After the Future

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.]

Heroes of the Fourth Turning

I have just read Will Arbery's intriguing play. I  haven't seen it on stage. I read an interview with Arbery in Vox, which motivated me to purchase the play.which I read the other day. 

I come out of the Catholic world, and this blog represents what I hope is an intellectually coherent presentation of a progressive Catholic sensibility. But while I know many conservative Catholics, I have no personal conversational relationships with the kind of people who appear in this play--extremely Conservative Catholic intellectuals who, with the exception of Emily, seem to befriend only other extremely conservative Catholics. My only encounter with people who think this way is in reading The American Conservative or First Things. The first was founded by Pat Buchanan, and it's a site on which Rod Dreher, a crunchy conservative and the author of The Benedict Option referenced in the play, seems to play an outsized role.

I think the play's performance in New York has gotten a lot of attention because like Hillbilly Elegy, it's an intelligent exposition of an American culture world that most New York cosmopolitans have no understanding of or sympathy for, and as such it is helpful for Liberals struggling to understand how intelligent, sympathetic human beings could vote for Trump. (BTW, alas) The events take place on August 19, 2017, right after Trump dumps Bannon. Although all five characters voted for Trump. Teresa, a wannabe Ann Coulter, is the only one of the five characters who did so without moral ambiguity. Teresa is smart and articulate, but she's the least attractive character in the play, unless, of course, you find someone like Ann Coulter attractive.  

I think the most interesting character is Emily, who is suffering from a mysterious disease reminiscent of Flannery O'Connor's Lupus. She's in enormous pain, and she is enormously empathic. Empathy is what this play is all about. It provides an opportunity for Liberals to empathize with this kind of Catholic, but I think Arbery intends it as an appeal to his people back home to encourage them to empathize with the suffering of people who don't fit neatly into their rigid, moralistic cubbies. I think dramatizing Emily's empathy is the central point of the play and is the only real way of understanding the fugue state into which she is transported in the final scene. More about that below.

The second most compelling character is Emily's mother, Gina. She is a woman in her sixties, was a Goldwater girl who knew Hillary Clinton when she was one too, but unlike Clinton Gina remained faithful to the kind of peculiar Libertarian cultural conservatism that Goldwater and later Reagan represented while at the same time being a committed Catholic. She is a First Things kind of conservative Catholic. Perhaps not--she could be a The American Conservative kind of Catholic. The first is more Neoconservative, the latter Paleoconservative, or Rod-Dreher-Crunchy-Conservative. She supported Pat Buchanan, founder of The American Conservative, in his presidential run. 

Gina is the kind of person I've written about over the years who I argue does not understand the intellectual incoherence of holding her Christian commitment together with her capitalist/libertarian political ideology. People like her claim that Liberalism is destroying everything they hold sacred while at the same time embracing capitalism, the engine of cultural Liberalism. Capitalism is the single most powerful force in history in destroying what all traditionalists hold sacred. One of the few people in that conservative Catholic world whose acuity I respect is Notre Dame's Patrick Deneen. He doesn't make that mistake.

I don't know if Gina would be a fan of Ayn Rand, as the similarly intellectually incoherent Catholic Conservative Paul Ryan is, but it wouldn't surprise me. I take that back. I don't think Gina would be taken in by a celebrant of the Darwinian Self like Rand, and she's better and more interesting than a big dope like Ryan. But she has a Barry Goldwater poster in her office, and that speaks to a simplistic, ideological borderline fanaticism that is disturbing. It raises the question: when does having principles slide into becoming fanaticism? More on that below. 

As written, Gina is the kind of person who is a second-rate thinker. I don't mean that in a pejorative, judgmental sense but more in a neutral descriptive one. Most of us are second rate. We are first-rate to the degree that we have thoroughly examined and critiqued our presuppositions. Gina does not lack intelligence or an instinct for truth, but she lives in a parochial world in which the incoherence of her presuppositions have never been challenged--at least not in a compelling way that could pierce her formidably wrought conservative armor. She is in that respect like most intelligent, interesting people, including Liberals.

Few people undertake that kind of rigorous self-examination, but most decent people are open to change their mind, and that's what prevents them from being third rate. Any kind of reductionistic, ideological thinking is third rate. Scientistic materialism of the Dawkins variety, for instance, is third rate in this sense. Or when First Things defended the invasion of Iraq in 2003, it exposed itself in all its ignominious ideological, third rateness. 

To become first rate requires humility enough to recognize the provisionality and limitations of one's thinking and to realize that one's thinking is an evolving, dynamic process. This doesn't mean that anything goes, but that we never arrive, we are always groping toward a deeper apprehension of the truth. Nothing about the truth is black and white, but there is better and worse, deeper and more superficial. Ideological thinking is not about seeking truth and articulating what one finds, but about defending a rigidified abstraction that has lost its living connection to whatever intuitions originally inspired it. A good part of Gina is very much a defender of the faith in this ideological sense, but unlike her protege Teresa, she strikes me as the kind of person who has an openness that makes a deeper movement of the mind a possibility. 

So what's more important about Gina is her basic moral instincts and a basic vulnerability to the truth when it presents itself to her. She's someone who has that possibility in a way that her protege Teresa does not. While she is still captured by her ideological thinking, she's still open. Teresa, intelligent though she is, is a third rate thinker because she lacks that openness to have her ideological thinking be subverted by the truth. Gina is still captured by ideological thinking, but she's not possessed by it in the fanatical way that Teresa is. Gina's healthy moral instincts save her from that. She is Emily's mother, after all.

Although she voted for Trump, Gina has no illusions about Trump and his crowd, and she laces into the Bannonite Teresa in a fittingly apt way that echoes the way that Teresa laced into Kevin earlier in the play. What goes around comes around. But I think that the animus that Gina directs toward Teresa is grounded in a projection of the aforementioned fanatical part of herself that she hasn't yet come to own. Gina is an interesting, but not yet integrated woman. Like most of us, she has parts within her that are not talking to one another. The Emily part isn't talking to the Teresa part, but the Emily part is stronger. 

So Gina is someone, unlike most conservatives I know, with whom I could have a conversation. I think she profoundly misreads the zeitgeist, but does it honestly. She lives and works in a siloed world where she would not have occasion to meet and talk with sane Progressives. She too easily dismisses them as abettors of abortion. Abortion as a political issue makes both Liberals and Conservatives crazy. It's a shibboleth issue for someone like Gina, and as such, as it is for someone from NARAL or MSNBC, it becomes a moral issue virtually impossible to discuss in a sane way. 

Teresa, on the other hand, is an articulate, all-in fanatic. She has virtually no self knowledge, and so no way of understanding the egoism that drives her. She believes that we're headed for a civil war, and that her generation, the millennials who are the Heroes of the Fourth Turning, have to be ready to fight the good fight. She's the kind of person who would have been among the mob storming the Capitol on Jan 6. So I guess if you want an intelligent, articulate justification for that kind of fanaticism, her speeches in the play provide it. But the bottom line is that she's a morally callow nutcase, like most of the people whose ambitions lead them to draft behind someone like Trump. She is a Social Darwinian obsessed with tribal survival. She has no sense that 'tribal Catholic' is an oxymoron. The spirit of the gospels is something incomprehensible to her. Gina sees that about her, and calls it out in no uncertain terms. 

So in Gina and Teresa we explore the question--When does being principled bleed into being a fanatic. Barry Goldwater famously said that "...extremism in defense of liberty is no vice; moderation in defense of justice is no virtue." Anyone with a lick of sense recognizes extremism/moderation as a false binary, and for that reason Conservatives who find this false binary inspiring confuse being principled with being fanatical. Robespierre didn't think of himself as a fanatic, but as principled. So do Goldwaterite Libertarians. In other words, when being principled becomes a function of reductionistic, third-rate ideological thinking, it is a form of fanaticism. 

It's true that being a moderate can be a coverup for being mushy, for not believing in anything. But moral maturity is always first generous in its judgments and discerning and compassionate in sussing out the good in the fundamental messiness of human affairs. If that manifests as moderation, tolerance, compassion, let's have more of it. Emily is moderate in this deeper sense. She certainly has more generosity of spirit than I have. For instance, she sees more good in someone like Teresa than I ever could. 

So in Gina we have someone who remains largely an unreconstructed Goldwater Girl and for that reason, despite her better moral instincts, retains a latent fanaticism in the liminal shadowy parts of her soul. In someone like Teresa, she encounters that fanaticism in full, throbbing, living color. Gina is horrified by Teresa at least in part because Gina was her mentor when Teresa was a student, and so Gina must now confront in Teresa something of herself that she imparted to Teresa, the latent part of herself that she thought was "principled" but was in fact always much darker. I'd like to think that Gina has the capacity to own that part of herself and do something about it. 

There is nothing much to say about the other two characters. Kevin, a holy fool, brings some comic relief. He represents the chaos archetype. He is Dostoyevski's Smerdyakov or Lear's jester--a teller of uncomfortable truths and asker of uncomfortable questions.  He keeps things moving. Justin, the fifth character, is the chivalric good soldier. A decent guy, an idealist, but lacks down-to-earth sense. His children's book idea--"The Grateful Acre"--is truly bizarre. It parodies a genuine moral insight about gratitude in a way that is off-the-wall inappropriate for children. I think Arbery almost certainly intends it as a sendup of a  perverse, masochistic, peculiarly Catholic celebration of suffering. I say so because I think he has an important to say about Emily's suffering that contrasts with it.  

So back to Emily. There is on the more mystical fringes of Christianity this idea that the most saintly people are capable of identifying empathically in a deeply specific bodily way with the suffering of others. St. Francis of Assisi and Padre Pio were stigmatists, which means that they so empathically identified with the crucified Christ that they developed in their own bodies the the wounds in the hands and feet from the nails that held him to the cross. 

The novelist and Dante scholar Charles Williams talks about substitutionary love. Some people are capable of relieving the suffering of others by absorbing parts of it, by finding a way to empathically transfer it to one's own body. It's a literal way to follow the gospel admonition to carry one another's burdens.  C.S. Lewis reports having done this with his wife while she was dying of cancer. I don't know that Arbery had these examples consciously in mind in writing Emily's character, but it wouldn't surprise me if he did. But whether he did or not, it informs how I read the last scene.

As in the line between being principled or fanatic, there's a line between masochism and empathy and its cousin compassion. Clearly in Emily we have no masochist. She would give up her suffering in a New York second if there were a way to. But she's someone whose suffering has opened her up to the suffering of the world in a way that is deeply Christic. The strange fugue state into which her pain and stress induce her in the last scene is not a sign of Emily's lack of faith, but of her Christic capacity. She channeling the psychic pain and anger of the woman she is counseling against getting an abortion. And the pain of the woman, temporarily, fuses with her own.

This is real suffering in all its ugliness. It's not the kind of thing you write a beautiful children's book about.

Bonhoeffer coined the phrase "cheap grace". Justin's children's book about suffering is a mushy piece of cheap grace. I think Arbery means to contrast it with something deeper and truer, a capacity for compassion that is not cheaply bought. It's no wonder that so few of us have much of it except in a cheap, mushy sense. Few of us are willing to pay the price that having the real thing requires. 

On Reading Simone Weil's 'Gravity and Grace'

There’s a palpable shift going on in elite institutions where it’s becoming edgy or even fashionable to take spiritual concerns seriously again. The fashionableness is important, not because fashion is in itself important, but because it creates a permission structure for people to start exploring ideas that were before beyond the pale. Twenty years ago someone like Simone Weil would have just been dismissed as a religious nut, now a book about letters she wrote to her family provides a pretext to profile her in The New Yorker, and she gets some serious, very positive attention from a Princeton “attention researcher” on an Ezra Klein podcast. Huh.

This is important because elite discourse shapes how people think for better or worse, and the argument that I’ve been making is that if we are to find a way to break out of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, new ideas about the importance of ‘transcendence’ have to become broadly acceptable by both elites and non-elites. As I argued in the Cathedral Talks, there has to be a consensus that emerges that will be strong enough to provide a moral, intellectual, and metaphysical counterbalance to the dehumanization promoted by the TCM, which so far has been just accepted by almost everyone as inevitable. We’ve all more or less become resigned to dehumanization being our future, and in the meantime we just try to live as humanly as circumstances allow, and hope the best for our kids and their kids. But why think about it? It’s too depressing.

Nevertheless, while it’s a small thing, I think this interest in Simone Weil might be an indicator of a shift in the zeitgeist that shapes elite thinking, at least in some quarters of it. Simone Weil is among the most interesting women of my parents’ generation. I see her as someone who experienced her woman’s body as too frail to contain the raging fire that enflamed her spirit and intellect, and so saw it as always getting in the way. As I point out in the essay below, that’s problematic, but it’s a problem that’s hard for us lesser mortals to understand or sympathize with. She was a force unto herself, and as such she’s not someone who can be reduced to or understood by ordinary human psychology, which the New Yorker profile is duty-bound to do to some extent. But the writer also conveys enough about the force and fierceness of her spirit that cannot be contained by that psychology.

In any event, this recent attention to Weil prompted me to dig up an essay I wrote about her in 2021, which follows. In most of what I’ve been posting, I’ve not focussed on the Christian dimension of my thinking, focusing instead mostly on what Christianity shares with the other great Axial Traditions. But I am a Christian, and it makes claims that other traditions do not that I believe need to be taken seriously. If you’ve never heard of Simone Weil, I recommend your reading the New Yorker article first for context, then this essay:

On Reading Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

I've avoided reading Weil's essays until recently because I was put off by what appeared to be her body hatred, her need to be pure, her angelism. But now that I've read her, I have to say I am strangely moved. There's something there to be grappled with, and I feel in her a kindred spirit with whom I would love to have conversed and to have befriended. Our becoming friends, though, could happen only after we spent some time arguing. 

