After the Future

End of History?

Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition, but at the preservation of life itself in conditions where populations could not agree on what the good life was. This leaves liberal orders with a spiritual vacuum: they allow individuals to go their own way, and create only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values like tolerance and openness to compromise and deliberation, but these are not the strong bonds of a tightly knit religious or ethno-nationalist community. Liberal societies have often fostered the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification, a consumer society that is both hungry for status but never satisfied with what any given individual is able to achieve.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022, pp. 115-16

I thought this quote succinctly summarizes the problem I've been writing about over the last year, and it sets up my response to his question about whether there is an alternative. So fair warning: I'm going to indulge in a little utopian fantasizing here and see where it takes us. My answer to the question of alternatives lies in making a distinction between progress made in the cultural sphere and that made in the political sphere. We tend to think that the only progress that counts is political or technological, but from my pov it's far less important than cultural/moral progress. The importance of politics lies in that the wrong kind can impede cultural/moral progress, and the right kind creates the conditions for the possibility of it. A good society does not force people to be good; it make it easier for them to be. 

So the problem as I see it is not that we have a Liberal Democracy--that's an unqualified good. The problem lies in that most Americans don't have the kind of cultural maturity to be masters of themselves in the way that a healthy democracy demands. That's not the problem of Liberal Democracy; it's the problem of the kind of "desire culture" that rationalist materialism has created. Within it, there can be no consensus about how within a Liberal Democracy cultural progress or moral maturity might be achieved.

Most people are decent enough, but they are not inspired by any great moral project. There's nothing in the culture that models that. Their life purpose, insofar as they think about it, is to fulfill their desires and they are 'moral' if they do it in a way that doesn't hurt others. The goal is to be happy while being nice. Not much more to it than that. But worse, the desire culture that capitalism has created establishes conditions that actively work against anything deeper or more morally significant, and such an ethos impedes the broad development of moral maturity. A desire culture is either infantilizing or encourages desire behaviors that are "not nice", that are predatory. Most popular film and fiction is about nice people with acceptable desires becoming the prey of people who have unacceptable desires, and the latter are usually far more interesting because they are transgressive, and we all want to be transgressive; we all want to kill the Oedipal Father. 

The problem, therefore, is not that we have a void in our politics, but that we have a void in our cultural/moral life, and that void creates a destabilizing vacuum in our political life. The solution to the problem of political stability can only be found in a recovery of something lost in our cultural/moral life. 

In Fukuyama's most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, he defends the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history and offers a quasi-defense of Kojeve/Hegel's proclamation that history has ended with the French Revolution. This marked the historical moment when political history replaced the 'megalothymic' with the 'isothymic', which in effect ended history driven by the master/slave dynamic that had been era primary driver. [See Note 1] This is not the place to deal with all the objections to such an idea, but there's an insight at the heart of it that has real validity: Liberal Democracy is as good as it's going to get, and any society that establishes a stable Liberal Democracy has come to the end of its political history. World history continues until every society achieves Liberal Democracy. [See Note 2] 

Now, if you haven't been exposed to this idea or have not had the time to think about it, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but I am inclined to believe that Liberal Democracy--if by 'liberal' we mean the freedom principle that protects the individual citizen from a coercive state, and if by 'democracy' we mean the equality principle that asserts that political sovereignty lies with its citizens--is the best possible form of political organization. And I have no problem with the idea that we will be at the end of "political" history when such a political regime has established itself stably throughout the world. But for such stability to be achieved, there must be significant cultural/moral progress that would enable the great majority of the world's population to be mature and free enough to be truly self-governing.

This requires that individuals become masters of themselves, and we've seen in recent years that even the stability of Liberal Democracy in the U.S. is more fragile than we have could ever imagined even twenty years ago. Huge swaths of the American population have demonstrated that they have no such self mastery in that they are too easily manipulated by demagogues. This is not the fault of Liberal Democracy, but of the nihilistic desire culture that rationalist materialism has created. I am arguing that it has eroded the customs and traditions that provided a trellis for souls to grow, expand, and mature. Those customs and traditions are gone, and the idea of restoring them is absurd. But it's not absurd to imagine a renaissance through which new culturally vital forms would be created if we could find a way to reconnect to the Living Real and its transcendentally founded ontonormative ideals in a way that all people of good will would acknowledge.

Clearly we're not as a society even remotely close to a thymotic culture of self mastery, so the achievement of Liberal Democracy in America and elsewhere remains unstable. It will remain so as long as there's no cultural/moral ballast to steady it and no trellis of living tradition to direct its citizens toward the moral achievement of euthymia [See Note 3]. We've got plenty of history ahead of us because the achievement of a Liberal Democracy here and elsewhere depends on developing a culture that grows humans capable of self-mastery. Freedom, yes. But freedom for what? A choice other than infantile fantasies should have robust purchase on the souls of all spirited Americans.  

But in the meanwhile, there is no evolution of the state that can get better than Liberal Democracy, even if an awful lot of people haven't the self-mastery that insures its stability. So far we've been able to muddle through. But even if we achieved a genuinely stable Liberal Democracy, that doesn't mean the end of human history. Political and human history are not the same. Liberal Democracy establishes the freedom and equality conditions for the more important evolutionary history of the human spirit in the cultural sphere. Politics recedes into the background, and cultural/moral quest becomes the main 'thymotic' activity.  

I think of this evolutionary process in ways that integrate Hegelian dialectic with his contemporary Schelling's ideas concerning how the human being is the site where the evolving earth (cosmos?) becomes aware of itself. For Schelling, all of nature is the human unconscious, and the human project is to gradually make it conscious in an evolutionary project that requires bringing the deep mysteries of Being, what I call the Living Real, into expanding human awareness. Humans need leisure in order to undertake such a project. Is that something the machines can give us? More on this in a future post. 

I think that Heidegger's idea concerning 'aletheia' and his defining 'Dasein is a clearing in the forest of being' is closer to Schelling than Hegel was, even if Heidegger had no interest in Schelling's evolutionary ideas. Hegel took Schelling's idea of consciousness evolution and emphasized the rational part of it rather than the irrational, and that's what people like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche objected to in Hegel. His philsophy was perceived by them to be an abstraction, an empty shell. And Kierkegaard, et al., were right to object to Hegel's system-building rationality. It can be suffocating. What makes human life interesting is not rationality--if by that we mean instrumental reason and its analytical and problem-solving capabilities, but rather the human capacity to bring into consciousness the meaning-saturated depths and heights of the Living Real. [See Note 4]

The Living Real has both suprarational and subrational dimensions to it. Nietzsche emphasized the chaotic subrational, and Christianity and other post-Axial traditions emphasize the lawful, form-giving suprarational. I believe that the human spiritual-cultural evolutionary project is to gradually integrate the suprarational with the subrational. Both are fathomless in their depths and heights, and both are apprehended on the vertical axis or dimension of experience. Rationalist Materialism denies the existence of the vertical, except in some reductive psychologized sense that assumes that the brain is the precondition for mind rather than that mind is the precondition for the brain. 

So the human project through the centuries (but also within a given lifetime in whatever measure is appropriate for the individual human) is to discover and then integrate what lies hidden below with what lies hidden above. [See Note 5] Not easy, but this is the solution for the megalothymia problem that Fukuyama wrestles with and, imo, fails to resolve satisfactorily. This kind of thymotic project is not primarily driven by thinking; it's rather more a practice that comes closer to what artists and monks do. The thinking follows from what shows up in one's practice. The knock on Hegel was that he saw evolution as primarily an evolution of thought, whereas it is really an evolution of awareness, a series of awakenings to higher and deeper dimensions of the Living Real. Rationalist Materialist civilizations see evolution as an expansion of horizontal technical control. I'm ok with technical control, but we have to ask ourselves--who's in control? In the service of what ends?

Thinking, of course is important, but only in the way that McGilchrist presents it, which is a process subsequent to the rich data that our intuitive discoveries present to consciousness. Any "thinking" is about experience, and the richness of our experience on the vertical is equally if not more important than our experiences on the horizontal. The quality of our thinking, therefore, depends on the scope and richness of our experience. And so it follows that any thinking that a priori excludes experiences that derive from the vertical axis is poor-quality thinking. High-quality thinking integrates the broadest scope of experiences on both the horizontal and the vertical axes, keeps pushing to expand the scope on both those axes, and articulates what is uncovered there in a coherent way that integrates it with what is already known. This is basic Thomas Kuhn, but with the addition of embracing the expansion of knowledge on the vertical. 

This is a spiritual/artistic/philosophical project, not a political one, but the conditions in which such a project flourishes require a deeply achieved (anti-Oedipal in the Socratic not Deleuzian sense) human freedom which requires a political regime that won't interfere with its exploration and questing. Ideally a sapiential community, independent of any political or state control, will emerge that will discern and debate the significance of what the culture's best explorers uncover. [See Note 6]

I don't see that such a development requires confessional commitments to a particular faith tradition, but I would expect that it would be a project consonant with the deepest aspirations of all the great faith traditions, and that any faith tradition, if it is to retain (or recover) vitality, would have to in some way participate in and contribute to this larger cultural project in ways that are adaptable to its own traditions of thought and practice. A religious or faith tradition would be a particular way to practice what is embraced universally by all people of good will. Cross fertilization between such traditions will inevitably occur, and "best practices" will evolve that all will share. 

The sapiential community will not therefore be an official magisterium or rabbinate, but will comprise people who emerge who prove themselves capable of communicating to the broader culture the vital, soul-enriching significance of the new knowledge that comes into awareness from the vertical dimensions. They will have the capability to integrate it coherently with what is already known on the horizontal dimension. Their legitimacy will be recognized in much the same way that any relatively well-educated person recognizes that Shakespeare and Shelley are more disclosive of the Living Real than, say, Quentin Tarantino and Taylor Swift.

In other words, there will be a broad consensus that accepts that great art is different from entertainments. Nothing wrong with entertainments, but they shouldn't be thought of as anything more than that. Great Art is great by virtue of the scope and richness of what it discloses of the Living Real. I like the verbal challenges involved in solving a tough crossword puzzle, but it's not the same as the verbal challenge of uncovering what lies hidden in Yeats or Wordsworth. 

So, if the human project is to flourish, I hope for and expect such a sapiential tradition to emerge in tandem with great spirits and artists whose role it will be to awaken the rest of us to as yet undiscovered dimensions of the Living Real. It will enjoy a deeply felt legitimacy by the broader culture, which will support the reconstruction of a trellis that will expand the culture's knowledge both vertically and horizontally and that will pass on that knowledge from generation to generation.

***

So I understand if you read this and think it's blathering, utopian nonsense. Maybe some even think that's it's no utopia they'd ever want to live in. Too much of the world's energies are directed in such a way that if they are not inimical to such a project, they are indifferent to it. As yet there is no a robust constituency of human beings who have progressed enough in this project to legitimate it to the broader culture, and until that happens what I'm describing seems, understandably, to be wishful thinking. I think of it as hopeful thinking, but hope based on intuitions I have had that have been tested over time and proved resilient.

I know that there is a hunger for what I'm describing here, and I know that there are enough people who recognize the deep reality of what I'm describing as the nourishment that will feed it. It remains to be seen whether those who share in this recognition will always remain on the culture's fringes or whether at some point they will find a way to play a more central cultural/moral role.

I, of course, don't know. As I've written in previous posts, all I see myself doing is as a dog barking up a tree, trying to call attention to something real up there--you can smell it, too, right?--but it's obscured by the branches and the the leaves. If you can smell it, you become interested and want to stick around to see if it emerges. But if you can't smell it, then it's understandable that you would think there's nothing there worth waiting for. But for people like me, there's no question that it's there, it just remains to be seen whether it can be brought to ground.

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Note 1: Fukuyama's book is really an extended reflection on the problem of thymos in shaping political life, Thymos is the spirited or soulful part of the human being according to Plato.(The other two are rationality/mind and bodily desire.) I used the phrase 'desire culture' in this essay because, as Fukuyama argues and I agree, that Anglo-American Liberalism is heir to the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition that wanted to neutralize a politics of thymos and replace it with a politics of desire. And it's not hard to understand how rationalist materialism follows from that. The thymotic part of the soul in a spirited human being is always striving to be the best it can be, and It's the basis for healthy self-respect. But in some people it manifests in what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, the compulsion to be  be recognized as superior to others. That's what Hobbes and Locke wanted to neutralize.

Hegel also recognized megalothymia as a problem but articulated a different solution. He saw megalothymia and its need to be recognized as superior as the driver of the master-slave dynamic which in turn is for him the primary social-psychological driver of history. Megalithymic humans need to dominate others and to derive therefrom glory. Megalothymic societies are usually aristocratic warrior societies. The whole point in such societies was to do glorious deeds in battle that the bards would sing songs about about through the ages. Hegel/Kojeve/Fukuyama solve the megalothymia problem by asserting that democratic societies are--or at least aspire to be--isothymic, which means that people in them want to be recognized as the equal of others. The end of history arrives when megalothymia is pushed out by isothymia. This happened symbolically with the French Revolution when the slavish lower ranks risked everything in rising up to overthrow the aristocratic warrior class that had been established since the beginning. 

There's a lot more to be said about this than is appropriate here, but I'd argue that isothymia is only a possibility in a society in which most of its citizens have achieved a level of maturity that few actually attain in late modern societies. You can't be recognized as a Self equal to others unless you have become one. That's not a given; it's a euthymic/eudaemonic achievement [See Note 3], And someone who achieves it has no need for glory or to dominate others or to be recognized as the best. The problem with isothymia in the political sphere is that it defines an equality that is an empty shell until it's substantively filled by humans who have realized to some degree their best Selves. In the abstract every human being has dignity, and that dignity is protected by law, but in reality, some people have more dignity than others because some people have more fully realized what is "original" in them. Some people squander rather than develop what is best in them. They are what Nietzsche calls Last Men.

