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I'm one of those human beings who doesn't know what the thinks until he writes about it, so the posts in After the Future tend to be unwieldy and prolix because they are essentially freewrites. So it was useful for me to review what I wrote in the last year to see if I could tease out essential excerpts. It was particularly hard to do for the posts written last winter because that's when the bulk of the Geneaology series was written, each of which part was about 3500-4000 words. So I tried to discipline myself to find a few paragraphs in the more substantive posts that would have a stand-alone quality while at the same time might entice the reader to go to their source. Spring, Summer, and Fall to follow in coming weeks.
From "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus", 1/7
Now it's pretty obvious to me that Socrates and probably Plato were mystics. I hesitate to use the word, because of its connotations of flakiness or associations with the New Age within contemporary discourse. But all I mean by it is experience on the vertical dimension. People have such experiences all the time that they used to recognize as experiences of the transcendent dimension breaking into ordinary consciousness in subtle or dramatic ways. The current fashion is to call them "aesthetic" rather than mystical experiences because that is more compatible with the hegemonic Rationalist Materialist imaginary.
But when Socrates talks about Justice, Truth, Beauty, and Goodness as transcendentals, he is not talking about abstract concepts, but about an encounter with the sacred. They are transcendentals because they, operating on the vertical dimension, intersect with the everyday horizontal experience. There is something about them through which the divine shines. They are numinous, and they inspire. If you have ever been deeply moved when learning of or witnessing a particularly inspiring manifestation of these transcendentals, you've had a mystical experience, an experience that comes from the vertical dimension. There are all kinds of mystical experiences, but the experience of the transcendental archetypes listed above is entry level for most people.
But the point I want to make here is that the experience of the divine or the sacred is something that is rather common. The interpretation of their meaning or significance is where it gets tricky, and this is where a wisdom tradition becomes critical, because while clearly some experiences might 'feel' sacred, many are not. They are delusional. If they are genuine, they are disclosive at varying levels of depth of the Living Real, while others are just counterfeit. I think that many, if not most, of the people storming the Capitol last year sincerely experienced it as a participation in a sacred event. Clearly it was not....
Our situation now as late moderns after the collapse of the vertical is that there are no longer any teachers--at least any that are public facing. ... None that break through all the noise, anyway. That along with the destruction/disappearance of customary culture means that there is no cultural trellis to climb. We're all on our own. And mostly we're not doing very well. If we're lucky we find someone along the way who is a little farther along in his or her learning how to navigate on the vertical, but even so, this has no significant impact on our larger cultural, political, and economic life. It just keeps doing its rationalist-materialist thing, and dragging us all along with it whether we want to go or not.
We can learn from Socrates how to teach ourselves and one another. ...
Socrates' transposed the daemon's negating, apophatic function as an inner experience into outward teaching practice in his dialectical method, or elenchus. His goal was not to tell people what to think, but to get them to say, for instance, that No, justice isn't this, and it isn't that, and No, Socrates, it can't be that. Then what is it? Well that's for the individual to discover for himself once the field has been cleared of all the things that Justice cannot be. Only then is it possible, or at least more likely, to see, or better, experience what it is.
From "Of Salience Landscapes and Metaphysical Imaginaries", 1/16
Now Vervaeke is not interested in belief systems, but he is interested in "ontonormativity". Ontonormativity is explained in the lecture 10 linked to above, and I will let him speak for himself, but he points to what I've been writing about here, which is how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities, and such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it.
I would say, for instance, that Jefferson's Declaration of Independence is ontonormative in its inspiration, but was also way ahead of the capacity of most people at that time (and now) to be changed by it. Some, of course, were changed by it. Was it naively idealistic, or does it set a standard by which we judge ourselves as failing to live up to our best selves as Americans? I would designate Lincoln and MLK as prophets of American ontonormativity. Were they naive idealists? They are rare figures in our public life, but we revere them because they point to a truth about our better possibilities as Americans that derives from their wisdom on the vertical dimension that is cognate with the wisdom of the Declaration.
So Vervaeke takes on the question regarding how it is possible that people have experiences that seem more real than reality, how they come to experience the world as not measuring up to its deeper possibilities. He says that this is at the heart of the Axial Revolution, and while I've been arguing that after the death of God we have lost any vital sense of Axiality as a culture-shaping power, it's recovery is as important for us now--i.e., for the social transformation that we need now--as it was for the civilizations and societies that were first transformed by it 2500 years ago. I have no idea how this will happen, but such transformations do happen.
From "Edsall on the Big Lie", 1/19
Most Americans don't really understand what it takes to be a democracy. Those who think they care, like the stormers of the Capitol, see themselves as patriots fighting to preserve democracy. That's the great irony of our moment--those who think most fervidly that American Democracy is in peril are the ones who are being manipulated by those whose goal is to destroy it. Others give democracy lip service but care more about whether their team is going to make it to the playoffs. And as a result American democracy has stopped being a healthy, living thing that adapts to changing realities. Like the USSR in the '80s, it has become perilously rickety, and it's swaying. Question is whether the Tucker Carlsons and Steve Bannons among us will be able to push it over.
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. ...
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. ...
**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.
From "Salience Landscapes v. Salience Bubbles", 1/30
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....
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.
From "Vervaeke's "Awakening" Series v. My "Genealogy" Series", 2/4
Lots of people have beliefs and experiences that occur on the vertical dimension of human experience, but those experiences are out of joint with the Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary that dominates in techno-capitalist/Neoliberal societies. And so that forces them to live in meaning bubbles that have little or nothing to do with the public world in which they live day-to-day. We think we live in a pluralistic society, but we really don't. Rationalist Materialism is not on an equal footing with other possibilities; it dominates all of our thinking when it comes to decisions that we make in the economic and political spheres--and plays an outsized role in shaping thinking and imagination in the cultural sphere as well. This is despite the fact that 95% of people are open to the possibility that there is a spiritual dimension, and 30-40% of people have had what Vervaeke calls awakening experiences, i.e., temporary experiences of spiritual provenance.
Vervaeke and I would probably both agree that most of those people who have had such experiences go back to sleep again and go on with their lives as if they never happened. The hypnotic, soporific power of Rationalist Materialism and its shadow spawn, techno-capitalism [See Note 1], is so, so powerful. Only a few find the resources within the culture to interpret and develop those experiences in a fruitful way. Religions used to do that kind of work, and still do here and there. But Vervaeke's solution is to establish scientifically legitimated psycho-technologies that when they become broadly available will help individuals to transcend their individual crises of meaning. I'm all for it, and more power to him. We disagree in that I think that the broader culture needs a richer, broader way of interpreting these experiences. In other words, we need mythos.
From: "The Bigger Picture", 2/8
At its energetic best the postmodern secular Left musters something like Occupy Wall Street, but because of its anarchic, foundation-less ethos, it has no ground to stand upon and so to sustain itself. The Enlightenment model, including its Marxist offshoots, was always flawed because too dependent on a flattened understanding of the human being and its aspirations, and it is hard for me to see any plausible sustainable resistance to the Right that is not grounded in an imagination of human possibility that is deeper and richer than the flattened, postmodern model of the human to which the secular Left largely subscribes.
But because the Enlightenment narrative for human progress has failed does not mean that another narrative of human progress cannot be framed.
From "Edsall on White Unhappiness", 2/9
So [Neoliberal] 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.
From "Plato: Habitus as Heurisitic", 2/11
So the metaphysical speculations of the ancients were provisional attempts to articulate or make some sense about what the nature of the Real is in the light of such experiences. But isn't this true of all philosophers who are worth paying attention to? They have a foundational intuition, and their philosophy is their attempt to extrapolate from it. The quality of their philosophy depends on the quality and richness of their intuitions. You cannot understand any "original" philosopher unless you can grasp his or her foundational intuitions, which may or may not be foregrounded in his discursive explication of them.
It's with this in mind that we must understand Plato's so-called doctrine of the Ideas: He's trying to give an account concerning how the world that we experience with the senses relates to this other transcendent realm that was disclosed to him in awakened visionary experience. There is no doctrine here--just metaphors, analogies, myths to make some attempt to give an account of his experience. Experience, not abstraction is the foundation here. I'm not going to belabor the argument. If you need more evidence read McGinn (Chapter 2, "The Greek Contemplative Ideal") and Hadot (chapters in Part 2: "Philosophy as a Way of Life").
A similar misunderstanding relates to the idea of the 'Intellect' in the Greek transcendental philosophy. It's not about intelligence in the IQ sense or about being an intellectual in the modern sense. It's about Nous (See Note 1), the divine part of the human soul, which is a dormant faculty that when awakened is capable of contemplating the divine and divine things like the transcendentals. Nous is the divine faculty that inheres in the human mind that must be activated or "remembered" in order to be capable of cognizing the divine. (See Comment 1) This is a different idea than the biblical assertion that humans are created in the image and likeness of God, but it's kissing cousins with it, and it will play a role in Patristic thinking about divinization or 'theosis'.
From "Progressive Fever Dreams", 2/14
In America, if your movement isn't a religious crusade, it's just smoke drifting in the wind. Like the anarchist OWS in New York or the absurdist CHAZ in Seattle. Marx was right about a lot of things, but he was wrong about religion. It isn't an opiate; it's political fuel. Reactionary religion fuels reactionary politics; progressive religion fuels progressive politics. 19th Century Marxism was itself an eschatological cult. Now it's just armchair cultural critique. For lack of a progressive religion, the reactionaries take the field unopposed.
MLK's assertion that "The arc of the moral universe is long but that it bends toward justice" resonates with us because we are innately eschatological. It works within the collective psyche at a deeply archetypal level. But eschatology makes no sense within a Rationalist Materialist metaphysical imaginary. The two things cancel one another out. There is no possibility for a sane, sustainable progressive politics so long as the Progressives are captured by a rationalist materialist metaphysical imaginary. Just not going to happen. Not in America, anyway. If you think any kind of religion is stupid and delusional, then it follows that you should think that any kind of progressive politics is too.
From "Jamelle Bouie on Civil War", 2/15
The American Civil War in the 1860s was on one level about the economics slavery, but it was more deeply about the South's paranoia, and its felt need to defend its cultural identity, an identity that it believed the North wanted to destroy. As then, so now, at least in that respect. Slavery was important economically, but it was more important as an essential component integral for Southern cultural identity. The problem now is that the paranoia is everywhere. It's as bad in Minnesota and Wisconsin as it is in Texas and Alabama.
And then as now, Southern paranoia was rooted in an assumption that in the same way the Whites dominated and destroyed the cultures of the Native Americans most egregiously during the Jackson era, and in the same way that they dominated and humiliated Blacks and Hispanics since forever, so will the Southernized American Right everywhere be dominated and humiliated when they lose political control. Paranoia tends toward prophetic self-fulfillment. Once the last Civil War started, the fear of identity loss that would come with military loss made it so bloody, and made reconstruction once the war ended unsustainable. So are we now facing a similar paranoid social dynamic that gives us good reason to believe that it will lead to bloody strife, although not, I hope, on the scale of the last Civil War?
From "Sifting through Hellenistic Hyperpluralism", 2/20
We tend to think of all the controversies surrounding who's a heretic or not through the lens of modern pluralistic tolerance for difference. We celebrate the heretic as the free thinker, the one who marches to the beat of a different drummer, the creative crazy whom stuffy, conventional thinkers fail to understand. It's important to understand that as with any cross-section of humanity, there always have been and will be anal Christians, but the really soul-crushing rigidity in the Church and its obsession with suppressing heretics didn't set in until after Constantine when the Roman Empire became the official sponsor of the Christian Church. The Christians' counter-cultural identity dissolves as the Church now becomes part of the establishment. More and more serious Christians leave society for wilderness monastic communities. ...
The Iron Law of Oligarchy is only rarely suspended in the life of human communities. That this is true should not prejudice us against the truly wise and inspired thinkers who were the real singers in this dynamic historically evolving opera. Too much attention is paid to the house managers, the lawyers, and the accountants, the people who have a role to play in keeping the house lights on. But too often they think they are more important than the singers. People come to be inspired by the music, not to be told moralistic platitudes or to check the books or hear learned disquisitions on Canon Law. My goal in this Genealogy series is to celebrate the singers.
From "Face to Face: The Jewish Foundation", 2/27
The post-Axial Mysticism of Transcendence is about redefining true human flourishing. In part it's about rising above mundane concerns of the Mysticism of the Heath, but also to be a presence in the world that seeks to undermine or subvert the regime of local gods. Christians pray "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", and it's so familiar to us that we rarely think about its implications. It defines an [ontonormative] aspiration that is at the heart of the Axial revolution--the idea that the local cultural operating system can be subordinated to another OS that operates above and outside it, and which can break into and reconfigure local, sublunary systems. This introduces the idea that things don't have to be the way they are now because that's the way they've always been. Things can change for the better. Progress--a dream of better future--becomes a possibility. This possibility is implicit in Greek thinking [See Note 2], but it is a more dynamic element in Jewish eschatological thinking and imagination.
This idea of progress has come to mean different things to different people, and it has often led people into delusional, destructive political projects. But that doesn't mean that all such attempts to 'immanentize the eschaton' are misguided. As I said in a post last week, a reactionary politics is rooted in a reactionary religion; a progressive politics must be rooted in an eschatological mythos. That it is even possible to think about a possible positive future is largely a product of Jewish thinking in the later Second Temple period about which I write below. But the important caveat here is that politics flows from culture. The transformation has to happen first in the broader culture so that the culture moves toward a true progressive politics without it being forced on it.
From "The Christian Synthesis", 3/12
One of the essential flaws that fragilized both the premodern cosmic and social imaginaries was their commitment to an order understood as a static hierarchy. The investment in such an order made it rather resistant to adapting to the torrent of new information and social change that flooded Western Europe in the post Renaissance/Reformation period. That the premodern hierarchical imaginary was not flexible enough to adapt does not mean that the fundamental intuitions that supported it were wrong, but that the custodians of the old hierarchical order lacked the imagination and flexibility of spirit to adapt. They were too invested in the superstructure rather than trusting in the Living Real that had given it its shape. The Erasmian spirit loses to the reactionary spirit in the Church, and science goes one way and faith the other. This was a tragedy, but perhaps one that could not have been avoided.
One interesting consequence was that a secular version of slumbering Jewish eschatological orientation toward the future gradually awakened and oriented those leaning toward a progressive understanding of history to see in science the method for achieving the New Jerusalem. In other words, Greek rationality coopts Jewish eschatology in the hopes of creating a reason-based utopian future that has nothing to do with God, who, if he exists at all, is a remote, uncaring clockmaker who set up a cosmic machine for humans to reverse engineer, if they have the wit to do it. Progress comes to equate only with material progress, not spiritual or moral progress. And so here we are.
From "Villanelle the Bore", 2/27
No character is interesting if there isn't some form of moral ascent or descent, and that's what these unwatchable shows lack. Depraved characters who start and stay depraved are not really interesting because they are so predictable in their soullesssness. And because they're so predictable, and because audiences become increasingly numbed to their persistent depravity, and because the writers probably think of ideas like moral ascent and descent as cliche, the writers must instead push for new ways to shock, new levels of depravity, new taboos to break, new ways to go where the watcher will say, "Wow. I didn't see that coming. Those writers are genius."
"Thank you, thank you," they respond. "Now where's my Emmy?"
And it's because TV critics like Hale accept these criteria about what makes a show entertaining, they can write bizarre sentences like, "The joy of the character from the start was the childlike satisfaction she took in being a really good killer; the violence didn't bother us because the joke worked."
"Joy"? Really? Is that the word you're looking for? Is your life so devoid of it that such a thing passes for it?
From "Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability", 3/19
Our contemporary rationalist-materialist imaginary performs these functions, too, but It provides a sense of intellectual coherency only if you accept its nihilistic presuppositions. Most people accept these presuppositions without really thinking about it and about how they conflict with other things they believe that are important values for them. So, why do I insist that these presuppositions are nihilistic? Like the Great Chain of Being [did for our premodern ancestors], our rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary integrates the cosmic, the social/political, and the moral. But it does so within a cosmology that accepts that the universe is shaped by Darwinism and other cosmological materialistic assumptions that creation itself was a random event, that the history of the universe since the Big Bang has been impersonal, meaningless, and dispassionately cruel. And that fits with a Darwinian social organization that embraces the randomness of markets and the inevitability of technological development. There's no meaning in any of it except that that's the way things are, and we do what we can to have a more or less pleasant life within its constraints.
And this fits with a Libertarian/utilitarian or socio-biological moral imaginary that makes no moral judgments about anything except to insure the randomness of each individual making his or her own random choices to determine for himself what is in his best interest within the minimum constraints of the social contract to not harm others. There is no robust sense of the common good, or else it is defined as the sum of each individual pursuing his own interests. This makes dealing with threats like climate change and income inequality almost impossible because it requires individuals to surrender their short-term interests for a common or social good that has no imagined, inspiring content. This idea of freedom has no real moral content; it's just the negation of restraint, and unrestrained you are free to do as you please whether it's to run a porn site or join Doctors without Borders. The second can have no more moral value than the first within a rationalist-materialist frame.
So on the cosmic level, randomness is all; entropic heat death is our telos. On the moral spiritual level, there is no concept of moral development or of there being a transcendent Good. On the social/political level Justice is something that we make up as we go along, a function of prudential contracts we make with one another to prevent the war of all against all, the greed and power of one against the greed and power of the other, which would otherwise be our natural condition in a random, impersonal, cruel cosmos.
Sunday, December 11, 2022 at 12:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Yellowstone v. Succession
[This post originally appeared as a note in an essay I put up in October called "Liberalism + Whatever". It doesn't really belong as a note there, so I'm moving it here with a few revisions to compliment "Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?" that I posted earlier this week.]
In recent posts, I've assumed you have some familiarity with Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now, but it's not watched as much in Blue America, which prefers Succession. So perhaps I assume too much. [See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.] It's in its fifth season now, but I only started watching it earlier this Fall. I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible for them unless they already know people in Red America.
I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters like Beth Dutton, about whom I wrote the previous post. And while this is a show mostly about megalothymic White males, the most interesting lines go to the women characters like Beth. Another interesting female character that hasn't shown up much in Season 5 is Angela Blue Thunder, a warrior princess with a fancy law degree who's working for the Chairman of the nearby Indian Tribe. In a conversation with Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale she says--
"They [white elites] make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters."
Not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch, and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely. if ever, against elites in the power structure.
Wonder why it's taking so long to indict the egregious lawlessness of the Trump family? Same reason none of the egregious lawlessness of the Duttons ever gets indicted. He like the Duttons and other elites have been breaking the law with impunity for decades, but It's understood that the system just doesn't go after it's elites unless it's forced to some. Black and Native Americans understand this. White Jacksonians know this. They regard Liberal Hamiltonian with bemusement because apparently they don't.
