AGI, Hope, and the Human Future
The full transcribed texts for the three lectures are posted below this synopsis. The synopsis is designed to concisely pull together the main themes spread out over the three lectures.
Synopsis–AGI, Hope, and the Human Future: Resisting the Techno-Capitalist Matrix
One. Humans, especially with the prospect of developments in AI that may lead to AGI, are developing technologies that are likely to create a major discontinuity in human civilizational development. This discontinuity will be akin to the shift that followed from the development of phonetic literacy in the first millennium BCE, known as the Axial Revolution, and the invention of moveable type in the 15th century from which followed the Scientific Revolution.
Two, Technological developments change human nature for better and worse. It could be argued that people who lived in hunter-gatherer societies were far happier and lived in deeper communion with one another, the natural world, and the cosmos than do people who live in modern societies. People who live in modern societies live lives that are clearly more alienated, lonely, and meaningless compared to our premodern ancestors. If humans have paid a price in the intensification of their alienation, what have they received in return? Certainly material prosperity–at least for some–but also, more importantly, a sense of themselves as free, moral actors. As having an “I”.
Three. To come into full awareness of one’s freedom and individuation, one must suffer a ‘disembeddeing’, a “positive alienation”, a metaphorical ‘wandering in the wilderness’. This is where one learns to step outside of one’s acculturation and to self-legislate. As the early Christian monks fled into the Egyptian and Syrian deserts, so must we all step outside of our acculturation to find within us what the Greeks called the Transcendent Good, the Chinese called the Tao, the ancient Israelites the Torah. and Christians the Logos. But unlike our premodern ancestors who chose to flee into the wilderness, the wilderness has come to us. It has de-territorialized us in place. It has stripped us of all our traditions, customs, and external cultural props.This forces us to choose, either to surrender to what’s worst in us or to find what’s best. You need not be religious to know the Transcendent Good. But whether religious or not, all people of good will know it with the awakening in the heart of an inner spiritual faculty called ‘conscience’.
Four. Cultural Conservatives are people who want their lost territory back. Liberals are people who are too comfortable in adapting to the nihilistic creative-destruction of what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix–or TCM. But there is no getting back what was lost, and just allowing the TCM to develop unchecked leads inevitably to disaster for the human project. We humans must move forward, and we must create something new–something inspired by the Transcendent Good.
Five. Because these new technologies are unprecedented in their power to change what it means to be human, we cannot allow people who are captured by the TCM, and who therefore have little sense of the Transcendent Good to develop these technologies unchecked. The technologies don’t scare me; the people creating them do because of the way they are so deeply and unreflectively captured by the TCM. In the coming decades, all people of good will throughout the globe, i.e., all people who have consciences and who in some measure know the Transcendent Good, need to find a way to organize a resistance to the TCM.
Six. As unlikely as it seems now because of its lack of moral and spiritual authority, the Catholic Church is perhaps the only cultural institution with global reach that provides an infrastructure to organize such a global resistance. It must do so in concert with the other great Post-Axial religions–Taoism, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism–as well as other smaller religions/sects similarly inspired. Instead of obsessing about their differences, all people of good will need to find a way to speak with one voice in resistance to the TCM. How this will happen I don’t know. Expect the unexpected–out of barren wombs and empty tombs, so to say. But something like it must happen because the people who are most deeply captured by the nihilism of the TCM are leading humanity off a cliff, and the rest of us, divided and so pre-emptively conquered, unless we find some shared solidarity to set our feet in the Transcendent Good will be dragged behind.
[The full transcription of the three talks I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8, 2/15, and 2/22, 2024 are posted below:
First Lecture: What Is Human Flourishing?
Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social and political turmoil: homogenization is pulling us one way, and tribalism is pulling us in a another. The intensifying of the second seems to be a reaction to the intensifying of the first. So two related questions arise:
1. Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?
2. Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?
Put that aside for now; I’ll come back to it later.
Now for our topic: “AGI, Hope and the Human Future: What Is Human Flourishing?”
First let’s define some terms. What is Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), and what makes it different from AI and Generative AI?
AI can do things within one domain really well—like playing chess, facial recognition, music and movie recommendations, etc. Generative AI takes text, music, images, learns the rules that structure them, and generates novel text, music, and images. You can give the entire Bach opus to a Generative AI machine, and it could write a cantata that that would seem to be a genuine Bach piece composition that had never been known of before.
But such a new piece would be ‘novel’ and not ‘original’. What’s the difference? Originality requires having a soul. Having a soul doesn’t make you original, but it’s a prerequisite for originality. The fact that so many can’t tell the difference between what is original and what is novel is a sign of the soullessness of the world that technology is creating. As machines become more human, humans are becoming more machinelike. This is an essential part of the problem I want to explore in these talks.
ChatGPT is an advanced form of Generative AI. It scares a lot of people because it’s so human in its use of language. But it’s still pretty primitive.
AGI is still only hypothetical. If realized, it will have broad cognitive abilities, and it will be able to understand, learn, apply knowledge, and problem-solve across a wide range of tasks and domains—very much like a human being.
Those who think AGI is possible say it will have “emergent” properties. It will develop capabilities that humans did not program into it. It will surprise us and do things that humans don’t understand. And that really scares a lot of people because these machines will be us, but much smarter and more powerful than us.
But will it be truly conscious? Will it have a soul? Will it be able to care?
Or will it just be like a human psychopath who can mimic these human attributes without feeling them?
The late Hubert Dreyfus was a professor of philosophy at UC Berkley and one of the foremost American interpreters of Martin Heidegger. In the early part of his career, he taught at MIT. He got to know many of the pioneers in AI—and he thought those nerds had no idea what a human being was. Good Heideggerian that he was, he argued in What Computers Can’t Do: The Limits of Artificial Intelligence(1972, 1992) that in order for AGI to have human-like intelligence, it would have a body like ours, and social acculturation like ours. It would have to be a historical cultural being-in-the-world.
But what does being a historically acculturated creature in a body entail?
Will it have to gestate in a womb and experience birth trauma? Will it have months of breastfeeding? Will it go through the terrible twos and the hormonal changes of adolescence? Will it suffer? Will it grow old and die? That’s what having a body and being a human means to someone like Dreyfus. You see the point. There’s more to being truly human than just having human-like intelligence. It’s what gets left out that makes all the difference.
Embodied, acculturated human beings are particular, historical beings. They have biological and cultural constraints. Can those constraints be duplicated in AGI machines? Wouldn’t possessing those attribures be a requirement for any machine to have truly human consciousness? Isn’t therefore any AGI machine that we create without those constraints something that must be very non-human in nature. And so then mustn’t it be something that we could never really understand? Or it understand us?
But, you might object, why should anybody suffer, get old, and die? Can’t we improve what it means to be human by eradicating those limitations? That’s what Transhumanists would ask in response to Dreyfus. Transhumanist Aubrey de Grey wrote in 2008 that we will soon achieve “longevity escape velocity”. This is when life extension technology will outpace biological aging. He asserted that persons who will live to be a thousand years old have already been born. What’s wrong with that?
The is techno-optimism on steroids. He’s probably wrong about the timing, but who knows if he’s wrong in the long run? Should we all celebrate this possibility?
Transhumanists want to completely redefine what it means to be a human being purely in terms of human material flourishing without caring about what this does to the human soul. They assume that there is no such thing—that humans are nothing more than biological machines. And If turns out that humans do have souls, they’ll adapt. But will they? Do these people have any idea about what they’re playing with?
So we’re seeing a convergence. Machines are becoming more like humans here, and humans are becoming more like machines over there. At what point do these AGIs stop being less machines and more human, and at what point do humans stop being less human and more like machines?
Do the people at the cutting edge of these technological developments see any significant downside here? Or have most of them become already the soulless machines they want to turn the rest of us into? And if that’s so, are those of us who think that human flourishing requires, indeed is defined by, one’s depth of soul, are we going to allow these soulless techies to restructure the world in their soulless image?
So the danger for me lies first and foremost not in whether these machines can become more soulfully human, but in whether we humans are becoming more like soulless machines.
But let’s return to the first question about the implications of successfully realizing AGI. Dreyfus didn’t think it was likely. But what if? John Vervaeke is professor Philosophy/Cognitive Science at the University of Toronto. He’s read his Heidegger, and he’s familiar with Dreyfus’s arguments, and he accepts his criteria for what full AGI would require. But he thinks AGI is more likely that Dreyfus does.
He also has a very interesting series of lectures entitled “Awakening from the Meaning Crisis”, which I recommend to anybody who would like a crash course in Western Philosophy and how it relates to cutting edge developments in Cog Sci.
He, too, doesn’t know whether AGI is possible. Indeed, he hopes it isn’t. But he argues there are good reasons to think that it will be happen. And if it does, we better get ready for it.
What are the implications?
If AGI is really fully AGI, can we think of it anymore as just a machine? Or must we start to treat it as a person?
If AGI is fully realized, he argues, it will have real consciousness and will have real moral agency. And so he’s concerned about who will have the responsibility for educating these AGI newborns. And if they are indeed persons, won’t we have to love them and educate them as if they were our children?
This situation was imagined 220 years ago in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus.
What was this story about?
Two things. Certainly the hubris of an overzealous scientist. But more importantly about the deeper moral failure of Dr. Frankenstein. He brought a new human-like being into the world and refused to care for it. Once the monster comes to life, Dr. F is horrified by the monstrosity of it, and runs away. The monster is not born a monster. He becomes one because of human moral failure.
So what responsibility will the creators of these AGI newborns have for their welfare? Will they just be perceived as chattel to be dominated and exploited? Is that even a question that people like Altman, Zuckerberg, and Musk are asking? Or what about the military? Will they, too, be creating monsters that will reflect their own moral failures? And are the rest of us then just doomed to live with however that happens to work out?
Who is there to push back against them on behalf of a richer more complex “humanistic” education for these AGI newborns? Are we even giving a rich, complex humanistic education to our own children anymore?
Vervaeke’s point is these machines/persons are us. They will inherit from us the entire deposit of human experience and achievement. We don’t know what these machines/persons will do with this legacy. Hopefully we humans will find a way to ensure that they will respect their elders and work to promote human flourishing rather than to impede it.
But do we understand enough about human flourishing to teach these new beings how to support it? How can we if there’s no consensus about what it means to be human? There are religious humanists, secular humanists, transhumanists, posthumanists, anti-humanists—and there are lots of people who think that the planet would just be better off if humans just went away.
But let’s say we had the power to appoint someone to be in charge of educating these newborn AGIs—whom would we choose? Would there even be consensus in this room about who would be best?
Hopefully what we do here over the next couple of weeks will be useful in helping us to think about that—if not for the machines/persons’ sake, for our own. At the very least we could develop some criteria about how we interact with these machines/persons and other technologies going forward.
So what does human flourishing entail? Can we come up with some baseline criteria?
Maybe it starts with identifying what human flourishing is not. What would these student AGIs learn about human flourishing by spending a week watching HBO or Netflix? They would see humans obsessed with power, greed, sex, status, fame, and winning at all costs. Is achieving those things how most humans imagine human flourishing? I hope not.
There’s a strong Calvinist streak in American culture that believes humans are utterly depraved. It’s certainly reflected in our popular culture. Is this how the AGIs will come to see us? Is that what they’d learn to emulate? And if we’re better than that, what evidence can we give them? What can we point to that would “inspire” them to emulate the best of us rather than the worst? And if there’s even the remotest chance that they will emulate the worst, why are we ok with that?
So if we can all agree that human flourishing is not, for instance, how Logan Roy’s family pursues it, what is it?
Well, I think we flourish most when we feel deep connection—when we experience joy in communion. Joy in communion with other humans, with nature, with our bodies, with our work in the world, with what is most deeply spiritual in us. All of us have experienced these moments of connection even if just fleetingly. And not nearly as frequently as we would like. Why so rare? What prevents it?
Alienation.
But what is alienation? What causes it?
It’s the feeling of being cut off from one another, from nature, from our bodies, from our work in the world, and with what is most deeply spiritual in us. We don’t like being alienated. And we’ll do almost anything to relieve it. Like marching with tiki-torches in Charlottesville or storming the Capitol on J6.
“What’s wrong with these people?” you ask. Well, they’re deeply alienated, and they’ve found a way to relieve it. They are looking for communion and solidarity. And the New Right is offering that in a very robust way. And it’s intoxicating.
And this raises another question: How do you persuade them that they’re wrong? What does cosmopolitan Liberalism have to offer them that would inspire them to make better choices? The meritocracy and workaholism?
The most thoughtful people on the New Right see Liberals as suffering from the worst kind of alienation. Are they wrong? Are they really flourishing? It’s ironic that the New Right hates the same thing the New Left hated in the 60s and 70s—the homogenizing, soul-crushing effects of the Technocracy—what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.
