[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post]
“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”
--Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3).
And I confess that I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing. --David Brooks
David Brooks, qua America's spokesperson for a principled conservatism, looks himself in the mirror in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. It's a companion piece to Gellman's and Packer's essays about the coming demise of American democracy, about which I've written in the last few weeks. I started writing this post to parse Brooks's quote excerpted above about why I think of his American Conservatism is oxymoronic, as clearly he seems to recognize by his listing of all its antinomies.
But before coming to that, I wanted to reflect a bit on how the current crisis has pushed me to appreciate in a way I did not before how a society's dominant metaphysical imaginary unconsciously shapes its experience about what is most important, what is most deeply true, and what is worthy of its aspirations--no matter what the conscious individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary derives from Rationalist Materialism. Whatever our individual beliefs, we live in a world whose basic assumptions about reality are shaped by Rationalist Materialism.
I believed before, or rather my basic world view was shaped by the belief, that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently.
And so it follows that ideally a pluralistic society embraces a plurality of metaphysical imaginaries. There are realists and idealists, theists and atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, pagans and polytheists, materialists and transcendentalists. And various combinations of all the above. And ideally all should live together in a society where at the very least they tolerate one another and where at best they actually engage with one another in an honest, empathic attempt to understand the other, to walk in his or her shoes, to come to appreciate what's best rather than to demonize what's worst.
Of course, that idea of pluralism in the abstract I still value, but I think the hard truth is that in our particular historical/cultural context our differences keep us divided and conquered. Few of us actually engage in good faith with the differences others present to us; rather we at best tolerate others, but mostly we'd rather not deal with them. So the default is to think of the Other as quasi-barbarians, and to support whatever efforts are afoot to promote one's own group's interests and to suppress the interests of everyone else. And this natural tendency in human beings is exaggerated if they are acculturated into, as we are, the One Metaphysical Imaginary that Rules Us All, which is Rationalist Materialism, its capitalist social-economic dynamics, its media, and with both of those a crude, Social-Darwinist ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics.
I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: Rationalist Materialism and its capitalist utilitarian moral frame is the the developed world's metaphysical operating system--all other beliefs are programs that must run on it. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, we have to live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran quite different, premodern metaphysical operating systems that were compatible with them. And the way those religions have been patched in to work with our current, late-modern OS makes them very buggy, if not unusable.
Does the problem lie with these older religious "programs" or with the late-modern operating system on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter, and I argue why in Part 2. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society that runs a Rationalist-Materialist OS. We're all in the Matrix created by that system, and extricating yourself from it is not easy for those who want to--and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably well adapted to life within it.
And so people who are well-adapted to materialist metaphysical matrix naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, you're not free if your personal beliefs are incompatible with the cultural OS. The cultural OS--not one's personal beliefs--plays the dominant role in shaping his experience of the world--even for people with religious commitments.
The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined participative ontology which supports and interprets the knower's experience of herself in a participative relationship with the mystery of Being. That's not how we think about or experience the world in a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Rather, we see and experience the world as just containing stuff to be used. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Some environmentalists, like the ones celebrated by Richard Powers in Overstory, are trying to restore an animist sense of the sacred, but they are considered by the mainstream culture as flakey nuisances.
But hardly anybody in the world--East, West, North, or South--experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. It feels forced, so much "hocus pocus", and it's understandable why people nowadays think it's nonsense. But it's not nonsense. It's that we've been culturally programmed to be insensible to their significance. The problem lies not with what's there but with our ability to see or experience it.
So if one has non-materialist personal beliefs, they are circumscribed or cramped by the dominant materialist metaphysical imaginary--unless we live like the Amish or in monastic communities off the grid. To use a less mechanistic metaphor, we are dyed yellow in our acculturation into the rationalist materialist imaginary, and so most people see a yellow-colored world, but even if some entertain religious thoughts that were in their original form green, they come out looking blue. It might look ok, but it is a distortion. And so no matter what your individual beliefs might be, they are always yellow-tainted, if not yellow-dominant. It's possible, but it takes an extraordinary effort to cleanse that yellow taint.
And I would argue that while not all cultural operating systems have this soul-deadening effect, our yellow one is killing us as a society, whether or not we as individuals have found a way to purge its taint. But the task isn't just an individual one, because our well being as individuals depends on the health of the whole society. We need an infusion of something that promises a different kind of life, a life that might actually help the best among us to transcend our differences and unite us at a level where we might actually have the strength to fight against what's coming.
