After the Future

Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it provides a foothold to take a stand. It's real enough for me to push back against everything that exists in denial or rejection of it.

We're at a point where we find it quite understandable what God might have been thinking when he told Noah to build his ark. "This experiment has gone far enough," God thinks. "Time to reboot." I take some solace in that he promised not to do it again, at least not by flood. Tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, and plague? We'll see.

But imminent ecological catastrophe has nothing to do with the divine, unless we see our behavior as a disruption of the Tao of things, the deep law of ontological balance. Which is how I see it. So our predicament is really more the consequence of our blind stupidity, of our losing any decision-making capacity that has a wisdom dimension to it. If we destroy the earth and everything living on it, it will be our own doing--the result of our failures in justice, of our venal, blinkered way of operating on the horizontal. That's the point of Adam McKay's Netflix satire Don't Look Up.

In Part 3, I mentioned in passing that the country took a turn toward the simulacral in 1980 with the rejection of Carter for Reagan. So much fantastical nonsense flowed from that moment. The emergence of FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Iran Contra, Newt Gingrich's tribal bloodsport politics, the Democrats' giving up FDR and embracing Neoliberalism, the hysterical, petty moral crusade against Clinton, the oxycontin plague, the frequency of mass shootings, the invasion of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of the Tea Party, the mainstreaming of white nationalism, the rise of Trump, and now tens of millions of people living in a MAGA bubble that prevents them from behaving sanely in response to a deadly virus or to accept the results of an election that wasn't even close.

Don't Look Up confronts us with the consequences forty years after the country chose Reagan, which is that we have become so captured by these trivial, tribal, interpretive frames that we've become incapable of dealing with reality as it is. I don't believe that if a comet were heading for the earth that people would react as depicted in the movie. We're not that far gone yet, but we're getting there. That's the point the point of the movie--to warn us that we're on our way if we don't find a way to course correct. 

All salience landscapes have constraints that limit what we are capable of seeing and understanding, but what is unique about our time lies in our having created "salience bubbles". As discussed in Part 4, a salience landscape helps us to organize our experience as humans so that we might navigate in and make sense of the living, real world in ways that are shaped by what is most relevant for them. A salience bubble organizes our experience in a way that is very similar to being in the virtual world of gamers, which is alienated from the living, real world, although it resembles it. The difference between a bubble and a landscape is that people in the latter are open to new information; people in the former are sealed off from it. Humans living in a real world are open to infinity, a virtual world is limited by the rules of its coders.

You can have two people from very different cultural backgrounds who have very different salience landscapes--let's say a Tibetan Buddhist monk conversing with a particle physicist. They have very different presuppositions about what is most salient in their understanding of reality, but if they are honest, curious, people who want to expand the scope of their salience landscapes, they enter into conversation with one another in the hopes of doing so. They must find within themselves a capacity for empathic understanding so that they can enter into the salience landscape of the other and see the world from the other's point of view.

This is not possible for someone who is in a salience bubble. The only new information that enters into the bubble is information that reinforces or thickens the bubble-defining membrane that filters out information that makes sense within the bubble. You can't have a conversation with someone who is inside a bubble unless you are inside the bubble with him. The only information or ideas that are relevant or salient for him are ideas that reinforce what he already "knows".

A bubble functions more viciously than confirmation bias: it's confirmation compulsion. Bias is normal, and we all have it no matter how objective we think we are. The goal is not to be unbiased, because that's impossible, but rather to be open to have one's biases challenged by new information. The goal is to have a salience landscape that continues to expand in its scope. [See Note 1]

So a bubble, instead of providing an interpretive frame that organizes our experience in a real world, creates frames that cut people within a bubble off from reality in any vital sense. They have become incapable of dealing with any information that lacks salience within the bubble because it makes no sense within the bubble. Contradictory facts are either filtered out, or when they are not in dispute, get interpreted in ways that are twisted to make sense within their bubble.

In our current situation, for instance, Liberals keep insisting on the fact that Trump's own AG Barr has said there is no evidence that the election was stolen. That Barr has said this is not in dispute for people in the MAGA bubble, but they interpret this fact as simply more evidence that supports their beliefs. Barr is just a sleeper agent for the Deep State, the evil system that seeks to destroy Trump's holy mission to save America from child-molesting elites. He's one of the elites, and he's simply protecting elite interests. It's the only logical explanation. And it makes sense if the only allowable facts are those that reinforce the presuppositions that structure the bubble. 

It's understandable that people should feel uncomfortable with a powerful technocratic state. I'm uncomfortable with it. But one's discomfort isn't a premise from which to deduce that it must be destroyed because anything else would be better. That is insane, and yet such an idea structures the salience bubble of tens of millions of Americans, and so because now so many people live inside such a bubble that sacrifices scope and richness for a narrowly defined coherence, it's hard to see how how you get them out. A pandemic couldn't do it, neither probably will a war with Russia, and maybe neither even a comet or asteroid hurtling toward earth. 

Facts matter, but how interpretive frames define what facts are salient matters more. Don't Look Up focuses less on the salience bubbles that capture the MAGA world, and more on the bubbles that capture the media, business, and political classes. They think themselves sophisticated about how the "real world" works, but really all they understand is how things work within their bubbles. That their world is going to be destroyed by a comet doesn't fit within their salience bubbles. It feels too weird, too anomalous, too abstract, too outside their patterned perceptions of normalcy to be actually true. It's not what they are used to because they too have become so acclimated and comfortable in a bubble that prevents them from seeing reality when it is looking them straight in the face. The only things that feel real are the elements that make sense within their virtual bubble worlds.

Don't Look Up presents exactly how it works in an exaggerated form to help us see it more clearly. And the president's calling off the one chance the earth had for survival was a perfect metaphor for how people within a bubble persuade themselves that what is relevant within their entrenched salience bubble gets priority consideration, and how they will seize any rationale to justify their dismissal of information that undermines what their salience bubble determines as most relevant. And besides, there is a Plan B for those who make the decisions. They always have a way to escape the consequences of their bad decisions. Elite decision makers very rarely suffer from their mistakes. It's the rest of us do, as in the financial crisis of 2008.

***

None of us knows the truth in any absolute sense, but we can evaluate individuals and societies as knowing more or less, better or worse, according to how effectively their metaphysical imaginaries operate according to four criteria:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of their knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of our knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to our experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in our experience of reality on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

Religious fundamentalism fails by these criteria, but so does a reductive scientism. But worse than either is the simulacral bubbles that for reasons explained above are cutting us off completely from our connection to the Living Real. 

So scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability are the criteria by which we measure a salience landscape and the broader metaphysical imaginary. A salience bubble lacks scope, but has coherence and a feeling of richness, even if it is delusional. A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that comes from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized. 

A lot of people in late modernity think that they have moral courage because they see themselves as capable of facing a bleak world that objectively lacks coherence and richness. Within their rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, they understand the universe as meaningless, cruel, and impersonal, and yet life is worth living because they see themselves as creating their own meaning and coherence from within their own subjective resources. There is no meaning except the meaning they impose on their experience of their world, i.e., the meaning that they create ex nihilo. The problem does not lie in their disbelief in God, but in that they unwittingly are enacting a causa sui project in which they are playing his role. 

