After the Future

Dolly Parton and the Coincidentia Oppositorum

There’s a mesmerizing and ironic artifice to Dolly Parton—a sincere and relatable duality. She’s one of those icons in whom seemingly opposing forces naturally connect: poverty and folksiness against the power of enormous success, vulnerability and tenderness against effervescent self-assuredness, a story of honesty and heartache under an image so artfully plastic it seems to turn in on itself. Her brand of iconography feels so aware of its own longing for beauty that it somehow trips over superficiality and falls back into the deepest reverence. What else is her appearance but a lie she’s telling us because she knows we love to hear it? “I think part of my magic, if I have any at all,” she once said on Australia’s 60 Minutes, “is that I look totally fake but am so totally real.” 

--Chris Dennis in Guernica

I'm sure that if DP saw her name associated with such a pretentious sounding Latin phrase such as coincidentia oppositorum, she'd have a good laugh, but one of the commonest of commonplaces associated with her is how she transcends her contradictions. But it's true--she has significant contradictions and she does transcend them. So I thought it might be important to at least try to understand how she does it. So here are some preliminary thoughts along those lines.

First, If you haven't listened to the nine-part WNYC podcast about her, Dolly Parton's America, you should definitely do that and soon. If you have only time for one, listen to Episode 2, "I will Always Leave You", which is mostly about her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner. And the Netflix series entitled Dolly Parton's Heartstrings is worth watching too. Most of what I have to say about DP reflects what I learned about her from those two sources. There's a kind of Fichtean theme that runs through both: there are powerful obstacles that separate us. These obstacles and the conflicts they create are not a bug but a feature of life because without them human beings would not have the opportunity to discover who they are as free spiritual beings. We can choose to overcome them, or we can make them worse by ignoring them or feeding the resentment, anger, and fear that fuels them. Each of the Heartstrings stories is about people who choose to confront and overcome these obstacles and in doing so to become more themselves. 

So the goal is not only a Fichtean affirmation of self in overcoming the enemy, but more importantly that we only become more ourselves when we recognize the selfhood and dignity of the "enemy". That's more of a Christian idea than a Fichtean one. The endings in the Heartstring series might be seen as sentimental by some, but I'd say that they are deeply true in the same way as at the end of Shakespeare's comedies. After the conflicts and misunderstandings are resolved, there's usually a wedding or a circle dance, and when well-performed, the audience is caught up in a deep, archetypal joy. This dynamic is at work at the end of Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, and it is at work in the Heartstring stories in a similar way. Those who dismiss this as not real or as overly sentimental misread these moments in a very significant way.

On one level such positive outcomes seem unrealistic, but that's because they're hyperrealistic, that is, they tap into the the transformative energy of an archetype, and the archetype active in these stories I'd call the "Communion Archetype". To feel its power is to feel its joy. It's an archetype that that Owen Barfield describes as defining the end of history--Final Participation--that we can now experience proleptically, that is, through a glass darkly. It's an archetype that I'd like to think in its modest way is an inspiration for this blog called "After the Future". 

If these endings feel contrived and sentimental to you, that means that you don't feel the energy of the archetype. And there are many obstacles that prevent our feeling it when it's there. If now, for instance, I was to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, I doubt I would feel its power, but that does not mean that the power isn't there. I know it's there because I have memories of experiencing it. The problem now is not with the music, but with something in me--some obstacle--that prevents me from responding to what is there. I don't want to get sidetracked explaining all the "jading" factors that create this obstacle, but to be jaded is not the same thing as to be discriminating. My point is, first, that the effort to overcome such an obstacle is analogous to the overcoming what is dramatized in the stories mentioned above. And, second, if you don't believe there's anything beyond the obstacle, you won't make the effort to overcome it; if you do believe something's there, you will. Our condition as late moderns is to be largely skeptical that there is anything there, and that paralyzes us.

So the goal in Shakespeare, Capra, Heartstrings, and other classic comedies is not the triumph of the individual over the forces of evil, but rather the triumph that overcomes conflict itself in the experience of reconciliation and communion. Communion is the antithesis of the hive mind or the mob because it involves free individuals having to choose it and in choosing it to become more themselves. There is neither individuality nor freedom in the hive or the mob. True communion is only possible among people who are truly themselves, and to be in a hive or mob is by definition to abdicate both. And so the biggest obstacles to communion are the myriad ways we all live false versions of ourselves. And that's what the Heartstings stories are about--people learning that they are trapped in false versions of themselves and then finding a way to free themselves and in doing so to discover the power that lies in communion at a deeper, truer level with others.

This overcoming of false versions of oneself, i.e., to move toward deeper levels of communion, is Dolly Parton's truth, and I think it's the key to understanding what enables her to transcend her contradictions. There is so much about her that seems fake--like her surgically manufactured appearance. But because of the way she jokes about it -- "It takes a lot of money to look this cheap", we can feel confident that she doesn't take that aspect of herself seriously. Like the Wizard of Oz she projects a persona that's bigger than life, but she has no delusions of grandeur. She knows who she is, which is just the little guy behind the curtain having fun trying to put on a good show. She knows the difference between what she projects and who she truly is. I think of Lady Gaga as doing much the same thing. This is completely different from what Donald Trump does. For him there is only the projected image, and that image is an expression of what is truest about him, which is his dishonesty. He's a con man, a modern day P.T. Barnum, and he cons himself as much as he attempts to con others. 

So perhaps because I'm writing this the day after Trump's third State of the Union Address and on the day that he's being acquitted in the Senate, I feel compelled to make the comparison between him and Parton. I'm sure there are many Dolly fans who are also Trump supporters, and they see in him much of what they see in her. It's easy to see why: both are successful entertainers, both wealthy businesspeople, both, though way past their prime, still highly sexualized, both trade on their name branding. What makes Dollywood any different from Trump Tower? Aren't both monuments to inflated ego? I don't think so, but let's suss out why.

Is it possible make such a distinction without knowing either of them personally? Yes and No. It could be that I have it completely wrong, I could find out someday that Trump really was Atticus Finch to those who really knew him and Parton was Cruella DeVil, but I doubt it. There's enough evidence in the public record for both to make some educated guesses we can feel confident about. And I think an exercise like this is instructive for understanding this coincidentia oppositorum theme. I want to argue that each derives her or his power by virtue of an archetype--for Dolly Parton, it's the Communion Archetype; for Trump, the Chaos Archetype. The first has an integrating effect on those who 'participate' in it; the second a disintegrative effect in those it possesses. 

I think a post for another day might be to tease out to what degree bigger-than-life people are free and to what degree they are determined (trapped) by the power of the archetypes that energize them. Was Napoleon free? Was Mozart? I have some ideas about that, but let me stipulate in provisional way for now that the Communion Archetype operates in a way that enhances a fully developed, free human being, and the Chaos Archetype in its many variations requires only raw instinct and animal cunning. The first works to integrate the serpent with the dove, the beast with the angel; the second is the serpent without the dove, the beast without the angel. The Great Chain of Being no longer shapes our cosmic imaginary, but it still works metaphorically. Chaos is at the bottom of the chain; Communion with the godhead is at the top. 

