After the Future

Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?

Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone:

The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who is willing to risk his life in a prestige battle to the death. [See Note 1] Yellowstone's John Dutton is a victorious First Man in this sense, who is the successor of a patrilineal line of First Men. The First Man ethics defines the  logic by which the show establishes that the lawless, violent things the Duttons do are in fact worthy or our admiration. They live something intensely real that the rest of us in Blue Liberalstan don't.

The Duttons are Hegelian-Nietzschean First men, not Hobbesian/Lockean Last Men. The first have spirit; the second are timorous animals who are motivated by nothing higher than avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. [See Note 2] For the Las Man only lives for pleasure. He's analogous to Kierkegard's human who lives only on the aesthetic, a man who is in despair and doesn't know it. He thinks his shallow life is just great, that it can't get any better. That, at least, is what he keeps telling himself. 

John's daughter, Beth, is also a First Man. If you didn't understand this already, this week's Season 5 Yellowstone episode makes it clear.  Beth and the hated eco-activist Summer have a First Man prestige battle. They traded punches to the face until one gave up. It was brutal. Beth, of course, long inured to cowboy ethics, would have died rather than concede, but she also knew that it was just a question of time before Summer would, and she did. 

Summer gets props for lasting longer and punching harder than anyone thought she would, but it's clear from the get-go who's superior and who's inferior. In a previous episode John describes Summer as one of the sheep, and she scolds Beth for taking advantage of her. Well, Summer proves she's better than a sheep by cowboy standards, but let's not get carried away. She's still a member in good standing of the Liberal Order to which the Duttons are sworn enemies. If her character is redeemable in Yellowstone world, it will be by her conversion to the cowboy ethic and in her ceasing to be such a sanctimonious, Liberal prig.

Later John is talking to Rip about the fight and says that there is no one he knows whom he envies--except Beth, because she is so uninhibitedly free. She is made of  pure Hegel First Man stuff, and there's a Nietzsche vibe in it that echoes a scene from Season 3--

Beth: I subscribe to Nietzsche’s thoughts on right and wrong.

Rip: Hmm?

Beth: He was a German philosopher who died of syphilis after he cornholed some prostitute, so not exactly a life to model yours after, but his thoughts on right and wrong, good and evil.

Rip: Which were: there’s no such thing.

Beth: That, I believe. I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love.

Rip: That’s it.

Beth: That’s all there is.

Beth might seem like a deeply troubled, vengeful psychopath to the uninitiated observer, but the show doesn't think of her that way. She's a megalothymic First Man. Her apparent psychopathy is what makes her admirable precisely because it's so uncivilized by standards set by the Liberal Order. She simply will not be ruled by that order. Sheridan clearly admires Beth precisely because she is a wild woman who doesn't care what anybody thinks about her. She's the opposite of the Last Man that is produced by the Hobbesian/Lockean culture that emphasizes bodily security and material comfort.

It could be argued that the whole show is an argument about how the post-Industrial Revolution Liberal Order produces spiritless, weak Last Men ruled by nothing more than their appetites. And really, the show asks, wouldn't the world be better if aristocratic barbarian warlords like John Dutton with Beth-like lieutenants ran things on Master Slave principles? Is any other kind of human truly worthy of our respect? These are intensely real humans, not snowflakey fools Isn't that really at the heart of alt Right fantasies about destroying the administrative state? Sheridan has protested that his show has no partisan axes to grind, but it's clear where his sympathies lie. 

But is Beth an exemplary uebermensch? I don't think that Nietzsche in his saner moments has someone like Beth in mind. My reading of Nietzsche's uebermensch focuses on the 'ueber', which is often translated as 'super' as in 'superman', but also sometimes as 'overman'. I prefer the second because it suggests 'overcomingman' or 'selftranscendingman', which comes closer to the Hegelian and German Romantic idea of the human being as free and undetermined, a being whose dignity lies in his or her capacity to transcend culturally imposed limitations. Beth has some of that, but I think that Nietzsche had a nobler kind of post-conventional human being in mind, someone like Lou Salome, a highly cultured human being, not a neoprimitive defined by her brutality.

But then, there's this photo(?) of Salome, Nietzsche, and his friend Paul Ree. It's clear who's the Master and who the slaves: 

Nevertheless, I think that given the choice between someone like Hillary Clinton or Beth Dutton, Nietzsche would certainly prefer to hang out with Beth. I think the same might be true if he were given the choice between Beth and someone like Jane Addams. Addams is more my idea of a 'selftranscendingman'. But more on that another time. 

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Note 1: Fukuyama writes:

But Hegel’s “first man” differs from the animals in a second and much more fundamental way. This man wants not only to be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man. And what constitutes man’s identity as man, the most fundamental and uniquely human characteristic, is man’s ability to risk his own life. Thus the “first man”’s encounter with other men leads to a violent struggle in which each contestant seeks to make the other “recognize” him by risking his own life. Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige. This “bloody battle” can have one of three results. It can lead to the death of both combatants, in which case life itself, human and natural, ends. It can lead to the death of one of the contestants, in which case the survivor remains unsatisfied because there is no longer another human consciousness to recognize him. Or, finally, the battle can terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one of the contestants decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent death. The master is then satisfied because he has risked his life and received recognition for having done so from another human being. The initial encounter between “first men” in Hegel’s state of nature is every bit as violent as Hobbes’s state of nature or Locke’s state of war, but issues not in a social contract or other form of peaceful civil society, but in a highly unequal relationship of lordship and bondage.

The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146-47

In other words, the Hegelian account of the move out of the state of nature into society is more historically accurate. The social contract idea was completely new, modern idea. But the point that Fukuyama emphasizes is that the Hegelian account is more psychologically astute. What makes the human human is not to be merely well fed and secure like our animal pets, but to have a self-consciousness. And Hegel picks up on the Fichtean theme that self-consciousness is awakened in conflict. We coast along in a dream until reality snaps us out of it, and, and we are most aware and self-conscious when we confront death.

Animals fight, but they don't do it with the self-consciousness of risking death, and so the human being proves himself to be superior to the animals in his self-conscious choice to transcend animal instinct and to risk his life in mortal combat, to "live free or die", so to say. This is the Dutton ethic. But it's also the motto of those that stormed the Capitol on J6. These are people who want to prove to themselves that they are truly human.

Someone like Beth Dutton is smart enough to see that these people are all deluded, but she would respect them for their willingness to fight. It's the same respect she seems willing to afford Summer after their fight. She still thinks Summer is deluded, but at least she was willing to fight. It is honorable to fight and lose than not to fight at all.  If you don't understand that about what's happening on the far Right in the U.S. today, you don't understand what's at stake for them, this is what it means to be red-pilled. Their radicalization correlates with their waking up to what it means to have dignity as a human, which apparently they had not experienced before in such a powerful way. This is not something that can be understood in Lockean/Hobbesean terms except with horror. Through a Hegelian/Nietzshean lens it looks quite different. See Note 2. 

Note 2: Fukuyama--

One might think that to uncover the real meaning of liberalism, one would want to go even further back in time to the thought of those philosophers who were the original source of liberalism, Hobbes and Locke. For the oldest and most durable liberal societies—those in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, like England, the United States, and Canada—have typically understood themselves in Lockean terms. We will in fact return to Hobbes and Locke, but Hegel is of particular interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, he provides us with an understanding of liberalism that is nobler than that of Hobbes and Locke. For virtually coeval with the enunciation of Lockean liberalism has been a persistent unease with the society thereby produced, and with the prototypic product of that society, the bourgeois. That unease is ultimately traceable to a single moral fact, that the bourgeois is primarily preoccupied with his own material well-being, and is neither public-spirited, nor virtuous, nor dedicated to the larger community around him or her. In short, the bourgeois is selfish; and the selfishness of the private individual has been at the core of critiques of liberal society both on the part of the Marxist Left and the aristocratic-republican Right.

Isn't this kind of selfishness the core animating spirit of leave-me-alone Libertarianism? Keep your nose out of my business, and I'll keep mine out of yours. So scram. Get off my lawn. 

Hegel, in contrast to Hobbes and Locke, provides us with a self-understanding of liberal society which is based on the non-selfish part of the human personality, and seeks to preserve that part as the core of the modern political project. Whether he ultimately succeeds in this remains to be seen: the latter question will be the subject of the final part of this book.

The second reason for returning to Hegel is that the understanding of history as a “struggle for recognition” is actually a very useful and illuminating way of seeing the contemporary world. We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is. Indeed, we do not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts. The “struggle for recognition” is a concept as old as political philosophy, and refers to a phenomenon coterminous with political life itself. If it seems to us today a somewhat strange and unfamiliar term, it is only because of the successful “economization” of our thinking that has occurred in the past four hundred years. Yet the “struggle for recognition” is evident everywhere around us and underlies contemporary movements for liberal rights, whether in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, or in the United States itself.

