A long deeply thoughtful discussion with an architect friend posted to the Internet during 1996 began with the question of how architecture contributes to the design of cyberspace. It proceeded to the question of learning the design processes and technologies which transition between profane spaces and sacred spaces; which touch the transcendental realm so that we can ascend to the sacred, our heart’s proper desire, and distinguish it from the profane. Some excellent aids to understanding these topics are: Philip Sherrard’s The Sacred in Life and Art and Louis Bouyer’s Liturgy and Architecture. This is a long essay, so it has been split into two parts. Part I is here. It contains real gems on technology, ideology, worship and culture. Part II Sections include:
- Trust and the Refinement of Consciousness
- Worship and Altars
- Walking Continuously on the Thin Crust of the Bottomless Pit
- Schweben - oscillate, hover, soar, balance, suspend
- Heart of the Anointed
- Definitions and Refinement of the Goal
- Unity and the Sovereign Individual
- Artifact Through Symbol Pointing to the Sacred
- Sinful Structures and Authority
- Defining the Good
Trust and the Refinement of Consciousness
Expansion and growth, fitness and evolvability are imperatives of life. Nothing utopian about that, it’s just factual. Advance or decadence are all we are offered.
I think that Chartres was specifically built to draw our spirit up, up and away into space through those tremendously rich stained-glass windows high overhead, with the sunlight streaming in through the wafting smoke of incense and candles. Spengler referred to the feelings that our modern technological power give us, in this way:
I think that Chartres was specifically built to draw our spirit up, up and away into space through those tremendously rich stained-glass windows high overhead, with the sunlight streaming in through the wafting smoke of incense and candles. Spengler referred to the feelings that our modern technological power give us, in this way:
This is the outward- and upward-straining life-feeling.... The intoxicated soul wills to fly above space and Time. An ineffable longing tempts him to indefinable horizons. Man would free himself from the earth, rise into the infinite, leave the bonds of the body, and circle in the universe of space amongst the stars.
I am here making the explicit claim that these feelings are identical to the feelings one had while worshipping in Chartres Cathedral in the thirteenth century, and that our technological wonders evolved as we aimed at our spiritual ideals from this period of time.
To connect this thought to Cyberspace, our true longing, to expand and grow, our pioneer spirit that took us from medieval Paris through the wilderness to the Oregon Territory, is to leave earth physically and explore outer space. Until we can do that, however, what frontiers are left to expand and grow into, where’s the wilderness to tame? Why, it is internal, it is Cyberspace, which boils down into a temporary stopover, a holding pattern, until our technology advances further. And the impetus we have to delve into Cyberspace is the same impetus we had in Chartres Cathedral, we have denatured space and Time here, we have ‘indefinable horizons’ and all the rest. A plunge into Cyberspace can invoke the same feelings as looking up through those high windows in Chartres. The same individuals who would call Chartres ‘a pile of rocks’ would call Cyberspace ‘electrons on a screen’ or a Lamborghini a ‘rolling hunk of metal.’ Such minds are staring fixedly at the mud. Just because the mud is made sacred (Mother Earth), does not make us turn our eyes upward. We need more discussion of ‘sacred spaces.’
Energy is not matter, matter is not energy. There is a mathematical equivalence between them, or I would rather say, a conjunction. The equal sign in e = mc2 is this conjunction, it points to a transcendental aspect of existence, in my thought. There is a transcendental aspect to human existence, but I am undecided as to how to conceptualize it, it is what Plato and Eric Voegelin refer to as metaxy.
We have discussed at length how faith is prior to reason, therefore, all faith is based on irrationality. There is no ground under reason, faith is not ground. Do we care to differentiate between “faith” and “presuppositions”? Aren’t we floating in “metaphysical space” here, or is it in “self-evident space”?
My definition of progress:
To connect this thought to Cyberspace, our true longing, to expand and grow, our pioneer spirit that took us from medieval Paris through the wilderness to the Oregon Territory, is to leave earth physically and explore outer space. Until we can do that, however, what frontiers are left to expand and grow into, where’s the wilderness to tame? Why, it is internal, it is Cyberspace, which boils down into a temporary stopover, a holding pattern, until our technology advances further. And the impetus we have to delve into Cyberspace is the same impetus we had in Chartres Cathedral, we have denatured space and Time here, we have ‘indefinable horizons’ and all the rest. A plunge into Cyberspace can invoke the same feelings as looking up through those high windows in Chartres. The same individuals who would call Chartres ‘a pile of rocks’ would call Cyberspace ‘electrons on a screen’ or a Lamborghini a ‘rolling hunk of metal.’ Such minds are staring fixedly at the mud. Just because the mud is made sacred (Mother Earth), does not make us turn our eyes upward. We need more discussion of ‘sacred spaces.’
Energy is not matter, matter is not energy. There is a mathematical equivalence between them, or I would rather say, a conjunction. The equal sign in e = mc2 is this conjunction, it points to a transcendental aspect of existence, in my thought. There is a transcendental aspect to human existence, but I am undecided as to how to conceptualize it, it is what Plato and Eric Voegelin refer to as metaxy.
We have discussed at length how faith is prior to reason, therefore, all faith is based on irrationality. There is no ground under reason, faith is not ground. Do we care to differentiate between “faith” and “presuppositions”? Aren’t we floating in “metaphysical space” here, or is it in “self-evident space”?
My definition of progress:
Successful consensual purposes never entirely disappear from the conceptual terrain, they represent peaks of meaning. If the next conceptual peak found in a search phase is lower, a population may move back to the higher one, or continue the search. Progress is the movement of a population to ever higher peaks of meaning, all novel, while avoiding catastrophes.
The life purposes that align most closely to “vital liberty,” to the equal sign in Einstein’s formula, to the transcendental conjunction of humanism and technicism as I have defined them, stand the best chance of surviving catastrophes and leading to higher peaks of meaning, or “progress.” Progress is most definitely not assured, catastrophes do happen, which is why we have technological development, to minimize their chance of occurring (that is our rationale, but perhaps catastrophes occur due to technological development, perhaps catastrophes are simply a necessary background to evolutionary fitness landscaping).
Progress is not a linear phenomenon, or a cyclical phenomenon, the time taken by populations to reach higher peaks of meaning is highly variable. Search phases dynamically alter our fitness landscapes as they progress, the “maps” change with time, and consolidation phases (what we call Embodiment) also vary depending on the depths of philosophical and religious penetration into the incoming stream of reality we have achieved. The deeper the penetration, the longer the consolidation required. Shallow, ephemeral religions (such as New Age nonsense) are built around shallow penetrations, deep and abiding religions are built around deep penetrations.
A direct Goethe quote, “In the beginning was the deed.” But, in which direction must one act? One must choose a direction prior to doing, right? So one must choose a direction, a value, a theory prior to a deed, a fact, evidence.
I want to pass on some quotes from Stuart Kauffman’s Origins of Order that deal with the dynamic nature of the extension and retraction of trust. In essence, Kauffman’s biophysical models have shown that excessive familiarity (trust) leads to contempt (distrust) and excessive contempt (distrust) leads to familiarity (trust). This movement over time is what I refer to as a homeorhetic process, the honing in on a moving point in a dynamic pattern of increasing complexity, what Kauffman refers to as coevolving to the edge of chaos. Our individual assent in this process is the major driving force in it, but it cannot be isolated from each other or from our environment. I define civility as the conjunction of familiarity and contempt; there is an impetus to civility over time no matter what state of brutality or civilization we start out in.
Progress is not a linear phenomenon, or a cyclical phenomenon, the time taken by populations to reach higher peaks of meaning is highly variable. Search phases dynamically alter our fitness landscapes as they progress, the “maps” change with time, and consolidation phases (what we call Embodiment) also vary depending on the depths of philosophical and religious penetration into the incoming stream of reality we have achieved. The deeper the penetration, the longer the consolidation required. Shallow, ephemeral religions (such as New Age nonsense) are built around shallow penetrations, deep and abiding religions are built around deep penetrations.
A direct Goethe quote, “In the beginning was the deed.” But, in which direction must one act? One must choose a direction prior to doing, right? So one must choose a direction, a value, a theory prior to a deed, a fact, evidence.
I want to pass on some quotes from Stuart Kauffman’s Origins of Order that deal with the dynamic nature of the extension and retraction of trust. In essence, Kauffman’s biophysical models have shown that excessive familiarity (trust) leads to contempt (distrust) and excessive contempt (distrust) leads to familiarity (trust). This movement over time is what I refer to as a homeorhetic process, the honing in on a moving point in a dynamic pattern of increasing complexity, what Kauffman refers to as coevolving to the edge of chaos. Our individual assent in this process is the major driving force in it, but it cannot be isolated from each other or from our environment. I define civility as the conjunction of familiarity and contempt; there is an impetus to civility over time no matter what state of brutality or civilization we start out in.
An even broader basis suggests that in order to optimally predict one another’s behavior, complex adaptive agents [that’s us] will build optimally complex, and hence boundedly rational, models of one another. Such adaptive agents might well coevolve to the edge of chaos.
The bounds to rationality he’s referring to here are the moral choices we make prior to reason. Trust is a choice, but the quality and nature of trust is complicated as he goes on to discuss.
