After the Future

Belief and Cash Value

I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately, and I want to do something in the future that compares their epistemology to the one developed in Barfield's Saving the Appearances. [That's a heavy lift, and we'll see if I have the energy for it during the summer] I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has 'cash value'; it's what you have confidence enough in to act on. It's never identical to the Real. At best it gives us a working model for or map of the 'Real'. And as such Pragmatist 'truth' is not static, but continuously open to deepening or rejection.

We are acculturated into working models for how the world around us works, but we should never assume that the model is the Real. It's just something that allows us to navigate in the Real. And over time we individually or collectively make revisions in the model, or we replace it with another one because it works better or because it delivers benefits the older one did not. This is the way science works, but it's also the way we  live our lives if we're sane. Delusion is persistence in the use of a model that no longer works. 

We humans have the understandable tendency to persist in the habits of mind formed by the model we grew up with and got comfortable with. We fear change and we often  fear losing something that is precious to us. The mistake fear makes is to think that the model and the Real are the same thing, that to lose the first is to lose the second. But it's liberating when you come to understand that's just not true, that our loss of one model does not mean rejection of what it modeled, but that we have a need for a better model. The only important thing is that we be in the best possible relationship with the Real. When the old model becomes an obstacle to that it must be discarded. 

It's this pragmatic view of truth that has been at the heart of my critique of Conservatism. Conservatives too often persist in habits of mind that are no longer adapted to the world that we live in. Liberal views are simply better adapted to the world created by Liberalism, especially in the decades since the French and Industrial Revolutions. Liberals are not the cause of the changes that conservatives lament. They are people who simply went with the flow rather than to have resisted it. They saw that the old model wasn't working very well, and it really wasn't. And they saw that there were many significant advantages in the new model, and clearly there were.

But thoughtful conservatives were not wrong in recognizing that something was lost in the shift to modernity. They were mistaken, though, when they reisted the clear advantages of the new model rather than finding ways to revise it so that it could account for what they knew had been lost. Reaction is never a solution. The Real and our model of it are not the same. If there are aspects of the Real that you know about and which are not part of the collective model, then you have to work to develop a model that delivers a robust account of what you know that has advantages the secular model lacks. My challenge to religious conservatives is hold fast to the Real that has been filtered out by modern habits of thinking, but to trust in their capacity to adapt to the world that the Real sustains.

Now I do not consider myself a Liberal because I think that Liberalism no longer works. It no longer explains adequately the world we live in, and its assumptions grounded in beliefs about the capacity of Reason, unencumbered by the constraints of traditional wisdom, can create a better world for everyone have been proved invalid. It brought some short term advantages, and it's understandable that some of the West's best minds explored its possibilities, but that Liberal model no longer works.

As I've written here frequently before, the Liberalism that was the child of the Enlightenment and the source of the optimistic republicanism of 1776, 1789, 1848, the revolutionism of the Paris Commune, the Bolsheviks, the Maoists, and so many others died in Western Europe after by World War I, in the U.S. during the 1960s, (when we said Bye Bye to Miss American Pie), and during the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China and everywhere else where the Jacobin spirit of 1789 was its inspiration. It had a good two-hundred year run, but now we're at a very interesting point in history. It's like a cultural/historical slack tide.

Neoliberal ideology has filled the political vacuum for want of anything better, but anything goes and who knows where it's going. It's going to be a rocky ride, and we have to trust in our ability to adapt, and to realize that to cling to habits of mind that no longer work will not preserve order, but rather lead to more suffering and to a more destructive collapse. Better to adapt, to go with the flow, and try to manage things to mitigate the inevitable transitional suffering as best we can. We need to be prudent, but not fearful. Fear almost always inclines us to make the wrong choice. 

***

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. Our experience of the world is shaped by habits of perception and thinking that enhance or filter out aspects of the Real. At any given moment, we only experience and understand what our acculturation has programed us to see or understand. Our habits change when we are forced to adapt to changes in our environment. We resist the change, but sooner or later we make it when we come to understand that we receive benefits from the change that our current habits prevent. This is Pragamtism 101.

We change our habits because we discover the benefit of the change on our own or because we imitate those whom we notice are thriving because they have already made the change. And when our habits change, as they did when the medieval model broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. But the world given to the French peasant in the 18th Century has more in common with his contemporary in China than it does to the French bourgeois information worker employed in a glass tower in Paris.

The biggest cultural gulf is not defined by whether one is Asian or European, Christian or Hindu, but by whether one's habits of mind are modern or premodern. We are now moving into another transition in which the differences will be defined by whether one's mind continues to be shaped by modern habits or by whatever the New Thing, the no-longer-modern modeling of the Real will be, with the new habits it forces us to adopt. Many are living intensely aware of our being in this slack tide, and it's not easy to flourish in such a time, but it's interesting.

And so because we are now living at a time when the modern model has broken down, we live with modern habits of mind for want of better ones. And so those of us who recognize this, especially if we are Christians, have a special opportunity and responsibility to develop new habits of mind that are both inspired by the spirit of the gospel but which also have  "cash value" in the Jamesian sense, that model the Real in a way that works. The biblical term for cash value  is "fruits".

Jamesian Pragmatism brackets questions about metaphysics, but it recognizes the central role that belief plays in shaping the world we work in and think about. So I consider myself a Jamesian Pragmatist when it comes to understanding the real world we live in, but I combine that with  Barfield's dynamic Christocentric Idealism when it comes to framing hypotheses to be tested by real-world experience. If the test for any belief system is its 'cash value', the burden on Christians is to prove that its beliefs deliver. It has to deliver meaning that makes sense in the real world that we live in, and it also must help us to be productive in the world in a way that has advantages that others would notice and imitate. It happened in the Roman world as it slowly disintegrated; it could happen in the modern Liberal world as it continues its disintegration. I accept, in a Jamesian key, that the best we can do is develop working models that map reality in ways that work. Do we have enough faith in our model to actually live by it and shape our life by it? Can we be ruthlessly honest about whether that is working for us or not?

