After the Future

Justice, Yes; Racism-Shaming, No

Yet when activists try to combat racism by calling it out, they often struggle to accomplish their goals. Focusing on Trump’s racist behavior did not keep him from winning the presidency. The Black Lives Matter movement has mostly failed to implement its

Race-based strategies are especially challenging in a country where living standards have stagnated in recent decades: Working-class families of all races have reason to distrust the notion that they enjoy a privileged lifestyle. No wonder that Steve Bannon, the far-right political figure, once said that he wanted liberals “to talk about racism every day.” When they do, Bannon said, “I got 'em."

The Arbery trial offers a reminder that calling out racism is not the only way to battle it. Sometimes, a more effective approach involves appealing to universal notions of fairness and justice.

--David Leonhardt

In other words, the more you make the struggle for justice a culture war issue, the less successful will young progressives be. The idea is to appeal to people's innate sense of what's right. As soon as you start guilt tripping people, you've lost them. But in order to do that, you have to believe that all humans have that in them--this capacity to be moved by the transcendental 'Justice'.

The only way to defeat a toxic cultural inheritance like racism is to appeal to awaken people to values that transcend culture. If you don't or can't, then the struggle is reduced to a power game, one power coalition pushing out another ad infinitum. The old oppressed become the new oppressors, and I have no dog in that fight. 

This supports the argument I made in my post last week--"Young Socialist Intellectuals". 

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause.

Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good enough b.s. detectors to recognize that what most people claim to be truth is some soulless idol that they worship in place of it. What most people call truth has the stink of death about it. Both wanted to find a method of inquiry and way of living that avoided that kind of idolatry, which is the tendency in all human beings when they let their relationship to the Living Real to rigidify. So Nietzsche undertook philosophy with a hammer, and Derrida took Heidegger's idea of 'deconstruction' to perform a similar kind of philosophy whose goal was to free up our relationship to the truth. This was for them a necessary task because In a Positivist age truth had come into the death grip of what McGilchrist calls the hegemony of the values of the usurping Left Brain. 

D. and N.'s goal was not to destroy or to debunk for the sake of debunking, but to free the  living from its entombment. They take a hammer to walls that imprison truth to liberate it, to make it available again in the lives of those who would love it if they could have any kind of living relationship with it. 

There are different interpretations of Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, which is usually interpreted as 'there is nothing outside of the text'. Derrida was a punster, and I don't want to go down the rabbit hole that follows all the possible allusions. But I think a fair reading of it is that he was emphasizing how every encounter with the truth is one determined by its con-text. I think this is common sense, and it owes a lot to phenomenology, which with people like Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Stein sought to liberate philosophy from Positivism. Truth after phenomenology becomes focused on experience rather than on abstractions. And experience and our interpretation of it is always first and foremost contextual. 

There is the dictionary definition of a tree, and then there is our experience of a tree, which is different for the botanist or the lumberjack or for a Druid priest in a primeval Irish forest. For each of these the truth of the tree is what shows up for them in their experience of it. The least important thing is its dictionary definition. That tells us nothing vitally important about trees. Phenomenology opens up the possibility to experience the truth of the tree in a living way, it allows us to take seriously what the tree in its inexhaustible meanings might reveal to us. It affirms the importance of the subjective in what a tree actually means. 

The tree is in this sense a text, and the text as such is vulnerable to limitless interpretations, and that limitlessness, when taken seriously by anybody who is serious about knowing truth, tells us more about the nature of the truth than any statement about the genus and species of a tree can begin to uncover. To say that nothing exists outside the text is not to relativize what we know but to open up new possibilities for knowing. 

This limitlessness is akin to what Buddhism and the apophatic tradition in Christianity affirm about God, which is nothing. There is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about God, and analogously there is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about a tree--or of ourselves or one another. But that does not mean that the effort to say something truthful is futile or that our attempts to say something true have no value.

Because we can never know THE truth does not mean there is no truth. It only means that whatever we can know of it is perspectival, culturally mediated, and always incomplete, and so therefore provisional. That's the human condition, and many sane humans throughout history have been able to live rich, truthful lives within those limitations.

Nevertheless there is always somebody who is tempted to idolatry, someone who wants to put the truth in a straitjacket and keep it locked up in the attic. They are usually the kind of people whose obsessive need for control leads them into positions of power in a society's political and religious institutions. They're the ones who freak out when someone challenges their rigid ideas about what is true or not. They're the ones who close themselves off from the truth because it scares them. 

Language makes the uncommon common, Nietzsche says somewhere. Yes, mostly that's true, but not always. And in that statement, he affirms the possibility of experiencing the "uncommon". Cliches once weren't stale even if whatever vitality was first in them is doomed to become stale over time. Religious language is like that, too. But there is always in any text the possibility to take a hammer to it, to crack open what entombs it, and to discover the living thing in it to which such texts first gave utterance. But the utterance isn't the truth; it's just a provisional attempt to articulate some experience of the Living Real that is always inadequate to whatever the experience of it might have been. 

And for this reason language--and other symbolic forms--can work as a portal to the uncommon. It is not what is actually literally said in the symbolic forms, but rather what we come to see through them into something uncommonly bigger and more vital. Some statements are more adequate than others because they articulate more effectively something uncommon in a way that has the fresh smell of truth about it.That's why we still read--or should--Homer and the Bible and Plato and Shakespeare. Because the language we find there has this enormous potential to surprise us. We think we know already what we will find in these texts, but if we have an openness to them, we will be refreshed by something unexpected, something living. We have to cultivate a mood that Heidegger called, following Meister Eckhart, gelassenheit, which is similar to Keat's negative capability. Look it up. 

This approach leads often to an awakening of something dormant, to a memory of something forgotten. Heidegger says we moderns suffer from a forgetfulness of Being, and one way to remember what has been forgotten is to spend time with important texts. The disclosures that come if one makes the effort have the freshness of life about them, and we are refreshed by it. That is the kind of truth that is worth knowing about. It is not THE truth, but it points to it as an inexhaustible spring of vitality. 

