After the Future

On Reading Simone Weil's 'Gravity and Grace'

There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago someone like Simone Weil would have just been dismissed as a religious nut, now a book about letters she wrote to her family provides a pretext to profile her in The New Yorker, and she gets some serious, very positive attention from a Princeton “attention researcher” on an Ezra Klein podcast. Huh.

This is important because elite discourse shapes how people think for better or worse, and the argument that I’ve been making is that if we are to find a way to break out of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, new ideas about the importance of ‘transcendence’ have to become broadly acceptable by both elites and non-elites. As I argued in the Cathedral Talks, there has to be a consensus that emerges that will be strong enough to provide a moral, intellectual, and metaphysical counterbalance to the dehumanization promoted by the TCM, which so far has been just accepted by almost everyone as inevitable. We’ve all more or less become resigned to dehumanization being our future, and in the meantime we just try to live as humanly as circumstances allow, and hope the best for our kids and their kids. But why think about it? It’s too depressing.

Nevertheless, while it’s a small thing, I think this interest in Simone Weil might be an indicator of a shift in the zeitgeist that shapes elite thinking, at least in some quarters of it. Simone Weil is among the most interesting women of my parents’ generation. I see her as someone who experienced her woman’s body as too frail to contain the raging fire that enflamed her spirit and intellect, and so saw it as always getting in the way. As I point out in the essay below, that’s problematic, but it’s a problem that’s hard for us lesser mortals to understand or sympathize with. She was a force unto herself, and as such she’s not someone who can be reduced to or understood by ordinary human psychology, which the New Yorker profile is duty-bound to do to some extent. But the writer also conveys enough about the force and fierceness of her spirit that cannot be contained by that psychology.

In any event, this recent attention to Weil prompted me to dig up an essay I wrote about her in 2021, which follows. In most of what I’ve been posting, I’ve not focussed on the Christian dimension of my thinking, focusing instead mostly on what Christianity shares with the other great Axial Traditions. But I am a Christian, and it makes claims that other traditions do not that I believe need to be taken seriously. If you’ve never heard of Simone Weil, I recommend your reading the New Yorker article first for context, then this essay:

On Reading Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

I've avoided reading Weil's essays until recently because I was put off by what appeared to be her body hatred, her need to be pure, her angelism. But now that I've read her, I have to say I am strangely moved. There's something there to be grappled with, and I feel in her a kindred spirit with whom I would love to have conversed and to have befriended. Our becoming friends, though, could happen only after we spent some time arguing. 

Where is the line that separates a pure-hearted commitment to truth and goodness from a fanaticism for perfection? Not sure I know for myself, and I don't think Weil found it either. But I think that the striving for moral perfection is basically un-Christian because it leads to a tight-assed rejection of the messiness of being human. Our ultimate destiny is to be perfect as God is perfect (emphasis on the 'as'), but this isn't something we accomplish by exertion of will. We must act, but action that is motivated by superego or other psychological/religious compulsions are not the kind of action that is called for here.

The testimony of the great saints is clear about that; it's something that happens to us if we're open to it, and if there is any will involved it’s in creating the negative capability, the emptiness, in which the movement of grace makes itself known to us. So perfection is something to be achieved in time, but not primarily by the will, and so the willfulness and body-hating angelism in the young Weil is just wrong, but I believe had she lived would have been tempered, but it's something that has to be called out. She was only thirty-four when she died.

Our perfecting, or theosis, plays out in different ways for different people, but mostly it's not about trying to be a perfect human being but about doing what's there for us to do, which is to accept the burden and yoke of discipleship more in the spirit of St. Therese's "little way". It's the small, everyday things that build habits of perception and will that prepare us to do the big things if we are called upon to do them. But the little things are enough if that's what's given you. Most of us haven't achieved the level of humility that would permit us to go big and not to be damaged by it. 

But if Weil's angelism led to something that I think was unbalanced, that doesn't mean that so much of what she perceived and understood was wrong. And in reading Weil, I find something I haven’t encountered in a long time, and it’s this feel for transcendence in a late-modern key, and this way of talking about what it’s like for humans to touch it.

There is in her this sense of its subtlety and beauty, its gentleness and serenity. It is that feeling I get from time to time when in the presence of true beauty. I think that it’s what medieval Christians experienced in the cult of the virgin, but it’s something found in all the great spiritual traditions, this sense of mercy, of grace, of whatever is the opposite of force. Weil gets that and talks about it beautifully.

