After the Future

Thoughts on 'All Things Shining'

I've been spending some time with Dreyfus and Kelly the last two weeks.  I like what they're up to in their book, All Things Shining, and also in their respective courses based on the themes in the book, which you can find on podcast here for Kelly's Harvard seminar or at iTunes U for Dreyfus's undergraduate lectures at Berkeley.(Search iTunes U for 'Dreyfus, Philosophy 6')  While I have a couple of problems with what I see as the limitations of their approach, I see them as as allies insofar as they are struggling in a post-Nietzschean culture-world to develop a non-nihilistic way to understand the human experience in its relationship to Being.

They want to do it avoiding a monotheistic ontology, and they see possibilities for a renewed sense of the sacred in a recovery of a polytheism in a postmodern key.  They spend a lot of time with Homer's Odyssey and with Melville's Moby Dick arguing that Homer and Melville give us important clues about experiencing a world that is infinitely rich and full of meaningful distinctions. Meaningful distinctions are precisely what nihilism cannot make.

I like the basic Heideggerian project they are promoting, which is to break out of the Cartesian subjectivist bubble. From my Barfieldian Christian point of view, Heidegger is one of the key thinkers involved in laying the philosophical foundation for the movement toward Final Participation. And I see the value of what they are doing as a credible (because of their incredible credentials) translation of "Heidegerrian" into a language that non-specialists can understand.

That's a very important thing to do, because nothing is more important to our cultural and collective spiritual health now than helping the culture to begin to imagine and experience itself as in a more healthful relationship to Being than the one promoted by Enlightenment rationality.

And so I find interesting the way they talk about the different historical epochs of Western Civilization as having very different, even incommensurate, ways of relating to Being. They lean heavily on Heidegger's lecture entitled "The Origin of the Work of Art,"  which talks particularly about articulating and reconfiguring forms of art, and the authors add what they argue is missing--the originating work of art. So let's start there.

In their reading of Heidegger they see Homer's poems as originating works of art. An originating work of art gathers within itself the practices, values, attitudes that define in a background way what everybody takes for granted as the real world. While I don't remember them saying so, I would think that the Pentateuch or Torah should also be considered an originating work of art. And other cultures have them as well, but their concern, and mine, is the "history" of Being in the West.

Articulating forms of art are the most common--they express or articulate aspects of the world as it is already defined by the originating work of art or a reconfiguring form of art. They spend a lot of time talking abut the Oresteia, which requires Homer as the background originating form of art and The Divine Comedy, which requires both the New Testament and Aristotle.  Again, they don't say so, but I should think that Socrates is to the Homeric tradition what Jesus is to the Hebrew tradition.  Both were tranfigurers.

Which brings us to the most intriguing of the three that they call a reconfiguring form of art. They use the gospels, particularly the Gospel of John as a paradigm of this form of art. They define it as a work that changes the rules of the game by pointing to a radically different way of relating to Being that is at first incomprehensible to those who encounter it. 

They call Descarte's Meditations a reconfiguring  work of art insofar as it "invents", so to say, the autonomous or buffered Self, and I see what they mean, but I think it's a questionable labeling. I don't think he reconfigures the culture, but articulates a shift that has already occurred. I'd argue that the shift from the connected premodern way of relating to Being to the modern disconnected way was more of a group effort following upon the collective change in consciousness effected by the invention of Gutenberg's printing press, but I'm not going to argue the point here. I suppose Nietzsche was more the articulator of the end of an age than the the prophet of a new age, unless you think his nihilism has a future, and I don't. And neither do D. and K.

So the authors would seem to be pointing to both Heidegger and Melville as providing a potentially transfiguring vision of a new relationship to Being as the one to replace the Enlightenment rationalist relationship to Being. And they very well could be right, but their visions would have to catch on culture-wide to fully qualify, and I don't know if the authors' commitment to  pluralism even allows for that possibility. Maybe it does. And while they don't say so, they msut see their own book as playing an articulating role for the Heideggerian/Melvillean vision. But they're not trying to convert anybody; they're just trying to make a case that looking at the world from their point of view allows for rich possibilities that offer a non-monotheistic alternative to nihilism.

