After the Future

A Word on Rene Girard and Gil Bailie

What those who repeat the cliche about the similarity between the crucifixion and the "Dionysus-Orpheus-Bacchus" myths fail to see is that the Gospels tell the story of the crucifixion from the point of view of the victim. The Gospels make it perfectly clear that the righteous mob, and the political and religious functionaries that kowtowed to it, were both morally wrong and mentally mesmerized into believing otherwise. "Forgive them for they know not what they do." Was the scholarly erudition required to recognize the similarity between the passion story and the archaic myths so exhausting that the recognition of the perfectly obvious dissimilarity between them had to be forsworn? To refuse to see this difference is to renounce any hope of moral clarity and to turn comparative religion into a parody of what its name implies. Refusing to interpret stories of mob murder as anagogic metaphors [Joseph Campbell's characterization] and concerning oneself instead with "actual historical events" is the victory of Gospel over myth. Swooning over the missed psychological or literary opportunities cannot eliminate the fact that it is that victory that is removing the cultural linchpin, throwing the world into its maturation crisis, and in the process, saving us from sin and death. Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, p. 129-30

I'll be returning to Peirce and James, but I've got sidetracked in the last several days by reading Gil Bailie's Violence Unveiled. I started it because Steve in a comment a couple of weeks ago asked me about Rene Girard, and I said I was only vaguely familiar with  him. I had his Violence and the Sacred on my bookshelf, and alongside it Bailie's book, but I never read either because I had it in my mind for some reason that Girard was writing in the  the 19th-century demythologizing vein to distinguish the historical Jesus from the mythological one. Whatever parts of such a project might be valid, I've never been sympathetic to the kind of reductionism that seems to flow from it.

As anybody reading here for a while knows, I'm interested in understanding and thinking about the metahistorical significance of the incarnation of the Logos, and particularly the significance of the event on Calvary and what happened three days later. I'm interested in it as history, as something that really happened, but not so much the 'how' and the 'what' of it as scholarship  determines those things, so much as the 'why' of it. So I decided to give the Girardian ideas a try and started with Bailie's book, for which Girard wrote the foreword. I learned that I was wrong and that Girard and Bailie have something important to say about all three--the how, the what, and the why.

Their project is not to demythologize the biblical story, but to show how the biblical story demythologizes everything else and how that demythologizing has led over time to the maturation crisis to which he refers. That crisis is acute now, has accelerated since the mid 19th century  because the vestiges of the old archaic mythologies that we needed to maintain some sense of order are all but collapsed, the center no longer holds, and it's not at all clear that we will be able to avoid the 'apocalyptic violence' that awaits us unless we do in fact collectively grow up. Girard and Bailie both claim that the gospels both wake us out of the trance that lingers from archaic mythologies, and offers a way forward in sobriety, freedom, and grace. 

This is an ambitious claim, and I don't know that I understand the idea well enough to be persuaded by it, but I do understand it well enough to be intrigued by it. It shows  that Hobbes's ideas about the state of nature was largely correct. In what I've read so far Bailie doesn't refer to Hobbes, but he uses the term 'apocalyptic violence' to describe pretty much what Hobbes imagined as the state of archaic societies in the war of all against all. I've always thought the state of nature, whether in Hobbes's version of it or Rousseau's, was more of a philosophical metaphor than an actual description of archaic human societies, but Girard's reading of the anthropological evidence would suggest that Hobbes wasn't far off. (It's not clear to me yet whether this applies to both patriarchal and the earlier matriarchal societies, or whether it's possible for his extrapolatory method to distinguish them.)

The foundation for his argument lies on two basic ideas. The first is 'mimetic desire', which is shorthand for the 'influence of others'. It's the primal way our desire is in a state of latency until we become aware that someone else wants it, and it's the root cause of the kind of vicious competition that leads to frenzied, murderous violence. Bailie says

I use the term mimetic "passions" or mimetic 'aggravations" to refer to the social and psychological effects of such influence. As I have tried to suggest the mimetic passions include jealous, envy, covetousness, resentment, rivalry, contempt, and hatred. The same powerful mimetic penchant that gives rise to these passions is responsible for humanity's most laudable traits and most promising potentials. . . . 

But . . .

The enormous value of positive mimesis comes into play only in non-rivalrous settings or where rivalry is carefully codified and limited in scope. The intrusion of jealousy, envy, resentment, and all the other mimetic passions into such settings immediately undermines the benefits of healthy mimesis. If the passions born of rivalistic desire are not eliminated or kept severely restricted, few of the blessings of positive mimesis will be able to survive in the social hot-house that results. What protects humanity from the ravages of these passions--and screens us from the apocalyptic violence toward which they would otherwise drift--is culture. As I have shown, in overriding these passions cultures have invoked the sacrificial resources of the primitive sacred or one of its weaker modern vestiges. As the gospel influence began to render the sacred system morally and culturally problematic, the mimetic passions it was once able to to tame grew, eventually becoming the social, psychological and spiritual crisis of our time. Violence Unveiled, p. 112.

Bad money pushes out bad, so to say, unless there is some mechanism to control it.

The second concept, human sacrifice, is alluded to in this excerpt. The idea is that once the frenzy of negative mimetic desire takes over, any group or any society, will tear itself to pieces unless some mechanism can bring order, and the mechanism that seems to have been a universal one in (patriarchal but not matriarchal?) archaic societies is the sacrificial murder of a human scapegoat--to tear one person to pieces so that the nation might survive. But if the goal is to end to apocalyptic violence or to keep it at bay, just killing the victim doesn't work unless the act is done in a ritual trance that imbues the act with a sacred significance that effects a catharsis, and that only happens if the victim is seen as a god.

The anthropological evidence is strong to show how such sacrificial societies bend over backwards to preserve the illusion that the sacrificial victim remains a godlike object of fascination. Once the victim is seen to be just a guy, the collective trance is broken, the ritual is rendered ineffective, and the society collapses into apocalyptic violence until the cycle repeats itself or has some other external ordering principle impose itself, e.g., getting conquered/enslaved by the tribe next door.

I don't want to oversimplify a more complicated argument, and I don't want to bore readers with an overly long explanation. But the Girardian theory explains why kings in archaic societies were in the beginning both godlike and sacrificial victims, and then later just godlike.  Archaic societies felt themselves to be always on the brink of falling back into apocalyptic violence driven by the tendency of negataive mimetic passions to blaze into anarchic collective insanity, and the only effective way to provide some stability was in various forms of ritual human sacrifice. A society reached a new level of stability when the godlike king was able to prove effective enough in his godlike persona to maintain order and to have other humans or animals sacrificed in his stead. 

