The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of us who turn to humor to help process the nonstop parade of weirdness, a new cultural trope was addictive: imagining that it is, indeed, all made up, that any improbable piece of news is a plot twist in a TV series or movie or digital simulation.
The writers’ room ran out of ideas (Donald Trump choppering from his Covid hospitalization back to the White House for a Mussolini balcony moment). This new show is so meta (the Ukrainian comedian who played an Everyman who became president and actually became president) and so implausible (who stopped a superpower tyrant’s blitzkrieg). That season finale really jumped the shark (Jan. 6). And then last year’s hearings of the Jan. 6 committee — astonishingly effective because a former ABC News president shrewdly produced them, unlike any before, as a 10-episode multimedia TV series.
In America at large, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy isn’t merely fascinating. Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.
During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, “I love you, but you are not serious people.” He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions.
We can take a splinter of truth and with it build a huge edifice of illusion. We can do it alone, but we prefer to do it with others because of the way others seem to give the illusion a solidity and stability that it otherwise lacks. Can we snap out of it? Yes, but if only if we're motivated--or inspired--to do so. Why would you be motivated? Because you are deeply interested--inpired--to get a deeper grip on reality. How do you get a deeper grip on reality? You must emulate Socrates.
It was not that Socrates knew more in some quantitative way but that he knew better in a qualitative way. The Socratic challenge is not to know more with certainty but to know more wisely, if by wisdom we mean a way of being in the world that has a deeper, richer cognitive, i.e., more deeply engaged, relationship with the Living Real.
Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because in a remarkably precocious way he had such a deep grip on reality, a grip that would not have been possible had he not understood first that he knew nothing. That's another way of saying that what we all take for knowledge isn't really knowledge--it's just a map or a simulacra of the real. Is it possible to know more deeply what's behind the map? I think it is, but that's a different topic than I want to get into here. The task is not to have some experience of Abosolute Being, but rather to progressively come into deeper contact and relationship with its presence in the world around us. The first step in coming into deeper contact with reality is to realize all the ways our lives are structured to estrange us from it.
What does that require? An attitude of humility and an openness to be corrected. Humility requires that we acknowledge that whatever we know is dwarfed by what we don't, and it's ok. Because then our life becomes much more interesting as we come to understand it as continuous process that progresses qualitatively--not quantitatively--toward greater levels of wisdom.
Qualitatively in the sense of the way our relationships are qualitative. The goal is not to know more, but to develop a better, deeper, richer relationship with the Living Real, i.e., to use a Vervaeke phrase, to fall in love with reality, which is what happens when you develop such a relationship. And so as we grow in wisdom we grow in love because the one cannot exist without the other.
The wise are not people who know more but who know better because they have this kind of deepening relationship with the Living Real. That was the Socratic project--to get his interlocutors to undestand first that what they thought they knew was mostly wrong not in some propositional way but in this qualitative way because their relationship to the Living Real was obstructed or blocked but needn't be.
Last Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated the feast of Pentecost. It is the celebration of the presence and movement of the Living Real in our lives. As Bishop Maximus says in the conversation with John Vervaeke that I commented on here, Christianity took what the great pre-Christian sages and saints knew, and made it more broadly available.There was still the life of the monk within the Christian tradition who sought this encounter with the Absolute, but there was made available to everyone after Pentecost a grace that enables us to find the presence of the Absolute everywhere, and that inspires us--or should--to look and pay attention more carefully so that we may find it wherever it would disclose itself to us. And our attending and responding over time is the way we humans come to renew the face of the earth.
Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Truth, that it works in us and inspires us to overcome our tendency to self-deception and self-destructive behaviors. It is that which inspires us to move into a deeper relationship with Reality, which is the only solution to the alienation that is the source of our delusional thinking. It is that which illumines our minds with insight which is the experience of deepening that relationship. It's what gives us hope that we might live in a Real world rather than in a simulacral one. It's a grace and power that is working there whether we're Christians or or not. It's just there, it's available to all people of good will who have a supple enough heart to acknowledge its presence and to hearken to it.
The problem is that to many who sense the presence of the Living Real don't know how to hearken to it. The problem with too many people who think of themselves as spiritually motivated is that they have neither Socrates' humility nor his openness to be corrected. They think they know when really they do not; they think they are right because if God is with them, how can they be wrong? But God cannot be with them if he is the cause for their fear, hatred, and desire for violence and retribution. This is where Socrates becomes an essential resource. We need his humility; we need his openness to be proved wrong, we need his hunger to come into deeper contact with the Living Real.
Pentecost is an invitation to enter into a deeper relationship with the Living Real, and as in all relationships that are worthy of the name, so does our relationship with the Living Real grow and develop and become richer. If that's not true for you in the relationships you have with the people in your life, how can you expect it be true for your relationship with reality? And so we must all ask ourselves whether the people in our lives are an occasion for our overcoming our inclination to live in a simulacra, or are they there to reinforce it?
See also "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" and "Habitus as Heuristic".