After the Future

Some Thoughts on 'The Banshees of Inisherin'

Martin McDonagh's movie opens with Padraig walking at the edge of the world in the paradisal beauty of western Ireland. As he makes his way toward his friend Colm's modest, oceanside cottage, we hear a haunting women's choral piece full of longing in a language I don't recognize. Is that Gaelic?  I would expect it to be, but It sounds eastern European. That's weird. So after watching the movie, I look it up, and it turns out that it is Bulgarian folk song Polegnala e Todora, and the first thing that comes to mind is Yeats great poem of spiritual longing, "Sailing to Byzantium". 

1920s Ireland/Bulgarian folk song/Istanbul/Byzantium/Yeats. Ok, it's a stretch. I have no idea whether this was in McDonagh's thinking, but it's in mine. So while making that connection of the song to Yeats might appear somewhat tendentious, indulge me. It provides an interesting entry point into a film that otherwise seems so bewildering. I've pasted the full text of the poem in Note 1 below. Read it first, and then I'll try to explain how the movie and the poem explain one another. 

This movie has been described as a breakup story between Colm and the younger Padraig, and it is that, but clearly it's working with much more than the psychology of friendship. It's also been analogized to the breakup that defined the sides in the Irish Civil War, and clearly that's there, but more in the background. These folks live on an island that is undisturbed by history. [See Note 2] 

The site for this film is Edenic, and there are three characters that stand out because they don't fit in it: Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic. Everyone else is more or less like Padraig, happy children in paradise. [See Note 6 about the priest and the policeman.] Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic are restless in a way the other islanders are not. All three need to get out of this beautiful but spiritually claustrophobic world into something bigger. Siobhan takes the boat; Colm takes to art; Dominic commits suicide. 

The story begins in that opening scene when Padraig arrives at Colm's little white house to fetch him to go the pub as is their daily ritual. When he knocks, Colm won't answer. Looking through the window, Padraig can see Colm just sitting, staring blankly, unresponsive to his calls to come out with him. Flummoxed, Padraig tells him he's going to the pub, and he'll wait for him there. No response. Padraig arrives at the pub without Colm, orders two pints, and when Colm comes in later he avoids Padraig at the bar and takes a seat by himself. When Padraig asks him what's going on, Colm tells him he no longer wants to be friends because he finds Padraig too boring.

This is a rather blunt, if not cruel, thing to say to an old friend, especially someone as good-natured and likable as Padraig. We take Padraig's side immediately in this dispute. Colm seems to be a grumpy, old curmudgeon, but soon we learn that the older Colm is feeling his mortality, and he wants to do something with his life--he wants to touch eternity.

This sounds at first rather pretentious, and surely that's how it looks to Padraig and others. But Colm is dead serious. When Padraig refuses to take Colm's ending the friendship seriously, Colm threatens to cut off one of his fingers each time Padraig talks to him. This is shocking, and soon enough, because Padraig cannot restrain himself and so peristently tries to restore the friendship on its old terms, Colm cuts off all the fingers of his left hand, first one and then the other four all at once.

What's going on? Is Colm suffering from some borderline personality disorder? I think this is where Yeats' poem might help us to understand Colm better. He's the aged man about whom the poem speaks--

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

We learn that Colm is composing a tune, and he wants to devote all his time to his music, and so the time he spends with Padraig is time wasted. Well, ok. But it still seems unnecessarily cruel for him to be so blunt about it, and we feel for poor Padraig who finds this change in his friend utterly incomprehensible and destabilizing.  He doesn't understand that Colm has set sail for Byzantium, and in doing so he must leave his old friend behind him if he won't come along.

 

Yeats' poem is about old age, but more than that it's a poem of deep spiritual longing, a longing to be transformed by spiritual fire--

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

We don't think of art as performing this function anymore. And so if there is nothing in you that feels the pull of that to which Yeats is pointing, it will probably be difficult to accept my reading of Banshees: But clearly the movie isn't just about two friends breaking up because one has lost interest in the relationship, but about one waking up in a bigger world and the other adamant to remain dreaming in a smaller one. It's about one who longs to soar, and the other who is happy, utterly unrestless and unalienated, and blissfully undisturbed until the events of the movie that turn his life upside down. But rather than adapt and grow in the new situation, he insists to remain only a talking animal, one whose talk is little more than good-natured birdsong, He's Papageno, [See Note 3] --one of the--

The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

In other words embedded in the beautiful, waxing-and-waning cycle of life and death, an eternally closed but repeating cycle the artist and the saint seek in their different ways to break open.

To sail to Byzantium does not require that one be an artistic genius. Colm is not one, but the longing for eternity that Yeats's poem so beautifully articulates is working in him. He must hearken to it, and he must resist all the forces that seek to draw him back into dreamy Eden. Chopping his fingers off is his way of saying that he no longer lives in a world where such a gesture is absurd. Absurd because why would he do that if his music is so important to him? It prevents him from playing it. But playing isn't the important thing, creating is, even if what he creates is modest by most standards. 

 

I've been re-reading Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining, and this morning came across this passage about Moby Dick that explains exactly what is working in Colm and then why he must resist Padraig's friendship--

Melville too considers a character—Bulkington is his name—who is at home only in the infinite openness of the sea, for whom land “seemed scorching to his feet.” And he thinks there is something serious and terrifying and wonderful about such a character.

I looked with sympathetic awe and fearfulness upon the man, who in midwinter just landed from a four years’ dangerous voyage, could so unrestingly push off again for still another tempestuous term.

...

Bulkington reveals a deep tension, perhaps even a paradox, of human existence, in Melville’s view. As a human being Bulkington has to work hard to keep his freedom; the seduction of the shore’s safety is a constant danger. For upon the land is where all normal human comfort and vulnerability lies. And though these comforts and vulnerabilities are not true realities but only seeming ones, although they are not as stable as they seem to be and grounded in God, and although Bulkington himself recognizes this, nevertheless their comfort appeals to every human being.

The port would fain give succor; the port is pitiful; in the port is safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper, warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities.

For Bulkington these human comforts and vulnerabilities must be resisted. Sure, the happiness of friendship seems a joy to normal folks, but Bulkington knows this joy is sanctioned by no God, and therefore in it lies no eternal truth; he knows that boredom, and anger, and frustration, and melancholy—yes, even the “damp, drizzly November in the soul” that we shall see is so important to Melville’s central character Ishmael—all these are a mirage, a nothing, and so can properly have no effect. He is not driven to the sea by melancholy, like Ishmael is. Rather, the “slavishness” of the land can only be counteracted by the complete lack of constraint one finds at sea. 

