On Archetypes and Zeitgeists

The right and the left share a sense of creeping doom, though for different reasons. For people on the right, it’s sparked by horror at changing demographics and gender roles. For those on the left, a primary source of foreboding is climate change, which makes speculation about what the world will look like decades hence so terrifying that it’s often easier not to think about it at all.

But it’s not just climate change. In his forthcoming book, “The Decadent Society,” my colleague Ross Douthat mourns the death of the “technological sublime,” writing that our era “for all its digital wonders has lost the experience of awe-inspiring technological progress that prior modern generations came to take for granted.” This is true, but doesn’t go nearly far enough. Our problem is not just that new technologies regularly fail to thrill. It’s that, from artificial intelligence to genetic engineering to mass surveillance, they are frequently sources of horror.  

--Michelle Goldberg

Our fears make us stupid, and it's our stupidity that makes our fears become unintentionally, i.e., stupidly, self-fulfilling prophecies. 

Is there a fearless way to think about or imagine the future at this time? It's more difficult because we seem to be in a fear-energized death spiral where common sense solutions seem impossible to come by. But if we are to find another way, I think we have to develop a positive, transformative understanding of what the nature and destiny of humanity is, and our understanding must transcend the limiting presuppositions currently held by both conservatives and liberals. Fearlessness is not an option, because there is too much genuinely to be feared. And so courage is called for. 

Perhaps the biggest test of courage for the contemporary intellectual is to risk appearing naive. But that's what's called for now in the coming years. We need people to be courageous in the naïveté of their convictions. But naïveté is useless if it's not working hand and hand with a certain shrewdness. I think this is essentially why Matthew's gospel entreats us to be as children, but to be "as" or "like" children is not the same as to be childish. It points to what Paul Ricoeur calls 'second naïveté', ¹ which I understand in the light of the same gospel's admonition that when we are out among the wolves, we must be shrewd as serpents and guileless as doves. The guileless dove part is the childlike part, but its being balanced by the shrewd/serpent part keeps guilelessness from being childish. 

So what have to say here is in the spirit of a certain guilelessness or second naiveté. I've been saying it for years, but maybe not as explicitly as I want to do now and in future posts. So if these ideas feel too far out there, just play with them as a heuristic or a thought experiment and see if it resonates.

The challenge is to activate a dormant archetype that lies slumbering in each of us. The Jungians call it the Anthropos or the Self archetype. Christians call it the Christ within. The awakening of this archetype in the broader culture must happen if we're ever to find a positive, humanly enriching way forward. This blog, named 'After the Future' since its inception in 2003, has been dedicated to discerning the emergence of this archetype. 

Now most people don't believe in archetypes, whether of the Platonic or the Jungian kind. Second naïveté is prerequisite, and that's in short supply because we are living in a decadent phase during which no archetype is defining our zeitgeist. I think that Jungian archetypes need to be understood in Platonic or Neoplatonic ontological terms, and Platonic archetypes in Jungian psychological terms, but explaining what I mean by that is a post for another day. It's not a matter of "believing" in archetypes, it's about feeling their energies and working with them. During a decadent historical period the Chaos Archetype provides most of the energy we feel. It plays a positive role in dissolving cultural forms and beliefs that have died in order to clear the way for a new, creative archetype to emerge.  

When an archetype is activated in individuals or societies, its power is transformative both of our experience of the world and in our thinking about it. What seems impossible to take seriously when under the influence of one archetype becomes obvious when under the sway of another. People are overtaken by the energies of the archetypes in a way similar to how the gods overtook the personalities of the Greek heroes in the Iliad. Some individuals are larger than life not because of their personal qualities or talents, but because they are more than others in touch with the energy of an archetype, aka the ‘gods’ or daemons. This is the meaning of 'genius' for the Renaissance artists. 

