Tag: religion

Token and Taboo

Token and Taboo (an unspoken snafu)

            In Bourgeois institutions, such as the Von Humboldtian university, the Jewish colleague was at once a token and a taboo. It was considered bad form to mention his ethnic background, but as well, it was in bad taste to mistreat him. He was both the ultimate outsider – insofar as ‘the Jews’ were the ‘pariah’ community; it should be noted here that Weber’s phrase does not connote any kind of stigmata but refers to the ancient Hebrews lack of a homeland – and, due to the Jewish precept of representing the Logos, and for some time even after the new covenant is proclaimed, the ultimate insider when it came to the text. ‘The people of the book’ is a stereotype, but rather more of a complimentary one than ‘the Jew’ both ‘eternal’ and ‘wandering’. This incipient tokenism in the Protestant space was, for some today, I imagine, the beginning of the end or, as Berdyaev might have it, both at once. Catholics had, of course, their own colleges, and it is important to note here that Jews were even less welcome in these institutions, modeled as they were after the original, medieval university and not that modern.

            The sense that an educational system must reflect the values of this or that subculture, whether originally ethnic-based or linguistic, religious or more recently, social class or simply of just plain material wealth, is a symptom of the absence of the concept of a wider human community. The Quakers founded their own colleges, and some few yet exist. From the late 19th century onward, schooling based upon specialized pedagogies also arose, beginning with John Dewey’s lab school in the 1890s and carrying forward with sites such as Black Mountain College, Summerhill, and the Montessori system. These alternative campuses presented themselves as attempts in creating an authentic learning community, and yet one within a wider society that hardly knew they even existed. The archetype is, of course, the ‘cult’ or sect; a small group of acolytes led by the master in the East or even a messiah figure in the West. Nietzsche’s comment about those who seek followers, ‘get noughts (zeros but also nothings) behind you’, is well taken, but at the same time, those with a vision, for better or worse, must indeed find those numbers if a solitary flash is to build into a social movement. The link between religion and education – in antiquity, much the same thing until the Eleatic and Miletian schools began to think something of worldly matters – is yet deeply held; the major competition to State education is still that parochial.

            Yet the continued existence of credo-based learning in separate sites, exclusive in terms of ideology and value-orientation, is not truly a testament to the endurance of such values, but rather a tacit admission of their failure and subsequent defeat. For, if I were confident in my Christianity, for instance, and followed the lead of Jesus in both eschewing the directly political-secular sphere – ‘render unto Caesar’ etc. – and yet working throughout the polis to model and demonstrate my ethics, why would I not desire to be within the very heart of where young people who are not converts and not believers dwell? If my values are so strong, are so noble, why would they not only withstand their foes but indeed, win them over? That parochial schools exist in modernity is a sign of self-mockery; a self-inflicted wound to be emblazoned upon the corpus of a dejected curricula laid upon the corpse now consisting of only disjecta membra. The truer Christian or Muslim does not turn away from the world; these are both Western worldviews and cosmogonies which do not seek Nirvana nor to transcend the earthly. Rather, they are soteriological through and through: the earth and its peoples must be saved, not left below in as yet an unenlightened state.

            Given this, teaching these children in spaces set apart from the world is tantamount to having given up the entire basis for the belief in the first place. It is especially concerning for the early Protestant sectarians such as the Anabaptists, for whom faith must be voluntary. The existence of such spaces, such as the child’s Sunday school, wherein very young persons are taught the basics of this or that belief, carry a patent and potent irony about them to this regard. Such presentation of the Logos is not in fact voluntary, and is practiced in almost an involuntary manner, as adults do not pause to think about what they are actually committing, and committing to. Such processes make faith the token, and taboo the anti-institutional critique in which Jesus and others engaged. Better by far to abandon these ‘Eastern’ spaces – the monasteries of Tibet and the Himalayas were also schools, and their very placement at higher altitudes was a nod to the physical sense that one was beginning to loosen one’s ties to the world and those who lived in it, far below – and fully immerse oneself in the hurly-burly of wider cultural life, as did Jesus himself. Never one to shy away from confrontation, at first appearing contrary to his uttered ethic exhorting both forgiveness and self-sacrifice – and in this did Jesus demonstrate that practicing both by definition meant placing oneself in the midst of resistance – the Christian god on earth would presumably disapprove of our attempts to shelter both ourselves, but especially our children, away from the society as a whole. It is, even in the Pauline texts, unchristian to make Christianity an exclusive space, geared to specific followers and training only those who happen to be born, very much involuntarily, into said communities.

