After the Future

Whither King Laius?

It’s now boring to be a rebel — or, rather, rebels have become boring. When everyone from cashiers at Rite Aid to associate humanities professors to seemingly every single NBA star has a pierced nose or face, ironic clothing item, an elaborate tattoo and disproportionately strong opinions; when multinational corporations selling hamburgers, potato chips and sneakers are urging you to think different and stand out by buying their things, then the specialness of individual rebelliousness is over. The cultural power granted to symbols and accouterments of dissent — signs once referring to the bourgeois person’s cheeky, recalcitrant individuality, his or her deep infusion with modernism — only work when they remain in the margins, when they mean something over and against what everyone else is doing. Only then do they keep their charge and pointed critique at what is “mainstream.” And even that word, “mainstream,” as we have witnessed, has already been co-opted by those non-mainstream mavericks over on the Palin Express. You see, they like “stirrin’ things up and tellin’ it like it is.” They are all up in your grill. The deluxe, stainless steel Kitchen Aid gas-powered kind. "Irony, Sincerety, normcore", by Jay Magill

I suspect I've been 'normcore' all along. Making a statement one way or another with the way I dress has always seemed kind of pointless--as I believe all attempts to shore up tribal identities are. I believe the impulse to be subversive in a corrupted society is healthy, but not if it's just in the service of being oppositional or hip, of saying I'm not with them. It doesn't matter that you are wearing a team uniform; it matters that you act in the service of something constructive, something good and truthful. Just do it; don't advertize it.

But as I've been writing about here lately, I think that one of the main differences between my boomer generation and the current millennials lies in that in our twenties we were involved in a largely reactive Oedipal drama that just isn't a script for millennials to act out the way it was my generation, and that's a good thing. 

Our generation grew up in a world where the "oppressor" was someone we met everyday at school and who was home every night at six. Millennials know there are "bad guys", but they're nobody they know as intimately as we did.They are not likely to be any other adult they have frequent contact with, unless it's a cranky uncle who watches too much FOX News. There's no there there for Millennials to rebel against, so why do it? Oedipal dramas don't change anything; they just waste everybody's time. At best such dramas tear down something that needed to be torn down to clear a path for others to travel later. 

Which is how I see our generations contribution--to clear the field this new generation to take the ball and run with it to the goal line. I think they can do it largely unimpeded--if they can find the will, the motive power, the interior resources, the fire in the heart to do it. If they can do it in a way I think they have the potential to do, then I believe the opposition will melt like wet snow on sun-drenched late-April meadow.

Man Up

[This is an encore post from March 2005. I put it up because it relates to what I've writing about Humanity 3.0, and might provoke further discussion about it along a different track. Check the comments for a further elaboration on this idea.]

Last week I put up an excerpt of an interview with Stephen Ducat in which he convincingly described the kind of crude masculinity that seems to be at the heart of GOP identity. But I've been thinking about it since, and there is an issue here that needs a more in-depth look. While I think the macho idea of masculinity is the coarsest way of imagining what it means to be a man, there are not very many alternative images that define for young men that to which they might aspire. And the result is a kind of mushiness that I've been lamenting when using the Nietzschean vocabulary of the Last Man.

There is something in every spirited young man's soul that aspires to an ideal of noble manhood, but there are very few men in contemporary American society who can model that for them. There are lots of nice, decent men, but few heroic men. I was lucky enough to have met or to have known many fine adults in my young manhood, and I am grateful to them, but none modeled for me what I longed most deeply to become. And so I have become what I have become for better or worse, but now I think about the whole process as my fourteen-year-old son is about to go through it in the next ten years or so. We always want something better for our children than we had for ourselves, and so it's a pressing question for me. What would this better be?

For many young men entering the military has been a traditional way to realize this ideal. I have students, soldiers and former soldiers who were deployed to the Middle East, in my classes who exhibit such a nobility. They are good kids, really good kids. There is a certain naive idealism in their attitudes, but there is a more important element, a noble element. These kids are not bullies; they are idealists sent to do a bully's work. The problem they face, though, when they come back from their tours to normal life is the same as that faced by other young men, a system that seeks to redirect their energies toward objectives that are not worthy of them, and as R.W. Emerson said, "Every hero becomes a bore at last."

We have seen or heard of many extraordinary young men, who never ripened, or whose performance in actual life was not extraordinary. When we see their air and mien, when we hear them speak of society, of books, of religion, we admire their superiority, they seem to throw contempt on our entire polity and social state; theirs is the tone of a youthful giant, who is sent to work revolutions. But they enter an active profession, and the forming Colossus shrinks to the common size of man. The magic they used was the ideal tendencies, which always make the Actual ridiculous; but the tough world had its revenge the moment they put their horses of the sun to plough in its furrow. They found no example and no companion, and their heart fainted. (Emerson, "Heroism")

Our culture provides no trellis upon which these young souls can grow to realize the greatness that lies within and which longs to be realized.

A lot of women are unhappy in their marriages because their husbands, despite their early promise, failed or shriveled in the way Emerson describes. And the men feel the shame of it, and yet don't quite know how it happened. But in Emerson's day, as now, there were precious few models for them to emulate or to inspire their aspiration. In other words, there is no living tradition in which young people grow up and in which they encounter living examples of virtue and heroism. And I would also argue that men once they reach adulthood haven't been helped much by the masculinizaton of women. For if women scorn their men for lacking a robust or heroic masculinity, the men also long for robust femininity, which has become almost as rare. They are too often soul-starved by their women who have in their own way lost their souls. 

American men and women these days lack a robust masculinity or femininity; they have become rather flat-souled and dull. They have become hypertrophied heads and genitals, and as such they lack what might be described as feminine virtue or masculine virtue, which are qualities of soul--not physical qualities or intellectual qualities, but soul qualities.

