After the Future

Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part II

As with many of my posts, "Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part I" is one in which I'm mostly thinking out loud about a problem in the hopes of resolving it. The problem in this case was to reconcile what I believe is important about what psychoanalytical thought tells us about repression and projection with the Heideggerian concept of truth as aletheia, i.e., truth as disclosure or revelation of Being, that is, 'truth' not as something that we impose on the world, but that the world reveals in its depths to us if we are in the properly receptive state of mind to recognize it. Aletheia is a quite different idea of the experience of truth that is assumed in empiricism. It allows for the kinds of truths that poets, prophets, and history's great sages have imparted to the world as real truth, not just some fanciful delusion to project onto the desert of the real. 

The Heideggerian worldview draws on ideas from German Romanticism and Idealists like Fichte and Schelling that the human being is the locus of Being becoming conscious of itself. Humans are an opening in the forest of Being, Heidegger famously said. Another way of imagining it is that the human being is a consciousness that floats on the surface Being whose depts are mostly unconscious to it. But that does not mean that the depths of Being are impenetrable to human consciousness. The great spiritual, artistic, and philosophical prodigies have a consciousness that expands into those depths, and they articulate as best they can what they have learned in those depths. 

I think psychoanalytical thought still assumes to a large degreee that we are rather Cartesian (or Husserlian) monads whose individual consciousness largely constitutes his experience of the world, and ideas like transference and projection follow from that. There is a sense when reading much of the psychoanalytical literature that almost everything valuable to the human being results from transference and that everything he creates is a necessary lie, the product of transference as projection fabricated to justify his otherwise meaningless existence.  

As phenomena of consciousness, I think that transference and projection are real; I'm trying to explain them  from within a more Heideggerian frame. I want to reframe the problem as one of discerning between delusional experiences and true disclosures of Being. 

The psychoanalytical model of human experience assumes that the infant is born with a complete openness to the flood of experience around him that is unmediated by language or culture. This is an overwhelming and traumatic experience that is mitigated by the safety the child feels in the mother's arms and in suckling.  So for a while, in a normal relationship with the mother, the child feels secure and anchored in a state of infantile narcissism in which he thinks he's in control. The child is hungry, he cries, and he's fed. He's uncomfortable, he cries, and his diaper is changed or he his cuddled. And so in this state, the child retains a pre-linguistic openness to dimensions of Being that will subsequently be filtered out. This filtering out is basically what Freud miscalled, imo, the Oedipus Complex, which occurs when a physical/psychological separation from the mother occurs at weaning and when the child learns that he must take his place in society, a society that is represented by the father and his cultural code and taboos.

This is the moment when superego is born and with it some sense of the self qua ego, as a separate, vulnerable being whose safety depends on conformity to the Father's code. We find out in a hurry if we have transgressed with a scolding if not a spanking. Gone is the state of blissful narcissism that came with the attachment to the mother. So with the new superego regime imposed and with it this sense of separation from the mother comes a necessary repression as many of the feelings and desires that gave a sense of fullness and satisfaction to the child are now ruled out of bounds. The name for the Oedipus Complex comes from Freud's idea that this moment of the child's separation is accompanied by an unconscious resentment of the father for disabusing him of his narcissistic project with the mother.

Oedipus famously unconsciously killed his father and married his mother, so, sure, there's a kind of parallel, but I think it obscures more than it reveals. And then Freud elaborates with his nonsense about the child's shock and resentment in witnessing the primal scene. To what degree this is to be taken literally or metaphorically is beyond the scope of what I want to get into here, but I think it deflects from the more important thing, which is that the child feels that he must behave in ways that measure up to the Father's rules, and the child resents it because it is associated with the loss of the fullness and sense of identity with the mother. The child experiences alienation for the first time, and while there is a new sense of safety and identity with the Father, it is an experience suffused with alienation and conflict. Welcome to civilization and its discontents, kid. 

And so afterwards there is an intense nostalgia--I know I felt it as a child--for the fullness, the security, the embeddedness the child felt in Being and the sense of union with the mother. This nostalgia is very beautifully articulated in Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality", which is also very evocative of Plato's/Socrates' idea of anamnesis.

I think this nostalgia points to something that's very real, which is the loss of the sense of infantile fullness and openness to Being. And I think it's pretty obvious that there is so much in human life, much of which is fanciful at best and destructively delusional at worst, that is motivated by this nostalgic sense that we had possessed something of great value and that we lost it. And humans do all kinds of insane things in the hopes of recovering it--from some of the crazy stuff that plays out in marriages to the kind of thing that plays out in right-wing politics. Both often are driven by a regressive, and therefore delusional, yearning for something that the objects of such yearning cannot deliver.

But because this nostalgic yearning is often a motivator for the emotionally unintelligent, that does not mean that what is yearned for--the pre-Oedipal fullness--is in itself a delusion. If repression is a fact, then there must be an experience of the world that is unrepressed, and so it's legitimate to ask whether it's possible to get unrepressed.

