After the Future

Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis

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

--"Jerusalem" by William Blake

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

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

So while the Greek influence is strong, there is obviously a lot going on in nascent Christianity that has little or nothing to do with Neoplatonism. My goal in this post is  to deepen understanding how these early Christians' experience of the Living Real was shaped by their imagination of it. To do so requires understanding the Greek influence as playing an almost equal role with Jewish influence.

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

Many moderns found it possible to take these experiences of self-transcendence seriously because, even though people often still have these experiences (qq.v, James, Varieties of Religious Experience; Taylor, Waking from Sleep), our metaphysical imaginary has changed in the last five hundred years in ways that have delegitimated such experience. They are reduced to subjective psychological/aesthetic experiences rather than thought of as disclosive of the Real. So underlying my argument is the assumption that this inability to take an ontology that comprises a spiritual or transcendent dimension is a mistake, and that this mistake has profound consequences of which we are mostly oblivious. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Ed. Note: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series. Regarding future installments in this series, they will come when I get to it, which depends on how much time and energy I have for it. The goal going forward will be to understand the historical development, i.e., the historical-cultural impact of Christian Neoplatonism on North Atlantic and Mediterranean societies through to the Renaissance, how it went underground after the Reformation, and how it worked as an underground, inspiring force in the arts and philosophy through the modern period. (3/30/22)]

Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back to the ancient Mediterranean world:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGinn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGinn goes on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

----------

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 11.

++++++++++

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

 

Progressive Fever Dreams

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

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

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

--Corey Robin

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

See also "Young Socialist Intellectuals".

Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture

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

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

--Terry Eagleton, Culture and the Death of God

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I see what I'm doing as small 'c' catholic in the spirit of Pico della Mirandolla. I am writing from a Christian perspective because that's where my roots lie and because I believe its disclosures, but I do not see it as incompatible with others who do it from a Buddhist or Hindu or Muslim perspective--or the cognitive-science approach exemplified in John Vervaeke's work. And it's for this reason that much of what I write is about the restoration of Christian Neoplatonism, which is metaphysically cognate with other such post-Axial traditions. We all have things to learn from one another. There will always be differences, but we also need to acknowledge that we all have a stake in the future of humanity that rationalist materialism and its mechanomorphic imagination of the human being does not. 

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

Note 2: This is part of an ongoing series entitled "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" that I first started posting in December. Part 1 can be found here, and you can find at the bottom there links to the other parts to this series.

Go to Part 8.

 

Genealogy Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series

Plato lived at a time when the inner crisis of the traditional Greek polis and the religion intimately bound up with it had become evident, and there seems to be no reason to deny that this had a profound effect on his decision to abandon the public arena to cultivate the wisdom necessary to build a more just human society. The reform of the polis meant the reform not only of its citizens, but of its religion as well. If society is out of joint, it can only be because humanity's whole attitude toward the universe and its divine source was in need of repair. Plato's philosophy is powered by an unremitting desire for reform: personal, political, and religious.

Bernard McGinn, The Foundations of Mysticism, 1991, p.  25

If you've  been reading my "A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" series, you are aware that I just learned of Vervaeke's "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis" series of YouTube video lectures. If you are intererested in what I am doing, you will be interested in what he's doing. We are barking up the same tree. But I thought I'd take a few minutes to explain that while much, if not most, of what I'm arguing is consonant with Vervaeke, there are a few critical places where we disagree. At the time I wrote Parts 4A and 4B in this series, I had only watched up to his Lecture 10, which I found very helpful in making my argument for the restoration of a metaphysical imaginary that had restored a vertical or transcendent wisdom dimension. I have to-date completed watching his lectures up to 24 on Hegel. 

It's clear that Vervaeke wants to restore a wisdom dimension to our way of knowing as much as I do, but he's mainly interested in establishing its legitimacy from a cognitive-science point of view. I think that his main concerns are to establish a broadened therapeutic model that establishes scientifically legitimized psycho-technologies that help people overcome their individual meaning crises. I am more interested in the broader social-political dimension of the meaning crisis and how that might be resolved in a way that enjoys broad consensus. I know--good luck with that. Nevertheless, however unrealistic such a project might seem at this moment, things do change in unexpected ways. So I do not see this as an idle exercise, but rather, if nothing else, as something that might be of use for my grandchildren. 

Vervaeke recognizes that these psycho-technologies are not new, and he's at pains to show how they were understood and used in shamanic relgious traditions but more importantly in the great Post-Axial religious traditions. His first 24 lectures tell the story of Post-Axial cognitive development by spending a little time with Buddhism, but mostly by tracing out historical developments in the Western religious or "awakened" thinking from Socrates, through the Gnostics, Neoplatonists, Augustine, Aquinas, Luther and on to the Romantics and Hegel. Considering its ambitious scope, I think he provides a very solid survey in a very concise format. I have a quibble here and there, but nothing serious. I think more positively about Romanticism than he does, for instance. 

We differ in a more significant way in that I have a broader concern, and a more ambitious argument to make, which is reflected in the epigraph. The Socratic/Platonic project was to reform the religion or metaphysical imaginary of early Hellenism. Their project initiated the Western wing of the Axial Revolution. The crisis in early 5th/4th century Athens is very different from the crisis that we face, but I don't think the solution is all that different, which is a recovery of the vertical or transcendent dimension that first broadly emerged in the mid-first millennium BCE. The loss of this dimension is what we now think of as the death of God. I think of this loss as temporary and aberrant. I believe it can be found again, but in a way adapted to a post-Positivist, global cultural milieu. 

It goes to what I wrote in Part 1: Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don't. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres--and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.

Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism (See Note 1), is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religiions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke's solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I'm all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos. 

Vervaeke makes it clear that while he recognizes the significance of the Axial Revolution, he doesn’t think that its use of mythos is retrievable because it is not plausible for us as late moderns after the death of God, and he seems to think that cognitive science can do the job that mythos once did. Maybe he's right, but I'm dubious. I understand why he thinks this--it's hard to imagine anything else within a metaphysical imaginary dominated by Rationalist Materialism. I'm trying to imagine a way out of those constraints--or at least how transcending the constraints of Rationalist Materialism and its positivist biases might be possible. If individuals can do it in a fruitful way, groups can, and if groups can, then so can the larger society. This has happened historically before, and it can happen again. Whether it will or not, I don't know, but I think that if Vervaeke and his colleagues in cognitive science are successful in their project, it prepares the way for the success of what I'm arguing for. 

Vervaeke probably wouldn't agree because he seems to be in the religion-without-religion camp, which, imo, is unsustainable even if it were desirable. Religionless religion = contentless wisdom. He argues that the content given in awakening experiences isn't relevant. In one of his lectures he says that some people have experiences of higher consciousness after which they say, “I know now that there is a God,” and others say, “I am sure now that no God exists.” So he seems to think that the content of one cancels out the content of the other in a way that makes both unreliable testimony and as such not legitimate knowledge. And besides, knowledge isn't the point. Overcoming the constraints is. 

I understand that some people find the religionless option attractive insofar as it insures against a rigidifying dogmatism, but there are other ways of dealing with that problem without giving up the idea that right understanding of the content given in these experiences is possible and preferable because of the way it can enrich culture. And it fails to address what I feel is the really important problem going forward, which is that a consensus needs to be developed that has enough potency to resist where Rationalist Materialism is dragging us. 

For Vervaeke, fruitfulness is achieved by the individual overcoming or transcending psychological constraints at one level by rising to a higher level of cognition, and I recognize the importance and legitimacy of that. Parts 4A and 4B explore its importance. But surely there can also be a legitimacy that comes from traditions that integrate the broad range of insights of those who have had a broad range of experiences of “higher consciousness”.

There are already sapiential traditions that have the legitimacy of thousands of years of testing truth claims derived from a wide variety of awakening experiences. Sapiential traditions have ways to discern the legitimacy or delusional character of the experience, to take the content that people report regarding their experiences seriously on their own terms, and then to reflect how they might be integrated into a larger, broader understanding so that these experiences might be interpreted in the most fruitful way that expand knowledge on the vertical dimension. This is real knowledge with real content.  

So to take his example about contradictory testimony about the existence of God above: the Dark Night of the Spirit is something recognized in Christian mysticism that in no way contradicts other experiences people have of the radiance of God’s agapic love. In fact the experience of darkness or absence is an indicator of a more advanced state of spiritual development. The two experiences are not contradictory, but different aspects within a bigger picture. The experience of absence is just as much content as the experience of presence. Each is powerful and important, but the interpretation is more important. And if you have the first experience outside the context of a broad, well-established sapiential tradition, you would probably be persuaded that there is no God. The sapiential tradition provides the bigger picture, a picture that hardly anybody is familiar with anymore, apparently not even Vervaeke who has made a sincere effort to educate himself about post-Axial spiritual traditions.

So from my pov, he is doing good work, but it needs to be supplemented. And that's really the goal of where I'll be going in the development of my Genealogy series. When I first started it in December, my goal was to make the case for Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary in a postmodern key, and that's still where I want to go. The five parts that I've written so far were attempts to clear the ground, so to say, to do what I can to make such a project at least minimally plausible for the skeptical but open reader. My plan is to show how powerful the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis was for 1500 years, why it broke down, and why and how I think it could be restored--not in a spirit of nostalgia but in a spirit adapted to a postmodern/post-positivist milieu.

I recognize people like John Millbank and the others in the Radical Orthodoxy 'movement' as allies in this project, but my goal is to write in a way that is more accessible for the non-specialist. I don't see what I'm doing as original, but I think I have a good nose for what's 'originary', i.e., what is connected to the Living Real, which is the origin of anything worth paying attention to. So I see my task as to curate and synthesize the originary work of others, hopefully in a way that is interesting and helpful for those who take the time to read through these long and admittedly first-drafty essays. This is a blog after all, not a book. It's a record of my learning and thinking about what its implications are. Maybe someday it will turn into a book, but I have no particular ambition to write one. 

The second part--why it broke down--is already laid out in a summary I made of Charles Taylor's A Secular Age, which can be found here, but in order to do justice to the first part--the power and depth of the Christian Neoplatonic synthesis--I think it's necessary for me to go deeper and into more detail. And my primary resource for doing this is Bernard McGinn's remarkably, rich and clear exposition of the entire tradition of Western mysticism in his "Presence of God" series. I'll also be drawing on Pierre Hadot from time to time, who was a source for McGinn and Vervaeke. McGinn is currently a retired University of Chicago scholar who published the first volume in this series in 1991 and the most recent in 2021, so it spans thirty years (so far?). For the purposes of this "Genealogy", I will focus primarily on Vol 1, The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the 5th Century and Volume 4, The Harvest of Mysticism in Medieval Germany.

I'm reading in both now at the same time. The first is important for establishing how the Christian revelation and Greek contemplative 'theoria' was developed in the "schools" founded by Plato, Aristotle, and others over six hundred years that culminates in the Plotinian synthesis, how Jews and Christians interacted with this tradition in such a way that culminated in Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos. Volume 4 is important for the way Augustine and Pseudo-Dionysos were 'modernized', so to say, after Albertus Magnus moved from Paris to Cologne in the mid-1200s to lay the foundations for modern science on the one hand, and on the other, the spiritual tradition we now call the Rhineland mystics. The great figures in this northern European Christian Neoplatonic tradition include Albert's student Aquinas, and their younger contemporary Meister Eckhart, Eckhart's disciples Suso and Tauler, then Nicholas of Cusa, and later Jacob Boehme. (Is it oxymoronic to be a Lutheran Neoplatonist? A question for later consideration.)

I've been arguing for a while that the southern wing of Christian Neoplatonism that flowered in Ficino's Florentine Platonic Academy is the key to understand the criteria by which great art should be evaluated from the Renaissance through Romanticism--esp., Keats, Shelly, Wordsworth, Coleridge and beyond. But the other little understood Christian Neoplatonic stream tracks through the Rhineland toward German Idealism. If German Idealism is incomprehensible without the Rhineland mystics, neither are they comprehensible without understanding the proto-Christian Neoplatonism that developed starting with figures like Clement of Alexandria and Origin.

And none of any of this would be comprehensible if there were not an experiential, "awakened" dimension that was the foundation for all their thinking. This is a sapiential tradition that had vitality until the middle of the 19th Century when it hit a wall after Hegel. (Is Wm James an exception? We'll look into that.) The question now is whether Vervaeke is right that there's no recovery of the knowledge, qua mythos, that lies on the other side of that wall. I think that it is recoverable, and that this great tradition can be renewed--not just for people at the fringe, but in a way that inspires a broader cultural renaissance. I continue to promote the possibility of renaissance not just because I believe it's possible but because I believe the alternative is so very, very dark. 

