After the Future

Belief and Cash Value

I've been thinking about William James and Charles S. Peirce lately. I like Jamesian Pragmatism, because of its open-endedness, its aptness for the way we actually live and think about the world. It's somewhat simplistic to say that for James 'truth' is what works, but it points us in the right direction. Truth is what has 'cash value'; it's what you have confidence enough in to act on. It's never identical to the Real. At best it gives us a working model for or a map of the 'Real'.

But there is a Real--even if our models of it are only better or worse approximations. There is an ontological foundation behind the models. aka, the "appearances". There's a difference between saying that we cannot know the Real and that there is no Real. There's a difference between saying that all our models about the Real are social constructions on one hand, and that all our constructions of the Real are ontologically groundless or arbitrary or merely serve ideological purposes on the other. Some models are better than others, and what makes them better is the degree to which they align with the Real or are out of alignment with it. 

We are acculturated into working models for how the world around us works, but we should never assume that the model is the Real. It's just something that allows us to navigate in the Real. And over time we individually or collectively make revisions in the model, or we replace it with another one because it works better or because it delivers benefits the older one did not. This is the way science works, but it's also the way we  live our lives if we're sane. Delusion is persistence in the use of a model that no longer works. 

We humans have the understandable tendency to persist in the habits of mind formed by the model we grew up with and got comfortable with. We fear change and we often fear losing something that is precious to us. The mistake fear makes is to think that the 'model' and the 'Real' are the same thing, that to lose the first is to lose the second. But it's liberating when you come to understand that's just not true, that our loss of one model does not mean the rejection of what it modeled, but that we have a need for a better model, one that accounts for the data--for our experience--in a richer more robust way. It is only important that we strive to be in the best possible alignment with the Real. When the old model becomes an obstacle to that, it must be discarded. 

The problem with modern materialistic Liberalism is not that it is misaligned with the Real, but that it filters out too much of it. It privileges the objective and what is given to the senses, and it dismisses as "subjective" what is given to the heart and to the spirit. It scoffs at the idea that the poets, not flat-souled technocrats, should be the true legislators of humanity, because they are the flat-souled technocrats who have no idea how spiritually impoverished their worldview is.

Our culture is in deep need of renewal, and that will only happen when, to use Iain McGilchrist's analogy from Nietzsche, the "Emissary"--the technocracy--once again serves the "Master"--the artists, prophets, and philosophers through whom the depths of Real are disclosed. If human beings are both angels and beasts, the problem with Liberalism is its hypertrophying of what is real about the second and hypotrophying the first. This leads to the kind of imbalances that we are suffering in the U.S. today, but also in every developed society in which the spiritual dimension of our humanity has become hypotrophied and trivialized, i.e., as having no 'cash value'. 

But materialist Liberals are better aligned with the Real than reactionary conservatives. Materialist Liberals navigate in a world that is shaped by the materialist presuppositions, as inadequate as those might be, that shape our dominant and now rather rickety social imaginary. Materialist Liberalism's social imaginary is our model of the Real, whether we feel comfortable within its constraints or not. And so it's what we use until something better replaces it. Reactionary conservatives are right in their critique of the spiritual poverty of a materialist social imaginary, but they fail to persuade because they don't provide a model that works better, if by working better we mean balances the spiritual with the material, the angel with the beast.  

It's this pragmatic view of truth that has been at the heart of my critique of Conservatism. Conservatives too often persist in habits of mind that are no longer adapted to the world that we live in. Liberals are not the cause of the changes that conservatives lament. They are not to blame. They are not bad people. They are people who simply went with the flow rather than to have resisted it. And most live perfectly decent lives within its limitations.

Early Liberals saw that the old premodern model wasn't working very well, and it really wasn't. The Thirty Years War de-legitimated for good reason confessional allegiances. Something better needed to be found. And they developed a new model that brought us levels of material property and technological advancement unimaginable within the premodern social imaginary. But it left behind much that was valuable, and, as I've been writing here for years, the task for us going forward is to retrieve much of what has been left behind. But retrieval in not reaction. Retrieval accepts the world given to us by materialistic Liberalism, and seeks now to spiritually enrich it. 

