Bird's Eye View

What's the Larger Argument that I'm Trying to Make?

What I’m trying to do here is probably not ideal for blog or Newsletter, but should rather be in a book. I’m not particularly motivated to write a book that nobody is going to read, but it might be useful exercise for me and for the few people who are interested to try to integrate all these themes in one place, hopefully in a coherent, readable, engaging (?) text. So we’ll see. Maybe a project for the winter when it starts getting dark and wet out here.

The tentative plan for such a book would be (1) to make the argument to open minded, educated, mostly, but not exclusively, “Liberal”, educated readers that we need an alternative metaphysical narrative to the one that currently dominates, (2) to argue that such a narrative cannot be invented out of thin air, but is already there in our collective unconscious waiting to be ‘remembered’— the classical tradition; and (3) to argue why such an outcome is more plausible than most people think it is and what kind of thing have to happen to bring it about. That’s a heavy lift, and I’m not at all sure I can pull it off, but I think it’s possible with a little help from Taylor, Hart, and MacIntyre, on whom I would heavily rely.

If I were to write such a book, I’d entitle it ‘Rescuing Aristotle: Finding Our Way to the Good Society’, Aristotle being a synecdoche for the classical tradition. So then, from whom does Aristotle need to be rescued? From reactionaries.¹ I’m sick of how the Right has come to claim the classical tradition in support of their illiberal, closed-society agenda. I am committed to both the open society and to the classical tradition, i.e., to hold both together in a creative tension. The open society without the classical tradition gives us what we have now—the Libertarian moral anarchy that produces a Trump. The classical tradition without an open society would give us what the reactionaries want, a theocracy or some ethnocentric state. I want neither. I want a Good Society, and I think there is no such thing as a Good Society without both an open-society ideal that is sustained and nourished by the classical tradition.

The culture war that has riven American society politically since the 90s has been going on for centuries, but it came into public view in American society during the Scopes Trial in the 1920s. This was the great battle over whether evolutionary theory should be taught in public schools. It was a cultural boxing match between, in one corner, the charismatic populist and Christian Fundamentalist William Jennings Bryan, and, in the other corner, representing the educated elites, the urbane Clarence Darrow. So, on the one side science and rationality and on the other religion and obscurantism.

Populist religion and obscurantism won the jury in that trial, and the culture’s educated elite scoffed, and kept scoffing right up to the election of Donald Trump. The educated elites (me included) were shocked that so many American could vote for someone so vile twice. It never occurred to them (me included) that their vote was not one of approval but because they were sick and tired of having their values scoffed at. We live in a society in which we’ve been running the Scopes Trial on a continuous loop. It’s insane, and we need to break out of it.

As I’ve been arguing here sporadically, this split became inevitable after the Reformation when Protestants rejected the classical tradition and embraced a fideism for which the only pursuit of truth that mattered was what was in the scriptures. Everything else was irrelevant because one’s salvation is the only thing that is relevant. Rationality—and actually caring about civilization as a rational project— became the exclusive preserve of a scientific pursuit of truth.

This project had about it from the beginning a materialistic inflection that created the space for capitalism and the Baconian—eventually the Transhumanist—Project. So Western civilization uniquely split so that its traditional spiritual ideals had less and less influence in the public sphere precisely because its most influential Christians abandoned rationality insisting on sola fide, sola scriptura, while its most dynamic creative personalities pursued careers in science and commerce. Both the religionists and the materialists rejected for their different reasons the classical tradition, and so I want to argue, that’s a big reason, if not the principal reason, we’re in the civilizational crisis we’re in now. As a civilization around 1600, the West was standing at the top of a ladder, and both these parties kicked it out from under themselves. That worked for a while, but gravity wins in the long run.

So the modern story is essentially about how in the West its two primary culture shaping forces—fideistic, anti-intellectual religion and materialistic rationality—both rejected a richer, more humane understanding of rationality.² I want to argue that the story for the future, if we are to have one, requires the recovery of a vital healthy civilization that has the cultural infrastructure that makes possible our aspiring toward the Good Society. Such an aspiration is simply not possible within the constraints of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. Lots of people, maybe even especially Liberals, want the Good Society, but they don’t realize that it’s an app that just cannot run on the TCM’s OS. And as long as that OS provides our civilizational architecture, all our efforts to create a more humane society will be frustrated.³ Every honest effort gets swallowed up by its maw and coopted by it. So I’m tired of doing the same thing over and over again with no effective change—it’s insane. I want a rational strategy, and that requires a restoration of a broader understanding about what rationality entails.