            In our time, over most of the globe, religion is itself a token. Why then also make it a token of itself, a shadow, even a remanant? If it is taboo to discuss religions matters, matters of the heart or soul, within secular spaces, surely even the looming presence of aging churches amidst all of the glass, concrete and steel of the modern metropolis, is also an unspoken self-indictment. They are anachronistic, both architecturally and atmospherically. The history of the urban landscape is such that it was inevitable these structures gain their ‘left-over’ look, for their organizational backdrop allowed them to survive demolition, even if no parishioners remained. It is also a taboo to suggest their final removal, perhaps even to think it! Such is seen as an unhallowed hallmark of the fuller presence of the anti-Christ among us. The famed hip-hop epigram, ‘bail out the banks, loan art to the churches’ might be more radically over-written, ‘socialize the banks, demolish the churches’, but so it goes. At the same time, there must also be those entrepreneurs who bemoan the waste of valuable real estate in city core business districts which are taken up by these wastrel relics. It is of some interest to acknowledge that even cemeteries have been moved or simply built over, especially the historical or ‘pioneer’ graveyard, where only the stone monuments have been preserved. It is an odd experience to investigate their newer sites knowing that no human remains lie underneath. What then is the point of the memorials?

            The preservation of both empty churches and hollow gravestones tells us that it is neither religion nor ancestor that is directly being recalled to culture memory, but rather the problem of mortality and the only response humanity has thus far invented, that is, faith itself, that retains its perennial quality. Modernity does not free itself from finitude, and indeed exacerbates its condition by sloughing off the conceptual gravitas of both death as an abstraction and the means by which one has been called to overcome it. It is almost as if by surpassing the salvation doctrine of the new covenant we have somehow also gotten beyond the very reason for its existence! That mortality is a clinical phenomenon alone makes soteriology something only theologically interesting. The modern priesthood, the guild of psychologists, presides over an altar dedicated to the origins, not of life, but rather of the individual person. Its great achievement is its ability to separate personhood from persona, and help anyone do the same for themselves. In this, it is absolutely and directly a descendent of Christian ethics, wherein Jesus appears as the first person. Its utter reliance on the individual, however, at the same time subjects it to an unethical reduction; the ego only relates to faith as if the latter were a mere symbolic apparatus of the super-ego. God dwells in morality – this is the ‘old God’, long dead; why should psychology co-opt it and place it at the head of the institutional and ideological table? – and the devil rusticates in unbridled sexuality, or the libidinal Id. Here, classical analysis betrays its reliance on Greek-Judaic myth, in the very face of its drive to become a science.

            Is the presence of mythos in logos then also a token? Is it taboo to point out such a presence? Just as morality dumbs down ethics, in the process making the world look far simpler than it actually is, myth hijacks thought, time sabotages history, the designer trumps the artist. These are the more worrisome ‘satanic reverses’. For Freud, the ‘totemic’ represented not just the crests of clans and their specific druthers but as well a kind of hierarchy wherein the symbolic forms of cultural life competed against one another; the vulvar shapes lower down the phallic pole, the male membership higher up. Certainly, he was not speaking of actual totems, whereupon we rather see the animal spirits and archetypes in mutual support, the bear or killer whale at the bottom in part due to their sheer ability to hold the rest of their allies skyward, the creatures of the air perched atop the pole exactly as they do in reality, and those with especial duties, such as the ‘three watchmen’, as well at the very top; in all of this, function and form are one. These last figures represent both the vigilance necessary for the village to safeguard itself from both storm and enemy alike, but as well, the unuttered but not at all taboo confidence in the people’s alliance with, and even love for, the beings of the forest and mountain, for there is never a fourth watchmen figure facing rearward, away from the ocean.

