renew the surface dimension of quantity--of the many and of beings--in the horizontal Day world with the vertical dimension of quality, grace, freedom, and depth that comes from the world of Being and Night. 

More on Eschatology, Teleology, and Omega Points

In the course of the next several weeks I want to add layer by layer ideas that flesh out the project I described in the last post, which is to lay out elements of a post-Enlightenment Christian world view.  I stated then that to be taken seriously such a worldview must effectively meet the three fundamental criteria:  that it not be contradicted by evidence established by the natural sciences, that it embrace the central elements  bequeathed to us by the Greek/Jewish heritage we know today as the Christian faith tradition, and that it provide a narrative framework that gives humans a context for meaningful, robust moral action.

With regard to the last criterion about a narrative framework, I spoke about how the eschatological imagination of history that infuses the Judaeo-Christian worldview, and when combined with the Greek ideas about teleology and entelechy yields an interesting metaphor for understanding the underlying Logos of earth history: the earth as an organism whose full development will result in a final flowering, fruiting, and seeding.  In some medieval iconography the goal of history is rendered as the Last Day in which we see the image of an angel blowing a trumpet  as all the dead burst out of their graves.  An alternative imagination might see the earth as a giant seed pod that bursts releasing like cottonwood seeds the billions of souls who have ever lived to fill the sky with their radiant resurrection bodies.

As we proceed we'll see whether that metaphor has any bite, or whether it's just a fanciful idea. A metaphor has bite to the degree that it discloses something deeply true about the nature of Being. Metaphors are disclosively true, not discursively true. I want to  argue that any philosophy or theology is as good as that which it seeks to disclose--that it begins with cognitions including intuitions, and then tries to make sense of the world in the light of them. Philosophy/theology the way I understand it is hearing music, and then trying to talk about it. The talk is insignificant in comparison to the music--the music is all that really matters. 

At best the music can be described metaphorically or one can try in some inadequate way to hum the tune, but all such attempts fail if they do not convey something of the quality of the music they seek to describe. The talk is not the music, but if the talk has something of the presence of the music in it, it might interest those who hear it to listen harder to hear what is being talked about. But ultimately if the existence of the music is doubted by those who hear the talk about it, then the whole philosophy/theology will be perceived as useless. The cognitions are doubted if they don't relate at all to the experience and worldview of someone who encounters them.  It could be that they are doubted for good reason because the person writing about them is delusional--and there's a good chance that he is delusional if there are others who have not had similar cognitions.  Or it could be that certain people are simply incapable of hearing a certain tune, perhaps because their ears are preoccupied with another.

And so the point obviously is that eschatology is part of the Christian song. It may not matter to those who are satisfied to live outside the Christian imagination of the meaning and purpose of the human project, but I hope they won't begrudge us our attempt to work out among ourselves what that means for us. It may not matter to them whether or not there is an ultimate point to human existence, but it matters to us who believe there is a point.  And I think that if framed in the right way an imagination of a goal can be a help in developing a narrative that gives hope, meaning, and purpose to the human project, a narrative which then should be judged according to the fruit it produces.  Do people who choose to live within such a narrative have a net positive or negative impact in the world?  Does such a narrative provide a trellis upon which human souls can grow and develop in ways that it would be otherwise difficult or impossible to do? 

That ultimately is the test. I'm sure I'll get an argument about it, but I think in previous cultural eras the Christian narratives for their time did in fact meet that test, but those narratives don't work for us now--at least in any way that enables most decent Christians to distinguish themselves from any other decent human being. That there is no contemporary robust Christian narrative doesn't doesn't mean that Christianity is obsolete, only that particular historical-cultural subnarrative expressions of it are. And so the task that confronts people like me, who are convinced of the power and importance of the Christian message, is to think about what new subnarrative is suited the historical-cultural situation of humans transitioning out of the modern era into whatever comes next.

The underlying ongoing world-historical drama is the same; we're just in a transition from one act to the next.  The curtain has been drawn down, the lights are still dimmed, and we await now for the beginning of the next act.  And when the curtain goes up we will find that we are no longer sitting in the audience but are all on stage with the instructions to improvise with the goal to bring something new into the world.  A telos or goal for actors in such a situation gives them some sense of direction, which in turn helps them to improve the quality of the improvisation. It orients the actor, helps him to make choices that will give shape and dynamism to his performance.  Without a goal, or if you believe the whole exercise is pointless, why not just go lie in the corner and take a nap until the curtain comes down again?  By what standard could anybody evaluate such a choice as morally inferior to another actor's choice to strive toward the goal.  By what argument could a friend rouse the napper to wakefulness and action? 

The task, then for us to write and improvise the next act as we go along.  We don't have a prewritten script, but it helps to have a feeling for the direction toward which a successful outcome would be achieved.  I think that this sense of goal is a fundamental archetype that all humans feel to one degree or another. Christians talk about it as the Omega point, but all humans with a scintilla of spiritual life experience it like a plant tropism where the Omega point is like a light that draws the plant toward it. 

Christians have a usefulness to the larger human community only to the degree that they find ways to work with this energy and build something with it, but they are by no means the only  ones who work with it. Perhaps the narrative Christians develop that attempts to articulate this understanding of history will have a usefulness to outsiders as well, maybe not. From where I stand it doesn't matter whether people understand this Omega point in Christian terms; it matters only that they are drawn to it, for in being drawn to it humans beings are renewed and empowered to become that which they were created to be, and gradually to renew the face of an all too  disenchanted earth.

 

Naturalism vs. Supernatualism III

Evolution, be it of organism or of mind, of subatomic matter or of the cosmos as a whole, reflects the pervasive role of process which philosophers of this school see as central both to the nature of our world and to the terms in which it must be understood. Change pervades nature. The passage of time leaves neither individuals nor types (species) of things statically invariant. Process at once destabilizes the world and is the cutting-edge of advance to novelty. And evolution of every level, physical, biological, and cosmic carries the burden of the work here. But does it work blindly?

On the issue of purposiveness in nature, process philosophers divide into two principal camps. On the one side is the naturalistic (and generally secularist) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of an inner push or nisus to something new and different. On the other side is the teleological (and often theological) wing that sees nature's processuality as a matter of teleological directedness towards a positive destination. Both agree in according a central role to novelty and innovation in nature. But the one (naturalistic) wing sees this in terms of chance-driven randomness that leads away from the settled formulations of an established past, while the other (teleological) wing sees this in terms of a goal-directed purposiveness preestablished by some value-geared directive force.  "Process Philosophy," Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

As a follow up to the discussion in the previous posts about Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism here and here, I want to start fleshing out a theist metaphysic that makes sense for the postmodern mind.  My resources for doing this are the tradition of metaphysics dating back at least to the time of Heraclitus, which carried on through Plato and Aristotle, and then through Augustine through the medieval period culminating in the thought of figures like Bonaventure and Nicholas of Cusa. 

I accept the difficulties involved in trying to make anything with a sniff of Platonism seem even remotely plausible in the contemporary thought world, so my resources are not just premodern thinkers but others, who, following from Bergson, James, and Whitehead, have developed a way of thinking that is both compatible with theism and particularly with developments in modern physics and evolutionary biology.  I reference the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article above for those of you unfamiliar with this stream of thought. I think that this stream, although not particularly well known or widely discussed these days, is pregnant with possibilities.

While I'm sure that a committed naturalist would not be convinced by the case that these thinkers (and I) want to make, I think that it can meet most of the objections that they pose.  But beyond meeting their objections there is the positive challenge that comprises three fundamental tasks: first, to absorb the data the naturalist understands to be true without necessarily accepting his interpretation of these data; second, to absorb ideas from the Judaeo-Christian tradition about creation and the meaning of history; and third to bring it down to earth to provide a robust, compelling framework for practical living in the world--for personal as well as social ethics, for ideas that give human life its sense of joy, meaning, and purpose. 

I would argue that any narrative that plausibly achieves all three has to be taken seriously, even by secularists.  Taking seriously" does not mean acceptance.  So for instance, while I am not a Buddhist, I take Buddhism seriously. I do so because I think I can learn from Buddhists. And while I have not the intention to convert Buddhists or secularists to Christianity,  I would hope, some at least would enter into dialog in good faith, which means that they too would expect to learn or gain something from the exchange. 

The merger of Hellenistic and Jewish worldviews in Christianity became the cultural "operating system" of the West.  Thought systems that exhibit such longevity, persistence and which have had such a world historical impact should never be trivialized.   And secularists often don't recognize how much they are indebted to that tradition.  They might counter that they recognize what is valid and have rejected what is silly, superstitious, and otherwise retrograde.  I would argue they are still blinded by Enlightenment rationalist prejudices that close them off to still-dormant possibilities that that lie within that OS.

I have no illusions that the kind of thinking that I want to promote here is marginal now and may very well continue to be. But one thing is sure, religion will continue to be a social force in one form or another into the distant future, and so even secularists have a stake in promoting good religion rather than the noxious kind that we see all around us today. Humans, being what they are, will always be attracted to bad religion.  But my argument is that the best antidote is not the abolition of religion altogether some secularists argue is the only way forward and which is impossible anyway, but rather the promotion of good religion. And a good form of Christianity meets the three criteria listed above.

My argument since the beginning of this blog has been that as the habits of mind and prejudices associated with Enlightenment rationality continue to erode, an opportunity presents itself for a  new presentation of a Christian metaphysics that is equal to any other plausible explanation about how the world works.  The resources for presenting such an explanation are there; my purpose in this blog is to use those resources to present a narrative that non-academic specialists can understand.  That doesn't mean that it will be easy; only that my goal will be to talk about these ideas in a more down-to-earth idiom striving wherever possible to use natural English rather than technical jargon, or when technical jargon can't be avoided to define clearly what it means. It remains to be seen whether I can do that effectively.

