After the Future

Genealogy Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project

I'm going to break up Part 12 into several components based on the conversations between Bishop Maximus and John Vervaeke that I have linked to here. In addition to watching these conversations between these two, I have watched the second half (25 lectures) of Vervaeke's Awakening to the Meaning Crisis, which has enabled me to better understand and appreciate what he's up to. (See Note 1.)

In any event, it took my watching his conversations with Bishop Maximus to get me see that Vervaeke is far more open to traditional religious thinking when he sees that it works, and clearly it's working for someone like Bishop Maximus. It has been one of my presuppositions that renaissance--if it's to come in the future--must come from a retrieval in a postmodern key of something understood by our premodern ancestors but forgotten by us, and that it must be integrated with science's practical approach to living in the world given to us by our rationality, i.e., our ability to figure things out and to understand them as they are and not as we wish them to be. I am committed to rationality, not to materialism. This is Vervaeke's project, too, or so it seems to me. 

Vervaeke's cognitive science compliments the neuro-scientific work of Iain McGilchrist about whom I've written extensively. Both thinkers are deeply philosophically literate, and they both use philosophy as a tool to integrate knowledge in other domains--cognitive science, neuroscience, computer science, biology--and the arts. And both use philosophy in what I illustrate in the diagram below to be the integration of Phronesis with Sophia. The goal for both is to point the way to the reestablish a Wisdom Tradition in the West--and elsewhere, but particularly the West. Wisdom is essential for any religion that might be described as 'good religion'--and I'd argue for any society that we can call a good society.  (See Note 2)

That, too, is my central concern, and I see my task here as to function mostly as an intermediary to make the work of these and others working on these issues available to an audience that might otherwise find such a project inaccessible because they haven't the philosophical background to understand the significance of what they are doing.  So that's the task for me with Vervaeke and McGilchrist going forward. Both are staking out a middle ground that integrates Sophia and Phronesis within 'Religio,' i.e., the experiential grounding of the human in the Living Real.

(See Note 3 below for explanation of this diagram. This is my way of conceptualizing what is needed using some of Vervaeke's language. I have no idea whether he would agree with it.)

I add content to this diagram in the Genealogy Series where I first introduce the critique of the contemporary metphysical imaginary as bereft of the vertical dimension depicted here, and about how the future of the human project requires its restoration in some way. I see both Vervaeke and McGilchrist as key contributors to this restorative task. Their work obviously depends on the work of many others, but what makes both so interesting to me is their ability to integrate and synthesize a broad range of work in ways that are so relevant to the meaning crisis for which late-modern Liberal thought has no remedy. 

The first twenty-five of Vervaeke's lectures are designed to establish the historical developments that led to the meaning crisis we are currently undergoing, and the second 25 lectures are designed to show how Third Generation Cognitive Science is mapping some possible solutions. He says that all healthy societies have highly functioning Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders. All three of these have broken down in contemporary North Atlantic societies, and their breakdown needs to be addressed because we, unlike other societies that have preceded us in the West, have no broadly recognized 'psychotechnologies' to help people to deal with what he calls the "perennial problems"--the various human tendencies toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--otherwise known as foolishness.

'Nomological Breakdown' is the prevailing sense that the cosmos is random, cruel, impersonal, and purposeless. Humans did not think this was true two hundred years ago. But developments in science coupled with the culturally disruptive effects of industrialization have destroyed any collective sense that we live in a cosmos that is undergirded by a benevolent order. We see this reflected in prestige cultural work from Game of Thrones to The Sopranos and Succession. I think that one of the reasons that Everything Everywhere All at Once won so many Oscars this year is because it wants to depict the random, meaningless, cruel cosmos that for us has become "normative" while asserting the possibility for deep, human personal meaning achieved through persistent, agapic love. The fundamental intuition is correct, but deeply inadequate. It's a start, though. And there are other signs of a shift toward affirming meaning among our culture's elites who are becoming bored with all the cruelty and meaninglessness. 

'Normative breakdown' is our experience of a social order that has come to emphasize the autonomous individual to such an extent that any idea of the common good has become impossible to ground politics, social norms/ethics, or any sense of living in a shared society. I've been arguing for years that this is leading us to disaster because of the way we are all divided and conquered in such a way as to be impotent to confront and push back against where techno-capitalism is dragging us.  