Is there another type that is the Dove without the Serpent? Yes. I write about that in this post about Steinbeck's East of Eden. Doves without Serpents tend to be idealist flakes or hippies in the most benign cases, but in the most malign cases they can be rigid, purist, morally fanatic ideologues--Savonarolas, Robespierres, Inquisitors. Alcoholics and other addictive personality types are often idealist Doves who refuse to deal with the hard realities that the serpent thrives in. Serpents are drug dealers, not users. Or Doves enact an enantiodromia in which in their disillusionment they completely reverse poles from unbalanced, naive Doves to unbalanced, cynical Serpents. Extremely unbalanced Doves or Serpents spin off in one way or another into psychic disintegration and become captured by the Chaos Archetype. And when they do, they wreak havoc in the lives of those around them. 

In the East of Eden post, I talk about how each of us is either a dove-dominant type or a serpent-dominant type, and that neither is morally superior, even if doves tend to be more socially acceptable in a boy-scouty way. Moral development is measured to the degree that doves integrate the recessive serpent aspects of their psyches, and serpents integrate the recessive dove aspects. In other words, we become successful human beings to the degree that we enact the coincidentia oppositorum. The marriage of the serpent-dominant Cal and the dove-dominant Abbra in East of Eden signifies a successful coincidentia oppositorum, the hieros gamos. The Dove-dominant Aron fails and is destroyed as he spins off into fanatic madness.  

I would say that DP is an earthy, savvy Serpent-dominant type who has largely succeeded in integrating her recessive Dove aspect, and Trump is also a serpent-dominant type, who failed to integrate his Dove. He probably at this point in his life has no idea that it even exists. This is what makes him a madman. To what degree he has any culpability in becoming such a truly horrible human being us between him and God, but the fact remains that he is a truly horrible human being and is extremely dangerous because he is so unbalanced. His personal imbalance is bigger than life because of the way that the Chaos Archetype works in him, and he becomes a vortex that sucks into his chaos anyone near him who hasn't a firm foothold to prevent him from being swept off his feet. Until recently the Trumpian vortex was little more than a dust devil. But his election to president has made him a good-sized tornado--a 2 or a 3 on the Fujita scale. God help us if we don't find a way to contain him before he becomes a 5. 

I should say, since I've been writing about it so much recently, that this aligns with Iain McGilchrist's book The Master and the Emissary. My 'dove' correlates with McG's depiction of how the right hemisphere opens us up to the utter uselessness and wonder of Being, and my 'serpent' with how McG's left hemisphere reduces Being to a useful abstraction. The left hemisphere values what is useful, graspable, controllable. In other words it values maps over the the concrete lifeworld of landscapes. Maps are useful in helping us to navigate in the life world, but they are not the life world. There's nothing wrong with maps except when they become valued more than what they represent, especially if they come to substitute for it. 

Thus, Magritte's famous--

We need the the utilitarian serpent and its clever, instrumental reason in order to work effectively and safely in a hostile world teeming with wolves. But when it becomes an end in itself, when it loses its grounding in the right hemisphere, it squeezes the life out of the soul. McG's argument, using my Serpent/Dove analogy (which he does not use), is that we currently live in a Serpent-dominant cultural milieu, and we have to find a way of opening up and reintegrating the repressed Dove, an aspect that the left-dominant elites regard as flaky and naive, subjective and unverifiable. The culture, in other words, is like Trump--dominated by the Serpent and either forgetful or contemptuous of the Dove. 

Dolly Parton is a wealthy entertainer and a shrewd, practical business woman. That's her Serpent part, but she's not just that. In DP we see a model of integration of the Dove with the Serpent, indeed the Serpent is in the service of the Dove, and if this reading of her is correct, it's her ability to keep those two aspects in the right relationship that makes her a model of the coincidentia oppositorum. And that's what makes her so different from Donald Trump, whatever the appearances might indicate otherwise.  

When people effect this reconciliation of opposites in their own lives, it affects those around them. That's why she's a unifying figure while Trump is a polarizing one. Her fraught relationship with Porter Wagoner exemplifies this. It could have been one of the Heartstrings stories. It's about conflict and reconciliation, but not a reconciliation that was effected by giving in on what was essential for the maintenance and growth of her integrity. Their conflict was born of DP's need to be her own woman, and of PW's inability to accept that. This was his failure not hers, because he, not she, was trapped in a false version of himself, and he probably would have stayed stuck in that false version of himself had Dolly not insisted on (1) being her own woman, while at the same time (2) refusing to let PW's bitterness to define the relationship. In refusing to be a false version of herself, she in the end enabled PW to become a better version of himself. In the end, the Communion Archetype  shining through her effected their reconciliation. That's a powerful story because it's a real-life enactment of the Communion Archetype. It's the circle dance at the end of a Shakespeare comedy. 

Not giving-in in the service of one's integrity is completely different from digging-in in the service of protecting one's false version of oneself. (Hat's off to Mitt Romney, btw, for being at this point the only Republican Senator who seems to understand the difference between not giving in and digging in.) At first Porter Wagoner got himself very dug in, and so was like Donald Trump and all the senators who are digging in with him. We'e all been there; we've all dug in to defend false versions of ourselves at different points in our lives. The difference between Wagoner and Trump lies in that Wagoner had a Dolly Parton in his life whereas Trump seems only to have had variations of Stormy Daniels, big-boobed Parton parodies.

That's why Dollywood isn't Trump Tower. Both are expressions of what's real in each, and neither would be possible without their potent fantasy projections, their dreams. But whatever its flaws or whatever criticisms one might direct toward Dollywood, it's something she built to be a source of enjoyment and employment for her people in east Tennessee. I see it as an expression of her Dove and its intimate connection to the lifeworld/culture of her people that shaped her and enabled her to become whom she became. It was a way of giving back. Trump Tower is pure Serpent. 

There's another archetype DP reminds me of--the Samaritain woman Jesus meets at Jacob's Well, Photine (Jolene in Heartsrings?). She's the archetype of a kind of a lively, bawdy sinfulness that is yet supple-hearted and naive enough to respond to the intrusion of a disruptive, transcendent power into her life. Dolly's moment at the well happened when she was younger, in that boarded-up church she used to visit with all the pornographic graffiti decorating it. That's when the Serpent in her bowed to the Dove. She talks about that in episode 9 of the Dolly Parton's America podcast. I think of Jacob's Well as a symbol for the source of the obstacle-shattering life that enables us to become our best selves. It's there for each of us. But while you can lead a horse to water you can't make him drink. I was thinking of bringing in Dorothy Parker here, but it's not apt. The important part about Dolly is that she did drink, and she does think, and that's what makes her the anti-Trump, whether she sees herself that way or not. 

Originality vs. Novelty

[George] Steiner’s mot , that ‘originality is antithetical to novelty’ ... puts its finger on a huge problem for the willed, self-conscious nature of modernist art, and art since modernism. For there is no polarity between the tradition and originality. In fact originality as an artist (as opposed to as a celebrity or a showman) can only exist within a tradition, not for the facile reason that it must have something by ‘contrast’ with which to be original, but because the roots of any work of art have to be intuitive, implicit, still coming out of the body and the imagination, not starting in (though they may perhaps later avail themselves of) individualistic cerebral striving.

