Essays from 2019-2024
Stephen Rowe
Four Epigraphs for
Our Time in General
Man [sic]would rather have the void for his purpose than be void of purpose.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Genealogy of Morals
Women seek to articulate 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 ego nor a diffuse self denied, but selfhood on the model of relational autonomy.
Elizabeth Johnson, She Who Is
Democratic pluralism, on the face of it a fine position, cannot be espoused in today’s world as if all we had to do was choose it. To achieve a truly egalitarian pluralism conceptually and politically, it is necessary for all groups to achieve self-knowledge, developed from within rather than imposed from without…. [We need] to think much more subtly and to live and work with more complexity and fineness of feeling and comprehension, taste and judgment. We begin again to create ways of thinking that support democracy rather than undermining it….”
Elizabeth Minnich, Transforming Knowledge
The democratic values that make up the very fabric of our nation are under assault and at risk of unraveling. It’s never been more important to safeguard our fragile democracy: as Benjamin Franklin so wisely put it, “A Republic, if you can keep it.”
Ken Burns, American Buffalo
Table of Contents
Prologue to the Mandarin edition of Overcoming America / America Overcoming forthcoming)
Introduction: Crow Days in Late Summer
Glimmers: The Call of a New Way
Finding Life Affirmation in Troubled Times:
Humanities as Practice Toward Maturity
loving democracy, flying at dusk
The Slide: An Essay in Radical Empiricism
Nihilism and the Threshold We Must Cross
Ode to the Humanities – and Invocation
Democratic Awakening: A Meditation on Amor Mundi
loneliness, nothingness, one love
… to be included –
All below written within the 2019 through late summer 2024 parameters for this project:
Prologue to the PRC Mandarin translation of Overcoming America / America Overcoming
“Overview of our Situation”
“A Hopeful Postscript”
Draft:
Prologue to Mandarin edition of OA/AO (forthcoming)
This is not an anti-American book. Neither is it anti-Chinese. It pushes for post binary thinking and living – past a period in which “Catch 22” was inevitable and ubiquitous. The deep root of binary thinking has been the chief obstacle to dialogue and the healthy human development we so urgently and fundamentally need – beyond what Ruth Nanda Anshen called “the logic of dichotomy.”
For dialogue – or call it deep pluralism or democracy — lets all cultures reconnect (re-legere) with their greatness, see and address modern divergences, and develop the ability to act with love and justice in that vast realm beyond either/or. This “new land” – known mostly through the glimmers of it we get from time to time — is perplexing (aporia) and challenging at first. It can be frightening despite our having powerful testimony that the crossing over – and the accompanying chaos – is necessary, and that it is possible for us to live in such a way that welcomes, for ourselves as well as others, of new lifeway, a new and compassionate lifeform emerging through Earth’s astonishing vitality in processes as yet unknown to us.
Let us begin with confession: there is both greatness and tragedy in all of us, both individually and collectively. Let’s get over the idea of being smashed on the rocks after loss of privileged status, and learn to live in awareness of life as gift, celebrating and preserving it from this most destructive time, for our grandchildren and theirs.
Foreword
to Stephen Rowe’s essay collection, Crow Days in Late Summer
Stephen and I are longtime colleagues and friends, and collaborators on many projects in both China and the U.S. (and elsewhere). About thirty years ago, we drove down from Michigan to the University of Notre Dame in Indiana to attend a dialogue between Masao Abe, the author of Zen and Western Thought, and a group of scholars from the Christian tradition. When the host of the dialogue introduced Abe, he mentioned not only how prominent Abe was as a scholar in Zen Buddhism, but also the fact that, by the age of around 80, Abe had “retired” many times from his various posts, and each time turned out to be a new beginning of his career.
After Stephen retired from Grand Valley State University in 2019, this seems to be happening to him—although he no longer shows up on the University campus regularly as he used to for about 45 years, he has remained active and kept writing, so much so that I can hardly keep up with him.
One thing about Stephen’s case that differs from Abe’s is that, during the years when Abe kept rolling back from his retirement and remained active, the world was full of hope. After the ending of the cold war and decades of fast development in technology and spread of democracy, there was an increasing sense of the need to develop humanity. Hence maturity or genuine adulthood as one of the primary themes we share in our work.
In these times the world’s most influential philosophers were post-modern critics, aiming at moving beyond the limitations of modern rationality. The need to transcend “self” and its very limited understanding demanded an openness to others as well as to the roots of one’s own tradition. With lived experience of this way of being – something both “new” to most people and yet well-grounded in the traditions (and something, in any event, most wanted to find in their own heritage). “Multiculturalism” was moving beyond mere tolerance and into appreciation of differences and the relational mode of “dialogue.”
Abe was fortunate, because in his context he did not need to engage much of his inner strength to continue what he was doing; he could keep doing and remain peaceful in his inner life – still at some distance from the consequences of the moral disease of Trumpism and nihilism.
The world that Stephen and we all face today is sadly different. Far beyond what we could have anticipated back then, today’s world is a world in which conflicts are pushing more toward having a nuclear war than a world in which we live together in peace and work collaboratively to build a commonly shared future. The absurdity of the world today makes me wonder, when Confucius lamented “I wish to say nothing” (The Analects, 17.19), whether he was like how I feel today, so disappointed and hopeless as if all our efforts were in vain.
Yet, Confucius was a man “who knew that it could not be done and yet kept doing it anyway” (ibid., 14.38). He knew that “Had the Way prevailed under heaven, the common people would not dispute about the actual state affairs” (ibid., 16.2), because there would be no need to. His world, like ours’ today, was not such a world. That was why he kept trying, like Sisyphus, who kept pushing a boulder uphill, although it would roll down every time. This is what makes Confucius different from merely being a teacher and a philosopher who is willing and able to accept things just as they are. He is also a spiritual leader, a leader ion walking tall and living well right in the midst of an impossible situation.
Likewise, Stephen is profoundly spiritual. That is what keeps him from losing his hope and giving up.
In addition, Stephen is no less a poet than he is a scholar and educator. This rare combination of qualities makes his writings distinct—instead of filling the pages with scholarly jargon, he mixes passion and prophet-like callings with penetrating insights. In the present book, this distinct characteristic of his writing is even more obvious. As if he is tired of beating around the bush for the sake of satisfying demands for “scholarly rigor,” he goes straight to the points he wants to make. Given the urgency of the situation, he cries loud to us about what is wrong with the world and what needs to be done to change it. As he puts it, this is a world we “must save as well as one which we must outgrow.”
Stephen might be too idealistic. I once mentioned to him about a conversation I had with an environmental philosopher—when I compared the existential condition of humans on this planet to a caravan rushing toward the edge of a cliff, that philosopher said to me, “No. We are already off the cliff.” Stephen did not say that he disagreed with this philosopher’s assessment. Instead, a few months later, he told me that he has put together a collection of new essays, and asked me to write a short Foreword.
