After the Future

The Historical Significance of This Moment

Over the years, [Ian Bassin] said, that kind of alliance has mobilized against autocratic movements in countries including the Czech Republic, France, Finland, and, most recently, Poland, where the center-right joined with its opponents on the left to topple the antidemocratic Law and Justice party. The chilling counterexample, Bassin noted, is that during the period between World War I and World War II, “center-right parties in Germany and Italy chose a different course.” Rather than directly opposing the emerging fascist movements in each country, they opted “instead to try to ride the energy of [the] far-right extremists to power, thinking that once there, they could easily sideline [their] leaders.”

That was, of course, a historic miscalculation that led to the destruction of democracy in each country. But, Bassin said, “right now, terrifyingly, the American Republican Party is following the German and Italian path.” The belligerent Jordan may face just enough personal and ideological opposition to stop him, but whether or not he becomes speaker, his rise captures the currents carrying the Trump-era GOP ever further from America’s democratic traditions.

Ronald Brownstein in The Atlantic 

My sense is that most of the Republicans who hate Matt Gaetz and now support Jordan have no sense whatsoever of the historical consequences of their fluctuating allegiances. They don't think in terms of historic calculations. It never enters into their minds. They and their staff just calculate what's good in the short term for their careers. As a group, these are not thoughtful, well-educated, or well-informed people. And so, while I hope at least some of them prove me wrong, they strike me as intellectually and emotionally incapable of making choices that support the long-term health of American democracy. Such thoughts are beyond the scope of their thinking. 

Do the voters who elected Republicans to the House in Biden districts in New York and California regret giving the GOP the majority? How many even think about majorities and minorities? And unless they voted for George Santos, most don't regret their votes because they don't even remember who they voted for or could tell you his or her name. Most are not paying attention to what's going on now in Washington. To the agree that they're aware of it, it's just the same old, same old with little significance for their lives. And the radical, anti-democratic force the Republicans have become is papered over by old caricatures about what they used to be, like fiscally responsible. What they have become is beyond the scope of their thinking because these voters rely on such cliches to navigate in a world they don't have the time or interest to understand more deeply. 

So most voters don't understand that we're on a razor's edge. And either they will not understand the historical significance of what we're going through until it's too late, or if somehow we avoid Germany's and Italy's fate, they will never understand how close we came. 

The Nihilism of the Intersectional Left

What I cannot understand is endorsing, validating, or standing in solidarity with war crimes. That so many student organizations did so is stunning. It commits them to positions anathema not only to the conservatives they often tangle with but to left-leaning liberals and progressives, many of whom now perceive a frightening difference in core values that too many had scarcely pondered before. 

Conor Fridersdorf

Simplistic moralistic thinking finds a way to justify the unjustifiable. It justified the Spanish Inquisition. It justified the French Terror. It justified the Cultural Revolution in China. The people who commit the worst atrocities are those who think they do it in defense of or inspired by some moral principle, and they believe that their actions serve justice and truth and that history will prove them right. The more moralistic the justification, the more brittle the thinking, and the more brittle the thinking, the greater the need to double down and to embrace an emotional fanaticism that blocks out all criticism. 

I have used my phrase 'ontological dizziness' most frequently to describe the kind of vertigo into which people with traditional values have been thrust in response to the dissolution of  the customary cultures into which they were born. They blame Liberals for this, but the post WWII consumerist society and its media are the real cause. These Americans shaped by Middle American customary culture embraced this shift into consumerism because they accepted that it was all a part of what made America great even as it has slowly dissolved the social infrastructure that supported their customs and traditions.

People in such a vertiginous state will grab onto whatever is near at hand to steady them, so they grab onto a guy like Donald Trump, a classic American huckster in the P.T. Barnum mold, and a guy whose gaudy faux success is a parody of the old American Dream. Perhaps there is a kind of comfort in being conned by Trump. What could be more American? 

But we see how the Cultural Left is affected by ontological dizziness in more subtle ways. The Cultural Left seems, relatively speaking, to be more sane because they are better adapted to and so benefit more from the values world shaped by Neoliberalism and its consumerist understanding of freedom. It's harder for the Left to truly grasp the underlying metaphysical nihilism that shapes this values world because their lives are so comfortable in it."I'm not a nihilist," they say to themselves. "I'm a good person who plays by the meritocratic rules, and I have all the socially approved, politically correct attitudes. What's nihilistic about that?"

Only the most self-aware intellectuals on the Cultural Left embrace their nihilistic presuppositions as a basis upon which to develop a politics and public morality. In the postmodern milieu that is still hegemonic for such thinking, there is no possibility for a transcendentally based morality; some other basis must be found, and the result over the last couple of decades has been the emergence of a new juxtaposition of desire (freedom to consume) with the unjust plight of the marginalized (those whose desires are culturally-politically thwarted). This leads to ham-fisted political moral judgments where the only salient moral criterion is where you sit in the hierarchy of marginalization.

The response to Hamas's butchery in Israel by campus groups influenced by this desire/mariginalization moral logic will, I hope, lead to its eventual intellectual and moral de-legitimization. For anyone with a sliver of basic, genuine moral sense, the fundamental vacuousness of this kind of Leftist moralizing has been exposed because until now it has seemed to many people of good will to be moral-ish. What is their moral-ish logic? They will say that, yes, Jews have been historically marginalized, but the Palestinians are being marginalized by the Jews, so Palestinian marginalization counts for more; therefore any horrific thing Palestinians do to fight against their Jewish oppressors is justified. Does the moral reasoning here get more complicated than that? 

Now it remains to be seen if Israel's response will sink to the same level of nihilistic moral reasoning: They started it, so we'll finish it. Will they? 6000 bombs in a few days? Cutting off power and water? Is this strategic or is it just vengeful lashing out?

On Checking Your Privilege

For the record, the real reason privilege checking fell out of favor is because checking your privilege doesn’t do anything. Like so much of cultural studies-inflected pseudo-left practices, it’s an entirely symbolic and semantic ritual. It turns out that even in the rare event that members of privileged groups actually checked their own privilege, they’re fully capable of going out into the world and deepening that privilege and abusing the people who don’t have it. Just like a lot of people put BLM signs in their windows and then avoided Black neighborhoods, just like a lot of men go to academic conferences and call themselves allies and then get aggressive with women at the conference hotel that night. The problem with making moral hygiene the centerpiece of your political project is that morality is a function of behavior, not of thought or emotion or intention. I’m sure Stancil sits at his laptop and talks about being good and thinks good things and feels good things and mistakes all of that for being moral. But only doing is moral, not being. So let’s do the right thing, yes for Black people and women and the poor and also for everyone else, and let’s forget about who’s performed the empty ritual of privilege checking. Who gives a shit?

Freddie de Boer

Agreed. Where we probably disagree is on what the telos of our "doing" is, which for me is a gradual personal and societal movement toward a transcendental ideal of justice. But like de Boer, I find it impossible to take this kind of performative moralism seriously. It changes nothing except to ingrain more deeply in the performer the delusion of his being a good person if he's conformist enough to have the right attitudes and to say the right things and to wear the right t-shirts. 

BTW, what de Boer is saying here is pretty much what Dietrich Bonhoeffer was describing in Christian terms in The Cost of Discipleship.  B distinguishes between cheap grace and costly grace. He lived the latter and paid with his life, as did MLK. Paying with your life isn't the only proof of moral seriousness, but having something in your life that defines your moral horizon and that is worth dying for is.

I think that's why the military is so attractive for a certain kind of idealistic young man or woman. I've met many over the years as students in my classes whom I have deeply admired despite their politics being completely different from mine. I see their idealism as too often having been manipulated by the venal or grandiose or moronic militarists who have brought us absurdities like the invasion of Iraq or the American Civil War. These kids have the guilelessness of  doves but who need a little more of the shrewdenss of the serpent. But what makes them admirable is that willingness to pay the cost. There is a seriousness there that is lacking in almost all their far more liberal classmates. 

 

Correlation and Causation (Updated 9/25)

That being said, I find Hanania’s description of the historical causes of wokeness more persuasive than other right-wing screeds or even the Atlantic contributor Yascha Mounk’s forthcoming book on the topic. Almost all such books blame identity politics on postmodern philosophy and critical race theory, with some pinch-hitting by Tumblr. Although strong overlaps certainly exist between the ideologies found in American humanities departments and contemporary “wokeness,” critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation.

Tyler Austin Harper reviewing Richard Hanania's The Origin of Woke

Hanania blames Civil Rights legislation in the sixties for forcing universities to become politically correct in their hiring practices--everything else follows from that. Whatever.

But what strikes me about this quote is the obtuseness of the last sentence --

critics rarely explain how exactly these complex, jargon-riddled philosophies are supposed to have migrated out of obscure academic journals and into mainstream discourse; they mistake correlation for causation.

Really?

Maybe they don't explain it because it's become the air they breathe. So here's an explanation from someone who breathes that air but also has other sources to supplement his respiratory health. 

Anybody who has spent any time in a university setting recognizes how the humanities and social sciences have been overtaken by a militant postmodern mood. It's not about even understanding or reading these "complex, jargon-ridden philosophies". Hardly anybody understands what these guys said. It's been dumbed down to a few misunderstood axioms about how everything is a cultural construction that justifies and reinforces power-holding factions and in doing so justifies and reinforces the marginalization of marginalized. This system and all the subtle ways it promotes inequality must be deconstructed in the name of social justice. [See Note 1] As if that's some kind of big insight. It's inherent in the tradition. It's the message that subversives like Socrates and Jesus gave, but they're dead white guys that the mood dictates should no longer be taken seriously and so have nothing relevant to say to us now. 

Students who are are acculturated into this mood, and since these students go on to become the faculty of schools K-12 as well as in the universities, and go on to careers in media and the arts, and go on to careers in NGOs and corporate human resources, they shape the culture top down in pretty obvious ways. This is at the heart of what's freaking Red America out even if they don't articulate it this way. They reject this postmodern mood, and their instincts are largely correct even if their solutions will just make things worse. 

So, as I've been arguing here, the meaning of something like 'social justice' becomes something that is understood more in Foucauldian or Derridean terms than in terms that are compatible with what Gandhi's or Martin Luther King's idea of it--or has much to do with Socrates and Jesus said about it. It's not the same thing at all, and it's a very big deal that it's not.  

