After the Future

Is a Post-Liberal Open Society Possible?

I have no truck with the Illiberalism of either the Right or the Left, and yet I look at the Liberal Order as no longer sustainable. We are moving into a Post-Liberal world whether we like it or not. I want to defend an open, pluralistic society, but it seems clear to me that the philosophical presuppositions that undergird Liberalism that were largely responsible for making the Open Society possible in the first place, can no longer sustain the Open Society in the future.

Something else is called for to take the baton from Liberalism to run the next leg. Whatever comes next will be, by definition, Post-Liberal, and I fear a forced Illiberalism, most likely from the Right, is our future unless a solidarity-gelling, transcendentally inspired alternative that supports an Open Society emerges as a counterforce.

This is not just a battle of ideas between magazine intellectuals. Something far greater is at stake: it's a battle for the human spirit in which the forces that would advance the human project are contesting with enormously powerful forces that would destroy it. Those destructive forces are inherent in technocapitalism and justified by the reductio ad absurdum of Liberal principles in the Neoliberalism that since the 1980s has accelerated the profusion of the toxic potentialities inherent in Liberalism. This is precisely why Liberalism is useless for us in this moment. It's presuppositions and contradictions created the mess we're in now, and a solution cannot be found within an imaginal/intellectual framework that is constrained by Liberal presuppositions. 

The reductive eschatology of Marxism has been utterly de-legitimated and offers no real possibilities unless coupled with a Christian eschatology, as in some possible future interation of  Liberation Theology. And the legatees of J.S. Mill on the cultural Left are all decent, reasonable people, but when push comes to shove, they are incapable anything inspiring a robust solidarity movement in the broader culture. They haven't the intellectual and spiritual resources to take us to whatever comes next if technocapitalism doesn't destroy us. 

Liberals of goodwill are defenseless against the deeper dystopian il-liberalism inherent in techno-capitalism (See Note 1) because Liberals share with techno-capitalism its fundamental presuppositions in Rationalist Materialism. Liberals accept the inevitability that technocapitalism will drag us wherever it wants, and that at best they can mitigate its most humanly deleterious effects. So instead they become preoccupied with identitarian issues that by comparison are trivial like transcending the gender binary. The best Liberals seem capable of at this point is simply to ask, "Can't we all get along and play nice?" 

What a compelling alternative might be or how it might emerge, I have no specific proposals or program. I trust it will arise in ways that are now unforeseeable. But I do believe that the general framework or components of what I think need to emerge are gestured to in the previous post entitled "Here We Are". I want to make clear that any form of il-liberalism would be utterly incompatible with everything that I think and that I care about.

But I believe that our movement into a Post-Liberal era is inevitable, and it will be Post-Secular in character. The choice in the future will not be between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad religion. What's the difference?  Bad religion closes off possibilities for human flourishing, while good religion opens up possibilities. Liberalism is failing us now because it is has become bad religion. In coming decades, we have good reason to fear that its weaknesses will allow it to be defeated by something far worse. 

Liberalism played an important historical-cultural role in opening up new possibilities for human flourishing, and we humans must not lose what we have gained from it. But it's done it's job, and now it's time for something new, something humanly deeper and richer that can take us forward to a place where Liberalism simply cannot. 

For a more expanded version of the argument, See "Progressivism in a Post-Liberal World". 

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Note 1: Whatever might be the ever-changing opinions of Sohrab Ahmari from week to week, his Tyranny, Inc. makes an overwhelming case that the Libertarianism embraced by the corporate overclass, despite its often woke window dressing, means freedom for them and peonage for everybody else. 

Here We Are

Many of those on the right, dependent on the web of lies and the nihilism, have twisted themselves into knots in order to justify their behavior not just to others but also to themselves. It’s too painful for them to acknowledge the destructive movement that they have become part of or to acknowledge that it is no longer by any means clear who is leading whom. So they have persuaded themselves that there is no other option but to support a Trump-led Republican Party, even one that is lawless and depraved, because the Democratic Party is, for them, an unthinkable alternative. The result is that they have been sucked, cognitively and psychologically, into their own alternative reality, a psychedelic collage made up of what Kellyanne Conway, a former counselor to Mr. Trump, famously called “alternative facts.”

Peter Wehner

Wehner's essay references Allan Bloom's 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind, at the time a critique of the postmodern Left's epistemic nihilism. Wehner's point here is that what Bloom complained about then is now a far more significant problem for the Right than for the Left, at least insofar as it threatens the stability of the political and social order.

I agree, but it's not that the Cultural Left has moved on from epistemic nihilism. Nihilism is the most influential shaper of our public metaphysical imaginary, no matter what one's personal beliefs might be, no matter whether one leans to the cultural and political Right or Left.

While most decent people don't think of themselves as nihilists, nihilism is so much in the air they breathe that they are unaware of how it influences their thinking and behavior. So the next thing you know a perfectly decent evangelical Christian finds himself voting for an uber-libertine in Donald Trump, believing his lies, and storming the Capitol to save his presidency. And perfectly decent, morally earnest college students find themselves marching to justify Hamas's butchery in southern Israel. It's the most morally earnest, whether they're aware of it or not, who are the most impassioned agents of a nihilism they would insist they don't believe in. 

***

The world is run by the ambitious, not the wise. I understand that. And the ambitious have no need of wisdom or knowledge except that which serves their ambitions. And yet humans don't want to live in chaos to which the unchecked ambitions of the ambitious lead us. So in a world where transcendent values have no public legitimacy we are given two basic choices: (1) either the Hobbesian state of nature in which a violent anarchy reigns, and where life is 'solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short', or (2) the Hobbesian Leviathan that produces a 'brave new world' of  frightened, flat-souled Last Men, distracted by bread and circuses--a lot like the world satirized in WALL-E. On the globals scale, Neoliberalism is producing the worst of both. 

Is there no alternative. I, of course, think there is, but we are reluctant to choose it for complicated reasons. It comes down to this: 

Every society needs forms and norms, but the healthiest society has norms that are aligned with Reality, that is, with the way things are, not with the way we wish them to be. And yet because there is a transcendental dimension to Reality, it must be a part of what a healthy society seeks to be in alignment with. (See diagram below.) Because this affirmation of a transcendent dimension is so difficult for us to enshrine in any vital way in our public discourse today, we cannot affirm it except as individuals. But as individuals we are divided and conquered. 

A broadly accepted sense of Justice as metaphysical balance is essential for a vital sense of social order. Even Machiavelli would agree with that. (See Note 1) Without a center pole to organize and orient our navigation of the world, we spin purposelessly and allow those with the coarsest ambitions to drag us where they may. That's why the idea of justice embraced by the intersectional Left is so useless for us today. It's a symptom of what ails us rather than any kind of cure for it. Whatever its good intentions, it has very little to do with Reality--either in terms of the way the world works or in its relationship to Justice as an inspiring transcendental. It's metaphysical foundations are nihilistic, and its program drags us toward chaos. 