I want to argue, leaning on Taylor, Hart, and MacIntyre, that because what came to be counted as ‘rational’ became too narrowly defined, we find ourselves boxed in by the TCM. Once again, the problem is not with technology itself, with innovation, or with the idea of scientific progress, but rather to challenge at a fundamental, civilizational level what ends or goals such progress serves within the TCM’s frame. It’s pretty clear to me that those ends have little or nothing to do with broad, rich human flourishing, and almost everything to do with hubris and greed. Such a challenge of the TCM while accepting its basic metaphysical presuppositions is impossible. It’s like the old days trying to run apps made for Windows not available for Mac on a Mac. Either it didn’t work at all, or it was ridiculously buggy.

So to get everyone to change the OS is not easy, and you probably think that it’s insane even to attempt it. And so, yes, the burden of making that case is on me, and that’s the third of the objectives that I outlined above. It certainly can’t happen overnight. No one is going to do it unless they see that the advantages make the hassle worth it. Like most things it will start with a vanguard, early adopters, who have some prestige in the larger culture to legitimate it. Then there will have to be concrete benefits that become obvious to more and more people.

So the bottom line here is that I see this as a rational project—one that to most reasonable people will makes sense. It is not a theological project and does not require faith, but seeks to establish metaphysical framework that is not inimical to religion and faith as the current TCM’s OS is. It would allow for a pluralism of local, particular religions and spiritual practices and welcome their participation and contributions to the commonweal, so long as they participate in it rationally. If that sounds too constraining for those of you who are people of faith, it’s either because you have too constrained an idea of rationality or you have too constrained an idea of faith. Besides, it’s the basic requirement for living in an Open Society. Nobody wants to live in somone else’s theocracy.

All of the great religious traditions, while they are founded on what the modern mindset perceives as irrational or mystical intuitions or insights, are, when at their best, quite rational in their accounting for what they understand to be true. And the proof of it is the remarkable way that the great post-Axial traditions overlap with one another to allow for rational intercourse between them because they all embrace a transcendental metaphysics.

So the argument that I want to make is not that we need to take a leap of faith into a transcendental metaphysics, but that such a metaphysics provides a more reasonable account of our human experience than the current mechanistic, soul-crushing, dogmatically materialistic, metaphysical frame that undergirds the Techno-Capitalist Matrix.

There is no reason, I would argue, for Western science to feel threatened by the broad cultural embrace of a transcendentalist metaphysical frame, but rather to see itself as an integral contributor to its enrichment. The difference is that science isn’t privileged in defining what’s true or not, what’s important or not, and what’s most worthy of human aspiration or not. Science takes its place within a larger civilizational project that is grounded in and inspired by transcendental ideals. Science isn’t a problem; scientistic Positivism is. Faith isn’t a problem; a rigd dogmatism and fundamentalism is.

The culture war, symbolized by its first public battle in the Scopes trial, is a war between vulgar Positivists and vulgar Religionists—they are each irrationalist sides of the same coin. The fanatical insistence that I am right and so therefore you must be wrong is crazy, and crazy cannot communicate with crazy. But crazy is our future until we find a metaphysical frame that is broadly embraced by both the culture’s elite and its everyday citizens.

1. The title is also a hat tip to Rescuing Socrates: How the Great Books Changed My Life and Why They Matter for a New Generation by Roosevelt Montas, the director of Columbia University’s Center for the Core Curriculum.

2. I think it’s fair to say that Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox traditions, (but more in the East than in the West) held onto aspects of the classical tradition and its commitment to rationality in ways that the Protestant churches did not, but both Catholicism and Orthodoxy became culturally irrelevant in shaping where things were going in the West.

The story of Catholic Church’s progressive civilizational irrelevance in the centuries since the Reformation is complicated, but clearly its principal figures were not up to the challenges that modernity confronted them with. I think that the game was lost for the Catholics after the Thirty Years War. It lost because it played the territorial power game surrendering to its most egregious barbarisms not animated by the spirit of the gospels, but by the spirit of the Roman eagle, which caused it to lose whatever moral and cultural authority it might have retained after the Reformation. This is the fundamental mistake that religious reactionaries, whether Catholic, Orthodox, Evangelical, or Islamic, don’t seem ever to understand—they cannot play the power game and retain any level of moral authority. They can force themselves on those who resist them, but they will always be hated.

Defenders of Catholicism might say that the Calvinists were worse, but that’s no argument, because neither have they retained any moral authority. In the end, Calvinism became simply an accessory to the materialist thrust of Capitalism and the Baconian Project, not a force that had any moral authority in directing either. The Catholic sacramental sensibility still played an important role in the arts, but not in influencing political and economic developments.

3. The Rachel Maddows of the world think we can create the Good Society on the existing TCM’s OS, and I just don’t. In writing this book I want to persuade intellectually honest Liberals of good will that that we have to find another way.