'Narrative Breakdown' is our experience of living in a society that derives no sense of meaning or purpose from an overarching Mythos derived from what I've been calling a metaphysical imaginary. The best we can do, as in Everything Everywhere All at Once--itself a paradigm of narrative breakdown--is affirm the possibility of meaning through love. Otherwise narrative meaning--true mythopoeisis rooted in Religio--is impossible in a society where Rationalist Materialism dominates our metaphysical imaginary. We are still skeptical of embracing grand narratives. So we are ruled by default by narrative habits we can't shake, in the American case by Calvinist individualism and its Horatio Alger bootstraps narrative that justifies Neoliberal meritocracy. This is a narrative that makes no sense in a world that is quickly evolving into one where the machines will be doing most of the work, and where humans will have to obtain their sense of identity, dignity, and purpose, i.e., their sense of life's meaning, from something other than their activities in the economic sphere. 

When I talk about the breakdown of the Liberal Order, this is basically what I mean--that Liberalism hasn't the resources within itself to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. That doesn't mean that Liberalism is or was wrong--it was enormously valuable and important for the human project--but Liberalism from the beginning has been structured in a tradeoff relationship between Phronesis and Sophia in which the former has crowded out the latter. Now it's time to reestablish a metaxis--a creative, balanced tension--between Phronesis and Sophia. More and more people are recognizing that this is necessary, but nobody knows how to do it. I certainly don't know how to do it, but I trust in the human project, and I believe that we can find a way to rebalance things one way or another.  

So the new restoration that is called for is what Vervaeke calls 'Religio', which is what I've been calling the Living Real. For him and for me this requires getting a deeper grip on reality, and to do this requires a participative ontology and epistemology that Neoplatonism theorizes, (with a little help from Heidegger, Merleau-Ponty, and 3rd Generation Cog Sci)--or so I want to argue.

Vervaeke uses this word 'transjective' (See Note 4) to describe our relationship to the world around us as alternative to the way our imaginary is still so profoundly influenced by Cartesian subject/object relationship. He references Martin Buber's talking about the same thing in his I-Thou relationships. This requires an ontology that is essentially different from the one we inherited from the Enlightenment, one that rejects the Cartesian I-It, and embraces a kind of intersubjectivity if we understand by that a deep, immersive interconnectedness that is in a very real sense a function of anagogic (self-transcending), expansive Love.

This is the deep truth at the heart of the cosmos, but it's a truth we have become oblivious of because of the breakdown of the three orders referenced above. And so the task is to "wake up" to it, not in some sentimental, superficial sense, but in a way that is profoundly restorative for true human flourishing. So this is not just an intellectual project, but it has an essential intellectual component. We must find a way as a society to get a grip on the world and our experience in it that our current Rationalistic-Materialistic imaginary makes extraordinarily difficult. 

For Vervaeke, (and for me, and for Bishop Maximus) such a project is agapic and anagogic, by which he means driven by an understanding of the human being as self-transcending by virtue of his developing a deeper grip on reality that is empowered by a transcendent benevolence--if we can find a way as a culture  to value this truth again. Obviously individuals "self-transcend" all the time, but it's not valued by the broader society in the way it needs to be. And I think that it goes to the restoration of Nomological, Normative, and Narrative Orders in ways that make sense, i.e., that are well adapted to the world that is emerging where machines will be playing an unprecedented role in shaping the world we all live in.

This is not a world that the Cultural Right has any real grasp on. They feel the disruption and the ontological dizziness it causes, but they have no creative solutions. Its project is if anything profoundly maladaptive because it refuses to deal with the world as it is and as it is changing. They want simply, to use the Bill Buckley phrase, to 'stand athwart history yelling stop', but that is no response adequate to the enormity of what's happening. As a result its best solution is to restore a nostalgic imaginary Normative order by top-down fiat. Such a Normative Order is necessary in any healthy society--they are right in that--but it must emerge bottom-up out of the 'self-organizing' energies of the Living Real. 

So this being my first stab at trying to write about what Vervaeke is doing is tentative because I'm not sure I understand it fully yet, but I think it's important to have this background to understand why he's so interested to have these conversations with Bishop Maximus. About which I'll have more to say in the near future. 

You might also want to watch this lecture Vervaeke gave in December that is his attempt to explain why Neoplatonism and Cognitive Science are doing the same thing. 