The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146

Hobbes/Locke vs. Hegel/Nietzche = Hamilton vs. Jackson. See "Some Thoughts on Election Day" where I explicate the Jacksonian/Hamiltonian dyad. Old School Democrats are captured by economic thinking, but the far Right and Left by identity thinking. It's not the economy, stupid, but identity and recognition that is the true driver of politics nowadays. Neither the cultural Left nor the cultural Right will allow politics to be about what is proper to politics, which is solving practical problems concerning the common good in ways that require mutual respect, compromise, and working things out. The culture warriors on both the Left and Right are bent on a prestige battle to the death. Isn't that what this Supreme Court case about the anti-gay wedding website designer is all about? It's certainly not about working out this conflict in a way that solves the practical problem. Rather, one side or the other must have complete victory because to lose is to become the slave to the other. 

The problem of the Last Man in the world technocapitalism is creating is crucial for Liberal Democracies to resolve if they are to survive into the 22nd Century. Fukuyama takes it on in the final part of this book, and, imo, fails to envision a satisfying solution. For as the robots do more of the work, and humans have more leisure, Lockean/Hamiltonian presuppositions lead to a society envisioned in Huxley's Brave New World in which everyone has time but doesn't know what to do with it. In a utilitarian Lockean desire culture the end is pleasure--sex, drugs, escape into virtual games in which we pretend to be First Men. It's all a dream. What else is there? The other Hegelian/Nietzschean/Jacksonian possibility would be a reversion to a battle of all against all. We'll all become First Men again. Primitive, but intensely real. In the first, everyone is bored to death; in the second we live in a neo-barbaric Westworld except it's not a virtual game. Isn't it clear which world Sheridan would prefer to live in? Isn't Yellowstone the non virtual reality of Westworld?

 

 

What Do You Believe?

What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. The narrative we choose opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply aspire to. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals.

Is it possible to say one set of beliefs is better than another? I think it is. Reality is real, whatever our beliefs about it, and the more our belief model aligns with reality, the 'truer' our experience. So belief shapes our experience. The richer our experience, the richer our beliefs, and the reverse is true. The richer and more complex our beliefs, the richer and deeper our experience. Good beliefs create the condition for a richer experience, evermore aligned with deeper levels of the Real; bad beliefs create the conditions for a poorer, more constricted experience of the Real. (Source)

What you think you know is in fact only in the final analysis what you believe because of what for most are unexamined presuppositions. No matter how "facts-based" you think you are, your facts are meaningful only insofar as they fit within an interpretive frame that is shaped by your metaphysics, whether you are aware of having a metaphysics or not. So be careful about what your metaphysics is, because insofar as it provides an interpretive frame that translates reality into knowledge, it might be filtering huge swaths of reality that would otherwise enrich your life if you had a metaphysics that allowed for richer possibilities. 

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails instead, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form obtaining "face" requires prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. Christianity replaces the ideas 'face' and 'honor' with 'dignity' and integrity. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the 'face' that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are irrelevancies for citizens who abide there.

Christianity transvalues honor into integrity. You can lose face if others take it from you, but having or losing your integrity does not depend on others. Honor is about the value that others give to you; integrity is a self-valuation that follows from an interior achievement. But integrity is not something you can organize a society around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have achieved it. Clearly there was no such critical mass in post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever.

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to become more instinctual and less civilized, while remaining "nice." In other words, wild and crazy, but loveable--like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put an American-Dream happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet for the aggression for those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but his is understandable because his experience of it was mainly of its collapse. The people he treated were living in cultural forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created a sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the introduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the human predicament accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

[Ed. note: This is a repost from November 2012. It seems relevant for explaining what's going on in Putin's head, and also why it has nothing to do with his perverse understanding of Christianity.]

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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

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

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

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

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

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B in this series, can be found here.) Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of him or his work, but he's clearly barking up the same tree that I am. His approach is from a different angle than the one I'm taking, but he provides some critical pieces from cognitive science that I see as supporting the argument I am trying to make.  

Vervaeke is more interested in the experiential, cognitive aspects that I've been calling 'knowing on the vertical dimension'--or 'Wisdom'. I'm more interested in the Mythos aspect, which is more about how the cultural matrix shapes/programs/configures individual experience. Mythos provides the meaning framework that makes experiences on the vertical interpretable. I'm arguing that our "meaning crisis" derives from our culture no longer having a broadly accepted mythos. I'm not sure Vervaeke would agree that our lack of 'mythos' is the cause of our crisis because he wants to develop an interpretive frame that is more cognitive-science based, with emphasis on the science. And he might not agree, but I think that what he means by a 'salience landscape' can be borrowed and repurposed to help me establish what I mean by a 'metaphysical imaginary'. Regardless, there's plenty of overlap there, and I'll get into that in "Part 4B". 

I'm assuming that anybody who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about regarding 'wisdom.' Vervaeke is spelling it out in a cognitive-science idiom that might make it more acceptable for people who are allergic to religious language. For him wisdom is the oppositie of foolishness, and foolishness is the innate human proclivity to self-delusion and self destructive behavior. And so wisdom is the antidote insofar as its an intrinsic human developmental capacity for self-transcendence, if by that we mean overcoming self-delusion by getting a deeper and firm grip on reality. And if Reality is what I call the Living Real, then growth in wisdom means a growing into a deeper participative relationship with the Living Real. (See Note 1) But clearly for the kind of metaphysical imaginary I think we need to restore in the future, its legitimacy would require that most people have some level of experiential wisdom by Vervaeke's definition--or at least respect for people who do have it. 

Referencing Steve Taylor's Awakening from Sleep, Vervaeke says that research studies have found that 30-40% of people claim to have had "wisdom" or "awakening" experiences of some kind. This doesn't surprise me. Just read Wm. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience to get some sense of how common such experiences are. In the U.S. today under 10% of people are atheists or agnostics, which means, whether or not they are churchgoers, the vast majority of Americans--perhaps 90%+--are open to an ontology that includes a spiritual dimension, however "spiritual" might be thought of or imagined.

The problem/question for me is why such a large percentage of the population hasn't a stronger and more positive impact in shaping the metaphysical imaginary but instead allows a materialist imaginary to be the default. As I argue in Part 1, while there are benefits to pluralism, hyperpluralism in this area of "knowledge" has the effect of dividing and conquering any opposition to the materialist imaginary. And, as suggested above, and I argue in Part 3, hyperpluralism is largely an effect of there being no cultural trellis, no Mythos, to provide an interpretive frame for people to make sense of the experiences they have.

Ten people might have similar awakening experiences, but there might be ten different interpretive frames used to make sense of them, and so each cancels the other out in terms of establishing broader legitimacy. And more importantly, experiences don't self-interpret--everything depends on the kind of interpretive frame that the individual brings to his awakening experience, and some interpretations lead to positive and others to very negative, if not insane, results. Context is critical. 

So the insanity does not originate with the experience itself, but with the insanity of interpretation given it. There's the awakening experience, but the wisdom only comes when it gets interpreted correctly, and correct interpretation comes from a wisdom tradition renewed in each generation by people who have had awakening experiences and developed them in a sane, morally fruitful way. Moral fruitfulness is the ultimate test of the interpretive frame for any kind of awakening experience. Right now, there's no such sane tradition, except on the fringes of our social life. And so while I believe 30-40% of people have had such awakening experiences, I wonder how many have interpreted them in sane, morally fruitful ways. 

And so there's no broadly agreed upon criteria to sort out what's sane or insane, real or delusional, profound or superficial. If a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical dimension ever emerges in the future, it will have to draw on the work of people like Vervaeke and his colleagues who are trying to develop a social science model to do this kind of sorting. More power to them, but I fear that the ethos of 'cognitive science' is still 'constrained' by the positivist taint imbued by the dominant Rationalist Materialist imaginary. That's fine, because I think that ultimately, whether Vervaeke wants to go there or not, there is an implied metaphysics that needs to be extrapolated from the experiences he is trying to understand. Ultimately, I believe a "right understanding" consensus will emerge, even if it's premature or unscientific to extrapolate a metaphysics from those experiences at this point.

In the meanwhile, I realize that when I represent myself as a Christian Neoplatonist, it makes no sense to almost everyone I know, including other Christians. Whatever floats your boat, they most probably would think, because they have no idea what I mean by it. And yet I'd argue that Christian Neoplatonism was the metaphysical imaginary for Western Civilization for over a thousand years because it provided what Vervaeke calls a coherent "salience landscape", i.e., a coherent, meaningful world picture in which certain things came into focus for our ancestors that no longer come into focus for us. Because they no longer come into focus for us, does not mean they are not there.