This is why a Trump indictment will never be accepted by his MAGA Jacksonian supporters. He will be indicted, I believe, but only because he poses such a threat to GOP establishment elite dominance. GOP establishment elites just hoped he'd go away, but he won't, so now, regardless of what they say publicly, they will green light the Justice Dept to do the dirty work. His Jacksonian supporters understand this. The law, in their reckoning, has nothing to do with justice; it has everything to do with punishing your enemies. And they will see the law being applied to Trump in this valence. That's why it's essential that they obtain power--so they can use it to club their enemies rather than to allow their enemies to club them. We'll see them try to swing it in the House now that they have control of it. They don't have enough power to do much damage there, but they will do their best to make mess.
Are the Jacksonians wrong about the emptiness of the rule of law in U.S. practice? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. It's a worthy aspiration, but at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now, and they will use any means, legal or extralegal, violent or non-violent, to get power and to hold onto it. Whether they succeed or not remains to be seen.
In a society with a living sapiential tradition, the "law" would be grounded in what I've been calling ontonormative justice, as for instance the Tao or the Torah is understood to be grounded in the law of heaven. We don't have a sapiential tradition, so Law is whatever we make up as we go along, and when it goes against people's sense of what's "right", it's disregarded as illegitimate. This sense of what's right largely derives from custom and acculturation, but in a healthy society custom and tradition would in turn be grounded in a vital, evolving connection to the Living Real. We're not a healthy society, and so appeals to Tao/natural law don't make much sense now, but that needn't always be the case.
In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substance-less and evanescent, a temporary inconvenience for the faction that opposes it because if can and will be reversed when the opposing faction has the power to do so. This is why they are so desperate to retain power--to prevent a reversal of their reversal. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect. With a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of moral authority.
Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities, the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. The differences more significant than the similarities, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians.
The difference lies in that none of the principal Hamiltonian characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.
The principal Jacksonian characters in Yellowstone--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie--are really bad people when we first meet them, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. There's moral ambiguity in the Yellowstone world. The characters in Yellowstone are at first glance all loathsome, but at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.
Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America perceives Blue elites, and leads them to find plausible all the nonsense about grooming, etc. Reds can't trust Blues because they perceive Blues as holding nothing sacred. They see Blues as nihilists who delight in transgressing taboos, who celebrate moral license and any kind of sexual weirdness. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they at least they know it's wrong when they do it, and have the decency to feel guilty about it. Not so Liberals.
And yes, they admit, our heroes in Red America might be lawless and often ruthlessly violent, but they act in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe is threatened. As Beth Dutton says, "I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love." And they ask, "How are we any different from the patriots that violently threw out the British?" Goldwater got it right when he said, ""I would remind you that extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice! And let me remind you also that moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue!". He's not advocating violence, but, you know, when it's called for, it's called for.
And, they ask, "What does Blue America believe in except its mission to break ancient taboos or to obsess about some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility?" That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?"
So Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents. But in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They do evil things in full knowledge about what they are doing, and so in a curious way, they come across as more complex, more human that the characters in Succession who are utterly predictable, at least in terms of their moral choices. Red America also knows the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.
They are wrong, of course, to think so. I live in a very secularized Blue American ethos, and almost everyone I know is genuinely decent and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of them. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest, most motivating commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?
I would never, ever want to live in the Yellowstone world, but put a gun to my head and force me to choose between it and the Succession world, I'd pick Yellowstone because for all that's cruel, lawless in it, it's a world in which the people there are more interestingly human in a way people in Succession just aren't. I don't think that most educated, urban Blue Americans understand why that's so. It's important that they do.
I doubt that Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the massive Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land, his patrilineal inheritance taken from those in his matrilineal heritage, to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Kayce, Monica, and Tate, when all the intrigue is put aside, are the throbbing heart of Yellowstone, and its moral center. Justice is a possibility in the Yellowstone world even if it rarely shines there. It's just not a possibility in Succession because there is no moral center anywhere in it.
Friday, December 09, 2022 at 09:04 AM in Am. History & Culture, American Left, American Right, Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)
Beth Dutton: Uebermensch?
Some further thoughts on themes about Fukuyama and how his ideas about Hegel and Nietzsche are represented in Taylor Sheridan's Yellowstone:
The concern of the last part of Fukuyama's The End of History and the Last Man is the "Last Man" part. The Last Man is Nietzsche's counterpoint to Hegel's First Man, the warrior aristocrat who is willing to risk his life in a prestige battle to the death. [See Note 1] Yellowstone's John Dutton is a victorious First Man in this sense, who is the successor of a patrilineal line of First Men. The First Man ethics defines the logic by which the show establishes that the lawless, violent things the Duttons do are in fact worthy or our admiration. They live something intensely real that the rest of us in Blue Liberalstan don't.
The Duttons are Hegelian-Nietzschean First men, not Hobbesian/Lockean Last Men. The first have spirit; the second are timorous animals who are motivated by nothing higher than avoiding pain and seeking pleasure. [See Note 2] For the Las Man only lives for pleasure. He's analogous to Kierkegard's human who lives only on the aesthetic, a man who is in despair and doesn't know it. He thinks his shallow life is just great, that it can't get any better. That, at least, is what he keeps telling himself.
John's daughter, Beth, is also a First Man. If you didn't understand this already, this week's Season 5 Yellowstone episode makes it clear. Beth and the hated eco-activist Summer have a First Man prestige battle. They traded punches to the face until one gave up. It was brutal. Beth, of course, long inured to cowboy ethics, would have died rather than concede, but she also knew that it was just a question of time before Summer would, and she did.
Summer gets props for lasting longer and punching harder than anyone thought she would, but it's clear from the get-go who's superior and who's inferior. In a previous episode John describes Summer as one of the sheep, and she scolds Beth for taking advantage of her. Well, Summer proves she's better than a sheep by cowboy standards, but let's not get carried away. She's still a member in good standing of the Liberal Order to which the Duttons are sworn enemies. If her character is redeemable in Yellowstone world, it will be by her conversion to the cowboy ethic and in her ceasing to be such a sanctimonious, Liberal prig.
Later John is talking to Rip about the fight and says that there is no one he knows whom he envies--except Beth, because she is so uninhibitedly free. She is made of pure Hegel First Man stuff, and there's a Nietzsche vibe in it that echoes a scene from Season 3--
Beth: I subscribe to Nietzsche's thoughts on right and wrong.
Rip: Hmm?
Beth: He was a German philosopher who died of syphilis after he cornholed some prostitute, so not exactly a life to model yours after, but his thoughts on right and wrong, good and evil.
Rip: Which were: there's no such thing.
Beth: That, I believe. I believe in loving with your whole soul and destroying anything that wants to kill what you love.
Rip: That's it.
Beth: That's all there is.
Beth might seem like a deeply troubled, vengeful psychopath to the uninitiated observer, but the show doesn't think of her that way. She's a megalothymic First Man. Her apparent psychopathy is what makes her admirable precisely because it's so uncivilized by standards set by the Liberal Order. She simply will not be ruled by that order. Sheridan clearly admires Beth precisely because she is a wild woman who doesn't care what anybody thinks about her. She's the opposite of the Last Man that is produced by the Hobbesian/Lockean culture that emphasizes bodily security and material comfort.
It could be argued that the whole show is an argument about how the post-Industrial Revolution Liberal Order produces spiritless, weak Last Men ruled by nothing more than their appetites. And really, the show asks, wouldn't the world be better if aristocratic barbarian warlords like John Dutton with Beth-like lieutenants ran things on Master Slave principles? Is any other kind of human truly worthy of our respect? These are intensely real humans, not snowflakey fools Isn't that really at the heart of alt Right fantasies about destroying the administrative state? Sheridan has protested that his show has no partisan axes to grind, but it's clear where his sympathies lie.
But is Beth an exemplary uebermensch? I don't think that Nietzsche in his saner moments has someone like Beth in mind. My reading of Nietzsche's uebermensch focuses on the 'ueber', which is often translated as 'super' as in 'superman', but also sometimes as 'overman'. I prefer the second because it suggests 'overcomingman' or 'selftranscendingman', which comes closer to the Hegelian and German Romantic idea of the human being as free and undetermined, a being whose dignity lies in his or her capacity to transcend culturally imposed limitations. Beth has some of that, but I think that Nietzsche had a nobler kind of post-conventional human being in mind, someone like Lou Salome, a highly cultured human being, not a neoprimitive defined by her brutality.
But then, there's this photo(?) of Salome, Nietzsche, and his friend Paul Ree. It's clear who's the Master and who the slaves:
Nevertheless, I think that given the choice between someone like Hillary Clinton or Beth Dutton, Nietzsche would certainly prefer to hang out with Beth. I think the same might be true if he were given the choice between Beth and someone like Jane Addams. Addams is more my idea of a 'selftranscendingman'. But more on that another time.
Note 1: Fukuyama writes:
But Hegel's "first man" differs from the animals in a second and much more fundamental way. This man wants not only to be recognized by other men, but to be recognized as a man. And what constitutes man's identity as man, the most fundamental and uniquely human characteristic, is man's ability to risk his own life. Thus the "first man"'s encounter with other men leads to a violent struggle in which each contestant seeks to make the other "recognize" him by risking his own life. Man is a fundamentally other-directed and social animal, but his sociability leads him not into a peaceful civil society, but into a violent struggle to the death for pure prestige. This "bloody battle" can have one of three results. It can lead to the death of both combatants, in which case life itself, human and natural, ends. It can lead to the death of one of the contestants, in which case the survivor remains unsatisfied because there is no longer another human consciousness to recognize him. Or, finally, the battle can terminate in the relationship of lordship and bondage, in which one of the contestants decides to submit to a life of slavery rather than face the risk of violent death. The master is then satisfied because he has risked his life and received recognition for having done so from another human being. The initial encounter between "first men" in Hegel's state of nature is every bit as violent as Hobbes's state of nature or Locke's state of war, but issues not in a social contract or other form of peaceful civil society, but in a highly unequal relationship of lordship and bondage.
The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146-47
In other words, the Hegelian account of the move out of the state of nature into society is more historically accurate. The social contract idea was completely new, modern idea. But the point that Fukuyama emphasizes is that the Hegelian account is more psychologically astute. What makes the human human is not to be merely well fed and secure like our animal pets, but to have a self-consciousness. And Hegel picks up on the Fichtean theme that self-consciousness is awakened in conflict. We coast along in a dream until reality snaps us out of it, and, and we are most aware and self-conscious when we confront death.
Animals fight, but they don't do it with the self-consciousness of risking death, and so the human being proves himself to be superior to the animals in his self-conscious choice to transcend animal instinct and to risk his life in mortal combat, to "live free or die", so to say. This is the Dutton ethic. But it's also the motto of those that stormed the Capitol on J6. These are people who want to prove to themselves that they are truly human.
Someone like Beth Dutton is smart enough to see that these people are all deluded, but she would respect them for their willingness to fight. It's the same respect she seems willing to afford Summer after their fight. She still thinks Summer is deluded, but at least she was willing to fight. It is honorable to fight and lose than not to fight at all. If you don't understand that about what's happening on the far Right in the U.S. today, you don't understand what's at stake for them, this is what it means to be red-pilled. Their radicalization correlates with their waking up to what it means to have dignity as a human, which apparently they had not experienced before in such a powerful way. This is not something that can be understood in Lockean/Hobbesean terms except with horror. Through a Hegelian/Nietzshean lens it looks quite different. See Note 2.
Note 2: Fukuyama--
One might think that to uncover the real meaning of liberalism, one would want to go even further back in time to the thought of those philosophers who were the original source of liberalism, Hobbes and Locke. For the oldest and most durable liberal societies—those in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, like England, the United States, and Canada—have typically understood themselves in Lockean terms. We will in fact return to Hobbes and Locke, but Hegel is of particular interest to us for two reasons. In the first place, he provides us with an understanding of liberalism that is nobler than that of Hobbes and Locke. For virtually coeval with the enunciation of Lockean liberalism has been a persistent unease with the society thereby produced, and with the prototypic product of that society, the bourgeois. That unease is ultimately traceable to a single moral fact, that the bourgeois is primarily preoccupied with his own material well-being, and is neither public-spirited, nor virtuous, nor dedicated to the larger community around him or her. In short, the bourgeois is selfish; and the selfishness of the private individual has been at the core of critiques of liberal society both on the part of the Marxist Left and the aristocratic-republican Right.
Isn't this kind of selfishness the core animating spirit of leave-me-alone Libertarianism? Keep your nose out of my business, and I'll keep mine out of yours. So scram. Get off my lawn.
Hegel, in contrast to Hobbes and Locke, provides us with a self-understanding of liberal society which is based on the non-selfish part of the human personality, and seeks to preserve that part as the core of the modern political project. Whether he ultimately succeeds in this remains to be seen: the latter question will be the subject of the final part of this book.
The second reason for returning to Hegel is that the understanding of history as a "struggle for recognition" is actually a very useful and illuminating way of seeing the contemporary world. We inhabitants of liberal democratic countries are by now so used to accounts of current events that reduce motivation to economic causes, so thoroughly bourgeois in our own perceptions, that we are frequently surprised to discover how totally non-economic most political life is. Indeed, we do not even have a common vocabulary for talking about the prideful and assertive side of human nature that is responsible for driving most wars and political conflicts. The "struggle for recognition" is a concept as old as political philosophy, and refers to a phenomenon coterminous with political life itself. If it seems to us today a somewhat strange and unfamiliar term, it is only because of the successful "economization" of our thinking that has occurred in the past four hundred years. Yet the "struggle for recognition" is evident everywhere around us and underlies contemporary movements for liberal rights, whether in the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, Southern Africa, Asia, Latin America, or in the United States itself.
The End of History and the Last Man, pp. 146
Hobbes/Locke vs. Hegel/Nietzche = Hamilton vs. Jackson. See "Some Thoughts on Election Day" where I explicate the Jacksonian/Hamiltonian dyad. Old School Democrats are captured by economic thinking, but the far Right and Left by identity thinking. It's not the economy, stupid, but identity and recognition that is the true driver of politics nowadays. Neither the cultural Left nor the cultural Right will allow politics to be about what is proper to politics, which is solving practical problems concerning the common good in ways that require mutual respect, compromise, and working things out. The culture warriors on both the Left and Right are bent on a prestige battle to the death. Isn't that what this Supreme Court case about the anti-gay wedding website designer is all about? It's certainly not about working out this conflict in a way that solves the practical problem. Rather, one side or the other must have complete victory because to lose is to become the slave to the other.
The problem of the Last Man in the world technocapitalism is creating is crucial for Liberal Democracies to resolve if they are to survive into the 22nd Century. Fukuyama takes it on in the final part of this book, and, imo, fails to envision a satisfying solution. For as the robots do more of the work, and humans have more leisure, Lockean/Hamiltonian presuppositions lead to a society envisioned in Huxley's Brave New World in which everyone has time but doesn't know what to do with it. In a utilitarian Lockean desire culture the end is pleasure--sex, drugs, escape into virtual games in which we pretend to be First Men. It's all a dream. What else is there? The other Hegelian/Nietzschean/Jacksonian possibility would be a reversion to a battle of all against all. We'll all become First Men again. Primitive, but intensely real. In the first, everyone is bored to death; in the second we live in a neo-barbaric Westworld except it's not a virtual game. Isn't it clear which world Sheridan would prefer to live in? Isn't Yellowstone the non virtual reality of Westworld?
Tuesday, December 06, 2022 at 09:46 AM in Am. History & Culture, American Right, Ideas, Pop Culture | Permalink | Comments (0)
End of History?
Let's begin with a more specific account of the discontents expressed by the political right. These center on something very fundamental to liberalism and have been raised repeatedly over the centuries during which liberalism has existed. Classical liberalism deliberately lowered the sights of politics, to aim not at a good life as defined by a particular religion, moral doctrine, or cultural tradition, but at the preservation of life itself in conditions where populations could not agree on what the good life was. This leaves liberal orders with a spiritual vacuum: they allow individuals to go their own way, and create only a thin sense of community. Liberal political orders do require shared values like tolerance and openness to compromise and deliberation, but these are not the strong bonds of a tightly knit religious or ethno-nationalist community. Liberal societies have often fostered the aimless pursuit of material self-gratification, a consumer society that is both hungry for status but never satisfied with what any given individual is able to achieve.
Francis Fukuyama, Liberalism and Its Discontents, 2022, pp. 115-16
I thought this quote succinctly summarizes the problem I've been writing about over the last year, and it sets up my response to his question about whether there is an alternative. So fair warning: I'm going to indulge in a little utopian fantasizing here and see where it takes us. My answer to the question of alternatives lies in making a distinction between progress made in the cultural sphere and that made in the political sphere. We tend to think that the only progress that counts is political or technological, but from my pov it's far less important than cultural/moral progress. The importance of politics lies in that the wrong kind can impede cultural/moral progress, and the right kind creates the conditions for the possibility of it. A good society does not force people to be good; it make it easier for them to be.
So the problem as I see it is not that we have a Liberal Democracy--that's an unqualified good. The problem lies in that most Americans don't have the kind of cultural maturity to be masters of themselves in the way that a healthy democracy demands. That's not the problem of Liberal Democracy; it's the problem of the kind of "desire culture" that rationalist materialism has created. Within it, there can be no consensus about how within a Liberal Democracy cultural progress or moral maturity might be achieved.
Most people are decent enough, but they are not inspired by any great moral project. There's nothing in the culture that models that. Their life purpose, insofar as they think about it, is to fulfill their desires and they are 'moral' if they do it in a way that doesn't hurt others. The goal is to be happy while being nice. Not much more to it than that. But worse, the desire culture that capitalism has created establishes conditions that actively work against anything deeper or more morally significant, and such an ethos impedes the broad development of moral maturity. A desire culture is either infantilizing or encourages desire behaviors that are "not nice", that are predatory. Most popular film and fiction is about nice people with acceptable desires becoming the prey of people who have unacceptable desires, and the latter are usually far more interesting because they are transgressive, and we all want to be transgressive; we all want to kill the Oedipal Father.
The problem, therefore, is not that we have a void in our politics, but that we have a void in our cultural/moral life, and that void creates a destabilizing vacuum in our political life. The solution to the problem of political stability can only be found in a recovery of something lost in our cultural/moral life.
In Fukuyama's most famous book, The End of History and the Last Man, he defends the idea that there is a meaningful pattern in history and offers a quasi-defense of Kojeve/Hegel's proclamation that history has ended with the French Revolution. This marked the historical moment when political history replaced the 'megalothymic' with the 'isothymic', which in effect ended history driven by the master/slave dynamic that had been era primary driver. [See Note 1] This is not the place to deal with all the objections to such an idea, but there's an insight at the heart of it that has real validity: Liberal Democracy is as good as it's going to get, and any society that establishes a stable Liberal Democracy has come to the end of its political history. World history continues until every society achieves Liberal Democracy. [See Note 2]
Now, if you haven't been exposed to this idea or have not had the time to think about it, it sounds pretty far-fetched, but I am inclined to believe that Liberal Democracy--if by 'liberal' we mean the freedom principle that protects the individual citizen from a coercive state, and if by 'democracy' we mean the equality principle that asserts that political sovereignty lies with its citizens--is the best possible form of political organization. And I have no problem with the idea that we will be at the end of "political" history when such a political regime has established itself stably throughout the world. But for such stability to be achieved, there must be significant cultural/moral progress that would enable the great majority of the world's population to be mature and free enough to be truly self-governing.