Where is the line that separates a pure-hearted commitment to truth and goodness from a fanaticism for perfection? Not sure I know for myself, and I don't think Weil found it either. But I think that the striving for moral perfection is basically un-Christian because it leads to a tight-assed rejection of the messiness of being human. Our ultimate destiny is to be perfect as God is perfect (emphasis on the 'as'), but this isn't something we accomplish by exertion of will. We must act, but action that is motivated by superego or other psychological/religious compulsions are not the kind of action that is called for here.

The testimony of the great saints is clear about that; it's something that happens to us if we're open to it, and if there is any will involved it’s in creating the negative capability, the emptiness, in which the movement of grace makes itself known to us. So perfection is something to be achieved in time, but not primarily by the will, and so the willfulness and body-hating angelism in the young Weil is just wrong, but I believe had she lived would have been tempered, but it's something that has to be called out. She was only thirty-four when she died.

Our perfecting, or theosis, plays out in different ways for different people, but mostly it's not about trying to be a perfect human being but about doing what's there for us to do, which is to accept the burden and yoke of discipleship more in the spirit of St. Therese's "little way". It's the small, everyday things that build habits of perception and will that prepare us to do the big things if we are called upon to do them. But the little things are enough if that's what's given you. Most of us haven't achieved the level of humility that would permit us to go big and not to be damaged by it. 

But if Weil's angelism led to something that I think was unbalanced, that doesn't mean that so much of what she perceived and understood was wrong. And in reading Weil, I find something I haven’t encountered in a long time, and it’s this feel for transcendence in a late-modern key, and this way of talking about what it’s like for humans to touch it.

There is in her this sense of its subtlety and beauty, its gentleness and serenity. It is that feeling I get from time to time when in the presence of true beauty. I think that it’s what medieval Christians experienced in the cult of the virgin, but it’s something found in all the great spiritual traditions, this sense of mercy, of grace, of whatever is the opposite of force. Weil gets that and talks about it beautifully.

For instance, this sensibility is at the heart of her insight about the difference between the Romanesque and the Gothic. In her essay “The Romanesque Renaissance”1, Weil makes clear she is not a fan of the Gothic because she associates with it, I think rightly, a kind of force that had no patience for the gentle, simple beauty of the Romanesque. The Romanesque balanced masculine and feminine; it gave us chivalry and the Grail stories, Hildegard of Bingen, and the cult of the Virgin. The  Gothic that gave us those astonishing cathedrals and the control-obsessed, centralizing Church militant. 

I remember when I made my first trip to Europe thinking that the Gothic cathedrals were impressive, but the Romanesque chapels were purer, simpler. There is grandeur in the Gothic, but better is that sense of gentle beauty before which one feels not compelled but invited. The Gothic cathedral has more in common with the assertiveness of the modern skyscraper, the Romanesque chapel with the roadside shrine in an arbor. The mood for the latter is not awe so much as it is of being moved to tears. Weil understands this difference. The latter is more deeply Christian. 

Weil was respected and read by a certain kind of mid-century Christian intellectual because she was such a prodigy, but I think mostly she was not understood. Did Gustave Thibon, who wrote the Introduction to Gravity and Graceunderstand her? I think mostly not. But he encountered in her something that he respected, a sincerity of spirit that was rare. So give him credit for that. (Perhaps I’m too hard on him, but I found his writing style in his introduction to Gravity and Grace jarringly out of tune with the spirit of the essays he introduces.) And amazingly her essays are still in print, which means there’s still enough of an audience that, like me, is intrigued by her and even now seeks to understand what she was pointing to.

***

But now I want to argue with the Weil who wrote “Human Personality”.2 At first I was struck by its Buddhistic tenor. I have no objections to Buddhism--I see it as pointing to parts of the human project that Westerners need to understand much better than they do. We have much to learn from Buddhists. But Christians emphasize the individual and the incarnate in a way that is mostly not found in Buddhism and that emphasis is, imo, misunderstood by Buddhists probably because it's misunderstood by most Christians, among them Weil. I suspect that her main exposure to Christian personalism was in its cruder or more childish forms, and in reaction to them goes too far in the other direction. We see this in an anecdote told about her by Thibon when he saw her for the last time:

As I parted from her I said jokingly, in an attempt to hide my feelings: “Goodbye until we meet again in this world or the next.” She suddenly became serious and replied, “In the next there will be no meeting again.’ She meant that the limits which form our ‘empirical self’ will be done away with in the unity of eternal life.  (Gravity and Grace, p. xii)

Of course, this is Thibon’s interpretation of a memory, so who knows how accurate it is, but it's not contradicted by what she writes in "Human Personality". There is something about the thinking of mid-century spiritual intellectuals—we see it in T.S. Eliot, as well—that is more interested in eternity than in temporality, as if we can know something about eternity and that it can be spoken about in some credible way. I resist this fascination with the “eternal” because it opposes my commitment to the idea that what matters most is what happens in time.

And I resist the idea of the “impersonal” because the whole point of Christian spiritual practice is to become more deeply a person, i.e., one's Self, i.e, the Self created in the image and likeness of God, and that this is accomplished when this Self, which starts as a seed, grows to eventually supplant/transform what I call the Darwinian Self, and this "supplanting/transforming" can only happen for us humans on earth over time. The Darwinian Self is the natural human being concerned with biological flourishing--spread your seed, dominate your enemies, seek glory in your achievements. In other words, get your inner Genghis Kahn (or Donald Trump or Tiger Woods or etc.) on if you have the will and wit to do it--or if you don't, bend the knee and draft on those who do. 

And I resist the idea that we shall not meet our deceased loved ones in the future as un-Christian because for Christianity the goal is communion. And communion, as opposed to Buddhistic merging into the pleromatic Unity requires a plurality of persons, that is, of realized Deep Selves. This plurality of Deep Selves is what Christians call the communion of saints. So it seemed to me this comment by Thibon suggested that Weil was more of a Buddhist than a Christian, at least in this respect.

Or at least this was my first impression upon reading this essay. But it became clear that she’s talking about something that resonates deeply with my own understanding of the relationship of transcendence to the temporal.

If I had a conversation with her, I might make the argument that the idea of eternity is a meaningless abstraction invented by philosophers as a placeholder for something they didn't really understand.  "Eternity" pointed to a dimension of reality they knew was important, something radically different and in some ways nobler and more deeply, densely real than what most people take for the real world. If time = change, change = growth/decay, so the opposite of temporal is the opposite of growth/decay, which is eternity. "Eternity" became a  way to name what was incorruptible, and the essence of incorruptibility was God. So I understand that, but I'd still argue that we have no way of knowing for sure whether God is an eternal being or a temporal one, or that he himself is not co-evolving with his creation. 

That being said, it’s certainly possible that there’s a dimension of God that exists beyond Time, but, even so, that is no concern of ours. What makes a theistic conception of God interesting for humans is the fact of his relationship to us in time, and clearly that means he exists in time. All attempts by thinkers to emphasize the eternity, infinity, the power, freedom, and the absolute transcendence of God might in some way be pointing to the truth about him, but it’s not relevant to our experience of him. If you profess to be Christian, the temporal aspect of God is knowable, and we are invited to form a relationship with this God in time through his revelation in Jesus of Nazareth.

Ideas about his existence beyond time are purely abstract speculation, and, imo, create more problems than they solve. Better not to speak of it. This is the emphasis of the apophatic tradition in Christianity, to recognize that anything we say or think about God is wrong, and so best not say or think it. I think that there is common ground here with Buddhist non-theism, which derives from an honesty that one can only speak about what one knows.

So instead of the word ‘eternity’, I prefer the word ‘transcendence’. Transcendence points to a dimension of being that stands outside of what I think of evolution without grace, but that doesn’t mean it’s outside of time. It just exists in another dimension, a temporal dimension, that interpenetrates with the world we experience on earth. In other words, there's a temporality--and evolution--at a higher level that seeks to become intertwined with and transformative of the lower temporality of biological evolution.

So when Weil talks about there being nothing sacred in the human personality, and that the sacred in the human is only what is impersonal, it sounds at first that she is rejecting the idea of human individuality, and that the goal is to give up our individuality and to merge into a higher unity. Maybe this is what she thought. I’m not sure. But there is common ground here with what I’ve been thinking about regarding the Deep Self and Communion.

I think we want to affirm the same thing. What she calls the impersonal eternal is the same as what I call the Antrhopos archetype, aka, the Christ within about which St. Paul is so articulate. The Christ/Anthropos archetype is universal--it's something potentially cognizable by every human being whether they are Christians or not, and it exists in a transcendent dimension, i.e., a dimension that is nobler and more densely real, as all archetypes do. But Christians like me believe that the possibility of the Christ Self supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self became a possibility for everyone only after the events in Jerusalem nearly two thousand years ago.

Our theosis, our divinization, becomes a possibility only after the Divine became human. Only after the Divine has lived into human death, did it become possible for the human to die into Divine life. Only after the Old Adam was redemptively transformed in the resurrected New Adam was it possible for the rest of to become who we were created to be. The interior, i.e., inside-out, realization of the New Adam became a possibility for all humans in a way that it was not pre-Pentecost.

So what I'm calling the Christ/Anthropos archetype is what St. Paul points to when he says not I but Christ in me--not the Darwinian Self, the Old Adam, but the Anthropos, the Christ Self, the New Adam. Wouldn’t Weil be receptive to the idea that this "Christ in me" is what she calls the impersonal, but which is in fact a deeper personal, a deeper form of individuality and uniqueness?

The Christ in me is not Christ himself--he has his own embodied individuality--but his image and likeness--the Anthropos archetype--is individualizable in my ‘person’. And the point of Christ's incarnation and resurrection was precisely to restore his shattered image and likeness*, qua the archetypal human in the human being. He did this so that this archetype might in its full development make us individually substantive enough to enter into communion with God face to face. Face to face is emphatically not Weil''s idea of “the empirical self being eradicated in the unity of eternal life”.

That's why Christians emphasize the resurrection of the body--the Anthropos archetype has no body; it must be individualized in bodies. The archetype is like a seed strewn into the souls of all humans but for reasons that are lost to human memory, the human soul-soil in the Old Adam became infertile to its growth. This infertility is what Christians like me point to as original sin. And so Christians like me believe that the possibility for the restoration in the Old Adam of the soul-soil's fertility became possible through the deeds of Jesus of Nazareth. In his resurrection, he was the first human being in whom the Anthropos archetype became fully realized in a particular human body and so now its realization becomes a possibility for the rest of us.

So for each of us to realize the Christ archetype does not mean we become Jesus bots, but rather the fully actualized individuals we were created to be who are destined for communion. The banquet parables in the Gospels and the circle dances and wedding parties at the end of Shakespearean comedies are proleptic images for this longed for telos. And while these are simply images about something that is otherwise unimaginable for us, especially given the poverty of our late-modern, buffered imaginations, they give us every reason to hope that we will be in communion with, among others, those whom we came to know and love, and to think this not possible is downright un-Christian. 

Nevertheless, Weil is right to point out that whatever part of us that touches eternity or that is moved by transcendence has little to do with our everyday personality shaped by the anxieties of our day-to-day getting along in the world, which I assume is what she means by the "empirical self". And I agree with her that our preoccupation with the aggrandizement of our personalities, our constant seeking to flourish in terms defined by the Darwinian Self (her empirical self?), is more of an impediment to the part of us that is capable of being moved by transcendence.

I see her as someone obsessed with trying to extirpate her empirical/Darwinian Self as it operated in her. We see something similar in Gandhi's autobiography. The idea is that you have to kill the empirical self (Darwinian Self) to liberate the Deep Self. And it would appear that she does not think of the Deep Self as a truly individuated being but rather as just a part of the soul that seeks to merge with eternity. I suspect we’re talking about the same thing. I just think her impersonalist way of articulating it is deficient from a Christian point of view.

I would agree with Weil that the more focused we are on being affirmed in our Darwinian Selves, the less sensitive we become to hear the music, which is the movement of grace in our lives. For this reason, our lives in the collectivity, especially one so dominated by consumer capitalism, make it more difficult to be touched by transcendence and to hear its music. And I agree that it is in solitude, away from the crowd, that we are more likely to be so touched. But isn’t this need to separate from the collectivity a way of affirming the importance of our individuality? And does it preclude the idea of our having individual Deep Selves brought into fuller realization by a lifetime of openness and response to grace?

So I may or not be right about this, but I think if I were to have a conversation with Weil, I could convince her that what she and I are talking about is pretty much the same thing.

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

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

I've been influenced enough by German Idealism--the Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel wing, not the desiccated, imaginatively impoverished Kantian wing--to see Protestantism and Modernity as the antithesis of Catholicism and pre-modernity, and so it follows quite possibly, if history is about the evolution of human consciousness, and if it proceeds dialectically, as I think it does, that the Postmodern era on whose cusp we sit will synthesize the Modern and the Premodern, the Protestant and the Catholic, the individual conscience and of a renewed sense of sacrament and communion. [But see comment 1]

I don't mean anything mystically metaphysical by dialectics here, just that as one energizing cultural impulse crowds out or represses others, the repressed always finds a way to make a return. The Postmodern future, if it is to be a time of human flourishing, will have to retrieve much of what modernity's dominant cultural impulse, Enlightenment rationality, repressed. We see it happening all around us already, but there is no going native in the past. We have to move forward; we have to progress. 

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

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

Central to this evolutionary project is a retrieval of the idea that Christianity is about the redemption of time and space; it is not a religion of escape from either. We need a framing metaphor to work for us as the Great Chain of Being worked for our premodern ancestors. It can no longer work after Newton, Darwin, and Einstein, but the Great Chain of Being was a metaphor that pointed to something deeply true about the structure of Being, i.e., its metaphysics embraced an idea of chaos/entropy in tension with the Deep Real as density of actualized form.

This tension between Chaos and Logos is still a reality, even if we have no robust metaphor that helps us to imagine it in the late modern imaginary. It was a spatial metaphor, but it allowed for the movement of lower to higher, from a potentiality inherent in chaos to actualize in form when it participates in form, which is to say, the Logos or the Mind of God.

