Glimmers: The Call of a New Way            
                            

 Abstract: In the genre of “pointings” or “glimmers,” here are ten short reflections on/of a life-way that is emerging in our time. They can help us in the choice to move beyond the modern way of abstraction, separation, and control, and toward a way oriented to relationship, appreciation, and quality. Each reflection identifies elements of choice as to thought, action, and embodiment.

Keywords: Relational, worldview, cancel culture, pandemic, embodiment, pluralistic, practice

The new way of being that is necessary for our survival as anything we would want to call “human” is emerging, breaking through, being ever more present in us and through us. I have tried to describe this new way before, as relational, process-oriented, immanent, dialogical, democratic, pluralistic…. But it is elusive, like the Dao: “the Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.”

And, in contrast with our belief and doctrine-loving Western ancestors, description or the having of a life-interpretation, is only part of the overall job of embodiment. Hence emphasis on practice and the priority of ethics in post-traditional times.

To say that description/interpretation of the new way is “process-oriented” is to say that this function of my life matures over time as I in my holistic and embodied life mature, and continue to grow beyond “adulthood” as we had known it before. This is to identify a kind of process that assumes “immanence,” the immediate presence of life’s most vital energy – to which I am more or less attuned. It is to say “relational” as well, the particular kind of relationship we point to when we say “dialogue” or “democracy,” the kind in which encounter with the other is opportunity rather than threat. And all of the above indicates that the new lifeway is also “pluralistic,” meaning that the new worldview affirms the fact that contingencies of person, time, and place mean there will be many different articulations of the new worldview, each limited and most with merits. Given the ineffability of the ultimate (and accepting the limitations of our own positions), it is possible to say these things without slipping into the swamp of relativism.

All of this makes life more complicated spiritually and culturally than it was in the traditional period of human history. There can be no orthodoxy, no catholicity like before, no established ritual, method or priesthood. Contemporary fundamentalist and ideological attempts to “get back” to before, when things were thought to be good, only lead to fascism, as desperate and misplaced attempts to locate and coax out the vital energy.

I want to write about these things in a way that is faithful to Socrates’ most basic advice in “The Apology” (Plato, “Apology,” 38a):

I tell you that to let no day pass without discussing goodness and all the other subjects about which you hear me talking and examining both myself and others is really the very best thing a man [sic] can do, and that a life without this sort of examination is not worth living.

What I’m proposing with this writing project is “glimmers,” presentation of flickers, glimpses, or glints of light that come to us from time to time in the mid-zone between theory and practice, on the field of our actual living. I am trying to talk about—and from – those flashes of insight as to what I should do and think. They don’t come via linear logic, memorization of doctrine, or patriarchal assertion, but rather as intuition or an acute perception.

During the pandemic my work has consisted of two projects. I refined and contextualized Overcoming America / America Overcoming for a second, “from pandemic” edition, and I wrote short pieces – in something I once called “Pandemic Diary.” The latter wound up as piles of scribbles, here and there around my workspace. Now that the book, with its 2021 additions, is out of my hands, I will go through those piles, “… let[ting] no day pass,” in the attempt to identify what I take to be genuine “glimmers” – as distinct from more flash in the pan drama of my own ego. Then I want to write something from the experiential center of them, something which might be helpful in our shared vocation of emergence, literally the birthing of a new culture.

Worldview

There is a lot of talk about “worldview.” It arises out of the fairly recent widespread consciousness of culture, its operations and choices. Up to our time this consciousness has been largely negative, critical of a worldview and culture that has been racist, sexist, and ecologically suicidal. We have more or less learned the critique of the European-American Cartesian culture of mechanism, isolated individualism, abstraction, misogyny, competition, a culture steeped in exceptionalism and a sense of God-given privilege legitimating colonialization and exploitation of the rest of the world.

It is against the backdrop of this awareness, and the mostly nihilistic reactions arising out of it, that some of us are experiencing a new and profoundly life-affirming worldview. I took a pass at describing it a few paragraphs ago.

I think it is important to repeat that “worldview” as description or theory is only one part of the broader assignment to embody a new way of living. I emphasize this because so much of the contemporary discussion of worldview reflects unwittingly the old Western prejudice of “epistemology prior,” assuming that if we can get things straight at the level of thought, then correct action will follow automatically. On top of this problem, there is the ancient assumption – as part of the worldview behind “worldview” – that we need to agree at the level of metaphysics or religion in order to be able to work together, to cooperate, and enjoy each other’s presence.

So the thing I want to keep in mind is that a worldview is not just an abstract and settled metaphysic or “philosophy,” like a piece of pottery we can place on the mantel, though it is that in one aspect, an artifact. As Karl Marx and behavioral therapy have discovered, a “worldview” is inevitably also expressive of material conditions, including the actions we are allowed to take. The relationship between worldview and action in the adventure of embodiment, then, runs both ways. From this standpoint, our worldview is the interdependent set of values and principles by which we live, as well as the actions we take on behalf of what we know is right. — (I recall one of my greatest teachers, Joseph Sittler, remarking casually in class one day: “Mankind [sic] creates the truth he must when he is confronted with the deed he ought.”)

Seeing into the Woods

One of the few things I appreciate about winter is that you can see into the woods. Without leaves on the trees, we can see more deeply than in the lusher seasons. Like looking into water when the lake surface goes calm, we can gaze upon geographical features, evidences of human activity, and even the mysterious origin of it all.

To draw the full analogy, in Pandemic I can see more deeply into the actual tissues of my life, see which practices and relationships are vital and which are unhealthy. The problem of the “brain fog” associated with pandemic provides a good example. People speak as if this is a problem that is new to pandemic, whereas looking a little more deeply we see that many great minds have observed the machine speed rather than human speed of modern life, and that as a consequence, humans are just chronically overloaded, overwhelmed, driven into the fog of scattered consciousness. Not fully ourselves.

This kind of seeing can be depressing to be sure. There are days of dreadfulness blended into late-winter dreariness, huge ecological uncertainty, and the incredulity of Trump followers who have severed themselves from whatever shared sense of sanity remained in our deeply eroded world, to live in some “alternative,” post-apocalyptic universe.

But, again, some of us experience the beauty of the world like never before, the gift quality of life itself in its ordinary moments. There is a sense of gratitude in the air, a light which, in the words of Emily Dickinson, “trembles in” (Williams, 1987, p. 209). I, like many of us, seek to respond with the words and deeds available to me.

A New Nobility

Actually, there are many who have recognized the emergence of a broader and deeper appreciation of life in the world, a new vision of human maturity and development, one which comes strangely out of the very disasters we have endured. I’ll name three of them as recommended companions and mentors in challenging times:

Karl Jaspers, in his magnificent 1930 book, Man in the Modern Age, speaks of the chaos and insincerity that inevitably overtake a society dominated by technique. He identifies “personal ties” as “the only source of a new and trustworthy objectivity:” “True nobility is not found in an isolated being. It exists in the interlinkage of independent human beings” (Jaspers, 1957, p. 210). Further, the independent human or “self-existent self” arises from our encounter with the Nothingness which is strangely both our origin and the degraded condition of contemporary society which brings it to awareness. He illuminates the paradox of Nothingness and personal ties as follows: “there is no generalizable situation, but only the absolute historicity of those who encounter one another, the intimacy of their contact, the fidelity and irreplaceability of personal ties. Amid the general social dissolution, man [sic] is thrust back into dependence upon these most primitive bonds out of which alone a new and trustworthy objectivity can be constructed” (Jaspers, 1957, p. 26).

Vaclav Havel, in his 1986 Living in Truth, addresses the condition of modern society as one which results from “the general unwillingness of consumption-oriented people to sacrifice some material certainties for the sake of their own spiritual and moral integrity” (Havel, 1986, p. 54). Citing the experience behind Heidegger’s saying that “Only a god can save us now,” and awareness of “the general failure of modern humanity” (Havel, 1986, p. 115), Havel describes the “existential revolution” through which both persons and society can engage in “the rehabilitation of values like trust, openness, responsibility, solidarity, love.” He specifies the center of this revolution as “living within the truth from its proper point of departure, which is concern for others” (Havel, 1986, p. 103).

Elizabeth A. Johnson, in her 1993 She Who Is, contributes to a movement beyond the dominant cultural paradigm of hierarchy and patriarchy, with its abstraction and isolation. But she does not want to simply substitute or mix and stir in “the feminine.” Rather, she envisions “an extensively relational self grounded in a community of free reciprocity”: “what is slowly coming to light is a new construal of the notion of the person, neither a self-encapsulated [male] ego nor a diffuse [female] self denied, but selfhood on the model of relational autonomy” (Johnson, 1993, p. 226).

Between these three figures I think we have a vision of what we can become, in fact of what we must become. They also help us understand that our urgency in the present is not without roots and ancestors, reaching as far back as the Hebrew statement that “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29: 18). Such a vision is profoundly lacking in our time, as we swirl in chaos, manipulation, and insincerity. Jaspers, Havel, and Johnson can be helpful as we struggle to embody a way of life that many of us perceive dimly and fleetingly, and yet compellingly. I am suggesting that, unlike so much of the often flashy but thin self-help offered today, with these authors we have real substance and real wisdom. As in the tradition of liberal education, the act of reading them can be a genuinely transformative practice.

Cancel Culture

The way out of the “wasteland” on which we find ourselves requires reappropriation of some traditional resources and values that were thrown overboard in the rush of modernization; it requires some reconnection with efforts of the past, some reappropriation. But any traditional value or ideal we want to hang on to and perpetuate in the present will inevitably be tainted with values we now – in our ambiguous post-traditional transcendence of culture – find abhorrent. Hence “cancel culture.” The baby goes out with the bath….

For example, Washington, Jefferson, and founding ideals of “liberty and justice for all” are associated with slavery. Therefore cancel. How are we able to have access to and choose from the riches of traditional culture, bring them into the present clean and useful? Apparently we must always be prepared to admit to the limitations of their embodiment, and resist the temptation to absolutize our articulation of them.

Is it even possible for culture to become self-aware and a matter of conscious choice, or are the two inherently in mutual opposition with one another – culture and choice? Even if I can make connection with traditional resources, what is to prevent my appropriation from being merely “aesthetic” – a mere lifestyle decoration — rather than fully “religious” or transformational? Maybe immersion in the life of a particular community is necessary. But what is to prevent this from becoming fundamentalism, a cult, or some other refusal to live in the actual, tortured present we share? Many questions; many wrong answers.

Socrates and AI

For me on some days it is as simple as open versus closed.

“Open” means what Socrates was talking about in the “Phaedo” when he spoke of the importance of maintaining belief in the immortality of the soul – belief that the person, in her depths and most genuine parts, is somehow confluent with, connected to, or even identical with the ultimate reality of the cosmos (Plato, “Phaedo,” 114d). Holding this belief, there is reason for hope, aspiration, on a wide horizon of possibility — including the choice for civility and regard for all persons, without which degradation and collapse are sure to follow.

“Closed” means we have succumbed to the human temptation to reach for more order and control than is given to us in this life. As William Barrett lays out in his extraordinarily important book, The Illusion of Technique (Barrett, 1978), the modern form of “closed” is the technological mindset that drives to what Peter Hershock (2001) describes as “the colonization of consciousness.”

The open way of living is what Socrates was pointing to with his famous “the one thing that I know is that I know nothing.” Coming as close as he ever comes to claiming wisdom, he contrasts himself with those he humbled in his famous encounters with experts of one sort or another: “at least I do not pretend to know what I in fact do not know.”

The center of this “limited” or “human” “wisdom” is aporia, the state of not-knowing sometimes described as wonder or perplexity. But this is only half the experience. For aporia is at the same time the state of availability through which genuine wisdom in its identity with vitality can flow.

Further, it is important to recall that Socrates was a “relationalist”: the location in the world where the experience of aporia is likely to occur most fully and fruitfully is in the meeting with other human beings, when we discuss matters of importance in “the examined life” of questioning “both myself and others.” Here, in this non-physical holy place, we can receive the insight and energy we need to live well and move toward a democratic and just society.

But this development requires the opening, and the continual refreshment and hygiene of having the kind of meeting Socrates was pointing to “every day,” as “the best thing a person can do.” It is as though the false or ego-based knowing builds up over time like plaque builds up on unattended teeth, and needs to be cleared away on a regular basis.

“Artificial Intelligence,” as the greatest extension of human control that has ever occurred, threatens to extinguish the human spirit, its sorrow and suffering along with its exaltation. The 2020 CNN film, “The Social Dilemma,” presents the threat very vividly, in terms of ever-sharpening algorithms that can give us what we want and even tell us what we want, all in the name of nothing higher or deeper than profit – which is just another name for the most insidious form of being closed ever devised.

Over the centuries, the old “free will versus determinism” dilemma seems to widen continuously on both sides. In our time we see the possibility of robots that will be “freer” than we have ever been, and forms of control that threaten to extinguish the human spirit. In this environment, the temptation to become an engineer of one sort or another is great. The danger is that you will treat others as well as yourself as object, no longer as beings capable of creativity or love – as beings who have souls. Instead we objectify others who are “known” and thereby reduced and controlled. The problem with engineering is that, while we need to be able to make distinctions – lest we be homogenized into a boring sameness, the lure of order often takes over, and metastasizes into fascism.

Breaking Ice to Open Water

Twice in this season of transition from Winter to Spring, I have seen humans breaking up shore ice in the effort to get out to the freedom of open water. One was a video from a Lake Michigan city nearby, where an ice-breaking tugboat was shown clearing a path for a commercial ship to get out of harbor and on to its next port. A second occurred on a late- winter walk, when we came upon two women (in bathing suits!) apparently wishing to join the polar bear club by smashing a path with ax and garden shovel, from the still-iced-in shore of an inland lake, out to where they could enjoy full membership.

The latter seemed a little mad, and profoundly expressive of the widely shared wish to break out of pandemic isolation and constraint. I find the metaphor helpful in an even broader sense of our not-always-joyful movement beyond not only Covid 19 and Trumpism, but beyond something much bigger, like modernity — to the new way of being I am trying to support with this writing.

Pandemic Learning and Mindfulness

We have to live consciously or mindfully. We have to be aware of what we are doing and that it is a choice we have made, which is to say we could have chosen otherwise. In the new nobility of Jaspers’ “self-existent self,” surviving the chaos of contemporary society requires that we learn to be our own boss. Living in pandemic requires this, as does living in post-traditional circumstances generally. The order of choice indicated here is quite beyond what most of our ancestors were capable of. Mostly they were enveloped in authority and convention, only later to conceive of freedom as escape or release from constraint. Only much later, as we begin to confront the challenge of our time, do we begin to understand that freedom must be a positive vision of living well.

So the kind of consciousness we are talking about is a stretch. Mostly we are so habituated to having an external boss (who we love or hate or both) that we are in the utter confusion of outer space when we discover that self-direction is the only possible alternative to decadence, authoritarianism, incoherence – or an unacceptably superficial life.

To live mindfully, then, is to open the scope of conscious awareness of “self,” so that much of psychological function which had been known to be “involuntary” in the past becomes voluntary. It is to exercise a self-direction or self-transcendence which, because of the invisible enveloping of the past, seems new and bewildering. We need to learn the most basic lesson: It is only once I stand outside of my “self” that I can choose to do and be otherwise, including the possibility of living a life of integrity as my genuine self. Another paradox.

The Transactional and the Relational

One way to understand what it means to “live mindfully” in a way that supports healthy development is in terms of two different paradigms of interaction. Here is a distinction that came close to the surface in the later days of the Trump administration, when it was observed that everything for Trump is a “deal,” quid pro quo, a transaction. When we are together we negotiate – you’ve got apples, I’ve got oranges…. Caring or mutuality or commitment to the other is not noticed, or is dismissed as sentimentality or projection of need, or weakness.

Relationality presupposes that I have regard for the other as a person not a thing, a subject not an object, an “end in themselves” and not a tool or a means to some end I might want. This is probably the oldest and most basic distinction in Western ethics.

The relational presupposes the space of our encounter as an open space in which discovery or emergent truth (alethea) might occur. It also presupposes some degree of the maturity in which I can see myself and my interests as elements of a work in process, so I do not have to freeze my position into hardened ideology and thereby cut myself off from that contact with the other which might enrich my life.

This is asking very much developmentally. It suggests that the maturity involved in the relational paradigm is not only a prerequisite for its actualization, but also a practice through which that maturity can be generated (with major implications for education and family life). Affirmation of this point, it seems to me, is a prerequisite for any culture we might choose to associate ourselves with.