And I've wondered for several years now if the obsessive need for women and men to achieve an ideal of physical feminine or masculine beauty and this whole bizarre focus on sexual performance, with boob size and penis length, isn't a compensation for a culture wide loss of a soulful masculinity and femininity. It's an attempt to manifest on a physical level what is lacking on the soul level. Men think that they are failing the women in their lives sexually, but rather it's their failure to radiate a masculine spiritedness. They think they need to be bulls when in fact what they need to be is 'heroes', by which I mean exemplars of masculine virtue--mensches. Women feel that they need to be cows with augmented udders to be interesting to their men, but what men need from women is a feminine spiritedness.

I'm thinking about "virtue" in the sense that I first came across it when I was studying the Italian Renaissance as an undergraduate. As I remember what I learned then, the Italian virtu does not have the meaning of being a boyscout in the sense of somebody who is well behaved and who does as he's told. It's a moral quality, to be sure, but not a moralistic quality. The word had more the sense of masculine spiritedness and is related more to the word virtuoso, a man who has achieved excellence as a fully realized talent.

The ideal for the "renaissance man" was to be a man of virtu, which meant to be a man of many excellences--accomplished in the arts of war & politics as well as the fine arts--not as a connoisseur, but as an accomplished maker or creator, as poet, painter, and musician, and in many cases in architecture and natural philosophy. Being specialized or good at one thing was not the ideal. The ideal, rather, was to achieve balanced development and to become fully realized as a complete human being. Specialization requires to some degree the hypertrophying of one dimension of one's humanity while allowing other dimensions of one's humanity to atrophy.

Men in contemporary American society have hypertrophied heads and genitals, and atrophied souls. I call it missing middle syndrome. Women suffer similarly, but not as badly.

Again, Emerson:

Self-trust is the essence of heroism. It is the state of the soul at war, and its ultimate objects are the last defiance of falsehood and wrong, and the power to bear all that can be inflicted by evil agents. It speaks the truth, and it is just, generous, hospitable, temperate, scornful of petty calculations, and scornful of being scorned. It persists; it is of an undaunted boldness, and of a fortitude not to be wearied out. Its jest is the littleness of common life. That false prudence which dotes on health and wealth is the butt and merriment of heroism.

This is an imagination of heroism that goes back to the days of the Greek and Roman republics. It is completely at odds with the type of avaricious corporate climber, or powerlusting politician. Glory and the immortality that comes with fame were motivators at the heart of this older republican mentality, but they were tempered later by forms of Christian republicanism that developed after the Renaissance and Reformation. It was an ideal that informed the imaginations of the American founding fathers.

Carlyle, Emerson, Nietzsche were all 19th Century thinkers who hated how modernity was shriveling the souls of men and women and drew on these earlier ideas of virtue and heroism as a counterpoint for the leveling, materialistic forces that was making men into the spirit-challenged humans Nietzsche called the Last Men.

Of course, Nietzsche blamed Christianity for promoting this slavish, weak-souled quality, and there is some merit in the accusation. But that's a theme I want to address in coming posts. Because now more than ever we need an imagination of future possibility that has religious roots and which inspires in us, and perhaps more importantly inspires in the young, an aspiration toward robust virtue. This is not a liberal project.

Basic Premises

I wrote out these premises or base points for my thinking in response to Jonathan on a previous thread, but I thought I'd lay them out here, and let whoever wants to take shots at them. They are all debatable, needless to say, but it's how they all work together that underlies most of my thinking about almost everything. 

1. That the incarnation has meaning for the entire earth and earth history.

2. That, therefore, history has meaning and what we do with our lives 'participates' in that meaning to greater or lesser degrees to promote or undermine the advancement of that meaning.

3. That the first phase of history--1.0--humans were largely passive and directed by forces they thought they had no control over.

4. That the second phase, 2.0, taking hold around the time of the Renaissance/Reformation, was characterized by humans' developing a sense of their own agency in history and gradually developing beliefs that history was humans' responsibility to direct. This last part was particularly strong in the period between the French Revolution and the WWI.

5. That since 2.0 largely defined itself in opposition to the irrational assumptions that grounded 1.0 traditional/customary cultures, it adopted new assumptions that were grounded in optimism about the future and the power of rationality guided by positivistic/materialistic norms to create a utopia on earth.

6. That the two 20th century world wars destroyed any optimism associated with human rationality--except in the US where it took until the sixties and seventies.

7. That we're in a slack tide phase now in which the 'best lack all conviction', etc. and virtually no attempt is being made to shape the human future, and so instinctual (i.e., non-Logos grounded) impulses of the 'worst' are driving history now largely unconstrained. 

7. That because of premise 1,  human beings have the resources to push back and to shape the future in accord with a Logos-grounded imagination of a human future. The Best have a chance, but it requires awakening capacities that like seeds lie dormant in the human heart waiting to germinate. This is what I mean by emergent 3.0.

8. That the advancements in technology, which could be subordinated to  objectives of the 'Worst', could also be subordinated to the objectives of the Best--i.e., emergent 3.0 Logos-grounded objectives.

9. That the difference between now and any other time iies precisely in these technological advancements. As the Roman Roads, built for military purposes, became the conduit for the emergence of Christianity in the first centuries A. D., so could the new information and bio technologies amplify the emergence of 3.0.

10. That the use of these technologies will lead to disaster for the earth and for humanity if anything but emergent 3.0 "moral thinking" guides the use and adoption of these technologies.

 

Deneen on In Loco Parentis

Deneen's most recent post is about the Feds getting tough on colleges and universities regarding sexual assault. He makes the case that this is the inevitable result of abolishing in loco parentis rules on college campuses (I"m old enough to remember parietals), which have created a vacuum that the state, a la Hobbes, must fill:

In effect, this immorality tale is Hobbes in microcosm: first tradition and culture must be eliminated as arbitrary and unjust (“natural man”). Then, we see that absent such norms, anarchy is the result (“the state of nature”). Finding such anarchy unbearable, we turn to a central sovereign as our sole protector, that “Mortall God” who will protect us from ourselves (“the social contract”). We have been liberated from all custom and tradition, all authority that sought to educate by habit and within the context of ongoing communities, and replaced it with a distant authority that punishes us when we abuse our freedoms. And, now lacking any informal and local forms of authority, it’s virtually assured that those abuses will regularly occur, and that the role of the State in ever more minute personal affairs will increase (“Prerogative”).