Now I don't know anything about Harper except that he teaches Environmental Studies at Bates. This is not a critque of him in particular, but of the postmodern mood that is so hegemonic in universities.  I'm sure Harper is a fine fellow, and that we would agree on most things--especially about how scary and dangerous people like Hanania are. But I thinik there's a pretty good chance that his own acculturation into this postmodern mood makes it difficult to recognize or understand why people might object to how schools at all levels are swimminng in it.

It's the mood that shapes the thinking of everyone he knows, and they're all good people, right? What perversity could be at the root of objecting to the good things that these good, data-based, clear-thinking people want? But then they don't understand why a lot of people don't find in it the Good that they long for, and so reject it as just elite fashionable thinking rather than see what is truly good in it. It's completely understandable to me why some people reject the moralistic nihilism that is at the heart of its postmodern articulation as woke social justice. Most of people who articulate it don't think of themselves as nihilists, but that's because they haven't thought it through.  In order for people to give up old habits of thinking and feeling, they need to be inspired not scolded. They need an encounter with Socrates. 

Update 9/25/23: Harper has an article in yesterday's NYT about social justice education in which he shows that he gets how this mood is particularly powerful among educated white progressives: 

Yet I can’t help also feeling that as American culture has become more racially progressive, it’s become more pathological about race. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the world of social justice parenting. ...

Social justice parenting gurus also tend to espouse strange and at times unsettling beliefs that encourage children of all races to become obsessed with Blackness and to view whiteness as a kind of cultural cancer.

A common theme across many antiracism parenting books is the importance of teaching your child to identify micro-gradations in skin tone and hair texture. In “Raising Antiracist Children,” Ms. Hawthorne recommends that parents acculturate children to recognize and label the many distinct colors of Black and brown skin, offering a typology like “red clay brown” and “pinecone brown.” She calls this phenotype introduction and provides helpful instructions for teaching children racial phenotypes by having them make “skin-tone play dough.”

As an academic with expertise in the history of science, I am struck by just how much overlap there is between social justice parenting’s fixation on phenotypes and that found in 19th- and early-20th-century race science, lending credence to John McWhorter’s observation that antiracism might be better understood as a kind of “neoracism” that peddles new forms of race essentialism under the guise of liberation.

BTW, I have not read Mounk's book yet, But whatever Harper's objections to it might be, Mounk's NYT piece last week pretty much makes the same point Harper does:

Critical race theory is far more than a determination to think critically about race; similarly, the identity synthesis as a whole goes well beyond the recognition that many people will, for good reason, take pride in their identity. It claims that categories like race, gender and sexual orientation are the primary prism through which to understand everything about our society, from major historical events to trivial personal interactions. And it encourages us to see one another — and ourselves — as being defined, above anything else, by the identities into which we are born.

This helps to explain why it’s increasingly common these days to see schools seek to ensure that their students conceive of themselves as “racial beings,” as one advocate puts it. Some of them even split students into racially segregated affinity groups as early as the first grade. These kinds of practices encourage complex people to see themselves as defined by external characteristics whose combinations and permutations, however numerous, will never amount to a satisfactory depiction of their innermost selves; it is also a recipe for zero-sum conflict between different groups. For example, when teachers at a private school in Manhattan tell white middle schoolers to “own” their “European ancestry,” they are more likely to create racists than anti-racists.

There is even growing evidence that the rapid adoption of these progressive norms is strengthening the very extremists who pose the most serious threat to democratic institutions. According to a recent analysis by The New York Times, Mr. Trump has attracted a new group of supporters who are disproportionately nonwhite and comparatively progressive on cultural issues such as immigration reform and trans acceptance, but also perturbed by the influence that the identity synthesis has in mainstream institutions, like the corporate sector.

As an educator and as the husband of a K8 public school teacher, I have observed over the years how vulnerable schools are to intellectual fads in university schools of education that are distributed into classrooms, i.e., rammed down teacher's throats, by district offices. A decade ago, a good example was how a Constructivist approach became dogma and Direct Instruction heresy. This had enormous consequences for the way that math and reading were taught, very often in ways that made learning for many kids performing under grade level more difficult. I wrote about that in a post over ten years ago when I was more involved in education politics. It's among the posts I've written over the years that get the most pageviews. 

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Note 1: One of the consequences of this move is in its making equality an absolute value. This is a mistake that leads to all kinds of problems. Equality is important, but it must be understood to be in a polar tension with freedom. The two have to be kept in a dynamic balance. Freedom without equality leads to the anarchic state of nature where the strong dominate the weak; equality without freedom leads to the leveled, spiritually inert Last Man society that Nietzsche warned about. 

Idols and Icons

Idolatry consists in immobilizing oneself before an idol because one sees it as opaque, because one is incapable of discerning in it the hidden invitation that it offers to go beyond it. Hence, the opposite of idolatry would not consist in breaking idols, in practicing a fierce iconoclasm aimed against every inner or external Image; it would rather consist in rendering the idol transparent to the light invested in it. In short, it means transmuting the idol into an icon.

Henry Corbin, “Theophanies and Mirrors: Idols or Icons?” trans. Jane Pratt and A. K. Donohue, Spring 1983:2.

A dogma--like the trinity; an image--like the cross, a text--like the Bible; a ritual--like the mass--can be either and idol or an icon. If the former it is a prison for the soul; if the latter, it is a doorway into a bigger, richer world. 

Quote of the Day: J. V. Last

Dune is the story of how the indigenous people find their savior—he is called Muad'Dib—who leads them to overthrow the empire and take control of their home planet. How does he do it? By threatening to destroy the spice.

Muad'Dib explains his insight this way:

The power to destroy a thing is the absolute control over it.

This simple maxim is root of all power. And it explains why Donald Trump controls the Republican party, absolutely. ...

And here is the fundamental truth that Paul Ryan, Ted Cruz, and the rest intuitively grasped: (1) They cared—still do care—a great deal about the Republican party. (2) Trump does not care about the party at all. If the Republican party were broken, institutional Republicans would be at sea. Mitt Romney’s reporting makes that clear.

Donald Trump, on the other hand, would simply move on to the next grift.

The Republican party is Trump’s hostage because he is willing to kill it and traditional Republicans are not.

Jonathan V. Last

About that Romney piece. I think it was Kurt Vonnegut who said that for most people adulthood is just a continuation of high school. The Coppins' piece shows that, at least as far as the Senate Republicans go, it’s a continuation of middle school. These GOP senators have the emotional and moral maturity of 5th graders.

Romney stands out because he's the 8th grader. He is like the bright, boy-scouty counselor at Christian summer camp trying to keep the 5th graders in line. But there's this very cool, rule-breaking 6th grader who is always making fun of the stiffly upright 8th grader because he's so profoundly un-cool. The 5th graders at first find the 6th grader uncomfortably naughty, but look, he's getting away with it. Wow. They'll do whatever he wants. 

I appreciate Romney for whatever it is in him that resists the juvenile nihilism of his colleagues. He is in comparison a decent man. To what degree it is his potty training and to what degree it is genuine conscience I don't know. It's some measure of both, but the level of his naivete and simplistic thinking is gobsmacking.

How Not to Defend Liberalism

Instead of class conflict, politics became a battle between two cultural factions, neither of which represented the working class. On the left side of these politics are many professionals whose concerns for equality have narrowed to involuted and essentialized conceptions of race and gender detached from the real material needs of the marginalized groups they claim to support. Meanwhile, the reactionary Right is populated by many relatively high-earning but uneducated small-business owners and tradespeople who obsess over the excesses of the Left, indulge in fear-mongering about crime and immigration, and toy with—or outright embrace—racist tropes. While this right-wing identity politics likes to invoke the downtrodden white working class and sometimes borrows from the rhetoric of mid-century labor politics, it effectively serves the interests of another set of the elite through a standard business-oriented Republican playbook. Our fervid cultural politics do not emerge, bottom-up, from a public that channels its economic anxiety in misguided, illiberal directions; it originates with those at the top of the economic system, whose privileges it obscures.

Alexander Stern in Commonweal

The subtitle for Stern's article is "Embracing technocracy will pnly fuel the populist surge." It is one of the best pieces I've come across in summing up our predicament. The culture war is a proxy war in which uneducated working class voters are manipulated to fight for the interests of the wealthy who stoke resentments by telling them that big-gummint-woke-Democrats want to destroy everything that they hold sacred. And so the Cosmopolitan Left enters the fight fists aflyin' on the culture-war terms these wealthy interests have defined. They think their cause is righteous, and, you know, they're gonna win because history is on their side. But guess what? The historical dialectic is a bitch. 

I have not been writing here about the Trump indictments because it's going to play out the way it's going to play out. I think his strength in the national polls is meaningless.Nobody's focused on politics now. The reigning commonplace is that both parties are corrupt, and a pox on both Republicans and Democrats. But when push comes to shove, most Americans will not vote for Trump. And they're less likely to do so in the swing states that put up the looniest of MAGA candidates last year. They know what they're dealing with there because they've seen the crazy up close. And while I doubt a sociopath like DeDantis could get elected again in FL because since the pandemic Floridians have come to see him for the cynical empty suit that he really is, that doesn't mean he can't get elected if he ran against Biden.  

I understand the arguments of those who think that Biden's running again is an unforced error by Democrats. I certainly would feel better if Dems ran Gretchen Whitmer or Chris Murphy or any reasonably competent Democrat under the age of 70. I think Douthat's analogy in today's column is apt. Putting Biden out there is akin to Boston's keeping Bill Buckner on first base in the '86 world series. They thought that it will probably be all right. What are the odds that a ball will be hit to him that will go under his gimpy legs? Well it did then, and it can again. Biden during the next year is one McConnell-esque TIA away from losing the game. And then what? What is the Dem Plan B? Is anybody in the Dem establishment talking about that?

In the meanwhile, it remains to be seen whether MAGA can be anything more than a rabid personality cult that can bring itself to think strategically. Probably not in time for '24, but at some point, post-Trump, it probably will. And this is really the point of Stern's article. Whatever happens in '24, MAGA is a symptom of a deeper problem, which is broad detestation of the technocratic managerial state and its elite, Neoliberal, cosmopolitan, meritocratic ethos. Defending that is not a long-term viable solution for Democrats. The Dems have got to find a Capra-esque multi-racial mythos that will re-establishthe Dems as the party of the little guy. I think lots of Dems think that's who they are because their policies are in fact more worker and family friendly, but they just don't get that that's not how they are perceived anymore. And it's up to educated Dem elites to understand this and change it.