...There’s a fear that without novelty there is only banality; but the pay-off is that it is precisely the striving for novelty that leads to banality. We confuse novelty with newness. No one ever decided not to fall in love because it’s been done before, or because its expressions are banal. They are both as old as the hills and completely fresh in every case of genuine love. Spiritual texts present the same problem, that they can use only banalities, which mean something totally different from the inside of the experience. Language makes the uncommon common. It can never create experience of something we do not know--only release something in us that is already there.

Iain McGilchrist,The Master and His Emissary, Yale University Press. [All excerpts in this post come from Chapter 12: "The Modern and the Post-Modern Worlds".]

This goes to what I was writing earlier this week about archetypes and energy and to what I wrote about "originality" in a post in December regarding Renaissance Neoplatonism. What matters is not whether there's something cleverly new in the execution, but whether it uncovers something in Being that in its uncovering releases transformative cognitive energy:

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

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

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

In other words, the encounter with the Divine Mind awakens what is already in us, which is the innate but nascent image and likeness in us of the Divine Mind. "Innate" does not mean realized. It is like a seed. But its germination and cultivation is not just an individual project; it is a cultural one.

The scope of possibility in such a task is largely enabled--or thwarted-- by the constraints of one's culture. Some cultures provide richer soil for such a a seed to grow and develop; others provide rather poor soil. One might ask why the genius of Beethoven or Mozart was recognized and appreciated in their lifetimes, and why no such geniuses with such creative scope and depth of soul have emerged in the last one hundred years. Theirs was a culture in which such genius could ripen; ours is not.

We are a culture that accepts novelty as a poor substitute for originality. True originality requires a return to the origins. We have lost any sense of the origins because our culture has all but sealed us off from it. Sealed off from it as we are, we have come to believe that there is no such thing. Who among us draws from the origins in a way that has anything like the vitality of the Romantics or the great Renaissance artists?

Sealed off as we are, it's hard for us to appreciate how the encounter with Plato in the late 1400s was so central to their understanding the nature of their artistic and scientific task. We see Neoplatonism as dry abstractions because it no longer interprets our experience or inspires our aspirations. The Renaissance artists and the English Romantics saw it as providing a framework that inspired their plunge into the mystery in the world around them. This was a world whose origins they believed participated in the mind of God, the hidden infrastructure of the created world. The Divine Mind for them was not a static abstraction; its apprehension was accompanied by creative inspiration, what Ficino called 'divine furuore', or divine frenzy. Their art originated in heightened states of consciousness. 

The artist's or philosopher's task was to open himself up the depths of Being where the creative energies of the Divine Mind could be encountered, and in such an encounter to have one's mind awakened--i.e., to be transformatively energized--was a step toward realizing its own inner potentiality to become more "like" the Divine Mind. In this sense the human being co-creates the world by bringing dimensions of it about which he is unconscious into consciousness. This idea is picked up later by Schelling, Hegel, and even Heidegger. The human being is where Being becomes conscious of itself; the human is the clearing in the forest of Being. 

This older idea of the mission of art has become unbelievable for sealed-off, alienated, buffered moderns, but I believe it's retrievable. Isn't this really the Heideggerian project?  It certainly seems to be McG's. I know that neither would frame it in the Neoplatonic way that I am doing, but the similarities are more significant than the differences.

But first we need to understand the nature of our alienation of the origins. McG goes on to talk about how art itself has become something so self-conscious and left-brained that it has sealed itself off from the possibility art as the product of divine frenzy:

The Aesthetes’ creed of ‘art for art’s sake’, while it sounds like an elevation of the value of art, in that it denies that it should have an ulterior purpose beyond itself – so far, so good – is also a devaluation of art, in that it marginalises its relationship with life. In other words it sacrifices the betweenness of art with life, instead allowing art to become self-reflexively fulfilled. There is a difference between the forlorn business of creating ‘art for art’s sake’, and art nonetheless having to be judged solely ‘as art’, not as for another purpose.

By "betweenness" he means that the art object as symbolic representation lies between and mediates something beyond it to the human being who encounters it. And, of course, art should never be subordinated to politics or economic interests. It has its own mission, which is to open up undisclosed dimensions of Being. But this is different from art that becomes self-consciously self-referential. It doesn't open up; it closes off. 

In the process of creation, the artist’s plane of focus needs to be somewhere beyond and through the work of art, not just on its being art, otherwise it becomes less than art. In viewing the art work, we too are carried beyond the work of art, precisely because the artist was not focussed on the art as such, but in something beyond it; and that is part of its greatness, by which, as it might seem paradoxically, we come to judge the work of art solely on its merits as a work of art--not, in other words, for some ulterior purpose for which art is being used. We come to see not the work of art, but the world according to the art work, as Merleau-Ponty says, necessitating that it is neither opaque nor wholly transparent, but ‘semi-transparent’.

I'd go further than McG seems willing to do by saying that the semi-transparency of the work of art when it works as great art is in some degree revealing or disclosing the originary energies of the immanent presence of the Divine Mind--whether it is recognized as such or not.

And this is where  the Neoplatonic idea of the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation overlaps with the use of archetypes in stories, whether fairy tales or in Shakespeare. Because the human mind, when it is at its most creative is most disclosive of the Divine Mind because the human mind is the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. in other words, what is deepest and most transformatively creative in the human mind is reflective of its participation in the Divine Mind. I wrote about this last week.

Great works of art are impossible without tradition or culture to provide a language and a symbol system as a pre-conscious meaning matrix, but this matrix is not a textual prison as Lacan, Derrida and their followers seem to think. Language--symbol systems in general--can be, maybe most often are in our everyday experience, closed systems, but they need not be. They can instead function as portals through which something from beyond enters into awareness.

So truly great art opens us up, helps us to see through it into dimensions of reality that transcend the semiotic systems inherited by tradition and acculturation. We are indeed acculturated linguistic beings, but the idea that we are completely sealed in by culture and language is a prejudice of left-hemispheric thinking and its quasi-pathological smugness.  

The heart of McG's book is to explain why contemporary elites' experience of language feels like a closed system because of the tendency of their hyper-self-consciousness to operate within a hall of mirrors. They experience the world as a domain fundamentally alienated from the life world of the Deep Real--where the originary archetypes of the Divine Mind sleep waiting for us to wake them and in our doing so to awaken what in our soul is capable of cognizing them.

What prevents this from happening more often has almost everything to do with how our culture has become so oppressively left-brained. The left brain hemisphere usurps control both of one's experience of the world in creating a model of the real that we mistake for reality.  And this model reinforces patterns of perception and thinking that seal us off from the origins, and this is what makes us 'forgetful' of Being. 

The problem for buffered moderns is that in their left-hemispheric, overly meta-self-consciousness, they've all but lost the capacity for experiencing the givenness of the world with even a degree of "naïveté". This has led to an experience of the world that is borderline psychopathic:

This coded-message model, which ‘has very much the status of an axiom in most versions of structuralism’, is the perfect expression of the left hemisphere trying to understand right-hemisphere language. Aware that there is more going on here than meets the eye, the left hemisphere sets about making things explicit, in an attempt to discover what it is; but meanwhile is not really aware of the ‘thisness’ of the work of art, in which the real ‘meaning’ lies, at all.

