After the Future

Getting After the Future

I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns.  By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common with his medieval peasant counterpart in China than than he would with a French worker living today. The greater divide is not between the medieval Frenchman and Chinaman, but between the Frenchman with premodern consciousness and the Frenchman with modern consciousness. 

It's not just about the cultural differences. It's about the reality differences because the premodern social imaginary shapes one's consciousness of reality in a profoundly different way from the modern social imaginary.  And we're living in interesting times now, because as the modern imaginary is breaking down, we're in the process of developing yet another social imaginary, which we've been calling postmodern for want of a better name--because it's whatever comes after the modern. Philosophers like Jean Gebser call it the "aperspectival".  But more on that another time.  

The interesting thing for Taylor is not that the world changed because of scientific discoveries, but that the imagination of the world changed during the modern era in such a way that an ordered, meaningful "cosmos" morphed into a vast, empty, disenchanted "universe". In other words, he seeks to describe how and why we have become secularized moderns. And without diminishing all the important advantages that come with our having become moderns, he challenges us to recognize what has been lost and the price we have paid for those advantages. He is not a conservative lamenting our cultural degradation.  He's a philosopher--and a Christian believer-- trying to understand what happened to us and what' its implications are.

Although Taylor's erudition is more than I could acquire in two lifetimes, he is groping with the same themes I've been exploring here at After the Future. This past summer (check July archive posts on "Naturalism and Supernaturalism") I got into it with some naturalists with whom I argued that they were unnecessarily limiting themselves by insisting only on naturalistic explanations for everything, including religious experiences. The more thoughtful naturalists who commented here admitted the reality of experiences that religious types like me call transcendent, but don't see how they provide proof of anything that points to a spiritual dimension that coexists or even envelops our material existence.  

I am not going to rehearse the back and forth that went on about that again.  But during those those exchanges it struck me how difficult it is for modern naturalists to stand outside of their assumptions, I think because those assumptions are still so strongly reinforced by the modern rationalist social imaginary. So as a remedy, might I suggest to open-minded naturalists to read Taylor if they are interested to get some perspective on terrain that is already very familiar to them if they are truly open to seeing this familiar territory in a larger, evolving context.  For me the value of the book is to see one's own little mental world as  but an eddy in this larger, magnificent stream. I think secular moderns of the naturalist variety would have a similar experience.

So don't get me wrong, if I had to choose who to spend time with stranded on a desert island, I'd much rather spend it with Sam Harris than someone like Pat Robertson. Robertson represents what I have called zombie traditionalism--traditional forms possessed by the ghoulish spirit of jingoistic, consumer capitalism. People so possessed tend to be hopelessly ineducable. Harris, on the other hand, represents the moribund spirit of Enlightenment rationality. It still has some kick in it, and I think with enough time I could show him that it has no future. That the future lies elsewhere.  

When Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins talk about the horror of religious belief, they are talking about the curdled vestiges of premodern and early modern religious impulses that have overstayed their welcome.  That's not what I'm talking about. I'm interested in religion in a postmodern key, which is something these atheists are for the most part unaware of or too easily and thoughtlessly dismiss.   

My argument is that these atheists are still constrained by the modern cultural template that has been breaking down for almost a century now, in part because it no longer works, and we are no longer willing to pay the price for the diminishing benefits it provides. But while we're waiting for something new to gel, anything goes, and for want of anything better to do, the culture rehearses over and over again the arguments advanced during the Scopes trial assuming that one or the other has to be right without considering that both are terribly, horribly wrong. 

And those of us who see that,while we would gladly pay, and extravagantly well, for a new social imagination of the world that would offer the depth and beauty and meaning that is so lacking in our current soul-flattened world, we are not willing to pay for solutions we have reason to believe will disappoint us. We're skeptical for good reason.  There are snake oil salesmen on every corner hawking elixirs that will cure what ails us, and what mostly ails us is anxiety about the future. And while they promise to give us what we long for, they don't deliver, not the least of which those proposed by the churches in their present state of diffidence or fanaticism. There are exceptions here and there, but while some offer better remedies or temporary anodynes  than others, none have the deep, resounding collective resonance required for the transformation of the collective imagination or social imaginary that we know will come sooner or later. We're at slack tide right now, but there will be a shift and anybody with half a clue will recognize it for what it is. 