***

I make the case for this in the informal series I've been writing on and off called A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity. The basic argument I make largely relies on the structure diagramed below. Every civilization needs a vertical pole as part of its metaphysical imaginary. But the intellectual elite in North Atlantic societies for complicated historical-cultural reasons beginning in the 14th century amputated what had been its vertical pole since the mid first millennium BCE. It remained as a  phantom limb so long as religious faith--in a fideistic form that rejected Greek metaphysics--remained robust. But it was just a question of time before the loss of this limb would be broadly felt in practical ways, and that time came in the mid-19th century.

After Darwin, any idea of transcendent dimension interpenetrating with the immanent was fairly quickly supplanted--in about 50-60 years--by a wholly horizontal, i.e., wholly immanent, cosmology. Henceforth the imaginary that dominated elite discourse essentially framed the human project as metaphysically meaningless, as an utterly random production of an impersonal, cruel, and purposeless universe that eventually ends with a whimper in heat death. To believe anything else was either naive or medieval. 

Now most Americans--at least 85%--believe that there is some kind of God or transcendent dimension or order despite what the scientific narrative tells them about the origin and history of the cosmos. The 15% who don't largely comprises overclass elites. Many of these Americans among the 85% might not go to church, but they don't believe the narrative of meaninglessness, even if they don't have a better narrative to replace it. Some, of course, on the religious Right completely reject this narrative and  the science that promotes such meaninglessness. But while those on the non-atheistic Left embrace science, they are capable of only weakly affirming some vague understanding about there possibly being a transcendent dimension, but who really knows? And certainly those crazy religious people can't be right.

So among the non-religiously fanatical, vagueness reigns, and vagueness always loses when it comes up against fanaticism on one side and scientistic dogma on the other. So, if you have to choose, it seems more respectable to lean toward scientistically based meaninglessness. It's as conventional an attitude on the cosmopolitan Left as believing in climate change. No one will challenge you at a cocktail party in New York or Seattle if you favorably quote Sagan, Hawking, or Dennett in making your point. However, describing yourself as a Neoplatonist and quoting Plotinus or Meister Eckhart at such a gathering would come across as bizarre, to say the least. 

So it's easier, especially for young people, to embrace the meaninglessness. Some read Ayn Rand or come up with some other pop-Nietzschean ideas about making their own meaning in a meaningless world or whatever. But the naiveté of such adaptations should be obvious to anyone who thinks about it for two minutes. And besides, there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum. And Ayn Rand is no Nietzsche. 

Along these lines, I had a conversation recently with a physics major who told me she cannot believe in free will, but chooses to live 'as if' she has it. That exemplifies the kind of cleverness that typifies the postmodern way of coping with its nihilism. We play all kinds of tricks on ourselves so that we may eat our cake and have it to. Cleverness in this sense is a poor substitute for intellectual honesty, but it passes in a world where nihilism is our public metaphysics. So, you know, whatever. Who am I to judge what lies you tell yourself? Whatever gets you through the night, right? 

So lying to oneself is not just something people on the Right do. Many on Left do it too, but with a sophistication that avoids criticism because it's attuned to the postmodern nihilistic aesthetic. If you challenge them by saying it makes no sense, they reply "Of course it makes no sense. Nothing does. Why should I care about making sense?"

Now there are still some Rationalist Materialists, you know the kind who 'believe' in science. They want to insist that their commitment to 'reason' and 'objectivity' absolves them of any accusations of nihilism. They just "follow the science". How can that be nihilistic? They believe in objective Truth. But here's where the postmodern thinkers do us a service. They have taken the presuppositions of Rationalist Materialism and pushed them to their logical, i.e., nihilistic, conclusions. There's no such thing as knowable objective truth, they correctly insist--there are only interpretations. 

But are some interpretations better than others? No--if there are no criteria by which you can judge better and worse. But yes, if there is some scale that measures deeper and truer, and more superficial and less adequately true. The point is that none of our propositions are absolutely true, because absolute truth is unknowable, but that doesn't mean that we can't move toward a deeper appropriation of the truth and talk about it in ways that make sense.  

As illustrated in the diagram below, if there is no vertical dimension to orient our thinking on the horizontal dimension, then there can be no way to evaluate better and worse, truer and falser. Maybe on a purely utilitarian level, but not in any way that truly matters for the way we live meaningful lives.

If there are no depths and heights, there are only surfaces, and if there are only surfaces, there are only shifting habitual patterns of perception that are 'truthy', but never really true in any profound sense. This was Hume's insight three hundred years ago, and postmodern thinkers are simply putting a point on it. What we think is truth, they more or less say, is whatever we all agree it is, and what's fashionably truthy one moment isn't in another. What is fashionable on the Left is rejected by the Right, and vice versa. And truth becomes whatever whoever has the power to force it on those who disagree.

So here we are. This is really what the culture wars are all about. 

***

But truth as fashion is not the only possibility. In my Genealogy Series I attempt to make the case for human reason having to operate on both horizontal and vertical dimension as illustrated below. The vertical dimension is what makes meaning in a deeply satisfying way a possibility. 

Now let me say that while accepting this imaginary is not the same thing as having religious faith, it is not incompatible religious faith. Indeed it diagrams the Christian metaphysical imaginary bequeathed by the early Church Fathers and accepted in both the East and West until the Reformation. I would also argue that it maps what Taoism, Vendantic Hinduism, the esoteric branches of Islam and Judaism affirm. But I'm more interested in retrieving an imaginary that does not require faith or confessional commitments.

In other words, in a pluralistic, globalizing society, I believe it's possible to develop a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical or transcendental dimension. It will be accepted to the degree that all people of good will would find it reasonable and desirable because restorative of cultural vitality and as a robust alternative to the meaninglessness and nihilism that is currently hegemonic in our public discourse.

I believe the embrace of such an imaginary is inevitable at some point in the future, but not in my lifetime. But until that happens, the nihilism of Rationalist Materialism that currently shapes our collective metaphysical imaginary rules by default. Our social and political disorder are its symptoms. I suspect we must (continue to?) go through a collective dark night of the spirit that strips away all our delusions to clear the way for the emergence of something new. In the meanwhile we sow seeds in the hope they may germinate in the future when the time is right.  

In the long run, the only real cure is to re-member the amputated vertical limb. Until then we all spin in ontological dizziness in a world without a center. BTW, I envision such a re-membering as a cultural project, not a political one. It cannot be forced. If we shift to a social imaginary that has regained its center, it will happen in much the same way that we shifted from a geocentric idea of the cosmos to the post-Copernican one--it will just make sense to anyone who thinks about it, and in time will become common sense. As our ideas change, our work in the world changes. And as our work in the world changes our ideas change, and the next thing you know, as our ancestors became no longer medievals but moderns, so will we become no longer moderns, but whatever comes next. 

Yes, even after such a transition, the world will continue to be run by the ambitious, not the wise. But the ambitious won't be allowed to run amok as they do now. There will be resources within the culture that will allow sane people of good will to push back. The problem for us now is that most people of good will have no deeply held convictions, and to the degree that they do, they are fragmented, divided and conquered in so many ways. And so with no common ground on which people of good will can set their feet to push back, an impassioned bad will takes the field unopposed. And I'm not as worried about how that bad will manifests in MAGA as I am as in how it manifests in the C-suites of the financial and techno-capitalist overclass. 