This is the crucial point. The left-hemisphere--the part of our minds that "makes explicit"--can only work with what is given to it implicitly in raw experience from the right hemisphere. So everything depends on the quality of the "data", what is given, that is available for the left hemisphere to work with. But if the left hemisphere excludes a priori huge swaths of experience because they are not measurable, testable, or just too subjective, then it closes the experience off or de-legitimizes the experiences that are the most important in making us human. And so for this reason we often have the experience but miss the meaning.

So a rebalancing is called for, but, McG argues, modern and postmodern cultural elites have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction in rejecting objectivity and rationality, and in doing so have created worse problems-- 

The post-modern revolt against the silent, static, contrived, lifeless world displayed in the fresco on the wall is not because of its artificiality--the fact that it is untrue to the living world outside--but because of its ‘pretence’ that there exists a world outside to be true to. The contrast is not between the fixity of the artificial and the fluidity of the real, but between the fixity and the chaos of two kinds of artificiality. Post-modern indeterminacy affirms not that there is a reality, towards which we must carefully, tentatively, patiently struggle; it does not posit a truth which is nonetheless real because it defies the determinacy imposed on it by the self-conscious left-hemisphere interpreter (and the only structures available to it). On the contrary, it affirms that there is no reality, no truth to interpret or determine.

And then he points to the kind of 'unknowing' that postmodern unknowing parodies:

The contrast here is like the difference between the ‘unknowing’ of a believer and the ‘unknowing’ of an atheist. Both believer and atheist may quite coherently hold the position that any assertion about God will be untrue; but their reasons are diametrically opposed. The difference is not in what is said, but in the disposition each holds toward the world. The right hemisphere’s disposition is tentative, always reaching painfully (with ‘care’) towards something which it knows is beyond itself. It tries to open itself (not to say ‘no’) to something that language can allow only by subterfuge, to something that reason can reach only in transcending itself; not, be it noted, by the abandonment of language and reason, but rather through and beyond them.

This is why the left hemisphere is not its enemy, but its valued emissary. Once, however, the left hemisphere is convinced of its own importance,...it revels in its own freedom from constraint, in what might be called, in a phrase of Robert Graves’s, the ‘ecstasy of chaos’.  One says ‘I do not know,’ the other ‘I know – that there is nothing to know.’ One believes that one cannot know: the other ‘knows’ that one cannot believe.

I spent quite a lot of time talking about the ecstasy of chaos in my post last week, and also in that post I made the point that it's precisely the smugness of the nihilistic 'unknowing' that must be overcome with second naïveté. McG is describing here a believing something that cannot be proved but which can be apprehended and spoken about with confidence, even if always provisionally and incompletely.

If it is possible to say true or untrue, good or bad, better or worse, there has to be a spectrum on which experiences fall which distinguishes one from the other. What defines this spectrum? I'd argue that the more ecstatically present the Divine Mind is in an experience, the truer and the better. The more the ecstasy of chaos is present, the worse. The trick is to know the difference, and for that you need a human being with an integrated center. And such people develop more frequently in a culture that has a sapiential tradition that has developed proven capabilities to discern one from the other.

So Ficino's divine frenzy and the ecstatic Dionysian frenzy of chaos are not the same thing. They define polarities in the human psyche, which must be held in a kind of metaxic tension, but the long-term human project is to integrate chaos and its energies into the the living flame of the Divine Mind. We do that by gradually awakening that flame in our own minds--or hearts, which is the same thing. 

11/27/23 Ed note: I slightly modified parts of this essay to expand and clarify some ideas in the light developments in my thinking since first writing it.

McGilchrist's Reading of Nietzsche's Misreading of Plato's Misremembering of Socrates

This separation of the absolute and eternal, which can be known by logos (reason), from the purely phenomenological, which is now seen as inferior, leaves an indelible stamp on the history of Western philosophy for the subsequent two thousand years. The reliance on reason downgrades not just the testimony of the senses, but all our implicit knowledge. This was the grounds of Nietzsche’s view that Socrates, far from being the hero of our culture, was its first degenerate, because Socrates had lost the ability of the nobles to trust intuition: ‘Honest men, he wrote, ‘do not carry their reasons exposed in this fashion.’ 

Degeneration, by this account, begins relatively late in Greece, with Plato, and involves the inability to trust what is implicit or intuitive. ‘What must first be proved is worth little,’ Nietzsche continues in The Twilight of the Idols :

one chooses dialectic only when one has no other means. One knows that one arouses mistrust with it, that it is not very persuasive. Nothing is easier to erase than a dialectical effect: the experience of every meeting at which there are speeches proves this.

With the loss of the power of intuition, 

rationality was then hit upon as the saviour ; neither Socrates nor his ‘patients’ had any choice about being rational: it was de rigueur , it was their last resort.

The fanaticism with which all Greek reflection throws itself upon rationality betrays a desperate situation; there was danger, there was but one choice: either to perish or – to be absurdly rational. And if this seems to be just the pardonable excesses of Nietzschean furor , the ravings of an inspired madman, consider these words from Panksepp the neuroscientist:

Although language is the only way we can scientifically bridge the chasm between mind and brain, we should always remember that we humans are creatures that can be deceived as easily by logical rigour as by blind faith … It is possible that some of the fuzzier concepts of folk-psychology may lead us to a more fruitful understanding of the integrative functions of the brain than the rigorous, but constrained, languages of visually observable behavioural acts.

In this later Greek world, truth becomes something proved by argument. The importance of another, ultimately more powerful, revealer of truth, metaphor, is forgotten; and metaphor, in another clever inversion, comes even to be a lie, though perhaps a pretty one. So the statements of truth contained in myth become discounted as ‘fictions’, that is to say untruths or lies – since, to the left hemisphere, metaphor is no more than this.

Great philosopher that he undoubtedly was, Plato is not quite straightforward in this respect. Even Plato had intuitions he could not dismiss. What is quite moving, even tragic, in the true sense (because it involves Socrates’ hubristic trust in his own dialectic powers), is to see Socrates/Plato torn between his own intuitions and the awareness that he is no longer at liberty to trust them. Plato was originally a poet and it was his association with Socrates that impressed on him the need to forsake poetry for dialectic.

In The Republic Socrates fulminates against the works of tragedians and other dramatists – such representations definitely harm the minds of their audiences … representations at the third remove from reality, and easy to produce without any knowledge of the truth … all the poets from Homer downwards have no grasp of reality but merely give us a superficial representation … So great is the natural magic of poetry. Strip it of its poetic colouring, reduce it to plain prose, and I think you know how little it amounts to … the artist knows little or nothing about the subjects he represents and … his art is something that has no serious value.

