After the Future

Consensus Reality and Conspiracy Theories

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genealogy Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The criteria that define this metaxic relationship are as follows: 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Some Thoughts on Equity Language

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

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

George Packer in The Atlantic

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

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

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

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

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

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

Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rip: Hmm?

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

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

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

Rip: That’s it.

Beth: That’s all there is.

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

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

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

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

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

++++++++++

Note 1: Fukuyama writes:

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

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

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

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

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

Note 2: Fukuyama--

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

The Duttons vs. The Roys

The TV shows Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in that they are both about two powerful American overlords and their families. What's different about them is more interesting and significant. To understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. In a proxy war between the Duttons and the Roys, who would you prefer to win and rule the country? From the POV of Red America, coastal corporate elites like the Roys are already ruling it, and the Duttons are fighting everything that the Roys represent. Are they wrong?

John Dutton is a stubborn, nasty character that you never want to cross, but at least there are some things--the land and its traditions--that are sacred to him. And he's willing to sacrifice his fortune to preserve and protect the land and its traditions in what he  knows is a losing cause. This is what makes him a hero for viewers in Red America. Is there anything analogously sacred for Logan Roy?

I have never lived in Anerica's rural heartland, but I've always had a soft spot for Wendell Berry's Jeffersonian vision for America (See Note 1), and it leads me to appreciate John Dutton in a way I could never appreciate the Hamiltonian Logan Roy. I'm not saying Wendell Berry would approve of John Dutton, but it wouldn't surprise me if a character like John Dutton (or his creator Taylor Sheridan) has read and approves of Wendell Berry. What thinker might Logan Roy approve of--Ayn Rand? 

So the difference between the shows lies in the difference between what the two families care most about. The principal characters in Yellowstone are by almost every normal standard of decency bad people, but the 'good' is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The principal characters in Yellowstone --particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are terrible people when we first meet them. But we gradually learn their backstories, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption. At least I do. 

I don't find myself hoping anything for the characters in Succession. These characters are written as soulless appetites. Repentance and redemption are never a question for any of them--it would never occur to any of them that they are in need of it. For the people in the Roys' world, there is no possibility for choosing the "good"--there are only winners and losers, and so there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices. They live in an morally flat world absent any ambiguity and so are completely predictable. 

Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but Red America thinks about Blue elites as typified by the amoral characters that make up the Roy family. Would it be so unbelievable to learn that some in the Roy family are into child trafficking as a sideline? What in their characters would incline them draw a line at that if the opportunity for it came up that would give them a kick or some extra cash? 

Red America tends to see all of America's coastal Liberal elites as very comfortable in that world inhabited by the Roys. Surely the Clintons are at home there, and so, they think, it's not ulikely that they committed the crimes that were rumored about them in the 90s. They're all birds of a feather. Didn't Bill hang out with Jeffrey Epstein?  Of course, from this pov, the Clintons have done much worse than anything that Donald Trump has done. They just got away with it because the elite establishment circled their wagons around them the way they did it for Ted Kennedy after Chappaquiddick. Trump, at least, hasn't killed anyone. Same now for the "Biden crime family".

Now almost all of this is nonsense, but some of it isn't. And it's understandable how Red America, because it is so cynical about America's coastal overclass, might be inclined to believe anything that fits with or reinforces their cynicism. And it's all consistent with what they've been taught to believe about elites from the way they are portrayed in movies and TV shoes like Succession. Red America looks at these elites in the corporate and media worlds and asks, "What deep down do they really believe in? What is their program except to shatter every taboo that decent people have respected from time immemorial? Is there anything wholesome or good that they don't seek to destroy?"

The point is that it's not unreasonable for Red America to hold the affluent, well-educated elites in Blue America in contempt. They have given the demagogues plenty to work with. 

I live in among relatively affluent, well educated folks in Blue America, and almost everyone I know has values shaped by Liberal cosmopolitan presuppositions. They are all decent people with a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. They do not recognize themselves in this caricature that Red America has of Blue America. But as with Red America, their moral code comes from their acculturation, and its interior logic is mostly left unexamined. As social attitudes change so do theirs without thinking about it too much. They simply adapt. Adapting is what Liberals do. It doesn't cost them anything to do so, and so they can't understand why to do so costs Red Americans so much. It must be because they're all racists and homophobes. 

Blue America is fascinated by the Roy family, but hardly approves of its amorality. If anything it mistakenly sees the Roys as inhabitants of Red America. Isn't Logan Roy a thinly disguised Rupert Murdoch? But this is what many in Blue America have a hard time understanding: the Roys and the Murdochs, regardless of the content they produce, are part of the cosmopolitan elite that Red America despises. Their commitments are essentially the same as woke corporations like the Comcast and Disney, or Amazon and Apple. They just serve a different, anti-woke market.

Folks in Red America often act in vicious, licentious, appetitive ways. You know, like Beth Dutton. But they know such behavior is wrong. And while Red America justifies resorting to violence to achieve its goals in ways that Blue America finds outrageous, Red Americans see themselves as defending something sacred. You've got to be meaner than evil to protect what you love, says John Dutton. What is sacred for Blue America that it would defend it with the same level of passion? 

Indeed, what does Blue America believe in at all about America except some shallow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. Whatever is vicious about Beth, she has a loyalty to her father and husband that ennobles her in a way that is utterly beyond Jamie. Jamie doesn't fit in the Dutton family; he'd be a much better fit with the Roys.

Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they believe, they have to play on the field where evil sets the rules. There are a lot of people in Israel who find that logic persuasive these days. Are they right? No, but it's at least understandable why they should. 

***

I don't know that Yellowstone qualifies as 'prestige' TV in the way that Succession, The Sopranos, or The Wire do. There are too many contrived, plot-driven implausibilities in Yellowstone, but the writing and dialogue (and the music) are often very good, and there and some compelling characters. For instance, Angela Blue Thunder, a Native American warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Tribal Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--

“They [the white elites] make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters.”

Not ideas you expect to hear expressed on a show streaming on Peacock. 

Liberals talk about the "rule of law" as if it has some sacred, numinous glow, but it has no such thing. For most Americans the rule of law lacks any deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. Even decent people feel little moral obligation to obey laws they think are stupid or wrongheaded. Legislators are perceived as easily corruptible careerist hacks with no claim even to a minimum of rudimentary competency or decency. What right have they to tell me what's right and wrong? Their laws are just stuff they make up as they go along that mostly suit the interests of those who have the power and money to pay them off. Liberals love Nancy Pelosi, but we saw recently how her instincts are to protect her overclass interests before doing what's obviously, from the non-elite pov, in the public interest.  

That's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals in the media sounds so empty these days, especially in Red America. Everybody understands that legislative policy is a tool the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to enrich their allies. And the criminal law has no real purpose except to keep the lower orders in line. That's why it's so rarely used against elites in the power structure. How many of the architects of the 2008 economic collapse went to jail? And now you're going after our guy Trump? Rule of law, my ass. 

Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history, but as such worthy of our aspiration. A democratic republic cannot survive with it, and it's important that we do everything we can to support it. But respect for it would get a huge boost if in fact it was enforced against elites as frequently as it is against poor folks. The behavior or the supreme court lately hasn't helped. If nothing else this attempt to hold Trump accountable for his crimes is forcing us to have a reckoning about how the Liberal Order functions and for whose benefit. 

But in the meanwhile, we need to appreciate better than we do why so many people are so cynical about the rule of law. It's not something Native Americans or Black Americans have reason to take seriously, and neither is it for those in the MAGA world. So for them it's to hell with self-serving Liberal pieties about the rule of law. Law is what those with power say it is, and so we in Red America mean to get it back by any means, legal or extralegal, so that we can enact and enforce laws that benefit us. And besides, God is on our side, and we are the tools of his just retribution. 

The shrewdest folks in MAGA world understand that Trump is an idiot, but he is an effectively blunt instrument in helping them to achieve such ends. When Trump tells his MAGA followers, "I am your retribution", he understands how it resonates because he's working with this deeply felt desire to turn the tables, to restore the old order, an order most of MAGA believes has been wantonly destroyed by Liberal elites.

And they're not wrong insofar as GOP and Dem elites both supported the Neoliberal policies that are largely responsible for destroying the economic and cultural matrix that supported their local communities, traditions, and customs. Heartland America has been hollowed out in the last 40 plus years because of a project initiated, ironically, by its hero Ronald Reagan.

***

Our feeling about what's "right" largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. This is how it has always worked in societies with living traditions.

Cosmopolitan Liberal Americans have no belief that law is something aligned with a transcendent Deep Real that is the ground for ontonormative justice. Conservatives do, even if their relationship to it has rigidified into something inflexible and lifeless. The problem with the traditionalists on the religious Right today is that they no longer have a living tradition, but only zombie traditions--there's no vitality or wisdom in them anymore. The traditions they seek to defend maintain the old forms, but are animated by something quite alien to the originary energies that gave them those forms. And the result is that most traditionalists can't tell the difference between what's wholesome and what's rotted. 

We're not a healthy society, and neither the Right nor the Left has a remedy. Both blame the other for impeding what is in effect their respective hoped-for nihilistic vision for an American future. And now because there's no culture anymore that is shared by both elites and non-elites, it comes down to who has the power to impose laws that benefit their team no matter how unfairly they penalize the other. 

Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, we have become default worshippers in the cult of the Invisible Hand. The invisible Hand has no interest in preserving traditions, customs, and communities. It destroys all that in the name of 'progress', and the Left-leaning, cosmopolitan elite are quite comfortable with that. Aren't patriarchy, homophobia, and racism all woven into those traditions and customs? Good riddance to the whole retrograde ball of wax.

But it's more complicated than that, and it's important that Liberals of good will try to understand that Red America is experiencing domicide--the destruction of their homeland--in a way that's analogous to the domicide that white America inflicted on Native Americans, and it's not too much of a stretch to compare it to the domicide that the Chinese government is inflicting on Tibetans and Uyghurs.

Why are American Liberals outraged at the destruction of those Asian traditional cultures but not those of traditionalist Americans? Well the reason is obvious. The people in those traditional cultures over there are not a massive voting block over here. Nevertheless, can American Liberals at least attempt to understand why Red America might think that assimilating into Blue America is about as appealing for them as Native Americans assimilating into White America? Or Palestinians assimilating into Israeli society? 

So Blue Americans--especially the most affluent and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest moral commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family? Of course, they're different, they say. The Roys are horrible people, and we're not.

But on what philosophical basis can you criticize their behavior? I would argue that your objection to the Roys is merely aesthetic, like your preferring Picasso to Matisse. And I would go further to argue that the Roys are perfect products of the anything-goes, nihilistic Libertarianism that shapes the corporate Right and the cultural Left. Tell me why I'm wrong.

----------

Note 1: Wendell Berry's agrarian vision of America might seem absurdly unrealistic. He seems to be decrying the loss of a world that is just gone, and there's no bringing it back. Too bad, one might think, but we have nothing to learn from him that will enable us to live in the world as it really is. I used to think that.

But I wonder now if Berry might be more relevant in a hundred years than he is now. I can say that because while he is certainly out of tune with the current, late-capitalist reality, he's more deeply in tune with the Living Real. And sooner or later, because no matter how out of tune with Reality we become, it always reasserts itself. When it does, the broader culture will recognize that Berry had it right all along, and that we need his wisdom about embodiement and the deep interrelationship between culture and agriculture going forward. How many hard lessons we have to learn between now and then remains to be seen. 

Technology is not necessarily the enemy; imbalance is. And while we humans need our tools, they are not going to save us. Indeed they will likely destroy us unless we develop a wisdom and clarity about what true human flourishing is. As a society we have no clue about that  right now and for that reason we have no idea about how to subordinate tools in the service of human flourishing. But Berry has has a clue, and because he does, he has more wisdom and clarity than anybody, for instance, in Silicon Valley. And yet we let these callow folks unfettered powers to determine the human future? Who's to stop them? 

It's cliche to say it, but that should not distract from its truth--we are not using our technology so much as our technology is using us. And only with the kind of wisdom Berry has will we have the clarity to find ways to subordinate technological developments to serve human ends rather than the ends of techno-capitalism. I assure you the latter is not taking us to a place where human beings will flourish. 

