After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them in mind as I write. But mostly I write about what I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It's where I go to think things out.
So if what I write here has any value, I trust it will be found by those who might value it. I have no ambition for it to be more than that. If there is anything unusual in what I write, it lies in my particular sensibility or perspective, which I'd describe as that of a Postmodern Christian Neoplatonist. (See Note 1) Such a framework, while it certainly does not at this moment resonate with the zeitgeist, I suspect will emerge with broader cultural legitimacy in the future. Either it or something like it. Why? Because it must. What we have now in hegemonic Rationalist Materialism is aberrational, and it cannot be sustained.
I say something like a Postmodern form of Christian Neoplatonism must emerge, but, of course, it might not. But if it doesn't, that will be because the machines will have won. As Willigis Jager writes, "The men and women of the future, to paraphrase a line by Karl Rahner, will be mystics, or they won't be at all." Most of us are mystics now without thinking of ourselves as such. (See Note 2) We don't because we have the experience but miss the meaning. We haven't a metaphysical imaginary to help us identify and interpret the mystical experiences both subtle and intense that most of us have. So like seeds strewn on barren ground these experiences cannot germinate, and if they do, they have no trellis upon which to grow.
I see Rahner's prediction about humans 'not being at all' in the future as the inevitable outcome if technocapitalism remains unchecked, and it will remain unchecked unless some consensus develops around a metaphysical imaginary that is robust enough to resist where technocapitalism is dragging us. Many (most?) decent, thoughtful people are horrified by the kind of world technocapitalism is creating, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How can they if they have no understanding about what a human being is and so have no imagination of a positive human future to fight for? Unless that changes, the machines will win by default. I'm no Luddite. I'm not against technological advancement. I'm against unchecked technocapitalism that serves no needs except its own, certainly not the needs of ordinary human beings.
I say something like Christian Neoplatonism because while that is my standpoint, I see the Neoplatonist part of it as the foundation for a prisca theologia that is cognate with the mystical theologies of Judaism, Islam, and the post-Axial spiritual and philosophical traditions of Asia. As suggested above, by 'mystical' I mean spiritually experiential in some degree, and entry-level experience in this sense is an intuition of the transcendent Good and Justice as an ontonormative ideal. By ontonormative I mean something that transcends our social constructions and which operates in the souls of the most alert humans as a force to subvert social constructions when they fail to live up to what transcendental Justice demands. If there is to be any sustained, robust resistance to technocapitalism, it has to be global in its scale. And so it must have a shared core imagination of what a human being is, and that imagination must comprise a spiritual dimension that draws from post-Axial commonalities and structural similarities rather than from differences in practice and distinctions in thought.
The Secular Age is over. The choice is no longer between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. The cult of the Invisible Hand is bad religion, very bad religion. Protestant fideism is not enough to build a new civilizational ethos upon, and in its Calvinist forms has been too complicit with the emergence of technocapitalism and a wisdomless Puritanical priggery on both the left and right that creates more problems than it solves. Therefore, we need to retrieve something like Christian Neoplatonism precisely because it restores the amputated vertical axis illustrated in the diagram below.
What do I mean by this? The retrieval of something like Christian Neoplatonism will require the restoration of the the Wisdom Axis. Wisdom, as it has been understood in every civilization except in the secular West and its imitators, has become excluded as playing any role in shaping contemporary public discourse. Wisdom, if it is to play a role in shaping a moral consensus within any society, must be grounded in a metaphysical imaginary that has a transcendent foundation. The metaphyiscial imaginary of the West had such foundation, but it was amputated after the Reformation. It retained a cultural presence in the West as a kind of phantom limb until the mid 19th Century, but since then, i.e., for the last 150+ years, we have been living out the consequences of its loss, and with each passing decade we spin with increasing speed in unsustainable ontological dizziness.