The history of the world, as I see it from my quasi-Hegelian, evolution-of-consciousness perspective, is the gradual interpenetration of Chaos by the Mind of God effected by humans in whom the Mind of God becomes gradually awakened. Science plays a role in this evolutionary awakening, but the more important evolution is moral. This would require a shift from outer to inner in human moral development, from humans being mostly directed by forces outside of them--extrinsic moral codes--to new possibilities for moral evolution that work from within the human soul and the awakened conscience. More on this below. 

***

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

This latter, I would argue, is the deeper Christian idea, although it's very similar to the Jewish idea of tikkun olam, or "world repair", especially as developed by Isaac Luria. Indeed, it's hard to understand the meaning of Christ's incarnation, death, and resurrection without it, even if in practice the Christian idea of salvation has been more Buddhistic. The Salve Regina, a beautiful medieval monastic Marian hymn, exemplifies this longing for escape. It depicts humans as the poor, banished children of Eve living in exile longing to return home off-planet in a better world in the timeless/spaceless beyond.

I'm arguing that the mission for individual human beings is to be infusion points through which the "beyond" incarnates in immanent human practice in the time/space dimension we call our life on earth. The goal is the renewal of the face of the earth, but this will not be accomplished by some external intervention, but rather by human beings inspired by grace working in the world to transform it from inside out. 

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

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

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

For Christians, redemption history starts with outside-in interventions through the great prophets and sages. This has played out in the West in such a way that it has led to the possibility of something different. The covenant made with Abraham culminates with Christ’s incarnation and death, and now continues with us humans post-Pentecost.  

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

Before this event the transcendent dimension could work on evolution-without-grace only outside-in, from external interventions and the prophetic enunciation of codes or law effected through Axial Age prophets and philosophers. These codes could be experienced only as an external command to follow the law. After Pentecost, the law is something that is experienced from within--in the heart, the seat of conscience. The post-Pentecost release of the Holy Spirit into history has made transforming biological evolution from within a new possibility.

This transformation is effected to the degree that people--whether they are Christians or not--have supple hearts capable for responding to the movement of grace in their lives. The redemption of the world is the cumulative effect of a process that happens heart by heart in little and large ways progressively through the arc of history. For this reason MLK was right: the arc of the moral universe is long, and it does bend toward justice. Conservatives don't believe moral progress is a possibility; they believe that evolution without grace is the only possibility for the earth, and that's why salvation means for them getting off of it. Such pessimism, alas, becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. 

***

So what does this mean practically. How, for instance, does this impinge on how we should think about the political economy? Is there any purer expression in the political and economic sphere of evolution-without-grace than the market? Was there ever a more brutal expression of the energies of evolution without grace than market capitalism? Is there anything in our contemporary political and economic life in greater need of transformation? 

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

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

Holiness is measured by the degree to which one’s Deep Self, the part of us that was created in the image and likeness of God, has come to gradually subvert/transform the will of the Social Darwinian Self, i.e., the Self driven by greed, will to power, and the need to indiscriminately spread one’s genes. The idea that the goal of life is to become good as God is good, i.e,, to restore the human as image and likeness of God, the idea celebrated by the early Church Fathers as 'theosis' got lost in the broader culture.

To be good came to mean simply to follow an extrinsic code, to follow the rules, to do one's duty, as in Kant. But even earlier Christianity had become a point system where to accumulate enough points earned you a place in heaven. This is a spiritualized transposition of the survivalist mentality that derives from evolution without grace. It's what Luther rightly reacted agains, but it lives on in capitalism, where the basic measure of worth is wealth. It's the logic of the professional athlete and the corporate CEO who thinks he's the best only if he gets paid the most.

Post-Reformation societies in northern Europe tore down that redemptive social infrastructure—it got rid of the monasteries and with them the idea that the evangelical counsels provided a path of growth in theosis, i.e., a path for supplanting/transforming the Darwinian Self with the Deep Self. In doing so they substituted a new idea about morality that was more extrinsically legalistic than inwardly driven and Christian.

Modernity introduced a new emphasis on the individual and freedom, but freedom in the service of what? As traditional ideas about theosis were cast aside, what I'm calling here the Social Darwinian Self and its fulfillment emerges as the new "natural" norm. It's only natural to want to dominate others. It's only natural to want to make billions of dollars. It's only natural to have as many lovers as possible. This is the opposite of the idea of Christian freedom as articulated by St. Paul. (See Galations 5 and elsewhere. BTW, Paul's concept of the "flesh" and my use of the term "evolution-without-grace" are roughly synonymous.)

Protestantism at its best (imo embodied most fully by the Quakers) was a celebration of the individual conscience. But morality in Protestant societies--and to a degree in counter-Reformation Catholic societies--in practice became more about doing good according to an extrinsic moralistic code where the code became an end in itself, rather than a means to an end. It started, as all genuine spiritual movements do, as an interior impulse, but devolved into a rigid extrinsicism. And in doing so it threw out many of the older religious cultural forms that provided a framework for theosis, I.e., for people to grow in holiness, i.e., into a recovery of the their deepest identity as image and likeness of God.

Although Catholicism is rife with tis own kind of extrinsicism, this more interior transformative ideal was preserved in some of the orders and monasteries. But it cannot thrive in a world in which the broad cultural imaginary that flowed from Reformation presuppositions is so dominant. Most Catholics, especially American Catholics, are more Calvinist than they are Catholic in this older sense. 

Calvinism played a central role in effecting a shift in Western moral imaginary that created the conditions for Enlightenment rationality, Liberalism, and free-market capitalism--both the good and the bad that came with these. America is a profoundly Calvinist society, and all Americans--whether Catholics, Jews, Muslims or atheists--have to understand how their politics and cultural/political imaginaries are shaped by Calvinism.

On the left, American political imaginary is shaped by Yankee and Black Calvinism that led to the development of the social gospel in the late 19th century. And on the right, the American political imaginary is shaped by Southern Calvinism, mainly the Baptists and other evangelical sects that were inclined to rigid ideas regarding the inerrancy of Scripture and were ok with slavery and later segregation. Wokeness and political correctness are developments out of Left Calvinism. A stern, mean-spirited disdain for the poor are developments out of Right Calvinism. 

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

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

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

***

Growing in Goodness/Holiness--theosis--for Catholics is (or should be) central to their practice, and the sacraments and the life of prayer don’t make any sense without it. That’s why the Calvinists essentially got rid of the sacraments. They no longer made sense since mainstream Calvinism didn’t think theosis was a thing. Either one was saved or he wasn’t. If you were lucky, you had a conversion experience, and you tried to live a righteous life, a life still mostly defined by extrinsic codes.

The Protestant reformers had a well-founded suspicion of spiritual elites, and so the idea was not to promote individual spiritual prodigies, but rather to insist that all the regenerated were equals. One's only moral responsibility after that was to follow the law as revealed in the scriptures, and there wasn't for most much sense of how the New Testament put the revelation of the old law in the Jewish scriptures into a new inside-out perspective.

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

***

So the Reformation unwittingly set the stage for the removal of constraints that kept the Social Darwinian Self in check. That liberation from these constraints released enormous productive capacity and wealth, but it also released forces that in an unprecedented way led to the destruction of traditions, local communities, and customary personal and communal ways of life that most conservatives insist they want to preserve against the intrusive state. But it’s not the state that has destroyed these traditional and customary ways of life, it’s been capitalism.

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

Liberals—both Left Liberals and Right Liberals—are people who celebrate what the economist Joseph Schumpeter called the creative/destructive character of capitalism, in other words, the Darwinian impulses as they work in the political economy. You don’t get the creative/productive/innovative without the destructive/disruptive. That’s a truism, but it’s something most conservatives I know don’t appreciate the implications of. One is that in North Atlantic societies it’s mostly educated elites—both Republicans and Democrats—who get the benefits of the creative-productive side of capitalism, and uneducated, rural and rust-belt working stiffs who suffer its destructive/disruptive effects.

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

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

Whatever. But Republican elites who say they stand for tradition and the integrity of local communities while at the same time embracing the creative destruction of capitalism are either cynical or naively incoherent. 

***

Illiberalism is where we’re headed unless some alternative with a robust consensus that embraces the better (Whiggish/Transcendentalist) angels of the American Calvinist character reasserts itself. Trump is a bully and con man trading on the fears and resentments that work with everything that is primitive and ugly in the American Calvinist character. But let me be clear, Transcendentalism--and its New Age and Theosophist cousins--in the long run just doesn't cut it either. A new Axial alignment is the only thing that will have the heft to push back against the unprecedented threat posed now by Evolution-without-Grace

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

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

The Axial Age introduced into human thinking the idea of a distinction between transcendence and immanence, and that the transcendent world set a standard for behavior in the immanent world. The idea of the Platonic Good, the Mosaic law, the Tao were all manifestations of the transcendent world in the immanent, and the goal of human aspiration was to become aligned with the transcendent good as opposed to immanent goods, what I described above as goods defined by biological flourishing or evolution-without-grace. From my pov, the Axial Age was an external (other-dimensional) intervention of the higher into the lower through the inspired thinking of prophets and philosophers who advanced their respective civilizations. Christian civilization integrates the Axial traditions of ancient Greece and Israel. Islam made axiality available, at least at first, for the Arab peoples of the Middle East, and expanded into Asia and Africa from there. 

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

So is history dialectical? Are we on the cusp of a cultural realignment that integrates the modern with the premodern. We'll see. For those for whom evolution-without-grace is accepted as the only legitimate historical narrative, humans are expendable. Some on the cultural Left even argue that the earth would be better off without humans. Or the other possibility as envisaged by transhumanists and poshumanists is a new eschatology as upload. Humans will become immortal machines, which is just another way for evolution-without-grace and the logic of the fall to win. And those on the Cultural Right don't believe that evolution without grace can be resisted because there is no collective moral progress, there is just the individual saving his own soul, and hopefully a few others so they can make it safely off planet after death. 

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

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

Christianity, as I've outlined it above, provides a robust mythos for a framework within which such an alternative evolutionary narrative could be developed, but I don't think that such an alternative narrative requires belief in Christian dogmatic assertions. What matters most is that the anthropos archetype be embraced in a non-Calvinist, transcultural idiom. Better Buddha and Lao-Tse than Calvin. I think there are resources within all the great post-Axial civilizations to embrace such an ideal. 

[This post is a revised version of a post of the same title that appeared in July 2019.]

Quote of the Day: Simone Weil

Art has no immediate future because all art is collective and there is no more collective life (there are only dead collections of people), and also because of this true breaking of the pact between the body and the soul. . . .Since 1914 there has been a complete cut. Even comedy is almost impossible. There is only room for satire. . . . Art will never be reborn except from amidst a general anarchy--it will be epic no doubt, because affliction will have simplified a great many things. . . . Is it therefore quite useless for you to envy Leonardo or Bach. Greatness in our times must take a different course. Moreover it can only be solitary, obscure, and without an echo . .  . (but without an echo, no art).

--From Gravity and Grace, p 151

To put it another way, the politics of the future must come into being as genuine art does. The poets must become the acknowledged legislators of the world. It must be the product of people who are inspired by the Real. It must be the work of genius in the mode of a poet/prophet like Martin Luther King or Nelson Mandela--people through whom the god or the inspiring muse Justice shines. I say this not because I know that it will happen but because I believe it must happen if there this to be a human future. The machines must otherwise win by default. 

Our current social order is like the dyke in the story of the Dutch boy who plugs a leak in it with his finger. The Dutch boy at this point is the liberal political/media class. Its main function now is to buy time in the hopes that true greatness of spirit, a greatness that Weil describes that "must take another course", might emerge and so come to support the boy, who by himself is incapable of holding back the flood. I believe this other kind of greatness is developing now quietly in the souls of the solitary and obscure where it is struggling to be reborn.

Greatness is not to be mistaken for the grandiose. People long for greatness but are easily seduced by the grandiose. Something is great to the degree that is disclosive of the Deep Real, which has always been mediated to us by the world's true poets and prophets. And when they do, they awaken awareness of it in the rest of us. Such a prospect in a moment like ours seems farfetched, and yet I believe it will happen because unless it or something like it does, the liberal order will break apart and we will all get washed away in the flood. 

For a more expanded articulation of what I hope will be the alternative to the flood, see this post about what I call the Nunes/Bannon Mind, the mindset that longs for the flood as a kind of eschatological baptism that will wipe the world clean so it can start anew. Needless to say, this is a delusion with deeply destructive potential. 

Quote of the Day: Thomas Edsall

"In God We Divide", by Thomas Edsall in today's NYT

...the “most powerful simple way to understand the electorate” is as composed of “white Christians (half), white seculars (a quarter) and voters of color (a quarter).”

Citing data from Pew, he noted that white Christians favored Trump 67 to 27, while white seculars favored Clinton 63-28 and voters of color favored Clinton 75-20. In more recent polling, he said, sorting by religion provides more insight than by education:

White non-college secular men support the generic Democrat by 17 points, while white college Evangelical women support Trump by 47 points, a 64 point gap going in the opposite direction from what education and gender would predict.

In addition, he continued, “identifying yourself as Christian in America today means that you are identifying yourself with a particular set of values that systematically set you apart from those who do not.”

The substitution, he wrote,

of “non-college” for “Christian” in elite discourse is consequential and damaging to progressive prospects. Pretty much everyone loosely agrees that Republicans want America the way they think it was and are revolting against cosmopolitan modernization, including even science. But naming white non-college voters as the Republican base suggests that the source of Republican grievance is lack of education, which organizes the conversation that follows about everything else. Imagine instead, the conversation that would follow from identifying the source of Republican grievance as religious.

Religion, he continued, “is real with values and motivated institutions, while non-college is barely more than an analytical category. Christians call themselves Christians, non-college folks don’t call themselves uneducated. Christian is an identity, non-college is a label.”

Religiosity has joined issues which cluster around race, immigration, abortion, women’s rights, gay marriage, the traditional nuclear family and globalization — all reinforced by the parallel split between urban and rural America, which is playing out again in our response to the dangers posed by coronavirus.