(This was revised with added notes to improve clarity in November 2023.)

End of History?

Let’s begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition, but at the preservation of life itself in conditions where populations could not agree on what the good life was. This leaves liberal orders with a spiritual vacuum: they allow individuals to go their own way, and create only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values like tolerance and openness to compromise and deliberation, but these are not the strong bonds of a tightly knit religious or ethno-nationalist community. Liberal societies have often fostered the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification, a consumer society that is both hungry for status but never satisfied with what any given individual is able to achieve.

Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022, pp. 115-16

I thought this quote succinctly summarizes the problem I've been writing about over the last year, and it sets up my response to his question about whether there is an alternative. So fair warning: I'm going to indulge in a little utopian fantasizing here and see where it takes us. My answer to the question of alternatives lies in making a distinction between progress made in the cultural sphere and that made in the political sphere. We tend to think that the only progress that counts is political or technological, but from my pov it's far less important than cultural/moral progress. The importance of politics lies in that the wrong kind can impede cultural/moral progress, and the right kind creates the conditions for the possibility of it. A good society does not force people to be good; it make it easier for them to be. 

So the problem as I see it is not that we have a Liberal Democracy--that's an unqualified good. The problem lies in that most Americans don't have the kind of cultural maturity to be masters of themselves in the way that a healthy democracy demands. That's not the problem of Liberal Democracy; it's the problem of the kind of "desire culture" that rationalist materialism has created. Within it, there can be no consensus about how within a Liberal Democracy cultural progress or moral maturity might be achieved.

Most people are decent enough, but they are not inspired by any great moral project. There's nothing in the culture that models that. Their life purpose, insofar as they think about it, is to fulfill their desires and they are 'moral' if they do it in a way that doesn't hurt others. The goal is to be happy while being nice. Not much more to it than that. But worse, the desire culture that capitalism has created establishes conditions that actively work against anything deeper or more morally significant, and such an ethos impedes the broad development of moral maturity. A desire culture is either infantilizing or encourages desire behaviors that are "not nice", that are predatory. Most popular film and fiction is about nice people with acceptable desires becoming the prey of people who have unacceptable desires, and the latter are usually far more interesting because they are transgressive, and we all want to be transgressive; we all want to kill the Oedipal Father. 

The problem, therefore, is not that we have a void in our politics, but that we have a void in our cultural/moral life, and that void creates a destabilizing vacuum in our political life. The solution to the problem of political stability can only be found in a recovery of something lost in our cultural/moral life. 

In Fukuyama's most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, he defends the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history and offers a quasi-defense of Kojeve/Hegel's proclamation that history has ended with the French Revolution. This marked the historical moment when political history replaced the 'megalothymic' with the 'isothymic', which in effect ended history driven by the master/slave dynamic that had been era primary driver. [See Note 1] This is not the place to deal with all the objections to such an idea, but there's an insight at the heart of it that has real validity: Liberal Democracy is as good as it's going to get, and any society that establishes a stable Liberal Democracy has come to the end of its political history. World history continues until every society achieves Liberal Democracy. [See Note 2] 

Now, if you haven't been exposed to this idea or have not had the time to think about it, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but I am inclined to believe that Liberal Democracy--if by 'liberal' we mean the freedom principle that protects the individual citizen from a coercive state, and if by 'democracy' we mean the equality principle that asserts that political sovereignty lies with its citizens--is the best possible form of political organization. And I have no problem with the idea that we will be at the end of "political" history when such a political regime has established itself stably throughout the world. But for such stability to be achieved, there must be significant cultural/moral progress that would enable the great majority of the world's population to be mature and free enough to be truly self-governing.

This requires that individuals become masters of themselves, and we've seen in recent years that even the stability of Liberal Democracy in the U.S. is more fragile than we have could ever imagined even twenty years ago. Huge swaths of the American population have demonstrated that they have no such self mastery in that they are too easily manipulated by demagogues. This is not the fault of Liberal Democracy, but of the nihilistic desire culture that rationalist materialism has created. I am arguing that it has eroded the customs and traditions that provided a trellis for souls to grow, expand, and mature. Those customs and traditions are gone, and the idea of restoring them is absurd. But it's not absurd to imagine a renaissance through which new culturally vital forms would be created if we could find a way to reconnect to the Living Real and its transcendentally founded ontonormative ideals in a way that all people of good will would acknowledge.

Clearly we're not as a society even remotely close to a thymotic culture of self mastery, so the achievement of Liberal Democracy in America and elsewhere remains unstable. It will remain so as long as there's no cultural/moral ballast to steady it and no trellis of living tradition to direct its citizens toward the moral achievement of euthymia [See Note 3]. We've got plenty of history ahead of us because the achievement of a Liberal Democracy here and elsewhere depends on developing a culture that grows humans capable of self-mastery. Freedom, yes. But freedom for what? A choice other than infantile fantasies should have robust purchase on the souls of all spirited Americans.  

But in the meanwhile, there is no evolution of the state that can get better than Liberal Democracy, even if an awful lot of people haven't the self-mastery that insures its stability. So far we've been able to muddle through. But even if we achieved a genuinely stable Liberal Democracy, that doesn't mean the end of human history. Political and human history are not the same. Liberal Democracy establishes the freedom and equality conditions for the more important evolutionary history of the human spirit in the cultural sphere. Politics recedes into the background, and cultural/moral quest becomes the main 'thymotic' activity.  

I think of this evolutionary process in ways that integrate Hegelian dialectic with his contemporary Schelling's ideas concerning how the human being is the site where the evolving earth (cosmos?) becomes aware of itself. For Schelling, all of nature is the human unconscious, and the human project is to gradually make it conscious in an evolutionary project that requires bringing the deep mysteries of Being, what I call the Living Real, into expanding human awareness. Humans need leisure in order to undertake such a project. Is that something the machines can give us? More on this in a future post. 

I think that Heidegger's idea concerning 'aletheia' and his defining 'Dasein is a clearing in the forest of being' is closer to Schelling than Hegel was, even if Heidegger had no interest in Schelling's evolutionary ideas. Hegel took Schelling's idea of consciousness evolution and emphasized the rational part of it rather than the irrational, and that's what people like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche objected to in Hegel. His philsophy was perceived by them to be an abstraction, an empty shell. And Kierkegaard, et al., were right to object to Hegel's system-building rationality. It can be suffocating. What makes human life interesting is not rationality--if by that we mean instrumental reason and its analytical and problem-solving capabilities, but rather the human capacity to bring into consciousness the meaning-saturated depths and heights of the Living Real. [See Note 4]

The Living Real has both suprarational and subrational dimensions to it. Nietzsche emphasized the chaotic subrational, and Christianity and other post-Axial traditions emphasize the lawful, form-giving suprarational. I believe that the human spiritual-cultural evolutionary project is to gradually integrate the suprarational with the subrational. Both are fathomless in their depths and heights, and both are apprehended on the vertical axis or dimension of experience. Rationalist Materialism denies the existence of the vertical, except in some reductive psychologized sense that assumes that the brain is the precondition for mind rather than that mind is the precondition for the brain. 

So the human project through the centuries (but also within a given lifetime in whatever measure is appropriate for the individual human) is to discover and then integrate what lies hidden below with what lies hidden above. [See Note 5] Not easy, but this is the solution for the megalothymia problem that Fukuyama wrestles with and, imo, fails to resolve satisfactorily. This kind of thymotic project is not primarily driven by thinking; it's rather more a practice that comes closer to what artists and monks do. The thinking follows from what shows up in one's practice. The knock on Hegel was that he saw evolution as primarily an evolution of thought, whereas it is really an evolution of awareness, a series of awakenings to higher and deeper dimensions of the Living Real. Rationalist Materialist civilizations see evolution as an expansion of horizontal technical control. I'm ok with technical control, but we have to ask ourselves--who's in control? In the service of what ends?

Thinking, of course is important, but only in the way that McGilchrist presents it, which is a process subsequent to the rich data that our intuitive discoveries present to consciousness. Any "thinking" is about experience, and the richness of our experience on the vertical is equally if not more important than our experiences on the horizontal. The quality of our thinking, therefore, depends on the scope and richness of our experience. And so it follows that any thinking that a priori excludes experiences that derive from the vertical axis is poor-quality thinking. High-quality thinking integrates the broadest scope of experiences on both the horizontal and the vertical axes, keeps pushing to expand the scope on both those axes, and articulates what is uncovered there in a coherent way that integrates it with what is already known. This is basic Thomas Kuhn, but with the addition of embracing the expansion of knowledge on the vertical. 

This is a spiritual/artistic/philosophical project, not a political one, but the conditions in which such a project flourishes require a deeply achieved (anti-Oedipal in the Socratic not Deleuzian sense) human freedom which requires a political regime that won't interfere with its exploration and questing. Ideally a sapiential community, independent of any political or state control, will emerge that will discern and debate the significance of what the culture's best explorers uncover. [See Note 6]

I don't see that such a development requires confessional commitments to a particular faith tradition, but I would expect that it would be a project consonant with the deepest aspirations of all the great faith traditions, and that any faith tradition, if it is to retain (or recover) vitality, would have to in some way participate in and contribute to this larger cultural project in ways that are adaptable to its own traditions of thought and practice. A religious or faith tradition would be a particular way to practice what is embraced universally by all people of good will. Cross fertilization between such traditions will inevitably occur, and "best practices" will evolve that all will share. 

The sapiential community will not therefore be an official magisterium or rabbinate, but will comprise people who emerge who prove themselves capable of communicating to the broader culture the vital, soul-enriching significance of the new knowledge that comes into awareness from the vertical dimensions. They will have the capability to integrate it coherently with what is already known on the horizontal dimension. Their legitimacy will be recognized in much the same way that any relatively well-educated person recognizes that Shakespeare and Shelley are more disclosive of the Living Real than, say, Quentin Tarantino and Taylor Swift.

In other words, there will be a broad consensus that accepts that great art is different from entertainments. Nothing wrong with entertainments, but they shouldn't be thought of as anything more than that. Great Art is great by virtue of the scope and richness of what it discloses of the Living Real. I like the verbal challenges involved in solving a tough crossword puzzle, but it's not the same as the verbal challenge of uncovering what lies hidden in Yeats or Wordsworth. 

So, if the human project is to flourish, I hope for and expect such a sapiential tradition to emerge in tandem with great spirits and artists whose role it will be to awaken the rest of us to as yet undiscovered dimensions of the Living Real. It will enjoy a deeply felt legitimacy by the broader culture, which will support the reconstruction of a trellis that will expand the culture's knowledge both vertically and horizontally and that will pass on that knowledge from generation to generation.

***

So I understand if you read this and think it's blathering, utopian nonsense. Maybe some even think that's it's no utopia they'd ever want to live in. Too much of the world's energies are directed in such a way that if they are not inimical to such a project, they are indifferent to it. As yet there is no a robust constituency of human beings who have progressed enough in this project to legitimate it to the broader culture, and until that happens what I'm describing seems, understandably, to be wishful thinking. I think of it as hopeful thinking, but hope based on intuitions I have had that have been tested over time and proved resilient.

I know that there is a hunger for what I'm describing here, and I know that there are enough people who recognize the deep reality of what I'm describing as the nourishment that will feed it. It remains to be seen whether those who share in this recognition will always remain on the culture's fringes or whether at some point they will find a way to play a more central cultural/moral role.

I, of course, don't know. As I've written in previous posts, all I see myself doing is as a dog barking up a tree, trying to call attention to something real up there--you can smell it, too, right?--but it's obscured by the branches and the the leaves. If you can smell it, you become interested and want to stick around to see if it emerges. But if you can't smell it, then it's understandable that you would think there's nothing there worth waiting for. But for people like me, there's no question that it's there, it just remains to be seen whether it can be brought to ground.