Meditation and Justice

An old Japanese saying goes something like this: “Easy to meditate in the monastery, more difficult in the home, most difficult in the world.” In other words, the end of meditating is to stop meditating. It is to no longer have one’s meditation be a separate and special activity, but a way of life – “Zen is your ordinary life.” It is return. The high religious figure is not the one who leaves in glory, but the one who remains present with and for others in compassion.

I am not there yet, though I can appreciate the point about relationality being a practice, imperfect though it (like sitting meditation) always will be. Both relationality and meditation connect us to life’s deepest and most reliable wellspring of energy, and to an embodiment which is joyous and just.

Before the time when I am able to embody this paradox, I “sit” in meditation. I both “think nothing” and focus, engaging both ends of the continuum between “emptiness” and “suchness” in Buddhist terms. In more contemporary terms, through the cognitive- behavioral discoveries of neuroscience via authors like Arthur Zajonc (Zajonc, 2013) and books like The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1993), meditation is clearing the mind of its endless chatter, moving toward complete emptiness; and at the same time it is learning to actually focus – after a lifetime of flitting around from one thing to another without pausing long enough to ever be present. Here too, we learn to live with vital paradox.

In this practice of just doing it, without distracting concern for proper technique or results, some Medieval Christians would speak of the “Magister Internus,” the master within who provides insight as to continuous refinement of one’s method – if we would just listen. But, again, the most important piece of advice is to remain alert to the fact that the best method is humble service to the other. Turns out “love thy neighbor as thyself” is not commandment so much as our best advice, and struggle for justice is not sacrifice but fulfillment.

References

Barrett, W. (1978). The illusion of technique. New York: Doubleday.

Havel, V. (1989). Living in truth. Ed. Jan Vladislav. London: Faber and Faber.


Hershock, P. D. (2001), Reinventing the wheel: A Buddhist response to the information age. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Jaspers, K. (1957). Man in the modern age. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.


Johnson, E.A. (1993). She who is: The mystery of god in feminist theological discourse. New York: Crossroad.


Orlowski, J. (2020). The social dilemma (film).


Plato. Apology, 38a.
Plato. Phaedo, 114d.


Rowe, S. C. (2021, second edition), Overcoming America / America overcoming: Choosing culture and being at home in the world. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.


Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1993). Embodied mind: Cognitive science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.


Williams, D. R. (1987). Wilderness lost: The religious origins of the American mind. London: Associated University Presses. 33

Zajonc, A. (2013). Contemplative pedagogy: A quiet revolution in higher education. In New Directions for Teaching and Learning, 134, 83-94. 

Finding Life Affirmation in Troubled Times: Humanities as Practice Toward Maturity      

Abstract:  An interpretation of the contemporary situation in both culture and higher education, from the perspective of America’s magnificent commitment to democratic pluralism – as radically distinct from the autocracies that prevail today. This essay is also presentation of a vision of human development from which emerges a mature form of humanity capable of living a democratic life, including what it takes to sustain it. These dynamics are articulated through consideration of the fate of the humanities in our time, and the great benefits for both person and society that could flow from their revival and practice.

Key Words:  humanities as valve, genius of diversity, life affirmation, healthy soul, risking belief, nihilism, democratization of culture, robots/AI versus humans, equality of difference, pluralistic democracy, culture wars, hope and possibility, autocracy, culture become self-aware, humanities as practice, ineffable energies, dialogue as relationship, humanities as useful, human maturity.

No sensible man [sic] would insist that these things are as I have described them, but I think it is fitting for a man to risk the belief –for the risk is a noble one – that this, or something like this, is true about our souls and their dwelling places, since the soul is evidently immortal, and a man should repeat this to himself as if it were an incantation…

Socrates in Plato’s Phaedo, 114d.

I.         

            My classrooms have always started out with that quality William James attributed to the consciousness of a baby, one of “blooming, buzzing confusion.” We have usually found some success in the creation of learning community, transforming blooming confusion and the discourse of unqualified critique into learning community and the (more or less) disciplined conversation or dialogue of mature adult life and democratic relationship.

            But in recent years the classroom, already diminished from earlier days of vitality and efficacy, has suffered repeated and overlapping waves of trauma: Trump, Covid, climate change, nuclear threats, displaced populations – the list goes on. In the process higher education has also suffered from lack of effective leadership, capitulation to market analysis, career training, and the moral disease of identity politics and culture wars. Worse than being powerless, colleges and universities have been complicitous in the collapse of culture and civility.

            Saul Bellow, one of the great humanists of the last century, remarked in his novel, Herzog, that “what this country needs is a good nickel synthesis.” We need fresh interpretation, and that is what I seek to offer with this essay, drawing on a half century of practicing the art of liberal education on the front lines of American (and sometimes Chinese) public education. I want to address these matters, beyond the fads and cliches, the latest techniques, and projects corrupted with opportunism. And I want to pursue insight, especially in relation to the fate of the humanities, as the most sensitive “canary” through which we might access and revive the coal mine of American culture, this pluralistic and sometimes raucous way of being together which sustains us all. 

II.

            Seems like humanity has become a mostly unhealthy infection on the planet, and that Earth may now be in the process of throwing us off. There is no need to repeat the list of potentially lethal and intersecting problems, many of which we create and have to face each day. Contributing to and fueling those problems is the fairly recent and virulent disparagement of the humanities, and the corresponding loss of the notion that the humanities are an important aid in the process of understanding and living, as Socrates said, “a life worth living.”

            Why are the humanities under attack? There are several reasons, which I will touch on below. Before discussing these it is important to point out that often in attempts to defend the humanities we – we who continue to worry about such things — follow our reflexes and get lost in arguments about what constitutes the “stuff” of the humanities (i.e. is it the “ten foot shelf,” Harvard or Chicago versions, or a revised canon not comprised entirely of “dead white men”?).

           Moving in a different direction, I want to say that the humanities first and most essentially could be understood as a practice, an activity, and a way of living, and these in service of the developmental process that leads to mature humanity, a state of being which is paradoxically both different and the same across space and time and peoples, reflecting the genius of human diversity.

           This utterly basic paradox of commonality and difference in human life arose from cultures of the traditional period (from around 600 BCE, the Axial Age, to sometime in the Twentieth Century, often August 6, 1945 with the bombing of Hiroshima) were organized around concern about humans (at least some humans) maturing beyond purely social behavior into a larger wisdom that sets them apart as a more highly developed (not necessarily to say “better”) form of humanity. They also share remarkable consensus in envisioning transformation as passage from ego orientation to a centering in something more like reality.

           Continuing boldly, we can identify world-wide reports about the role of diversity in the maturation process, as mediating an ever-expanding harmony between difference and commonality when they stand in synergetic relation. This, of course, is a highly discussable claim (what is this “synergy”!?), especially so since it is grounded in a certain very delicate experience of vitality in life, far more than in established doctrine and the communal structures of society – in the direct experience of democracy as distinct from the experience of autocracy/monarchy/patriarchy. This claim about diversity and maturity suffers most, in the raucous conversation of the present, not so much by blows to vital parts as by chilly non-responsiveness followed by smug turning away (as if to say the democratic relationship is too much to hope for; as if to acknowledge it in a peculiar way of our peculiar present).

           In light of the horrendous issues of our time and their manifestation in all realms of life, we must ask again: What are “the humanities?” In today’s avaricious and weaponized climate, can we once again come to understand and evaluate them – not as means to job opportunity, but as resources for living with meaning, compassion, and sustainable values? Are the humanities a necessary component of a well-educated and vibrant populace? And with Artificial Intelligence bearing down on us from all sides, do we need them at all, or perhaps only need them as decoration, and a another medium through which the wealthy can project their privilege and superiority?

           The following pages are my attempt to address the relationship between the humanities and the status of human life under contemporary circumstances. In this attempt, I want to describe three outcomes of approaching the humanities as practice, including their integration with culture, their study and their enjoyment. This includes awareness of their implications for a very necessary and across the board resuscitation of education, a reconstruction – through the devastating and ever ongoing storms of Covid and Trump, climate change, and the grinding repulsiveness of worldwide authoritarianism.

III.

           Before going ahead with this daunting assignment, I want to say something about a new and vastly more promising life-orientation which is emerging in our time, right alongside the more ominous developments. It is one which is neither the passivity, negativity, or giving up that are so prevalent, nor the “toxic positivity” or “aggressive apathy” which also abound – pathways to nihilism either way. Rather, it contains the mindset sometimes referred to in the discourse of today as “hopeful pessimism,” or Jane Goodall’s “hope in dark times,” or the profound experience William James was pointing to when he spoke of “new ranges of life succeeding upon our most despairing moments.”

           Could it be that those today who present these qualities of being neither Zombies nor Angels but humans in the glory of our self-transcending life affirmation, are showing us what we must become? They show us that it is possible to live well, do what we can to save the world, and remain attuned to the gift quality of life, even in “impossible” circumstances. Like that species of bird which is prohibited from flying by the laws of physics and yet somehow flies nevertheless, the people I am talking about live with dignity, awareness, and compassion – right in the midst of disaster. How do they do that?!

           Recalling the Hebrew warning that “Where there is no vision the people perish” (Proverbs 29:18), we can say that the life-orientation to which I am pointing requires that we sustain belief in the existence of what used to be called “soul,” a quality of the person deeper than “self-actualization” and closer to the essence of who they are. We are speaking of a connection within the person with a reality beyond the scope of ordinary human experience, something universal and sacred, a point of contact and even identity with an agency which is the source of right action and healthy living, one which is paradoxically both beyond what any person could do or be on their own and at the same time the most authentic identity of that person. In Hinduism, and with variations in the other great traditions, the ultimate realization is contained in the simple (though by no means easy) phrase Atman is Brahman (self is God). Phrases like this, of course, are very frustrating to the data-driven mindset of today, with its impatience and even animosity toward matters qualitative, relationally complex, and irreducible.

           Socrates indicates in the epigraph above that life on Earth is so ordered that realities like “soul” – and the other ineffables of human life, including love, justice, truth, goodness, beauty – are actually dependent on human belief in them, as a prerequisite for their being active in the world and in our lives. Humans are challenged to be co-creators by the very structure of life, the very divinity of life on Earth. So it is catastrophic when humans are no longer willing or able to “risk the belief” – or “keep the faith,” as we used to say. Everything just falls apart, or together, but not into that unity in diversity we know as democracy.

           It is hard for us to adopt and sustain such a belief because it is in the essence of our postmodern circumstance that matters of meaning and value as they have been expressed in traditional cultures, often bundled as “the axiological dimension,” have been critiqued, deconstructed, “cancelled,” and dismissed. On this the “anti-woke” people are right: babies have gone out with the bath). This has happened, in large part, following the hugely unsettling awareness of the contamination of culture by values which are racist, sexist, classist, etc., especially through association of traditional cultures with atrocities of the past which taint all of them – in America with annihilation of native peoples, slavery, and the oppression of women and others. Plus, especially in the West, there is the problematic heritage of heavily negative and escapist – even Earth and life-denying — understandings of freedom. So alongside and mixed ambiguously with intuitions and gestures toward a new life-orientation, all peoples share the negative solidarity of a problematic past – inevitably with both cultural and personal aspects.

           This discouraging realization is not at odds with Socrates’ statement, since “risk[ing] the belief” is contained within the simple affirmation which we share with all other life, the joie de vivre that makes the world go round. The risking, then, is as deep as it is large, that life is good, with broader horizons than we (or the robots) can know, and that it is moving ever so slowly and mysteriously toward a world of peace, justice, and art — and that our efforts actually do matter.

           Believing in the existence of soul and the significance of our action — and avoiding arrogant declarations of disbelief — means moving beyond brittle intellectualist and doctrinal ways of knowing that were prevalent in our past, and also beyond the shallow and materialist empiricisms and scientisms of modernity, with their insistence that all must be known from the bottom up, from the simple to the complex. It also means that we must outgrow the ancient need to always occupy a position of certainty and righteousness (even more highly than we value being truthful or loving, whether by idealist, empiricist, or fascist epistemologies), knowing Plato demonstrates to be about as reliable as flickering shadows on the wall of a cave.

           Outgrowing old ways occurs as we become able to receive assurance from deep down in that inner territory of soul (sometimes “conscience,” or the root of “self-respect,” or through attunement with the natural world), making contact with that deepest source of our vitality, as both similar to and different from that of other life forms. This can sound frightening at first, but growth and reintegration in a new lifeway turns out to be surprising liberation. For now it becomes possible to have some perspective on our ego, some distance on that raging drama which refuses to be “fixed” by the popular psychologies and pharmaceuticals so widely prescribed for the malaise of our time.

           With new awareness – so fragile, so vulnerable, so improbable — we are able to exercise a much broader range of choice as to emotional state and the general direction of our lives, rather than always chasing from one impulse to another, with no moral compass, repose, or cultural companionship. We are liberated from the tyranny of our own ego, from our “whim and caprice,” as John Dewey puts it in his monumental Democracy and Education.      

           In the atmosphere of ego it is impossible to live well (hedonism notwithstanding as a viable option). And it is extremely difficult to engage sincerely in the hard and necessary cultural work of sorting that which is important to save from that which we must let go in our mixed inheritance. This is a big problem, a “wicked problem,” because in the absence of this work we are stuck in the quagmire of moral disease, arising like a noxious gas from the dead lake that had once been culture. Now, problematic as traditional culture was, we now must cope with absence and what follows: ever more disturbing incivility, non-regard for others, and reduction of persons to their financial, use-for-me potential, and/or their demographic characteristics.

           Indeed, conscious engagement with passage from an old way in collapse to new life-orientation emerging may be the most ambitious ever undertaken by the human race. As in previous times of rapid growth, that which had been unconscious and involuntary becomes both conscious and voluntary, and hence a matter of choice and responsibility. With the surge of growth our time requires — and exhibits to some degree, culture becomes self-aware, no longer dependent on unconscious processes of socialization and acculturation for its perpetuation; now culture can (and must) be chosen and created. So much of the drama of culture wars, “angertainment,” etc, can be seen as a process of finding out whether humans are able to live with the responsibility that is a necessary component of the ambiguous democratization of culture. 

           This is not as mysterious as it may sound. There are many people and resources out there available to support and guide us. Certainly there are those among them who wish to exploit and manipulate, preying on the extreme vulnerability of humans in this historical moment. We learn to be more effectively aware, not cynically rejecting of everything, but not gullible either, not hiding from news of the world , but not detached.

           Yet the new orientation which is so crucial yet fragile is fairly well understood in the broader culture of educated people – at least intellectually, which is to say, more “conscious” than “voluntary” (per above). It begins and gathers strength with basic emotional intelligence, the “know thyself” capacity to sustain a more or less friendly relationship between “me” and “myself,” which is like other healthy relationships in being both critical and caring – and willing to reside together in creative tension. Development also entails refinement of critical thinking, beyond reductive “critical theory” and “deconstruction,” into appreciative mindfulness, as the ability to discern value and focus attention. Development in these capacities progresses with coming to be more fully able to live in the zone of simultaneity between acknowledging limitations (without self-loathing) and accessing wisdom (without absurd claims of entitlement).

           So on many days it looks like our problem may be plain old human sluggishness, more a failure of willing than knowing – like the proverbial frog who does not notice ever-increasing water temperature in the pot on the stove in which it sits as it is poached! Perhaps the frog is frozen in sudden but too late awareness of her circumstance. What could she do? What can we do?

IV.

           With that brief and ambitious attempt to describe the context of the humanities and our commonly shared life in the present, as well as an alternative vision of both personhood and culture which is struggling to emerge from the ruins of traditional (including modern) cultures, here are the three outcomes I want to advocate in terms of the role the humanities could play going forward.

           I think these considerations of outcome can say a lot more to questions about how to engage, study, and practice – and evaluate — the humanities than most of the more abstracted and mechanistic ideas of education which have been out there since invention of the assembly line. These outcomes, and the conditions under which they are likely to be manifest, with their deeply empirical and experiential footings, can be more fruitful than more theoretically-framed discussions of “innovative pedagogy,” often beginning with a creative notion but then veering off into disconnected methodology or strange localism. 

           The first must be Healthy Soul:

           The presence of a well-cultivated and conscious soul has been unusual in the human past, though it certainly has been envisioned. It might be even more improbable in late modern societies like ours, despite unimaginable physical advantages, where vision is lost in chaos. These societies are characterized by their failure to sustain even belief in the existence of soul, let alone its immortality, sacredness, etc. Let alone also the understanding implicit in “soul” that each person is unique and valuable, a potential source of creativity, wisdom, and the insight needed to solve problems of the immediate moment, the most general of which is how to live well.

