Theses about myth. An old interest of mine, partly stimulated by reading Joseph Campbell as a student.

And also by the way Plato uses myth to express truths when the Socratic method of dialectic (i.e. philosophical conversation) reaches a limit, but mainly by the fact that I enjoying reading them. These are just theses I would love to discuss with someone who really understood myth.

 

·         I doubt myth ever really had the function of explaining, in anything remotely resembling scientific explanation, the physical causes at work in the origin or nature or the physical workings of nature itself.

 

·         To the extent that certain complexes of myths and rites were intended to influence or control the forces of nature that had particular groups at its mercy, this has been totally replaced by science and technology, and thus cut off from myth. I would call the attempt to control nature rather 'magic' than myth in the proper sense, though magical practices can integrate myth-like stories. ["The serious magical endeavour and the serious scientific endeavour are twins: one was sickly and died, the other strong and throve. But they were twins. They were born of the same impulse.” - C. S. Lewis]

 

·         Religious stories are canonized, officially sanctioned or perhaps in some cases spiritually sanctioned myths. (Joseph Campbell)

 

·         Myths are like public dreams. (Joseph Campbell, C. J. Jung)

 

·         Some myths, the ones people have lived by, concern the deepest mysteries and sources of the human: why something exists at all and not rather nothing, coming to be (birth), passing away (transience, death), sex, etc. They make the terror of existence bearable and give expression to the deepest joys. Myths relate us to the same ultimate realities that metaphysics does, but through narrative and symbols, imagination and emotion.

 

·         Myths can serve different purposes – to entertain, to communicate ethical insights, etc. But when they are candidates for religion, when they deal with the phenomena on which all else depends, they express sublime experiences in a symbolic-picturesque narrative that is a placeholder standing for our relationship to a transcendence beyond our conceptual thought and scientific categories. This need not be religious or mythological in the narrow sense; the story of man’s progress (StarTrek view of the world) or Woody Allen’s nihilism are as mythical in this sense as religious narratives: the Nothing, the Void, is just as much a transcendence as the diverse pictures of God or the Buddhist universe. To that extent, there is nothing deeper, or higher, than mythical consciousness. Neither science nor philosophy can touch it.

 

·         Myth, unfortunately, I am almost tempted to say, gets used to relate the individual to the social order, which has always been an order in which some have power over others; that is to say, it is typically modified to function ideologically in a society or culture. To this extent, the dimension of depth, the symbolic relation to transcendence, is diluted or even perverted. Typically, when a priestly caste assumes authority over the interpretation and development of myth, that means trouble. Campbell says this is a function of myth, and I agree myths that do not connect us to the social order have no life. But myths that reinforce an unjust hierarchy are ideology.

 

·         A myth is a translation of a human relationship to transcendence. [Campbell, like Jung, located transcendence in the human psyche; that seems reductive to me.] To treat it as a factual account of transcendence – to read Genesis, for example, as a report of events that happened in space and time, something like a newspaper article on the origins of the universe – kills the myth. The source of myth is dream, the subconscious mind. The meaning-loaded images it gives rise to do not get their force from states of affairs in the waking world that they are thought to describe, but from the light and value and meaning they shed on the waking world. If the waking world were not imbued with mystery, if the subconscious mind was cut off from it, so to speak, because the mystery of it had been lost to view, if birth, sex, and death had no more significance and wonder than any other trivial fact, then there would be no myth.

 

·         To conclude from the belief that myth has its location in the subconscious mind – the spirit if you will – that myths are nothing but subjective-intersubjective psychological energies translated into conscious images and narratives, that therefore the ‘primitives’ and ‘medieval people’ were less ‘advanced’ than we enlightened moderns, is a modern prejudice and naiveté that many past peoples never made. It is wrong to believe that the Greeks, for example, really imagined Zeus and Hera up on Mount Olympus having a marital quarrel over Zeus’ infidelity, or on the contrary that they believed that Zeus and Hera were nothing but masks for psychological brain workings that could be understood by physical science purely naturalistically. Neither. Zeus, Hera, Aphrodite, Ares, etc. and the stories connected with them were placeholders for spiritual forces beyond the human ken that entered into human life at various critical times. The reality of Aphrodite consisted precisely in the human inability to comprehend Aphrodite’s reality except indirectly through the experience of the sublime in certain forms connected with erotic love. There was never any assumption that the myths were factual stories or entertaining ways of describing human psychology in purely naturalistic terms. Indeed, what lies beyond what our minds can conceptualize or theorize about scientifically is not a possible scientific question, and it is not something philosophy can grasp except speculatively. What realities our mythical (sublime) consciousness interacts with and translates into human symbols is mystery, the conceptual space in which myth may live.

 

·         The monotheistic religions, in essence, present themselves as myths that were sublimely and uniquely enacted in the waking world. A myth that erupted into history, so to speak, from the other realm.

 

·         Myths can be criticized, but only from within a perspective that draws on another mythical or at least supra-natural (metaphysical) intuition. For example, the dominant image of most if not all oriental mythical narratives – that “there is no such thing as individual life, but only one great cosmic law by which all things are governed in their places,” such that one’s birth determines absolutely what one is to be, and thus what one is to think and do: such a way of imagining the individual’s relation to the cosmos may be deep and even noble in some ways. But as it seems incompatible with the reality of the individual soul, a reality that comes to be in the many forms of love, including the grief over the loss of a beloved individual, it is not a myth I could live by. I don’t think the myths I do live by are true in any absolute sense, and the ones I don’t are false. I think there is a price for the myths that do give rise to the significance of the individual soul. Still, the love of the particular is real to me. So either that is an illusion (Buddhism, for example, would see it like that) or it is real; and if real, then the cycles of myth that reduce individuality to social function, and society to a mirror of some transcendent order, is blind to certain phenomena. Either way, it is not an empirical state of affairs that is at stake but ways of experiencing self and the world.

 

·         Perhaps I am wrong, but I think Campbell’s illuminating thought about myth – in the tradition of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Jung – presupposes a certain metaphysical philosophy that is unquestioned and in the background: that the universe is the mechanical universe of science – indifferent, deterministic, meaningless – and the myth is a subjective, subconscious symbolic response to our place in this universe making it possible for us to live with the horror at the center of our existence. In my thinking, I would replace this closed metaphysic with an open one, one that leaves space for all the don’t know. Myths relate us to transcendence – that which is beyond our conceptual or scientific knowledge. They deal at their deepest with birth, death, and sex; with our connections to the soul, the community, strangers, nature, and the divine – metaphysical realities in the end. There is no need to believe none of these phenomena are disconnected from the rest of being, are illusions produced by a meaning-seeking animal thrust into an inherently meaningless universe. That, too, is a myth.

 

 

C. S. Lewis on the relation of Christianity to myth. C. S. Lewis wrote that Christianity is great myth – true myth. I believe a myth is true when it illuminates spiritual realities in the only way such realities can be illuminated: with images that form some connection between the sublime and the human; that are sublime analogies to experiences we can grasp and which then point to transcendence. Lewis then added: it is a myth that happened in our world. For me, honestly, the truth in the myth would be enough to connect me to Christianity. The becoming real in our world would be icing on the cake.