The Judaeo-Christian tradition is eschatological, which means it is future oriented; it sees history as having a goal or a telos.  Most Christians think that the goal is to get off the earth and into the spirit world or heaven.  I think that the Christian goal is to care for the earth, which is an organism, like a plant, which grows until it flowers, fruits, and seeds. The biblical metaphor for that flowering is the New Jerusalem, and fruiting/seeding the resurrection of the dead. I have no idea what either of those metaphors mean in concrete terms, so I chose to understand them by means of another metaphor: The earth as an entelechy,  an organism which is both stable and in constant change, but the change has an underlying pattern, a logos with a telos, so to speak.  Christianity is where Greek thinking and Jewish thinking converge.

That's the meaning of Christian eschatology for me.  It's an organic conception rooted in Aristotle's idea of the entelechy:  As the acorn grows to become the oak tree, so is the earth like a seed that has germinated and is growing toward that which it is "genetically" programmed to be. And we humans are the ones charged with the healthful development of the earth, to fight off the diseases that seek continuously to infect and to divert its growth toward its telos.  All that should matter to us now is proper horticulture, not of the harvest.  The harvest, whatever its nature, is too far off to worry about now.

For if we humans are the cultivators (stewards) of the earth--and fi the relative health or sickness of our human culture directly relates to the healthy maturation of the earth, then everything depends on our getting our house in order.  For now more than ever the future of the earth is the future of human culture. 

News Not What It Used to Be?

Russell Baker has an interesting piece at The New York Review of Books about the future of newspapers.  He rehearses many of the obvious things about the negative impact of corporate chains--how it destroyed the Los Angeles Times, threatened to destroy the New York Times, and now threatens to destroy the Wall Street Journal. But one of the more interesting points it makes is to remind us that it's not information that makes the difference; it's the will to act:

Like so many who comment on journalism these days, the authors of When the Press Fails—three journalism professors—are angry about the press's flabby performance at the time when Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz & Co. were stoking public appetite for war in Iraq. Everyone, including most journalists, seems to agree that the press did a rotten job, but whether a superb job would have defeated the neocons' determination to have their war is another question. Following events fairly closely at the time, I thought nothing could stop them. For one thing, the lust for war had the public in its grip. For another, Congress, the one force powerful enough to resist presidential follies, though not always to prevent them, had ceased to function as an effective arm of government and was utterly useless for much of anything beyond cheering the President on. Senator Robert Byrd, the West Virginia Democrat, accurately described Congress's position as "supine."

As if to prove his point, most Democratic senators with presidential ambitions, including Hillary Clinton, to her continuing mortification, voted for war. They were simply responding to the political necessity of a moment when patriotic demand for battle was running high. At such moments politicians almost always decide they would rather be president than right.

Finally, credit the administration with a masterful job of deception. It fooled its own secretary of state, Colin Powell. It even fooled itself about enjoying a swift flower-strewn triumph. Despite Congress's humiliating performance, the idea that the press could have averted the disaster is slow to die. When the Press Fails does not endorse the notion but certainly flirts with it. It is "most interesting" that the press "remained a silent if often uncomfortable partner" in the "reality-bending exercise" with which the administration sold the war, the authors write.

The ideal of press independence does not mean that the resulting open public debate will necessarily shape or improve the course of policy. At the very least, publicizing credible challenges to dubious policies may give large numbers of citizens more timely information. And when those citizens hear their private and sometimes ill-defined concerns aired and clarified in the legitimating space of the mainstream press, they may begin to act as a public, instead of suffering in isolation with their own shock and awe as events unravel.

In such statements the book's authors expect more of the press than it is built to deliver. Airing and clarifying Washington activities is surely healthy, but it is also a tedious process that may yield nothing better than public indifference. The Washington Post began airing and clarifying the Watergate affair in the summer of 1972, yet six months later Americans were still so uninterested that they reelected President Nixon with one of the biggest landslides in history. Were it not for the intervention of the little-known lower-court judge John Sirica, the Watergate scandal might have expired unnoticed.

The actions of Daniel Ellsberg, John Sirica, and others were far more important than what the Press did or did not do back in the seventies.  Nothing has changed in that regard.  So let's not overestimate the importance of the Press.  We have access now to more information than at any time in our history, and yet as citizens we are as confused and powerless as we have ever been. The challenge lies in not just having more information but in having a narrative that organizes the information in a way that inspires fruitful, positive, political action.

As I've frequently pointed out here, the Libertarian meme is one of the primary obstacles toward the achievement of an action-oriented political narrative. Libertarianism is not a philosophy; it is a noxioius, debilitating mood.  It and its religious devotion to market solutions promotes narcissism and self-absorption, and in doing so institutionalizes fragmentation and division.  It keeps us supine, divided and conquered, and plays right into the hands of the already powerful. It neuters the collective political will to work for the public good--and even to fight for the preservation of public goods already achieved.

For all his limitations, I'll take Michael Moore over Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman any day of the week.  At least you find in him an old-fashioned common decency and public spiritedness that seems impossible for Americans today who have been sucked into the Libertarian void.

Why Less Political Commentary

Because the situation has become unbearable:

At its core, the history of the Iraq War has been authored by an indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite, perfectly symbolized by Kit Bond. These are people who spent four years hailing the Great Progress the Leader was making in Iraq, claiming we were "clearing and holding" neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom was on the March, that anyone who questioned any of this was either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists.

And now, four years later, with the War plainly having been a failure, and their assurances all exposed as false, what are they doing? Hailing the Great Progress the Leader is making in Iraq, claiming we are "clearing and holding" neighborhoods of all the Terrorists, that Freedom is on the March, that anyone who questions any of this is either brainwashed by the war-hating media or a Friend of The Terrorists. Nothing ever changes. It just plods along with the same idiot slogans and the same people spouting them. And they do it with no shame, no acknowledgment of their own past behavior, and no loss of credibility.  Glenn Greenwald

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The modern Republican party has perverted that idea by adopting the belief that they can manipulate the press so efficiently that the public will never really understand just what was done. This has freed them to adopt the Wall Street style of short term thinking that makes it possible to care nothing for the long range effects of their actions, as politicians might have before, and simply do whatever it takes to "win" the next play. The Democrats have never caught on to this new extreme form of politics and continue to think that these people play by the established rules. But the Republicans know that the press and the Democrats will be confused by this kind of provocative behavior and will fail to respond with any coherence because they cling to their quaint notions.

Right now, for example, we have the Republicans filibustering everything in sight and calling the Democrats a do-nothing congress. We have the president spending twelve billion dollars a month on a war the country hates and saying the Democrats are overspending. And oversight is being met with incoherence that better resembles a three stooges routine than cooperation. They are not behaving as normal politicians behave, they are behaving like reckless, emotionally deranged teen-agers daring someone to stop them. And like the nice, nurturing parents they are, the Democrats try to be reasonable and "talk" while the miscreant kids steal the money out of their wallet and take the family car --- screaming "suckers" as they peel out of the driveway.

They aren't playing by any rules and neither the press nor the public seems to quite understand that. The Dems are trying to position themselves for the next election, which is what the system anticipates, but their hapless act in the face of this anarchistic GOP response is not going to get them there.--Digby

It's not just Iraq; it's one outrage after another. The events of the last week regarding Bush's egregious claims for executive privilege confirm that the drift toward authoritarianism continues unabated, and will until there is a broader shift in the culture in which the majority becomes outraged about this kind of thing, rather than just a minority on the left. I'm not talking about approval or diapproval ratings; I'm talking about outrage.

Speaking of outrage, a quick comment on Michael Moore's Sicko, which I saw over the weekend with my teenage son. He couldn't contain his outrage or stop talking about it for over an hour after.  That's the only appropriate response from anyone with a scintilla of common sense and decency.  If you saw it, and had the feeling, as he did, that Americans are living in this black hole of delusion and insanity brought to us by those described above, you haven't fallen for Moore's propaganda. No, you've just got enough common sense to see through the propaganda of the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite," which at this point shouldn't be so hard, but somehow it still is a challenge for too many Americans.  It's not about: "Well, that's Michael Moore's side of the story; now let's heare the insurance and pharmaceutical industries' side of the story."

I have been driven nuts by the incessant nitpicking of Libertarian ideologues like Andrew Sullivan who say Moore is unfair because he only tells the positive side of the health care systems in Canada, England, and France. The point is that whatever problems other systems have, the problems in the corrupted, broken American system exceed them by several orders of magnitude. People's lives are being  destroyed in ways that would never happen in the other systems. I knew a couple in the 80s (both are dead now) who were bankrupted and lost their homes to pay off medical bills. She had a job at the university, got sick and couldn't work, lost her insurance, the husband's VA benefits didn't cover her, they lose everything. At first I couldn't believe the system could be so outrageously, yet matter-of-factly cruel.  But it is; it really is.

People like Sullivan and those who look to him for political wisdom are still living in the bubble reality created by the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite."  Sullivan isn't unintelligent, but he's just plain stupid, in the sense of being in an ideologically induced stupor, when it comes to government's role in solving problems the market cannot solve.  Either that or he can't see beyond the interests of his class as a member in good standing of the aforementioned political and media elite.

Back to Sicko: I wish Moore had the discipline to resist the Cuban agitprop at the end. I think that it undermines the film's broader appeal to middle Americans who don't need their hackles raised about Cuba to get in the way of the film's more important message.  But the key point  of the film for me was the question Moore asks near the end: "Who are we?"  My answer is similar to his in that we are a people who have lost our moral compass and common sense because most of us are are too easily conned by the "indescribably deceitful and very intellectually limited political and media elite."  What it's going to take for these Americans to wake up the reality of what is happening to their country is for me beyond my imagining. I can't dwell on such subjects anymore.  It makes me too exasperated.