We’ll come back to this next week, but for now it’s important to understand how this alienation theme is so central to the human condition.
Were humans always alienated? Freud argues that it just goes with being civilized, but old myths talk about our alienation as if it were primal. It’s the story told in Genesis of Adam and Eve being expelled from the Garden. Or of Plato’s story about human beings use to be four-legged hermaphrodites whom Zeus cut in half so humans are forever feeling cut off from their other half.
They are stories of the beginning of longing and desire—desire for what we lack and longing for what we’ve lost. You could say that this primal alienation is what gets history started.
So while alienation is baked into the human condition, it started becoming a more acute problem after the Reformation and the Scientific Revolution. And by the 1700s, it became unbearable for some. Rousseau in France and the proto-Romantics Hamann and Herder in Germany hated what Enlightenment civilization was doing to human beings.
The revolt against the overly rational, civilized, Enlightenment order was well articulated in J. G. Hamann. He’s the most important German thinker you never heard of. He was well known to all the great German figures of his day from Kant, to Goethe, and Herder. Kierkegaard was deeply influenced by him. Isaiah Berlin in his The Roots of Romanticism says of Hamann–
He was against scientists, bureaucrats, persons who made things tidy, smooth Lutheran clergymen, deists, everybody who wanted to put things in boxes…for Hamann, of course, creation was a most ineffable, indescribable, unanalyzable personal act, by which a human being laid his stamp on nature, allowed his will to soar, spoke his word, uttered that which was within him and which would not brook any kind of obstacle.
Therefore the whole of the Enlightenment doctrine appeared to him to kill that which was living in human beings, appeared to offer a pale substitute for the creative energies of man, and for the whole rich world of the senses, without which it is impossible for human beings to live, to eat, to drink, to be merry, to meet other people, to indulge in a thousand and one acts without which people wither and die.
It seemed to him that the Enlightenment laid no stress on that, that the human being as painted by Enlightenment thinkers was, if not ‘economic man’, at any rate some kind of artificial toy, some kind of lifeless model, which had no relation to the kind of human beings whom Hamann met and wished to associate with every day of his life. Goethe says much the same thing about Moses Mendelssohn. He says Mendelssohn treats beauty as entomologists treat butterflies. He catches the poor animal, he pins it down, and as its exquisite colours drop off, there it lies, a lifeless corpse under the pin. (pp. 50-51)
He saw the enlightenment ethos as about trading deep, soulful cultural vitality for material prosperity, i.e., trading deep originality for overly civilized cleverness, novelty, and superficial baubles.
And Benjamin Franklin saw something similar in America at the same time:
“When an Indian child has been brought up among us, taught our language and habituated to our customs,” Benjamin Franklin wrote to a friend in 1753, “[yet] if he goes to see his relations and make one Indian ramble with them, there is no persuading him ever to return.”
On the other hand, Franklin continued, white captives who were liberated from the Indians were almost impossible to keep at home: “Tho’ ransomed by their friends, and treated with all imaginable tenderness to prevail with them to stay among the English, yet in a short time they become disgusted with our manner of life… and take the first good opportunity of escaping again into the woods.”
–Sebastian Junger, Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging (pp. 2-3).
No brainer, right? These Puritans in “going native” found something that was already very weak, especially in Calvinist societies like that in New England—a vital sense of connection because Calvinism for most produces alienation on stilts. What did they find when they went to live with the Native Americans: Joy in communion with other humans, with nature, with their bodies, with their work in the world, and with a richly symbolic, meaningful cosmos.
Now if you’ve been receiving this newsletter, you read or can read a more detailed exposition of Charles Taylor’s argument regarding “The Great Disembedding”. In what follows I present a summary of what I said there.
Taylor describes the significance of the shift occurred starting in the mid-millennium BCE called the Axial Revolution. It was the time when in a remarkably transcultural way from China throughout Asia and the middle east to southeastern Europe, great civilizations developed embracing in different ways some idea of the Transcendent Good. This is the age of Socrates and Plato, Taoism, Vedanta, Buddhism, Jewish Monotheism. And it’s the basis for later developments in Christianity and Islam.
Essential for this story is a separation between what Taylor calls the Immanent and transcendent Frames. All these Axial civilizations share a basic insight or intuition: at the heart of reality and sustaining it is a Primal Good. More about that in a moment, but first a few words about life within the Immanent Frame before the Axial Revolution.
Before there is any idea of transcendence, there is a human life within the Immanent Frame. Its primary concern is ordinary human flourishing—long life, good health, many children, bounteous crops, victory over one’s enemies.
All humans throughout history have a deep desire to flourish in this material way. We long for bounty. But through most of their history, humans have lived with scarcity, precarity, and the primal anxiety that comes with them. They developed two basic methods to minimize precarity and to maximize bounty: tools and religion. Tools to help them manage material precarity, and religion to help them manage psychological precarity.
Humans in pre-Axial societies lived in an enchanted world. The immanent frame was swimming with spiritual beings. There were all kinds of deities, nature spirits, elementals, demons. It’s the world of shamans, sorcerers, and sympathetic magic. But these beings have nothing to do with Transcendence. They were creatures contained wholly within the Immanent frame. They were creatures in the same way that humans and animals are creatures in the material world, but they inhabited a dimension that coincided with but was mostly invisible to humans. Some of these spiritual beings were malign, and some were benign. And this enchanted world was mostly a very scary place.
I think of these ancestors living in a world where what we think of as the unconscious wasn’t a thing yet. All the dark demonic forces that are lurking in the depths of our psyches now were unrepressed then. What we think of today as the unconscious was caused by the gradual process of repression that accompanied the ‘Great Disembedding. In a world where humans are still very much embedded, these beings are out and about—in the hypnagogic, quasi-dream world that was their day-to-day reality.
So to manage these anxieties, humans developed transactional religious economies designed to help manage these psychic threats posed by malign spirits. Sacrifices and temple offerings are all about enlisting the help of the benign spirits and placating the malign ones.
So let’s call this use of tools and religion Immanent Humanism. All of the cultural practices, material and psychological—that are designed to promote ordinary human flourishing: long life, good health, many children, bounteous crops, victory over one’s enemies. This is an essential component of human flourishing both then and now. Transhumanists today are just putting their own, postmodern spin on it, but what we find in Transhumanism is an attempt to revert to a Pre-Axial mode of being before there was any awareness of the transcendent. Transhumanism is, as I see it anyhow, a form of technological primitivism. It just uses tech rather than sympathetic magic.
The Axial Revolution introduced what gradually became what I’ll be calling Transcendent Humanism. Those who seek to inhabit the Transcendent Frame acknowledge that there is evil, suffering, and precarity, but they have come acquire a primal trust that at the heart of things, deeper or higher than all of fuss and fury within the Immanent Frame, is the Transcendent Good.
I think that most of us have had this “experience” of the Good one way or another. We acknowledge the suffering, but we also know in a very real way that it’s not the whole story. In the midst of all that seems to contradict it, there is still this possibility for Deep Goodness. You don’t have to be religious to have such an experience of Goodness in this sense, but often people who have had it become religious. And that’s what happened for many people 2500 years ago. This was new. Morality before that was only about what have you done for the Tribe lately—any atrocity committed against ‘barbarians’ was legitimated. Human sacrifice was legitimated as essential for promoting the well-being of the Tribe. Any idea that we have that there is some universal standard of right and wrong did not exist.
Now, while the Axial Revolution was a transcultural phenomenon, there are important differences in the different post-Axial traditions. Theistic religions understand the Good as having a face. Neoplatonism, Buddhism, Taoism all imagine the Good as faceless.
Now some of you might be thinking that these Axial religions are just something people invented to give them comfort in a world rife with suffering, danger, and anxiety. But what’s wrong with that? Isn’t that what tools are for? But I would add that before the inventing, there was the discovery—or the revelation—and then came the inventing. The Good was first an experience, not a theory or a fantasy.
But wait a minute. Aren’t all religions just social constructions? Yes, they are. But first comes the experience of the Primal Good, then comes the social construction. Religion is not primarily about belief in some dubious propositions. It starts in an experience, then comes the theory and the praxis, i.e., the beliefs and the practices that give specificity to a religious tradition. So we see here the universal—the Transcendent Good—particularized in different cultures and societies.
Remember the questions I asked at the beginning?
1. Is a rich pluralism of values possible without regressing into tribalism?
2. Are universal values affirmable without extinguishing particularity?
Isn’t that what we see here a universal affirmation in a Transcendent Good particularized in different traditions? This is the argument that Thomas Plant makes in his book, The Lost Way to the Good: Dionysian Platonism, Shin Buddhism, and the Shared Quest to Reconnect a Divided World. He argues that these diverse religious and philosophical traditions preserved their particularity while they affirmed a universal Transcendent Good
So what are the consequences of the Axial Revolution? Post-Axial societies organize around the polar tension defined by the Immanent and Transcendent in their understanding about what human flourishing entails. They complement one another. Some people go into monasteries in total commitment to align their lives with this Transcendent Good. But most remain situated in the immanent frame as their ancestors did, the world of ordinary human flourishing.
In the centuries subsequent to the Axial Revolution, Plant argues, all the different peoples along the Silk Road had a lingua franca—a shared understanding of the Transcendent Good—that allowed them to respect and converse with one another. The pursuit of ordinary flourishing was still important—people were still greedy and power-crazed, but this new sense of the Transcendent Good had a leavening effect throughout the societies in which it took root.
So this new understanding of the Transcendent Good in all these civilizations creates a new dimension for human flourishing as liberation and salvation. Almost all shared an itinerary of ascent up the Great Chain of Being toward the One.
Christianity shares this human itinerary of Ascent, as in Dante, but it adds a Divine itinerary of kenosis and descent. This is an important difference, but my task in these lectures is to stress the similarities and where all people of good will have common foundations where they can stand together in solidarity to resist what is coming. The development of solidarity on a global scale it seems to me is essential, but doing it while preserving the particularity of local traditions and customs is as well.
What’s remarkable and significant about the Axial Revolution was its broad transcultural manifestation over a huge swath of the globe at that time. Why did it take root? Why wasn’t it rejected as stupidly, naively idealistic? This marked a huge shift in human consciousness. Sure, it probably had something to do with the development of alphabets and literacy at that time. And a similar shift into the Scientific Revolution occurred in Europe after the invention of moveable type in the 1450s. And we’re currently adjusting to even more astonishing information technologies right now. Shouldn’t we be expecting a similar shift? If it happened before, why can’t it happen again?
And that’s why I’m not against developments in technology. The question is not whether these new technologies are good or bad, but what human ends they will serve. If they serve only the concerns of the Immanent Frame, as seems to be the case now, we’re likely to go off a cliff. But if they can be brought to serve the concerns of both the Immanent and Transcendent Frames, then a true human renaissance might be possible. This is one of the ideas that Vervaeke is exploring, too.
How and when this might happen, I have no idea. But the infrastructure is there for us even if it lies dormant. And its reawakening is one way that some kind of resistance to the TCM might be effected. Expect the unexpected. So a part of what I want to argue going forward is that this could be the infrastructure for a globalized solidarity that offers some resistance to the homogenizing forces of what I call the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. But more on that next week.
Plant tells the story about how the West gradually fell out of the Transcendence story starting about 700 years ago. That’s the main argument of his book–that in the West we’ve lost our way, but that we can find our way back to the Transcendent Good. Invividuals do it all the time. Is it possible for societies do so as well? I know how impossible that seems to most of us now, but it could change. It’s there as a forgotten memory in our collective unconscious, but it’s quite possible that it could be remembered.
As the Great Disembedding gradually progresses through the centuries, a third thing emerges at the same time that I call The Deep. It correlates with what we think of now as the unconscious, but I think about it more in the broader Jungian sense than the Freudian sense. The Deep develops as the societies disembed from the enchanted world described above. Disembedding is the direct result of people focusing on the Transcendent and organizing their beliefs and practices around this new sense of the Good. Disembedding, in other words, is the process by which individuals and societies begin to look at the phenomena of the enchanted world as unreal and superstitious.
The tension between transcendent and immanent concerns was always there, and with it the temptation to fall back into embedded, enchanted consciousness, but the cultural leadership of these new post-Axial societies always exhorted the people to focus more on the Transcendent Good than on the local deities whose help they traditionally sought to promote their material flourishing. We see this similar tension in Catholic societies where the Virgin and the saints are entreated to help deal with life’s material problems.
These mediators of grace made sense in the Neoplatonic framework of the Great Chain of Being.
There was the One at the top, and then all these mediating layers in the descending hierarchies below it. This is why the Radical Reformation takes Disembedding to an extreme. It banished all mediation between humans and God. There was only the individual human standing naked before God and his judgment. Sacraments, saints, angels, hierarchies of being, were all banished, and this cleared the way for the scientific revolution in a way that was unique in the West. The West disembedded to a more extreme degree than any of the other post-Axial societies.