And it's also the point that I've been making here for years. The cosmopolitan Left is deeply mistaken if it thinks it can win the culture war in the long run. It thinks it can win because it believes young people share their cosmopolitan values and MAGA will age out. But, again, the historical dialectic is a bitch, and now that Woke defines boring conventional establishment thinking, it provokes robust anti-woke rebellion in the young. Count on this continuing to be a thing. 

BTW, if you want to understand why Hard-Right thinking can be so compelling for serious, spirited young people, read A World after Liberalism by Matthew Rose. He's raising all kinds of warning flags that a complacent Left should be paying attention to. And so the Democratic Party, as the vehicle for what is a very confused and feckless Left, must return to its class-first roots, and that requires that they find a way to win back the white working class, and in doing insure that they retain the loyalty of the Black and Brown working class.

What's going on in the Hard Right is an overdetermined, complex social phenomenon, and while an atavistic white racism is a part of it, it cannot be reduced to and dismissed as just that. There were an uncomfortable number of Black and Brown people storming the Capitol on J6. Educated Black, Hispanic, and Asian ideologues do not represent the thinking and values of working class Blacks, Hispanics, and Asian Americans. And yet the thinking and values of these educated elites have become the brand of the party. How many educated Democrats understand how alienating that is for the rank and file? 

The Oliver Anthony Dilemma

Good piece in the Atlantic about Chris Murphy and Oliver Anthony. Anthony's song, "Rich Men North of Richmond"...

... which became an unlikely national hit, also took jabs at “obese” welfare recipients and high taxes. The right applauded and that turned off the left. Vox christened Anthony a right-wing breakout star; Variety floated accusations that he was an “industry plant”; The Washington Post divined in his song the “mainstreaming” of conspiracy culture. The press coverage of Anthony, and the dismissive tone on the left, would change only on Friday, when the singer released a video in which he disowned the right’s championing of his song.

So if right-wingers like the song, then cultural Lefties have to hate it, right? Those are the rules of engagement in this absurd culture war that the Left plays so obtusely. But really, what does it tell you that the Right immediately identified with this song and Left rejected it? Well, maybe there's good reason for ordinary Americans to see the Dems, the party of the cultural Left,  as the party of rich men north of Richmond. 

But Murphy had the compassion to see the song--without the culture-war lens--for what it really is, a scream of pain...

 Progressives who want to fix a broken economy, Murphy argues, better find a way to hear out people like Anthony. It was with that in mind that a few weeks ago Murphy typed out a post on X (formerly known as Twitter):

a. I think progressives should listen to this. In part, bc it’s just a good tune.

b. But also bc it shows the path of realignment. Anthony sings about the soullessness of work, shit wages and the power of the elites. All problems the left has better solutions to than the right.

Murphy’s comment did not please his tribe. Some social-media liberals—skeptical that ties between Democrats and the rural working class can be repaired—decried Murphy’s apostasy and wondered archly if he had hit his head. Others muttered that the 50-year-old second-term senator deserved a primary challenge.

Is this negative response to Murphy's common sense compassion typical of Democrats? Certainly not typical of rank-and-file Democrats, but among the Dems' cultural elite? Alas--

Murphy is a repeat provocateur. In July, he tweeted that “there are a lot of social conservatives who believe in populist economic policies, and it would be a good idea to have those people a part of a Democratic/left coalition and accept a bit more intra-movement friction on culture issues as a consequence.” That post included a thoroughly unscientific but still revealing poll that found that 77 percent of those who responded disagreed with him.

Good for Murphy.

Whatever happens in the general election next year, the future of the country depends on whether the Dems or the GOP win the broad blue-collar vote, a vote comprising white, black, and brown voters--all of whom lean conservative in their cultural values. Most ordinary Americans are not ideologically driven, but they have no interest in the preoccupations of Neoliberal tribalists in media and the universities. Ordinary Americans have good reason to be completely turned off by those preoccupations, and insofar as those preoccupations become associated with the Democrat Party's brand, it gives them good reason not to vote for Democrats. 

So what will be  the post-Biden future for Democrats? Will it be the party the Clintons, i.e., the party of rich men and women north or Richmond,  or the party that Sanders and Murphy, the party that sticks up for ordinary Americans? 

Freddie de Boer on Class-First Politics (Updated)

I myself am a class-first leftist, and indeed the penultimate chapter of my new book is titled “Why is Class First?” And the answer is that class comes first because class approaches to politics are the best approach to combating injustice, including racial injustice. Being class-first is an instrumental position, not a moral one; it’s an approach to means and not a definition of ends. My basic gloss on racial inequality has been the same for forever: it’s futile to try and get everyone to not be interpersonally racist, but we can economically empower Black people and other people of color such that interpersonal racism no longer has the power to hurt them. A lot of people hate rich people, hate them reflexively and passionately. It doesn’t matter because rich people have money and money gives them power, which means the hate that’s directed towards them is impotent. Interpersonal racism, the state of some people hating other people because of their race, is unlike any other form of human hatred. But the same basic logic applies - if we dismantled Black people’s economic disadvantage, the structures that make up structural inequality, then the interpersonal hatred just won’t matter to anything like the degree it matters today. Of course I want people not to walk around with personal racial animus, but politics is about what can be achieved materially, not about manipulating people’s emotional attitudes.

You could contrast this with, say, Robin Diangelo and her obsession with ending micro-aggressions. Even if you could eliminate all of those little vestiges of social racism (you can’t), doing so would not put a dent in the Black-white wealth gap or eliminate mass incarceration of Black men or anything of that nature. That kind of focus does, however, fit comfortably with the social expectations of the kind of educated white liberals who buy her books. (

--Freddie De Boer

De Boer is a curiosity--a throwback, class-first Leftist. Not many of those around today. Too bad because he's mostly right. But his Left is not what passes for the Left these days. Class analysis and organizing requires real work and comes off as dry and abstract, while woke cultural politics costs little and is emotionally energizing--no matter how stupid, politically ineffectual, and downright counterproductive it is.

Woke Politics just feels so morally right, right? And that's what matters, feeling good about yourself and then everybody you know feeling god about you too, no matter how self-delusional in any deeply true moral sense such feelings are. This is not a Left that grownups can or ought to take seriously.

And then these members of the establishment Left in the universities and media wonder why so many young intellectuals are attracted to the Right. Why? Because it's what's you do these days if you want to be a rebel bad boy. It's not that hard to understand why some spirited young people feel a need to say No to a suffocating Niceness that passes these days for moral seriousness. That they do so is reactive, delusional, and predictable. 

I want to live in a world where people are kinder to one another, but most grownups resist being treated like kindergartners who must learn to play nice by the unctuously patronizing politically correct. Maybe this explains why DEI trainings don't work. I understand the good intentions, but this is a counterproductive strategy that gives Liberals a feeling that they are doing something constructive. But isn't such a program only asking people to behave with kindness to other human beings? Do people who have a good measure of kindness in them need to be taught to act? Can such a program work with people who are bigoted? Or Can mandating a DEI training create kindness where there's little of it to work with? And isn't such a mandate more likely to make the bigoted more angry and resentful when they are forced to take such trainings? 

8/16/ Update: From Edsall's column quoting former AFL-CIO Political Director Michael Podhorzer:

The idea that the Democrat Party is a pro-business party, Podhorzer wrote, “is hardly a bulletin. It’s been pro-business since Carter. Deregulation (including Glass-Steagall, holding companies, communications, etc.) as well as trade agreements (NAFTA, China WTO, proposed TPP, etc.) are all Democratic Party ‘accomplishments.’”

Podhorzer, however, took sharp issue with Hersh, Shah and Teixeira. “I find Teixeira’s constant harping on Democratic ‘elites,’ as well as Hersh’s and others’ use of the term to be playing with fire at this moment,” he told me.

The focus on cultural elitism, in Podhorzer’s view, masks billionaires’ collective influence over the political process or the ways in which their success is responsible for immiseration and what we call “inequality.” This enables fascist politicians to shift the blame to intellectual and cultural “elites,” like liberals or people with college degrees, redirecting the inevitable resentments of the losers in the winner-take-all economy.

For that reason, Podhorzer continued, "Centrist commentators and Democratic strategists who have aggressively and continuously diagnosed the party’s capture by a woke 'elite' unwittingly — and without justification — affirm the fascist worldview in which 'cultural,' rather than economic or political, elites are the source of their disappointments."

I don't understand Podhorzer's problem with what Teixeira is saying. Doe he not think that the Democratic Party's capture by cosmopolitan elites and their values is a problem? Does he not understand that if they don't shift their branding strategy along the lines Teixera is suggesting that they will lose not just white blue collar voters, but black and and brown blue collars as well? These working class folks don't need Teixera to tell them that Democrat elites don't share their cultural values. They just need to watch the Dems who show up on mainstream media or to attend a typical local Democratic district meeting.

The educated White, Black, and Brown elites who are running the Democratic Party do not, of course, think of themselves as serving billionaires' interests, but they do serve their interests to the degree that they (1) promote Neoliberal policies, and (2) promote extreme woke cultural values that drive culturally conservative blue collars into the party of Trump and DeSantis.

They do less of the first thanks to the influence of Bernie, but they are doing more of the second. Does Podhorzer not get that what Teixera calls Brahmins are making the Democratic Party a hard place for non-college-educated, culturally conservative working class people of any skin color to feel at home? 

BTW, this is what Teixera says to Edsall--

Democrats continue to be weighed down by those whose tendency is to oppose firm action to control crime or the southern border as concessions to racism, interpret concerns about ideological school curriculums and lowering educational standards as manifestations of white supremacy, and generally emphasize the identity politics angle of virtually every issue. With this baggage, rebranding the party — making it more working class oriented and less Brahmin — is very difficult, since decisive action that might lead to such a rebranding is immediately undercut by a torrent of criticism.

[Edsall] asked Teixeira whether the changing Democratic Party has reached a point of no return on this front, and he emailed back:

A good and big question. In the short run it looks very difficult for them to shed much of their cultural radicalism and generally make the party more attractive to normal working class voters. Over the medium to long term, though, I certainly think it’s possible, if there’s an internal movement and external pressures/market signals consistent with the need for a broader coalition. That is, if enough of the party becomes convinced their coalition is too narrow and therefore some compromises and different approaches are necessary. That may take some time.