For instance, this sensibility is at the heart of her insight about the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. In her essay “The Romanesque Renaissance”1, Weil makes clear she is not a fan of the Gothic because she associates with it, I think rightly, a kind of force that had no patience for the gentle, simple beauty of the Romanesque. The Romanesque balanced masculine and feminine; it gave us chivalry and the Grail stories, Hildegard of Bingen, and the cult of the Virgin. The  Gothic that gave us those astonishing cathedrals and the control-obsessed, centralizing Church militant. 

I remember when I made my first trip to Europe thinking that the Gothic cathedrals were impressive, but the Romanesque chapels were purer, simpler. There is grandeur in the Gothic, but better is that sense of gentle beauty before which one feels not compelled but invited. The Gothic cathedral has more in common with the assertiveness of the modern skyscraper, the Romanesque chapel with the roadside shrine in an arbor. The mood for the latter is not awe so much as it is of being moved to tears. Weil understands this difference. The latter is more deeply Christian. 

Weil was respected and read by a certain kind of mid-century Christian intellectual because she was such a prodigy, but I think mostly she was not understood. Did Gustave Thibon, who wrote the Introduction to Gravity and Graceunderstand her? I think mostly not. But he encountered in her something that he respected, a sincerity of spirit that was rare. So give him credit for that. (Perhaps I’m too hard on him, but I found his writing style in his introduction to Gravity and Grace jarringly out of tune with the spirit of the essays he introduces.) And amazingly her essays are still in print, which means there’s still enough of an audience that, like me, is intrigued by her and even now seeks to understand what she was pointing to.

***

But now I want to argue with the Weil who wrote “Human Personality”.2 At first I was struck by its Buddhistic tenor. I have no objections to Buddhism--I see it as pointing to parts of the human project that Westerners need to understand much better than they do. We have much to learn from Buddhists. But Christians emphasize the individual and the incarnate in a way that is mostly not found in Buddhism and that emphasis is, imo, misunderstood by Buddhists probably because it's misunderstood by most Christians, among them Weil. I suspect that her main exposure to Christian personalism was in its cruder or more childish forms, and in reaction to them goes too far in the other direction. We see this in an anecdote told about her by Thibon when he saw her for the last time:

As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: “Goodbye until we meet again in this world or the next.” She suddenly became serious and replied, “In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life.  (Gravity and Grace, p. xii)

Of course, this is Thibon’s interpretation of a memory, so who knows how accurate it is, but it's not contradicted by what she writes in "Human Personality". There is something about the thinking of mid-century spiritual intellectuals—we see it in T.S. Eliot, as well—that is more interested in eternity than in temporality, as if we can know something about eternity and that it can be spoken about in some credible way. I resist this fascination with the “eternal” because it opposes my commitment to the idea that what matters most is what happens in time.

And I resist the idea of the “impersonal” because the whole point of Christian spiritual practice is to become more deeply a person, i.e., one's Self, i.e, the Self created in the image and likeness of God, and that this is accomplished when this Self, which starts as a seed, grows to eventually supplant/transform what I call the Darwinian Self, and this "supplanting/transforming" can only happen for us humans on earth over time. The Darwinian Self is the natural human being concerned with biological flourishing--spread your seed, dominate your enemies, seek glory in your achievements. In other words, get your inner Genghis Kahn (or Donald Trump or Tiger Woods or etc.) on if you have the will and wit to do it--or if you don't, bend the knee and draft on those who do. 

And I resist the idea that we shall not meet our deceased loved ones in the future as un-Christian because for Christianity the goal is communion. And communion, as opposed to Buddhistic merging into the pleromatic Unity requires a plurality of persons, that is, of realized Deep Selves. This plurality of Deep Selves is what Christians call the communion of saints. So it seemed to me this comment by Thibon suggested that Weil was more of a Buddhist than a Christian, at least in this respect.

Or at least this was my first impression upon reading this essay. But it became clear that she’s talking about something that resonates deeply with my own understanding of the relationship of transcendence to the temporal.

If I had a conversation with her, I might make the argument that the idea of eternity is a meaningless abstraction invented by philosophers as a placeholder for something they didn't really understand.  "Eternity" pointed to a dimension of reality they knew was important, something radically different and in some ways nobler and more deeply, densely real than what most people take for the real world. If time = change, change = growth/decay, so the opposite of temporal is the opposite of growth/decay, which is eternity. "Eternity" became a  way to name what was incorruptible, and the essence of incorruptibility was God. So I understand that, but I'd still argue that we have no way of knowing for sure whether God is an eternal being or a temporal one, or that he himself is not co-evolving with his creation. 

