Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies.
Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common-sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals.
If we have any hope for a positive future, it lies in awakening on a broad cultural scale the dormant archetype that slumbers in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype in the broader culture as an potential eschatological energizing cultural force. If there is any hope for us, it lies in new aspects of its awakening as we move more deeply into the 21st Century and to the unprecedented challenges to the Human that humans will confront.
Now most people in mainstream institutions don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Some might, but they would never bring it up in polite society. But then again it's not a matter of "believing" in archetypes, it's about feeling their energies and working with them. Archetypes, even the Platonic ones, are not abstractions but numinous beings that carry intense energy. During a healthy, creative cultural period, positive, form-shaping archetypes work to harness chaotic energies, but during a decadent historical period Chaos works with minimal checks, and unchecked works to dissolve old cultural forms and beliefs that have lost their vitality.
This is a positive process when it clears a space to make room for a new, vital aspect of the Anthropos archetype to emerge. Chaos cannot destroy what lives, so the Anthropos archetype can never be destroyed, but the forms that the Anthropos archetype has inspired in a particular historical society can be destroyed. What's important is not the forms but the archetypal, i.e., the supra-human energies that gave them their forms in the first place.
When an archetype with positive energy is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when feeling the power of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. In the Iliad the great personalities are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because more than others they are in touch with the energy of an archetype. In the Iliad Helen shone with enormous power of Aphrodite. In Achilles Ares did.
So for instance, I've been arguing that Justice is a transcendental archetype [See Note 1], and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was Justice, and he embodied that for the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the Justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with a power that people only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work.
But here's the point I want to make: Unless a positive archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society. That's our situation now, and, for me at least, it explains why all efforts to get anything positive done seems so futile. Individuals know what needs to be done because they as indviduals feel and are inspired by, say, the Justice archetype or by a deep sense of the transcendent Good, but it's not a felt presence in the broader culture. I believe that can change, and I expect it to. I'm not talking about the coming of the eschaton, but of the next step forward in the human project.
What I mean by archetype operating on the collective level here might be more understandable in relation to the term 'zeitgeist'. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no broadly felt, positive, transcendent archetype to shape it--so we feel the negative power of Chaos by default. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in a way that guys like Ross Douthat feel compelled to write about it.
But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of collective future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative transcendental archetype working to shape the zeitgeist. It works first among those most sensitive to it--poets, philosophers, artists, prophets--and then it ripples out from them into the broader culture. When the active, positive transcendental archetype is no longer felt for whatever reason, the Chaos archetype fills the vacuum. [See Note 2] Because the energy of Chaos is so strong now, it's hard for us to believe that anything positive is possible. But it is, and at some point things will shift.
Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype, whose phases of growth and diminution shaped the the zeitgeist as laid out in a chart in Note 2. I think most historians would agree that it reached its fullest development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline. [See Note 3]
Decline ensues when the Chaos energies are more powerful than the energies of the positive, transformative archetype. The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about dissolution and the increasing dominance of chaotic energies than about positive cultural transformation. The principal personalities in these movements were still acculturated into the cultural forms shaped that were shaped by the once vital positive Enlightenment archetype, but as the positive energy waned, Chaos waxed. The 19th Century is an era of brittle, rigid, de-vitalized social forms juxtaposed with the chaotic energies of industrial capitalism, the emergence of a cosmology shaped by Darwinian randomness, and the mechanization of violence that empowered Western societies to spread through the world exterminating what remained of societies that still retained vital customary cultures. By 1950 they are all gone or soon will be. They are replaced by soul-dead zombie societies that mimic living societies but are only simulacra of them.
Nietzsche's Dionysian is perhaps the purest expression of the role of Chaos has played in Western societies in the period 1850-1950 and beyond. Since Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God, we've been in the chaos-dominated Age of Whatever [See Note 4], an in-between time--between the era energized by the Enlightenment zeitgeist and whatever comes next. That's the source of our collective anxiety in this moment. When Chaos dominates, we are all thrown into ontological dizziness, and we grab onto whatever will steady us. But nothing works because the only thing that can is the emergence of a new, positive form-shaping archetype that will define the zeitgeist of the era that comes next.
In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of Chaos in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by Chaos. Chaos shines through him, and clearly for many he has a numinous power. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from this avatar of Chaos.
Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the Chaos. The Trump cult has very little to do with him as an individual human being; it has everything to do with Chaos that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the Chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this utterly substance-less human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to play such a significant role during the current Chaos zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges.
