After the Future

Archetypes and the Zeitgeist: The Tension between Order and Chaos

Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common-sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals.

If we have any hope for a positive future, it lies in awakening on a broad cultural scale the dormant archetype that slumbers in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype in the broader culture as an potential eschatological energizing cultural force. If there is any hope for us, it lies in new aspects of its awakening as we move more deeply into the 21st Century and to the unprecedented challenges to the Human that humans will confront.

Now most people in mainstream institutions don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Some might, but they would never bring it up in polite society. But then again it's not a matter of "believing" in archetypes, it's about feeling their energies and working with them. Archetypes, even the Platonic ones, are not abstractions but numinous beings that carry intense energy. During a healthy, creative cultural period, positive, form-shaping archetypes work to harness chaotic energies, but during a decadent historical period Chaos works with minimal checks, and unchecked works to dissolve old cultural forms and beliefs that have lost their vitality.

This is a positive process when it clears  a space to make room for a new, vital aspect of the Anthropos archetype to emerge. Chaos cannot destroy what lives, so the Anthropos archetype can never be destroyed, but the forms that the Anthropos archetype has inspired in a particular historical society can be destroyed. What's important is not the forms but the archetypal, i.e., the supra-human energies that gave them their forms in the first place.

When an archetype with positive energy is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when feeling the power of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. In the Iliad the great personalities are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because more than others they are in touch with the energy of an archetype. In the Iliad Helen shone with enormous power of Aphrodite. In Achilles Ares did. 

So for instance, I've been arguing that Justice is a transcendental archetype [See Note 1], and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was Justice, and he embodied that for  the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the Justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with a power that people only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work.

But here's the point I want to make: Unless a positive archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society. That's our situation now, and, for me at least, it explains why all efforts to get anything positive done seems so futile. Individuals know what needs to be done because they as indviduals feel and are inspired by, say, the Justice archetype or by a deep sense of the transcendent Good, but it's not a felt presence in the broader culture. I believe that can change, and I expect it to. I'm not talking about the coming of the eschaton, but of the next step forward in the human project.

What I mean by archetype operating on the collective level here might be more understandable in relation to the term 'zeitgeist'. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no broadly felt, positive, transcendent archetype to shape it--so we feel the negative power of Chaos by default. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in a way that guys like Ross Douthat feel compelled to write about it.

But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of collective future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative transcendental archetype working to shape the zeitgeist. It works first among those most sensitive to it--poets, philosophers, artists, prophets--and then it ripples out from them into the broader culture. When the active, positive transcendental archetype is no longer felt for whatever reason, the Chaos archetype fills the vacuum. [See Note 2] Because the energy of Chaos is so strong now, it's hard for us to believe that anything positive is possible. But it is, and at some point things will shift. 

Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype, whose phases of growth and diminution shaped the the zeitgeist as laid out in a chart in Note 2. I think most historians would agree that it reached its fullest development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline. [See Note 3]

Decline ensues when the Chaos energies are more powerful than the energies of the positive, transformative archetype. The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about dissolution and the increasing dominance of chaotic energies than about positive cultural transformation. The principal personalities in these movements were still acculturated into the cultural forms shaped that were shaped by the once vital positive Enlightenment archetype, but as the positive energy waned, Chaos waxed. The 19th Century is an era of brittle, rigid, de-vitalized social forms juxtaposed with the chaotic energies of industrial capitalism, the emergence of a cosmology shaped by Darwinian randomness, and the mechanization of violence that empowered Western societies to spread through the world exterminating what remained of societies that still retained vital customary cultures. By 1950 they are all gone or soon will be. They are replaced by soul-dead zombie societies that mimic living societies but are only simulacra of them. 

Nietzsche's Dionysian is perhaps the purest expression of the role of Chaos has played in Western societies in the period 1850-1950 and beyond. Since Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God, we've been in the chaos-dominated Age of Whatever [See Note 4], an in-between time--between the era energized by the  Enlightenment zeitgeist and whatever comes next.  That's the source of our collective anxiety in this moment. When Chaos dominates, we are all thrown into ontological dizziness, and we grab onto whatever will steady us. But nothing works because the only thing that can is the emergence of a new, positive form-shaping archetype that will define the zeitgeist of the era that comes next. 

In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of Chaos in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by Chaos. Chaos shines through him, and clearly for many he has a numinous power. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from this avatar of Chaos.

Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the Chaos. The Trump cult has very little to do with him as an individual human being; it has everything to do with Chaos that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the Chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this utterly substance-less human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to play such a significant role during the current Chaos zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges.

Until it does, the rest of us can only say No to the most destructive and cruel manifestations of Chaos. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might buy us time and create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political and cultural Liberalism, in the meanwhile, is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment zeitgeist performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. But what we need, optimally, is not to keep the dyke plugged, but rather a controlled, cleansing flood. Not something that destroys everything in its path, but rather one that washes away everything that's dead and cannot serve us in the future. Again, Chaos cannot destroy what truly lives, what truly has a transcendental foundation, but that doesn't mean it won't make things very, very uncomfortable.  [See Note 5]

So, Chaos is the most dominant cultural force during an era when the zeitgest is going through a decadent phase. Nietzsche was the prophet announcing the advent the Age of Whatever. For him the Dionysian is always there energizing, counter-pressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms--the Apollonian--the zeitgeist produces. During a positive transformative period Chaos is subordinated to the transcendental and as such is  a Shiva-like source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks vitality. When Nietzsche announced the death of God he was simply pointing out that the old theistic- (Age of Faith) and deistic (Age of Reason) metaphysical imaginary no longer played a defining role in shaping what was of central importance in the broader society. The forms persisted, but they had no vitality. 

There is a lot of energy in Chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't a positively transformative archetype to counter it. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced and so therefore vulgar Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures--you know, the world as envisioned by a typical evening's entertainmnet on HBO. 

The strong emergence of any archetype tends after a while to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so creates a psychic instability that leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. That's when Chaos moves in. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.)

I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values during the Age of Reason was important for human development insofar as it encouraged the development parts of the larger 'Anthropos' Archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being. But its gains were unstable because they led in a historically unprecedented way to an experience of alienation--a radical disembedding--from the life world. It might have been temporarily necessary for human spiritual evolution, but it was not sustainable. The challenge for humans going forward is to find a lawful way to reconnect to the life world without losing their gains in autonomy and freedom. Surrender to the Dionysian is one way to reconnect, but it's not a way forward. [See Note 6]

So Romanticism was an attempt, often suffused with nostalgia, to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. But it's also where the Chaos Archetype--the Dionysian--begins to play a more dominant role, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism. And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter culminating in the explosion of the atom bomb. The Age of Matter is the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism. And yet we kinda get that it's the beginning of something new.

Romanticism and German Idealism were the last dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny in the West. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and premodern traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in ideologically driven total wars around the world. As the first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment zeitgeist and the Age of Reason. 

And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. So Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal agents through which Chaos is destroying the Liberal social order, which, rickety and inadequate though it might be, is the only order that we have. But it no longer works and must be replaced by something new and positive--and that's scary because we don't know what it is, and all we feel in the meantime is the chaos and disorder. But because I assume that all of our worst fears are stupid, I look forward in hope to the emergence of a new order energized by the awakening of a heretofore slumbering aspect of the Anthropos Archetype. 

As a society we are feeling a deep, primal anxiety that is the symptom of what I call ontological dizziness. It's the source of so much of the stupidity we see everywhere we look. People are reeling and will grasp at whatever promises to steady them. Each of us during these times needs to find a source of steadiness, and in this moment it can only be found within. And when found I think it can be described as a deep confidence, a primal trust, that in the face of uncertainty we can rely on a fundamental truth that a profound goodness lies at the heart of things.  And so that the only important thing for us going forward is that we act in trust that no matter how bad things look in any given moment that that Goodness will have the last word. This confidence will be sorely tested, but in the end, as the visionary Julian of Norwich, a survivor of the Black Death, wrote, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

[This is an adapted version of an essay I posted in early 2020 entitled "Fear of the Future". The 'Vitruvian' painting inserted near the top was made by Hildegard of Bingen]

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Note 1: There are both archetypes of transcendence and archetypes of immanence. Until the Axial Revolution, the archetypes of immanence were most influential. The most powerful among them, as with the Greek gods, correlate with planetary archetypal energies.  The Axial Revolution awakened the most consciously evolved personalities in the first millennium BCE from China, through India, the Middle East and Greece to an awareness of transcendence--a dimension of reality beyond space and time, that was at the same time deeply implicated with space and time. This apophatic/cataphatic dynamic was recognized in the Tao that cannot be named, the One whose name cannot be spoken for the ancient Israelites or the Neoplatonists.

After the Axial Revolution, the immanent archetypes--the gods and goddesses--did not go away. In some societies, they were repressed, but in healthier societies their energies were integrated with the transcendent archetypes in a marriage of heaven and hell, in the Blakean sense. These unruly immanent archetypes need to be tamed, not destroyed. I don't know if Jungians would put it in these terms, but I think that what Jung was pointing to in his "process of individuation" was the integration of immanent and transcendent archetypes as they exist in the individual psyche.

In Christian terms, the transcendent Anthropos Archetype is a way of understanding what we mean when we say humans are created in the image and likeness of God. Human fallenness--the innate human predisposition toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--is most deeply experienced as the fragmentation of that archetype. On a day-to-day basis, we experience this fallenness in all the ways we experience being ruled by one impulse (immanent archetype) in one moment, and then another later and then another and so on. To become an adult is to learn to 'rule oneself', which means to command these unruly and often contradictory energies not by repressing them but by recruiting them and their energies as allies in a larger humanizing project, which is to become fully individuated human beings, i.e., the one whom were created to be, the fully particularly realized Anthropos or Christ archetype. As this is a moral project on the individual level, it is an evolutionary project on the collective historical-cultural level. 

I realize that this seems like fanciful nonsense to the skeptical, but at least consider the possibility that skepticism is the 'conventional' attitude during a Chaos zeitgeist. The mood of the zeitgest can shift, and when it does, someone will write something like Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, a classic Renaissance-era essay inspired by the Anthropos archetype, and this and other works like it will articulate this new mood. 

Note 2: During a decadent period, mostly what we get from artists and philosophers are articulations of Chaos because that's the mood of the zeitgeist. Others, who represent other aspects of human possibility work in the background because what they represent is out of tune with the zeitgeist and so is not recognized. They will come into the forefront when the zeitgeist shifts in a way that is more favorable to the work that they are doing.

I'm suggesting that archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So when we look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. I know this kind of typology causes "serious" students of history to roll their eyes. But that's a characteristic of the Age of Whatever--to discount larger synthetic intuitions and to focus instead on more atomized facts. "Serious" people in the academy flourish in the Age of Whatever insofar as  their primary skills are analytic, i.e., all about breaking things down. The bent of my mind is synthetic, which is to look for connections using analogy and metaphor.

The "analysts" believe that there is more substance in the atomized facts than in typologies, as if facts have an existence apart from hidden typological interpretive frames. The metaphors that shape their perceptions are invisible to them but provide the frame withing which  some and not other "facts" become visible to them. "Synthesists" like me rely on the facts that the analysts bring into view, but we're willing to see patterns in them that the analysts feel are too speculatively simplistic, and they will tell you all the ways in which the chart below is contradicted by 'facts' that don't fit.

Maybe. But I'd argue that the trick is to understand which facts are relevant and which are noise. Relevance is largely determined by your metaphysics, and my archetypal approach derives from my Neoplatonism, which in turn shapes my epistemological evaluation concerning which facts are relevant and which are noise. At the very least, I look at such archetypal patterns as heuristic thought experiments that will prove over time whether they were helpful or just wrong. They will prove helpful to the degree that they help one get a better grip on reality, i.e., to help one to understand history in such a way that it helps him to navigate effectively in the present in anticipation of a hoped-for future. 

Besides, my goal is not to persuade the skeptical but rather to open up new plausible possibilities for thinking about what's going on. Looking for helpful metaphors, analogies, and typologies is kinda what I do on this blog. I think most of them have held up over the years. So all I ask of the skeptical reader is to play with this approach, and if it helps you to understand what's happening, great. If not, not. We'll just have to wait and see if the mood changes. When it does, it might prove us both wrong, but whether I'm right or wrong in the particulars about which I write here, the one thing I'm certain of is that the mood of Chaos cannot be sustained, and for better or worse, something will arise to replace it. I'm arguing here for what I hope would be the better possibility. 

Here is a chart that relies on this typological/archetypal way of thinking. It lays out the phases of what I call the Enlightenment Zeitgeist, which was the zeitgeist of Modernity. When I talk about Late Modernity I mean the phases of accelerating decline of the Enlightenment zeitgeist after 1850. Whether or not we are still in Late Modernity or in a truly Postmodern phase, I don't know. We won't until whatever positive transformative zeitgeist comes after Modernity has become broadly felt. 'Postmodern' is simply a placeholder name that asserts that the old thing no longer works, and the new thing hasn't yet emerged. It is in that sense that we are currently in the Age of Whatever Comes Next. 

Note 3: It's interesting that the entire history of the United States, while its founding was inspired by Enlightenment thinking at its acme, came into existence and into world prominence during this era of the Enlightenment zeitgeist's spiritual decline into a crude materialism. This is compounded by the way Calvinism, a form of Christianity that only makes sense in societies that have rejected their premodern cultural roots, plays such a dominant role in shaping American culture. It's very hard for Americans to reach back past the Reformation to find anything of spiritual value there. But that's what must be done--not by going native in the past, but by retrieving so much of what the Reformation and the Enlightenment threw out, and installing it in a way that makes sense in the 21st Century.

Note 4: In any event, the energies that shape the Age of Whatever derive from the everpresent energies of Chaos. It provides fuel, so to say, that energizes a more positive archetype with which in a healthy society it is in creative tension. But Chaos reigns when there is no energizing, positive collective archetype to work with it and to give those energies cultural forms. Our problem now is that those forms still linger, but they are so hollowed out that a guy like Trump can come along and blow them all over with such ease and (so far) with such impunity. 

That's the reason for our collective anxiety in this moment. We find the shapelessness unbearable. When Chaos is dominant, some can find a personal, individual way to work creatively with it to give it some shape, but most people can't. They are thrown into ontological dizziness, and they either surrender to it--via substance abuse, hedonic excess, etc.--or they grab onto whatever will give them the illusion of stability-- control freakery, religious cults, MAGA, etc. Those who have found a way to work creatively with the chaos can do so because they have found a way to activate or awaken the positive, form-giving Anthropos archetype within themselves. If you can find a way to give shape to the chaos within, you can deal more easily with the chaos without. That's when you know you have primal trust. 

Note 5: I've used other metaphors to describe this cleansing process. For instance, I've argued that we're going through a collective Dark Night of the Spirit a la John of the Cross or that we are wandering in the wilderness a la the Book of Exodus. They all point to the same thing, which is that we are in this 'purgative', in-between place. Nobody likes it, but if we understand the necessary negativity of it and live through it with faith and hope, i.e., with a primal trust, that we will come to the next stage, which is 'illuminative'. If someone is looking for me to prove this, I can't. But hopefully it resonates with you, and helps to give you a positive way to live through difficult times. 

Note 6: A perfectly balanced, metaxic tension between chaos and the positive energies of the Anthropos Archetype is theoretically possible. Maybe that's what will define the end of history. But in the meanwhile, history would appear to "progress" by dialectical swings from being out of balance, overcorrecting, and on it goes. During this process certain aspects of the Anthropos archetype emerge that energizes a particular historical-cultural era's forms and ways of thinking for a while, but these forms and ways of thinking eventually rigidify and die and give way to the emergence of another aspect of the Anthropos archetype that energizes new forms that, in turn, rigidify and die. It's in this sense that history is dialectical much in the way Hegel and Marx described it. Marx's ideas about it, though, were reductively simplistic. 

But Marx's dialectical eschatology was what largely infused a sense of meaning and purpose for the political and cultural left. It's where the whole idea of being on the right side of history comes from. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the postmodern mood of incredulity concerning grand narratives set in, and the Left lost its bearings. What passes for social justice  now on the Left is a brittle parody whose energies come mostly from Calvinistic sanctimony.  The Left won't regain its mojo until it finds a plausible eschatological narrative, and that, imo, will be found in something like the evolutionary Neoplatonism that I have been laying out in this blog over the years.

So I don't think of this cultural historical dialectic as an endless, cyclical process of rise and fall, but a process that with each stage makes an advance the benefits of which we carry with us into the next phase. The Enlightenment was not a mistake as many religious conservatives argue, but an advance in this sense. The mistake would be to think, as Hegel did, that it defined the end of history. Hardly. It's just one chapter or stage in a much longer story, and it's important that we preserve the advances in the human spirit that the Enlightenment bequeathes to us, and among those gifts is the idea of progress. 

The Enlightenment zeitgeist was inhospitable to the Neoplatonism I've been arguing must now be retrieved in a postmodern key, and that requires an expansion of Neoplatonism that embraces an imagination of human progress, that is, movement on the horizontal. I'd argue that the primary defect of pure Neoplatonism, which it shares with Buddhism, Vendantic Hinduism, and Taoism, is its emphasis on the eternal or transcendent--the vertical--in such a way that it diminishes the significance of meaning in history on the horizontal. The just society in Neoplatonism is the one that mirrors the law of heaven in such a way that it stresses balance and stability, and this leads to a rejection of the idea that there could be such a thing as historical progress. There is movement upward or downward, but not forward and backward. 

BTW, this is a point of disagreement I have with John Vervaeke's "Zen Neoplatonism", and it's the main reason why I think he's (respectfully) resistant to a Christian Neoplatonism. He is very skeptical about the idea of progress or meaning in history. I think that while Christianity shares the basic metaphysics of transcendence and the Good with classic Neoplatonism, Taoism, and Buddhism, it emphasizes incarnation and meaning in history in a way they would resist. For Neoplatonism and Buddhism, history is an illusion from which we must be liberated. For this reason, I would argue, Schelling, Hegel, Teilhard, and A.N. Whitehead--for all their limitations--are possibilities in the West in a way they could not be in the East. (Although Aurobindo, about whom I know nothing, might be an exception.)  I will develop this idea about how Christian Neoplatonism differs from, say, the classic Neoplatonism in a future post. 

The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

 Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism, 2018

After reading Ezra Klein's column about Matthew Rose's A World after Liberalism, I read the book, which profiles five anti-Christian thinkers who have been influential on the far Right over the last one hundred years--Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis. I've also been reading (but not yet finished) Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, which profiles Ivan Ilyin, a Christian fascist who lived through the Russian Revolution who has been very influential in shaping Putin's understanding of Russia's historical mission and his role in it after the fall of the Soviet Union.

While the thinkers that Rose profiles are anti-Christian atheists or neo-pagans, Ilyin's idea of Christianity has almost nothing to do with Christianity except as it reflects the worldview of the Grand Inquisitor, the main character in a "poem" that Ivan Karamazov presents to his brother Alyosha in Dostoyevski's great novel written in 1880. Snyder doesn't mention the Grand Inquisitor in his book--at least not in the parts I've read so far--but it struck me while reading his book how much explanatory power Ivan's story has in explaining Putin/Ilyin's imagination of what Russia is or should be, and how this keys around the idea of innocence and an idea of national identity that is shaped by it, and then by extension how explains why totalitarianism is so attractive for so many.

I think revisiting the story is worthy of a little of your time. Go to the link above for the whole thing--it's not that long--but in what follows I focus on key passages to develop my theme:

The Grand Inquisitor is a man of the Church who is an admitted servant of the "tempter" whom Jesus confronted during his forty days in the desert. In Ivan's story, Jesus returns to earth in Spain during the Inquisition, and the Inquisitor recognizes him and immediately arrests him as a threat to the social order. The Inquisitor's argument when confronting Jesus is that he, the Inquisitor, is the more compassionate because he wants to allay human suffering while Jesus's project to liberate humans leads only to unhappiness. Ivan's Inquisitor says to Jesus--

Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions.

They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves.

And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.

And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.

Chilling and prescient, not so much about the Church but of the totalitarianism to come, whether or not it is cloaked in religion. That last sentence is so revealing of the contempt that the Inquisitor has for his wards. Because even if there is a God and an afterlife, it is not meant for these insects who could never be worthy of what Christianity tells them is their ultimate destiny. So, insists the Inquisitor, we few among the elite tell them the noble lie, we tell them what they need to hear so that they will obey and will live in the hive society we create for them. It's for their own good. And we, the noble liars, will nobly take on the unhappy burdens of freedom and rule so they may live and die in peace.

Jesus is cruel because he expects too much from humans, whereas the Inquisitor is kind because he expects nothing. He tells Jesus that his believing in the human possibility to be truly free, to become fully human persons, was criminally naive:

But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. ... Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.

He tells Jesus that when tempted in the desert he failed in what could have been a truly salvific mission. Rather than to have initiated the human farce that ensued, he could have created the perfect totalitarian state had he not resisted the tempter:

Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him [the tempter]. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism.

This is the Grand Inquistor's project: to relieve the people of the burden of freedom, to allow them to live as children, as innocents who never have to become free, mature individuals, who have no moral responsibility except to obey. The Grand Inquisitor sees himself as a benefactor of humanity because he relieves them of their suffering, a suffering that follows from their being called to freedom by Jesus. This maps remarkably well to Snyder's depiction of  Ilyin's, and so Putin's, Christian fascism, particularly this idea of the Russian people as innocents:

Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine. Ilyin thought that Soviet power concentrated all of the Satanic energy of factuality and passion in one place. And yet he argued that the triumph of communism showed that Russia was more rather than less innocent. Communism, he maintained, was a seduction by foreigners and deracinated Russians whom Ilyin called “Tarzans.” They lusted to violate immaculate Russia precisely because it was guileless and defenseless. In 1917, Russians had simply been too good to resist the cargo of sin arriving from the West. Despite the depredations of Soviet leaders, Russians retained an imperceptible goodness. Unlike Europe and America, which accepted facts and passions as life, Russia retained an underlying “Spirit” that recalled God’s totality. “The nation is not God,” wrote Ilyin, “but the strength of its soul is from God.”

When God created the world, Russia had somehow escaped history and remained in eternity. Ilyin’s homeland, he thought, was therefore free from the forward flow of time and the accumulation of accident and choice that he found so intolerable. Russia instead experienced repeating cycles of threat and defense. Everything that happened must be an attack from the outside world on Russian innocence, or a justified Russian response to such a threat. In such a scheme it was easy for Ilyin, who knew little of actual Russian history, to grasp centuries in simple phrases. What a historian might see as the spread of power from Moscow across northern Asia and half of Europe was for Ilyin nothing more than “self-defense.” According to Ilyin, every single battle ever fought by Russians was defensive. Russia was always the victim of a “continental blockade” by Europe. As Ilyin saw matters, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.  (pp. 23-24)

Russia is innocent, and all evils, from Communism to homosexuality, come from the West. Everything that Russia does, no matter how barbaric, is by definition in self-defense against the corrupting influences of the West. It's not hard to see how this translates into Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine. He wants to save the Ukrainians from the corrupt West. Any brutality he must commit is in the service of returning them to the innocence that they want deep down, even if they are not conscious of it. They are like children who must be disciplined for their own good against temptations they haven't the good sense to resist. 

I'll probably have another post about the thinkers that Rose presents in A World after Liberalism, but I think that the same basic idea is at the heart of what these more "Western" thinkers want. It is a nostalgia for an Edenic existence before all the complications of human cultural evolution. The main difference these thinkers from the West and the Russian thinkers is that they see Christianity as the primary obstacle to achieving a return to such a society. Rose says, 

Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not dismissive of religion or religious questions. On the contrary, to read deeply in its foundational sources is to discover a movement that takes Christian thought and practice seriously. It is the conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary, whose moral assumptions, they believe, distort our culture and twist our consciences. Against Christianity they make two related charges. Beginning with the boast that Europeans effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—they argue that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous, providing inspiration to ideologies of white disempowerment. They insist that conservatives are therefore tragically mistaken to see in Christianity a buttress against the spread of liberal and progressive values. From the alt-right perspective, such values are the rebellious offspring of Christianity, whose legacy is not the preservation of a cultural past, but the ongoing subversion of traditional ways of life.

That is, pre-Christian ways of life. The Alt Right finds support in figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger and those influenced by them on both the Left and on the Right who see Christianity as a disaster because of the way they have alienated humans from a more natural, organic way of living. They see Christianity as the source of all unhappiness and alienation.

But for Christianity alienation is not a bug. Christianity--as with all the post Axial religions/philosophies--is all about disembedding humans from the natural world so that the human soul might know and be aligned with a transcendent order. It's about moving out of the cave. The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan Ilyin, and Rose's thinkers, in varying degrees, reject the existence of such a transcendental order. Nothing exists outside the cave, and any effort to go out from it is delusional and dangerous. They propose as a religious solution that would return culture to an embedded paganism, a religion of land and blood, rather than going forward toward an idea of a human future in which humans live as free individuals in communion. Such a future, they insist is impossible, so they preach instead a return to the cave, to Eden and infantilism. Rose explores what that means on the Right, but even on the Left, the postmodern polytheism proposed by Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining or the pagan animism extolled by Richard Powers is acceptable in a way that the disembedding dynamic Christianity is not. That's why Christianity is hard--you have to go through the alienation to get to something deeper and more profoundly connecting. It's not supposed to be easy. 

Alienation is the fundamental human problem, and the human future boils down to which solution most humans will choose--to return to some kind of womb existence in a hive society, or to choose cultural and political forms that take a chance that humans are capable of becoming truly free, of leaving the womb and individuating, and of eventually moving out of their alienation into a deeper communion with one another, with the natural and the spiritual worlds. This cannot be accomplished if one remains forever in a hive or cave or cult. What was lost can be restored, but only by moving forward. 

This is what I mean when I say that the future will be shaped either by good or bad religion. Good religion looks forward inspired by the possibility of realizing a richer, more deeply free, more fully mature and realized human future. Bad religion looks backward in nostalgia to restore a childish innocence. Good religion has faith in humanity in the same way that the Inquisitor's Jesus does. Bad religion, like the religion of the Inquisitor has no such faith, and seeks to quash human freedom, to impose instead its fascistic control. There is no going native in the past, which is what all bad religion wants to do in one way or the other. 