This requires that individuals become masters of themselves, and we've seen in recent years that even the stability of Liberal Democracy in the U.S. is more fragile than we have could ever imagined even twenty years ago. Huge swaths of the American population have demonstrated that they have no such self mastery in that they are too easily manipulated by demagogues. This is not the fault of Liberal Democracy, but of the nihilistic desire culture that rationalist materialism has created. I am arguing that it has eroded the customs and traditions that provided a trellis for souls to grow, expand, and mature. Those customs and traditions are gone, and the idea of restoring them is absurd. But it's not absurd to imagine a renaissance through which new culturally vital forms would be created if we could find a way to reconnect to the Living Real and its transcendentally founded ontonormative ideals in a way that all people of good will would acknowledge.
Clearly we're not as a society even remotely close to a thymotic culture of self mastery, so the achievement of Liberal Democracy in America and elsewhere remains unstable. It will remain so as long as there's no cultural/moral ballast to steady it and no trellis of living tradition to direct its citizens toward the moral achievement of euthymia [See Note 3]. We've got plenty of history ahead of us because the achievement of a Liberal Democracy here and elsewhere depends on developing a culture that grows humans capable of self-mastery. Freedom, yes. But freedom for what? A choice other than infantile fantasies should have robust purchase on the souls of all spirited Americans.
But in the meanwhile, there is no evolution of the state that can get better than Liberal Democracy, even if an awful lot of people haven't the self-mastery that insures its stability. So far we've been able to muddle through. But even if we achieved a genuinely stable Liberal Democracy, that doesn't mean the end of human history. Political and human history are not the same. Liberal Democracy establishes the freedom and equality conditions for the more important evolutionary history of the human spirit in the cultural sphere. Politics recedes into the background, and cultural/moral quest becomes the main 'thymotic' activity.
I think of this evolutionary process in ways that integrate Hegelian dialectic with his contemporary Schelling's ideas concerning how the human being is the site where the evolving earth (cosmos?) becomes aware of itself. For Schelling, all of nature is the human unconscious, and the human project is to gradually make it conscious in an evolutionary project that requires bringing the deep mysteries of Being, what I call the Living Real, into expanding human awareness. Humans need leisure in order to undertake such a project. Is that something the machines can give us? More on this in a future post.
I think that Heidegger's idea concerning 'aletheia' and his defining 'Dasein is a clearing in the forest of being' is closer to Schelling than Hegel was, even if Heidegger had no interest in Schelling's evolutionary ideas. Hegel took Schelling's idea of consciousness evolution and emphasized the rational part of it rather than the irrational, and that's what people like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, and Nietzsche objected to in Hegel. His philsophy was perceived by them to be an abstraction, an empty shell. And Kierkegaard, et al., were right to object to Hegel's system-building rationality. It can be suffocating. What makes human life interesting is not rationality--if by that we mean instrumental reason and its analytical and problem-solving capabilities, but rather the human capacity to bring into consciousness the meaning-saturated depths and heights of the Living Real. [See Note 4]
The Living Real has both suprarational and subrational dimensions to it. Nietzsche emphasized the chaotic subrational, and Christianity and other post-Axial traditions emphasize the lawful, form-giving suprarational. I believe that the human spiritual-cultural evolutionary project is to gradually integrate the suprarational with the subrational. Both are fathomless in their depths and heights, and both are apprehended on the vertical axis or dimension of experience. Rationalist Materialism denies the existence of the vertical, except in some reductive psychologized sense that assumes that the brain is the precondition for mind rather than that mind is the precondition for the brain.
So the human project through the centuries (but also within a given lifetime in whatever measure is appropriate for the individual human) is to discover and then integrate what lies hidden below with what lies hidden above. [See Note 5] Not easy, but this is the solution for the megalothymia problem that Fukuyama wrestles with and, imo, fails to resolve satisfactorily. This kind of thymotic project is not primarily driven by thinking; it's rather more a practice that comes closer to what artists and monks do. The thinking follows from what shows up in one's practice. The knock on Hegel was that he saw evolution as primarily an evolution of thought, whereas it is really an evolution of awareness, a series of awakenings to higher and deeper dimensions of the Living Real. Rationalist Materialist civilizations see evolution as an expansion of horizontal technical control. I'm ok with technical control, but we have to ask ourselves--who's in control? In the service of what ends?
Thinking, of course is important, but only in the way that McGilchrist presents it, which is a process subsequent to the rich data that our intuitive discoveries present to consciousness. Any "thinking" is about experience, and the richness of our experience on the vertical is equally if not more important than our experiences on the horizontal. The quality of our thinking, therefore, depends on the scope and richness of our experience. And so it follows that any thinking that a priori excludes experiences that derive from the vertical axis is poor-quality thinking. High-quality thinking integrates the broadest scope of experiences on both the horizontal and the vertical axes, keeps pushing to expand the scope on both those axes, and articulates what is uncovered there in a coherent way that integrates it with what is already known. This is basic Thomas Kuhn, but with the addition of embracing the expansion of knowledge on the vertical.
This is a spiritual/artistic/philosophical project, not a political one, but the conditions in which such a project flourishes require a deeply achieved (anti-Oedipal in the Socratic not Deleuzian sense) human freedom which requires a political regime that won't interfere with its exploration and questing. Ideally a sapiential community, independent of any political or state control, will emerge that will discern and debate the significance of what the culture's best explorers uncover. [See Note 6]
I don't see that such a development requires confessional commitments to a particular faith tradition, but I would expect that it would be a project consonant with the deepest aspirations of all the great faith traditions, and that any faith tradition, if it is to retain (or recover) vitality, would have to in some way participate in and contribute to this larger cultural project in ways that are adaptable to its own traditions of thought and practice. A religious or faith tradition would be a particular way to practice what is embraced universally by all people of good will. Cross fertilization between such traditions will inevitably occur, and "best practices" will evolve that all will share.
The sapiential community will not therefore be an official magisterium or rabbinate, but will comprise people who emerge who prove themselves capable of communicating to the broader culture the vital, soul-enriching significance of the new knowledge that comes into awareness from the vertical dimensions. They will have the capability to integrate it coherently with what is already known on the horizontal dimension. Their legitimacy will be recognized in much the same way that any relatively well-educated person recognizes that Shakespeare and Shelley are more disclosive of the Living Real than, say, Quentin Tarantino and Taylor Swift.
In other words, there will be a broad consensus that accepts that great art is different from entertainments. Nothing wrong with entertainments, but they shouldn't be thought of as anything more than that. Great Art is great by virtue of the scope and richness of what it discloses of the Living Real. I like the verbal challenges involved in solving a tough crossword puzzle, but it's not the same as the verbal challenge of uncovering what lies hidden in Yeats or Wordsworth.
So, if the human project is to flourish, I hope for and expect such a sapiential tradition to emerge in tandem with great spirits and artists whose role it will be to awaken the rest of us to as yet undiscovered dimensions of the Living Real. It will enjoy a deeply felt legitimacy by the broader culture, which will support the reconstruction of a trellis that will expand the culture's knowledge both vertically and horizontally and that will pass on that knowledge from generation to generation.
So I understand if you read this and think it's blathering, utopian nonsense. Maybe some even think that's it's no utopia they'd ever want to live in. Too much of the world's energies are directed in such a way that if they are not inimical to such a project, they are indifferent to it. As yet there is no a robust constituency of human beings who have progressed enough in this project to legitimate it to the broader culture, and until that happens what I'm describing seems, understandably, to be wishful thinking. I think of it as hopeful thinking, but hope based on intuitions I have had that have been tested over time and proved resilient.
I know that there is a hunger for what I'm describing here, and I know that there are enough people who recognize the deep reality of what I'm describing as the nourishment that will feed it. It remains to be seen whether those who share in this recognition will always remain on the culture's fringes or whether at some point they will find a way to play a more central cultural/moral role.
I, of course, don't know. As I've written in previous posts, all I see myself doing is as a dog barking up a tree, trying to call attention to something real up there--you can smell it, too, right?--but it's obscured by the branches and the the leaves. If you can smell it, you become interested and want to stick around to see if it emerges. But if you can't smell it, then it's understandable that you would think there's nothing there worth waiting for. But for people like me, there's no question that it's there, it just remains to be seen whether it can be brought to ground.
Note 1: Fukuyama's book is really an extended reflection on the problem of thymos in shaping political life, Thymos is the spirited or soulful part of the human being according to Plato.(The other two are rationality/mind and bodily desire.) I used the phrase 'desire culture' in this essay because, as Fukuyama argues and I agree, that Anglo-American Liberalism is heir to the Hobbesian/Lockean tradition that wanted to neutralize a politics of thymos and replace it with a politics of desire. And it's not hard to understand how rationalist materialism follows from that. The thymotic part of the soul in a spirited human being is always striving to be the best it can be, and It's the basis for healthy self-respect. But in some people it manifests in what Fukuyama calls megalothymia, the compulsion to be be recognized as superior to others. That's what Hobbes and Locke wanted to neutralize.
Hegel also recognized megalothymia as a problem but articulated a different solution. He saw megalothymia and its need to be recognized as superior as the driver of the master-slave dynamic which in turn is for him the primary social-psychological driver of history. Megalithymic humans need to dominate others and to derive therefrom glory. Megalothymic societies are usually aristocratic warrior societies. The whole point in such societies was to do glorious deeds in battle that the bards would sing songs about about through the ages. Hegel/Kojeve/Fukuyama solve the megalothymia problem by asserting that democratic societies are--or at least aspire to be--isothymic, which means that people in them want to be recognized as the equal of others. The end of history arrives when megalothymia is pushed out by isothymia. This happened symbolically with the French Revolution when the slavish lower ranks risked everything in rising up to overthrow the aristocratic warrior class that had been established since the beginning.
There's a lot more to be said about this than is appropriate here, but I'd argue that isothymia is only a possibility in a society in which most of its citizens have achieved a level of maturity that few actually attain in late modern societies. You can't be recognized as a Self equal to others unless you have become one. That's not a given; it's a euthymic/eudaemonic achievement [See Note 3], And someone who achieves it has no need for glory or to dominate others or to be recognized as the best. The problem with isothymia in the political sphere is that it defines an equality that is an empty shell until it's substantively filled by humans who have realized to some degree their best Selves. In the abstract every human being has dignity, and that dignity is protected by law, but in reality, some people have more dignity than others because some people have more fully realized what is "original" in them. Some people squander rather than develop what is best in them. They are what Nietzsche calls Last Men.
I can envision a society in which superior and inferior are not important qualifiers, but instead 'realized' or 'unrealized' would be. The goal of a life well lived in such a society is to realize, to make substantively real, who one was created to become, and that's a unique achievement that is incommensurate with the parallel achievement of any other. And yet even now we recognize people who are more mature in this way and others that are not. You know them by their eudaemonian menschlichkeit, menschiness--their warmth and compassion, their magnanimity and down-to-earthness, their utter lack of phoniness, fanaticism, and fussiness. [See Note 3] Often they are flawled and fallible, but always intensely real human beings, and as I said, rare. Late modern societies don't produce many of them for reasons I discuss in this essay--there's no trellis anymore for them to grow on.
Note 2: I think it's interesting also to note that Fukuyama wrote this book in 1992 when it looked like the world was entering a unipolar age dominated by the capitalistL iberal Democracies that won the Cold War. It's also interesting that Fukuyama was a signer of the 1997 Statement of Principles for the Project for the New American Century, the Neocon group that was one of the most influential advocates for the invasion of Iraq in 2003. I doubt Bush and Cheney read Hegel or his most influential 20th Century interpreter Alexandre Kojeve, but the idea of bringing democracy to a place like Iraq was understood by Neocons in this Hegelian key, which was to hasten the end of history in the places that most stubbornly resisted it. Fukuyama distanced himself from all that when it became clear what a fiasco American policy in the Middle East had become; clearly we got plenty of world history before us.
Fukuyama's teacher Samuel Huntington's idea of 'clash of civilizations' seems to be the prevailing model now, which traces back to another German Romantic, J. G. Herder. I don't think that Huntington is right in the long run. It explains Putin's Russia for the time being, but not Zelensky's Ukraine, which should by Huntington's account align with Russia rather than Western Europe. I think the dynamics in Ukraine will be more typical over the next century if we survive it. No morally mature human being wants to live Putin's Russia or Xi's China. And while I'm arguing in this essay that the desire culture of North Atlantic Liberal Democracies encourages a moral infantilism, it also provides the conditions of freedom for something more morally compelling to emerge. The bottom line is that all of us, East and West, have got to choose to grow up. A healthy culture offers models about how to do that.
BTW, I'm not a proponent of a one-world government, but I can see a point when all the world's major societies have evolved into Liberal Democracies that work together in a loose confederation to solve global problems. The survival of the earth depends on it.
Note 3: I use the term 'euthymia' in the present context with a meaning that comes close in my thinking about it to 'eudaemonia'. Both describes states of mature, self-actualized well being, but maybe eudaemonia is better because associated with an ethical project that involves the practice of the virtues. In either case, euthymia is the goal--
The term euthymia has a Greek origin and results from the combination of 'eu' meaning 'well' and 'thymos' meaning 'soul, emotion'. This latter term encompasses however four different meanings: life energy; feelings and passions; will, desire and inclination; thought and intelligence. Interestingly, its verb (euthymeo) means both I am happy, in good spirits and I make other people happy, I reassure and encourage. The definition of euthymia is generally ascribed to Democritus: one is satisfied with what is present and available, taking little heed of people who are envied and admired and observing the lives of those who suffer and yet endure. It is a state of quiet satisfaction, a balance of emotions that defeats fears. The Latin philosopher Seneca translated the Greek expression of euthymia with 'tranquillitas animi' (a state of internal calm and contentment) and linked it to psychological well-being as a learning process. Happiness is not everything and what is required is 'felicitatis intellectus', the awareness of well-being:
Happy is thus the life that is in accordance to its nature, and this is possible only when the mind, first of all, is healthy at any time; then, if it is strong and energetic, definitely patient, capable of mastering everything; concerned with the body and its belongings, but without anxiety; lover of what is life, but with detachment; willing to take advantage of the gifts of fortune, without being its slave. [Seneca: De Vita Beata, translation by G.A.F.] (Source)
Perhaps 'eudaemonia' would work better to describe the moral project that I write about in this post, but we'll stick with euthymia in the present Fukuyamian context.
Note 4: I've got my problems with Hegel, but it's not because I think he was too rationalistic. Hegelian philosophy is inspired and visionary in the best sense of those words, and his 'sublation' (or aufhebung) is not rational in the ordinary sense of the word as dealing with abstractions. See "Iain McGilchrist, Hegel, and the Coincidentia Oppositorum."
Note 5: Why some people are great artists & saints and others are criminals & psychopaths raises questions that are interesting but not relevant to what I'm saying here. The bottom line is that each of us has a life to live that is incommensurate with others, and all that is required of us is that we make the choices that move us toward becoming the deepest realization of ourselves. It's not for others to judge us by some tight-assed standard, but we rely on others for help and correction when clearly we are making self-destructive choices. I don't think this contradicts the idea of the trellis; it's just that each of us has to find our own place on it. There's no one best way to climb it, but our movement toward human maturity requires that we climb on our part of it. Hard to do if it doesn't exist.
Note 6: Such a sapiential community would not be officially sanctioned. It would be very similar to what we think of now as the role played by critics, but the culture will have shifted to a point where good criticism will be distinguished from bad by the quality of the critic's own capacities to intuit and articulate her own experiences of the Living Real. Nihilistic or shallow criticism will not go away, but it will be crowded out by a new kind of criticism that has a vitality and richness that anybody with a shred of soul life will recognize and welcome. And then, it should be hoped, this sapiential community will have a culture-wide influence on how children are acculturated into this renewed sapiential tradition. It would require that our educational curricula teach what is known from both the horizontal and the vertical--in other words, what it used to mean to get a good liberal education.
Tuesday, November 29, 2022 at 11:20 AM in Coming Discontinuity, Making Sense of Religion, McGilchrist, Metahistory, Mythos, Pop Culture, Post Secularism, Subversive Christianity | Permalink | Comments (3)
Return of the Repressed
In "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part I", I argue on a more practical political level that the future of democracy in the U.S. depends on Liberal Democrats succeeding and Republicans in their current form failing and then being pushed to the margins. I argued that's not likely to happen if Main Street Americans continue to associate the Democratic Party with what is for them the unrelatable ethos of the secular, cultural Left, i.e., the ethos of top 15-20% of educated, economic elite Americans who live in urban areas and university towns throughout the country.
Main Street's discomfort with Dems is not primarily about whiteness and racism, it's about Dems having a mindset that Main Street finds strange because it's not what it grew up with. And for that reason, Main Streeters ally with racists and white nationalists. While most on Main Street might sincerely reject any kind of overt racism, they still feel more comfortable with the traditionalist ethos of the GOP-- even if it shelters racists--than with the secularist Liberal ethos that Democrats have become identified with. On the votes of these decent, but conventionally conservative, denizens of Main Street does the future of American democracy depend. [See Note 1]
So the Democrats, if they are to save democracy, [still] have the extraordinarily difficult challenge of maintaining their secular progressive base while winning enough Main Streeters to overcome all the structural advantages the Republicans are now exploiting. The Democrats have programs that will benefit most Main Streeters, but Main Street still doesn't like the Dems and their programs because they "feel" socialist and un-American.
The Republicans' job is so much easier. They're like Lee defending Richmond. Their task is simply to stoke the flames of anxiety and resentment in Main Streeters about Liberals seeking to destroy everything they hold sacred. And once elected, Republicans feel no need govern competently, no need to even try to solve urgent problems. Just obstruct, obstruct, obstruct to defend the interests of the 1%, which is really all they truly care about.
The problem for us now is that if Republicans aren't defeated decisively and soon, we will remain impotent and paralyzed as a society to deal with the real threat that comes from Technocapitalism. It's become clear to me that the Republican elite have come to assume that democracy is no longer viable, and so they are jockeying for their place in the autocracy to come. They don't care about where Technocapitalism is taking us or what happens to the rest of us so long as they're in control and the 1% remain unmolested. The one-party rule that dominated in the South for most of its history provides the blueprint they want to nationalize.
In Part II, I go more metahistorical, more big picture. I try to explain why I believe that this is more than a temporary political crisis, but a civilizational one, a crisis of the spirit. The country is reeling from what I call ontological dizziness. This dizziness is symptomatic of the kind of society that the disruptive, quasi-nihilistic, materialist ontology that consumer, Technocapitalist society has created. In doing so it has crowded out the originary mythos that grounded Western societies since at least the mid-first millennium BCE until the mid-19th century. This originary mythos fused Greek transcendental philosophy with Jewish revelation, and while the Logos/Mythos polar tension in this fusion has always been fraught, those leaning more toward the Logos pole still embraced its transcendental Mythopoetic foundations. That ended in the mid-19th century, and if one hadn't realized it already, Nietzsche spelled it out for him.