(Note: This diagram is explained in some detail in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A)
We are going through momentous events in this historical moment, and while we may be having the experiences and missing their meanings, is there any doubt that we are experiencing something unprecedented in its significance? What happens in this century will be a huge civilizational axial moment, a turning point for humanity, for better or worse. What that means remains to be seen, but something big is afoot. Everybody feels it. The world is crackling with it. It's different from other historical moments if for no other reason than the ways in which machine learning and developments in biotechnology are seeking to redefine what it means to be human. Some radical discontinuity lies not too far ahead in the human future. Our anticipation of its inevitability is the deep source of our collective anxiety and our insane politics.
I have no illusions that what I have to say is original. I traffic mostly in the originality of others whose insights and scholarship are far more profound and interesting than anything I am capable. If I contribute anything it might be in the ways I make connections. If I have a talent, it is more synthetic than analytic. I think also I have a good nose for the Living Real and with it a reliable ability to sniff out b.s. when it presents itself as something more.
So what is After the Future about? It's simply one person's attempt to read the signs of the times and to interpret them from the perspective of Christian Neoplatonist. For the moment that's rather an eccentric perspective. But then again maybe I'm onto something.
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Note 1: Christian Neoplatonism shaped the metaphysical imaginary of the West from the early Church fathers from the gnostic elements in St. Paul through Origen, Clement of Alexandria, the Cappodocians, Gregory of Nyssa, St. Augustine, Dionysos the Areapogite, through John Eriguena, the Cathedral schools, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. With the theological assertion of nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th Century, Neoplatonism lost its hegemony. This occured, ironically, almost simultaneously with Christian Neoplatonism's artistic apogee in Dante's Divine Comedy.
The main characteristic of Neoplatonism in any of its forms is its participative ontology and epistemology and its openness to the working of transcendent energies (agapic love) to effect the human transformation the Church fathers called theosis. Once that participative imagination of the human relationship with the world was gone, once the Reformation rejected theosis, the way was paved for educated elites to reject the world as shot through with the divine, and to see it instead as just stuff that could be molded by the human will. Hence Calvin's Geneva, hence the Jacobins' Paris, hence capitalism's remaking the world in its materialist-consumerist image. This worked for a while, but it is clearly no longer sustainable.
Neoplatonism provided an imaginary for the educated to live compatibly with the animism that lingered from Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism. That was all gradually pushed to the side after the 14th Century in a way unique in the West, and the world became Hamlet's disenchanted, sterile promontory. But it's not the world that is sterile, but our ability to relate to the deep Living Real that suffuses it. It is we who are sterile, and that sterility must be overcome if humans are to 'exist at all' in the future. Is it possible for us as a society to become once again spiritually fertile?
I think it is possible. There have been Neoplatonic moments of spiritual fertility from time to time since the 1300s: Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, the Cambridge Platonists in the 1600s, the influence of Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato on the English Romantics in the late 1700s are the most prominent. But none of these could compete with the seductive materialistic power of the burgeoning science and the capitalist system it abetted. So my point is that Neoplatonism has always been there under the surface--is there now--waiting to re-emerge. I guess I'm arguing that it must emerge again in the near future but this time stick. For if it doesn't, it's hard to see how there can be any kind of human future that I would define as human. Am I optimistic? No. Am I hopeful? Always.
Note 2: Studies/polling have establish that at least 40% of people have had spiritual experiences that they would call as such. My guess is that there are many more who have had spiritual experiences but they think of them as aesthetic rather than spiritual. Many people think of themselves as agnostics, but few--5-6%--are atheists, if by atheism we mean a hard rejection of any kind of spiritual reality. To be an agnostic ususally means that one does not accept the confessional assertions of organized religion, but does not preclude an openness to religious/spiritual ideas that makes sense. My hope is that in coming decades the kind Neoplatonism about which I'm talking will make sense. In order to do that it needs to provide a compelling, plausible narrative that integrates experience of the world with a recognition of interior capacity for self-transcendence. That's what the diagram above seeks to illustrate in a rudimentary way.