If there is some meaning that transcends what can be subjectively projected, they believe no one can know it, and so it's irrelevant. To ask why humans , unlike animals, need meaning and purpose would be for them an irrelevant question because it's excluded a priori. Their presuppositions make answers to such questions unanswerable. It's just the way it is; we are the way we are. And so when someone provides a coherent explanation for why meaning and purpose are built into the human condition, they don't want to hear it. They see it as someone selling snake oil. 

This kind of thinking, when it is genuinely agnostic, can be admirable for its honest humility, when it is in fact humble and honest. But often it's just a form of conformity to the groupthink about what's acceptable in secular intellectual circles. It's bubble-ish, if not completely so. There's no courage in it if it's just believing what's au courant. But even when it's honest and admirable, I think it's unnecessarily restricted in its scope because it doesn't realize how it is necessarily captured by the constraints of the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary.

It naively assumes that real knowledge isn't possible on the vertical dimension, or it dismisses that kind of knowledge as merely subjective and so having no real metaphysical heft--not enough, at least, to depose the seeming solidity of their Rationalist-Materialistic assumptions. They think that the only kind of knowledge that is reliable is knowledge that comes from science because science has a method for seeing the the broad scope of what's there and for providing a coherent explanation for what's there without illusion.

That's true about science, but science also operates within constraints discussed in Part 4. Good science is always an ongoing process of upgrading its salience landscapes. As the scope of the information made available to scientific inquiry expands, so does the need to revise the coherency of its explanations. This is basic Thomas Kuhn. The scientific saliency landscape for Einstein is very different from what it was for Newton, whose landscape was very different from that for Copernicus, and his from Ptolemy's.

There is continuity because solving one set of problems leads to the next, and so there is a feeling of expanding coherency as it keeps pace with the expanding scope of information, at least within a particular discipline. But is the saliency landscape of advanced physics coherent with the saliency landscape of biology and neuroscience? If anybody is doing work on integrating that, it certainly isn't breaking through to the larger culture. But maybe that's because it isn't work for scientists; it's work for philosophers. And when you are doing philosophy, everything depends on your metaphysical imaginary. And the metaphysical imaginary for most academic philosophers in the U.S. is Rationalist Materialism. 

Because scientific work is primarily oriented on the horizontal dimension, it is not constrained by its Rationalist-Materialist assumptions most of the time. But with physics since the Uncertainty Principle, we are getting into territory where it's getting more difficult not to see that the role of Mind is critical in shaping not just our interpretation of information but the actual experience of the information to begin with. And this raises challenging questions for the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary. What if Mind is primary, and Matter is a function of Mind? Does that offer a more coherent explanation than that now afforded by Rationalist-Materialism?  I think it does.

Nevertheless, the bias within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is to see Mind as somehow produced by matter, which makes no sense. Everything that mind does has zero to do with what matter does. It's clearer and clearer to anybody who thinks about it that there is no such thing as an objective, material world. Matter is a mental construct. Whatever material things are in themselves, they have more the qualities of mind than whatever we used to think was the mind-independent character of the material world after Galileo and Descartes.

And so one is forced to ask what the relationship between Matter and Mind is, and if you think about it with an open 'mind', it makes more sense that matter is a function of mind than that mind is a function of matter, and that to think the latter is simply a bias that comes from assuming that a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy. It's legitimacy is broadly accepted, but its incoherent with our broader experience is obvious to anybody who has a sense of the spiritual, which is most people, whether or not they churchgoers. This fundamental incoherency without our experience should disqualify it from the hegemonic legitimacy that it enjoys. 

And so it's astonishing to me that if 95% of Americans are at least open to the idea that there is a non-material spiritual dimension, why it is so hard for us to accept the idea that the fundamental stuff of the universe is Mind. Why? Because it's unscientifically provable? But that's like saying the game of chess doesn't exist because we're playing a game where the rules for checkers are the only ones that count. Says who? And if asserting the priority of Mind provides a more coherent explanation of things than the rationalist-materialist imaginary's assertion of the primacy of Matter, why is it so hard to take it seriously? "Well," sputter people captured within the Rationalist Materialist bubble, "that's religion, not science. And religion is irrational and ignorant because it believes in things that are not there, that people make up because they want to be comforted by beliefs that have no supportable evidence. It has nothing to do with real knowledge." This kind of blinkered stupidity is contributing nothing except to impede the the awakening of a spiritual potency that we will need to confront and push back against what's coming. 

Religion when it works in a healthy society, which ours is not, is about real knowledge that comes from experience on the vertical dimension. It's knowledge that plays by different rules that have deep legitimacy if you make the effort to understand them. Chess is possible even for people who think Checkers is the only game in town. Every great civilization until about 150 years ago had a vertical dimension. Do we really think we're smarter than everybody who lived before then? Look around you. What evidence is there that we are any wiser than our ancestors? Is it just because we have computers, antibiotics, and airplanes?

The problem is not about a dispute concerning what's really there, but with the efficacy--the scope, coherence, richness & adaptability--of different metaphysical imaginaries. It's not about what's there but about how our metaphysical imaginary interprets what's there, and, in fact, limits what we can see and experience. The problem is not that people don't believe that spirit/mind exists, but that they live in a metaphysical imaginary in which materialist explanations are the only ones that have legitimacy in our collective intellectual discourse. That spirit/mind exists is irrelevant for the decisions we make in the political and economic spheres. The problem is that our intellectual elites are so captured by Rationalist Materialism that they are in the predicament of the captives in the mirrored room described above. They, however, are not aware that they are imprisoned within it, and so feel no need to exit. 

The argument of this Genealogy series is that our refusal of the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical is the underlying cause of our current collective insanity. It might not matter if we were not facing ecological catastrophe on the one hand, and on the other, a "Metaverse" singularity that threatens to radically diminish, if not destroy, what it means to be human. The political foolishness we're living through now is just a distraction that keeps us from confronting where the real threats come from.

That's what exasperates me most about the delusional nonsense on the cultural Right. They are not wrong to believe that something is dreadfully wrong about what's happening to us, but their analysis of the causes of the problem is bonkers, and they are abetting the factions within American society that are the greatest impediments to finding solutions that might work. 

We desperately need to find a wisdom dimension to help orient us to face what's coming. It's not good enough for individuals here and there to find wisdom. We need a reboot. 

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Note 1: Compulsion is a trap that imprisons those who are in its grip. People in the grip of cognitive compulsion are like a crowd of people who wake up gathered in a large police interrogation room but are not sure how they got there. The room has mirrors they believe their captors can look through to see them but prevent them from seeing their imagined captors. Nothing enters from outside; they see only themselves and hear only their own thoughts, but they imagine their captors as evil, because who else but someone evil would imprison them? But there's nobody on the other side of those mirrors. Nobody is watching them or cares.

No wonder they feel that they are the victims of a conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of their own making. They have no recollection of it, but it's a room they designed and built for themselves and freely chose to inhabit. They live in it, whether they admit it to themselves or not, because it feels safer than living in the big, confusing, hostile world outside of it. And so because they built it, the lock is on the inside not outside. But they've forgotten that. They've forgotten that they can walk out any time they want.

Maybe one among them remembers and considers leaving, but he's afraid to. If he does, he will lose the companionship and safety he finds in this room, and he fears the hostility of the imagined captors outside whose malevolence he will not be able to defend himself against alone. But perhaps even a worse fate awaits him if he were to leave the room: What if he were to be proved wrong? What if there is no hostile enemy waiting for him outside? What if he were to discover that no one really cares enough about him to hate him in the way that he and the others assume they do? What will give his life meaning and purpose if there is no enemy?  

