After the Future

End of History?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Liberation to What?

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

--Tom Nichols

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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

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

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

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

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

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Coming Discontinuity

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

--Ezra Klein

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

Hip to be Catholic?

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

From "How Catholicism Became a Meme" in Vox

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The past is never dead. It's not even past.

In fact, if you ask me what really went wrong after 1991, it’s ... that there was no recognition among the Soviet elites that they had lost the Cold War and that they had deserved to lose it. Instead, people like Putin and others nursed resentments about betrayal and humiliation—as if the Soviet Union had just been another country and hadn’t been part of a mad project that killed millions of its own people and enslaved its neighbors.

--Tom Nichols

Faulkner's quote points to a reality that was particularly true in the American South, and it is at the heart of its dysfunction. Perhaps the only way of overcoming it is to follow the gospel's admonition to let the dead bury the dead. The dead are always with us, but their misdeeds should not be allowed to foreclose the future. We must find a way to recognize what was fundamentally wrong about the attitudes and practices of our ancestors while at the same time to be inspired by and build upon what's best. This attitude toward a better future is at the heart of Christian spiritual practice which is all about becoming liberated from the mistakes of the past. But there is no moving into a better future unless you acknowledge that past behaviors were wrong, to make amendments to those who were harmed, and resolve as best you can not to do it again. 

When I read Nichols' article, it struck me that as the South lost to the North in the American Civil War, as the Germans lost to the Allies in the First World War, as the Soviet Union lost to America in the Cold War, the most important result was to reinforce what was most dysfunctional, delusional, and extreme in the defeated societies precisely because they failed to confront why they were wrong. Instead they chose to stew in their humiliation. And that dysfunction in the South produced the KKK, Jim Crow, and the sense of white grievance that paved the way for Trump in the U.S; it produced Hitler and the Holocaust in Germany, and now Putin in Russia.

In each defeated society factions that sought to aggressively assert its delusions came to dominate the collective imaginary because these societies never faced the fact that they had been wrong. They never made amends. Rather they doubled down. They sought to prove, even if mostly to themselves, that their delusions were true. So they undertook to force, by any means necessary, to defeat those whom they saw as having humiliated them. Anything rather than to face the humiliation of admitting to themselves that they were wrong. Were the North after the Civil War, the Allies after WWI, or the West after the collapse of the Soviet Union without hypocrisy or fault? Of course not. But that's no excuse for failure to recognize your own faults, which in the South and the Soviet Union were egregious. 

But why were Germany and Japan after WWII different? I think that it has primarily to do with each having been able to suppress the humiliations of past and to embrace a new national identity that focused on the future. They let the dead bury the dead, or at least pushed to the fringes those who didn't want to. Why some societies are capable of that while others are not is worth thinking about more, but clearly huge, irrepressible factions within American and Russian societies have not been able to do it. But a key factor is that as long as a society has a vital sense of future possibility, it finds a way to push the reactionaries to the fringes, but as soon as that sense of future possibility weakens, there is space for the reactionaries to thrive.

. We see that happening in the UK, in France, and now even in Germany. The growing strength of the Right correlates not with the diminishing strength of the Left, but with a diminishing felt sense of collective future possibility. 

The crisis of Liberal Democracies derives from its failure to provide for huge swaths of their populations any robust sense of future possibility, and so nothing is more important for the continued flourishing of Liberal democracies than that they find a robust consensus in their imagination of a possible positive human future that's worth fighting for. This is, whether most people realize it or not, a metaphysical question, and it cannot be adequately answered within the limitations of the rationalist materialist imaginary that is the default because the most energetic shaping influence among the culture's elites. Its failure in this regard has created a spiritual vacuum for passionate reactionaries with a delusional metaphysics to rush in. 

So now in the U.S., the problem is acute. American democracy is under threat from a reactionary faction that thinks it is fighting a holy war in defense of Christian values. Of course, their war has nothing to do with Christianity and everything to do with a defense of a customary culture that was only ever nominally Christian. 

Any society that claims to be Christian, even medieval Christendom, is only nominally Christian. It is, of course, better for whatever is genuinely Christian in it. But Christianity in its essence is a religion of the future, of promise, of a looking forward to something better.  Its fundamental thrust is to challenge every individual, and the societies in which they live, to be better than they are. That requires that the most mature Christians adopt a subversive attitude toward existing unjust social arrangements, and if not to be actively involved in their subversion at least to be open to any challenges posed to whatever is vestigially barbaric in them. 

How that fulfillment is to be effected is a matter for debate, but monotheistic Judaism and Christianity are post-Axial religions, religions whose effect on their societies is to disembed them from traditional practices in the hopes of achieving something higher and better. That this disembedding is difficult because it often feels contrary to 'nature' has always been understood. But the essence of the disembedding dynamic in any post-axial religion is to give up what is comfortable in the hope of obtaining something more deeply real. Any society that claims to be Christian is honest only to the degree that it acknowledges how far it is from what it aspires to become. It is dishonest to the degree that it is complacent in its existing social arrangements. A Christian society is truly Christian not because it fights wars and tortures heretics in the defense of Christian values but because it is has the capacity to be ashamed of such behaviors. 

The only really important question at this moment for Americans is about how they imagine their future. The conservatives are correct that Liberalism, insofar as it imagines the future only in terms of economic development, is inadequate by itself to speak to the deep longings of the spirit that are at the heart of our current crisis. But the answer does not lie in preserving past forms and customs that no longer have vitality. The only real solution comes in reconnecting with the deep vitality that gave these cultural forms--or any healthy, vibrant culture--their shape. Our culture is vibrant in the sense of its being energetically innovative in the entrepreneurial sense, but it is unhealthy because it shares no deep metaphysical consensus about what it means to be human, and so a vulgar, leveling, least common denominator prevails by default. It celebrates energy for energy's sake, no matter how crude or dehumanizing. Elon Musk and Donald Trump have energy, and so both are celebrated in ways that any healthy society would be incapable of. 

The problem. of course, is that people who have no sense about what this deep vitality is in their lives are suffering, and that suffering is real. They look for society to alleviate their suffering, and if we had a healthy culture, it would be easier for them to find healthful relief. But we don't, and so unless they find a remedy from within themselves, they will continue to take their cues from whatever groupthink--whether on the Left or the Right--dominates in their proximity. What we need is leadership that is grounded in the inside-out thinking that is the essence of post-Axial spiritual practices promoted by Socrates and Jesus. If we had a healthy society, such people would be recognized and elected. Instead, American society is dominated by an outside-in dynamic that is born of a vestigial pre-Axial form of embeddedness that is the driving force behind the mob and any other kind of groupthink. A 'liberal' education used to be about promoting citizens who had that capacity for inside-out thinking. Now education is mostly about job training, the only thing that makes sense within an imaginary that dominated by a utilitarian ethos. 

Nevertheless, Liberal Democracies are a step forward because they are heirs of axial disembedding. As such they allow for flexibility and change in ways that static, top-down hierarchical societies cannot. It's their adaptability that makes them reformable, and so, at least in theory, capable of moral progress. But at this juncture, they have no moral compass, and flail about without any consensus shaping policy decisions except a utilitarianism that is inadequate to confront the challenges posed by developments in AI and biotechnology. So the emergence of Liberal Democracies during the modern era is not in itself the end of the story. We're at the end of a chapter in a much longer story, one that is more likely to move toward a positive fulfillment if Liberal Democracies rather than autocracies prevail in the future.

***

Liberal Democracy is a tool, and like most tools its effective use depends on the skill of the people who use it. The primary challenge for democracies is that they depend on their citizens to act like grownups, to be responsibly informed, to be passionate in their advocacy but civil in their debate, to eschew violence always, and to be willing to accept losses in the short run in the knowledge they can fight another day and perhaps prevail in the future. Such skills are no longer revered in America, especially by the American traditionalist faction that has proved itself deficient in every one of these skills. And so in their deficiency they fail to recognize that they are not soldiers in the service of preserving American democracy but of its destruction.

And essential to the effective use of a tool is to understand what it's good for and what it's not. Liberal democracy is a good tool to provide a political framework that is best suited for grownups to manage their affairs, which in the political sphere should be mostly about about solving practical problems and peaceably resolving conflicts. It is not a good tool to adjudicate metaphysical disagreements. Metaphysical arguments are important, and developing a healthy consensus about them is of central concern for any healthy society, but they should not be resolved in the political sphere. They are matters to be hashed out in the cultural sphere, and they have to be won by persuasion not force. Right now we have two "metaphysical" factions who are dominating American society, and both are duking it out in the political sphere in such a way that they are making it extremely difficult to use Liberal democracy as an effective problem-solving tool. 

The first, a rationalist materialism. Its cosmopolitan ethos dominates in American society's cultural establishment--the media, the universities, and corporate board rooms. At its best, it produces a basic decency and desire for fairness; it seeks a balance between freedom and equality; it is intellectually honest and rigorously self critical; and it is open to innovation, exploration, growth, and change. At its worst it is elitist and arrogant; it is sanctimonious in its judgments of people who want simpler, more stable lives; it has no real feel for what is sacred or worthy of reverence, and it regards the inheritance from the past shaped by dead, white men as something to be overcome rather than as something to be cherished and built upon.

The second, a traditionalist American Christian imaginary, is a vestige of 19th century American ethos of the frontier. At its best, it embraces an unpretentious decency and down-to-earthness; it values human dignity as found in a balance between neighborliness and self-reliance; it professes a heartfelt simple, Christian piety; and it feels a deep connection to the land and to the natural world. At its worst, it's xenophobic and racist, it's resistant to and so poorly adapted to complexity and change; it's intellectually lazy or dishonest and so prone to delusional, crackpot conspiratorial thinking. 

There are lots of people who don't fit comfortably in either of these influential camps, me included, but they are for the most part culturally and politically irrelevant.

Those most influenced by the traditionalist imaginary feel they are forced to live in a world shaped by the Rationalist-Materialist imaginary, and they don't like it. For them, American society feels soulless and perverse. It goes against every good thing they were taught as children, and they don't see why they should have to live in such a world, a world that from their pov has lost its soul.