***

One of the main consequences of the shift from matter to mind consequent to the gradual collapse of the modern rationalist/materialist habits of mind over the last hundred years is that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. 

Since Kant, metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional maps that have meaning only insofar as they work, i.e., have  explanatory power that allows you to work with them, but they make no pretense of understanding the 'thisness' of the atom. That's open to different interpretations, and I would say the same is true for evolution. It's for now a provisional map; it works, but no one can claim to know with certainty the 'thisness' of evolution. What we know about it is open to different interpretations. 

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics and its prescription for a cure. Marxism gives us a good map for understanding how capital works; it gives us a deeply inadequate model for something better. 

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. Can we show that there is more 'cash value' in our model?  And such a project starts by acknowledging the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. 

‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, which has a cognitive dimension that the popular idea of believing does not, but it bears a family relationship to it. It can have heuristic value. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical. What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound.  Whatever narrative we ultimately choose to model the Real for us opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism.  If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case to day for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  And if 'belief' is where it's at, why not loosen it up a little, get wild and crazy and see if it works. The worst that can happen is that it won't, and then we'll make the necessary adjustment. But anything is better than the thing we have now, which just isn't working. The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

[Ed. Parts of this post are adapted from an 2006 post entitled "Believing"]

Bye, Bye Miss American Pie

[Encore from September 2004]

Several months ago I was watching one of the talking-heads shows on which Pat Buchanan sits in wearing his conservative's hat. I forget what the show's topic was about, but I remember his saying something along the lines that the America he grew up in was a good America, and that it wasn't good anymore. It struck me then that this sentiment is what's really at the heart of the conservative backlash in this country. There is a deeply abiding sense among many Americans that we lost the good America in the sixties and seventies, and they want to get it back. They see Liberalism as the enemy that destroyed the wholesome America, and I think that many on the cultural right believe that if they can defeat liberalism in the political sphere, that somehow this will make things all right again.

I think the mistake that conservatives make is to think of liberalism as if it were a mistaken way of thinking, and if people would just stop thinking liberal thoughts, that would solve the problem. But liberalism is the emancipatory, laissez-faire spirit of modernity, and the driving force behind modernity is technology and commerce, and the driving force behind technology and commerce is innovation and growth. Any society in which innovation and growth are the central driving forces is not going to be hospitable to the values and structural requirements that make a traditional society work. The conservatives want to eat their cake and have it, too. They want the affluence that comes with consumer capitalism and free markets and they want the America that essentially contracted a terminal disease in the twenties and died in the sixties.

That's why the traditional-values agenda of the GOP seems so hollow. It's all form and no substance. The GOP agenda is to take a whore of consumer capitalism and dress her up for church on Sunday, but to let her do her thing the rest of the week. The basic difference between conservatives and liberals lies in that liberals don't see any point in dressing up the old girl or making her go to church. They accept modernity on its own terms and are simply willing to let her do her thing, and the thing she likes to do best is consumer capitalism.

Our basic understanding of what the word freedom means is shaped primarily by the terms defined by consumer capitalism. Freedom means the freedom to choose, and the idea of choice has become linked to having more and more choices, and having evermore choices means that you can never settle in with anything--you're always moving on to the next thing. There's little stability; everything becomes fragmented--our culture, our families, our very selves. We swallow what's in our environment, excrete it, and move on.

This is what freedom has come to mean in the popular American imagination. And it's hard to imagine anything that could do a better job of undermining a genuine living tradition than this particular way of understanding what freedom means. This isn't real freedom; it's a kind of counterfeit of freedom. It's freedom understood at its crudest level as a mere lack of constraint. Why American and Thatcherite conservatism celebrates this kind of crude freedom is really for me at the heart of why contemporary Anglo-American conservatism just seems intellectually incoherent and naive. Conservatism is in effect dating a prostitute while all the time thinking she's a paradigm of virtue and beauty.

But this doesn't mean that I approve of the sanctimonious condemnation of consumerism that comes from certain sectors of the politically correct left. I don't think stoning the old girl is going to accomplish anything. If people want to opt out of a consumption-oriented lifestyle, fine, but their doing so doesn't change much. They still have to swim in the same soup as the rest of us, unless they decide to drop out and, dragging their kids kicking and screaming with them, go live in some nook of the world where modernity has not yet encroached.

But what's the point, because there's no escape in the long run no matter where you go. This kind of refusal is often (not always) a form of anal Puritanism in politically correct garb. There's no getting out of the soup, only learning how to swim in it without drowning. And maybe over the long haul we can find truly effective ways to clean it up so it isn't so foul smelling--because it really does stink now. There's nothing I see going on out there that I find terribly encouraging. It seems as though all my effort now is directed toward keeping my head dry, and that's in a large way my motivation for keeping up this blog. It's my way of keeping my head, if nothing else, out of the soup.

But this brings us back to Pat Buchanan because in his memory, the soup he swam in as a kid smelled pretty good. And he wants to swim in that soup again. But I suspect that the soup of Buchanan's memory has more to do with a feeling of the lost innocence of his childhood, which like most of our childhoods was a time when we just weren't aware how bad things smelled, even though they did. We were just better then at covering up the stench. 

Wandering in the Wilderness II

I'm a little reluctant to do this, but since I've started with the Intro, why not put up Chapter one of Wandering in the Wilderness, entitled "The Shift from Outer to Inner".

