After the Future

Francis as the Vatican's Gorbachev? (Updated)

Oh, I forgot. John 23rd was. The Vatican since then has been trying futilely to get back to the status quo ante, but the "Vatican Security System" has been in a slo-mo implosion mode since then. Things move a little more slowly in such ancient institutions. Anyway, this paragraph struck me in an article in today's NYT about Pope Francis's new appointments:

Vatican experts also noted that Francis favored men who had worked long years as priests before becoming bishops, and who had shown the sort of merciful pastoral style he advocates. And the Vatican also highlighted the selection of Archbishop Loris Francesco Capovilla as an emeritus cardinal. He is 98, and served as the secretary for Pope John XXIII, who will be canonized by Francis in April during the continuing commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council.

I don't want to oversell what Francis is doing, but he does seem to be doing some structurally substantive things as well as some stylistic things. He does seem to "get it", if by getting it we mean that the real church is on the local level, and the people who play management roles are there to serve the work that goes on at the local level. In order to do that you need to appoint bishops and cardinals who have had long careers working in parishes on the front lines. And you need to get people who are not going to be Yes men, empty cassocks, who will simply do as they are told.

For someone who is old enough to have lived through the Vatican II reforms and then to witness the retrenchment that followed it, I have been pessimistic that anything could be done by a single personality to take down the Vatican Security System. For the last several hundred years it has operated as a corrupt little city state, and there are too many vested interests that like it that way for some interloper to come in and change things. But I think there come moments in the history of all institutions when they are no longer viable and must either collapse from their own dead weight (as the Soviet Union did) or grow something new from within, which like the new chick bursts the shell of the brittle old thing when the time is ripe. John XXIII started the process, and maybe Francis is going to finish it.

Maybe, maybe not. I have no idea whether we are entering such a time for the Roman Church, and I'm sure many readers here could care less one way or the other.  But let me explain why it matters to me. I have often enough explained my reasons for remaining a practicing Catholic despite how difficult it has been to take the institution seriously. In the last ten years I've been holding on by my fingernails. But I have this belief, which might be naive, but it's that the pre-Reformation Churches provide a part of the essential infrastructure for a cultural rebirth.

They have played, often rather clumsily, an essential role as a sign of contradiction to the materialist/rationalistic frame that has shaped optimistic modernity, and pessimistic postmodernity (so far). The core element in this being a sign of contradiction is their  insistence on the fundamentally sacramental and multidimensional nature of reality. The post-Reformation churches, particularly those in the Calvinist wing, tip their hat to that reality insofar as the scriptures point to it continuously, but their worldview is otherwise thoroughly modern and rationalistic. Faith is not a head trip.

And while these churches have been in a defensive mode and in such a posture have not introduced anything new of any broad cultural import in over 500 years, I think of them as like fallow fields, rich in nutrients from having been rested, and as such providing fertile ground for the emergence of something new, something that can have broad cultural import.

It will bear some resemblance to the old, but will be  different, the way Aquinas is like Aristotle or Bonaventure like Plato. But I don't mean this as something new in purely the intellectual sense, but more in an experiential sense. New thinking has to come out of new experience broadly shared. This will be something that comes not top down, but from the bottom up, and with the right people in place in the hierarchy, people who 'get it', people who are themselves looking for it and doing what they can to nourish and cultivate it, it might have a chance of taking root, flowering, and fruiting.

UPDATE: Pope Removes Cardinals in Shakeup of Vatican Bank. Cleansing the temple? It looks like it. I hope this guy doesn't get himself killed. There is a very interesting story unfolding here. It's time to start paying attention. This from the National Catholic Reporter:

Most recently, we have from Jesuit Fr. Antonio Spadaro, editor of the magazine La Civiltà Cattolica, a detailed account of the pope's conversation in November with leaders of men's religious orders gathered in Rome. This appears to be another important segment of a corner of the puzzle that, while perhaps not as apparent as other elements, is fundamental to the rest. From the start, the pope has been slowly dismantling that portion of the clerical culture that has led to destructive secrecy, corruption and lack of accountability. . . .

