After the Future

The Coming Discontinuity

At the heart of our difficulty predicting the future is our assumption of stability. It is like this today and so it will probably be like this tomorrow, too. What makes this way of thinking seductive is that it is, usually, true. And then, all at once, it’s not.

--Ezra Klein

What makes discontinuity discontinuous is its being unpredictable. If it were predictable, then it would be in some way continuous with trends we already understand. It is predictable that humans dread discontinuities because they are so destabilizing, and the fear of instability is continuous with historical trends in human psychology. But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

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. 

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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.

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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 December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Cixin Liu: Democracy and Culture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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".

The Coming Discontinuity: A Theological Reflection through the Sensibility of a Progressive Catholic

I realize that in this moment the idea of recovering a Catholic sensibility is so much spitting in the wind, but nevertheless, in the long run something like it is called for because without a restoration of a sense of the sacramental, the machines win. I'll come back to defend this assertion toward the end. 

I'm enough of an Hegelian to see Protestantism and Modernity as the antithesis of Catholicism and pre-modernity, and so it follows quite possibly, if history is dialectical, as I think it is, that the Postmodern era on whose cusp we sit will be a synthesis of the Modern and the Premodern, the Protestant and the Catholic, of the individual conscience and of a renewed sense of sacrament and communion.

So I am a Catholic and a  progressive, but I reject the term ‘Liberal’ as a way of describing my politics because I think that the phrase "liberal Catholic" is an oxymoron, but I do believe that all Catholics are called upon to be progressives if they believe, as they should, that the Spirit is active in history. This seems to be an assertion about Catholicism that goes against every stereotype about it, stereotypes that historically have been well justified. Catholicism, except for a few decades last century in Latin America, has rarely been associated with progressive cultural or political causes in the modern period. That is why I make a distinction between a Catholic intellectual/aesthetic sensibility and the institutional distortions of that sensibility. Those distortions can be traced back to Constantine, or perhaps more interestingly to the shift from the Romanesque to the Gothic as Simone Weil argues in her essay "The Romanesque Renaissance".

The point I want to make now is that the modern social imaginary does not give us the resources to push back against problems that derive uniquely from the modern suppression of the premodern, and so it's not unreasonable to assert that a part of the solution lies in retrieving suppressed aspects of the premodern, but in a postmodern key. I don't know if it's dialectically inevitable, but if real spiritual progress is a possibility, I think such a retrieval must play an essential role. And that's why the Catholic and Orthodox traditions are important, not for their institutional moral authority, which is close to nil, but because they have preserved pre-modern forms and practices that need to play a role in a hoped-for cultural renaissance. 

Central to this project is a retrieval of the idea that Christianity is about the redemption of time and space; it is not a religion of escape from either. But what made sense in a premodern cosmic imaginary dominated by the Great Chain of Being no longer makes sense in a cosmic imaginary shaped by Darwin and Bohr. Nevertheless, the Great Chain of Being was a metaphor that pointed to something deeply true about the structure of Being, i.e., its metaphysics embraced an idea of chaos/entropy in tension with the Deep Real as density of actualized form.

It was a spatial metaphor, but it allowed for the movement of lower to higher, from a potentiality in chaos to its actualization in form, which is to say, the Logos or the Mind of God. The history of the world, as I see it from my quasi-Hegelian, evolution-of-consciousness perspective, is the gradual interpenetration of Chaos by the Mind of God effected by humans in whom the Mind of God becomes gradually awakened. Science plays a role in this evolutionary awakening, but the more important evolution is moral, i.e., an evolution in humans from being directed by forces outside to new possibilities for evolution that work from within the human soul. As the human being becomes more him or herself, the world changes. More on this below. 

This tension between Chaos and Logos is still a reality, even if we have no robust way of thinking it within the late modern imaginary. In other words, the Great Chain of Being points to a truth about Being for which we need a new metaphor that is better adapted to our current post-Darwinian/Einsteinian imaginary. I think the post-Einsteinian part of that opens up possibilities for thinking about Being as multi-dimensional, which is a postmodern way of talking about what premoderns and contemporary believers call the supernatural. Supernatural = Other-dimensional.

***

So here's a rough, preliminary attempt to explore mostly the post-Darwinian part of that. I accept Darwin’s description of the chaotic, blind, groping, often cruel, impersonal, random forces that drive natural selection, but I see the randomness of natural selection as that into which fallen humanity has fallen. It was a fall into chaos, and the human mission is to be submerged in that chaos and to find within it a path toward redemption. One way to define 'redemption' is as escape, to get off the planet in a Buddhistic liberation from samsara. Another is to willingly accept one's submergence in the chaos and to gradually transform it--bring order and form to it-- from within. 

This latter, I would argue, is the more deeply Christian idea. It's very similar to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or "world repair", especially as developed by Isaac Luria. Indeed, it's hard to understand the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection without it, even if in practice the Christian idea of salvation has been more Buddhistic. As, for instance, the Salve Regina, a beautiful medieval monastic Marian hymn, depicts humans as the poor, banished children of Eve living in exile longing to return home off-planet in a better world in the beyond. I'm arguing that the human mission is for individual human beings to be infusion points through which the "beyond' incarnates in immanent human practice in the time/space dimension we call our life on earth. The goal is the renewal of the face of the earth, but this will not be accomplished by some external intervention, but rather by human beings inspired by grace working in the world to transform it from inside out. 

So the goal is not to escape earth, but gradually to transform it, to make a garden of the wilderness. And so in a very real sense it's biological evolution as that from which humans need to be redeemed, or more precisely,  it is the human mission to redeem biological evolution by the power of something higher, i.e., something outside our limited time/space dimension. In other words, the human task is to redeem the earth from its subjection to the primitive, random, groping forces that shape biological evolution. Read Romans 8 in the light of that idea. But in order to do this, you need to believe there is something higher, something other-dimensional--which very few educated late moderns believe anymore (yet?)--at least in any robust way that has real stakes for the way they think about how they act in the world. 

So I'm suggesting that a way to think about the logic of natural selection is to see it as the logic of Original Sin, if by Original Sin we mean the condition of Nature that is shaped by concerns dominated by survival and propagation. Original sin is, I want to argue, "evolution-without-grace", i.e., evolution without the influence of forces outside our space/time dimension. In such a condition it's natural for biological species to do whatever it takes to promote their biological flourishing. In humans we see this as the need to dominate and control (will to power), the need to accumulate and hoard material resources (greed), and the need to spread one's genes (promiscuous/predatory sexuality).