So the plan, for now at least, is to do what I can to understand that tradition better for myself and to do what I can to make it interesting and plausible for readers here who might also be interested to understand it better. The installments over the next weeks  (and months) will explore the Axial impact of Socrates and Plato, the schools that developed from them. For reasons explained above, I'm more interested in this 'tradition' not for its various thought systems but for its development of life-transformative psycho-technologies, to use Vervaeke's term, that afforded experiences of transcendence that grounded their thought systems, which were left-brain-hemisphere attempts to understand the world in the light of their experiences on the vertical dimension. And then the task is to understand how awakened Christian thinkers appropriated these technologies and transformed them. 

Go to Part 7,

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Note 1: I just want to clarify that I am not a Luddite, I am not against markets; I am not against innovation, and I am not against rationality, except in its reductively materialist forms. And I am against the tail wagging the dog when the tail is Neoliberal technocapitalism and the dog is the broader society. The tail wags the dog when the dog has no ground upon which to set its feet to resist, and so cannot say No to developments in technocapitalism that are in techno-capitalism's interests but not the interests of the larger society or of humanity in general. 

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

Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 6.

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

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

At some point I might go back and organize this series into something easier to follow, but in the meanwhile it's simply a raw reflection of my thinking through things as I go. The problem/question that I'm working on is why, if most people believe in or are open to an ontology that has a spiritual dimension, are we living in a culture where a materialist imaginary dominates in the most important areas that shape our collective priorities. I'm also interested to think about whether it's possible for a society to develop an imaginary that operates at a higher moral or wisdom level. What I say below does not depend on your having watched this lecture by John Vervaeke, but it will help. I recommend that you start around the 17-minute mark. Or you can read this first and go back and watch the video. 

Vervaeke is presenting a model for understanding what consciousness does, which is that it provides a way to focus our attention in such a way that it filters out the vast amount of possible information that there is out in the world and in our memories so that we might focus on what is relevant or salient. What defines relevance? Well that depends on your 'salience landscape'. He references Piaget's ideas about child development to illustrate how constraints within one's salience landscape are overcome when one has insights.

In the five-candies example, he points out that most four-year-olds when given the choice between two rows of five candies in which the second row is arranged with more space between the candies, invariably choose the second row because it looks like more. Why? Because it takes up more space. Space, says Vervaeke, is "super salient" for the four-year-old, and super salience is usually a sign that you're stuck or blocked by unconscious patterns that organize what is salient for you. Normal cognitive development is all about the way you transcend those unconscious patterns by having insights. An older kid will understand--will have an insight--that space isn't relevant, that the only thing that matters is the number of candies. What's in the world does not change, but your ability to see the world with greater clarity and depth does. 

So the point that Piaget and Vervaeke are making is that the way we see the world is not shaped by what's there but by the constraints in our salience landscape. Cognitive development for all of us, children or adults, is determined by overcoming the constraints of our salience landscapes at different points in our life. The problem lies not in our being blind to evidence but with the unconscious psychological systems or structures that organize what is 'salient' or relevant.

This goes a long way in explaining what has been described as the epistemic bubbles that shape our polarized politics. Kellyanne Conway was mocked for talking about 'alternative facts', but she would have avoided the mockery if she said instead that there are alternative salience landscapes, or alternative interpretive frames, which is what I think she really meant. Liberals also would do well to understand better how their own salience landscapes shape what facts are relevant, and which are not. 

Our salience landscapes shape the interpretive frame that shapes for us what's meaningful. If we lived in a society that had a vertical dimension, we would understand that the path of wisdom is a life-long process of self-transcendence, i.e, of a continuous transformation of our salience landscapes. There are an awful lot of people, and many of them are our leaders in media, business, and politics, who haven't advanced much further than to see the world from within a typical middle-schooler's salience landscape. Middle School is when we all learn to be Social Darwinists. 

In theory, there is no limit to the kind of transcending that is possible. The wisest among us are those who have progressed furthest in transcending their constraints--this is what it means to be truly free--but there are limits to what's possible for any individual that are set by the collective metaphysical imaginary into which a person is acculturated. You can't get too far ahead of the pack, or you're completely in your own world, which is insanity. We all need to keep a foot in the social imaginary of our contemporaries. 

Hopefully those who are more advanced in their self-transcending are beating a path to make it easier for the rest of us to follow. And when enough people follow, a tradition develops, and after a while that tradition, if it remains vital, provides to the broader society an alternative salience landscape that more and more people will find attractive because of the self-transcending benefits it affords, and things can reach a tipping point where the entire society flips its salience landscape so that it is more in touch with the Living Real. This happened in the Axial Age and some would argue during the Upper Paleolithic. But it also explains how imaginaries evolve, including, for instance, how intellectuals, even many of those in the French nobility, became "Republicans" in the 18th Century. For them it was a combination of seeing that the current ancien regime wasn't working and that a compelling republican alternative was being presented by the philosophes.

Because these constraints that structure our salience landscapes are culturally conditioned, they shape a consensus reality in very provisional ways. They feel more real than they are. Premodern societies had constraints that are very different from the constraints of modern societies, and so what is relevant or salient for premoderns is very different from what is for moderns. The point is that we see things that our ancestors did not see because what we see as salient from within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary is very different from what is salient for people from within, really, any premodern metaphysical imaginary, whether in the West or anywhere else.

The challenge for us is to be open to the possibility that they saw things that we do not. I am not saying that we have to re-inhabit a premodern imaginary, but that we must retrieve in a postmodern key what was lost, which is the vertical or wisdom dimension. Wisdom was salient for our ancestors in a way it just is not for us, and so the question is whether we are capable of developing a new salience landscape where wisdom can be restored as salient not just for a few individuals here and there, but for the society as a whole. That is the formula for 'renaissance' or rebirth--a recovery or remembering of something vital that has been lost or forgotten. 

All of us are working within constraints, and to think that we know T.H.E. truth is always delusional, but some are wiser than others because their cognitive development has helped them see through certain common systematic or structural constraints that come with their acculturation. To use Vervaeke's language, they have learned how to realize when they are bullshitting themselves.

We can never live without constraints because we need the necessary filters that consciousness provides to prevent our being overwhelmed by too much reality. But some filters (or salience landscapes) are more aligned with what is really there, and the goal is to be continuously trading up, so to say, i.e., to trade in one set of constraints for another that helps you to see more deeply what is really there, to get into, to use Vervaeke's phrase, "deep contact with the guts of the world". This was Heidegger's and Merleau-Ponty's project, and it's the project of Iain McGilchrist. And, as I argue here, it was the project of the great Renaissance artists influenced by Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism. 

If you watch Vervaeke's earlier lectures you will see that Socrates is a hero for him for pretty much the same reasons he's one for me. In Part 3, I talk at length about how Socrates was a master of cognitive development in Vervaeke's sense. The beginning of wisdom is to know that you don't know, and Socrates' project was to confront his interlocutors with the fact that they were bullshitting themselves. It's all about seeing the limits of conventional wisdom, but it goes deeper.

Socrates understood that the people with whom he was conversing were living within a constrained salience landscape that came with their acculturation. For us those constraints are also shaped by experiences growing up, including trauma, but mostly from what you learn about and submit to in progressive stages about how the dreary "real world" works within the constraints of a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary. And the same was true in Socrates day, even if the constraints were structured differently. Whether then or now, our experience is shaped by our acculturation starting with the Oedipus Complex when we learn what our role is in society and to follow its codes.

This is Stage 1 in Kohlberg's moral development scheme,and his successive stages illustrate how what might be described as 'moral' saliency landscapes progress from pre-Conventional, to Conventional, and, for some people, to post-Conventional stages. [**See note at end of this post where I expand on this.] Schiller and Kierkegaard talk about similar shifts in saliency landscapes. The point in all of these is to move beyond or to transcend conventional constraints, and to find something that in contrast was 'really real'. This isn't a justification for antinomianism, but for discovering a deeper "law", a deeper understanding about how reality actually works. And it isn't just an intellectual exercise, but one that, if successful, enriches and deepens your experience of the world.

As an aside here, a problem that I have with a lot of New Age spirituality is that it's all about developing human potential that doesn't really care that much about moral development so much as it cares about cognitive development. Or it's what David Brooks calls the "higher selfishness" that is typified by Gwyneth Paltrow's new-agey lifestyle brand "Goop". There is no real wisdom without moral development, no matter how much other aspects of human potentiality might be expanded or developed. I don't think Vervaeke, qua cognitive scientist, falls into this trap. I don't agree with him about everything, but I respect his moral seriousness and sincerity. Moral seriousness is not a problem for any of the great civilizational post-Axial religions, and that's why the recovery of the depth dimension must start with them and what they have to say about self-transcendence.

My own contribution to this, for what's worth, is from a Christian Neoplatonic perspective, but I have the deepest reverence for the other great traditions from which I will always have much to learn. I will argue in a future post that the Christian Neoplatonic tradition does not reject Gnosticism, but takes what's best from it and the other ancient mystery religions, and integrates them in a synthesis that has the highest level of coherency, scope, and richness. The renewed interest in Gnosticism after Nag Hammadi, while it might undermine a certain kind of wisdomless, conventional, law-and-order Christianity, does not undermine its deepest mission found in the the canonical New Testament, particularly in Paul and John, which is to provide a model for self-transcendence grounded in a moral ontology.] 

Socrates' elenchus, I argue in Part 3, was a tool to awaken his interlocutors to the constraints of the their salience landscape so as to open them up to the possibility of experiencing what's really there at a deeper, richer level of perception and understanding. Its relevance for us today lies in that while the elenchus could be used effectively to disabuse materialists of their constraints, the same is true for religious people. The problem with Christians or Buddhists or Muslims--or any religious group--is the way that their beliefs rigidify to become part of a system of constraints that need to be transcended if they are to truly understand the deeper truths to which their doctrines point.

We are all fools--whether religious or irreligious--if we think that we are not operating under constraints in our current salience landscapes. And all of us--whether religious or irreligious--are all captured by the constraints of a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary, which creates a baseline salience landscape from which we all need to be liberated. It has a tether on all of us. The problem lies in that too many people are too comfortable and too well-adapted to it, and too many of them are making decisions that shape our life together, and not for the better. 

But in the same way that we all need salience landscapes, all religions need doctrines. The idea of doctrine-less religion or religion without religion is silly. It is embraced mostly by people who have strong religious instincts but who are either trying to shake the rigid religious formation in which they were brought up or because they associate these doctrines with the rigid, doctrinaire people whom they understandably find deeply unattractive.

But doctrines should not be thought of as unbelievable things that we believe anyway because we fearfully think that's what is expected of us--that's Kohlberg Stage 1. We should think of them rather as invitations for contemplation. We should feel challenged by them. We need to take them seriously because people wiser than we have taken them seriously for thousands of years. They are truths that call us into a deeper relationship with them, and if we approach them in the right way, they will deepen and broaden us, i.e., increase our level of wisdom as they transform our salience landscapes.

A living tradition is one in which the insights of one generation are passed to the next, not as propositional assertions of truth, but in the vitality of the lives lived in that tradition that are exemplary of its wisdom and moral fruitfulness. One is inspired by their lives, and so one wants to follow on the path of wisdom and moral fruitfulness they trod before us. So we approach any doctrine in a spirit of learned ignorance. We must assume that we have no idea what the doctrine signifies, and that rational analysis of the doctrine is by itself an approach that is unlikely to lead to a deeper understanding of it. But if we are even half alive, we feel that there is something calling to us in it, and we hearken to it. We cognize the truth, and then we use our rational faculties to integrate that truth with what we already know or in some cases to revise what we already know, because the "insight" delivers us from the limitations of the salience landscape that made the knowing at this higher level so difficult. 

So I've been arguing that because the salience landscape in which most people today are acculturated is so profoundly shaped by Rationalist Materialist assumptions, it is extraordinarily difficult to take spiritual or awakening experiences seriously or to interpret them in a way that might actually be life-transforming in a positive way. People will continue to have these experiences, but the question is whether they are having them in such a way that the ontonormativity that challenges them to align their own lives on a higher salience landscape can have a similarly transformative effect in our broader cultural life.

I suspect a broader cultural shift will happen when a critical mass of people who have these experiences--the 30-40%--coalesce around a coherent interpretation of their experience that creates the conditions that make a next step possible. In other words, a new collective salience landscape emerges within a certain group within the culture, and then this group has a ripple effect throughout the culture, and perhaps even reaches a tipping point where its salience landscape becomes normative for the whole culture. If such a thing is to happen, its appeal will lie in that it is continuous with what we have come to understand about reality through science, but reframes scientific factuality not with "alternative facts" but with a compelling alternative salience landscape that meets the criteria for coherence, scope, richness, and adaptability in a way that nothing available to us now in our collective life does. 

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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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.

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

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.  

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.  Example: healthy testing of boundaries typical in middle school 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 Athenian law. 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.

6. The rules might be right 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 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 that 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, which is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil.

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker 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--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior. 

Genealogy Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

I had been struggling about how to present what I want to say about Western Axiality in a way that might make some sense when I came across this lecture series by the Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke entitled "Awakening from the Meaning Crisis". (His Lecture 10, which is relevant for Posts 4A and 4B in this series, can be found here.) Until a few weeks ago, I had never heard of him or his work, but he's clearly barking up the same tree that I am. His approach is from a different angle than the one I'm taking, but he provides some critical pieces from cognitive science that I see as supporting the argument I am trying to make.  