In general, given finite data, optimal models best able to generalize are of an intermediate complexity tuned to the data available. Second, when adaptive agents make models of one another as part of their mutual ongoing behavior, the eventual failure of any finite, approximate model of another’s behavior drives substitution of a ‘nearby,’ optimally complex of the other’s behavior which now appears to be the best fit to the other’s behavior.
Sounds like what we call “stereotyping,” or “labeling,” both very highly useful mechanisms.
Third, adaptive agents may persistently alter their models of one another’s behavior. Once an agent adopts a changed model of another agent, then his own decision rules, and hence behavior, will change. It follows that such agents must coevolve with one another using changing models of one another’s behavior.
This is the learning behavior we indulge in with our on-line letter campaigns. What do cyberspace individuals mean anyway, and who are they really?
Fourth, presumably, such coevolving behavior can be chaotic, ordered, or at the edge of chaos. Chaotic behavior would correspond to rapidly changing models of the other agents. Ordered behavior would correspond to converging on a mutually consistent set of models of one another. This yields full behavior coordination and is close to the theory of rational expectations in economics. At the edge of chaos, models of one another would be poised, tending to change, unleashing avalanches of changes throughout the system of interacting agents.
This last scenario is the homeorhetic one, it is where I believe our best chance to increase meaning in our lives is to be found.
Fifth, a qualitative argument suggests that, in a persistent attempt to optimize prediction about the behavior of other agents, adaptive agents will alter their finite, optimally complex models of one another so that the entire system approaches the edge of chaos. If the dynamics are very stable and mutually consistent, then each agent has an abundance of reliable data about the behavior of the other agents. Given more data, each agent naturally attempts to improve his capacity to generalize about the other agents’ behavior by constructing a more complex model of the others’ actions. This more complex model is necessarily more sensitive to small alterations in the other agents’ behavior. It lives on a more rugged landscape. Thus as agents adopt more complex models to predict better, the coevolving system of agents tends to be driven from the ordered regime toward the chaotic regime.
Individuals with very high emotional acuity, who can pick “out of the air” signals as to the other person’s intentions and motivations that the other person may not be consciously sending, are highly sensitized to even the slightest shifts in emphasis of speech or movements in body language. Likewise, individuals living in a close-knit moral polity can react quickly and strongly to the tiniest deviations in others behavior, deviations that in a stranger would go entirely unnoticed. We are driven to become less sensitive by our social relations.
Conversely, in the chaotic regime, each agent has very limited reliable data about the other agents’ behavior. In part, the absence of reliable data reflects the fact that in the chaotic regime each agent adopts successive models of the others, thus actually changing the ‘law’ or decision rules governing his own behavior. Given the small amount of reliable data, each agent, in order optimize the capacity to generalize, is driven to build a less complex model of the other agents’ behavior. These less complex models are less sensitive to the behavior of the others, and thus live on smoother landscapes. The substitution of simpler models therefore drives the system from the chaotic regime toward the ordered regime. The process, I hope, will generically attain the edge of chaos.
Our expectations of stranger’s behavior, or of the behavior of other cultures or countries, is low. As they become more familiar, our expectations rise and rise and rise, until they inevitably disappoint us, then our expectations drop back. This constant to and fro, of high expectations (trust) and low expectations (distrust), is a dynamic process over time, never settling down, but tending towards the middle ground of homeorhesis, or civility.
I hope this helps some about where trust comes from and where it is directed towards. We agree that trust is an aspect of love, in the individual case, not the general case. We can “love” all humanity in the abstract, this does not require us to “trust” all individuals. But, in the concrete, it seems that we need to trust an individual prior to loving that individual. A big part of what makes a saint a saint, is that they have the ability to extend the abstract love of all humanity down to the concrete case of each individual, they “trust” all individuals, willing to bear any consequences.
I hope this helps some about where trust comes from and where it is directed towards. We agree that trust is an aspect of love, in the individual case, not the general case. We can “love” all humanity in the abstract, this does not require us to “trust” all individuals. But, in the concrete, it seems that we need to trust an individual prior to loving that individual. A big part of what makes a saint a saint, is that they have the ability to extend the abstract love of all humanity down to the concrete case of each individual, they “trust” all individuals, willing to bear any consequences.
Worship and Altars
Who or what is deserving of our worship must be subjected to the same analysis that we used to destroy any a priori foundations of reason. The observer must not be left out. The gap between the object of our worship and ourselves is vast, unbridgeable. Every deeply religious thinker comes to this image. It must be “mediated” regardless of what the object is. We must have the free will to choose our object, to choose our mediator, this means we can choose wrongly (undeserving) as well as rightly (deserving). We agree that the “right” choice can only be made with, in essence, grace.
My children wanted to know why celebrity TV shows are so popular, why the public is so interested in Hollywood and Rock Stars. I explained how the TV set is the modern version of the altar in our homes. The images we see day by day presented on the altar are the object to which our worship is drawn. I explained the worship of icons in the Orthodox Church in ancient times, why it was eventually deemed to be heresy, and why it is no accident that such stars today are referred to as “pop icons.”
Libraries may once have been thought of as the temples of learning and civilizational knowledge, but there were no altars in them, no images placed on the altars. The bookshelves in homes which still have books are not altars. The personal computer and the web do not have the same “altar” aspect as TV does, but they are moving in that direction [achieved in the smartphone of 2016]. Seduction awaits around every corner, every minute of the day.
You can refuse to inhabit a space if you have practicable choices available to you. Most individuals in human history have had to live, think and educate children in severely constrained conditions. As Boethius wrote, a rigorous enough internal coherence of virtue, and a dollop of principled fortitude, must suffice to avoid seduction even when we can’t refuse the outward space-and-time we exist in. But individuals, by and large, are weak, hence, if we can keep the seductive artifacts to a minimum, society gets along better. A truly virtuous individual, filled with high internal character, need not fear the “valley of the shadow of death.”
This is the Puritan impetus that founded this great country, and which largely animated it until the post-Revolution era. It is difficult to find much purity of motives amongst the public these days. The last few generations have been steeped in moral equivalency to the degree that would have sunk any other civilization, had it not been for our tremendous moral reserves and memory of reserves from our Founding Days. It helped to have the evil empire of world communism around to disguise how far we were falling. Relative to them, we were a paragon of virtue.
If you look at the TV and movies from 1996 on, it would appear that our culture has adopted hedonistic emotions as the object of our worship. Our hearts and minds are directed to carnal and blood lust.
My children wanted to know why celebrity TV shows are so popular, why the public is so interested in Hollywood and Rock Stars. I explained how the TV set is the modern version of the altar in our homes. The images we see day by day presented on the altar are the object to which our worship is drawn. I explained the worship of icons in the Orthodox Church in ancient times, why it was eventually deemed to be heresy, and why it is no accident that such stars today are referred to as “pop icons.”
Libraries may once have been thought of as the temples of learning and civilizational knowledge, but there were no altars in them, no images placed on the altars. The bookshelves in homes which still have books are not altars. The personal computer and the web do not have the same “altar” aspect as TV does, but they are moving in that direction [achieved in the smartphone of 2016]. Seduction awaits around every corner, every minute of the day.
You can refuse to inhabit a space if you have practicable choices available to you. Most individuals in human history have had to live, think and educate children in severely constrained conditions. As Boethius wrote, a rigorous enough internal coherence of virtue, and a dollop of principled fortitude, must suffice to avoid seduction even when we can’t refuse the outward space-and-time we exist in. But individuals, by and large, are weak, hence, if we can keep the seductive artifacts to a minimum, society gets along better. A truly virtuous individual, filled with high internal character, need not fear the “valley of the shadow of death.”
This is the Puritan impetus that founded this great country, and which largely animated it until the post-Revolution era. It is difficult to find much purity of motives amongst the public these days. The last few generations have been steeped in moral equivalency to the degree that would have sunk any other civilization, had it not been for our tremendous moral reserves and memory of reserves from our Founding Days. It helped to have the evil empire of world communism around to disguise how far we were falling. Relative to them, we were a paragon of virtue.
If you look at the TV and movies from 1996 on, it would appear that our culture has adopted hedonistic emotions as the object of our worship. Our hearts and minds are directed to carnal and blood lust.
Walking Continuously on the Thin Crust of the Bottomless Pit
Spengler speaks of the beginnings of a new culture in places protected from the hustle and bustle of city-life, where time to imagine is available, and protection from hostile criticism ‘not of the body.’ He says the “youthful inwardness proceeds always out of... sanctuaries, solitary cloisters, and hermitages.” In these protected spaces “is formed the community of high awareness, of the spiritual elect” who are little understood by those in the ‘real’ world. The building of Chartres proceeded from such a small beginning, “the mysticism of earliest Gothic, too, was confined to small elect circles, sealed by Latin and the difficulty of its concepts and figures, and neither nobility nor peasantry had any distinct idea of its existence.”
Spengler held that culture is religious, civilization is irreligious, “In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete - thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.” It is difficult to argue with this given that the great writers have been lamenting the crumbling of Western Christianity for over two hundred years now, long before Nietzsche pronounced the death of god.