I argue that while faith is still a possibility for individuals and small groups whose ontology still draws on the great originary mythos, it is completely at odds with the materialist, Positivist ontology that has become hegemonic in defining the contemporary American imaginary. There are some people of faith, like me, who can live with that and adapt, but I also understand why people of faith who don't have the time to think things through feel that things are profoundly out of joint. Because when they try to hold two opposing ontologies together--the spiritual onotology assumed by their faith and the materialist ontology that shapes almost every aspect of the world they live in--they're just not compatible. To use a fancy word like 'ontology' does not mean that the feeling of out-of-jointness isn't experienced by ordinary Americans as deeply disorienting.
They believe that the materialist ontology is wrong, and I agree with them. And when people tell them that they are free to believe whatever they want to believe, it doesn't change the fact that whatever they believe as individuals or small communities is contradicted and dwarfed by the mammoth materialist energies of Technocapitalism; a vulgar, materialist, violence-celebrating entertainment media; and a snarky Liberal elite who see them as antediluvian morons. They have come to feel that they are strangers in their own land.
Ok--so maybe we could sort all that out in time, but there is no time. I'm arguing that this usurping materialist ontology has come to shape the presuppositions of the cosmopolitan Left and its institutions in such a way that it has enervated Liberal resistance to the greatest proximal threat humanity faces, which is posed by Technocapitalism.
The real villain here is not the radical Right, but Technocapitalism and its materialist ontology, and the way it is impoverishing what it means to be human. Liberals have got to come to terms with how they've bought into it and how their continued acquiescence is a large part of why we're in such trouble.
And so here we are in a society riven by a culture war in which both sides need what's best in the other--Logos from one, and Mythos from the other--but cancel one another out as techno-capitalism continues to drag us all toward disaster. What is best in each is buried under what is worst, so it's easy to understand why each side sees the other at its worst--that's mostly how they present themselves to one another.
But the curious thing is the way each is in its own way lives in a delusional bubble. The cultural right lives divorced from the reality as it is in fact shaped by the rationalist-materialist social imaginary that dominates in North Atlantic societies. That is the dominant, collectively experienced reality that all of us experience regardless of our personal beliefs. And so the dizziness that people who also have spiritual beliefs experience in such a world is understandable, and so too is their groping for and grasping onto all kinds of bizarre ideas that give them the illusion of stability or the hope of a return to it.
On the other hand, educated Cultural Left elites are living in their own bubble. They are quite comfortable within the hegemonic rationalistic-materialistic imaginary that the cultural right finds so disorienting. And so those on the Cultural Left feel their imaginary is grounded in reality in a way that the Right does not. Their private ontology aligns with the public one. But it's not grounded in reality, either--or more precisely it's repressing the most important part of reality. It's all Logos and no Mythos. But it has no sense of what's missing, and it's precisely because the Logos-dominant worldview of the Cultural Left is so hegemonic, that those in it are blinded concerning how ontologically ungrounded and unbalanced their world is. They take for granted that it is the only "legitimate" possibility. It's not, but they feel no need for any other. At least the people on the Cultural Right know there's problem, even if their proposed solutions are horrifying.
Techno-capitalism has created a society in which most Liberals feel mostly comfortable--it's a social construct that flows from their basic rationalist-materialist ontological presuppositions. But from my pov, this Liberal, Technocapitalist society is now or soon will be in a predicament rather like that of Wile E Coyote: Bamboozled by the trickster Roadrunner, it has run off a cliff, and there, hovering in midair for a few moments, it runs in place until gravity does its thing.
Well, Technocapitalism is the trickster spirit, and the radical Right is the law of gravity. The Right is basically saying that if you want to take society off the cliff, you're forcing us to do our thing--it's the law. We'll crash it. Since Liberals believe that laws are just stuff we make up, they have no capacity to comprehend what's happening. In their minds they should be able to go wherever they want and fulfill every desire unless a Democratic congress passes a law against it. Reality doesn't work that way. Sooner or later it pushes back.
So I argue in Part II that if we're not off the cliff yet, we're on our way. And if we're not off yet, maybe there's a chance we can change course, or even if we're already off it, maybe--maybe--it's not too late to turn back to get a handhold on some root or branch that's extending out to us.
If what I'm saying here is that the radical right is unwittingly performing meta-historical Hegelian negation is too far-fetched or too much of a stretch for the secular Liberal imagination to take seriously, let me suggest another analogy that comes from Freud: We're seeing a collective return of the repressed. [See Note 2] What's been repressed is the spiritually transforming vitality of the originary mythos, and as with all powerful repressed energies, the more persistent and rigid the resistance to them, the more violent and crude their return.
19th Century capitalism and its vulgar materialistic/positivistic ontological imaginary crudely replaced what at its best was profound and sublime manifestation of the Living Real that had its last cultural efflorescence during the Romantic period. So now, for lack of any vital presence of the profound and sublime in our collective life, it makes sense that something even cruder must come to displace what is already so crude. The religious-cultural Right represents the return of repressed Mythos, but in its crudest and most delusional form. If there is a more robust explanation for the emergence Donald Trump and his embrace by the Religious Right in this country, I've not heard it.
And it's not over because the hegemonic Cultural Left still hasn't learned the lesson. Nevertheless, I believe the restoration of a transcendental Mythos dimension that has broad cultural legitimacy and which restores access to the profound and sublime is still a possibility for us. The future of the human depends on it because the machines don't do profound and sublime, not at least in the way I understand what both those words mean.
For any society to truly thrive, it must provide a trellis on which its citizens might grow to realize their best human possibilities. That trellis comprises both vertical and horizontal dimensions, i.e. both Mythos and Logos, and both must be maintained from generation to generation. In the mid-19th century the neglect with which the vertical dimension had been treated by previous generations led to its collapse. And so souls born into such a society with the collapsed vertical only know the horizontal, and they sprawl aimlessly along the ground.
In such a collapsed, flattened society, there is nothing readily available for those who would climb upward, and the whole society suffers from the deprivation of something deeply vital and inspiring. It loses the capacity to be vitalized or inspired by the ancestors who had climbed upward because what they have to report from that higher altitude no longer makes any sense.
Nevertheless, for any healthy society to thrive, there must be both a Logos and Mythos dimension, and a constant, vigilant effort in the cultural sphere to integrate Mythos with Logos, and Logos with Mythos as knowledge on both dimensions expands. A society that has one without the other might survive for a while, but the people in it suffer, and sooner or later the repressed polarity will return guns ablazin'. And when it gets to that point, there's little chance of reconciliation.
I fear that is where we are--at a point beyond reconciliation. But maybe not. Maybe it's not too late to avert disaster. I remain hopeful, but not optimistic.
P.S. In 2010, I wrote a long piece on the TV Series Lost a few weeks before its finale. I used it to riff about its allusions to Dante and to what a postmodern imagination--i.e., a post secular, post-Positivist imaginary--that integrates Mythos and Logos might look like. Near the end I say:
Whatever we think we know at this moment is both true and untrue. We have experiences which are true, but so what? Our interpretation of what they mean is mostly guesswork and belief. There are dimensions upon dimensions of facts, and modern rationalism has validated access only to one dimension, the northern hemisphere dimension [maya], so to say, and its superficiality and materialism is profoundly impoverishing to the imagination and to the life of the soul. Jack's story is the story for the culture as a whole. He's the modern, northern hemisphere rationalist, who has been gradually converted to become a southern hemisphere [awakened] kind of guy. He is the archetype of modern consciousness converted to the postmodern [post-secular] consciousness, and I think the smart money is on his being chosen as Jacob's replacement. If the angelic world is going to hand off responsibility for the future of the earth to someone, he has to be both a man of science and a man of faith.
What does it mean to have postmodern [post-secular] consciousness? We are in a state of mind as fallen beings, especially as fallen moderns, where we are having experiences but almost always missing their meanings, because we haven't the imaginative frame or habits of mind to recognize [what's significant in] them. Whatever we think we understand is engulfed by an infinite sea of all that we don't--and so it always was and will always be. Modern rationalists are the only fools who ever thought otherwise. That's why the sacred texts and great works of art are more true than science. They point us to dimensions of the real that transcend our current impoverished, commonplace understanding of it. Postmodern [post-secular] consciousness creates the possibility of being open to a broader spectrum of the real again. That openness is the transformation we see in Jack.
Note 1: This essay originally appeared on November 22, 2021, under the the title, "The Crisis of the Liberal Order, Part III". I then feared that Dems would do worse than they actually did in the midterms earlier this month. It's pretty clear that enough Independents on Main St. were discerning enough not to do what history would incline them to do, which is vote against a sitting president with low approval ratings in the midterm after his taking the White House. But the country is still split, Trump has announced his candidacy and is still the dominant force in the GOP, and Kevin McCarthy, or someone Trumpier, is likely to be the new Speaker of the House. So everything I wrote then still stands. We're still very much not out of the woods.
Note 2: I'm appropriating the phrase 'return of the repressed' in a way that Freud would not approve, but Jung probably would. He was trained in Freud's very rationalist-materialist horizontal milieu that set very strict taboos regarding the validity of experiences in the mythos dimension. And yet despite his resistance, repressed mythos found a way to break through in Jung. It produced his mythos-oriented depth psychology, which forced his break with Freud, and it produced the mythic symbology of The Red Book, which was derived from his experience of recurrent hypnagogic states. For someone to dismiss those experiences as psychotic is simply to betray the prejudices of someone who operates constrained within a rationalist-materialist ontology.
I should point out that Jungian mythos is set in what I would describe as a more shamanic, i.e., pre-Axial, neighborhood within the Mythos dimension than the post-Axial, transcendental neighborhood to which most of my essays point. Nevertheless, knowledge that derives from experiences in both neighborhoods (and others) are valid and need to be legitimated in the post-secular future that restores the Wisdom/Mythos dimension. The problem for us now is that we don't have a sapiential community to help individuals who have experiences like these to interpret them in such a way that they understand their significance and can learn from them in fruitful ways. To what degree Jung--and other guys like Joseph Campbell and Mircea Eliade--had the spiritual maturity and wisdom to interpret such experiences correctly is open to debate, to say the least. But at least they took such experiences on the vertical axis seriously.
See also "A Geneaology of Our Current Insanity, Part 1".
Saturday, November 26, 2022 at 10:10 AM in Christian Neoplatonism, Coming Discontinuity, Humanist Traditions, Making Sense of Religion, Metahistory, Post Secularism, Techno-capitalism | Permalink | Comments (3)
Liberation to What?
The proper pop-culture reference here is not The Handmaid's Tale or 1984 but The Shawshank Redemption: Americans got a look at what life would be like not in Gilead or Oceania but under Samuel Norton, the corrupt, sadistic, Bible-toting warden, a Pharisaical hypocrite whose scripture needlepoint hid his wall safe.
--Tom Nichols
Nichols' reference is to what most normal Americans fear about the religious right's threat to impose its will in the political sphere, and I think that the Shawshank prison is an apt analogue. But Shawshank is apt in a bigger way for its mythopoesis. On one level it's about how the prison keepers like Norton are just as much prisoners as those behind bars. The main difference is that the prison keepers don't know it and have no desire to escape. They think they're in control, but are completely oblivious of how they themselves are captured by a system that oppresses them perhaps even more than it oppresses their prisoners.
Norton is a perfect metaphor for the traditionalist whose identity is deeply embedded in the empty forms of traditional morality that been invaded and occupied by evil forces that could not be more alien from a true morality. His situation is worse than his prisoners because he feels no need of liberation or the desire to seek for it. He's not locked in as his prisoners are, but he chooses to stay anyway.
But more importantly Shawshank is a story about what true liberation means. I've spent a chunk of time in the last several months talking about how the justice project on the Cultural Left is captured by a post-Marxist Freudianism exemplified by Deleuze and Guattari (D&G) and theorized in their book Anti-Oedipus. (See here here, and here.) I've written about how I think that's a dead-end because it's fundamentally a negative project with nothing inspiring in it to which people can say Yes. One leaves the prison behind for, you know, 'whatever', as in whatever makes you happy, which cannot get beyond the appetitive in a milieu on the Cultural Left in which the transcendent cannot enter into consideration. "Desire" is the big thing for D&G. Desire for what? It doesn't matter.
Liberation in that milieu means mostly to be transgressive of old taboos without getting punished for it. And so Trump is the apotheosis of D&G liberation project, whether they intended it or not. If they argue he's breaking the wrong taboos, who's to say they're wrong? By what standard? But the bottom line here is that whether we're talking about Trump or D&G, the moral frame is too often a movement from Kohlberg's Stage 1 to Stage 2, from the eight-year-old who dutifully follows the rules, to the ten-year-old who realizes the rules are arbitrary and there is nothing fundamentally "good" about them. He realizes he can break the rules if he's clever enough to get away with it. [See Note 1]
Our politics, but more importantly our consensus about moral norms, whether on the Right or Left, doesn't really operate beyond stage 2. Traditionalists on the Right differ from Cosmopolitans on the Cultural Left only in that Traditionalists believe that transgressors ought to be punished for traditionally deviant behavior while Cosmopolitans don't. And the Cosmopolitans of course trade in the old traditionalist taboos for trendy, new, PC ones. Traditionalists allow Trump his transgressive behavior because what really matters is his even more flagrant transgression of PC taboos. He may not be an exemplar of their traditionalist norms, but his flouting of PC taboos with impunity is more important because in doing so he gives them permission to flout them with impunity as well.
All the energy in the D&G liberation project derives from the thrill of moving beyond the old taboos, not in where one arrives once he is freed from them. Nevertheless, D&G are half right: we are acculturated into Oedipal social-psychological constructs that imprison us to the degree that we allow them to unconsciously program us both individually and as a society. We are all prisoners of our acculturation, and we do need to be liberated from it.
So I agree with D&G that our acculturation into oppressive "Oedipal" cultural structures is provisional and is indeed, like Shawshank Prison, a largely an arbitrary social construction designed to reinforce certain power arrangements. But I differ from them in insisting that the provisionality of our social constructions lies in that they are always under challenge by ontonormative transcendentals like Justice and Truth. This is at the heart of Socrates' subversive project but also at the heart of the gospels. The Socratic and Christian projects are both in very similar ways "anti-Oedipal". Christianity when it is truest to itself is always subversive of oppressive social constructs. But neither project is subversive for the sake of subversion, but subversive in the service of the ontonormative, i.e., of a deeper, more truly liberating, transcendental norm.
The Shawshank prison as a social system has no relationship to the ontonormative, but what makes Andy, the Tim Robbins character, different from every other prisoner is not that he's just motivated to get out of an evil, cruel, oppressively destructive system to resume a normal life, but that he is like the man in Plato's cave that walks out into the sunlight where he can experience not just getting out but getting into the Living Real. That's what the beach in Mexico symbolizes, a state of awareness that is truly liberating because more deeply in touch with the Living Real. Leaving prison was not just about getting out, but about getting into something that was more ontonormatively "real".
From my pov, D&G describe a situation that is very much like out of the pan into the fire, from one destructive set of circumstances into another. It's the situation of Red, the Morgan Freeman character, once he's released on parole. He's free, but Is his life significantly better in the world outside? There was at least a kind of comfort and security in the old prison life, but now he's wandering in the wilderness with all the stress and insecurity that come with that. But there's wandering that's purposeful and hopeful, and there's wandering that's just being lost. And Red seems pretty lost there for a while, until there's an intervention, his finding the gift buried in the field left for him by Andy. (See Note 2).
Finding it is his awakening moment, the moment when something truly new and liberating becomes a possibility. He left Egypt when he got out of prison and went out into the wilderness, but now that he's found the treasure buried in the field, he can move to the promised land, a land he never took seriously as as a possibility for himself. Good thing that he had a friend who did.
Getting out of the old, constraining, oppressive structure is important, but where you go after is more important.
+++++++++++++
Note 1: I'm pasting in this summary of Kohlberg's Six Stages from Genealogy Part 4B. Although Kohlberg is a social scientist who eschews any talk about transcendentals and insists his work is just descriptive or phenomenological, it's not hard to extrapolate from his 'description' what I've been calling the 'ontonormative'.
1. Follow the Rules for fear of Punishment. Example: Teacher's pet in elementary school who tattles on those breaking the rules. Rules are arbitrary and have no legitimacy except as how those with power define a regime of rewards and punishments. Example of arrested Level 1 development: the slave in any master-slave relationship. I follow the rules not because they are in any way true or right but because the Master demands it, [and I will be punished if I disobey and am caught].
2. What can I get away with? I'll do what's expected of me to avoid punishment, but will do what I want if I'm clever enough to get away with it. Since the rules have no legitimacy outside of an arbitrary rewards and punishments regime, there is nothing wrong with doing what you want so long as you can avoid punishment. This is a perfectly healthy way kids test boundaries in middle school that is necessary for developing sense of autonomy. Example of arrested Level 2 development: Donald Trump. Rules are for other people. I make my own, and I don't care who gets hurt.
4. Personal relationships matter, but the common good matters more. You can't just break the rules with impunity because it benefits your family and friends. Example: Socrates submits to his execution despite being offered escape by rich friends. He rejects escape because he does not want to undermine the rule of law in Athens, even though he has been unjustly condemned by it. His personal well being and the pain of his loss for his friends is not as important as the larger common good.
5. Some rules are just wrong, and I have to do whatever I can including breaking them at the risk of my own well being and the well being of my family to reform them. Example: Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela, and Gandhi. [The common good is served by breaking these laws, which are fundamentally unjust by an informative standard.]
6. The rules might be just and reflect the ontonormative ideal 99% of the time, but some circumstances require that I break them and suffer the consequences. K's teleological suspension of the ethical. Example: Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the Lutheran pastor executed for his involvement in the failed plot to assassinate Hitler. Murder is [ontonormatively] wrong, but in this instance the rule must be suspended for the greater good.
And it's usually a personal crisis of some sort that forces a choice that will move someone from one level to the next. Socrates is not the moral inferior of Bonhoeffer; it's just that the choices that they were confronted with were different and so required a different order of thinking. And it could be argued that Socrates was condemned for the same reason that MLK was shot and Bonhoeffer hung because each in their different way was perceived as destabilizing the existing social order. So really Socrates' moral mission was enacted on Level 5/6, even if his choice to submit to his execution was made on Level 4.
I should also point out that most of our public moral thinking in politics and business operates on the level of utility, which never goes beyond Levels 1 and 2. The highest level of moral development that you'll see dramatized on TV is Level 3, which is when family and friend loyalty trumps everything else. But most of our popular culture in TV and films operates only on Levels 1 and 2 where Level 2 people think of themselves as uebermenschen and everyone else as Last Men.
I'm sure that's how Trump thinks of himself, as a superman who lives in a realm beyond good and evil because the norms that define good and evil are b.s and have no foundation in the Good, which he has no sense of. He, and other masters of the universe like him in the political and business spheres, confuse the Pre-Conventional with the Post-Conventional.
I think the latter is what Nietzsche really means in his talk about beyond good and evil. Nietzsche was a Post-Conventional moralist who has been appropriated by people to justify their Pre-Conventional behavior. And most of the rest of us can't tell the difference because we have no vertical dimension--no wisdom--that provides criteria with which to evaluate non-conventional thinking and behavior.