Secular Liberalism, for all its limitations, at least insofar as it affirms the sanctity of human freedom, is morally more advanced than that kind of Christianity that flows from the cynical presuppositions about humanity held by the Grand Inquisitor. In order for people to be free, they have to make mistakes. That's why in the story of the prodigal son, the prodigal is morally more advanced than the older brother who follows the rules and stays at home. The prodigal by any conventional moralistic standard is a reprobate, and yet in the eyes of God he is closer to fulfilling his human destiny than the older brother, who stews in his alienation and resentment. The prodigal has not yet arrived; he has only begun his journey toward becoming him who he was created to be. The older brother hasn't even started. 

Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo--

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

...

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Well, of course. The Democratic Party is dominated by the interests of technocratic elites in the economic top 20%, and those elites, being who they are, might feel guilty about their "privilege" in a way that Republicans do not, but not so guilty that they're willing to give it up. And, you know, inflation has got them worried, and Biden's BBB, seems a little too aggressive. And yada, yada, yada. For this reason, nothing bold is possible with the kind of timid people who call themselves moderate Democrats. Nice, decent, sane people, but, you know, they gotta think about what's best for their families. 

To expect ordinary people to support bold initiatives is a path to guaranteed disappointment. That's the downside of democracy. So I admire deBoer's tempered idealism and his willingness to commit to the long term, but I don't think that he'll ever succeed because of one the principal flaw in the socialist agenda--it's fundamentally uninspiring. I used to hang out with old-school Marxists in the '70s--nice, sincere, earnest people--but they were, so, so boring. All logos, no mythos. The New Left, of course, rejected the old-school style, but that faded away because, except for a few like Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders, it lacked the old-school commitment and analysis.

Ordinary people are capable of embracing bold programs only if they are inspired to do it, and the arguments of most socialists never get beyond a rather crude utilitarian logic and vague ideas about fairness. And while deBoer might see this as a  multi-decade persuasion project, we don't have decades. Technocapitalism is foreclosing such a future unless socialists, the kind who write for Jacobin, wake from their materialistic, utilitarian slumber. They've got some legitimate logos; they need some inspiring mythos. 

If we lived in a society whose ontology was not so implacably materialistic, we might have a chance to realize a bold progressive agenda, but we don't. If we lived in a balanced, sane, humane society, one that integrated the spiritual and the material, we would be able to find our way to some kind of Socialist social organization in coming decades because it would be the only humane solution. Why? Because it's likely by the end of the century that AI and robotics will create sufficient wealth for everyone, but not enough work for people to earn their share of it. 

In such a world, socialism would be a practical, humane solution to redistribute the abundance the machines will do most of the work producing. But that would require that as a society we retain our humanity, and it's an open question whether we will be able to do that. And then there's another problem, even if we were to endorse a generous UBI, what do people who don't work do with all that time on their hands? What do they do to give their lives meaning and purpose?

***

As I've been arguing in my posts about "The Crisis of the Liberal Order", the resistance of Main Street to socialism is not programmatic but cultural. It feels un-American because self-reliance is so fundamental to American cultural identity. DeBoer kind of recognizes this, but if I am correct, the kind of long-term persuasion project about which he speaks will continue to fail because it assumes that the good society can emerge from within the materialistic ethos that grounds his Marxist presuppositions.

Old-school Marxism retained some mythos in its Jewish/Christian eschatology without the spiritual part, and so was half right, but half right doesn't get it done. The spiritual part is essential. But unlike old-school Marxists, this postmodern generation is skeptical of all grand narratives, so it doesn't even believe in the eschatological part anymore. They've got nothing to work with except a vague idea about economic justice as, you know, being desirable-ish. 

The young Marx kind of gets the need for more than that when he wrote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” ***

Yes, and everyone will have his own blog and podcast.

It's very Maslovian--once one's material needs are taken care of, the human being can then meet his "Being Needs". I'm all for it, but I don't think we get to that unless the Being Needs get taken care of more adequately first. And Being Needs are not just about having interesting hobbies; it's where 'mythos' plays its part in inspiring and shaping human aspiration. And that requires a retrieval of an understanding of the human as both a material and a spiritual being, whose spiritual needs are equally as important as his material needs. Man does not eat by bread alone. It used to be a truism, but it no longer is. Religion is an opiate only if it enervates; not if it inspires.

Some of the folks at Jacobin might say that this is unfair, that they, especially the more Frankfurt-y among them, acknowledge that human beings have a spiritual dimension. The Frankfurters because of their interest in culture were also interested in an honest interrogation of religion. They saw religion as both the matrix of superstition and repression, while at the same time as the repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity. True and True, but do young American socialist see religion in any but the first sense? And when they talk about spirit, isn't their imagination of it shaped primarily by the materialism that is hegemonic among conventional American intellectuals? Do they believe anything other than that the human being is first a material being who has this excrescence from matter they call spirit but understood only in some biologistic sense? This is far too limiting. There's no mythos in it.

The retrieval of religion about which I speak, if it is to work, must understand the human being who has spiritual aspirations in a much more fundamental sense. It maintains the spirit/matter polarity, but with the spiritual as playing a more leading role. I think of the human project as an eons-long work whose spiritual task is to transform the material as in tikkun olam, i.e., for the sake of repairing the world. Look it up. That could be inspiring if it was something that people could bring themselves to believe. 

I wonder if many Jacobin writers or readers could embrace a tikkun olam "philosophy" of history. Maybe some could, or find it at least quaintly interesting. But the socialism as imagined by most of the young socialists deBoer addresses remains fundamentally materialist in its presuppositions and at its best leads maybe to a more egalitarian, more mechanized version of Huxley's Brave New World--or Pixar's WALL E. It's a world where any idea of deep spiritual aspiration is long forgotten because repressed as too disruptive. Here, take a bit of soma, play your games. Be equally as happy as everyone else. Mission accomplished--we're at the end of history.

So what happens if the socialist dog catches the car? Then what? To say that you'll worry about that later is to miss the point. There is no later unless you answer the question now.

Socialism as it is currently imagined on the American cultural Left is a vision of future human possibility that is far too restricting and depressing. Nobody with any sense would want to live in such a future. Something broader, richer, more open-ended, and more inspiring needs to be imagined in progressive politics, and until it does, deBoer's hopes of ever being persuasive will never be realized. The socialist organization of society will only come about if it is built on a broadly accepted ontology that includes a spiritual substrate. 

And we desperately need an inspired Progressive vision for a human future, because without it the bad guys win, and in a hundred years we're in something like Jodie Foster's Elysium. And the reason is very clear--technocapitalism, if left unchecked, does not now or ever will care about human 'being needs", and as long as technocapitalism is the unimpeded driving force of world civilization, those needs become evermore less likely to be realized by either the haves or the have nots. The haves on Elysium, like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World, don't care about them anymore, and the have-not proles remanded to the desert of the real back on earth don't have the time or the energy for their pursuit. 

***Postscript: From Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right--

Whether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of. [Marx, in other words, at his best was a right-brain thinker.]

...

In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behaviour. [The goal for all human beings, in other words, is to become intrinsically motivated to actively transform the world. This is a spiritual task in the mode of tikkun olam.]

...

Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call “mind.” To call human beings rational is to say that their behaviour reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism.

...

If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the “spiritual” is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (p. 96-104). Yale University Press. 

Most contemporary Marxists are materialists not in Marx's Romantic understanding of it, but in a way that has been colonized by Positivism. We need more of Marx the Romantic and less what he has been turned into by the totalist regimes that have vulgarized him. But, for me, even Eagleton's Marxist materialism doesn't go far enough--it needs more of the mythos dimension, but his is a place to start. Although I doubt that Eagleton would go as far as I do in embracing the kind of Christian Neoplatonic mythos, his "materialist" reading of the gospels provides some significant overlap.

But in America, whatever use we make of Marxist ideas is better off if Marx is not credited with them. It's not something that Americans are ever going to be "comfortable" with.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part II

And that is not all: even if man really were nothing but a piano-key, even if this were proved to him by natural science and mathematics, even then he would not become reasonable, but would purposely do something perverse out of simple ingratitude, simply to gain his point. And if he does not find means he will contrive destruction and chaos, will contrive sufferings of all sorts, only to gain his point! ...--that is, convince himself that he is a man and not a piano-key! If you say that all this, too, can be calculated and tabulated--chaos and darkness and curses, so that the mere possibility of calculating it all beforehand would stop it all, and reason would reassert itself, then man would purposely go mad in order to be rid of reason and gain his point! I believe in it, I answer for it, for the whole work of man really seems to consist in nothing but proving to himself every minute that he is a man and not a piano-key!

--Fyodor Dostoyevski, Notes from the Underground, 1864, Chapter 8

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators. 

--Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

In Part I, I assert that religion and faith are not the same thing. A few words to elaborate because it's important for advancing the larger argument:

Religion is social; faith is personal. The possibility for faith is obviously something culturally mediated, but one’s experience of it is deeply intimate. When Augustine says in his Confessions, “You have made us for yourself, O Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in thee", it is a deeply personal and intimate assertion of faith, and it follows from a discovery, an epiphany, an event, an encounter, which is what we mean by the “gift” of faith. The Christian ‘mythos’ provided a framework for him to interpret and to develop what was given in the gift. And that explains a lot of what went down in shaping the European religious imaginary of the Living Real--and rigidified parodies of it--for the next thousand years. 

But the point I'm arguing here is that the crisis of the spirit to which I referred in the previous post is not a crisis of faith, but a crisis of the social order--the superstructure--whose foundations lie in the Greco/Judeo fusion that Augustine was largely responsible for constructing. This social order was always at best provisional, something that worked for quite a while and later didn't. But that doesn't mean that the originary intuitions like Augustine's upon which the superstructure were based are untrue. It just means each generation needs to adapt them better to social/cultural realities as they evolve.  Those adaptations essentially stopped working in the 19th century.

The crisis of the spirit that we are experiencing now lies in what is commonly referred to as the death of God in North Atlantic societies. This crisis has been a long time in the making--its originary framework started to shake during the Enlightenment in the mid-18th Century but was given knock-out blows by the one-two punch of Darwin and Industrial Capitalism in the mid-19th Century. The death of God signifies that the basic superstructure shaped by Augustine, emended by Luther, and then again by Enlightenment Deism gradually lost it vital connection to its origins, and then came to interpret that to mean that there were no origins for it to become disconnected from. In failing to adapt, the superstructure became increasingly rickety and unbalanced. We got away with it for a while, but now we're paying the price. This disconnect from our origins is at the root of our civilizational crisis of the spirit. The solution lies in reconnecting.

We're paying the price because we've allowed the vital connection to our origins to be supplanted by the energies of materialist bounty delivered by science and capitalism.  Pre-axial religions were mostly about managing a spiritual economy by placating the gods to entice them to support human flourishing in the most basic sense--long life, many children, plenty of food, victory over one's enemies. Capitalism solved those problems far more effectively than primitive religious practice. And so many since the advent of capitalism, those whose religiosity had always been pre-axial in this transactional sense --Please, God, if I close this deal, win this battle, get that promotion I will never miss church ever again--eventually traded in their old religion for capitalism's work ethic. Better to depend on one's own efforts than on very iffy divine assistance. Or worse, they created a parodic form of Christianity that replaced spirit of the gospels with the spirit of the gospel of wealth. 

We live in a society now were the default among its intelligentsia, whether in the sciences or the humanities, is to think about any talk of transcendentals is hogwash. But their rejection of it is mixed up with an absurd reductionistic understanding religious transcendence that depends on a conception of religion whose deity is the God of the Gaps. In other words, their idea of religion is almost always confused with the primitive transactional elements that linger from its pre-Axial modes.

This transactional function of religion is not at the core of the great post-Axial religions, even if it lingered in them. These religions were all about affirming a transcendent Good and about developing practices that aligned with it. Post-Axial religions in the West that were a fusion of Greek philosophy and Jewish revelation were not at their deepest level about tit for tat, but about getting one's life right, i.e. about living in alignment with the transcendental Good or an idea of transcendental Justice. 

But the intelligentsia, in rejecting the primitive elements in Western religion, have also thrown out something much more important, which is any sense of its transcendental foundations, its vital spiritual origins, on which any civilization with vitality is dependent for its sustenance. And in doing so have created a spiritual vacuum that has been filled with crude energies that crowd out the possibility for anything more civilizing, vitalizing, or humanizing that should, if we had a healthy culture, shape its imaginary.

The Death of God was announced by Nietzsche in the late 19th century, and, as the quote in the epigraph indicates, he hated what it meant, and his philosophy was largely a diagnosis of the causes and suggestions for a cure. His diagnosis or genealogy of the problem traced back to what he saw as the progressive shriveling of the human spirit endemic to the disembedding caused by Western Axial traditions. He blames Socrates for starting us down this path, but he sees the disease as infecting the entirety of the  Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. For him the cure lay in a return to a pre-Axial (pre-Socratic), un-alienated way of living by a recovery of a more intimate relationship with the chaotic energies of the Living Real that he called the Dionysian.  

Nietzsche was prescient in his announcement of the death of this post-Axial mythos. Its all but gone now, except for vestiges, traces in a cultural palimpsest that lie hiding behind a consumer/materialist overlay. But Nietzsche's philosophy is just one variant on a rich counter-Enlightenment theme, which seeks to reassert something about the infinite depths of the human being, depths that unbalanced rationality and its Positivist ontological assumptions have effectively sealed us off from. 

So Nietzsche was right, God has died, and we have killed him, if by his death we mean that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a vital way in the societies shaped by the Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos. Nietzsche feared that this collapse would bring with it a flattening of the spirit that would quash all noble human aspiration, i.e., that it would create a society of Last Men. His solution was the uebermensch, the overcoming-human, the human who distinguishes him or herself by acts of self-creation and self-transcendence without any reference to Axial ideas about transcendence.

I wouldn't be the first to point out that Nietzsche's uebermensch draws from the Christian ideas about 'theosis', which asserts that we humans born in the image and likeness of God are destined to become like gods, if we choose a path that will lead us to it. He wanted to assert the possibility for human divinization as a purely human project without any reference to a transcendent foundation. The problem is that without such a foundation to ground it, such a project easily morphs into vulgar narcissism. And most of the would-be uebmenschen celebrated in film and fiction are variants on the narcissistic theme. So much of pop culture now is some form or another of vulgarized Nietzsche. 

I have a soft spot for Nietzsche, the brilliant, shy, sensitive man who thought himself as a lightning-bolt-throwing prophet. He was the miner's canary, though. He saw before most, and imagined and even lived where late modern societies were headed, which was to the madhouse. 

***

In contemporary America we largely see Nietzsche's fear about a culture of Last Men, Dostoyevski's Piano-Key-Men in the epigraph, affirmed. There is no ethos among the educated elite that celebrates noble aspiration, except maybe in the way that Ayn Rand does it. If there is anyone that speaks to spirited, ambitious young people these days it is she, and her imagined American uebermenschen Howard Roark and John Galt are models of noble aspiration for many of our contemporary entrepreneurs and financial elites. 

To say that God is dead does not mean that faith has become impossible, but it does mean that people who have it have an understanding of reality that has little to do with how the broader contemporary society imagines it. People of faith extrapolate from what is central to their understanding of the Living Real an ontology that is utterly out of joint with how the broader society after the death of God imagines it, and that's the crux.

If people of faith broadly understood are right, people who are guided by their spiritual intuitions, people like MLK, Gandhi, Wordsworth, Shelly, Galileo, Goethe, Blake, Erasmus, Hegel, Emerson, Einstein, Beethoven, Bergson, Berdyaev, Buber, Yeats, and so many more, then the whole materialist edifice is wrong.  It's not wrong because of what it affirms, but because of what it leaves out. As a result, it's out of balance with Reality, and if it's out of balance with reality, it's going to tip over and come crashing down unless it finds a way to get back in balance. It's no longer enough to be neutral on the questions of the spirit because the default ontology shaping the late-modern imaginary isn't neutral--it's materialist, and because it's the default, it undermines in unconscious ways the public will to resist its most destructive effects. 

So secular Liberals will read this and say, "Well that's very interesting, but I don't buy it. And yet I celebrate your right to think whatever you want. I want a society in which it's possible for everybody to be free to think what they want. What scares me is that these fanatics on the religious right want to kill democracy and impose an illiberal theocratic autocracy where people won't be free to think and believe what they want. And you seem to be flirting with that if you think that religion is a solution in the political sphere. You, sir, are a proto-theocrat."

I'm no theocrat--religion should embrace a commitment to political powerlessness. And yes. I fear illiberalism, too. But I also fear that it is inevitable unless a cure for the underlying problem is found. Theocracy provides no solution, but a shift in the broader cultural imaginary is needed, and if secular Liberals understood this need, they would be more openly receptive and supportive of healthy forms of it, because an unhealthy form will fill the vacuum otherwise.

It's a tired cliche, but I can't think of a better one: Liberals are worried about the deck chair arrangement on sinking ship, when they should be concerned with the reason the ship is sinking. What public intellectual these days is talking about a crisis of the spirit. I know it sounds hopelessly old fashioned, but that doesn't mean it isn't true. Is this a crisis public intellectuals grapple with in the New Yorker, the Atlantic, or the NYRB? It's beyond the scope of such intellectuals to even frame the problem in this way. To do so is so profoundly inimical to their presuppositions, and that's a big part of why we're in crisis. Nonsense from Peter Singer, John Gray, or Richard Dawkins, however, can be taken very seriously. 

***

What I'm trying to get at here is that with the death of God, i.e., the collapse of the axial Greek/Jewish/Christian mythos, there are no restraints anymore on the real threat to Liberals' ideals for an ever-more open society: the deeper threat is not from the cultural right, but the one posed by the Randians who are driving techno-capitalism. Those folks at the cutting edge of its developments see themselves as uebermenschen at the vanguard of evolution, and they see it as their manifest destiny to steamroll over any one who would oppose them: Get with their evolutionary program, or get out of the way. The craziness on the cultural Right is largely rooted in the "irrational" idea they don't want to get out of the way. They don't want to be piano keys, and in that irrationality I sympathize. 

Because from where I sit techno-evolutionary project is frightening because it's very likely to lead to a society that will be deeply, dystopically, anti-human. And I can say that because I have a very clear commitments about what it means to be human, which draws on the Western Axial ideas about that. And what these 21st century uebermenschen are doing is completely in opposition to those commitments. And because secular Liberals don't feel threatened by this in the way that I do, or maybe find my outlook "interesting" but remain agnostic, i.e, unworthy of their commitment, they have no ground on which to set their feet to push back against the coming anti-human tide. They will just get swept along by it when it comes. 

What's at stake now is the future of humanity, not in some will-we-survive-an-eco-catastrophe sense, but will we all be absorbed into some hyper-real virtual dream completely cut off from the Living Real. Anxiety about our future as humans, whose underlying causes remain mostly unconscious, pervades the culture. It plays out in this fetishizing of guns and liberty and fundamentalist religion, but this fear of losing one's humanity to the machine is at the heart of the malaise that drives right-wing fanaticism. As I argued in Part I, this is not going to be solved by economic or safety-net policies, but it has become nevertheless a problem critical for the future of democracy. The solution for it is not political, but if no solution is found, the consequences will have profound political impacts, none of them good. 

And to be frank, Conservatives are not wrong when they see Liberals as too comfortable with the kind of world that the Positivisitic/Scientistic metaphysics that Dostoyevski is railing against in the quote above. They got a similar scolding from Solschenitzyn over forty years ago that made them squirm. (Why did we invite this lunatic to Harvard?) Well he was mostly right then, and hopefully Liberals can begin to see now why. That 19th-century Positivism is cognate with the humanity-crushing techno-capitalism that is now shaping the human future. And so it's understandable that the cultural Right sees Liberals as collaborationists with machine, for them fetishized in the Deep State, and themselves as the Bravehearts who stoutly resist it.

The radical Right offers no real solutions, and if it takes over, as they well might, they will only make things worse if for no other reason than because its leadership are utterly corrupt nihilists. The ideas that animate the cultural right are 90% delusional fantasy, but that remaining 10% is based in fears that are quite legitimate. But these demagogues on the Right are cunning enough to exploit these anxieties in such a way as to make an enemy of the one thing that can save us from going off the cliff, which is a functioning democracy. 

And in the political sphere, it's too easy to paint the Liberals as those who are aligned with and coopted by the machine. It shouldn't be hard to see why many Americans in the mushy middle turn to the cultural Right because it's a way for them to resist becoming piano keys, a way for them to resist becoming Last Men. They want to hold on to an older idea about what it means to be human. Their sense of human dignity lies in their resistance to the machine.  

***

So you say, "Whatever, but even if you're right, what can be done about it?"

I think the first step is to recognize the deep nature of the problem, and that the only real solution is to rebalance. And if that seems impossible, it's probably because you're still too inured, whether you're aware of it or not, to the materialist/Positivist ontology in which techno-capitalism and the consumerist dreamworld it produces thrives.

So a first step is at least to seek out and listen to those who have an understanding of what's at stake in a way that maybe you don't yet. And those are generally people who have a religious sensibility, people who have a deep sense of reverence about the mystery of Being, people for whom reality is defined by that reverence and not the profane, reductive imagination that comes to us from Positivistic materialism. Wendell Berry, Iain McGilchrist, and Charles Taylor should be on the short list of people to talk to. Almost anybody else I can think of is dead. 

At the very least we need from you a more sympathetic understanding about what role a healthy religious sensibility might play in redressing this balance. 

Religion, if it's working in a healthy way, should function more as a cultural frame that plays the central role in shaping a society's understanding about what is real and unreal, what's true and untrue, what's good and not good, what is worthy of our desires, and what is not. It doesn't need to be linked to a particular religion, but it needs practices and beliefs than help sustain a good society that helps people to become their best selves.  

I'm arguing here that in a society after the death of God, that the deepest aspirations of so many of the brightest and most spirited young people have no where to go except to Silicon Valley until someone comes up with something better. And all the world's Silicon Valleys, if left unchecked, will lead us off the cliff. This is not a Luddite argument; it's simply asserting that in this moment technology is subordinating humans for its needs, and we're powerless against it until humans find enough ontological grit, and with it the self-confidence to assert a human future that subordinates technology to human needs. This is impossible so long as the culture's intelligentsia is captured by the materialist ontology that is cognate with the ontology that supports techno-capitalism. There is no solution within that frame. 

And so here's the thing: whoever controls the most compelling imagination of human possibility controls the future of being human. Silicon Valley owns the human future until a more compelling alternative emerges. And for something better to emerge, maybe it's people who have some deeply felt sense for the mystery of the Living Real--people who are in their many different way 'religious', who need to be consulted on that.

As a rule of thumb, the last people I would turn to are the clerisy in the religious and humanities bureaucracies. North Atlantic societies are too far gone, and Eastern Europe and Northern Asia have little to offer. I'd look to the global South. Just a hunch.

Naive Idealism

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

 

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

The Return of the Bobos

A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful.

For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the posts that have appeared here in the last several weeks. It's mostly just another version of describing the latest arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic--in other words, not much more than describing how one faction of Social Darwinians has replaced another. And so the world turns.

The question that most preoccupies my thinking is whether it's possible for us as a society to transcend the logic of evolution without grace, which manifests in the American Liberal social imaginary in what I've been describing as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is simply the ideology that justifies what most people think of as natural, healthy human behavior--seek glory in your achievements, grow as rich and prosperous as you can, spread your genes as widely as possible, and triumph over your enemies. But it boils down 'to eat or be eaten'. Raw capitalism thrives within an ethos defined by such an ideology--it is as pure a manifestation of Social Darwinism as you're ever likely to find. 

The best human beings as individuals are capable of transcending this way of "being natural". We see it all the time. The question is whether societies are. I believe they are capable of it, of at least slowly evolving out of it. But the first step is to believe it's possible so that at least we can organize around our aspiring toward it. That would require our transcending the values presuppositions of the Liberal Order, presuppositions that privilege the secular and the materialistic. From the beginning, the most trenchant criticism of modernity and its Liberal ethos has been that it quashes any kind of spiritually noble aspiration, channeling human aspiration instead toward the fulfillment of crude appetites, aka, the pursuit of happiness. In other words, Liberalism has always implicitly accepted the logic of Social Darwinism avant la lettre. Hobbes was its earliest theoretician of note. 

At this point in our development, Social Darwinism shapes the social imaginary of the cultural left as much as it does the right. Left and Right are just competing tribes in a contest for survival. There are "nice" Social Darwinians and "mean" ones. The nice ones want to find ways of mitigating the worst effects of the Social Darwinian game on its losers, and they're mostly on the Left. The mean ones couldn't care less about the losers, and they're mostly on the Right. But the problem lies in the rules of the game itself. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives question the validity of the rules, and neither do moderates like David Brooks. 

But I fear that the U.S is like the USSR in the '80s. We're teetering and about to collapse from our own dead weight. The Tucker Carlsons of the world are just the hyenas who are waiting for the sick elephant to die, and doing what he can in the meantime to hasten the process. 

The average educated, affluent Liberal cannot appreciate that we're near collapse because for him the Liberal meritocracy is as good as it gets.The system has worked well for him, and all it needs is a few tweaks here and there. Such Liberals are concerned that the system be fair, but they don't understand that a meritocracy can never be fair. Fairness is just their way of fooling themselves that that they can participate  in a system that is fundamentally corrupting in good conscience.

Liberals often talk about their being an epistemological crisis--and it's true, there is one--but they're less likely to appreciate that it's rooted in a metaphysical crisis, which in turn leads to a moral or ethical crisis. Liberals don't understand that so much of their posturing about fairness and justice is like a group of drug dealers debating among themselves whether there is an environmentally friendly way to exploit their users.

Liberals in the order bequeathed to us by Hobbes have no real moral imperative except to be Nice. We all do better if we don't tear ourselves to pieces in the war of all against all. But there is something so emasculating about "being nice" in this way. Hobbes understood the price, which was the alienation that comes with the surrender of one's freedom to the State, so is there any wonder that factions within the Liberal Order, especially those benefitting least from it, might consider being not nice is more authentic, more free, more noble? 