And so for centuries, right up to the Reformation, this imaginary worked for many of the culture's most intelligent and creative people, i.e., those who were knowledgeable on the vertical or wisdom dimension. Most educated people today know more on the horizontal dimension than St. Augustine did. That does not mean they are wiser than he. Whatever the scope of his personal genius, he had an interpretive frame provided by Christian revelation and Neoplatonism to work with that gave his thinking and his spirit scope to grow. We don't have that scope now, and we need something like it that works in a plausible way in a postmodern, post-secular key. I would argue that one of the principal reasons we have so few great souls who play a larger role in shaping our contemporary social imaginary is because they have no trellis on which to grow and expand. 

So when I talk about Neoplatonism, I am talking about an ontology that assumes that we are living in a world that we mostly don't understand because we don't really see or experience what is really real. And while the goal is to gradually improve our experience and grasp of what is really real, it is extremely difficult to do it in a society whose metaphysical imaginary lacks a vertical dimension. Having a vertical dimension is not unique to Christian Neoplatonism. Other post-Axial religions and philosophies make similar assertions and prescribe similar cures. But Christian Neoplatonism is my tradition, and it contributes to our understanding about what it means to be human in ways that other traditions do not, and so it deserves to be correctly understood by more people than do.

Like most serious Christians, I see Christianity as being first and foremost about moral development, but what distinguishes me from most Christians is that I care about the ontological and epistemological framework in which true moral development needs to be understood. Such a frame is not absolutely necessary, but it provides the aforementioned trellis, which is helpful for healthy, expansive growth. I think there would be more people with a profounder degree of moral development and the 'wisdom' that comes with that if there was such a trellis. When I look around, I don't see a lot of wisdom and depth to help people with their moral development. I see mostly moralistic platitudes and pop-psychological nonsense because the only trellises broadly available are moralistic and pop-psychological. 

Each vine finds its own way on the trellis, but it helps if there is some consensus about the trellis's basic structure and orientation. All I'm saying is that we have something to learn about that from the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism adapted for the kind of post-secular society we will inevitably become. The question concerning the human future, assuming there will be one, is not whether humans will be religious but whether their religion will be crazy or sane. And its sanity will be largely determined by whether it works with an ontology and epistemology that helps to map a way for people to more deeply participate in the Living Real. There is a lot of religion embraced by an awful lot of people right now that is insane precisely because its reality map is so deeply alienated from the Living Real. 

So while the story is more complex, and I hope to get into details about them at some point, one aspect of understanding what happened after the Reformation was that the 60-70%--I'm assuming there's a consistency here from generation to generation in Stephen Taylor's and Wm James's findings--who did not have such "awakening" experiences, and in the 18th and 19th centuries asserted that their un-awakened perception of reality was more accurate than those who wanted to take seriously what their awakening experiences seemed to imply. The combined impact of the industrial revolution and the new understanding of the human being post-Darwin allowed them to assert an alternative imaginary without a vertical dimension that supplanted the older one. This majority--whether secular or religious--became more interested in knowledge that produced material results rather than produced wisdom. Faith, rather than being understood as a cognitive faculty that when developed leads to wisdom, became instead believing in stuff that no longer made sense within an imaginary that had lost its vertical dimension. Religious fundamentalism and rigid dogmatism are "faith" for people who don't know better. 

Increasingly during the Modern period, while people continued to have awakening experiences, they were artists and mystics, and as such curiosities, rather than sources of legitimate knowledge and insight, at least insofar as they shaped public life in the "real" world of science, politics, and economics. And so by the mid-19th century, the vertical dimension became less accessible even for artists. The avant-garde, as a weak echo of what was more robust in Romanticism, was interested in saying No to what it perceived as bourgeois or reactionary, but it became progressively less capable of mediating the Living Real, at least in a way that broke through to the broader culture.

I don't want to oversimplify. Clearly some great art was produced until around the time of WWI, but after that, art became, mostly, something else--either entertainments whose quality was measured by their cleverness or novelty, or, more seriously, works of despair that expressed the artist's alienation from the Living Real. Waiting for the Living Real, i.e, for disclosures from the vertical dimension, became Becket's Waiting for Godot or Munch's Scream. This kind of art was sincere and important in reflecting to the broader society what had become of it in a world dominated by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Such art is truthful because it reflects the reality of what has happened to us. But because it happened does not mean it's the final chapter in the story. And I, for one, am ready to move on. I don't have any patience for what has become a conventional nihilism. It's no longer telling us anything important.

Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture 10 linked to above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is 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, and 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 would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration, but was also way ahead of the capacity of most people at that time (and now) to be changed by it. Some, of course, were changed by it. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figures in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration. 

So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now--i.e., for the social transformation that we need now--as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen. 

So before continuing with what I want to say, please watch the Vervaeke lecture, and take notes about some of the technical terms he uses to explain how cognitive frames get transformed. I hope to write later this week "Part 4B", which will try to further unpack what he's saying in the light of the ongoing argument I'm trying to make here about the restoring a balanced metaphysical imaginary. 

Vervaeke's lecture is the tenth in a series that extends to over forty. It's as far as I've come, so I don't know yet where's he's going, but there's nothing he's said so far that I haven't found to be aligned with and supporting what I'm arguing, and in many ways expanding and enriching it. The crux of what I want to talk about comes in the second half of this lecture, so you can fast forward to that to see why. If you want, start around the 17 minute mark--and then go back to the beginning or to the preceding lectures to see how he got there.

Go to 4B.

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Note 1: By Living Real I mean those experiences, particularly experiences of beauty in nature, experiences of Love of other human beings, our feelings of being inspired by extraordinary acts of courage, kindness, and experiences of the ontonormative, as Vervaeke calls them, which I would describe as a disclosure of the transcendental Justice. These are where the Living Real breaks through in the ordinary humdrum of our lives otherwise alienated from it, and I'd argue that while they are common enough experiences they are all in various degrees disclosures of the transcendent or numinous sacred. So as I discuss above, people have these experiences all the time--at least 40% of people according to Steve Taylor--but we haven't a meaning framework that's broadly accepted to interpret what they mean. Such experiences are usually not self-interpreting, and so the interpretive frame people inhabit when they have these experiences is critical for their working with them in fruitful ways--or not. This is why a wisdom tradition is needed. The churches should play that role, but they are too often more concerned with a priggish moralism that has nothing to do with the Living Real and more often than not is one of the main obstructions for experiencing it. 

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

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal conversational relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily, seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding of or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home to encourage them to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one too, but unlike Clinton Gina remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whose acuity I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving, dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever intuitions originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is Emily's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre didn't think of himself as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving. Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there were a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

Of Groupthinks & Cognitive Moments

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quote of the Day: David Brooks

As Hannah Arendt once observed, fanaticism is a response to existential anxiety. When people feel naked and alone, they revert to tribe. Their radius of trust shrinks, and they only trust their own kind. Donald Trump is the great emblem of an age of distrust—a man unable to love, unable to trust. When many Americans see Trump’s distrust, they see a man who looks at the world as they do. By February 2020, America was a land mired in distrust. Then the plague arrived.

David Brooks

Fanaticism is the response of people who refuse to live inside-out and look to the mob to reinforce their shaken sense of self.

Brooks' Essay entitled "America Is Having a Moral Convulsion" is worth reading in its entirety. He's describing a condition I call "ontological dizziness". The existentialists called it "shipwreck"; Christians like me see ontological dizziness as an opportunity like that St. John of the Cross called the Dark Night of the Spirit.

The Dark Night is not a bad thing, but a phase in spiritual development that is necessary for growth in maturity. It happens when the foundations that support identity and one's sense of self dissolve. In the past, this happened mostly to spiritually gifted individuals and they either made it through the darkness, or they didn't. (Nietzsche, imo, was a spiritual prodigy who didn't make it.) But the point is that it's something that'a necessary for spiritual development--the external props have to be taken away so that you can discover that your life is something that must be lived inside out, not outside in. 

The only true cure for ontological dizziness is to realize that the ontological ground on which you can set your feet is not found out there in society or up there in heaven or in some ideology or cult, but in one's own interior depths. Nietzsche said that God was dead, but he was looking in the wrong place. He was right that God was no longer to be found in the cultural forms, but that doesn't mean he died. He just moved underground.

In the past, this Dark Night and its possibilities for discovery were experienced by individuals, but we're experiencing it now as an entire society. Trump represents the worst possible response to this collective crisis/opportunity of the spirit, but it's inevitable that he should be there to present the country with this destructive possibility.