In the previous post I suggested that this was possible in a 'lawful' way, and I'd argue that all the great post-Axial religions seek to lay out a path for the recovery of what has been lost, but in a progressive rather than a regressive way, which is to say, a yearning forward rather than a yearning backward. Certainly yearning forward can be delusional as well, but the question I am asking is whether perhaps it's possible to become unrepressed in forward, but lawful way. By Lawful I mean not just lifting the repression, but growing a moral self from within that as it becomes more substantive transcends the Oedipal filters.

I think that this is the real meaning when Jesus says that we  change and become like little children. The commonplace interpretation of this verse from Matthew 18 is that we need to retrieve a kind of innocence and docility, the kind of thing that Nietzsche despised in the slavishness that he thought was an essential component of being a Christian. But I want to argue that it means a recovery of the pre-Oedipal fullness. The Christian iconography of Madonna and the Christ child are proleptically suggestive here, and can be interpreted in ways that have little to do with their conventional, nostalgic, sentimental feelings they also evoke. So this is an idea to be explored some day in another post. 

While all the post-Axial religions talk about liberation from illusion, the Judaeo-Christian tradition distinguishes itself from the others  in its orientation toward a collective or communal liberation in the future. The image of liberation from illusion is not one of melting back into the pleroma, but of individuating in such a way that the person can enter a communion with other fully individuated persons in the fullness of Being. The individual person is emphasized in Christianity, and that person, I would argue, is not part of the ego/superego Freudian complex--the old wineskin--but something in us grows that displaces it, supersedes it as new wine in new wine skins. Christianity has value for humanity only insofar as it supports the fermenting of this new wine.

Few have succeeded in becoming public exemplars of lawful liberation from post-Oedipal repression (St. Francis and St. Teresa of Avila are, imo, such exemplars), although I am sure there are many people who have achieved it in obscurity. And there are many, many people who have become partially liberated to the degree that they have developed the moral discernment of higher law known as conscience, which is not to be confused with superego.

All kinds of distortions and parodies of true liberation abound, and the laws and methods for "liberation" get distorted and fetishized in ways that often create worse problems than they're trying to solve. And understandably many people, whether they experience this yearning or not, come to think of the whole project as fundamentally misguided because of all the bad fruit it has yielded. Better to be rational, sensible, conventional. That was Freud's view.

But there is something in the human spirit that is irrepressible, and that is a good thing. The problem lies in that there are so many bad ways to channel that irrepressibilty, and there's precious little wisdom or knowledge in the culture anymore about how to channel it in healthful, truly liberating ways. And that's maybe as it has always been, more or less. Even when great sages and prophets walked the earth, they were mostly mostly misunderstood, and their teachings distorted.

But the problem for us now is that we're running out of time. We have two--at least--major crises looming on the horizon that require that we get our yearnings lawfully ordered. The first is climate catastrophe; the second is the machine-learning singularity. These both pose existential threats to the very essence of the human project that raise serious questions about whether the kind of democracy that gives such power to demagogues like Trump, that allows so much power to delusional cults like the GOP and the right wing movements developing in Europe, or when the best we can expect is from a deracinated, feckless Left that doesn't believe in anything except some idea of un-repression for the sake of un-repression, we are in bad shape. If there is hope it lies elsewhere, in the people described above who are prodigies of conscience. 

Fantasy, Projection, and Reality in the Age of Trump, Part I

Freud found that the leader allows us to express forbidden impulses and secret wishes. Redl saw that in some groups there is indeed what he perfectly calls the “infectiousness of the unconflicted person.” There are leaders who seduce us because they do not have the conflicts that we have; we admire their equanimity where we feel shame and humiliation. Freud saw that the leader wipes out fear and permits everyone to feel omnipotent. Redl refined this somewhat by showing how important the leader often was by the simple fact that it was he who performed the “initiatory act” when no one else had the daring to do it.

Becker, Ernest. The Denial of Death (p. 135). 

The psychoanalytic concept of transference--or projection--isn't without its problems, but it clearly points to a phenomenon that is undeniable. My problem with it lies in its assumption that we are isolated individuals who take our internal, personal psychic contents and project them onto some blank screen--the leader, the beloved, or, in a negative way, on the Other, the Enemy. This is very un-Heideggerian, and we are all Heideggerrians now, or we should be. But there's what I call Beam-in-Eye Syndrome, which is what the gospels pointed out millennia ago as the tendency we all have to project the dark, repressed parts of the psyche onto others. 

The problem as I see it is not one of projection, but of our basic human condition as born into a symbolic system that must of necessity repress or filter out huge swaths of Reality. So because humans are living in states in which most of Reality is filtered out, and because human beings live in symbolic systems that seek to make sense of Reality within the constraints of their necessarily filtered experience of Reality, there is a tendency for humans to take partial disclosures of reality and to build delusional symbolic systems around them. 