They are phenomenologists, so their goal is to describe the phenomena, which means all the stuff that happens in human experience. And the phenomenon that most interests them is 'mood', which they want to argue is a non-subjective experience--it's something given by Being that we attune to if we are receptive to it. They refer to Heidegger's description of the gods as the "attuning ones". When the gods favor you, they attune you to aspects of Being that effect feeling states and shifts in consciousness. And the difference between the heroes, or a figure like Helen, is that when the gods 'shine' upon them they are overtaken by a mood that raises them above the normal grade of human to be themselves god-like. When the gods abandon them, as Athena does Odysseus, they are quite ordinary and usually screw things up. 

So what's important about Achilles is not that he is a killing machine in the modern militaristic sense, but that he has a special relationship to the god Ares. And the same is true for Helen. She may have been the cause of untold death and suffering, but, hey, Aphrodite shown upon her, and she did what any right-thinking Greek would do--surrender to the god because only in doing so does the possibility for human excellence lie. Such surrender is the prerequisite for any human to live at his or her best. And besides if she didn't run off with Paris, there would have been no great deeds for the bards to sing about.

Now the case that the authors want to make is that this experience of surrender is precisely what makes human beings perform at their best, and that the key is to learn to live, as the Homeric Greek did, with an attitude of receptivity, reverence, and gratitude.  Living with such an attitude makes it more likely that you will catch this mood, and the worst thing is to live like Penelope's suitors, whose lives are bestial precisely because they have no sense of reverence and so are incapable of being receptive of the gods' gifts. And they have, I think, very interesting things to say about what that means for us today.  It's not about nostalgia for the Homeric world but a way of gathering all the ways in which we humans have been in relationship with Being and saying Yes to all of them, even if they seem to contradict one another.

Whether it is Jesus' sense that the world is best revealed through the light of his mood of agape love or Dante's sense that we teach ourselves the skill to be receptive to the love that moves the sun and other stars; whether it Aeschylus' sense that we can bring out the culture at its best by finding an appropriate place for all its nascent forces, or Sturt's sense that we can dwell in a natural world of sacred worth, these poietic accounts of the sacred are gentle and nurturing in a way that was alien to Homer's world. . . .

The practices have gathered through the history of the West to reveal these manifold ways the world is.  Perhaps there are other ways the practices have gathered too. But only now, released from the ancient temptation to monotheism, can we find a place for each of these ways of being in our contemporary world. The polytheism that gets all these ways in balance will be more varied and more vibrant than anything Homer ever knew.

This contemporary Polytheistic world will be a wonderful world of sacred shining things.

The book and their lectures crackle with all kinds of interesting insights, and I'm not doing it justice here, and I might be posting on some of their other ideas later. The last chapter from which the excerpt is taken is for the most part an exposition and meditation on the development of what Aristotle called phronesis--practical wisdom, which is a good beginning. Aristotle also talked about sophia, which is higher order kind of wisdom. Dreyfus and Kelly don't go there, and that's from my point of view a limitation. As the piece I put up yesterday indicates, for me it's all about the Logos as ground of Being, and sophia is what we get when the logos in potentialis becomes in small or significant ways actus. They might think that makes no sense; I don't know.

D & K would probably say that the constraints of their phenomenological method prevent them from talking about Logos and Sophia, at least in the way that I do. They'd probably tell me that's cool if it works for you, but don't judge anybody as inferior if they don't agree with you. But I'd argue that there are different kind of judgments, stupid ones and wise ones, and I think we're so freaked out by the kinds of stupid judgments that have been made especially by religious types that we are afraid of any standard by which you can judge something as better or worse.

I believe it's possible to embrace a rich pluralism of responses to being, but also to develop a wisdom about what is higher and lower, better and worse, mature and immature. I think there is a way of honoring differences, and knowing not to judge what you don't understand. But I think it's also dangerous to bracket a priori the possibility of all such judgments. That's what I hear them saying. And this brings me to my second objection where this problem becomes particularly acute.

I'd argue that their ontological pluralism while it might work effectively for individuals and small or local groups, reinforces a mentality that keeps us divided and conquered in the larger public sphere--particularly when it comes to issues regarding political and economic power. Here's an excerpt from an email I wrote them yesterday asking them about this:

But here's what worries me: In a globalizing world I think there must  be some transcultural standard of 'right' that transcends local-god particularity.  Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela, for instance, were able to change the mood in their respective societies, but they did so by appealing to universalist Christian and Enlightenment ideals. They were able to create successful movements that were powerful precisely because they were not circumscribed by local gods--they appealed to something at a different level, a level that during the modern period has come to be recognized trans-culturally as a legitimate standard of the Good by all men and women of good will.

