After the Future

Left Authoritarians?

This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters the argument I made in Naive Idealists posted on 9/6. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, work with the energies of one-sided Doves, aka Naive Idealists. You don't have to be a Dove like Robespierre or John Brown to be an authoritarian. Stalin and Trump were one-sided Serpents, but even they could not have succeeded without the support of easily inflamed and manipulable Naive Idealists. While the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy, whatever its flaws and limitations.

Another difference between contemporary Right and Left authoritarianism is that authoritarian movements, especially on the Right, tend to require a personality cult to catalyze its latent energies. There is no personality on the Left who performs this function in the way that Donald Trump has done for Right authoritarians. Bernie Sanders might have been recruited for such a role by Left authoritarians, but he's no authoritarian. He's too much of a mensch to have ever assumed the role in a way that could ever have been effective. And the energies on the Left in this moment are not incendiary to the same extent that they are on the Right. In other words, the Left in the U.S. is not ripe for demagoguery in the same way that the Right is. 

The question for me at this point is whether someone like Trump is needed to sustain Right authoritarian extremism in the U.S. If Trump fades from the scene, can anyone replace him? I'm not sure about that. I don't think that Ron DeSantis, Josh Hawley, or a twerp like Tucker Carlson can, but maybe there's someone else lurking on the fringes who will emerge that can. Or it could be that rank-and-file authoritarians don't care who gets in front of their parade. Maybe any figurehead will do so long as he or she tells the mob what it wants to hear. I don't know. We'll see one way or the other. 

No 'fuehrer' emerging in this sense even imaginable in the short-term future on the Left. AOC and Stacy Abrams have the charisma, but imo they, too, are too menschy, too balanced, to play such a role. But I don't know them personally and I could be wrong. Nevertheless, it's hard to imagine the energies on the American Left being catalyzed by them or someone yet to emerge in the way Trump has catalyzed the Right. Whatever the whackadoodle Right says about the threats posed by Left authoritarians, there is very little short-term danger posed by them compared to the threat posed by the Right. 

Lenin pointed out after his successful Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 that the 1905 First Russian Revolution was its dress rehearsal. The same thing might be said about the 1923 Beer Hall Putsch in Germany. There's good reason to fear that we will come to see J6 similarly as such a dress rehearsal. That's a threat that comes from the authoritarians on the Right, not the Left.  

One of the biggest obstacles to restraining the authoritarian Right at this moment are the one-sided Serpents that dominate the Beltway political class. They are capable of thinking only about what is in their short-term political interests, and are virtually incapable of thinking about the big picture. They see politics as a game, and they are incapable of seeing what they do as having consequences beyond what affects their narrow interests. What distinguishes the various Beltway Insider players is how they have responded to the radical way in which the game has changed since 2008. 

Some Republicans like Boehner, Ryan, Corker were shrewd enough to understand that the game has changed in such a way that they no longer wanted to play it. Others like Susan Collins, Joe Manchin, and Kristen Sinema seem clueless that the game has changed at all and continue to play by the old business-as-usual rules. And others, extreme Serpents like Graham, McCarthy, McConnell, Cruz, DeSantis, Hawley et al., recognize that the game has changed, but they still want to play--even if it their winning means destroying American democracy. They don't care so long as they come out on top. 

I think that most prominent Democrats understand what's at stake. There are few naive idealists among them. (Most Naive Idealists on the Left are in the media or in academia.) Prominent Dem pols--Pelosi, Schiff, Raskin, Sanders, and others--are both shrewd game players who also are sincerely committed to preserve and improve American democracy. The question is whether they will be able to get the clueless snakes like Sinema, Manchin, Collins, et al. to recognize that business as usual is no longer an option. If they don't, the shrewder snakes in the GOP and Right-wing media will continue to demagogue the Naive Idealists on the Right, and if they are effective in focusing the intensity of Right-wing passions, they just might find a way to win.

I don't think they will win, but there's a very good chance that they will.  

Reality: Nice While It Lasted 2

From Thomas Edsall's column a few weeks ago:

Brian Klaas, a political scientist at University College London, captured the remarkable nature of the 2024 presidential election in an Oct. 1 essay, “The Case for Amplifying Trump’s Insanity.”

Klaas argued that the presidential contest now pits

a 77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection aimed at overturning a democratic election, who has committed mass fraud for personal enrichment, who is facing 91 separate counts of felony criminal charges against him and who has overtly discussed his authoritarian strategies for governing if he returns to power

against “an 80-year-old with mainstream Democratic Party views who sometimes misspeaks or trips.”

“One of those two candidates,” Klaas noted, “faces relentless newspaper columns and TV pundit ‘takes’ arguing that he should drop out of the race. (Spoiler alert: It’s somehow not the racist authoritarian sexual abuse fraudster facing 91 felony charges.)”

Klaas asked:

What is going on? How is it possible that the leading candidate to become president of the United States can float the prospect of executing a general and the media response is … crickets?

How is it possible that it’s not front page news when a man who soon may return to power calls for law enforcement to kill people for minor crimes? And why do so few people question Trump’s mental acuity rather than Biden’s, when Trump proposes delusional, unhinged plans for forest management and warns his supporters that Biden is going to lead us into World War II(which would require a time machine), or wrongly claims that he defeated Barack Obama in 2016?

In Klaas’s view, newspapers and television have succumbed to what he called the “banality of crazy,” ignoring “even the most dangerous policy proposals by an authoritarian who is on the cusp of once again becoming the most powerful man in the world — precisely because it happens, like clockwork, almost every day.”

I think there is something to the banality of crazy idea, but I don't think this is the MSM's fault in the way that Klass does. There's plenty of anti-Trump stuff in the MSM. The problem lies in that Red America does not trust the MSM. So, for instance, nobody in Red America is going to read Edsall's column because it appears in the NY Times--Red America trusts the NY Times about as much as Blue America trusts Fox News.

And so because there is no shared trusted media source, there can be no shared sense of reality. When there's no shared sense of reality, people believe whoever tells them what they already believe or want to believe. It doesn't matter how detached from Reality it gets because there's no foundation in reality against which nonsense can be contrasted. You believe whom you trust. When everybody one knows and trusts believes nonsense, how can they all be wrong?

I think the basic trust dynamic works the same on the Left as it does on the Right. The difference lies in that the media that the Right consume are largely nonsense, and the media those on the Left consume mostly meet traditional journalistic standards. That doesn't mean that there's no bias in the Liberal media. But the bias lies in the interpretation of the facts not in the fabrication of them. It's been proved time and again that Right media has utterly flouted journalistic standards in its willingness to  report nonsense. But that's not reported in the Right media, so the consumers of Right media remain shielded from those facts. 

For this reason, I think that anybody coming from Mars who objectively observed the beliefs and behaviors of those on the Right and Left would see clearly that those on the Right are more detached from Reality than those on the Left. You don't find thousands of people on the Left showing up in Dealey Plaza expecting the return of JFK or believing anything like Qanon conspiracy theories or joining plots to kidnap Gretchen Whitmer. There is a cargo-cult quality in what's going on in Red America to which nothing corresponds in Blue America.

When people believe something that is fundamentally untrue, deep down they know it's untrue, but they don't want to face it.Their sense of meaning, purpose, and identity largely derive from believing nonsense, and there is a very real terror associated with learning that they've accepted nonsense as reality. It would be humiliating and identity-shattering to have to face this.

Driven by this fear of humiliation and identity loss, they must resist any information that might lead to the unraveling of their nonsense-based beliefs. It becomes virtually impossible to entertain facts that might prove them wrong, so they double down, and in some cases adopt violent means of resistance to reality rather than to face it and be corrected by it.

Fanaticism and extremism in the service of nonsense become signs of being a truth-teller, and because the fervor of fanatics is respected by the less fervid, the fanatics rise into positions of leadership. Then a competition to out-fanatic the other arises among those who seek leadership and power. Moderation and sanity become signs of weakness. Then the fanatical leaders demand proof of loyalty and commitment from the less fervid. Willingness to break the law or commits act of violence becomes the test of one's belief. Are you with us or against us? Prove it by joining us in our plot to kidnap Grethcen Whitmer or to storm the Capitol or tamper with voting machines.

This is how it goes--the more fragile one's nonsense-based beliefs, the more one has to double down; the more one doubles down, the more the need to violently resist reality; the more one resists reality; the more fanatical one becomes; the more fanatical one becomes, the more detached from reality--and the more prone to become involved in a militia that's planning acts of domestic terrorism.

The not-yet-radicalized will not go so far, but they will show their commitment to nonsense by voting for the "77-year-old racist, misogynist bigot who has been found liable for rape, who incited a deadly, violent insurrection," etc. It's the least they can do. 

So here we are. 

Here We Are

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

Peter Wehner

Wehner's essay references Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, at the time a critique of the postmodern Left's epistemic nihilism. Wehner's point here is that what Bloom complained about then is now a far more significant problem for the Right than for the Left, at least insofar as it threatens the stability of the political and social order.

I agree, but it's not that the Cultural Left has moved on from epistemic nihilism. Nihilism is the most influential shaper of our public metaphysical imaginary, no matter what one's personal beliefs might be, no matter whether one leans to the cultural and political Right or Left.

While most decent people don't think of themselves as nihilists, nihilism is so much in the air they breathe that they are unaware of how it influences their thinking and behavior. So the next thing you know a perfectly decent evangelical Christian finds himself voting for an uber-libertine in Donald Trump, believing his lies, and storming the Capitol to save his presidency. And perfectly decent, morally earnest college students find themselves marching to justify Hamas's butchery in southern Israel. It's the most morally earnest, whether they're aware of it or not, who are the most impassioned agents of a nihilism they would insist they don't believe in. 

***

The world is run by the ambitious, not the wise. I understand that. And the ambitious have no need of wisdom or knowledge except that which serves their ambitions. And yet humans don't want to live in chaos to which the unchecked ambitions of the ambitious lead us. So in a world where transcendent values have no public legitimacy we are given two basic choices: (1) either the Hobbesian state of nature in which a violent anarchy reigns, and where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', or (2) the Hobbesian Leviathan that produces a 'brave new world' of  frightened, flat-souled Last Men, distracted by bread and circuses--a lot like the world satirized in WALL-E. On the globals scale, Neoliberalism is producing the worst of both. 

Is there no alternative. I, of course, think there is, but we are reluctant to choose it for complicated reasons. It comes down to this: 

Every society needs forms and norms, but the healthiest society has norms that are aligned with Reality, that is, with the way things are, not with the way we wish them to be. And yet because there is a transcendental dimension to Reality, it must be a part of what a healthy society seeks to be in alignment with. (See diagram below.) Because this affirmation of a transcendent dimension is so difficult for us to enshrine in any vital way in our public discourse today, we cannot affirm it except as individuals. But as individuals we are divided and conquered. 

A broadly accepted sense of Justice as metaphysical balance is essential for a vital sense of social order. Even Machiavelli would agree with that. (See Note 1) Without a center pole to organize and orient our navigation of the world, we spin purposelessly and allow those with the coarsest ambitions to drag us where they may. That's why the idea of justice embraced by the intersectional Left is so useless for us today. It's a symptom of what ails us rather than any kind of cure for it. Whatever its good intentions, it has very little to do with Reality--either in terms of the way the world works or in its relationship to Justice as an inspiring transcendental. It's metaphysical foundations are nihilistic, and its program drags us toward chaos. 

***

I make the case for this in the informal series I've been writing on and off called A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity. The basic argument I make largely relies on the structure diagramed below. Every civilization needs a vertical pole as part of its metaphysical imaginary. But the intellectual elite in North Atlantic societies for complicated historical-cultural reasons beginning in the 14th century amputated what had been its vertical pole since the mid first millennium BCE. It remained as a  phantom limb so long as religious faith--in a fideistic form that rejected Greek metaphysics--remained robust. But it was just a question of time before the loss of this limb would be broadly felt in practical ways, and that time came in the mid-19th century.