Until it does, the rest of us can only say No to the most destructive and cruel manifestations of Chaos. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might buy us time and create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political and cultural Liberalism, in the meanwhile, is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment zeitgeist performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. But what we need, optimally, is not to keep the dyke plugged, but rather a controlled, cleansing flood. Not something that destroys everything in its path, but rather one that washes away everything that's dead and cannot serve us in the future. Again, Chaos cannot destroy what truly lives, what truly has a transcendental foundation, but that doesn't mean it won't make things very, very uncomfortable. [See Note 5]
So, Chaos is the most dominant cultural force during an era when the zeitgest is going through a decadent phase. Nietzsche was the prophet announcing the advent the Age of Whatever. For him the Dionysian is always there energizing, counter-pressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms--the Apollonian--the zeitgeist produces. During a positive transformative period Chaos is subordinated to the transcendental and as such is a Shiva-like source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks vitality. When Nietzsche announced the death of God he was simply pointing out that the old theistic- (Age of Faith) and deistic (Age of Reason) metaphysical imaginary no longer played a defining role in shaping what was of central importance in the broader society. The forms persisted, but they had no vitality.
There is a lot of energy in Chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't a positively transformative archetype to counter it. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced and so therefore vulgar Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures--you know, the world as envisioned by a typical evening's entertainmnet on HBO.
The strong emergence of any archetype tends after a while to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so creates a psychic instability that leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. That's when Chaos moves in. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.)
I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values during the Age of Reason was important for human development insofar as it encouraged the development parts of the larger 'Anthropos' Archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being. But its gains were unstable because they led in a historically unprecedented way to an experience of alienation--a radical disembedding--from the life world. It might have been temporarily necessary for human spiritual evolution, but it was not sustainable. The challenge for humans going forward is to find a lawful way to reconnect to the life world without losing their gains in autonomy and freedom. Surrender to the Dionysian is one way to reconnect, but it's not a way forward. [See Note 6]
So Romanticism was an attempt, often suffused with nostalgia, to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. But it's also where the Chaos Archetype--the Dionysian--begins to play a more dominant role, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism. And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter culminating in the explosion of the atom bomb. The Age of Matter is the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism. And yet we kinda get that it's the beginning of something new.
Romanticism and German Idealism were the last dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny in the West. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and premodern traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in ideologically driven total wars around the world. As the first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment zeitgeist and the Age of Reason.
And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. So Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal agents through which Chaos is destroying the Liberal social order, which, rickety and inadequate though it might be, is the only order that we have. But it no longer works and must be replaced by something new and positive--and that's scary because we don't know what it is, and all we feel in the meantime is the chaos and disorder. But because I assume that all of our worst fears are stupid, I look forward in hope to the emergence of a new order energized by the awakening of a heretofore slumbering aspect of the Anthropos Archetype.
As a society we are feeling a deep, primal anxiety that is the symptom of what I call ontological dizziness. It's the source of so much of the stupidity we see everywhere we look. People are reeling and will grasp at whatever promises to steady them. Each of us during these times needs to find a source of steadiness, and in this moment it can only be found within. And when found I think it can be described as a deep confidence, a primal trust, that in the face of uncertainty we can rely on a fundamental truth that a profound goodness lies at the heart of things. And so that the only important thing for us going forward is that we act in trust that no matter how bad things look in any given moment that that Goodness will have the last word. This confidence will be sorely tested, but in the end, as the visionary Julian of Norwich, a survivor of the Black Death, wrote, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."
[This is an adapted version of an essay I posted in early 2020 entitled "Fear of the Future". The 'Vitruvian' painting inserted near the top was made by Hildegard of Bingen]
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Note 1: There are both archetypes of transcendence and archetypes of immanence. Until the Axial Revolution, the archetypes of immanence were most influential. The most powerful among them, as with the Greek gods, correlate with planetary archetypal energies. The Axial Revolution awakened the most consciously evolved personalities in the first millennium BCE from China, through India, the Middle East and Greece to an awareness of transcendence--a dimension of reality beyond space and time, that was at the same time deeply implicated with space and time. This apophatic/cataphatic dynamic was recognized in the Tao that cannot be named, the One whose name cannot be spoken for the ancient Israelites or the Neoplatonists.
After the Axial Revolution, the immanent archetypes--the gods and goddesses--did not go away. In some societies, they were repressed, but in healthier societies their energies were integrated with the transcendent archetypes in a marriage of heaven and hell, in the Blakean sense. These unruly immanent archetypes need to be tamed, not destroyed. I don't know if Jungians would put it in these terms, but I think that what Jung was pointing to in his "process of individuation" was the integration of immanent and transcendent archetypes as they exist in the individual psyche.
