After the Future

End of History?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Return of the Repressed

In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.

Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the GOP-- even if it shelters racists--than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.

The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.

The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from Technocapitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where Technocapitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize. 

In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, Technocapitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him. 

I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the great originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting. 

They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of Technocapitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.

Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by Technocapitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but Technocapitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble. 

And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.

But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it. 

On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. Their private ontology aligns with the public one. But it's not grounded in reality, either--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying. 

Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, Technocapitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote: Bamboozled by the trickster Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.

Well, Technocapitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back. 

So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us. 

If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.

19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence of the profound and sublime in our collective life, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.

And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean. 

For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.  

Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.

I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic. 

P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale. I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:

Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.

What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack. 

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Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy, or someone Trumpier, is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods. 

Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.

I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these to interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they took such experiences on the vertical axis seriously. 

See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".

Liberation to What?

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

--Tom Nichols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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

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

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

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

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

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Liberalism + Whatever

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

--Ross Douthat

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

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

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

So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. [See Note 1] They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves. 

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

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

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

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

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

Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 2] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.

Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 3]

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

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

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

***

I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist, managerial liberal strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I have no desire to destroy it but see the task as to vigilantly hold it accountable and to use its power as a tool to solve problems only it is capable to solve in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.

As suggested above, I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society. 

So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments. 

So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and economic issues. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued. 

The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there. 

So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of our hatred. It has, though, created a world that is inadequate for true human flourishing. It is incomplete, not evil. For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored. 

All I am asking of any Liberal reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.

Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.

The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on. 

***

So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by one that is rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in his religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right. 

I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who are my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.

I am among those who believe that any new political project lies downstream from the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.

Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--

A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.  

In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture. 

A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]

...

There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.

...

Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 4 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]

So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live. 

Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:

1. They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
2. There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks. 
3. They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc.  It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
4. They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression. 

This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.

I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in providing the broader culture access to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis. 

The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt. 

How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the  Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.

If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.

The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.

So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.

***

Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?

Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.

In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.

We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.

In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV,  I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos or vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are not. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.

In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming. 

So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.

He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.

So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck . 

++++++++++

Note 1: Some of the references in this essay assume you have some familiarity with  Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now  but more in Red than in Blue America. (11/10/22: See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.) I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible unless you know people in Red America. I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters. For instance Angela Blue Thunder, a ruthless warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--

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

Not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to their own advantage to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely if ever against elites in the power structure.

Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. And at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now.

In a society with a living sapiential tradition, the "law" would be grounded in what I've been calling ontonormative justice, as for instance the Tao or the Torah is understood to be grounded in the law of heaven. We don't have a sapiential tradition, so Law is whatever we make up as we go along, and when it goes against people's sense of what's "right", it's disregarded as illegitimate. This sense of what's right largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would in turn be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. We're not a healthy society, and so appeals to Tao/natural law don't make much sense now, but that needn't always be the case.

In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substanceless and evanescent for opposing factions, a temporary inconvenience that can and will be reversed when they take power. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect--with a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of rudimentary wisdom. 

Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. What's different about these two worlds is more significant than what's similar, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. The show doesn't justify all the violence; it just accepts it as reality, and if violence is just the way it is, who would you rather win--the Duttons or the Roys?

The difference lies in that none of the principal characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.

The principal characters in Yellowstone are really bad people, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The souls in Yellowstone are on the road to damnation and loathsome when you first meet them--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie. But at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.  

Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America thinks about Blue elites. They can't trust them because they don't believe in anything except a project to justify moral license and appetite. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they know it's wrong. And yes, our leaders in Red America might be ruthlessly violent, but they justify it in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe in. What does Blue America believe that goes beyond some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?" 

Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents, but in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They also know the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.

They are wrong to think so. I live in Blue America and almost everyone I know has a decency and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?

I doubt that the Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Justice is a possibility in that world even if it rarely shines in it.

Note 2: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--

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

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

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

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

Note 3: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it. 

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

Note 4: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:

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

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

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

(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.

...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 derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.

How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left 2

Sean Illing interviews Stuart Jeffries, author of Everything, All the Time, Everywhere: How We Became Postmodern, and the discussion focuses on themes I've been making for years now about why the Left hasn't the resources to fight the Right. I'll say more about it below, but my argument over the years is that insofar as the Left has been captured by Postmodern theory, its politics align with Neoliberal capitalist objectives. In other words, the anti-capitalist postmodern theorist is as incoherent as the traditional values conservative who celebrates capitalism.

Sean Illing

I wanted to avoid the temptation to ask you to define postmodernism at the top, but I feel like we have to do it, right?

Stuart Jeffries

So the simple idea is that postmodernism is what comes after modernism. And modernism was a very earnest and serious commitment to progress, a commitment to overturning the frills and furbelows of Victorian culture and early 20th century decorative culture, in the arts and in architecture. It’s joyless, really.

And postmodernism is a rebellion against all that. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we should become leaner and fitter and meaner in our architecture and in our literature. It’s a rebellion against the idea that we’re on some path to improving ourselves as human beings, that we’re heading toward some kind of absolute perfection. Postmodernism disdains all that. It says that’s garbage. The postmodernists said we’re going to tear up the rule books to make buildings, to make art, and make it all about expression and fun.

Now the weird thing about postmodernism is that when you put it like that, it sounds great! But my book is about how there’s another “ism” looming as postmodernism emerges and it’s called neoliberalism, which is a new form of capitalism and very much the world we’re living in now. We’re living in a neoliberal era and postmodernism has become a cultural handmaiden for that.

...

Sean Illing

Do you feel like the emancipatory potential of postmodernism was squandered? Like, there was a genuine subversiveness to it that could’ve been revolutionary, but in the end it gets commercialized and becomes another trick of capital.

Stuart Jeffries

Absolutely. If you read Francois Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition [the book that coined the term “postmodernism” in 1979], or if you read Gilles Deleuze, both of them are quite radical thinkers. Both of them are born of the disappointment of the failure of the student rebellions in ’68 in Paris. Their ideas are filled with mourning over the lost revolution.

But they’re not Marxist revolutionaries anymore. And Deleuze, the great postmodern theorist, starts to think about desire as a liberator. So forget about socialist organizing, forget about trade unions and barricades — it’s all about desire. Desire is truly revolutionary.

And that just seems so incredibly naive to say now, because you think of how desire — sexual desire, the desire for products, the desire for material titillation — is utterly conformist. Our desires are constantly manufactured and then sold back to us. Desire is so obviously a tool for capitalism.

Marxism was the last grand narrative for the Left, and once you give up on the grand narrative all you have is individuals, and what motivates individuals? Well since the metaphysical imaginary for both capitalism and postmodernism is rationalist materialism, the only thing that makes life worth living is desire, and that's a very individual thing, so the politics becomes not about defining a collective vision for a better society, but rather only the negation of whatever impedes individual desire.

As soon as you understand that, you understand everything that has gone wrong on the cultural Left and why it was so easily captured by Neoliberalism, why it isn't subversive or revolutionary in any truly meaningful way and is really just a branch of the same disease that brings us unimpeded capitalism, which thrives on unimpeded desire.

The inevitable result is that a Progressive politics without a narrative loses to a politics that has one. The folks on the Right haven't heard the news yet about the unbelievability of grand narratives. Maybe they should take a course on it. In the meanwhile, the people on the Right, whose desire is primarily grounded in wanting to destroy the cultural Left and its capture of American cultural institutions makes it very easy for them to get organized in movements designed to do just that.

What does the Left have to offer as a counter--anarchic, evanescent, happenings like Occupy or quixotic, unpopular riots like the anti-WTO demonstrations in Seattle? But except for a few of the most hardcore on the Left, as soon as Left politics stops being fun or entertaining, there is no 'desire' for it. And besides, the politics of the Left can't compete with the politics on the Right for being fun. Those folks on January 6 were having a ball. Owning the Libs is great sport. Watching Libs get apoplectic about Trump is a hoot. 

Liberals just don't understand how boring and uninspiring is their sanctimony, how ridiculous their woke fetishes, how easy they are  to mock and to dislike. Their political naïveté and rhetorical ineptness bred in university seminar rooms is truly breathtaking, and yet all the youngsters these days in the media who went to prestigious universities and liberal arts colleges are its acolytes. The Right scares them, as it should, but this generation simply hasn't the ability to push back because it has no place to set its feet. The cultural Left has become the new "establishment", but theirs is an establishment without a foundation except for old habits that grew out of beliefs they no longer hold. 

The only possible argument against Neoliberalism needs a foundation that lies deeper than desire. That is an intellectual impossibility given the presuppositions held by the cultural Left, and so inevitably it will be defeated, if not by the Right, by a more sophisticated and deeply grounded movement on the Left. 

Listening to the entire interview is well worth it. See "How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left III" where I talk more about Jeffries book. 

See also How Neoliberalism Captured the Cultural Left I and "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Toward a Robust Meaning Story

In the past week the subtext of my posts about Reaganism and the ideological capture of the Supreme Court has been the ineffectiveness of Liberals to frame a robust meaning story. This was a theme in Ezra Klein's conversation with Larry Kramer about about why Liberals lose so many political and legal battles. They get caught up in technical and process issues rather than motivating meaning issues. My post yesterday attempts to explain why this is challenging for Democrats in a way that it isn't for Republicans. Democrats are pluralistic in a way the Republicans are not. A meaning story that works for lots of different groups is harder to frame than one that works for a relatively homogeneous one. Nevertheless, such a story must be developed.

In 2014, I wrote an essay about Mythos and Logos in which I outline the basic problem: 

A worldview that embraces competency, a logos mythos, so to say, cancels itself out and loses to a worldview that embraces ultimate purposes almost every time. Marxism succeeded to the degree that it did because it affirmed ultimate purposes, even if its ultimate purposes were misguided or delusional. Reality has a feedback mechanism that sooner or later lets you know if your ideas are delusional, but as we've seen in this country, the disasters of the Iraq War and the 2007 economic meltdown didn't provide evidence enough that the mythos that guides the GOP or neoliberal Democrats is delusional, so Americans keep sending Republicans to Washington.

I think they do this for reasons somewhat different from Tom Frank's explanation: they do it because Republicans give the appearance of standing for something and Democrats just don't. Republican policies might be toxic and delusional, but Republicans present themselves as being committed to "ultimate" values that Americans care deeply about. Democrats look more like our worst stereotype of what a politician is: the weak-kneed hypocrites who stand for nothing but the advancement of their own careers. I believe that the country would back progressive politicians who stand for core American values. That's why Jim Webb's candidacy intrigues me. 

So that's a part of it: When a particular mythos has captured the collective imagination of a group, it is virtually impossible to argue against it on a logos level. This is what people mean when they talk about cognitive divides or conservatives and liberals working with different epistemologies--one's epistemology follows from one's metaphysics, and one's metaphysics follows from one's Mythos, whether that mythos is consciously or unconsciously affecting one's thinking. One's mythos will not be given up until disaster proves conclusively that it is misaligned with the Real. Or it can be given up when an alternative mythos that shares its foundations with the reality-misaligned mythos emerges that proves itself better adapted to the Real. 

The latter is to be preferred to the former. When the old mythos collapses as it did in the Soviet Union in the 80s or Germany after WWI, it's usually replaced with an even more primitive and regressive mythos that has to run its course toward yet other disasters. These primitive myths have more in common with the primordial flood that pushes us from behind than with grace and freedom that call us forward into the future.  

More Americans have chosen Republicans in congressional elections (Presidential elections are different) because Democrats don't offer a robust enough alternative mythos that would motivate people to care enough to vote for them. So I'm arguing that secular progressives will continue to fail in the political and economic spheres, no matter how competent or practical their policy prescriptions, so long as their mythos is grounded in a soft nihilistic metaphysics/mythos no matter how humanistic and well intentioned. The Weimar Republic was humanistic and well intentioned in that Liberal sense.

So the answer for progressives does not lie in adopting an expedient Noble Lie that competes with the mythos of cultural Right. Such a contrived mythos will have as much staying power as the reality-misaligned mythos of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.  A mythos that works has to be grounded in the Real--the spiritual Real, the Real that comes to us from the Absolute Future, and that's why secular progressives will never be able to give us what the country and world needs if they are to move forward into a truly progressive future. But such a mythos cannot be developed out of thin air--that't the Jacobin fallacy--it has to grow out of the tradition, and in the Western world that means the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

I might change a few things in that rendering today. I think that instead of Judaeo-Christian tradition being the foundation, I would say that a prisca theologia along the lines first outlined by the Renaissance Neoplatonists would work. Within that framework, many different schools or tradition could co-exist and cross-fertilize one another.  But however it emerges, it has to be fundamentally post-secular and global and small 'c' catholic in its imagination of what's most important. American Calvinism is an obstacle to be overcome rather than a framework within which such a solution might be framed. I think that something along these lines will emerge by the end of the century. The task now is simply to clear the ground to create a space in which it might emerge. 

 

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. 

J.S. Mill + Alisdair McIntyre = Charles Taylor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Maybe more on this later. 

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

Lecture 2

Lecture 3

Lecture 4

Lecture 5

The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

..Essayist Gregory Hood claims that “Christianity burns through ties of kinship and blood. It is the essential religious step in paving the way for decadent modernity and its toxic creeds.” A major work of alt-right history concludes: “The introduction of Christianity has to count as the single greatest ideological catastrophe to ever strike Europe.”

 Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism, 2018

After reading Ezra Klein's column about Matthew Rose's A World after Liberalism, I read the book, which profiles five anti-Christian thinkers who have been influential on the far Right over the last one hundred years--Oswald Spengler, Julius Evola, Francis Parker Yockey, Alain de Benoist, and Samuel Francis. I've also been reading (but not yet finished) Timothy Snyder's The Road to Unfreedom, which profiles Ivan Ilyin, a Christian fascist who lived through the Russian Revolution who has been very influential in shaping Putin's understanding of Russia's historical mission and his role in it after the fall of the Soviet Union.

While the thinkers that Rose profiles are anti-Christian atheists or neo-pagans, Ilyin's idea of Christianity has almost nothing to do with Christianity except as it reflects the worldview of the Grand Inquisitor, the main character in a "poem" that Ivan Karamazov presents to his brother Alyosha in Dostoyevski's great novel written in 1880. Snyder doesn't mention the Grand Inquisitor in his book--at least not in the parts I've read so far--but it struck me while reading his book how much explanatory power Ivan's story has in explaining Putin/Ilyin's imagination of what Russia is or should be, and how this keys around the idea of innocence and an idea of national identity that is shaped by it, and then by extension how explains why totalitarianism is so attractive for so many.

I think revisiting the story is worthy of a little of your time. Go to the link above for the whole thing--it's not that long--but in what follows I focus on key passages to develop my theme:

The Grand Inquisitor is a man of the Church who is an admitted servant of the "tempter" whom Jesus confronted during his forty days in the desert. In Ivan's story, Jesus returns to earth in Spain during the Inquisition, and the Inquisitor recognizes him and immediately arrests him as a threat to the social order. The Inquisitor's argument when confronting Jesus is that he, the Inquisitor, is the more compassionate because he wants to allay human suffering while Jesus's project to liberate humans leads only to unhappiness. Ivan's Inquisitor says to Jesus--

Oh, we shall persuade them that they will only become free when they renounce their freedom to us and submit to us. And shall we be right or shall we be lying? They will be convinced that we are right, for they will remember the horrors of slavery and confusion to which Thy freedom brought them. Freedom, free thought, and science will lead them into such straits and will bring them face to face with such marvels and insoluble mysteries, that some of them, the fierce and rebellious, will destroy themselves, others, rebellious but weak, will destroy one another, while the rest, weak and unhappy, will crawl fawning to our feet and whine to us: "Yes, you were right, you alone possess His mystery, and we come back to you, save us from ourselves!"

Oh, we shall persuade them at last not to be proud, for Thou didst lift them up and thereby taught them to be proud. We shall show them that they are weak, that they are only pitiful children, but that childlike happiness is the sweetest of all. They will become timid and will look to us and huddle close to us in fear, as chicks to the hen. They will marvel at us and will be awe-stricken before us, and will be proud at our being so powerful and clever that we have been able to subdue such a turbulent flock of thousands of millions.

They will tremble impotently before our wrath, their minds will grow fearful, they will be quick to shed tears like women and children, but they will be just as ready at a sign from us to pass to laughter and rejoicing, to happy mirth and childish song. Yes, we shall set them to work, but in their leisure hours we shall make their life like a child's game, with children's songs and innocent dance. Oh, we shall allow them even sin, they are weak and helpless, and they will love us like children because we allow them to sin. We shall tell them that every sin will be expiated, if it is done with our permission, that we allow them to sin because we love them, and the punishment for these sins we take upon ourselves.

And we shall take it upon ourselves, and they will adore us as their saviours who have taken on themselves their sins before God. And they will have no secrets from us. We shall allow or forbid them to live with their wives and mistresses, to have or not to have children according to whether they have been obedient or disobedient- and they will submit to us gladly and cheerfully. The most painful secrets of their conscience, all, all they will bring to us, and we shall have an answer for all. And they will be glad to believe our answer, for it will save them from the great anxiety and terrible agony they endure at present in making a free decision for themselves.

And all will be happy, all the millions of creatures except the hundred thousand who rule over them. For only we, we who guard the mystery, shall be unhappy. There will be thousands of millions of happy babes, and a hundred thousand sufferers who have taken upon themselves the curse of the knowledge of good and evil. Peacefully they will die, peacefully they will expire in Thy name, and beyond the grave they will find nothing but death. But we shall keep the secret, and for their happiness we shall allure them with the reward of heaven and eternity. Though if there were anything in the other world, it certainly would not be for such as they.

Chilling and prescient, not so much about the Church but of the totalitarianism to come, whether or not it is cloaked in religion. That last sentence is so revealing of the contempt that the Inquisitor has for his wards. Because even if there is a God and an afterlife, it is not meant for these insects who could never be worthy of what Christianity tells them is their ultimate destiny. So, insists the Inquisitor, we few among the elite tell them the noble lie, we tell them what they need to hear so that they will obey and will live in the hive society we create for them. It's for their own good. And we, the noble liars, will nobly take on the unhappy burdens of freedom and rule so they may live and die in peace.

Jesus is cruel because he expects too much from humans, whereas the Inquisitor is kind because he expects nothing. He tells Jesus that his believing in the human possibility to be truly free, to become fully human persons, was criminally naive:

But Thou didst think too highly of men therein, for they are slaves, of course, though rebellious by nature. Look round and judge; fifteen centuries have passed, look upon them. Whom hast Thou raised up to Thyself? I swear, man is weaker and baser by nature than Thou hast believed him! Can he, can he do what Thou didst? By showing him so much respect, Thou didst, as it were, cease to feel for him, for Thou didst ask far too much from him- Thou who hast loved him more than Thyself! Respecting him less, Thou wouldst have asked less of him. That would have been more like love, for his burden would have been lighter. He is weak and vile. ... Mankind as a whole has always striven to organise a universal state. There have been many great nations with great histories, but the more highly they were developed the more unhappy they were, for they felt more acutely than other people the craving for world-wide union.

He tells Jesus that when tempted in the desert he failed in what could have been a truly salvific mission. Rather than to have initiated the human farce that ensued, he could have created the perfect totalitarian state had he not resisted the tempter:

Hadst Thou taken the world and Caesar's purple, Thou wouldst have founded the universal state and have given universal peace. For who can rule men if not he who holds their conscience and their bread in his hands? We have taken the sword of Caesar, and in taking it, of course, have rejected Thee and followed him [the tempter]. Oh, ages are yet to come of the confusion of free thought, of their science and cannibalism. For having begun to build their tower of Babel without us, they will end, of course, with cannibalism.

This is the Grand Inquistor's project: to relieve the people of the burden of freedom, to allow them to live as children, as innocents who never have to become free, mature individuals, who have no moral responsibility except to obey. The Grand Inquisitor sees himself as a benefactor of humanity because he relieves them of their suffering, a suffering that follows from their being called to freedom by Jesus. This maps remarkably well to Snyder's depiction of  Ilyin's, and so Putin's, Christian fascism, particularly this idea of the Russian people as innocents:

Like fascists and other authoritarians of his day, Ilyin insisted that his nation was a creature, “an organism of nature and the soul,” an animal in Eden without original sin. Who belonged within the Russian organism was not for the individual to decide, since cells do not decide whether they belong to a body. Russian culture, Ilyin wrote, automatically brought “fraternal union” wherever Russian power extended. Ilyin wrote of “Ukrainians” in quotation marks, because he denied their separate existence beyond the Russian organism. To speak of Ukraine was to be a mortal enemy of Russia. Ilyin took for granted that a post-Soviet Russia would include Ukraine. Ilyin thought that Soviet power concentrated all of the Satanic energy of factuality and passion in one place. And yet he argued that the triumph of communism showed that Russia was more rather than less innocent. Communism, he maintained, was a seduction by foreigners and deracinated Russians whom Ilyin called “Tarzans.” They lusted to violate immaculate Russia precisely because it was guileless and defenseless. In 1917, Russians had simply been too good to resist the cargo of sin arriving from the West. Despite the depredations of Soviet leaders, Russians retained an imperceptible goodness. Unlike Europe and America, which accepted facts and passions as life, Russia retained an underlying “Spirit” that recalled God’s totality. “The nation is not God,” wrote Ilyin, “but the strength of its soul is from God.”

When God created the world, Russia had somehow escaped history and remained in eternity. Ilyin’s homeland, he thought, was therefore free from the forward flow of time and the accumulation of accident and choice that he found so intolerable. Russia instead experienced repeating cycles of threat and defense. Everything that happened must be an attack from the outside world on Russian innocence, or a justified Russian response to such a threat. In such a scheme it was easy for Ilyin, who knew little of actual Russian history, to grasp centuries in simple phrases. What a historian might see as the spread of power from Moscow across northern Asia and half of Europe was for Ilyin nothing more than “self-defense.” According to Ilyin, every single battle ever fought by Russians was defensive. Russia was always the victim of a “continental blockade” by Europe. As Ilyin saw matters, “the Russian nation, since its full conversion to Christianity, can count nearly one thousand years of historical suffering.” Russia does no wrong; wrong can only be done to Russia. Facts do not matter and responsibility vanishes.  (pp. 23-24)

Russia is innocent, and all evils, from Communism to homosexuality, come from the West. Everything that Russia does, no matter how barbaric, is by definition in self-defense against the corrupting influences of the West. It's not hard to see how this translates into Putin's justification for his invasion of Ukraine. He wants to save the Ukrainians from the corrupt West. Any brutality he must commit is in the service of returning them to the innocence that they want deep down, even if they are not conscious of it. They are like children who must be disciplined for their own good against temptations they haven't the good sense to resist. 

I'll probably have another post about the thinkers that Rose presents in A World after Liberalism, but I think that the same basic idea is at the heart of what these more "Western" thinkers want. It is a nostalgia for an Edenic existence before all the complications of human cultural evolution. The main difference these thinkers from the West and the Russian thinkers is that they see Christianity as the primary obstacle to achieving a return to such a society. Rose says, 

Alt-right thinkers are overwhelmingly atheists, but their worldview is not dismissive of religion or religious questions. On the contrary, to read deeply in its foundational sources is to discover a movement that takes Christian thought and practice seriously. It is the conflicted tribute paid to their chief adversary, whose moral assumptions, they believe, distort our culture and twist our consciences. Against Christianity they make two related charges. Beginning with the boast that Europeans effectively created Christianity—not the other way around—they argue that Christian teachings have become socially and morally poisonous, providing inspiration to ideologies of white disempowerment. They insist that conservatives are therefore tragically mistaken to see in Christianity a buttress against the spread of liberal and progressive values. From the alt-right perspective, such values are the rebellious offspring of Christianity, whose legacy is not the preservation of a cultural past, but the ongoing subversion of traditional ways of life.

That is, pre-Christian ways of life. The Alt Right finds support in figures like Nietzsche and Heidegger and those influenced by them on both the Left and on the Right who see Christianity as a disaster because of the way they have alienated humans from a more natural, organic way of living. They see Christianity as the source of all unhappiness and alienation.

But for Christianity alienation is not a bug. Christianity--as with all the post Axial religions/philosophies--is all about disembedding humans from the natural world so that the human soul might know and be aligned with a transcendent order. It's about moving out of the cave. The Grand Inquisitor, Ivan Ilyin, and Rose's thinkers, in varying degrees, reject the existence of such a transcendental order. Nothing exists outside the cave, and any effort to go out from it is delusional and dangerous. They propose as a religious solution that would return culture to an embedded paganism, a religion of land and blood, rather than going forward toward an idea of a human future in which humans live as free individuals in communion. Such a future, they insist is impossible, so they preach instead a return to the cave, to Eden and infantilism. Rose explores what that means on the Right, but even on the Left, the postmodern polytheism proposed by Dreyfus and Kelly in All Things Shining or the pagan animism extolled by Richard Powers is acceptable in a way that the disembedding dynamic Christianity is not. That's why Christianity is hard--you have to go through the alienation to get to something deeper and more profoundly connecting. It's not supposed to be easy. 

Alienation is the fundamental human problem, and the human future boils down to which solution most humans will choose--to return to some kind of womb existence in a hive society, or to choose cultural and political forms that take a chance that humans are capable of becoming truly free, of leaving the womb and individuating, and of eventually moving out of their alienation into a deeper communion with one another, with the natural and the spiritual worlds. This cannot be accomplished if one remains forever in a hive or cave or cult. What was lost can be restored, but only by moving forward. 

This is what I mean when I say that the future will be shaped either by good or bad religion. Good religion looks forward inspired by the possibility of realizing a richer, more deeply free, more fully mature and realized human future. Bad religion looks backward in nostalgia to restore a childish innocence. Good religion has faith in humanity in the same way that the Inquisitor's Jesus does. Bad religion, like the religion of the Inquisitor has no such faith, and seeks to quash human freedom, to impose instead its fascistic control. There is no going native in the past, which is what all bad religion wants to do in one way or the other. 

Secular Liberalism, for all its limitations, at least insofar as it affirms the sanctity of human freedom, is morally more advanced than that kind of Christianity that flows from the cynical presuppositions about humanity held by the Grand Inquisitor. In order for people to be free, they have to make mistakes. That's why in the story of the prodigal son, the prodigal is morally more advanced than the older brother who follows the rules and stays at home. The prodigal by any conventional moralistic standard is a reprobate, and yet in the eyes of God he is closer to fulfilling his human destiny than the older brother, who stews in his alienation and resentment. The prodigal has not yet arrived; he has only begun his journey toward becoming him who he was created to be. The older brother hasn't even started. 

Imagining a Positive Human Future

The anti-liberals Rose profiles all believed that liberalism prescribed a life without sacrifice, an age when individual contentment reigned supreme and collective struggle disappeared. This was not true then, and it is not true now. What they missed is what liberalism actually believes: that there is a collective identity to be found in collective betterment, that making the future more just than the past is a mission as grand as any offered by antiquity.

