I'm one of those human beings who doesn't know what the thinks until he writes about it, so the posts in After the Future tend to be unwieldy and prolix because they are essentially freewrites. So it was useful for me to review what I wrote in the last year to see if I could tease out essential excerpts. It was particularly hard to do for the posts written last winter because that's when the bulk of the Geneaology series was written, each of which part was about 3500-4000 words. So I tried to discipline myself to find a few paragraphs in the more substantive posts that would have a stand-alone quality while at the same time might entice the reader to go to their source. Spring, Summer, and Fall to follow in coming weeks.
From "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus", 1/7
Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. 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 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 when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, 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 the transcendental archetypes listed above is entry level for most people.
But the point I want to make here 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....
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. ... 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. ...
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.
From "Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries", 1/16
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.
From "Edsall on the Big Lie", 1/19
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.
From "Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries", 1/23
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. ...
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. ...
**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.
From "Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles", 1/30
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....
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.
From "Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series", 2/4
Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don't. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres--and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.
Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism [See Note 1], is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke's solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I'm all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos.
From: "The Bigger Picture", 2/8
At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened, postmodern model of the human to which the secular Left largely subscribes.
But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed.
From "Edsall on White Unhappiness", 2/9
So [Neoliberal] Liberals understand that the trade policies they supported might be disruptive, but that living in a dynamic, innovative, future-oriented society requires that people adapt, that they should expect to have three careers, that they should come to love and embrace change, etc. But it's all self-justifying, capitalist b.s., And so it's understandable that those whose lives capitalism has disrupted resent having to uproot themselves, move from their homeland to where the work is, and be trained to assimilate into an economy that destroyed everything that they loved. And they particularly resent the smug Liberals who tell them that what they loved was stupid and that they should live like them: See how happy we are in the suburbs working in our cubbies!
Their situation is a lot like that of Native Americans who experienced a similar destruction of their customary culture when they were moved from their sacred homeland to places where traditional practices were not possible or not allowed and where they were pressured to assimilate into a culture that they despised. Black and Hispanic Americans are more resilient because they live in communities that have adapted to economic instability and have less reason to fear status loss because historically they have had more to gain in that regard and than to lose.
From "Plato: Habitus as Heurisitic", 2/11
So the metaphysical speculations of the ancients were provisional attempts to articulate or make some sense about what the nature of the Real is in the light of such experiences. But isn't this true of all philosophers who are worth paying attention to? They have a foundational intuition, and their philosophy is their attempt to extrapolate from it. The quality of their philosophy depends on the quality and richness of their intuitions. You cannot understand any "original" philosopher unless you can grasp his or her foundational intuitions, which may or may not be foregrounded in his discursive explication of them.
It's with this in mind that we must understand Plato's so-called doctrine of the Ideas: He's trying to give an account concerning how the world that we experience with the senses relates to this other transcendent realm that was disclosed to him in awakened visionary experience. There is no doctrine here--just metaphors, analogies, myths to make some attempt to give an account of his experience. Experience, not abstraction is the foundation here. I'm not going to belabor the argument. If you need more evidence read McGinn (Chapter 2, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal") and Hadot (chapters in Part 2: "Philosophy as a Way of Life").
A similar misunderstanding relates to the idea of the 'Intellect' in the Greek transcendental philosophy. It's not about intelligence in the IQ sense or about being an intellectual in the modern sense. It's about Nous (See Note 1), the divine part of the human soul, which is a dormant faculty that when awakened is capable of contemplating the divine and divine things like the transcendentals. Nous is the divine faculty that inheres in the human mind that must be activated or "remembered" in order to be capable of cognizing the divine. (See Comment 1) This is a different idea than the biblical assertion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, but it's kissing cousins with it, and it will play a role in Patristic thinking about divinization or 'theosis'.
From "Progressive Fever Dreams", 2/14
In America, if your movement isn't a religious crusade, it's just smoke drifting in the wind. Like the anarchist OWS in New York or the absurdist CHAZ in Seattle. Marx was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about religion. It isn't an opiate; it's political fuel. Reactionary religion fuels reactionary politics; progressive religion fuels progressive politics. 19th Century Marxism was itself an eschatological cult. Now it's just armchair cultural critique. For lack of a progressive religion, the reactionaries take the field unopposed.
MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" resonates with us because we are innately eschatological. It works within the collective psyche at a deeply archetypal level. But eschatology makes no sense within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. The two things cancel one another out. There is no possibility for a sane, sustainable progressive politics so long as the Progressives are captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary. Just not going to happen. Not in America, anyway. If you think any kind of religion is stupid and delusional, then it follows that you should think that any kind of progressive politics is too.