And so a part of me sympathizes with his predicament because I think that what he really wants is meaning and purpose, and having an enemy is the easiest way to get both. If he leaves the room, he'll find there is no enemy, but then neither is there anything else to give his life meaning and purpose. There's precious little in the world outside shaped by the rationalist-materialist imaginary that will provide that for him. It's understandable that he would want to stay with his friends. It might be a small world, but it's a safe and meaningful one. 

And that would be fine if they'd just stay in the room, but they want more than that. "Why should we live so confined?" they say among themselves. "Why don't we develop a plan to break out together?" But for the plan to succeed, they must capture and kill anyone who disagrees with them for fear of being captured and killed by them.

But nobody wants to capture or kill them. At worst there are those who laugh at them for their delusional stupidity, but they wish them no harm until they become a force that threatens harm to them. That all this has no relationship to reality outside their bubble or prison never enters into consideration. Within the bubble this plan possesses powerful coherence within its very limited scope, and it provides deeply felt sense of meaning, even if it has no basis in reality.

Everybody in the room believes it, but because deep down they know it's baseless, they must viciously reject anyone who raises doubts. "We're absolutely right," they think, "and anybody who doesn't think so cannot be trusted. Doubters are collaborators with our enemies. There's no other explanation. They are enemy infiltrators who seek to undermine our resolve." 

Go to Part 6.

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Thomas Chatterton Williams on 'Rescuing Socrates'

Padilla’s criticisms raise the perennial question of utility—what is an education for?—and inflect it with the social-justice mission that seems to have permeated virtually all of the nation’s academic, cultural, and artistic institutions. Yet it is Montas who answers most persuasively: The purpose of an education is liberation. And the ideas and traditions that support that liberation are not and can never be crudely racialized as one group’s property, thinned out and flattened beneath the rolling pin of identity. We are not only one thing (Dominican! Brown! ESL!) and ideas are not black or white. They are good or bad, worthy or not worthy, useful or not useful—judgments that can shift and evolve with time, and not always for the worse.

“Many people today, even academics, take the approach to liberal education based on the study of classics to be elitist and exclusivist, with little understanding of the democratizing impulse behind it,” Montas writes. But “we do minority students an unconscionable disservice” when we steer them away from it. “We condescend to them when we assume that only works in which they find their ethnic or cultural identities affirmed can really illuminate their human experience.”

Ideas and identity are not in opposition, and they are not equals. Striving with and against the most durable human thinking to have created and altered the intellectual, cultural, and political landscape beyond our own backyard equips all of us to discover who we are most fully. This is the message brought vividly to life in Montas’s book. It is a simple one. But in times of extreme social tension and tribal polarization such as our own, the act of stating obvious, lasting truths can amount to the most generous form of bravery. (Source)

What is truly remarkable is that reading the Great Books should be controversial in the first place. Such thinking is thinkable only in a society that has lost its vertical dimension and is adrift in a sea being buffeted about by each new academic fad--including ideas about social justice. A thirst for Justice is among the most important things a human being can have, but our thinking about and understanding of Justice deserves more than what too often is thought of as a  kindergarten level of fairness between two egotistical children. 

See also "Jacobin Magazine on the Great Books"

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a spiritual dimension, are we living in a culture where a materialist imaginary dominates in the most important areas that shape our collective priorities. I'm also interested to think about whether it's possible for a society to develop an imaginary that operates at a higher moral or wisdom level. What I say below does not depend on your having watched this lecture by John Vervaeke, but it will help. I recommend that you start around the 17-minute mark. Or you can read this first and go back and watch the video. 

Vervaeke is presenting a model for understanding what consciousness does, which is that it provides a way to focus our attention in such a way that it filters out the vast amount of possible information that there is out in the world and in our memories so that we might focus on what is relevant or salient. What defines relevance? Well that depends on your 'salience landscape'. He references Piaget's ideas about child development to illustrate how constraints within one's salience landscape are overcome when one has insights.

In the five-candies example, he points out that most four-year-olds when given the choice between two rows of five candies in which the second row is arranged with more space between the candies, invariably choose the second row because it looks like more. Why? Because it takes up more space. Space, says Vervaeke, is "super salient" for the four-year-old, and super salience is usually a sign that you're stuck or blocked by unconscious patterns that organize what is salient for you. Normal cognitive development is all about the way you transcend those unconscious patterns by having insights. An older kid will understand--will have an insight--that space isn't relevant, that the only thing that matters is the number of candies. What's in the world does not change, but your ability to see the world with greater clarity and depth does. 

So the point that Piaget and Vervaeke are making is that the way we see the world is not shaped by what's there but by the constraints in our salience landscape. Cognitive development for all of us, children or adults, is determined by overcoming the constraints of our salience landscapes at different points in our life. The problem lies not in our being blind to evidence but with the unconscious psychological systems or structures that organize what is 'salient' or relevant.

This goes a long way in explaining what has been described as the epistemic bubbles that shape our polarized politics. Kellyanne Conway was mocked for talking about 'alternative facts', but she would have avoided the mockery if she said instead that there are alternative salience landscapes, or alternative interpretive frames, which is what I think she really meant. Liberals also would do well to understand better how their own salience landscapes shape what facts are relevant, and which are not. 

Our salience landscapes shape the interpretive frame that shapes for us what's meaningful. If we lived in a society that had a vertical dimension, we would understand that the path of wisdom is a life-long process of self-transcendence, i.e, of a continuous transformation of our salience landscapes. There are an awful lot of people, and many of them are our leaders in media, business, and politics, who haven't advanced much further than to see the world from within a typical middle-schooler's salience landscape. Middle School is when we all learn to be Social Darwinists. 

In theory, there is no limit to the kind of transcending that is possible. The wisest among us are those who have progressed furthest in transcending their constraints--this is what it means to be truly free--but there are limits to what's possible for any individual that are set by the collective metaphysical imaginary into which a person is acculturated. You can't get too far ahead of the pack, or you're completely in your own world, which is insanity. We all need to keep a foot in the social imaginary of our contemporaries. 

Hopefully those who are more advanced in their self-transcending are beating a path to make it easier for the rest of us to follow. And when enough people follow, a tradition develops, and after a while that tradition, if it remains vital, provides to the broader society an alternative salience landscape that more and more people will find attractive because of the self-transcending benefits it affords, and things can reach a tipping point where the entire society flips its salience landscape so that it is more in touch with the Living Real. This happened in the Axial Age and some would argue during the Upper Paleolithic. But it also explains how imaginaries evolve, including, for instance, how intellectuals, even many of those in the French nobility, became "Republicans" in the 18th Century. For them it was a combination of seeing that the current ancien regime wasn't working and that a compelling republican alternative was being presented by the philosophes.

Because these constraints that structure our salience landscapes are culturally conditioned, they shape a consensus reality in very provisional ways. They feel more real than they are. Premodern societies had constraints that are very different from the constraints of modern societies, and so what is relevant or salient for premoderns is very different from what is for moderns. The point is that we see things that our ancestors did not see because what we see as salient from within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is very different from what is salient for people from within, really, any premodern metaphysical imaginary, whether in the West or anywhere else.