Note on this diagram. I have no expectations that this is more confusing than helpful for most people who look at it unless they are already familiar with the presuppositions that undergird it. But I'd like to emphasize that I don't see this diagram as describing a static situation. The movement from ignorance to knowledge is dynamic, experiential, and developmental. As is the movement toward self transcendence. Wisdom as Phronesis and Sophia is a function of the experience of a movement away from ignorance on the horizontal dimension, and delusional, self destructive thinking and behavior on the vertical dimension.

Both axes describe growth upward toward becoming a more densely, i.e., a more fully realized or formed  or individuated Self, which in turn leads to the development of capabilities to see and understand the depths of things on the horizontal dimension, the world around us. So I mean for this diagram to suggest that a human life well lived requires the integration of the vertical with the horizontal in whatever measure that is possible for each of us within the limits of our particular existential situations. That growth toward integration changes the way we experience and imagine Reality. Its fruits are apparent in the generally good judgments we make as we grow in wisdom in both dimensions. As one becomes wiser, he or she makes better judgments both in practical matters as well as in matters of cognizing truth in art, religion, and philosophy. Nobody knows everything, but some people get it right more than they get it wrong, and there's a reason for that. 

In previous posts I talk about four criteria that define what a healthy society's metaphysical imaginary should comprise: Here's a summary: 

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

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

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

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

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Note 1: As Charles Taylor points out in his A Secular Age:

Even Machiavelli still has an understanding of this kind when it comes to Republican forms. There is a certain equilibrium-in-tension which needs to be maintained between the “grandi” and the people, if these forms are to survive. In healthy polities, this equilibrium is maintained by the play or rivalry and mutual surveillance between the orders. But there are certain developments which threaten this, such as an excessive interest on the part of citizens in their private wealth and property. This constitutes “corruzione”, and unless dealt with in time, and severely, will bring about the end of republican liberty. There is a causal attribution here: wealth undermines liberty; but the term used, with its strong normative resonances, shows that the understanding of society is being organized around a concept of normal form. (p. 182). 

What Is After the Future About?

Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today:

After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were no such thing as a blog. I have no imagined ideal audience. Friends, family, and a few former students know of my work here, and so of course I have them in mind as I write. But mostly I write about what I find to be compelling for whatever reason. It's where I go to think things out. 

So if what I write here has any value, I trust it will be found by those who might value it. I have no ambition for it to be more than that. If there is anything unusual in what I write, it lies in my particular sensibility or perspective, which I'd describe as that of a Postmodern Christian Neoplatonist. (See Note 1) Such a framework, while it certainly does not at this moment resonate with the zeitgeist, I suspect will emerge with broader cultural legitimacy in the future. Either it or something like it. Why?  Because it must. What we have now in hegemonic Rationalist Materialism is aberrational, and it cannot be sustained. 

I say something like a Postmodern form of Christian Neoplatonism must emerge, but, of course, it might not. But if it doesn't, that will be because the machines will have won. As Willigis Jager writes, "The men and women of the future, to paraphrase a line by Karl Rahner, will be mystics, or they won't be at all." Most of us are mystics now without thinking of ourselves as such. (See Note 2) We don't because we have the experience but miss the meaning. We haven't a metaphysical imaginary to help us identify and interpret the mystical experiences both subtle and intense that most of us have. So like seeds strewn on barren ground these experiences cannot germinate, and if they do, they have no trellis upon which to grow. 

I see Rahner's prediction about humans 'not being at all' in the future as the inevitable outcome if technocapitalism remains unchecked, and it will remain unchecked unless some consensus develops around a metaphysical imaginary that is robust enough to resist where technocapitalism is dragging us. Many (most?) decent, thoughtful people are horrified by the kind of world technocapitalism is creating, but they feel powerless to do anything about it. How can they if they have no understanding about what a human being is and so have no imagination of a positive human future to fight for? Unless that changes, the machines will win by default. I'm no Luddite. I'm not against technological advancement. I'm against unchecked technocapitalism that serves no needs except its own, certainly not the needs of ordinary human beings. 

I say something like Christian Neoplatonism because while that is my standpoint, I see the Neoplatonist part of it as the foundation for a prisca theologia that is cognate with the mystical theologies of Judaism, Islam, and the post-Axial spiritual and philosophical traditions of Asia. As suggested above, by 'mystical' I mean spiritually experiential in some degree, and entry-level experience in this sense is an intuition of the transcendent Good and Justice as an ontonormative ideal. By ontonormative I mean something that transcends our social constructions and which operates in the souls of the most alert humans as a force to subvert social constructions when they fail to live up to what transcendental Justice demands. If there is to be any sustained, robust resistance to technocapitalism, it has to be global in its scale. And so it must have a shared core imagination of what a human being is, and that imagination must comprise a spiritual dimension that draws from post-Axial commonalities and structural similarities rather than from differences in practice and distinctions in thought.

The Secular Age is over. The choice is no longer between secularism and religion, but between good religion and bad. The cult of the Invisible Hand is bad religion, very bad religion. Protestant fideism is not enough to build a new civilizational ethos upon, and in its Calvinist forms has been too complicit with the emergence of technocapitalism and a wisdomless Puritanical priggery on both the left and right that creates more problems than it solves. Therefore, we need to retrieve something like Christian Neoplatonism precisely because it restores the amputated vertical axis illustrated in the diagram below. 

What do I mean by this? The retrieval of something like Christian Neoplatonism will require the restoration of the the Wisdom Axis. Wisdom, as it has been understood in every civilization except in the secular West and its imitators, has become excluded as playing any role in shaping contemporary public discourse. Wisdom, if it is to play a role in shaping a moral consensus within any society, must be grounded in a metaphysical imaginary that has a transcendent foundation. The metaphyiscial imaginary of the West had such foundation, but it was amputated after the Reformation. It retained a cultural presence in the West as a kind of phantom limb until the mid 19th Century, but since then, i.e., for the last 150+ years, we have been living out the consequences of its loss, and with each passing decade we spin with increasing speed in unsustainable ontological dizziness. 

(Note: This diagram is explained in some detail in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A)

We are going through momentous events in this historical moment, and while we may be having the experiences and missing their meanings, is there any doubt that we are experiencing something unprecedented in its significance? What happens in this century will be a huge civilizational axial moment, a turning point for humanity, for better or worse. What that means remains to be seen, but something big is afoot. Everybody feels it. The world is crackling with it. It's different from other historical moments if for no other reason than the ways in which machine learning and developments in biotechnology are seeking to redefine what it means to be human. Some radical discontinuity lies not too far ahead in the human future. Our anticipation of its inevitability is the deep source of our collective anxiety and our insane politics. 

I have no illusions that what I have to say is original. I traffic mostly in the originality of others whose insights and scholarship are far more profound and interesting than anything I am capable. If I contribute anything it might be in the ways I make connections. If I have a talent, it is more synthetic than analytic. I think also I have a good nose for the Living Real and with it a reliable ability to sniff out b.s. when it presents itself as something more.