Genghis Khan, Caesar, Napoleon, etc., are all prodigies of evolution-without-grace. Their behavior is perfectly "natural", and there is really no coherent understanding of the earth history that can push back against this "natural" behavior unless you allow for the possibility of a counter story Christians call redemption history, which I'm arguing is a story of 'evolution-with-grace'. Liberal ideas about pushing back either draft on Christian ideas or derive from Hobbesian/Lockean contract theory. Both are weak tea that provide no real foundation to deal with the crisis of culture in which we are currently implicated. 

For Christians, redemption history starts with the covenant made with Abraham, culminates with Christ’s incarnation and death, and now continues with us humans post-Pentecost. But it's not only humans, but earth history that must be redeemed--and we humans, inspired by grace--the spiritual energy that inspires us from outside the otherwise closed Darwinian system--have the responsibility to be agents who enact that redemption. Human beings at their best, whether they are aware of it or not, are infusion points of grace. You don't have to be a believer to be such an infusion point--all humans are responding or failing to respond to this energy all the time--but the whole point of a spiritual practice is to increase one's capacity to be an effective infusion point, and in doing so to realize/integrate his or her Deep Self, the part of us that is created in the image and likeness of God. 

For me this provides a compelling answer to the Cur Deus Homo question: Why was the Incarnation necessary in the first place? Christ's incarnation and death effected his submerging himself into the chaos of evolution-without-grace, i.e., the emptying of the unfallen into the fallen, the uncreated into the created, in order to effect a potential fusion of above with below so that after this event human and earth history might be infused with grace in an inside-out process that was not possible before. Before Pentecost, salvation could be imagined in Platonic or Buddhistic terms as an escape from illusion off an evil-dominated planet. After Pentecost, evolution-with-grace on planet became a new possibility, but now as something effected inside out, from within the human being acting in a world otherwise dominated by the logic of evolution-without-grace. 

Before this event the transcendent dimension was open to certain extraordinary individuals, and they were the culture heroes and lawgivers who provided for their societies a code, a way of living that was in close alignment with the Logos or the Tao. These codes could be experienced only as an external command to follow the law. After Pentecost, the law is something that is experienced from within--in the heart, the seat of conscience. The post-Pentecost release of the Holy Spirit into history, I would argue, made what was available to what before was only known/experienced by a spiritual elite, and in doing so made transforming biological evolution from within a new possibility. This transformation is effected to the degree that people--whether they are Christians or not--have supple hearts capable for responding to grace. The redemption of the world is the cumulative effect of a process that happens heart by heart in little and large ways progressively through the arc of history. For this reason MLK was right, the arc of the moral universe is long, and it does bend toward justice. 

***

So how does this impinge on how we should think about the political economy? Is there any purer expression in the political and economic sphere of evolution-without-grace than the market? Is there anything in our contemporary political and economic life in greater need of transformation? 

I would argue, therefore, that if you embrace the market as the main driving force in modern history, you are not a conservative in the traditionalist, principled sense—you are a Liberal. Liberalism was developed as a political-economic ideology in the 18th century to justify the “liberation” of market forces from traditional constraints, constraints that were grounded in Christian, i.e., redemptive concerns, to push back against, avant la lettre,  evolution-without-grace.

Pre-Reformation Christian societies sought to restrain the logic of evolution-without-grace They established the monasteries for those who were more serious about growing in holiness, and the bedrock of monastic life was founded in the evangelical counsels--poverty, chastity, and obedience. These were practices designed to push back against the logic of evolution-without-grace—greed, will to power, and indiscriminate spreading of one’s genes.

Holiness is measured by the degree to which one’s Deep Self, the part of us that was created in the image and likeness of God, has come to gradually displace the Social Darwinian Self, i.e., the Self driven by greed, will to power, and the need to indiscriminately spread one’s genes. The idea that the goal of life was to become good as God is good, i.e., to restore the human as image and likeness of God, and to do so by engaging in a life-long inner transformative process got lost. To be good was simply to follow an extrinsic code, to stoically do one's duty, to follow the rules, as in Kant. 

Post-Reformation societies in northern Europe tore down that redemptive social infrastructure—it got rid of the monasteries and with them the idea that the evangelical counsels provided a path of growth in holiness, i.e., a path for the supplanting of the Darwinian Self with the Deep Self. In doing so they substituted a new idea about morality that was more extrinsically legalistic than inwardly driven and Christian. There was a new, important emphasis on the individual and freedom, but freedom in the service of what? As traditional ideas about growth in holiness were cast aside, what I'm calling here the Social Darwinian Self and its fulfillment emerges as the new "natural" norm. This is the opposite of the idea of Christian freedom as articulated by St. Paul. (See Galations 5 and elsewhere. BTW, Paul's concept of the "flesh" and my use of the term "evolution-without-grace" are roughly synonymous.)

Protestantism at its best (imo embodied most fully by the Quakers) was a celebration of the individual conscience. But morality in Protestant societies in practice became more about doing good according to an extrinsic moralistic code where the code became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. It started, as all genuine spiritual movements do, as an interior impulse to recover a spiritual authenticity, but devolved into a rigid extrinsicism. And in doing so it threw out many of the older religious cultural forms that provided a framework for people to grow in holiness, i.e., into their Deep Selfhood. This framework was preserved to a certain extent in Catholic societies, but it cannot thrive in a world in which the secular imaginary that flowed from Reformation presuppositions is so dominant. 

It became a commonplace, especially for the Calvinists, that wealth was a sign that one was blessed by God, and that he was among the elect predestined for salvation, and poverty was a sign that one was a reprobate predestined for damnation. It’s hard to exaggerate how upside down this idea is from pre-Reformation Christianity and the spirit of the Gospels, which makes it pretty clear that you’re more likely to find holiness among the poor than you are to find it among the rich. And the reason for that is that the rich usually got rich by being evolution-without-grace's winners and as such largely impervious to the counterforces (grace) that seek to transform and eventually displace evolution-without-grace.

Calvinism played a central role in effecting a shift in Western moral imaginary that created the conditions for Enlightenment rationality, Liberalism, and free-market capitalism--both the good and the bad that came with these. America is a profoundly Calvinist society, and all Americans--whether Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists--have to understand how their politics are shaped by Calvinism. On the left, American political imaginary is shaped by Yankee and Black Calvinism that led to the development of the social gospel in the late 19th century. 

And on the right, the American political imaginary is shaped Southern Calvinism, mainly the Baptists and other evangelical sects that were inclined to rigid ideas regarding the inerrancy of Scripture and ok with slavery and later segregation. 