Naturalism vs. Supernatualism II

My basic assumption is that moderns don't have a privileged position from which they can judge the validity of experiences of Being that humans have had in the course of their history.  Being discloses itself in different ways at different times.  And I would argue that our relationship to it at this juncture in human history is impoverished in a way unprecedented in human history.  And so one path to remedy this situation is to take very seriously what we can learn from the experiences of humans who have other than modern consciousness.  This is not a nostalgic project, but rather a process of recovery of what has been lost so that we can move forward, without the abandonment of critical consciousness, into a deeper, richer relationship with the created cosmos.

I say "created" because for Christians, anyway, the more important distinction is created/uncreated rather than natural/supernatural.  In a response to a comment to the first post on this topic I suggested a better description of what we commonly think of as natural/supernatural might be sensible/supersensible. The relationship between created and uncreated I'll leave for another day, but I'd like to share a few preliminary thoughts about the relationship between sensible and supersensible.

I think of what is ordinarily considered supernatural phenomena--the world of beings perceived in animist and shamanic culture, the gods, demons, angels, etc. that appear in almost every culture--as part of the natural system even if they are not perceived in ordinary consciousness.  To modern rationalist consciousness, all these phenomena are nonsense, or they are explained away as intrapsychic projections the way the Jungians do. 

My problem with that model is that it assumes consciousness is something that we own as individuals.  There is my consciousness within my subjective bubble, and there are all these atoms out there that make up the objective world that somehow impinge on our senses to give us this picture in our private consciousness of things that are not us. The gods flee from such a sterile consciousness, and breaking out of it is one of the most important cultural tasks for the postmodern era. 

This flawed model of humans in relationship with the world was precisely the kind of thing that Heidegger was trying to think himself out of, and in that respect I am very sympathetic to his project.  Dasein is not over-against; it is flung into and deeply interpenetrated with Being and the beings that it manifests. The challenge is to pay attention, to allow what hides behind the surfaces to disclose itself rather like the way we pay attention to other people, and we just might find that there are dimensions of Being behind the sensible reality we are in the habit of seeing that will show themselves.   Being 'R Us, after all.

Whether the gods will once again disclose themselves, I don't know, but I'm open to the possibility and would welcome them if they make a come back.  Most naturalists, as Matthew points out, are probably not open to the possibility, and it was to that garden variety naturalism that I was referring in my previous post. But I agree with  Joachim that such a form of naturalism is flawed.  Some balance between modern skepticism and openness, or following Ricoeur what I call 'second naivete, has to be found, but it's like anything.  If you aren't looking you're not likely to see.  If you don't knock, the door shan't be opened. A one-sided skepticism becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

So the heuristic for me here is that what non-modern cultures and styles of consciousness experienced points to dimensions of being that even if we moderns don't experience it now is potentially re-experienceable. And that in fact the way forward into the future is marked for us like bread crumbs strewn along the forest path by those who have gone before us.  But if we don't take their testimony seriously, those crumbs will be eaten by the birds, and we will remain lost in the wood.   Let me quote myself from another piece I wrote some time ago:

The ultimate criterion, for me at least, about whether something is ultimately accepted as true is in whether it resonates with these deep ancient traditional understandings of the way things are, and in order for resonance to occur we need to think again analogically, metaphorically, imagistically, symbolically, that is, to think more in the way premoderns think.  Myth comes out of the premodern dream time; mythopoesis is soul thinking, but in a postmodern key.

Those premodern traditions are preserved for us in a variety of ways, but however we have access to them, they are like melodies that we need to learn how to play again, and once that melody has been woven into the fabric of our souls, we need then to learn how to improvise on those melodic themes.  Improvisation isn’t really possible until the music is living in you, . . .

I go on to talk about how that basic approach can be applied to the Christian melody, which is essentially what I see myself doing all the time here.  But more on that another time. The point here is that there's a lot of music out there, and mostly we're deaf to it. It's great if you hear anything, even one wobbly melodic strand, but we should never think that's all there is.

Naturalism vs. Supernaturalism I

First let’s define terms.  Naturalism excludes any reference to the supernatural as false or unknowable and so not worthy of serious consideration. Any evidence of the supernatural is dismissed as potentially explainable in naturalistic terms even if not explainable now.  Fox TV's Gregory House is an exemplar of naturalism in this sense. 

In contrast, I don’t see the supernatural as something over against the natural.  Rather I see the world of our ordinary experience as a small part of a large spectrum which we humans have only limited capability to perceive, and a significant part, perhaps even the major part of that spectrum is non-material or what we call spiritual.  This spiritual world is what I was referring to in the Night metaphor explored in the Tristan und Isolde piece I wrote last week. Naturalism prefers the Day, and assumes that whatever others might think of as composing the mystery of the Night is explainable in naturalistic or rationalistic Day terms.  The Romantic and supernaturalist impulse gives precedence to the Night. It sees the Day world as this thin crust that floats on a sea of unfathomable Night.

I think most sensible people are open to that idea that our ordinary experience does not comprise everything there is.  The argument today has more to do with accepting or discarding traditional beliefs regarding the nature of these dimensions outside the ordinary spectrum of human sense experience and in developing some criteria about what is real and what is delusional about what lies outside our normal experience in the Night world.

While there have always been skeptics about the supernatural, you'd have to say that most human beings in the history of the world have believed that there was such a thing.  Even in the West until recently, there way pretty much universal acceptance of the idea that we humans are part of a larger spiritual reality.  But there has been a rather significant cultural shift since the middle of the 19th century in which this traditional understanding about human connection with a larger spiritual world has met with much broader skepticism by the culture’s educated class in the West. 

I think the reasons for this are complex but quite understandable.  On the one hand the new faith in Reason celebrated in the previous century began to take hold in broader circles, becoming the religion of these elites, and anything that smacked of the irrational was suspect and dismissed.  Maybe there was a god, but he had nothing to do with the world down here.  Religious traditions and beliefs were dismissed as superstitious, obscurantist, and unnecessary. 

There was also the ecrasez l’infame argument that focused on the blatant corruption and power games played by the official Church, which de-legitimated any claims it made for itself regarding its spiritual authority.  The people in the Church were playing the same violent power game as everyone else. They were obviously using their superstitions to instill fear in a master/slave game in which they asserted themselves as masters to everyone else in the social and political order as slave. Why should anything they say be believed?  If anything, what they say should be actively opposed as an enslaving ideology.

Add to that the explosion of technological advancement and material prosperity in the West, which promoted the new religion of commodity fetishism among the culture’s more affluent (and aspirational fetishism among the less affluent), concerns about the now ever more remote spiritual world became far less important to the average bourgeois than they were for their ancestors.

Add to that the culture-wide mood of suspicion among intellectuals after Darwin, Marx, and Nietzsche that found it difficult to accept the validity of any of the traditional received wisdom. By the end of the 19th century the mood had completely reversed from the wildly exuberant romanticism of the early century, and you have a class of cultural elites finding itself incapable of believing anything.  The best anybody could come up with was Nietzsche’s uebermensch who was a meaning-creating being to replace the older meaning-discovering being.  Since there was nothing out there to discover, if there was to be any meaning at all, it had to be created by the self-constituting subject.  Problem was one person’s meaning is a good as the next guy’s.  If there is no transcendent Good, then good and evil is determined by those who have the power to define it.

Nietzsche would not have approved what the Nazi’s did to his philosophy, but I think he would have a hard time arguing that what they did with it was implicit within his basic ontology.  His basic nihilistic assumptions about the nature of reality were the same as theirs.  The Nazi’s simply applied his ideas in a way that suited their idea of the will to power—that which meant strength and greater life for them and for the German nation.  In a world defined by the will to power, who’s to say what’s the right interpretation of N’s thought except him who has the power to impose his view on everyone else?

But I bring this up here because it illustrates the problems with any moral philosophy that operates within closed naturalistic limits. As Dostoyevski’s Ivan says, anything is permissible, and who’s to say it’s not?  If there is no transcendent Good, what grounds has anyone to resist what the powerful say is real?  On what ground is there to stand outside the system as determined by those who hold the power?  And if someone thinks differently, why should he pay the price to assert his thinking?  Because of some obscurantist notion about the dignity of the truth-loving individual? It wouldn’t take long for the powerful in a closed system, if they got hold of such a believer, to convince him he was laughably delusional.

So what are the pros of Naturalism vs. the pros of openness to Supernaturalism? It seems to me you have to fall into one camp or the other.  Which camp do you fall into?  Nietzsche and Heidegger tried to avoid the either/or here, but in my opinion they create more problems than they solve and both--especially Nietzsche--are talking about a closed system. So anyway,  these are the main pros/cons ideas that occur to me now, which are hardly exhaustive.  I invite readers to add to them. I might add to them later in updates if something comes to mind.

Naturalism Pros:

•    Simpler, cleaner in the Ockham's razor sense.  Starts from below with what we know from within the closed sphere of the average human’s experience. 

•    Doesn’t require believing improbable things that don’t make sense within this closed sphere or wasting one’s time with puzzling over obscurantist nonsense wondering whether there’s anything to them.

•    Avoids problems with infallibilism and the kind of violence groups throughout history have inflicted on other groups because their improbable beliefs differed from their own improbable beliefs.

•    If supernaturalism were universally rejected, people would be forced to look at the world as it really is instead of living in fantasies that feed an infantile need for security.

Supernaturalism Pros:

•    Open to a broader range of experience including experiences the people who have them identify as of the supernatural.  Not dogmatically dismissive or reductionistic about experiences that don’t make sense within naturalistic parameters.

