After the Future

Grace in the Wilderness

If you want optimism, I don't have any for our society's  near future. But hope I have, and here's a repost of an essay that explains my reason for it:

Barfield and Nietzsche start from the same place—a recognition that the transcendent values of the West have dried up as a living source of meaning in the culture, that is to say as a source of “given’ meaning in the cultural forms and institutions that we inherit from the past and into which we are socialized as children. And both agree as to the remedy—that human beings must find a way to reconstitute meaning in the outer world from resources found within their own individuated subjectivity. 

The difference lies in that for Nietzsche this reconstituting project was to be achieved through the will to Power; for Barfield through the awakening of the Logos. (By Logos Barfield means that which is referred to in the Prologue of John's Gospel, not the logical functions of the mind, although an argument can be made that the latter relies on the former, but that's another post.) The point is that either N’s choice must be made or Barfield’s--or the culture shrivels into something shaped by the bread and circus values of the Last Man.

I think it’s important to point out that neither Nietzsche nor Barfield are the first to talk about the interiorization of meaning. It was a movement in the history of Western thought that began with Descartes and then with Kant’s “Copernican Revolution”. (See my post "Metaxis" for more on this) 

Barfield’s importance for what I want to present lies, first, in his explanation of why the objective world has become stripped of so much of the meaning that people of an earlier age took for granted. And, second, in his proposal, that hearkens back to the thought of the Romantics, perhaps Coleridge, Schelling, and Novalis more than the others, that transcendent meaning can no longer be found out there because its source has migrated from out in the world into the depths of the human soul. Indeed the whole meaning of the Incarnation of the Logos two thousand years ago was to enable this transition. For after Christ an entirely new possibility for freedom became available for human beings, and the history of the world since then is the story of conditions gradually changing in such a way as to allow for the emergence of this freedom in all of its fullness. 

The idea of Christian freedom has been a theme in Christian thought since it was first articulated in the Epistles of St. Paul, but during the Romantic period, Western thought awakened to it as a possibility in a profoundly new way that has given shape to the modern human sense of individuality and selfhood, to the importance of human creativity, and for the shaping power of the human imagination that simply was impossible for people in earlier era.

So the irony lies in that as the culture has come more and more to understand meaning as subjectively constituted, the Christian meaning world has significantly diminished in its influence and in its power to shape the public culture. The objective meaning of the traditional language and ritual of the Church has become more stripped of its obvious objective meanings and as such has become easy not to take seriously.  Since the Reformation the Church’s control over even its own meanings has progressively eroded to a degree where now Christianity means pretty much anything anyone wants it to mean and where moral and doctrinal orthodoxy is something only a relatively small group of traditionalists care about.

There is, therefore, no real mystery about why Christianity and the religious sensibility in general has had such a diminished influence in shaping public culture since the mid nineteenth century. But this does not mean that the traditional forms are meaningless.  It makes a huge difference if one believes that the forms have lost meaning because they never had any to begin with or if one believes that the loss of “given” meaning was an essential stage in a longer term process by which human beings have to become liberated from external forms if they are to come into possession of the freedom and selfhood for which they were created.  

If the forms never had meaning to begin with, then the past is irrelevant and the future is a blank slate upon which the uebermenschen can write whatever script pleases them. If the latter, then the script for the future at least in part lies in finding ways to reconstitute the forms from the past so that they might live again, pulsing again with meaning, not as something given from without by the gods, but constituted by a self-transcending, world-constituting human Self, the Self created in the image of the I Am Who Am, whose purpose and meaning derives from an awakened sense of the Logos which lives in the interior depths of the human soul. 

Because this is the difference between the Nietzschean and the Christian. For the first, the world is radically open-ended and any human future is a possibility. The Christian would also acknowledge that because humans are no longer fated by the gods and determined by outside forces in the way they were, that a wide range of futures is a possibility, but however it is attained the future has a goal, a telos,  an Omega point.  And the striving toward that endpoint is what gives meaning and significance to what we do now. 