I sympathize, and I, like they, would like to live in a society where I felt more at home, where there were broadly shared vital customs and traditions, where there was a broadly shared sense of the sacred, and a shared sense of what is truly most worthy of our deepest aspirations. That's not the society any of us lives in. But the difference between most American traditionalists and me is that I don't think Rationalist-Materialists are evil; I just see them as mistaken. I see them as in need of persuasion, and in order to do that I need to make the case that there is something better available that they don't have.

In the meanwhile, I make my peace with the broader culture, and live as best I can according to my own lights. Politics for me is not an arena for philosophical persuasion, but as I said above, it's the arena for solving shared practical problems--like infrastructure, managing pandemics, dealing with climate change, and income inequality. My positions on these issues are obviously affected by my metaphysics, but that doesn't mean I will only work with people who share it.

The problem with so many American traditionalists is that, unlike other traditionalist groups--Mennonites, Jews, Muslims, Buddhists, and others--it's not enough for them to be left alone to freely practice what they believe. They want to assert control over the entire society. But you can't force your metaphysics on others, especially when it is so poorly adapted to the world as it is. People have every right to choose for themselves to live in communities that are simple and isolated from the corruptions and complexity of modern consumer capitalism, but they are not competent to govern in such a complex world. And if they elect people who share their desire to live in a simpler world, people like Sarah Palin, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert, et al., they put people in critical decision-making positions who simply haven't the competence to do the job that is required of them.

And the problem for honest, simple people is that they often haven't the sophistication to understand how cynical politicians tell them what they want to hear so they can achieve their own ego-driven agendas. I know that sounds condescending, but it's the hard truth. This is a faction within the U.S. that needs a 12-Step program to be developed for conspiracy theory believers. Healing can only start once you admit you have a problem, and then you need to make amends. 

I fear that the worst for which they will have to make amends still lies ahead. Even if this American traditionalist faction wins in the short run by electing a demagogue, it will lose in the long run. It might seem for a while that they have the winning hand, but ultimately they will lose. Putin will inevitably lose. All the suffering and destruction they cause has been and will be for naught because it's always based on a fundamentally delusional relationship with reality. History keeps moving on, and one way or the other, sooner or later, societies have to adapt to the changing reality history produces. Clinging to the dead past leads to a delusional relationship with reality. This kind of traditionalist imaginary produces a politics that is ill-adapted to the world as it really works. 

In a rapidly changing, complex world with so many billions of people, there are no simple solutions. We have to be nimble in the way we adapt, and we have to elect the people who are most competent into decision-making positions. We need people who are both sophisticated and profound to emerge as leaders, and that means that we need a society that produces an electorate capable of recognizing them and choosing them. Ideally, in coming decades a new consensus will develop that is not shaped by the limitations of the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates now, but by a new consensus that emerges that is grounded in a renewed connection to the Living Real. 

We'll see, but clearly we're at the end of something. And because our collective imagination of the future is largely shaped by the vertigo we experience as cultural and political forms crumble around us, we tend to embrace cataclysmic scenarios for the future. It's understandable, but I live in hope that as disruptive as things will continue to be, those disruptions are clearing the way for the human spirit to take a step forward. The question is to what extent in the meanwhile people will grab onto whatever fool thing they find to stabilize themselves in their vertigo.  

The Grand Inquisitor and the Alt Right

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

 Matthew Rose, A World after Liberalism, 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Imagining a Positive Human Future

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

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

--Ezra Klein

Yes and No.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

Genealogy Part 11: The Christian Synthesis

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

--"Jerusalem" by William Blake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Genealogy Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Back to the ancient Mediterranean world:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGinn:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

McGinn goes on:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 11.

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

 

Genealogy Part 7: The Bigger Picture

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 8.

 

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 Mythos--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. [See Note 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 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 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 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 being connected to the 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 matter for demagogues, propagandists, and advertisers. 

Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. 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 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 when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, 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 the transcendental archetypes listed above 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. [See Note 2]

But the point I want to make here 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. 

***

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. 

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

Note 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. 

Note 2: 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.

Reflections on the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and [G.B.] Shaw, that life was, so to speak, already there, but not in our universe of matter. It has spent fifteen billion years or so somehow ‘inserting’ itself into matter. Shaw expressed it by saying that the universe that began as a ‘whirlpool of pure force’ aims at becoming a ‘whirlpool of pure intelligence’.

 --Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"

 

“The Word of God [the Logos] became a human so that you may learn from a human how a human may become God.”--

Clement of Alexandria, Protrepticus, 1.8.4.7-9

 

Gombrich writes that ‘the true miracle of the language of art is not that it enables the artist to create the illusion of reality. It is that under the hands of a great master the image becomes translucent .’

I have used the language of transparency and translucency--of ‘seeing through’--repeatedly: because as Gombrich says of the work of art, as Jean Paul says of metaphor, as Kerényi says of myth, and as Merleau-Ponty says of the body, our vision must not stop there at the bounds of the ‘thing’--but neither must it be replaced by something else. It is the function of such translucent, or semi-transparent, beings to remain transparent rather than draw attention to themselves, because in doing so they achieve their goal.

. . . 

Body and soul, metaphor and sense, myth and reality, the work of art and its meaning--in fact the whole phenomenological world, is just what it is and no more, not one thing hiding another; and yet the hard thing is the seemingly easy business, just ‘seeing what it is’. The reality is not behind the work of art: to believe so would be, as Goethe put it in an image I referred to earlier, like children going round the back of the mirror. We see it in--through--the mirror. Similarly, he says, we experience the universal in, or through, the particular, the timeless in, or through, the temporal.

 --Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812ff)

In the Judeo-Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by what Shaw calls the whirlpool of pure force, whose stand-in at the time was Herod and the Roman Empire. Earth evolution, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the whirlpool of pure force by the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., the gradual divinization of the non-divine.

Whatever Shaw means by it, by intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I mean something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence', which suggests what's measured by IQ. I like Shaw's whirlpool metaphor because it suggests that intelligence--the Logos--is a dynamic, supra-rational, energetic thing rather than static in the way the Platonic world of ideas is usually conceptualized. Logos as creative energy comes closer to the biblical idea of this Greek word. 

The incarnation of the Logos, the birth of the divine in the human, meant that the divine was infused into humanity in a way that was unprecedented until then. We Christians, of course, believe that we were created as divine beings because we were created in the image and likeness of God, i.e., we always were in some sense divine. But the story of the Fall is the story of identity loss, that is, of our having lost or forgotten any sense of ourselves as truly divine and of our looking for all kinds of counterfeit ways to restore it through egoism and will to power. And the story of redemption is of our having been given the possibility of finding or remembering  our true identity--our true divinity--again. Christians like me believe that something happened on Good Friday, which was the restoration of something that had been lost by way of an infusion or transfusion of divine blood, so to say, into the earth and by extension into the human, which is the same thing. And by its salubrious effects the possibility of restoring the divine in the immanent world becomes a possibility inside/out. The kingdom of justice is born within, we are told, and so then is the restoration of Justice in the world effected, inside out. It cannot be imposed outside-in by force. 

I think it's quite intelligible in light of Shaw's idea in the epigraph. The Incarnation if understood as the infusion of the divine into the whirlpool of pure force initiates at least the possibility by which the whirlpool of pure force can be transformed into the whirlpool of pure intelligence. This infusion of the divine into the earth/human is like a seed which if cultivated by humans grows within their own hearts and as it does, humans become agents through which the earth awakens to its own deepest potentialities. The cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately presents as the material world and its energies becomes subverted.

All we have is metaphors, and another for the divine blood shed on Good Friday is seed that fertilizes an otherwise sterile world egg. And as the fertilized egg gestates and develops, it subverts the kingdom ruled by the law of evolution without grace. This deeper evolutionary process is what I call the Living Real, and as it operates in the depths of the earth, so does it operate in the depths of the human soul. As it grows in one, it grows in the other, and gradually a fallen world--a world that knows not Justice becomes transformed, restored, and the face of the earth renewed. 

Humans can therefore, if they choose, become agents in this evolutionary project. No longer exclusively acted upon, humans can become active co-creators in the project to transform the whirlpool of pure force into the whirlpool of pure intelligence, i.e., to subvert evolution without grace by being infusion points through which Divine Intelligence awakens and transforms it. This is an impossible idea within the dominant late-modern metaphysical imaginary, but it would not be if we find a way to restore the vertical dimension to the Rationalist Materialist imaginary that thinks it can get along without it. 

What might this project look like if successfully completed? It's imaged for us in Isaiah 11, the first reading of the second Sunday of Advent:

“The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb,
The leopard shall lie down with the young goat,
The calf and the young lion and the fatling together;
And a little child shall lead them.
⁷ The cow and the bear shall graze;
Their young ones shall lie down together;
And the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
⁸ The nursing child shall play by the cobra’s hole,
And the weaned child shall put his hand in the viper’s den.
⁹ They shall not hurt nor destroy in all My holy mountain,
For the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the Lord
As the waters cover the sea.

That's the Christian mythos as I understand it. Fanciful nonsense? Only if the idea of the whirlpool of pure intelligence gradually taming the whirlpool of pure force remains an imaginative impossibility for us. This, of course, is an impossibility, for those whose imaginations are completely circumscribed by the Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary.

Humans play their role in this project to the degree that their minds become right or just, that they are restored in the image and likeness of the Divine Intelligence in which they were created. The goal for humans is to get into their right minds, which clearly most are mostly out of. This intelligence, of course, is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is "evolution without grace". Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent, light-filled dimension of Being by which the immanent world derives its life, i.e., to the degree that it truly lives, it participates in it. 

Computer Science seeks to mimic an attenuated, left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to transform evolution in this inside-out transformative process. 

***

Incarnation is mostly about a descent that makes possible an ascent, how the latter is impossible without the former. But I want to digress for a few moments to discuss The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino. Ficino's Christian Neoplatonism transposes the Platonic Ideas from outside of space time into space time. He and the artists influenced by him came to understand that their task was to raise up creation by descending into it to discover there the mind of God embedded in it. The goal for them was to reimagine ascent as descent. The task was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., hidden, in the created world.