I can envision a society in which superior and inferior are not important qualifiers, but instead 'realized' or 'unrealized' would be. The goal of a life well lived in such a society is to realize, to make substantively real, who one was created to become, and that's a unique achievement that is incommensurate with the parallel achievement of any other. And yet even now we recognize people who are more mature in this way and others that are not. You know them by their eudaemonian menschlichkeit, menschiness--their warmth and compassion, their magnanimity and down-to-earthness, their utter lack of phoniness, fanaticism, and fussiness. [See Note 3] Often they are flawled and fallible, but always intensely real human beings, and as I said, rare. Late modern societies don't produce many of them for reasons I discuss in this essay--there's no trellis anymore for them to grow on. 

Note 2: I think it's interesting also to note that Fukuyama wrote this book in 1992 when it looked like the world was entering a unipolar age dominated by the capitalistL iberal Democracies that won the Cold War. It's also interesting that Fukuyama was a signer of the 1997 Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, the Neocon group that was one of the most influential advocates for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I doubt Bush and Cheney read Hegel or his most influential 20th Century interpreter Alexandre Kojeve, but the idea of bringing democracy to a place like Iraq was understood by Neocons in this Hegelian key, which was to hasten the end of history in the places that most stubbornly resisted it. Fukuyama distanced himself from all that when it became clear what a fiasco American policy in the Middle East had become; clearly we got plenty of world history before us.

Fukuyama's teacher Samuel Huntington's idea of 'clash of civilizations' seems to be the prevailing model now, which traces back to another German Romantic, J. G. Herder. I don't think that Huntington is right in the long run. It explains Putin's Russia for the time being, but not Zelensky's Ukraine, which should by Huntington's account align with Russia rather than Western Europe. I think the dynamics in Ukraine will be more typical over the next century if we survive it. No morally mature human being wants to live Putin's Russia or Xi's China. And while I'm arguing in this essay that the desire culture of North Atlantic Liberal Democracies encourages a moral infantilism, it also provides the conditions of freedom for something more morally compelling to emerge. The bottom line is that all of us, East and West, have got to choose to grow up. A healthy culture offers models about how to do that. 

BTW, I'm not a proponent of a one-world government, but I can see a point when all the world's major societies have evolved into Liberal Democracies that work together in a loose confederation to solve global problems. The survival of the earth depends on it. 

Note 3: I use the term 'euthymia' in the present context with a meaning that comes close in my thinking about it to 'eudaemonia'. Both describes states of mature, self-actualized well being, but maybe eudaemonia is better because associated with an ethical project that involves the practice of the virtues. In either case, euthymia is the goal--

The term euthymia has a Greek origin and results from the combination of ‘eu' meaning ‘well' and ‘thymos' meaning ‘soul, emotion'. This latter term encompasses however four different meanings: life energy; feelings and passions; will, desire and inclination; thought and intelligence. Interestingly, its verb (euthymeo) means both I am happy, in good spirits and I make other people happy, I reassure and encourage. The definition of euthymia is generally ascribed to Democritus: one is satisfied with what is present and available, taking little heed of people who are envied and admired and observing the lives of those who suffer and yet endure. It is a state of quiet satisfaction, a balance of emotions that defeats fears. The Latin philosopher Seneca translated the Greek expression of euthymia with ‘tranquillitas animi' (a state of internal calm and contentment) and linked it to psychological well-being as a learning process. Happiness is not everything and what is required is ‘felicitatis intellectus', the awareness of well-being:

Happy is thus the life that is in accordance to its nature, and this is possible only when the mind, first of all, is healthy at any time; then, if it is strong and energetic, definitely patient, capable of mastering everything; concerned with the body and its belongings, but without anxiety; lover of what is life, but with detachment; willing to take advantage of the gifts of fortune, without being its slave. [Seneca: De Vita Beata, translation by G.A.F.]  (Source)

Perhaps  'eudaemonia' would work better to describe the moral project that I write about in this post, but we'll stick with euthymia in the present Fukuyamian context. 

Note 4: I've got my problems with Hegel, but it's not because I think he was too rationalistic. Hegelian philosophy is inspired and visionary in the best sense of those words, and his 'sublation' (or aufhebung) is not rational in the ordinary sense of the word as dealing with abstractions. See "Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum."

Note 5: Why some people are great artists & saints and others are criminals & psychopaths raises questions that are interesting but not relevant to what I'm saying here. The bottom line is that each of us has a life to live that is incommensurate with others, and all that is required of us is that we make the choices that move us toward becoming the deepest realization of ourselves. It's not for others to judge us by some tight-assed standard, but we rely on others for help and correction when clearly we are making self-destructive choices. I don't think this contradicts the idea of the trellis; it's just that each of us has to find our own place on it. There's no one best way to climb it, but our movement toward human maturity requires that we climb on our part of it. Hard to do if it doesn't exist.

Note 6: Such a sapiential community would not be officially sanctioned. It would be very similar to what we think of now as the role played by critics, but the culture will have shifted to a point where good criticism will be distinguished from bad by the quality of the critic's own capacities to intuit and articulate her own experiences of the Living Real. Nihilistic or shallow criticism will not go away, but it will be crowded out by a new kind of criticism that has a vitality and richness that anybody with a shred of soul life will recognize and welcome. And then, it should be hoped, this sapiential community will have a culture-wide influence on how children are acculturated into this renewed sapiential tradition. It would require that our educational curricula teach what is known from both the horizontal and the vertical--in other words, what it used to mean to get a good liberal education. 

 

Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the GOP-- even if it shelters racists--than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from Technocapitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where Technocapitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, Technocapitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the great originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of Technocapitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by Technocapitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but Technocapitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. Their private ontology aligns with the public one. But it's not grounded in reality, either--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, Technocapitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote: Bamboozled by the trickster Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, Technocapitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence of the profound and sublime in our collective life, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale. I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

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Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy, or someone Trumpier, is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods. 

Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these to interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they took such experiences on the vertical axis seriously. 

See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

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Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek:

In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future.

Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.

Humans, they write, “are able to apply their intelligence across a wide range of domains. This capacity is termed general intelligence. If A.I. reaches and surpasses human levels of general intelligence, a set of radically different considerations apply.” That moment, according to “the median estimate in the A.I. expert community is around 2040 to 2050.”

Once parity with the general intelligence of human beings is reached, they continue, “there is broad agreement that A.I. would soon after become super‐intelligent, i.e., more intelligent than humans, since technological progress would likely accelerate.”

Without extraordinary interventions, Korinek and Stiglitz foresee two scenarios, both of which could have disastrous consequences:

In the first, “man and machine will merge, i.e., that humans will ‘enhance’ themselves with ever more advanced technology so that their physical and mental capabilities are increasingly determined by the state of the art in technology and A.I. rather than by traditional human biology.”

Unchecked, this “will lead to massive increases in human inequality,” they write, because intelligence is not distributed equally among humans and “if intelligence becomes a matter of ability‐to‐pay, it is conceivable that the wealthiest (enhanced) humans will become orders of magnitude more productive — ‘more intelligent’ — than the unenhanced, leaving the majority of the population further and further behind.”

Key phrase here is "without extraordinary interventions". Who will the agents of such extraordinary interventions be? Will it come from the class of elites who are best positioned to benefit from these enhancements?  You can be sure the technocapitalist elite are making sure they are at the front of the line to get these enhancements. Who will stop these sociopaths? 

 

The article goes on:

In the second scenario, “artificially intelligent entities will develop separately from humans, with their own objectives and behavior, aided by the intelligent machines.”

In that case, they write, “there are two types of entities, unenhanced humans and A.I. entities, which are in a Malthusian race and differ — potentially starkly — in how they are affected by technological progress.”

In this hypothetical race, “A.I. entities are becoming more and more efficient in the production of output compared to humans,” the authors write, because “human technology to convert consumption goods such as food and housing into future humans has experienced relatively little technological change.” By contrast, “the reproduction technology of A.I. entities — to convert A.I. consumption goods such as energy, silicon, aluminum into future A.I. — is subject to exponential progress.”

Evolution without grace, i.e., evolution driven by the logic of the will to power and greed, has no particular interest in human beings, not even as much as the Mongol horde was interested in the thousands of humans they massacred or enslaved in their manic project to expand their power and control. Evolution without grace is the default and can be resisted only by moral actors who are grounded in something that transcends it. Evolution without grace only cares about expansion, and if that means that humans are no longer needed at the leading edge its expansion project and machines will serve evolution better, then what reason have we to think that hyper-intelligent machines won't take over? 

I don't think either of these two scenarios are inevitable, but because they have become the fodder for so many Hollywood dystopian entertainments, we tend to dismiss such concerns as unlikely. But what argument is there against all the evidence that supports that this is where unchecked technocapitalism is headed? And what argument is either of these two scenarios is more of a likelihood than not if there is no intervention to insure that machines serve human purposes rather than the reverse. Do we just shrug and say, "Well, it will all work out one way or the other."

How can such an intervention be marshaled if there is no consensus about what human purposes are? Certainly no intervention can be marshaled from within the hegemonic rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary, because it's precisely that imaginary that supports the values presuppositions of Social Darwinism, i.e., evolution without grace. The point I'm trying to make here is this: These scenarios are, if not inevitable, extremely likely unless there's an intervention. But from where shall it come? Who on the scene today has the moral authority to say No to technocapitalism and the power to enforce such a No?

Our situation vis a vis AI is very much like the one depicted in Don't Look Up. In that movie, the impending disaster was a comet heading toward the earth that is a MacGuffin for what could be any potential human extinction event from eco-catastrophe to the rise of the machines. The most important insight around which the premise of the film is based is that even when confronted with extinction, humans are so fragmented, so distracted and so morally feckless that they are incapable of uniting around an obvious human value--survival. The logic of technocapitalism is the default, and that logic, left unchecked, leads to the extinction of the human project. Only a few sociopaths escape to despoil a planet elsewhere. 

So as long as the nihilistic sociopathic logic of technocapitalism and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary plays such an outsized role in shaping our moral and material priorities, what reason have we to think that any kind of resistance to its logic can be mounted? What reason have we to think that any good can come of just letting that logic play out?  And where within the rationalist materialist imaginary can we get a foothold to push back against this logic?

On Sunday in a post entitled "The Coming Discontinuity" I wrote:

But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

What I've written here yesterday and today is not meant to contradict that but rather to put us on alert that an attitude of hope requires active vigilance. It does not justify a lazy complacency that whatever happens happens. Imageless hope for me is rather like Keats's 'negative capability', i.e., a way of being attentive to the world with a kind of radical openness that expects to be surprised. But it's quite possible that we will miss what's there that might actually be a solution if we're not paying attention. And maybe more than we can understand now depends on our not missing it. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can ask an algorithm to do only what you tell it to do. All that we can come up with to compare machines with humans are little games, such as Turing’s imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing. 

From "Artificial Consciousness is Boring" by Stephen Marche

Boring? Depends on the question you ask.

I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be able replicate human consciousness. That's not really even an interesting question from where I stand.  The not-boring question is whether AI and machine learning evolve a kind of inhuman consciousness that will supplant or push aside human consciousness,

I think there is reason to fear that machines can become more sociopathically intelligent than human beings and operate at a level that is incomprehensible to human intelligence. And I think there is reason to fear that with a malevolent programmer or even with an unintentional programming mistake, machines can become a destructive, malevolent, and uncontrollable by humans. ... Artificial Intelligence need not be seen as possibly attaining human consciousness to warrant our alarmed interest.

Machines can be programmed to create Bach cantatas that even Bach experts would think were composed by Bach, and they can be programmed, as this article describes, to talk and converse with humans in ways that humans will be convinced pass the Turing test. They already play chess better than humans and they could probably be programed to write jokes and do a stand-up routine that might be genuinely funny. There are algorithms for all of that, and once those algorithms are part of a machine's intelligence and once a machine has access to all the music or jokes ever written they will be able to use the algorithms to develop novel variations on those algorithmic themes. They might even be able to combine algorithms in ways not done before by humans to make something truly novel that no human ever thought of before or maybe could ever have thought of. 

But novel isn't original. To be truly original you have to be connected to the originary power of the Living Real, and while machines might even develop a concept like monotheism as the fictional Cylons in Battlestar Galactica do, that doesn't mean they will ever have the capacity to experience awe. They can mimic awe, but they cannot experience it. The Living Real is something that humans can experience, and machines simply will never be able to. You can create machines that mimic human thinking and human feeling, but not machines that have souls with depths capable of experiencing the mystery of Being. The Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus makes similar arguments.  

The problem for human beings in the future lies in that the kind of mentality that drives technocapitalism is sociopathic, at least insofar as its principals proceed without any consideration for or connection with the Living Real. Technocapitalism's energies are Social Darwinist, and so its Social Darwinist biases will be consciously or unconsciously programmed into the machines it makes. And therein lies the danger. Humans can make machines that mimic and exaggerate by their sheer power of intelligence the worst traits of sociopathic Technocapitalist thinking and behavior. And that's what will happen unless they are held in check by human beings who embody the best traits of being human. Is there anybody among the principals in technnocapitalism either here or in Europe or Asia who embodies what is best in being human?

No? What could go wrong?

The Coming Discontinuity

At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not.