The question I have is whether there are enough people who are responding to this collective spiritual crisis in such a way as to realize its constructive possibilities. In other words, are there sufficient numbers of anonymous people who are now navigating the darkness in a way that will enable them when they get through it to imagine a different kind of a positive human future? I doubt I'll live long enough to get an answer.

For years I've been writing here that I agree with the conservative diagnosis about what ails us as a society, and that a large part of it is that Liberalism and its Enlightenment rationalist assumptions were always inadequate and have finally run their course. But the problem with religious cultural conservatives is that they spend too much time lamenting what was lost rather than looking forward in hope to something new. Conservatives cling to things that have to be let go because they lack the faith and the hope to do it. Their response to the dizziness is to grab whatever is near at hand to stabilize them, and, alas, the mob and its resentments are very seductive in that regard. 

Albee's "The Goat" or A Discourse on Ontological Dizziness

Last weekend I saw a very good student production of Edward Albee's The Goat or Who Is Silvia? It's the story of Martin Gray, a successful architect and gentle, loving husband and father, someone that typifies the kind of educated, cosmopolitan person who would go and see an Edward Albee play in Blue America. Martin, however, becomes enraptured with and starts sleeping with a goat named Silvia, and the play examines how family and friends react when they learn of his breaking the bestiality taboo, and how each falls into a state that I call ontological dizziness.

Ontological Dizziness (OD) is an experience that many people are having with increasing frequency: one is walking along in a world that seems securely grounded in reality, but then finds that all the while he was walking while balancing on a fraying tightrope over an abyss--and that there's no certainty that the rope is anchored securely anywhere ahead. Cultural Liberals and Traditionalist Conservatives in this country in their different ways experience themselves walking on firm ground, but they have been doing it in what I like to think of as Reality Simulation Orbs, and these orbs for both groups are breaking down.

By 'simulation' I mean that people, all of us, live in symbolic systems that provide models of reality that work with data given by Reality, but these symbolic systems interpret the data in any number of possible ways depending on the cultural download that runs the simulation. It's a simulation because it gives us a model of reality and not reality itself. A good analogy is how a pilot can fly in extreme fog with instruments rather than seeing what's there. The instruments use real data to provide information about what's there. The instruments provide a stripped down version of reality, that is good enough to navigate by, but filters out almost everything else that is not relevant to navigation.

Similarly, our acculturation runs a program that takes the data given by Reality and assembles it into patterns that make a kind of sense of it, but it's a very filtered version of what's actually there. The best simulations work with the broadest range of accurate data, but even when a simulation works with good data, it always filters out more than it lets in.

We know there's real data, and we know when our simulation fails to interpret it correctly. How? Well, when we make mistakes, i.e., when our simulation isn't reflecting accurately what's there, we pay the price. For instance, Neocons were working with a Reality Simulation in which invading Iraq and replacing Saddam Hussein would be a cakewalk. Their reality simulation worked with some data that was accurate, but their simulation failed because it filtered out too much data, data that was actually readily available, and that's what made their plan so egregiously foolish. We can't know everything, but the definition of foolishness is to reject good data because it challenges the assumptions that govern our simulation orb. Reality has a way of asserting itself when we filter out the parts of it that insist on being taken seriously. 

I think that most human mistakes are caused by the fact that all simulation orbs--even the best of them--work with incomplete data, and so the programs that run the simulation can only provide best guesses in their interpretation of the data available to it. If the simulation program seems to work, we assume it's interpretations of the data are good enough, at least until they don't work. And because Reality is dynamic and continuously transforming, sooner or later simulations break down or need to be upgraded to make the necessary adjustments. So, for instance, it no longer works for most of us to think that the woods are full of spirits, that the gods control our destiny, that the sun rotates around the earth. Or more recently that Blacks and Native American are subhumans who deserve to be treated like animals or just wiped from the face of the earth.

Most people live in simulations that have made the appropriate adjustments, but many have not. Those who operate in simulations that filter out important data given in a particular society's historical reality have a harder time navigating in the real world. They experience OD with greater intensity than others, and substance abuse, joining cults, or engaging in extremist politics are coping mechanisms for some victims of OD. And some feel OD with such intensity that they will do anything they think necessary to restore the simulation that gives them a sense of security and order. Some of the mass shootings we've seen in recent years are motivated by vengeance, but many of them are motivated by a need to restore the old Reality Simulation that the shooters feel is being undermined by those they shoot.

Capitalism and technological innovation are amoral, anarchic forces that have, like the proverbial bull in the china shop, destroyed every traditional culture into which it has come into contact. Either the people who live in those cultures adjust to the new data or they don't. Liberals are people who have adjusted, and Conservatives are people who have not. The strength of operating within the Liberal Reality Simulation is that it's better adapted to the creative destructive forces of techno-capitalism; the disadvantage is that is that its adaptation has left behind aspects of the older simulations that worked with real data regarding transcendent dimensions of Reality, aspects of Reality that transcended randomness and anarchic change.

The Liberal Simulation has developed in such a way that transcendent data has been filtered out. But that doesn't mean there is no such data available. Conservatives on the other hand cling to aspects of the older reality that affirms transcendence, but they do it in a a way that is deeply maladapted to Reality in a reality shaped by the creative destructive aspects of contemporary techno-Capitalism. 

Progress, until recently, has been intrinsic to the Liberal program, but the new data given by the reality of the World Wars, the dropping of the atom bomb, the unraveling of traditional cultural norms in the sixties and seventies, the failure of the Political Left almost everywhere since the 80s has led the Progressive Left to surrender to the anarchy of markets and to a rejection of any grand narratives that suggests there is anything but anarchy. And so at least among the elite in the Cultural Left, their simulation Orb no longer allows for narratives in which some kind of better future is a possibility, because the word "better" really is a word fraught with metaphysical assumptions that are no longer part of their simulation. Randomness is all, so learn to live with it. 

***

This idea of Ontological Dizziness, I would argue, is a key to understanding what Albee is up to in The Goat.At first I thought his play was going to be just another transgressive exercise in shock and norm busting, but I think he's trying to give the audience an experience of what's causing its OD. And so it struck me that the play is a rather conservative statement about the human condition, in that it seeks to point out that all human beings, even well-educated cosmopolitan, tolerant, live-and-let-live Liberals, need cultural norms and taboos, because when they are subverted, they experience OD that just as their conservative opponents do. They are more like them than they might want to acknowledge. Whether Albee thinks that's a good or bad thing, I don't know. But the underlying point seems to be that we have these filtering systems because we cannot deal with too much reality.

So, let's go with the basic Freudian/Lacanian assumption, as Albee seems to do, that all human beings are polymorphously perverse in their desires but those desires are repressed by the Oedipus Complex, the cultural download of codes and taboos that we all receive as children. Humans, no matter what their culture, have the Oedipus Complex, which generates the codes in the symbolic sphere--the Reality Simulation-- that gives humans their sense of order, an order that no sane person can live without. It creates the program--different for different cultures--that the simulation orb plays for us.

In Albee's play, Stevie, Martin's wife, finds herself precisely in this condition of Ontological Dizziness. Her Reality Simulation Orb has been shattered with the revelation that her "normal" husband is having an affair with a goat. So, after her violent, dish-throwing, furniture-overturning rant during the middle of the play when she learns about her husband's "infidelity", she goes out to find Silvia, the goat, severs her head, and hauls the carcass onto the stage in the play's final moment. It's pretty horrifying. 

After the curtain came down, the actors and directors came out to discuss the play with the audience. And I asked these very urban-hip, intelligent students whether they thought Stevie had over-reacted. "Why couldn't she be more tolerant and understanding of her husband?" I asked. I was curious to see how far their non-judgmental, anything-goes-so-long-as-you-don't-hurt-anybody ethic extended. Apparently it does not extend to bestiality.  All the students thought that Stevie's violent freak-out was completely understandable, and that this was not a play celebrating bestiality, which clearly, they all thought was horrifying.

Apparently some sexual taboos are still in place with this generation. But why should bestiality be so horrifying if taboos are just arbitrary social constructions? Isn't that what these students have come to believe about all the traditional taboos that govern the ethos of Rural America? Why is bestiality different? Martin makes clear that his relationship with Silvia was consensual, and that his love for her was reciprocated. Who are we to judge? And by what standard do we judge?

Anyway, it wouldn't surprise me if Albee was familiar with Derrida's famous 1969 essay, "Plato's Pharmacy" in which Derrida plays with the Greek word pharmakos and pharmakon. Pharmakos has the ambivalent meaning of a potion that can be both cure and poison; pharmakon is the Greek word for goat. In the play, Silvia, the goat, is a potion that both poisons and cures. It is poison as the kind of potion, like Puck's in Midsummer Night's Dream, that induces Titania to swoon for the ass-headed Bottom.