***

I like David Brooks. He's a serious, decent guy, and he's often insightful. But as I've been arguing for years, Liberals, and Brooks is very much a Liberal, don't have the spiritual and cultural resources to transcend the contradictions of the society Liberalism with its capitalist engine has created, and American society is Liberalism on steroids, and insofar as it is driven by the logic of capitalism, it is Social Darwinism on steroids. There are no real constraints anymore on the worst excesses of capitalism except to hope that people be "nice". The churches used to provide some constraints, but they've become more a part of the problem than a solution insofar as they are among the major promoters of our current tribal warfare. (The churches for the most part have become an embarrassment. They've given Christianity a bad name.) 

Brooks, among the members of the class he purports to represent, has historically been more friendly to religion and more critical of the secularist and materialist presuppositions that play such a large role in shaping its ethos. And as such he has represented a version of Liberal cultural conservatism within the broader Liberal ethos as an op-ed columnist at the NYT or the reasonable moderate conservative on PBS. I've wondered sometimes if his University of Chicago roots has meant his concern for religion is more in the vein of the Straussian noble lie, but I have come to believe that he is sincere in his aspiration for Americans to find a higher collective moral purpose.

Brooks has long played the role of describing the manners of his class. What is the "higher selfishness", except a spiritualized version of Social Darwinism peculiar to his liberal Bobos? He's right to point out that there's nothing higher about it at all. But he does this while on the one hand standing on ground defined by the older Judeo-Christian values he sees as intrinsic to the American character, while on the other standing on the ground defined by capitalism, which has been the historical-cultural force most destructive of Judeo-Christian values.

And so for that reason he's always struck me as that kind of incoherent religious conservative that wants to embrace the creative/destructive energies of capitalism while at the same time preserving the traditional religiosity, customs, and decency mores of Middle America. I say incoherent because the destructive powers of consumer capitalism have obliterated 'traditional' America, and the loss of 'traditional America' is really what bothers the tribalists that constitute Brooks's Red class hierarchy in his Atlantic article. Brooks seems to want to blame Red-Team insanity at least in part on the sins of Blue-Team arrogance, but this is just wrong.

The Bobos who sit atop the Blue-Team class hierarchy are simply those who have best adapted to the kind of culture/society that the creative/destructive powers of capitalism have created. They didn't cause it, and they're not to blame. They were just clever enough or lucky enough to go with the flow. The people in the Red-Team hierarchy are simply resentful of those who sit atop the Blue-Team hierarchy because the cosmopolitan Blues won, and now their traditionalist Red politics are all about finding a way for them to win back what was lost. This is what makes their politics so stupid and destructively revanchist--because it is so out of tune with and poorly adapted to the kind of society that late capitalism has created. 

There's no stuffing the toothpaste back into the tube, and that's what these revanchists want to do, and Brooks seems to be at least mildly sympathetic to the revanchist cause in this respect. He, too, wishes that somehow we could find a way to return the toothpaste from whence it came, and he seems to think that if Blues could compromise a little or try to empathize with the concerns of Red America, it might help. He praises Biden for not making things worse, and fair enough. But, really, we're past that. Moderation might have some role in damage control and in buying some time, but there are no real solutions to be found by compromising with people who are living or long to live in a delusional dreamworld. The problem is with the Liberal Order itself. 

So Bobos are not to be blamed for being intelligently adaptive to the underlying reality. This does not make them in any way morally superior; they are just better players of the Social Darwinian game. Blue elites are just doing what any red-blooded Social Darwinian should do in a society based on Social Darwinian presuppositions. The Blues are flourishing in the world that Capitalism created, and the Reds, threatened with extinction, are freaking out and doing whatever they can to claw and scratch to survive. There is no virtue whatsoever in their revanchist program. Not a shred of it. But virtue, if by it we mean counter-instinctual practices that cultivate what is truly good in the human soul, is not something that the Liberal Order has ever cared much about.

As I alluded to above, my basic argument for years now is that the Liberal Order is in decay, and that Liberalism does not have within its philosophical/ontological presuppositions the resources to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. Does that mean that some progressive imagination of a human future is impossible? No, of course not. And in my clumsy way here on this blog I've been trying to suss out what that future human possibility might look like. I don't know what it will look like. But at this point I can say with some degree of certainty, that things cannot go on as they are going. Something has to give, and either something truly new, something with originary power arises from within the culture that offers a way forward, or the bad guys--the revanchists and the more ruthless among the techno-capitalist Social Darwinists--win. 

***

So thinking about Brooks's article leads me to what I really want to talk about: If the future of America is to be determined by which Social Darwinian faction wins, who cares? Well, I do because I persist in believing that the American experiment was an important step forward in the human evolutionary project, and the Blues are, imo, more likely to be receptive to new ideas about moving forward. The Blues are right for all the wrong reasons.

I think the American future will be determined by either the reactionaries on the Red team winning or by our finding another way. I believe that the Blue team is the more likely one to find a positive way forward because it has more flexibility, but it will require that it retrieve elements from within the Judeo-Christian tradition that Liberalism jettisoned as irrational and barbaric. The American experiment was very much animated by an anti-traditional values liberation project, but it threw the baby out with the bath water, and the experiment will fail if it does not find a way to renew itself by drawing on these rejected older, deeper "irrational" resources. I think that Blacks and Hispanics are closer to those sources because they still live in communities where their religious traditions still have vitality. 

Most Blues are not hard-core atheists. They are agnostic or vaguely spiritual in a New Agey way. And many retain the moral habits of the religious communities into which they were born even if they no longer go to church. There is an infrastructure there to work with.

I think that the metaxis that leads us out of this impasse lies in integrating what's best in the modern project--critical consciousness, a respect for the individual conscience, a genius for innovation, an experimental spirit that guides the quest to better understand the Real--with what's best in in the "irrational" premodern--a sense of the sacred and sacramental, a feeling for connection with the cosmos, a renewed sense of the deepest possibilities for the human being as becoming divinized, i.e., each of us becoming what we are as created in the image and likeness of God. 

If it fails, I fear the reactionary critics of modernity and Liberalism will be proved correct. They were right to insist that societies, because of the persistence of Original Sin--what I call evolution without grace--are incapable of moral progress. They were right to insist that the idea of egalite is palpably ridiculous because talent and wealth have always and everywhere been distributed in ways that make equality impossible. They were right to insist that the idea of human freedom--liberte--is palpably ridiculous because the Grand Inquisitor was right: most people don't want to be free; they want to be told what to think and how to behave because the burden of accepting true existential freedom is too heavy for average humans. 

And the reactionaries were right to insist that the idea of fraternite is palpably ridiculous because most humans don't know who they are unless they have an enemy, someone in opposition to whom they can define themselves. They cannot feel any sense of nobility of purpose unless they can risk everything in a war fighting loyally and courageously for their tribe.

But more than that, humans need an enemy onto whom they can project all their unresolved irrational resentments and hatreds. This is why world peace is a structural impossibility, and world government and the aspiration for global world orders is insanely naive. We will always have--must have--wars because from time to time these irresolvable hatreds must be purged with blood sacrifice. If we don't project these hatreds onto the Other over there, we project them onto one another over here, and we have the interminable war of all against all. Most humans are primitive and irrationally stupid in this way, and to wish them capable of anything more leads to chaos and greater suffering for all. This is just the human condition if you look at it clearly and with any knowledge of history. 

These reactionaries would say that democracy was doomed from the beginning, that the ancients knew what Liberals refuse to acknowledge, that the 'demos' are too selfish, ignorant, and too easily manipulable to rule themselves. They need an elite, the 'aristos' to to rule them. It was stupidly wrong to destroy the old class/caste system that replaced the aristos with the demos. In any society, there will always be winners and losers--it's naive to think otherwise--but better that there be order than chaos in which almost everybody is a loser.

And the reality is that the demos are happier and less resentful so long as they have a place in the hierarchy and know their role. They don't really want the burden of true freedom, and they are happier when ruled by those whom they see clearly as their 'betters'. And in a Christian society those betters--the aristos--have a responsibility to make sure that the demos are well provided for, not something your typical amoral Social Darwinian capitalist elite ever thought necessary. And besides, the most important things in life, the things that bring true happiness--love, family, friends, piety--are available even to those in the lowest ranks. All these deep goods Liberalism and capitalism have made less available. And now these people, these demos, are now so deeply alienated and unhappy that all they want to do now is tear down the system that has abused them so terribly materially and spiritually.

***

But I still have hope that the reactionaries will be proved wrong. There is a another way of looking at Liberalism and the American experiment, and it's one I still believe we can be inspired by. It assumes that there is a quorum of people in America who have a basic decency, whose values are  not completely circumscribed by the Social Darwinian logic of late capitalism and more importantly that they have the suppleness of heart to respond if something better should be presented to them in a way that makes sense and can inspire.

My reasons for hope assume that the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were inchoate articulations of a future human possibility, even if humans at the time of their writing were not yet spriritually or morally mature enough to realize it. These documents were prophetic rather than realistic for their contemporaries; they were aspirational for a future order rather than descriptive of what was possible at the time they were written.

But it's precisely the aspiration toward something that seems so impossible that makes them so interesting. These ideals born at the inception of the Liberal Order during the Enlightenment are seeds, which if cultivated provide a way of growing out of the Social Darwinian logic the Liberal Order that it has come to promote until now without constraint.

That the aspirations of the French and American  Declarations have not yet been realized does not mean that they never can be. If we are to break out of the current impasse, we must be renewed by their ideals. We just have to reassess and think about a more realistic route to get there, and that would require in the U.S., among many other things, an overhaul of the U.S. Constitution to bring it more in line with the ideals articulated in both Declarations.

The American constitution was written by the realists, not the idealists. As such, it tips its hat with a roll of the eyes to the Declaration and gets down to the real business of governing men as they are not as we would wish them to be. And at the time, it was written to protect the interests of both the Southern and Northern oligarchs who assumed that they were the aristos who would continue to rule the demos. That might have been realistic in the late 1780s; it no longer is.

The Constitution is a patchwork of compromises that reflected the competing interests of the Social Darwinian factions of its day. It no longer serves our purposes. And at this juncture in our history, the Constitution is both a symbolic and practical cause of the gridlock that paralyzes us at a time when we must be nimbler and more adaptive. Fetishizing the Constitution by both Conservatives and Liberals is one of the biggest obstacles to any real solutions. 

So while a Democratic Republic with a quorum of sane, decent, well-informed human beings should in theory be nimbler and more adaptive, ours is not because hamstrung by the imagination of it by its 18th Century founders. And so our institutional paralysis is due primarily to the senate and to a supreme court, the former stuffing the latter with Federalist Society types whose imaginations are stuck in the 18th Century. Whether their rationale is sincere or cynical, the practical effect is to reinforce the interests of wealthy elites who justify their predations with a Libertarian ideology. As the worst "thought product" of modernity, Libertarianism provides the ideological justification for what is worst in the American character. Libertarianism is simply the Social Darwinist pig gussied up with a little makeup.

So my impossible hope for a better American future also assumes that this quorum of decent Americans is capable of being realistic about what's worst in human nature while also creating new institutions, customs, mores that aspire to what's best in the American character. In order to achieve this, Americans need to integrate the ideals articulated in the Declaration with an understanding of the human being that draws upon its Judeo-Christian roots. These are roots that made writing the Declaration a possibility in the first place. 

It assumes, therefore, that a broad enough swath of Americans can retrieve the idea that we all have an inherent dignity before one another and before God--egalite--and that we have all have the capacity to choose--liberte--to become the best versions of ourselves, creatures that are born to aspire to become divinized because created in the image and likeness of God. It assumes that because we all have this potential for divinity that we have the obligation to help one another to realize it, that none of us can do this alone, that we fail as humans so long as we only care about saving our own individual eternal asses--fraternite. And not only do we have a responsibility to one another but to the earth because that's where this drama unfolds. No earth, no human future. The idea of colonizing other planets is ridiculous if it's motivated only by extending our Social Darwinian sickness of soul.

A democratic republic is the best way to organize a society that promotes these objectives. But it can only work if there is an aspirational idealism that operates as a counterforce to the Social Darwinism that otherwise seems so natural. Such an idealism must be broadly accepted by all people of good will who are committed enough to it to fight for it when the revanchists allied with elite cosmopolitan Social Darwinians on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Congress do everything they can to mock it and break it down and find ways to co-opt it for their own greedy, power-mad purposes.

Again, these ideals are not something that we just invent out of whole cloth. They are archetypes that lie dormant in the collective unconscious awaiting our awakening them. It's a special part of our heritage in the Judeo-Christian West, but it's there for everybody. It's just been forgotten, washed away by the flood that roared through American society starting with industrial capitalism and abetted by a soul-flattening materialism that seemed the only plausible metaphysics after Darwin.

We can recover what was lost and reimagine it in a new post-secular key.. Otherwise, I fear, the reactionaries will be proved right. 

A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe that began as a ‘whirlpool of pure force’ aims at becoming a ‘whirlpool of pure intelligence’.

 --Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"

Gombrich writes that ‘the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent .’

I have used the language of transparency and translucency--of ‘seeing through’--repeatedly: because as Gombrich says of the work of art, as Jean Paul says of metaphor, as Kerényi says of myth, and as Merleau-Ponty says of the body, our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’--but neither must it be replaced by something else. It is the function of such translucent, or semi-transparent, beings to remain transparent rather than draw attention to themselves, because in doing so they achieve their goal.

. . . 

Body and soul, metaphor and sense, myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning – in fact the whole phenomenological world, is just what it is and no more, not one thing hiding another; and yet the hard thing is the seemingly easy business, just ‘seeing what it is’. The reality is not behind the work of art: to believe so would be, as Goethe put it in an image I referred to earlier, like children going round the back of the mirror. We see it in – through – the mirror. Similarly, he says, we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.

 --Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812ff)

In the Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by the Law of Force, whose stand-in at the time was the Roman Empire, whose more local stand-in was Herod. Salvation history, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the Rule of Force by the Rule of Divine Intelligence. By intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I means something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence' which suggests what's measured by IQ. Not what I mean here. 

The incarnation of the Logos was akin to the planting of a seed in the earth, which if cultivated grows within it and subverts the cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately presents as the material world and its energies. It effects this subversion and transformation by gradually penetrating matter, for which the Incarnation of the Logos is the paradigm. Humans are the tip of the spear in this evolutionary project. They are the infusion point of Divine Life into the whirlpool of pure force. Humans are the means by which, if it is to happen, force becomes transformed into Divine Intelligence.

What might this project look like if successfully completed. It's imaged for us in Isaiah 11, the first reading of the second Sunday of Advent:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
⁹ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

Humans play their role in this salvific project to the degree that their minds are shaped by Divine Intelligence, which is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is "evolution without grace". Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent, light-filled dimension of Being in which the immanent world derives its life, i.e., to the degree that it truly lives.

Computer Science mimics an attenuated, left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to transform evolution by gradually interpenetrating it with grace. 

The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in the heart of matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.

The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its unfiltered translucency visible to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of awareness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which--if it works and we are in our right mind--we can see what he saw.   

The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies hidden or at best filtered out in the world around us. In other words great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or at best seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.

We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it still isn't there waiting for us to discover it as our ancestors did. 

That these objects were often beautiful is a secondary effect of the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy and so were not translucent because there was no light in it to shine through it. But the deeper creativity to which I point here is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not in it before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it. That's what the translucency discloses, an inner dimension of light that radiates out of it. It is in this sense disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Living Real that are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind.

There are many objects that present themselves as art, but they are great art to the degree that they have this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.' It's not something you get from critical analysis. First the disclosure, then some feeble, inadequate attempt to articulate what was experienced. 

For the best of these Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into matter to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in creation. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is in a process of being suffused by the Divine Intelligence, that we play a role in the advancement of this project, and that we therefore have a responsibility, in whatever modest way there for us, to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence, something more deeply penetrated by the Logos--its truth, its goodness, and its beauty. 

***

With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus Christ (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence penetrating the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove. First the experience--the dove--then some attempt to use our intelligence to understand its significance. 

The Christian idea of incarnation, when taken seriously, awakens in us an awareness of the centrality of earth existence, that what happens on earth matters, that it is not some delusional prison from which we must be liberated, or an exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It suggests that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. They have a choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace, which appears to be leading us to some post-human dystopia, or to become co-redeemers of the earth. Humans become the latter insofar as they restore within themselves the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. The Divine became human so that the human might become divine--here on earth, in space and time, not in some other world or dimension.

So much in our late modern conception of what it means to be human refuses to countenance this possibility, and yet our survival as humans requires that we retrieve it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will ourselves become machines, who operate with an intelligence that has nothing divine about it and that becomes closed off from the dimension of depth where the Divine Mind seeks to disclose itself. 

"All creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God," according to St. Paul in Romans 8. That is, it awaits humans who have awakened within themselves the Logos, the kingdom within, and with this awakening the gradual restoration of their identities as image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved by discovering its presence in the created world. To the degree that the Logos awakens in us, we become the sons and daughters of God.

This is not achieved overnight. There's a reason the gospels use seed metaphors for the birth of the kingdom within, and yet as it grows, we begin to see and think more clearly as our propensity for delusion and bad judgment gradually subsides. Our feelings of alienation and estrangement subside, our love of the earth and the people in it grows (if not the capacity to suffer foolishness).

I believe that this seed has incarnated and germinated in the hearts of all kinds of people, and being a Christian is not a requirement. Understanding is secondary; more important is to hear or hearken to follows from a kind of hearing or hearkening to a song that since the Incarnation suffuses creation. It helps to have a little music theory (or teaching), but more important is hearing the music and playing it, no matter the level of proficiency. 

As the sons and daughters of God awaken, they hear this music, this song, which is the voice of conscience, the daemon, the muse, whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of chaos and violence, it can be heard and hearkened to. This is not easy to do at this critical juncture in human history. This is a project that is continuously threatened by the forces of chaos and violence whose noise currently all but drowns out our ability to hear it.

But if we hear and hearken to it, this song will come gradually to still the violence and chaos that otherwise dominates in our hearts, and we in turn become chaos whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violent hearts of Isaiah's cobras, bears, lions, and wolves. Wasn't this the gift of St. Francis, to subdue the tooth-and-talon violence of biological evolution to the peace and harmony of the divine intelligence that ruled so prodigiously in his soul? 

In this way we become co-creators of the New Jerusalem, an image of earth existence where violence and chaos have been subdued by the rule of Divine Intelligence and its justice, when the earth shall be full of Isaiah's knowledge of the Lord. This is an evolutionary project. It is accomplished gradually, heart by heart, generation by generation, each finding its own part of the song to sing. Each of us as individuals has some part in this chorus, some part to sing, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All that matters is that we harden not our hearts, that we hear and hearken, and do what is called for. 

[This post originally appeared on December 12, 2019]

The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end. 

I've been influenced enough by German Idealism--the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel wing, not the desiccated, imaginatively impoverished Kantian wing--to see Protestantism and Modernity as the antithesis of Catholicism and pre-modernity, and so it follows quite possibly, if history is about the evolution of human consciousness, and if it proceeds dialectically, as I think it does, that the Postmodern era on whose cusp we sit will synthesize the Modern and the Premodern, the Protestant and the Catholic, the individual conscience and of a renewed sense of sacrament and communion. [But see comment 1]

I don't mean anything mystically metaphysical by dialectics here, just that as one energizing cultural impulse crowds out or represses others, the repressed always finds a way to make a return. The Postmodern future, if it is to be a time of human flourishing, will have to retrieve much of what modernity's dominant cultural impulse, Enlightenment rationality, repressed. We see it happening all around us already, but there is no going native in the past. We have to move forward; we have to progress. 

So I am a Catholic and a  progressive, but I reject the term ‘Liberal’ as a way of describing my politics because I think that the phrase "liberal Catholic" is an oxymoron, but I do believe that all Catholics  are called upon to be progressives if they believe, as they should, that the Spirit is active in history. This seems to be an assertion about Catholicism that goes against every stereotype about it, stereotypes that historically have been well justified. Catholicism, except for a few decades last century in Latin America, has rarely been associated with progressive cultural or political causes in the modern period. That is why I make a distinction between a Catholic intellectual/aesthetic sensibility and the institutional distortions of that sensibility. Those distortions can be traced back to Constantine, or perhaps more interestingly to the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic as Simone Weil argues in her essay "The Romanesque Renaissance".

The point I want to make now is that the modern social imaginary does not give us the resources to push back against problems that derive uniquely from the modern suppression of the premodern, and so it's not unreasonable to assert that a part of the solution lies in retrieving suppressed aspects of the premodern, but in a postmodern key. I don't know if it's dialectically inevitable, but if real spiritual progress is a possibility, I think such a retrieval must play an essential role. And that's why the Catholic and Orthodox traditions are important, not for their institutional moral authority, which is close to nil, but because they have preserved pre-modern cultural forms and practices that need to play a role in a hoped-for cultural renaissance. 

Central to this evolutionary project is a retrieval of the idea that Christianity is about the redemption of time and space; it is not a religion of escape from either. We need a framing metaphor to work for us as the Great Chain of Being worked for our premodern ancestors. It can no longer work after Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, but the Great Chain of Being was a metaphor that pointed to something deeply true about the structure of Being, i.e., its metaphysics embraced an idea of chaos/entropy in tension with the Deep Real as density of actualized form.

This tension between Chaos and Logos is still a reality, even if we have no robust metaphor that helps us to imagine it in the late modern imaginary. It was a spatial metaphor, but it allowed for the movement of lower to higher, from a potentiality inherent in chaos to actualize in form when it participates in form, which is to say, the Logos or the Mind of God.

The history of the world, as I see it from my quasi-Hegelian, evolution-of-consciousness perspective, is the gradual interpenetration of Chaos by the Mind of God effected by humans in whom the Mind of God becomes gradually awakened. Science plays a role in this evolutionary awakening, but the more important evolution is moral. This would require a shift from outer to inner in human moral development, from humans being mostly directed by forces outside of them--extrinsic moral codes--to new possibilities for moral evolution that work from within the human soul and the awakened conscience. More on this below. 

***

So here's a rough, preliminary attempt to explore mostly the post-Darwinian part of that. I accept Darwin’s description of the chaotic, blind, groping, often cruel, impersonal, random forces that drive biological evolution, but I see the randomness of natural selection as that into which fallen humanity has fallen. It was a fall into randomness, violence, and cruelty, and the human mission is to be submerged in that chaos and to find within it a path toward redemption. One way is to escape, to get off the planet, to leave time and space for what is imagined as its opposite--eternity. Another is to willingly accept one's submergence in the chaos and to gradually transform it--bring order and form to it-- subversively from within. 

This latter, I would argue, is the deeper Christian idea, although it's very similar to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or "world repair", especially as developed by Isaac Luria. Indeed, it's hard to understand the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection without it, even if in practice the Christian idea of salvation has been more Buddhistic. The Salve Regina, a beautiful medieval monastic Marian hymn, exemplifies this longing for escape. It depicts humans as the poor, banished children of Eve living in exile longing to return home off-planet in a better world in the timeless/spaceless beyond.

I'm arguing that the mission for individual human beings is to be infusion points through which the "beyond" incarnates in immanent human practice in the time/space dimension we call our life on earth. The goal is the renewal of the face of the earth, but this will not be accomplished by some external intervention, but rather by human beings inspired by grace working in the world to transform it from inside out. 

So the goal is not to escape earth, but gradually to transform it, to make a garden of the wilderness. And so in a very real sense it's biological evolution as that from which humans need to be redeemed, or more precisely,  it is the human mission to redeem biological evolution by the power of something higher, something outside mechanics of biological evolution as science accurately sees it. The human task is to redeem the earth from its subjection to the primitive, random, groping forces that we accept as "natural". Read Romans 8 in the light of that idea. But in order to do this, you need to believe there is something higher, something other-dimensional--which very few educated late moderns believe anymore (yet?)--at least in any robust way that has real stakes for the way they think about how they need to act in the world. 

So I'm suggesting that a way to think about the logic of biological evolution is to see it as the logic of Original Sin, if by Original Sin we mean the condition of Nature that is shaped by concerns dominated by survival and propagation. Original sin is, I want to argue, "evolution-without-grace", i.e., evolution without the influence of forces outside our space/time dimension. In such a condition it's natural for biological species to do whatever it takes to promote their biological flourishing. In humans we see this as the need to dominate and control (will to power), the need to accumulate and hoard material resources (greed), and the need to spread one's genes (promiscuous/predatory sexuality).

Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon, etc., are all prodigies of evolution-without-grace. Their behavior is perfectly "natural", and there is really no coherent philosophy of history that can push back against this understanding of the "natural" drivers of human history unless you allow for the possibility of a counter story Christians call redemption history. I'm arguing that the deeper way to understand what salvation history means is as the story of 'evolution-with-grace'. Liberal ideas about pushing back against the Genghis Khans of the world--past and future--either draft on Christian ideas or derive from Hobbesian/Lockean contract theory. Both are weak tea that provide no real foundation to deal with the crisis of culture in which we are currently implicated. 

For Christians, redemption history starts with outside-in interventions through the great prophets and sages. This has played out in the West in such a way that it has led to the possibility of something different. The covenant made with Abraham culminates with Christ’s incarnation and death, and now continues with us humans post-Pentecost.  

For me this provides a compelling answer to the Cur Deus Homo question: Why was the Incarnation necessary in the first place? Christ's incarnation and death was his kenosis,  his emptying and submerging himself in the chaos of evolution-without-grace. This was the emptying of the unfallen into the fallen, the uncreated into the created, in order to effect a potential fusion of above with below so that after this event human and earth history might be infused with grace in an inside-out process that was not possible before. After Pentecost evolution-with-grace became a new possibility, but now as something effected inside out, from within the human being acting in a world otherwise dominated by the logic of evolution-without-grace. 

Before this event the transcendent dimension could work on evolution-without-grace only outside-in, from external interventions and the prophetic enunciation of codes or law effected through Axial Age prophets and philosophers. These codes could be experienced only as an external command to follow the law. After Pentecost, the law is something that is experienced from within--in the heart, the seat of conscience. The post-Pentecost release of the Holy Spirit into history has made transforming biological evolution from within a new possibility.