--Ezra Klein

What makes discontinuity discontinuous is its being unpredictable. If it were predictable, then it would be in some way continuous with trends we already understand. It is predictable that humans dread discontinuities because they are so destabilizing, and the fear of instability is continuous with historical trends in human psychology. But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series

Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build a more just human society. The reform of the polis meant the reform not only of its citizens, but of its religion as well. If society is out of joint, it can only be because humanity's whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair. Plato's philosophy is powered by an unremitting desire for reform: personal, political, and religious.

Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991, p.  25

If you've  been reading my "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" series, you are aware that I just learned of Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series of YouTube video lectures. If you are intererested in what I am doing, you will be interested in what he's doing. We are barking up the same tree. But I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain that while much, if not most, of what I'm arguing is consonant with Vervaeke, there are a few critical places where we disagree. At the time I wrote Parts 4A and 4B in this series, I had only watched up to his Lecture 10, which I found very helpful in making my argument for the restoration of a metaphysical imaginary that had restored a vertical or transcendent wisdom dimension. I have to-date completed watching his lectures up to 24 on Hegel. 

It's clear that Vervaeke wants to restore a wisdom dimension to our way of knowing as much as I do, but he's mainly interested in establishing its legitimacy from a cognitive-science point of view. I think that his main concerns are to establish a broadened therapeutic model that establishes scientifically legitimized psycho-technologies that help people overcome their individual meaning crises. I am more interested in the broader social-political dimension of the meaning crisis and how that might be resolved in a way that enjoys broad consensus. I know--good luck with that. Nevertheless, however unrealistic such a project might seem at this moment, things do change in unexpected ways. So I do not see this as an idle exercise, but rather, if nothing else, as something that might be of use for my grandchildren. 

Vervaeke recognizes that these psycho-technologies are not new, and he's at pains to show how they were understood and used in shamanic relgious traditions but more importantly in the great Post-Axial religious traditions. His first 24 lectures tell the story of Post-Axial cognitive development by spending a little time with Buddhism, but mostly by tracing out historical developments in the Western religious or "awakened" thinking from Socrates, through the Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and on to the Romantics and Hegel. Considering its ambitious scope, I think he provides a very solid survey in a very concise format. I have a quibble here and there, but nothing serious. I think more positively about Romanticism than he does, for instance. 

We differ in a more significant way in that I have a broader concern, and a more ambitious argument to make, which is reflected in the epigraph. The Socratic/Platonic project was to reform the religion or metaphysical imaginary of early Hellenism. Their project initiated the Western wing of the Axial Revolution. The crisis in early 5th/4th century Athens is very different from the crisis that we face, but I don't think the solution is all that different, which is a recovery of the vertical or transcendent dimension that first broadly emerged in the mid-first millennium BCE. The loss of this dimension is what we now think of as the death of God. I think of this loss as temporary and aberrant. I believe it can be found again, but in a way adapted to a post-Positivist, global cultural milieu. 

It goes to what I wrote in Part 1: Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don't. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres--and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.

Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism (See Note 1), is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religiions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke's solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I'm all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos. 

Vervaeke makes it clear that while he recognizes the significance of the Axial Revolution, he doesn’t think that its use of mythos is retrievable because it is not plausible for us as late moderns after the death of God, and he seems to think that cognitive science can do the job that mythos once did. Maybe he's right, but I'm dubious. I understand why he thinks this--it's hard to imagine anything else within a metaphysical imaginary dominated by Rationalist Materialism. I'm trying to imagine a way out of those constraints--or at least how transcending the constraints of Rationalist Materialism and its positivist biases might be possible. If individuals can do it in a fruitful way, groups can, and if groups can, then so can the larger society. This has happened historically before, and it can happen again. Whether it will or not, I don't know, but I think that if Vervaeke and his colleagues in cognitive science are successful in their project, it prepares the way for the success of what I'm arguing for. 

Vervaeke probably wouldn't agree because he seems to be in the religion-without-religion camp, which, imo, is unsustainable even if it were desirable. Religionless religion = contentless wisdom. He argues that the content given in awakening experiences isn't relevant. In one of his lectures he says that some people have experiences of higher consciousness after which they say, “I know now that there is a God,” and others say, “I am sure now that no God exists.” So he seems to think that the content of one cancels out the content of the other in a way that makes both unreliable testimony and as such not legitimate knowledge. And besides, knowledge isn't the point. Overcoming the constraints is. 

I understand that some people find the religionless option attractive insofar as it insures against a rigidifying dogmatism, but there are other ways of dealing with that problem without giving up the idea that right understanding of the content given in these experiences is possible and preferable because of the way it can enrich culture. And it fails to address what I feel is the really important problem going forward, which is that a consensus needs to be developed that has enough potency to resist where Rationalist Materialism is dragging us. 

For Vervaeke, fruitfulness is achieved by the individual overcoming or transcending psychological constraints at one level by rising to a higher level of cognition, and I recognize the importance and legitimacy of that. Parts 4A and 4B explore its importance. But surely there can also be a legitimacy that comes from traditions that integrate the broad range of insights of those who have had a broad range of experiences of “higher consciousness”.

There are already sapiential traditions that have the legitimacy of thousands of years of testing truth claims derived from a wide variety of awakening experiences. Sapiential traditions have ways to discern the legitimacy or delusional character of the experience, to take the content that people report regarding their experiences seriously on their own terms, and then to reflect how they might be integrated into a larger, broader understanding so that these experiences might be interpreted in the most fruitful way that expand knowledge on the vertical dimension. This is real knowledge with real content.  

So to take his example about contradictory testimony about the existence of God above: the Dark Night of the Spirit is something recognized in Christian mysticism that in no way contradicts other experiences people have of the radiance of God’s agapic love. In fact the experience of darkness or absence is an indicator of a more advanced state of spiritual development. The two experiences are not contradictory, but different aspects within a bigger picture. The experience of absence is just as much content as the experience of presence. Each is powerful and important, but the interpretation is more important. And if you have the first experience outside the context of a broad, well-established sapiential tradition, you would probably be persuaded that there is no God. The sapiential tradition provides the bigger picture, a picture that hardly anybody is familiar with anymore, apparently not even Vervaeke who has made a sincere effort to educate himself about post-Axial spiritual traditions.

So from my pov, he is doing good work, but it needs to be supplemented. And that's really the goal of where I'll be going in the development of my Genealogy series. When I first started it in December, my goal was to make the case for Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary in a postmodern key, and that's still where I want to go. The five parts that I've written so far were attempts to clear the ground, so to say, to do what I can to make such a project at least minimally plausible for the skeptical but open reader. My plan is to show how powerful the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis was for 1500 years, why it broke down, and why and how I think it could be restored--not in a spirit of nostalgia but in a spirit adapted to a postmodern/post-positivist milieu.

I recognize people like John Millbank and the others in the Radical Orthodoxy 'movement' as allies in this project, but my goal is to write in a way that is more accessible for the non-specialist. I don't see what I'm doing as original, but I think I have a good nose for what's 'originary', i.e., what is connected to the Living Real, which is the origin of anything worth paying attention to. So I see my task as to curate and synthesize the originary work of others, hopefully in a way that is interesting and helpful for those who take the time to read through these long and admittedly first-drafty essays. This is a blog after all, not a book. It's a record of my learning and thinking about what its implications are. Maybe someday it will turn into a book, but I have no particular ambition to write one. 

The second part--why it broke down--is already laid out in a summary I made of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which can be found here, but in order to do justice to the first part--the power and depth of the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis--I think it's necessary for me to go deeper and into more detail. And my primary resource for doing this is Bernard McGinn's remarkably, rich and clear exposition of the entire tradition of Western mysticism in his "Presence of God" series. I'll also be drawing on Pierre Hadot from time to time, who was a source for McGinn and Vervaeke. McGinn is currently a retired University of Chicago scholar who published the first volume in this series in 1991 and the most recent in 2021, so it spans thirty years (so far?). For the purposes of this "Genealogy", I will focus primarily on Vol 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the 5th Century and Volume 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany.

I'm reading in both now at the same time. The first is important for establishing how the Christian revelation and Greek contemplative 'theoria' was developed in the "schools" founded by Plato, Aristotle, and others over six hundred years that culminates in the Plotinian synthesis, how Jews and Christians interacted with this tradition in such a way that culminated in Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos. Volume 4 is important for the way Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos were 'modernized', so to say, after Albertus Magnus moved from Paris to Cologne in the mid-1200s to lay the foundations for modern science on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual tradition we now call the Rhineland mystics. The great figures in this northern European Christian Neoplatonic tradition include Albert's student Aquinas, and their younger contemporary Meister Eckhart, Eckhart's disciples Suso and Tauler, then Nicholas of Cusa, and later Jacob Boehme. (Is it oxymoronic to be a Lutheran Neoplatonist? A question for later consideration.)

I've been arguing for a while that the southern wing of Christian Neoplatonism that flowered in Ficino's Florentine Platonic Academy is the key to understand the criteria by which great art should be evaluated from the Renaissance through Romanticism--esp., Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Coleridge and beyond. But the other little understood Christian Neoplatonic stream tracks through the Rhineland toward German Idealism. If German Idealism is incomprehensible without the Rhineland mystics, neither are they comprehensible without understanding the proto-Christian Neoplatonism that developed starting with figures like Clement of Alexandria and Origin.

And none of any of this would be comprehensible if there were not an experiential, "awakened" dimension that was the foundation for all their thinking. This is a sapiential tradition that had vitality until the middle of the 19th Century when it hit a wall after Hegel. (Is Wm James an exception? We'll look into that.) The question now is whether Vervaeke is right that there's no recovery of the knowledge, qua mythos, that lies on the other side of that wall. I think that it is recoverable, and that this great tradition can be renewed--not just for people at the fringe, but in a way that inspires a broader cultural renaissance. I continue to promote the possibility of renaissance not just because I believe it's possible but because I believe the alternative is so very, very dark. 

So the plan, for now at least, is to do what I can to understand that tradition better for myself and to do what I can to make it interesting and plausible for readers here who might also be interested to understand it better. The installments over the next weeks  (and months) will explore the Axial impact of Socrates and Plato, the schools that developed from them. For reasons explained above, I'm more interested in this 'tradition' not for its various thought systems but for its development of life-transformative psycho-technologies, to use Vervaeke's term, that afforded experiences of transcendence that grounded their thought systems, which were left-brain-hemisphere attempts to understand the world in the light of their experiences on the vertical dimension. And then the task is to understand how awakened Christian thinkers appropriated these technologies and transformed them. 

Go to Part 7,

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Note 1: I just want to clarify that I am not a Luddite, I am not against markets; I am not against innovation, and I am not against rationality, except in its reductively materialist forms. And I am against the tail wagging the dog when the tail is Neoliberal technocapitalism and the dog is the broader society. The tail wags the dog when the dog has no ground upon which to set its feet to resist, and so cannot say No to developments in technocapitalism that are in techno-capitalism's interests but not the interests of the larger society or of humanity in general. 

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a spiritual dimension, are we living in a culture where a materialist imaginary dominates in the most important areas that shape our collective priorities. I'm also interested to think about whether it's possible for a society to develop an imaginary that operates at a higher moral or wisdom level. What I say below does not depend on your having watched this lecture by John Vervaeke, but it will help. I recommend that you start around the 17-minute mark. Or you can read this first and go back and watch the video. 

Vervaeke is presenting a model for understanding what consciousness does, which is that it provides a way to focus our attention in such a way that it filters out the vast amount of possible information that there is out in the world and in our memories so that we might focus on what is relevant or salient. What defines relevance? Well that depends on your 'salience landscape'. He references Piaget's ideas about child development to illustrate how constraints within one's salience landscape are overcome when one has insights.

In the five-candies example, he points out that most four-year-olds when given the choice between two rows of five candies in which the second row is arranged with more space between the candies, invariably choose the second row because it looks like more. Why? Because it takes up more space. Space, says Vervaeke, is "super salient" for the four-year-old, and super salience is usually a sign that you're stuck or blocked by unconscious patterns that organize what is salient for you. Normal cognitive development is all about the way you transcend those unconscious patterns by having insights. An older kid will understand--will have an insight--that space isn't relevant, that the only thing that matters is the number of candies. What's in the world does not change, but your ability to see the world with greater clarity and depth does. 

So the point that Piaget and Vervaeke are making is that the way we see the world is not shaped by what's there but by the constraints in our salience landscape. Cognitive development for all of us, children or adults, is determined by overcoming the constraints of our salience landscapes at different points in our life. The problem lies not in our being blind to evidence but with the unconscious psychological systems or structures that organize what is 'salient' or relevant.

This goes a long way in explaining what has been described as the epistemic bubbles that shape our polarized politics. Kellyanne Conway was mocked for talking about 'alternative facts', but she would have avoided the mockery if she said instead that there are alternative salience landscapes, or alternative interpretive frames, which is what I think she really meant. Liberals also would do well to understand better how their own salience landscapes shape what facts are relevant, and which are not. 

Our salience landscapes shape the interpretive frame that shapes for us what's meaningful. If we lived in a society that had a vertical dimension, we would understand that the path of wisdom is a life-long process of self-transcendence, i.e, of a continuous transformation of our salience landscapes. There are an awful lot of people, and many of them are our leaders in media, business, and politics, who haven't advanced much further than to see the world from within a typical middle-schooler's salience landscape. Middle School is when we all learn to be Social Darwinists. 

In theory, there is no limit to the kind of transcending that is possible. The wisest among us are those who have progressed furthest in transcending their constraints--this is what it means to be truly free--but there are limits to what's possible for any individual that are set by the collective metaphysical imaginary into which a person is acculturated. You can't get too far ahead of the pack, or you're completely in your own world, which is insanity. We all need to keep a foot in the social imaginary of our contemporaries. 