So thoughtful conservatives were not wrong in recognizing that important dimensions of human experience were lost in the shift to modernity. If there are aspects of the Real that they know about and which are not part of the contemporary social imaginary, they must work to develop a model that delivers a robust account that has advantages the materialist Liberal model lacks. I don't see anybody on the Right who is doing that in a way that maps a way forward. I think a big part of that is because those who are temperamentally inclined toward the Right don't believe there is a way forward; they believe "progress" is a liberal delusion. Nevertheless, my challenge to religious conservatives is hold fast to the Real that has been filtered out by modern habits of thinking, but to trust in their belief that God is Good, and that because he is our movement in history is toward the Good. 

For this reason I think of myself as a political progressive. I believe that there is a movement in history toward the Good, that the arc of history does in fact bend toward justice. Nevertheless I do not consider myself a Liberal because I think that Liberalism no longer works. Look around you. Is the world given to us by liberalism working?  It brought some short-term advantages, and it's understandable that some of the West's best minds explored its possibilities, but that Liberal model no longer works. It is deeply, profoundly inadequate. 

As I've written here frequently before, the Liberalism that was the child of the Enlightenment and the source of the optimistic republicanism of 1776, 1789, 1848, the revolutionism of the Paris Commune, and so many others died in Western Europe after by World War I. Bolshevism in Russia morphed into an authoritarianism that had nothing to do with the spirit of '89. This progressive idealism died in the U.S. during the 1960s, (when we said Bye Bye to Miss American Pie). And it died officially during the 1990s in Eastern Europe, China, and everywhere else where the Jacobin spirit of 1789 was its inspiration. It had a good two-hundred year run, but now we're at a very interesting point in history. We're in a cultural/historical slack tide.

Neoliberal ideology has filled the political vacuum for want of anything better, but anything goes and who knows where it's going. It's going to be a rocky ride, and we have to trust in our ability to adapt, and to realize that to cling to habits of mind that no longer work will not preserve order, but rather lead to more suffering and to a more destructive collapse. Better to adapt, to go with the flow, and try to manage things to mitigate the inevitable transitional suffering as best we can. We need to be prudent, but not fearful. Fear almost always inclines us to make the wrong choice. 

***

We take for granted the solidity of world around us, and yet we also understand, even if only abstractly, that the way we experience it is profoundly shaped by our acculturation. Our experience of the world is shaped by habits of perception and thinking that enhance or filter out aspects of the Real. At any given moment, we only experience and understand what our acculturation has programed us to see or understand. Our habits change when we are forced to adapt to changes in our environment. We resist the change, but sooner or later we make it when we come to understand that we receive benefits from the change that our current habits prevent. This is Pragamtism 101.

We change our habits because we discover the benefit of the change on our own or because we imitate those whom we notice are thriving because they have already made the change. And when our habits change, as they did when the medieval model broke down to make way for the modern, our experience changes. This is not a process that moves quickly. It happens slowly from generation to generation. But the world given to the French peasant in the 18th Century has more in common with his contemporary in China than it does to the French bourgeois information worker employed in a glass tower in Paris.

The biggest cultural gulf is not defined by whether one is Asian or European, Christian or Hindu, but by whether one's habits of mind are modern or premodern. We are now moving into another transition in which the differences will be defined by whether one's mind continues to be shaped by modern habits or by whatever the New Thing, the no-longer-modern modeling of the Real will be. Many are living intensely aware of our being in this slack tide, and it's not easy to flourish in such a time, but it's interesting.

And so because we are now living at a time when the modern model has broken down, we live with modern habits of mind for want of better ones. And so those of us who recognize this, especially if we are Christians, have a special opportunity and responsibility to develop new habits of mind that are both inspired by the spirit of the gospel but which also have  "cash value" in the Jamesian sense, that model the Real in a way that works. The biblical term for cash value  is "fruits".

Jamesian Pragmatism brackets questions about metaphysics, but it recognizes the central role that belief plays in shaping the world we work in and think about. So I consider myself a Jamesian Pragmatist when it comes to understanding the real world we live in, but I combine that with a Christian Neoplatonic metaphyisics concerning the ontological grounding of the Real. The Real is real, and while it transcends our models of it, it provides an ontological foundation for those models.