Catholics—on both the left and the right—have to own how their moral imaginaries have been Calvinized. It's not about doctrine; it's about how our moral imaginations are shaped. In that respect most Liberal Catholics have more in common with secular Liberals and most conservative Catholics have more in common with conservative Protestants than either conservative or liberal Catholics have with one another.

And both liberal and conservative Catholics must accept that they have more in common with secular moderns than either has with their premodern Catholic ancestors, for whom a sense of the sacramental and the distinction between the sacred and the profane was a commonplace. The world is just as disenchanted for contemporary Catholics as it is for their secular contemporaries, and so their attempts to force the sacred into secular spaces fails in almost every instance. The old Catholic sensibility lingers where premodern cultural forms do, as in some Latin American societies. People whose imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism think of those old premodern practices as at best naively quaint, and so they fail to understand how those forms genuinely mediate dimensions of the Real that the modern imaginary filters out. 

Disenchantment is a fact; re-enchantment is a possibility, but if it is to be effected, it will happen gradually from the inside out. That will require, I believe, retrieving much of what has been lost from premodern practice and imagination, but dialectically. Conservatives, particularly those with a Romantic bent, too often want to go native in the past, which never works. The challenge is to live through the modern secular as a kind of wandering in the wilderness with fidelity and by trusting that that such faithfulness will eventually lead to a renewal of the face of the earth. But this is a gradual, evolutionary, i.e,  evolution-with-grace, process. We do what is called for now in the hope that future generations will build on it. Perhaps all we can do now is plant seeds that will germinate in the future. We do that in our actions in all the ways small and large that are a response to the flow of grace in our lives. 

***

Growing in Goodness/Holiness for Catholics is (or should be) central to their practice, and the sacraments and the life of prayer don’t make any sense without it. That’s why the Calvinists essentially got rid of the sacraments. They no longer made sense since mainstream Calvinism didn’t think it was possible to grow in Holiness—either one was saved or he wasn’t. They had a well-founded suspicion of spiritual elites, and so the idea was not to promote individual spiritual prodigies, (aka, saints) but rather to insist that all the regenerated were equals. There are always exceptions, and the exceptions prove the rule, the rule being that one had a conversion experience of some kind, and that was it. One's only moral responsibility after that was to follow the law as revealed in the scriptures, and for most there wasn't much sense of how the New Testament put the revelation of the old law in the Jewish scriptures into a new perspective.

If Calvinists behaved righteously, then they were righteous. In the meantime, the typical not particularly spiritually gifted Calvinists had no compunction about doing their Social Darwinian best to get rich and to increase their power and social status. Indeed their success in these endeavors was the measure and proof of their righteousness. Catholics are surely not immune here--especially American Catholics--but to the degree that they have not been Calvinized, Catholics feel guilty about surrendering to their Social Darwinian selves in ways that traditionalist Calvinists do not, especially with regard to the their attitudes to the poor. "God helps them who help themselves", etc., is their motto. Besides, most of the poor are probably damned. 

So the Reformation unwittingly set the stage for the removal of constraints that kept the Social Darwinian Self in check. That liberation from these constraints released enormous productive capacity and wealth, but it also released forces that in an unprecedented way led to the destruction of traditions, local communities, and customary personal and communal ways of life that most conservatives insist they want to preserve against the intrusive state. But it’s not the state that has destroyed these traditional and customary ways of life, it’s been capitalism and its materialistic presuppositions. Lots of religious people in capitalist societies might believe that there is a spiritual dimension, but they live as if the material was the only thing that really mattered. Their religiosity is a thin patina that covers over their deepest ultimate concern, which is success as measured by materialist capitalist values. Andrew Carnegie thought himself as a good Christian, but we learn more about him by reading his Gospel of Wealth, not to mention the atrocious way he treated his workers.

The American state has been always a tool of capitalism, and both have evolved interdependently. Capitalism is the Sun; the modern state, the Moon. The bigger and more complex the capitalist economy became, the bigger and more complex the state. Without the one, you don’t get the other. The idea of limiting the state in a huge, complex capitalist economy is naively quixotic at best, and downright cynical at worst, insofar as a less intrusive state clears the field for pure Social Darwinians to do as they please with little or no constraints. If we’re to have a large, globalized capitalist economy, you need to have some mechanism for constraining and mitigating its worst excesses, and the only tool adequate for that is a strong state structured by the principle of subsidiarity and held accountable by a vigilant electorate. That's all we've got until there is some kind of new Axial alignment-(explained below)

Liberals—no matter in which party—are people who celebrate what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative/destructive character of capitalism, in other words, the Darwinian impulses as they work in the political economy. You don’t get the creative/productive/innovative without the destructive/disruptive. That’s a truism, but it’s something most conservatives I know don’t appreciate the implications of. One is that in North Atlantic societies it’s mostly educated elites—both Republicans and Democrats—who get the benefits of the creative-productive side of capitalism, and uneducated, rural and rust-belt working stiffs who suffer its destructive/disruptive effects.

Both Democrats and Republicans are “Liberals” in the classic sense. The difference between them, from my pov, is that Democrat elites are Liberals who understand that we pay for the creative benefits of capitalism with a destruction and disruption that affects ordinary working people disproportionately, and they care enough (or feel guilty enough) to try to develop programs that mitigate the negative effects on non-elites. 

Republican elites are classical Liberals in the dark Calvinist sense who either don’t understand or don’t care about the destructive effect capitalism has on traditions and local communities and the ordinary people who live in them, and so don’t try to do anything to mitigate it. This mentality is rooted in a vestigial Calvinism that sees the poor as lazy reprobates deserving of their poverty and the rich as blessed by God. Double predestination still lives on in this perverse way.

Whatever. But Republican elites who say they stand for tradition and the integrity of local communities while at the same time embracing the creative destruction of capitalism are either cynical or naively incoherent. Principled conservatives like Notre Dame’s Patrick Deneen understand this, and I recommend his book Why Liberalism Failed if you want a very thoughtful, eloquent articulation of a kind of principled conservatism that aligns with what I’m saying. 

My principal reservation about Deneen lies in that he is complaining about the condition of the patient after the cancer has ravaged him. While I agree with his etiology of the disease, it’s already done its worst, and now the question is how to go forward. The authoritarian/corporatist/integralist, Trump/Putin/Erdogan/Xi model represents one very grim possibility that exploits the understandable fears and resentments of non-elites who have felt most the destructive/disruptive forces of market capitalism. 

That’s where we’re headed if some alternative with a robust consensus that, at least until the deeper, long-term restoration I'm calling for here, embraces the better (Whiggish/Transcendentalist) angels of the American Calvinist character reasserts itself. Trump is a bully and con man trading on the fears and resentments that work with everything that is primitive and ugly in the American Calvinist character. 

