After the Future

Our Collective Insanity

Nature loves to conceal herself. Heraclitus, Frag. 10

Eyes and ears are bad witnesses to men having rude souls. Heraclitus, Frag. 4

Though the Logos is common, yet the many live as if they had an understanding of their own. Heraclitus, Frag 92

Crazy means not being in your right mind. I am interested in understanding how groups and even entire societies may or may not be in their right minds, and how in such groups crazy can be normal. So I'm not talking about clinical crazy, but the way crazy can be normal for many if not most people. But I want to treat this not as a social psychological problem, but as a philosophical/theological one. 

Everything I say here assumes that our contemporary condition as disembedded, late moderns makes us vulnerable to particularly vicious forms of collective craziness because the infrastructure that makes nature Nature--the Logos--is concealed from us in an historically unprecedented way. It always has been concealed, even in Heraclitus's day, but before around the middle of the 19th century the North Atlantic societies were at least open to its disclosing itself. The celebration of the 'sublime' was the last, rickety attempt to hold on to a sense of the mystery our ancestors felt in a cosmos that they took for granted as shot through with the divine. In our current peculiarly extreme buffered condition in which the reality on screens is more vivid than the reality we actually live in, we have become collectively prone to what I call ontological dizziness. In such a state we are likely to grab onto anything that will give us a feeling of stability. 

When people suffer from ontological dizziness, they frequently grab onto a collective delusion that seems real only because everybody else thinks it is. Its delusional character derives from its having nothing to do with the Logos or the deep structure of the Real to which Heraclitus refers. We see how this kind of extreme collective delusion works in cults, but we find it harder to see operating in the mainstream. Most southerners before the 1960s were incapable of seeing that the segregated south was built on such a collective delusion.

Similarly everyone in the 1930s who wasn't already inclined to the authoritarian fantasy promoted by right-wing demagogues saw how Germany was in the grips of such a collective delusion. Both societies--the segregated south and post-Weimar Germany--were supported by many ordinary, decent human beings who were  thrown into ontological dizziness by the humiliation and identity loss after their societies lost devastatingly bloody wars. Disruptions that destroy traditional ways of life, customs, or ideologies force the people in those disrupted societies into a state of dizziness, and they are presented with a choice to either adapt in a healthy way or to double down in an attitude of self-pity, grievance, and resentment toward the agents of disruption. 

Creative adaptation doesn't require simply surrendering to the disrupters. The situation in Japan suggests that there are ways of taking what's valuable from the disrupters, while remaining true to one's traditions while at the same time shedding its more delusional pretensions. But if you are in  a society that adapts in unhealthy ways, it's very hard to know whether the adaptation is healthy or unhealthy because if unhealthy everyone you know shares the disease. And sometimes you don't get to healthy until unhealthy runs its course. A catastrophic collective death shock is sometimes the only thing that can snap a society out of its collective delusion. This is an open question for American society right now as clearly it is in extreme need of a slap upside the head. Apparently 2008 wasn't a big enough slap. 

So is it possible for a society to establish a standpoint outside of its collective delusions to critique itself for what is healthy or unhealthy in it? The answer at this point seems to be no. Insofar as God is dead, his spokespersons on earth, particularly in the churches, have little credibility or authority for shaping a healthy social imaginary. And there are no other credible persons--philosophers, poets, or saints--who are capable of speaking on behalf of the Logos. So it's not just the uneducated who have rude souls who are incapable of recognizing it; it's a culture-wide phenomenon. The educated elite are equally if not more likely to be insensible of the Logos and mistrustful of anybody who tries to call attention to it as a possible path toward collective sanity:

To this Logos which I unfold, although it always exists, men make themselves insensible, both before they have heard it and when they have heard it for the first time. For notwithstanding that all things happen according to this Logos, men act as though they had never had any experience in regard to it when they attempt such words and works as I am now relating, describing each thing according to its nature and explaining how it is ordered. And some men are as ignorant of what they do when awake as they are forgetful of what they do when asleep. Heraclitus, frag. 2.

Heraclitus and the Greek philosophical tradition through to the Roman Stoics thought that the Logos was the deep structure of reality, and the Christian Neoplatonic tradition integrated that line of Greek thinking into its own cosmology. But the condition of being "insensible" or asleep has since the middle of the first millennium BCE been recognized as the problem--and all the great post-axial religious traditions--the Hebraic/Hellenic tradition of the West as well as the Buddhist, Hindu, and Taoist traditions of the East, have provided a regime for waking up.