***

This week I met with a friend, and she said something I've been thinking about since.  She asked me how I was imagining the future, or words to that effect, and I said I was having a hard time with that, or words to that effect. Imagining next week is a big enough task for me at the moment.  Nevertheless, I took it as an important reminder about the true nature of our task: She said we have to bend our efforts to create the future in our imaginations. We need to write novels and songs and poems. We need to create movies and plays and use all the media available to us to create the future in our imagination of it. 

Something in time will emerge out of these efforts, because the future is not something that happens to us anymore; it's something that at some level we have to choose and create. It's not enough anymore to just point out what wrong; we have to create a world that's right, and it starts in our efforts to think about such a world and to imagine it as a real possibility. What would such a world look like? I'd argue that right now that's the difference between the right and the left. The right has an imagination of the future that is based on a return to an imaginary past. The left no longer believes in the future and has no compelling vision to compete with the Right.  The energies of the traditional left are tired and dissipated--it provides no compelling social imaginary. 

For whatever any of us thinks of as real is only our current provisional imagination of it.  Our modern naturalist social imaginary is a temporary house of cards, currently collapsing in slow motion. That isn't to say that there is nothing real about the cards in use now--but only that we are dealing with half a deck. In a hundred years we will have reshuffled the deck that by then, if things go well, will include cards that have not yet been discovered and others that were lost and have been found, and we will assemble them into something new. If things go badly, we could then be looking back from the other side of technological singularity--if they go well from a spiritual singularity--perhaps a new axial age. I don't know how this will play out, no one does. But something's got to give, and the responsibility for making the future happen, as never before, is in human hands.

Reality is not something that we can allow to just happen to us. If we do, then the bad guys win by default. For my friend is right: reality is a work of the imagination. Our work with the imagination, of course, has has to operate within the limitations of the cards we have to play with, but it's important that we play with all the cards, not just the ones we're most familiar with and most comfortable with. And this discovery of the new and the remembering of the old keeps the process interesting and dynamic. And because it is so dynamic and evolving, both Christians and naturalists would do well to have a lot more humility and flexibility about what they think of as real. 

I've been saying all along that ultimately the solution isn't political. We have to do what we can to restrain the forces of powerlust and greed from dominating the political and economic sphere, but saying No to them, while it is a tactical necessity, is not a long-range strategy. Changing the social imaginary is.

[Editor's Note: This is a repost from October 2007 slightly revised. I am reposting it here because I think it's a good follow-up to the previous post, "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses."] 

I've been reading in philosopher of religion Charles Taylor's new book, A Secular Age, which explores the monumental cultural shift over the last 500 years from having the "social imaginary" of premoderns to that of moderns.  By social imaginary he means a culture's collective representation of reality. The medieval peasant in France has more in common with his medieval peasant counterpart in China than than he would with a French worker living today. The greater divide is not between the medieval Frenchman and Chinaman, but between the Frenchman with premodern consciousness and the Frenchman with modern consciousness. 

It's not just about the cultural differences. It's about the reality differences because the premodern social imaginary shapes one's consciousness of reality in a profoundly different way from the modern social imaginary.  And we're living in interesting times now, because as the modern imaginary is breaking down, we're in the process of developing yet another social imaginary, which we've been calling postmodern for want of a better name--because it's whatever comes after the modern. Philosophers like Jean Gebser call it the "aperspectival".  But more on that another time.  