Note 2: "Now Again, the Kingdom of Heaven is like a treasure hidden in the field, which a man found, and hid. In his joy, he goes and sells all that he has, and buys that field." —  Matthew 13:44.
The Kingdom of Heaven is a metaphor for the ontonormative regime that lies buried until found in every human heart. The Socratic project was to dig into the hearts of his interlocutors to see if he might unearth it. To have unearthed it is liberation from the constraints of custom and taboo in cases where custom is oppressive or unjust, but can also be restorative of the vitality of customs that were ontonormative in their origins.
See also "Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga".
Tuesday, November 15, 2022 at 12:31 PM in Pop Culture, Post Secularism, Subversive Christianity | Permalink | Comments (0)
Is It Finally the End of Trump?
The front page above is from one of Rupert Murdoch's right-wing propaganda media properties. I don't know that it means much. MAGA is toothpaste that Trump squeezed out of the tube. It was always there, and now that it's out, it ain't goin' back in. If the MAGA Jacksonian base is just as Trumpy now as it ever was--and is there any reason to think it's not?--then Murdoch will get back in line once the base makes clear that they're not ready to move beyond Trump. The same is true for the Republican lawmakers who hate Trump but fear the MAGA base more. They will still have to deal with the base in the primaries, which means that they will still have to kiss the ring of the MAGA King.
Trump is not going away unless he goes to jail. But will the indictments (if they come) that Trump faces be the nails in his coffin, or will they be incitements in MAGA world that will galvanize MAGA in support for Trump the Martyr? I don't know.
And then there's the DeSantis phenomenon. Is he strong enough to push a weakened Trump off the stage? I don't know that either. He doesn't have the "it" factor that Trump has, and if Trump runs head-to head with DeSantis, Trump will make mincemeat out of him. But DeSantis surprised me in his sound trouncing of Crist, a centrist guy whom Floridians voted in as governor before and who at least, unlike DeSantis, has a personality. But it's hard to make the case that Florida is a bellwether. If I were DeSantis and Trump runs, I'd stay out of the race, let Trump go down in flames, then step in to save the party from complete self-immolation.
In the next two years, unless something really surprising happens in the next week, Kevin McCarthy--or someone worse--will become Speaker of the House, and it will be interesting to see if the crazier Jacksonians like Marjorie Taylor Greene set the agenda. If so, expect endless Trump ass-kissing, expect frivolous investigations, and expect a frivolous impeachment. And we'll be hearing more about Hunter Biden than any but the MAGAiest Americans will have a stomach for.
Will enough sane House Republicans vote No on impeachment if it comes to that? Unlikely. We all saw what happened to those who went against the MAGA mob last time. All the Republicans in the House with a spine have either quit or been voted out.
If the crazy Jacksonians set the GOP agenda in the House, that will almost certainly insure that the Dems will take the House back in '24. Is there any reason to believe Republicans are capable of learning the right lessons from the unpopularity of their fanaticism? Doubt it, but things feel very fluid right now, and who really knows?
Along the lines of what I wrote in my election day post, I'm more worried about how irrationally the MAGA world will react if they see that the Blues keep winning elections in ways that someone in their Facebook feed tells them were rigged by Venezuelan communists using Italian satellites in collusion with the American Deep State. With or without Trump the fundamentals haven't changed. And there's no reason to believe the crazies will now become sane because they didn't win the way they thought they should. Just proves they were right all along.
Will the Dems be able to wash the toothpaste down the drain? I don't think so, but they might be able to push it to the edges of the sink. To do so would require that they distance themselves from the Neoliberalism that Clinton and the DLC branded the party with in the '90s. That's a stain that won't be easy to wash out, even if it no longer represents where most rank-and-file Democrats are--or ever have been.
And then there's the cultural piece. Most everyday Dems are like most everyday Republicans. They're normies who want to be compassionate toward people who are suffering. The Dems are more attentive to the suffering of the historically marginalized, and that's a good thing, but they need to find a way to enact their compassion and their thirst for justice without coming across as virtue-signaling, sanctimonious prigs. They won't always have crazy to run against.
Friday, November 11, 2022 at 09:35 AM in American Right, Culture Wars, Trumpism | Permalink | Comments (0)
Some Thoughts on Election Day
Whatever happens this week in the midterm elections, it won't be decisive. The stalemate will continue regardless whether the Red or Blue team gets the upper hand.
America has always had a split personality: One part Jeffersonian/Jacksonian, mostly premodern in its outlook, wanting to stay close to the land and keep to the old ways, hating progress and most anything industrialized. And the other part Hamiltonian and Whiggish--more about economic growth, change, development and as such celebrators of the creative destructive energies of capitalism.
In the first two centuries after the founding, the first dominated in the South and the second the North, but since the 1970s the split is more rural/urban whether in Texas or in Wisconsin, Georgia or Pennsylvania. The Republicans used to be the party of the urban Hamiltonian elites, but over the last thirty years has become the demotic party of rural Jacksonians. And the Dems have become the party of Hamilton, the party of urban, educated elites and Technocapitalists. No wonder an incongruous rap musical about him was so popular in New York.
I've been talking for years about how something has to give, how the basic compromises that held things together must break apart. The framework has always been fragile and the pressure has been building for years, at least since the Bush administration disasters in Iraq and the financial meltdown, but really since Reagan's fusion of Hamiltonian financial elitism with Jacksonian rural grievance that made the disasters of '01, '03, and '08 all but inevitable. And Reagan's Republican Neoliberalism was a reaction against the New Deal, which was a Democratic/Jacksonian reaction to the classical laissez-fair, Republican/Hamiltonian liberalism of the Robber Barons who emerged out of the Civil War, and the Civil War traces back to the North-South compromises made during the founding, which we're still fighting about today in this interminably irresolvable culture war between Hamiltonians and Jacksonians.
Things started breaking apart for the first time in the thirty year run up to the Civil War starting with the Missouri Compromise, and in a similar way they've been breaking apart again in the in the last thirty years starting with the repeal of the Fairness Doctrine during the late Reagan administration, insofar as it provided a media soapbox for the repressed grievances of Middle America through Rush Limbaugh and Fox News. And so here we are in the MAGA Age when it feels as if Humpty Dumpty has fallen off his wall and all the king's horses and all the king' s won't be able to put him together again.
History doesn't repeat itself exactly--the particularities matter--but certain historical themes do. We're not in the 1850s now, but we're in a situation where many of the same patterns are working very similarly. In the decade before the Civil War, the authoritarian, one-party South had advantages that enabled it to win most of the big fights in Congress and the Courts, and the pattern is repeating itself now. It remains to be seen how it will play out this time around.
The mistake the South made in the runup to the Civil War lay in its obsession for control that led to its overreaching. Most prominently The Fugitive Slave Act and the Dred Scott decision crossed a line that forced the North, which was mostly indifferent to slavery so long as it stayed in the South, to push back. The GOP is overreaching similarly now in its obsessive need for control and in that it has made it abundantly clear that it would be quite happy with one-party rule going forward.
Most everyday Americans aren't paying attention, or they see politics rather like sports and so without real-life implications other than the team they root for winning or losing. They can feel a passionate bond with their team, and they really, truly hate it when their team loses, and hate the other team for beating them. But the idea that one team doesn't believe in democracy anymore is for those rooting for the Red team too abstract, not enough for them to break with them, and so the real-world implications of the Red team winning are something they are going to have to feel before they understand them. Lots of Red Team fans won't care about one-party rule so long as their team wins, but most Americans will not be ok with it. They don't want the Red team running things, and they won't stand for it.
The 1850s culminated in a war that killed north of 600K people, and while it's hard to believe that kind of violence is a possibility for us, we're in for some level of increasing violence, especially if the Blue Team finds a way to keep winning. MAGA is not going away peacefully. We're not likely to see a territorial war, but I could see assassinations and terroristic acts that will make the 60s and the McVeigh Oklahoma City bombing seem like the good old days. And it's not inconceivable that a Red block of mostly rural states, for instance, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana, and the Dakotas declare a Democratic administration and Congress illegitimate, and assert their independence.
And what's a Blue President going to do? Send in the army? Not likely for fear of pushing the border states--the more urbanized Red States like Texas, Florida, Georgia--into the secessionist camp. But if he does nothing, then other rural states like Mississippi, Alabama, etc. will go "independent". Then what? Corporations and Wall Street won't care so long as they're left alone. A lot will depend on where the how many MAGA heads are in the army--not the top brass, but MAGA brigadiers, colonels, and captains, the Michael Flynn types, who command the loyalty of the MAGA lower ranks.
It could get messy. There are a lot of unknown unknowns, so to say. Who knows what kind of plotting and collusion between military and local militias is going on even now? Sure secession would be crazy and irrational, but it was in 1861 as well. Lots of smart people then, Lincoln included, thought that saner heads would prevail. They didn't.
On the other hand, If the Red team wins and institutionalizes a nation-wide, one-party system, and continues to stack the courts, it's not as clear to me what the Blue states would do. People will take to the streets, but Blue America has no infrastructure like Red America to support militarized resistance. If there will be any militarized violence it will come from the Red government moving in to suppress the rioting. I think it's likely that we'd become Hungary or Brazil for a while, but not China. It's unlikely that a regime that will be so fundamentally unpopular could last very long, but it could make things miserable for a while. The Hamiltonians won in the 1860s, and the smart money would be on their eventually winning again if a scenario like this unfolds, even if, as then, the early rounds go to the Jeffersonian/Jacksonians.
Ok, sure I'm letting my imagination get the better of me. But neither scenario is as inconceivable today as it was ten years ago. Who knows what things will look like ten years hence? Better to hope and work for the best and yet be prepared for the worst. But one way or the other, it's likely to get violent in some areas of the country, and if so, it's going to be profoundly destabilizing. How that actually plays out, nobody, I least of all, knows. But it's hard to believe that we're just going to muddle through without there being some catastrophe-generated major realignment.
I'd prefer a scenario in which we'd find a way to muddle through without catastrophe. I'd prefer a stalemate to chaos in the political sphere while we wait for a breakthrough in our cultural life along the lines of what I wrote toward the end of my previous post. But it seems that we humans only learn the hard way. But whatever happens in the short run, I don't really trust the Blues or the Reds to get us safely through the next fifty years without a restoration of the wisdom axis in our metaphysical imaginary. That might be a long shot, but in the meanwhile, better the Blues come out winners because pragmatic is always better than fanatic.
Note 1: Jacksonians constitute the MAGA base of the GOP, but GOP elite leadershp--McConnell, McCarthy, Romney, Cheney, Stefanic, etc.--are Neoliberal Hamiltonians who often campaign as Jacksonians to remain in power. This is the coalition of Neoliberal Hamiltonian elites and Jacksonian Reagan Democrats that Reagan forged. Reagan was Barry Goldwater with FDR populist charisma. The Jacksonians (for cultural reasons) and Hamiltonians (for economic reasons) in this GOP fusion share common ground in their both wanting as little interference from the federal government as possible in the private sector. But the populist/elite tension between them is real, and it will be interesting to see if the Hamiltonians in the GOP establishment will retain leadership positions in the House and Senate in coming years. Establishment Republicans are the Party of the One Percent, and its interests simply do not align in the long run with the GOP populist base.
The Democrats, formerly the party of rural and ethnic urban Jacksonians, don't know who they are. Their establishment does not represent the interests of the Hamiltonian One Percent, but of the Hamiltonian top Twenty Percent plus rural and urban Blacks. They have have become resolutely anti-Jacksonian on cultural issues and have become instead a mishmash of Hamiltonian cosmopolitan urban and suburban coastal technocrats and technocapitalists, Blacks, feminists and LGBTQ+ identitarians. As such, the Dems have no real positive uniting vision for an American future. The only thing that unifies them now is in their being the party of anti-MAGA. But, as I've said elsewhere, they won't always have crazy to run against, and there's no future in No.
Since this is the week of the premier of the fifth season of Yellowstone, it's worth a few minutes to show how this Jacksonian/Hamiltonian tension is really the heart of the show. Jacksonians like John Dutton are in conflict with Neoliberal Hamiltonian developers. Dutton votes Republican, but it's a safe bet that his developer enemies vote Republican too. The few Blue team types that show up are usually portrayed as naive flakes from California.
Beth and Jamie Dutton are both comfortable in the Hamiltonian world in a way that the other Dutton Ranch characters are not. Beth is acceptable to her father in a way that Jamie isn't because Beth's loyalties are beyond question in a way that Jamie's are not. Loyalty is the supreme value in the Jacksonian world. Having no loyalties except to your self is beyond contemptible.
Beth, a true loyalist, submits her Hamiltonian skills to Jacksonian ends; Jamie is untrustworthy because his east-coast elite education has inured him to the Neoliberal Hamiltonian order. He's no longer truly a Jacksonian, and his pursuing a career in the Hamiltonian world is, when push comes to shove, more important to him than defending his family's Jacksonian heritage. He protests that he's loyal, but his loyalty is for hire and can be bought by the highest bidder. He went to Harvard, after all, a place where you learn to be a soulless, Neoliberal, meritocratic, careerist for whom the only value is what the market determines. Ask Larry Summers.
Tuesday, November 08, 2022 at 09:40 AM in Am. History & Culture, American Right, American Whigs | Permalink | Comments (4)
Liberalism + Whatever
There are moments of transition and turmoil when liberalism appears to stand alone, and liberals sometimes confuse these moments for an aspirational norm. But nobody except Hugh Hefner, Gordon Gekko and a few devotees of the old A.C.L.U. can bear to live for very long under conditions of pure liberalism. Instead, the norm for successful societies and would-be society builders is liberalism-plus: liberalism plus nationalism (as in 19th-century Europe or Ukraine today), liberalism plus intense ethnic homogeneity (the Scandinavian model, now showing signs of strain), liberalism plus mainline Protestantism (the old American tradition), liberalism plus therapeutic spirituality (the mode of American culture since the 1970s), liberalism plus social justice progressivism (the mode of today's cultural left), etc., etc. Something must be added, some ghost needs to inhabit the machine, or else society begins to resemble the portraits painted by liberalism's enemies — a realm of atomized, unhappy consumers, creatures of self-interest whose time horizons for those interests are always a month rather than a decade, Lockean individuals moving in a miserable herd.
--Ross Douthat
There are many Liberalisms from the hard, classic Libertarianism of the Koch Brothers and the Cato Institute to the soft Liberal Niceness of bleeding-heart Dems, but Liberalism, whether left- or right-leaning, is the basic cultural operating system that runs American society, and as such it is essentially the ideological justification for the material conditions that Capitalism has created. And whatever the material benefits produced by Capitalism, this ideology in turn justifies its sociopathies in all its iterations from Industrial Capitalism to Consumer Capitalism to what I've been calling Technocapitalism, the thing that is warping our minds and flattening our souls as our humanity becomes more deeply disembodied and simulacral.
So it's not surprising that Liberalism is under attack from both the Left and the Right, but mostly from the Right--whether it's the Claremonsters like Michael Anton and John Eastman, the Federalists like John Daniel Davidson, or the Integralists like Sohrab Ahmari and Adrian Vermeule, all of whom in their different ways are proposing illiberalism as an antidote. The post-structuralist, Identitarian cultural Left is not against Liberalism so much as it's become its reductio ad absurdum. Is there any possibility for a healthy Progressivism in a post-liberal world? I think so. More on that below.
So both Republicans and Democrats are Liberals, and both parties assume its Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, no matter what the individual religious or spiritual beliefs of its members. Michael Novak's theo/neocon nonsense notwithstanding, the phrase Christian Capitalism is an oxymoron. American Democrats' biggest blind spot is its assumption that Capitalist political economies are the best and really the only healthy possibility. At the same time, neither party denies that Capitalist political economies are in their essence sharklike--predatory, impersonal, cruel, vicious, untameable. The difference between them lies in that the Democrats think the shark is tameable and the Republicans don't.
So Republicans have accommodated themselves to its fundamental cruelty. They justify a politics of cruelty by asserting that it's the natural order, and it's better to be predators than prey--and if you're prey, it's your own damn fault. Pack a gun, grab what you can, and defend what's yours once you get it. The cowboy patriarch John Dutton is exemplary in this respect. And so is someone like Trump, although he and his family resemble more the Roy family in Succession. [See Note 1] They are all barbarian warlords who understand how the "real" world works, and that the law and religion are for slaves and prey, not for the master predators they fancy themselves.
Republicans, the "Conservative" Liberals, are probably right that they're in this sense more realistic than Democrats about how capitalism and the society it has created really works. They see Liberal Democrats as feckless in their thinking that Capitalism has a benign face, and just plain silly insofar as Dems try to be Bruce, the fish-friendly shark in Finding Nemo. You know, "Fish are friends, not food." Cute idea, but unless someone like St. Francis is his trainer, a ridiculous one. The problem with this kind of "liberal" Liberal is that they are too comfortable with Capitalism and too complacent about its fundamental nihilism and so too easily find ways to to live with it because for the most part they benefit from its predations.
So implied in the Douthat epigraph above is that that Liberalism is a cultural operating system that anybody who feels the emptiness of its nihilism finds ways to hyphenate it with what he calls "liberalism plus"--Liberalism plus nationalism, Liberalism plus mainline Protestantism, etc. The "plus" is what gives Liberalism the meaning that it can't supply on its own. But in the end all these "pluses" are simply remoras clinging to the shark's underbelly. And whatever, for instance, might have been a genuine spiritual energy in mainstream Protestantism for a while had at best a constraining effect on the monster, but Protestantism, especially in its Calvinist forms, was always in an uneasy tension with the beast its theology cleared the way for. Eventually the monster ate its maker, and now the shark roams free. We call the shark's unconstrained freedom since the Reagan era Neoliberalism.
Democrats feel guilty about how they benefit from Capitalism in a way the Republicans do not, and Republicans, as a way to deal with their own repressed guilt, project their contempt for Democrats as weakness, gutlessness, or a fundamental lack of manliness. They are thought of by Red America as overly educated hollow men like Jamie Dutton. And as for the underclass, life is hard, they assert, and we do the weak no good to make it easier for them. Better to brand them like a cow or make them shovel out the stables, then see if they have what it takes to become a real man. And so we get these absurd, cringey manliness performances from people who have no center, empty suits like Don Jr., Josh Hawley, and Marco Rubio. And yet they are embraced by Red America despite the utter inauthenticity of their schtick. They're phonies, but they're our phonies, declares Red America.
But Liberal elites on the cultural Left, rather than to find relief from their guilt by focussing their energies by working to remedy the class and wealth disparities from which they derive their privilege, find relief in a performative priggishness. Is there real compassion and thirst for Justice that motivates those in the woke social justice warrior project on the Secular Left? For some, of course, yes, and I don't question their sincerity. But the ethos that frames this project is more the heir of Foucault and Deleuze than Gandhi and King. Does this cultural Left mindset allow for the possibility of Justice as a transcendental ideal? Clearly not. Whether these folks have read Foucault and Deleuze or not, the mental framework that shapes the SJW project derives from a postmodern commitment to historicism that makes any talk of transcendentals incomprehensible.