So the real problem is to distinguish between fantasy and reality. I'd like to argue that there's a difference between what is "unrepressed" and what is "disclosed", even if it's often hard to tell the difference. Psychoanalytical thinking is right, imo, when it talks about fantasy as being related to the repressed, but what is it that's repressed? Well, it's a lot of things. If Becker and Kierkegaard are right, and I tend to think that they mostly are, the fundamental repression is of our awareness of our contingency, frailty, and of our finitude and eventual death, but also of our power and potential, of our infinity. But the problem with repressed reality is that it doesn't stay repressed, it leaks out in different ways, many of which are delusional rather than disclosive. The human task is to become unrepressed in a lawful way, which by definition means to experience the unrepressed as reality, not as delusion. 

With the Oedipus Complex, (which really needs another name) comes a forced delimiting  of our infantile narcissism as we accept our role in the family and through the family or role in the larger culture. Our raw experience of the world becomes both filtered--this is where repression plays an essential role--but also ordered, interpreted, and given meaning by way our being embedded in the collective symbolic system into which we are acculturated. The Oedipus Complex functions as a necessary filtering system, but there are healthy and unhealthy filters. A healthy filtering system must allow limits what is available to consciousness so that we can navigate in the world it in the practical, everyday sense. But it must also provide the means for transcending the filters, i.e., gradually opening up the filters so that we can become more exposed to the fullness of Reality that the filtering system keeps out of view. A healthy society is healthy to the degree that religion and art perform this unfaltering or disclosive function for it. 

Becker points out that most of the smartest people around around Freud--Jung, Adler, Rank, Ferenczi--understood that his ideas about the mechanics of repression were genius, but that his sexual reductionism was fundamentally wrong. Obviously human sexuality is a big deal, but Freud's ideas about it were absurdly reductive. Nevertheless, psychoanalytic theory and its idea of repression came into popular culture as justification to unrepresss ourselves sexually. But Becker argues that it's not sex that we repress, but Life, and we do it, he says, because we are cowards and need to take refuge in the collective. He points to Norman O Brown and Erich Fromm--and Kierkegaard--as wiser guides than Freud about how to open up the filters to let the life in.

But we tend to look at repression as this thing we need to get rid of, as if we just decided that if we behave in a disinhibited way, we have solved the problem of repression. But this is one of the really stupid consequences of pop-Freudianism. Repression is necessary because the individual would be drowned and overwhelmed by the flood of reality that is too much for him to deal with without "repressive" filters. We need filters, but we also, I would argue, need to grow something from within, a Self, that as it develops substantively, it gradually transcends or 'obsoletizes' the filters. I'm not being precise here because it's not really about obsoletizing or transcending, so much as it is about finding a way in which the symbolic system--language, etc--becomes more richly disclosive. Our symbolic systems both repress and disclose, the intersting question is how we get it to do more of the latter and less of the former. 

I would argue that the human being without filters is proleptically imaged in the resurrected Christ. Christians believe that Christ as Logos is the symbol system itself made flesh, and his incarnation created the conditions for the possibility of humans resurrecting like him, which, I would argue, is to become unrepressed as Jesus was unrepressed, i.e., liberated from the Oedipus Complex. This is what makes Christianity different from Buddhism and Gnosticism. The goal is not to escape the constraints of the body, but to live in the body in a lawfully unrepressed way.

This particular idea of the resurrection of the body is explored by Norman O. Brown, and while I don't know of any orthodox Christian theologians who are Brownites in this sense, I don't think it's impossible to align with orthodox thinking. I'll explore that in some future post. But the point here is that the  human project is to become substantive enough, strong enough to live in a symbolic system that discloses more than it filters. And so this is a project that needs to be culturally mediated, and so the health or illness of a culture can be measured by whether it provides a path, a method, that its members can choose to walk that will unrepress them in a lawful way. 

By lawful I mean non-delusional, and to be non-delusional you need to have developed a substantive moral Self. Nazi brown shirts and southern lynch mobs were unrepressed, but unlawfully so, because there is little evidence of morally substantive selves in such expressions of unrepression. Growing a morally substantive Self is a tricky business and beyond the scope of what I want to discuss here, but it assumes that there are aspects of reality that are lawful and unlawful, and that we have the capabillity--the moral sense-- to discern the difference. Someone like Heidegger clearly did not have this moral sense in any significant measure. 

The problem with Heidegger, from what I know about him through what his friends Jaspers and Arendt have written about him, was that while he had depth of experience--i.e., he had a filtering system that was more porous and disclosive than most--he had not developed a substantive moral Self capable of discerning what was delusional from what was real. There was a kind of hypertrophied passivity about Heidegger that made him extraordinarily receptive to the disclosures of Being, but I think he had also a kind of vanity about his capabilities that produced a parody of the Self that stunted him spiritually, and in doing so stunted his moral sense. He was rather a moral cipher. 

Wittgenstein, whose fundamental insights complement and enrich Heidegger's, had a biography that suggests to me that he was far more developed as a moral Self. He famously declared in his Tractatus that his book was like a ladder, and that if you ascended it to where it wanted to deliver you, then you could throw away the ladder. And there you will find yourself in a zone where anything worth saying is best left unsaid because it will be incomprehensible to those who have not climbed the ladder. 