So here it is, the book in front of you, by a deeply spiritual and poetic philosopher in the relational-democratic mode. What does this mean, this mode? It means to say that with the essays in this book the spiritual, the poetic, and the relational-democratic converge on living well and maturing into a fresh affirmation of life, even in terribly troubled times.
Peimin Ni, late Spring 2022
In Grand Rapids, MI
Introduction: Crow Days in Late Summer
I.
Here are some essays from what is still an extremely difficult period – one that may not end, or may suddenly intensify and end in an afternoon. We really don’t know.
It is a period bookended on one side in 2019, with onset of the Covid-Trump Pandemic, the consequent move to on-line teaching– and living, and my own decision to retire after a half century of vigorous engagement with embodied liberal education in many splendid locations, including Chicago, Grand Rapids, Shanghai, New York, and Claremont. I have been privileged and I am grateful. The other bookend is late 2024, with the world in general and America as my location within it so tenuous and endangered that it seems the whole human project could slide into the abyss at any moment.
How are we to breathe?
It has been a time of turmoil and severe degradation, very little of which appears in the daily news cycle. My university and higher education more broadly have suffered collapse of that vague but essential ideal of the liberally educated person and citizen, as necessary to both individual and collective well-being. Hence we come into a time of waring tribalisms, a crazy-making time in which reality itself is in question, and when free speech is simultaneously prohibited and out of control.
Collapse has occurred under the heat of high temperature critique, coming like a perfect storm from all across the political-cultural spectrum. Some of us, under the influence of the Frankfurt School, Marx, the pragmatic revolution in hermeneutics, and the American tradition of democratic social change, have inadvertently participated in the effective reduction of all relationships to the dynamics of interest, power — and demographics.
We had become intoxicated by critique to the point of forgetting about the necessity of constructive vision, affirmation, mutual support, and nurturing the possibility of agency in the cosmos greater than our own – across the table or across the Abyss. We’d lost sight of the relational dimension altogether. In the collective dimension, the urge to reduction has included the critique that America has been more about exploitative capitalism than democracy. In this atmosphere of unrestrained critique, every constructive myth from the past is revealed to be sitting on a mountain of falsification.
People become “woke,” suddenly standing in the searing light of realities previously hidden beneath both ideals and lies. It is as though all veils covering evil deeds of the past are simultaneously and suddenly pulled off. We’ve seen evil deeds following from white supremacy/slavery, cultural and political exceptionalism, and male dominance/misogyny. Much liberation in this awareness, yes, but much chaos as well.
Liberals have embraced “woke,” taking new awareness as a duty to pursue justice more fully. Here is the axis of conflict in a bipolar world that consumes so much of our energy and attention today: liberal opportunity – and responsibility – to act for a better world (and soon!), versus conservative reverence for an original creation that was good, while human action to modify it in light of further discovery is seen as likely to lead to misery as to good.
From another side, the country has been afflicted with weird and frightening images of what it would take to make it “great again,” where this is taken to mean restoring America as God’s gift of the Promised Land to Christian Europeans at the expense and denigration of women and indigenous populations.
On yet another side there has been considerable talk, curricular reform, and other forms of action oriented toward the emergence of a new lifeway and understanding (not necessarily “new” in all senses – a very important distinction here) of human maturity, one that makes it possible for humans to move on to a place beyond the severe dangers and pain of the present phase. This voice is sometimes hard to hear, this new and renewed ethic and spirituality as the meager hope of our time.
The sudden and unexpected light of this wokeness generates both hope and panic. It radicalizes in all directions, generating confusion and chaos at the deepest levels, before pure energy is given shape and order through the creation of conventions, commitments, institutions, and basic agreements about what’s what and what to do. Before culture.
Side #5: Exposure to the primal source, as in the exposure we are talking about above, without proper guidance and companionship usually is very painful. It leans toward fascism in its polarization, defensiveness, “weaponization,” opportunism, and retreat from meaningful engagement, into pillboxes of ideological and ego assertion. It becomes extremely challenging to find any public space in which authentic human encounter can occur, and be honored, in a culture – maybe even in a species – with the worst imaginable autoimmune disorder.
It is bleak, as Trumpism’s threats of revenge and violence cast ominous shadows and defensive-aggressive motivations over the land. Moments of sincere contact with others, with friends, and even the maybe-angels strangers we interact with as we move through a day, become the source of our best inspiration in the resolve to live as though life is a gift.
II.
So yes, the title of this work, “Crow Days:” A particular kind of day in which a distinctly ontological anxiety hangs in the air. And then a bird cries out from the middle distance, providing perfect articulation. It seems that to be human on this fragile and incomplete planet is to live with a certain number of these days, days saturated with the pathos of that bird’s caw, mournful with an undertone of malice. Curiously, though, it is sometimes those very same days in which our nobility and true self shine forth, neither caving under their weight nor fleeing into some fantasyland. Somehow able to move on a whole different plane.
I present the essays in this collection in the continuing and consciously naïve faith that talking with each other about these dynamics of meaning and value can be helpful, energizing in its way. But, as Plato and others have pointed out long ago, writing is really only a fallback option, after the public square, the classroom, and the kitchen table have been brought to vexation. Face to face talking in the full presence of friendship is always better, if we can have it (“if you can keep it,” as Ben Franklin said about this fundamental feature of the American Republic). My aim is to write as though we were talking, and for the sake of a world in which talking is the gyroscope.
III.
I am an old relational liberal who still thinks we have a responsibility to maintain some understanding of what is going on in a circle larger than that of our local circumstance, a larger world in which the local is both embedded and in tension (creative or otherwise). This, it seems, is also a basic element of being human, the holding of a life interpretation, some more or less considered scale of value, some kind of meaning beyond what is given in the immediate moment, like grass before a cow.
Considering the challenges of maintaining healthy and effective interpretation of the big drama of life on Earth, and aware of the dangers of turning this function over to another, autocrat or otherwise, brings me back to that great American poet, Wallace Stevens: “Poetry is response to the daily necessity of getting the world right.” Poetry, in the face of humans’ profound and impossible need for meaning and order, is also our best alternative to the autonomy-melting force of autocracy.
I recall the influence of other mentors, like Arendt, with her understanding that we know most meaningfully through the stories which illuminate the truth that my knowing is only vital when it is continuously refined in the interaction – the “dialogue” – with the knowing of others. We grow in the “higher education” of a form of knowing which arises from wisdom, the wellspring, and from discovering how this “thinking” element is interdependent with action and relationship – the wholeness of our lives, we begin to live a way of life containing the experience to which Arendt is appealing when she calls plurality “the law of the earth”—the experience of being most fully present as my genuine self when I am here with and for others, in the commonly shared project of movement toward a plurality-loving peace on Earth.
IV.
So here are some recent essays, written in and to the ever more urgent conversation on which our lives depend, what some have called “the conversation of civilization” — as distinct from both impersonal autocracy and the thin, hyper individualistic “democracy” which it is often little different from the consumerist end of capitalism.