That being said, it’s certainly possible that there’s a dimension of God that exists beyond Time, but, even so, that is no concern of ours. What makes a theistic conception of God interesting for humans is the fact of his relationship to us in time, and clearly that means he exists in time. All attempts by thinkers to emphasize the eternity, infinity, the power, freedom, and the absolute transcendence of God might in some way be pointing to the truth about him, but it’s not relevant to our experience of him. If you profess to be Christian, the temporal aspect of God is knowable, and we are invited to form a relationship with this God in time through his revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Ideas about his existence beyond time are purely abstract speculation, and, imo, create more problems than they solve. Better not to speak of it. This is the emphasis of the apophatic tradition in Christianity, to recognize that anything we say or think about God is wrong, and so best not say or think it. I think that there is common ground here with Buddhist non-theism, which derives from an honesty that one can only speak about what one knows.

So instead of the word ‘eternity’, I prefer the word ‘transcendence’. Transcendence points to a dimension of being that stands outside of what I think of evolution without grace, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside of time. It just exists in another dimension, a temporal dimension, that interpenetrates with the world we experience on earth. In other words, there's a temporality--and evolution--at a higher level that seeks to become intertwined with and transformative of the lower temporality of biological evolution.

So when Weil talks about there being nothing sacred in the human personality, and that the sacred in the human is only what is impersonal, it sounds at first that she is rejecting the idea of human individuality, and that the goal is to give up our individuality and to merge into a higher unity. Maybe this is what she thought. I’m not sure. But there is common ground here with what I’ve been thinking about regarding the Deep Self and Communion.

I think we want to affirm the same thing. What she calls the impersonal eternal is the same as what I call the Antrhopos archetype, aka, the Christ within about which St. Paul is so articulate. The Christ/Anthropos archetype is universal--it's something potentially cognizable by every human being whether they are Christians or not, and it exists in a transcendent dimension, i.e., a dimension that is nobler and more densely real, as all archetypes do. But Christians like me believe that the possibility of the Christ Self supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self became a possibility for everyone only after the events in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago.

Our theosis, our divinization, becomes a possibility only after the Divine became human. Only after the Divine has lived into human death, did it become possible for the human to die into Divine life. Only after the Old Adam was redemptively transformed in the resurrected New Adam was it possible for the rest of to become who we were created to be. The interior, i.e., inside-out, realization of the New Adam became a possibility for all humans in a way that it was not pre-Pentecost.

So what I'm calling the Christ/Anthropos archetype is what St. Paul points to when he says not I but Christ in me--not the Darwinian Self, the Old Adam, but the Anthropos, the Christ Self, the New Adam. Wouldn’t Weil be receptive to the idea that this "Christ in me" is what she calls the impersonal, but which is in fact a deeper personal, a deeper form of individuality and uniqueness?

The Christ in me is not Christ himself--he has his own embodied individuality--but his image and likeness--the Anthropos archetype--is individualizable in my ‘person’. And the point of Christ's incarnation and resurrection was precisely to restore his shattered image and likeness*, qua the archetypal human in the human being. He did this so that this archetype might in its full development make us individually substantive enough to enter into communion with God face to face. Face to face is emphatically not Weil''s idea of “the empirical self being eradicated in the unity of eternal life”.

That's why Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body--the Anthropos archetype has no body; it must be individualized in bodies. The archetype is like a seed strewn into the souls of all humans but for reasons that are lost to human memory, the human soul-soil in the Old Adam became infertile to its growth. This infertility is what Christians like me point to as original sin. And so Christians like me believe that the possibility for the restoration in the Old Adam of the soul-soil's fertility became possible through the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection, he was the first human being in whom the Anthropos archetype became fully realized in a particular human body and so now its realization becomes a possibility for the rest of us.

So for each of us to realize the Christ archetype does not mean we become Jesus bots, but rather the fully actualized individuals we were created to be who are destined for communion. The banquet parables in the Gospels and the circle dances and wedding parties at the end of Shakespearean comedies are proleptic images for this longed for telos. And while these are simply images about something that is otherwise unimaginable for us, especially given the poverty of our late-modern, buffered imaginations, they give us every reason to hope that we will be in communion with, among others, those whom we came to know and love, and to think this not possible is downright un-Christian. 

Nevertheless, Weil is right to point out that whatever part of us that touches eternity or that is moved by transcendence has little to do with our everyday personality shaped by the anxieties of our day-to-day getting along in the world, which I assume is what she means by the "empirical self". And I agree with her that our preoccupation with the aggrandizement of our personalities, our constant seeking to flourish in terms defined by the Darwinian Self (her empirical self?), is more of an impediment to the part of us that is capable of being moved by transcendence.