The work of painters and artists of all kinds, including poets are ‘far removed from reality’, and appeal to ‘an element in us equally far removed from reason, a thoroughly unsound combination’. Art is ‘a poor child born of poor parents’, appeals to ‘a low element in the mind’, and has ‘a terrible power to corrupt even the best characters’. Poets are to be banished from the Republic. 131 All those involved in creative arts deal in deceit: the metaphor is a lie. Calculation (logic) is to be preferred to imagination: denotation to connotation. Being a poet also involves imagining one’s way into many things, and ‘is unsuitable for our state, because there one man does one job and does not play a multiplicity of rôles’: so much for Heraclitus’ insight that one needs to inquire into many things, not just one, if one is not to be led astray. 132 Plato’s proscriptions on music, like so much else about his Republic, remind one of a Soviet-style totalitarian state. There is no need of a wide harmonic range; most rhythms and modes are outlawed; flutes, harps and ‘harpsichords’ are banned, as are all ‘dirges and laments’; and there will be need only of two kinds of music, the kind that encourages civil orderliness, and the kind that sternly encourages us to war. 133 All has been reduced to utility in the service of the will to power. 134

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7729-7772). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

While McGilchrist sees Socrates and Plato through a Nietzschean lens, I see him through the Christian Neoplatonic lens. I would argue that it’s ironic that the Socrates that Nietzsche sees is the Socrates that comes to us through the Left Brain bias that McG would warn us about.

The idea that Socrates was merely a clever left-brained dialectician like the other Sophists strikes me as silly. If he were only that, I wouldn't find him interesting at all. I see Socrates as a man who was enlightened in the Buddhist sense, as someone who had a satori experience, a deep revelatory experience regarding the nature of the Deep Real, and he came to understood that the world as we ordinarily experienced it was like a shadow compared to the real thing. He used dialectic not as an end in itself but as a technique  to wake his listeners up to the fact that the world of opinion, the world given to us by custom, was mostly an illusion, a state of sleepfulness from which one needed to awaken. It is rather like Aquinas and the proofs of God—they do not render the experience of faith, they lay a foundation for it when it is experienced as gift, as revelation. As Tomberg (I think) says of Aquinas's comment about his theology as being like straw--Yes, but what wonderful tinder straw makes to ignite the soul when lightning strikes it. 

The true, certainly the more interesting, Socrates is the ecstatic prophet of Love who in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, the disciple of Diotima, someone inspired by Divine Madness who seeks for a deep intuitive experience of the Good, its truth and beauty. The true Socrates was an ecstatic prophet, not a dry logician. The Socrates of the Republic is the Socrates of an aging Plato who like Augustine became cranky and forgetful of what he once felt and understood with such power. Indeed McG seems to recognize this, but sees it as the exception not the rule—

But at the same time, Plato himself needs to use myth in order to explain things that resist formulation in language or dialectic: the allegory of the Cave, or the ring of Gyges, for example. In fact Plato appears ambivalent, and gives hints, particularly in the Symposium , that the realm of the Forms attracts us in a way that transcends the logical; and that those who have intuited the Form of the Good, and the Form of the Beautiful, are compelled to pursue them, and to try to convey them to others, exactly as I have suggested the ideals towards which the right hemisphere is drawn act upon it, contrasting these with the purely abstracted forms of things which are created by the left hemisphere. While awaiting death in prison, Socrates’ daemon (conscience) visited him and repeatedly told him to make music. 135 ‘Whatever urged these exercises on him’, wrote Nietzsche, ‘was something similar to his warning voice’:

it was his Apolline insight that, like some barbarian king, he did not understand the noble image of some god and, in his ignorance, was in danger of committing a sin against a deity. The words spoken by the figure who appeared to Socrates in dream are the only hint of any scruples in him about the limits of logical nature; perhaps, he must have told himself, things which I do not understand are not automatically unreasonable. Perhaps there is a kingdom of wisdom from which the logician is banished? Perhaps art may even be a necessary correlative and supplement of science? 136

But there is no doubt that it is ultimately the left-hemisphere version of the world that Plato puts forward, for the first time in history; puts forward so strongly that it has taken two thousand years to shake it off. And so it is that perhaps the most profound legacy of the Greeks, their myths, come to be seen as ‘myths’ as we now use the term, false histories. But here is Malinowski on the true nature of myth:

These stories live not by idle interest [that is, not as a sort of primitive science, merely to answer intellectual curiosity], not as fictitious or even as true narratives; but are to the natives a statement of a primeval, greater, and more relevant reality, by which the present life, fates, and activities of mankind are determined, the knowledge of which supplies man with the motive for ritual and moral actions, as well as with indications as to how to perform them. 137

This kind of truth cannot be apprehended directly, explicitly; in the attempt, it becomes flattened to two-dimensionality, even deadened, by the left hemisphere. It has to be metaphorised, ‘carried across’ to our world, by mythology and by ritual, in which the gods approach us; or as we begin to approach them, when we stand back in ‘necessary distance’ from our world through sacred drama. So Kerényi writes:

In the domain of myth is to be found not ordinary truth but a higher truth, which permits approaches to itself from the domain of bios [not just life, but ‘the highly characterised life of a human being’, perhaps best rendered, despite the apparent chasm of two millennia, as Dasein ]. These approaches are provided by sacred plays, in which man raises himself to the level of the gods, plays too which bring the gods down from their heights. Mythology, indeed, especially Greek mythology, could in some sense be considered as the play of the gods, in which they approach us. 

McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7772-7813). Yale University Press. Kindle Edition.

And whether or not this is special pleading, is it not possible that Plato as reacting not to the great poets and playwrights but to their second-rate imitators. He could not have been too happy the “truth” of Aristophanese depiction of Socrates. There was a lot of theater in his day, and most of it was not great. Homer was for most Athenians what the Bible has become for most Christians, a dead text that presents fundamentalist truths, rather than sacred mythos in the Malinowski sense. What Plato and Socrates were doing was trying to get those who would listen to go to the source of Deep Truth, not to simply accept its rendering in second-hand form. Neoplatonism as an experience grounded mystical, i.e., irrational, philosophy is not so alien from Socrates/Plato as Nietzcche and McG would have us think. 

McGilchrist on Hemispheric Balance and Imbalance

The Greek tradition had been one of tolerance of others’ beliefs, an inclusive attitude to the gods, and one could see Constantine’s Edict as lying in that tradition. But by the end of the fourth century, such tolerance was a thing of the past as the dispute between Symmachus and Ambrose over the Altar of Victory demonstrates. For the Greeks spirituality and rationality, muthos (mythos) and logos, could coexist without conflict. That muthoi could be ‘frozen in written form and interpreted to make statements of “truth” (logoi)’ was alien to the Greeks.

But, as Freeman [in The Closing of the Western Mind: The Rise of Faith and the Fall of Reason] admits, there was resistance to such formulations in early Christianity, as well, and Christians as much as pagans suffered under Theodosius’ decree.  What Freeman takes to be the contrast between Greek and Christian thought might better be seen, according to some scholars, as the contrast between, on the one hand, the flexibility of a way of thinking which can be found in the rich tradition of the early Christian fathers as well as in the paganism with which it co-existed (where the hemispheres, too, co-operated), and, on the other, a culture marked by a concern with legalistic abstractions, with ‘correctness’, and the dogmatic certainties of the left hemisphere, whether Greek or Christian, which inexorably replaced them. Thus Mary Beard writes in a review: ‘The real problem is in Freeman’s stark opposition between the classical and Christian worlds.’ . . . 

