After the Future

Wandering in the Wilderness

Reader DS wrote me offline asking if I had written a book or anything that might help him understand the fuller context of what I write here, and I sent him the intro to a book entitled Wandering in the Wilderness I started around 2000-01. Back then I tried half-heartedly to find a publisher, but I worked for several years as an editor in the book publishing world, and I knew that what I wrote didn't have a market. It was clear to me since I came to Seattle in '85 that I wasn't writing as a part of a larger community of discourse, and the feedback I got was that what I wrote was interesting in an eccentric way, but not in a way that makes books salable. They were right. 

At the time I was more interested in thinking about culture and changes in consciousness. But then the invasion or Iraq came in 2003, and it challenged my assumptions that what had started with Reagan was aberrational and that we would soon return to a normal. It became clear that dangerous minds were now in the American society's driver's seat. Bush, the neocons, and the whole phenomenon of the fringe right of my youth having become legitimized and taking center stage in my middle age then became a preoccupation for me in a way it was not before. It continues to be one of my central concerns.

So I began to think about politics and power more than about culture and consciousness. But in the early days, I also posted chapters from the book, like "The Hypertrophied Eye", and when I did, nobody responded or cared, it further confirmed for me that there was no market for the book, so I put it aside as a project to which I might return when I retire, if at all. And focused my energies on this blog. 

As I've said, I've worked in the book world in the late 70s and early 80s at The Seabury Press during the Mark Linz days, which at the time was the main publisher in America for the best European theology like Rahner, Schillebeecx, and Kung, and Americans like David Tracy, Langdon Gilkey and many other lesser lights. I was the in-house manager for the Concilium series, and had occasion to hang out with them at one of their meetings in Nijmegen. We also published interesting stuff by Adorno, Canetti, and Milosz. It was a great place to work, but it was owned by the Episocopal Church, whose board thought it was too Catholic or secular, and after much intrigue the more interesting part of the company split off into what became  Continuum Publishing, which now apparently has been absorbed into Bloomsbury.

But by then I was burned out on academic theology. It seemed to me to becoming more irrelevant with each passing year, and I just didn't care about it anymore. For personal reasons I chose not to go to Continuum, and instead took a chance with an ill-fated publishing start-up in the middle of the Reagan first-term recession, and then left the east coast for Seattle, where I've been since and, after a short stint with the university press here, have had nothing to do with the book publishing or academic theological/philosophical world. 

Maybe because familiarity breeds contempt or because I worked in the industry at a time when the writing was on the wall regarding its future viability, I have never had a particular need to get published. A decent sale of our books was in the 5K to 10K range within a year. I acquired a short book by Henri Nouwen, with whom I took classes at YDS in the 70s, about the Egyptian Desert Fathers--The Way of the Heart--that sold 40K and made me a local hero for a while. Now my blog is very, very small potatoes by blog standards, but when I'm active on it, it gets between 3-4K pageviews a month. So I have been happy to use the blog as a vehicle for thinking about stuff I care about with a freedom I would not be permitted if I have to make it fit a publisher's criteria of marketability. I consider my posts as bread on the water--or messages in a bottle. If they reach other readers, great; if not, that's ok, too. I'm grateful, though, to those of you have been readers and commenters here. You've enriched and clarified my thinking immensely. 

So anyway, after  DS asked me about the book, I read its introduction for the first time in years, and I thought I'd post it here. It's about 4200 words, and I have to say that I was surprised that it holds up and that so much of what I've written in the last decade is more or less an elaboration of what is contained in it. I've posted it with a few minor tweaks after the jump.

 

Beast + Angel = Mensch

 

 

I hope you'll forgive my mania for diagrams lately.  I'm just practicing for stuff I have to do for work.  But a couple of years ago I put up a reflection piece on Steinbeck's East of Eden entitled "Shrewd as Serpents, Guileless as Doves." About a year before I reread The Brothers Karamazov.  I don't know the secondary literature well enough, but I'm sure others have made the connection between the two books.  This diagram shows how the two map onto one another I think pretty neatly, and it gives me a chance to riff on a theme I've been thinking a lot about lately.

I don't want to make too much of it; it's just an opportunity for me to make a diagram, but the diagram summarizes a basic Kierkegaardian idea that I doubt either was aware of, and it is in the background of my piece Metaxis--to be human is to be pulled in two opposite directions at the same time--toward the eternal and ideal on the right, and toward the particular and finite on the left-- and the people who reach what I think of as "Menschhood" are those who live in the space between these opposing forces, hold them together, and over time marry or integrate the two. 

Those who don't hold it together tend toward either Hell West--which is the conventional idea of Hell--the realm of the seven deadly sins, the human life driven by instinct unmixed with grace. It's where Papa Karamazov and Smerdyakov are situated in The Brothers K, and Cathy, the sociopath brothel madame and mother to the two brothers, Aron and Cal, in East of Eden. But Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Steinbeck point out that's only the western wing of hell; the east wing is occupied by those who are seduced by angelism. Both Ivan and Aron live there, and Adam, the brothers' father, spends a lot of time there as well.

Garry Wills NYRB piece on 'All Things Shining'

I came across Garry Wills New York Review of Books review of ATS last night. He pretty much hated it. "It is written by well-regarded professors," he says "(one of them the chairman of the Harvard philosophy department). This made me rub my eyes with astonishment as I read the book itself, so inept and shallow is it." I'll leave it to you to read the rest of the review. Now I don't want to oversell Dreyfus's and Kelly's book, because I think its objectives are fairly modest. But I think Wills's misreading of it is hilarious. It's a classic case of someone who plows in one field being incapable of understanding the work being done in another.