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Note 1: Vervaeke's use of the term "naturalist imperative" is still not particularly clear to me, but it is not fatal from my pov because I'm willing for now to live with his understanding of 'self-transcendence' without insisting on extrapolating from it the metaphysical implications. But I'm still not crazy about his ideas about "Religion that is not Religion", because I think is impossible. The issue, as I see it, is not to give up on religion but to make distinctions between good religion and bad religion, and then to find ways of protect good religion from the forces--particularly the forms of idolatry that are associated with propositional tyranny--that persistently work to degrade it. What he's doing in 'Religion that isn't Religion', imo, is his trying to establish what's involved in good religion, and he's doing it in a way with which I am completely sympathetic. Good religion has vulnerabilities that often incline it to become a parody of good religion, to be sure. But even a 'Religion that is not Religion' must have its cult, code, and creed--or it just becomes another individualistic lifestyle choice, like choosing to undergo psychoanalysis. There is clearly a therapeutic dimension to what Vervaeke is doing, but his ambition is to find a remedy for a culture-wide meaning crisis, and so his proposals have broader aspirations than simply to be just another individualistic therapeutic technique. In article about him he's quoted:

How do we get from these disparate groups developing these new wisdom practices to an actual culture shift? Vervaeke’s answer surprised me. “I call it stealing the culture. What I mean is something analogous to what Christianity did in the ancient world where it stole the culture from the pagan worldview. There was no political revolution and no one was proposing how to reorganize the state. Instead, there were a bunch of communities of practice and transformation that rehomed people, teaching them through agape that they could be persons whereas the existing worldview said that they were not persons. The communities started networking together.”

I've thought for a while now that something like this is probably what's going to happen. As Christianity grew out of Hellenized Judaism, so will a restored vertical axis develop from within already existing post-axial religious traditions. In other words it will grow out of those traditions that have the infrastructure that predispose it to embrace self-transcendence. Vervaeke's conversations with Bishop Maximus demonstrate how this might happen. Eventually--not any time soon--a fusion metpahysical imaginary that integrates what's most valuable in all the great post-Axial traditions in concert with developments in Cognitive Science and philosophy will emerge that works best along the lines diagramed in the figure above. This needn't replace the great traditions, but it will provide a common framework that will allow for consensus to develop about what's important for the human future. I don't know that this will happen, but I hope it will. 

Any religion becomes a parody of itself when the cult, creed, and code become ends in themselves rather than a means 'affording' self-transcending transformation--what Vervaeke calls anagoge. Because such 'means' have value only insofar as they "work", then when they stop working for whatever reason, the 'wise' have to be adaptive enough to find out what does work. Vervaeke looks around him and he sees religions mostly not working in that they don't produce self-transcending, wise human beings, but too often rather the opposite--self-deceptive, self-destructive fools.

So religion as it is broadly practiced understandably seems for him to be more a part of the problem than offering any real solutions. But on the other hand, he certainly doesn't want to see himself as trying to promote a new religion, so it makes sense that he should come up with a way of talking about 'Religion that is not Religion' as a non-inflated way of describing what he's trying to do. But in the final analysis, his 'Rellgion that is not Rellgion' has a cult, code, and creed, and clearly, whatever he calls it, he hopes it will be culturally ascendant. 

Note 2. Lest there be any ambiguity, I support the secular state, and I believe that the restoration of a Sapiential Tradition is cultural project, not a political one, that can thrive in an open, democratic society. But as a cultural project, a sapiential tradition should have broad cultural legitimacy in the same way that Rationalist Materialism has legitimacy today. In my view there was no greater damage done to Christianity and its subversive call to self-transcendence than when Constantine made it the official religion of the Roman Empire. 

Note 3. The diagram seeks to conceptualize what a healthy metaphysical imaginary comprises. Such an imaginary recognizes knowledge and truth on both the horizontal and vertical axes, and I'd argue prioritizes the Vertical in the sense that McGilchrist prioritizes the Master over the Emissary. Both are needed, and both keep the other honest, but wisdom is more important because more foundational, and wisdom is precisely what our current Rationalist-Materialist imaginary has no place for. Late modern societies are in turmoil because they have no vertical axis and so spin aimlessnessly with no center to stabilize them. They continue to expand on the horizontal axis but have only the most superficial utilitarian criteria to interpret what they learn. I think this is changing and it must change. Vervaeke's work is very encouraging to me for this reason insofar as he's seeking to restore a place for Wisdom within the framework of cognitive science. The science part of that is horizontal, but the 'congitive' part of it is very open to ideas about self-transcendence on the vertical. 