And the achievement of this telos will require unprecedented effort and imagination if it is to be achieved, but not any kind of effort or any kind of imagination. Rather the challenge lies in awakening an imagination-inspired effort that is informed by the Logos. What’s required is a way of reconstituting meaning from within that also resonates deeply with the truth Christians recognize as a presence in the Gospels and the traditions of the Church. This is not the truth of the scholars who have deconstructed, torn up, demythologized, and eviscerated the scriptures and traditions of the church in a misguided search for objectivity.  Among the most absurd of these projects has been the modern, mostly Protestant, project of wanting to determine which were the words in the Gospels that Jesus really spoke. It misses almost completely the point. The real goal of modernity has not been the enshrinement of objective truth, but of the discovery of the profound subjectivity of truth. Kierkegaard, Yes. Comte, No.

But subjective doesn't mean arbitrary. It requires that in the same way that humans developed criteria about understanding what was true or false in the the outer world of nature through experimental method, a similar method must be developed for understanding what is true or false in the interior world of the Soul. What it will come down to is what works, what is fruitful, what moves the individual toward true freedom and the culture forward toward an embodiment of peace and justice. William James, Yes. Syllabus Errorum, No. There are resources from the tradition from which we can make a beginning here. There is no need to reinvent the wheel, but those resources have to be adapted to these remarkably open-ended cultural conditions.

So here is the essential thing:  If there is no Logos and no Grace, the Nietzscheans are right, and it’s either the uebermensch or the Last Man, masters and slaves. I know there are other possibilities, but they are not serious because if Grace is an illusion, then Power is the only thing that matters. That's hard for some to accept, but it's obvous to anyone who thinks it through. But if the Logos is potentially awakenable in the depths of every human being’s soul, then a whole range of possibilities lie before us. For this graced awakening is what we mean by “faith,” and faith is the main ingredient that distinguishes the subjectivity of the Christian from the subjectivity of the Nietzschean. And this is an experience that has been repeated continuously through the centuries and will always continue to happen regardless what happens in the larger culture or the Church. 

So the shift toward the interiority of meaning is not something new after Kant. Indeed the Pietism in which he was nourished as a child and which he never relinquished as an adult was the 18th-century German manifestation of this interiority that has always been central to genuine Christian faith. It’s just that now the fundamental experience of faith has become essential in a different way for a culture that has otherwise lost its way. If the challenge for the first Israelites was to live according to the law, which meant an effort of will to resist regression into the idolatry that surrounded them, the challenge for us now is to find the will and the imagination to stoke the slumbering flame that burns within our hearts. For a truth lives there as real and “objective” as any that lived in an earlier age on tablets of stone. But it’s for most of us a weakly recognized truth which tends to get lost amid a myriad other subjective impulses. Its presence is like a still small voice, which can only be heard if one listens for it, and that requires the stilling of other voices that roar within the soul.  And so like the Israelites of old, a discipline is required to resist the natural flow of the world to create a space for grace to work. 

Before modernity, Christianity had to fight for its interior truth in a world in which the exterior world of meanings given by a culture still steeped in original participation was overwhelming and in which its clamor easily drowned out the still, small voice now calling from within. Those who heard this interior calling went out into the desert or sequestered themselves in monasteries where the noise outside could be kept at bay. After Constantine, Christianity was recognized and incorporated into what remained of the cultural forms of Imperial Rome, and life continued much as it had before despite the Christian trappings. But the world since the mid nineteenth century has changed radically, and as recognized in Eliot’s zeitgeist-defining poem of the 1920s, it is no longer necessary for us to go out into the Wasteland; the Wasteland has come to us.

The culture until the mid 19th century was able to maintain some integrity, some coherence because the old forms given by a human consciousness that were shaped by an outside-in Christianity still provided a context of meaning. But Nietzsche following Schopenhauer and Feuerbach realized that meaning is no longer out there—it’s no longer given to us by a God who is out there. It’s time for us to reclaim as something essential to human dignity what was projected outward onto God. There is no god out there; it’s we who are God, and we must accept the active, world-creating responsibility that goes with it. They were half right.

The story of modernity is essentially the story of the shift from outside-in to inside-out, of individuals asserting their interiority over against the perceived exterior authority.  There would be no felt need to do this if the exterior authority had not rigidified into a “system” that no longer carried life, the way, for instance, the oral traditions of tribal cultures carried life. The modern period has been dominated by one liberation program or another, and liberation has become an end in itself, and politics has become a simple-minded program for progressive-minded of  searching for anyone or anything in need of liberation. Politics in the modern period has been defined as the need of the oppressed individual or group to  assert itself against the individuation-crushing system—whether it be governmental, corporate or religious. 