I think that culture--in Freudian terms, the Oedipus Complex--functions in the same way. If it is a healthy culture, it provides the steps that lead us to a place where we can transcend its limitations. To become unrepressed does not mean to become sexually liberated as pop culture has debased this idea of it, but rather to become more radically open to Life while still in the body. This is something that people accomplish progressively and in degrees, because none of us, even the great saints and yogis, can deal with too much reality. But some people are more unrepressed in this sense than others. And to be lawfully unrepressed is wisdom because we are wise to the degree that we are  open to the fullness of Reality. But openness, as Heidegger exemplifies, is not enough. It is essential that one has developed a morally substantive Self capable of discerning what is healthful or lawful and what is not. 

The problem for us now is that we do not live in a healthy culture. We don't know what's real and what is delusional, what is lawful/healthful and what is not. In America, we are living in Blue fantasy worlds and Red fantasy worlds--and all manner of purple ones, too--without any anchor in a tradition of wisdom that will help us to break out of the fantasy.  In the blue sections of the electoral map, ideas about what it means to be unrepressed are trivial, and yet Blues, despite the fundamental groundlessness of their worldview, preach to the rest of the culture that this groundlessness is somehow superior because it's more rational and liberating. But why should rationality without any kind of ontological foundation be considered superior to any other ungrounded point of view? If there are no foundations, then all attempts at meaning are groundless fantasies.

And so it's no wonder that the folks in the Red sections of the electoral map reject the Blue world view and insist on the validity of the tradition, which for the most part the cultural dominance of the Blue worldview and its celebration of markets and technological progress has eviscerated. That tradition no longer is anchored in a lived sense of the Deep Real but rather only in the dead husks of it, which they fetishize for want of anything better.

They know that the Blues don't have a real answer, and they are right. They suspect that the Blues don't know what they are talking about, that their idea of progress trusts too much in glib ideas about liberation that parodies true liberation, and they are right. But the Reds have nothing to offer that's better because they live in a fetishized tradition rather than in a living one, There is none among them who is publicly recognized exemplar of true liberation. If there are such people, and I'm sure there are, they are living in quiet anonymity. 

And so the Reds live in a state of repression that is dangerously prone to delusion. They are scared because they are feeling that history is leaving them behind, and they are right about that. They are resentful because they feel that they are being surpassed by a world view that is fundamentally wrong, and they are right about that.  And they are too prone to project their hopes and fears on any demagogue who comes along and tells them that it's going to be ok, that he's got their back.

And, obviously, they are wrong about that, which is the point of the Becker epigraph. In the short run, the greatest danger to finding a way forward comes from the delusions of the Right. But in the long run, the Blues, while they are more aligned with a dynamically changing historical reality, are inclined to just go along with it no matter where it takes them regardless whether it is healthful or lawful. Heidegger surrendered temporarily to a 'disclosure' of historical reality in Nazism that was fundamentally unlawful and unhealthful. There is a passivity among Blues that is not unlike the kind Heidegger had.  

Even if the symbol systems on the Left and the Right in their different ways are more delusional than disclosive, there are still many individuals who are not completely enclosed in those systems. If I have any hope at all for the future of the earth, it's that something new will develop from the moral sense of people whose filtering systems are open to Reality, and from their efforts to develop a healthy culture that is better aligned with the Deep Real whether they recognize it as the Logos or not. But not in my lifetime.

Rural vs. Urban and Our Techno Capitalist Future

There's this universal shorthand that epic adventure movies use to tell the good guys from the bad. The good guys are simple folk from the countryside ... while the bad guys are decadent assholes who live in the city and wear stupid clothes. In Star Wars, Luke is a farm boy ...while the bad guys live in a shiny space station. In Braveheart, the main character (Dennis Braveheart) is a simple farmer ... and the dastardly Prince Shithead lives in a luxurious castle and wears fancy, foppish clothes. The theme expresses itself in several ways -- primitive vs. advanced, tough vs. delicate, masculine vs. feminine, poor vs. rich, pure vs. decadent, traditional vs. weird. All of it is code for rural vs. urban. That tense divide between the two doesn't exist because of these movies, obviously. These movies used it as shorthand because the divide already existed.

We country folk are programmed to hate the prissy elites. That brings us to Trump. I was born and raised in Trump country. My family are Trump people. If I hadn't moved away and gotten this ridiculous job, I'd be voting for him. I know I would. (David Wong, "How American Lost Half Its F*ing Mind")

Don't forget The Hunger Games. Maybe there's more in that movie that describes our future than we want to admit. Are cosmopolitan urbanites really on the moral side of history? It's a question worth thinking about. 

American meaning narratives work with these rural/urban archetypes. People in the Rural Narrative see themselves as Outsiders who need to defend themselves from slick Insiders. Trump's status as Outsider is more important to Rurals than the real truth about him, which is that he's a classic urban snake-oil salesman.

