AGI, Hope, and the Human Future

Lecture 3: Hope and the Human Future

In the first lecture I talked about how Primal Alienation is the source of all that ails us. And how humans will do almost anything to ease its disease. If the main symptoms of our alienation are our feeling of being cut off from one another, nature, our bodies, our work in the world, and what is most deeply spiritual, then the criteria for how we ought to interact with technology are pretty straightforward. If you don't like feeling alienated, don't use technology in a way that makes it worse.

And that requires being honest with yourself about how it might be making it worse. And that's made more difficult because we are living in a cultural environment that both produces alienation and celebrates it as "progress". The Techno-Capitalist Matrix (TCM), I argued, is an alienation factory because it works hard to cut us off from the things that matter, and then it offers seductive remedies for the alienation it creates that draw us into even deeper forms of being cut off. And we accept it as normal because everyone around us is experiencing the same thing. 

In the first two lectures, I spoke about how the Transhumanist movement, the culmination of the Baconian Project that emerged in the late 20th Century typifies this alienation in its most extreme form. The argument that I want to make today, following on what I had to say about Baudrillard and the Precession of the Simulacra last week, is that the postmodern condition, to use Frederic Jameson's phrase, is the cultural logic of Late Capitalism.

Postmodern thought makes no sense outside the kind of imagination of reality that Late Capitalism has created, and Late Capitalism, as the culmination of the Baconian Project, is dragging us toward two unprecedented catastrophes--ecological disaster and the prospect of AI running amok outside human control. The solutions for the problems that Baconian Project have created cannot be solved from within the logic of the Baconian project. 

The TCM provides the dominant values system that shapes ideas about progress in Late Capitalist societies. It sees the human being in exclusively immanent terms, and it sees the human being as primarily a Biological Desiring Machine. I call it the Matrix because like the Matrix in the movie, it has become an all-but-closed system. And like the Matrix, it has an OS, a set of operational principles, which are incompatible with a certain category of cultural apps. For instance any premodern, richly symbolic or sacramental religion that still tries to operate within the Matrix. 

While few people think that human beings are machines, the machine is the governing metaphor for the Transhumanists and much of postmodern thinking in defining what human beings are. And since the Transhumanists are shaping the human future for us all, we need to have an argument about what its philosophical presuppositions are and whether we want to be governed by them. Because if you, like most people, believe that the human being is something more than a wetware machine, you nevertheless find yourselves being dragged along where the inherent nihilism in Transhumanist thinking is taking you. There is no robust countervailing broadly galvanizing argument.

So if the TCM is an all-but-closed system, those most habituated to it cannot imagine standing outside of it because it is axiomatic that nothing exists outside of it. It is a system that seeks to be totalizing, and so it follows that all our major societal institutions are captured by it—our economic system, our healthcare system, and our political system and our mainstream cultural institutions as well--whether we’re talking about the mainstream universities, media, or art world.

So the arts, which until at least the 1930s had been a bastion of resistance to this totalizing capitalist system, have become all but subsumed into it in the post WWII era. And we see how that has come to influence the teaching of the humanities, which rejects the transcendental tradition as the irrelevant musing of dead, white men. This is a cultural catastrophe, and it's the one place, the only place, where the cultural Right has it right. My mission for years now has been to retrieve the great transcendental tradition as a basis for a progressive cultural and poltical program. I think that otherwise the TCM takes the field unopposed. 

I introduced Baudrillard’s use of the word ‘semiotic’ last week. It’s the use of language or symbols that have lost they ‘symbolic’ function as language as unambiguous language that seeks to be “objective” in a scientific sense becomes the only truly valid use of language. The symbolic use of language in art or religion becomes something mushy and subjective, something for private amusement if one is so inclined, but not to be taken seriously in the serious business of working the the real world, which can be understood only in materialistic terms. And so ambiguity, multivalence, metaphor, and analogy are uses of language that still persist, but function these days more as clever witticisms that might get a laugh, but rarely open us up to the disclosure of something deep and original, which is the function of truly symbolic language and other art forms.

A semiotic society is one in which significance only comes from lateral or horizontal references, not from vertical references, i.e., references that draw from the depths of the Soul, or the heights of the Spirit. A sacramental religion cannot flourish in such an environment, and we’re the poorer for it. The TCM is an utterly and thoroughly semioticized values world.