And Bailie is making a larger argument with which I sympathize: that our society now is more fragile than we think because we are in a condition in which there is diminishing possibility for positive mimesis and yet is rife with negative possibilities. We think that what happened in Germany after WWI was aberrational, but Bailie is pretty convincing that it's the norm when cultural forms have lost their legitimacy and no longer have the authority to hold negative mimetic desire in check. The old sacralized cultural forms, ideas like 'democracy' and 'republican virtue'  have lost their ability to fascinate or evoke from us collective reverence. We find it hard to think of them except as in air quotes, and once the air quotes go around anything, they will be blown away by the next storm.

What's the antidote? Well it is, of course, presented by the gospel narratives, and I would say also what was effected by the passion of Christ, which was to create a new possiblity for humans and the earth. So we need both to be awakened from our negative mimetic trance and to a better possibility that is always there, which is the ubiquity of grace. That's why the early civil rights movement rooted in its religious commitments provides the best model for breaking the vicious cycle of mimetic violence. How do we make of that movement something that can be broadly adopted as a model for positive mimesis? How can it be applied as an antidote to the centrifugal forces that are otherwise tearing us apart, and I fear with greater ferocity with each passing year. 

On that note a blessed and happy new year to you all, and I'm not saying that with air quotes. 

C.S. Peirce on Believing 1

If the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry, and if belief is of the nature of a habit, why should we not attain the desired end, by taking any answer to a question which we may fancy, and constantly reiterating it to ourselves, dwelling on all which may conduce to that belief, and learning to turn with contempt and hatred from anything which might disturb it? This simple and direct method is really pursued by many men. I remember once being entreated not to read a certain newspaper lest it might change my opinion upon free-trade. "Lest I might be entrapped by its fallacies and misstatements," was the form of expression. "You are not," my friend said, "a special student of political economy. You might, therefore, easily be deceived by fallacious arguments upon the subject. You might, then, if you read this paper, be led to believe in protection. . . ." I have often known this system to be deliberately adopted. Still oftener, the instinctive dislike of an undecided state of mind, exaggerated into vague dread of doubt, makes men cling spasmodically to the views they already take. The man feels that, if he only holds to his belief without wavering, it will be entirely satisfactory. Nor can it be denied that a steady and immovable faith yields great peace of mind. It may indeed give rise to inconveniences, as if a man . . . would be eternally damned if he received hist ingest otherwise than through a stomach-pump. But then the man who adopts this method will not allow that it's inconveniences are greater than it s advantages. He will say, "I hold steadfastly to the truth, and the truth is always wholesome." And in many cases it may very well be that the pleasure he derives from his calm faith overbalances any inconveniences resulting for its deceptive character. (From Pragmatism: A Reader, ed. by Louis Menand, p. 15-16)

Peirce talks about how we don't like the unsettled feeling of doubt, so we adopt different strategies to remove it. So in his essay "The Fixation of Belief", from which the excerpt above was taken,  he does a kind of phenomenology of the ways in which humans deal with doubt by finding different psychological methods to get rid of it. The goal is to reach a state of stability that seems safe from the unsettling feeling of being in doubt.

One method, the one illustrated in the excerpt above, is the method of 'tenacity'. The others are 'authority'  'a priori', and 'science'.  I'm going to look at each one in different posts, but I would point out here that for Peirce 'science' is just a way of believing, with its own advantages and disadvantages. So while we may recognize with some sense of superiority people we know who have adopted the method of 'tenacity, he ends the discussion on it by saying,

It would be an egotistical impertinence to object that his procedure is irrational, for that only amount to saying that his method of settling belief is not ours. He does not propose to himself to be rational, and, indeed will often talk with scorn of man's weak and illusive reason. So let him think as he pleases. 

Climate change deniers and anti-Darwinians, nothwithstanding, I suppose Peirce would say, that reality will soon enough teach them from hard experience the error of their ways, and if it doesn't, who cares? But aren't there some situations in which we need to be tenacious in the face of the evidence? I'll look into that in future posts. And then there's a part of me that will always have a warm spot for Tertullian's credo quia absurdum. As D.T. Suzuki said of him:

"A noted Christian Father of the early Middle Ages once ex­claimed: "O poor Aristotle! Thou who has discovered for the heretics the art of dialectics, the art of building up and destroying, the art of discussing all things and accomplishing nothing!" So much ado about nothing, indeed! See how philosophers of all ages contradict one another after spending all their logical acumen and analytical ingenuity on the so-called problems of science and knowledge. No wonder the same old wise man, wanting to put a stop once for all to all such profitless discussions, has boldly thrown the following bomb right into the midst of those sand-builders: "Certum est quia impossible est"; or, more logically, "Credo quia absurdum est." I believe because it is irrational; is this not an unqualified confirmation of Zen?" (from Suzuki, Essays in Zen Buddhism, p. 68.)

I should add that I am not a fideist. My project is to make the ground of my beliefs plausible to the late modern mind. But as I've long argued here, we all start, no matter how rational we think we might be, with assumptions that are grounded in the irrational. And so the argument I want to make in the long run is that the most important criteria for anyone's choosing what he or she believes should be whether it opens up greater possibilities for becoming more deeply human. If we accept that as the basic framework for argument, irrationally grounded though it might be, then Christians have some important things to contribute to the conversation. 

Even More on Torture

 

 

 

 

I don't usually talk about family stuff on this blog, but my son just started as a fellow at Mother Jones magazine last week, and he posted this piece about documents just recently released about how the US dealt with Japanese waterboarders. It's worth a read.

Believing 2

Earlier this week I tried to make the case that "believing" is what we all do when we give value, meaning, and purpose to our experience and to our work in the world.  Believing is fundamentally an irrational act. It draws upon resources that transcend what the brain/sense system can give us with certainty. The scope of what the brain/sense system can give us with certainty is very, very limited.  

And if we were to live our lives only within the scope of what is certain on that level, our lives would be very limited and poor. They would revert to lives lived on a purely instinctual level as animals live them, doing their bull and cow thing. There are indeed plenty of people who "believe" that human beings are nothing more than talking animals. For such people any belief system that imputes a spiritual dimension to the human being is delusional, and such beliefs lead to alienation and repression. That's a pretty common attitude among the educated during the twentieth century.

But this view of the human being is aberrational. 99% of the human beings who ever lived would take for granted that they are spiritual beings. I would argue that the instinctualism/materialism characteristic of a certain kind of person who became rather common during the modern period is the result of an atrophying of the soul that directly correlates with the hypertophying of the eye that came with widespread literacy after Gutenberg. This is a McLuhanite idea, and I go into it in some detail about it in a piece I have previously posted entitled  "The Hypertrophied Eye." (Go to fifth paragraph.)