But a critique they make thrums through our present, and should be taken seriously: Liberalism needs a healthier relationship to time. Can the past become a foreign country without those who still live there being turned into foreigners in their own land? If the future is to be unmapped, then how do we persuade those who fear it, or mistrust us, to agree to venture into its wilds?

--Ezra Klein

Yes and No.

 

Marxism was an eschatological cult despite its materialism, and with the de-legitimization of the Marxist grand narrative, the Left lost any way of framing a positive imagination of the future. Any philosophy of history has to be grounded in a metaphysics, and a metaphysics is only popularized, i.e., comes to shape the cultural imagination, through religion--or something religion-y. The Progressive Left was drafting on Judaeo-Christian ideas about the 'end of history', and without those ideas, it has nothing to offer to replace it. This is where I think Klein is wrong about Liberal identity found in collective betterment: The Liberal project has naively believed that in saying No to constraints on Liberty, it is is saying Yes to a 'better' future. It isn't. Liberalism has no positive content; it is only a No to what it perceives as constraints on Liberty. You need religion, or something religion-like, to provide the positive content that defines what "betterment" means. 

 

Without religion there is no shared cultural imagination of positive human future, i.e., a future to which we can all say Yes. It's just not possible. But secular Liberalism does not trust religion; it sees it as a problem to be overcome because the secular Liberal project has been primarily defined as Liberation from the dead weight of the past. Liberalism sees Christianity as too implicated with the mores, taboos, and constraints of customary culture and its accommodation with racism, patriarchy, and negative attitudes toward sexual minorities. Nevertheless, what's positive in Liberalism would not have been possible without the disembedding, universalistic dynamic that is inherent in Christianity. And at the same time, ironically, Liberalism constrains a broader spectrum of human possibilities that are inherent in Christianity. Again, it's not in what Liberalism affirms in terms of individualism and rights but in what it leaves out--or has thrown out--that is the cause of its lethal deficiency. 

 

In another part of this column, Klein seems to get this in a preliminary way--

Both liberalism and Christianity become thrilling when described by their critics. Far from the technocratic slog of trade regulations and the deadening work of dragging laws past the filibuster, this liberalism is a marvel of imagination and ambition. It’s an ideology that believes human beings capable of new forms of social organization and a movement capable of untethering them from hierarchies so deeply embedded in our societies that they were thought to represent a natural, or even divine, order.

Christianity, too, gleams with a light it often lacks in today’s politics, and even in its pews: Here is a religion that insists on the dignity of all people and centers the poor and the marginalized. Rose’s subjects fear Christianity because they fear it cannot be tamed; even when the leaders they admire try to subvert it for their own purposes, it infects their societies with a latent egalitarianism, setting a trap that will inevitably be sprung.

Klein is talking about Matthew Rose's new book, A World after Liberalism: Philosophers of the Radical Right, a book I haven't read yet but will soon. I've been a little concerned that my critique of the Liberal Order might be associated with illiberal critiques of it, the kind surveyed by Rose in his book. Clearly, I am proposing the opposite of embracing their reactionary vision. But I do believe we are entering a post-secular world "after Liberalism", and my greatest fear is that the radical Right will win because it has a compelling story that draws on the past that provides the most important answers to questions that many people these days have, which are the metaphysical questions "Who am I?" and the ethical questions: "What ends are worthy of my deepest aspirations?"

 

Liberalism's answer is that you can be whatever you want to be, but this is not an answer most ordinary people find helpful because it's too open-ended and vague. A healthy culture provides a framework for growth that works like a trellis; it provides a pattern of growth for ordinary people that allows them to come into a flourishing maturity and with it a deeper freedom rather than to sprawl aimlessly along the ground. Even the most creative cooks started with recipes, and only after they learned how food works, did they become capable of cooking without them and creating something new. We learn the best practices from those who preceded us, and then we reach a point where we can add to what has been given to us by them from our own interior resources, i.e., from our own creativity and freedom.

 

Likewise, we all of us need to learn how the human soul works, and healthy cultures provide some practical structures that most people find helpful in that regard. Liberalism provides no trellis. It just says, "You're free, do as you please. Sprawl or climb to the heights; make a mess or don't." It's a matter of indifference to Liberalism what you choose. All that matters is that you are free to choose." Well, as we saw during the Trump years, an awful lot of people chose to embrace an authoritarian personality cult. Why? Because capitalism and its anti-customary culture ideology destroyed their trellis, and so in the ontological dizziness that ensues, they grab onto anything that provides some semblance of stability, meaning, and purpose. To say that these people should be more mature, that they should find ways to adapt or to be more creative reeks of the arrogance that makes them 'choose' anything that is not 'Liberal'. 

 

Christianity has a very compelling solution to the problems of identity, meaning, and purpose, and it has nothing to do with the right-wing religiosity of Evola or Bannon. In the coming post-secular age, we will learn that there is no escaping religion. The only question is whether this age will be defined by good religion or bad. And good religion is only a possibility if something happens within the culture that allows most of us, even our intelligentsia, to become inspired once again by what Klein calls its more thrilling, inspiring, truly liberating aspects. Then perhaps we can find a way together to imagine a compelling human future, one where the economy and the machines serve humans, and not the other way around, which is our current predicament. 

Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability

Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you actually desire. You lose the habit, right? You never perform the mental gymnastics of stretching to figure out what a better world might actually be because you think you’re on track to that better world no matter what happens.

So it’s not just that you don’t recognize that somebody else’s values are different from your own. You’ve forgotten completely that there is such a thing as values, that they might be plural, they might be different, they might be contested. And so you find yourself, as you say, in this kind of binary where I’m rational and the other guy’s irrational.        

But actually, your notion of rationality is completely meaningless. It’s just means-ends rationality. But you can’t even really define what the ends are, your own ends. And you’ve lost the habit of asking what another end might be like.

...

And once we realize that there’s a plurality of values and we actually stretch ourselves again to see that, then we can track backward from that and start to ask about means-end rationality. But when we forget all about ends, which is what the politics of inevitability has done to our brains for the last 30 years, then we can’t actually talk about rationality. You can’t talk about means-end rationality if you don’t know how to talk about ends anymore.

Timothy Snyder on Ezra Klein's show

The context for these comments is Putin's rationale for invading Ukraine, but it touches upon the larger argument I'm making in my Genealogy series about metaphysical imaginaries: In our public intellectual life, we have come to assume that the rationalist-materialist imaginary is the only one that has legitimacy, and so any possible future must follow from its presuppositions. The imaginary and its deity, the Invisible Hand, work together to promote a sense of complacency or resignation that the global economy is going to do what it's going to do; technology is going to do what it's going to do--and it's all for the best, so no need for us to do anything except go with the flow.  And even if we wanted to do something, it's pointless; it's out of our hands. That passes for rational thinking, but it isn't. It's just an an act of abdicating our collective agency, which we justify by the tenets of a bad religion. [See Note 1]

Bad religion is any metaphysical imaginary and its practices that close down possibilities for human flourishing; good religion is a metaphysical imaginary and its practices that open them up. American mainstream political thinking is under the sway of a religion called Neoliberalism. As with any religion, it has its extremists (Republicans) and its moderates (Democrats), but the basic tenets for this religion are its utilitarian ethic, its profession of toleration, and its celebration of individual autonomy and self determination.

"So what's wrong with that?," you might ask. It's certainly better than some form of religious or ideological fanaticism. Yes, it is. But as with most problematic ideologies or values systems, It's not about what they affirm but about what they leave out. Certainly a healthy society must embrace pluralism, but that should not mean an embrace of chaos and randomness. Has it become impossible for us to imagine a non-nihilistic meaning structure that embraces pluralism and difference? Only if we believe in the inevitability of our own current presuppositions. 

The idea here of having a coherent, non-nihilistic meaning structure is not easy to convey in the context of a society that on the face of it seems so irretrievably committed to its current imaginary. But as I argue in Part 1 of the Genealogy series, there is an underlying coherency, even if it is nihilistic, in our contemporary rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that promotes, if not guarantees, our experience of fragmentation, alienation, and isolation. How so? It might be helpful to contrast our contemporary imaginary with the premodern imaginary given to us in the Great Chain of Being.

The Great Chain of Being provided a coherent meaning structure for late ancient and medieval Western societies until it broke down after Galileo and the barrage of new knowledge that obsoletized its static structure. But, as I argue in Part 11, that doesn't mean its fundamental intuitions were wrong. It wasn't just a pure fiction that had no basis in reality; it worked effectively on several different levels--until it didn't. The test of any imaginary is the degree to which it works to effectively convey a coherent picture of reality. It should never be confused with reality, which mostly lies filtered beyond any capacity we have to cognize it directly. A healthy metaphysical imaginary adapts and evolves as knowledge on both the vertical and horizontal dimensions expands. As I argue in the Genealogy series, after the breakdown of the Great Chain of Being, the vertical dimension gradually disappeared. That's what's missing now, and that's the root cause of our collective ontological dizziness. 

The best metaphysical imaginary is the one that integrates the broadest scope of knowledge most coherently and in a way that has rich emotional and spiritual depth. The Great Chain of Being did that. It worked because it provided a model of reality that integrated a picture of the cosmos, with a picture of good social/political order, with a rich picture of spiritual/moral aspiration. That's what any effective metaphysical imaginary should do.

Our contemporary rationalist-materialist imaginary performs these functions, too, but It provides a sense of intellectual coherency only if you accept its nihilistic presuppositions. Most people accept these presuppositions without really thinking about it and about how they conflict with other things they believe that are important values for them. So, why do I insist that these presuppositions are nihilistic?  Like the Great Chain of Being our rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary integrates the cosmic, the social/political, and the moral but does so within a cosmology that accepts that the universe is shaped by Darwinism and other cosmological materialistic assumptions that creation itself was a random event, that the history of the universe since the Big Bang has been random, impersonal, meaningless, and dispassionately cruel. And that fits with a Darwinian social  organization that embraces the randomness of markets and the inevitability of technological development. There's no meaning in any of it except that that's the way things are, and we do what we can to have a more or less pleasant life within its constraints.

And this fits with a Libertarian/utilitarian or socio-biological moral imaginary that makes no moral judgments about anything except to insure the randomness of each individual making his or her own random choices to determine for himself what is in his best interest within the minimum constraints of the social contract to not harm others. There is no robust sense of the common good, or else it is defined as the sum of each individual pursuing his own interests. This makes dealing with threats like climate change and income inequality almost impossible because it requires individuals to surrender their short-term interests for a common or social good that has no imagined, inspiring content. The idea of freedom has no real moral content; it's just the negation of restraint, and unrestrained you are free to do as you please whether it's to run a porn site or join Doctors without Borders. The second can have no more moral value than the first within a rationalist-materialist frame.   

So on the cosmic level, randomness is all; entropic heat death is our telos. On the moral spiritual level, there is no concept of moral development or of there being a transcendent Good. On the social/political level Justice is something that we make up as we go along, a function of prudential contracts we make with one another to prevent the war of all against all, the greed and power of one against the greed and power of the other, which would otherwise be our natural condition in a random, impersonal, cruel cosmos. 

If you think I'm exaggerating about the fundamental spiritual vacuity of the the rationalist-materialist imaginary, it's probably because you don't think of yourself as a nihilist even though you accept the its basic presuppositions as outlined above. You think of yourself as a good person who has a moral code. You see yourself as being more moral than lots of people who justify their violence and cruelty by appeal to the scriptures or other religious sources.

But what's your argument from within a strict Libertarian frame to justify your thinking of yourself as a good person? Being good within a rationalist materialist frame simply means being conventional, following the rules, rules that have no ontological foundation except a Hobbesian agreement that we cease to pillage and rape and to lord it over one another. [See Note 2]

But it's important to understand that there is nothing deeply moral about the Hobbesian social contract. It is simply a truce, a way to stop the underlying savagery for a while. It's just a survival strategy that we pay for by alienating ourselves from our inner predator, our inner Genghis Kahn, our need to dominate, to be glorified, to be be in control. The Hobbesian Liberal is not a moral hero, but a scared rabbit hiding behind the police powers of the state and the so-called rule of law and its bureaucracies. Scared rabbits have no morality; they have only shame to frighten other scared rabbits into conformity. There is nothing inspiringly moral in a fear-based conformity. Liberal societies are created by scared rabbits who foreswear their inner predator and use the state to suppress any predator who breaks the rules. It's a system that has utility, but no real moral significance. 

My point has been that while you may think of yourself as a good person, what basis have you to argue that you are no more than a scared rabbit? I believe that you are more, or are potentially more, but that you have to awaken and grow something within you that supplants the predator/prey dynamic that is our natural condition. In order to do that, you must draw on some understanding about what it means to be human that does not fit within a Hobbesian utilitarian ethos, which is the only social organization that makes sense within a rationalist-materialist metaphysics. We all deep down know we are more than that. A true morality, as contrasted with a moralism that parodies it, is all about realizing that deep-down we are more than talking animals, that we are capable of transcending and transforming that aspect of ourselves. 

The Great Chain of Being models that human potentiality in a way that our current rationalist-materialist imaginary does not and cannot. The Great Chain had a place for Chaos--at the very bottom. But it also had a place for human moral transformation, for human divinization, which is what we are to become if we follow the growth pattern that is in our spiritual DNA. There is a dynamic, growth aspect in this model insofar as a being can ascend or descend. A thing was judged better or worse depending on its place on the chain, either closer to the top--good because more constituted by Mind, or the bottom--bad because more constituted by chaos and less by Mind. In the rationalist-materialist imaginary, a human being can only be predator or prey. 

