[I thought a break from Hart might be welcomed by some, and so I thought that revisiting an essay I wrote a week before the election might be useful to provide some context. This essay seems to have more cogency now after the election than before it, and perhaps it helps readers to understand why I think what Hart is doing is so important.
The problem, as I see it, lies mainly with the culture’s Democrat-voting educated class and their complacency about their living in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. They see MAGA as the enemy more than the Silicon Valley as the enemy. They want to fight the populist demos rather than to align with it against those who in the long run pose the greatest threat to the human future. The Dems' last chance to do that was in their choosing Hillary over Bernie, so now the demos belongs to MAGA.
So why is what Hart doing so important? Because he’s one one of the few thinkers who can get published by an elite institution like Yale University Press that attacks the metaphysical presuppositions that elites in TCM rely on for their legitimacy, a legitimacy that is given to them by the educated folks who vote Democratic. And while the main thrust of this book is an attack on the mechanistic/materialist metaphysical imaginary currently hegemonic among our cultural elites, it is also suffused with utopian thinking about re-enchanting the world. It’s not just about saying No, but also about framing an imagined future to which we can say Yes.
Is such utopian thinking escapism? Well, what’s wrong with escapism if by it we mean the longing of the prisoner to escape his imprisonment? First the dream, then the plan to make it real.
So reproduced below is a somewhat condensed version with the addition of some footnotes of the post in which I first introduced my Utopian Mythos diagram. My reading of Hart since then has struck me that it almost precisely maps to this diagram, especially as it’s an argument about restoring the amputated northern limb.]
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Much of what I do here is more in the form of thought experiments rather than hard analysis of the hard realities of the world we actually live in. I justify it because (1) I do not accept the hard realities of the world we live in as anything more than a provisional consensus reality, i.e., a cultural construct, a “mythos” if you will, that mediates aspects or reality in more or less adequate ways, and (2) that because our constructed consensus reality is so profoundly out of balance and out of alignment with the Deep Real, sooner or later it will rebalance whether peacefully or violently. I believe that what I've been calling the Techno-Capitalist Matrix is a modern-day, hubristic Tower of Babel, and sooner or later it will bring destruction upon itself. Perhaps in MAGA we're seeing the beginning of that. I don't want to believe that, but the thought is there nonetheless.1
I don't think it's controversial to point out that the chief sign of any out-of-balance society is when the interests of its elites are out of alignment with the interests of ordinary people--the demos. Perhaps this always true to a certain extent, but there are tolerable and intolerable degrees of it. Certainly economic imbalances are profoundly destabilizing, but that can be compensated for in societies where political elites take seriously their obligations to see to the material needs of non-elites.
But another destabilizing factor is when there is what I'll call a metaphysical misalignment--when the religion, traditions, and customs of the society are no longer shared by both elites and the demos. That has been our condition in America now for decades, and it needs to be taken more seriously by cultural elites and the intelligentsia than they currently do. If there is anything good that can be said about MAGA, it's that it's forcing the issue. Because the combination of both an economic misalignment combined with a metaphysical misalignment is almost certainly fatal to any social order.
When the demos sees elites as cynical nihilists who have nothing but contempt for their traditions and customs and then that combines with their feeling of economic precarity, you have a powder keg. If Trump wins next week, it will be because this double misalignment is far more deeply felt than I thought. But if he loses, it's a problem that doesn't go away until cultural and political elites make progress toward more alignment with the demos both economically and metaphysically. I explain what I mean by that more in the second half of this post.
Most secular elites, so convinced as they are about the superiority of their rationalism and "fact-based thinking", do not understand how destabilizing their secularism is, especially for people who rely on family and local community rather than the universities for shaping their world view. But I would make another claim—it's not the backward 'metaphysical imaginary' of the demos that's the deeper problem, but the nihilistic imaginary of the cultural elites who produce the pop culture that the demos consumes.
In film, TV, and the other arts these elites have made mainstream a nihilism that was until recent decades the province of fringe intellectuals. Do you think that the depiction of the corruption and nihilism of America's corporate and political elites in TV, fiction, and film doesn't have an impact on ordinary Americans? Liberal elites think that the Dems they vote for are all some variation of Jed Bartlett, but the demos has come to see establishment Dems as variations of Frank Underwood. Which are the more naive?
The American business and political elite are almost always depicted as corrupt villlains in film, TV, and the news media. There's enough truth in those accounts that it lands, but it's not the whole truth. There are lots of people in the political and business spheres that are decent people who work in good faith. But they're boring and invisible. So is it any wonder that MAGA wants to punish corporate elites, destroy the deep state, and drain the swamp that TV and movie elites have told them now for decades is the Beltway reality? And who better to do it than a swamp creature from Queens who knows the landscape and sees his chance to engorge himself by exploiting populist resentments to tear the whole rickety system down? This is what the Left has been calling for since the sixties, but it’s the Right that has captured the energies of the demos to do it.