           In the pathological condition of our transitioning into either a new way or oblivion, persons are treated — and treat themselves — in ways exclusively physical and psychological. We do this by objectification (as in thing-making), and on the modern, laisse faire, push-pull model of transaction (you’ve got apples, I’ve got oranges…). This worldview, having failed and collapsed, leaves us in a world of human construction on a barren plain (physical, psychological, cultural, even spiritual…). Here, interests and power and their common denominator in money are bottom line, and we are “known” in those terms, along with our demographic characteristics – nothing deeper. We relate as animals or machines, but not often as humans. Is there no greater (and more reliable!) agency in which we can participate?

           It might be sufficient to say that having a healthy soul is fundamental to moving from our current condition of grimness to vital living, that its maintenance is a necessary and ever ongoing project, a kind of hygiene, one that has obviously become extremely challenging in our world.

           The humanities, at the very least, remind us in these things – that being human is very different from being a machine (a person rather than a thing, a subject rather than object, a thou rather than an it – that most basic distinction at the root of traditional Western and other ethics). They make it clear that the astonishing permutations possible with AI are nevertheless wholly different from real creativity; that a “soul” is different from mechanism, no matter how well lubricated the machine may be.

           The second outcome is Sense of Possibility:

           There is something about human beings which causes us to become so apprehensive that we shut down and retreat from life into cramped and closed quarters. We are skittish in the ontological sense, attracted-lured by the illusion of protection which various ideologies and conspiracy theories present, from the vast uncertainty of life and the inevitability of death. Yet – in what seems a cruel joke – those containers we rush to actually are quite unreliable; they starve and suffocate, and render us dangerous.

           So a developed sense of possibility, a willingness to maintain hope when all is lost, is the first prerequisite and the first practice in nurturing the healthy soul. It involves the adult form of return to childhood wonder, and a reclaiming of that point of departure indicated by “philosophy begins in wonder” (could a robot wonder?).

           A developed sense of possibility (and the accompanying ability to tolerate complexity and not knowing, aporia) also involves emergence of that specific capacity to distinguish authentic creativity from the sensationalism echoing off of every wall and from increasingly desperate people trying to prove to themselves that they are alive. Along with this key sense of discernment comes ability to recognize truth as it emerges fresh from the dialogue of similarity and difference, whether between you and me, me and myself, or between us and the most singular other.

           Sometimes engagement with or identification of the capacity I want to illuminate is spoken of as the ability to identify and appreciate a fully developed human being, not only those who are old, but also “old souls.” Other times it is evident in attempts to describe “practical wisdom,” judgment and graceful movement in the midst of the full particularity of life, rather than insisting on the dream of detached abstraction and pronouncement from a place of superiority and mere application of preset rules. This same recognition and sense of possibility has also been associated with renewed appreciation of the significance of art, including awareness of its broader meaning in what Alfred North Whitehead called “the most austere of all mental qualities,” “style:” the ability to act decisively, cleanly, with as little extraneous movement or exertion as possible, as with Chuang Tzu butchering an ox with one, continuous, apparently effortless movement (“Carving Up An Ox”). Note the similarity here with Confucius’ “at age seventy I could follow my heart’s desire without ever transgressing the way” (Analects 2.4), or with Islam on surrender, Judaism’s acute sensitivity to idolatry, or curious Christian talk about “he who would save his life will lose it” (Mark 8:35). Traditional cultures/religions contain unfathomable riches in relation to the conundrums of our time, though we have made them extremely difficult to access.

           Third is Humanities as Valve:

           A third outcome is more political and cultural. It is the developed capacity to be persuasive in the world (including with oneself) on behalf of a lifeway compatible with the pluralistic and democratic sentiments necessary to a future other than that of tyranny and autocracy. It takes some real discipline and focus of human agency.

           Though it is nearly impossible to even speak of these things in our present environment of suspicion, relativism, and degraded relationship, the humanities are distinct in their ability to evoke and motivate our common humanity, providing signs of life beyond ever-changing consumer preference, private wishes, conspiracy theories, and the quirks of society and culture – indeed, a life beyond the corrosive loneliness of partially liberated individuals and our weird accommodations.

           Development of these crucial motivating sentiments involves activation of a love of the world, Amor Mundi, an active love of mortal, ever ambiguous, always particular, embodied life on Earth. It involves a finely honed appreciation of that most magnificent American affirmation of an equality of difference, grounded in the understanding that all persons are unique possible sources of revelation and inflowing of ultimate reality – modeling what it means to live well and be created “in God’s image,” as a creator.

           Like the great religions, the humanities can lead us beyond the life we have received through the enormous contingency of our origins in traditional cultures and their still-somewhat alive remnants, as well as through the always-flawed families and local tribes from which we merge, somehow into centering awareness of how to live and die well. Communication of this awareness is beyond any one articulation, only to be heard in and through and under the vast symphony of individual and cultural stories of life affirmation. The humanities return us to the world and the most basic insight about care for others as the locus of true enlightenment.

V.

           So maybe the most important distinction is that between open and closed. Machines are subject to entropy, eventually running down into non-functioning. They are closed systems. Now AI introduces the claim that machines will be able to program themselves to function indefinitely (talk about feeling hot breath on the back of our necks!). But AI, as distinct from full human presence, is still not “open” in the cosmological sense of being a space or an activity through which new energy comes into the world, fresh vitality from as deep – or as far beyond –as the wellspring of life itself, what humans and other life-forms most basically need in order to thrive.

           Humanities can be understood as the great ventilator, the very lungs of human life. One might even say that all other good things for both person and community flow from them – as do bad things flow from their absence or corruption, demonstrating again and again how entropy is manifest in human life.

           An old song comes to mind: “Anything you can do I can do better.” Yes, certainly this is true about robots. Operating by objectification in all functions, Robots can command huge swaths of all kinds of data and do better than humans with it. But if they do develop that capacity to program themselves, what then? What is the purpose or end to which they point? –if this is still a relevant question. Or are we already completely engulfed in technological determinism?

           As we still love and aspire, there remains the dimension of meaning and value, always overlapping the most Earthly dimension of objectification, the freezing of dynamic processes and entities into the “knowing” which then dominated and constrained life – for better and for worse). Sometimes the meaning/value dimension is called “the spiritual.” It is very hard to know how to characterize or describe reality in this sense from our current position in the outer space of social media and high tech. This turns out to be no better vantage point by way of identifying the vitality of life than the attempts of our all too local ancestors, in abstracting and generalizing from what was under their noses, into peculiar, often charming, sometimes dangerous descriptions of what is real and how we should live. Indeed, identification of and responsiveness to sources of vitality – through descriptions and interpretations, yes, but also through enactments and reminders in ritual and art, are essential to the ongoing, creative adventure of life.

           We know by now that, in the absence or incoherence of the axiological and spiritual dimensions, humans are lost and become indeterminant, protean, and dangerous. We must become more sophisticated in matters hermeneutical than our ancestors, to see that what we are looking for often lies in living in good faith with the questions, more like an abiding than a possessing, a keeping faith.  

VI.

           Meanwhile in higher education, long known as a critical bellwether of American society and what Fareed Zakaria once called “America’s best industry,” students are choosing not to attend college. They do this in part because of the cost, in part because they are recruited for well-paying jobs that do not require a college education, in part because they do not see the long-term rewards in areas other than medicine, law, and technology. Others around them do not see either, so the advice young people may hear most emphatically is to get an associate’s degree and skip the humanities because they will never “use them.”

           (Here I must interject, appealing to no credential other than my age: it can take many decades in “the school of hard knocks” for human beings to learn that the only “use of use” is creation of a world of love, justice, and beauty.)  

           I am suggesting the opposite of the prevailing understanding: that the humanities can be of very high use value, in both public and private life, both short-run and long. How ironic and profoundly sad that they (some more than others – we could use some empirical research here) are rejected today, in acts of cultural self-hatred and perverse attempts at atonement.

           I do not have easy solutions about how to pull out of death spiral and revive this deep valuing, but suggest we begin a new conversation with the hypothesis that the humanities are not primarily an established subject matter or body of work, or a universalizable canon. Rather, they first and fundamentally indicate a movement of the human spirit, a transformative practice which honors what is effective in specific times and places in bringing humans to fullness of life, to the kind of ripeness that is the glory of our species.

           In the modern democratization, with its limitations and ambiguities, humans move from a secondary to a primary relationship to culture. Clearly this is a development that comes with both opportunity and danger, including that of persons who are too overwhelmed to be able to respond with the dignity of their own agency, broadcasting instead fascist assertions which have been pumped through their colonized ego.

           It is possible, though, that democratization might not be as dangerous as it has come to seem in the very wild early Twenty First Century, with liberation of the masses from those well-disciplined but underdeveloped patriarchal elites that dominated and then left (with the money) the wasteland of cutthroat competition in their wake. Possibly what is passing now is more vivid and more  frightening than that which will later emerge from the wreck, in fact, that which is already emerging – when we look closely — despite feebleness of its infancy.

           Supporting this possibility, especially in the crucial realm of education, where we at present have NO coherent vision apart from its lowest form in training to make money, I propose that we adopt the developmental approach to the humanities as movement toward maturity and practices which elicit mature humanity.

           This, of course, is dependent on the existence and vitality of open, lively, and free dialogue about the meaning of such always challenging matters. For “dialogue,” as the term for that relationship through which wisdom emerges, the relationship in which we can affirm sources of wisdom other than our own. Here we are way beyond the simplicity of mere transaction (which, obviously, remains necessary for other kinds of human relationships and developments – as in child-rearing and education where we are so anemic today.

           Through all of this we come to see that understanding and practicing dialogue is the most general and basic definition of education, the most effective way of coming to solid understanding of the crucial processes and dynamics of maturation, including its typical failures and distortions. It also leads to the fresh conversation we need, about reinvention of culture and education and what is – or could be – so great about the humanities.

           This is what we get to as we press the case for pluralism, as vastly different not only from autocracy, but also from relativism and the transaction of “free market economy.” And in a world of as yet limited interpretive (hermeneutical) sophistication, it soon becomes clear that pluralism requires that we let go of older forms of universalizing, and now adopt a deeper form, one which celebrates the fact that the particulars of practice can vary greatly from place to place and time to time, while the personal and relational consequences of healthy human practice and encounter remain remarkably the same in the civilized human being. “Depth” rather than “transcendence” begins to seem the better metaphor for that which is beyond metaphor.

           This most demanding set of qualifications and commitments implies that the grand aspiration of free and full humanity is still present and active in the world, that there is still some “objectivity” to the old aspirational talk. It takes us back around, to the inherently democratic nature of the humanities: not only as pluralistic, but also as dependent on that dialogue/conversation mentioned above, one whichturns on a very particular kind of relationship with each other and the ineffables, those mysterious and elusive energies on which our lives depend. We should explore this relationship more fully.

References:

James, W. (1971), “A pluralistic universe,” in Essays in radical empiricism and a pluralistic universe, ed. Richard J. Bernstein. New York: Dutton, 264.

Whitehead, A.N. (1957), “The aims of education,” in The aims of education and other essays. New York: Free Press, 12.

Zakaria, Fareed (2008), The post-American world. New York: Norton, 190.

Loving Democracy, Flying at Dusk

           1. That Third Quality

           In the midst of vaccination controversy someone remarked that we need a better balance between individual and communal dimensions.

            Yes, but aren’t we talking about something beyond only balance or mixture, or transaction – something more like interdependence or synergy? I think we are pointing to the very quality that makes democracy so difficult to articulate. Indeed, the state of right relationship at the heart of democracy is a bit like the Dao: “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.” It is, in its essence, ineffable. It is beyond words and symbols, the more beautiful of which can obscure in ever more subtle and dangerous ways.

            Beyond tension between communal and individual dimensions, democracy envisions what some in my tradition have called “thirdness” (e.g. Josiah Royce), and what I currently refer to as “relational liberalism.” It is a shared space which is paradoxically both empty and full. In the healthy state, everything stands out vivid — in its “suchness,” fully differentiated against the backdrop of emptiness – as the poet Rilke said, “whole and against a wide sky.” And yet the pluralism of this ideal space does not collapse into chaotic and irresponsible individualism. Instead, harmony is maintained and continuously enhanced.

           Humans may have an innate affinity for the relational space in which we can both be who we most genuinely are at the same time we become capable of love and being loved. Sharing that fundamental human experience of the “sweet spot” beyond antinomy between self and other, we then become capable of participating in the design of communal life which cultivates faithfulness to the sacred space.

           But democratic community is only possible if enough of us maintain awareness of its existence in an endlessly distracting world, aware of it as profound experience of the goodness of life, aware of it with enough zest to pass it along.

           2. The Perspective of Dusk

           William James, re-imagining religion from the ground up in the post-traditional era, begins with what he describes as the commonly shared and quite ordinary religious experience of “an unexpected life succeeding upon death…. Experiences of a life that supervenes upon despair.” It seems pretty clear to me that some these days are speaking of this same paradigmatic experience as one of “hopeful pessimism.” Could closer examination of these experiences provide an opening to a revival of the humanities?

           Which takes us to Hegel: “the owl of Minerva only flies at dusk.” Like the fire required by the jack pine tree for its seeds to open and grow, there seems a natural law at work here, one our modern ancestors overlooked, dismissed, or relativized into non-existence. “In a dark time the eye begins to see” (Roethke). 

           I think what many of us see in the early stages of this flight was well articulated by Heidegger’s saying that humans are “beings unto death.” We are finite beings who are strangely “religious” in our awareness of death impending, and at the same time of the possibility of agency in the cosmos more advanced than our own (I think James had something like this in mind when he spoke of religion as “harmonious adjustment with an unseen order”).

           These observations, of course, involve deeply existential questions about the status of our presence in life, questions no human should have to live with alone. The intensity would be too much.

           3. Collapse of Culture, and Nihilism

            Traditional cultures, in the complexity of all their similarities and differences, were thrown into the totally chaotic backwash of the enormous engines of modernization and technology, while the world came to be rewoven into the ever more tenuous interdependence of an interim time, a time in which lying is taken as normal, and any affirmation is easily colonized by the anti-culture of money and power. In retrospect, it all seems to have happened so exceedingly fast.

            The consequences of radical departure from traditional culture as a way of ordering and prioritizing life have been enormous and ambiguous. Without downplaying modernity’s  liberation from the oppressions of tradition, the cultural critique pushed by natural rights liberals in recent times effectively reduced culture to privileges and oppressions ordered according to demographic characteristics. This led to a kind of feeding frenzy from which no affirmation is safe. Then the GOP, after decades of obsession with confounding the liberal establishment, and finally with their own President who turns out to be a nihilist and a fascist, reveals – among other things — the dangers of relativistic society in which value is privatized and the public is left without standards of truth and decency. On the other side of ambiguity, movements toward ecological integrity, sanity on weapons of mass destruction, dialogue, and justice definitely do bring light some into the deeply troubled world from time to time.

           Amidst absurdity and bad theater, the question becomes simple: do we still believe in “Liberty and Justice for All,” E Pluribus Unum, and the ambitious ideal of an “equality of difference”? Do we still aspire to create and live in a society where difference is approached as opportunity rather than dreaded as threat? Are we able to expect civility, truthfulness, and sincerity?  Do we still believe in anything like a society of peace and justice? Were we totally naïve when we “believed” these things before?

           With the old order of civilization, the civilization of the Traditional Period of human history, great aspiration was mixed ambiguously with stunning failure and atrocity. Now, with the old order eclipsed and starved by machine life and the making of money, we suddenly find ourselves standing naked with these questions about what we believe or live for. This occurs at a time when we are no longer able to trust institutions of the past to insulate us from discomforting realities or supply answers. Loneliness and what people do to avoid it become serious problems.

           We live in a time of multiple, intersecting, and mutually reinforcing crises. It is like living in a firestorm, as though there is a single crisis with many mutually reinforcing manifestations, indicating something like the smashing of tectonic plates deep under surface expressions of earthquake in the seemingly unrelated tipping over of bookshelves, etc. at your place and mine. If only we could identify that underlying crisis.

           The problematic individualism of Hobbes and Locke in which relatedness comes to be of extrinsic value only (i.e. what I might get), not intrinsic (i.e. what I might be, or what might be right), is both the cause and the result of the collapse of traditional culture – and ensuing loneliness. Driven by critical awareness and unexamined assumptions about the nature of “freedom,” tradition, was thrown overboard – so we have no choice but to work with the blank slate.

            A different kind of person is required in order for human thriving to occur under our new circumstances, different from “tradition-directed,” “inner-directed,” and “other-directed” images of adulthood from the past. We need people who are emotionally as well as intellectually (and can we say “spiritually”?) well-developed, and who are not only creatively and voluntarily connected with the richness of history and tradition in whatever form they receive it, but also, and above all, compassionate — on what can be a very nasty planet (many, recently Karen Armstrong, have observed that compassionate presence in the world is the commonly shared ideal of the world’s great traditions).