In Geneaology Part 5 I introduce the criteria listed in the lower left of the chart above in an a preliminary attempt to evaluate what from my pov the health of any society's metaphysical imaginary requires. The argument to support such criteria is laid out in the development of the various parts of the series, but the crux of it is that any healthy society must have a metaphysical imaginary that comprises both a vertical and horizontal dimension as depicted in the diagram. The vertical and the horizontal map different domains of knowledge and have their own criteria of legitimacy, but they must remain in metaxic, creative tension, what Vervaeke calls an opponent or trade-off relationship. They both constrain and enable one another to produce deeper levels of knowledge and wisdom. Because knowledge on the horizontal and vertical proceed in a way that is interactive--we, i.e., our cognitive capabilities, are transformed/expanded as our knowledge of the world is transformed/expanded. When that interaction breaks down, when one or the other operates without being in a dynamic interrelationship with the other, as is our current condition, the whole system becomes impoverished and dysfunctional.

The criteria that define this metaxic relationship are as follows: 

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

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

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

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

Note 4: 'Transjective' is his term to identify the relationship between subjects and objects. There is no subject-object relationship; there are only transjective relationships. I'm not crazy about the term. I think maybe 'interjective' would work better in the sense that in the word understanding the prefix 'under' is etymologically closer in meaning to 'inter'. This emphasizes a way of experiencing the process of "understanding' as involving a cognitive subject standing between or in the midst of two poles of of knowledge and integrating them in the way that metaphor and analogy integrate two different things to produce insight. 

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

For "Genealogy Part 12 B: Propositional Tyranny in the West", go here.

Progressives v. Jacobins

For so long, San Francisco has been too self-satisfied to address the slow rot in every one of its institutions. But nothing’s given me more hope than the rage and the recalls. “San Franciscans feel ashamed,” Michelle Tandler told me. “I think for the first time people are like, ‘Wait, what is a progressive? … Am I responsible? Is this my fault?’”

San Franciscans are now saying: We can want a fairer justice system and also want to keep our car windows from getting smashed. And: It’s not white supremacy to hope that the schools stay open, that teachers teach children, and, yes, that they test to see what those kids have learned.

San Franciscans tricked themselves into believing that progressive politics required blocking new construction and shunning the immigrants who came to town to code. We tricked ourselves into thinking psychosis and addiction on the sidewalk were just part of the city’s diversity, even as the homelessness and the housing prices drove out the city’s actual diversity. Now residents are coming to their senses. The recalls mean there’s a limit to how far we will let the decay of this great city go. And thank God.

From Nellie Bowles, "How San Francisco Became a Failed City" in The Atlantic

Bowles, a progressive in good standing, laments, at least as I see it, the takeover of San Francisco by Jacobins on the identitarian cultural Left, which is a parallel phenomenon to the way the Republican Party has been taken over by Jacobins on the identitarian Right. We see much of what she points to in San Francisco dysfunction here in Seattle. There seems to be in both "progressive" cities a deficit of common sense that directly results from a kind of woke Jacobinism. By Jacobin I mean a kind of political fanaticism born of an unbalanced idealism that takes absolutist positions on particular values and issues. It's not that there isn't something true and important in what Jacobins assert; it's rather the absolutism of their assertions and their need to forcefully repress any dissent as being in bad faith or counterrevolutionary . 

The Jacobin is someone who becomes captured by the logic of an abstraction in such a way that the abstraction and what one extrapolates from it become more real than reality. Jacobinism is usually associated with a kind of revolutionary zeal on the Left, as in the Jacobins behind the terror in France in 1793. But Neoconservative Jacobinism was the driving force behind the invasion of Iraq in 2003. MAGA Jacobinism was behind the storming of the Capitol on January 6.

As a side note, I haven't paid much attention to Jacobin magazine over the years since I assumed by its choice of the name that it was run by Leftist absolutists, but I was interested to learn this week on the Ezra Klein podcast that Bhaskar Sunkara, the founder of Jacobin, is not himself a Jacobin by my definition of the term. Rather, he's a common-sense, 'non-identitarian' Democratic Socialist, which is how I would describe myself.

His interview with Klein made clear to me that he gets how the culture war is the biggest impediment preventing progress toward more important structural goals with regard to wealth distribution. Why?  Because insofar as its brand has become aligned with Left identitarian politics, it prevents the lower 80% on Main Street--working class, and non-college educated people--from feeling comfortable with Democrats. It's precisely this kind of Left cultural politics that has led to the dysfunction Bowles describes in San Francisco. I don't know that Sunkara, if he lived in San Francisco, would have voted to recall Ches Boudin, but he is very clearheaded about the limitations of imagination and thinking on the Left that led San Franciscans to recall him. In any event, Sunkara has made a Jacobin subscriber of me after listening to this interview. 