But is the potion something that creates delusion, or is it rather something that induces 'disinhibition' insofar as it lets in heretofore filtered-out aspects of Reality--in this case Martin's repressed polymorphous perversity that is no respecter of taboos in the way it eroticizes everything. Someone like Norman O. Brown (remember him?) would say that a retrieval of polymorphous perversity and its ecstasy is the goal--and even argues that its attainment is the true meaning of the Christian idea of Resurrection of the Body. A guy like Martin is closer to it than Stevie and the others who are so appalled by his breaking of this taboo. Is the pharmakon a blue pill or a red pill? Is it the red pill insofar as it dissolves the Oedipal simulation orb? Or is it the blue pill insofar as it restores the old simulation and the sense of sanity, safety, and order it provides? Or to put it another way, which pill is the poison and which the cure?

So Martin's encounter with Silvia is like his having taken a potion that induces him to leave his particular late-modern, taboo-constrained Oedipal Reality and to enter a kind of Norman O Brown ecstasy state. Stevie and the others are appalled by the breaking of the taboo, by the disgust that is evoked by the physical act, but for Martin it's all about the ecstasy, an ecstasy he knows the others cannot understand because they have not taken the potion.The old Liberal, taboo-constrained Simulation is dissolved, and he goes into a new, polymorphously perverse orb of de-tabooed ecstatic Desire.

Is Martin ill? Or is Stevie? Or are they both? Now, to step outside the Oedipal Simulation in Freudian terms is mental illness. The degree to which one steps out determines whether one's illness is neurosis or psychosis. So do both need a cure? Which pill to take then--the red or the blue? They both are experiencing aspects of Reality outside the Oedipal System that in their case is defined by the Liberal cosmopolitan Simulation Orb. It has broken down in different ways for both; it's just that Martin does not feel the need to return to the old order whereas Stevie does, and so she acts in uncharacteristically violent ways for a tolerant, cosmopolitan liberal in order that she might restore the old order.

***

And so it struck me that one of the takeaways for these students--and all Liberal, cosmopolitan audiences--is that everybody has taboo systems, and everybody needs them, and when they are subverted, it's understandable that people react as Stevie did, And it's completely understandable that she wants to go back into the old simulation--she wants that blue pill. But if Stevie's violent reaction to the subversion of the bestiality taboo is understandable, isn't the violent reaction of Red America to the subversion of its taboos equally understandable?

The question here is not about what's right or wrong in any ultimate sense, but in just understanding the role that taboos play in keeping us sane. There is nothing absolute about superego, but we need one. The question is how to transform it so that it does its job of preserving our sanity while at the same time it becomes more permeable to a broader, richer experience of Reality.

And I would add that superego always assumes some kind of grand narrative. Collective sanity--a cure for our chronic OD--cannot be restored without there being some plausible collective imagination of future possibility that is grounded in Reality. The challenge for us is not to live without such a narrative, but to develop a good one, one that works with the real data that Reality provides for us. Reality is in large part chaotic and anarchic, but what's more important is that humans learn how to work with those energies lawfully.  

And we don't have a narrative for that yet, at least not one that has broad acceptance. But for me such a future narrative will draw upon the wisdom of the past. We may never be able to live outside a Reality Simulation Orb, but we can keep developing better orbs that use higher levels of good data and are flexible enough to adapt as new, higher quality data becomes available. And that includes data given to us that transcends the anarchic, destructive forces that otherwise will continue to drive history. 

 

Eagleton on "Theory"

'Theory' indicates that our classical ways of carving up knowledge are now, for hard historical reasons, in deep trouble. But it is as much a revealing a symptom of this breakdown as a positive reconfiguration of the field. The emergence of theory suggests that for good historical reasons, what had become known as the humanities could no longer carry on in their customary shape. This was all to the good, since the humanities had too often proclaimed a spurious disinterestedness, preached 'universal' values which were all too socially specific, repressed the material basis of these values, absurdly overrated the importance of 'culture' and fostered a jealously elitist conception of it. It was for the bad, since the humanities had also kept warm some decent, generous values brusquely disregarded by everyday society; fostered--in however idealist a guise--a searching critique of our current way of life; and in nurturing a spiritual elitism had at leas seen through the phoney egalitarianism of the marketplace. Literary Theory, p. 207

I feel from time to time the need to make clear that while it may appear so, my defense of humanism is not a defense of the Liberal humanism that emerged during the Enlightenment. It is a defense of "the human", whom I would define as a linguistic being in a historical/material world who is open to transcendence. I understand the humanities to be the full spectrum of intellectual and creative activity in which being human is so understood. As such it's an area within which we find it possible to think and to be actively engaged with culture and its institutions that live in a tension between preserving what the best humans--i.e., those humans most radically open to the transcendent: its greatest prophets, artists, and philosophers--have bequeathed to us while at the same time subverting all the ways in which what they have bequeathed has had the life squeezed out of it by an elite clerisy/professoriate for ideological or other purposes.

On the one hand, a true humanism should subvert positivism in all its ideological guises, but it should also subvert the kind of nihilistic, anti-positivist, transgression for transgression's sake, debunking for the sake of debunking that has infected too many humanities departments, elite creative writing programs, film studies programs, museums and arts institutions of all kinds. This is less a problem now than it was a few years ago, and I'm not saying that there aren't some very valuable things to be found in the efforts of people in those institutions, but in most cases it's found in the efforts of those who resist what Eagleton, a few paragraphs above the one quoted above, describes how the humanities clerisy functions:

Postmodern theory is part of the postmodern marketplace, not just a reflection upon it. It represents, among other things, a way of amassing valuable 'cultural capital' in increasingly competitive intellectual conditions. Theory, partly because of its high-poweredness, esotericism, up-to-dateness, rarity and relative novelty, has achieved high prestige in the academic marketplace, even if it still provokes a virulent hostility of a liberal humanism which fears being outside by it. . . Theory has been one symptom in our time of the commodifying of the intellectual life itself, as on e conceptual fashion usurps another as shortwindedly as changes in hairstyle. . . .theory has become a kind of minority art form, playful, self-ironizing and hedonistic, one place to which the impulses behind high modernist art have now migrated. It has been among other things, the refuge of the disinherited Western intellect cut loose by the sheer squalor of modern history from its traditional humanistic bearings and so at once gullible and sophisticated, streetwise and disorientated.   p. 206

Cultural sophisticates are just as guilty of 'group think' as the benighted masses from whom they hope to distinguish themselves. I want nothing to do with either the hipness of postmodern theory or the stodgy, liberal humanism that it seeks to subvert. There is some value to sift out from all of that, and I want to give it its due, but both are otherwise symptoms of a deep alienation that I argue comes from a misalignment with the transcendent Deep Real. Postmodern theory seeks to subvert Liberal Humanism because it thinks its assumptions about the 'human' and what it means to be a human subject are untenable, but surely the assumptions of Postmodern Theory need to be subverted because its nihilistic assumptions are untenable. The idea that it's more courageous to be a nihilist is just another form of faux-Nietzschean, phoney, elite group think. There was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

I want to argue instead that while I agree that the fundamental assumptions that support the Enlightenment narrative are no longer tenable because it's impossible to defend a metaphysics that assumes stasis and the possibility of certainty--I think that God does play dice and he did so in the creation of the human. And so it is nevertheless possible to present an alternative humanistic metaphysics that embraces dynamic change, chance, and the provisionality of all knowledge while yet asserting that there is such a thing as transcendent truth and goodness.

Justice is not just something we make up. While it's something we never possess or see anywhere in its pure form, it is nevertheless something that we see all around us as working in institutions and in the lives of individuals where it manifests in greater or lesser degrees of approximation to it. It's that ability that any deeply human being experiences that enables him or her to discern this "greater or lesser degree of approximation", and it's  that commonplace experience that provides the premise for my argument. Such an experience, of course, is culturally and linguistically mediated, but the point is that there is something there that is mediated.

This blog is my modest effort to "keep warm generous values brusquely disregarded by everyday society".  I believe that those generous values  are intrinsic to what makes us human, but also that what makes human beings capable of generosity depends on the kind of culture that cultivates it.

Our beliefs and customary practices open up and close off human possibility. Those who work for a just society are those who think it's possible to create one that gives its citizens the best chance to develop that kind of generosity.

It should be clear to anybody who has any sense of the deep meaning of justice that American capitalism promotes beliefs and practices that are toxic for the development of a just society. It's not just the political economic system that needs to be transformed but the fundamental beliefs that ordinary Americans accept as commonplace. Without the latter, the former can never have a chance. 