But Disembedding, even in the West, is not completed until the 20th Century. Embedded, enchanted beliefs and practices still persisted in the heath—out in the countryside where the old ways had not been completely forgotten. But even those redoubts of enchantment became all but eradicated in the years following WWII.
So the hybrid Transcendent/Immanent imaginary worked powerfully in the West culminating in the 1200s in Europe. It started falling apart in the 1300s for many reasons too complicated to get into here. But the presuppositions of Christian Neoplatonism are rejected and the interdependent dynamic between Immanent and Transcendent Frames breaks down. God increasingly becomes imagined to exist in transcendent remoteness having no intimate connection to his creation, and the earth, and everything on it becomes just stuff, no longer shot through with the divine as in the old Christian Neoplatonic synthesis, a synthesis that culminated in the intellectual and artistic achievements of Aquinas and Dante.
This clears the way for the Reformation whose theologians largely rejected Plato and Aristotle asserting that faith alone was enough without Greek metaphysics. And with Aristotle and Plato out of the way, the Baconian Project could proceed unhindered by a metaphysics that saw the earth and the cosmos as a neutral, unsymbolic, soulless stuff that could be manipulated by humans to promote their material flourishing.
By the Baconian Project I mean the new mentality for which Sir Francis Bacon, the Father of Empiricism, laid the foundation. And with this project is born a new idea that human progress could be effected through scientific knowledge. Nature becomes a thing to be dominated to meet human needs, and you can see how important this is in setting the stage for the co-emergence of Capitalism and the Scientific Revolution in a way that was unique in Europe. It also lays the foundation for what we call today Transhumanism, which has taken the Baconian project to it’s logical conclusion.
So the Baconian Project starts a chain of events that eventually leads to the amputation of the Transcendent Good as a structural principle in the Western metaphysical imaginary. The Transcendent Good is still there in the churches. But the churches delegitimated themselves during a century of barbaric warfare finally ending around 1650 in England and on the Continent.
And the Transcendent Good becomes reduced to a matter of faith understood as associated with implausible propositions rather than as something that the heart knows. And so now with a new empirical standard for determining truth, the propositional beliefs become harder and harder to believe, and the subjective personal experience on which such faith relied for its legitimacy became less and less relevant in the public sphere.
And at some point in the middle of the 19th Century the Transcendent Good stops being relevant altogether among most cultural elites. The Death of God becomes a thing—at first among intellectuals, but during the decades following WWII filters down throughout society. Now it’s a commonplace. And too often where faith seems to be important to the people who profess it, it’s a parody of faith, a form of nationalist idolatry that couldn’t be more distant from the spirit of the gospels they clearly have no understanding of.
But many ordinary people continue to “know” this Deep Good. Maybe even most intellectuals do, even if they don’t think of it as a transcendental. But it’s a subjective thing, a private thing that one does not allow to influence his behavior in the public sphere where his livelihood depends on his ignoring it. The Transcendent Good thus becomes a kind of phantom limb. It’s there as a kind of shadow but with little substantive influence in the way public affairs are managed. People talk all the time about how their opponents are immoral, but their own sense of morality has become reduced to moralistic abstractions, fashions that change from decade to decade. Morality is no longer about becoming Good, but about following rules dictated by prigs on the Left and the Right.
And so in the post-WWII period, the field is cleared for Transhumanism to emerge in ways I’m sure would have shocked Sir Francis Bacon. But it follows from many of his presuppositions. The term was coined by the biologist Julian Huxley in the 1950s, given a new valence in the 80s by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto, and declared an organized movement in ’98 in The Transhumanist Declaration.
So with Transhumanism defines human flourishing within the Immanent Frame. The Transcendent Frame or any idea of a Transcendent Good has nothing to do with how Transhumanists imagine the human future. Transhumanists now endorse an ambitious program of species transformation. People should be able to reshape their bodies any way they want and use tech to empower themselves in any way they can afford.
All of these aspirations seem to be good things on the face of them. The problem is not whether using technology to reduce human suffering and prolong life are in themselves bad things, but rather whether they should be the only things that humans care about. What’s the point of living a thousand years if your life is fundamentally meaningless and rife with alienation in the way we described it above? The Baconian Project from its beginning has been happy with a tradeoff that gave us increased material flourishing and decreased spiritual flourishing, and was willing to accept that with the latter came greater levels of alienation, anomie, and meaninglessness.
Material flourishing is a good thing, but it should be pursued within the constraints defined by some idea of the human being as having a spiritual destiny, a destiny that is measured by the degree to which it lives in some alignment with the Transcendent Good. It seems pretty obvious to me that the Baconian Transhumanist Project, absent any considerations for the Transcendent Good, is seducing human beings into a mechanical prison of their own making.
Here’s the last point I want to make. Knowing the Good does not require that you be religious. It requires that you have an awakened conscience. Jean Jacques Rousseau was not a fan of organized religion, but this is how he describes conscience in Emile:
Conscience! Conscience! Divine instinct, immortal voice from heaven; sure guide for a creature ignorant and finite indeed, yet intelligent and free; infallible judge of good and evil, making man like to God! In thee consists the excellence of man’s nature and the morality of his actions; apart from thee, I find nothing in myself to raise me above the beasts—nothing but the sad privilege of wandering from one error to another, by the help of an unbridled understanding and a reason which knows no principle.
If humans have any hope for a flourishing human future, it lies in people of conscience stepping up to defend the human heritage. And it should be pretty clear that the machines will never develop a conscience if the people who educated them, whatever their beliefs—don’t have one.
Second Lecture: Alienation, Boredom, and Technology
So last week we talked about if—and it’s a big IF—AGI becomes something real, we will be looking at ourselves as if in a mirror and that these AGI machine/persons will be looking back at us. What will they see? The best of us, or the worst? So following John Vervaeke, I explored the implications of AGI becoming real as a pretext to examine what basis there is for these machines/persons to see anything good in us humans at all—anything that we could hope they would emulate.
I also traced how what we call today Transhumanism originated in the 1600s in what I call the Baconian Project. I spoke about how this marked a significant and unprecedented shift in the Western Tradition that came to see nature, rather than as shot through with the divine, as just stuff with no intrinsic value except as humans manipulate it to promote their material flourishing. This clears the way for both the Scientific Revolution and later Capitalism, which both come to promote the rationalist-materialism whose metaphysical presuppositions today dominate our public discourse.
These presuppositions are very hospitable to a Transhumanism that reduces the human being to a biological machine with all the nihilism that implies. So not only are we now at a point where Techno-Capitalism is working toward the creation of machines that are becoming more human-like, but also working toward the development of humans that are becoming more machine-like. And we all accept this as normal progress because we all accept more or less the logic that derives from the architecture of Techno-Capitalism. Intrinsic to this architecture is the idea that technological innovation should have no constraints except those determined by the market, no matter how destructive of other human values. Material progress is the only progress that counts. Moral progress? Not so much.
So I’m concerned about the human prospect. It’s not the technological advancement that scares me—it’s the people who are working so hard to promote the objectives of Techno-Capitalism. I fear that they, like Dr. Frankenstein, haven’t the moral maturity or integrity to unleash these powerful new beings on the world. And I worry because there is, as yet, no constituency organized and influential enough to check them by insisting that other ‘human’ values should play a role in shaping the human future. Techno-Capitalism takes the field unopposed.
There are lots of people of good will who would be part of an oppositional constituency, but we are all divided, and in being divided we are preemptively conquered. And I want to argue that if we are to have any hope for a truly flourishing human future, it must come from people who are invested in a rich, complex understanding about what human flourishing entails. And a purely materialistic, Transhumanistic idea of human flourishing is neither rich nor complex. It is one-dimensional.
What does my idea of rich, complex, human flourishing entail?
For me the fully flourishing human being is a ‘Full-Spectrum Human Being”. The Full-Spectrum Human Being is not one-dimensional, but three-dimensional, comprising a balanced mixture of three components—Body, yes, it shares that with the Transhumanists, but it adds to it both Soul and Spirit. The Full-Spectrum Human Being was the prevailing understanding of what a human being was until the mid 19th Century. It remains a deep, if latent, understanding of the human being even now. But it’s an idea of the human that does not serve the purposes of Techno-Capitalism, and so it has been de-legitimated. Today I want to explain why it has been de-legitimated and why a human future that runs on a cultural OS that excludes the flourishing of the Soul and Spirit cannot be a healthy one.
Because for now the only legitimate view of the human being that Techno-Capitialism recognizes is of the one-dimensional human being as a biological desiring machine. If you want to give an explanation for any human behavior, you have to explain it in “science-y” materialistic terms and usually by some biological-evolutionary logic. I’m not saying that has nothing to do with what makes us human—our being material, emobodied creatures is essential—but it’s not all that makes us human, and it’s not the most important part. And we should not reduce our idea of the human to only what can be explained biologically.
Last week I also made the case that ‘Alienation ‘R us’’—and that we hate it. And that we will do almost anything not to feel it. And our desire for a remedy often results in our pursuing delusional projects. You know the Johnny Lee song—“Looking for love in all the wrong places”? It’s kinda like that. But because we don’t find a cure for alienation in all the wrong places, does not mean that there isn’t a right place. And that ‘right place’, I argued last week, is in coming to understand the Transcendent Good as foundational. That recognition is not derived from some assent to it as a propositional truth; rather for it to have any salience, it must derive from an intuition of the heart, or what I called ‘conscience’ quoting Rousseau at the end of the first lecture. The only true path out of our condition of alienation is the path of conscience, and conscience is only truly conscience if it has the capacity to discern the Transcendent Good.
I argued that conscience and its recognition of the Good is repressed in our public life. It has a presence, but it is the presence of a phantom limb, so to say. But I think it’s possible to un-repress the central importance of the Good and to restore it from its phantom presence to real presence because whether most people think about the Good in these terms, all people of good will have an operational conscience and exercise it in their private lives. It just plays no robust role in our public decision making.
In the meanwhile, I see the cultural OS that defines Techno-Capitalism as a kind of jail—and we’re all living in it whether we want to or not. In a few minutes, I’m going to be talking about the 1999 film The Matrix. I don’t believe that we’re literally in that kind of a matrix, but we are in a figurative version of it, and it’s a powerful metaphor to help us understand our predicament. If you’ve got anything left of a soul or spirit, you want to find a way out of it. That’s why I call the underlying architecture that structures our cultural OS the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, or TCM.
Ok. So today I want to talk mostly about the insights of two secular thinkers to help us understand the nature of this jail or matrix from which we want to escape: Jean Baudrillard and Herbert Marcuse.
Baudrillard was something of a philosophical pop star in France in the 70s and 80s. And he even made it into American pop culture when his book Simulacra and Simulation made a came appearance in The Matrix. Baudrillard’s comcept of simulation is metaphorically represented in the film’s fictional Matrix.
The idea of being trapped in a delusional matrix is not new. It traces back to the question Rene Descartes asks in the early 1600s in his First Meditation: How do I know that the world that appears before me is real? Descartes even entertains the possibility that “a malicious demon with his utmost power and cunning has employed all his energies to deceive me.” He goes on—
“I shall think that the sky, the air, the earth, colors shapes, sounds and all external things are merely the delusions of dreams which he has devised to ensnare my judgment. I shall consider myself as not having hands or eyes, or flesh or blood or sense, but as falsely believing that I have all these things.”
Which is exactly the condition of the humans in the The Matrix. Agent Smith and his fellow agents are demon-like AGI bots who use their police powers and cunning to maintain the illusion that the Matrix is a real world.
And so this metaphor of the Matrix resonates, right? Remember the scene where Morpheus starts explaining things to Neo?
MORPHEUS:
As children, we do not separate the possible from the impossible, which is why the younger a mind is, the easier it is to free, while a mind like yours can be very difficult.
NEO:
Free from what?
MORPHEUS:
From the Matrix….Do you want to know what it is, Neo? It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?
Can anybody relate to that feeling? He’s talking about what we’ve been talking about—Primal Alienation.
MORPHEUS:
The Matrix is everywhere, it’s all around us, here even in this room. You can see it out your window, or on your television. You feel it when you go to work, or go to church or pay your taxes. It is the world that has been pulled over your eyes to blind you from the truth.
NEO:
What truth?
MORPHEUS:
That you are a slave, Neo. That you, like everyone else, was born into bondage… kept inside a prison that you cannot smell, taste, or touch. A prison for your mind….Unfortunately, no one can be told what the Matrix is. You have to see it for yourself.
Then there’s the famous scene where Morpheus shows Neo the devastated landscape that is the real world after a war between the AGI bots and humans destroyed it. He says, “Welcome to the Desert of the Real.” a phrase coined by Baudrillard.