If there is to be any resistance to the semioticizing TCM, it has to start in the cultural sphere. But as I stated before, most of our cultural institutions are already captives within the TCM. So from where else might a resistance be mounted but in the churches?  That’s the reason I wanted to give these talks here. But the churches have little spiritual or moral authority. That’s in part their fault. They have this habit of living up to the most negative stereotypes about them, and in doing so have largely made themselves irrelevant in the public sphere. But is that completely the churches’ fault? Or is it the fault of a society that has been subsumed into the TCM, a society that has allowed itself to become ‘semioticized’?

So I wanted to spend a few minutes describing the intellectual framework that has come to define the terms of the argument. We need to understand the “ideology” that I would argue is currently most influential in shaping the ethos of our cultural institutions and in doing so offer little or no resistance to the TCM. We need to understand its strengths--why it’s so appealing—and its weaknesses—why it doesn’t really solve the problem. And a place to start is to understand the thrust and enormous influence of this book that appeared in 1972—

DeLeuze is a philosopher in the Hegelian/Marxist tradition. Guattari was a radical psychoanalyst, sometimes compared to his contemporary R.D. Laing. They were very influential in providing a theoretical justification for so much of what we accept today as the commonplaces of the postmodern cultural elite, and so they are very influential today in shaping the ethos of the humanities in our universities and in broader cultural circles.

The book’s title is Anti-Oedipus, so in order to understand their argument you have to understand Freud’s Oedipus Complex. In what follows I assume the audience, especially the American millennial audience, has no knowledge of Freudian psychoanalysis since it isn’t as influential in therapeutic circles as it once was. But I don’t think it’s possible to overestimate how important Freud was in shaping the post-WWII cultural ethos in North Atlantic societies.

I think of Freud as more of a philosopher in the German tradition that flows from Fichte, Schopenhauer and Nietzche to him. If you think of him as a philosopher rather than as a scientist, he beomes very much more interesting and compelling. He doesn’t tell the whole story, but he tells a good chunk of it that we are foolish not to make an effort to understand. 

The Oedipus Commplex is often misunderstood as a boy’s repressed jealously toward his father and repressed inscestuous desire for his mother. This is not reallly what it means. It is, rather, a compelling account of how all humans become acculturated and how societies develop and enforce their taboo systems.

In the Freudian mythos, life for all humans starts with two trauma: First, the birth trauma--the baby’s being thrust from the womb into the world. Second, the trauma associated with weaning and separation from the mother. The instinctive response to trauma is to seek comfort and safety, and so after being thrust from the womb the baby naturally finds this in the warmth of the mother’s body, and in its feeling of unity with the mother—especially while being embraced during breastfeeding. It’s not as good as the comfort/safety of the womb, but it’s the next best thing.

If a baby has a normal, nurturing mother, the baby’s desires are usually met after crying out. The mother responds, and there is very little in baby’s experience to suggest that it’s not the center of the universe. This is a state of primal narcissism—we all go through it, even if some get stuck there.

Weaning, when the child experiences the second separation from the mother’s body, is the second trauma. This the moment when the baby learns that it is not the center of the universe and when it begins the long process of acculturation. It’s when it must find its place in the world and play its assigned role there as defined by the “Father”.

Weaning is a shock. If the baby no longer feels merged with the body of the mother, it feels a deep vulnerability, and it needs to ‘embed’ in a new safe place. The safe place is the approval of the Father, and one earns that approval by learning and following the tribal code whose enforcement he represents. So the baby’s sense of security depends on its embedding itself in the tribal codes, customs, as “dictated” by the Father.

These rules are by definition repressive because they rule out the child’s desire to be united with the mother. This is what Freudians mean by the Oedipus Complex. It is not so much about boys wanting to sleep with their mothers and to kill their fathers as it is about a traumatic transition that both boys and girls experience from the unity they felt with the mother to a separate existence as a person with a role to play in the larger social world.

In other words, it’s just part of growing up. Children who do not make this transition become the kind of adult we call a Primal Narcissist, King Lear types for whom the whole world is an extension of their ego.

So the Father in patriarchal societies—as enforcer of the code—is always an ambiguous figure. Both loved for providing safety, and feared for punishing transgression, i.e., the breaking of taboos. The father is the symbolic representation of what Freudians call the Superego. The Superego is the internalized, mostly unconscious cultural program that shapes for the individual what is acceptable or unacceptable social behavior. It is the internal voice that continuously reminds us what is praiseworthy and what is taboo. So the father becomes both a source of resentment, but also a new place to find safety. The child finds security by gaining the approval and the praise of the father by playing its assigned role well.

This acculturation process is normal and healthy if the father and mother are both normal, loving, healthy parents. But if they’re not, problems, obviously, arise. This is what it means to be ‘mal-adjusted’. Maladjusted to what? Well to the tribal code—to the norms, customs, and mores of one’s society. But what if the norms, mores, and customs of the child’s society are kinda sick?  Like the Jim Crow south, for instance? Or Germany in the 30s? Won’t being “well-adjusted” in those societies mean that your children are being made sick?