  

Being and nothingness. The title of Sartre's major work in philosophy. 

"Existence precedes essence," which means that for human beings, there is no inherent nature or reality that defines us – we are not created to know and love the Creation and our Creator, to perfect our inborn gifts, for example; or to perfect our nature by becoming virtuous. Unlike inanimate objects and other life forms, humans do not have a predetermined nature or essence that defines them. Actually, nothing does except in the sense that science can describe it. The universe for science is a closed, deterministic system; events can be predicted in the future or described in the past because everything is based on cause and effect.  We, however, exist first and then define ourselves through our choices and actions. Through self-consciousness we transcend nature itself; we are little absolutes. We determine what our reality is, and thus also what is good and evil; it is not fixed or given. This freedom is not just the ability to make choices but entails the responsibility to choose and create one's own values and meaning in life. With freedom comes anxiety and a sense of abandonment because we bear the burden of creating our own essence. The anxiety leads us into “bad faith”: we deny our freedom and seek to become like a thing or an animal with a fixed nature: e.g. by conforming to predetermined roles or adhering to social expectations. This necessarily involves self-deception given what Sartre posits about our inherent lack of reality. Our nature is to have no nature. That is the thesis Sartre develops in his long book – and develops perhaps even better in his literary works. 

     For the wise prior to Sartre and modernity, evil was the failure to bring the mind and heart in tune with reality - not by instinct, as with the other animals, but through education and effort - and for Christians, grace. Our nature was open in a way that was not possible for other animals, but it was not radically open as it was for Sartre. We are not little absolutes, but finite and fallible. We are creatures, not in the radical sense creatures. The universe is meaningful: the value of anything attaches to its reality. The Good is what accords with reality. Our task is to gain wisdom - insight into reality - and make it possible to want and act so as to conform our actions and way of life to objective reality. We are free not to do that, but that is folly - or sin.

   There are two forms of sin or evil - both contrasting with Sartre's belief that evil was giving into bad faith i.e. not embracing your freedom (understood as autonomy) to create your own values. Loving something real, and thus good, in excess such that essential connections are damaged – food is good but loving the pleasure of eating (being addicted) can destroy your health, your bonds with other people, your connections to the earth; it can break the wholeness of your body-soul. If you elevate your narcissistic desires or deep insecurities over the good things in your life or indeed over all of Creation (here I can’t help but think of Trump, addicted to himself and his fantasies), you “love” something good, namely your life, but in a perverse way that damages others, again destroys essential connections to others, the common good, God, your own soul. I think people who get off on feeling self-righteous by judging others – contrary to the teachings of Christ – are guilty of a perversion of love: not of the people they cut out through their judgments but of themselves and their group, which they elevate over their fellow man. These forms of diseased love are all-too-human, and have their roots in damaged egos. They are failures of love. I guess most all of us fail at love in different ways; thus, 'let he who is without sin cast the first stone.' But though we may not judge, we are obligated to do what we can to love, honor, and cherish - and preserve - what we know in our hearts to be good. 

     The second form of evil is more sinister: the willful desire that what is real, what exists, and thus is good, essential connections included, should cease to exist or be annihilated. Or at least be corrupted into something not good: as elves were perverted into orcs by Sauron in Lord of the Rings; as a meadow  is perverted into a garbage dump or another Walmart; as the great plains were corrupted and made into the chemicalized monocultures of agribusiness; as an innocent child with many gifts of mind and a potential to become a loving person is slowly deformed into a relentless ego-and-greed-driven hedge fund manager. This is a demonic form of evil, perhaps best expressed by an imagined demon, Goethe’s Mephisto, who replied when asked to say who or what he was: “Ich bin der Geist der stets verneint! /Und das mit Recht; denn alles, was entsteht, /Ist wert, daß es zugrunde geht;/Drum besser wär’s, daß nichts entstünde…” (I am the spirit that negates. / And rightly so, for all that comes to be/Deserves to perish wretchedly; ‘Twere better nothing would begin…]    

     If it is better to be than not to be, if the act of existing is itself inherently good, then evil can only be perversion or negation. It has no positive content - like Sartre's autonomous man with no pre-given reality. It can’t create anything. Only destroy or disconnect. And you know it not by how it presents itself but by its fruits. (I learned this from St. Augustine’s Confessions – I disagree with Augustine about many things, but he hit that nail right on the head. The theme is very much a part of Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings as well.) 

     Sartre's picture of humankind is the perfect expression of one side of modernity (the other being a naturalism that leaves no conceptual space at all for freedom). The Sartrean hero finds a perfect literary expression very early in the modern era: it is Milton's Satan: The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav'n of hell, a hell of heav'n. 

 

"Christianity is not based on a historical truth, but presents us with a (historical) narrative & says: now believe! But not, believe this report with the belief that is appropriate to a historical report,—but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life." – Ludwig Wittgenstein

      I want to say this is essential to any world version (belief system, faith, religion, political ideology, etc.) Where “Christianity” is in the passage, you can substitute a variable and make a couple of small changes to make the thought more general:

x is not based on a merely factual truth, but presents us with a narrative or a set of axioms & says: now believe! But not, believe this narrative or these axioms with the belief that is appropriate to ordinary reason (science, court cases), which tests beliefs, confronts counter-evidence, etc.,—but rather: believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life.

where x is a world version people live by. 

     For x you can substitute, for example,  any traditional religion and all the variations within particular religions; political philosophies like Marxism or secular humanism in all its forms; various forms of nationalism as well as the kinds of cosmopolitanism; left ideologies that come out of culture & gender studies as well as the belief in the Nietzschean Übermensch (i.e. man beyond good and evil who creates his own values, his own reality); National Socialism as well as the Enlightenment; hedonism, the ruthless pursuit of self-interest – I could go on. x doesn’t have to be an -ism; it can be a purely narcissistic spirituality.  Whatever gives people’s lives meaning in their own minds such that they would sacrifice or do wrong rather than lose it, and losing it would be a personal catastrophe. x is whatever set of convictions that we construct our life around, that condition the way we feel, think, and act. x is the main conscious source of meaning.

    Having an x has become problematic. x typically is a gift – or curse – of culture, depending, something that we take in with our mother’s milk. But to condense a long, complicated story into a simple sentence: capitalism-science-technology – one complex, one regime – has transformed the way human beings live such that traditional cultures have dissolved, or are in the process of dissolving, or sometimes are violently and fanatically (usually in a stupid way) trying to preserve something. 

      Having an x has become problematic. Individual choice increasingly determines what x a person has, and within a single family, there can be several incommensurable x’s. Many people don’t have an x at all, as the regime generates ideologies that have made it increasingly difficult to believe in anything at all, and everything we do believe in is tinged with the suspicion of narcissism or sentimentality – usually, those two defects go together. In a capitalist society, it almost seems like shopping on the marketplace of meaning. The consequence of not having an x is often depression – the clinical term for resignation or despair. There is for many people no answer to the question “Why?” to use Nietzsche’s way of putting it.