A being descends as it physically or morally disintegrates, i.e., loses its form. It ascends as it grows into a fuller, denser, intenser possibility of its innate potencies, as a seed become a mature plant. What defined something as good was the degree to which it realized the fullness of its form as imagined in the mind of God. So something participates in the Good to the degree that is healthily growing toward the full realization of its mature form. Something is bad to the degree that it lacks participation in the Good becomes a perversion or parody of what it was meant to be, and so  regresses, moves away from the the path toward the full realization of its form.  

Now there's another aspect regarding the rationalist-materialist presuppositions that undergird the Liberal Order, which is that like the Great Chain of Being had its day, so now has the Liberal Order reaching the end of its day. We live in dread of its collapse because our only imagined alternative is a regression into illiberalism--and clearly that's a possibility if we don't think of something better. But we now have an opportunity to think of something better, and we should be very much involved in that. Snyder points to that in the excerpt above.

What's missing in the rationalist/materialist/Libertarian/utilitarian imaginary that currently dominates our collective imagination is a positive imagination of future possibility. We have no imagined future that inspires us to work for it or fight for it. That's what enervates us and so inclines us to a politics of inevitability.  We think we have values, but our values only incline us to say No to things that are repressive or restrictive of individual freedom.

We are energized only in the service of a No. We have nothing positive that inspires us to transcend our constraints. And isn't that what real freedom is all about?--to transcend our individual and collective constraints? And the only way that's truly, deeply possible for us as a society is if for the best of us its an imagined possibility, which requires a metaphysical imaginary that embraces the possibility of moral transcendence.That's really not a part of our moral landscape as Americans for complicated reasons I'm exploring in the Genealogy series. 

***

I think that what inspires us about the Ukrainian resistance is the way we see an entire society coming together in such a way that so many people experience themselves  as transcending their individual constraints and petty self interests. These Ukrainians are not scared rabbits, and we're inspired to learn that people who are not that different from us are still capable of such courageous, spirited behavior. Each person who commits himself to the resistance is putting his or her personal self interest aside in order to contribute to something that transcends those interests. While surely these resisters hope for practical outcomes, these are not people who are applying a utilitarian calculus to motivate their actions.

No one sane puts his or her life on the line for an abstraction; they do it because they are inspired by something that calls them to be something more. The essence of being a truly alive human being is to be in a continuous process of self-transcendence. Sometimes circumstances force us out of our slumber; sometimes awakening to the more we have it in us to be is something we must find within ourselves to achieve alone or with others. When we actually see others awakened in this way, we cannot help but be inspired by it. 

I want to argue for a metaphysical imaginary that asserts that some things are more worthy of our desires and aspirations than others, that to assert this is not incompatible with living in Liberal social democracy, and that it is not sufficient for a healthy society to just say No to tyrants. It must say Yes to a Good, and that while this Good is something mediated by cultural constructions, it transcends cultural constructions, and that the measure of our lives both individually and collectively is determined by our proximity to that Good. The Great Chain of Being did that for the premodern West; it broke down not because it was wrong on a vertical moral/spiritual axis, but because it no longer worked on the horizontal historical axis. 

And the important thing to understand about the juncture between the American Right and Left right now is that the people who were storming the capitol on 1/6 saw themselves as resisting tyranny in a similar way to how the Ukrainians see themselves doing it. It's not the same, of course. And this goes to my point about good and bad religion. Those who stormed the capitol were inspired by bad religion because there was no good religion available to them. Without it they feel a desperate, ballast-less anomie that comes from living within the spiritual vacuity of a soulless, rationalist-materialist imaginary they associate for good reason with Liberalism because of its antipathy to the values of American customary culture.

The stormers want to feel inspired by something, anything. And if bad, delusional religion gives them that feeling, they are going to embrace it. The only real solution in the long run is not to tell them that they are ignorant and delusional, but to offer them something better, to inspire them with something that is truly Good. Customary culture can no longer provide that sense of the Good to ordinary Americans. It has to be found in something else. It has to be found in an imagined hoped-for future. 

One of the more interesting ideas that Snyder discusses was in his answer to Klein's question about how Ukrainians see their historical story as defining them. Snyder says: 

...what’s interesting about the Ukrainians is that they seem to be moving more towards the argument that the nation is not about a clear story of the past. It’s more about action directed towards the future.

And I say this because both in the case of the Russian invasion in 2014 and in this much more stressful period now, when I talk to Ukrainians anyway, I don’t find them talking much about the Second World War, about ancient hatreds with Russia, or about some long narrative which has to be clear in some way. I find them more focused on what they’re doing.

...

Like a French historian said that a nation is a daily plebiscite. It’s not about having the past all in order. It’s not about having all of your blue books on a shelf, all of your red books on a different shelf. It’s about what you do every day, you know, as a collectivity which exists, as a collectivity because it’s directed towards some kind of a future.

That's all I'm saying. That if we're to break out of our spiritual/ideological gridlock here in the U.S., we can learn from the Ukrainians in quite a few ways, but perhaps the most important is their refusal to be constrained by the past grievances and instead to focus on imagining a best possible Ukrainian future. There is for us no positive political future for Americans if, unlike the Ukrainians, we continue to surrender our agency to an idea of historical inevitability. And we will continue to feel impotent unless we undertake the 'mental gymnastics' Snyder talks about that requires that we scrutinize what our deepest values truly are and in awakening to them to discover flowing from theman inspiring vision of a future--a telos--that's worth fighting for. 

----------

Note 1: I feel a need to stress from time to time that I am not against technology or innovation. The question is not whether either is good or bad but rather what or whose interests do they serve. The system is set up in such a way that technology and innovation are driven by the desire of innovators to make a lot of money. This is a truism that plays a central role in the politics of inevitability. It is assumed that there could be no other motive and no other ends besides financial gain that would be adequate to motivate innovation. So long as we inhabit a metaphysical imaginary that is dominated by rationalist-materialist presuppositions, this will remain the case. Change the imaginary, you change the motivations--and almost certainly change the nature and quality of what is innovated. 

Note 2: And so the irony here is that so many religious people are pre-Hobbesian. Their desire to burn people at the stake is better explained by a primitive alignment with the impersonal, Darwinian cosmic nihilism outlined above. Those on the American religious Right experience themselves as prey being crushed and mangled in the Liberal maw, so they embrace a new identity as predators and justify it as doing God's will. They are correct that their customary culture and its norms and values are being destroyed, but Liberals are not to blame; consumer capitalism and mass media are the real culprits. Like so many other things, human identity has become a consumer choice, and it's understandable why people who derive their sense of identity from traditions find this bewildering and wrong. The Liberals that they despise are simply those who have adapted to this brave new world and have prospered in it. It's in this sense that Colbert's mot that 'reality has a liberal bias is true'. The mainstream cultural OS is Liberal in its rationalist materialist presuppositions, and so only programs compatible with rationalist materialism run smoothly on it. Customary culture most emphatically does not run well on it, and so seems divorced from reality. 

Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis

I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In Englands green & pleasant Land.

--"Jerusalem" by William Blake

I want to bring into focus certain key themes that emerge in the early common era that became central for shaping the Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary of Latin Christendom. I want to focus, first, on how Christian Neoplatonism came to provide the metaphysical imaginary throughout the Mediterranean world, and then to focus particularly on developments in the European West until the late medieval period. And then we'll look at how retrieval of its essential elements lost after that point might provide a matrix for a postmodern/postsecular metaphysical imaginary. 

Christianity started as a Jewish sect among several other Jewish sects, but the cosmopolitan pluralism that we discussed in Part 9 created a cultural infrastructure for its rapid spread. So while its historical roots were deeply embedded in Judaism, it quickly become a universalist religion, riding on the back, so to say, of Hellenistic cosmopoltanism and Roman roads. The New Testament was written in Greek; new Christians read the Septuagint, the Hebrew scriptures that were written in Greek.

So while the Greek influence is strong, there is obviously a lot going on in nascent Christianity that has little or nothing to do with Neoplatonism. And when push comes to shove, I'm not interested in tracing the systematic thinking of Christian intellectual elites that owes so much to Greek thought as I want to deepen understanding how these early Christians' experience of the Living Real was shaped by their imagination of it. To do so requires understanding the Greek influence as playing an almost equal role with Jewish influence.

Understanding the interrelationship between reality and our imagination of it is critical for the larger argument that I'm trying to make about the evolution and malleability of our metaphysical imaginaries. We tend to think that we live in reality, and of course we do, but our experience of it is filtered by our imagination of it, and that imagination of it is provisional, to say the least. What is real and what we experience of it are not the same thing. Some people are more deeply open to and aware of aspects of the real than others are, and one of the premises of the argument I've been making so far is that the ancient philosophical schools developed spiritual praxes that opened up transcendent dimensions of reality to their experience, and these experiences were foundational for their thought. If you don't understand the nature of the experience, you can't understand what they were thinking. 

We no longer find it possible to take these experiences of transcendent reality seriously because, even though people often still have these experiences (qq.v, James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Taylor, Waking from Sleep), our metaphysical imaginary has changed in the last five hundred years in ways that have delegitimated them. They are reduced to subjective psychological/aesthetic experiences rather than thought of as disclosive of the Real. So underlying my argument is the assumption that this inability to take an ontology that comprises a spiritual or transcendent dimension is a mistake, and that this mistake has profound consequences of which we are mostly oblivious. 

This experience of transcendence is central to the Axial Revolution and its assertion of ontonormativity, our sense that the immanent world isn't but ought to be ruled by the law of a higher order. Humans have become aware of this higher law through the intuitions, visionary experiences, and revelations of philosophers and prophets in different civilizations--whether the Law given to Moses, the Tao by Lao Tse, or the transcendental realm of the One, the Good, and the Beautiful as in Socrates and Platonism. There are two basic responses to this revelation--either (1) give up on the sin-dominated, delusion-saturated, immanent world and find a way to get out of it and into the transcendent world, or (2) Reform/transform the immanent world so that it aligns with the transcendent world--'thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven'. 

The Theocracy of ancient Israel set itself apart from the pre-Axial societies that surrounded it, and in doing so exemplified the second; the Greek philosophical schools exemplified the first. [See Note 1] In the age of empire after Alexander and then Rome, Aristotelian or Stoic republican virtue was still exercised by the few elites who were in politics--e.g., Cato, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Seneca--but this was not an option open to most attracted to philosophy, who instead undertook more apolitical philosophical pursuits.

Virtue as practiced in the more prominent Greek schools became mostly about theoria--the purification and alignment of one's individual mind with the transcendent One through ascetical spiritual and contemplative practice. There's not much room for political engagement when the whole goal is to get out of the body and up into the transcendent world where the One is to be contemplated. So the idea of an eschatological-historical political fulfillment is more Jewish than Greek, and it becomes symbolized in Christian imagination as the New Jerusalem, which is to be the fulfillment of history when the Law of Heaven and the Law on Earth become one as pictured in the Book of Revelations.

Now whether the mythopoeisis of the New Jerusalem means that history gradually evolves toward toward it or whether it's a dramatic intervention to come crashing down from the heavens at the end of time has been much debated. If you lean in the hopeful, progressive direction, you believe that humans are co-responsible with the Divine for making the New Jerusalem a reality in history.  If you lean in the more pessimistic direction, you believe in the marrow of your  bones that humans can do nothing to change history. History is a jail from which humans must be liberated either in the Buddhistic sense of being released from the chain of incarnations, or in the Christian sense of returning home after death from exile in a fallen world. The New Jerusalem is not something we co-create with the Divine, but something that the Divine gives the just, risen from the dead, in the eschaton.

Most secular people operate oblivious of how their imaginations are shaped by theological presuppositions, but these are two archetypes regarding the telos of history have a profound influence in organizing our political and metaphysical imaginaries, whether we are religious or not. And I think it's fair to say that if you incline to the first interpretation, your politics tends to be hopeful, progressive, and reform-oriented, and if the latter, oriented toward conservative stability and good order.

The first is more flexible and desirous of change, the second more rigid and resistant to change--except maybe to change things back to the way they were before things get out of joint. I'm with Blake, and like him I see this as a local project; it starts small here and there, in England or in America; in South Africa or in India. What is universalist in such a project is discovered only in the depths of particularity. 

This conservative idea of political change shaped the medieval order. That order derived from an integration of Jewish monarchical theocracy with Greek metaphysics. The politcal-social realm on earth receives its form as it reflects the cosmic metaphysical hierarchy in the Great Chain of Being, which, of course, derives from Neoplatonism. As above, so below. As the transcendent world is changeless and eternal, so should the immanent world be stable and ordered. Revolution does not mean the creation of something new, but rather a "turning back" to the way things were before they became deformed by the lawlessness of tyrants or political elites whose debauched lives went against the natural cosmic order, as in Macbeth. [See Note 2] 

I am conscious how removed these themes are from our ordinary experience of the world we live in today. And I feel compelled whenever I can to try to show their relevance. These ideas were not abstract two thousand years ago but in fact organized the imaginaries of the societies in which they arose--and deep down, even if only latently, they continue to organize our contemporary imaginaries. In the premodern West, the social imaginary and the cosmic imaginary were interdependent, and both were shaped by the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis. When the cosmic imaginary started to break down after Galileo, so did the stability of the hierarchical social imaginary, and with it the moral imaginary that was deeply linked to it. 

One of the essential flaws that fragilized both the premodern cosmic and social imaginaries was their commitment to an order understood as a static hierarchy. The investment in such an order made it rather resistant to adapting to the torrent of new information and social change that flooded Western Europe in the post Renaissance/Reformation period. That the premodern hierarchical imaginary was not flexible enough to adapt does not mean that the fundamental intuitions that supported it were wrong, but that the custodians of the old hierarchical order lacked the imagination and flexibility of spirit to adapt. They were too invested in the superstructure rather than trusting in the Living Real that had given it its shape. The Erasmian spirit loses to the reactionary spirit in the Church, and science goes one way and faith the other. This was a tragedy, but perhaps one that could not have been avoided. 