We have gotten into the realm of medieval theological positions of free-will versus determinism in our discussion. I love Spengler’s description of the mind-set these took place in, “Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit.” This is a metaphor for cyberspace in our world today. “Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant...” Those who cannot feel the presence of evil in the world, in this post-gulag, post-holocaust world, are blind to the microscope they are being placed under in the World Surveillance State. The sense of the presence of evil is required for peaks of meaning to lift up, “Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the [Divine Comedy] or the frescoes of [Fra Angelico] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” This mind-set was of “an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces; that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully.” We are still fearful of where our freedom is leading us, but where is the meditation on this today? All ye who enter cyberspace walk continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit.
Why the centrality of cyberspace? Why is it space? Because “the only way of actualizing itself that the soul knows - is the symbolizing of extension, of space or of things; and we find it alike in the conceptions of absolute space that pervade... Gothic cathedral-interiors and... in the world-embracing spatial energy of modern technics.” The technological evolution of cyberspace will be in the direction of how our minds work, our spectrum-of-focus, our tradeoffs between depth and breadth of thought, or between cold abstract intensity and dreamy associative creativity. But, where this evolution falls short of how we actually think, our minds will evolve to fit the technology; we will, in fact, think radically differently than we do now after long use. The only comparison I can think of, is between oral and literate societies. Thought itself is different.
Spengler discusses the architectural symbols of Ancient Greece versus Western Christendom as being the answers to life’s deepest questions. The ancients regarded “the prime problem of all being” as “the material origin and foundation of all sensuously-perceptible things. While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic hovers. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil.” The interior pulls up, but also: “The window as architecture... is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless.” What prime symbol answers our deepest questions in today’s post-rational global civilization? It seems that modern architecture is just fashion, a recycling of older forms in jumbled splotches, no answers on the horizon.
Why have we gone into space with our technology, and instead of thrusting outward, have turned the extensions of our senses away from the stars, and back down to the earth, to observing and recording human ants and sheep scurrying around importantly on the surface. “It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving - to be alone with endless space.” Why have we abandoned this craving? In a word, nihilism.
Nihilism comes when “the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone...” The last living act of a culture is self-repudiation, witness the hatred of America rooted in academia today. “The notion of a Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man.” This is just wonderful, 95 years ago, the World State is pegged correctly as the political expression of nihilism. Give up the struggle for individuality, for privacy, for existence, the World State will bring peace to all, Big Brother loves humanity.
The twin manufactured “crises” of our age, environmental catastrophe and over-population, are both manifestations of nihilism. Spengler calls this attempt to reduce humanity to ciphers, and then to expertly manage the world population demographics, “Unfruitfulness.” It
Spengler held that culture is religious, civilization is irreligious, “In religion as otherwise the human pyramid rises with increasing sharpness, till at the end of the Culture it is complete - thereafter, bit by bit, to crumble.” It is difficult to argue with this given that the great writers have been lamenting the crumbling of Western Christianity for over two hundred years now, long before Nietzsche pronounced the death of god.
We have gotten into the realm of medieval theological positions of free-will versus determinism in our discussion. I love Spengler’s description of the mind-set these took place in, “Man walked continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit.” This is a metaphor for cyberspace in our world today. “Life in this world is a ceaseless and desperate contest with the Devil, into which every individual plunges as a member of the Church Militant...” Those who cannot feel the presence of evil in the world, in this post-gulag, post-holocaust world, are blind to the microscope they are being placed under in the World Surveillance State. The sense of the presence of evil is required for peaks of meaning to lift up, “Men who did not feel the Devil very near at hand could not have created the [Divine Comedy] or the frescoes of [Fra Angelico] or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.” This mind-set was of “an Ego that was all force, but a force negligibly weak in an infinity of greater forces; that was all will, but a will full of fear for its freedom. Never has the problem of Free-will been meditated upon more deeply or more painfully.” We are still fearful of where our freedom is leading us, but where is the meditation on this today? All ye who enter cyberspace walk continuously on the thin crust of the bottomless pit.
Why the centrality of cyberspace? Why is it space? Because “the only way of actualizing itself that the soul knows - is the symbolizing of extension, of space or of things; and we find it alike in the conceptions of absolute space that pervade... Gothic cathedral-interiors and... in the world-embracing spatial energy of modern technics.” The technological evolution of cyberspace will be in the direction of how our minds work, our spectrum-of-focus, our tradeoffs between depth and breadth of thought, or between cold abstract intensity and dreamy associative creativity. But, where this evolution falls short of how we actually think, our minds will evolve to fit the technology; we will, in fact, think radically differently than we do now after long use. The only comparison I can think of, is between oral and literate societies. Thought itself is different.
Spengler discusses the architectural symbols of Ancient Greece versus Western Christendom as being the answers to life’s deepest questions. The ancients regarded “the prime problem of all being” as “the material origin and foundation of all sensuously-perceptible things. While the Gothic style soars, the Ionic hovers. The interior of the cathedral pulls up with primeval force, but the temple is laid down in majestic rest. The choice of prime symbol in the moment of the Culture-soul’s awakening into self-consciousness on its own soil.” The interior pulls up, but also: “The window as architecture... is peculiar to the Faustian soul and the most significant symbol of its depth-experience. In it can be felt the will to emerge from the interior into the boundless.” What prime symbol answers our deepest questions in today’s post-rational global civilization? It seems that modern architecture is just fashion, a recycling of older forms in jumbled splotches, no answers on the horizon.
Why have we gone into space with our technology, and instead of thrusting outward, have turned the extensions of our senses away from the stars, and back down to the earth, to observing and recording human ants and sheep scurrying around importantly on the surface. “It was we and not the Hellenes or the men of the high Renaissance that prized and sought out high mountain tops for the sake of the limitless range of vision that they afford. This is a Faustian craving - to be alone with endless space.” Why have we abandoned this craving? In a word, nihilism.
Nihilism comes when “the ideals of yesterday, the religious and artistic and political forms that have grown up through the centuries, are undone...” The last living act of a culture is self-repudiation, witness the hatred of America rooted in academia today. “The notion of a Socialist Nirvana has its justification in so far that European weariness covers its flight from the struggle for existence under catchwords of world-peace, Humanity and brotherhood of Man.” This is just wonderful, 95 years ago, the World State is pegged correctly as the political expression of nihilism. Give up the struggle for individuality, for privacy, for existence, the World State will bring peace to all, Big Brother loves humanity.
The twin manufactured “crises” of our age, environmental catastrophe and over-population, are both manifestations of nihilism. Spengler calls this attempt to reduce humanity to ciphers, and then to expertly manage the world population demographics, “Unfruitfulness.” It
marks the brain-man of the megalopolis, as the sign of fulfilled destiny, and it is one of the most impressive facts of historical symbolism that the change manifests itself not only in the extinction of great art, of great courtesy, of great formal thought, of the great style in all things, but also quite carnally in the childlessness and ‘race-suicide’ of the civilized and rootless strata...
Abortion, sterilization, birth control, euthanasia, managed (meaning rationed) health care, high family taxes and gay marriage all are aspects of expertly managed demographics; a weariness of the struggle for existence.
The experts bring about mediocrity, a great leveling, no great issues, no great ideas, no heroes, no saints allowed, all in the name of increasing manageability of the masses. The “old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great-man” is replaced “by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd.” “Ideas” are replaced by “aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening.” This “hurried and shallow activity” means “that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City.” Clearly, as American inner spiritual space is deadened by the prevailing dogma of scientific nihilism, we need to grow and expand into outer space, i.e., South America, the Balkans, the Pacific Rim, in short, into a global empire.
Part of the expert class are the scientists and the self-help gurus:
The experts bring about mediocrity, a great leveling, no great issues, no great ideas, no heroes, no saints allowed, all in the name of increasing manageability of the masses. The “old meaningful and far-ranging Creation of the great-man” is replaced “by the unrestrained Agitation of the small and shrewd.” “Ideas” are replaced by “aims, symbols by programs. The expansion-element common to all Civilizations, the imperialistic substitution of outer space for inner spiritual space, characterizes this also. Quantity replaces quality, spreading replaces deepening.” This “hurried and shallow activity” means “that creative inner life is at an end and intellectual existence can only be kept up materially, by outward effect in the space of the City.” Clearly, as American inner spiritual space is deadened by the prevailing dogma of scientific nihilism, we need to grow and expand into outer space, i.e., South America, the Balkans, the Pacific Rim, in short, into a global empire.
Part of the expert class are the scientists and the self-help gurus:
This decisive turn towards the one remaining kind of life - that is, life as a fact, seen biologically and under causality-relations instead of as Destiny - is particularly manifest in the ethical passion with which men now turn to philosophies of digestion, nutrition and hygiene. Religions, as they are when they stand new-born on the threshold of the new Culture... would have felt it degradation even to glance at questions of this kind. Nowadays, one rises to them.
This is so true today, it is swamping our bookstores and our television, I suppose it’s related to ‘bad money drives out good.’
Now that the experts have euphamized all our living, vital terminology into politically correct inert sludge, what is the best we can hope for in our World State?
Now that the experts have euphamized all our living, vital terminology into politically correct inert sludge, what is the best we can hope for in our World State?