In the  Styles of Thinking diagram (see below) I discussed in my last post, I used Kelly and Dreyfus as examples of Q1 thinking. Wills is an example of mid-Q4 thinking.  He's an American liberal Catholic plowing in the field of Enlightenment-rationalist scholarship. Dreyfus and Kelly are Heideggerians who are attempting to make Heidegger accessible to a broader audience. If you don't understand or care about the post-Nietzschean problems that Heidegger is trying to solve, chances are you are not going to be interested or understand what D&K are doing. The culture is inundated with pop-Nietzschean, self-absorbed subjectivism, and this intelligent and well informed pop-Heideggerian attempt to break out of the subjectivist box is a refreshing and welcome relief.

I'm not saying that Wills's critique has no merit if you understand where he's coming from.  But I think it's fair to say that Wills doesn't have a clue what the book is really about or trying to do. And it probably shows the cluelessness of the Q4 NYRB sensibility that the editors there would give the book to Wills to review in the first place. They probably thought that, what with him being a Catholic and all, it's his kind of thing. But Q4 American liberal intellectuals are still very pre-Nietzschean in their sensibility, and someone like Wills is very much shaped by that sensibility. 

Wills most likely thinks that the old things, the Enlightenment things and Catholic things, still play essential roles in our civilization because for him they still do. I get that because they play that role for me too. But I don't make the mistake I think he and other Q3 and Q4 people make in thinking that because these old, valuable things play this role for me, that if more people would just think like me, that would solve their nihilism problem. The fact is that Wills represents a moribund, minority position in the culture at large, and lots of people, especially young people, if they think about these issues at all, look at Wills and the style in which he writes this review as being over the top for its learned, pompous cluelessness.

D&K are thoroughly post-Nietzschean in their sensibility. They are extraordinarily learned but extraordinary also for their modesty. They are very familiar with and clearly appreciate all the things that Wills and I value, but they would argue, and I would agree, that they don't signify and can't signify to the culture at large in the way they used to. So they want to start out fresh, and so the mood of their book (and of their lectures if you listen to them) is modest, exploratory, and collaborative.

In Q3 you have to meet certain standards of rigor; in Q1 the task is more tentative and experimental. Wills's world is well traveled and well understood--and, except in the subjective experience of a few well-educated dead-enders, dead. D&K's world is terra incognita, and into it they are taking baby steps. And I doubt the authors would claim more for their book than that.

Their quoting Melville here pretty much sums up the modesty of their project because in the end it comes down to gratefulness for what is near at hand. That is a very good beginning for anyone in a post-NIetzschean mindset who is looking to break out of the subjectivist box in finding signifiers, homely as they might be, of transcendence, or existentialized grace:

I have perceived that in all cases man must lower, or at least shift, his conceit of attainable felicity; not placing it anywhere in the intellect or the fancy; but in the wife, the heart, the bed, the table, the saddle, the fire-side, the country. (ATS p. 163)

I do not accept this as a final statement, but rather as a honest, modest beginning; it's something to build from.

Here's the Styles of Thinking diagram referred to above:

 

More Thoughts on "All Things Shining"

 

 

I’ve been thinking more about All Things Shining and why I am drawn to it and why I have problems with it. I think the easiest way for me explain my thinking about the book is by reference to the diagram above.  ATS is Quadrant 1 thinking, and it’s very interesting and helpful within that context, but the thinking in other quadrants is also useful, even if it is out of season. I’ll explain the seasonal logic of this diagram below, but first a word about my approach to the history of ideas in the West, which is really what ATS is all about.

My basic approach to the great thinkers in the history of the West is not to judge any as right or wrong, but to see each philosopher as a more or less successfully attempting to articulate a fundamental insight or intuition that tells us something important. One might say one of the gods has shone upon them, and they have something to tell us by virtue of their inspiration. The problems arise when these thinkers or their followers get inflated notions about how their philosophy has some exclusive claim on the truth. None does—each is a limited perspective, but this kind of perspectivalism doesn’t mean that what comes into view within a particular perspective isn’t a significant truth. 

So it’s not about agreeing or disagreeing with Descartes or Schopenhauer or Plato. The challenge is to look at their philosophies as poem-like texts that reveal or disclose aspects of Being that cumulatively tell us about what it means to be human in a world. It’s silly to say that one was wrong or that his mistake is at the root of some fundamental cultural malady. They are spokespersons or articulators of a particular perspective, and our task as their readers is to accept the validity of what comes into view within that perspective, and then to see it as best we can in relationship to other perspectives. The diagram above is a scheme I’ve been tinkering with over the years that attempts to understand the relationships between these perspectives.

So the diagram is an attempt at a kind of synthesis, i.e., to map out different styles of thinking, but in doing so to see those styles contextually, i.e., in relationship to one another and also to the the cultural (or seasonal) phase in which it emerges. Styles of thinking that seem diametrically opposed to one another can be explained not as disagreeing, but as plowing in a different field, so to speak, but I'm interested in understaninding the relationship or connections between the fields. There is a developmental or seasonal logic that shapes the quadrants from 1-4, but there is also a metaxical logic between quadrants 1 & 3 and 2 & 4 that holds in any season. This, I hope, will become clearer in the exposition below.

I accept the basic point that ATS makes about how radically different moderns are from medieval Christians and medieval Christians from the Homeric Greeks, and that each mindset has to be understood on its own terms. But I am uncomfortable with their statements about how incommensurate they are with one another, or the implication that their relationship to one another is random, as if it's not possible for workers in one field to seek a rapprochement with workers in another, or that work in one field doesn't depend on or develop one of the others. They don't seem interested to see the connections, and so we are left with the impression that the history of thought in the West is so contingent that it could have happened in any random way.