This shift invites a new consideration of the significance of the Incarnation. The descent of the divine into all creation made possible the lifting up of all creation, not just a means to escape from it. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the tasks for both philosophy and art--and, of course, for a nascent science. Science becomes a possibility now in a way it wasn't before this shift. In order to awaken to the hidden mysteries in the earth, first must the hidden potentialities of the human mind be awakened. The unawakened Mind embedded in creation is correlative, an image of, so to say, the unawakened Mind embedded in the individual human. But science loses its way insofar as it becomes subordinated to the will to power and the desire for material prosperity. I'm not saying that material prosperity is a bad thing it itself, but it is when it becomes an end in itself. It becomes evil when it is the only important thing sought for rather than a byproduct of a different kind of pursuit, which is the pursuit of wisdom, a pursuit which seeks the awakening to the Divine Mind both within ourselves and the earth.  

It's interesting to me that a central theme of the Christian mythos is that the most significant things originate in the least significant places. Why should there not be an analogy along the lines of as a barn in Bethlehem is to the violence of the Roman Empire, so is the earth to the cosmic whirlpool of force? Is it possible then to at least imagine the plausibility that the divinizaton of the cosmos, i.e.,the evolutionary process Shaw imagines by which the cosmos as whirlpool of force becomes interpenetrated by pure intelligence could therefore begin in a cosmic backwater like the earth? It's at least an interesting premise for an Amazon sci-fi series.

My point here is that the event we celebrate every Christmas needs to be understood within this cosmic context. It was the first step in the enactment of this project--the incarnation of the Divine Mind into the whirlpool of pure force that culminated in a surrender of the former to the latter on Golgotha. Pure Cosmic Love crucified in that event paradoxically created the conditions that made possible the ultimate subversion of the whirlpool of pure cosmic force--or so Christians like me believe.

And so Christians like me believe that those who claim to be Christians fail as Christians to the degree that they embrace the rule of violence and force--whether in crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, or the violent overthrow of governments. These are agents of the whirlpool of force, not agents of divine intelligence. They are Christians to the degree that they work in whatever way they can as agents of divine intelligence to subvert cruelty, violence, and force in all the ways it continues its rule in the immanent world. Yes, there is no peace without justice, but neither justice nor peace is served by the aggressive use of violence. The rule of pure force cannot be overcome by pure force. Something else is called for, and if we're Christians we should believe that 'something' became available to all humans after the Incarnation of the Divine in the human on that silent night that we celebrate on Christmas.

After that first Christmas something new became a possibility for humans, the possibility for them to restore within themselves the Divine Mind in whose image and likeness they were created. The divine descending into the human created the conditions that made possible the human ascending to the divine. The early church fathers called this 'theosis'. 

What are the implications? There are many, but one of them is cognitive, which is what the McGilchrist excerpt points to. He talks about how the artist's gift is to render what he sees in its unfiltered translucency visible to the rest of us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary, unawakened states of consciousness. The Renaissance artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman, but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we who encounter in what he made, if we are in our right mind, and can see what he saw. We become capable of seeing the world in Merleau-Ponty's phrase "according to" the work of art. I'm arguing that that "right mind" became a possibility for us because of the Incarnation. 

At the time of the Renaissance, the quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies hidden or at best mostly filtered out in the world around us. In other words, great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from the awakening of a latent inner capacity. This awakened 'talent' enables him to see what was before undisclosed. The latency of the divine mind within awakens to the latency of the Divine Mind embedded in the created world. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or at best seen as through a fuzzy lens.

That these works of art were often beautiful is a secondary effect of the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy, and so their work lacked this quality of translucency because there was no light in them to shine through them. They were merely algorithmic. But the deeper creativity to which I point here is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not in awareness before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it. That's what the translucency discloses, an inner dimension of light that radiates out of it. It is in this sense disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Living Real that are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind. Regardless of what intellectual difficulties there might be in grasping what I'm trying to articulate here, it used to be possible for people to take what I'm describing seriously. There used to be a shared sense of the truth of it, even if there was no way to explain it that was completely satisfactory. That there is no longer a shared sense of the truth of it is at the heart of what ails us. 

There are many objects that present themselves as art, but they are great art to the degree that they have this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, it is a judgment on our inadequacy, and as such is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.' It's not something you get from critical analysis. Rather first there must be a 'disclosure' in the encounter with the art object, then comes some feeble, inadequate attempt to articulate what was experienced. The articulation is never equal to the experience. At best it simply points to it, and tries to understand the world "according to" it. 

My reason for digressing here about the great Renaissance artists is to provide a model for something that is possible for us all. The Renaissance artists, like the great saints, were prodigies, but they image for us in their work a kind of work that is possible for each of us in more modest ways. For like them, when we awake to ourselves, we awake to the world. We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it isn't there waiting for us to discover it. The chances of your making such a discovery are increased significantly if you are predisposed to believe it's there to be found.  

For the best of the Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into the material world to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in it. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is in an evolutionary process of the awakening of Divine Intelligence in both the soul of the world and the individual souls of us humans. And that we humans, in whatever small way, play a central role in the advancement of this project, and that we therefore have a responsibility in whatever way is there for us to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. We need to see the Good; we need to be the Good for others to see. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence--its truth, its goodness, its beauty--and its fundamental justice. 

 

Part 2

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.

--Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11566)

With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus of Nazareth (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence working through human beings to penetrate the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. It's a big idea--I know. Big ideas make us uncomfortable these days. But it grows on you if you give it a chance. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove. First the experience--the insights, intuitions, visions that come by way of the dove--then some attempt to use our intelligence to understand its significance and to create cultural forms that embody or make available or enact that understanding. 

The Christian idea of incarnation, when taken seriously, awakens in us an awareness of the centrality of earth existence, that what happens on earth matters, that it is not some delusional prison from which we must be liberated, or a place of exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It emphasizes that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside of history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. We humans have always had the choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace--the whirlwind of pure force--or to resist it, and in doing so to become co-redeemers of the earth as agents of the whirlpool of divine intelligence. Humans become the latter insofar as they restore within themselves the image and likeness of the Divine Mind. The Divine became human so that the human might become divine--here on earth, in space and time, not in some other world or dimension.

So much in our late modern conception of what it means to be human refuses to countenance this possibility, and yet our survival as humans requires that we retrieve something like it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will ourselves become machines, who operate with an intelligence that has nothing divine about it and that becomes closed off from the dimension of depth where the Divine Mind seeks to awaken in us. 

"All creation groans for the revelation of the sons of God," according to St. Paul in Romans 8. That is, it awaits humans who have awakened within themselves the Logos, the kingdom within, and with this awakening the gradual restoration of their identities as created in the image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved, in part, by its awakening to its presence embedded in the created world. To the degree that the Logos awakens in us, we become the sons and daughters of God.

This is not achieved overnight. There's a reason the gospels use seed metaphors for the birth of the kingdom within, and yet as it grows, we begin to see and think more clearly as our propensity for delusion and bad judgment gradually subsides. Our feelings of alienation and estrangement subside, our love of the earth and the people on it grows.

I believe that this seed has incarnated and germinated in the hearts of all kinds of people, and being a Christian is not a requirement. Understanding is secondary; more important is to hear or hearken to a song that since the Incarnation suffuses creation. It helps to have a little music theory (or teaching), but more important is hearing the music and singing it, no matter the level of proficiency. 

As the sons and daughters of God awaken, they hear this music, this song, which is the voice of conscience, the daemon, the muse, whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of the whirlpool of violence, it can be heard and hearkened to. This is not easy to do at this critical juncture in human history. This is a project that is continuously threatened by the forces of chaos and violence whose noise currently all but drowns out our ability to hear it.

But if we hear and hearken to it, this song will come gradually to still the violence and chaos that otherwise dominates in our hearts, and we in turn become violence whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violence in our own hearts and then eventually the violence of Isaiah's cobras, bears, lions, and wolves. Wasn't this the gift of St. Francis, to subdue the tooth-and-talon violence of biological evolution to the peace and harmony of the divine intelligence that ruled so prodigiously in his soul? 

In this way we become co-creators of the New Jerusalem, an image of earth existence where violence and chaos have been subdued by the rule of Divine Intelligence and its justice, when the earth shall be full of Isaiah's knowledge of the Lord. This is an evolutionary project. It is accomplished gradually, heart by heart, generation by generation, each finding its own part of the song to sing. Each of us as individuals has some part in this chorus, some part to sing, no matter how seemingly insignificant. All that matters is that we harden not our hearts, that we hear and hearken, and do what is called for. 

 

[Versions of this post originally appeared around Christmas 2019 and 2020. I've revised it a little for clarity and added some content as it will be helpful in my attempt to develop "The Genealogy of Our Current Insanity" theme I'll be posting about in coming weeks.]

Young Conservative Intellectuals

From David Brooks in the Atlantic reporting on the National Conservatism Conference earlier this month in Orlando. You know, the one where Hawley gave his American masculinity speech:

Yoram Hazony, the chief intellectual architect of national conservatism, is an Orthodox Jew who went to Princeton before moving to Israel. He argues that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere. The public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite. If conservatives want to stand up to the pseudo-religion of wokeism, they have to put traditional religion at the center of their political project.

Another Israeli political philosopher at the conference, Ofir Haivry, argued that Americans shouldn’t delude themselves into thinking that a nation is built out of high-minded liberal abstractions, like the Bill of Rights. A nation is, instead, a cultural tradition, a common language, a set of rituals and beliefs, and a religious order—a collective cultural identity.

The history of Judaism demonstrates, Haivry argues, that you don’t need a state or a political order to be a nation.

For his part, Hazony argued that the American cultural identity is Christian—and has to be if it is not going to succumb to the woke onslaught. If 80 percent of Americans are Christian, Hazony reasoned, then Christian values should dominate. “Majority cultures have the right to establish the ruling culture, and minority cultures have the right to be decently treated,” he said. “To take the minority view and say the minority has the ability to stamp out the views of the majority—that seems to me to be completely crazy.”

