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 20th 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:
One—The Shift from Outer to Inner
The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . . Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.
--Friederich Nietzsche, Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76
Nietzsche was precocious in understanding our predicament at the end of the Modern Age. He understood that the meaning of transcendence as something ‘given’[1] by the Western tradition had all but collapsed, and that the cultural institutions and traditions of the West had withered into husks, which with the rising of a strong wind could blow away.[2] If culture is the collective soul of a people, ours has shriveled into something animated almost exclusively by economic concerns, and any talk in the media or in the political sphere about hope for the future is framed exclusively by the imagination of the commercial and entertainment worlds. We’ve become a bread-and-circuses culture, and Nietzsche described this condition as the triumph of the Last Man.
People have always lived for bread and circuses, but when a culture is thriving, there is in the air a sense of Possibility that points beyond the concerns of the everyday. In premodern cultures this sense of Possibility was associated with a natural, commonly shared religious feeling and a sense of awe. In such cultures there is a time for work and a time for festival, but each time is surrounded by the transcendent “more”, and this more suffuses secular activities with a sense of the sacred.[3] And because the sacred was always there, even if only in the background, it was a ‘given’ in the premodern collective life of every culture in ways that are hard now to imagine. But we postmoderns long for it now, and feel attracted to those places in the world where that premodern sense of the sacred still lingers—in Asia or Africa or the Australian Outback. In such places primitive doesn’t mean backward, but ‘soulful’.[4] This is a form of nostalgia, and indulging it is not healthful, but it points to a commonly experienced symptom of a deeper underlying problem.
Modernity is, among other things, the story of the gradual shriveling up of that sense of the “sacred” as a given in human experience. The common name used to describe this story is secularization, but that word only scratches the surface of the significance of what has happened to us in the last five hundred years. My goal here is not to lament what we have lost. The social conservatives’ are naive if they think we can find a way to go back to an earlier form of consciousness just by reintroducing sacred talk into our public practice. I will make an argument elsewhere that we are moving into a post-secular era, and this movement into the future will require the retrieval of much from the premodern era that was jettisoned during the Modern Age. Retrieval and nostalgia are not the same thing.
But the conservative program is essentially nostalgic, and its strategies that focus on prayer in schools or other religious practices in public places will not solve the problem. Such strategies derive from a significant underestimation of how deeply secularized we have become. Yes, surely, our public institutions and political discourse have become profoundly secularized, but even more significant has been the degree to which our cognitive/perceptual capacity has become secularized as well. Secularization has affected not just our institutions and public discourse, but also the very way we experience the world. It affects what we see or don’t see in nature, in other people, in the everyday world that surrounds us in our homes and workplaces. Our public, secular language is an honest reflection of our secular experience. Just changing the language won’t change the experience. The cultural shift into a post-secular idiom is already underway. But we need first to understand where we are and how we got here.
It has often been noted that we Moderns in the West have developed what is fundamentally a mechanomorphic imagination of reality. The world has lost its numinous quality, its ability to enchant. We see it now as a big machine—as something interesting and complex and full of unanswered questions about how it works, but we have a very hard time thinking about it in terms other than as something machinelike. And in some quarters of the culture there is serious talk about how the human being is evolving into something evermore machinelike. We see this reflected particularly in contemporary film. Cyborgs are everywhere.
But we moderns also believe that our mechanomorphic view of the world is and accurate reflection of the way it really is. Any talk, for instance, that suggests that the earth is our Mother, as has become popular in New Age and ecological circles, seems dotty and overly sentimental. And yet for people in an earlier age, this was their reality. That the earth was a godlike being was as obvious to them as the law of gravity is to us. The gods and goddesses were everywhere inhabiting and animating the streams and forests and mountains, and the modern sensibility finds it impossible to believe this experience of the world was ever anything more than the product of the over-fertile imaginations of a primitive people still living in a dreamworld. For moderns this is the mentality of children who have not yet awakened to the way things really are—the way the enlightened, rational modern sees them.[5]
So to say that meaning has collapsed does not of course mean that there is no meaning; it is simply to recognize that the public world into which we have been socialized has been stripped of any possibility of there being sacred meanings. All that is left to us are the husks of things, and when we look at these husks we see only their physicality, and so our questions about them become limited to their mechanics and how they work. And so one is left with the world as a machine, and if one asks what this machine is for, the only answer that makes sense is for our economic and entertainment uses. In such a world, what is there to hope for but better bread and better circuses?
