Is Moral Progress Possible?

It is if we want it

In the post that follows, I’m going to review/repeat some ideas that are foundational for my argument in order to address a question that I’ve only tip-toed around before: What happened to all the gods, spirits, elementals, demons, etc., that inhabited the enchanted world of our premodern ancestors? Do they simply no longer exist, or have they just gone into hiding? My answer is a bit fringe, but I think it’s at least part of the key for answering the question that’s asked in the post’s title. (BTW, I’m exceeding my 1000-word rule today. The rule still stands, but once in a while I’m going to break it.)

If you’ve been reading here, you know that I do not equate human progress with technological advancement. I’m not against tech; I’m against the nihilism of the mindset that is obsessed with its advancement no matter what the cost, no matter what the consequences.

So the idea of progress for me is linked foundationally to the idea of moral progress. Does anybody believe anymore that moral progress is possible? I do. I am with MLK when he talks about moral arcs bending toward Justice, but there can be no moral progress unless there is a broad consensus about what it is, and maybe it starts with actually believing that there is such a thing as Justice or the Good as transcendental ideals, i.e., as metaphysical realities that exist outside our human constructions but which shape our human constructions if we are open to be inspired by them.

So yes I am a Progressive in this sense of the word. I believe in progress but that any progress worthy of the name has to be correlated with moral progress. And so tech progress is progress so long as it serves rather than impedes moral progress. That’s not how most elites living within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix think about what progress is or what the Good is.

But if you polled Americans, whether they lean Left or Right, I believe most think about Justice as a transcendental even if they are unfamiliar with the transcendental as a concept. I think that most people think of Justice as not just something that we make up. The people who do understand the concept and don’t believe it exists are mainly elites on the Right and Left: the political operatives who run the duopoly, the conventional atheists who occupy most humanities departments, the media types who are cynical about everything, the Social Darwinists who run our corporations. And for that reason, such an idea of the transcendental Good or Justice plays hardly any role in shaping our politics, our economy, or our cultural life.

The people who rise to the top of our social institutions are the hyper-thymotic types, often sociopaths, who think that might makes right, and that anybody who doesn’t understand that is a fool and a loser. Is there any wonder we’ve put Donald Trump in the White House—twice? He’s not an aberration; he’s just an ugly revelation of who of the cultural Operating System that on which the country has been running since the Civil War and especially since WWII. Some represented its goals with more charm and style—e.g.,the Kennedys and Obama—and so were more acceptable, but all served the same system where material and tech progress is the only kind of progress that counts. Whether it was their personal intention or not, they served what is at its root an evil system that made Trump possible.

Nevertheless, I believe moral progress is possible. It comes in fits and starts, but in the long arc of history there are some historical moments of transition that are more significantly transformative than others. One of the really big moments is what Karl Jaspers called the Axial Revolution that occurred in the mid first millennium BCE.

So let’s review:¹

For our purposes in this post, let’s define religion since the Axial Revolution as being split into two fundamentally different impulses. First, the old religion of the plural gods, of spirits both malign and benign, of demons, and tricksters, and all manner of sprites and elementals that teemed in the created world, even if mostly invisibly. These are phenomena are found in every society throughout the globe going back thousands of years, whether in aboriginal tribal societies or in highly civilized, sophisticated empires, East and West—until about 500 years ago. Let’s call this ‘immanent religion’.

The second kind of religion emerged in the first millenium BCE—not all at once, but in a way that was profoundly disruptive to the old immanent religions. They emerged at more or less the same time in China, India, Persia, Israel, and Greece—and perhaps also in the Americas, although the historical record isn’t as clear. Let’s call this ‘transcendent religion’.

I would describe this disruption as a moment of significant human moral progress, and a model for other similar disruptions since (the advent of Christianity and Islam), and likely a model for future disruptions. In any event, it was a response of particular people in particular societies to a new experience of the transcendent Good. There is usually a founder—Moses, Zoroaster, Buddha—and later Jesus and Mohammed—who articulated and channeled this experience of the Good in a way that those who encountered it in them found found their lives to have become profoundly changed.