Christianity from the very beginning has been universalist and anti-tribal, and so Christian tribalism is just as Social Darwinian (and therefore un-Christian) as any other form of tribalism. To defend the faith or the Church by a Social Darwinian logic is a sin against the Holy Spirit and a failure of both faith and hope. My faith leads me to hope against hope that the Holy Spirit will sustain the Church--as sacrament and as the community of the faithful--no matter what. And that no matter how bad things get, no matter how egregious our mistakes, we will never be abandoned so long as repentance is a possibility. And whenever the church has put its institutional survival above its fidelity to the spirit of the gospel, which it has done on countless occasions, it has sinned egregiously and in doing so diminished egregiously its spiritual authority.  

***

But the real threat for the future of humanity doesn't come from Trumpian or right-wing politics, but rather from Silicon Valley, metaphorically speaking. That's where evolution-without-grace is at its cutting edge, and it's becoming clearer with each passing decade that evolution-without-grace doesn't need human beings. Machines serve evolution's purposes quite nicely. And at this historical juncture, what resources do humans have that they can draw upon to constrain what seems at this point the inevitable dominance of the machines? From a purely Darwinian perspective humans are irrelevant, but from the Christian perspective that I'm trying here to articulate, humans are the whole point of evolution.

So what do I mean by a new Axial alignment? The Axial Age, a  term coined by Karl Jaspers, was a remarkable transcultural moment in the history of human spiritual evolution to provide an intervention against evolution-without-grace. It occurred in a huge swath from China to Greece in the mid centuries of the first millennium BCE, from the emergence of Taoism, Buddhism, prophetic monotheism in ancient Israel, and Greek philosophy. Charles Taylor makes the Axial Age and the subsequent "disembedding" of culture that follows from it a central theme in his monumental A Secular Age. Recently its implications are explored in The Great Transformation by Karen Armstrong and in The Axial Age and Its Consequences, ed. by Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.

The Axial Age introduced into human thinking the idea of a distinction between transcendence and immanence, and that the transcendent world set a standard for behavior in the immanent world. ("Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.") The idea of the Platonic Good and the Neoplatonic One, the Mosaic law, the Tao were all concepts of the transcendence in relationship with immanence,  and the goal of human aspiration was to become aligned with the transcendent good as opposed to immanent goods, what I described above as goods defined by biological flourishing or evolution-without-grace. From my pov, the Axial Age was an external (other-dimensional) intervention of the higher into the lower through the inspired thinking of prophets and philosophers who advanced their respective civilizations in East Asia, South Asia, the Middle East and the West. Christian civilization integrates the Axial traditions of ancient Greece and Israel. 

So is a New Axial moment a possibility? It seems clear that one way or another there's going to be a radical discontinuity in human history in coming decades. Developments in machine learning, biotechnology, AR and VR virtually guarantee it. The question is whether humans as beings open to and responsive to grace will survive in such a  brave new world. It seems to me that they cannot unless some kind of Axial awakening occurs because the power of evolution-without-grace is too strong to be resisted otherwise.

So is history dialectical? Are we on the cusp of a cultural realignment that integrates the modern with the premodern? We'll see. For those for whom evolution-without-grace is accepted as the only legitimate historical narrative, humans are expendable. Some even argue that the earth would be better off without humans. Or the other possibility as envisaged by transhumanists and poshumanists is a new eschatology as upload. Humans will become immortal machines, which is just another way for evolution-without-grace and the logic of the fall to win.

So what's at stake here? I don't exclude the possibility that developments in technology can be subordinated to the logic of evolution-with-grace, but unless there's some broad cultural awakening and with it the emergence of a new transcultural moment celebrating transcendence and its central influence in human affairs, it's hard to see how that might be possible. The forces of evolution-without-grace right now are too strong to be resisted.

So is such a broad awakening a possibility? Stranger things have happened. And so for those humans who are concerned about being evolutionarily obsoletized, it would seem that Christians and other heirs of the great Axial traditions need to play a role in formulating a counter-narrative that pushes back against the inevitability of the machines. But they can't unless they have a theology of the evolution-with-grace that makes sense and resonates with the broader culture. 

Christopher Nolan, Andrei Tarkovsky, and the Unconscious

[I haven't had a chance to see Interstellar yet, but Nolan's work has always interested me, and I'm reposting a piece I wrote in 2010 about Tarkovski's Solaris, his response to Kubrick's 2001, which I saw for the first time around the time I first saw Nolan's Inception. I think the post makes sense even if you haven't seen either film. I'm posting it now because it relates to what I wrote "Sacramental Semiotics", and sets up a post I'll probably be writing about Interstellar. Wormhole as metaphor? ]

In the past week I've watched both Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris and Christopher Nolan's Inception. Both in very different ways try to grapple with the question: What is the human unconscious? First, a little riff on that question, and then maybe I'll get around to the movies.

We all heard when we were children that that the human brain is underutilized, that we humans are using only a minuscule percentage of its potential. I remember when I first heard that as a kid I thought that if I could just figure out how to increase capacity a little I could get my math homework done more quickly--I thought about it in terms of IQ and as having underutilized content. Later I wondered what it would mean to have !00% utilization, and I believe now that there is no 100%, that the brain has no content that can be measured in terms of whether it is being well or underused.

It is, rather,  a mirror-like tool developed for human use so that Nature might become self-aware. But a mirror has no capacity of its own; it's empty and its value lies in its being in good working order: clear and clean rather than cracked, dirty, and warped. Its content is completely dependent on what comes into view. And when the brain is the mirror what comes into view is potentially limitless because it emerges out of the human unconscious, and the human unconscious is a fathomless, limitless, transpersonal sea of possibility. There are dimensions of the Real of which we are unconscious, but that doesn't mean that they don't exist, only that our awareness of them lies outside the current "consensus reality" or social imaginary.

Carl Jung's understanding of the collective unconscious comes close to what I'm talking about here, but Jung suffered from what Owen Barfield called RUP--Residue of Unresolved Positivism. [Peirce, Heidegger, Barfield are better, if less accessible, guides for our thinking about this.] 

So when people talk about how we humans use only a small capacity of our brains, I think they really mean to say that we humans are only conscious of a small percentage of the Real, that most of reality is hidden from us--because it is unconscious. But the task is not to use more of the brain's capacity, but rather to find ways of bringing into awareness that which is now outside of it, because submerged in the limitless sea of unconsciousness. If we find ways to bring it out from where it is hidden, the brain as mirror will see it, remember it, and give the viewer something to think about and make sense of. "Making sense" means making it fit within the frame of  the existing social imaginary, or if it doesn't fit, expanding the social imaginary to accommodate the new 'data'. Science is certainly one area where this deepening of awareness is the task, but so is art and spiritual practice. 