If the test for any belief system is its 'cash value', the burden on Christians is to prove that its beliefs deliver. It has to deliver meaning that makes sense in the real world that we live in, and it also must help us to be productive in the world in a way that has advantages that others would notice and imitate. It happened in the Roman world as that world slowly disintegrated; it could happen in the modern Liberal world as it continues its disintegration. I accept, in a Jamesian key, that the best we can do is develop working models that map reality in ways that work. Do we have enough faith in our model to actually live by it and shape our life by it? Can we be ruthlessly honest about whether it is working for us or not?

***

If the 19th Century was a time when the Western social imaginary--its model of the real shifted from mind-dominated model to a matter-dominated model, we've been undergoing a shift, at least in some precincts of the culture from matter to mind. We see it in popular culture in the way that “believing” no longer has the pejorative connotations it once had. It’s possible now to entertain metaphysical questions in a way that it was not even thirty years ago. That much of it feeds a spiritual narcissism that is hard to take seriously because it just isn't is beside the point. There's an openness to a new story, a new grand narrative, a new Jamesian model if it can deliver cash value. 

Since Kant, metaphysics has been suspect; it was perceived by the mainstream of western thought to be about believing something rather than really knowing it, and “believing” until recently was considered a weakness of mind. And for lots of people whose habits of mind are still modern, it still is. But one of the pillars of the postmodern critique of modern rationality has been that most of what we think we know is really only what we believe. Our truths—even scientific facts like our model for the atom—are just provisional maps that have meaning only insofar as they work, i.e., have  explanatory power that allows you to work with them, but they make no pretense of understanding the 'thisness' of the atom. That's open to different interpretations, and I would say the same is true for biological evolution. It's for now a provisional map; it works, but no one can claim to know with certainty the 'thisness' of evolution. What we know about it is open to different interpretations. 

The postmodern thinkers recognize this, and while I don't buy into the nihilism that many of them think is the ineluctable consequence of their critique, I find what they say interesting because their mood of "deconstruction" reflects accurately the spirit of our decomposing age. I have the same relation with Marxism. I find much value in its critique of capital, but I reject the materialistic metaphysics and its prescription for a cure. Marxism gives us a good map for understanding how capital works; it gives us a deeply inadequate model for something better. 

So the question for me is whether a saying No as the Marxists and postmodernists say is possible to join with a Yes which the Christians have said. Can we show that there is more 'cash value' in our model?  And such a project starts by acknowledging the opportunity now being afforded to us because we are at a new stage of cultural development in which believing has become rehabilitated—it’s at the heart of the Romantic impulse as it continues to operate in the popular culture. 

‘Believing’ is one of the best things you can do. “You gotta believe” is a commonplace in our sports and pop psychological worlds. We are constantly admonished to believe in ourselves and to believe in one another. And the assumption that lies beneath these admonitions is that our believing it’s so will make it so if we have enough faith. Believing is what gives life meaning and purpose. It doesn't matter really what you believe, just so long as you do it one way or the other.

Now I don’t want to equate this popular idea of believing with the deeper and more mysterious phenomenon we recognize as religious faith, which has a cognitive dimension that the popular idea of believing does not, but it bears a family relationship to it. It can have heuristic value. The practical benefits of belief have a long heritage from St. Augustine’s De utilitate credendi, to Pascal’s “wager” to the pragmatism of William James, to the prescriptions of our current health care professionals who have noticed that people who have religious practices live happier, healthier lives. 

This is just another way of saying that the metanarrative precedes the ethical. What we believe shapes how we live, whether our beliefs are superficial or profound. Whatever narrative we ultimately choose to model the Real for us opens up certain possibilities and closes off others; it shapes what we can see and what we are blind to. But most important, the narrative we choose points to and defines that which we most deeply long for. Every narrative is shaped in one way or another by hope. Even nihilism. If you live with a materialistic narrative, your longing focuses on materialistic goals; if a spiritual narrative, spiritual goals. 

So I hope  I can count on the flexibility and adaptability of my readers as I try to make my case for the plausibility of my beliefs. And I hope I've made the  case today for the idea that there are worse things that you can do than to believe something.  And if 'belief' is where it's at, why not loosen it up a little, get wild and crazy and see if it works. The worst that can happen is that it won't, and then we'll make the necessary adjustment. But anything is better than the thing we have now, which just isn't working. The bottom line is whether your beliefs lead you to  live a fruitful life or one that is sterile and puerile.