In “Red Versus Blue,” David Hopkins accurately sums up the situation:

Perpetually vigorous competition between two closely matched parties that each maintain reliable electoral dominance over a significant, and roughly equal, proportion of the nation’s geographic territory has become a signature characteristic of American politics in the twenty- first century.

The result is a national politics in which conflict replaces resolution. Hopkins goes on:

The appearance of distinct and stable geographic alignments on the contemporary electoral map thus serves as an apt visual symbol of an era defined by the emergence of intense partisan conflict among leaders and citizens alike. With the vast majority of voters now providing consistent support to the candidates of a single party in national elections, and with Democratic and Republican politicians collectively shifting toward opposite ends of the ideological spectrum, the United States has entered a political age characterized by the dual trends of mass-level partisanship and elite- level polarization.

I think this pretty accurately explains why White Evangelicals and conservative Catholics give Christianity a bad name. It's not about education; it's about anger and resentment. It's not about hope and compassion, it's about fear and delusional thinking. The proof of it is in that 67% of White Christians approve Trump. No more evidence need be provided. At least 27% have retained their wits and some level of composure. Among them you will find the true remnant. One's politics is not an essential indicator of of faith, but it is an indicator of one's grasp of reality. And if faith isn't something that enables you to see reality more clearly and deeply, it isn't really faith. It's just run-of-the-mill ideology. 

A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

My own conviction is that life was not ‘created’ — I have always taken the view of Bergson and 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"

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 11812-11826)

In the 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 the Law of Force, whose stand-in at the time was the Roman Empire, whose stand-in was Herod. Salvation history, 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 Rule of Force by the Rule of Divine Intelligence. By intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I means something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence' which suggests a certain cleverness or nimbleness of mind that is measured by IQ. Not what I mean here. 

The incarnation of the Logos was akin to the planting of a seed in the earth, which as it grows subverts the cruel, random, whirlwind of brute force that cosmological and Darwinian science accurately present as the material world and its energies. It effects this subversion and transformation by gradually penetrating matter, for which the Incarnation of the Logos is the paradigm. Humans are the tip of the spear in this evolutionary project. They are the infusion point of Divine Life into the whirlpool of pure force. Humans are the means by which, if it is to happen, force becomes transformed into Divine Intelligence.

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 earlier this week:

“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.

Humans play their role in this salvific project to the degree that their minds are shaped by Divine Intelligence, which 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 foundation for the immanent world. Computer Science mimics an attenuated left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the 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 subvert and transform evolution by interpenetrating it with grace. 

The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal 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., unseen, in the created world.

The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to 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 states of consciousness. The 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 can see what he saw.   

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 opaquely hidden or at best filtered 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 a visionary encounter with that Mind. 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 seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.

We don't believe in the presence of the Divine Mind suffusing all creation anymore, but that doesn't mean it still isn't there waiting for us to discover it as our ancestors did. 

That these objects were often beautiful is a secondary effect to 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 light. Later, 'novelty' becomes confused with 'originality', and being inventive becomes synonymous with being creative. But real creativity 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 before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it because it is disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Being which 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. There are many objects that present themselves as art, but it is great art to the degree that it has this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that 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.'

For the best of these Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into matter to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in his creation. 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 suffused by the Divine Intelligence, and that we have a responsibility in whatever modest way to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. 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, and its beauty. 

***

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 Christ (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence penetrating the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. 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.

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 an exile in a vale of tears from which we must be rescued. It suggests that God didn't choose to redeem us from outside history; rather, he effects his redemption by entering into it and working within it through human beings. They have a choice either to go with the flow of evolution without grace, which is leading to some post-human dystopia, or to become co-redeemers of the earth. They 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 it. The threat is very real that otherwise the machines will push us aside, or we will 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 disclose itself. 

"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 image and likeness of the divine, that is with minds that participate in the Divine Mind, which is achieved by discovering its presence 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 in it grows (if not the capacity to suffer foolishness).

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; it follows from a kind of hearing or hearkening 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 playing 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 whispering in its still small voice. Even if in the midst of the roar of chaos and 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 chaos whisperers, people who have the ability to calm the violent hearts 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 his or her 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. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Drift toward Authoritarianism

I am sympathetic to those who think that liberal democracy is failing, was, in fact, always doomed to failure. After all it gave us Trump, who presently is at an all time high approval rating with Gallup at 46%. The U.S. had a flawed but good run for a good quarter millennium. But it's time to return to the historical norm and that means to the strong man. People don't really like to rule themselves; they'd rather be ruled. It's far less trouble. But I still have hope that some how or other we'll get through this without becoming China or Russia, some tawdry banana republic. We're already Berlusconi's Italy. 

Nevertheless, American democracy is just failing because it has become incapable of dealing with real-world problems. All people really get worked up about is red/blue identity politics--whether my team is winning or the other guy's is.

Inaction and gridlock are the preconditions for crises that will create increasing levels of civil unrest and chaos, and civil unrest and chaos are the preconditions for an authoritarian takeover, and once the authoritarians are in place, they have the technology to stay in place for a long, long time. Surveillance technology, as currently implemented (and exported from) in China, is the future and will be increasingly used to suppress any kind of dissent--from the Left or the Right. If you're a betting man, the odds are not that China will not become more like the U.S., but that the U.S will become more like China.

To think that supporting Trump is a way to push back is fanciful at best. This line of thinking assumes that because the Deep State is against Trump, then he must be against the Deep State. He's not against the Deep State in principle, only the Deep State that opposes him. Give him two terms, and he'll find a way of coopting the Deep State to support his interests.

Trump is an authoritarian personality, and it's only his ignorance and incompetence that has prevented him from being more effective--so far. The one thing he's good at is b.s.-ing or bullying his way out of trouble. We'll see if he can keep his grift going, and with a little help from oligarchs--domestic and abroad--who see him as a useful idiot, he just might. His first hires--the Bannons,etc.--were punching way over their weight class. The new hires, smooth operators like Wm. Barr, and others like him for whom Barr is paving the way, could  very well save Trump's ass. We'll see. 

At first I couldn't understand why the Republican establishment was embracing a clown like Trump. I thought they would support some way of easing him out of office and easing a less volatile tool like Pence in. It didn't make sense to me that these wily establishment Republicans would want to tie their collective fate to Turmp.  I understand all about the base and the primary threats it poses, but I assure you, that if the power establishment wanted to get rid of Trump, they would have found a way. They'd find a way to get Fox News aligned with it, and Trump would be gone in a flash.

The only explanation that makes sense to me at this point is that there's a deep split in the conservative establishment. The first are principled conservative never Trumpers who actually care about preserving traditional norms of decency and the rule of law. The second are nihilist right-wing elites who are ruthlessly committed to entrench their oligarchic power. The latter appear to have adopted the Trump-as-useful-idiot strategy. It's not clear to me yet whether they are delusional or whether they understand things the rest of us do not. 

The people in the second group are all about power, and they are fine with authoritarianism as long as their faction holds the power, and I think that's what's at stake for them in keeping Trump propped up. If they can find a way to get him into a second term, they will have all the time they need to consolidate their control. This is a hypothesis I'm just playing with now, but I'm becoming more convinced that more and more establishment types are willing to "ruin" their reputations by associating with Trump because they don't care about the old establishment anymore--they are trying to set up a new one.

They believe, correctly, that the winners write history, and they intend to win. This is their play, and it could succeed, especially if most Democrats continue to think that Trump is an aberration, and things will return to normal when we elect Uncle Joe. Who knows what these right-wing power elites talk about among themselves, and who knows what narrative they are reinforcing to justify this play among themselves. I'm sure there's no limit to their hubris, and with it their ability to justify whatever they do as in the best interests of the country. 

***

And so for this reason, President Chaos is not the harbinger of freedom from liberal technocracy, but the harbinger of a far more repressive right-wing oligarchy. When I discuss Trump with his supporters in my family or with others, I try to understand why they think that he, despite all his admitted flaws, is better than anybody the Democrats will put up. Most Trump supporters don't see him as a wannabe Putin. They would dismiss my hypothesis as unfair and motivated by alarmist sour grapes. They just see him as an anti-establishment renegade who is stirring things up--it's good to stir things up once in a while, right?. 

I understand their discomfort with liberal technocracy and its secular, nothing-is-sacred-or-worthy-of-reverence cultural ethos, but let's face it, the Churches are as instrumental in destroying that ethos as any secular Liberals have been. From Jerry Falwell, Jr. to Bernard Law, they've been exposed for the frauds most of their clerical ilk have always been. They are, as a class, at best mediocre bureaucrats, careerists without a shred of moral or spiritual authority that exceeds that of an earnest middle manager at Wal-Mart.  

That doesn't mean that there is no spiritual vitality in the culture, but only that it's not to be found in its institutions and its managerial class. I'm a practicing Catholic, but Voltaire was right--ecrasez l'Infame. Good riddance to all that ecclesial, faux-medieval claptrap. It's time to grow up. For me as a Catholic, the only thing necessary is that the Mass be continuously celebrated and that the real faithful remain faithful, and that there be a tradition of lively "midrasnhic" reflection on the central historical mystery we celebrate as Christians. That last part is not going to come out of most chanceries and seminaries, at least not for some time to come.

I'm not saying these are bad people--neither were the segregationist Christians in the South. I'm saying they are very ordinary, socially conforming people who have no special wisdom or moral authority. They just reflect conventional wisdom, and they haven't enough deep moral sense to know when the conventional wisdom is morally wrong. That's how most people are regardless of their avowed political or religious commitments. They are just going along to get along.

The people who are the most virulent defenders of conventional morality are not defending the Good; they are defending their particular culture's Oedipus Complex. The Good, as revealed through different cultures' great prophets and philosophers, has obviously played a role in shaping these cultures' norms and taboos. It's a good thing that human sacrifice is no longer culturally acceptable. And so, of course, we measure moral progress in cultures to the degree that they have proscribed the worst forms of savagery.

But the cultures that are most evolved are those in which the cognitive capacity of the heart, i.e., the individual conscience, to know the good as something that transcends one's acculturation. Christian cultures are not the only ones in which this capacity for moral cognition has been valued, but there's a reason why freedom and individuality emerged most precociously in the West. The problem with cultures that celebrate freedom and individuality lies in that they tend to be irreverent, and that's a good thing, when clearly there are sacred cows that deserve no reverence. But conscience bows before that which is worthy of reverence. It just patiently awaits until it appears, and refuses anything and anyone who presents itself as the form without the substance. 

But the more difficult thing for these traditionalists to understand is that the real destroyer of traditional values and a sense of the sacred has been consumer capitalism. Liberalism and Capitalism are interdependent social systems and the only difference between secular Liberals and traditionalist conservatives lies in that the former accept the disruptive changes that capitalism has wrought and have adapted to it and seek to mitigate its most harmful effects, whereas traditionalist conservatives still think capitalism is great without guardrails and have no clue that ubridled capitalism has been the most powerful destroyer of the norms and traditions they cherish.

You can't disapprove of Liberalism without disapproving of Capitalism. While there are some principled conservative intellectuals like Patrick Deneen who get this, they don't get much air time on Fox News. Fox News propaganda wants its audience to believe that both capitalism and traditional values are compatible, and the only reason conservative traditions and norms have eroded is because there's a Liberal plot to exterminate everything they hold sacred. Read Deneen. He will quickly disabuse you of this mode of deluded thinking. Deneen understands that the market has commodified everything; it has become our fundamental, culture-wide metaphor for assessing value, and without a robust pushback from credible spiritual authorities, it takes the field unopposed. And without a credible spiritual foundation, a culture cannot be anything but secular, regardless of whatever ridiculous shade of lipstick religious conservatives want to gussie this pig up with. 

Trump represents not the contradiction of secular Liberalism in this sense, but its apotheosis. That conservative Christians have embraced him betrays their own confusion, moral bankruptcy, and fundamental misunderstanding of the spirit of the Gospels. These are culture Christians, not genuine Christians. They are as much Christians as those church members In the bad old days who supported slavery and later segregation. The spirit of the gospels is always a challenge to culture and a call to transcend its limitations, especially the various ways it celebrates power and greed, and especially the way it makes enemies of the Other.

Tribal Christianity is an oxymoron. There is nothing--absolutely nothing--tribal about true Christianity--it is radically universalist. It is corrupted as soon as it becomes a justification of us against them, even when the 'them' are non-Christians. Tribal Christianity is a kind of mediocre social conformism that parodies Christianity. So it's not surprising that so-many people who think they're Christians are among Trump's staunchest supporters. And it's not surprising that so much of his support comes from Southerners who--good Christians though they have thought and continue think themselves to be--were ok with slavery and then later with Jim Crow.  And the strongest indicator of the mediocrity of their moral sense is their allowing themselves to be conned by this buffoonish Yankee grifter. 

So a vote for Trump started out a vote against Hillary, and a vote against Hillary was a vote against the hated Liberal establishment. I get it, but then it blossomed for many Christians into this bizarre logic that because we self-identify as God's people, and what makes us God's people is our opposition to secularizing Liberals, and secular Liberals hate Trump, then Trump must be God's instrument. Even if we are laying the foundations for a future autocratic plutocracy, at least it will be a Godly autocracy. It has to be if if it's what God's people have effected. If people really believe this kind of craziness, there's nothing that can be said to them. Reality itself will intervene at some point and give them a slap upside the head. The problem is that their delusional thinking is dragging the rest of them off the cliff with them.

But let's assume there's are still some Trump supporters who haven't gone completely off the deep end. I would ask them, what kind of alternative to liberal democracy would you embrace?  They say they don't like Hillary and patronizing cosmopolitan liberals, but so what? You're going to burn the whole thing down because you haven't been able to adapt to the world that capitalism has created? You really believe that something better will emerge out of the chaos?  You'd really be ok with the kind of Plutarchy that Koch brothers' style radical Libertarianism will bring us--has already brought us? That's what this embrace of conservative values with unbridled capitalism is turning us into. 