[I talk more about this in a review of Kelly and Dreyfus's Book, All Things Shining. They are Heideggerians who call for a form of postmodern polytheism that honors how the gods shine through us even now. What I’m calling archetypes, they call the “gods” or if that’s too much, “moods of being”. ]

So for instance, I would assert that there is an archetype for justice, and you can't understand someone like Martin Luther King if you don't see how his entire life was energized and ultimately sacrificed to it. His daemon was justice, and he channeled that to the broader culture in a way that evoked and inspired the justice archetype in each of us if we were open to it. Justice shone through him. If you are not moved and inspired by his story, then you are probably insensible to whatever I have to say about archetypes. Whenever anyone is larger than life, whenever he or she speaks in such a way that it resonates with people in ways they only quasi-consciously understand, that's a sign that there's an archetype at work. But here's the point I want to make: Unless an archetype becomes activated on the collective level, nothing truly new and transformative can be accomplished within a particular society.

What I mean by archetype here might be more understandable in relation to the term zeitgeist. The zeitgeist is the way that an archetype takes hold of a culture's most creative people and then has a ripple effect throughout the entire society. Our problem now as late moderns is that we have a zeitgeist that has no positive archetype to shape it. This is essentially why our current era feels so decadent in a way that Douthat feels compelled to write about it.

But I think it's wrong to think about decadence in the moralistic terms of a scold. Decadence, as Jacques Barzun pointed out in From Dawn to Decadence, is not a morally pejorative term; it's a descriptive one. It describes what happens to a society when it has lost any robust sense of collective future possibility. I'm arguing that this sense of collective future possibility comes from the energy of an active, transformative archetype working first among those most sensitive to it--poets, philosophers, prophets--and then rippling out from them into the broader culture. 

Archetypes provide the underlying cultural matrix that shapes a historical cultural era. So just to look at the cultural history of the West over the last thousand years, we see the Age of Faith zeitgeist and its archetype giving way to the zeitgeist of the Age of Reason giving way to where we are now, the Age of Whatever.² The energies that shape the Age of Whatever derive from the chaos archetype, which is the one constant archetypal presence from age to age. It provides fuel, so to say, that energizes a more positive archetype with which it is in creative tension. But chaos reigns when there is no energizing, positive collective archetype to work with it, to counterbalance it in some actively positive way.

The Age of Whatever, as I see it, is the age of whatever-comes-next, because we must be vigilant in our awaiting the emergence of a new transformative archetype and its zeitgeist. In this interim, all the energy derives from the chaos archetype, weakly counterbalanced by the inertia of all-but-dead cultural forms from the decayed previous positive archetype of Enlightenment Modernity. With this archetype North Atlantic societies enjoyed historically unprecedented degree of optimism about a positive future enabled by reason, science, and technological development—what I’ve been calling the Baconian Project. Goldberg's quote in the epigraph exudes how changed our hope for a better technological future has become. I'm arguing that the only power that can counter the dehumanizing, chaotic energies of Baconism run amok in consumer technocapitalism--energies that lead inevitably to a mechanomorphic transmutation of the human into something that clearly is not human--is the awakening of the anthropos archetype referred to above. 

So, a decadent zeitgeist emerges by default when a society is between positive, transformative archetypes. Chaos rules by default. Nietzsche called what I'm calling the chaos archetype the Dionysian, and it is always there energizing, counter-pressuring, challenging, keeping honest whatever cultural forms the zeitgeist produces. During a positive transformative period the chaos archetype is a Shivanic source of creative energy, but during decadent periods it threatens to destroy everything that lacks transformative vitality. There is a lot of energy in chaos, and it's hard to resist when there isn't an equally powerful positive, or transformative archetype to counter it. When there is no positive archetype energizing a society, such a society is likely to be governed by the unbalanced Dionysian--will to power, greed, and joyless pleasures. In such moments the Dove in us needs to defend what it knows about transformative truth, even when there are few social supports in the culture to validate it.  

In someone like Donald Trump we have the apotheosis of the chaos archetype in the Age of Whatever. Trump is larger than life because he is energized by the chaos archetype. How else to explain the way Trump infects everyone around him with bad faith, lies, greed, infidelity, and why else would they be willing to go to the mat for someone they know is so awful? They are themselves ciphers who are seduced by the numinous energy that radiates from the chaos archetype.