This chapter relies quite a bit on Owen Barfield's, I think, great book Saving the Appearances. I met and had a chance to talk with Barfield from time to time when he was at SUNY Stony Brook at the invitation of TJJ Altizer in the 70s. I sat in on some of his lectures. He had a horrible stammer and was hard to follow sometimes, but there was a greatness about him.

Although I'm sure, especially in the contemporary intellectual environment, his 'metahistory is a grand narrative that will seem to many tendentious, it was something that when I first read Saving the Appearances struck me as solving so many problems on so many levels. He offers, in my view, the most compelling explanation about why history has developed in the pattern that has led to Modern suppression of the sacred. He also lays the foundation for the narrative that I believe best offers Christians a way to think about the future and to move forward into it. I treat it not as "Truth", but as a useful heuristic that points us toward a way to retrieve meaning in history. I seem his project as similar to Teilhard's.

He was a lifelong friend of the better-known C.S. Lewis, and although he was a lawyer by profession, he  wrote several books in philosophy, etymology, and literary criticism.  The historian John Lukacs calls him one of the most important thinkers of the 20^th century, and I agree. I think he's one of those eccentric thinkers, who, though he is out of sync with the zeitgeist, is perhaps in touch with something deeper and more compelling. Time will tell. I wrote this before reading Charles Taylor's book on secularism. I'd probably rewrite it now to incorporate aspects of his work, or supplement this chapter with another based on Taylor's work. So for what it's worth, after the jump:

Wandering in the Wilderness

Reader DS wrote me offline asking if I had written a book or anything that might help him understand the fuller context of what I write here, and I sent him the intro to a book entitled Wandering in the Wilderness I started around 2000-01. Back then I tried half-heartedly to find a publisher, but I worked for several years as an editor in the book publishing world, and I knew that what I wrote didn't have a market. It was clear to me since I came to Seattle in '85 that I wasn't writing as a part of a larger community of discourse, and the feedback I got was that what I wrote was interesting in an eccentric way, but not in a way that makes books salable. They were right. 

At the time I was more interested in thinking about culture and changes in consciousness. But then the invasion or Iraq came in 2003, and it challenged my assumptions that what had started with Reagan was aberrational and that we would soon return to a normal. It became clear that dangerous minds were now in the American society's driver's seat. Bush, the neocons, and the whole phenomenon of the fringe right of my youth having become legitimized and taking center stage in my middle age then became a preoccupation for me in a way it was not before. It continues to be one of my central concerns.

So I began to think about politics and power more than about culture and consciousness. But in the early days, I also posted chapters from the book, like "The Hypertrophied Eye", and when I did, nobody responded or cared, it further confirmed for me that there was no market for the book, so I put it aside as a project to which I might return when I retire, if at all. And focused my energies on this blog. 

As I've said, I've worked in the book world in the late 70s and early 80s at The Seabury Press during the Mark Linz days, which at the time was the main publisher in America for the best European theology like Rahner, Schillebeecx, and Kung, and Americans like David Tracy, Langdon Gilkey and many other lesser lights. I was the in-house manager for the Concilium series, and had occasion to hang out with them at one of their meetings in Nijmegen. We also published interesting stuff by Adorno, Canetti, and Milosz. It was a great place to work, but it was owned by the Episocopal Church, whose board thought it was too Catholic or secular, and after much intrigue the more interesting part of the company split off into what became  Continuum Publishing, which now apparently has been absorbed into Bloomsbury.

But by then I was burned out on academic theology. It seemed to me to becoming more irrelevant with each passing year, and I just didn't care about it anymore. For personal reasons I chose not to go to Continuum, and instead took a chance with an ill-fated publishing start-up in the middle of the Reagan first-term recession, and then left the east coast for Seattle, where I've been since and, after a short stint with the university press here, have had nothing to do with the book publishing or academic theological/philosophical world. 

Maybe because familiarity breeds contempt or because I worked in the industry at a time when the writing was on the wall regarding its future viability, I have never had a particular need to get published. A decent sale of our books was in the 5K to 10K range within a year. I acquired a short book by Henri Nouwen, with whom I took classes at YDS in the 70s, about the Egyptian Desert Fathers--The Way of the Heart--that sold 40K and made me a local hero for a while. Now my blog is very, very small potatoes by blog standards, but when I'm active on it, it gets between 3-4K pageviews a month. So I have been happy to use the blog as a vehicle for thinking about stuff I care about with a freedom I would not be permitted if I have to make it fit a publisher's criteria of marketability. I consider my posts as bread on the water--or messages in a bottle. If they reach other readers, great; if not, that's ok, too. I'm grateful, though, to those of you have been readers and commenters here. You've enriched and clarified my thinking immensely. 

So anyway, after  DS asked me about the book, I read its introduction for the first time in years, and I thought I'd post it here. It's about 4200 words, and I have to say that I was surprised that it holds up and that so much of what I've written in the last decade is more or less an elaboration of what is contained in it. I've posted it with a few minor tweaks after the jump.

 

Arvo Part: I am the True Vine

Typepad, which provides the platform of this blog, has been under a Denial of Services Attack for the last 18 hours or so. It's on again off again. 

In the meanwhile, one of Jonathan's comments made me think it might be appropriate for today to have a musical interlude. Here is Arvo Part's I Am The True Vine.

All the best to you all on this Good Friday.
.

Shlain on Our Disembedding

. . . and re-embedding?

I first posted this McLuhanesque lecture by Leonard Shlain in 2010. I think it's worth another look because of the way it treats themes discussed this week. Lecture starts around 2:30 minute mark. He doesn't use the term 'disembedded', but that's what he's talking about. Great images.

  

I've posted this one before, too, but if you haven't seen it, it's worth watching and supplements Shlain in an interesting way.  It runs about twelve minutes.