Our fundamental metaphysical imaginary should be a colorless, radiant light that comprises the full color spectrum and allows for a range of possibilities that are all in their different ways aimed at the same goal, which is an imagined future possibility for human flourishing that simply is not possible within the current materialist imaginary.
So let there be pluralism, but let it run on a cultural OS that has a spiritual dimension. What that might look like, I don't know, but I can imagine a trans-cultural system of symbols that opens up such possibilities unavailable to us now. Otherwise our pluralism within our current spiritually impoverished metaphysical imaginary promotes divisions that will continue to keep the best of us preoccupied with clickbait--all the stupid, superficial stuff--and so distracts us from the real threat that is posed by techno-capitalism and the simulacra of culture that it is creating.
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So back to Brooks. I think he's grappling with a fundamental truth concerning American Conservatism that most American Conservatives don't understand, which is that it is oxymoronic. I want to explore this a little more deeply within the broader context outlined above. I see the primary historically positive function of Conservatism, whether here in America or in Europe, as its mission to 'conserve' the cultural ballast that customary culture, especially in its towns and rural areas, provided to the larger society. Liberals, generally speaking, see customary culture as oppressive, unless it's someone else's, which then they find charming.
A healthy society needs that ballast, especially if it has healthy communities that pass from generation to generation a cultural vitality that works for most ordinary people. Local musical and dance traditions, oral histories, local heroes, local lore and legends, a vital communal religious life and reverence for things that are worthy of reverence. A healthy customary culture is rich with symbols and close to nature. A healthy conservatism cherishes these things, and seeks to push back against whatever works to undermine them. I think that Brooks would see himself as a defender of this kind of conservatism, and it would be worth defending--if in America it still existed.
I would argue American customary culture was rather weak to begin with since it was so deeply Calvinist in its origins. Calvinism was already a movement grounded in the rejection of old European symbolic customary culture, which it perceived as papishly exotic and paganly exuberant. Which it was. The old Christendom was an extravagant symbolic world that Calvinists wanted no truck with, and so they did what they could to strip out all that symbolism and exuberance and to remake society from scratch based on their stern, spare, rather colorless imagination of what was most important. Absolute Spirit might be colorless, but our life on earth cannot be. It needs to refract that light into its many colors. The problem with the Calvinists was they wanted to live in a pure colorlessness that is not meant for humans, and their attempt to do so created negative, unintended consequences I'll lay out in a future post. A few, rare individuals can live in thin, unshaded, mountaintop air, but not whole societies.
And so frustrated in their inability to impose their spare, colorless vision in Geneva, they tried it in New England. This eventually failed. And as Ben Franklin notes in the quote excerpted above from Tribe, the descendants of those stern Puritans couldn't stand the society they created, and once they had a taste of truly rich customary culture in the Native American societies of their time, they had no desire to go back to the life of the English. Many Northern Europeans in the 19th Century had the same experience when they went to Italy: Yikes! What have I been missing all of my life?!
They found there what was still a vital customary culture in the old pre-Reformation European sense, something that had been all but purged in Protestant northern Europe, which had by then become quite smugly superior about its having traded cultural vitality for prosperity--at least for the few who prospered. Contemporary American Conservatism is ironically largely heir to the mentality that saw it as its mission to destroy the two principal customary cultures they encountered at the time--first, that of old Europe and then that of the Native Americans.
In the U.S. today, if there are American Conservatives who have anything interesting to say, they are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on intellectual traditions that have deep premodern roots. WASP America hated both when they started arriving in droves starting in the mid-19th Century because they represented a worldview, a metaphysical imaginary, that they saw as deeply incompatible with theirs. They were seen as unassimilable. Well, in the decades after WWII, consumer capitalism and its media has bleached out most Catholics and Jews so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists. Now, if we are mainstream Americans, we're all Calvinists whether we realize it or not--either the Woke kind on the Left or the gun-and-bible-toting kind on the Right.
American Calvinism has always been more interested in vilifying what was not compatible with its tight-assed vision rather than understanding or preserving what was vital in anything that did not fit within it. And so after the founding, most of New England's intellectuals couldn't stand Calvinism either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German Romanticism and idealism. I know this is oversimplifying Calvinism in this pejorative sense, and in future posts I'll add some nuance. There is a positive side to Calvinism (despite itself). MLK came out of it, after all. There are many good, decent, spiritually vital Calvinists. But Calvinism as an idea system and cultural movement has done more harm than good overall.