In place of the parent we now have a distant power which, perhaps like a parent, seeks to punish us when we act against decency and civilization. But, unlike a parent, it does not educate or seek to cultivate its wards into self-governing adults. It infantalizes us by saying that we don’t have to grow up—just don’t get caught. Of course, know too that your professors and every adult on campus—while we can’t speak of norms or character or morality or virtue (and most don’t even believe in such things) will be acting as “agents” and reporters. You are free, but Leviathan is watching.

This goes to my recent arguments about the difference between having an inner sense of what's lawful, and not having it which requires that one be constrained by extrinsic means, which boils down to the fear of punishment if caught. Does it matter qualitatively if it's Father O'Brien or the politically correct police or the real police who punishes you? The real issue, the real moral failure, lies in that the person who committed the offense is not a master of himself and needs to be constrained by something outside himself. 

I get his larger point about Leviathan, but honestly, if the parents haven't done their job by the time their kids go away to college, they can't expect the college to do what they failed to. Sexual assault is a crime, and it should be dealt with by the local police. So if Deneen's larger point is that the Feds getting involved is overreach, well, maybe. But the idea that the college itself playing policeman is unrealistic and, frankly, counterproductive. Does he really think that clergy patrolling the hallways in dormitories at Notre Dame is a solution? It will create more Mary McCarthys than Dorothy Days.

I'm not happy with this 1.0, 2.0, 3.0 scheme, because it's too oversimplifying, but it's useful as shorthand to layout the larger argument that I am trying to make. The moral evolution of humans requires a movement from external constraints on greed, glory/pride), will to power--and, yes, appetitive excesses like gluttony, drunkenness, and lust--imposed by law and custom to the internal restraints on these. Because we have more freedom or latitude to choose them, we have to build more interior capacity to refuse them. In other words, we have to be moral grownups. Living in a 2.0 society forces one to face up to what he is--a child or an adult.

When the constraints are primarily external in law or custom, there will always be those, on the one hand, who game it, try to remain "legal" while doing the minimum, or follow the letter while abusing the spirit. On the other hand, a system of external constraints creates in the "spirited" a need to rebel against its oppressiveness, and so we come to celebrate the transgressors as rebels who stick to the Man. This response to external constraint is silly and tedious, as well. But it thrives so long as there are conservatives trying to impose their extrinsic norms. 

So my point is that both responses miss the point, which is that it's not about the external constraints or what is permitted or forbidden by society; it's what's inside you that matters, and the only morality that matters concerns the ability to master yourself. Everything else is just a matter of setting up rules to get along, like agreeing that green means go and red means stop. 

So I'm fine with saying good-bye to all that and having a civil code that seeks minimally to protect citizens from the assaults on their economic well being or civil rights. Gesellschaft is sink or swim, and for most of us, it forces us to grow up. There is nothing morally superior about fearing neighbors gossip in the gemeinschaft face-to-face world conservatives lament having lost. That's the great gift to humanity of 2.0--it has washed away all the 1.0 extrinsicism and created a space for individuals to grow from the inside out.

We forget the tyrannies of outside-in gemeinschaft society. There's good reason people fled it, and rather than lament its loss, which is a pointless waste of time anyway, I say good riddance, and let the moral grownups build something new from the inside out. In the long run, it's the only thing that protects us from the Leviathan that Deneen and all sane people are right to fear as our possible future. My overall argument here is that only 3.0s, whether they are religious or not, will have the inner moral capacity to push back against the machine that is growing out of the 2.0 materialist/positivist thinking. The only question for me is whether there will be enough 3.0 critical mass to constrain its growing power. The 1.0 thinking that typifies the critique of religious conservatives fears what I fear, but it frames the solution in ways that are irrelevant and a waster of time. 

The Logos

From Wallace Stevens' 'Like a Primitive Orb'

We do not prove the existence of the poem. 
It is something seen and known in lesser poems.
It is the huge, high harmony that sounds
A little and a little, suddenly
By means of a separate sense. It is and it
Is not and, therefore, is. In the instant of speech,
The breadth of an accelerando moves,
Captives the being, widens--and was there.

One poem proves another and the whole,
For the clairvoyant men that need no proof: 
The lover, the believer and the poet.
Their words are chosen out of their desire,
The joy of language, when it is themselves.
With these they celebrate the central poem,
The fulfillment of fulfillments, in opulent,
Last terms, the largest, bulging still with more,

The central poem is the poem of the whole,
The poem of the composition of the whole,
The composition of blue sea and of green,
Of blue light and of green, as lesser poems,
And the miraculous multiplex of lesser poems are brought then:
Not merely into a whole, but a poem of
The whole, the essential that is compact of its parts,
The roundness that pulls tight the final ring

And that which in an altitude would soar,
A vis, a principle or, it may be,
The meditation of a principle,
Or else an inherent order
active to be
Itself, a nature to its natives all
Beneficence, a repose, utmost repose,
The muscles of a magnet aptly felt,
A giant, on the horizon, glistening,

And in bright excellence adorned, crested
With every prodigal, familiar fire,
And unfamiliar escapades: whirroos
And scintillant sizzlings such as children like,
Vested in the serious folds of majesty,
Moving around and behind, a following,
A source of trumpeting seraphs in the eye,
A source of pleasant outbursts on the ear.

Wallace Stevens was not a believer (at least not in the sense of Dickinson, Hopkins, Eliot, or Auden), but he's close in his intuition here, and in his expression of it, to the basic intuition of the Logos, (aka the Word) affirmed by the Greeks of old and the Romans. Christians identify the Logos with the Christ. Christians think of the Logos as both the ground of  being, in which "all things were made, and not one thing was made without him." The Logos is the foundational matrix in which everything that existis exists.