Hopefully those who are more advanced in their self-transcending are beating a path to make it easier for the rest of us to follow. And when enough people follow, a tradition develops, and after a while that tradition, if it remains vital, provides to the broader society an alternative salience landscape that more and more people will find attractive because of the self-transcending benefits it affords, and things can reach a tipping point where the entire society flips its salience landscape so that it is more in touch with the Living Real. This happened in the Axial Age and some would argue during the Upper Paleolithic. But it also explains how imaginaries evolve, including, for instance, how intellectuals, even many of those in the French nobility, became "Republicans" in the 18th Century. For them it was a combination of seeing that the current ancien regime wasn't working and that a compelling republican alternative was being presented by the philosophes.

Because these constraints that structure our salience landscapes are culturally conditioned, they shape a consensus reality in very provisional ways. They feel more real than they are. Premodern societies had constraints that are very different from the constraints of modern societies, and so what is relevant or salient for premoderns is very different from what is for moderns. The point is that we see things that our ancestors did not see because what we see as salient from within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is very different from what is salient for people from within, really, any premodern metaphysical imaginary, whether in the West or anywhere else.

The challenge for us is to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we do not. I am not saying that we have to re-inhabit a premodern imaginary, but that we must retrieve in a postmodern key what was lost, which is the vertical or wisdom dimension. Wisdom was salient for our ancestors in a way it just is not for us, and so the question is whether we are capable of developing a new salience landscape where wisdom can be restored as salient not just for a few individuals here and there, but for the society as a whole. That is the formula for 'renaissance' or rebirth--a recovery or remembering of something vital that has been lost or forgotten. 

All of us are working within constraints, and to think that we know T.H.E. truth is always delusional, but some are wiser than others because their cognitive development has helped them see through certain common systematic or structural constraints that come with their acculturation. To use Vervaeke's language, they have learned how to realize when they are bullshitting themselves.

We can never live without constraints because we need the necessary filters that consciousness provides to prevent our being overwhelmed by too much reality. But some filters (or salience landscapes) are more aligned with what is really there, and the goal is to be continuously trading up, so to say, i.e., to trade in one set of constraints for another that helps you to see more deeply what is really there, to get into, to use Vervaeke's phrase, "deep contact with the guts of the world". This was Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's project, and it's the project of Iain McGilchrist. And, as I argue here, it was the project of the great Renaissance artists influenced by Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism. 

If you watch Vervaeke's earlier lectures you will see that Socrates is a hero for him for pretty much the same reasons he's one for me. In Part 3, I talk at length about how Socrates was a master of cognitive development in Vervaeke's sense. The beginning of wisdom is to know that you don't know, and Socrates' project was to confront his interlocutors with the fact that they were bullshitting themselves. It's all about seeing the limits of conventional wisdom, but it goes deeper.

Socrates understood that the people with whom he was conversing were living within a constrained salience landscape that came with their acculturation. For us those constraints are also shaped by experiences growing up, including trauma, but mostly from what you learn about and submit to in progressive stages about how the dreary "real world" works within the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary. And the same was true in Socrates day, even if the constraints were structured differently. Whether then or now, our experience is shaped by our acculturation starting with the Oedipus Complex when we learn what our role is in society and to follow its codes.

This is Stage 1 in Kohlberg's moral development scheme,and his successive stages illustrate how what might be described as 'moral' saliency landscapes progress from pre-Conventional, to Conventional, and, for some people, to post-Conventional stages. [**See note at end of this post where I expand on this.] Schiller and Kierkegaard talk about similar shifts in saliency landscapes. The point in all of these is to move beyond or to transcend conventional constraints, and to find something that in contrast was 'really real'. This isn't a justification for antinomianism, but for discovering a deeper "law", a deeper understanding about how reality actually works. And it isn't just an intellectual exercise, but one that, if successful, enriches and deepens your experience of the world.

As an aside here, a problem that I have with a lot of New Age spirituality is that it's all about developing human potential that doesn't really care that much about moral development so much as it cares about cognitive development. Or it's what David Brooks calls the "higher selfishness" that is typified by Gwyneth Paltrow's new-agey lifestyle brand "Goop". There is no real wisdom without moral development, no matter how much other aspects of human potentiality might be expanded or developed. I don't think Vervaeke, qua cognitive scientist, falls into this trap. I don't agree with him about everything, but I respect his moral seriousness and sincerity. Moral seriousness is not a problem for any of the great civilizational post-Axial religions, and that's why the recovery of the depth dimension must start with them and what they have to say about self-transcendence.

My own contribution to this, for what's worth, is from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, but I have the deepest reverence for the other great traditions from which I will always have much to learn. I will argue in a future post that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition does not reject Gnosticism, but takes what's best from it and the other ancient mystery religions, and integrates them in a synthesis that has the highest level of coherency, scope, and richness. The renewed interest in Gnosticism after Nag Hammadi, while it might undermine a certain kind of wisdomless, conventional, law-and-order Christianity, does not undermine its deepest mission found in the the canonical New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, which is to provide a model for self-transcendence grounded in a moral ontology.] 

Socrates' elenchus, I argue in Part 3, was a tool to awaken his interlocutors to the constraints of the their salience landscape so as to open them up to the possibility of experiencing what's really there at a deeper, richer level of perception and understanding. Its relevance for us today lies in that while the elenchus could be used effectively to disabuse materialists of their constraints, the same is true for religious people. The problem with Christians or Buddhists or Muslims--or any religious group--is the way that their beliefs rigidify to become part of a system of constraints that need to be transcended if they are to truly understand the deeper truths to which their doctrines point.

We are all fools--whether religious or irreligious--if we think that we are not operating under constraints in our current salience landscapes. And all of us--whether religious or irreligious--are all captured by the constraints of a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, which creates a baseline salience landscape from which we all need to be liberated. It has a tether on all of us. The problem lies in that too many people are too comfortable and too well-adapted to it, and too many of them are making decisions that shape our life together, and not for the better. 

But in the same way that we all need salience landscapes, all religions need doctrines. The idea of doctrine-less religion or religion without religion is silly. It is embraced mostly by people who have strong religious instincts but who are either trying to shake the rigid religious formation in which they were brought up or because they associate these doctrines with the rigid, doctrinaire people whom they understandably find deeply unattractive.

But doctrines should not be thought of as unbelievable things that we believe anyway because we fearfully think that's what is expected of us--that's Kohlberg Stage 1. We should think of them rather as invitations for contemplation. We should feel challenged by them. We need to take them seriously because people wiser than we have taken them seriously for thousands of years. They are truths that call us into a deeper relationship with them, and if we approach them in the right way, they will deepen and broaden us, i.e., increase our level of wisdom as they transform our salience landscapes.

A living tradition is one in which the insights of one generation are passed to the next, not as propositional assertions of truth, but in the vitality of the lives lived in that tradition that are exemplary of its wisdom and moral fruitfulness. One is inspired by their lives, and so one wants to follow on the path of wisdom and moral fruitfulness they trod before us. So we approach any doctrine in a spirit of learned ignorance. We must assume that we have no idea what the doctrine signifies, and that rational analysis of the doctrine is by itself an approach that is unlikely to lead to a deeper understanding of it. But if we are even half alive, we feel that there is something calling to us in it, and we hearken to it. We cognize the truth, and then we use our rational faculties to integrate that truth with what we already know or in some cases to revise what we already know, because the "insight" delivers us from the limitations of the salience landscape that made the knowing at this higher level so difficult. 

So I've been arguing that because the salience landscape in which most people today are acculturated is so profoundly shaped by Rationalist Materialist assumptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to take spiritual or awakening experiences seriously or to interpret them in a way that might actually be life-transforming in a positive way. People will continue to have these experiences, but the question is whether they are having them in such a way that the ontonormativity that challenges them to align their own lives on a higher salience landscape can have a similarly transformative effect in our broader cultural life.

I suspect a broader cultural shift will happen when a critical mass of people who have these experiences--the 30-40%--coalesce around a coherent interpretation of their experience that creates the conditions that make a next step possible. In other words, a new collective salience landscape emerges within a certain group within the culture, and then this group has a ripple effect throughout the culture, and perhaps even reaches a tipping point where its salience landscape becomes normative for the whole culture. If such a thing is to happen, its appeal will lie in that it is continuous with what we have come to understand about reality through science, but reframes scientific factuality not with "alternative facts" but with a compelling alternative salience landscape that meets the criteria for coherence, scope, richness, and adaptability in a way that nothing available to us now in our collective life does. 

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it.  

2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school necessary for developing sense of autonomy.  Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

3. Rules matter because they define what is  "right", but personal loyalties matter more. I'll break the rules if it benefits those I love even if it means I'll get in trouble if caught. Example: It's wrong to lie, but I'll tell a lie to protect a friend who will get in trouble. Extreme example: The mother with a sick child who will break every protocol--steal, scream, maim, or stomp over anyone who gets in the way of her mission--to make sure her sick child gets the best care in a hospital. 

4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by Athenian law. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good. 

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

6. The rules might be right 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good. 

How one's moral thinking and actions develop from one stage to the next depends on a lot of factors, including challenges posed in particular existential situations. Not everybody is confronted with the choice whether to get involved in a plot to assassinate a genocidal madman. But that's the point. The rules at one level don't determine thinking or behavior in situations where they don't apply, and the morally mature person understands the difference.

And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4. 

I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is that family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.

I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional, which is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

Genealogy Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West

Are we using the word "mythology" illegitimately in applying it to objectivity as a state of consciousness?  I think not.  For the myth at its deepest level is that collectively created thing which crystallizes the great, central values of a culture. It is, so to speak, the intercommunications system of culture. If the culture of science locates its highest values not in mystic symbol or ritual or epic tales of faraway lands and times, but in a mode of consciousness, why should we hesitate to call this a myth?  The myth has, after all, been identified as a universal phenomenon of human society, a constitutive factor so critical in importance that it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond....

What is essential here is the contention that objective consciousness is emphatically not some manner of definitive, transcultural development whose cogency derives from the fact that it is uniquely in touch with the truth.  Rather, like a mythology, it is an arbitrary construct in which a given society in a given historical situation has invested its sense of meaningfulness and value.  And so like any mythology, it can be gotten round and called into question by cultural movements which find meaning and value elsewhere.

Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture (1969), p. 214

What Roszak calls myth, I call a metaphysical imaginary. I use the word 'mythos' in a way similar to the way Roszak uses 'myth', but I do not think it's possible to have a materialist or rationalist 'mythos', because a mythos works on the dimension of spiritual depth. Roszak points out that rationalist materialists think they know the truth as opposed to those who believe in myths, but that they, too, live circumscribed within myth. Point taken, but I still prefer to make a distinction between myth and metaphysical imaginary.

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.

Religion and poetry have become consumer choices, like buying a new car. They serve our needs or they don't, and mostly they don't because religion and poetry fail to be relevant to the way the larger society actually operates. People don't feel a need for either because the larger society feels no need for either. Being irreligious has become as conventional as being a sports fan. Is this the problem of religion, or is it the problem of the society that has made religion so irrelevant? Well the answer depends on whether you think there is a problem with a society whose cultural forms no longer connect the people in it to the Living Real. Lots of people (most?) are like Cypher in The Matrix--they would prefer to live in a virtual reality, a Metaverse, which is both the pinnacle and the reductio ad absurdum of the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. 

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

Roszak says that myth is so critical for the operation of a society that "it is difficult to imagine a culture having any coherence at all if it lacked the mythological bond". Well, in my terms, he's talking about a metaphysical imaginary, and in our case it's a metaphysical imaginary that's missing one of its two dimensions. This creates incoherence despite even if until recently it provided the appearance of it. Our current crisis of incoherence lies not in that we lack a metaphysical imaginary, but in that the one we have lacks a vertical dimension, the having of which provides what Roszak calls the "mythological bond" that holds things together. Rationalist materialism fails to provide that bond, even if it is our dominant metaphysical imaginary. That's why it feels like the world is falling apart. 

This loss of Mythos, the vertical dimension, in Western societies is also known as the death of God. It spawned a backlash that was simmering for a while, but it flared into public awareness in the U.S. at the time of the Scopes trial. Since then, American evangelical Christianity, which had been the custodian of the American version of the Western mythos, became more rigidly fundamentalistic and increasingly hostile to knowledge on the horizontal dimension. But its growing fundamentalism also made its already rather weak hold on the vertical dimension even weaker. We're in a situation now where neither rationalist materialism nor American Christianity provides American society with any vitality on the dimension of depth. We are a society that completely lacks wisdom in the conduct of its affairs. Expediency is all. 

Roszak is saying that Rationalist Materialism is a myth and doesn't realize it, but I'm saying that Rationalist Materialism has come to so dominate our metaphysical imaginary that we operate no longer with a Mythos or vertical pole around which to spin, and so we spin erratically and meaninglessly. Without the vertical pole to orient activity on the horizontal, we reel in ontological dizziness. Because neither a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary and its religious fundamentalist antithesis has a vertical dimension, neither can be called Mythos. The civilizational crisis we face today, I'm arguing, is the direct consequence of a society whose metaphysical imaginary has lost its vertical dimension. This loss of Mythos has produced a society that lacks wisdom because it lacks broadly accepted cultural forms that connect it to the Living Real. 

A functional metaphysical imaginary 'works' on both the horizontal and vertical. It integrates facts and wisdom. It fails to the degree that one or the other fails to balance the other. The difference between premoderns and moderns is that premoderns privileged the vertical; moderns the horizontal. Most premodern metaphysical imaginaries worked because the vertical and the horizontal reinforced one another. In other words, the everyday world of experience made sense in the context of its mythos. Modern societies have evolved in a way where its everyday experience became increasingly divorced from what had been its vertical dimension until eventually the vertical became irrelevant for the way in which people conducted their everyday lives.