But I digress. Barzun's book traces the power of the transformative archetype that shaped western history from the late 1400s to the mid 1900s. We'll call it the Enlightenment archetype because it reached its full development in the period between 1650 and 1750 more or less. The energy in this archetype didn't come out of nowhere, but it emerged with a splash during the Renaissance in Italy, 1450-1550, developed dramatically and violently during the Wars of Religion from 1550-1650 in northern Europe, and came to its peak during the Enlightenment and scientific revolution between 1650-1750. Then decline. Decline ensues when the chaos archetype is more powerful than than the positive, transformative archetype. The French Revolution, Romanticism, the Industrial Revolution, Darwinian cosmology are all more about chaos than about positive cultural transformation. More on Romanticism below. 

The strong emergence of any archetype tends to unbalance or hypertrophy certain aspects of the human psyche, and in doing so creates a psychic instability that leads to the inevitable self-destruction of the social forms these archetypes create. This is what Hegel and Marx mean by 'contradictions'. McGilchrist is good in laying out what this hypertrophying entailed during the Enlightenment zeitgeist, which is what he calls the values of the left-brain hemisphere. (Charles Taylor uses the term "buffered self" to describe the same syndrome.)

I think this hypertrophying of left-brain-hemispheric values was important for human development insofar as it awakened parts of the larger 'anthropos' archetype--the centrality of freedom and the importance of the autonomous individual human being. But its gains were unstable because they led in a historically unprecedented way to an experience of alienation--a radical disembedding--from the life world. It might have been temporarily necessary for human evolution, but it is not sustainable. The challenge for humans going forward is to find a lawful way to reconnect to the life world without losing their gains in autonomy and freedom. Surrender to the Dionysian is one way to reconnect, but it's regressive. It's not a way forward. 

So Romanticism was an attempt, often suffused with nostalgia, to push back against the kind of unbalanced, alienated rationality that the Enlightenment zeitgeist promoted. But it's also where the chaos archetype--the Dionysian--begins to play a more dominant role, and lays the foundation for a mood in the West that's ready for the cosmic randomness affirmed by Darwin and celebrated by Industrial Capitalism. And so in the century between 1850 to 1950 we have the Age of Matter, the last, most decadent phase of the Enlightenment archetype. During this period, Enlightenment ideals about human progress become parodied in technological and materialistic advancements effected through industrial and later a soul-deadening techno-consumerist capitalism.

Romanticism and German Idealism from Fichte through Hegel was the last, dying gasp of an older spiritual understanding of human destiny in the West. It was steamrolled by the soul-flattening, dehumanizing effects and ideology of capitalism that commodifies the human, one-dimensionaizes it, makes of the human an abstraction. Industrial capitalism and its anarchic, libertarian ideology destroyed the old personalist, face-to-face customs and premodern traditions and sets the stage for the crematoriums in central Europe and the annihilation of millions in total wars around the world. As the first Thirty Years War from 1618 to 1648 destroyed whatever was left of the Age of Faith, Europe's second Thirty Years War from 1914 to 1945 utterly destroyed whatever was positive and transformative in the Enlightenment archetype and the Age of Reason. 

And that's where we are now, in the Age of Whatever, not knowing what comes next. Chaos reigns by default. The historical irony, of course, is that those on the Right, supposedly the champions of good social order, are the principal agents through which the chaos archetype is destroying the Liberal social order, which is, rickety and inadequate though it might be, the only order that we have. 

Lev Parnas is right: Trump is the center of cult, but it's a cult 'organized' around the numinous power of the chaos archetype. The Trump cult has very little to do with him personally; it has everything to do with the chaos archetype that shines through him. Trump is a cipher, but is as such an empty vessel and a channel for chaos that fits perfectly the chaos zeitgeist. That's what makes this deeply foolish man, this cipher of a human being, larger than life. And he or someone like him will continue to command the zeitgeist until some other, positive transformative archetype emerges. Until it does, the rest of us, because there is no broadly recognized positively energizing archetype perceivable in the culture, can only say No. But while No isn't enough to solve the problem, it might buy us time and create enough space for a real, positive solution to emerge. Political Liberalism, in the meanwhile, is the shaky residue of the Enlightenment archetype performing a role like the little Dutch boy with his finger plugging the hole in the dyke. 