[Ed. This is a revised version of a post of the same title from 2014. ]

A Reflection on the Meaning of the Incarnation

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

 --Colin Wilson in "The Future of Mankind"

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

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

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

 --Iain McGilchrist, The Master and His Emissary (Kindle Locations 11812-11826)

In the Christian mythos, of course, uncreated life is God, whose spirit in Genesis is described as hovering over the Deep, the chaos God created out of nothing. In the Christian mythos, the Johannine Logos, the supreme Divine Intelligence, incarnated in a world ruled by the Law of Force, whose stand-in at the time was the Roman Empire, whose stand-in was Herod. Salvation history, as I think about it, is the gradual interpenetrating of the Deep--the created non-Divine--by the Spirit of God--the uncreated Divine--and the eventual supplanting of the Rule of Force by the Rule of Divine Intelligence. By intelligence I mean 'mind', and by mind I means something more akin to the German 'geist', which has a more dynamic, creative, active meaning than the English 'intelligence' which suggests a certain cleverness or nimbleness of mind that is measured by IQ. Not what I mean here. 

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

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

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

Humans play their role in this salvific project to the degree that their minds are shaped by Divine Intelligence, which is not to be confused with the kind of intelligence that computer science mimics. CS's machine learning project is mainly driven by the un-subverted whirlpool of pure force that is evolution without grace. Divine intelligence is that to which Socrates, Plato, and all the Axial philosophers and prophets point--a transcendent foundation for the immanent world. Computer Science mimics an attenuated left-brained human intelligence incapable of responding to mystery or the the numinous, but intelligence in the Christian Neoplatonic sense means to participate in the mind of God. We are at a critical moment in human history when it's not clear whether the human mind will align itself with the law of force that governs evolution without grace or with the Divine Intelligence that seeks to subvert and transform evolution by interpenetrating it with grace. 

The Renaissance Neoplatonists, particularly the Florentine artists influenced by Ficino, came to understand that the mind of God was not something that you ascend to by escaping from matter, but rather something that you find embedded in matter. There is a shift at this time in the imagination of the the task for both philosophy and art. The goal was no longer to ascend up the Great Chain of Being to a realm of pure intelligence outside time and space, but rather to uncover the presence of the Divine Intelligence  incarnated but lying undisclosed, i.e., unseen, in the created world.

The artist's gift is to render what he saw in its translucency translucent to us, if we have the eyes to see it. The goal is to see what's there, but what is there is far more than what we are usually aware of in ordinary states of consciousness. The artist assumed at this time the status of more than a craftsman but of a creative, visionary genius because in inspired states of mind he saw what others mostly did not, and through his craft was able to render a likeness through which we can see what he saw.   

The quality of genius in great art was measured by its inspired disclosive power, which was to reveal the inner life of a thing in its translucency, i.e., the goodness and beauty that lies opaquely hidden or at best filtered in the world around us. In other words great art discloses the immanence of the Divine Mind in creation, but this isn't possible unless the artist's mind is somehow suffused with the creative energies that flow from a visionary encounter with that Mind. The greatness of all great art is commensurate with its disclosive power and its ability to help us who encounter it to see or recognize something that before was not visible to us or seen as through a fuzzy lens. Originality was primarily about revealing the 'origin' of the subject in the Divine Mind.

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

That these objects were often beautiful is a secondary effect to the felt truth that they disclosed. Later second-rate artists would make paintings, sculptures, music, and literature that reversed engineered, so to say, the work of great visionary artists, and these may be more or less interesting, but lack originality in this deep sense. They had the form without the originary energy and light. Later, 'novelty' becomes confused with 'originality', and being inventive becomes synonymous with being creative. But real creativity is both a discovery of what's there coupled with an active intensity of attention or concentration that brings into the field of awareness what was not before. 

Genuine visionary art always has something of the numinous or the sacred about it because it is disclosive of dimensions of the mystery of Being which are not available to us in everyday consciousness. The power of great art comes from the energy that is released by its participation in its origins in the Divine Mind. There are many objects that present themselves as art, but it is great art to the degree that it has this disclosive power. If we encounter great art but are not moved by it, that is an indicator that there are dormant parts of our own minds that have yet to awaken. Contemporary, late-modern, consumer culture values in its educated elite a cleverness and celebration of irony that is inimical to this awakening. They need to find what Ricoeur call 'second naïveté.'