This transformation is effected to the degree that people--whether they are Christians or not--have supple hearts capable for responding to the movement of grace in their lives. The redemption of the world is the cumulative effect of a process that happens heart by heart in little and large ways progressively through the arc of history. For this reason MLK was right: the arc of the moral universe is long, and it does bend toward justice. Conservatives don't believe moral progress is a possibility; they believe that evolution without grace is the only possibility for the earth, and that's why salvation means for them getting off of it. Such pessimism, alas, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

***

So what does this mean practically. How, for instance, does this impinge on how we should think about the political economy? Is there any purer expression in the political and economic sphere of evolution-without-grace than the market? Was there ever a more brutal expression of the energies of evolution without grace than market capitalism? Is there anything in our contemporary political and economic life in greater need of transformation? 

I would argue, therefore, that if you embrace the market as the main driving force in modern history, you are not a conservative in the traditionalist, principled sense—you are a Liberal. Liberalism was developed as a political-economic ideology in the 18th century to justify the “liberation” of market forces from traditional constraints, constraints that were grounded in Christian, i.e., redemptive concerns, to push back against, avant la lettre, evolution-without-grace.

Pre-Reformation Christian societies sought to restrain the logic of evolution-without-grace. They established the monasteries for those who were more serious about growing in holiness, and the bedrock of monastic life was founded in the evangelical counsels--poverty, chastity, and obedience. These were practices designed to push back against the logic of evolution-without-grace—greed, will to power, and indiscriminate spreading of one’s genes.

Holiness is measured by the degree to which one’s Deep Self, the part of us that was created in the image and likeness of God, has come to gradually subvert/transform the will of the Social Darwinian Self, i.e., the Self driven by greed, will to power, and the need to indiscriminately spread one’s genes. The idea that the goal of life is to become good as God is good, i.e,, to restore the human as image and likeness of God, the idea celebrated by the early Church Fathers as 'theosis' got lost in the broader culture.

To be good came to mean simply to follow an extrinsic code, to follow the rules, to do one's duty, as in Kant. But even earlier Christianity had become a point system where to accumulate enough points earned you a place in heaven. This is a spiritualized transposition of the survivalist mentality that derives from evolution without grace. It's what Luther rightly reacted agains, but it lives on in capitalism, where the basic measure of worth is wealth. It's the logic of the professional athlete and the corporate CEO who thinks he's the best only if he gets paid the most.

Post-Reformation societies in northern Europe tore down that redemptive social infrastructure—it got rid of the monasteries and with them the idea that the evangelical counsels provided a path of growth in theosis, i.e., a path for supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self with the Deep Self. In doing so they substituted a new idea about morality that was more extrinsically legalistic than inwardly driven and Christian.

Modernity introduced a new emphasis on the individual and freedom, but freedom in the service of what? As traditional ideas about theosis were cast aside, what I'm calling here the Social Darwinian Self and its fulfillment emerges as the new "natural" norm. It's only natural to want to dominate others. It's only natural to want to make billions of dollars. It's only natural to have as many lovers as possible. This is the opposite of the idea of Christian freedom as articulated by St. Paul. (See Galations 5 and elsewhere. BTW, Paul's concept of the "flesh" and my use of the term "evolution-without-grace" are roughly synonymous.)

Protestantism at its best (imo embodied most fully by the Quakers) was a celebration of the individual conscience. But morality in Protestant societies--and to a degree in counter-Reformation Catholic societies--in practice became more about doing good according to an extrinsic moralistic code where the code became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. It started, as all genuine spiritual movements do, as an interior impulse, but devolved into a rigid extrinsicism. And in doing so it threw out many of the older religious cultural forms that provided a framework for theosis, I.e., for people to grow in holiness, i.e., into a recovery of the their deepest identity as image and likeness of God.

Although Catholicism is rife with tis own kind of extrinsicism, this more interior transformative ideal was preserved in some of the orders and monasteries. But it cannot thrive in a world in which the broad cultural imaginary that flowed from Reformation presuppositions is so dominant. Most Catholics, especially American Catholics, are more Calvinist than they are Catholic in this older sense. 

Calvinism played a central role in effecting a shift in Western moral imaginary that created the conditions for Enlightenment rationality, Liberalism, and free-market capitalism--both the good and the bad that came with these. America is a profoundly Calvinist society, and all Americans--whether Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists--have to understand how their politics and cultural/political imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism.

On the left, American political imaginary is shaped by Yankee and Black Calvinism that led to the development of the social gospel in the late 19th century. And on the right, the American political imaginary is shaped by Southern Calvinism, mainly the Baptists and other evangelical sects that were inclined to rigid ideas regarding the inerrancy of Scripture and were ok with slavery and later segregation. Wokeness and political correctness are developments out of Left Calvinism. A stern, mean-spirited disdain for the poor are developments out of Right Calvinism. 

Catholics—on both the left and the right—have to own how their moral imaginaries have been Calvinized. It's not about doctrine; it's about how our moral imaginations are shaped. In that respect most Liberal Catholics have more in common with secular Liberals and most conservative Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than either conservative or liberal Catholics have with one another. 

And both liberal and conservative Catholics must accept that they have more in common with secular moderns than either has with their premodern Catholic ancestors, for whom a sense of the sacramental and the distinction between the sacred and the profane was a commonplace. The world is just as disenchanted for contemporary Catholics as it is for their secular contemporaries, and so their attempts to force the sacred into secular spaces fails in almost every instance. The old Catholic sensibility lingers where premodern cultural forms do as in some Latin American societies. People whose imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism think of those old premodern practices as at best naively quaint, and so they fail to understand how those forms genuinely mediate dimensions of the Real that the modern imaginary filters out. 

Disenchantment is a fact; re-enchantment is a possibility, but if it is to be effected, it will happen gradually from the inside out. That will require, I believe, retrieving much of what has been lost from premodern practice and imagination, but dialectically. As suggested above, Conservatives, particularly those with a Romantic bent, too often want to go native in the past, which never works. The challenge is to live through the modern secular as a kind of wandering in the wilderness with fidelity and by trusting that that such faithfulness will eventually lead to renewal. But this is a gradual, evolutionary, i.e,  evolution-with-grace, process. We do what is called for now in the hope that future generations will build on it. Perhaps all we can do now is plant seeds that will germinate in the future. We do that in our actions in all the ways small and large that are a response to the flow of grace in our lives. 

***

Growing in Goodness/Holiness--theosis--for Catholics is (or should be) central to their practice, and the sacraments and the life of prayer don’t make any sense without it. That’s why the Calvinists essentially got rid of the sacraments. They no longer made sense since mainstream Calvinism didn’t think theosis was a thing. Either one was saved or he wasn’t. If you were lucky, you had a conversion experience, and you tried to live a righteous life, a life still mostly defined by extrinsic codes.

The Protestant reformers had a well-founded suspicion of spiritual elites, and so the idea was not to promote individual spiritual prodigies, but rather to insist that all the regenerated were equals. One's only moral responsibility after that was to follow the law as revealed in the scriptures, and there wasn't for most much sense of how the New Testament put the revelation of the old law in the Jewish scriptures into a new inside-out perspective.

If Calvinists behaved righteously, then they were righteous. In the meantime, the typical, not-particularly-spiritually-gifted Calvinists had no compunction about doing their Social Darwinian best to get rich and to increase their power and social status. Indeed their success in these endeavors became the measure and proof of their righteousness. Catholics are surely not immune here--especially Calvinized American Catholics--but to the degree that they have not been Calvinized, Catholics feel guilty about surrendering to their Social Darwinian selves in ways that Calvinists do not, especially with regard to the their attitudes to the poor. 

***

So the Reformation unwittingly set the stage for the removal of constraints that kept the Social Darwinian Self in check. That liberation from these constraints released enormous productive capacity and wealth, but it also released forces that in an unprecedented way led to the destruction of traditions, local communities, and customary personal and communal ways of life that most conservatives insist they want to preserve against the intrusive state. But it’s not the state that has destroyed these traditional and customary ways of life, it’s been capitalism.

The American state has been always a tool of capitalism, and both have evolved interdependently. Capitalism is the Sun; the modern state, the Moon. The bigger and more complex the capitalist economy became, the bigger and more complex the state. Without the one, you don’t get the other. The idea of limiting the state in a huge, complex capitalist economy is naively quixotic at best, and downright cynical at worst, insofar as a less intrusive state clears the field for pure Social Darwinians to do as they please with little or no constraints. If we’re to have a large, globalized capitalist economy, you need to have some mechanism for constraining and mitigating its worst excesses, and the only tool adequate for that is a strong state structured by the principle of subsidiarity and held accountable by a vigilant electorate. That's all we've got until there is some kind of new Axial alignment-(explained below)

Liberals—both Left Liberals and Right Liberals—are people who celebrate what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative/destructive character of capitalism, in other words, the Darwinian impulses as they work in the political economy. You don’t get the creative/productive/innovative without the destructive/disruptive. That’s a truism, but it’s something most conservatives I know don’t appreciate the implications of. One is that in North Atlantic societies it’s mostly educated elites—both Republicans and Democrats—who get the benefits of the creative-productive side of capitalism, and uneducated, rural and rust-belt working stiffs who suffer its destructive/disruptive effects.

Both Democrats and Republicans are “Liberals” in the classic sense. The difference between them, from my pov, is that Democrat elites are Liberals who understand that we pay for the creative benefits of capitalism with a destruction and disruption that affects ordinary working people disproportionately, and they care enough (or feel guilty enough) to try to develop programs that mitigate the negative effects on non-elites. 

Republican elites are classical Liberals who either don’t understand or don’t care about the destructive effect capitalism has on traditions and local communities and the ordinary people who live in them, and so don’t try to do anything to mitigate it. I think that this mentality is rooted in a vestigial Calvinism that sees the poor as lazy reprobates deserving of their poverty and the rich as blessed by God. Double predestination still lives on in this perverse way.

Whatever. But Republican elites who say they stand for tradition and the integrity of local communities while at the same time embracing the creative destruction of capitalism are either cynical or naively incoherent. 

***

Illiberalism is where we’re headed unless some alternative with a robust consensus that embraces the better (Whiggish/Transcendentalist) angels of the American Calvinist character reasserts itself. Trump is a bully and con man trading on the fears and resentments that work with everything that is primitive and ugly in the American Calvinist character. But let me be clear, Transcendentalism--and its New Age and Theosophist cousins--in the long run just doesn't cut it either. A new Axial alignment is the only thing that will have the heft to push back against the unprecedented threat posed now by Evolution-without-Grace

The real threat for the future of humanity doesn't come from right-wing politics, but rather from Silicon Valley, broadly speaking. That's where evolution-without-grace is at its cutting edge, and it's becoming clearer with each passing decade that evolution-without-grace doesn't need human beings. Machines serve its purposes quite nicely. But what resources do humans have to draw upon to constrain what seems at this point the inevitable dominance of the machines? From a purely Darwinian perspective humans are irrelevant, but from the Christian perspective that I'm trying here to articulate, humans are the whole point of evolution.

So what do I mean by a new Axial alignment? The Axial Age, a  term coined by Karl Jaspers, was a remarkable transcultural moment in the history of human spiritual evolution to provide an intervention against evolution-without-grace. It occurred in a huge geographical swath from China to Greece in the mid centuries of the first millennium BCE, from the emergence of Taoism, Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, prophetic monotheism in ancient Israel, and Greek philosophy. Charles Taylor makes the Axial Age and the subsequent "disembedding" of culture that follows from it a central theme in his monumental A Secular Age. Recently its implications are explored in The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. by Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.

The Axial Age introduced into human thinking the idea of a distinction between transcendence and immanence, and that the transcendent world set a standard for behavior in the immanent world. The idea of the Platonic Good, the Mosaic law, the Tao were all manifestations of the transcendent world in the immanent, and the goal of human aspiration was to become aligned with the transcendent good as opposed to immanent goods, what I described above as goods defined by biological flourishing or evolution-without-grace. From my pov, the Axial Age was an external (other-dimensional) intervention of the higher into the lower through the inspired thinking of prophets and philosophers who advanced their respective civilizations. Christian civilization integrates the Axial traditions of ancient Greece and Israel. Islam made axiality available, at least at first, for the Arab peoples of the Middle East, and expanded into Asia and Africa from there. 

So is a New Axial moment a possibility? It seems clear that barring a complete civilizational collapse--one way or another there's going to be a radical discontinuity in human history in coming decades. Developments in machine learning, biotechnology, AR and VR virtually guarantee it. The question is whether humans as beings open to and responsive to grace will survive in such a  brave new world. It seems to me that they cannot unless some kind of Axial awakening occurs because the power of evolution-without-grace is too strong to be resisted otherwise.

So is history dialectical? Are we on the cusp of a cultural realignment that integrates the modern with the premodern. We'll see. For those for whom evolution-without-grace is accepted as the only legitimate historical narrative, humans are expendable. Some on the cultural Left even argue that the earth would be better off without humans. Or the other possibility as envisaged by transhumanists and poshumanists is a new eschatology as upload. Humans will become immortal machines, which is just another way for evolution-without-grace and the logic of the fall to win. And those on the Cultural Right don't believe that evolution without grace can be resisted because there is no collective moral progress, there is just the individual saving his own soul, and hopefully a few others so they can make it safely off planet after death. 

So what's at stake here? I don't exclude the possibility that developments in technology can be subordinated to the logic of evolution-with-grace, but unless there's some broad cultural awakening and with it the emergence of a new transcultural moment celebrating transcendence and its central influence in human affairs, it's hard to see how that might be possible. The forces of evolution-without-grace right now are too strong to be resisted otherwise.

So is such a broad awakening a possibility? Stranger things have happened. And so for those humans who are concerned about being evolutionarily obsoletized, it would seem that Christians and other heirs of the great Axial traditions need to play a role in formulating a counter-narrative that pushes back against the inevitability of the machines. But they can't unless they have a theology/philosophy of the evolution-with-grace that makes sense and resonates with the broader culture.

Christianity, as I've outlined it above, provides a robust mythos for a framework within which such an alternative evolutionary narrative could be developed, but I don't think that such an alternative narrative requires belief in Christian dogmatic assertions. What matters most is that the anthropos archetype be embraced in a non-Calvinist, transcultural idiom. Better Buddha and Lao-Tse than Calvin. I think there are resources within all the great post-Axial civilizations to embrace such an ideal. 

[This post is a revised version of a post of the same title that appeared in July 2019.]

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

All of us to a certain extent have slid into groupthink at one time or another. We all had to go through middle school, didn't we? We've all felt the pressure to conform our thinking to whatever were the group norms then or at other times in our life. So what is doing the thinking in a groupthink? I want to set up my answer to that question by discussing first the difference between calculation and wisdom.

It doesn't require discernment to determine that 2 + 2 = 4. You just need a mind that operates in a mechanically logical way. And in our day-to-day life a lot of what passes for wisdom is really calculation in this sense--it's automatic and mechanical: "The wise person reads his Consumer Reports before making a purchase decision." Obviously some calculations are more complicated than others because more factors than price and practicality may enter into consideration, but I tend to roll my eyes when someone claims that his decision is purely data driven, as if no judgement or interpretation of the data entered into it. Having accurate data is important, but It's the judgment and interpretation of them where the wisdom lies.

So what I mean by wisdom comes into view in situations that require a weighing of alternatives for which no calculus offers an answer. It requires something else--discernment, and the discernments of the truly wise lead them to make good judgments that prove themselves correct time after time. That contrasts with the poor judgments consistently made by those whose judgments are based on the groupthink of a conventional wisdom, which more often than not goes off the tracks. The decision making that led to the invasion of Iraq comes to mind.

I would argue that not all groupthink is bad. The tribal wisdom handed down from generation to generation in vibrant traditional societies was real and lifegiving. In such societies there is an experience of the living presence of the wisdom of the ancestors. And one could say that the life of the tradition is the soul of a culture, and it's that soul or ancestral mind that thinks in the people in a living traditional culture. But a tradition that no longer conveys in a living way the mind of the ancestors is a failed tradition. The tradition no longer functions as the medium through which its members experience cognitive moments that reveal the inner content of the traditional formulations. The formulations, as a consequence, become empty and rigid.

But when we try to understand the nature of wisdom, there is a difference between sophia and phronesis. Phronesis is the practical wisdom we call prudence; sophia is a different kind of wisdom which derives from inspiration, from moments when something divine or sacred breaks into our everyday experience. Living traditional societies were 'porous' enough so that these events were more frequent. Secular materialist societies are structured to make them rare. These events are what I mean by cognitive moments, which are close to what Heidegger meant by his term 'ereignis'--an aletheia event, a moment when Being discloses itself. Forgotten Being reveals itself and one finds a way to relate to it--to align one's life with it--authentically. It's rare enough when these events occur in secular materialist societies, but even when they do, they are often misinterpreted. 

A tradition that no longer discloses the sacred and finds a way to align its collective life with it is no longer a living tradition. It's in this sense that Nietzsche was right in describing our condition as moderns by saying not just that God was dead, but that we moderns killed him.  It's not a statement so much about God as about how modern consciousness has lost its capacity to naturally and easily experience the sacred. Moderns, to use the Heideggerian phrase, have forgotten Being--they live now in a sterile world of things. We even have to fight hard to think of people as something other than things. For souls shaped by such a world, the sacred rarely discloses itself. But conservatives are wrong to think that we should pass policies in the political sphere that will align with traditional practices that no longer have life. 

Already for the literate Athenians in Socrates' time, a "Being-mediating" traditional consciousness was withering away, and with it the traditional forms were starting to rigidify into sterile groupthink. Socrates' demployment of his deconstructive 'elenchus', was his attempt to clear away the dead wood to open up a space for Being to reveal itself. Socrates pushed his interlocutors to move from naive, unconscious acceptance of conventional wisdom to aporia--a condition of 'knowing ignorance' promoted in Plato's early dialogues, a condition which clears the way for a deeper cognitive apprehension of Being.

I'd argue that Plato's 'anamnesis' or 'remembering' is a different way of talking about the same movement in consciousness to which Heidegger's 'ereignis'. (Forgetfulness, after all, is the central problem for H.) I'm also inclined to think that Plato's theory of the forms derived from an experience or intuition of Being--an aletheia moment, which he later tried to make sense of in rational terms with unsatisfactory results. I'd argue that the Christian Neoplatonists develop more satisfactorily what he began, but that's another discussion.   

So authentic appropriation of traditional wisdom requires a cognitive, "numinous" moment in which the sacred character of the traditional wisdom reveals itself, and this contrasts with modern traditionalism which accepts social norms as ends in themselves rather than as a means to something more important. Such "cognitive moments" are not impossible in our world, but they are much harder to come by in pluralistic, tradition-dead societies that shape the human soul by its crude, materialistic sensibility.

It used to be the goal of a liberal, humanistic education to help us "remember" Being. Poetry is the primary linguistic form that seeks to disclose being, but it's boring for most of us now because our capacity to have Being revealed to us has all but withered away. And as a result wisdom is in short supply. We have lots of people with good heads, but dried-out souls; many who are good calculators, but few who are sophia wise.

***

So the healthy groupthink of living tradition is rare or nonexistent in modern pluralistic, choice-centered societies in which any sense of living tradition is a distant memory. And as a result we hold on to traditional forms that have no living content, and the forms rigidify as do the souls ensnared by them. In politics and business social calculation substitutes for wisdom. When we complain that the media pundits or politicians no longer speak the truth, it's because these people are members of a courtier class possessed by the spirit of social calculation. They have become incapable of the kind of independent judgments that distinguish what is true from what is false, and when if someone actually speaks the truth, the courtiers immediately reduce it to terms of social, economic, or political calculation.

These courtiers have themselves been coopted by a calculating groupthink, so it has become impossible for them to think anything else is possible. Social calculation is the only thing they understand because it consumes them, and it's the primary skill that propelled them into the prominent positions they occupy. And the system selects and promotes only those who distinguish themselves as prodigies of social calculation. It's another way of saying that the people who set the agenda and shape the conventional wisdom or groupthink in this society are soul sick.

Now the people who subject all traditional wisdom to the Socratic test and find it completely unacceptable are called cynics. Cynics are either disappointed idealists embittered by the failure of the world to live up to their naive expectations, or they are extreme rationalists for whom everything is rational calculation. For the latter group the phrase 'cognitive moment' as I speak of it here is meaningless.

Skepticism is different from cynicism. Skepticism as aporia it is a first step toward wisdom, but it becomes cynicism when it refuses to take the next step, which requires the acknowledgment of the logic of the heart or logic of the suprarational. Heart logic is what opens us up to cognitive moments. It is our an innate capacity to think in a non-calculative way and as such a prerequisite for wisdom, but it remains dormant in many, a seed waiting to germinate. It is no longer awakened in us automatically as it was in living traditional societies.

If such moments occur in our society, they are individual experiences, not group experiences. And so, as described above, the more typical kind of groupthink that arises in tradition-dead societies is an empty, lifeless formalism, and as such an emptiness vulnerable to be filled by various seductions. Like a vacant house on a rundown city block, groupthinks often find themselves occupied by squatters that make a bad situation worse. So back to the question in the first paragraph:  Q: What thinks in a groupthink?  A: In tradition-dead societies psychic complexes fill the empty forms and perform a compulsive kind of thinking that infects the group with collective mental illness. The degree of mental illness is measured by the degree a society is alienated from Being. We see this alienation in religious cults; we see it in political movements; and we see it in the media, and in the inanity of fashion, celebrity, and consumer fads. It's everywhere, and because it's everywhere we think it's real. It's not; it's nuts. (See my pieces on Zombie Traditionalism that explore this theme further.)

A conversation is not possible between two people who are possessed by the "demons" animating tradition-dead groupthink. It's not possible even if only one of the two interlocutors is possessed. Such people only make calculations about whether what the other says meets their litmus test for orthodoxy. A real conversation is possible only between two people who have the mutual intent to have a cognitive moment with one another--when both are open for the revelation in the Other of the sacred. Everything else is chatter, and chatter has its place. But our intersubjective experience is for most of us the last place where our capacity to recognize the sacred has not completely withered. We experience Love in the presence of the sacred. And so if other people have been occasions of the disclosure of the sacred and the awakening of 'real' love, other beings can also be the occasion for such disclosures. And that's the task, to extend our capacity for experiencing the sacred by increasing our capacity for love, even ultimately for the hated Other, the enemy.   

This is a cultural and not a political, task, but it has political implications insofar as it shapes our political discourse. Because two people in the grip of opposing groupthinks cannot possibly communicate with one another. In order for such cognitive moment to occur in the political sphere, both parties have to be open to the Other's disclosing something 'real'. But if neither party has anything but groupthink truisms to parrot, no cognitive moments are possible. The culture wars, as we have experienced them in this country, at least since the time of the Scopes trial, are like two crazy people trying to have conversation. Neither is in his right mind. Neither is capable of true judgment. All they can do is shout at one another. The best one can do is create the conditions for an opening by refusing to be sucked into the left/right groupthink polarity. (Listen to this podcast interview with Douglas Johnston for an example of someone who seeks to create this kind of opening with Muslims.)

***

Now the groupthinks of the political left and the right, insofar as either is unconsciously assimilated, infect individuals as a kind of naive idealism. And insofar as it is naive, i.e., lacking the "cognitive moment' described above, it is innocent and well-intentioned, but empty. And insofar as it is empty, it is a vacuum ready to suck in anything that will enliven it. Demagogues are con men who understand how this process works, and they are masters who feed off of the naive idealism of either the left or the right. They don't care about traditional values, and they don't care about ideals; they only care about concentrating power under their control. And  they understand that their ability to consolidate power requires that they manipulate the naive groupthink of a majority of the public. If they can control the majority groupthink, they can simply dismiss the concerns of the minority. They know how to work with Resentment and Arrogance to achieve their ends.

Maintaining power by manipulating groupthink was Orwell's great theme. The demagogue drapes everything he does in idealistic or obfuscating language, and those for whom those words have no living cognitive content simply accept the new content that the demagogues fill them with. And the next thing you know, the words have no relationship to their original meanings. They are old wine skins filled with new wine, wine whose purpose is to addle the minds of the cognitively naive. What thinks in the Orwellian groupthink is the mind of Big Brother, which is the mind of the demagogue.  This is our social evolution:  From a groupthink that thinks the wisdom of the ancestors to a groupthink that thinks the nihilism of the Powermad.

The point is this: The power hungry feed off naive idealistic groupthink, which they are very skilled at manipulating. It doesn't matter if it's the utopian idealism of the left or the traditionalist idealism of the right. Demagogues care only about manipulating whichever naive groupthink will best serve their purposes. This is Orwell's insight. Left, right--it doesn't matter. But in this country, at this time, they are working the empty, naive idealism of the traditionalist right. And their basic strategy is to incite traditionalist resentment toward the secular liberal elites, who play into this strategy by disdaining traditionalist concerns as foolish.

Their concerns are not foolish, but naive traditonalists are indeed foolish to the degree they allow themselves to be manipulated by demagogues who pretend to care about those concerns. But so are the secular liberals foolish insofar as they are unable to transcend the toxicity of the left/right polarity. Both sides need some tough-love slaps upside the head to snap the spell and bring them back to what's real. So-called moderate strategies to split the difference between the polarities can't work because they accept the insanity of the system as normative.

An intervention is called for, and it will come in the form of catastrophe if we don't find another way. 9/11 was Reality's warning shot across the bow, and we took all the wrong lessons from it. But one way or the other, something from outside the system will be introduced, something that will bring us back to reality, and then it's a matter of enough people recognizing and working with it. But more important in the short run is having enough people to say No to demagogic manipulation. Its groupthink has to be seen through, deconstructed, so that a space can be cleared for something real to disclose itself.

[I thought it might be interesting in this moment to repost this entry, slightly edited to clarify some of technical philosophical terminology, from July 2007. If this interests you, the discussion in comments on the original post (when I was more active on this blog) is pretty lively.]

A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe that began as a ‘whirlpool of pure force’ aims at becoming a ‘whirlpool of pure intelligence’.

 --Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"

Gombrich writes that ‘the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent .’

I have used the language of transparency and translucency – of ‘seeing through’ – repeatedly: because as Gombrich says of the work of art, as Jean Paul says of metaphor, as Kerényi says of myth, and as Merleau-Ponty says of the body, our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’ – but neither must it be replaced by something else. It is the function of such translucent, or semi-transparent, beings to remain transparent rather than draw attention to themselves, because in doing so they achieve their goal. . . . 

