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.