The interesting thing for Taylor is not that the world changed because of scientific discoveries, but that the imagination of the world changed during the modern era in such a way that an ordered, meaningful "cosmos" morphed into a vast, empty, disenchanted "universe". In other words, he seeks to describe how and why we have become secularized moderns. And without diminishing all the important advantages that come with our having become moderns, he challenges us to recognize what has been lost and the price we have paid for those advantages. He is not a conservative lamenting our cultural degradation.  He's a philosopher--and a Christian believer-- trying to understand what happened to us and what' its implications are.

Although Taylor's erudition is more than I could acquire in two lifetimes, he is groping with the same themes I've been exploring here at After the Future. This past summer (check July archive posts on "Naturalism and Supernaturalism") I got into it with some naturalists with whom I argued that they were unnecessarily limiting themselves by insisting only on naturalistic explanations for everything, including religious experiences. The more thoughtful naturalists who commented here admitted the reality of experiences that religious types like me call transcendent, but don't see how they provide proof of anything that points to a spiritual dimension that coexists or even envelops our material existence.  

I am not going to rehearse the back and forth that went on about that again.  But during those those exchanges it struck me how difficult it is for modern naturalists to stand outside of their assumptions, I think because those assumptions are still so strongly reinforced by the modern rationalist social imaginary. So as a remedy, might I suggest to open-minded naturalists to read Taylor if they are interested to get some perspective on terrain that is already very familiar to them if they are truly open to seeing this familiar territory in a larger, evolving context.  For me the value of the book is to see one's own little mental world as  but an eddy in this larger, magnificent stream. I think secular moderns of the naturalist variety would have a similar experience.

So don't get me wrong, if I had to choose who to spend time with stranded on a desert island, I'd much rather spend it with Sam Harris than someone like Pat Robertson. Robertson represents what I have called zombie traditionalism--traditional forms possessed by the ghoulish spirit of jingoistic, consumer capitalism. People so possessed tend to be hopelessly ineducable. Harris, on the other hand, represents the moribund spirit of Enlightenment rationality. It still has some kick in it, and I think with enough time I could show him that it has no future. That the future lies elsewhere.  

When Harris, Hitchens, and Dawkins talk about the horror of religious belief, they are talking about the curdled vestiges of premodern and early modern religious impulses that have overstayed their welcome.  That's not what I'm talking about. I'm interested in religion in a postmodern key, which is something these atheists are for the most part unaware of or too easily and thoughtlessly dismiss.   

My argument is that these atheists are still constrained by the modern cultural template that has been breaking down for almost a century now, in part because it no longer works, and we are no longer willing to pay the price for the diminishing benefits it provides. But while we're waiting for something new to gel, anything goes, and for want of anything better to do, the culture rehearses over and over again the arguments advanced during the Scopes trial assuming that one or the other has to be right without considering that both are terribly, horribly wrong. 

And those of us who see that,while we would gladly pay, and extravagantly well, for a new social imagination of the world that would offer the depth and beauty and meaning that is so lacking in our current soul-flattened world, we are not willing to pay for solutions we have reason to believe will disappoint us. We're skeptical for good reason.  There are snake oil salesmen on every corner hawking elixirs that will cure what ails us, and what mostly ails us is anxiety about the future. And while they promise to give us what we long for, they don't deliver, not the least of which those proposed by the churches in their present state of diffidence or fanaticism. There are exceptions here and there, but while some offer better remedies or temporary anodynes  than others, none have the deep, resounding collective resonance required for the transformation of the collective imagination or social imaginary that we know will come sooner or later. We're at slack tide right now, but there will be a shift and anybody with half a clue will recognize it for what it is. 

***

This week I met with a friend, and she said something I've been thinking about since.  She asked me how I was imagining the future, or words to that effect, and I said I was having a hard time with that, or words to that effect. Imagining next week is a big enough task for me at the moment.  Nevertheless, I took it as an important reminder about the true nature of our task: She said we have to bend our efforts to create the future in our imaginations. We need to write novels and songs and poems. We need to create movies and plays and use all the media available to us to create the future in our imagination of it. 