The striking thing about Greek intellectual life had been the tolerance of opposition: independence of mind, in this sense, began with the Greeks.  But it also declined with them, and eventually with the Romans after them, so that Christianity, which is in one sense the most powerful mythos in advocacy of the incarnate world, and of the value of the individual, that the world has ever known, also ended up a force for conformity, abstraction, and the suppression of independent thought.

--McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 7951-7980).

The point here, with which I concur, is that Christianity loses its potential to enrich and vitalize culture to the degree that it becomes hamstrung in dogma and fundamentalism. Basic Christian beliefs can be asserted or celebrated--the Incarnation, the death and resurrection, even the Immaculate Conception, so long as there is an mythopoetic openness to interpretation. Mythos is true in a different way from how most of us tend to think of truth as being fact or evidence based.

Mythos is potentially disclosive of unseen depths. If we develop a mindset that is open to it, those depths disclose "data" that then becomes something that left brain thinking can integrate with 'facts' ascertained in the ordinary way. The left brain is at its best when it is less obsessed with being certain and more nimble and adaptive to a broader range of possibilities. As McGilchrist points out in the excerpt above, the early Church fathers had that in a way that got lost later when Christian authorities became obsessed with certainty and social order. 

If Christians had real faith, they would just trust that the experiences, revelations, intuitions, of the ancestors invite us to a deeper understanding of our own experiences, revelations, and intuitions. Dogmatism, fundamentalism, and moralistic priggishness instead strangle the life out of those revelations and attenuate their possibilities for enriching our lives. And the reason they do, according to McGilchrist, is because of the tendency humans have to straitjacket the world of experience that the right cerebral hemisphere gives and to live instead in the overly controlled environment given by the left hemisphere. 

I've been familiar with McGilchrist's book for years now, and thought its basic thesis interesting, but it's only been in the last few months that I've taken the time to read through it carefully. It maps so closely to what I've been writing here that it's kind of eerie. It's essentially a book that grounds in neuroscience my development of the Metaxis theme in the light of the gospel admonition to 'be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents'.

My metaphorical dove is the experience in consciousness that the right hemisphere gives us--empathy, felt meaning, concreteness, synthesis and connection, gestalts, metaphor, a profound sense of connection to the life world, and openness to and curiosity about the unknown. It's what is spirited in the human being. The serpent is the experience the left brain hemisphere gives us, which is highly focused, analytical, abstract, calculative, organization-and-system-building, and desperately needy for certainty, neatness, perfection, and control--and prone to violence to achieve or maintain its hegemonic control. It prefers to deal with truths removed from their life context, to study the butterfly dead and dissected rather than alive in its habitat. 

When the two work together in a balanced way, the right hemisphere delivers richly textured experience, and the left hemisphere makes the attempt to understand it, to reflect on it. So our sense of Self is more associated with this kind of work that the Left brain does in relationship to the givenness of the world disclosed to us through the right brain. But the title of the book is based on a story told by Nietzsche about which I wrote in this post back in 2012. Basically it's about how the Emissary (my Serpent), which should be the servant of the Master (my Dove), develops instead a contempt for the Master, and decides to rule on its own authority. Tyranny ensues. The Serpent Party locks up those in the Dove Party who live more anarchically  Or the Serpent Party, whose experience of he world is circumscribed by calculation, abstraction, and the need fore certainty, simply dismisses those in the Dove Party as Fools who attest to things that nobody can prove.

McG is at pains to distinguish what he has to say about the two hemispheres from notions that were popularized in the 80s, and it's easy, before reading the book, to think that this is just another kind of silly attempt to simplify what is far more complex. But when I first encountered the book, I thought that establishment neuroscience would be unsympathetic to his thesis. Apparently, so did McG. So I was surprised when I read in his recently published preface to the updated edition ten years after publication --

When after twenty years of research I arrived at the point of publication of this book, I believed I would face a hostile establishment. With a few exceptions, that has not been the case, and, thankfully, some of the best-known names in neuroscience are on record as engaging seriously with the book’s thesis. I also expected, of course, the usual faction of self-appointed ‘myth debunkers’, who would feel comfortably one-up on the gullible masses by professing that there was ‘nothing in it’ without the bore of acquainting themselves with the evidence before pronouncing. I imagine there have been plenty of those, but that is neither here nor there. . . .

Ten years on, I have been genuinely astonished by the completely unforeseen extent to which this book has been taken up by people in every discipline, and from every walk of life. It has already sold over 100,000 copies, and has readers all over the world. I think the reason for this must be that the structural and functional differences between the brain hemispheres which I describe have, as indeed they must, their correlates in the mind; and that we are intuitively aware of these structural and functional differences within our consciousness – but only, it seems, once they are pointed out.

--McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 156-169)

Indeed they do, but this intuitive awareness assumes in the reader a certain openness to the world that the right hemisphere would give him if he's open to it. This book is not pop psychology or philosophy. It's an important, ambitious, intellectual synthesis. It is, in fact, prodigiously exemplary of left and right hemisphere cooperation. It is for that reason unlikely to persuade those who are already captured by the tyranny of reductive left hemisphere biases

The first part of his book is essentially a marvelous synthesis of the findings of neuroscience with phenomenological philosophy, drawing particularly on Husserl, Scheler and Heidegger. The second part is to look at the history of ideas and culture in the light of the synthesis established in Part 1.

He focuses primarily on the great moments of hemispheric balance in western cultural history were Golden Age Greece, Augustan Rome, the Renaissance, and the Romantic period. These are periods of expansion, soulfulness, wide-ranging creativity in the arts. But they don't last, and usually there's a period of constriction and ridgidification that follows, and we've been in such a post-Romantic constriction at least since the second half of 19th Century. We are at a moment of the apotheosis of Left Hemisphere tyranny now in the West both in its high culture and popular culture. And the question is when, if ever, the balance will be redressed.

In the meantime contemporary high art is with some exceptions lifeless, abstract, ironic, conceptual and popular culture in film and TV is irredeemably vulgar, either in its Hallmark Channel sentimentality on the one hand, or in its Game of Thrones or Westworld celebration of  the violent, the pornographic, the greedy, the powermad and the paranoid on the other. And in the midst of this utterly soul-shriveling disconnection from the life and wisdom of a world given to us by the right hemisphere, we have Game of Thrones/Westworld mentality shaping the future of what it means to be human in the image of psychopaths running high-tech companies and authoritarian governments whether here or in China.

I think that if there is anything that I contribute on this blog since its inception in 2003 that you will be hard pressed to find elsewhere is the attempt to look at the world through a mythopoetic lens that seeks a to be 'hemispherically balanced'. Whether I do this well or poorly is not for me to judge, but I do it because I trust my fundamental intuitions, and because it seems to me that it's called for.