For the best of these Renaissance artists, ascent to the divine is effected by a descent into matter to discover the incarnate divine hidden everywhere in his creation. This is the paradigmatic way in which the world ruled by force is transformed into a world ruled by the Divine Intelligence. Our participating in the project does not require that we be great visionary artists, but rather that we take seriously the idea that the world is suffused by the Divine Intelligence, and that we have a responsibility in whatever modest way to be agents of its disclosure, particularly its Goodness. In doing so we participate in the great evolutionary project, which is to transform the whirlpool of pure force, of violence and cruelty, of meaninglessness and absurdity, into pure intelligence--its truth, its goodness, and its beauty. 

***

With these ideas in mind, try to understand the power of the Christian mythos of Incarnation. Whether or not you can accept the idea that the cosmic Logos literally incarnated in Jesus Christ (which, of course, I do), just contemplate the idea of Uncreated Life and its Divine Intelligence penetrating the whirlwind of force in order to redeem it. Try to put aside your late-modern, jaundiced view of everything, and instead entertain the idea with 'second naïveté'. This requires something childlike in us, the willingness to be perceived by the sophisticated as foolish--for the child in us shall lead us. Jesus said that we should be guileless as doves and shrewd as serpents, but second naïveté requires that the serpent enter into the service of the dove.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mythos and Logos 3

In “The Battle for God,” Karen Armstrong illuminates a slightly different, though related, difference, contrasting the modalities of mythos and logos. As Armstrong explains, logos is concerned with the practical understanding of how things work in the world, while mythos is concerned with ultimate meaning. Either modality can be used by liberals and conservatives alike in their everyday lives. But macro-historically, there’s been a distinct bias—and weird twist on top of it—at least since the dawn of the modern era. That’s when logos began becoming so all-pervasive that it seemed destined to dislodge mythos, and some defenders of mythos (now commonly known as fundamentalists) fought back paradoxically by assuming the framework of logos, and arguing that their mythos was literally true—a move that true traditionalists would have found to be deeply in error, because it devalued the essential purpose of mythos.

The congruence with Mooney’s argument is obvious: There’s a clear kinship between logos and the Enlightenment model of reason on the one hand, and mythos and persuasion on the other. If conservatives under George W. Bush once again proved themselves incompetent in the logos of governing, liberals under Obama proved themselves incompetent in its mythos.

Paul Rosenberg has a couple of long pieces in Salon that support my argument in "The Silicon Valley Flood" posted the other day. The first is with George Lakoff, whose work is important and to which I plan to return when I start developing the semiotic themes that I've been dancing around lately. The second is with David Dunning. The first interests me because I want to talk more about the theological implications of how language structures our world; the second, because it focuses on how language is used in two fundamentally different modes as  'Mythos' and 'Logos'. Logos is about the 'what' the facts, seeing the world as clearly as possible and working in it as competently and effectively as possible. Mythos provides the meaning infrastructure that shapes the way we think. 

Mythos is more foundational because it's where the meaning and the purpose lie. It's what orients Gordon Gecko to work in the world in the way he does or Mother Teresa to work the way she does. The Wall Street Mythos is every bit as much a mythos as the Christian one is. But the point is that both mythos and logos interact in important ways--one's mythos creates a filter through which the 'facts' are perceived--even when the data is shared, mythos connects the dots in patterns that look different and mean very different things depending on which mythos works as your meaning infrastructure.  

Mythos is in that sense foundational: everybody has a foundational mythos whether he or she is conscious of it or not. And in the end, a la William James, the test of the truth of your mythos is directly related to whether it allows you to work with the Real effectively or ineffectively, whether it broadens and enriches your experience of the Real, or whether it narrows and impoverishes it. Both Fundamentalism and Scientism provide narrow, impoverished mythic narratives. I believe the Judaeo-Christian mythos has depths and riches that have yet to be explored. 

Competency in your work in the world requires a mythos that is suited to the reality that you are working with. If your mythos leads you to make persistent, disastrous mistakes, or if things just aren't working right, then clearly your mythos is misaligned with the Real, and adjustments are necessary. Gorbachev tried to effect these adjustments to the Soviet mythos in the 80s, and every sane person in the U.S. hoped that Obama would effect similar adjustments to the hybrid neoliberal/neoconservative mythos that proved itself disastrously misaligned with reality during the Cheney Bush years. Obama failed because he didn't understand that he had to deal with the foundational problem--the mythos problem--before he could deal with practical or logos problems. He made the fundamental Liberal mistake of overvaluing logos, to think that being reasonable and practical was enough, when instead he should have been trying to change the fundamental story. I think the country was ready for a different story. Obama as campaigner showed himself capable of telling that story; Obama as government bureaucrat has proved himself incapable.  