So our cosmopolitan cultural elites are simply reaping the nihilism that they’ve sown for decades now. When the elites in France in the 1780s and the Soviet Union in the 1980s no longer believed in their social order, it was just a matter of time before the whole thing collapsed. Are we in the North Atlantic democracies now in the same position? Is Trump the clownish American version of Robespierre? The Robespierres of the world do a great job of making a bloody mess, but sooner or later, a Napoleon or a Putin emerges to restore some semblance of order, and it's generally not an order that most of us would prefer to live in.
***
The rest of this post is just me thinking out loud in a utopian vein. In my previous post, I mocked the utopian thinking of the Silicon Valley nerds who are excited about all the cost-free benefits that AGI will bring to humanity. The naiveté is obvious to anyone with a shred of common sense, but I'd add that the naiveté feels legitimate-y because it aligns with the presuppositions of the thought and practice within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. The TCM is the primary shaper of our unbalanced consensus reality, and most of us accept it as a hard reality that is harder than we need think it is. It remains hard only so long as we believe it is, and it remains our reality so long as no one can present a better, plausible alternative.
I suggest we at least attempt to imagine other possibilities, and one way to do that is to indulge in a little utopian thinking. The kind of utopian thinking I'm talking about is different from the transhumanist, techno-optimistic, utopianism of Silicon Valley because, unlike their utopianism, mine is just a thought experiment, and as such does not pretend to predict what actually is going to happen. That's not the purpose of thinking about utopias.
Utopian literature from Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) to Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward (1888) and William Morris’s News from Nowhere (1891) were not blueprints for an imagined future so much as they were thought experiments that allowed its readers to look around at their contemporary societies and to make judgments about how they measured up or failed to.
But measured up to what? And by what standard? Implicit in every utopian thought experiment are values presuppositions by which the writer frames his critique of the ills that exist in the current consensus "reality" by imagining a society where those ills are cured. Bellamy's book, hugely popular internationally at the turn of previous century, imagines a social-democratic utopia in a techno-optimistic, technocratic vein, and Morris's is more anti-technocracy in a Wendell Berry vein with a touch of the romantic humanism of the early Marx. I lean more toward Morris, but I’d argue there’s something important missing in both.
In a course I taught earlier this year, I asked my students to read both Bellamy and Morris with two objectives. First, to break them out of the nihilistic, dystopian mindset that pervades the popular culture produced by its mostly nihilistic, pessimistic, cynical elites, and, second, to suggest that if we live in a consensus reality, it is malleable and so we have some agency in shaping the future if we can imagine one that's worth living in.
The challenge is not to argue about what's realistic, but about what is desired, about what is essential for human flourishing, not just for any of us as an individuals, but to ask what kind of society promotes the development of full-spectrum human beings in their unique particularity? We can talk about nuts and bolts after we've developed some consensus about what should be the North Star to orient us as we move toward it into the future. Without such a North Star we stagger erratically in the condition I call ontological dizziness--the best people languish in confusion, and the worst take the field unopposed.
I am not gifted enough imaginatively to write a utopian novel, but if I were to do so, it would be an attempt to imagine a future society that evolves out of our current one into one whose underlying structure--or mythos--is mapped in the diagram below.
A couple of things to to orient you: The basic structure here is one that would restore what was the structure of the mythos of Western societies before the Reformation and Scientific Revolution, and the general structure of every other society that had been transformed by the Axial Revolution. The northern limb of the North/South Axis played a major role in shaping the mythos of all the great premodern civilizations. The transcendent dimension was as important in China, India, and the Middle East, as it was in Christian Europe.2
What happened uniquely in Europe and its colonies during the modern period (roughly 1500-1900) was the gradual amputation of the northern limb of the North/South Axis that allowed for unconstrained developments on the horizontal axis. This had enormous consequences for generating material progress, but at the cost of spiritual depth and richness. The consequences were first recognized in the late 19th Century—Nietzsche's proclamation of the death of God being an important benchmark, and the utterly pointless, irrational destructiveness of Second Thirty years War from 1914-1945 being its primary concrete manifestation. It destroyed whatever lingered of the idea that history had purpose and direction. After WWII, it was no longer possible for the culture's elites to believe in the Christian mythos of a loving, personal God, or to believe that human moral progress was a possibility. We don’t write or read utopias anymore.
A Social Darwinian evolutionary mythos emerged to supplant the old Christian eschatological mythos: the earth and our existence on it is merely the result of random, impersonal, cruel cosmic processes. There is no moral order, and history is just the story of a succession of elites fighting to hold on to their privilege against wannabe elites who seek to replace them. Morality is just a fiction the powerful use to justify their reign at the top of the pyramid. Whoever gets the most money, the most power, the most sex wins. Isn't this the message we get in almost every prestige TV show or movie since the 70s? What has there been to counterbalance it? The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter?!