In essays I've posted this month, I've argued that a human society cannot sustain itself if it becomes permanently cut off from its originary mythos--and the way that mythos grounds us in the Living Real. That mythos in North Atlantic societies is Christianity, which is the fusion of two post-Axial traditions--transcendental Greek philosophy and Judaism superimposed on Mediterranean, Germanic, and Celtic paganism. Perhaps a post-human society can can live without its being grounded in such a mythos, but not a human one. In making this argument, I was aware that it sounds a lot like what cultural conservatives have been saying since forever, so while there is some overlap, I want to distinguish what I'm saying from what Hazony is saying as reported by Brooks.

The difference lies in that conservatives like Hazony do not take seriously the implications of the death of God as a cultural reality. The death of God is a statement about the fact that the originary mythos and its transcendental ontology has been displaced as the primary shaper of the social imaginary by a materialist ontology. This materialist ontology co-existed for a while with the originary ontology in a kind of tension, but the materialist ontology is clearly dominant now, mainly because what people have come to care about most is what works in day-to-day life, and science and capitalism get practical results in a way that religious beliefs don't. It's not much more complicated than that. 

Obviously people still believe in God, and there's nothing wrong with science or markets. What's different after the death of God is that there is very little creative dynamism that comes from the originary mythos. Since the death of God, most of the culture's creative energy has been channeled toward projects shaped by the merger of science and capital. That materialist project defines who we are. If you have religious beliefs, good for you, but that has nothing to do with what really matters. What matters is where all the creative energy is, which has nothing to do with religion. The practical effect is that the values of the originary mythos have no constraining effect on the most destructive influences of techno-capitalism, and among them the destruction of the the idea of the human itself.

Conservatives like Hazony want to prop up the corpse of the dead king on his throne for fear of the kingdom's being taken over by evil usurpers. He and conservatives who think like him don't seem to realize that the usurpers took over long ago, and they were welcomed with open arms, including by most people who consider themselves Christian. The king has been dead for some time now, and propping up the rotted corpse is delusional and can't work. It has to be replaced by something living, something inspiring. I believe that resurrection is possible, or another word for it is renaissance. But that's not what people like Hazony are talking about. 

Now as I made clear in my posts in the last weeks on this topic, because God is dead doesn't mean that faith is. Many people, me included, affirm its vitality in shaping their sense of what is real and what is worthy of their deepest aspirations. But the cultural forms of Christianity no longer signify robustly in the broad cultural sphere, which means that the tradition that once 'worked' effectively to convey from generation to generation the life of the originary mythos no longer conveys it. It's there in the background, i.e., in the private sphere, and clearly a secularized version of Christianity is the basis the democratic ethos that prevails in American society, but it is mostly impotent in shaping the most important judgments that we must make about the human future. Techno-capitalism and its materialist imaginary is in the driver's seat, and Hawley/Cruz administration would do nothing to remove it.

If the traditional Christian mythos still played a vital role in shaping American society's ethos, there wouldn't be any felt need to reimpose it in the political sphere. It would be something that people would gladly choose because it provides meaning and vitality in a way that secular beliefs do not. The fact of the matter is that what is best, most vital, and most liberating in Christianity is not available to the broader culture because its most public-facing institutions have made it so profoundly unattractive to people who might find it otherwise.

This is so because so many Christians, mostly fundamentalists and conservative Catholics, have given Christianity a bad name because they themselves are emphatically not exemplars of what is best, most vital, most liberating in Christianity. They come across as anal, resentful, fanatics animated by a vulgar, totemic version of Christianity that is about as far from the spirit of the gospels as one could take it.

That being said, Dallas Jenkins' The Chosen is one good-faith effort coming out of the evangelical world that avoids all the ideological culture-war nonsense in a way that could have broader cultural appeal. It finds a way of bringing out the vital, liberating, subversive dimension of the gospels--subversive regarding the rigidly conservative political and religious establishments of its time--in a way that you don't often see in television or film in this genre. And it's grittily human and often funny. Skeptics, if they could muster some second naïveté, might actually find something in it. 

So if you want a more Christian culture, O young conservative intellectuals, live Christianity in a way that is more humanly appealing, in a way that will attract people to it rather than repel them. And there is nothing more repellant than the prospect of a Hawley/Cruz administration supported by a Republican Congress imposing a Christian sharia on the nation. You don't seem to understand this because you are too caught up by a cultural ressentiment that blinds you as to how matters of the spirit actually work. Most people, including genuinely religious ones, don't want to live in Franco's Spain. 

In my previous post about Socialism, I talk about how socialism will never take hold in American culture until there is a vast shift in the cultural imaginary, and I'd argue the same for Christianity. Both are too unattractive because both, at least in their current manifestations, are too uninspiring. Young socialists and conservative Christians are two sides of the same coin. Neither understand how real cultural change works, which is what is fundamentally required for there to be any real receptivity to what they are selling. And without such a shift in the cultural ethos that is freely and willingly embraced by most Americans, both conservatives and socialists are deluded if they think that their programs can be effected in the political sphere. 

I understand Hazony's point "that you can’t have a society that embraces government neutrality and tries to relegate values to the private sphere" because the "public realm eventually eviscerates private values, especially when public communication is controlled by a small oligarchic elite." I would agree, this is a problem that cannot be sustained in the long run. But Hazony misdiagnoses the root of the problem. He doesn't seem to understand that it's industrial/consumer/technocapitalism that has eviscerated private values, not the ideology of progressive Liberals who are simply trying to mitigate the damage capitalism has done in the material lives of the non-wealthy.

The public (political) sphere simply represents the values of capital, which in turn shapes the vital, animating ethos of both Democrats and Republicans. In the Republican Party, traditional Christian values are a thin veneer that covers up what is the party's real vital, animating 'ultimate concern', which is preservation of the wealth and property rights of the wealthy. Democrat elites' ultimate concern is similar, but complicated by their guilt about it. But that guilt makes them more practical when it comes to wanting to solve pressing material problems that concern the broader society. So two cheers for guilt. Better that than Republican indifference to or contempt for the suffering of the poor. 

And so while these young conservatives are upset with corporate America for its being captured by 'wokeness', I suspect that most would be appeased if corporate boards hired good, conservative Christians who would have no compunction about how techno-and consumer-capitalism continues to crush the American soul. I suspect that most are blind how its doing so diminishes with each passing decade the human capacity to even respond to what is genuinely, authentically religious. And I feel confident that most would resist my assertion that capitalism and the Neoliberal ideology, which justifies its unchecked hegemony in the economic sphere, is the single-most powerful force in preventing what they think they want. So in other words, they offer no real solution, not even the beginning of one. They don't even understand the real cause of the problem.

Nevertheless, I agree with conservatives who complain that the secular public square is not neutral, that it is aggressively materialist. And I agree that a good society needs to understand and value that humans are material/spiritual beings, and it needs to embrace a humanizing mythos that draws upon the wisdom traditions that come to us from the great post-axial religions. And I agree with conservatives that a purely secular society cannot sustain itself in the long run. It's too imbalanced.

But I don't agree that these problems can be solved from within the political sphere. I have been arguing that Progressives, if they have any hope of saving democracy, need to better understand how the destructive effects that follow from a rigidly materialist ontology having crowded out spiritual values in the intellectual/cultural sphere, and that their success in the long run depends on their taking seriously good-faith efforts to rebalance things in that sphere.

What's so discouraging to me is that, unlike in the 1950s and 60s, there are no prominent, credible voices who are making a compelling case for such a rebalancing. If such voices don't emerge, I fear that these young conservative intellectuals will get what they wish for. That would be a disaster for them, as well as everyone else, in ways they are currently incapable of imagining. 

See also my post on Heroes of the Fourth Turning 

Naive Idealism

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

_____________

*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

 

During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever motivated these Christians to kill one another had nothing to do with the spirit of the gospels. This pathology that calls itself Christian derives from extreme forms of what I want to describe here as "naive idealism". 

My take on 'naive idealism' flows from a typology I describe elsewhere as the Serpent/Dove personality polarity*. Idealist Doves get you riled up enough to join a Crusades, but savvy Serpents win them.

Serpents are earthbound and worldly wise; they are  shrewd, practical, rational, calculating and concerned primarily about personal and tribal survival and comfort. They accept the world as it is, and look at life as a game that the smartest players win. They don't take rules or ideals of any kind seriously, and rather than change them, they'll just ignore them or stretch them beyond recognition in lawyerly or Jesuitical ways. They look at most of the Doves that they meet as flakes or boy scouts who don't understand how the real world works.

Doves are natural idealists who dream of a better world, a world purged of evil, and they are primarily motivated to do what they can to transform the world into their image of what it ideally should be. Not could be, but should be. Doves care about the rules, and if their group is dominant, they can be ruthless in their enforcement. If their group is not dominant, they quickly join crusades that seek to change the rules.

Serpents would never bother. They'd rather pay their accountants or lawyers to find a loophole or pay enforcers to look the other way.  Doves tend to be uncompromising. The most committed Doves are willing to make huge sacrifices, even to die, in the service of their ideals. Serpents, on the other hand, are always willing to cut a deal. Doves look at most of the Serpents they meet as utilitarian and soulless. 

I think each of us is a mix of Serpent and Dove, but in each of us one is dominant and the other recessive. Being a Dove, despite the Dove's penchant to claim the high moral ground, is in no way morally superior to being a Serpent. But I do believe that there is a moral project that involves both the Serpent and Dove in each of us, and that involves our becoming a "mensch"--someone who integrates both Serpent and Dove. This usually requires first understanding which of these for you is dominant, and then undertaking the lifelong task of integrating the part that is recessive. In other words, a mensch is someone who becomes both shrewd as a serpent and guileless as a dove.

An extremist Dove or Serpent refuses to live in the tension between their dominant and recessive aspects and becomes one-sided in the service of whichever is dominant. One-sidedness is more common than integration, but there are degrees of one-sidedness. An extremist Dove is what I describe below as a "naive idealist", and all fanaticism derives from some form or another of naive idealism. An extremist Serpent is never a fanatic but could be a criminal sociopath--a mob boss or a ruthless CEO. The culture of Wall Street, for instance, is shaped by one-sided serpentine values, as is capitalism in general.