All Things Shining, pp. 50-51

It should be pointed out that D&K think Bulkington is a kind of nihilist because of his inability to live a normal, grateful, down-to earth life where the local gods will shine if you can attune to them. They see the longing for transcendence as a temptation to be resisted and that leads inevitably to suicide. There is something of Bulkington in Yeats and Colm, but maybe more in Yeats--

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

 

And while I'm sympathetic to much Dreyfus and Kelly's argument against the kind of transcendence that seeks to lift humans off the earth and out of nature, there is a place for such ecstasy, and ecstatics need to be part of the mix in a society that has recovered its vertical dimension. [See Note 4] And the phrase "out of nature" could be parsed in ways that mean more a transformation of nature than an escape from it. [See Note 5]

 

So Colm is a Bulkington type who must resist human slavish comforts and vulnerabilities if he is to hearken to eternity's call--he needs neither his fingers nor his house to live in the free air of the spirit. But I think there's an important difference between Bulkington and Colm in that Colm's path is not some Icarian, hubristic flight toward the sun. His path is that of an artist. Artists like him don't seek to leave the immanent world to live in a transcendent one, but to bring the transcendent into the immanent world through their poeisis. And that's the reading that I'd give to Yeats' fourth verse. The artist becomes an agent of spiritual transformation in his act of making. He becomes himself transformed by the power that inspires his making. 

Two scenes illustrate that Colm is not about escaping Nature but about transforming it. The first occurs in the moments after he finishes his tune, in his joy he wants to dance, but not alone--he tries to teach his dog to dance. This is not about living among the animals as Padraig does but lifting the animal into the spiritual. The other is the scene at the pub where the fingerless Colm while spraying his blood all over the table leads his students in the playing of his new tune. It's a Eucharistic image. He can no longer play, but he's fully engaged with the other players as they are bathed in his blood in this participative ritual around an altar. This is no depressed loner. This is not a man who is seeking to be absorbed into infinity, but to bring some small part of the infinite into the world in musical ritual.  

Colm can only befriend Padraig if he’s willing to come with him on his voyage to Byzantium. He has this kind of friendship with his students and the other musicians. But Padraig can only befriend Colm if he returns to his dreamy, embedded, Papageno level of existence. Padraig is as stubborn in his resistance to wake up as Colm seems to be in resisting the old comforts. Padraig is intransigent, and he declares war on the one who would disrupt his paradisal life. But of course, because it is already fatally disrupted, there can be no restoring it. So like those today on the American Right who are stewing in similar resentments about the disruption and loss of their world, they grieve rather than nimbly adapt, and go to war against those who have destroyed their sleep.

Siobhan's solution is the story told in Brooklyn of those who left the comforts of the familiar to live in a bigger world. But for Siobhan it's more than that because for her it's not just freedom from the old ways, but a freedom that is defined by the life of the mind and the love of learning. For her there’s no neglect of the monuments of unageing intellect. She leaves the island to take a job as a librarian, i.e., to work as a caretaker in a repository of such monuments. [See Note 6] She is happy in her bigger world and wants Padraig to join her, but he cannot. His world is in Eden and his sense of purpose in life derives from his grievance war with Colm. 

I think that it's rather beautiful the way McDonagh celebrates the ways in which this longing for eternity plays out in the lives of ordinary people. It's as if to say great spirits are all around you if you have the eyes to see them. You don't have to be a prodigy to share in some part of this greatness. You have only to recognize it and hearken to it in whatever capacity you have--and be willing to pay a price for not fitting in.   

 

Note 1: 

Sailing to Byzantium

I

 

That is no country for old men. The young

In one another's arms, birds in the trees,

—Those dying generations—at their song,

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,

Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long

Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect

Monuments of unageing intellect.

 

 

II

 

An aged man is but a paltry thing,

A tattered coat upon a stick, unless

Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing

For every tatter in its mortal dress,

Nor is there singing school but studying

Monuments of its own magnificence;

And therefore I have sailed the seas and come

To the holy city of Byzantium.

 

 

III

 

O sages standing in God's holy fire

As in the gold mosaic of a wall,

Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,

And be the singing-masters of my soul.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire

And fastened to a dying animal

It knows not what it is; and gather me

Into the artifice of eternity.

 

 

IV

 

Once out of nature I shall never take

My bodily form from any natural thing,

But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make

Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;

Or set upon a golden bough to sing

To lords and ladies of Byzantium

Of what is past, or passing, or to come.

 

Note 2: It also occurred to me that there's something of the argument between Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn in My Dinner with Andre. Yes and No. Andre wants to soar; Wally finds meaning in a more down to earth way. The trick is to live in the tension between the urge to ascend and descend by finding a way to bring what's higher into what's lower, and to raise what's lower into what's higher. Seems to me that's what happens every time a mass is said. What's above lives into our death, so that we below might die into into the life that comes to us from above and so in our dying into life become gradually agents whose task is to renew the face of the earth. 

 

BTW, Dreyfus and Kelly's All Things Shining is a resolute rejection of Andre and endorsement of Wally. They abhor all things post Axial Revolution. They make their case in what is rather a reductive interpretation of David Foster Wallace's suicide--

PERHAPS THE SADDEST PART of Wallace’s story is that the human qualities he aspired to, the capacities of spirit that he revered and coveted, are a mirage. Indeed the entire mode of existence that he castigated himself for not being strong enough to achieve, far from being the saving possibility for our culture, is in fact a human impossibility. Wallace’s inability to achieve it was not a weakness, but the deep and abiding humanness in his spirit. (p. 42).

Well, maybe impossible for an entire culture, but not a mirage and not an impossibility for some individuals.

To be fair to D&K, they are mostly critical of DFW for imagining this reaching out for eternity as a willful, egoistic, Icarian project absent a spirit of gratitude, which I'd agree with if it were true about him. But I doubt that was true for someone for whom  St. Paul and Dostoyevski were his favorite authors. DFW is more complicated than that, and he deserves better treatment from D&K than he gets from them as a straw man who represents the longing for transcendence that they, good Heideggerians that they are, abhor.

Note 3: Whatever. Colm makes an oblique reference to Mozart most noteworthy for his being corrected by Siobhan about getting his dates wrong. Colm doesn't really care about history. But then a little more free association gives us Mozart/Magic Flute/Tamino v Papageno/Freemasons/Order of the Golden Dawn/Yeats. It's also interesting that Colm finds Padraig most interesting and likable when Padraig laces into him in drunken rage in the pub. His talk then is more than birdsong. It's also interesting that at the end, Padraig is awake in a way he was not because that's what conflict does--it wakes you up. Colm must concede that he will have a relationship with Padraig even if now it will be eternally adversarial. They can only be friends if the one or the other surrenders to live on the level of his adversary. 

Note 4: It's unlikely that if you've read this far, you need persuading that this transcendent dimension exists. But it's a territory that doesn't get much explored in mainstream, late-modern high culture or pop culture. I don't know if this is McDonagh's intent. I'm not yet familiar enough with the rest of his work. My Geneaology Series is largely about trying to make the case for the retrieval of that sense of transcendence as essential for the restoration of a vertical dimension in our broader cultural/metaphysical imaginary. I deal specifically with the idea of Platonic and Neoplatonic ascent in Part 8: Plato--Habitus as Heuristic . Part 9: Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism, and Part 10: Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation. For me Christianity works faithfully with the Greek transcendental ontology when it reverses the Platonic movement from ascent from below to above, to descent from above to below. Big difference. It’s a difference biblicists and fideists like Luther through Barth never seemed to grok in the way the Chirch fathers through the cathedral schools to Aquinas and Bonaventure and later Cusa and Ficino did.