Body and soul, metaphor and sense, myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning – in fact the whole phenomenological world, is just what it is and no more, not one thing hiding another; and yet the hard thing is the seemingly easy business, just ‘seeing what it is’. The reality is not behind the work of art: to believe so would be, as Goethe put it in an image I referred to earlier, like children going round the back of the mirror. We see it in – through – the mirror. Similarly, he says, we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.

 --Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812-11826)

In the Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by the Law of Force, whose stand-in at the time was the Roman Empire, whose stand-in was Herod. Salvation history, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the Rule of Force by the Rule of Divine Intelligence. By intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I means something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence' which suggests a certain cleverness or nimbleness of mind that is measured by IQ. Not what I mean here. 

The incarnation of the Logos was akin to the planting of a seed in the earth, which as it grows subverts the cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately present as the material world and its energies. It effects this subversion and transformation by gradually penetrating matter, for which the Incarnation of the Logos is the paradigm. Humans are the tip of the spear in this evolutionary project. They are the infusion point of Divine Life into the whirlpool of pure force. Humans are the means by which, if it is to happen, force becomes transformed into Divine Intelligence.

What might this project look like if successfully completed. It's imaged for us in Isaiah 11, the first reading of the second Sunday of Advent earlier this week:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
⁹ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

Humans play their role in this salvific project to the degree that their minds are shaped by Divine Intelligence, which is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is evolution without grace. Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent foundation for the immanent world. Computer Science mimics an attenuated left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to subvert and transform evolution by interpenetrating it with grace. 

The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence  incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.

The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of consciousness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we can see what he saw.   

The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies opaquely hidden or at best filtered in the world around us. In other words great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.

We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it still isn't there waiting for us to discover it as our ancestors did. 

That these objects were often beautiful is a secondary effect to the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy and light. Later, 'novelty' becomes confused with 'originality', and being inventive becomes synonymous with being creative. But real creativity is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it because it is disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Being which are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind. There are many objects that present themselves as art, but it is great art to the degree that it has this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.'

For the best of these Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into matter to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in his creation. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is suffused by the Divine Intelligence, and that we have a responsibility in whatever modest way to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence--its truth, its goodness, and its beauty. 

***

With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus Christ (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence penetrating the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove.

The Christian idea of incarnation, when taken seriously, awakens in us an awareness of the centrality of earth existence, that what happens on earth matters, that it is not some delusional prison from which we must be liberated, or an exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It suggests that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. They have a choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace, which is leading to some post-human dystopia, or to become co-redeemers of the earth. They become the latter insofar as they restore within themselves the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. The Divine became human so that the human might become divine--here on earth, in space and time, not in some other world or dimension.

So much in our late modern conception of what it means to be human refuses to countenance this possibility, and yet our survival as humans requires that we retrieve it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will become machines, who operate with an intelligence that has nothing  divine about it and that becomes closed off from the dimension of depth where the Divine Mind seeks to disclose itself. 

"All creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God," according to St. Paul in Romans 8. That is, it awaits humans who have awakened within themselves the Logos, the kingdom within, and with this awakening the gradual restoration of their identities as image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved by discovering its presence in the created world. To the degree that the Logos awakens in us, we become the sons and daughters of God.

This is not achieved overnight. There's a reason the gospels use seed metaphors for the birth of the kingdom within, and yet as it grows, we begin to see and think more clearly as our propensity for delusion and bad judgment gradually subsides. Our feelings of alienation and estrangement subside, our love of the earth and the people in it grows (if not the capacity to suffer foolishness).

I believe that this seed has incarnated and germinated in the hearts of all kinds of people, and being a Christian is not a requirement. Understanding is secondary; it follows from a kind of hearing or hearkening to a song that since the Incarnation suffuses creation. It helps to have a little music theory (or teaching), but more important is hearing the music and playing it, no matter the level of proficiency. 

As the sons and daughters of God awaken, they hear this music, this song, which is the voice of conscience whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of chaos and violence, it can be heard and hearkened to. This is not easy to do at this critical juncture in human history. This is a project that is continuously threatened by the forces of chaos and violence whose noise currently all but drowns out our ability to hear it.

But if we hear and hearken to it, this song will come gradually to still the violence and chaos that otherwise dominates in our hearts, and we in turn become chaos whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violent hearts of Isaiah's, cobras, bears, lions, and wolves. Wasn't this the gift of St. Francis, to subdue the tooth-and-talon violence of biological evolution to the peace and harmony of the divine intelligence that ruled so prodigiously in his soul? 

In this way we become co-creators of the New Jerusalem, an image of earth existence where violence and chaos have been subdued by the rule of Divine Intelligence and its justice, when the earth shall be full of Isaiah's knowledge of the Lord. This is an evolutionary project. It is accomplished gradually, heart by heart, generation by generation, each finding his or her own part of the song to sing. Each of us as individuals has some part in this chorus, some part to sing, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All that matters is that we harden not our hearts, that we hear and hearken, and do what is called for. 

Calvinism + Baconism = The Toxically Arrogant Technocratic State

I've been a bit rough on the Calvinists, and I haven't been giving them enough credit for the genuine idealism that motivated the best among them. It's easy to criticize what's worst and in doing so to obscure what's best. Catholics wouldn't have any reason to be taken seriously, to what extent they might be taken seriously at all, for what's best in its traditions if the way most Catholics have acted is the measure. The same can be said of the Calvinists, but as I argued in my previous post, we're all Calvinists now, even Catholics, and we need to understand how Calvinism shapes the way we experience the Real for better and worse.

I have often wondered why the Calvinist doctrine of double predestination didn't lead the Calvinists into a kind of Amish separatism. For the early Calvinists, most people are unregenerate and damned, so why should the elect not just move away and start something new that leaves the damned to the damned. Perhaps the Puritan experiment in Massachusetts came close to this kind of project. But the early Puritans saw themselves not as separatists, but as a vanguard, a light shining on a hill to be emulated by those left behind in England.

This is one of the main questions that Charles Taylor addresses in both A Secular Age and Sources of the Self. He is quite eloquent in describing how ambitious the Calvinists were not just for themselves but for transform all of European society. The English Civil War and the Thirty Years War are hard to understand without acknowledging this as a central Calvinist objective. They wanted to tear down the old thing in its entirety and to build something new. But If they truly believed that most humans were utterly, irredeemably depraved, how could the possibly believe that such a reform project could possibly succeed? 

As Taylor points out, the Calvinist logic is that good people—the regenerate—do good things. Paul says to the regenerate in Corinthians 1: 15.58—"My dear brothers and sisters be strong and immovable. Always work enthusiastically for the Lord, for you know that nothing you do for the Lord is ever useless.”

Calvinists do good not because it is efficacious for their salvation, but out of an energy that flows from their having been regenerated. There is something genuinely noble about that. There's no quid pro quo, no need to do good to earn points that can buy you a place in paradise; instead, there's just the impulse to do good because that's what's called for, because It's what conscience dictates. But not only must they do good, they must order their lives and the lives of others in such a way as to restore creation from the chaos into which it has degenerated. So, this means that they must restore order in society and in the lives of the unregenerate, even though most living in society are damned.

For the Puritans, the disorder of the world is a stink in God’s nostrils, and so the regenerated have a responsibility to mitigate God’s discomfort and the insult this stinking, disordered, chaotic world presents as an offense to his dignity. Once the “law” awakens in the heart of the regenerate, he is tasked with imposing that law on a lawless world, and by force if necessary. There is an inside-out dynamic at work here. The order is discovered within, and then it is imposed without, both in getting one’s own life in order, but also in imposing order on the world. This is a central insight if one is to understand the the new kind of reform mentality that is born in the modern period. The Thirty Years War, rather than being seen as cruel, destructive holocaust, which it was, is seen rather as a violent cleansing of the old degenerate society to make way for the new regenerated one. We know now how naive such an idea is, but it's understandable that idealists of a certain temperament could believe this. Is it so different from the mentality of Robespierre, Lenin, Mao and those who were inspired by them?

The idea of radical, top-down, humanly engineered revolution is something that only becomes possible after Calvin. And so without Geneva in the 1550s, there would be no Paris in the 1790s. Rousseau was a Genevan, but he took the idea of Calvinist human depravity and flipped it on its head. The idea of starting something new, something in defiance of the old, is very much part of the Calvinist imaginary, and plays an important shaping influence on Rousseau's imagination of the possible. Without Rousseau, there is no French Revolution. The causes of the French Revolution are more complex, of course, but it was not possible without this very different, very modern idea of reform that originated in Calvinism. And it lays a foundation for the technocratic state ruled by the best and brightest who know what's best and seek to impose their will from their positions of power.

And at the same time Calvinism lays the foundation for the Baconian revolution in science. Both Puritanism and Baconism set themselves against tradition and see themselves as involved in creating something new, from scratch. Aristotle becomes the foe for each—an authority that stands in the way of seeing things more clearly as they are. So Aristotle and the whole premodern, medieval superstructure is ripped down, and the idea that traditions and customs have any value except to impede the transformation of the world into something pleasing to God for the Calvinists morphs easily into transforming the world into something pleasing for humans by the Baconians.

Modernity is the confluence of both Calvin and Bacon, but in such a way that the first, the idea of pleasing God, becomes gradually supplanted by the latter, which in turn becomes something understood as evolution-without-grace. Hobbesian and Macchiavellian realism emerge at this time. Both accept the world as defined by evolution-without-grace, a world ruled by greed, will to power, and promiscuous sexuality. To be a realist is to understand the world as if grace does not exist. 

If the goal for the Calvinists was to restore God’s order, Baconian science provides a methodology that allows humans to come to a better understanding about what that order is. But there is a different spiritual impulse or energy at work in Baconism. It works hand in hand with Calvinism because it is impelled by a desire to understand the underlying order of God’s creation in order to make it useful and productive. This had  become a key element in the Puritan ethic—to be productive in ways that benefit humans, but it can very easily morph into the Faustian by the less pious. 

So Baconism is the Faustian side of Calvinism. Baconism is a movement driven more by evolution-without-grace than by what was the originary imputse within Calvinism, which was to do what conscience calls for. There is a similarity of motive—to improve the human condition by the establishment of a new order—but there is a fundamental difference in the nature of the orders that each seeks to realize. It’s easy for people of good will to be confused by such distinctions, but one leads eventually to a mechanomorphic, technocratic hellscape, and the other to the New Jerusalem. As I argued in my previous post, we're headed for the former if we don't find a way to restore a sense of the latter's possibility, and I see that effected only by something like a transcultural Axial awakening some time in the next century. 

But the idealism of the Puritans goes wrong almost from the start in part because of its image of God that stresses His power and freedom. God is everything all powerful and utterly free and without obligation to anyone or anything beneath him in dignity of Being. So he owes humans nothing. But this is the God of the philosophers, not the God revealed in the Bible. This idea of God as arbitrary despot depicts him as a being closer in nature to Genghis Khan than the one who reveals himself in a still, small voice to Elijah or as the one who seeks to forgive and befriend us in the New Testament.

God might indeed be all powerful, but that aspect of his nature is not how he presents himself in the Gospels. But no matter how pious the original intent--to exalt God and to insist on a radical human humility vis a vis the power of God--the Calvinist idea of God, even if unintentionally, aligns with and supports the technocratic power project of Baconism.

And there is something toxically arrogant about someone who insists that he knows God’s will and insists that you submit to it. This is the flip side of Calvinist humility--an incredible arrogance that the regenerate Calvinist knows better in ways that the unregenerate cannot. And this leads in turn to the remarkable hubris necessary to reorganize a society top-down according to a template that they alone had access to.

This mentality is secularized in modern revolutionary ideologies, which are born of the same kind of we-know-better arrogance. But so is this mentality found in the kind of technocratic mentality that reigns in Silicon Valley. It shares in the arrogance that I call Aspen Institute Liberalism, the mentality of rich elites who think they know better because they are rich and are good at navigating in the world created by consumer capitalism. Trump, Brexit, and the "democratic" embrace of illiberalism everywhere is an understandable, if even more dangerously toxic, response to this liberal, Baconian arrogance. The problem we face at this moment lies in that there are no healthy alternatives to either. 

This kind of technocratic top-downism claims to be progressive, but it's a progressivism that is shaped primarily by evolution-without-grace. It's a "liberal" mentality that seeks to be cutting edge in the development of the new, and as such is consonant with the Baconian project to use science and technology to make life better for human beings. But at a certain point the tail started wagging the dog, and as modern society lost any sense of a vital connection to a sense of a transcendent moral order, there has been no foothold for people to get traction to push back. Technological progress is not human progress unless it can become baptized in some way, which is to say subordinated to the logic of grace. Technological progress without grace, i.e., evolution without grace, is dehumanizing--slowly at first, but ultimately it leads to the complete extermination or enslavement of the human. 

Whether consciously or unconsciously acknowledged, evolution-without-grace is the metaphysics, i.e, the dominant metaphysical imaginary, of the intelligentsia in North Atlantic societies. It is running amok in consumer capitalism and in the developments in machine learning and biotechnology. As I pointed out in my last post, while in the short run evolution-without-grace might need human beings, in the long run it doesn't.  

Transhumanism and Posthumanism are the culmination of the Baconian project, a project that from my pov seems peculiarly impervious to grace. As a Christian, I must live in hope that grace will find a way, but its operation in the world right now is out of sight, and out of most people's minds. 

Moral vs. Moralistic

There's a difference, of course, but it's not one most of us think about much. A moral person is wise and compassionate; a moralistic person is a judgmental prig. The crux of the difference lies in that being moral requires an ability to suss out what the right thing  to do is--it's a matter of conscience, and conscience is one of those things that gets stronger the more you use it. Being moralistic involves no sussing--it's simplistic indictment-by-superego.

Superego is a Freudian term, and despite Freud's descendancy, it's one that everyone should be familiar with. It's essentially the cultural download that we receive when we are children--but also later in life when we learn the codes of any group we join. We absorb these codes mostly unconsciously, and the code determines what attitudes and behaviors are ideal, and which are vicious. To the degree that they unconsciously shape our judgments about what is right and wrong, we are moralistic. 

So there is social utility in moralism insofar as it establishes ground rules for people to be nice and get along in any group, but the tyranny of the superego has very little to do with being truly good, because it is not at all acquainted with wisdom and compassion. People who are unconsciously in thrall to their superegos repress the parts of own psyches that the superego has programmed them to see as vicious, and this act of repression usually results in projecting what is repressed in oneself onto others in a way that tends to demonize them. The more severe the repression, the more violent the negative judgment of others. Call it Beam-in-the-Eye Syndrome. It's been long understood. It's why we are instructed by the gospels not to judge.

Why should we not judge? Because the guilty are in no position to judge the guilty. "But I'm not guilty", you say to yourself--"I did nothing wrong; that other guy did, I faithfully follow the code, and anybody who transgresses must be punished." But what you mean to say is that this transgressor has not been able to keep the darker side of his psyche repressed as effectively as you, and your punishment is simply your method for getting that darkness stuffed back into the psychic basement where it should be kept under lock and key. That's what you've been able to do so well, and so everybody should live a righteously repressed life just as you have been able to do. This results in whited-sepulcher syndrome--clean and pure on the outside, but a rotting mass of fetid soul death inside.

Most people think that from a social utility point of view it's better to be a moralistic prig than to be a monster, but they are two sides of the same coin. Monsters are people who have been captured by--or who have surrendered to--the dark, amoral, chaotic forces within all of us that live out of sight beneath the line of self-awareness. In extreme cases monsters are destructive, ruthless, violent predators. A moralistic prig is someone who thinks that the dark, amoral forces in us only live in other people, and in extreme cases they are ruthless, violent, purity-obsessed inquisitors who love a good witch hunt.

There's a difference between confronting somebody about his or her destructive behavior or attitudes, and demonizing him or her for them. Monsters must be confronted and contained, but moralistic prigs need to be confronted and contained, too. Both are in thrall to the power of the dark unconscious. If we are in thrall to the dark unconscious and we are incapable of confronting it and taming it ourselves, we need an intervention. And if the intervention does not succeed, then we need to be ostracized. A moralistic prig skips the intervention and moves directly to ostracize. But the incorrigibly un-self-aware prig is in just as much need of being ostracized when his judgments have a destructive, repressive effect on other people. 

Most of us, if we are human at all, have done monstrous things at one time or another in our lives, and most normal people feel ashamed to have behaved so. But we have also made cruel, unfair judgments about other people, too. And we should feel equal shame for that. Shame has its social utility, but being well behaved has nothing to do with being truly good. There is little benefit to the individual or to society if shame leads us to shove this moment of transgression back into the psychic basement in hopes that it was an aberration. It's not aberrant; it's unrepressed, and just to repress it again is no cure. The more severely repressed, the more it grows in power and is likely to explode again in another monstrous act. And one of the most monstrous things we can do is see our own monster in someone else rather than to own it and make the effort to domesticate it. You can't do that if it's repressed--pushed into a basement corner out of sight. 

Sitting Bull is reputed to say “Inside of me there are two dogs. One is mean and evil and the other is good and they fight each other all the time. When asked which one wins I answer, the one I feed the most.” I"m not  sure starving the mean dog is the best approach, but at least it is acknowledged. The beginning of real moral development is recognizing that the mean dog is real, that he's in each one of us, and that it's ok, kind of. It's ok in the sense that its presence in our soul makes us human, but it's not ok to let the dark dog run wild. And it's equally not ok--maybe worse--if you pretend you don't have a dark dog and that only certain categories of people do because they have not repressed their dark dog in the same way you have.

The dark dog is Prospero's Caliban, and the good dog is Ariel. Caliban symbolizes the part of each of our souls that needs first to come out into the open where he can be disciplined and whose energies can at some point be reintegrated at a higher level. Until then he controls us more than we control him. Ariel is the part of us that knows and seeks to serve the Good. He also needs to be brought out into the open, i.e., into our conscious awareness. Prospero achieves this first in his liberating him from the witch Sycorax's spell so that he can be put to work. I see him as the symbol of the awakened conscience, and until awakened this part of ourselves is unable to help us to do any real good in the world. It, like Ariel, serves us but only respects us if we put it to good use. If Prospero’s goal was not to effect a work of creative mercy in the end, then Ariel’s service would have contradicted his fundamental nature.

There's a story I heard years ago, and I'm not sure I have the details quite right. But it involved two Christian monks who lived in a monastic community in the Egyptian wilderness. They had to go into Alexandria on monastery business, and one thing led to another and the next thing they are at an orgy having a wild, debauched evening. The next morning the two wake up naked and hung over, and they both feel deeply ashamed. One of the monks is so horrified at learning that he had this debauchee--this dark dog--hidden within himself that he thought himself unworthy to continue in his monastic vocation. He never went back to the monastery but stayed instead in Alexandria, surrendered to the dark dog, and drank himself to his death within a few years. The other monk went back to the monastery, humbly confessed his transgression to the abbot, lived a long life, and developed a reputation for wisdom and compassion that drew many to him for advice.

Each of us has an inner dark dog; each of us needs to confront and tame it. And we're not able to do much good in the world until we do. History is full of  moralistic prigs--inquisitors and Robespierres--who have destroyed the lives of so many people thinking they had God or Justice on their side. They didn't. The guilty are not in a position to judge the guilt of others until first they've owned their own guilt and have found a way to look at everyone else with some degree of wisdom and compassion. 

History & Meaning

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche,  Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them when we are older. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given, traditional meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--so neither are we humans what we used to be. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect. Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the customary cultures of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, which in turn causes increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important. It creates a new kind of culture in which all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort, whether we are bored or entertained.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other deeper, richer meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a global-commercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, vulgar elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and by non-elites thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are life's winners. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life forces that once worked in them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away--and a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

How did we get here? It's complicated, and it seems to be a development that comes peculiarly out of the cultural mentality of the West. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is one of the best books I know that traces out the variety of subtle lines that brought us here. Another is Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. And another recently released book grappling in an intriguing way with this loss of the sacred is Dreyfus's and Kelly's All Things Shining. 

 

I think that what it boils down to this: The enlightenment rationalist model was unbalanced and naively hubristic. Its culture heroes thought rationality was going to solve everything, and it's only lately that we're catching on to what Hume already saw at the Enlightenment's high point--that reason is the slave of the passions. And it should be clear to the sane observer that the modern rationalist project in its mission to destroy tradition has cleared the ground for the most barbaric passions to run unrestrained. These crude passions have always been a part of the human experience, but now they command the field in a peculiar and unprecedented way, and will continue to do so until or unless other passions, those which Lincoln called our 'better angels', grow once again in the collective consciousness to become potent enough to push back to create a space for something new to emerge.

 

But the passions of our better angels are weaker than ever because modernity has had such a withering effect on the life or our souls. Rationality has flattened and disenchanted the world, and in doing so has caused the soul to shrivel, and in its shriveling its capacity for wonder, for reverence, and for a natural, intuitive sense of the sacred. Lots of people say they don't need all that superstitious hocus pocus. But they're like someone who has never fallen in love and wonders what all the fuss is about: for them the sacred and any talk about it is all projection and fantasy and nonsense. Yes, that is how it looks from the outside. But from the inside it's not so easy to dismiss, and when lost, not so easy to forget.

 

The argument here is not that individuals in a secular society are incapable of wonder and reverence, but that the culture as a whole, as a frame that shapes our response to the world, has no ordinary lived sense of the sacred anymore. Other, cruder passions have pushed it to the side, or people feel diffident and white-bready, lost and wandering in a secular, disenchanted wilderness without a moral compass, and in their disorientation feel themmselves unable to commit to anything, much less fight for it or put one's life on the line for it. We have become a society populated by what Nietzsche called Last Men. 

 

This condition of moderns is what Nietzsche and Heidegger lamented: moderns don't know their own poverty. It's not that they have loved and lost, but that because they have never loved, they don't know what they have lost. Nietzsche understood the enormity of the loss, and his proclamation that God is dead derives from his recognition that we no longer find him in the collective consciousness; he no longer informs our collective meanings and our collective aspirations. N. recognized that insofar as the Judaeo-Christian God was the foundation for a culture-wide mythopoesis or metanarrative, he no longer exists. And I don't think there's any quarreling with that basic claim.

 

And so in this world in which God no longer lives in the collective consciousness, there is a pervasive, culture-wide nostalgia that longs to enjoy again a religious connectedness that our ancestors took for granted. It’s as much an issue for restorationist Catholics as it is for the guy with ear-lobe plugs and a full-body tattoo. The first longs for a lost Christendom, the other for a lost animism; the first for an integrated, culture-wide mythos that inspires in men and women self-transcending, noble ideals; the second, a sense of oneness with the cosmos. I sympathize with both, but there is no future in nostalgia. And nostalgia abounds in a culture that can no longer frame for itself a vibrant, collective sense of future possibility. Nostalgia, in other words, is the dominant mood in a spiritually stagnant society. A society that lacks dynamic spiritual élan looks backward for want of anything better.

 

And in this disenchanted world in which we have killed God, we have made the earth into a thing to be exploited, and the spirits that once numinously made their homes in the glades and streams and groves have withdrawn--or so it seems. Las Vegas is the New Jerusalem of our era, and the pop-Nietzschean Ayn Rand is its prophet. And the people in the culture who are most aware of what we have lost, who feel it most acutely, are living through a culture-wide experience of a Dark Night of the Senses, and a culture-wide experience of the absence of God as the Dark Night of the Spirit.

 

These 'dark nights' are conditions described by the great 16th-century lyric poet St. John of the Cross in which he describes a process during which the individual soul experiences the stripping away of all external supports to be left alone in a dreadful darkness. But he sees this stripping away as a necessary stage of spiritual development. I have long thought of St. John, an early modern who died in 1591, as one who lived intensely on the individual level the experience at the dawning of the Modern era that would be lived on a collective level three centuries later. But if St. John was the herald of the spiritually darkening age to come, he also points to a way to move through it.

 

St. John gives us, at least those of us who are believers, some reason to believe that there is the possibility to move forward into the Dark with confidence, and that if we remain faithful, we shall awaken to a Good that we, most of us, cannot at the moment bring into view. That doesn't mean it isn't there, only that we cannot see it. But because the beloved has departed does not mean that he or she no longer exists. We find mementos everywhere, but the mementos are not the presence. Only signifiers of a presence that is no longer experienced. Absence is non-presence, but there is no absence unless there was once presence. And it's possible to hold that 'presence' in memory, like the soldier on the front who holds on to the picture of his beloved back home, while we move forward in the dark. He points us to the development of the cognitive capacity that will allow us to navigate in this darkness, which is not ordinary Appollonian day-time thinking and sight, but rather the thinking heart, the heart that does not see but eventually feels the presence that it seeks. And this presence, as I describe it below, is the Logos.

 

***

So here are some preliminary thoughts rooted in my own struggle to make sense of what we're going through and what a framework for developing a robust sense of future possibility might look like. It begins with a meditation on how we experience meaning in the first place. So bear with me. What I say below starts out kind of abstractly, but I think I bring it back down to earth in the end.

The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is beyond the scope of what's appropriate to discuss here, so I would like just to work with a simpler, more seat-of-the-pants understanding of how we experience meaning. The key word is “connection,” and the key to understand it is the many various ways in which we find and make connections. When we see a connection or make a connection, there is meaning. When we don’t see it, there is meaninglessness. The discrete elements in our experience are meaningless to us unless or until they fall into a meaningful pattern in which each element is connected to the other in a way that makes sense. When we are told a joke and don't get it, we don't understand how the punchline connects the dots in the setup that preceded it. The experience of connection that renders an experience of 'meaning'  in this sense is what we commonly experience as 'insight'.

Take for example our reading of a poem when any meaning in it at first eludes us; the words don’t make sense. We know the meanings for each word, but they don’t connect with one another in any meaningful way; it seems to be quasi-gibberish on first reading. We try again, still nothing. Then perhaps several times more, and finally it hits us, and the words vibrate not only with their interconnectedness among themselves, but with something in us that comes alive in response to them. Not just the excitement of breaking the code, but the revelation of a kind of secret that was held in the poem. Its meaning is a discovery, or perhaps it's more accurate to say our experience of it a kind of awakening.