So what is After the Future about? It's simply one person's attempt to read the signs of the times and to interpret them from the perspective of Christian Neoplatonist. For the moment that's rather an eccentric perspective. But then again maybe I'm onto something. 

 

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Note 1: Christian Neoplatonism shaped the metaphysical imaginary of the West from the early Church fathers from the gnostic elements in St. Paul through Origen, Clement of Alexandria, the Cappadocians, St. Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, through John Eriguena, the Cathedral schools, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. With the theological assertion of nominalism and voluntarism in the 14th Century, Neoplatonism lost its hegemony. This occured, ironically, almost simultaneously with Christian Neoplatonism's artistic apogee in Dante's Divine Comedy. It's spirit, if not it's theology, was carried on, however, through Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, and the Rhineland Mystics, and after Luther, German pietism, which was the source of German Romanticism in the 1700s. 

The main characteristic of Neoplatonism in any of its forms is its participative ontology and epistemology and its openness to the working of transcendent energies (agapic love) to effect the human transformation the Church fathers called theosis. Once that participative imagination of the human relationship with the world was gone, once the Reformation rejected theosis, the way was paved for educated elites to reject the world as shot through with the divine, and to see it instead as just stuff that could be molded by the human will. Hence Calvin's Geneva, hence the Jacobins' Paris, hence capitalism's remaking the world in its materialist-consumerist image. This worked for a while, but it is clearly no longer sustainable. 

Neoplatonism provided an imaginary for the educated to live compatibly with the animism that lingered from Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism. That was all gradually pushed to the side after the 14th Century in a way unique in the West, and the world became Hamlet's disenchanted, sterile promontory.  But it's not the world that is sterile, but our ability to relate to the deep Living Real that suffuses it. It is we who are sterile, and that sterility must be overcome if humans are to 'exist at all' in the future. Is it possible for us as a society to become once again spiritually fertile?

I think it is possible. There have been Neoplatonic moments of spiritual fertility from time to time since the 1300s: Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, the Cambridge Platonists in the 1600s, the influence of Thomas Taylor's translations of Plato on the English Romantics in the late 1700s are the most prominent. But none of these could compete with the seductive materialistic power of the burgeoning science and the capitalist system it abetted. So my point is that Neoplatonism has always been there under the surface--is there now--waiting to re-emerge. I guess I'm arguing that it must emerge again in the near future but this time stick. For if it doesn't, it's hard to see how there can be any kind of human future that I would define as human. Am I optimistic? No. Am I hopeful? Always. 

Note 2: Studies/polling have establish that at least 40% of people have had spiritual experiences that they would call as such. My guess is that there are many more who have had spiritual experiences but they think of them as aesthetic rather than spiritual. Many people think of themselves as agnostics, but few--5-6%--are atheists, if by atheism we mean a hard rejection of any kind of spiritual reality. To be an agnostic ususally means that one does not accept the confessional assertions of organized religion, but does not preclude an openness to religious/spiritual ideas that makes sense. My hope is that in coming decades the kind Neoplatonism about which I'm talking will make sense. In order to do that it needs to provide a compelling, plausible narrative that integrates experience of the world with a recognition of interior capacity for self-transcendence. That's what the diagram above seeks to illustrate in a rudimentary way. 

Genealogy Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West

The following post is a mainly a background piece to provide context for the first conversation between the Greek Orthodox Bishop Maximus and the cognitive scientist John Vervaeke.

This is also a contribution to my ongoing Genealogoy Series which has two primary objectives. First, to establish that the metaphysical imaginary that developed in the West in the last seven hundred years, for all its benefits, is reductive and unbalanced. Secondly, to make the case how Neoplatonism provides a template for the restoration of the vertical axis as depicted in the diagram below, i.e., to restore in the West (and elsewhere) a metaphysical framework that comprises both "Sophia", understood as self-transcendence, and "Phronesis", understood as the methodologies that enable us to get a deeper grip on the reality of the World. Such a framework, I want to argue, would restore a philosophical imaginary that Christians, Jews, Muslims shared until the Reformation. And it provides the infrastructure for an East-West dialogue that isn't possible between Eastern religions and forms of Christianity that have rejected their Neoplatonic heritage.

Why should this matter? Because there is no pushing back against where technocapitalism is dragging us unless there is global consensus derived from a shared imagination of the human future. (See Note 1) Neoplantonism, I am arguing, is latent in the West and Middle East, and is essential for establishing in thought and practice an antidote to the rationalist materialist imaginary that while still hegemonic for us is faltering. The collapse of the vertical axis was unique in the West and maybe necessary (for a time) to allow for certain critical developments on the horizontal axis, but it's now time to restore the vertical. 

To make the second argument for restoration requires making the first argument in a way that is compelling enough that people understand both how we got here and why where we have got to is no longer tenable. Western theology made a turn in the 14th Century, as Maximus and Vervaeke discuss, that had ambiguous unintended consequences in shaping the metaphysical imaginary in the West. Eastern Orthodox Christian thinkers debated the same issues, but rejected making this turn and in doing so were able to preserve the vertical axis in a way the West proved unable to do.  

I say the turn in the West was ambiguous because on the one hand it allowed for a new emphasis on human freedom and the dignity of the autonomous individual, it opened up a political vision for self-determination through republican and later democratic polities, and it created the conditions for the emergence of science and technological development in ways that have materially benefitted humanity enormously. This has been a source of the West's sense of its exceptionalist self-understanding--and for good reason. 

But on the other hand, this turn has led to the amputation of the vertical axis, and we have paid a price for that, a price whose cost many have understood all along, but which was ignored because of all the material benefits that we accrued without it.

It's arguable that these positive developments may not have been possible if the vertical axis had not been amputated, but it's important to understand that the vertical still was felt as a phantom limb until the middle of the 19th Century. The radical turn to materialism at that point has led us into our current predicament. This materialism is no longer tenable, and neither is a pietistic call to faith a solution.

Societies cannot produce or impose faith in the people who populate them, but they can provide a trellis, a framework that recognizes the central importance of wisdom, has ways of identifying those who have some measure of it, and ways of teaching it to those who would aspire to it. We have none of that anymore. Whatever solution we develop to restore the vertical axis, it will perform for us in ways that Neoplatonism performed throughout the West and Middle East for centuries, so why not start by trying to understand what Neoplatonism is and taking seriously the possibility that it might be helpful in helping us to find a way forward? 

(Note: This diagram is explained in Note 2 at the end of Genealogy Part 12A.)

So in our current situation the challenge, in theory, is how you reintroduce the vertical in a way that avoids such a restoration that will, if the Religious Right gets its way, turn the country into a Christian version of Iran. This would be a disaster. The kind of restoration I hope for can only happen in a bottom-up way, rather as Christianity became hegemonic in the Roman Empire. Christianity, as Bishop Maximus points out, took Neoplatonism and transfigured it into something that was compatible with Christian soteriology in such a way as to make it broadly available. It was broadly accepted because it made sense to elites and had practices that engaged both elites and non-elites. A healthy society needs the engagement of both, and so now something similar is called for--something that would make sense in a pluralistic society with a latent infrastructure that is open the transcultural insights that shaped the Axial Revolution. 