The result is that the data available to such atrophied souls is much more limited.  Moderns are to the spiritual what the deaf are to the world of sound and music. And  it is understandable that they should think that people who have experiences that they don't have are delusional. But it's not just a problem of deafness, but one of knowing how to listen. That's the challenge: The song is playing but we're not paying attention enough to hear it.

The challenge is to make some sense of the world as we experience it, and that starts with taking the world seriously as it is given to us and listening for the song that will help us understand what it means and what we are to do about it. It means taking seriously the accounts given of broader ranges of experience this song, and that includes the experience of the East and that of primitive, shamanic cultures. That experience provides important data that we have to take seriously if we are to break out of the materialist straitjacket in which we now find ourselves.  

Taking 'experience' seriously is the starting point for any such project. Otherwise  discussion about religion is for the most part pointless palaver. And spiritual experience is rather more common than we suppose; it's not necessarily something extraordinary (although it can be). It's more a question of recognizing it for what it is, and you have to have the right perceptual frame to do so, and that requires having a belief system that provides the mindframe to recognize what is otherwise unremarkable. And you have to have a belief system which enables the habits of mind to work with these experiences to make them fruitful.  

People have experiences all the time which are wasted on them, and these experiences are like the seed in the gospel parable that falls on barren ground that sprouts and shrivels. It's not necessarily the individual's fault, because there is no nurturing context for such individuals to help them understand what's going on and to work with it to become fruitful. That's the spiritual dilemma of our time:  We're having the experience, but missing the meaning. We have no interpretive framework that is really all that helpful in that regard. The old interpretive frames are not without value, and we have much to learn from them, but they are poorly adapted to our circumstances as no-longer-moderns.

The most important things we know are not facts that have been established with scientific rigor, but rather deeper truths that we recognize with the faculties of the soul that open us up to dimensions that transcend the world of sense. This is not brain knowledge; it's soul knowledge. We hearken to such  truths all the time, and surely we have to learn the rules of true hearkening, just as we have to learn the rules of true love. Actually the rules are quite similar because we only truly know what we truly love. But delusion in both spheres is also something we do all the time. 

Believing 1

[Ed: I'm preparing a post on C.S. Peirce's ideas about 'The Fixation of Belief' ' elaborated on in his 1877 essay of the same name, which is something I'm just becoming familiar with. So I thought that I'd repost today Believing 1, which I originally published here in January 2006, and tomorrow I'll post "Believing 2" which I posted around the same time, and in the next week or so I'll post the piece about Peirce, which I think is interesting and relevant.]

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. The world we see is a social construction, and while this doesn’t mean that the world is arbitrary, it does mean that it is a lot more malleable than we ordinarily suppose. When the construction changes, as it did when the medieval construction broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. 

We're now living at a time when the modern construction has broken down, and we live with it out of habit rather than thriving with it. And so now we have a special opportunity and responsibility to frame something new. But it can't simply be something that is made up out of one's fantasy. It has to make sense. It has to have plausibility. It has to have  "cultural legitimacy."

I've argued here that we are now in a post-secularist cultural era. People with secular minds still function effectively, and will continue to, but there are other more interesting possibilities. One of the main consequences of this shift from secular to postsecular is a parallel shift in primacy from matter to mind. And now “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. 

Since Kant metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional metaphors that have meaning only insofar as they fit into a larger metanarrative which we have assimilated unconsciously or which we have chosen in a kind of leap of faith. 

We might take the leap of faith into communism, feminism, positivism, or any number of other 'isms' if we think it provides the most compelling narrative to give our life meaning and purpose, or to provide a coherent frame to organize our experience and our longings.  But just as modern physics has taught us that there is no there there at the heart of the atom, there is no objective, rational grounding for accepting any meaning narrative. They all have an irrational ground. 

Nihilism and Materialism are as much belief systems as trinitarian monotheism. Different people have different criteria that confer legitimacy on their chosen or acculturated belief systems, but ultimately they are subjective criteria that one "believes" are more valid than others, and so everything depends on the quality of the soul which makes the subjective judgment about legitimacy. What is obvious or self-evident to the Amerindian shaman is quite different from what is obvious to the M.D. treating your kidney stones. I would argue that both see things that are true that the other does not see, and what they see or don't see is determined by what they believe.

Most people accept unthinkingly the meaning frameworks that are implicit in the social world to which they belong, even when the values of one contradict the values of another. I'm sure there were at least a few executives at Enron who accepted the implicit or explicit Social Darwinian corporate narrative that directed policy there and then went home to their families where a fundamentalist Christian narrative was dominant. One set of beliefs for work; another set for home and family without a thought about the contradictions. 

Others of a more thoughtful temperament might carefully examine the undergirding assumptions of the narratives that organize their various worlds and choose to live a life without contradiction by adapting or rationalizing in order to make one side of the contradiction work more in tune with the other. Or they may just reject one or the other. But in doing so he's making a choice that involves a leap of faith of one kind or another. There are no purely rational choices, only choices for narratives that are more or less plausible.

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the inescapable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting nevertheless because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics. It's one thing to diagnose the illness; it's another to prescribe a healthful remedy.

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. And it starts with the acknowledgment of the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture.  ‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

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

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

And so what we believe is pretty much all we have when it comes to meaning, and we see now a huge marketplace of conflicting belief possibilities. In politics there is a blue state cosmopolitan narrative, and in red states a traditionalist narrative that is quite different, and both define the divide which is at the heart of a culture war that has been going on at least since the Scopes trial in the twenties. The structure of these two narratives is something that I've been trying to understand over the last couple  of years. Neither works for me, but there is far more potential, because more flexibility, in the cosmopolitan group than in the traditionalist group. I'd liken the first group to the Pharisees in the gospel accounts, and the latter group to the sinners. The advantage the latter had over the former was flexibility, and flexibility and adaptability are essential values in a culture undergoing the shift we are now experiencing.

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case to day for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

More on the Torture Report

If our leaders were more honest, they’d admit that the CIA’s recently revealed torture isn’t a break from this legacy, but the fruit of it – the product of decades of dehumanizing counter-insurgency warfare that expanded the USA from 13 colonies on the East Coast to much of North America and, ultimately, a global empire (it’s no coincidence that the code-name for Osama bin Laden was “Geronimo,” taken from the famed Apache leader).

After almost wiping out America’s original inhabitants, the U.S. government went on to declare total war on differently pigmented people around the globe. President Woodrow Wilson re-instituted slavery (or “forced labor”) in Haiti after its political class proved insufficiently compliant, his famed commitment to the right of self-determination not extending to those darker than pasty white. In Vietnam, the CIA’s “Phoenix Program” saw those accused of collaborating with the North Vietnamese subjected to “assassination, kidnapping, and systematic torture,” according to historian Douglas Valentine. Inmates at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were raped and murdered. And today, amid official proclamations that we live in a post-torture age, inmates held in Guantanamo Bay – many of whom could never even go to a show trial because insofar as there’s any real evidence against them it was gained through torture – continue to be subjected to torturous force-feedings that have been condemned by the United Nations.