It is one thing to look and see; it's another to remember and understand. The brain is the tool that allows us to see, to remember, to make connections, i.e., to be conscious. It is important to have a brain that is clean and in good working order, but more important is the scope and quality of the information available for it to work with. Neuroscience is mirror mechanics, not consciousness mechanics. Consciousness just is. The brain is a function of consciousness, not consciousness a function of the brain.  

 

The argument at this blog has been that moderns and postmoderns, insofar as the scope of our awareness is limited to the positivist frame, to what can be seen and touched, are working with only the surfaces or the husks of things. Far more interesting is what lies behind those surfaces or within those husks. That we are now incapable of experiencing that 'behind' and 'within' does not mean that they aren't there, only that we are unconscious of them, that the modern collective consciousness has forgotten about them. If we can accept that there are individual repressed memories, is it so hard to accept that there are also collective repressed memories? 

Owen Barfield in Saving the Appearances says that all Nature is the human unconscious. In other words, it's wrong to think of the Unconscious as yours or mine--its ours; we are all swimming in it, and we are all connected in it. But in the same way that childhood memories are forgotten or repressed, in the same way we cannot bring those forgotten experiences into awareness at will, so too are we unable to bring into felt awareness our connection to the Real beyond the husks that is Natura.

We experience, if we are true moderns and postmoderns, mostly our being cut off from it. We think we are over here and that nature and other people are over there because we have forgotten how we all emerged out of this deep network of interconnection. Our embeddeness in that deep network is a repressed memory. And every once in a while we might have an experience, a moment of recall, so to speak, and we feel that we understand something we once took for granted, but because it is so out of tune with the way everyone thinks and behaves around us, we soon forget what we've remembered and reabsorb into the surrounding social imaginary.

Holding on to the memory is the main discipline in what I think of as 'faith'.  Having these moments of recall are moments of grace, and everything depends on whether they are taken seriously and remembered, whether they are seed moments that fall on fertile ground or fall on ground that is barren or where it is trampled under foot.

***

Of the two movies, Solaris interests me more. And there is more to be said about it than I have the energy to write about it right now--I think I need also to watch it again. But it was developed by Tarkovsky as a response to Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey. I think the biggest difference in their respective mythic imaginations lies in that for Tarkovsky reality, the part of it that we have "forgotten", is at its root interpersonal. The Kubrick vision of the Star Child and of Bowman's Odyssesy is suffocatingly disconnected and isolating. They mythic grandeur and ambitions of Kubrick's film are admirable, but it is still very much the product of an imagination that is circumscribed by RUP. Tarkovsky was working in another, very different neighborhood. I'll leave it there for now, but someday I want to come back to that. Or in comments if anybody wants to explore that angle.

And Inception interests me more about what it has to say about our conscious world than what it says about our unconscious. This film isn't about exploring an unconscious dream world; it depicts more an imperial colonization of the unconscious by the conscious. It's not about discovering and entering into a relationship with what's there, but rather a pushing back, as the white man pushed back the Indian, and imposing its old-world structures and habits of thinking in this strange and unfamiliar new world.

And that's fine for the purposes of the movie. Because isn't the real point that what we think of as the real world is pretty much the same kind of construct as the dream worlds?  Isn't the ending with the top spinning meant to suggest that it's not clear whether Cobb is still in a dream world even though he thinks he's in the real world? And isn't the point then that what we take for real, really isn't, that it's just as much a construct and just as much a prison as the so-called Limbos? This story tells us nothing about the unconscious and its mysteries, only about the ephemeral, fundamentally unstable nature of what we take to be conscious reality, or the so-called "real world". 

But I find Nolan's fascination with the role of memory in this movie--as well in his earlier Memento--as interesting and important, and explored in ways that need more exposition than I can do now and here. But the takeaway for now is that remembering, correct memory, is one of the most important things we can do that connects us to the Real, and that improving our capacity for remembering is a critically important spiritual discipline. We are our memories, and the quality of who we are in large part depends on the quality of what we remember.

 

The Silicon Valley Flood

The culture of Silicon Valley today sits somewhere on the autistic spectrum and exhibits the elemental qualities of water. Water will always find its way, it will find the unseen cracks, and find ways through obstacles and even tear them down, as a tiny leak can bring down a mighty dam.

Water is an amazing disruptor in nature -- materializing from thin air, it can torrent and push aside mountains, or it can patiently work at opening up tiny cracks in solid stone, freezing and expanding, thawing and flowing.

Water doesn't need ethics or morality it is a force of nature. It will always find its right level. It's an appropriate metaphor for Silicon Valley's culture of amorality. (Tom Forensky)

I am trying to formulate a way of thinking about "progress" that fits into a bigger evolutionary narrative, and so any notion of progress for me must embrace a notion of moral development. It is certainly possible to progress economically and technologically and to regress morally. it happens all the time, and Google is a case study over the last ten years. Earlier in the article Forenski points out:

Google became an important thought leader in the burgeoning social corporate responsibility movement, which was kick-started earlier by Salesforce.com founder Marc Benioff. 

Corporate Social Responsibility was important because it was important to the software engineering community. It was essential in recruiting the best engineers. A company bus and a company lunch didn't cut it with that generation of coders.

Today's Silicon Valley culture is dominated by a peculiar amorality, a narcissism that claims Ayn Rand for its aspirations, even though few have read her books or even their dust jackets.

It's as if everyone has forgotten, "What the right thing to do is." And Google has worked hard to play down its "Don't be evil" rule.

There are moments in time when human beings have a glimpse of the transcendent, but usually that's all they get, and they either remain faithful to the memory of what they came to understand in this glimpse, or they allow themselves to be swept away by the primordial flood, the forces in nature and within ourselves that trend toward entropy and dissolution. And it was so easy for the elites at Google, who had such a glimpse, to allow themselves to be swept away.There are always elaborately contrived justifications for being swept away. In this case, a little Ayn Rand here, some neoliberal market ideology there.  It's not something most people in Silicon Valley (or anywhere in our consumer culture0 think about; there are these occasional moments of wakefulness, and then it's back to sleep in submerged in the flood.

So the other day in my post "Sacramental Semiotics" and the comments that follow it, I was tentatively feeling my way toward explaining the "Big History" understanding of how evolution works that I have been thinking about that moves beyond purely naturalistic metaphysics. A naturalist metaphysics is a closed system; a metaphysics that is open to transcendence embraces the naturalistic "facts", but does not see them as the only shaping force in history or evolution. 