Socialism is the maximum possible of attainment to a life-feeling under the aspect of Aims; for the directional movement of Life that is felt as Time and Destiny, when it hardens, takes the form of an intellectual machinery of means and end. Direction is the living, aim the dead. The passionate energy of the advance is generically Faustian, the mechanical remainder - ‘Progress’ - is specifically Socialistic, the two being related as body and skeleton. In spite of its foreground appearances, ethical Socialism is not a system of compassion, humanity, peace and kindly care, but one of will-to-power. Any other reading of it is illusory.
Schweben - oscillate, hover, soar, balance, suspend
The expert class, managing the world masses, worships Power - perks and privilege. Another word for the struggle to grab the reins of global empire is Caesarism.
But what now remains of those barriers which formerly arrested tyranny? Since religion has lost its empire over the souls of men, the most prominent boundary that divided good from evil is overthrown; everything seems doubtful and indeterminate in the moral world; kings and nations are guided by chance, and none can say where are the natural limits of despotism and the bounds of license.
Transhumanists who speak of “meat-space” and denigrate our bodies as “meat” are undoubtedly neo-Manichaeans. Why they don’t think of the computers they’ll download themselves into as evil materiality, I don’t know, perhaps it’s just an oversight. Why is a silicon/germanium skeleton superior to a carbon/calcium skeleton? It is either fashion, a current fad that is “in the air,” or self-hatred.
Neo-Manichaeanism is strong in the world today. Science says that we are just material bodies, clumps of molecules, which, when looked at more closely, turn out to be clumps of random activity, which came from nothing and are going to nothing, purposelessly and meaninglessly. Our material bodies must be bad, they make us die, obviously we must be free of them. The overthrow of religious beliefs in anything but this scientific view has been the object of states around the world for many years now, it makes the imposition of tyranny so much easier. Tocqueville wrote in 1835:
Neo-Manichaeanism is strong in the world today. Science says that we are just material bodies, clumps of molecules, which, when looked at more closely, turn out to be clumps of random activity, which came from nothing and are going to nothing, purposelessly and meaninglessly. Our material bodies must be bad, they make us die, obviously we must be free of them. The overthrow of religious beliefs in anything but this scientific view has been the object of states around the world for many years now, it makes the imposition of tyranny so much easier. Tocqueville wrote in 1835:
It seems to me that Spengler was writing about the origin of the idea of the dynamic perfectibility of humanity which arose in the pre-Chartres culture. Anselm articulated it in the eleventh century. It is a foundational belief of Americans, Tocqueville observed that Americans all have
a lively faith in the perfectibility of man, they judge that the diffusion of knowledge must necessarily be advantageous, and the consequences of ignorance fatal; they all consider society as a body in a state of improvement, humanity as a changing scene, in which nothing is, or ought to be, permanent...
It is not technology that points us to this goal, it is our spiritual ideal, of rising up through the exquisite windows of the cathedral, up and out into space.
Perhaps a better term for this foundational belief is not ‘progress’ but perfectibility. The approach of the spirit, and of the intellect, to God, was a dynamic voyage through space closer to perfection, but never arriving. See Anselm’s Proslogium (1070), see Charles Hartshorne’s Anselm’s Discovery (1965) or see Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Basis for Morals (1992) for commentary on Anselm’s ideas of perfection. The idea was ‘in the air’ at the time Chartres was constructed, this is not conjecture, we have the writings.
As I have said, the idea of the overcoming limits, evolving into even overcoming the limits of our bodies, can be traced back to the Crusades. It is a specifically western Christian idea.
But Tocqueville says this is simply the natural evolution of democratic societies,
Perhaps a better term for this foundational belief is not ‘progress’ but perfectibility. The approach of the spirit, and of the intellect, to God, was a dynamic voyage through space closer to perfection, but never arriving. See Anselm’s Proslogium (1070), see Charles Hartshorne’s Anselm’s Discovery (1965) or see Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Basis for Morals (1992) for commentary on Anselm’s ideas of perfection. The idea was ‘in the air’ at the time Chartres was constructed, this is not conjecture, we have the writings.
As I have said, the idea of the overcoming limits, evolving into even overcoming the limits of our bodies, can be traced back to the Crusades. It is a specifically western Christian idea.
But Tocqueville says this is simply the natural evolution of democratic societies,
As they go forward, the barriers which imprisoned society and behind which they were born are lowered; old opinions, which for centuries had been controlling the world, vanish; a course almost without limits, a field without horizon, is revealed: the human spirit rushes forward and traverses them in every direction.
Democracy itself, when inexorably pursuing equality, is disembodied, all by itself. The Greeks thought of democracy as empowered envy.
After reading Etienne Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy (1960), I must say that I recognized the brain-uploaders as not committing the Original Sin of attempting to be as God, but rather as attempting to enter Thomas Aquinas’ angelic order. When I read the description of the angelic order, compared to the human order, I recognized the philosophical essence of what the uploaders are planning. The whole idea of evolution backs up the uploaders in this pursuit, dynamic evolution, that is, not a Teilhard de Chardin linear evolution to a static perfection. The evolution is of intellectual substance proceeding from the bestial order to the human order to the angelic order. The desire to be as gods is present in some of them, but in others, it is to be as angels. More adolescent behavior is shown by their virulent anti-Christian bigotry while unknowingly pursuing Christian theological lines of thought.
This whole discussion has prompted many interesting thoughts, and led down some odd byways about how to get the message of transcendence transmitted between messenger and receiver in such a way as to minimize the seductive aspects of symbols, while retaining the conceptual richness that the symbols need to represent. The act of symbolizing is a rendering of the transcendent into the solid or ordered realm, an aesthetic artifact or an act of writing, no matter how great, is a static thing, a snapshot in time. Dynamic symbols, moving to a homeorhetic filigreed flux between order and chaos, is what is needed to more closely approach the transcendent. This sounds suspiciously close to “the message is the medium.” But the PC, smartphone and the web, technologically miraculous as they are, pale before this task. The engagement of the body is needed, perhaps, maybe a perfected VR might work if we are free to physically act out. A VR liturgy of high mass bells and smells, in a virtual Chartres, with standing for praise, sitting for learning, and kneeling for prayer. It is not only the capture of the intellect as it is drawn upwards and outwards without limits through the high windows of Chartres cathedral, it is also the pervading sense of peace that the body experiences when it passes through the close at Salisbury cathedral. The spaces are linked side-by-side, but not experienced simultaneously. Perhaps a simultaneous experience, a weaving, of these is something to learn to design for, over time.
After reading Etienne Gilson’s Elements of Christian Philosophy (1960), I must say that I recognized the brain-uploaders as not committing the Original Sin of attempting to be as God, but rather as attempting to enter Thomas Aquinas’ angelic order. When I read the description of the angelic order, compared to the human order, I recognized the philosophical essence of what the uploaders are planning. The whole idea of evolution backs up the uploaders in this pursuit, dynamic evolution, that is, not a Teilhard de Chardin linear evolution to a static perfection. The evolution is of intellectual substance proceeding from the bestial order to the human order to the angelic order. The desire to be as gods is present in some of them, but in others, it is to be as angels. More adolescent behavior is shown by their virulent anti-Christian bigotry while unknowingly pursuing Christian theological lines of thought.
This whole discussion has prompted many interesting thoughts, and led down some odd byways about how to get the message of transcendence transmitted between messenger and receiver in such a way as to minimize the seductive aspects of symbols, while retaining the conceptual richness that the symbols need to represent. The act of symbolizing is a rendering of the transcendent into the solid or ordered realm, an aesthetic artifact or an act of writing, no matter how great, is a static thing, a snapshot in time. Dynamic symbols, moving to a homeorhetic filigreed flux between order and chaos, is what is needed to more closely approach the transcendent. This sounds suspiciously close to “the message is the medium.” But the PC, smartphone and the web, technologically miraculous as they are, pale before this task. The engagement of the body is needed, perhaps, maybe a perfected VR might work if we are free to physically act out. A VR liturgy of high mass bells and smells, in a virtual Chartres, with standing for praise, sitting for learning, and kneeling for prayer. It is not only the capture of the intellect as it is drawn upwards and outwards without limits through the high windows of Chartres cathedral, it is also the pervading sense of peace that the body experiences when it passes through the close at Salisbury cathedral. The spaces are linked side-by-side, but not experienced simultaneously. Perhaps a simultaneous experience, a weaving, of these is something to learn to design for, over time.
Heart of the Anointed
• The utopian (or anointed) premises are first, that we can create a heaven on earth by freeing our natural goodness from all external discipline; and second, that the world is remade anew every second, that everything is ultimately malleable.
• The realist (or benighted) premises are first, that we should avoid excess and assume that most individuals default to the bad in the absence of assistance; and second, that the world is not remade every second, that honor, integrity, dignity and respect aren’t created on earth minute by minute ex nihilo.
Thomas Molnar, in Utopia, the Perennial Heresy, concludes that “utopianism is based on errors of judgment.” False judgment typifies the miseducated individual, one who has not had sufficient exposure to true facts, clarified meanings and correct values. Such an individual, upon consciously or unconsciously accepting the utopian premises, becomes little more than an indoctrinated ideologue who in turn spreads the utopian worldview. The ideologue enters a closed conceptual loop akin to a mathematical fixed point attractor, with the fixed point being, of course, a final utopian state of perfection. When the utopians place themselves in charge of the education system, the media and the leading cultural institutions, as they are driven to, in order to best serve their ideal, a feedback mechanism is introduced that ensures a continual recruitment of future utopians. In the language of memetics, a self-perpetuating pattern of anti-realist thought emerges, finding sustenance in an rich environment of fraud.