The headlines his comments generated were not inappropriate. After all, this was the pope warning that "formation is a work of art, not a police action" and that the result should not be the creation of "little monsters." How many of us sitting in the pews recognize those "little monsters" or have had our parishes disrupted by priests "who have hearts that are as sour as vinegar"?

That would be tough talk for any group to hear, but Francis also went on at length talking about the need for tenderness, for forgiveness. He made the distinction between sin and corruption. "Sinners are accepted [into religious life], but not people who are corrupt."

He's a mensch who has entered a den dominated for so long by moral midgets, but don't underestimate the resentment of the midgets and their power to push back. 

The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part II

"To dare is to temporarily lose one's footing; Not to dare is to lose one's self."

"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."                                    --Soren Kierkegaard

                                                                                    

If I’ve come to understand anything over the years, it’s that individual human beings, even the best and worst, are always a mix of good and bad motives, but large institutions (governments, corporations, churches) the larger they get, the less ambivalent the motives that drive them. Large institutions don't do ambivalence. Their defenders will make all kinds of nuanced, clever, lawyerly arguments to justify what they do, but what in the end they do is boringly predictable, i.e., whatever serves their institutional self-interest.

That self interest is defined mainly in terms of security and control. There are always threats, real or imaginary, that justify getting more of the latter to insure the former. No argument, no matter how morally compelling, succeeds if it requires that the institution act in such a way that it threatens to undermine or diminish its security and control, no matter how much security and control it already possesses. The individuals who do the institutional will might feel ambivalently about what they do, but they do it, or the institution will spit them out.

No human project is unambiguously motivated, but some Institutions like the Church, the United States, the first French Republic, and I'd argue even the USSR and the PRC moved the ball ahead because they were at least in part inspired by ideals that pointed to truths that have deep, sustaining power. But at some point the anxious institutional mind takes over and chooses to play it safe rather than to live even ambiguously in the light of its founding ideals. Those ideals are pushed to the side in the interests of security and control. Early in the institution's existence there is usually more institutional ambivalence about it, but at a certain point it crosses the line and never goes back unless forced to.

Take for instance the U.S. policy toward Latin America in the 70s and 80s. I think the historical record about Operation Condor is well established, and the story of American support for Pinochet's Chilean coup and its support for other fascist (sorry, authoritarian) governments is well established. The people of Chile democratically elect a socialist government, and because that was an affront to the security interests of the United States, its democratic principles and values are pushed aside so Americans can install an authoritarian government they can control. The Pinochet cabal might have been bastards, but they were our bastards.

Nothing shocking about that. Humans will rarely choose ideals over security, even if they have every reason to feel secure by most human standards. I'm sure there are some exceptions that prove the rule, but large institutions after crossing that line of no return never do it. They will only compromise when a greater threat to their security forces them to. Large institutions have their minds made up, and they are never interested in having a discussion in which it is genuinely open to a proposal unless it has a positive or neutral effect regarding its security and control interests. If representatives of a large institution sit down to talk with you about doing something that would have a substantive positive impact but could possibly have a negative impact on its security and control, they will not listen to your arguments. They will just see the conversation as an opportunity to propagandize you into accepting that its security project is in your best interests. They are not in the least open to being persuaded that anything else is more important.

We all need a certain level of security and stability in our lives to function effectively as humans, but when we allow security concerns to crowd out all others, we create hells of alienation. This is at the heart of the Gospel warning about the difficulty for the rich man entering the kingdom as it is for a camel to go through the eye of a needle. The rich man has the resources to buffer himself against all threats to his security, and in doing so he cuts himself off from reality and instead lives in a toxic, alienating dream prison. So do rich nation states and empires operate by the same logic, and the modern security state is one of its most toxic manifestations. These hells are, however, country club prisons for most of the people who live in it, and the inmates are mostly unaware that they are in fact prisoners, and they are unaware of the price people outside it pay to maintain them in it. 

In Part I I tried to make the argument that progress is not to be confused with heedless innovation, but rather with whether changes we experience move us toward greater levels of freedom and communion.  There is no progress if innovation simply reinforces the prison walls by lulling us into a deeper state of hypnosis or stupefaction. For Americans this stupefaction is particularly strong because of our security obsession. If anxiety is the dizziness of freedom, we'd rather not be free. Better for us just to anesthetize ourselves in any way we can, better for us just to stay passed out, unconscious, asleep. 