When I put my Q2 hat on I become something of a Leibnizian arguing for the necessity of what has happened and that while there's plenty of room for contingency, for good and bad choices, for successes and failures, there is a necessity about the underlying structure, which provides a kind of trellis on which history grows and develops. Necessity and contingency define a Q1/Q2 antinomy, and they both need to be held in a balanced tension. That's why I think the seasonal analogy is helpful--there's the ineluctable (necessary) cyclical change of the seasons as the earth revolves around the sun, but there is also an unpredictable variety (contingency) in the way each season plays out.

So this diagram maps out what I’ve been describing here for years as the seasonal shifts that determine cultural change, from Quadrant 1 to Quadrant 4, from winter to autumn.  We’re currently in a cultural winter phase, which means we’re in Q1, and All Things Shining in this scheme is a very good example of Q1 thinking.  I see it as an interesting effort to begin something new in this epoch after the death of God, which is another way of saying in this time after the death of the Christian cultural cycle.

Although Dreyfus and Kelly don’t use this seasonal analogy, and in fact would probably object to its use in reference to their book, I want to argue that it adds an interesting dimension to the story that they tell, which is essentially the story of the birth, burgeoning, withering, and death of the Christian West. In telling this story they, following Nietzsche (late Q4) and Heidegger (early Q1), point to the Homeric Greeks as having an experience or relationship with Being they think offers a clue as to what a new springtime might might look like. This interests me because I think they are pointing to a part of the story, but I’m interested in trying to understand what I believe is the bigger story, and readers can decide for themselves whether they think my framing of this larger story is compelling or not.

***

So let’s use my seasonal diagram above to retell the story Dreyfus and Kelly tell in their book. They start with and spend a lot of time with the Homeric Greeks, because they think a retrieval of the relationship with Being as experienced by these archaic Greeks is an important clue that will lead us out of our current winter-season nihilism. While they also spend a lot of time with the Christian story from the Gospel of John through Dante to Luther, it surprised me how little attention they paid to the Jewish story. They nowhere discuss the Torah an originating work of art in the Heideggerian sense. This, from where I stand is strange, since I’d argue that it’s equally or more significant for the history West than Homer’s poems. But that's a debate for another day.

They argue that one of the problems in the West is this conflict, in their opinion, an irresolvable conflict, between the Judaeo-Christian, existential, historical side of the Western Tradition and the Greek side, which is preoccupied with theory, essences, and timeless absolutes. They see the two as incommensurate antinomies, and that every attempt to get them together has been a mistake. I tend to agree and disagree, but mostly disagree—I’d argue that it’s not one or the other that defines the West but the Q2/Q4 tension between them, and that this tension has given the West its peculiar dynamism, for better and for worse. The problems arise when one side of the antinomy gets out of balance with the other, i.e., when the tension breaks down.

I’ll come back to that argument later, but it should be clear that from where I stand, that the limitations of what D&K are doing lie in their seeing as incommensurate by definition the work being done in different fields or quadrants, and I’d argue that there is instead a dynamic relationship between them. Anyone doing creative work in one of the fields tends to think people working elsewhere are wrong, but my goal is more catholic or synthetic—to appreciate what they are doing but also the possibility, the desirability, and the validity of what has been or is being produced in any field at any time, but especially when they are in season. 

When it’s winter, summer is a distant memory, and it’s hard sometimes to believe that spring is around the corner. And that’s where we are now—in winter. We’re at the end of a cycle, which means that we’re also at the beginning of a new cycle, and D&K interest me as winter thinkers who are giving us the tools that will help us to develop the right kind of vigilance that will help us see signs of the coming spring.

Their work is different from most of the late autumnal, early wintery postmodern stuff precisely because it has a whiff of springtime in it. Winter thinking is suffused with Nietzschean nihilism and its dissolving, isolating subjectivism. When Sartre tells us that "l'enfer c'est l'autre" we're really in the dead of winter. (Remember for Dante the deepest part of the inferno is a frozen lake.)

D&K accept the world bequeathed to us by Nietzsche, but they want to move us out of the subjectivist box, to move us away from the idea that meaning is something that the individual human in an act of the overcoming must create for himself--or else fall back into the slavish Last Man. Kelly in particular, in his discussion of David Foster Wallace, makes a compelling argument that such a life, while it might be described in some ways as heroic, is for most people unlivable. It puts way too much unnecessary pressure on the individual and requires an unsustainable effort. It may be a possible life, but he rightly questions whether it is the only kind of authentic life possible or worth living.

And so the whiff of springtime comes in their Heideggerian argument for what can be called 'existentialized transcendence'. Meaning as gift rather than meaning as work; meaning as discovered or disclosed, rather than meaning as created. They talk about experiencing the infinite richness and the infinitely varied meaningful distinctions of Being. They are describing existentialized grace, existential because they want to insist that it’s important to experience this infinite variety as a gift without a giver. The Homeric gods aren’t personal; they are impersonal forces or moods. But they are not moods understood in the subjectivist sense. Rather they are moods that come from the “world”, from Being, and that have authority over us, an authority to which we must submit if we are to live a human life at its highest potentiality.

***

This is an interesting and important move, and while I think there are problems (which I discuss here), they are not insuperable—especially if we understand their work in the context of the diagram above. So let’s try that on. How does their story, which is the story of the birth and death of the Christian West framed by Homer on the front end and Melville on the back end, map in relation to my Styles of Thinking scheme?