Something in time will emerge out of these efforts, because the future is not something that happens to us anymore; it's something that at some level we have to choose and create. It's not enough anymore to just point out what wrong; we have to create a world that's right, and it starts in our efforts to think about such a world and to imagine it as a real possibility. What would such a world look like? I'd argue that right now that's the difference between the right and the left. The right has an imagination of the future that is based on a return to an imaginary past. The left no longer believes in the future and has no compelling vision to compete with the Right.  The energies of the traditional left are tired and dissipated--it provides no compelling social imaginary. 

For whatever any of us thinks of as real is only our current provisional imagination of it.  Our modern naturalist social imaginary is a temporary house of cards, currently collapsing in slow motion. That isn't to say that there is nothing real about the cards in use now--but only that we are dealing with half a deck. In a hundred years we will have reshuffled the deck that by then, if things go well, will include cards that have not yet been discovered and others that were lost and have been found, and we will assemble them into something new. If things go badly, we could then be looking back from the other side of technological singularity--if they go well from a spiritual singularity--perhaps a new axial age. I don't know how this will play out, no one does. But something's got to give, and the responsibility for making the future happen, as never before, is in human hands.

Reality is not something that we can allow to just happen to us. If we do, then the bad guys win by default. For my friend is right: reality is a work of the imagination. Our work with the imagination, of course, has has to operate within the limitations of the cards we have to play with, but it's important that we play with all the cards, not just the ones we're most familiar with and most comfortable with. And this discovery of the new and the remembering of the old keeps the process interesting and dynamic. And because it is so dynamic and evolving, both Christians and naturalists would do well to have a lot more humility and flexibility about what they think of as real. 

I've been saying all along that ultimately the solution isn't political. We have to do what we can to restrain the forces of powerlust and greed from dominating the political and economic sphere, but saying No to them, while it is a tactical necessity, is not a long-range strategy. Changing the social imaginary is.

[Editor's Note: This is a repost from October 2007 slightly revised. I am reposting it here because I think it's a good follow-up to the previous post, "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses."] 

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

“The Word of God [the Logos] became a human so that you may learn from a human how a human may become God.”--Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 1.8.4.7-9

For what follows to make sense, the reader must be at least relatively open to the idea that ancient Greek speculative metaphysics from Heraclitus through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics cross-fertilized with Jewish and Christian revelation provide a mythopoetic framework to think about who we are, why we're here and where we're going. I realize for most people whose imaginations have been programed by later modernity's rationalist materialist cultural operating system, this is a heavy lift. All I ask here is that you be open to some level of resonance that the theses laid out below might have as you read them. They are not meant to persuade so much as to evoke a memory, so to say. Each thesis that follows could be a chapter in a book, but I'll assume the reader has enough biblical and philosophical literacy so that the more obvious references need not be elaborated upon. I've also added several "footnotes" in the comment section to develop some of these ideas or to entertain objections. 