•    Open to the possibility of the human project being purposeful rather than just some implausibly random occurrence. Answers the ‘why are we here’ question, which is not possible within the limitations of naturalism.

•    Provides metaphysical validation to moral projects. Gives moral heft and gravity to human actions not possible within naturalist system. If the human project is fundamentally purposeless and if the Good is simply what most people complacently define it to be, why bother to do anything that costs too much? 

I think that either alternative cannot reject or deny well-established evidence, but ultimately we’re in the realm of mythos rather than logos here, and the winning narrative goes to whichever narrative most robustly and plausibly explains human experience, answers fundamental human questions, and lays a foundation for costly moral action.

From Outer to Inner; From Given to Chosen II

This post is meant as a follow up to the first post with the same title which can be found here.  What I'm writing here is a beginning, a groping forward as best I can.  I'm struggling for more concreteness and clarity, but I recognize I'm not even close:

Barfield and Nietzsche start from the same place—a recognition that the transcendent values of the West have dried up as a living source of meaning in the culture, that is to say as a source of “given’ meaning in the cultural forms and institutions that we inherit from the past and into which we are socialized as children. And both agree as to the remedy—that human beings must find a way to reconstitute meaning in the outer world from resources found within their own individuated subjectivity. 

The difference lies in that for Nietzsche this reconstituting project was to be achieved through the will to Power; for Barfield through the awakening of the Logos. (By Logos OB means that which is referred to in the Prologue of John's Gospel, not the logical functions of the mind, although an argument can be made that the latter relies on the former, but that's another post.) The point is that either N’s choice must be made or Barfield’s--or the culture shrivels into something shaped by the bread and circus values of the Last Man.

I think it’s important to point out that neither Nietzsche nor Barfield are the first to talk about the interiorization of meaning. It was a movement in the history of Western thought that began with Descartes and then with Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”. (See my post "Metaxis" for more on this) 

Barfield’s importance for what I want to present lies, first, in his explanation of why the objective world has become stripped of so much of the meaning that people of an earlier age took for granted.  And, second, in his proposal, that hearkens back to the thought of the Romantics, perhaps Coleridge, Schelling, and Novalis more than the others, that transcendent meaning can no longer be found out there because its source has migrated from out in the world into the depths of the human soul. Indeed the whole meaning of the Incarnation of the Logos two thousand years ago was to enable this transition.  For after Christ an entirely new possibility for freedom became available for human beings, and the history of the world since then is the story of conditions gradually changing in such a way as to allow for the emergence of this freedom in all of its fullness. 

The idea of Christian freedom has been a theme in Christian thought since it was first articulated in the Epistles of St. Paul, but during the Romantic period, Western thought awakened to it as a possibility in a profoundly new way that has given shape to the modern human sense of individuality and selfhood, to the importance of human creativity, and for the shaping power of the human imagination that simply was impossible for people in earlier era.

So the irony lies in that as the culture has come more and more to understand meaning as subjectively constituted, the Christian meaning world has significantly diminished in its influence and in its power to shape the public culture. The objective meaning of the traditional language and ritual of the Church has become more stripped of its obvious objective meanings and as such has become easy not to take seriously.  Since the Reformation the Church’s control over even its own meanings has progressively eroded to a degree where now Christianity means pretty much anything anyone wants it to mean and where moral and doctrinal orthodoxy is something only a relatively small group of traditionalists care about.

There is, therefore, no real mystery about why Christianity and the religious sensibility in general has had such a diminished influence in shaping public culture since the mid nineteenth century. But this does not mean that the traditional forms are meaningless.  It makes a huge difference if one believes that the forms have lost meaning because they never had any to begin with or if one believes that the loss of “given” meaning was an essential stage in a longer term process by which human beings have to become liberated from external forms if they are to come into possession of the freedom and selfhood for which they were created. 

If the former, then the past is irrelevant and the future is a blank slate upon which the uebermenschen can write whatever script pleases them. If the latter, then the script for the future at least in part lies in finding ways to reconstitute the forms from the past so that they might live again, pulsing again with meaning, not as something given from without but constituted by a self-transcending, world-constituting Self, the Self created in the image of the I Am Who Am, whose purpose and meaning derives from an awakened sense of the Logos which lives in the interior depths of the human soul. 

Because this is the difference between the Nietzschean and the Christian. For the first, the world is radically open-ended and any human future is a possibility. The Christian would also acknowledge that because humans are no longer fated and determined by outside forces in the way they were, that a wide range of futures is a possibility, but however it is attained the future has a goal, a telos,  an Omega point.  And the striving toward that endpoint is what gives meaning and significance to what we do now. 

And the achievement of this telos will require unprecedented effort and imagination if it is to be achieved, but not any kind of effort or any kind of imagination. Rather the challenge lies in awakening an imagination-inspired effort that is informed by the Logos. What’s required is a way of reconstituting meaning from within that also resonates deeply with the truth Christians recognize as a presence in the Gospels and the traditions of the Church. This is not the truth that scholars who have deconstructed, torn up, demythologized, and eviscerated the scriptures and traditions of the church in a misguided search for objectivity.  Among the most absurd of these projects has been the modern, mostly Protestant, project of wanting to determine which were the words in the Gospels that Jesus really spoke.  It misses almost completely the point.  The real goal of modernity has not been the enshrinement of objective truth but of the discovery of the profound subjectivity of truth. 

But subjective doesn't mean arbitrary. It requires that in the same way that humans developed criteria about understanding what was true or false in the the outer world of nature through experimental method, a similar method must be developed for understanding what is true or false in the interior world of the Soul. What it will come down to is what works, what is fruitful, what moves the individual toward true freedom and the culture forward toward an embodiment of peace and justice. There are resources from the tradition from which we can make a beginning here. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but those resources have to be adapted to these remarkably open-ended cultural conditions.

So here is the essential thing:  If there is no Logos and no Grace, the Nietzscheans are right, and it’s either the uebermensch or the Last Man, masters and slaves. I know there are other possibilities, but they are not serious because if Grace is an illusion, then Power is the only thing that matters. That's hard for some to accept, but it's obvous to anyone who thinks it through. But if the Logos is potentially awakenable in the depths of every human being’s soul, then a whole range of possibilities lie before us. For this graced awakening is what we mean by “faith,” and faith is the main ingredient that distinguishes the subjectivity of the Christian from the subjectivity of the Nietzschean. And this is an experience that has been repeated continuously through the centuries and will always continue to happen regardless what happens in the larger culture or the Church. 

So the shift toward the interiority of meaning is not something new after Kant. Indeed the Pietism in which he was nourished as a child and which he never relinquished as an adult was the 18th-century German manifestation of this interiority that has always been central to genuine Christian faith. It’s just that now the fundamental experience of faith has become essential in a different way for a culture that has otherwise lost its way. If the challenge for the first Israelites was to live according to the law, which meant an effort of will to resist regression into the idolatry that surrounded them, the challenge for us now is to find the will and the imagination to stoke the slumbering flame that burns within our hearts. For a truth lives there as real and “objective” as any that lived in an earlier age on tablets of stone. But it’s for most of us a weakly recognized truth which tends to get lost amid a myriad other subjective impulses. Its presence is like a still small voice, which can only be heard if one listens for it, and that requires the stilling of other voices that roar within the soul.  And so like the Israelites of old, a discipline is required to resist the natural flow of the world to create a space for grace to work. 

Before modernity, Christianity had to fight for its interior truth in a world in which the exterior world of meanings given by a culture still steeped in original participation was overwhelming and in which its clamor easily drowned out the still, small voice now calling from within. Those who heard this interior calling went out into the desert or sequestered themselves in monasteries where the noise outside could be kept at bay. After Constantine, Christianity was recognized and incorporated into what remained of the cultural forms of Imperial Rome, and life continued much as it had before despite the Christian trappings. But the world since the mid nineteenth century has changed radically, and as recognized in Eliot’s zeitgeist-defining poem of the 1920s, it is no longer necessary for us to go out into the Wasteland; the Wasteland has come to us.

The culture until the mid 19th century was able to maintain some integrity, some coherence because the old forms given by a human consciousness that were shaped by an outside-in Christianity still provided a context of meaning. But Nietzsche following Schopenhauer and Feuerbach realized that meaning is no longer out there—it’s no longer given to us by a God who is out there. It’s time for us to reclaim as something essential to human dignity what was projected outward onto God. There is no god out there; it’s we who are God, and we must accept the active, world-creating responsibility that goes with it. They were half right.

The story of modernity is essentially the story of the shift from outside-in to inside-out, of individuals asserting their interiority over against the perceived exterior authority.  There would be no felt need to do this if the exterior authority had not rigidified into a “system” that no longer carried life, the way, for instance, the oral traditions of tribal cultures carried life. The modern period has been dominated by one liberation program or another, and liberation has become an end in itself, and politics has become a simple-minded program for progressive-minded of  searching for anyone or anything in need of liberation. Politics in the modern period has been defined as the need of the oppressed individual or group to  assert itself against the individuation-crushing system—whether it be governmental, corporate or religious. 

This is a Romantic project. Because since the late 18th century Western culture has split into two main factions. One, the rationalist “technocrats” who see the world as a machine and are fascinated primarily with the engineering and system-building challenges the world poses, including social engineering projects.  The other, the alienated “Romantics” who instinctively find any given cultural forms or meanings oppressive and think of their purpose as only to stifle individual expression. The real culture war that will shape the next century is not between fundamentalists and evolutionists, but between Romantics and Technocrats.  It’s what’s driving, for instance, the protests against the WTO. 