Note 5: This kind of transformation echoes Ariel's mysterious Sea Change song in The Tempest:

 

Full fathom five thy father lies:
Of his bones are coral made:
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.

 

Note 6: What about  Dominic, Peader, and the priest? It's interesting that McDonagh chooses not to take the easy punch at the priest by making the policeman the sexual abuser instead. I don't know that there's much to be said about the priest. Nothing special about him except the role he plays that he fills in an uninspired, pro forma way. The church, of course, symbolizes the community's spiritual and moral ideals, but usually in a lowest-common-denominator kind of way. For most people the Church is a community's superego, its proclaimer and custodian of social norms.  And while the church seems to spend most of its energies in the domestication of what remains untamed in its flock, it is also the custodian of a tradition that calls its members to  the highest levels of spiritual aspiration. It's interesting to me that McDonagh seems to respect that about the church in that the island's Church has a home for both the domesticated and those that like Colm, Siobhan, and Dominic who don't comfortably fit. 

 

The policeman is the enforcer of the community's norms, but in Peader we have the perverse transgressor of them. I could go off on a tangent a la St. Paul about the psychodynamic of law and repression, but the main point here is that in his abusing his son Dominic, he has awakened him. He is no longer asleep in Eden as the others are. He is no longer an innocent and can no longer live there. He seems at first rather a feral animal than the others like Padraig who are more domesticated. He has become something raw and wild and uncomfortable. But then there's that tender moment with Siobhan when in his stumbling way he asks if it would be possible for her to love him. Siobhan understands the poignancy of the moment, and is kind in her refusal. But for Dominic it was his last hope, to be loved by someone he recognizes as capable of loving but not loving him. And that's the end for him.

 

 

Why It's Hard to Admit You're Wrong

 

“We’ve got lots of theories. We just don’t have any evidence.”

--Rudy Giuliani, as testified by Rusty Bowers in the J6 Committee Hearings

After more than 60 lawsuits brought by the former president and his allies failed to overturn the 2020 election results, Cudd’s brother Jarrod thought, “Maybe she’ll come back off the ledge here.” Even if she felt that her actions at the Capitol were righteous, overwhelmingly, others found them repugnant.

Instead, Cudd doubled down. When pressed, she says she regrets entering the Capitol, but she’s clearly still angry at how she and other Sixers were treated. The experience galvanized her, proving her worst fears about the government, Democrats, and the media.

Olga Khazan, "The Insurrectionist in the Flower Shop"

I think the Trump superfans are terrified of being wrong. I suspect they know that for many years they’ve made a terrible mistake—that Trump and his coterie took them to the cleaners and the cognitive dissonance is now rising to ear-splitting, chest-constricting levels. And so they will literally threaten to kill people like Kinzinger (among others) if that’s what it takes to silence the last feeble voice of reason inside themselves.

We know from studies (and from experience as human beings) that being wrong makes us feel uncomfortable. It’s an actual physiological sensation, and when compounded by humiliation, it becomes intolerable. The ego cries out for either silence or assent. In the modern media environment, this fear expresses itself as a demand for the comfort of massive doses of self-justifying rage delivered through the Fox or Newsmax or OAN electronic EpiPen that stills the allergic reaction to truth and reason.

--Tom Nichols, "What Are Trump Supporters So Afraid Of?"

Bottom line: Admitting you're wrong requires that you be a grown-up, that you take responsibility for your mistakes, and when appropriate to make amends. In reading the story of Jenny Cudd, the flower-shop insurrectionist, you see the profile of a woman who is in many ways admirable and spirited, but she reminds me of people I know who are dry drunks. They may not be drinking, but they're still alcoholics. Nothing changes until they admit they are alcoholics. Yes, it's humiliating. Yes, denial is so much easier. Yes, it's so much easier to blame others. But if they face up to it, they'll get over the humiliation, and they''ll realize that there addiction doesn't define them.

Overcoming the fear of humiliation is the first step toward becoming who you really are. It then becomes possible to learn that your identity and dignity subsists in something more deeply true, and does not depend on the good opinion of others. Only after the getting through the fear of humiliation can recovery begin. To live in thrall to the fear of humiliation and to the hatred of those who make you feel humiliated is to live inside a prison of your own making. The prison door is not locked. You can walk out any time you choose to. It's a frightening prospect to live in the world outside, but it really is so much better there than inside. 

But instead of walking out and going to an AA meeting, Cudd is like the drunk who organizes meetings with other drunks where they all agree that getting drunk is like a sacrament--nothing nobler or more beautiful. How can all of us be wrong, right? Their drug of choice is MAGA.

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 2

After posting yesterday, It came across this Thomas Edsall column from May in which he quotes Stiglitz and Korinek:

In their December 2017 paper, “Artificial intelligence, worker-replacing technological progress and income distribution,” the economists Anton Korinek, of the University of Virginia, and Joseph E. Stiglitz, of Columbia — describe the potential of artificial intelligence to create a high-tech dystopian future.

Korinek and Stiglitz argue that without radical reform of tax and redistribution politics, a “Malthusian destiny” of widespread technological unemployment and poverty may ensue.

Humans, they write, “are able to apply their intelligence across a wide range of domains. This capacity is termed general intelligence. If A.I. reaches and surpasses human levels of general intelligence, a set of radically different considerations apply.” That moment, according to “the median estimate in the A.I. expert community is around 2040 to 2050.”

Once parity with the general intelligence of human beings is reached, they continue, “there is broad agreement that A.I. would soon after become super‐intelligent, i.e., more intelligent than humans, since technological progress would likely accelerate.”

Without extraordinary interventions, Korinek and Stiglitz foresee two scenarios, both of which could have disastrous consequences:

In the first, “man and machine will merge, i.e., that humans will ‘enhance’ themselves with ever more advanced technology so that their physical and mental capabilities are increasingly determined by the state of the art in technology and A.I. rather than by traditional human biology.”

Unchecked, this “will lead to massive increases in human inequality,” they write, because intelligence is not distributed equally among humans and “if intelligence becomes a matter of ability‐to‐pay, it is conceivable that the wealthiest (enhanced) humans will become orders of magnitude more productive — ‘more intelligent’ — than the unenhanced, leaving the majority of the population further and further behind.”

Key phrase here is "without extraordinary interventions". Who will the agents of such extraordinary interventions be? Will it come from the class of elites who are best positioned to benefit from these enhancements?  You can be sure the technocapitalist elite are making sure they are at the front of the line to get these enhancements. Who will stop these sociopaths? 

 

The article goes on:

In the second scenario, “artificially intelligent entities will develop separately from humans, with their own objectives and behavior, aided by the intelligent machines.”

In that case, they write, “there are two types of entities, unenhanced humans and A.I. entities, which are in a Malthusian race and differ — potentially starkly — in how they are affected by technological progress.”

In this hypothetical race, “A.I. entities are becoming more and more efficient in the production of output compared to humans,” the authors write, because “human technology to convert consumption goods such as food and housing into future humans has experienced relatively little technological change.” By contrast, “the reproduction technology of A.I. entities — to convert A.I. consumption goods such as energy, silicon, aluminum into future A.I. — is subject to exponential progress.”