***

I think more than anything else it has to do with the broader crisis in meaning that has cast many Americans, particularly traditionalist conservatives, into a state of ontological dizziness. It's particularly important for certain personality types to take their cues from external cultural symbols and norms, and when those norms are fragilized by pluralistic complexity, their sense of meaning and identity are also fragilized. Most people are not independent thinkers; they need to be told what to think, and cultural norms and traditions have been the normal means to effect that through basic acculturation as children. When everything this kind of personality type has been taught as a child  is true and good is brought into question, ontological dizziness sets in. The floor has disappeared beneath them. They are free floating, and will grasp anything that will give them a sense of stability and grounding. This makes such people extremely vulnerable to demagoguery and outlandish conspiracy theories. What makes sense is anything that resonates with their acculturation and explains why their symbolic world has lost its cultural hegemony. 

So I don't think most Trump supporters are toxic racists or ignorant brutes. They're dizzy, and they just want to live in an America that feels stable and comfortable for them, and Fox News and right-wing talk radio gives them that, and so does Trump. They restore their sense of what's right because it resonates with what they were taught as children. They have not been able to adapt to a complex world in which people who have been acculturated into very different symbolic meaning systems must live cheek by jowl. They used to be ok with "different" folks so long as their traditional American Christian symbol system was dominant, but they cannot tolerate being only one among many with no cultural primacy. It's in this sense they see themselves as "real Americans" and why they see Trump as their champion. Making America great again means restoring their cultural hegemony. And this "restoration" is more important than any other economic or other mundane political consideration.

But, of course, this is a con. And as with almost every kind of hope these conservative elites cynically dangle in front of this dizzy population, it will disappoint them. Everything in Reality is pushing hard against whatever bubble they are trying to sustain to keep it out, and the only question is whether when this bubble bursts it will be too late not just for them but for the rest of us. 

Artists, Saints, Prophets, and Philosophers

This election of Donald Trump was driven by irrational factors, and overt racism is too simplistic a way to characterize them. The problem is broader in that it embraces fundamental issues of identity and acculturation in Red and Blue America. So it's important to understand what's going on rather than moralistically to dismiss his election as driven mainly by racism. Then the task is to begin to look for some plausible cures. 

The beginning of a cure lies in recognizing how deeply everybody is shaped by their acculturation as children. Our acculturation effects an indelible cultural download that shapes our experience of the world and of our place in it. Even if we choose to reject the values and worldview of the culture in which we were brought up, it remains deeply embedded in our psyches and continues to shape our perceptions and experience. For better or worse, we can never transcend completely the limitations of our acculturation. For better, extraordinary gifts are bequeathed to us by our ancestors; for worse because among those gifts are insinuated attitudes and practices that are deeply wrong.

The best we can do is cultivate the positive and to be emotionally intelligent about the negative, among them attitudes and practices regarding race and gender. That means we need to be aware of how these negative elements in our acculturation shape our perceptions, attitudes, and behaviors, and then to develop strategies that help us manage them. While none of us can control how we feel, we can control what we say and do. And while there is no legislation that can force a change in our attitudes, it is sometimes necessary to use legislation to force a change in our customs and practices. 

But force should always be the last resort, and a more effective approach is education--an education that should happen in schools and churches if we had schools and churches that had any idea about how they could play a culturally transformative role. The development of this kind of emotional intelligence about our acculturation should be one of the primary benefits of a good education, and transformation the benefit rendered by the churches.

Such an education starting at the high school age in some critical courses in the humanities, particularly history and literature, would give students the opportunity to examine their values in a conscious, critical manner, and in doing so to evaluate what is just and true, and what is not. This is frequently done in our schools when gifted teachers work with young people in these areas, but it is not a formal part of the curriculum. The churches should be playing a life-long supportive role in helping people to build on the foundation that should have been laid for them during adolescence. Clearly that's not what's happening either in our schools or in our churches and other places of worship. If it is happening, it's very exceptional. 

Another way of putting it is that the main goal of education should be to enable or create the conditions for an awakening in young people from naive consciousness, i.e., a consciousness that is circumscribed by one's acculturation, to a consciousness that can find a standpoint outside of one's acculturation to evaluate what is good in it and what is not. Parents on the Left and Right would resist this who think the main purpose of education is indoctrination or job training. The churches see their main role as indoctrination into a moralistic code that reinforces a narrowed tribal identity more than it fosters a liberating, open, magnanimous, compassionate embrace of the world. There are exceptions, but they prove the rule.

Finding this balance between embracing the gifts of the ancestors while at the same time looking to transcend the limits of custom and tradition is a tough sell these days. Nobody on the Left or Right seems to believe that it's possible to find a standpoint outside one's acculturation. In a culture that has become so deeply materialist, it is hard for anyone to believe that they have access to anything outside "culture", except to switch from one tribal perspective to another. There is some merit in the exercise of looking at one's values and worldview through the eyes of someone who does not share it, but that's not what I'm talking about. I have been arguing here for years that there is another possibility, that most of us have common experience of it, but that we have forgotten how to name it, and have become incapable in any collective sense of taking it seriously.

So here's how I see it. The educational task is not a matter of doctrine or indoctrination; it is a matter of awakening to what I call the Deep Real. A healthy culture is one in which there is a broad consensus that the great ancestors--the artists, saints, prophets, and philosophers--have something to teach us about the Deep Real, but that we must find our own way of living in accordance with it in our own time. This requires that we awaken to what they awakened to. This awakening should lead not to the wholesale throwing out of babies with the bathwater, but rather to an appreciation of the gifts that have been conferred to us by our ancestors, but also an awareness that our ancestors were wrong, often very deeply wrong. 

But how is it possible to transcend one's acculturation if there is no standard by which we can measure whether the ancestors in our tradition (or anyone else's) were right or wrong? This is the problem that Socrates posed to his interlocutors in Athens, and for his trouble he was executed by the citizens of Athens for corrupting their youth. He was engaged in a subversive activity that has been resisted by conservatives through the ages, which is to question the authority of the tradition. But Socrates did not do this simply to debunk; he did it because he insisted that there was a deeper, supra-cultural truth that his students could recognize, and that that truth provided the standard by which they could evaluate the justice of the customs, mores, myths, norms of the society in which they lived.

The goal was not destructive, but constructive. Not just to critique the inadequacy of what exists, but to hold it to a standard that shows how something deeper and more satisfying could be realized. This is the only way I think a true progressivism is possible. It's not just a liberation from the constraints of custom and tradition, but a way of thinking about how what is given to us by the ancestors is always in a tension with the Deep Real that calls upon people shaped within any tradition to move beyond it by aspiring to come into deeper alignment with Reality. This is both an individual task, but also a social one. It cannot be a task that is forced on anyone; it can only be encouraged, and it can only be encouraged by people who have a sense of the worth of taking it on. If enough people "get it" they can effect significant changes in our collective imaginary.  

This was Socrates' mission. His challenge to the citizens of Athens was, to use Charles Taylor's language, a post-Axial, disembedding move. We are culturally embedded to the degree that we live unconsciously in our acculturation; we are incapable of evaluating our acculturation unless we are able to stand outside of it and look at it dispassionately, but such a move leads to nihilism unless it also leads to a deeper awareness of the Deep Real, which is the standard by which we evaluate all things in our otherwise very limited, contingent experience of the world. 

Our experience and interpretation of such experiences of the Deep Real are always limited and perspectival. We never know it in any complete sense, but some people--the great artists, saints, prophets, and philosophers--have had deeper experiences of it than the rest of us. Their authority and credibility lies in that we recognize that they have come to see and understand something that we 'intuit' to be  true, that they are pointing to something of tremendous value that we should like to know more about. This is not primarily a cognition in the head, so much as it is a cognition of the heart. The heart takes in the experience of the Deep Real, and then the head interprets it and then tries to express or articulate in some way what has been disclosed to the heart. Heidegger's talk about the 'moods' of Being is suggestive of what I'm talking about here. 

I think people frequently have these heart cognitions, but their head does not know how to interpret them in a way that comports with their importance. Too often such cognitions are dismissed as merely subjective or aesthetic, but I would insist that they are disclosive of something that is trans-subjective, or inter-subjective, i.e., relational. (Read Buber's I and Thou for more on this.) Christians and Jews believe that the Deep Real is personal, but other plausible interpretations (Buddhism, Heidegger) of our experiences of it are possible. This is a pre-doctrinal experience, but obviously we interpret such cognitions through the filters of our acculturation. The materialist framework in which all of us, even people who are believers, are acculturated makes it extremely difficult to interpret such disclosive experiences in a way that takes them seriously. If we don't take them seriously, then these experiences are like the seed that falls on rocky ground. 

The important thing to emphasize here is that such cognitions are not something we make up or subjectively project; they are rather more like discoveries about how things are, because "how things are" wants to disclose itself to us if we can find a way to be receptive to it. The great ancestors conducted, to use Thomas Merton's phrase, "raids on the unspeakable", and so what they speak is 'true' but limited. It is helpful because it is disclosive in its own way, but not definitive. They point to something real that is outside our historically and culturally limited, perspectival consciousness, but they do it within the limitations of their own limited, perspectival consciousness. They point, however, to the place where we, too, can find the foothold outside of our acculturation where we can stand to evaluate the "quality" of our experience of the world, and to judge its just-ness. We never completely transcend our acculturation, but neither are we completely trapped within it--unless stubbornly we choose to be. 

***

What I have described here was pretty much the standard view among sane, educated people in the West until Romanticism gave way to the crude materialistic, instrumental rationalism of the late 19th century and its mechanomorphic social imaginary. The eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophes largely rejected custom and traditional religion, but they did not reject the idea of universal truth apprehensible by Reason. It would not be possible for Jefferson to have written "We hold these truths to be self-evident" and to be so broadly understood unless there was among his readers, even the most irreligious of them, the presumption that their understanding of the Truth was grounded in the Deep Real. Their name for it was Providence in those days. 

The problem with the Enlightenment rationalists lay in that they had an inflated understanding of the significance of Reason. It wasn't what they affirmed about Reason that was problematic so much as what they left out. Their understanding of it was too often more of a cold, heady thing than a heart thing. And they naively thought they could completely transcend their acculturation, wipe clean the traditions and customs they found so oppressive, and start from scratch according to a heady blueprint for a new society they felt obligated to impose, top-down, on everyone else. This is the Jacobin fallacy, and it remains the core delusion of the Left to this day.

The Left then and now did/does not understand that the great mass of human beings are embedded in their traditions and customs, which, in addition to giving their lives shape and meaning, had/have the salutary effect of constraining their basest instincts and inhibiting them from turning into a mob. The radical Left then didn't understand that when you destroy the extrinsic traditional framework, some few might awaken to the Deep Real, but most awaken instead to an increased awareness of their resentments, greed, and egotism, and they no longer feel any external constraints concerning their violent expression. There was Robespierre the Jacobin idealist who thought he was in some privileged way a prophet of the Deep Real, and then there was the Parisian mob. The combination of Jacobin custom-destroying idealism and mob resentments leads to chaos, the terror, and eventually to military dictatorship as the last resort to restore order.  

In our own day, many decent heartlanders have been driven into the arms of a demagogue like Trump and the billionaires, militarists, and extreme-right ideologues for whom he will carry water. The causes are complex, but chief among them is the one-two punch of the tradition-and-custom-destroying effects of global capitalism combined with the neo-puritanical, moralistic contempt of the Cultural Left for what remains of their customs and traditions. Heartlander choices have not been rational, but that doesn't mean they don't make sense. 

This does not mean that the Conservatives were/are right. Burke and his conservative epigones reacted too extremely to the extremism in France. They were right that like the Jacobins you just can't trash existing traditions, norms, and institutions and start over from scratch, but they were/are wrong if they think that the cultures and traditions of the West don't stand vulnerable to judgment by the Deep Real. Buckley's defense of segregation in the South was appalling.

Burke was right and wrong to emphasize historical rights over abstract human rights. He was right because rights in the abstract are not worth much; they have to be historically incarnated in the beliefs and practices of particular societies. He was wrong to think about these rights as coming primarily from the past, because I would argue they come from a Deep Real that is calling us into the Future. I would argue that the ancestors in England and elsewhere who established the rights of Englishmen were in their time and place, whether they were aware of it or not, were responding, at least in part, to the call of the Deep Real, and so must we now in our time and place advance their work. That sense of the justice of the rights of Englishmen doesn't come out of thin air; it can't be explained away simply with contract theory. But I don't want to get off on a tangent here.

Many if not most conservatives profess to be religious (Libertarians are not conservatives), but too often they focus on preserving the dead forms of the tradition rather than working with the energies that gave those forms the shape that was appropriate for their time and place. The task now for them, as well as people of goodwill on the Left, is to work with the energies of the Deep Real to shape new forms that are appropriate for our time and place. This is not a Jacobin project, because it needs to work bottom up, not top down; it needs to be deeply democratic, and it needs to work with the better angels that lay slumbering in the souls of the American demos, not with their anger and resentment. 

The Left as a group has no way of awakening these angels because they do not believe in the Deep Real whence they come. But the people in the Churches have been equally useless because even if they believe in the Deep Real there is very little about what they say or do in the Public sphere that points to its inspiring vitality. They work with energies that are more tribal than transcendent, and they are more interested in indoctrination than in metanoia. 

But if conservatives mostly profess a dead moralism, so too does the Left in the sanctimony and condescension they direct toward those with traditional values. The cultural Left is right about a lot of things the cultural Right is wrong about, but it is powerless to convince or persuade anybody who is not already singing in their choir. If they are passionate about anything it is their advocacy  of a groundless relativism that provides no firm footing for anyone to take a stand and to push back against the Darkness that has been building on the Right for over thirty years now, and for which they have had no answer.

They are strident in the way they say "No" and offer a goofy kumbaya celebration of "difference" that is hard for anybody to take seriously.who doesn't think John Lennon's "Imagine" is a masterpiece. And as a result they come across as flaky, moralistic scolds rather than as  prophets who point to something deep and true. And so it's easy for thoughtful heartlanders to reject their critique because it is mostly negative without affirming anything deeply positive. Heartlander conservatives can just say, "Well, you don't understand our culture and history. Your practices go against everything deep and true we were taught by our ancestors. You speak with no authority, and so why should we take your groundless, Liberal, debunking, flaky nonsense seriously."