If such movements have no such background ideals that transcend the local gods, then I'd argue that in a world that is in almost in every other respect divided and conquered by its pluralism, there is no resisting the coming transhuman barbarism.  And I fear that because the lack of or the diminution of the felt power of those transcultural ideals is precisely what allows the barbarians to take the field unopposed, especially in the techno/economic and political spheres.

I'd argue that what is required is not a new polytheism, but something that comes closer to henotheism, in the sense that there is one transcultural principle, (call it what you want--Logos works for me), but in a balanced tension or metaxis with local gods, incommensurate as they may be [with one another].  Maybe these events in Wisconsin will change the national mood, but it's been disturbing to me that appeal to universalist ideals seems so impotent, and I don't see that your approach has an answer for it. Is this something you've thought about?

It could be that politics is just not something they want to get into--and that's fine, but if so, it's a limitation. I think there has to be some transpersonal, transcultural philosophical principle that everyone accepts as legitimate that can slap down the local gods (or demons, like racism) when they get out of line. It's fine for individuals to learn from experience that choices that they've made were not the best, but sometimes people who are further along in the development of their phronesis need to have a word with those who are less far along, especially if they're about to make choices that will have tragic consequences for others. But you have to believe there is the possibility for being further along, that there is a better and worse, and that the judgment about it is not just an aesthetic one, but one about what is deeply real or less deeply real. The Heideggerians have it right when they say that truth is not propositional, but rather revelatory. But somer revelations are more profound than others. 

To take the example of Homer's Helen that the authors spend a great deal of time describing as an exemplar of a shining human being at her best, it probably would have been better if someone slapped her upside the head and told her that Paris was a chump. Eventually she figured this out for herself, and there are in life all kinds of lessons that we have to learn from experience, but the authors' argue that to think Helen's running off with Paris was childish and irresponsible is to fundamentally misunderstand what makes the Greeks so wonderful. And I think this is, to say the least, questionable. It's actually pretty ridiculous, and explains why Heidegger was similarly seduced by Hitler. No doubt he thought the gods were shining on him as Aphrodite was shining on Helen. 

D & K point out that Helen was regretful about all the death and destruction that followed upon her running away with Paris, but she had no regrets about being swept up by the 'mood' of Aphrodite, and neither did any of her contemporaries blame her, including Menelaus her husband. They didn't think she had done anything wrong because in the author's reading humans are at their best when they are shined on by the gods and surrender to them. I don't know if Cheney and Rumsfeld regret their invasion of Iraq--probably not. But even if they did, as Robert McNamara came to regret his Vietnam delusions, that doesn't mean that we should refrain from judging them, or to accept their justification that they were swept up by the mood of Ares, and they were for a while, at least, at their shining best and brightest. 

Now that the god has abandoned them, the dust has settled, and all the unnecessary death and destruction is appallingly obvious to everyone, can anyone possibly justify their actions by reference to being swept up by a mood? By D & K's logic we would be patronizing them as we would the the Homeric Greeks if we did so. Why? Because we can't make judgments about the experiences of the gods others have if we worship other gods.  If I'm into Jesus' mood of agape love, that's cool, but leave the other dude who's into Mars alone.  Sorry I can't accept that, if that's what they're saying.

This is fine when it comes to relate to and understand our family members, neighbors and co-workers, but not when it comes to politics. These fools ought to have been stopped, just as Helen ought to have been stopped, and if the gods aren't going to give the rest of us a mood to motivate our doing it, then we have to find other resources. Maybe I'm misreading D & K, or maybe they have an answer for these objections. If they write back, I'll let you know.

 

Quote of the Day: Mark Erlich

A generation ago, non-union workers often welcomed news of improved wages and benefits for unionized employees, recognizing that a rising tide lifts all boats. But ... at a time of sacrifice and insecurity, many would prefer to sink their neighbor's slightly bigger boat while wistfully hoping for a glance at a yacht in a gated marina. (Source)

There are people who romanticize unions and the labor movement. I don't--there's a lot about the empirical performance of organized labor that really stinks.  But we're involved in a power game, and all the power is with Big Money, and they realize that the only organized force that still has the financial resources to oppose them is the unions.