The old religious answers to that question have come to seem incredible because the language in which they were developed was steeped in an experience of the world in which the sacred was a part of everyone’s common experience. If for moderns it doesn’t make sense to talk about the spirits who animate nature, how can it make sense to talk about the sacraments, or transubstantiation, or apparitions, or the communion of saints? These words are labels for experiences common to the premodern consciousness. To use such language meaningfully assumes a kind of everyday experience of the sacred and of a sense of intimate connection with mostly invisible worlds. In a world that moderns have come to experience everyday as a machine, such language just doesn’t work. It’s too much at odds with our ordinary understanding of how things work.
And so as the sense for the sacred as a common experience diminished during the modern era, so did meaning. Surely people find ways to give their lives meaning; but these meanings have no robust transcendent reference or validation. Meaning as something given from out there has progressively diminished over the last five hundred years. Meaning has become more and more what we make it. We live in a Potemkin village of public meanings, for what lies behind them is simply the void. Most people can live in such a world comfortably enough, but Nietzsche couldn’t. He didn’t persuade the culture to that human existence was essentially absurd. He simply recognized what had happened in the West, and drew out the logical consequences.
Nietzsche, in fact, was nauseated by the modern experience and by the kind of soulless human being it was creating. He was a Romantic who longed for the kind of full-souled tragical human being more common in the days before Socrates and Jesus changed things for the worse. A part of him was the nostalgic conservative classics scholar who wanted things to go back to the way they were in a Golden Age. The world of public given meaning as it had been defined by the transcendent values of the Christian West no longer made sense, so how was one to live. Humans had only two choices: either to continue in religious beliefs that simply could not be held by anyone with a shred of intellectual honesty; or to revert to Last Man, bread-and-and-circus meanings. He thought both were forms of slavishness insofar as they were founded on a fundamental gesture of the soul toward unfreedom. He recognized that there are no possibilities for transcendence within the closed circle of the world as he felt any intellectually honest person had to see it. But he insisted that even in a world that was metaphysically meaningless, the human being nevertheless had to find a way to aspire to be something “more.”
He saw as his philosophical task to find a way to affirm that in a world where nothing is given to him—in a world where all a human being has is his own freedom and will and the inner resources of his soul—to achieve nobility by self-overcoming. If there is no transcendence out there, then transcendence is something that one must find within. And so “self-transcending” becomes its own goal. There is no heaven or future afterlife reward of any sort. The human being’s dignity and nobility lie in his refusal of such fantasies and in refusing to surrender to any meanings except those of his own making. Such a human being he called the uebermensch, translated sometimes as the ‘superman’, but more accurately as the ‘overman’. But really what he meant was the ‘overcoming man’.
I think Nietzsche’s diagnosis of the problem was essentially correct; and his solution, while it had a tremendous cultural impact during the twentieth century for good and ill, points to a truth about human nature and human aspiration that is only part of the story. The human being is truly an “overcoming man,” and I would agree with Nietzsche and his disciple Sartre that the deepest dignity of the human being lies in his unconditional freedom, and I would agree that the assertion of this freedom is at the heart of what makes the human being in his thinking an in his willing the remarkable and unique creature that he is. But the human being is in fact so much more. And the absurdist narrative central to the Nietzschean metaphysics is not the only one in which such an affirmation of radical human freedom is possible. There is also a Christian possibility.
Owen Barfield[6] recognized the problem as Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of the Christian historical drama. This drama extends from what he calls Original Participation to Final Participation, from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant future. For Barfield evolution is the story of the unfolding of human consciousness, and its central moment is the Christ event, the Incarnation of the Logos in Palestine over 2000 years ago.
Barfield, like Nietzsche, agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of the sense of transcendent meaning as something given in the world have disappeared—transcendence is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. And he agrees that the solution must be to draw upon the inner resources of the soul to reconstitute meaning in the outer world. The essential difference lies in that for Nietzsche meaning derives from the Superman and his will to power, whereas for Barfield meaning derives from the Logos who dwells in the depths of every human soul. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not the Superman, but the Logos bearer.
For the whole thrust of Barfield’s thought[7] is to show how human consciousness has evolved in such a way that “meaning” has shifted from something given in the world outside to something that now lies in potentia, slumbering in the depths of every human soul, and which it is now the human task to awaken. The Logos, although he was known to the Greeks and Jews of antiquity, was not primarily known by them through their interior experience. Jesus’ announcement that “the Kingdom of God is within” was a critical turning point in the history of meaning. An epochal shift occurred then which has not yet been fully accomplished, a shift that really didn’t manifest itself broadly in western culture until the time of the renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period.