In Christian terms, the transcendent Anthropos Archetype is a way of understanding what we mean when we say humans are created in the image and likeness of God. Human fallenness--the innate human predisposition toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--is most deeply experienced as the fragmentation of that archetype. On a day-to-day basis, we experience this fallenness in all the ways we experience being ruled by one impulse (immanent archetype) in one moment, and then another later and then another and so on. To become an adult is to learn to 'rule oneself', which means to command these unruly and often contradictory energies not by repressing them but by recruiting them and their energies as allies in a larger humanizing project, which is to become fully individuated human beings, i.e., the one whom were created to be, the fully particularly realized Anthropos or Christ archetype. As this is a moral project on the individual level, it is an evolutionary project on the collective historical-cultural level.
I realize that this seems like fanciful nonsense to the skeptical, but at least consider the possibility that skepticism is the 'conventional' attitude during a Chaos zeitgeist. The mood of the zeitgest can shift, and when it does, someone will write something like Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, a classic Renaissance-era essay inspired by the Anthropos archetype, and this and other works like it will articulate this new mood.
Note 2: During a decadent period, mostly what we get from artists and philosophers are articulations of Chaos because that's the mood of the zeitgeist. Others, who represent other aspects of human possibility work in the background because what they represent is out of tune with the zeitgeist and so is not recognized. They will come into the forefront when the zeitgeist shifts in a way that is more favorable to the work that they are doing.
I'm suggesting that archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So when we look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. I know this kind of typology causes "serious" students of history to roll their eyes. But that's a characteristic of the Age of Whatever--to discount larger synthetic intuitions and to focus instead on more atomized facts. "Serious" people in the academy flourish in the Age of Whatever insofar as their primary skills are analytic, i.e., all about breaking things down. The bent of my mind is synthetic, which is to look for connections using analogy and metaphor.
The "analysts" believe that there is more substance in the atomized facts than in typologies, as if facts have an existence apart from hidden typological interpretive frames. The metaphors that shape their perceptions are invisible to them but provide the frame withing which some and not other "facts" become visible to them. "Synthesists" like me rely on the facts that the analysts bring into view, but we're willing to see patterns in them that the analysts feel are too speculatively simplistic, and they will tell you all the ways in which the chart below is contradicted by 'facts' that don't fit.
Maybe. But I'd argue that the trick is to understand which facts are relevant and which are noise. Relevance is largely determined by your metaphysics, and my archetypal approach derives from my Neoplatonism, which in turn shapes my epistemological evaluation concerning which facts are relevant and which are noise. At the very least, I look at such archetypal patterns as heuristic thought experiments that will prove over time whether they were helpful or just wrong. They will prove helpful to the degree that they help one get a better grip on reality, i.e., to help one to understand history in such a way that it helps him to navigate effectively in the present in anticipation of a hoped-for future.
Besides, my goal is not to persuade the skeptical but rather to open up new plausible possibilities for thinking about what's going on. Looking for helpful metaphors, analogies, and typologies is kinda what I do on this blog. I think most of them have held up over the years. So all I ask of the skeptical reader is to play with this approach, and if it helps you to understand what's happening, great. If not, not. We'll just have to wait and see if the mood changes. When it does, it might prove us both wrong, but whether I'm right or wrong in the particulars about which I write here, the one thing I'm certain of is that the mood of Chaos cannot be sustained, and for better or worse, something will arise to replace it. I'm arguing here for what I hope would be the better possibility.
Here is a chart that relies on this typological/archetypal way of thinking. It lays out the phases of what I call the Enlightenment Zeitgeist, which was the zeitgeist of Modernity. When I talk about Late Modernity I mean the phases of accelerating decline of the Enlightenment zeitgeist after 1850. Whether or not we are still in Late Modernity or in a truly Postmodern phase, I don't know. We won't until whatever positive transformative zeitgeist comes after Modernity has become broadly felt. 'Postmodern' is simply a placeholder name that asserts that the old thing no longer works, and the new thing hasn't yet emerged. It is in that sense that we are currently in the Age of Whatever Comes Next.
Note 3: It's interesting that the entire history of the United States, while its founding was inspired by Enlightenment thinking at its acme, came into existence and into world prominence during this era of the Enlightenment zeitgeist's spiritual decline into a crude materialism. This is compounded by the way Calvinism, a form of Christianity that only makes sense in societies that have rejected their premodern cultural roots, plays such a dominant role in shaping American culture. It's very hard for Americans to reach back past the Reformation to find anything of spiritual value there. But that's what must be done--not by going native in the past, but by retrieving so much of what the Reformation and the Enlightenment threw out, and installing it in a way that makes sense in the 21st Century.