Well, yes. But by what standard do you judge healthy and unhealthy? Especially if you are completely, naively, uncritically unconsciously embedded within that society. Unhealth just seems normal for everybody in an unhealthy society, right? It’s the only thing they know. And so it is with us in the TCM. Most of us, especially if our lives are relatively comfortable, are unaware of how unhealthful life in the TCM is. We just accept it as normal.

We are all deeply shaped by this acculturation process, whether our acculturation is into a healthy society or an unhealthy one. But we are not completely captured by it. And it’s important for all morally mature adults to establish some ability to stand outside of the Oedipus Complex—and the authoritarian role that the superego plays in its service. That’s the only way that health can be achieved, but how many people have learned to do this? And how many instead look for solutions within the nihilist system that has created all the problems in the first place, and so end up substituting one form of nihilism with another?

This is how I view the Deleuze & Gauattari Project. They are serious people, but they accept the postmodern assumption that while liberation is desirable, it must be achieved without any reference to the Transcendent. They want to overcome alienation by overcoming the constraints of Superego and Oedipus Complex by obliterating all constraints as repressive. They argue that the only way that the sick, late capitalist order can be overthrown is by the destruction of all the Superego’s constraints on desire.

Stuart Jeffries, who wrote—

--is an old-school Lefty who is upset by the way the Left has become preoccupied with culture war and identity politics. He writes that Anti-Oedipus is a –

“gleefully godless liberation theology for which Deleuze and Guattari had proselytized. The  Gender was fluid, identities exchangeable – perhaps even the biologically determinate constraints of sex could be overcome. Instead of being doomed to be, one could become multiple. Instead of remaining what one was born as, one could become what one wanted – multiple, provisional, fluid. Identities became masks one could pick up in the marketplace, wear, and discard at will. In this way, desire exploded identity.” (pp. 46-47)

The whole idea of ‘reinventing oneself’ becomes a thing. Americans always knew that, of course, read The Great Gatsby, but now it gets the imprimatur of French intellectuals. Reject your acculturation, reject your biology, your gender, whatever it is that you’ve been acculturated to believe that you are because it’s all a jail that’s keeping you imprisoned. Step beyond all that determines you and embrace endless other possibilities. Reject that you are a fixed self and embrace that your identity changes incessantly—or it should. Do you see how this meshes with the Transhumanist project?

I’m spending so much time on this because of the way it has become so normative among cultural elties and fits into exactly Marcuse’s critique of repressive de-sublimation that we talked about last week. Their solution is a form of transgressivity for the sake of transgessivity in the name of liberation, but liberation to what? It has no positive doctrine about what it means to be human except that you now have a responsibility to reinvent yourself by whatever whim catches your fancy. There is only repression on the one hand and de-sublimation on the other. 

They encourage their readers to “de-territorialize”—to stop being sheep and start being birds. Sheep are ‘territorialized. They don’t need fences or walls to keep them in. People, say D&G are the same way. They can be given unrestricted freedom, and they will not exercise it. Why? Because they are habituated, like sheep to remain in their stable, safe identities. Better that we become ‘birds because then we de-territorialize—“rather than live tranquilly and hypocritically in false refuges.”

A ”flight” for D&G is a kind of delirium—

To be delirious is exactly to go off the rails.… There is something demoniacal in a line of flight. Demons are different from gods, because gods have fixed attributes, properties and functions, territories and codes: they have to do with rails, boundaries and surveys. What demons do is jump across intervals, and from one interval to another. (Dialogues II, p. 40)

This they saw as an anti-capitalist, subversive project. They want to challenge all preconceptions of normality and madness. Madness need not be all breakdown; it may also be breakthrough. Madness is sanity, and sanity is deadening conformity. A conformity enforced by the Oedipus Complex and superego. So to be free humans must slay all forms of superego, all forms of authority, tradition, morality, and restraint. 

Marriage and family, for D&G, are schools for oppression. They preached “de-individualization”: Lose you sense of self completely. Disappear into a collective, as in a rave or a mob. This is for them the only real solution for alienation. They thought of the de-individualization as a revolutionary act. They say--

“It is explosive; there is no desiring-machine capable of being assembled without demolishing entire social sectors. Despite what some revolutionaries think about this, desire is revolutionary in its essence – desire, not left-wing holidays! –and no society can tolerate a position of real desire without its structures of exploitation, servitude, and hierarchy being compromised.’ (p116)

This is really crazy, right? How is this anything other than a theoretical justification for primal narcissism? Do I have to argue the point? Human beings need constraints. We can argue about which constraints are healthy or unhealthy, but we can't argue that having no constraints whatsoever can be healthy.