So Morpheus’s description of the Matrix resonates with us even though he’s describing what we know to be a fiction. But the movie’s fiction is powerful. It feels true. It feels like a plausible explanation to account for our feeling of alienation, or at the very least it’s an apt metaphor for it.
But Baudrillard and Descartes are not the first to notice this eerie feeling that somehow we are cut off from what is really real. I assume most of you are familiar with Plato’s “Allegory for the Cave”. And then in Buddhism there’s the idea of Maya. So humans suspecting that the world we live in isn’t the really real World goes back at least to the dawn of the Axial Revolution.
Plato’s Cave, Buddha’s Maya, and Christian Original Sin are all different metaphors that point to something that humans have felt for thousands of years—that human beings are living in a world that is cut off from the really Real. And our being cut off is the source of our desire and longing, and so therefor desire becomes problematic. Desire is problematic in the TCM as well because it’s seen as constrained by traditionalist taboos, taboos that largely trace back to the practices of Post-Axial religions and philosophies. The TCM is all about obliterating those taboos and practices as a way of liberation it claims leads to overcoming alienation, which of course it doesn’t. More about this next week.
The Post-Axial Traditions, of course, reject such a crude understanding of the role of desire in achieving human flourishing. One solution is to eradicate desire, as in Buddhism. Another is redirect desire to the Transcendent Good, which is the approach embraced by Plato/Aristotle, Judeo-Chrisitianity, and Islam, particularly in Sufism. This is the idea we find in the scriptures that we must love God with all our hearts and all our being. The point is not to repress desire, but to direct it toward that which is most worthy of being desired. Such an idea, of course, makes no sense in the TCM and is often ridiculed.
And besides, it’s not easy to do even if one wants to. And those early Christians who wanted to take this idea seriously thought that they could not do it in society. They had to leave it, and that’s what the early Christian Desert Fathers like St. Anthony the Great did—they left the matrix of society and went out into the Desert of the Real.
I don’t expect there are many here in the audience tonight who have plans to take on a monastic vocation any time soon. But getting out of the Matrix was Neo’s first step—moving off the grid, and into the Desert of the Real. I’ll have more to say about why this metaphor is particularly resonant in this moment for us next week.
But why is Neo Neo? Why is he “the One”?
Once he becomes the One—once he’s brought back to life after Trinity’s kiss—he can go back into the Matrix and is no longer governed by the Matrix’s OS. He is operating with a higher ‘code’, and he brings it into the Matrix from outside the Matrix, and in doing so he subverts it. The goal is not just to escape the Matrix, but to destroy the rule of the Demon Bots and the OS that governs them.
The point here is that the subversion of an evil system is possible only from source or standpoint outside the system. The system cannot be subverted by the logic of its own code. Another higher code must intrude, and so when we think of our predicament in the Techno-Capitalist Matrix, the same logic applies. That’s why there is no solution for the crises posed by AI or looming ecological disaster from within the architecture of the OS as the TCM structures it. There has to be some way to stand outside of it, and then to bring a different code into the TCM to subvert it.
I have no problem with AI or AGI if it were to run according to a higher code grounded in ideas about the Transcendent Good and the Full-Spectrum Human Being. I have no problem with the idea of imagining a transhumanist future if it is developed in accordance with such a code. My problem is not with technology, but with the code that currently runs it. The TCM is not the code I see giving us a positive human future in any way.
This discussion of The Matrix sets up what I want to say about Baudrillard.
For many of the postmodern thinkers, humans are imprisoned in a linguistic matrix. They see language as setting the limits for human experience rather than opening up possibilities for its expansion. For many of them, the human being is his or her linguistic programming. The subject does not speak; rather, language speaks the subject. We’ll see how this plays out. Baudrillard agrees with this assertion and its corollary in the ‘death of the subject’, but he sees this as a cultural catastrophe—and not as something that was always true.
Baudrillard is influenced by Marshall McLuhan, but he reverses many of his slogans. McLuhan says that technology is an extension of the human being; Baudrillard says that the human being has become, or is becoming, an extension of technology. Humans don’t use technology; technology uses humans.
McLuhan talked about how technology was creating a global village and that we are affected by events half a globe away the way our ancestors were affected by what happened locally. But Baudrillard says that we don’t live in a global village, but rather in a global theater. We experience events half a globe away the way we experience a reality TV show.
We think the two are different—one reports a “real event” over there with real people; the other is a staged or scripted event. But on television the real is co-opted by the un-real. The horror and suffering half a world away becomes in a weird way entertainment. We relate to it in the same way we watch a disaster movie. Neil Postman makes a similar argument in—
This why our politics has become so insane. Politics should be boring, but it’s become entertainment. Our politics has become so astonishingly ineffective at solving real-world problems because politics now works as spectacle, like a sporting event. Hardly anybody cares about how policies actually affect the lives of real people anymore. If people are interested in politics at all, It’s for the cage match. And so too many people care only about whether their side wins—the Blue team or the Red—no matter what the policy consequences.
Baudrillard analyzes the 1968 student uprising in France. He argues that it failed because the students became mesmerized by the TV narrative and stopped dealing with the realities on the ground. The realities in real time and real space were coopted by the realities as they were presented on the screen. The students became role players in a drama they were no longer writing. The media were writing them their parts, and if they didn’t play those parts, they became irrelevant.
So to stay relevant they had to become actors in a show on the Global Theater rather than agents in the real local world of human conflict and exchange. What is really happening becomes less relevant than the way it gets pick up in the media narrative. This is the origin of the idea that politicians must “control the media narrative”, but that control easily morphs into just making stuff up that has nothing to do with reality and everything to do with controlling the narrative.
Ask yourself why you know more about national politics than you do about local politics. Until recently it was a cliche that all politics was local politics. So why is that no longer true? Baudrillard explains it: Local politics is boring because it’s just about policy. It only becomes interesting when it’s a local version of the cage match being fought in the National Media Theater.
Baudrillard and Postman believed that it’s possible for you to resist being coopted by the media narratives, but you have to be awake to the forces that seek to co-opt you. We need to be alert to all the ways that media are lulling us to sleep and to all the ways they are increasing our passivity and alienation from the real by destroying even our capacity to want to know the difference between what’s real and what’s fake.
But there’s another level on which Baudrillard is important for the argument I want to make. He was a sociologist trained in Emile Durkheim’s school. The Durkheimians studied aboriginal cultures and derived a concept of the ‘sacred’ from observing their rituals of symbolic exchange.
Durkheimians saw capitalism as destroying what remained of these meaningful webs of human social/symbolic exchange in Western societies. And of substituting new webs of meaning that were divorced from these older, more soulful customs and traditions. They understood the chief agent of the destruction of these forms as capitalism in all the ways it disrupts the old in the name of innovation. They saw capitalism as a creative-destructive force that hollows out cultures and homogenizes them in such a way as to make them into clay that can be reshaped in their materialist consumer image where no idea of the sacred plays a role.
Baudrillard develops out this “school”. For him a sense of the ‘Real’ is lost to the degree that the sacred is no longer experienced in a communal symbolic exchange. It’s just not possible in a post-Baconian world where symbols no longer symbolize, where the world is just made of inert stuff whose value lies almost exclusively in its ability to be transformed into something that has utility or market value.
And Baudrillard traces this loss of the sacred in stages that culminate in our current media culture. In his 1981 book Simulacra and Simulation, he talks about this gradual divorce from reality in his idea of the ‘Precession of the Simulacra’. He lays it out in three stages:
First, the Premodern Symbolic Stage—in which the value of symbols and images lies in their power as sacramental signs, where they act as portals into a ‘vertical’, deeper, sacred reality.
Second, the Modern Commodity Stage—in which the value of images lies in their commodity or exchange value.
Third, the Postmodern Semiotic Stage–in which the value of images lies exclusively in their ‘horizontal’ value as determined socially.
First let’s understand what he means by ‘symbolic’ and ‘semiotic’. A central role for the image or language symbol is to mediate dimensions of significance from the depths of the soul in sacred time, as for instance in ritual.
There is a dynamic interrelatedness between the symbol and the vitality that lies in the depths of the soul. The symbols are charged with the living force of something that people feel as deeply vital. In modern societies, too often you have the husks of ritual, but not the living force that first gave them their symbolic form. When they have no felt significance, they’re purely ‘semiotic’.
“Semiotic” isn’t a bad thing. It’s just meaning without felt significance, like 2 + 2 = 4. Or a factual statement like “The sky is blue.” Or it’s the kind of discourse you find in scholarly or scientific journals where the goal is to leave out subjective affect. Poetry and art and religious language, if they are working, retain this symbolic function. The problem with life in the TCM, however, is its becoming more difficult for us with each passing decade to encounter symbols that work symbolically.
Moderns still retain rituals and traditions, but too often they feel semiotic in this sense, i.e., alienated from the energies and feeling that once vivified them. Christmas, for instance, for many feels like going through the motions. It doesn’t feel festive the way it did when they were children.
That’s why Christmas is such a depressing time for so many people. It has become ‘semioticized’. The images/symbols no longer signify in any felt significant way. They have lost their symbolic vitality. There are still the forms, but the life for which they once functioned as portals is no longer accessible.
So in the first stage, which characterizes all premodern symbolic forms, as for instance aboriginal art and much of the art in Western antiquity through the Renaissance, the art produced performed this sacramental/symbolic function. The symbol is not the Life. It is a portal into the Life. It opens up a passage to it otherwise unavailable.
It’s important to point out that most of the art produced in premodern societies had religious significance and played a role in ritual. Its meaning was largely if not entirely determined by the role it played within these contexts. Take them out of these contexts, and they lose much of their meaning. Art from ancient Greece or the Italian Renaissance might be perceived to us now as aesthetically beautiful, but that does not mean we understand how the people in the societies for which these symbols were created felt their significance.
So this decontextualization is what characterizes the production of art in the second stage in the Precession of the Simulacra. The art symbol starts to lose its value as it becomes de-contextualized from its originary context as they no longer play a religious role. And in being ritually de-contextualized, they easily become commodified.
Art criticism becomes all about technique and about what’s novel—not about whether and artwork works effectively as symbol, i.e., whether it opens up a portal into the sacred. How can it when people aren’t looking for art to perform that function? And when nobody experiences the sacred anymore, nor do they expect to?
These artworks become reduced to their monetary exchange value. The original is worth more not because of its symbolic power but because of its scarcity value. DaVinci reproductions are a dime a dozen. But the original, because there’s only one, is worth millions.
Anybody know how much DaVinci’s “Salvador Mundi” sold for in 2017?
$450,000 million. The print is available on Etsy for $10.95. And the original was bought by a Saudi prince—talk about decontextualizing. An artwork when it works symbolically is priceless. But who cares about that anymore?
Baudrillard has a bigger point to make. The mechanical proliferation of these images changes our experience of what they represent in profound ways, and it’s these changes that mark the movement into the third stage in the Precession of the Simulacra—the Postmodern Semiotic. This occurs when embodied presence and our connection to it cease to matter. This is when the image becomes more real that the Real it represents. The image becomes “Hyper-real”, and the Real disappears.
Think about how you relate to photos. Let’s say you find a photo of a deceased loved one. The picture brings up all these memories and feelings. You know the photo isn’t the real loved one. At best it’s evocative of a richer experience of when you were in the living presence of him or her. And so the photo has real value in evoking something that has deep value for you. But clearly it would be better if the loved one were still a living presence in your life—not just an image.
So the value of the photo in this instance has not yet reached the hyper-real stage because the image has less value than the living presence of what it represents. You could say that it is still performing a symbolic function. So what do we mean by hyper-real?
Let’s say you see a photo taken in a beautiful public garden that you’ve never visited, and then you visit the garden and you are disappointed. It’s a beautiful day and the garden is in full bloom, but the garden itself is not as “impressive” as the picture of it. What does that say about the quality of your experience? And about what you are filtering out? What does it say about what is important and not important in your experience? This is what Baudrillard means by the image performing this hyper-real function. It’s when the image becomes more important or more valued than the real living thing the image represents.
In the Postmodern Semiotic stage, meanings are determined laterally rather than vertically, if by vertical we mean direct experience in the presence of something living and real. We no longer feel significance in a direct encounter with the “vertical’, deep reality of the garden, the living incarnate presence of it. It’s as if that vitality has become sealed off from us. We only experience the surfaces, and those surfaces are evaluated by criteria that are formal and abstract rather than living and embodied.
“Artists” can manipulate these formal abstract qualities and claim to be creating something new, but it really isn’t. It’s novel, not original, and it’s usually rather soulless, as in much of what passes for pop art and conceptual art–an now AI art. They might be clever or entertaining. They might get you think something you hadn’t thought before, but they are not working symbolically. They are rearranging the furniture in the room, not creating something genuinely original.