This diagram maps what I think would be the underlying structure and function of an healthy metaphysical imaginary: 

A metaphysical imaginary should not be judged as inadequate by what it affirms but by what it leaves out. And so for that reason I would say that the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails us, not because of what it affirms as knowledge on the horizontal, but because of what it leaves out the dimension of depth and its wisdom. But any religious system that seeks to play a vital role in a society fails if it rejects knowledge on the horizontal. Fundamentalism fails twice over because it rejects knowledge on both the vertical and the horizontal--it lacks factuality and wisdom. Biblicism is a reductive metaphysical imaginary that provides no real knowledge on either the horizontal or vertical dimensions. Fideism, which for some people has a genuine spiritual depth, rejects knowledge whether derived vertically or horizontally. Biblicism and Fideism cannot work on a social or civilizational level because both in their different ways reject real knowledge on the horizontal dimension as irrelevant for the individual's salvation, which is the only thing humans should be concerned about. I think Christians should be concerned about the redemption of history, but that's a topic for another day. 

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being, as well as a healthy, integrated society, "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. 

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their religious beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. More often than not, those religious concerns become directed toward a supernatural world that has little relationship with the immanent, sublunar everyday, common-sense world of their daily experience.

Their mythos must necessarily alienate them from life in a world that is dominated by a Rationalist Materialist imaginary. Rather than for them to think of their lives as entwined with the destiny of the earth, they see the earth as a place of exile or as illusion from which they must be freed by getting off-planet and into the supernatural dimension, which is their true home.

This leads to a quietism that leaves the earth open to be dominated by the sociopaths. A quietist mythos that assumes that the earth is dominated by evil, delusional, and depraved human beings has robust explanatory power--isn't this an apt description of the world we live in? But it also functions as a self-fulfilling prophecy. But better that kind of otherworldly, quietistic fideism, like that, for instance, practiced by the Amish, than the kind of militant fundamentalism that seeks holy war to impose a wisdomless theocracy on the rest of us. That would simply replace a wisdomless Liberal horizontality with a wisdomless Illiberal one. Theocrats on the American cultural right crave to live in a "godly" society, but what they really crave is a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. 

We all crave it, whether we recognize it or not, because we all crave the Living Real, whether we recognize it or not. As I said above, a felt connection to the Living Real is the only cure for alienation, and there is no society in the history of the world that is experiencing alienation with greater intensity than American society. American society craves a restoration of Mythos to balance out a suffocating, alienating, overweening horizontality. Lots of people live in communities that attempt to live lives aligned on the vertical dimension, but as I argued in Part I, it is hard for such communities to flourish. They are running a cultural program on a cultural OS that has become incompatible with it. I believe that eventually, if we are to find health again, we must find a way for the entire society to restore the dimension of depth while respecting the freedom of every individual to find his or her way on it.

I realize that such an idea is an affront to the postmodern, cosmopolitan ethos in which most the culture's elite swim, but I think that most also recognize that something's got to give. I also realize that I have to make a more compelling case than I've done so far that at the root of our crisis is this loss of the vertical. See Part 3 for that. People have lived so long without it that they have no sense of its loss. It's just disappeared without a trace, and so we assume it never existed. The ancestors who report their connection with the Living Real, we think, were delusional; they didn't have science to set them straight.  

In a future posts, I will make the case that there is a Living Real, and that we live in a society that has lost any sense of its importance. But even without having made that case yet, I think anybody who is half awake realizes that we cannot continue on the course we're on. Something radically different is called for. At the root of our civilizational crisis is a crisis of meaning, and meaning comes from the vertical dimension. 

Part 2B: Random Reflections on This Theme

On Christmas, I posted "A Reflection on the Incarnation" in which I laid out in rough outline a way of synthesizing the vertical with the horizontal. The challenge is to recover the Mythos that roots Western civilization within the context of what evolutionary science and modern cosmology tell us about reality on the horizontal dimension. I think that the core mythos of Western civilization can be accurately described as Christian Neoplatonism, which is an integration of two post-Axial traditions--Greek transcendental speculative philosophy and Jewish revelation. Of course, I recognize how implausible what I wrote there sounds both to Christians of a certain stripe and to secularists of another. But my goal is not to persuade people I am right that the Christian Neoplatonic mythos is the only one that's possible for the West--or the world. I do, however, insist that something like it is called for. My goal is not to argue by marshaling evidence and logic so much as it is to evoke a memory of something long forgotten. 

And in any event, I suspect that Christianity is its best version of itself when it is countercultural rather than providing a civilization's central mythos. In all likelihood, at least in the next hundred or so years, I think that something other than the Christian mythos will play the primary role if we find a way to restore the vertical pole to our collective metaphysical imaginary. But in its main outlines such a mythos should be compatible with the Christian mythos as well as with the mythoi of the other great post-Axial religions. All I'm saying is that the broader society needs an alternative to the Rationalist Materialist cultural OS if they are to run effectively, i.e., run in a way that provides a way for the broader society to reconnect to the Living Real. 

I think there needs to be room for the vertical knowledge that comes from pre-axial 'shamanic' religions, as well. This was the case in medieval Christendom and in Buddhist societies, where a system of hierarchical complementarity allowed for a whole range of religious practices within one social system. The goal in restoring  the vertical dimension would be to embrace a religious integrated pluralism. I'll explore what this means in a future post, but the way I think about it now is that a future Mythos has its own vertical and horizontal dimensions--a transcendent, theistic vertical, and an immanent, polytheistic horizontal.

As suggested in Part 1, something like a metaxis that defines a centering Perennial Philosophy as the colorless light in tension with many colors refracted in particular traditions, local variations, orders, and sects is probably what is called for. Again, this is for a later post, but I"m not talking about Bellah's "civil religion". There's not enough of the vertical in that, but there must be a civil dimension to whatever mythos we come to embrace.

My goal in writing these essays is to bark up a tree that needs to be barked up. For those of us who live in societies shaped by the Christian mythos, it's important to understand why that Mythos "worked" for so long and then why it didn't. To do so requires that we think very differently than we think now, that we entertain the plausibility of a metaphysical imaginary that is not dominated by Rationalist Materialism.

All I see myself doing, is barking out loud to draw attention in whatever modest way to something that's missing but not gone--it's up there in that tree. We need to bring it to ground one way or another. And the best way I know how to do that is to talk about what I see hiding among the leaves and branches when I look up into them. Perhaps others will see more clearly something quite different than what I see. And clearly, bringing it to ground is a task for the future. We're not ready for it yet. The important thing is that people start looking, and then that they find some way to bring it back into our collective lives. I make no pretension to know anything more than to say that there's something up in that tree, and that we need to coax it out of hiding. 

In the posts to come in this 'genealogy" series, I want to bark a little more. I want to spend some time to understand how the originary mythos of the West collapsed, what the implications of that collapse were, and then how to imagine a robust Mythos for the future. We're at a juncture now where we've lost any sense that the vertical matters--that wisdom matters--that spiritual concerns should play any role in shaping life in our collective public life. They are not even relevant in defining our collective moral commitments. We've bent over backwards to find ways of affirming moral goods that have no reference to a transcendental foundation, to the Good. We find utilitarianism, social contract theory, abstract deontological rules or some bizarre form of sociobiology as preferable alternatives to ground our moral thinking. These are all moral programs that might work compatibly on the rationalist materialist cultural OS, but that doesn't mean they are adequate or come even close to what is called for to meet our civilizational crisis. They confuse a practical expediency for wisdom. 

As I said above, people who actually take the great post-Axial metaphysical imaginary of the West seriously still exist, but they have no influence. What they have to say does not scan in the broader culture. It's a tradition that isn't even taught anymore (mostly) as part of an educated person's understanding of what it means to be educated. At best, matters of the spirit are concerns that might be allowed for people to muse about in private, but mostly they are entertainments to be indulged by children and adults who have nothing more interesting to do with their leisure. Reading Plato has the same status as reading a Michael Crichton novel, but more boring. But I think that nothing is more important than for those who will be most influential in shaping future civilization to recover that great tradition. [See Note 2]

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So I'm arguing that the deep roots of our crisis are causally linked to the failure of our current metaphysical imaginary. That being said, who among us with any cultural legitimacy thinks metaphysically anymore? The intellectual class just blithely accepts that Rationalist Materialism is the only game in town. There are the religious people and then there are people who accept science. Sometimes there are people who have a foot in both worlds, but even if religious people accept science, the metaphysical imaginary in which they live is dominated by Rationalist Materialist assumptions.

How that jibes with their religious beliefs is not something most people fret about--at least until recently. But whether they fret or not, they have been living in a disjointed world where one set of assumptions is at odds with the other. Most compartmentalize: this is my private life where I read the Bible or Cabbala; that is my public life where I enact ruthless tactics to enrich my company's shareholders. It is never good to compartmentalize, even if doing so was a strategy that provided some temporary social stability. That stability is gone, and so therefore is the utility of compartmentalizing. 

I argued in Part 1 that it was possible for American society to maintain some level of stability so long as the customary culture that shaped the lives of most people in Main Street America still had some vitality. The persistence of customary culture until last mid-century provided the social ballast that insured a level of stability that just isn't there anymore. American customary culture used to provide a grounding, humanizing character for exurban America, but it has lost its vitality. It has become a simulacral.

Norman Rockwell's depiction of that customary world in the mid 20th century was the earliest sign that it was already achieving museum status rather than doing anything vital. This loss of WASP, exurban customary culture is coupled with the loss of the customary cultures of the ethnic minorities in the urban areas--Irish, Italian, Jews, Germans, and other European traditions that carried the Western originary mythos and its customs with them from the old country. With the destruction of all those customary cultures has died whatever vestiges of vitality were left of the Western originary mythos in American society. 

There is still some customary vitality in Black and Hispanic communities, and I'm sure there are other communities I'm unaware of where some customary vitality persists, but the pressures to erode what's left of them are terrific. Many people still go through the motions in communities where the originary mythos has lost its vitality. But it doesn't work, and it can't be passed to the next generation. But without even the zombie forms of customary culture, people are now being thrust into ontological dizziness in a way that is unprecedented.

These are the people who are attracted to Trump or to cargo cults like Qanon who show up in the hundreds at Dealey Plaza. It gives them an unhealthy parody of community because the healthy real thing is no longer available. Better such collective fantasies than oxycontin or meth, but these are simple folk dealing with the loss of a cultural heritage that is making them crazy, and as such they are vulnerable to be seduced by anything that promises a cure or even just a temporary respite.

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As I argued in Part I, the Western originary mythos came to English North America in a deeply attenuated form with Calvinism, which means that its metaphysics were univocal/nominalist and voluntarist. If you're unfamiliar with these terms, i'll explain them in a future post, but the upshot is this: Ideas have consequences, and by the time Europeans, especially the English, came to America, they carried with them a metaphysical imaginary that profoundly alienated them from the Living Real. And it was for this reason that the native Americans who encountered them thought they were crazy. And as Benjamin Franklin observed (see epigraph for Part 1), the English who lived among the Native Americans never wanted to go back to live among their own people. Why choose to live in a cold, soul-shriveling social world if you could live in a rich, warm, deeply symbolic one. 

So before the reader rolls his eyes dismissing me as a naive Rousseauan who celebrates the noble savage, let me assert quite adamantly that, yes, Rousseau was mostly right in some very important respects. I would just frame the noble savage issue differently. It wasn't that there was anything special about native American culture that was not true of most premodern, pre-literate customary societies. Such societies lived close to nature and felt deep communal bonds that are essential for the flourishing of any human life. And they had a richly deep metaphysical imaginary that provided a symbolic world that reinforced their experience of the world as deeply participative with it. They had societies with a mythos axis and so had societies in which wisdom played an essential role in shaping their societies, a wisdom that most of the white settlers had no capacity to recognize. 

What was really different and weird was what elite European society had become by the 1600s, which was one deeply alienated from the Living Real, and so the European metaphysical imaginary came to reflect that profound alienation. Descartes was the miners' canary. With him we get the first strong indicator that the European educated elite had become so alienated from the Living Real that they could actually conduct a thought experiment that started with the assumption that no extra-mental Real even existed.

A century later, Rousseau looked at the people he hung out with, especially in the courtier class, and it was clear to him that these people were just strange, because so deeply estranged. There's got to be a better way to live, he thought, and so it's not surprising that he embraced the idea of the nobility of a people who were as different from the French courtier class as could be imagined. They had a dignity and a wisdom that was simply unavailable to Rousseau's elite contemporaries.  And in fact, as Franklin pointed out, so many of the English who emigrated to America found in their encounter with the Native Americans something that proved Rousseau correct.

But we all know the story that follows. The other more deeply alienated English who stayed proudly English in their deep alienation from the Living Real, responded to their encounter with Native Americans by essentially wiping them out by force of arms. An aboriginal, richly human, symbolic society is destroyed by a deeply alienated, anti-symbolic society, and we Americans have inherited the winners' violence and their deep alienation from the Living Real. We've had two hundred and fifty years to become even more alienated from it. And we wonder why everybody around us now is losing their minds. 