Q1 represents the dimension of existential immediacy in human experience of the world. Some experiences within this dimension are life changing and in some cases culture changing. In their book, D&K talk about Jesus as having the kind of experience of agape love that radically reconfigured the Jewish framework and eventually the entire cultural framework of the West. (BTW I strongly recommend listening to Kelly’s lecture on the Gospel of John in the light of Heidegger’s long essay “The Origin of the Work of Art”. It is very interesting gloss on the chapter in the book covering this topic.)

On the individual level the stories of Jesus’ baptism in the Jordan, or the disciples experience at Pentecost, or St. Paul’s experience on the road to Damascus are the existential experiences that had transformative personal effects, and these personal effects were robust enough to change an entire civilization over time—and in historical time, not in mythic time. Something clearly happened, the attempts to articulate what happened are recorded in certain texts, and of course all that is open to interpretation. But a dominant interpretation emerged and it shaped the West for the next 1500+ years.

So in the diagram above, let’s place the events from Jesus’ death through Pentecost on the winter solstice line, and the formation of the primitive Christian communities, the letters of St. Paul, and the gospels as activities of Q1 with the the Gospel of John sitting on the spring equinox line. Q1 then (as now) was an anarchic, antinomian phase during which almost anything goes in the wildly pluralistic cultural context of the Roman Empire. Q2 marks a different kind of activity in which certain key figures try to make sense of the world in light of the Q1 existential experience. It was about the attempts of the early Church Fathers to bring some order into the Q1 chaos, and this was an articulating project.

In my diagram, Q2 is the field in which thinking seeks to work out the implications of the Q1 existential experience, and the early Christian thinkers leaned heavily on Greek philosophy to effect that kind of understanding. Greek thinking, particularly in its Platonic and Neoplatonic articulations, is concerned to understand the world in terms of its eternal essences. For Plato, mathematics was the hidden logos of being, and the human mind was capable of understanding Being with mathematical clarity. It's no surprise then, that the ground of Being defined as the Logos made flesh in John's Gospel made Platonic and Neoplatonic philosophy a very seductive tool for Christian thinkers to articulate the implications of the Christian Q1 experience. I must say that I myself find it a very attractive tool, and I suspect that when we move into Q2 in the current cycle, there will be a convergence of what theoretical physicists are doing with Christian and Greek ideas about the Logos. But I digress.

I see the first Q2 cycle as extending from Irenaeus, an early Q2 figure (late 100s A.D.) through Nicaea to Nazianzus, Chrysostom, and Augustine, who sit on the summer solstice around the 400 A.D. mark. In my view this process of defining what is canonical and orthodox was not purely a political power game, although clearly that played a role, especially after Constantine. But I think that there was also the honest attempt to “get it right” when clearly some people were getting it wrong.

This was not simply a head-trip, but rather one primarily of discernment, i.e., the probing of the thinking heart that weighs the relative validity of certain Christian articulations and 'moods' in the light of the originating Q1 experience. People who have no idea what the Q1 experience is cannot judge the validity of these judgments; they can only be evaluated by those who have had the experience, which however does not guarantee that among those who have had the experience there are no differences of opinion or that the final consensus developed is the best one or in any way definitive for all time.

So there’s the experience, the verbal articulation of the experience within the limits of language and culture, and that’s the work of Q1. In Q2 we get a second level of experience and interpretation. St. Augustine is a paradigm here, and if John’s Gospel is sitting on the cusp of Q1/Q2, Augustine is sitting on the cusp of Q2/Q3, a late spring, early summer figure. He typifies the Q2 experience.  He like others during this phase is now removed from the originating existential experience, but has his own experience, in this case mediated by a Q1 text. He in turn creates his own text, which is a second level of articulation. 

Augustine’s Confessions is a profound, existentially grounded text, and Augustine given the kind of soul he was, felt compelled to understand the world in the light of that life-transforming, existential experience. The medieval phrase fides quaerens intellectum captures this project, and it was the project of the West culminating in Aquinas’s Summa and Dante’s Divine Comedy, both late Q3 or late summer products. 

But it’s important to remember that fides, faith here, is understood as an existential experience, as a kind of gift or revelation, and not as it has come to be thought of during decadent periods, viz., believing in what cannot be explained. There is an experience, and then there is the attempt to understand the world in the light of that experience. Lots of people have the experience, even in culturally decadent periods. The problem for us now is that since we are in a decadent part of the cycle (Q1), the old articulations about how to understand the world in the light of the grounding existential experience have all broken down and no longer have broad-based cultural legitimacy. So we are in a stage in which the grounding experience has to be re-articulated if it is to have any broad cultural resonance.

But in thie first cycle this grounding faith experience sought to understand its relationship to the world first by reference to Plato and Neoplatonic thought, then toward the end by reference to Aristotle. D&K argue that this was a mistake because this project lost the existentialized dimension of primitive Christianity and rendered the Christian experience into a Greek abstraction. They also argue that Dante’s bliss, because it is an obliteration of the individual in its encounter with the beatific vision, is more Greek or even Buddhistic than it is Christian, and that’s something I’ve argued myself.

Is Dante, or Meister Eckhart for that matter, talking about anything that is essentially Christian? I don't think so, but they are describing something that is clearly part of the picture, and needs to be understood on its own terms. I don’t think that there is necessarily a ‘metaphysical mistake’ being made by any of them, or that Greek philosophy and Judaeo-Christian revelation are necessarily incommensurate.  I’d argue that they’re in a Q1/Q2 tension, and that trouble arises when they get out of balance.  Dante, it could be argued, might be out of balance. It's an interesting question, but I don’t want to get into that here. 