Evolution without grace, i.e., evolution driven by the logic of the will to power and greed, has no particular interest in human beings, not even as much as the Mongol horde was interested in the thousands of humans they massacred or enslaved in their manic project to expand their power and control. Evolution without grace is the default and can be resisted only by moral actors who are grounded in something that transcends it. Evolution without grace only cares about expansion, and if that means that humans are no longer needed at the leading edge its expansion project and machines will serve evolution better, then what reason have we to think that hyper-intelligent machines won't take over? 

I don't think either of these two scenarios are inevitable, but because they have become the fodder for so many Hollywood dystopian entertainments, we tend to dismiss such concerns as unlikely. But what argument is there against all the evidence that supports that this is where unchecked technocapitalism is headed? And what argument is either of these two scenarios is more of a likelihood than not if there is no intervention to insure that machines serve human purposes rather than the reverse. Do we just shrug and say, "Well, it will all work out one way or the other."

How can such an intervention be marshaled if there is no consensus about what human purposes are? Certainly no intervention can be marshaled from within the hegemonic rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary, because it's precisely that imaginary that supports the values presuppositions of Social Darwinism, i.e., evolution without grace. The point I'm trying to make here is this: These scenarios are, if not inevitable, extremely likely unless there's an intervention. But from where shall it come? Who on the scene today has the moral authority to say No to technocapitalism and the power to enforce such a No?

Our situation vis a vis AI is very much like the one depicted in Don't Look Up. In that movie, the impending disaster was a comet heading toward the earth that is a MacGuffin for what could be any potential human extinction event from eco-catastrophe to the rise of the machines. The most important insight around which the premise of the film is based is that even when confronted with extinction, humans are so fragmented, so distracted and so morally feckless that they are incapable of uniting around an obvious human value--survival. The logic of technocapitalism is the default, and that logic, left unchecked, leads to the extinction of the human project. Only a few sociopaths escape to despoil a planet elsewhere. 

So as long as the nihilistic sociopathic logic of technocapitalism and its rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary plays such an outsized role in shaping our moral and material priorities, what reason have we to think that any kind of resistance to its logic can be mounted? What reason have we to think that any good can come of just letting that logic play out?  And where within the rationalist materialist imaginary can we get a foothold to push back against this logic?

On Sunday in a post entitled "The Coming Discontinuity" I wrote:

But whatever is going to happen probably has nothing to do with what we expect or with what we want or don't want. So perhaps, for precisely that reason, we should entertain the possibility that it might be smarter to think about the future with imageless hope. That's the attitude of a true wanderer who wonders in the wilderness. 

What I've written here yesterday and today is not meant to contradict that but rather to put us on alert that an attitude of hope requires active vigilance. It does not justify a lazy complacency that whatever happens happens. Imageless hope for me is rather like Keats's 'negative capability', i.e., a way of being attentive to the world with a kind of radical openness that expects to be surprised. But it's quite possible that we will miss what's there that might actually be a solution if we're not paying attention. And maybe more than we can understand now depends on our not missing it. 

Sociopathic Artificial Intelligence 1

“I don’t anthropomorphize,” Chowdhery said bluntly. “We are simply predicting language.” Artificial consciousness is a remote dream that remains firmly entrenched in science fiction, because we have no idea what human consciousness is; there is no functioning falsifiable thesis of consciousness, just a bunch of vague notions. And if there is no way to test for consciousness, there is no way to program it. You can ask an algorithm to do only what you tell it to do. All that we can come up with to compare machines with humans are little games, such as Turing’s imitation game, that ultimately prove nothing. 

From "Artificial Consciousness is Boring" by Stephen Marche

Boring? Depends on the question you ask.

I do not think that artificial intelligence will ever be able replicate human consciousness. That's not really even an interesting question from where I stand.  The not-boring question is whether AI and machine learning evolve a kind of inhuman consciousness that will supplant or push aside human consciousness,

I think there is reason to fear that machines can become more sociopathically intelligent than human beings and operate at a level that is incomprehensible to human intelligence. And I think there is reason to fear that with a malevolent programmer or even with an unintentional programming mistake, machines can become a destructive, malevolent, and uncontrollable by humans. ... Artificial Intelligence need not be seen as possibly attaining human consciousness to warrant our alarmed interest.

Machines can be programmed to create Bach cantatas that even Bach experts would think were composed by Bach, and they can be programmed, as this article describes, to talk and converse with humans in ways that humans will be convinced pass the Turing test. They already play chess better than humans and they could probably be programed to write jokes and do a stand-up routine that might be genuinely funny. There are algorithms for all of that, and once those algorithms are part of a machine's intelligence and once a machine has access to all the music or jokes ever written they will be able to use the algorithms to develop novel variations on those algorithmic themes. They might even be able to combine algorithms in ways not done before by humans to make something truly novel that no human ever thought of before or maybe could ever have thought of. 

But novel isn't original. To be truly original you have to be connected to the originary power of the Living Real, and while machines might even develop a concept like monotheism as the fictional Cylons in Battlestar Galactica do, that doesn't mean they will ever have the capacity to experience awe. They can mimic awe, but they cannot experience it. The Living Real is something that humans can experience, and machines simply will never be able to. You can create machines that mimic human thinking and human feeling, but not machines that have souls with depths capable of experiencing the mystery of Being. The Heideggerian Hubert Dreyfus makes similar arguments.  

The problem for human beings in the future lies in that the kind of mentality that drives technocapitalism is sociopathic, at least insofar as its principals proceed without any consideration for or connection with the Living Real. Technocapitalism's energies are Social Darwinist, and so its Social Darwinist biases will be consciously or unconsciously programmed into the machines it makes. And therein lies the danger. Humans can make machines that mimic and exaggerate by their sheer power of intelligence the worst traits of sociopathic Technocapitalist thinking and behavior. And that's what will happen unless they are held in check by human beings who embody the best traits of being human. Is there anybody among the principals in technnocapitalism either here or in Europe or Asia who embodies what is best in being human?

No? What could go wrong?

The Coming Discontinuity

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

--Ezra Klein

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

Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere

[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability".]

Maybe because The Hobbit is being released this weekend I have Tolkien on the mind, so let's take Mordor as the type of political system defined by hugeness, by domination and submission, and the Shire as the type defined by smallness, localism, face-to-face relationships, and self rule. In Mordor the people must submit to the will of the leader; in the Shire people live mostly by mores inherited from custom, but submit to laws and regulations they enact through debate and consensus. In Mordor, the space for the exercise of freedom is profoundly restricted, not in the interior sense, but certainly in the public sense. In the Shire, it is broad enough for people to exercise it both interiorly and publically. Nobody, I think it's safe to say, wants to live in Mordor.

In Mordor there is no public space for Truth, Beauty, and Goodness. In the Shire, the space is there, even if most people choose to fill it with vulgar distractions. In the Shire it's possible for a community to self-correct, and reorganize its public life; in Mordor that is not a possibility. Having political and economic arrangements that provide a broad scope for the exercise of freedom does not guarantee that it will be exercised, but it's possible to talk about those arrangements as either creating or restricting the public space for its exercise. 