   So we need an x and all x has become problematic. My x used to be the Enlightenment. All other possible x’s were in the dock and Reason was the judge. What evidence were they based on? Are the fundamental convictions falsifiable? Are they tautologies that tell us nothing about the world? Are they forms of false consciousness, making our true social situation? It was a comfortable x since in my mind it was not an x but a way of making myself – my Reason – judge of all other x’s. But I didn’t believe it out of complacency; I wanted truth and believed that reason – as the Enlightenment conceived of reason –  was the path to truth. 

     But my Enlightenment was an x. It was something I believed through thick and thin. The conviction that nothing could or  should be considered good, true, or meaningful unless there was sufficient evidence; the belief that believing nothing unless there were sufficient evidence or sound arguments for it was an act of faith: that our puny human reason could know everything there was to know in the same way we can know that the sun rises and that the universe is expanding. There is absolutely no evidence for that, nor could there ever be. That is just as much an unsupported dogma as ‘Jesus is God’ or ‘Hitler is the German Messiah,’ etc.

    ‘Christ rose from the dead.’ Imagine this attitude expressed by a priest during mass: “Since this is an event in history, there must be historical evidence. We have the testimony of the gospels, but there are many reasons to doubt them as historical sources. The Vatican has thus established a commission of the best historians in their field to study the matter and make recommendations.” That is what Wittgenstein thought was absurd. That is a completely different area: history and religion each have their own often overlapping but different agendas, forms of life, conceptions of what make sense, and so on. I cease being a historian when I participate in the Eucharist.

    I want to say: all x’s relate the individual to a transcendence – even and perhaps especially the most worldly who want reality to be nothing more than what our reason and experience says it is. Therefore, the convictions, the narratives that support them are beyond our normal reasoning powers to verify, falsify, or prove. Even convictions that seem to have empirical content – e.g. ‘Christ was crucified and rose from the dead,’‘ or Blacks are natural slaves,’ or ‘Humanity is divided up into essential different and competing races whereas the German race is the natural master race and the Jewish race is the natural parasite,’ or ‘Donald Trump won the election and did not attempt a coup.’ It is a risk to make a belief with some empirical claim the center of an x, but as I tried to explain in my previous entry if a group wants a closed world version, they can also deal with such quasi-empirical beliefs. There are still flat earthers today.

    But in general, most convictions relate us to transcendence and cannot be falsified in principle. Rather than understand such language as deficient factual language I suggest they should be understood in a partly symbolic sense, which is necessary if they are to do their job and connect us to some image of transcendence - i.e. by definition that which is not a fact but which makes it possible to judge facts. (Wittgenstein thinks that such language is in some respects like a picture - say, God and Adam in the Sistine Chapel:

The point is not to give a realistic portrayal of God and Adam, though it using the pictural language of representation. That would reduce the picture to absurdity. The point is to symbolize God's love reaching out to mankind, and it is communicated in 'factual' i.e. representational mode, the same mode as is used to paint real people we know and can compare to representation to. I am saying the language of all possible x's are some like that. And that, therefore, it is a mistake to bring them down to the purely factual and representational level and think you can verify or refute them like that. They are ways of making sense of the world as a whole. (People like Carl Sagan, Christopher Hitchens, and Richard Dawkins are thus - as I was earlier in my life - completely off base when they think that science has anything to do with it.)

   That is not to say x's  cannot make contact with reality. Indeed, they must make contact with reality if they are to function as an x. For me, amidst all the stupidities, confusions, selfish acts, and failures of my life, what I cling to is what I have experienced as more or less pure, purely good; my love and care for my children, for my family, for the inner life of the mind (i.e. love of truth), and thus for the open society necessary for the inner life of the mind to thrive. These experiences are the soil from which my x grows and indeed judges me. Wittgenstein ended the passage I quoted at the beginning with these words: “…believe, through thick & thin & you can do this only as an outcome of a life.” In other words, as I from day to day try to be a decent father – among other things – my convictions are either strengthened or weakened. I think our lives are the tests of our convictions.

    Now we know people connect their x to life experiences in different ways. Pathological narcissists will make their world version reflect the most gratifying self-image they have of themselves; traumatized people full of hatred might make destroying an enemy the central purpose of their lives. Etc. Now my life is not free of narcissism or hatred – well, more indifference as a form of contempt – as others. But I strive not to allow these to be the source of what gives my life meaning – not to feel superior to those that don’t (‘Judge not lest you yourself be judged’ is such a liberating conviction that is central for me and my x; I don’t always follow it, but I criticize myself or even feel remorse when I don’t). ‘Love what is good’ – part of my x. The conscious beliefs of an x – like Naziism – often mirror some spiritual poison, but this will only be visible from the perspective of love, invisible otherwise. I am grateful to all the things in my life that prevented such hatred from taking deep root in me – my parents above all, and grandparents.

     This is the level where world versions make contact with reality, and this is the level where you have to confront them. Not with intellectual arguments, at least in the first place.

     

"Irrealism" and Propaganda. 

How is propaganda – the making of fantasy worlds for the purpose of exercising power – possible? 

    It is complex. I apologize, but this is a question that exceeds the normal length of a journal entry, and I don’t pretend to have mastered it here – only sketched my way of thinking about it. And everything I want to say about presupposes a social context. When cultures and societies lose the center, the kinds of irrationality I am trying to make sense of become more prevalent. 

    Human nature. This is a conception of human nature that will seem less plausible to postmodern, narcissistic culture - (postmodern as a cultural thing; philosophically I take seriously and even accept some aspects of what is called postmodernism. After all, I have never been very comfortable in the modernist world interpretation). But here is it.

      For all the fundamental difference between Karl Marx and Christian thinkers like Aquinas, one deep commonality is emphasized – which given the radical opposition of the two ways of looking at the world is good prima facie evidence that something profound is in play. Something is wrong with us, I mean, with our species. I mean what Marx called ‘alienation’ (translation of Entfremdung – the fact that what should be part of us, part of our home on earth, confronts us as something alien, oppressive even) and Christian theologians call ‘sin.’ Both concepts involve a rupture between our true nature and what our nature over generations has become after some historical catastrophe. Our close bonds with our families in many cases dissolve and family becomes oppressive; we are alienated from other human beings both within and without our group; from nature (as Creation), which capitalism is destroying at an accelerating pace; from our capacity to reason and even the capacity of our souls to love – a split between “ego” and soul or our true nature (for Ananda K. Coomaraswamy, this alienated ego is the essence of Satan).

      The very idea of an ego lives from a rupture between self and all the things to which the soul is connected in bonds of fellowship and love – for Christians above all, God – such that these basics of our lives confront us as something utterly separate and even hostile. Sin is that which dissolves our necessary connections and pits what we should be connected to against us; for the young Marx, sin is called injustice, exploitation, oppression of man over man and nature. Sin or alienation has become second nature to our kind. The disorder introduced by alienation/sin affects not only the individual but also the social and natural orders. This rupture disorders the human will and intellect, leading to a lack of harmony within the human person and in society. Living in societies driven by injustice, by the power of the few over the many through exploitation made possible by monopolies over the sources needed to live – whether in land in feudalism or markets in capitalism – our second, alienated nature gets perpetuated through the generations: without, however, completely losing sight of the fact that something is not right with us.