            We have long lost that confidence, thinking that our superior comprehension of nature entails our complete abandonment of what that same nature has bequeathed to us via its patent evolution. Reason stands aloof to imagination, and yet both are necessary to be fully human. The rational admits nothing of the non-rational into its intensely bureaucratized corridors of borrowed power. Our success at personhood, even if we continue to deny even this to ourselves through identity politics and the adoration of celebrity persona, is at times overshadowed by the ultimate need for a shared existence which carries us beyond death whilst we are still dying. It is authentic courage to face death as mine ownmost completion of being, an overcoming of the final taboo and a dismissal of all euphemism, but it is an equally sincere cowardice to make human community, however passing, into a token of itself, in order to vault that most incomplete being into the sham of personalized myth.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 60 books, and was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy

The Not So Sweet Buy and Buy (can a consumer culture consume a culture?)

            This is a different question than ‘can a consumer culture consume itself’? We have seen quite evidently, especially in popular media, that this is in fact not merely an outcome thereof but a way of maintaining its dominance upon consumption in general. One views a situation comedy, especially an animated one, and if one has not viewed many years of similar programming as well as following the popular culture news, one is immediately lost. Such media constitute one long in-joke, and their satire is disingenuous at best, since it serves also as an ongoing advertisement for everyone else in the same game. Humor is itself tied to the consumption of a specific kind of media, and this also has the convenience of saving the hack writer’s time imagining innovative scripts and characters. Similarly, retreads of film and television, upshifts to streaming etc. from video games and comic books, exhibit the same symptomatology, and one might even wish to cast the older but continuing sourcing from the novel as the beginning of this self-absorbed and auto-absorbing manner of production.

            But for all this, has our contemporary consumer industry been able to reach its wider goal; that of the consumption of the entirety of the culture in which it is ensconced? This is a more difficult query and the response appears at once more nuanced. In order to take it up, we must begin with the most perceptive analyses of consumption, those of Marx and Durkheim. For the former, the well-known understanding of commodity as fetish may serve, for a moment, as a starting point. We have seen elsewhere how the religious overtones of the original fetish item, a vehicle for, and representation of, Mana, which is otherwise quite an abstract power, turns what is mere force into a usable forcefulness. It is a more focused legerdemain that can also be associated with the difference between magic and sorcery. In the most value-neutral sense, sorcery is simply magic in use. The fetish quality of a commodity turns it from a mere use object into a representation of power redefined by capital, but the much older aura of status retains its hold over the consumer, even if the source of such status has shifted from heaven to earth, as it were. Marx’s own example is pedestrian, likely purposely; a table. Unlike Heidegger, who later uses the same item to illustrate the phenomenological intimacy of dialogue amongst other such aspects of ‘closeness’ and ‘alongsideness’, Marx offers us not a whiff of old-world paternalism. Instead, he is didactic in the extreme. And a piece of furniture is not a terrible example given that such a genre of commodity had been coopted by industrial production in a manner that accosted the senses used to cottage-style craftsmanship. Furniture could well have been called ‘fine’ or even ‘beautiful’, and we pay a homage both archival and ironically fetishistic, genuflecting perhaps somewhat ludicrously, to handcrafted antique furniture in art galleries and museums. I have seen such objects placed adjacent to paintings and sculptures, as if we were to place ourselves, in our mind’s eye at least, in some Mannerist domestic scene, replete with paternalism aplenty and this time with no Heideggerean insight in sight.

            So for Marx, the table was a good mark. Now mass-produced, what could the buyer expect regarding possession and status, which prior to industry could be borrowed from the artisan, just as one would borrow status from having a Gainsborough paint one’s wife’s portrait: ‘Hmm, she’s hotter than ever I thought. Now that’s artistic genius!’ For more plebeian items, Marx desired to show that the same fetishistic display of status markers remained available. In our age, however, it was not to be associated with the ability to command ethereal forces, but rather quite material ones, and those through wealth. In pre-modern modes of production, from horticulture through the late-stages of agrarian organizations, one’s own status was linked to the procurement of status items or services. For capital, the accumulation of wealth shifted from an ‘in-itself’, or a ‘for its own sake’, as if it were either a kind of aesthetic endeavor, or indeed an esthetic one, associated with some lineage hagiography. From this the Protestants developed the idea of assignation through worldly success; wealth was a sign of soteriological favor. Especially well-evidenced in the Netherlands, this idea spread forth through Puritanist longings and Anabaptist communitarianism. A Spartan lifestyle belied a very productive lifeway, and it was not long in generational span before considerable accumulations of wealth were built up. To this day, such ethnic enclaves that remain, including those Mennonite and Hutterian, display such in-typical advantages.