The challenge for us is to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we do not. I am not saying that we have to re-inhabit a premodern imaginary, but that we must retrieve in a postmodern key what was lost, which is the vertical or wisdom dimension. Wisdom was salient for our ancestors in a way it just is not for us, and so the question is whether we are capable of developing a new salience landscape where wisdom can be restored as salient not just for a few individuals here and there, but for the society as a whole. That is the formula for 'renaissance' or rebirth--a recovery or remembering of something vital that has been lost or forgotten. 

All of us are working within constraints, and to think that we know T.H.E. truth is always delusional, but some are wiser than others because their cognitive development has helped them see through certain common systematic or structural constraints that come with their acculturation. To use Vervaeke's language, they have learned how to realize when they are bullshitting themselves.

We can never live without constraints because we need the necessary filters that consciousness provides to prevent our being overwhelmed by too much reality. But some filters (or salience landscapes) are more aligned with what is really there, and the goal is to be continuously trading up, so to say, i.e., to trade in one set of constraints for another that helps you to see more deeply what is really there, to get into, to use Vervaeke's phrase, "deep contact with the guts of the world". This was Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's project, and it's the project of Iain McGilchrist. And, as I argue here, it was the project of the great Renaissance artists influenced by Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism. 

If you watch Vervaeke's earlier lectures you will see that Socrates is a hero for him for pretty much the same reasons he's one for me. In Part 3, I talk at length about how Socrates was a master of cognitive development in Vervaeke's sense. The beginning of wisdom is to know that you don't know, and Socrates' project was to confront his interlocutors with the fact that they were bullshitting themselves. It's all about seeing the limits of conventional wisdom, but it goes deeper.

Socrates understood that the people with whom he was conversing were living within a constrained salience landscape that came with their acculturation. For us those constraints are also shaped by experiences growing up, including trauma, but mostly from what you learn about and submit to in progressive stages about how the dreary "real world" works within the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary. And the same was true in Socrates day, even if the constraints were structured differently. Whether then or now, our experience is shaped by our acculturation starting with the Oedipus Complex when we learn what our role is in society and to follow its codes.

This is Stage 1 in Kohlberg's moral development scheme,and his successive stages illustrate how what might be described as 'moral' saliency landscapes progress from pre-Conventional, to Conventional, and, for some people, to post-Conventional stages. [**See note at end of this post where I expand on this.] Schiller and Kierkegaard talk about similar shifts in saliency landscapes. The point in all of these is to move beyond or to transcend conventional constraints, and to find something that in contrast was 'really real'. This isn't a justification for antinomianism, but for discovering a deeper "law", a deeper understanding about how reality actually works. And it isn't just an intellectual exercise, but one that, if successful, enriches and deepens your experience of the world.

As an aside here, a problem that I have with a lot of New Age spirituality is that it's all about developing human potential that doesn't really care that much about moral development so much as it cares about cognitive development. Or it's what David Brooks calls the "higher selfishness" that is typified by Gwyneth Paltrow's new-agey lifestyle brand "Goop". There is no real wisdom without moral development, no matter how much other aspects of human potentiality might be expanded or developed. I don't think Vervaeke, qua cognitive scientist, falls into this trap. I don't agree with him about everything, but I respect his moral seriousness and sincerity. Moral seriousness is not a problem for any of the great civilizational post-Axial religions, and that's why the recovery of the depth dimension must start with them and what they have to say about self-transcendence.

My own contribution to this, for what's worth, is from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, but I have the deepest reverence for the other great traditions from which I will always have much to learn. I will argue in a future post that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition does not reject Gnosticism, but takes what's best from it and the other ancient mystery religions, and integrates them in a synthesis that has the highest level of coherency, scope, and richness. The renewed interest in Gnosticism after Nag Hammadi, while it might undermine a certain kind of wisdomless, conventional, law-and-order Christianity, does not undermine its deepest mission found in the the canonical New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, which is to provide a model for self-transcendence grounded in a moral ontology.] 

Socrates' elenchus, I argue in Part 3, was a tool to awaken his interlocutors to the constraints of the their salience landscape so as to open them up to the possibility of experiencing what's really there at a deeper, richer level of perception and understanding. Its relevance for us today lies in that while the elenchus could be used effectively to disabuse materialists of their constraints, the same is true for religious people. The problem with Christians or Buddhists or Muslims--or any religious group--is the way that their beliefs rigidify to become part of a system of constraints that need to be transcended if they are to truly understand the deeper truths to which their doctrines point.

We are all fools--whether religious or irreligious--if we think that we are not operating under constraints in our current salience landscapes. And all of us--whether religious or irreligious--are all captured by the constraints of a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, which creates a baseline salience landscape from which we all need to be liberated. It has a tether on all of us. The problem lies in that too many people are too comfortable and too well-adapted to it, and too many of them are making decisions that shape our life together, and not for the better. 

But in the same way that we all need salience landscapes, all religions need doctrines. The idea of doctrine-less religion or religion without religion is silly. It is embraced mostly by people who have strong religious instincts but who are either trying to shake the rigid religious formation in which they were brought up or because they associate these doctrines with the rigid, doctrinaire people whom they understandably find deeply unattractive.

But doctrines should not be thought of as unbelievable things that we believe anyway because we fearfully think that's what is expected of us--that's Kohlberg Stage 1. We should think of them rather as invitations for contemplation. We should feel challenged by them. We need to take them seriously because people wiser than we have taken them seriously for thousands of years. They are truths that call us into a deeper relationship with them, and if we approach them in the right way, they will deepen and broaden us, i.e., increase our level of wisdom as they transform our salience landscapes.

A living tradition is one in which the insights of one generation are passed to the next, not as propositional assertions of truth, but in the vitality of the lives lived in that tradition that are exemplary of its wisdom and moral fruitfulness. One is inspired by their lives, and so one wants to follow on the path of wisdom and moral fruitfulness they trod before us. So we approach any doctrine in a spirit of learned ignorance. We must assume that we have no idea what the doctrine signifies, and that rational analysis of the doctrine is by itself an approach that is unlikely to lead to a deeper understanding of it. But if we are even half alive, we feel that there is something calling to us in it, and we hearken to it. We cognize the truth, and then we use our rational faculties to integrate that truth with what we already know or in some cases to revise what we already know, because the "insight" delivers us from the limitations of the salience landscape that made the knowing at this higher level so difficult. 

So I've been arguing that because the salience landscape in which most people today are acculturated is so profoundly shaped by Rationalist Materialist assumptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to take spiritual or awakening experiences seriously or to interpret them in a way that might actually be life-transforming in a positive way. People will continue to have these experiences, but the question is whether they are having them in such a way that the ontonormativity that challenges them to align their own lives on a higher salience landscape can have a similarly transformative effect in our broader cultural life.

I suspect a broader cultural shift will happen when a critical mass of people who have these experiences--the 30-40%--coalesce around a coherent interpretation of their experience that creates the conditions that make a next step possible. In other words, a new collective salience landscape emerges within a certain group within the culture, and then this group has a ripple effect throughout the culture, and perhaps even reaches a tipping point where its salience landscape becomes normative for the whole culture. If such a thing is to happen, its appeal will lie in that it is continuous with what we have come to understand about reality through science, but reframes scientific factuality not with "alternative facts" but with a compelling alternative salience landscape that meets the criteria for coherence, scope, richness, and adaptability in a way that nothing available to us now in our collective life does. 

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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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.

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it.  