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Note 1: Fukuyama's book is really an extended reflection on the problem of thymos in shaping political life, Thymos is the spirited or soulful part of the human being according to Plato.(The other two are rationality/mind and bodily desire.) I used the phrase 'desire culture' in this essay because, as Fukuyama argues and I agree, that Anglo-American Liberalism is heir to the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition that wanted to neutralize a politics of thymos and replace it with a politics of desire. And it's not hard to understand how rationalist materialism follows from that. The thymotic part of the soul in a spirited human being is always striving to be the best it can be, and It's the basis for healthy self-respect. But in some people it manifests in what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, the compulsion to be  be recognized as superior to others. That's what Hobbes and Locke wanted to neutralize.

Hegel also recognized megalothymia as a problem but articulated a different solution. He saw megalothymia and its need to be recognized as superior as the driver of the master-slave dynamic which in turn is for him the primary social-psychological driver of history. Megalithymic humans need to dominate others and to derive therefrom glory. Megalothymic societies are usually aristocratic warrior societies. The whole point in such societies was to do glorious deeds in battle that the bards would sing songs about about through the ages. Hegel/Kojeve/Fukuyama solve the megalothymia problem by asserting that democratic societies are--or at least aspire to be--isothymic, which means that people in them want to be recognized as the equal of others. The end of history arrives when megalothymia is pushed out by isothymia. This happened symbolically with the French Revolution when the slavish lower ranks risked everything in rising up to overthrow the aristocratic warrior class that had been established since the beginning. 

There's a lot more to be said about this than is appropriate here, but I'd argue that isothymia is only a possibility in a society in which most of its citizens have achieved a level of maturity that few actually attain in late modern societies. You can't be recognized as a Self equal to others unless you have become one. That's not a given; it's a euthymic/eudaemonic achievement [See Note 3], And someone who achieves it has no need for glory or to dominate others or to be recognized as the best. The problem with isothymia in the political sphere is that it defines an equality that is an empty shell until it's substantively filled by humans who have realized to some degree their best Selves. In the abstract every human being has dignity, and that dignity is protected by law, but in reality, some people have more dignity than others because some people have more fully realized what is "original" in them. Some people squander rather than develop what is best in them. They are what Nietzsche calls Last Men.

I can envision a society in which superior and inferior are not important qualifiers, but instead 'realized' or 'unrealized' would be. The goal of a life well lived in such a society is to realize, to make substantively real, who one was created to become, and that's a unique achievement that is incommensurate with the parallel achievement of any other. And yet even now we recognize people who are more mature in this way and others that are not. You know them by their eudaemonian menschlichkeit, menschiness--their warmth and compassion, their magnanimity and down-to-earthness, their utter lack of phoniness, fanaticism, and fussiness. [See Note 3] Often they are flawled and fallible, but always intensely real human beings, and as I said, rare. Late modern societies don't produce many of them for reasons I discuss in this essay--there's no trellis anymore for them to grow on. 

Note 2: I think it's interesting also to note that Fukuyama wrote this book in 1992 when it looked like the world was entering a unipolar age dominated by the capitalistL iberal Democracies that won the Cold War. It's also interesting that Fukuyama was a signer of the 1997 Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, the Neocon group that was one of the most influential advocates for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I doubt Bush and Cheney read Hegel or his most influential 20th Century interpreter Alexandre Kojeve, but the idea of bringing democracy to a place like Iraq was understood by Neocons in this Hegelian key, which was to hasten the end of history in the places that most stubbornly resisted it. Fukuyama distanced himself from all that when it became clear what a fiasco American policy in the Middle East had become; clearly we got plenty of world history before us.

Fukuyama's teacher Samuel Huntington's idea of 'clash of civilizations' seems to be the prevailing model now, which traces back to another German Romantic, J. G. Herder. I don't think that Huntington is right in the long run. It explains Putin's Russia for the time being, but not Zelensky's Ukraine, which should by Huntington's account align with Russia rather than Western Europe. I think the dynamics in Ukraine will be more typical over the next century if we survive it. No morally mature human being wants to live Putin's Russia or Xi's China. And while I'm arguing in this essay that the desire culture of North Atlantic Liberal Democracies encourages a moral infantilism, it also provides the conditions of freedom for something more morally compelling to emerge. The bottom line is that all of us, East and West, have got to choose to grow up. A healthy culture offers models about how to do that. 

BTW, I'm not a proponent of a one-world government, but I can see a point when all the world's major societies have evolved into Liberal Democracies that work together in a loose confederation to solve global problems. The survival of the earth depends on it. 

Note 3: I use the term 'euthymia' in the present context with a meaning that comes close in my thinking about it to 'eudaemonia'. Both describes states of mature, self-actualized well being, but maybe eudaemonia is better because associated with an ethical project that involves the practice of the virtues. In either case, euthymia is the goal--

The term euthymia has a Greek origin and results from the combination of ‘eu' meaning ‘well' and ‘thymos' meaning ‘soul, emotion'. This latter term encompasses however four different meanings: life energy; feelings and passions; will, desire and inclination; thought and intelligence. Interestingly, its verb (euthymeo) means both I am happy, in good spirits and I make other people happy, I reassure and encourage. The definition of euthymia is generally ascribed to Democritus: one is satisfied with what is present and available, taking little heed of people who are envied and admired and observing the lives of those who suffer and yet endure. It is a state of quiet satisfaction, a balance of emotions that defeats fears. The Latin philosopher Seneca translated the Greek expression of euthymia with ‘tranquillitas animi' (a state of internal calm and contentment) and linked it to psychological well-being as a learning process. Happiness is not everything and what is required is ‘felicitatis intellectus', the awareness of well-being:

Happy is thus the life that is in accordance to its nature, and this is possible only when the mind, first of all, is healthy at any time; then, if it is strong and energetic, definitely patient, capable of mastering everything; concerned with the body and its belongings, but without anxiety; lover of what is life, but with detachment; willing to take advantage of the gifts of fortune, without being its slave. [Seneca: De Vita Beata, translation by G.A.F.]  (Source)

Perhaps  'eudaemonia' would work better to describe the moral project that I write about in this post, but we'll stick with euthymia in the present Fukuyamian context. 

Note 4: I've got my problems with Hegel, but it's not because I think he was too rationalistic. Hegelian philosophy is inspired and visionary in the best sense of those words, and his 'sublation' (or aufhebung) is not rational in the ordinary sense of the word as dealing with abstractions. See "Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum."

Note 5: Why some people are great artists & saints and others are criminals & psychopaths raises questions that are interesting but not relevant to what I'm saying here. The bottom line is that each of us has a life to live that is incommensurate with others, and all that is required of us is that we make the choices that move us toward becoming the deepest realization of ourselves. It's not for others to judge us by some tight-assed standard, but we rely on others for help and correction when clearly we are making self-destructive choices. I don't think this contradicts the idea of the trellis; it's just that each of us has to find our own place on it. There's no one best way to climb it, but our movement toward human maturity requires that we climb on our part of it. Hard to do if it doesn't exist.

Note 6: Such a sapiential community would not be officially sanctioned. It would be very similar to what we think of now as the role played by critics, but the culture will have shifted to a point where good criticism will be distinguished from bad by the quality of the critic's own capacities to intuit and articulate her own experiences of the Living Real. Nihilistic or shallow criticism will not go away, but it will be crowded out by a new kind of criticism that has a vitality and richness that anybody with a shred of soul life will recognize and welcome. And then, it should be hoped, this sapiential community will have a culture-wide influence on how children are acculturated into this renewed sapiential tradition. It would require that our educational curricula teach what is known from both the horizontal and the vertical--in other words, what it used to mean to get a good liberal education. 

 

Liberation to What?

The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid’s Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe.

--Tom Nichols

Nichols' reference is to what most normal Americans fear about the religious right's threat to impose its will in the political sphere, and I think that the Shawshank prison is an apt analogue. But Shawshank is apt in a bigger way for its mythopoesis. On one level it's about how the prison keepers like Norton are just as much prisoners as those behind bars. The main difference is that the prison keepers don't know it and have no desire to escape. They think they're in control, but are completely oblivious of how they themselves are captured by a system that oppresses them perhaps even more than it oppresses their prisoners.

Norton is a perfect metaphor for the traditionalist whose identity is deeply embedded in the empty forms of traditional morality that been invaded and occupied by evil forces that could not be more alien from a true morality. His situation is worse than his prisoners because he feels no need of liberation or the desire to seek for it. He's not locked in as his prisoners are, but he chooses to stay anyway.

But more importantly Shawshank is a story about what true liberation means. I've spent a chunk of time in the last several months talking about how the justice project on the Cultural Left is captured by a post-Marxist Freudianism exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) and theorized in their book Anti-Oedipus. (See here here, and here.) I've written about how I think that's a dead-end because it's fundamentally a negative project with nothing inspiring in it to which people can say Yes. One leaves the prison behind for, you know, 'whatever', as in whatever makes you happy, which cannot get beyond the appetitive in a milieu on the Cultural Left in which the transcendent cannot enter into consideration. "Desire" is the big thing for D&G. Desire for what? It doesn't matter. 

Liberation in that milieu means mostly to be transgressive of old taboos without getting punished for it. And so Trump is the apotheosis of D&G liberation project, whether they intended it or not. If they argue he's breaking the wrong taboos, who's to say they're wrong? By what standard?  But the bottom line here is that whether we're talking about Trump or D&G, the moral frame is too often a movement from Kohlberg's Stage 1 to Stage 2, from the eight-year-old who dutifully follows the rules, to the ten-year-old who realizes the rules are arbitrary and there is nothing fundamentally "good" about them. He realizes he can break the rules if he's clever enough to get away with it. [See Note 1]

Our politics, but more importantly our consensus about moral norms, whether on the Right or Left, doesn't really operate beyond stage 2. Traditionalists on the Right differ from Cosmopolitans on the Cultural Left only in that Traditionalists believe that transgressors ought to be punished for traditionally deviant behavior while Cosmopolitans don't. And the Cosmopolitans of course trade in the old traditionalist taboos for trendy, new, PC ones. Traditionalists allow Trump his transgressive behavior because what really matters is his even more flagrant transgression of PC taboos. He may not be an exemplar of their traditionalist norms, but his flouting of PC taboos with impunity is more important because in doing so he gives them permission to flout them with impunity as well. 

All the energy in the D&G liberation project derives from the thrill of moving beyond the old taboos, not in where one arrives once he is freed from them. Nevertheless, D&G are half right: we are acculturated into Oedipal social-psychological constructs that imprison us to the degree that we allow them to unconsciously program us both individually and as a society. We are all prisoners of our acculturation, and we do need to be liberated from it. 

So I agree with D&G that our acculturation into oppressive "Oedipal" cultural structures is provisional and is indeed, like Shawshank Prison, a largely an arbitrary social construction designed to reinforce certain power arrangements. But I differ from them in insisting that the provisionality of our social constructions lies in that they are always under challenge by ontonormative transcendentals like Justice and Truth. This is at the heart of Socrates' subversive project but also at the heart of the gospels. The Socratic and Christian projects are both in very similar ways "anti-Oedipal". Christianity when it is truest to itself is always subversive of oppressive social constructs. But neither project is subversive for the sake of subversion, but subversive in the service of the ontonormative, i.e., of a deeper, more truly liberating, transcendental norm. 

The Shawshank prison as a social system has no relationship to the ontonormative, but what makes Andy, the Tim Robbins character, different from every other prisoner is not that he's just motivated to get out of an evil, cruel, oppressively destructive system to resume a normal life, but that he is like the man in Plato's cave that walks out into the sunlight where he can experience not just getting out but getting into the Living Real. That's what the beach in Mexico symbolizes, a state of awareness that is truly liberating because more deeply in touch with the Living Real. Leaving prison was not just about getting out, but about getting into something that was more ontonormatively "real".

From my pov, D&G describe a situation that is very much like out of the pan into the fire, from one destructive set of circumstances into another. It's the situation of Red, the Morgan Freeman character, once he's released on parole. He's free, but Is his life significantly better in the world outside? There was at least a kind of comfort and security in the old prison life, but now he's wandering in the wilderness with all the stress and insecurity that come with that. But there's wandering that's purposeful and hopeful, and there's wandering that's just being lost. And Red seems pretty lost there for a while, until there's an intervention, his finding the gift buried in the field left for him by Andy. (See Note 2). 