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And so the question follows: If our deepest problem lies in that we live within a metaphysical imaginary that is profoundly spiritually impoverishing, how do we find our way to a remedy? Well, it's a chicken-and-egg kind of thing. Does our metaphysical imaginary shape our experience, or does our experience shape our metaphysical imaginary? I'd argue that experience is primary and then our thinking about the implications of our experience follow from it. But it's reverberative, to use a McGilchrist term. A society reaches a tipping point where the one reinforces the other for better or worse. I'll come back to McGilchrist in a future post to explore how this might work in a positive way, but in the meanwhile, an examination of a society's underlying metaphysical imaginary is a strong indicator of the relative sanity or insanity of the social world in which its people live. We are insane now largely because our metaphysical imaginary is so deeply alienating, and our insanity is reinforced by our metaphysical imaginary precisely because it lacks a vertical dimension. 

And so, any reader of this blog should not be surprised to learn that I think that the secular materialism/positivism defines the contemporary metaphysical imaginary of the global north and pretty much everywhere capitalism defines a society's central priorities. My critique here owes more to Baudrillard's ideas about disappearance, symbolic exchange, commodification, and seduction than to Marx. Marx assumed that humans would stay relatively rational in thinking about their political interests, and it's there where's he's been proved most wrong. He had important things to say about alienation, but he had no idea how bad it was going to get. 

What we have is too insane for a Marxist critique. Because Marxism suffers from the same problem that the capitalist materialism does--no vertical dimension--it provides no cure for ontological dizziness. That's why Soviet Society failed and why now Capitalist democracy is failing. Both in their ontological vertigo are ripe to be exploited by someone like Putin over there and Trump over here. These demagogues present themselves as figures who are selling sanity and metaphysical realignment with the vertical dimension when in fact they are promoting a counterfeit of them. They represent a reversion to oligarchical warlordism in a postmodern, hi-tech key.

Even if they have a really bad solution, they, at least, understand the problem. Not Trump of course: he's a big, dumb, dark channel for an egregore whose energy someone like Bannon and the Claremonsters, who do understand it, seek to exploit. But unless the "good guys" come up with a better solution to our collective loss of verticality, then there's a very good chance the dark, violent forces Bannon seeks to exploit will win. He understands the hunger for the vertical dimension can be exploited with a snake-oil version of it. Secular Liberals correctly see the snake oil, but then incorrectly conclude that anything that comes from the vertical dimension must be snake oil. 

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And so then the next question is this: what happened in Europe that set it apart from every other society that existed in the world around five hundred years ago? The causes are complex, of course, but chief among them is Gutenberg's printing press and the Reformation. Both together magnified what had been an incipient trend among some of Europe's elite toward alienation and disenchantment, and while I have laid out a summary for what I believe is the most coherent explanation for what comes next in Charles Taylor's A Secular Age here, in posts to come, I want to emphasize key parts of Taylor's story and add a layer of Iain McGilchrist's The Master and the Emissary to provide the thousand-year genealogy of our current insanity. Both these books are essential reading for anybody whose hair is on fire as mine is and who wants a deeper understanding about what we're truly dealing with and how we might find a way forward.

Go to Part 3.

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Note 1: My use of Logos here as knowledge on the horizontal axis carries a different meaning from what I understand as the Johannine Logos, which is foundational for intelligibility on the horizontal axis, but also the intelligibility of revelations that disclose themselves from the depths of of the Living Real on the vertical axis. The Johannine Logos is in my Christian epistemology foundational for both Logos and Mythos. 

Note 2: After writing Part I, I learned about David Brooks's interviewing Leon Kass on Ezra Klein's podcast. I see Kass as struggling with the same issues I am, and while I'm uncomfortable with any thinking that originates from within the University of Chicago's Straussian milieu, Kass is an interesting, morally serious man, and I intend to read his Founding God's Nation: Reading Exodus (Yale University Press, 2021). I am interested to learn whether he is barking up the same tree as I am. 

At first glance, it would appear that he is. In the podcast he says that there are three things a 'nation' needs to flourish, (1) a story of origins, (2) a covenant/law, or broadly accepted moral ethos, and (3) a tabernacle, a cult that defines a nation's highest spiritual aspirations. Ok--he's talking mythos here, restoring the vertical dimension--and I'm listening with interest to learn where he's going to take this, and then he blows it by saying American society had such a mythos until the sixties. There's no bigger turn off for me than to blame our current turmoil on the sixties.

The sixties were a failed attempt to correct the deeper problem. Read Roszak. The Making of a Counterculture is still very, very relevant and remarkably prescient. That the counterculture failed then has more to do with the power of technocapitalism to absorb and coopt almost every vital attempt to subvert it. There was no mention in the conversation between Brooks and Kass about how technocapitalism might be playing a role in our current crisis. This is a blatant refusal or blindness that affects so many American Conservatives. It renders whatever of value they have to share, if not irrelevant, at least as something incapable of influencing the broader cultural ethos. Nevertheless, I'll read Kass's book in the hope that his arguments will be more nuanced, but I fear it won't get past much of what's acceptable at the American Enterprise Institute where Kass is a fellow.

But even so, there might be common ground here. I'm just not sure that Exodus provides the originary mythos that is going to do the job for us now, even if it was the mythos of the Puritans who came to New England. If you read Part I, you know what I think about Calvinism. The Canaan they founded was no land of milk and honey I'd ever want to live in. But the basic problem with the Puritans was that while indeed they had a vital mythos, it was too colorless and too deeply implicated with the emergence of capitalism and its materialist metaphysical imaginary. I'll argue this assertion in a future post, but the point to make here is that you can't solve a problem from within the frame of the metaphysical imaginary whose contradictions are the cause of the problem.

We are living in a time where the problem needs desperately to be resolved, and the Calvinist mythos does not have the resources to do it. And yet Exodus could work as a contemporary mythical lens if we understand it not as our having arrived in Canaan as those first Puritans believed they did, but as our still wandering in the wilderness. It's precisely the the obsoletized metaphysical imaginary of the Calvinists that we must leave behind as we wander in the wilderness for a few generations during which we unlearn its soul-crushing habits of mind. But to what land of milk and honey are we headed? Again, considerations for a future post. 

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in early December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

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.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live--as much as that's possible. I realize there's some overlap.

But if it's not clear by now, it should be: The most politically engaged voters on the political Left and Right care much more about cultural and identity issues than boring, practical, policy issues. Policy issues only get traction when they get culturized, as we saw with Obamacare over the last decade. By 'culturized' I mean that if I'm on the Red Team, I'm against it if it's a win for the Blue Team, no matter how positively the policy might benefit me. The more politics becomes culturized, the more it become a zero/sum game, and it's hard to see how democracy survives if this is the only political game we're playing going forward. 

And so our politics has become riven by issues of the spirit that cannot be satisfactorily adjudicated in the practical sphere of politics. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is where the future of democracy is being put to the test, so Liberals better start learning how to play this game more effectively. If, as I think it does, the future of Democracy depends on the future political success of the Democrats, Democrats need to understand why so many people are not buying what Liberalism is selling. But I fear that the Liberals who are most politically engaged haven't the spiritual imagination to do it in a way that will work effectively enough to save our democracy. 

Despite its having a devout Catholic president who wears his heart on his sleeve, the Democrats are Identified by broad swaths of the electorate as the party of godless atheists and heartless bureaucrats. It is not, more often than not, an inaccurate picture of what most Democrats are really like, but it's true enough for it to stick. For many everyday low-information voters, i.e., people who are not riveted every night to cable news, which is most people, it's what the word 'Democrat' signifies.

Today I was on line at Costco behind a sweet older couple, you know the kind who pay their $300+ bill all in cash. Ok--I'm projecting here--but my guess is that this is the kind of couple that knows enough about Trump to feel uncomfortable about him, so voted for Biden instead in 2020, but in 2022 they probably voted Republican. These are not the kind of folks who religiously watch Fox or spend hours on social media. They just feel more comfortable with politicians who talk Conservative than with those who talk Liberal. They're scared. They think that things are getting out of control, and so that inclines them to look for a strong man, someone who can get things back under control. Trump's bluster looks strong; Biden's physical frailty looks weak. 

Conservative is their native tongue; it's what they grew up with. That's how the people they go to church with and their friends at the coffee shop talk. It used to be that talking Conservative wasn't an impediment to voting Democratic in places like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but now it is. It's not mainly about race; it's about the larger cultural frame, and yes, that frame is vestigially racist. But that doesn't make people who speak Conservative frothing racists. But race makes them nervous.

The future of democracy depends on who captures those non-frothing Conservative votes. This couple should be on the Blue Team if it were only about policy, but they're not because it's about culture. They're not culture warriors; they're just ordinary folks from Main Street who vote for normalcy, which is what feels 'right' to them, and what feels right is what they grew up with, and what they're seeing in the movies and on TV, and what they hear their smart-ass grandkids home from college spouting at Thanksgiving dinner makes them think that the world has been turned upside down.

What the Democratic establishment doesn't seem to realize is that this is a cultural not an economic concern. Every Democrat I hear being interviewed on TV is clearly speaking as if the only fundamental political truth is that "it's the economy stupid". Well, however true that might have been in the past, now "it's the culture, stupid". Of course, they're not ignorant that culture is political factor; it's that they think they can overcome their cultural negatives with what they see as policy positives. And maybe they could if people were paying attention to policy debates, but they're not. They just vote Red unless there's a really compelling reason not to.  

Few on Main Street care about spending and taxes or extending the safety net, but they fear racial disorder and Big Brother. They fear all the stuff that feels un-American to them because it's not what they grew up with. These are not evil people; they're just scared by change. They are not frothing white nationalists, but they'll vote for the party that provides safe harbor for white nationalists because they can't bring themselves to vote blue because it just doesn't feel "right". And on what they feel is "right" the future of democracy depends. Steve Bannon understands the the future of American politics depends on who wins this decent middle on Main Street, but Liberals seem oblivious. 

Liberal Democrats have to recognize that their biggest asset is their progressive policy agenda, but it's complicated because their biggest liability is how their secularity merges with their advocacy for big-state solutions. That scares people. Working-Class Americans, even many who vote Democratic, don't identify anymore with the Democratic Party. Black and Brown voters are largely culturally conservative, and they vote Democratic because the Red Team is so bad on race. They do not, however, look to Democrat establishment types as "their" people because the Democrats represent the worldview and interests of the educated, affluent top 20%, which is not them. The bond of loyalty there is far weaker than many Liberals think.

Secular Liberals also mostly don't understand that the imaginal worlds in which people live are more important than facts, and that facts get filtered and interpreted though a cultural lens that is shaped by the world they grew up in. Ideas matter, but ideas feel true or untrue depending on how they align or don't with how their cultural imaginary structures their sense of the real. Activists on the cultural Right understand the importance of winning the ideas war no matter what because they live in an imaginal world that they believe faces extinction. Fear of extinction is very politically motivating. 

Whether or not their imaginal deserves to go extinct or whether such fears of extinction are just a paranoid fantasy is not at issue here. It is what it is, and the only way to convert people who have bad ideas is to present them with better, more compelling ones. And that's where secular liberalism has nothing to offer. Liberals need to find a vision that actually sells a positive culture message that has broader appeal, something that is more than a No to the boorish, racist, homophobic Right, something that gives people who speak Conservative a robust sense of positive future possibility. Liberals think their progressive policies are enough, but they just aren't. They need to win over the decent, low-information voters on Main Street with hope. It's important to expand the safety net to ease the stress that so many feel, but the despair and anxiety so many Main Street Americans feel won't be cured by that. It might buy a little time at best. 

***

So here's the bigger issue that has become a political issue whether we like it or not: People want a cure for their existential anxiety and despair, and Liberalism doesn't offer it. Rather Liberalism feels like the cause of it for too many Americans. The radical Right in this country is offering a cure, which, of course, is no cure. But for many it feels like a cure because it draws on a memory that precedes the death of God.

That "God is dead" is simply to say that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a living way in our cultural life. It signifies something, but the signified is not living; it's rather a zombified parody of what the great Jewish prophets and rabbis, Muslim sages, and Christian saints understood by the word. 

'God' still 'signifies' in the old, living way for individuals and some small groups here and there, but not for the culture at large. But so much of what passes for religion today on the cultural Right is an attempt to exhume the dead and to animate it with energies that have nothing to do with a Living God and everything to do with tribal identity. The god the cultural right worships is an idol, a totem, and has nothing to do with the unconditioned boundlessness that the great traditions when they were a living force in culture understood as God.

And from where I sit, that's at the core  of the Crisis of the Liberal Order. A society that is no longer nourished from a living connection to its transcendental roots is a culture that is living on borrowed time. Neither the Right nor the Left has a solution for this problem, and the Left doesn't see it as a problem. And for that reason they don't appreciate how rickety the superstructure they take for granted is, and how easily it will topple from its own dead weight when the next strong storm blows, and that storm she's a-brewin' on the radical Right. America has an infrastructure problem, but it's not just about bridges and the grid. 

When I hear secular Liberals say I don't need religion, it's as if they see it as an an option on a menu of possible consumer choices, and one that only the vulgar would choose. It's understandable if the word "religion" only signifies for them what I would describe as zombie parodies of it. But often when I hear them say it, it sounds to me as foolish as someone saying I don't need love, or I don't need beauty or nature, or I don't need music and poetry. It's true, many people live without these, but such people are not healthy, full-spectrum human beings. They don't feel what they lack, and in that sense they are in the despair that Kierkegaard described as being unaware of itself. But it's one thing for an individual to be in despair; it's quite another for an entire society to be in it. Democracy is not a priority for people who are in despair. Getting out of despair is, and they'll swallow whatever Ivermectin for the soul demagogues and conmen will pitch to them if they think it will provide a cure. 