It's one thing to oppose certain policies that unions support; it's another thing to seek to destroy them. And it should be clear that the Republicans and their backers are out to destroy them. They start with the public service unions, because they're more vulnerable with regard to public opinion, and if they succeed there, they'll come after every other union.

We're in a class war, and many Americans just don't want to believe it because it sounds so "leftist" or "extremist", but it's being waged by Big Money, and Big Money is quite happy to do so without any organized opposition, and the longer most Americans think there's no war going on, the longer they'll stay unorganized.  And in the meanwhile the unions are the only organized opposition it has to deal with.

There's room for legitimate debate about particular policies that unions support, but at the same time we cannot lose sight of the larger picture.  We're involved in a war here; the time for splitting hairs is behind us, and so at a very crude level it's coming down to a fundamental question: Whose side are you on?

 

History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them somewhere along the way. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--neither are we humans what we used to be.  There are opportunities, but also risks that come with this changed context in which humans come to define who they are what they are capable of. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect.   Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the traditions of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, and with that increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important, and in the final analysis all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort. It's in this sense that modernity has had a soul-flattening effect.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a globalcommercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are embraced as life's winners. Who are  the winners and who the losers, who the master, who the slaves?--that's the only thing that matters in such collective values constellation. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life force that once suffused them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away. And a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

Wisconsin

I don't have much except the obvious to say about it from my perspective. But for the record, I'll say it anyway: We're seeing the classic pattern in American politics play out there that we've seen grow in intensity since 1980. Republicans take power and aggressively seek to roll back what the rest of us thought was settled; people throw the Republicans out when their extremist agenda becomes obvious; Democrats take power, and they dither while Republicans consolidate their gains, and in doing so nauseate everyone who expects them to fight to win back what the Republicans took away; voters whose disgust with spineless Democrats is fresher than their memory of the irresponsible extremism of Republicans vote Republicans back into power; Republicans claim a mandate, pick up where they left off, and take the next step in aggressively rolling back what the rest of us thought was settled.

This is the pattern and the only sane way to break it is to take peacefully to the streets to make the case that otherwise doesn't get made because it dies somewhere in committee. The idea that somehow this is anti-democratic because the people have spoken in voting Walker and other Republicans into office is inane because it fails to recognize that the two-party electoral democracy in this country doesn't work anymore--at least for ordinary working Americans. Clearer choices have to be given to the people besides those offered by this moribund party system. And it starts with workers.

These workers doing what they're doing now in Wisconsin, which is making the case for themselves that no party is willing robustly to make on their behalf, is the first step toward restoring a robust representative democracy--if it's already not to late to do it.

Quote of the Day: Cormac McCarthy

Black: “What would you do if Jesus was to speak to you?”

White: “Do you imagine that he might?”

Black: “No, I don’t. But, but, I’own know.”

White: “I’m not virtuous enough.”

Black: “No, professor, it ain’t nothing like that. You ain’t got to be virtuous. You just got to be quiet.”

Source: From his play, The Sunset Limited

As a side note It's interesting that Berkeley Heideggerian Bert Dreyfus's and his former student and now chair of Harvard Philosopy Sean Kelly's "All Things Shining" is making something of a splash in the zeitgeist. It's Heidegger for "masses", which is about attunement to Being through receptivity and gratitude. Jesus isn't the hero of their story, though--Homer and Melville are.

I'll have more to say about that book when I have more time. 

Quote of the Day: John Cole

One thing that even the dim bulbs in the media should understand by now is that there is in fact a class war going on, and it is the rich and powerful who are waging it. Anyone who does anything that empowers the little people or that threatens the wealth and power of the plutocracy must be destroyed. . . .

You have to understand the mindset--they are playing for keeps. The vast majority of the wealth isn’t enough. They want it all. Anything that gets in their way must be destroyed. . . .

And they are well financed, have a strong infrastructure, a sympathetic media, and entire organizations dedicated to running cover for them. They’ve even created their own mythical ideology in which they are superhero Galtian overlords, and this lets a few rubes who babble ignorantly about the free market get to feel like they are playing along, when they are really just being played. It’s these guys versus all of us, yet half the people being rogered (Republicans and glibertarians and hell, half the Democrats) have been convinced the other side is a bigger threat to their well being than the people with all the power, money, and resources. (Source)

When John Cole, the moderate voice of reason, says it, then maybe this class-war narrative is really almost ready for prime time, even if not in the MSM. But will a movement arise to vigorously push back rather than just whine about it?  That's the question.