            But all of this has been analyzed in detail by Weber, who is our usual third wheel in thinking aloud about modernity and capital. For Marx, wealth was to be displayed by and through the purchase of commodities, which for him, meant any object that could contain a value surplus to its own autochthonous use-value. This constitutes an extension of ipssissimosity, and such a sleight of hand can only be maintained, he felt, through consumption itself. In this, Marx’s sense of things proved incomplete, for we now understand modern advertising to be the chief vehicle of the production, not of the object or commodity, but rather of the fetish surrounding it. Its advent in 1925, the year of John Watson’s Theory of Modern Advertising, occurred almost simultaneously with the first overproduction, wherein the means of production outstripped the actual material needs of consumers. For almost a century then have we lived in this odd situation; we make more than we use, so we must make mere needs into desires. This, in a word, is the meaning of marketing.

            In the decades just prior to this seismic shift in the definition of value in capital, it was Durkheim who detailed and augmented Marx’s analytic to include the sensual and sensitive aspects of fetish in general. For Durkheim, the aura of the commodity had less to do with  a borrowed status hung up upon material outlay and rather more about the character of awe. Just as the collective conscience could be offended by a perceived injustice, so too could it recognize itself in a culture’s higher self-expressions. Beauty, in this view, still made sense as a representation of its traditional siblings; truth, the good, and the spirit. Marketing would soon learn how to exploit this sensitivity by engineering quite artificial outbursts of the ‘collective effervescence’, to use Durkheim’s phrase. In one of his most famous epigrams, if ‘religion is society worshipping itself’, then one immediately can understand the wider scope of what is at stake in modern mass media. The commodity fetish in our day must transcend the object in order to take into itself the whole of culture.

            What then would it mean to worship ourselves in this more material manner? Certainly there are collateral clues – signage, rather than truer signs, perhaps – in the cult of celebrity, the esteem of marque and logo, the esthetic purity of fashion and modeling, or yet the mystique surrounding the founder or CEO of this or that ‘revolutionary’ enterprise. All these and others no doubt foster a sense that not only is our culture a visionary one, holding in its own breast the heated breath of distant stars and with its eyes reflecting their eternal light – all the while whilst bathing in a bathos of self-stultification, mind you – but that it is also of the value that we may indeed sincerely worship it and not feel anything of either the larger narcissism which must be involved, or, more damning, of the anxiety which must drive such collective preening. Here, we must allow Durkheim to take us back to Marx in order to read again, with a fresh set of frames, the critique of capital itself. Now the rhetorical term ‘bathos’ traditionally suggests a lack of intent, and while it may not be central to the goals of advertising and marketing to create this slide from what we take to be the historically sublime to what can be taken as trivial – almost everything within the ambit of popular media is at least this, if not actually ridiculous or yet absurd – in any calculated manner, the mere fact that it has the power to manifest the nothing much as something and even something great suggests to its latter-day sorcerers that magic, at least of a sort, is yet extant in our otherwise disenchanted world.

            Yet this cannot be a conclusion, for it begs the implication that our culture is, as a whole, trivial. I would like to think that this is not the case, even if we are often turned in the direction of the valueless by the fetish of status-value and that of the marque. One might go so far, without being overly vain, and suggest that for some of the legendary marques, whose brand-value has distinguished itself consistently over many decades, that the actual quality of the products in question do merit some respect, if perhaps not outright adoration or yet worship. Ferrari, the brand with the most current admiration of this sort, could serve as an example of a product which actually is what it claims to be, at least in its actual use. Whether or not its aura is transcendental is not really at issue; all it needs to do is transcend its general genre of commodity. In this, a keenly-crafted and daringly-designed machine can carry a near-primordial torch; the shaman accomplished his tricks ad hoc. Sorcery, unlike magic, is always directed to some specific purpose.