The abuse, exported across Latin America through the torture-training School of the Americas, also continues here at home, with tens of thousands of black and brown and poor white US citizens currently languishing in mind-destroying solitary confinement, California’s Pelican Bay State Prison alone holding over 500 people in isolation for a decade or more. In Chicago, a cop who electrocuted and otherwise tortured more than 200 people until they confessed to crimes they didn’t do, got off with about 3 years behind bars after the evidence of his sadism became too great to ignore; that’s less prison time than if he had been caught with a gram of crack cocaine.

I don't dispute the facts--in fact, he left out the American brutality during the Filipino Insurgency after the Spanish American War--but I find the narrative into which they are woven to be too one-sided and self-defeating. He describes Thomas Jefferson as a "savage white supremacist who in practice if not always in speech believed that people of color (“slaves” and “savages” as they were known then; “thugs” and “terrorists” as they’re often called today) did not deserve all the same rights as wealthy white Americans like him." Come on. There has always been this split in the American soul, and I think it's wrong to say that the darker side of that split is the 'real' or the 'only' truth, as if there is no other story to be told. 

The darker side follows the logic of the serpent, which is the human default if you accept the Christian story that all human beings are fallen. 'Being fallen' means doing what comes naturally, if by that we mean how animals behave, i.e., acting as either predator or prey. Hegel uses the terms master and slave, but it's a more sophisticated variant on the same theme. We are programmed by the logic of the serpent whether we consciously acknowledge it or not. And so we shouldn't be surprised that most Americans are inclined to follow this script, i.e., it's normal for anyone to follow his natural inclination to advance his own interests without regard to their harmful effects on others, especially when the Other belongs to another tribe. White racism toward black and brown people is just a relatively recent variety of a tribalism that has organized social power relations for millennia. It's normal. The miracle happens when people don't act normally. 

And 'being nice' is too often just the way we humans have been domesticated; we are almost as easy to train as dogs and horses. And that's fine for laying a foundation of habits that enable us to operate within the consensus reality, but It is just a form of slavishness until we find some way of transcending it. Contemporary culture celebrates in film, in video games, and elsewhere pop forms of the Nietzschean Master, the uebermensch, who rejects all forms slavishness, the live-free-or-die guy who refuses to be bound by the conventions determined by the play-nice consensus reality and the clueless bureaucrats who set the rules. But the logic of the uebermensch is the logic of the serpent, and it is always regressive. The only truly progressive way to subvert the consensus reality is to reach toward the Absolute Future, and in doing so to awaken the Logos slumbering within. This is the only true Liberty. 

So the master/slave pattern is not abnormal behavior. Nothing could be more normal. Look around you. You see it everywhere. It's only in its most brutal manifestations that we find ourselves upset by it. But these brutal extremes, to take torture for an example, are behaviors that aren't different in kind, only in degree, from our everyday experience of the master slave dynamic in our families, at work, in sports, in politics. Cheney understands that, and he has no patience for anybody who doesn't. He understands that nothing could be more normal or natural; that it's either be master or slave, rule or be ruled, eat or be eaten. Any other way of understanding how the world works is a fairy tale. There are no miracles.

But that's where he's wrong. There are miracles and they occur individuals or groups find a way to transcend normalcy. And I think there have been plenty of miracles, often effected by people who in most ways we find it hard to admire. We should nevertheless celebrate the miracles, no matter who performs them, because every miracle advances the ball a little farther toward the Absolute Future. 

Christians are not exempt from the logic of the serpent. It is the Christian's default programming as it is everyone else's. But if honest Christians have any advantage, it lies in their having a heightened awareness of their default programming and have at their disposal tools that (should) help them to resist and transcend it. The honest Christian realizes that it's not enough to decide to follow the tribal rules, to think benevolent thoughts, and not "be evil". It's not good enough to be simply domesticated into Christian habits. 

Our social or group acculturation can, depending on the group, provide tools for resistance, but they are like apps that still must work with the underlying operating system. The real task is to reprogram the operating system, and that is a lifelong struggle individually and an eons-long struggle for humans as a species. As badly as we still mostly behave, I'd argue that the ball has been advanced by our intermittently idealistically motivated ancestors. The task is to increase the frequency of these moments of response to the ideal, and to find ways to consolidate the gains. 

So why do I describe the story told in the excerpt quoted above as self-defeating? Because it's not telling us anything new. It holds Jefferson and the other founding fathers to an impossibly high standard, and its goal is wrongly to negate the good in what they did because they also behaved, as most all of us do, according to the default programming. There is such a thing as cheap grace, but there is also cheap cynicism. To expect any human being, especially those who have had public careers, to be anything but a mix of good and bad is silly and naive. 80:20 bad to good advances the ball, I'd say.  The best among us are maybe 50:50. So I see nothing wrong in celebrating the miracles of grace when someone, even if it was only once in his or her life, chooses the Absolute Future, that is, reached toward it as Peter reached impulsively toward Jesus as he walked on the waves, only to slip back again into the flood. It's our reaching out that matters, even if we can't sustain it.

Reaching out is a skill that needs to be learned, and like any other skill you get better at it with practice. But it's hard to practice if you don't believe there's anything there toward which to reach.

Silicon Valley Utopian Nerdthink

In five years, an estimated 5.9 billion people will own smartphones. Anyone who can code, or who has something to sell, can be a free agent on the global marketplace. You can work from anywhere on your laptop and talk to anyone in the world; you can receive goods anywhere via drone and pay for them with bitcoins — that is, if you can’t 3-D print them at home. As software eats everything, prices will plunge. You won’t need much money to live like a king; it won’t be a big deal if your job is made obsolete by code or a robot. The rich will enjoy bespoke luxury goods and be first in line for new experiences, but otherwise there will be no differences among people; inequality will increase but cease to matter. Politics as we know it will lose relevance. Large, gridlocked states will be disrupted like any monopoly. Customer-citizens, armed with information, will demand transparency, accountability, choice. They will want their countries to be run as well as a start-up. There might be some civil wars, there might be many new nations, but the stabilizing force will be corporations, which will become even more like parts of a global government than they are today. Google and Facebook, for instance, will be bigger and better than ever: highly functional, monopolistic technocracies that will build out the world’s infrastructure. Facebook will be the new home of the public sphere; Google will automate everything.