While in any society, even those shaped by one of these great traditions, most people remain asleep, there has been among the elite enough wakefulness to  acknowledge the importance of the role of the philosophers, poets, or saints who were awake and shared what they have learned about the Deep Real. In contemporary secular society, there is no sense that we are in a collective sleep state or that we have any need to be awakened from it, so anything goes. But a society is sane to the degree that its ethos is shaped by some level of alignment with the Logos, even if most people in it are shaped by it unconsciously. A society spins off into insanity when it loses touch with it. 

And so our being insensible to the Logos is what keeps us out of our collective right minds. We are born alienated and out of touch with that to which Heraclitus points--the Logos or the Deep Real that hides itself from us so long as we sleep--but if we lived in a sane society we would understand that our lives should be oriented toward greater states of wakefulness, and the more awake we are, the more real our cognition of the Logos suffusing all that exists. 

To the degree that we are not oriented toward the Logos, i.e., not sensible of it, we are not in our right minds. To the degree that we are oriented toward it--that we hearken to it--we are still not right, but are moving toward a greater level of health. To the degree that we are in our right minds, we owe it to those who have gone before us who were sensible of the Logos in their different ways and have passed on what they learned about it.

But the ancestors can only pass forward the letter; each generation has to discover for itself the spirit, the life-nourishing energy that comes from having a foothold in the Deep Real. Individuals find their way to it in eccentric ways, but a tradition dies when in the collective life of a society only the form--the letter--is passed on and a quorum among the next generation cannot find the spirit in it. It is in this sense that Nietzsche was correct when he said that God was dead. The cultural forms of Western society no longer conveyed the spirit--at least in a way that was cognizable to the culture's elite. Those forms were essentially pushed to the side by a soul-flattening utilitarianism in thrall to a reductive materialism that shaped a social imaginary peculiarly impervious to disclosures of the Logos. And this reductive materialism is what all 'sane', educated people accept as normal reality, even if they think of themselves as religious. 

But individuals are still capable of hearkening to the Logos. What is it in us that hearkens? Anybody who has a rudimentary experience of "conscience" knows what I mean by this hearkening. Hearkening is not something performed by the head. It's not a function of superego. Our common experience of hearkening is more like how we are moved by an encounter with beauty or goodness. I mean really moved, as in moved to tears. Whatever that cognitive faculty in us that orients us toward the Logos, is that in us that in its encounter with anything that is good, true, and beautiful feels an emotional resonance that moves us in a very distinctive way.  

Regardless of one's metaphysics or religious beliefs, all that matters is that one hearkens--that one has some capacity for it. Everybody does, but in some it lies dormant, and so they live lives insensible to it according to a script given them by their cultural conditioning--as for instance Christians living complacently in the segregated South--or they live a life swinging back and forth between a life episodically intoxicated by the lower instincts and then retreat to the order and safety of social convention. 

***

The Christian word for spiritual unhealth is 'sin'. Many, probably most, Christians tend to think of sin as synonymous with what is socially taboo, i.e., as breaking the tribal code by behaving badly in some way. If you are someone who habitually transgresses traditional taboos, you think of yourself as sinful person, and you think of those who don't transgress as good persons defined by their lack of sinfulness. People who are serious about being 'good' think that if they can avoid certain transgressive acts, they will remain pure, sinless, in a state of grace. This idea assumes that such a state of purity is our natural condition and that it's only our bad behavior that removes us from that state of purity. 

The reality is the opposite. We are never pure: sinfulness constitutes the warp and woof of our everyday experience of being insensible to the Logos, which remains hidden from us until we gradually become sensible to it. And only then do we develop the capacity to know the good and to do it. Just living out the cultural script for being well behaved has nothing to do with being truly good or sane. Trying to maintain one's purity by rigorously observing the code creates the even bigger problem I call Whited-Sepulcher Syndrome.