 

The Hypertrophied Eye (encore)

Protestantism is the expression of faith that resulted from changes in consciousness effected by the spread of literacy after Gutenberg. Catholicism is the expression of a faith shaped by a consciousness formed in traditions and customs that have its roots in oral culture. A literate consciousness is one that hears the Word while reading alone. An oral culture hears the Word when it is read aloud and heard in the assembly in the context of a sacramental ritual--the mass--which became meaningless hocus pocus for the modern Protestant sensibility. I'm not talking here about the difference in doctrine between Catholics and Protestants, but about a very fundamental difference in the way each experiences and encounters the Word.

A spoken-word culture shapes minds that easily swim in the world of symbol and mythopoesis. The premodern ear-centered imagination is a far richer than the literal literate mind of moderns. Things change very dramatically when a culture tips toward literacy from orality. It's the difference between whether the ear or the eye is the main organ for processing information that comes to us from the world outside our minds. And this shift from orality to literate consciousness is central in understanding what caused the shift from medieval to modern consciousness. This is Marshall McLuhan's basic thesis, and it's an important one to understand if we're to grasp the significance of what is happening to us at this moment as once again consciousness is being changed by our continuous exposure to electronic media.

There are so many things that can be said about this, but the most important for my purposes here is the way these processes require the hypertrophied eye. Did you ever think that what we mean by doing science is essentially thinking only about what we can see and that the scientific revolution was founded on the development of instruments like the telescope and later the microscope that helped us to see more, and that knowing eventually became equated with seeing. In contrast, knowing in a textless world came from what people heard, from the poets and storytellers, which meant that human 'knowing' by people not less intelligent than us was more metaphorical and analogical. The experience of knowing was different because it was done in very different mode of consciousness than the one we now take for granted as universal.

In the scientific age, the age of seeing, everything that was invisible was thought to be unreal—or merely a matter of subjective opinion. But the effect of this new habit of thought was to render a whole dimension of reality as unreal subjective fantasy even though for preliterates this dimension of reality was as objective as the chair upon which I’m sitting. In other words the invisible dimension of reality was pushed into unconsciousness, and as the mind individuated during the modern era, we came to understand the “unconscious” as a personal, subjective realm rather than as a transpersonal collective one. The "unconscious" means for almost everyone today our individualized personal reservoir from which arise personal thoughts, feelings, and fantasies, and we project back our own experience into the minds of the primitive preliterates as having thoughts, feelings, and fantasies the way we have them. Therefore, moderns think, the mythologies they created are the same thing as moderns writing science fiction--a species of imaginative speculation.

But what has become unconscious for us was conscious, or semi-conscious, for them. They lived in a world that was permeated by the gods. The gods were not in here locked in our individual unconscious minds, but out there animating a world shimmering with their presence. We have just come to think that the poor benighted fools were projecting intrapsychic unconscious content onto the blank screen that was the world around them. They weren't. This is simply the prejudice of a shriveled kind of mind that knows only with its eyes and brain.

Nature, for moderns, became the realm of "common sense,” but it has never been other than a cognitive consensus based on sharing in the heritage of alphabetic literacy. The world became “Newtonized” as mystics like William Blake lamented. The scientific process cast aside traditional lore and authority as steeped in superstition and the irrational, and substituted a new understanding of objectivity which required the freezing of reality by making most of it irrational, i.e., opaque to reason, except its physical husk. The world literate moderns came to live in is more like one of those awkward looking exhibits at local Natural History Museum than the living, buzzing, spiritually animated and soulful world of preliterates. And it is this experience of the world that is at the heart of our allienation and of our longing for something more.

Our cognitive capacities to understand more deeply come from listening and speaking. “Out of the depths I cry out unto you, O Lord.” What depths is the Psalmist speaking of? Music and the spoken word correctly heard engender feeling states that are the precondition for deeper modes of cognition. Music is very important here, and the trivialization of music is linked to our loss of a sense of the sacred and of the "moods" or "modes" of consciousness needed for extraordinary cognitive states. And so insofar as our acoustic sense has atrophied, so has our capacity for cognitive depth. What passes for deep thinking is just complex thinking, which comes from complex seeing, analytical seeing, decontextualized seeing, abstract seeing.

So I would argue, then, that Marshall McLuhan was one of the most important Catholic thinkers of the 20th Century. For him understanding the shift from orality to literacy was central to his understanding about how the modern mind is programmed, and his ideas about how the mind is being even now reprogrammed by electronic media is a major driver that is bringing us into a post-modern, post-literate world.

This is really the meaning behind McLuhan's idea of how society is becoming tribal. He didn't mean by this Balkanized or fragmented; 'tribal' was a positive word for him, and he didn't mean it as a regressive movement. He meant it as a way of describing a social connectedness that was lost during the modern era. The point bears repeating: post-literate doesn't mean a regression to preliterate, as it is commonly supposed. But reading and the eye will no longer remain virtually the exclusive means through which we obtain and process information. The goal is to return to a broader, more balanced cognitive capacity that will allow for a more ready acceptance of objective realities that are “unseen.”

McLuhan's point is that the human being in becoming literate paid a price by throwing off what had been a more balanced ratio among the senses. The hypertrophied visual man lives in a kind of estrangement from the world around him in a way that was not the experience of the preliterate, acoustic man. Modernity and its eye centeredness created the conditions for the possibility of individualism and critical reflection, but it also led to the gradual disenchantment of the world which became reified, Hamlet's sterile promontory, a thing over against which we become aware of our own subjectivity, but which in itself lost its numinous character. Yes, we developed a capacity to see with our physical eyes more accurately—but we see only the surfaces of things, and as a result our ability to cognize a richer kind of multidimensional reality has severely atrophied.