A realist cannot stand outside the ideological loop and hope to politically control the utopian outcome, because outcomes based on false judgment, only proceed to dust and ashes. A realist must squarely confront the utopian, the danger of being trapped inside the loop precludes entry. A utopian cannot leave the loop to meet the realist, step off the path to utopia, and remain true to their ideal, or without denying their central premises. Thus, a realist will be depicted from afar by the utopian ‘moral entrepreneur’ as a ‘mean-spirited, cynical pessimist,’ or less charitable permutations of this, such as ‘folk devils’, to be dismissed out of hand. Dismissed, that is, unless the realist directly blocks the path to utopia, then ‘re-education’ or ‘mental hospitals’ or stronger measures are required. No meeting of the minds is possible, no tolerance is workable.
• The realist (or benighted) premises are first, that we should avoid excess and assume that most individuals default to the bad in the absence of assistance; and second, that the world is not remade every second, that honor, integrity, dignity and respect aren’t created on earth minute by minute ex nihilo.
Thomas Molnar, in Utopia, the Perennial Heresy, concludes that “utopianism is based on errors of judgment.” False judgment typifies the miseducated individual, one who has not had sufficient exposure to true facts, clarified meanings and correct values. Such an individual, upon consciously or unconsciously accepting the utopian premises, becomes little more than an indoctrinated ideologue who in turn spreads the utopian worldview. The ideologue enters a closed conceptual loop akin to a mathematical fixed point attractor, with the fixed point being, of course, a final utopian state of perfection. When the utopians place themselves in charge of the education system, the media and the leading cultural institutions, as they are driven to, in order to best serve their ideal, a feedback mechanism is introduced that ensures a continual recruitment of future utopians. In the language of memetics, a self-perpetuating pattern of anti-realist thought emerges, finding sustenance in an rich environment of fraud.
A realist cannot stand outside the ideological loop and hope to politically control the utopian outcome, because outcomes based on false judgment, only proceed to dust and ashes. A realist must squarely confront the utopian, the danger of being trapped inside the loop precludes entry. A utopian cannot leave the loop to meet the realist, step off the path to utopia, and remain true to their ideal, or without denying their central premises. Thus, a realist will be depicted from afar by the utopian ‘moral entrepreneur’ as a ‘mean-spirited, cynical pessimist,’ or less charitable permutations of this, such as ‘folk devils’, to be dismissed out of hand. Dismissed, that is, unless the realist directly blocks the path to utopia, then ‘re-education’ or ‘mental hospitals’ or stronger measures are required. No meeting of the minds is possible, no tolerance is workable.
Definitions and Refinement of the Goal
First, let’s recap some definitions from our discussion. Awhile back, we described sacred space this way: space which, by its patterning of human interrelatedness points man to that which gives him the power, the energy, the might, the motivation, to seek the source of his own life. We also said about art and artifact: Sacred space doesn’t give him this, it only is a sign along the way. As artifact, it engages him beneath his consciousness, on the level of his artistic sense, convicting him and persuading him to continue in his choice, to continue pointing his face ahead, when all the culture around him is drunk on images of carnality and blood lust. It is art to the degree to which it makes its object self-evident, it embeds in the person so sheltered the emotional education of his sentiments, to seek that which he ought to seek, when reason fails him. Given the above definitions: When sacred space does this, it does what Chartres did.
I will refine our goal somewhat. I am seeking, rather than the design process itself, the knowledge of how we can learn such a design process. Coincident with this search, is a seeking for knowledge of how we can learn to penetrate the transcendental realm, the mechanism of how we recognize the sacred, how we distinguish it amidst the welter of our mundane sensory experience.
The designation of the transcendental realm as “real” plunges us into a real sticking point in all of modern thought. Ontology and epistemology have not kept to their own bailiwicks very well here. Because we cannot experiment on the transcendent, we deny its existence. I would say that the transcendental realm is a precursor to existence. “Real” is associated with time-matter conjoined with space-energy. The transcendental realm is pointed at by this conjunction, as represented by the equal sign in E = mc^2. The transcendental realm is the source of coherency between the time and space that entities have their existence in, a cosmic glue, if you will. The words ‘true’ and ‘real’ are inadequate to express this realm, they appropriately belong to the objective-consensual-subjective aspects of their-our-my physical existence.
We are not discussing an aspiration to sacralize all of cyberspace, there’s too much commercialization, filth and inane scribblings in it for this. What I was asking in the beginning, was about the possibility of a purified demarcated region within cyberspace. In essence, a sacralized enclosure. Not a seductive artifact, in the negative sense we have discussed, but nevertheless, an artifact that draws in those who have “something” inside and are prepared to seek a bit.
From Thomas Molnar’s Twin Powers: “The sacred cannot be solicited, and therefore, civilizations, with their sacred nucleus, cannot be approximated, planned, or outlined in advance, let alone prescribed.”
No doubt about this one. No final form can be known in advance. The design process simultaneously juggles so many functions, with a constantly shifting hierarchical structure, that forms can only be fixed when this structure has been consolidated. The search for functions conjoined with consolidated forms, this is my metabolic view of civilizational design processes. The search can be fruitless or retrograde, progress towards greater meaning comes by grace. Again Molnar:
I will refine our goal somewhat. I am seeking, rather than the design process itself, the knowledge of how we can learn such a design process. Coincident with this search, is a seeking for knowledge of how we can learn to penetrate the transcendental realm, the mechanism of how we recognize the sacred, how we distinguish it amidst the welter of our mundane sensory experience.
The designation of the transcendental realm as “real” plunges us into a real sticking point in all of modern thought. Ontology and epistemology have not kept to their own bailiwicks very well here. Because we cannot experiment on the transcendent, we deny its existence. I would say that the transcendental realm is a precursor to existence. “Real” is associated with time-matter conjoined with space-energy. The transcendental realm is pointed at by this conjunction, as represented by the equal sign in E = mc^2. The transcendental realm is the source of coherency between the time and space that entities have their existence in, a cosmic glue, if you will. The words ‘true’ and ‘real’ are inadequate to express this realm, they appropriately belong to the objective-consensual-subjective aspects of their-our-my physical existence.
We are not discussing an aspiration to sacralize all of cyberspace, there’s too much commercialization, filth and inane scribblings in it for this. What I was asking in the beginning, was about the possibility of a purified demarcated region within cyberspace. In essence, a sacralized enclosure. Not a seductive artifact, in the negative sense we have discussed, but nevertheless, an artifact that draws in those who have “something” inside and are prepared to seek a bit.
From Thomas Molnar’s Twin Powers: “The sacred cannot be solicited, and therefore, civilizations, with their sacred nucleus, cannot be approximated, planned, or outlined in advance, let alone prescribed.”
No doubt about this one. No final form can be known in advance. The design process simultaneously juggles so many functions, with a constantly shifting hierarchical structure, that forms can only be fixed when this structure has been consolidated. The search for functions conjoined with consolidated forms, this is my metabolic view of civilizational design processes. The search can be fruitless or retrograde, progress towards greater meaning comes by grace. Again Molnar:
Care of the soul is that movement of the inner life which carries us beyond the observed phenomena to their essence - to their sacrality, we might say.... The soul, at all times the rectifier of matter, appears as the only conceivable counterpoint to the material dynamics implicit in the linear course of history. The sentence contains no program of civilization; it contains something better; hope.
Hope for the future would seem to be a prerequisite for the exercise (not the biological capacity) of our free will. When hope dies, we are enslaved to our animal desires. “Rectifier of matter” sounds close to my own terminology, my definitions of humanism and technicism above. Plato’s “Form of the Good” returns to us repeatedly. What an achievement!
Unity and the Sovereign Individual
The seductive artifact is easily experienced. The true sacred artifact is approached with a knowledge that exertion is called for. Self-questioning sets in, ‘Will I measure up? Am I worthy?’ How can an individual possibly be worthy to approach the sacred? It doesn’t make any sense. Far easier to simply claim that the sovereign individual is sacred, equally sacred to anything. Of course, this is equivalent to saying that nothing is sacred.
To say that Original Sin is merely man’s rebellion from his purpose, which is simply to “be man,” sounds close to my conception of Original Sin, which is that “man exists.” Humans appropriate energy and matter, space and time, from their environment. They do this by the force of their existence, they do not ask for permission to live from whatever and whomever in the environment they are appropriating from (unless they are slaves, and this is the definition of slavery). The Garden of Eden was a place of total material abundance, a place where humanity did not forcefully appropriate material, energy, space and time from his environment, because the Tree of Life replenished anything appropriated without loss, indeed without change. The Tree of Life was denied after the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was eaten. What was forcefully appropriated was no longer replenished, and what was worse, humanity was aware of this. Unassuageable pain entered in. To Be Man, and To Exist As Man, seem semantically related to me.