That just seems to be common sense. Nobody's talking about restoring a politics of Meanness toward historically marginalized constituencies. The GOP has a monopoly on that. Rather it's a question of pushing a class-first strategy that is designed to support the welfare of everyday American working families. Who's not for that?

A sane politics is not a moral crusade to force everybody to think and behave and you do, but rather a very practical project to find common ground with people who have shared interests. Everybody, except GOP Libertarian cranks, wants to support working families, and that should be the Democratic Party's brand. Warren, Sanders, and even Biden seem to get this. It's not that others Dems are against it; it's just that other identitarian issues are for them more salient. The Robin DiAngelos should be listened to and treated with respect, but they should not be allowed in any way to become the face of the party.  

It's more complicated than that, of course. The  meaning crisis that flows from the slow-motion crackup of the Liberal Order still looms in the background. For there to be genuine relief, there has to be a shift in the zeitgeist that addresses these deep meaning needs. But in the meanwhile, we need to support a politics that mitigates the most negative consequences of the Neoliberal social order on the lives of ordinary working Americans. 

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It's the Meaninglessness, Stupid

Last year, at a conference of political philosophers at Michigan State University, a Yale professor named Bryan Garsten told his colleagues that they were in trouble. The topic of the conference was liberalism—not Ted Kennedy liberalism, but the classical version that predates the modern Democratic Party and indeed America itself. Liberalism is the view that individuals have rights and beliefs, and that politics involves safeguarding rights and making compromises when beliefs conflict. It has existed for only a few centuries and is by some measures the most successful idea in history. Just look where people want to live: the United States, the European Union, Canada, Australia, and the United Kingdom, all liberal places that people will risk their life to reach.

But Garsten said liberalism had some of his best students hopping into rafts and paddling in other intellectual directions. He said they had been “captured” by the belief “that to be morally serious, one faces a choice.” The choice, he said, is not between liberalism and illiberalism. Liberalism had already lost. Its greatest champion, the United States, had run aground after pointless wars, terminal decadence, and bureaucratic takeover by activists and special interests. Garsten said his best students were choosing between the protofascism of Nietzsche and a neomedieval, quasi-theocratic version of Catholicism opposed to Enlightenment liberalism. These students considered liberal democracy an exhausted joke, and they hinted—and sometimes did more than hint—that the past few centuries had been a mistake, and that the mistake should now be corrected.

Why are these young intellectuals so attracted to illiberalism? Because they reject the flabby meaninglessness of life in the Age of Whatever. There is no future in flabby meaninglessness, so people--me included--who are committed to retaining an open, free society had better find an antidote for it. If we don't, Illiberalism in some form or another will win. 

Liberals say that finding meaning is something you do on your own time in the cultural sphere--go meditate or go fishing, join Doctors without Borders, go camping in the wilderness, start collecting stamps--whatever. Meaning in life is what individuals choose it to be, right? This is commonplace Liberal thinking, and we're so inured to it, it seems irreproachable.But meaning doesn't work that way. It's filtered or disclosed through cultural constructs, and our current culture mostly filter out the deep sources of felt meaning in ways that are suffocating us. Finding a pleasant hobby is no solution. This explains why conservatives feel this need to make their meaning everybody else's. They feel a need to change the mediating social forms. I get that, but they don't understand that illiberalism provides a cure that is worse than the disease. 

But this mentality among young conservative intellectuals should be seen as a miner's canary signal by complacent Liberals. The empirical reality, whether Liberals recognize it or not, is that everything about what a LIberal society produces is fake and meaningless. And spirited young people are disgusted by it, and want something more. In 1962, they put together the Port Huron Statement. That noble, humanistic project failed miserably. The Left since then has capitulated to a postmodern priggish moralism that feels completely out of touch with Reality as most people live it, and almost anybody with any sense gets that Liberal anything goes cluelessness is inadequate to meet the challenges that the world will confront in the coming decades. So now a significant minority of young intellectuals are willing to look for other ways to make change happen. 

This is why Nietzsche and his shallower imitators like Ayn Rand resonate with these young intellectuals. (See Note 1) They hunger for more than vapid Liberal bromides. Nietzsche and Rand map out a path of self-transcendence, a path toward what the Greeks called arete, excellence, which is what all spirited human beings long to achieve. The Liberal Left instead have become of the celebrators of the mediocre. In their misguided understanding of equality, they want a society that levels everyone to the least common denominator. And so in the Age of Whatever, Nietzsche and Rand seem to offer the only legitimate alternative for such a noxious leveling mentality.

But Nietzsche's and Rand's self-transcendence project leads to barbarism, not excellence, because both were involved in what Ernest Becker called causa sui projects. A causa sui project is a parody of self-transcendence, and Rand's heroes are parodies in this sense. I'm more sympathetic to Nietzsche and would argue that most would-be Nietzsheans have no understanding about what he was talking about. Nevertheless Nietzsche books, particularly toward the end, virtually beg to be parodied by lesser human beings.

What Nietzsche and Rand have in effect done is to take what is a profound human longing for excellence and to pervert it in the promotion of what every great metaphysical imaginary from Taoism to Buddhism to Neoplatonism insists is delusion. Self-transcendence? Yes. Uebermenschen? No. Last Men? No. The true humility, and so the true excellence of Socrates and Chuang Tzu? Yes. 

Is it possible to build civilizations on such an impractical ideal? It was done before; it can be done again. 

I believe it's possible because deep down everybody, including Garsten's right-leaning young intellectuals, hungers for reality. Garsten's students are starved for Reality, and they reject the system whose main produce is the false and the fake. They are right to do so, but they will choose instead whatever seems more authentically, deeply real, even if it isn't.  

That's why it's important that some how some way we find a way--as a broadly accepted societal ideal--to make contact with Reality at its deepest something that is what the most spirited human beings strive for. I believe it's possible because I think that Socrates was right, that people chose the Good when they know the Good, because the Good is the deep Real. The challenge is to find a way to make that experience of the Good available as something that's easier for people to know and so to choose. That's almost impossible where a nihilistic materialistic consumer-choice Neoliberalism defines the terms of discourse. A rationalist materialism is not necessary for preserving a truly free open society. Indeed, it creates the conditions that make it almost impossible to sustain. 

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Note 1: I am a practicing Catholic, so I understand why there is a hunger among Garsten's Catholic students for a pre-Reformation Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary. One finds in Aquinas and Dante, and later in Cusa and Ficino, a beautifully articulated imaginary that resonated among its greatest souls at that time. We must draw now upon the deep originary sources that gave rise to those articulation then in a way that fits what we've become since then. Catholic Integralism is a truly crazy solution to a real problem, and I reject it utterly and completely. 

My argument on this blog might seem equally crazy, but at least I recognize that there can be no imposition of a confessional religion on the broader society. That's why I'm an advocate for a restoration within the cultural sphere--by no means the political sphere--of a form of Neoplatonism that provides a vertical pole to the metaphysical imaginary that is cognate with all the great post-Axial religions and philosophies.

As far-fetched as that might seem in this moment, I think it's possible because Neoplatonism points to something whose truth is not to be evaluated in its historical propositions, but rather in the way it is an expression of something deeply, vitally true in an originary sennse. And because we all hunger for truth and to have deeper contact with Reality, I think we will find our way to it once again. The Integralists are wrong because you just can't take the forms from another era and impose them on people who don't feel the originary energy that gave rise to them. New forms have to arise in a new way that inspires people because they shine with originary Reality. I sincerely believe that such a restoration lies ahead of us.

I focus on Neoplatonism as restored in a postmodern key because it can provide a on a civilizational framework that works with the innate human longing for the Good while not being prescriptive or dogmatic about it. And it provides a lingua franca for people who are averse to religion but who are attracted to a kind of Emersonian transcendentalism, and this in turn can put them in conversation with Christians, Jews, Muslims of goodwill in the West and with the same constituencies in the religions of the East. Something like this is necessary if we as a human race are going to find a way to define what it means to be human in the face of threats posed to the human by nihilistic technocapitalism.

Thoughts on the Yesterday's Indictment

From Charlie Syke's Morning Shots--

Jack Smith and other prosecutors have flooded the zone with Trump’s criminality. The rapidly filling legal calendar means that 2024 will be dominated by:

• Trump the fraudster

• Trump the rapist

• Trump’s hush money payments to a porn star

• Trump’s violation of the Espionage Act

and

• Trump, the conspiracist, who tried to overthrow the government

“Each of these conspiracies — which built on the widespread mistrust the defendant was creating through pervasive and destabilizing lies about election fraud — targeted a bedrock function of the United States federal government: the nation’s process of collecting, counting and certifying the results of the presidential election.”

If only Republicans had been warned. But they bought this ticket; and this is the ride they are about to take.

I've been avoiding talking about politics on the ground if I don't have anything to say that isn't being said over and over and that doesn't fit into already established ideological bins, there's no point in writing about it. But his indictment yesterday on charges that relate to his failed coup attempt on J6 demand some acknowledgement.

I accept that American society is broken, and that it's main fissure line is defined by whether you voted for Trump even once. If you are a principled Conservative, the only option for you was to have become a Never Trumper. That so few Conservatives made that choice spoke, and continues to speak, to the deep trouble that we are in. Too many Americans see Trump as a legitimaage politician, and in doing so have defined down legitimacy and shattered any ideas of norm-al politics for years to come. Chaos 'R Us and will continue to be until there's a shift in the zeitgeist. Trump's indictments will not decrease the chaos; rather they are a harbinger of a more intense experience of chaos to come next year. 

Those of us who were appalled by Trump, who thought he was a grifter, a bull-shitting fabulist, and a demagogue, also thought that a sensible majority of Americans, both Liberal and Conservative, would see through his con. We were like Lincoln and many of the otherwise astute Northerners in 1860 who thought that saner minds would prevail and that the South would never provoke a Civil War. They were wrong then, and we were wrong in 2016. Chaos ensued, and it's not over for us yet in this recent iteration of this old American story. It's an open question as to how violent things will get. No reason for optimism because, 'Violence 'R Us'. 