This is a Romantic project. Because since the late 18th century Western culture has split into two main factions. One, the rationalist “technocrats” who see the world as a machine and are fascinated primarily with the engineering and system-building challenges the world poses, including social engineering projects.  The other, the alienated “Romantics” who instinctively find any given cultural forms or meanings oppressive and think of their purpose as only to stifle individual expression. The real culture war that will shape the next century is not between fundamentalists and evolutionists, but between Romantics and Technocrats.  It’s what’s driving, for instance, the protests against the WTO. 

The kind of Christian that has most to contribute will ally himself naturally with the Romantics, but not in the interests of promoting subjectivist anarchy, but in affirming, as they do, the dignity and sacredness of the individual and of the potency of human imagination and freedom. But he or she will also form alliances with the those who want to give shape and form to our lives together in culture. If there is any meaning at all to be found in our public institutions, it is something we give them from within our own subjectivity.  Meaning isn’t there now for most people in the Romantic faction, and they feel estranged from the system.

The political implications of this viewpoint are present throughout the blog entries I've been posting since 2003.  I've described here the basis for both saying No and Yes.  There isn't much to say Yes to at this point, but that could change. In the meanwhile we must recognized that the old forms, withered and brittle though they have become, have not yet collapsed. There is much that is worthy in them, no matter how much they have been coopted and distorted by the forces of anti-freedom. But if they haven’t collapsed, they  stand as something rather rickety and vulnerable to collapse soon. It needn’t happen, and it won’t if some way can be found to reconstitute the forms from within. This does not mean that the forms themselves must be preserved at all costs, but rather that what remains of the forms be approached with reverence because they once held something precious. And they must be approached with the attitude that in our contemplation of them, something in us will awaken that correlates with what first gave them shape. And once that happens, the life in us so awakened will lead to new growth, and the Wasteland will bloom again.

Quote of the Day: Cornell West

I think a post-Obama America is an America in post-traumatic depression. Because the levels of disillusionment are so deep. Thank God for the new wave of young and prophetic leadership, as with Rev. William Barber, Philip Agnew, and others. But look who’s around the presidential corner. Oh my God, here comes another neo-liberal opportunist par excellence. Hillary herself is coming around the corner. It’s much worse. And you say, “My God, we are an empire in decline.” A culture in decay with a political system that’s dysfunctional, youth who are yearning for something better but our system doesn’t provide them democratic venues, and so all we have are just voices in the wilderness and certain truth-tellers just trying to keep alive some memories of when we had some serious, serious movements and leaders. (Source)

Or they, the youth, have Silicon Valley "idealism".

I haven't had anything to say about events in Ferguson because I have had no desire to belabor the obvious. But I'll do a little belaboring anyway. There is, of course, the centuries-old story of racism being told there, but the bigger story is the way the country is slowly morphing into a police state.The great mistake in Ferguson from the elite perspective was that in its overreaction the Ferguson police put a spotlight on what elites would prefer to remain in dark. Editorialists throw their hands up in dismay about the militarized police, but nothing is going to change because the power elite in this country wants a police state. 

It's not about 9/11 or a post-9/11 mentality. 9/11 was just the excuse. A  largely unconscious and anxious people accepted the message that all this nonsense at airports, etc., was being done to keep them safe. Please. The post-9/11 security freak out has always been about the deep anxiety of post-Reagan Neoliberal elites to protect themselves--not the rest of us. It's the rest of us they are worried about.

The post 9/11 security freakout is about the even older-than-racism story of deeply anxious elites to protect themselves from the inevitable revolt of the resentful, deprived masses, whether they are carrying torches and pitchforks or backpack nukes. These elites are like the monkey who cannot let go of the banana in the jar. But whether they are conscious or unconscious of it, the cosmic law of What Goes Around Comes Around will inevitably seek to balance things out, and the jar will be shattered  the banana taken away. 

I thnk 2008 was a turning point. It was the point of no return. There was an opportunity to change the rules, but it wasn't taken. So this age old-farce will have to play itself out in violence. Ferguson is the future, not just because racism persists, but because greed and stupidity do.  