But there are capitalist naive idealists. They call themselves Libertarians. Someone like Milton Friedman was completely sincere in an idealism that ironically came to justify capitalism's becoming dominated by extreme, i.e., utterly non-idealist, one-sided Serpents.  Libertarianism is a form of Dove fanaticism that justifies Serpent sociopathy.  

Naive idealism, as I speak of it here, is a condition of profound alienation. It is an anti-human form of angelism that hates the world as it is and which cannot tolerate the presence of evil in it. Evil for naive idealists is a force that must be purged from the world, and they will do whatever it takes to get the job done. There is no compromise with evil. Inquisitions, witch trials, the French Terror,  Mao's cultural Revolution, the January 6 storming of the Capitol all derive from the kind of naive idealism of which I speak here. The naive idealists who drive these sociopathies see themselves as trying to rid the world of evil, which by definition is incarnated in any group that opposes the realization of their ideals. In their one-sidedness they become, with all the best intentions, a force that promotes evil. This is, I believe, the real point of the adage that the road to hell is paved with good intentions. The worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. 

For this reason, naive idealists are a force in the world with enormous potential for destructive violence. Because there is no compromising with evil for extreme, one-sided Doves, they often become explosively enraged when their project to create an ideal society is being undermined by groups who by the very fact of their opposition can be nothing other than evil. This anger at the intractable evil of the world results in escalating levels of violence with each successive failure to force it to conform. This is as much true of Islamic fundamentalists as it is of fervent Marxist revolutionaries as it is for the MAGA minions who stormed the Capitol. 

Again, the worst crimes are perpetrated in the name of the highest ideals. Religious fanaticism of the Muslim or Christian type is all in the family with the fanaticism of the Hitler youth or the Red Guard in China during its cultural revolution in the sixties. They might have different ideas about what the world would look like if it were cleansed of evil, but they are united in their obsession to cleanse it. This is not a religious phenomenon; it is a psychological pathology that can garb itself in religion, but just as often in secular ideologies like Jacobinism, Marxism, Nazism, and MAGAism. Religion has no corner on the market for fanaticism.

Was John Brown wrong in his goals to abolish slavery? Of course not. But he was nevertheless a delusional fanatic whose hatred of slavery made him more a force for evil and destruction than for good. People cut him slack because he had 'good intentions'; they shouldn't have. He was cut from the same cloth as Timothy McVeigh. Both were fanatics because both believed in the purity of their good intentions. But the impulse to purge evil from the world is in itself evil. It's as if evil creates a system that involves both those who promote it in serpentine sociopathic ways--crimes of greed, powerlust, predatory sexuality--and those who seek to exterminate it in righteous fanaticism. It's a closed system that locks both parties in an endless karmic loop where victory means becoming the evil one sought to purge. Like a parasite, evil just moves from one host to the other.

So the hatred naive idealists have for what they perceive as evil usually winds up sooner or later destroying themselves and a lot of innocents with them. The Jacobins during the French Revolution were paradigmatic in this respect. Jacobinism was marked by increasingly stringent tests of Revolutionary Purity. Recently, we saw this to some extent on the Left leading to the ridiculous purity test that requires that you are not sufficiently woke unless you agree that we must defund the police.

But that is benign when compared to what we see the same thing going on in Republican politics right now. The party is marked by an insane escalation of purity tests based on who is the most anti-vaccine or anti-mask in response to the Covid Crisis or who is the most fervid in his or her belief that the election was stolen from Trump. This is all justified by the  naively idealist, fanatical commitments to a delusional ideal of "Liberty".

One of the great cliches among aspiring writers is their ambition to write the "great American novel." But it has already been written, and it's called Moby Dick. Ahab is the archetype of the American version of the naive idealism that is so deeply woven into our Calvinist national character. Melville is our national prophet, and Ahab's story is the American story now in the fight against Communism and then Fundamentalist Islamic Terrorism in the Middle East. Both stories are about how the hatred of evil and the desire to hunt it down and exterminate it make one profoundly complicit in the system of evil. Ahab does evil's work just as much as the evil he hates, and he thinks he's doing God's work the whole time. And the final result is shipwreck, and the only victor is Evil. The whale swims on.

Moby Dick Syndrome is this tendency deriving from America's Puritan heritage that seeks to create a pure society that is on a mission to eradicate evil. It feeds our current Millennial generation with the expectation that society should be fair, equal, and free everywhere and immediately. It's at the heart of what it means to be "woke". I'm arguing here that as John Brown and Robespierre were not wrong in their ideals, neither are woke Millennials. But both are wrong when their ideals become fanatically one-sided. The challenge is to retain one's ideals while at the same time being shrewd about how to live in a way that is faithful to them. Naive idealism is something conjured in the head; a truly menschy idealism is conjured in the heart.  

Contrast the Naive Idealist attitude toward evil with the gospel depiction** of Jesus' intervention regarding the woman caught in adultery whose Ahab-like accusers were about to stone her to death. Jesus' attitude is "menschy"; It's not one of "whatever", but neither does he condemn. He encounters actors in the eternal action/reaction loop here in the accusers and the accused. Both parties will remain locked within the loop unless there could be an intervention from outside of it. And that's what Jesus' confrontation with the adulteress and her accusers represented--not a condemnation, but the chance to liberate both parties from the loop.

The great saints are not fanatics; they are mensches. Jesus's intervention in this story gives them the opportunity to become released from the loop in which they are trapped, which opens up the possibility for them to move toward greater levels of integration and 'menschiness'.

We are all of us caught in an all-but closed toxic system. Christians call it original sin; Buddhists call it maya.  And we are all suffocating spiritually, whether we are aware of it or not, to the degree that we have no access to sources of clean air from outside this system. We all need to breathe this clean air if we are truly to flourish as human beings. Clean air promotes integration. To the degree that we breathe it, we become healthier and in a curious way we absorb the toxins within the loop and this helps to cleanse the air around us. So when people choose to live from this cleaner air, their lives become infusion points through which clean air enters into the system, and they become filters through whom the toxins around them are removed. This is how real, positive change takes place. Naive idealists do not promote substantive change; they are fanatics, high on the toxins, who just perpetuate a demi-life within the loop.

Most people prefer to breathe clean air if it's available to them. The problem now is that in America, especially in its public personalities and in its public life, it's in such short supply. But I do believe that it's possible, both as individuals and as communities, to create zones within the world that are relatively free from these toxins. We can each of us find our own individual way to breathe clean air, but alone we can find only enough air to stay alive. Alone, we're like someone who has to drag an oxygen tank around with him wherever he goes. Better if we can together create zones where the air is oxygen rich enough so that the tanks are unnecessary. This is the only way in which true integrated, human flourishing--menschiness--on earth becomes real.

Is it naively idealistic of me to hope for such a future? I don't know. We'll see. But I do think I understand enough about human nature and human history to assert that Life within the "Loop" is not the only possibility for humans. Whether or not we survive as a species depends on whether we find a way, step by step, to improve air quality in this metaphorical sense. 

9/26/21 Update: This Atlantic article entitled "The Experts Somehow Overlooked the Authoritarians on the Left" bolsters my argument here. All authoritarians, whether on the Left or Right, whether cynically (Trump) or sincerely (Robespierre), work with the energies of one-sided doves, aka Naive Idealists. If you lean Left, you tend to cut some slack for--if not admire--the John Browns while being horrified by the Timothy McVeighs, and vice versa if you lean Right. Nevertheless, there's no question that while the authoritarians of the Left--the Neopuritans in the P.C./Antifa/anarchist crowd--are annoying, they pose relatively little danger, whereas the authoritarians of the Right might very well destroy American democracy and the open society that America has become, whatever its flaws and limitations. For more on this, see Left Authoritarians.

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*The Serpent/Dove archetype suffuses literature and popular culture, and I'd argue it's at the heart of the meaning of the Taoist Yin/Yang symbol. In the Bible: Eve and Adam, Cain and Abel, Jacob and Esau, Peter and Paul. In Shakespeare--Iago and Othello, Hamlet and Ophelia, Berowne and Navarre, Antonio and Prospero, Rosalind and Orlando--are just the ones that come to mind off the top of my head. In Dickens Estella and Pip, Dora and Agnes, etc. In 20th Century Comedy Abbot and Costello, Hardy and Laurel, Martin and Lewis. It's central to themes developed in Dostoyevski's Brothers Karamazov and Steinbeck's East of Eden. Watch the recent Disney movie Cruella through this lens.

In most cases the Dove is the dullard, and the more interesting, compelling character is the shrewder, more worldly wise Serpent--Jacob, Hamlet, Berowne, Rosalind. In rare cases the more interesting character is the Dove--St. Paul, Prospero, Alyosha Karamazov.

I'd argue that interesting one-sided Serpents are a dime a dozen and so are easy to write, and the only compelling Doves are fanatics, which are rarely, for good reason, portrayed sympathetically. People have tried see John Brown and Che Guevara as compelling doves, but they are compelling only to the degree that we see them struggling with moral ambiguity in private rather than merely in their public personae as extremists. Interesting Doves like Prospero and Alyosha are compelling because we see them struggling to integrate their Serpent. Dickens' David Copperfield is the story of a Dove-dominant character integrating his Serpent. It's a rare Dove that integrates his Serpent, but it's also the rare Serpent who integrates his Dove. In Shakespeare the Serpent-dominant Rosalind achieves this whereas Hamlet does not. In this post, I argue that Dolly Parton is a Serpent-dominant type who has integrated her Dove. MLK, Gandhi, and Mandela, on the other hand, were Doves who had made more progress than most in having integrated their Serpents. 

Contemporary literature and literary criticism is almost completely circumscribed by Serpent-dominant values and so is inclined to dismiss any depiction of successful integration as sentimental. I think that most of the Shakespearean comedies are parables of integration. As is Capra's It's a Wonderful Life, which is the story of the Dove-dominant character George Bailey integrating his Serpent. A litmus test for me as to whether someone has a shred of the Dove's guileless spiritual vitality in him is whether he dismisses this movie as sentimental nonsense or finds in it something vital.