A major theme in this blog since its inception provoked by the fabulism among Neoliberal elites that led to our invading Iraq in 2003 has been why are Americans are so prone to delusional thinking that seeks a violent outlet? The short answer is that without a vertical pole in our metaphysical imaginary, American society spins but without a center, and the consequent erratic,meaningless spinning leads to mass ontological dizziness. The consequences of the amputation of vertical pole began to be felt acutely by the Western cultural elite around 1850, and since then we've experienced a gradual development toward a broadening intensification of the experience of ontological dizziness. What affected mostly educated elites in the 20th century is affecting everyvbody now. 

It was aggravated by Neoliberal ideology and policies that became normative for elites since 1980 and who in their callow hubris after the collapse of the USSR thought that they should impose it on the world. And even now, despite its magnificent failures, the only class of people--mostly educated elites--who are not feeling particularly dizzy are those whose identities are in some degree still enmeshed in Neoliberal ideology and its nihilism. Why? Because of all the ways they benefit from it. (But how are their hyper-anxieety-prone children doing?)

But Neoliberalism and the cultural 'whateverism' it promotes is unsustainable for any society, and a society suffering from ontological dizziness will find a center one way or the other. And the question is whether or not it will find a true center--or whether it will just invent one around a cult of personality or some of other form of delusional thinking. 

And so as we "look forward" to what will be certainly one of the most chaotic and unpredictable election years in American history. As I've written in a series of posts earlier this year, while a Trump nomination by the Republicans looks extremely likely, it's unlikely that he will be elected in the general. Nevertheless, it's scary because, who knows--he could be elected. Those of us who thought it was impossible in '16 could very well be wrong again because we underestimate the degree to which American society suffers from ontological dizziness. Nevertheless, I am inclined to agree with those who think that the combined effect of Trump running for President while under indictment or while appealing his convictions--there is no way he'll be running from jail-- is very bad politics, and not a good thing for the Republican Party up and down the ballot. And whatever is bad for Republicans is good for America, at least in the short term. 

So better Trump than a Republican who has a better chance of winning. The MAGA wing of the GOP must be completely an utterly discredited, and the best chance of that is letting them run and watching them lose. The best possible outcome for America as 2024 will come to a close will be for Democrats to win resoundingly everywhere. Why? Not because Democrats offer any real solutions but because Democrats are the true conservatives now. Whatever you might think about their views on cultural issues, they are the political force that stands for conserving norms and traditions in the political sphere. Republicans just don't care about them anymore, and no decent Republicans can get elected if they don't not cater to their ontologically dizzy base that wants to tear the whole system down.  

But if Democrats prevail in '24, as we should all hope they will, that is at best a short-term fix unless important voices from within the American soul emerge who articulate what ontological dizziness is and why it is such a profoundly destabilizing force in American--or any-- society. And then they must also develop an imagination of an American future where there is a cure for it. If this could happen in America, it would be truly a light shining on a hill. But maybe it will happen first elsewhere. It doesn't matter so long as it happens and it is broadly recognized as the next step forward. 

As I've been writing here for years, cultural problems and conflicts cannot be resolved in the political sphere. The American Civil War is a classic example: The North won in the power politics sphere, but not in the cultural sphere. Forcing people to change their values hardly ever works. The resentments fester and swell, and it's only a matter of time before they burst out in ways that debilitate the entire system. But because almost all politics lies downstream from culture, cultural warfare in the political sphere is extraordinarily hard to avoid. 

So if the real problem is ontological dizziness, what's the cure? As I argued last month, I don't think there is one until we experience a profound shift in the zeitgeist. Until then we're all like the ancient Hebrews wandering in the wilderness. There are those among us--mostly on the religious right--who long to return to the fleshpots of Egypt (aka the 1950s--and for some the 1850s). But there are also many Americans of goodwill, whether they lean conservative or liberal, who in their quiet, everyday lives provide ballast for the larger society. They put one foot in front of the other, do what must be done as conscience indicates, and they live lives of quiet integrity and hope. They do not suffer from ontological dizziness, and hopefully from out of their ranks a thoughtful, new leadership will emerge in the cultural sphere, and so consequently in the political sphere. Such leadership will succeed to the degree that it inspires most Americans to move toward a saner, ontologically less vertiginous place by the end of the century.

There can be no endlessly muddling through. Dome significant shift needs to happen. Better that it not be effected by the forces of darkness on whose behalf a guy like Trump works. 

 

Archetypes and the Zeitgeist: The Tension between Order and Chaos

Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common-sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals.

If we have any hope for a positive future, it lies in awakening on a broad cultural scale the dormant archetype that slumbers in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype in the broader culture as an potential eschatological energizing cultural force. If there is any hope for us, it lies in new aspects of its awakening as we move more deeply into the 21st Century and to the unprecedented challenges to the Human that humans will confront.

Now most people in mainstream institutions don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Some might, but they would never bring it up in polite society. But then again it's not a matter of "believing" in archetypes, it's about feeling their energies and working with them. Archetypes, even the Platonic ones, are not abstractions but numinous beings that carry intense energy. During a healthy, creative cultural period, positive, form-shaping archetypes work to harness chaotic energies, but during a decadent historical period Chaos works with minimal checks, and unchecked works to dissolve old cultural forms and beliefs that have lost their vitality.

This is a positive process when it clears  a space to make room for a new, vital aspect of the Anthropos archetype to emerge. Chaos cannot destroy what lives, so the Anthropos archetype can never be destroyed, but the forms that the Anthropos archetype has inspired in a particular historical society can be destroyed. What's important is not the forms but the archetypal, i.e., the supra-human energies that gave them their forms in the first place.

When an archetype with positive energy is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when feeling the power of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. In the Iliad the great personalities are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because more than others they are in touch with the energy of an archetype. In the Iliad Helen shone with enormous power of Aphrodite. In Achilles Ares did. 

So for instance, I've been arguing that Justice is a transcendental archetype [See Note 1], and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was Justice, and he embodied that for  the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the Justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with a power that people only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work.

But here's the point I want to make: Unless a positive archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society. That's our situation now, and, for me at least, it explains why all efforts to get anything positive done seems so futile. Individuals know what needs to be done because they as indviduals feel and are inspired by, say, the Justice archetype or by a deep sense of the transcendent Good, but it's not a felt presence in the broader culture. I believe that can change, and I expect it to. I'm not talking about the coming of the eschaton, but of the next step forward in the human project.

What I mean by archetype operating on the collective level here might be more understandable in relation to the term 'zeitgeist'. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no broadly felt, positive, transcendent archetype to shape it--so we feel the negative power of Chaos by default. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in a way that guys like Ross Douthat feel compelled to write about it.

But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of collective future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative transcendental archetype working to shape the zeitgeist. It works first among those most sensitive to it--poets, philosophers, artists, prophets--and then it ripples out from them into the broader culture. When the active, positive transcendental archetype is no longer felt for whatever reason, the Chaos archetype fills the vacuum. [See Note 2] Because the energy of Chaos is so strong now, it's hard for us to believe that anything positive is possible. But it is, and at some point things will shift. 

Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype, whose phases of growth and diminution shaped the the zeitgeist as laid out in a chart in Note 2. I think most historians would agree that it reached its fullest development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline. [See Note 3]

Decline ensues when the Chaos energies are more powerful than the energies of the positive, transformative archetype. The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about dissolution and the increasing dominance of chaotic energies than about positive cultural transformation. The principal personalities in these movements were still acculturated into the cultural forms shaped that were shaped by the once vital positive Enlightenment archetype, but as the positive energy waned, Chaos waxed. The 19th Century is an era of brittle, rigid, de-vitalized social forms juxtaposed with the chaotic energies of industrial capitalism, the emergence of a cosmology shaped by Darwinian randomness, and the mechanization of violence that empowered Western societies to spread through the world exterminating what remained of societies that still retained vital customary cultures. By 1950 they are all gone or soon will be. They are replaced by soul-dead zombie societies that mimic living societies but are only simulacra of them. 

Nietzsche's Dionysian is perhaps the purest expression of the role of Chaos has played in Western societies in the period 1850-1950 and beyond. Since Nietzsche's announcement of the death of God, we've been in the chaos-dominated Age of Whatever [See Note 4], an in-between time--between the era energized by the  Enlightenment zeitgeist and whatever comes next.  That's the source of our collective anxiety in this moment. When Chaos dominates, we are all thrown into ontological dizziness, and we grab onto whatever will steady us. But nothing works because the only thing that can is the emergence of a new, positive form-shaping archetype that will define the zeitgeist of the era that comes next. 

In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of Chaos in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by Chaos. Chaos shines through him, and clearly for many he has a numinous power. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from this avatar of Chaos.

Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the Chaos. The Trump cult has very little to do with him as an individual human being; it has everything to do with Chaos that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the Chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this utterly substance-less human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to play such a significant role during the current Chaos zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges.

Until it does, the rest of us can only say No to the most destructive and cruel manifestations of Chaos. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might buy us time and create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political and cultural Liberalism, in the meanwhile, is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment zeitgeist performing a role like little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. But what we need, optimally, is not to keep the dyke plugged, but rather a controlled, cleansing flood. Not something that destroys everything in its path, but rather one that washes away everything that's dead and cannot serve us in the future. Again, Chaos cannot destroy what truly lives, what truly has a transcendental foundation, but that doesn't mean it won't make things very, very uncomfortable.  [See Note 5]

So, Chaos is the most dominant cultural force during an era when the zeitgest is going through a decadent phase. Nietzsche was the prophet announcing the advent the Age of Whatever. For him the Dionysian is always there energizing, counter-pressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms--the Apollonian--the zeitgeist produces. During a positive transformative period Chaos is subordinated to the transcendental and as such is  a Shiva-like source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks vitality. When Nietzsche announced the death of God he was simply pointing out that the old theistic- (Age of Faith) and deistic (Age of Reason) metaphysical imaginary no longer played a defining role in shaping what was of central importance in the broader society. The forms persisted, but they had no vitality. 

There is a lot of energy in Chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't a positively transformative archetype to counter it. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced and so therefore vulgar Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures--you know, the world as envisioned by a typical evening's entertainmnet on HBO. 

The strong emergence of any archetype tends after a while to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so creates a psychic instability that leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. That's when Chaos moves in. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.)