Is it then only that something awakens in us that has given the words their meaning? Clearly that's too one-sided. But then is the poem, particularly if it is a great poem, something that the poet "creates", or is it something about our shared reality that he has awakened to himself  and then uses language to 'remember' that experience of awakening but which also creates the possibility for others to awaken to it (or remember it) too. I like that way of thinking about it because it gets us out of our individual bubbles and into a shared reality of which we are mostly oblivious. A great poem is not about the poet's subjective experience, but rather disclosive of the Being of the World in which we are all immersed.

But then what is it about us humans that allows us to make these connections in the first place?  Certainly the kind of acculturation with its imprinting of foundational meanings is an essential background element, but must there not be something that lies behind the acculturation?  Even if we cannot know it except as mediated through our acculturation, is there not something that we must deduce as the ground for the production of culture in the first place? If the creation of cultural worlds is what makes us human, mustn't there, despite all the varieties of culture, be some kind of underlying structure that is the condition for the possibility of culture? Certainly language and symbol making are essential here, but where does that come from? To explain this by some Darwinian evolutionary logic is from where I stand comically reductionistic.

***

Reading is not a passive activity; it is an active one. It has to be if we are to understand anything we have read. But it's not as if we're making up the meanings that we read. They are there for us to discover, but there has to be something in us that wills to pay attention in order to discover it. But what is it in us that gives us this capacity for understanding when we have this moment of discovery or insight? I think of my experience of insight when the poem yields up its meaning as the experience of something in me that lay dormant as it lay dormant in the poem, a potentia that has becomes actum when, through my act of attention, some meaning discloses itself in the experience of making a connection. What is in me in potentia is stimulated into actuality by my encounter with the poem, but it is not simply given by the poem unless the poem points to something I am already awake to. Otherwise, the meaning doesn’t come alive until I awaken it in my struggle to understand what the poem seeks to disclose. Now the greater the poem, the richer its potential for disclosure and for awakening something in the reader. Someone else in reading the poem might discover a different aspect of what the poem discloses. The poet himself may not be aware of all the poem has to disclose.

So meaning, as in this example, comes from the way words connect with other words, but also in the ways in which we make connections in all kinds of ways--in the way people connect with one another, the way memory connects us with our past, and imagination with our future. But also in the ways in which we become more aware, especially regarding the depths and layers of the Being of the World. We have experiences all the time but we miss the meaning because we don't have a sophisticated or well developed enough meaning framework that allows us to make meaningful connections. The Being of the World is for us as a musical score for a Mozart symphony as would be for musically illiterate deaf people. We see the notes but can have no idea about the full, living reality to which they point. 

So our experience of meaning, if it is rich and deeply textured, requires a kind of erotic thinking, I.e., the development or the rediscovery of the thinking heart, a retrieval of the understanding that we cannot really know something if we do not love it, and to love something means to be awakened to its deep truth and goodness and beauty. And loving, if it is truly loving means in some manner an encounter with the mystery and depth of the beloved as 'Thou'. Meaning is relational in the obvious mechanical sense that the brain enables, but it is relational in an interpersonal sense, too. And as all interpersonal relationships are multi-layered, so is our relationship with the Being of the World, for which depth upon depth lie slumbering in potentia awaiting our awakening to them.

We live in a hyper-eroticized society, but we no longer understand Eros because our capacity for it has withered with the withering of our modern souls. We moderns (or no-longer-moderns) have atrophied souls but hypertrophied heads and genitals. We have what I've called Missing Middle Syndrome--we've become what C.S. Lewis described in The Abolition of Man as 'men without chests'. In a soul-atrophied culture, in which there is no robust common experience of the middle that we used to know as soul, we oscillate from head to groin, from groin to head endlessly, pointlessly, compulsively. It gets us nowhere.

Observe our popular culture in film and fiction--there is only the genital experience to make vivid emotion all connections and the head to make meanings, but the two operate in their own orbits, and don't really talk to one another because the soul in a soulless culture plays such a weak role in mediating between them. And we suffer from an internal sense of dissociation and alienation that mirrors the dissociation and fragmentation of the society around us. Our disorientation is the result of the stupor that results when we have lost our souls.

And so we long most deeply for meanings that are not just head meanings or or a sense of connection that derives not just from the temporary satisfaction of our instinctual impulses, but such meanings can be effected only in the soul, and so it is required to have one. If your soul is withered (or just slumbering), there is no real capacity for richly textured, deeply significant meanings. And so we settle for innumerable variations on cheap sex in the back of the car, intensified now by its manifold virtual possibilities. And we mistake excitement for significance, and instinct-driven passion for spiritual élan. 

Our popular culture, for this reason, exults in the life of instinct as if it's some affirmation of life, liberty, joyousness. But it just isn't. It's Charlie-Sheen pathetic. It's just a parody of eros and its sacred mysteries. It's pathetic the way fundamentalist Christians and Muslims focus on everything that is unimportant in their rich religious traditions. It's all so much going through the motions because, I guess, it's better than doing nothing. It's something. Or if it's got any juice to it, it's a form of obsession or compulsion, and it's better to be obsessed or in the grip of a compulsion that to feel numb and dead.

The difference between modern, soul-withered man and archaic, soulful man is that for the latter the connections are obvious and given in their traditions and customs and in their intimately experienced connection with the natural world around them. They are Charles Taylor's "porous selves", and for him the world is full of wonders and rich given meanings. For the modern "buffered selves", the world is disenchanted and flat, not because the Being of the World is flat, but because we moderns have lost the cognitive capacity to experience its depths. And so we moderns and no-longer-moderns are mostly aware of the disconnections and therefore the the lack of meanings in a meaning-flattened, disenchanted world.

So has the world flattened, or is it just that it seems flat because we are so soul-flat, so soul-sleepy. Is it that there is no meaning, or that our capacity for experiencing it has become so diminished that we no longer have the range of experiences that provide the data for us to make meaningful connections?  Or Is it that the data is there, but we haven't awakened to it, that we are having the experiences but missing their meanings because we haven't the interior capability to make the connections? In other words, do we experience the world as we do the poem that at first reading seems like gibberish? Is it that the connections are there, but we just haven't awakened to them, perhaps because we haven't tried hard enough. And so therefore, Is it possible, perhaps, that the gods have not abandoned us, but that they await our re-awakening to their presence.

***

So back to a reflection on potentia and actum, which is largely derived in my thinking about it from Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Barfield and Nietzsche saw that the world of given collective meanings and given connections no longer had any vitality. Nietzsche and Barfield agree that we are living in a dead-tree world rather than in a living world in which the collective consciousness is vibrant with life and meaning. Barfield’s word to describe a human experience rich with connection and meaning is 'participation', a word that deliberately has Platonic connotations, and for him it comes in two varieties ‘original’ and ‘final.’ His word to describe our life lived among the dead trees is 'idolatry'. Original participation is experienced by what Taylor calls 'porous selves', selves embedded, animist cultures in which everything is connected and merged into one another and in which the world is alive with spirits. Final participation is a stage of human development that lies before us in the future in which the autonomous, buffered, idolatrous, modern self will re-embed or de-buffer in a deeper and more richly textured experience of of communion with the Being of the World.

Remnants of original participation lingered in Europe through the medieval period and even into the nineteenth century in some rural areas where the old ways hadn’t quite died. But a phenomenal world emerged in the West during the modern period in which layer upon layer of meanings had been stripped away by a withering rationality.  All that remained was a kind of minimalist husk whose meaning was mostly defined by its utilitarian or economic value, rather than the I-Thou relationship that is more characteristic of aboriginal and other premodern cultures. These husks are Barfield's idols. 

For Nietzsche this stripping away of given meanings was a liberation because it cleared the way for an unprecedented, open-ended human project in a joyous effusion of self assertion unrestrained by tradition, Kantian categories (or whatever). For Barfield, a Christian, this loss of the original, rich experience of meaning is a necessary step in the evolution of consciousness. Meaning moved from out there as something publicly experienced to something grounded in interior experience, from the Mosaic stone tablets to the supple human heart, and the possibility for movement from outer to inner, from burning bush out there, to burning heart in here, was effected by the incarnation of the Word as described in the prologue to John's Gospel.

For the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, is about the new law, a felt experience (in Heideggerian, a new mood?) of something that is born within, and so from this 'within' new practices and attitudes are developed. So for Barfield God has not died, he's just gone into hiding in the depths of the human soul. And he argues that the new human task is to renew the face of the earth by making the Logos now in potentialis, actualis. In other words, the Logos is sleeping in the depths of every human soul, and salvation both for humans and for the earth becomes a possibility to the degree that it is awakened, i.e., becomes actualis, i.e., activated in the human soul. There's some overlap with Norman Brown here. Brown thought highly of Saving the Appearances.  

Both Barfield and Nietzsche agree that freedom is at the center of the human project. But Barfield's is a Christian understanding of freedom. It envisions the nobility and dignity of the future human being and his existence on the earth as dependent on his willingness to undertake the struggle to make what is implicit explicit and in doing so to awaken what is in potentialis or slumbering in both nature and the human soul, because they are the same thing--Nature is the human unconscious. A fully animated experience of Being is there in the collective unconscious like a repressed memory. And for him the implicit that is to be made explicit, the potential to be made actual, the slumbering to be awakened is the Logos--the substructure of Being and the ground for its intelligibility. The awakened, thinking heart to paraphrase St. Paul, is not I but the Logos thinking in us. I am arguing that the key to the restoration of the withered soul is the awakening to this presence of the Logos which lies in the soul's depths, but also in the depths of everything. The Logos is not a head thing; it's a Being thing, and as such a soul thing.

***

The story of the world for the last three thousand years has been that of a gradual human disembedding, to use Charles Taylor's term. It's been a movement from original participation, to use Barfield's phrase, to a radically disembedded experience of the human being as autonomous or buffered Self. The shift to autonomy reached a kind of tipping point among educated elites in the period between Descartes and Kant, and its culmination in the doctrine of radical, open-ended freedom articulated by Nietzsche and later Sartre, which has become the new values backdrop for cosmopolitan, Western educated elites. In such an autonomous state, humans have a sense of their individual freedom and a lack of external restraints that were unimaginable in previous epochs. And the challenge that lies before them now is what they will do with that freedom.

We humans are free, but we don't seem to have the will (or is it the inspired imagination) to do anything really constructive with it. We are as a result passive, and we are allowing the technological/economic tail to wag the dog. We are serving it, rather than finding the vision and the will to make it serve us.  We are living in a perilous time for the earth and for humans, particularly with the way in which information and biological technologies are pushing for what appears to be an inevitable transhuman mechanomorphic redefinition of what it means to be human. It's deeply disturbing to me that there is so little push back from the older humanistic traditions--at least any push back that seems to matter.

I think what I have written above largely explains why. We've lost our souls, and so that older understanding of what it means to be human, a being with soul and spirit, is something that nobody in your typical humanities department believes in anymore. That tradition is largely dismissed as the boring, myopic utterances of dead, white males.  There simply isn't enough mass among our cultural elite which believes in those traditions anymore, and so it cannot provide a culture wide foothold to push back against the coming barbarism. Does the new anti-humanism offer a better foothold? I don't think so.

And so my preoccupation, and the underlying preoccupation of this blog, has been about how to resist the coming barbarism, and the only answer is to counter with an alternative vision of the future that will be robust enough to galvanize the collective will to fight for it. And I would argue it lies in the retrieval of essential aspects of the old humanism that flashed forth brilliantly in Renaissance and then diminished slowly after that during the Enlightenment, and after that the materialistic period that darkened the world in the 19th Century and from which we are now trying to emerge. 

We're all one way or another Nietzscheans now, but really there was only one Nietzschean and he died in an asylum. His diagnosis of what ails us was correct, his cure questionable at best, and at its worst produces symptoms far worse than the original ailment. So the challenge is to frame a robust alternative cure--one that accepts the basic Nietzschean frame that there is no robust sense of shared, culture-wide meanings, and so no robust sense of the "better angels" working with us in our collective consciousness. But they are there, in our collective unconsciousness, in our souls and underground in the Being of the World, and the task is to find a way to awaken them.

The challenge should be easier and more naturally embraced by Christians. It should be easier for them to accept that the connections are there--as they are in the poem I talked about earlier. This is the work, and it is, I believe, where the imagination, the inspiration, and the will to push back and to create something new will come from. But while this is a difficult work, I don't see anything else that is likely to work. 

To undertake this work it's not essential to accept in some credal or doctrinal sense Christian beliefs. The important thing is that people of good will become grounded and oriented again, that they lose their diffidence, and begin to push back. And my argument here is that if we are truly grounded, it's possible to accept pluralism and multi-perspectivalism at the same time that one embraces that there is an underlying lawful, liberating, love-abounding substructure to reality that is the source of all meaning, the giver of all productive purposes, healthful customs, and living traditions. Christians need to explain why they understand the meaning of history the way they do, and trust that if there is any truth in it, others will come to embrace it. 

And so for me, a Christian, I call that ground the Logos, and I do believe that what happened 2000 years ago mattered to the history of the earth in a central way and that the whole history and evolution of the earth pivots around it. But I also believe it doesn't matter what you believe; it matters what you do. The right kind of doing does not require a complete understanding of the underlying forces that direct it. But the right kind of doing will in my view always be work than in its manifold ways leads to the awakening the Logos in the individual and in the collective consciousness. That's the critical task no matter how you think about it or how you do it. This is how we save our collective soul, and how we as individuals restore our collectively missing chests.

There is the particular, local, and historical--but it must be held in a tension with a transcendent grounding that exists in a very real way in potentio in the depths of every human soul--and in the depths of the Being of the World--and which when awakened awakens in magnificent, abundant variety and particularity. But more important than this awakening, whatever its manifest variety, is that it will gradually provide a transcultural framework for people of good will everywhere to come together to decide what a good, healthful, human future should look like. Otherwise the barbarians take the field unopposed. 

Ed: This post, somewhat revised here, originally appeared in February 2011. For a more explicitly theological, and tercer statement of the underlying principles that shape this essay, see "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses."]

Custom is our nature. What are our natural principles but principles of custom?
--Blaise Pascal 

The growing rush and the disappearance of contemplation and simplicity from modern life [are] the symptoms of a complete uprooting of culture. The waters of religion retreat and leave behind pools and bogs. The sciences . . . atomize old beliefs. The civilized classes and nations are swept away by the grand rush for contemptible wealth. Never was the world worldlier, never was it emptier of love and goodness. . . . Everything, modern art and science included, prepares us for the coming barbarism. . . .Everything on earth will be decided by the crudest and most evil powers, by the selfishness of grasping men and military dictators.  --Nietzsche,  Thoughts out of Season, 1873-76

“If a man wishes to be sure of the road he treads on, he must close his eyes and walk in the dark.”--St. John of the Cross

Most people would say that their lives have meaning. It's not something they think a lot about. It just does, and it does because each of us has been socialized into a set of meanings about which we had no choice. Custom is, in this sense, our nature, and these meanings given by custom or tradition are in the background for all of us, even if we consciously reject some of them when we are older. And while I do not want to suggest that I undervalue the importance of given, traditional meanings, it's also clear that in the modern world custom and tradition are not what they used to be. And clearly the pluralization of custom in a globalizing world has a fragilizing effect on human nature--so neither are we humans what we used to be. 

It should be clear that there is something essential in the spirit of modernity, coupled with its capitalist economic engine, that destroys customs and traditions and replaces them with other practices that tend to have a soul-flattening effect. Everywhere modernity has established itself traditions and customary practices have died. Islam is quite right to see modernity (or westernization or globalization) as a threat. It will destroy its traditions as it has destroyed the customary cultures of the West. And the hyper-cerebral logic of modernity is now turning on itself attacking even the traditions of rationality that have developed since the Enlightenment. 

And the result, of course, is social fragmentation and with it the slow destruction of any sense of robust 'given' collective meanings, which in turn causes increased loneliness and alienation, loss of depth and texture in our experience, anomie and a growing sense that nothing is really important. It creates a new kind of culture in which all that matters is our relative comfort or discomfort, whether we are bored or entertained.

If things continue on their present course, we will have soon enough a globalized world in which all collective social meanings except commercial/consumerist meanings will have withered away. Other deeper, richer meanings, insofar as one can find them, will be a matter for individuals and small groups, who will live as islands surrounded by an ocean dominated by a global-commercial culture that will produce, already is producing, crude Donald-Trump-type culture heroes, vulgar elites committed to their own aggrandizement--and by non-elites thought well of for it, because, according to the new collective values emerging, they are life's winners. And it's a world in which the masses will be increasingly anesthetized by hi-tech bread and circuses, or preoccupied in passively observing elites as they play their power and sex games with one another on tabloid tv and computer screens and iPhones.

In the meanwhile the older traditions continue to provide something of a meaning backdrop, but do so without much, if any, vitality. There are exceptions in pockets here and there, but they are moribund. These dying traditions still provide a certain kind of order, but they no longer have any real life; they no longer have any eros. They are like dead trees that maintain the shape given to them by the life forces that once worked in them, but which now are sapless and brittle. So "higher" meaning in the modern age has withered into boring, eros-less abstractions, and its sapless cultural forms have become what African-Americans call “whitebread”--bland, textureless, soulless. Sure, there is a superstructure of meaning, and most people find a way to live a life within it, but it won’t take much to blow it away--and a storm, she's a brewin'.

***

How did we get here? It's complicated, and it seems to be a development that comes peculiarly out of the cultural mentality of the West. Charles Taylor's A Secular Age is one of the best books I know that traces out the variety of subtle lines that brought us here. Another is Jacques Barzun's From Dawn to Decadence. And another recently released book grappling in an intriguing way with this loss of the sacred is Dreyfus's and Kelly's All Things Shining. 

 

I think that what it boils down to this: The enlightenment rationalist model was unbalanced and naively hubristic. Its culture heroes thought rationality was going to solve everything, and it's only lately that we're catching on to what Hume already saw at the Enlightenment's high point--that reason is the slave of the passions. And it should be clear to the sane observer that the modern rationalist project in its mission to destroy tradition has cleared the ground for the most barbaric passions to run unrestrained. These crude passions have always been a part of the human experience, but now they command the field in a peculiar and unprecedented way, and will continue to do so until or unless other passions, those which Lincoln called our 'better angels', grow once again in the collective consciousness to become potent enough to push back to create a space for something new to emerge.

 

But the passions of our better angels are weaker than ever because modernity has had such a withering effect on the life or our souls. Rationality has flattened and disenchanted the world, and in doing so has caused the soul to shrivel, and in its shriveling its capacity for wonder, for reverence, and for a natural, intuitive sense of the sacred. Lots of people say they don't need all that superstitious hocus pocus. But they're like someone who has never fallen in love and wonders what all the fuss is about: for them the sacred and any talk about it is all projection and fantasy and nonsense. Yes, that is how it looks from the outside. But from the inside it's not so easy to dismiss, and when lost, not so easy to forget.

 

The argument here is not that individuals in a secular society are incapable of wonder and reverence, but that the culture as a whole, as a frame that shapes our response to the world, has no ordinary lived sense of the sacred anymore. Other, cruder passions have pushed it to the side, or people feel diffident and white-bready, lost and wandering in a secular, disenchanted wilderness without a moral compass, and in their disorientation feel themmselves unable to commit to anything, much less fight for it or put one's life on the line for it. We have become a society populated by what Nietzsche called Last Men. 

 

This condition of moderns is what Nietzsche and Heidegger lamented: moderns don't know their own poverty. It's not that they have loved and lost, but that because they have never loved, they don't know what they have lost. Nietzsche understood the enormity of the loss, and his proclamation that God is dead derives from his recognition that we no longer find him in the collective consciousness; he no longer informs our collective meanings and our collective aspirations. N. recognized that insofar as the Judaeo-Christian God was the foundation for a culture-wide mythopoesis or metanarrative, he no longer exists. And I don't think there's any quarreling with that basic claim.

 

And so in this world in which God no longer lives in the collective consciousness, there is a pervasive, culture-wide nostalgia that longs to enjoy again a religious connectedness that our ancestors took for granted. It’s as much an issue for restorationist Catholics as it is for the guy with ear-lobe plugs and a full-body tattoo. The first longs for a lost Christendom, the other for a lost animism; the first for an integrated, culture-wide mythos that inspires in men and women self-transcending, noble ideals; the second, a sense of oneness with the cosmos. I sympathize with both, but there is no future in nostalgia. And nostalgia abounds in a culture that can no longer frame for itself a vibrant, collective sense of future possibility. Nostalgia, in other words, is the dominant mood in a spiritually stagnant society. A society that lacks dynamic spiritual élan looks backward for want of anything better.

 

And in this disenchanted world in which we have killed God, we have made the earth into a thing to be exploited, and the spirits that once numinously made their homes in the glades and streams and groves have withdrawn--or so it seems. Las Vegas is the New Jerusalem of our era, and the pop-Nietzschean Ayn Rand is its prophet. And the people in the culture who are most aware of what we have lost, who feel it most acutely, are living through a culture-wide experience of a Dark Night of the Senses, and a culture-wide experience of the absence of God as the Dark Night of the Spirit.

 

These 'dark nights' are conditions described by the great 16th-century lyric poet St. John of the Cross in which he describes a process during which the individual soul experiences the stripping away of all external supports to be left alone in a dreadful darkness. But he sees this stripping away as a necessary stage of spiritual development. I have long thought of St. John, an early modern who died in 1591, as one who lived intensely on the individual level the experience at the dawning of the Modern era that would be lived on a collective level three centuries later. But if St. John was the herald of the spiritually darkening age to come, he also points to a way to move through it.

 

St. John gives us, at least those of us who are believers, some reason to believe that there is the possibility to move forward into the Dark with confidence, and that if we remain faithful, we shall awaken to a Good that we, most of us, cannot at the moment bring into view. That doesn't mean it isn't there, only that we cannot see it. But because the beloved has departed does not mean that he or she no longer exists. We find mementos everywhere, but the mementos are not the presence. Only signifiers of a presence that is no longer experienced. Absence is non-presence, but there is no absence unless there was once presence. And it's possible to hold that 'presence' in memory, like the soldier on the front who holds on to the picture of his beloved back home, while we move forward in the dark. He points us to the development of the cognitive capacity that will allow us to navigate in this darkness, which is not ordinary Appollonian day-time thinking and sight, but rather the thinking heart, the heart that does not see but eventually feels the presence that it seeks. And this presence, as I describe it below, is the Logos.

 

***

So here are some preliminary thoughts rooted in my own struggle to make sense of what we're going through and what a framework for developing a robust sense of future possibility might look like. It begins with a meditation on how we experience meaning in the first place. So bear with me. What I say below starts out kind of abstractly, but I think I bring it back down to earth in the end.

The meaning of meaning and all the semiotic theory developed over the last 150 years is beyond the scope of what's appropriate to discuss here, so I would like just to work with a simpler, more seat-of-the-pants understanding of how we experience meaning. The key word is “connection,” and the key to understand it is the many various ways in which we find and make connections. When we see a connection or make a connection, there is meaning. When we don’t see it, there is meaninglessness. The discrete elements in our experience are meaningless to us unless or until they fall into a meaningful pattern in which each element is connected to the other in a way that makes sense. When we are told a joke and don't get it, we don't understand how the punchline connects the dots in the setup that preceded it. The experience of connection that renders an experience of 'meaning'  in this sense is what we commonly experience as 'insight'.

Take for example our reading of a poem when any meaning in it at first eludes us; the words don’t make sense. We know the meanings for each word, but they don’t connect with one another in any meaningful way; it seems to be quasi-gibberish on first reading. We try again, still nothing. Then perhaps several times more, and finally it hits us, and the words vibrate not only with their interconnectedness among themselves, but with something in us that comes alive in response to them. Not just the excitement of breaking the code, but the revelation of a kind of secret that was held in the poem. Its meaning is a discovery, or perhaps it's more accurate to say our experience of it a kind of awakening.

Is it then only that something awakens in us that has given the words their meaning? Clearly that's too one-sided. But then is the poem, particularly if it is a great poem, something that the poet "creates", or is it something about our shared reality that he has awakened to himself  and then uses language to 'remember' that experience of awakening but which also creates the possibility for others to awaken to it (or remember it) too. I like that way of thinking about it because it gets us out of our individual bubbles and into a shared reality of which we are mostly oblivious. A great poem is not about the poet's subjective experience, but rather disclosive of the Being of the World in which we are all immersed.

But then what is it about us humans that allows us to make these connections in the first place?  Certainly the kind of acculturation with its imprinting of foundational meanings is an essential background element, but must there not be something that lies behind the acculturation?  Even if we cannot know it except as mediated through our acculturation, is there not something that we must deduce as the ground for the production of culture in the first place? If the creation of cultural worlds is what makes us human, mustn't there, despite all the varieties of culture, be some kind of underlying structure that is the condition for the possibility of culture? Certainly language and symbol making are essential here, but where does that come from? To explain this by some Darwinian evolutionary logic is from where I stand comically reductionistic.

***

Reading is not a passive activity; it is an active one. It has to be if we are to understand anything we have read. But it's not as if we're making up the meanings that we read. They are there for us to discover, but there has to be something in us that wills to pay attention in order to discover it. But what is it in us that gives us this capacity for understanding when we have this moment of discovery or insight? I think of my experience of insight when the poem yields up its meaning as the experience of something in me that lay dormant as it lay dormant in the poem, a potentia that has becomes actum when, through my act of attention, some meaning discloses itself in the experience of making a connection. What is in me in potentia is stimulated into actuality by my encounter with the poem, but it is not simply given by the poem unless the poem points to something I am already awake to. Otherwise, the meaning doesn’t come alive until I awaken it in my struggle to understand what the poem seeks to disclose. Now the greater the poem, the richer its potential for disclosure and for awakening something in the reader. Someone else in reading the poem might discover a different aspect of what the poem discloses. The poet himself may not be aware of all the poem has to disclose.

So meaning, as in this example, comes from the way words connect with other words, but also in the ways in which we make connections in all kinds of ways--in the way people connect with one another, the way memory connects us with our past, and imagination with our future. But also in the ways in which we become more aware, especially regarding the depths and layers of the Being of the World. We have experiences all the time but we miss the meaning because we don't have a sophisticated or well developed enough meaning framework that allows us to make meaningful connections. The Being of the World is for us as a musical score for a Mozart symphony as would be for musically illiterate deaf people. We see the notes but can have no idea about the full, living reality to which they point. 