Both the Greeks and Jews played a critical historical role in helping the kind of soul that could become such a Logos bearer.[8] Although both knew Him and both played an essential role in developing the kind of human soul that could hold Him within. This has been the essential contribution of the West to the world—the space-and-eye oriented, Promethean, restless, overcoming, speculative, exploratory heritage that comes from the Greeks and the ear-and-time-oriented sense of the profundity and mystery of the human will, of human identity, and of the meaning of history from the Jews.
And what we have seen in the last five hundred years is the transition of our experience of transcendence from a Greek, outer-focused, spatial imagination of transcendence to a Jewish inward-focused, temporal, forward-oriented imagination. Transcendence in the modern period has become more about time than about space, more about listening than about seeing. For the former transcendence is an out- or up-there that shapes our life down here, for the latter it’s something down-here, within history, experienced as a hope for the fulfillment of a promise. For the Greek what is good is higher and comes from above, and what’s bad is lower coming from below. For the Jew, the good is progressive,[9] aiming toward something better that lies in the future, and what’s bad is nostalgia, a falling back to previous stages of development. The longing to regress is symbolized by Lot’s wife in Genesis, the Jews in Exodus who longed to return to Egypt’s fleshpots, and Ahab’s regression to Baal worship in Kings. In the Old Testament narrative, these are all instances of disobedience on one level, but at a deeper level they are a breaking of faith, a failure to trust in the promises made to them by their Lord.
According to Barfield it was the historical mission of the Greeks and the Jews to begin a process of thinking and willing that enabled human beings began to extricate themselves from what had been before an ‘immersion in Being’. Barfield called this immersion ‘original participation,’ a condition of soul that all premoderns experienced to some extent, totemic or animistic peoples being the extreme case. Original participation lingered in the West, especially in rural areas, well into the nineteenth century and can still be found in rural cultures where premodern consciousness and traditions haven’t been completely snuffed out.[10] But it began slowly to dry up in Israel after Moses and in Greece in the 5th century B.C., accelerated (for reasons we’ll explore in Chapter X) at the time of the Renaissance, and culminated in the Enlightenment rationality and materialism of the 18th and 19th century.
For Barfield these changes in human consciousness have not been religiously regressive despite the secularism that has accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as the Nietzscheans have come to think. The outer world as we think of it as just a complex pattern of atoms, has lost its ability to confer robust meaning. And that is as it should be, because so long as the world outside was perceived to be the source of all meaning and human beings were seen as passive receptors of that meaning, humans were living in a world in which their freedom could not come into full development.
As humans emerged gradually out of original participation, their capacity for freedom grew. In Barfield’s view, the modern period marks a profoundly significant turning point in human history, because the human being has come into possession of his freedom in a way unprecedented in the history of the world. Everything depends on how he uses it in shaping what is to a remarkable extent an open-ended future. And everything depends on whether humans envision that future as shaped by the values of the Last Man or if he is able to develop a new possibility for a nobler kind of human being. There are three choices before us: the Last Man, the Superman, or the Logos bearer. The fundamental purpose of this book is to show how the last is not only a plausible option, but a necessary one.
The Emergence from Original Participation
Original participation is a condition in which the freedom and individuality that we take for granted as moderns is inconceivable. The more deeply a human being experiences immersion in original participation, the less distinct is his sense of self and the more profoundly he experiences how everything is mystically interconnected. This experience of mystical interconnection is something that some moderns came to think of as a privileged experience in the tradition of the great mystics in the East and also in the Western tradition who articulated their experience in pantheistic terms in which one loses his sense of self in an experience of immersion in Being.[11]
In shamanic and animist culturesk where original participation dominates the sense of self as an autonomous individual is likewise rather weak. For a person with such a consciousness the world is pervaded with spirit, and where the individual begins and where he ends is not so clear. One’s individual identity is something given by his connection to the tribe and its totem spirit, and the individual human being feels he has no real identity apart from it. For this reason ostracism was a fate worse than death for him because it was the experience of being a living nobody, for everything is given from outside--by the gods, by the tribe--and one has nothing of his own.[12]
This is not reality as the modern experiences it, and for this reason it’s easy to understand why the traditional religious language of the Western tradition no longer makes much sense. That language was shaped during an era when original participation still strongly influenced ordinary human experience, and as Barfield is at pains to point out, we are always wrong when in our thinking about the experience of people in premodern cultures we assume their experience of the modern world is in most respects the same as ours. The world as moderns have come to see it is, relatively speaking, an abstraction, rather like black and white stick drawings compared with the psychedelic vibrancy and immediacy of the world given to human experience in original participation. A few minutes with the visual art of Tibet, the Mayas or even something as late in the West as the illuminated manuscripts of the Irish monks, gives some indication of the differences.