It is easy to see frantic attempts to escape Original Sin everywhere in the world today. The whole “World Peace” movement is such an effort, so is the “brain-in-a-vat” movement, so is the whole “inert metaphysics” of the Eastern religions. Spirituality disconnected from materialism is simple nihilism. The attempt to exist without forceful appropriation from the environment, living or inert, is in full swing, the symbols and ideology are everywhere. Modern scientists and philosophers try to define away consciousness, define away soul, define away humanity itself. All to avoid confronting our Sin of Existence. Languages are invented, like E-prime, which completely do away with any conjugations of the verb ‘to be.’ I mentioned the article in Metaphysical Review that details the predicament modern-day physicists have gotten themselves into; they cannot legitimize the statement ‘I am.’ They literally have more faith in their mathematical equations than they do in their own existence. Amazing.
We agree that if Rousseau’s “social contract” is real, then sovereignty truly is located within each individual. Each individual then, is in Aristotle’s phrase, a “law unto himself.” If Power is to achieve its end, then it must control the individual. He who would rule, then, must “defeat the Sovereigns.” Unity must consist of the exertion of Power over anarchic Sovereigns. Socialism with a happy face is what issues from that pagan center. It does not bode well for “World Peace,” unless it is Tacitus’ peace of the desert of solitude; one tyrant at peace, everyone else dead or enslaved. Thus, the fervent desire to become the Superman, the equal to any tyrant or force of nature conceivable. Only by becoming such, could one possibly be “a law unto oneself.” This goal of becoming a law unto oneself, is deeply resonant in many pockets of the world’s cultures, but particularly in America, and particularly among the multiform anarcho-libertarians. As Tocqueville pointed out, what can you expect from an egalitarian society? There can be no legitimate command of an equal when the concrete real is substituted for the theoretical ideal, hence, no authority is legitimate. It’s a short hop from this to all of us being laws unto ourselves, similar to the situation outside our locked urban doors every night.
We certainly did not create ourselves. And if we create other artificial, or mechanical species, or posthumans, they will be unique individuals if they aren’t interchangeable slaves. Their uniqueness comes from where? Not from their “creators,” so from where? From outside, of course.
Subjectivist epistemology, or Idealism, gets us nowhere. But neither does objectivist epistemology or Materialism. We must steer a course between these two, in the language of Lynn Margulis (of Gaia Theory fame, the scientific theory not the dirt-worshipper’s fantasy) - homeorhesis; in the language of Herbert Spencer - the moving equilibrium; in the language of C.S. Lewis - the Tao (in The Abolition of Man); in the language of Heraclitus, Philo and Paul - the Logos; in the language of Thales - water; in the language of Stuart Kauffman (the biophysical theory of life ascending) - the edge of chaos; in the language of Hegel - Reason, the living arrow of creation. It’s all the same.
We are biological creatures, by our nature our knowledge is corrigible. This includes our knowledge of the transcendent realm. Some can know that the transcendent realm is “real” while only seeing a limited portion of its characteristics, its implications for life on Earth. Thus, sacred spaces exist all over the world, pointing towards this realm, yet organically growing out of irreconcilably different cultures, e.g., Islam and Christianity. This is not to say that we invent the sacred, it is to say that our knowledge of the transcendent is corrigible, hence, our embodiment expressed in the symbology of sacred artifacts and sacred spaces are multiform. The daubs of color on the ceilings of the catacombs beneath Rome are of an entirely different aesthetic dimension than the daubs of color on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel above them. Yet they supposedly point to the same transcendental truth.
This characteristic gives the cultural relativist justification for maintaining that we invent the sacred, but this is incredibly shallow and jejune thinking. Sacred spaces which point to immanence rather than transcendence, are falsely sacred. We can safely say that Paganism, as well as many current world religions, are in fundamental error. They are not life sustaining or life enhancing. They would never have given rise to cyberspace. We can also say that cultures that produce progressive civilizations arise from deeper and broader penetrations into the transcendent realm. This gets back to my definition of progress as being the movement of populations to ever higher peaks of meaning, while avoiding catastrophes.
We are not limited to recovering the animating spirit of pre-Baroque Western Culture. We can, with grace, make a new penetration into the transcendental realm. But we cannot know whether such a penetration is rational until after it has entered into public circulation, and survived. I say that we are not limited, because I see around me that Generation Duh has been successfully disconnected from Western Culture’s history, root and branch, by the media/education/Hollywood troika. You cannot bootstrap the old culture on nothing, the foundation is gone, it exists only in the very oldest generations.
Arts commemorate real events, real people, who are a part of “sacred history.” This being the case, we may look around us at our contemporaries and our near ancestors, their actions and their artifacts, for examples. Undoubtedly, we will find them. But, the radical skepticism of our scientifically nihilistic age, destroys heroes, destroys saints, destroys meaning by unrelenting hostile criticism that finds no ground anywhere. Again, my question is, how can a region be demarcated in cyberspace that is free from this moral pollution, and free from the World Surveillance State?
A Cyber-Chartres demarcated space is similar to a church in one sense. Desecrators and ill-intended rabble aren’t welcome. If congregations allowed all the churches to be destroyed or secularized, the bootstraps to traditional liturgy would be gone. A huge amount of meaning would evaporate. Bits and pieces could be recovered at a later date, the Renaissance humanists did with Greek civilization, but the original cannot be recovered or continued. Sacred spaces must be protected, the congregations and the police cannot be at odds over this.
To say that Original Sin is merely man’s rebellion from his purpose, which is simply to “be man,” sounds close to my conception of Original Sin, which is that “man exists.” Humans appropriate energy and matter, space and time, from their environment. They do this by the force of their existence, they do not ask for permission to live from whatever and whomever in the environment they are appropriating from (unless they are slaves, and this is the definition of slavery). The Garden of Eden was a place of total material abundance, a place where humanity did not forcefully appropriate material, energy, space and time from his environment, because the Tree of Life replenished anything appropriated without loss, indeed without change. The Tree of Life was denied after the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge was eaten. What was forcefully appropriated was no longer replenished, and what was worse, humanity was aware of this. Unassuageable pain entered in. To Be Man, and To Exist As Man, seem semantically related to me.
It is easy to see frantic attempts to escape Original Sin everywhere in the world today. The whole “World Peace” movement is such an effort, so is the “brain-in-a-vat” movement, so is the whole “inert metaphysics” of the Eastern religions. Spirituality disconnected from materialism is simple nihilism. The attempt to exist without forceful appropriation from the environment, living or inert, is in full swing, the symbols and ideology are everywhere. Modern scientists and philosophers try to define away consciousness, define away soul, define away humanity itself. All to avoid confronting our Sin of Existence. Languages are invented, like E-prime, which completely do away with any conjugations of the verb ‘to be.’ I mentioned the article in Metaphysical Review that details the predicament modern-day physicists have gotten themselves into; they cannot legitimize the statement ‘I am.’ They literally have more faith in their mathematical equations than they do in their own existence. Amazing.
We agree that if Rousseau’s “social contract” is real, then sovereignty truly is located within each individual. Each individual then, is in Aristotle’s phrase, a “law unto himself.” If Power is to achieve its end, then it must control the individual. He who would rule, then, must “defeat the Sovereigns.” Unity must consist of the exertion of Power over anarchic Sovereigns. Socialism with a happy face is what issues from that pagan center. It does not bode well for “World Peace,” unless it is Tacitus’ peace of the desert of solitude; one tyrant at peace, everyone else dead or enslaved. Thus, the fervent desire to become the Superman, the equal to any tyrant or force of nature conceivable. Only by becoming such, could one possibly be “a law unto oneself.” This goal of becoming a law unto oneself, is deeply resonant in many pockets of the world’s cultures, but particularly in America, and particularly among the multiform anarcho-libertarians. As Tocqueville pointed out, what can you expect from an egalitarian society? There can be no legitimate command of an equal when the concrete real is substituted for the theoretical ideal, hence, no authority is legitimate. It’s a short hop from this to all of us being laws unto ourselves, similar to the situation outside our locked urban doors every night.
We certainly did not create ourselves. And if we create other artificial, or mechanical species, or posthumans, they will be unique individuals if they aren’t interchangeable slaves. Their uniqueness comes from where? Not from their “creators,” so from where? From outside, of course.
Subjectivist epistemology, or Idealism, gets us nowhere. But neither does objectivist epistemology or Materialism. We must steer a course between these two, in the language of Lynn Margulis (of Gaia Theory fame, the scientific theory not the dirt-worshipper’s fantasy) - homeorhesis; in the language of Herbert Spencer - the moving equilibrium; in the language of C.S. Lewis - the Tao (in The Abolition of Man); in the language of Heraclitus, Philo and Paul - the Logos; in the language of Thales - water; in the language of Stuart Kauffman (the biophysical theory of life ascending) - the edge of chaos; in the language of Hegel - Reason, the living arrow of creation. It’s all the same.
We are biological creatures, by our nature our knowledge is corrigible. This includes our knowledge of the transcendent realm. Some can know that the transcendent realm is “real” while only seeing a limited portion of its characteristics, its implications for life on Earth. Thus, sacred spaces exist all over the world, pointing towards this realm, yet organically growing out of irreconcilably different cultures, e.g., Islam and Christianity. This is not to say that we invent the sacred, it is to say that our knowledge of the transcendent is corrigible, hence, our embodiment expressed in the symbology of sacred artifacts and sacred spaces are multiform. The daubs of color on the ceilings of the catacombs beneath Rome are of an entirely different aesthetic dimension than the daubs of color on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel above them. Yet they supposedly point to the same transcendental truth.