So my criticism of the post-Marxist Left, i.e., the Left that has given up on class war for culture war, is that its identitarian politics leads to a form of groundless metaphysical lostness that gives meaning and purpose to its warriors only so long as one is engaged in the liberating project to abolish taboos. But once you run out of taboos, then what? This project is only good at saying No but has nothing inspiring to which it can say Yes.
Justice as transcendental ideal also often requires saying No to custom and taboo, but the Socratic project [See Note 2] required a saying No to clear the way for something deeper and richer to emerge to which one could say Yes. Cultural Left elites today are heirs of the Sophists, not Socrates. The distinction was significant then, and it is now. There are a lot of young idealists on the Cultural Left who sincerely believe they are warriors for Justice, but in fact, they are warriors for Nothing, i.e., warriors in the service of a negative project that clears a space for nothing except appetite.
Is there an alternative? Yes, the one pointed to by Socrates--and all the prophets and philosophers of the Axial Turn. I argue in a preliminary way in my genealogy series for the restoration of a transcendental dimension to the broader cultural imaginary. While the illiberal traditionalists horrify me, I understand where they're coming from. I think their diagnosis of the fundamental emptiness or flatness of Liberalism is mostly correct. Nevertheless, while After the Future's project has been to accept parts of the conservative critique of Liberalism, it seeks a solution that aligns with a Left politics, i.e., a progressive solution that embraces ontonormativity as a foundational experience/concept. [See Note 3]
The project on the illiberal, reactionary Right derives from an assertion of ontonormativity divorced from an intuition of it as participating in the Living Real. They focus on the empty form, not the life that gave the form its shape. And so without the life, the empty form too often becomes filled by dark, chthonic impulses that serve ends that are quite the opposite of what ontonormativity would inspire. They justify the illiberalism of their project because they believe American society needs an intervention, and that because they know better, they must rescue society from its nihilism and restore Justice and Cosmic Order to a society that has lost any sense of either. But, in fact, they don't know any better.
And yet they persuade themselves that if people don't understand it now, they'll nevertheless benefit from their tough-love intervention. Eventually those who resist will come to appreciate the benefits of having been "educated" by the new regime. So they use this appropriation of transcendental idealism to justify their illiberalism, and are either ignorant of or don't care that in the past similar justifications have legitimated the most horrifying violence. It derives its energies not from the Living Real, but from an old, anal, control-freaky impulse that leads to the auto da fe and pogrom.
I agree that the only real solution to the nihilistic crisis that is at the heart of contemporary Liberalism is a religious one, but I have argued here for years that that the fundamental choice that lies before us as a society is not between religion and secularism but between good religion and bad. Politics as religion is always bad religion because politics--and economic striving, as well--when they become the primary source of meaning in people's lives, become parodies of religion, and as such a form of idolatry. One's participation in politics and the economy should be shaped by one's religious commitments, but they should never be substitutes for them.
I do not consider myself a Liberal, but I do think of myself as a Progressive in the late-19th-, early-20th-Century sense, more with the Social Gospel/W. J. Bryan strain than with the Deweyan/statist strain. I'm a communitarian/subsidiarist who nevertheless recognizes that the technocratic state is a necessity. I have no desire to destroy it but see the task as to vigilantly hold it accountable and to use its power as a tool to solve problems only it is capable to solve in the service of a democratically determined common good. Without a broadly shared cultural commitment to an inspiring ideal of the common good, no productive, healthy Progressive Left project can get traction. Material interests alone cannot provide a sufficient basis for a vigorous Progressivism that might actually enact Justice.
As suggested above, I reject as a dead end the poststructuralist historicism that plays such a large role in shaping the post-Marxist politics of the contemporary Left. An effective Left politics must derive inspiration from transcendentals like Justice, Truth, Goodness, Beauty that are the source of all ontonormativity. These are not intellectual abstractions but energizing sources of felt meaning. A truly vigorous Left politics becomes a possibility only when the broader culture becomes capable of imagining a possible future in which these provide a solidarity-creating energy for its accomplishment. And I'd argue that a true Left solidarity cannot come into being so long as Rationalist Materialism provides the dominant metaphysical imaginary for American society.
So those on the secular Left who talk about the need for solidarity are quite right--nothing changes without it. But that kind of healthy, constructive, Left solidarity is playing no significant role on the American political landscape right now. We got a whiff of it in Bernie's campaigns, but the last time we really saw it was in the Civil Rights movement before the assassination of King. King, for all his flaws, was someone through whom Justice as a transcendental ideal shone. All Americans of good will felt it, were moved by it, and changed by it. But King was killed and reaction set in, and not long after with the ascension of Reagan, Neoliberalism and its inherent nihilism becomes the elite consensus for both the Republican and Democrat establishments.
So after Reagan, a "Liberalism" that dominates both GOP and Dem elites becomes too entrenched an ideology to have any truck with Justice and a solidarity movement to instantiate it. Let the Invisible Hand do its thing. Goodbye labor unions, good by multi-racial solidarity, goodbye any hope on the Left for real Justice, goodbye any sense that there's such a thing as 'society', much less a common good. The hardcore Neoliberals consolidate their gains as the isolating, enervating, anti-common good, individualistic world they always wanted becomes realized by the proliferation of its solipsizing Technocapitalist produce. The Left retreats to fight cultural issues in despair of fighting structural power and economic issues. Nothing pleases Neoliberal elites more--their opponents are divided in their squabbling over abortion and guns, and thus easily subdued.
The historicist Secular Left has no robust answer for this because it has no real way of standing outside of it. If we've learned nothing else in the last few decades, some things other than material interests are important for the creation of solidarity. The Right has an easier job of creating it because its goals are served by drawing upon the primitive resentments and fears that have always been the primary animator of the mob. The mob is a form of counterfeit solidarity, and the best on the Left know that riding the tiger produces nothing good. Some other energies must be drawn upon to create a sense of solidarity, but they're not readily available except in small groups here and there.
So how is my critique of Liberalism different from the one illiberalism makes? I do not think that Liberalism has created a world that is worthy of our hatred. It has, though, created a world that is inadequate for true human flourishing. It is incomplete, not evil. For all its talk of freedom, Liberalism and its rationalist materialist imaginary imposes constraints on the spirit and closes off more possibilities than it opens up. The cure is not to destroy Liberalism but rather to subordinate what's good in it to something else more deeply humanizing. Science and critical thinking, pluralism and free speech, freedom of religion, democracy, and a conception of fundamental natural rights are good gifts Liberalism bequeaths to us. They must be retained and defended while realizing that they must inevitably be subsumed into a higher cultural synthesis in which the Wisdom dimension is restored.
All I am asking of any Liberal reading this is to suspend disbelief, to treat what I'm saying as a thought experiment. I am asking you to try to step back from the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary that shapes all our ways of thinking whether we have religious commitments or not. We can surely say about Liberalism that it worked for a while, that it gave us a spectacular means to create material bounty. But it exacted significant costs, and we are no longer in a position to pay them. The cost was a loss of wisdom in our public life and of our capacity even to care that we lost it.
Insofar as people care about wisdom in their private life, it has at best indirect public impacts. But the fact is that wisdom never has a seat at the table in our political economy. Utility and expediency are the only criteria, and both are useless in solving the deeper problem, which is one of metaphysical imagination. The cost therefore is not just that we lack wisdom in planning for the future, but that without it we are we are spinning meaninglessly at a time when we need our wits about us and firm ground upon which to plant our feet if we are to face what's coming without being washed away.
The inadequacy of Liberalism is apparent to everyone but the 20% or so of educated elites who have benefited most from it and who are the primary constituency that the Democratic Party now serves. They cannot understand how the regime that has benefited them so much could be hated so intensely by those whom Sam Francis called years ago Middle American Radicals, the Jacksonians the GOP recruited during the Reagan era but mostly neglected until the Tea Party and Trump. The gifts of Liberalism are not valued by the Middle American Radicals or the Integralists and others on the Right because they see Liberalism as the shark that has chewed up their world and everything they hold sacred. They're not wrong. And elite Liberals do not endear themselves to these folks when they tell them to get over it and move on.
So if you've stuck with me this far, I'm likely to lose you in what follows. I have no expectation that what I'm trying to do here would be well received either by those who are deeply captured by a rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary or by one that is rigidly dogmatic or fundamentalistic in his religious beliefs. I speak to those who care about the human prospect and share with me the sense of urgency about what is happening to us as a civilization. And I speak to those who are open to think through things in a way that doesn't fit neatly into any established categories, but nevertheless sees their thinking as part of a long tradition that dates back to the Axial revolution. There's lots of 'new' thinking out there about our collective life together, but the only thinking that I can take seriously has to be grounded in some understanding of the transcendent. Transcendence should not be surrendered to the Right.
I'm arguing for something that is, to say the least, not obvious--especially to people who lean Left, who are my primary audience. I see myself as a dog that's barking up a tree. I smell something up there and I think I know what it is, but it's hidden among the branches and leaves, so I'm not sure quite what it looks like. But there's something there, and we need to see it and understand it better.
I am among those who believe that any new political project lies downstream from the emergence of a new cultural project. This new cultural project requires bringing what's up in that tree to ground. What that means for us going forward is outlined in the first five or six parts of my Geneaology Series, and if what I'm writing here makes any sense to you, I encourage you to at least read Part 1 and Part 2.
Here's an excerpt from Part 2 "Restoring the Vertical Dimension to the Metaphysical Imaginary of the West" to suggest what I'm barking about--
A metaphysical imaginary can be judged as effective to the degree that it works in providing a meaning framework for a society on both vertical and horizontal dimensions. Let's call the horizontal dimension Logos and the vertical dimension Mythos. Mythos operates on the dimension of depth, with the deep meaning of things; Logos works on the horizontal dimension, on the everyday surfaces of things. Science and what might be described as everyday common sense operate on the Logos axis. Religion, poetry, music, and other art forms work on the vertical axis, and if they play a vital cultural role, they connect a society to the Living Real. Being connected to the Living Real is the only true cure for alienation.
In Part 1, I talked about how we are facing the imminent death or disappearance of culture. By that I meant that it's what inevitably happens to any society that has lost the vertical dimension that connects it to the Living Real. No Living Real, no culture. What we have now within the rationalist-materialist metaphysical imaginary is not "culture" as it has been experienced by humanity throughout most of its history, but a simulacra of culture, a virtual culture, a parody of culture.
A full, effective metaphysical imaginary integrates knowledge from both the horizontal and vertical dimensions, from both Logos and Mythos. Our contemporary civilizational crisis lies in that Mythos no longer plays a vital cultural role. There are still artists and deeply spiritual people, but they do not play a vital role in shaping the culture's metaphysical imaginary. They are subsumed into the materialist commodifying ethos of contemporary consumer capitalism. [Art and Religion become optional, a matter of preference, a consumer choice, entertainments. Neither offers robust counterbalance to the pervasive Rationalist Materialism.]
There is real knowledge found on both horizontal and vertical dimensions that derives from real experiences, but the criteria for the legitimacy of knowledge on either dimension is very different. The criteria for knowledge on the horizontal dimension is empirical, objective factuality; the criteria on the vertical is wisdom. Factuality is relatively easy to establish, but wisdom is rare, and some people have more of it than others. It needs to be sustained by a tradition. Because it's unverifiable except to those who have some measure of wisdom, its legitimacy became questionable to all those who had only a little measure of it. And so inevitably it led to the current crisis we are undergoing that is directly related to the loss of the vertical dimension playing a role in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West. This is a crisis that has been a long time coming, most acutely since the middle of the 19th Century. But we're living now with the consequences. We have become a society that lacks any capacity for making judgments that are wise. We make decisions only on the basis of expediency and utility, i.e., by criteria that exist only on the horizontal or Logos dimension.
Mythos, if understood as operating on the vertical dimension, is compatible with science, which operates on the horizontal. Science gets out over its skis when it tries to be Mythos. Religion gets out over its when it tries to be Logos. Nevertheless, a robust future metaphysical imaginary must find a way to satisfactorily integrate the knowledge that comes from both the vertical and the horizontal dimensions, but in such a way that the legitimacy of the knowledge gained on either dimension is respected by the other on its own terms. A healthy, integrated human being as well as a healthy, integrated society "knows" in both ways. Fideism and Scientism must be rejected as equally inadequate in their respective reductionisms. [See Note 4 for criteria to evaluate effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary.]
So why is it no longer possible for us to sustain a culture-wide metaphysical imaginary that integrates both Logos and Mythos? In Part 1, I argued that because we are acculturated into a Rationalist-Materialist metaphysical imaginary, it is extraordinarily difficult even for genuinely religious people, people whose individual lives have a vital vertical dimension, to feel that the mythos that grounds their spiritual beliefs has anything to do with the everyday world in which they live.
Religious people respond in four basic ways to this split between what their religion tells them is true and the reality of their everyday world:
They separate their lives into public and private spheres. In private life they go to church and practice their religion with friends and family, but in public their lives are ruled by the law of the shark, and they, too, become sharks if they have any ambition.
There are, of course, lots of religious or spiritual people who live decent lives in this public sphere, but because they are not driven by ambition, they only rarely rise to leadership positions. They choose careers as artisans or in service professions. But even so, unless they own their own businesses, they must work in organizations--schools, hospitals, government bureaucracies--whose ethos is shaped by rationalist-materialist assumptions and that are often run by ambitious sharks.
They retreat into quietism--monasticism, Anabaptist separatism, Dreher's Benedict Option, off-the-grid cults, etc. It's possible to live an integrated life in such bubble worlds, but living in them requires the abdication of responsibility for what happens in the rest of the world.
They seek power in the political sphere to order the society into a theocracy in which they will no longer feel alienated even if almost everyone else will. This was Calvin's project in Geneva, and is now the Catholic Integralist and Evangelical Dominionist project. It leads to illiberalism and oppression.
This is pretty much reality in North Atlantic societies as most people experience it, and few are really, truly happily thriving in it. The restoration of the vertical axis to the metaphysical imaginary cannot be forced in the way the fourth group wants. As soon as it's forced, it loses any claims to wisdom or spiritual authority. Nevertheless, the restoration of a wisdom dimension is desirable, and it's more likely to happen if people are prepared for it, look for it, hope for it--and live it in their own lives as best they are able. My Genealogy Series is an attempt to trace how the wisdom dimension functioned in shaping the metaphysical imaginary of the West until it didn't, and to make the case for its retrieval in a way that makes sense in a globally pluralistic world.
I do not see "wisdom" as being as exclusively derived from any one religious or philosophical tradition. I see religious and philosophical traditions deriving their legitimacy by their effectiveness in providing the broader culture access to the Living Real. No religious or philosophical tradition is doing that for North Atlantic societies in this moment, and, I'm arguing, the lack of such a sapiential tradition with broad cultural legitimacy is at the heart of the crisis we are living through. A lot depends on whether we will be able to find a healthy way to resolve this crisis.
The task as I see it is not to force anything on anybody but rather to ring an alarm that we are in a profound meaning crisis, and that we need to find some level of consensus on the vertical dimension. Any solution to this problem must be bottom-up rather than top-down. No sane person wants some Mandarin class to arise to impose its "knowing better" on everyone else. Or another way of saying this is that we should expect no solutions from our current Mandarins in the universities, media and other cultural institutions, including the church's managerial class. If something 'real' arises, they will, after some initial resistance, adapt.
How might this happen? I really don't know the specifics but suspect it will emerge in a way that is both continuous with Liberalism and discontinuous with it. How did Buddhism happen? How did Taoism happen? How did Christianity happen? How did is Islam happen? The energies of the Living Real have a way of breaking through from time to time in a way that is recognized by the broader culture, and it does it in a way that is both continuous and discontinuous. Christianity, for instance, is both continuous with and discontinuous with Judaism. I have every expectation that something like these historical breakthroughs will happen again. How and when I have no idea, but we should hope for it, expect it.
If it happens it won't be about believing a new doctrine so much as it will be about restoring a felt connection to the Living Real. No felt connection, no breakthrough. And when such a breakthrough occurs, it's something that wise Buddhists, Christians, Jews, Muslims, other religionists, and all people of good will will recognize as cognate with their own wisdom traditions. Doctrine--right teaching--follows from the experience of connection.
The Living Real is accessible by all. Those of us who are Christians have an account regarding how such access became possible, but accepting that account is no prerequisite for access to it. What matters is that one hears the song and is inspired to sing it. It doesn't matter what language you sing it in if we all are hearing the same melody, the melody of Justice. Hearing this melody is the prerequisite for the solidarity that is necessary for any real progress.
So this is not an intellectual enterprise. It's not something you can think yourself to--and it's certainly not something a minority can force on a majority in the political sphere. It's about hearing the song. Lots of people hear it even now, but maybe only faintly because of all the noise that drowns it out, and because so few others who do hear it are singing it with confidence and gusto.
Question: But what to do if we don't hear it, or until we hear it?
Answer: The best we can. We respond to what's given to us and do what's called for. We work for Justice as best we can know and feel it. And sometimes that means just resisting as best we can the siren songs that lure us and our fellow citizens toward shipwreck.
In the short run, perhaps all many of us can do is say, No, that's not the song. I don't know what it is, but that's not it. That's the Socratic daemon working in us. Better to wait and trust that something true and new will break through. So while the temptation is for many compelling, the worst thing anyone can do is surrender to the siren song for want of anything better.
We are in that respect like Odysseus on the trackless sea or the ancient Israelites wandering in the wilderness. We must keep moving even if we don't know when we'll eventually arrive. And that means we must resist Circe's enchantment or the longing to return to the fleshpots of Egypt. These are mythopoetic archetypes that speak to us in this moment. I realize that this might sound like a rationale for complacency, but it isn't. It requires fortitude and hope beyond hope. It is not just about waiting passively because there will come a moment when we must act decisively, but there has to be a chance for success, even if a small one. Wisdom is knowing when the chance is presented. Only a fool expects his roses to bloom in January, but we must be alert, vigilant, and prepared for the first signs of Spring.
In a post last month I wrote that I was looking for an entertainment alternative to the nihilism that passes for prestige TV, I read for the first time Tolkien's Silmarillion, re-read the LOTR trilogy, and re-watched the Jackson films. I was surprised by how they engaged and moved me. And I've been wondering since why it works in a way differently from something like Game of Thrones, which after a while I found unwatchable. I think the key is that for all GOT's fantastical elements, there is no Mythos or vertical dimension in it. There's not a whiff of transcendence in it. It's just the modern secular world transposed into one where dragons and zombies and magic are real, but where true goodness and true wisdom are not. It's Succession in medieval garb. Some find such entertainments interesting and enjoyable. Some find Tarantino's films entertaining for the same reason. I find them suffocating.
In Tolkien's legendarium, the whole point is to imagine a world where the vertical Mythos or Wisdom dimension is integrated with the Logos dimension. It's an adventure fantasy and an entertainment on one level, but it strives and largely succeeds to create a metaphysical imaginary with a Mythos dimension that provides an analogue or metaphor for what we all long for but can't bring ourselves to believe in because of our Rationalist-Materialist cultural programming.