Electronic media is changing us profoundly, but these changes are gradual just as the shift from oral to literate did not change humans very quickly. Literates until recently lived in a world in which most people were still illiterate, and the oral world still flourished in the rural areas, and the oral culture preserved there was an endless source of material and inspiration for the literate artists of the last two or three centuries. But as literacy has become almost universal and along with that the rural world withers as it technologizes, another way has to be found to break out of the literate straitjacket so many have come to assume is the sole basis for our civilized life.

I feel very ambivalently about technolgoical civilization, because it's not at all clear that the changes that come are an unambiguous good. So the question here, as elsewhere, is who's in the driver's seat--the serpent or the dove? (Matt 10.16) If it's the serpent, we're likely to evolve into a race of cyborgs. But if the dove is driving or at least influences the direction evolution will be taking in the future, something else is possible.

And so if there is one point I hope I’ve made so far it's that being literate is not the goal of the evolution of consciousness; it’s just a stage. And whatever anxiety we may understandably feel about the unknown terrain to be navigated ahead, we need to trust that we will have the resources to find our way. These technologies cannot be feared, they must be mastered and used for transformative purposes. And the one rudimentary resource we have to achieve that now at this point is conscience--Protestantism's bequeathal to the future, which is the way the serpent part of us searches out and listens for the prompting of the dove part.

 

Irony and Decadence

From a piece worth reading in its entirety in Salon article today:

Percy Shelley famously wrote that “poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” For Shelley, great art had the potential to make a new world through the depth of its vision and the properties of its creation. Today, Shelley would be laughed out of the room. Lazy cynicism has replaced thoughtful conviction as the mark of an educated worldview. Indeed, cynicism saturates popular culture, and it has afflicted contemporary art by way of postmodernism and irony. Perhaps no recent figure dealt with this problem more explicitly than David Foster Wallace. One of his central artistic projects remains a vital question for artists today: How does art progress from irony and cynicism to something sincere and redeeming?

Or put another way: Why did the avante-garde lead to nowhere?

I'm working on an essay tentatively titled "1848" in which I try to understand (think out loud about) the impact of what I called in a recent post the Flood and what Eric Hobsbawm calls the "dual revolutions"--i.e., the French and Industrial Revolutions--on European and by extension world culture. It's also an attempt to explore further a question I address in my essay "Metaxis": Why did Romanticism die?

Why did its intoxicating spiritual aspirations, aspirations that dominated the cultural elite of the first half of the 19th century, from Schiller and Beethoven to Shelly and Wordsworth, become something about which the cultural elite of subsequent generations could only talk about ironically? Why did their imagination of the world lose and a soul-shriveling bourgeois materialism win? Why was the last great Romantic, Friederich Nietzsche, the first great postmodernist in the nihilist key? Why did David Foster Wallace, an achingly honest, good man, commit suicide? Why will his Bizarro doppelganger, Don Draper, probably do the same? What options, what life possibilities are open to talented, imaginative men and women such as these?

***

An afterthought: Later in the article the authors talk about the spiritual "Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen" as pointing to the antidote:

In an interview with Bill Moyers, Professor James Cone of Union Theological Seminary explains the seeming contradiction between the grief of the refrain and the promise of the closing exaltation.

"And you sort of say, sure, nobody knows the trouble I’ve seen. Nobody knows my sorrow. Sure, there is slavery. Sure, there is lynching, segregation. But, Glory Hallelujah. Now, the Glory Hallelujah is the fact that there is a humanity and a spirit nobody can kill."

One can hear that abiding spirit in the voice of Sam Cooke in his pop adaptation of the song, and in renditions by others like Louis Armstrong and Marian Anderson. Cornel West elaborates on the contradiction between the refrain and rejoinder.

"Glory Hallelujah is a tragicomic moment. Going to struggle anyway. Cut against the grain anyway. Never view oneself as a spectator but always a participant. Never view oneself as somehow outside the struggle but always meshed in it."

Both West and Wallace call for participation over spectatorship. We must move toward the Glory Hallelujah, toward the possibility of something greater. The best art can inspire us and push us closer.

Watch Fellini's "Nights with Cabiria" with this in mind. I just saw it for the first time over the weekend. Its last scene is a perfect example of what the writers are pointing to. It was one of the most deeply moving moments I've experienced from a film in a long time. Cabiria's look into the camera breaks the fourth wall in a way that breaks your heart most unironically. But then Fellini is a great Romantic.

"Even though he slay me, yet will I trust him," says Job--and says the Negro spiritual singer. False consciousness? Or one that has made a discovery?

Corpus Christi: A Holy Week Meditation

Palm Sunday, 2014

I'm finding that I have less and less in common with most Catholics I know--particularly the ones in the management class--because they have become so Protestantized. By that I mean, to stereotype somewhat, overly literal, overly moralistic, and lacking anything that remotely resembles a sacramental sensibility. We Americans whether churched or unchurched, Catholics or Protestants, are all Calvinists now. So when I talk about Catholic or Protestant, I'm not talking about denominational affiliation so much as I'm talking about a question of cultural style, a sensibility, or a way of imagining the world.

The classic Protestant style is to think of God as so utterly transcendent and of the yawning gulf that separates him from humans, who are unworthy and irretrievably depraved beings incapable of anything good. The Catholic style is more sanguine. It understands that we live in a fallen world, but understands it as wounded, not destroyed. And it understands that we humans are in our deepest depths good because we carry within us the image of God, broken but capable of being healed, and that grace is the necessary healing balm. For Catholics there has always been this sense of the fundamental goodness of creation, even if it is not what it could be or was meant to be.