And yet Christians believe that they are called to be perfect as their Father in heaven is perfect. How do you resolve this contradiction? I don't think it's that hard to understand. We are called to become fully the image of God in whose likeness we were created, but this is effected only by a gradual, healing process called 'theosis'.  Moral behavior might have some social utility, but it is spiritually meaningless unless it is a means to an end, which is theosis. This is effected not by following the cultural script but by hearkening to the Logos, which, if we respond in the right way, leads us into a life that is truly Good. 

Sin is our normal reality, not something we slip into when we act badly. Acting badly is the default. Acting in a way that is genuinely good is the exception. Our motives for doing even the right thing are never pure. They can't be, but it's ok if you understand that all that matters is the part of the motive that is a true hearkening--that part is real even if there are other less noble factors influencing our decision. All that matters is that we 'hearken'.

Sin is not something into which we fall; we're already immersed in it, as if in a fog. It's important to accept that as the starting point for any moral progress. It's only something we can gradually dissipate as the sun does the fog. Our experience of hearkening is like those disclosive moments when there is a momentary break in the fog and we see the sun, some blue sky, or a tree top and are startled by its beauty. But most of our world remains still shrouded in mist. 

Religion or any philosophy or ideology has utility only as a guide rail might provide some help insofar as it gives us something to hold onto in a fogbound world. But the guide rail is not an end in itself; its value lies in leading us to a clearing where we might see for ourselves what those who left the guide rail behind saw. The goal is not simply to cling to the rail, but to dissipate the fog for ourselves and those around us. 

Religious or philosophical assertions about the nature of what lies beyond the fog have no liberating power if they do not provide the resources that will enable us all to clear the fog for ourselves, and a religious practice can do this only if there are some people in every generation who can credibly speak to the way the world looks unfogged.

Too often religion, rather than dissipating the fog, produces more of it and thicker. It promotes the guide rail as an end in itself, and people in their anxiety clutch to it and refuse to move along it. It becomes a security fetish rather than a guide toward greater freedom and clarity.  And as such, a religion can often be for many people an institution that jails us in our condition of alienation and sin rather than providing for us the means to free ourselves from it.  

***

Our contemporary social imaginary is shaped by two contradictory impulses, a dual heritage that comes to us from the Enlightenment and Romanticism. From the Enlightenment we inherit the need for social control and the managerial liberalism that has created the buffering technocracies that organize the political and economic regimes that most of find so oppressive. From Romanticism we inherit the longing to be free of all  those oppressive social regimes, to be in touch with something alive, natural, densely real, and un-constructed. The first we embrace because it makes us feel safe; the second we embrace because it makes us feel alive.

The oscillation between them is poorly managed by almost everybody because we all suffer from what I call Missing Middle Syndrome--we are brains seeking control while at the same time contending with an instinctual life that chafes against that control, and the iciness of the brain when contending with the wet heat of instinct creates the fog about which we spoke above. The missing middle is the life of the soul, and the heart is the radiating energy center whose power integrates within itself the energies of the instinctual life with the reflective powers of the mind.

Missing Middle Syndrome is the disease that caused the group insanity that gripped Spain during its inquisitions and religious purges, Protestants and Catholics during the Thirty Years War, the Jacobins during the French Revolution, the Puritans in Salem, the Leninists during the Russian Revolution, the Fascists in Spain, Italy, and Germany, the Maoists in China, the McCarthyites in the 1950s, and more recently the Tea Party in this country. In each case there is an ideal, a partial truth, at the center of this form of insanity that justifies the insanity. The ideal is fetishized in a way that hardens the heart. Hard-hearted idealism is one of the most destructive forms of collective insanity. 

The cure for Missing Middle Syndrome is found only when the  brain or mind with its undisciplined thinking and unruly instinctual drives submits to the rule of the regent who lives in the heart. Sanity is sanctity. Sanity in this sense is more than just being conventionally normal; it is an achievement. It requires of each person that he become master of his own psychic domain, and this requires that he  become master of the undisciplined, unruly forces within his or her kingdom. If one's heart is shriveled and hard, the regent is rendered impotent, and so powerless to bring the mind and instinctual life into harmony. If her heart is supple and warm, she recognizes that repression is not a solution and only makes things worse. Repression is not "rule". A wise, warm-hearted regent seeks to recognize and win over--not defeat--the unruly forces in her kingdom and to make them allies in the larger project of building something good and beautiful. 