But while original participation lingered as a condition of soul in the West well into the modern era, the West was the leader among world civilizations in moving out of it. The Greeks and the Jews both found different means by which each was able to slowly emerge out of original participation in a way that in retrospect is rather astonishing. The end result was for the Greeks their remarkable capacity for speculative free thinking, and for the Jews another kind of freedom manifested in the life of the will.
The liberation of thinking and will from the constraints of original participation is the chief contribution of the West to world culture. But in the early literature of both peoples it’s clear that original participation governed their experience just as it governed the experience of the peoples around them. The ancient literature of the Greeks and the Jews is suffused with original participation. It’s a world where, for instance, the greatness of heroes and prophets, comes not from their own achievements but rather from their being overshadowed by gods and angels.
The Homeric hero is not great because of his personal courage, but because he has been chosen by the gods for their use. His actions depend not on his individual talent or courage but on the power of the god working through him. This is vividly illustrated in the scene in the Iliad where Hector, in abject fear, is chased around the walls of Troy by Achilles. There was no shame in this for him because the god Panic had possessed him. For Hector it was more usually the case that one of the other gods used him to do great deeds for Troy.
Neither the Trojans nor the Greeks thought less of Hector because of what appeared to be his cowardly lapse with Achilles. It wasn’t his fault. He was still favored by the gods in a way ordinary men were not and that’s what made him a hero. He was, as were most of the Greek heroes, a completely fated man, with no will or freedom to resist the power of the god who chose to work through him. But a shift is evident in the figure of Odysseus who is not merely a puppet but someone who uses his own wits in a way that the other fated heroes do not. With him we see a movement toward an independence of mind that was to become the hallmark of the Greek spirit.
The prophet in Israel was similarly fated. There was no resisting God or his angelic messengers. The biblical narrative is clear that those chosen, whether he be Moses during his time in Midian or Jeremiah several hundred years later, wanted nothing to do with the job being foisted on them, but they had no choice in the matter. The Jonah story illustrates what happens if you resist. But a shift was also in the works, perhaps first indicated by the precocious individuality of King David, and later by the revelation to Elijah that God was not in the great displays of natural power, but in the still, small, whispering voice, and then again later by Isaiah’s inspired recognition that while the law was given to the Jews on tablets of stone, in the future it would be written on the human heart.
But in order for that day to come, the Jews first had to live according to the law of stone which promoted a drying out of souls soggy with original participation so that eventually a fire within them could be kindled there. The Law according to which the Jews lived required a tremendous discipline of refusal. The allure of the surrounding fertility-oriented Canaanite cults was not easy to resist, nor were the Jews particularly successful in doing so. Their being asked to refuse it was asking them to refuse what was obviously natural because all the world was immersed in original participation. The Law required that the Jews no longer be immersed, and this required a discipline whose main effect was to dry them out. Indeed the forty-year sojourn in the arid Sinai after having left Egypt is a very apt image of the drying out process by which this people became significantly different from the other peoples who were their contemporaries.
Also unique was the acknowledgement and worship of a transcendent God, a God who was not in any way dependent on or immersed in the world below. This was a God who identified himself as “I Am Who Am,” and as such the very ground of a world which was in fact His creation. As transcendent, he was a Being completely unaffected by attempts to control Him by magical practice, and this was a new, unprecedented understanding of deity. Also implied in the Jewish revelation was the idea that this transcendent deity was in some way an image of possibility for the human being himself, that his deepest identity was in some way linked, not in its essence, but in a way analogous to the identity of this transcendent God. For while it was clear that man was a creature and not God, he was nevertheless a being who was made in the image and likeness of his creator. Man was in his creaturely way his own ‘I Am Who Am’. As such he or she was something more than the nature-circumscribed, talking animal who lived in fated unfreedom.
In Israel, because it was constrained by the law, there emerged a new possibility for human freedom. Israel was chosen not to be delivered only from its physical bondage in Egypt, but more significantly from the fated passivity of original participation. Because the essential dynamic of original participation is a life which is primarily determined from forces which come from outside. The Greek hero, as was shown, had no will of his own, and neither would the Jew had it not been for the introduction of the law. For the law required “obedience” and obedience is not the same as doing what the gods require in the Greek sense, because in that the Greek had no freedom to refuse.
The effort required to live in obedience to Jewish law was enormous. The story of Ahab and Jezebel and of the other repeated failures of the rulers of the two kingdoms illustrates how strong was the inclination in Israel to regress to Baal worship. But the practice of obedience over time had an individuating effect. Obedience, which means “conformity” to moderns, ironically, is what for the Jews created the possibility of individuality because it required choice and a tremendous effort of the will. It was up to them either to obey or to regress, and mostly they regressed, which meant simply behaving like the nations that surrounded them. But a remnant remained faithful to the Law, and that was enough for Israel to achieve its mission.