The Crisis of Liberalism is a crisis of the spirit, which is a crisis of imagined future human possibility. And this is why so many are not interested in buying the kind of human future that Liberals are selling. Classic secular Liberals like Musk and Bezos see the human future somewhere off-planet, because they've all but given up on this one. But earth is where the rest of us are going to live it. The Liberal vision for life on-planet is too impoverished, too flat-souled, too glib--too lacking in wisdom. And so it's too incapable of meeting this crisis of the spirit in a way that resonates, that speaks to the deepest human aspirations. It offers no cure for the people who think Ivermectin might be one. It offers no cure for existential despair.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this shouldn't be a problem for politics to solve, but it is now if we have any hope for saving democracy. At the very least, it's become an aspect of politics that Liberals have to contend with better than they have been. 

Liberals need to develop and embrace a meta-narrative (or mythos) that cures despair, and I believe that the development of such a thing is possible, even in a pluralistic society. But it doesn't matter what I think or some others like me think. It's about how a shift or expansion in the Liberal imaginary might actually be effected so that it might inspire people and give them real hope in an American human future. It's not a head problem; it's a soul problem, so the solution has to be a soul solution. 

So the question is not whether or not we need religion, i.e., a plausible mythos that gives us hope--we do. (Faith, btw, is not religion or mythos. See Part II.) But it's not just that individuals need religion, healthy societies need it too. And the question is whether our culture will be able to find its way to a healthy form of it, a living form of it, one that opens us up to the deepest possibilities for becoming human beings, rather than closing us off to them, which is what bad religion--or none--does.

This ought not to be a problem for politics, but the destructive forces of techno-capitalism have created a spiritual vacuum, and there's a huge swath of Americans on the political Right in this country that thinks its politics can fill it. So Liberals better understand if they have no answer for that, they are playing a losing game.  

In the long run, the only solution is to replace bad religion with good religion. The culture has the resources to do that. We used to believe that we humans were created in the image and likeness of the Living God. Such an idea is retrievable in a postmodern (i.e., post-Liberal) key. And I fear that if something like an idea of the Living God isn't retrieved, even if only in some diminished Feuerbachian sense, then any future possibility dies for the Living Human, and with it any reason to resist becoming machines or letting them takeover.  

Already our diminished imagination of what it means to be human is so far advanced that I wonder if we're too far gone. I wonder if we have become too cut off in a hyper-real, simulacral dream, and so sealed off from the Living Real that if tomorrow Jesus himself were to arrive on clouds of glory, any but a few would notice. That couple on the line at Costco probably would. But most everybody else would be too preoccupied with what's on their screens. What they find there is so much more interesting. 

Go to Part II

Some Random Thoughts on Afghanistan

Despite whatever level of culpability Biden has for not planning the logistics of the evacuation effectively, it's also become abundantly clear that those Afghanis who supported the twenty-year American boondoggle in Afghanistan as translators, etc. should be very happy that Biden was in office rather than Trump. This withdrawal was going to be a mess no matter what. I know that Trump made the initial decision to get out, but whatever the incompetencies on display from the Biden administration, just imagine how much worse it would have been had the uber-incompetent Trump and his team of racist xenophobes still been in office.

So my hat's off to Biden for making the hard decision to take the heat from the media and the military and to go through with the withdrawal. My respect for Biden has, if anything, been increased by the events of the last couple of weeks. 

Joe Biden's only real mistake was to listen to his military and its assessments of the reality on the ground in Afghanistan. The U.S. military is astonishingly clueless in its estimations of its own efficacy, and it never learns from its mistakes. The problem for a U.S. president is that he must depend on the cluelessness of his military and the so-called intelligence community for the information he needs to make decisions. These people are obviously not stupid, but their thinking is in the service of very simplistic, fear-driven assumptions that never seem to be questioned.  I know this sounds simplistic--it is--but it's more right than it's wrong. 

If someone does question them, he or she is clearly not a team player and never gets promoted. Cluelessness is thus baked into the military culture. The clueless only promote those who have bought into the fundamental cluelessness, and so the cluelessness is ineluctably passed on from generation to generation. Nothing really changes from Vietnam to Iraq and Afghanistan. Fixing that is rather like trying to fix the racism that pervades most police departments. You don't change the fundamental elements that structure a group's culture by sending people to a training seminar. To think that works is just part of the fundamental cluelessness. 

For another example of premium-quality cluelessness, read Anne Applebaum's piece in the Atlantic. It's astonishing to me is that The Atlantic will still publish Neocon nonsense like this. This woman is operating on a planet other than earth, and on it some kind of political theory rules in a way that feels no need to accommodate the realities on the ground. She is not unintelligent; she's just naively captured by her ideological presuppositions. This is not unlike the ailment from which the military suffers. In theory Afghanistan or Vietnam or whatever should all work out very differently. We just lack the will to make the theory work. Whatever. The bottom line is that to argue that the U.S. should be fighting for liberal democracy abroad when it is at serious risk of losing it at home is just plain nutty.

To think that any country in the world would trust us now or look to us after the messes we have made every time we tried to make the world a better place is delusional. Or even now, there's a good chance that the Bannonist Right*, with the help of gerrymandering and voter suppression laws, will take over the house and senate next year and the White House in '24. Why would anybody in the world look to the U.S., teetering on the brink of illiberalism, as even a remotely decent model of liberal democracy? To think that the U.S. now has a role in modeling anything good and decent for the world is truly, deeply, clueless.

***

It has struck me that 1989 was the year that the Soviet Union withdrew from Afghanistan under similarly humiliating circumstances. And everybody knows what happened next--no more Soviet Union. It collapsed of its own dead weight and broke apart. I've been writing here for some time that the Liberal Order in the U.S. is teetering in a way that is very similar to situation of the Soviet Union in the 80s. And it's pretty clear that if Bannonistic fascism and Fox News get their way, they will push the rickety thing over for good. Goodbye America as the open society that we have known. 

Or, as I've also written, perhaps the country will just fall apart into ethno-religious areas as in the Balkans or the Soviet Union in the 90s, but in the U.S. defined more by the blue and red areas on the U.S voting maps. Or Colin Woodard's map below and his writing about "American Nations" is a good place to start thinking about how this may play out: 

How this breakup happens in practical, logistical terms is anyone's guess--will it be state by state? will it be in regional coalitions? some other possibility? But something has to give. Either one side wins the culture war or things break apart. The country is otherwise ungovernable. If the Blues win, as it should with its clear popular majorities, we should expect if not a secession movement in the Red areas, a growing number of de-stablizing, right-wing terrorist events--assassinations, bombings a la McVeigh, etc.  If, on the other hand, there is another Bannonite/revanchist takeover of the federal government as described above, it won't give up power again.

The events since Nov. 6 have shown beyond any doubt that the Republican Party has become an anti-democratic, fascistic political movement that will cross any ethical or legal line to obtain power and remain in it. November 3, 2020, to January 6, 2020 was just the dress rehearsal. And if they succeed next time, then it's a question of how the more populous, better-educated, and wealthier blue areas of the country are going to respond. Does anyone think they'll just accept such a coup? Something has to give. 

--------------------------

*Perhaps I give Bannon too much credit in talking about the "Bannonite Right". But there is no other figure I can think of, regardless of his current relevance or personal hygiene, who has articulated better the religio-nationalist ideology that has the best chances of effecting a successful Right-wing takeover of the U.S federal and state governments. I believe there's a very good chance that Trump would be in power today if he had listened to Bannon rather than to have fired him. But because Trump was a fool, does not mean that others are, and whether or not Bannon plays a role in any future attempts at a fascistic takeover of the U.S., he will have been one of its most influential theorists and propagandists.

What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period.

As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.

McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. For if the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of late medieval scholasticism could morph into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life of the Renaissance, perhaps we can find a way forward toward our own Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the hubristic Enlightenment Age of Reason, which was until mid last century the consensus spirit animating the Liberal Order. And as the Liberal Order decays, a revanchist, regressive irrational Right arises to provide some atavistic fantasy of a bygone Golden Age. This has come to a head in the Age of Whatever, which set the stage for the Age of Trump. 

In the Age of Whatever, what remains of the old Liberal Order is in one prominent aspect a Neo-puritan, moralistic priggery that at best parodies a serious moral outlook for want of something better. At the same time, a Social Darwinist Neoliberalism dominates in the most woke of workplaces, a Liberalism that paradoxically celebrates diversity, equality, individualism, and freedom while too-often imposing a soul-deadening technocratic organization and a managerial culture of compulsive surveillance and control. But that's all cool because management tacked up a Black Lives Matter poster in the lunchroom.

In the Age of Whatever, there is no consensus about anything. Anything is permissible so long as you don't hurt others. Outside of a depressingly Social Darwinian Ayn Randian framework, there is no longer any imagination for what might be noble individual aspiration, much less noble collective aspiration. Depressing because so many of my most spirited students are attracted to it for, again, want of something better. So everybody is as free to be as good or bad as they wish in theory, but in reality most people are constrained by tribal Liberal or Conservative moralistic groupthinks.

De Toqueville pointed this out about Americans almost two hundred years ago. There is something about Anglo-American and French culture that makes true independent or original thinking very rare and hard to come by. What passes for original is really just novel, a clever variation along lines accepted by Right or Left groupthinks. {See Note 1 in the comments section.] Nobody sane wants to live in the Age of Whatever--except maybe a handful of wannabe Nietzsches in the academy and in pop culture who have persuaded themselves it's edgier or braver to live in some realm beyond Good and Evil. But there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

So the culture must move through this awkward phase, and it will. The Age of Whatever is the Age of Whatever Comes Next. The only question is whether it will do it in a healthy or unhealthy way. Healthy means an open society in which its citizens are provided a cultural framework, a trellis, on which they as individuals can become their best selves.

Unhealthy means a rigid, autocratic, closing down of any possibilities except those that are sanctioned by elites on the theocratic Right or on the technocratic Left who think they know best. That's why the individualistic liberation agenda of the Cutltural Left is inadequate. There is in it no vision of possibility for a better human future except to say No to traditional constraints. That's fine so far as it goes, but it has the unintended consequence of clearing the ground for technocratic Social Darwinians to take the field unopposed. We need an imagination of a human future to which all people of good will can say Yes. We need them to be inspired enough by such a vision to be willing to fight for it. 

The culture can move through the Age of Whatever to something better only if it finds a way to synthesize its contradictions on a higher level. That is the coincidentia oppositorum, or the Hegelian aufhebung or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as the Platonic metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy or positive in both to marry, so to say, to create a new moment of integration at a higher level. That is the formula for Renaissance and for true moral development. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance. We will need a little help from the zeitgeist for such a thing to happen, but there will have to be enough people awake enough to its possibility to work with it when it shifts. [BTW, I don't think this is a task for philosophers. They're the last ones to look to. I think someone like Dolly Parton is a better model to emulate.]

I am an advocate for Renaissance, not nostalgia. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age or some darker, Evola-esque autarchy. In this rather long post, I want to lay out in one place some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.

Part of the mission of this blog is to help cosmopolitan educated types to understand the forces driving the Right but also the limitations of their own presuppositions. The Right and Left are two poles of the same system, and they work dynamically together, but they no longer do so creatively because there's no deep vitality in either. So the task is to transcend both their contradictions in a new synthesis. In previous posts here and here, I've made as sympathetic a case as I can muster to understand what I call Bannonism, whether or not he personally plays any future role in it. His critique of the contemporary Liberal Order is incisive, and his strategy for overturning it could have worked if Trump were not such a self-absorbed fool. But it may work still with a less feral, more strategic fuerher in the future. So I take Bannonism very seriously. 

The most intelligent advocates for Bannonism see themselves as redressing an imbalance in the Liberal Order, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. So the No to traditional restraints that animates the Left is matched by the No to Liberal technocracy that animates the Right, and both Nos lead not to resolution, but to impasse. You need something positive in one pole to interact with something positive in the other to move forward--and neither has it at any level of meaningful vitality. 

Bannonism, in realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. The insane have a way of taking control because they are willing to cross lines the sane won't. And the sane tend to give the insane the benefit of the doubt, and when they realize that they were mistaken, it's too late.

So Bannonism offers nothing positive; it certainly does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate negating ideology for another. If the Bannonites succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us more intense pain and broader suffering. Some Bannonites are naive because they honestly think anything is better than the current Liberal Order; others simply don't care how many people suffer after the Liberal Order's collapse so long as they're in power. 

The Meta-Historical Context

I don't have views that flow easily in the mainstream, but I persist in thinking I can make compelling arguments for some alternative to the current Left/Right impasse. There are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview who see evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions who believe life on earth is a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that are valid, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.  

My own mythopoetic framework, which I believe is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity in a Christian Neoplatonic key is tersely summarized here. I think something along these lines is necessary to provide a future framework for Renaissance. It need not be Christian, but should be post-Axial along the lines of the Philosophia Perennis. My framework is also shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung, Gebser, and the Englishman Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French thinkers Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin add a dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. 

This German story can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being". This is a human centered, progressive, evolutionary process extending over millennia. The health of the earth matters because the earth is where the sacred human project unfolds. 

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud are also contributors to this "German story". They would dissent about their being a collective progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of Being itself. It is human openness to this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are and will be to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up. They might open possibilities up on the horizontal dimension--like the superpowers celebrated in the movies--but it's hard for me to see how they might open them up more than close them down on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth. We'll see.

Insofar as they are closing off the human being from the dimension of depth, they are obstructing what I believe central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the sophistication and nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book. 

I know the computer science folks have great hopes that machine learning will find a way to replicate human consciousness, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special thing that humans have, which is this openness to the dimension of depth mediated to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. I wonder how many in CS folks actually believe that there are depths in human consciousness that they need bother to try to replicate. Machines can mimic left-brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which is only mediated through the right brain, because that data comes from having a soul and with it the capacity for cognitions on the dimension of originary depth.