And D&G go further: they think of the human being as a “desiring machine”, which is exactly how the human is thought of in the TCM. But isn’t the TCM the capitalist order that they seek to destroy? Jeffries, drawing on Marcuse, drives home the point—

“If the human world can be comprehended as a factory consisting of billions of desiring machines, as Deleuze and Guattari suggest, then those machines can readily be owned by capitalists and exploited for profit, like anything else that is produced....Deleuze and Guattari became, in effect, complicit with the system they ostensibly sought to destroy.”

In other words, D&G are hardly agents of revolution. Rather they are agents in the service of the TCM. Their doctrine does not liberate humans but infantilizes them. It endorses a regression to Primal Narcissism. And this insanity is now taken seriously by many if not most of the TCM’s cultural elite. Is there any wonder that “normie” America is moving right if this is how they have come to see what the secular cultural Left is mostly concerned about?

Who isn’t for Liberation? That’s how anybody who objects to this project is caricatured, as someone who wants to go back to the repressive bad old days, but this kind of liberation is the only kind of liberation that is conceivable because the kind of deep liberation that is associated with the great Axial traditions is perceived as part of the repressive, patriarchal past that must be destroyed.

So this this kind of thinking would be fringe and harmless for people who think of themselves as free spirits in a kind of post-Nietzschean key would just explore it on the fringes. I’m all for people to be free to shape their lives in whatever eccentric and nonconformist ways they want. My problem is that they seek to make their nihilism normative in the public sphere, and in doing so crowd out other possibilities, and in doing so serve the interests of the TCM.

And so young people buy into this doctrine because it seems like a solution for their loneliness and alienation. It sounds brave and bold. Who wants to be a sheep? And because it provides a sophisticated seeming ideological justification for their sexual self-commodification. There’s nothing about this philosophy that Hugh Hefner or Donald Trump would object to. Who wants to be a prudish sex-negativist?

Nevertheless, I think there are two things that D&G get right: One is that humans who are acculturated into a sick society are likely to become sick themselves. Their diagnosis of the illness is, imo, quite correct. It’s that their cure is worse than the disease. It’s a parody of liberation, a counterfeit form that is understandably seductive for want of a healthy, robust alternative.

Two, they’re right that morally mature humans need to understand that the Oedipus Complex and superego in a sick society create sick people. But what is health? This is where we can get help from the ancestors, if we'd just give them a chance. 

So when speaking to students who are ‘territorialized’ in the postmodern D&G ethos, how do you make an argument that accepts what D&G get right while pointing to an alternative, more healthful way to understand how to overcome that? Let me share with you how I try.

In both my classes I spend a lot of time with the German Romantics. Prominent among them was--

Schiller is one of the Jena Romantics—heir to J.G. Hamann about whom I spoke on the first day. Remember, he’s the guy who hates all systems and abstractions and wants to celebrate the particular and the concrete. Schiller was a playwright and a poet. He’s perhaps most famous for writing “The Ode to Joy”, which later became the lyrics for Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.

But he also wrote plays like The Robbers in 1781. This is one of the earliest works of literature to celebrate the transgressive anti-hero. For Schiller the worst thing that a human being could be is a slave to convention, i.e., to the Oedipus Complex and the Superego. And his anti-hero, Karl Moor, becomes a model of the outlaw--the free, convention-smashing, transgressive, tragic human being. Tragic because anti-heroes like him always lose in the end because the authoritarian superego system always must win. But he’s admirable because he writes his own script; he doesn’t let society write it for him.

Schiller is very similar to D&G in diagnosing the problem. He sees humans as unfree to the degree that they are “territorialized”, i.e., to the degree that they live by society’s script and not by a script of their own writing. But there’s an important difference. Schiller’s idea of freedom/liberation is like that of Socrates and Rousseau. His doctrine of transgressiveness is not about transgression for the sake of transgression as in D&G, but transgression in the service of a higher Good.

Schiller is all about the individual pitting himself against both Nature and Duty, of being free from, or transcending both. He wants to assert the power and dignity of the human being as lying in his or her freedom to make choices that are constrained by no power outside of him or herself. Again, we hear echoes of this in D&G.

For Schiller humans are alienated when they live “outside-in”, when they live constrained by societal laws and conventions. He wants to embrace a new kind of human who lives inside-out, who is ‘self-legislating’, who determines for himself what is lawful.