1. The Logos is the uncreated ground--the ontological foundation--of all created Being and as such the condition for the possibility of the created World's intelligibility. The Logos is the interface between the fathomless incomprehensibility of the uncreated Godhead and the intelligible Being of the World.
2. So much of the Being of the World has been forgotten because human consciousness is shrouded in darkness since the Fall, a prehistorical, perhaps even a prebiological, event after which humans forgot who they were and for what purposes they were created. 
3. Humans were created in the image and likeness of the Logos. So while profound dimensions of the Being of the World remain mostly undisclosed to human awareness, their disclosure is the progressive process of humans becoming self-aware. As humans come to understand their own depths, they come to understand the depths of the World as it is structured by and participates in the Logos. 
4. We have no idea about what the biblical mythos of the Fall literally signifies, but it suggests that the universe is multi-dimensional and that the Fall was experienced as an ontological shift in the sphere of human activity from a higher dimension to a lower one, from a conscious communion with a higher order of being to a state of alienation from it, i.e., from alignment with the Logos, to a misalignment with and an eventual forgetting of our participating in the Logos.
5. The Being of the World is the human unconscious as the human soul is grounded in the Logos. Heidegger says that we humans have forgotten Being. Yes, and knowledge is the progressive process of both remembering what our primordial relationship to Being is and moving into a deeper relationship with it. 
6. We are immersed in Being yet we are estranged from it insofar as a vestigial memory of our former home in the higher order lingers. Homelessness is our existential condition and some humans experience that homelessness more intensely than others. To not experience homelessness is to be in the despair that Kierkegaard says is unaware of being despair.
7. The rules governing how things work in the lower dimension are what we recognize as the physical laws of science in the material world, which, like the principles governing biological evolution in the life world are for the most part impersonal, random, and cruel. 
8. The fall into biological evolution--qua fall into alienation, homelessness, and misalignment with the Logos--is a fall into a condition of fundamental injustice. This state of 'injustice' is what the Christian tradition calls ‘original sin’, a condition from which humans are helpless by themselves to liberate themselves. 
9. To be liberated means to be realigned with the Logos, which is to be in a state of justice, or to be 'justified'. A state of justice is one in which cruelty is replaced with compassion, randomness by realignment with the higher order, the impersonal when all aspects of the Being of the World are in communion with one another. This higher, transcendent order is recognized in other religions and philosophies after the Axial Revolution from the Tao in China to the Good in Plato.
10. Promises were made by the Logos to ancient Hebrew ancestors that this liberation or justification or realignment would be a possibility in the future. A world ruled by justice is, therefore, one in which the logic of biological evolution will be replaced by a restoration of the higher order, which will make possible the restoration an order of communion in which wolves lie down with lambs and swords are beaten into ploughshares. 
11. The movement toward justification was enabled by Logos-inspired interventions from outside the sphere of original sin through the work of prophets, philosophers, saints, bodhisattvas, rishis, great sages, culture heroes, and lawgivers throughout the world and at different times. What Jaspers calls the Axial Age was an era of profound interventions of this kind. 
12. These culture heroes provided extrinsic rules, laws, taboos, and customs that helped humans to live in ways that more closely approximated justice, i.e., rules to help humans find ways to live together that were more aligned with the Logos's higher order rather than with the random, cruel, impersonal principles that governed the lower or 'fallen' dimension alienated from communion with the Logos.
13. The introduction of Law was a reminder of the forsaken home in the higher order, and with it an uncomfortable tension developed in the human soul, which was pulled intrinsically in one direction by the instinctual logic of biological evolution comprising the will to power and the master/slave dynamic, and in the other direction by the extrinsic imposition of counter-instinctual laws and customs given by Logos-inspired culture heroes. 
14. While interventions from outside the fallen sphere were universally experienced by all human cultures, some interventions had more significant impacts than others. The cultures in which the great post-Axial world religions developed are those in which these interventions had the greatest impact.
15. One particular society, that of the ancient Israelites, was singled out for a unique intervention, and it was through it that the Logos entered into biological evolution in order to influence the evolution of the earth from within it rather than only from outside of it. The Logos incarnated as the human being Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew. His mission was to remind humans who they were and to make possible a restoration of the communion with him that had been lost in the Fall. And in restoring that communion to divinize human beings, if by that we mean restoring human lost identity as created in the image and likeness of of the Logos. This the early Church fathers callled 'theosis'. See epigraph by Clement above. 