So whether one identifies the Logos/Word/Poem with Christ or not--Stevens would not--this fundamental intuition that Stevens is trying to articulate marks the difference between people who "get it" and those who don't, if by getting it we mean "knowing" that our existence in this world given to us through our senses is embedded in something larger with unfathomable depths of meaning, depths the poet makes feeble attempts to fathom. This isn't something you believe; it's something you know in the way that Stevens knows it. And so long as it is recognized, intuited, it's the common ground, the meeting place where we can gather to be refreshed and where there exists already the foundation upon which to build something new.

Because I believe that this 'Poem' in which we all subsist is the soil from which all good things grow. I believe in renaissances, springtimes of the spirit, moments in history when the ground softens and brings forth new life. These moments occur when this intuition about the foundation of things becomes more broadly recognized and experienced, and is expressed in a superabundance of ways by a culture's great artists and philosophers. This springtime, this new thing, is a very old thing, but it's the source of everything new, a new that cannot happen unless we humans find an unalienated way to think and speak. And the measure of this unalienation is the measure of our communion with the Logos. It doesn't matter whether we identify if with the Christ; it matters only that we recognize it and seek to live in a deeper communion with it.

This is not easy, but we overcome our alienation by sinking into the thisness of the Real, by sinking into the foundations, which is the Logos, which is the heart of things. We don't want to go there. We'd rather live in our dreams. But it's the Dream in all its manifestations that is the cause of our alienation. What waking up means is different for each of us. But the only moral question that really matters is to what degree are we awake, and what are the temptations in our life that draw us back into sleep. It's so easy to fall back to sleep.

We humans can bear only so much reality, and I don't think we have to deal with the enormity of it. But we know where deep communin beckons to us, and we know when we hearken to it or turn away. And we are inclined turn away because where it beckons too often we see Christ crucified, and we'd rather not deal with that. But that's a subject for another day. 

[This was originally posted 1/7/09]

From Humanity 2.0 to Humanity 3.0

 

This half hour RSA clip about Steve Fuller's book, Humanity 2.0 is worth watching. It establishes the state of the conversation about a transhuman future. Fuller is pushing up against the approach that I'm trying to develop here on this blog, but it's not what I'm talking about. I think his thinking, and the thinking of the other panelists, is still circumscribed by materialistic thinking and positivistic assumptions. I'd like to suggest another alternative for Humanity, the one I've been talking about on and off here over the years, the one imagined in somewhat different ways by Owen Barfield and Teilhard de Chardin. More about them below. 

Staying within Fuller's cybernetic metaphor, let's call what I hope for Humanity 3.0. Humanity 1.0 is the premodern consciousness shaped by customary culture. Humanity 2.0 is modern secular consciousness that swept most of the customary culture away in rejecting it as superstition. Nevertheless, there have been many people who have shown us what Humanity 3.0 looks like. Kierkegaard, M.L. King, Gandhi, Mandela,  Bonhoeffer, Popes John XXIII and Francis, Mother Teresa, Jean Vanier, Teilhard, and Barfield are exemplars who are for me top of mind because of their public profiles, but there are many, many more who whether known or unknown quietly go about their business--knights of faith as Kierkegaard called them. These people are not flawless, but they have something working in them that significantly distinguishes them from Humanity 1.0 or 2.0. They are people in whom the Logos has awakened in ways it has not for people who are still at 1.0 or 2.0.

So to help frame what I'm trying to articulate here about Humanity 3.0, let's first quote from our first text in Barfield's Saving the Appearances:

I believe that the blind spot which posterity will find most startling in the last hundred years or so of Western civilization, is, that it had, on the one hand , a religion which differed from all others in its acceptance of time, and of a particular point in time, as a cardinal element in its faith; that it had, on the other hand, a picture in its mind of the history of the earth and man as an evolutionary process; and that it neither saw nor supposed any connection whatever between the two. . . .

When the horizon of time expanded suddenly in the nineteenth century, one would have expected those who accepted evolution and remained Christians, to see the incarnation of their Saviour as the culminating point of the history of the earth--a turning point of time to which all at first led down and from which all thereafter was to lead upward. Moreover, having regard to the antiquity now attributed to the earth and man, one would have expected them to feel that we are still very very near to that turning-point, indeed hardly past it; that we hardly know as yet what the Incarnation means; for what is two thousand years in comparison with the ages which preceded it?  --Owen Barfield, chapter 24, "The Incarnation of the Word", p. 167-68

Yes. Isn't that what Christians are supposed to believe--that something of world historical importance happened 2000 years ago and everything changed? But has it? I think it has, but we don't have the right lens to see it.

So let's change the metaphor from a cybernetic one to one that's more organic. Think of the earth as a giant egg that was sterile until fertilized by the Incarnation. Cur Deus Homo? Because evolution required it. Humanity 2.0 and 3.0--and perhaps 4.0 and beyond--would not be otherwise possible because this new possibility for the earth was never possible so long as the influence of the Logos was outside in as it has been in 1.0 cultures. So now at the heart of the earth, from the inside out, a new creation is gestating and growing in the belly of the beast, eventually subverting a regime that is otherwise ruled by greed, glory, and will to power.

These instinctual drivers were restrained somewhat by external norms imposed by 1.0 cultures, Christian Europe was never anything more, but nothing changes substantively until it occurs from the inside out. Christendom produced exemplars of Humanity 3.0, but they were few and far between. Most Christians lived at a 1.0 level. But as Barfield points out, we're only at the relative beginning. And I would add, that we are at a critical growth point now in the 21st century. 

Second text, from the transcript of Krista Tippet's January 23 show about Teilhard de Chardin. This from the segment in which she's interviewing Ursula King:

Ms. Tippett: Was it also in the context of "The Divine Milieu" that he spoke of the human as "matter at its most incendiary stage"?

Dr. King: Yes, I think you're right. I think you're right. That's a wonderful …

Ms. Tippett: Which is also such a wonderful image.

Dr. King: It's a wonderful phrase. So, you see, I think he has this dynamic awareness from his evolutionary approach, so one could call his spirituality also an evolutionary spirituality, as some people do. And he feels that we are today at a very, very important threshold of emerging into a new phase of humanization, of becoming human, in a different way from the way our forebears were.

Ms. Tippett: Right, right.