I assume that we all start more or less in a sleep state insofar as we accept uncritically the conventional thinking into which we have been acculturated. This is the consciousness of children whom adults seek to protect from life's evils, as they should. But if we want our children to grow into highly functioning adults, we cannot protect them forever. We cannot be like the Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, who sincerely believes he is performing the highest service for the people in his care by arresting their development, protecting them by treating them like children. And so when Jesus Christ appears on the scene to invite those in the Inquisitor's care to experience deeper levels of freedom and communion, this Jesus cannot be tolerated. The Inquisitor sees him as a threat, a destabilizing influence who threatens to subvert the security state that it's his duty to preserve. He must be got rid of.

This is the human story on so many levels, but it's particularly relevant in describing how we humans become hypnotized by inquisitors in our own day--politicians, religious figures, media personalities--who tell us not to worry, they understand what we cannot, that they have our interests and safety in mind, and that we should just go back to sleep. We want to feel safe, and so we want to believe them. We find ourselves wanting very much to accept the conventional wisdom--everybody does--and we feel a twinge of anxiety when we entertain the possibility of thinking differently: to dare to think differently means to go where we will not have the protection these authorities offer us. So, yeah, what they say sounds a little fishy, but so what? It's none of my business. It's better to just roll over and go back to sleep.

***

This is a long prelude to what I originally sat down to write about, which is Costas Gavras's 1982 film, Missing, which I saw again the other night after having seen it years ago. It struck me as a much better film this time because I saw in it more than just formulaic political propaganda. It works on another level because it's a parable of awakening from the dream prison I've just described. Ed Horman (played by Jack Lemmon) is Everyman, and he's quite comfortable in his imprisonment by the security state and accepts its conventional wisdom as "reality". It’s the story of Ed's waking up from his complacent dream as he gradually comes to realize a twin horror—that his adult son has been killed by the Chilean government and that the US government was complicit in his execution. 

This is a quest story, one in which Ed Horman searches for his son, Charlie, a writer who was swept up by the military in the aftermath of Pinochet’s Chilean coup. Ed is an honest man, a devout Christian Scientist, and someone who trusts his government. He's a middle American, a member of what was called back then the 'silent majority'. He arrives in Chile after learning from his daughter-in-law, Beth (Sissy Spacek) about his son's disappearance. Ed is in immediate conflict with Beth because Beth stands outside the security state's conventional wisdom in which Ed still sleeps.

She sees the situation more clearly. She is not cynical--she is anything but. But her epistemology, so to say, allows her to entertain an alternative explanation of the facts than the ones presented by the security state that Charlie accepts. Beth and Charlie have chosen to live outside the safe zone defined by the conventional wisdom of the American security state, and have found a deeper experience of communion there. They are poor, but they have a good life in which they are creatively engaged with spirited, interesting American and Chilean friends. 

Ed sees Beth as a flake who in stepping outside of the protections provided by the security state has exposed herself and his son unnecessarily and foolishly to danger. For Ed the prospect of living outside the conventional security zone is deeply repugnant and incomprehensible. These kids, Charlie and Beth, are stick figures for him in a crude anti-establishment cartoon, and he is incapable of understanding them because of his deep alienation from them and the life they lead. 

The story is about Ed losing his footing but saving his Self. It's about his coming gradually to see the world from Beth’s perspective, and about his coming into a deeper communion with her and by proxy with his son. Ed has arrested development; he is like one of the Inquisitor's children. He is someone who has resisted all his life the invitation to grow up, even though invitations were continuously offered to him by his son. For him it was better, safer, to live estranged from his son than to grow up.

The U.S. government officials, of course, make a good show of wanting to help Ed find Charlie. But really their objective is to reinforce the security perimeter that shapes Ed's childish worldview, and they suggest in so many ways that he just go back home and back to sleep, but Charlie's disappearance has awakened him. He's up, he's roused, and his mind is clearing. He keeps digging, and gradually it becomes clear to him that the U.S embassy officials have no interest in telling Ed the truth; they care only about protecting American interests, which means reinforcing the  system that keeps the Americans safe and well fed within the country club prison, aka. the American Dream.