So our experience of meaning, if it is rich and deeply textured, requires a kind of erotic thinking, I.e., the development or the rediscovery of the thinking heart, a retrieval of the understanding that we cannot really know something if we do not love it, and to love something means to be awakened to its deep truth and goodness and beauty. And loving, if it is truly loving means in some manner an encounter with the mystery and depth of the beloved as 'Thou'. Meaning is relational in the obvious mechanical sense that the brain enables, but it is relational in an interpersonal sense, too. And as all interpersonal relationships are multi-layered, so is our relationship with the Being of the World, for which depth upon depth lie slumbering in potentia awaiting our awakening to them.

We live in a hyper-eroticized society, but we no longer understand Eros because our capacity for it has withered with the withering of our modern souls. We moderns (or no-longer-moderns) have atrophied souls but hypertrophied heads and genitals. We have what I've called Missing Middle Syndrome--we've become what C.S. Lewis described in The Abolition of Man as 'men without chests'. In a soul-atrophied culture, in which there is no robust common experience of the middle that we used to know as soul, we oscillate from head to groin, from groin to head endlessly, pointlessly, compulsively. It gets us nowhere.

Observe our popular culture in film and fiction--there is only the genital experience to make vivid emotion all connections and the head to make meanings, but the two operate in their own orbits, and don't really talk to one another because the soul in a soulless culture plays such a weak role in mediating between them. And we suffer from an internal sense of dissociation and alienation that mirrors the dissociation and fragmentation of the society around us. Our disorientation is the result of the stupor that results when we have lost our souls.

And so we long most deeply for meanings that are not just head meanings or or a sense of connection that derives not just from the temporary satisfaction of our instinctual impulses, but such meanings can be effected only in the soul, and so it is required to have one. If your soul is withered (or just slumbering), there is no real capacity for richly textured, deeply significant meanings. And so we settle for innumerable variations on cheap sex in the back of the car, intensified now by its manifold virtual possibilities. And we mistake excitement for significance, and instinct-driven passion for spiritual élan. 

Our popular culture, for this reason, exults in the life of instinct as if it's some affirmation of life, liberty, joyousness. But it just isn't. It's Charlie-Sheen pathetic. It's just a parody of eros and its sacred mysteries. It's pathetic the way fundamentalist Christians and Muslims focus on everything that is unimportant in their rich religious traditions. It's all so much going through the motions because, I guess, it's better than doing nothing. It's something. Or if it's got any juice to it, it's a form of obsession or compulsion, and it's better to be obsessed or in the grip of a compulsion that to feel numb and dead.

The difference between modern, soul-withered man and archaic, soulful man is that for the latter the connections are obvious and given in their traditions and customs and in their intimately experienced connection with the natural world around them. They are Charles Taylor's "porous selves", and for him the world is full of wonders and rich given meanings. For the modern "buffered selves", the world is disenchanted and flat, not because the Being of the World is flat, but because we moderns have lost the cognitive capacity to experience its depths. And so we moderns and no-longer-moderns are mostly aware of the disconnections and therefore the the lack of meanings in a meaning-flattened, disenchanted world.

So has the world flattened, or is it just that it seems flat because we are so soul-flat, so soul-sleepy. Is it that there is no meaning, or that our capacity for experiencing it has become so diminished that we no longer have the range of experiences that provide the data for us to make meaningful connections?  Or Is it that the data is there, but we haven't awakened to it, that we are having the experiences but missing their meanings because we haven't the interior capability to make the connections? In other words, do we experience the world as we do the poem that at first reading seems like gibberish? Is it that the connections are there, but we just haven't awakened to them, perhaps because we haven't tried hard enough. And so therefore, Is it possible, perhaps, that the gods have not abandoned us, but that they await our re-awakening to their presence.

***

So back to a reflection on potentia and actum, which is largely derived in my thinking about it from Owen Barfield's Saving the Appearances: A Study in Idolatry. Barfield and Nietzsche saw that the world of given collective meanings and given connections no longer had any vitality. Nietzsche and Barfield agree that we are living in a dead-tree world rather than in a living world in which the collective consciousness is vibrant with life and meaning. Barfield’s word to describe a human experience rich with connection and meaning is 'participation', a word that deliberately has Platonic connotations, and for him it comes in two varieties ‘original’ and ‘final.’ His word to describe our life lived among the dead trees is 'idolatry'. Original participation is experienced by what Taylor calls 'porous selves', selves embedded, animist cultures in which everything is connected and merged into one another and in which the world is alive with spirits. Final participation is a stage of human development that lies before us in the future in which the autonomous, buffered, idolatrous, modern self will re-embed or de-buffer in a deeper and more richly textured experience of of communion with the Being of the World.

Remnants of original participation lingered in Europe through the medieval period and even into the nineteenth century in some rural areas where the old ways hadn’t quite died. But a phenomenal world emerged in the West during the modern period in which layer upon layer of meanings had been stripped away by a withering rationality.  All that remained was a kind of minimalist husk whose meaning was mostly defined by its utilitarian or economic value, rather than the I-Thou relationship that is more characteristic of aboriginal and other premodern cultures. These husks are Barfield's idols. 

For Nietzsche this stripping away of given meanings was a liberation because it cleared the way for an unprecedented, open-ended human project in a joyous effusion of self assertion unrestrained by tradition, Kantian categories (or whatever). For Barfield, a Christian, this loss of the original, rich experience of meaning is a necessary step in the evolution of consciousness. Meaning moved from out there as something publicly experienced to something grounded in interior experience, from the Mosaic stone tablets to the supple human heart, and the possibility for movement from outer to inner, from burning bush out there, to burning heart in here, was effected by the incarnation of the Word as described in the prologue to John's Gospel.

For the Kingdom of God, said Jesus, is about the new law, a felt experience (in Heideggerian, a new mood?) of something that is born within, and so from this 'within' new practices and attitudes are developed. So for Barfield God has not died, he's just gone into hiding in the depths of the human soul. And he argues that the new human task is to renew the face of the earth by making the Logos now in potentialis, actualis. In other words, the Logos is sleeping in the depths of every human soul, and salvation both for humans and for the earth becomes a possibility to the degree that it is awakened, i.e., becomes actualis, i.e., activated in the human soul. There's some overlap with Norman Brown here. Brown thought highly of Saving the Appearances.  

Both Barfield and Nietzsche agree that freedom is at the center of the human project. But Barfield's is a Christian understanding of freedom. It envisions the nobility and dignity of the future human being and his existence on the earth as dependent on his willingness to undertake the struggle to make what is implicit explicit and in doing so to awaken what is in potentialis or slumbering in both nature and the human soul, because they are the same thing--Nature is the human unconscious. A fully animated experience of Being is there in the collective unconscious like a repressed memory. And for him the implicit that is to be made explicit, the potential to be made actual, the slumbering to be awakened is the Logos--the substructure of Being and the ground for its intelligibility. The awakened, thinking heart to paraphrase St. Paul, is not I but the Logos thinking in us. I am arguing that the key to the restoration of the withered soul is the awakening to this presence of the Logos which lies in the soul's depths, but also in the depths of everything. The Logos is not a head thing; it's a Being thing, and as such a soul thing.

***

The story of the world for the last three thousand years has been that of a gradual human disembedding, to use Charles Taylor's term. It's been a movement from original participation, to use Barfield's phrase, to a radically disembedded experience of the human being as autonomous or buffered Self. The shift to autonomy reached a kind of tipping point among educated elites in the period between Descartes and Kant, and its culmination in the doctrine of radical, open-ended freedom articulated by Nietzsche and later Sartre, which has become the new values backdrop for cosmopolitan, Western educated elites. In such an autonomous state, humans have a sense of their individual freedom and a lack of external restraints that were unimaginable in previous epochs. And the challenge that lies before them now is what they will do with that freedom.

We humans are free, but we don't seem to have the will (or is it the inspired imagination) to do anything really constructive with it. We are as a result passive, and we are allowing the technological/economic tail to wag the dog. We are serving it, rather than finding the vision and the will to make it serve us.  We are living in a perilous time for the earth and for humans, particularly with the way in which information and biological technologies are pushing for what appears to be an inevitable transhuman mechanomorphic redefinition of what it means to be human. It's deeply disturbing to me that there is so little push back from the older humanistic traditions--at least any push back that seems to matter.

I think what I have written above largely explains why. We've lost our souls, and so that older understanding of what it means to be human, a being with soul and spirit, is something that nobody in your typical humanities department believes in anymore. That tradition is largely dismissed as the boring, myopic utterances of dead, white males.  There simply isn't enough mass among our cultural elite which believes in those traditions anymore, and so it cannot provide a culture wide foothold to push back against the coming barbarism. Does the new anti-humanism offer a better foothold? I don't think so.

And so my preoccupation, and the underlying preoccupation of this blog, has been about how to resist the coming barbarism, and the only answer is to counter with an alternative vision of the future that will be robust enough to galvanize the collective will to fight for it. And I would argue it lies in the retrieval of essential aspects of the old humanism that flashed forth brilliantly in Renaissance and then diminished slowly after that during the Enlightenment, and after that the materialistic period that darkened the world in the 19th Century and from which we are now trying to emerge. 

We're all one way or another Nietzscheans now, but really there was only one Nietzschean and he died in an asylum. His diagnosis of what ails us was correct, his cure questionable at best, and at its worst produces symptoms far worse than the original ailment. So the challenge is to frame a robust alternative cure--one that accepts the basic Nietzschean frame that there is no robust sense of shared, culture-wide meanings, and so no robust sense of the "better angels" working with us in our collective consciousness. But they are there, in our collective unconsciousness, in our souls and underground in the Being of the World, and the task is to find a way to awaken them.

The challenge should be easier and more naturally embraced by Christians. It should be easier for them to accept that the connections are there--as they are in the poem I talked about earlier. This is the work, and it is, I believe, where the imagination, the inspiration, and the will to push back and to create something new will come from. But while this is a difficult work, I don't see anything else that is likely to work. 

To undertake this work it's not essential to accept in some credal or doctrinal sense Christian beliefs. The important thing is that people of good will become grounded and oriented again, that they lose their diffidence, and begin to push back. And my argument here is that if we are truly grounded, it's possible to accept pluralism and multi-perspectivalism at the same time that one embraces that there is an underlying lawful, liberating, love-abounding substructure to reality that is the source of all meaning, the giver of all productive purposes, healthful customs, and living traditions. Christians need to explain why they understand the meaning of history the way they do, and trust that if there is any truth in it, others will come to embrace it. 

And so for me, a Christian, I call that ground the Logos, and I do believe that what happened 2000 years ago mattered to the history of the earth in a central way and that the whole history and evolution of the earth pivots around it. But I also believe it doesn't matter what you believe; it matters what you do. The right kind of doing does not require a complete understanding of the underlying forces that direct it. But the right kind of doing will in my view always be work than in its manifold ways leads to the awakening the Logos in the individual and in the collective consciousness. That's the critical task no matter how you think about it or how you do it. This is how we save our collective soul, and how we as individuals restore our collectively missing chests.

There is the particular, local, and historical--but it must be held in a tension with a transcendent grounding that exists in a very real way in potentio in the depths of every human soul--and in the depths of the Being of the World--and which when awakened awakens in magnificent, abundant variety and particularity. But more important than this awakening, whatever its manifest variety, is that it will gradually provide a transcultural framework for people of good will everywhere to come together to decide what a good, healthful, human future should look like. Otherwise the barbarians take the field unopposed. 

Ed: This post, somewhat revised here, originally appeared in February 2011. For a more explicitly theological, and tercer statement of the underlying principles that shape this essay, see "The Meaning of History in 25 Theses."]

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

Terry Eagleton's book, Culture and the Death of God runs parallel to the parts of Taylor's book that trace out the West's march toward secularism and the possibility for atheistic humanism. Eagleton's book, however, starts at the Enlightenment and focuses more on the history of ideas than in changes to the social imaginary. It's a dynamic process, of course, Ideas change because the imaginary does, and the imaginary changes in response to new ideas. What's possible to think is limited by the imaginary, but the imaginary is in continuous development as material conditions change the world and our thinking about the world changes in response. 

So, for instance, it was not possible to think of Nature as a machine while the social imaginary was still dominated by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas about formal and final causality. As soon as Aristotle and Plato are thrown out, efficient causality and instrumental reason become the only legitimate ways to think about the natural world, and our imagination of the cosmos changes from something humans thought of before as organic and alive with spirit to something that is disenchanted and mechanical. And the legitimacy of this mechanistic imaginary is reinforced by the material and technological advances that follow. The price we pay, however, is with the atrophying of the soul and the hypertrophying of meaninglessness that comes with what Taylor calls the  'buffered self'. This is the kind of human native to modernity who feels cut off from the social and natural worlds around him rather than feeling deeply embedded within them. Meaning comes with connection--or to use the Christian word, 'communion'. 

In Part 4 of my reading of Taylor's A Secular Age, I trace the process by which the personal God of Christian revelation becomes depersonalized, first by the way the radical Reformers stress God's remote transcendence, greatness, and inscrutability. This is a God before whom we humans skulk as depraved and inconsequential sinners all deserving of eternal damnation. This is a God, who because of his inscrutable mercy, nevertheless sees fit to predestine a few for salvation and most for the damnation we all deserve except for that selective application of his mercy.

This is a God who more closely resembles the judgmental, juridical, jealous God in parts of the Old Testament than the God who is revealed in the Gospels. After the vicious religious wars of the late 16th and early 17th century, there were good reasons for decent people to think that they needed some relief from the God in whose name everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, were so willing to slaughter one another. So in some quarters of Latin Christendom, this deeply unattractive and un-Christian God starts to morph into the impersonal God of the Deists, a god who created the universe but who does not intervene in human affairs. 

The Enlightenment rationalists' god created a world that was benevolent in its design, but after he got things running, he left the scene. There was in it no need to be saved, and so no need of a savior or of revelation or grace or much of traditional Christianity at all. Everything that was worth knowing was knowable by reason. It was enough that humans have the wit to discern in the world's design God's benevolent intentions that humans should thrive. The human project was no longer to cravenly worship a despotic God but to assert a new sense of human dignity and autonomy. The task now was for humans to use their God-given intelligence, i.e., instrumental reason, to discern the engineering logic of the cosmos so as to exploit it for human benefit. The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 was a shock to the idea of a benevolently designed cosmos, because it was an anomaly inexplicable within its framework. A hundred years later, the educated classes have become Darwinians: the universe is no longer run by a benevolent logic, but by one that in addition to being impersonal, is random and cruel. 

And so if God didn't create a benevolent universe after all, but rather a cruel one where bad things happen to good people, who needs him? Humans can get along very nicely without him, and the possibility for an atheistic humanism emerges, one that wants to retain much of the Christian morality, but without its ontological grounding. The problems of theodicy that come with the traditional idea of God  were too big in their minds to overcome. Best just to ditch any idea of God at all. 

An 'exclusive' humanism develops that seeks to retain what the best in the religious traditions affirms: justice, goodness, truth, magnanimity, etc. These are purely human possibilities without any need of transcendent grounding. The atheist can assert in all sincerity that he strives to be a moral person, and can believe that he is morally superior to believers precisely because he does what's right for its own sake, not because he fears punishment or because it's a downpayment on one of the bigger mansions in the kingdom to come. And this idea that human decency and moral behavior are possible without any reference to God has since become a commonplace in secular societies. Well, less so in America, but certainly a commonplace among its cosmopolitan, university-educated class.

Eagleton's book traces this process to what he describes as an 'authentic atheism', which really isn't accomplished until the anti-humanist post-Nietzscheans of the last forty years or so. Eagleton shows that it's not so easy to kill God, that even Nietzsche didn't quite do it; we must keep finding substitutes for him. If for the Enlightenment rationalist the substitution was the Deist clockmaker God, for the German idealists it was the Absolute, and for the Romantics it was the creative Self and the elan inherent in Nature. For the Victorians like Matthew Arnold it was 'culture', the kind of thing that morphed later into the ethical culture movement. It seeks to  preserve what's best in human ethical aspiration and creative achievement without all the metaphysical folderol. Then Nietzsche comes along and says, I don't think so. Either there's a God or there isn't, and if there isn't, then you're ridiculous if you constrain yourself by traditional moral codes. You need to free yourself from all that b.s. Here's Eagleton on this:

Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand. The death of God, he argues in The Joyful Wisdom, is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment. The time has come, then, to renounce the consoling fantasy that you can do away with God without also putting paid to Man. As Gilles Deleuze comments in Difference and Repetition, "God is retained so long as the Self is preserved." In Nietzsche’s eyes, all such essences involve some hint of celestial design or metaphysical substratum. Unless these, too, are rooted out, men and women will continue to languish in the shadow of the Almighty.

Of the various artificial respirators on which God has been kept alive, one of the most effective is morality. “It does not follow, Feuerbach anxiously insists," that goodness, justice and wisdom are chimaeras because the existence of God is a chimaera.” Perhaps not; but in Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain intact. Morality, for example, must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in a chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience or obligation in the first place. (156-57)

And so for Nietzsche, if you are going to take the death of God seriously, you must understand that it 

must herald the death of man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self-dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him. (159)

And so Nietzsche insofar as he substitutes the uebermensch/Overman for him, isn't quite able to kill God either, and the irony doesn't end there--

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self–emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.

So much for Nietzsche's uprooting all the deepest theological roots. if you're going to claim to be an authentic, god-is-dead atheist, you have to take it even further than Nietzsche did, which is what the postmodern thinkers do. As Deleuze quoted above suggests, If you are going to kill God, you must kill the human Self:

If Romanticism seeks to replace God with the fathomless, infinite, all-powerful subject, as Carl Schmitt argues in his Political Romanticism, postmodernism, in Perry Anderson’s words, represents a “subjectivism without a subject.” If God is dead, then Man himself, who once dreamed of filling his shoes is also near his term. There is not much left to disappear. (192)

The postmodern subject, like the Ubermensch, is clay in its own hands, able to change shape at its own behest; but by the same token it lacks the indomitable will with which Nietzsche’s post-human animal bends reality to his demands.

Since Man is no longer to be seen primarily as agent or creator, he is no longer in danger of being mistaken for the Supreme Being. He has finally attained maturity, but only at the cost of relinquishing his identity. He is not to be seen as self-determining, which is what freedom means for the likes of Kant and Hegel. The self is no longer coherent enough to be so. This is certainly one way in which postmodernism is post-theological, since it is God above all who is One, and who is the ground of his own being. It follows that if you want to be shot of him, you need to refashion the concept of subjectivity itself, which is just what postmodernism seeks to do. (189-90)

The only way to kill God for good is to kill the idea of humanity. So be careful what you wish for. Is this post-modern anti-humanism something that is anything more than a thought experiment taken on by bored intellectuals who want to take the death of God idea to its logical conclusion? If you take the death of God to its necessary conclusion, then you see the kind of fatuous human being that you are left with--Nietzsche called him the Last Man. Eagleton goes on to say that the anti-human project of the postmodern thinkers is easier to accomplish --

...if the capitalist system happens to be in transit from the subject as producer to the subject as consumer. Consumers are passive, diffuse, provisional subjects, which is not quite how the Almighty is traditionally portrayed. As long as men and women are seen as producers, labourers, manufacturers or self-fashioners, God can never quite expire. Behind every act of production lurks an image of creation, and one act of production in particular—art—rivals that of the Almighty himself. Not even he, however, can survive the advent of Man the Eternal Consumer. (189-90)

Who would be insane enough to wish for a humanity fitting this description if there was another plausible option?

This alternative within the current social imaginary is not easy for many to grasp yet, but it is profound in its implications, and it brings into focus the very difficult to understand, because so profound, implications of the events from Good Friday through Easter. If, as Christians and Jews have claimed for thousands of years,  humans are created in the image and likeness of God, then what we know about being human is commensurate with what we know about God, and Christians claim to know something about God because of the way he revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

Our knowledge of God is, therefore, commensurate with our ability to know ourselves, and vice versa. Feuerbach had it half right. He thought that God was a projection of characteristics that belonged to man, and that we attribute to God what humans need to claim for themselves, i.e., that human beings, contra Calvin's view of man as depraved and powerless, need to embrace God's attributes as their own if they are to come into their own.

But it does not follow that God is therefore merely a projected chimera. For if God is a chimera, so then are humans, or at least our current understanding of what it means to be human, including the mainstream understanding of atheistic humanists, is chimerical. For Christians the reverse is true. God projects himself into us, and insofar as we work with that, we become more deeply human. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: it was the definitive projection of God into the human being. This is admittedly a heavy lift for most moderns to accept.

I would go so far as to say that most who claim to be Christians don't understand or accept it. Most Christians see Christian belief as comprising mainly a morality code that is validated by its transcendent provenance. And surely there is a Christian morality and practice, but it is not an end in itself. It has validity only as a means to an end, and it has validity as long as it promotes rather than obstructs human movement toward that end. The telos of Christian morality is the agapic achievement of communion, and any kind of Christian behavior or belief that obstructs the movement toward greater levels of communion is illegitimate. Nothing, IMO, could be clearer from any clear-headed reading of the Gospels or Paul's epistles. 

So why is communion so hard to achieve? Calvin had it partially right in that there is something deeply wrong about the human condition. But he his wrong that we are depraved. Rather we are broken, soul shattered, incapable of being what we long to be and were created to be. Genesis depicts Adam's sin as an act of disobedience. Ok, but I think of the Genesis story as very closely related to the story of Icarus's defying his father. He like Adam and Eve over-reached; they took on more than they could handle. They aspired to something that was worthy of their aspiration, but without the capacity to attain it, like swimming the English Channel without having trained for it. And the consequences that followed were not so much punishment as the result of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.

God's warning to Adam and Eve, like that of Daedelus to Icarus, was not the warning of a despot to follow arbitrarily imposed rules, but like that of parent talking to spirited teenager. He knows that certain actions are folly and lead to destruction, and he knows he's dealing with somebody who is impatient to realize his full potential but cannot do it in one giant leap. So despite all warnings he leaps, and then comes the all but fatal fall. The human condition, like Icarus's after his crash, was like Humpty Dumpty's. It is concussed, amnesiac, shattered and in need of being put together again, and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't do it. All attempts for humans unaided to assemble the scattered shards of the broken human soul create parodies of the human, from Sun Kings to tinpot dictators, to the more recent project to manufacture a new transhuman version of Frankenstein's monster. They are all cartoon humans compared to the humans we were created to become. 

Only God could effect the reintegration of the shattered image, and he achieved that by taking the human soul into himself in his Incarnation, then allowing it to be shattered on the cross, and put back together again in the resurrection. The resurrection body of Christ is the proleptic image of the human being transformed into the fullness for which it was created, the fulfillment of the promise made by the serpent in the garden--to be like God. It is the restored image and likeness of God in the God/Man. 

The process of restoration for the rest of us is what the early Greek fathers called thesois. This is an idea of the human that the radical Reformers of the 16th century gave up on. They were justifiably worried about the human tendency to hubris, but went too far in the other direction. For if we are to become human beings capable of deep communion with God, with one another, and with all of creation, that's possible only to the degree that we become transformed. We are transformed to the degree that the shards of our shattered souls are slowly reassembled so that they once again reflect in their fullness the image and likeness of the God that has projected himself into them. 

So is God dead, or is it that we're looking for a God that is our projection of what we think a God should be rather than looking for the one who has projected himself into our brokenness? Eagleton puts it nicely--

The absence of God may be occluded by the fetish of Man, but the God who has been disposed of would seem little more than a fetish in the first place. As with William Blake’s Urizen or Nobodaddy, he was a convenient way of shielding humanity eager to be chastised from the intolerable truth that the God of Christianity is friend, lover and fellow accused, not judge, patriarch and superego. He is counsel for the defence, not for the prosecution. Moreover, his apparent absence is part of his meaning. The superstitious would see a sign, but the sign of the Father that counts is a crucified body. For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary it is one of the places where he is mostly fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility. Only by living this reality to the full, experiencing one’s death to the very end, can there be a path beyond the tragic. It is not a claim that fits well with the Religion of Humanity. (159-60)

Christianity rightly understood is the Religion of Humanity. Wrongly understood it leads to mistakes that recapitulate the hubristic ur-mistake of Edenic over-reaching, of rushing in where angels fear to tread, of trying to take on something before we are ready. There is a faux-noble, naive idealism that motivates this kind of hubristic action. The French Revolution and its imitators are classic examples. But the opposite is also true, we cannot allow our fear of hubris to be an excuse for inaction. 

Because we are not ready for some things now does not mean that we are unready to do what is there for us  to do. That's the challenge--to know the difference between hubris and making excuses for complacency. That's what I struggle with, anyway. The challenge at some of the most critical turning points in our lives is to live in the tension between two impulses that pull us in opposite directions. Usually a third, deeper possibility emerges if we are vigiliant enough to discern it. The tension, for instance, between being the one without conviction and being the one driven by passionate intensity is resolved in the ability to have the capacity to discern the right thing to do, and then to do it with quiet resolve, like Tolkien's Ents.

Where is that quiet resolve found? In the part of us that has been restored by the events of the first Holy Week. Those parts are in us all, whether believer or unbeliever. Belief is only important if it leads to a greater openness to the emollient effects of grace on our too rigid and shattered hearts. Too many people who claim to be believers, like the Pharisees depicted in the Gospels, use their mineralized beliefs as a carapace that shuts out that healing balm. Better to be an egregious sinner with a heart of flesh, than a clean-living, moralistic prig with a heart entombed in stone. 

Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 4

Part 4: The Anthropocentric Turn

Let's sum up what we've presented in Parts 1 - 3. Part 1 focused on the process of disembedding from the premodern enchanted social and cosmic imaginary to one that is thoroughly disembedded and disenchanted. This disembedding process has produced the buffered selves that we have become and the radically secular society to which buffered selves are native. The radically secularized society culminates a long process that began in the Axial period starting in the first half of the first millennium BCE. 