After Darwin, any idea of transcendent dimension interpenetrating with the immanent was fairly quickly supplanted--in about 50-60 years--by a wholly horizontal, i.e., wholly immanent, cosmology. Henceforth the imaginary that dominated elite discourse essentially framed the human project as metaphysically meaningless, as an utterly random production of an impersonal, cruel, and purposeless universe that eventually ends with a whimper in heat death. To believe anything else was either naive or medieval. 

Now most Americans--at least 85%--believe that there is some kind of God or transcendent dimension or order despite what the scientific narrative tells them about the origin and history of the cosmos. The 15% who don't largely comprises overclass elites. Many of these Americans among the 85% might not go to church, but they don't believe the narrative of meaninglessness, even if they don't have a better narrative to replace it. Some, of course, on the religious Right completely reject this narrative and  the science that promotes such meaninglessness. But while those on the non-atheistic Left embrace science, they are capable of only weakly affirming some vague understanding about there possibly being a transcendent dimension, but who really knows? And certainly those crazy religious people can't be right.

So among the non-religiously fanatical, vagueness reigns, and vagueness always loses when it comes up against fanaticism on one side and scientistic dogma on the other. So, if you have to choose, it seems more respectable to lean toward scientistically based meaninglessness. It's as conventional an attitude on the cosmopolitan Left as believing in climate change. No one will challenge you at a cocktail party in New York or Seattle if you favorably quote Sagan, Hawking, or Dennett in making your point. However, describing yourself as a Neoplatonist and quoting Plotinus or Meister Eckhart at such a gathering would come across as bizarre, to say the least. 

So it's easier, especially for young people, to embrace the meaninglessness. Some read Ayn Rand or come up with some other pop-Nietzschean ideas about making their own meaning in a meaningless world or whatever. But the naiveté of such adaptations should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two minutes. And besides, there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. And Ayn Rand is no Nietzsche. 

Along these lines, I had a conversation recently with a physics major who told me she cannot believe in free will, but chooses to live 'as if' she has it. That exemplifies the kind of cleverness that typifies the postmodern way of coping with its nihilism. We play all kinds of tricks on ourselves so that we may eat our cake and have it to. Cleverness in this sense is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty, but it passes in a world where nihilism is our public metaphysics. So, you know, whatever. Who am I to judge what lies you tell yourself? Whatever gets you through the night, right? 

So lying to oneself is not just something people on the Right do. Many on Left do it too, but with a sophistication that avoids criticism because it's attuned to the postmodern nihilistic aesthetic. If you challenge them by saying it makes no sense, they reply "Of course it makes no sense. Nothing does. Why should I care about making sense?"

Now there are still some Rationalist Materialists, you know the kind who 'believe' in science. They want to insist that their commitment to 'reason' and 'objectivity' absolves them of any accusations of nihilism. They just "follow the science". How can that be nihilistic? They believe in objective Truth. But here's where the postmodern thinkers do us a service. They have taken the presuppositions of Rationalist Materialism and pushed them to their logical, i.e., nihilistic, conclusions. There's no such thing as knowable objective truth, they correctly insist--there are only interpretations. 

But are some interpretations better than others? No--if there are no criteria by which you can judge better and worse. But yes, if there is some scale that measures deeper and truer, and more superficial and less adequately true. The point is that none of our propositions are absolutely true, because absolute truth is unknowable, but that doesn't mean that we can't move toward a deeper appropriation of the truth and talk about it in ways that make sense.  

As illustrated in the diagram below, if there is no vertical dimension to orient our thinking on the horizontal dimension, then there can be no way to evaluate better and worse, truer and falser. Maybe on a purely utilitarian level, but not in any way that truly matters for the way we live meaningful lives.

If there are no depths and heights, there are only surfaces, and if there are only surfaces, there are only shifting habitual patterns of perception that are 'truthy', but never really true in any profound sense. This was Hume's insight three hundred years ago, and postmodern thinkers are simply putting a point on it. What we think is truth, they more or less say, is whatever we all agree it is, and what's fashionably truthy one moment isn't in another. What is fashionable on the Left is rejected by the Right, and vice versa. And truth becomes whatever whoever has the power to force it on those who disagree.

So here we are. This is really what the culture wars are all about. 

***

But truth as fashion is not the only possibility. In my Genealogy Series I attempt to make the case for human reason having to operate on both horizontal and vertical dimension as illustrated below. The vertical dimension is what makes meaning in a deeply satisfying way a possibility. 

Now let me say that while accepting this imaginary is not the same thing as having religious faith, it is not incompatible religious faith. Indeed it diagrams the Christian metaphysical imaginary bequeathed by the early Church Fathers and accepted in both the East and West until the Reformation. I would also argue that it maps what Taoism, Vendantic Hinduism, the esoteric branches of Islam and Judaism affirm. But I'm more interested in retrieving an imaginary that does not require faith or confessional commitments.

In other words, in a pluralistic, globalizing society, I believe it's possible to develop a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical or transcendental dimension. It will be accepted to the degree that all people of good will would find it reasonable and desirable because restorative of cultural vitality and as a robust alternative to the meaninglessness and nihilism that is currently hegemonic in our public discourse.

I believe the embrace of such an imaginary is inevitable at some point in the future, but not in my lifetime. But until that happens, the nihilism of Rationalist Materialism that currently shapes our collective metaphysical imaginary rules by default. Our social and political disorder are its symptoms. I suspect we must (continue to?) go through a collective dark night of the spirit that strips away all our delusions to clear the way for the emergence of something new. In the meanwhile we sow seeds in the hope they may germinate in the future when the time is right.  

In the long run, the only real cure is to re-member the amputated vertical limb. Until then we all spin in ontological dizziness in a world without a center. BTW, I envision such a re-membering as a cultural project, not a political one. It cannot be forced. If we shift to a social imaginary that has regained its center, it will happen in much the same way that we shifted from a geocentric idea of the cosmos to the post-Copernican one--it will just make sense to anyone who thinks about it, and in time will become common sense. As our ideas change, our work in the world changes. And as our work in the world changes our ideas change, and the next thing you know, as our ancestors became no longer medievals but moderns, so will we become no longer moderns, but whatever comes next. 

Yes, even after such a transition, the world will continue to be run by the ambitious, not the wise. But the ambitious won't be allowed to run amok as they do now. There will be resources within the culture that will allow sane people of good will to push back. The problem for us now is that most people of good will have no deeply held convictions, and to the degree that they do, they are fragmented, divided and conquered in so many ways. And so with no common ground on which people of good will can set their feet to push back, an impassioned bad will takes the field unopposed. And I'm not as worried about how that bad will manifests in MAGA as I am as in how it manifests in the C-suites of the financial and techno-capitalist overclass. 

Note on this diagram. I have no expectations that this is more confusing than helpful for most people who look at it unless they are already familiar with the presuppositions that undergird it. But I'd like to emphasize that I don't see this diagram as describing a static situation. The movement from ignorance to knowledge is dynamic, experiential, and developmental. As is the movement toward self transcendence. Wisdom as Phronesis and Sophia is a function of the experience of a movement away from ignorance on the horizontal dimension, and delusional, self destructive thinking and behavior on the vertical dimension.

Both axes describe growth upward toward becoming a more densely, i.e., a more fully realized or formed  or individuated Self, which in turn leads to the development of capabilities to see and understand the depths of things on the horizontal dimension, the world around us. So I mean for this diagram to suggest that a human life well lived requires the integration of the vertical with the horizontal in whatever measure that is possible for each of us within the limits of our particular existential situations. That growth toward integration changes the way we experience and imagine Reality. Its fruits are apparent in the generally good judgments we make as we grow in wisdom in both dimensions. As one becomes wiser, he or she makes better judgments both in practical matters as well as in matters of cognizing truth in art, religion, and philosophy. Nobody knows everything, but some people get it right more than they get it wrong, and there's a reason for that. 

In previous posts I talk about four criteria that define what a healthy society's metaphysical imaginary should comprise: Here's a summary: 

Scope: The best metaphysical imaginary has the broadest scope on both the horizontal and vertical axes. Premodern societies have more scope on the vertical axis and less scope on the horizontal, but it could be argued that premoderns had a better grip on reality than moderns because they were not as profoundly alienated from the world as moderns are. We moderns know more "about" the world, but we are at the same time more disconnected from its vitality, and in that sense have less of a grip on it.  A remedy for us now is to restore the individual's ability to get a better grip on reality, or in Neoplatonic terms, to participate more deeply in it. This requires self-transformation in both a psychological-therapeutic sense and in a spiritual sense. We need to expand our scope on both the horizontal and the vertical, but it's more important now that we expand on the vertical because we desperately need more wisdom to deal with the crises looming on the horizontal as it expands especially in the domain of information technologies--AI and VR. 

Coherence: The best metaphysical imaginary therefore integrates in a coherent way what it knows on both the vertical and the horizontal. This is the task of philosophy. As we learn more on the horizontal, we need to integrate it on the vertical. As more people take seriously the importance of growing in wisdom, i.e., as a new participatory epistemology and ontology becomes increasingly legitimated, humans will find ways to understand and interpret what we know as knowledge expands on the horizontal in ways that help us to get a healthier grip on the world. We need science, but we need its findings now more than ever to be wisely interpreted in such a way that it serves the deepest human needs, not the needs of shareholders. 

Adaptability: The best metaphysical imaginary is in a continuous process of expanding and deepening our grip on reality. Coherence requires the development of the ability to adapt what is known on the horizontal to what has broad consensus on a restored vertical, and vice versa. As new knowledge becomes legitimated on either axis, it is likely to challenge existing imaginal models on either the vertical or horizontal, and so the Wise celebrate as progress (rather than resist as disruption) the need to revise the imagined models because our doing so effects the expansion and deepening of our grip on reality. Self-transcendence on the Vertical axis means that our model of reality is continuously developing as we become wiser, and analogously our expansion of knowledge on the horizontal requires a continuous adaptability in our thinking and knowing on both horizontal and vertical axes. The best metaphysical imaginary is a dynamic, evolving system. But such evolution is healthy only so long as it retains a creative tension between the horizontal and the vertical.

Richness:  The best metaphysical imaginary enriches, complexifies, and deepens our experience of the mystery of Being--or what I call the Living Real. When a society loses touch with the Living Real, it sickens and it must find a remedy. It should be obvious to anyone--even those who are best adapted to living in a late-modern milieu, i.e., educated, affluent cosmopolitans, that late Modernity has produced a sick, spiritually impoverished society for most people who are living in it. The problem of spiritual poverty cannot be addressed from within Liberalism because Liberalism has created the problem, but neither can it be addressed by the Religious Conservatives because while they want to restore the vertical axis, their solutions are incoherent and maladapted to the reality on the horizontal axis. An important task for 'richness' is to develop some consensus about what a rich, deeply human life comprises. Right now, as a matter of cultural consensus, we haven't a clue. 

---------

Note 1: As Charles Taylor points out in his A Secular Age:

Even Machiavelli still has an understanding of this kind when it comes to Republican forms. There is a certain equilibrium-in-tension which needs to be maintained between the “grandi” and the people, if these forms are to survive. In healthy polities, this equilibrium is maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in their private wealth and property. This constitutes “corruzione”, and unless dealt with in time, and severely, will bring about the end of republican liberty. There is a causal attribution here: wealth undermines liberty; but the term used, with its strong normative resonances, shows that the understanding of society is being organized around a concept of normal form. (p. 182). 