So it was interesting to me when, after not thinking much about this Genealogy project for over a year, I came across this YouTube of Vervaeke conversing with Bishop Maximus which addresses these issues in ways that surprised me for reasons that I describe here. The following is a commentary on this conversation in a way that I hope will be helpful both in furtherance of the Genealogy project but also to make available what might seem to many fine points of metaphysics whose relevance it might be hard to comprehend.  

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As the post's title suggests, I think the crux of this conversation is to point to a turn in the West that led to what Vervaeke has been calling "propositional tyranny". This turn set the stage for secularization and a kind of rationalism that was not at first incompatible with religion but gradually became so. People nowadays say all the time that religion makes no sense to them, and I say of course it doesn't because it can't to the degree they are captured by the conventional imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. This imaginary is shaped by Rationalist Materialist presuppositions that are incompatible with the kinds of presuppositions that are required for a religious worldview. (See Note 2)

There was a time when being an atheist was transgressive, but now in the marketplace of ideas it's a consumer choice that is as conventionally acceptable as preferring football to baseball. To be an atheist for many (most?) does not require that you think or that you reject prevailing conventions, but only that you go with the flow if you travel in certain cosmopolitan cultural circles. If you are captured within the Rationalist Materialist frame, you are likely convinced that atheism is the only thing that makes sense, but it's just not. You are simply acculturated to believe that it is, and that acculturation began as a "mistake" among theologians in the 14th century. 

I have long been persuaded by the arguments made by Charles Taylor in A Secular Age, by Brad Gregory in Unintended Reformation, and the arguments made by John Milbank and the other figures in Radical Orthodoxy that Western theology who make this argument. They trace how this turn had enormously impactful unintended consequences for reshaping the metaphysical imaginary in the West that led to its secularization in a way that was unimaginable in other societies. This argument is about how the Univocity of Being, Nominalism, and Voluntarism in the theologies of Scotus and Ockham crowded out the participatory ontology and epistemology that was hegemonic before them.

But, you might ask, "Who cares? That was then and this is now, How is an argument among medieval monks remotely relevant to our situation in late modernity?" Well, because ideas matter. They shape how we think about the world which in turns shapes how we work in the world, which in turn shapes how we think about the world--and the next thing we know we've worked and thought our way into a nihilistic dystopia. Ideas that we have come to accept as normal have justified the liberation of greed and will to power, and we just accept it as normal. This is insane. Humans have always been driven by greed and will to power; what is unique about our late modern civilization is that we celebrate these vices rather than seek to constrain them. And sane people have no flag to rally around to push back against such insanity.

Nietzsche and Heidegger blame the metaphysical tradition that began with Socrates for this trend toward nihilism. I'd argue the opposite--that the nihilism about which they complained ensued from a misreading of Socrates and Plato in the late medieval period. This is what Maximus and Vervaeke are talking about in this video. I see the problem not as originating with Socrates and Plato, but in a creeping Averoism that led Western thinkers to misread them in a way that overemphasized their use of logic and abstract rationality. That's there in them, but it's not what makes them important. But it's what these 14th Century philosophers took from them while leaving out what they thought was mumbo jumbo. Logic and propositional truth have their place, but the hypertrophied role they played in Western philosophy going forward from that moment displaced participative knowing, and in doing so created the conditions for the meaning crisis through which we are now suffering.

After the Renaissance, a Neoplatonic participatory ontology and epistemology played little role in philosophy and mainstream Reformed theology in the West, but remained vital in the visual arts and literature. It popped up now and then in Anglo philosophy in figures like Ralph Cudworth and Henry More in the 1600s, and Thomas Taylor in the late 1700s who deeply influenced figures like Blake, Coleridge, Shelly, Wordsworth, and Emerson. Poets "got it" in a way that Western philosophers and theologians, with a few exceptions, became incapable of. I think this is important to keep in mind when listening to the Maximus/Vervaeke conversation, which is essentially about how this participative ontology and epistemology was preserved in the East, and how it provides some clues about how it might be bolstered, if not restored, in the West.

I want to emphasize that Neoplatonism is always there in a state of dormancy in the cultural memory of the West, and it can at some point be 'remembered', especially when, as now, there is such a need for it. English Romanticism and American Transcendentalism were deeply Neoplatonic in their roots, but neither was powerful enough to push back against the enormous materialist energies released by the Industrial Revolution, by its celebration of greed and will to power, and by its justification by a crudely materialist Social Darwinist ideology. Any recovery of a Wisdom tradition in the West will start with poets and mystics (See Note 3), or with philosophers who have the souls of artists and mystics, but it must spread to mainstream philosophy and science, and cognitive scientists like Vervaeke are among those beating such a path. Hence his openness to Bishop Maximus's demonstrating to him that Christian Neoplatonism is still alive and well in Eastern Christian traditions in ways it's not in the West. (See Note 4) 

And so it follows if the imaginary could shift from a richly deep participatory ontology to one that is flat and non-participative, it can switch back again--but in a postmodern key. Indeed this is the project of figures like Heidegger and thinkers influenced by him such as Paul Tillich, Henry Corbin, and Martin Buber--and other interesting figures like Owen Barfield who was influenced by Coleridge. (I was recently surprised to see that Vervaeke gives these figures a tip of the hat in the closing lectures of his Awakening series.) So in what follows, I want briefly to lay out some background to put into context Maximus's comments about shifts in Western theological thinking in the 14th century that led to what he and Vervaeke call the "tyranny of the proposition". Maximus talks about how the same issues were debated contemporaneously in the East and were resolved in ways that preserved the participative ontology that was lost in the West. This, it could be argued, is a more consequential reason for schism between the Eastern and Western Churches than the Filioque debate that led to the earlier schism In the 11th century. (See Note 5)

This turn in the West away from a participatory ontology leads to two arguments made most prominently by Duns Scotus in reaction to Aquinas's analogy of Being--the univocity of Being and Voluntarism--which in turn cleared the way for Nominalism--lurking in the background since the 1100s--and the literalism associated with it to take the field pushing participatory knowing to the fringes. (See Note 6)

So if the reader will indulge me, I want to lay out how consequential was the shift toward the "univocity of being" argued for by Duns Scotus. This is really the background for what Maximus is arguing for as the fundamental flaw in post-Thomistic scholasticism. Hopefully what I write here will be more clarifying than mystifying.

The problem for the early Church Fathers was to preserve a way of affirming that God was both transcendent and immanent without falling into a form of pantheism. This problem is at the heart of what Maximus is trying to explain to Vervaeke. Plotinian Neoplatonic emanationism, without the idea of creation ex nihilo, lends itself to pantheism because if all creation is an emanation of the One, all creation must be the same substance with the one. (See Note 7) In pantheism, individual beings arise from and melt back into the One. To think that any individual being has existence that is in any way separate from or different from the One is delusional. Christian theism, on the other hand, is personalistic; it wants to preserve a concept of persons as having irreducible, individual identities--what Maximus calls hypostases--that at the same time are deeply connected to a personal God, to other people, and to the Being of the world.  