Americans must wake up from their delusional individualistic fantasy that anything is possible, the sky's the limit, that anybody can be whatever they dream of becoming--if you're willing to work hard for it. This collective delusion breeds narcissists who think that their individual happiness has little or nothing to do with promoting the flourishing of others. And by others I don't mean just friends and family--I mean the stranger, i.e., the broadest understanding of the neighbor. Americans justify their narcissism by aspiring to become billionaires so that they might distribute their excess to causes they deem worthy, but never consider that the system that allows them to become billionaires in the first place is fundamentally unjust. 

That's why an American restlessness of spirit is endemic to the American soul. It's always looking for happiness in precisely the ways that are guaranteed to disappoint it. People want to be autonomous, independent, a power to themselves, unrestricted by the demands of others--or of justice. They want to do as they please. This is the essence of the American Dream, and it's what makes Americans so restless and unhappy. This fantasy is so deeply woven into our national character that is is hard to imagine how it could possibly be dislodged. The only way likely is for an alternative to replace it. It's not something people will be able to say No to until something emerges to which they can say Yes.

Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers

This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly by racism. Then the task is to begin to look for some plausible cures. 

The beginning of a cure lies in recognizing how deeply everybody is shaped by their acculturation as children. Our acculturation effects an indelible cultural download that shapes our experience of the world and of our place in it. Even if we choose to reject the values and worldview of the culture in which we were brought up, it remains deeply embedded in our psyches and continues to shape our perceptions and experience. For better or worse, we can never transcend completely the limitations of our acculturation. For better, extraordinary gifts are bequeathed to us by our ancestors; for worse because among those gifts are insinuated attitudes and practices that are deeply wrong.

The best we can do is cultivate the positive and to be emotionally intelligent about the negative, among them attitudes and practices regarding race and gender. That means we need to be aware of how these negative elements in our acculturation shape our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors, and then to develop strategies that help us manage them. While none of us can control how we feel, we can control what we say and do. And while there is no legislation that can force a change in our attitudes, it is sometimes necessary to use legislation to force a change in our customs and practices. 

But force should always be the last resort, and a more effective approach is education--an education that should happen in schools and churches if we had schools and churches that had any idea about how they could play a culturally transformative role. The development of this kind of emotional intelligence about our acculturation should be one of the primary benefits of a good education, and transformation the benefit rendered by the churches.

Such an education starting at the high school age in some critical courses in the humanities, particularly history and literature, would give students the opportunity to examine their values in a conscious, critical manner, and in doing so to evaluate what is just and true, and what is not. This is frequently done in our schools when gifted teachers work with young people in these areas, but it is not a formal part of the curriculum. The churches should be playing a life-long supportive role in helping people to build on the foundation that should have been laid for them during adolescence. Clearly that's not what's happening either in our schools or in our churches and other places of worship. If it is happening, it's very exceptional. 

Another way of putting it is that the main goal of education should be to enable or create the conditions for an awakening in young people from naive consciousness, i.e., a consciousness that is circumscribed by one's acculturation, to a consciousness that can find a standpoint outside of one's acculturation to evaluate what is good in it and what is not. Parents on the Left and Right would resist this who think the main purpose of education is indoctrination or job training. The churches see their main role as indoctrination into a moralistic code that reinforces a narrowed tribal identity more than it fosters a liberating, open, magnanimous, compassionate embrace of the world. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

Finding this balance between embracing the gifts of the ancestors while at the same time looking to transcend the limits of custom and tradition is a tough sell these days. Nobody on the Left or Right seems to believe that it's possible to find a standpoint outside one's acculturation. In a culture that has become so deeply materialist, it is hard for anyone to believe that they have access to anything outside "culture", except to switch from one tribal perspective to another. There is some merit in the exercise of looking at one's values and worldview through the eyes of someone who does not share it, but that's not what I'm talking about. I have been arguing here for years that there is another possibility, that most of us have common experience of it, but that we have forgotten how to name it, and have become incapable in any collective sense of taking it seriously.

So here's how I see it. The educational task is not a matter of doctrine or indoctrination; it is a matter of awakening to what I call the Deep Real. A healthy culture is one in which there is a broad consensus that the great ancestors--the artists, saints, prophets, and philosophers--have something to teach us about the Deep Real, but that we must find our own way of living in accordance with it in our own time. This requires that we awaken to what they awakened to. This awakening should lead not to the wholesale throwing out of babies with the bathwater, but rather to an appreciation of the gifts that have been conferred to us by our ancestors, but also an awareness that our ancestors were wrong, often very deeply wrong. 

But how is it possible to transcend one's acculturation if there is no standard by which we can measure whether the ancestors in our tradition (or anyone else's) were right or wrong? This is the problem that Socrates posed to his interlocutors in Athens, and for his trouble he was executed by the citizens of Athens for corrupting their youth. He was engaged in a subversive activity that has been resisted by conservatives through the ages, which is to question the authority of the tradition. But Socrates did not do this simply to debunk; he did it because he insisted that there was a deeper, supra-cultural truth that his students could recognize, and that that truth provided the standard by which they could evaluate the justice of the customs, mores, myths, norms of the society in which they lived.

The goal was not destructive, but constructive. Not just to critique the inadequacy of what exists, but to hold it to a standard that shows how something deeper and more satisfying could be realized. This is the only way I think a true progressivism is possible. It's not just a liberation from the constraints of custom and tradition, but a way of thinking about how what is given to us by the ancestors is always in a tension with the Deep Real that calls upon people shaped within any tradition to move beyond it by aspiring to come into deeper alignment with Reality. This is both an individual task, but also a social one. It cannot be a task that is forced on anyone; it can only be encouraged, and it can only be encouraged by people who have a sense of the worth of taking it on. If enough people "get it" they can effect significant changes in our collective imaginary.  

This was Socrates' mission. His challenge to the citizens of Athens was, to use Charles Taylor's language, a post-Axial, disembedding move. We are culturally embedded to the degree that we live unconsciously in our acculturation; we are incapable of evaluating our acculturation unless we are able to stand outside of it and look at it dispassionately, but such a move leads to nihilism unless it also leads to a deeper awareness of the Deep Real, which is the standard by which we evaluate all things in our otherwise very limited, contingent experience of the world. 

Our experience and interpretation of such experiences of the Deep Real are always limited and perspectival. We never know it in any complete sense, but some people--the great artists, saints, prophets, and philosophers--have had deeper experiences of it than the rest of us. Their authority and credibility lies in that we recognize that they have come to see and understand something that we 'intuit' to be  true, that they are pointing to something of tremendous value that we should like to know more about. This is not primarily a cognition in the head, so much as it is a cognition of the heart. The heart takes in the experience of the Deep Real, and then the head interprets it and then tries to express or articulate in some way what has been disclosed to the heart. Heidegger's talk about the 'moods' of Being is suggestive of what I'm talking about here. 

I think people frequently have these heart cognitions, but their head does not know how to interpret them in a way that comports with their importance. Too often such cognitions are dismissed as merely subjective or aesthetic, but I would insist that they are disclosive of something that is trans-subjective, or inter-subjective, i.e., relational. (Read Buber's I and Thou for more on this.) Christians and Jews believe that the Deep Real is personal, but other plausible interpretations (Buddhism, Heidegger) of our experiences of it are possible. This is a pre-doctrinal experience, but obviously we interpret such cognitions through the filters of our acculturation. The materialist framework in which all of us, even people who are believers, are acculturated makes it extremely difficult to interpret such disclosive experiences in a way that takes them seriously. If we don't take them seriously, then these experiences are like the seed that falls on rocky ground. 

The important thing to emphasize here is that such cognitions are not something we make up or subjectively project; they are rather more like discoveries about how things are, because "how things are" wants to disclose itself to us if we can find a way to be receptive to it. The great ancestors conducted, to use Thomas Merton's phrase, "raids on the unspeakable", and so what they speak is 'true' but limited. It is helpful because it is disclosive in its own way, but not definitive. They point to something real that is outside our historically and culturally limited, perspectival consciousness, but they do it within the limitations of their own limited, perspectival consciousness. They point, however, to the place where we, too, can find the foothold outside of our acculturation where we can stand to evaluate the "quality" of our experience of the world, and to judge its just-ness. We never completely transcend our acculturation, but neither are we completely trapped within it--unless stubbornly we choose to be. 

***

What I have described here was pretty much the standard view among sane, educated people in the West until Romanticism gave way to the crude materialistic, instrumental rationalism of the late 19th century and its mechanomorphic social imaginary. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes largely rejected custom and traditional religion, but they did not reject the idea of universal truth apprehensible by Reason. It would not be possible for Jefferson to have written "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and to be so broadly understood unless there was among his readers, even the most irreligious of them, the presumption that their understanding of the Truth was grounded in the Deep Real. Their name for it was Providence in those days. 

