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.
Marshall McLuhan was by training and temperament a paragon of the 20th Century literary man. How ironic that he became the prophet of post-literate culture. In the fifties and sixties he understood better than anyone what was happening to our collective consciousness because of the influence of electronic technologies. He told us then what will become more apparently true as we move into the 21st century: We are currently undergoing a major transition of one historical era into another, not unlike the passing from the medieval era to the modern, or earlier from classical antiquity into the medieval age.
For this reason, he would affirm that the sense of decline or decay that so many or our contemporaries are lamenting is not illusory, but he didn’t think of it as something to be resisted either, he saw it as part of a longer term developmental process. Our current decline doesn’t mean the end of civilization as social conservatives seem to think; it just means the end of an era. Something new will arise; it always does, and as always it will not be unambiguously good or unambiguously evil; it will mix both. But it will also open up new possibilities for the human spirit.
What lies in the future, of course, is impossible to predict, but an axiomatic McLuhanism is that we tend to look at the future in terms of the past, and as a result we really don’t see what’s coming at us. We tend to miss the new and just see it as a variation on something old. Or we simply don’t see it at all—it’s simply invisible as a phenomenon that doesn’t fit into our perceptual frame of reference. And so a corollary to this is that the assumptions we carry now that shape our perceptions about what is real and unreal are old habits that will be gradually given up generation by generation
Our situation now would be similar to that of a hypothetical pundit during the reign of Louis XIV in the 1660s who would have proposed that the days of the ancien regime were numbered and that the bourgeoisie were already in the European society’s driver’s seat. In retrospect we see that he would have been right to say so, but to have said it then would not have made sense to anyone because everyone’s perceptual frame was still shaped by medieval habits. The habits and attitudes of the old medieval narrative persisted well into the modern era, but the energy that was then shaping the future lay in the modern impulse. Although the medieval impulse died by the 15th century in Europe, its complete decay took several more centuries to complete. In the same way, even though the Modern died in the 20th century, its habits of mind will persist well into the future. Nietzsche, the first post modern, announced the end toward the close of the nineteenth century; it took the rest of the European intelligentsia until after World War I to recognize that he was right.
As medieval habits persisted into the modern era, so will modern habits persist into the next era. As the modern era grew out of the medieval, so will the next era grow out of the modern. The trick now is to develop a new perceptual frame that will help us to see the signs of the burgeoning new. In springtime when everything is sprouting in the garden, it’s hard to tell which are the seedlings of the weeds and which are the seedlings of the desirable plants one would want to cultivate. When we look around us now at the wide array of seedling cultural impulses, the same is true. Among them are the plants that we will want to cultivate, but it’s hard to know which they are.
We need now patiently, carefully to watch as they develop. Soon we will know which ones to nurture and which to weed out. But assuming the desirable plants survive and flourish, none of us in this generation or the next will live to see them flower and fruit; our responsibility lies more in keeping the weeds in control and doing what we can to nurture the desirable impulses to give them the best chance to survive and flourish. In the second part of this book I attempt, if not to cultivate, at least to identify, some seeds that come to us from the living tradition of the Christian West. Some are sprouting; some are not. But my hope is that if they are cultivated in the right way, they might become the new cultural impulse that will lead us forward into the historical era that lies before us.
For we are at the end of something and the beginning of something. Jacques Barzun, in From Dawn to Decadence, his wonderful book about the birth, flourishing, and dying of The Modern Age, defines decadence in a neutral, non-pejoratiave way. He means it simply to describe the end of something that once flourished. “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal,“ he writes, “the culture is decadent. The term is not a slur, it is a technical label.” Decadence, he says, “. . . implies in those who live in such a time no loss of energy or talent or moral sense. On the contrary, it is a very active time, full of deep concerns but peculiarly restless for it sees no clear lines of advance. The loss it faces is that of Possibility.” This is where we are now. The first part of this book attempts to develop some clarity about what it means to be there—how we got there and what it affords us now in terms of opportunities for both good or ill.
It’s important to recognize that this new shift also creates the conditions for the possibility of great human depravity and delusion. Now perhaps more than at any time in the history of the planet, its future lies in the choices that humans make, and right now the moral imagination of most humans is simply not up to the challenges that they will face in the coming century. If people aren't thinking about or struggling to imagine and create the cultural forms that will support progressive spiritual possibilities, then some Blade Runner style Babylon becomes an inevitability. People naturally choose the regressive tendencies in their human nature if there is no nobler imagination of possibility for their lives to inspire them.