Christianity for dogmatic, fundamentalistic, and moralistic Christians is all logoi and no muthoi, all left hemisphere and very little of the right. The main reason I remain a Catholic is that no matter what left-brained nonsense comes out of Rome (although with Francis we have a reprieve from nonsense) or lifeless, priggish moralism comes out of so many pulpits, or continued stream of revelations of corrupt chanceries, there is a richly textured experience for an awakened right hemisphere in its liturgies, sacred music, and emphasis on contemplation and the life of prayer. I am lucky in my local parish because all those things, including good homiletics, are there in a very palpable way. Catholicism survives despite itself because of the space it preserves, no matter how misunderstood, for that which is given to human experience from the depths. 

Faith is something that must be understood mythopoetically. It comes to us from the right hemisphere, and becomes a parody of itself when it loses its felt sense of being grounded in that experience. Faith will always be nonsense to a left-hemispheric critique if there is no grounding of it in the right. The mantra for me is fides quaerens intellectum, which means 'faith seeking understanding'. Fides is the experiential foundation in the right unpacked and made sense of by intellectum, the left.

So faith is not the credulous assertion of unbelievable propositions, but a way of experiencing and understanding the world in the light of a heart awakened to a dimension of reality that has always been central to authentic Christian experience. To live in a faith community in the best sense of the phrase is to live in a community shaped by the intuitions and revelations of the ancestors, which are there to awaken in us the same intuitions and revelations. When they stop doing that the community dies or becomes a zombie version of itself. The awakening is the experience of faith as 'gift' that is so often spoken about and so little understood by those who have not experienced it. If there is no such awakening, no matter how groggy one remains after it, there is nothing for the left hemisphere to understand, and Christianity becomes a parody of itself dominated by left-hemispheric tyrants. 

Dostoyevski depicts such a parody in Ivan's Grand Inquisitor parable. It describes the efforts of a left-hemispheric tyrant to keep the "faithful" in a state of sleep because they are easier to control when slumbering. When Christ appears on the scene to wake them up, the Grand Inquisitor must kill him. Wakefulness and liberation are too messy, too hard to control, too inimical to social order. In The Brother's Karamazov, Ivan's is a life tortured by a dominant left-hemispheric experience of the world, while Alyosha has a more balanced experience of it. He may be somewhat naive at the outset, but he's grounded and has more inner resources to work with and is capable of developing or maturing in a way that his brothers are not. He is as intelligent as Ivan, but his intelligence is a serpent in service to his dove. 

Anxiety, substance abuse, clinical depression, insane, cult-like partisan politics shapes the soul of the West in this moment, and nobody with any credibility has a remedy. It all comes from living in a social imaginary in which left-hemisphere values have hypertrophied in such a way that they strangle or crowd out the possibility of a deeply felt connection to truth, to real meaning and real life.

Politics has no answer. In fact, no sane politics is a possibility until some sanity be restored to the broader culture. The churches may at some point present a possible solution, but for now they have lost their moral authority and can be of no use in the near future in addressing the broader cultural crisis.

But something has got to shift, and I believe that the shift will come bottom-up rather than top-down. Life is stirring in the seeds and roots and the question is when this Winter will end and a new Spring commence. There are lots of individuals who feel this, but the problem now is that they have no robust cultural legitimacy in a utilitarian, expediency-oriented, soul-crushing, left-hemisphere-dominated world. I trust, though, that somehow they will eventually find one another and find a way to articulate a sane imagination of a flourishing human future that is just not available to us at this moment. 

There are signs of Spring, though--and this book by McG is one of them. While I'm not as active on this blog as I have been in its earlier years, I do intend for it to be a place to point to those signs and interpret them as honestly as I can. 

Nunes/Bannon Mind Rebuttal, Part 2

For the most part, however, the changes that occurred at around this period [the Renaissance] do suggest the salience of primarily the right hemisphere’s world. One of the defining features of the Renaissance must be its opening of the eyes to experience, initially almost exclusively personal experience, in preference to what is ‘known’ to be the case, the teachings of scholastic theory and received opinion. There is a corresponding respect for the quiddity of individual things and people, rather than their being seen as members of categories.

There was a faithful imitation of, and close attention to, the natural world, and to what other people in other times may have thought or known; and in this breadth of concern, and the insistence on the interconnectedness of things and the importance of the fullest possible. This also included the body and the soul equally and inseparably as the context of all living things. In its respect for the body as more than a thing, and an integral part of the whole person; in its rehabilitation of the senses; in its emphasis on spatial depth, and on time as lived, with man becoming the ‘being towards death’; in the rekindling of empathy in the arts, including theatre, and a preoccupation with the expressive powers of the human face in particular, in the portraiture that dominates the visual arts of the period; in the sense of the self as an individual, yet integrated by moral and emotional bonds to society; in the newfound expressiveness of all the arts; in the rise of polyphony, with the importance of melody, harmony and the relationship of the parts to the whole; in the rise of wit and pathos, and the predominant emphasis on the links between wisdom and melancholy; in its attraction to exemplars, rather than to categories; in its capacity to accept the coniunctio oppositorum, and to relish mixed emotions and the coming together of widely different ideas; in its emphasis on the importance of what must remain implicit, on inborn and intuited skills (as well as on the artist as a semi-divine being), and on the world as never just what it ‘seems’ to be, but pointing beyond to something Other, a world that is semi-transparent, pregnant with myth and metaphor –

[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period. As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

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

McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. If we can understand the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of the late medieval period into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life and concreteness of of the Renaissance, and then why it shifted back again to the hubristic left-brain dominance of the Enlightenment rationality, perhaps we can find a way forward toward a new Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the Enlightenment Age of Reason in our profoundly imbalanced situation in which autocratic technocratic control vies with the postmodern, anarchic, anything-goes ethos of "The Age of Whatever".

Nobody wants to live in The Age of Whatever.  But the only way to avoid this endless ping-ponging between the worst of the Right and what is worst in the Left is to synthesize what is best in both. That is the coniunctio oppositorum, or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy in both to marry, so to say. That is the formula for Renaissance. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance.

In previous posts here and here, I've made the case that Trump support has two aspects represented respectively by Devin Nunes and Steve Bannon--the first ignorance and gullibility, the second well-informed and shrewd bordering on cynical. For the purposes of this post, I am going to address the elements in this mindset that are not cynical but which have some validity.

The most intelligent advocates for the Bannon/Nunes mindset see themselves as redressing a balance, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. The most thoughtful Liberals understand the limitations of the Liberal Order, but they simply do not have the cultural or spiritual resources to overcome them.

Liberalism is the real conservatism now because it seeks to maintain the status quo. Bannonism, realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. There are always good reasons to do or support the wrong thing. So Bannonism does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate ideology for another. If they succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us the worst of the Right.

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

The Meta-Historical Context

Regarding my understanding of the meaning of history, there are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview that sees evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions that lead them to believe that life on earth a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that I see as essentially true, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.  

My own view, which I would argue is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity, tersely summarized here, is shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Heidegger, Jung, Gebser, and Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin adds a Christian dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. In the last year I've come across the work of Gary Lachman and his mentor Colin Wilson, with whom I am also deeply sympathetic. This German intuition can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being".  