So, Liberalism has a role to play because it's the only positive way to say No to chaos in the political sphere. If its No fails, order will be imposed by regressive, fascistic political forms because people will choose order, even fascistic order, rather than live with chaos. But Liberalism on its own is not enough. It has now as much archetypal energy in the political sphere as Monarchy had in the late 19th century--close to zero. Sure, it's there in the collective subconscious. But like the old monarchy archetype that can be activated nostalgically by a royal wedding, it has no future-shaping power.

I think similarly someone like Bernie Sanders activates a nostalgia for the old Enlightenment Liberal archetype, more concretely, a nostalgia for FDR and the New Deal. I confess to my feeling such a nostalgia. So in this sense Liberals are ruled by nostalgia in the same way that traditionalist conservatives are, and while nostalgia has energy, there's no future in it. It is to look at the future through the rear-view mirror, as McLuhan was fond of pointing out.

I call it Lot's Wife Syndrome--paralysis by the fear of the future. But it's fitting that in the last decade such an elderly, physically frail person like Sanders should be its most robust champion--especially among young people. Someone like Bernie—and certainly Biden—are not the answer; they’re just a way to say No to the forces of chaos. They are a stopgap at best. 

The chaos archetype can be held in check only so long. You can't destroy chaos, you can only counterbalance and integrate its energies in a higher synthesis, and that counterbalancing synthesis has to come from the emergence into the collective consciousness of a positive, transformative archetype that might energize us toward embracing positive future possibility.

I feel certain that a new aspect of the anthropos archetype will emerge. But I'm not at all certain that humans today will be attuned to its emergence if it does. We might be too buffered, too far gone in our alienation from the Real. In the Age of Whatever, machines and screens have sealed off so many humans from the Deep Real from where the archetypes arise. Will there be human beings enough open enough, awake enough, naive or guileless enough, to notice and be energized by such an archetype when it arises?

[A version of this post was originally written in January 2020. It seemed an apt followup to “Genotext, Phenotext, and the TCM”.]

1. First naiveté is the condition of people who still live without having examined their lives and their presuppositions. They are “pre-Socratic” in this sense, in that they accept the conventional consensus reality as the only reality. Second naiveté requires first a thorough examination of the presuppositions that come from one’s acculturation, and then to bracket one’s cynicism and skepticism in order to develop a radical openness to something disclosing itself that doesn’t fit with those presuppositions.

Second naiveté often results in an embrace of the wisdom of the ancestors, but in an an adult, flexible, inside-out way, not in a rigid, childish outside-in way. Someone in first naiveté is all but completely sealed in by his or her acculturation, by what “society says”. Someone in second naiveté is open for the revelation of something truly ‘original’, if by original we mean something that originates in the Deep Real. So, for instance, In Whale Rider, Koro lacked the second naiveté to see something original and surprising, i.e., who his granddaughter was—both a fulfillment of the tradition and an unexpected development of it. This is a problem with rigid traditionalists in general. They are so fixated on the phenotext that they miss all the signs that are genotext.

2. This chart below is another way of thinking about how archetypes shaped the zeitgeist over the past five hundred years. Another metaphor might be the four seasons—Spring: 1450 - 1650; Summer, 1650 - 1750; Autumn, 1750-1950; Winter 1950 - ?.

I like the seasonal metaphor because it suggests that if we’re in Winter now, Spring lies ahead, and that while there isn’t much vitality in the cold, wintry world around us, it’s there, underground in the roots and seeds. Life will come again. Our job now is to stay alert, to oil and sharpen the tools, and to look forward in hope for signs of Spring.

I know. That requires a good dose of second naiveté. But, as I suggest in the closing paragraph above, if there’s not enough of us looking for its genotext, there’s a good chance, like Koro, we might miss it.