2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school necessary for developing sense of autonomy.  Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

3. Rules matter because they define what is  "right", but personal loyalties matter more. I'll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I'll get in trouble if caught. Example: It's wrong to lie, but I'll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol--steal, scream, maim, or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission--to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital. 

4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by Athenian law. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good. 

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

6. The rules might be right 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good. 

How one's moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that's the point. The rules at one level don't determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don't apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.

And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4. 

I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is that family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.

I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional, which is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

Edsall on the Big Lie

Bart Bonikowski, a sociologist at N.Y.U., describes the danger of this political dynamic:

In capturing the party, Trump perfectly embodied its ethnonationalist and authoritarian tendencies and delivered it concrete results — even if his policy stances were not always perfectly aligned with party orthodoxy. As a result, the Republican Party and Trumpism have become fused into a single entity — one that poses serious threats to the stability of the United States.

The unwillingness of Republican leaders to challenge Trump’s relentless lies, for whatever reason — for political survival, for mobilization of whites opposed to minorities, to curry favor, to feign populist sympathies — is as or more consequential than actually believing the lie.

In that sense, the “big lie” is a precursor to more dangerous threats — threats that are plausible in ways that less than a decade ago seemed inconceivable. The capitulation to and appeasement of Trump by Republican leaders is actually setting up even worse possibilities than what we’ve lived through so far. (Source)

This is going to play out the way it's going to play out, but it really does look at this moment as if the Delusional/Cynical Right, aka the GOP, is in control. I'm sure the Susan Collinses and Ben Sasses have persuaded themselves otherwise. I look forward to reading their self-justifying memoirs after the country goes the way of the USSR.

Because that's where we are--as everybody in the Soviet establishment stopped believing in the soviet system in the 1980s, few among American econonomic, political, and media elites really believes in American Democracy anymore. A few do, of course, but they are relatively powerless. As China is proving, Technocapitalism doesn't need democracy to thrive, and in America, what technocapitalism wants, technocapitalism gets. FOX news is paradigmatic. It cares only about its profitability, not about how it contributes to the destruction of the American democracy. And because so much of technocapitalism, like FOX, couldn't care less about democracy, there is no constituency who does care that is robust enough to push back with strength enough to preserve it.

I am eager to be proved wrong on this, but I fear we are about to prove the ancients right when they said that democracy was the second worst form of government because the 'demos' was too easily manipulated by demagogues who turned democracy into tyranny, which for them was the worst form of government. We proved them wrong for almost 250 years, but the people who really care about it are too few and have been outmaneuvered by those who don't. So it appears, anyway. The world sees it, and they are preparing for it--some with dread, others with glee. 

Most Americans don't really understand what it takes to be a democracy. Those who think they care, like the stormers of the Capitol, see themselves as patriots fighting to preserve democracy. That's the great irony of our moment--those who think most fervidly that American Democracy is in peril are the ones who are being manipulated by those whose goal is to destroy it. Others give democracy lip service but care more about whether their team is going to make it to the playoffs. And as a result American democracy has stopped being a healthy, living thing that adapts to changing realities. Like the USSR in the '80s, it has become perilously rickety, and it's swaying. Question is whether the Tucker Carlsons and Steve Bannons among us will be able to push it over. 

Biden is an apt metaphor for our current predicament. Every time I watch him on TV, I fear he will collapse before he finishes speaking. Nevertheless, I am still hoping that we can find some way to prop the old girl up to prevent its collapse, but an awful lot of unlikely things have to happen this year to prevent it.

I started worrying about this inevitability when it started this blog in 2003. I was coming out of the '90s as a Democrat in name only who was disgusted with Clinton's neoliberalism and psychopathy, but even more so by Gingrich and Republican rabidity. I thought of Bush as a decent, platitudinous guy, a Warren Harding type in way over his head. I responded to 9/11 not so much with shock as with sadness, and hoped that Americans would be smart in their response. Instead, it reacted exactly as bin Laden had hoped. If he were alive today, he would be among those watching our likely collapse with glee.

9/11 woke me up as to how astonishingly self-deluded the entire political, economic, and media establishment had become that it could be so stupid as to think the invasion of Iraq to be legitimate. The fundamental delusional character of those elites didn't change during the 2000s or during the Obama years. Most among them can't see more than six inches in front of their noses. No wisdom, just expediency. That kind of thinking led to the crisis in 2008, to the idiocy of the Tea Party, and to the rise of Trump. And now some among those elite are beginning to see where it was all leading even back then, but in all likelihood it's too late to do anything about it. 

I remember people writing to me back in the 2000s asking me to stick with the philosophical/religious themes, which they found helpful, but to stay away from my biased anti-GOP politics, which for them was a turn off because, in their view, it was overwrought and hyperbolic. Well I'll let what I wrote then speak for itself, but the two things--the philosophical/religious and the political--go hand in hand. Because the former is about seeing with as much clarity as possible what's there, but also what the best possibilities might be in any given situation if people have the good sense to see and choose them.

It's becoming clearer that we've got to a point where the best possibilities or even reasonably good ones will not be chosen. For a while there I thought Biden had a shot, but alas. I might feel better if the Democrats hold the House and Senate in November. There's an outside chance that the findings of the 1/6 Committee might break through in such a way that decent but oblivious Americans will reject the Republicans whom they otherwise vote for out of habit. It's possible, but at this moment looks unlikely. Sure, none of us knows what's going to happen--surprises are always a possibility, but it's very hard to feel optimistic right now. 

I realize that the Genealogy series I'm in the midst of writing has little relevance for our current situation. I think of it rather as something I'm writing for my grandchildren, as something that might help to orient them when it comes time to rebuild after the current insanity plays itself out. Which it will. Reality always reasserts itself. 

Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B in this series, can be found here.) Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of him or his work, but he's clearly barking up the same tree that I am. His approach is from a different angle than the one I'm taking, but he provides some critical pieces from cognitive science that I see as supporting the argument I am trying to make.  

Vervaeke is more interested in the experiential, cognitive aspects that I've been calling 'knowing on the vertical dimension'--or 'Wisdom'. I'm more interested in the Mythos aspect, which is more about how the cultural matrix shapes/programs/configures individual experience. Mythos provides the meaning framework that makes experiences on the vertical interpretable. I'm arguing that our "meaning crisis" derives from our culture no longer having a broadly accepted mythos. I'm not sure Vervaeke would agree that our lack of 'mythos' is the cause of our crisis because he wants to develop an interpretive frame that is more cognitive-science based, with emphasis on the science. And he might not agree, but I think that what he means by a 'salience landscape' can be borrowed and repurposed to help me establish what I mean by a 'metaphysical imaginary'. Regardless, there's plenty of overlap there, and I'll get into that in "Part 4B". 

I'm assuming that anybody who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about regarding 'wisdom.' Vervaeke is spelling it out in a cognitive-science idiom that might make it more acceptable for people who are allergic to religious language. For him wisdom is the oppositie of foolishness, and foolishness is the innate human proclivity to self-delusion and self destructive behavior. And so wisdom is the antidote insofar as its an intrinsic human developmental capacity for self-transcendence, if by that we mean overcoming self-delusion by getting a deeper and firm grip on reality. And if Reality is what I call the Living Real, then growth in wisdom means a growing into a deeper participative relationship with the Living Real. (See Note 1) But clearly for the kind of metaphysical imaginary I think we need to restore in the future, its legitimacy would require that most people have some level of experiential wisdom by Vervaeke's definition--or at least respect for people who do have it. 