And so when no one can inspire the better angels of our nature, it creates room for the dark angels to enter stage right. The mission of these dark angels is to destroy the norms, practices, and customs that have made an already deeply flawed democracy viable. These dark angels have always been there in the American psyche, but operated out of sight in the Deep South or lurking on the fringes in other areas of the country. But they started to come out onto center stage in the 90s.

It started with Newt Gingrich and his scorched-earth, norm-destroying politics, and then Cheney/Bush and their delusional militaristic hubris, their nihilistic justifications for torture, their abrogation of basic human rights like habeas corpus, their delusional economic thinking, and now, God help us, we have Donald Trump who wouldn't know a norm if he tripped over one. The Democrats as a group, because most of them believe in nothing more than advancing their careers, stood fecklessly, impotently by. And so there is nobody to push back because the Left has no place to stand and comes across as so clueless. Nobody on either the Right or the Left seems capable of making a compelling counterargument that can be heard outside their own tribal echo chambers.

And so there is really no hope unless someone can find a way to frame a counterargument that might provide an inoculation to the disease in this country that is contaminating the Right. No compelling counterargument has been made because there is no one on the American scene today who has the stature of one of the great artists, saints, prophets, or philosophers who is capable of awakening us to the Deep Real where our better angels reside and can be called on for help. Lincoln did it, and so did MLK and Jim Lawson, and RFK might have become someone who could. Who since then? Bernie? Maybe, not sure. But certainly him before Hillary. 

Calling people racists or naive or ignorant is not an effective political strategy. We are all racists, naive, and ignorant relatively speaking. To know that about ourselves is the beginning of wisdom, but if we have any realistic expectation of asking people to transcend their acculturation, they have to be awakened to their better angels. Trump, candidate chaos, has instead given many Americans license to indulge their resentments. And so we await the figure to enter stage Left who can speak with authority because he has a strong foothold in the Deep Real. 

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

Terry Eagleton's book, Culture and the Death of God runs parallel to the parts of Taylor's book that trace out the West's march toward secularism and the possibility for atheistic humanism. Eagleton's book, however, starts at the Enlightenment and focuses more on the history of ideas than in changes to the social imaginary. It's a dynamic process, of course, Ideas change because the imaginary does, and the imaginary changes in response to new ideas. What's possible to think is limited by the imaginary, but the imaginary is in continuous development as material conditions change the world and our thinking about the world changes in response. 

So, for instance, it was not possible to think of Nature as a machine while the social imaginary was still dominated by Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas about formal and final causality. As soon as Aristotle and Plato are thrown out, efficient causality and instrumental reason become the only legitimate ways to think about the natural world, and our imagination of the cosmos changes from something humans thought of before as organic and alive with spirit to something that is disenchanted and mechanical. And the legitimacy of this mechanistic imaginary is reinforced by the material and technological advances that follow. The price we pay, however, is with the atrophying of the soul and the hypertrophying of meaninglessness that comes with what Taylor calls the  'buffered self'. This is the kind of human native to modernity who feels cut off from the social and natural worlds around him rather than feeling deeply embedded within them. Meaning comes with connection--or to use the Christian word, 'communion'. 

In Part 4 of my reading of Taylor's A Secular Age, I trace the process by which the personal God of Christian revelation becomes depersonalized, first by the way the radical Reformers stress God's remote transcendence, greatness, and inscrutability. This is a God before whom we humans skulk as depraved and inconsequential sinners all deserving of eternal damnation. This is a God, who because of his inscrutable mercy, nevertheless sees fit to predestine a few for salvation and most for the damnation we all deserve except for that selective application of his mercy.

This is a God who more closely resembles the judgmental, juridical, jealous God in parts of the Old Testament than the God who is revealed in the Gospels. After the vicious religious wars of the late 16th and early 17th century, there were good reasons for decent people to think that they needed some relief from the God in whose name everyone, Protestant and Catholic alike, were so willing to slaughter one another. So in some quarters of Latin Christendom, this deeply unattractive and un-Christian God starts to morph into the impersonal God of the Deists, a god who created the universe but who does not intervene in human affairs. 

The Enlightenment rationalists' god created a world that was benevolent in its design, but after he got things running, he left the scene. There was in it no need to be saved, and so no need of a savior or of revelation or grace or much of traditional Christianity at all. Everything that was worth knowing was knowable by reason. It was enough that humans have the wit to discern in the world's design God's benevolent intentions that humans should thrive. The human project was no longer to cravenly worship a despotic God but to assert a new sense of human dignity and autonomy. The task now was for humans to use their God-given intelligence, i.e., instrumental reason, to discern the engineering logic of the cosmos so as to exploit it for human benefit. The Lisbon earthquake in 1755 was a shock to the idea of a benevolently designed cosmos, because it was an anomaly inexplicable within its framework. A hundred years later, the educated classes have become Darwinians: the universe is no longer run by a benevolent logic, but by one that in addition to being impersonal, is random and cruel. 

And so if God didn't create a benevolent universe after all, but rather a cruel one where bad things happen to good people, who needs him? Humans can get along very nicely without him, and the possibility for an atheistic humanism emerges, one that wants to retain much of the Christian morality, but without its ontological grounding. The problems of theodicy that come with the traditional idea of God  were too big in their minds to overcome. Best just to ditch any idea of God at all. 

An 'exclusive' humanism develops that seeks to retain what the best in the religious traditions affirms: justice, goodness, truth, magnanimity, etc. These are purely human possibilities without any need of transcendent grounding. The atheist can assert in all sincerity that he strives to be a moral person, and can believe that he is morally superior to believers precisely because he does what's right for its own sake, not because he fears punishment or because it's a downpayment on one of the bigger mansions in the kingdom to come. And this idea that human decency and moral behavior are possible without any reference to God has since become a commonplace in secular societies. Well, less so in America, but certainly a commonplace among its cosmopolitan, university-educated class.

Eagleton's book traces this process to what he describes as an 'authentic atheism', which really isn't accomplished until the anti-humanist post-Nietzscheans of the last forty years or so. Eagleton shows that it's not so easy to kill God, that even Nietzsche didn't quite do it; we must keep finding substitutes for him. If for the Enlightenment rationalist the substitution was the Deist clockmaker God, for the German idealists it was the Absolute, and for the Romantics it was the creative Self and the elan inherent in Nature. For the Victorians like Matthew Arnold it was 'culture', the kind of thing that morphed later into the ethical culture movement. It seeks to  preserve what's best in human ethical aspiration and creative achievement without all the metaphysical folderol. Then Nietzsche comes along and says, I don't think so. Either there's a God or there isn't, and if there isn't, then you're ridiculous if you constrain yourself by traditional moral codes. You need to free yourself from all that b.s. Here's Eagleton on this:

Nietzsche sees that civilization is in the process of ditching divinity while still clinging to religious values, and that this egregious act of bad faith must not go uncontested. You cannot kick away the foundations and expect the building still to stand. The death of God, he argues in The Joyful Wisdom, is the most momentous event of human history, yet men and women are behaving as though it were no more than a minor readjustment. The time has come, then, to renounce the consoling fantasy that you can do away with God without also putting paid to Man. As Gilles Deleuze comments in Difference and Repetition, "God is retained so long as the Self is preserved." In Nietzsche’s eyes, all such essences involve some hint of celestial design or metaphysical substratum. Unless these, too, are rooted out, men and women will continue to languish in the shadow of the Almighty.

Of the various artificial respirators on which God has been kept alive, one of the most effective is morality. “It does not follow, Feuerbach anxiously insists," that goodness, justice and wisdom are chimaeras because the existence of God is a chimaera.” Perhaps not; but in Nietzsche’s view it does not follow either that we can dispense with divine authority and continue to conduct our moral business as usual. Our conceptions of truth, virtue, identity, and autonomy, our sense of history as shapely and coherent, all have deep-seated theological roots. It is idle to imagine that they could be torn from these origins and remain intact. Morality, for example, must therefore either rethink itself from the ground up, or live on in a chronic bad faith of appealing to sources it knows to be spurious. In the wake of the death of God, there are those who continue to hold that morality is about duty, conscience and obligation, but who now find themselves bemused about the source of such beliefs. This is not a problem for Christianity—not only because it has faith in such a source, but because it does not believe that morality is primarily about duty, conscience or obligation in the first place. (156-57)

And so for Nietzsche, if you are going to take the death of God seriously, you must understand that it 

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. (159)

And so Nietzsche insofar as he substitutes the uebermensch/Overman for him, isn't quite able to kill God either, and the irony doesn't end there--

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. 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.

So much for Nietzsche's uprooting all the deepest theological roots. if you're going to claim to be an authentic, god-is-dead atheist, you have to take it even further than Nietzsche did, which is what the postmodern thinkers do. As Deleuze quoted above suggests, If you are going to kill God, you must kill the human Self:

If Romanticism seeks to replace God with the fathomless, infinite, all-powerful subject, as Carl Schmitt argues in his Political Romanticism, postmodernism, in Perry Anderson’s words, represents a “subjectivism without a subject.” If God is dead, then Man himself, who once dreamed of filling his shoes is also near his term. There is not much left to disappear. (192)

The postmodern subject, like the Ubermensch, is clay in its own hands, able to change shape at its own behest; but by the same token it lacks the indomitable will with which Nietzsche’s post-human animal bends reality to his demands.

Since Man is no longer to be seen primarily as agent or creator, he is no longer in danger of being mistaken for the Supreme Being. He has finally attained maturity, but only at the cost of relinquishing his identity. He is not to be seen as self-determining, which is what freedom means for the likes of Kant and Hegel. The self is no longer coherent enough to be so. This is certainly one way in which postmodernism is post-theological, since it is God above all who is One, and who is the ground of his own being. It follows that if you want to be shot of him, you need to refashion the concept of subjectivity itself, which is just what postmodernism seeks to do. (189-90)

The only way to kill God for good is to kill the idea of humanity. So be careful what you wish for. Is this post-modern anti-humanism something that is anything more than a thought experiment taken on by bored intellectuals who want to take the death of God idea to its logical conclusion? If you take the death of God to its necessary conclusion, then you see the kind of fatuous human being that you are left with--Nietzsche called him the Last Man. Eagleton goes on to say that the anti-human project of the postmodern thinkers is easier to accomplish --

...if the capitalist system happens to be in transit from the subject as producer to the subject as consumer. Consumers are passive, diffuse, provisional subjects, which is not quite how the Almighty is traditionally portrayed. As long as men and women are seen as producers, labourers, manufacturers or self-fashioners, God can never quite expire. Behind every act of production lurks an image of creation, and one act of production in particular—art—rivals that of the Almighty himself. Not even he, however, can survive the advent of Man the Eternal Consumer. (189-90)

Who would be insane enough to wish for a humanity fitting this description if there was another plausible option?

This alternative within the current social imaginary is not easy for many to grasp yet, but it is profound in its implications, and it brings into focus the very difficult to understand, because so profound, implications of the events from Good Friday through Easter. If, as Christians and Jews have claimed for thousands of years,  humans are created in the image and likeness of God, then what we know about being human is commensurate with what we know about God, and Christians claim to know something about God because of the way he revealed himself in Jesus Christ.

Our knowledge of God is, therefore, commensurate with our ability to know ourselves, and vice versa. Feuerbach had it half right. He thought that God was a projection of characteristics that belonged to man, and that we attribute to God what humans need to claim for themselves, i.e., that human beings, contra Calvin's view of man as depraved and powerless, need to embrace God's attributes as their own if they are to come into their own.

But it does not follow that God is therefore merely a projected chimera. For if God is a chimera, so then are humans, or at least our current understanding of what it means to be human, including the mainstream understanding of atheistic humanists, is chimerical. For Christians the reverse is true. God projects himself into us, and insofar as we work with that, we become more deeply human. This is the meaning of the Incarnation: it was the definitive projection of God into the human being. This is admittedly a heavy lift for most moderns to accept.

I would go so far as to say that most who claim to be Christians don't understand or accept it. Most Christians see Christian belief as comprising mainly a morality code that is validated by its transcendent provenance. And surely there is a Christian morality and practice, but it is not an end in itself. It has validity only as a means to an end, and it has validity as long as it promotes rather than obstructs human movement toward that end. The telos of Christian morality is the agapic achievement of communion, and any kind of Christian behavior or belief that obstructs the movement toward greater levels of communion is illegitimate. Nothing, IMO, could be clearer from any clear-headed reading of the Gospels or Paul's epistles. 

So why is communion so hard to achieve? Calvin had it partially right in that there is something deeply wrong about the human condition. But he his wrong that we are depraved. Rather we are broken, soul shattered, incapable of being what we long to be and were created to be. Genesis depicts Adam's sin as an act of disobedience. Ok, but I think of the Genesis story as very closely related to the story of Icarus's defying his father. He like Adam and Eve over-reached; they took on more than they could handle. They aspired to something that was worthy of their aspiration, but without the capacity to attain it, like swimming the English Channel without having trained for it. And the consequences that followed were not so much punishment as the result of fools rushing in where angels fear to tread.

God's warning to Adam and Eve, like that of Daedelus to Icarus, was not the warning of a despot to follow arbitrarily imposed rules, but like that of parent talking to spirited teenager. He knows that certain actions are folly and lead to destruction, and he knows he's dealing with somebody who is impatient to realize his full potential but cannot do it in one giant leap. So despite all warnings he leaps, and then comes the all but fatal fall. The human condition, like Icarus's after his crash, was like Humpty Dumpty's. It is concussed, amnesiac, shattered and in need of being put together again, and all the king's horses and all the king's men can't do it. All attempts for humans unaided to assemble the scattered shards of the broken human soul create parodies of the human, from Sun Kings to tinpot dictators, to the more recent project to manufacture a new transhuman version of Frankenstein's monster. They are all cartoon humans compared to the humans we were created to become. 