In contemporary America, there is still a rather broad space for the practice of deep, interior, creative freedom, even if it is rarely used. Consumerist ideas about freedom are a delusion that traps large swaths of the American population in collective patterns of compulsion, and their lives individually, and our lives together, would be healthier, more free, were not that the case. But these compulsions are reinforced by the structural requirements of the economy and the interests of the mass media, and both dominate the public sphere in ways that make it extraordinarily hard to resist. Nevertheless, there is nothing that prevents anyone from choosing a life that is resistant to or oblivious of all that.

 

***

In the early American republic, which was far more Shirelike than America is now, the ethos of economic sphere assumed that citizens were economically free, that they were self-employed farmers, small businessmen, and professionals. The franchise was limited to people with property because there was a fear then that if the vote were extended to salaried workers, their employers could compel them to vote as the employer dictated. (We saw employers using this tactic in the last election.) It was a commonplace that people could not be free in the political sphere unless they were free in the economic sphere. A similar logic applied to extending the franchise to women, since they were economically dependent on their husbands.

That simpler Jeffersonian world gave way to the economic warlordism of the Robber Baron era after the Civil War that turned much of America into Mordor. The new problem that the founders couldn't grasp was the way that the population, diversity, and economy would grow and change, and in doing so make their Jeffersonian imagination of America as a network of Tokienesque Shires obsolete. Bigness and huge concentrations of power and wealth became a problem by the turn of the century that no one could have envisaged one hundred years before. And so spirited Americans who understood how the scope of the new wage slavery was destroying freedom in the public sphere began to organize to push back.

The Progressive Movement emerged to pressure elected representatives to use the power of big government to break up monopolies, to regulate private-sector economic behaviors that negatively impacted the common good, and to provide social safety-net programs to ensure a minimum of economic security and dignity for those helpless to provide it for themselves. That balance between the public interest and free-market capitalism brought us the unprecedented prosperity of the post-WWII period.

Putting aside the question whether that prosperity and the consumerism that came with it was a positive or negative for the exercise of true freedom, the important thing was the consensus that a balance had to be struck between the interests of the market and the common good. That balance is what creates the public space for the exercise of freedom in the public sphere. It's precisely that balance that has been systematically destroyed since 1980 justified by a perverse appeals to liberty understood as negative freedom from the government so that positive freedom can be exercised in the marketplace. The laudable freedom-protecting principle of economic independence and self-reliance became perverted into celebrating the un-republican vice of unrestricted greed. The ideal was no longer the economically independent farmer or small businessman, but the plutocrat, the millionaire--and America became the place where anyone can become one. And shame on you if you haven't the ambition and drive to do so.

So that old lower-case 'r' republican imagination of America was destroyed in the late 19th century, but American conservatives still cling to it as if it were still a possibility. It's not. And the irony is that conservatives in voting for Republicans think that they are voting to retain the Shire but in fact are voting for the private-sector version of Mordor, one in which the government is dominated by plutocrats. In such a world we have the illusion of freedom so long as we have consumer choice, i.e., so long as we think of the exercise of freedom primarily in economic terms.

***

Thinking about what the space for republican freedom requires demands that we first understand how that space has collapsed in the post-war period. One strand, contributing to that collapse has been the replacement of the balance between the public and private spheres struck in the New Deal compromise with Libertarian/Neoliberal, market-centered, consumerist ideas about freedom. Freedom was no longer something we exercised in any robust way in the political sphere, it was something we came to think of almost exclusively in market terms. Freedom equals your ability to choose a Prius or a Hummer, to shop at Walmart or at Nordstroms.

Since market choices are consequential in our daily experience in ways that political choices are not, it was an easy sell. As long as we had market choices in the economic sphere, we felt free, and so why should anyone care about making positive choices in the political sphere? Politics is the domain of entrenched corrupt cronyism; the market is pure and self-correcting. Government just gets in the way, so the only political choices that have validity are the negative choices that diminish the power exercised in the political sphere and expand those exercised in the economic sphere. This is the core belief that has animated American conservatism since the 19th Century--to the degree that the public sphere grows, the private sphere diminishes. It's an naive belief, but it has extraordinary power because of the way it draws upon the 19th-century American mythos.

But the problem is not public vs. private sectors, but in keeping the two in a metaxis, a creative balance. Imbalance can lead, on the one hand, to too much government, as in the Mordor that was the Soviet Union. Or, on the other, imbalance leads to the Mordor of a weak government dominated by corporate interests that wildly exacerbate income inequality and reduce most people to serfdom or wage slavery. But in the U.S., half the country fears that any attempt to redress the balance by increasing public-sector controls leads to a Soviet Mordor. These fears have been reinforced by the dominance of an unbalancing Neoliberal market ideology that has dominated the political sphere since at least 1980. 

The effect of the post-Reagan era dominance of Neoliberal market ideology has been to destroy the popular consensus that representative government was an effective tool in the hands of the electorate to promote and preserve the public good. And the result has been to give a broad, unrestricted field for the economic warlords to emerge again and to wreak the havoc they are wont to wreak. And now we are facing a situation where the worst aspects of the economic sector--the few making serfs of the many--are merging with the worst aspects of the public sector--the security-obsessed surveillance state with Draconian police powers. (Habeas Corpus taken away in the Military Commissions Act still hasn't been restored.) We haven't seen these powers being abused on a wide scale yet, but the infrastructure for such abuse is very much in place. Both Democrats and Republicans are complicit in this surrender of the government to this ideology. 

 ***

The lesson of Tolkien’s trilogy is that republican freedom is personal and interpersonal, and it is exercised in concrete commitments that mostly happen on the local level, in the various Shires in which we all live, but we cannot be oblivious of the forces in history that seek to destroy those local and personal freedoms. 

And when humans are in such a situation in which their freedoms are so severely restricted in the public sphere, the only path to recovery is a freely chosen resistance, which often requires heroic levels of sacrifice. That is, the exercise of republican freedom requires the exercise of interior freedom by enough citizens who are willing to pay the price to keep the public sphere open. Frodo is a paradigm of the exercise of that kind of deep interior freedom.

Tolkien’s trilogy is on one level a story of great powers in violent conflict, but at a deeper level it’s the story of the suffering servant, the tzadik, the righteous man, Frodo, weak by the ordinary standards defined by power, freely accepts a burden and the stealth mission that went with it. The stakes were the preservation of a political space for ordinary people to live in freely. While so much of the story focuses on the great clash of armies, the struggle on that level was futile and nothing more than a subterfuge to keep the tyrant distracted. But the tyrant was vulnerable because it never occurred to him that anyone could do the unthinkable, that is, to 'freely' surrender the enormous power of the ring willingly.

Of course, Frodo needed a little help in the end, but that’s often the way it works. We hardly ever accomplish anything without the help of others. And no matter how good we think our intentions might be, they are never pure. Sometimes our exercise of freedom is simply the effort to put one foot in front of the other with only the faintest hope that someday we will reach our destination. But as we proceed along on our way, the exercise of our freedom is best expressed when in the service of others, in the creation of something that contributes to the common good, not just our own good. And that requires that we exercise it positively in the political and economic spheres, even if it is only to create a negative space for others to freely choose to fill it or not. 