This following exchange occurs after Ed hears from a reliable source that Charlie was killed in the stadium. He goes to the American embassy to confront the U.S. ambassador.  My comments are in brackets:

U.S. Ambassador: We're not involved, Mr. Horman. Our position has been completely neutral. [This is the Big Lie needed to reinforce complacency of prison life. It assumes that most people will believe it because most people want to believe it, because not to believe will initiate a chain reaction that will bring down the prison walls. We resist losing our footing, and we don't like feeling dizzy.]

Ed Horman: That is a bald face lie, sir. How can you say a thing like that when you have army colonels, you have naval engineers, they're all over Viña Del Mar! [Ed has been exposed to too much evidence for him to accept that the Big Lie can be true. He wanted to believe it, but now his instinct for truth is stronger than his desire to stay safe. There's no more ambivalence--he's fully awake; he's regained his balance, and so now there's nothing for the ambassador to work with, but he gives it one last try:]

U.S. Ambassador: Please sit down. Look, it's very obvious you're harboring some misconception regarding our role here. [Misconception = any ideas or evidence that don't support the Big Lie. This statement is like the Jedi mind trick, to work with Ed's predisposition to be hypnotized by the Lie, but it doesn't work now.]

Ed Horman: What is your role here? Besides inducing a regime that murders thousands of human beings? [Ed's not having it. He's passed the point of no return. His prison walls have collapsed. He's already walked out. His gait is determined and confident.]

U.S. Ambassador: Let's level with each other, sir. If you hadn't been personally involved in this unfortunate incident, you'd be sitting at home complacent and more or less oblivious to all of this. This mission is pledged to protect American interests, our interests. [The ambassador sees that Ed can no longer be hypnotized, so he provides an honest answer: If your son's leaving the confines of the security state and its conventional wisdom hadn't made you aware that there was life outside it, you'd still be home living happily on your prison rations without a care in the world. Don't blame us; blame your son.]

Ed Horman: Well, they're not mine.[Ed is coming to realize that his real interests lie outside the security system. This was his son's gift to him, even if he had to die to give it to him.]

U.S. Ambassador: There are over three thousand US firms doing business down here. And those are American interests. In other words, your interests. I am concerned with the preservation of a way of life. [Way of life = American Dream = existence in the country club prison of the American Security State. This prison cannot exist without American political and economic dominance. This is Costas Gavras's political statement, and I accept it as true for reasons I'll explain below.]

Capt. Ray Tower, USN: And a damned good one. [So take your rations, Ed. Stop complaining, leave matters you don't understand to us, and don't leave prison or you'll end up like your son.]

Ed Horman: (Staring out the window at empty yard) Maybe that's why there's nobody out there. [Not sure what this line means. Maybe that preservation of the American way of life requires murdering anybody who opposes American interests.]

U.S. Ambassador: You can't have it both ways. [You can't have the benefits of living in prison without those living outside the prison paying to maintain you in it.]

I don't look at this as anti-American propaganda, because the story it tells is universal. The American government is behaving like all governments any where and at any time. I'm sure the real U.S. embassy officials in Chile at the time of the coup were more complicated as human beings than the way they were depicted in the film, but whatever their discomfort and feelings of moral ambiguity about what happened to Charlie, they accept that their duty is to serve the institutional will, and in that they were not caricatured. It doesn't matter what they feel; it matters what they do. 

It's not that our "enemies" hate our freedom; it's that our enemies are paying the price for our American 'way of life'. The defenders of that way of life understand that our 'enemies' have good reason to resist paying for it, and so they must be suppressed. And so they also sincerely believe, like the Grand Inquisitor, that keeping the rest of us safe and asleep is in our best interest. 