Only God could effect the reintegration of the shattered image, and he achieved that by taking the human soul into himself in his Incarnation, then allowing it to be shattered on the cross, and put back together again in the resurrection. The resurrection body of Christ is the proleptic image of the human being transformed into the fullness for which it was created, the fulfillment of the promise made by the serpent in the garden--to be like God. It is the restored image and likeness of God in the God/Man. 

The process of restoration for the rest of us is what the early Greek fathers called thesois. This is an idea of the human that the radical Reformers of the 16th century gave up on. They were justifiably worried about the human tendency to hubris, but went too far in the other direction. For if we are to become human beings capable of deep communion with God, with one another, and with all of creation, that's possible only to the degree that we become transformed. We are transformed to the degree that the shards of our shattered souls are slowly reassembled so that they once again reflect in their fullness the image and likeness of the God that has projected himself into them. 

So is God dead, or is it that we're looking for a God that is our projection of what we think a God should be rather than looking for the one who has projected himself into our brokenness? Eagleton puts it nicely--

The absence of God may be occluded by the fetish of Man, but the God who has been disposed of would seem little more than a fetish in the first place. As with William Blake’s Urizen or Nobodaddy, he was a convenient way of shielding humanity eager to be chastised from the intolerable truth that the God of Christianity is friend, lover and fellow accused, not judge, patriarch and superego. He is counsel for the defence, not for the prosecution. Moreover, his apparent absence is part of his meaning. The superstitious would see a sign, but the sign of the Father that counts is a crucified body. For Christian faith, the death of God is not a question of his disappearance. On the contrary it is one of the places where he is mostly fully present. Jesus is not Man standing in for God. He is a sign that God is incarnate in human frailty and futility. Only by living this reality to the full, experiencing one’s death to the very end, can there be a path beyond the tragic. It is not a claim that fits well with the Religion of Humanity. (159-60)

Christianity rightly understood is the Religion of Humanity. Wrongly understood it leads to mistakes that recapitulate the hubristic ur-mistake of Edenic over-reaching, of rushing in where angels fear to tread, of trying to take on something before we are ready. There is a faux-noble, naive idealism that motivates this kind of hubristic action. The French Revolution and its imitators are classic examples. But the opposite is also true, we cannot allow our fear of hubris to be an excuse for inaction. 

Because we are not ready for some things now does not mean that we are unready to do what is there for us  to do. That's the challenge--to know the difference between hubris and making excuses for complacency. That's what I struggle with, anyway. The challenge at some of the most critical turning points in our lives is to live in the tension between two impulses that pull us in opposite directions. Usually a third, deeper possibility emerges if we are vigiliant enough to discern it. The tension, for instance, between being the one without conviction and being the one driven by passionate intensity is resolved in the ability to have the capacity to discern the right thing to do, and then to do it with quiet resolve, like Tolkien's Ents.

Where is that quiet resolve found? In the part of us that has been restored by the events of the first Holy Week. Those parts are in us all, whether believer or unbeliever. Belief is only important if it leads to a greater openness to the emollient effects of grace on our too rigid and shattered hearts. Too many people who claim to be believers, like the Pharisees depicted in the Gospels, use their mineralized beliefs as a carapace that shuts out that healing balm. Better to be an egregious sinner with a heart of flesh, than a clean-living, moralistic prig with a heart entombed in stone. 

On Charles Taylor's 'A Secular Age', Part 1

Part 1:  Disenchantment: Post Axial Disembedding

Charles Taylor's A Secular Age seeks to answer the fundamental question: How is it that if five hundred years ago it would have been very unusual to profess yourself an atheist, today it is no longer the case, and among intellectuals it's arguably the majority position. Another way of saying it is that there were always the impious or people for whom religion meant little, but before the modern age, they were marginal. During modernity meant that impious ideas have become not only acceptable, but in some precincts--inhabited these days by Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris, and their fellow travelers--the new orthodoxy. 

Taylor is at pains to reject classical secularization theory as a subtraction story that is too simplistic, and wants to tell instead a story about secularization that is much more complex and interesting. By subtraction he means that as the powers and characteristics ascribed to God fell away--were subtracted--when science developed alternative explanations, very little was left that one could say about God, especially the biblical God, that anyone could take seriously. Taylor grants that rendering irrelevant of God is true insofar as religion is conflated with the practices and beliefs--the social imaginary--of an 'enchanted' society, but 'disenchantment' has been the project of the post-Axial 'higher religions' for at least the last 2500 years. Disenchantment is not a bug of the post-Axial religions, but a feature.

A basic premise of this blog is that we are on the cusp of another shift in our imaginaries. As we shifted from premodern to modern, we are now in the process of shifting from modern to whatever comes next. Our current condition described as 'postmodern' is the last gasp of modernity in its reductio ad absurdum of individualism and freedom understood in an unbalanced way. It's an age in which debunking for the sake of debunking is the rule, and we have nothing positive--except a kind of groundless freedom--that can be affirmed. It is The Age of Whatever, a period of ontological vertigo in which any belief or practice is defensible. This can't last; nobody, even intellectuals, wants to live in a world like that, and it's not the only intellectually legitimate option, even if many intellectuals haven't been persuaded of that yet. Taylor's book I think will be seen as important for laying a foundation for what comes next. It sifts what is essential from the Western religious heritage, and discards what is not. 

If modernity mainly identified itself over against pre-modernity, we are moving into a new phase. If all goes more or less well, I believe that we will find a way to synthesize what is essential from modern developments--science, critical consciousness, equality ideals, the importance of the free individual--with much of what modernity rejected as irrational and delusional--a sense of the sacred, the sacrament, the movement of grace, a renewed sense of the Deep Real as personal, perhaps even a retrieval of lost knowledge/wisdom that persists in the not-quite-extinguished "enchanted" shamanic and totemic cultures that persist mostly in the global south. There is no going backwards, but the way forward involves retrieval and reintegration of much of what has been lost or forgotten. 

Taylor isn't concerned to talk about what comes next so much as he is to explain how we got here, and also to create an intellectual space for legitimate belief, and I believe, a space for the development of a positive ontology in a post-Axial key that can be broadly accepted, even by philosophers. I see his work as foundational, something that must be understood and assimilated before moving forward. In what follows in this post and in three posts that follow, I want to provide a summary with my own glosses of his analysis of the factors that so profoundly shifted the social imaginary of Latin Christendom. 

But before talking about the dramatic shift in the social imaginary that occurred during the modern era, I want to provide a broader historical context, which for Taylor begins with what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Age. This was the extaordinary time around 500 BCE when various higher forms of religion emerge seemingly independently in different civilizations, marked by such founding figures as Confucius, Gautama, Socrates, and the Hebrew prophets.

The 'axial' impulse  begins a process of disembedding. In "embedded" societies human beings are enmeshed in their surroundings to such a degree that their identity and sense of personal agency are severely limited by "outside" factors that surround them. The embedded human being has what Taylor calls the 'porous self', one where the boundaries of his individuality are very permeable to outside social and spiritual influences. His personal identity is deeply merged with that of his tribe, clan, polis, and he is broadly vulnerable to the influence of spirits and spiritual forces, both malign and benign that, though invisible, are all around him and with which he must contend. 

For the porous self, the cosmos is enchanted not as a matter of belief or theory, but as a matter of experience. Think of the way the gods influence the fates of the Greek heroes in Homer's enchanted world. The hero's personal prestige is linked to how he performs in battle, but that performance is determined by whether he is favored by the gods or not. Paris let's loose his arrow, and Apollo guides it to its mark in Achilles' heel. It's Apollo's achievement, not Paris's skill that effects Achilles' demise.

Moderns call it luck; premodern called it good or bad fortune. But good or bad fortune is not random; it is personally intended by the gods. Humans act, but they are mostly reacting to outside spiritual influences that have the larger role in determining the outcomes. Julian Jaynes talks about this way of experiencing the world in his book The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind (1976). The point here is not whose interpretation what was going on then is correct, but simply to establish that the premodern experience of porous selves was very different from the experience of the world that we buffered moderns accept (naively?) as real. 

So religion in its pre-Axial modality is about trying to navigate in such an enchanted environment, appeasing or propitiating the malign spirits and enlisting the support of those who are benign. The goal of pre-Axial religion is to develop rituals and practices in an enchanted world that are designed to promote ordinary human flourishing--long life, prosperity, success in all one's worldly projects.  

Societies that live in an enchanted social imaginary are embedded societies, but a shift toward disembedding begins in the Axial period. Taylor explains:

Human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine. What I've been describing as the Axial transformation breaks this chain at least at one point, if not more. Oakley argues that the break point which was particularly fateful for our development in the West was the rupture, as it were at the top, the Jewish idea of (what we now call) the creation ex nihilo, which took God quite out of the cosmos, and placed him above it. This meant that potentially God can become the source of demands that we break with "the way of the world"; that what Brague refers to as "the wisdom of the world" no longer constrains us. 

But perhaps the most fundamental novelty of all is the revisionary stance towards the human good in Axial religions. More or less radically, they all call into question the received, seemingly unquestionable understandings of human flourishing, and hence inevitably also the structures of society and the features of the cosmos through which this flourishing was supposedly achieved. The change was double. . . . On the one hand, the “transcendent” realm, the world of God, or gods, spirits, or Heaven, however defined, which previously contained elements which were both favorable and unfavorable to the human good, becomes unambiguously affirmative of this good. But on the other hand, both the crucial terms here, both the transcendent and the human good are reconceived in the process.

We have already noted the changes in the first term. The transcendent may now be quite beyond or outside of the cosmos, as with the creator God of Genesis, or the Nirvana of Buddhism. Or if it remains cosmic, it loses its original ambivalent character, and exhibits an order of unalloyed goodness, as with the “heaven” guarantor of just rule in Chinese thought, or the order of Ideas of Plato, whose key is the Good.

But the second term must perforce also change. The highest human good can no longer just be to flourish, as it was before. Either a new goal is posited, or a salvation which takes us beyond what we usually understand as human flourishing. Or else Heaven, or the Good, lays the demand on us to imitate or embody its unambiguous goodness, and hence to alter the mundane order of things down here. This may, indeed usually does, involve flourishing on a wider scale, but our own flourishing (as individual, family, clan, or tribe) can no longer be our highest goal. And of course, this may be expressed by a redefinition of what “flourishing” consists in.

Seen from another angle, this means a change in our attitude to evil, as the destructive, harm-inflicting side of things. This is no longer just part of the order of things, to be accepted as such. Something has to be done about it. This may be conceived as an escape through self-transformation, or it may be seen as a struggle to contain or eliminate the bad, but in either case evil is not something just to be lived with as part of the inevitable balance of things.  (152-53)

The Axial Age introduces a new idea that things are not what they seem; that what people have always accepted as normal reality, enchanted as it might be, is not necessarily the best reality, and that 'normal reality' is something from which we need to be liberated. Something more and better--higher--is possible. A tension is created between this idea of a transcendent Good and the life most people live in pursuit of ordinary human flourishing. And this tension is destabilzing. But the "higher" life is not for everybody because leaving normal reality, like Abraham leaving Ur, is not easy. (Ask Lot's wife.)

But for the ancient Israelites, to live according to a higher law required disembedding from the enchantment-saturated fertility cults that shaped the societies around them. That this was extraordinarily difficult, even unnatural, is repeatedly attested to in the Hebrew scriptures. To 'disembed' is to 'disenchant'; the austerity that comes with disenchantment isn't and end in itself; it's a means to an end, which is to live something at a higher, freer level of human possibility. Socrates' project in Athens had a similar purpose, to disembed the youth of Athens from their naive acceptance of their enchanted cultural download.

The goal for both Socrates in Athens and the prophetic tradition in Israel was not just to debunk worldview seeped in enchantment, but to point to something that was higher and better. Both Plato and the religious traditions of the book--Judaism, Christianity, and Islam--get a bad rap in post-Freudian/Darwinian societies that have largely reverted to materialism and celebration of the sensual. These traditions are perceived as unnaturally, repressively anti-body and anti-life.

But disembedding is misunderstood if it's thought to be only about repression because some vindictive father god in the sky demands it for whatever capricious reasons he may have. It makes no sense to repress what is lower if you don't believe there's anything that higher. The problem in a secular society lies in that the higher is something hardly anyone, especially among its educated elites,  believes is a possibility. Now whether an ascetic path is the only path to realize the higher is a legitimate question, and I am inclined to think not--the choice is not binary. The more important concern is to retrieve the Axial understanding of the "higher", but now in a postmodern key.

But back to our story: In some post-Axial societies, those shaped by Buddhism and Christianity for instance, a stabilizing compromise was developed in which some people left the world of ordinary human flourishing to live in the wilderness or in monasteries. It's a compromise because these individuals who responded to the Axial challenge and who left the ordinary world of flourishing behind to live austerely in pursuit of this higher good, still remained in relationship with the old world. And the people left behind looked to those who went into the monasteries as having a special role to play as 'holy' men and women who could provide spiritual benefit to those who remained in the 'world'. A spiritual/secular dyad develops, and with it a sense of complementarity:

So that those who are fully dedicated to the "higher" forms, while on one hand they can be seen as a standing reproach to those who remain in the earlier forms, supplicating the Powers of human flourishing, nevertheless can also be seen as in a relationship of mutual help with them. The laity feed the monks, and by this they earn "merit", which can be understood as taking them a little farther along the "higher " road, but also serves to protect them against the dangers of life, and increases their health, properity, fertility. (154)

There were those who pursued the spiritual life in a purer, more demanding form in the wilderness or monasteries, and there were those who lived in the secular world, but who drew strength and inspiration from those who lived outside of it. This compromise as it worked in Latin Christendom was rejected by the Reformers in the 16th Century. The Reformers insisted that a Christian society is one in which everyone is equal before God, and so there should not be 'special' vocations: such vocations only lead to spiritual pride. Their model was more that of ancient Israel, in which the whole society was expected to live a rigorous spiritual life, and this led to experiments like those in Geneva or Boston. 