One interesting consequence was that a secular version of slumbering Jewish eschatological orientation toward the future gradually awakened and oriented those leaning toward a progressive understanding of history to see in science the method for achieving the New Jerusalem. In other words, Greek rationality coopts Jewish eschatology in the hopes of creating a reason-based utopian future that has nothing to do with God, who, if he exists at all, is a remote, uncaring clockmaker God who set up a cosmic machine for humans to reverse engineer, if they have the wit to do it. Progress comes to equate only with material progress, not spiritual or moral progress. And so here we are. 

In the premodern imaginary, the only kind of progress that mattered was spiritual and moral. I'm interested in thinking through to a way of reconnecting the moral imaginary with the cosmic imaginary in a postmodern, Christian-Neoplatonic key. But in order to do so, the static hierarchical imaginary has to give way to an imaginary that is dynamic and historical. And so obviously, when I use the word "cosmic" I don't mean by it only the visible world, but a multi-dimensional cosmos where these various dimensions impinge on one another.

We're at a point where ancient religious ideas are converging with developments in computer science and modern physics--at least in its "weird science" precincts. It suffuses our imagination in science fiction from The Matrix, Lost, The Anomaly, The City and the City, Upload to just name a few that are top of mind. We don't take these works of fiction literally, but they work as metaphors for something that we deep down sense to be true: that the world given to us by the senses is not the only world that there is, maybe not even the most important one.

If we are intelligent enough to create virtual worlds, it becomes easier to imagine that other intelligences likely created our world. Once you've allowed yourself to make the shift regarding "other dimensions" from 'probably not' to 'probably so', then you move to the next step, which is to ask what can we know about these other dimensions that has any real plausibility? How do we know about them?  Who can we trust among those who profess to have answers for these questions? What criteria are there to evaluate the validity of this 'knowledge'? As the asking of these questions acquires increasing legitimacy in intellectual circles, we move more deeply into a post-secular age. 

So this is my way of segueing to how Christian thinking about what the deepest human aspirations should be about, which couldn't be clearer or more plainly stated in the Christian scriptures and in the thinking of the most important early Church Fathers--to become transformed by Divine Love. The point cannot be more emphatically asserted: Nothing is more important for the human project than to be transformed by Love. History, however imagined, is first a moral project--not a moralistic one. And so therefore, knowledge--the only knowledge that really counts--correlates with spiritual transformation, and the primary agent in this transformation is Divine Love. That was true then, and it's true now.

And so the only people you can trust about what they have to say about 'other dimensions' are people who have been in some degree transformed by Love. Are there "other dimensions" that have nothing to do with Love. Undoubtedly. Does this tell us something about the nature of evil and delusion? Probably so. And so for that reason, the only way you can be sure about anything is the degree that you feel the power of Love in it. And so therefore it follows that you cannot truly know anything really worth knowing if you are not Good, and you are Good to the degree that you have been transformed by Love. All other moral prescriptions, rules, imperatives, practices are subordinate to that one. If they are not in some essential sense enacted in the service of Love, they are at best useless and probably harmful. 

So the cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical axis is linked to the moral/spiritual project. The reason that Western developed societies are reeling in ontological dizziness currently is because they gave up on this moral spiritual project because it was difficult, and because there were more easily obtained benefits by pursuing a cognitive/epistemological project that operated solely on the horizontal material Logos axis. There is currently no cognitive/epistemological project on the vertical Mythos axis that has broad cultural acceptance. The big question is how to remedy this. I am not claiming that to do so solves all our problems, but it at least provides a framework for a solution that is currently unavailable to us. 

Christians inherited the idea of the dynamic, central animating power of Love from both the Greeks and the Jews, integrated it, and popularized it, that is, made it more broadly available. It saw itself as the bringer of good news regarding this subversively deep truth to the whole world. Not just for a particular people--the Jews--and not just for Greek philosophical elites, but to all people of good will. And many people of good will were already receptive to it because it fit with what they already suspected was true. That Christians often let this mission become coopted by other agendas that are utterly alien to it, and often in spectacular fashion, is not at issue. I want to focus on where it has succeeded, not in where it has failed. What matters is what was most deeply true in this new cultural movement. 

No religious tradition can sustain itself if there is no experiential underground water table, so to say, that from time to time erupts into the above-ground world in springs that renew life in the waking world. This underground stream is the spiritual dimension that sustains any living culture by virtue of its connection to the Living Real. And a culture is healthy to the degree and to the extent that its people are refreshed by it. Now this idea of interior depths in the soul, which we'll see developed in Augustine, contrasts with the earlier imagination of mysticism which owes more to the Greeks, which emphasizes something in the heights, as something that one has to leave the body to encounter. This is true in Plotinian mysticism [See Note 3], and we see it even in Philo, for whom ecstasy is central to his experience of encounter with the Divine--

...but escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it.

I have no doubt that this was a real experience, and as I laid out in Part 10, the aspiration to have such ecstatic experiences of transcendence comes from the Axial Revolution's focus on a transcendent dimension that is more real than reality as we experience it in the immanent, sublunar, embodied world.  And so it makes sense that a longing to leave this world to experience that other world would be a focus of spiritual practice.

But this is a rare experience. According to his biographer, even a mystical prodigy like Plotinus had such an experience only four times, and with varying degrees of intensity and duration. And in reading about the sages who oriented their whole lives toward such experiences, you might wonder whether this is any way to live. Isn't this too world-denying, too negating of the body? Too individualistic? An example, perhaps, of what David Brooks calls the higher selfishness? It can be, although apparently it was not true of Plotinus. [See Note 3] But this tendency to see the body and its impurities as the chief impediment to the highest faculty of the mind--nous--attaining to the enjoyment of the contemplation of the One is very Greek. The Jewish m.o., even when influenced by the Greeks, is more down to earth. And so in Christianity there is this metaxic, creative tension between Greek otherworldliness and Jewish earthiness. Problems ensue when the tension snaps, or when one crowds out the other. 

And so in the period of post-Axial development in the early centuries of the the common era, the dominant element in this tension is Greek--the orientation of spiritual practice is on a vertical axis, with the primary focus on what is above--with the individual spiritual aspirant reaching out from below to that which is above. As we'll see there is an ecclesiology that shapes Christian thinking that counterbalances spiritual elitism, but still the goal is the transformation of what is below by the power of that which is above. And spiritual fulfillment is something imagined as having begun below but only completed above after death. The idea of eschatological historical fulfillment recedes into latency.  

Nevertheless, the Jewish idea of a God who cares, who initiates a reaching out from above to us humans below, valorizes a dynamic of descent not seen with the Greeks. We see it, though, in Philo and in the Song of Songs the One God reaching out in Love downward toward his people Israel, as the bridegroom to his bride.

And so it is by this logic of outreaching Divine Love that Christianity sees itself as an extension of Judaism. This Divine reaching out from above to humans below attains a fulfillment in the incarnation of the One God in a human being. That this was perceived as blasphemy by many Jews is understandable, and that it is implausible for most people now who inhabit a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary goes without saying. I am not here to persuade the skeptical, but instead to show how powerful this idea was, and why it was so broadly accepted within the Hellenic/Roman world--and beyond.

I've used the following Iain McGilchrist quote before, but I think it warrants re-reading from time to time because it distills what is central to the Christian mythos and why it was so compelling then and why it still is for so many now:

The 2,000-year old Western tradition, that of Christianity, provides, whether one believes in it or not, an exceptionally rich mythos – a term I use in its technical sense, making no judgment here of its truth or otherwise – for understanding the world and our relationship with it. It conceives a divine Other that is not indifferent or alien – like James Joyce’s God, refined out of existence and ‘paring his fingernails’ – but on the contrary engaged, vulnerable because of that engagement, and like the right hemisphere rather than the left, not resentful (as the Old Testament Yahweh often seemed) about the Faustian fallings away of its creation, but suffering alongside it. At the centre of this mythos are the images of incarnation, the coming together of matter and spirit, and of resurrection, the redemption of that relationship, as well as of a God that submits to suffer for that process. But any mythos that allows us to approach a spiritual Other, and gives us something other than material values to live by, is more valuable than one that dismisses the possibility of its existence.(The Master and the Emissary, Kindle Locations 11566)

This points to why this new religion was so appealing when people first encountered it. It was compatible with foundational ideas already in the Hellenistic imaginary, and yet there was a central distinguishing idea here that derived from Judaism that refutes Greek ideas about the impersonal indifference of the godhead and asserts instead that the One God cares because he is Love, that he suffers compassionately with us, that our choices and our actions matter, particularly as we choose to love or refuse to. How astonishing this idea is, and that, especially for us now who have become incapable of astonishment, it sounds too good to be true is also understandable. But there are an awful lot of very smart, deeply wise people who hearkened to this good news, and this Genealogy series seeks to better understand why it was so compellingly believable for them. 

And so going forward I want to organize our consideration of the thinkers and developments within Christian Neoplatonism around several key themes:

Imago Dei/Divinization: What is our deepest identity and destiny as human beings, and how do we find our way to its fullest realization?  What practices promote the development of our deepest human identity as created in the image and likeness of God? 

Visio Dei/Apophaticism: To what degree is God knowable or unknowable? To what degree is his presence in our lives cognizable? Where is such a presence visible?

Agapic and Erotic (understood correctly) Love: What is the real thing? What is its counterfeit? How can we tell the difference? How do we become transformed by it and so more capable of communion with other people, with the natural world, with the spiritual world.

Wisdom/Knowledge: What does it mean to truly know? How do we deepen our knowing? How do we distinguish truth from illusion? What is the role of tradition, exegesis, hermeneutic theory? How does a Neoplatonic metaphysics support a participatory epistemology? 

Cosmic/Moral/Social Imaginaries: How is our moral development linked to our ideas about the Cosmos? Does our cosmic/moral imaginary play a role in shaping our political/social imaginary? What does that say about our current political and social imaginary? Is it possible within the framework of knowledge provided by science to frame a different cosmic imaginary that, so to say, could be extrapolated from our moral imaginary? 

The Meaning of History: Is the goal to escape history or to transform it? Is this even a legitimate topic? 

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Note 1: Nobody with any sense can take seriously Plato's political thought experiment in The Republic as a blueprint for politics in the real world. It's clear that civic virtue was critical for Aristotle, but that had more to do with the idea that human flourishing required political engagement without there being any idea about what the ideal polis ought to look like. Aristotelian republican virtue as an ideal recedes during the late Roman Empire and early medieval period and emerges again in the Italian city states in the late middle ages. 

Note 2: I think that this goes a long way to explain the power of the archetype that energizes Qanon. People attracted to Qanon are not wrong to sense that the world is disordered, and so it's understandable that an atavistic sense of medieval order and disorder would incline them to blame corrupt elites and to believe that their elimination would restore cosmic and social order. But is it so atavistic? Does this not explain the disorder and the remedy for it as we all imagine it in Putin's corrupt, kleptocratic Russia? How ironic then, that Qanon is inclined to side with Putin. It can only make sense if you are committed to the idea that Western media is part of the whole corrupt Western elite system, so it must be wrong about Putin. And therefore Putin must be right no matter how overwhelming the evidence to the contrary. 

Note 3: I'll probably have more to say about Plotinus in the context of the the cosmology developed by Dionysos the Areopagite. I want to go to Augustine first. He was influenced by Plotinus, and I will discuss Plotinus in passing as an influence on Augustine, but the most interesting thing about Plotinus from a history-of-ideas perspective and for the story I'm telling was his integration of Plato, Aristotle, and other Greek philosophers, and then how in turn Plotinus's thought was Christianized. He would probably be a far more important figure in Western thought in his own stead if he had not been absorbed into what became Christian Neoplatonism after Augustine and Dionysos. 

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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. Regarding future installments in this series, they will come when I get to it, which depends on how much time and energy I have for it. The goal going forward will be to understand the historical development, i.e., the historical-cultural impact of Christian Neoplatonism on North Atlantic and Mediterranean societies through to the Renaissance, how it went underground after the Reformation, and how it worked as an underground, inspiring force in the arts and philosophy through the modern period. (3/30/22)]

Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation

I wanted to stress in Parts 8 and 9 of this series that philosophy for the ancients, and theology for the early Christians, while it was an exercise in theoria, which in Greek means nous-awakened contemplative seeing, it was not 'theoretical' in our modern sense. It was first a praxis whose objectives were to transform the soul. Or to use a word that has pejorative connotations for most moderns, it was a mystical exercise. But I would like to clarify that there are two broad categories of mysticism that often co-existed in post-Axial societies that must be distinguished from one another: the Mysticism of the Heath, which is the continuation of pre-Axial Revolution religious practices, and the Mysticism of Transcendence, which is post-Axial.

The Mysticisms of the Heath were mostly concerned with managing a spiritual economy of malign and benign local gods and spiritual forces to prevent and mitigate misfortunes and to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc. This is the world of shamans, sorcery, and ritual sacrifice. The Mysticism of Transcendence is what we've been talking about regarding the praxis and theoria of the Greek schools whose primary objectives were to ascend to a union with the One and to know the Good, to do it, and gradually to become it.