Civilization and Its Discontents

It's always been interesting to me that Freud's dour assessment of civilization was written at that moment in Europe when Enlightenment rationalism came crashing down and lay all about him in shards. That book and T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, likewise written in the 1920s, stand as cultural benchmarks for the end of the civilizing impulse that animated the West from the time of the Renaissance. World War I was the war that marked the end of the modern era, and World War II was the war that marked the beginning of the postmodern. That's how I have come to think of it, anyway.

Freud's 1929 book was a development of ideas he introduced in his 1927 book, The Future of an Illusion, in which he attacks organized religion as a collective neurosis. Both books have become more or less the background music that plays in most secularist thinking since then. Until recently it has been impossible for any self-respecting modern intellectual to accept that religion is anything but a form of delusional wish-fulfillment born out of the fundamental inability human beings have to accept the real ugliness and horror in the world, not the least of which is the prospect of their own deaths.

Civilization, according to Freud, is essentially the product of the fundamental tradeoff humans make to live in an ordered, secure world. The rule of law is the foundation of any civilization, for without it the law of the jungle prevails instead, and according to that law, the strong dominate the weak. Without the restraint of civilizing laws, the stronger prey on the weaker, the former searching out the latter to satisfy their instinctual drives, which boil down to sex, money, power.

I am inclined to think of Power as primary, and the other two as secondary. Power is aggression. Aggression is about one person or a group of persons seeking to dominate another. As Hegel pointed out way before Nietzsche, Freud, and Adler, this aggression is not economically motivated; it's about prestige. It's about the ego rush one feels in victory. Wealth and sexual satisfaction are a byproduct. They are the trappings of power. You must be powerful if you were able to acquire all that wealth and to obtain all those slaves and wives.

Premoderns understand this seeking after prestige as essential for their "honor." Their value as human beings depended on how much of it they got, and the worst possible thing that could happen to them would be to lose it. The Chinese call it "losing face" which is basically the same thing. You lose your honor, you lose your face, you lose your identity. You're nobody. Your identity is in this sense completely a social construction. There's nobody at home behind the mask.

In its most primitive form obtaining "face" requires prestige battle to the death. The truly noble person is the one who would rather die than submit. This sentiment is echoed in the New Hampshire state slogan and imprinted on all New Hampshire license plates: "Live free or die." The slave is the one who makes the calculation that it would be better to live serving the one who vanquished him than to be slain by him. He chooses submission. Any feudal hierarchy is based on this fundamental transaction. And it's why Roman emperors and medieval kings were always having to put down rebellions by ambitious generals, dukes, and barons who lusted to have more face.

The whole point for those in the old aristocracy was "honor", and honor was something that depended on station, and station was something you took by force of arms. The question they would ask themselves was basically: Do I have have the balls or don't I? This is barbarism, of course, but at least these men were men, not alienated, faceless wimps sitting in cubbies in big, anonymous, high-rise cages. It was a barbarism mitigated to a certain extent in the high middle ages by the Christian-inspired chivalric code and the tradition of courtly love.

But it affected not at all the earlier Christian rulers, the Roman emperors and their Germanic successors in the west. The whole underlying prestige-centered honor code was barbaric through and through. Christianity replaces the ideas 'face' and 'honor' with 'dignity' and integrity. The whole movement of Christianity is one away from external identity props and toward the discovery of an interior identity, the 'face' that is created in the image and likeness of God, where we live as citizens of the Kingdom born within, as the gospels describe it. The idea of face and honor are irrelevancies for citizens who abide there.

Christianity transvalues honor into integrity. You can lose face if others take it from you, but having or losing your integrity does not depend on others. Honor is about the value that others give to you; integrity is a self-valuation that follows from an interior achievement. But integrity is not something you can organize a society around, unless you have a critical mass of people who have achieved it. Clearly there was no such critical mass in post-Constantinian Christendom, nor is there one now, or perhaps ever.

Until such a day when a critical mass develops, a true Christianity is more of a leaven in any civilization in which there are true Christians. It's influence is subtle, and it works more on the periphery than at the center. 

Back to Freud: His point was that civilization in suppressing aggression creates alienation. Alienation is what happens to human beings when they are cut off from their instinctual life. It happens when they make a choice for safety and conformity of the group that comes with renouncing one's impulse life. It is the condition of the slave. This, according to Freud, is the source of the discontent that must necessarily come with civilization. Becoming civilized in modern societies (since Hobbes anyway) requires submitting to the law, and submitting is always an act of slavishness.

Most of the "advanced" thought since Freud has been about finding ways to become more instinctual and less civilized, while remaining "nice." In other words, wild and crazy, but loveable--like John Belushi or Jack Black. These are our contemporary models for what it means to be un-alienated. The way this works in practice is while continuing to suppress aggression, give more free rein to the pursuit of sex and money, and to put an American-Dream happy face on both. Consumer capitalism provides the political cultural framework that celebrates this solution to the problem of alienation. And it works insofar as it satisfies what is most vulgar in human desire, but fails in all the truly important ways. And then we fight endless wars to give an outlet for the aggression for those who need to earn a 'face' through mortal combat.

Freud's idea of civilization is the opposite of what I mean by it, but his is understandable because his experience of it was mainly of its collapse. The people he treated were living in cultural forms that had no inner vitality. That was Nietzsche's big idea--there was no there there anymore; there are only the empty forms, like a copse of dead trees. They point to something that once lived but no longer does.

Nevertheless people hang onto those dead forms and because their sense of self is deeply entiwined with them, and this clinging to lifeless forms is the essence of alienation, because in order to be un-alienated you have to be in touch with Life, something green and living. For Freud that meant the suppressed instinctuall life of formalistic Victorians, a suppression of life impulses that arise from below, so to speak. But the late 19th century in its mechanistic materialism created a sytem that also suppressed life that descends from above, so to speak. 

The goal of civilization is not to suppress life but to create forms for its expression in such a way that we are raised up above the barbaric and purlely instinct-driven. But that does not require a suppression of instinct, but rather humanizing it. And the humanization, I'd argue, is only possible by the introduction of something outside the barbaric eat-or-be-eaten system, and that would be the leavening effects of 'grace'. 

Freud and Darwin would have described the human predicament accurately if the world were indeed a closed system. But something enters from outside the system that has this leavening effect. You don't have to be a believer to know what it is. We've all experienced it at one time or another. True advances in the human story occur when grace and human instinct combine to create something new. The instincts are the raw material. Grace is the active principle inspiring our imaginations, and the human will works with both to bring something of value into the world. It can be a small thing; it can be a great thing. But if it is worth anything, all three were essential in its making.

In the early years, many of the Christians who "got it", the ones who understood that the kingdom was within and that one's identity was not solely determined by social constructions, headed out into the wasteland. In the period in which we live, celebrated by T.S. Eliot's famous poem, people who get it no longer have to flee into the wasteland because the wasteland has come to us. They get that's our life now, and so we must learn to wander in it, in a way analogous to the Israelites of old, but as with ordering from Amazon, no need to go out, it has been delivered to us right at home. Nevertheless we long for the fleshpots of Egypt and find it hard to hope that there might be any landscape physical or psychic, exterior or interior, in our future that is flowing with milk and honey.