Thiel and Vassar and Yudkowsky, for all their far-out rhetoric, take it on faith that corporate capitalism, unchecked just a little longer, will bring about this era of widespread abundance. Progress, Thiel thinks, is threatened mostly by the political power of what he calls the “unthinking demos.”

i think it's worth thinking a little bit about an article that came out in the most recent Harper's Magazine entitled "Come with Us if You Want to Live: Among the Apocalyptic Libertarians in Silicon Valley from which this quote by Michael Vassar was excerpted. The article is  behind a pay wall, so I'll quote liberally from it, but it focuses on what Elieazar Yudkowsky calls the "New Enlightenment".

"We’re part of the continuation of the Enlightenment, the Old Enlightenment. This is the New Enlightenment,” he said. “Old project’s finished. We actually have science now, now we have the next part of the Enlightenment project.”

It's all about very smart, post-political, radical libertarian, singularitarian rationalists who think they can carry us into the New Jerusalem with code and entrepreneurism and tech. For them it's all about engineering a utopian transhuman fantasy. Postmodern ennui and skepticism about grand narratives are not in their m.o. If you've been following the blowing up of the New Republic under the ownership of Chris Hughes and his new CEO, Guy Vidra, you have some feel for the mindset, but this article goes into the heart from which so many of these ideas flow and in doing so shapes these, alas, very powerful shapers of our economy and culture. 

I found the article fascinating for introducing me to a world I have some vague awareness of, but no real feel for. So assuming you are as unfamiliar with this world as I am, you should read it or just take the following abbreviated tour with me. One of the key shapers of that ethos is Peter Thiel,

a billionaire who cofounded PayPal with Elon Musk and invested early in Facebook. His companies Palantir Technologies and Mithril Capital Management had borrowed their names from Tolkien. Thiel was a heterodox contrarian, a Manichaean libertarian, a reactionary futurist. 

“I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible,” Thiel wrote in 2009. Freedom might be possible, he imagined, in cyberspace, in outer space, or on high-seas homesteads, where individualists could escape the “terrible arc of the political.” Lecturing in Palo Alto, California, Thiel cast self-made company founders as saviors of the world . . . .

Thiel’s lectures posited a world in which democratic universalism had failed, and all that was left was a heroic, particularist, benevolent libertarianism. 

It's understandable why many people might have given up on politics and are looking for ways to circumvent it, but these guys take it to the next level. I love that the perverse Tolkien connection because salvation for these folks lies with technological and entrepreneurial innovation and markets, hardly elvish institutions. 

We meet Michael Vassar, 34, quoted above. He  went "to college at seventeen, and had worked as an actuary, as a teacher, in nanotech, and in the Peace Corps. He’d founded a music-licensing start-up called Sir Groovy. Early in 2012, he had stepped down as president of the Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence, now called the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)."

"There are all of these different countdowns going on,” he said. “There’s the countdown to the broad postmodern memeplex undermining our civilization and causing everything to break down, there’s the countdown to the broad modernist memeplex destroying our environment or killing everyone in a nuclear war, and there’s the countdown to the modernist civilization learning to critique itself fully and creating an artificial intelligence that it can’t control. There are so many different — on different timescales — ways in which the self-modifying intelligent processes that we are embedded in undermine themselves. I’m trying to figure out ways of disentangling all of that. . . .

“I’m not sure that what I’m trying to do is as hard as founding the Roman Empire or the Catholic Church or something. But it’s harder than people’s normal big-picture ambitions, like making a billion dollars.”

It's funny, except, it's kind of not. And then we meet to Eliezer Yudkowsky:

In 2006, Yudkowsky began writing a hydra-headed series of blog posts: science-fictionish parables, thought experiments, and explainers encompassing cognitive biases, self-improvement, and many-worlds quantum mechanics that funneled lay readers into his theory of friendly AI. Rationality workshops and Meetups began soon after.

In 2009, the blog posts became what he called Sequences on a new website: Less Wrong.

The next year, Yudkowsky began publishing Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality at fanfiction.net. The Harry Potter category is the site’s most popular, with almost 700,000 stories; of these, HPMoR is the most reviewed and the second-most favorited. The last comment that the programmer and activist Aaron Swartz left on Reddit before his suicide in 2013 was on /r/hpmor.  

Who is attracted to  Less Wrong his website devoted to human improvement through Bayesian probability models:

Of the 1,636 people who responded to a 2013 survey of Less Wrong’s readers, one quarter had found the site thanks to HPMoR, and many more had read the book. Their average age was 27.4, their average IQ 138.2. Men made up 88.8 percent of respondents; 78.7 percent were straight, 1.5 percent transgender, 54.7 percent American, 89.3 percent atheist or agnostic. The catastrophes they thought most likely to wipe out at least 90 percent of humanity before the year 2100 were, in descending order, pandemic (bioengineered), environmental collapse, unfriendly AI, nuclear war, pandemic (natural), economic/political collapse, asteroid, nanotech/gray goo.

Forty-two people, 2.6 percent, called themselves futarchists, after an idea from Robin Hanson, an economist and Yudkowsky’s former co-blogger, for reengineering democracy into a set of prediction markets in which speculators can bet on the best policies. Forty people called themselves reactionaries, a grab bag of former libertarians, ethnonationalists, Social Darwinists, scientific racists, patriarchists, pickup artists, and atavistic “traditionalists,” who Internet-argue about antidemocratic futures, plumping variously for fascism or monarchism or corporatism or rule by an all-powerful, gold-seeking alien named Fnargl who will free the markets and stabilize everything else.

These folks have moved, in their thinking at least, way past any sense of frustration or malaise about our current political and economic arrangements:

 On October 1, 2013, Republicans in Congress shut down the government. The venture capitalist Chamath Palihapitiya made news for crowing about how great the stagnation was for Silicon Valley. “It’s becoming excruciatingly, obviously clear to everyone else that where value is created is no longer in New York, it’s no longer in Washington, it’s no longer in L.A.,” he said. “It’s in San Francisco and the Bay Area. . . . Companies are transcending power now. We are becoming the eminent vehicles for change and influence and capital structures that matter. If companies shut down, the stock market would collapse. If the government shuts down, nothing happens and we all move on, because it just doesn’t matter.”

These utopian New Enlightenment nerds are not interested in reforming the current system; they are "post-political" and are working to create a world that can bypass political institutions altogether as an anarchic, radically decentralized new technno-social order emerges from the ruins of the current institutions of the Old Enlightenment.

It sounds naively delusional at first glance, and yet it's been clear to me for some time that something, some kind of radical discontinuity is inevitable in the next fifty years or so. I have argued that evolution has until our own time been the unconscious, random process described by Darwin, but it no longer has to be because of the possible role that human consciousness and human choices can make. Will humans choose the Absolute Future, or will they just be swept along by the Flood?