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Freud are also contributors to this "story". They would dissent about their being a progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of being itself. It is this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up.

I fear that they are closing off the human being from an openness to the dimension of depth, the plumbing of which is central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. I will have more to say about McGilchrist's argument in future posts. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book. 

I know what the computer science folks hope for with regard to machine learning, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special things that humans have, which is the world of depth given to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. Machines can mimic Left Brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which requires a right brain, because that data comes from the dimension of depth. If McGilchrist's fundamental argument is correct, and I think it is, what currently ails us is caused by a condition that has caused us to become progressively alienated and buffered.

This is a condition that began to take hold among the voluntarists and nominaliststs in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. And so then the what is imagined as the transhuman or posthuman future is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony. It is the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to llberate the human from the irrational. Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason are blind to and complacent about the threats posed by a mechanomorphic human future. 

The Current Crisis

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

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

Cultural Conservatives blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these smug, shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and want to throw up. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so smug, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a soulless, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; they're as alienated as everyone else, but they don't see a need to blow up the existing order because they know how much worse it will be without it. 

And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a community with an exceptional local church, they rightly see that there's nothing special there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle club would be more edifying than attending local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the church to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize. 

Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. He asked and so I answered truthfully.  I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy. I wasn't seeking to persuade him or to accuse women and doctors of being murderers. I focused more on the the group-think aspect of the issue.

Whether it's criminalized or not is not as important to me as what it says about our glib, technocratic-utilitarian tolerance for what is a dehumanizing act, whether people want to face it or not. It says something very damning about us as a society, but so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a  sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many. Abortion is the Liberal moral blind spot. The other symptoms are mostly Conservative blind spots.

My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the cultural legitimacy that abortion has obtained. Deep down he knows it's wrong, whatever the good reasons might be that are presented to justify it, but he never heard anybody explain why in language that made sense to him. My friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this.  But most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. 

Authenticity and Morality

Any kind of moral position that is determined mainly by outside-in factors is immature and inauthentic. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no real convictions. They just do what people expect them to do. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to take advantage of poor old people. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it, since everyone else is doing it. Whatever. There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what is the right thing and then finding the courage to do it. Moral questions are decided for you outside-in. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue it when it requires no courage or moral agency to just go along. 

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

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

So a healthy "Axial" culture's, customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party over here. Both are proposing a cure to the ills of the Liberal Order that is worse than the disease. 

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

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

What prominent figure on the cultural Right has that inner dignity and thoughtfulness? If there is such a person, would he be invited as a regular guest on Fox News? Could he have a nice, sane, sit-down chat with Rush Limbaugh or Alex Jones? If any is an elected official, could he or she give a sane, thoughtful speech on the Senate floor without being ostracized and kicked out of the GOP? There are lots of thoughtful, sane cultural conservatives, but they are all Never Trumpers. 

Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own  shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves. 

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

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

You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal Tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others. Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason more than loyalty, and so that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are reasons to doubt the tribal wisdom. 

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

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

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

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

***

Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but it has no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't really understand what a real cure requires. They are angry, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. But even here, the issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. Warren and Sanders seems to "get" this in a way almost everyone else doesn't. 

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

The real solution is Renaissance a la Iain McGilchrist. So in future posts, I want to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear answers, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it. 

The Master and His Emissary

This is the title of Iain McGilchrist's important new book. It's subtitle is "The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World". The video below summarizes very succinctly and broadly the argument he's making, but it's based on a story by Nietzsche:

There was once a wise spiritual master, who was the ruler of a small but prosperous domain, and who was known for his selfless devotion to his people. As his people flourished and grew in number, the bounds of this small domain spread; and with it the need to trust implicitly the emissaries he sent to ensure the safety of its ever more distant parts. It was not just that it was impossible for him personally to order all that needed to be dealt with: as he wisely saw, he needed to keep his distance from, and remain ignorant of, such concerns. And so he nurtured and trained carefully his emissaries, in order that they could be trusted.

Eventually, however, his cleverest and most ambitious vizier, the one he trusted most to do his work, began to see himself as the master, and used his position to advance his own wealth and influence. He saw his master’s temperance and forbearance as weakness, not influence, and on his missions on his master’s behalf, adopted his mantle as his own – the emissary became contemptuous of his master. And so it came about that the master was usurped, the people were duped, the domain became a tyranny; and eventually it collapsed in ruins.

McGilchrist comments: At present the domain – our civilisation – finds itself in the hands of the vizier, who, however, gifted, is effectively an ambitious regional bureaucrat with his own interests at heart. Meanwhile the Master, the one whose wisdom gave the people peace and security, is led away in chains. The Master is betrayed by his emissary.

Echoes of Dostoyevski's Grand Inquisitor story, no? Or Prospero and Antonio?

Have you ever wondered why there are these historical moments, renaissance moments, that bloom and fade: 5th-century Athens, 15th century Florence, Germany in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? Why can't these moments be sustained? Well, McGilchrist has an unusual take on it that is rooted in hemispheric brain research. So he starts from characterizations about the roles the right and left hemispheres play in the way individual human beings relate to reality, but it's particularly interesting for its implications about the way human beings develop their collective habits of mind--their cultures, their politics, and economics. 

The right brain is the Master, and the left is the Emissary; people and cultures begin to decay as soon as the emissary begins to think it no longer needs the master. Left-brained scientistic and bureacratic thinking sees itself as the master of its domains, but it's not. And that's why they are so arrogant, because they have forgotten whom they serve. The first claims to serve the truth, but it is such an attenuated, meaningless notion of truth as to be worthless. The second claims to be serving the public, but all bureaucracies serve themselves and their own institutional interests first. And both modes of left brain thinking are all about control and about filtering out or de-legimitating whatever they cannot control. 

If you have ten minutes to spare, watch the RSA video. It mainly focuses on how the right and brain hemisphers function, how they relate to one another, and suggests at the end the price we pay when the left brain operates independently from the right. 

 

I have the book on order, so I haven't had a chance to read it yet.  But anybody who has been a long-time reader here can see how it relates to themes I've developed over the years.  

I also want to relate it to my recent involvement in Public Schools and the politics of education reform. The reformers are egregiously left-brained in their understanding the of the challenges, and the results have been predicatably disastrous.

I've characterized the the conflict as one between technocrats and humanists, but the humanists are at a very severe disadvantage, not only because they haven't near the money or the media megaphone that the technocrats have, but because they don't really have a coherent, legitimated world view that gives them a strong place to stand and fight back. The video clip above refers to the difficulty when it talks about the Berlusconi function of the left brain. It controls the messaging, and it tends to filter out anything that does not fit its preconceptions.

Many people who are inclined to be open to humanist thinking feel ambivalently about it because they have come to accept that the discussion is to be held on left-brain terms following left-brain rules, and so the humanist cannot talk about the colors red, green, and blue in a discussion where the rules stipulate that only black and white are permitted. The argument, therefore, is lost from the get-go because the master, the part of us that has the most important things to say, is locked up in the back room bound in chains.

More when I've had a chance to read the book.

UPDATE: Interesting review of the book here.