Essays are offered, perhaps absurdly, in a world where all credentials, except those of monetary worth have been “cancelled,” essays by who knows who (some professor from Michigan whose only significant credential is a half century with students in liberal education), inquiring about how it could be possible to live well in what may not necessarily be the last days. We could actually be living in the very fragile and dangerous first days of something new.
The essays that follow can be seen as meditations on the fact that everybody has a past containing injustices and violence, both oppressions and oppressings, and that traditional cultures contained (mostly to no avail) cautions against “idolatry” or “confusing the symbol with that which it points,” focus on the finger pointing to the Moon while forgetting about the Moon altogether! Indeed humans, in the now-past Traditional Period, mostly failed to heed Lao Tzu’s admonition that “The Dao that can be spoken is not the eternal Dao,” and thereby failed to recognize companionship with the other we are walking next to as the locus of meaning, value, and adventure we need. We succumb to the very human temptation to absolutize our own position, thereby overreaching on the claim as to what humans are able to know and control. Better to abide in not-knowing, grateful for the sacred stories that tumble out of the traditions, secure in vulnerability, at peace even with the reality of death.
Speaking from my own tradition as it reappears, after the long and nasty acid bath of modernity, these essays can be taken as exercises in reappropriation of the old and often mysterious Socratic “knowing nothing” – where “nothing” is not absence but source, an opening onto vitality itself. It is, then, also an instance of dialogue, as that most essential cultural practice for a human future.
Glimmers: The Call of a New Way
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 see and appreciate 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.
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, with their focus on the having of a life-interpretation consisting of approved belief and subscription to doctrine, in a context of supervision by patriarchy, we are now speaking about a step beyond that developmental stage. We speak of movement beyond obedience to faithfulness to an energy that moves from within the deepest self. We speak of something like the Dao. Hence the emphasis in contemporary ethical studies, on integrity and authentic presence as marks of the true hero.
To say that description/interpretation of a new lifeway is “process-oriented” is to say that this function of my life, this matter of interpretation, matures over time, is even educated from time to 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 experience that assumes “immanence,” the immediate presence of life’s most vital wisdom/energy in and between, woven deep into the tissues of our being. . 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, our fallibility, 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 (this matter of articulation and identification of healthy transformative practice) 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, many of which occurred to me during the Covid-Trump Pandemic,
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 either buried in the folds of conventional morality, or largely and often vehemently 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 little flickerings of 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] selfl-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.” When we join together to solve problems. 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 with others who are both the same and different. It must be aspirational.
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, surrender to authoritarianism, incoherence – or an unacceptably superficial life. To make it all even more complex and overwhelming, this self-direction is often spoken of as identical with surrender to a higher power.
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 first 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 at once 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 and directionas 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:
Burns, Ken (2023). American Buffalo.
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).
Needleman, J. (2002). American Soul. New York: Tarcher/Putnam.
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
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, 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 of both the streets and academe, 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.”
But 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, not totally dependent but inescapably as a prerequisite for their being present and 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 both belief and 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 integrityor 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 much 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. 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 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, before they then 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, 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 actually 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, more alert as to the factors – and choices — at play as we weave webs of meaning across clumps of sensory experience we encounter, as we pick our way along, on a journey we only partly understand.
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, if not in gestures of indifference or reduction, then 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
- 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 as mixture or exchange – 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, in its essence, ineffable. It is beyond words and symbols, the more beautiful of which can obscure ultimate reality 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 and incoherent 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 their similarities and differences, were thrown into the totally chaotic backwash of the enormous engines of modernization and technology, while humanity was colonized by mechanism, materialism, competition, and hierarchy – and the endless distraction of entertainment and consumption. While the world came to be rewoven into the ever more tenuous interdependence of an interim time, a time in which lying came to be normalized, and any affirmation is easily reduced to mere preference 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 and all feel betrayed. 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 now 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?
The Slide: An Exercise in Radical Empiricism
I
Since around 2011 there has been a slow, yet in hindsight entirely obvious slide, a destabilizing and collapse. Maybe movement happened when we were sleeping, in those mysterious times of dreamless slumber Maybe some had seen it coming for so long that their voices of warning were dismissed as crying wolf or diagnostic personal problems
Uncertain and adrift down deep, at the level of reality itself, where the footings themselves are unsteady, undependable. Here we came to be living in a strange time, with “fake news,” conspiracy theories and Kellyanne Conway’s’ “alternative facts,” all floating here and there, along with outrageous incivility, “post-truth” normalization of lying, anger as substitute for rational discourse, and accumulating skepticism about the value of higher education beyond job training. Some have developed a shorthand term for all this as a “race to the bottom.” How did we get to this place?
In this essay I want to track the slide as it has occurred in American higher education, as a progression through three stages leading into our contemporary situation of collapse and shatter. And I want to show how this interpretation can be broadened from education to understanding the character of the present in culture and politics as well. For in our time education is no longer cloistered from society, as a protected space of undisturbed cultivation. Now education has become more like a mirror, a microcosm.2
In higher education, we had labored for decades, under the accumulating weight of “culture wars,” with a critical perspective (sometimes in the form of the profoundly ambiguous “Critical Theory” of our time, and “Identity Politics” – which, in the very act of liberating can leave the mutual space from which liberation ccurred looking ike the scene of a missle launch. In an irony of history, Those of us on the left who were looking for progress beyond stereotypes to a more full embodiment of “liberty and justice for all” had a hard time – in our zeal – recognizing and taking account to this. So the result of critique was certainly some degree or kind of liberation – actually quite amazing, looking back. But the epistemology of culture wars has also been indiscriminate in the tearing down all structures of value and meaning based on traditional cultures, replacing them mostly with structures based on money and power in the low sense of the term, and only rarely on anything like justice or a common life held together by anything more than the myth of automatic results of individuals pursuing their (mostly material) interests. Meanwhile, critics from the right spoke and acted from much the same reductionist perspective, only they were tearing down the present because they see it as having fallen from an idealized past. Tearing down, the attraction of the “blank slate,” the need for to a new beginning.
At some point, the heaviness of critique became so great that a break occurred, and a parting company with the high aspirations of both liberal education and democracy as anything more than slogans in a world ruled by market analysis. Iin an environment increasingly defined by the clashings of identity and tribal groups, each with their own and competing claims to the center, such terms as “liberal education” and “democracy” came to be understood by many as perpetuation of the privileges with which “liberalism” had been associated in the past. Meanwhile, Critical theory had reached across and underneath polarizations – into a shattering of even the agreement to disagree without violence which before had laid like a floor, at a depth below differences in ideology. With shattering came the reduction of all values to privileges and oppressions, hunting down and obliterating the faith of previous generations, good, bad, and “whatever.”3
II
Still in the tumult of a global process of moral and spiritual degradation we do not yet well understand (one which makes “secularization” look simple), I want to venture an interpretation of what happened in university life generally in the U.S., with many, very different local variations which are easy to track – see my endnotes in previous writings). I hope I can articulate an interpretation in support of revitalization, not only of higher education but American and even world-wide democratic culture (this being no time for modest proposals!). For I know the process to be described is not unique to any particular campus or community, and also that interpretation that is more linked to the empirical than the ideological is necessary, most especially in chaotic times, it is necessary to anything like real democracy. And it appears there is no way we will reach revitalization until we slog through and understand the breakdown and our as yet unactualized possibilities for survival.