Silicon Valley Progressivism

"And when you walk thru Uber’s HQ in San Francisco, the place is pulsating with young, brilliant and dedicated employees who believe they are part of doing something historic and meaningful and won’t take no for an answer. It’s a feeling I’ve been fortunate to experience previously and feel incredibly lucky to be surrounded by that talent and energy one more time." David Plouffe quoted in Andrew Leonard's "How Uber Will Conquer America".

Exploiting the idealism and adventurousness of the young--it's an old game played by old men to get kids to fight in wars that should not have been declared or to support demagogues who should never be given power. It's now a game being played to hoodwink kids into supporting a economic model that is leading us into neofeudal peonage.

It's cool--it's disruptive, no stodgy rules, no boring safety net. But those kids working for Uber are no different than the associates who work for Wal-Mart--except in their having been sold a bill of goods that they are going to change the world. For better or worse? Who cares? It's not boring. A lot of German kids reasoned that way in the early 30s. As did a lot of kids worldwide in 1914. Off to war. What a lark! What excitement! What a delusion. 

My son just turned 18 in time for the election in 2008. He was a senior in high school, and with a handful of his friends who were voting age decided to ritualize the moment by wearing a suit and tie to school on election day and to drive together to the polls to cast their votes for Obama. I was touched by that, that they would even care enough, but Obama did that for kids then. It was one of the last years that such a ritual was even possible, at least here in Washington State, because now here it's mail-in only voting. It's more consumer friendly, no hassle of having to actually go out to the local school, wait in line with neighbors for a few minutes, go to a booth, and actually cast your vote. Voting is so much easier to do in the privacy of your own home.

Well, we all now know how disappointing for young people the election of 2008 turned out, and now politics are no longer inspiring for them--disruptive business models are the next new thing. The 'consumer' has now completely displaced the 'citizen'. There is no stronger indicator that we have given up on the belief that we have the capability to govern ourselves; we all have abdicated responsibility to the mystical powers of the Invisible Hand to make all things right. 

How Liberalism Lost Its Good Name

I look forward to reading Rick Perlstein’s The Invisble Bridge, his latest chronicle on the development of American movement conservatism since the 1950s. When reading Nixonland, his previous volume in the series, I was disturbed by how much I needed to reminded about what happened during the 1960s. But as I read through it, I remembered what it felt like as a teenager growing up in a Long Island suburb and to live during that tumult. Unlike the experience of kids today, there was a generation gap that shaped political opinions.  Young people, at least in the mostly educated, relatively affluent world I grew up in were as likely to be attracted to the Liberalism of their mostly young, hip teachers in school, as to the conventional, not particularly thoughtful conservatism of their parents. But Nixon understood where most young people’s politics lay, and that’s why he pushed to lower the voting age in time for the presidential election in 1972.

My wife  grew up in the Bronx in a working class, mostly Irish and Italian neighborhood. There was no ambiguity there because her community was on the front line of what was for them a racial war in which their neighborhoods were the battleground. They saw their low-crime, working class Shangri-La degrade before their eyes. They blamed the influx of poor blacks into their neighborhoods,  and they blamed the Liberal politicians who weren't doing enough to protect them and their interests. Although they were life-long Democrats, Liberalism became a dirty name for people who grew up in working-class neighborhoods in urban America.

But Liberals were in a politically impossible predicament in the mid to late sixties. They were caught in the middle between, on the one hand, a had-it-up-to-here African-American community that sought to force change, and on the other hand, working-class, urban, white Americans who were scared to death they were seeing the beginning of a new, race-driven Civil War in which they would be on the front lines taking most of the casualties. Their concerns were dismissed as racist-by too many Liberal elites—the kind who wrote editorials for the NY Times, but those Liberals were not forced to pay the price the way these working class white ethnics were.

The term ‘Limousine Liberal’ was coined to describe the attitude of these Liberal elites, and there was justice in it. These Liberals paid no price for their glib opinions. It was easy for them to be sanctimonious about the racism of urban ethnic whites, to dismiss them as so many Archie Bunkers, and to see them the problem rather than as victims of historical happenstance. And so from the resentful ranks of these urban working-class whites, Nixon and later Reagan found the electoral pickens abundant.

***

Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law on August 6, 1965, and the Watts riots began August 11. How was the juxtaposition of these two events interpreted at the time? From Johnson's and the Liberal white perspective: "This is how "they" thank us?"  From the African American perspective: "What do you expect?  It's too little, too late."  From the southern and working-class white perspective: "We told you this was going to happen. You Liberals don't know what you're doing." Reading Perlstein convinced me that the racial politics of the sixties was the biggest reason for the de-legitimation of Liberalism on America’s “Main Street”, while also convincing me it was Liberalism's finest hour.