Vervaeke is more interested in the experiential, cognitive aspects that I've been calling 'knowing on the vertical dimension'--or 'Wisdom'. I'm more interested in the Mythos aspect, which is more about how the cultural matrix shapes/programs/configures individual experience. Mythos provides the meaning framework that makes experiences on the vertical interpretable. I'm arguing that our "meaning crisis" derives from our culture no longer having a broadly accepted mythos. I'm not sure Vervaeke would agree that our lack of 'mythos' is the cause of our crisis because he wants to develop an interpretive frame that is more cognitive-science based, with emphasis on the science. And he might not agree, but I think that what he means by a 'salience landscape' can be borrowed and repurposed to help me establish what I mean by a 'metaphysical imaginary'. Regardless, there's plenty of overlap there, and I'll get into that in "Part 4B". 

I'm assuming that anybody who reads this blog knows what I'm talking about regarding 'wisdom.' Vervaeke is spelling it out in a cognitive-science idiom that might make it more acceptable for people who are allergic to religious language. For him wisdom is the oppositie of foolishness, and foolishness is the innate human proclivity to self-delusion and self destructive behavior. And so wisdom is the antidote insofar as its an intrinsic human developmental capacity for self-transcendence, if by that we mean overcoming self-delusion by getting a deeper and firm grip on reality. And if Reality is what I call the Living Real, then growth in wisdom means a growing into a deeper participative relationship with the Living Real. (See Note 1) But clearly for the kind of metaphysical imaginary I think we need to restore in the future, its legitimacy would require that most people have some level of experiential wisdom by Vervaeke's definition--or at least respect for people who do have it. 

Referencing Steve Taylor's Awakening from Sleep, Vervaeke says that research studies have found that 30-40% of people claim to have had "wisdom" or "awakening" experiences of some kind. This doesn't surprise me. Just read Wm. James's The Varieties of Religious Experience to get some sense of how common such experiences are. In the U.S. today under 10% of people are atheists or agnostics, which means, whether or not they are churchgoers, the vast majority of Americans--perhaps 90%+--are open to an ontology that includes a spiritual dimension, however "spiritual" might be thought of or imagined.

The problem/question for me is why such a large percentage of the population hasn't a stronger and more positive impact in shaping the metaphysical imaginary but instead allows a materialist imaginary to be the default. As I argue in Part 1, while there are benefits to pluralism, hyperpluralism in this area of "knowledge" has the effect of dividing and conquering any opposition to the materialist imaginary. And, as suggested above, and I argue in Part 3, hyperpluralism is largely an effect of there being no cultural trellis, no Mythos, to provide an interpretive frame for people to make sense of the experiences they have.

Ten people might have similar awakening experiences, but there might be ten different interpretive frames used to make sense of them, and so each cancels the other out in terms of establishing broader legitimacy. And more importantly, experiences don't self-interpret--everything depends on the kind of interpretive frame that the individual brings to his awakening experience, and some interpretations lead to positive and others to very negative, if not insane, results. Context is critical. 

So the insanity does not originate with the experience itself, but with the insanity of interpretation given it. There's the awakening experience, but the wisdom only comes when it gets interpreted correctly, and correct interpretation comes from a wisdom tradition renewed in each generation by people who have had awakening experiences and developed them in a sane, morally fruitful way. Moral fruitfulness is the ultimate test of the interpretive frame for any kind of awakening experience. Right now, there's no such sane tradition, except on the fringes of our social life. And so while I believe 30-40% of people have had such awakening experiences, I wonder how many have interpreted them in sane, morally fruitful ways. 

And so there's no broadly agreed upon criteria to sort out what's sane or insane, real or delusional, profound or superficial. If a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary with a vertical dimension ever emerges in the future, it will have to draw on the work of people like Vervaeke and his colleagues who are trying to develop a social science model to do this kind of sorting. More power to them, but I fear that the ethos of 'cognitive science' is still 'constrained' by the positivist taint imbued by the dominant Rationalist Materialist imaginary. That's fine, because I think that ultimately, whether Vervaeke wants to go there or not, there is an implied metaphysics that needs to be extrapolated from the experiences he is trying to understand. Ultimately, I believe a "right understanding" consensus will emerge, even if it's premature or unscientific to extrapolate a metaphysics from those experiences at this point.

In the meanwhile, I realize that when I represent myself as a Christian Neoplatonist, it makes no sense to almost everyone I know, including other Christians. Whatever floats your boat, they most probably would think, because they have no idea what I mean by it. And yet I'd argue that Christian Neoplatonism was the metaphysical imaginary for Western Civilization for over a thousand years because it provided what Vervaeke calls a coherent "salience landscape", i.e., a coherent, meaningful world picture in which certain things came into focus for our ancestors that no longer come into focus for us. Because they no longer come into focus for us, does not mean they are not there.

And so for centuries, right up to the Reformation, this imaginary worked for many of the culture's most intelligent and creative people, i.e., those who were knowledgeable on the vertical or wisdom dimension. Most educated people today know more on the horizontal dimension than St. Augustine did. That does not mean they are wiser than he. Whatever the scope of his personal genius, he had an interpretive frame provided by Christian revelation and Neoplatonism to work with that gave his thinking and his spirit scope to grow. We don't have that scope now, and we need something like it that works in a plausible way in a postmodern, post-secular key. I would argue that one of the principal reasons we have so few great souls who play a larger role in shaping our contemporary social imaginary is because they have no trellis on which to grow and expand. 

So when I talk about Neoplatonism, I am talking about an ontology that assumes that we are living in a world that we mostly don't understand because we don't really see or experience what is really real. And while the goal is to gradually improve our experience and grasp of what is really real, it is extremely difficult to do it in a society whose metaphysical imaginary lacks a vertical dimension. Having a vertical dimension is not unique to Christian Neoplatonism. Other post-Axial religions and philosophies make similar assertions and prescribe similar cures. But Christian Neoplatonism is my tradition, and it contributes to our understanding about what it means to be human in ways that other traditions do not, and so it deserves to be correctly understood by more people than do.

Like most serious Christians, I see Christianity as being first and foremost about moral development, but what distinguishes me from most Christians is that I care about the ontological and epistemological framework in which true moral development needs to be understood. Such a frame is not absolutely necessary, but it provides the aforementioned trellis, which is helpful for healthy, expansive growth. I think there would be more people with a profounder degree of moral development and the 'wisdom' that comes with that if there was such a trellis. When I look around, I don't see a lot of wisdom and depth to help people with their moral development. I see mostly moralistic platitudes and pop-psychological nonsense because the only trellises broadly available are moralistic and pop-psychological. 

Each vine finds its own way on the trellis, but it helps if there is some consensus about the trellis's basic structure and orientation. All I'm saying is that we have something to learn about that from the tradition of Christian Neoplatonism adapted for the kind of post-secular society we will inevitably become. The question concerning the human future, assuming there will be one, is not whether humans will be religious but whether their religion will be crazy or sane. And its sanity will be largely determined by whether it works with an ontology and epistemology that helps to map a way for people to more deeply participate in the Living Real. There is a lot of religion embraced by an awful lot of people right now that is insane precisely because its reality map is so deeply alienated from the Living Real. 

So while the story is more complex, and I hope to get into details about them at some point, one aspect of understanding what happened after the Reformation was that the 60-70%--I'm assuming there's a consistency here from generation to generation in Stephen Taylor's and Wm James's findings--who did not have such "awakening" experiences, and in the 18th and 19th centuries asserted that their un-awakened perception of reality was more accurate than those who wanted to take seriously what their awakening experiences seemed to imply. The combined impact of the industrial revolution and the new understanding of the human being post-Darwin allowed them to assert an alternative imaginary without a vertical dimension that supplanted the older one. This majority--whether secular or religious--became more interested in knowledge that produced material results rather than produced wisdom. Faith, rather than being understood as a cognitive faculty that when developed leads to wisdom, became instead believing in stuff that no longer made sense within an imaginary that had lost its vertical dimension. Religious fundamentalism and rigid dogmatism are "faith" for people who don't know better. 

Increasingly during the Modern period, while people continued to have awakening experiences, they were artists and mystics, and as such curiosities, rather than sources of legitimate knowledge and insight, at least insofar as they shaped public life in the "real" world of science, politics, and economics. And so by the mid-19th century, the vertical dimension became less accessible even for artists. The avant-garde, as a weak echo of what was more robust in Romanticism, was interested in saying No to what it perceived as bourgeois or reactionary, but it became progressively less capable of mediating the Living Real, at least in a way that broke through to the broader culture.

I don't want to oversimplify. Clearly some great art was produced until around the time of WWI, but after that, art became, mostly, something else--either entertainments whose quality was measured by their cleverness or novelty, or, more seriously, works of despair that expressed the artist's alienation from the Living Real. Waiting for the Living Real, i.e, for disclosures from the vertical dimension, became Becket's Waiting for Godot or Munch's Scream. This kind of art was sincere and important in reflecting to the broader society what had become of it in a world dominated by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Such art is truthful because it reflects the reality of what has happened to us. But because it happened does not mean it's the final chapter in the story. And I, for one, am ready to move on. I don't have any patience for what has become a conventional nihilism. It's no longer telling us anything important.

Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture 10 linked to above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is 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, and 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 would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration, but was also way ahead of the capacity of most people at that time (and now) to be changed by it. Some, of course, were changed by it. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figures in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration. 

So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now--i.e., for the social transformation that we need now--as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen. 

So before continuing with what I want to say, please watch the Vervaeke lecture, and take notes about some of the technical terms he uses to explain how cognitive frames get transformed. I hope to write later this week "Part 4B", which will try to further unpack what he's saying in the light of the ongoing argument I'm trying to make here about the restoring a balanced metaphysical imaginary. 

Vervaeke's lecture is the tenth in a series that extends to over forty. It's as far as I've come, so I don't know yet where's he's going, but there's nothing he's said so far that I haven't found to be aligned with and supporting what I'm arguing, and in many ways expanding and enriching it. The crux of what I want to talk about comes in the second half of this lecture, so you can fast forward to that to see why. If you want, start around the 17 minute mark--and then go back to the beginning or to the preceding lectures to see how he got there.

Go to 4B.

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Note 1: By Living Real I mean those experiences, particularly experiences of beauty in nature, experiences of Love of other human beings, our feelings of being inspired by extraordinary acts of courage, kindness, and experiences of the ontonormative, as Vervaeke calls them, which I would describe as a disclosure of the transcendental Justice. These are where the Living Real breaks through in the ordinary humdrum of our lives otherwise alienated from it, and I'd argue that while they are common enough experiences they are all in various degrees disclosures of the transcendent or numinous sacred. So as I discuss above, people have these experiences all the time--at least 40% of people according to Steve Taylor--but we haven't a meaning framework that's broadly accepted to interpret what they mean. Such experiences are usually not self-interpreting, and so the interpretive frame people inhabit when they have these experiences is critical for their working with them in fruitful ways--or not. This is why a wisdom tradition is needed. The churches should play that role, but they are too often more concerned with a priggish moralism that has nothing to do with the Living Real and more often than not is one of the main obstructions for experiencing 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.

Genealogy Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus

Rather than proceed in some linear fashion with the genealogy of the title, I want to explore first the claim made in Part 2 concerning the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical--or Wisdom--dimension. Without first having established that, I think it's very difficult to understand why the originary Mythos of the West--Christian Neoplatonism--worked for so long, why it eventually failed, and how something like it might be recovered. It's not Christian Neoplatonism as it functioned then that I'm concerned about so much as finding something like it that can function for us now in the way we need it. The goal here in Part 3 is to try to begin to understand what kind of work it did and why that's important. In future posts I'll attempt a more sustained attempt to understand why later it failed. The answer, btw, is not because science disproved it. But before getting to that, some thoughts about our current predicament and why such questions matter. Why should one care about things like the vertical dimension of a metaphysical imaginary, anyway?

My concern is not with individual religious belief. Individuals can believe whatever they want, but I do think that a society to flourish, it must have a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary that integrates a central vertical axis, or Mythos, that works in tension with the horizontal axis, or Logos. I make that case in Part 2.  Most contemporary Christians, especially if they are Protestants, don't think of their faith as a 'mythos' that fuses two post-axial traditions: Greek speculative transcendental philosophy and prophetic Judaism. It just isn't that Greek/Jewish synthesis anymore in any way that matters for contemporary Christian practice or understanding.