I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values during the Age of Reason was important for human development insofar as it encouraged the development parts of the larger 'Anthropos' Archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being. But its gains were unstable because they led in a historically unprecedented way to an experience of alienation--a radical disembedding--from the life world. It might have been temporarily necessary for human spiritual evolution, but it was not sustainable. The challenge for humans going forward is to find a lawful way to reconnect to the life world without losing their gains in autonomy and freedom. Surrender to the Dionysian is one way to reconnect, but it's not a way forward. [See Note 6]

So Romanticism was an attempt, often suffused with nostalgia, to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. But it's also where the Chaos Archetype--the Dionysian--begins to play a more dominant role, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism. And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter culminating in the explosion of the atom bomb. The Age of Matter is the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism. And yet we kinda get that it's the beginning of something new.

Romanticism and German Idealism were the last dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny in the West. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and premodern traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in ideologically driven total wars around the world. As the first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment zeitgeist and the Age of Reason. 

And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. So Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal agents through which Chaos is destroying the Liberal social order, which, rickety and inadequate though it might be, is the only order that we have. But it no longer works and must be replaced by something new and positive--and that's scary because we don't know what it is, and all we feel in the meantime is the chaos and disorder. But because I assume that all of our worst fears are stupid, I look forward in hope to the emergence of a new order energized by the awakening of a heretofore slumbering aspect of the Anthropos Archetype. 

As a society we are feeling a deep, primal anxiety that is the symptom of what I call ontological dizziness. It's the source of so much of the stupidity we see everywhere we look. People are reeling and will grasp at whatever promises to steady them. Each of us during these times needs to find a source of steadiness, and in this moment it can only be found within. And when found I think it can be described as a deep confidence, a primal trust, that in the face of uncertainty we can rely on a fundamental truth that a profound goodness lies at the heart of things.  And so that the only important thing for us going forward is that we act in trust that no matter how bad things look in any given moment that that Goodness will have the last word. This confidence will be sorely tested, but in the end, as the visionary Julian of Norwich, a survivor of the Black Death, wrote, "All shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well."

[This is an adapted version of an essay I posted in early 2020 entitled "Fear of the Future". The 'Vitruvian' painting inserted near the top was made by Hildegard of Bingen]

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Note 1: There are both archetypes of transcendence and archetypes of immanence. Until the Axial Revolution, the archetypes of immanence were most influential. The most powerful among them, as with the Greek gods, correlate with planetary archetypal energies.  The Axial Revolution awakened the most consciously evolved personalities in the first millennium BCE from China, through India, the Middle East and Greece to an awareness of transcendence--a dimension of reality beyond space and time, that was at the same time deeply implicated with space and time. This apophatic/cataphatic dynamic was recognized in the Tao that cannot be named, the One whose name cannot be spoken for the ancient Israelites or the Neoplatonists.

After the Axial Revolution, the immanent archetypes--the gods and goddesses--did not go away. In some societies, they were repressed, but in healthier societies their energies were integrated with the transcendent archetypes in a marriage of heaven and hell, in the Blakean sense. These unruly immanent archetypes need to be tamed, not destroyed. I don't know if Jungians would put it in these terms, but I think that what Jung was pointing to in his "process of individuation" was the integration of immanent and transcendent archetypes as they exist in the individual psyche.

In Christian terms, the transcendent Anthropos Archetype is a way of understanding what we mean when we say humans are created in the image and likeness of God. Human fallenness--the innate human predisposition toward self-deception and self-destructive behaviors--is most deeply experienced as the fragmentation of that archetype. On a day-to-day basis, we experience this fallenness in all the ways we experience being ruled by one impulse (immanent archetype) in one moment, and then another later and then another and so on. To become an adult is to learn to 'rule oneself', which means to command these unruly and often contradictory energies not by repressing them but by recruiting them and their energies as allies in a larger humanizing project, which is to become fully individuated human beings, i.e., the one whom were created to be, the fully particularly realized Anthropos or Christ archetype. As this is a moral project on the individual level, it is an evolutionary project on the collective historical-cultural level. 

I realize that this seems like fanciful nonsense to the skeptical, but at least consider the possibility that skepticism is the 'conventional' attitude during a Chaos zeitgeist. The mood of the zeitgest can shift, and when it does, someone will write something like Pico della Mirandola's Oration on the Dignity of Man, a classic Renaissance-era essay inspired by the Anthropos archetype, and this and other works like it will articulate this new mood. 

Note 2: During a decadent period, mostly what we get from artists and philosophers are articulations of Chaos because that's the mood of the zeitgeist. Others, who represent other aspects of human possibility work in the background because what they represent is out of tune with the zeitgeist and so is not recognized. They will come into the forefront when the zeitgeist shifts in a way that is more favorable to the work that they are doing.

I'm suggesting that archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So when we look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever. I know this kind of typology causes "serious" students of history to roll their eyes. But that's a characteristic of the Age of Whatever--to discount larger synthetic intuitions and to focus instead on more atomized facts. "Serious" people in the academy flourish in the Age of Whatever insofar as  their primary skills are analytic, i.e., all about breaking things down. The bent of my mind is synthetic, which is to look for connections using analogy and metaphor.

The "analysts" believe that there is more substance in the atomized facts than in typologies, as if facts have an existence apart from hidden typological interpretive frames. The metaphors that shape their perceptions are invisible to them but provide the frame withing which  some and not other "facts" become visible to them. "Synthesists" like me rely on the facts that the analysts bring into view, but we're willing to see patterns in them that the analysts feel are too speculatively simplistic, and they will tell you all the ways in which the chart below is contradicted by 'facts' that don't fit.

Maybe. But I'd argue that the trick is to understand which facts are relevant and which are noise. Relevance is largely determined by your metaphysics, and my archetypal approach derives from my Neoplatonism, which in turn shapes my epistemological evaluation concerning which facts are relevant and which are noise. At the very least, I look at such archetypal patterns as heuristic thought experiments that will prove over time whether they were helpful or just wrong. They will prove helpful to the degree that they help one get a better grip on reality, i.e., to help one to understand history in such a way that it helps him to navigate effectively in the present in anticipation of a hoped-for future. 

Besides, my goal is not to persuade the skeptical but rather to open up new plausible possibilities for thinking about what's going on. Looking for helpful metaphors, analogies, and typologies is kinda what I do on this blog. I think most of them have held up over the years. So all I ask of the skeptical reader is to play with this approach, and if it helps you to understand what's happening, great. If not, not. We'll just have to wait and see if the mood changes. When it does, it might prove us both wrong, but whether I'm right or wrong in the particulars about which I write here, the one thing I'm certain of is that the mood of Chaos cannot be sustained, and for better or worse, something will arise to replace it. I'm arguing here for what I hope would be the better possibility. 

Here is a chart that relies on this typological/archetypal way of thinking. It lays out the phases of what I call the Enlightenment Zeitgeist, which was the zeitgeist of Modernity. When I talk about Late Modernity I mean the phases of accelerating decline of the Enlightenment zeitgeist after 1850. Whether or not we are still in Late Modernity or in a truly Postmodern phase, I don't know. We won't until whatever positive transformative zeitgeist comes after Modernity has become broadly felt. 'Postmodern' is simply a placeholder name that asserts that the old thing no longer works, and the new thing hasn't yet emerged. It is in that sense that we are currently in the Age of Whatever Comes Next. 

Note 3: It's interesting that the entire history of the United States, while its founding was inspired by Enlightenment thinking at its acme, came into existence and into world prominence during this era of the Enlightenment zeitgeist's spiritual decline into a crude materialism. This is compounded by the way Calvinism, a form of Christianity that only makes sense in societies that have rejected their premodern cultural roots, plays such a dominant role in shaping American culture. It's very hard for Americans to reach back past the Reformation to find anything of spiritual value there. But that's what must be done--not by going native in the past, but by retrieving so much of what the Reformation and the Enlightenment threw out, and installing it in a way that makes sense in the 21st Century.

Note 4: In any event, the energies that shape the Age of Whatever derive from the everpresent energies of Chaos. It provides fuel, so to say, that energizes a more positive archetype with which in a healthy society it is in creative tension. But Chaos reigns when there is no energizing, positive collective archetype to work with it and to give those energies cultural forms. Our problem now is that those forms still linger, but they are so hollowed out that a guy like Trump can come along and blow them all over with such ease and (so far) with such impunity. 

That's the reason for our collective anxiety in this moment. We find the shapelessness unbearable. When Chaos is dominant, some can find a personal, individual way to work creatively with it to give it some shape, but most people can't. They are thrown into ontological dizziness, and they either surrender to it--via substance abuse, hedonic excess, etc.--or they grab onto whatever will give them the illusion of stability-- control freakery, religious cults, MAGA, etc. Those who have found a way to work creatively with the chaos can do so because they have found a way to activate or awaken the positive, form-giving Anthropos archetype within themselves. If you can find a way to give shape to the chaos within, you can deal more easily with the chaos without. That's when you know you have primal trust. 

Note 5: I've used other metaphors to describe this cleansing process. For instance, I've argued that we're going through a collective Dark Night of the Spirit a la John of the Cross or that we are wandering in the wilderness a la the Book of Exodus. They all point to the same thing, which is that we are in this 'purgative', in-between place. Nobody likes it, but if we understand the necessary negativity of it and live through it with faith and hope, i.e., with a primal trust, that we will come to the next stage, which is 'illuminative'. If someone is looking for me to prove this, I can't. But hopefully it resonates with you, and helps to give you a positive way to live through difficult times. 

Note 6: A perfectly balanced, metaxic tension between chaos and the positive energies of the Anthropos Archetype is theoretically possible. Maybe that's what will define the end of history. But in the meanwhile, history would appear to "progress" by dialectical swings from being out of balance, overcorrecting, and on it goes. During this process certain aspects of the Anthropos archetype emerge that energizes a particular historical-cultural era's forms and ways of thinking for a while, but these forms and ways of thinking eventually rigidify and die and give way to the emergence of another aspect of the Anthropos archetype that energizes new forms that, in turn, rigidify and die. It's in this sense that history is dialectical much in the way Hegel and Marx described it. Marx's ideas about it, though, were reductively simplistic. 

But Marx's dialectical eschatology was what largely infused a sense of meaning and purpose for the political and cultural left. It's where the whole idea of being on the right side of history comes from. But after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the postmodern mood of incredulity concerning grand narratives set in, and the Left lost its bearings. What passes for social justice  now on the Left is a brittle parody whose energies come mostly from Calvinistic sanctimony.  The Left won't regain its mojo until it finds a plausible eschatological narrative, and that, imo, will be found in something like the evolutionary Neoplatonism that I have been laying out in this blog over the years.