Among those so changed, a small cadre of disciples became a vanguard through whom the news of the Good is spread. The good news is usually resisted by the old guard, but over time the new thing becomes accepted and begins to shape societal norms and mores in very significant ways. These are moments of significant moral progress, different in different societies, but all in some measure a response to an experience of the Transcendental Good.

But the old thing doesn’t just go away. It persists in significant ways because the old ways were a genuine response to people’s experience of reality. The new revelation of the transcendent Good didn’t change the fundamental problems of human material and spiritual/psychological precarity. For most people human flourishing was still about the ordinary ‘immanent’ desires for good hunting or bountiful crops, many children, long lives, and victory over one’s enemies, and there was still a deeply felt need to call upon the local gods to help them manage their experience of precarity. I think it’s presumptous if we assume that these local practices didn’t work for them because they don’t work for us, but I don’t want to get sidetracked.

So while these those desires and fears didn’t go away, the new understanding of the Good opened up possibilities for understanding and managing them differently. The new idea was to trust in the Good and not worry too much about controlling one’s immanent precarity so obsessively. Those concerns about precarity remain because they are just a part of being human, but the new goal was to try not to be too distracted by those concerns, and instead to get one’s life aligned with the Good and in doing so to become oneself, gradually, the Good. The great saints and sages were those who were most advanced in this project. In the West this process was best articulated by Aristotle as ‘eudaimonia’, and it was later expanded, enriched, and democratized by the Christian idea of ‘theosis’.

Although the contemporary “human potential movement” is a kind of counterfeit version of Aristotelean eudaimonia, the idea that the human telos lies not just in doing good but in becoming Good otherwise plays no role within the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. This is true even in the Churches—especially the churches most deeply affected by the Reformation. Theosis is still there in the Eastern Orthodox traditions and to some extent it lives in American Catholicism in its veneration of the saints, although you’ll rarely hear the word uttered from any Catholic pulpit. This is true, in my opinion, because American Catholicism was largely shaped by the double whammy of its developing in a Calvinist society largely led by an Irish clergy deeply influenced by Jansenism—the Catholic version of Calvinism.²

Back to the Axial Revolution: So societies affected by this disruptive revelation of the Good 2500 years ago responded in ways that were in different degrees continuous and discontinuous with the old Immanent Religion. New beliefs and practices developed in these post-Axial societies that challenged the best people, i.e., the people of good will capable of responding at some level to this encounter with the Good, to discontinue their old ways and change their lives in such a way that they aligned with this new understanding about what most most deeply true and Real. And these ‘best’ people were profoundly influential in developing new societal norms and practices that were more in alignment with the new awareness of the Good as something that stood in contradiction to the old ways.

So the disruption into the old Immanent Religion of the new Transcendent Religion doesn’t mean that the old thing goes away. It’s always there as layer in the society as a whole and as a layer in the individual souls of those who rejected the old in their attempt to respond to the new thing. Both, the higher and the lower, the transcendent and the immanent, co-exist in the individual soul and in the broader society.³

But at the same time, for those inspired by this new awareness of the transcendent, a feeling of alienation grows because to respond to the new thing means to reject the old thing in some measure, and yet the old thing persists, and so one feels the tension between the call to something transcendently higher that must at the same time contest with the powerful pull of the old, lower, immanent thing. This tension was not felt before; it is very, very uncomfortable; and it is handled in different ways by different societies. There might be a new hope for a different kind of future, but there is still a longing or nostalgia for the old thing where at least there was no tension, no experience of guilt for falling short of an almost impossible demand to live at the higher level.⁴

In ancient Israel, especially after the Deuteronomic Reform (600s BCE), the old thing was completely rejected, and a new society was created that aspired to be completely in alignment with the Torah, the law of heaven—the gift of the One, transcendent Godhead. And everybody from top to bottom was expected to live in complete conformity to the new thing. Everything else was a form of idolatry because nothing could be tolerated that distracted one from seeking to do what the One true God commanded. This was extraordinarily demanding, and there was incessant falling back into the old thing. ⁵