These experiments failed for a complex of reasons that we'll explore in more detail later. But it's interesting to note that an unintended consequence ensued: in a world where the spiritual and secular were collapsed into one another, a new social construct was created in which a sense of higher, spiritually transformative possibilities were de-emphasized and replaced by a rigorist, if not suffocating, moralism, i.e., a focus on codes of behavior more than on spiritual transformation. This causes a significant flattening of human possibiliites, especially in Protestant societies.

Not all, or even most, monks achieved significant (or any) levels of spiritual transformation, but some did, so the possibility of a monastic vocation always held out the possibility of that kind of transformation. That disappears in Protestant societies. And in the long run the moralistic rigor of the Puritan societies breaks down, because most people, unless particularly spiritually gifted,  have little reason to remain religious once the spell of primitive enchantment has been broken.

That's why the early Puritans insisted on a conversion experience to be a church member. If you were not so gifted, you were only going through the motions. But the problem for subsequent generations of Puritans was that fewer experienced such authentic conversion, and so maintaining such a theocratic society became extraordinarily difficult in a burgeoning, modern, commercial society. Too many other options were becoming available to those who were not particularly pious or gifted and who didn't feel particularly at home in these strait-laced New Jerusalems. In such a pluralizing social context, if there is no spiritual/secular dyad, then everything tends to collapse into the 'secular' by default. It's not hard to see how a loss of a sense of the "higher" as a human possibility follows for the the broader, un-gifted population. 

And it's not hard to see how a reversion to older, pre-Axial understandings of human flourishing develop as the norm for Christian societies who gradually lose any sense of the post-Axial challenge to aspire to a higher, transcendent Good, especially in Calvinist societies. For the Calvinist, God who is Good wants our good; he wants us to flourish, and we will flourish if we follow his commandments. We must live ordinary lives in the ordinary, daily, disenchanted world; we must be good householders, i.e., we must work hard, take care of our families, be responsible and productive.

If there is no "higher" to be achieved in this life except to live righteously in this sense, then human purposes become focused on flourishing in the ordinary sense--long life, prosperity, victory over one's enemies (mostly papists and other infidels). Taylor says that Weber, if not in every detail, was fundamentally right about his connecting the rise of capitalism with the Protestant work ethic. 

The Protestant model was still post-Axial, but more in the mode of ancient Israel, where the whole society had to live righteously in conformity with the Law. We can see how this attitude persists among the "theocrats" on the religious right in the U.S. today. They want to transform Washington into Jerusalem, or an updated Geneva. But we can see how the murky boundary between the spirit of capitalism and the spirit of the gospels leads to a kind of assimilation to, rather than contradiction of, the mores of a society whose idea of flourishing is 'consumption'. After a while the consumer capitalist impulse crowds out the Christian impulse, which is what we see today in much of what we call the evangelical Right.

The Catholic model, insofar as it maintains the tension in the spiritual/secular dyad, also maintains a tension between pre-Axial and post-Axial, between concerns about everyday flourishing in the world and the aspiration to be spiritually transformed. But while most Catholics, now as always, are more assimilated to pre-Axial concerns with flourishing than with spiritual transformation (growth in holiness), at least it's one place in a secular society where it is broadly revered as a possibility. (But less so with each generation.)

But we're getting a bit ahead of ourselves here. The point for now is to understand that for the first thousand years of Christianity, if one was serious about pursuing a higher Christian spiritual life in the Latin West, one had to leave society--the secular world. Even if that society was nominally Christian, it was still largely enchanted and "superstitious" in its popular piety--more Celt or German pagan than Christian. And such nominal Christians concerned themselves primarily with how spiritual beings and forces--saints, relics, sacramentals, rituals like beating the bounds, etc., could be used to promote human flourishing in the pre-Axial sense.

A shift in which spiritual elites move toward reforming the 'secular' realm begins in the 11th Century--the Hildebrandine reforms, the Lateran Councils, the evangelical mission of the Dominican preachers, Franciscan mendicants, and the Waldensians, Wycliffe & the Lollards, Hus, etc., and all of that culminates in the Reformation in the 16th. The nature of this reform dynamic is arguably unique in the Latin West, and while it has led to the secularized society in which we now live, it's important to undestand how it was in its roots religiously motivated. But more about that in future posts. 

[This completes Part 1. Parts Two, Three, Four, etc., will follow in posts written over the next weeks discussing Reform and the Disciplinary Society, more on the Buffered and Porous Self, the Enlightenment and the Anthropocentric Turn, Deism and the Impersonal Order, more on the modern social imaginary and modern moral order, and other topics I have yet to consider.]

[Part 1 was revised to reduce wordiness and improve clarity 5/23/20]

Walker Percy's Postmodern Catholicism

The Communion of Saints

Metaxis

Disembedding and Theosis

The Religion of Humanity and the Death of God

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

The Meaning of History in 25 Theses

“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

For what follows to make sense, the reader must be at least relatively open to the idea that ancient Greek speculative metaphysics from Heraclitus through Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics cross-fertilized with Jewish and Christian revelation provide a mythopoetic framework to think about who we are, why we're here and where we're going. I realize for most people whose imaginations have been programed by later modernity's rationalist materialist cultural operating system, this is a heavy lift. All I ask here is that you be open to some level of resonance that the theses laid out below might have as you read them. They are not meant to persuade so much as to evoke a memory, so to say. Each thesis that follows could be a chapter in a book, but I'll assume the reader has enough biblical and philosophical literacy so that the more obvious references need not be elaborated upon. I've also added several "footnotes" in the comment section to develop some of these ideas or to entertain objections. 

1. The Logos is the uncreated ground--the ontological foundation--of all created Being and as such the condition for the possibility of the created World's intelligibility. The Logos is the interface between the fathomless incomprehensibility of the uncreated Godhead and the intelligible Being of the World.
2. So much of the Being of the World has been forgotten because human consciousness is shrouded in darkness since the Fall, a prehistorical, perhaps even a prebiological, event after which humans forgot who they were and for what purposes they were created. 
3. Humans were created in the image and likeness of the Logos. So while profound dimensions of the Being of the World remain mostly undisclosed to human awareness, their disclosure is the progressive process of humans becoming self-aware. As humans come to understand their own depths, they come to understand the depths of the World as it is structured by and participates in the Logos. 
4. We have no idea about what the biblical mythos of the Fall literally signifies, but it suggests that the universe is multi-dimensional and that the Fall was experienced as an ontological shift in the sphere of human activity from a higher dimension to a lower one, from a conscious communion with a higher order of being to a state of alienation from it, i.e., from alignment with the Logos, to a misalignment with and an eventual forgetting of our participating in the Logos.
5. The Being of the World is the human unconscious as the human soul is grounded in the Logos. Heidegger says that we humans have forgotten Being. Yes, and knowledge is the progressive process of both remembering what our primordial relationship to Being is and moving into a deeper relationship with it. 
6. We are immersed in Being yet we are estranged from it insofar as a vestigial memory of our former home in the higher order lingers. Homelessness is our existential condition and some humans experience that homelessness more intensely than others. To not experience homelessness is to be in the despair that Kierkegaard says is unaware of being despair.
7. The rules governing how things work in the lower dimension are what we recognize as the physical laws of science in the material world, which, like the principles governing biological evolution in the life world are for the most part impersonal, random, and cruel. 
8. The fall into biological evolution--qua fall into alienation, homelessness, and misalignment with the Logos--is a fall into a condition of fundamental injustice. This state of 'injustice' is what the Christian tradition calls ‘original sin’, a condition from which humans are helpless by themselves to liberate themselves. 
9. To be liberated means to be realigned with the Logos, which is to be in a state of justice, or to be 'justified'. A state of justice is one in which cruelty is replaced with compassion, randomness by realignment with the higher order, the impersonal when all aspects of the Being of the World are in communion with one another. This higher, transcendent order is recognized in other religions and philosophies after the Axial Revolution from the Tao in China to the Good in Plato.
10. Promises were made by the Logos to ancient Hebrew ancestors that this liberation or justification or realignment would be a possibility in the future. A world ruled by justice is, therefore, one in which the logic of biological evolution will be replaced by a restoration of the higher order, which will make possible the restoration an order of communion in which wolves lie down with lambs and swords are beaten into ploughshares. 
11. The movement toward justification was enabled by Logos-inspired interventions from outside the sphere of original sin through the work of prophets, philosophers, saints, bodhisattvas, rishis, great sages, culture heroes, and lawgivers throughout the world and at different times. What Jaspers calls the Axial Age was an era of profound interventions of this kind. 
12. These culture heroes provided extrinsic rules, laws, taboos, and customs that helped humans to live in ways that more closely approximated justice, i.e., rules to help humans find ways to live together that were more aligned with the Logos's higher order rather than with the random, cruel, impersonal principles that governed the lower or 'fallen' dimension alienated from communion with the Logos.
13. The introduction of Law was a reminder of the forsaken home in the higher order, and with it an uncomfortable tension developed in the human soul, which was pulled intrinsically in one direction by the instinctual logic of biological evolution comprising the will to power and the master/slave dynamic, and in the other direction by the extrinsic imposition of counter-instinctual laws and customs given by Logos-inspired culture heroes. 
14. While interventions from outside the fallen sphere were universally experienced by all human cultures, some interventions had more significant impacts than others. The cultures in which the great post-Axial world religions developed are those in which these interventions had the greatest impact.
15. One particular society, that of the ancient Israelites, was singled out for a unique intervention, and it was through it that the Logos entered into biological evolution in order to influence the evolution of the earth from within it rather than only from outside of it. The Logos incarnated as the human being Jesus of Nazareth, a Jew. His mission was to remind humans who they were and to make possible a restoration of the communion with him that had been lost in the Fall. And in restoring that communion to divinize human beings, if by that we mean restoring human lost identity as created in the image and likeness of of the Logos. This the early Church fathers callled 'theosis'. See epigraph by Clement above. 
16. Jesus remained deeply aligned with his own inmost identity as Logos, but unlike the prelapasarian Adam's failure in the garden, Jesus in his prelapasarian state (born without original sin) resisted a similarly intense temptation in the wilderness. After returning from the wilderness, he began a public teaching ministry in which He announced the coming rule of Justice, i.e., the coming realignment, in a kingdom in which the first, those who flourish in a world dominated by will to power and greed in the Fallen World, will be last in a Just World.
17. At the end of his public ministry, he freely surrendered to the rule of cruelty and will to power that had been the inner driving force behind evolution and empire, and penetrated into the very depths of it so that a new competing inner driving force might be introduced into earth evolution. 
18. The kingdom of justice is thus something that gestates within the soul of the world and within the individual human soul insofar as each becomes gradually more aligned with the Logos, i.e., as each soul moves gradually toward its theosis. So as more individual souls move toward their theosis a counterdevelopment grows alongside it in biological evolution effecting its transformation, and in the distant future supplanting it. 
19. If interventions before this point were outside-in (law, custom), after Easter and Pentecost, the interventions would gradually become more inside-out. Moral behavior becomes increasingly governed by the grace-inspired heart rather than by law or custom. Conscience, the intuitive apprehension of the Logos, replaces superego, the internalized extrinsic code of the tribe.
20. The kingdom of God born within is the seed of the promised reign of justice, and individuals and societies are justified to the degree that that seed germinates and grows first in individual souls and then in the communities they form and the societies they build.    
21. The Christian Church itself goes through evolutionary stages: the first, the ebullient Age of the Church Fathers who integrated Jewish revelation with Greek transcendental metaphyiscs; the second, the stern post-Constantinian age of Roman code and dogma; the third, the Protestant disenchantment of the world emphasizing interiority, freedom, and the individual conscience; the fourth in which we are now, which is a wandering in the wilderness necessary for stripping away extrinsic supports so that the new thing can emerge from within. 
22. The fifth, the post-secular age into which we are entering now, I believe will retrieve a sacramental imagination of the cosmos. As the Logos germiniates and grows in individual souls, it awakens correlatively in the soul of the world, and with that awakening comes the re-enchantment of the world experienced as sacrament and with that the restoration of a participative ontology and metaphysics. 
23. The goal of history is the fulfillment of the promises made to the Jewish Patriarchs, the earth and all beings on it shall be justified and all creation shall live in communion, thous in love with other thous. All shall be well, all manner of things shall be well. 
24. The transformation of evolution is a divinely inspired human task from within history, not a purely divine intervention from outside of it. After Easter, humans still remain very much in a fallen, homeless  condition, but their deliverance comes from inside out, from the depths. The Logos since Good Friday no longer works outside-in; he works inside-out. Home is not in some eternal or heavenly dimension, but something humans build gradually in history. This is the human project, to renew the face of the earth gradually from inside out.
25. The task for humans now individually and collectively is to help and encourage one another to live justly as best they can, i.e., to cultivate the growth of the reign of justice within, to live discerning their way forward with grace-inspired consciences, to fight compassionately for justice rightly understood, to do their part, no matter how small, to advance the reign of justice in the world.

While I'm sure that people more learned than I can point to problems I'm unaware of, I believe this is a completely orthodox account that answers the question: Cur deus homo? Whether this account is believable for others or not, I believe an account like it is called for and will emerge sooner or later that will be broadly accepted by Christians, who currently have little sense of meaning in history or of how to think about evolution. 

Conventional Christian thinking about history cares more about what happens outside of time than what happens inside of it; the goal has been for the most part to get out of the flood rather than to push back against its impersonal, random cruelty and chaos. This "escape" narrative is deeply and unnecessarily alienating insofar as it distracts us from the richer, deeper meanings of incarnation that were opened up for us two thousand years ago.

Secular postmodernity and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary gives us no place to stand to get a foothold to push back against the flood. We need such a foothold if we are not to be swept away, but we need more than a foothold if we are to move forward. We need a sense of rich, future human possibility that's worth striving for. Does anyone really believe that secular humanism and the levelled consumer society it has spawned has any belief in human possibility that is worth fighting for? The political and religious Right in the country are deeply, deeply mistaken, but they at least believe that they are defending something worth fighting for. Does the typical careerist cosmopolitian on the cultural Left have any such belief?  

[Slightly revised 6/11/23]