I see her as someone obsessed with trying to extirpate her empirical/Darwinian Self as it operated in her. We see something similar in Gandhi's autobiography. The idea is that you have to kill the empirical self (Darwinian Self) to liberate the Deep Self. And it would appear that she does not think of the Deep Self as a truly individuated being but rather as just a part of the soul that seeks to merge with eternity. I suspect we’re talking about the same thing. I just think her impersonalist way of articulating it is deficient from a Christian point of view.

I would agree with Weil that the more focused we are on being affirmed in our Darwinian Selves, the less sensitive we become to hear the music, which is the movement of grace in our lives. For this reason, our lives in the collectivity, especially one so dominated by consumer capitalism, make it more difficult to be touched by transcendence and to hear its music. And I agree that it is in solitude, away from the crowd, that we are more likely to be so touched. But isn’t this need to separate from the collectivity a way of affirming the importance of our individuality? And does it preclude the idea of our having individual Deep Selves brought into fuller realization by a lifetime of openness and response to grace?

So I may or not be right about this, but I think if I were to have a conversation with Weil, I could convince her that what she and I are talking about is pretty much the same thing.

Why Neil deGrasse Tyson Bugs Me

I am an absolute sceptic and materialist, and regard the universe as a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity. Nothing really matters, and the only thing for a person to do is to take the artificial and traditional values he finds around him and pretend they are real; in order to retain that illusion of significance in life which gives to human events their apparent motivation and semblance of interest.

H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters 1925-29

 

Most educated people share a cosmic imaginary that is shaped more by Newton than by relativity theory, the uncertainty principle, and quantum mechanics. While a lot of the freakier things like multiverses, black matter, and worm holes make it into popular science fiction, those ideas don't make it into the everyday way educated people imagine their place in the cosmos. We are taught to see it the way Lovecraft describes it. If you accept the description as he presents it as "factual", the conclusions follow--the cosmos is meaningless and absurd. He's just following the evidence.

I don't mean what I write below to be a personal attack on Neil DeGrasse Tyson, but rather on how his attitude typifies a conventional mindset among many (most?) American cultural elites. From all appearances, he seems to be a great guy, someone you'd enjoy conversing with. But I also know enough about him from his public appearances on Colbert's show (See Note 1) that his view of the cosmos, insofar as such a view follows from the material evidence, aligns with Lovecraft's. It follows, therefore, that for him the cosmos is "a wholly purposeless and essentially temporary incident in the ceaseless and boundless rearrangements of electrons, atoms, and molecules which constitute the blind but regular mechanical patterns of cosmic activity". To think anything else is to go beyond the evidence. 

But from my pov his evidence-based rationalist materialism is as naive as the Christian fundamentalist who tells you his religious ideas are absolutely true it follows from what's plainly written in the Bible. The same kind of naiveté affects the Originalists on the Supreme Court. The Originalist and the Fundamentalist both say,  "Just read the words in the text". Rationalist materialists like Tyson say, "Just look at the evidence."

As if it were that simple. All three are naive because they don't understand how their unconscious presuppositions organize and filter the "evidence" or the "words", or how they foreground and privilege some evidence and some words, and background or just plain disregard others that don't fit their interpretations. The problem with grasping the truth is not just to see what's there, but to interpret what's there in the most humanly profound way. Both the fundamentalists, Originalists, and rational materialists fail in that regard miserably. 

Part of what I do here is try to deconstruct what I see as incoherent intellectual positions. It's easy to do with most conservatives, but it's done less frequently with rationalist materialists, who tend to be Liberals. I want to argue that Tyson's ontological presuppositions don't fit with what I'm sure are his sincere feelings of awe when contemplating the cosmos. I'm not arguing that his exuberance is fake, but that his feelings are not adequately accounted for by his rationalist materialism. His mistake is to start with the material facts rather than starting with the wonder. Because he starts with the material facts, he cannot give a satisfying account for the source of the wonder. 

Science studies the the husks and mechanics of the cosmos. What science affirms about them is true until new evidence proves them not to be. I have no quarrel with material facts and evidence. My quarrel is with how an obsessive focus on them crowds out other kinds of knowing that are much more important. 

Science has always been a child of instrumental reason, i.e., more interested in utility than awe, in getting results than contemplating in wonder. And instrumental reason has always been the practical, debunking, snarky cousin who thinks he knows better and who delights to make you feel like a naive idiot if you insist there's anything more. "Prove it", he says. And yet to prove it requires proving the existence of 'red' to someone who sees only in black and white. I'm fine with the kind of scientist who is agnostic about matters of the spirit; it's those who aggressively reject the spiritual--like Tyson--who bug me. There is an honest humility in the first, but a smug condescension in the second. 