   Well, alienation is the source of removing us from our place in reality, and thus giving the lie the fertile ground it has; and the lie is the mother of propaganda. It is said that the devil is a liar. (Some parents love their children purely enough to believe they owe them the truth. This is a good place to start from if you want to work against sin/alienation.)

. . . .

     Next.  We cannot know reality absolutely, as only a divine knower could; we do not have a view of reality as if from no place in it.  Reality is bigger than even the intellect of a genius philosopher-saint (well, Marx believed his own intellect was up to the task). Our sadness: we all live in one earthly atmosphere, metaphorically speaking, but within that atmosphere, we live in different (metaphysical) bubbles, some of which are indifferent to one another, others actively hostile to one another. A bubble, though vastly more complex, is somewhat like different readings of the same text - like the Bible. Different people, different churches, different religions read the Bible in different ways, some profound, some silly. They even differ about what the Bible is. How we read a certain sentence (sentence here is like a concepts in our bubbles) - e.g. "God is love" - depends on what you think the Bible is and how the read the book as a whole. Reality is like the Bible with this difference: we only have access to a fragment of the text in all probability. Now bubbles can fuse with other bubbles and become bigger, more expansive bubbles. That can be a good thing. It is one way to think of philosophy. Some bubbles – I will switch now interchangeably to the term world versions – are based on lies born of alienation: racist world versions like Naziism or American White Supremacy; misogynist world versions like the world of the Taliban; I would say capitalist world versions, but defending that goes beyond my purpose.

    World versions are complex things, but my point is that what is good and true is a function of a person’s world version. If it were true that “the Jews” were the malevolent evil that some Nazis honestly believed they were, then killing every one of them – women and children, included – would be the only way to guard against their evil. It is a mistake to believe that it is a simple fact that “the Jews” were not such a malevolent evil. It was a dogma for the Nazis, like “God is good” for Christians. A dogma is something that can’t be doubted without exploding the bubble one is in. If a Christian can no longer believe that God is good, which is to say, can no longer believe in God, then they no longer live in a Christian world. If a Nazi ceases to believe “the Jews” are racially malevolent, then their world version collapses. The bubble pops. The conceptual web that yields the idea of the Good and reality comes untangled.

     To understand modern propaganda, you have to delve into the gray area between facts and (metaphysical) dogmatic beliefs. I believe it to be a kind of fact that “the Jews” are no more malevolent than any other people (and that concept of “race” as used by Nazis and White Supremacists is incoherent), but it is the kind of fact that one can obscure if one wants to. It is a howling lie, frankly, but seeing it my way would be question-begging for the Nazis because it is a howling lie only within a non-Nazi worldview bubble. I can’t quote it but I recall reading about an exchange between the American prosecutor at Nurnberg and the commander of a death squad – Einsatzgruppe D – Dr. Otto Ohlendorf, in which the prosecutor asked how women and children could be a threat to the Reich. He responded that killing only the young men and leaving the women and children behind would result in another generation of enemies with an even greater desire to destroy the German race. Race was pitted against race in a life-or-death struggle; individuals were nothing but exemplars of the race, and as such without inherent meaning. Race was a metaphysical category. Different races had different racial essences.

       Any evidence that anyone could bring against that in general or the malevolence of the Jews, in particular, could always be countered by something: some qualification, the treachery of the Jews, their influence over whatever group, our blindness to their true nature, our gullibility to believe their propaganda, their control on the media, etc. Attempts to refute Naziism – any closed world version –  could always be brought to the point where ‘factual’ evidence ran out and you had to rely only on what made sense. But what makes sense depends on world versions – at least partly.  World versions (like metaphysical theories for Karl Popper) are immune from factual counter-evidence as long as the people in the world version stipulate it so.

     World versions, bubbles, consist of concepts, webs of concepts, ideas of what is real and good. The most abstract and controlling – metaphysical ideas like space, time, cause, unity, plurality, object, and so on – while others are more practical and more open to investigation. My world version, and I assume in yours, contains the idea of plurality: that the world consists of many particular people and objects, for example. But some people – monists –  have believed that this plurality is an illusion, that reality was one, and that our perception of particular things was an illusion produced by consciousness. What we perceive are in reality aspects of Being, which is singular. The idea of plurality is illusory in that world version. Who is right? What fact of the matter could I cite to convince the monist that plurality is real? I could put different things on the table and count them. Have I refuted monism? Not at all. The monist would simply argue that my observation of multiple objects is a result of the limitations of sensory perception. From his perspective, the true understanding of reality requires relying on reason and intellect rather than sensory experience. He might maintain that the diversity I observe is not a refutation of his monism but rather a manifestation of the deceptive nature of the senses. What could I say against that? If he wants to believe in monism at all costs, reason is in the end powerless to refute him in a way that is not question-begging and/or ad hominem (i.e. doesn’t attack the views by attacking the person).

     Between monism and our common sense plurality, the incommensurability is radical.    To prove which bubble was ‘right’ you would have to get outside all the bubbles and compare them with the world as it is in itself, outside all bubbles. You would have to be God. We can’t do that. Still, some facts of life no world version can refute. I can’t imagine a world version in which fire didn’t burn, vegetable gardens could flourish in the desert, or homosexual sex could conceive children. We can be in a bubble but we cannot imagine worlds outside our atmosphere. If a bubble requires me to believe that tomatoes are a fruit and not a vegetable, that is one thing; if it requires me to believe that can grow without water, that is another. But that doesn’t mean our atmosphere is the ultimate truth.

     This is getting too long, but the point is so important I will risk another example (adapted from Hilary Putnam, who was great at finding such examples). Suppose I put these objects on a table - △, ◯, ▢. I define the surface of the table as the universe – as the “space” in which the objects exist. And if I ask you how many objects this universe contains, you will say “3”. In our world version, that would be correct. But in some logical-mathematical systems, a set of objects must be counted as objects themselves for the system to work. So if our concept of object includes sets of objects, then there would be: △, ◯, ▢, {△, ◯}, {△,▢}, {◯, ▢}, and {△, ◯, ▢} – thus “7” objects. Well, so how many objects really exist in this universe? What is an object, really? According to what objective criterion could we judge between monism (the idea of the universe as one object), atomism (the idea that the real objects of the universe are atoms – that I am not an object but am nothing but a composite of trillions of atoms), our common-sense notion, or the idea that the universe contains abstract objects like sets?

      Our common-sense notions of what an object is – they belong to the atmosphere in which world-version-bubbles float around – seem so powerfully intuitive because it is difficult to imagine a form of life that could be based on another conception. But in some systems of math abstract objects must be presupposed for them to work or at least apply to the world. Etc. Always relative to some life purpose or some larger cultural form of life – here is where cultural relativism in anthropology gets its purchase – the one or the other conception makes sense, in some cases so powerfully that it is practically impossible to doubt it; or where to doubt it would lead to insanity. But just because it makes sense of our lives in different contexts does not mean that it is the true idea of objects, absolutely – captures what an object is in itself apart from all purposes and life forms.       

     To have access to the pure essence of object we would have to be able to read the mind of God, to apprehend the Idea of object in the mind of God, metaphorically. We would have to leave not only our bubbles but our common human, earthly atmosphere. That we can’t defines our finitude, which is radical, defining – it is not an accident that, say, improved technology could help us overcome.