The Sacred Polity

"Was anybody else offended by...can you put your hand on your heart?" Beck said. "It's the national anthem!" He said he had shushed his son and told him to put his hand on his heart when Christina Aguilera was singing the song.

"I was really offended by the sports players that were just hanging on their jersey," Beck said.

"The country that gives them the ability to...pursue their happiness in peace and safety is not worth putting your hand on the heart."  (Source)

In a secular age, it's hard for most cosmopolitan types to understand why Glenn Beck gets so upset at things like this.  I think I get it, but I'm going to give one of my long-winded explanations to provide some context to explain what I think is going on. Doing so also gives me  a platform to talk about a couple of other things as well. And in doing so I'm going to lean heavily on Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, chapter 12--"The Age of Mobilization".

In the pre-Reformation Europe, the world still had an enchantment about it--some things were sacred and some very much were not. But it was a rather vertical, static sense of the sacred. The sacred was experienced in special times during the cycle of the seasons, in sacred places, and in sacred ritual actions. The sacred was sharply distinguished from the profane, and profane behavior in a sacred time or place was more than a breach of decorum--it was sacrilegious.

Today secular cosmopolitans and even, I'd say, most believers have lost any sense of the intensity of experience that was associated with the sacred--or, for that matter, the sacrilegious. Comedians keep trying to push past the last vestiges of an old decorum as if they were on some other sacred mission, but it's all rather inconsequential. They think they are lion tamers in their imaginations of themselves, when in fact in a reversal of the Monty Python sketch, they are really dealing with anteaters.

And with Beck you have  someone who articulates a nostalgia for the lost sacred--and that's the part I get, kind of, because I, too, feel that loss. But Taylor illuminates something that I as someone who grew up in a pre-Vatican Catholic world (I was born in 1950, graduated 8th grade in '64 and high school in '68) had very little sense of--the sacred rituals of American civil religion. We Catholics had our own definition and way of experiencing the sacred and the sacrilegious, and all the Protestant versions of it (with which I associated the rituals of civil religion) seemed rather pallid, a kind of wannabe sacred that really didn't cut the mustard. It was all so much going through the motions. The various rituals of American civil religion always seemed kind of silly and unserious to me, the way the Shriners play at being some kind of initiatory mystery cult--they're acting out a collective fantasy that has lost any real connection to the living spiritual forces that gave these rituals their shape.

So here's where Taylor helped me understand something I didn't before. I had only a passing acquaintance with Bellah's work on civil religion in the 70s--it didn't really interest me because it had little to do with what I believed to be a vital spiritual future.  But that work is important if you want to understand what's going on in American society today, and I'm more interested in that now than I was then. I see now that there was a moment when American civil religion really had valid sacred power, where the rituals weren't empty or without reference to something noble.  And I understand how it functioned effectively to replace the experience of the lost sense of the sacred that pervaded the collective imagination in the ancien regime:

In an enchanted world, there is an obvious way in which God can be present in society; in the loci of the sacred.  And the political society can be closely connected to these, and can itself be thought to exist on a higher plane.  Ernst Kantoriowicz tells us that one of the first uses of the term 'mystical body' in European history referred to the French kingdom. The king himself could be one of the links between the planes, represented respectively by the king's mortal and undying bodies. . . .

This is a description of what we'll call the old-school sacred polity. But this model began to crumble after the Reformation for lots of complex reasons that are beyond the scope of what I want to write about here.  But three very important factors were the religious fragmentation of Christendom that broke apart its organic sense of modeling a hierarchical cosmos, coupled with the post-Copernican understanding of the cosmos that supplanted the Ptolemaic hierarchical scheme, and lastly the project by both Protestant and Catholic counter-Reformation elites to purify religious practice and belief by purging the pagan vestiges of popular religion, which were essential for maintaining a sense of the world's enchantment. 

Educated ecclesial elites were among the most aggressive in trying to stamp out all that superstitious enchantment; nevertheless, it continued, even in the Protestant countries, well into the 19th Century. In Catholic countries there was what Taylor calls the baroque compromise, which allowed for a little of the old mystery and spiritual exuberance, but it was definitely 'new school'. I experienced as a child the last gasp of that baroque ecclesial mentality. The old-school practices of the heath, that had been largely accepted and reframed in the pre-Reformation Christian social imagination, were now taboo.