The Liberal mythos, as I argued the other day, values competence but is grounded in what I describe as soft nihilistic metaphysics that by definition rejects as delusional any mythos that affirms ultimate purposes. And Rosenberg, quoting John Jost, points out that Liberals just don't have what it takes when it comes to a street fight:

True, we find some support for the traditional “rigidity-of-the-right” hypothesis, but it is also true that liberals could be characterized on the basis of our overall profile as relatively disorganized, indecisive and perhaps overly drawn to ambiguity — all of which may be liabilities in mass politics and other public and professional domains.

A worldview that embraces competency, a logos mythos, so to say, cancels itself out and loses to a worldview that embraces ultimate purposes almost every time. Marxism succeeded to the degree that it did because it affirmed ultimate purposes, even if its ultimate purposes were misguided or delusional. Reality has a feedback mechanism that sooner or later lets you know if your ideas are delusional, but as we've seen in this country, the disasters of the Iraq War and the 2007 economic meltdown didn't provide evidence enough that the mythos that guides the GOP or neoliberal Democrats is delusional, so Americans keep sending Republicans to Washington.

I think they do this for reasons somewhat different from Tom Frank's explanation: they do it because Republicans give the appearance of standing for something and Democrats just don't. Republican policies might be toxic and delusional, but Republicans present themselves as being committed to "ultimate" values that Americans care deeply about. Democrats look more like our worst stereotype of what a politician is: the weak-kneed hypocrites who stand for nothing but the advancement of their own careers. I believe that the country would back progressive politicians who stand for core American values. That's why Jim Webb's candidacy intrigues me. 

So that's a part of it: When a particular mythos has captured the collective imagination of a group, it is virtually impossible to argue against it on a logos level. This is what people mean when they talk about cognitive divides or conservatives and liberals working with different epistemologies--one's epistemology follows from one's metaphysics, and one's metaphysics follows from one's Mythos, whether that mythos is consciously or unconsciously affecting one's thinking. One's mythos will not be given up until disaster proves conclusively that it is misaligned with the Real. Or it can be given up when an alternative mythos that shares its foundations with the reality-misaligned mythos emerges that proves itself better adapted to the Real. 

The latter is to be preferred to the former. When the old mythos collapses as it did in the Soviet Union in the 80s or Germany after WWI, it's usually replaced with an even more primitive and regressive mythos that has to run its course toward yet other disasters. These primitive myths have more in common with the primordial flood that pushes us from behind than with grace and freedom that call us into the future.  

More Americans have chosen Republicans in congressional elections (Presidential elections are different) because Democrats don't offer a robust enough alternative mythos that would motivate people to care enough to vote for them. So I'm arguing that secular progressives will continue to fail in the political and economic spheres, no matter how competent or practical their policy prescriptions, so long as their mythos is grounded in a soft nihilistic metaphysics/mythos no matter how humanistic and well intentioned. The Weimar Republic was humanistic and well intentioned in that Liberal sense.

So the answer for progressives does not lie in adopting an expedient Noble Lie that competes with the mythos of cultural Right. Such a contrived mythos will have as much staying power as the reality-misaligned mythos of the 'dictatorship of the proletariat'.  A mythos that works has to be grounded in the Real--the spiritual Real, the Real that comes to us from the Absolute Future, and that's why secular progressives will never be able to give us what the country and world needs if they are to move forward into a truly progressive future. But such a mythos cannot be developed out of thin air--that't the Jacobin fallacy--it has to grow out of the tradition, and in the Western world that means the Judaeo-Christian tradition.

Those of us who believe that the Judaeo-Christian tradition is deeply aligned with the Real must find a way of presenting it as a robust alternative mythos that might actually help to move us into a the more deeply human future we all of us most deeply long for.

