For the most part, however, the changes that occurred at around this period [the Renaissance] do suggest the salience of primarily the right hemisphere’s world. One of the defining features of the Renaissance must be its opening of the eyes to experience, initially almost exclusively personal experience, in preference to what is ‘known’ to be the case, the teachings of scholastic theory and received opinion. There is a corresponding respect for the quiddity of individual things and people, rather than their being seen as members of categories.
There was a faithful imitation of, and close attention to, the natural world, and to what other people in other times may have thought or known; and in this breadth of concern, and the insistence on the interconnectedness of things and the importance of the fullest possible. This also included the body and the soul equally and inseparably as the context of all living things. In its respect for the body as more than a thing, and an integral part of the whole person; in its rehabilitation of the senses; in its emphasis on spatial depth, and on time as lived, with man becoming the ‘being towards death’; in the rekindling of empathy in the arts, including theatre, and a preoccupation with the expressive powers of the human face in particular, in the portraiture that dominates the visual arts of the period; in the sense of the self as an individual, yet integrated by moral and emotional bonds to society; in the newfound expressiveness of all the arts; in the rise of polyphony, with the importance of melody, harmony and the relationship of the parts to the whole; in the rise of wit and pathos, and the predominant emphasis on the links between wisdom and melancholy; in its attraction to exemplars, rather than to categories; in its capacity to accept the coniunctio oppositorum, and to relish mixed emotions and the coming together of widely different ideas; in its emphasis on the importance of what must remain implicit, on inborn and intuited skills (as well as on the artist as a semi-divine being), and on the world as never just what it ‘seems’ to be, but pointing beyond to something Other, a world that is semi-transparent, pregnant with myth and metaphor –
[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period. As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.
Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.
McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. If we can understand the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of the late medieval period into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life and concreteness of of the Renaissance, and then why it shifted back again to the hubristic left-brain dominance of the Enlightenment rationality, perhaps we can find a way forward toward a new Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the Enlightenment Age of Reason in our profoundly imbalanced situation in which autocratic technocratic control vies with the postmodern, anarchic, anything-goes ethos of "The Age of Whatever".
Nobody wants to live in The Age of Whatever. But the only way to avoid this endless ping-ponging between the worst of the Right and what is worst in the Left is to synthesize what is best in both. That is the coniunctio oppositorum, or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy in both to marry, so to say. That is the formula for Renaissance. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance.
In previous posts here and here, I've made the case that Trump support has two aspects represented respectively by Devin Nunes and Steve Bannon--the first ignorance and gullibility, the second well-informed and shrewd bordering on cynical. For the purposes of this post, I am going to address the elements in this mindset that are not cynical but which have some validity.
The most intelligent advocates for the Bannon/Nunes mindset see themselves as redressing a balance, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. The most thoughtful Liberals understand the limitations of the Liberal Order, but they simply do not have the cultural or spiritual resources to overcome them.
Liberalism is the real conservatism now because it seeks to maintain the status quo. Bannonism, realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. There are always good reasons to do or support the wrong thing. So Bannonism does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate ideology for another. If they succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us the worst of the Right.
I am an advocate for Renaissance, not revanchism. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age. In this post, I want to lay out some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.
The Meta-Historical Context
Regarding my understanding of the meaning of history, there are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview that sees evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions that lead them to believe that life on earth a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that I see as essentially true, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.
My own view, which I would argue is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity, tersely summarized here, is shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, Jung, Gebser, and Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin adds a Christian dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. In the last year I've come across the work of Gary Lachman and his mentor Colin Wilson, with whom I am also deeply sympathetic. This German intuition can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being".
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud are also contributors to this "story". They would dissent about their being a progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of being itself. It is this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up.
I fear that they are closing off the human being from an openness to the dimension of depth, the plumbing of which is central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. I will have more to say about McGilchrist's argument in future posts. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book.
I know what the computer science folks hope for with regard to machine learning, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special things that humans have, which is the world of depth given to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. Machines can mimic Left Brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which requires a right brain, because that data comes from the dimension of depth. If McGilchrist's fundamental argument is correct, and I think it is, what currently ails us is caused by a condition that has caused us to become progressively alienated and buffered.
This is a condition that began to take hold among the voluntarists and nominaliststs in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. And so then the what is imagined as the transhuman or posthuman future is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony. It is the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to llberate the human from the irrational. Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason are blind to and complacent about the threats posed by a mechanomorphic human future.
The Current Crisis
I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, or nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul left feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. Everybody feels an increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.
The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do, but they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. And people will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'.
Cultural Conservatives blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these smug, shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and want to throw up. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so smug, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a soulless, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; they're as alienated as everyone else, but they don't see a need to blow up the existing order because they know how much worse it will be without it.
And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a community with an exceptional local church, they rightly see that there's nothing special there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle club would be more edifying than attending local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the church to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize.
Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. He asked and so I answered truthfully. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy. I wasn't seeking to persuade him or to accuse women and doctors of being murderers. I focused more on the the group-think aspect of the issue.
Whether it's criminalized or not is not as important to me as what it says about our glib, technocratic-utilitarian tolerance for what is a dehumanizing act, whether people want to face it or not. It says something very damning about us as a society, but so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many. Abortion is the Liberal moral blind spot. The other symptoms are mostly Conservative blind spots.
My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the cultural legitimacy that abortion has obtained. Deep down he knows it's wrong, whatever the good reasons might be that are presented to justify it, but he never heard anybody explain why in language that made sense to him. My friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. But most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points.
Authenticity and Morality
Any kind of moral position that is determined mainly by outside-in factors is immature and inauthentic. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no real convictions. They just do what people expect them to do. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to take advantage of poor old people. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it, since everyone else is doing it. Whatever. There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what is the right thing and then finding the courage to do it. Moral questions are decided for you outside-in. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue it when it requires no courage or moral agency to just go along.
Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must be inside-out. But the way the inside moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who themselves have some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind, but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.
That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcended custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the Good, which is something that can only happen in one soul at a time.
So a healthy "Axial" culture's, customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party over here. Both are proposing a cure to the ills of the Liberal Order that is worse than the disease.
The problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration that once animated them.
Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.
What prominent figure on the cultural Right has that inner dignity and thoughtfulness? If there is such a person, would he be invited as a regular guest on Fox News? Could he have a nice, sane, sit-down chat with Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones? If any is an elected official, could he or she give a sane, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor without being ostracized and kicked out of the GOP? There are lots of thoughtful, sane cultural conservatives, but they are all Never Trumpers.
Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves.
Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming an individual. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.
Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.
You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal Tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others. Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason more than loyalty, and so that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are reasons to doubt the tribal wisdom.
Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its tribalism and rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe.
I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. These people so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4).
Despite the Gospel sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that rendered them morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described them as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable.This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good.
Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older, son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question.
***
Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but it has no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't really understand what a real cure requires. They are angry, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. But even here, the issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. Warren and Sanders seems to "get" this in a way almost everyone else doesn't.
But it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media and the Democratic Party, to push back against the techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, or even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Bill Buckley mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in anyway on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking.
The real solution is Renaissance a la Iain McGilchrist. So in future posts, I want to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear answers, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it.