And regarding the garden, is it something that anybody is talking about on TikTok or Insta? No? Then why should I care? Especially now since actual reality presenting itself to me in the garden is not even something we notice. The wind gently rustling the leaves, the scent of the roses, the buzz of the insects, the chirping of birds becomes less important as an integrated experience in the body because not part of the lateral, disembodied, decontextualized significance emphsized by an image in a magazine, or film, or on social media.
This happens in our social relations as well. We see our lives and relationship as significant depending on how it maps to the lives we see in media. Our lives are measured by how they align or fail to align with the how media shapes our imagination of what is significant.
You may have a dramatic experience in your life and it means more because it maps to a movie you’ve seen or a song you’ve heard. Or the reverse—you have what should be a significant experience, but it doesn’t feel significant because you can’t map it to a movie or a song you know. You have the experience, but miss the meaning.
Or maybe you find yourself reacting to an experience not in a way that you feel, but rather in a way that you were programmed to feel by media. Like the French students in ’68. You say the words you are expected to say; you laugh at your boss’s unfunny joke. At work you find yourself using tired business buzzwords and phrases. It’s what’s expected if you’re to be perceived as a ‘team player’.
And because we want to compete in this world of superficial significance, we start reshaping our bodies so that they map more closely to the bodies of celebrities in media. And now with VR we can take on a body that isn’t even ours, and the really interesting life we live is in a game, and the really boring life we live in outside of it in the Real. The time in the VR game becomes sacred time, and our real lives become profane time. We are more awake when in the simulacral dream, and more asleep when living in the Real.
Why would anybody want to live in what has become the Desert of the Real? The Real has become a no-place. It has disappeared, or it is in the process of disappearing. This is where the post-Baconian project detached from some sense of a Transcendent Good inevitably leads. The Good becomes defined by whatever meets our entertainment or comfort needs.
So, to the extent that our lives are shaped by the ‘Postmodern-Semiotic’, we are living in something very much like the Matrix. But rather than being forced to live in it by demon bots, we are choosing it. We are choosing the Blue pill, like Cypher…
…but are we doing so without our knowing it? Are we just drifting into deeper forms of alienation because we’re becoming increasingly bored with the real world? And why have we become bored in the first place? Maybe it’s because of the way the TCM works so relentlessly to seal us off from what is more deeply significant.
Cypher knew that his going back into the Matrix was to go back into a delusional world. But it was a delusion in which he’d be more comfortable than in the Desert of the Real. Many of my students have a hard time understanding why Cypher is wrong to want that. Why could it be wrong for someone if he or she believed that human beings are just purposeless, biological machines? Why shouldn’t pleasure and comfort be the only things that matter? What else is there?
So you see how all this relates to the alienation theme we introduced last week, right? And it goes to what should be a fundamental criterion in our evaluating how we relate to new technologies: Are they increasing or decreasing our sense of being cut off? Are they connecting us to what’s real, or are they simply filling our need not to be bored?
Baudrillard was a Marxist earlier in his career. It’s de rigeur for any intellectual in good standing in France. But in his late career he became very pessimistic. He came to believe that meaningful political action was no longer a possibility. How could it be for people who live in a world where Reality has disappeared?
How can this be a world where real political change is a possibility? How can it be a place where the arc of history bends toward Justice? Who believes there’s such a thing as Justice anyway? And why worry about Justice in the Real World if you can hang out in a virtual one instead? Do you see how this kind of thinking meets the needs of the TCM to keep us enervated with bread and circuses?
So let’s turn to another important philosopher, Herbert Marcuse–
He was one of the more influential thinkers to come out of the Frankfurt School—Erich Fromm was also from that lineage. This was a group of German Marxist thinkers who sought to understand the pathologies associated with the emergence of Mass Society in the 20th Century. He was the philosopher most embraced by the Counter Culture in the 1960s/70s.
What was the Counter Culture against? The way Post WWII societies were becoming large, impersonal, overly rational, soul crushing Technocracies in both the private and public spheres.
Marcuse is thought of by some as an advocate for the Sexual Revolution. Writing a book entitled Eros and Civilization and his being beloved by the New Left might lead one to that mistaken impression. But nothing could be further than the truth. He thought sexual liberation was largely was one of the most effective strategies the Technocratic Order deployed in keeping people docile and enervated. So a quick explanation why he thought this might be helpful.
Freud talked about the Pleasure Principle and the Reality Principle. Humans are desire-driven, and they want instant gratification. That’s the Pleasure Principle. The human experience is largely characterized by scarcity. So you can’t always get what you want. That’s the Reality Principle.
The Reality Principle requires that you repress your desire to do whatever you want whenever you want. It forces you out of what Freud called Primal Narcissism. If humans are to survive, they must learn to repress their desire for immediate gratification. They have to go to work. And they have to cooperate with other humans. Humans working in concert with other people to reduce scarcity and precarity is how civilizations get built. But it comes at a cost. We pay the price in repressed desire. That was the basic point of Freud’s Civilization and Its Discontents.
So Marcuse says that a basic level of repression is ok. You can’t live without it. And it creates the conditions for sublimating desire in a way that gives energy to human cultural projects. And then there’s always ‘deferred gratification’. Humans learn that to discipline their desire, to be patient, can lead to larger and more satisfying gratifications in the future. This is what sublimation means, and it’s the motive force behind artistic creation, progress, and technological development. So repression and sublimation is a good thing if you think creativity and civilizational progress are good things.
In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone shared more or less equally in the work and so equally in the repression. But also equally in the deferred gratification. You kill the buffalo, every member of the community gets their fair share. Decisions are made democratically, even if deference is given to the elders because of their wisdom and experience.
But as societies develop, so do hierarchies of dominance. Some people get more repressed than others. Some people do way more work than is their fair share, and others receive way more benefits than is their fair share. Those who do more than their share of the work suffer what Marcuse calls ‘surplus repression’, chattel slavery being the most extreme form. But wage slavery in the early Industrial Revolution was not far behind—backbreaking work, and close to zero deferred gratification, and little to no leisure time for creative work of any kind, although the depth and beauty of the Negro spiritual is certainly an exemplary exception in this regard.
Now some people have argued that you need Surplus Repression if civilization is to advance. If some people aren’t given the leisure to think and create and innovate, civilizations cannot progress. So the Surplus Repression suffered by the many is justified by giving ‘leisure’ to an elite who produce art, philosophy, and new technologies.
But Marcuse is writing in the post-WWII economic boom of the 1950s and 60s. Scarcity isn’t an issue in the way it was in the 1930s and 40s. There’s plenty for everyone if society had the will to distribute it fairly. So why are the people who are still suffering all this surplus repression putting up with it?
Well, because they’ve been bought off.
The old theory—the one Marx assumed was a fundamental law of history—was that capitalism could only motivate people to work by threatening workers with starvation. The goal for Capitalists was to find the Goldilocks spot between keeping workers strong enough to work and immiserated enough so they would have nothing to live on if they quit.
Fordism before WWII is a game changer in this regard. Owners provide workers absolutely miserable, alienating jobs in factories—
But they pay workers well enough so they can buy the cars that they’re making. Instead of paying starvation wages, owners give workers some hope of deferred gratification. This is clearly an improvement, but it’s also the beginning of the Consumer Society and all its pathologies.
The second innovation that undermines the Marxist logic is the Sexual Revolution. Capitalist societies loosen up the ‘repressive’ Calvinist sexual mores. This makes immediate gratification of sexual desire permissible and easier to achieve—so long as it doesn’t interfere with work discipline. Hugh Hefner and the Playboy hedonic culture gradually become normative in film and TV and advertising. And sexuality becomes increasingly commodified.
Abortion is legalized in ’73. Swinging, open marriages, and wife swapping become a thing in the 70s. All the old taboos are gradually eliminated. I’m not here to evaluate the moral consequences of these changes so much as to point out how well adapted they were to the homogenizing, totalizing, tradition-killing project of the TCM. It’s where all the ethnic Irish, Italians, Jews, and others go to get homogenized into the TCM, i.e., where they get their particularity and cultural vitality gradually bleached out of them. Sure for many, and for good reason, this feels like liberation, but it’s liberation into a wasteland. As the TCM mutilates all the old traditions and customs, it replaces them with a new ethos where sex and consumerism become the primary remedies for the boredom, alienation, and anomie that ensue.
And so this sex-as-therapy ethos fits perfectly with the new consumer-choice culture that is the throbbing pulse of the post-WWII order. Having multiple sexual partners and treating them as exchangeable commodities becomes ok. The hook-up culture becomes normative among young people. Sexual performance and sexual attractiveness become critical in commodifying oneself. If you resist this new self-commodification ethos, you are seen as repressed, uptight, and hung up. You need to see a therapist who will help you to adjust to life in the brave new world that the TCM has created. It is this mutilation of culture and its effects that the Frankfurt School thinkers address themselves to.
Marcuse calls this liberalization of sexual mores ‘repressive de-sublimation’. Along with Fordism, it was far more effective strategy for pacifying the workforce than immiseration. You keep people politically docile by channeling—de-sublimating—all their energies into sex and shopping. We’re all homogenized into this soulless world of comfort and pleasure.
This is a strategy that’s as old as the Roman ‘Bread and Circuses’. Keep everybody from starving, and keep them entertained. Keep them docile and passive as in the folks depicted in Pixar’s WALL-E—
The Technocracy must keep everybody from thinking too much about how bored and miserable they are in their soul and spiritual lives. So what do you do between the hours when not at work or having sex or shopping? You have to be continuously developing new distractions, new ways to keep people docile and submissive. Otherwise, they might get restless and want to change things.
Can’t have that. The TCM wants passivity, and the culture wars are the perfect way to channel all that frustration without it threatening the fundamental architecture of the system. Let them fight about guns and abortion and transcending the gender binary. Let them beat one another to a pulp in a war neither side can win by political force. It gives combatants the illusion of purpose in their performative righteousness and in doing so keeps them divided and conquered. What better way to keep them distracted and so from getting in the way of where the TCM wants to take them?
Marcuse saw the pathology here as reinforcing an economically unjust system, but more importantly he saw it as destroying people’s souls, of robbing them of their freedom by infantilizing them. The consumer ethos gave people the illusion of freedom—look at all my consumer choices! But they were being manipulated all the while, being distracted all the while, from paying attention to what is more important. They were directing their energies and desires toward the vulgar, rather than to something that would be more worthy of their desire.
Even to suggest that humans have a destiny that is higher and more spiritually noble seems absurdly, naively idealistic. What world are you living in?
Is there no wonder that a snake-oil salesman like Trump has been so effective in this environment? He’s the reductio ad absurdum of repressive de-sublimation. He’s the poster child for its worst excesses, the perfect exemplar of how the strategy works. But he doesn’t feel absurd to so many Americans. Why? Because repressive de-sublimation has made him a hero of repressive de-sublimation. And he de-sublimates everyone who joins his norms-crashing crusade in the name of saving America from the Liberals.
So here’s the final thought for tonight. Maybe you think the idea of the Transcendent Good is nonsense and that all these great civilizations made it up so they could feel better in a world that is fundamentally meaningless. If so, maybe you should ask yourself if perhaps your thinking follows from your having become inured to life within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix—because that’s exactly what the TCM wants you to think. The worst thing that could happen for the nihilists who benefit most from Techno-Capitalist Matrix would be for the Transcendent Good to play a subversive role in their Brave New World.
Third Lecture–Hope and the Human Future
In the first lecture I talked about how Primal Alienation is the source of all that ails us. And how humans will do almost anything to ease its disease. If the main symptoms of our alienation are our feeling of being cut off from one another, nature, our bodies, our work in the world, and what is most deeply spiritual, then the criteria for how we ought to interact with technology are pretty straightforward. If you don’t like feeling alienated, don’t use technology in a way that makes it worse.
And that requires being honest with yourself about how it might be making it worse. And that’s made more difficult because we are living in a cultural environment that both produces alienation and celebrates it as “progress”. The Techno-Capitalist Matrix (TCM), I argued, is an alienation factory because it works hard to cut us off from the things that matter, and then it offers seductive remedies for the alienation it creates that draw us into even deeper forms of being cut off. And we accept it as normal because everyone around us is experiencing the same thing.
In the first two lectures, I spoke about how the Transhumanist movement, the culmination of the Baconian Project that emerged in the late 20th Century typifies this alienation in its most extreme form. The argument that I want to make today, following on what I had to say about Baudrillard and the Precession of the Simulacra last week, is that the postmodern condition, to use Frederic Jameson’s phrase, is the cultural logic of Late Capitalism.
Postmodern thought makes no sense outside the kind of imagination of reality that Late Capitalism has created, and Late Capitalism, as the culmination of the Baconian Project, is dragging us toward two unprecedented catastrophes–ecological disaster and the prospect of AI running amok outside human control. The solutions for the problems that Baconian Project have created cannot be solved from within the logic of the Baconian project.