So I don't think of this cultural historical dialectic as an endless, cyclical process of rise and fall, but a process that with each stage makes an advance the benefits of which we carry with us into the next phase. The Enlightenment was not a mistake as many religious conservatives argue, but an advance in this sense. The mistake would be to think, as Hegel did, that it defined the end of history. Hardly. It's just one chapter or stage in a much longer story, and it's important that we preserve the advances in the human spirit that the Enlightenment bequeathes to us, and among those gifts is the idea of progress. 

The Enlightenment zeitgeist was inhospitable to the Neoplatonism I've been arguing must now be retrieved in a postmodern key, and that requires an expansion of Neoplatonism that embraces an imagination of human progress, that is, movement on the horizontal. I'd argue that the primary defect of pure Neoplatonism, which it shares with Buddhism, Vendantic Hinduism, and Taoism, is its emphasis on the eternal or transcendent--the vertical--in such a way that it diminishes the significance of meaning in history on the horizontal. The just society in Neoplatonism is the one that mirrors the law of heaven in such a way that it stresses balance and stability, and this leads to a rejection of the idea that there could be such a thing as historical progress. There is movement upward or downward, but not forward and backward. 

BTW, this is a point of disagreement I have with John Vervaeke's "Zen Neoplatonism", and it's the main reason why I think he's (respectfully) resistant to a Christian Neoplatonism. He is very skeptical about the idea of progress or meaning in history. I think that while Christianity shares the basic metaphysics of transcendence and the Good with classic Neoplatonism, Taoism, and Buddhism, it emphasizes incarnation and meaning in history in a way they would resist. For Neoplatonism and Buddhism, history is an illusion from which we must be liberated. For this reason, I would argue, Schelling, Hegel, Teilhard, and A.N. Whitehead--for all their limitations--are possibilities in the West in a way they could not be in the East. (Although Aurobindo, about whom I know nothing, might be an exception.)  I will develop this idea about how Christian Neoplatonism differs from, say, the classic Neoplatonism in a future post. 

Self-Transcendence, Constraints, and Social Order

Every society needs moral norms and behavioral codes. Without them we would all be in Hobbes's state of nature. The culture war that is tearing the country apart right now is about who gets to define what those codes are. The main combatants are the Left and Right wings of our Calvinist heritage--the priggish Neo Victorians on the Right and the equally priggish Neo Abolitionist Identitarianss on the Left. The Right is wrong because the old social order was unjust in its repressiveness of women and minorities; the Left is wrong because its basis for abolition is not 'justice' but 'desire'. The cultural Left seeks to abolish taboos that impede desire understood in a postmodern Freudian sense, and they find a way to do it that is insufferably moralistic. 

The intellectual vanguard on the cultural Left, at least for now, does not believe in transcendentals. For them Truth and Justice are just stuff we make up for the sake of convenience to navigate in a world that at root makes no sense. Justice is just a name for whatever is the cause of the day, which is usually what is trending in elite academic circles. For this faction on the Left, the idea that Justice is a transcendental ideal that calls a society to become its best possibility is an impossibility.  But without justice as a grounding principle, it must find something else, and it draws on forms of postmodern Freudian theory like that of Lacan, Zizek, Deleuze, and Guattari to find it--and all they's got is 'desire', which in the American context is conflated with the 'pursuit of happiness' and the freedom to determine for oneself what that happiness might be. Any attempt to argue that some desires are better than others and some may be destructively narcissistic is rejected except when it involves violence. 

So to boil the postmodern Freudian doctrine down to essentials, humans are all victims of the Oedipus complex, which is the cultural download we each receive when we are weaned and learn that we are not the center of the universe and must learn to play our role in society. These roles are cultural constructs and are  by definition repressive and as such the greatest impediment to our pursuit of happiness, and so they must be deconstructed and abolished when they are obstacles to any individual's pursuit of happiness however that might be construed. 

These roles are social constructs and as such are in flux over time, but they trace back to our premodern cultural heritage, so, for instance, the vast majority of children who are born biologically male and female must learn to play the roles of men and women, brothers and sisters, aunts and uncles, etc.  Daddy insists on it, and so does Mommy, perhaps even more vehemently. Those roles for men and women are different in different societies, but one gets assigned a role and one must fit into it whether one likes it or not, and mostly we humans don't like it.

I accept that humans are born polymorphously perverse, and that as a result no matter what the gender or sexual role assigned to us, it's a constraint.  And so the Oedipal desire to kill the Father is not personal; it's about the child's resentment at being constrained when she or he loses the Mother as his or her exclusive object of desire. The people who fail to make the Oedipal transition become primal narcissists--people like the fictional King Lear or the all too real Donald Trump--people whose driving force is to become once again the center of the universe as they were in the pre-Oedipal state where their wish was their desire. So what is this desire about except to restore our polymorphous perversity, which means a longing to return to a state of primal narcissism?

So all of us at that early age and continuing through life resent the constraints that were forced on us with our acculturation, some more than others depending on the configuration of the tribal codes and the roles they assign. But the resentment is always there, and so if we have not learned to own and manage these resentments, they lie festering in the soul. And when someone completely unrepressed and infantile like Donald Trump comes along, he gives permission to many for all that unmanaged, festering resentment to express itself in deeply destructive ways. And so here we are wallowing in a culture of narcissists, the Left not being much better than the Right in that regard. 

So the resentment is a problem for the powerless post-Oedipal child, and he must repress it and seek the Father's approva--or else. There's a fundamental slavishness to it as the child becomes rather like a dog seeking the approval of his master, and spirited human beings rebel in adolescence in different ways. But its why, especially in more straitlaced, repressive societies, the repressed admire the rebels among us insofar as they seek to break the taboos and assert their individuality over against the regime imposed by the symbolic Father. We all go through this in adolescence, but it's a phase for most of us that we pass through if we become successful adults. Adults understand that there are positive and negative constraints. Negative constraints keep us trapped insofar as they remain unconscious and unexamined; positive constraints become a path to liberation if chosen and worked with.

So, for instance, It's one thing to have a parent who forces his child to play a sport or a musical instrument so he can live through his child vicariously; it's another if the parent imbues a love of the sport or music in his child that inspires him to want to be the best he can be. To become the best you can be requires discipline and constraint. To give your life a shape, you have to constrain desires that if indulged would lead to shapelessness. To become an adult means to have chosen to give a shape to one's life. A man-child is either trapped by his fear of displeasing the Father or trapped in a resentful need to rebel against him. The Right tends toward the first kind of childishness; the Left toward the second. 

The adult has become of aware of his resentments and desires, has learned to own and manage them and to integrate them into a bigger, richer, shapelier possibility for becoming a full human being. So you can look at constraints as a problem or you can come to understand them as what gives a good life its shape in a life-long process of auto-poiesis and self-transcendence. In Neoplatonism, the more form a being has, the more densely real it is. So in Neoplatonic terms, true freedom is exercised in a continuous, dynamic trading in one set of constraints for another in an ongoing auto-poetic process of becoming more densely, humanly real. Another word for this intensity of form is 'virtue', and at the end of the process is what Aristotle called eudaemonia, which is the only happiness that is worthy of our desire. This sense of the word 'virtue' must be retrieved. In a society in which Calvinistic moralism is so dominant, we hear the word only in the sense of what Big Daddy wants. 

We must have constraints, but we must develop some wisdom about which constraints are healthful and which are not; we are children to the extent that we live passively with the constraints that were imposed on us children. We become adults to the degree that we come to understand those constraints and find ways to transcend them by adopting other constraints that are auto-poetic. This was the Nietzschean project, but as I'll argue below, it was in a deeper way the Socratic project. I respect those among our cultural elites who see Nietzsche as a model of self-transcendence in this mature sense. The argument that I've been making here over the years is that we have to move beyond Nietzsche to retrieve Socrates understood in the right way. 

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Every society has constraints, aka taboos, and every society always will, and the culture war in this country right how is about who gets to define what those taboos are for our children. But the deeper, really important question is how do you decide which constraints are healthy and which are not? And the answer depends on how you define what it means to live a full human life, and about that we clearly have no consensus. And so, as suggested above, an important part of living a full human life is to develop the capacity to transcend the constraints of our acculturation, but not in a way that is completely shapeless.

My critique of the the Cultural Left is that while it's right about transcending oppressive cultural constraints, it's wrong insofar as it leads to social shapelessness and forms of narcissisim. We humans both need constraints and we need to transcend them, but transcendence for the sake of transcendence, the Nietzschean option, is not a foundation on which you can build a healthy society. The Socratic option is to transcend one's cultural constraints but in such a way that one comes into a deeper relationship and alignmnet with Reality. This is not a possibility on the Cultural Left because it cannot believe that there is any such thing as Reality in the Platonic-realist sense of the word.

So instead the Cultural Left, insofar as it is in thrall to the postmodern Freudians, is obsessed with sexual desire. But do we really believe sex and sex drives are what most deeply defines us? Don't we all deep down recognize that the cult of Sex Positivity takes something that's partially true and pushes it into something that's unbalanced and distorting and fundamentally empty? 

So, from my pov, the moral program proposed on the Left, insofar as it makes an idol of Desire in the post-Freudian sense, is reductive and as such offers no genuinely 'desirable' alternative to the program of the Right. And quite possibly the Left is endorsing a program that is harmful for people in the throes of ontological dizziness insofar as it endorses metaphysical meaninglessness and shapelessness at a time when we need to feel that there's something firm underfoot upon which we can take a stand.  

Using 'desire' as a criterion for defining the 'good life' is not the problem; defining what is most deeply worthy of our desire is. Desire, like the intentionality of consciousness, is always 'about' something. The most important question we need to ask ourselves is what is our desire about? In other words, what is worthy of or deepest aspirations? What kind of society might there be that would help people to shape their lives inspired by such aspirations? To make it so much about sex is shooting too low at best, and at worst promoting a narcissistically regressive infantilizaton.  

But if sex is not the main thing, what ought to be the object of our desire--on what ends, individually and as a society, should we focus our attention and energies as worthy of our deepest aspirations? Is it possible that we could come to some consensus about that? I genuinly believe that we can because in the final analysis Socrates was correct--what we all desire is the Good, and if we knew it, we would choose it. (See Note 1) I believe this deep desire for the Good is innate in all human beings, even the worst of us. We just live in a society that has no memory anymore about what that Good is as something to guide our collective cultural aspirations. 