[Ed. note: This is a repost from November 2012. It seems relevant for explaining what's going on in Putin's head, and also why it has nothing to do with his perverse understanding of Christianity.]

Reactionary Chic

Whereas the old Christian conservatism was about defending an old order, the new social conservatism is about overthrowing a new one. The transformation of the right is a direct response to a shift on the left. In the years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, when the G.O.P. was the party of the traditional moral order, many individualists, rebels and eccentrics found themselves aligned with progressives. Today the reverse is true. The left is now widely seen as the schoolmarm of American public life, and the right is associated with the gleeful violation of convention. Contemporary social pieties are distinctly left wing, and progressives enforce them with at least as much moral ardor as the most zealous members of the religious right.

--Nate Hochman

According to Pogue, the [reactionary chic] movement “has become quietly edgy and cool in new tech outposts like Miami and Austin, and in downtown Manhattan, where New Right-ish politics are in, and signifiers like a demure cross necklace have become markers of a transgressive chic.” This might be an overstatement, but it’s pretty clear that there’s cultural energy in the opposition to the progressive norms and taboos that are derisively called “wokeness.”

The BuzzFeed News writer Joseph Bernstein captured this energy in a March article about an anti-woke New York film festival funded by Thiel and headed by a Black queer provocateur named Trevor Bazile. “Call it, if you must, a vibe shift: a new generation of internet-native tastemakers — like many of the people crowded into Bazile’s party — who find the moralistic gatekeeping of millennials all a bit passé,” wrote Bernstein.

Michelle Goldberg, "The Awful Advent of Reactionary Chic"

There's tremendous energy in any group that sees itself as unfairly marginalized, and there's also a lot of energy in transgressing the pieties of the establishment. Isn't that what's driving what Goldberg calls 'reactionary chic' in her column yesterday? She gives an example of what is being reacted against:

In novels set in progressive social worlds, internet leftism tends to be treated with disdain — not a tyranny, but an annoyance. In Torrey Peters’s “Detransition, Baby,” a young trans woman reacts with priggish outrage to a dark joke shared between the book’s heroine, Reese, and her friend, both older trans women. “Reese recognizes her as one of those Twitter girls eager to offer theory-laden takes on gender,” writes Peters. “The girl has listened in on the joke and shakes her head — insensitive! — staring at them over her black-framed glasses with watery, wounded eyes.”

For those who get most of their politics online, this can be what the left looks like — a humorless person shaking her head at others’ insensitivity. As a result, an alliance with the country’s most repressive forces can appear, to some, as liberating.

I remember thinking decades ago that what made gay culture interesting and energetic was its transgressiveness, it's being anti-establishment, it's being a place for those who couldn't stand the sanctimonies of the straight, conventional world to gather in a joyful communities of liberation and mutual support apart from all of that was too buttoned down, prim and proper. There was something my gay friends in New York and Seattle had that straight people did not, which was a vital sense of community that gave them a sense cohesiveness and energy and purpose. They had an elan, a verve, a joie de vivre, a disinhibited, creative craziness that most straight people I knew lacked, and I saw it as as being directly associated with their being counter-cultural, their being against and so liberated from establishment pieties.

And I wondered back then if the assimilation of gay culture into the mainstream would take the joy out of it, make it as boring as the culture it saw itself then in opposition to. It would appear so, at least insofar as the partisans of gay assimilation into the establishment have now become santimonious scolds. They've become the new establishment with a new set pieties. They've become the new gatekeeper regime of the boring and ordinary. It's annoying because all moralistic priggery is annoying, but as such it was inevitable that it would spawn a new counter-cultural reaction. 

So it's ironic that the sexual identity politics of the 80s has spawned a new transgressive community on the Right that now occupies the space they once did. These days if you want to belong to a community that provides cohesiveness, energy, and purpose born of transgressiveness, you have few other choices than on the radically chic Right. 

Imagining Covid Risk

Why did the CDC issue new guidelines that allowed most Americans to dispense with indoor masking when at least 1,000 people had been dying of COVID every day for almost six straight months? If the U.S. faced half a year of daily hurricanes that each took 1,000 lives, it is hard to imagine that the nation would decide to, quite literally, throw caution to the wind. Why, then, is COVID different?

--Ed Yong

It's not hard to understand why Covid is different. People don't think abstractly. Statistics are meaningless in shaping one's daily experience. A hurricane or tornado may kill fewer people, but the devastation is not abstract. It's local and concentrated and is dramatically symbolized by the environmental destruction. Covid devastation was spread out and invisible for everyone except healthcare workers.  

Many died from the disease but most didn't. It wasn't like Ebola or AIDs in the early days, a death sentence.  If you weren't living in a small community impacted by a superspreader event, the risks felt low. Individual families were devastated, but most of the people they knew were not. If you knew of someone who died of Covid, it was like knowing someone who died of cancer or heart disease. You feel the impact to the degree that you feel the loss.

University Neo-Puritanism

In the classroom, backlash for unpopular opinions is so commonplace that many students have stopped voicing them, sometimes fearing lower grades if they don’t censor themselves. According to a 2021 survey administered by College Pulse of over 37,000 students at 159 colleges, 80 percent of students self-censor at least some of the time. Forty-eight percent of undergraduate students described themselves as “somewhat uncomfortable” or “very uncomfortable” with expressing their views on a controversial topic during classroom discussions. At U.Va., 57 percent of those surveyed feel that way.  (Source)

Any wonder why it's hard to get a robust class discussion going these days?

A few years ago, I was called into the dean's office for a little chat. Apparently a complaint was made against me about something offensive I had said in class. I tried to think what inadvertent thing I might have said that would have caused offense, but could think of nothing. I was eventually told that a student overheard me chatting with an international student before class. He said that I asked where she was from. He said that made him uncomfortable because he felt that this would make the foreign student uncomfortable to talk about how she was different. There was nothing more than that. I'm not exaggerating. 

Authoritarian Psychopathy

Like other authoritarians, he equates his own well-being with that of the nation and opposition with treason. He is sure that Americans mirror both his cynicism and his lust for power and that in a world where everyone lies, he is under no obligation to tell the truth.--Madeleine Albright

This is Albright's description of Putin, but it could have been of Trump.

I'm still waiting to find out what Trump's Russian connection was. I've assumed it was something venal, as for instance his hopes for a Trump Tower in Moscow. But maybe it could just be that he really thinks Putin is the smartest guy in the world, that Putin understands how the world works in a way all these other establishment dumbasses don't. Or if they do understand it, they lack the boldness to play the game the way Putin does. Trump just plain admires the man and trusts whatever he says and does more than whatever anybody else says or does.

It's pretty clear that Putin, like Trump, is deeply delusional. Such delusional game players cause so much needless suffering in the service of their their spiritual vacuity. That the rest of us let them get away with it is on us more than it's on them. They're crazy, but we let crazy do its thing. We admire it. It's how the whole system works. It rewards cunning psychopathy whether it's in boardrooms, TV studios, or the corridors of Congress.