A purely naturalist metaphysics presents a universe and the life world on earth as dominated by  randomness, chance, sometimes stunning beauty, and often impersonal cruelty. Heat death is its telos. Why anybody chooses to embrace a purely naturalistic metaphysics (IMO) has little to do with seeing the world as it is; it has everything to do with seeing the world through a certain world-weary lens skeptical about, if not cynical about, all grand narratives. 

Through such a grand-narrative skeptic's lens, the old religious orthodoxies seem antiquated and absurd. And while the great Eastern religious and philosophical traditions may for a while (in the sixties and seventies) have seemed to provide a possible legitimate alternative for allowing the possibility of a spiritual dimension, those traditions have been trivialized by Hollywood and New Age flakiness. So without a credible, robust narrative that presents a credible spiritual alternative, the intellectual class reverts to a complacent, soft nihilism. Nihilist, because when people in this class have an encounter with the transcendent, as all humans do whether they recognize it as such or not, they have no way to hold onto it or understand it, so they reduce it to the aesthetic. The soft nihilist narrative allows for an appreciation of the "spiritual" experience, but cannot give it any meaning, because, a priori there is no meaning.  

This nihilism leads to moral complacency because while your typical secular intellectual wants to be moral, that means little more than being nice in a politically correct kind of way. And they are nice, but because there is no grounding for deeper moral commitments, those moral commitments are easily discarded when they become inconvenient. That's my reading about what happened at Google. It was "nice"  for a while not to be evil; now it's ok. Whatever momentary glimpse some had about the importance of 'not being evil', it was too easily swept away by the flood, by the primordial, amoral forces that grope randomly for primitive survival and advantage. 

And these points reinforce the argument I've been making over the years that the secular Left offers no real promise of a progressive or more just future, not because at some level many who are at home in the secular Left don't sincerely want Justice. Many do. It's just that they don't have a way to hold on to it because they don't believe in it as a transcendent ideal. If the bigger meta-story is randomness and senselessness, and if it just ends in heat death, why should anybody care deeply about the future, especially if one is relatively comfortable in the present?  Why would anybody choose to suffer and sacrifice for a purpose larger than maintaining his comfort? Yes, there are the few romantic nihilists, the Che Guevara types, who are willing to make that sacrifice. But in a comfortable country like the U.S. all they can do is criticize the injustices that pile up left and right and wait for the contradictions to heighten enough so that the masses become uncomfortable enough to find the resentment that will motivate them to act.  

But a politics of resentment is just another way that the primordial flood works; it leads nowhere good, and certainly not in a direction that I would call progressive. Justice, if it is to have any real staying power and any transformational effect, has to be grounded in more than a passing social mood inspired by a fleeting glimpse of the Transcendent. A commitment to transcendent ideals has to be grounded deeply in peoples' souls, in their collective imaginations and traditions, where it is understood that the Absolute Future is the only truly progressive transformational force in history. 

So the counternarrative that I am trying to articulate would embrace Justice, for instance, as a transcendent ideal, if by transcendent we mean something that exists outside a system that in our experience of it is best explained in naturalistic language. But rather than imagine this transcendent realm as something that works from above,  in some static Platonic world of ideas, we imagine it as working dynamically toward us from the future, the Abolute Future, working in time shaping history and evolution. I imagine history as being propelled by this raw, primitive energy that pushes from behind us, but which is given shape as it meets the Absolute Future which is flowing against it. Let me repeat here what I wrote as a comment in the preceding post:

It's all about the future, the Absolute Future, streaming toward us in a counterflow against the chaotic noise released in the big Bang. That's the story of evolution for me: the groping, random, cruel, noisy, chaotic entropic energies streaming from the past--Teilhard's Alpha point--and the ordering, coding, truth and beautifying flow coming to meet it from the future--the Omega point. And caught right in the middle is the human being, who determines whether the forces of the past win or the forces of the future do. Goodness, deep goodness, comes into the world when humans choose the Future, even in the smallest of matters. 

The angel Gabriel was in this sense a herald of the Future. A simple choice is presented to Mary: yes or no, no matter what the cost, choose. Refusal or Amen. So must we all choose. The Magnificat is an eschatological song of deep truth and beauty inspired by her encounter with the Absolute Future. This is the archetypal choice for any of us who long for peace and justice. It is the template for analogous choices we too must make all the time.

So I don't know if this orientation of our spiritual imagination toward the future is helpful for anybody else, but it works for me because of the problems it solves on so many levels. And not the least of which among them is to introduce a way of thinking about history as having a purpose while at the same time recognizing that much if not most of what works in history is random, cruel, and amoral. And to recognize that randomness, cruelty and amorality are the default unless resisted. Amorality becomes 'evil' when humans fail to resist and allow themselves to be swept away by the Flood. Good comes into the world humans resist by choosing a place to stand in the Absolute Future. Good and Evil have no meaning except as they relate to the fundamental human choice to either choose the Absolute Future or to refuse it.

Sacramental Semiotics

For what does elemental matter--the microscopic stuff of stars, planets and DNA molecules--look like in a post-Einsteinian universe? The first thing to say, I suppose, is that matter is bound or condensed energy, captured from the torrential, buzzing flow set loose by the big bang. Just as water moves through a whirlpool and simultaneously creates it, so are we and the stars disturbances (or warps) in the free flow of ballooning, random energy sounded with the opening chord of our cosmic symphony (whether it was the first or just one of many). Democritus and the classical atomists (or the Hindus) had it about right: the atoms that compose all the object-like entities in the universe are vortices, eddies or fluctuations within a vast cosmic river. . . [which began its flow with the Big Bang]

Hence it is an anachronism (and a sign of cultural lag) that the word atom should any longer serve as a metaphor of our insularity and shut-in-ness. It is precisely the opposite. Due to its field properties, atomic structure means that the whole universe is woven into us and we into it. It may be true, as Aristotle had it, that the soul is potentially all things. The point is that at an invisible (because microscopic) physical level, everything is actually implicated in everything else--the one in the many, the many in the one. Or to put it in a medieval frame, the macrocosm is in the microcosm. 

From David S. Toolan, S.J., "At Home in the Cosmos," America Magazine, 2/24/1996

I want to introduce another theme for this blog, to which I've adverted indirectly over the years, which is that our social imaginary hasn't yet caught up with what physicists are telling us about how the universe works. We (me included) have (mostly) a rather nineteenth-century materialist imagination of the world, and it's precisely the limitations, the rather crude limitations, of that imagination that allow for all the silliness now that passes for the new atheism that sees itself pitted agains the pre-Darwinian imagination of religious fundamentalists. It's silly because it's locked into a way of thinking about the Real, both its spiritual and material dimensions, that has been made obsolete, and if anything, science is moving toward a retrieval of older understandings of the sacramental nature of the Real. 