***

Part I focused on the macro theme that progress is not simply innovation, but a movement from alienation and lack of autonomy to communion and freedom. Ed Horman's story is a parable of what "progress" looks like on the micro, individual level. Ed's is the story of what it's like for any of us to hear the wakeup alarm and to dare to get up and live in the world with a greater degree of wakefulness. The context of the movie was political, but politics is only one area of our lives in which we are lulled into the dream state we experience as conventional thinking. Our work lives and religious lives are shaped by churches, schools, companies that follow the logic of the security state as much as our political lives do.

The logic of all conventional thinking follows the logic of the security state, and the degree to which we remain confined in any aspect of our life is the degree to which we remain in a state of arrested development. To leave the confines of the security systems that seek to confine us does not mean that the alienating dream dissolves all at once and that one immediately finds complete liberation from illusion; it means that you take on the life-long task of developing a greater capacity for freedom and communion. At some point a critical mass of people reach a point in the project which has a transformative effect on the collective mind, and the social imaginary changes, even for the people who are still only semi-conscious. 

This is a task that starts in freedom--it must be freely chosen--but it succeeds to the degree that it moves the toward communion. It begins with individuals as autonomous agents who accept the task as their own individual responsibility, but in accepting it, they start on a path toward greater levels of wakefulness. Taking this path requires in the beginning that one feel a little unsteady on one's feet, but the farther one moves along, the more he awakens, and the greater becomes his awareness of the communion that was there all along, but which was shrouded when he was dreaming. As we awaken, our experience of alienation from ourselves, from others, from all of creation begins to melt away. Not all at once, but gradually. But nothing changes for him who, when he hears the wakeup alarm, rolls over and goes back to sleep. 

 

The Dream Prison of Conventional Wisdom, Part I

In the last several years I have been impressed with the power and persistence of conventional thinking in the face of powerful evidence that would contradict it. So what do I want to say here that hasn't be said a thousand times before referencing Thomas Kuhn and paradigm shifts, etc.  Everybody reading here already understands that conventional thinking creates an epistemological frame that conditions what we accept uncritically as true or reject as false. It's what becomes our "common sense", and I don't have to argue here that too much of that kind of common sense is nonsense.

But I want to think out loud a bit about why we humans are so resistant to having our minds changed. Why do some people eagerly embrace frame-crashing truths and others resist them? Is it merely a superficial embrace of novelty that distinguishes liberal progressives from traditionalist conservatives? Is anyone, if he moves from the old frame to a new one, really just swapping one set of illusions for another? Is the idea of 'progress' always an illusion? If not, how do we discern the difference between the 'novel' and the 'true'? If there is a difference, what is in us that knows it, and what is in us that embraces the truth or resists it? 

So before I go further, let me frame what I'm going to say by laying out my philosophical biases. I think the Christian Neoplatonists have it more right, and the rationalists have it mostly wrong. I'm not going to try to defend that bias here, but merely note that I assume that we all begin in a state of consciousness in which we  see the world as if through a glass darkly. That everything we see and think we understand as true is always partial and  distorted, and that the goal is not simply to correct that problem by adding more light and adjusting the focus, but to deepen our relationshp with the world and people around us, which means to increase our experience and awareness of the ways we participate in Being.

We are each of us deeply embedded in the cosmos, and yet we feel ourselves cut off from it. It's precisely that experience of disembeddedness that distinguishes Moderns from almost everyone else who has ever lived. Most moderns think they are better for it, and in a way I would agree, but I don't think it gives moderns a better sense of what the cosmos is. Moderns think that they have a superior epistemology because it is "objective", and while objectivity and precision are valuable for engineers, an unbalanced preference for objective truth has given us a world of objects and with it a world that has become un-souled.

My criteria for truth has less to do with clarity and certainty than with intensity--Intensity in delivering an experience that expands our level of communion or participation with the 'known'. Truth, the kind that matters, is not something you know like 2 - 2 = 0; it's something you find yourself intensely engaged with, like the love for your children. Objective truth is always either an abstraction from the lived world, or a provisional construction of conventional wisdom--at best a tinny, superficial, provisional representation of the world.