And I think that Catholics are more sanguine because for them grace is more readily available, that it's more small 'c' catholic in its ubiquity, that we all of us humans are swimming in it, and that all we need to do is drink it in. For Protestants grace comes through a narrower gate, in the classical moment of conversion and choosing his salvation, and then that's pretty much it. Either it happens or it doesn't, and if it doesn't, well that's a sign that you're not one of the presdestined elect. After conversion, it's mostly a question of living a moralistic, stiffly upright life, which more often than not lacks any real joie de vivre. I think those conversion moments are real and important, but I don't think they are the only way. And these moments are like seeds that need to be sustained, nurtured, and grown to maturity. 

And that's for me where the mass comes in, because in one's understanding of it lies another key diference between the Protestant and Catholic sensibilities. If you think this is just a memorial service, you're a Protestant, regardless of your denominational affiliation. (I read somewhere recently that somewhere in the vicinity of 50% of practicing Catholics believe this. Don't quote me on the number, but it was a big one.) But if you think it's the reenactment of the mystery of Good Friday, then you're a Catholic.

All of the other fine points of theological debate boil down to this fundamental difference. It starts with the idea that the mass is a reenactment of the sacrifice on the cross and everything that this implies. One of the Protestantizing effects on Catholic liturgical practice is now to call the altar the "table", commemorating the table of the Last Supper and also as an image of the banquet table to which all the lame and the poor and the outsiders are invited. I'm fine with that, but only so long as we don't lose the idea that there are two moments--the altar moment, then the table moment: first the sacrifice, then the banquet. If there is no altar moment, then there's nothing on the table worth eating.

The modern sensibility is offended by the idea of sacrifice, particularly bloody sacrifice. But if sacrifice isn't an essential part of what we understand is being reenacted in the mass, then quite frankly, who cares? I don't. It's a trivial exercise in nostalgia. The sacrificial part is key because it emphasizes a willing vulnerability on both sides. The willingness on the one side of a Being who, as the very antithesis of death and want, took death and want into himself, was penetrated to the core of his being by it, and was all but crushed by the weight of it.

On that side, the divine side, it begins on Christmas and ends on Golgotha. It begins with the kenosis, this willing emptying of himself of this superabundance of life and taking on the body of death, which in turn is emptied on the cross as we see the blood dripping from his wounds into the earth; it's a double emptying--the first spiritual in the incarnation, the second physical on Good Friday. Everything he has he has given away, and the final result is an interpenetration of the physical and the spiritual that we have not yet begun to fathom.

The Protestant imagination, it seems to me, stresses the continued separation of these two worlds rather than their having been conjoined by the events of Good Friday through Easter. While it's true that most Catholics think similarly, I think that the Catholic sacramental imagination permits the possibility of thinking of history since those events as a process that effects the gradual interpenetration of both worlds, the fallen and unfallen, and by it the gradual redemption of the former. And it leads to the possibility of someone like Teilhard de Chardin whose prfound sacramental sensibility  led him to a magnificent, if preliminary, reframing of evolution in a spiritual key, and to see in it possibilities for the salvation, that is, the sacramentalizing of the earth.

The eucharist is in this sense a meeting place between two worlds, where a world defined by living, pleromatic superabundance breaks into a world defined by death, dearth, illness, and want. And for us on the human side of this transaction, vulnerability lies in the imitatio Christi, which is a kind reversal of the ur-sacrifice enacted on Good Friday. If during the mass Christ enacts the sacrifice of living into our death, we are given the opportunity to die into his life. We are, in other words, given a means to empty ourselves of death. Of course we'd much rather not do this, and since we are free not to, we find ways to distract ourselves. So rather than make the sacrifice required of us in order to live superabundantly, we choose to live small, safe lives circumscribed by inertia, habit, and fear.

If we were great souls, we would find a way to take the superabundance he offers us into us in one radical gesture of vulnerability. He would give it to us without stint. St. Francis had that greatness--and there are many other holy fools less well known who have had it as well. But since we are most of us not great and fear becoming fools, we are given instead the eucharist, which slowly, at a pace we can handle, feeds us this life, assuages our want, and in some, to the degree that they have found a way to be vulnerable to it, over time, find that this real life builds up enough in their souls to overflow into the lives of those around them so that then these around them are awakened to the possibility of living a life other than the death-soaked alienation that they take for the real world.

Catholics are for this reason incrementalists, and the danger for them is complacency.  Protestants look for the one great moment of choice, and the danger is anxiety and despair if it is never made in some definitive way, or if after it is made nothing seems to change, and he slides into a joyless, boyscouty, bourgeois, heady moralism which is a species of alienation just as toxic as any other. For Catholics there  is no one moment of choice; there is a lifetime of choices, and this choice is made, or should be, every time they go up to the altar/table to eat the bread and drink the wine, to take into themselves this fragment of superabundance, which like a hologram contains within it the whole thing, the whole of the real presence of the living Christ.

So for me the meaning of mass and receiving the eucharist, to the degree that I can bring any level of consciousness or intentionality to it, goes back to this old sacrificial idea of "giving up" in the sense of loosening my grip on the things that I cling to that prevent this huge thing from penetrating to my inmost core. For me the struggle is not with doubt that this superabundance is waiting there for its opportunity to flood my soul. The more significant struggle lies rather in my sense of shame for all the ways that I keep it at bay. But that shame is counterbalanced with a sense of trust that my persistence is chipping away at my resistance.

To most people these days the Protestant/Catholic rift seems irrelevant. As an institutional matter, I would agree. Who cares? The separations within the church are just another form of doctrinal tribalism and are silly. So I am not interested in arguing whose doctrines are closer to the truth, but rather in the development of a sensibility or a cultural style that integrates what's best from the 'spirit' of both traditions. The spirit of Protestantism emphasizes the individual conscience; the spirit of Catholicism, the goodness of creation and of our sacramental interdependence in the communion of saints. We need both.

