The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.
But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror. --Michelle Goldberg
Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals. Fearlessness is not an option, because there is too much genuinely to be feared. But courage is.
Perhaps the biggest test of courage for the contemporary intellectual is to risk appearing naive. But that's what's called for now in the coming years. We need people to be courageous in the naïveté of their convictions. But naïveté is useless if it's not working hand and hand with a certain shrewdness. I think this is essentially why Matthew's gospel entreats us to be as children, but to be "as" or "like" children is not the same as to be childish. It points to what Paul Ricoeur calls 'second naïveté', which I understand in the light of the same gospel's admonition that when we are out among the wolves, we must be shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves. The guileless dove part is the childlike part, but its being balanced by the shrewd/serpent part keeps guilelessness from being childish.
I think that an excellent example of this kind of thinking is found in Gary Lachman's Caretaker's of the Cosmos. It's both shrewd and naive, and it assumes a certain sophisticated naïveté it its readers. It points to the kind of imagination of what it means to be human that might actually get us out of the death spiral.
So I want here to assert something again that I've been saying for years, but maybe not as explicitly as I want to do now and in future posts. The challenge is to activate a dormant archetype that lies slumbering in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. The awakening of this archetype in the broader culture must happen if we're ever to find a positive, humanly enriching way forward.
This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype from a Christian pov, but I believe the power of this archetype is transcultural and no religion has complete ownership of it. Different spiritual traditions illuminate different aspects of it. I do, however, believe that Christianity in a Neoplatonic key provides the fullest possibilities for its realization in earth history. (See comment 1)
Now most people don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Second naïveté is prerequisite, and that's in short supply. I think that Jungian archetypes need to be understood in Platonic or Neoplatonic ontological terms, and Platonic archetypes in Jungian psychological terms, but explaining what I mean by that is a post for another day. The important thing about archetypes is that it's not a matter of "believing" in them, it's about feeling their energy and working with it.
When an archetype is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when under the sway of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. Some individuals are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because they are more than others in touch with the energy of an archetype. This is the meaning of 'genius' for the Renaissance artists or of the 'daemon' for Socrates.
[I talk more about this in a review of Kelly and Dreyfus's Book, All Things Shining.]
So for instance, I would assert that there is an archetype for justice, and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was justice, and he channeled that to the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with people in ways they only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work. But here's the point I want to make. Unless an archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society.
What I mean by archetype here might be more understandable in relation to the term zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no positive archetype to shape it. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in such a way that Douthat feels compelled to write about it. But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative archetype.
Archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So just to look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. The energies that shape the Age of Whatever zeitgeist derive from the chaos archetype. Anything goes because there is no energizing, positive collective archetype that shapes the collective consciousness.
The Age of Whatever, as I see it, is the age of whatever-comes-next, because we must be vigilant in our awaiting the dawn of a new transformative archetype--hopefully some aspect of the anthropos archetype. In this interim, all the energy derives from the chaos archetype, weakly counterbalanced by the inertia of all-but-dead western cultural forms. The only power that can counter the dehumanizing, chaotic energies of Baconism run amok in consumer technocapitalism that leads inevitably from trans humanism to post humanism is the awakening of the anthropos archetype referred to above.
So, a decadent zeitgeist emerges when a society is between positive, transformative archetypes. It's when chaos rules by default. Chaos is not evil; it's essential. Evil comes from any kind of imbalance, and when chaos is unbalanced by some intelligence that seeks to shape it, things get pretty evil. Otherwise, chaos is the raw stuff out of which the future is to be shaped. Nietzsche called it the Dionysian, and it is always there counterpressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms the zeitgeist produces.
During a positive transformative period the chaos archetype is a source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks transformative vitality. There is a lot of energy in chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't an equally powerful positive, or transformative, shaping archetype to work with its energies. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures. In such moments the Dove in us needs to defend what it knows about transformative truth, even when there are few social supports in the culture to validate it.
In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of the unbalanced chaos archetype in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by the chaos archetype. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are themselves ciphers who are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from the chaos archetype. They are in a state of hypnosis, as if under a bad spell cast by a master magician
Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype because it reached its full development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. I think the Enlightenment archetype was a positive aspect of the larger Anthropos archetype. That's where I differ from most conservative traditionalists with whom I agree on other matters. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance starting in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline.
Decline ensues when the chaos archetype is ascendant, when the more positive, transformative archetype starts to lose its generative energy The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about the Anthropos archetype in its Enlightenment aspect in decline. The second Thirty years war from 1914 to 1945 marked its extinction as a force with any positive transformative Anthropic energy. Since then we've been living with mostly chaos mixed with parodic, reductive or stilted forms of the Anthropos archetype. We have the forms without the life that gave them their shape. Or the forms are filled with some kind of undead, wraithlike, destructive energy--which is what we see on the cultural right.