But despite the resistance to these changes by these heathen heathdwellers, a new notion of the sacred began to take hold of the imaginations of the educated elites, especially in the Protestant countries. Here's Taylor on this shift:

Now with advancing disenchantment, especially in Protestant societies, another model took shape, with relation both to the cosmos and the polity. In this the notion of Design was crucial. To take the cosmos, there was a shift from the enchanted world to a cosmos conceived in a conformity with post-Newtonian science, in which there is absolutely no question of higher meanings being expressed in the universe around us. But there is still, with someone like Newton himself, for instance, a strong sense that the universe declares the glory of God. . . . Now the presence of God no longer lies in the sacred, because this category fades in a disenchanted world. But he can be thought to be no less powerfully present through His Design.

So before getting to our more intensely late-20th century experience of secularism, there was an intermediary stage that was very much at the center of the American project. It was carried primarily by what I have written about here as the whiggish spirit for which the Puritans and other northern Calvinists were the chief bearers. The sacred wasn't something experienced in sacred space so much as it was experienced in a kind of sacred time--or perhaps more accurately in a sense of Providentially ordained historical purposes. This is what I'll call the new-school sacred polity.  Its citizens belonged to a society that was developing, moving at the cutting edge history according to a divinely ordained purposes.

One's experience of the sacred correlated with this sense of living one's life as a free individual, but in a free individualism that was attuned to the evolving effort to fulfill that plan, and in doing so to be on the right side of history:

The presence of God in the cosmos is matched by another idea: His presence in the polity. Here an analogous change takes place. The divine isn't there in a King who straddles the planes. But it can be present to the extent that we build a society which plainly follows God's design. This can be filled in with an idea of moral order which is seen as established by God, in the way invoked, for instance, in the American Declaration of Independence: Men have been created equal, and have been endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights.

The idea of a moral order which is expressed in this Declaration, and which has since become dominant in our world, is what I have been calling the Modern Moral Order. It is quite different from the orders which preceded it. Its members are disembedded individuals who come to associate together. The design underlying the association is that each, in pursuing his or her own purpose in life, acts to benefit others mutually. It calls for a society structured for mutual benefit, in which each respects the rights of others, and offers them mutual help of certain kinds.

But in the earlier days, when the plan was understood as Providential and the order seen as Natural Law, which is the same as the law of God, building a society which fulfills these requirements was seen as fulfilling the design of God. To live in such a society was to live in one where God was present, not at all in the way that belonged to the enchanted world, through the sacred, but because we were following His design. God is present as the designer of the way we live.  We see ourselves, to quote a famous phrase, as "one people under God".

This is the basis for American exceptionalism that was felt especially strongly in the 19th century. Lincoln was an exemplar in his sense of the nation's providential mission, and his vision and his prodigious ability to articulate it have made him the architect of America's second founding. He articulated what so many Americans came to believe--that America was  the world's "last best hope".  Not because it was flawless, but because in the American soul there were these better angels working to accomplish in a more perfect union a providentially ordained design. Lincoln--who was no churchgoer--more than any other prominent American I can think of had a profound sense of America as sacred polity in the new school sense. He was the St. Paul, so to speak, of American civil religion--not its founder, but its most eloquent evangelist.

So this sense of higher national purpose comprised two elements: first, the sense that there was something providential in the American project to the degree that it was progressively moving toward a greater realization of this higher purpose or design, that it was in this sense a project of the nation's better angels; second, a collective sense that while we are a self-reliant, freedom-loving people, we are also good neighbors, that we have as individuals a vested, mutual interest in the welfare of the whole society--that we all have a shared hope for a better American future.

This idea of moving toward a more perfect realization of a divine order was was not a possibility in the  collective social imagination of the  old-school sacred polity.  The order was already established, and people lived virtuous lives in conformity with it or they lived dissolute, disordered, sinful lives out of conformity with it.  But in the new-school sacred polity it became a commonplace, especially for the more "whiggish" factions in the new American republic, that the American providential purpose was to realize more perfectly over time the ideals articulated in the Declaration, and in doing so to be a light to the nations. And to a large degree, and for a long time, America was that.

Sure, the nation had its dark side. There has always been a  violent, rapacious aspect to the American character, but it was balanced by this other side, these better angels, this feeling for a providential destiny, and for the hope of a society ruled by decency and a spirit of mutual help. This sense in those who bore the nation's better angels empowered them with a zeal that is hard for progressives today to imagine or embrace. Just read the lyrics to the "Battle Hymn of the Republic" to get a feel for it if you need some reminding.