The Cosmic Flood is metaphor I've been playing with for the cruel, impersonal, random process that scientists describe as having formed the universe and more locally the solar system, the earth, and the random, adaptive processes on it Darwin describes as biological evolution. I will leave aside for now any consideration of the degree to which transcendent forces played a shaping role in the universe and accept the scientific account as mostly correct, i.e., as describing 99%+ of what has happened in the history of our universe since the Big Bang.

But I would argue that's precisely what we needed saving from. And that the Event, the incarnation of the Logos 2000 years ago, introduced a new factor into evolution, and while its influence has been significant, it has gone and continues to go largely unnoticed. This was the moment when the Cosmic Flood met the Absolute Future. And since then, in a slow but persistent way, something has been happening in human beings that allows for a different possibility in history: the resistance and subversion of the random, impersonal processes of evolution driven by the logic of the Flood--or to use another metaphor, the logic of the Serpent.

Both metaphors describe the principle of evolution without grace. If you want to personalize this principle, go ahead: Call it Mephistopheles, Satan, Lucifer, or whatever. I don't want the suggeston that there might be a higher intelligence driving this process to stop any conversations, because I"m not sure there is. But I am talking  about what otherwise is a widely recognized phenomenon. But, whether it is a higher intelligence or just a blind force, I would not describe it as  evil for the same reason that I would not describe an earthquake or a tsunami as evil--it is just massively impersonal and cruel. It doesn't care about persons.

I would argue that this is the principle of civilization, that it drives the impersonal process that builds empires and promotes advances in science and technology. It thinks, but it thiniks with the logic of the serpent, the principle of intelligence without mercy, of the cold, purely rational calculation that needs no moral justification for its choices except to exclaim, "I am the spirit of evolution". "Greed is good", said the Ayn Rand-parroting Gordon Gecko:

Greed clarifies, cuts through, and captures, the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of its forms; greed for life, for money, for love, knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind . . .

This is the logic of the serpent. It was his logic in the Garden of Eden, wherever or whatever that was, and it's its logic now.

So the Silicon Valley utopia is for me a description of the world and the development of a human being that follows the logic of the serpent. Clearly a lot of what these people are talking about is going to happen whether it's a good idea or not. Perhaps some of it can be redemptively transformed, so I'm not saying that the world they are hoping for is impervious to the influence of grace, but I am saying that to the degree that the New Enlightenment is about building a world without grace, to the degree that its thinking follows the logic of the serpent, the utopia they envision will turn out to be hell on earth. 

Jim Sleeper on White Male Rage

White guys who succumb to ressentiment aren’t as trapped and brutalized as black guys. But unlike blacks, who’ve been denigrated, mauled and murdered forever in almost routinized ways that whites can barely imagine ever happening to themselves, the white guys are reeling now because their loss seems so recent, humiliating and, to them, inexplicable.

In ressentiment some of them find “easy” enemies on whom to wreak vengeance for frustrations borne of exploitation by powers they’re afraid or ill-prepared to confront. By making them feel big even as it diminishes them, ressentiment warps their assessments of the hardships and challenges before them. It shapes disguises they put on when they run those shell games in education, real estate and employment, pursuing vengeance, if not vindication, without risking punishment or reproach.

Wherever ressentiment has erupted throughout history — whether in medieval Catholic Inquisitions, Puritan or McCarthyite witch hunts, Chinese cultural revolutions, nihilist extremes of “people’s liberation movements,” or political correctness in academic departments — its most telling symptoms have been paranoia and routinized bursts of hysteria. Its collective passions touch raw nerves, often under the ministrations of an increasingly surreal journalism that brutalizes public discourse itself. (Cue Murdoch and Fox.)

Those “journalists” who’ve made a fine art of fomenting and feeding on overstressed people’s fears and resentments soften up the public sphere for something much worse. Movements borne of ressentiment carry legitimate grievances to a fleeting brilliance, but soon they curdle and collapse, tragicomically or catastrophically, on their own cowardice, ignorance, and scapegoating and other lies.

As they collapse, adherents spin their resentments into newer, more perverse kinds of force and fraud that emerge in racist shootings, road rage, addictions to violent video games, intensively marketed security precautions against armed home invasion, gladiatorialization in sports (including cage fighting but also hockey and football), nihilism in entertainment that fetishizes violence without context and sex without attachment, and a huge prison industry that employs mostly white guys to punish mostly nonwhite, broken, violent men, even as schools in the whitest neighborhoods are imprisoned by fear of gunmen who are often the students themselves.

Staggering through this growing derangement, which Democratic and Republican policies are enabling and which Murdoch, the Koch brothers and their minions are fomenting, millions are spending billions on palliatives, medications, addictions and even surveillance designed to protect them from themselves.

No wonder that neoliberal economic and political strategists survey the public wreckage they’ve caused, cluck their tongues and tell one another at Davos that, after all, the people must be ruled. Yet these supposed leaders can barely rule themselves, and they, too, become reliant on demagogues who vow to rule everybody for everybody’s own good.

There’s certainly no harm in well-meaning whites . . . plumbing their own feelings about race. But only newly instructive leadership and organizing could turn white guys’ heads, rattle the commentators’ rationalizations, and politicize the spiritually inclined.

The civil rights movement did all that when it roused impoverished black churchgoers to walk, unarmed and trembling, into silent Southern squares ringed by armed white guys and dogs. It didn’t always deter the white guys, but it did instruct and shame some of them.

Is anything analogous possible now? 

(Source)

The Torture Report (Updated)

From an interview with Glen Greenwald:

The more you look at just how many people and institutions were involved (either actively or by looking the other way) — the doctors, the psychiatrists, the media, members of Congress — the more it starts to sound like a society-wide failure. It reminds me of what Arendt wrote about Germany (and Europe in general) in the interwar and World War II periods, how she described it as a kind of civilizational collapse. Tell me if you think I’m going too far.

I think there are several similar dynamics. For one thing, after World War II, when the full history got told, lots of people who had every way to know what was happening under their noses pretended they didn’t because the recognition of their complicity was just too painful. So they denied it and pretended they didn’t know and claimed that, had they known, they would have reacted a lot more strongly. That reminds me a lot of Tuesday’s reaction on the part of political and media circles in the United States.

And I also agree with your observation that the way in which values get jettisoned and standards get violated is incremental. It’s the frog in the boiling pot analogy; it just incrementally and slowly but inexorably keeps moving away from this point where you think you’re at [vis-à-vis norms and values], but because it’s incremental you feel like you’re always close enough to the prior point that you don’t actually feel like it’s a radical departure. And that has been the story of the United States not just under the Bush administration but for the last 13 years, where everything that happens that seems shocking becomes the justification for the next step.

So what's the next step? Do we really want to know? Is there anything anybody can do about it?