But Schiller is not an antinomian. He affirms that there is a moral law—it’s not something you just make up as you go along. It’s something you have to discover within yourself. This is a very Rousseauan and Kantian idea. Kant, leaning on Rousseau, famously said:

There is this idea among these thinkers that the moral law is written on the heart of every human being, and that it is a reflection of Cosmic Law. And that both the law above and the law within is knowable. So Schiller is very much a Kantian and a Rousseauan in affirming the moral law within him. But what Schiller could not abide in Kant was his idea of “duty”.

For Kant, if a moral choice wasn’t painful and difficult, it didn’t really count as a moral choice. And there was this sense in Kant that to do one’s moral duty was an end in itself. This was not true for Rousseau, nor was it true for Schiller. For both moral law, what Rousseau called the Law of Nature, is something to be discovered within the soul, and when it was awakened there, it was a source of joy and liberation. To live in alignment with the Law of Nature is to be vitalized b it. It’s what cures our alienation. It’s a pleasure. (Remind you of anything? Read Psalm 1.)

So Schiller was struggling to find a way to live lawfully in this ‘unconventional’ sense, and his solution was what he called the ‘spieltrieb’ that roughly translates as ‘play drive’. He elaborated on this in a series of letters to a friend that was later published in 1792 as—

Schilller asserts there that there are three stages in human moral development—

First, the Savage, the human driven by instinct, purely hedonic, no impulse control, not free but a slave to his passions. In other words, the kind of human that D&G celebrate.

The second stage is the Barbarian, the human constrained by rules, laws, duty and so alienated from his instinctual and natural life. He’s thinking of Kant here.

The third stage he calls ‘The Beautiful Soul’, the human animated by the spieltrieb or play drive. He was thinking of his friend Goethe as exemplary in this regard. I think these stages foreshadow stages in moral and psychological development outlined by Kierkegaard and later Maslow and Kohlberg, but no time to get into that here.

So what is the Play Drive as it works in the Beautiful Soul? Think about children who are playing a game. The game has rules. Without the constraints that the rules impose, there is no game. Without rules the game has no shape. And yet the kids are all-in, completely, unselfconsciously, playfully engaged. Until someone breaks the rules. Then there’s outrage. Such a breach ruins everything. The point is that humans need constraints even if they are playing and having fun. Chaos is no fun. We humans like to give a shape to things; if there is no shape, there is no Beauty. 

Where else do we see these constraints “in play”?  How about in music? You can’t just play whatever you want. That would be infantile. There is a deeper lawfulness that must be learned and obeyed. And within that structure there is a broad range of possibilities for improvisation. But there has to be a tension between the free play and the underlying lawfulness that makes the playing possible.

But more than that—how does one become capable of such improvisational “play” at such a high level? There are disciplines—constraints— that the aspiring musician gladly submits to because they are necessary for him or her to achieve the level of mastery required for such transcendent’ aesthetic’ moments. Without the technical mastery, you lack the capability to ‘play’. Without the discipline that allowed you to achieve mastery, the ecstasy of the aesthetic moment cannot be available. You haven’t the skill to meet it.

Contra D&G and the Transhumanists, constraints are necessary for human flourishing. But some constraints are simply repressive, and others are liberating. The trick is to be able to tell the difference. This is what Schiller’s spieltrieb was struggling to articulate. I think that what he’s talking about is similar to what psychologists call the ‘flow state’. And this flow or play state is perhaps most frequently experienced by athletes and musicians, but they have to train; they have to develop the bodily habits and the physical skills that makes such play at a high level a possibility.

And there’s a huge difference between having those constraints imposed upon you from outside authorities and choosing them for yourself. That makes all the difference for Schiller. You have to live inside-out, not outside-in.

I’d say the same thing is true in the moral life. But the training one does is what’s called virtue or ‘arete’. In Greek ‘arete’ means excellence. Really it means ‘training for excellence’. And the goal of this training is what Aristotle called eudaimonia. I think that what Schiller called spieltrieb is kissing cousins with what Aristotle called eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia means literally a state of happy or blessed divinity. For Aristotle virtue isn’t practiced as an end in itself or as duty for the sake of duty, as in Kant. Rather it is practiced as a means to an end, which is a joyful alignment with the divine, aka, the Transcendent Good. A soul that reaches some level of eudaimonia, is akin to what Schiller calls the Beautiful Soul.

The goal for Schiller, as for Socrates and Rousseau, was to subvert the repressive conventional social order that breeds delusion and alienation. They wanted to promote a way of living that enables humans to live in a deeper contact with something vitally real, and because it is vital, liberating, and because it is liberating, a cure for alienation.