That's why many decent Americans can vote for Trump and his surrogates, i.e., deeply indecent people like DeSantis, Kemp, and Cruz, when truly inspiring, decent people oppose them. For Urban Cosmopolitans, DeSantis, Kemp, and Cruz are the real Prince Shitheads, and Gillum, Abrams, and O"Rourke are the true Bravehearts. But is it that unambiguously true? 

***

Those who live in the Rural Traditionalist narrative are not able to frame for themselves a life that has real future possibility, so they fetishize the past, a past they mostly misinterpret and don't understand, but that they nevertheless intuit as a source of value that Urban Cosmopolitans don't value. For those in the Urban Cosmopolitan narrative, the past has always been a burden--it's all about patriarchy, racism, homophobia, superstition, slavery and torture. There's little of value there, and so value comes only from moving toward a positive future, a future defined as unconstrained by the past. That plays out in a meaningful way for most Urban Cosmopolitans in their pursuit of careers in techno-capitalism, carreers not open to most of those living in the Rural Traditionalist Narrative because STEM is just not their thing; it's just not honored in that world. It's always been held in suspicion because of the ways in which it tends to de-legitimize traditional values and practices. Darwin and climate change don't fit in the Rural Narrative, so they are just filtered out. 

And so since Urban Cosmopolitan success depends on uncritically going with the creative/destructive historical flow that is techno-capitalism, they see no problem with allowing techno-capitalism free rein, and a Libertarian market ideology has become an essential feature that justifies their acquiescence. In other words, the people who feel comfortable within the Urban Cosmopolitan Narrative are also comfortable, or at least uncritical of, a future that will be determined by the random, materialist, often cruel, greedy, and always meaningless forces that shape markets. That's ok, because Urban Cosmopolitans are on the cutting edge of evolution, to quote 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, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind.

Gordon Gecko is everybody's definition of Prince Shithead, right? Nevertheless, there's a kind of uplifting meaning that some people take in this peroration on greed, especially the people who are shaping the human future in Silicon Valley. And Urban Cosmopolitans, especially the types who rise to positions of influence in either major party, are operating more in a Geckoist narrative than the Rurals are. The only difference between the major parties lies in that the Dems want to mitigate some of the 'frictional' negative effects of Geckoism, but they are otherwise in tune with Gecko's "evolutionary" program. They benefit from it and have no obvious interest in opposing it. 

This evolutionary program when given free rein destroys everything the people in the Rural Narrative hold dear. Urban Cosmopolitans don't care for reasons stated above about how constricting all that traditional baggage is. They tell the resentful winters in the Rural Narrative, too bad: adapt or die. Get off your ass and your opioids and move to the coast where all the dynamism is. Become like us. The people in the Rural narrative understandably say, "No way I'm going to become you, Prince Shithead. You will not replace us. I'll fight you, your Liberal minions, and your evil agenda to the death. Freedooooooooom." 

So to right-thinking Urban Cosmopolitans this seems delusional and over the top. Understandably so. But is it possible for Urban Cosmopolitans to understand that while Rural attribution of blame is misplaced on Blacks, Muslims, Latinos, Jews, and Liberals in general, the underlying fear of being "replaced" is not. There is a kind of repressed, culture-wide dread, imo, that humanity itself will soon be replaced. This gets acted out in completely dysfunctional ways by White Nationalists, but is the underlying dread so unfounded? White Nationalism is a coping mechanism for people in a profound state of fear about being obsoletized. But is it just the loss of their traditionalist way of life that is becoming obsolete, or are they miners' canaries for a deeper fear about humanity itself becoming obsoletized?.

The markets and market capitalism are the proximate cause of Rural Traditionalist anxiety whether they realize it or not. As I've said here often before, there is no force in human history that has been more destructive of traditional ways of life than capitalism in all its different phases. But markets are more than an economic force; they are the random, destabilizing, disruptive processes of evolution at work in the human sphere. And it's an open question whether evolution--now working as technological evolution--has a need for humans in its future. Evolution might very well replace humans with machines if machines serve its purposes better. So maybe Rurals are prescient to fear evolution. Maybe evolution is Prince Shithead personified. And if so, maybe Urbans are a little more chummy with Prince Shithead and his agenda than they'd like to admit. 

And so maybe Rural Traditionalists have a point, even if they're not able to articulate it very effectively. Maybe they're right to feel that Urban Cosmopolitans have become allies to Prince Shithead in ways they are blind to. The Urban Narration is aligned with current historical Reality as it is shaped by techno-capitalism, so it seems more "fact based", but is that really such a good thing? Is the Urban narrative filtering in some 'facts' while filtering out others that are essential for true human flourishing? The Rural archetype, even if crudely, retains the memory of a kind of 'natural' human being, an idea of the human that resists being replaced by the mechanomorphic whatever that technological evolution seems bent on displacing humans with. 