Remember how self-congratulatory the media and political class were after driving Nixon from office? They thought they proved that the system worked, that it was capable of self-correcting when things went wrong. It all seems rather quaint now, especially the idea that driving Nixon out of office was a significant corrective move, that we had then a political culture of accountability that we have since lost.

Update: Noah Millman on the report:

Willingness to torture became, first within elite government and opinion-making circles, then in the culture generally, and finally as a partisan GOP talking point, a litmus test of seriousness with respect to the fight against terrorism. That – proving one’s seriousness in the fight – was its primary purpose from the beginning, in my view. It was only secondarily about extracting intelligence. It certainly wasn’t about instilling fear or extracting false confessions – these would not have served American purposes. It was never about “them” at all. It was about us. It was our psychological security blanket, our best evidence that we were “all-in” in this war, the thing that proved to us that we were fierce enough to win.

I’ve used “we” all through this piece, and the reason is not just because America is a democracy. Our government tortured for us, not just in the sense that it is our representative nor in the sense that its motive was our protection, but in the sense that we, as a country in aggregate, really wanted the proof of seriousness that torture provided.

That’s something we’ll have to grapple with, as a country, if we’re ever to have the strength to follow our own laws and bring the guilty to justice.

Well, will we grapple with it. Obama wants to move on. We have the two legislatures after January whose thinking is shaped by Fox News. No grappling is likely to come from Washington. I hope I'm wrong, but by the middle of January this will likely all be forgotten. 

Christian Liberty 2

A talented musician can get so far just noodling away, say, on his violin or piano.  He might think he's pretty good, and he gets a lot of support to reinforce his high opinion of himself from people who don't know much about music. And so he is not likely to realize the full potential of his talent unless he finds a teacher who can train him in proper technique and introduce him to the accomplishments of the ancestors. It's the same with any kind of spiritual development; most people are noodlers, and they are either to lazy or too egotistical to submit to a basic discipline. They think they are pretty good, or at least good enough. 

But the goal of restricting one's freedom in the short run by submitting to training discipline has the longer-term objective to be able to perform at a greater level of freedom and creativity. The highly trained, disciplined musician is freer because she can play things that are impossible for the noodler. And she has the skills that give more scope that will enable her to respond to deep the inspiration from which all creativity flows. So the goal of submitting to a discipline is to obtain a higher level of freedom and capability--not endless submission as if 'meekness' were an end in itself. We must humbly absorb the what the ancestors have learned and created in their encounter with the "Future" in order that we may advance from their accomplishments further into it. This is what the word 'progress' means to me, and it's at the heart of what  I mean when I call myself a "progressive". And it's also why I don't think of myself as a Liberal. 

Now any spiritually serious person in our western consumer culture faces the problem that  most of the religion that seems to be flourishing today has very little to do with developing spiritual freedom. There are people everywhere who are spiritually starving, and all they can find is spiritual junk food, which has an unwholesome, addictive effect. It provides short-term solution while at the same time creating a more serious long-term problem. And when the junk food offered identifies itself as Christian, it gives Christianity a bad name. 

And then there's the Catholic way of framing freedom and obedience. I think the current Pope Francis understands something about Christians freedom that his predecessor did not. Or at least he's more willing to walk his talk. I don't know for sure what Pope Benedict would have said in response to what I'm saying here about the goal of Christian practice being a deeper level of freedom. I suspect he would agree in theory--his early writings show he understood and embraced the concept.  But his persistent attempts to suppress, for instance, Liberation Theology in Brazil in the 80s was a pretty strong indicator that he was never very sympathetic to the idea that ordinary people were capable of much freedom or that its development was important for their spiritual lives. He probably would have argued that the goal of true spiritual freedom is rarely realized, and that too many people who think they are exercising real freedom are in fact deluded and more than likely really in the grip of compulsion, aka, sin. The road is narrow and the path steep toward the attainment of genuine freedom, he might say, and, Liberation Theology is not what it advertises itself to be. Maybe. 

But I'd argue that nothing is more important in the life of the faith than the development of true Christian freedom. And  maybe true Christian freedom is so rarely realized because the "authorities" are too fearful of people getting it wrong than hopeful that they'll get it right. It's the old Grand Inquisitor archetype from The Brothers Karamazov: the clergy has to keep those in its care in a childlike dependent state to keep them safe from harsh truths that they could not bear to know or cope with. Leave the politics to the grownups who sacrifice themselves to deal with the world's ugly truths so that you children might remain innocent. This is a classic  subterfuge perpetrated by elites to justify their own fear-driven need for control. 

So the question I would put to him then would be this: Is it really desirable that people should just be well-behaved children? Or is that as much a form of unfreedom as the compulsiveness of, say, the sexual libertine? Is it significantly better to be a prig than it is to be a debauchee. Is it better to be a Pharisee than a tax collector? Is it better to be the older son or the prodigal, younger son? It's not good to be either, but if you had to be one or the other, which would it be?

I'm pretty sure he'd say it's better to be the former in these pairs--the prig. It's safer, less messy. And as a parent I understand where he's coming from. Much less to worry about if your kid (or your priests and nuns) is well-behaved and repressed. Better he or she be a member of the party of the Superego rather than of the party of the Id. Better to be neither, but the second has a better chance of salvation, so the Gospels would indicate. 

There's a reason why Jesus got a much warmer reception among those in the party of the Id who had morally scandalous reputations than the morally righteous who were the party of the Superego. The former were less smugly sure of themselves, more vulnerable, more open to the surprising and the new possibility. They were, for sure, in a state of unfreedom, but they were not locked up tight the way the Pharisees were in their whited sepulchers. The unrighteous were disposed toward freedom and recognized true liberation when it came to them. They had a capacity for discernment that the Pharisees did not, at least the ones depicted in the gospels. These Pharisees had highly developed superegos, but profoundly underdeveloped consciences. Conscience is one of those use-it-or-lose it kind of things. Better to use it and be occasionally wrong than not to use it at all. 

Pharisaical moral conformism is the bias of the cultural right and leads to spiritual passivity and a defensive, fortress mentality. The Jesus of the Gospels came to subvert such fortress. But the strength of the fortress correlates with the intensity of the fear, and the intensity of the fear correlates with the intensity of violence needed to suppress the threat. And the threat they fear is true, genuine freedom because it is destabilizing. 

Being well-behaved little children is not the goal of Obedience. Obedience in the spiritual sense is rather the submission of the will to the logic of grace. But you have to have some cognitive capacity to recognize it, and that's a function of  conscience. Those of us who are parents have a duty to challenge the natural narcissism of our children, but we have the more important duty to nourish in them freedom and the development of their consciences. Because in the long run having a well-developed conscience is the only thing that matters. It is the cognitive capacity that must be developed in all mature Christians if they are to discern the movement of grace in their lives or distinguish truth from illusion.