So American conservatism, insofar as it had a "tradition" to conserve, had a tradition that was symbolically weak to begin with in its rejection of the old Catholic, sacramental religion and with it the old European folkways, festivals, and quasi-heathen customs. And yet there was a customary culture in Yankee America, symbolically spare though it might have been, which before the Civil War retained a basic decency and public spiritedness that Toqueville writes about.
And then there was the South, which also had a vital customary culture, but its society was dominated by thugs living out a poor-man's fantasy about what it would be like to be an aristocrat. And so they made a society based on chattel slavery that was rotten at its core, and so whatever was vital in Southern customary culture was the warp to the chattel slavery woof that wove the Southern social fabric. We're still suffering from that rot--not just in the South now but everywhere. And whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies has hollowed out whatever was vital and humanizing in them. The old customs have become museum pieces preserved by cultural societies of different sorts.
In future posts I want to lay out the genealogy of the death of culture, if by culture we mean a vibrant symbolic system that mediates the Living Real for a civilization. I'll draw on both Jean Baudrillard and Iain McGilchrist who in their different ways make a compelling argument that we are living now in the aforementioned simulacra of culture, i.e, a parody of culture, and we're suffocating because of it. Baudrillard is pessimistic that there's any way out, but McGilchrist sees one. Whether we'll find a way to choose it remains to be seen. More on that in a future post. But what we're living together as Americans now is insane, and we need to understand its genealogy if we are to find a cure.
Anyway, this is why Brooks's American Conservatism was always oxymoronic because it wanted simultaneously to preserve customary culture while embracing the capitalist dynamics that have been most responsible for destroying it. American Conservatism was never a movement to preserve what was vital, but rather only a movement to slow down the inevitable decay of a pre-Industrial way of life.
But the upshot is that America never had a richly vital tradition to preserve. Ask the "English" who went native in Franklin's account quoted in the epigraph. And for that reason it never had the spiritual or cultural resources to push back against the materialist flood that industrial capitalism brought to it in the decades following the American founding. The desire to preserve local community values and their customary cultures while at the same time celebrating the disruptive, creative-destructive energies of capitalism was at best a naive fantasy and always intellectually incoherent.
American society was founded on some important ideals, but those ideals were never rooted in a metaphysical imaginary in which they might have been cultivated and sustained. Certainly the contemporary American cultural Left, the primary defender of those ideals now, does so with an unattractive moralistic priggishness that lacks the metaphysical heft to sustain them. These ideals were doomed from the start to be smothered by far more powerful cultural energies that accompanied the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie as a dominant social class.
The new imaginary legitimated greed and the will to power and came to see it as the engine that drove material progress, and indeed it did. Nevertheless, while people have always lusted for power and wealth, no civilized society had before embraced these vices as admirable. That we live in such a society is in large part what makes us so crazy, and no such society has a vital human future.
Materialist capitalism's negative effects are not primarily about the inevitable gross social inequities it produces, but about the way it impoverishes the human spirit of everyone it taints. It creates the conditions that make it extraordinarily difficult to deal humanely with its excesses. BTW, American socialism suffers from the same metaphysical imaginal limitations. I lean socialist in my politics because the system needs some constituency to mitigate the worst excesses of the private-sector sociopaths American society lionizes. But in the long run, socialism does not solve the deeper problem.
So that's why 'American Conservatism' is oxymoronic. You can't have both vital local communities and their customary cultures in a larger society shaped by the unchecked energies of a capitalist economy. The flourishing of the latter leads invevitably to the destruction of the former.
I want to take some time over the next year or so to reflect on how the 'death or disappearance of culture' presents some opportunities as well as dangers, but I want to state as clearly as I can now my conviction that our current collective metaphysical imaginary is no longer sustainable if we want to secure a positive future for humanity. And so long as we are culturally divided and conquered, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human.
A respect for and celebration of pluralism is a good thing, but there needs to be an overarching commitment to which all the parties in a pluralistic society submit, and the argument that I want to make is that this commitment needs to be grounded in an imagined future, a cultural OS if you will, of positive human flourishing. Such a future is simply beyond the resources of our current Rationalist Materialist OS, and so people for want of something better turn to toxic fantasies of a lost past.
See also "Dying Traditions"and "Tthe Baymen and Farmers of New York before World War II".
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This is the first in a series that is still in process. The parts posted so far are summarized below with links to each:
Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary.
Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him. Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. All of us should be in a continuous process of clearing away what we think in order to create a space for what is true to emerge. This is true especially for Christians who think they know what Christianity is but really don't.
Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a cognitive-science basis for understanding and legitimating knowledge on the vertical dimension since the Axial Revolution. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.
Part 4B takes Vervaeke's 'salience landscape' concept further in arguing that it provides a model for how people and societies make real progress, which requires not just progress on the horizontal axis, but on the vertical as well. I talk about how some salience landscapes can be evaluated as better or worse according to three criteria--coherency, scope, and richness. I talk about how Kohlberg's six stages of moral development are examples of how children through adulthood self-transcend in their moral development by having moral insights at progressively higher levels of coherency, scope, and richness. The "moral" is one dimension of self-transcendence on the vertical axis that does not get enough attention in a lot of New Age spirituality, which is more interested in developing cognitive scope rather than moral richness.
Part 5: Salience Landscapes and Salience Bubbles explores the distinction between the two. It draws upon the Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as a case study in how salience bubbles work. It argues that the goal is not to be unbiased because that is impossible, but rather to always be open to have our biases challenged by new information. That's possible for people who live in a flexible salience landscape, not possible for those who live in saliency bubbles. It argues that real science proceeds from within evolving salience landscapes on the horizontal level which deserves the legitimacy that it enjoys, but the problem for the rest of us is the way that the criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate on the horizontal dimension is used to evaluate the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension. Hopefully sooner, but probably later, we will develop a metaphysical imaginary that restores the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension in such a way that it can be integrated with knowledge on the horizontal dimension.
Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series discusses how what this series is trying to achieve supplements Vervaeke's Awakening series. If his goal is to do a genealogy that explains why his psychotechnologies are a needed solution for our contemporary meaning crisis as it affects individual in crisis, my series runs on a parallel track that focuses more on the need for a broader societal solution insofar as it is the root cause of the experience of crisis on the individual level.
Part 7: The Bigger Picture lays out, in a sense, the map for where this Genealogy series is heading. The goal is to make plausible--not to prove; proof is impossible--a Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary that integrates an evolution of consciousness mythopoesis with developments in science and a progressive politics. The heavy lifting to establish plausibility lies in the future after retracing the evolutionary pattern from the past. I think that while there is much overlap with the claims that I want to make with other religious traditions and with contemporary science, there are two things that Christianity emphasizes that are less important in these other traditions: One, history has meaning because it has a telos. This has practical implications because no progressive politics is possible without an eschatology. Marxism was an eschatological cult, and MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" assumes a deep eschatology. The second thing Christianity emphasizes is the importance of the individual person who is destined for communion, for deep connectedness with God, with other humans, with the cosmos.
Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic is the first post to begin at the beginning of this Genealogy. The goal now, with some digressions here and there is to understand the origin and evolution of Christian Neoplatonism, the premodern Western metaphysical imaginary. The focus of this post is to demonstrate that Plato's philosophy was based on visionary experience from contemplation of the Divine One. This experience of transcendence is not common, but it's hardly exceptional. The whole post-Axial tradition is essentially the attempts of various societies to make sense of the world in the light of such experiences of transcendence. I further argue, following Pierre Hadot, that you can't understand either Plato or Aristotle if you don't see their philosophies as practices in their schools as promoting a habitus that orients its students toward this experience of the transcendent One.
Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism makes the case that early Christian thinking was open and fluid in its development and took from Judaism, Greek philosophy, and mystery religions what fit within a framework of criteria that were shaped by the Christian revelation. While Christianity after Constantine became more obsessed with correct doctrine for political and social reasons, this earlier sifting process needs to be understood as an honest attempt to understand what was valuable from non-Christian sources and to integrate them into a broad "catholic" synthesis.
Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation surveys the importance of late Second Temple Jewish literary forms that arose from the cross-fertilization of Jewish belief and practice with Hellenic philosophy and practice. Relying heavily on Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, I focus particularly on the significance of the Apocalypses and the Song of Songs. And then we spend quite a bit of time understanding the significant contribution of the great Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. I also make some distinctions between the Mysticism of the Heath and the Mysticism of Transcendence. This Genealogy series is mostly concerned with the second, but it's important to understand how it co-existed in a cultural milieu in which the first played a significant if not dominant role in the broader society. I emphasize the role of Love in both Greek and Jewish itineraries of spiritual ascent and the importance of the personalist dimension that Jewish thinking added to Greek ideas.
Part 11: The Christian Synthesis
Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project.
Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West