This kind of remembering is something no AI will ever be able to do because machine memory cannot forget. It's the forgetting and then the remembering that is the peculiar human thing. And for that reason human memory is capable of resurrecting the dead. 

And so, while it might be that the symbolic forms that once articulated something living no longer live for us, it does not mean that what once lived is now dead. It's just gone underground. It can be remembered, resurrected. Those forms once steeped in uncommonness have become stale and common because of the human proclivity to be distracted by other shiny objects--in our case the produce of techno-capitalism. Nevertheless we still live in a society shaped by symbolic forms that retain their potency even if it is not something we have easy access to. A tradition dies because people let something die within themselves, and this is how I take what Nietzsche means when he says that God is dead. It is not really God who is dead, but we who are. 

And this is the value of Derrida's deconstruction--to break open the sarcophagi in which these once living texts lie because nobody who plays a significant role in shaping the culture reads them anymore--texts like those of Plato and Augustine, for instance, that D spends a good chunk of time with--and to find again what's living in them, and to critique what is not. What's important is not what Derrida finds there, although you might be surprised to learn what he does find. Rather what's important is to follow his method, to interrogate the great texts, and like Jacob wrestling with the angel to derive therefrom a blessing.

See also "Deconstructing God". 

Young Conservative Intellectuals

From David Brooks in the Atlantic reporting on the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month in Orlando. You know, the one where Hawley gave his American masculinity speech:

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. “Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated,” he said. “To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majority—that seems to me to be completely crazy.”

In essays I've posted this month, I've argued that a human society cannot sustain itself if it becomes permanently cut off from its originary mythos--and the way that mythos grounds us in the Living Real. That mythos in North Atlantic societies is Christianity, which is the fusion of two post-Axial traditions--transcendental Greek philosophy and Judaism superimposed on Mediterranean, Germanic, and Celtic paganism. Perhaps a post-human society can can live without its being grounded in such a mythos, but not a human one. In making this argument, I was aware that it sounds a lot like what cultural conservatives have been saying since forever, so while there is some overlap, I want to distinguish what I'm saying from what Hazony is saying as reported by Brooks.

The difference lies in that conservatives like Hazony do not take seriously the implications of the death of God as a cultural reality. The death of God is a statement about the fact that the originary mythos and its transcendental ontology has been displaced as the primary shaper of the social imaginary by a materialist ontology. This materialist ontology co-existed for a while with the originary ontology in a kind of tension, but the materialist ontology is clearly dominant now, mainly because what people have come to care about most is what works in day-to-day life, and science and capitalism get practical results in a way that religious beliefs don't. It's not much more complicated than that. 

Obviously people still believe in God, and there's nothing wrong with science or markets. What's different after the death of God is that there is very little creative dynamism that comes from the originary mythos. Since the death of God, most of the culture's creative energy has been channeled toward projects shaped by the merger of science and capital. That materialist project defines who we are. If you have religious beliefs, good for you, but that has nothing to do with what really matters. What matters is where all the creative energy is, which has nothing to do with religion. The practical effect is that the values of the originary mythos have no constraining effect on the most destructive influences of techno-capitalism, and among them the destruction of the the idea of the human itself.

Conservatives like Hazony want to prop up the corpse of the dead king on his throne for fear of the kingdom's being taken over by evil usurpers. He and conservatives who think like him don't seem to realize that the usurpers took over long ago, and they were welcomed with open arms, including by most people who consider themselves Christian. The king has been dead for some time now, and propping up the rotted corpse is delusional and can't work. It has to be replaced by something living, something inspiring. I believe that resurrection is possible, or another word for it is renaissance. But that's not what people like Hazony are talking about. 

Now as I made clear in my posts in the last weeks on this topic, because God is dead doesn't mean that faith is. Many people, me included, affirm its vitality in shaping their sense of what is real and what is worthy of their deepest aspirations. But the cultural forms of Christianity no longer signify robustly in the broad cultural sphere, which means that the tradition that once 'worked' effectively to convey from generation to generation the life of the originary mythos no longer conveys it. It's there in the background, i.e., in the private sphere, and clearly a secularized version of Christianity is the basis the democratic ethos that prevails in American society, but it is mostly impotent in shaping the most important judgments that we must make about the human future. Techno-capitalism and its materialist imaginary is in the driver's seat, and Hawley/Cruz administration would do nothing to remove it.

If the traditional Christian mythos still played a vital role in shaping American society's ethos, there wouldn't be any felt need to reimpose it in the political sphere. It would be something that people would gladly choose because it provides meaning and vitality in a way that secular beliefs do not. The fact of the matter is that what is best, most vital, and most liberating in Christianity is not available to the broader culture because its most public-facing institutions have made it so profoundly unattractive to people who might find it otherwise.

This is so because so many Christians, mostly fundamentalists and conservative Catholics, have given Christianity a bad name because they themselves are emphatically not exemplars of what is best, most vital, most liberating in Christianity. They come across as anal, resentful, fanatics animated by a vulgar, totemic version of Christianity that is about as far from the spirit of the gospels as one could take it.

That being said, Dallas Jenkins' The Chosen is one good-faith effort coming out of the evangelical world that avoids all the ideological culture-war nonsense in a way that could have broader cultural appeal. It finds a way of bringing out the vital, liberating, subversive dimension of the gospels--subversive regarding the rigidly conservative political and religious establishments of its time--in a way that you don't often see in television or film in this genre. And it's grittily human and often funny. Skeptics, if they could muster some second naïveté, might actually find something in it. 

So if you want a more Christian culture, O young conservative intellectuals, live Christianity in a way that is more humanly appealing, in a way that will attract people to it rather than repel them. And there is nothing more repellant than the prospect of a Hawley/Cruz administration supported by a Republican Congress imposing a Christian sharia on the nation. You don't seem to understand this because you are too caught up by a cultural ressentiment that blinds you as to how matters of the spirit actually work. Most people, including genuinely religious ones, don't want to live in Franco's Spain. 