Despite Sunkara's not fitting my definition of a Jacobin (I'd say he has misnamed his magazine), I'd argue that a true Jacobin is someone who has an important insight or intuition, and he builds a reductionistic worldview from it that excludes any evidence that doesn't fit into it. It becomes crazy because of its surfeit of rationality and a deficit in understanding how people actually live and think.

To understand a Jacobin, you have to understand his foundational intuition, and then how he extrapolates from it. For Neocon Jacobins, Saddam ran a corrupt autocratic regime that that needed to be toppled so that in its place a model democracy could be created that would inspire other Islamic states to emulate. Again, a worthy ideal is at work there, but it's completely divorced from how people actually live and think in the Middle East. For MAGA Jacobins, the foundational insight is that the political system is run by corrupt elites from which the country must be saved. There's some truth there, but their idealism and the fanatic militancy of their solutions is completely divorced from reality. The fault does not lie in the validity of the original intuition about corrupt elites, but in the reductionistic worldview it engenders, which leads them to misidentify who exactly those elites are, which are mostly people the GOP's entire mission is to protect. 

And a similar dynamic plays out for the Jacobins on the Left. There is a difference between having extreme views and being a Jacobin. Bernie Sanders or AOC are not Jacobins. They might appear to have extreme views in relation to others on the political spectrum, but they are not purists. Sunkara talks in his interview about how AOC is taking flak from her Left because she actually wants to work to get some things done, and that requires compromise and working with the enemy, which the Jacobins to her Left cannot tolerate. A true Jacobin is an absolutist for whom compromise is anathema.

For Left identitarian Jacobins, the fundamental intuition is that American society is built on the exploitation of people of color and other marginalized populations and that justice requires that those historically marginalized become privileged. In order to do this, the justice system, so historically biased toward oppressing the marginalized, must be constrained from doing so in the future, and if that means a reduction in public safety, or homeless people shooting up and dying on the streets, or street muggings, store robberies, and other street crimes going unpunished, it's a price justice requires that the heretofore privileged must pay.

In their minds it's a way to restore balance, a balance that I'd agree needs to be restored. The question is how?

Jacobins are moral absolutists who are incapable of patience and who too easily feel contempt for anybody who does not share their absolutism. Such absolutism is mostly performative for other absolutists and, to say the least, alienating for everybody else. And it's counterproductive if you have any understanding about how politics work. Jacobins have no real understanding of human nature or a sense for how humans--and human societies--actually grow and change. For them there's no faith in the long arc of the moral universe bending toward justice; it must be justice now, and it must be forced down the throat of anybody who resists. 

It's for that reason that Progressives are not Jacobins. Progressives in my definition believe that both moral and material progress are a possibility, but that it is a long, difficult slog toward their achievement. Jacobins--whether on the Left or the Right--are like adolescent idealists who are spirited enough to feel deeply the transcendent power of Justice, who see clearly and are disgusted by the hypocrisy of those in charge, and who in their youthful zeal want to destroy the whole corrupt thing.

I sympathize. But it's one thing to be an idealist, and it's another thing to know how to make progress toward those ideals. Wisdom requires that we not only feel deeply the ideals that inspire us to work toward bringing the world into a deeper alignment with Justice, but to have a felt understanding of the intransigency of the resistance that impedes us. And a big part of that intransigency is to be found in the depths of our own souls, where progress toward an inner transformation of that intransigency must be made first in order that we might actually have the capacity to confront and overcome the intransigency in the world. That capacity is moral, and moral capacity has nothing to do with Jacobin moralistic absolutism. 

There is simply no true material progress without moral progress--the two are one and the same. One without the other isn't progress. That's why developments in technology are not progress by themselves. They become part of the movement toward progress when they serve moral ends. Technocapitalism has no moral ends. But there is no true individual moral progress that does not in some small way have a correlative transformative material effect on the world. The progress of the human spirit is deeply entwined with the spiritual renewal of the earth. [See note 1] 

Patience with ourselves leads to a patience with with the world. The trick is not to confuse patience with complacency, and to refuse cynicism, and to believe that the little things matter, that the small, often faltering steps we take forward matter--often more than we know. 

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Note 1. Such a grand statement needs more unpacking than I can give it here. My main point is to counter the broadly held idea both east and west that spiritual progress is all about getting out of space time, the house of illusions and exile, and into eternity. I would argue that the solution to the feeling of cosmic homelessness is not to find a home elsewhere, but to gradually build it here on the earth. The goal is not to escape into transcendence but rather the be focus points in space and time through which transcendence is infused into the earth, which is the historical evolutionary process that will effect its renewal. The Christian Neoplatonic frame I use to support this idea can be found here.