It's hard today to think of American evangelicalism as being a force for progressive change, but it was. The last time we saw it was in Martin Luther King's rhetoric that drew deeply and powerfully from this now submerged sense of the new school sacred polity. And that's the last time we saw any real significant change in this country. I'd argue that without an appeal to the new school sacred polity nothing significant gets done. I'd like to say that if Lincoln was the American sacred polity's St. Paul, then MLK was its St. Augustine. Augustine's imagination of the world and God's relationship to it dominated Europe for over a thousand years--would that MLK's did so as well.

But for most educated now Americans it's too hard to believe that America has a providential role to be at the cutting edge of history, or to think of America as Lincoln did as the world's last best hope. People mouth the words from time to time, but it doesn't resonate. That's what was different, though, about Obama.  When he used the language of the sacred polity, it resonated, and it awakened what Lincoln called our better angels.

I think this was the key to Obama's mystique during his campaign, and is the reason why for so many of us he is now such a crushing disappointment. During the campaign, he awakened that latent sense of America's sacred providential calling, he roused those better angels. But when they reported to work the day after his inauguration, he told them to go home. He told them that America is a game played by insiders, that it was back to business as usual and that he would govern in a way that was in its substance, if not its style, in continuity with everything decent Americans hated about what had happened to the country since the invasion of Iraq.

That's Obama's great failure--not to recognize the opportunity that was afforded him, that these angels with his leadership could have accomplished significant progress toward the change we all long for, whether we consciously recognize it or not. But Obama so far has disregarded them, and he has given new life and restored legitimacy to the forces of regression, which were on their heels in 2008. That's what's so infuriating--this sense of missed opportunity.  And so now we're told by all the jaded types that those of who believe in those better angels were foolish ever to think they exist. I insist that we were not.  And I insist that nothing changes until those angels are roused and put to work.

***

The culture wars in America since the 70s is a war between two competing forms of nostalgia--between those nostalgic for a sacred, providential sense of America's purpose--the cultural right--and those nostalgic for the lost, collective spirit mutual help--mainly progressives on the cultural left. The odd thing about this culture war is that both sides need the aspects in the other they oppose. It's as if the American soul were riven in two, and in its division cannot stand. They each in their way flip and flop impotently, gasping for breath like fish on a dock. We're left with impotence, stalemate, frustration--the best people at best mustering a kind of diffident goodwill, and the worst a barbaric ferocity that commands the field.

The cultural right is all about a longing for this static sacred with little sense of what I described above as the national project of our better angels--it is on the whole remarkably mean spirited and small minded. And the cultural left is all about social progress without any sense of history's having a sacred or providential dimension. And that's why, I'd argue, progressives are so weak. They lack the force of deeply inspired conviction. They don't really believe in the better angels, except maybe as a quaint, air-quoted metaphor, so they would never think to call upon them.

Progressives on the cultural left don't "get" what Lincoln and MLK "got". They don't understand that in order to resist the enormous power of the barbaric forces that now dominate in our political and economic sphere, there has to be a deeply felt spiritual counterforce that resistance can draw from.

So what's the takeaway here? Someone like Glenn Beck recognizes on an unconscious level that something is missing--a feeling for the sacred that all of us whether we realize it or not deeply long for, but he doesn't know where to find it. He looks vainly for it in a preservation of dessicated forms rather than in a recovery of the broad-minded generous spirit Lincoln helped us to imagine. These forms without their originating animating spirit are zombie forms, possessed in his case by paranoid demons and the delusional thinking that follows from such a possession.

This kind of extremist right wing conservative embraces a fantasy sacred, one that has no existence or force except to reinforce his delusional thinking. By their fruits you will know them. Progressives, on the other hand, reject any possibility for experiencing the sacred, and so don't, and so on the whole lack the collective will to oppose the barbarians except to write nasty things about them in their blogs. And so we're at this impasse. And the barbaric forces rule until somehow or other the better angels find their footing in some kind of social movement that understands the power they have to make the difference.

We must at some point retrieve this sense of a sacred national purpose in the way that Lincoln and MLK understood it.  And to recognize once again the difference between the sacred and the sacrilegious, and that there is nothing sacred about markets; they are profane neutral. Nevertheless there are some market behaviors, like the kind of thing we've seen done by Wall Street, that are downright sacrilegious--deep, appalling, abject affronts to what in our collective sense of decency and common national purpose.