The kind of Christian that has most to contribute will ally himself naturally with the Romantics, but not in the interests of promoting subjectivist anarchy, but in affirming, as they do, the dignity and sacredness of the individual and of the potency of human imagination and freedom. But he or she will also form alliances with the those who want to give shape and form to our lives together in culture. If there is any meaning at all to be found in our public institutions, it is something we give them from within our own subjectivity.  Meaning isn’t there now for most people in the Romantic faction, and they feel estranged from the system.

The political implications of this viewpoint are present throughout the blog entries I've been posting since 2003.  I've described here the basis for both saying No and Yes.  There isn't much to say Yes to at this point, but that could change. In the meanwhile we must recognized that the old forms, withered and brittle though they have become, have not yet collapsed. There is much that is worthy in them, no matter how much they have been coopted and distorted by the forces of anti-freedom. But if they haven’t collapsed, they  stand as something rather rickety and vulnerable to collapse soon. It needn’t happen, and it won’t if some way can be found to reconstitute the forms from within. This does not mean that the forms themselves must be preserved at all costs, but rather that what remains of the forms be approached with reverence because they once held something precious. And they must be approached with the attitude that in our contemplation of them, something in us will awaken that correlates with what first gave them shape. And once that happens, the life in us so awakened will lead to new growth, and the Wasteland will bloom again.

Night & Day; Eros & Incarnation

I was reading in Safranski about the great 1929 debate between Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer at Davos.  Safranski frames it as a battle between Night and Day.  Heidegger's philosophy is a night philosophy.  It begins with the gesture to wipe away all facticity--the day world of things and forms--and to enter into that moment of the Nothing out of which any thing emerges.  This is the task for Heidegger--to enter into the night and to behold there the creation out of nothing. 

Cassirer, on the other hand, is the philosopher of the Day.  His most famous work is his multi-volume Philosophy of Symbolic Forms.  If Heidegger wants to begin his work from Nothing to understand how forms arise.  Cassirer's point of departure is the forms of culture and to work backward to understand that from which they arose.  His book The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance Philosophy, mainly about Nicholas of Cusa, had a tremendous impact on me as an undergraduate--more certainly than my exasperated attempt to read through Being and Time.  Cusanus, the great exponent of the coincidentia oppositorum has been a hero of the human spirit for me ever since. 

The jury's still out on Heidegger, and I think in the piece I paste in below, I explain why.  It's a piece I wrote after having seen a Seattle Opera production of Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, (Jane Eaglen/Ben Heppner) which unexpectedly blew me away.  I was surprised that this Night/Day theme was the key to understanding it.  Wagner, at least at this point seems to be an advocate of the Night.  His defection in Parsifal to be a champion of and integration of Day and Night (my interpretation) is perhaps what caused the Night creature Nietzsche to see Wagner as a traitor to the cause of Night. I understand why N. was upset, but Parsifal, from my point of view, is an advance, not a regression. 

This is something I want to talk about in the future.  The human challenge is  not to  find the Night but to live in the Day world  in such a way that the Day forms don't become a prison. Our Day world becomes a prison to the extent that is cut off from the Night and is no longer fed by it. It's not easy to find the balance point, and advocates of the Night like N. and H. are quite right about how strong the human inclination to lose oneself in Dayworld cares and things. But whether or not Wagner consciously intended it to be, his Tristan und Isolde is a cautionary tale regarding what happens when one becomes a prisoner of the Night.

 

***

Tristan und Isolde

Seattle, August 1998

I just saw Wagner's Tristan und Isolde.  I was both moved and troubled by it.  The music, the poetry, the acting, the tension, and that unbearable longing, all found their mark in me.  The longing especially. 

But I think that there were two moments in particular, and in a different way a third, that really grabbed me.  The first was at the end of the first act in that moment right after T & I's having drunk the potion when they both expect to die and instead are initiated into the "mysteries of the Night."  [The cause was the servant's switching a love potion for the death potion Isolde ordered her to prepare. The point is that the love potion caused another kind of death, a death to the world of Day and an birth into the world of Eros.] 

Most of us have had experiences like that at one time or another--when the spirit brightness of another human being, even if one was dimly aware of it before,  blasts into one's awareness like an exploding supernova.  And the evocation of that kind of moment was quite effective on stage.  The potion did not kill them in the ordinary sense, but they did die to the world of the "Day," namely the shadowland, the mundane, pesky, prosaic world of incarnation where the Night and its mysteries are hidden.  In this kind of death they are born into a spirit world where one sees no shadows; one perceives only what is bright and beautiful and eternal in the other.

I went to the preview lecture, and I have to say that I was really annoyed with the guy who gave it.  He was entertaining, but he's fundamentally a smartass psychologizer with an anti-Wagner axe to grind.  (And the Nietzsche/Wagner dispute reduced to Oedipal terms.) This opera is not about sex, if by sex we mean, as he would have it, simply carnal desire.  Carnal desire is only one note on desire's musical scale, and Wagner is clearly not a one-note kind of guy. 

In fact the one thing this opera is not about is carnal desire.  It is about Eros, which is much, much bigger.  It is the cosmic power by which all things are properly joined, and spiritual beings long to be joined with other spiritual beings.  The problem for us all is that we moderns and post moderns have all but lost the soul capacity to cognize the mystery.  And for us everything from the learned tracts of the sexologists and other intellectuals to so much of what we see on TV and the movies has devolved to the one note of carnal desire;  because in all honesty it's the only thing most people experience with any intensity. The opera is important precisely for its not being about carnal desire in this limited sense but for pointing to this other more deeply "erotic" desire that lies behind it.  But that's also what's troubling about it, but more about that below.

This blazing forth of Eros between Tristan and Isolde does not come out of nowhere; it was kindled in an earlier meeting,--a meeting of the eyes--which literally disarms Isolde who drops the sword with which she is about to strike Tristan in vengeance.  So there's already this thing smoldering, but nobody talks about it because of all the Day-world complications.

So we come upon Isolde some years after her first accidental encounter with Tristan.  They are on a ship bound for Cornwall, she having been fetched by Tristan to be the wife for his friend and king, Marke.  And is she in a funk.  At the beginning she's virtually catatonic.  But this gradually turns into raging anger at what she perceives to be her humiliation.  Isolde feels humiliated not for any of the reason she articulates--the great Irish princess being married off to some no-name in a backwater duchy.  It is rather because she feels unloved by her beloved Tristan, and cannot believe that this one would come to fetch her not for himself but for another. 

At the beginning of the first act, I think she still believed that if she could just behold him and he her, to reenact that first encounter, that everything would be all right.  But Tristan won't come to her.  He gives lame excuses, and she knows they are lame.  Isolde has it right--he's shy.  He's afraid of being caught in her glance, and is afraid of how that will turn his world upside down.  As subsequent events unfold, we see that he was right to be afraid.  And so because he stays distant, her frustrated longing links up with her earlier desire for vengeance, and she instructs her servant Bragane to prepare the death potion.

And so eventually he goes down to her, and she starts making up lame reasons for him to drink "atonement," and he knows they're lame, and he knows her intent, and that for him to drink means the end of him and probably her.  And while at first he's not crazy about the idea, it dawns on him how hopeless his life will be after Isolde is lost to him as Marke's wife.  So might as well, and he does.  And she does.  And then there's that moment when they just stand there waiting for something to happen.  And something does.  He goes over to her, and the nuclear reaction occurs, and the two of them are hurtled into the world of Night, and nothing in the world of Day makes sense to them anymore.  Complications?  What complications?  Honor?  Vengeance?  What was that all about?  It was as if they awoke from a dream, a Day dream.  And then the horrible realization that they are not going to die; that they must remain in Day world and be impeded from their complete union by the "complications," and Isolde faints away.  Holy Moly.  That's the first moment.

The rest of the opera is simply about the two of them trying to rid themselves of the shackles of the Day.  This is what they sing about in the second act and finally accomplish in the third.  Because they have been initiated and now are citizens of the Night, they cannot think according to the logic of the Day.  They are incapable of understanding the implications of their actions as they are to be seen in the objective cold light of the sun.  What's the worst that could happen to them?--that they'd get caught and killed?  Terrific.  They'll take the Night any way they can get it.  And so they choose imprudently to meet and they sing the  poetry of their longing for the complete erotic union of the Night.  I don't think it was Victorian stage prudery that prevented them from ravishing one another as the carnal desire proponents would have it.  That's not really what T. and I. wanted.  They wanted something for which bodies only get in the way. 

For me the second great moment of the opera is not what occurs between them during their rapturous tryst--that had its moments, but it also seemed to me to be more of a philosophical disquisition.  (Blah, blah, blah... Night.  Blah, blah, blah. . . Day.  Blah Blah. . . . Alright already, I get it.)  What really cut into me was King Marke's having been devastated by the loss of his friend. That shift from their mystical rhapsodizing to his lament was profoundly, deeply moving.  The part was so well acted and so beautifully sung, and what makes this opera great is that his character should be so poignantly and sympathetically drawn.  His learning of Tristan's betrayal is not, as Melot the spy would have it, an insult to his dignity, but rather the shattering revelation of the loss of his beloved nephew, his ideal, whose spirit brightness he was capable of seeing even in the bright light of the Day world, and now that bright light had become extinguished, and this crushing loss was incomprehensible to him. 

Why couldn't Tristan just explain, as Bragane did later, that the potion made him do it?  Because to do so was impossible for him; he was too far gone into the world of Night; there was no going back.  It was as if Marke's lament was only barely audible, as if  from another dimension that had no reality for him any more.  It's as if Tristan were thinking as he listened to Marke: "Oh yes.  That's how it is for him there.  Ah.  Poor Old Friend.  You ask me why?  How can I explain it to you?  Come here where I am, come into the Night, and maybe you will understand.  But where you stand it is impossible." 