So the challenge in Christian thought is to preserve a sense of God as 'personal' and intimately engaged with his creation while at the same time utterly, unspeakably transcendent and incomprehensible. This is emphasized in the apophaticism of Dionysius the Areopagite, which asserts that God is beyond being and so beyond comprehension. He wants to insure that God both functioned as the deep infrastructure of creation while still 'existing' outside of creation. If pantheism overemphasizes immanence in a way that merges creation with its transcendent source, Scotus's univocity of being (for reasons explained below) understands transcendence in a way that emphasizes the separateness of God from his creation and from God's playing an immanent role in creation upon whom, in the Neoplatonic ontology, it is utterly dependent for its existence and for its flourishing. As the grape depends on the vine for its nurture toward ripeness, so does creation and the individual soul depend on God. 

So why is 'univocity a problem'? It was born of a rejection of Aquinas's analogy of being in such way that it sundered the grape from the vine. In thought, at least. But as I said above, ideas have consequences. So first, let us clarify what the analogy of being accomplished:

It's often been pointed out that Aquinas was more influenced by the Neoplatonism of Dionsysius the Areopagite than by Aristotle, and that his project was not so much to Aristoteleianize theology as to integrate Aristotle within the existing Christian Neoplatonic, i.e., Dionysian metaphysical frame. Aquinas might use Aristotelian language, but he uses it in the service of a Neoplatonic participative knowing.

Good Dionysian that he was, he stressed the absolute "otherness" and apophatic (unspeakable) nature of God that asserts that nothing that we say about God can be true, at least in any propositional sense. We can say things, though, that are true by analogy or metaphor. We can know something of the Goodness of God because we have some sense of the goodness of creation, and so we can infer indirectly that its source must be good. That we can say that the uncreated God is good can only be inferred by analogy from our knowledge of creatures. And the same is true of the being of creatures and whatever might be true of the Being of God. There is nothing we can say in a propositional sense about the Being of God that is true. To think otherwise leads to idolatry and propositional tyranny. That's the challenge for Aquinas--to find a way that talks about the intimate relation of God with his creation while avoiding pantheism on the one hand, while, on the other, preserving a way of talking about God that is not reductive and idolatrous. As we'll see, Scotus's univocity of being leads to the latter. 

So for Aquinas, while this goodness or existence of creatures is sourced in God, it isn't God. It is, however, good or it exists in a way that points to God as its source. So to say that God is Good or that he 'Exists' is to affirm something in this analogous way. We know of our existence and have a taste of Goodness in our lives as creatures, and in that sense we have some taste of God, but the Goodness and Existence of God is so beyond human understanding that to say that God is good or that he exists is to say something that is true-ish, but not true in any way that we can with confidence assert that we comprehend.

Now I don't want to go down any rabbit holes regarding to what degree Scotus embraced a pure univocity of being, and so what I'm describing here is more about a current of thought that shows itself in him with more nuance than those who later go through the door he opens. But here's what the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy says about Scotus and univocity:

Scotus has a number of arguments for univocal predication and against the doctrine of analogy (Ordinatio 1, d. 3, pars 1, q. 1–2, nn. 26–55). One of the most compelling uses Aquinas’s own view against him. Aquinas had said that all our concepts come from creatures. Scotus says, very well, where will that analogous concept come from? It can’t come from anywhere. If all our concepts come from creatures (and Scotus doesn’t deny this), then the concepts we apply to God will also come from creatures. They won’t just be like the concepts that come from creatures, as in analogous predication; they will have to be the very same concepts that come from creatures, as in univocal predication. Those are the only concepts we can have—the only concepts we can possibly get. So if we can’t use the concepts we get from creatures, we can’t use any concepts at all, and so we can’t talk about God—which is false.

So it's important to understand what's going on here. He's essentially dismissing the apophaticism of the Neoplatonic tradition as illogical, and in doing so, whether or not he goes through it, he opens the door to idolatry. To refuse any logical assertions about God was the whole point of Aquinas's use of analogy--to protect a way of understanding how humans can be intimately related to a being about whom they could say nothing that had propositional truth value. Our knowledge of God is fundamentally experiential-participatory, and about that no propositions can be asserted with univocal clarity. Poetry works precisely because of its multivalence. Poetry, and any kind of religious language, can't be taken "literally", not because it's untrue, but because literalism is reductive of the infinitely deep meaning of Being and as such idolatrous. Scotus was not interested in poetic language; he was interested in logic. Aquinas was trying to use langauage as clearly as possible to make the point that language can never clearly and univocally assert anything about God. 

Scotus had no problem with Aquinas's assertion of the utter transcendence and infinity of God, but he took exception to the idea that the existence of creatures was definitionally different than the existence of God. Either a being is or it isn't. Sure, God is an infinite being and humans are only finite beings, but both "exist", and to say that God is not 'a being' or that he doesn't 'exist' is makes no sense. Clearly creation 'is' and God 'is'  So yes God exists, and yes, he transcends everything that we can know and comprehend, but the being of God as existing is logically the same as the being of creatures as existing. To claim anything else is to abuse our use of language, right? It's just logical, no?

Why is this a problem? What are the stakes in this kind of assertion? The older Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary insisted that whatever God may be is not 'univocal' with the word 'being' or 'existing'. Aquinas's analogy avoids this univocity in preserving both God's beyondness of any concept of being that we might have while at the same time showing how it's possible for a kind of knowing about him in a way that resists a propositional reductiveness and the literalness that comes with that.

The problem lies in that this assertion of univocity of being, along with voluntarism and nominalism, is part of a three-legged stool that supplants the older tradition of participatory knowing. Aquinas, in the Dionsysian tradition, strove to find a way to preserve God's immanence and transcendence. Univocity of Being/Voluntarism/Nominalism destroys the immanence part of this balance. With this new three-legged stool, God's absolute transcendence is affirmed, but so is his absolute freedom, which requires that the world not depend on him because that would constrain his freedom.

Voluntarism asserts that God created a world but did so in a way that would not impinge on his freedom, which it would do if it depended on him as participation requires. Language in nominalism hypertrophies truth as logically correct propositional assertions and loses its ontologically disclosive character in metaphor and analogy. Words just become arbitrary signifiers, and their relationship to the deep 'truth' of the world becomes significantly weakened. With these developments begin the disenchantment of the West. The world thus disconnected from God just becomes profane stuff, material to be exploited, clay to be molded by the human will to meet human needs. In the beginning, the shaping was constrained by some residual sense of the old divine immanence, but in time the shaping became whatever the market demanded. Anybody who disagreed was considered a flake or a mystic, which are synonyms for within this new mindset. 

And although not logically required by the disconnection of the human being from the mystery of being effected by these developments, it was only a matter of time before the personal God of revelation became the impersonal god of the Deists, a remote deus otiosus that had no interest in his creation or intervening in it in an way, and with whom no personal relationship was possible. The Christian idea of incarnation became unnecessary and then unbelievable. Sure, plenty of educated people remained Christians, and many of them retained a personal sense of relationship with the God of Christianity, but unless there was some powerful experience that supported that sense of relationship, Christianity became more of a moralistic system that morphed easily into Unitarianism or ethical humanism. And besides, religious belief was a private affair and should have no influence in the public square. 