So this is the question that few people seem interested in thinking about. I think there is so little thinking about it because most have adopted an attitude that is very passive in the face of its inevitability. Technology will develop as it has always developed, and there's nothing we can do about it. If we don't work hard to keep up with it, someone--the Chinese or Russians or whoever--will overtake us. And so it doesn't matter whether the kind of techno-trans-humanism or post-humanism that techno capitalism is driving us toward is what we really want. It's coming, and there's nothing we can do about it but adapt. And that's what Cosmopolitan Liberals excel at--adapting--even if what they are adapting to is fundamentally dehumanizing. Does any sane person think that the mentality that governs the ethos of Silicon Valley is leading humanity into a deeper, richer, more deeply spiritual and emotionally nuanced experience of being human?

So maybe somebody ought to push back against all this inevitability. Maybe humans should not submit to being the tail wagged by technological evolution's dog. But who could possibly possibly develop such a program that would have broad legitimacy to do it? The religious traditions? Yes and No. I think the resources are there to push back, but it's not at all clear that humans will find a way to draw on them that can make a difference. Certainly the institutional manifestations of these traditions are beyond useless.  

So all this is pretty dismaying. But such a program, no matter what it's source of inspiration, must link our imagination of the future of humanity to what the ancestors have told us it means to be human. It's not a question of rejecting evolution, but of taking control of it. And that requires developing a philosophy of history, a deep humanistic narrative, that imagines a rich, a humanistic future rather than a soulless, mechanomorphic one. 

Some Random Thoughts on the American Character

I never quite grasped why Jefferson and Adams were so discouraged by the way the country had democratized by the 1820s. Wasn't that what they, especially Jefferson, had hoped for? I tended to dismiss their concerns as a snooty elitism. But I understand it differently now, especially in light of Trump’s ascendancy. Reading Wood, Howe, and Potter over the last several months has set me straight about that. There was a snootiness in it, but also there were good reasons for them to be appalled. 

The “populism” that dismayed Jefferson and Adams was the kind of populism that lifted Trump into power. Adams's and Jefferson’s republican ideals —and really the ideals of the entire revolutionary generation—seem quaintly naïve over against the crude, myopically interest-driven energies released after the Revolution. The most active Americans were remarkably ignorant and short-sighted, they were drunks, they were all too inclined to run with the mob, they were white supremacists and nativists who exhibited a barbaric violence toward Blacks and Indians, and they indulged in a kind of grandiosity about being an American that fed their delusions and their worst instincts. America was a nasty, nasty place in the 19th Century. There is very little about it to be nostalgic about. 

The old republican ideals were payed lip service to, but played hardly any role in the dynamic realities shaping the political and economic spheres. Everything was transactional. Everybody in the private sector was on the make and in the public sector you were considered an idiot if you weren't on the take. You know the picture we have about the lawless, wild west in the period after the Civil War? That's the way it was back East before it.

It's a mentality that made America economically dynamic, for sure, but also what made it shallow and cruel. It's the America that Trump envisions when he wants to make it great again because Trump's America appeals to whatever is shallow, cruel, and short-sighted in the American character. Trump's candidacy and now his presidency have shown how fragile the norms that have suppressed what has always been there as the ugliest aspects of the American character. And what has become clearer to me is not that Trump is an aberration, but rather he is a reversion to the 19th century, pre-Progressive Era norm. He's the culmination, if not the reductio ad absurdum, of the Republican project that began with Reagan in 1980 to dismantle the reforms that made the U.S. a relatively decent place to live for a while.

What we see in Trump's kakistocracy (look it up) is very much in line with that part of the American character. The Mueller investigation seems to be approaching its climax. It seems to be big news that Cohen has come public about lying about not having contact with the Russians during Trump’s 2016 campaign. People think this is a big deal because it shows that Trump was dealing with the Russians to promote his own business interests in such a way that could compromise the country’s interests. But we know this already, and do we have any confidence that Mueller's proving it will make a difference?

The talking heads on TV keep telling us that the Trump people are second raters who cannot withstand Mueller’s attack. But it’s amazing to me that the elites in this country have put up with Trump this long, and it’s simply because the elite factions disgusted by Trump simply don’t have enough power anymore to push him out.  A piece in the NYT today sums it up:

The allure of a Mueller report lies in its imagined promise of a single, definitive truth capable of cutting through the haze of lies, confusion and “alternative facts.” But Mr. Corsi’s and Mr. Papadopoulos’s antics are a warning that this hope will inevitably fall short. Conspiracy theorists and prosecutors live in different worlds: The first, unmoored from truth; the second, devoted to proving facts beyond a reasonable doubt. Mr. Mueller has the power to charge Mr. Corsi for lying; he has already done so to Mr. Papadopoulos. Rather than crumbling, though, their falsehoods have continued to spread and grow — and they’ve taken root in the media ecosystem in which the president chooses to spend his days. 

In this environment, the question is less what Mr. Mueller will do next and more what Congress and the American people will do with the information they already have.

By now it’s clear that the special counsel is not armed with a silver bullet, not because the facts are not bad for the president but precisely because they are. If facts were enough, Mr. Trump would already have been impeached.