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

I understand the impulse to believe conspiracy theories. It comes from a largely correct view that most people are living in a consensus trance. It comes from that feeling that Neo had before he took the red pill: Something is deeply wrong. Why does everyone around me seem to accept these attitudes and behaviors that feel so off? And so when someone comes up with an explanation for what's going on, there's a strong temptation to go with it because now we don't have to be alone in our suspicions. There are others, too,  who "get it". We're not the crazy ones. Everyone else in the consensus trance is crazy. They're asleep. We're awake. Whether or not this alternative explanation is itself just another illusion--well, there aren't many incentives to consider that as a possibility, are there? (See Note 1)

Nevertheless, the feeling that one's life is mostly shaped by one's participation in a consensus trance is real, because we are. The feeling is innate in all of us because It's born of the same sense of falsity that compelled Socrates to challenge the Athenian consensus reality in his time and as Buddha did in the India of his time. Socrates' and Buddha's critique of what is false consensus reality was not purely a negative debunking, but rather part of an effort to open people up to the the really Real. 

Our consensus reality is largely delusional. But that's not to say it's something completely made up--it does indeed have a relationship to what's really there. That was true in Scorates' day and it is in ours. Our modern social imaginary--our current consensus reality--has a pretty clear picture about the surface reality of things, but it's the spiritual part that it filters out that is problematic. It's as if we see the notes on a musical score but are incapable of hearing the music. And it's this inability to hear the music that induces us into a materialistic trance that cuts off from the deep Real, which is where the music in its fullnness originates.  

Are we near deaf, or is it that there's just so much noise now that makes that music so much harder to hear? Either way, we live in a consensus reality that makes it extraordinarly difficult to hear the music. But it's the world we live in, and we have to navigate in it in our day-to-day lives as best we can. And a part of doing what we can is to make a serious effort to listen. The trick is to discern what's signal from what's noise, and then to find a way to filter out the noise. So conspiracy theorists are correct to be skeptical that the consensus reality is mostly noise that's filtering out the signal. But they should be even more skeptical that the alternatives their conspiracy theories point to aren't just more noise.

So we must live in the world in such a way that we accept the consensus reality for what it is--a provisional working model of reality that makes it possible for us all to live together. As we need a common language, we need a consensus reality to get along, and disrupting it for the sake of disruption because you think you're so smart as to see through it is just egotistical and often mean-spirited. Smartass intellectuals do it with their sophistical debunking, but so do redneck red-pillers who think they know better than everyone else about elites who are working behind the scenes with a plan to destroy the America they love.

They think they've had the BIG INSIGHT, and maybe there's kernel of truth in what they've learned, but they are always mistaken when they think that this kernel is bigger than it is, and when they think it is the key to explaining everything. It never is. All they're doing is creating more noise by insisting that their delusional thinking is better than the conventional delusional thinking. The challenge in the long run is to develop a consensus reality that is more deeply aligned with and so disclosive of the Deep Real, i.e., a consensus reality that is attuned to the Deep Music. 

Jumping from one collective trance into another is not a solution, and so the challenge for us individually is to do what we can to live in such a way that we grow in wisdom, which means that we progressively break with our innate tendency to be entranced by gradually getting  a better grip on Reality. We do this by becoming like Socrates. We start from a position of learned ignorance--we assume we know nothing and that we are inclined toward delusional thinking--and we gradually learn to overcome our tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. This is a life-long process. 

How do you know if you are becoming wiser? You see yourself slipping into and out of the trance, and knowing the difference. You find that your prudential judgments prove sound with increasing frequency. And you find that the perceptions and intuitions you have that depart from "consensus reality" stand up over time as more right than wrong. You learn better to distinguish between what's music and what's noise. Or to shift metaphors, you learn to distinguish the difference between going down a rabbit hole, which leads to delusion, from finding a trail of breadcrumbs, which leads toward a better grip on the Real. 

This is what I mean by the term 'self-transcendence' as I've been using it lately. Self-transcendence is the gradual process by which we come into a deeper, truer relationship with Reality. While we can use language to make an attempt, to essay so to say, what we have learned in this ongoing developing relationship, nobody knows the truth. Some people do, however, have a deeper relationship with it.

None of us is Wise, but some are wiser. And as a society we need to develop broadly accepted cultural practices that make it easier for people to become wiser, i.e., to hear the music, or to see the bread crumbs. We need a sapiential tradition that will help people--everyone from ordinary folks to elites--to overcome their tendency toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. We lost our sapiential tradition in the West in the late medieval period, and we need to restore it now in a postmodern key. 

So if there are any conspiracy theorists out there reading this post, I commend you for your skepticism regarding the consensus reality, but your theory about what's really going on is probably wrong too. It's ok to play with alternative theories as a heuristic tool, but you must never take them too seriously or become fundamentalistic or dogmatic about them. Stay away from true believers. None of us understands what's really going on, and alternative theories to the consensus reality are just as prone to deceive us as the deceptions provided by the consensus reality. 

And yet we must always make the effort to get a stronger, deeper grip on Reality. That requires that we start from the consensus reality as a baseline, that we develop a healthy skepticism about it--which is the whole point of Socratic aporia. This creates a space for the breadcrumbs to appear, so we must keep an eye peeled looking for those breadcrumbs, and when they show up, we follow them where they lead us. And if they lead us down blind alleys, then we must have the humility and intellectual honesty to recognize it, learn from the mistake, and move on. It's ok. Making mistakes is part of the process of self-transcendence. Digging in when proven wrong is moronically self-destructive. 

But also to remember even when you have significant insights, i.e., when you make deeper connections with aspects of the Real, they never tell the whole story. They are just the next step on the breadcrumb trail. 

And a final bit of advice:  If you encounter a conspiracy theorist who is making a living from it, don't believe him even if there is a kernel of truth in what he's saying. He might even be sincere, but he has too much invested in digging in rather than admitting he's wrong when the evidence proves him so. Say No to moronically self-destructive beliefs and behaviors. 

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Note 1: I think that this rejection of the consensus reality in part explains why intellectuals like Martin Heidegger, Ezra Pound, Mircea Eliade, and others were seduced by the alternative fantasies that Nazism or Fascism offered. It's not that far from what pushes so many American conservative intellectuals to embrace Trump now. Anything, they have come to believe, is better than the Liberal materialist consensus reality.

Liberals who feel comfortable in the materialist Liberal Order that is crumbling around them need to understand that rightist Traditionalist critique of modernity better than they do because they underestimate its power. I believe that we only move out of the current crisis with a progressive mindset, but it has to have different presuppositions than those that now shape Liberal progressive thinking. A new progressive mindset must not reject Liberalism so much as go beyond it, i.e., absorb its gifts and transcend it. Such a mindset, while it must be optimistic about the human future, cannot succeed unless it finds a way to retrieve and embrace the wisdom traditions these men of the Right drew from. They were more wrong than they were right, but it's the part that they got right that we need to learn from. 

The problem is that what is valid--even profound--in what they write is tainted by what seems to have been their often bizarre political commitments. Really they did that or wrote that? YIkes. They thought there was a political solution, whereas a political solutions was simply impossible for all the reasons they wanted one, which was that there was no spiritual-cultural foundation for it. Any political solution was doomed to be barbaric precisely because those on the hard Right in the 1930s trying to effect a political solution were spiritual cretins.There is no political solution unless there is first a profound spiritual-cultural transformation.

My political commitments lie mainly on the Left because the Left is more future oriented, less fanatic, and more oriented toward practical problem solving. It has its fanatics, but they are more annoying than they are dangerous when compared to the fanatics on the Right, at least in the U.S. context. The ethos on the Left is that of good intentions, while that on the Right is shot through with resentment-driven malice. But I do not expect a political solution to resolve our crisis because the Left offers close to zero when it comes to matters of the spirit. At best support of the Left in American society buys us time for something new to emerge. But the new thing, if it is to provide a true resolution, must come from outside of politics. 

A Simulacral Age

The past decade has been defined by how life, the real thing, so often resembles fiction — the first Black president succeeded by a reality TV star and serial conjurer of failed businesses, the pandemic, the astounding and scary new artificial intelligence marvels monthly. “You can’t make it up,” people say. But for those of us who turn to humor to help process the nonstop parade of weirdness, a new cultural trope was addictive: imagining that it is, indeed, all made up, that any improbable piece of news is a plot twist in a TV series or movie or digital simulation.

The writers’ room ran out of ideas (Donald Trump choppering from his Covid hospitalization back to the White House for a Mussolini balcony moment). This new show is so meta (the Ukrainian comedian who played an Everyman who became president and actually became president) and so implausible (who stopped a superpower tyrant’s blitzkrieg). That season finale really jumped the shark (Jan. 6). And then last year’s hearings of the Jan. 6 committee — astonishingly effective because a former ABC News president shrewdly produced them, unlike any before, as a 10-episode multimedia TV series.

In America at large, however, the blurring of reality and fantasy isn’t merely fascinating. Americans’ knack and weakness for these mixtures amount to a founding national predisposition — what made America the global center of show business, from P.T. Barnum to Hollywood to televangelism to reality TV. Our wise forebears also built walls between important reality over here and entertainment and make-believe over there and installed useful establishment gatekeepers to decide what belonged where.

During the past half-century, those barriers crumbled gradually, then suddenly. America’s iffy grip on reality turned from a chronic condition to acute and pathological, metastasizing beyond entertainment and spreading throughout the real world, most disastrously into our information and political systems, a phenomenon for which no single individual and enterprise has been more responsible than the real-life inspirations for Logan Roy and ATN. Early this season, Logan told his children, “I love you, but you are not serious people.” He could have been talking to America, where people now feel entitled to their own facts as well as their own opinions.

Kurt Andersen

We can take a splinter of truth and with it build a huge edifice of illusion. We can do it alone, but we prefer to do it with others because of the way others seem to give the illusion a solidity and stability that it otherwise lacks. Can we snap out of it? Yes, but if only if we're motivated--or inspired--to do so. Why would you be motivated? Because you are deeply interested--inpired--to get a deeper grip on reality. How do you get a deeper grip on reality? You must emulate Socrates.

It was not that Socrates knew more in some quantitative way but that he knew better in a qualitative way. The Socratic challenge is not to know more with certainty but to know more wisely, if by wisdom we mean a way of being in the world that has a deeper, richer cognitive, i.e., more deeply engaged, relationship with the Living Real.

Socrates was the wisest man in Athens because in a remarkably precocious way he had such a deep grip on reality, a grip that would not have been possible had he not understood first that he knew nothing. That's  another way of saying that what we all take for knowledge isn't really knowledge--it's just a map or a simulacra of the real. Is it possible to know more deeply what's behind the map? I think it is, but that's a different topic than I want to get into here. The task is not to have some experience of Abosolute Being, but rather to progressively come into deeper contact and relationship with its presence in the world around us. The first step in coming into deeper contact with reality is to realize all the ways our lives are structured to estrange us from it. 

What does that require? An attitude of humility and an openness to be corrected. Humility requires that we acknowledge that whatever we know is dwarfed by what we don't, and it's ok. Because then our life becomes much more interesting as we come to understand it as continuous process that progresses qualitatively--not quantitatively--toward greater levels of wisdom.

Qualitatively in the sense of the way our relationships are qualitative. The goal is not to know more, but to develop a better, deeper, richer relationship with the Living Real, i.e., to use a Vervaeke phrase, to fall in love with reality, which is what happens when you develop such a relationship. And so as we grow in wisdom we grow in love because the one cannot exist without the other.

The wise are not people who know more but who know better because they have this kind of deepening relationship with the Living Real. That was the Socratic project--to get his interlocutors to undestand first that what they thought they knew was mostly wrong not in some propositional way but in this qualitative way because their relationship to the Living Real was obstructed or blocked but needn't be.  