If Aquinas and Dante are late summer figures, Luther is an early autumn figure, and with him the great dissolution of the medieval synthesis, already foreshadowed in the voluntarism and nominalism of Ockham and Scotus, gathers force. D&K argue that Descartes was a reconfiguring personality because his Cogito ergo sum ushered in the modern sense of the secularized, autonomous self over against the rest of Being.  But I think that Luther’s “Here I stand” had a more significant cultural or transforming effect. I think Luther, not Descartes, was the more significant threshold figure defining the shift from the premodern to the modern. Descartes, I would argue, is more of an articulator of this new experience of the individual that is the defining characteristic of the epoch following upon the Renaissance and Reformation. And yes, as soon as the subjectivist-driven dissolution begins, Nietzschean nihilism became inevitable.

I would also argue that the awakening of this deep sense of the individual was not a reconfiguring event, but rather a necessary development from the original Q1 experience. Central to the Christian revelation was the idea of the Kingdom of God being born within the individual soul of the believer—Protestantism is the necessary culture-wide expression or blossoming of this sense of the individual as having this kind of interior life. This life is something separate from the collective or communal life of the Durkheimian social world, which defined the Catholic Christian experience. It’s not that the Catholic experience at its best was wrong; around 1500 it was no longer in season.  

The breakdown of the Durkheimian community is the story Charles Taylor tells in his A Secular Age, and it was inevitable that as soon as the primary locus for religious experience moves from outer communal framework to an inner subjective framework that this would have a dissolving effect on religious institutions. And a second problem develops because the existential faith experience is not available to everyone--it is by definition a gift. This was a problem the Massachusetts Puritans faced when second and third generation colonists did not have existential conversion experiences that were necessary for church membership. It doesn't take long for the originating experience to dissipate and evolve into a fuzzy Unitarianism that has little or no understanding of the originating existential faith experience.

Institutions shaped by foundational, existential experiences cannot survive long in the Durkheimian sense if the foundational existential experience is something that has to meet this subjectivist criterion. The subjective experience cannot be generationally transferred, because faith as an existential experience just doesn’t work that way. And so the Durkheimian god of the Christian West abandoned communal life in going underground, so to speak, into the interior subjective experience of believers, and eventually it all but died as a presence in the traditional Durkheimian social forms. There develops what Taylor calls the neo-Durkheimian religious forms that typify American civil religion, but that has little or nothing to do with Christianity.   

So Q3, which correlates with modern, post-renaissance, post-reformation period in the West, is the Age of Dissolution. Put Kant and Rousseau and the American Revolution in October,  the French Revolution begins the downslide into the secular in November, and the crude capitalist materialism of the 19th century as December. And the darkness of December culminates with Nietzsche, whom we place on the Winter Solstice line. If Jesus Christ was in that position at the beginning of the cycle, it is fitting that the man who called himself the anti-Christ sits on it at the end of the cycle.

***

It’s always struck me as interesting that the year in the Western calendar begins in winter rather than in spring. It relates, of course, to the solstice and the shift from increasing darkness to increasing light in late December early January, rather than the shift from organic death to organic rebirth in late March early April.  It symbolizes what deep down we all know to be true—that what happens in the sublunar or immanent, contingent world is preceded in some way by that which influences it from outside in the world of transcendent necessity.

And so here we are in Q1 again. Like Q1 at the beginning of the last cycle, it’s an anarchic, wildly pluralist era in which anything goes. But if in retrospect we see Jesus’ life and the formation of the primitive Christian communities as the seeds from which the new cycle would develop, it would have been impossible for a contemporary, objective observer to recognize their significance, unless they were somehow, magi-like, predisposed to see the signs of it.

Quadrant 1 correlates with winter, the season when the old thing has clearly died, and it's not yet clear what the new thing will be. You look around, not much life to be seen. It doesn’t  mean it isn’t there,  it’s just not visible because it’s in the underworld awaiting the sun’s return which will set off all the alarms awakening this sleeping life so that it groggily at first will emerge to do its work in the daylight world. I’d argue that God hasn’t died, but that he’s gone underground. He’s living in the seeds and roots and tubers, which during winter hold an enormous store of dormant life that awaits its moment to burst forth.  Our task is to practice the good farmer's winter discipline--to sharpen and oil the tools, to feed and care for the animals, to repair the rickety barn and the empty silos, and to be vigilant for signs of spring.

I like All Things Shining because I see it as a tool-sharpening exercise. It’s a book about developing habits of vigilance, of paying attention to the Being of the world. It’s a modest book in that sense, because its examples about what Being has to reveal are homely ones—experiences at sports events, or the making of a well-crafted wheel or cup of coffee. And that’s fine. That’s the kind of thing we must attend to during winter. But surely there is much, much more. And when it emerges from the underworld where it’s sleeping, then we shall have that 'more' to talk about as we move into Q2. 

Tea Party at the Mall

Liberal and rationalist Steve Benen asks what do these people want?  He can't figure it out, but I don't think it's that difficult.  They want the United States to be what it was before the Civil War.  I don't think it's primarily driven by racism; racism is a part of it because that's the way people were then--it's part of the ante-bellum social imaginary. Sure this is a story about people being manipulated by the Koch brothers, Rupert Murdoch, and astro-turf organizations like Freedom Works, but what interests me is the underlying sub-rational mythos that makes their manipulations possible in the first place. If you cannot understand the appeal that the Tea Party has for many Americans, it's probably because you have no feel for that underlying mythos, which makes you immune from the rhetorical manipulation.