And as soon as Marke is done, Tristan is back gazing at Isolde, asking her if she will follow him for good into the Night.  He simply could no longer stand his incarnation, and he succumbed to the primal temptation-- to want to become prematurely a god--and to Isolde that's what he's become as she, crazed, describes his apotheosis singing the liebestode as she sits there beside his corpse . 

But the truth is that Tristan has become a madman, and this is the disturbing part, and for me the third emotional moment of the evening--realizing that the opera is the story about a kind of delusional madness that comes from overexposure to the Night.  There lies the real tragedy of Tristan, and also Isolde whom he drags along with him.  It is a beautiful madness, but it is madness all the same.  And at the end, it was hard to feel sad for them, because didn't they get what they wanted?  But neither did I feel glad; mostly I felt a chill, as one feels when one visits a retirement home and hears one of the poor old soul's wailing. 

I don't know.  Maybe what they really needed was to get carnal, which they never did--to celebrate  the Night mystery as something that happens to them and is to be enjoyed while they are in their bodies.  Physical lovemaking is supposed to be about the joining of Night and Day.  For some couples it becomes a way into the Night.  I think that for Tristan and Isolde it would have been a way back into the Day.  A joke or two might have helped as well.  That's why Mozart's "Magic Flute" is wiser in treating the same subject.  It has humor, and it understands that this experience of Eros, though it comes to us from the world of Night, happens while we're  in our bodies and that it is not the end but the beginning; it initiates a work to be accomplished--to bring the Night into the Day and the Day into the Night. 

A few days ago by chance while looking for something else, I came across a very interesting book by Charles Williams entitled The Figure of Beatrice: A Study in Dante.  I've exerpted some parts that stand in interesting contrast to the Wagner theme.  The first part describes the experience.  The second part describes the meaning:

[Quoting Dante:] "Love lies asleep in that heart till the beauty of a wise woman (saggia donna) causes it, by desire, to awaken, and so in a woman's heart does the worthiness of a man."  "Love is nothing else than the spiritual union of the soul with the object loved."  "And since the constitution of the divine nature is shown in the excellences of nature, therefore the human soul unites herself spiritually with them the quicker and the closer as they themselves appear more perfect." 

[Williams commenting:] What Dante sees is the glory of Beatrice as she is 'in heaven'--that is, as God chose her, unfallen, original; or (if better) redeemed; but at least, either way, celestial.  What he sees is something real.  It is not 'realer' than the actual Beatrice who, no doubt, had many serious faults, but it is as real.  Both Beatrices are aspects of one Beatrice.  The revealed virtues are real; so is the celestial beauty.

There is nothing new or uncommon about this experience; it is in a great many novels and films and plays and songs; our modern songs hold it as much as the lyrics of the metaphysical poets.  All that is new is the seriousness with which Dante treats it and the style in which he expresses it.  The lady creates in her lover the sensation of supreme content.  It does not last.  Why not? 

Dante, at least, had a perfectly definite answer.  Everything desires its own perfection: "in this all desires are appeased and for the sake of this all is desired."  Our desires are everlasting, and to see an image of perfection is not the same thing as to be perfect ourselves, which until we are, possession, even the possession of Beatrice, must lack perfection.  This is what all the talk of 'the ideal' comes to; the ideal can never satisfy us until we are [ourselves] ideal.  He who pursues any hope of satisfaction, without his own conditioning perfection is bound, sooner or later, straight for the Inferno..

Could Tristan's experience and fate be more clearly described?  This revelation of the other should rather be a vision of the ideal which inspires us to double our efforts in the World of Day, to bring it and ourselves closer to the perfection for which we were created, not only for our own sakes but to offer it to those whom we love.  And it is only in the sunlight that our shadows can be perceived, cognized, and so worked with and transformed.  The Day world is the only place where that perfection can be achieved. 

Williams makes it clear that the vision of perfection in the other is real--it is not just an intrapsychic projection as the Jungians would have it, but it is only part of what's real.  In the Night, one can see only what shines.  In the Day it's harder; the shadows of everyone we meet are much easier to see.  That is why it's so extraordinary and intoxicating to have experienced another's spirit brightness in ordinary Day consciousness; it's like seeing the Night stars in the full light of Day; it's to know whence we've come and whither we go; it's to know one's own spirit potency as well as that of the beloved.  It's to be received as a gift, cherished, always remembered, but not grasped.  Grasping  was Tristan's problem; it was his own uncognized shadow doing it, and that's the tragedy of this opera.  I wonder if Wagner saw it that way.

We know that movie too well. We walked out, remember?

I wrote the piece below in June 2003.  I'm reposting it with a few edits because I was reminded of it by Greenwald's posts this week about America's loss of moral stature in the world (see here and here). My piece connects with some of the things Greenwald is saying this week as well as laying some groundwork about the cultural task--as opposed to economic and political tasks--that I've been trying to get my arms around.  The cultural task is more difficult--that's why we tend not to deal with it.  Politics and economics are something you can sink your teeth into.

But the health of our economics and politics is directly related to the health of the culture's soul, and  the limits about what is possible in the political and economic spheres are set by the attitudes formed in the cultural sphere. So for instance, in a country in which Libertarianism has become a kind of default philosophy for so many Americans, no remedy for serious problems, like the insanity of our healthcare system, can be found.  For Libertarians there is no common good, and there is no sense that we are all in this together.  We are in the state of nature where the only law is eat or be eaten.  If some Libertarians say that they don't really believe that, they haven't thought it through.

                      ***

State of Nature

“[The] USA has been the beacon of hope [this] past half a century to the disenfranchised, the wounded, the refugees (yours truly among zillions), the hopefuls of the world. . . . More important USA, until now, has been seen as the fair arbiter of the world — a fair judge, and, despite its unsurpassed muscles, a fair and unfeared policeman. . . . Nearly all imperial powers in history have been just the opposite. . . . The world is saying USA has become a self-righteous, self-centered Master of the Universe. . . . The world does not want to see you morph into just another imperial power. We know that movie too well. We all walked out, remember . . .? The America we loved was on the side of the poor and the powerless. . . . Yes, we bought the whole story. . . . And we were right in doing so. . . . I am not sure future generations around the world will feel the same as we did toward America." A Chinese-American Graduate Student

"For better or for worse the world is a bunch of petulant teenagers that now think of us (the U.S.) as the parent.  They want our protection, our comfort (our financial support). They want us out of their rooms while keeping them tidy, freedom to mock us but come to us when they have problems. They want the keys to the car, allowance money . . . to spend on what they want, freedom to hang around with questionable friends, stay out late, steal from us, con us and always expect we will be there for them whenever things turn sour. Most of all, they want no responsibility for their own behavior.”   Roger

“. . .the West won the world not by the superiority of its ideas or values or religion but rather by its superiority in applying organized violence. Westerners often forget this fact, non-Westerners never do."    Samuel P. Huntington

The first two quotes are from emails written in response to NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman’s request for thoughts about why the world hates America. The third quote is from a conservative Yale political scientist who has achieved renown lately for his theory about the ‘clash of civilizations’.  So which one of these quotes best represents what America is?  Is it still naïve to think of America as a beacon of hope to a world seeking to be liberated from premodern autocracies? Or are we just brutal imperialists in the great Western tradition? Then again, are we just reluctant global adults who, with eyes rolled, forbear the childish antics of our global kiddies as we prod them along into adulthood?

The reality, of course, is complex. The ideals are real, but so have been the paternalism and the violence.  We want to think of ourselves as the Chinese-American student wants to think of us, but the US has always played hardball in the realm of international power politics.  That’s what nation states do.  They seek what’s in their best interest, and they are none too delicate about it.

But there has been all along a kind of blithe assumption on the part of Americans that when America leverages its power, the world benefits. The nations we come to dominate are better off for it.  It’s tough love. We beat them up with our military power, and then we convert them into thriving capitalist democracies. Look at Japan.  Look at Germany. Such experiences are the reason for Gary’s and other Americans’ paternalism and therefore justify in their minds America’s just doing what it wants.  And, so their thinking goes, if these recalcitrant Muslims would just cooperate, their governments, too, could become healthy, vibrant democracies as ours is.  It’s inevitable that they have to grow up and enter the real, modern world.  So if we have to take them by the scruff of the neck to force them to do what’s for their own good, so be it.  Tough love.

But just how healthy and vibrant is our democracy?  And while no one would dispute America’s leadership role, does it really have the maturity and the moral authority to be the world’s parent?  I don’t think so, and here’s why:

Politics isn’t meant to solve the deepest and thorniest human problems; ideally, the role of politics is to create a fair structure that will enable as many people as possible to freely work out these problems on their own. For most normal people economics and politics—all the issues in their lives that relate to money and power—are important, but they don’t determine for them what is most important. Decent Americans want to do good work and want to be economically self-reliant.  Decent Americans value their democratic institutions and traditions and understand the importance of actively participating in them.  But their real life, the life that is most important to them is not lived in either of those spheres of activity. It’s found in the sphere of culture.

For most healthy people the “cultural” part of their lives, not the economic or political, is where the meaning is. The cultural is the sphere of leisure and freedom.  It’s the sphere of their family, friends, religion, education, sport, art, storytelling, dance, music, and song. The political and economic are spheres of obligation. People whose lives are subsumed either by their economic or political activities or whose life's meaning is determined by their political and ecnomic concerns, need, in the common parlance, to “get a life.” The 70-hour-a-week careerist has no life, neither does the destitute Somali refugee who doesn’t know where his next meal is coming from. We have a life to the degree that we don’t have to be preoccupied with the economic and the political. We have a life to the degree that we participate in a rich, warm, creative cultural life.  But in order to insure that our cultural life flourishes, we have to fulfill our political and economic obligations.