It's a fairy tale, but like many fairy tales it points to an important truth about what it means to be human. You need to have some Dove life working in your soul to enable at least a minimal level of 'second naïveté'. It's second naïveté that allows you to appreciate what Capra achieves in this movie. Second naïveté is essential in a Serpent-dominated cultural milieu where a kind of worldly-wise cynicism plays such a dominant shaping role on the worldviews of, especially, the well-educated. 

**John 8: 1-11

What the Right & Left Get Right but Why Both Are Mostly Wrong

[I]n all these respects, it seems to me that the Renaissance started out with a huge expansion of the right hemisphere’s way of being in the world, into which, initially, the work of the left hemisphere is integrated. And it is this that accounts for the astonishing fertility and richness, as well as the remarkable breadth of concern, to this day memorialised in the concept of the Renaissance man, of this period.

As the Renaissance progresses, there becomes evident, however, a gradual shift of emphasis from the right hemisphere way of being towards the vision of the left hemisphere, in which a more atomistic individuality characterised by ambition and competition becomes more salient; and originality comes to mean not creative possibility but the right to ‘free thinking’, the way to throw off the shackles of the past and its traditions, which are no longer seen as an inexhaustible source of wisdom, but as tyrannical, superstitious and irrational – and therefore wrong. This becomes the basis of the hubristic movement which came to be known as the Enlightenment.

Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World  (Kindle Location 8766-8783). Yale University Press.

McGilchrist's book is astonishing on so many levels. It is a prodigious feat of synthesis drawing on neuroscience, philosophy, literature, psychiatry and so much more. It, imo, is one of the most important efforts at thinking published in the last decade or so. I believe it gives us the resources to find a way forward. For if the shift from the stale, abstract, left-brainy, rigid intellectualism of late medieval scholasticism could morph into the the rich, lively, right/left balanced celebration of life of the Renaissance, perhaps we can find a way forward toward our own Renaissance. Because now in our "postmodern" condition, we are living the reductio ad absurdum of the hubristic Enlightenment Age of Reason, which was until mid last century the consensus spirit animating the Liberal Order. And as the Liberal Order decays, a revanchist, regressive irrational Right arises to provide some atavistic fantasy of a bygone Golden Age. This has come to a head in the Age of Whatever, which set the stage for the Age of Trump. 

In the Age of Whatever, what remains of the old Liberal Order is in one prominent aspect a Neo-puritan, moralistic priggery that at best parodies a serious moral outlook for want of something better. At the same time, a Social Darwinist Neoliberalism dominates in the most woke of workplaces, a Liberalism that paradoxically celebrates diversity, equality, individualism, and freedom while too-often imposing a soul-deadening technocratic organization and a managerial culture of compulsive surveillance and control. But that's all cool because management tacked up a Black Lives Matter poster in the lunchroom.

In the Age of Whatever, there is no consensus about anything. Anything is permissible so long as you don't hurt others. Outside of a depressingly Social Darwinian Ayn Randian framework, there is no longer any imagination for what might be noble individual aspiration, much less noble collective aspiration. Depressing because so many of my most spirited students are attracted to it for, again, want of something better. So everybody is as free to be as good or bad as they wish in theory, but in reality most people are constrained by tribal Liberal or Conservative moralistic groupthinks.

De Toqueville pointed this out about Americans almost two hundred years ago. There is something about Anglo-American and French culture that makes true independent or original thinking very rare and hard to come by. What passes for original is really just novel, a clever variation along lines accepted by Right or Left groupthinks. {See Note 1 in the comments section.] Nobody sane wants to live in the Age of Whatever--except maybe a handful of wannabe Nietzsches in the academy and in pop culture who have persuaded themselves it's edgier or braver to live in some realm beyond Good and Evil. But there was only one Nietzsche, and he died in an asylum.

So the culture must move through this awkward phase, and it will. The Age of Whatever is the Age of Whatever Comes Next. The only question is whether it will do it in a healthy or unhealthy way. Healthy means an open society in which its citizens are provided a cultural framework, a trellis, on which they as individuals can become their best selves.

Unhealthy means a rigid, autocratic, closing down of any possibilities except those that are sanctioned by elites on the theocratic Right or on the technocratic Left who think they know best. That's why the individualistic liberation agenda of the Cutltural Left is inadequate. There is in it no vision of possibility for a better human future except to say No to traditional constraints. That's fine so far as it goes, but it has the unintended consequence of clearing the ground for technocratic Social Darwinians to take the field unopposed. We need an imagination of a human future to which all people of good will can say Yes. We need them to be inspired enough by such a vision to be willing to fight for it. 

The culture can move through the Age of Whatever to something better only if it finds a way to synthesize its contradictions on a higher level. That is the coincidentia oppositorum, or the Hegelian aufhebung or what I have stressed repeatedly on this blog as the Platonic metaxis--a practice by which we stand between polarities, identifying with neither, but allowing what is healthy or positive in both to marry, so to say, to create a new moment of integration at a higher level. That is the formula for Renaissance and for true moral development. We all, if we are sane, want to live in Renaissance. We will need a little help from the zeitgeist for such a thing to happen, but there will have to be enough people awake enough to its possibility to work with it when it shifts. [BTW, I don't think this is a task for philosophers. They're the last ones to look to. I think someone like Dolly Parton is a better model to emulate.]

I am an advocate for Renaissance, not nostalgia. Renaissance means 'rebirth', and while it involves a retrieval of things lost or forgotten, it does not involve a nostalgia for former social orders, or the fantasy of so many conservatives to go native in the past imagined as some Tolkienesque golden age or some darker, Evola-esque autarchy. In this rather long post, I want to lay out in one place some of the meta issues that define us at this moment. We are most of us looking at things from the worm's eye view, and it's helpful sometimes to take a look at things from 30,000 feet up.

Part of the mission of this blog is to help cosmopolitan educated types to understand the forces driving the Right but also the limitations of their own presuppositions. The Right and Left are two poles of the same system, and they work dynamically together, but they no longer do so creatively because there's no deep vitality in either. So the task is to transcend both their contradictions in a new synthesis. In previous posts here and here, I've made as sympathetic a case as I can muster to understand what I call Bannonism, whether or not he personally plays any future role in it. His critique of the contemporary Liberal Order is incisive, and his strategy for overturning it could have worked if Trump were not such a self-absorbed fool. But it may work still with a less feral, more strategic fuerher in the future. So I take Bannonism very seriously. 

The most intelligent advocates for Bannonism see themselves as redressing an imbalance in the Liberal Order, which clearly is needed, but they have no real positive, healthy alternative. Their movement is mostly animated by an impassioned NO to the soullessness of the secular materialist and technocratic ethos that shapes mainstream society. So they understand something that most Liberals do not, because to be a Liberal means that you are more or less well adapted to the secular, materialist technocracy. So the No to traditional restraints that animates the Left is matched by the No to Liberal technocracy that animates the Right, and both Nos lead not to resolution, but to impasse. You need something positive in one pole to interact with something positive in the other to move forward--and neither has it at any level of meaningful vitality. 

Bannonism, in realizing that there is no longer anything of real value for conservatives to conserve in the Liberal Order, seeks to tear it down in the hope that something better might arise from the ashes. That, of course, is crazy. But so is Islamic fundamentalism, Stalinism & Nazism, Maoism, and any number of collective delusions that justify themselves as pushing back against what they see as an evil, corrupt status quo. The insane have a way of taking control because they are willing to cross lines the sane won't. And the sane tend to give the insane the benefit of the doubt, and when they realize that they were mistaken, it's too late.

So Bannonism offers nothing positive; it certainly does not offer Renaissance, only a substitution of one deeply inadequate negating ideology for another. If the Bannonites succeed in their tearing down the Liberal Order--and they just might--they will only bring us more intense pain and broader suffering. Some Bannonites are naive because they honestly think anything is better than the current Liberal Order; others simply don't care how many people suffer after the Liberal Order's collapse so long as they're in power. 

The Meta-Historical Context

I don't have views that flow easily in the mainstream, but I persist in thinking I can make compelling arguments for some alternative to the current Left/Right impasse. There are primarily two resistant audiences I need to persuade. The first would be people with a conventional, secular, scientific worldview who see evolution, and therefore human evolution, as driven primarily as a random, meaningless process; the second would be people with religious convictions who believe life on earth is a prison, a vale of tears to be escaped. Both of these constituencies have grounding intuitions that are valid, but both for reasons that I will try to explain are wrong in the way they extrapolate from these intuitions.  

My own mythopoetic framework, which I believe is completely consistent with a Nicene Christianity in a Christian Neoplatonic key is tersely summarized here. I think something along these lines is necessary to provide a future framework for Renaissance. It need not be Christian, but should be post-Axial along the lines of the Philosophia Perennis. My framework is also shaped by a combination of non-theological sources, but probably the main one is what I call "The German Story". Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Jung, Gebser, and the Englishman Owen Barfield are all different articulators of a basic intuition about the meaning of history as the evolution of consciousness. The French thinkers Henri Bergson and Teilhard de Chardin add a dimension to this story that I have deep sympathies with. 

This German story can be briefly summarized like this: The human being is the place where the cosmos becomes aware of itself, or to use Heidegger's phrase, a "clearing in the forest of Being". This is a human centered, progressive, evolutionary process extending over millennia. The health of the earth matters because the earth is where the sacred human project unfolds. 

Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Freud are also contributors to this "German story". They would dissent about their being a collective progressive dimension to the evolution of consciousness, but they are important because, like the others, they emphasize that the human being has fathomless depths, depths that are as deep as the mystery of Being itself. It is human openness to this dimension of depth that I see as threatened by the new technologies, particularly the seductions of artificial intelligence and virtual reality. These technologies need not be malign, but they are and will be to the degree that they close off human possibilities more than they open them up. They might open possibilities up on the horizontal dimension--like the superpowers celebrated in the movies--but it's hard for me to see how they might open them up more than close them down on the vertical dimension, the dimension of depth. We'll see.

Insofar as they are closing off the human being from the dimension of depth, they are obstructing what I believe central to the human project. To put it in McGilchrist's terms, the new technologies insofar as they mechanomorphize the human being, are working from the imbalanced, closed-off perspective of the Left hemisphere of the brain. This may sound simplistic, but it will not appear so after you've read the book. If you've not seen it, the RSA animate video will give you a better feel for the sophistication and nuance that McG brings to this subject. But, really, you've got to read the book. 