Now that we can look at it from the perspective of fifty years later, it’s hard to imagine that things should have or could have gone otherwise. What could a decent, intelligent governor or mayor have done once the rioting began? Read Perlstein’s history to learn how haplessly they flailed, but there was nothing more for them to do except contain the chaos, limit the damage, and wait it out. As we see now in retrospect, the violence did eventually subside, and we survived.  But from the perspective of 1965, it looked like things would only get worse—and in the short run they did get worse. And so those law-and-order types who thought the Liberal, mostly Democrat (New York’s uber Liberal John Lindsay was a Republican) were too permissive were among the core of those who engineered the conservative backlash of the seventies, eighties, and beyond.

But the problems of the 1960s must be traced back to the many levels of failure by both the locals and the Feds in 1870s for which Black Americans paid an awful price. The Feds in the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries hadn't the political will to prevent enactment of the Jim Crow laws. So to use Rev. Wright's term, America's chickens were going to come home to roost sooner or later. However you want to understand the causes, the legal mistreatment of Black Americans was a boil festering on the American soul, and the civil rights legislation in the 1960s lanced it, and the riots were the necessary release of all the built-up infection that had festered for generations. Until the boil was lanced, no social healing could happen.

The Civil Rights legislation of the sixties was not a Jacobin program to engineer utopia; it was the simple insistence by the Federal government that Black Americans should get equal protection under the law when local governments in the South and elsewhere were unwilling or incapable of providing it. Healing could not happen until the boil had been lanced, so any talk of taking it slow or letting things evolve at their own pace was ridiculous in the mid-sixties. The riots were evolution taking its course, the age-old story of what goes around comes around, and all the violence blowback from a long history of legal and illegal white violence inflicted on Black Americans.

The Liberals were right to force the civil rights legislation. Does any sane person living today dispute it? And it was probably good that they were naive about the explosion they were triggering because they wouldn't have had the political will to pass the legislation if they were shrewder about the consequences.  But they got the blame for the pain, and with it the bad name to this day associated with wishy-washy appeasement of lawlessness. 

And so the Liberals who were in charge at the time looked like ineffectual fools. Liberalism got its bad name because Liberals became defined by their letting the demon out while refusing to use all the violent force at their disposal to put the demon back in it. You were a Liberal if you resisted the idea that the only way to treat the angry-African-American problem was the same way Americans treated the Indian problem in the 19^th century: Force them back into that box and sit on the lid. 

But we took our medicine in the sixties because the Liberal leaders of the time decided it was time for us to take it. It wasn't pleasant, but we're better off for it now. Had the legislation failed, the boil would have continued to fester, and today the American situation could very well look like the Israeli/Palestinian one. The sixties, for all their violence and chaos, were a necessary phase in healing the American soul. The election of Barack Obama has shown how far we have progressed since then, but also how deeply those old resentments still linger among certain sectors of White America, sectors that refused to take their medicine then and so still suffer from a kind of delirium now.

***

From my reading advanced reviews of The Invisible Bridge, Perlstein’s newest book makes the argument that Ronald Reagan beat Jimmy Carter in 1980 in large part because Carter told Americans that they had to continue to take their medicine, and Reagan told Americans they didn’t have to. I’m sure Perlstein’s argument is not so simplistic, but I think it boils down to something close to that. And the results are clear. We have half the country willing to deal with hard realities like climate change, crumbling infrastructure, an absurd healthcare insurance system, and persistent structural poverty, and we have the other half that just doesn’t want to deal with it at all, or is willing to surrender responsibility to the market’s invisible hand.

We’ve seen this movie before. This is a lesson our grandfathers in the ‘30s and 40s learned the hard way, and now it looks like we will have to learn it all over again. Well, let’s hope we learn it because otherwise this is how great nations wither and die. And yes, we can trace the origin of our troubles now back to the sixties, but for reasons precisely the opposite to those given by Conservatives. Morning in America was in fact a refusal to wake up; it was a regression into a resentment-and-nostalgia-soaked dream.

[This is a revised, shortened version of a post entitled How Liberalism Got Its Bad Name, from 2008.]