The need to “think outside of the box” has become a business cliché in the last decade signifying the need to think creatively. The phrase resonates, as all cliches do at first, because it points to a truth, which is that what we find within the box, although familiar and comfortable, is stale and lifeless. So there is the understandable desire to get out of the box to where the air is fresh and the light bright, but I don’t think it’s desirable or even possible to do without the box, for we humans cannot deal with too much reality, and the box performs an essential filtering function which keeps us sane.
But while that is true, it's important to understand that the "box" is a human cultural construction. There is nothing absolute about it, and in fact different cultures have different boxes, different ways of filtering the reality outside of it, and moderns have constructed a box for themselves that has a pretty thick filter. Moderns like to think that their filter excludes everything that is delusional, superstitious and irrational–that "reason" is the stuff out of which it is made.
But reason always serves another master, and for moderns reason serves the compulsive need to control and dominate, and to find ways to justify all the human projects that are born of the need to control and dominate. The need to control and dominate, therefore, is the ur-filter through which we see everything. It controls our politics and economic mores. It's essentially what we see in the kind of people the culture lionizes in film from the Jack Bauers to James Bonds. They may be individuals, but they are exemplars of control and domination. We think of admirable personalities as those who control and dominate and who refuse to be controlled and dominated. It really is pretty basic. Our whole idea of human value and dignity is defined by winners and losers on that scale.
Humans have always made an idol of power, but until the modern period they never lived in a world they thought they could completely control. And whether or not that's possible, it's the compulsion that is driving us toward a totalizing surveillance police state. You could say that most people are not in the grip of this compulsion, but it doesn't matter. Insofar as we live in a culture that is dominated by the compulsion for control and domination, most people accept that these kinds of controls are acceptable and they won't resist the minority who seeks to implement them.
We see in congress right now a group of people who are living inside a box in which this need for domination and control goes without question. They would not be taken seriously if they dissented. They are, with some exceptions, creatures of the domination and control model of reality. They wouldn't have arrived at their positions if they were not. Hillary Clinton is an exemplar in this respect, and that's why there's little reason to hope for much from the Democrats. Insofar as they live in the domination and control box, they are incapable of resisting the kinds of things that the more blatantly aggressive Republicans are promoting.
But however that plays itself out, one way or the other we have to find ways to punch holes in that structure and to create a new box that lets in the light and air that will allow us to live the kind of healthy, fruitful lives that have become almost impossible within the stale confines as defined by the domination and control box.
Premodern cultures, including the premodern west, provide part of the answer. Premoderns saw nature and its creatures as manifestations of the sacred, and as something they were in relationship with, not dominators of. In the medieval West the world was seen as a sacred book to be read in which were found the ideas in the mind of God, and the task was imagined as punching holes in the roof of the box so that one could be open to the life and illumination that would flow in from heaven above. But this project also involved sealing up the floor under which the devil lurked seeking to destroy souls with an appeal to the base instincts symbolized by sex, power, and money. Those serious about their spiritual lives fled the world to enter monasteries where they took vows of chastity, obedience, and poverty, each designed to protect the soul by sealing up the floor of the box to block out the influence of those instinctual drives. Let the box be filled with spirit, and don’t let anything up from down below.
This is better than living in a completely closed system, with no holes in the roof, but it didn't work. You have to have a better strategy for dealing with the stuff that comes up from below, and simply suppressing those energies promotes "angelism." Angelism is at the root of body and earth loathing, and of an overemphasis on eternity at the cost of diminishing the importance of history. As such it is a one-sided distortion of a multi-sided human project. We need to punch holes in the ceiling, but we also need to punch them in the sides (front, openness to future; back, reverence for the past; right,
communion with humans; left, communion with natural world) and the floor (the instinctual drivers sympolized by sex, power, money). It's the mix of all of these in the alembic of the soul that defines the human task. Shutting out any one of them causes severe problems. And as the Self, the individuating incarnate human spirit, grows in strength, the need for filters lessens, and the box melts away.
That, in somewhat simplistic terms, is the model that I am working with. I lay it out here as a point of reference for future posts. It's at the heart of everything I say about politics, as suggested in the paragraphs above, but it's also at the heart of my thinking about the culture, which is an evolving spiritual work of steadily punching more holes in the box. As I've said before, our politics is a function of the kind of souls we have, and our souls are shaped by culture, and culture is shaped by the kind of filters that let in reality or close it off. The culture shapes the box, and insofar as our box now is constructed out of the compulsive need for domination and control, our politics will be all about domination and control. Nothing changes in the political sphere until fundamental changes occur in the cultural sphere, and that requires fundamental alterations in the filter system.
The cultural project is long-term, and our political crisis is short term. And that's the source of my pessimism for the short run. In the long term, I think we'll figure it out. I worry, though, about what's in front of us in the next couple of decades. It seems inevitable that we will have to learn the hard way. But our responsibility is to do what we can do, individually and together.
I've started re-reading The Brothers Karamazov. Alyosha (and Dostoyevski himself) has always been the model for me of the filtering system most appropriate for our time. More on that as I get into the book more.
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