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.
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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.