Elsewhere in the article Toolan says, "

these areas of a post-Einsteinian world begin to show striking affinities to the chancy, interconnected and semiotic universe presupposed by Catholic sacramental theology. Moreover, as Northrop Frye once observed, to begin to think of God in the way scientists now do of atoms and electrons--as forces, fields and energies rather than 'things'--may prove a way of recovering our biblical ancestors' sense that God is linguistically a "word of power," not a noun but essentially a verb."

In the beginning was the Word, the Logos, ... and through him all things were made." There is entropy and chaos and then there is the Logos; there is noise and there is information and organization, which are deep linguistic structures, the codes at the heart of the universe. This is an idea that has been a part of modern and postmodern thinking at least since the time of Charles Peirce whose semiotics laid the foundations for Heisenberg and Bohr, Crick and Watson. Everything is code, signs working with other signs. Everything is Word. More on Charles Peirce's semiotics in the future, but for now let's hear what Toolan has to say:

We no longer need to carry the physicist's energy and the humanist's signs and symbols in separate accounts. One balance sheet will do. Information physics has given us back a semiotic universe, a nature that--like the medieval sacramental universe--gives signs. University divisions of the natural sciences and divisions of humanities while working at different parts of the spectrum, need not figure themselves as concerned with utterly disparate matters. The natural sciences, we may now say, deal with primitive sign systems and their protolanguages and protogrammars, whereas the humanities deal with the more developed sign systems and meanings of the animate star dust we call human cultures.

There is a telos, an Omega point, toward which all creation groans, and this telos is the slow, eons-long process of a largely unconscious, inarticulate Natura becoming aware of itself. The human being is the 'warp' in the cosmic flow where this 'becoming conscious' occurs and through whom this awareness is given a voice. And humans speak what they learn most truly and deeply when it is the Word, the deep Real, the Logos, the substrate for all that exists, that speaks in and through them. For since the beginning the Logos has sung the ongoing cosmic song of creation, a song we humans over time are learning to sing with greater depth and greater complexity and greater beauty. In the end it is the song sung in full throated joy by the communion of saints.

The "Lost" Sensibility

Heather Havrileski at Salon doesn't have it:

Damn you, "Lost"! We went and jumped on your bandwagon way back in the first season, got sucked into your endless jungley maze and suspenseful chords, and waited breathlessly for the next shoe to drop, over and over again. Remember when that was still fun? Remember? Henry Gale's googly-eyed provocations? Michael shooting Ana Lucia in the gut? The impenetrable, nostalgia-inducing mysteries of the Dharma Initiative? Thanks to the brilliant character studies of the first season (we ignored the dumb monsters), thanks to the genius twists and turns of the second and third seasons, we're doomed to do our penance as the whole tale unravels in a messy heap. . . .

Back then, like teenagers at a Baptist retreat, we thought the big, bad world would add up to something, that every confusing twist was laden with hidden meaning. Now we know better. Now we get up in the morning and put on our Sunday best and trudge off to church on the off-chance that the Lord Himself will appear and shine His glory on us in person. Now we watch because we were once "Lost" fans, and here it is the final season, and there are only a handful of episodes left. Even though the long-awaited answers we're looking for are offered in such blunt, unimaginative language that we feel like we're reading first drafts: "I'm a smoke monster." "You're going to have to kill the devil." "It's all meaningless if I have to force them to do anything." And if we wanted to waste six years in a Judeo-Christian allegory, we would've just followed a Jehovah's Witness home a long time ago. At least their Armageddon should be a little bit gripping and suspenseful. (5/8)

Neither does Laura Miller at Salon after watching the finale, and there are many others who felt the show was a "long con". But needless to say I disagree, and I think the difference lies in there being two fundamentally different postmodern sensibilities. Havrileski and Miller represent one, and the Lost writers represent the other. The first is one that with its arms folded and foot tapping, suspicious about everything, fears to be hoodwinked. The second is arms open with second naivete ready to embrace everything that has the slightest scent of truth. Count me in with the second group.

Lost was remarkable for its ability to be both complex and multilayered and yet to end with a theme that was simple, clear, resonant, and deeply human. It was a show that was full of ideas but was never just a head trip. In the end it was about the characters and their relationships, and it was about why those relationships matter and with meanings that might be described as having cosmic import.

There have been complaints that the cosmic-import theme wasn't original or that it was sentimental. The question for me is not whether the "idea" was original, as if inventiveness is the most important thing, but whether the story points us to something that smells or feels true. Sentimentality is emotion that feels false, that is formulaic, contrived, that smells of a kind of emotional b.s., and there's a ton of it out there in the culture. But this ending was not sentimental because it points us to something deeply true in a way that I thought was emotionally brilliant--anamnesis, remembrance. Aren't all of our deepest, most lasting relationships discovered as a kind of remembering? As a kind of revelation or surprise? As if remembering something we always knew but forgot for whatever reason? This happens even with the people we already know and love--we have these moments when we remember why. I guess people who have not had that experience cannot relate to the way the show worked with it. So later I talk about what the Sideways reality was, but whatever you think of it, it allowed the writers to give us this remembering theme in a very powerful way.

And on the ideas level the show as a whole succeeds emotionally because it isn't just clever inventiveness. It succeeds because it draws upon traditional sources--not just stuff they made up; it's an exercise in retrieval and imaginative fusion. Its themes draw from ideas about aboriginal dream time, from Persian religion, from Buddhism, from Neoplatonic and Judaeo-Christian sources ancient and contemporary (C.S. Lewis, Teilhard, Flannery O'Connor), from the Hermetic tradition, and others, I'm sure, I didn't recognize. These sources resonate because they speak to the soul from transpersonal depths that you have to be extraordinarily spiritually tone deaf not to hear. Anamnesis plays a role here as well, because the show is asking us to re-member this fragmented and and for the most part 'lost' wisdom.

It's synthetic in its ambitions rather than analytic.  It embraces an impossibly broad spectrum of human experience and thought and still manages to tell a compelling story in prime time television. I don't care what anybody says, it's a remarkable achievement. We'll see if it stands the test of time and whether people will be watching it twenty years from now or a hundred years from now, but I'm confident the people like Havrileski and Miller who are all chippy about it now will be proved wrong.