In some traditions to be chosen as leader was understood to require a significant sacrifice by the one chosen because the ordinary joys of a cultural life had to be given up in order to assume the burdens that came with power. That’s a healthy attitude toward power. The problem lies in that such an attitude is rare because power and the enjoyment of its exercise is for many an end in itself.  But the argument that I want to make over the long term in these columns is twofold.  First, that the economic and political activities in any society are healthy to the extent that they serve the flourishing of activity in the cultural sphere.  Second, that there is something fundamentally disordered about any society which is driven by people whose life’s meaning is determined by their personal political and economic goals. The rich and powerful we shall always have among us, but a healthy democracy lives from the middle and must guard against any society’s natural tendency toward oligarchy.  This is a fundamental problem Americans have struggle with since the beginning.  [See this Bill Moyers piece to give this some historical framing.]

Americans are confused about how to think about this problem because too many, even the most religious among them, think it’s desirable for the ambition-driven to have as much money and as much power as they can contrive to obtain.  That’s what a lot of people think of as their freedom to pursue the American Dream.  Any attempt to restrict such pursuits is un-American.  So freedom has come to  mean “no restriction,” and the less restriction there is, the more American it is. Anything that smacks of restriction is “socialistic,” and there is no dirtier word in the American political lexicon.

But a pure state of non-restriction is the political philosopher’s anarchic and dreaded “state of nature” where the eat-or-be-eaten law of the jungle is the only ordering principle. Societies that live by this law  are societies in which people who are sick with greed and powerlust come to dominate people who are not.

This is hardly a profound insight.  It’s an everyday observation. And yet most Americans are allowing the current administration in Washington to systematically dismantle the system of restrictions that have protected the small from  the big since the age of the Robber Barons in the late 19th century.  Maybe most of us don’t think of ourselves as small enough to worry about it now.  But the rest of the world has been made to feel small by this administration, and sooner or later so shall we middle-sized fish who live in this country.

I make no apologies for being alarmist about this.  Better to be awake to the threat even if it is in its incipient stages than to sleep until it’s too late. In the US, the pursuit of the American Dream is the cover story used by those obsessed by the pursuit of wealth and power to justify what is fundamentally a disorder of soul.  And the rest of us are soul-sick to the degree that we collude with their project.  The political and economic sphere are not where freedom is the guiding principle.  In a healthy society freedom governs the cultural sphere, and our economic and political life should be ordered to insure fair distributions of political power and economic resources to allow everyone real freedom in the cultural sphere.  Freedom in the cultural sphere cannot flourish if most people are preoccupied with economic concerns.

And so this cuts to the heart of our dilemma.  One of the great advances of the Western democracies was the idea that power should be distributed to as many people as possible to prevent its concentration in the hands of a few. The citizen submits to no other human or group of humans with special powers; he or she submits only to the rule of law. The laws derive their legitimacy from the collective will of a morally responsible citizenry. So everything depends on the informed and enlivened conscience of the individual citizen. There is always the inevitability that citizens out of laziness or lack of vigilance might fail to fulfill their obligations to do what is in the interest of the common good. Then the society will revert to the “state of nature,” which in human social terms is a system of masters and slaves--a society run by bullies, godfathers, warlords, kings, or dictators.  In other words, the way most societies operated through most of history. America in our imagination of of it was designed to say No to all of that, and so we look at ourselves and say, “We don't do that.”  The rest of the world looks at us and, like the Chinese-American student, is not so sure anymore.

Americans have therefore an easier time understanding why the political power of individuals and groups (kings, dictators, etc.), but they have a much harder time understanding how the power of these individuals and groups is linked to their freedom to acquire enormous wealth. In America it is universally recognized that it’s not ok for anyone to have unlimited political power, but that it is ok to have unlimited economic power? Isn’t it obvious that whatever restraints there might be on the first become meaningless because of the lack of restraints on the latter? Isn’t that exactly why most ordinary American citizens feel that they have no real political power because they are resigned that the real power in this country is in the hands of the big fish who have the big money?  Does anything happen in this country anymore except if big money interests want it?

So really just how healthy and vibrant is our democracy?  I would say that it is vibrant and healthy to the degree that the big fish are not allowed to do as they please.  It is vibrant to the degree that the middle and small fish are vigilant and feisty enough to oppose the big fish when they start throwing their weight around. Right now we are neither vigilant nor feisty--we are bewildered and complacent. And that’s why it’s necessary to be alarmist about this.  I don't that some people have a lot of money.  There is no resentment or envy here. I care that the very wealthy have an unfair power advantage that gives them the power to work the system to their advantage.

So I care about the agenda of the wealthy to dismantle the tax code and other restrictions in the name of freedom and the American dream. I am frustrated with the attitudes of so many middle fish with Libertarian leanings who support this big-fish agenda because they don't really understand how they are preparing the fire and oiling the skillet in which they eventually be fried. And I am frustrated by this Libertarian mood that prevents any action in the political sphere designed to solve real problems that relate to the common welfare.  Libertarianism in the political economic spheres means a return to nature.  We've seen that movie. We really don't want to see it again.

Because right now in America we’re letting the big fish do pretty much what they want.  And so if our own house is not in order, what right have we to impose order on the rest of the world?  Are we really promoting democracy and the ideals of fairness that the Chinese American student looks to the United States for, or are we just promoting the American big-fish agenda? Whatever we might have been in the past, what have we become now?

The world’s revulsion at the actions of the United States in Iraq is quite understandable.  As awful as Saddam was, he was not nearly as scary to the world as the United States is.  He was just another small fish--crazy, nasty, brutish, criminal, but not someone whom anyone with any sobriety could see as posing a significant threat to the  world.  In the eyes of the world the really significant threat doesn’t come from a crazy dime-a-dozen small fish like Saddam, but from a big one no one can prevent from doing as it pleases.

No one, that is, except the American people themselves. How? Here’s a conservative proposal: Domestically, let’s prevent the current administration from dismantling the system of laws that keeps us out of the state of nature. Here’s a radical proposal:  In the international sphere, let’s help to move the world out of the state of nature by demanding that our government support and submit to the system of international law.

 

Masked Religion

Safranski's bio on Heidegger provides a wonder lived feeling for the intellectual ferment in the first part of the 20th Century.  I like this description about Christian Bry's book, Masked Religions, a best seller in the 1920s.

Anything, Bry wrote, can become a "masked religion," if it becomes "monomaniacally," the sole principle for interpretation of meaning and salvation.  Bry, himself a religious man, found a surprisingly simple criterion for distinguishing between religion and substitute religion.  A genuine religion educates Man for reverence for the inexplicability of the world.  In the light of faith, the world grows bigger, and also darker, because it retains its mystery, and Man sees himself as part of it.  For the monomaniac of a "masked religion," on the other hand, the world shrinks.  "in each and every thing he finds only the confirmation of is opinion," which he defends with he fervor of faith against the world and against his own doubts.

That's a good start, and goes far these days to distinguish what I've been describing real Christianity from the cultism of Dobson/Fallwell right. But it also provides a good template to describe how secular ideologies function in fact as masked religions.  Ernest Becker picks up on this theme in contrasting Kierkegaard's faith with the causa sui projects of Freud and others in his book The Denial of Death.  I want to come back to this idea of causa sui as one of the principal seductions that  alienate us from Being or cause us to forget it, which is the same thing.   No time to get into it now.

Another quote in Safranski from Max Scheler suggests both that the causa sui projects are the temples of Babel we become obsessed to build and what freedom from such obsession might mean:

It will be like the first step into a flowering garden by a man kept for years in a dark prison.  This prison will be our human environment bounded by reason directed solely at what can be measured or mechanized, and the civilization of such an environment.  And the garden will be God's colorful world that--albeit at a distance--we long to salute and have open up to us.  And the prisoner will be European Man of today and yesterday, who, sighing and groaning, strides under the burden of his own mechanisms and who, his eyes turned earthward and heaviness in his limbs, has forgotten his God and his world.--Scheler, Attempt at a Philosophy of Life, 1913.

Which segues nicely into this quote by Chesterton sent by Forestwalker a couple of days ago:

We are all under the same mental calamity; we have all forgotten our names. We have all forgotten what we really are. All that we call common sense and rationality and practicality and positivism only means that for certain dead levels of our life we forget that we have forgotten. All that we call spirit and art and ecstasy only means that for one awful instant we remember that we forgot.

Is this mental calamity something we chose and continue to choose? If we chose it, what did we think we were gaining?  Was it freedom and independence?  Have we got it?  Maybe there was no choice in the matter; the meta-calamity overtook us like like the war or Wal-Mart. They just happen. Nothing we can do; just shrug the shoulders and go mow the lawn.  But maybe new choices are a possibility now, and they confront us with the possibility to reclaim in freedom and independence what was lost when the "given world" of the ancestors was left behind.

But if the prison break is to be effected, we must honestly reckon the price we must pay.  Would we pay it? Even if there is no sure return on the investment?  Or are we ok in our semi-stupor, our complacent state of anesthetization?  What will it take to become aroused from our slumber and to remember our names?  Is such a thing even possible at this late date? I don't know. I address these questions to myself, first, but also to anyone interested in thinking about it.

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking in a groupthink? I want to set up my answer to that question by discussing first the difference between calculation and wisdom.

It doesn't require discernment to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really calculation in this sense--it's automatic and mechanical: "The wise person reads his Consumer Reports before making a purchase decision."  Obviously some calculations are more complicated than others because more factors than price may enter into consideration. But what I mean by wisdom comes into view in situations that require a weighing of alternatives for which no calculus offers an answer. It requires something else--discernment, and the discernments of the truly wise leads them to make good judgments that prove themselves correct time after time that contrasts with the poor judgments consistently made by those whose judgments are based on the groupthink of the conventional wisdom.