Most Christians believe what they believe without it having to make sense in terms that the broader culture recognizes as legitimate. They may have found a personal vertical dimension, but it has little or nothing to do with the way the broader society operates, and so at the heart of their experience of the world is a fundamental incoherency, that in extreme cases results in Ontological Dizziness, aka, the absurd. As I argued in Part 2, one common strategy to avoid Ontological Dizziness is to compartmentalize: Religion is about my private, spiritual life; work and career are about my public, material life. The two have little to do with one another, and for most the former has no impact on the latter. As Eagleton remarks in Culture and the Death of God, "...it is when religion starts to interfere with your everyday life that it is time to give it up." The children of the compartmentalized usually don't compartmentalize. Most just get absorbed into the great rationalist materialist metaphysical void, or they join a religious cult. 

But for the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era these two traditions lived together in what was often in somewhat simplistic terms rendered as a marriage between Athens and Jerusalem as metonyms for reason and faith. This might be understood as Athens/Reason = the horizontal, and Jerusalem/Faith = the vertical, but that would be wrong because it fails to recognize the central role that Axial verticality played in Greek philosophy, at least as it came to us from Plato and Aristotle. 

Of course the persistence of pre-Axial Celtic, Germanic, and Mediterranean paganism continued to play a significant role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West, especially in shaping its local customary cultures. But the idea of the marriage of Athens and Jerusalem was more right than it's wrong in describing the post-Axial dimension of the Western metaphysical imaginary. The philosophical/theological framework for it was Christian Neoplatonism. It worked for those first 1500 years, with its last robust articulation in Florentine Neoplatonism in the late 1400s, and after that continued to be influential in the arts, if not in philosophy, science, or even the theology of the Reformers.¹ 

So the 19th Century after the fading of Romanticism becomes increasingly individualistic and materialistic, both undermining whatever relevance religion--or the vertical dimension however understood--had played in the social sphere. After Nietzsche, it becomes harder for anybody to think on the vertical dimension--at least publicly. Whatever trust there was in the testimony of people who attested to knowledge on the vertical dimension eroded with each passing generation after the mid-19th Century. Because with each generation those attestations were becoming increasingly incompatible with a materialist metaphysical imaginary whose hegemony among educated elites was becoming increasingly dominant after Darwin, the Industrial Revolution, and the intoxicating success of new technologies and discoveries in science.

What changes is not the validity and power of traditional vertical knowledge, but rather the incapacity of the growing numbers of the educated to understand it--or really, to even care about it. During this time there were plenty of religious charlatans and cranks of the televangelist or theosophical ilk, but there were also Christians and other religious figures who were still taken seriously as public intellectuals, even as late as the the decades immediately after WWII. Reinhold Niebuhr, William Sloane Coffin, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton, Ivan Illich come to mind. But by the 80s they were no longer taken seriously--or maybe more accurately, there was no new generation that arose to carry on where they left off. Desmond Tutu is the last of that kind of religious public intellectual, but most people born after 1980 were probably wondering what the fuss was about when he was eulogized after his death last week. He was a mensch--a great, wise spirit. 

That kind of public figure no longer exists, and one has to wonder why. I'd argue that we experienced a shift in the country after the failure of the sixties to rebalance things. The shift was symbolized by the country's choosing Ronald Reagan over Jimmy Carter in 1980. Whatever Carter's limitations as a politician, he was a morally serious person in a way his successor was not. I'll argue this in a future post, but I think the country's choosing Reagan and the way he was lionized on Main Street America marked the beginning of what I believe was an irreversible shift into a simulacral culture and in doing so left behind any possibility that American society might be led by relatively sane grownups.

Since Reagan, the country has progressively slipped into greater and more intense alienation from reality. I'm not saying Reagan is the cause, but he symbolizes it, just as Trump is not the cause of our current collective insanity, but the symbol of it. It has become increasingly difficult for people to hear or see the truth; it's become much easier to live in a world where you can customize it to meet your preferences. This is particularly acute on the cultural Right where since Reagan it looks for shallow performance artists to lead them by playing to their fantasies. Reagan, a remarkably talented political performance artist, was at least recognizably "normal" in a way that Trump is not, the difference between them is the measure of how deeply the Red zones of this country has descended into ontological dizziness.

So, while the crisis became particularly acute after the 80s, it has been a long time coming--for around a thousand years. But in its current acute stage, it traces back to the mid-19th century when the truth claims of the old Mythos started to seem for many dubious or, even worse, irrelevant. Life on the horizontal was where it was at for mid- and late-20th-century Americans on the make, and considerations concerning the vertical could be postponed to end-of-life anxieties about what comes next. The young have no time for that, or at best they give a tip of the hat on Sundays to such concerns.

Life otherwise for any red-blooded American was to be lived on the horizontal.That's where all the energy and action was. Religion was for most primarily a transactional technology that was supposed to enhance one's flourishing on the horizontal. If I mind my Ps and Qs, I will prosper. That kind of horizontal religiosity simply cannot withstand any kind of stress test. The sense of the vertical in that kind of thinking about God was already very weak, and so no need to depend on him when one has the use of his wits and the strength of his will to succeed.

That is the Protestant work ethic. It derives from the Calvinist vertical mythos, but it was something that found it could live very well without the vertical. Conservatives praise middle-class values, but there is no need for a God or vertical axis to practice them because there is no presence of the vertical in them. Prosperity and success are its primary motivators. Christianity ceases to be itself to the degree that it loses its ability to mediate the Living Real. If Christianity only does its work on the horizontal, it becomes Christianity in name only. It's a pseudo-Christianity that functions in the same way that Catholicism functioned for the IRA in Ireland or Orthodoxy for the Christians Serbs in the Balkans. It easily slips into becoming a tribal cult. 

But increasingly for the larger post-WWII population, the horizontal became the only thing that mattered--that's where a full life was to be found and lived. The vertical was only for people who hated life, who hated sex and pleasure and life's bounty. A kind of superficial, pop-Nietzcheanism emerges for the sophisticated to justify and celebrate the hedonism that the post-WWII consumer society not only made available, but demanded of citizens in fulflilment of their patriotic duty. As people become increasingly absorbed in their pleasures and their stuff, they become increasingly incapable of responding or hearkening to the vertical. New Age spirituality emerges to provide a religiosity designed for consumer capitalist society, where one can dabble and indulge one's egoism for a lifetime and think oneself profound.

So the dimension of depth became increasingly irrelevant with each passing generation from the mid-19th Century to the present day. And so starting in the late-19th Century, the most important thinkers understood the significance of the loss of depth and its consequences in diminishing the human. They started scrambling to find an alternative for what had been the vertical dimension heretofore occupied by the God of Jewish revelation. For Nietzsche it was the Dionysian, for Heidegger it was the unfathomable depths Being, for Sartre it was this idea of the human as having a godlike, boundless freedom.

All in their different ways generated a God replacement after his death some time in the middle of the 19th Century, and the plausibility or legitimacy of these new gods was measured by the degree to which they solved the problem of modern alienation. They were in their different ways trying to find a way back to a connection to the vertical--however that might be conceptualized. For people who were attracted to these thinkers, the last place they'd look for a cure for what was ailing them was the Churches, which, in their view, were alienation factories. And to a large extent, they were not wrong. Kierkegaard certainly thought so of the church in 19th Century Copenhagen. His experience was not exceptional then or now. The churches in their obsession to make sure that Christianity is correctly understood and practiced too often have made Christianity into something that is misunderstood and wrongly practiced. 

The one thing that united all existentialists, following Nietzsche, was the rejection of Greek transcendental "essentialism", for which they blamed Socrates'--through whom, for Nietzsche, emerged the beginning of Western decadence. Socrates' overly rational dialectic and Plato's notions of an otherworldly world of ideas or essences were where all our problems started. Nietzsche and those who followed him were in effect rejecting the entire post-Axial project and its assertion of a transcendent, vertical dimension in reality that impinged on and sustained an immanent world. That rejection became axiomatic afterwards. It's something that is hardly ever challenged these days if you want to be an intellectual in good standing.

But if solving the alienation problem was the primary concern, Nietzsche's real villains should have been Democritus and Protagoras, not Socrates and Plato. It's astonishing to me that Socrates of all people should be considered a "decadent", and the only reason I can think of is that the intellectual avant-garde after Nietzsche became so captured by a form of Rationalist Materialism by the late 19th Century that they became incapable of responding to Plato's mythos. It would be like admitting you really like watching It's a Wonderful Life at Christmas. Intellectuals in good standing don't take such sentimental rubbish seriously. But really what they're saying is that they've become incapable of responding to truth that comes in the form of parables. They've lost the imagination for it, the vertical capacity for it. 

The Socratic/Platonic program was adamantly opposed to the tendencies in Greek thought that Democritus, the proto-scientist, and Protagoras, the Sophist, represented, which was truth on the horizontal without reference to the dimension of depth. The vertical dimension in Plato is essential to his post-Axial project--for him it is all about overcoming alienation by becoming connected to the transcendent Living Real, but late-modern, educated elites captured by a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary must reject the vertical in Plato as nonsense.The Greek proto-scientists--Thales, Anaxagoras, Democritus, et al--are the only Greeks that matter for contemporary Rationalist Materialists. Of course the Sophists like Protagoras matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers.

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. Most thinkers in the ancient world who were influenced by them thought so.² Nevertheless, I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is  experience of the Living Real on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.

But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved, perhaps even to tears, by an encounter with beauty or justice or someone speaking from a deep intuitive sense of the Truth in an inhospitable environment, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of these transcendental archetypes is entry level for most people.

So such experiences are common enough, but less so in a culture that has become increasingly simulacral. And obviously there are different ways of understanding or interpreting their provenance. The Heideggerians, Dreyfus and Kelly, try to make the case for a retrieval of a pre-Axial sense of the sacred in their All Things Shining, and I am sympathetic to what they are trying to do, but they bend over backwards to avoid any reference to the vertical in the post-Axial sense I'm trying to articulate here.³ 

But the point I want to make now is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not.

How do we tell the difference? Well, assuming we have good moral instincts and a modicum of intellectual honesty, we can all find out for ourselves by trial and error. But while you can teach yourself the violin, your chances of becoming a good violinist are significantly increased if you have a teacher or a tradition as a resource that makes learning more efficient. It helps to have someone in your life who "knows", who can say to the student, "No, that's not it. Try again." The aspiring violinist is more likely to make progress if there is a trellis on which his development as a violinist can climb and a "gardener" who checks things from time to time to prune what otherwise drains vitality. The same is true in moral development or In the life of the spirit in general. To have such a teacher/gardener can save time, and it might even save your soul. 

Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. No more Desmond Tutus. None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not. 

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We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. There have been--and still are--extraordinary people like Socrates who were/are able to find their own way. And we need to learn from them as best we can. Such people search out those who have some wisdom and learn what they can from them, but when push comes to shove, they find their own way insofar as they have activated an interior moral compass that guides them. For Socrates his teacher was his daemon, and I suspect it's the same for many people today, whether they think of their inner teacher as a daemon or not. For Socrates his daemon had an apophatic or negative influence. It was an inner voice that warned him when he was going off path, when he was being seduced. His daemon only said No, it had nothing to say about how to proceed positively. Socrates had to find within himself a positive way forward, and he had to choose it. (Apparently in the early-'30s Heidegger had no such daemon. Similarly self-proclaimed Christians like Josh Hawley haven't one either.)

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.

Logic is used not to reveal what's true, but what cannot be true. As Socrates' daemon doesn't tell him what to do, it tells him only that that's not it--don't go there. That's what all good teachers should do. Wisdom on the vertical dimension comes from learning, first, what to say No to, and then, second, saying Yes to what emerges or discloses itself when a space is cleared for it. This is why the beginning of wisdom is to know what you don't know. The biggest problem that we have in truly knowing is that we think we already know when we just don't. This is the problem for people who are attracted to theocracy. They lack humility; they think they know better, and they just don't  And the biggest problem for people who live captured within a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is that they think their knowledge on the horizontal is the only  knowledge that's truly worthing knowing, and that's why they lack wisdom. 

If you don't have this disclosive experience, and you only just believe what others tell you what the truth is, you remain in a state of alienation from the Living Real. At best, believing in the testimony of others who have vertical knowledge predisposes you to obtain such knowledge for yourself. You're unlikely to do the preparatory work if you don't believe there's anything that will emerge once you've cleared a space for it. But if you knock, the door will be opened; if you ask in good faith, you will be answered. But you have to develop the vertical capacity to hear the answer. A 'mystic' is someone who simply has developed some measure of vertical capacity, some level of discernment made possible by the acquisition of some degree of wisdom. That vertical capacity was something one encountered in prominent public figures quite frequently before forty years ago. It's very, very rare to encounter it anywhere these days.  

***

Back to the Christian Mythos: The originators of the Christian Neoplatonic mythos, the early Church Fathers, were mystics in this sense--their greatness lies in their capacity to have cleared a space for something divinely originary to fill it. Among the earliest of them were those who fled into the emptiness of the Egyptian desert where they could create for themselves more easily an interior emptiness, that aporia, that was the precondition for their encounter with the divine. The quality of their theology depended on this vertical capacity to have been emptied so as to be open to be filled in this sense.