So let me finish this long piece on a Tolkienian note. A few paragraphs above I referenced the mythopoesis of Homer and Exodus as a source of needed wisdom in this moment. Let me now reference Tolkien and his central character, Aragorn. "Not all those who wander are lost", he says. He knows this from his experience wandering anonymously throughout all Middle Earth for decades until finally his decisive moment arrives.
He goes by many names, but his real name, the name his mother and wife called him by, was Estel, which means hope beyond hope. Tolkien's entire legendarium is a meditation on fate and freedom, patience and fortitude, and of the centrality of hope when there seems to be no "Logos" for it. What is it in us that makes us capable of such a thing? Our capacity for living on the vertical, or mythos dimension, the dimension of depth and wisdom.
So to sum up, Liberalism Plus, i.e., the various Whatevers subordinated to "Liberalism" that Douthat talks about, can no longer work, but going forward the gifts of Liberalism must to be retained in a way that is subordinated to a living, developing, dynamic Wisdom Tradition. We don't have that now, but until we do, the bad guys and their seductive song of destruction must be resisted lest they steer us all to shipwreck .
Note 1: Some of the references in this essay assume you have some familiarity with Yellowstone, the most popular (and important?) TV show in America right now but more in Red than in Blue America. (11/10/22: See "How Taylor Sheridan Created America's Most Popular TV Show" in The Atlantic.) I think every Liberal in Blue America should watch it to better understand a moral world that is largely incomprehensible unless you know people in Red America. I don't know that it qualifies as 'prestige' TV (too many contrived plot-driven implausibilities), but it's got some good lines here and there and some compelling characters. For instance Angela Blue Thunder, a ruthless warrior princess with a fancy law degree, tells Chairman Rainwater in the Season 3 finale--
"They make their rules to be broken. The United States has broken every rule it has ever made. From its first treaty with France to every treaty with us, to their last treaty with Iran. They only hold others to their rules. They make war when they want, where they want, they take what they want, and then they make rules to keep you from taking it back. They make rules for the slave and they make rules for the masters."
Not the kind of sentiment you expect to hear expressed streaming on Peacock. But that's how the Duttons run their ranch and it's how the U.S.--whether the Blues or Reds are in office--runs the world. And it belies the Liberal fetishization of 'rule of law', and it's why so much piety about rule of law from Liberals sounds so empty these days in Red America. What does it have to do with the way the world really works? It's just a tool that the powerful use to their own advantage to sustain their hold on power and to punish their enemies. It's used to keep the lower orders in line, but rarely if ever against elites in the power structure.
Are they wrong? Yes and no. The rule of law has always been at best aspirational in most of U.S. history. And at best it's been like a fragile truce competing parties agree to abide by until it's no longer in their interests to do so. And it's a truce that the MAGA world no longer feels works in its interests. So for them it's all-out war now.
In the meanwhile the distance between what people feel is right based on custom and what is enacted law results in a contempt for the law and the kind of vigilantism that is rampant in Yellowstone or that we saw on J6. The law when it's just just based on one faction's opinion is substanceless and evanescent for opposing factions, a temporary inconvenience that can and will be reversed when they take power. Because we live in a society that has no sapiential tradition, the rule of law has no deeply felt legitimacy because no one sees the lawmakers as people worthy of respect--with a few exceptions, they are just careerist hacks with no claim even to even a minimum of rudimentary wisdom.
Succession and Yellowstone are very similar in their being about two "mob bosses" and their families, but despite their similarities the Succession world is profoundly repugnant to those in the Yellowstone world. What's different about these two worlds is more significant than what's similar, and to understand why is to understand a lot about the clash between Red and Blue America. It's really about the clash between Jacksonians and Hamiltonians. The show doesn't justify all the violence; it just accepts it as reality, and if violence is just the way it is, who would you rather win--the Duttons or the Roys?
The difference lies in that none of the principal characters as written in Succession has a soul and so redemption isn't a possibility any of them. Winning is the best it gets for anybody, so it's the only thing that matters. But you don't care who wins, or at least I don't. Goodness doesn't exist, so there is no possibility for a good choice--there are only the clever, ruthless, winning choices—or stupid, cringey, losing choices.
The principal characters in Yellowstone are really bad people, but goodness is a possibility in the Yellowstone world in a way it's not in the Succession world. The souls in Yellowstone are on the road to damnation and loathsome when you first meet them--particularly John, Beth, Rip, and Jamie. But at least they have souls, and you find yourself, despite the horrible things they've done, hoping for their redemption.
Most people who live in Blue America are not typified by the people who inhabit Succession, but that's how Red America thinks about Blue elites. They can't trust them because they don't believe in anything except a project to justify moral license and appetite. People in Red America act in egregiously licentious, appetitive ways, but they know it's wrong. And yes, our leaders in Red America might be ruthlessly violent, but they justify it in the service of preserving something sacred that they believe in. What does Blue America believe that goes beyond some callow, meritocratic, careerist idea of upward mobility? That's why Jamie Dutton is such a pariah in the Yellowstone world. He'd be a perfect fit in the Roy family. He's a careerist who only cares about what's good for him. And Blue America asks, "What's wrong with that?"
Red America knows the difference between good and evil, and the protagonists in Yellowstone believe they are in a continuous struggle against evil and its agents, but in order to prevail against evil, they must be meaner than evil. They also know the difference between having a soul and not having one, and Red Americans see the ethos of Blue America as so soulless that those who live in it have become incapable of making such distinctions.
They are wrong to think so. I live in Blue America and almost everyone I know has a decency and lives by a deeply felt, if little understood, moral code. But Blue Americans--especially the most powerful, affluent, and educated among them--should perhaps think a little about what's valid in Red America's perception of it. What do Blue elites really believe in? When push comes to shove, are their deepest commitments really all that different from the commitments of the Roy family?
I doubt that the Yellowstone writer Taylor Sheridan is going to go there, but it's not impossible in in a sequel show called 2043 that Tate --the child of both White America and Native America and heir to the Yellowstone Ranch--returns the land to the Tribe and succeeds Rainwater (or whoever) as chief/chairman. Unlikely, but not inconceivable in the more complex moral world Yellowstone explores. Justice is a possibility in that world even if it rarely shines in it.
Note 2: In Genealogy Part 3 "Axiality and the Socratic Elenchus" I write--
A wise teacher must first discover for himself what the truth is, but she can't tell you what you must discover for yourself. But she can help you see why x, y, and z are not it. She can help you strip away wrongheadedness to create a space for the Living Real to reveal itself to you, to allow you to learn what you can do on your own while at the same time warning you against dead ends and bad habits that will make the task more difficult or to take longer. And once you've cleared away all that is wrongheaded, in the empty space thus created, aka, the Socratic aporia, it becomes possible for the Living Real to disclose itself to you. This is as true now as it was 2400 years ago. Heidegger's 'Aletheia' owes more to Plato and Socrates than I'm aware he gave them credit for. The Socratic elenchus makes no sense if it's just a method for debunking conventional wisdom and abstractly defining certain concepts.
Well, in part it was for Socrates a debunking exercise, and that's what got him into trouble with the citizens of Athens. But Socrates would be no better than the Sophists if he were only a debunker. The elenchus makes sense only if it is a way to prepare the soul for a revelation, a theophany, an encounter with, or better, a "remembering" of the Truth that discloses itself as sacred knowledge, the Living Real, on the vertical dimension.
See also Geneaolgy Part 8 "Plato--Habitus as Heuristic"
Note 3: "Ontonormativity" is a word I first came across in John Vervaeke's YouTube series entitled Awakening from the Meaning Crisis. I like his description of it as how we are often inspired--or awakened--by something that can only be described as transcendental, something that breaks into the everyday world that makes us experience ourselves and the world as failing to live up to its best possibilities. Such experiences inspire us to believe that we as individuals and the society we live in can do better. This can lead to naive idealism, but it needn't do so. Like most things on the vertical dimension, there are immature and mature versions of it.
I spend a lot of time talking about Vervaeke in Parts 4A,4B, 5, and 6 of my Genealogy Series. In Part 6 I make the case why I find Vervaeke's insistence on understanding ontonormativity within a naturalistic framework inadequate. So I am appropriating the term in way that is congenial to my Transcendentalism that is different from Vevaeke's use of the term. My idea of ontonormativity bears some relationship to the Eastern idea of the Tao or the Western idea of Natural Law, but not in a way that is primarily intellectualized or systematized. By that I mean that the ontonormative is discerned by the supple or wise heart. It's grounded in a kind of inspired or awakened experience that breaks through our acculturation from a transcendent source.
Note 4: In Genealogy Part 5--scroll down to the second half of the essay--I lay out and develop in a preliminary way four criteria--coherency, scope, richness, and adaptability--for evaluating the effectiveness of a society's metaphysical imaginary:
(2) how broad the scope of its knowledge on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions,
(3) how both the scope and coherence of its knowledge adds a spiritual and emotional richness, meaning, and purpose to human experience, and
(4) how adaptable the imaginary is to changes in human experience of reality [and growth of knowledge] on both the horizontal and vertical dimensions.
...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 derives from our expanding on both dimensions, and the ability to adapt as that expansion produces knowledge not yet recognized.
Monday, October 24, 2022 at 10:15 AM in American Left, American Right, Christian Neoplatonism, Coming Discontinuity, Culture Wars, Democrats, Libertarians, Mythos, Pop Culture, Post Secularism, Social Democracy, Techno-capitalism, Trumpism, Wealth Distribution | Permalink | Comments (0)
MAGA Republicans Are Not Hypocrites...
...they are Nihilists
You can't be a hypocrite if you don't have foundational values to betray, and Republicans in thrall to MAGA are proving that they only value will to power, which is the will toward illusion and chaos. They would nominate and vote for Jeffrey Dahmer if they thought he would get them a senate majority. They will say anything and do anything to achieve that end. It's no more complicated than that. They might justify this by telling themselves that as soon as they obtain complete power they'll impose their god-and-nation values on the American political system.
And so some decent moral-traditionalist Republicans are vulnerable to be seduced by the god-and-nation rhetoric because they don't understand that "god" is a placeholder symbol for Chaotic Power, and "nation" is a placeholder symbol for the Mob, and the Mob is always a conduit for the darkest and most evil impulses humans are capable of. The Mob might think that its actions are justified by the god in whose name it acts, but that god is an idol, a fabrication, a delusional mist, an egregore. And the god-and-nation rhetoric is a fog of delusions that will at some point dissipate to reveal the evil, i.e., the destructive chaos, i.e, the 'Nihil' that it enshrouds.
So I'm tired of Liberal pundits pointing to MAGA Republican hypocrisy as if somehow to do so was to shame them into some form of moral consistency, to get their actions aligned with what they profess. This is an exercise in sanctimonious futility. It gives MAGA Republicans more credit for having a moral compass than they deserve. What they profess has nothing to do with their deepest beliefs because, in fact, they believe in Nothing.
These people seduced by MAGA are not themselves evil, but to the degree that they are swept up by the Mob, they become ciphers, empty vessels for evil. I still retain hope that there is enough substantive decency and discernment in moral-traditionalist Americans that they will resist this seduction into idolatry. If enough don't, Nihilism will likely win in the short run.
The good news is that Nihilism always loses in the end. Nothing cannot sustain itself on Nothing. The Living Real will reassert itself. It just seems that we must learn this over and over again the hard way.
BTW, Liberals and the Cultural Left are vulnerable to be seduced by the other prominent contemporary form of Nihilism, which is Neoliberalism. Neoliberals don't run in a mob because they control all most of the institutional power, including the McConnell wing of the GOP establishment. The GOP has become essentially the party of Neoliberal elite Nihilists trying to get in front of the MAGA Nihilist parade. While Nihilism and will to power play a role in the Democratic Party, the Dems are not completely captured by it in the way that the GOP is. The GOP is bereft of good faith, whereas there is still plenty of good faith and basic decency among important Democratic leaders, among whom I'd list Joe Biden, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Sherrod Brown, AOC, Pramila Jayapal (my rep), Chris Murphy, and several more. Agree with them or disagree with them, they are good-faith actors in a way that GOP leaders are not. Most non-Nihilist Republicans have either quit or been voted out, and if they remain in office, unless they are governors or mayors, their influence is inconsequential.
Saturday, October 08, 2022 at 10:21 AM in American Right, Good & Evil, Trumpism | Permalink | Comments (0)
Sincerely Bad Religion
I wrote a post last week about Tolkien, fantasy, and escape that attempted to make a relatively nuanced argument that fantasy escape can be a healthy thing if one is truly imagining a world that represents a reality that is more real than the prison in which we are currently confined. It is healthy if, for instance, it inspires or wakes us up to aspire to a nobility of spirit that we have been unaware of or need reminding of. So some fantasies are qualitatively better than others if what is imagined is truly ennobling in some way. Vulgar fantasies of wealth and fame and power, not so much.
Tolkien's romanticism imagines a world before the twilight of the gods, i.e., before it became disenchanted. It is suffused with nostalgia in that sense, and there is no future in nostalgia. But it is a world in which many of its characters have a nobility of spirit that is no longer found in our most important public figures, and that needn't be the case. There are ways in which figures of the past can be represented that inspire us to find ways to retrieve it in a contemporary key. That's why we read the classics--or should. There is no going native in the past, but we have much to learn from the ancestors, who knew many things that we have forgotten.
And because we live in a secular, disenchanted world does not mean that we must always do so. I believe that in the long run the human project is to find the interior spiritual resources to renew the face of the earth, to create such a world if enough humans could find within themselves the nobility of spirit that could do it. But such a project cannot be accomplished by people who might want such an outcome but haven't the spiritual maturity to effect it, and such people are dangerously naive if they think that if they dominate in the political sphere they can restore what has been lost or forgotten by fiat.
And so it was depressing but not surprising to learn in this piece in the NY Times about the Italian far Right's Giorgia Meloni's assertion that Tolkien's LOTR is sacred text:
But in Italy, "The Lord of the Rings" has for a half-century been a central pillar upon which descendants of post-Fascism reconstructed a hard-right identity, looking to a traditionalist mythic age for symbols, heroes and creation myths free of Fascist taboos.
"I think that Tolkien could say better than us what conservatives believe in," said Ms. Meloni, 45. More than just her favorite book series, "The Lord of the Rings" was also a sacred text. "I don't consider 'The Lord of the Rings' fantasy," she said.
"The genre of fantasy in Italy has always been cultivated by the right," said Umberto Croppi, a former member of the Italian Social Movement who is now the director of a national association of public and private agencies in Italy's culture industry. He said that the two worlds shared a "vision of spirituality against materialism, a metaphysical vision of life against the forms of the modern world."
Tolkienism, as I'm sure Tolkien would be the first to tell you, is bad religion. But this speaks to what I've been writing about here for quite some time now, which is that people are inherently religious, and that in a secular society they will adopt bad religion rather than none. Cosmopolitan Liberalism represents None, and in the U.S. the Democrats have become dominated by the mindset of cosmopolitan Liberalism, and so in public perception they are the party of None. And so since the traditional churches have worked so hard to undermine their spiritual authority and offer no robust healthy alternative, bad religions proliferate like weeds. I belong to the party of None because I don't think politics should be about metaphysics, but about solving practical problems that effect the common good. But I recognize that in a time when the churches have largely failed to deliver good religion, people will grab onto any kind of bad religion. And politics--whether on the Right or the Left--is always bad religion when it become an arena for achieving one's metaphysical fantasies.
Another example of this was rather poignantly represented in this week's Paola Ramos's Field Report in which she meets with Republican Mayra Flores and her Evangelical supporters. Flores is interesting because she is a Republican from the religious right who flipped a traditionally Latino-dominated district from blue to red in a special election earlier this year. What makes this show poignant is Flores's sincerity, her basic decency, and her naïveté. She's is in way over her head for failing to understand how her personal story is being manipulated by fascistic forces that I'm sure she would disavow if she understood better what's really happening.
One of the basic ideas through Ramos's show is how many Latinos who habitually voted Democratic have come to discover that Democrats simply don't represent their values, which they define as God, family, country. The Republican Party, in their view of it, comes much closer to representing those conservative values than the Democratic Party, so why do they just mindlessly vote Democrat? That's very powerful question to pose to Latinos who have voted for Democrats not out of conviction but out of habit. There are a lot of Latinos in Texas and elsewhere right now that are being confronted with that question, and what answer do the Democrats have for them? That they're not as mean as Republicans on immigration?
That is very weak tea compared to the need so many people feel for their politics to align with their deepest metaphysical longings. That's what explains both Meloni in Italy and Flores in Texas--there is this deep desire for a more meaningful politics, a politics that is not just about fixing bridges and paying medical bills, a politics that aligns the world down here with the world up there--"thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven", a longing that seeks a cure for the disease of secular disenchantment. I understand that longing, but I also understand how easily it is demagogued. Demagogues understand these longings, and they understand to to channel what should be the focus of religion into a place where they don't belong, which is politics. It is one thing for one's religious commitment to inform his or her political choices; it's another to force those religious commitments onto others in the political sphere.
Conservatives have always been very alert to the dangers of immanentizing the eschaton when the imagined eschaton is Leftish, but less so when it is Rightish. The inevitable result, whether Left or Right, is a cure that is worse than the disease. Politics should not be where you find your life's meaning. In a pluralistic society, meaning comes from diverse cultural sources--religions, philosophies, customs, traditions--that must be respected in their diversity. The political sphere should only be concerned with finding consensus about solving practical problems that affect us all as Americans. Whether or not you agree with the solutions that Democrats propose, they are serious about solving problems in a way that the GOP just isn't. The question going forward is whether the Democrats' utilitarianism, which is proper for politics, can compete with the GOP's metaphysical project, which is proper for religion but not for politics.
Flores's pastor is a key figure in her political success. Whether or not he is a demagogue, I don't know. But it's clear that he's very ambitious--and has adopted as his slogan the Trumpian "Make America Godly Again". I'm sure in his own mind he sincerely believes he's ambitious for God, not for himself. But so do all religious fanatics believe that. Hopefully that fanaticism will be repellant to most non-evangelical Latinos in Texas, but who knows? Again there's a naïveté here that is both touching and frightening. And what's frightening is that in Flores's success, the GOP sees a strategy for winning over a traditional Democratic constituency, and the Democrats as they are currently constituted have no effective antidote, at least none that I'm aware of.
UPDATE 9/10/22: It turns out that Mayra Flores got whooped in the regular election for her seat 53% to her 44%. Fun while it lasted.
Saturday, September 24, 2022 at 09:17 AM in Culture Wars, Democrats, Making Sense of Religion, Politics | Permalink | Comments (1)
Moral Parity
The former president recognized that the fact of an investigation was far more important than the results. It worked with the Benghazi investigation, about which House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy was accidentally honest, and in the investigation into Hillary Clinton's emails, which didn't produce charges but did hobble her presidential campaign. By the time Trump was extorting Volodymyr Zelensky by withholding defense supplies in 2019, all Trump wanted was for Ukraine to announce an investigation into Hunter Biden. He didn't even care whether it actually happened, because the talking point is what he needed.