Dr. King: They pull from the future and towards the future. And he's less and less interested in the past and more and more interested in where are we going, what are we doing with the potential we have, with the imagination, the creativity, the consciousness, the complexification of people thinking together and acting together. What is all this aiming for?

Teilhard is 'after the future'. 

And then later in the show, this interchange with biologist/anthropologist David Sloan Wilson:

Ms. Tippett: Right, and you feel like this may be something that Teilhard got wrong or that his view was too optimistic?

Dr. Wilson: Well, first let me tell you another thing that he got right and then the one thing that he got wrong. Another thing he talked about was that he called them grains of thought. And what he meant by that is that at first, of course, humans existed in tiny groups and they each had their separate symbolic systems, which were disconnected to each other. Then he imagined these grains of thought coalescing and that corresponds to increasing the scale of society. Indeed, that has happened. Then he thought that his would result in a single global consciousness that he called the Omega Point.

Ms. Tippett: Right, the process of evolution reflecting on itself.

Dr. Wilson: [Laugh] Now it is true that we have the increasing scale of society all the way to the mega societies of today, but the idea that this was going to result in a single global brain, and especially that there is some inevitability about this, is what's not quite right. It could happen. It's within the realm of possibilities, but it is by no means certain. There is such a thing as collapse. And I think one of the reasons that his work does have the spiritual quality is because of the idea that there is an Omega Point and we're going towards the Omega Point. I think the real situation is that, yes, there's an Omega Point, but we have to work real hard to get there. And if we don't get there, then woe is us.

Teilhard saw that evolution now is no longer a passive process as it was when most of the action was in the biosphere--and that's really what Darwin's theory is good for explaining--processes in the biosphere, and those explanations are fine so far as they go. But Teilhard was among the first to see that evolution now has shifted from the Biosphere to the Noosphere. (Read the rest of the Tippet/King transcript if you are unfamiliar with this term.)  In the Noosphehre, evolution is no longer something that happens to us; it's something that humans enact. So everything depends on the kind of mind that is directing the evolutionary process. If that mind is circumscribed by materialistic and positivistic assumptions, i.e., Humanity 2.0, I don't see a positive outcome. But neither does a reversion to 1.0 lead us to one. 

So what reason have I to be optimistic? Well, even if I don't know how this is going to play out, I just choose to be optimistic. My optimism derives from my deep sense (intuition?, hope?) that the human being has the resources, in potentia, to write a comedic rather than a tragic script. I described where I think those  resources lie. Central to the idea of Humanity 3.0 is what I describe in the recent post "On the Sensus Communis" as the awakening of the Logos. The Logos works in everyone, but for the most part it sleeps or operates unconsciously in Humanity 1.0 and 2.0.  Nevertheless, I believe that there is enough incipient 3.0 wakefulness to give us a chance.

It's interesting that Fuller talks about the Logos, but only in the context of pointing out that nobody believes in it anymore. But here's the point. There is no broad cultural acceptance of the idea of the Logos anymore precisely because the Logos has gone underground. The idea of an all-powerful God or Christus Rex no longer makes because that's not where the Logos is found--out there. He's found instead slumbering in seed form in the human heart waiting to either to germinate, or where it has done so to flower and fruit. The Logos, if it has a shaping influence in our global social life and thinking, will have it only to the degree that it awakens and grows in the souls of fertile men and women. 

Something's got to give. There is the materialist 'singularity' that is imagined and longed for by many who are still stuck in 2.0, and there is the kind of spiritual singularity that is imagined and longed for by Teilhard and Barfield, which is 3.0. I think either is a possibility. Indeed, one or the other is inevitable, unless, of course, the whole thing, the entire emerging global Noosphere collapses into a new Dark Age.

Tragedy and disappointment is the movie we've seen time and again, but I think we are mistaken to think that the tragic script is inevitable or even the most likely. There is something in the human being that regroups, that adapts, and keeps the ball moving forward no matter how many or how severe the setbacks he experiences. As bad as things seem, we seem to find a way. As Barfield points out:

. . . we may permit ourselves to ask what would have happened if the incarnation of the Word had been understood at the time when it occurred; if Christ had been acknowledged instead of being crucified. In fact, by the time the Event happened, the pharisaical element in Jewish religion had apparently triumphed, balking the nation of the opportunity of fulfilling its destiny. Instead of realizing the inwardness of the Divine Name--a consummation to which their whole history had been leading--the Children of Israel had turned aside. The Name had ceased to be uttered even by the priests in the temple, and the Creator had been removed to an infinite external distance, as a Being, omnipotent indeed, and infinitely superior, but, in the way He was thought of, existentially parallel with man himself.

Yet--so we may speculate--this need not have happened. On the contrary, precisely the pharisees should hardly have needed even reminding of their nation's destiny by the Saviours' pregnant words; they should have leaped instantly into recognition of man's Creator speaking with the voice and through the throat of a man. Logically there was the possibility of a gentle, untragic transition from original to final participation, the one maturing in proportion as the other faded. Within the limits of this sort of speculation we can even say that it was this which was 'intended'. For the whole tenor of the Old Testament suggests that the imaginal consciousness characteristic of original participation was being destroyed, precisely in order that it might be reborn. 'The rejection of idolatry', writes Dr. Austin Farrer,

"meant not the destruction but the liberation of the images. Nowhere are the images in more vigour than in the Old Testament, where they speak of God, but are not he . . .there is no historical study more significant than the study of their transformation. Such a transformation finds expression in the birth of Christianity; it is visible rebirth of images." 

That rebirth, however, did not take place. The crucifixion did.

Original participation fires the heart from a source outside itself; the images enliven the heart. But in final participation--since the death and resurrection--the heart is fired from within by the Christ; and it is for the heart to enliven the images. Saving the Appearances, pp. 171-72

It is that fire, the fire that Moses encountered in the burning bush on Mt. Sinai, the one that announced Himself as 'I am who am', is a fire now that burns in the heart of Humanity 3.0. This is indeed 'matter at its most incendiary stage'. My hope lies in that it even now burns in a greater number of people than is acknowledged in a world that is still dominated by Humanity 2.0 thinking and figuration.