The greatest of them were inspired and illumined by their experience of the Christian revelation, and they used Greek philosophy to make sense of their experience of the world in the light of it. The trick was to stay grounded in the vertical experience and to make philosophy, or Logos, work to serve its explication on the horizontal. Trouble sets in when philosophy/Logos is used by people detached from the vertical. That's when the Emissary usurps the Master. The task is to hold the two--Logos and Mythos, the horizontal and vertical together, but the vertical is more important because its what grounds or roots you in the Living Real. I think the early Church Fathers did it in a way that is very difficult for us to understand now, but not impossible. I'll try to make their project more relatable in posts in the future. 

--------------

1. One of the most concise and accessible renderings of the tension between Athens and Jerusalem is provided in the still very readable Irrational Man by William Barrett. (See Chapter 4 "Hebraism and Hellenism".) Barrett understands Continental existentialism as the heir of the Hebrew part of this marriage, and scientific rationalism as heir to the Greek part. Yes and no. He's wrong about the Hellenic insofar as he sees the Greek contribution as significant only on the rationalist, horizontal dimension. The verticality of Greek philosophy was essential for the role in played in the Christian Mythos in its premodern form.

But he's right insofar as he sees the Hebraic as the down-to-earth, gritty, menschy, experiential dimension of faith, a faith that cares about the depth dimension regarding moral issues, if not so much about metaphysical ones. The fathers of existentialism are, after all, the Danish, Tertullianesque, anti-Hegelian gadfly Soren Kierkegaard and the Russian irrationalist Fyodor Dostoyevski. Both were deeply Christian in their commitments. But then again they still lived in societies before the disappearance of the vertical pole, aka, the death of God.

For these existentialists, the attitude was to hell with metaphysics and its systems, of the whole futile effort to make sense of things that are beyond our capacity to make sense of them. The only thing that matters is one's moral commitments. Yes, every individual human being's life is a drama that needs to be lived in this particularist, existentialist sense, but existentialism in its radical individualism gives up on the societal (civilizational?) sphere leaving it to go its merry way, and that's the sphere that is in crisis right now because the deep meaning axis in our lives has become so privatized in this existentialist sense. Both Kierkegaard and Dostoyevski could assume the vertical dimension, i.e., a broadly accepted metaphysical imaginary as a backdrop for their thinking in a way that we no longer can. 

2. See Pierre Hadot, What is Ancient Philosophy?, Harvard University Press, 2004.

3. Even in their description of the most intensely vertical, i.e., mystical, of the gospels, that of St. John, Dreyfus and Kelly reduce Christianity to a "mood" of agape. They see no reason to explain what the origin of this mood is, or whether it has more validity than any other mood or whim. It's just part of a smorgasbord of moods that you can choose from those that call to you on a menu on which all choices are equal. I think their book also makes it clear, if unintentionally, why Heidegger was seduced by the "mood" of early Nazism, and why without a transcendental or vertical dimension to ground our ideas of the Good, there's no real reason to say he was wrong. They try to, but fail, imo. Heidegger is an important, corrective thinker who must be taken seriously, but he is an incomplete, and to say the least, flawed one. The same is true for Dreyfus and Kelly--important and incomplete.

Ed. Note For more on the importance of Greek transcendentalism, see also "Part 8: Plato: Habitus as Heuristic".

Go to Part 4A.

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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.

A Genealogy of Our Current Insanity, Part I

[This is the 1st installment in a series. Links to the other installments are found at the end of this post]

“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.” On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”

 --Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3). 

And I confess that I’ve come to wonder if the tension between “America” and “conservatism” is just too great. Maybe it’s impossible to hold together a movement that is both backward-looking and forward-looking, both in love with stability and addicted to change, both go-go materialist and morally rooted. Maybe the postwar American conservatism we all knew—a collection of intellectuals, activists, politicians, journalists, and others aligned with the Republican Party—was just a parenthesis in history, a parenthesis that is now closing.          --David Brooks

David Brooks, qua America's spokesperson for a principled conservatism, looks himself in the mirror in the most recent issue of The Atlantic. It's a companion piece to Gellman's and Packer's essays about the coming demise of American democracy, about which I've written in the last few weeks. I started writing this post to parse Brooks's quote excerpted above about why I think of his American Conservatism is oxymoronic, as clearly he seems to recognize by his listing of all its antinomies.

But before coming to that, I wanted to reflect a bit on how the current crisis has pushed me to appreciate in a way I did not before how a society's dominant metaphysical imaginary unconsciously shapes its experience about what is most important, what is most deeply true, and what is worthy of its aspirations--no matter what the conscious individual beliefs of the people in it. For us that metaphysical imaginary derives from Rationalist Materialism. Whatever our individual beliefs, we live in a world whose basic assumptions about reality are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. 

I believed before, or rather my basic world view was shaped by the belief, that pluralism is a good thing, that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking, that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded by our being confronted by others who see things differently.

And so it follows that ideally a pluralistic society embraces a plurality of metaphysical imaginaries. There are realists and idealists, theists and atheists, Muslims, Buddhists, Hindus, Jews, and Christians, pagans and polytheists, materialists and transcendentalists. And various combinations of all the above. And ideally all should live together in a society where at the very least they tolerate one another and where at best they actually engage with one another in an honest, empathic attempt to understand the other, to walk in his or her shoes, to come to appreciate what's best rather than to demonize what's worst.

Of course, that idea of pluralism in the abstract I still value, but I think the hard truth is that in our particular historical/cultural context our differences keep us divided and conquered. Few of us actually engage in good faith with the differences others present to us; rather we at best tolerate others, but mostly we'd rather not deal with them. So the default is to think of the Other as quasi-barbarians, and to support whatever efforts are afoot to promote one's own group's interests and to suppress the interests of everyone else. And this natural tendency in human beings is exaggerated if they are acculturated into, as we are, the One Metaphysical Imaginary that Rules Us All, which is  Rationalist Materialism, its capitalist social-economic dynamics, its media, and with both of those a crude, Social-Darwinist ethos that shapes our bloodsport politics.

I hesitate to use a mechanistic metaphor, but it's perhaps never more appropriate for our current predicament: Rationalist Materialism and its capitalist utilitarian moral frame is the the developed world's metaphysical operating system--all other beliefs are programs that must run on it. We don't have any choice about that because whatever our individual beliefs, we have to live in a world whose fundamental presuppositions are shaped by Rationalist Materialism. The problem for people with religious commitments lies in that that most of the world's great religions originated in societies that ran quite different, premodern metaphysical operating systems that were compatible with them. And the way those religions have been patched in to work with our current, late-modern OS makes them very buggy, if not unusable.

Does the problem lie with these older religious "programs" or with the late-modern operating system on which they are forced to run? I rather think the latter, and I argue why in Part 2. But that's extremely hard to accept by anybody who has been acculturated into a society that runs a Rationalist-Materialist OS. We're all in the Matrix created by that system, and extricating yourself from it is not easy for those who want to--and impossible for people who don't feel a need to do it the first place because they're quite comfortably well adapted to life within it. 

And so people who are well-adapted to materialist metaphysical matrix naively believe that everybody is free to think or believe whatever they want. But in fact, you're not free if your personal beliefs are incompatible with the cultural OS. The cultural OS--not one's personal beliefs--plays the dominant role in shaping his experience of the world--even for people with religious commitments.

The idea of a sacrament, for instance, depends on an imagined participative ontology which supports and interprets the knower's experience of herself in a participative relationship with the mystery of Being. That's not how we think about or experience the world in a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. Rather, we see and experience the world as just containing stuff to be used. Nothing sacred or sacramental about anything in it. Just so many atoms and empty spaces. Some environmentalists, like the ones celebrated by Richard Powers in Overstory, are trying to restore an animist sense of the sacred, but they are considered by the mainstream culture as flakey nuisances. 

But hardly anybody in the world--East, West, North, or South--experienced the world that way until about five hundred years ago. Some religious people today might believe in sacraments, but they cannot, with some rare exceptions, experience their power in the way our ancestors did. It feels forced, so much "hocus pocus", and it's understandable why people nowadays think it's nonsense. But it's not nonsense. It's that we've been culturally programmed to be insensible to their significance. The problem lies not with what's there but with our ability to see or experience it. 

So if one has non-materialist personal beliefs, they are circumscribed or cramped by the dominant materialist metaphysical imaginary--unless we live like the Amish or in monastic communities off the grid. To use a less mechanistic metaphor, we are dyed yellow in our acculturation into the rationalist materialist imaginary, and so most people see a yellow-colored world, but even if some entertain religious thoughts that were in their original form green, they come out looking blue. It might look ok, but it is a distortion. And so no matter what your individual beliefs might be, they are always yellow-tainted, if not yellow-dominant. It's possible, but it takes an extraordinary effort to cleanse that yellow taint. 

And I would argue that while not all cultural operating systems have this soul-deadening effect, our yellow one is killing us as a society, whether or not we as individuals have found a way to purge its taint. But the task isn't just an individual one, because our well being as individuals depends on the health of the whole society. We need an infusion of something that promises a different kind of life, a life that might actually help the best among us to transcend our differences and unite us at a level where we might actually have the strength to fight against what's coming.

Our fundamental metaphysical imaginary should be a colorless, radiant light that comprises the full color spectrum and allows for a range of possibilities that are all in their different ways aimed at the same goal, which is an imagined future possibility for human flourishing that simply is not possible within the current materialist imaginary.

So let there be pluralism, but let it run on a cultural OS that has a spiritual dimension. What that might look like, I don't know, but I can imagine a trans-cultural system of symbols that opens up such possibilities unavailable to us now. Otherwise our pluralism within our current spiritually impoverished metaphysical imaginary promotes divisions that will continue to keep the best of us preoccupied with clickbait--all the stupid, superficial stuff--and so distracts us from the real threat that is posed by techno-capitalism and the simulacra of culture that it is creating. 

***

So back to Brooks. I think he's grappling with a fundamental truth concerning American Conservatism that most American Conservatives don't understand, which is that it is oxymoronic. I want to explore this a little more deeply within the broader context outlined above. I see the primary historically positive function of Conservatism, whether here in America or in Europe, as its mission to 'conserve' the cultural ballast that customary culture, especially in its towns and rural areas, provided to the larger society. Liberals, generally speaking, see customary culture as oppressive, unless it's someone else's, which then they find charming. 

A healthy society needs that ballast, especially if it has healthy communities that pass from generation to generation a cultural vitality that works for most ordinary people. Local musical and dance traditions, oral histories, local heroes, local lore and legends, a vital communal religious life and reverence for things that are worthy of reverence. A healthy customary culture is rich with symbols and close to nature. A healthy conservatism cherishes these things, and seeks to push back against whatever works to undermine them. I think that Brooks would see himself as a defender of this kind of conservatism, and it would be worth defending--if in America it still existed.

I would argue American customary culture was rather weak to begin with since it was so deeply Calvinist in its origins. Calvinism was already a movement grounded in the rejection of old European symbolic customary culture, which it perceived as papishly exotic and paganly exuberant. Which it was. The old Christendom was an extravagant symbolic world that Calvinists wanted no truck with, and so they did what they could to strip out all that symbolism and exuberance and to remake society from scratch based on their stern, spare, rather colorless imagination of what was most important. Absolute Spirit might be colorless, but our life on earth cannot be. It needs to refract that light into its many colors. The problem with the Calvinists was they wanted to live in a pure colorlessness that is not meant for humans, and their attempt to do so created negative, unintended consequences I'll lay out in a future post. A few, rare individuals can live in thin, unshaded, mountaintop air, but not whole societies. 

And so frustrated in their inability to impose their spare, colorless vision in Geneva, they tried it in New England. This eventually failed. And as Ben Franklin notes in the quote excerpted above from Tribe, the descendants of those stern Puritans couldn't stand the society they created, and once they had a taste of truly rich customary culture in the Native American societies of their time, they had no desire to go back to the life of the English. Many Northern Europeans in the 19th Century had the same experience when they went to Italy: Yikes! What have I been missing all of my life?!

They found there what was still a vital customary culture in the old pre-Reformation European sense, something that had been all but purged in Protestant northern Europe, which had by then become quite smugly superior about its having traded cultural vitality for prosperity--at least for the few who prospered. Contemporary American Conservatism is ironically largely heir to the mentality that saw it as its mission to destroy the two principal customary cultures they encountered at the time--first, that of old Europe and then that of the Native Americans.

In the U.S. today, if there are American Conservatives who have anything interesting to say, they are mostly Catholics and Jews, people who draw on intellectual traditions that have deep premodern roots. WASP America hated both when they started arriving in droves starting in the mid-19th Century because they represented a worldview, a metaphysical imaginary, that they saw as deeply incompatible with theirs. They were seen as unassimilable. Well, in the decades after WWII, consumer capitalism and its media has bleached out most Catholics and Jews so that they left behind the old customs to become nice, upstanding work-a-holic Calvinists. Now, if we are mainstream Americans, we're all Calvinists whether we realize it or not--either the Woke kind on the Left or the gun-and-bible-toting kind on the Right. 