Last Sunday, Christians around the world celebrated the feast of Pentecost. It is the celebration of the presence and movement of the Living Real in our lives. As Bishop Maximus says in the conversation with John Vervaeke that I commented on here, Christianity took what the great pre-Christian sages and saints knew, and made it more broadly available.There was still the life of the monk within the Christian tradition who sought this encounter with the Absolute, but there was made available to everyone after Pentecost a grace that enables us to find the presence of the Absolute everywhere, and that inspires us--or should--to look and pay attention more carefully so that we may find it wherever it would disclose itself to us. And our attending and responding over time is the way we humans come to renew the face of the earth. 

Christians believe that the Holy Spirit is the spirit of Truth, that it works in us and inspires us to overcome our tendency to self-deception and self-destructive behaviors. It is that which inspires us to move into a deeper relationship with Reality, which is the only solution to the alienation that is the source of our delusional thinking. It is that which illumines our minds with insight which is the experience of deepening that relationship. It's what gives us hope that we might live in a Real world rather than in a simulacral one. It's a grace and power that is working there whether we're Christians or or not. It's just there, it's available to all people of good will who have a supple enough heart to acknowledge its presence and to hearken to it.

The problem is that to many who sense the presence of the Living Real don't know how to hearken to it. The problem with too many people who think of themselves as spiritually motivated is that they have neither Socrates' humility nor his openness to be corrected. They think they know when really they do not; they think they are right because if God is with them, how can they be wrong? But God cannot be with them if he is the cause for their fear, hatred, and desire for violence and retribution. This is where Socrates becomes an essential resource. We need his humility; we need his openness to be proved wrong, we need his hunger to come into deeper contact with the Living Real. 

Pentecost is an invitation to enter into a deeper relationship with the Living Real, and as in all relationships that are worthy of the name, so does our relationship with the Living Real grow and develop and become richer. If that's not true for you in the relationships you have with the people in your life, how can you expect it be true for your relationship with reality? And so we must all ask ourselves whether the people in our lives are an occasion for our overcoming our inclination to live in a simulacra, or are they there to reinforce it? 

See also "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" and "Habitus as Heuristic".

Defending the Western Canon

A part of my mission at After the Future has been to save the Western Canon from being captured by conservative ideologues. That is a heavy lift these days, and it shouldn't be. There's a reason why people like Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt--and really anybody who is truly culturally literate--have spent so much time with Plato and St. Augustine. The former recognize how the latter wrote the cultural software that runs Western Civilization. If you don't understand how Plato and Augustine did that, then you don't understand what or why you think what you think and believe what you believe. For one of the best explanations for why the Western Canon is important from a Progressive perspective, read director of Columbia University's core curriculum Roosevelt Montas's Rescuing Socrates or this piece in Jacobin by Liza Featherstone entitled "The Left Should Defend Classical Education". 

So I get a little frustrated when the more public-facing defenses of classical education are showcased in the MSM as part of the conservative social agenda. The results are predictable when a conservative businessman like Jeremey Wayne Tate, the founder of the Classical Learning Test (CLT), gets interviewed by a conventional progressive like the NY Times Lulu Garcia-Navarro. Why is Tate worthy of the attention of the NY Times? Because Ron DeSantis is pushing to replace the SAT with his CLT in the Florida State education system. 

I am no defender of SAT or of the whole standardized testing regime in general, including Tate's CLT. But I get pretty frustrated when guys like Tate become the frontmen for defending the Western canon. He doesn't have a prayer against Garcia-Navarro. He's at best a well-intentioned businessman who says, rightly, that a classical education should not be either conservative or liberal--but human. But he's a conservative guy trying to run a company. He'is worried about making payroll, and if the conservatives want to be his customers, then hoo-rah for conservatives.

He gives a ridiculously naive explanation for why public schools are failing and for why even Catholic schools like the one his daughter attends shape their curricula to the test. If the school is daughter attends was serious about their values, they would determine the curricula by their own pedagogical standards, not by what the SAT requires. (See Note 1) And so with such defenders of a classical education as Tate and DeSantis, it is easily condemned as guilty by association by the liberal consumers of the NY Times. Liberals used to know better, but don't now precisely because of the consumerist design and career-training ethos that has become the default in university curricula in the last several decades. Why would anybody in their right minds waste their tuition money on a philosophy or literature course?

I was going to do a more detailed analysis of how the presuppositions of both Garcia-Navarro and Tate gurantee that they will talk past one another, but who really cares? It's the same old, same old. Garcia-Navarro is smart and she asks fair questions, but it's clear that she's in the why-should-we-care-about-what-dead-white-men-think camp. Her audience would be better served if she interviewed Roosevelt Montas or Cornell West (who has a seat on the CLT board), both of whom would be far more capable of defending the importance of the Western canon from a non-conservative perspective than Tate is. She might learn something if she were to do so. 

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Note 1: One of the more significant absurdities in Tate's justification for the CLT is the story he relates about how his daughter's Catholic School offers an elective philosophy course that no students sign up for. Why? Because, according to Tate, it doesn't give them AP credits or isn't covered in the SAT. Waste of time. So, in Tate's mind, if curriucla are determined by the standardized test, then you must change the standardized test. It never seems to occur to Tate that if this Catholic School were truly effective in shaping the souls of its students, they should all be chomping at the bit to take this philosophy course for intrinsic motivations. But clearly this school is just turning out kids like every other elite high school, i.e., kids who don't care about learning but about getting ahead. They make choices not according to criteria that Socrates or Aristotle might approve but by what a Neoliberal careerist agenda approves. They are so many young Hippocrates-es looking for a life that Protagoras would train them for. Neither Tate nor Garcia-Navarro get the irony because neither clearly has any idea about what Plato was about. 

What Is After the Future About?

Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today:

After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them in mind as I write. But mostly I write about what I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It's where I go to think things out. 

So if what I write here has any value, I trust it will be found by those who might value it. I have no ambition for it to be more than that. If there is anything unusual in what I write, it lies in my particular sensibility or perspective, which I'd describe as that of a Postmodern Christian Neoplatonist. (See Note 1) Such a framework, while it certainly does not at this moment resonate with the zeitgeist, I suspect will emerge with broader cultural legitimacy in the future. Either it or something like it. Why?  Because it must. What we have now in hegemonic Rationalist Materialism is aberrational, and it cannot be sustained. 

I say something like a Postmodern form of Christian Neoplatonism must emerge, but, of course, it might not. But if it doesn't, that will be because the machines will have won. As Willigis Jager writes, "The men and women of the future, to paraphrase a line by Karl Rahner, will be mystics, or they won't be at all." Most of us are mystics now without thinking of ourselves as such. (See Note 2) We don't because we have the experience but miss the meaning. We haven't a metaphysical imaginary to help us identify and interpret the mystical experiences both subtle and intense that most of us have. So like seeds strewn on barren ground these experiences cannot germinate, and if they do, they have no trellis upon which to grow. 

I see Rahner's prediction about humans 'not being at all' in the future as the inevitable outcome if technocapitalism remains unchecked, and it will remain unchecked unless some consensus develops around a metaphysical imaginary that is robust enough to resist where technocapitalism is dragging us. Many (most?) decent, thoughtful people are horrified by the kind of world technocapitalism is creating, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How can they if they have no understanding about what a human being is and so have no imagination of a positive human future to fight for? Unless that changes, the machines will win by default. I'm no Luddite. I'm not against technological advancement. I'm against unchecked technocapitalism that serves no needs except its own, certainly not the needs of ordinary human beings. 

I say something like Christian Neoplatonism because while that is my standpoint, I see the Neoplatonist part of it as the foundation for a prisca theologia that is cognate with the mystical theologies of Judaism, Islam, and the post-Axial spiritual and philosophical traditions of Asia. As suggested above, by 'mystical' I mean spiritually experiential in some degree, and entry-level experience in this sense is an intuition of the transcendent Good and Justice as an ontonormative ideal. By ontonormative I mean something that transcends our social constructions and which operates in the souls of the most alert humans as a force to subvert social constructions when they fail to live up to what transcendental Justice demands. If there is to be any sustained, robust resistance to technocapitalism, it has to be global in its scale. And so it must have a shared core imagination of what a human being is, and that imagination must comprise a spiritual dimension that draws from post-Axial commonalities and structural similarities rather than from differences in practice and distinctions in thought.

The Secular Age is over. The choice is no longer between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. The cult of the Invisible Hand is bad religion, very bad religion. Protestant fideism is not enough to build a new civilizational ethos upon, and in its Calvinist forms has been too complicit with the emergence of technocapitalism and a wisdomless Puritanical priggery on both the left and right that creates more problems than it solves. Therefore, we need to retrieve something like Christian Neoplatonism precisely because it restores the amputated vertical axis illustrated in the diagram below. 

What do I mean by this? The retrieval of something like Christian Neoplatonism will require the restoration of the the Wisdom Axis. Wisdom, as it has been understood in every civilization except in the secular West and its imitators, has become excluded as playing any role in shaping contemporary public discourse. Wisdom, if it is to play a role in shaping a moral consensus within any society, must be grounded in a metaphysical imaginary that has a transcendent foundation. The metaphyiscial imaginary of the West had such foundation, but it was amputated after the Reformation. It retained a cultural presence in the West as a kind of phantom limb until the mid 19th Century, but since then, i.e., for the last 150+ years, we have been living out the consequences of its loss, and with each passing decade we spin with increasing speed in unsustainable ontological dizziness. 

(Note: This diagram is explained in some detail in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A)

We are going through momentous events in this historical moment, and while we may be having the experiences and missing their meanings, is there any doubt that we are experiencing something unprecedented in its significance? What happens in this century will be a huge civilizational axial moment, a turning point for humanity, for better or worse. What that means remains to be seen, but something big is afoot. Everybody feels it. The world is crackling with it. It's different from other historical moments if for no other reason than the ways in which machine learning and developments in biotechnology are seeking to redefine what it means to be human. Some radical discontinuity lies not too far ahead in the human future. Our anticipation of its inevitability is the deep source of our collective anxiety and our insane politics. 

I have no illusions that what I have to say is original. I traffic mostly in the originality of others whose insights and scholarship are far more profound and interesting than anything I am capable. If I contribute anything it might be in the ways I make connections. If I have a talent, it is more synthetic than analytic. I think also I have a good nose for the Living Real and with it a reliable ability to sniff out b.s. when it presents itself as something more.

So what is After the Future about? It's simply one person's attempt to read the signs of the times and to interpret them from the perspective of Christian Neoplatonist. For the moment that's rather an eccentric perspective. But then again maybe I'm onto something. 

 

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Note 1: Christian Neoplatonism shaped the metaphysical imaginary of the West from the early Church fathers from the gnostic elements in St. Paul through Origen, Clement of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, through John Eriguena, the Cathedral schools, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. With the theological assertion of nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th Century, Neoplatonism lost its hegemony. This occured, ironically, almost simultaneously with Christian Neoplatonism's artistic apogee in Dante's Divine Comedy. It's spirit, if not it's theology, was carried on, however, through Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Rhineland Mystics, and after Luther, German pietism, which was the source of German Romanticism in the 1700s. 

The main characteristic of Neoplatonism in any of its forms is its participative ontology and epistemology and its openness to the working of transcendent energies (agapic love) to effect the human transformation the Church fathers called theosis. Once that participative imagination of the human relationship with the world was gone, once the Reformation rejected theosis, the way was paved for educated elites to reject the world as shot through with the divine, and to see it instead as just stuff that could be molded by the human will. Hence Calvin's Geneva, hence the Jacobins' Paris, hence capitalism's remaking the world in its materialist-consumerist image. This worked for a while, but it is clearly no longer sustainable. 