And so the consequence for Western civilization was the loss of the vertical axis in the diagram above. People might have their personal relationship with God, but that had nothing to do with vertical axes or wisdom or self-transcendence or the idea of theosis that Maximus and Vervaeke are talking about. The world became flat, and the only legitimate discourse concerned knowledge on the horizontal. But I'm arguing that the vertical axis is the civilizational trellis on which the healthy vine grows, and while the vine is always there, it sprawls and grows wildly in a society in which there is no sapiential tradition, i.e., no trellis to give its growth shape. The society suffers because it produces no truly great, wise souls, and so expediency and utility are all. (See Note 8)

With the loss of Aquinas's analogy, came the loss of the ability to resist the temptation that our propositions about God come to represent truths about God, which they can never be. Better to say nothing at all. For similar reasons the Jews prohibited speaking the name of YHWH and making images of him. The danger is idolatry, and language can become idolatrous, and in fact that's exactly what happened in Western thought--and culture. So while propositions such as 'God is Good'  or 'God exists' seem piously unobjectionable to those of us who live in a world where language has become idolized, we have become insensible to the problem such statements are indicative of, which is the degree to which they really say nothing unless you participate in the truth to which they point, and if you participate in the truth of it, it would be risible to make such a statement.

The result of taking such statements seriously at this time leads to our living in a world where language, like the grape from the vine, has become sundered from its source, and the Neoplatonic project about which I write is largely about restoring language to its connection with reality. This sundering starts in the late medieval period, and nominalism is what it becomes, and we are all nominalists now. It's ironic that univocal propositions like 'God is good' could lead to nihilism, but this is the argument, and I agree with it. The implications need to be explicated more than there's room to do here, but this is what Vervaeke and Maximus are talking about when they talk about procedural and participative knowing and demonstrative reference. 

As we'll see in coming posts, literalness is the problem because of the way that it leads to idolatry, to the illusion that our propositions about God are anything more than 'demonstrative reference' to a Thou. Our language about God has no positive content; it can only say,  "Harden not your hearts. Pay attention. Respond." When you start claiming that your statements about God are anything more than that, you start demanding that people believe in certain propositions, and if they don't--then to the stake with them! Dogmatism and Literalism are a perennial temptation for religious thinking, but with the crowding out of the participative ontology and epistemology of Neoplatonism by univocity and Nominalism in the West, there was no longer a vigorous way to defend against it. And you see how too much of Chrisitianity has become, on the one hand, a soul-dead alienation factory and, on the other, an incubator for fanaticism. 

This is why ideas matter. The problem is not whether someone disagrees or agrees with a given proposition about God or anything else. The problem is that propositional tyranny became a thing in the first place and was legitimated by a kind of reductive thinking that made logic and propositional truth "super-salient" during the modern period. This came to distort our experience of reality in such a way that by the early 1600s we have Descartes sitting in his study wondering if there's a world outside of his head. This is unthinkable in a world shaped by a participative experience of reality, an experience that was--and is-- theorized by Neoplatonism in a way many are just coming once again to appreciate. The rubber hits the road in philosophy not in some abstract sense, but in the way that it helps us to participate in reality and to get a grip on it.

I was going to say something about Scotus's Voluntarism, but I'll save that for another time. This is enough for now. The main point of this post was to provide some background for what Bishop Maximus is trying to lay out regarding how Eastern Christianity in retaining its Neoplatonic framework was able to resist the West's drift toward Rationalist Materialism. Next time more about how this metaphysical imaginary provides a framework for the recovery of a participatory ontology and epistemology, which is at the heart of Vervaeke's Cog-Sci project, his commitment to the 'naturalistic imperative' notwithstanding. I'll have more to say about these conversations next week or whenever I have the time. 

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Note 1: Whatever may have been the benefits of the marriage of market capitalism with science to produce the unprecedented technological developments of the last two hundred years, the chickens are coming home to roost, and with the advent of AI-machine learning, developments in biotechnology, and the continued improvement in Virtual Reality, we are confronted with a transhumanism or a post humanism that is fundamentally in conflict to an understanding of human nature and human ends that has shaped all the great post-Axial civilizations for the last 2500 years. I am appalled that there is so little resistance to what might very well become the end of the human project unless there is a concerted global effort to push back.

Note 2: Those who have been gifted with faith must live in a metaphysical imaginary that is incompatible with the nomological order that shapes the modern conventional worldview, and so religious people can make no arguments that make sense in the mainstream societies in which a conventional Rationalist-Materialist frame is hegemonic. They can only point to all the ways that it's failing. If you don't see there's a problem, then you're not looking for an answer, and so what I write here probably seems a little nutty. Nevertheless, my imagined audience is not primarily religious people, but open-minded people who get that there's a problem and are receptive to solutions that embrace a non-materialistic metaphysics. 

Note 3: Catholic and high church Anglican thought and practice in some quarters remains an exception to this generalization. I'm very sympathetic to Millbank's, Pickstock's, and Jean-Luc Marion's theology, and I think that Pope Francis is a breath of fresh air. But the most public facing and impactful aspects of Catholicism in the U.S. are reactionary and more obstructive to what I'm talking about than receptive to it. The conservative Catholics on the  U.S. Supreme Court and Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari, Adrian Vermeule, and kids like Nate Hochman have a greater voice in defining the American Catholic intellectual ethos than the proponents of Radical Orthodoxy. Hopefully that will change at some point. 

Note 4: By "mystics" I don't mean anything particularly woo-woo, but rather the common experience--at least 40% of the population--of 'illuminating' experiences or experiences of heightened cognition or what can only be described as "spiritual". This is something available to everyone, not just elites. But elites are essential for providing an interpretive frame to help people understand the significance of these experiences and how to cultivate them in such a way that they lead to wisdom and a deeper grip on reality.

The problem that I have witnessed over and over again is that too many people who have these experiences either (1) suppress them as weird and frightening, (2) have them interpreted in primitive, distorting ways by religious cults, or (3) reduce them to aesthetic experiences that are caused by brain chemistry. It's not on the level of experience but on the level of interpretation that the restoration of the vertical Wisdom axis is most needed. I would go on to argue that poetry and the arts have suffered precisely because poets and artists have illuminating experiences but not the cultural framework to represent them in genuinely fruitful ways. 

Note 5: More consequential because causing a more fundamental rupture between the metaphysical imaginaries of the West and East. I've made several attempts to wrap my head around the Filioque debate, and it boils down to a problem, which from my point of view, seems to be exemplary of both sides falling into theology's tendency toward propositional tyranny, that is, of trying to make distinctions by the use of language and logic that is beyond the scope of our capacity to do so. It's astonishing to me that such a debate could be the cause of schism. So the idea that Eastern Orthodoxy is in some way immune to propositional tyranny in a way the West is not is at the very least questionable. But that's not a debate I want to get in here. The question of the univocity of Being, which did take hold in the West in a way it did not in the East, is very consequential--as is the related shift to Nominalism and Voluntarism.