In Chapter Three we will talk about another drying out factor, the introduction of the phonetic alphabet, a Semitic invention, and of its impact on the consciousness of both Greeks and Jews. But for now it’s enough to simply state that it was the mission of the Jews that the source of all meaning move gradually from without to within, from Sinai to Pentecost, from burning bush to burning heart. And since Pentecost, the movement of history—the deepest meaning of history—is found in the slow process by which this interior meaning reconstitutes or renews the face of the earth, a process whose completion lies as far in the future as its beginning lies in the past.
[1] , By ‘given’ I mean simply that which is given to us as our common experience by culture or tradition. What is given is obvious or readily accessible to everyone in the same way—it is what I will describe later, following Owen Barfield, as our system of collective representations. To what degree these representations are actually “given” and to what degree we actively create them is a theme that we will explore later.
[2] This partially explains what happened in Germany, the most “civilized” culture in Europe” in the twenties and thirties.
[3] This phenomenon is anthropologically well documented. If the reader is unfamiliar with this literature, he or she can start with the many books written by Mircea Eliade.
[4] I would also point to the popularity of the Harry Potter books as anindicator of this contemporary hunger for the sacred. Their appeal lies in their suggestion that despite how profane and “muggle” our lives may be, magic surrounds us if we have the eyes to see it.
[5] But as I will discuss later, perhaps there is a clue here as to what Jesus is saying when he tells his disciples that they must become like children if they are to enter the Kingdom of God. See discussion in Chapter X
[6] There have been many Christian responses to the problem as Nietzsche saw it, starting with Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and through the Christian existentialists like Gabriel Marcel and Karl Jaspers. But Owen Barfield, (1899-2000), in my view offers the most compelling explanation of 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. 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 20th century, and I agree.
[7] The main thrust of Barfield’s arguments come from his etymological studies, such as History in English Words. He draws upon his findings there in his best-known book, Saving the Appearances, in which he lays out the ideas that I will work with here.
[8] What we mean by this will be explained in Chapter 3.
[9] The word “progressive” as I use it here is not to be confused with the idea of “progress” as many have come to think of it in economic development terms. As I will explain in Chapter X, progress means movement toward a telos. In the premodern imagination, that telos was imagined in eschatological terms as an event initiated by God which will break into our ordinary world in the end time. But since the modern era, there has developed an irrepressible instinct to think that the goal is something humans can achieve on earth. I think that the instinct at its root is true or points to a truth about human history that has been misapplied. The problem lies in the naiveté with which this desire for progress gave rise to utopian projects in the belief that the goal was something to be achieved by people in their own lifetimes. Progress, in the sense I mean it, does require that there be a telos. This is not an idea that the postmodern sensibility is comfortable with, and a part of my challenge lies in trying to make the idea more plausible.
But I want to make the point here in a preliminary way that because there is a telos, it is not inevitable that it be achieved. It’s quite possible that we will fail; human history is the story of repeated tragedies. This history of Israel as it is depicted in the Scriptures is one of repeated failure and tragedy, but also of success. As a Christian, I believe that Israel succeeded in achieving the most important part of its historic mission, but more about that later. Israel’s drama was one chapter in a much longer story. The challenge for us now is to understand the basic outline of the story and then to understand what we must do to write the script for the chapter in the story that we are living now.
[10] Any sense we still have of meaning coming from out there is an echoing in our experience now of cultural forms developed by premodern consciousness.
[11] In my view these experiences are temporary reversions to a more primitive consciousness which is here described as original participation. In my judgment, these experiences are atavistic and while they are indicators that help us to understand the consciousness of the past, they are not desirable insofar as they tend to suppress the individual’s sense of Self. As I will explain later, the whole point of the evolution of consciousness is the attainment of higher levels of freedom and individuation, and mystical experiences that undermine that goal are interesting reminders of the “more,” but are not the way forward. The way forward is not a blissed out mysticism in which one loses her or his sense of self. It should be understood in different terms in which the sense of our Self or subjectivity is not lost, but is rather enhanced in an experience of re-connection or re-immersion in Being without being overwhelmed by it.
[12] The fan’s experience of identification with his local sports team is an example of how this more primitive consciousness lingers in the postmodern West. It also explains why fans get so upset with a star who traitorously goes to another team when offered more money because it spoils the fantasy of tribal unity and loyalty. The athletes are individualistic businessmen, and have a hard time understanding why fans hate them so much. Wouldn’t the fan take the money if he were given the choice? The fan is conflicted because his emotions are premodern while his thinking ins modern.