           4. Authoritarianism as Response to Failure of Individualism

           John Stewart Mill said “democracy is only possible among those who are in the maturity of their faculties.” 

           Persons who are unable to tolerate the complexity, danger, and wild plurality of our time, and who are also severed from connection with healthy sources of ongoing education and care of the soul, wind up sowing seeds of chaos. They may even look good or be popular (or an “influencer”) while doing so. And since chaos is the essence of what we call “toxic,” it melts confidence in anything like a shared reality and cooks up all manner of conspiracy theories, leading to admiration only for those who have the power – or whatever magical capacity, including outrageous violence — to assert themselves.

           Democracy can be seen as the attempt to build a society on the vital paradox of simultaneous self and other thriving. This is that central point about compassion mentioned above, as broadly celebrated among the world’s great traditions though very distinctly not sharedamong modern, consumer-based schemes of fulfillment, let alone authoritarian reaction to the insufficiencies of modern life.

           In the midst of all this, let us recall democracy as the most noble (though by no means exclusive) American (maybe human) aspiration, a hope and an ontological push that invigorates the natural world as well as the human, in the deep surging of interdependent life. It should also be said that our time we are brought to see imperfect democracy as the only alternative to hell on Earth. So the choice in one sense is about as simple as it could be.

           What it comes down to is a way of being, even with myself, on a planet where, as Arendt put it, “plurality is the law of the earth.” The relational-democratic alternative to racist, sexist, classist behaviors and criteria, locates us at our best in the “paradoxical plurality” of beings who are the same in that we are each unique and capable of beginning something new, which is to say, capable of participating in the ongoing act of creation itself and the religious community implicit therein. Which is to say, having a soul.

           The question now is whether, after all we have been through in the super-compressed educational process of the last several decades, we have the energy to step up to action on/with this aspiration, this possibility which glimmers at dusk?

FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO MORAL DISEASE

           Beginning in the 1950’s, some disturbing reports about the state of American individualism began to appear.  Coincident with ever greater dominance of the post-traditional, scientific worldview, especially after World War II, Americans were found to be increasingly removed from traditional culture as “a design of motives directing the self outward to communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.”¹  In this condition, there began to emerge the highly vulnerable and increasingly protean “other directed” personality, a personality which is simultaneously isolated and dependent, capable of neither real intimacy nor real independence.² 

           Lacking culture mediated through tradition, and isolated from community and appreciation of  the intrinsic value of relationship, this late modern self was found to be increasingly empty and in “a highly suggestible and vulnerable state.”³  It began to find meaning and purpose not so much through connections with others and the world which were provided by tradition, but more in the expectations of the immediate context in which the individual was located – within whatever disturbingly broad limits may be in play.  Philip Cushman emphasizes the compensation aspect of defining “immediate context” in terms of acquisition and consumption: “The post World War II self thus yearns to acquire and consume as an unconscious way of compensating for what has been lost: It is empty.”⁴ This compensation, of course, was supported by the natural rights individualism out of which it grew, its orientation to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property” (before Jefferson revised Locke to read “… the pursuit of happiness”) as “inalienable” rights.

           At the same time, there emerged a new and distinctly post-traditional culture or quasi-culture to support and guide the late-modern individual.  This culture is distinguished by the fact that it is not oriented, as even individualistic Western societies of the past had been, to commonly shared beliefs, but rather entirely to the liberation of the individual through scientific insight.  In fact, Philip Rieff, in his monumental work on the emergence of the culture of “the therapeutic,” characterizes it in terms of “the systematic hunting down and uprooting of settled convictions”.⁵  The post-communal, post-orthodoxy, post-traditional culture of the therapeutic is, as Zygmunt Bauman points out, essentially liquid in its nature,⁶ or, in the terms of description we see in both Hannah Arendt and Robert Jay Lifton, protean — void of any definite and enduring form.   ADD NOTE 7

           The post-traditional culture was/is profoundly ambiguous.  On one side, this culture contributed to the postmodern uprooting of and liberation from problematic traditional convictions.  It made possible identification of injustices that had not come to consciousness before, such as those of racism, sexism, and classism, as well as the many ways in which individuals place unhealthy limits on themselves and others. 

           Also on the positive side, the therapeutic perspective supported the possibility of what is coming to be acknowledged as a critical threshold of human development: the threshold beyond which the person transcends their ego sufficiently to be able to take responsibility for their wounds and neuroses, so as not to simply displace or project them onto others as a way of maintaining the illusion of their own perfection, accepting fallibility and hence also both the need for and the possibility of growth.  With emergence of the therapeutic perspective, we begin to see relatively widespread awareness of what Robert Bellah calls “knowledge of the laws of the formation of the self,”⁷ as well as ability to act on this awareness.

           However, the liberation orientation, as manifest in both society and individual, tended to be limited in the same way freedom in the Modern Period had been limited generally.  In terms of a famous distinction made by Isaiah Berlin, it was mostly about freedom from, the negative side of freedom, and virtually incoherent – or completely individualistic and hence relativistic also — when it came to the positive, to the question of what freedom was for.  Therefore, definition of freedom as removal of previous constraints, or “uprooting,” tended to exacerbate emptiness, vulnerability, an indiscriminate readiness for new senses of meaning and direction, and/or naiveté about the significance of this function of a human life, a certain gullibility.

           This definition of freedom left the door open to the inflowing of science, now in the form of social science, as definer of meaning and direction — as a form of culture or quasi-culture which brought the scientific paradigm into the most intimate reaches of human life.  So at the same time traditional definitions of meaning and direction flowed out – or were swept out — new definitions flowed in.  And since so much critical attention or “hunting down” was directed to the former, the inflowing tide of social science was not much noticed and was rapidly taken for truth itself.

           Treatment of the person in the social scientific paradigm involves work on “self,” as container of ego components or “drives” to be adjusted and brought under control in the service of healthy functioning through the objective knowing of therapeutic interpretation.⁸ “Ego therapies,” then, are severed from connection with community on the one hand, and from traditional conceptions of a deeper Self in the process of transforming that ego on the other. 

           The therapeutic orientation took root in popular culture generally, and gave rise to a post-traditional scientific (or scientistic) priesthood of therapists, counselors, and psychologists who were trained to help people in this mode.  They claimed the authority of science, though the evidence to support this claim was mixed, often contentious, sometimes internally contradictory, and often very thin.  Further contributing to the problematic nature of the therapeutic was the fact that there was little ability on the part of the larger community to identify and discipline those therapists who were engaging in the highly tempting vice of “narcissistic transference,”⁹ taking advantage of the vulnerability of clients/patients in order to satisfy needs of the therapist.  Despite these limitations, the therapeutic orientation became established as a distinctly post-traditional orthodoxy.  Along with the advertising industry and management, two parallel post-traditional extensions of the scientific worldview into the realm of human behavior, it became the default position in American society, something analogous to the established religions of traditional cultures.

           But what about the disease?  Let us turn from the more external qualities of vulnerability and potential for exploitation of the post-traditional, modern self, and now look directly into the emptiness from which these qualities flow.  From here we need to track progression of the moral and spiritual disease which issues from that emptiness.

           Moral Disease

           What gestates in the emptiness of post-traditional disconnection from the world, and what fuels moral disease, is anger.  It is large and deep, and difficult to articulate since it is nearly synonymous with the emptiness itself.  It has many faces, one of which is reaction against the inhumanity of our situation, response to the fact that the deeper dimensions of selfhood are virtually excluded from modern society, even in the popular modes of caring for the person.  It is expressive of a sense of abandonment and betrayal, associated with the perception of absence of something we once had: a comfort or repose, home, and definiteness of role assignment and expectation, a sense of connection with the world and others which had been given by traditional culture — despite the fact that traditional cultures determined these based on values we now find unacceptable. 

           This is the kind of anger which induces nihilistic conclusion: life is about nothing more than conflicting or coinciding interests, competition, and the power to assert and impose one’s will upon others.  And not only power in the physical sense, but even moreso in the psychological dimension. “Reality” itself comes to be understood as that interpretation which is “socially constructed” and imposed by those who have power.  This conclusion requires getting past “old convictions” now seen as oppressions which counseled such old virtues as veracity, altruism, and concern for the common good, as nothing more than devices by which those in positions of domination were/are able to maintain control; as hidden expressions of ethnocentrism at best, exploitative power at worst.  The new ethic of competitive social construction requires that one stop being “passive,” as so many discovered themselves to have been prior to their liberation (and learning new virtues of assertiveness, maintaining a self-image of decisiveness and success, and living with a strong sense of self-generated self-esteem).

           With this stepping beyond what is taken to be the illusion that there is anything more to life than interest and power, the urge is not only to impose one’s will in the pursuit of self-interest, but something more: a peculiar kind of evangelism sets in, the insistence that all others submit to the nihilistic conclusion.

           Here arises the face of envy: the resentful wish to tear down or “deconstruct” those who still live in the enclosure of traditional culture, to reduce those who aspire to too much, with cynical mocking or reductive psychological diagnosis.  So the conclusion about the ultimacy of power-relations is by no means benign or passive.  Fueled by the anger out of which it arises, and the manic intensity of Faustian liberation, it is very different from lazy relativism and “live and let live” toleration.  It presents a new kind of absolutism, an absolutism of competitive social construction,¹⁰ the post-traditional absolutized relativism which is nihilism. It wills the autocrat. The intensity and destructiveness of nihilism, its frustration over alienation from value and enchantment in life, is revealed in a chilling statement from Nietzsche: “man would sooner have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.”¹¹ 

           As disease progresses, nihilism penetrates society, relationships, and persons to such an extent that it becomes difficult to see.  Here is the normalizing mentioned earlier.  At the same time there is a drawing back from the actual world of complex experience.  The theme here is isolation, retreat from a world that has become intolerably ambiguous, unstable, uncertain, dangerous. 

           There are many forms of isolation (American society can be seen as a smorgasbord of options), but escape into knowing, especially in the form of diagnosis of the other as a common way of isolation and escape.  It reflects the deep Western tendency to place knowing before being, and to understand living as essentially about application or implementation of knowing. 

           Here we speak not of the knowing of mutuality, but of the specifically scientific knowing which objectifies, which sees that which is to be known through the lens of separation, fixity, materiality, and control.  In American society, this kind of knowing, especially in the context of a weak sense of shared reality, becomes a primary way to exercise power, a form of Bacon’s “knowledge is power.”  The difference is that now the power-relation is extended from the natural world to the social and interpersonal world.  Knowing becomes both weapon and shield in the struggle to prevail in the highly competitive game of socially constructing reality, gaining the upper hand by having one’s interpretation become the “correct” one – the one which prevails.  In the aggressive knowing, truth is defined as strength of assertion; it becomes a tool with which to consolidate and wield power within a social environment whose chief feature is perpetual war of interpretation. It is a lot like what we see and participate in as “the daily news.”

            This kind of knowing does not recognize the reality of either relationship or personhood, and hence is profoundly confusing and destructive from a human perspective.  The significance of knowing as objectification in the human world is described very clearly by Hans-Georg Gadamer:

By understanding the other, by claiming to know him, one takes from him all justification of his own claims. The dialectic of charitable or welfare work in particular operates in this way, penetrating all relationships between men as a reflective form of the effort to dominate. The claim to understand the other person in advance performs the function of keeping the claim of the other person at a distance….  A person who does not accept that he is dominated by prejudices will fail to see what is shown by their light. It is like the relation between the ‘I’ and the ‘Thou.’ A person who reflects himself out of the mutuality of such a relation changes this relationship and destroys its moral bond.

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1988), pp. 323-324.  But again note that not all social scientists objectify in this way.  For a significant exception, see Robert Kegan’s “constructive-developmental perspective,”  which “leads us to bracket every hope, save the growth of the truth,” as a form of “care” which “is not merely another of ‘my values’ but [is] itself rooted in the psychological and philosophical development of the truth.  It arises out of a recognition of the other’s distinctness.”  In The Evolving Self,  p. 296.

           With the dominance of this kind of knowing, its claim to be free of all prejudice and its legitimation as a scientific diagnosis, we see systematic violation of the most basic tenet of traditional Western ethics: that the person must always be treated as a subject rather than an object, as an “end in themselves” rather than a means, as a person rather than a thing.¹²

           With the nihilistic conclusion, and once the moral bond is broken and “soul” is lost, there is no inhibition against manipulation.  With knowing as power, the person is reduced to whatever category they are required to represent.  And at the same time the one who “knows” is further isolated from sensitivity and relationship – from the webs of mutuality, responsibility, and criticism that are necessary to human well-being.  The essential cultural quality of sincerity – which, again, requires the presence of others, the relationship of mutuality, and the presumption of good faith — is eroded and weakened, as is the supporting ability to sustain belief in anything higher or deeper than the material world, stimulus-response conditioning, and power relations.

           As the natural progression of disease unfolds, lying begins to be a major theme of both private and public life, reflecting Dostoyevsky’s prophetic statement: “If God does not exist, everything is permitted.”  If knowing is relative not to truth but to power, and if power defines social reality, then the option of Plato’s “noble lie” becomes available to all (for who is to define “nobility”?).  The typical lying of our time is not only about this or that fact, but also comes in packages wrapped up as interpretation of persons, situations, or policies, interpretations which serve the interests of the liar. 

           Lying of this sort is effective when people do not quite know what is going on: because they are overwhelmed or confused or withdrawn, because the social fabric has been so badly weakened, because the circumstances are complex and ambiguous, because people are compromised in their humanity due to chronic multiple-tasking, and/or because of prevailing emptiness and vulnerability, or because they are young. 

           In this state, aggressive knowing can be imposed, in a dynamic not unlike that of brainwashing, through insistence backed by threat of violence (mostly emotional violence in American society, such as showing anger or the threat of anger in “emotional abuse”), repetition, the invocation of currently popular trends in diagnosis (for example, repressed memory of childhood sexual abuse), and other forms of manipulative preying on the vulnerability of the other.  And since the confusion and uncertainty in the human world are so widespread today, we are especially vulnerable to predators, vulnerable psychologically, politically, culturally, and spiritually. 

           Part of the difficulty is that predators are often difficult to identify (some have credentials and prestigious positions, some adapt to attractive social styles) until after their damage has been done.  And awareness of this fact further weakens trust, generates suspicion, wariness, and cynicism, which together constitute the breeding ground of moral disease – a death spiral.  Like a firestorm, it begins to feed on itself – as the individualism, with its professed concern for freedom, begins to look more like Max Weber’s famous “iron cage.”¹³  

           The combined effect of the above elements is progressive suffocation of the self — and of mutuality in both private and public life, willingness to be present with the other.  As ego becomes ever more isolated, and in isolation ever more focused on control as the means of gaining and maintaining power, it becomes closed, often losing awareness of its lying, disappearing into its own construction. 

           In the enclosure of ego, no spirit can blow through, no insight or affection from the other, no energy of friendship or of the deeper self.  In isolation, and in an entropy of the ego starved of incoming energy, the person is increasingly propelled by anger alone, in its attempt to win competitive advantage and enforce its ideological conclusions – in a life which is increasingly removed from any new experience of the world or of the other.  World and other become mere occasions onto which opportunistic knowing can be asserted, or from which threat can be anticipated.  And this knowing comes to be closely associated with identification of the problems, pain, and negative experiences of the other, almost a possession of these experiences in order to establish superiority of control through the objectifying power of diagnosis, and hence the annihilation of the other to which Gadamer refers, by reducing them to their problems.

           Meanwhile, simultaneous with ever greater identification of the other with their problems or the diagnosis which has been assigned to them, the one who knows develops a very distinct loss of self-transcendence and blindness to their own individuality and fallibility, isolated even to him/herself, amazingly unconsciousness as to what she/he is being and doing.  As Gadamer points out, the prejudice to having no prejudice within the enclosure of scientific objectivity results in a kind of hyper-awareness of others which has the consequence of keeping the purposes of the knower in the shadows, in a peculiar exemption from self-examination.  In this progressively isolated condition, all manner of strange and unhealthy mental states can incubate, recalling the wisdom of those who have said that ultimately it is necessary to act in cultural good faith in order to avoid being overcome by one’s own dis-ease.¹⁴   

           At some point it ceases to be clear that there is a deeper self, at least in traditional terms of conscience, soul, and at least occasional self-transcending wisdom, along with ongoing need for confession, forgiveness, and intimacy.  The person comes to be defined almost exclusively by ego, a package of deconstructive projects, political alliances, and superficial engagements – all swirling around in the anger, otherwise without center.  And in the absence of centered selfhood,¹⁵ the individual becomes “bad faith” (mauvaise foi), a malevolent agent who cannot be addressed and who cannot respond in sincerity – even though he/she often is able to perform well, through flattery and the age-old bag of manipulative tricks, among those with whom alliance is found to be advantageous.¹⁶

           As the grip of moral disease tightens, another element comes into view, and that is  blaming, and the associated purpose of capturing the position of being victim.  But it is not only blaming in the usual sense of off-loading onto the other that which cannot be tolerated in the self, along with inability to take responsibility for the actions of a limited self, inability to confess mistakes.  Beyond this, the form of blaming that is characteristic of late-stage individualism involves the inversion of accusing the other of doing precisely what the one blaming is doing, thereby hiding one’s action under the accusation.  This manipulative adaptation of the isolated self serves as a way of both defense and control, maintaining a taboo against any questioning of their actions.  Hence through preemptive attack, both superiority and the isolation are aggressively enforced.  In its ultimate form, the degraded self will turn to accuse the other of blaming itself.  This serves to deflect any and all criticism because, having laid down the accusation/diagnosis of the other as one who is blaming, anything they say can then be taken as a case in point – so it is always possible to invoke the old Ronald Reagan phrase, “See, there you go again,” (or the more recent “What about…”) as defense against any criticism whatsoever.  Now the isolation is complete.