Finding it is his awakening moment, the moment when something truly new and liberating becomes a possibility. He left Egypt when he got out of prison and went out into the wilderness, but now that he's found the treasure buried in the field, he can move to the promised land, a land he never took seriously as as a possibility for himself. Good thing that he had a friend who did.

Getting out of the old, constraining, oppressive structure is important, but where you go after is more important. 

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Note 1: I'm pasting in this summary of Kohlberg's Six Stages from Genealogy Part 4B. Although Kohlberg is a social scientist who eschews any talk about transcendentals and insists his work is just descriptive or phenomenological, it's not hard to extrapolate from his 'description' what I've been calling the 'ontonormative'. 

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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

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

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

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

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

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi. [The common good is served by breaking these laws, which are fundamentally unjust by an informative standard.]

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

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

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

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

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

I think the latter is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil. Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional moralist who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--that provides criteria with which to evaluate non-conventional thinking and behavior. 

Note 2:  "Now Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found, and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field." — Matthew 13:44. 

The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for the ontonormative regime that lies buried until found in every human heart. The Socratic project was to dig into the hearts of his interlocutors to see if he might unearth it. To have unearthed it is liberation from the constraints of custom and taboo in cases where custom is oppressive or unjust, but can also be restorative of the vitality of customs that were ontonormative in their origins.

See also "Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga".

Liberalism + Whatever

There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today’s cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism’s enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.

--Ross Douthat

There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.

So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is their assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right and in this sense they are more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.

So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And mainstream Protestantism might have had a genuine spiritual energy for a while that imposed some constraints on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate mainstream Protestantism leaving only its most fanatical forms behind, and now the shark roams free gobbling up the customs and traditions of the heartland. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.

Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. Blue America is thought of by Red America as overly populated by educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, and then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center--empty suits  like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. "They're phonies, but they're our phonies," declares Red America.

But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief from their guilt in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.

So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes. 

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 1] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 2]

The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.

And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom. 

I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them. 

++++++++++

Note 1: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is. 

A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts. 

Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.

See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"

Note 2: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source. It's not derived from logic but from the cognitive capabilities of a supple heart. 

 

Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga

Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not aware when I did so that Amazon was planning a new series focusing on Galadriel in the Second Age. I was not aware that Queen Elizabeth would die, and England would once again have a king. So both events present an opportunity to reflect a little about my reading LOTR, with an aside to the Parzival or Grail story, in the light of what's really going on in our obsessive fantasies concerning royalty and nobility. 

I first read Tolkien's trilogy when I was in high school, and the last time I read it was in the late 90s to my elementary-school-age son. But I haven't thought much about the trilogy or the Tolkien legendarium since, and I have to say that I have been strangely moved in this most recent reading of it in ways that I was not in earlier readings. There are depths in this story that I missed before, and it's clearer to me now why this "fantasy"  has such cultural resonance.  

I think that what I have found moving in Tolkien's saga relates what in some fictional literature, i.e., some works of the imagination that enable us to transcend the everyday world in such a way as to see it in a broader, potentially more liberating context. That's not something I experience in my watching of, for instance, Game of Thrones, which I gave up on in Season Two because I found it to be an oppressively small, vulgar, predictable world, despite its fantastical elements and its overwrought attempts to titillate and shock. It's fantasy, but it's not escape in the way, as we'll see below, Tolkien thought about it. 

I'll come back to that, but first a thought experiment. Whether or not you believe in angels, let's "fantasize" what it might be like to have an angelic consciousness. If we could look at the world with the non-judgmental dispassionate eyes of an angel, what would we see? By dispassionate, I don't mean unconcerned, I mean without fear and desire. And I don't mean by it without feeling, but rather I mean with a deep compassion for the suffering of humans who are so ignorant about what is best for them. By non-judgmental I don't mean non-discriminating but rather hope without expectation. Angels, in my  imagination of them, hope that humans will make the right choices but have no expectation that they will, and are rather surprised when they do. When it happens they rejoice.

In my fantasy picture of angels I see them as having the long view, as beings who don't have politics, as beings who see the people in one faction being driven by passions as foolish and ignorant as the passions of any other faction. In fact, such a being has no interest in any kind of group mind, or moral systems or principles but only in the individual and his or her choices in a particular moment to do what is called for in that moment. 

And dispassionate does not mean that angels don't suffer, because their own destinies, as I imagine them, are deeply intertwined with human choices. I think of their invovlvement in human affairs as rather like the court of the Fisher King in the Parzival story. Parzival first meets the ailing Fisher King, and the whole court is gathered there because there is a chance that Parzival might ask the key question, and if he does, the King will be healed.

Because this is a fairy story, everybody in the court has what I've been describing as angelic consciousness. Everybody understands what's at stake except Parzival. But nobody can tell Parzival what to do. He has to know from within his own resources what he must do, and because he has not yet developed those resources, he cannot do what the situation requires of him. It's not that he lacks good will; it's that he's too ignorant, too naive, too immature--and so he fails, and the King goes on suffering. It's a remarkable scene and a remarkable metaphor that captures both the significance of human choices and how hard it is for humans to know what the right ones are. And how others--even angelic beings--suffer from human failures. 

It's such a beautiful scene, too, because when you first read it, you wonder how can so much depend on the choice of such a bumpkin, someone so green, so ignorant, so naive? Because by thinking so we are brought into an encounter with our own greenness, ignorance, and naïveté. We are given a parable of what is at stake in our own lives and how all the hosts of heaven are silent witnesses to whether we will be able to become capable of knowing what is called for. And so the point of the story is not that Parzival should just do the right thing--they could have just told him what it was--but that he must become the kind of person who knows what the right thing is and then find the will to do it.

So back to The Fellowship of the Ring: I was reminded of this  scene from the Parzival story when reading the scene about the Council of Elrond in Rivendell when it is decided that the Ring must be destroyed. While everyone is arguing about who should or should not be the ring bearer, the wisest in the group, Elrond and Gandalf, know who alone can do it, but they, like the court of the Fisher King, must wait without importunity to see if he knows what to do and has the courage to do it. Unlike Parzival, Frodo can and does.

He must find from within his own interior resources the ability to choose freely to step forward, to do what is called for. He must choose it, and so much depends on his choice, and he does. And both the book and the film do a good job of establishing what a significant and unexpected moment this is. No one would have expected this of a halfling bumpkin like Frodo, but something in him rises to the occasion and he accepts the burden of the Ring and the all-but-impossible quest to destroy it. No one would have blamed him if he chose not to, and yet so much depended on his ability to understand that this task was his and his alone. 

Parzival, unlike Frodo, fails. But he fails from ignorance not lack of courage. His confrontation shortly after with Cundrie, a being rather like one of the Greek Furies or Erinyes, who rips him up and down, left and right for being such an ignorant dolt. He becomes aware of what was at stake and how he failed, and aware also that the moment has passed, that it's not possible for him to easily correct it--but that his life mission is now to find a way to correct it. It's this idea of mission or quest that Parzival shares with Frodo, and it's only in fairy or fantasy stories that the true nature of this mission can be imagined and explored.

This is his moment when Parzival loses his innocence, when he realizes the consequences of his failure, and is wracked with remorse. How could he have been so stupid? And yet he was, and so we all are. This is the "Fall". This is his waking up to the human condition, to his ignorance. He was always 'fallen', but now he knows it, and that's an important first step. It's the movement from Kierkegaard's Aesthetic to the Ethical. He realizes now that he has a task, a mission and that he must commit his life to it.

Those who remain imprisoned in the Aesthetic continue to stumble ignorantly through life, and they do so until they are confronted with their own ignorance and stupidity, and come to feel an urgent need to undertake a quest to find a remedy. To be in despair is to be in ignorance of the need to undertake this quest. And so his quest to find the Grail Castle begins in earnest. This is the real moment of choice, as was Frodo's choice in Rivendell to find his way to Mt. Orodruin, but undertaking the quest is also to undertake a path fraught with dangers, seductions, dead-ends, and other obstacles one must overcome. But the first step is to choose to undertake the quest, which first requires that one become a person who is capable of making the right choice--not because someone tells you that this is the right choice, but because deep down you know it to be. 

The point is, then, that in matters of the spirit, whether we are sophisticated atheists or religious true believers, we are all alike. Regardless of our bloodline or cultural inheritance, we are all bumpkins until we awake to our need to undertake the lifelong quest for the Grail. In Tolkien's moral world there is no magisterium or rabbinate, but there are the wise and the foolish. There are those--Elves, Men, Dwarves, and even Hobbits--who were seduced or fooled by Melkor or later Sauron, and there are those who resist. Feanor in the First Age fails, Ar-Pharazon fails in the Second Age--and the in Third Age Smeagol fails. Bilbo is sorely tested, but resists. Saruman fails and refuses to repent, Boromir fails and repents, but Faramir resists; Galadriel is sorely tempted but resists and passes the test, and Denethor fails and refuses repentance.

There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and to pass the test requires not just that you do the right thing, but that you have developed an interior capacity to know when you are bullshitting yourself. Gandalf and Aragorn seem never to be tempted because they are exemplars in their different ways of characters who are fully formed. They are incapable of bullshitting themselves. They have well developed capacities for moral cognition; they have simply to discern and act. There is never a question whether they will have the courage and will to act, only whether they will know what the right thing to do is, and they usually do. They are all prodigies of the Ethical in their resoluteness in that once a choice or promise has been made to be unwavering in fulfilling it no matter the price, no matter how hopeless, no matter how compelling the reasons might be to justify quitting. This is true nobility of spirit. And this is why The Lord of the Ring has such broad cultural resonance--it provides for the culture what the culture longs for but can no longer find in its most prominent personalities: true nobility of spirit.

Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests when their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized in their coronation. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously. 

These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.

That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is everyone's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.

Maybe that's not the job of "realistic" fiction, but maybe that's why we need fairy stories. They are fantasies, but not necessarily escapist. Tolkien was quite aware that "escapism" was a criticism that was directed toward his stories, and he rejected it completely. R.J. Reilly addresses this in his Romantic Religion--

Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."

Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.

Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion, a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation) but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. (pp. 206-07)

That is, to accept it as the only possible reality, which is to adopt an attitude of complacency and despair. And that's why Game of Thrones isn't escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. It's just a fantastical representation of the jail we all live in and assumes there is no escape from. And the point I'm trying to make here is that escape in this healthy sense is only a possibility for those who can "imagine" and be inspired by a life that exists as a possibility outside the prison walls.

We remain imprisoned so long as we accept the prison as the only reality and the life within it as the only thing that can be legitimately discussed. Game of Thrones's most fantastical elements are horrors like dragons and white walkers. There are horrors like that too in Tolkien, but there is also Lorien and Rivendell and the Undying Lands in the true West. Fantasy for the modern sensibility passes sophisticated critical scrutiny so long as it is horrifying, but it goes too far when it strives to represent liberation as beauty and nobility of spirit. Then it becomes escapist in the most pejorative sense. 

The age of blood nobility has faded by the end of the Third Age in Middle Earth, and it is given a temporary stay with the return of Isildur's heir to the throne in Gondor, but the story is really about this other kind of nobility that is born from within--the kind that Frodo, the suffering servant, exemplifies. He is the true hero of the story, and all the other more obvious exemplars of blood nobility--Galadriel, Mithrandir, Aragorn, Faramir--recognize this. Their time is over; the time for another kind of nobility is nigh in the Fourth Age, one that no longer comes with the blood, but is achieved. This is Tolkien's foundational metaphor in his remarkable twilight-of-the-gods saga. After the passing of the elves to the West, the time of blood nobility wanes, and thereafter true nobility of spirit is something one must quest for. 

So now in England we have the passing of a noble of the blood--a blood line that traces back over a thousand years according to some sources, and now her heir. And what do we have really? A very ordinary woman and a very ordinary man onto whom the world has projected its longing for another kind of nobility, a nobility of the spirit. Many commentators have pointed out that Elizabeth was shrewd enough to keep her mouth shut and to play the role in such a way that the fantasy or mystique could be maintained, but that's all it was, really. An escapist illusion, but not escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. She seems to have been a nice enough old girl, but an exemplar of true nobility of spirit? I don't think so. And now Charles? 