I'm working on a longer post on this subject drawing on Gordon Wood's The Radicalism of the American Revolution and Christopher Lasch's Revolt of the Elites.  The goal is to understand the persistence of this mindset/mythos that once for good reason had its day. Wood lays out the architecture of that mindset, its strengths and weaknesses with remarkable detail and lucidity, and Lasch is interesting to me for being a former leftist whose positions toward the end of his life resonate with many of the Tea Party themes and concerns, but at a higher level of credibility and seriousness.

Although I think he's wrong, Lasch is always a man to grapple with. I think he's wrong because in the final analysis he makes the mistake that all conservatives do, which is to spend too much time lamenting what what has been irretrievably lost, and because I think he underestimates a certain resiliency decency in the underlying culture that does not depend on conscious knowledge about or respect for the tradition.  Yes I agree that secularists and liberals owe the tradition a debt, but the most intelligent liberals understand that. The point is that while there might be a lot of silliness in Liberal attitudes, that silliness is not the whole story.  There's a basic decency there as well, and that can't be discounted.  It's not one or the other; it's both. But I'll argue that point in the essay I'll be posting later in the week.

2012 or Apocalypse Now (really)

The river's tent is broken: the last fingers of leaf     
Clutch and sink into the wet bank. The wind     
Crosses the brown land, unheard. The nymphs are departed.    
Sweet Thames, run softly, till I end my song.     
The river bears no empty bottles, sandwich papers,     
Silk handkerchiefs, cardboard boxes, cigarette ends     
Or other testimony of summer nights. The nymphs are departed.     
(From T.S. Eliot, "The Wasteland")

***

For the creation was subjected to frustration, not by its own choice, but by the will of the one who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be liberated from its bondage to decay and brought into the glorious freedom of the children of God.

We know that the whole creation has been groaning as in the pains of childbirth right up to the present time. Not only so, but we ourselves, who have the first fruits of the Spirit, groan inwardly as we wait eagerly for our adoption as sons, the redemption of our bodies. Romans 8: 20-23

2012--I haven't watched the movie, and I don't intend to, but I want to think out loud a bit about our fear of, or is it our need for, or perhaps longing for, "apocalypse".

The word in Greek means 'revelation' as in uncovering something hidden, and perhaps it is such a revelation we really want while fearing that the only way we get it is with the violence. If we have any sense, we recognize that things just can't keep going this way--something has to give. It just isn't working, and given our consensus materialist assumptions, I'd argue that we simply haven't the imagination of a way out of this impasse, or if we had an idea, we haven't the will to act on it. So since radical change is something we seem incapable of choosing, it's something we want ambivalently to happen to us, to suffer passively, and we therefore fear what we long for most.

We yearn for Apocalypse, an empowering revelation, some cleaning of the slate and the arrival of a political leader, an avatar, saint, bodhisattva, or the return of Quetzacoatl, or King Arthur, or Jesus on clouds with his angels.  For they will do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.  But of course, it just doesn't work that way.  (Does it?)

Nevertheless, we long for and fear some breaking of the dam, so that the world can be washed clean of everything in the current normal reality that obstructs the flourishing of what is healthful and sane. This is an archetypal longing felt most intensely during periods of decay. We're mostly sick of normal reality, because it just doesn't deliver.  It provides lots and lots of stuff, but little value.  Quality, or any natural sense for it,  is drowned in this torrent of quantity and our greed for even more. We've lost our collective sense of what matters and what doesn't, and we're reduced to arguing for the sake of arguing, because at least it gives some feeble sense that we're alive.  And so, if we have any sense, we're seeing normal more clearly for its insanity--that "normal" is, in fact, consensus insanity--and deep down we'd just as soon be rid of it. But there's the comfort factor; we'd just as soon not have to deal with too much change or too much reality.

Honor

The word has mostly positive connotations for us--it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor.  But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates--it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with virtue, too concerned about being well thought of and "honored" and not concerned enough about living a life of interior integrity, as if one's standing in society mattered more than one's standing before God--or that both were the same thing. 

And the more you learn about honor's origins the fouler the smell. They lie in a primitive warrior ethic, which in turn is a part of the master/slave complex. Honor is accorded to both parties in conflict so long as neither backs down. It's is better to fight and die than to refuse the fight and submit to the other. Submission is always dishonorable and slavish. The logic of the duel, a practice that lasted well into the nineteenth century in America in the South and West, and the the blood feud follow this basic honor logic. In an honor culture, if one has been dishonored in any of a number of complex ways, it's as if someone took away your existence, and the only way you can get it back is by killing the one who took it from you.

Duels and feuds point to the real meaning of honor, which is that the humiliation of losing face must be saved by annihilating the one who caused you to lose it or dying in the effort. Better to die saving face than to live with the humiliation of losing face because in an honor culture, the individual human being is completely identified with his reputation--he has no existence apart from it. Honor has hardly anything to do with courage; it has almost everything to do with the fear of humiliation and the social consequences that follow from it.

James Bowman's book, Honor: A History, does a very effective job of laying out the contours of the honor culture as it played out in the West. There are several layers of influence that led to its destruction, not the least of which is its fundamental tension with Christianity. There are reasons why the poor and powerless, those with the least honor, are given a kind of preferential treatment in the Christian tradition, and why the wise, the rich, and the powerful are often deconstructed, so to say, by the spirit of the gospels. These people who think they know who they are as defined by their place in the honor framework, don't really have a clue, and their sense of honor makes them invulnerable to the kind of grace that might give them that clue. Pharisees and Sadducees in the Gospels, had the highest status and the most honor, but they were incapable of recognizing transcendent truth when it walked among them because it was in the form of a no-account from the hinterlands.