           Here, then, is the angry, post-modern individual, starving in the emptiness of its own enclosure.  It can persist for some time, and it can cause great harm – before the anger finally begins to spill over all strategies of containment.  Legislating their nihilistic conclusion, insisting on it with frantic, quasi-religious fervor, the individualist winds up disappearing into a cloud of confusion in the midst of multiple strategies of manipulation, engulfed by the anger, effectively “willing the void” within themselves.  At this point a certain feebleness begins to be manifest, one which is often hidden with aggressive assertion and defensiveness.  It is like a deep chill, something like a spiritual equivalent to hypothermia – among those who have allowed their Qi (vital energy) to be displaced and scattered by anger.

           Nihilism

           This is Modern individualism at the edge, and the condition of a culture at war with itself.  Ironically, what I have just described can be seen as a form of the very “war of all against all” and “state of nature” from which Hobbes and other early modern champions of natural rights individualism had sought escape.  The return to (or creation of) this nightmare state – sometimes known as “culture wars” — is also ironic because it obstructs the profoundly significant developmental possibilities implicit in the therapeutic perspective (which are discussed in other chapters).  In fact, what we see with the syndrome I have just described is competitive individualism coming to exploit the deep insights and positive possibilities of psychology – and often feminism at the same time — as fundamental to the creative possibilities of our era.  In Bellah’s terms the individualist exploitation represents “pathological distortion” as against “creative possibility.”¹⁷  In the language of Alfred North Whitehead, this exemplifies the historical tendency for “great ideas [to] enter history with disgusting alliances….”¹⁸

           Modern individualism ends in nihilism, short of the full encounter with Nothingness toward which it drives.  This is extremely basic and subtle.  The experience of Nothingness is experience of complete lack of traditional support for any life-interpretation, including even that of the nihilistic conclusion of “willing the void” – or “negating your negation” in Japanese.  It includes the subsequent experience of a mysterious liberation associated with what some have described as the Dao, or God, or the deepest wellspring of life itself and a sense of “soul” – and statements like “Zen is your ordinary mind.”  But experience of Nothingness is something most Western people are not prepared for,¹⁹ especially given our history of heavy metaphysics, both traditional and scientific — heavy in the sense that they insist on absolutized correctness in the cognitive dimension as a function of correspondence with displaced, static principles or commandments.  So people get stuck on “the near shore,” in early experiences of Nothingness which can be extremely dangerous.

           Some wise guides to the treacherous post-traditional territory point not only to the inevitability but also to the necessity of the experience of Nothingness, as prelude to the crossing of a crucial developmental threshold which takes us beyond the emptiness of nihilism.  Karl Jaspers, for example, says that “if man [sic] is not to be allowed to founder in the mere persistence of life, it may seem essential that in his consciousness he shall be confronted with Nothingness; he must recall his origin.”²⁰  The key is in the word “origin,” in experience of Nothingness beyond nihilism as experience of the radically ineffable source of creativity, genuine presence, and life-affirmation. 

           But, again, most individuals do not actually come to that encounter which Jaspers and other post-traditional visionaries find so significant to the rebirth that is necessary in our time.  Instead of moving beyond nihilism and through Nothingness, into a new affirmation, most individualists become snared within the oblivion of nihilism and the emptiness of moral disease, an emptiness which is nearly the same as the anger, an emptiness – or hollowness — which at the same time becomes full of manipulative projects.²¹  They become arrested on the near-side of Nothingness, in the post-traditional world of never-ending distraction, numbing, and forms of education, psychology, and religion which baptize isolation and teach self-esteem as the highest value.  In the oblivion of nihilism and the “mere persistence” of moral disease, people are unable radicalize their nihilism and hence move beyond it, unable to move forward into the Nothingness and what some call a “new nobility” of “self-existent” personhood,²² or a “soul beyond psychology.”²³ At the same time they are unable to reconnect with or reappropriate traditional values which might provide guidance, support, and traction.  Fascism, as the adoption of a totalistic and absolutized ideology, is an obvious option for those who grow weary of nihilistic individualism.

                                         Nihilism and the Threshold We Must Cross

I.

            Nihilism hangs in the air like a bad fog. While it is not a new phenomenon historically speaking, the pervasiveness of nihilism in American life today is truly ominous – and may be accelerating.

            “Nihilism” is a basic and complex term that stands as one of the central dynamics of our unthinkably complex times. Hence it is one easily clichéd or weaponized in the culture wars. I take it to refer to persons or groups who have given up on meaning, value, duty, truth – given up, that is, on both God and themselves. Nihilism is distinct from the ways of passivity in which many find apparent shelter from the humanly impossible situation we have built for ourselves. These include ways of going limp or “lying flat” (as in the current Chinese “tang ping”). While passivity can become compliance and normalization of uncivilized behavior, nihilism is fundamentally active, aggressive, angry with an edge of self-righteousness.

           Nihilists, as Nietzsche pointed out, are those who would rather “will the void than be void of will.” They tear down and obstruct with no reason other than to assert their negating will. So they are not interested in reason (sometimes taken as another liberal ruse), truth, or morality, or even their own well-being (and that of their children). But to see them only as high-speed opportunists is to miss their jihad against life in the present. They will the void because they feel excluded, replaced, betrayed, despite ever more shrill claims of their superiority.

           We encounter nihilism all around us, in the uncivilized behavior of politicians, media and business types, and sometimes in people close to us with whom the revelation of their nihilism comes as a shock. We see it as some slide off the American Founders’ ideal of “ordered liberty,” into the quagmire of Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts,” and the politics of identity, obstruction, and mob rule.   

            The best vaccine against nihilism is to understand it, drag it into the light of day and talk about it – with it if possible also, to see it with others who retain common sense. In this spirit I offer the interpretation which follows, one in which nihilism is an inevitable and necessary stage in an utterly crucial developmental process. It reflects what Karl Jaspers spoke of, from the Nazi era, as our need in the midst of cultural collapse to “recall our origin” in nothingness.

II.

            The nihilism of our time is embedded in the culture of moral disease which breeds and normalizes it. The disease is the terminal point of the dominant Western ethic of the modern period, coming to full force in the Natural Law philosophy of the Seventeenth Century, wrapped in myths of exceptionalism, manifest destiny, and the common good which was thought to arise automatically, “as though the presence of an invisible hand,” when “everyone” is pursuing their interests. Moral disease reflects what happens when the ethic of isolated and competitive individualism comes into contact with other ways of life over which it can no longer dominate. Nihilism is what the modern ideal comes to as it plays out in history.

           In the smash up of a tenuously interdependent world which results from several centuries of religious and economic colonizing by Western Europe, all values, including those of “the common good” and “the public,” are relativized, and thereby reduced to interest and power. Public – and increasingly private – discourse come to be mediated by the values and myths of market capitalism. The resulting nihilism is profoundly depressive (as in reductive and “canceling”) of anything resembling “common humanity” or “the public.” And, especially as the supposed satisfactions of private life evaporate and/or become unsustainable, “depression” becomes a widespread personal and cultural problem as well. It is hard not to hear the voice of T.S. Eliot in the background of any serious consideration of these matters: “… this is the way the world ends, not with a bang but with a whimper.”

            Claiming that awareness and overcoming of nihilism and disease which is its medium represents a stage in a journey through the collapse of one culture and the emergence of another can be dangerous. For one, there is the assertion of a knowing of history – of what is going on in the larger drama. This, of course, is something no human being could possibly possess. On the other hand, constructing and adopting some kind of interpretation as to the broader drama and context of life seems necessary, certainly to the living of a full life, if not something that is inevitable due to childhood socialization – either by virtuous parents or by “Sponge Bob.” Either way, it seems fair to ask each other to take responsibility for the interpretation through which we live into the world.

            All cautions acknowledged, there is no exemption from the need to venture an interpretation, at the very least as a major support for our best intentions and actions in the crossing and navigating of the territory beyond. As Viktor Frankl and others familiar with living in a society which has gone nihilistic point out, interpretation involves the essential human act of creating meaning, as articulation of our underlying affirmation of life, and what humans do when we are living well.

III.

            I have attempted to describe the pathology of nihilism and moral disease in greater detail elsewhere, and have argued for decades that these streams of culture are closely associated with a threshold we must cross, a ground over which we must pass. That crossing involves what Rinehold Niebuhr called the “sublime madness” of living with hope in a hopeless world, into an orientation to life that is very different from that which guided the vast majority of our ancestors. As some have said about the death of parents, now there is nothing between us and the Void.

           From the perspective of this madness, what we need is not the one, best description, in the form of a doctrine, orthodoxy, or final revelation, but rather a prescription as to what to do and how to position ourselves in the turmoil of the present, as we learn how to thrive in the great pluralism that is given by life on Earth. Having an effective description is certainly one component of a healthy life-interpretation, understood as a lifeway – with descriptive and prescriptive aspects — that nurtures living well in a world which includes others who have descriptions different from our own. But it can no longer be assumed, as in industrial production and much of traditional religion as we receive it, that living well will occur by simply following (or agreeing on, submitting to…) a single, correct formulation, from which all else becomes a matter of deduction, implementation, application, and rule-following – with little concern for the process, relationships, and the complex life-situations in which we live our actual lives. Maybe a simpler way to make this point is to say that metaphysics must follow ethics, not, as it did for so long in the West, the other way around (recalling a phrase from one of my greatest teachers, Joseph Sittler: “man [sic] creates the truth he must when it is confronted with the deed he ought”).

           But living with these dynamics in a post-ideological world requires that humans step beyond both the dependence and the adolescent rebellion of the past, into a new world of pluralism and expanded responsibility, in an environment populated by fascists who are ready to do their work of terrorizing frustrated and confused people into accepting their preposterous interpretations. In fact, the more outrageous the better for the fascist, the better to demonstrate complete power over their subjects.

           The new orientation to life I am pointing to arises from and is expressive of a life-affirmation on the far side of the dark night of encounter with nihilism and the post-apocalyptic conclusion of doom. It entails the decision to proclaim to oneself and the world – against massive evidence to the contrary – that life is worth living. In the language of Kyoto School Zen, we are talking about the “negation of negation.” With American Wallace Stevens, it is the “Yes” that follows “the final no” on which “the future world depends” (or what William James is pointing to when he speaks of “new ranges of life succeeding upon our most despairing moments” – or Paul Tillich with “God is the god who appears when ‘God’ has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.” We are speaking about a very distinctly religious phenomenon.

           The consciousness being expressed in these statements is profoundly – one might say impossibly – challenging for human beings. It involves an understanding of humanity, as beings “created in God’s image,” not as cookie cutter miniatures, but rather as beings who are capable of participating directly in the ongoing act of creation, of “creating something out of nothing.” Humans cease cowering at the feet of the patriarch, and stand up to become co-creators through whom reality passes directly into that mutual project known as the world. Etty Hillesum, the Jewish Dutch nurse who was executed at Auschwitz, made much the same point when she said, in the conclusion to her efforts to understand how a loving God could let the Holocaust happen, that “God needs our help.” This kind of consciousness leads to a way of life in which one is respectful of both self and others, in the shared vocation of waking up each day to create the world anew, bringing order out of chaos, justice out of oppression, and love out of deceit – to “be the change you wish to see in the world” (per Gandhi). It is an attitude and a choice, emerging from many “dark nights” such as we have in these times.

           Yet, again, all this may just be asking more of human beings than we can handle. For the stress of living with the dynamics we’re discussing is loaded with uncertainty, awareness of danger, and a high level of ambiguity, something very few human beings have been able to tolerate in the past, a weight that can drive to disease in one form or another.

           One reason why the new orientation and worldview is so difficult to talk about, especially given the inherited Western need for a displaced and static metaphysic, is that it is fundamentally both pluralistic and relational. As pluralistic, it acknowledges the limitations of all interpretations, including our own, since we are beings who are radically limited in language, society, and responsiveness to that which is ultimate in life. In pluralism, this acknowledgment does not lead to frustration, cynicism, and relativism – paving the way for fascism, because it also recognizes the presence and value of other partially correct descriptions from which we can learn and grow. The new worldview, then, is also relational in that meeting with others is not just an arena for exchange or transaction, but of discovery, and even the space through which fresh energy enters persons and the world.

           Here it is important to be aware of how we are using the key word, “new.” For the new we are talking about is not – as in the modern dream – completely out of nowhere. Rather, it will contain elements of tradition which are retrieved from the wreck, cleaned up, and woven into a post-traditional culture in which traditional elements serve as much more than decoration. For example, I have long advocated for what became a sub-tradition of the broader modern liberation movement, one that identifies and cultivates faithfulness to precisely the kind of relationship to which I keep referring, one which “gives more energy than it takes.” Hence some of us speak of “relatedness as locus of the ultimate” – as the temple or holy place.

           I have been able to do my own work of retrieving this largely forgotten Western sub-tradition in a most fruitful dialogue with Chinese colleagues and friends who are doing something both similar and different: reappropriating Confucius and his vision that “it is not the way that makes the human great, but the human that makes the way great” (Analects 15:29), as richly parallel with the Hebrew injunction to “choose life, that you and your descendants may live” (Deuteronomy 15:29).

IV.

            On the more practical aspects of prescription, our planet contains a magnificent array of yogas (in Sanscrit, yokes), disciplines, methods for moving from negation to affirmation, from ego-centered to reality-centered self. This ambiguous situation in which vast riches become available at the same time we have thrown out or deconstructed all criteria for judgment beyond personal preference or authoritarian command is complicated by the fact the method – even within a tradition — that may be appropriate to one person may not be to the next. The choices – and the necessity of choice — can be overwhelming, can seduce in the direction of relativism with its high tolerance for indifference.

           To find — or be found by — one of the world’s great disciplines, especially the one most effective for us in particular, both among and within the variety of traditions, as well as non-traditional sources appropriated by the growing “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR) population and elements of cognitive science, is by no means easy.

           However we might navigate these impossible waters (like the bird which, by the laws of physics, is unable to fly – until it does), it seems that the engagement of a spiritual practice is necessary in order for us to be anything other than spectators in the human journey. This would include work with a mentor and community who can guide, observe, correct, and encourage. The crossing over we so urgently need cannot be accomplished by the individual alone, so it may be that healthy spirituality requires a religion, a relatively stable integration of myth and ritual, word and deed.

           Do the dangers associated with these “practical aspects” of a most challenging passage constitute the reef on which civilization breaks up? We press on beyond this question.

           Perhaps it is best to conclude with saying that before the various questions identified above can arise in any meaningful sense there is the decision as to whether to be alive, to accept the gift of life, even like an animal with no awareness of its mortality? –Or not. A positive response, the deepest “Yes,” is not just a smiley face on Pollyanna, but an expression of co-creativity, and the faith Hannah Arendt so beautifully articulated: “that the manifold points to a Oneness which diversity conceals and reveals at the same time.” Diversity ceases to be threat, and becomes inspiration in the full and literal sense of that old term.

Return to Life

           With “whack-a-mole” as a tempting metaphor for this moment, we experience endless crises. In the onslaught, some of our fellow citizens drive themselves to exhaustion and dysfunction in the effort to get control, attempting to whack all moles that pop their heads up. Others turn away in the post-apocalyptic conclusion that the game is unwinnable and essentially lost – so they rush off to either passive or aggressive expressions of their modern/American individuality. What are the rest of us to do? High rates of suicide, depression, drug and alcohol abuse, and reports of corruption and moral disease suggest that we are not doing well. At the deeper level of political and cultural movements, the situation seems similar to that Sidney Hook referred to as “the failure of nerve,” the loss of confidence in Greek and modern democratic values that signals the collapse of Western civilization. He might have pointed also to the active side of this dynamic, the hyper-nerve of those who energetically accept conspiracy theories and the really wild and violent political strategies that bloom in our time. Xi Jinping and the CCP are not the only ones to adopt the idea that “the East is rising and the West is declining.” There are many among us who have done this also, often unwittingly.