The problem with the Enlightenment rationalists lay in that they had an inflated understanding of the significance of Reason. It wasn't what they affirmed about Reason that was problematic so much as what they left out. Their understanding of it was too often more of a cold, heady thing than a heart thing. And they naively thought they could completely transcend their acculturation, wipe clean the traditions and customs they found so oppressive, and start from scratch according to a heady blueprint for a new society they felt obligated to impose, top-down, on everyone else. This is the Jacobin fallacy, and it remains the core delusion of the Left to this day.

The Left then and now did/does not understand that the great mass of human beings are embedded in their traditions and customs, which, in addition to giving their lives shape and meaning, had/have the salutary effect of constraining their basest instincts and inhibiting them from turning into a mob. The radical Left then didn't understand that when you destroy the extrinsic traditional framework, some few might awaken to the Deep Real, but most awaken instead to an increased awareness of their resentments, greed, and egotism, and they no longer feel any external constraints concerning their violent expression. There was Robespierre the Jacobin idealist who thought he was in some privileged way a prophet of the Deep Real, and then there was the Parisian mob. The combination of Jacobin custom-destroying idealism and mob resentments leads to chaos, the terror, and eventually to military dictatorship as the last resort to restore order.  

In our own day, many decent heartlanders have been driven into the arms of a demagogue like Trump and the billionaires, militarists, and extreme-right ideologues for whom he will carry water. The causes are complex, but chief among them is the one-two punch of the tradition-and-custom-destroying effects of global capitalism combined with the neo-puritanical, moralistic contempt of the Cultural Left for what remains of their customs and traditions. Heartlander choices have not been rational, but that doesn't mean they don't make sense. 

This does not mean that the Conservatives were/are right. Burke and his conservative epigones reacted too extremely to the extremism in France. They were right that like the Jacobins you just can't trash existing traditions, norms, and institutions and start over from scratch, but they were/are wrong if they think that the cultures and traditions of the West don't stand vulnerable to judgment by the Deep Real. Buckley's defense of segregation in the South was appalling.

Burke was right and wrong to emphasize historical rights over abstract human rights. He was right because rights in the abstract are not worth much; they have to be historically incarnated in the beliefs and practices of particular societies. He was wrong to think about these rights as coming primarily from the past, because I would argue they come from a Deep Real that is calling us into the Future. I would argue that the ancestors in England and elsewhere who established the rights of Englishmen were in their time and place, whether they were aware of it or not, were responding, at least in part, to the call of the Deep Real, and so must we now in our time and place advance their work. That sense of the justice of the rights of Englishmen doesn't come out of thin air; it can't be explained away simply with contract theory. But I don't want to get off on a tangent here.

Many if not most conservatives profess to be religious (Libertarians are not conservatives), but too often they focus on preserving the dead forms of the tradition rather than working with the energies that gave those forms the shape that was appropriate for their time and place. The task now for them, as well as people of goodwill on the Left, is to work with the energies of the Deep Real to shape new forms that are appropriate for our time and place. This is not a Jacobin project, because it needs to work bottom up, not top down; it needs to be deeply democratic, and it needs to work with the better angels that lay slumbering in the souls of the American demos, not with their anger and resentment. 

The Left as a group has no way of awakening these angels because they do not believe in the Deep Real whence they come. But the people in the Churches have been equally useless because even if they believe in the Deep Real there is very little about what they say or do in the Public sphere that points to its inspiring vitality. They work with energies that are more tribal than transcendent, and they are more interested in indoctrination than in metanoia. 

But if conservatives mostly profess a dead moralism, so too does the Left in the sanctimony and condescension they direct toward those with traditional values. The cultural Left is right about a lot of things the cultural Right is wrong about, but it is powerless to convince or persuade anybody who is not already singing in their choir. If they are passionate about anything it is their advocacy  of a groundless relativism that provides no firm footing for anyone to take a stand and to push back against the Darkness that has been building on the Right for over thirty years now, and for which they have had no answer.

They are strident in the way they say "No" and offer a goofy kumbaya celebration of "difference" that is hard for anybody to take seriously.who doesn't think John Lennon's "Imagine" is a masterpiece. And as a result they come across as flaky, moralistic scolds rather than as  prophets who point to something deep and true. And so it's easy for thoughtful heartlanders to reject their critique because it is mostly negative without affirming anything deeply positive. Heartlander conservatives can just say, "Well, you don't understand our culture and history. Your practices go against everything deep and true we were taught by our ancestors. You speak with no authority, and so why should we take your groundless, Liberal, debunking, flaky nonsense seriously."

And so when no one can inspire the better angels of our nature, it creates room for the dark angels to enter stage right. The mission of these dark angels is to destroy the norms, practices, and customs that have made an already deeply flawed democracy viable. These dark angels have always been there in the American psyche, but operated out of sight in the Deep South or lurking on the fringes in other areas of the country. But they started to come out onto center stage in the 90s.

It started with Newt Gingrich and his scorched-earth, norm-destroying politics, and then Cheney/Bush and their delusional militaristic hubris, their nihilistic justifications for torture, their abrogation of basic human rights like habeas corpus, their delusional economic thinking, and now, God help us, we have Donald Trump who wouldn't know a norm if he tripped over one. The Democrats as a group, because most of them believe in nothing more than advancing their careers, stood fecklessly, impotently by. And so there is nobody to push back because the Left has no place to stand and comes across as so clueless. Nobody on either the Right or the Left seems capable of making a compelling counterargument that can be heard outside their own tribal echo chambers.

And so there is really no hope unless someone can find a way to frame a counterargument that might provide an inoculation to the disease in this country that is contaminating the Right. No compelling counterargument has been made because there is no one on the American scene today who has the stature of one of the great artists, saints, prophets, or philosophers who is capable of awakening us to the Deep Real where our better angels reside and can be called on for help. Lincoln did it, and so did MLK and Jim Lawson, and RFK might have become someone who could. Who since then? Bernie? Maybe, not sure. But certainly him before Hillary. 

Calling people racists or naive or ignorant is not an effective political strategy. We are all racists, naive, and ignorant relatively speaking. To know that about ourselves is the beginning of wisdom, but if we have any realistic expectation of asking people to transcend their acculturation, they have to be awakened to their better angels. Trump, candidate chaos, has instead given many Americans license to indulge their resentments. And so we await the figure to enter stage Left who can speak with authority because he has a strong foothold in the Deep Real. 

History & Meaning

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mythos and Logos 3

In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s been a distinct bias—and weird twist on top of it—at least since the dawn of the modern era. That’s when logos began becoming so all-pervasive that it seemed destined to dislodge mythos, and some defenders of mythos (now commonly known as fundamentalists) fought back paradoxically by assuming the framework of logos, and arguing that their mythos was literally true—a move that true traditionalists would have found to be deeply in error, because it devalued the essential purpose of mythos.

The congruence with Mooney’s argument is obvious: There’s a clear kinship between logos and the Enlightenment model of reason on the one hand, and mythos and persuasion on the other. If conservatives under George W. Bush once again proved themselves incompetent in the logos of governing, liberals under Obama proved themselves incompetent in its mythos.

Paul Rosenberg has a couple of long pieces in Salon that support my argument in "The Silicon Valley Flood" posted the other day. The first is with George Lakoff, whose work is important and to which I plan to return when I start developing the semiotic themes that I've been dancing around lately. The second is with David Dunning. The first interests me because I want to talk more about the theological implications of how language structures our world; the second, because it focuses on how language is used in two fundamentally different modes as  'Mythos' and 'Logos'. Logos is about the 'what' the facts, seeing the world as clearly as possible and working in it as competently and effectively as possible. Mythos provides the meaning infrastructure that shapes the way we think. 

Mythos is more foundational because it's where the meaning and the purpose lie. It's what orients Gordon Gecko to work in the world in the way he does or Mother Teresa to work the way she does. The Wall Street Mythos is every bit as much a mythos as the Christian one is. But the point is that both mythos and logos interact in important ways--one's mythos creates a filter through which the 'facts' are perceived--even when the data is shared, mythos connects the dots in patterns that look different and mean very different things depending on which mythos works as your meaning infrastructure.  

Mythos is in that sense foundational: everybody has a foundational mythos whether he or she is conscious of it or not. And in the end, a la William James, the test of the truth of your mythos is directly related to whether it allows you to work with the Real effectively or ineffectively, whether it broadens and enriches your experience of the Real, or whether it narrows and impoverishes it. Both Fundamentalism and Scientism provide narrow, impoverished mythic narratives. I believe the Judaeo-Christian mythos has depths and riches that have yet to be explored. 