I know the computer science folks have great hopes that machine learning will find a way to replicate human consciousness, but it is hard for me to believe that machines can have the special thing that humans have, which is this openness to the dimension of depth mediated to them by the Right hemisphere of the brain. I wonder how many in CS folks actually believe that there are depths in human consciousness that they need bother to try to replicate. Machines can mimic left-brain thinking, but do not have access to the "data" which is only mediated through the right brain, because that data comes from having a soul and with it the capacity for cognitions on the dimension of originary depth.

The peculiarly modern condition of alienation from Being began to take hold in the West among the Voluntarists and Nominalists in the late medieval period, and it is chiefly characterized by a mindset in which the values of the Left brain have usurped and crowded out the richness and soulfulness given to us by the Right. Occam's razor became a justification for cutting away more of the richness of thinking and imagination than the pious Occam ever intended. Why? The left brain is all about seizing power and imposing order. "I just want to keep people safe" is the most common justification for all control zealots, and safety and control are dominant themes in the cultural ethos of the military in one way and of the bourgeois Cultural Left in another. 

The Right brain opens humans up to the depths, the messy domain of everything beyond human control, while the Left Brain is all about grasping, controlling, and ordering what is given to it from the right. Ideally, as McG explains above, they work together--that's the formula for true creativity and Renaissance--but when they do the Right Brain is the Master and the Left the Emissary and servant. Societies get into big trouble when the Emissary usurps control from the Master, much as Antonio usurped Milan from Prospero in Shakespeare's The Tempest. We're in that trouble now. 

The Tempest is the story that hinges on the coincidentia oppositorum. I would argue that most of Shakespeare's plays work with its archetypal power. The basic structure of the comedies starts with conflict between two dramatic polarities, then proceeds with a serious effort by the protagonist to effect a reconciliation at a higher moral level, and if successful, culminates in the final act with a scene that celebrates the expansive joy of an achieved communion--weddings, feasts, circle dances.

In The Tempest, the basic dramatic conflict is between Prospero and his usurping brother, Antonio. The moral question at the heart of the play is to avenge or not to avenge. Prospero refuses revenge and its endless cycle of counter-revenge, which is "natural" in its following logic of evolution without grace. His refusal allows for the possibility to achieve integration at a higher level, a restorative, expansive aufhebung, that reestablishes him in Milan with the expansion of his realm with the marriage of Miranda and Ferdinand to include Naples. 

Something like that has to happen to resolve the sterile conflict between the Left and Right in American society; otherwise our future will be an infinite, irresolvable series of Left/Right backlashes. Aufhebung is not the same as compromise. It's about synthesis and communion at a higher level. This is how real moral progress happens, but it requires leaders who are mature moral agents. Is the Cultural/Religious Right capable of producing such leaders? I'm sure there are mature moral agents on the Right, but will they be listened to by the rank and file they would lead? 

And on the Cultural Left, are there leaders there with the spiritual or moral resources to say No to the ways the Enlightenment project leads to the end of the human project? Is there any capacity there to push back against those who are advocating for a mechanomorphized transhuman or posthuman future? Are they capable of seeing how this is the reductio ad absurdum of Left Brain cultural hegemony? Is it within their resources to see it as the parodic apotheosis of the Enlightenment project to liberate the humans from the irrational by liberating them from their bodies? 

Left Braininess is something Liberals value in a way that Conservatives do not, and for this reason, elite Liberals in the universities, the media, in pop culture either celebrate or are otherwise blind to, complacent about, or resigned to the threats posed to the human project by mechanomorphizing it. Technocratic Neoliberalism and the postmodern liberation ethos of anything goes are symptoms of Left-braininess on steroids. Are Liberal elites able to transcend such limitations? We'll see. but I don't see much sign of it at this juncture. 

The Current Crisis

I believe that the shrunken capacity of humans to cognize levels of Being on the dimension of depth is the greatest threat to humanity in this moment. All the other problems, whether environmental degradation, terrorism, nuclear holocaust, immiseration of the masses, the trend toward authoritarianism, are one way or another symptoms of our historically unprecedented Left-brainy shallowness in the West--and increasingly everywhere else as well. Anybody with a shred of a soul feels it. They might identify it as a feeling that their lives are being choked by a suffocating 'inauthenticity'. And so many people feel increasingly alienated, anxious, angry, depressed.

The world around them seems unreal, a kind shadow theater, a virtual simulation, with little in it that resonates meaningfully. People are going through the motions because what else is there to do? But they are starved for authenticity, and it's in very short supply. People will seize on almost anything that gives them an antidote to their alienation. The easiest remedy is to lose oneself one way or another--in a surrender to Tribal identity or to sterile, instinct-driven pleasures. These are deeper forms of alienation from which it is more difficult to recover because they require a refusal of what Tillich called 'the courage to be'. The Liberal model with all the best intentions frames existential failures of courage in this sense as disease, which hygienizes it in ways that rob people of their spiritual dignity. 

Nevertheless, Cultural Conservatives are wrong to blame liberals for creating this shallow, alienated shadow world. Liberals didn't create it, but they are better adapted to it. They don't feel as uncomfortable in it as cultural conservatives do, at least the affluent, educated Liberals don't. Religious conservatives look at these shallow, happy Liberals--Hillary Clinton being their exemplar--and are disgusted by their smug complacency. What's the matter with these Liberals? How can they be so glib, so self-righteous? Have they no souls? How can they be so comfortable in such a flat, spiritually eviscerated culture? Well, most Liberals are not soulless; the best among them feel as alienated as conservatives, but they certainly don't think that the people on the religious right have any real remedies. And they're not wrong.

And hardly any Liberal I know is a hard-core secularist. There are some, but they are far fewer than most conservative ideologues believe. They are secular but not necessarily unspiritual; they are mostly agnostic when it comes to religious questions, because when they look at the churches, unless they're lucky enough to live in a place with an exceptional local church community, they rightly see that there's nothing special or challenging there either intellectually, morally, or socially. Joining a bicycle or hiking club would be more edifying than attending a local church services. They certainly don't care or even know about the pronouncements of Church bodies like the National Council of Churches, or the various Catholic, Lutheran, or other denominational synods. And even if these bodies make pronouncements that they agree with, why should they care? They have no political clout, and Liberals don't need the churches to tell them what common sense and common decency easily recognize without them. 

Their views on liberal policies, in my experience, are not rigid. I live in Seattle, a very culturally liberal place. I had a conversation recently with a very Liberal, very secularized, non-observant Jewish friend who knew that I was a practicing Catholic. This perplexed him because I otherwise seemed so sane. He wanted to know what my position on abortion was. I usually avoid conversations on tribal shibboleth issues like abortion. Most Liberals, like most Conservatives, don't have strongly thought out or deeply held convictions. They just go along with whoever in their tribe shouts the loudest, and so when it comes to having a conversation about such a topic, most Liberals and Conservatives just mouth the tribal talking points. And I don't want any part of the kind of moronic conversations that operate on that level. 

But my friend is an honest, morally serious person. He's someone you can have a frank conversation about a radioactive topic like this. So he asked and I answered frankly. I told him I thought it was wrong, and that there is something soul-dead about a society that has come to see abortion as a banal surgical practice which is the moral equivalent of an appendectomy.

I see it as consonant with the deeply alienating and perverse extreme aspects of the modern liberation project toward a posthumanism that seeks to liberate what it means to be human from what it means to have a body. Having a body is the whole point of being human. It is only in our bodies that we can renew the face of the earth. 

I don't think this because I'm a Catholic, and that's what Catholics believe. But I do think that my being a Catholic gives me a way to stand outside the Liberal Groupthink and to determine for myself what is truly good or a counterfeit of it. My life as a Catholic is largely defined as a metaxis between its rich tradition of thinkers, prophets, and saints and the Liberal social imaginary, which is the world into which I was born and in which I live my day to day life. Striving to live in the space between them rather than to be circumscribed by either is not easy, and I may not do it well, but it's my understanding about how to live authentically in a world that has lost its mind. It enables one to find a foothold in a place that is foundational for both but which also transcends both.

In any event, I didn't say all this to my friend, but I explained to him that I'm not interested in criminalizing abortion, but I am truly dismayed by Liberals' glib, technocratic-utilitarian approval for what is a fundamentally a dehumanizing act. It says something very damning about us as a society, but it's just one among many symptoms of a deeper disease because so does the dehumanization of criminals with the death penalty, our enthusiastic support for the vengeance-driven invasion and destruction of Iraq, our dehumanizing of political prisoners with torture, and our dehumanizing treatment of immigrants and refugees. We are a  sick society, which is losing its grip on its humanity, and our hygienizing of abortion is one symptom of the way the way the utilitarian-technocratic ethos has dehumanized us among many others. I know--life is messy. Nothing in a life seriously lived is determined by binary black-and-white thinking. There are situations where having abortion is a defensible choice. But the exception should not be the rule. At some time in the future, I hope most people will look back on our contemporary mainstream attitudes toward abortion and think of them as barbaric as we now see genital mutilation. 

My friend's reaction was interesting. I think my answer to his question gave him permission to express his own moral discomfort with the knee-jerk cultural legitimacy that abortion has achieved in his cosmopolitan culture world. Deep down he feels it's wrong because it really is, whatever clever utilitarian or ideologically driven reasons might be used to justify it. But he never heard anybody explain why in language that was not ideologically motivated. 

Authenticity and Morality

Any moral position is inauthentic to the degree that is determined primarily by outside-in factors. People who have an outside-in morality generally have no strongly held convictions. They just do what people expect them to do, whether it's contribute to a group-approved charity or show up at church--or whether to wear a mask or not to wear a mask. Too many of the same people who do nice things if that's what expected of them will also do horrible things if that's what expected of them. If their neighbors are part of a lynch mob, they'll join in. If they're working at Enron, they'll come up with creative ideas to cheat the elderly poor. If they're sitting in Trump's cabinet room, they will kiss his ass when he demands it because everyone else is doing it. Whatever.