I would argue that not all groupthink is bad. The tribal wisdom handed down from generation to generation in vibrant traditional societies was real and lifegiving. In such societies there is an experience of the living presence of the wisdom of the ancestors. And one could say that the life of the tradition is the soul of a culture, and it's that soul or ancestral mind that thinks in the people in a living traditional culture. But a tradition that no longer conveys in a living way the mind of the ancestors is a failed tradition. The tradition no longer functions as the medium through which its members experience cognitive moments that reveal the inner content of the traditional formulations. The formulations, as a consequence, become empty and rigid.

This cognitive moment, as I want to talk about it, is close to what Heidegger meant by his term 'ereignis'. It conveys the idea of numinous Being revealing itself and of its being authentically appropriated. A tradition that no longer discloses the sacred, in other words, is no longer a living tradition. It's in this sense that Nietzsche was right in describing our condition as moderns by saying not just that God was dead, but that we moderns killed him.  It's not a statement so much about God as about how modern consciousness has lost its capacity to naturally and easily experience the sacred. Moderns, to use the Heideggerian phrase, have forgotten Being--they live now in a sterile world of things. We even have to fight hard to think of people as something other than things. For souls shaped by such a world, the sacred rarely discloses itself.

Already for the literate Athenians in Socrates' time, a "Being-mediating" traditional consciousness was withering, and with it the traditional forms were starting to rigidify into sterile groupthink. Socrates' demployment of his deconstructive 'elenchus', was his attempt to clear away the dead wood to open up a space for Being to reveal itself. Socrates pushed his interlocutors to move from naive, unconscious acceptance of conventional wisdom to aporia--a condition of 'knowing ignorance' promoted in Plato's early dialogues, a condition which clears the way for a deeper cognitive apprehension of Being. I'd argue that Plato's 'anamnesis' or 'remembering' is a different way of talking about the same movement in consciousness to which Heidegger's 'ereignis'. (Forgetfulness, after all, is the central problem for H.) I'm also inclined to think that Plato's theory of the forms derived from an experience or intuition of Being, which he later tried to make sense of in rational terms with unsatisfactory results. I'd argue that the Christian Neoplatonists develop more satisfactorily what he began, but that's another discussion.   

So authentic appropriation of traditional wisdom requires a cognitive, "numinous" moment in which the sacred character of the traditional wisdom reveals itself, and this contrasts with modern traditionalism which accepts social norms as ends in themselves rather than as a means to something more important. Such "cognitive moments" are not impossible in our world, but they are much harder to come by in pluralistic, tradition-dead societies which conditions the human soul by its crude materialistic sensibility. It used to be the goal of a liberal humanistic education to help us "remember" Being.  Poetry is the primary linguistic form that seeks to disclose being, but it's boring for most because our capacity to have Being revealed to us has all but withered away. And as a result wisdom is in short supply. We have lots of people with good heads, but dried-out souls, who are good calculators, but few who are wise.

So the healthy groupthink of living tradition is rare or nonexistent in modern pluralistic, choice-centered societies in which any sense of living tradition is a distant memory. And as a result we hold on to traditional forms that have no living content, and the forms rigidify as do the souls ensnared by them. In politics and business social calculation substitutes for wisdom. When we complain that the media pundits or politicians no longer speak the truth, it's because these people are a courtier class possessed by the spirit of social calculation. They have become incapable of the kind of judgments that distinguish what is true from what is false, and when if someone actually speaks the truth, the courtiers immediately reduce it to terms of social, economic, or political calculation. They have themselves been coopted by a calculating groupthink, so it has become impossible for them to think anything else is possible. Social calculation is the only thing they understand because it consumes them, and it got them into the prominent positions they occupy. And the system selects and promotes only those who distinguish themselves as prodigies of social calculation.  It's another way of saying that the people who set the agenda and shape the conventional wisdom or groupthink in this society are mentally ill.

Now the people who subject all traditional wisdom to the Socratic test and find it completely unacceptable are called skeptics. Skeptics are either disappointed idealists embittered by the failure of the world to live up to their naive expectations, or they are extreme rationalists for whom everything is rational calculation. For the latter group the phrase 'cognitive moment' as I speak of it here is meaningless.

I see either kind of skepticism as partially valid. As aporia, it is a first step toward wisdom, but its refusal or inability to take the next step, which requires the acknowledgment of the logic of the heart or logic of the suprarational. Heart logic is what opens us up to cognitive moments. It is our an innate capacity to think in a non-calculative way and as such a prerequisite for wisdom, but it remains dormant in many, a seed waiting to germinate. It is no longer awakened in us automatically as it was in living traditional societies.

If such moments occur in our society, they are individual experiences, not group experiences. And so, as described above, the kind of groupthink that arises in tradition-dead societies is an empty, lifeless formalism, and as such an emptiness vulnerable to be filled by various seductions.  Like a vacant house on a rundown city block, groupthinks often find themselves occupied by squatters that make a bad situation worse. So back to the question in the first paragraph:  Q: What thinks in a groupthink?  A: In tradition-dead societies psychic complexes fill the empty forms and perform a compulsive kind of thinking that infects the group with collective mental illness. The degree of mental illness is measured by the degree a society is alienated from Being. We see this alienation in religious cults; we see it in political movements; and we see it in the media, and in the inanity of fashion, celebrity, and consumer fads. It's everywhere, and because it's everywhere we think it's real. It's not; it's nuts. (See my pieces on Zombie Traditionalism that explore this theme further.)

A conversation is not possible between two people who are possessed by the "demons" animating tradition-dead groupthink. It's not possible even if only one of the two interlocutors is possessed. Such people only make calculations about whether what the other says meets their litmus test for orthodoxy. A real conversation is possible only between two people who have the mutual intent to have a cognitive moment with one another--when both are open for the revelation in the Other of the sacred. Everything else is chatter, and chatter has its place. But our intersubjective experience is for most of us the last place where our capacity to recognize the sacred has not completely withered. We experience Love in the presence of the sacred. And so if other people have been occasions of the disclosure of the sacred and the awakening of 'real' love, other beings can also be the occasion for such disclosures. And that's the task, to extend our capacity for experiencing the sacred by increasing our capacity for love, even ultimately for the hated Other, the enemy.   

This is a cultural and not a political, task, but it has political implications insofar as it shapes our political discourse. Because two people in the grip of opposing groupthinks cannot possibly communicate with one another. In order for such cognitive moment to occur in the political sphere, both parties have to be open to the Other's disclosing something 'real'. But if neither party has anything but groupthink truisms to parrot, no cognitive moments are possible. The culture wars, as we have experienced them in this country, at least since the time of the Scopes trial, are like two crazy people trying to have conversation. Neither is in his right mind. Neither is capable of true judgment. All they can do is shout at one another. The best one can do is create the conditions for an opening by refusing to be sucked into the left/right groupthink polarity. (Listen to this podcast interview with Douglas Johnston for an example of someone who seeks to create this kind of opening with Muslims.)

Now the groupthink of the left and the right, insofar as either is unconsciously assimilated, infect individuals as naive idealism. And insofar as it is naive, i.e., lacking the "cognitive moment' described above, it is empty. And insofar as it is empty, it is a vacuum ready to suck in anything that will enliven it. Demagogues are con men who understand how this process works, and they are masters who feed off of the naive idealism of either the left or the right. They don't care about traditional values and they don't care about utopian ideals; they only care about concentrating power under their control. And  they understand that their ability to consolidate power requires that they manipulate the groupthink of a majority of the public. If they can control the majority groupthink, they can simply dismiss the concerns of the minority. They know how to work with Resentment and Arrogance to achieve their ends.

Maintaining power by manipulating groupthink was Orwell's great theme. The demagogue drapes everything he does in idealistic or obfuscating language, and those for whom those words have no living cognitive content simply accept the new content that the demagogues fill them with. And the next thing you know, the words have no relationship to their original meanings. They are old wine skins filled with new wine, wine whose purpose is to addle the minds of the cognitively naive. What thinks in the Orwellian groupthink is the mind of Big Brother, which is the mind of the demagogue.  This is our social evolution:  From a groupthink that thinks the wisdom of the ancestors to a groupthink that thinks the nihilism of the Powermad.

The point is this: The power hungry feed off naive idealistic groupthink, which they are very skilled at manipulating. It doesn't matter if it's the utopian idealism of the left or the traditionalist idealism of the right. Demagogues care only about manipulating whichever naive groupthink will best serve their purposes. This is Orwell's insight. Left, right--it doesn't matter. But in this country, at this time, they are working the empty, naive idealism of the traditionalist right. And their basic strategy is to incite traditionalist resentment toward the secular liberal elites, who play into this strategy by disdaining traditionalist concerns as foolish.

Their concerns are not foolish, but naive traditonalists are indeed foolish to the degree they allow themselves to be manipulated by demagogues who pretend to care about those concerns. But so are the secular liberal foolish insofar as they are unable to transcend the toxicity of the left/right polarity. Both sides need some tough-love slaps upside the head to snap the spell and bring them back to what's real. So-called moderate strategies to split the difference between the polarities can't work; because they accept the insanity of the system as normative.

An intervention is called for, and it will come in the form of catastrophe if we don't find another way. 9/11 was Reality's warning shot across the bow, and we took all the wrong lessons from it. But one way or the other, something from outside the system will be introduced, something that will bring us back to reality, and then it's a matter of enough people recognizing and working with it. But more important in the short run is having enough people to say No to demagogic manipulation.  Its groupthink has to be seen through, deconstructed, so that a space can be cleared for something real to disclose itself.