But apart from the fundamentally subversive relationship Christianity has with the honor culture, other forces came to bear in the modern period which eventually led to its dissolution. The honor complex in the West was severely weakened during the nineteenth century, despite the Victorians' attempt to maintain it against this larger corrosive current, and it toppled after World War I. The Great War was widely perceived among the younger members of the European elite to have been fought for no reason other than to preserve the 'honor' of the ruling class, which continued the carnage for fear of the disgrace that suing for peace would bring. It's not cricket to quit no matter how much pointless carnage ensues. Charge of the Light Brigade, and all that. Those Lost Generation survivors of that carnage saw the folly of the honor system, and bitterly rejected it in the twenties. Hemingway, Remarque, Sassoon, Fitzgerald, and so many others. But the question arose:  What would fill the vacuum created by its rejection?

Bowman is good in laying out the how this played out in the 20th Century, and how the unofficial culture of honor skepticism supplanted the official honor culture and how the consumer culture that emerged filled that vacuum with a muddle of inadequate or pernicious substitutes--celebrity, for instance, and pop-psychological therapeutic ideas about self-esteem and authenticity. I enjoyed very much his discussion about how the old honor culture and the new therapeutic culture meet comically in The Sopranos. In one episode, Johnny Sack wants to have another mafioso executed because he made a joke about his wife's weight problem: 

Then [when the honor culture flourished] the mortal insult, the insult to a woman's honor, would have been against her chastity or fidelity.  Now, having assimilated the therapeutic language of "sensitivity" and "appropriateness" rather than honor, he [Uncle Junior, who alone takes Johnny's side on this] and Johnny Sack both find it natural to assume that an insult against her self-image or self-esteem, even the mention of so obvious a fact as that she is considerably overweight, is as bad or worse. Like Tony himself on occasion, Johnny and Junior find it easy to confuse honor--that old-fashioned thing they have been brought up to respect without entirely knowing what it is--with the self esteem which is its therapeutic equivalent.

"Who does he think he is, Sir Walter Raleigh," says one of the incredulous mafiosi upon learning that Johnny wants one of his colleagues whacked for something so trivial. For Johnny it's a matter of perverse principle--it's a question of honor--but the bottom line is that honor is just a cover up for the rage he felt in losing face, and he would kill a man to expiate that humiliation. That's what honor demands. 

The whole substructure upon which the honor complex is built is absurdly primitive, and yet Bowman is right to worry about the vacuum its loss has created and the silliness that has come in to substitute for it. But he's wrong to argue for honor's revival, as he does in his last chapters. His argument, to me at least, seemed oddly out of joint with the entire thrust of his exposition until he tacked in on near the end. It is basically rooted in neocon cant that we are in mortal danger from primitive enemies who seek to destroy us, and because they operate within the honor complex, so must we if we are to prevail in this struggle to the death. It's as if 9/11 was Osama's way of slapping the U.S. with his glove, and we have no honor if we didn't respond to the challenge. 

I'm not particularly interested to refute his argument in detail, because I find it silly. While terrorism is a real problem, it doesn't threaten our survival, and our response to the terrorist threat should have little or nothing to do with any idea of national honor. Terrorism is a criminal act, and it should be treated as such. It doesn't need to get any more complicated than that. And any argument that assumes that at this point in our confrontation with terrorism that our survival requires that we descend to the level of terrorists is just classic wingnuttery. It's steeped in a quasi-hysterical fearfulness that I've described time and again here that makes us stupid. We need courage and poise in the response to any threat. But we need to be intelligent, and we don't need some primitive honor code to dictate our policies.  Prudent defensive measures, aggressive police work, and a commitment to realistically, intelligently come to grips with the fact that there are legitimate reasons for resentment toward the U.S. are sufficient to deal with threats posed by primitive mindset of terrorists. 

***

But while it's good riddance to honor, I would like to suggest an alternative solution to what should replace it and its already in place whether we're consciously aware of it or not--it's the concept of "integrity." Integrity is an interior capacity that embraces virtues such a courage, compassion, principle, and so much more, but it does not depend on one's standing in the world--either for us as individuals or as a nation.  A man or woman of integrity may or may not be honored; it's irrelevant to what integrity requires. It's primarily interior; it's a quality of soul, or more accurately it's an achievement of soul. And governments simply have to be clear about what they stand for and what they will not tolerate, and the honor code has nothing to do with it.

But let me address this issue of interiority and its relationship to integrity. I accept, to use Charles Taylor's terminology in A Secular Age, that there has been a fundamental movement in history away from the embeddedness characteristic of outward-directed, premodern societies and toward disembeddedness characteristic of modern and postmodern societies, and with this development the emergence of what Taylor calls the interior-focused, disconnected "buffered self". [Quick summary if you're unfamiliar with the book: Extreme embeddedness--animistic/totemic societies; intermediate embeddedness--medieval Christianity; intermediate buffered self--Renaissance through Enlightenment individualists and rationalists; extreme buffered self--Camus's Mersault comes to mind as a literary depiction of the buffered self's condition of soul, but Camus himself is perhaps a better exemplar.]