Do some rationalist materialists nevertheless feel a genuine sense of awe when beholding the cosmos? Of course, and this capacity for wonder points to something about the human spirit that rationalist materialists like Tyson, because of their presuppositions, are unwilling to acknowledge--that the very possibility for awe requires something that cannot be explained in purely materialistic terms. A sack of chemicals is not capable of awe; one needs a mind and a soul to feel them. 

Neither the Mind nor the soul is a material thing, and all attempts to explain their existence in materialist terms fail miserably. As soon as you flip the sequence from matter preceding mind to mind preceding matter, everything makes much more sense. Why is that so difficult for so many among the educated elite? It wasn't the case even 150 years ago. There's no logical reason for anyone to think that Mind is not anterior to matter even now. It's difficult because of how educated elites--especially those who are most influential in our cultural institutions--are acculturated to privilege scientific knowing in a way that delegitimates any other kind of knowing. 

This priority of mind is what every great civilization took for granted until about the middle of the 19th Century in Europe. Hegel, the last of the German Idealists, died in the 1830s. The great early 19th century English Romantic poets Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, and Shelly and figures like R.W. Emerson were all Platonists. These are people whose attempt to make sense of the world began in wonder. They were the cultural elite of their day. 

What changed in the second half of the 19th century? The causes are hard to adequately explain because overdetermined. But clearly one massive reason obtrudes: Western societies at that time were caught up in an infatuation with how technological innovations got material results. Within a few generations concerns of the spirit or the experience of wonder came to appear squishy and trivial. These were concerns that had no robust relationship to the "real world". They were not the concerns of serious men of action with dreams of making a fortune and shaping a brave new world in their mechanomorphic image.

People have always been greedy and lustful for power. But now the machines magnified their wealth and power and made robust resistance to them extraordinarily difficult. And people who might otherwise resist were seduced: "Look at the results! Don't we all benefit from their greed and powerlust?" We became the first great civilization in the history of the world that could actually take seriously the idea that "Greed is good." There was resistance, but it was always relatively powerless and so easily pushed to the Left Bank, so to say. Not a neighborhood where good citizens careful of their reputations dare to wander. 

But few Americans of good will understood then that in allowing the greedy to have their way, they were trading cultural vitality for material prosperity. Americans are optimists, so it was difficult for them to anticipate how with each passing decade since the mid 19th century American society would become a soulless, hollowed-out shell, and so we have no problem electing soulless, hollowed out human beings to represent us politically.  And even now most don't understand what we've lost--even Liberals. They just adapt, and still they marvel at our technology and about how great the machines are going to make our lives. It's gonna be awesome. What's next? Flying cars and vacations on the moon. Can't wait.

Rationalist materialism is not science; it is a particular kind of metaphysics that follows from a particular interpretation of human experience that has been impoverished by the hypertrophying of instrumental reason. The real question is whether other metaphysical presuppositions that would lead us to a deeper, richer understanding of the cosmos and of humanity's place in it is possible for us in the future. For me, it's obvious where the development of such an alternative metaphysical imaginary should begin--by retrieving the ontological anteriority of mind before matter. 

In the meanwhile, the attempt to rhapsodize about what we know from science has always been to me an attempt to make the best of a fundamentally bad situation. It's akin to marveling  about how beautiful or clever the work of a taxidermist or the cosmetic work of the undertaker. There’s skill in it, and even a kind of beauty, but we're marveling at something that is not so marvelous as the thing was when it was alive. It lacks other deeper possibilities for the cognition of beauty because in the end its object is something abstract and dead, and as such a simulacrum, a faded memory of a living Real no longer believed in. 

So any meaning we see in it beyond the engineering practicality of it seems forced at best and perverse at worst. It feels to me like an attempt to make more of something than is really there to make of it: I want to be entertained and to be in a good mood, so by the gods I’m going to enjoy this unfunny movie no matter what, and laugh at its vulgar, unfunny jokes. Similarly regarding the cosmos, I'm going to feel the awe no matter that it is meaningless, purposeless, random arrangement of atoms. It’s an attempt to force some distant memory of beauty, from a time when humans had a profound capacity for apprehending the sacred, onto something that provides no evidence to justify our feelings of awe. Maybe it's unfair to accuse Tyson of this kind of thing, but I can't help but feel there's a forced, performative qualiity to his cosmic ebullience. 

***

Here's another way of getting at what I'm trying to point to: I'm reminded of the story from Zen and the Art of Archery, by Eugen Herrigel, where the author describes his having achieved a certain archery skill, which he demonstrates it to his teacher. But the teacher is outraged at the fraud because while he might have got the result that indicates mastery, he achieved that result in a non-Zen, mechanistic way. He took mastering the mechanics as the end rather than understanding that the goal was the transformation of his soul. He did not understand that the mechanical result was a secondary effect. He got the result, but getting the result wasn't the point--an expansion of the soul was. He had the appearance--the husks--of the master archer but not the soul of one. Such a distinction is beyond the scope of our contemporary materialistic imaginary, even for most people who profess to be religious.