As I get older I become more convinced that the basic spiritual cultural task is to find a way of reconciling opposites. This is the practical key to understanding the command to love one's enemies. So the reconciliation of the Catholic/Protestant polarity is the task for Christians of all denominations in the next century. It's the need to reconcile symbolists and iconclasts, mystics and intellectualists, antinomians and legalists, communitarians and individualists, universalists and sectarians, world affirimers and world deniers, immanentists and transcendentalists, sacramentalists and moralists. These are the things that separate us more than whether we are Calvinists or Catholics, eastern or western. We are, after all, one body; we are the Corpus Christi, and sooner or later we might actually look like him. 

The Dismal Science

First this from Krugmnan'a NYRB  review of Thomas Piketty's Capital in the 21st Century:

But even those [economists] willing to discuss inequality generally focused on the gap between the poor or the working class and the merely well-off, not the truly rich—on college graduates whose wage gains outpaced those of less-educated workers, or on the comparative good fortune of the top fifth of the population compared with the bottom four fifths, not on the rapidly rising incomes of executives and bankers.

It therefore came as a revelation when Piketty and his colleagues showed that incomes of the now famous “one percent,” and of even narrower groups, are actually the big story in rising inequality. And this discovery came with a second revelation: talk of a second Gilded Age, which might have seemed like hyperbole, was nothing of the kind. . . . 

The big idea of Capital in the Twenty-First Century is that we haven’t just gone back to nineteenth-century levels of income inequality, we’re also on a path back to “patrimonial capitalism,” in which the commanding heights of the economy are controlled not by talented individuals but by family dynasties.

A revelation? I'm glad we have economists who now have received it. That', I'm sure, will change everything.

Then, there's this from this morning's NYT about a shift within the so-called "Washington Consensus":

But the newfound attention to income inequality isn’t just another facet of a more liberal, Keynesian economic worldview. The fund’s economists have been producing research that suggests that inequality could make the world economy less stable.

Ms. Lagarde echoes an I.M.F. staff paper issued in January, which suggested that policies recommended by the fund should also be judged for their impact on inequality. “Income inequality can be of macroeconomic concern for country authorities, and the fund should accordingly seek to understand the macroeconomic effects of inequality,” it says.

Jonathan D. Ostry, the I.M.F.’s deputy head of research, and Andrew Berg, another economist at the fund, published a study three years ago suggesting that inequality makes growth less durable: The average stretch of robust growth among relatively equitable industrial countries lasted more than 24 years. In Africa, a much more unequal place, the average was less than 14 years.

A flatter distribution of income, the study concluded, contributes more to sustainable economic growth than the quality of a country’s political institutions, its foreign debt and openness to trade, its foreign investment and whether its exchange rate is competitive.

I often wonder why anybody listens to economists. Their prestige far exceeds their usefulness. They exemplify the worst kind of rear-view mirror thinking. They are exceedingly conventional and reactive, and have little real insight to deliver that people don't already know from their knowledge of about history and human nature. There's this pretense that somehow it's scientific and objective, but it just isn't.  Whenever you hear some economist spouting off, ask what his politics are. That will be a clearer indication of his thinking. Economics is not science; it's ideology. 

Even Keynesianism was legitimated only as an ex post facto explanation for what happened in a kind of ad hoc experimental way in the U.S. during the 1930s and 40s. It was easily supplanted by voodoo economics and Laffer curvers when it seemed unable to explain the stagflation of the 1970s. 

Economics as a discipline ought to be demoted to a subdiscipline within university history departments. Let them gather their statistics, but make them stay away from theories that have the patina of a-political or "scientific" authority. The idea of giving the Nobel prize to economists is more an indicator of elite conventional thinking than it is about any economist having real objective insight into the world as it really works. It's about as silly as giving the peace prize to Henry Kissinger or Barrack Obama. 

So I post this about Piketty or the IMF not because it's startling news, but because it's an indicator of a shift within the precincts of elite thought. The establishment is worried about instability. Who'd of thought? Would that working and middle class folks in this country would give it more cause for worry. That's the only thing that will ever change their thinking further. It's the only thing that will create the conditions for the emergence of an economics that represents their interests rather than those of the One Percent. But let's not fool ourselves that it's anything more than a political ideology that seeks to bend theory to serve one set of interests rather than another. 

Another approach to putting the predators back in their cages

 

Not clear what the criteria are to get to his goals, and who decides which candidates gets the thumbs up, but I'm for it until there's a reason I shouldn't be. A little quixotic, maybe, and I'm not given to the quixotic, but this is a walk I'd like to take--at least it gets people away from their screens and out of their heads. May not get immediate results, but it sends a message, and might even spark something surprising. 

Good opening story about Intel. Where's there's enough of an outcry, there's a way--and the money will be found. 

This is how it's done

I've been a lifelong Democrat, but I'm getting close to quitting. I think the Clintons, Obamas, Emmanuels, and the whole New Democrat crowd have ruined the Democratic brand for years to come. It might be salvageable, and I've stayed in because it's possible to win fights within the local Democratic Party, but ultimately it comes down to money as it does everywhere else. And Dems are the establishment party locally, and that means that many of them can run as Neoliberals and get away with it, and the local LD clubs go along in supporting them, and it turns my stomach.  

So in this morning's NYT I read this about the Vermont Progressive Party:

The Vermont Progressives have only eight seats in the State Legislature, but they played a decisive role in the 2010 gubernatorial election. They promised not to play spoiler if the Democratic candidate supported single-payer health care. “Shumlin was very clear on his stance, and it pulled him through a narrow primary — a lot of Progressives were volunteers on that — and then he narrowly won,” Chris Pearson, a Progressive state representative from Burlington, told me. “He kept his promise.”