Competency in your work in the world requires a mythos that is suited to the reality that you are working with. If your mythos leads you to make persistent, disastrous mistakes, or if things just aren't working right, then clearly your mythos is misaligned with the Real, and adjustments are necessary. Gorbachev tried to effect these adjustments to the Soviet mythos in the 80s, and every sane person in the U.S. hoped that Obama would effect similar adjustments to the hybrid neoliberal/neoconservative mythos that proved itself disastrously misaligned with reality during the Cheney Bush years. Obama failed because he didn't understand that he had to deal with the foundational problem--the mythos problem--before he could deal with practical or logos problems. He made the fundamental Liberal mistake of overvaluing logos, to think that being reasonable and practical was enough, when instead he should have been trying to change the fundamental story. I think the country was ready for a different story. Obama as campaigner showed himself capable of telling that story; Obama as government bureaucrat has proved himself incapable.  

The Liberal mythos, as I argued the other day, values competence but is grounded in what I describe as soft nihilistic metaphysics that by definition rejects as delusional any mythos that affirms ultimate purposes. And Rosenberg, quoting John Jost, points out that Liberals just don't have what it takes when it comes to a street fight:

True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity — all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains.

A worldview that embraces competency, a logos mythos, so to say, cancels itself out and loses to a worldview that embraces ultimate purposes almost every time. Marxism succeeded to the degree that it did because it affirmed ultimate purposes, even if its ultimate purposes were misguided or delusional. Reality has a feedback mechanism that sooner or later lets you know if your ideas are delusional, but as we've seen in this country, the disasters of the Iraq War and the 2007 economic meltdown didn't provide evidence enough that the mythos that guides the GOP or neoliberal Democrats is delusional, so Americans keep sending Republicans to Washington.

I think they do this for reasons somewhat different from Tom Frank's explanation: they do it because Republicans give the appearance of standing for something and Democrats just don't. Republican policies might be toxic and delusional, but Republicans present themselves as being committed to "ultimate" values that Americans care deeply about. Democrats look more like our worst stereotype of what a politician is: the weak-kneed hypocrites who stand for nothing but the advancement of their own careers. I believe that the country would back progressive politicians who stand for core American values. That's why Jim Webb's candidacy intrigues me. 

So that's a part of it: When a particular mythos has captured the collective imagination of a group, it is virtually impossible to argue against it on a logos level. This is what people mean when they talk about cognitive divides or conservatives and liberals working with different epistemologies--one's epistemology follows from one's metaphysics, and one's metaphysics follows from one's Mythos, whether that mythos is consciously or unconsciously affecting one's thinking. One's mythos will not be given up until disaster proves conclusively that it is misaligned with the Real. Or it can be given up when an alternative mythos that shares its foundations with the reality-misaligned mythos emerges that proves itself better adapted to the Real. 

The latter is to be preferred to the former. When the old mythos collapses as it did in the Soviet Union in the 80s or Germany after WWI, it's usually replaced with an even more primitive and regressive mythos that has to run its course toward yet other disasters. These primitive myths have more in common with the primordial flood that pushes us from behind than with grace and freedom that call us into the future.  

More Americans have chosen Republicans in congressional elections (Presidential elections are different) because Democrats don't offer a robust enough alternative mythos that would motivate people to care enough to vote for them. So I'm arguing that secular progressives will continue to fail in the political and economic spheres, no matter how competent or practical their policy prescriptions, so long as their mythos is grounded in a soft nihilistic metaphysics/mythos no matter how humanistic and well intentioned. The Weimar Republic was humanistic and well intentioned in that Liberal sense.

So the answer for progressives does not lie in adopting an expedient Noble Lie that competes with the mythos of cultural Right. Such a contrived mythos will have as much staying power as the reality-misaligned mythos of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.  A mythos that works has to be grounded in the Real--the spiritual Real, the Real that comes to us from the Absolute Future, and that's why secular progressives will never be able to give us what the country and world needs if they are to move forward into a truly progressive future. But such a mythos cannot be developed out of thin air--that't the Jacobin fallacy--it has to grow out of the tradition, and in the Western world that means the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Those of us who believe that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is deeply aligned with the Real must find a way of presenting it as a robust alternative mythos that might actually help to move us into a the more deeply human future we all of us most deeply long for.

[See also Mythos and Logos 1 and Mythos and Logos 2]

Awakening to Adulthood

Not much time lately to think or write--or read. But I was struck by A.O. Scott's piece in yesterday's NYT Magazine entitled "The Death of Adulthood in American Culture", and by Andrew O'Hehir's  thoughts about it today in Salon. There is much in both pieces, but these paragraphs in O'Hehir's piece gets to the nub:

But to use Scott’s schema, the old-style masculine adult clearly thought of himself as productive first and foremost, even if (like Don Draper) he was actually a species of cultural parasite. The consumer, on the other hand, is a distinctly childlike figure, a dependent who demands pleasurable stimulus 24/7 from the comforting and/or imprisoning info-bubble around him. “The elevation of every individual’s inarguable likes and dislikes over formal critical discourse, the unassailable ascendancy of the fan, has made children of us all,” Scott writes. “We have our favorite toys, books, movies, video games, songs, and we are as apt to turn to them for comfort as for challenge or enlightenment.”

He is right that this happened, but he doesn’t appear to see (or doesn’t want to say) exactly how and why it happened. The suit-wearing, gin-drinking 35-year-old Organization Man of 1964 and the couch-bound, action-figure-collecting 35-year-old fanboy of 2014 are dialectical mirror images of each other, economic archetypes called forth by their respective eras. The freedom and autonomy each perceives in himself is better described by some other term, a force of compulsion or overdetermination (there’s the college Marxism again) that disguises itself as liberation from the stodginess of yesteryear. For better or worse, the “crisis of authority” Scott sees in contemporary culture is not a matter of “choosing” to emulate childhood long into adulthood, or to read J.K. Rowling instead of Philip Roth. (A choice for which I cannot blame anyone!) It’s the latest manifestation of the corrosive, creative and revolutionary force of capitalism, which may or may not be in terminal decline but continues to shape us into its instruments.

I don't think either writer defines adulthood in a way that resonates with me. I think for men being an adult has meant doing what it takes to get what you want. Isn't that essentially what the women's movement has been about, trying to accomplish a narrative in the feminine imagination where they can become adults too? It means not playing by the rules if the rules are an obstacle. It means being transgressive of society's arbitrary repressions grounded in left-behind religiously precriptions and proscriptions. This is the Liberation project that has defined western culture at least since the Enlightenment; it is a project to live one's life without any of the constraints of tradition, and consumer capitalism is its reductio ad absurdum.

But without the trellis of tradition, the soul has nothing to grow on, and instead sprawls aimlessly, and to be a consumer is just that: to sprawl aimlessly in the pursuit of infantile amusements. So yes, Scott is right, we live in a culture dominated by a consumer capitalist ethos that legitimates infantilism, and O'Hehir is right, that there isn't any essential difference between Don Draper and one of the idiots showcased on, say, "The Real Housewives of New Jersey". Both represent different style of infantilism, or what Kierkegaard called the despair of the aesthetic.

But I sense that whether Don Draper lives or dies, the writers are moving him in the direction of a kind of awakening to adulthood, which, to use K's scheme, is a movement into the Ethical, which requires making something other than your infantile desires worthy of your deepest commitment. That's the beginning of becoming an adult, when you are able to do something you don't want to do, not just because it's socially expected of you, but because you choose it because it's the right thing to do, even if it is indecorous. And that's always been true, whether now or a thousand or two thousand years ago. It's just that now there's no trellis; you have to figure it out for yourself. The adult, as I see him, is one who refuses sprawl and still finds a direction upward without a trellis to guide his ascent.

Honor as a Destructive Recognition Fantasy

The word 'honor' has mostly positive connotations for us--it's a good thing to be a man of honor, or to give one's word of honor. But I've always thought there was something fishy about honor and the honor culture from which it originates--it seemed to be too concerned with reputation and public perception rather than with virtue; too concerned about being well thought of and "honored" and not concerned enough about living a life of interior integrity, as if one's standing in society mattered more than one's standing before God--or that both were the same thing. When we indulge in fantasies that relate to wealth and security, recognition and fame, or power and control, these all seem 'natural' enough, and often they can be harmless, but they never lead anywhere that is 'true' and 'good'. They are, spiritually speaking, a waste of time at best, but often enough they are destructive to oneself and the lives of those around us. "Honor", I'd argue,is a recognition fantasy that has played a more destructive role in the lives of people throughout history than a hamless one. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[This is a slightly revised encore post of Honor, first posted in July 2009.]