The idea that if we could just be rational, we'll behaved, non predators everything would be fine is as silly as saying that if we were all lobotomized, we would be fine. We are not built to be just rational or bovine. Being rational is only a part of what makes us human, and it's not the most important part. The heart's capacity to respond to goodness and beauty is. 

So what does being in your right mind mean?  For me as a Christian it starts with the assumption that original sin is our starting point. That means we all start out fundamentally alienated from what is. This condition of alienation is something all humans experience and so seek deliverance from it. But most people, especially in a secular society resort to all kinds of ineffectual methods to effect this delivery, and most them result in one form or another of craziness--substance abuse, hyper sexuality, wealth accumulation, will to power. These are all ancient forms of craziness, but they are particularly virulent forms of craziness now because there is no check that is deeply grounded in a collective sensibility of the Logos.

So our attempts to save ourselves from our alienation make things worse but this is ok if it aggravates our felt need for deliverance. I think this is the real point of the Prodigal Son story. The Prodigal was in a better position than his older brother because he at least knew his need of deliverance whereas the older brother was a resentful prig. He was safety-seeking rules follower living in what Kierkegaard calls the despair that does not know it is in despair. The younger brother is a classic example of a moral decision made with mixed motives. That the motives were mixed does not matter; all that matters is the part of his motivation, as inchoate as it might have been, that was a hearkening to the Deep Real manifested through the Father. The younger brother is more 'awake' than the older brother even if his mind is still more fogbound than clear. It's a beginning.

We are born deluded and alienated, and salvation is the process of getting clearer in our heads about what is real and what is delusion, and then doing the work to effect a deeper communion with what is. The Buddhists and Hindus agree with Christians about the essential nature of our delusion, but their ideas about what it means to be saved are somewhat different, although I don't think incompatible. I think of their approaches--and the approaches of any authentic religious practice--as complementary with the Christian approach. Religions become inauthentic when anything about them becomes an end in itself. Inauthentic religion is an aspect of religious truth distorted by the delusional effects of original sin. Authentic religion, no matter from which tradition it derives, is religion under the liberating and illuminating aspect of the Logos. The Logos is 'what is'.

The goal of philosophy or spiritual practice is to establish a deeper communion with the Logos. This is not a head trip, but rather a reorientation of the entire soul. But as with the satori experience of the Zen Buddhist, this intuition is not ready at hand. Wisdom hides itself; it must be discovered. Or rather it reveals itself through the dissipating fog if we are paying attention.

Moral vs. Moralistic

There's a difference, of course, but it's not one most of us think about much. A moral person is wise and compassionate; a moralistic person is a judgmental prig. The crux of the difference lies in that being moral requires an ability to suss out what the right thing  to do is--it's a matter of conscience, and conscience is one of those things that gets stronger the more you use it. Being moralistic involves no sussing--it's simplistic indictment-by-superego.

Superego is a Freudian term, and despite Freud's descendancy, it's one that everyone should be familiar with. It's essentially the cultural download that we receive when we are children--but also later in life when we learn the codes of any group we join. We absorb these codes mostly unconsciously, and the code determines what attitudes and behaviors are ideal, and which are vicious. To the degree that they unconsciously shape our judgments about what is right and wrong, we are moralistic. 

So there is social utility in moralism insofar as it establishes ground rules for people to be nice and get along in any group, but the tyranny of the superego has very little to do with being truly good, because it is not at all acquainted with wisdom and compassion. People who are unconsciously in thrall to their superegos repress the parts of own psyches that the superego has programmed them to see as vicious, and this act of repression usually results in projecting what is repressed in oneself onto others in a way that tends to demonize them. The more severe the repression, the more violent the negative judgment of others. Call it Beam-in-the-Eye Syndrome. It's been long understood. It's why we are instructed by the gospels not to judge.

Why should we not judge? Because the guilty are in no position to judge the guilty. "But I'm not guilty", you say to yourself--"I did nothing wrong; that other guy did, I faithfully follow the code, and anybody who transgresses must be punished." But what you mean to say is that this transgressor has not been able to keep the darker side of his psyche repressed as effectively as you, and your punishment is simply your method for getting that darkness stuffed back into the psychic basement where it should be kept under lock and key. That's what you've been able to do so well, and so everybody should live a righteously repressed life just as you have been able to do. This results in whited-sepulcher syndrome--clean and pure on the outside, but a rotting mass of fetid soul death inside.