Why then are educated Liberals so surprised that Donald Trump has emerged as such a powerful cultural figure? Born in June of 1946, not even a year after dropping the bombs on Japan, he's the epitome of the postmodern, post-WWII nihilism of a society has severed its north limb. He's its egregore. Why are they surprised that the shallow Liberal morality of breaking any taboo so long as you're nice about it has been so morally corrosive and destabilizing? Those on the religious Right are the return of the repressed north limb. As with all things repressed, they erupt in their most ugly, shadowy, violent form. Liberals who a couple of years ago were complaining about microagressions will be finding out what real aggression looks like should Trump win.
So since the World Wars, the only kind of progress that could be justified had to be on Social Darwinian terms--there is no moral order, there is just the groping, random process for which technological advancement was the cutting edge. If this process produces machines with higher intelligence that supersede and obsoletize human intelligence, so be it. That, according to this mythos, is just evolution at work. Nothing we can do about it. Any attempt to resist is like building sand castles at low tide. Just a matter of time before they will be washed away. Look at what happened at Open AI—talk about castles in the sand. Evolution doesn't care, and neither will the machines.
And so within this frame, Trump begins to make sense. He is an unconstrained product of this amoral evolutionary process. He's a vulgar ignoramus, but it doesn't matter because he's what evolution wants. He's the perfect exemplar of the kind of human being that a north-limbless society produces. In the mythos of the TCM, there is no transcendence, there is only southern-limb, roiling, chaotic, creative destruction that is driven by crude appetite.
Now I, of course, completely reject this Social-Darwinist mythos. It accurately describes the world without a north limb, but that does not mean that the reality the north limb represents does not exist. For complex reasons we have moved into a Kali Yuga-esque, collective, dark night of the spirit in which most of our secular elites are incapable of sensing transcendence anymore. There are plenty of people who still feel it. Perhaps even most people believe or are open to the idea that a transcendent dimension exists, but it doesn't matter because these individuals have no power or influence so long as Social Darwinism remains the dominant mythos justifying the Techno-Capitalist Order.
Social Darwinism as the current mythos, the current consensus reality, requires that there be no constraints on developments on the horizontal axis. And there will be none until a robust northern limb is restored among the culture's intelligentsia and its business and political elites.
So back to utopian thinking, or at least my version of it. My future society would find a way to restore the north limb in a postmodern/postsecular key, i.e., in a key that absorbs everything we've learned on the horizontal axis during the modern era, but which also will have supplanted the Social Darwinist mythos with a broadly accepted moral authority and wisdom—the restored north limb--to direct developments on the horizontal. Progress in knowledge about the material world and continued technological development are deeply valued, but equally so are virtue and self-transcendence toward a eudaemonistic ideal.
And so in such a mythos, there would be some wisdom about how to proceed on the horizontal axis rather than allowing south-limb, raw appetite to be the only driver. Such a society would require that elites and the demos be aligned on the vertical axis, and one in which the down-to-earth wisdom of the demos, through a democratic process, would keep the high-flying hubris of elites in check.
I know. Hard to imagine, but it’s not impossible because there have been such societies before. It’s difficult, though, to imagine how we get from here to there.
There is much more to say about the diagram above, but it serves its purpose for what I want to say today without further commentary. Maybe more about it another time.
Notes
1.Ross Douthat’s interview with Steve Bannon yesterday underscores the point that the populists understand and want to resist the threat the Silicon Valley oligarchs pose more than most cosmopolitan, Dem-voting elites, do. Clearly there’s something deeply disturbed and disturbing about Steve Bannon, but that doesn’t means he’s more right than he’s wrong about much of what’s going down now.
The same might be said about Curtis Yarvin. Both he and Bannon are part of the MAGA coalition for now, but I’d have to say that Yarvin’s apologetic for the rule of TCM oligarchs/monarchs, as disturbing as it is, has a far better chance of surviving the infighting than Bannon’s populism. Why? Because money power almost always beats people power.
Meanwhile the Dems are freaking out about how everything Trump is doing is illegal. Who’d a thought? Well I suppose they have to say something. But if Trump’s first term was all about obliterating norms, the second will be all about obliterating the rule of law. That’s the program. Good luck stopping him.
The Dems—or some form of a revived Left (the Dems are likely damaged beyond repair)—should instead be developing a strategy for winning back the demos. In the long term, the only power that beats the TCM oligarchs is people power, and right now the people have no one to lead them. Certainly not the Dems, and certainly not Steve Bannon.
2. I don’t know enough about Native American religions to say for sure, but from what I do know about it, I think their religion, not always, but often, maps to this diagram as well. I doubt Aztec religion maps, for instance. There are in many aboriginal religions what Eliade and others call a deus otiosus or a deus absconditus, an idea of the transcendent godhead existing but uninvolved, who abides in the distant background but which plays very little role in day-to-day practice or ritual. The local, immanent gods are more important to transact with to insure day-to-day flourishing. Someday I’d like to understand better how the transcendent and immanent dimensions worked together in Native American religion. It could be a model for us going forward.