The strong emergence of any archetype tends to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. This is what Hegel and Marx mean by 'contradictions'. The hypertrophied parts of the psyche--aka, the repressed--always return, whether in healthy or unhealthy ways. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.) As suggested above, I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values was important for human development insofar as it awakened parts of the larger 'anthropos' archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being, but the price paid was dear.
So Romanticism is largely a return of the repressed. Its cultural energy, often suffused with nostalgia, sought to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the radical aspects of the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. Romanticism's characterization as "spilt religion" is instructive. It was so insofar as it was an unbalanced celebration of the Dionysian. Goethe, a paradigm of the balanced psyche, someone who held the Dionysian and Apollonian in a creative tension, for this reason rejected his being characterized as a Romantic.
So Romanticism points to something essential for life, but it is destructive when it manifests in unlawful ways. Historically, Romaticism sets the stage for the chaos archetype to play a more dominant role in North Atlantic societies, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism--and Nietzsche. [FN's uebermensch, like Ayn Rand's Galt and Roark, are, imo, perversely imagined forms inspired by the Anthropos archetype in the Age of Matter.] And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter, the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism.
Nevertheless, Romanticism and German Idealism from Fichte through Hegel were the last, dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in total wars around the world. As Europe's first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment archetype and the Age of Reason.
And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the extreme Trumpian Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal zombified agents through which the chaos archetype is destroying the Liberal social order, which, rickety and inadequate though it might be, is the only order that we have.
Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the chaos archetype. The Trump cult has very little to do with him personally; it has everything to do with the chaos archetype that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this sad, little human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to command the zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges. Until it does, the rest of us, because we have no energy to affirm something positive, can only say No. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political Liberalism is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment archetype performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke.
It is very difficult to persuade the many guileless, if not particularly shrewd, people who support Trump not to support him if you can't give them something that is clearly better. Something better requires that it has to fit with their innate, dovelike sense of what's 'right'. Because the sources of positive Liberal energy died with the Enlightenment archetype in the "second" Thirty Years War, Liberalism no longer provides any real moral authority. A moralistic, politically correct fussiness is not the same thing as moral authority; it is a parody of it.
Nevertheless, Liberalism has a role to play because it's the only positive way to say No to chaos in the political sphere. If its No fails, order will be imposed by regressive, fascistic political forms because chaos rules by default. Liberalism has now as much archetypal energy in the political sphere as Monarchy did in the 19th century--close to zero. Sure, it's there in the collective subconscious, and like 'monarchy' it can be activated nostalgically as by a royal wedding, but it has no future-shaping power. Liberals are ruled by nostalgia for the good old days when the Enlightenment archetype had life in the same way that traditionalist conservatives are nostalgic for the premodern hierarchical order that mapped to the Great Chain of Being. But while nostalgia has energy, there's no future in it. I call it Lot's Wife Syndrome--paralysis by the fear of the future. McLuhan called it looking at the future through the rear-view mirror.
For example, I think someone like Bernie Sanders activates a nostalgia for the old Enlightenment Liberal archetype, more concretely, a nostalgia for FDR and the New Deal. And it's fitting that such an elderly, physically frail person should be its most robust champion--especially among young people. But neither FDR nor Bernie isn't the answer; they were in their different contexts just a way to say No to the ugliness meanness of the Social Darwinian Right. They were a stopgap at best. Traditionalist conservatives I think rightly understand the inadequacy of Liberal solutions, but are naive if they think that there is any other way to preserve some basic sense of order in this historical moment. Nostalgic Conservative solutions are far more out of touch with the historical moment than Nostalgic Liberalism. The only sane politics now is to embrace Liberalism and to find a way to transcend it in the longer term.
This is the chief source of my anxiety at the moment. Things just might be too far gone. Democrats are all but divided and conquered. While Democrats might have the numbers, they have no energizing, unifying center in the way that the Right has the zombie destructive energy of the chaos archetype. The Left is energized only in its No to the forces of chaos and regression. That No is a sign of health, but the energy of No is not enough for the long run. Even if Liberals find enough energy to get rid of Trump, it isn't enough to prevent the larger horror--which Michelle Goldberg points to in the epigraph. The chaos archetype can be held in check only so long. You can't destroy an archetype, you can only counterbalance and assimilate it, and that counterbalance has to come from the emergence into the collective consciousness of a positive, transformative aspect of the Anthropos archetype that might energize us and thus enable us collectively to embrace a sense of positive future human possibility.
I feel certain that a new aspect of the anthropos archetype will emerge--I think Lachman's book, if only in a preliminary way, is one of many signals of what it might look like. But I'm not at all certain that humans today will be attuned to its emergence if it does. We might be too buffered, too far gone in our alienation from the Real. In the Age of Whatever, machines and screens have sealed off so many humans from the Deep Real from where the archetypes arise. Will there be human beings enough open enough, awake enough, naive or guileless enough, to notice and be energized by such an archetype when it arises?
[This essay was first posted on 1/27/20]