The three stages of slide I see leading to our current condition are Managerialism, Managerialism Plus Identity Politics, and Flailing.4 Each stage builds on and intensifies features found in the stage which preceded it, so there is an identifiable progression. Think snowball, such that our position in the present as analogous to being under much snow at the bottom of a hill after an unpleasant ride.
The first is Managerialism.
Following decades of concern with the challenges and uncertainties associated with moving away from previous parochialisms and toward internationalization, as well as with the insecurities inherent in assertions of “political correctness.” Finally, by the second decade of the new century, everything had become “political” (as it had in previous times of slide, in 1969, for example, with Robin Morgan’s famous Second Wave feminist declaration that “the personal is the political” (Morgan, 1978).
Now in an atmosphere of weakened assumption as to the legitimacy of higher education brought on by erosion and eclipse of tradition and the ascending of purely mechanical (and at the same time, the purely emotional, per remarks above and below, numerical indicators of success, heavy pressures were placed on those charged with what has long been known as the “administration” of education. Given enormous desire for order and control, plus admiration of corporate life as the predominant model, there were few surprises in the emergence of managerialism.
Managerialism, as a response to these dynamics, is the data driven orientation to education focused on accountability, outcomes, and cost-benefit analysis [Mehta, 2013, Miech, 1995, Rowe, 2014]. Though this response seemed purely mechanistic at first, it later becomes clear that managerialism is energized by a very powerful cultural passion, a mythos. It rages against practices of the past, educational and otherwise, for their failure to deliver on actual or implied promises of a better life. This includes a largely subterranean anger at the failure of culture in the most general senses to protect against what Erich Fromm long ago called “the megamachine” (Fromm, 1968), later known as out-of-control automation, AI, and robotics. But this is only one expression of the massive tide of cultural critique, with others involving everyday cynicism and mocking of old ways, rooting out of any and all values that stood in the way of the modern liberation from everything that had gone before. It was like a clearcut fire. Under the banner of the limited valuing of iindividualism, which had not always been so crude in the modern past as it has become today, exercise of this liberation was very often indistinguishable from unbridled and unexamined self-interest (showing the emotional side of post-modern reaction). There is a real sense in which Ayn Rand and Donald Trump were inevitable manifestations of the cultural mood of late modernity.
In the university the underlying and mysterious mood of the big anger which can often found linked to resentment directed most severely at the Humanities and those educational programs dependent on the “arts,” requiring — and promising — the professional judgment (phronesis) of particular faculty working with particular students (and communities) in which any one of several methods might be most effective – or not. This is very different from the relatively simple application of either pre-set procedure, or the “rote learning” model of material delivered, acquired, and tested. In these unsophisticated methods everything has been resolved and ordered in the abstract, apart from the messiness of real life, ready to be “applied” without concern for who the recipient is, or the conditions of their encounter with those who represent “education.”
The university came to be colonized (and in a sense re-colonized by an orientation which is profoundly antithetical to liberal education in any of its root meanings, as a transformative practice through which humans can come to mature adulthood. In our time we are able to see (just as our ancestors finally came to see what had been invisible to those before them) our tradition of liberal education standing alongside other great practices the world over, which also testify to the fact that the healthy adult human does not simply unfold out of the natural process, but rather requires a cultivation, a transformative practice.5
Managerialism is a late and frenzied assertion of the harsh underlying pedagogy of modernity, with its idolizing of the machine, industrial production, and consumption. What we have in the university of today is like the violent smashing of tectonic plates: as the modern, mechanical, individualist, competitive, masculinist, materialist world is increasingly challenged by an emerging Post-traditional, Relational world which is pluralistic, developmental, and oriented to the kind of relationship in and through which thriving occurs, a reality – to make our situation even more challenging — which is hardly visible apart from a maturity which was rare in the past. Working with “college-age” fellow citizens, we are blessed to be working in higher education today, in occupying a most rich, dynamic, and momentous context, one in which the human future is being decided and shaped right up front, and for better or for worse..
In the tensions of today, managerialism almost always takes the upper hand, the iron hand. In the atmosphere of culture wars, it is extremely tempting to deal with disagreement by the relatively simple act of reducing the opposition to whatever inferior demographic characteristic they might be taken to represent. The persuasiveness of relationalism, on the other hand, is less physical, more about commitment to the overall project of education in a democratic society, with “democracy” and “liberal education” as ways to describe a life well lived. The relational life-way is dependent on maintaining the quiet determination to continue with education, rather than slipping off into either training, or the curious and sad kind of entertainment which can infect the dysfunctional classroom. Though my description of them here is very brief, I think there is no way we can act in good faith in education today without acknowledging ours as an environment of two fundamentally different alternatives and futures.
The second stage is Managerialism Plus Identity Politics.
The identity politics of our time is profoundly ambiguous: it both liberates and dehumanizes. In higher education identity politics seeks, at least on the surface, the inclusion of those who had been previously excluded from the great benefits of “liberty and justice for all,” in its privileging of those who are white, male, and land-owning. It seeks liberation. But in another form identity politics signals a great reduction into the pit of unrelenting, dog-eat-dog dehumanizing competition
Ambiguity arises from the fact that both forms of identity politics are predicated on treating people not as the unique individuals envisioned in the taproot of Western civilization (and it seems some others as well), per Amartya Sen, Tu Weiming, and others, but as instances of a demographic category, whether racial, sexual, and-or economic in nature. So everyone is reduced by just entering the arena. Once in, everyone is tempted to step away from their own integrity and into the cynical conclusion that the world is ultimately about nothing more than competitive interactions at the level of interest and power. –From there it is only a short step to acceptance of the nihilist rage against the loss of humanity.
In continuing testimony to amazing human plasticity, people “adapt” to the humanly impossible circumstances of life today (including the prevailing managerialism) by refusing to treat others (and sometimes especially self) as fully human – as they also did via the demographically-based discriminations of traditional life (is this a deep and non-negotiable human need, to dominate and submit?). In the degraded moral and spiritual state, we are no longer capable or willing to know others except as they are instances of a demographic category, physical, psychological, or otherwise, and according to how these differences calculate in our own interests. Otherwise, non-response. We are no longer willing or able to relate as unique human beings with “soul” and “conscience,” both terms indicating that sacred coincidence between the particular and the universal, the locus of natality, the Kora. We are talking about that oldest and most basic affirmation of civilization itself: of the human capability to abide in the ever-mysterious connection between the human and the ultimate energy of the universe — as the well-spring of life.