A Buddhist or Hindu or Confucian society was more or less united in sharing among all layers of their respective societies the same metaphysical imaginary shaped by their understanding of the Transcendent Good, but there were different levels of engagement with the it. Some, mostly monks, sought and found a deeper alignment with it; others lived pretty much continuous with the way that their pre-Axial ancestors did. Most ordinary people—peasants, soldiers, merchants, political elites—lived in a way more continuous with the old ways, reverencing the old gods, the old totems, rites, and practices—and continued in the old sins. But they acknowledged the moral superiority of the new, transcendent ideal and sought to be on good terms with it.

So in these societies there was a sense of both higher and lower, of some people being more spiritually serious than others. In Platonism, Hindu and Buddhist societies (and later in Jewish Hasidism), a doctrine of reincarnation allowed the less serious to accept their lower spiritual status in the hopes that their living a decent life more or less in accord with the new thing—the Tao or Eightfold Path or Torah—would set them up in their next life to live at a higher spiritual and social level.

The Asian hierarchical model was also eventually adopted in Christian societies. Although Christianity grew out of ancient Judaism, it was at first more tolerant of the local Celtic, Germanic, or Mediterranean gods, which were, where possible, translated into cults of the saints and the Virgin. The desert or the monastery was there for the more spiritually serious. And so the same system of hierarchical complementarity that developed in Asia evolved in Europe until the Reformation when radical Reformers sought to reinstate the ancient Judaic model—i.e., a model intolerant of the local gods, intolerant of any of pagan rites and practices of their neighbors, intolerant of making images of the One, or even to speak his name. No more toleration of the old thing, which for the Reformers was the Catholic thing. It was all rejected as superstition and idolatry. Everybody was expected to live at the same level of moral seriousness. This was the model Calvin tried to establish in Geneva in the 1500s, and so likewise for him there was no compromise with the local gods and the quasi-heathen rites and practices that lingered in Catholicism. All that became taboo.

Maybe it was necessary for human moral progress to make such things taboo, at least for a while. There’s an argument to be made there. But declaring something taboo doesn’t mean it goes away. It just gets repressed. It lives in the collective unconscious and sooner or later it comes back with a vengeance. And so if the German Romantics and Idealists (particularly Goethe and Schelling⁶) are right that Nature and the human unconscious are the same thing, both deeply intertwined and interdependent, then real knowledge involves a correlation between awakening in the depths of human consciousness what is yet undisclosed (or has been repressed) in Nature.⁷

That’s the answer to the question posed earlier about where have all the gods and nature spirits gone. They’ve gone into hiding in the human individual and collective unconscious.⁸ I realize that for some readers this is a big idea, perhaps even a repugnant idea, but if you’re open to it, it grows on you and makes more and more sense, and it opens up interesting possibilities for imagining a future outside the Techno-Capitalist Matrix. If it’s true, it’s a key to understanding what moral progress in the future entails. And how it necessitates confronting and subordinating technological progress to moral progress. In any event, ‘After the Future’ is all about trying to develop some ability to think outside the constraints defined by the presuppositions of the Techno-Capitalist Matrix and to point out the people, ancestors and contemporaries, who provide the resources to do it. If that’s interesting to you, keep reading.

(BTW, it would help if more of you challenged me if you’re skeptical or asked questions for clarification in comments. Outside of a handful or regular commenters, I have no idea how these ideas are landing with readers here. Or you can email me. I have no ambitions to build a huge readership, but I would like to feel more engaged with the people who have been consistently reading here.)

So, if you’re still with me, here are some preliminary considerations: If what is in the depths of the human soul correlates with what’s in the depths of Nature, this completely redefines what our advancement in knowledge, perhaps most importantly our scientific research, should really be about. And it also redefines how progress in knowledge goes hand in hand, or should, with moral progress. And it also opens up a way of thinking about how we might once again re-inhabit an enchanted, multi-layered, soulful, symbolically rich world rather than to live in the flat, one-dimensional world that Calvinism/Capitalism has given us.