What explains the success of the Progressive Party? Vermont is small, and “it was expected that I’d knock on every door in my district,” Mr. Pearson said. “Progressives are dedicated to that style of campaigning. It’s also affordable. You can run a House race for $5,000.”

Despite their urban origins in Burlington, the Progressives have won crucial support from rural, traditionally conservative parts of the state, where lifelong Republicans have responded to the same argument that the Populists once used: Without regulation and a public safety net, capitalism will grind the independent farmer into the ground.

Read on. This is  the kind of thing I've been talking about. It has to start local by building consensus face to face as described here. More on this as I find out about how these guys got started.

 

The Fatuity of Identity Politics

Freddie de Boer on the subject:

I mean, ask yourself: who is more likely to call for the elevation of identity politics above all other kinds of political engagement, liberals or socialists? Liberals. Who has thrown their shoulder behind the gay rights movement with all of their fervor but demonstrated nothing resembling a similar commitment to economic justice? Liberals. Who’s more likely to accept the empty symbolic politics of the Obama administration, rather than calling for deeper change and a real alternative to American plutocracy? Liberals. Who identifies people as being “the right kind” through the kind of limp social signalling expressed through buzzwords, rather than based on deeper concerns about the fundamental social order? Liberals. Salon gives readers a never-ending parade of complaints about who used the wrong word when; Jacobin questions the basic power structures that make the oppression those words signal possible. The Nation wants people to say nice things about women and people of color; In These Times wants to reorganize our economic order so that it doesn’t matter if white men say nice things about women and people of color. I suspect Goldberg knows that.

I have lots of radical queer friends, socialists and anarchists, who are totally contemptuous of the kind of politics involved in #CancelColbert or the recent Mozilla CEO freakout. They are far more likely to complain about Brendan Eich’s salary and power than they are to complain about his boneheaded views on gay marriage. Nor are they likely to think that enshrining the ability of gay people to engage in bourgeois marriage contracts represents some sort of ultimate victory, in a world where stultifying social and economic norms are otherwise untouched. . . .

I am not, and have never been, an “it’s not about race” lefty. It’s most certainly about race, and sex. What I am is a lefty who thinks that the only way for permanent racial justice and equality between sexes and genders to be achieved is for people of color and women to have the economic and political strength necessary to secure their own best interests. . . .

Karen Lewis of the Chicago Teacher Union, an organization filled with women of color fighting daily for economic justice through street level activism and labor organizing, has less than 3,000 Twitter followers. Suey Park has almost 23,000. Yet Lewis does more for women of color in a day than Park has done in her whole life. If attention is the coin of the realm in a world of hashtag politics, then something is clearly wrong here.

Karen Lewis v. Rahm Emmanuel is like Katniss Everdeen v. President Snow. Identity politics is an entertainment for the good citizens of the Capitol. It is faux outrage as all emotion is faux emotion in the Capitol.

Stupid analogy? I don't think I'm nailing it, but it points to something and I'm trying to put my finger on it. In part it's about the level on which we should focus our struggle against injustice. But more than that it's about how identity poltics is ultimately a symptom of profound alienation, a dehumanized and dehumanizing alienation that is so well depicted as normative in the Hunger Games films. Identity politics is like wanting to be with the cool kids in middle school. Its outrages have more in common with the attitude of mean girls making fun of the girl who is wearing the dorky dress than it does with an attitude that wants to get to fundamental roots of what ails us. It's a symptom of the disease, not a path to its cure. 

And yet my outrage about the fatuity of identity politics is about as impotent as the outrage felt by those I'm outraged by. So I just want to name it and move on. To do otherwise is to stay stuck in this loop that renders us impotent. How to break out of it--not just individually--lots of individuals are not caught in this loop--but how to do it collectively?

The Spirit of Classical Liberalism

In brief, for classical liberalism, the human world consisted of self-contained individual atoms with certain built-in passions and drives, each seeking above all to maximize his satisfactions and minimze his dissatisfactions, equal in this to all others, and 'naturally' recognizing no limits or rights of interference with his urges. In other words, each man was 'naturally' possessed of life, liberty and the pursit of happiness, as the American Declaration of Independence put it, though the most logical liberal thinkers preferred not to put this in the language of 'natural rights'. In the course of pursuing this self-interest, each individual in this anarchy of equal competitors, found it advantageous or unavoidable to enter into certain relations with other individuals, and this complex of useful arrangements--which were often expressed in the frankly commercial terminology of 'contract'--constituted society and social or poltical groups. Of course such arrangements and associations implied some diminution of man's naturally unlimited liberty to do what he liked, one of the tasks of politics being to reduce such interference to the practicable minimum. . . . Social aims were therefore the arithmetical sum of individual aims. (Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, p. 235-36)

When seen in this stark description of its primitiveness, I don't think it's hard to understand why not only reactionaries have resisted the the spirit of the new age. Hobbes through Bentham and the whole tradition of classical economics and Neoliberal politics and political economy accepts this narrative or variations of it as the most accurate description of the human condition. From a Christian perspective it is a description of Hell, a nightmare world to be saved from. 

While a good part of me is revolted by the spirit of Liberalism, there's another part of me that accepts it as the inevitable--a kind of Noah's flood to wash away the inequities and corruptions of an ancien regime that lived past its usefulness. It would have been nice if another way could have been found, but humans being who they are, that was never likely.

If modernity can be likened to a flood, we can acknowledge its cleansing and fertilizing 'utility', but it does not have within it the resources for constructing something new. That something new will arise--I am certain of it--but it will come from Logos bearers and people who carry seeds of things that grew before the flood worth preserving and cultivating in a brave new, no-longer-modern, that is, no-longer-flooded world. The flood waters have not quite receded, but when they do, it will be time for planting.