The American Civil War in the 1860s was on one level about the economics slavery, but it was more deeply about the South's paranoia, and its felt need to defend its cultural identity, an identity that it believed the North wanted to destroy. As then, so now, at least in that respect. Slavery was important economically, but it was more important as an essential component integral for Southern cultural identity. The problem now is that the paranoia is everywhere. It's as bad in Minnesota and Wisconsin as it is in Texas and Alabama.
And then as now, Southern paranoia was rooted in an assumption that in the same way the Whites dominated and destroyed the cultures of the Native Americans most egregiously during the Jackson era, and in the same way that they dominated and humiliated Blacks and Hispanics since forever, so will the Southernized American Right everywhere be dominated and humiliated when they lose political control. Paranoia tends toward prophetic self-fulfillment. Once the last Civil War started, the fear of identity loss that would come with military loss made it so bloody, and made reconstruction once the war ended unsustainable. So are we now facing a similar paranoid social dynamic that gives us good reason to believe that it will lead to bloody strife, although not, I hope, on the scale of the last Civil War?
We tend to think of all the controversies surrounding who's a heretic or not through the lens of modern pluralistic tolerance for difference. We celebrate the heretic as the free thinker, the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer, the creative crazy whom stuffy, conventional thinkers fail to understand. It's important to understand that as with any cross-section of humanity, there always have been and will be anal Christians, but the really soul-crushing rigidity in the Church and its obsession with suppressing heretics didn't set in until after Constantine when the Roman Empire became the official sponsor of the Christian Church. The Christians' counter-cultural identity dissolves as the Church now becomes part of the establishment. More and more serious Christians leave society for wilderness monastic communities. ...
No character is interesting if there isn't some form of moral ascent or descent, and that's what these unwatchable shows lack. Depraved characters who start and stay depraved are not really interesting because they are so predictable in their soullesssness. And because they're so predictable, and because audiences become increasingly numbed to their persistent depravity, and because the writers probably think of ideas like moral ascent and descent as cliche, the writers must instead push for new ways to shock, new levels of depravity, new taboos to break, new ways to go where the watcher will say, "Wow. I didn't see that coming. Those writers are genius."
"Thank you, thank you," they respond. "Now where's my Emmy?"
And it's because TV critics like Hale accept these criteria about what makes a show entertaining, they can write bizarre sentences like, "The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked."
"Joy"? Really? Is that the word you're looking for? Is your life so devoid of it that such a thing passes for it?
From "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability", 3/19
Our contemporary rationalist-materialist imaginary performs these functions, too, but It provides a sense of intellectual coherency only if you accept its nihilistic presuppositions. Most people accept these presuppositions without really thinking about it and about how they conflict with other things they believe that are important values for them. So, why do I insist that these presuppositions are nihilistic? Like the Great Chain of Being [did for our premodern ancestors], our rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary integrates the cosmic, the social/political, and the moral. But it does so within a cosmology that accepts that the universe is shaped by Darwinism and other cosmological materialistic assumptions that creation itself was a random event, that the history of the universe since the Big Bang has been impersonal, meaningless, and dispassionately cruel. And that fits with a Darwinian social organization that embraces the randomness of markets and the inevitability of technological development. There's no meaning in any of it except that that's the way things are, and we do what we can to have a more or less pleasant life within its constraints.
And this fits with a Libertarian/utilitarian or socio-biological moral imaginary that makes no moral judgments about anything except to insure the randomness of each individual making his or her own random choices to determine for himself what is in his best interest within the minimum constraints of the social contract to not harm others. There is no robust sense of the common good, or else it is defined as the sum of each individual pursuing his own interests. This makes dealing with threats like climate change and income inequality almost impossible because it requires individuals to surrender their short-term interests for a common or social good that has no imagined, inspiring content. This idea of freedom has no real moral content; it's just the negation of restraint, and unrestrained you are free to do as you please whether it's to run a porn site or join Doctors without Borders. The second can have no more moral value than the first within a rationalist-materialist frame.
So on the cosmic level, randomness is all; entropic heat death is our telos. On the moral spiritual level, there is no concept of moral development or of there being a transcendent Good. On the social/political level Justice is something that we make up as we go along, a function of prudential contracts we make with one another to prevent the war of all against all, the greed and power of one against the greed and power of the other, which would otherwise be our natural condition in a random, impersonal, cruel cosmos.