My hope lies in that at some point the fires burning in those hearts, and they are everywhere burning even if still diffidently without awareness about their potential to shape something new, will find a way to join one with the other to set the world ablaze and thus to enliven and reanimate a world disenchanted by 2.0 thinking. That is the only thing that I can imagine will save us from a new dark age or a mechanomorphic singularity that locks in death-saturated 2.0 thinking and its materialistic aspirations. 

Lapham and Frank

A must read article, crackling with interesting ideas--too much to excerpt for a quote here, but I'll put this one up since it relates to something that came up here last week. A questioner in the audience asks:

A Russian scholar drew a map of the United States where it sort of dissolved into four or five regions, with the Northeast kind of drifting toward Canada because of shared interests. The idea of an empire collapsing under its own weight, is any version of that a plausible scenario to you?

Lapham answers:

To me that is an entirely plausible scenario. Actually, Kevin Phillips, the historian mentioned earlier by Tom, published an article in Harper’s Magazine in the ’70s called “The Balkanization of America.” He actually had the map and he had the way it would divide and why, and I see that as entirely possible. I do. Because Washington can’t govern the United States. They’re trapped inside the Beltway. They’re dysfunctional. Again, to answer the question, there’s a wonderful book that I just read which is influencing me because I’m very impressionable and I’m apt to parrot the last thing I read. This book is called “Immoderate Greatness.” And it’s short. It’s a hundred pages but it’s extremely persuasive as to what happens to civilizations when they become so big that they in fact must fail. The author goes into the laws of entropy and the laws of thermodynamics and the exponential growth and the environment. It brings all the angles to bear.

One more excerpt. Lapham says:

No, capitalism is a machinery. It’s neutral. It’s not an idea. It’s a mechanism.

Audience question: So we are up against an idea?

Well, no. We’re up against heavily entrenched interests.

Audience question: Which is the idea…

Well, I don’t think they even put it to themselves that way. The only idea that I can ever see in the minds of the moneyed interests is that money is good for rich people and bad for poor people. That’s about the beginning and end of their idea, I think.

Yes, and the long and the short of it. All the b.s. on Fox or being spouted by Paul Ryan and the Koch brothers is a smokescreen to obscure this central truth. It just shouldn't be that hard to build consensus around something that is this simple to understand.

Quote of the Day: Andrew Revkin

For two generations, the nascent environmental movement railed against this process. Like many, I was weaned on that scary sensibility. Population was a ticking bomb. Spring threatened to be silent. I still admire those who led the call for cleaning up the mess people had created in the rise and spread of industrialized, consumptive living.

But lately I’ve come to see those recent dirty decades less as malfeasance (mind you, there have been plenty of dubious actors) and more as an inevitable phase, a transition as natural — and volatile — as puberty.

The real question is, what comes next? As its moment on Earth has arrived, H. sapiens, one of nature’s great experiments, has necessarily had to have a selfish, muscle-flexing, exuberant adolescence. It is only natural for a young person to break things, burn things, kill things, to be mean and even nasty sometimes, if only to learn how that attitude can bite back. In a youth’s life, mistakes are not only inevitable; they are vital. (Source)

My concerns are broader than Revkin's, but like him, I'm inclined to see the destructive phase we've been going through as a phase in a  larger developental or evolutionary process. Ours is the optimistic view, obviously, and it depends on humans effecting a moral evolutionary punctuation. That seems hard to imagine, and the purpose of my post earlier today was to sketch out how it might happen. Revkin's metaphor of "growing up" supplements mine about "waking up". It doesn't take everybody, just enough to create a tipping point.

On the 'Sensus Communis'

Of this Word's being forever do men prove to be uncomprehending, both before they hear and once they have heard it. For although all things happen according to this Word, they are like the unexperienced experiencing words and deeds such as I explain when I distinguish each thing according to its nature and show how it is. Other men are unaware of what they do when they are awake just as they are forgetful of what they do when they are asleep. Heraclitus, B1

In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.  John 1:1

I just want to say a few preliminary things, more of a warm up than anything else, as I get ready for a (possible) deeper dive into a comparative study of Pragmatism and what I'm calling Barfield's Logoscentric idealism. I'm interested in laying out a few relatively simple-to-understand assertions, and seeing how far they take us. 

First, the historicist assumption. Our thinking about and perceptions of the world are deeply historically and culturally conditioned. What any human accepts as common sense, even if it's our common sense about what a tree or a table looks like, is provisional.It's good enough, and clearly has a 'true' relationship with what is Real about it, but it's mediated knowledge, mediated through language and other historical/cultural preconceptions. The Real is like an elephant that stands behind a sheet (our preconceptions) and presses up against it. We get a feel for its shape and its movements; we can learn a lot about what it is, but we don't see it as it is.

And so common-sense knowledge--our individual cognition of the Real--can never be significantly different from what our culture's social imaginary gives us as preconception. But the social imaginary shifts from time to time for complicated reasons that need more attention than I can give it here. But it's as if for all of us the sheet is there, and we know something is there pressing up against it, and what we see is real but obscured and distorted. Neverthless, if for some the sheet is stiff and thick, for others it's more sheer and transparent. Among the latter group are the artists, philosophers, and saints who, even though they work within the same historically conditioned social imaginary as their contemporaries, can help them to see more clearly and in some instances to develop a completely different model of the Real. 

Cognition of the Real, then, is an evolving, socially mediated process that is well described by Pragmatism. And our social imaginary undergoes from time to time tipping points, like the shift from seeing a flat world to seeing it with perspective that occurred, at least among the educated elites, in the late 1400s. Some people 'tip' quicker than others. There's a point where the cognitions of radical outliers, people who seem out of tune with common sense, become the common sense. Think about how attitudes tipped regarding attitudes toward African Americans and Gays in this country within my lifetime. The old habits linger, but clearly we've passed a tipping point. 