I don't look at the emergence of the lonely, alienated, meaning-starved, inner-directed, buffered self as a negative, but rather as a culmination, or as the maturation of seeds that germinated with the Greeks and the Jews, which is the central gift that the West has given to the world. The Jews' refusal of the embeddedness of the fertility cults of their neighbors on the one hand, and on the other, the leading Greeks' easy dismissal of traditional embedded ideas for almost any imagined possibility were the beginning of a process that has reached its maturity in the last century. Socrates was executed for his efforts to disembed the youth of Athens from their pious embeddedness in traditional ideas about the gods. 

We are all buffered selves to the degree that we have left the womb of premodern embeddedness and inhabit a world where it is no longer possible to live according to the wisdom of the tradition as a "given", but to live instead in a world where one has to think things out for himself and choose, and choosing is the activity that lies at the heart of the work that leads to integrity. The Buffered Self is free in an unprecedented way, and with that freedom comes an enormous burden of responsibility, and the future of the earth and mankind depend on what humans do with this freedom. And it's understandable that many people are not interested in accepting the burden and will seek any means to avoid it. The conservative avoidance strategy has been to reject the emergence of the buffered self as a mistake that must be corrected by restoring premodern, transpersonal traditionalist social codes--like the honor complex. 

This cannot work. It leads to what I call "Lot's Wife Syndrome" and "Zombie Traditionalism", a  calcification of human life into dead forms. The liberal avoidance strategy, even though it is far more comfortable with the idea of disembedded freedom than most conservatives are, lies in a rejection of the fundamental tension that defines us as human and that pulls us in two opposite directions.  I refer you to Ernest Becker's  treatment of this fundamental tension in his The Denial of Death, but the key idea is that we are both angels and beasts, and that a central integrating task is to live in this tension without denying one side or the other.

Modern Liberalism is rooted in a rationalist scientism that denies the spiritual side of human nature and in thinking of humans as talking animals and in rejecting the spiritual side as delusional and the principal cause of modern/postmodern alienation. For these, alienation is a problem caused by our loss of connection to nature, so we must become more like the animals and celebrate our instinctual life. That's what it means to be authentic--to be natural and spontaneous. Authenticity is the only virtue, and the authentic man or woman is not alienated. I'm simplifying here, and this subject could use more nuance, but you know what I mean.

Authenticity is not the same thing as integrity. Integrity is a soul-shaping work; it's something that must be achieved. Authenticity is simply doing what comes naturally. Authenticity has devolved into different ways of running around naked, and if there's any work involved it's getting rid of the inhibitions that restrain us from doing so. The banal private lives of Hollywood celebrities are monuments to this quest for authenticity, i.e., sterile self-absorption, and its tedium in recent decades has been raised to the apogee of self-conscious banality in Woody Allen's so-called serious films, which I find unwatchable.

We celebrate authenticity because it presents itself as organic and natural rather than synthetic or contrived, but the truth is everything is contrived. The real question is not whether something is natural or contrived, organic or synthetic, but whether it is synthesized from materials that are real, i.e., true and good, or materials that are delusional, I.e., dream stuff when the dreams are wish fulfillments for safety, recognition, or power. The honor system I critique above was built from a recognition need fantasy.  

The challenge posed to the buffered self is the use of his freedom to become more deeply real, i.e., true and good. This is a work, and as such a synthesizing or integrating project.  Everything depends on humans figuring out what this means for him or herself, and eventually in the developing some collective wisdom about it, becuase right now there is precious little of it.

The challenge of freedom has  been at the center of any serious anthropology from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche through Sartre and the contemporary postmodernists. I think of thee people as first wave if by that we mean the people who first accepted that the new reality was that little or nothing is given to us from a culture that has become come disembedded, disenchanted, and deeply secular except the opportunity for the exercise of freedom. First wavers were struggling to define what kind of meaning and purpose are left for human beings in a world where the framework of "given" meanings handed down from the tradition has collapsed.

They didn't cause its collapse; they simply accepted it as their contemporary condition and as the context for the discovery and exercise of levels of human freedom that were not possible earlier. But while freedom is something to be celebrated, it comes with a cost, and a part of that cost is how free humans have become cut off from one another. There are no given connections--even in families anymore. Connections have to be worked for, developed, achieved; they can never be taken for granted.

So liberation from repressive social constraints has little to do with freedom correctly understood. The constraints have fallen, and the challenge is no longer to break down what no longer constrains, but to choose to develop new constraints, new disciplines, that will function to help grow and give shape to a soul life and community life that without constraints sprawls wildly. The challenge is to find forms help individuals to work together to help one another to develop an integrated soul life. Some of those forms are to be retrieved from the tradition, but there's a difference between retrieval and wanting to go premodern-native, which is the conservative mistake, but also the liberal mistake when going native means joining an ashram, or returning, hippie-like, to nature, or moving to the Third World where one can still lose oneself in not-yet disembedded cultures where the buffered self and disconnection is less common.

Retrieval requires first the acceptance of one's alienation as a kind of wandering in the wilderness. It requires the acceptance of having become a disconnected or buffered self and accepts the discomfort that comes with that as transitional, perhaps a purgative precondition, a dark night of senses and soul,  for moving on to whatever's next. It then requires accepting the fundamental task to choose to connect in a world where connections are no longer given or easy, where connections must be worked for with people who very often have little natural capability for real connection. It requires seeking a connection with people who in fact we might perceive as our enemies. Integration is the strategy; retrieval is one of many tactics such a strategy draws upon. 

There's very little established wisdom about how to effect this work, but I'm convinced that's what we're supposed to be doing now. I think the 20th Century was the period during which the last remnants of the old thing--the customary traditional thing in which the honor systme played a prominent role--where torn down, and the 21st Century marks the beginning of the work to build something new.