I realize that such a framework for most people--even Christians--seems too fantastic to take seriously. So it seems for now. But a metaphysical imaginary like this is required if humans are to find the inner resources and the practices that will give them the moral capacity to fight what is coming. A purely secular progressivism cannot provide that. 

My ongoing series--temporarily suspended, but to be resumed shortly--A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity is an attempt to rehabilitate Christian Neoplatonism in a postmodern key. I argue that Christian Neoplatonism is the ur-cultural operating system for Western Civilization. It lies there in the background mostly misunderstood but still shaping us in ways we are mostly unaware, but can be more fully awakened and developed in a way that could be restorative.  

J.S. Mill + Alisdair McIntyre = Charles Taylor

The third question is, will Democrats realize that both moral traditions need each other? As usual, politics is a competition between partial truths. The moral freedom ethos, like liberalism generally, is wonderful in many respects, but liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive.

America needs institutions built on the “you are not your own” ethos to create social bonds that are more permanent than individual choice. It needs that ethos to counter the me-centric, narcissistic tendencies in our culture. It needs that ethos to preserve a sense of the sacred, the idea that there are some truths so transcendentally right that they are absolutely true in all circumstances. It needs that ethos in order to pass along the sort of moral sensibilities that one finds in, say, Abraham Lincoln’s Second Inaugural Address — that people and nations have to pay for the wages of sin, that charity toward all is the right posture, that firmness in keeping with the right always has to be accompanied by humility about how much we can ever see of the right.

Finally, we need this ethos, because morality is not only an individual thing; it’s something between people that binds us together. Even individualistic progressives say it takes a village to raise a child, but the village needs to have a shared moral sense of how to raise it.

David Brooks, "How Democrats Can Win the Morality Wars"

I largely agree with what Brooks is trying to do, and I want to give him credit for trying. But as usual, I have some quibbles: "...liberal societies need nonliberal institutions if they are to thrive" sounds like an endorsement of illiberalism, which I don't think he means. Why not just say 'conservative'. The idea of obtaining liberal education has become a conservative idea precisely because the meaning of the word Liberal has become attenuated in ways that most cosmopolitan Liberals don't recognize. 

Essentially I think he's arguing for a metaxis, or a coincidentia oppositorum of Liberal and Conservative moral traditions. Mill represents the first and McIntyre the second. I think that Brooks goes wrong, though, when he lumps Taylor in with the second, 'you are not your own' tradition. For Taylor that simply is not true, but his goal is to establish how we can be our own in a non-trivial way. 

Elsewhere in his essay, Brooks uses the phrase 'horizons of significance' in reference to Taylor without explaining it. In doing so seems inadvertently to lump Taylor into the conservative camp, but Taylor is man of the Left. He's also a Catholic, but that's what makes him interesting, imo. He's not easily categorizable. He in fact embodies exactly what Brooks is calling for, which is an integration of Right and Left moral traditions.  He achieves this metaxis in his 1992 Massey lectures entitled "The Malaises of Modernity". I wish these five 45-minute-long lectures were more widely recognized, and I encourage the reader here to listen to them or to read them.

Taylor's offers what he calls the 'ethic of authenticity", which requires a deeply developed sense of mature individual freedom combined with a deeply felt sense of there being existential horizons of significance. It's his attempt to integrate the second with the first that prevents the first from devolving into a groundless, anything-goes narcissism.

And it raises the essential question: what does it mean to be authentically human? Any morally serious consideration of that question must draw upon what the great post-Axial religious and philosophical traditions have to say about it. This is precisely what the 'moral freedom ethos' that dominates cosmopolitan Liberalism fails to do. Or rather, the moral freedom ethos presupposes this tradition without understanding its broader horizons of significance, which leads to its trivialization. 

Maybe more on this later. 

BTW, here are the links to the subsequent Taylor lectures:

Lecture 2

Lecture 3

Lecture 4

Lecture 5

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

In a 2018 New Yorker profile of the Chinese science fiction writer Cixin Liu, Jiayang Fan writes--

I looked at him, studying his face. He blinked, and continued, “If you were to loosen up the country [China] a bit, the consequences would be terrifying.” I remembered a moment near the end of the trilogy, when the Trisolarans, preparing to inhabit Earth, have interned the whole of humanity in Australia:

The society of resettled populations transformed in profound ways. People realized that, on this crowded, hungry continent, democracy was more terrifying than despotism. Everyone yearned for order and a strong government. . . . Gradually, the society of the resettled succumbed to the seduction of totalitarianism, like the surface of a lake caught in a cold spell.

Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. Liu closed his eyes for a long moment and then said quietly, “This is why I don’t like to talk about subjects like this. The truth is you don’t really—I mean, can’t truly—understand.” He gestured around him. “You’ve lived here, in the U.S., for, what, going on three decades?” The implication was clear: years in the West had brainwashed me. In that moment, in Liu’s mind, I, with my inflexible sense of morality, was the alien. 

And so, Liu explained to me, the existing regime made the most sense for today’s China, because to change it would be to invite chaos. “If China were to transform into a democracy, it would be hell on earth,” he said. “I would evacuate tomorrow, to the United States or Europe or—I don’t know.” The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice. He went on, “Here’s the truth: if you were to become the President of China tomorrow, you would find that you had no other choice than to do exactly as he has done.”

It was an opinion entirely consistent with his systems-level view of human societies, just as mine reflected a belief in democracy and individualism as principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes. I was reminded of something he wrote in his afterword to the English edition of “The Three-Body Problem”: “I cannot escape and leave behind reality, just like I cannot leave behind my shadow. Reality brands each of us with its indelible mark. Every era puts invisible shackles on those who have lived through it, and I can only dance in my chains.”

The most interesting part of this excerpt is the sentences I've highlighted in the last two paragraphs, "The irony that the countries he was proposing were democracies seemed to escape his notice". And then her assertion that her "belief in individualism and democracy are principles to be upheld against all outcomes". 

Fan betrays the cluelessness of cosmopolitan elites that I described in my post last week about the military and foreign policy establishment. It is not ironic or inconsistent at all that Liu can see the danger that democratic governance would pose to Chinese society while at the same time embracing life as it's lived in a liberal democratic society.

Liu's view is more complex, and he is right about Fan if indeed he sees her as brainwashed. She is a 'type', even if she doesn't think she is. She thinks of herself, I'm sure, as an independent, critical thinker. She writes for The New Yorker! But she's just mouthing the cosmopolitan Liberal talking points. Her editor doesn't pick up on it, because he or she is also brainwashed, i.e., captured by his or her unconscious presuppositions.

It is obvious to me that Liu is not contradicting himself in saying that democracy is not right for China now even though it is for many Western societies. That doesn't mean that a Liberal Democracy will never be right for China. It has to find its own way, it has to grow from the seeds that we see were sown there in Tiananmen or in Hong Kong. The problem for the Chinese, as for all societies, is to live in the tension between the realities on the ground and one's idealistic aspirations. One might see that as dancing in one's chains. Not a bad metaphor for the human condition in general.

As I wrote in my Bobos post recently, I believe that the French and American declarations were a profound evolutionary step forward for humanity.  And while I also believe that the Liberal Order to which those declarations gave shape is currently near collapse, that doesn't mean that we stop evolving.

I believe that we will find a way to preserve what was best in the Liberal Order, particularly its ideals regarding liberte, fraternite, egalite. I believe these ideals are universal and transcultural, but I also believe that even the Western societies in which those ideals were first articulated were not politically or morally mature enough to realize them except in a very preliminary way. We are seeing in the U.S. slow collapse of the constitutional framework designed as a first attempt to realize those ideals. It was bound to fail sooner or later because its contradictions and shortcomings were just too profound. But there have been and will continue to be repeated attempts to overcome these contradictions. What number of republics is France up to? I've lost count. 

The ideals that shaped the Liberal Order are seed ideas, and they germinate and grow in different ways in different soil conditions. The country that soon after the articulation of the ideals in the Declaration became the slave state known as the U.S.A. was simultaneously an interesting embodiment and a mockery of those ideals. And the country that soon after became France's First Republic very quickly unraveled into a military dictatorship. And France ping-ponged through the next 150 years between right and left in its own peculiar French way.  

Indeed, it's very much an open question whether whatever level of its realization of these ideals the U.S. has achieved will survive in the U.S. to the end of the decade. But even if we regress into an era of dark, fascistic politics, which is a real possibility, I believe that the political DNA of these ideals is strong enough that it will eventually restore the U.S. to its better self.

How much stupidity and suffering we must endure between now and then remains to be seen. But perhaps we need to wander in the wilderness for a while in order that it might become clear to everyone that the ridiculously obsolete U.S. Constitution has to go so that a new one, better adapted to realities in the 21st Century and beyond, can be formulated. I have lost all patience with the U.S. Constitution fetishizers, whether they are Liberals or Conservatives. 