In my chapter “Twilight of the Bourgeoisie” I talk about how the bourgeois as the prototypical model for being human that emerged during the last five hundred years simply doesn’t inspire anymore. I sympathize with the conservatives who look to him as the last bulwark against the chaos perhaps justifiably they fear inevitably will descend upon us if the culture fails to honor his virtues. For better or worse, we are in a profound state of vulnerability to anyone who arises with compelling vision of possibility. The problem is that we are in such a state of confusion right now that almost anything might do. Fascism was for many in the first generation of postmoderns such a compelling vision, and its return in some different updated form is always a possibility, even in America.
I just don’t believe that the bourgeois and his Liberal rationalist ideal is the answer. He is too linked to the materialism and to a kind of flat-souled sobriety, which while it has its usefulness for maintaining a certain kind of social order, it has also created a culture of hollow men who are not up to the profound challenges that confront the earth and all of us who live on it. I don’t know that I would be thrilled if my preadolescent son comes home some time in the near future with orange hair, multiple piercings, and a body swathed in tattoos. But if he did, I would understand it as a failure on my part to have shown him something better, something that transcends the limited possibilities for the spirit defined by the now dying bourgeois ideal. What young people are saying in this time of decay is understandable: “Either show me a way forward, or I’m going backward.” We have to come up with a more compelling vision for human possibility than that offered by the bourgeois. And my hope is that as the bourgeois gradually supplanted the medieval aristocrat as the ideal type during the modern era, so will a new kind of human being, Logos Bearers, supplant the bourgeois. This need not be a terrifying prospect.
So I sympathize with the critique of social conservatives regarding the present state of contemporary culture. But I think they are wrong in their prescriptions for a cure. The sixties was not an era an unmitigated disasters as they like to point out. The sixties were for America what the twenties were for Europe--a time when they realized for all that was wonderful about the modern era and its enlightenment ideals, it had died—it no longer had the vigor to offer human beings a vision of Possibility. The putrefaction that the conservatives smell is not the result of anything new that arose in the 1960s, but of the rotting carcass of the old. All of the things conservatives hate most about contemporary culture are the shadow side of those things they most admire about the bourgeois culture that they seek to preserve.
There is no healthy way to go back to what was. The solution to our present ills does not lie in looking primarily backwards. The solution lies in what comes to us from the future. Whatever remains to us from the past that has value is the fruit of those of our ancestors who knew how to live into the future in the right way. I’ll explain more clearly what I mean by this later, but the point that I want to make now is that it is not possible to develop the correct relationship with what comes to us from the past without first developing the correct relationship to the future. This is the formula for renaissance.
Barzun is in accord with McLuhan about the end of the old modern bourgeois culture, although he is not as sanguine as McLuhan (in certain moods anyway.--See his 1969 interview in Playboy Magazine.) about the possibilities that lay ahead for us. That’s the problem with any period like ours when the old thing is dying. Yes, there is the stench of decay; it’s strong, especially in relationship to whatever slight fragrance the fresh new thing is producing. But because the new thing is there in front of our noses, it is useless to lament the loss of the old. and to wring our hands about the end of civilization. Rather all of our attention should focus on sniffing out the fragrance of the new impulse or impulses that will shape the next era. This is fundamentally an act of conscience.
***
Whether McLuhan is right or wrong in the particulars of what he wrote is not so important as his approach, which led him to his quirky insights, which I think more often than not have important seminal value. However debatable much of what he said might be, his central insight is one that I find very compelling: We are experiencing on a global scale a shift in consciousness similar to what happened in Golden Age Greece or Renaissance Europe. This shift directly correlates to how we process information depending on the ratio of the senses. The shift from oral space to visual space was effected by the introduction of the most significant information technology of all time, namely the phonetic alphabet. As I’ll explain in more detail in Chapter X, it created the possibility for a new experience of ourselves individuated in space and with that experience of separation came the possibility for innovative or non-tradition bound thinking,
The introduction of new electronic information technologies is changing consciousness again, but its effect, depending on how we do it, is to move us either forward or backward down the mountain we have been ascending from our origins in an aboriginal embedded consciousness. I imagine this in the context of assumptions I hold about the evolution of consciousness shaped by the Christian teleology of Teilhard de Chardin and Owen Barfield as a long progressive climb up the mountain to greater levels of individuated consciousness—from Levy-Bruhl’s participation mystique to Descartes “I think therefore I am.”
Descartes’s proclamation is a benchmark in the development of the modern individuated consciousness, the consciousness of the bourgeois, and it marks the beginning of the culture’s peaking in its ascent. But the individuated, isolated consciousness announced by Descartes is not the endpoint; it’s only the midpoint. The air at the peak is thin, the vegetation sparse, the life impulse weak--and it’s lonely. It’s no place to live.