And they asserted that humans are happiest and most deeply liberated when they find a way to align themselves with the deep cosmic lawfulness of things, rather than to live as a slave to the passions, Schiller’s savage, or a slave to convention, Schiller’s barbarian.

And so when we talk about what human flourishing entails, surely this must be an intrinsic part of that, right? Does it play any prominent role in what human flourishing entails with the TCM? Is this the object of all the efforts toward which the Transhumanists strive? Hardly. Why? Because eudaimonia serves no useful function in the TCM. Indeed, it is subversive of it.

Am I overstating the case? I don’t think so. Why is anxiety and control-freakery more the spirit of life in the TCM? Why is it that “play” has become identified with unconstrained surrender to vulgar, hedonic appetites? What is it that makes a true, free playfulness so difficult for us now? Why do so few people seem to have it, even compared to a few decades ago?

Fear and control-freakery is the enemy of free play. And fear of death and control freakery is the fuel that drives Transhumanism. Living authentically toward death has always been thematic in philosophy, at least since the time of Socrates. Dealing with human finitude and mortality is a constraint, a constraint that gives shape to a human life. And it’s a constraint that makes living deeply and happily a possibility. All constraints—any ideas about limits—are utterly rejected by the postmodern logic of the TCM. 

But those are deep waters we need not swim in today. But here’s the thing: the Transhumanists are those who are engineering the AI future, and they are programming into these machines their own unacknowledged demons, their fear and their control-freakery. And that cannot be a good thing for the machines, and for that reason cannot be a good thing for humans. Their pursuits do not affect them alone. What they are doing affects us all. The TCM offers us solution to alienation it has created in a way that only deepens it because of all the ways it seeks to cut us off from what is vitally real. 

So, that’s the anti-Anti-Oedipus argument that I make to my students that some find compelling as an alternative to the anything-goes, no-limits Libertarianism that typifies thinking in business schools and computer science programs. This is the values world they swim in and accept as normative. Anything-goes Libertarianism is the ideology of the TCM, and it has enormous persuasive force because it’s a program that in my lifetime has come to dominate every sector of the university, even in the humanities where there has traditionally been resistance to this crude kind of materialism.

But I believe that if my students respond to it positively, it’s not because it is persuasive on a purely logical basis, but because there is something innately good in them that is provoked by it. They respond because they have consciences. And I daresay that if they are not persuaded it’s because they are too invested in the TCM. They are quite comfortable to live in it, at least for now, and their careers and material comforts depend on it. 

And so it’s been my observation that while I believe that everyone has a conscience, in too many people it’s latent or sleeping. And too often it’s confused with the Superego. So I want to spend a few moment talking about the difference between Conscience and Superego. In the TCM, there is no such thing as conscience; there can only be Superego, and what we have in the absurd culture wars tearing our society apart are two factions arguing over whose superego codes should dominate in the broader society. My answer is neither. The only real solution in the long run is for more and more people to grow stronger consciences. 

As I laid out earlier, Superego is what we get from our acculturation. It’s the linguistic-cultural download we receive as children with the Oedipus Complex. It’s when we learn the rules of the society into which we are born, and when we learn what is socially acceptable or unacceptable, it’s when we learn the taboos. And I also pointed out that what’s socially acceptable or unacceptable may or may not align with what is deeply True and Good--as it did not in the segregated South or Germany in the ‘30s.

Conscience is different from Superego. We all have one, but it must be awakened, and when it’s awakened, it gives one the capability to stand outside his or her acculturation, to stand outside the Oedipus Complex. This is why the story of Atticus Finch in To Kill a Mockingbird is so moving for us. If Finch were wholly enclosed within his acculturation, he would have just gone along with what as expected of him as a white man in the segregated South. Atticus Finch is a model of the self-legislating human. He knows the Transcendent Good, and he is free enough, morally mature enough, to obey it.

How is conscience born? We get an interesting clue in The Matrix dialogue I recited last week when Neo is confronted by Morpheus:

MORPHEUS

Do you want to know what it is, Neo?

It's that feeling you have had all your life. That feeling that something was wrong with the world. You don't know what it is but it's there, like a splinter in your mind, driving you mad, driving you to me. But what is it?

That “splinter” is his conscience struggling to be born. It’s the part of him that already knows that something’s wrong, but didn’t know that he knew until Morpheus gave him a good slap upside the head. Conscience doesn’t tell us something new so much as it awakens what we already know.

And then the question for him becomes whether he will do what conscience requires. And so he must choose—red pill or blue?