Clearly there are some shifts that are for the worse. Clearly mistakes are made that shape the social imaginary in a negative direction. We don't have to rehearse the obvious examples--the Jim Crow south, Europe and Latin American fascism, the self-reinforcing culture of greed on Wall Street. But I would argue that the Real has a way of correcting even the most egregious mistakes we make collectively, but that's a hard sell if you don't believe that there is something working in history that is calling us forward toward a deeper, richer cognition of the Real. It's a hard sell if you think history or evolution is just a random, meaningless process.

So this brings us to the second assumption, the idealist assumption. I would assert that each of us has an innate capacity to know and understand with greater depth, richness,  and clarity. Because the sheet of preconceptions that obscures our elephant is a culturally mediated construction, there will always (?) be a kind of filter that prevents us from immediate knowledge, i.e., seeing the elephant as the elephant is in all its Real-ness. But some filters are less obscuring than others, and I'd argue that our capacity for cognizing the Real depends on the level of wakeful activity of that which in us cognizes.

This 'cognizer' is the Logos. The Logos works in each of us unconsciously and its working there makes possible even the crudest cognitions, but the degree to which the Logos is awake in each of us varies. In some it is more awake than in others, and those who are more wakeful are the aforementioned artists, philosophers, and saints. And it's their role in shaping the social imaginary--the sensus communis-- that wakes the rest of us up. While waking is subjectively experienced, it, too, is socially or communally mediated.  

Heraclitus experienced the Logos as something external to him--it was perceived more as a cosmic law ruling all things. I argue that for humans born since the Incarnation, there has been a shift from experiencing it out there to in here, from transcendent, to immanent, from law of heave to law of the human heart. But for some its interior working works more consciously. That's the theory I want to test.

William James said somewhere that having a bad theory is better than having none at all, because it gives you a starting point that allows you to work on real problems--and the amorality of modern knowing in the sciences, in our economic life, and elsewhere is a huge, huge problem. I am interested in developing a way of understanding the nature of knowing--all kinds of knowing--that has integral to it a moral dimension. I want to argue that is no progress in knowing unless moral progress accompanies it. I am interested also in retrieving in a more dynamic, developmental, evolutionary sense the Christian Neoplatonic idea that what we know we know because there is an innate or connatural capacity to know what is in the mind of God, if by that we mean the Logos, and by that we mean the Ideal Real, and by that we mean the Real that is the unrealized potential all creation. So I want to add a teleological dimension as well. I think this theory presents a lot of problems to be solved, but that it also solves a lot of problems. But this is the task for the summer if I can find the time for it. So for now I'm just thinking out loud. 

So according to the theory, the Logos is the capacity for cognition and language in all humans, but it operates in each of us mostly unconsciously, but with others it is more conscious and wakeful. In some, maybe most, it is deeply asleep, in many others groggy, in others awake momentarily then nods off again, and in a very few, it's  intensely, actively awake. The Logos, the Word, is the ur-Mediator--it is the condition for possibility for any level of cognition, and is always working in us unconsciously. As such it is the Real in us that makes us capble to experience the Real all around us, and our capacity to cognize the Real correlates with the degree of wakefulness of the interior Logos. I believe that the Logos works in animals and all conscious beings, and that it's possible for animals to develop the Logos sleeping in them to a point where they, too, could have language and higher levels of cognition. As the Logos  achieves greater levels of wakefulness, the world wakes--more is seen and more intensely experienced. The world is the sleeping Logos waiting for humans to awaken to it, because the human awakening is also the awakening of the earth, of all creation. As Romans 8 puts it--

For all creation, gazing eagerly as if with outstretched neck, is waiting and longing to see the manifestation of the sons of God.

Waiting in eager expectation for humans to finally wake up.

I'm sure it's an indication of my ignorance, but I'm unaware of any of the modern epistemoligical theories allowing for a more qualitative sense of cognitive development, except as such development is understood in scientific/mechanistic terms. Certainly none are mainstream. The scientific/mechanistic models are inadequate because they leave out or cannot adequately account for or don't care about the moral dimension. [See comments for note on Kierkegaard's Stages, which is similar to what I'm talking about here but is different because I am also talking about the kind of knowing we associate with science.] But knowledge is never for the sake of knowledge; it always serves some end, and if the end is not a moral good, then it works in the service of other ends, usually our instinctual needs. And then, sure, you can develop some  crude utilitarian calculus to measure the degree of collective 'happiness' our knowledge provides. Happiness, however, is not the measure of the moral. Happiness morality is the morality of adolescents.

I want to insist that higher quality levels of cognition require a more deeply moral experience  of the world, and I'm arguing that can't happen unless you see cognitive development--a deepening awareness of the True as correlated with a deepening awareness of the Good. Because my account of the awakening Logos not only provides an account for seeing the world more clearly, but also for seeing with accompanying awakened moral cognitions. I'm arguing that the True and the Good go hand in hand, that one is a guarantee of the other, and one without the other is an unlawful fraud.   Knowledge that serves ends other than for the promotion of deeper levels of compassion, communion, and justice is just that, an unlawful fraud. But that's a hard sell if you don't believe there's a Good, or that the good is simply the satisfaction of our instinctual impulses. 

Where the Logos lies dormant, the instinctual--i.e., the need for security and wealth, for belonging and recognition, and for autonomy and power--dominates thinking, motivations, and behavior by default. The great world religious traditions had culture heroes--philosophers, artists, saints--who introduced rules for behavior that were counterinstinctual, and the measure of the superiority of any culture, depends on the success by which they developed constraints on Greed, Vainglory (excessive need for adulation or fame), and Will to Power. Most people thought history have needed external constraints. In our age of the waking of the Logos within the constraints are interior because the Law is written on the human heart not on tablets of stone. It's written there in all of us, but not all have awakened and still need external constraints. 

In other words, the great civillizations based on spiritual concepts introduced the Logos from without, as external social norms. These norms put constraints on instinctual excess, and promoted healthy prospering as an alternative to greed; mutuality and intedependence as an alternative to Vainglory; and freedom and dignity as an alternative to the Will to Power. But these 'healthy' cultures imposed these rules as constraints from without--as the law; only a few individuals internalized this law.