And why this week has there been nothing on the news except this story of the passing of the queen and the return of a king? Because the world longs to be inspired by a manifestation of true nobility of spirit. And because such nobility is nowhere to be found in our public figures, we cannot control our need to fetishize certain personalities that have the trappings of nobility while they haven't the substance of it. For that we must look elsewhere--to fictional characters, the Frodos, Aragorns, and Parzivals, the unpretentious folk who are more than the world perceives them to be--and more than they themselves perceive themselves to be--but who undertake the quest to become what the angels hope for them to become and rejoice when they do. 

Hip to be Catholic?

What’s so great about faith is that it doesn’t have to be grounded in rational thought. We are seeing a lot of people return to religion because everything feels so senseless and pointless, so why not be a Catholic?” 

From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox

This is from a quote from Dasha Nekrasova, " a central fixture of the so-called “dirtbag left,” a cadre of progressive podcasters, posters, and provocateurs, according to Interview. She's also a practicing Catholic. 

The meme article is mostly about trendy silliness that overlaps with themes I wrote about in a post entitled "Reactionary Chic." But it struck me as I read it that one of the main reasons I remained Catholic when I was most sorely tempted to throw the whole thing off was precisely because it was for me a countercultural statement. It's also because I came to believe the Church's fundamental assertions, but I could believe them without being officially "Catholic". But it's that feeling of homelessness in the whole capitalist, materialist, rationalist, soul-flattening, utilitarian world that Enlightenment rationalism constructed, even if with all the best intentions, that drives many like me to search for something deeper and richer. So I sympathize with what Nekrasova is saying and to what the rest of the Vox article points to inchoately even if trivializing, vulgar way. Irony can often be a way for someone to present what he hopes is true but hasn't the courage to commit to it. He can put it out there to test the waters while his tone gives him plausible deniability. The author, despite the mandatory ironic hipness her pop-culture perch at Vox requires of her, has an earnest moment or two near the end of the article. 

And I remain Catholic for the same reason I remain an American. I see what is best in both for all that is embarrassing and corrupt in both. I came to see Catholicism as the great tradition of the West, for whatever its failures and crimes, it is still the custodian of the great marriage of Greek thought with Jewish revelation--and a liturgical tradition that preserves a participatory epistemology/aesthetic that must be retrieved by the broader culture in the future one way or the other. I see it as playing this preservationist role, much as the medieval monasteries preserved classical learning in a brutish society that had no use for it, and of a sacramental sensibility and sense for the sacred that must at some point be retrieved to energize a future renaissance.

The Vox article reflects a broadly experienced longing for something lost. This longing is valid, and even if it leads many to look for love in all the wrong places, it doesn't mean that there isn't a right place that what is longed for can be found. A wrong place is nostalgia.  Many of the northern European Romantics in the late 18th and early 19th century converted to Catholicism out of such nostalgia for the richly symbolic world mostly rejected by the Reformation. And we see a similar nostalgia as a underlying motivation for the interest in Catholicism to which the article points. But there is no future in nostalgia, and the longing that leads some Catholic restorationists and integralists to go native in the past is unhealthy and fundamentally delusional. And yet, I would argue, there is something in this longing that can be worked with in a positive, constructive way.

In retrieval we have something that is quite different from nostalgia. It's born of the same longing that leads some to nostalgia, but its project is not about restoring the lost forms, but about reconnecting with the deep, living energies that gave them their form in the first place. The experience that leads to retrieval is rather like remembering something that has been forgotten, and wondering how one could have been so absentminded about something so essential, so necessary for life. What has been forgotten is, to use Heidegger's term, "Being", but I prefer to call it the 'Living Real'. It is the source of all true creativity because to be connected to it is to be connected to the origins of all true creativity. To have achieved such a connection is the only what to be truly 'original' in the deepest sense of the word.  Our lack of creativity is directly related to our forgetfulness. Nostalgia is the experience of the loss of the Living Real, but it has none of the creativity of being deeply connected with it. 

The Church, for all its failings and limitations, points to this deep originary source and seeks in its liturgies to connect us to it. All true art, whether or not it is churchy, is deeply liturgical in this sense. That the Church isn't doing this particularly well in this moment is really a reflection of how it has been weakened in a society whose cultural operating system is a rationalist materialism in which it cannot thrive. And so it's understandable that the future for such a church seems rather bleak. Because the Church's life is deeply implicated with the life of the culture in which it is embedded, it suffers the same problems as those that afflict the broader culture. What ails both the Church and the broader culture is its lost confidence in their ability to live something that manifestly expresses its connection the Living Real.

The Church, however, performs an important function for the broader society in its preserving a portal to the Living Real, which at this moment for the most part works underground and out of sight. If in good faith, you knock on this portal, it shall be opened unto you. But to be truly receptive to it requires that you be open to having most of your presuppositions turned upside down. 

It's there. But for now, it's mostly unmanifest. Its presence is subtle, and so its power as a culture-shaping energy is dormant. I don't believe that will always remain dormant, but for now it is. And so we find ourselves rather like the ancient Jews wandering in the wilderness, neither here nor there, neither in Egypt for which the nostalgists long, nor in Canaan toward which some (like me) retain hope that however long we must wander, it will be our destination. In the meanwhile we wander, we put one foot in front of the other, and we wonder. Unlike those who long backward to return to Egypt, we long forward in wonder. 

Such 'wondering' is a big part of what constitutes the content of this blog; hence its title. It's not data driven, to say the least, but what of any real significance is?

Villanelle the Bore

And she’s also, paradoxically, less sympathetic. The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked. Now, when she does kill — out of anger and disappointment rather than a misplaced sense of duty — the bloodshed doesn’t have a comic charge, and it’s simply unsettling. (Mike Hale in the NYT reviewing the new Season of "Killing Eve")

The reviewer misses the happy-go-lucky psychopath, the more morally conflicted one is a bore. Or unsettling. Either way, what's the fun in that? 

There are some "prestige television" shows I have watched as a kind of duty to keep up with the zeitgeist, so to say. But several I gave up on, in some cases because I felt as though an hour of exposure to their vulgarity required a shower afterward. Or in other cases because they have this banality-of evil vibe that is more  numbing than interesting. The Sopranos, Game of Thrones, Billions, and Succession. That's how I felt about Killing Eve. I didn't find much in it that made me. It was banality trying too hard to be clever. Or maybe that's just my lack of sophistication. In any event, I gave them all a chance, and stuck with some longer than others, but eventually found them unwatchable. 

The writers and producers of these shows I find unwatchable seem to assume that the only interesting characters are deeply, irredeemably depraved. They start depraved and stay depraved. I'm sure they pat one another on the back with words like "We create real characters, not comic book stereotypes as in the Marvell universe." Well, ok, but that's a pretty low bar.  

Breaking Bad would appear to have been in this same category, but it really wasn't because Cranston's Walter White character was Shakespearean in his tragic moral descent.  Billy Bob Thornton's character in Goliath kept me involved because there was just something movingly heroic about his ability just to get out of bed every morning. I really liked Russian Doll. I like almost anything the Coen brothers do because there is a moral seriousness in their work that lies behind the apparent nihilism of many of their characters. Most recently, I watched the first and last episodes of Inventing Anna. That was enough for me. Empty, lost people are simply not very interesting, no matter to what extremes they go to make themselves appear more than they are. 

No character is interesting if there isn't some form of moral ascent or descent, and that's what these unwatchable shows lack. Depraved characters who start and stay depraved are not really interesting because they are so predictable in their soullesssness. And because they're so predictable, and because audiences become increasingly numbed to their persistent depravity, and because the writers probably think ideas like moral ascent and descent as cliche, the writers must instead push for new ways to shock, new levels of depravity, new taboos to break, new ways to go where the watcher will say, "Wow. I didn't see that coming. Those writers are genius."

"Thank you, thank you," they respond. "Now where's my Emmy?"

And it's because TV critics like Hale accept these criteria about what makes a show entertaining, they can write bizarre sentences like "The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn’t bother us because the joke worked."

"Joy"? Really? Is that the word you're looking for? Is your life so devoid of it that such a thing passes for it? 

Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

I don't see myself as doing anything particularly original, but I do see myself as part of a larger effort to get things rebalanced. When I talk about the "Living Real", that's real for me, but I am no prodigy in the scope of my experience of it. It's real enough for me that it provides a foothold to take a stand. It's real enough for me to push back against everything that exists in denial or rejection of it.

We're at a point where we find it quite understandable what God might have been thinking when he told Noah to build his ark. "This experiment has gone far enough," God thinks. "Time to reboot." I take some solace in that he promised not to do it again, at least not by flood. Tornados, hurricanes, wildfires, and plague? We'll see.

But imminent ecological catastrophe has nothing to do with the divine, unless we see our behavior as a disruption of the Tao of things, the deep law of ontological balance. Which is how I see it. So our predicament is really more the consequence of our blind stupidity, of our losing any decision-making capacity that has a wisdom dimension to it. If we destroy the earth and everything living on it, it will be our own doing--the result of our failures in justice, of our venal, blinkered way of operating on the horizontal. That's the point of Adam McKay's Netflix satire Don't Look Up.

In Part 3, I mentioned in passing that the country took a turn toward the simulacral in 1980 with the rejection of Carter for Reagan. So much fantastical nonsense flowed from that moment. The emergence of FOX News, Rush Limbaugh, Iran Contra, Newt Gingrich's tribal bloodsport politics, the Democrats' giving up FDR and embracing Neoliberalism, the hysterical, petty moral crusade against Clinton, the oxycontin plague, the frequency of mass shootings, the invasion of Iraq, the financial crisis of 2008, the rise of the Tea Party, the mainstreaming of white nationalism, the rise of Trump, and now tens of millions of people living in a MAGA bubble that prevents them from behaving sanely in response to a deadly virus or to accept the results of an election that wasn't even close.

Don't Look Up confronts us with the consequences forty years after the country chose Reagan, which is that we have become so captured by these trivial, tribal, interpretive frames that we've become incapable of dealing with reality as it is. I don't believe that if a comet were heading for the earth that people would react as depicted in the movie. We're not that far gone yet, but we're getting there. That's the point the point of the movie--to warn us that we're on our way if we don't find a way to course correct. 

All salience landscapes have constraints that limit what we are capable of seeing and understanding, but what is unique about our time lies in our having created "salience bubbles". As discussed in Part 4, a salience landscape helps us to organize our experience as humans so that we might navigate in and make sense of the living, real world in ways that are shaped by what is most relevant for them. A salience bubble organizes our experience in a way that is very similar to being in the virtual world of gamers, which is alienated from the living, real world, although it resembles it. The difference between a bubble and a landscape is that people in the latter are open to new information; people in the former are sealed off from it. Humans living in a real world are open to infinity, a virtual world is limited by the rules of its coders.

You can have two people from very different cultural backgrounds who have very different salience landscapes--let's say a Tibetan Buddhist monk conversing with a particle physicist. They have very different presuppositions about what is most salient in their understanding of reality, but if they are honest, curious, people who want to expand the scope of their salience landscapes, they enter into conversation with one another in the hopes of doing so. They must find within themselves a capacity for empathic understanding so that they can enter into the salience landscape of the other and see the world from the other's point of view.

This is not possible for someone who is in a salience bubble. The only new information that enters into the bubble is information that reinforces or thickens the bubble-defining membrane that filters out information that makes sense within the bubble. You can't have a conversation with someone who is inside a bubble unless you are inside the bubble with him. The only information or ideas that are relevant or salient for him are ideas that reinforce what he already "knows".

A bubble functions more viciously than confirmation bias: it's confirmation compulsion. Bias is normal, and we all have it no matter how objective we think we are. The goal is not to be unbiased, because that's impossible, but rather to be open to have one's biases challenged by new information. The goal is to have a salience landscape that continues to expand in its scope. [See Note 1]

So a bubble, instead of providing an interpretive frame that organizes our experience in a real world, creates frames that cut people within a bubble off from reality in any vital sense. They have become incapable of dealing with any information that lacks salience within the bubble because it makes no sense within the bubble. Contradictory facts are either filtered out, or when they are not in dispute, get interpreted in ways that are twisted to make sense within their bubble.

