Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness? I think not. For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth? The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....
What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth. Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value. And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.
Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214
What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.
A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.
In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture.
A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.
Religion and poetry have become consumer choices, like buying a new car. They serve our needs or they don't, and mostly they don't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion, or is it the problem of the society that has made religion so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people (most?) are like Cypher in The Matrix--they would prefer to live in a virtual reality, a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.
There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.
Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two dimensions. This creates incoherence despite even if until recently it provided the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, the having of which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart.
This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then, American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodian of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all.
Roszak is saying that Rationalist Materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that Rationalist Materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis has a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks broadly accepted cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real.
A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.
A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us, not because of what it knows on the horizontal, but because of what it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which for some people has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge on the horizontal dimension.
Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms.
So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.
Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a Rationalist Materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.
This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like that, for instance, practiced by the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless liberal horizontality with a wisdomless illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension.
We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than American society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually, if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.
I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern, cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's elite swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.
In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension.
Part 2B: Random Reflections on This Theme
On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that the core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. I do, however, insist that something like it is called for. My goal is not to argue so much as it is to evoke, as a memory of something long forgotten.
And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our collective metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions. All I'm saying is that the broader society needs an alternative to the Rationalist Materialist cultural OS if they are to run effectively, i.e., run in a way that provides a way for the broader society to reconnect to the Living Real.
I think there needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic vertical, and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.
As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.
My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by Rationalist Materialism.
All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention in whatever modest way to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly, bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. The important thing is that people start looking, and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding.
In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in our collective public life. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation, to the Good. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They confuse a practical expediency for wisdom.
As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure. Reading Plato has the same status as reading a Michael Crichton novel, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition. [See Note 2]
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So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that Rationalist Materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by Rationalist Materialist assumptions.
How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing.
I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. American customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.
Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the mid 20th century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP, exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society.
There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.
These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.
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As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one.
So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me assert quite adamantly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it. They had societies with a mythos axis and so had societies in which wisdom played an essential role in shaping their societies, a wisdom that most of the white settlers had no capacity to recognize.
What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Real even existed.
A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. They had a dignity and a wisdom that was simply unavailable to Rousseau's elite contemporaries. And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.
But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds.
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And so the question follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension.
And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get.
What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist democracy is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are selling sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. They represent a reversion to oligarchical warlordism in a postmodern, hi-tech key.
Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon and the Claremonsters, who do understand it, seek to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil.
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And so then the next question is this: what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.
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Note 1: My use of Logos here as knowledge on the horizontal axis carries a different meaning from what I understand as the Johannine Logos, which is foundational for intelligibility on the horizontal axis, but also the intelligibility of revelations that disclose themselves from the depths of of the Living Real on the vertical axis. The Johannine Logos is in my Christian epistemology foundational for both Logos and Mythos.
Note 2: After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass is an interesting, morally serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am.
At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.
The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share, if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.
But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinism. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.
We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a few generations during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post.
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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.