The TCM provides the dominant values system that shapes ideas about progress in Late Capitalist societies. It sees the human being in exclusively immanent terms, and it sees the human being as primarily a Biological Desiring Machine. I call it the Matrix because like the Matrix in the movie, it has become an all-but-closed system. And like the Matrix, it has an OS, a set of operational principles, which are incompatible with a certain category of cultural apps. For instance any premodern, richly symbolic or sacramental religion that still tries to operate within the Matrix.
While few people think that human beings are machines, the machine is the governing metaphor for the Transhumanists and much of postmodern thinking in defining what human beings are. And since the Transhumanists are shaping the human future for us all, we need to have an argument about what its philosophical presuppositions are and whether we want to be governed by them. Because if you, like most people, believe that the human being is something more than a wetware machine, you nevertheless find yourselves being dragged along where the inherent nihilism in Transhumanist thinking is taking you. There is no robust, countervailing, broadly galvanizing that inspires solidarity in resistance to it.
So if the TCM is an all-but-closed system, those most habituated to it cannot imagine standing outside of it because it is axiomatic that nothing exists outside of it. It is a system that seeks to be totalizing, and so it follows that all our major societal institutions are captured by it—our economic system, our healthcare system, and our political system and our mainstream cultural institutions as well–whether we’re talking about the mainstream universities, media, or art world.
I introduced Baudrillard’s use of the word ‘semiotic’ last week. It’s the use of language or symbols that have lost their ‘symbolic’ function in its striving to be unambiguous and “objective”. The symbolic use of language in art or religion becomes something mushy and subjective, something for private amusement if one is so inclined, but not to be taken seriously in the serious business of working the the real world, which can be understood only in materialistic terms. And so ambiguity, multivalence, metaphor, and analogy are uses of language that still persist, but function these days more as clever witticisms that might get a laugh, but rarely open us up to the disclosure of something deep and original, which is the function of truly symbolic language and other art forms that do the the work of symbols to open us up to the originary energies of the Deep Real.
A semiotic society is one in which significance only comes from lateral or horizontal references, not from vertical references, i.e., references that draw from the depths of the Soul, or the heights of the Spirit. A sacramental religion cannot flourish in such an environment, and we’re the poorer for it. The TCM is an utterly and thoroughly semioticized values world.
If there is to be any resistance to the semioticizing TCM, it has to start in the cultural sphere. But as I stated before, most of our cultural institutions are already captives within the TCM. So from where else might a resistance be mounted but in the churches? That’s the reason I wanted to give these talks here. But the churches have little spiritual or moral authority. That’s in part their own fault. They have this habit of living up to the most negative stereotypes about them, and in doing so have largely made themselves irrelevant in the public sphere. But is that completely the churches’ fault? Or is it the fault of a society that has been subsumed into the TCM, a society that has allowed itself to become ‘semioticized’?
***
So I wanted to spend a few minutes describing the intellectual framework that has come to define the terms of the argument. We need to understand the “ideology” that I would argue is currently most influential in shaping the ethos of our cultural institutions and in doing so offer little or no resistance to the TCM. We need to understand its strengths–why it’s so appealing—and its weaknesses—why it doesn’t really solve the problem. And a place to start is to understand the thrust and enormous influence of this book that appeared in 1972—
DeLeuze is a philosopher in the Hegelian/Marxist tradition. Guattari was a radical psychoanalyst, sometimes compared to his contemporary R.D. Laing. They were very influential in providing a theoretical justification for so much of what we accept today as the commonplaces of the postmodern cultural elite, and so they are very influential today in shaping the ethos of the humanities in our universities and in broader cultural circles.
The book’s title is Anti-Oedipus, so in order to understand their argument you have to understand Freud’s Oedipus Complex. In what follows I assume the audience, especially the American millennial audience, has no knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis since it isn’t as influential in therapeutic circles as it once was. But I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how important Freud was in shaping the post-WWII cultural ethos in North Atlantic societies.
Although Freud thought of himself as a scienties, I think of him as a philosopher in the German tradition that flows from Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzche to him. If you think of him as a philosopher rather than as a scientist, he beomes very much more interesting and compelling. He doesn’t tell the whole story, but he tells a good chunk of it that we are foolish not to make an effort to understand.
The Oedipus Commplex is often misunderstood as a boy’s repressed jealously toward his father and repressed inscestuous desire for his mother. This is not reallly what it means. It is, rather, a compelling account of how all humans become acculturated and how societies develop and enforce their taboo systems.
In the Freudian mythos, life for all humans starts with two trauma: First, the birth trauma–the baby’s being thrust from the womb into the world. Second, the trauma associated with weaning and separation from the mother. The instinctive response to trauma is to seek comfort and safety, and so the baby naturally finds this in the warmth of the mother’s body, and in its feeling of unity with the mother—especially while being embraced during breastfeeding. It’s not as good as the comfort/safety of the womb, but it’s the next best thing.
If a baby has a normal, nurturing mother, the baby’s desires are usually met after crying out. The mother responds, and there is very little in baby’s experience to suggest that it’s not the center of the universe. This is a state of primal narcissism—we all go through it, even if some get stuck there.
Weaning, when the child experiences the second separation form the mother’s body, is the second trauma. This is the moment when the baby learns that it is not the center of the universe and when it begins the long process of acculturation. It’s when it must find it’s place in the world and play its assigned role there as defined by the “Father”.
Weaning is a shock. If the baby no longer feels merged with the body of the mother, it feels a deep vulnerability, and it needs to ‘embed’ in a new safe place. The safe place is the approval of the Father, and one earns that approval by learning and following the tribal code whose enforcement he represents. So the baby’s sense of security depends on its embedding itself in the tribal codes, customs, as “dictated” by the Father.
These rules are by definition repressive because they rule out the child’s desire to be united with the mother. This is what Freudians mean by the Oedipus Complex. It is not so much about boys wanting to sleep with their mothers and to kill their fathers as it is about a traumatic transition that both boys and girls experience from the unity they felt with the mother to a separate existence as a person with a role to play in the larger social world.
In other words, it’s just part of growing up. Children who do not make this transition become the kind of adult we call a Primal Narcissist, King Lear types for whom the whole world is an extension of their ego.
So the Father in patriarchal societies—as enforcer of the code—is always an ambiguous figure. Both loved for providing safety, and feared for punishing transgression, i.e., the breaking of taboos. The father is the symbolic representation of what Freudians call the Superego. The Superego is the internalized, mostly unconscious cultural program that shapes for the individual what is acceptable or unacceptable social behavior. It is the internal voice that continuously reminds us what is praiseworthy and what is taboo. So the father becomes both a source of resentment, but also a new place to find safety. The child finds security by gaining the approval and the praise of the father by playing its assigned role well.
This acculturation process is normal and healthy if the father and mother are both normal, loving, healthy parents. But if they’re not, problems, obviously, arise. This is what it means to be ‘mal-adjusted’. Maladjusted to what? Well to the tribal code—to the norms, customs, and mores of one’s society. But what if the norms, mores, and customs of the child’s society are kinda sick? Like the Jim Crow south, for instance? Or Germany in the 30s? Won’t being “well-adjusted” in those societies mean that your children are being made sick?
Well, yes. But by what standard do you judge healthy and unhealthy? Especially if you are completely, naively, uncritically unconsciously embedded within that society. Unhealth just seems normal for everybody in an unhealthy society, right? It’s the only thing they know. And so it is with us in the TCM. Most of us, especially if our lives are relatively comfortable, are unaware of how unhealthful life in the TCM is. We just accept it as normal.
We are all deeply shaped by this acculturation process, whether our acculturation is into a healthy society or an unhealthy one. But we are not completely captured by it. And it’s important for all morally mature adults to establish some ability to stand outside of the Oedipus Complex—and the authoritarian role that the superego plays in its service. That’s the only way that health can be achieved, but how many people have learned to do this? And how many instead look for solutions within the nihilist system that has created all the problems in the first place, and so end up substituting one form of nihilism with another?
This is how I view the Deleuze & Gauattari Project. They are serious people, but they accept the postmodern assumption that while liberation is desirable, it must be achieved without any reference to the Transcendent. They want to overcome alienation by overcoming the constraints of Superego and Oedipus Complex by obliterating all constraints as repressive. They argue that the only way that the sick, late capitalist order can be overthrown is by the destruction of all the Superego’s constraints on desire.
Stuart Jeffries, who wrote—
–is an old-school Lefty who is upset by the way the Left has become preoccupied with culture war and identity politics. He writes that Anti-Oedipus is a –
“gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytized. The Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted – multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.” (pp. 46-47)
The whole idea of ‘reinventing oneself’ becomes a thing. Americans always knew that, of course–read The Great Gatsby–but now it gets the imprimatur of French intellectuals. Reject your acculturation, reject your biology, your gender, whatever it is that you’ve been acculturated to believe that you are because it’s all a jail that’s keeping you imprisoned. Step beyond all that determines you and embrace endless other possibilities. Reject that you are a fixed self and embrace that your identity changes incessantly—or it should. Do you see how this meshes with the Transhumanist project?
I’m spending so much time on this because of the way it has become so normative among cultural elties and fits into exactly Marcuse’s critique of repressive de-sublimation that we talked about last week. Their solution is a form of transgressivity for the sake of transgessivity in the name of liberation, but liberation to what? It has no positive doctrine about what it means to be human except that you now have a responsibility to reinvent yourself by whatever whim catches your fancy. There is only repression on the one hand and de-sublimation on the other.
They encourage their readers to “de-territorialize”—to stop being sheep and start being birds. Sheep are ‘territorialized. They don’t need fences or walls to keep them in. People, say D&G are the same way. They can be given unrestricted freedom, and they will not exercise it. Why? Because they are habituated, like sheep to remain in their stable, safe identities. Better that we become ‘birds because then we de-territorialize—“rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.”
A ”flight” for D&G is a kind of delirium—
To be delirious is exactly to go off the rails.… There is something demoniacal in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another. (Dialogues II, p. 40)
This they saw as an anti-capitalist, subversive project. They want to challenge all preconceptions of normality and madness. Madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be breakthrough. Madness is sanity, and sanity is deadening conformity. A conformity enforced by the Oedipus Complex and superego. So to be free, humans must slay all forms of superego, all forms of authority, tradition, morality, and restraint.
Marriage and family, for D&G, are schools for oppression. They preached “de-individualization”: Lose you sense of self completely. Disappear into a collective, as in a rave or a mob. This is for them the only real solution for alienation. They thought of the de-individualization as a revolutionary act. They say–
“It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left-wing holidays! –and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.’ (p116)
This is really crazy, right? How is this anything other than a theoretical justification for primal narcissism? Do I have to argue the point? Human beings need constraints. We can argue about which constraints are healthy or unhealthy, but we can’t argue that having no constraints whatsoever can be healthy.
And D&G go further: they think of the human being as a “desiring machine”, which is exactly how the human is thought of in the TCM. But isn’t the TCM the capitalist order that they seek to destroy? Jeffries, drawing on Marcuse, drives home the point—
“If the human world can be comprehended as a factory consisting of billions of desiring machines, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, then those machines can readily be owned by capitalists and exploited for profit, like anything else that is produced….Deleuze and Guattari became, in effect, complicit with the system they ostensibly sought to destroy.”
In other words, D&G are hardly agents of revolution. Rather they are agents in the service of the TCM. Their doctrine does not liberate humans but infantilizes them. It endorses a regression to Primal Narcissism. And this insanity is now taken seriously by many if not most of the TCM’s cultural elite. Is there any wonder that “normie” America is moving to the political Right if this is how they have come to see what the secular cultural Left is mostly concerned about?
Who isn’t for Liberation? That’s how anybody who objects to this project is caricatured, as someone who wants to go back to the repressive, bad old days, but this kind of liberation is the only kind of liberation that is conceivable because the kind of deep liberation that is associated with the great Axial traditions is perceived as part of the repressive, patriarchal past that must be destroyed.
***
So this this kind of thinking would be fringe and harmless for people who think of themselves as free spirits in a kind of post-Nietzschean key would just explore it on the fringes. I’m all for people to be free to shape their lives in whatever eccentric and nonconformist ways they want. My problem is that they seek to make their nihilism normative in the public sphere, and in doing so crowd out other possibilities, and so therefore serve the interests of the TCM.
And so young people buy into this doctrine because it seems like a solution for their loneliness and alienation. It sounds brave and bold. Who wants to be a sheep? And because it provides a sophisticated seeming ideological justification for their sexual self-commodification. But there’s nothing about this philosophy that Hugh Hefner or Donald Trump would object to. Who wants to be a prudish sex-negativist?