This pre-Axial/post-Axial distinction is important to keep in mind. Most people who don't know much about religion tend to lump the two together. Nevertheless, the popular practice of many Christians, Jews, Buddhists is often more pre-Axial than post-Axial, at least insofar as it is transactional: "Lord, if I win this battle, I will build a cathedral to honor your Holy Mother." Or in a more contemporary idiom,"If I get this promotion or win this game, I won't miss church on Sundays anymore." Central here is the quid pro quo. If there's no payoff, what's the point of religion? If God isn't going to help me get what I want, then who needs him? This is pre-Axial religious thinking. [See Note 1]

The post-Axial Mysticism of Transcendence is about redefining true human flourishing. In part it's about rising above mundane concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath, but also to be a presence in the world that seeks to undermine or subvert the regime of local gods. Christians pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", and it's so familiar to us that we rarely think about its implications. It defines an aspiration that is at the heart of the Axial revolution--the idea that the local cultural operating system can be subordinated to another OS that operates above and outside it, and which can break into and reconfigure local, sublunary systems. This introduces the idea that things don't have to be the way they are now because that's the way they've always been. Things can change for the better. Progress--a dream of better future--becomes a possibility. This possibility is implicit in Greek thinking [See Note 2], but it is a more dynamic element in Jewish eschatological thinking and imagination. 

This idea of progress has come to mean different things to different people, and it has often led people into delusional, destructive political projects. But that doesn't mean that all such attempts to 'immanentize the eschaton' are misguided. As I said in a post last week, a reactionary politics is rooted in a reactionary religion; a progressive politics must be rooted in an eschatological mythos. That it is even possible to think about a possible positive future is largely a product of Jewish thinking in the later Second Temple period about which I write below. But the important caveat here is that politics flows from culture. The transformation has to happen first in the broader culture so that the culture moves toward a true progressive politics without it being forced on it. The worst thing that ever happened to Christianity was its having become the official religion of the Roman Empire after Constantine. 

So in societies in which post-Axial religions took root, they lived side by side with pre-Axial customary practices. This was true in the Hellenic-Roman world; it was true in medieval Christianity, and it was true in Buddhist societies, and others. And so in such societies, an interesting split develops between a small spiritual elite that aspires to spiritual transformation--and everybody else. These elites see spiritual transformation as a possibility for themselves and their brothers and sisters who are likewise engaged in the spiritual practices of the Mysticism of Transcendence--usually in monasteries. Those outside the monasteries, generally speaking, have no such spiritual aspirations; they expect that their lives will follow the pattern established by their ancestors, and in the West their religious practice owes more to Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean Mysticisms of the Heath than to the Mysticisms of Transcendence.

I think it was St. Bernard of Clairvaux (d. 1153) who said that few will be saved and most will be monks. But this problem of elitism is a tension in Christianity from the beginning, and it motivates a reform movement in the late medieval period whose objective was to export the Mysticism of Transcendence from the monasteries into the world. This is a story we'll tell in more detail in future posts, but these reform movements culminate in the the Protestant Reformation. The Reformers'--particularly the Calvinists'--objective was to exterminate any vestiges of the Mysticism of the Heath as they persisted in Catholic practice. And they also rejected institutions committed to the Mysticism of Transcendence, at least as it was pursued in the monasteries. The Reformers saw monasticism as promoting a spiritual elitism they thought to be un-Christian. In doing so, they proscribed the pursuit of an itinerary of spiritual transformation that was central to Greek, Jewish, and Christian practice that has been the focus in recent posts in this series--and posts to come.

So a more nuanced discussion of these developments lies ahead of us, but for how I can say that it is obvious to me that they threw out the baby out with the bath water, and their doing so led to unintended consequences that contribute significantly to the crisis of meaning through which we are suffering now. Nevertheless, after the Reformation the hope for progress still ran deep, but it was imagined instead primarily in terms that were cognate with the concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath. In other words, progress after the Reformation  was framed as a means to secure ordinary human flourishing--long life, bounteous crops, healthy children, victory over one's enemies, etc.--but now without the mysticism or any aspirations to divinization.

Or so I'll argue in future posts in this series. But I want to remind the reader from time to time why it's interesting and important to understand where these ideas originate, why they were significant at the time, how they evolved and were adapted to different historical circumstances, and why they still remain consequential for us today. 

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Back to the ancient Mediterranean world:

One of the most important characteristics of the Western Mysticism of Transcendence is the role of Love--both for the Greeks and for the Jews, and later for the Christians. The main texts here are Plato's Phaedrus and Symposium, which lay out an eros-driven itinerary that leads the soul upward toward union with the transcendent One--the source of all Goodness, Beauty, Wisdom. For Christians this love of the One is central, but also comes to emphasize a love of the neighbor--even of the enemy--in a way that is not found in the Greek tradition. Indeed the eschaton referenced above is imagined as the communion of saints at a banquet in the New Jerusalem to which all are invited but only those transformed by Love will be admitted. 

The point is that the goal for both Greeks, Jews, and Christians in this early post-Axial era is an interior moral transformation that is effected by this transcendent force whose main characteristic is Love. This love, as we'll see, has both an erotic and an agapic dimension to it. I will let scholars argue about the precise meanings of these terms, but for our purposes Eros is about deeply felt connection and communion with everything--nature, other people, beings in the spiritual world. Agape is about overflowing compassion. Both are first and foremost divine activities, but they become possible for humans by virtue of their communion with the Divine. 

So, again, post-Axial philosophy and theology were first grounded in experience; they were not an abstract exercise. The quality of one's thinking was directly related to the quality and depth of one's experience. Wisdom is about the integration of experience and one's reflection about its significance, but in the light of the inherited wisdom of the ancestors. The sacred texts--both from the pagan philosophers, the Bible, and the early Fathers are part of an ongoing reflection, and our reading of them has value primarily as they afford occasions for inspired exegesis.

So reading the text is not an intellectual exercise, at least 'intellectual' in the sense that moderns mean it. It was a spiritual exercise, a way of becoming transformed by one's encounter with the text. This was true for both the pagan philosophers who read Plato and Aristotle as it was for the learned Jews who read the Torah, the Prophets, or the Wisdom literature. From early on Jewish exegetes encountered the Bible not just as history and law, but as having deeper mystical meanings that were not available to the superficial or uninspired reader. This kind of reading was adopted later by Christian exegetes who saw at least three levels of Biblical interpretation--Literal/historical, Allegorical, and the more deeply mystical/Anagogic. 

In Part 9, I talked a little about Gnosticism as arising out of Jewish interactions with Greek thought and practice, but I wanted to say a bit more about what was happening in Judaism in the later Second Temple period, which ended with the Roman destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. 

McGinn spends most of his Chapter 1 "The Jewish Matrix" in Foundations (See Note 2) focusing on the two primary forms of literature that came out of Jewish culture at this time--the aforementioned Apocalypses and Wisdom literature. The second of these we know most familiarly as the Psalms and the Song of Songs, both of which would be central to Christian mystical thinking and practice:

"If the purest of wisdom had ancient roots in Israel, it is nonetheless true that it became an ever-growing force in Jewish intellectual life during the years of the direct contact with Hellenism," James Kugel reminds us. The Wisdom of Ben Sira (or Ecclesiasticus, composed early in the second century BCE) the Psalms of Solomon (first century BCE), and especially the Wisdom of Solomon, dated as early as the second century BCE by some more likely written ca. 40 CE, are primary examples of this tendency which has close ties with the philosophical tradition in Hellenistic Judaism evident in such figures as Aristobulus and especially Philo. . . . If the concern for cosmic secrets in the otherworldly apocalypses brings them close to the ambit of the developing cosmic piety of Hellenistic tradition, this proximity of interest is heightened in the wisdom literature, where, as in Greek cosmic piety, the experience of God reaches the believer through meditation of the order of the universe. Elements of a more personal relationships to God, or at least to a divine power, are also discovered here. (Foundations, p. 19)

The Song of Songs isn't mentioned in this paragraph because it's not clear when it was written, but best guess is in the early 100s CE--so very late. 

The Apocalypses are significant for two main reasons. They articulate a shift in the understanding of history, and, second, they articulate an aspiration to see God face to face, as in the famous passage from Paul's first letter to the Corinthians. This was a vision afforded to certain important Jewish figures--Abraham, Jacob, and Moses. But it became something available to the writers of Apocalypses in a visionary experience where they ascended into the heavens where they had this encounter. These texts became a key resource in their adapting Greek theoria, the contemplation of the One, to Jewish thinking and practice. Jews aspired to an encounter that was more personal, i.e., face to face--not as a merging of one's identity into the Infinite Divine. Judaism is a personalistic monotheism in a way that Greek transcendental philosophy is not. The Greek schools were closer to Buddhism in this respect. 

This personalism is abundantly evident in the overtly erotic language of the Song of Songs, which in an interesting way reverses the dynamic of ascent that we see in Plato's Phaedrus and Diotima's discourse in The Symposium. The Lover is not the human who ascends, but God who descends, who reaches out to his beloved. The initiative lies with God who seeks to bring us to him. In the Greek imagination, the One is just up there doing his thing without much interest in human beings. If humans are motivated to go and pay him a visit, that's fine, but their doing so is of no concern to him. 

McGinn:

Building on the work of Gershom Scholem and Saul Lieberman, Joseph Dan argues that the rabbinic evidence suggests that [Rabbi] Akiva [who flourished in early 100s CE], the great hero of early Merkavah mysticism, was also the source for a new understanding of the Song of Songs based on three elements: (1) that the book was given to Israel on Mount Sinai; (2) that it is the holiest of all the biblical books; and (3) that its author was not Solomon but "the King who owns peace," that is, God himself. In other words, the book is a divine self-description, the kind that seems expanded upon in the unusual Merkavah text known as the Shi'ur Qomah. In Dan's words, "A new concept and meaning of the Song of Songs emerged in rabbinic academies and transformed esoteric homiletics [e.g., midrasnhic speculation on Ezekiel 1] into mystical activity.

...The early rabbinic commentaries on the Song make it quite clear that the Bride is to be identified with the people of Israel. This corporate and historical allegorical reading of the Song of Songs was influential on Origen, the first surviving Christian mystical commentator on the book, who knew the that the rabbis placed it among the four esoteric texts reserved for advanced students. (Foundations, p. 21)

We'll get to Origen in a future post, but first we need to spend some time with the great Jewish thinker, Philo of Alexandria, whom McGinn describes as the

"first figure in western history to wed the Greek contemplative ideal to the monotheistic faith of the Bible, a union since applauded by many but condemned by others, both Jews and Christians, as a form of miscegenation." (Foundations, p. 35)  

Lest there be any question, I am not in the anti-miscegenation camp.

Philo was an older contemporary of Jesus of Nazareth, born around 20 BCE and died 50 CE. McGinn says that "Although his most avid readers were Christians insofar as he foreshadowed an exegetical method for joining biblical revelation and Greek philosophy in the service of a mystical Ideal. . . .His goal was to show that Judaism was the true religion and to draw out the inner meaning of the biblical narratives and ritual practices that formed the heart of Judaism" (Foundations, p. 36)

Let me start with this long excerpt from McGinn Chapter 3, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal" where he discusses Philo, and then we'll unpack it:

If the story of the Fall signifies the disordered soul which has forgotten its true nature as image of the Logos, the hidden message of the other books of the Pentateuch, especially the histories of the patriarchs and the story of Moses, presents a typology of those souls who have regained their true nature by following the path to mystic conemplation. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God". 

Thus Moses,"entering into the dark cloud, the invisible region, abides there while being initiated into the most holy mysteries." He becomes, however, not only an initiate, but also a hierophant and instructor of divine rites, which he will impart to those clean of ear.

The power that motivates the contemplative life leading to the vision of God is a divine eros, but Philo makes it clear that this love is not a native gift of the soul but is rather an inspiration by which God calls us upward to himself. Philo gives greater emphasis than Plato to the role of ecstasy "standing outside" [the self] in the upward path:

...escape also from your own self and stand outside from yourself, like persons possessed and corybants seized by Bacchic frenzy and carried away by some form of prophetic inspiration. For it is the mind that is filled with the Deity and no longer in itself, but is agitated and maddened by a heavenly passion drawn by the truly Existent and attracted upward to it. (Her. 70)

....the Jewish thinker holds that the soul is only a created image of the Logos, not a part of the Logos itself, to come to know one's inner self on the journey up to the Existent is to gain an awareness of the "absolute nothingness of created being". "And the man who has despaired of himself is beginning to know him that is." Divinization for Philo thus implies a self-naughting absent in much pagan mystical tradition, though we shall see an analogue in Plotinus. 