In our current situation, for instance, Liberals keep insisting on the fact that Trump's own AG Barr has said there is no evidence that the election was stolen. That Barr has said this is not in dispute for people in the MAGA bubble, but they interpret this fact as simply more evidence that supports their beliefs. Barr is just a sleeper agent for the Deep State, the evil system that seeks to destroy Trump's holy mission to save America from child-molesting elites. He's one of the elites, and he's simply protecting elite interests. It's the only logical explanation. And it makes sense if the only allowable facts are those that reinforce the presuppositions that structure the bubble. 

It's understandable that people should feel uncomfortable with a powerful technocratic state. I'm uncomfortable with it. But one's discomfort isn't a premise from which to deduce that it must be destroyed because anything else would be better. That is insane, and yet such an idea structures the salience bubble of tens of millions of Americans, and so because now so many people live inside such a bubble that sacrifices scope and richness for a narrowly defined coherence, it's hard to see how how you get them out. A pandemic couldn't do it, neither probably will a war with Russia, and maybe neither even a comet or asteroid hurtling toward earth. 

Facts matter, but how interpretive frames define what facts are salient matters more. Don't Look Up focuses less on the salience bubbles that capture the MAGA world, and more on the bubbles that capture the media, business, and political classes. They think themselves sophisticated about how the "real world" works, but really all they understand is how things work within their bubbles. That their world is going to be destroyed by a comet doesn't fit within their salience bubbles. It feels too weird, too anomalous, too abstract, too outside their patterned perceptions of normalcy to be actually true. It's not what they are used to because they too have become so acclimated and comfortable in a bubble that prevents them from seeing reality when it is looking them straight in the face. The only things that feel real are the elements that make sense within their virtual bubble worlds.

Don't Look Up presents exactly how it works in an exaggerated form to help us see it more clearly. And the president's calling off the one chance the earth had for survival was a perfect metaphor for how people within a bubble persuade themselves that what is relevant within their entrenched salience bubble gets priority consideration, and how they will seize any rationale to justify their dismissal of information that undermines what their salience bubble determines as most relevant. And besides, there is a Plan B for those who make the decisions. They always have a way to escape the consequences of their bad decisions. Elite decision makers very rarely suffer from their mistakes. It's the rest of us do, as in the financial crisis of 2008.

***

None of us knows the truth in any absolute sense, but we can evaluate individuals and societies as knowing more or less, better or worse, according to how effectively their metaphysical imaginaries operate according to four criteria:

(1) how coherent its integration of its knowledge on both vertical and horizontal  dimensions,

(2) how broad the scope of their knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,

(3) how both the scope and coherence of our knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to our experience, and

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in our experience of reality on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

Religious fundamentalism fails by these criteria, but so does a reductive scientism. But worse than either is the simulacral bubbles that for reasons explained above are cutting us off completely from our connection to the Living Real. 

So scope, coherence, richness, and adaptability are the criteria by which we measure a salience landscape and the broader metaphysical imaginary. A salience bubble lacks scope, but has coherence and a feeling of richness, even if it is delusional. A rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary has broad horizontal scope, coherence, and adaptability, but lacks vertical scope and richness. Religious subcultures like the Amish or Hasids have coherent, vertically rich metaphysical imaginaries that lack horizontal scope. What a vital, healthy civilization needs is a metaphysical imaginary that has both vertical and horizontal scope, coherence that integrates knowledge on both dimensions, and richness that comes from a sense of meaning and purpose that comes from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized. 

A lot of people in late modernity think that they have moral courage because they see themselves as capable of facing a bleak world that objectively lacks coherence and richness. Within their rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary, they understand the universe as meaningless, cruel, and impersonal, and yet life is worth living because they see themselves as creating their own meaning and coherence from within their own subjective resources. There is no meaning except the meaning they impose on their experience of their world, i.e., the meaning that they create ex nihilo. The problem does not lie in their disbelief in God, but in that they unwittingly are enacting a causa sui project in which they are playing his role. 

If there is some meaning that transcends what can be subjectively projected, they believe no one can know it, and so it's irrelevant. To ask why humans , unlike animals, need meaning and purpose would be for them an irrelevant question because it's excluded a priori. Their presuppositions make answers to such questions unanswerable. It's just the way it is; we are the way we are. And so when someone provides a coherent explanation for why meaning and purpose are built into the human condition, they don't want to hear it. They see it as someone selling snake oil. 

This kind of thinking, when it is genuinely agnostic, can be admirable for its honest humility, when it is in fact humble and honest. But often it's just a form of conformity to the groupthink about what's acceptable in secular intellectual circles. It's bubble-ish, if not completely so. There's no courage in it if it's just believing what's au courant. But even when it's honest and admirable, I think it's unnecessarily restricted in its scope because it doesn't realize how it is necessarily captured by the constraints of the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary.

It naively assumes that real knowledge isn't possible on the vertical dimension, or it dismisses that kind of knowledge as merely subjective and so having no real metaphysical heft--not enough, at least, to depose the seeming solidity of their Rationalist-Materialistic assumptions. They think that the only kind of knowledge that is reliable is knowledge that comes from science because science has a method for seeing the the broad scope of what's there and for providing a coherent explanation for what's there without illusion.

That's true about science, but science also operates within constraints discussed in Part 4. Good science is always an ongoing process of upgrading its salience landscapes. As the scope of the information made available to scientific inquiry expands, so does the need to revise the coherency of its explanations. This is basic Thomas Kuhn. The scientific saliency landscape for Einstein is very different from what it was for Newton, whose landscape was very different from that for Copernicus, and his from Ptolemy's.

There is continuity because solving one set of problems leads to the next, and so there is a feeling of expanding coherency as it keeps pace with the expanding scope of information, at least within a particular discipline. But is the saliency landscape of advanced physics coherent with the saliency landscape of biology and neuroscience? If anybody is doing work on integrating that, it certainly isn't breaking through to the larger culture. But maybe that's because it isn't work for scientists; it's work for philosophers. And when you are doing philosophy, everything depends on your metaphysical imaginary. And the metaphysical imaginary for most academic philosophers in the U.S. is Rationalist Materialism. 

Because scientific work is primarily oriented on the horizontal dimension, it is not constrained by its Rationalist-Materialist assumptions most of the time. But with physics since the Uncertainty Principle, we are getting into territory where it's getting more difficult not to see that the role of Mind is critical in shaping not just our interpretation of information but the actual experience of the information to begin with. And this raises challenging questions for the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary. What if Mind is primary, and Matter is a function of Mind? Does that offer a more coherent explanation than that now afforded by Rationalist-Materialism?  I think it does.

Nevertheless, the bias within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is to see Mind as somehow produced by matter, which makes no sense. Everything that mind does has zero to do with what matter does. It's clearer and clearer to anybody who thinks about it that there is no such thing as an objective, material world. Matter is a mental construct. Whatever material things are in themselves, they have more the qualities of mind than whatever we used to think was the mind-independent character of the material world after Galileo and Descartes.

And so one is forced to ask what the relationship between Matter and Mind is, and if you think about it with an open 'mind', it makes more sense that matter is a function of mind than that mind is a function of matter, and that to think the latter is simply a bias that comes from assuming that a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy. It's legitimacy is broadly accepted, but its incoherent with our broader experience is obvious to anybody who has a sense of the spiritual, which is most people, whether or not they churchgoers. This fundamental incoherency without our experience should disqualify it from the hegemonic legitimacy that it enjoys. 

And so it's astonishing to me that if 95% of Americans are at least open to the idea that there is a non-material spiritual dimension, why it is so hard for us to accept the idea that the fundamental stuff of the universe is Mind. Why? Because it's unscientifically provable? But that's like saying the game of chess doesn't exist because we're playing a game where the rules for checkers are the only ones that count. Says who? And if asserting the priority of Mind provides a more coherent explanation of things than the rationalist-materialist imaginary's assertion of the primacy of Matter, why is it so hard to take it seriously? "Well," sputter people captured within the Rationalist Materialist bubble, "that's religion, not science. And religion is irrational and ignorant because it believes in things that are not there, that people make up because they want to be comforted by beliefs that have no supportable evidence. It has nothing to do with real knowledge." This kind of blinkered stupidity is contributing nothing except to impede the the awakening of a spiritual potency that we will need to confront and push back against what's coming. 

Religion when it works in a healthy society, which ours is not, is about real knowledge that comes from experience on the vertical dimension. It's knowledge that plays by different rules that have deep legitimacy if you make the effort to understand them. Chess is possible even for people who think Checkers is the only game in town. Every great civilization until about 150 years ago had a vertical dimension. Do we really think we're smarter than everybody who lived before then? Look around you. What evidence is there that we are any wiser than our ancestors? Is it just because we have computers, antibiotics, and airplanes?

The problem is not about a dispute concerning what's really there, but with the efficacy--the scope, coherence, richness & adaptability--of different metaphysical imaginaries. It's not about what's there but about how our metaphysical imaginary interprets what's there, and, in fact, limits what we can see and experience. The problem is not that people don't believe that spirit/mind exists, but that they live in a metaphysical imaginary in which materialist explanations are the only ones that have legitimacy in our collective intellectual discourse. That spirit/mind exists is irrelevant for the decisions we make in the political and economic spheres. The problem is that our intellectual elites are so captured by Rationalist Materialism that they are in the predicament of the captives in the mirrored room described above. They, however, are not aware that they are imprisoned within it, and so feel no need to exit. 

The argument of this Genealogy series is that our refusal of the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical is the underlying cause of our current collective insanity. It might not matter if we were not facing ecological catastrophe on the one hand, and on the other, a "Metaverse" singularity that threatens to radically diminish, if not destroy, what it means to be human. The political foolishness we're living through now is just a distraction that keeps us from confronting where the real threats come from.

That's what exasperates me most about the delusional nonsense on the cultural Right. They are not wrong to believe that something is dreadfully wrong about what's happening to us, but their analysis of the causes of the problem is bonkers, and they are abetting the factions within American society that are the greatest impediments to finding solutions that might work. 

We desperately need to find a wisdom dimension to help orient us to face what's coming. It's not good enough for individuals here and there to find wisdom. We need a reboot. 

-----------

Note 1: Compulsion is a trap that imprisons those who are in its grip. People in the grip of cognitive compulsion are like a crowd of people who wake up gathered in a large police interrogation room but are not sure how they got there. The room has mirrors they believe their captors can look through to see them but prevent them from seeing their imagined captors. Nothing enters from outside; they see only themselves and hear only their own thoughts, but they imagine their captors as evil, because who else but someone evil would imprison them? But there's nobody on the other side of those mirrors. Nobody is watching them or cares.

No wonder they feel that they are the victims of a conspiracy, but it's a conspiracy of their own making. They have no recollection of it, but it's a room they designed and built for themselves and freely chose to inhabit. They live in it, whether they admit it to themselves or not, because it feels safer than living in the big, confusing, hostile world outside of it. And so because they built it, the lock is on the inside not outside. But they've forgotten that. They've forgotten that they can walk out any time they want.

Maybe one among them remembers and considers leaving, but he's afraid to. If he does, he will lose the companionship and safety he finds in this room, and he fears the hostility of the imagined captors outside whose malevolence he will not be able to defend himself against alone. But perhaps even a worse fate awaits him if he were to leave the room: What if he were to be proved wrong? What if there is no hostile enemy waiting for him outside? What if he were to discover that no one really cares enough about him to hate him in the way that he and the others assume they do? What will give his life meaning and purpose if there is no enemy?  

And so a part of me sympathizes with his predicament because I think that what he really wants is meaning and purpose, and having an enemy is the easiest way to get both. If he leaves the room, he'll find there is no enemy, but then neither is there anything else to give his life meaning and purpose. There's precious little in the world outside shaped by the rationalist-materialist imaginary that will provide that for him. It's understandable that he would want to stay with his friends. It might be a small world, but it's a safe and meaningful one. 

And that would be fine if they'd just stay in the room, but they want more than that. "Why should we live so confined?" they say among themselves. "Why don't we develop a plan to break out together?" But for the plan to succeed, they must capture and kill anyone who disagrees with them for fear of being captured and killed by them.