And we admire all the stupid, foolish ways that celebrities look for love in all the wrong places, no matter the path of destruction they leave behind them. At least they're not boring. It's fascinating spectacle. And they give the less bold hope in a strange way because it parodies the real thing. Someone like Putin gives a second-rate player like Trump hope. He sees Putin's game as genius, and it's a game Trump still has hopes to play here. Will we let him--or the next psychopath in line after him--play and win?

Edsall on White Unhappiness

Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.”

Graham and Pinto write:

The deepest desperation is among cohorts in the white working class who previously had privileged access to jobs (and places) that guaranteed stable, middle-class lives. Rather ironically, African Americans and Hispanics — the cohorts that historically faced high levels of discrimination — retain higher levels of well-being, especially hope for the future.

The data suggest that a large segment of the white, non-college population lives day-by-day in a cauldron of dissatisfaction, a phenomenon that stands apart from the American tradition.

This discontent drew many disaffected Americans to Donald Trump, and Trump’s defeat in 2020 has produced millions of still more disaffected voters who support his claim that the election was stolen.

Michael Bang Petersen puts it this way:

We know that humans essentially have two routes to acquire status: prestige and dominance. Prestige is earned respect from having skills that are useful to others. Dominance is status gained from intimidation and fear. Individuals who are high in the pursuit of dominance play a central role in political destabilization. They are more likely to commit political violence, to engage in hateful online interactions and to be motivated to share misinformation.

If you read the rest of the article, the various researchers Edsall quotes talk about how 'trade shock' after NAFTA in 1993 and China entering the WTO in 2000 cut whatever vestigial ties working-class whites had to the Democratic Party. There's a lot of talk about status loss in the article, but I think the deeper issue is culture loss. I think the argument I make in the second half of Genealogy Part 1 about capitalism's destruction of customary culture goes to the heart of it.

This destruction has been a long-term, erosive process, but it was accelerated by these free trade policies that destroyed the economic infrastructure of so many rust-belt communities. Neoliberal Democrats like the Clintons supported free trade because they bought the Kool Aid that it benefits everyone in the long run economically. But they never took into consideration the destructive impact these policies have on local communities and their traditional cultures. Most Liberals couldn't care less about local communities and their local cultures because (1) they've never lived in one, or (2) if they have, they left them because they wanted to be free of the constraints that living in any kind of real community requires.

So Liberals understand that the trade policies they supported might be disruptive, but that living in a dynamic, innovative, future-oriented society requires that people adapt, that they should expect to have three careers, that they should come to love and embrace change, etc. But it's all self-justifying, capitalist b.s., And so it's understandable that those whose lives capitalism has disrupted resent having to uproot themselves, move from their homeland to where the work is, and be trained to assimilate into an economy that destroyed everything that they loved. And they particularly resent the smug Liberals who tell them that what they loved was stupid and that they should live like them: See how happy we are in the suburbs working in our cubbies!

Their situation is a lot like that of Native Americans who experienced a similar destruction of their customary culture when they were moved from their sacred homeland to places where traditional practices were not possible or not allowed and where they were pressured to assimilate into a culture that they despised. Black and Hispanic Americans are more resilient because they live in communities that have adapted to economic instability and have less reason to fear status loss because historically they have had more to gain in that regard and than to lose. 

So what's the solution? Well, maybe it would be good to start by not destroying local communities and cultures. Rather than assume that the economy and its mystical Invisible Hand always knows best, make the economy serve human needs. And most humans need stable community life and vibrant, local traditional cultures to live happy, productive lives. Stop letting utilitarian, economic logic be the only consideration as if good-paying jobs were the only thing that mattered no matter how disruptive the economy is in every other aspect of human life. Yes, it might be and probably is, too late to preserve what's vital, but recovery can't begin until you stop making a remedy impossible. 

Let's exercise some wisdom. But we can't do that, right, because our capacity for making wise collective decisions about what humans need to flourish was lost long ago. Instead, we've surrendered all our agency to the Invisible Hand. Our minds are so held captive by that propaganda, that no other possibility can be even entertained. 

The ironic thing is that far more people who identify as Democrats get this than do doctrinaire Libertarian Republicans. The Clinton Neoliberal wing of the party destroyed the Democratic brand with working class whites, but the Republicans couldn't care less about them. If we lived in a sane world, working class whites and people of color would take over the Democratic Party and force it to make the economy work in their interests, but the Democrats can no longer be a home for American working-class whites--the Dems are anti-gun, pro-abortion, et al.--and they're the party of the people of color who they fear seek to displace them.

And there you have it. There's good reason to believe that this will play out in the stupidest, most violent way possible because the best among us lack conviction, and they lack conviction because they lack wisdom, and they lack wisdom because they live within a metaphysical imaginary that discourages them from thinking such a thing exists. Expediency is all. 

Genealogy Part 5: Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-----------

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Go to Part 6.

++++++++++

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

Thomas Chatterton Williams on 'Rescuing Socrates'

Padilla’s criticisms raise the perennial question of utility—what is an education for?—and inflect it with the social-justice mission that seems to have permeated virtually all of the nation’s academic, cultural, and artistic institutions. Yet it is Montas who answers most persuasively: The purpose of an education is liberation. And the ideas and traditions that support that liberation are not and can never be crudely racialized as one group’s property, thinned out and flattened beneath the rolling pin of identity. We are not only one thing (Dominican! Brown! ESL!) and ideas are not black or white. They are good or bad, worthy or not worthy, useful or not useful—judgments that can shift and evolve with time, and not always for the worse.

“Many people today, even academics, take the approach to liberal education based on the study of classics to be elitist and exclusivist, with little understanding of the democratizing impulse behind it,” Montas writes. But “we do minority students an unconscionable disservice” when we steer them away from it. “We condescend to them when we assume that only works in which they find their ethnic or cultural identities affirmed can really illuminate their human experience.”

Ideas and identity are not in opposition, and they are not equals. Striving with and against the most durable human thinking to have created and altered the intellectual, cultural, and political landscape beyond our own backyard equips all of us to discover who we are most fully. This is the message brought vividly to life in Montas’s book. It is a simple one. But in times of extreme social tension and tribal polarization such as our own, the act of stating obvious, lasting truths can amount to the most generous form of bravery. (Source)

What is truly remarkable is that reading the Great Books should be controversial in the first place. Such thinking is thinkable only in a society that has lost its vertical dimension and is adrift in a sea being buffeted about by each new academic fad--including ideas about social justice. A thirst for Justice is among the most important things a human being can have, but our thinking about and understanding of Justice deserves more than what too often is thought of as a  kindergarten level of fairness between two egotistical children. 

See also "Jacobin Magazine on the Great Books"

Genealogy Part 4B: Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We'll see. 

Go to Part 5

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

**How I think of Kohlberg's Six Stages

Pre-conventional: Kierkegaard's Aesthetic

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

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

Conventional: Kierkegaard's Ethical

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

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

Post-Conventional: Kierkegaard's Religious

5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi.

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

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

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

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

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

Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional thinker who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--which provides criteria with which to evaluate their thinking and behavior.