It's in subjective truth you find the gold and the eternally valid. Truth is something that is given, in other words, in ways similar to the way we develop a friendship. We make the initial encounter. We have first impressions and make preliminary judgments, and over time our appreciation for the 'other' deepens. It's the quality of the communion between you and the other that sets the conditions for how deeply he or she can be known. The other can never be completely known, and yet what we know of him is true. The quality of the communion determines the quality of the knowing. So some people know more and others less, because all of us have greater or lesser capacities for communion.

The goal is not to know more, but to know better by increasing our capacity for communion. It's easier to understand how this works with people, but the same kind of communon is possible with all of Being. (I've got Goethe and Buber in mind here, and while I'm not particularly enamored of Heidegger, I think he's barking up the same tree: Communion, or our throwness into Being and enmeshment with it is a given; so why do we experience such a profound alienation from Being, and how do we overcome it?)

So I assume that as moderns we begin in a state of profound alienation from the world and from one another. The more modern you are, the more you live in your head, and the more you live in your head the more alienated you are. And because we are so deeply alienated, we don't see anything clearly and most of the efforts over the last five hundred years to obtain clarity and certainty have been profoundly misguided because they've been such a head trip. They have given us a way of experiencing the world that has allowed us to cleverly exploit it to make the lives of a relative few more comfortable, but at the price of making the world and the creatures in it 'things'--pure extension--and in doing so making the lives of so many people more miserable than they were before their traditional lives, lives saturated with communion, were disrupted by the flat-souled modern obsession with novelties and innovation.

***

So, you may be thinking, this guy thinks of himself as a progressive? He sounds pretty conservative to me. But I'd argue that I am a progressive who rejects the Liberal frame that defines modernity, and this blog is about trying to develop a counter frame to modern liberalism that is nonetheless progressive. Such a counterframe would retrieve the gold that moderns have thrown off the boat over the last five hundred years. Their doing so has given us an impoverished, half-assed metaphysics and epistemology, and it needs to be replaced. But it won't be until our experience of the world changes radically. We can't think our way to a solution, but bad thinking, insofar as it impedes our capacity for freedom and communion, must be called out for what it is, and replaced with something that offers more 'progressive' possibilities. 

The modern philosophical frame is impoverished because its chief characteristic is an epistemology of alienation--it assumes the separation between subject and object rather than their communion. And the epistemology of alienation has had profound effects in shaping our social imaginary. We live in a world of objects that we experience mainly through sight and touch. The only truths our conventional wisdom accepts as true are the ones we can see, ones that can be recorded by a camera, or that can be represented as data on a spread sheet.

So, perhaps to reinforce my anti-liberal bona fides, let me ask the question: Would a camera have recorded the resurrection of Christ? I don't think so. Does that mean it didn't happen? No. Does it mean that the post-Resurrection appearances to the apostles were therefore delusional (or just symbolic)? No, they were real, historical, and transformative events, but they cannot be understood within a modern rationalist frame because it is too one dimensional.

My argument is that this rejection of what seems to be the more outlandish claims of Christianity derives from the limitations of the frame or the lens through which the modern mind encounters them. They can be more easily understood within a different frame that embraces a participatory and cosmic multidimensionality, which is essentially what the Christian Neoplatonism of the medievals embraced, and it's why I think it needs to be retrieved and adapted to a post-quantum theory world.

The post-resurrection appearances in such a frame are quite plausible if you understand it as a historical moment when reality in one dimension interpenetrated with another in such a way that some humans were conscious of it. It was, in other words, a privileged, but temporary moment of interdimensional communion. I would say that the salvation of the world that Christians and some other religious traditions talk about it is essentially a process of becoming increasingly aware of the communion between these dimensions. It is the only progressive remedy to the deep alienation we currently experience. 

Nominalism and the kind of rationalism that engenders it has led to the  hypertrophying of the eye, which in turn has led to the atrophying of soul, and the atrophying of the soul leads to a diminished capacity for communion. The more diminished our capacity for communion, the more implausible the existence of anything existing that cannot be empirically verified as true. And so the more we live in the surface reality, the more inaccessible and unconscious becomes the deep reality. The more unconscious it becomes, the less we are capable of understanding and managing our lives freely.