But the important point is that neither American or French society was ready in the late 18th century to become a truly open, egalitarian democracy, and neither has truly become one today. But each in its a few-steps-forward-then-a-step-backward way has made progress. So the mistake is to think that because we do from time to time take a step backward that progress isn't possible.

So the mistake, therefore, is to think that the ideal is wrong because societies cannot embody it immediately--or permanently. This is the mistake made by eastern European autocrats or the Chinese who believe that Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere delusional. But it is also a mistake that Neocons and others in the foreign policy establishment, for whom Anne Applebaum is a representative type--make in thinking that a Liberal Democracy can be imposed by force or fiat in Iraq or Afghanistan--or China. And so it's also the mistake made by all cosmopolitan elites--for whom Jiayang Fan is a representative 'type'-- who are smugly complacent in thinking that their embrace of Liberal Democracy is always and everywhere better, and so therefore any society that doesn't embody its ideals is deserving of their opprobrium. That in Fang's words, "democracy and individualism [are] principles to be upheld regardless of outcomes." This is rank, naive Jacobinism. 

The seeds of these ideals are have been strewn everywhere, and if there are places, like China where they have sprouted and then been stamped out, other seeds will keep sprouting and there will be a time when the conditions will favor their flourishing. The Chinese are famous for the ability to take the long view, not something Western utilitarian Liberals are capable of. The Western sense of justice or fairness requires that if some have it now, then so should everybody. Immediately. "Regardless of outcomes". Regardless of how much suffering and chaos the effort to impose it causes. Regardless whether this effort has any reasonable chance of success. This seems to be Fan's view--and the view of most liberal media types. If North Atlantic societies can have Liberal Democracies, why can't China? Why can't Afghanistan? 

Because that's just not how it works on planet earth.

So the challenge is, as always, to live in a metaxic tension between the harsh realities on the ground and the ideals we aspire to in a hoped-for future. The ideals cannot be imposed, they can only be grown, and they grow in the space between the current reality and the unrealized ideal. The mistake is to refuse to live in the discomfort of being neither here or there, i.e., to be naively idealistic like the Neocon Right and Jacobin Left, on the one hand, or to be so cynical as to believe that progress is impossible, that humans are too evil, that life on earth can only be a Social Darwinian eat-or-be-eaten agon. 

The latter seems to be kinda/sorta Liu's vision, and perhaps that is what Fan is really reacting to. It's a little more complex for Liu, but at least in The Three Body Problem the values frame irredeemably Social Darwinist. It's a battle between two factions for whom Social Darwinist assumptions completely circumscribe the antagonists whether on earth or on Trisolaris. On earth there are the Naive Idealists whose disappointment in humanity has made them profoundly cynical about humanity. They have come to be believe that humans as a species are not worthy of survival and so work in collaboration with the invading Trisolarans.

Then there is Team Human who understandably see these collaborators as traitors. Team Human, of course, is represented by an international coalition of scientific, military, and security elites because what other humans really count, right? In any event, for these elites the only imperative is the survival of the human species in the face of threat from the alien invaders who are more advanced civilizationally, i.e.,scientifically (does anything else really matter for Liu?). For them survival and continued evolution of the species is an end itself that justifies any means to preserve it. 

But if within an exclusively Darwinist values frame humans as a species have no more cosmic significance than any other species, who really cares about what happens to humans in the future? (The Trisolarans aren't due to arrive for another 450 years!) If there isn't more to fight for--some spiritual ideal, for instance--than simply surviving, is the fight and the human species being fought for worth the trouble? Why not just allow the superior Trisolarans or, more relevant to our current situation, the more faster evolving AI-driven machines to win? Humans had their run, let whoever comes next take the field.

I haven't read the other books in Liu's trilogy, but I suspect he'd say that the continued human evolution through scientific exploration is justification enough for human survival. There seems to be an unconscious Fichtean idealism, and in that what I see as a parodic spiritual impulse, in Liu's vision of ever-increasing scientific and technological development. He might argue that the very fight for survival against the Trisolarans pushes the human race to greater levels of innovation and discovery, that is, to a higher civilizational level. Humans evolve to higher levels of civilization precisely because of the threat to their survival posed by a superior civilization. It's not just species survival that matters, but civilizational (scientific/technological) advancement. That's what justifies human species survival. 

But I'm not going to parse out what's wrong with the logic here because in the end all Liu is really talking about is China vs. the West, isn't he? And if all he really cares about is nationalistic vanity disguised as species vanity, it's not very interesting, at least to me. I'm not denying its motivating power of survival and the need to dominate, but hopefully there is more to being human worth fighting for.