This characteristic gives the cultural relativist justification for maintaining that we invent the sacred, but this is incredibly shallow and jejune thinking. Sacred spaces which point to immanence rather than transcendence, are falsely sacred. We can safely say that Paganism, as well as many current world religions, are in fundamental error. They are not life sustaining or life enhancing. They would never have given rise to cyberspace. We can also say that cultures that produce progressive civilizations arise from deeper and broader penetrations into the transcendent realm. This gets back to my definition of progress as being the movement of populations to ever higher peaks of meaning, while avoiding catastrophes.
We are not limited to recovering the animating spirit of pre-Baroque Western Culture. We can, with grace, make a new penetration into the transcendental realm. But we cannot know whether such a penetration is rational until after it has entered into public circulation, and survived. I say that we are not limited, because I see around me that Generation Duh has been successfully disconnected from Western Culture’s history, root and branch, by the media/education/Hollywood troika. You cannot bootstrap the old culture on nothing, the foundation is gone, it exists only in the very oldest generations.
Arts commemorate real events, real people, who are a part of “sacred history.” This being the case, we may look around us at our contemporaries and our near ancestors, their actions and their artifacts, for examples. Undoubtedly, we will find them. But, the radical skepticism of our scientifically nihilistic age, destroys heroes, destroys saints, destroys meaning by unrelenting hostile criticism that finds no ground anywhere. Again, my question is, how can a region be demarcated in cyberspace that is free from this moral pollution, and free from the World Surveillance State?
A Cyber-Chartres demarcated space is similar to a church in one sense. Desecrators and ill-intended rabble aren’t welcome. If congregations allowed all the churches to be destroyed or secularized, the bootstraps to traditional liturgy would be gone. A huge amount of meaning would evaporate. Bits and pieces could be recovered at a later date, the Renaissance humanists did with Greek civilization, but the original cannot be recovered or continued. Sacred spaces must be protected, the congregations and the police cannot be at odds over this.
Artifact Through Symbol Pointing to the Sacred
Mary Douglas, in Natural Symbols: Explorations in Cosmology (1973) points to how the Neo-Luddite movement has a liturgical aspect to it. The meetings I’ve been to involving groups of liberals or socialists or leftists or radical feminists or eco-fascists or neo-luddites or neo-Marxists or multiculturalists or progressives or whatever else they go by, are liturgical. The ritualized telling of personal stories, the group confessionals, the dogmatic cant of core ideological beliefs, the naming of Satan’s minions to be re-educated or cleansed, all swirling about the presence lamp containing “Feelings.”
I don’t want to place undo emphasis on the role of symbol vis-a-vis the growth of culture. There is a rich literature of philosophical and analytical thought on gradations and categories of symbol (as opposed to signs or icons), in fact, on the larger question of representation and communication in general, what I term consensual reality. Symbols are only a part of what drives cultural growth. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas are always open to the charge of determinism, because they maintain the fiction that they are scientists analyzing objects, rather than entities with volitional freedom, who have the capacity to legislate both to nature and to themselves. No science is possible when dealing with entities such as this, only political programs (this includes economists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psycholinguists, and all the so-called “soft sciences”).
I don’t like any formulations that explicitly or implicitly convey the notion that static perfection in any human thing is a real possibility. I think that not only is static perfection concretely impossible, but it is not in human capacity to abstractly, i.e., conceptually, conceive of it. Conceptions of static perfection, whether of individuals or societies, are delusions, sometimes dangerous delusions when they are acted upon.
The following quotes are all from Mary Douglas, in Natural Symbols: “[T]he masses who experience control by objects… rush to adopt symbols of non-differentiation and so accentuate the condition from which they suffer.”
These would be symbols that are “egalitarian,” ones that are “non-heirarchical.” I am reminded of Tocqueville’s forecast of democratic egalitarianism, particularly in its capitalistic form. Culture and tradition are swept away by the leaders who sway to and fro while catering to the inconstant whims of the least qualified segment of the electorate to rule. Governance by popular poll and image management is all that’s possible, while the best and brightest pursue private lives of public irresponsibility and accumulation of wealth. The man who has been raised up seeks symbols of his high estate; the one who has been degraded seeks symbols of debasement, but no one is raised in a radically egalitarian society. All are debased, except the ruling executive elite, and their symbols are timeless: the spiritually empty trappings of money and power.
“Thus we should expect that those who have the sense of living without meaningful categories, and who suffer from being treated as an undifferentiated, insignificant mass, should seek to express themselves by inarticulate, undifferentiated symbols.”
This makes eminent sense. Ralph Waldo Emerson said as much in The American Scholar (1837):
I don’t want to place undo emphasis on the role of symbol vis-a-vis the growth of culture. There is a rich literature of philosophical and analytical thought on gradations and categories of symbol (as opposed to signs or icons), in fact, on the larger question of representation and communication in general, what I term consensual reality. Symbols are only a part of what drives cultural growth. Anthropologists like Mary Douglas are always open to the charge of determinism, because they maintain the fiction that they are scientists analyzing objects, rather than entities with volitional freedom, who have the capacity to legislate both to nature and to themselves. No science is possible when dealing with entities such as this, only political programs (this includes economists, psychologists, anthropologists, sociologists, psycholinguists, and all the so-called “soft sciences”).
I don’t like any formulations that explicitly or implicitly convey the notion that static perfection in any human thing is a real possibility. I think that not only is static perfection concretely impossible, but it is not in human capacity to abstractly, i.e., conceptually, conceive of it. Conceptions of static perfection, whether of individuals or societies, are delusions, sometimes dangerous delusions when they are acted upon.
The following quotes are all from Mary Douglas, in Natural Symbols: “[T]he masses who experience control by objects… rush to adopt symbols of non-differentiation and so accentuate the condition from which they suffer.”
These would be symbols that are “egalitarian,” ones that are “non-heirarchical.” I am reminded of Tocqueville’s forecast of democratic egalitarianism, particularly in its capitalistic form. Culture and tradition are swept away by the leaders who sway to and fro while catering to the inconstant whims of the least qualified segment of the electorate to rule. Governance by popular poll and image management is all that’s possible, while the best and brightest pursue private lives of public irresponsibility and accumulation of wealth. The man who has been raised up seeks symbols of his high estate; the one who has been degraded seeks symbols of debasement, but no one is raised in a radically egalitarian society. All are debased, except the ruling executive elite, and their symbols are timeless: the spiritually empty trappings of money and power.
“Thus we should expect that those who have the sense of living without meaningful categories, and who suffer from being treated as an undifferentiated, insignificant mass, should seek to express themselves by inarticulate, undifferentiated symbols.”
This makes eminent sense. Ralph Waldo Emerson said as much in The American Scholar (1837):
Is it not the chief disgrace in the world, not to be an unit - not to be reckoned one character - not to yield that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south? Not so, brothers and friends - please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds.
Look how far America has strayed from the ideas of its champion of self-reliance, we live entirely by polls, census numbers and marketing data.
“[Leadership should] seek to establish clear categories and distinctions which the oppressors would be forced to recognize. They would get organized. This would involve them in hierarchical discriminations.”
Even in the patriot sites on the web, you can’t even get anyone to own up to the fact that they are “natural aristocrats.” They shrink before the designation in fear of the PC police. Radical egalitarianism has been a fact of American life since the sixties revolution, only fools or heroes go up against it. In Emerson’s time, Tocqueville was still able to speak of “the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue.” No one dare speak of it now. Yet, Ortega y Gasset was absolutely right in observing that, “human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic.”
“It is as if the symbolic mode has overwhelmed the freedom of the mind to grapple with reality.”
This is more often the human state than that of rationality, at least historically. This tendency is where coherence theories of truth obtain their semblance of validity, the symbolic mode becomes a self-contained web of concepts surroundings a few tightly interrelated core metaphysical presuppositions. Truth need not apply in such a web.
“The whole history of ideas should be reviewed in light of the power of social structures to generate symbols of their own. These symbols deceivingly present themselves as spiritual truths unconnected with fleshly processes of conception.”
Douglas’ position is that symbols generated within social structures precede individual concepts. This is wrong, but is very typically sociological in outlook. Anthropologists can’t help themselves in thinking collectively, in terms of groups, rather than individuals, because you can’t do science on one individual, on one intellect. An individual, reflective thinker is not chained to the symbols of the social structures surrounding him. The deep thinker really is free to create the new. Where do symbols come from? From the free will of the individual, of course. Conceptualizing precedes social structure. Concepts precede semantics, this is what biological epistemology explains.
Symbols, like commands, convey no authority when first generated by the conceptualizing individual, they must be accepted into a social structure, that is, they must bring forth the volitional act of obedience before they convey authority. When the social structures have become ossified, or rigid, as happens in egalitarian mass societies because there is no room for hierarchical distinctions, then the extant symbols usurp the human command, and the human generation of new symbols. This sets up obedience to principles, in Douglas’ words. A leadership must view the undifferentiated mass as objects because the mass demands to be viewed as such, will not be viewed any other way, because they obey the symbols, not the humans. An undifferentiated mass of equals is abhorrent to nature; stagnation and death can be the only result. This is the evil under the sun that is referred to in Ecclesiastes 10:6-8: “Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth. He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it...”