In my previous post about Socialism, I talk about how socialism will never take hold in American culture until there is a vast shift in the cultural imaginary, and I'd argue the same for Christianity. Both are too unattractive because both, at least in their current manifestations, are too uninspiring. Young socialists and conservative Christians are two sides of the same coin. Neither understand how real cultural change works, which is what is fundamentally required for there to be any real receptivity to what they are selling. And without such a shift in the cultural ethos that is freely and willingly embraced by most Americans, both conservatives and socialists are deluded if they think that their programs can be effected in the political sphere. 

I understand Hazony's point "that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere" because the "public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite." I would agree, this is a problem that cannot be sustained in the long run. But Hazony misdiagnoses the root of the problem. He doesn't seem to understand that it's industrial/consumer/technocapitalism that has eviscerated private values, not the ideology of progressive Liberals who are simply trying to mitigate the damage capitalism has done in the material lives of the non-wealthy.

The public (political) sphere simply represents the values of capital, which in turn shapes the vital, animating ethos of both Democrats and Republicans. In the Republican Party, traditional Christian values are a thin veneer that covers up what is the party's real vital, animating 'ultimate concern', which is preservation of the wealth and property rights of the wealthy. Democrat elites' ultimate concern is similar, but complicated by their guilt about it. But that guilt makes them more practical when it comes to wanting to solve pressing material problems that concern the broader society. So two cheers for guilt. Better that than Republican indifference to or contempt for the suffering of the poor. 

And so while these young conservatives are upset with corporate America for its being captured by 'wokeness', I suspect that most would be appeased if corporate boards hired good, conservative Christians who would have no compunction about how techno-and consumer-capitalism continues to crush the American soul. I suspect that most are blind how its doing so diminishes with each passing decade the human capacity to even respond to what is genuinely, authentically religious. And I feel confident that most would resist my assertion that capitalism and the Neoliberal ideology, which justifies its unchecked hegemony in the economic sphere, is the single-most powerful force in preventing what they think they want. So in other words, they offer no real solution, not even the beginning of one. They don't even understand the real cause of the problem.

Nevertheless, I agree with conservatives who complain that the secular public square is not neutral, that it is aggressively materialist. And I agree that a good society needs to understand and value that humans are material/spiritual beings, and it needs to embrace a humanizing mythos that draws upon the wisdom traditions that come to us from the great post-axial religions. And I agree with conservatives that a purely secular society cannot sustain itself in the long run. It's too imbalanced.

But I don't agree that these problems can be solved from within the political sphere. I have been arguing that Progressives, if they have any hope of saving democracy, need to better understand how the destructive effects that follow from a rigidly materialist ontology having crowded out spiritual values in the intellectual/cultural sphere, and that their success in the long run depends on their taking seriously good-faith efforts to rebalance things in that sphere.

What's so discouraging to me is that, unlike in the 1950s and 60s, there are no prominent, credible voices who are making a compelling case for such a rebalancing. If such voices don't emerge, I fear that these young conservative intellectuals will get what they wish for. That would be a disaster for them, as well as everyone else, in ways they are currently incapable of imagining. 

See also my post on Heroes of the Fourth Turning 

Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo--

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

...

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Well, of course. The Democratic Party is dominated by the interests of technocratic elites in the economic top 20%, and those elites, being who they are, might feel guilty about their "privilege" in a way that Republicans do not, but not so guilty that they're willing to give it up. And, you know, inflation has got them worried, and Biden's BBB, seems a little too aggressive. And yada, yada, yada. For this reason, nothing bold is possible with the kind of timid people who call themselves moderate Democrats. Nice, decent, sane people, but, you know, they gotta think about what's best for their families. 

To expect ordinary people to support bold initiatives is a path to guaranteed disappointment. That's the downside of democracy. So I admire deBoer's tempered idealism and his willingness to commit to the long term, but I don't think that he'll ever succeed because of one the principal flaw in the socialist agenda--it's fundamentally uninspiring. I used to hang out with old-school Marxists in the '70s--nice, sincere, earnest people--but they were, so, so boring. All logos, no mythos. The New Left, of course, rejected the old-school style, but that faded away because, except for a few like Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders, it lacked the old-school commitment and analysis.

Ordinary people are capable of embracing bold programs only if they are inspired to do it, and the arguments of most socialists never get beyond a rather crude utilitarian logic and vague ideas about fairness. And while deBoer might see this as a  multi-decade persuasion project, we don't have decades. Technocapitalism is foreclosing such a future unless socialists, the kind who write for Jacobin, wake from their materialistic, utilitarian slumber. They've got some legitimate logos; they need some inspiring mythos. 

If we lived in a society whose ontology was not so implacably materialistic, we might have a chance to realize a bold progressive agenda, but we don't. If we lived in a balanced, sane, humane society, one that integrated the spiritual and the material, we would be able to find our way to some kind of Socialist social organization in coming decades because it would be the only humane solution. Why? Because it's likely by the end of the century that AI and robotics will create sufficient wealth for everyone, but not enough work for people to earn their share of it. 

In such a world, socialism would be a practical, humane solution to redistribute the abundance the machines will do most of the work producing. But that would require that as a society we retain our humanity, and it's an open question whether we will be able to do that. And then there's another problem, even if we were to endorse a generous UBI, what do people who don't work do with all that time on their hands? What do they do to give their lives meaning and purpose?

***

As I've been arguing in my posts about "The Crisis of the Liberal Order", the resistance of Main Street to socialism is not programmatic but cultural. It feels un-American because self-reliance is so fundamental to American cultural identity. DeBoer kind of recognizes this, but if I am correct, the kind of long-term persuasion project about which he speaks will continue to fail because it assumes that the good society can emerge from within the materialistic ethos that grounds his Marxist presuppositions.

Old-school Marxism retained some mythos in its Jewish/Christian eschatology without the spiritual part, and so was half right, but half right doesn't get it done. The spiritual part is essential. But unlike old-school Marxists, this postmodern generation is skeptical of all grand narratives, so it doesn't even believe in the eschatological part anymore. They've got nothing to work with except a vague idea about economic justice as, you know, being desirable-ish. 