But nobody wants to capture or kill them. At worst there are those who laugh at them for their delusional stupidity, but they wish them no harm until they become a force that threatens harm to them. That all this has no relationship to reality outside their bubble or prison never enters into consideration. Within the bubble this plan possesses powerful coherence within its very limited scope, and it provides deeply felt sense of meaning, even if it has no basis in reality.

Everybody in the room believes it, but because deep down they know it's baseless, they must viciously reject anyone who raises doubts. "We're absolutely right," they think, "and anybody who doesn't think so cannot be trusted. Doubters are collaborators with our enemies. There's no other explanation. They are enemy infiltrators who seek to undermine our resolve." 

Go to Part 6.

++++++++++

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

An Interesting Theory from Breitbart

Do you want to know why I think Howard Stern is going full-monster with his mockery of three fellow human beings who died of the coronavirus? Because leftists like Stern and CNNLOL and Joe Biden and Nancy Pelosi and Anthony Fauci are deliberately looking to manipulate Trump supporters into not getting vaccinated.

Nothing else makes sense to me.

In a country where elections are decided on razor-thin margins, does it not benefit one side if their opponents simply drop dead?

If I wanted to use reverse psychology to convince people not to get a life-saving vaccination, I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!

And why is that a perfectly human response? Because no one ever wants to feel like they are being bullied or ridiculed or mocked or pushed into doing anything.  --John Nolte

???!!!

Oh, I get it--Nolte is using reverse psychology on his readers to get them to get vaccinated. He understands that the only way his readers will get vaccinated is if they can see it as a way to thwart a Liberal plot to deprive them of their liberties.

Staying alive, one would think, is something of a prerequisite for exercising your liberty. But dying, of course, is preferable if it's a way to thwart what the Libs want. So now that Nolte has uncovered the real reason that Biden and Fauci have been so insistent on people getting vaccinated, by using reverse psychology to kill off MAGA voters, MAGA voters can finally stick it to the Libs by getting vaccinated and staying alive. Brilliant.

And this is such an classic example of projection in the way people on the Right are particularly prone. As I said in a post earlier this month--whatever dark, nasty motivation people on the Right asserts about the Left, it's almost always something that they are already doing or want to do.  So it's very revealing when Nolte says,

"I would do exactly what Stern and the left are doing… I would bully and taunt and mock and ridicule you for not getting vaccinated, knowing the human response would be, Hey, fuck you, I’m never getting vaccinated!"  

These people cannot imagine anybody being motivated by anything other than whatever nasty thing motivates them.

Now if the Dems could just figure out a reverse psychological strategy to manipulate MAGA voters to not vote. Hmm, I know! The Dems should insist that elections in the U.S. are not rigged so that MAGA voters will believe they are rigged for that reason making it pointless to vote.  What better way to lower GOP voter turnout?

"But," you say, "the Dems are already doing that? Even Trump is telling them that they shouldn't vote." Oh my. Those Dems. They're so sneaky brilliant. 

The Return of the Bobos

A few thoughts on David Brook's Atlantic piece, "How the Bobos Broke America". It's interesting but not particularly helpful.

For the most part, I think it accurately correlates with my own perception about how class works in the U.S., but it doesn't get to the underlying problem that I have been writing about in the posts that have appeared here in the last several weeks. It's mostly just another version of describing the latest arrangement of the deck chairs on the Titanic--in other words, not much more than describing how one faction of Social Darwinians has replaced another. And so the world turns.

The question that most preoccupies my thinking is whether it's possible for us as a society to transcend the logic of evolution without grace, which manifests in the American Liberal social imaginary in what I've been describing as Social Darwinism. Social Darwinism is simply the ideology that justifies what most people think of as natural, healthy human behavior--seek glory in your achievements, grow as rich and prosperous as you can, spread your genes as widely as possible, and triumph over your enemies. But it boils down 'to eat or be eaten'. Raw capitalism thrives within an ethos defined by such an ideology--it is as pure a manifestation of Social Darwinism as you're ever likely to find. 

The best human beings as individuals are capable of transcending this way of "being natural". We see it all the time. The question is whether societies are. I believe they are capable of it, of at least slowly evolving out of it. But the first step is to believe it's possible so that at least we can organize around our aspiring toward it. That would require our transcending the values presuppositions of the Liberal Order, presuppositions that privilege the secular and the materialistic. From the beginning, the most trenchant criticism of modernity and its Liberal ethos has been that it quashes any kind of spiritually noble aspiration, channeling human aspiration instead toward the fulfillment of crude appetites, aka, the pursuit of happiness. In other words, Liberalism has always implicitly accepted the logic of Social Darwinism avant la lettre. Hobbes was its earliest theoretician of note. 

At this point in our development, Social Darwinism shapes the social imaginary of the cultural left as much as it does the right. Left and Right are just competing tribes in a contest for survival. There are "nice" Social Darwinians and "mean" ones. The nice ones want to find ways of mitigating the worst effects of the Social Darwinian game on its losers, and they're mostly on the Left. The mean ones couldn't care less about the losers, and they're mostly on the Right. But the problem lies in the rules of the game itself. Neither Liberals nor Conservatives question the validity of the rules, and neither do moderates like David Brooks. 

But I fear that the U.S is like the USSR in the '80s. We're teetering and about to collapse from our own dead weight. The Tucker Carlsons of the world are just the hyenas who are waiting for the sick elephant to die, and doing what he can in the meantime to hasten the process. 

The average educated, affluent Liberal cannot appreciate that we're near collapse because for him the Liberal meritocracy is as good as it gets.The system has worked well for him, and all it needs is a few tweaks here and there. Such Liberals are concerned that the system be fair, but they don't understand that a meritocracy can never be fair. Fairness is just their way of fooling themselves that that they can participate  in a system that is fundamentally corrupting in good conscience.

Liberals often talk about their being an epistemological crisis--and it's true, there is one--but they're less likely to appreciate that it's rooted in a metaphysical crisis, which in turn leads to a moral or ethical crisis. Liberals don't understand that so much of their posturing about fairness and justice is like a group of drug dealers debating among themselves whether there is an environmentally friendly way to exploit their users.

Liberals in the order bequeathed to us by Hobbes have no real moral imperative except to be Nice. We all do better if we don't tear ourselves to pieces in the war of all against all. But there is something so emasculating about "being nice" in this way. Hobbes understood the price, which was the alienation that comes with the surrender of one's freedom to the State, so is there any wonder that factions within the Liberal Order, especially those benefitting least from it, might consider being not nice is more authentic, more free, more noble? 

***

I like David Brooks. He's a serious, decent guy, and he's often insightful. But as I've been arguing for years, Liberals, and Brooks is very much a Liberal, don't have the spiritual and cultural resources to transcend the contradictions of the society Liberalism with its capitalist engine has created, and American society is Liberalism on steroids, and insofar as it is driven by the logic of capitalism, it is Social Darwinism on steroids. There are no real constraints anymore on the worst excesses of capitalism except to hope that people be "nice". The churches used to provide some constraints, but they've become more a part of the problem than a solution insofar as they are among the major promoters of our current tribal warfare. (The churches for the most part have become an embarrassment. They've given Christianity a bad name.) 

Brooks, among the members of the class he purports to represent, has historically been more friendly to religion and more critical of the secularist and materialist presuppositions that play such a large role in shaping its ethos. And as such he has represented a version of Liberal cultural conservatism within the broader Liberal ethos as an op-ed columnist at the NYT or the reasonable moderate conservative on PBS. I've wondered sometimes if his University of Chicago roots has meant his concern for religion is more in the vein of the Straussian noble lie, but I have come to believe that he is sincere in his aspiration for Americans to find a higher collective moral purpose.

Brooks has long played the role of describing the manners of his class. What is the "higher selfishness", except a spiritualized version of Social Darwinism peculiar to his liberal Bobos? He's right to point out that there's nothing higher about it at all. But he does this while on the one hand standing on ground defined by the older Judeo-Christian values he sees as intrinsic to the American character, while on the other standing on the ground defined by capitalism, which has been the historical-cultural force most destructive of Judeo-Christian values.

And so for that reason he's always struck me as that kind of incoherent religious conservative that wants to embrace the creative/destructive energies of capitalism while at the same time preserving the traditional religiosity, customs, and decency mores of Middle America. I say incoherent because the destructive powers of consumer capitalism have obliterated 'traditional' America, and the loss of 'traditional America' is really what bothers the tribalists that constitute Brooks's Red class hierarchy in his Atlantic article. Brooks seems to want to blame Red-Team insanity at least in part on the sins of Blue-Team arrogance, but this is just wrong.

The Bobos who sit atop the Blue-Team class hierarchy are simply those who have best adapted to the kind of culture/society that the creative/destructive powers of capitalism have created. They didn't cause it, and they're not to blame. They were just clever enough or lucky enough to go with the flow. The people in the Red-Team hierarchy are simply resentful of those who sit atop the Blue-Team hierarchy because the cosmopolitan Blues won, and now their traditionalist Red politics are all about finding a way for them to win back what was lost. This is what makes their politics so stupid and destructively revanchist--because it is so out of tune with and poorly adapted to the kind of society that late capitalism has created. 

There's no stuffing the toothpaste back into the tube, and that's what these revanchists want to do, and Brooks seems to be at least mildly sympathetic to the revanchist cause in this respect. He, too, wishes that somehow we could find a way to return the toothpaste from whence it came, and he seems to think that if Blues could compromise a little or try to empathize with the concerns of Red America, it might help. He praises Biden for not making things worse, and fair enough. But, really, we're past that. Moderation might have some role in damage control and in buying some time, but there are no real solutions to be found by compromising with people who are living or long to live in a delusional dreamworld. The problem is with the Liberal Order itself. 

So Bobos are not to be blamed for being intelligently adaptive to the underlying reality. This does not make them in any way morally superior; they are just better players of the Social Darwinian game. Blue elites are just doing what any red-blooded Social Darwinian should do in a society based on Social Darwinian presuppositions. The Blues are flourishing in the world that Capitalism created, and the Reds, threatened with extinction, are freaking out and doing whatever they can to claw and scratch to survive. There is no virtue whatsoever in their revanchist program. Not a shred of it. But virtue, if by it we mean counter-instinctual practices that cultivate what is truly good in the human soul, is not something that the Liberal Order has ever cared much about.

As I alluded to above, my basic argument for years now is that the Liberal Order is in decay, and that Liberalism does not have within its philosophical/ontological presuppositions the resources to solve the problems that Liberalism has created. Does that mean that some progressive imagination of a human future is impossible? No, of course not. And in my clumsy way here on this blog I've been trying to suss out what that future human possibility might look like. I don't know what it will look like. But at this point I can say with some degree of certainty, that things cannot go on as they are going. Something has to give, and either something truly new, something with originary power arises from within the culture that offers a way forward, or the bad guys--the revanchists and the more ruthless among the techno-capitalist Social Darwinists--win. 

***

So thinking about Brooks's article leads me to what I really want to talk about: If the future of America is to be determined by which Social Darwinian faction wins, who cares? Well, I do because I persist in believing that the American experiment was an important step forward in the human evolutionary project, and the Blues are, imo, more likely to be receptive to new ideas about moving forward. The Blues are right for all the wrong reasons.

I think the American future will be determined by either the reactionaries on the Red team winning or by our finding another way. I believe that the Blue team is the more likely one to find a positive way forward because it has more flexibility, but it will require that it retrieve elements from within the Judeo-Christian tradition that Liberalism jettisoned as irrational and barbaric. The American experiment was very much animated by an anti-traditional values liberation project, but it threw the baby out with the bath water, and the experiment will fail if it does not find a way to renew itself by drawing on these rejected older, deeper "irrational" resources. I think that Blacks and Hispanics are closer to those sources because they still live in communities where their religious traditions still have vitality. 

Most Blues are not hard-core atheists. They are agnostic or vaguely spiritual in a New Agey way. And many retain the moral habits of the religious communities into which they were born even if they no longer go to church. There is an infrastructure there to work with.