“[Leadership should] seek to establish clear categories and distinctions which the oppressors would be forced to recognize. They would get organized. This would involve them in hierarchical discriminations.”
Even in the patriot sites on the web, you can’t even get anyone to own up to the fact that they are “natural aristocrats.” They shrink before the designation in fear of the PC police. Radical egalitarianism has been a fact of American life since the sixties revolution, only fools or heroes go up against it. In Emerson’s time, Tocqueville was still able to speak of “the natural aristocracy of knowledge and virtue.” No one dare speak of it now. Yet, Ortega y Gasset was absolutely right in observing that, “human society is always, whether it will or no, aristocratic by its very essence, to the extreme that it is a society in the measure that it is aristocratic, and ceases to be such when it ceases to be aristocratic.”
“It is as if the symbolic mode has overwhelmed the freedom of the mind to grapple with reality.”
This is more often the human state than that of rationality, at least historically. This tendency is where coherence theories of truth obtain their semblance of validity, the symbolic mode becomes a self-contained web of concepts surroundings a few tightly interrelated core metaphysical presuppositions. Truth need not apply in such a web.
“The whole history of ideas should be reviewed in light of the power of social structures to generate symbols of their own. These symbols deceivingly present themselves as spiritual truths unconnected with fleshly processes of conception.”
Douglas’ position is that symbols generated within social structures precede individual concepts. This is wrong, but is very typically sociological in outlook. Anthropologists can’t help themselves in thinking collectively, in terms of groups, rather than individuals, because you can’t do science on one individual, on one intellect. An individual, reflective thinker is not chained to the symbols of the social structures surrounding him. The deep thinker really is free to create the new. Where do symbols come from? From the free will of the individual, of course. Conceptualizing precedes social structure. Concepts precede semantics, this is what biological epistemology explains.
Symbols, like commands, convey no authority when first generated by the conceptualizing individual, they must be accepted into a social structure, that is, they must bring forth the volitional act of obedience before they convey authority. When the social structures have become ossified, or rigid, as happens in egalitarian mass societies because there is no room for hierarchical distinctions, then the extant symbols usurp the human command, and the human generation of new symbols. This sets up obedience to principles, in Douglas’ words. A leadership must view the undifferentiated mass as objects because the mass demands to be viewed as such, will not be viewed any other way, because they obey the symbols, not the humans. An undifferentiated mass of equals is abhorrent to nature; stagnation and death can be the only result. This is the evil under the sun that is referred to in Ecclesiastes 10:6-8: “Folly is set in great dignity, and the rich sit in low place. I have seen servants upon horses, and princes walking as servants upon the earth. He that diggeth a pit shall fall into it...”
Sinful Structures and Authority
You cannot view humanity from a position both physically and executively on a pinnacle, without losing your own concrete connection to the individual humans down below. They are abstracted, objectified, undifferentiated into focus groups, test markets, statistics, etc. This mode of viewing humanity is essentially symbiotic in nature, in a radically egalitarian society. The equal individuals down below refuse to view anyone at all in terms of hierarchical gradations, thus transferring their obedience to abstract symbols, instead of to any human individual. Their allegiance is given to the corner office of the skyscraper, not to the inhabitant therein; to the corporate logo, not the corporate employee who made the product or provided the service they threw their money at. Everyone from top to bottom is in on it.
We could very well combine our language of ‘seductive artifact’ with ‘plausibility structure’ and basically describe the same phenomena that John Paul II calls “sinful structures.” This is what, in fact, we are talking about.
Malachi Martin, in The Keys of This Blood, writes about the Corporate Ziggurat:
We could very well combine our language of ‘seductive artifact’ with ‘plausibility structure’ and basically describe the same phenomena that John Paul II calls “sinful structures.” This is what, in fact, we are talking about.
Malachi Martin, in The Keys of This Blood, writes about the Corporate Ziggurat:
When money, ideology, class or technological development dictates exclusively how we behave, then we are in effect worshipping idols, just as surely as if we were to set up a golden calf in the Sinai of our world, ascribe omnipotence to it, and give it our obeisance and adoration. In that sort of situation, at least one and probably two sinful intentions are operative: an all-consuming desire for profit; and the thirst for power. In fact, as these human attitudes and propensities are built into the structures of our society, they are not merely operative; they quickly become absolutized. They dominate our thoughts, our intentions and our actions. They become the household gods on the mantels of our structures. The originators of those structures have, in other words, introduced into the everyday world of men and women influences and obstacles that last far beyond the actions and brief life span of any individual. The structures are the vehicles of their sins, and can aptly and accurately be described as “sinful structures.”
As Alasdair MacIntyre says, “Which rationality?” Who should we believe? I know that we discussed that we should believe ancient authority located “in a historic continuity of a symbolic community whereby we can judge the sacred from the profane.” But in our compost-modern world, history just isn’t what it used to be, is it? Our younger generations are taught, and believe it fiercely, that history and truth are fictions pushed on us by control-mad individuals only exercising their will-to-power. How do we propose to introduce ancient authority to the Nintendo/MTV generation [or successor smartphone generation,] who know, a priori, that it’s all bunk? We have a problem, in this post-rational world, only personal feelings, based on personal experience count as valid authority. Literally, you’d need “revelation du jour” in order to sustain belief in the sacred amongst today’s Generation Duh. This is why New Age “channeling” and other forms of extemporaneous pseudo-revelation are so popular.
It is difficult to locate authority outside of ourselves, it takes much exertion to do so. It’s like spiritual gravity, we want to center the source of authority in ourselves, this is the path of least resistance. It’s difficult to achieve escape velocity and leave the bonds of ourselves behind, without the help of others. Why not be a rock and just lay in whatever valley we have rolled into? Because we are called higher.
Either we can be reduced by neo-Gnostic physics down to random activity between two voids, or else we are designed all the way down. Either purpose enters in at the smallest scales, or you can never sneak it in later. Absent purpose aiming at truth, there can be no meaning.
If random activity is the foundation of physics, then our acts are not “real,” we do not exist. Thomas Aquinas’ conception of esse or “to be” in the sense of pure act, the actual transition point between potency and actuality, is the only way “existence” can make sense. Not ens which is static being itself, but esse which is dynamic, and makes movement possible. Esse points to the same reality that lies behind the conceptual meaning of the equal sign in E = mc^2.
It is difficult to locate authority outside of ourselves, it takes much exertion to do so. It’s like spiritual gravity, we want to center the source of authority in ourselves, this is the path of least resistance. It’s difficult to achieve escape velocity and leave the bonds of ourselves behind, without the help of others. Why not be a rock and just lay in whatever valley we have rolled into? Because we are called higher.
Either we can be reduced by neo-Gnostic physics down to random activity between two voids, or else we are designed all the way down. Either purpose enters in at the smallest scales, or you can never sneak it in later. Absent purpose aiming at truth, there can be no meaning.
If random activity is the foundation of physics, then our acts are not “real,” we do not exist. Thomas Aquinas’ conception of esse or “to be” in the sense of pure act, the actual transition point between potency and actuality, is the only way “existence” can make sense. Not ens which is static being itself, but esse which is dynamic, and makes movement possible. Esse points to the same reality that lies behind the conceptual meaning of the equal sign in E = mc^2.
Defining the Good
If we cannot define the good, then no political system is possible for us. For we must simply abandon ourselves to either fate, like the Muslims, or to religious dogma, as administered by fallible humans, or to random chance, like the Epicurean/Hobbesian/Machiavellian world of “might makes right.” No thanks. We are created “in the image of God,” therefore we have the capacity to define the good. This definition is an aim, a pointer, it is not a standard. The standard is imposed from without, the consequences of our actions shows us whether our aim was accurate or not. We can incorrectly define the good, we can be deceived or seduced, but we cannot escape the consequences of such an incorrect definition. The Bolsheviks incorrectly defined the good and they have been relegated to the dustbin of history in relatively short time (70 years).
I think we must aim at the good, but our aim must be towards something outside ourselves. This is why it is so empty to simply pronounce yourself “good,” you are not pointing to anything outside. Defining something external to ourselves does not “create” it, unless you are one of those compost-modernists. The New Age people who think they create the good by defining it, must forever be happy because they pronounce themselves good. Thus, the New Agers raise “blaming the victim” to metaphysical levels because the only unhappy people are those who brought it on themselves. Whacky!
Part I is here.
Reilly Jones © 2001
I think we must aim at the good, but our aim must be towards something outside ourselves. This is why it is so empty to simply pronounce yourself “good,” you are not pointing to anything outside. Defining something external to ourselves does not “create” it, unless you are one of those compost-modernists. The New Age people who think they create the good by defining it, must forever be happy because they pronounce themselves good. Thus, the New Agers raise “blaming the victim” to metaphysical levels because the only unhappy people are those who brought it on themselves. Whacky!
Part I is here.
Reilly Jones © 2001