Referencing Steve Taylor's Awakening from Sleep, Vervaeke says that research studies have found that 30-40% of people claim to have had "wisdom" or "awakening" experiences of some kind. This doesn't surprise me. Just read Wm. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience to get some sense of how common such experiences are. In the U.S. today under 10% of people are atheists or agnostics, which means, whether or not they are churchgoers, the vast majority of Americans--perhaps 90%+--are open to an ontology that includes a spiritual dimension, however "spiritual" might be thought of or imagined.

The problem/question for me is why such a large percentage of the population hasn't a stronger and more positive impact in shaping the metaphysical imaginary but instead allows a materialist imaginary to be the default. As I argue in Part 1, while there are benefits to pluralism, hyperpluralism in this area of "knowledge" has the effect of dividing and conquering any opposition to the materialist imaginary. And, as suggested above, and I argue in Part 3, hyperpluralism is largely an effect of there being no cultural trellis, no Mythos, to provide an interpretive frame for people to make sense of the experiences they have.

Ten people might have similar awakening experiences, but there might be ten different interpretive frames used to make sense of them, and so each cancels the other out in terms of establishing broader legitimacy. And more importantly, experiences don't self-interpret--everything depends on the kind of interpretive frame that the individual brings to his awakening experience, and some interpretations lead to positive and others to very negative, if not insane, results. Context is critical. 

So the insanity does not originate with the experience itself, but with the insanity of interpretation given it. There's the awakening experience, but the wisdom only comes when it gets interpreted correctly, and correct interpretation comes from a wisdom tradition renewed in each generation by people who have had awakening experiences and developed them in a sane, morally fruitful way. Moral fruitfulness is the ultimate test of the interpretive frame for any kind of awakening experience. Right now, there's no such sane tradition, except on the fringes of our social life. And so while I believe 30-40% of people have had such awakening experiences, I wonder how many have interpreted them in sane, morally fruitful ways. 

And so there's no broadly agreed upon criteria to sort out what's sane or insane, real or delusional, profound or superficial. If a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical dimension ever emerges in the future, it will have to draw on the work of people like Vervaeke and his colleagues who are trying to develop a social science model to do this kind of sorting. More power to them, but I fear that the ethos of 'cognitive science' is still 'constrained' by the positivist taint imbued by the dominant Rationalist Materialist imaginary. That's fine, because I think that ultimately, whether Vervaeke wants to go there or not, there is an implied metaphysics that needs to be extrapolated from the experiences he is trying to understand. Ultimately, I believe a "right understanding" consensus will emerge, even if it's premature or unscientific to extrapolate a metaphysics from those experiences at this point.

In the meanwhile, I realize that when I represent myself as a Christian Neoplatonist, it makes no sense to almost everyone I know, including other Christians. Whatever floats your boat, they most probably would think, because they have no idea what I mean by it. And yet I'd argue that Christian Neoplatonism was the metaphysical imaginary for Western Civilization for over a thousand years because it provided what Vervaeke calls a coherent "salience landscape", i.e., a coherent, meaningful world picture in which certain things came into focus for our ancestors that no longer come into focus for us. Because they no longer come into focus for us, does not mean they are not there.

And so for centuries, right up to the Reformation, this imaginary worked for many of the culture's most intelligent and creative people, i.e., those who were knowledgeable on the vertical or wisdom dimension. Most educated people today know more on the horizontal dimension than St. Augustine did. That does not mean they are wiser than he. Whatever the scope of his personal genius, he had an interpretive frame provided by Christian revelation and Neoplatonism to work with that gave his thinking and his spirit scope to grow. We don't have that scope now, and we need something like it that works in a plausible way in a postmodern, post-secular key. I would argue that one of the principal reasons we have so few great souls who play a larger role in shaping our contemporary social imaginary is because they have no trellis on which to grow and expand. 

So when I talk about Neoplatonism, I am talking about an ontology that assumes that we are living in a world that we mostly don't understand because we don't really see or experience what is really real. And while the goal is to gradually improve our experience and grasp of what is really real, it is extremely difficult to do it in a society whose metaphysical imaginary lacks a vertical dimension. Having a vertical dimension is not unique to Christian Neoplatonism. Other post-Axial religions and philosophies make similar assertions and prescribe similar cures. But Christian Neoplatonism is my tradition, and it contributes to our understanding about what it means to be human in ways that other traditions do not, and so it deserves to be correctly understood by more people than do.

Like most serious Christians, I see Christianity as being first and foremost about moral development, but what distinguishes me from most Christians is that I care about the ontological and epistemological framework in which true moral development needs to be understood. Such a frame is not absolutely necessary, but it provides the aforementioned trellis, which is helpful for healthy, expansive growth. I think there would be more people with a profounder degree of moral development and the 'wisdom' that comes with that if there was such a trellis. When I look around, I don't see a lot of wisdom and depth to help people with their moral development. I see mostly moralistic platitudes and pop-psychological nonsense because the only trellises broadly available are moralistic and pop-psychological. 

Each vine finds its own way on the trellis, but it helps if there is some consensus about the trellis's basic structure and orientation. All I'm saying is that we have something to learn about that from the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism adapted for the kind of post-secular society we will inevitably become. The question concerning the human future, assuming there will be one, is not whether humans will be religious but whether their religion will be crazy or sane. And its sanity will be largely determined by whether it works with an ontology and epistemology that helps to map a way for people to more deeply participate in the Living Real. There is a lot of religion embraced by an awful lot of people right now that is insane precisely because its reality map is so deeply alienated from the Living Real. 

So while the story is more complex, and I hope to get into details about them at some point, one aspect of understanding what happened after the Reformation was that the 60-70%--I'm assuming there's a consistency here from generation to generation in Stephen Taylor's and Wm James's findings--who did not have such "awakening" experiences, and in the 18th and 19th centuries asserted that their un-awakened perception of reality was more accurate than those who wanted to take seriously what their awakening experiences seemed to imply. The combined impact of the industrial revolution and the new understanding of the human being post-Darwin allowed them to assert an alternative imaginary without a vertical dimension that supplanted the older one. This majority--whether secular or religious--became more interested in knowledge that produced material results rather than produced wisdom. Faith, rather than being understood as a cognitive faculty that when developed leads to wisdom, became instead believing in stuff that no longer made sense within an imaginary that had lost its vertical dimension. Religious fundamentalism and rigid dogmatism are "faith" for people who don't know better. 

Increasingly during the Modern period, while people continued to have awakening experiences, they were artists and mystics, and as such curiosities, rather than sources of legitimate knowledge and insight, at least insofar as they shaped public life in the "real" world of science, politics, and economics. And so by the mid-19th century, the vertical dimension became less accessible even for artists. The avant-garde, as a weak echo of what was more robust in Romanticism, was interested in saying No to what it perceived as bourgeois or reactionary, but it became progressively less capable of mediating the Living Real, at least in a way that broke through to the broader culture.

I don't want to oversimplify. Clearly some great art was produced until around the time of WWI, but after that, art became, mostly, something else--either entertainments whose quality was measured by their cleverness or novelty, or, more seriously, works of despair that expressed the artist's alienation from the Living Real. Waiting for the Living Real, i.e, for disclosures from the vertical dimension, became Becket's Waiting for Godot or Munch's Scream. This kind of art was sincere and important in reflecting to the broader society what had become of it in a world dominated by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Such art is truthful because it reflects the reality of what has happened to us. But because it happened does not mean it's the final chapter in the story. And I, for one, am ready to move on. I don't have any patience for what has become a conventional nihilism. It's no longer telling us anything important.

Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture 10 linked to above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities, and such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it.

I would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration, but was also way ahead of the capacity of most people at that time (and now) to be changed by it. Some, of course, were changed by it. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figures in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration. 

So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now--i.e., for the social transformation that we need now--as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen. 

So before continuing with what I want to say, please watch the Vervaeke lecture, and take notes about some of the technical terms he uses to explain how cognitive frames get transformed. I hope to write later this week "Part 4B", which will try to further unpack what he's saying in the light of the ongoing argument I'm trying to make here about the restoring a balanced metaphysical imaginary. 

Vervaeke's lecture is the tenth in a series that extends to over forty. It's as far as I've come, so I don't know yet where's he's going, but there's nothing he's said so far that I haven't found to be aligned with and supporting what I'm arguing, and in many ways expanding and enriching it. The crux of what I want to talk about comes in the second half of this lecture, so you can fast forward to that to see why. If you want, start around the 17 minute mark--and then go back to the beginning or to the preceding lectures to see how he got there.

Go to 4B.

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Note 1: By Living Real I mean those experiences, particularly experiences of beauty in nature, experiences of Love of other human beings, our feelings of being inspired by extraordinary acts of courage, kindness, and experiences of the ontonormative, as Vervaeke calls them, which I would describe as a disclosure of the transcendental Justice. These are where the Living Real breaks through in the ordinary humdrum of our lives otherwise alienated from it, and I'd argue that while they are common enough experiences they are all in various degrees disclosures of the transcendent or numinous sacred. So as I discuss above, people have these experiences all the time--at least 40% of people according to Steve Taylor--but we haven't a meaning framework that's broadly accepted to interpret what they mean. Such experiences are usually not self-interpreting, and so the interpretive frame people inhabit when they have these experiences is critical for their working with them in fruitful ways--or not. This is why a wisdom tradition is needed. The churches should play that role, but they are too often more concerned with a priggish moralism that has nothing to do with the Living Real and more often than not is one of the main obstructions for experiencing it. 

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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.

Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical--or Wisdom--dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West--Christian Neoplatonism--worked for so long, why it eventually failed, and how something like it might be recovered. It's not Christian Neoplatonism as it functioned then that I'm concerned about so much as finding something like it that can function for us now in the way we need it. The goal here in Part 3 is to try to begin to understand what kind of work it did and why that's important. In future posts I'll attempt a more sustained attempt to understand why later it failed. The answer, btw, is not because science disproved it. But before getting to that, some thoughts about our current predicament and why such questions matter. Why should one care about things like the vertical dimension of a metaphysical imaginary, anyway?

My concern is not with individual religious belief. Individuals can believe whatever they want, but I do think that a society to flourish, it must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary that integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos, that works in tension with the horizontal axis, or Logos. I make that case in Part 2.  Most contemporary Christians, especially if they are Protestants, don't think of their faith as a 'mythos' that fuses two post-axial traditions: Greek speculative transcendental philosophy and prophetic Judaism. It just isn't that Greek/Jewish synthesis anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

Most Christians believe what they believe without it having to make sense in terms that the broader culture recognizes as legitimate. They may have found a personal vertical dimension, but it has little or nothing to do with the way the broader society operates, and so at the heart of their experience of the world is a fundamental incoherency, that in extreme cases results in Ontological Dizziness, aka, the absurd. As I argued in Part 2, one common strategy to avoid Ontological Dizziness is to compartmentalize: Religion is about my private, spiritual life; work and career are about my public, material life. The two have little to do with one another, and for most the former has no impact on the latter. As Eagleton remarks in Culture and the Death of God, "...it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up." The children of the compartmentalized usually don't compartmentalize. Most just get absorbed into the great rationalist materialist metaphysical void, or they join a religious cult. 

But for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era these two traditions lived together in what was often in somewhat simplistic terms rendered as a marriage between Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for reason and faith. This might be understood as Athens/Reason = the horizontal, and Jerusalem/Faith = the vertical, but that would be wrong because it fails to recognize the central role that Axial verticality played in Greek philosophy, at least as it came to us from Plato and Aristotle. 

Of course the persistence of pre-Axial Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism continued to play a significant role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West, especially in shaping its local customary cultures. But the idea of the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was more right than it's wrong in describing the post-Axial dimension of the Western metaphysical imaginary. The philosophical/theological framework for it was Christian Neoplatonism. It worked for those first 1500 years, with its last robust articulation in Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, and after that continued to be influential in the arts, if not in philosophy, science, or even the theology of the Reformers.¹ 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion--or the vertical dimension however understood--had played in the social sphere. After Nietzsche, it becomes harder for anybody to think on the vertical dimension--at least publicly. Whatever trust there was in the testimony of people who attested to knowledge on the vertical dimension eroded with each passing generation after the mid-19th Century. Because with each generation those attestations were becoming increasingly incompatible with a materialist metaphysical imaginary whose hegemony among educated elites was becoming increasingly dominant after Darwin, the Industrial Revolution, and the intoxicating success of new technologies and discoveries in science.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to understand it--or really, to even care about it. During this time there were plenty of religious charlatans and cranks of the televangelist or theosophical ilk, but there were also Christians and other religious figures who were still taken seriously as public intellectuals, even as late as the the decades immediately after WWII. Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich come to mind. But by the 80s they were no longer taken seriously--or maybe more accurately, there was no new generation that arose to carry on where they left off. Desmond Tutu is the last of that kind of religious public intellectual, but most people born after 1980 were probably wondering what the fuss was about when he was eulogized after his death last week. He was a mensch--a great, wise spirit. 

That kind of public figure no longer exists, and one has to wonder why. I'd argue that we experienced a shift in the country after the failure of the sixties to rebalance things. The shift was symbolized by the country's choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whatever Carter's limitations as a politician, he was a morally serious person in a way his successor was not. I'll argue this in a future post, but I think the country's choosing Reagan and the way he was lionized on Main Street America marked the beginning of what I believe was an irreversible shift into a simulacral culture and in doing so left behind any possibility that American society might be led by relatively sane grownups.

Since Reagan, the country has progressively slipped into greater and more intense alienation from reality. I'm not saying Reagan is the cause, but he symbolizes it, just as Trump is not the cause of our current collective insanity, but the symbol of it. It has become increasingly difficult for people to hear or see the truth; it's become much easier to live in a world where you can customize it to meet your preferences. This is particularly acute on the cultural Right where since Reagan it looks for shallow performance artists to lead them by playing to their fantasies. Reagan, a remarkably talented political performance artist, was at least recognizably "normal" in a way that Trump is not, the difference between them is the measure of how deeply the Red zones of this country has descended into ontological dizziness.

So, while the crisis became particularly acute after the 80s, it has been a long time coming--for around a thousand years. But in its current acute stage, it traces back to the mid-19th century when the truth claims of the old Mythos started to seem for many dubious or, even worse, irrelevant. Life on the horizontal was where it was at for mid- and late-20th-century Americans on the make, and considerations concerning the vertical could be postponed to end-of-life anxieties about what comes next. The young have no time for that, or at best they give a tip of the hat on Sundays to such concerns.