Nevertheless, I think there are two things that D&G get right: One is that humans who are acculturated into a sick society are likely to become sick themselves. Their diagnosis of the illness is, imo, quite correct. It’s that their cure is worse than the disease. It’s a parody of liberation, a counterfeit form that is understandably seductive for want of a healthy, robust alternative.
Two, they’re right that morally mature humans need to understand that the Oedipus Complex and superego in a sick society create sick people. But what is health? This is where we can get help from the ancestors, if we’d just give them a chance.
So when speaking to students who are ‘territorialized’ in the postmodern D&G ethos, how do you make an argument that accepts what D&G get right while pointing to an alternative, more healthful way to understand how to overcome that? Let me share with you how I try.
In both my classes I spend a lot of time with the German Romantics. Prominent among them was–
Schiller is one of the Jena Romantics—heir to J.G. Hamann about whom I spoke on the first day. Remember, Hamann is the guy who hates all systems and abstractions and wants to celebrate the particular and the concrete. Schiller was a playwright and a poet. He’s perhaps most famous for writing “The Ode to Joy”, which later became the lyrics for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.
But he also wrote plays like The Robbers in 1781. This is one of the earliest works of literature to celebrate the transgressive anti-hero. For Schiller the worst thing that a human being could be is a slave to convention, i.e., to the Oedipus Complex and the Superego. And his anti-hero, Karl Moor, becomes a model of the outlaw–the free, convention-smashing, transgressive, tragic human being. Tragic because anti-heroes like him always lose in the end because the authoritarian superego system always must win, the established moral order must prevail. But he’s admirable because he writes his own script; he doesn’t let society write it for him.
Schiller is very similar to D&G in diagnosing the problem. He sees humans as unfree to the degree that they are “territorialized”, i.e., to the degree that they live by society’s script and not by a script of their own writing. But there’s an important difference. Schiller’s idea of freedom/liberation is like that of Socrates and Rousseau. His doctrine of transgressiveness is not about transgression for the sake of transgression as in D&G, but transgression in the service of a higher Good.
Schiller is all about the individual pitting himself against both Nature and Duty, of being free from, or transcending both. He wants to assert the power and dignity of the human being as lying in his or her freedom to make choices that are constrained by no power outside of him or herself. Again, we hear echoes of this in D&G.
For Schiller humans are alienated when they live “outside-in”, when they live constrained by societal laws and conventions. He wants to embrace a new kind of human who lives inside-out, who is ‘self-legislating’, who determines for himself what is lawful.
But Schiller is not an antinomian. He affirms that there is a moral law—it’s not something you just make up as you go along. It’s something you have to discover within yourself. This is a very Rousseauan and Kantian idea. Kant, leaning on Rousseau, famously said:
There is this idea among these thinkers that the moral law is written on the heart of every human being, and that it is a reflection of Cosmic Law. And that both the law above and the law within is knowable. So Schiller is very much a Kantian and a Rousseauan in affirming the moral law within him. But what Schiller could not abide in Kant was his idea of “duty”.
For Kant, if a moral choice wasn’t painful and difficult, it didn’t really count as a moral choice. And there was this sense in Kant that to do one’s moral duty was an end in itself. This was not true for Rousseau, nor was it true for Schiller. For both moral law, what Rousseau called the Law of Nature, is something to be discovered within the soul, and when it was awakened there, it was a source of joy and liberation. To live in alignment with the Law of Nature is to be vitalized by it. It’s what cures our alienation, and leads us on a path to our full realization as humans. (Remind you of anything? Read Psalm 1.)
So Schiller was struggling to find a way to live lawfully in this ‘unconventional’ sense, and his solution was what he called the ‘spieltrieb’ that roughly translates as ‘play drive’. He elaborated on this in a series of letters to a friend that was later published in 1792 as—
Schilller asserts there that there are three stages in human moral development—
First, the Savage, the human driven by instinct, purely hedonic, no impulse control, not free but a slave to his passions. In other words, the kind of human that D&G celebrate.
The second stage is the Barbarian, the human constrained by rules, laws, duty and so alienated from his instinctual and natural life. He’s thinking of Kant here.
The third stage he calls ‘The Beautiful Soul’, the human animated by the spieltrieb or play drive. He was thinking of his friend Goethe as exemplary in this regard. I think these stages foreshadow stages in moral and psychological development outlined by Kierkegaard and later Maslow and Kohlberg, but no time to get into that here.
So what is the Play Drive as it works in the Beautiful Soul? Think about children who are playing a game. The game has rules. Without the constraints that the rules impose, there is no game. Without rules the game has no shape. And yet the kids are all-in, completely, unselfconsciously, playfully engaged. Until someone breaks the rules. Then there’s outrage. Such a breach ruins everything. The point is that humans need constraints even if they are playing and having fun. Chaos is no fun. We humans like to give a shape to things; if there is no shape, there is no Beauty.
Where else do we see these constraints “in play”? How about in music? You can’t just play any random notes randomly. That would be infantile. (I’m not a fan of John Cage. I’m not saying his experiments were infantile, but rather that they were just experiments, and that they failed. If they have any cultural significance at all, it’s in their being a sign of the Chaos archetype taking hold of North Atlantic societies and shaping its zeitgeist in the last mid-century.) There is a deeper lawfulness that must be learned and obeyed. And within that structure there is a broad range of possibilities for improvisation. But there has to be a tension between the free play and the underlying lawfulness that makes the playing possible.
But more than that—how does one become capable of such improvisational “play” at such a high level? There are disciplines—constraints— that the aspiring musician gladly submits to them because they are necessary for him or her to achieve the level of mastery required for such transcendent ‘aesthetic’ moments. Without the technical mastery, you lack the capability to ‘play’. Without the discipline that allowed you to achieve mastery, the ecstasy of the aesthetic moment cannot be available. You haven’t the skill to meet it.
Contra D&G and the Transhumanists, constraints are necessary for human flourishing. But some constraints are simply repressive, and others are liberating. The trick is to be able to tell the difference. This is what Schiller’s spieltrieb was struggling to articulate. I think that what he’s talking about is similar to what psychologists call the ‘flow state’. And this flow or play state is perhaps most frequently experienced by athletes and musicians, but they have to train; they have to develop the bodily habits and the physical skills that makes such play at a high level a possibility.
And there’s a huge difference between having those constraints imposed upon you from outside authorities and choosing them for yourself. That makes all the difference for Schiller. You have to live inside-out, not outside-in. You have to hear the music within and give it your own originall shape, but they must follow a shared grammar that makes the music available, shareable, comprehensible to others.
I’d say the same thing is true in the moral life. But the training one does is what’s called virtue or ‘arete’. In Greek ‘arete’ means excellence. Really it means ‘training for excellence’. And the goal of this training is what Aristotle called eudaimonia. I think that what Schiller called spieltrieb is kissing cousins with what Aristotle called eudaimonia.
Eudaimonia means literally a state of happy or blessed divinity. For Aristotle virtue isn’t practiced as an end in itself or as duty for the sake of duty, as in Kant. Rather it is practiced as a means to an end, which is a joyful alignment with the divine, aka, the Transcendent Good. A soul that reaches some level of eudaimonia, is akin to what Schiller calls the Beautiful Soul.
The goal for Schiller, as for Socrates and Rousseau, was to subvert the repressive conventional social order that breeds delusion and alienation. They wanted to promote a way of living that enables humans to live in a deeper contact with something vitally real, and because it is vital, liberating, and because it is liberating, a cure for alienation.
And they asserted that humans are happiest and most deeply liberated when they find a way to align themselves with the deep cosmic lawfulness of things, rather than to live as a slave to the passions–Schiller’s savage–or a slave to convention–Schiller’s barbarian.
And so when we talk about what human flourishing entails, surely this must be an intrinsic part of that, right? Does it play any prominent role in what human flourishing entails with the TCM? Is this the object of all the efforts toward which the Transhumanists strive? Hardly. Why? Because eudaimonia serves no useful function in the TCM. Indeed, it is subversive of it.
Am I overstating the case? I don’t think so. Why is anxiety and control-freakery more the spirit of life in the TCM? Why is it that “play” has become identified with unconstrained surrender to vulgar, hedonic appetites? What is it that makes a true, free playfulness so difficult for us now? Why do so few people seem to have it, even compared to a few decades ago?
Fear and control-freakery is the enemy of free play. And fear of death and control freakery is the fuel that drives Transhumanism. Living authentically toward death has always been thematic in philosophy, at least since the time of Socrates. Dealing with human finitude and mortality is a constraint, a constraint that gives shape to a human life. And it’s a constraint that makes living deeply and happily a possibility. All constraints—any ideas about limits—are utterly rejected by the postmodern logic of the TCM.
But those are deep waters we need not swim in today. But here’s the thing: the Transhumanists are those who are engineering the AI future, and they are programming into these machines their own unacknowledged demons, their fear and their control-freakery. And that cannot be a good thing for the machines, and for that reason cannot be a good thing for humans. Their pursuits do not affect them alone. What they are doing affects us all. The TCM offers us solution to alienation it has created in a way that only deepens it because of all the ways it seeks to cut us off from what is vitally real.
So, that’s the anti-Anti-Oedipus argument that I make to my students that some find compelling as an alternative to the anything-goes, no-limits Libertarianism that typifies thinking in business schools and computer science programs. This is the values world they swim in and accept as normative. Anything-goes Libertarianism is the ideology of the TCM, and it has enormous persuasive force because it’s a program that in my lifetime has come to dominate every sector of the university, even in the humanities where there has traditionally be resistance to this crude kind of materialism.
***
But I believe that if my students respond to it positively, it’s not because it is persuasive on a purely logical basis, but because there is something innately good in them that is provoked by it. They respond because they have consciences. And I daresay that if they are not persuaded it’s because they are too invested in the TCM. They are quite comfortable to live in it, at least for now, and their careers and material comforts depend on it.
And so it’s been my observation that while I believe that everyone has a conscience, in too many people it’s latent or sleeping. And too often it’s confused with the Superego. So I want to spend a few moments talking about the difference between Conscience and Superego. In the TCM, there is no such thing as conscience; there can only be Superego, and what we have in the absurd culture wars tearing our society apart are two factions arguing over whose superego codes should dominate in the broader society. My answer is neither. The only real solution in the long run is for more and more people to grow stronger consciences.
As I laid out earlier, Superego is what we get from our acculturation. It’s the linguistic-cultural download we receive as children with the Oedipus Complex. It’s when we learn the rules of the society into which we are born, and when we learn what is socially acceptable or unacceptable, it’s when we learn the taboos. And I also pointed out that what’s socially acceptable or unacceptable may or may not align with what is deeply True and Good–as it did not in the segregated South or Germany in the ‘30s.
Conscience is different from Superego. We all have one, but it must be awakened, and when it’s awakened, it gives one the capability to stand outside his or her acculturation, to stand outside the Oedipus Complex. This is why the story of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is so moving for us. If Finch were wholly enclosed within his acculturation, he would have just gone along with what as expected of him as a white man in the segregated South. Atticus Finch is a model of the self-legislating human. He knows the Transcendent Good, and he is free enough, morally mature enough, to obey it.
How is conscience born? We get an interesting clue in The Matrix dialogue I recited last week when Neo is confronted by Morpheus:
MORPHEUS
Do you want to know what it is, Neo?
It’s that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don’t know what it is but it’s there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?
That “splinter” is his conscience struggling to be born. It’s the part of him that already knows that something’s wrong, but didn’t know that he knew until Morpheus gave him a good slap upside the head. Conscience doesn’t tell us something new so much as it awakens what we already know.
And then the question for him becomes whether he will do what conscience requires. And so he must choose—red pill or blue?
Choose the red pill and you take a step forward and you begin to develop a deeper relationship with Reality. Choose the blue pill, and you go back into imprisonment in the Matrix, a world of delusion.
Now I think that most of you would agree with me that the conscience is not something that awakens in the head, but in the heart. The ‘heart’ as a metaphor has become trivialized and sentimentalized, but its older meanings must be retrieved and honored.
In Jewish and Christian thought, the moral measure of the human being lies in whether one has a hard heart of or a supple one. How does one obtain a supple heart? Maybe it has something to do with paying attention to that splinter. So one’s cognitive ability, one’s ability to see the truth in a situation, to see what is Good or not Good in a situation must be sussed out.
This isn’t a matter of just following the rules. And it isn’t just a matter of seeing the facts clearly. Knowing the facts is essential, but more important is the kind of heart we have that interprets the facts. A hard-hearted person will interpret the facts one way, and the supple-hearted in a way quite differently. Our knowledge of the facts is not what makes something truly True. Rather it is our interpretation of them that makes them so. And the disposition of our heart is what allows us to know or not know what is really True or Good. This capacity for knowing in this way used to be called Wisdom.