Most people think that from a social utility point of view it's better to be a moralistic prig than to be a monster, but they are two sides of the same coin. Monsters are people who have been captured by--or who have surrendered to--the dark, amoral, chaotic forces within all of us that live out of sight beneath the line of self-awareness. In extreme cases monsters are destructive, ruthless, violent predators. A moralistic prig is someone who thinks that the dark, amoral forces in us only live in other people, and in extreme cases they are ruthless, violent, purity-obsessed inquisitors who love a good witch hunt.

There's a difference between confronting somebody about his or her destructive behavior or attitudes, and demonizing him or her for them. Monsters must be confronted and contained, but moralistic prigs need to be confronted and contained, too. Both are in thrall to the power of the dark unconscious. If we are in thrall to the dark unconscious and we are incapable of confronting it and taming it ourselves, we need an intervention. And if the intervention does not succeed, then we need to be ostracized. A moralistic prig skips the intervention and moves directly to ostracize. But the incorrigibly un-self-aware prig is in just as much need of being ostracized when his judgments have a destructive, repressive effect on other people. 

Most of us, if we are human at all, have done monstrous things at one time or another in our lives, and most normal people feel ashamed to have behaved so. But we have also made cruel, unfair judgments about other people, too. And we should feel equal shame for that. Shame has its social utility, but being well behaved has nothing to do with being truly good. There is little benefit to the individual or to society if shame leads us to shove this moment of transgression back into the psychic basement in hopes that it was an aberration. It's not aberrant; it's unrepressed, and just to repress it again is no cure. The more severely repressed, the more it grows in power and is likely to explode again in another monstrous act. And one of the most monstrous things we can do is see our own monster in someone else rather than to own it and make the effort to domesticate it. You can't do that if it's repressed--pushed into a basement corner out of sight. 

Sitting Bull is reputed to say “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.” I"m not  sure starving the mean dog is the best approach, but at least it is acknowledged. The beginning of real moral development is recognizing that the mean dog is real, that he's in each one of us, and that it's ok, kind of. It's ok in the sense that its presence in our soul makes us human, but it's not ok to let the dark dog run wild. And it's equally not ok--maybe worse--if you pretend you don't have a dark dog and that only certain categories of people do because they have not repressed their dark dog in the same way you have.

The dark dog is Prospero's Caliban, and the good dog is Ariel. Caliban symbolizes the part of each of our souls that needs first to come out into the open where he can be disciplined and whose energies can at some point be reintegrated at a higher level. Until then he controls us more than we control him. Ariel is the part of us that knows and seeks to serve the Good. He also needs to be brought out into the open, i.e., into our conscious awareness. Prospero achieves this first in his liberating him from the witch Sycorax's spell so that he can be put to work. I see him as the symbol of the awakened conscience, and until awakened this part of ourselves is unable to help us to do any real good in the world. It, like Ariel, serves us but only respects us if we put it to good use. If Prospero’s goal was not to effect a work of creative mercy in the end, then Ariel’s service would have contradicted his fundamental nature.

There's a story I heard years ago, and I'm not sure I have the details quite right. But it involved two Christian monks who lived in a monastic community in the Egyptian wilderness. They had to go into Alexandria on monastery business, and one thing led to another and the next thing they are at an orgy having a wild, debauched evening. The next morning the two wake up naked and hung over, and they both feel deeply ashamed. One of the monks is so horrified at learning that he had this debauchee--this dark dog--hidden within himself that he thought himself unworthy to continue in his monastic vocation. He never went back to the monastery but stayed instead in Alexandria, surrendered to the dark dog, and drank himself to his death within a few years. The other monk went back to the monastery, humbly confessed his transgression to the abbot, lived a long life, and developed a reputation for wisdom and compassion that drew many to him for advice.

Each of us has an inner dark dog; each of us needs to confront and tame it. And we're not able to do much good in the world until we do. History is full of  moralistic prigs--inquisitors and Robespierres--who have destroyed the lives of so many people thinking they had God or Justice on their side. They didn't. The guilty are not in a position to judge the guilt of others until first they've owned their own guilt and have found a way to look at everyone else with some degree of wisdom and compassion.