Abstracted from encounter of any depth, relieved through stereotyping from the complexity and ambiguity of real life, the identity politics orientation (some would call it “woke”) is convenient. It makes it easier to maintain an understanding of what is happening in a world which is absolutely overwhelming: it provides the illusion of knowing what is going on. The world comes to be understood as an arena of essentially isolated groups (tribes) and individuals competing and making deals, where the only hope for any succor is in private life. The ethic implicit in identity politics also legislates and legitimates a certain coldness, even an inclination toward cruelty, perhaps especially toward those who have somehow been able to maintain their humanity in the unpleasant swamp of our shared life.
Driven by a primal and mysterious anger-as-power (almost vitality, or zest, but something quite short of joie de vivre), and perhaps expressive of arrest in a developmental phase before full and authentic encounter with the Nothingness out of which it arises (a longer story, possibly a novel) rather than life-affirmation, managers, under the influence of identity politics of the second sort have done great harm – through their unexamined broadcasting of anger through a leadership orientation which is aggressively both self-righteous and cynical, not to mention radically deficient in its envisioning of ideal community.
In the second stage, the inherent emptiness of management came to be occupied by the anger and identity constructs – and weapons — which weave the moral texture of our time of culture wars, demonstrating that human community as well as nature “abhors a vacuum.” The dangers of “democratic mobs” (per Thucydides, the French Revolution, and American concern with “the tyranny of the majority”), fueled by the ordinary human hunger for order and belonging, the wish to be included, combined with the dangers of individuals who are liberated but undeveloped, especially as evidenced in their inability to distinguish between feelings and reality, began to become evident. Under these conditions, politicized management winds up functioning in a way that is analogous to “the big lie” in the realm of political life. Both exhibit hyperbolic forms of both rational and emotional insistence, and both want to occupy and remake the center with insane assertion of their own superiority, mediated through a process of social construction which, like anesthesia, is unconscious to the one being colonized – as we reach a new depth of dehumanization (even while AI is standing by to take charge of the project and move us to a “better” place.
The third stage is Flailing.
Transition to a third stage came abruptly, like tectonic plates finally slipping under great pent-up pressure where they meet, finally crushing past and through each other in the vioilent formation of a new landscape.
In both of the first two stages of managerialism, administration had been focused inward, on adjusting and modifying an already running machine. Then at some point, certainly by the time dismal enrollment forecasts began to come in, the onset of Covid plus Trump and Trumpism, there developed a keen interest in finding technological resources to facilitate the big move to on-line education, focus turned to the outside, almost to market analysis. At the same time, the university began to manifest increasingly that cultural condition Sidney Hook famously described as “failure of nerve” (1947), the mysterious muting of sincerity and vigor, the self-censorship, as well as the advent of unsatisfying efforts to get commitment and purpose back by reifying them in mission statements, strategic plans, etc. (reinventing orthodoxy for a new Catholicism?). The search was on for technological innovations that could save institutions in a time of “declining birth rate.” The university began operating something like a start-up, with frantic emphasis on marketing as the foremost way of knowing, trying and discarding in rapid succession many strategies, searching for “the silver bullet” which was aimed at what was assumed to significant as yet unnamed populations out there who would like to university studies in some form.
The entrepreneurs (one branch of which would contain the great American inventor, and the other the “snake oil salesman” – in what can be seen as a late form of colonialism) had moved in, with many schemes for success and many clichés and new buzzwords. All this occurred against a backdrop of loss of confidence in commonly shared truth, and withdrawal from public life –more and more ceding these realms as scenes of crazed post-apocalyptic self-expression, sometimes entertaining performance. Circulating around and through a computer-mediated and enterprise-driven atmosphere are programs of degree completion, life-long learning, certification (or “badging”), and alliances with underserved communities. Some of these programs include on-line lectures and even “discussion” sessions. But despite efforts to give a relational feel or a business “high touch” to education, the laws of social media have prevailed: ultimately we and our students are at home in our shorts, while management experts zoom on about the problem of “student disengagement.” Sometimes it seems they hardly need us!
Today there is so much confusion in society and culture – along with just plain obliviousness supported by overblown senses of entitlement (and if this is frustrated, the downright nihilistic will to tear it all down) — about any and all non-technical, non-financial matters, anything non-quantitative. The situation can be enticing to naked emperors, opportunists, and aspiring autocrats. It is as though a new illiteracy and even a new “dark ages” had set in (a condition impossible for humans, though it still remains to be seen what happens with robots). Perhaps the deepest testimony of our time is to the near-complete neglect of cultivating the mature and adult human being, the very one we so desperately need if we are to survive the insufficiencies of our moment. If only we could give birth to a phoenix from the ashes.
Our situation is perilous because after the entrepreneurs, the opportunists, and the snake oil salespeople, there come the true nihilists. Like Bannon and Putin, they have taken the scorched earth sentiment of Hegel’s profoundly ambiguous Aufheben to metaphysical proportions. The necessity of the modern tearing down to a “blank” slate is seen as the necessary prerequisite to a necessary new beginning – where “necessity” translates into an urgency both paralyzing and fanatical. Holders of this view see themselves and the followers which they require in love-hate as being at the origin of a new myth, and they exemplify the fact that if you don’t share a world with others who are different, then, quite paradoxically, conspiracy is everywhere. The oft heard but rarely understood loneliness sets in.
With modern laissez faire and the transactional world of social contract, all “higher values” were privatized (and thereby either automatically relativized and reduced to personal preference or converted into consumer value-money completely annihilated in monetization. And yet somehow this earlier vision of modernity maintained at least some acknowledgement of a shared world, and hence certain limits on individual freedom in terms of decency, decorum, and regard for a commonly shared social world on which we all depend and to which we all contribute – or at least for some. But in the world of nihilism – a world in which we have given up such “hope” –all such restraints are negated and mocked. They are now seen as Marx saw religions, as “opiates of the people,” something weak people require.
The university has itself become educational in the unfortunate sense of being a microcosm of the larger world Dostoevsky described: “The problem when people stop believing in God is not that they no longer believe, but rather that they will believe anything.” “God,” of course, is here a synonym for those higher or deeper values which make life worth living.
In the stage of Managerialism Plus Identity Politics, all relations are reduced to transactions of power, leaving the domain of morality and civility far behind, while sliding from collapse to shatter of any common ground – as binary opposition gives way to the nihilist gesture of “whatever,” and the barbaric state some early moderns had worried about as “the war of all against all.” In the third stage of slide we see nihilism morphing into fascism, with its rage against not only the past, and whatever group has been identified as enemy), but finally against humanity itself.
We come to see that under the drama in which nihilists like to wrap themselves, they really just want sensation, a primitive kind of proof of life. Strangely, the ability to destroy, the aesthetic of anger and destruction, even the inflicting of pain, become attractive forms of perverse proof. From a slightly different angle of a phenomenon that eludes description.
At the end of the three stage slide, then, we come to the current place of exhaustion, frustration, instability, confusion, collapse, and shatter. But we continue in the trust that our ongoing ability to even speak about these realities at all can be taken as evidence of having passed a crucial low point, and that we are already working toward not only reconstruction but advance – maybe at last beginning to learn how to live our proper place in the universe.
Notes
1. See especially the 2022 Prologue to my Overcoming America/America Overcoming.
2. I appeal throughout this essay to both local experience of vitality at GVSU (later clichéd to become “the Laker effect”) and the broad heritage of liberal education and democracy that are in grave danger of being lost in our time. My “credentials” for being able to speak to these questions, and to engage the Jamesian “radical empiricism” as a way of conducting inquiry, are presented – in one form – on my website < DrStephenRowe.com >
3. For two deep glimpses at the situation in higher education in regard to character formation, see Haidt, ”After Babel: how social media dissolved the mortar of society and made America stupid,” and Harvard College, “The teaching of the arts and humanities at Harvard College: mapping the future,” June 5, 2013.
4. In my work I organize these broader themes and the slide as “Moral Disease,” “Identity Politics,” and “Fascism.” See Overcoming America / America overcoming.
5. I develop this idea in “The adulthood we need: education and developmental challenge in the U.S. and China,” in Whipps, et. al. eds (2013), and translated into Chinese (哲学分析 Philosophical Analysis, vol. 3, no.1, 2014). See also Martha Nussbaum’s very influential “capacities approach” in her Cultivating humanity (1997).
6. Re dialogue – in #5, top 18. Mention Kofi Annan, U.N. Secretary-General proclamation of 2001 as “Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations,” and the movement that followed until the autocratic turn around 2016, and now the UNESCO Center for Intercultural Dialogue. See my Ch 6. “Dialogue as Democratic Possibility,” in OA/AO.
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 appears to 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 are those who would rather 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 ethnocentric 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. It is tragedy.
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.
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 Sanskrit, 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. But the urge to end never-ending ambiguity leads some right back to the front door of relativism.
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. Engagement of the practice I am thinking of 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 sufficiently 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 be addressed in any meaningful sense there is the underlying and encompassing decision as to whether to be alive, to accept the gift of life? –Or not. Not necessarily a conscious or articulate decision, but the most elementary one if there is to be a human future. It is the underlying flooring for ethics and dialogue. Without a shared affirmative response – a collective joie de vivre! (what James had in mind when he spoke of our mutually shared desire to be “faithful to the common mother”), we are all adrift.
A positive response, the deepest “Yes,” is not just a smiley face on Pollyanna, but itself 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 was 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
( from Saint Augustine, via Hannah Arendt, about a specific way of being in the world )
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 pandemics of Covid and Trump. The agenda is vast, including political, cultural, ecological, and even biological 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 recall my amazement with how national attention on the war in Viet Nam in the 1960’s eclipsed the War on Poverty going on in American society became an eruption of resentment and anger a few decades later …). 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, both active and passive?
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 the “inner dialogue” 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.
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.
loneliness, nothingness, one love
… the faculty of voluntarily bringing back a wandering
attention, over and over again, is the very root of judgment,
character, and will. … An education which would improve
this faculty would be the education par excellence. But it
is easier to define this ideal than to give practical directions
for bringing it about.
William James
I.
It strikes right in the midst of ordinary life, sometimes severing family and other bonds of connection, other communities of cooperation which had held before – problematic though they so often were. This occurs, as even the closest people are reduced to their demographic or financial status. It prepares the ground for the widely recognized though not much understood condition of “loneliness,” as an essential component of the moral disease.
With bonds broken by the very structures of modern life that had been designed to serve the individual, moral disease billows forth from the putrid atmosphere of loneliness in which we mostly live, both overly apart and overly together, as if out of sync with our species nature.
The great majority deal with this odd sobriety of our moment, our voluntary deprivation, by cutting off connection with both others and themselves, thereby reinforcing separation, and further weakening togetherness. In the playing out of this especially brittle modification of our humanity, they/we also cut off connection with depth, “soul,” the idea at the root of ethics and civilized life that the other should always be treated as “as end in themselves,” as a being in intimate relation with Spirit, never as a “means,” and that all persons have dignity in their capacity to create, to pull back the veil and reveal what is real. Likewise with morality, “soul” means that all persons are able to exercise moral judgment and right action through the essential cultural organs of “conscience” and “autonomy.” This understanding, though, is precisely what is missing in autocrats and those who suffer late-stage forms of what is widely known as “the curse of Western individualism.”
In the absence of connection with vital depth, we come to both occupy and perpetuate a world of hard-hearted interest and power, with the common denominator of money. As lying and violence are normalized, the world is reduced to the material and transactional; it becomes, quite ironically, the very “war of all against all” early modern visionaries worried about. Driven by volcanic energies spewing out of that fundamental yet elusive fog of loneliness, this condition is recognized by its intertwined themes of resentment, anger, regret, suspicion, betrayal, envy, and self-effacement.
We find ourselves living on a bewildering landscape. This is all the more so since the same world also contains exquisite elements of beauty, justice, and peace, and an inextinguishable (and easily misplaced) love of the best of what has gone before, often in adoration of “the old days” when things were thought to be good. Somewhere in the mix, and looking toward the future, we also have occasional and partial experiences of a hidden world of possibility, while at the same time we remain aware that ours is not a world likely to continue beyond impending collapse. Still, the frail face of hope sometimes stands as magnificently distinct from what all the numbers can tell us.
The ground (as in “figure-ground”) on which these dynamics interact is Nothingness. To clarify this difficult point, it helps to consider, as we are now able to do in post-traditional times, the amazing worldwide consensus of the traditional “religions” that energized human life in the Historical Period – in all their ambiguity. They shared the understanding that humans, in the ordinary course of healthy development, are at some point brought to experience of the great abyss, and the crisis of meaning that ensues. This is the experience of Nothingness.
Sources from the traditions have also understood that modernity, with its great though ambivalent democratization, has had the effect of short circuiting earlier developmental stages, and depositing us into the middle of a mystical phase of “leaving,” with no understanding of how we got here, and no preparation whatsoever for what comes next, for a “returning.”
So we float and drift and plummet through rapids, without forewarning or instruction, oblivious as to our location and condition. Only at a late stage does the irony of Al Gore’s “inconvenient truth” come into focus, as we see that our survival requires us to recognize where we are now and how we got here, now in the global context, and to examine the shape and substance of our choice to continue (or not) on the path of life – a process both humbling and elevating.
It should also be said here that the condition I have just described is the reason that major visionaries of democracy, with Thomas Jefferson and John Stuart Mill as primary American examples, famously argued on the necessity of public education to support democratic life, and that, per Mill, “democracy is only possible among those who are in the maturity of their faculties.”
Here is the maturity we sometimes envision but rarely embody.
Karl Jaspers, author of one of the most monumentally significant interpretations of what is happening in our time, makes the essential 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, MMA, 193). Again, a choice and a process we need to understand and support. !
Living as we do, on the razor’s edge, we can say that the stress inherent to living in loneliness can have some varieties which are life-affirming, and good reason not to give oneself over to some form of narcosis. Some of the life-affirming varieties can even lead us to a portal, an opening into a new way of life. It is a state that has been envisioned in Native, Hindu, Jewish, Buddhist, Muslim, Chinese, Christian, and spiritualities both traditional and contemporary, a state which opens onto Nirvana, Enlightenment, Salvation, as well as forms of cultivation and practice which can actually guide us in that direction – toward that greater consciousness which directs, motivates, and energizes us – though we always seem to walk the ultra fine line right on the border with chaos.
Genuine experience of the greater consciousness becomes a way beyond despair, a way into humans becoming more calm, compassionate, and appreciative, more willing to engage world-building efforts toward justice and beauty, more able to affirm life as gift rather than endure it as a condemnation.
The developmental process here is crucial, as the utterly necessary humanities component of education, therapy, and childrearing.
II.
However, this is not the pathway most fellow citizens take. Most choose some form of denial, and many more are driven or drift, into the low-level gloom of meaninglessness and indefiniteness, the “mere persistence” Jaspers talks about. They come to be distinguished by their lack of distinction, devoid of what used to be called character or integrity, an unhappiness often hidden under frantic lifestyles of business and/or pleasure. Their condition is exacerbated by lack of supportive relationships, in a world that does its best to deny genuine human agency by turning us into functionaries.
We find there are many among us who have denied the existence of Covid, Trump losses and insurrection, the Holocaust, climate change, nuclear risk – the whole big list. But the denial comes at a cost: the outrageous and dangerous claims associated with it, along with the “alternative facts” and conspiracy theories with which they are linked, contribute to the loss of confidence in a commonly shared world – and reality itself, and the inability to adjudicate behavior based on anything that could pass for “common sense.” All this in an atmosphere which constantly minimizes us through the raw power of the autocrat and/as his totalitarian system.
We fail tragically to realize the power of human choosing and willing, denial, self-censorship, and self-discipline. I think William James says it beautifully in the quote at the head of this essay. We need to grow beyond the distractable state, the state of scattered consciousness and endless chasing around.
The capacities involved here indicate a high level of energy, which is also to say potentially evil. This includes the ambiguity of education, through which the ruling elite is able to cause people to internalize new ideologies and foci of attention that operate more by feeling – mostly fear — and manipulation, ideologies that are all the more powerful for their being vague and fluid in its post-ideological orientation. It is closely associated with the experience of “liberal education” and other key practices which have served as the footings of culture in the past devolving very quickly into a mess that can easily be shaped by the autocratic is among the chief lessons of our time.
The combined effect of these dynamics add up to closing the door on the possibility of a better world – or any world, really – except those running on inertia alone. They more likely add up to what Arendt referred to as “a protean universe in which anything can at any moment become anything else.” These world-shaping dynamics illustrate the fact that humans, in the name of self-preservation and “survival of the fittest,” have been way more concerned with refusing and controlling the goodness with which the fabric of life is woven than with cultivating it.
But we must not allow ourselves to become overwhelmed with the enormity of the issues, condemning ourselves to wander the ever-anxious land between fitful half-sleep and – as Angelina Jolie put it recently – “too much woke” (or perhaps better, as Kevin Hart said it, “too much magic.)” The crime of denial, from either side of infraction, is that of closing the door on the sacred and transhuman quality of what is, a closing which comes at the cost of alienatingoneself from the life-affirming vitality upon which the continuation of life itself depends. In the midst of what can become a paralyzing condition, it helps to be reminded that the enlightened or mature being is the one who renounces his/her own entry to Heaven for the sake of helping others get out of the swamp.
It is heartbreakingly unfortunate that realization as to the nature of our situation and an available remedy usually only come after a long period of suffering and maximum vulnerability, a period in which our capacities for such things as love, justice, and beauty (not to mention the kind of intelligence which contains both critical and constructive aspects) have either not yet emerged or atrophied and/or been exploited to the point where now even our species viability comes into question. This applies most obviously and immediately to the dimension of knowing and agreement about facts, about what is actually the case (no small thing, it turns out. Remember Henry David Thoreau: “a true account of the actual is the rarest poetry.”
The deprivation brought on by the modern, secular monasticism (in what Whitehead referred to as our “celibacy of the intellect”), is also manifest in pathological constriction (or simple childishness, or as personal feeling and sense of self-worth run to such extremes as to give off offensive odors), blind and ever more absurd ideological assertion associated with what that “common sense” would see as widespread life-denying (or “toxic”) behavior and relationships.
Of course, the question, the practical question – the only question really — becomes how to live in and through and beyond the paralyzing loneliness of moral disease, learning to be at home in the Nothingness of our origin and ultimate source — where “at home” indicates a state of being variously identified in traditional cultures as well-being (Eudemonia), happiness (Xing Fu), salvation, thriving, flourishing, actualizing – Being fully alive! We can – and must – move beyond academic quibbles about methodologies, the always-disappointing inevitability of projection, and the very real facts of our vulnerability.
The mind-boggling challenge of this learning was only rarely addressed by our ancestors. They didn’t need to, protected as they were by communities, and covenants, and culture (only one! – which is to say no such thing, objectification “baked in”). Ancestors were more likely to form cults around people and superstitions that addressed the question as to who had had the primary and direct experience, the authentic revelation which legitimates them in the teaching of others.
The crucial (and sometimes hard to understand ) developmental process we are talking about here is helpfully illuminated when Whitehead speaks about movement through three stages of relationship with “God” [or Ultimate Reality]: “… if religion [or he would accept “spirituality” here too] 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” (RM, 16).
“… from God the enemy to God the companion.” What could this mean?, and could it mean anything compelling for a generation so badly in need of direction? Maybe it signals sufficient conscious experience of living an extremely improbable life (after all that has gone before, how could it be that we are still here!? – something any human, looking forward or back can always say — one containing questions about how “God,” if any, could not only permit the continuation of the modern life we have been warning about for a very long time, including the atrocities of our ancestors — and apparently those of all other human groups, especially those associated with unhealthy relationships between females and males as they had been mediated in the past through patriarchy. God the enemy.
Coming into the sense in which we live “by the grace of God,” after all previous collaboration with insufficient identities and gods have collapsed, we are finally left to recreate “God” in the midst of our best practices and relationships. Gradually we learn to trust “God the companion,” and fly in the direction of the better world that is already under our wings. Indeed, we even begin to live beyond hatred of our fathers, and to catch glimpses of how far we sons and daughters of the American adventure have come.
III.
The dynamic of moral disease and its manifestations in the cultural warfare of Identity Politics come to light in ways that can be helpful:
Demographic characteristics are inevitably mixed in live human beings, so that, for example, a male could be a patriarch or not in combination with a potentially infinite number of other markers.
It is the hard fix of descriptions in our highly politicized environment, their weapon-like use, that makes this socio-cultural mood so dangerous. It breeds loneliness, and also fear as generalized wariness or shyness in life, and other elements of moral disease.
“Hard fix” means that with maximum speed (i.e. before the other can take the same kind of descriptive action you are about to take on them) you affix a description on the other with sufficient firmness that it sticks. This is what James called “vicious intellectualism,” remarking with his usual charm that it is as though, once one is identified as an equestrian, one shall never walk again!
So “define or be defined,” in simplest terms, is the moral wisdom of our hyper-competitive, dog-eat dog time! How odd, that our war became a war of hermeneutics!
IV.
Now in America – and worldwide — we are in the midst of an extremely dangerous uprising, a slow-motion, multiple-stage insurrection, with crude and unthinkable Jan 6 acts of physical invasion only the beginning and still-fresh expression of a much deeper and well-advanced invasion of a Zombie life form (as a local mutation of moral disease), often well disguised. It is distinguished, under the disguise, by its having actively given up not only on America, democracy, etc, but also on civilization itself, humanity. All forms of stability must be torn down, with cynical humor as the closest we get to anything like assurance of new life emerging through the rubble, and the more we experience what some have called the ”humanity gap,” the epidemic of non-recognition in which we live.
Dog whistles blaring, calling out to the insurrectionists with their indiscriminate need to identify an enemy and destroy. Now we will see (as if we haven’t repeatedly seen already) who comes out and how we ourselves respond. It is not as though the stance of anxious waiting is new, but the urgency level with which it is fused has never been this intense and disruptive, prohibitive of those conditions of culture and society which allow us to get some rest and revitalization.
Our best hope is that the culture wars, which have raged in the pandemic years of Covid and Trump, will have cleansed the American soil of its self-fulfilling disbelief in anything “higher” (or “deeper,” choose your vocabulary) than the crudest governance of “might makes right,” and “pragmatism” in the lowest sense as instrumentalism, opportunism, functionalism).
So let there be a deeper appreciation of “we the people,” one which can cure refusals of ourselves and fellow citizens to trust that the democratic hope actually can spring forth again from the soil of North America, be revived with the awakening of dormant yet still growing roots, completing a process of preparation and revitalization we do not understand, though we sometimes witness or even experience it directly.
We need to somehow forgive ourselves, or accept the miracle of being forgiven, as an essential quality of life, mediating the finer energy we need in order to live well, allowing it to flow rather than jamming things up with uninteresting self-hatred. So let us be done with the utterly exhausting, fractious and destructive period in which we find ourselves, and move on in a collective embodiment of good will, pursuing our shared pluralistic (not relativistic!), democratic vision of the good life Iived in the presence of others who may be angels or devils.
Let us each do our part to complete and refine the terrible national exorcism in which we have been ensnarled, not necessarily for all time, but for now at least — remembering views of the Constitution which saw its genius in embracing and disciplining – and drawing the rare and pure relational energy from what American ancestors called an “ongoing revolution.”
Let us grow in our partnership with America as “lively experiment,” with its continuous, and often against-the-odds, pulsing of a certain persuasiveness, an affinity resonating deep, under all the animal urges, genes, bad childhood experiences, adult mistakes, problematic decades, etc. Still alive – the dream of dignity.
To live into this American way, we must continue to confront the demons of slavery, sexism, racism, homophobia, indefensible wealth, and any claim to superiority based on either demography or ideology. In the process, we need to come to accept the limitations of our previous actions, hereby becoming “fierce with reality” (Rilke), living in a certain trust that is in no way naïve or “romantic” or “Pollyanna.” We become ourselves as we learn the salvation which enters our lives when we are in compassionate presence with the other, and learning ever more clearly and deeply to embody that most beautiful paradox of “an equality of difference.”
In this spirit of deep pluralism, then, and speaking only for myself and a certain American subculture with profound overlaps in the roots with many other cultures on North America and beyond, I continue to walk with MLK in his message as urgently appropriate to our moment: Love is “the supreme unifying principle of life,” and for humans we participate in life’s ever-overflowing goodness when we navigate by “other preservation” as “the first law of life:” “The universe is so structured that things go awry if men [sic] are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension.”
King is an extremely fortunate visionary companion as we walk through the fields of the terrible –even fatal — interactions of the old traditions out of which a new world order is already emerging – maybe Heaven, maybe Hell, potential for both. King, unlike so many others, not only provides essential tools of articulation, including those which support the inclusive tool/practice of democratic deliberation or dialogue, and he is also a living example of the understanding he advocates. I think it was MLK who Cornell West had in mind when he said “Justice is Love in action.”
King helps us toward fresh appreciation of “Love” as the ultimate source of vitality, shaping and guiding us to greater or lesser extent. Hearing the many names for the source helps us finally come to acceptance of the limitations and dangerous tendencies contained within our own understandings of the source, our traditions of interpretation. This awareness is essential to development of the ability to live with people of other traditions, in the mutuality beyond mine and yours in which humans thrive, a space in which what had previously been weakness becomes strength, through the ability to see and relate deeply to other beings. Through this process vulnerability is transformed into the deeper strength beyond force, as the energy that unites and separates all things.
Here is the portal we are looking for, the passage into a state sometimes described as “encounter,” pure relationality, full presence, or cheng (sincerity). In more developmental terms, we become capable of dwelling in that most magnificent paradox of definiteness and openness.
Now we can see that Earth is a continuous presentation of ever stronger (ever more “persuasive” in Whitehead’s terms) embodiments flowing out of the co-creative process, a process in which humanity, in its very nature, participates (as mysterious and disruptive as this thought has been in human history).
The perennial question to us as both species and person thus becomes: can we dare accept life, our own included, as imperfect instantiation of gift, and Earth as a humble orb upon which love slowed down and came to body (per E=MC2) – at least for a time? Could our living “to the glory of God” contribute to the unfolding of that complex and beautiful union, that most magnificent possibility of a solidarity which is at one with liberation?
“Love” yes. It is everywhere and has an infinite number of faces. It still resonates with something deep within most (certainly not all) people, something like “soul.” But it can be squishy, and it comes and goes, and it requires a kind of surrender that is terrifying. So it is easier to hang back in the shadows, that zone of low-level, normalized resentful living which could never permit anything like genuine happiness (too much exposure, risk). Most of us know this much.
We need love to be the opposite of everywhere! We need it here, right now, in the intimate center of this particular moment. But the vast majority of our moments are mixed, ambiguous, and sometimes deceptive, as those beloved transcendent moments are immediately seized upon for purposes both unexamined and demonstrably problematic.
So let’s get on with it, each in our unique way, following our recognition of a presence which is responsive in love, understanding, and adventure. There are many descriptions, each partially correct, all limited by their association with previous experience on the planet.
At this very late hour, after discovering we have painted ourselves into a corner, it really comes down to a simple question: Do I affirm life as a gift, or destroy it as my way of contributing to impossibility?
Dr. Stephen Rowe 