The Axial religions, among them Buddhism, Greek ontology, Judaism--and later Christianity--are significant because for the first time they assert that there is a higher Good than ordinary human flourishing. They introduce the idea that there is a level of Being that transcends our ordinary experience of the world, and that true happiness or liberation lies in aligning with that transcendent, universal Good rather than in traditional religious practices that focus on appeasing or propitiating local gods. So while the enchanted world of spirits, demons, devas is still very much a part of the world in which the post-Axial spiritual practices are developed, the dynamics of the enchanted world are unimportant. The goal is to not worry about all that, but rather to focus on aligning oneself with the higher Good. So this starts the process of disembedding and disenchantment in these different societies, a movement from local and particular to transcendent and universal. 

Buddhism envisions liberation as deliverance from the chain of incarnations in world where the ordinary pursuit of human flourishing was considered delusion; the goal was to shed the illusion of one's individuality and to melt back into the cosmic pleroma--the Deep Real. Judaism taught that while there may be many gods, they were false gods, and there was only one that was the true God, a 'personal' Deep Real, whose existence transcended time and space and yet who cared about the people to whom he said he was betrothed. Loving Him and obeying his laws should be their only concern, and the ancient Israelites developed a society that disembedded them from the enchantment-heavy pagan fertility cults in the societies that surrounded them. No need to propitiate or appease the local gods for this and that; there was only the one God: if the good Jew loves this God and follows his law, he will flourish.

Greek ontology asserted that there was a Deep Real that transcended space/time and which provided a universal standard of truth and goodness by which the quality of things in space time could be measured. And Christianity integrates both the Jewish and Greek streams in a synthesis that paradoxically asserts that the transcendent Deep Real--the Logos--entered into space time in a way that opens up possibilities for the transformation of space time that were before impossible. The paradox of the transcendent immanentizing is something that Jews and Greeks (and their rationalist heirs) could not accept then or now. It was blasphemous for Jews and a logical impossibility for Greeks.

Part 2 focused on the unique impulse for reform that developed within Latin Christendom, which goes through two phases: the first, was/is very like the Buddhist model in which there are two levels of religious commitment. The higher level was lived by monks outside the world of flourishing and committed to the goal of living a life that sought greater levels of alignment with the transcendent Good. The second level was lived by everyone else whose lives were mostly circumscribed by concerns about ordinary human flourishing--health, prosperity, fertility-- and religious practice for them was mainly one of management of the spiritual forces that promoted or obstructed flourishing. In Buddhism and in Western and Eastern Christianity, a two-level system of hierarchical spiritual complementarity developed in which both levels worked in a larger system of hierarchical social complementarity.

This system promoted social stability to a fairly significant degree, although there was always tension because of the gap that lay between the higher and the lower levels. No one in Latin Christendom--or anywhere else--believed during the first millennium CE that society was reformable by the standards presented in the gospels. If the transcendent Good to which the gospels pointed was to have a transformative effect, it would be only in the lives of spiritual virtuosi who left society and went into literal or figurative wildernesses to find the transcendent Good there. As St. Anselm (d. 1109) said:

If thou wouldst be certain of being in the number of the elect, strive to be one of the few, not of the many.  And if thou wouldst be quite sure of thy salvation, strive to be among the fewest of the few… Do not follow the great majority of mankind, but follow those who enter upon the narrow way, who renounce the world, who give themselves to prayer, and who never relax their efforts by day or by night, that they may attain everlasting blessedness.

The elitism is pretty stark, and it doesn't have a whole lot to do with the Christ of the gospels who spent most of his ministry with ordinary folks and often society's outcasts. The wilderness and mountain fastness are places where in Jewish and Christian tradition one encounters the transcendent Good, but the goal is not to stay there, but rather to come back into society. So the second phase, which Taylor calls the evangelical turn, seeks to break out of this static, hierarchical, elitist understanding of the Christian life and to raise the standards of religious practice throughout the larger extra-monastic society.  In the 1200s the Franciscan and Dominican orders emerge to take the higher, transcendently grounded spirituality out of the monasteries and into the world. Other popular religious movements emerge, and a serious Christian life becomes a possibility for people who are not monks.

So in the late medieval period, this kind of seriousness, however, continues to be mixed in with Christianized pagan popular practices that are designed to help the everyday Christian manage in a still very enchanted world. There is this mix of enchanted religion in popular piety, but also a very strong idea that the God of Love who revealed himself in His Son wanted them all to live lives that sought to be closer to Him. In that late medieval world there was an interesting, vibrant mix of religious possibilities. So people were religious in all kinds of ways and at all different levels of seriousness, some in a more pre-Axial key, others in a more post-Axial key for whom spiritual transformation or 'theosis' was the focus of their practice. And the institutional church and its leadership reflected this hodgepodge of possibilities, sometimes leaning more post-Axial, sometimes more pre-Axial, sometimes just concerned with its own institutional prerogatives and power. The selling of indulgences was clearly more pre-Axial in its mentality, and it was this and other pre-Axial tendencies of the Roman Church that inclined a growing educated, literate class in the Renaissance period to demand radical reforms in the 16th Century. 

The Calvinist reformers rejected the Catholic pluralistic model, and adopted a model that was more like the society of the ancient Israelites. There was one norm of righteousness, and everybody had to live by it. No more pluralism of practice, no more Christianity at higher and lower levels or different speeds. Everybody was equal in the eyes of God, and Christian practice was the same for everybody. So this collapsed the two-level spiritual/secular system in the Catholic model--the spiritual as a special vocation of prayer and contemplation was eliminated completely, and with that the eventual unintended consequence of creating a much larger space for the secular. 

But to the extent that churches, and later states with churches, set themselves the goal of mobilizing and organizing and actively bringing about these higher levels of conformity to (what was seen as ) the Christian life, this latter comes to be codified, laid out in a set of norms. Reform comes to be seen as a serious business, brooking no alternatives. There is no more separate sphere of the "spiritual" where one may go to pursue a life of prayer outside the saeculum; and nor is there the other alternation between order and anti-order, which Carnival represented. There is just this one relentless order of right thought and action, which must occupy all social and personal space. 

How then does the break-out occur? Because the very attempt to express what the Christian life means in terms of a code of action in the saeculum opens the possibility of devising a code whose main aim is to encompass the basic goods of life in the saeculum: life, prosperity, peace, mutual benefit. In other words, it makes possible what I call the anthropocentric shift. Once this happens then the break-out is ready to occur. It just needs the step to holding that these "secular" goods are the point of the whole code. Pushed by annoyance and resentment at the ascetic demands of ultra-conformity, many will be willing to take this step. (266-67)

Any robust impulse within Protestant societies that sought post-Axial aspiration to spiritual transformation or theosis was de-legitimated. There was instead a focus on a piety that at its best sought genuinely to reform society according to the spirit of the gospels, but because that is so difficult to sustain, this project inevitably devolved into a rigid, extrinsic moralism that I call 'whited sepulcher syndrome'. The gospels make fairly clear that this kind of extrinsic moralism is the deepest and most difficult kind of alienation to remedy because it creates a hard heartedness that is impervious to grace.

Part 3 focuses on how parallel to these changes in the social imaginary, there were changes also in the cosmic imaginary. The early Christian thinkers used Greek thought, particularly Stoicism, Neoplatonism, and Aristotle to help them articulate a Christian ontology. The premodern order was based on ancestral heritage on one hand, but also on a Platonic hierarchical cosmic order in which the social order was implicated, and the health of the social order was dependent on its virtue, i.e., the degree to which it realized its ideal form. 

It is out of this outlook that the idea emerges that disorders in the human realm will resonate in nature, because the very order of things is threatened. [In MacBeth] The night on which Duncan was murdered was disturbed by "lamenting heard i' the air; strange screams of death", and it remains dark even though day should have started. . . .

...in these cases, it is very clear that a moral order is more than just a set of norms, that it also contains what we might call an "ontic" component, identifying features of the world which make the norms realizable.

So there was an organic sense of order in that everybody had a job to do in the way that the head, the heart and the limbs have jobs to do in the body, and that there was a greater dignity to some of those functions than others. This idea of hierarchical dignity was tossed out in the modern period as the new idea of complementarity was determined simply by the random roles people play in society with no correlation to any ontological order. In the premodern order--

…the hierarchical differentiation itself is seen as the proper order of things. It was part of the nature or form of society. In the Platonic and neo-Platonic traditions . . . this form was already at work in the world, and any attempt to deviate from it turned reality against itself. Society would be denatured in the attempt. Hence the tremendous power of the organic metaphor in these earlier theories. The organism seems the paradigm locus of forms at work, striving to heal its wounds and cure its maladies. And at the same time, the arrangement of functions which it exhibits is not simply contingent: it is “normal’ and right. That the feet are below the head is how it should be.

The modern idealization of order departs radically from this. It is not just that there is no place for a Platonic-type form at work; but connected to this, whatever distribution of functions a society might develop is deemed contingent; it will be justified or not instrumentally; it cannot itself define the good. The basic normative principle is, indeed, that the members of society serve each other’s needs, help each other, in short, behave like the rational and sociable creatures that they are. In this way, they complement each other. But the particular functional differentiation which they need to take on to do this most effectively is endowed with no essential worth. It is adventitious, and potentially changeable. . . . In one way or the other, the modern order gives no ontological status to hierarchy, or any particular structure of differentiation. (163-65)

In the Christian Neoplatonic order the impersonal Logos embraced by the pre-Socratic philosophers through to the Stoics was personalized in the person of the Cosmic Christ depicted in the Prologue to John's Gospel and the first chapter of Paul's letter to the Colossians. The enchanted world is a deeply personal and interpersonal world, and the Christian revelation of the gospels and later the emergence of idea of the Trinitarian structure of the Deep Real reinforces that sense of a deeply personal cosmos in which the Deep Real is the Deep Personal. Salvation or liberation in the Christian scheme is not release from the world, but a release from Deep Alienation--human alienation from God, from the natural world, from one another, and even from one's own sense of Self. The goal, in other words, was a liberation from deep alienation, and the cure was the achievement of a deep interpersonal communion analogous to that the Trinity enjoys within itself. 

This personal cosmos, however, is significantly depopulated by the Calvinist reformers starting a process that the Enlightenment rationalists will take further. The Calvinist reformers take the process of disenchantment to another level: gone the sacramentals, relics, images and statues, Marian devotion, the intercession of the saints, etc., and all that's left is the remote Father God in his heaven outside time and space. This is a God who must be dutifully loved and worshiped, but who doesn't really need us, and it's just his caprice that some of us he'll save and most he won't.

This is a very severe, austere God, and what it has to do with the God revealed in the gospels, I don't know. But within Catholicism, too, this severe God became embraced by the Jansenists who played a very significant role in shaping the kind of extreme juridical-penal imagination of Christianity that perversely took root in France and Ireland. And then there were the Spanish Dominicans who took this severity to a bizarre level according to their own perverse logic. And then, as if to counterbalance all this severity there was Baroque exuberance in the arts in Catholic countries, and exuberant wealth in the Protestant capitalist societies, as in Holland. There's a lot going on.

This is an important shift. The cosmos already before the dawn of the scientific revolution, especially in Protestant societies, has become disenchanted and impersonal. This is an important precondition for the development of the scientific method, which requires that the meanings of things be bracketed in order simply to understand the mechanical logic of things with instrumental reason. Aristotle and his final causality had to be eliminated. The scene is set for the clockmaker god who built the machine, started it running, and then became the deus otiosus, leaving humans in charge to figure things out for themselves using instrumental reason. 

Living a godly life in this world is something very different from living in the ordered Aristotelian Cosmos of Aquinas or the hierarchy of Pseudo-Dionysios. It is no longer a matter of admiring a normative order in which God has revealed himself through signs and symbols. We rather have to inhabit it as agents of instrumental reason, working the system effectively in order to bring about God’s purposes; because it is through these purposes, and not through signs, that God reveals himself in his world. These are not just two different stances, but two incompatible ones. We have to abandon the attempt to read the cosmos as the locus of signs, reject this as illusion, in order to adopt the instrumental stance effectively. Not just on a level of popular belief, as a world of spirits, do we have to disenchant the universe; we have also to bring about the analogous shift on the high cultural level of science, and trade in a universe of ordered signs, in which everything has a meaning, for a silent but beneficent machine. (99)

The enchanted cosmos suffused by the life of the Logos stops its singing (or is it that buffered ears can no longer hear it?). The cosmos is no longer full of angelic hosts, but is now dark, cold, and silent. The earth becomes reified, a thing to be exploited for human benefit. The natural world in this new imaginary is a machine that runs according to the logic of the engineer rather than the lighthearted free play of the artist. This was Blake's lament about how the social imaginary by his time had been Newtonized. The chief human project now becomes to understand its mechanical principles, its clockwork, in order that it might better serve human utility, that is, ordinary human flourishing. We're back in the pre-Axial mode, but now science and technology replaces magic and the ritual appeasement of the gods. 

So now that we've summarized this broader historical context, let us focus on the implications for what Taylor calls the 'anthropocentric turn' and the movement to the possibility of the social imaginary embracing an exclusive humanism, i.e., a humanism completely immanent with no need of transcendent reference or grounding. This turn was driven first by the impulse for reform that began in the late medieval period that led to the radical split within Christendom after Luther and Calvin. This in turn led to the grisly confessional wars in roughly the century between 1550 and 1650 that ended on the continent with the Treaty or Westphalia in 1648 and in the Puritans' beheading of Charles I in England in 1649 and the restoration of Charles II about a decade later. This was a grisly, bloody time of so-called Christians killing one another so that confessional factions could insure control of their respective societies. 

So it's understandable that many intelligent, decent people coming out the experience of these absurd, disgusting confessional wars would view the claims of orthodox Christianity with a huge degree of skepticism. Both sides did their best to discredit themselves. And so it's understandable that there would be an attempt to retain what was best from the Christian tradition and throw overboard everything that was irrational and violent. The Enlightenment rationalists weren't anti-religion so much as they were anti-Church. As Terry Eagleton puts in in his Culture and the Death of God--

The Enlightenment's assault on religion, then was at root a political rather than a theological affair. By and large, the project was not to replace the supernatural with the natural, but to oust a barbarous, benighted faith in favour of a rational, civilized one. It was the role of ecclesial power in consecrating the ancien regimes, the unholy alliance of throne and altar, which scandalised these scholars more deeply, as the intellectual avatars of an emergent middle class. Some of them were less philosophers in the modern sense of the word than ideologues and intellectual agitators. . . .What seized their imagination was the Baconian project of harnessing knowledge and power, placing the findings of scientific reason at the service of social reform and human emancipation. (12)

A new apologetic project emerged whose goal was to take Calvin's idea of God, and to make him even more remote and 'civilized'. He would be retained as Creator and providential benefactor, but now we see him as the author of an impersonal, mechanical moral order whose code it was the human task to discern. No need for revelation. So now we see a move to understand religion in moralistic or disciplinary terms rather than in devotional or prayerful terms--too irrational (i.e., primitive, barbarous). It's not hard to see how that natural desire to restore peace and order for the pious or impious alike converges in their wanting to take the irrational out of religion. We, therefore don’t need to be soul transformed; we need simply to behave according to prescribed norms and laws. The goal was to become 'civilized' after a century of barbaric religious strife. 

So Taylor describes this new moral order that emerges in the late 17th century as having the following six characteristics:  

First, God has no other inscrutable purposes for us other than the fulfillment of our own good understood in terms of normal human flourishing. Post-axial spiritual aspiration drops out. There are no spiritually transformative aspirations, no idea of theosis. Theosis is rejected as anti-social monkishness that impedes rather than promotes the new ideal of mutual support through mutual exchange--

Our primary service to each other was thus (to use the language of a later age) the provision of collective security, to render our lives and property safe under law. But we also serve each other in practicing economic exchange. These two main ends, security and prosperity, are now the principal goals of organized society, which itself can come to be seen as something in the nature of a profitable exchange between its constituent members. The ideal social order is one in which our purposes mesh, and each in furthering himself helps the others.

The ideal order was not thought to be a mere human invention. Rather it was designed by God, an order in which everything coheres according to God’s purposes. Later in the eighteenth century, the same model is projected on the cosmos, in a vision of the universe as a set of perfectly interlocking parts, in which the purposes of each kind of creature mesh with those of all the others.

. . . Locke reasons that God gave us our powers of reason and discipline so that we could most effectively go about the business of preserving ourselves. It follows that we ought to be “Industrious and Rational”. The ethic of discipline and improvement is itself a requirement of the natural order that God had designed. The imposition of order by human will is itself called for by his scheme.

We can see in Locke’s formulation how much he sees mutual service in terms of profitable exchange. “Economic” (that is, ordered, peaceful, productive) activity has become the model for human behavior, and the key for harmonious co-existence. In contrast to the theories of hierarchical complementarity, we meet in a zone of concord and mutual service, not to the extent that we transcend our ordinary goals and purposes, but on the contrary, in the process of carrying them out according to God’s design. (165-69)

Second, the eclipse of grace. God is retained as the creator and designer of the cosmos, but the idea of a God who intervenes in the world is rejected; it is enough that he created a beneficent order and bestowed on humans reason, which, if used correctly, gives them the capacity to discern God's benevolent purposes in the world he created. If God does not intervene, then there is no grace. There is just the natural capacity of humans to use their brains. The shift to the impersonal god of Deism is not far behind. 

Third, in addition to reason, God, in his benevolence, made humans naturally inclined toward benevolence, if they would just use their reason to understand the benevolent cosmos as it is. The great obstacles to the natural flourishing of human benevolence are the irrationality of tradition and custom. Religion is fine so long as it is "reasonable" and eschews delusion (i.e., superstition), enthusiasm (i.e., mysticism), and fanaticism (i.e., inquisitions, witch hunts).  The imagination of the cosmos as dark, random, cruel will come later after Darwin. 

Fourth, God as Judge: he stands at the end of time ready to distribute rewards and punishments. Even if it be in everyone's interest to be reasonable and benevolent, the enlightenment elite, at least at the beginning, thought that the fear of punishment was still a necessary motivator for those who were not intrinsically motivated to be reasonable and benevolent. The need for extrinsic rewards and punishments eventually falls away, and it is seen as morally superior for humans to demonstrate benevolence for its own sake, not as a means to an end. 

Fifth, the sense of mystery fades. “If God’s purposes for us encompass only the fulfillment of our own good, and this can be read from the design of nature, then no further mystery can hide here." Evil is dismissed as stupidity and ignorance, and all the motivation we need to be decent human beings is innate, either in our self-interest well understood, or in our natural feelings of benevolence. There is no mystery about God. All we need to know about him is in his plan for us, which is knowable by reason. No miracles or interventions, no grace, no mystery. We're in the suburbs already of the Secular City. 

Sixth, God has no plan for human transformation or ‘theosis’. Certainly not in this life, but maybe in the next. After a while, neither in the next. The afterlife becomes a place where we are perhaps reunited with loved ones, but the idea that any kind of profound spiritual transmutation of the human being is a goal is dismissed. And eventually, for many, the afterlife is altogether dismissed as the delusional wish fulfillment of the childish who cannot face the hard truth of the finality of death. 

There are so many converging factors that contribute to this shift: increasing literacy, the civilizing of the nobles, the celebration of commerce over warfare, the strengthening nation state, increasing urbanization, the disruptions of war, and significant shifts in technology and production. Taylor spends a chapter entitled "The Spectre of Idealism" in which he argues that these changes on the material level and on the thinking or imaginative level reinforce one another dynamically. There's a lot going on. But the inevitable endpoint of it all is that while many people clearly remain religious believers, a huge space opens up for the possibility of non-belief, particularly among the culture's elite. 

There is thus no iron link, but there is also here a possible affinity, which in the absence of other factors can lead people into the sense that a more impersonal reading of Christianity, or Deism, or even something further removed from orthodoxy is more suitable to their age. This link is invoked in another form by David Martin when he remarks about the eighteenth-century British scene “that latitudinarian clergy deployed a public version of Isaac Newton to promote a separation of creation from its Creator in order the better to ensure that rationality ruled both the natural and the social universes”.

This affinity becomes stronger when one thinks of the ethical consequences of the two kinds of belief. At the heart of orthodox Christianity, seen in terms of communion, is the coming of God through Christ into a personal relation with disciples, and beyond them others, eventually ramifying through the church to humanity as a whole. God established the new relationship with us by loving us, in a way we cannot unaided love each other (John 15: God loved us first.) The lifeblood of this new relation is agape, which can’t ever be understood simply in terms of a set of rules, but rather as the extension of a certain kind of relation, spreading outward in a network. The church is in this sense a quintessential network society, even though of an utterly unparalleled kind, in that the relations are not mediated by any of the historical form of relatedness: kinship, fealty to a chief, or whatever. It transcends all these, but not into a categorical society based on similarity of members, like citizenship; but rather into a network of ever different relations of agape.

Of course, the church lamentably and spectacularly fails to live up this model; but it is the kind of society that it is meant to be. (282)

Agape is the universalizing impulse at the heart of Christian transcendental universalism, and for Christians a kind of selfless love that is impossible without a grace-nourished spiritual transformation. But Taylor wants to argue that the space created for an exclusive humanism within this impersonal cosmic imaginary needed to see itself as morally superior to what it replaces, and in order to do that it had to find a way to retain this agapic ideal without any transcendent grounding for it. And once achieved this became a possibility for a completely immanentized humanism.

Taylor argues that it was achieved in a completely new way with the celebration of dispassionate instrumental reason, which in those who have realized it come to experience non-transcendent agape, i.e., a natural, magnanimous benevolence. Modern humanism innovated in relation to the ancients in that they drew on the forms of Christian faith it emerged from, but, following the Calvinist lead, rejected the post-Axial aspiration to transcend flourishing. “The successor to agape was to be held strictly within the bounds of measure, instrumental reason, and perhaps also good taste.” (247)

The immanent resources of benevolence were found in four places:

1. Disengaged instrumental reason. Disengagement itself frees us from the confused, perturbed mass of personal desires, cravings, envy, and liberates a universal benevolence in us. He quotes the atheist Bertrand Russell who articulates this eloquently

Distant ages and remote regions of space are as real to it [disengaged instrumental reason] as what is present and near. In thought, it rises above the life of sense, seeking always what is general and open to all men. In desire and will, it aim’s simply at the good, without regarding the good as mine or yours. In feeling it gives love to all, not only to those who further the purposes of the self. Unlike the finite self, it is impartial; its impartiality leads to truth in thought, justice in action, and universal love in feeling.

No need for God or grace here. The capacity for this kind of universality and magnanimity is within the natural scope of the human being. It begs the question, of course, why humans are constructed in such a way as to have this capacity in the first place. Can it be explained by Darwin? 

2. Sense of a pure, universal will, an inner power before which we stand in awe, as with Kant. The very fact that we have the power to act by universal law is an object of wonder and infinite respect. 

3. A sense of natural, universal sympathy, which only needs the right conditions to flourish into virtue. Since the human will is naturally good, it inclines toward solidarity or sympathy with others. This natural ability has been lost and must be retrieved. It has been covered over by the false and denaturing conditions which have developed in history. The goal is to create the social conditions that will liberate and nourish it.

4. Eventually, a Feuerbachian vision that the powers we have attributed to God are really human potentialities.

Taylor is at pains to point out that this isn’t the discovery of something old that was always there, but the creation of something new, i.e., to live in these modes of moral life in which the sources are radically immanentized. The subtraction story doesn’t allow us to be as surprised as we ought to be at this achievement—or as admiring of it. 

The newness of the modern form which Russell articulates is this: that for the first time, we have such an opening to the universal which is not based on a connection to the transcendent. This purely immanent sense of universal solidarity is an important achievement, a milestone in human history. It is an achievement, because getting to the point where we can be inspired and empowered to beneficence by an impartial view of things, or a sense of buried sympathy within, requires training, or inculcated insight, and frequently much work on ourselves. It is in this respect like being moved by other great moral sources in our tradition, be they the Idea of the Good, or God’s agape, or the Tao.

These things are not just given to us by birth. Making the new sources available was thus a step in an unprecedented direction. Of course, Nietzsche, the cranky anti-humanist, comes along and says the whole project is just Christianity in disguise, and I think he's right about that. He rejects it for that reason, but I embrace it. I see it, however, as a chapter in a longer, continuously developing story. 

But what is the ontic component in this modern understanding of moral order? What makes these norms appropriate and possible of realization? The old order was anchored in the cosmos, which tends to realize itself, and reacts to any breach as the animal kingdom did to Duncan’s murder. So is it just an arbitrary construction? Taylor argues that the new order is not an arbitrary construction, that it speaks to something profound in us, so that building toward it is not like constructing sand castles. On the contrary, it can be self-stabilizing, its realization making us see how much we cherish it. There is just something in us that responds to this idea of universality, even if so much postmodern thought has striven to repudiate it. The postmoderns' attempt to deny it defies common sense and common decency, and it's just unnecessary, even if it is an eddy of thought that some had to go into and explore for a few years. 

I think there's an argument to be made, and I don't think is that hard to make, that while it's possible that this universal benevolence and capacity for reason is something that might have developed in humans as a completely random Darwinian outcome, it's not very likely that it did. It is more likely that what we experience within the human microcosm reflects the larger macrocosm, and sooner or later we'll find our collective way to embracing a social imaginary that retrieves that old idea in a postmodern key.

And whether or not a Christian version of this retrieval is broadly adopted, the whole point of Christ's incarnation was to immanentize the transcendent in the depths of the human soul. Since the incarnation, the "ontic component" is grounded as much in the human soul as it is in the cosmos. The human project, as I understand it, is to develop this interior ontic component, inchoate though it is in most of us,  so that the human soul comes gradually to live more in alignment with the cosmic "ontic component". 

This means then a retrieval of the Patristic idea of theosis, which is just another way of saying the same thing. That's for me the significance of the anthropocentric turn. The ur-anthropocentric turn actually occurred in the events that transpired between the first Good Friday and Easter. The Logos, the Deep Real, lived into human death and alienation so that humans could die into a life of communion with the Him. If before that moment transcendence was experienced by most as outside in, since then gradually it has become something experienced inside out. And the Secular Age is for us like a collective empty tomb that creates the space for that arising from within its austere darkness. No need to go out into the wilderness to find God; the wilderness has come to us. And this experience of transcendence inside out does not require that one be a Christian, but Christianity, I think, gives the most robust explanation for the why and the how of it.  

Related:

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses