After the Future

Assessing the Brazenness of Trump's Coup

“Honest to god, I’ve never seen anything like it,” said Steven Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and coauthor of “How Democracies Die” and “Competitive Authoritarianism.”

“We look at these comparative cases in the 21st century, like Hungary and Poland and Turkey. And in a lot of respects, this is worse,” he said. “These first two months have been much more aggressively authoritarian than almost any other comparable case I know of democratic backsliding.” (Source)

There are two basic scenarios that seem to me likely (to me at least) if we’re trying to understand what the U.S. situation is likely to look like by the end of the decade:

First, the more positive scenario--the brazenness, the aggressiveness and lack of stealth of the Trumpist reactionaries¹ is an indicator of their underlying ignorance and hubris. While there should no longer be any doubt about their revolutionary intent, it’s clear that they haven't the cunning or competence to pull off and sustain a real coup. The grownups will eventually prevail. The judiciary and the military will stand against the really crazy unconstitutional stuff, and an alarmed American electorate will vote in a Democratic Congress in '26 that might finally succeed in impeaching this Caligula and constraining the Savonarola who will replace him. Their extremism will wake up sane Americans of good will. New leadership will emerge to change what needs to be changed to make the system more responsive to ordinary Americans’ needs and guide us sanely as we enter into the 2030s.

Second, the most negative way: the Trumpist reactionaries' aggressiveness and what appears to be openly insane behavior is an indicator that they have a clearer understanding how the world has changed, and the rest of us reality-based "grownups" have not caught up with the new reality they are creating. Remember the quote in a Ron Susskind piece likely made by Karl Rove?—

The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do'.

This quote was largely mocked by the ‘reality-based community’ when it appeared in 2004, but maybe it was just twenty years too early.

So, of course, I'm a partisan of the first more optimistic scenario or some variant of it, but I have little confidence it’s correct. A lot has to happen for it to work out. It's not enough that institutions hold; a broad swath of the American public must rise up in protest. There are nascent signs of that at town halls and Bernie events, but if I'm a Trumpist reactionary, I would dismiss such protests as a minority of the usual suspects composed mostly of far-Left malcontents. The middle majority is still with us, or so they think.

They have to be proved wrong. These protest events have to turn into something much bigger--events with hundreds of thousands, not just tens of thousands. And then strategic leaders with creative tactical aptitude must emerge from the people who participate in these events The protests about the Invasion of Iraq in '03, Occupy Wall Street in '11, the women's marches after the first Trump inauguration, the Black Lives Matters protests in '20 were all impressive shows of popular resistance, but achieved nothing because no credible, broadly respected leadership emerged to channel and sustain that energy. Nothing is more important than the emergence of new leadership with a new imagination of how to move into the future.

And so, effective leadership, if it is to emerge in the next few years, is unlikely to come from elected politicians. It must arise bottom up, and it has to feel fresh and new, not like some retread of New-Left style protests of the late 60s and 70s that Middle America found so alienating. The goal needs to be solidarity among a broad base of Americans who hate what they see happening to their country—not just the usual suspects. It has to come off as, yes, angry, but also as morally serious and clear about its positive, concrete strategic objectives. It has to be focused on one or two key objectives^,2 not on the grievances of every interest group. And it has to have a down-to-earth, savvy, blue-collar vibe.³

If the second, scarier possibility is realized, it's because Trump and his thugs are riding the zeitgeist, and most of us haven't come to fathom what that zeitgeist is yet nor where it’s heading. I assume that we are all looking at events through the McLuhanesque rear-view mirror. That is, we assume by default the continuous, and don't take seriously enough that we are living through something that is profoundly discontinuous. And if the latter is our situation, It's extremely difficult to think and talk and strategize effectively about how to cope with what we don't really understand.

I certainly don't claim to understand what's happening. Like the rest of you, I'm hoping for the first scenario, but bracing for the second. Or maybe it will be something completely unexpected. I'm just trying to suss things out as they become visible. It's what's invisible now that really worries me.

1. I’m distinguishing these reactionaries from MAGA. I see MAGA as a loose coalition of Middle Americans who for good reason no longer trust establishment elites. The reactionaries comprise oligarchic demagogues, white nationalists, and religious fanatics, but these reactionaries are a minority that appear stronger than they really are because they are the most stridently vocal. My point is that there are many MAGA folks who are potentially persuadeable if a credible, sane, down-to-earth leadership emerges to redirect their energies in a more constructive direction.

2. What those objectives might be is up for debate. I think there will be a trigger. It could be around Social Security/Medicare/Medicaid. It might be about how Trump is crashing the economy while pushing for another round of tax cuts for billionaires. It might be around the personal corruption of Trump, his family, and his cronies. It might be around something that hasn’t emerged yet. It’s hard to organize around abstractions that are not impacting anybody in a felt way yet. My sense is that most people who aren’t paying close attention see DOGE as a positive thing: who doesn’t want more efficient government? They won’t understand what’s really happening until it hits them or the people they care about.

3. Is it just me, or is the choice of Lennon/Ono’s “Power to the People” as walk up-music for Bernie in his Las Vegas event last week precisely the wrong vibe? Sure, power to the people. All for it. But It’s hard to think of anybody who represents the ethos of out-of-touch, performative, cultural elites more than Lennon and Ono. Don’t get me started on Lennon’s maudlin “Imagine”.

Maximizers vs. Minimizers

From Edsall's column this morning:

Gil Duran, a former editorial page editor of the Sacramento Bee and the San Francisco Examiner, who produces a newsletter covering the tech industry, is sharply critical of recent developments. In an email, Duran wrote:

Having realized that money buys political power, these tech billionaires are now trying to buy the entire U.S. government. This is an unprecedented hostile takeover. With Elon Musk as their avatar, they openly dismantle the government and disregard the Constitution. They pose an existential threat to American democracy, and they see this as their moment to seize power.

Many of the tech billionaires who have merged with Trump believe democracy is an outdated software system that must be replaced. They want a future in which tech elites, armed with all-powerful AI systems, are the primary governing force of the planet.

The tech oligarchs, Duran argued,

are an existential threat to democracy. Look at the news. It makes no sense that a presidential administration would seek to crash the economy while allowing an unelected foreign-born billionaire to rip apart the government. This goes against every rule in politics. Trump’s poll numbers are sinking yet he’s taking no steps to correct the course. This is the logic of a suicide bomber.

These billionaires, Duran argued, “are fully in control of Trump’s MAGA Party,” but their ambitions go beyond that. “The Republican Party is simply a host organism for the parasite of tech fascism,” Duran wrote, but “it’s not just the Republican Party that’s lost its soul. The tech authoritarians are also moving to co-opt leaders in the Democratic Party.”

There are many ways to divide the world in two, and one of them is Minimizers and Maximizers. You see it regarding one's bodily health. Maximizers might discover a lump somewhere on their bodies and jump to the conclusion that they're among the walking dead. A Minimizer will ignore it and make fun of the Maximizer for being such an alarmist baby. Obviously, the sane response is to keep your cool and get it checked out.

If there's one thing we've learned during the Trump era--it's that the Maximizers have almost always been right. However bad Trump was, we never learned the half of it.

The Minimizers in the mushy, low-information middle are responsible for electing Trump. They made fun of the Maximizers, and accused them of having Trump Derangement Syndrome. He's too foolish and ignorant to be a threat, some said. Better him than the Woke Libs, others said. But a threat to democracy?! Get a grip!

But Trump himself isn't the problem. He's the lump. Even if he were to be cut out, the underlying disease would remain. It's systemic. Neither is the problem MAGA populism, which in my bodily health metaphor plays the role of confused, ineffective antibodies. Both are symptoms of the underlying disease, which is the structural logic of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. In a guy like Musk, we're seeing the disease progress to its next stage.

Is there a therapy that can get it under control or Is it too late? The old remedies have proved time and again that they don't work, so I hope somebody somewhere is developing something new.

Rescuing Aristotle.5: Afterthought

Hart doesn’t call it the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, but what he describes here as ‘modernity’—I think what he means is its terminus in ‘late modernity’ or ‘early postmodernity’—is what I’m talking about when I use the phrase:

PSYCHE: I fear—I dread—a nihilistic narrative reaching its ineluctable nihilistic terminus. Whatever else modernity is, good and bad alike, it’s most definitely also the project of a fully realized nihilism, in the most neutral philosophical sense of that term: the belief that there’s no eternal scale or realm or horizon of meaning and moral verity, and that instead the will in each of us stands before a universe devoid of any intrinsic structure of moral truths, and is now at liberty to create or destroy values as it chooses.

No doubt, in its dawn, this reduction of lived existence to the dialectic between an objectively meaningless cosmos and a subjectively self-creating will must have felt like a kind of emancipation; but it has always also been the metaphysical accomplice of a project of setting loose the will to power, now unencumbered by any sense of anything inviolable or sacred, or any sense of the self’s dependency upon a higher order of truth.

It was inevitable, really, that in time the mechanistic method should mutate into—or, perhaps, be revealed as—a metaphysics as well, and an ideology, and a program not merely for investigating nature as if it were a machine, but also for actually transforming the world—nature, but also culture, politics, economics, and everything else—into a machine. Thus the insane intellectual ethos of absolute reduction: of the dissolution of reality into principles of impersonal force and function, the systematic stripping away of the whole rational, vital, sensuous semantics of life from our picture of the “really real,” as though all of them were nothing more than an impasto of epiphenomenal conventions concealing the real nature of things.

And what a strange animosity toward the real world of experience it all requires of us. It must now be reduced to the ghostly syntax of the purely impalpable, imperceptible, lifeless, mindless realm of the quantitative. And mind must be reduced to the bare syntax of a functional system for processing stimulus into behavior, operating through a neural technology, denuded of the semantics of real qualitative experience, intentionality, consciousness, unified subjectivity, rational thought, and immediate intuition. And life must be reduced to a bare genetic syntax of determinate traits constructed upon a purely chemical platform, so that in the end life proves to be nothing more than a somewhat more elaborate modality of death—inert matter with ideas above its station, so to speak.

And language must be reduced to the functionalist syntax of a mechanical system for processing data and converting stimulus into behavior, to which the apparent semantics of communication and communion has been applied as a mere system of manipulable user-illusions. The fullness of reality and of awareness and of life must be dissolved into a collection of spectral paradigms, inhabiting a phantom order of the real, where the rose is not red, or alive, or known to any intending conscious mind, or loved in the light of its eternal value as something good and true and beautiful. None of this is truly rational. None of it’s an enlightened or enlightening view of reality. None of it’s logically warranted, or even logically defensible.

None of it conforms to any reality that could actually exist in any possible frame of being. It’s pure ideology dissembling itself as scientific realism; it’s the will to power wrapping itself in the stolen garments of disinterested reason. It’s also pure insanity. Systematic disenchantment is, as it turns out, a mad and destructive delusion, which sees everything as machinery and so makes everything into a machine—a delusion that sees everything as already dead, and then contrives with boundless ingenuity and ease of conscience to prove the point by progressively killing the world. It’s all a cruel alienation from life . . . the very death of nature . . . of the soul. (pp 547 ff.)

And yet here we are.

Do you understand that the argument that he’s making (and that I am) is that because this mechanistic nihilism shapes the entire system, it affects the lives of those of us who reject it as much as it shapes the lives of those who promote it? It’s not that we who don’t believe this nihilism can just go our own way. Secular Liberals like George Packer might say to us: “Good for you if ‘transcendence”—or whatever—is what you’re into. But let us skeptical, sophisticated sorts in media, academia, and other cultural institutions believe in our nihilism if that’s what we’re into.”

But It doesn’t work like that, because the nihilists are driving the bus, and all the rest of us are in it with them, and we’re all going off the cliff they’re driving us toward even if they can’t bring themselves to believe that it’s toward a cliff that they’re heading.

Hephaistos responds to Psyche as I’m sure the ‘enlightened’ members of the editorial board of the NY Times would:

HEPHAISTOS: You’re growing just a little apocalyptic, you know. Is this really all you see in the—and forgive me for using the traditional term—the Enlightenment?

Tut, tut. Let’s not get too bent out of shape here. Psyche responds:

PSYCHE: Oh, no, of course not. Don’t talk in historical abstractions. I believe in the freedom of the mind, I detest dogmatism, I despise arbitrary authority. God bless the Enlightenment. But not everything we associate with that term is actually enlightening, is it?

I agree. It’s not the Enlightenment that needs to be rejected, but one strain of it that became dominant. The Enlightenment didn’t have to take a nihilist turn, but it did. Guys like Rousseau and Kant were not nihilists. Their feet were firmly planted in the transcendentalist tradition I’m trying to defend.

So there were many possible paths Western elites could have taken in the 1600s and 1700s. But nihilism was always a dark potential that was implicit in the Baconian project because of the way it turned against Nature, the way it came to look at Nature as a machine to be exploited for human benefit no matter what the cost to the non-human world.

This mechanistic nihilism implicit in Baconism manifested in its rawest form in the period between 1850 and 1950, but it was buffered somewhat by a Christianity that still played the role of phantom limb. But whatever was healthful and legitimate in that gradually evaporated after WWII, and was gone by the ‘80s. We got instead this bizarre simulacra of it in a Reaganism and forms of zombie Christianity that tried to look like what had been lost, but was never anything more than nihilism with a smiley face. And at the same time transhumanism—the celebration of a cyborgian human future—emerged as the creepy new religion of the techno-capitalist elites who were driving the bus.

In a Politico interview the other day, Tim Walz said that a charismatic leader isn’t going to save us. In the short run, he’s right—but neither are the Democrats going to save us. What I’m calling for, if it’s to emerge, will emerge in the long run. In the short run we need good-faith Democrats like Tim Walz to resist the nihilists and hopefully buy us some time. And out of that resistance something new must emerge, something radically discontinuous with the regnant nihilism in a new social-cultural movement. And it will be its freshness, its originality, the truth of it, the justice of it that will shine through its leadership. If you think anything else can save us, I’d like to know what it is.

Rescuing Aristotle.5

Toward Finding a Common Idiom

In my post "The Difference between Faith and Belief" I introduced the Kantian antinomies. The basic idea is that important arguments about whether humans are free or determined or whether God exists or doesn’t lead to conclusions that can neither be considered proved or disproved. So which is right? Well, you have to choose.¹ What are the criteria? I think it has a lot to do with the disposition of the heart in the Pascalian sense. ²

I think this is a good way to approach the argument that Hart is making in All Things Are Full of Gods. Either the Universe is foundationally Mind or it's foundationally Matter. Neither position can be proved or disproved, so you have to choose. Your head can’t get you there, so what does your heart tell you?

The best arguments for Matter are that our entire society runs on its materialist metaphysics, and if you are on the Matter Team, you’re likely to mesh well with its mainstream political, economic, and cultural institutions. There will be little dissonance between your work life and private life. And so the strongest argument for the Matter team is that it has all the benefits of incumbency: "We're in control, we intend to remain in control, so submit or remain fringe and irrelevant."

The strongest argument for the Mind team is that it provides a fuller and more richly textured map of Reality, and because it does, it provides a map for those who want to get a deeper, firmer grip on Reality. And in the long run it's better to have people running things who have a grip on Reality rather than people who are sealed off from it and who in their hubris are intent on creating simulacral un-Reality to replace it. That’s the program of Techno-Capitalist Matrix and the oligarchs who are managing it. So in the final analysis, the best argument for the Mind Team is that the Matter team has been running things, it has made a mess, it’s dragging us toward dystopia, and it needs to be replaced.

***

For several years I taught a course entitled "The Disenchantment of the West". I mainly wanted to introduce students to the arguments of the Mind Team that until fairly recently were well understood by anybody who was well educated. Most of my students had never been exposed to these arguments before, or if they were exposed often dismissed them as the irrelevant bloviation of dead, white men. The students who were most receptive to the Mind Team tended to be Muslim, Hindu, Buddhist, or an occasional Catholic.

On more than one occasion students from these backgrounds told me they were surprised that the West was ever anything but Materialist, and that there was this sophisticated, rich spiritual tradition. And that makes sense because In their high school and university educations they had only heard the arguments of the Matter Team. Well, it wasn’t even argued; it was just presented as settled fact. For them what it meant to be an educated human being was to be a member in good standing of the Matter Team. So my goal for this and another class I taught was to expose them to a Western tradition most had no awareness of so that they could at least entertain the idea that to be a truly educated person required understanding the arguments of the Mind Team.

For them arguments about God and transcendence were always religious arguments, and I wanted them to understand that it wasn't a matter of faith so much as it was a matter of whether the thinkers on the Mind Team--from Socrates and Plato through the German Idealists--were making arguments that were reasonable, that perhaps their arguments made even better sense of their experience of the world than the explanations given by the Matter Team.

I wish I had Hart's All Things Are Full of Gods to help me in that project because it presents the arguments of both teams in an compelling way in a contemporary idiom. Hephaistos represents the Matter Team and Psyche the Mind Team, supported by her teammates Eros and Hermes. The book assumes that Hephaistos's mechanistic materialism is hegemonic, and that the burden of proof lies with the Mind Team. And so the main purpose of the book is (1) to confront educated elites complacent in their materialism with its limitations and contradictions; (2) to make the case for Mind Team on rational grounds, but perhaps more importantly (3) to make the argument on the the grounds of emotional/spiritual richness and human flourishing.

I’ve been struggling to find a way to talk about the book that isn’t too technical, and I think the best way is to excerpt some passages that I think particularly salient and comment on them. If weeds are what you want, read the book. I think some of the most eloquent passages come toward the end of the book where both arguments get summarized in a relatively un-weedsy way.

First Hephaistos and then Psyche’s response:

HEPHAISTOS: …Honestly, I sometimes think that you three believe you can simply rhapsodize me into submission. It’s not going to happen. And let me just say here that it seems to me we might reverse a good deal of the argument you’re all intent on making today. I can grant that the internal structure of mental acts—and, I should add, of mental representations—is precisely this dialectic you describe between, on the one hand, a mental and volitional orientation toward an abstract realm of absolute values and, on the other, a secondary orientation toward particular things in the world.

Understanding the technicalities alluded to here isn’t as important as the admission that Hephaistos is making. One of the most interesting characteristics of the Hephaistos character in this book is that he thinks he understands the other side’s arguments, and he can articulate them very effectively. At one point he tells Eros “I’ve heard the song often before; I know all the lyrics.” And Eros responds, “If only we could teach you to sing it.” Eros’s a good line because it goes to the heart of the dispute—that it’s one thing to be able to read the score, and another to hear the music. The map isn’t the territory, and the score isn’t the music. To know the first is not to truly understand. As suggested above, true understanding requires a movement of the heart. The brain alone doesn’t get you there. And machines might be able to replicate the way our brains work, but will they ever have hearts that truly understand?

So Hephaistos thinks he understands, but he doesn’t, because if he did, he wouldn’t make the next move—

I’m still free, however, to conclude that this is simply how, practically speaking, the brain needs to function, and that this very fact imposes upon our minds the tendency to believe in a transcendent reality, as a convenient user-illusion. The dynamism of neural operations generates its own operative principle: that hypothesis, so to speak. “God” is merely the name we give to the supreme algorithm in our systems of behavior—the supreme user-interface. Yes, I know your objections. We’ve been over them. They’re powerful, I concede, and in certain moods I might find them persuasive; but that’s perhaps only to say that I too, as an organic system of functions, am destined to see things in certain ways by the structure of my own . . . programming, as it were.

In other words, “Everything you say, Psyche, makes perfect sense, but I’m sticking with the incumbent materialism. And that requires that I reduce what makes sense in your argument to terms that make sense in my mechanistic model, no matter how badly that distorts them. When push comes to shove, you can’t make me buy into your cringey, woo-woo, mystical package no matter how persuasive.”

Psyche responds:

PSYCHE: [After several seconds of silence:] Back to functionalism again, after we’ve done so much to dismantle its presuppositions? Forsooth, my dear. I honestly don’t believe you really believe what you say you believe. I believe also that we’ve already demonstrated the falsehood of what you’re saying, and that you know it. But of course there’s no way in the end of combatting a pure epistemological nihilism. If you choose to believe that you’re a machine programmed to think it’s conscious and programmed to think it wills . . . well, I’m not going to start the debate again from the beginning.

You can lead a horse to water, etc. Later in the book Hephaistos explains what perhaps is the real reason for his resistance, which is the irrelevance of the idea of the Transcendent Good in a world where cruelty and absurdity are everywhere so rampant. We’ll look at that in future post, but for now let’s summarize the two positions. Psyche summarizes her position:

PSYCHE: … Anyway, you know where I stand. I believe in the power of reason to discern truths, principally because I believe that there are real formal causes that shape the world’s reality, and that these inhabit and shape our thoughts as well, and that therefore we can truly think and speak about reality. And I believe that this is the nature and substance at once of mind, life, and language. I believe that all that is has its being as, so to speak, one great thought, and that our individual minds are like prisms capturing some part of the light of being and consciousness . . . or, rather, are like prisms that are also, marvelously, nothing but crystallizations of that light . . . as is all of nature. I believe that this is the reality in which we live and move and exist, and that we enter into it at the beginning of life as into a kind of dream that was already being dreamed before we found ourselves within it, and that—from our first moment of being aware that we’re aware—our participation in that reality comes filled with both memories of the eternal and an urgent yearning for the transcendent. All is familiar, all is impossibly strange. In the end, that reality in which we exist and in which we participate as spiritual agencies may as well be called “God,” since we have no better name for infinite mind that’s also infinite being. Moreover, I believe that the structure of all thought reveals its immanent ground to be that inner witness that is the divine light within. But then, too, it reveals its transcendent end: again, teleologically considered, the mind is God, striving not only to see—but to become—infinite knowledge of infinite being, beyond any distinction between knower and known. And all of this I take to be just so many different ways of saying that, as the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad tells us, Ayam Ātmā Brahma: this Ātman is Brahman—this Spirit within each of us is godhead.

HEPHAISTOS: [Smiling patiently but sardonically:] All right. So we began five days ago with science and we end now with mysticism? Is that really the path we should have taken? (pp. 531-532).

Is it mysticism, or is it just the way the world starts to look once you no longer see it as a big machine? So choose. Which metaphysical imaginary do you want to inhabit? The Machine or one that is grounded in Infinite Mind? And if you choose the latter, what are the implications for how you live your life?

Why would anybody choose the Machine? Maybe because the implications of the making the other choice would be too disurptive. I think it boils down to the Machine imaginary’s powers of incumbency, not to its deep persuasiveness. And that of course is the problem I have had with most of my students well inured to life in the mechanistic imaginary of the TCM. Nobody they know and respect makes the Mind Team’s arguments, no teacher they've had in high school or university. And maybe if they were brought up in a religious family they got a whiff, but chances are that even if they were made to memorize the hymn, they never learned the melody. Religion was about keeping your pants zipped, following the rules, and maybe doing some tedious volunteer work. “And besides,” they might say to themselves, “what does all of that have to do with living in the world my friends at school live in or the career that I aspire to in the TCM? Religion is baggage I'd rather not carry.”

But if religion has too much negative baggage, philosophy, if presented in the right way--not as an academic exercise but as the quest for wisdom—might be a more effective tool to show these students that there was another attractive choice besides the one presented by the Matter Team. For what is wisdom except to have a richer, deeper, firmer relationship with Reality. Isn’t that what all intelligent, spirited human beings want? The duller, more conformist students wouldn’t care, but the best would, right? A good many of them did. And Hart’s arguments can over time work the same way on the best, most spirited independent minded folks in the culture’s intelligentsia.

***

This is already too long, but one last thought: As suggested, Hart is making an argument for the benefit of the secular intelligentsia in much the same spirit that I was teaching my class. Hart is saying to those on the Matter Team: I understand your point of view, but do you understand mine? Can you see its reasonableness and do you grasp the richness of its possibilities?

Ideas matter, and what a society’s elites think and believe is important because it affects the entire society. Right now a big part of the crisis we’re in lies in the split between its educated elites and its Middle-American demos, and I don’t see how the crisis gets resolved until that gets fixed. Perry Anderson addresses this in his article "Idees Forces" that I referenced in a previous post:

Eliot’s key observation was that any major belief system constitutes a hierarchy of different levels of conceptual complexity, running from highly sophisticated intellectual constructions at the top—accessible only to an educated elite—through broader and less refined versions at intermediate tiers, down to the crudest and most elementary simplifications at a popular level: all of these nevertheless unified by a single idiom, and supported by a corresponding set of symbolic practices. Only such a totalized system, he argued, was worthy of the name of a real culture, and capable of generating great art.

I think that Anderson is mainly right here—what we’re missing is the “unity of idiom”. Elites are speaking a language that makes no sense to Middle America, and Middle America needs its elites to be on the same page with it not just on economic issues, but also in sharing the same metaphysical imaginary. The great post-Axial civilizations at their core were unified in this way. There was plenty of room for disagreement about details, but there was at least a shared language that allowed them to argue about the details. There is no such shared language now between America’s elites and its demos, and so long as there isn’t, the demos will continue to put people into power who speak their language even if they are fools, thieves, and predators.

Is it possible the Mind Team might once again become hegemonic in Western societies? Maybe. I don’t really know if it’s possible any time soon, but it would be one path toward restoring a common language between elites and the demos. But the best argument for the Mind Team is its discontinuity with what we have now because the Matter Team has been running things, it has made a huge mess, it’s dragging us toward dystopia, and it needs to be replaced.

 

 

Notes

1. Not to choose is a choice, too. A choice that leads to a lukewarmness of the spirit.

2. ”The heart has its reasons which reason knows nothing of.”

The Difference between Faith and Belief

I haven’t read Douthat’s new book, Believe: Why Everybody Should Be Religious, and I don’t intend to. I’m sure there’s much in it that overlaps with what I’ve been writing here, as well as significant differences, neither of which are particularly interesting to me. I’m more interested in George Packer’s review of it this morning in the Atlantic because it represents the attitude common if not the conventional default among liberal intellectuals—

At difficult times I’ve tried very hard to cross the river into the kingdom of faith—read the Jewish Bible and the New Testament, attended church and temple services, immersed myself in Kierkegaard, and stared at the sky for a flicker of divinity. None of it made any difference. The universe remains random, empty, cold. We’re alone in the dark, nothing means anything until we give it meaning, and death is the end. These are comfortless facts, but I’ve come to accept and even, at times, embrace them, with no desire to disenchant anyone else.

This strives to sound brave and dignified, and I’m sure it’s sincerely believed, but it sounds to me like conventional, intellectual cant. It’s what most secular liberals “believe” without much pressure to believe anything else. Sure, he’s done his due diligence, read his Kierkegaard and whatnot, and he finds no need to take his “leap” into faith.

But I think K’s leap of faith is generally misundertood as are the purposes of the traditional proofs for the existence of God. No one can persuade you to have faith. Faith is a gift, which means that it’s not something you reason yourself to. There’s something fundamentally irrational, or, more accurately, supra-rational about it. It’s something if you experience it, turns your world upside down, and then the question becomes whether you choose to live with the implications, i.e., to live in the world in a upside down kind of way.

So Faith and Belief are not the same thing. Belief can be reaonable in a way faith cannot be. And so my reading of the Kierkegaardian leap is to understand it in light of the Kantian antinomies. Kant was the great philosopher of the powers and limits of Reason, but he didn’t think that reason was the only way you get to truth. So, for instance, he said that reason alone cannot prove that humans have freedom or whether they are determined. Perfectly reasonable cases, he said, can be made for either, and neither case disproves the other. So you’re faced with a choice, an either/or. You must choose, take a leap, so to say, in ‘believing’ either that you are free or that you are not without there being any rational certainty that you are either. Believing is not the same as rational certainty, and it’s not the same as faith. But it’s not un-reasonable.

But, you might ask, isn’t the leap itself the enactment of freedom? Good point. And in a way that is the point. Unfreedom is our condition until we choose it, not because we’re rational, but because freedom, in order to be freedom, has to be enacted. If you are truly free, you choose freedom. And that cannot make any “sense” to someone who has not chosen it. Those who are truly free have no doubts about it. What you believe or don’t has consequences.

And the same thing is true about God—his existence cannot be rationally proved or disproved. So you must choose. And your choice is existentially consequential on so many different levels. And among those consequences is the choice to live in a world that is ontologically meaningless or meaningful.

Why would anyone choose to live in a world that is meaningless? There are only two reasons that I can think of:

1. That’s honestly how one experiences it. Everything in his or her life is meaningless, graceless, cruel, and without purpose.

2. Two, it’s an idol of the tribe. It’s the fashion. There’s a kind of intellectual conformity that drives it. You can’t be an intellectual in good standing unless your beliefs conform to what is for the moment hegemonic.¹

And I’d add a third reason, peculiar to our moment, that reinforces both of these—the nihilistic hegemony of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Insofar as it is the cultural operating system on which our cultural/political/economic system runs, it promotes meaningless and unfreedom. It wants you to be docile and to derive your sense of meaning from your participation in its hive mind. Human meaninglessness and unfreedom are essential to its program.

But, you might object, if you are of an Ayn-Randian, Libertarian bent, isn’t the creative entrepreneur free? Isn’t he the Nietzschean uebermensch? Aren’t they creating their own meaning? I don’t see Sam Altman as free. I see him as a slave of the TCM, and the same is true for Musk. These figures, as I explained in yesterday’s post, are compelled by the logic of the TCM, and are simply its tools. They are bric-a-brac being swept along by its flood.

As are the rest of us if we don’t find a place to set our feet to resist.

But one last point. My argument for the restoration of a transcendentalist metaphysics to replace the hegemonic nihilism of the TCM is not an argument for faith, because there is no argument for faith. Either you have it or you don’t. Belief and Faith are not the same thing. And so it’s not an argument for Christianity or any other confessional commitment, which requires some minimal level of faith. It is an argument, however, for a choice, a la the Kantian antinomies, that we need to make as a civilization—i.e., either to ‘believe’ that the cosmos is meaningful or that it’s not. If most elites and everyday folks choose meaning to be the collective default, that has consequences, mostly positive.² Right now the meaninglessness of the TCM is the collective default, and it has consequences, mostly negative.³

So the point that I’m making, and the one I think that Douthat’s making, is that it’s not unreasonable to believe that the cosmos has meaning, and while you as an individual are perfectly free to believe that it doesn’t, we’d all be better off if as a civilization we believed it did. Right now the meaninglessness that Packer so stoically embraces is the default among the culture's elites that is leading us to a dystopia. If the rest of us join him in such ‘belief’, it becomes for all of us a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Notes

1 I can hear all the objections, but I don’t want the post text to be overly long in preemptively refuting them. I’d be happy to address them in comments.

2. How such a “collective” choice is made and what its positive consequences might be are what I want to explore in my “Rescuing Aristotle” series in coming months.

3. My argument about how the TCM is our default cultural OS is central to my argument, and I don’t know anybody else who is making this argument in the way I am. Please let me know if I’m wrong about that. But for that very reason it might seem rather eccentric—interesting but not to be taken seriously. I think it has to be taken dead seriously.