American Calvinism has always been more interested in vilifying what was not compatible with its tight-assed vision rather than understanding or preserving what was vital in anything that did not fit within it. And so after the founding, most of New England's intellectuals couldn't stand Calvinism either, so they became Unitarians and Transcendentalists, the latter basically an import from German Romanticism and idealism. I know this is oversimplifying Calvinism in this pejorative sense, and in future posts I'll add some nuance. There is a positive side to Calvinism (despite itself). MLK came out of it, after all. There are many good, decent, spiritually vital Calvinists. But Calvinism as an idea system and cultural movement has done more harm than good overall. 

So American conservatism, insofar as it had a "tradition" to conserve, had a tradition that was symbolically weak to begin with in its rejection of the old Catholic, sacramental religion and with it the old European folkways, festivals, and quasi-heathen customs. And yet there was a customary culture in Yankee America, symbolically spare though it might have been, which before the Civil War retained a basic decency and public spiritedness that Toqueville writes about.

And then there was the South, which also had a vital customary culture, but its society was dominated by thugs living out a poor-man's fantasy about what it would be like to be an aristocrat. And so they made a society based on chattel slavery that was rotten at its core, and so whatever was vital in Southern customary culture was the warp to the chattel slavery woof that wove the Southern social fabric. We're still suffering from that rot--not just in the South now but everywhere. And whatever little was healthful in either Yankee and Southern customary cultures is gone now because post-war consumer capitalism and its information technologies has hollowed out whatever was vital and humanizing in them. The old customs have become museum pieces preserved by cultural societies of different sorts. 

In future posts I want to lay out the genealogy of the death of culture, if by culture we mean a vibrant symbolic system that mediates the Living Real for a civilization. I'll draw on both Jean Baudrillard and Iain McGilchrist who in their different ways make a compelling argument that we are living now in the aforementioned simulacra of culture, i.e, a parody of culture, and we're suffocating because of it. Baudrillard is pessimistic that there's any way out, but McGilchrist sees one. Whether we'll find a way to choose it remains to be seen. More on that in a future post. But what we're living together as Americans now is insane, and we need to understand its genealogy if we are to find a cure. 

Anyway, this is why Brooks's American Conservatism was always oxymoronic because it wanted simultaneously to preserve customary culture while embracing the capitalist dynamics that have been most responsible for destroying it. American Conservatism was never a movement to preserve what was vital, but rather only a movement to slow down the inevitable decay of a pre-Industrial way of life.

But the upshot is that America never had a richly vital tradition to preserve. Ask the "English" who went native in Franklin's account quoted in the epigraph. And for that reason it never had the spiritual or cultural resources to push back against the materialist flood that industrial capitalism brought to it in the decades following the American founding. The desire to preserve local community values and their customary cultures while at the same time celebrating the disruptive, creative-destructive energies of capitalism was at best a naive fantasy and always intellectually incoherent. 

American society was founded on some important ideals, but those ideals were never rooted in a metaphysical imaginary in which they might have been cultivated and sustained. Certainly the contemporary American cultural Left, the primary defender of those ideals now, does so with an unattractive moralistic priggishness that lacks the metaphysical heft to sustain them. These ideals were doomed from the start to be smothered by far more powerful cultural energies that accompanied the emergence of the industrial bourgeoisie as a dominant social class.

The new imaginary legitimated greed and the will to power and came to see it as the engine that drove material progress, and indeed it did. Nevertheless, while people have always lusted for power and wealth, no civilized society had before embraced these vices as admirable. That we live in such a society is in large part what makes us so crazy, and no such society has a vital human future.

Materialist capitalism's negative effects are not primarily about the inevitable gross social inequities it produces, but about the way it impoverishes the human spirit of everyone it taints. It creates the conditions that make it extraordinarily difficult to deal humanely with its excesses. BTW, American socialism suffers from the same metaphysical imaginal limitations. I lean socialist in my politics because the system needs some constituency to mitigate the worst excesses of the private-sector sociopaths American society lionizes. But in the long run, socialism does not solve the deeper problem. 

So that's why 'American Conservatism' is oxymoronic. You can't have both vital local communities and their customary cultures in a larger society shaped by the unchecked energies of a capitalist economy. The flourishing of the latter leads invevitably to the destruction of the former. 

I want to take some time over the next year or so to reflect on how the 'death or disappearance of culture' presents some opportunities as well as dangers, but I want to state as clearly as I can now my conviction that our current collective metaphysical imaginary is no longer sustainable if we want to secure a positive future for humanity. And so long as we are culturally divided and conquered, culture-killing energies will remain unchecked, and with the death of culture inevitably comes the death of the human.

A respect for and celebration of pluralism is a good thing, but there needs to be an overarching commitment to which all the parties in a pluralistic society submit, and the argument that I want to make is that this commitment needs to be grounded in an imagined future, a cultural OS if you will, of positive human flourishing. Such a future is simply beyond the resources of our current Rationalist Materialist OS, and so people for want of something better turn to toxic fantasies of a lost past. 

See also "Dying Traditions"and "Tthe Baymen and Farmers of New York before World War II".

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This is the first in a series that is still in process. The parts posted so far are summarized below with links to each: 

Part 2: Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West argues that the prestige of science and the material benefits of capitalism and its technological advancements has led to the development of metaphysical imaginary that is unique in the history of the world for its lacking a wisdom dimension, and that this accounts for the ontological dizziness that is at the heart of our current collective insanity. And I argue that because  technocapitalism and its rationalist, materialist, utilitarian imaginary reigns unopposed by any coherent wisdom tradition, the human project is at risk to be dragged off the cliff. For this reason, the only way to prevent disaster in the long term is to find a way not just as individuals but as a society to restore the vertical dimension to our metaphysical imaginary. 

Part 3: Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus argues why some recovery of the vertical or wisdom dimension is necessary for us as a society, not just on an individual level. I try to make, at least in a preliminary way, the case for Axial verticality, and I defend Socrates as an essential model for us now--the opposite of what Nietzsche and Heidegger thought of him. Socrates should be for us now a model of both acquiring and teaching wisdom. All of us should be in a continuous process of clearing away what we think in order to create a space for what is true to emerge. This is true especially for Christians who think they know what Christianity is but really don't.

Part 4A: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries points to the work of John Vervaeke and others who are trying to establish a cognitive-science basis for understanding and legitimating knowledge on the vertical dimension since the Axial Revolution. I see their work as supporting and enriching my argument. Vervaeke's presentation of a "salience landscape" and how cognitive development as the growth in wisdom is really about the transformation of one's salience landscape is a key for understanding how I think the metaphysical imaginary might eventually flip in such a way that the vertical dimension could be restored.

Part 4B takes Vervaeke's 'salience landscape' concept further in arguing that it provides a model for how people and societies make real progress, which requires not just progress on the horizontal axis, but on the vertical as well. I talk about how some salience landscapes can be evaluated as better or worse according to three criteria--coherency, scope, and richness. I talk about how Kohlberg's six stages of moral development are examples of how children through adulthood self-transcend in their moral development by having moral insights at progressively higher levels of coherency, scope, and richness. The "moral" is one dimension of self-transcendence on the vertical axis that does not get enough attention in a lot of New Age spirituality, which is more interested in developing cognitive scope rather than moral richness. 

Part 5: Salience Landscapes and Salience Bubbles explores the distinction between the two. It draws upon the Adam McKay film Don't Look Up as a case study in how salience bubbles work. It argues that the goal is not to be unbiased because that is impossible, but rather to always be open to have our biases challenged by new information. That's possible for people who live in a flexible salience landscape, not possible for those who live in saliency bubbles. It argues that real science proceeds from within evolving salience landscapes on the horizontal level which deserves the legitimacy that it enjoys, but the problem for the rest of us is the way that the criteria for what makes knowledge legitimate on the horizontal dimension is used to evaluate the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension. Hopefully sooner, but probably later, we will develop a metaphysical imaginary that restores the legitimacy of knowledge on the vertical dimension in such a way that it can be integrated with knowledge on the horizontal dimension. 

Part 6: Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series discusses how what this series is trying to achieve supplements Vervaeke's Awakening series. If his goal is to do a genealogy that explains why his psychotechnologies are a needed solution for our contemporary meaning crisis as it affects individual in crisis, my series runs on a parallel track that focuses more on the need for a broader societal solution insofar as it is the root cause of the experience of crisis on the individual level. 

Part 7: The Bigger Picture lays out, in a sense, the map for where this Genealogy series is heading. The goal is to make plausible--not to prove; proof is impossible--a Christian Neoplatonic metaphysical imaginary that integrates an evolution of consciousness mythopoesis with developments in science and a progressive politics. The heavy lifting to establish plausibility lies in the future after retracing the evolutionary pattern from the past. I think that while there is much overlap with the claims that I want to make with other religious traditions and with contemporary science, there are two things that Christianity emphasizes that are less important in these other traditions: One, history has meaning because it has a telos. This has practical implications because no progressive politics is possible without an eschatology. Marxism was an eschatological cult, and MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" assumes a deep eschatology. The second thing Christianity emphasizes is the importance of the individual person who is destined for communion, for deep connectedness with God, with other humans, with the cosmos. 

Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic is the first post to begin at the beginning of this Genealogy. The goal now, with some digressions here and there is to understand the origin and evolution of Christian Neoplatonism, the premodern Western metaphysical imaginary. The focus of this post is to demonstrate that Plato's philosophy was based on visionary experience from contemplation of the Divine One. This experience of transcendence is not common, but it's hardly exceptional. The whole post-Axial tradition is essentially the attempts of various societies to make sense of the world in the light of such experiences of transcendence. I further argue, following Pierre Hadot, that you can't understand either Plato or Aristotle if you don't see their philosophies as practices in their schools as promoting a habitus that orients its students toward this experience of the transcendent One.  

Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism makes the case that early Christian thinking was open and fluid in its development and took from Judaism, Greek philosophy, and mystery religions what fit within a framework of criteria that were shaped by the Christian revelation. While Christianity after Constantine became more obsessed with correct doctrine for political and social reasons, this earlier sifting process needs to be understood as an honest attempt to understand what was valuable from non-Christian sources and to integrate them into a broad "catholic" synthesis.

Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation surveys the importance of late Second Temple Jewish literary forms that arose from the cross-fertilization of Jewish belief and practice with Hellenic philosophy and practice. Relying heavily on Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Christian Mysticism, I focus particularly on the significance of the Apocalypses and the Song of Songs. And then we spend quite a bit of time understanding the significant contribution of the great Jewish thinker Philo of Alexandria. I also make some distinctions between the Mysticism of the Heath and the Mysticism of Transcendence. This Genealogy series is mostly concerned with the second, but it's important to understand how it co-existed in a cultural milieu in which the first played a significant if not dominant role in the broader society. I emphasize the role of Love in both Greek and Jewish itineraries of spiritual ascent and the importance of the personalist dimension that Jewish thinking added to Greek ideas. 

Part 11: The Christian Synthesis 

Part 12A: Vervaeke's Neoplatonic Wisdom Project.   

Part 12B: Propositional Tyranny in the West  

 

il n'y a pas de hors-texte

I'm no Derridean, but I've read enough of him and about him to know he was no nihilist. Neither was Nietzsche. But many nihilist have read both and appropriated what they think they've found in their texts for their cause.

Both D. and N. grapple with the problem of truth and interpretation. Both have good enough b.s. detectors to recognize that what most people claim to be truth is some soulless idol that they worship in place of it. What most people call truth has the stink of death about it. Both wanted to find a method of inquiry and way of living that avoided that kind of idolatry, which is the tendency in all human beings when they let their relationship to the Living Real to rigidify. So Nietzsche undertook philosophy with a hammer, and Derrida took Heidegger's idea of 'deconstruction' to perform a similar kind of philosophy whose goal was to free up our relationship to the truth. This was for them a necessary task because In a Positivist age truth had come into the death grip of what McGilchrist calls the hegemony of the values of the usurping Left Brain. 

D. and N.'s goal was not to destroy or to debunk for the sake of debunking, but to free the  living from its entombment. They take a hammer to walls that imprison truth to liberate it, to make it available again in the lives of those who would love it if they could have any kind of living relationship with it. 

There are different interpretations of Derrida's statement that il n'y a pas de hors-texte, which is usually interpreted as 'there is nothing outside of the text'. Derrida was a punster, and I don't want to go down the rabbit hole that follows all the possible allusions. But I think a fair reading of it is that he was emphasizing how every encounter with the truth is one determined by its con-text. I think this is common sense, and it owes a lot to phenomenology, which with people like Husserl, Heidegger, Scheler, Stein sought to liberate philosophy from Positivism. Truth after phenomenology becomes focused on experience rather than on abstractions. And experience and our interpretation of it is always first and foremost contextual. 