Philo was the first to introduce into mystical literature the famous oxymoron of "sober intoxication" to describe  the way in which the mind is taken out of itself in the upward way. "It longs for the intelligible, and on beholding in that realm beauties beyond measure the patterns and originals of the sensible things in the world below it is possessed by a sober intoxication . . . (Foundations, p. 39)

Philo makes no reference to the Song of Songs (probably because it wasn't written yet), and so his idea of union with God follows more the Greek pattern of ascent, but an ascent that foreshadows the Song of Songs insofar as it is in response to a Love that reaches out to the human soul from above. Like Plato, Philo holds that ultimate bliss resides in the vision of God, or "knowledge of him who truly is. ...For the beginning and end of happiness is to be able to see God" as Moses did: 

Making Moses the ideal mystic, the divinized man, marks an important moment in the history of mystical traditions, for both Jews and Christians, if only because it links the generalized and often abstract subjective apophaticism [See Note 4] of the Hellenic tradition with the personal life story that could, at least in part, be imitated--the account in Exodus of how Moses ascended to meet God in the cloud and darkness that hung upon Sinai. (Foundations, p. 38)

Philo's importance rests on the merger he effected between this form of Greek contemplative piety, with its growing emphasis on the transcendence of the divine First principle, and his Jewish faith grounded in the Bible and in the practices and laws of his people. This reconciliation was achieved not only by seeking a deeper and more universal meaning in the scriptures, but also by transforming Platonic contemplation into a more personalistic mode. (Foundations, p. 36) (See Note 3)

So Philo approaches Greek philosophy from within the Wisdom tradition in Judaism that was already heavily influenced by Hellenism. But his most interesting contribution for the purposes of this Genealogy series was his placing Plato's transcendental Ideas, not in some vague transcendental dimension, but in the Mind of God. This is a critical move that will profoundly influence Christian Neoplatonism: 

Philo's Logos doctrine has deep roots in Hellenistic Judaism's speculation about the figure of Sophia, or Wisdom, as well as in certain aspects of Middle Platonism, especially in the gradually emerging intradeical interpretation of Plato's world of Ideas (i.e., the teaching that the Ideas are to be found in the mind of God). Aristotle's criticism of Plato's theory of Ideas had shown how difficult it was to maintain a separate realm of Ideas as in some sense a cause of the world. One solution first explicitly found in Philo but almost certainly something he inherited from previous Middle Platonists, was to move the Ideas into God, to identify them with the Divine Mind that causes the universe. (Foundations, p. 37)

But again there is a personalist character here that for instance is not found later in Plotinus, whose concept of the Ideas is as impersonal principles in the first emanation from the One. The Logos for Philo is conceived not as an abstract principle, but as son of God and the face of God:

The existence of the inconceivable God can be known through analogy because he reveals himself in two ways, first, through the intelligible Universe, or elder son, that is his Logos, and second, and derivatively through the sensible universe as through a younger son. . . .The Logos is "the Idea of Ideas, the first begotten son of he Father, a "second god."

To his chief messenger and most venerable Logos, the Father who engendered the universe has granted the singular gift, to stand between and separate the creature from the Creator..."And I stood between the Lord and You" (Deut. 5.5 ) neither unbegotten as God, nor begotten as you, but midway between the two extremes, serving as a pledge for both.

...he [the Logos] is a "vivid and living hypostatization of an essential aspect of deity, the face of God turned toward creation," as David Winston puts it. As the manifestation of the hidden God, the Logos reveals the two essential aspects of God's relation to the world, the creative power and the ruling or conserving power. (Foundations, p. 37-38)

I don't suppose it's so obvious that it needn't be pointed out that there is a proto-trinitarian theme introduced here, one that is further developed in Kabbalism--the Ein Soph in its three aspects Keter, Chokhma, and Binah. This Genealogy series is not the place to get into this, but maybe some time in the future it would be interesting to become more deeply immersed in understanding the continuous cross-fertilization through the centuries between Christian and Jewish mysticism. I don't know a lot about it, but I do know enough to understand how rich a vein this would be to mine. And in a very significant way, at least in terms of speculative theology/philosophy, this cross-fertilization starts with Philo. 

McGinn goes on:

The Logos is also central in the soul's return to God, both primordially and consequently. "For just as God is the Pattern of the Image [i.e., the Logos], which was just named Shadow, so does the Image become the pattern of others, as Moses makes clear at the beginning of the Law Code by saying, "And God made man after the iImage of God" (Gen 1:27); thus the Image had been modeled after God, but man after the Image . . ." (Legum allegoriae 3.96) (Foundations, p. 38)

This idea of humans being created in the image and likeness of God is articulated here in a way that will be central for defining the Christian spiritual itinerary. The human being in his fallen state knows not who he is until he rediscovers his deepest identity as created in the Image of God. This is key to both Jewish and Christian ideas about divinization.

But it's also key to what will become a Christian Neoplatonic participatory epistemology:

The Logos is immanent in all things but in a special way in the human mind. The presence of the Logos within the soul, that is, within the higher dimension of nous (Philo followed Plato in adhering to a tripartite understanding of the soul)...makes possible both knowledge of the existence of God and the return of the soul to God from its present fallen state. (Foundations, p. 38)

The world is intelligible because the underlying structure of the macrocosmos is the Logos, which also deeply structures the human Mind as microcosmos. Like knows like, but as the deep structure of the macrocosmos is mostly hidden from human awareness, so are the deep, inner capacities of the human mind hidden. To know the first requires the awakening of the latter, i.e. the awakening of the dormant 'nous'. [See Note 5] So I want to stress from the get go here that while there is a tendency to think of Platonism and Neoplatonism as having a rather static epistemology,  that is, imo, a rather vulgar understanding of them. There is an inherent capacity within this transcendental framework for a continuously evolving process of learning and deepening of one's knowledge: as the mind wakes to its own unfathomable depths, so does it wake to the unfathomable depths of the cosmos. Depth calls unto depth. 

But I think it is also critical to understand that the capacity for true participatory knowledge is a function of one's moral development and, as we'll see, of one's capacity for Love. The spiritual itinerary is not just to learn magical formulae and acquire cognitive superpowers, but to become the Self one was created to be. This is a moral project. The capacity for growth in real knowledge is a function of real moral development, if by moral development we mean becoming gradually transformed into the image in whose likeness we were created. The wisdom that follows from that is the only really important cognitive power that humans should care about. Whatever the range of one's cognition, one still needs wisdom to interpret and understand correctly what one cognizes. 

So far, we've spent time with the two main streams that constituted the Western Axial Revolution. We turn in future posts to understand how these streams were adapted to and developed in light of the Christian revelation. I think it should be clear that I have no sympathy with efforts to try to isolate a pure Christianity from Greek or Jewish elements. I applaud miscegenation. Christianity at its best is small 'c' catholic. It must embrace the whole world with confidence in its capacity to find what is Good where there is truly good, and not be so fussy about its provenance as providing some criteria about what is truly Christian and what is not. This is not syncretism if it is done with arms spread wide in a broad, empathic, erotic embrace. 

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Note 1: I'm not saying that all intercessionary prayer is wrong. A subject like this needs more nuanced discussion than I can give it here: clearly it is not wrong to pray for the deliverance from suffering for others or ourselves. Clearly Jesus made a point of delivering many from their suffering. But I would just say that Jesus's miracles were more than just his random administering supernatural medicine to the ailing, but rather infusions of liberating life that were proleptic of a life in which all will share in the coming kingdom, which was already taking root in the hearts of those who encountered and recognized him. The intecessionary prayer that is more deeply appropriate for us in almost all situations, then, is not something like "Cure my cancer," but "Thy kingdom come."

Note 2: Plato's Republic is an exercise in utopian thinking, even if it depicts a regime  in which none of us would ever want to live. 

Note 3: All the excerpts that follow are from Bernard McGinn, The Foundation of Mysticism: Origins to the the Fifth Century, 1991, Crossroad/Herder & Herder. I indicate locations in the text with the abbreviated (Foundations, p. xx.) I don't always include in the excerpt McGinn's references to primary sources. You can get the book and check those on your own.

Note 4: I don't want to get into the weeds about apophaticism now because we'll get into that in the future. But it's a key theme that creates a paradoxical tension between the idea of a theistic personal God who cares about humans and a God that is beyond all understanding. 

Note 5: This is a theme I've talked quite a lot about, and is reflected in the quote from Max Scheler I posted the other day. It's also a theme that I relate to John Vervaeke's work as I discuss it in Parts 4A and 4B. Whether Scheler was aware of its similarity to Neoplatonic thinking I don't know.

Go to Part 11.

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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.

 

Progressive Fever Dreams

Every reconstructive president must confront vestiges of the old regime. The slavocracy evaded Lincoln’s grasp by seceding; the Supreme Court repeatedly thwarted F.D.R. Yet they persisted. How?

What each of these presidents had at their back was an independent social movement. Behind Lincoln marched the largest democratic mass movement for abolition in modern history. Alongside F.D.R. stood the unions. Each of these movements had their own institutions. Each of them was disruptive, upending the leadership and orthodoxies of the existing parties. Each of them was prepared to do battle against the old regime. And battle they did.

Social movements deliver votes to friendly politicians and stiffen their backs.

--Corey Robin

Dear Corey: You are describing what the Right has, and the Left hasn't even a whiff of. The Right is politically organized at every level; it is well financed; it is armed; it is highly motivated. That it is delusional doesn't matter because their delusions have teeth, which cannot be said of the reconstructive dreams on the Left.

Look, I'm with you in what I would hope a progressive politics could achieve in this country, but what the Left must understand much better than it does is why the Right is so much more successful in mobilizing than the Left is. And while the reasons are complex, it comes down to the Right's having an infrastructure of values that builds cohesiveness and toughness in a way that the Left does not have now, nor will have any time soon. The Left depends too much on an ethos that validates rank-and-file snowflakiness among too many who are not embarrassed when they freak out about micro-aggressions.

I'm exaggerating to emphasize that, relatively speaking, they lack the resiliency to face the truly aggressive violence and instability that's coming. The point is that there is very little moral heft on the secular Left--secular Liberal morality has no foundations and is mostly performative for the benefit of the likeminded. Otherwise, it's mostly about the least costly way for one to feel better about himself. There's very little in the secular Liberal ethos that promotes a sense of feeling a part of something bigger, of something that one might sacrifice his or her life for. That's not true on the Right.

I'm not criticizing individuals on the secular Left who are clearly motivated by good will. I'm criticizing the enervating ethos that has captured them. Different people are captured by it with varying degrees of conformity or independence, but it's the ethos that makes any effective, morally serious political progressivism extremely difficult because of the way it celebrates safety, anality, a rigidly stubborn niceness, and a suffocating fetishization of process. The people most deeply shaped by this ethos are not ready for the no-rules fight to the death that the hard right wants so badly and will probably get. Much less to push through a progressive reconstruction of government.

The Progressive cause became progressively a losing one in this country as soon as it lost Evangelical Christians. The social gospel movement was the driving force behind abolitionism in the early 19th Century and the Progressivism in the late-19th/early-20th Century,. Without it there would have been no political-social infrastructure for the New Deal. But Christian Evangelical progressivism started to dissolve after the Scopes trial,  and had disappeared in playing any meaningful role in Progressive politics by the 1980s. After William Jennings Bryan, with the brief but potent exception of MLK, no evangelical figures have emerged to inspire and mobilize a Main-Street Progressivism. And Main Street is the 'institution' that Progressives need most to win back if they want a sustainable movement.

In America, if your movement isn't a religious crusade, it's just smoke drifting in the wind. Like the anarchist OWS in New York or the absurdist CHAZ in Seattle. Marx was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about religion. It isn't an opiate; it's political fuel. Reactionary religion fuels reactionary politics; progressive religion fuels progressive politics. 19th Century Marxism was itself an eschatological cult. Now it's just armchair cultural critique. For lack of a progressive religion, the reactionaries take the field unopposed.

MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" resonates with us because we are innately eschatological. It works within the collective psyche at a deeply archetypal level. But eschatology makes no sense within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. The two things cancel one another out. There is no possibility for a sane, sustainable progressive politics so long as the Progressives are captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary. Just not going to happen. Not in America , anyway. If you think any kind of religion is stupid and delusional, then it follows that you should think that any kind of progressive politics is too.

My Genealogy series is a long argument for an idea of the evolution of consciousness that seeks to establish the plausibility for such an eschatology that will integrate a progressive politics with late modern sensibilities that are becoming progressively post-secular with each passing decade. I have no illusions that a sane eschatological politics is something for the near term, but I do believe that if there is any possibility for a robust, progressive politics in the future, it has to retrieve this eschatological dimension. 

In the meanwhile, Biden's window to accomplish an ambitious progressive reconstructive agenda is closed. I thought for a while he had a shot, but it was probably never going to happen with the Senate structured as it is. Now the only thing sane Americans should care about is the survival of its democracy. Everything other short-term consideration is a distraction. 

See also "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture

[For Nietzsche t]he Overman or post-human animal is he who freed himself from those forms of sham religion known as Nature, Reason, Man and Morality. Only this audacious animal can peer into the abyss of the Real and find in the death of God the birth of a new species of humanity. As with Christian faith, the only place to begin is with a confession that our hands are steeped in the blood of divinity. Man, too, must be dismantled, in so far as he is modeled on the unity and infinity of the godhead. He is defined so completely by his dependence on his Creator that the two must fall together. There can be no obsequies for the Almighty without a funeral ceremony for humanity as well. The death of God must herald the death of Man, in the sense of the craven, guilt-ridden, dependent creature who bears that name at present. What will replace him is the Overman. Yet in his sovereignty over Nature and lordly self dependence, the Overman has more than a smack of divinity about him, which means, ironically, that God is not dead after all. What will replace him continues to be an image of him.

That the death of God involves the death of Man, along with the birth of a new form of humanity, is orthodox Christian doctrine, a fact of which Nietzsche seems not to have been aware. The Incarnation is the place where both God and Man undergo a kind of kenosis or self-humbling, symbolized by the self-dispossession of Christ. Only through this tragic self-emptying can a new humanity hope to emerge. In its solidarity with the outcast and afflicted, the crucifixion is a critique of all hubristic humanism. Only through a confession of loss and failure can the very meaning of power be transfigured in the miracle of resurrection. The death of God is the life of the iconoclast Jesus, who shatters the idolatrous view of Yahweh as irascible despot and shows him up instead as vulnerable flesh and blood.   --Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

It's clear to me, anyway, that our life here on earth has a purpose, and that the future of the earth is central to that purpose. And yet it's clear that for most Christians this history, or any sense of humans being part of an evolving historical drama, has little to do with their understanding of who they are, where they came from, and where they are going. I think there is a mythopoetic narrative possibility here that awaits its moment to emerge into a legitimate space that has not yet been prepared for it. We live now in a time when all grand narratives are suspect, but that will not always be true. It's just a sign of the temporarily "decadent" stage through which we must pass in our time. We are at a historically low slack tide now, and soon enough we will be dealing with the flood tide and its aftermath.