The modern period, the era of the flood, has been a time during which the external constaints and norms have been largely washed away. The erosion of these norms has been gradual, but it accelerated in the late 18th century and through the 19th. While the old habits of premodern norms persisted for decades, with each passing generation they have become increasingly weakened to a point where today in the West we live in a culture where, truly, anything goes. There is no longer any "common sense" about what common decency requires. There's very little social penalty for breaking the ancient codes, and the  civil law plays a role in restraining only the most egregious violoations of property rights. 

And so, I contend, we are left with people on one extreme who without compunction and with varying degrees of intensity are ruled by Greed, Vainglory, and Will to Power.  And on the other extreme we have people in whom an  the interior sense of Law or the Logos has awakened to some degree, whether they think of themselves as religious or not. And in the middle we have  a lukewarm group, the conventional, go-with-the-flow types, who are still partially ruled by the persistence of habits shaped by the old external code for want of anything better, a code they find easy to violate when it's convenient, because the penalties are weak. Guys like Bill O'Reilly and Rush Limbaugh are perverse examples of this middle type. They have made their careers lamenting the loss of the old exterior code while at the same time having become caricatures of the Greed, Vainglory, and Will to Power that the old codes sought to constrain. 

I don't like Kantian deontology, and  the deep relativity of consequentialist ethics is inadequate in so many ways.  I'm looking to articulate a Pragamatic, situational way of thinking about moral questions that is situational but not relativistic because always grounded in the Real. The Real is the Logos, but it is not a fully realized Real, and it won't be until fully awakened from its slumber. Anyway, that's where I'm going with this. I want a theory that provides the possibility for moral progress that is integrated with progress in knowledge about the world. And while I don't have any intention of hiding my Christian presuppositions, I'd like to think I'm talking about something that has transcultural references, that it's something that could be embraced by non-Christians, if we agree to disagree about the identity of the Logos.

[revised 5/6/14]

Seattle's $15 Minimum Wage

From the NYT (I boycott quoting from the Seattle Times):

Mayor Ed Murray presented on Thursday what he described as an imperfect but workable plan to increase the city’s minimum wage to $15 an hour, more than twice the federal minimum wage and one of the highest anywhere in the nation, through a series of complex and phased-in stages. Just as crucially, he said, the plan has broad political support, with a coalition of labor and business groups ready to push hard for it at the City Council, starting with the first hearings next week.

But the plan, which in many other cities might be seen as a liberal Democratic agenda at the frontier of social and economic engineering, was immediately attacked not from the mayor’s right, but from his left.

Kshama Sawant, a Socialist Alternative Party member who was elected to the Seattle City Council last year on a single-minded drive to raise wages, said the plan had been “watered down” by business interests on the mayor’s 24-member committee on income inequality, of which she was also a member.

It's not a done deal yet, but it probably will go forward. I worry about unintended consequences, but I endorse this  primitive, but at least politically possible, strategy to help the working poor. Sawant doesn't like it, but she's done her job by pressuring from the left. She's a catalyst, not a policymaker. Such a catalyst is what's missing on the national level.

I think it's impressive that a fairly broad consensus within the  business and labor community here in Seattle was developed. Hat tip to Ed Murray, for whom I did not vote.

Local is where it's at, if for no other reason than you have a better chance to know the people you are dealing with. When we send a representatives to Washington, she or he is an avatar, a virtual presence, playing a role in a political game whose rules have nothing to do with reality as people live it in the real, local world. Unfortunately the policies, or the lack of them, that flow from that national game have impacts on us in the real world--so the game must be played. But real life is lived on the local level. 

I am wondering if we aren't evolving into, or have already become, a society in which the only meaningful kind of democracy is on the local level. I've argued that our democracy has become ceremonial on the national level, but it would actually be more highly functioning if that were true. Our democracy has become dysfunctional precisely because certain regions in the country can send deeply foolish and ignorant people to the national capital who insure that no consensus on practical ways to manage issues like climate change and even the immiseration of the working poor can be developed. It's hard to believe that this level of paralysis and dysfunction can continue indefinitely. We're talking 1850s levels of dysfunction here, and we all know how that turned out.

Perhaps it would be better if the country became a confederation of autonomous  regional jurisdictions--the Deep South, the Pacific Coast, The Heartland, the Great Lakes, the Northeast, the Mountain West. Let each of these regions develop their own tax, healthcare, energy, economic, and regulation, etc. policies. Maybe Mark's ideas about social credit would have a shot in The Pacific Coast, if not in the Northeast. If it worked there, maybe other regions would follow.

Let Washington, D.C., become more like the U.N.--mainly about international relations--and let real decision making power devolve to regions that have a greater capacity for developing consensus and leadership on issues that most of its citizens can get behind. Let the Deep South and the other current Red States live with the consequences of its 19th century mentality without getting bailed out by the economic power of the Pacific Coast, the Northeast, and the Great Lakes. Twenty-first century reality will in due course force them to adjust because they'll have nobody to blame but themselves when that reality smashes them in the face. 

Ok. Now you can tell me all the reasons why this wouldn't work.

 

Rising Inequality and Rising Temperatures

Interesting article by Paul Rosenberg this monring at Salon talking about Thomas Piketty and Elizabeth Warren. The question that's in the back of my head as I read this, though, is what difference does it make if even a three quarters of the country understands what's happening if there isn't the will to overcome the resistance of the other entrenched 25%--the top 1% and their delusional wannabes--that likes things just the way they are.

We seem long ago to have passed the point of having honest arguments about what's in the best interest of the country. We have devolved into a society in which it's everyone out for himself and his short-term interests, and if that means that the earth becomes a huge crock pot fifty to a hundred years from now or if the world's population becomes increasingly immiserated, who cares so long as I'm ok now? So thinks the entrenched top 25%. 

As the article points out, the two central issues that face our country and the world are growing inequality and climate change. All other issues, particularly the tribal ones, pale in comparison. Will a tipping point ever come? Will a point come when a sane consensus about the hugely negative consequences of not confronting these problems coalesce with the will to do something about them? Although it's very difficult for me to imagine how, I must believe that it will.