Each successive new gambit offers the tantalizing prospect that the crooked behavior everyone has seen on public display from Trump over the past seven years is somehow actually the product of nefarious plotting by his opponents. Now Trump is on to a new battle over his alleged absconding with presidential records, including highly sensitive information, to Mar-a-Lago. Once again, he has claims of hoaxes. Once again, they don't hold water. Yet hope springs eternal among MAGA backers, well fertilized by manure spread by the former president. Trump's vindication can never be failed; it can only be delayed.
The whole premise of MAGA is that Democrats are so corrupt, so evil, so beyond the moral pale that whatever wild accusations are made about Democrats' crimes only scratch the surface of the dark horror that lies below. Just wait--it will all come out. It's just a matter of time before it all comes to light.
"Sure," those on the religious right argue, "Trump might have crossed the line here and there, but whatever he's done is nothing compared to what these demon-possessed Democrats have done." That the evidence supports the opposite, that more corrupt Republicans get caught than Democrats by a fairly wide margin does not matter because, they think, the Dems are just cleverer in avoiding getting caught or the Liberal Media in collusion with the Deep State insures that they don't.
The first step toward moral maturity is owning your projections, or as the gospel puts it, "Why do you look at the speck in your brother's eye, but fail to notice the beam in your own eye?" That's really at the heart of the problem for those on the religious right in this country. They think they are morally righteous when in fact they haven't even taken most basic steps toward achieving it. Matthew goes on: "You hypocrite! First take the beam out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to remove the speck from your brother's eye."
Seeing clearly is not something that happens much in MAGA world because they are so easily manipulated to see what is not there. MAGA folks are too obsessed with seeing evil in the Other. And so they have not the moral maturity or aptitude to recognize that that they see the Other not as they are but through the lens of their own unowned wickedness.
I was talking about Tolkien in my previous post and about how 'fantasy' often finds a way to urgently illuminate truths in a way that plain prose or realistic fiction cannot. This passage from The Silmarillion is about how the fallen Valar Melkor works with ordinary, decent folk who lack the discernment that comes with moral maturity--
Long was he at work, and slow at first and barren was his labour. But he that sows lies in the end shall not lack of a harvest, and soon he may rest from toil indeed while others reap and sow in his stead. Ever Melkor found some ears that would heed him, and some tongues that would enlarge what they had heard; and his lies passed from friend to friend, as secrets of which the knowledge proves the teller wise. Bitterly did the Noldor atone for the folly of their open ears in the days that followed after.
When he saw that many leaned towards him, Melkor would often walk among them, and amid his fair words others were woven, so subtly that many who heard them believed in recollection that they arose from their own thought. Visions he would conjure in their hearts of the mighty realms that they could have ruled at their own will, in power and freedom. . . .
J.R.R Tolkien, The Silmarillion, p. 69
The manipulation of the religious right, Qanon, and others in MAGA world by Melkorian lies is as old as the hills. Liberals, of course, are not immune from such manipulation, but their vulnerabilities lie in their seduction by the material abundance produced by technocapitalism. "Let the Invisible Hand do its thing," whispers Melkor. "Don't interfere or you'll make things worse. Leave it to the Hand. All shall be free; all shall be well." And way too many Liberals in the cultural and political spheres kneel to the Hand.
The delusions of the Cultural Right might lead to the end of democracy in the short term, but the delusions of the Cultural Left might lead to the end of humanity in the long term. So in this sense there is moral parity: the delusions and moral immaturity of both work hand in hand to paralyze the collective will to find a cure for what most deeply ails us. But in order to be able to deal with the long-term threat, we need a vibrant, healthy, democratic open society--a society that is open to allow remedies to arise bottom up, and which has the discernment to know which remedies are delusional and which might actually work.
Thursday, September 15, 2022 at 09:47 AM in American Left, American Right, Current Affairs, Deep State, Democrats, Good & Evil, Trumpism | Permalink | Comments (0)
Fantasy and Escape: Thoughts on Tolkien's Quest Saga
Instead of watching TV in the evenings this summer, which for lack of energy in my evenings has been the only thing I have felt capable of, I decided to listen to Lord of the Rings and The Silmarilion on Audible. Listening requires less energy than reading, and the narrators are quite good. I was not aware when I did so that Amazon was planning a new series focusing on Galadriel in the Second Age. I was not aware that Queen Elizabeth would die, and England would once again have a king. So both events present an opportunity to reflect a little about my reading LOTR, with an aside to the Parzival or Grail story, in the light of what's really going on in our obsessive fantasies concerning royalty and nobility.
I first read Tolkien's trilogy when I was in high school, and the last time I read it was in the late 90s to my elementary-school-age son. But I haven't thought much about the trilogy or the Tolkien legendarium since, and I have to say that I have been strangely moved in this most recent reading of it in ways that I was not in earlier readings. There are depths in this story that I missed before, and it's clearer to me now why this "fantasy" has such cultural resonance.
I think that what I have found moving in Tolkien's saga relates what in some fictional literature, i.e., some works of the imagination that enable us to transcend the everyday world in such a way as to see it in a broader, potentially more liberating context. That's not something I experience in my watching of, for instance, Game of Thrones, which I gave up on in Season Two because I found it to be an oppressively small, vulgar, predictable world, despite its fantastical elements and its overwrought attempts to titillate and shock. It's fantasy, but it's not escape in the way, as we'll see below, Tolkien thought about it.
I'll come back to that, but first a thought experiment. Whether or not you believe in angels, let's "fantasize" what it might be like to have an angelic consciousness. If we could look at the world with the non-judgmental dispassionate eyes of an angel, what would we see? By dispassionate, I don't mean unconcerned, I mean without fear and desire. And I don't mean by it without feeling, but rather I mean with a deep compassion for the suffering of humans who are so ignorant about what is best for them. By non-judgmental I don't mean non-discriminating but rather hope without expectation. Angels, in my imagination of them, hope that humans will make the right choices but have no expectation that they will, and are rather surprised when they do. When it happens they rejoice.
In my fantasy picture of angels I see them as having the long view, as beings who don't have politics, as beings who see the people in one faction being driven by passions as foolish and ignorant as the passions of any other group. In fact, such a being has no interest in any kind of group mind, or moral systems or principles but only in the individual and his or her choices in a particular moment to do what is called for in that moment.
And dispassionate does not mean that angels don't suffer, because their own destinies, as I think of them, are deeply intertwined with human choices. I think of their invovlvement in human affairs as rather like the court of the Fisher King in the Parzival story. Parzival first meets the ailing Fisher King, and the whole court is gathered there because there is a chance that Parzival might ask the key question, and if he does, the King will be healed.
Because this is a fairy story, everybody in the court has what I've been describing as angelic consciousness. Everybody understands what's at stake except Parzival. But nobody can tell Parzival what to do. He has to know from within his own resources what he must do, and because he has not yet developed those resources, he cannot do what the situation requires of him. It's not that he lacks good will; it's that he's too ignorant, too naive, too immature--and so he fails, and the King goes on suffering. It's a remarkable scene and a remarkable metaphor that captures both the significance of human choices and how hard it is for humans to know what the right ones are. And how others--even angelic beings--suffer from human failures.
It's such a beautiful scene, too, because when you first read it, you wonder how can so much depend on the choice of such a bumpkin, someone so green, so ignorant, so naive? Because by thinking so we are brought into an encounter with our own greenness, ignorance, and naïveté. We are given a parable of what is at stake in our own lives and how all the hosts of heaven are silent witnesses to whether we will be able to become capable of knowing what is called for. And so the point of the story is not that Parzival should just do the right thing--they could have just told him what it was--but that he must become the kind of person who knows what the right thing is and then find the will to do it.
So back to The Fellowship of the Ring: I was reminded of this scene from the Parzival story when reading the scene about the Council of Elrond in Rivendell when it is decided that the Ring must be destroyed. While everyone is arguing about who should or should not be the ring bearer, the wisest in the group, Elrond and Gandalf, know who alone can do it, but they, like the court of the Fisher King, must wait without importunity to see if he knows what to do and has the courage to do it. Unlike Parzival, Frodo can and does.
He must find from within his own interior resources the ability to choose freely to step forward, to do what is called for. He must choose it, and so much depends on his choice, and he does. And both the book and the film do a good job of establishing what a significant and unexpected moment this is. No one would have expected this of a halfling bumpkin like Frodo, but something in him rises to the occasion and he accepts the burden of the Ring and the all-but-impossible quest to destroy it. No one would have blamed him if he chose not to, and yet so much depended on his ability to understand that this task was his and his alone.
Parzival, unlike Frodo, fails. But he fails from ignorance not lack of courage. His confrontation shortly after with Cundrie, a being rather like one of the Greek Furies or Erinyes, who rips him up and down, left and right for being such an ignorant dolt. He becomes aware of what was at stake and how he failed, and aware also that the moment has passed, that it's not possible for him to easily correct it--but that his life mission is now to find a way to correct it. It's this idea of mission or quest that Parzival shares with Frodo, and it's only in fairy or fantasy stories that the true nature of this mission can be imagined and explored.
This is his moment when Parzival loses his innocence, when he realizes the consequences of his failure, and is wracked with remorse. How could he have been so stupid? And yet he was, and so we all are. This is the "Fall". This is his waking up to the human condition, to his ignorance. He was always 'fallen', but now he knows it, and that's an important first step. It's the movement from Kierkegaard's Aesthetic to the Ethical. He realizes now that he has a task, a mission and that he must commit his life to it.
Those who remain imprisoned in the Aesthetic continue to stumble ignorantly through life, and they do so until they are confronted with their own ignorance and stupidity, and come to feel an urgent need to undertake a quest to find a remedy. To be in despair is to be in ignorance of the need to undertake this quest. And so his quest to find the Grail Castle begins in earnest. This is the real moment of choice, as was Frodo's choice in Rivendell to find his way to Mt. Orodruin, but undertaking the quest is also to undertake a path fraught with dangers, seductions, dead-ends, and other obstacles one must overcome. But the first step is to choose to undertake the quest, which first requires that one become a person who is capable of making the right choice--not because someone tells you that this is the right choice, but because you know it to be.
The point is, then, that in matters of the spirit, whether we are sophisticated atheists or religious true believers, we are all alike. Regardless of our bloodline or cultural inheritance, we are all bumpkins until we awake to our need to undertake the lifelong quest for the Grail. In Tolkien's moral world there is no magisterium or rabbinate, but there are the wise and the foolish. There are those--Elves, Men, Dwarves, and even Hobbits--who were seduced or fooled by Melkor or later Sauron, and there are those who resist. Freanor in the First Age fails, Ar-Pharazon fails in the Second Age--and the in Third Age Smeagol fails. Bilbo is sorely tested, but resists. Saruman fails and refuses to repent, Boromir fails and repents, but Faramir resists; Galadriel is sorely tempted but resists and passes the test, and Denethor fails and refuses repentance.
There are always good reasons to do the wrong thing, and to pass the test requires not just that you do the right thing, but that you have developed an interior capacity to know when you are bullshitting yourself. Gandalf and Aragorn seem never to be tempted because they are exemplars in their different ways of characters who are fully formed. They are incapable of bullshitting themselves. They have well developed capacities for moral cognition; they have simply to discern and act. There is never a question whether they will have the courage and will to act, only whether they will know what the right thing to do is, and they usually do. They are all prodigies of the Ethical in their resoluteness in that once a choice or promise has been made to be unwavering in fulfilling it no matter the price, no matter how hopeless, no matter how compelling the reasons might be to justify quitting. This is true nobility of spirit. And this is why The Lord of the Rings has such broad cultural resonance--it provides for the culture what the culture longs for but can no longer find in its most prominent personalities: true nobility of spirit.
Aragorn, like Parzival, has blood nobility that is hidden from the world, and both spend years wandering in obscurity before finally reaching the symbolic culmination of their quests when their inner, now fully achieved nobility is finally recognized in their coronation. Having nobility in the blood is not what makes you noble; rather it's a potential (in all of us) that is achieved only after a lifetime of wandering, learning, and having been tested. How many people today imagine the trajectory of their lives in that way? I think they should, and maybe that requires taking fairy stories more seriously.
These are old-fashioned virtues only rarely celebrated in contemporary film and fiction. The noblest contemporary protagonists are motivated by a willingness to sacrifice themselves out of loyalty to friends, family, a cause, but there is rarely a character that is motivated by a feeling for this quest to realize his or her inner nobility. The contemporary aesthetic requires that interesting characters be driven by unconscious compulsions of one kind or another, and the character arc focuses on a deconstruction of what might appear at first glance noble in the protagonists but revealed in fact to be Daddy or Mommy issues or insecurities, need for control, vengeance, or just garden-variety egoism.
That's fine so far as it goes because it's generally true about all of us--it's like Parzival's awakening encounter with Cundrie, but it is a wasted moment unless it becomes the first step on the quest. So while there's an implied sense in modern storytelling that there is a right and a wrong choice that confronts the protagonist, there's very little sense about what the stakes are for advancing or regressing the larger story arc of a human life. There's little sense that choices have consequences, not just in the immediate context, but in the larger one that is everyone's life quest story. There's little sense that making the right or the wrong decision is a test, a step in a much longer quest story that has a goal or telos.
Maybe that's not the job of "realistic" fiction, but maybe that's why we need fairy stories. They are fantasies, but not necessarily escapist. Tolkien was quite aware that "escapism" was a criticism that was directed toward his stories, and he rejected it completely. R.J. Reilly addresses this in his Romantic Religion--
Tolkien will not admit that Escape is a bad thing. The word, he thinks, has fallen into disrepute because its users too often confuse "the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter."
Why should a man be scorned, if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it.
Thus Escape from Hitler's Reich is not desertion, it is really rebellion, a refusal to be identified with Hitler. And, Tolkien thinks, this is often the nature of Escape. A man may refuse to write about the world in which he lives not out of cowardice (which is the usual accusation) but because to write about it is in a sense to accept it. (pp. 206-07)
That is, to accept it as the only possible reality, which is to adopt an attitude of complacency and despair. And that's why Game of Thrones isn't escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. It's just a fantastical representation of the jail we all live in and assumes there is no escape from. And the point I'm trying to make here is that escape in this healthy sense is only a possibility for those who can "imagine" and be inspired by a life that exists as a possibility outside the prison walls.
We remain imprisoned so long as we accept the prison as the only reality and the life within it as the only thing that can be legitimately discussed. Game of Thrones's most fantastical elements are horrors like dragons and white walkers. There are horrors like that too in Tolkien, but there is also Lorien and Rivendell and the Undying Lands in the true West. Fantasy for the modern sensibility passes sophisticated critical scrutiny so long as its horrifying, but it goes too far when it strives to represent liberation as beauty and nobility of spirit. Then it becomes escapist in the most pejorative sense.
The age of blood nobility has faded by the end of the Third Age in Middle Earth, and it is given a temporary stay with the return of Isildur's heir to the throne in Gondor, but the story is really about this other kind of nobility that is born from within--the kind that Frodo, the suffering servant, exemplifies. He is the true hero of the story, and all the other more obvious exemplars of blood nobility--Galadriel, Mithrandir, Aragorn, Faramir--recognize this. Their time is over; the time for another kind of nobility is nigh in the Fourth Age, one that no longer comes with the blood, but is achieved. This is Tolkien's foundational metaphor in his remarkable twilight-of-the-gods saga. After the passing of the elves to the West, the time of blood nobility wanes, and thereafter true nobility of spirit is something one must quest for.
So now in England we have the passing of a noble of the blood--a blood line that traces back over a thousand years according to some sources, and now her heir. And what do we have really? A very ordinary woman and a very ordinary man onto whom the world has projected its longing for another kind of nobility, a nobility of the spirit. Many commentators have pointed out that Elizabeth was shrewd enough to keep her mouth shut and to play the role in such a way that the fantasy or mystique could be maintained, but that's all it was, really. An escapist illusion, but not escapist in the healthy Tolkien sense. She seems to have been a nice enough old girl, but an exemplar of true nobility of spirit? I don't think so. And now Charles?
And why this week has there been nothing on the news except this story of the passing of the queen and the return of a king? Because the world longs to be inspired by a manifestation of true nobility of spirit. And because such nobility is nowhere to be found in our public figures, we cannot control our need to fetishize certain personalities that have the trappings of nobility while they haven't the substance of it. For that we must look elsewhere--to fictional characters, the Frodos, Aragorns, and Parzivals, the unpretentious folk who are more than the world perceives them to be--and more than they themselves perceive themselves to be--but who undertake the quest to become what the angels hope for them to become and rejoice when they do.
Monday, September 12, 2022 at 12:54 PM in Art & Literature, Good & Evil, Mythos, Pop Culture, Television | Permalink | Comments (0)
Quote of the Day: Charlie Sykes
When Trump says that he could shoot someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue without losing the support of the MAGA base, Trump is, of course marveling at his own popularity. But he is also admitting his deeply felt disdain for the rubes and marks who have fallen into his hands. Trump's contempt for his supporters is shared by others in his orbit, including Bannon, who know that they can monetize their lies and scams by fleecing their most loyal backers.
They are counting on their marks to: (1) continue to buy the con and pony up the cash, (2) not realize that they are being lied to and ripped off.
As David Frum has repeatedly noted, victims of scams are often angrier at those who point out the ruse than at the fraudsters themselves.
But as hopeless as it might seem, somebody needs to tell them. (Source)
There's no point in trying to tell them because they're convinced they understand some deep truth that others don't. They sincerely believe they've taken the red pill, not realizing that, in fact. they have taken the blue one.
Friday, September 09, 2022 at 07:52 AM in Trumpism | Permalink | Comments (0)
A Word about Biden's Philadelphia Speech
Republicans were not really Mr. Biden's target audience in any case. For all his expressed hopes of bringing the country together, the president and his team have come to accept that 40 percent of Americans are beyond his reach, unwilling to listen. And so Mr. Biden was speaking not to them but to the 81 million Americans who formed the coalition of Democrats, independents and disaffected Republicans he assembled two years ago, hoping to bring them out for his favored congressional candidates. (Source)
Again, only 27% of Americans self identify as Republicans, and some of them are Never Trumpers. The Independents that voted for Trump did so before J6 and Mar-a-Lago, and maybe by now it's finally dawned on them what's he's really about.
But the problem is not just Trump but the GOP that has embraced him, excuses his crimes, and caters to his crackpot MAGA base. The GOP is no longer the party of traditional values, national security, good sense, fiscal restraint, and law and order, but the party of extremists, conspiracy theory lunatics, religious fanatics, proto-fascists, white supremacists, and obeisant personality cultists. These folks are no longer on the fringes of the party, but dominate it. So there is no redeeming the party except by rejecting it at the polls, and that's up to to Independents and Never-Trump Republicans to whom Biden was speaking last night. I'm feeling more optimistic that they are finally capable of understanding the important role that they play in shaping the American future, and that lies with holding their noses and voting Democrat--or just not voting at all.
Friday, September 02, 2022 at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)