The Republican Party and Fox News are more than ok with Trump and his unprecedented awfulness. They represent the America that appalled Jefferson and Adams that I described above. The Republicans have become the party of incompetent ideologues and grifters who think that America is at its best when it is a crude, un-regulated circus where the most cunning kleptocrats can engorge themselves on the public teat. They want to destroy the whole American public infrastructure for reasons they don’t even understand because their ignorance, venality, and short-term thinking blinds them to the consequences of their actions. (If this isn't obvious to you already, read Michael Lewis's The Fifth Risk.) But tens of millions of American think that any accusations about Trump and his cronies' corruption and incompetence is fake news. The Democrats are just as bad, they argue. How do you penetrate that kind of filter?

***

Trump doesn't frighten me nearly as much as the breathtaking stupidity, the willful ignorance, the childish resentfulness, and the ideological blindness of the Americans who allowed themselves to be conned by him. Their psychology is very similar to the kind of delusional psychology that led to the Civil War. I understand better now how this kind of ignorance and stupidity can take hold after reading Howe and Potter. At the time of the founding and even into the first couple of decades of the 19^thcentury, everyone, including southern elites, was embarrassed about slavery. It was an unhealthy thing, like smoking or drinking too much. It's something that everybody wanted to stop, but they kept procrastinating about because it would be hard to do. 

And then around 1820 with the Missouri crisis, it became clear that the slaveholders no longer wanted to give slavery up, and they started looking for ways to justify it. They were  rather like the drunk who comes up with any rationalization to keep drinking. And like the drunk who is really deeply ashamed of his having a problem, he denies he has one. And because he cannot face it, he becomes indignant when someone confronts him about it. He tells the person to mind his own business, and maybe takes a swing at him. 

States Rights and Nullification become the ideological justifications to beat back the busy-body northerners. Heretofore American nationalists like Calhoun become localists in the name of protecting slavery from Federal interdict. And after 1830, in the wake of the Nat Turner slave rebellion, this shame is compounded by an intensified fear that the cruelty that they have inflicted on their slaves will in turn be inflicted on them if the slaves are ever freed. What goes around comes around is a deep source of fear for the violent and cruel. Black slaves come to represent all their repressed fear and shame, and rather than face it, they must double down to make sure they keep it repressed. This subconscious drama gets acted out in ante-bellum Slavery politics and after the war in the fantasy of the Lost Cause and the cruelty of Jim Crow. 

Anything that threatened to weaken Slaveholder control threatened to unleash all these dark, repressed, violently irrational parts of the Southern psyche. A fantasy about Southern nobility and gentility begins to develop. Southern elites begin to think they are not morally inferior for being slaveholders, but rather morally superior to Northerners. Those Yankees don’t have the nobility of soul to understand what makes their Southern way of life so sweet, so civilized as compared to their money-grubbing, mercantile ways.

Theological digression: Everybody feels ontological shame; all humans feel that they don’t measure up, that they’ve failed, even if they cannot understand quite why. Call it original sin or whatever you please; it's just built in to the human condition. And so much of human motivation is about compensating for the feeling of shame and inadequacy that is its chief symptom. It might be a cliché, but it points to a real truth about why the greatest achievers are often those who feel most intensely this “ontological” inadequacy. It drives them to do almost anything to get rid of it.

And that's why 'pride' is considered by the wise to be among the worst human characteristics. Pride is not a sense of one's inherent dignity as someone born in the image and likeness of God. Pride is a false image of ourselves that we fabricate to overcome our sense of ontological shame. That's why the tradition has always been suspicious about human effort. It's not that effort is bad in itself, but rather that the effort is more often than not in the service of the wrong motivation--that it's a causa sui project, and as such delusional because we are not causa sui. That is the fundamental insight of the person of faith and the reason why gratitude, not pride, is the fundamental precondition of a life well lived. And this is why American culture, for all its ostensible religiosity, is fundamentally delusional. It is a prideful, greedy, and ungrateful culture through and through

And so the one thing that people cannot stand is to be accused of doing anything shameful by someone whom they see as no better. And in a kind of deep ontological sense we are right to think that our accusers are no better. We’re all projecting our deep-down ontological sense of shame onto others. And that’s why the gospels admonish us not to judge or accuse others, because more likely than not what we see in others is just a reflection of what is in ourselves that we don’t want to face.

But complementing this suppressed shame is a transcultural honor fantasy that is central to sustaining this pathology. It's called "losing face", when the "face" is the delusional construct, the mask we wear that masks the deep truth about who we are. The honor fantasy is a delusional fantasy about our identity being the same as the mask we present to the world, that part of ourselves we've constructed that’s captured in our reputation. And when that reputation is challenged as fraudulent by someone, we feel a deep, angry hostility toward whoever would shame us by doing so.

But everyone captured by the honor fantasy is by definition a fraud because the whole idea of one's 'honor' is a delusional construct designed to keep you from confronting who you really are. If you lived in ante-bellum America and other places, your honor would require you to fight to the death to defend this fantasy, because nothing is more unbearable to people who have become identified with their "honor" than to face the deep truth about their ontological inadequacy. And this, in brief, is why we fought the Civil War, and it's why so many Americans cannot admit why their vote for Donald Trump was a disaster. You must cling to the fantasy at all costs, because once it bursts there's nothing to hold onto to prevent your plunge into that deep vat of ontological shame. 