There is the dictionary definition of a tree, and then there is our experience of a tree, which is different for the botanist or the lumberjack or for a Druid priest in a primeval Irish forest. For each of these the truth of the tree is what shows up for them in their experience of it. The least important thing is its dictionary definition. That tells us nothing vitally important about trees. Phenomenology opens up the possibility to experience the truth of the tree in a living way, it allows us to take seriously what the tree in its inexhaustible meanings might reveal to us. It affirms the importance of the subjective in what a tree actually means. 

The tree is in this sense a text, and the text as such is vulnerable to limitless interpretations, and that limitlessness, when taken seriously by anybody who is serious about knowing truth, tells us more about the nature of the truth than any statement about the genus and species of a tree can begin to uncover. To say that nothing exists outside the text is not to relativize what we know but to open up new possibilities for knowing. 

This limitlessness is akin to what Buddhism and the apophatic tradition in Christianity affirm about God, which is nothing. There is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about God, and analogously there is nothing that can be said that is THE truth about a tree--or of ourselves or one another. But that does not mean that the effort to say something truthful is futile or that our attempts to say something true have no value.

Because we can never know THE truth does not mean there is no truth. It only means that whatever we can know of it is perspectival, culturally mediated, and always incomplete, and so therefore provisional. That's the human condition, and many sane humans throughout history have been able to live rich, truthful lives within those limitations.

Nevertheless there is always somebody who is tempted to idolatry, someone who wants to put the truth in a straitjacket and keep it locked up in the attic. They are usually the kind of people whose obsessive need for control leads them into positions of power in a society's political and religious institutions. They're the ones who freak out when someone challenges their rigid ideas about what is true or not. They're the ones who close themselves off from the truth because it scares them. 

Language makes the uncommon common, Nietzsche says somewhere. Yes, mostly that's true, but not always. And in that statement, he affirms the possibility of experiencing the "uncommon". Cliches once weren't stale even if whatever vitality was first in them is doomed to become stale over time. Religious language is like that, too. But there is always in any text the possibility to take a hammer to it, to crack open what entombs it, and to discover the living thing in it to which such texts first gave utterance. But the utterance isn't the truth; it's just a provisional attempt to articulate some experience of the Living Real that is always inadequate to whatever the experience of it might have been. 

And for this reason language--and other symbolic forms--can work as a portal to the uncommon. It is not what is actually literally said in the symbolic forms, but rather what we come to see through them into something uncommonly bigger and more vital. Some statements are more adequate than others because they articulate more effectively something uncommon in a way that has the fresh smell of truth about it.That's why we still read--or should--Homer and the Bible and Plato and Shakespeare. Because the language we find there has this enormous potential to surprise us. We think we know already what we will find in these texts, but if we have an openness to them, we will be refreshed by something unexpected, something living. We have to cultivate a mood that Heidegger called, following Meister Eckhart, gelassenheit, which is similar to Keat's negative capability. Look it up. 

This approach leads often to an awakening of something dormant, to a memory of something forgotten. Heidegger says we moderns suffer from a forgetfulness of Being, and one way to remember what has been forgotten is to spend time with important texts. The disclosures that come if one makes the effort have the freshness of life about them, and we are refreshed by it. That is the kind of truth that is worth knowing about. It is not THE truth, but it points to it as an inexhaustible spring of vitality. 

This kind of remembering is something no AI will ever be able to do because machine memory cannot forget. It's the forgetting and then the remembering that is the peculiar human thing. And for that reason human memory is capable of resurrecting the dead. 

And so, while it might be that the symbolic forms that once articulated something living no longer live for us, it does not mean that what once lived is now dead. It's just gone underground. It can be remembered, resurrected. Those forms once steeped in uncommonness have become stale and common because of the human proclivity to be distracted by other shiny objects--in our case the produce of techno-capitalism. Nevertheless we still live in a society shaped by symbolic forms that retain their potency even if it is not something we have easy access to. A tradition dies because people let something die within themselves, and this is how I take what Nietzsche means when he says that God is dead. It is not really God who is dead, but we who are. 

And this is the value of Derrida's deconstruction--to break open the sarcophagi in which these once living texts lie because nobody who plays a significant role in shaping the culture reads them anymore--texts like those of Plato and Augustine, for instance, that D spends a good chunk of time with--and to find again what's living in them, and to critique what is not. What's important is not what Derrida finds there, although you might be surprised to learn what he does find. Rather what's important is to follow his method, to interrogate the great texts, and like Jacob wrestling with the angel to derive therefrom a blessing.

See also "Deconstructing God". 

Young Socialist Intellectuals

Freddie deBoer in today's NYT talking about the mayoral election in Buffalo--

What too many young socialists and progressive Democrats don’t seem to realize is that it’s perfectly possible that the Democratic Party is biased against our beliefs and that our beliefs simply aren’t very popular.

...

Socialist victory will require taking a long, hard road to spread our message, to convince a skeptical public that socialist policies and values are good for them and the country. Which is to say, it will take decades.

Americans have lived in a capitalist system for generations; that will not be an easy obstacle for socialists to overcome. If you want socialist policies in the United States, there is no alternative to the slow and steady work of changing minds. My fellow travelers are in the habit of saying that justice can’t wait. But justice has waited for thousands of years, and we all must eventually come to terms with the fact that we don’t get to simply choose when it arrives.

Well, of course. The Democratic Party is dominated by the interests of technocratic elites in the economic top 20%, and those elites, being who they are, might feel guilty about their "privilege" in a way that Republicans do not, but not so guilty that they're willing to give it up. And, you know, inflation has got them worried, and Biden's BBB, seems a little too aggressive. And yada, yada, yada. For this reason, nothing bold is possible with the kind of timid people who call themselves moderate Democrats. Nice, decent, sane people, but, you know, they gotta think about what's best for their families. 

To expect ordinary people to support bold initiatives is a path to guaranteed disappointment. That's the downside of democracy. So I admire deBoer's tempered idealism and his willingness to commit to the long term, but I don't think that he'll ever succeed because of one the principal flaw in the socialist agenda--it's fundamentally uninspiring. I used to hang out with old-school Marxists in the '70s--nice, sincere, earnest people--but they were, so, so boring. All logos, no mythos. The New Left, of course, rejected the old-school style, but that faded away because, except for a few like Tom Hayden and Bernie Sanders, it lacked the old-school commitment and analysis.

Ordinary people are capable of embracing bold programs only if they are inspired to do it, and the arguments of most socialists never get beyond a rather crude utilitarian logic and vague ideas about fairness. And while deBoer might see this as a  multi-decade persuasion project, we don't have decades. Technocapitalism is foreclosing such a future unless socialists, the kind who write for Jacobin, wake from their materialistic, utilitarian slumber. They've got some legitimate logos; they need some inspiring mythos. 

If we lived in a society whose ontology was not so implacably materialistic, we might have a chance to realize a bold progressive agenda, but we don't. If we lived in a balanced, sane, humane society, one that integrated the spiritual and the material, we would be able to find our way to some kind of Socialist social organization in coming decades because it would be the only humane solution. Why? Because it's likely by the end of the century that AI and robotics will create sufficient wealth for everyone, but not enough work for people to earn their share of it. 

In such a world, socialism would be a practical, humane solution to redistribute the abundance the machines will do most of the work producing. But that would require that as a society we retain our humanity, and it's an open question whether we will be able to do that. And then there's another problem, even if we were to endorse a generous UBI, what do people who don't work do with all that time on their hands? What do they do to give their lives meaning and purpose?

***

As I've been arguing in my posts about "The Crisis of the Liberal Order", the resistance of Main Street to socialism is not programmatic but cultural. It feels un-American because self-reliance is so fundamental to American cultural identity. DeBoer kind of recognizes this, but if I am correct, the kind of long-term persuasion project about which he speaks will continue to fail because it assumes that the good society can emerge from within the materialistic ethos that grounds his Marxist presuppositions.

Old-school Marxism retained some mythos in its Jewish/Christian eschatology without the spiritual part, and so was half right, but half right doesn't get it done. The spiritual part is essential. But unlike old-school Marxists, this postmodern generation is skeptical of all grand narratives, so it doesn't even believe in the eschatological part anymore. They've got nothing to work with except a vague idea about economic justice as, you know, being desirable-ish. 

The young Marx kind of gets the need for more than that when he wrote:

“For as soon as the distribution of labour comes into being, each man has a particular, exclusive sphere of activity, which is forced upon him and from which he cannot escape. He is a hunter, a fisherman, a herdsman, or a critical critic, and must remain so if he does not want to lose his means of livelihood; while in communist society, where nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have a mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, herdsman or critic.” ***

Yes, and everyone will have his own blog and podcast.

It's very Maslovian--once one's material needs are taken care of, the human being can then meet his "Being Needs". I'm all for it, but I don't think we get to that unless the Being Needs get taken care of more adequately first. And Being Needs are not just about having interesting hobbies; it's where 'mythos' plays its part in inspiring and shaping human aspiration. And that requires a retrieval of an understanding of the human as both a material and a spiritual being, whose spiritual needs are equally as important as his material needs. Man does not eat by bread alone. It used to be a truism, but it no longer is. Religion is an opiate only if it enervates; not if it inspires.

Some of the folks at Jacobin might say that this is unfair, that they, especially the more Frankfurt-y among them, acknowledge that human beings have a spiritual dimension. The Frankfurters because of their interest in culture were also interested in an honest interrogation of religion. They saw religion as both the matrix of superstition and repression, while at the same time as the repositories of the highest hopes and aspirations of humanity. True and True, but do young American socialist see religion in any but the first sense? And when they talk about spirit, isn't their imagination of it shaped primarily by the materialism that is hegemonic among conventional American intellectuals? Do they believe anything other than that the human being is first a material being who has this excrescence from matter they call spirit but understood only in some biologistic sense? This is far too limiting. There's no mythos in it.

The retrieval of religion about which I speak, if it is to work, must understand the human being who has spiritual aspirations in a much more fundamental sense. It maintains the spirit/matter polarity, but with the spiritual as playing a more leading role. I think of the human project as an eons-long work whose spiritual task is to transform the material as in tikkun olam, i.e., for the sake of repairing the world. Look it up. That could be inspiring if it was something that people could bring themselves to believe. 

I wonder if many Jacobin writers or readers could embrace a tikkun olam "philosophy" of history. Maybe some could, or find it at least quaintly interesting. But the socialism as imagined by most of the young socialists deBoer addresses remains fundamentally materialist in its presuppositions and at its best leads maybe to a more egalitarian, more mechanized version of Huxley's Brave New World--or Pixar's WALL E. It's a world where any idea of deep spiritual aspiration is long forgotten because repressed as too disruptive. Here, take a bit of soma, play your games. Be equally as happy as everyone else. Mission accomplished--we're at the end of history.

So what happens if the socialist dog catches the car? Then what? To say that you'll worry about that later is to miss the point. There is no later unless you answer the question now.

Socialism as it is currently imagined on the American cultural Left is a vision of future human possibility that is far too restricting and depressing. Nobody with any sense would want to live in such a future. Something broader, richer, more open-ended, and more inspiring needs to be imagined in progressive politics, and until it does, deBoer's hopes of ever being persuasive will never be realized. The socialist organization of society will only come about if it is built on a broadly accepted ontology that includes a spiritual substrate. 

And we desperately need an inspired Progressive vision for a human future, because without it the bad guys win, and in a hundred years we're in something like Jodie Foster's Elysium. And the reason is very clear--technocapitalism, if left unchecked, does not now or ever will care about human 'being needs", and as long as technocapitalism is the unimpeded driving force of world civilization, those needs become evermore less likely to be realized by either the haves or the have nots. The haves on Elysium, like the Alphas and Betas in Brave New World, don't care about them anymore, and the have-not proles remanded to the desert of the real back on earth don't have the time or the energy for their pursuit. 

***Postscript: From Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right--

Whether the world is made of matter, spirit or green cheese is not a question over which Marx lost much sleep. He was disdainful of such large metaphysical abstractions, and had a brisk way of dispatching them as idly speculative. As one of the most formidable minds of modernity, Marx was notably allergic to fancy ideas. Those who regard him as a bloodless theorist forget that he was among other things a Romantic thinker with a suspicion of the abstract and a passion for the concrete and specific. The abstract, he thought, was simple and featureless; it was the concrete that was rich and complex. So whatever materialism meant to him, it certainly did not revolve on the question of what the world was made out of. [Marx, in other words, at his best was a right-brain thinker.]

...

In a boldly innovative move, Marx rejected the passive human subject of middle-class materialism and put in its place an active one. All philosophy had to start from the premise that whatever else they were, men and women were first of all agents. They were creatures who transformed themselves in the act of transforming their material surroundings. They were not the pawns of History or Matter or Spirit, but active, self-determining beings who were capable of making their own history. And this means that the Marxist version of materialism is a democratic one, in contrast to the intellectual elitism of the Enlightenment. Only through the collective practical activity of the majority of people can the ideas which govern our lives be really changed. And this is because these ideas are deeply embedded in our actual behaviour. [The goal for all human beings, in other words, is to become intrinsically motivated to actively transform the world. This is a spiritual task in the mode of tikkun olam.]