Choose the red pill and you take a step forward and you begin to develop a deeper relationship with Reality. Choose the blue pill, and you back into an imprisonment in the Matrix, a world of delusion.

Now I think that most of you would agree with me that the conscience is not something that awakens in the head, but in the heart. The ‘heart' as a metaphor has become trivialized and sentimentalized, but its older meanings must be retrieved and honored.

In Jewish and Christian thought, the moral measure of the human being lies in whether one has a hard heart of or a supple one. How does one obtain a supple heart? Maybe it has something to do with paying attention to that splinter. So one’s cognitive ability, one’s ability to see the truth in a situation, to see what is Good or not Good in a situation must be sussed out.

This isn’t’ a matter of just following the rules. And it isn’t just a matter of seeing the facts clearly. Knowing the facts is essential, but more important is the kind of heart we have that interprets the facts. A hard-hearted person will interpret the facts one way, and the supple-hearted in a way quite differently. Our knowledge of the facts is not what makes something truly True. Rather it is our interpretation of them that makes them so. And the disposition of our heart is what allows us to know or not know what is really True or Good. This capacity for knowing in this way used to be called Wisdom.

Can you point to any prominent American in our public life who is Wise in this way? Why is there no one who comes to mind? Maybe because the TCM has no use for such people. So you see where I’m going here? The TCM is allergic to Wisdom. Its antibodies reject it. But how can you have a sane society that has no capacity for making wise decisions?

What is Wisdom and how does one become wiser? I think of wisdom as the measure of our progress in overcoming our innate foolishness. What is our innate foolishness? Our proclivity toward self-delusion and self-destructive behaviors. So the measure of our Wisdom is the measure of our ability to develop a progressively deeper grip on Reality. But this makes no sense if you don't believe that there is a reality that you can get a grip on. Do the Transhumanists believe that? Do Deleuze and Guattari? Do any of the postmodernist thinkers like Foucault, Butler, etc.? 

And yet many people take these postmodern thinkers seriously because what they write makes sense in the TCM, which is where we all live. And so they articulate what makes sense within its constraints, even if, ironically, their doctrine is to throw off all constraints. If, as in the TCM, the transcendent Good as ground of Reality is a priori excluded from our understanding about what Reality, isn’t then anything produced with the boundaries it defines as legitimate almost certainly foolish?

I am not asserting that what the TCM knows about the material world is untrue. Clearly it has a firm grip on the material facts. But is its heart right? Rather the TCM’s foolishness lies in what it leaves out, that which the supple heart knows to be Good. And in doing so it assumes that its knowledge of the mechanics of the material world explains everything.

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[In the lecture I went into some detail describing how the movie Whale Rider brings all these themes together. To make this written version shorter and more readable, I'm deleting it here and i’ll be posting it separately as an Appendix later in the week.]

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Ok. Here’s the thing: I believe that pluralism is a good thing. I believe that differences make life more interesting, that they prevent us from ever becoming complacent and rigid in our thinking. I believe that our limited, provisional understanding of the world is expanded when whe are confronted by others who see things differently.  

But dialogue is useless among people who are entrenched in mutually opposed delusional viewpoints that share no common ground. Where can that that common ground be found? Well, where it always used to be found, in a shared sense of the Transcendent Good.

 In an open society, yes, there is freedom of religion. You can believe whatever you want, and most non-religious  people will say to someone who is religious:  “Cool—whatever floats your boat. I have no objections. But it’s not for me, and don’t force it on me.” And that’s perfectly understandable. None of us wants to live in someone else’s theocracy. So we embrace the secular society as the default.

But there’s an unintended consequence that we have to grapple with. The secular society represents itself as metaphysically neutral. But it isn’t. It’s metaphysically materialistic. Its ethos is dominated by the TCM. It sees the human being as a wetware, consuming machine--even though most Americans don’t think that's what a human being is. But it doesn’t matter what most humans think because we’re only allowed to talk about humans in the public sphere as biological machines. Those are the only terms the TCM recognizes as legitimate.

In forbidding a transcendental metaphysics of any kind to influence our public life, we allow a materialistic metaphysics to dominate it by default. And so while we are all free to believe in our private lives whatever we want, when we go to work every day, or when we engage in politics, we must do it on the materialist terms that the TCM defines. 

So we accept this split. Over here in our private lives we believe in the Transcendent Good. But over there in our public lives, we must live in a values world that is in complete contradiction to what we believe in private. This is kind of schizophrenic. It’s hard to live a life of integrity if we are split like this.