So whenever we judge or accuse others, it's more likely than not that they are just going to dig in and come to a far more rigid defense of their delusional thinking. So better not to judge, right?  But then you have this problem of an entire social system behaving toward other human beings in a way that is horrifically cruel and living in a fantasy that justifies it. And just as you have a loved one with a wife-beating problem, you can’t just do nothing. You have to intervene. And this is where things tend to go off the rails, especially when you call the police, all of whom have a wife-beating problem, metaphorically speaking. This was essentially the situation that the relatively sane and decent people had in confronting slaveholder delusions in the ante-bellum south.

Now while the Abolitionists wanted the southerners to go cold turkey, the free-soil types thought that it was impossible to tell the southerners to quit, so they adopted a strategy of containment. The Wilmot Proviso introduced in 1846 initiates a pitched battle fought not about the existence of slavery where it already existed, but about whether slavery, in principle, should be allowed in the territories opened up by the Mexican cession. Here’s it’s wording:

Provided, That, as an express and fundamental condition to the acquisition of any territory from the Republic of Mexico by the United States, by virtue of any treaty which may be negotiated between them, and to the use by the Executive of the moneys herein appropriated, neither slavery nor involuntary servitude shall ever exist in any part of said territory, except for crime, whereof the party shall first be duly convicted.

Ironically this statement is modeled on the Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which was uncontroversial when formulated for reasons explained above, and it shows how much things had changed since the founding. The slaveholders didn’t want to be contained anymore. To agree to a containment policy in the new territories would be "dishonorable"; it would imply that to be a slaveholder was to be morally inferior, and the Southern honor fantasy could not be sustained if they were to give in on that.

There were other factors besides honor, of course. The economic and power dynamic was always a factor, and the southerners were justifiably afraid of being outnumbered in Congress if they didn’t match the admission of each new ‘free’ state with a ‘slave’ state. And they understandably feared that no matter what people said in 1846, they would not have the power to resist a future abolitionist congress. The slaveholders understood deep down that they were on the wrong side of history, and they did everything they could to keep the tide from rising.

And in the short run they succeeded. They controlled the Senate, and their threats of secession forced concessions that were wins for them:  In the Compromise of 1850 with its notorious Fugitive Slave Act, in the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1855 that repealed the Missouri Compromise, in the Dred Scott decision in '57 that made slavery legal even in the states that had banned it, and in '58 the astonishingly fraudulent pro-slavery Lecompton Constitution for Bleeding Kansas that President Buchanan rammed through. Mitch McConnell is playing the same game. He's read his history, and he's learned a thing or two from his ante-bellum ancestors. It remains to be seen whether his victories will be as Pyrrhic. 

So the Civil War ends in slavehollder defeat. Six hundred thousand dead. For what? For Southern honor? If it was just about the money, they could have worked it out. The Civil War, like most wars, is always about something else, something deeper  and darker in the human psyche. Sometimes, a war though, knocks some sense into those who waged it, but not true for the South. The honor fantasy morphs into the Lost Cause fantasy, and a deep-seated culture of resentment develops there. Slavery ends officially, and while Black Americans get a taste of freedom for a decade or so, it's quickly back to the same old, same old as the white shame-repression fantasy reasserts itself. Black Americans find themselves getting 'repressed' in whatever way it's still possible for white people to do it. 

A part of the fantasy is still to see Northerners as soulless, money-grubbing grifters, which, of course, many are. But then this curious thing happens when Donald Trump runs for office. There is no one in the history of American politics who embodies the kind of person Southerners hate more than Donald Trump. He is the king of the grifters. He owns casinos, for gods sakes. And yet there he is, playing his blatant, pandering con, and they embrace him like a long, lost brother. So now we've got the worst of the North embraced by the worst of the South.

And we have to ask what is there in the American character in the long term to push back against this deep-seated worst? In the short term, sure, people in the mushy middle who voted for him and kakistocrats like him vote for the other party. We saw this a couple of weeks ago. Why am I not relieved? Because too many deeply awful, ignorant, delusional people beat truly decent and intelligent ones, and because it won't take long for the kakisitocrats to regroup where they've lost. They want power in a way that ordinary, decent Americans don't. Decent Americans can say No when things get egregiously bad, but they can't win in the long run until there's something truly decent to which they can say Yes. 

Donald Trump is not an aberration, he is an exemplar of a long tradition of American bad actors who have played too large a role in shaping our history. People like him and his supporters are deeply ignorant, delusional people living in a self-worth magnification fantasy. The only real cure is intervention by people who are wise and compassionate, and who can point to an alternative, reality-based meaning story that gives all Americans a robust imagination of future possibility. We have to hope and pray that some how, some way, a movement will arise in America that can promote such an alternative. I think there is a fundamental, latent decency in every human being, but you have to have a cultural story that activates it. And until we do, MAGA, or variations of it. wins by default.