Something like that is at the bottom of what I’m trying to get at here. The scientistic cosmologists are technically right about the mechanics, but the soul of their excitement isn’t "right". Their experience of awe should call them to seek for a deeper interpretation of its significance. Their excitement by their own presuppositions is the "illusion of significance", to use Lovecraft's phrase. They're not wrong because what they assert about the facts of the cosmos are wrong so far as it goes; they are wrong because the immaterial they insist cannot exist is the source of their capacity for awe. 

So I’m trying to make the point that scientific truth, which is real, and does in fact have a kind of beauty, nevetheless has gradually come to crowd out another kind of experience of truth, and in fact has come to delegitimate it. That's what happens if you start with facts rather than starting with awe and wonder. The rationalist materialist does not see the legitimacy of this other way of understanding the deep source of truth and beauty, so people who retain some level of soul life--and Tyson is clearly among them--try to eke out what juice they can from an unyielding rock because the rock is all they've got. But it doesn’t work. 

I exaggerate, perhaps unfairly, to make a point. A less exaggerated way of saying it might be that there is something inherent in the human spirit that rightly longs for beauty and to participate deeply in the mystery of Being, but we live in a world whose primary imaginary is shaped by engineering utility and capitalist expediency. This imaginary has progressively crowded out our capacity to experience real beauty and real mystery. If you experienced the real thing, it wouldn't be possible to be a rationalist materialist. 

And It becomes a vicious circle--the more our spiritual capacity diminishes, the more jejeune becomes the most frequent articulations of spiritual experience. Serious people see those who claim to be spiritual as jejeune, and so they reject any kind of spiritual reality as unserious--even if they have had such experiences themselves. Such experiences are for them embarrassing, or are dismissed as merely aesthetic. And so because rejected as unserious, the implications of such experiences are not developed, and because they are undeveloped, there are fewer and fewer people who achieve any substantive level of spiritual maturity. The last place one would expect to find such maturity these days is the churches. It's there, but you have to look hard to find it.

So this is not a personal knock on Tyson; it's about the limitations of his cosmic imaginary. I'm sure his enthusiasm and love of science are sincere. But there is, it seems to me, a mismatch between his very conventional, scientistic-materialist worldview and his understandable need to find a mysterious beauty in it. He connects them in a way that seems fraudulent to me--there's an inherent contradiction in it that most people--including Tyson--are oblivious of, and accept without thinking it through. In the end, I'm just saying that If he took the second impulse--his capacity for awe--more seriously, it would lead to his undermining of the first--his materialist presuppositions. 

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Note 1: I'm thinking in particular about one of his appearances on Stephen Colbert. In the clip below you'll see how incredulous Tyson is when he asks Colbert how the "urges of a believer" are compatible with following the evidence.  I've queued this to the point in the video that's most relevant, but watch from beginning if you're unfamiliar with Tyson and his cosmic enthusiasm.  

Waiting for the Music

Nations, like individuals, tell stories in order to understand what they are, where they come from, and what they want to be. National narratives, like personal ones, are prone to sentimentality, grievance, pride, shame, self-blindness. There is never just one—they compete and constantly change. The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking. They’re the ones that address our deepest needs and desires. Americans know by now that democracy depends on a baseline of shared reality—when facts become fungible, we’re lost. But just as no one can live a happy and productive life in nonstop self-criticism, nations require more than facts—they need stories that convey a moral identity. The long gaze in the mirror has to end in self-respect or it will swallow us up.  Packer, "How America Fractured into Four Parts")

This goes to what I have been saying about our current cultural decadence. A society has become decadent when it has lost any collective sense of future possibility. It's happens when the music dies, so to say. Since at least the 1600s Liberalism and the Age of Reason has provided the basic framework for most North Atlantic societies that had given them that sense of future possibility. Liberalism is the song North Atlantic societies sang. Within that framework, there have been a variety of thematic variations and improvisational riffs, and often they have been out of tune with one another, but pretty much everyone, especially in America, believed that progress toward a better, prosperous, happier future was there for anyone who was willing to work for it. It energized the liveliest minds and souls, from entrepeneurs and scientists, to transcendentalists and utopian dreamers. But it has become at best for us now elevator music. 