           As we crawl out from the very long winter of Covid and Trump, William James provides some helpful reminders. In his classic work, Pragmatism: A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking (1907), he proposes that we choose to participate in a world which is “not certain to be saved,” and yet one dependent for salvation — if any – on the condition that each person “does their level best.”[1] He is envisioning humans in a cooperative, co-creative relationship with God, or what he called “an unseen order” in his earlier Varieties of Religious Experience, a god whose initial act of creation was left incomplete, inviting humans to join in the project. The sense of risk associated with accepting this invitation can be overwhelming – maybe better to hold back in the seemingly safer posture of cynicism.

           Here is a very significant way of understanding the human drama, its disease and its remedy. It is all the more compelling once one has experienced “Pandemic Brain,” a condition of partial paralysis that has been widespread even among people who have not tested positive. And it is one which is considerably at odds with traditional understandings, especially those in the West that have tended toward detached, static, patriarchal, authority-oriented views of the relationship between God and world (or essence and existence).

           James presents his understanding as a hypothetical for our consideration: “Suppose that the world’s author put the case to you before creation” – the case for our doing our best in an uncertain world? Especially in the absence of any more authoritative answer to the perennial question, “What is life and how can we live it?,” wouldn’t we choose for cooperation and mutual support along with the maintenance of our own dignity? 

           Let us observe that this understanding is based on conscious awareness and choice rather than traditional revelation or command, or post-traditional weight of empirical evidence. It is also important to note that choice, as James presents it, is to be guided not by any particular metaphysic, but by considerations of results, consequences, evaluations of what the various choices come to in the lived world of our purposes and relationships, in short, the world we choose to create.

           So let us stand up in the warmer seasons with greater awareness of what we are doing and why, including the components of our chosen way of self-care and of giving articulation to the new culture we are creating. James acknowledges that there is a leap of affirmation involved in choice of this life-way, and that

           The return to life can’t come about by talking.  It is an act; to make you return to life, I must set an example for your imitation, I must deafen you to talk, or to the importance of talk, by showing you, as Bergson does, that the concepts we talk with are made for purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight.[2]

           We may still have the chance to join in the shared vocation of saving the planet. James suggests that we are desperately in need of a culture which supports this possibility, and that we are capable of taking the action to make it our own life-vocation.

           Here’s hoping we can hear this message today – from James and other sources, even despite a radical upsurge in post-apocalyptic behavior which assumes that these days are really the last days, and that we have already dropped off the cliff of oblivion, such that pandemic and the final episodes of Trump are phenomena of freefall. Maybe not. William James recommends we “posit life.”[3]

[1] Pragmatist, Lecture IX, “Pragmatism and Religion.”

[2] A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture VII, “The Continuity of Experience.”

[3] William James, Diary, April 30, 1870.

Ode to the Humanities – and Invocation 

In a recent conversation with my granddaughter, she told me she’s reading Gary Chapman, The Five Languages of Love. I’m struck by the sense that she’s learning how to be human, learning the range of human response to life, including some values that lead in a good direction.

In the “wasteland” of modern society, traditional sources of learning about meaning, value, and purpose have ceased functioning. And yet the need for (and actually the inevitability of human learning about these things – for better and for worse) remains. It seems that each day we learn again that relativistic chaos is very different from the democratic pluralism we cherish, and that cultish authoritarianism is not an acceptable alternative.

Even more than our dogs, we are learning beings, beings imprinted with the values of those with whom we grew up, and their extensions in education and community. The question is not whether or not we have an ethic, but only which one, and whether or not we are conscious of this fact. Are we living and moving in the world through the ethic that was impressed upon us as the unconscious given of childhood, or one that we have freely chosen as an adult?

A complete and healthy human being does not simply unfold out of the natural process, as seems to be the case with other forms of life. Humans require a cultivation, a practice which energizes a transformative process – roughly speaking, from an ego-centered to a reality-centered self. Traditional cultures, for all their faults and limitations, knew this and applied their own versions of transformative practice to at least their elites. But the seductions of the machine age caused people to forget and even belittle this most basic function of culture. So now we have the barbarism Martin Luther King described in terms of “guided missiles and misguided men [sic].”

In the West, the most basic and general transformative practice was called “the Humanities.” It grew to be a very big tent, including arts, performances, artifacts, discourses, and a wide diversity of role models – all focused on questions of meaning, value, and purpose in human life. After several centuries of expansion, critique, and liberation, that tent is now in such disarray we might not recognize it. Or we might see it as the decaying remains of a previous civilization, a ruin.

As one of the most urgent of the many impossible tasks facing us today, we must now reappropriate and create the humanities – before humanity itself is lost; before it drifts into a form of life with which we would not want to identify.

These considerations bring us back to what is known as “Meno’s Paradox” in Plato: “… a man [sic] cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows – since he knows it, there is no need to search – nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for” (Plato, Meno, 80e).

But how is it possible to live with this paradox, stuck between the insufficiency of what we know and not knowing what to look for? And how can I tell what forms of practice in the riot of contemporary culture are authentic, and discern which could be most effective for me in particular? We get little help with these very important life questions, ones that can so confuse that they distract us from practice altogether.

In some societies, like China when I first started working there, there was so much deference to authority that people could be easily manipulated and deprived of their moral and spiritual agency (like some parts of America now). But within the paradox, the opposite pertains as well: in an environment of relativism and nihilism, chaos and brute force reign. As Dostoevsky said, “If god does not exist everything is permitted.”

Socrates taught great modesty in terms of what humans can claim to know. He also engaged practice of democratic discourse within an “examined life,” sharing what we think we know with both vigor and humility, open to more clear picturing of the the common good we seek, open to persuasion from others with whom we “disagree,” as well as to my own ongoing efforts to describe our shared ideal. It is through this practice – one later referred to as “liberal education” – -that we engage a form of education distinguished not only by its subject matter – as in “the Humanities,” but also by its “Socratic method,” the method of asking and addressing questions about the big issues in life, like love, justice, beauty, goodness, and truth. Further, liberal education has envisioned Socratic teaching working its benefits – in problem-solving as well as personal development — through inquiry or conversation, or what we today sometimes call “dialogue.” This art form involves working with a variety of partially correct answers, as we learn how to navigate between solipsism and authoritarianism, weaving a shared culture of mutual support and delight in each others’ presence. It moves toward answers (and askings) that are ever more effective and compassionate. Hence Socrates cultivated a certain kind of “through inquiry” relationship as the most fruitful context in which to continuously gather and refine commitments and life purposes.

So what of my granddaughter and her generation of emerging adults? Some might call her Chapman books “pop psych,” or dismiss them on other terms of contemporary disagreement. I would not do this, and certainly support what she is reading now, see no evil embedded in those books, and trust the ever-greater refinement of her choices going forward. I also stand by with my own, also evolving, list of “Great Books” and art (in case anyone asks!), as well as my stockpile of articulations of that ineffable and quintessentially human activity we call the humanities, plus some awareness of institutions which are distinctly in pursuit of ideal practice and embodiment in several forms of liberal education.

Maybe ours is a time in which the experience of coming to know gradually, through a process of inquiry and conversation (as distinct from revelation and command), is just beginning to dawn. Perhaps we are at a point of renaissance and fresh affirmation of the gift quality of life and the variety of its expressions. Perhaps an age of polarization between ideologies and authoritarianisms, either-or conflicting assertions of the binary, curiously mixed with chaos and nihilism, is beginning to pass. My granddaughter herself may be evidence that at a deeper level we are waking up to the more mature human enactment of “knowing,” and to the realization that love has several languages. Let’s start with basics.

                                                         Regard as Bedrock

Amid the general social dissolution, man [sic] is thrust back into dependence upon those most primitive bonds out of which alone a new and trustworthy objectivity can be constructed.

Karl Jaspers, 1957, p. 26

I.

What it comes down to, if we want to have anything like a democracy, is regard for the person (including self) as a source of insight, support, and inspiration; as a kind of valve through which creativity and fresh energy enter a world otherwise overtaken by entropy. Beyond mere toleration and “live and let live,” we are talking about a positive appreciation and cultivation of difference.

Regard is the simple though not easy secret at the center of the good life as envisioned by democracy. In the journey through the last several tumultuous years, the portal aspect of pandemic opens up so we can see some of these basic things more fully than before. These include awareness that once might have been known as common sense, but which now becomes the imperative of any future worth living.

Of course, there are significant details, beginning with identification of the very particular factors in our lives that make it so difficult for us to be faithful to and nurturing of those relationships that are rich in the quality of regard. This point brings us to the center of a great global moral heritage, one which turns on the root distinction between person and thing, subject and object, Thou and it…. Here is a heritage of presumptive appreciation and trust: until you show me it is unwarranted (which sometimes does not take long), I regard you as an unprecedented event in the cosmos and a source of the vitality we most need in order to live well.

Traditionally this value was “baked into” cultures in limited and uneven ways. And the post-traditional critique which hastened the collapse of tradition was only sometimes about widening the circle of inclusion. Mostly the Twentieth Century tsunami of critique was about the ambiguous project of tearing down all old social and cultural structures, ultimately even those closely associated with democracy and the dignity of the American experiment. It is as if tradition itself had become the enemy. So, as we moderns and post-moderns became experts at deconstruction, we tacitly bought into the profoundly mistaken notion that exercise of this reductionist activity is the same as freedom.

Now, with pandemic of Covid and Trump, we find there are no structures left anymore. We find ourselves in the condition Karl Jaspers spoke of in the time of the Third Reich, as one of “general social dissolution.” The U.S. Capitol becomes a scene of chaos and barbarism. So when we step out there from what had constrained us previously, we are not met with regard, but rather we enter a void. Anything of tradition lies shattered on the floor and mixed with other shards from the past, and the people we might want to talk with about civility and the value of the public have mostly converted to Ayn Rand and Donald Trump. So “the public” as an ideal and a practice of mutuality is really gone. This is how the world comes to be dominated by autocrats who cynically assume – and legislate — the ultimacy of interest and power. It is an environment which is disturbingly similar to what early modern individualists called “the war of all against all.” As Kenan Malik (2015) has pointed out so clearly, the void at the center of the autocratic phase we are in presently is profoundly different from the liberation movements of the recent past. Contemporary fascism does not protest for the sake of a piece of the pie, but acts out of the nihilistic wish to destroy as an end in itself.

II.

The drift into fascism occurs as many people become disconnected from anything like a culture of aspiring to “liberty and justice for all.” As they drift in the process, they often lose all meaningful relationship with other persons. Meanwhile, the autocrats learn how easy it is to manipulate frightened and marginalized people who are in this state, to repeat lies until the people believe them and/or are willing to act as though they were true, even when the lies obviously run square against their interests. The lies – the bigger the better – are prime instruments of the domination. They – and the ease with which they are spread like a virus – both demonstrate and amplify the fascist leader’s power and their underlying distain for “the people.”

As if all this is not crazy-making enough, these dynamics are running wild at the same moment when America – and the world more generally — is struggling to come to terms with the atrocities of the past, both demographic and ecological. Indeed, it is a reckoning which seems necessary if humans – both individually and collectively — are to be able to pass through the heavy turbulence of our time without catastrophic collapse. It is necessary if we want to cross over into a wider and deeper embrace of both the global heritage of democracy and what is magnificent in our separate traditions.

In America, once known as the prow or cutting edge of modernity, we must now overcome what “our” ancestors did to Native and African peoples, and “we” have continued to do. We must expand the circle of liberty and justice in a fully pluralistic (as distinct from relativistic) form of democracy. The task can be absolutely overwhelming (and I do not think I am being overly dramatic in my reading of the moment and what it requires), as we struggle to avoid the clutch of the fascist, while living with the possibility of an even more generalized collapse of society than we have already experienced. The challenge runs so deep that it requires us to examine and revive our natures as limited and incomplete beings, hoping to re-heal on a new plane on which “liberty and justice for all” can be practiced around the globe.

So yes, we are talking about nothing less than a “paradigm shift,” a metanoia, and a conscious act of affirmation of life. But not something impossible or without precedent (see Cornell West, Democracy Matters for a history of the death and rebirth of democracy in the 1860’s, 1890’s, 1930’s, and 1960’s, based on “ordinary citizens’ desire to take their country back from the hands of corrupted plutocrats and imperial elites”) (West, 2004, p. 23).

III.

Some of us think we already have the lineaments of a new worldview and way of being, as well as some institutions which are beginning to embody its core values and ethic. We are beginning to give birth to a world which is life-affirming, pluralistic, relational, ecologically responsible, and oriented to human transformation in the direction of thriving.

But in its present state it is like other forms of new life, wobbly, fragile, and vulnerable. Especially in the midst of all the vulgarity and bluster of our time, the exhaustion and crazed frustration, the survival of this new but not unprecedented lifeway seems completely improbable. And yet we recall previous times in history when a physically weak but spiritually ablaze movement overcame its predecessor which continued to hold a monopoly on force and violence long after their persuasive vision had ceased to energize society.

Western ancestors, with their fixation on the order and control that can be achieved through orthodoxy and hierarchy, probably overestimated the significance of codification in support of vision, a mistake I wish to avoid. But still, articulation and other forms of celebrating a “shared” narrative of meaning and value are literally and otherwise central to any culture that can fly. So what I am hoping to lift up in this short piece is “regard” as foundational to what Masha Gessen (2020) refers to as the reinvention of civilization that is called for by our times, as bedrock upon which we can take up our task. Without fear of reinventing colonialization, I point to the universal experience of regard, of regarding and being regarded. It can be seen as the form of love appropriate to public life, no less significant than forms like justice and caring and unconditional commitment.

References

Gessen, M. (2020), Surviving autocracy. New York: Riverhead. Jaspers, K. (1957). Man in the modern age. Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

Malik, K. (2015). The quest for a moral compass: A global history of ethics. Brooklyn, NY: Melville.

West, C. (2004). Democracy matters. New York: Penguin.

Democratic Awakening: A Meditation on Amor Mundi

In the absence of Trump’s never-ending acting out – culminating in the insurrection of Jan 6, Trumpians are left with the fear, anger, and a sense of being replaced. Trump had previously protected his followers from these feelings through his acting them out day after day of what must be the most bizarre presidency. But with Trump out of office vicariousness wanes. Now “the base” acts the part of Trump without him, its cult leader. We see this in the spring of 2021, to greater and lesser degrees, and in a wide array of disturbing mutations.

At the same time, America – always a complex proposition – is in a phase of catching up: rooting out injustices of the past that have been brought to light by the dual pandemics of Covid and Trump. The agenda is vast, including political, cultural, and ecological dimensions all at very high stakes. In the midst of civil war in all of those dimensions and pervasive moral disease, the question is whether the justice agenda can be pursued sufficiently (I remember how the war in Viet Nam in the 1960’s eclipsed the War on Poverty…). And, with the chill of fascism in the air, another side to the same question arises: will America be able to reintegrate the Trumpians, or let them discharge their venom in ways that could be tolerated? – or will they overwhelm and sink the American project with their resentment?

It seems more important than ever that those of us not infected (or more moderately so) step up and do our part to energize a society based on mutual respect, appreciation of encounter with the other who is different, and striving for “liberty and justice for all.” As Cornell West and others have pointed out, this kind of generalized democratic awakening has occurred before, in fact in times like ours when the very viability of the “American experiment” was on the line. For me, the most vivid memory of a previous time like our own was in the 1960’s when Martin Luther King captured the essence of democratic awakening with his 1963 “Letter From a Birmingham Jail:” “Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform a pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood [sic].”

We can take some encouragement from the 2020 election (imagine if Trump had won!). But now is not the time to give in to the exhaustion that follows overcoming of “the big lie” while living in pandemic with issues of racism and climate change. Here, it seems, is democracy’s essential appeal to American citizens today: can we step beyond the exhaustion to affirm a life together?

The genius of American democracy lies within the heart of ordinary citizens living this affirmation, each in our own walk of life. Here is the center of the paradoxical “equality of difference,” as America’s deepest source of vitality. For it is only when I stand in the presence of real but not incommensurable difference that I begin to have access to that vitality as well as to my genuine self. Here is where the magic of E Pluribus Unum occurs.

What is most valued in these dynamics is a certain creative space, one which is – again paradoxically – both open, as in the ineffability of the Dao, Allah, God, and simultaneously plentiful, as the source of life’s greatest gifts. It is a space that becomes available when we are able to stand in the paradox. It requires an “other,” one who is separate and different (not confluent or co-dependent), at the same time that their appearing in the midst of the great openness makes them radically equal – no less a miracle than I am. Here is an elevating equality, where difference is understood not on a scale that ranks from better to worse, and neither in a way that opens on to the relativism of “whatever” or the reductionist preferences of consumerism

The origin of this consciousness is to be found in the human capacity for self-transcendence, literally the capacity to make my former self other. So the fact that I can reflect on myself and make choices as to how to direct myself, in what Hannah Arendt so significantly articulated as “the inner dialogue between me and myself,” could be seen as the headwaters of a new vision of human maturity and well-being (or a very old one, nearly forgotten, urgently needed in these post-traditional times).

This last point accounts for how rare democracy has been in world history, though people like Amartya Sen point out that it has likely been more present as an inspiring force than we might have been brought up to think. Democracy is intimately connected with the deepest aspiration of the human race: to live as a self that can be kind and patient – and effective — with a lower self who stumbles frequently, and in a community in which we are all valued and supported in our uniqueness. Democracy, then, both requires and generates a certain possibility of human maturity or self-actualization.

From where we stand in our time we can see that the baser urgencies of our lower nature have intervened and mostly prevailed. We’ve insisted on being right, superior, special in the eyes of a judging god who chooses his people without revealing the criteria, forcing society to define them crudely. We’ve been obsessed with order and control, and placing ourselves at the center of the universe. We’ve gone to outrageous extents to deny death.

Maybe the deep meaning of the intersecting crises of our time is that they bring death to our door: Covid and Trump, wildfires and police shootings, denial of truth and assertion of that which is untrue, transparently self-serving political arguments and actions – the list goes on and on. These crises are expressive of the fact that we live on what is likely a failing planet, at least in its Anthropocene Era. The cultural air we breathe is saturated with fear, lethargy, and dread.

My own time as a person might be up at any moment. So why not withdraw and relax into the abyss, or break into a lifestyle of cynicism (or join a cult associated with one of these options)? The answer must be Amor Mundi, love of the world and especially of those human beings with whom I share it and its ongoing creation. They anchor me, comfort me, join me in weaving meaning.

So indeed America is ambitious as a vision of the good life, an ever-unfolding aspiration, a hope, an enlightenment. This vision is very attractive to human beings, though perhaps less so than a fine automobile. John Dewey, one of America’s greatest visionaries, said democracy is  “more than a form of government; it is primarily a mode of associated living,” and I want to join Arendt (per above) in saying it is a way of being a person as well. Democracy does not call on us to do anything beyond our means, just that we live well and give our little push for the common good. It presumes – rather astonishingly, given the facts of our species history — that the individual person is capable of learning and taking care of themselves. This includes awareness that attending to the common good is beneficial for us as well as those we help, mindful that – as MLK put it — other-preservation, not self-preservation is the first law of life. And, of course, in our time we have come to much greater understanding as to what this requires, including the maintaining of an active awareness that the common good must now be enacted on a planetary scale. And all this sits alongside ever-present temptation to live chronically overwhelmed or otherwise checked out.

There is a story about Confucius being asked what he would do if he knew the world was going to end.  He said, in a distinctly calm sort of way, that he would keep tending his garden. He did not dismiss the question.

Stephen C. Rowe is professor emeritus of philosophy at Grand Valley State University. A second, “From Pandemic” edition of his Overcoming America / America Overcoming will be published later this year.

References

Arendt, H. (1977). “The two in one,” in The life of the mind: thinking. New York: Harvest Books, 185.

Dewey, J. (1966). Democracy and education. New York: Free Press, 87.

King, M. L. (1967) “The world house,” in Where do we go from here: chaos or community? (Boston: Beacon Press), 182. This seminal essay is also included in an anthology of mine in which I sought to preserve wisdom of the 60’s, as the later Seventies tide of Reagan’s “moral majority” flowed in: Rowe, S. (Ed.), (1989). Living beyond crisis: essays on discovery and being in the world. New York: Pilgrim Press.

Scranton, Roy. (2015). Learning to die in the Anthropocene. San Francisco: City Lights Books.

Sen, A. (2003). “Democracy and its global roots,” in The new republic, Oct. 6, 2003, 28-35.

West, C. (2004). Democracy matters: winning the fight against imperialism. New York: Penguin Press.

<A>Toward a Relational World

<B>From a Western Perspective

<space>

We wish to flip the figure-ground gestalt of perception to focus on the relation rather than the thing. We want to see in a different way—deeper, broader, with more appreciation and care. We want to stop objectifying, so we will be able to live out of that magic William James called “pure experience,” the experience Wittgenstein was talking about when he said “not how the world is, is the mystical, but that it is.” Or Socrates (then Plato, then Aristotle) when he/they said “philosophy begins in wonder.” Or Adrienne Rich Daly, when she said: “The void is the creatrix, the matrix. It is not mere hollowness and anarchy…The something born of that nothing is the beginning of our truth.”[i] We want a new worldview, one that honors these realities, rather than obscuring and denying them.

There is something we are trying to point to; something we are trying to say and become, something that stretches us just beyond what we have been at our best, as beings who are capable—despite all kinds of decadence, confusion, and lethargy—of transcending ourselves when we are ready. This is not the something of adolescent religiosity or rebellion, but only what is required if the world and our children are to endure in any but the most miserable of circumstances.

Reaching to a little articulation, as in good philosophy generally, could provide a resource and support in the process of living into and embodying those best moments. But this could not happen in the old mode of articulation as either doctrine or technique, as linear construction of propositional logic or mechanics. We need to speak of and from the origins of our best moments, before they are lost in attempts to capture and contain them in ways that only make them more distant to us. Maybe the most effective articulation comes in the form of what Martin Buber called “pointings,” glimpses at a sacred center from several angles of approach, always remembering with Lao Tzu at the opening of the Dao Te Ching: “the Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao.”

I

Look into the eye of the other and see the Void, that absolute darkness at the center of each eye, that “gateway to the soul” through which the undifferentiated Nothingness becomes most distinctly a living, creating human being, a source of discovery, novelty, and fresh energy in the world. But this is just an eye exam. Now pull focus out from the singular eye to somewhere a few inches in front of the face, where two eyes can be seen simultaneously as the presence of an other. Now we are in the space of the infinitely complex event of an actual encounter, the space where relationality becomes explicit in what Hannah Arendt refers to as “the paradoxical plurality of unique beings,”[ii] such that plurality is “the law of the Earth.”[iii] Now we are in the most sacred open space of the world, the space of Nothingness and possibility in which revelation—and you, and I—might appear when we are together in the mode of compassionate, full presence, and commitment to the common good. Here, in that open space of our being together, we can also make discoveries about matters of mutual interest, solve problems, or—in the dimmer light at the edges of this space—we can negotiate, make deals, compromise (at least get along with some measure of mutual respect).

Why do we so rarely think or speak of these most basic dynamics? We are so busy in the object world, chasing this, that, or some other—probably because of the amazingly fragile and highly temporary quality of our existence.

Yet so often we fail to appreciate what is beautiful on this planet (and why it is said that the angels envy us) until it is too late: When you come to me not as dealer or player, function or obligation, but in the mode of relationality, which is to say both most definitely as yourself and at the same time open, free of self-interested agenda or need, you come clean and with open hands, with no gift other than your presence. You emerge astonishingly and without precedent, out of the vastness, as utterly unique and miraculous. You approach free and yourself, and our meeting might be pure joy. Or we could at least begin the day by greeting each other as sources of this possibility, and then proceed to the shared work and inevitable conflict that arise from loving the world enough to change it.

If we are fortunate and smart we can accept that the purity of our encounter will not last in this world of distortion and suffering, and have faith that despite this the light still shines, as does the sun on cloudy days through blue sky openings or heavy cloud filter. We keep the relational faith, that primal faith of pure encounter. We are alive, there is goodness to it, and we are not alone.

II

Of course we all emerge from trauma. We are born, paradoxically, both out of nowhere and out of somewhere. And for most of us, a second, distinctly spiritual kind of birth seems to be required by the curriculum of life. Who we are emerges from the relationship with who we have been, and with whom.

Later in the energetic career of William James, he came to see this second birth experience with the kind of understanding I am describing as the source of life’s essential vitality. After becoming famous for categorizing “The Varieties of Religious Experience,” James concluded his 1909 Hibbert Lectures, later published under the title of A Pluralistic Universe,by focusing on a very particular and fundamental kind of experience:

<block quote>…there are religious experiences of a specific nature, not deductible by analogy or psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience. I think that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment…[iv]<end block quote>

What he is talking about are “…experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon death…the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within the individual’s experience, processes that run to failure, and in some individuals, at least, eventuate in despair.”[v] He characterizes the unexpected life that follows these moments in terms of “resources in us that naturalism with its literal and legal virtues never recks of, possibilities that take our breath away, of another kind of happiness and power, based on giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us…”[vi] James concludes that “Sincerely to give up one’s conceit or hope of being good in one’s own right is the only door to the universe’s deeper riches.”[vii]

This theme of an essential relatedness with a deeper self that is paradoxically continuous with “a wider spiritual environment” is echoed far and wide across the world’s traditions. The American Christian theologian Paul Tillich speaks of it as experience of “the God who appears when God has disappeared in the anxiety of doubt.”[viii] The Japanese Kyoto School philosopher Keiji Nishitani says it in a way—like the feminist Adrienne Rich, cited above—that is compelling existentially:

<block quote>…emptiness is something we are aware of as an absolute near side. It opens up more to the near side than we, in our ordinary consciousness take our own self to be. It opens up, so to speak, still closer to us than what we ordinarily think of as ourselves. In other words, by turning from what we ordinarily call ‘self’ to the field of sunyata, we become truly ourselves…We take leave of the essential self-attachment that lurks in the essence of self-consciousness and by virtue of which we get caught in our own grasp in trying to grasp ourselves.[ix]<end block quote>

These experiences are relational in the depth of encounter with genuine self—as distinct from being locked up in the striving, ever-anxious, and lonely-isolated objectifying ego, and in the paradox of genuineness somehow being identical or “continuous” with the creative energy of the cosmos.

It may be a developmental necessity that the individual has at least begun the process of cultivating this fundamental relation between ego and genuine self before they become capable of bearing the creative energy into the world. And surely persons in the world can be transformed through the presence of those others in whom the developmental process is well-advanced—like the Bodhisattva in Buddhism, the enlightened one who returns to the world to help others, or the Judeo-Christian God who “so loved the world” that it “gave his only son” for our redemption. In fact, the transformative power of this presence—in more or less intense forms—is right at the heart of some interpretations of the traditions arising out of the Axial Age.  In Christianity, for example, “where two or more are gathered in my name, there am I in the midst of them” (Matthew 18:20), or “the Kingdom of God is among you” (Luke 17:21), or Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s statement that “being there for others is the experience of transcendence.”[x] In some religious orientations, then, the “temple” or “holy place” is not a building, institution, or any kind of geographical space, but relatedness itself as locus of the ultimate. And insofar as movement to capacity for full relatedness is parallel to what social scientists like James Fowler identify as healthy development, developmental thinking can also be seen as pointing toward the relational.[xi] Robert Kegan goes so far as to suggest that it may be one of the more optimistic qualities of our time that the very fact of people living longer means that the world has the benefit of contact with the higher levels of human development like never before.[xii]

III

But all of the above could sound like mystical or romantic babbling, maybe echoes from an enchanted past that is no longer recognized in the mechanized present. Yet if we are to avoid being replaced by the robots who could already be walking among us, there is something deep and ineffable within our nature that needs to be maintained and cultivated, something well and effectively—if incompletely—remembered by priests of solitude like Ralph Harper and Anne Morrow Lindbergh.[xiii] There is something within us that needs to be honored, and deeply attuned to the value of remaining open, as against the temptations of living closed and clouded.

This awareness resonates with my own past in a way that is surprising to me at first, because my discovery is so distinctly not private. In fact, the surprise itself is instructive, since it reveals the tendency to assume that what we need is only to be found in private spaces apart from the world, in the exotic, the “religious,” the psychoanalytical, or wilderness. Again, I do not mean to dismiss the significance of those more private spaces, but only the assumption that they alone—as in the world-denying tendencies of traditional religion—contain what we need in order to thrive.

I had the great good fortune to be among the activists of the American Sixties, one of those who heard Martin Luther King, Jr.’s proclamation in his 1963 “Letter from a Birmingham Jail:” “Now is the time to make real the promise of democracy and transform a pending national elegy into a creative psalm of brotherhood [sic].”[xiv] In my understanding of the story of that time, this was a very palpable call, something heard as compelling and profoundly hopeful by many of my generation—as though some possibility from deep under the flow of history had come to the surface, challenging us to respond and promising a kind of sustaining energy if we did.[xv]

We did. Across a broad spectrum of issues and causes, people came out. There were self-help centers, civil rights protests, War on Poverty programs, anti-war demonstrations. Race, poverty, and peace provided the issue focus in the early 1960’s, in the wake of the monumental 1952 Supreme Court Brown v. the Board of Education ruling that “separate is inherently unequal.” But there were also more culturally oriented responses to the call for transformation.  The children of Ginsberg and Kerouac’s earlier Beatnik generation multiplied in the Sixties, into a widespread hippie protest against the shallowness and hypocrisy of middle class life, as the sense of a better possibility began to impact the intergenerational relations of families, schools, and religious institutions.

In the medium of activism, we talked, we deliberated, shared a public life, and enjoyed—without really knowing it at the time—participation in the core meaning of democracy. By today’s standards of texting and tweeting, it’s amazing how long and intensely we talked. Above and beyond (or under) the issues and alternative actions we were discussing, we were learning the magic of being able to be more fully and authentically ourselves in the presence of others than we could be in private. We were teaching each other the richness we often grasp for today under banners of multiculturalism, diversity, inclusion: a public space not only populated by difference, but where that difference interacts in a specific sort of way that generates energy, beauty, and justice. We were learning democracy first hand, democracy not as structures and mechanism of government, but as what John Dewey called “a mode of associated living, of conjoint, communicated experience”[xvi] and what global democrats such as Amartya Sen and Sor-hoon Tan refer to as governance by discussion.[xvii]

I recall reading A.D. Lindsay’s magnificent little book, The Essentials of Democracy (1929), in the middle of the Sixties and realizing two things. First, strange as it seems in the midst of our astonishing material affluence, few people any more have much sustained and cultivated experience of this most basic human activity; very different from “chatting,” it has to be about something, it has to go somewhere, and it requires us to be both definite and open in ways that do not come naturally to most of us. And, second, without direct experience of governance by discussion, “democracy” is disconnected from its mooring and adrift, even to the extent of that distinctively modern kind of tyranny de Tocqueville, Nietzsche and others have identified as “the tyranny of the majority.”

It was also at this point that I became aware of the deeply antidemocratic and anti-relational intellectualism of Western culture. When something good (—or bad, but something that nonetheless must be remembered) happens, we need to interpret. And the dominant Western way of interpretation became one of abstraction into displaced and static intellectual constructs of “individual” or “community.” So when a moment of relationship or democratic life occurred, it was likely interpreted either as individuals combining together in overlapping interests to form a social contract, or some kind of organic or mechanical entity expressing itself through the life of individuals. But not both together in a living reciprocity, not in relationship itself. Relationality needed to be frozen and then understood as either parts determining wholes or wholes determining parts, not the co-presence of both. It’s as though the West came to prefer the apparent shelter of intellectual order to the risks of embodied life. Real democracy began to die, or at least failed to receive the cultural/intellectual/artistic support it needs to remain as a real possibility in the world. Perhaps, in the global era, and with the benefit of dialogue with other cultures—such as those in Asia that have maintained a healthieraffirmation of Nothingness and ineffability—this Western fixation on intellectual order at the expense of the vitality of life is beginning to loosen its grip.

IV

So relationality requires a certain threshold of individual development, as well as a degree of socio-cultural support for activities and experiences of discussion—or what we might more likely today call “dialogue.” But engagement with relationality also generates this development as well, such that purely private efforts to cultivate maturity, while possibly producing smart consumers, good negotiators, maybe even psychologically astute companions, are not likely to inspire citizenship or the art of substantive and reliable friendship. Relationality requires that quality that distinguishes education from training, development from habituation, transformation from information.

Seen in this way, I want to suggest that much of the creative endeavor of higher education in America today is organized around just such an effort to cultivate the maturity of the relational human being.[xviii] Just look, for example, at the Association of American Colleges and Universities’LEAP programs: they are all about the related arts of service learning, civic engagement, diversity, inclusion, multiculturalism…Of course, these can be understood cynically, or in terms of their instrumental value, as media for acquisition of the management skills necessary to success in the world of today, or as faddish distractions from the intellectual and/or occupational purposes of education [switch the order, to correspond to “cynically or instrumentally[SR3] ”]. But there is something much more to these programs and the newer emphasis in higher education in what is variously referred to as “transformative” or “integrative” education by Parker Palmer, Arthur Zajonc and other leaders in the movement to a new understanding of the purposes and methods of education.[xix] In fact, I think it is possible to go so far as to say that these programs are quite literally ushering in the new and distinctly post-modern worldview that is required if we are to be able to survive modernity and its unsustainable habits of materialism and isolation.[xx]

Relationality is the heart of the new worldview. It involves the developed capacity of moving beyond traditional absolutism, with one set of right answers and all others in the wrong, as well as modern relativism in which any answer is as good (or marketable) as any other, into a pluralism that involves a higher order of hermeneutical sophistication not common in the past. I am speaking of the sophistication to realize that everyone has an interpretation—of this situation or that, as well as of life overall, and that all interpretations are limited by the inevitably contingent circumstances out of which they arise. Further, the developed sophistication to which I am pointing sees no reason for adolescent nihilism and/or despair over the complexity of more than one “right answer,” and no reason to lament passing of the old culture of a single, static, detached absolutism, with the hierarchy, logocentrism, and patriarchy that inevitably followed.

Instead, we can learn an active aesthetic of difference, and the relationship in which we can truly both benefit from and serve the other who is different. And more: we find that it is in the presence of the other who is and remains different that we are able to be present from the depth of our genuine self, even in the tumult of ordinary life.

So critics of the transformation-oriented programs in contemporary higher education, as distracting from both the “academic,” understood as accumulation of amounts of testable knowledge, and the “professional,” understood as acquisition of marketable skills and protocols, actually miss the finer point: It is in mutuality that we find ourselves being alive, in compassionate presence with the other that we experience fulfillment, in the interdependent play of relationality that we are able to walk away from the iron cage of modernity’s rationalization of everything for the sake of nothing more than more.

Out in the fresh air of a relational worldview, both knowledge and skills receive a motivation, which makes these necessary but not sufficient functions seem easy by comparison with the old paradigm of rote learning. For in a relational worldview we are able to move beyond the Cartesian dichotomy between what Whitehead, in his famous essay, “The Aims of Education,” called “inert knowledge,”[xxi] on the one hand, and merely mechanical (or soon to be automated, as humans are replaced by robots) skills on the other. We come to a place where knowledge (understanding, i.e. a sense of proportionality and/or relationality) and skills are integrated as the gestalt (mentioned at the outset) is indeed flipped, so that meaning stands in front of function—understanding function as ability to exercise intention in the world, and meaning as the sense of value, significance, and satisfaction that may be associated with but never reduced to exercise of human intention.

For putting meaning ahead of function is to place attention on the relation rather than the thing; it is to understand that ultimately it is only relationship that generates meaning, purpose, and a reliable abode for life on this planet.

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[1] Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), p. 4.  I take Rieff’s book to be among the greatest on the fate of Western individualism.  Other authors who are helpful in this genre are Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979) and Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

[2] See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd  (New Haven: Yale, 1961), and Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self (New York: Basic Books, 1993)..

[3] Philip Cushman, “Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” in American Psychologist, May 1990, pp. 600.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 12.

[6] Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2000).

[7] Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” p. 45.

[8] There have been significant exceptions, following in the tradition of R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self  (New York: Penguin, 1960).  For contemporary articulations of a movement away from “drive-based” theories and toward “relational therapy,” see Peter Wilberg, “Modes of Relatedness in Psychotherapy” (via his website).                                             

[9] Cushman, p. 607.

[10] On the relationship between power and meaning, see Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline (Oxford: Blackwell,1994), especially Ch 8, “Against the New Morality,” pp. 169-181.

[11]Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in Francis Golffing, trans., ed., The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 299.

[12] Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method (New York: Crossroad, 1988), pp. 323-324.  But again note that not all social scientists objectify in this way.  For a significant exception, see Robert Kegan’s “constructive-developmental perspective,”  which “leads us to bracket every hope, save the growth of the truth,” as a form of “care” which “is not merely another of ‘my values’ but [is] itself rooted in the psychological and philosophical development of the truth.  It arises out of a recognition of the other’s distinctness.”  In The Evolving Self,  p. 296.

[13] Observance of this tenet becomes especially complex in the context of human growth, where objectification of the self or ego is to some degree a necessary prerequisite to healing and growth.  One must confront one’s ego self as other in order for the open space to occur, and for genuine self or soul to be present.  For further discussion of this point, see my Living Philosophy, pp. 80-83. 

[14] Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’ Sons,1958), p. 181.

[15] Rieff, p. 3.

[16] There is a big issue here.  Is there a self, a genuine or centered self?  Or is it more effective to speak in more Buddhist language of non-self, of any sense of self as a displacement, or in Confucian terms of a purely relational self?  Addressing this could result in a long (and important) essay.  For now at least, I want to say that “self,” like “God,” is fundamentally mysterious, and that each way of speaking has both assets and liabilities. 

[17] See William Barrett, Death of the Soul (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1986), especially Ch 9, “The Disappearing Self,” 119-141.

[18] Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” p. 44.

[19] Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933), p. 18.

[20] For perspective on how it is that some sense that Western people, and perhaps Americans in particular, are most vulnerable to the nihilism which is implicit in the Modern life, see, Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, trans. J.W. Heisig (New York: Paulist Press, 1980).

[21] Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1957), p. 193.

[22] Maybe the best way to draw the crucial distinction between Nothingness and emptiness is to say that Nothingness is open, while emptiness is closed.  Here I think Hannah Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness is helpful also; where solitude entails the openness of dialogue between me and myself, and loneliness is painful isolation.

[23] Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, pp. 210-217,  and  Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Living in Truth, pp. 36-122.

[24] Ira Progoff, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: Julian Press, 1956), p. 15.

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[i] Adrienne Rich, On Lies, Secrets, Silence (New York: Norton, 1979), 64.

[ii] Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 176.

[iii] Ibid., 109.

[iv] “A Pluralistic Universe,” in Essays in Radical Empiricism and A Pluralistic Universe, ed. Richard J. Bernstein (New York: Dutton  (1971), 264

[v] Ibid., 265.

[vi] Ibid., 266.

[vii] Ibid.

[viii] Paul Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), 190.

[ix] Keiji Nishitani, Religion and Nothingness (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), 151.

[x] Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Letters and Papers from Prison (New York: MacMillan, 1976,) 381.

[xi] James Fowler, Stages of Faith: The Psychology of Human Development and the Quest for Meaning (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1981).

[xii] Robert Kegan, Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994).

[xiii] Ralph Harper, On Presence: Variations and Reflections (Philadelphia: Trinity Press International, 1991); Anne Morrow Lindbergh, Gift from the Sea (New York: Pantheon Books, 1955).

[xiv] Martin Luther King, Jr., “Letter from a Birmingham Jail,” in Why We Can’tWait (New York: New American Library, 1963), 86.

[xv] Stephen Rowe, Leaving and Returning: On America’s Contribution to a World Ethic (London: Associated University Presses, 1989).

[xvi] John Dewey, Experience and Education (New York: Macmillan, 1938), 87.

[xvii] Amartya Sen, Democracy and its Global Roots, The New Republic, October 6, 2003, 28-35; and Sor-hoon Tan, Confucian Democracy: A Deweyian Reconstruction (Albany: SUNY Press, 2004).

[xix] Parker Palmer and Arthur Zajonc, The Heart and Higher Education: A Call to Renewal (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2010).

[xx] In my Overcoming America / America Overcoming: Can We Survive Modernity? (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2012).I think about the underlying problematic of modernity, its positive features as well as liabilities, the degree to which there can be “Many Globalizations” (Berger and Huntington), and the worldview of dialogue/relationality/democracy which is emerging through the struggles of our era.

[xxi] Alfred North Whitehead, “The Aims of Education,” in The Aims of Education and Other Essays (New York: Free Press), 5.

11/21/23            1091                  DRAFT – NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION

adapted from Overcoming America / America Overcoming

                Loneliness, Nothingness, Possibility

 — moral disease as elephant in the room, what William James was looking for when he spoke of turning on the lights so fast you could see the dark

                        Stephen Rowe

            It strikes right in the midst of ordinary life, sometimes severing family and other bonds of connection which had held – problematic as they so often were —  against the forces of barbarism. 

Bonds broken, moral disease billows forth from the atmosphere of loneliness in which we live both overly apart and overly together at the same time, as if out of sync with our species nature. This might well describe the sad and odd sobriety that follows the intoxications of modernity and its sometimes pleasurable collapse.

            The great majority deal with inescapable loneliness by cutting off connection both with others and in themselves, connection with depth, “soul,” “personhood,” the idea at the root of ethics and civilized life that the other should always be treated as “as end in themselves,” never as a means, and that all are endowed with that essential cultural organ of “conscience.”

In the absence of connection with vital depth, we come to both occupy and perpetuate a world of interest and power, with normalization of lying and violence, reducing the world to the material and transactional, and ironically to the very “war of all against all” early modern visionaries wanted to avoid. In these manifestations, the disease seems unstoppable.

Driven by volcanic energies spewing out of the fundamental yet elusive mood of loneliness, with its intertwined themes of resentment, anger, regret, suspicion, betrayal, envy, and self-effacement, we find ourselves living on a bewildering landscape. It is all the more bewildering since it also contains elements of beauty, justice, and peace – and an inextinguishable love of the best of what went before, including what is right under our noses. But these are mixed ambiguously within the generalized gloom. We see and experience a hidden world of possibility in/as our better moments, while at the same time remaining aware that it is not a world likely to live beyond the old world collapsing so dangerously.

The ground (as in “figure-ground”) on which these dynamics play is Nothingness. To clarify this difficult point, it helps to consider, as we are now able to do in post-traditional times, the worldwide phenomenon of mysticism. As a form or expression found in all traditional religions, it is based in the understanding that humans of any depth are brought to that most intense loneliness known as experience of the original and eternal Nothingness. Traditions have also understood that the structures of modernity and its great democratization deliver us to the frightful mid-passage of the mystical journey, with neither preparation nor any sense of what comes next. So we float and drift, without forewarning or instruction, pretty completely oblivious as to our location. Karl Jaspers, author of one of the most monumentally significant interpretations of what is happening in our time, makes this point from a slightly different angle: “if man [sic] is not to be allowed to founder in the mere persistence of life, it may seem essential that in his consciousness he shall be confronted with Nothingness: he must recall his origin.” (Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, 1931, p. 193).  

Living as we do, on the razor’s edge, we can say that the stress inherent to living in loneliness and the collapse out of which it is bred can also lead to a portal. It can become an opening, as in that state commonly recognized in Jewish, Chinese, Hindu, Christian, Muslim, Native spiritualities, an opening onto Nirvana, Enlightenment, Salvation — that greater state of consciousness which both directs and motivates. Genuine experience of the greater consciousness becomes a way beyond despair, a way into humans becoming more compassionate, calm, accepting, more appreciating, willing to engage and contribute effort, more able to affirm life as gift – rather than condemnation.

However, this is not the way most fellow citizens take. Many have denied the existence of Covid, Trump losses and lies, the Holocaust, etc., even as the broader society denies climate change, nuclear risk, discrimination, etc. We fail to realize that denial closes the door to the possibility of a better world – or any world, really. To deny the sacred reality of what is is to be cut off from the “more positive” mind and spirit and the kind of in-spiration upon which cultural health and the continuation of life itself depend.

It is heartbreakingly unfortunate that this realization comes after a very long period of deprivation and maximum vulnerability, a period in which our capacities for such things as love, justice, and beauty have atrophied severely, to the point where now even our species viability is in question. This applies most obviously and immediately to the dimension of knowing and agreement about facts, about what is actually the case .

But the deprivation brought on by the modern, secular monasticism (what Whitehead referred to as our “celibacy of the intellect”) is also manifest in pathological constriction (or simple childishness), blind and ever more absurd ideological assertion associated with perverse self-entitlement/racism, and what anything like “common sense” would see as widespread life-denying behavior and relationships.

Of course, the question, the practical question – the only question, really — becomes how to live in and through and beyond the loneliness of moral disease, learning to be at home in the Nothingness of our origin — where “at home” means what used to be called variously well-being (Eudemonia), happiness (Xing Fu), salvation, thriving, flourishing – Being Alive!

The mind-boggling challenge of this learning to be at home, a learning that was only rarely addressed by our ancestors, is very helpfully illuminated by what Whitehead says about movement through three stages of relationship with “God” [or what is Ultimate in life]: “… if it evolves to its final satisfaction. It is the transition from God the void to God the enemy, and from God the enemy to God the companion.” (Whitehead (1960), Religion in the Making. p. 16).

“… from God the enemy to God the companion.” What could this mean? Maybe, after sufficient experience of living an extremely improbable life, one containing questions about how “God,” if any, could permit the atrocities all around us. Coming into contact with the sense in which we live “by the grace of God alone,” we learn to trust, and fly in the direction of the better world that is already under our wings.   

---

1. Philip Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1968), p. 4.  I take Rieff’s book to be among the greatest on the fate of Western individualism.  Other authors who are helpful in this genre are Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism (New York: Norton, 1979) and Philip Slater, The Pursuit of Loneliness (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970). ↩︎
2. See David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd  (New Haven: Yale, 1961), and Robert Jay Lifton, The Protean Self (New York: Basic Books, 1993). ↩︎
3. Philip Cushman, “Why the Self is Empty: Toward a Historically Situated Psychology,” in American Psychologist, May 1990, pp. 600. ↩︎
4. Ibid. ↩︎
5. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 12. ↩︎
6. Zygmunt Bauman, Liquid Modernity (Cambridge: Policy Press, 2000). ↩︎
7. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” p. 45. ↩︎
8. There have been significant exceptions, following in the tradition of R.D. Laing’s The Divided Self  (New York: Penguin, 1960).  For contemporary articulations of a movement away from “drive-based” theories and toward “relational therapy,” see Peter Wilberg, “Modes of Relatedness in Psychotherapy” (via his website). ↩︎
9. Cushman, p. 607. ↩︎
10. On the relationship between power and meaning, see Richard Stivers, The Culture of Cynicism: American Morality in Decline (Oxford: Blackwell,1994), especially Ch 8, “Against the New Morality,” pp. 169-181. ↩︎
11. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals, in Francis Golffing, trans., ed., The Birth of Tragedy and the Genealogy of Morals (Garden City, NY: Doubleday Anchor, 1956), p. 299. ↩︎
12. Observance of this tenet becomes especially complex in the context of human growth, where objectification of the self or ego is to some degree a necessary prerequisite to healing and growth.  One must confront one’s ego self as other in order for the open space to occur, and for genuine self or soul to be present.  For further discussion of this point, see my Living Philosophy, pp. 80-83.  ↩︎
13. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Charles Scribner’ Sons,1958), p. 181. ↩︎
14. Rieff, p. 3. ↩︎
15. There is a big issue here.  Is there a self, a genuine or centered self?  Or is it more effective to speak in more Buddhist language of non-self, of any sense of self as a displacement, or in Confucian terms of a purely relational self?  Addressing this could result in a long (and important) essay.  For now at least, I want to say that “self,” like “God,” is fundamentally mysterious, and that each way of speaking has both assets and liabilities.  ↩︎
16. See William Barrett, Death of the Soul (Garden City, NY: Anchor Doubleday, 1986), especially Ch 9, “The Disappearing Self,” 119-141. ↩︎
17. Bellah, “Religious Evolution,” p. 44. ↩︎
18. Alfred North Whitehead, Adventures of Ideas (New York: Free Press, 1933), p. 18. ↩︎
19. For perspective on how it is that some sense that Western people, and perhaps Americans in particular, are most vulnerable to the nihilism which is implicit in the Modern life, see, Hans Waldenfels, Absolute Nothingness: Foundations for Buddhist-Christian Dialogue, trans. J.W. Heisig (New York: Paulist Press, 1980). ↩︎
20. Karl Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age (Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1957), p. 193. ↩︎
21. Maybe the best way to draw the crucial distinction between Nothingness and emptiness is to say that Nothingness is open, while emptiness is closed.  Here I think Hannah Arendt’s distinction between solitude and loneliness is helpful also; where solitude entails the openness of dialogue between me and myself, and loneliness is painful isolation. ↩︎
22. Jaspers, Man in the Modern Age, pp. 210-217,  and  Vaclav Havel, “The Power of the Powerless,” in Living in Truth, pp. 36-122. ↩︎
23. Ira Progoff, The Death and Rebirth of Psychology (New York: Julian Press, 1956), p. 15. ↩︎