The peculiarly modern condition of alienation from Being began to take hold in the West among the Voluntarists and Nominalists in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. Occam's razor became a justification for cutting away more of the richness of thinking and imagination than the pious Occam ever intended. Why? The left brain is all about seizing power and imposing order. "I just want to keep people safe" is the most common justification for all control zealots, and safety and control are dominant themes in the cultural ethos of the military in one way and of the bourgeois Cultural Left in another. 

The Right brain opens humans up to the depths, the messy domain of everything beyond human control, while the Left Brain is all about grasping, controlling, and ordering what is given to it from the right. Ideally, as McG explains above, they work together--that's the formula for true creativity and Renaissance--but when they do the Right Brain is the Master and the Left the Emissary and servant. Societies get into big trouble when the Emissary usurps control from the Master, much as Antonio usurped Milan from Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. We're in that trouble now. 

The Tempest is the story that hinges on the coincidentia oppositorum. I would argue that most of Shakespeare's plays work with its archetypal power. The basic structure of the comedies starts with conflict between two dramatic polarities, then proceeds with a serious effort by the protagonist to effect a reconciliation at a higher moral level, and if successful, culminates in the final act with a scene that celebrates the expansive joy of an achieved communion--weddings, feasts, circle dances.

In The Tempest, the basic dramatic conflict is between Prospero and his usurping brother, Antonio. The moral question at the heart of the play is to avenge or not to avenge. Prospero refuses revenge and its endless cycle of counter-revenge, which is "natural" in its following logic of evolution without grace. His refusal allows for the possibility to achieve integration at a higher level, a restorative, expansive aufhebung, that reestablishes him in Milan with the expansion of his realm with the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand to include Naples. 

Something like that has to happen to resolve the sterile conflict between the Left and Right in American society; otherwise our future will be an infinite, irresolvable series of Left/Right backlashes. Aufhebung is not the same as compromise. It's about synthesis and communion at a higher level. This is how real moral progress happens, but it requires leaders who are mature moral agents. Is the Cultural/Religious Right capable of producing such leaders? I'm sure there are mature moral agents on the Right, but will they be listened to by the rank and file they would lead? 

And on the Cultural Left, are there leaders there with the spiritual or moral resources to say No to the ways the Enlightenment project leads to the end of the human project? Is there any capacity there to push back against those who are advocating for a mechanomorphized transhuman or posthuman future? Are they capable of seeing how this is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony? Is it within their resources to see it as the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to liberate the humans from the irrational by liberating them from their bodies? 

Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason, elite Liberals in the universities, the media, in pop culture either celebrate or are otherwise blind to, complacent about, or resigned to the threats posed to the human project by mechanomorphizing it. Technocratic Neoliberalism and the postmodern liberation ethos of anything goes are symptoms of Left-braininess on steroids. Are Liberal elites able to transcend such limitations? We'll see. but I don't see much sign of it at this juncture. 

The Current Crisis

I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West--and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. And so many people feel increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.

The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do? But they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. People will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'. The Liberal model with all the best intentions frames existential failures of courage in this sense as disease, which hygienizes it in ways that rob people of their spiritual dignity. 

Nevertheless, Cultural Conservatives are wrong to blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and are disgusted by their smug complacency. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a flat, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; the best among them feel as alienated as conservatives, but they certainly don't think that the people on the religious right have any real remedies. And they're not wrong.

And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a place with an exceptional local church community, they rightly see that there's nothing special or challenging there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle or hiking club would be more edifying than attending a local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the churches to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize without them. 

Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, very secularized, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. This perplexed him because I otherwise seemed so sane. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. I usually avoid conversations on tribal shibboleth issues like abortion. Most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. And I don't want any part of the kind of moronic conversations that operate on that level. 

But my friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. So he asked and I answered frankly. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy.

I see it as consonant with the deeply alienating and perverse extreme aspects of the modern liberation project toward a posthumanism that seeks to liberate what it means to be human from what it means to have a body. Having a body is the whole point of being human. It is only in our bodies that we can renew the face of the earth. 

I don't think this because I'm a Catholic, and that's what Catholics believe. But I do think that my being a Catholic gives me a way to stand outside the Liberal Groupthink and to determine for myself what is truly good or a counterfeit of it. My life as a Catholic is largely defined as a metaxis between its rich tradition of thinkers, prophets, and saints and the Liberal social imaginary, which is the world into which I was born and in which I live my day to day life. Striving to live in the space between them rather than to be circumscribed by either is not easy, and I may not do it well, but it's my understanding about how to live authentically in a world that has lost its mind. It enables one to find a foothold in a place that is foundational for both but which also transcends both.

In any event, I didn't say all this to my friend, but I explained to him that I'm not interested in criminalizing abortion, but I am truly dismayed by Liberals' glib, technocratic-utilitarian approval for what is a fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It says something very damning about us as a society, but it's just one among many symptoms of a deeper disease because so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a  sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many others. I know--life is messy. Nothing in a life seriously lived is determined by binary black-and-white thinking. There are situations where having abortion is a defensible choice. But the exception should not be the rule. At some time in the future, I hope most people will look back on our contemporary mainstream attitudes toward abortion and think of them as barbaric as we now see genital mutilation. 

My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer to his question gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the knee-jerk cultural legitimacy that abortion has achieved in his cosmopolitan culture world. Deep down he feels it's wrong because it really is, whatever clever utilitarian or ideologically driven reasons might be used to justify it. But he never heard anybody explain why in language that was not ideologically motivated. 

Authenticity and Morality

Any moral position is inauthentic to the degree that is determined primarily by outside-in factors. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no strongly held convictions. They just do what people expect them to do, whether it's contribute to a group-approved charity or show up at church--or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. Too many of the same people who do nice things if that's what expected of them will also do horrible things if that's what expected of them. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to cheat the elderly poor. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever.

There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. You just go along to get along. It's what's expected. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what the right thing is and then finding the courage to do it. No authenticity is required if moral questions are decided for you outside-in, by the authorities or cultural bullies. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue in it when it requires no courage or moral conviction to just go along. 

Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must have some degree of inside-out. But the way the inside-out moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who have themselves achieved some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind--a conversation, a lecture, a book--but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.

That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to have honest conversations and through through them to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcends custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to mindlessly goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the transcendent Good.

So a healthy "Axial" culture's customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. A shame culture is not a truly moral culture. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party or Woke political correctness over here. A shame culture functions merely as a social constructions whose concerns are for social utility and order, not on what is truly, deeply Good.

But the problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the spiritual Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration--the Good--that originally gave them their form.

Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy, living one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others when they encounter it the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.

Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. If they really cared about and aspired to the Good, they could only be disgusted by him and by the dark impulses he evokes in their souls. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves. 

Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its own mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming a mature moral agent. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.

Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.

You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others.

Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason (usually in a rather attenuated, left-brainy form) more than loyalty, but that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are really, really good reasons to doubt the validity or the goodness of their tribal norms. 

Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe. 

I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. Every religion produces this class of meathead. These people, so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves, were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new moral possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4). 

Despite these sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that made them de facto morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described the latter as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable. This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good. 

Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new moral possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question. But the chances are better for him than for his resentment-driven, rotted-on-the-inside brother. 

***

Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but they have no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't understand what a real cure requires. They are understandably frustrated, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. It's a place where they could find many allies on the Progressive Left. But even here, saying No is not enough. The issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. You can't do that if you believe that humans are talking animals that have no more significance for the cosmos than slime molds. But neither can you if you think the earth is a prison from which we must escape. 

So it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media, pop culture, and the Democratic Party, to push back against the hubristic techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, and even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Goldwater/Norquist mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in any way on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking and makes their heads explode. 

So this is why I think that both Liberals and Conservatives are both right and wrong, but in the short term I side with the Liberals because they are the true conservatives insofar as they are committed to the rule of law and to finding practical solutions in a complex, pluralistic, globalizing world. In other words, the real world. Conservatives just want to say No to all that complexity and to live bunkered in their traditionalists hidey-holes and media bubbles and in doing so make themselves unavailable for honest conversation with Liberals of good will.

I see Cultural Conservatives as like people in a burning house, a house that they co-own with Liberals, but would just as soon let it burn if they have to share management responsibilities with the Liberals. Anyway, their real home is in heaven, not in this house, so, yeah, let it burn. We will die with the Liberals, but we go to a better place where we won't have to deal with them anymore because there won't be any of them there.

Is it really more complicated than that? If so, not by much. 

Liberals might be blind to things that the most thoughtful conservatives know and understand, but conservatives in the political sphere have proved themselves over and over again to have nothing positive to contribute. They just say No and then find convoluted ways to justify their support for a sociopath like Donald Trump. Conservatives in America have become more a part of the problem than partners with sane Liberals who are seeking in good faith to find solutions to the most pressing problems we are facing. 

In the long term, I believe what I described above as the German story will continue to play out. And this moves forward through successive moments of Renaissance, moral leaps forward, a la the Iain McGilchrist epigraph. So in future posts, I want to continue to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear program, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it. 

[A version of this essay originally appeared here in 2019 under a different title.]

In the meanwhile...

Yesterday I wrote about what I believe has to happen in the long run if the machines aren't going to win. By the machines winning I mean that we're at a balance point where technological development can go one way or the other: either the machines will serve human needs or humans will come to serve the machines. What resources are there now in the culture to resist the latter?

Everything is moving inevitably toward transformations defining the human future in which biological and information technologies are setting the agenda by default. This is what we should all be worried about, not petty con men like Trump and his besotted supporters. They are so many resentment-blinded Calibans who are naive enough to think the drunken clown Stephano will deliver them from the wizard Prospero. Caliban, at least, was educable. It remains to be seen whether most Trump supporters will be able to acknowledge as Caliban did in the end --

Ay, that I will; and I'll be wise hereafter
And seek for grace. What a thrice-double ass
Was I, to take this drunkard for a god
And worship this dull fool!

But while I believe that unfettered techno-capitalism presents a greater threat to the human future than right-wing fanatical fantasists, no compelling defense against techno-capitalism can be mounted if the forces that care about a positive human future must waste time and energy fighting this rear-guard action against thrice-double asses and political drunkards.

Yesterday, I reiterated what I've been saying here off and on for years--a compelling mythos must emerge that synthesizes what science and religion have always provided at least since classical antiquity. Humanity flourishes when both are in balance and working in a mutually cross-fertilizing ways. Chaos ensues when one or the other dominates a society in such a way that it excludes or filters out what the other would contribute. 

When rationalism dominates, a soulless, rather mechanical, algorithmic imaginary of the human being dominates. Think Immanuel Kant or Auguste Comte or Jeremy Bentham. This in turn causes as a reaction, some times healthy, like the Romantic reaction to Enlightenment rationality, but sometimes really, really crazy as we see now in the various, bizarre cargo-cults like Q anon. 

When a fundamentalistic or rigidly dogmatic religiosity dominates, it produces theocratic autocracies that crush the human spirit and its need for free inquiry. This in turn causes an overly rationalistic reaction that becomes radially skeptical about all spiritual possibilities and often a haughty contempt for anybody who thinks there are such possibilities, and this in turn leads to the problems described in the previous paragraph. 

This is where we are now. Things are very, very fragile. Things could go really bad really quickly if balance isn't somehow restored. 

So, in the meanwhile, for me, the question is how to keep at least one eye on the long-term extinction-of-humanity threat posed by techno capitalism while at the same time dealing with the immediate cultural war between the spiritual delusionists and the rationalist nihilists. This war is a ridiculous waste of time; it's a petty squabble that is completely divorced from the real crisis that we as global humans face. It is keeping us stuck in impotent paralysis and preventing any consensus to develop in attacking the imminent threats to everybody, left or right, for whom a "humanism" and its ideals still have some inspirational power.

For me central to the humanistic ideal is the possibility of depth, of retaining the capability for an openness to the fathomless mysteries of Being. As Heidegger put it somewhere, we're too late for the gods and too early for Being, but at the very least we have to keep that option open for future generations. Opening up to those depths and resisting any developments--technical or moral--that close us down or create filters that seal us off from those depths is the very minimum that must be accomplished in the short run.

An openness to these depths is essentially dependent on our being embodied, and through our bodies embedded in nature--real nature, not virtual, new-Gnostic parodies of it--and through nature an openness to the Cosmos and its mysteries. Mortality and the body are essential elements of maintaining this openness, and any attempts to get rid of either are profoundly de-humanizing.

My guess is that for some readers this assertion is obvious but for others not. The idea of science finding a way to overcome death is the most desirable thing they can imagine. But I can't imagine anything worse if overcoming death requires becoming a disembodied consciousness or a consciousness that comes to reside in a machine of some kind. This kind of post-humanism must be resisted, but nobody is making a robust case for resistance, and so technological developments move inevitably toward it with few obstacles. 

So in the meanwhile...

On the one hand, we must vigorously combat delusion while at the same time respecting the human need for a larger sense of meaning and purpose for human history. As we have seen dramatically realized in recent years, large swaths of the population will embrace delusion unless something better fills the need. And so then on the other hand, we must develop a robust counter narrative that celebrates human possibility in such a way that it might be possible to resist the coming post-humanistic reign of the machines.

Such a narrative must honor science and critical consciousness while at the same time celebrating a second naïveté, one which enables us childlike to become open to mysteries of Being that would disclose themselves to us were we to become receptive to them. This is the way to balance, which is the precondition for renaissance and a cultural reconfiguration--perhaps even a new Axial moment in the evolution of consciousness.