The next phase, if things go well, will be one of descent into deeper connectedness with the “otherness” over against which the literate, modern, bourgeois mind has become so estranged—the otherness of people, of animals, of plant life, of the earth itself. A movement from what Barfield calls “original participation” or what Taylor calls embedded consciousness to “final participation”, re-embedded consciousness. The goal of the descent is to once again live in an enchanted world, a world animated, a world once again ensouled, but to live there without having lost the individuated consciousness it took so many thousands of years to achieve. Like the ascent, the descent over many, many generations will be neither quick nor easy.
In McLuhan’s terms, if the shift before was from preliterate to literate, the shift we’re undergoing now, the beginning of the descent, is a shift from literate to postliterate. This does not mean that people will stop reading, just as people did not stop talking after they started to read. If the first meant that humans began to process language primarily through their eyes rather than through their ears, the shift we’re undergoing now will mean that the eye will become secondary to processing language and experience in a different way, which I believe will encourage cognition on more levels of knowing than simply the visual level.
This at least is the optimistic view. The pessimistic view is to think that the loss of literate culture will be a loss of civilization, and these concerns are understandable. Most of what we think of as civilization, especially in the West in the last 2500 years, is the product of literate minds. We take for granted that literacy is an advance for human consciousness, and it has been , but we don’t reckon the cost we have paid for it, which is to have lost most of our capacity to respond to the magical quality that words have.
Poetry, of course, is the form that we think of when regarding the magical effects of language, but moderns tend to think of poetry as something to read. And yet hardly anyone reads poetry anymore because so few now can really ‘”hear” it. And if we listen to someone reciting it without having first read it, it mostly washes over us without our getting its sense. To get it takes so much work, usually through reading and rereading, and most often there seems too little reward for the effort. Whatever our contemporary experience of poetry might be, it is a pale reflection of how preliterate, embedded bardic cultures experienced the word.
Literate cultures are too literal. We who are literate simply do not live in a word world in the same way people do who are preliterate. Such a word world is ripe with metaphor and symbol which evoke experiences of the depths that lay under the surfaces that the eye cannot penetrate. And the word resonated in the depths of preliterate souls in a way which we only glimpse now from time to time. We very rarely penetrate much deeper to experience more than the intelligible surface meanings of the words we hear. Rarely do we experience what is evocative of other realms of feeling and cognition.
As a result we have become tone deaf to the Word, the Logos, that is the primal reality in which everything that has life and being has its life and being through it. Literate, bourgeois culture is the story of the loss of Faith as a living experience; “faith” has come to mean believing things even though they don’t make sense. Or Faith has come to mean a kind of highly intellectualized, but soulless and often senseless literalism with regard to the “truths” contained in the Bible. Faith is not something that easily and naturally arises in an eye-centered consciousness. It does better in cultures that are ear-centered, in which people have the ability to hear messages that arise from the depths, who can here truth uttered in poetry.
***
Now I’m not advocating, nor was McLuhan, regressing to a preliterate state because things were so wonderful back then. But it hardly needs arguing that the shift from the Age of Faith to the Age of Reason involved a loss of the natural sense of the transcendence in things, the way everything pointed to something behind it, to meanings and depths and mysteries that the literal mind came to think of as mere fancy or superstitious non-sense. My intention is only to point out that whatever benefits we derived through literacy, we also lost something, and this something we must now seek to retrieve.
For “retrieval” is different from regression. Nostalgia is at the heart of human regression; it comes of focusing our longing in the wrong direction, toward the past rather than toward the future. Nostalgia is the regressive, past-oriented longing that leads people to a wider variety of behaviors from the neo-primitive body piercing adverted to above to the idealizing of Victoriana indulged in by conservatives. Nostalgia idealizes forms of culture that existed before its creative impulse began to decay. Retrieval is a future-oriented, conscious attempt to integrate from the past what has been more recently rejected or neglected. Nostalgia is an understandable longing in a time of decay because insofar as we don’t see any clear lines of advance and the future offers us no Possibility to strive for, we direct our longing toward that which we have known and lost.
And yet the way forward, the way down the mountain requires retrieving our past. How to correctly negotiate this descent is the challenge that faces us in the future. It is, I believe, the key to understanding what will be the line of advance that will shape the next cultural era. It remains a question whether we choose a path of descent that leads us to the New Jerusalem or to Babylon.
The concern that motivates this book is that people of faith, and I speak here as a Christian, despite our having the resources to frame one, do not have a compelling vision of future possibility for the earth, and I think that it is our responsibility to the culture at large to help provide that. The world, now globalizing according to the tradition-killing logic of the modern liberal impulse run amok, is in desperate need of a progressive vision of future possibility that draws inspiration from the lives of those who lived truthfully and faithfully in the past. Otherwise we live by default within the dying narrative of the modern with its crude materialistic vision of what is real and unreal, and this way leads to no good end.
***
St. Augustine lived, as we live now, at the end of something and the beginning of something. His personal quest to understand the deepest longings of his soul shaped by the crumbling cultural forms of classical antiquity resulted in a literature that shaped the cultural aspirations of medieval Christendom for the next thousand years. The Puritans in England lived at the end of something and at the beginning of something. Their rejection of the Medieval crown-and-altar narrative of the Stewarts led to the creation of a new imagination of future possibility that more than any other influenced what became the American narrative, which is the modern narrative in one of its purest forms.
This book has no goal other than to start a conversation among people of faith, who are hopeful that even if it is not clear to them now, that there is some possibility for the future. The future does not lie in capitalism, socialism, feminism., fundamentalism, or Darwinism, or in any other of the “isms” produced during the modern era and its twilight. As the Puritans and other emerging bourgeois rejected a decadent medievalism, so must we now reject a decadent modernism if we have any hope of discerning the genuinely new.
This book, therefore, is addressed to all people who are concerned about the future of the earth and cannot accept that the commercial/technological logic of the dying modern is the only possibility for shaping its future. It’s addressed to people of faith who suspect that implicit in their faith, even if not very well developed by those who have gone before them, there are clues that will help them to develop a new imagination of future possibility for the earth and all that lives on it.
The greatest temptation for us now is to give up hope, to think that the way that the world is going according to its current bread-and-circuses, sex/power/money, technological/commercial logic is the only possibility, but it is understandable that we should feel powerless and hopeless in the face of its huge power and seemingly unrestrainable energies. But then who would have thought that a tiny Jewish sect which originated in the backwaters of the Roman Empire at the height of its influence and power would have subverted the old classical narrative in the way that it did?
There is something operative in history other than the logic of sex, power, and money. It’s the logic of the cross, and this logic is what impels salvation history, and this is the deeper possibility that lies at the heart of the history of the earth. But how many Christians really believe this? How many live their lives as if this were the real story and instead live their lives according to the pagan logic of the fallen world. The truth is that however sincere the profession of their faith, few Christians live truly, consistently according to the logic of the cross. As Chesterton said, Christianity hasn’t failed; it just hasn’t been tried.
The purpose of the second part of this book is not to develop a sanctimonious, otherworldly condemnation of the evils of money, sex, and power but to understand and accept them for what they are as the primary defining instinctual drivers that shape life and culture in a fallen world. In an older, prehistoricized Christian imagination, the future lay in timeless eternity, and so the path to get there was defined by world-denying ascetical practices that involved, in often severe ways repugnant to the modern sensibility, the rejection of sex, power, and money.
The second part of this book explores the idea that the future of the earth lies not in the rejection of these three but in their redemption. And if the practice of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the evangelical counsels practiced in the monastic and other orders, derived its practical logic from a premodern, ascetical, eternity-centered imagination of the future, I want to explore how a new practical logic might be developed in shaping their practice in a post modern, “worldly,” historicized imagination of the future.
Because we live in the decay of the end of an era, it’s hard to feel hopeful and it’s hard to do what needs to be done because we don’t feel energized and inspired by any vision of future possibility, of any goal, even if it lies in the far distant future, for which we might do our part now to work toward its achievement. We’re out of ideas about what to do because our ideas are framed by old habits of mind shaped primarily by the dying modern sensibility. Our challenge is not to create something new but to develop the capacity to smell its fragrance, and in our being drawn to that, to trust that we’ll discover what we need to do. Our spiritual practice is in large part abut developing the capacity to sniff out the future.
It’s hard enough to do what needs to be done when you know what the goal is, but it is virtually impossible to do anything if you have no ideas about what the goal might be. So perhaps it is the purpose of our generation not to achieve the goal, but to begin to frame what it might be, even if we do it in the most provisional, beginning steps kind of way. That’s the hope in which this book is conceived. In the next chapters I address some of the obstacles that stand in the way of our achieving even this beginning because of the lingering habits of the modern mind. But I also explore why this moment affords us a special opportunity, and why it’s a moment that may not last long , and to sound at the very least an alarm that would rouse us from our complacency or our hopelessness.