I think that the metaxis that leads us out of this impasse lies in integrating what's best in the modern project--critical consciousness, a respect for the individual conscience, a genius for innovation, an experimental spirit that guides the quest to better understand the Real--with what's best in in the "irrational" premodern--a sense of the sacred and sacramental, a feeling for connection with the cosmos, a renewed sense of the deepest possibilities for the human being as becoming divinized, i.e., each of us becoming what we are as created in the image and likeness of God. 

If it fails, I fear the reactionary critics of modernity and Liberalism will be proved correct. They were right to insist that societies, because of the persistence of Original Sin--what I call evolution without grace--are incapable of moral progress. They were right to insist that the idea of egalite is palpably ridiculous because talent and wealth have always and everywhere been distributed in ways that make equality impossible. They were right to insist that the idea of human freedom--liberte--is palpably ridiculous because the Grand Inquisitor was right: most people don't want to be free; they want to be told what to think and how to behave because the burden of accepting true existential freedom is too heavy for average humans. 

And the reactionaries were right to insist that the idea of fraternite is palpably ridiculous because most humans don't know who they are unless they have an enemy, someone in opposition to whom they can define themselves. They cannot feel any sense of nobility of purpose unless they can risk everything in a war fighting loyally and courageously for their tribe.

But more than that, humans need an enemy onto whom they can project all their unresolved irrational resentments and hatreds. This is why world peace is a structural impossibility, and world government and the aspiration for global world orders is insanely naive. We will always have--must have--wars because from time to time these irresolvable hatreds must be purged with blood sacrifice. If we don't project these hatreds onto the Other over there, we project them onto one another over here, and we have the interminable war of all against all. Most humans are primitive and irrationally stupid in this way, and to wish them capable of anything more leads to chaos and greater suffering for all. This is just the human condition if you look at it clearly and with any knowledge of history. 

These reactionaries would say that democracy was doomed from the beginning, that the ancients knew what Liberals refuse to acknowledge, that the 'demos' are too selfish, ignorant, and too easily manipulable to rule themselves. They need an elite, the 'aristos' to to rule them. It was stupidly wrong to destroy the old class/caste system that replaced the aristos with the demos. In any society, there will always be winners and losers--it's naive to think otherwise--but better that there be order than chaos in which almost everybody is a loser.

And the reality is that the demos are happier and less resentful so long as they have a place in the hierarchy and know their role. They don't really want the burden of true freedom, and they are happier when ruled by those whom they see clearly as their 'betters'. And in a Christian society those betters--the aristos--have a responsibility to make sure that the demos are well provided for, not something your typical amoral Social Darwinian capitalist elite ever thought necessary. And besides, the most important things in life, the things that bring true happiness--love, family, friends, piety--are available even to those in the lowest ranks. All these deep goods Liberalism and capitalism have made less available. And now these people, these demos, are now so deeply alienated and unhappy that all they want to do now is tear down the system that has abused them so terribly materially and spiritually.

***

But I still have hope that the reactionaries will be proved wrong. There is a another way of looking at Liberalism and the American experiment, and it's one I still believe we can be inspired by. It assumes that there is a quorum of people in America who have a basic decency, whose values are  not completely circumscribed by the Social Darwinian logic of late capitalism and more importantly that they have the suppleness of heart to respond if something better should be presented to them in a way that makes sense and can inspire.

My reasons for hope assume that the American Declaration of Independence and the French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen were inchoate articulations of a future human possibility, even if humans at the time of their writing were not yet spriritually or morally mature enough to realize it. These documents were prophetic rather than realistic for their contemporaries; they were aspirational for a future order rather than descriptive of what was possible at the time they were written.

But it's precisely the aspiration toward something that seems so impossible that makes them so interesting. These ideals born at the inception of the Liberal Order during the Enlightenment are seeds, which if cultivated provide a way of growing out of the Social Darwinian logic the Liberal Order that it has come to promote until now without constraint.

That the aspirations of the French and American  Declarations have not yet been realized does not mean that they never can be. If we are to break out of the current impasse, we must be renewed by their ideals. We just have to reassess and think about a more realistic route to get there, and that would require in the U.S., among many other things, an overhaul of the U.S. Constitution to bring it more in line with the ideals articulated in both Declarations.

The American constitution was written by the realists, not the idealists. As such, it tips its hat with a roll of the eyes to the Declaration and gets down to the real business of governing men as they are not as we would wish them to be. And at the time, it was written to protect the interests of both the Southern and Northern oligarchs who assumed that they were the aristos who would continue to rule the demos. That might have been realistic in the late 1780s; it no longer is.

The Constitution is a patchwork of compromises that reflected the competing interests of the Social Darwinian factions of its day. It no longer serves our purposes. And at this juncture in our history, the Constitution is both a symbolic and practical cause of the gridlock that paralyzes us at a time when we must be nimbler and more adaptive. Fetishizing the Constitution by both Conservatives and Liberals is one of the biggest obstacles to any real solutions. 

So while a Democratic Republic with a quorum of sane, decent, well-informed human beings should in theory be nimbler and more adaptive, ours is not because hamstrung by the imagination of it by its 18th Century founders. And so our institutional paralysis is due primarily to the senate and to a supreme court, the former stuffing the latter with Federalist Society types whose imaginations are stuck in the 18th Century. Whether their rationale is sincere or cynical, the practical effect is to reinforce the interests of wealthy elites who justify their predations with a Libertarian ideology. As the worst "thought product" of modernity, Libertarianism provides the ideological justification for what is worst in the American character. Libertarianism is simply the Social Darwinist pig gussied up with a little makeup.

So my impossible hope for a better American future also assumes that this quorum of decent Americans is capable of being realistic about what's worst in human nature while also creating new institutions, customs, mores that aspire to what's best in the American character. In order to achieve this, Americans need to integrate the ideals articulated in the Declaration with an understanding of the human being that draws upon its Judeo-Christian roots. These are roots that made writing the Declaration a possibility in the first place. 

It assumes, therefore, that a broad enough swath of Americans can retrieve the idea that we all have an inherent dignity before one another and before God--egalite--and that we have all have the capacity to choose--liberte--to become the best versions of ourselves, creatures that are born to aspire to become divinized because created in the image and likeness of God. It assumes that because we all have this potential for divinity that we have the obligation to help one another to realize it, that none of us can do this alone, that we fail as humans so long as we only care about saving our own individual eternal asses--fraternite. And not only do we have a responsibility to one another but to the earth because that's where this drama unfolds. No earth, no human future. The idea of colonizing other planets is ridiculous if it's motivated only by extending our Social Darwinian sickness of soul.

A democratic republic is the best way to organize a society that promotes these objectives. But it can only work if there is an aspirational idealism that operates as a counterforce to the Social Darwinism that otherwise seems so natural. Such an idealism must be broadly accepted by all people of good will who are committed enough to it to fight for it when the revanchists allied with elite cosmopolitan Social Darwinians on Wall Street, in Silicon Valley, in Congress do everything they can to mock it and break it down and find ways to co-opt it for their own greedy, power-mad purposes.

Again, these ideals are not something that we just invent out of whole cloth. They are archetypes that lie dormant in the collective unconscious awaiting our awakening them. It's a special part of our heritage in the Judeo-Christian West, but it's there for everybody. It's just been forgotten, washed away by the flood that roared through American society starting with industrial capitalism and abetted by a soul-flattening materialism that seemed the only plausible metaphysics after Darwin.

We can recover what was lost and reimagine it in a new post-secular key.. Otherwise, I fear, the reactionaries will be proved right. 

Is Magic a Thing?

I've no personal interest in magic as most esotericists practice it, but I'm open to the possibility that the human psyche is capable of shaping reality in ways that make no sense if understood in purely materialistic, mechanistic terms. Materialists believe that Mind is an epiphenomenon of Matter, a kind of steam that is emitted from the brain in some unexplainable way. That makes hardly any sense, and the only people who believe it are those who have a religious commitment to a materialistic ontology and those who are thoughtlessly influenced by them.

If, on the other hand, your ontology presupposes Mind as primary and that matter is something that is constituted by Mind, i.e., made of Mind stuff, then it follows that Mind should be able shape Matter, and do it in more ways than are imaginable to most of us now.

It would not surprise me terribly if in the next hundred years or so, that human minds will become more adept in using psychic powers to shape the material world. An interesting thought experiment in how this might happen is explored in the Hugo-Award-winning novel, Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell by Susanna Clarke, which takes place in an alternative history around the time of the Napoleonic Wars.

In Clarke's imagined England, the recovery of practical magic, after a shock to an initially skeptical power establishment, becomes accepted as just another kind of technology. And the military wastes no time in finding ways to employ it to defeat Napoleon. What interested me about the book is its matter of factness about something that seems so impossible. As soon as something thought impossible becomes clearly possible, most people adapt rather easily and it becomes part of the everyday social imaginary. The public comes to see Strange and Norrell much as we see Einstein. They have no idea how they do what they do, but waddyaknow, it works. 

And so the book, among other themes, poses a question about magic, which is the same as the fundamental question about any technology: To what ends?  The problem is that we hardly ever ask this question with regard to our invention and use of technologies. We just assume that the employment of any technology is justified by a kind of Social Darwinian logic, which is that it should be used to increase our individual or collective aggrandizement. It is capable only of using a utilitarian calculus regarding how it might increase our personal  or collective power, glory, and wealth. Since we have no robust collective idea about humanity having any higher moral purposes except those as defined by such a utilitarian calculus, the Social Darwinian aggrandizers win by default.

Liberalism hasn't the resources to push back against the Social Darwinians because utilitarian logic is the warp and woof of Liberal morality. There are nice utilitarians and mean ones, aka respectively as Democrats and Republicans. But recently the Republicans have become something else, conduits for a repressed, dark irrationality in the American soul, which, if left unchecked will bring down what's left of the Liberal Order and its open society.

Some believe that the old must die so that the new might be born. Out of the chaos something new will emerge. Well that's something to look forward to only if you're ok with the 'new' looking like Russia after its suffering through the chaos of the collapse of the USSR. If you're not, and I'm not, then the Liberal "Nice" Order and its vestigial habits are the only thing that provides a bulwark against the chaos that leads to a post-truth, warlord thug like Putin. There is a basic decency in Niceness that should not be dismissed, morally shallow though it might be. I prefer overly sensitive snowflakes to Neo-Nazi skinheads any day of the week. 

Yes, the lust for power, glory, wealth is the way of the world from time immemorial. This is the Social Darwinian logic of evolution without grace.  And yes, it seems naive to think that it should ever be otherwise. I don't think it will be otherwise any time soon, but I do think that there is an alternative, nobler way of imagining the human project, and I do think it's possible that there be a more robust push back against the aggrandizers by people of good will who have a foothold from which to push. Right now they don't. It seems to me that nothing is more important in the coming decades than framing such an alternative imagination of future human possibility. My own view is sketched out in posts like this one. 

So my point here is that the truly important question is not whether humans will develop psychic or spiritual powers they currently don't have, but whether they can develop an inspiring imagination of noble human moral purpose and with it a sense of possibility to which human energies and efforts might be employed. We need a contemporary Pico moment to go viral.  

Technologies are neutral; everything depends on to what purposes humans employ them. This is where the real problem lies for the future, whether we're talking about advancements in biotech or AI or the psychic powers of the human mind. To what ends? The bad guys--the Social Darwinian aggrandizers in the private and public sectors--will co-opt any new powers unless we develop a higher sense of moral purpose to guide the human project into the future. Such nobility of human purpose is not going to supplant the Social Darwinian impulse any time soon, but it might at least neutralize it in the short run and provide a foothold that will enable an effort in the long run to transform it.

So the more important question is not whether magic is possible. If it is, it's just another technology. Big whoop. That is really inconsequential in comparison to the question whether there will be a retrieval of some cross-cultural understanding that the human project is fundamentally a moral project, i.e., something bigger and nobler than using power--any kind of power--for personal, tribal, or national aggrandizement.

I believe the human project going forward is about the renewal of the face of the earth, which is the spiritual project of redeeming evolution without grace. If this is a project that is understood as effected from as yet unrealized powers within the human soul, then that's the kind of magic "thing" I could get behind. 

See also "The Coming Discontinuity".