We are all of us in our different ways in states of unfreedom. It's a given. It's what Christians mean when they talk about original sin. But in the final analysis it doesn't matter what the particular form our unfreedom takes. The more important issue is how well disposed we are to be free. Will we greet the Liberator if he should come to us, or violently suppress him out of fear because we care more deeply about stability and good order? 

[Ed.: This is a revised version of an essay originally posted in May 2006.  See also a related post, "Christian Liberty 1." See also "The Communion of Saints"]

Christopher Nolan, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Unconscious

[I haven't had a chance to see Interstellar yet, but Nolan's work has always interested me, and I'm reposting a piece I wrote in 2010 about Tarkovski's Solaris, his response to Kubrick's 2001, which I saw for the first time around the time I first saw Nolan's Inception. I think the post makes sense even if you haven't seen either film. I'm posting it now because it relates to what I wrote "Sacramental Semiotics", and sets up a post I'll probably be writing about Interstellar. Wormhole as metaphor? ]

In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies.

We all heard when we were children that that the human brain is underutilized, that we humans are using only a minuscule percentage of its potential. I remember when I first heard that as a kid I thought that if I could just figure out how to increase capacity a little I could get my math homework done more quickly--I thought about it in terms of IQ and as having underutilized content. Later I wondered what it would mean to have !00% utilization, and I believe now that there is no 100%, that the brain has no content that can be measured in terms of whether it is being well or underused.

It is, rather,  a mirror-like tool developed for human use so that Nature might become self-aware. But a mirror has no capacity of its own; it's empty and its value lies in its being in good working order: clear and clean rather than cracked, dirty, and warped. Its content is completely dependent on what comes into view. And when the brain is the mirror what comes into view is potentially limitless because it emerges out of the human unconscious, and the human unconscious is a fathomless, limitless, transpersonal sea of possibility. There are dimensions of the Real of which we are unconscious, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, only that our awareness of them lies outside the current "consensus reality" or social imaginary.

Carl Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious comes close to what I'm talking about here, but Jung suffered from what Owen Barfield called RUP--Residue of Unresolved Positivism. [Peirce, Heidegger, Barfield are better, if less accessible, guides for our thinking about this.] 

So when people talk about how we humans use only a small capacity of our brains, I think they really mean to say that we humans are only conscious of a small percentage of the Real, that most of reality is hidden from us--because it is unconscious. But the task is not to use more of the brain's capacity, but rather to find ways of bringing into awareness that which is now outside of it, because submerged in the limitless sea of unconsciousness. If we find ways to bring it out from where it is hidden, the brain as mirror will see it, remember it, and give the viewer something to think about and make sense of. "Making sense" means making it fit within the frame of  the existing social imaginary, or if it doesn't fit, expanding the social imaginary to accommodate the new 'data'. Science is certainly one area where this deepening of awareness is the task, but so is art and spiritual practice. 

It is one thing to look and see; it's another to remember and understand. The brain is the tool that allows us to see, to remember, to make connections, i.e., to be conscious. It is important to have a brain that is clean and in good working order, but more important is the scope and quality of the information available for it to work with. Neuroscience is mirror mechanics, not consciousness mechanics. Consciousness just is. The brain is a function of consciousness, not consciousness a function of the brain.  

 

The argument at this blog has been that moderns and postmoderns, insofar as the scope of our awareness is limited to the positivist frame, to what can be seen and touched, are working with only the surfaces or the husks of things. Far more interesting is what lies behind those surfaces or within those husks. That we are now incapable of experiencing that 'behind' and 'within' does not mean that they aren't there, only that we are unconscious of them, that the modern collective consciousness has forgotten about them. If we can accept that there are individual repressed memories, is it so hard to accept that there are also collective repressed memories? 

Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances says that all Nature is the human unconscious. In other words, it's wrong to think of the Unconscious as yours or mine--its ours; we are all swimming in it, and we are all connected in it. But in the same way that childhood memories are forgotten or repressed, in the same way we cannot bring those forgotten experiences into awareness at will, so too are we unable to bring into felt awareness our connection to the Real beyond the husks that is Natura.

We experience, if we are true moderns and postmoderns, mostly our being cut off from it. We think we are over here and that nature and other people are over there because we have forgotten how we all emerged out of this deep network of interconnection. Our embeddeness in that deep network is a repressed memory. And every once in a while we might have an experience, a moment of recall, so to speak, and we feel that we understand something we once took for granted, but because it is so out of tune with the way everyone thinks and behaves around us, we soon forget what we've remembered and reabsorb into the surrounding social imaginary.

Holding on to the memory is the main discipline in what I think of as 'faith'.  Having these moments of recall are moments of grace, and everything depends on whether they are taken seriously and remembered, whether they are seed moments that fall on fertile ground or fall on ground that is barren or where it is trampled under foot.

***

Of the two movies, Solaris interests me more. And there is more to be said about it than I have the energy to write about it right now--I think I need also to watch it again. But it was developed by Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the biggest difference in their respective mythic imaginations lies in that for Tarkovsky reality, the part of it that we have "forgotten", is at its root interpersonal. The Kubrick vision of the Star Child and of Bowman's Odyssesy is suffocatingly disconnected and isolating. They mythic grandeur and ambitions of Kubrick's film are admirable, but it is still very much the product of an imagination that is circumscribed by RUP. Tarkovsky was working in another, very different neighborhood. I'll leave it there for now, but someday I want to come back to that. Or in comments if anybody wants to explore that angle.

And Inception interests me more about what it has to say about our conscious world than what it says about our unconscious. This film isn't about exploring an unconscious dream world; it depicts more an imperial colonization of the unconscious by the conscious. It's not about discovering and entering into a relationship with what's there, but rather a pushing back, as the white man pushed back the Indian, and imposing its old-world structures and habits of thinking in this strange and unfamiliar new world.

And that's fine for the purposes of the movie. Because isn't the real point that what we think of as the real world is pretty much the same kind of construct as the dream worlds?  Isn't the ending with the top spinning meant to suggest that it's not clear whether Cobb is still in a dream world even though he thinks he's in the real world? And isn't the point then that what we take for real, really isn't, that it's just as much a construct and just as much a prison as the so-called Limbos? This story tells us nothing about the unconscious and its mysteries, only about the ephemeral, fundamentally unstable nature of what we take to be conscious reality, or the so-called "real world". 

But I find Nolan's fascination with the role of memory in this movie--as well in his earlier Memento--as interesting and important, and explored in ways that need more exposition than I can do now and here. But the takeaway for now is that remembering, correct memory, is one of the most important things we can do that connects us to the Real, and that improving our capacity for remembering is a critically important spiritual discipline. We are our memories, and the quality of who we are in large part depends on the quality of what we remember.