But the taboos can only be transcended in a healthy way if there's agreement that such transcendence is in the service of the Good. If there is no mutually shared idea of the Good as a transcendental aspiration, then all you've got is desire, and one man's desire to grab a woman in the genitals because he wants to and can is equal to another's to give up her life to save someone else's. To argue otherwise is implicitly to acknowledge that there's a hierarchy, i.e., some desires are higher and more worthy than others, and that only makes sense if there is some transcendental standard that defines what is more or less worthy, more or less truthful, more or less Good, more or less Just. We all deep down recognize this. None of us are moral relativists. We just don't know how to talk anymore about what it means to be truly a moral agent, which involves the capacity for self-correction and self-transcendence. We perform instead what we think others expect of us as moral behavior--whatever the Daddies and Mommies of the Left or Right demand--rather than to be inspired by what is truly, deeply transformatively Good. 

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Note 1. What Socrates means to "know the Good" is another question. We mostly have opinions about what the right thing to do is that derive from our programming by to prevailing cultural conventions, which is quite different from 'knowing' the good. According to Plato/Socrates, it's possible to have right opinion, i.e., when your opinion about what is good happens to correspond with what the Good is, but that is different from knowing the Good. Knowing the Good comes from a deeper kind of disclosure that transcends convention. And because such disclosures are a possibility, convention is always vulnerable to challenge. In the Neoplatonic tradition, there are degrees of knowledge--from inklings to satori-like theophanies. But inklings are where most of us start. 

A healthy society has norms that derive from right opinion about the Good. It passes onto its children habits and attitudes that will make it easier for them aspire to the Good and to be open to its disclosures--in other words easier for them to become free adults. The segregated societies in the South clearly did not have norms that were aligned with the Good, and most people of good will recognized that. Clearly, there are other things about southern society and its customary culture that are aligned with the Good, but if it were a healthy society, it would have recognized that slavery and segregation was just wrong, and not looked for all manner of sophistical arguments to justify it.

It's in this sense that southern society has trapped too many of its citizens in such a way as to make it harder for them to become free adults. They are trapped by their resentments and find themselves incapable of transcending them. This, as suggested above, is why they have embraced an infantile nihilist like Trump. He has legitimized their resentments of the Liberal Big Daddy that shames any behaviors that are not P.C or woke, and encourages their acting these resentments out. Before Trump those resentments festered. He blew the lid off whatever contained them, and bizarre, delusional, clownishly ineptly childish events like J6 were the result. 

But societies that have mostly right opinion about the Good are not good enough unless they encourage its children to become free adults. In Calvinist societies we think of Virtue as a cage. If we lived in a Neoplatonic society, we would think of it as a trellis. That used to be the goal of a liberal education. All spirited human beings want to overcome illusion and ignorance; they want to develop a deeper and richer relatiohship with Reality. They are not satisfied to live in a shadow realm but want to live in a world where the deep Real lives and shines. And the project for Socrates was to play the role of midwife for his interlocutors, that his he sought to bring their innate capacity for recognizing the living, shining Good into awareness.  

Socrates agreed with the Sophists that most people's thinking was shaped by social conventions, and insofar as they were, they were living in a world of shadows. He disagreed with the Sophists that shadow thinking was the the only kind possible.The postmodern Freudians, like the Sophists, would argue that there are only the conventions, and our freedom--if we have any freedom at all--lies primarily in transgressing conventional constraints, i.e., saying No to Big Daddy. Is there really any more to it than that, and  is there anything truly morally serious about that for anyone older than 17? 

The naivete, if not the absurdity, of the postmodern Freudians, I hope, is apparent to most readers. It's sophisticated nonsense. Their position leads to regression toward Hobbes's state of nature which forces the social contract that creates the Leviathan--which is for Hobbesians, most of our cultural elite, a closed system in which transcendence is an impossibility. To this extent Freud was correct in Civilization and Its Discontents. Being in society creates constraints, and those constraints are the source of our resentment and violence and discontent and we long to break out. 

None of us want to live in a closed, repressive system. But we can't live in one that is completely without constraints. We want to live in a system where self-transcendence and auto-poeisis is a real possibility, but transcendence toward what? Making our Selves into what? Anything we want? But is anything we want the Good? I don't think so, and neither can anybody who thinks about it for a minute. We all deep down know there is a "Good". Why are we so afraid to acknowledge it and build a society around a collective aspiration toward it? 

CNN and Bias in Journalism

Journalism can never be unbiased because human beings can never be unbiased. The best we can expect from journalists, as is the best we can expect from human beings, is that they give a reasonable account in defense for their more controversial stories. So what constitutes a reasonable account? Well first of all a firm grounding in the facts. But it's not just as easy as that. The more controversial the issue, the more difficult to establish and prioritize the relevant facts. 

Have you ever had an argument with a 9/11 Truther? If they lean Left, they believe it was a Bush administration inside job, and if they lean Right, they'll argue that it was  coordinated by the Israelis or some other conspiracy. When you ask them what are the sources for their facts, they direct you to websites or podcasts where experts in engineering, explosives, etc., make a factual case for why the official explanations cannot be possibly correct, and so then select and present the facts and quasi-facts that support alternative narratives that they argue connect the dots in ways that make much more sense.  

They do not make irrational arguments, but they do make arguments that reek of confirmation bias in matters where the facts are hard to pin down. Am I guilty of confirmation bias in rejecting their conspiracy narratives? Maybe. But the official Osama bin Laden story makes enough sense for me that I choose to believe that it, or something like it, is the most likely explanation, even if the real truth is much more complex and thorny. 

But the bottom line comes down to this, I don't want to spend my time and energy going down these rabbit holes. I've got better things to do. But this gets to the nub of the issue when it comes to trusting journalistic narratives. Most people when it comes to the reporting of the everyday news don't have the time and energy to chase down the truthfulness of what they hear and read. They trust their sources, and they trust them to a large extent because of their own confirmation biases, i.e., because these sources tell them what they already believe and want to hear.

Nevertheless, despite the unavoidable bias, an essential criteria for trusting a news source is the quality of their fact checking. And so when I read the NY Times or The Atlantic or the New Yorker, I know that they take fact checking very seriously. Certainly in a way that FOX or any of the MAGA supporting media do not. Will the Liberal interpretation of the facts render their stories as unbiased? Of course not. Might the facts they choose to foreground as more salient and which to background be biased? For sure. But I trust that these media make a good-faith effort to write stories that are rigorously fact checked and reasonable. And I try to be aware of and critical as I can be of their biases--and my own--in evaluating the truth value of the story.  

And this is really the difference between the cultural Left and cultural Right at this moment. They both read or listen to media that confirms their biases, but the Liberal media have far higher journalistic standards for basing their stories in facts. The MAGA Right doesn't believe that. They believe that the stories reported in the MSM are just as factually baseless as the stories the Right media put out. But it's just not true. There's a huge difference between stories that have no factual or evidentiary basis and biased stories that do have a factual and evidentiary basis. You can have a reasonable argument with the latter; you can't with the former. 

Both Left and Right media focus on stories that support their biases because they both foreground facts that are shaped by those biases, but one is far more trustworthy than the other. One provides stories or makes arguments that are reasonable because they make a good-faith effort to be grounded in actual facts, and they are far more open to engage with alternative arguments that interpret the facts differently or emphasize facts that were backgrounded or de-emphasized. You can argue with people with whom you disagree but who are committed to factuality; you can't with people for whom facts don't matter.

This is why Chris Licht was doomed from the start at CNN and why his previous bosses Joe Scarborough and Stephen Colbert told him not to take the job. The picture of him that emerges from the Tim Alberta story that apparently did him in was that he was well-intentioned, but astonishingly naive in his belief that he could make CNN a place that was factually rigorous and still be a place where Republicans could feel comfortable. Why was this so naive? Because the only Republicans and conservatives who respect the facts are Never-Trumpers.

Liberal media is saturated with Conservatives who are never Trumpers. But none of them are in office because any elected Republican politician cannot remain an elected Republican politician unless he or she endorse Trump's egregious, over-the-top lies. To be a Republican who is not a Never-Trumper means that you cannot tell the truth when you appear on any media--whether Liberal or Conservative. Some Republican pols will tell reporters off the record that they think Trump is a sociopathic liar, but they won't do it on the record. To be a Republican with a future in politics requires that you either lie or refuse to refute the lie. You can rationalize it as the price of remaining in business, but it makes no sense to appear on any media where the fundamental lying will be challenged. Why expose yourself to that?  

That's why no elected Republicans (hardly ever) appear on CNN or MSNBC. It's not because of Liberal bias; it's because they don't want to be confronted with the facts because to acknowledge them is political suicide. The best they can do if they choose to appear on Liberal MSM is refuse to answer questions and filibuster talking points that they've prepared in advance. There is no possibility of a good-faith argument or debate. Chris Christie when he was a Trump surrogate was an outlier in willing to debate on Liberal media platforms, but now even he's a Never-Trumper. 

And so in the end, whatever might have been good faith in Chris Licht's attempt to make CNN more MAGA-friendly was always impossible if CNN was to retain any journalistic integrity. The absurdity of the CNN platforming the New Hampshire town hall proves it. Trump gets everything he wanted if he is to condescend to appear on CNN, and this means giving him an open platform to promote his lies. Sure, there would be a pretense of fact-checking, but in front of a live MAGA audience that has no interest in the facts and only cares about retaining its delusional narrative of election fraud and Liberal moral turpitude.

And so Kaitlan Collins, the CNN host, tried her best to challenge the lies, but they came so fast and furious that she couldn't keep up. And so the whole thing  blows up in CNN's face: Rather than presenting itself as media where MAGA can feel comfortable, MAGA folks walk away thinking that CNN is just what they always thought it was--hostile to Trump. Was any other outcome possible? The goal of having a fact-based forum with Trump in which MAGA world would feel comfortable was from the beginning an impossibility. To care about the facts and expect MAGA to thank CNN for insisting on them are two mutually exclusive goals. In the end CNN does not get its win. It just gives Trump another opportunity to excrete his lies and to give MAGA good reason to continue to hate CNN.