       There is a black hole, a void, at the center of our understanding. Or more positively, a mystery, an openness. Heidegger conceived of it as “Being.” Mystics (Christian, Hindu, Sufi Islam, Kabbalistic Judaism) have called it “God.” Whether it is a void or Mystery depends on how our world versions relate to it. If the people in the bubble want it to be closed, it can be closed. Reason is powerless against the will to make the bubble an island (prison) for the mind – unless your bubble has a strong common sense, the kind of common sense grounded in our human reality that we might have if we did not live in an alienated state. If the powers that be, or the insecure (or complacent) ego that craves happiness, consolation, and/or security are constructors or users of a certain world version – Trumps, Nazis, many Christians, Muslims, and Jews, many “progressives” influenced by culture and gender studies, Marxists, etc. – then the world version will seek to close itself off from this radically unreachable “view from nowhere” – to define the horizon as the end of the world. 

    But then they are confronted by a void, a suspicion that only those approaching fanaticism or insanity can block out. But somewhere, deep down we all know: our worlds lack a solid foundation; that our worlds are fragile. We are haunted by this thought, always, no matter how hard we try to cover it up with plausible rationales. it is the source of what many great thinkers have called the source of metaphysics. It is also a source of propaganda, which goes right to the heart of this buried fear.

   If, however, our world version is open, understands that, rationally, it cannot be a “theory of everything”, builds our finitude into its conceptual web of ideas, and seeks nevertheless to know, to understand, to have a relationship with the truly true, good, and beautiful – ideas of realities that we can have access to through our intellect informed by joy, hope, faith, and love, even if we cannot know these realities in any factual way – then what is a black hole to be repressed by the closed mind reveals itself as a mystery to the open one. Minds are conditioned by world versions. [Most of us go back and forth between closed and open; I don’t think of it as an absolute dichotomy but a spectrum that we as people but also world versions are located on.] The closer we are to building in mystery, the more intellectually humble we are; the more intellectually humble we are, the more open our minds; the more open our minds, the less susceptible to propaganda they are.

    This immunity of closed world versions – I already wrote about echo chambers – to factual refutation opens the door for the kind of propaganda that Trump does. He has created a fantasy world in which his opponents – mainstream American political culture and everyone who is part of it – a like “the Jews” were for the Nazis. And his fantasy world version is just as immune from factual refutation as Dr. Otto Ohlendorf’s – much to the consternation of his liberal opponents, who like the Nurnberg prosecutor saw it as a part of their world version value openness to refutation of political opinions through evidence, facts. Or the Trumpists can’t admit even the possibility that they have been duped or their world would come crashing down. That is the punishment for making an idol out of a man, a belief system. The root of totalizing world versions – and thus the power of propaganda as well as all forms of non-thinking conformism – is the fear of God, the big mystery, Being.

. . .

    The is a radical division between world versions that are open and those that are closed; between those that value thought, insight, imagination, and truth and those that the propagandist seeks to construct: that is, those that are immune from criticism, safe from and forces of change.

       This is how I would make sense of the underlying gap between the liberal prosecutor (liberalism, whatever it faults, is an open world version in meaningful ways) and the Nazi perpetrator or the Trumpist. Proving that “the Jews” were not malevolent to the Nazis was like proving there were many objects on the table to the monist.  Well, not quite. If a Nazi cared about truth, they could think of ways to find out. They could send uncover anthropologists to live among Jewish people and do an ethnology, try to uncover evidence that proved or disproved their malevolence. Still, no proof can be definitive unless it makes sense, and sense-making cannot be compelled by pure reason. They – like the Trumpist on the Big Lie – can always find a way to spin the evidence by modifying concepts or adjusting beliefs somewhere else in the web. “The Jews instinctively know whether someone belongs to their race, and put on a show for the anthropologist.” “The courts are part of the deep state conspiracy of child molesters.” But the reality constructors like the Trumpists and the Nazis don’t care that much about the truth to begin with; they just want everything to cohere so as to reassure against possible doubt. They liked the consequences of their fantasy and prefer their closed off their world version to the truths or Ideas that would undermine it. Into the black hole comes the will-to-power.

   So I have tried to understand the source of the power of propaganda is many historical contexts. Facts depend on world versions and world versions can always be made immune to truth. All of our commonsense beliefs in the end rest on a kind of faith because we can get out of our own bubble but we can’t get out of the atmosphere, of all bubbles, to compare them with the thing itself, reality. One implication of this should be intellectual humility. But it opens to the door to irrationalism – of which closed bubbles and the propaganda that keeps them closed is one form.

. . .

    Combine this with the fact that most of our knowledge of the world he have on trust in authority. I believe germs are causing my illness and not witches because I accept the authority of science on this question. I can’t see the germs or understand the science; for all I know it could be witches – witches would explain all the data. Of course, someone who believed witches were in play could also accept the science of germs. What why did the germs invade my body and not someone else's? Random chance? That is no more scientific or empirical than malevolent forces. Why did his barn burn down? Termites. But why did Termites attack his barn and not his neighbors? Malevolent forces. But I believe that I could in principle learn and understand the science, and so it is enough if others do it for me. The fact, however, that most of what we take for granted as true depends on authority and trust makes us vulnerable to echo chambers that undermine people’s trust in institutions like science. We know at some level that most of what we think we know we only believe on trust. That makes us at some level insecure when that foundation is attacked by propaganda.

 . . .

    What I am saying is this: if people will themselves to live in a reality in which Jews are a malevolent race, or there are 72 genders, or God requires blasphemers to be stoned and witches burned at the stake, or Trump did not try to negate the results of an election by hook and crook to stay in power, or the earth is flat, or the dinosaurs are an illusion designed by God to test our faith, or slavery wasn’t so bad, or (more positively) the universe was created by the Ideas of God – and these people shut their minds to any fact or Idea that raises questions – then rationally there is not much we can do.

     It’s like trying to prove astrology is a hoax. Astrology, which involves making predictions based on the positions of celestial bodies, often lacks clear and specific predictions that can be rigorously tested. The language used in astrological predictions is often vague and open to interpretation, making it difficult to test or refute astrology. For example, if an astrologer predicts that a person will have a challenging day, it can be interpreted in various ways, making it difficult to determine if the prediction is accurate. This lack of specificity and the interpretative nature of astrological claims make it challenging to falsify astrological predictions. Moreover, unending qualifications, ad hoc explanations or special conditions are used to defend the theory against potential refutation. In astrology, practitioners may provide post hoc justifications or additional qualifications to explain why a prediction did not come true. For instance, they might argue that the influence of a certain celestial body was "blocked" or that other astrological factors were at play. This kind of reasoning can create a situation where the theory is difficult to disprove because any apparent failure can be explained away retroactively. It all goes back to the dependence of fact on concept and the way we can adjust concepts to world versions. The ability to continuously adjust or qualify predictions based on new information or outcomes makes it challenging to subject astrology to a clear, objective evaluation. In this astrology is like world versions. Propaganda and fantasy-world construction are based on the same principle.