Neoplatonism provided an imaginary for the educated to live compatibly with the animism that lingered from Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism. That was all gradually pushed to the side after the 14th Century in a way unique in the West, and the world became Hamlet's disenchanted, sterile promontory.  But it's not the world that is sterile, but our ability to relate to the deep Living Real that suffuses it. It is we who are sterile, and that sterility must be overcome if humans are to 'exist at all' in the future. Is it possible for us as a society to become once again spiritually fertile?

I think it is possible. There have been Neoplatonic moments of spiritual fertility from time to time since the 1300s: Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, the Cambridge Platonists in the 1600s, the influence of Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato on the English Romantics in the late 1700s are the most prominent. But none of these could compete with the seductive materialistic power of the burgeoning science and the capitalist system it abetted. So my point is that Neoplatonism has always been there under the surface--is there now--waiting to re-emerge. I guess I'm arguing that it must emerge again in the near future but this time stick. For if it doesn't, it's hard to see how there can be any kind of human future that I would define as human. Am I optimistic? No. Am I hopeful? Always. 

Note 2: Studies/polling have establish that at least 40% of people have had spiritual experiences that they would call as such. My guess is that there are many more who have had spiritual experiences but they think of them as aesthetic rather than spiritual. Many people think of themselves as agnostics, but few--5-6%--are atheists, if by atheism we mean a hard rejection of any kind of spiritual reality. To be an agnostic ususally means that one does not accept the confessional assertions of organized religion, but does not preclude an openness to religious/spiritual ideas that makes sense. My hope is that in coming decades the kind Neoplatonism about which I'm talking will make sense. In order to do that it needs to provide a compelling, plausible narrative that integrates experience of the world with a recognition of interior capacity for self-transcendence. That's what the diagram above seeks to illustrate in a rudimentary way. 

Middle American Radicals Twelve Years Later

In December 2010, at a time when thoughtful readers frequently commented on my posts, I put up an essay entitled "Thanksgiving Encounters". It was about visiting with relatives at a Thanksgiving gathering in North Carolina where my father had retired. I found myself astonished to learn that these thoughtful, well-educated relatives, people I care about, were adamant in their defense of Sarah Palin. I knew these relatives leaned conservative, but I was astonished that they could even for a minute take Palin seriously. It was my first encounter up close with something happening among cultural conservatives that I hadn't yet felt the full import of. And it was the beginning of my not being able to talk politics with these relatives because subsequently the gap had become too wide and too emotionally fraught. Before then, I knew the extremists were out there, but I could not bring myself to believe they were so close as this. 

I wrote then—

Sarah Palin conservatives look at Liberals--and people like me--as people defined precisely by their lacking this "common sense", as lacking a groundedness in a given world of meanings and traditions that give their world sense and shape.  I'm family, so they want to think well of me, but they can't quite understand how I went astray. My father attributes it to bad influences in my formative years in the sixties and seventies. But it struck me recently that the way Sarah Palin conservatives see "liberals" is similar to the way the American Indians saw the white man. 

The Indians thought the white man was "crazy", as having no understanding, because the white man lived outside the system of sacred relationships that gave the Indian world its shape and meaning. And so white behavior was inexplicable and barbaric to them. Well that's pretty much the way Liberals appear to Conservatives. It's not just a difference of opinion that makes conservatives different from liberals; it's a completely different epistemology, a different way of experiencing what's true and what's not, what has value and what doesn't.

The basic question they seemed to be asking me was "Why are you siding with those kooks? Why aren't you loyal to your roots?" In other words,  "It's either you're with them or you're with us." It wasn't really much more complicated than that. A big part of what I've been writing about since then has been to understand how we got ourselves into this cold civil war and about my fears that it will become a hot one. 

Mathe, one of my occasional commenters in those days, saw the possibility of it becoming a hot civil war before I did. She thought I was being too kind to try to understand things from their pov, and that the shift I was describing in the post wrote then was about something much more dangerous than I understood. Her thinking seemed to me then to mirror the kind of paranoia that I was seeing in my relatives, and so while I agreed with much of what she said, I thought then she was too alarmist. Writing now, 12 years later, it's clear she saw a threat then that I didn't take as seriously. She was talking about Middle American Radicalism before it was understood how radical it was becoming. My family is not a natural constituency for MAR, but they were enlisting. Here's the exchange that we had back then. The underlining for emphasis is mine: 

mathe said...

The real question is how your Sarah Palin loving relatives react if the economy really goes bad. It seems clear to me that one very real scenario is launch a systematic campaign of persecution and elimination of the "Liberals" much like the campaigns in Yugoslavia or Rwanda. There is more going on here than just a difference of world view or of "common sense" versus the insane liberal formulations. Sectors of Americans, particularly whites who call themselves middle class are being psychologically manipulated into a separate reality that in particular rejects those who have the ability to use the knowledge they have to sort out "the facts of the matter" apart from what is spooned out to them-- regardless of their politics.

They reject would be servants of the public interest like Russ Feingold , or the recent Democratic candidate for governor of Michigan, or countless others. This is NOT just a liberal vs. conservative modality, but goes much deeper than that. Whatever arguments one could make for traditionalism, localism , small government or other small c conservative shibboleths have been made irrelevant by the global political crisis which alas, is just in its infancy.

As Chris Hedges argues, leftists have got to get into the conversation and present the case in forceful and courageous terms. In particular that means a clear and unblinking attack of the so-called conservatism of the last 50 years.

Saturday, November 27, 2010 at 03:00 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--

I guess my point is that not everybody who admires SP is a fanatic, and a lot of them see her for what she is, but nevertheless enjoy how she rankles liberal types. I guess I've been arguing here for a while that because the most visible Right Populists are extremists, not every one is. In fact most are not, and I still believe some common ground can be found between moderates who are attracted to the Tea Party and the economic Left who are able to bracket culture war issues.

If the economy really seriously self-destructs--which some in my family believe is inevitable--then who knows what's going to happen. Is there the possibility of a "Seven Days in May" scenario?--sure there is. Do I think it will happen? No. It really depends on how bad it gets of course.

I understand where Hedges is coming from, but I think he would agree with me that Left Liberalism is a spent force--it offers no robust alternative to Right Populism. I believe the alternative has to come from sane "believers", people who can talk to Main Street on terms they understand using biblical language and metaphors where appropriate, but which also seeks to invite people who are deeply sequestered in their right wing ideological silos into a larger, more complex world.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 12:35 AM

mathe said...

Jack,
Admirers, followers, people who agree with SP do not need to be extremist. By definition most people aren't. Nevertheless, whole populations are capable of being manipulated (or manipulating themselves) into terrible acts. The instinct to attack apparently vulnerable and unpopular minorities is present with or without a rationale. People may or may not be amenable to the "right sort of argument". There is a wide spread understanding of the fact that much of the present crisis is caused by the business and economic elite. Yet I am not convinced that a populist argument couched in the kind of moral terms you describe would be all that effective in and of itself. There has to be as you suggest some sort of common meeting ground where the conversation and possible argument can take place. Sara Robinson and others have talked about the kind of world view that people in right wing silos occupy. Events that effect them personally and over time have more weight than argument.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 05:25 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--I'm not convinced that a cross-left/right-cultural populist movement is possible either. And it certainly isn't possible with the Libertarian wing of right-wing populism, which really wants the Federal government out of everything. They may hate Wall Street, but they hate the Feds more.

I'm thinking more of the traditional New Deal constituencies--ethnic Catholics and other white blue collars, including many in the south, and white collar Main Streeters who are conventionally conservative in their thinking and tend to sway one way or the other depending on the national mood. Along with the strength that would come from enfranchised Blacks and Hispanics, who aren't particularly culturally liberal in their values either.

I think a political movement capable of taking on the power of Wall Street and other powerful moneyed interests can only come if Blue Collars of whatever tribe are at the center of it, not educated liberal elites.

Sunday, November 28, 2010 at 07:50 PM

mathe said...

The problem with the group of white conservatives or conservative sympathizers is that their desire to rule the roost unchallenged in power or worldview is that it is far stronger than their desire to challenge the economic overlords responsible for their worsening condition. I think the understanding of the class war going on now is deeper than you suggest. I think middle and working class whites understand what is really happening in that regard but they cannot confront the implication; namely that they are now just like as African Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans. In fact, the cultural destruction and dislocation they sense is not unlike that experienced by these groups. It is their turn to be left behind. You say many of these people are like the Southern planters on the eve of the Civil War and that is precisely why I am very uneasy. There is a restless, violent rule or ruin emotional current that was somewhat moderated by two centuries of almost constant but largely successful warfare. Now that time is done but they and the nation they largely dominate is heavily armed.

As malleable as they are and given what we know historically and recently what will stop them from turning their rage on the groups they hate?

Let's take one group that you mentioned-- ethnic Catholics. Your argument is that many are angry about the damage modernism has brought to traditional values.The fact of the matter is much of the damage to traditional values comes not only from untrammeled and immoral capitalism which the Catholic Church occasionally criticizes but results as well from war, the preparation for war and the worship of war and the unquestioning brutal authoritarianism of the military. Many of these ethnic Catholics would reject Catholic heroes like the Berrigans and the still active anti-war, anti-torture communities they founded, or Father L.Bourgeois and other campaigners against the School of the Americas.

In his speech at Riverside Church in 1967, Martin Luther King got the nature of our problem as a nation exactly right. It was three fold, Racism, Materialism and Militarism. Yes, white working class and middle class conservatives are a little unhappy with Materialism right now because it's not working for them all that well at present-- and your argument is that this creates some kind of opening. I am telling you that it doesn't because of Racism and Militarism. The new coalition has to be one with radically different ethos than what I see in any American subgroup or ethnic group on the right. Many of the values of the new coalition--if it ever comes to fruition will be a spiritual re-imagining of democratic American values. I say spiritual but not religious. How do we engage with these people or more exactly how do you engage them without feeding their prejudices about "liberals". It's simply wrong to paint everyone on the left with the same "secular liberal" brush. It is not enough to just act as if believing in God were the issue when it is so obviously not.

Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 09:03 PM

Jack Whelan said...

Mathe--

I agree with much of what you say, particularly in the first half of your comment.

I resist, however, the idea that blue collar catholics are typified by the attitudes of cranks like Bill Donahue. I think they are more down to earth, and have none of his fanaticism. Those that do are a very small minority. But you're right when you say that they would perceive the Berrigans as kooks, but that doesn't mean that they are not on the whole decent and sane. They work with Black blue collars day in and day out, and they are no longer Other. Most were George Wallace supporters back in the sixties, but not now. I think there's more common ground and mutual respect between the blue collar ethnics and the blue collar blacks than there is between either of them and culturally left educated elites.

Southern whites, mostly Scots Irish, are another kettle of fish, and I think most of your worries about racism and military are much more a factor. But they were very much a part of the New Deal coalition, and not all of them are frightened idiots.

I don't know how long it's going to take to happen, but sooner or later it must. Real change in this country isn't going to come without blue collar Americans, whether white, ethnic, black or hispanic. Sooner or later, they will see where their mutual interests lie. They'll get organized, and cultural liberals will join their parade; these blue collars are never going to join the parade organized by the cultural left.

Thursday, December 02, 2010 at 11:14 PM

mathe said...

Jack,

I truly and fervently hope you are right about blue collar America. As a member of the "cultural left", I've participated in enough marches, spent hours in enough phone banks, where blue collar people are neither seen nor heard to see they have little interest in "us" even if we are fighting in their interests.

Nevertheless, I do experience them as busy (distracted), ill-informed and thus easily manipulated. When they finally do rise, what will be their issues aside from anger and revenge? What is to prevent new demagogues riding the emotions of the moment to power? People who have been lucky enough to have the leisure to study, think and analyze our situation need to be involved, really in educating and publicizing in ways that appeal to the mass of people. It may be that there are such people for example among the veterans groups, particularly veterans of the Iraq wars. Many of these people are working and middle class folks who could not afford to go to college and chose the military. Their years inside opened their eyes to what is going on. They have a certain credibility that "intellectuals" (that is largely what the cultural left is) lack.