Note 6: I'm not prepared to argue it here, but until someone convinces me otherwise, it's hard to argue that  Catholic theology retained Aquinas's participative epistemology. If so, scholasticism strangled the life out of it. Certainly scholasticism's epistemology was only latently participative, especially in its Counter-Reformation dogmatic forms that were so propositionally rigid. This kind of propositional tyranny was defended in the name of clarity, an obsession that defined the mood of the modern age, and reduced language to a form of idolatry. The 19th Century assertion of papal infallibility does not arise from an ethos that drew from a rich experience derived from a participative epistemology.

I'm sure I'm oversimplifying here, but Catholic Scholasticism seems on the whole to have suffered deeply from propositional tyranny because it was captured by an imaginary that privileged a reductive rationality in this sense. Aquinas's participative ontology/epistemology was there dormantly, and was not brought out again until thinkers like Gilson and Maritain made efforts to restore our memory of it. As mentioned in a previous post, more important for what I'm talking about is Nouvelle Theologie's retrieval of the Patristic Neoplatonism. Whatever is participative in Catholicism was preserved in its sacraments, liturgical practices, Marian devotions and veneration of the saints, its sacred music traditions, its monastic communities, and in its varied local festivals and customs. That's not nothing, but to the degree that they preserved a participatory vitality, it did so despite the rigid dogmatism of its theology and moralistic legalisms, not because of it.

Note 7: The problem with pantheism is the difficulty within it to establish a moral imperative. If everything is God, then there is no evil and there can be no better or worse, no wisdom or foolishness. There is no moral telos, and so no reason for virtue within a such a metaphysical imaginary. The good and the evil alike melt back into pleromatic Being. (I know some pantheists would object to this characterization, but that's a debate for another time and place.) Creation ex nihilo, on the other hand, requires first of all the creation of The Nothing. If everything is God before creation, where does The Nothing come from? I'm drawn to the Cabbalistic mythopoetic notion of the tsimtsum, which asserts that the infinite Godhead, in order to create the universe, had first to create a void--a Not-God--within himself.

Without the void, then everything would be God, and so the making of the void within the godhead creates the possibility of there being 'Not-God', i.e., the Nothing out of which the universes is created. This void in Genesis is imaged as the "Deep", the chaotic nothingness as yet unmixed with the form-investing energies of the the creative Godhead. This idea maps well to a Jewish/Christian transfiguration of Neoplatonism insofar as provides an imagination of a moral cosmos that stretches between chaos and the void of nonexistence at one extreme and the density of form and existence at the other extreme.

The human moral project begins somewhere between these two extremities, and human freedom lies in whether it will choose to ascend toward greater levels of density of Being, i.e., to become more real analogously as God is real, or to descend toward dissolution and chaos and in doing so to become less real.  As Maximus says, Humans become by grace what God is by nature. We don't become God, but we "can" become divinized. To become divinized requires, therefore, not that we become some plaster saint, but rather that we become more deeply, densely human, i.e., "mensch-y". And this process of gradually becoming more real in this sense is not only self-transformative, but transformative of the world. This process is what Vervaeke is trying to articulate when he talks about his "virtual engine". (See his lecture on Aristotle.)

And so for Christians the Pauline idea of incarnation as kenosis comes to make a kind of profound sense because it suggests that the redemption of the world--not just humans, but all creation--required that the godhead, which from the beginning contained creation as the emptiness that is not-God--entered into that emptiness in an unprecedented way. His energies brought creation into being and sustained it from the beginning--but radiating from outside it into it, but the Incarnation suggests that a new kind of relationship between the Godhead and creation was initiated. No longer was the relationship outside-in, from the periphery toward the center, but now inside-out from the deep center.

When Nietzsche declared that God is dead, he was talking about a phenomenon that was broadly experienced in the late 19th century, but he misinterpreted its significance. God had not died; he had just changed his address. This had been true since Pentecost, but the social imaginary hadn't adjusted. Modern science has forced us to ditch the hierarchical imaginary, but that doesn't mean that Neoplatonism is incompatible with science. God, I would argue is no longer to be sought as a presence outside the void shining down and into it as the old Plotinian/Dionysian hierarchical imaginary mapped it, but now need to seek him at the center of it radiating up and out.

Any postmodern Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary, I would argue, needs to start with this relocation of the origin of emanationary "energies" of the One from the periphery or creation to the center, and I would suggest that requires a re-imagination of what had been conceived as an itinerary of Ascent up the chain of Being to now an itinerary of Descent into the guts of the world, to use a Vervaeke phrase I like. The goal is not to get out of the immanent world into a transcendent, timeless, eternal world at the top of the chain of Being, but to discover the possibilities for transcendence within and at the heart of chaotic immanence and so to be the agents for its transformation. 

Maximus was correct when he said that the Eastern Fathers transfigured Neoplatonism in a way that enriched it and popularized it in the light of the Christian revelation. I'm arguing that Neoplatonism needs further transfiguration in the light of how this inside-out imagination of the post-Incarnation world makes salient the idea of descent into the guts of the world, and that such an idea of Neoplatonic descent will expand and make more meaningful what scientists understand as their task. 

I have no doubt that there is a dimension outside of time and space, and that there are people who have experienced it, but, since the Incarnation and Pentecost, that's not our concern and not the kind of experience that we should seek. The task for us is transcendence within immanence. That, at least, is how I have come to think about it. If the human task is to get a deeper grip on reality, that requires plumbing the depths of the human soul, which correlates with plumbing the depths of the world. We Christians celebrate this week the events that made this human descent not just a possibility, but a moral imperative that frames the human project going forward. I see this as very compatible with what Vervaeke is talking about. I also see such a framing as imperative for framing the human project in way that offers a robust alternative to where techno-capitalism is dragging us. 

Note 8: I do not think having such a vertical axis is incompatible with democracy and an open society. People should be free to believe whatever they want and should never be forced into anything by the state. People cannot be coerced into being good, they must be inspired to become good. Democracy is a political regime that provides the space for people to choose to be as good or bad as they choose to be so long as they don't infringe on the rights of others. The really important question is what kind of society would inpire most people to freely choose to be as good and wise as they can be. Secular Liberalism with its Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary fails in almost every respect except to protect individual rights and freedoms. 

Nevertheless, I think it's wrong to assume that democracy must necessarily have a leveling or least-common-denominator effect, where the the crude and the vulgar have equal footing with the the sublime and holy. Right now that is true, but it need not be. A healthy society with a healthy sapiential tradition would inspire most people of good will toward self-transcendence and wisdom. That most don't is not because they aren't capable of it but because no public figures model it, and it has little legitimacy as a real possibility. How that might be remedied is perhaps the most important question facing us in the next few decades as developments in technology threaten to shape by default what the human project will become if there is not a robust constituency of the Wise to resist it.  

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

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.

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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 are at the very least dabbling in illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum and in doing so has given Progressives a bad name. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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.