Now the problem with re-enchanting the world is that we, like our ancestors, will have to deal not just with the benign spirits, but the malign ones, too. We’re already dealing with them, of course. We just think of them as a purely subjective neurotic/psychotic phenomena best dealt with by drugs. If we saw this phenomena as a more objective, transpersonal reality, not just affecting us as individuals, but as the energies that have created our collective psychosis and which are driving human history quite possibly off a cliff, maybe we could develop the collective will not to keep them repressed where they work mostly unconsciously in destructive ways, but to deal with them consciously in an effort to redirect them more constructively.

Another way of putting it is that our moral progress in this moment depends on confronting the Demonic repressed in depths of the world—both nature and in our social constructs, which is the same as the Demonic that is repressed in the depths of our souls—both individual and collective. Our pre-modern ancestors were in a better position to deal with it because they saw the Demonic as ‘objective’ in a way we don’t. The Demonic insofar as it is repressed in our collective unconscious is easy to ignore so long as we think of it as unreal. But we ignore it at our peril.

What makes me think we can succeed? We have something our pre-Axial Revolution ancestors did not have, a place to set our feet in the transcendent Good, and the belief that our alliance with the Good enables us—not to defeat the Demonic—but to redeem it. That’s the difference between the Asian post-Axial religions and many sectors of Christianity. There is a pessimism in Augustinian Christianity which it shares with much in Buddhism that nothing good can ever happen on earth, and the goal is to get out of the earth prison and into the higher dimension once and for all. I reject that pessimism.

Christianity as I understand it is all about bringing the transcendent into the immanent. The degree to which we do that is the degree to which we make moral progress. But how to do that in the right way is problematic. It can’t be imposed top down. It has to be cultivated from within the depths of human soul and the soul of the world.

The point is that if Nature is Us, so therefore the demonic is Us. It’s not some alien power over which we have no control. We must confront it, befriend it, and in doing so redeem it. This is one important meaning, I believe, of the command to love our enemy—it’s the enemy within but also there in Nature and in our social constructs so long as we keep feeding it with our compulsive desires and anxieties.

See also “Swimming Lessons”.

1. This is a condensed version of a much longer summary of the story Charles Taylor tells in his A Secular Age.

2. Both Calvinism and Jansenism are forms of hyper-Augustnianism, Augustine being the source of all our problems in Western Christendom, imo. I think that’s why a lot of people who are interested in a return to Christianity are turning to the Eastern Orthodox churches, which were not influenced by Augustine’s fatalistic pessimism.

BTW, While writing this essay I came across this passage in Chesterton’s book about Thomas Aquinas in the chapter about Manichaeism, which he describes as—

… always in one way or another a notion that nature is evil; or that evil is at least rooted in nature. The essential point is that as evil has roots in nature, so it has rights in nature. Wrong has as much right to exist as right. As already stated this notion took many forms. Sometimes it was a dualism, which made evil an equal partner with good; so that neither could be called an usurper.

More often it was a general idea that demons had made the material world, and if there were any good spirits, they were concerned only with the spiritual world.

Later, again, it took the form of Calvinism, which held that God had indeed made the world, but in a special sense, made the evil as well as the good: had made an evil will as well as an evil world. On this view, if a man chooses to damn his soul alive, he is not thwarting God’s will but rather fulfilling it. In these two forms, of the early Gnosticism and the later Calvinism, we see the superficial variety and fundamental unity of Manicheanism. The old Manicheans taught that Satan originated the whole work of creation commonly attributed to God. The new Calvinists taught that God originates the whole work of damnation commonly attributed to Satan. One looked back to the first day when a devil acted like a god, the other looked forward to a last day when a god acted like a devil. But both had the idea that the creator of the earth was primarily the creator of the evil, whether we call him a devil or a god.