However it happens, a real left, like the one that existed before the incredibly damaging McCarthy era. If the world doesn't blow up in war or blow away in a global warming catastrophe I am quite certain it will arise- it has to. Countries like Germany, and the Scandinavian countries (which by the way are increasingly multi-cultural) show that mixed economies can work. What I am less certain about is whether the US can remain one country or not as the inevitable transition mixed economies comes about.

Saturday, December 04, 2010 at 04:56 PM

Now over 12 years later, here's what I would say in response:

What strikes me is that Mathe's sense of doom was prescient, and my hope for a political Left winning over ethnic blue collars in an anti-Neoliberal coalition has proved, so far, to be disappointed. I wonder, though, what would have happened had Bernie Sanders won the Dem nomination in '16. That's a counterfactual that cannot be tested because Hillary and her Neoliberalism won, and because she did, most of what Mathe predicted proved correct in four years of Trump. But I remember arguing in '16 that unless Bernie won, then it would likely be the last chance for the economic Left, as contrasted with the cultural Left, to win the white working class. Bernie might have failed had he been elected rather than Trump, but he was our last best chance for assembling a multi-racial, working-class Democratic coalition that excited anti-Neoliberal young people,  and would have broad appeal among the bottom 80%. Not everybody, but I think a majority. The Libertarian wing of the conservative movement would resist Sanders with all it has got. 

The problem that too many influencers on the Left don't see now, though, is not that parts of white working class are so horrible--they are--but the degree to which Neoliberal values have infected the Cultural Left, which in turn has captured the Democratic Party and in so doing has made the Democratic Party broadly perceived in Main Street America as the party of 'kooks'. If anything that perception is worse now than it was in 2010. The cultural Left does not offer a remotely realizable political future in the American political sphere because non-elite Americans will continue to resist what seems to be its assault on normalcy. So long as Democrats’ continue to be perceived as captured by elite ideology, it will continue to push normie Americans--most Americans, including Blacks and Latinos--toward the Right.

I assume that Mathe was a Bernie supporter for all the reasons I was, and I assume that she would share with me the perception of the Democratic Party as complicit in the rise of Trump because of its surrender to Neoliberalism, not just in the economic sphere but in the cultural sphere as well. For the white working class, politics has become a culture war for all the reasons described in the post. The mistake the Left makes is being drawn into the culture wars on the terms the Right frames--normies vs kooks. That's why Youngkin and DeSantis have won in what used to be competitive states for the Dems. 

Look, the cultural Left is right insofar as it promotes a policy of compassion and justice for Americans who have been marginalized for whatever historical-cultural reasons; they are wrong to the degree that they frame that support in the language of poststructural theorists they learned about at university and then get all sanctimonious about it. The Democrats have moved away from the Clinton/Obama embrace of Neoliberalism in the economic sphere, thanks to Bernie, but their Neoliberalism has gotten stronger in the cultural sphere.

As I've argued here, the justice project of the great 20th Century social justice figures like Gandhi, King, Mandela, has been replaced by a liberation project theorized by Foucault, Guatarri and Deleuze. Whatever the merits of discussing the latter in the university seminar room, any attempt to bring their theory into the American political sphere is suicidal. The problem for many on the cultural Left who aren't philosophically literate is that they have been captured by 'theory' whose deep presuppositions most don't share, but most who lean left adopt it because it feels more "compassionate". 

But is genuine compassion what drives its hegemony among cultural elites? It can't be insofar as it shapes one side in a zero/sum culture war. So the debate becomes not about what is truly just and compassionate, but about whose value frame--that of the cultural right or the cultural left-- shall be hegemonic. The vast majority of Americans don't comfortably fit within the value frames of either the extreme cultural  Right or Left, but they feel more antipathy for one or the other, and that defines their politics. And so Left and Right gridlock the system over cultural issues that have little to do with the real existential threats that face us. Not to mention that the rich keep getting richer and the poor poorer. 

From my pov, the value frames of both the Right and Left are deeply flawed--the Right because its values are a form of zombie traditionalism--form without life; the Left because its values are based on incoherent, nihilistic set of ideas that have almost nothing to do with deep, genuine human flourishing. The Right, at least, understands we're in a profound meaning crisis; the Left has no idea how it has become a cultural force that exacerbates it. The cultural Right whether its rank and file realize it or not has become captured by the aforementioned loathsome, racist ideology of the Middle American Radicalism articulated by Sam Francis, popularized by Rush Limbaugh, and normalized by Donald Trump; the rank and file on the cultural Left, whether it realizes it or not, has become captured by theory that too often leads it into becoming a self-parodying woke joke. They are two sides of the same coin. Some other currency is called for. 

Some Thoughts on Equity Language

Like any prescribed usage, equity language has a willed, unnatural quality. The guides use scientific-sounding concepts to lend an impression of objectivity to subjective judgments: structural racialization, diversity value proposition, arbitrary status hierarchies. The concepts themselves create status hierarchies—they assert intellectual and moral authority by piling abstract nouns into unfamiliar shapes that immediately let you know you have work to do. Though the guides recommend the use of words that are available to everyone (one suggests a sixth-to-eighth-grade reading level), their glossaries read like technical manuals, put together by highly specialized teams of insiders, whose purpose is to warn off the uninitiated. This language confers the power to establish orthodoxy.

Mastering equity language is a discipline that requires effort and reflection, like learning a sacred foreign tongue—ancient Hebrew or Sanskrit. The Sierra Club urges its staff “to take the space and time you need to implement these recommendations in your own work thoughtfully.” “Sometimes, you will get it wrong or forget and that’s OK,” the National Recreation and Park Association guide tells readers. “Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.”

George Packer in The Atlantic

The road to hell is paved with good intentions. The culture war in this country is really about who gets to impose its taboos--the priggish Right or the priggish Left. Most people in the middle couldn't care less about what obsesses either extreme, but when push comes to shove they will pick sides, and they will ally with whoever seems to resonate with what they "feel" is right. And because most people don't care one way or the other, they'll just go along with whatever the group they affiliate with requires of them.

If you work at a university or a non-profit, you'll simply adapt as required. You might make a mistake, but you know, "Take a moment, acknowledge it, and commit to doing better next time.” This seems so pleasant and reasonable. What decent person would resist compliance? But why does it feel so dystopic? Is it just that I'm an old guy who is too enmeshed with the patriarchy? Maybe there's some of that. But I'm not an idiot. I know the difference between what is truly offensive and what is b.s. I know what basic human decency requires, and this is not it.

I recently watched the Season 2, Episode 6 of Reservation Dogs entitled "Decolonativization". It captures perfectly the nonsense factor in all of this, which is that it's based in theory that has hardly any relationship to the way ordinary, decent people--in this case the "colonized"-- live and what they care about most deeply. Watch the episode; it's pitch perfect. It nimbly and gently demonstrates that this kind of top-down programming is just another form of colonization. It demonstrates how fundamentally unrelatable it is for people who have no aspiration to be educated liberal elites. And how the people who do buy into it have no idea why they have bought into it except that it's what you do if you have ambitions to make it in the world of Aspen Institute Neoliberalism. 

As Packer suggests, its main function is shibboleth language. Speaking it is a pre-requisite for belonging in the elite strata of the university, media, non-profit, and many corporate worlds. It justifies itself by an ideology of compassion, but is there any real compassion in it, or is it for the most part a parody of compassion, a form of cheap compassion that doesn't cost anything except the effort to conform.

And yet, the problem is that there's a truth there--marginalized people have experienced real injury. Native Americans were colonized and defrauded and betrayed over and over again, and those are truths that every decent American needs to acknowledge, and it calls for a morally adequate response. It's just that this language policing just feels so fundamentally artificial and stupid. It fails to deal with the deep particularity of the human beings who have been affected by historical injustices.

It's a gesture, maybe, and it seems harmless enough, except that it is harmful as all parodies of truth are harmful. To adopt such language gives people the illusion that they are fighting for justice without dealing with the deeper structures that sustain more intractable, truly hurtful injustices. Anybody with an ounce of decency feels the injustice. And it's rather awkward because the same decency compels us to want to do something about it. But as with consoling someone who has lost a loved one, talking too much doesn't help, and it often makes things worse. 

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Is It Finally the End of Trump?

The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as it ever was--and is there any reason to think it's not?--then Murdoch will get back in line once the base makes clear that they're not ready to move beyond Trump. The same is true for the Republican lawmakers who hate Trump but fear the MAGA base more. They will still have to deal with the base in the primaries, which means that they will still have to kiss the ring of the MAGA King. 

Trump is not going away unless he goes to jail. But will the indictments (if they come) that Trump faces be the nails in his coffin, or will they be incitements in MAGA world that will galvanize MAGA in support for Trump the Martyr? I don't know.

And then there's the DeSantis phenomenon. Is he strong enough to push a weakened Trump off the stage? I don't know that either. He doesn't have the "it" factor that Trump has, and if Trump runs head-to head with DeSantis, Trump will make mincemeat out of him. But DeSantis surprised me in his sound trouncing of Crist, a centrist guy whom Floridians voted in as governor before and who at least, unlike DeSantis, has a personality. But it's hard to make the case that Florida is a bellwether.  If I were DeSantis and Trump runs, I'd stay out of the race, let Trump go down in flames, then step in to save the party from complete self-immolation. 

In the next two years, unless something really surprising happens in the next week, Kevin McCarthy--or someone worse--will become Speaker of the House, and it will be interesting to see if the crazier Jacksonians like Marjorie Taylor Greene set the agenda. If so, expect endless Trump ass-kissing, expect frivolous investigations, and expect a frivolous impeachment. And we'll be hearing more about Hunter Biden than any but the MAGAiest Americans will have a stomach for.

Will enough sane House Republicans vote No on impeachment if it comes to that? Unlikely. We all saw what happened to those who went against the MAGA mob last time. All the Republicans in the House with a spine have either quit or been voted out. 

If the crazy Jacksonians set the GOP agenda in the House, that will almost certainly insure that the Dems will take the House back in '24. Is there any reason to believe Republicans are capable of learning the right lessons from the unpopularity of their fanaticism? Doubt it, but things feel very fluid right now, and who really knows?

Along the lines of what I wrote in my election day post, I'm more worried about how irrationally the MAGA world will react if they see that the Blues keep winning elections in ways that someone in their Facebook feed tells them were rigged by Venezuelan communists using Italian satellites in collusion with the American Deep State. With or without Trump the fundamentals haven't changed. And there's no reason to believe the crazies will now become sane because they didn't win the way they thought they should. Just proves they were right all along.

Will the Dems be able to wash the toothpaste down the drain? I don't think so, but they might be able to push it to the edges of the sink. To do so would require that they distance themselves from the Neoliberalism that Clinton and the DLC branded the party with in the '90s. That's a stain that won't be easy to wash out, even if it no longer represents where most rank-and-file Democrats are--or ever have been.

And then there's the cultural piece. Most everyday Dems are like most everyday Republicans. They're normies who want to be compassionate toward people who are suffering. The Dems are more attentive to the suffering of the historically marginalized, and that's a good thing, but they need to find a way to enact their compassion and their thirst for justice without coming across as virtue-signaling, sanctimonious prigs. They won't always have crazy to run against. 

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. 

++++++++++

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. 

 

Sincerely Bad Religion

I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if, for instance, it inspires or wakes us up to aspire to a nobility of spirit that we have been unaware of or need reminding of. So some fantasies are qualitatively better than others if what is imagined is truly ennobling in some way. Vulgar fantasies of wealth and fame and power, not so much.