Liberalism no longer has that kind of vitality; people are still singing it but not with the same guileless conviction. It's rather like the way people sing in most Catholic churches, dutifully but weakly humming along with the melody that they don't really like that much. So we are no longer in the Age of Reason, we're in the Age of Whatever, which means the Age of Whatever Comes Next, and whatever comes next is either going to be regressive or progressive, but regressive by default unless a robust, unifying progressive future-oriented song emerges that most sane people can find both inspiring and plausible, that most people want to sing with gusto. 

People want to believe there's morning in America, but there's a difference between the false promises of politicians and the real thing. Buying into Reagan's America was rather like the guy who is going thorough middle-age crisis who divorces his wife, buys a sports car, starts wearing an ascot, and dates someone half his age. It felt good for a while, but it was really stupid and often irresponsible. Reagan's 1980s fantasy of America laid the foundation for the delusional thinking that led to Jan. 6. But because there have been numerous false promises does not mean that the real thing isn't possible. But until it emerges, most of the cultural energy is coopted by cynics and fanatics. 

So unlike most conservatives, I do not believe that decadence is a morally pejorative term; it's rather a descriptive one. It's the cultural equivalent of a slack low tide--we're in a time between tides waiting for the new tide to come in. Or perhaps a better metaphor is that a decadent cultural period happens when the cultural song becomes something that no one really wants to sing anymore. Conservatives think the world is going to hell in a handbasket, and they want to get things back to the way they were before the music died. They want to force us back into church and sing songs we no longer love. They want us to eat our spinach, and that's not possible in the consumer society that Liberalism created. The trick is to listen for a new melody, new in the sense of original, not novel.

Sooner or later it will be sung, and most people of good will will hear it, and we can once again move forward. But for now, we're wandering in the wilderness, putting one foot in front of another. Some of us are humming a tune that we hope will catch on. 

More Packer--:

But Smart Americans are uneasy with patriotism. It’s an unpleasant relic of a more primitive time, like cigarette smoke or dog racing. It stirs emotions that can have ugly consequences. The winners in Smart America—connected by airplane, internet, and investments to the rest of the globe—have lost the capacity and the need for a national identity, which is why they can’t grasp its importance for others. Their passionate loyalty, the one that gives them a particular identity, goes to their family. The rest is diversity and efficiency, heirloom tomatoes and self-driving cars. They don’t see the point of patriotism.

Patriotism can be turned to good or ill purposes, but in most people it never dies. It’s a persistent attachment, like loyalty to your family, a source of meaning and togetherness, strongest when it’s hardly conscious. National loyalty is an attachment to what makes your country yours, distinct from the rest, even when you can’t stand it, even when it breaks your heart. This feeling can’t be wished out of existence. And because people still live their lives in an actual place, and the nation is the largest place with which they can identify—world citizenship is too abstract to be meaningful—patriotic feeling has to be tapped if you want to achieve anything big. If your goal is to slow climate change, or reverse inequality, or stop racism, or rebuild democracy, you will need the national solidarity that comes from patriotism.

"Love of country" has to be part of a new melody of future possibility. Hopefully it will be a song that calls us to be our best possibility. The kind of vulgar MAGA patriotism on display the last several years is what happens by default when a better song is not available. 

Animal House and the American Right

Watching it again today, I didn’t think so much of righteous defiance, or underdogs and outsiders; I thought of Wall Street. This particular iteration of Ramis’ martinet vs. slob theme pits—as everyone knows—a prissy, militaristic college fraternity against a fraternity where the boys like pleasure, which is to say, where they drink beer and throw parties and actually enjoy getting laid. If this basic formula doesn’t strike you as particularly rebellious or even remarkable, that’s because it isn’t: in its simple anarchic assertion of appetite, it’s the philosophy of the people who rule us. Everyone is a fraud in this world; learning is a joke; sex objects are easily conned; Kennedy-style idealism is strictly for suckers; and in one telling moment, fratboy 1 remarks to fratboy 2, who is crying over the trashing of his borrowed automobile by fratboy 1 and company, “You fucked up. You trusted us.” What popped into my mind when I heard that line was that other great triumph of the boomer generation: the time-bomb investments of 2008; Goldman Sachs peddling its “shitty deals” to the naive and the credulous.  (Tom Frank) 

Frank points to something that is at the heart of what confuses and ennervates the American Left, which is that its liberation project, insofar as it amounts merely to an f-you to "the Man", whoever the Man of moment might be, is at its heart a nihilistic project not that different from the nihilism of Roger Stone. Different sides of the same coin.

The occasion for Frank's piece in Salon was the passing of Harold Ramis, the creative mind behind Animal House, Caddyshack, and Ghostbusters, movies of the eighties that he argues are celebrations of Reaganism. The flippers off are not in the mold of Che and Angela Davis, but more in the mold of Gordon Gecko and Jordan Belfort. As Frank points out, Otter and Bluto's fraternity was modeled on one at Dartmouth that mainlines its alums to Wall Street. Isn't Scorcese's recent Wolf of Wall Street just Animal House for forty year olds? Isn't Kappa Beta Phi described in Kevin Roose's new book Young Money any different from Bluto's Delta Tau Ki. The plots are all the same--lovable, earthy hedonists vs the conformist, tight-assed, right-thinking, moralistic prigs. 

Caddyshack pits the filthy-rich but down-to-earth, vulgar but lovable wise-cracking, unconstrained Rodney Dangerfield character against the Ted Knight prig, the way The Howards of Virginia pit the Cary Grant character against Sir Cedric Hardwicke. It's a classic Hollywood trope--we are made to admire and root for the lively, clever, freedom-loving, no-rules-or conventions-left-unbroken character as he pits himself against the authoritarians who run the 'Establishment', only the Establishment in the 1970s and 80s was the New Deal Regulations Regime. The 'rules' were all the restrictions imposed on financial markets, you know rules like Glass-Steagall. Glass-Steagall is for squares. Who's the real American--Family Ties's Alex Keaton or his cluelessly bland, earnest, conventionally liberal parents? 

Here's the point: those on the cultural left share common ground with those on the libertarian right insofar as both share a liberation project to crash old conventions. The good guys are for individual freedom and the bad guys are those who stand for discipline and restraint. This has been the modern, liberal project at least since Luther posted his 95 theses.

Right wing liberationists are really no different from their counterparts on the Left; it's just that the right-wing types haven't a shred of moral earnestness in their doing it. It's all about the joy of unbridled libido--greed, lust, will to power. The Libs, on the hand, believe their tearing down of repressive traditional forms is making the world a better place. 

And this is where it gets confusing, because so many on the political left are also on the cultural left, there is very little in their code that justifies restraint, and so it is hard for anyone on the Left to support a program in which restraint and discipline play a role. And so, at best, you get ineffectual things like Occupy or Jon Stewart's silly Rally to Restore Sanity.

The problem, of course, is that the hard right has no problem with discipline and restraint. Work hard; play hard is the motto once they get inspired by their desire to own the Libs. Think Roger Stone. The Right  knows how to organize and get things done, and they do it with fanatical zeal. They have a warrior mentality when it comes to discipline and sacrifice. It understands and embraces the will to power in a way that the  can't-we-just-get-along Left cannot even begin to fathom. 

Remember the scene in Freaks and Geeks when Nick wants his garage band to get better to prove to his father he can have a career as a drummer so he won't have to go into the army. Well the rest of the freaks refuse to practice--they say it's too much like school. Daniel says to Nick something like, "It's Rock and Roll, man; it's supposed to come from the crotch. If you got any, you'd know that." And the band breaks up.

That scene for me is a metaphor for the American cultural/political Left. It's not just the bad boys like Daniel, it's the good girls like Lindsay, too. She aligns with the Freaks because she wants something "real", and the Freaks represent that because they are so, what . . .?  Freaky? Unbuttoned down? So uninterested in conventional success, which excludes any idea of becoming successful human beings? Well, whatever it is, it doesn't amount to much more than living from the crotch and bird flipping the Man. And so Lindsay rejects the path of discipline and restraint, a path with the right guidance that might lead her to realize a deeper kind of freedom and capacity as a musician and a human being. But that's sooo square. Better to set forth on some amorphous journey of self-discovery.

Living in a decadent cultural period means that hardly anyone, especially when young, is exposed to deeply successful, i.e., authentic, genuinely menschy, full-spectrum human beings. There are only the prigs and the hedonists. And Liberals these days are doing their best to be prigs in all things except sexual license, and even that they find a way to make boringly politically correct. Liberals work so earnestly to change the rules; Conservatives would rather have fun breaking them. Contemporary Cultural Conservatism is the reductio ad absurdum of the Modern Liberation project; they have even found a way to become liberated from reality. So for the time being, at least, I can see why some think it's a lot more fun to be on the cultural right--to be Matt Gaetz instead of Al Gore. 

And in the meanwhile the wolves circle. 

Judd Apatow is for the Millennials what Harold Ramis was for the Boomers--same old, same old Hollywood nihilsm with a happy face.

[This is a repost from March 2014 somewhat edited. I've changed the opening quote because the one used in 2014 is no longer linkable. I'm posting this now because it relates to a recent post, " Boredom, Dionysos, and the Ethic of Authenticity.]