Note 4: In any event, the energies that shape the Age of Whatever derive from the everpresent energies of Chaos. It provides fuel, so to say, that energizes a more positive archetype with which in a healthy society it is in creative tension. But Chaos reigns when there is no energizing, positive collective archetype to work with it and to give those energies cultural forms. Our problem now is that those forms still linger, but they are so hollowed out that a guy like Trump can come along and blow them all over with such ease and (so far) with such impunity.
That's the reason for our collective anxiety in this moment. We find the shapelessness unbearable. When Chaos is dominant, some can find a personal, individual way to work creatively with it to give it some shape, but most people can't. They are thrown into ontological dizziness, and they either surrender to it--via substance abuse, hedonic excess, etc.--or they grab onto whatever will give them the illusion of stability-- control freakery, religious cults, MAGA, etc. Those who have found a way to work creatively with the chaos can do so because they have found a way to activate or awaken the positive, form-giving Anthropos archetype within themselves. If you can find a way to give shape to the chaos within, you can deal more easily with the chaos without. That's when you know you have primal trust.
Note 5: I've used other metaphors to describe this cleansing process. For instance, I've argued that we're going through a collective Dark Night of the Spirit a la John of the Cross or that we are wandering in the wilderness a la the Book of Exodus. They all point to the same thing, which is that we are in this 'purgative', in-between place. Nobody likes it, but if we understand the necessary negativity of it and live through it with faith and hope, i.e., with a primal trust, that we will come to the next stage, which is 'illuminative'. If someone is looking for me to prove this, I can't. But hopefully it resonates with you, and helps to give you a positive way to live through difficult times.
Note 6: A perfectly balanced, metaxic tension between chaos and the positive energies of the Anthropos Archetype is theoretically possible. Maybe that's what will define the end of history. But in the meanwhile, history would appear to "progress" by dialectical swings from being out of balance, overcorrecting, and on it goes. During this process certain aspects of the Anthropos archetype emerge that energizes a particular historical-cultural era's forms and ways of thinking for a while, but these forms and ways of thinking eventually rigidify and die and give way to the emergence of another aspect of the Anthropos archetype that energizes new forms that, in turn, rigidify and die. It's in this sense that history is dialectical much in the way Hegel and Marx described it. Marx's ideas about it, though, were reductively simplistic.
But Marx's dialectical eschatology was what largely infused a sense of meaning and purpose for the political and cultural left. It's where the whole idea of being on the right side of history comes from. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the postmodern mood of incredulity concerning grand narratives set in, and the Left lost its bearings. What passes for social justice now on the Left is a brittle parody whose energies come mostly from Calvinistic sanctimony. The Left won't regain its mojo until it finds a plausible eschatological narrative, and that, imo, will be found in something like the evolutionary Neoplatonism that I have been laying out in this blog over the years.
So I don't think of this cultural historical dialectic as an endless, cyclical process of rise and fall, but a process that with each stage makes an advance the benefits of which we carry with us into the next phase. The Enlightenment was not a mistake as many religious conservatives argue, but an advance in this sense. The mistake would be to think, as Hegel did, that it defined the end of history. Hardly. It's just one chapter or stage in a much longer story, and it's important that we preserve the advances in the human spirit that the Enlightenment bequeathes to us, and among those gifts is the idea of progress.
The Enlightenment zeitgeist was inhospitable to the Neoplatonism I've been arguing must now be retrieved in a postmodern key, and that requires an expansion of Neoplatonism that embraces an imagination of human progress, that is, movement on the horizontal. I'd argue that the primary defect of pure Neoplatonism, which it shares with Buddhism, Vendantic Hinduism, and Taoism, is its emphasis on the eternal or transcendent--the vertical--in such a way that it diminishes the significance of meaning in history on the horizontal. The just society in Neoplatonism is the one that mirrors the law of heaven in such a way that it stresses balance and stability, and this leads to a rejection of the idea that there could be such a thing as historical progress. There is movement upward or downward, but not forward and backward.
BTW, this is a point of disagreement I have with John Vervaeke's "Zen Neoplatonism", and it's the main reason why I think he's (respectfully) resistant to a Christian Neoplatonism. He is very skeptical about the idea of progress or meaning in history. I think that while Christianity shares the basic metaphysics of transcendence and the Good with classic Neoplatonism, Taoism, and Buddhism, it emphasizes incarnation and meaning in history in a way they would resist. For Neoplatonism and Buddhism, history is an illusion from which we must be liberated. For this reason, I would argue, Schelling, Hegel, Teilhard, and A.N. Whitehead--for all their limitations--are possibilities in the West in a way they could not be in the East. (Although Aurobindo, about whom I know nothing, might be an exception.) I will develop this idea about how Christian Neoplatonism differs from, say, the classic Neoplatonism in a future post.