Tolkien's romanticism imagines a world before the twilight of the gods, i.e., before it became disenchanted. It is suffused with nostalgia in that sense, and there is no future in nostalgia. But it is a world in which many of its characters have a nobility of spirit that is no longer found in our most important public figures, and that needn't be the case. There are ways in which figures of the past can be represented that inspire us to find ways to retrieve it in a contemporary key. That's why we read the classics--or should.  There is no going native in the past, but we have much to learn from the ancestors, who knew many things that we have forgotten.

And because we live in a secular, disenchanted world does not mean that we must always do so. I believe that in the long run the human project is to find the interior spiritual resources to renew the face of the earth, to create such a world if enough humans could find within themselves the nobility of spirit that could do it. But such a project cannot be accomplished by people who might want such an outcome but haven't the spiritual maturity to effect it, and such people are dangerously naive if they think that if they dominate in the political sphere they can restore by fiat what has been lost or forgotten.

And so it was depressing but not surprising to learn in this piece in the NY Times about the Italian far Right's Giorgia Meloni's assertion that Tolkien's LOTR is sacred text:

But in Italy, “The Lord of the Rings” has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.

“I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in,” said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, “The Lord of the Rings” was also a sacred text. “I don’t consider ‘The Lord of the Rings’ fantasy,” she said.

...

“The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right,” said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy’s culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a “vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world.”

Tolkienism, as I'm sure Tolkien would be the first to tell you, is bad religion. But this speaks to what I've been writing about here for quite some time now, which is that people are inherently religious, and that in a secular society they will adopt bad religion rather than none. Cosmopolitan Liberalism represents the "None" category in questionnaires that ask what one's religious affiliation is. And in the U.S. the Democrats have become in public perception the party of None.

And so since the traditional churches have worked so hard to undermine their spiritual authority and offer no robust healthy alternative, bad religions proliferate like weeds. None seems a perfectly understandable response. I don't belong to the Nones, but I don't think politics should be about metaphysics, but about solving practical problems that affect the common good. But I recognize that in a time when the churches have largely failed to deliver good religion, people will grab onto any kind of bad religion. And politics--whether on the Right or the Left--is always bad religion when it becomes an arena for achieving one's metaphysical fantasies. 

Another example of this was rather poignantly represented in this week's Paola Ramos's Field Report in which she meets with Republican Mayra Flores and her Evangelical supporters. Flores is interesting because she is a Republican from the religious right who flipped a traditionally Latino-dominated district from blue to red in a special election earlier this year. What makes this show poignant is Flores's sincerity, her basic decency, and her naïveté. She's is in way over her head for failing to understand how her personal story is being manipulated by fascistic forces that I'm sure she would disavow if she understood better what's really happening.

One of the basic ideas through Ramos's show is how many Latinos who habitually voted Democratic have come to discover that Democrats simply don't represent their values, which they define as God, family, country. The Republican Party, in their view of it, comes much closer to representing those conservative values than the Democratic Party, so why do they just mindlessly vote Democrat? That's very powerful question to pose to Latinos who have voted for Democrats not out of conviction but out of habit. There are a lot of Latinos in Texas and elsewhere right now that are being confronted with that question, and what answer do the Democrats have for them? That they're not as mean as Republicans on immigration? 

That is very weak tea compared to the need so many people feel for their politics to align with their deepest metaphysical longings. That's what explains both Meloni in Italy and Flores in Texas--there is this deep desire for a more meaningful politics, a politics that is not just about fixing bridges and paying medical bills, a politics that aligns the world down here with the world up there--"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", a longing that seeks a cure for the disease of secular disenchantment.

I understand that longing, but I also understand how easily it is demagogued. Demagogues understand these longings, and they understand how to channel what should be the focus of religion into a place where they don't belong, which is politics. It is one thing for one's religious commitment to inform his or her political choices; it's another to force those religious commitments onto others in the political sphere. 

Conservatives have always been very alert to the dangers of immanentizing the eschaton when the imagined eschaton is Leftish, but less so when it is Rightish. The inevitable result, whether Left or Right, is a cure that is worse than the disease. Politics should not be where you find your life's meaning. In a pluralistic society, meaning comes from diverse cultural sources--religions, philosophies, customs, traditions--that must be respected in their diversity. The political sphere should only be concerned with finding consensus about solving practical problems that affect us all as Americans. Whether or not you agree with the solutions that Democrats propose, they are serious about solving problems in a way that the GOP just isn't. The question going forward is whether the Democrats' utilitarianism, which is proper for politics, can compete with the GOP's metaphysical project, which is proper for religion but not for politics.  

Flores's pastor is a key figure in her political success. Whether or not he is a demagogue, I don't know. But it's clear that he's very ambitious--and has adopted as his slogan the Trumpian "Make America Godly Again".  I'm sure in his own mind he sincerely believes he's ambitious for God, not for himself. But so do all religious fanatics believe that. Hopefully that fanaticism will be repellant to most non-evangelical Latinos in Texas, but who knows? Again there's a naïveté here that is both touching and frightening. And what's frightening is that in Flores's success, the GOP sees a strategy for winning over a traditional Democratic constituency, and the Democrats as they are currently constituted have no effective antidote, at least none that I'm aware of. 

UPDATE 9/10/22: It turns out that Mayra Flores got whooped in the regular election for her seat 53% to her 44%. Fun while it lasted. 

The Coming Violence

These people, acting individually or in small groups, will be led not by rebel generals but by narcissistic wannabe heroes, and they will be egged on by cowards and instigators who will inflame them from the safety of a television or radio studio—or from behind the shield of elected office. Occasionally, they will congeal into a mob, as they did on January 6, 2021.

There is no single principle that unites these Americans in their violence against their fellow citizens. They will tell you that they are for “liberty” and “freedom,” but these are merely code words for personal grudges, racial and class resentments, and a generalized paranoia that dark forces are manipulating their lives. These are not people who are going to take up the flag of a state or of a deeper cause; they have already taken up the flag of a failed president, and their causes are a farrago of conspiracy theories and pulpy science-fiction plots.

What makes this situation worse is that there is no remedy for it. When people are driven by fantasies, by resentment, by an internalized sense of inferiority, there is no redemption in anything. Winning elections, burning effigies, even shooting at other citizens does not soothe their anger but instead deepens the spiritual and moral void that haunts them. 

Tom Nichols

I thought this quote from Nichols was an appropriate follow up to my post yesterday about the foolishness of some moderates who think the more prudent course is to compromise with a paranoia-driven fanaticism by refusing to hold Trump to account legally. There is no remedy for fanaticism, so compromising with it makes no sense. There is only containing it and suppressing it.

Yes, I understand that doing so will feed the paranoia. But the problem with paranoids is that their behavior and attitudes create the enemies that would not exist if not provoked by their paranoid behavior and attitudes. Once paranoia is acted out violently, it's too late to talk them down. It must be dealt with by the lawful exercise of the police powers of the state. And then, yes, the political process should address the legitimate grievances that are the underlying causes of right-wing fear and resentment--what I call ontological dizziness--insofar as that's possible. That's the purpose of my A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity series. 

In the meanwhile the forces of sanity need to contain the forces of insanity. Fanatics we shall have always among us, but J6 was a break point, and GOP complicity in abetting or condoning that violence should de-legitimate the party for all truly sane, patriotic Americans, which most Americans are. The problem is that too many Americans still don't understand what's at stake; they tend to minimize the dangers posed by this paranoia-driven fanatacism--how its inherent authoritarianism deeply threatens both the execution of fair elections and the judicious application of the rule of law. But hopefully that is changing.

True patriots must use the tools available to them to suppress the paranoia while they still have those tools available to them--the law and elections. If there are no longer fair elections or the judicious application of rule of law, there is no longer America. Moderates fear that if the true patriots use the law they will lose the elections, but if patriots don't defend the rule the law for fear of feeding the insanity, what's the point of their winning the elections? 

Update: After posting above, I read Rich Lowry NYT op ed entitled "A Defense of GOP Paranoia":

If it is too difficult now for Democrats to imagine how they might react to such a prosecution of one of their own, they might have a clearer sense soon enough. An indictment of Mr. Trump would invite retaliation, and if Republicans retake the White House, a motivated G.O.P.-controlled Justice Department could be expected to aggressively pursue a reason to indict Joe Biden over his son Hunter’s business dealings.

In the tumult over a Trump indictment, both sides will accuse the other of violating the country’s norms and traditions. But there’s no doubt that a fierce Republican response, deeply distrustful of the authorities and openly defiant, would be profoundly American.

Yes, paranoia, is deeply American.

Lowry really seems incapable of seeing what's going on in terms other than Red Team vs. Blue Team. Lowry purports to want to help Democrats and independents to understand why GOP paranoia is justified, but it seems that it is he who needs much more help in understanding why Democrats, Independents, and Never-Trump Republicans cannot understand why Trump is never held accountable for the blatantly illegal things he does. 

The assumption here is that if the FBI were to come after Biden or Obama, Democrats would be just as upset as  Republicans are that the FBI is going after Trump. Yeah, they would be if the sole justification was revenge, and not holding the accountable for egregious illegal behavior while in office.

I feel like with Lowry, heir to the Wm. Buckley legacy as editor of National Review, we're dealing with someone here whose moral development was stunted in Middle School. Buckley, whatever his limitations, was not a moral moron. Can you think for a moment, Rich, not just about what's good for the Red Team but what's good for the country?  Hunter isn't the president. You get that right? He's no threat to the good governance of the country. He, unlike Trump's kids, has no involvement with Daddy's administration. Whatever they have on Hunter is likely to be dwarfed by what they could get on the Trump kids, but have at it. Go after Hunter, if that makes you feel better. If he broke the law, indict him. Sheesh. The pettiness is breathtaking. 

Here's what Republicans like Lowry can't quite grasp. They assume that because Democrats don't share their pinched, moralistic world view, that they must be even more corrupt and immoral than they are.  But they just aren't by any objective standard. How many of Trump's, Reagan's, and Nixon's associates have been indicted? Lots. How many of Obama's? None. Is that because the FBI has a bias favoring Democrats? Hardly.  

Are there venal, corrupt Dem swamp creatures here and there?  Sure. Go after them if they actually broke the law. But go after them because they broke the law, not just because you want to get even. But there's less to go after because most Democrats believe in the rule of law in the way Republicans don't. Republicans habitually do clumsy illegal and corrupt things in a way that Dems don't. Trump is off the charts, but he's following in the footsteps of Nixon's Watergate and Reagan's Iran-Contra. The idea that Republicans are the party of law and order is facetious. More Republicans get indicted because more Republicans break the law.

Rich, If and when the Dems put up a lying, corrupt, promoter of insurrection, stealer of top-secret documents, who is the first to undermine the peaceful transfer of power in our history , and who otherwise had continuously abused the power of his office for the most venal reasons, then let's talk.  

Toward a More Perfect Union

I've used this phrase a few times in the last couple of weeks. It's from the Constitution's preamble, and famously echoed in Lincoln's first inaugural, and eloquently elaborated in Obama's famous campaign speech in 2008. It struck me as I was thinking about it that both the Right and the Left want a more perfect union, but they have two completely different visions about how to achieve it.

The Left accepts, even celebrates, the richness of American pluralism and seeks to find rules for living together that focus on how we can all get along--that the more perfect union is e pluribus unum. A more perfect union for the Left means an integrated society where everyone is treated equally and with respect. The only taboo for the Left is for one faction to force its worldview on the other factions.

And yet to transgress this taboo is at the heart of the American Right's program to achieve a more perfect union. It wants to force its 19th-Century, pre-Industrial Revolution fantasy of America on everyone. The goal is not to develop unity from diversity, but rather to suppress diversity in the name of a simplistic, obsoletized imagination of American identity.