And the tension between the two is hard to maintain. And so slowly, whether we are aware of it or not, the values and beliefs that define what a human being is become the mechanistic values assumed in the TCM because it plays such a powerful role in all our public institutions. People who were brought up in religious households begin to say to themselves. “I don’t need religion.” Well, is it because they are “free thinkers”, or is it because they’ve just come to accept the conventional thinking as the TCM has established it? They’re just going with the flow.

Even if we continue to go to church, it’s very hard for our children to see its relevance in their lives. The symbolic/sacramental dimension of reality makes no sense to them. The symbols don’t symbolize. And so church just becomes a system of repressive constraints—rules to follow without any sense of how they provide a path to a deeper kind of human flourishing. 

Where are the churches doing a good job of inspiring our children to become self-legislating, beautiful souls? I’m not saying that it doesn’t happen. It’s just not what the churches are known for these days, and nobody looks to them for that. If they became known for that, they would have relevance, and they would recover their moral and spiritual authority because they would be providing people with a truly relevant path to overcome their alienation. Maybe some day.

So people who are well adapted to living in the TCM see religion, or any assertion that there might be a Transcendent Good, as irrelevant for their lives, because it has no functional presence in the TCM, which has come to define rather rigidly the horizons that define what’s real and unreal, valuable and worthless for them. Can the secular liberals among you who fear an unchecked TCM at least try to see why this dismissal of the Transcendent Good has significant negative consequences? Can you see how accepting the metaphysical materialism of the TCM makes resisting the TCM so extraordinarily difficult? 

So the point here is that religious freedom is a phantom. It’s tolerated because it doesn’t really matter. It has no legitimacy and no real energy to have an impact on what the TCM envisions as the Transhumanist future. Those most habituated to life in the TCM see any interest in the Transcendent as at best an entertainment like getting into astrology, Tarot Cards, or practicing Wicca. Fine, Whatever. But don’t bring it with you to work if you have any career ambitions to rise in the TCM hierarchy.

And yet the churches still do matter, not just for individual people of faith, but for the broader society. Because feeble though they might be in this moment, the church is a sign of contradiction within the TCM. It functions within it as a ‘splinter’.

So now let me take a few minutes to close this series on a hopeful note.

If I were to write a book, my title for it would be Wandering in the Wilderness. I shared this book idea with a friend about twenty years ago, and his response was “Who’d ever read a book with a title like that?” I thought he was probably right and started a blog instead. But even now if I were to write a book, that would still be my title, and here’s why:

The wilderness is the place you go when you want to get out of society. It’s the place were there are no rules, no Superego. Wandering in the wilderness was a necessary passage for the ancient Israelites after being liberated from Egypt, and it was a place for them to learn to be free, to un-learn their long habituation to being sheepish slaves.

The wilderness is a place where one is freed from the old, unhealthful constraints in the hope of creating something new. And so the wilderness is the place where you de-territorialize. It can be a place where one reverts to savagery. Or it can be a place where one learns to be free in the sense that Socrates and Schiller understood it, to become a master of oneself, to become self-legislating.

Bt here’s the difference between the role of the wilderness for our ancestors and the wilderness for us now. Now we do not choose to go out into the Wilderness because the Wilderness has come to us.

That was my reason for spending so much time with Deleuze and Guattari earlier. They are describing our collective condition when there are no external traditions, customs, or laws to guide us. We’re on our own. The wilderness in coming to us has de-territorialized us in place, without our going anywhere. And so we find ourselves in a society where many have reverted to savagery and some are learning to become free in the best and deepest sense. 

And it’s our experience of being collectively de-territorialized that I believe is at the root of what is driving MAGA’s grievances. They want their territory back. I get it. But there is no getting it back. They, like the rest of us, must grow up. We must all embrace our being de-territorialized. The churches, wherever they have retained some degree of spiritual vitality, have found a way to help people to do so without indulging their grievances.

And for this reason, I think that the Church must also wander in the wilderness for a while. In part because it’s being chastened for its foolishness and its egregious moral failures. But in part because that’s our collective condition now. It must be where the people are and suffer what the people suffer. But it like the rest of us will recover. And recovery comes from the inside out, from the depths where the gospels tell us the kingdom of God, the Law of Heaven, is born within. For it is in the depths of the human soul where the Transcendent becomes Immanent.

And I would argue that the Church, if it is to have any relevance for the broader globalizing world, has to do a better job to help people learn to become truly free, to become self-legislating, to grow in Wisdom, and to become Beautiful Souls. And it is from within the latent riches of the human soul that together, regardless of our religious affiliations, that we will find the resources to renew the face of the earth.