In the meanwhile, the default Christian mythopoesis about history seems to depend strongly on the "exile" model--history is jail time: we do our time on the earth following the rules as best we can so that we can get out of jail on good behavior and go to our heavenly home in the spiritual pleroma. This model, in my opinion, is more Buddhist or Hindu than Christian. In such a model the earth is a prison to be escaped. I think of the earth rather as our ailing, semi-comatose mother whom humans must find a way to nurse back to health.

And so the exile model also enervates rather than energizes progressive political action by focusing on goals to be realized in eternity rather than in history. The Enlightenment idea of historical progress has likewise suffered enervation. Like all grand narratives, its assumptions have been debunked by postmodern deconstructive skepticism. And so the secular Left, because of its now postmodern assumptions, has no plausible narrative of human progress that it can embrace unironically, and so has become feckless in the face of threats from a more robust, grounded, regressive Right.

At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened, postmodern model of the human to which the secular Left largely subscribes. 

But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed. And I would argue that once there is a broader willingness to recognize that Christian ontological foundations can legitimately provide a framework for its development, Christian thinkers and activists can play a pivotal role in shaping such a future narrative. That foundation is already there; it always was. The Enlightenment narrative grew from a reductive misappropriation of it. We are clearly not at a point where the broader culture and its public intellectuals are willing to recognize that fact, but it's interesting to me that a Marxist like Eagleton seems to be working his way toward it, and that is perhaps a harbinger of things to come. Maybe, maybe not. Eagleton, at least, understands the terms of the problem.

***

Owen Barfield in his book Saving the Appearances provides a mythopoetic way to think about the Christian meaning of history that I, at least, find compelling. For me it's a heuristic device, a provisional way to organize and hold random things I believe together with an openness to a better way presenting itself. Barfield understood the problem of modern cultural decline in much the same way Nietzsche did, but he frames it as a necessary, if risk-fraught, middle phase in the unfolding of a larger historical drama. This drama extends back in the evolution of human consciousness to what he calls Original Participation and forward to Final Participation, i.e., from the metaphorical Garden of the beginning times to the metaphorical New Jerusalem of the far-distant end times, from the participation mystique of totemic and animistic peoples, to the communion of saints envisioned in Revelations.

These ideas are similar to Teilhard de Chardin's evolutionary mythopoesis regarding the movement of history from the Alpha to Omega, from creation of the cosmos to the true telos of history at which point all things converge in Christ. Both Barfield and Teilhard take evolution seriously, but in a way that hearkens back more to Hegel than to Darwin. (See Note 1) The mechanics of Darwinian biological evolution are mostly accepted but subsumed into a larger movement that is geist-driven, i.e., spirit or mind driven--or, as I would put it, grounded in an understanding of how the world is dynamically grounded in the Logos, what I have been calling in other posts the Living Real. 

Like Nietzsche, Barfield agrees that the modern era has been a time in which the last vestiges of transcendent meaning as a 'given' in the world have disappeared—transcendent meaning is no longer something a truly modern consciousness experiences as coming from out there. Moderns experience meaning partly from acculturation, but while that provides the scaffolding, the most intense experiences of meaning are subjective and constituted from within. But with this enhancement of subjectivity comes social fragmentation, anomie, fecklessness, enervation--and with it the progressive undermining of the cultural scaffolding that has brought us to this postmodern moment. So the solution must be to awaken capacities in the human soul and the soul of the earth (which are the same thing) in order that meaning in the world be reconstituted. The movement toward Final Participation is a movement toward an intersubjective communion: the alienation of the subject-object rift is repaired, all beings become Thous. The lion lies down with the lamb, and swords are refashioned into plowshares.

For Nietzsche this reconstituting project assumes a world without grace and without the possibility of communion--it is radically individualist. If there is any meaning to be created, it derives from the ontologically groundless uebermensch and his surrender to the will to power. For Barfield's postmodern Christian, the reconstituting project derives from an ontological grounding in the Logos that dwells in the depths of the human soul and the soul of the world. For Barfield it is possible, indeed essential, that meaning be constituted by a different kind of ‘overcoming’ man, not Nietzsche's uebermensch, but rather the Logos awakener, the man or woman in whom the shattered or broken image of the Logos in whose likeness they were created can itself be reconstituted: awakened, healed or reintegrated into a joyful communion with the cosmos.

Whether currently believable or not by most non-believers, this narrative opens up human possibilities rather than closes them off, and it provides a frame that helps to shape a humanity-enhancing political agenda. The bigger problem as I see it is that most Christians don't believe it either because they are still locked in the Exile model. If Christians don't live it, or something like it, they offer no real alternative to the prevailing narratives of the secular Left or the inflamed Right. 

If for the postmodern Christian, meaning is fundamentally subjective, that does not mean it is arbitrary or ungrounded. It just means that the grounding is intrinsic, and lies within the supple, grace-inspired, Logos-grounded human heart rather than in the cultural nomos. We are still in a fraught intermediary stage insofar as we still feel compelled to privilege objective truth as real truth, which we still see in the vestiges of in positivistic science. But the understanding of truth as subjective to which Kierkegaard pointed, and then later Nietzsche, directs us to an understanding the rest of us have to catch up to. For both the postmodern Christian and Nietzsche, truth is not static and timeless; it's creative, dynamic, and evolving, but if for Nietzsche truth is basically stuff the "post-human animal" makes up as he goes along, for the postmodern Christian it is deeply grounded in a creative, evolving understanding of the Logos's awakening in history. It is, therefore, about discovering depths and potentialities in the Logos-grounded human being heretofore unrealized. For Christians the image of those potential capacities fully realized is the risen Christ. 

***

An epochal shift occurred on the first Easter that has not yet been fully accomplished. The nature of this shift didn’t manifest itself broadly in the West until the time of the Renaissance and the dawn of the Modern period when individual inwardness and the autonomy of the thinking self became more broadly experienced by humans for many reasons, not the least of which was the broadening of literacy after Gutenberg. Modernity has been very much the Age of the Eye; whatever we're moving into now will involve a different McLuhanite ratio of the senses, and with it a corresponding shift in consciousness that is even now underway. 

The ancient Israelites were the "Chosen" people because they were "given" the Law on Mt. Sinai. If at first the law was given extrinsically on slabs of stone, the Law has worked to soften the heart to be vulnerable enough to receive an awakening of the Law, i.e., the Kingdom of God, i.e., the rule of Justice, that Christians believe became a new possibility for humans through his birth, death, and resurrection. This new Law is like an infusion of blood in the sick soul of the earth and of the humans who live on it, and is the salubrious power by which the law of tooth and talon becomes subverted by the law of Justice and Peace.  

Since those events, that Law has been gradually awakening in the depths of human souls of many who recognize it intrinsically or intuitively, whether or not they are Christians or even believers of any kind. It's just there as an ontological fact. The only question is whether humans will hearken to it and align their lives with it. To the degree that they do, they become "justified". What's important is, first, the intuition of Justice as an inspiring trasncendental that calls us to live at a higher level, i.e., to live by a law that subverts the "natural" inclination to live in accordance with the will to power, greed, and joyless pleasure.

The Logos sings the secret song that the entire cosmos sings; we hear it and hearken to it with the grace-inspired heart--the conscience--and the more developed the conscience the more clearly heard the song. The condition of being fallen is the condition of not being able to hear the song.

The great saints sing this song and dance spontaneously to its rhythm. But all humans of good will, believers or unbelievers, hear it to some degree whether they recognize its source or not. Christians are those who identify it as the Logos and who believe that the human capacity to hear this song at all depended on the events we celebrate during Holy Week. It is therefore something that is extra-subjective, in the sense that it is the song of the Cosmos, but our way to it is by first awakening to its sounding within. And as it sounds in one heart it has the power to awaken its sound in the hearts of others, and eventually it will be a song heard and sung everywhere and developed everywhere. That's my image of Final participation, the Omega point, and of how we are to find our way to it.

For Barfield these changes  in human consciousness during the modern period have not been spiritually regressive despite the secularism and materialism that have accompanied them. He recognizes that for the educated urban dweller in the West, religious language and ritual have lost almost all of their sacred power as something given to us from a meaning world out there in culture. But that does not mean that what comes to us as given from the tradition is therefore untrue or unbelievable as atheists insist. Does that mean, then, that rituals like the Catholic mass because they confer no external meaning should be cast off as meaningless? No, because the mass is the celebration of the central event on which all history pivots, and as such the moment when the song of the cosmos dies into human subjectivity, so that it might rise again in our human singing of it and in doing so awaken one another and eventually our semi-comatose mother, the earth. The mass is that song, and to participate in it is to sing it whether we experience the full significance of its meaning or not.

***

And right now the Christian imagination of the future is not very robust because it is still hamstrung by its premodern self-understanding. The exile model--the heaven as final destination model--still plays too powerful a role in the Christian imagination of history. The idea that the goal and purpose of human existence is to get off the planet and into some spiritual pleroma can no longer be embraced; too much is at stake, and it makes too easy a blindness to our responsibility for future generations who will live on the earth. 

There is indeed a spiritual pleroma, and it is the source of all life and all goodness, but our job is not to get off the planet and into it, but to be the awakening point in whom the unheard song is heard and sung. We humans are the infusion points through which the Logos lives into our death, enlivens our souls, and thus enables us to renew the face of the earth.

This is a big, big task, and we are only at the beginning of our understanding how to do it, because we are only at the beginning of understanding how radically things have changed in the last five hundred years. We are only beginning to fathom the massive, unprecedented responsibility that human beings have now assumed for the future of the earth.

I believe this this cultural moment that conservatives call "decadence" is a necessary moment in our collective spiritual evolution. It is not a story of decline but rather simply a story of transition from the old to something new. It is analogous to the ancient Israelites' wandering in the wilderness, or perhaps better to think of it as a cultural dark night of the soul, a collective Good Friday moment through which we must pass in order for a cultural resurrection, a renaissance, to occur. In the Darkness we must maintain hope; we must keep putting one foot in front of the other, we must trust that if we stay alert and vigilant we will be able to tell the difference between the song that calls us forward or calls us to disaster.

We are in a transitional experience, but the outcome is never certain because the outcome depends on our fallible choices. We have the choice either to fall back into Egypt or move forward into Canaan. Nazism was Germany's hearkening to a neo-pagan song, a song that awakens a nostalgia for totemic embeddedness. That tendency is an ever-present temptation for all "decadent" western societies. Nostalgia is the siren song to which the Right hearkens, and we should never underestimate its power to enchant and to draw us toward shipwreck.

Over the years I've written extensively about my fears that the attitudes that lie behind the political popularity of movement conservatism are rooted in this nostalgia for lost embeddedness and with it the lost sense of the sacred. It was a terrible loss, and it is cruel to adopt an attitude of contempt toward those who feel the loss most acutely. But you don't win these people over politically by debunking their beliefs, but rather by offering them something better. And the Left in this country is not offering anything that satisfies the ontological craving that those on the Right feel.

If the cultural Left believes it has adopted a more grown-up understanding of how things are in its refusal to believe in spaghetti monsters or however they callowly reject a deeply complex and interesting religious tradition, they will soon discover that they will be overwhelmed by religious forces that are not so complex and interesting. Going forward, the argument will not be between the forces of irreligion and religion but between good religion and bad religion. Good religion hears the song of the Logos, bad religion the enchanting, demagogic songs of the anti-Christ.

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Note 1: "'Hegel', remarks Jurgen Habermas, 'completed the philosophical appropriation of the Judeo-Christian tradition as much as was possible under the conditions of metaphysical thinking.' Transcendence is now, so to speak more horizontal than vertical--more a question of history which is perpetually in excess of itself, en route to some future pleroma or state of fulfillment, than of a God who lies in the silent spaces beyond his own universe." (Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God, pp. 46-47)

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Ed. Note 1: This is a repost of a pre-Trump essay written in 2016 at a time when even most Republicans saw Trump as a vulgar, self-absorbed buffoon not to be taken seriously. It is entitled "Death & Resurrection of the Human: The Rising of the Logos's World Constituting Song". I post it as part of this Genealogy series especially for those who have not been reading here over the years to provide some context. And I post it because I think it goes to the heart of the larger argument I'm trying to make, which is that we need to develop a postmodern mythopoesis, i.e., a pole in a reconstituted metaphysical imaginary that plausibly provides a vertical dimension. Such a mythopoesis cannot just be fabricated out of whole cloth as if it were some science-fiction fantasy or a work of purely intellectual construction. It has to be grounded in a tradition of revelation sustained by individuals from generation to generation who are awake to the significance of that revelation. And it must work plausibly to provide a robust, fruitful interpretation of people's experience of the Living Real, which is more common than is generally acknowledged (See Taylor or James.)

I see what I'm doing as small 'c' catholic in the spirit of Pico della Mirandolla. I am writing from a Christian perspective because that's where my roots lie and because I believe its disclosures, but I do not see it as incompatible with others who do it from a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim perspective--or the cognitive-science approach exemplified in John Vervaeke's work. We all have things to learn from one another. There will always be differences, and they are to be celebrated, but we also need to acknowledge where we are all talking about the same thing but from different angles of approach.

My interest is to retrieve and celebrate what is vital from the western wing of the Axial Revolution. I look forward to learning from those who are doing it from other traditions--and from cognitive science, which is heir to the Western wing of the Axial Revolution, as Vervaeke is quite aware. I just think the scope of what can be relevantly retrieved and developed from Western axiality is broader than he does. 

Ed. Note 2: 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.

Go to Part 8.