We are unfree to the degree that our lives are determined by any number of entities that can compel us to do what we do not will to do, whether enemies or family, the gods or the tribe, or our own inner demons, addictions, and compulsions.

And so the more unconscious we are, the more vulnerable and receptive we are to a will that is not our own. We are easily hypnotized by the will of the crowd and seduced into living in a collective dream that we call conventional wisdom, which in our time is dominated by the rationalistic, materialistic assumptions on one hand, or a banal, self-absorbed New Age spirituality on the other. The key characteristic of any idea that comes to us from conventional thinking is its banality, its flatness. When something is deeply, truly true, it has an energy, an intensity, that disrupts our superficial complacency and moves us into a deeper experience of communion. There are subjective truths, and there are subjective cliches. 

None of us can resist living in the darkened, alienated consciousness that is given to us through conventional thinking, but the beginning of wisdom is to recognize that what is given to us by conventional wisdom is mostly wrong and that we should be suspicious of it, and that what is resistant in us to its soul-deadening banality is the best thing in us--our longing for a deeper communion with Being, and to participate consciously in the world at greater and greater levels of depth.

Both skeptic and cynic share the fundamental insight that the world defined by conventional thinking is a skein of illusions, but skepticism is not cynicism. The difference lies in that the skeptic accepts the conventional reality as a provisional convenience, something he needs to work in because that's the world everybody lives in, but it's not what he cares about. He cares more about the subjective truths that grab him and subvert the collective dream. He believes that there is an alternative to collective delusion, that the alienation that comes with a non-participatory, non-communal experience of the world can be overcome. Cynicism, on the other hand, believes that there is no alternative, that delusion is all there is, so make yourself as comfortable as you can in a world that makes no sense. Both conventional thinking and the cynicism that stays stuck in debunking it are mental prisons, both in their different ways are forms of arrested development stuck in the same closed system.

In the opening paragraph I asked:

Is anyone, if he moves from the old frame to a new one, really just swapping one set of illusions for another? If not, how do we discern the difference between the 'novel' and the 'true'? If there is a difference, what is in us that knows it, and what is in us that embraces the truth--or resists it? 

Truth works on us in different ways to wake us up, first, to the fact of our alienation and, second, to the freedom and communion that lie beyond it. Progress is not just more novelty or innovaton; it's a movement toward greater freedom and deeper communion. That which is deeply true increases our capacity for freedom and communion. That which is false impedes it. And for any culture its conventional wisdom either works to  enhance or impede its "progress". It is false to the degree that it impedes, and true to the degree that it enhances. It's hard to imagine a moment in our history when there was a greater impediment to progress. That's where I share common ground with thoughtful conservatives. But the challenge is to move beyond those impediments, and it's usually there that I part company with them. For me the 'moving beyond' overlaps with the future orientation that typifies the conventional wisdom of the left. 

But there are positive and negative ways of moving beyond. I see the conservatism of the political right in this country as a particularly insane form of the basic alienation that affects us all; it offers no solutions, and if anything aggravates what is already a bad situation. But neither does Liberalism have a solution. I see the Liberalism of the political left as a spent force that was always contrained by its rationalist assumptions. It was just a matter of time before it would collapse, and we're living through its collapse now. At best it was just something we had to go through; at worst, it's laid a path leading to a mechanomorphic transhuman future.

Such a transhuman future is not my idea of progress, but perhaps that's because I look at it through the limitations of the current conventional wisdom's materialistic framing of it. If transhumans have a greater capacity for freedom and cosmic interdimensional communion, I would embrace such a future. Pehaps the resurrected Christ was the first transhuman.

In Part II I want to look at two films, Costa Gavras's 1982 Missing and the 1984 film The Shawshank Redemption as parables that show how we both want to leave our world of alienation and yet often fight tooth and nail to stay in it. I want to look at the parallel relationships between, on the one hand, Andy DuFresne and Red Redding in Shawshank, and on the other, Charlie & Beth Horman's relationship with their father/father-in-law, Ed, in Missing. The first part of the pair are more "progressed", so to say,  because they are freer and more deeply in communion with the world outside the constraints of the prison of conventional wisdom; as such they point the way for those of us who are still contrained.