    Or it’s like the situation faced by Kyle Reese and the psychiatrist Dr. Silberman in The Terminator, when Kyle tries to convince Silberman of the truth of his time travel. Dr. Silberman approaches Kyle's story with skepticism, demanding concrete evidence or observable proof for the extraordinary claims. But Silberman's skepticism is heightened by the lack of falsifiable elements in Kyle's narrative. The nature of time travel and the future war described by Kyle can't be verified. By insisting on tangible evidence and expressing doubt about the validity of Kyle's claims, Dr. Silberman is implicitly applying the principle of falsifiability. He is essentially asking for something concrete that can be objectively examined – but there is nothing like that available. 

     Furthermore, Dr. Silberman can only frame the story within his world version. When faced with Kyle's persistent narrative, Dr. Silberman dismisses it as a delusion or paranoid fantasy, attributing it to post-traumatic stress or other psychological conditions. This dismissal allows Dr. Silberman to maintain his world version (in which Kyle’s story is impossible) without seriously engaging with the possible truth of Kyle's story and ignoring or spinning any evidence that speaks in favor of Kyle's sanity. Kyle's story can't be true because it is incompatible with the world version and thus must be understood as a product of his mental state. Of course, in the movie there is an objective reality the viewers know. Imagine  the situation in which reality could be interpreted in two or more radically incommensurable ways and then Kyle's predicament would be like ours. 

    In this we see the logic of cults and sects. Cults often promote beliefs that are not easily falsifiable. Leaders may present doctrines or prophecies that are vague, ambiguous, or based on supernatural claims that cannot be objectively tested. Followers are often discouraged from questioning or critically examining the core tenets of the cult. Doubt may be framed as a lack of faith or commitment, making it difficult for members to challenge or reject the teachings through the use of reason. By being a world version and thus avoiding falsifiability, the cult leaders create a situation where their claims cannot be easily disproven, fostering an environment where followers are more likely to accept the doctrines without critical scrutiny.

Cult leaders, moreover, employ unending qualifications to explain away any discrepancies, unfulfilled prophecies, or failed predictions. When events don't unfold as promised, leaders may introduce new explanations, such as blaming the followers for not having enough faith or suggesting that the fulfillment of the prophecy is delayed for mysterious reasons. This continuous adaptation allows the leaders to maintain control over the narrative, preventing followers from questioning the validity of the bubble. The introduction of new justifications or qualifications serves to deflect criticism and reinforces the authority of the leaders. Followers are conditioned to accept these qualifications without scrutiny, fostering a mindset where the bubble is protected from rational refutation.

Finally, cult leaders often employ psychological techniques to manipulate the beliefs and identities of their followers. This may include creating a sense of dependency, instilling fear of consequences for leaving the group, or manipulating emotional responses. Solidarity is above all maintained by instilling fear of some other, like Jews or Democrats. (The replacement for the malevolent Jew is not as well-defined for MAGA: the WOKES, LIBERALS, DEMOCRATS – now also SOCIALISTS, MARXISTS, PROGRESSIVES, LGBTQ, FASCISTS (because he is being called that) NON-TRUMP CHRISTIANS, RINOS, MUSLIMS – basically anyone not in the MAGA bubble, function as the malevolent Jews in that worldview – are VERMIN. Perhaps for the more liberal, compassionate wing of MAGA, the rest are simply unenlightened, duped people who think they are better than everybody else.) The rejection of falsifiability and the use of unending qualifications contribute to a closed belief system within the cult. Members may become emotionally invested in the teachings and develop a strong sense of identity tied to the group. This can make it difficult for them to consider alternative perspectives or to critically evaluate the world version.

    Make no mistake: There is in a crucial sense a fact of the matter. Facts depend on concepts, which are like interpretations (what makes sense; world versions in the end) but not all interpretations are equal. True concepts allows facts - truth - to be apprehended. It is not a matter of interpretation whether Trump lost the election. It is an interpretation, a dogmatic, closed one - one that makes no sense to me - that makes Trump an infallible source of truth, Jews a malevolent race, Africans natural slaves. Such interpretations are reduced to absurdity for those outside them because to believe it we would have to deny truths and blind ourselves to evil. To say that, however, already assumes a particular conception of truth, the everyday, commonsense conception. But if a person is willing to abandon that and conceive of Truth as whatever Trump says it, a lie as whatever non-Tumpers assert, then we have "alternative facts." There is no fact that truth should be understood as common sense understands it, only interpretation - the best interpretation in terms of what makes sense of life. Interpretations make sense or not. But making sense depends on a web of Ideas and beliefs. If Trumpists don't live in ours, no fact will refute, no matter how obviously factual. But given that facts depend on concepts and concepts depend on world version, for those inside those world versions there is no fact of the matter that you can cite to refute their world version - unless they start trying to make sense in a more open way. 

       I am suggesting that all world versions per se are limited such that, if wanted, they can be sealed against any Idea or evidence that calls them into question. In the gap between Silberman’s world version – by implication, any world version – and the truth that his beyond his world version lies the space in which propaganda can thrive.

    This contra ultra-rationalists like Richard Dawkins or Carl Sagan, who believe science has all the answers and that reality is nothing more than science reveals it to be! If there were only an experiment that proved conclusively that the idea of race is incoherent! Or that the election was rigged – evidence being irrelevant to truth because the concept of truth is conceived as what Trump says is true; lie as whatever the demonic opponents of Trump assert. If that is your conception of truth, then it is a fact (in your mind) that the election was rigged.

   When people who are part of a common social matrix inhabit incommensurable bubbles and when at least one of those bubbles is closed, the prospects for peace are not good. Not reason convinced the slavers they were wrong. A terrible war imposed the wrongness of their world version on them. Same with the Nazis. I fear it will be the same with MAGA.

   I am not a radical skeptic. I do think we can achieve a limited degree of wisdom based on a true, if limited, understanding of the real world. Our ideas of things can be deepened and expanded without end. But the beginning of wisdom is the recognition that relative to reality as such we are mostly ignorant. Closing the mind is the greatest sin, the greatest alienation from Being.

 

 

 Orwellian Times

      The Putin regime, the Chinese Communist Party under Xi, the followers of Erdogan in Turkey or Orban in Hungary, the pop-fascist movements in France and America (Trump followers who reject election results and the courts i.e. the rule of law) – their controllers have all achieved something that even Goebbels did not dare in his conduct of Nazi propaganda. The absolute standard of patriotism, of loyalty, and thus of humanity, of goodness, is to embrace uncritically . . . not just embrace but passionately espouse and propagate whatever construction of “reality” their fearless leaders determine serves the interests of their “movement” (i.e. their controllers). Anyone who insists on comparing a propagated belief with the hard facts is a “traitor” by definition. Truth is simply irrelevant, of no importance. Important is commitment, and whatever world version heightens commitment is by definition “true”. (Seems the logical outcome of Sartrian existentialism: being before essence, commitment before truth.)

       Goebbels, by contrast, when confronted with some fact that could not be plausibly denied without destroying credibility did what propagandists have always done: accept the fact that could not be plausibly denied, and spin it in ways that served the Party, or frame it in ways that disarmed its potential to harm the Party. He couldn't just put it out that the Wehrmacht won the battle for Stalingrad - as Trump would have, I guess - but framed the defeat as a glorious triumph of German heroism, etc. 