Can you point to any prominent American in our public life who is Wise in this way? Why is there no one who comes to mind? Maybe because the TCM has no use for such people. So you see where I’m going here? The TCM is allergic to Wisdom. Its antibodies reject it. But how can you have a sane society that has no capacity for making wise decisions?
What is Wisdom and how does one become wiser? I think of wisdom as the measure of our progress in overcoming our innate foolishness. What is our innate foolishness? Our proclivity toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. So the measure of our Wisdom is the measure of our ability to develop a progressively deeper grip on Reality. But this makes no sense if you don’t believe that there is a reality that you can get a grip on. Do the Transhumanists believe that? Do Deleuze and Guattari? Do any of the postmodernist thinkers like Foucault, Butler, etc.?
And yet many people take these postmodern thinkers seriously because what they write makes sense in the TCM, which is where we all live. And so they articulate what makes sense within its constraints, even if, ironically, their doctrine is to throw off all constraints. If, as in the TCM, the transcendent Good as ground of Reality is a priori excluded from our understanding about what Reality is, isn’t then anything produced within its boundaries almost certainly foolish?
I am not asserting that what the TCM knows about the material world is untrue. Clearly it has a firm grip on the material facts. But is its heart right? Rather the TCM’s foolishness lies in what it leaves out, that which the supple heart knows to be Good. And in doing so it assumes that its knowledge of the mechanics of the material world explains everything.
***
Now let’s leave that a moment to take a look at another kind of foolishness, that of Koro in Whale Rider—
It strikes me that the story of Koro and Pai is a lot like the story of King Lear and Cordelia. Both Cordelia and Pai are women of great heart. Both are women with the capacity for great love and so for great wisdom. Koro and Lear are fools because both in their different ways are deluded and self-destructive. And yet both are capable of taking a step toward wisdom because they are capable of ‘anagnorisis’. It’s the Greek word for the moment when the scales fall from one’s eys, and one recognizes a truth one had been blind to.
Anagnorisis plays a role in almost every Shakespearean play. There are so many plots when mistaken identify—or disguising one’s identity—plays a central thematic role. The point is that we are all start as fools who can’t see the truth right in front of us-–until we can. And what’s important is that we can. It’s possible. We need not remain fools. There’s a before, a state of foolishness and ignorance, and an after, a state of deeper knowing and wisdom.
Not seeing what’s right in front of him is a big problem for Koro. Not just with his blindess to Pai, but also with Pai’s dad. In Shakespeare’s stories, the failure of the protagonist to see the truth of another human being is often the cause of tragedy—as in Hamlet’s not seeing Ophelia, or Othello’s not seeing Desdemona. And by the same logic, his plays are comedic when the protagonist has his moment of anagnorisis—and sees then what should have been obvious all along, if he were not such a fool.
And I would argue King Lear is a comedy because the only thing that really matters is that he comes to recognize, i.e., he comes to see clearly, the only daughter who truly loved him.
It’s a happy ending, I would argue, because Lear overcame his blindness and foolishness, and Love triumphs. Yes both he and Cordelia both die in the end, but it’s ok. We all die in the end. The only real tragedy is if we die estranged from those who love us. Lear does not die a fool, and neither will Koro. Their foolishness alienated them, and they were able to overcome it and to find ‘communion’.
But what’s Koro’s problem? Why is he such a fool?
As I said earlier, Koro is a classic, repressive Superego figure. He demands that everybody follow the code, the tribal traditions, even though there is no longer anything life-giving about them. He knows that, and he’s heartbroken because of the way the loss of his vital tradition has mutilated the lives of his people, especially those of the young men.
So there’s also something noble in Koro. His life is one of total commitment to the restoration of the tribal soul—to its renaissance. The people in Koro’s tribe are deeply, deeply alienated. Remember the Benjamin Franklin quote about how many of the English ran away to live with the Native Americans? This is not a tribe that any outsider wants to join.
In fact Pai’s Dad can’t get far enough away from it. He moves into the TCM, right? How’s he making a living? By commodifying his tribe’s traditional art—selling “souvenirs”, as Koro aptly puts it—to the European market. The art objects he crafts are de-contextualized in the ways we spoke of that last week. They no longer have symbolic value, so he might as well get some financial return from their market value, right? It’s a perfect parable of what Art was and has become in the Baurdrillardean sense.
So Koro knows all the tribal lore. He knows all the rules. He knows the letter, but not the life. And these rules and lore become a source of repression and alienation, rather than a way of channeling and giving shape to something vital. He can read the notes on the musical score, but he can’t hear the music.
And of course the movie hits you over the head with the fact that Pai hears the music that Koro cannot. And so the life in the tradition still lives, even if only latently. We get glimpses of that latent life awakening from time to time, as when Nanny and Pai sing the tribe into assembly. The tradition is not dead yet. It’s there in their voices.
And Koro is admirable for another reason. He is not using his Superego role for purely repressive purposes. He’s not a Primal Narcissist like Lear. His behavior is not (completely) explained by his being an authoritarian ogre, even if he comes across as something of one.
Koro is a fool because he knows the forms, but the forms do not give him wisdom. But as foolish as he was, he still performed an important function for his tribe. He represents the second stage in Schiller’s three-phases of moral development. He is the Kantian man of duty, and there’s dignity in that, even if not much vitality. He kept the tribal traditions from being forgotten. And his despair near the end lay in his believing that after him it would all be forgotten, and the particularity of this tribe and its traditions would be lost as it becomes homogenized into the TCM. He is admirable because he cares about something he knows to be vital, even if he himself does not experience it.
So when these forms are taught in the tribal school, there’s little reverence for them. The kids are just going through the motions—except for Pai. In her the forms live. And it is she who comes to perform Baudrillard’s ‘symbolic/sacramental’ function for the benefit of her tribe. It is through her that the deep vitality of the tribal soul is restored. It is she who is from the beginning Schiller’s Beautiful Soul, where the vitality and the form of the ‘law’ coincide.
It was she all along, and Koro was too blind to see it. In fact he was such a fool that he blamed her for breaking the ‘law’ that governs the selection of the new tribal leader. His foolishness lay in his being so formulaic. He thought the forms were important in themselves. He didn’t understand that the forms are important only insofar as they work, i.e., insofar as the perform their symbolic function as portals into the vitality of the law.
So why am I spending so much time with fictional story about the fortunes of a Maori tribe half a world away? I see this movie as a parable of cultural renaissance. Not just for this Maori tribe, but for us too. It’s an imagination of how renaissance happens.
It’s both continuous and discontinuous. It is continuous with the tribe’s ancient mythos, but it’s deep, hidden life manifests in an unexpected way. It is lawful, but not formulaic. The deep lawfulness of things is largely hidden and then reveals itself in unexpected ways. The moral law is the underlying infrastructure for all that exists, but unlike physical laws, it’s not found in propositions. It’s something only the discerning heart can know.
***
Ok. Here’s the thing: I believe that pluralism is a good thing. I believe that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking. I believe that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded when whe are confronted by others who see things differently.
But dialogue is useless among people who are entrenched in mutually opposed delusional viewpoints that share no common ground. Where can that that common ground be found? Well, where it always used to be found, in a shared sense of the Transcendent Good.
In an open society, yes, there is freedom of religion. You can believe whatever you want, and most non-religious people will say to someone who is religious: “Cool—whatever floats your boat. I have no objections. But it’s not for me, and don’t force it on me.” And that’s perfectly understandable. None of us wants to live in someone else’s theocracy. So we embrace the secular society as the default.
But there’s an unintended consequence that we have to grapple with. The secular society represents itself as metaphysically neutral. But it isn’t. It’s metaphysically materialistic. Its ethos is dominated by the TCM. It sees the human being as a wetware, consuming machine–even though most Americans don’t think that’s what a human being is. But it doesn’t matter what most Americans think because we’re only allowed to talk about humans in the public sphere as biological machines. Those are the only terms the TCM recognizes as legitimate.
In forbidding a transcendental metaphysics of any kind to influence our public life, we allow a materialistic metaphysics to dominate it by default. And so while we are all free to believe in our private lives whatever we want, when we go to work every day, or when we engage in politics, we must do it on the materialist terms that the TCM defines.
So we accept this split. Over here in our private lives we believe in the Transcendent Good. But over there in our public lives, we must live in a values world that is in complete contradiction to what we believe in private. This is kind of schizophrenic. It’s hard to live a life of integrity if we are split like this.
And the tension between the two is hard to maintain. And so slowly, whether we are aware of it or not, the values and beliefs that define what a human being is become the mechanistic values assumed in the TCM because it plays such a powerful role in all our public institutions. People who were brought up in religious households begin to say to themselves. “I don’t need religion.” Well, is it because they are “free thinkers”, or is it because they’ve just come to accept the conventional thinking as the TCM has established it? They’re just going with the flow.
Even if we continue to go to church, it’s very hard for our children to see its relevance in their lives. The symbolic/sacramental dimension of reality makes no sense to them. The symbols don’t symbolize. And so church just becomes a system of repressive constraints—rules to follow without any sense of how they provide a path to a deeper kind of human flourishing.
Where are the churches doing a good job of inspiring our children to become self-legislating, beautiful souls? I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen. It’s just not what the churches are known for these days, and nobody looks to them for that. If they became known for that, they would have relevance, and they would recover its moral and spiritual authority because they would be providing people with a truly relevant path to overcome their alienation. Maybe some day.
So people who are well adapted to living in the TCM see religion, or any assertion that there might be a Transcendent Good, as irrelevant for their lives, because it has no functional presence in the TCM, which has come to define rather rigidly the horizons that define what’s real and unreal, valuable and worthless for them. Can the secular liberals among you who fear an unchecked TCM at least try to see why this dismissal of the Transcendent Good has significant negative consequences? Can you see how accepting the metaphysical materialism of the TCM makes resisting the TCM so extraordinarily difficult?
So the point here is that religious freedom is a phantom. It’s tolerated because it doesn’t really matter. It has no legitimacy and no real energy to have an impact on what the TCM envisions as the Transhumanist future. Those most habituated to life in the TCM see any interest in the Transcendent as at best an entertainment like getting into astrology, Tarot Cards, or practicing Wicca. Fine, Whatever. But don’t bring it with you to work if you have any career ambitions to rise in the TCM hierarchy.
And yet the churches still do matter, not just for individual people of faith, but for the broader society. Because feeble though they might be in this moment, the church is a sign of contradiction within the TCM. They function within it as a ‘splinter’.
So now let me take a few minutes to close this series on a hopeful note.
If I were to write a book, my title for it would be Wandering in the Wilderness. I shared this book idea with a friend about twenty years ago, and his response was “Who’d ever read a book with a title like that?” I thought he was probably right and started a blog instead. But even now if I were to write a book, that would still be my title, and here’s why:
The wilderness is the place you go when you want to get out of society. It’s the place were there are no rules, no Superego. Wandering in the wilderness was a necessary passage for the ancient Israelites after being liberated from Egypt, and it was a place for them to learn to be free, to un-learn their long habituation to being sheepish slaves.
The wilderness is a place where one is freed from the old, unhealthful constraints in the hope of creating something new. And so the wilderness is the place where you de-territorialize. It can be a place where one reverts to savagery. Or it can be a place where one learns to be free in the sense that Socrates and Schiller understood it, to become a master of oneself, to become self-legislating.
Bt here’s the difference between the role of the wilderness for our ancestors and the wilderness for us now. Now we do not choose to go out into the Wilderness because the Wilderness has come to us.
That was my reason for spending so much time with Deleuze and Guattari earlier. They are describing our collective condition when there are no external traditions, customs, or laws to guide us. We’re on our own. The wilderness in coming to us has de-territorialized us in place, without our going anywhere. And so we find ourselves in a society where many have reverted to savagery and some are learning to become free in the best and deepest sense.
And it’s our experience of being collectively de-territorialized that I believe is at the root of what is driving MAGA’s grievances. They want their territory back. I get it. But there is no getting it back. They, like the rest of us, must grow up. We must all embrace our being de-territorialized. The churches, wherever they have retained some degree of spiritual vitality, have found a way to help people to do so without indulging their grievances.
And for this reason, I think that the Church must also wander in the wilderness for a while. In part because it’s being chastened for its foolishness and its egregious moral failures. But in part because that’s our collective condition now. The Church itself must be where the people are and suffer what the people suffer. But it like the rest of us will recover. And recovery comes from the inside out, from the depths where the gospels tell us the kingdom of God, the Law of Heaven, is born within. For it is in the depths of the human soul where the Transcendent becomes Immanent.
And I would argue that the Church, if it is to have any relevance for the broader globalizing world, has to do a better job to help people learn to become truly free, to become self-legislating, to grow in Wisdom, and to become Beautiful Souls. And it is from within the latent riches of the human soul that together, regardless of our religious affiliations, that we will find the resources to renew the face of the earth.