I fear that if a movement inspired by the nation's better angels does not arise, we will eventually be thrown into a dialectic of barbarism, one barbarian faction seeking to supplant the reigning barbarians in an endless cycle of political king of the hill.  We were supposed to be better than that--and at times we have been, but we're in a part of the cycle now in which we have no sense of our national purpose.

I guess the question is whether the game is lost or whether we can at some point recover what we've lost. I'm pessimistic, but not without hope. 

The Human Future

I bring up the subject of the singularity from time to time, and it usually gets ignored. But when you look ahead twenty years the challenges it poses to the idea of the 'human' dwarf everything else. Outside of science fiction that most people see as mere entertainment, not much is said or written about it in the mainstream.

I think because it's just so hard to get your head around.  We're in the habit of looking toward the future in the rear-view mirror, and we assume fundamental continuity with incremental changes. The idea of some major discontinuty shorts the brain circuits, and we choose to think instead about Obama's approval ratings or whatever we're comfortable with. But there is nothing going on in the world right now that has more importance; it will change everything. It would seem to be the kind of thing we should be talking more about.

And while Kurzweil might be mostly sanguine about the prospects, I think his 'engineer-think inclines him already to think like a cyborg, and  if it comes to a choice, it's  clear which side of the cyborg-human divide he'd prefer to be on. But unless something very dramatic changes in the spiritual makeup of humans soon (or some environmental cataclysm befalls us), the likely the human human future for all of us is one dominated by cyborgs.

We have no idea what that means, really.  But we have every reason to believe that a major discontinuity lies ahead, and that our kids will live through it.

 

And Maher's Two Cents

Quote of the Day: Greenwald

Can you believe that "in Hosni Mubarak's Egypt," private wealth translates into great political power and vice-versa?  What is it like, wonders the curious and concerned Times reader, to live in a country like that?  No wonder there's an uprising. 

How many American politicians with a national platform over the last thirty years have failed to convert their political standing into great personal wealth? (source)

How many indeed?

It's really pretty amazing how difficult it is for Americans, particularly those in the media, to look in the mirror. I guess it's just because we're so "special."  We're just not like those other creepy oligarchies--nothing like them at all. We're the world's oldest democracy where the will of the people is sovereign.

Reaching the Breaking Point

I don't have a lot to say about what's going on in Egypt, but here's what comes to mind. On one level it's complicated, but on another it isn't. It's just about people who have reached a breaking point. People in poor countries reach the breaking point more quickly than people in richer countries. The power elite in poorer countries don't have the sophisticated control techniques richer countries have, and so they have to work with more primitive tools.

The American people have no real power until they take to the streets, and they won't until they reach a breaking point. That's the great advantage now that the U.S. power elite has.  There's more of a cushion here. Lots of Americans are feeling uncomfortable, but they aren't anywhere near the breaking point. American politics is an insider game played between different factions in the American power elite. For the rest of us it's a kind of spectator sport.

What we get on FOX or MSNBC or talk radio is no different from the analysis we get on ESPN or on our local sports radio shows. It's amazing how much time, thought, analysis goes into all the sports talk. Is it qualitatively any different from the political news and analysis we get down the dial? How does any of it really affect our lives except for feeling good when our side wins and bad when it loses. But nothing fundamental changes unless it's something that the currently most powerful faction in the power elite wants anyway. The electorate has as much influence on what happens in Washington as the fans have an influence on decisions made by the NFL and its owners.

And so the power elite in this country can pretty much do as it pleases knowing there won't be any repercussions. Americans are couch potatoes, and  if I'm in the American power elite, I don't care how bad things get for these coach potatoes so long as they stay on the couch, and they will so long as things don't get breaking-point bad.

Ultimately the people who get power are the ones who have an unhealthy, compulsive need for it. And that's how things will play out in Egypt. Mubarak might be pushed out in the next week or so, but things won't fundamentally change. Too many people with power and money--within Egypt and outside of it--have a vested interest in the Mubarak system. They want stability, and the definition of stability is business as usual--the rich getting richer, and the poor, well, staying poor, but not so poor they reach that breaking point. That was Mubarak's only failure, that he let things reach the breaking point. And he will have to pay personally for that, but the system will remain in place.