Life otherwise for any red-blooded American was to be lived on the horizontal.That's where all the energy and action was. Religion was for most primarily a transactional technology that was supposed to enhance one's flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs, I will prosper. That kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. The sense of the vertical in that kind of thinking about God was already very weak, and so no need to depend on him when one has the use of his wits and the strength of his will to succeed.

That is the Protestant work ethic. It derives from the Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle-class values, but there is no need for a God or vertical axis to practice them because there is no presence of the vertical in them. Prosperity and success are its primary motivators. Christianity ceases to be itself to the degree that it loses its ability to mediate the Living Real. If Christianity only does its work on the horizontal, it becomes Christianity in name only. It's a pseudo-Christianity that functions in the same way that Catholicism functioned for the IRA in Ireland or Orthodoxy for the Christians Serbs in the Balkans. It easily slips into becoming a tribal cult. 

But increasingly for the larger post-WWII population, the horizontal became the only thing that mattered--that's where a full life was to be found and lived. The vertical was only for people who hated life, who hated sex and pleasure and life's bounty. A kind of superficial, pop-Nietzcheanism emerges for the sophisticated to justify and celebrate the hedonism that the post-WWII consumer society not only made available, but demanded of citizens in fulflilment of their patriotic duty. As people become increasingly absorbed in their pleasures and their stuff, they become increasingly incapable of responding or hearkening to the vertical. New Age spirituality emerges to provide a religiosity designed for consumer capitalist society, where one can dabble and indulge one's egoism for a lifetime and think oneself profound.

So the dimension of depth became increasingly irrelevant with each passing generation from the mid-19th Century to the present day. And so starting in the late-19th Century, the most important thinkers understood the significance of the loss of depth and its consequences in diminishing the human. They started scrambling to find an alternative for what had been the vertical dimension heretofore occupied by the God of Jewish revelation. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian, for Heidegger it was the unfathomable depths Being, for Sartre it was this idea of the human as having a godlike, boundless freedom.

All in their different ways generated a God replacement after his death some time in the middle of the 19th Century, and the plausibility or legitimacy of these new gods was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were in their different ways trying to find a way back to a connection to the vertical--however that might be conceptualized. For people who were attracted to these thinkers, the last place they'd look for a cure for what was ailing them was the Churches, which, in their view, were alienation factories. And to a large extent, they were not wrong. Kierkegaard certainly thought so of the church in 19th Century Copenhagen. His experience was not exceptional then or now. The churches in their obsession to make sure that Christianity is correctly understood and practiced too often have made Christianity into something that is misunderstood and wrongly practiced. 

The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--through whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent, vertical dimension in reality that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.

But if solving the alienation problem was the primary concern, Nietzsche's real villains should have been Democritus and Protagoras, not Socrates and Plato. It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of Rationalist Materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Intellectuals in good standing don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. 

The Socratic/Platonic program was adamantly opposed to the tendencies in Greek thought that Democritus, the proto-scientist, and Protagoras, the Sophist, represented, which was truth on the horizontal without reference to the dimension of depth. The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about overcoming alienation by becoming connected to the transcendent Living Real, but late-modern, educated elites captured by a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary Rationalist Materialists. Of course the Sophists like Protagoras matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers.

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. Most thinkers in the ancient world who were influenced by them thought so.² Nevertheless, I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is  experience of the Living Real on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.

But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved, perhaps even to tears, by an encounter with beauty or justice or someone speaking from a deep intuitive sense of the Truth in an inhospitable environment, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of these transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people.

So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I'm trying to articulate here.³ 

But the point I want to make now is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who "knows", who can say to the student, "No, that's not it. Try again." The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his development as a violinist can climb and a "gardener" who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul. 

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. No more Desmond Tutus. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not. 

***

We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. Such people search out those who have some wisdom and learn what they can from them, but when push comes to shove, they find their own way insofar as they have activated an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon, and I suspect it's the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off path, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it. (Apparently in the early-'30s Heidegger had no such daemon. Similarly self-proclaimed Christians like Josh Hawley haven't one either.)

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

Logic is used not to reveal what's true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates' daemon doesn't tell him what to do, it tells him only that that's not it--don't go there. That's what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don't. This is the problem for people who are attracted to theocracy. They lack humility; they think they know better, and they just don't  And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only  knowledge that's truly worthing knowing, and that's why they lack wisdom. 

If you don't have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real. At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You're unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don't believe there's anything that will emerge once you've cleared a space for it. But if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical capacity to hear the answer. A 'mystic' is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of discernment made possible by the acquisition of some degree of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It's very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days.  

***

Back to the Christian Mythos: The originators of the Christian Neoplatonic mythos, the early Church Fathers, were mystics in this sense--their greatness lies in their capacity to have cleared a space for something divinely originary to fill it. Among the earliest of them were those who fled into the emptiness of the Egyptian desert where they could create for themselves more easily an interior emptiness, that aporia, that was the precondition for their encounter with the divine. The quality of their theology depended on this vertical capacity to have been emptied so as to be open to be filled in this sense.

The greatest of them were inspired and illumined by their experience of the Christian revelation, and they used Greek philosophy to make sense of their experience of the world in the light of it. The trick was to stay grounded in the vertical experience and to make philosophy, or Logos, work to serve its explication on the horizontal. Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from the vertical. That's when the Emissary usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two--Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together, but the vertical is more important because its what grounds or roots you in the Living Real. I think the early Church Fathers did it in a way that is very difficult for us to understand now, but not impossible. I'll try to make their project more relatable in posts in the future. 

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1. One of the most concise and accessible renderings of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is provided in the still very readable Irrational Man by William Barrett. (See Chapter 4 "Hebraism and Hellenism".) Barrett understands Continental existentialism as the heir of the Hebrew part of this marriage, and scientific rationalism as heir to the Greek part. Yes and no. He's wrong about the Hellenic insofar as he sees the Greek contribution as significant only on the rationalist, horizontal dimension. The verticality of Greek philosophy was essential for the role in played in the Christian Mythos in its premodern form.

But he's right insofar as he sees the Hebraic as the down-to-earth, gritty, menschy, experiential dimension of faith, a faith that cares about the depth dimension regarding moral issues, if not so much about metaphysical ones. The fathers of existentialism are, after all, the Danish, Tertullianesque, anti-Hegelian gadfly Soren Kierkegaard and the Russian irrationalist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Both were deeply Christian in their commitments. But then again they still lived in societies before the disappearance of the vertical pole, aka, the death of God.

For these existentialists, the attitude was to hell with metaphysics and its systems, of the whole futile effort to make sense of things that are beyond our capacity to make sense of them. The only thing that matters is one's moral commitments. Yes, every individual human being's life is a drama that needs to be lived in this particularist, existentialist sense, but existentialism in its radical individualism gives up on the societal (civilizational?) sphere leaving it to go its merry way, and that's the sphere that is in crisis right now because the deep meaning axis in our lives has become so privatized in this existentialist sense. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski could assume the vertical dimension, i.e., a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary as a backdrop for their thinking in a way that we no longer can. 

2. See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, Harvard University Press, 2004.

3. Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, Dreyfus and Kelly reduce Christianity to a "mood" of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It's just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the "mood" of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there's no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. The same is true for Dreyfus and Kelly--important and incomplete.

Ed. Note For more on the importance of Greek transcendentalism, see also "Part 8: Plato: Habitus as Heuristic".

Go to Part 4A.

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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.