...

Human bodies are lumps of material, but peculiarly creative, expressive ones; and it is this creativity that we call “mind.” To call human beings rational is to say that their behaviour reveals a pattern of meaning or significance. Enlightenment materialists have sometimes been rightly accused of reducing the world to so much dead, meaningless matter. Just the reverse is true of Marx’s materialism.

...

If you want an image of the soul, remarked the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, look at the human body. Happiness for Marx, as for Aristotle, was a practical activity, not a state of mind. For the Judaic tradition of which he was an unbelieving offspring, the “spiritual” is a question of feeding the hungry, welcoming the immigrants and protecting the poor from the violence of the rich. It is not the opposite of mundane, everyday existence. It is a particular way of living it.

Terry Eagleton, Why Marx Was Right (p. 96-104). Yale University Press. 

Most contemporary Marxists are materialists not in Marx's Romantic understanding of it, but in a way that has been colonized by Positivism. We need more of Marx the Romantic and less what he has been turned into by the totalist regimes that have vulgarized him. But, for me, even Eagleton's Marxist materialism doesn't go far enough--it needs more of the mythos dimension, but his is a place to start. Although I doubt that Eagleton would go as far as I do in embracing the kind of Christian Neoplatonic mythos, his "materialist" reading of the gospels provides some significant overlap.

But in America, whatever use we make of Marxist ideas is better off if Marx is not credited with them. It's not something that Americans are ever going to be "comfortable" with.

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III

In 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. But for that reason, they 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 party that shelters racists than with the secularist Liberal ethos the 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. 

So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, 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 techno-capitalism. 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 techno-capitalism 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, techno capitalist 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 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 techno-capitalism; 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 techno-capitalism.  

The real villain here is not the radical Right, but techno-capitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms 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. But it's not grounded in reality--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, techno-capitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote. Bamboozled by the trickster spirit 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, techno-capitalism 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 is a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 1] 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 in our collective life of the profound and sublime, 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 profound and sublime 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 that 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 the souls born into such a society with the collapses vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.

In such a collapsed, flatten 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 in which 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 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. 

++++++++++

Note 1: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, of course, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in him. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology that forced his break with Freud and produced the mythic symbology derived from recurrent hypnagogic states as represented in The Red Book. 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 neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the 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 of course for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these 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 experiences in this world correctly is open to debate, to say the least.  

The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I

I've pleaded here for years that the political sphere should not be the place to arbitrate cultural issues. In a pluralistic society, the political should focus on practical policy concerns, things like healthcare, energy and transportation infrastructure, and wealth distribution. In the cultural sphere, the rule should be simply to live and let live--as much as that's possible. I realize there's some overlap.

But if it's not clear by now, it should be: The most politically engaged voters on the political Left and Right care much more about cultural and identity issues than boring, practical, policy issues. Policy issues only get traction when they get culturized, as we saw with Obamacare over the last decade. By 'culturized' I mean that if I'm on the Red Team, I'm against it if it's a win for the Blue Team, no matter how positively the policy might benefit me. The more politics becomes culturized, the more it become a zero/sum game, and it's hard to see how democracy survives if this is the only political game we're playing going forward. 

And so our politics has become riven by issues of the spirit that cannot be satisfactorily adjudicated in the practical sphere of politics. Nevertheless, the cultural sphere is where the future of democracy is being put to the test, so Liberals better start learning how to play this game more effectively. If, as I think it does, the future of Democracy depends on the future political success of the Democrats, Democrats need to understand why so many people are not buying what Liberalism is selling. But I fear that the Liberals who are most politically engaged haven't the spiritual imagination to do it in a way that will work effectively enough to save our democracy. 

Despite its having a devout Catholic president who wears his heart on his sleeve, the Democrats are Identified by broad swaths of the electorate as the party of godless atheists and heartless bureaucrats. It is not, more often than not, an inaccurate picture of what most Democrats are really like, but it's true enough for it to stick. For many everyday low-information voters, i.e., people who are not riveted every night to cable news, which is most people, it's what the word 'Democrat' signifies.

Today I was on line at Costco behind a sweet older couple, you know the kind who pay their $300+ bill all in cash. Ok--I'm projecting here--but my guess is that this is the kind of couple that knows enough about Trump to feel uncomfortable about him, so voted for Biden instead in 2020, but in 2022 they probably voted Republican. These are not the kind of folks who religiously watch Fox or spend hours on social media. They just feel more comfortable with politicians who talk Conservative than with those who talk Liberal. They're scared. They think that things are getting out of control, and so that inclines them to look for a strong man, someone who can get things back under control. Trump's bluster looks strong; Biden's physical frailty looks weak. 

Conservative is their native tongue; it's what they grew up with. That's how the people they go to church with and their friends at the coffee shop talk. It used to be that talking Conservative wasn't an impediment to voting Democratic in places like West Virginia or Pennsylvania, but now it is. It's not mainly about race; it's about the larger cultural frame, and yes, that frame is vestigially racist. But that doesn't make people who speak Conservative frothing racists. But race makes them nervous.

The future of democracy depends on who captures those non-frothing Conservative votes. This couple should be on the Blue Team if it were only about policy, but they're not because it's about culture. They're not culture warriors; they're just ordinary folks from Main Street who vote for normalcy, which is what feels 'right' to them, and what feels right is what they grew up with, and what they're seeing in the movies and on TV, and what they hear their smart-ass grandkids home from college spouting at Thanksgiving dinner makes them think that the world has been turned upside down.

What the Democratic establishment doesn't seem to realize is that this is a cultural not an economic concern. Every Democrat I hear being interviewed on TV is clearly speaking as if the only fundamental political truth is that "it's the economy stupid". Well, however true that might have been in the past, now "it's the culture, stupid". Of course, they're not ignorant that culture is political factor; it's that they think they can overcome their cultural negatives with what they see as policy positives. And maybe they could if people were paying attention to policy debates, but they're not. They just vote Red unless there's a really compelling reason not to.  

Few on Main Street care about spending and taxes or extending the safety net, but they fear racial disorder and Big Brother. They fear all the stuff that feels un-American to them because it's not what they grew up with. These are not evil people; they're just scared by change. They are not frothing white nationalists, but they'll vote for the party that provides safe harbor for white nationalists because they can't bring themselves to vote blue because it just doesn't feel "right". And on what they feel is "right" the future of democracy depends. Steve Bannon understands the the future of American politics depends on who wins this decent middle on Main Street, but Liberals seem oblivious. 

Liberal Democrats have to recognize that their biggest asset is their progressive policy agenda, but it's complicated because their biggest liability is how their secularity merges with their advocacy for big-state solutions. That scares people. Working-Class Americans, even many who vote Democratic, don't identify anymore with the Democratic Party. Black and Brown voters are largely culturally conservative, and they vote Democratic because the Red Team is so bad on race. They do not, however, look to Democrat establishment types as "their" people because the Democrats represent the worldview and interests of the educated, affluent top 20%, which is not them. The bond of loyalty there is far weaker than many Liberals think.

Secular Liberals also mostly don't understand that the imaginal worlds in which people live are more important than facts, and that facts get filtered and interpreted though a cultural lens that is shaped by the world they grew up in. Ideas matter, but ideas feel true or untrue depending on how they align or don't with how their cultural imaginary structures their sense of the real. Activists on the cultural Right understand the importance of winning the ideas war no matter what because they live in an imaginal world that they believe faces extinction. Fear of extinction is very politically motivating. 

Whether or not their imaginal deserves to go extinct or whether such fears of extinction are just a paranoid fantasy is not at issue here. It is what it is, and the only way to convert people who have bad ideas is to present them with better, more compelling ones. And that's where secular liberalism has nothing to offer. Liberals need to find a vision that actually sells a positive culture message that has broader appeal, something that is more than a No to the boorish, racist, homophobic Right, something that gives people who speak Conservative a robust sense of positive future possibility. Liberals think their progressive policies are enough, but they just aren't. They need to win over the decent, low-information voters on Main Street with hope. It's important to expand the safety net to ease the stress that so many feel, but the despair and anxiety so many Main Street Americans feel won't be cured by that. It might buy a little time at best. 

***

So here's the bigger issue that has become a political issue whether we like it or not: People want a cure for their existential anxiety and despair, and Liberalism doesn't offer it. Rather Liberalism feels like the cause of it for too many Americans. The radical Right in this country is offering a cure, which, of course, is no cure. But for many it feels like a cure because it draws on a memory that precedes the death of God.

That "God is dead" is simply to say that the word 'God' no longer signifies in a living way in our cultural life. It signifies something, but the signified is not living; it's rather a zombified parody of what the great Jewish prophets and rabbis, Muslim sages, and Christian saints understood by the word. 

'God' still 'signifies' in the old, living way for individuals and some small groups here and there, but not for the culture at large. But so much of what passes for religion today on the cultural Right is an attempt to exhume the dead and to animate it with energies that have nothing to do with a Living God and everything to do with tribal identity. The god the cultural right worships is an idol, a totem, and has nothing to do with the unconditioned boundlessness that the great traditions when they were a living force in culture understood as God.

And from where I sit, that's at the core  of the Crisis of the Liberal Order. A society that is no longer nourished from a living connection to its transcendental roots is a culture that is living on borrowed time. Neither the Right nor the Left has a solution for this problem, and the Left doesn't see it as a problem. And for that reason they don't appreciate how rickety the superstructure they take for granted is, and how easily it will topple from its own dead weight when the next strong storm blows, and that storm she's a-brewin' on the radical Right. America has an infrastructure problem, but it's not just about bridges and the grid. 

When I hear secular Liberals say I don't need religion, it's as if they see it as an an option on a menu of possible consumer choices, and one that only the vulgar would choose. It's understandable if the word "religion" only signifies for them what I would describe as zombie parodies of it. But often when I hear them say it, it sounds to me as foolish as someone saying I don't need love, or I don't need beauty or nature, or I don't need music and poetry. It's true, many people live without these, but such people are not healthy, full-spectrum human beings. They don't feel what they lack, and in that sense they are in the despair that Kierkegaard described as being unaware of itself. But it's one thing for an individual to be in despair; it's quite another for an entire society to be in it. Democracy is not a priority for people who are in despair. Getting out of despair is, and they'll swallow whatever Ivermectin for the soul demagogues and conmen will pitch to them if they think it will provide a cure. 

The Crisis of Liberalism is a crisis of the spirit, which is a crisis of imagined future human possibility. And this is why so many are not interested in buying the kind of human future that Liberals are selling. Classic secular Liberals like Musk and Bezos see the human future somewhere off-planet, because they've all but given up on this one. But earth is where the rest of us are going to live it. The Liberal vision for life on-planet is too impoverished, too flat-souled, too glib--too lacking in wisdom. And so it's too incapable of meeting this crisis of the spirit in a way that resonates, that speaks to the deepest human aspirations. It offers no cure for the people who think Ivermectin might be one. It offers no cure for existential despair.

As I said in the opening paragraph, this shouldn't be a problem for politics to solve, but it is now if we have any hope for saving democracy. At the very least, it's become an aspect of politics that Liberals have to contend with better than they have been. 

Liberals need to develop and embrace a meta-narrative (or mythos) that cures despair, and I believe that the development of such a thing is possible, even in a pluralistic society. But it doesn't matter what I think or some others like me think. It's about how a shift or expansion in the Liberal imaginary might actually be effected so that it might inspire people and give them real hope in an American human future. It's not a head problem; it's a soul problem, so the solution has to be a soul solution. 

So the question is not whether or not we need religion, i.e., a plausible mythos that gives us hope--we do. (Faith, btw, is not religion or mythos. See Part II.) But it's not just that individuals need religion, healthy societies need it too. And the question is whether our culture will be able to find its way to a healthy form of it, a living form of it, one that opens us up to the deepest possibilities for becoming human beings, rather than closing us off to them, which is what bad religion--or none--does.

This ought not to be a problem for politics, but the destructive forces of techno-capitalism have created a spiritual vacuum, and there's a huge swath of Americans on the political Right in this country that thinks its politics can fill it. So Liberals better understand if they have no answer for that, they are playing a losing game.  

In the long run, the only solution is to replace bad religion with good religion. The culture has the resources to do that. We used to believe that we humans were created in the image and likeness of the Living God. Such an idea is retrievable in a postmodern (i.e., post-Liberal) key. And I fear that if something like an idea of the Living God isn't retrieved, even if only in some diminished Feuerbachian sense, then any future possibility dies for the Living Human, and with it any reason to resist becoming machines or letting them takeover.  

Already our diminished imagination of what it means to be human is so far advanced that I wonder if we're too far gone. I wonder if we have become too cut off in a hyper-real, simulacral dream, and so sealed off from the Living Real that if tomorrow Jesus himself were to arrive on clouds of glory, any but a few would notice. That couple on the line at Costco probably would. But most everybody else would be too preoccupied with what's on their screens. What they find there is so much more interesting. 

Go to Part II

The Return of the Bobos

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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