16. Jesus remained deeply aligned with his own inmost identity as Logos, but unlike the prelapasarian Adam's failure in the garden, Jesus in his prelapasarian state (born without original sin) resisted a similarly intense temptation in the wilderness. After returning from the wilderness, he began a public teaching ministry in which He announced the coming rule of Justice, i.e., the coming realignment, in a kingdom in which the first, those who flourish in a world dominated by will to power and greed in the Fallen World, will be last in a Just World.
17. At the end of his public ministry, he freely surrendered to the rule of cruelty and will to power that had been the inner driving force behind evolution and empire, and penetrated into the very depths of it so that a new competing inner driving force might be introduced into earth evolution. 
18. The kingdom of justice is thus something that gestates within the soul of the world and within the individual human soul insofar as each becomes gradually more aligned with the Logos, i.e., as each soul moves gradually toward its theosis. So as more individual souls move toward their theosis a counterdevelopment grows alongside it in biological evolution effecting its transformation, and in the distant future supplanting it. 
19. If interventions before this point were outside-in (law, custom), after Easter and Pentecost, the interventions would gradually become more inside-out. Moral behavior becomes increasingly governed by the grace-inspired heart rather than by law or custom. Conscience, the intuitive apprehension of the Logos, replaces superego, the internalized extrinsic code of the tribe.
20. The kingdom of God born within is the seed of the promised reign of justice, and individuals and societies are justified to the degree that that seed germinates and grows first in individual souls and then in the communities they form and the societies they build.    
21. The Christian Church itself goes through evolutionary stages: the first, the ebullient Age of the Church Fathers who integrated Jewish revelation with Greek transcendental metaphyiscs; the second, the stern post-Constantinian age of Roman code and dogma; the third, the Protestant disenchantment of the world emphasizing interiority, freedom, and the individual conscience; the fourth in which we are now, which is a wandering in the wilderness necessary for stripping away extrinsic supports so that the new thing can emerge from within. 
22. The fifth, the post-secular age into which we are entering now, I believe will retrieve a sacramental imagination of the cosmos. As the Logos germiniates and grows in individual souls, it awakens correlatively in the soul of the world, and with that awakening comes the re-enchantment of the world experienced as sacrament and with that the restoration of a participative ontology and metaphysics. 
23. The goal of history is the fulfillment of the promises made to the Jewish Patriarchs, the earth and all beings on it shall be justified and all creation shall live in communion, thous in love with other thous. All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. 
24. The transformation of evolution is a divinely inspired human task from within history, not a purely divine intervention from outside of it. After Easter, humans still remain very much in a fallen, homeless  condition, but their deliverance comes from inside out, from the depths. The Logos since Good Friday no longer works outside-in; he works inside-out. Home is not in some eternal or heavenly dimension, but something humans build gradually in history. This is the human project, to renew the face of the earth gradually from inside out.
25. The task for humans now individually and collectively is to help and encourage one another to live justly as best they can, i.e., to cultivate the growth of the reign of justice within, to live discerning their way forward with grace-inspired consciences, to fight compassionately for justice rightly understood, to do their part, no matter how small, to advance the reign of justice in the world.

While I'm sure that people more learned than I can point to problems I'm unaware of, I believe this is a completely orthodox account that answers the question: Cur deus homo? Whether this account is believable for others or not, I believe an account like it is called for and will emerge sooner or later that will be broadly accepted by Christians, who currently have little sense of meaning in history or of how to think about evolution. 

Conventional Christian thinking about history cares more about what happens outside of time than what happens inside of it; the goal has been for the most part to get out of the flood rather than to push back against its impersonal, random cruelty and chaos. This "escape" narrative is deeply and unnecessarily alienating insofar as it distracts us from the richer, deeper meanings of incarnation that were opened up for us two thousand years ago.

Secular postmodernity and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary gives us no place to stand to get a foothold to push back against the flood. We need such a foothold if we are not to be swept away, but we need more than a foothold if we are to move forward. We need a sense of rich, future human possibility that's worth striving for. Does anyone really believe that secular humanism and the levelled consumer society it has spawned has any belief in human possibility that is worth fighting for? The political and religious Right in the country are deeply, deeply mistaken, but they at least believe that they are defending something worth fighting for. Does the typical careerist cosmopolitian on the cultural Left have any such belief?  

[Slightly revised 6/11/23]