For the Right, America can only be united under one overarching meaning story, a story that combines the rugged individualism and pioneering spirit of the 19th-Century frontiersman with the entrepreneurial spirit of the Robber Barons in a vague penumbra of Calvinist religiosity. This meaning story has no future in a society  where most of the work is going to be done by machines. One's sense of identity, meaning, and purpose will have to come from other, deeper sources. 

Americans who were acculturated into this idea of American identity believe they are the real Americans, and everyone else who thinks differently is destroying America. The people on the Left, for whom tolerance is the most important civic virtue, find the intolerance of the American Right's vision of American identity contemptibly intolerable. So the American Right finds itself in the position of believing that it is the custodian of the secret sauce that makes America America, and so it follows that the American Left in its contempt for the American Right has nothing but contempt for America, which makes them traitorous, and for that reason should be disqualified from citizenship. 

As I've written here for years, the American Right has a vision for America that no longer aligns with reality; it's too simplistic for the complexities of a world experiencing rapid transformations that come with global convergence and the disruptions effected by technological advancements. These transformations are dizzying, and it's understandable why so many people look to the past to find there something that will provide a sense of stability. But there is no stability in founding your vision of an American future in a rigidly obsolete idea of an America that no longer aligns with reality. It is fragile and doomed to inevitable collapse. 

It's a formula for disaster, and in the short run, unless something surprising happens, such a disaster seems probable. And its probability lies in the fact that the Right's vision for America, although it is out of alignment with reality, has a coherency that the Left's vision for America does not. Some people can live with confusion and incoherency, but most cannot, and the more disruptive and chaotic things get, the more attractive will become the vision of the Right because it gives the appearance of being real. It does so not because it is real, but because it resonates with this older imagination of American identity and it makes a kind of sense that the vision on the Left does not make. 

I think that the Trumps and Bannons and Stones of the world understand that the more confusing and chaotic things get, the better the prospects for the Right. People will clutch at anything to stop the world from spinning, and until a coherent vision of a positive American future that aligns with reality emerges, people will embrace a seemingly coherent vision that is misaligned with it. 

If the Right wins in the short run, it's only a matter of time before factions within the Right will start fighting with one another over whose vision is most pure. The whole Right wing enterprise is doomed to fail precisely because it's such an abstractly purist head trip that is incapable of adapting to reality as it is. The vigor of the Right derives from its remarkable ability to exclude any aspect of reality that doesn't fit within its fantasy, and so inevitably reality asserts itself and with it inevitable collapse. 

Toward a Normie Progressive Politics

I'm getting a little self-conscious about my incessant references to Ezra Klein, but he is quite remarkable for having his finger on what I see as the critical issues. This week he had on Michelle Goldberg, a woman I respect as a sensible Progressive and like for her intellectual honesty and personal authenticity. But she's a good example of this kind of intellectual with all the good will in the world, who I'm sure does not think of herself as a nihilist but whose presuppositions make it difficult for her to argue against ideas that deep down she knows are nonsense. From the podcast transcript:

You know, I’m not sure that there is. I do think that there’s utopian thinking around gender, and this is probably a generational division. And I’m in some ways the wrong person to speak to. There’s someone I interviewed for the piece that I didn’t end up quoting for that bigger piece that we were talking about. I didn’t end up being able to work it in, where she was saying that the thing that really excites her now is the movement for trans rights and these new ways of thinking about and talking about gender.

And it’s not feminism per se, but the idea of making the gender binary, kind of irrelevant as a social organizing principle, I mean, that’s pretty utopian. We’ve never seen anything like that in, as far as I can tell, the history of the world. I mean, this is something that Margaret Mead the anthropologist wrote about, that every society organizes gender differently, assigns different roles to male and female. So those roles, there’s nothing really natural about them. And there’s also a ton of societies that have different iterations of like a third gender, or that allows some sort of flexibility.

Nevertheless basically every society is organized in some sense around the gender binary. You know, so I think there are younger people that have a vision of a society in which that is not true. And it might just be my own lack of vision or creativity that I find it hard to even envision. So I think that is where a lot of the utopian energy on the kind of part of the left that is really concerned about gender.

Utopian thinking is now about making the gender binary irrelevant as a social organizing principle?!?! Goldberg, a married heterosexual with two kids, is rather defensive about her normie status. Maybe, she says, she just doesn't have the vision or creativity of these younger people. Maybe she's just an old fogey now, as if the arrogance of youth gives them a special wisdom and their ideas a legitimacy their elders must bend a knee to. It's the classic conundrum for the contemporary cosmopolitan Liberal elite. The rationalist materialism into which she was acculturated gives her no tools with which to push back when a truly off-the-wall, disembodied Gnostic head trip like this is presented to her.  She has to accept its fundamental validity as the next really cool new thing on the cutting edge even though it goes against what her common sense is telling her is nonsense. Margaret Meade is a straw she desperately grasps at to offer some legitimacy for her understandable negative reaction, but she can't seem otherwise to find a basis to explain it.

The problem here is that this so-called utopian project on the Cultural Left is one that can only be imagined in a society where people believe that humans are only what they are culturally conditioned to be. It's an historicist, anti-essentialist view of humanity, so to be human means whatever people want it to mean. So in the future, since there's no basis for understanding what a human is or what the human good is, whoever has the most power gets to define it. And so at some point, assuming the Cultural Left is running the government, it can decree that all children be acculturated in an AI-powered Skinner's Box where they will be molded into a society that has transcended the gender binary and whatever else the government thinks will make them happy, good citizens.

And why would anyone resist? Everybody will be happily liberated from the constraints of gender. So in such an ideal world we'll all live happily in a transhuman polity where everyone is polymorphously perverse, and no one identifies as male or female, and babies are made in Skinner labs where they are cultivated to fit in a world where everyone is programmed to be like everyone else--happy, happy, happy.

Nobody wants this--not even the people on the cultural Left--but it's what the consequences of their unbalanced equality program lead to. Equality must always be held in tension with freedom, and freedom requires a metaphysical imaginary that is open to possibilities that transcend any particular social arrangement, no matter how utopian its proponents think it. All spirited human beings aspire to something more, something that requires risk and moral courage. The irony of the Cultural Left's project lies in that the "more" that it aspires to leads ultimately to less because its presuppositions shut out other, deeper human possibilities.

Real moral progress cannot come from a behavioral modification regime but by awakening dormant but expansive moral dimensions within people's souls. Such an idea has no resonance within the secular Cultural Left.  People who are awakened like this will be respectful and kind to those who don't fit easily into the broader society's norms, but they will have common sense enough to realize that the norms, though stretchable, cannot be stretched beyond a breaking point. There's a way to make room for people who don't fit without destroying archetypal human norms.

Perhaps in another post I'll talk about how Jung says we're both male and female and St. Paul says we're neither male or female and why I think they're both right teleologically, but my focus here is about our current political situation. My objective here is not to develop an extended argument why this kind of thinking is wrong for us here and now. The gist of such an argument lies with what I've been saying for years now about the way in which Calvinism, Capitalism, and Science have deeply alienated us from any deeply felt connection with the Living Real.

This, I think, was Goldberg's dilemma. Goldberg feels the anomaly, but she can't articulate it in a way that maps to her presuppositions. So this goes to my point about how Liberals are in their own way incapable of thinking outside the norms-destroying frame shaped by Neoliberal and late capitalist presuppositions. These presuppositions certainly shape the ethos of the NY Times and news media in general--but other cultural institutions like universities, non-profits, film, literature, and the other arts. Are the people who work comfortably within these Liberal cultural institutions any more brainwashed than their less sophisticated opponents on the Right?

To the degree that their thinking is simply a reflection of the cultural milieu in which they swim, I'd say they are quite similar in their being unconsciously captured by their respective narrative frames. Are the two frames equally delusional? No, because the Liberal frame maps closer to the world that late capitalism has given us. Even if one is unconsciously captured by it, it aligns with what's there. The Right's narrative exists in a bubble that has only a tangential relationship to what's there. That's why history almost always proves them wrong sooner or later.

And so hard-right narratives are either naive or intellectually dishonest in a way that the Liberal narratives, for all their limitations, are not. Whatever positive step forward that comes next will develop not out of the Right's narrative frame but the Left's. That doesn't mean that we might have to live for a time in a world where the Right tries to jam its narrative down Liberals' throats. But I feel relatively certain that even if the Right enjoys some big short-term victories, it will not be able to sustain control of the critical institutions that shape American society in the long term. They seek to control forces that they simply don't understand.

***

Most Americans accept gay marriages, and if you know any gay-parented families, they are as normal in every way as other American families except for their being two dads or two moms. The point here is that in gay marriage what has been the traditional norm stands; the norm just became flexible enough to accommodate same-sex relationships that before were not accepted as normal. They are broadly acceptable today precisely because while they stretch a norm, they don't seek to abolish or destroy it. Because gay marriage accepts the basic norm, it's easier for traditional normies to accept gay marriage. 

Getting rid of the gender binary, on the other hand, is fundamentally different because such a project assumes that long-standing gender norms are arbitrary constructs whose primary function is to justify patriarchy. I think that's a rather simplistic, reductive way to account for gender. But for the social justice warriors for whom transcending the gender binary is desirable, it follows that it is just as oppressive as racial segregation because it was part of the same patriarchal social structure, and as such has no legitimacy. I have no desire to defend patriarchy, but if there's no idea here of justice as a transcendental, but only of a flattened idea of justice as the repeal of all oppressive taboos. But without any sense of the dignity of human beings as in some way deeply linked to transcendental moral aspiration, the secular cultural Left's taboo-cancelling project ends locking everyone up in some version of a Skinner's Box. 

So there's a difference between stretching norms and destroying them. Insofar as Democrats and Liberals in the media become associated with ideas that are associated with destroying norms that normal Americans believe are central to their identity and to the operating of a healthy society, they will be rejected by most normie Americans. This is a real problem for Democrats insofar as they have allowed themselves to be perceived in the culture wars as associated with cultural energies that are norm destroying. And so it's a real problem for democracy because it depends on Democrats retaining power. 

Democrats differ from Republicans for reasons I outlined yesterday because they are a diverse party of normal Americans who who value tolerance and compromise. However the Democrats as a party have become too identified with extremist activists in their coalition who do not represent the views of most rank-and-file Democrats. Democrats need to become the party of cultural normalcy that contrasts itself with the Republicans who have become the party of crackpot, anti-democracy extremists. To the degree that they can do that, i.e., to the degree that they can accommodate but not become identified the culture-war extremists in their coalition, they can establish a solid governing majority that could pass progressive legislation that will actually be popular.

Most Americans would find Democrats' programs attractive if they weren't proposed by Democrats. Too many normie Americans have come to perceive Democrats as captured by culture-war, norm-destroying activists within their coalition, and so don't trust them in other policy areas. Most rank-and-file Dems are normies, but to the degree that they come to feel that their normalcy is under attack by major constituencies in the Democrats' coalition, they will be pushed toward the Republicans. For Democrats to allow this to conintue in this critical moment would be political malpractice. Democrats need to do everything they can to win the culture war by presenting themselves as the party of normal American values, and if they do that, then they can win on left-of-center Progressive policies. 

Every healthy society needs an avant-garde, but it belongs on the fringes. It stops being avant-garde when it demands to be at the center. Then it just becomes a new Jacobin establishment that will inevitably generate a backlash. So let the avant-garde play its role in challenging and stimulating the thinking and often the gradual evolution of normies, but don't let them push too hard. If they do, they will almost inevitably bring on a backlash that if successful will push them beyond the fringes to underground hidey holes to which they must flee to escape the wrath of the Right that wants payback for all its perceived slights.