The young Marx kind of gets the need for more than that when he wrote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” ***

Yes, and everyone will have his own blog and podcast.

It's very Maslovian--once one's material needs are taken care of, the human being can then meet his "Being Needs". I'm all for it, but I don't think we get to that unless the Being Needs get taken care of more adequately first. And Being Needs are not just about having interesting hobbies; it's where 'mythos' plays its part in inspiring and shaping human aspiration. And that requires a retrieval of an understanding of the human as both a material and a spiritual being, whose spiritual needs are equally as important as his material needs. Man does not eat by bread alone. It used to be a truism, but it no longer is. Religion is an opiate only if it enervates; not if it inspires.

Some of the folks at Jacobin might say that this is unfair, that they, especially the more Frankfurt-y among them, acknowledge that human beings have a spiritual dimension. The Frankfurters because of their interest in culture were also interested in an honest interrogation of religion. They saw religion as both the matrix of superstition and repression, while at the same time as the repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity. True and True, but do young American socialist see religion in any but the first sense? And when they talk about spirit, isn't their imagination of it shaped primarily by the materialism that is hegemonic among conventional American intellectuals? Do they believe anything other than that the human being is first a material being who has this excrescence from matter they call spirit but understood only in some biologistic sense? This is far too limiting. There's no mythos in it.

The retrieval of religion about which I speak, if it is to work, must understand the human being who has spiritual aspirations in a much more fundamental sense. It maintains the spirit/matter polarity, but with the spiritual as playing a more leading role. I think of the human project as an eons-long work whose spiritual task is to transform the material as in tikkun olam, i.e., for the sake of repairing the world. Look it up. That could be inspiring if it was something that people could bring themselves to believe. 

I wonder if many Jacobin writers or readers could embrace a tikkun olam "philosophy" of history. Maybe some could, or find it at least quaintly interesting. But the socialism as imagined by most of the young socialists deBoer addresses remains fundamentally materialist in its presuppositions and at its best leads maybe to a more egalitarian, more mechanized version of Huxley's Brave New World--or Pixar's WALL E. It's a world where any idea of deep spiritual aspiration is long forgotten because repressed as too disruptive. Here, take a bit of soma, play your games. Be equally as happy as everyone else. Mission accomplished--we're at the end of history.

So what happens if the socialist dog catches the car? Then what? To say that you'll worry about that later is to miss the point. There is no later unless you answer the question now.

Socialism as it is currently imagined on the American cultural Left is a vision of future human possibility that is far too restricting and depressing. Nobody with any sense would want to live in such a future. Something broader, richer, more open-ended, and more inspiring needs to be imagined in progressive politics, and until it does, deBoer's hopes of ever being persuasive will never be realized. The socialist organization of society will only come about if it is built on a broadly accepted ontology that includes a spiritual substrate. 

And we desperately need an inspired Progressive vision for a human future, because without it the bad guys win, and in a hundred years we're in something like Jodie Foster's Elysium. And the reason is very clear--technocapitalism, if left unchecked, does not now or ever will care about human 'being needs", and as long as technocapitalism is the unimpeded driving force of world civilization, those needs become evermore less likely to be realized by either the haves or the have nots. The haves on Elysium, like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World, don't care about them anymore, and the have-not proles remanded to the desert of the real back on earth don't have the time or the energy for their pursuit. 

***Postscript: From Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right--

Whether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of. [Marx, in other words, at his best was a right-brain thinker.]

...

In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behaviour. [The goal for all human beings, in other words, is to become intrinsically motivated to actively transform the world. This is a spiritual task in the mode of tikkun olam.]

...

Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call “mind.” To call human beings rational is to say that their behaviour reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism.

...

If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the “spiritual” is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (p. 96-104). Yale University Press. 

Most contemporary Marxists are materialists not in Marx's Romantic understanding of it, but in a way that has been colonized by Positivism. We need more of Marx the Romantic and less what he has been turned into by the totalist regimes that have vulgarized him. But, for me, even Eagleton's Marxist materialism doesn't go far enough--it needs more of the mythos dimension, but his is a place to start. Although I doubt that Eagleton would go as far as I do in embracing the kind of Christian Neoplatonic mythos, his "materialist" reading of the gospels provides some significant overlap.

But in America, whatever use we make of Marxist ideas is better off if Marx is not credited with them. It's not something that Americans are ever going to be "comfortable" with.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III

In Part I, I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. But for that reason, they ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the party that shelters racists than with the secularist Liberal ethos the Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. 

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from techno-capitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where techno-capitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control, and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, techno capitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of techno-capitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by techno-capitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but techno-capitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. But it's not grounded in reality--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, techno-capitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote. Bamboozled by the trickster spirit Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, techno-capitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing is a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 1] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence in our collective life of the profound and sublime, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what profound and sublime mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis that comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so the souls born into such a society with the collapses vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flatten society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale in which I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

++++++++++

Note 1: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, of course, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in him. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology that forced his break with Freud and produced the mythic symbology derived from recurrent hypnagogic states as represented in The Red Book. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point.  Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem of course for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret experiences in this world correctly is open to debate, to say the least.  

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! ...--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

--Fyodor Dostoyevski, Notes from the Underground, 1864, Chapter 8

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators. 

--Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

In Part I, I assert that religion and faith are not the same thing. A few words to elaborate because it's important for advancing the larger argument:

Religion is social; faith is personal. The possibility for faith is obviously something culturally mediated, but one’s experience of it is deeply intimate. When Augustine says in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee", it is a deeply personal and intimate assertion of faith, and it follows from a discovery, an epiphany, an event, an encounter, which is what we mean by the “gift” of faith. The Christian ‘mythos’ provided a framework for him to interpret and to develop what was given in the gift. And that explains a lot of what went down in shaping the European religious imaginary of the Living Real--and rigidified parodies of it--for the next thousand years. 

But the point I'm arguing here is that the crisis of the spirit to which I referred in the previous post is not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of the social order--the superstructure--whose foundations lie in the Greco/Judeo fusion that Augustine was largely responsible for constructing. This social order was always at best provisional, something that worked for quite a while and later didn't. But that doesn't mean that the originary intuitions like Augustine's upon which the superstructure were based are untrue. It just means each generation needs to adapt them better to social/cultural realities as they evolve.  Those adaptations essentially stopped working in the 19th century.

The crisis of the spirit that we are experiencing now lies in what is commonly referred to as the death of God in North Atlantic societies. This crisis has been a long time in the making--its originary framework started to shake during the Enlightenment in the mid-18th Century but was given knock-out blows by the one-two punch of Darwin and Industrial Capitalism in the mid-19th Century. The death of God signifies that the basic superstructure shaped by Augustine, emended by Luther, and then again by Enlightenment Deism gradually lost it vital connection to its origins, and then came to interpret that to mean that there were no origins for it to become disconnected from. In failing to adapt, the superstructure became increasingly rickety and unbalanced. We got away with it for a while, but now we're paying the price. This disconnect from our origins is at the root of our civilizational crisis of the spirit. The solution lies in reconnecting.

We're paying the price because we've allowed the vital connection to our origins to be supplanted by the energies of materialist bounty delivered by science and capitalism.  Pre-axial religions were mostly about managing a spiritual economy by placating the gods to entice them to support human flourishing in the most basic sense--long life, many children, plenty of food, victory over one's enemies. Capitalism solved those problems far more effectively than primitive religious practice. And so many since the advent of capitalism, those whose religiosity had always been pre-axial in this transactional sense --Please, God, if I close this deal, win this battle, get that promotion I will never miss church ever again--eventually traded in their old religion for capitalism's work ethic. Better to depend on one's own efforts than on very iffy divine assistance. Or worse, they created a parodic form of Christianity that replaced spirit of the gospels with the spirit of the gospel of wealth. 

We live in a society now were the default among its intelligentsia, whether in the sciences or the humanities, is to think about any talk of transcendentals is hogwash. But their rejection of it is mixed up with an absurd reductionistic understanding religious transcendence that depends on a conception of religion whose deity is the God of the Gaps. In other words, their idea of religion is almost always confused with the primitive transactional elements that linger from its pre-Axial modes.

This transactional function of religion is not at the core of the great post-Axial religions, even if it lingered in them. These religions were all about affirming a transcendent Good and about developing practices that aligned with it. Post-Axial religions in the West that were a fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish revelation were not at their deepest level about tit for tat, but about getting one's life right, i.e. about living in alignment with the transcendental Good or an idea of transcendental Justice. 

But the intelligentsia, in rejecting the primitive elements in Western religion, have also thrown out something much more important, which is any sense of its transcendental foundations, its vital spiritual origins, on which any civilization with vitality is dependent for its sustenance. And in doing so have created a spiritual vacuum that has been filled with crude energies that crowd out the possibility for anything more civilizing, vitalizing, or humanizing that should, if we had a healthy culture, shape its imaginary.

The Death of God was announced by Nietzsche in the late 19th century, and, as the quote in the epigraph indicates, he hated what it meant, and his philosophy was largely a diagnosis of the causes and suggestions for a cure. His diagnosis or genealogy of the problem traced back to what he saw as the progressive shriveling of the human spirit endemic to the disembedding caused by Western Axial traditions. He blames Socrates for starting us down this path, but he sees the disease as infecting the entirety of the  Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. For him the cure lay in a return to a pre-Axial (pre-Socratic), un-alienated way of living by a recovery of a more intimate relationship with the chaotic energies of the Living Real that he called the Dionysian.  

Nietzsche was prescient in his announcement of the death of this post-Axial mythos. Its all but gone now, except for vestiges, traces in a cultural palimpsest that lie hiding behind a consumer/materialist overlay. But Nietzsche's philosophy is just one variant on a rich counter-Enlightenment theme, which seeks to reassert something about the infinite depths of the human being, depths that unbalanced rationality and its Positivist ontological assumptions have effectively sealed us off from. 

So Nietzsche was right, God has died, and we have killed him, if by his death we mean that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a vital way in the societies shaped by the Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. Nietzsche feared that this collapse would bring with it a flattening of the spirit that would quash all noble human aspiration, i.e., that it would create a society of Last Men. His solution was the uebermensch, the overcoming-human, the human who distinguishes him or herself by acts of self-creation and self-transcendence without any reference to Axial ideas about transcendence.

I wouldn't be the first to point out that Nietzsche's uebermensch draws from the Christian ideas about 'theosis', which asserts that we humans born in the image and likeness of God are destined to become like gods, if we choose a path that will lead us to it. He wanted to assert the possibility for human divinization as a purely human project without any reference to a transcendent foundation. The problem is that without such a foundation to ground it, such a project easily morphs into vulgar narcissism. And most of the would-be uebmenschen celebrated in film and fiction are variants on the narcissistic theme. So much of pop culture now is some form or another of vulgarized Nietzsche. 

I have a soft spot for Nietzsche, the brilliant, shy, sensitive man who thought himself as a lightning-bolt-throwing prophet. He was the miner's canary, though. He saw before most, and imagined and even lived where late modern societies were headed, which was to the madhouse. 

***

In contemporary America we largely see Nietzsche's fear about a culture of Last Men, Dostoyevski's Piano-Key-Men in the epigraph, affirmed. There is no ethos among the educated elite that celebrates noble aspiration, except maybe in the way that Ayn Rand does it. If there is anyone that speaks to spirited, ambitious young people these days it is she, and her imagined American uebermenschen Howard Roark and John Galt are models of noble aspiration for many of our contemporary entrepreneurs and financial elites. 

To say that God is dead does not mean that faith has become impossible, but it does mean that people who have it have an understanding of reality that has little to do with how the broader contemporary society imagines it. People of faith extrapolate from what is central to their understanding of the Living Real an ontology that is utterly out of joint with how the broader society after the death of God imagines it, and that's the crux.

If people of faith broadly understood are right, people who are guided by their spiritual intuitions, people like MLK, Gandhi, Wordsworth, Shelly, Galileo, Goethe, Blake, Erasmus, Hegel, Emerson, Einstein, Beethoven, Bergson, Berdyaev, Buber, Yeats, and so many more, then the whole materialist edifice is wrong.  It's not wrong because of what it affirms, but because of what it leaves out. As a result, it's out of balance with Reality, and if it's out of balance with reality, it's going to tip over and come crashing down unless it finds a way to get back in balance. It's no longer enough to be neutral on the questions of the spirit because the default ontology shaping the late-modern imaginary isn't neutral--it's materialist, and because it's the default, it undermines in unconscious ways the public will to resist its most destructive effects. 

So secular Liberals will read this and say, "Well that's very interesting, but I don't buy it. And yet I celebrate your right to think whatever you want. I want a society in which it's possible for everybody to be free to think what they want. What scares me is that these fanatics on the religious right want to kill democracy and impose an illiberal theocratic autocracy where people won't be free to think and believe what they want. And you seem to be flirting with that if you think that religion is a solution in the political sphere. You, sir, are a proto-theocrat."

I'm no theocrat--religion should embrace a commitment to political powerlessness. And yes. I fear illiberalism, too. But I also fear that it is inevitable unless a cure for the underlying problem is found. Theocracy provides no solution, but a shift in the broader cultural imaginary is needed, and if secular Liberals understood this need, they would be more openly receptive and supportive of healthy forms of it, because an unhealthy form will fill the vacuum otherwise.

It's a tired cliche, but I can't think of a better one: Liberals are worried about the deck chair arrangement on sinking ship, when they should be concerned with the reason the ship is sinking. What public intellectual these days is talking about a crisis of the spirit. I know it sounds hopelessly old fashioned, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Is this a crisis public intellectuals grapple with in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the NYRB? It's beyond the scope of such intellectuals to even frame the problem in this way. To do so is so profoundly inimical to their presuppositions, and that's a big part of why we're in crisis. Nonsense from Peter Singer, John Gray, or Richard Dawkins, however, can be taken very seriously. 

***

What I'm trying to get at here is that with the death of God, i.e., the collapse of the axial Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos, there are no restraints anymore on the real threat to Liberals' ideals for an ever-more open society: the deeper threat is not from the cultural right, but the one posed by the Randians who are driving techno-capitalism. Those folks at the cutting edge of its developments see themselves as uebermenschen at the vanguard of evolution, and they see it as their manifest destiny to steamroll over any one who would oppose them: Get with their evolutionary program, or get out of the way. The craziness on the cultural Right is largely rooted in the "irrational" idea they don't want to get out of the way. They don't want to be piano keys, and in that irrationality I sympathize. 

Because from where I sit techno-evolutionary project is frightening because it's very likely to lead to a society that will be deeply, dystopically, anti-human. And I can say that because I have a very clear commitments about what it means to be human, which draws on the Western Axial ideas about that. And what these 21st century uebermenschen are doing is completely in opposition to those commitments. And because secular Liberals don't feel threatened by this in the way that I do, or maybe find my outlook "interesting" but remain agnostic, i.e, unworthy of their commitment, they have no ground on which to set their feet to push back against the coming anti-human tide. They will just get swept along by it when it comes. 

What's at stake now is the future of humanity, not in some will-we-survive-an-eco-catastrophe sense, but will we all be absorbed into some hyper-real virtual dream completely cut off from the Living Real. Anxiety about our future as humans, whose underlying causes remain mostly unconscious, pervades the culture. It plays out in this fetishizing of guns and liberty and fundamentalist religion, but this fear of losing one's humanity to the machine is at the heart of the malaise that drives right-wing fanaticism. As I argued in Part I, this is not going to be solved by economic or safety-net policies, but it has become nevertheless a problem critical for the future of democracy. The solution for it is not political, but if no solution is found, the consequences will have profound political impacts, none of them good. 

And to be frank, Conservatives are not wrong when they see Liberals as too comfortable with the kind of world that the Positivisitic/Scientistic metaphysics that Dostoyevski is railing against in the quote above. They got a similar scolding from Solschenitzyn over forty years ago that made them squirm. (Why did we invite this lunatic to Harvard?) Well he was mostly right then, and hopefully Liberals can begin to see now why. That 19th-century Positivism is cognate with the humanity-crushing techno-capitalism that is now shaping the human future. And so it's understandable that the cultural Right sees Liberals as collaborationists with machine, for them fetishized in the Deep State, and themselves as the Bravehearts who stoutly resist it.

The radical Right offers no real solutions, and if it takes over, as they well might, they will only make things worse if for no other reason than because its leadership are utterly corrupt nihilists. The ideas that animate the cultural right are 90% delusional fantasy, but that remaining 10% is based in fears that are quite legitimate. But these demagogues on the Right are cunning enough to exploit these anxieties in such a way as to make an enemy of the one thing that can save us from going off the cliff, which is a functioning democracy. 

And in the political sphere, it's too easy to paint the Liberals as those who are aligned with and coopted by the machine. It shouldn't be hard to see why many Americans in the mushy middle turn to the cultural Right because it's a way for them to resist becoming piano keys, a way for them to resist becoming Last Men. They want to hold on to an older idea about what it means to be human. Their sense of human dignity lies in their resistance to the machine.  

***

So you say, "Whatever, but even if you're right, what can be done about it?"

I think the first step is to recognize the deep nature of the problem, and that the only real solution is to rebalance. And if that seems impossible, it's probably because you're still too inured, whether you're aware of it or not, to the materialist/Positivist ontology in which techno-capitalism and the consumerist dreamworld it produces thrives.

So a first step is at least to seek out and listen to those who have an understanding of what's at stake in a way that maybe you don't yet. And those are generally people who have a religious sensibility, people who have a deep sense of reverence about the mystery of Being, people for whom reality is defined by that reverence and not the profane, reductive imagination that comes to us from Positivistic materialism. Wendell Berry, Iain McGilchrist, and Charles Taylor should be on the short list of people to talk to. Almost anybody else I can think of is dead. 

At the very least we need from you a more sympathetic understanding about what role a healthy religious sensibility might play in redressing this balance. 

Religion, if it's working in a healthy way, should function more as a cultural frame that plays the central role in shaping a society's understanding about what is real and unreal, what's true and untrue, what's good and not good, what is worthy of our desires, and what is not. It doesn't need to be linked to a particular religion, but it needs practices and beliefs than help sustain a good society that helps people to become their best selves.  

I'm arguing here that in a society after the death of God, that the deepest aspirations of so many of the brightest and most spirited young people have no where to go except to Silicon Valley until someone comes up with something better. And all the world's Silicon Valleys, if left unchecked, will lead us off the cliff. This is not a Luddite argument; it's simply asserting that in this moment technology is subordinating humans for its needs, and we're powerless against it until humans find enough ontological grit, and with it the self-confidence to assert a human future that subordinates technology to human needs. This is impossible so long as the culture's intelligentsia is captured by the materialist ontology that is cognate with the ontology that supports techno-capitalism. There is no solution within that frame. 

And so here's the thing: whoever controls the most compelling imagination of human possibility controls the future of being human. Silicon Valley owns the human future until a more compelling alternative emerges. And for something better to emerge, maybe it's people who have some deeply felt sense for the mystery of the Living Real--people who are in their many different way 'religious', who need to be consulted on that.

As a rule of thumb, the last people I would turn to are the clerisy in the religious and humanities bureaucracies. North Atlantic societies are too far gone, and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia have little to offer. I'd look to the global South. Just a hunch.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live--as much as that's possible. I realize there's some overlap.

But if it's not clear by now, it should be: The most politically engaged voters on the political Left and Right care much more about cultural and identity issues than boring, practical, policy issues. Policy issues only get traction when they get culturized, as we saw with Obamacare over the last decade. By 'culturized' I mean that if I'm on the Red Team, I'm against it if it's a win for the Blue Team, no matter how positively the policy might benefit me. The more politics becomes culturized, the more it become a zero/sum game, and it's hard to see how democracy survives if this is the only political game we're playing going forward. 

And so our politics has become riven by issues of the spirit that cannot be satisfactorily adjudicated in the practical sphere of politics. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is where the future of democracy is being put to the test, so Liberals better start learning how to play this game more effectively. If, as I think it does, the future of Democracy depends on the future political success of the Democrats, Democrats need to understand why so many people are not buying what Liberalism is selling. But I fear that the Liberals who are most politically engaged haven't the spiritual imagination to do it in a way that will work effectively enough to save our democracy. 

Despite its having a devout Catholic president who wears his heart on his sleeve, the Democrats are Identified by broad swaths of the electorate as the party of godless atheists and heartless bureaucrats. It is not, more often than not, an inaccurate picture of what most Democrats are really like, but it's true enough for it to stick. For many everyday low-information voters, i.e., people who are not riveted every night to cable news, which is most people, it's what the word 'Democrat' signifies.

Today I was on line at Costco behind a sweet older couple, you know the kind who pay their $300+ bill all in cash. Ok--I'm projecting here--but my guess is that this is the kind of couple that knows enough about Trump to feel uncomfortable about him, so voted for Biden instead in 2020, but in 2022 they probably voted Republican. These are not the kind of folks who religiously watch Fox or spend hours on social media. They just feel more comfortable with politicians who talk Conservative than with those who talk Liberal. They're scared. They think that things are getting out of control, and so that inclines them to look for a strong man, someone who can get things back under control. Trump's bluster looks strong; Biden's physical frailty looks weak. 

Conservative is their native tongue; it's what they grew up with. That's how the people they go to church with and their friends at the coffee shop talk. It used to be that talking Conservative wasn't an impediment to voting Democratic in places like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but now it is. It's not mainly about race; it's about the larger cultural frame, and yes, that frame is vestigially racist. But that doesn't make people who speak Conservative frothing racists. But race makes them nervous.

The future of democracy depends on who captures those non-frothing Conservative votes. This couple should be on the Blue Team if it were only about policy, but they're not because it's about culture. They're not culture warriors; they're just ordinary folks from Main Street who vote for normalcy, which is what feels 'right' to them, and what feels right is what they grew up with, and what they're seeing in the movies and on TV, and what they hear their smart-ass grandkids home from college spouting at Thanksgiving dinner makes them think that the world has been turned upside down.

What the Democratic establishment doesn't seem to realize is that this is a cultural not an economic concern. Every Democrat I hear being interviewed on TV is clearly speaking as if the only fundamental political truth is that "it's the economy stupid". Well, however true that might have been in the past, now "it's the culture, stupid". Of course, they're not ignorant that culture is political factor; it's that they think they can overcome their cultural negatives with what they see as policy positives. And maybe they could if people were paying attention to policy debates, but they're not. They just vote Red unless there's a really compelling reason not to.  

Few on Main Street care about spending and taxes or extending the safety net, but they fear racial disorder and Big Brother. They fear all the stuff that feels un-American to them because it's not what they grew up with. These are not evil people; they're just scared by change. They are not frothing white nationalists, but they'll vote for the party that provides safe harbor for white nationalists because they can't bring themselves to vote blue because it just doesn't feel "right". And on what they feel is "right" the future of democracy depends. Steve Bannon understands the the future of American politics depends on who wins this decent middle on Main Street, but Liberals seem oblivious. 

Liberal Democrats have to recognize that their biggest asset is their progressive policy agenda, but it's complicated because their biggest liability is how their secularity merges with their advocacy for big-state solutions. That scares people. Working-Class Americans, even many who vote Democratic, don't identify anymore with the Democratic Party. Black and Brown voters are largely culturally conservative, and they vote Democratic because the Red Team is so bad on race. They do not, however, look to Democrat establishment types as "their" people because the Democrats represent the worldview and interests of the educated, affluent top 20%, which is not them. The bond of loyalty there is far weaker than many Liberals think.

Secular Liberals also mostly don't understand that the imaginal worlds in which people live are more important than facts, and that facts get filtered and interpreted though a cultural lens that is shaped by the world they grew up in. Ideas matter, but ideas feel true or untrue depending on how they align or don't with how their cultural imaginary structures their sense of the real. Activists on the cultural Right understand the importance of winning the ideas war no matter what because they live in an imaginal world that they believe faces extinction. Fear of extinction is very politically motivating. 

Whether or not their imaginal deserves to go extinct or whether such fears of extinction are just a paranoid fantasy is not at issue here. It is what it is, and the only way to convert people who have bad ideas is to present them with better, more compelling ones. And that's where secular liberalism has nothing to offer. Liberals need to find a vision that actually sells a positive culture message that has broader appeal, something that is more than a No to the boorish, racist, homophobic Right, something that gives people who speak Conservative a robust sense of positive future possibility. Liberals think their progressive policies are enough, but they just aren't. They need to win over the decent, low-information voters on Main Street with hope. It's important to expand the safety net to ease the stress that so many feel, but the despair and anxiety so many Main Street Americans feel won't be cured by that. It might buy a little time at best. 

***

So here's the bigger issue that has become a political issue whether we like it or not: People want a cure for their existential anxiety and despair, and Liberalism doesn't offer it. Rather Liberalism feels like the cause of it for too many Americans. The radical Right in this country is offering a cure, which, of course, is no cure. But for many it feels like a cure because it draws on a memory that precedes the death of God.

That "God is dead" is simply to say that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a living way in our cultural life. It signifies something, but the signified is not living; it's rather a zombified parody of what the great Jewish prophets and rabbis, Muslim sages, and Christian saints understood by the word. 

'God' still 'signifies' in the old, living way for individuals and some small groups here and there, but not for the culture at large. But so much of what passes for religion today on the cultural Right is an attempt to exhume the dead and to animate it with energies that have nothing to do with a Living God and everything to do with tribal identity. The god the cultural right worships is an idol, a totem, and has nothing to do with the unconditioned boundlessness that the great traditions when they were a living force in culture understood as God.

And from where I sit, that's at the core  of the Crisis of the Liberal Order. A society that is no longer nourished from a living connection to its transcendental roots is a culture that is living on borrowed time. Neither the Right nor the Left has a solution for this problem, and the Left doesn't see it as a problem. And for that reason they don't appreciate how rickety the superstructure they take for granted is, and how easily it will topple from its own dead weight when the next strong storm blows, and that storm she's a-brewin' on the radical Right. America has an infrastructure problem, but it's not just about bridges and the grid. 

When I hear secular Liberals say I don't need religion, it's as if they see it as an an option on a menu of possible consumer choices, and one that only the vulgar would choose. It's understandable if the word "religion" only signifies for them what I would describe as zombie parodies of it. But often when I hear them say it, it sounds to me as foolish as someone saying I don't need love, or I don't need beauty or nature, or I don't need music and poetry. It's true, many people live without these, but such people are not healthy, full-spectrum human beings. They don't feel what they lack, and in that sense they are in the despair that Kierkegaard described as being unaware of itself. But it's one thing for an individual to be in despair; it's quite another for an entire society to be in it. Democracy is not a priority for people who are in despair. Getting out of despair is, and they'll swallow whatever Ivermectin for the soul demagogues and conmen will pitch to them if they think it will provide a cure. 

The Crisis of Liberalism is a crisis of the spirit, which is a crisis of imagined future human possibility. And this is why so many are not interested in buying the kind of human future that Liberals are selling. Classic secular Liberals like Musk and Bezos see the human future somewhere off-planet, because they've all but given up on this one. But earth is where the rest of us are going to live it. The Liberal vision for life on-planet is too impoverished, too flat-souled, too glib--too lacking in wisdom. And so it's too incapable of meeting this crisis of the spirit in a way that resonates, that speaks to the deepest human aspirations. It offers no cure for the people who think Ivermectin might be one. It offers no cure for existential despair.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this shouldn't be a problem for politics to solve, but it is now if we have any hope for saving democracy. At the very least, it's become an aspect of politics that Liberals have to contend with better than they have been. 

Liberals need to develop and embrace a meta-narrative (or mythos) that cures despair, and I believe that the development of such a thing is possible, even in a pluralistic society. But it doesn't matter what I think or some others like me think. It's about how a shift or expansion in the Liberal imaginary might actually be effected so that it might inspire people and give them real hope in an American human future. It's not a head problem; it's a soul problem, so the solution has to be a soul solution. 

So the question is not whether or not we need religion, i.e., a plausible mythos that gives us hope--we do. (Faith, btw, is not religion or mythos. See Part II.) But it's not just that individuals need religion, healthy societies need it too. And the question is whether our culture will be able to find its way to a healthy form of it, a living form of it, one that opens us up to the deepest possibilities for becoming human beings, rather than closing us off to them, which is what bad religion--or none--does.

This ought not to be a problem for politics, but the destructive forces of techno-capitalism have created a spiritual vacuum, and there's a huge swath of Americans on the political Right in this country that thinks its politics can fill it. So Liberals better understand if they have no answer for that, they are playing a losing game.  

In the long run, the only solution is to replace bad religion with good religion. The culture has the resources to do that. We used to believe that we humans were created in the image and likeness of the Living God. Such an idea is retrievable in a postmodern (i.e., post-Liberal) key. And I fear that if something like an idea of the Living God isn't retrieved, even if only in some diminished Feuerbachian sense, then any future possibility dies for the Living Human, and with it any reason to resist becoming machines or letting them takeover.  

Already our diminished imagination of what it means to be human is so far advanced that I wonder if we're too far gone. I wonder if we have become too cut off in a hyper-real, simulacral dream, and so sealed off from the Living Real that if tomorrow Jesus himself were to arrive on clouds of glory, any but a few would notice. That couple on the line at Costco probably would. But most everybody else would be too preoccupied with what's on their screens. What they find there is so much more interesting. 

Go to Part II