There are degrees of inauthenticity, of course. But the defining essence of inauthenticity is that "you" don't really decide; "you" just do what somebody else thinks is best. You just go along to get along. It's what's expected. There is no moral agent working from the inside-out struggling to know what the right thing is and then finding the courage to do it. No authenticity is required if moral questions are decided for you outside-in, by the authorities or cultural bullies. No matter how much you might appear to others as a model citizen, there is no virtue in it when it requires no courage or moral conviction to just go along. 

Mature moral judgments are always inside-out, and any kind of authentic moral development must have some degree of inside-out. But the way the inside-out moral agent emerges initially is almost always in conversation with people who have themselves achieved some level of inside-out, authentic moral development. So of course, there is some outside-in triggering event of some kind--a conversation, a lecture, a book--but this is completely different from just downloading someone else's or one's tribe's moral code and following it mainly for fear of being caught and shamed.

That was Socrates' project, right? He was condemned to death for corrupting the youth of Athens, but all he was trying to do was to have honest conversations and through through them to awaken them, to have them go deeper to see that their cultural download was shallow, that there was in fact a Good that transcends custom and culture. He wanted to awaken them to the existence of this culture-transcending Good so that they might live lives that are aligned with it rather than simply to mindlessly goose step to the tribal code. This is the essence of "Axiality", this awakening to the transcendent Good.

So a healthy "Axial" culture's customs and traditions are important because of the role they play in awakening individuals in each generation to this transcendent Good. Any culture is healthy to the degree that it awakens the people born into it to their best possibilities as human beings, to their blossoming inside-out. A culture becomes decadent to the degree that it no longer produces this kind of authentic moral development. It is unhealthy to the degree that it imposes a rigid outside-in code and demands a rigid obedience to that code or risk ostracism. A shame culture is not a truly moral culture. It looks like Islamic fundamentalism over there, but like the Republican Party or Woke political correctness over here. A shame culture functions merely as a social constructions whose concerns are for social utility and order, not on what is truly, deeply Good.

But the problem I have with cultural conservatives is that their traditions and customs are more what I have called elsewhere Zombie Traditions: their traditions and codes maintain a cadaverous form, but they no longer carry the spiritual Life that originally gave them shape. They are animated by a kind of undead energy that masquerades as but really parodies the transcendent inspiration--the Good--that originally gave them their form.

Zombie traditionalists show themselves in their anger and resentment because they feel that they don't get enough outside-in respect in a society dominated by Liberal values. But if their tradition was a healthy, living one, it would produce enough people who have that interior sense of dignity that always awakens in others when they encounter it the same inner dignity. If people feel this sense of inner dignity, they don't feel anger and resentment at being slighted by people that don't "get it". Instead they try to share with them the Good that they have come to know.

Why are so many cultural and religious conservatives attracted to Trump? Because he articulates the anger of profoundly alienated people on the cultural Right and channels their resentment. If they really cared about and aspired to the Good, they could only be disgusted by him and by the dark impulses he evokes in their souls. One of the most common symptoms of stunted moral development is the urge in the immature to blame others for their own failures, and to project onto them their own shortcomings that they fail to see in themselves. 

Everybody does this--me included--but there is a peculiarly toxic way that this is endorsed and legitimated on right-wing media. It blames Liberals for everything rather than even entertaining the possibility that its own mindset reinforces and rigidifies a mentality that is morally stunting precisely because it refuses to do the hard work of becoming a mature moral agent. Trump, Rush, Alex, and others give them permission to be their worst selves, and it must be ok because everybody they know thinks and feels the same. So it's just so satisfying to join the mob and blame the Liberals. That feeling that they get, that rush, substitutes for and crowds out any possibility for authentic moral, inside-out development.

Zombie Traditionalists are aggressively outside-in in their moral program. Their sense of identity is something that depends on the propping up of a fragile structure that no longer awakens an authentic, calming, interior dignity. And so it produces another form of alienation that is just as toxic, and I'd argue more dangerous, than the kind of alienation that typifies the anything-goes ethos of secular Liberals.

You can have a conversation with most Liberals, you can't with fanatic, right-wing tribalists. Are there fanatic, Liberal tribalists? Yes, of course, and you can't have a conversation with them either. But they are the exception, in my experience, rather than the rule. If the primary negative characteristic of Cultural Conservatives is their outside-in moral rigidity, the primary negative characteristic of Liberals is their moral diffidence and tolerance for any individual's thinking so long as they are tolerant of others.

Cultural Conservatives value loyalty more than reason. Cultural Liberals value reason (usually in a rather attenuated, left-brainy form) more than loyalty, but that makes it possible for Liberals to be open to arguments that lay outside the Liberal Groupthink. That's much, much harder for conservatives because their sense of integrity lies in keeping faith with others in the Tribe no matter whether there are really, really good reasons to doubt the validity or the goodness of their tribal norms. 

Cultural conservatives see Liberals as morally lax and unprincipled, but most Liberals don't see themselves that way. They have deeply felt moral commitments, even if they are agnostic about the metaphysical foundations that ground those commitments. And they don't "hate" cultural conservatives. The only thing most rank-and-file Liberals really hate about the cultural Right is its rigid intolerance. Cultural Liberals are quite tolerant of all kinds of conservative values and practices so long as they who hold them do not seek to impose them on others. But since intolerance is at the core of the Cultural Conservative identity, the Cultural Left's hatred of the Cultural Right's intolerance feels like a complete rejection of everything that conservatives believe. 

I think there is an analogy presented in the gospels that illuminates the difference between the cultural Right and Left. Jesus had more problems with the religious professionals, the culturally conservative Pharisees and Saducees who were so obsessed regarding their moral rectitude. Every religion produces this class of meathead. These people, so 'righteous' in their imaginations of themselves, were closed to having a conversation that might open them up to new moral possibilities. So Jesus spent most of his time with the local sinners, i.e., the morally lax cultural liberals of his day, who were quite open to having a conversation. Zacchaeus (Luke 19) is the classic affluent liberal of his time, as was the Samaritan woman at Jacob's well (John 4). 

Despite these sinners' code-breaking, they had supple enough hearts that made them de facto morally superior to the rigidly moral Pharisees. Jesus described the latter as 'whited sepulchers', clean outside, but rotting inside, a vivid image of an inauthentic, alienating morality that is outside-in. The worst kind of sin is hardness of heart because it's the disposition of soul that makes you invulnerable to the influences of Goodness and Truth when it is standing there right in front of you. They couldn't see who Jesus was because he didn't fit their morally rigid template for what was acceptable. This is the source of the kind of intolerance that is central the cultural conservative's identity. They think they know what is moral, when in fact they are remarkably clueless about what is truly Good. 

Not a problem for the Zachaeuses and Photines of the world, morally lax though they might be. It is better to be the improvident, morally lax prodigal son than the older son, righteous but tight-assed and full of resentment. The point of the parable is not to endorse an antinomian moral laxity but rather to point out that the prodigal son is open to new moral possibilities in a way that the older brother is not. Whether he realizes those possibilities in becoming an authentically inside-out moral agent is another question. But the chances are better for him than for his resentment-driven, rotted-on-the-inside brother. 

***

Thoughtful cultural conservatives have a legitimate critique of the Liberal Order, but they have no realistic, healthy remedy. They don't understand what a real cure requires. They are understandably frustrated, but they channel their anger toward the wrong enemy. They should instead focus their energies at the greater threat posed by unbridled techno-capitalism. It's a place where they could find many allies on the Progressive Left. But even here, saying No is not enough. The issue is not to put a halt to what Silicon Valley is doing, but rather to offer an alternative imagination for a human future where machines serve human purposes rather than to let the machines and the logic of techno-capitalism set the agenda, which is currently the default. You can't do that if you believe that humans are talking animals that have no more significance for the cosmos than slime molds. But neither can you if you think the earth is a prison from which we must escape. 

So it is extraordinarily difficult for secular Liberals, especially the Neoliberal elite who dominate the media, pop culture, and the Democratic Party, to push back against the hubristic techno-capitalist agenda because most Liberals don't have strong convictions about what it means to be a human being, and even frequently believe that the earth would be better without humans. That kind of thinking is truly, deeply crazy as anything the Cultural Right puts out there. But it is also extremely difficult for the Cultural Right to push back because, if they think about it at all, which most don't, they are Libertarians in the Goldwater/Norquist mode, and the idea of using government power to impinge in any way on private-sector freedoms shorts out their thinking and makes their heads explode. 

So this is why I think that both Liberals and Conservatives are both right and wrong, but in the short term I side with the Liberals because they are the true conservatives insofar as they are committed to the rule of law and to finding practical solutions in a complex, pluralistic, globalizing world. In other words, the real world. Conservatives just want to say No to all that complexity and to live bunkered in their traditionalists hidey-holes and media bubbles and in doing so make themselves unavailable for honest conversation with Liberals of good will.

I see Cultural Conservatives as like people in a burning house, a house that they co-own with Liberals, but would just as soon let it burn if they have to share management responsibilities with the Liberals. Anyway, their real home is in heaven, not in this house, so, yeah, let it burn. We will die with the Liberals, but we go to a better place where we won't have to deal with them anymore because there won't be any of them there.

Is it really more complicated than that? If so, not by much. 

Liberals might be blind to things that the most thoughtful conservatives know and understand, but conservatives in the political sphere have proved themselves over and over again to have nothing positive to contribute. They just say No and then find convoluted ways to justify their support for a sociopath like Donald Trump. Conservatives in America have become more a part of the problem than partners with sane Liberals who are seeking in good faith to find solutions to the most pressing problems we are facing. 

In the long term, I believe what I described above as the German story will continue to play out. And this moves forward through successive moments of Renaissance, moral leaps forward, a la the Iain McGilchrist epigraph. So in future posts, I want to continue to think out loud about this, and I'm interested in anybody wanting to join in to think with me. It's not as if I have any clear program, except to strongly believe that humanity is a sacred project and that humans have within themselves everything they need to transcend their ignorance and delusional thinking if somehow they find the will to do it. 

[A version of this essay originally appeared here in 2019 under a different title.]