[See also Mythos and Logos 1 and Mythos and Logos 2]

The Elite Center of Gravity in the Democratic Party

Michael Lind nails it this morning:

During the Progressive Era and the New Deal era that succeeded it, idealistic professional-class reformers were only one element of a coalition they were forced to share with the representatives of farmers and blue-collar workers — groups that made up a majority of the workforce in the mid-20th century. Take away the farmer-labor wing of the center-left, and you are left with upper-middle-class do-gooders like Woodrow Wilson and Eleanor Roosevelt. A progressivism based among college-educated professionals is going to be much more elitist, and perhaps much less egalitarian and effective, than one dominated by union leaders, urban bosses and agrarian politics. True, nonwhite and low-income Americans are important in the Democratic electorate — but they are grossly underrepresented in the organized center-left.

If there were a real progressive movement in the U.S., its attitude toward the professional class would be more skeptical than celebratory. In order to fund a decent-size welfare state, genuine progressives would demand higher taxes on Americans making more than $100,000 — or maybe more than $50,000 or even $30,000. Why not? Polls show that Americans are willing to pay somewhat higher taxes as long as they get better benefits like expansions of Social Security or Medicare. The pressure to exempt professional households that make between $100,000 and $250,000 a year is not coming from Middle America.

Genuine progressives would side with producers, of all kinds, against rentiers, of all kinds — including credential-rentiers like the members of professional monopoly guilds. If software can replace pricey lawyers, if moderately paid instructors can replace highly paid professors, if skilled nurses were allowed to do some of the things that only M.D.s now do at a fraction of the salary, the working-class majority would benefit immensely.

The proletarianization of the professional class should be welcomed and encouraged by the progressive movement. Already independent physicians are being replaced by doctors who are salaried employees of hospitals. Let prole lawyers work for legal services corporations and prole professors work for educational service companies. Unable to set their own incomes by means of guilds, many downwardly mobile professionals might belatedly discover the benefits of unions and legislation protecting workers against exploitation by managers and investors.

The bad news, then, is that the self-serving minority of credentialed professionals, rather than the majority of wage earners, is increasingly important in setting the agenda of the center-left. The good news is that the contradiction between progressive reform and the self-interest of the professional elite may come to an end as technology and economic reorganization eliminate the professions altogether.

This, in part, explains why Neoliberalism is embraced by so many Democrats. It is an ideology whose purpose is to sustain the interests of elites, and elites now define the center of gravity in the Democratic Party. Nothing changes until the center of gravity in the party shifts back to labor. 

I don't know if I can get up much enthusiasm for the proletarianization of anybody, but if that's what it takes to get a coherent, broad-based pushback against the way the top wealth percentiles have rigged the system in their favor, then so be it. Wage slavery is wage slavery whether your collar is blue or white.

What kind of society do I want? Might as well lay it out here in broad strokes.

In the long run, ownership of companies has to shift away from the rentier class to workers on the Mondragon model or other variations of it.

I support state ownership for a few enterprises that serve the common good, like healthcare, energy, and transportation.

There should always be room for innovative, small startups, and that requires capital, but there are ways of raising it and rewarding investors without their owning the company indefinitely. 

A few thoughts about the future of education and the professoriate:

I'm fine with the public-private mix in education. K-12 public schools should get state and federal funding, but should be governed locally.

Tenure as we know it should be abolished in post-secondary education, but there should be mechanisms in place to insure due process for faculty who are fired. But class distinctions between tenured and non-tenure faculty should be abolished. The criteria for accountability should be developed in faculty senates, and it should be possible for the faculty senate to overturn unjust firings.  

I don't know what's going to happen to the large state research universities regarding undergraduate education.They will not much longer be able to justify the large, impersonal lecture classes in the MOOC era. My guess is that they'll downscale and become heavily subsidized centers for graduate education for engineers, biotech, healthcare professionals, and other science/technical professions. 

While they are not going away any time soon, I think Law School and MBA programs are  credentialing scams. There are far less expensive and more practical ways to train lawyers and business people. Certificate programs in specialized areas make more sense, but a lot of that could be handled by MOOCs.

I would like to see a continued place for small, liberal arts colleges for undergraduates, but how that will work economically I don't know. Perhaps as an extension of the K-12 system. I suspect that the elite schools will survive because of their endowments and because there will always be an elite willing to pay the freight, but I wouldn't want anybody I care about to be just MOOC educated. Maybe people want to discuss that in comments.