       I find this new power to create reality for a mass of people amazing and depressing. I find the utter tenuousness of our hold on reality (truth) shocking and depressing. “Reality” and “truth” – it’s not just weaponizing false constructs of reality, influencing people’s perceptions of reality in the service of power. The atomic bomb here is that truth and reality themselves have been made radically indeterminate, and thus in their very essence negated. It is a making true of Nietzsche’s idea that all claims to truth are masks for a will-to-power such that the only choice is what makes me more powerful.

    Power: I remember a definition from course in government: the ability to enforce one’s will over others, even against resistance. But Trump’s power over the minds and hearts of his “base” is more than that. Resistance is precluded from the outset. Trump’s kind of power, like Hitler’s, is Orwellian. Orwellian power: when the insurrectionist believes Trump’s lie in the face of all contrary evidence; when, therefore, every source of information or judgment that even at the margin’s casts doubt on the Trumpian fantasy version of the world is automatically rejected as “fake news” coming from the enemy (who are “vermin”). He is immune from truth. He invents his own “truth.” Trump says x; therefore, x is true. He once bragged: “I could shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Well, not really bragging: he really is untouchable: corruption on a massive scale, sexual assault, the Hollywood tapes, a coup attempt – nothing touches him. He determines what is to be believed and his base demands that he determine what is to be believed. Many of his inner circle wanted him to distance himself from the attack on the Capital. He understood better than they that would have meant the end. His base wanted the Big Lie and would never have forgiven Trump had he not given it to them. They are one, Trump and his base.

      Recall the scene in 1984 when Winston Smith really believed 2+2=5 because Big Brother said it did. That was after extreme torture. Trump’s people believe it because they want to believe it, no torture necessary. And if truth is nothing but whatever the powerful say it is, why not? (If the Nazi’s had won, the history of WWII would be very different – so the line of thought. No it wouldn’t. Only people would be prevented from knowing that history.) Through him those who felt powerless feel powerful. That is his trick. That is all he cares about; that is all they care about in their hearts: “For where your treasure is, there will your heart be also.” (Never mind that he is using the suckers; a Jim Bakker of politics.)

    We see the same thing in individual personalities on a small scale – the narcissistic personality of our times tends toward the same deconstruction of the distinction between truth and lie. Nietzsche preached the superman who determines for himself what is good and evil, what is true and false. Seems we have a whole country of little supermen and superwomen now. 

     What a fragile and utterly precious and essential thing is truth for our humanity! How easy it is to lose the love for it.

 

. . .

 

Alternative  facts, or the reduction to absurdity of the notion that reality is essentially socially constructed. Trying to control what people think about something horrible Trump did, his propaganda minister used some technical jargon from the trade: ‘we need to come up with some alternative facts,’ which of course is logically absurd, since a fact is by definition ‘what is the case’ and what we agree on or can be brought to agree on. The limits of what we can think and feel, the determinant of our thoughts, actions, and responses to our lives and all that happens in our world is ultimately a function of what we take to be real (or true) and good. But the Trumpian 'alternative facts' reveals something philosophically interesting. The subversion of truth doesn't happen at the level of facts. 'Alternative facts' already imply a different conceptualization of things. Define your terms differently, and you get 'alternative facts.' It's actually a quite sophisticated propaganda tool that plays on the radical lack of determination of meaning in language. 

     You can see this clearly in the current Putin "special military operation." Putin largely controls what those who are in his bubble think is real, factually and conceptually - his base only, not all or even most Russians, I have read; no more than Trump controls all Americans.  Russians are not supposed to believe there is a war. Well, depends on what you mean by 'war,' doesn’t it? And the ‘special military operation’ that is not a war has the purpose of ‘de-nazifying’ Ukraine – for example, of their Jewish president – and ‘liberating’ the Ukrainians, who perhaps don’t realize yet they are being liberated. In an alternative reality, words like ‘war’, ‘propaganda’, ‘liberate’, and ‘Nazi’ mean different things, things that have only the most tenuous connection to reality if they have any at all. They are like bad interpretations of a poem nobody knows directly. 

     This is just an example of how reality is not constructed by changing the facts; what is a fact at all depends on how reality is conceptualized, and this happens at a deeper level than facts. If any form of Ukrainian nationalism is defined as 'Nazi,' and given that Ukrainian nationalism is part of the resistance to Putin's designs for the country, then it is a 'fact' that the 'special military operation' seeks to 'de-nazify' Ukraine. Translated: seeks to remove Ukrainian nationalism in all its forms. Facts are only facts when one agrees on concepts. People who think it is absurd to think of the current Ukraine government as Nazis simply don't share Putin's implicit definition of 'Nazi' to include Ukrainian nationalists. 

     (Of course, there were some Ukrainian nationalists who embraced the Nazis during WWII, a very bad lot to be sure, probably full of fanatical hatred because of the mass starvation in the 30's caused by Stalin's destruction of traditional agriculture. To get revenge on Stalin they slaughtered Jewish women and children, because in the Nazi conceptualization the Stalin regime was a tool of the whole Jewish race. Well, if this is the concept you believe in, then it would be perfectly rational to murder every single man, woman, child of Jewish heritage. When concepts get so detached from the world, anything goes.)

        Facts depend on concepts, and concepts depend on seeing the world as a whole in one way rather than another. And like Orwell’s 1984, Putin or Trump have enormous power based on their ability to determine what is real – partly in a dance with the resentments of large sections of the population that want to live in a different reality and through the fearless leaders can, in their own minds, live in an alternative reality. They would revolt against Trump in a heartbeat if he started speaking truth.  It’s not that it is forced on them at gunpoint – that’s what makes it so powerful. 

      I suppose the Catholic totalitarians of the 17th century feared the loss of their power to define reality when they persecuted Galileo and others - they needed the stake to enforce belief, unlike Trump. They cared more about the power to say what the cosmos was than any particular model of the cosmos. They didn't give a hoot about science; they were interested in the power to define reality, to define what universe we live in. What power! God-like! To stipulate what the cosmos must be like for everybody, authoritatively.  In the desire for that kind of power I think may lay the deepest essence of evil.

 'Seeing As' verses 'Seeing That'

    I can see that a birch tree is in front of me; I see the birch as part of Creation. A man with a different inner life might see the birch tree as nothing but a natural resource. A poet or a saint might see and imagine the birch tree – even if they see it as part of Creation – in ways much more profound than I can.

       Walking among the redwood trees of California, three hikers stop to take in the vista. One, a poet, says: ‘The forest is sublime.’ One, a rich socialite, says: ‘The forest is quite pretty.’ A third, the owner of a major coal company, says: ‘Being unsentimental, I would say that is a very valuable resource that is currently being unutilized due to people’s self-indulgent Romanticism.’  