He’s talking about Calvin’s double predestination here, one of the most appallingly un-Christian ideas that was ever thought. Whatever psycho/spiritual needs this utterly fatalistic doctrine was designed to meet is something hard for us to fathom. But its shadow is long, and it affects us in many perverse ways, not the least in how we have come to think of the rich as the righteous Elect and the poor as the Reprobates damned from all eternity. Why care about the poor if they’re just going to hell anyway?

Chesterton goes on to contrast this Manichaeism with the healthier wing of Christian thought that Aquinas represented:

…To understand the medieval controversy, a word must be said of the Catholic doctrine, which is as modern as it is medieval. That “God looked on all things and saw that they were good” contains a subtlety which the popular pessimist cannot follow, or is too hasty to notice. It is the thesis that there are no bad things, but only bad uses of things. If you will, there are no bad things but only bad thoughts; and especially bad intentions. …The work of heaven alone was material; the making of a material world. The work of hell is entirely spiritual.

St. Thomas Aquinas: The Dumb Ox, 1933. Chapter Four: “A Meditation on the Manichees”. (The date is interesting.)

What Chesterton is saying here becomes salient for remarks I make at the end of this essay. Nothing is more important than that we come to understand that Evil is real, and it is Us, and that it has a transpersonal dimension. But also that we must overcome any pessimism or fatalism that any other future is possible for us than the one we’re being dragged toward by the Demonic forces animating the TCM. The TCM and transhumanism are fed by a perverse respsonse to human precarity, to the compulsive desires and anxieties that come from living in bodies. There are far healthier, embodied ways to deal with our precarity.

3. The difference between the experience of shame and guilt emerges. In Immanent Religion there is shame when one fails to live up to the tribal norms; in Transcendent Religion there is guilt when one fails to live up to one’s self-imposed transcendental aspirations. The first is a failure to meet social expectations; the second a failure to live up to one’s highest spiritual aspirations. Luther was wracked with guilt; the coward in battle is wracked by shame. Big difference. Give the second Gyges’ Ring, and he’ll do the most monstrous things shamelessly. With Trump and guys like Stephen Miller we encounter remarkable personalities who feel neither guilt nor shame. That’s what makes them a sociopaths.

4. This tension was acutely felt by St. Paul who talks about how Christianity opens up a possibility to be liberated from the guilt, and the same tension was grappled with later by Martin Luther, who described the tension as our being simul justus et peccator—we are both sinner and redeemed at the same time— I’m not ok; you’re not ok. But it’s ok. There’s wisdom in the humility that follows from that, but it also leads to complacency. Theosis is rejected in this imagination of Christian salvation. It’s seen as a path toward spiritual pride, which is a real danger. But because there are counterfeits of the real thing (Father Ferapont) doesn’t mean that there isn’t the real thing (Father Zossima).

5. Another attempt to have everyone in society from top to bottom live at such a high level was attempted in Geneva in the 1500s and Massachusetts in the 1600s. Both efforts were doomed to failure, and yet this is still the project of contemporary theocrats, whether they are the Evangelical Dominionists or the Catholic Integralists, both heirs in their mentality of the combatants of the Thirty Years War. We saw how well that went.

6. I’ve not forgotten about the Germans. I just needed a break from them for a while. I plan to dive into Goethe’s Faust and to try to explore the implications of Schelling’s Naturphilosophie.

7. This idea can be taken in a pantheist direction, but as a Christian personalist I reject pantheism. There’s a big difference. The goal for the personalist is not to merge into one hive consciousness as depicted in Apple TV’s Pluribus, but to be in communion, which involves not a merging of personalities into one thing, but rather each of us becoming completely who we uniquely are and growing in our capacity to love everything around us—other people, the animal world, the plant world, and perhaps even eventually the Demonic. St. Francis is exemplary in this respect, a model of theosis in communion with everything around him.

8. I am convinced the the alien abduction phenomena so widely reported has nothing to do with Extraterrestrials, but is rather the return of beings who are very terrestrial and immanent beings who exist in alongside us in a dimension our ancestors called ‘faerie’. That’s a dimension that exists in both Nature, the created world, and in our consciousness, even if most of the time our unconsciousness. But they break into human consciousness from time to time.