***

Thoughts on the sideways reality.  I think there's a strong argument that the sideways reality is a kind of bardo state, and in-between place between the survivors real life in the Island timeline and whatever comes next when they move on. Christian says that it's a timeless place the survivors created so that they could meet together and move on together. And so I think there's a tendency to look at it as if it were a dream state, a state in which Jack, for instance, can give himself a son who doesn't really exist, and in which Hurley is both rich and lucky, and Jin and Sun can have their baby together. The people we see in the sideways reality are more like avatars in a virtual reality than they are real people--or are they?

I think there's an argument to be made that the sideways reality is more than virtual and that the characters are more than dream images of themselves. Ben's situation underscores the point. He has decided not to move on with the survivors.  He will continue to live in the virtual reality even after having remembered his "real" life in the Island reality. Is his choice like Cypher's in The Matrix? I he choosing to live in a virtual world rather than a real one? If he connects with Rousseau and Alex, as we are led to believe he will, is he connecting with dream people is he connecting with people who are real, who are independently voltional?  So  Is Jack's son real?  Does he have another self in the Island timeline?  Or is it possible that the sideways reality has a kind of substantive ontological status of its own?

And then what about Keamy? He dies in the Island reality and then he dies in the sideways reality. Is that just his avatar dying--or is it really him? Does he give himself another sideways reality in which things work out better for him? Is that what we all do until we finally wake up to the bitter truth that we are not who we think we are?  Is that Ben's bitter realization? And are we not all more like Ben and Keamy before they remember than the others? Isn't that really a restatement of the Hindu idea about Maya or the Christian idea of Original sin?

I'm wondering if the show isn't asking us as viewers whether we're in a sideways reality and haven't awakened to our real life yet that we have lived in another dimension. Perhaps we're all living in a sideways time line of another sideways timeline of another sideways timeline, and we keep living in one until we finally have the satori moment that allows us to move on. Perhaps the Island reality is a sideways reality of yet another, but it was the one that allowed the survivors to resolve persistent issues, that once resolved allows them finally to move on. 

Cosmogenesis II

I suppose if I'm going to make the case for mythopoesis plausible, I have to establish that all of us live within a mythic framework.  I'll try to do that another time, but for now let's just assume that all of us live within belief systems.  And because our belief systems, no matter how sensible seeming, are saturated, soaked through, with the irrational, our attempts to speak rationally about them are the attempts of a swimmer in the middle of the ocean to dive a few dozen feet below to discover a thing or two about a vastness that he could never even begin to grasp. 

What we know is dwarfed by what we do not know. And yet whatever part of that ocean we have explored and have gotten to know is connected to the vastness that lies beyond it.  And we can deduce some things about what the ocean is like elsewhere based on what we have learned about it locally, but such deductions are provisional at best. How the ocean works near the surface is quite different from how it works in its deepest depths, and what might be true about its laws here could be very different from its laws there. And yet there is a continuum that connects there with here.

So the best myths are the narratives that we sense come from the deepest depths and yet make sense of our lives here. One cannot but read the Gospels with an open mind and come away from them with a sense that on the one hand they are talking about the ordinary world as we all experience it, and yet they present a narrative that is in almost every way a contradiction to the world as we ordinarily understand it to work. 

I do not think it is possible to grasp the astonishing significance of the information given to us in the Gospels unless one opens himself up to the possibility that the world as he has come to know it is not necessarily the world as it must always be. There is the kingdom of this world that operates according the austerely rational Newtonian and eat-or-be-eaten Darwinian principles, and yet within that framework there is another kingdom that Jesus said is "within," which as it grows in strength has the power to subvert the outer kingdom, to turn it upside down and to transform it into something very non-Newtonian and non-Darwinian. Lions will someday lie with lambs, and swords shall indeed be made into plowshares. 

But that's not something that will happen to us, effected by some divine intervention; it will only happen if we humans make it happen, and we will make it  happen over time to the degree that we live according to the law of the kingdom within rather than simply assuming that the law of the kingdom without is the only law worth taking seriously.

And this brings me to what I wanted to say about the Myth of Redemptive Violence, which exemplifies how we have come to assume that the law without, the eat or be eaten law, is the only one to be taken seriously. It's primal source is the Enuma Elish, and I will recount here quoting from Wink's The Powers that Be:

In the beginning according to the Babylonian myth, Apsu, the father god, and Tiamat, the mother god, give birth to the gods.  But the frolicking of the younger gods makes so much noise that the elder gods resolve to kill them so they can sleep. The younger gods uncover the plot before the elder gods put it into action, and kill Apsu. His wife Tiamat, the Dragon of Chaos, pledges revenge.

Terrified by Tiamat, the rebel gods turn for salvation to their youngest member, Marduk.  He negotiates a steep price: if he succeeds, he must be given chief and undisputed power in the Assembly of the gods. Having extorted this promise, he catches Tiamat in a net, drives an evil wind down her throat, shoots an arrow that burst her distended belly and pierces her heart.  He then splits her skull with a club and scatters her blood in out-of-the-way places.  He stretches out her corpse full length, and from it creates the cosmos...

In this myth, creation is an act of violence. Marduk murders and dismembers Tiamat, and from her cadaver creates the world.  As the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur observes, order is established by means of disorder.

I'm going to assume that people who are bothering to read this are on board with the idea that we all live within a mythic framework, even if it isn't commonly recognized as such.  And I'm going to assume that since we no longer live in a world of 'given' traditionalism, in which we have little choice about the myths into which we are acculturated, that readers are on board with the idea that we have an obligation to bring the unconscious assumptions in which all myths are rooted and to evaluate whether they are healthful or sickening.

I agree with Walter Wink that the myth of redemptive violence is the one that unconsciously saturates our culture and shapes our perceptions about what is most real, what is admirable, and what has cultural legitimacy. 

There are a lot of Christians who are more influenced by the cosmogonic myth of redemptive violence with its roots in the Enuma Elish than they are in the cosmogonic myth presented in Genesis. They accept that the world is ruled by the strong who dominate the weak, and that if you're smart you put your money on the strong man or you get branded as a loser. They look to the God of power and might before they look to the God who speaks in a still, small voice. They look to the strong, violent man for redemption before they look to the suffering servant. They feel more comfortable entrusting their fate to the Boromirs than they do to the Frodos.

This week I'll talk more about how this myth is part of the irrational that saturates our beliefs about how the world works. I'm, of course, not talking about literally believing or disbelieving that this is the way world was made, but in the irrational archetypes that govern our sense of what is real. My intention eventually is to get back to the Genesis myth and to contrast this one with that one, and then to ask: Which myth does George Bush live by? It will be clear that he's as much a Babylonian as Saddam is, at least in that respect. And so is every other gun-toting American who thinks he's a Christian.