       A kind of philosopher-physicist joins them and says: "Actually, the coal company owner is closest to the truth. The poet and the rich socialite are projecting subjective feelings onto a reality that can only be objectively described by a de-subjectivizing language of science. What the poet should say is rather ‘I have feelings of awe when I behold the forest’ and not just assume his feelings has anything to tells about the forest itself. His reaction tells us only about him. The evolutionary and biochemical scientist could explain the hardware determining this response; the social scientist could explain the social software. In any case, the feeling can only be sentimental: the idealization of reality in fantasy [the psychologist could explain that] to produce some self-gratifying feeling – perhaps to project an image of a sensitive soul onto others or feel that way about oneself. This should be obvious from the fact that you all disagree, and yet there is no ‘reality’ out there independent of all your views except science to refer your disagreement to."

       The sublime and the pretty, being subjective-psychological reactions, have no place in the discourse of science. Thus the businessman is closest to the truth.’ This illustrates how making the language of science or brute de-meaned facts normative disconnects responses like the priest from the real world. In fact, though,  people do use the language of the sublime for sentimental or counterfeit reasons – the critical vocabulary of many kinds of emotional responses (grief, love, joy, remorse, wonder, etc.), the way we test such emotions against reality, is of just this kind: is the response authentic or sentimental?

       I say the poet is right. His response reveals something of the reality of the Redwood forest the others are blind to. That is a view that science can neither confirm nor falsify; it has nothing to do with science as science at all. The poet’s language belongs to the human language, more specifically, the language of love and wonder; the rewriting of the human language by the reductive scientist-philosopher takes humanity out of the language along with subjectivity. There is nothing in the nature of things that rules out in advance that a complex thought-emotion tells us something about the real world. Only by elevating one particular and idiosyncratic way of seeing to absolute status – the one compatible with technological-capitalist interests – does the seeing mind get deformed into a tunnel vision that keeps us from truly becoming better acquainted with reality, perhaps even intimate: with people, places, living things, the universe – whatever. (Acknowledgement to C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, a section of the Philosophical Investigations.)

Autonomy and the construction of reality

 

I want to add a thought to yesterday's entry on the anniversary of the insurrection. 

     From Freud I learned about fantasies of omnipotence and primary narcissism – experiencing the world and others as extensions of self with no independent value or reality. Autonomy. What Trump does in politics – constructs reality to suit his egoism; constructs tiny epistemic bubbles and ferocious echo chambers in which his fantasy-self has  some "reality" – has been the cultural norm for his social class for centuries now. That is what every narcissist does in a small way: social media makes it easy (most of us have at least a bit of the narcissist in us; another way of saying we are sinners). Trump has millions in thrall to the fantasy world required by his narcissism. It's just a matter of scale. 

       The prototype was Milton’s Satan – “The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”  

That may be said to be the root of all evil, as Milton perceived. It is the pure condition of sin unless modified by some real care for something outside the ego. (I love Paradise Lost read aloud by Ian Richardson.) Narcissism might well be translated as "original sin." And the difference between us fallible mortals and an angel like Satan is that our narcissism is a form of spiritual damage, a spiritual disease - not chosen in pure unconditioned freedom as an angel theoretically could choose it. (Read about Trump's family and you will know where the damage - which he at some point embraced and identified himself with - came from.) 

    The proper emotional response to Trump is pity or compassion. But he can only be helped by breaking the link between his worshippers who feed his narcissism and the man himself. The courts may be the last best chance for the man to be forced to see the truth and be saved ("... and the truth will set you free,"). To see him as a broken spirit is the last best hope for his worshippers. Being made into an idol is the secret goal of every narcissist. By cooperating with this project his worshippers become idolaters, worshipping a fantasy rather than the true God. Everything is says is Truth. Everything is does is purely good. It is not an accident that the first commandment is against making idolatry. His appeal for so-called Christian nationalists reveals something deeply disturbing about that mentality, for Trump is about as close to Christ as I am to the edge of the universe. 

   ("Christian nationalism" - what a devilish oxymoron. Jesus a xenophobe? Jesus a hater of the downtrodden? Jesus directing the construction of a wall to keep all those hopelessly impoverished people out? What happened to the Good Samaritan? What happened to the beatitudes? "Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these brothers and sisters of mine, you did to me." But as we know, all kinds of horrible stuff is done in the name of God. Idolatry, all of it. Any bad or evil thing done in the name of God or Christ makes an idol, a human construct, out of God. Well, what does the epistemological bubble say: “This is an invasion. This is like a military invasion.... Drugs, criminals, gang members and terrorists are pouring into our country at record levels. We’ve never seen anything like it. They’re taking over our cities.” Scrooge. Dehumanize and demean to cut the heart off from compassion.  Just dehumanize whoever you want to be cruel to. I don't know what to do about immigration but I do know there is nothing Christian about that. And people like me? In comes the echo chamber: WOKE or RINO or LIBERAL or VERMIN - i.e. someone without anything to say who is just insanely and obsessively out to get Trump, as though that were their life purpose. Lord have mercy. Pardon this digression.)

      Acknowledging the worth of others, that other people are limits to a person's will like nothing else in the world, limits the ego. Nature, if it is Creation, limits our range of choice in different ways. We may use it well, but not destroy it. We must preserve in our use its essential beauty and goodness (“And He saw that it was good, very good.”)  It is not ours but God’s and it exists only because God loves it. At least, that has been the mainstream Christian teaching. The common good also limits the will of those who govern (with or without consent). It may be difficult at times to judge what the common good requires; the one who governs needs practical wisdom to understand what is right and the courage to do the right thing. All these limits define our humanity and yet are precisely what must be rejected at all costs by the narcissist - who is spiritually sick and deserves pity, at least while they are not in the process of destroying something good; then they must be stopped - for their own good as well as the good of what they would reduce or destroy. 

       That is what Trump and his radical left antipodes have in common: a refusal to recognize that reality limits the will, whether the reality be nature, one’s own body, the country, or other people. They share a refusal to recognize any value that does not have its source in their own uneducated desires. They can have nothing to be accountable for; they are their own judge and jury. They are, in Nietzsche’s words, beyond good and evil. They are autonomous. 

 

. . .

Afterthought

      The state of culture in America reminds me a bit of the setting for many of Plato's dialogs in Athens, with the sophists being the enemies of truth, the servants of the autonomous ego. Socrates in conversation really cares about truth – about the whole family of truth concepts: deepened understanding, more comprehensive insight, awareness of alternative viewpoints, conceptual clarity, logical consistency, etc. His sophist interlocutors often do not. Their egos and their social capital are typically at stake. Argument and conversation become a veneer; not a vehicle of understanding and self-disclosure but a mask concealing the desire to be right elevate their egos and increase their social capital, partly by diminishing their interlocutor. Words become weapons. They kill Socrates. 

    The driving conceptual metaphor (discussed in Metaphors We Live By) that informs our language of argument (as in giving reasons to support a conclusion) is ARGUMENT IS WAR, and it represents the attitude of the sophists: we attack, undermine, destroy the opponent’s argument and defend our own from attack, etc. The point is not to understand together with a partner, but the propagandist’s: to produce an emotive effect creating the mere appearance that puts you in a good light and the opponent in a bad one. Arguments in this sophist version are not a means to justify or understand but one tool among others to diminish others and elevate the self. 

    Using argument like that is like using an umbrella as a sword or a book of philosophy to hit someone over the head.