            Yes, but in capital we also have magic itself as a commodity of sorts, for a Ferrari accomplishes its specific engineering purpose in it remaining an automobile, and nothing else. But if it were perceived in capital as only a car it would lose most of its value all along the line. So, marketing has, in addition to point-of-sale, the deeper and more sophisticated task of maintaining aura ‘after-market’, so to speak. The fact that a new auto loses about a quarter of its ticket value when driven off the lot – it is now a ‘used car’ or, in a marketing lingo perishingly close to that Orwellian, ‘pre-owned’ – must not impinge upon its value as a status item, a commodity in the Marxian sense. And indeed, the exotic car’s new owner cares not a jot that they have been stiffed however much cash on the barrel upon getting behind the wheel of such a vehicle. Even my relatively quite staid and stoic Lexus sports sedan was able to overcome any such hint of regret on my part when I purchased it new many years ago. But less mystically, its truer value has manifest itself in the fact that though now 16 years old, it still drives like a new car. Surely such testimonials from the ‘consumer’s themselves’ would be of the greatest value to any marketer. But even here, the suasion of worship is present; a testimonial is suggestive of a testament; but then again we are today not recording the irruptive Mana of a messiah, but rather the manufactured mimesis of the forces of nature and cosmos, ever aloof to the Babel of humanity’s vainer desires.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, aesthetics, religion, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Divine Sodomy

The Divine Sodomy (You might think it very God of me)

            Imagine if Dante had written Meet the Feebles instead of Peter Jackson. According to Auerbach, one of the founders of comparative literary criticism, a literary triptych based on a complete fantasy both inaugurated realism in Western literature and beyond this, the image of the self in contemporary fiction. Seen in this light, Dante’s seemingly semi-satirical vision of the Thomistic afterlife was stunningly successful in convincing the very few readers it must have originally had – remember, this is 1308-1321 – that somehow as vile a figure as Bernard of Clairvaux would be the best guide to Paradiso. Yeah, right. Even the more plausible idea that the work helped establish the Tuscan language as the general Italian vernacular is a bit of a ‘so what’? Clearly the merit of religious fantasy lies not so much in any allegorical narrative but rather in the art of the writing itself; in this case the High Medieval poetry which is unmatched in any similar epic. Otherwise, it’s simply the author, under the guise of the divine, doing us up the collective, well, you know where.

            It wasn’t until 1472 that the qualifier ‘divine’ was added, by none other than Boccaccio, subsequently to appear in print under the title we know it today by 1555. It is within this period, the High Renaissance this time, that the work took hold, not of the growing humanistic imagination, but rather of the world of arts and letters. On the one hand, the first-person of Dante as disembodied pilgrim lends itself to the idea of self-portraiture, but one might be forgiven – term used advisedly – if he was rather testing his own idea of personhood in the light of values that he as author had already rejected. Why call such a serious undertaking, ahem, a comedy in the first place? T.S. Eliot’s own cantos on his own age of modernity, seemingly so dryly driven, mark the author as a critic after all, though one in the lineage of John Donne and to a certain extent, William Blake as well. But there are a number of ways in which to engage in literary KulturKritik. Today, at least, we can appreciate the underside of Dante’s vision, the nether regions whereabouts good things happen to bad people, speaking of forgiveness.

            But this piece is supposed to be about types of Godhead, perhaps pace its introduction. In Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses we find some most valuable cross-cultural perspective: ‘What kind of God listen to you complain all day?’. Precisely. The Christian God, apparently open 24/7 to entreaty and plaintiff, would not rate as divine at all in many other civilizations. Certainly, in so doing, He takes out his frustrations upon erring humanity through the tortuous pilgrim’s progress in this version of the afterlife. The original Egyptian idea of posthumous evaluation, momentary as it was in their underworld, not even lasting long enough to perhaps have felt violated in some intimate manner, has been distended apace. This suggests that while the ancient Egyptian was no bottom and Horus no top, it is quite otherwise by the time we get to Christianity. Of course, no one could beat the ancient Hebrews – likely the scions of the displaced Akhenatonites – for unbending themselves to a God who was perpetually wearied of their lack of attentiveness to his wisdom. Much of the Jewish testaments is a repetitive accounting of ‘Look, I told you guys to do this and you didn’t do it, and look what happened! And now you come braying to me to fix it! God!’, and all this to be mouthed in a Brooklyn accent, of course.

            But more seriously, folks, the attempt by historical Christian writers, beginning with Augustine and perhaps ending just before Thomas Merton, to maintain a metaphysical aspect to their Godhead is no divine comedy at all, but rather its opposite. This human tragedy misses entirely the point of both the radical new ethics Jesus made manifest, as well as the equally historical fact of His presence on the earth, as one of us, living and dying, working and loving, and placing Himself at risk on an almost daily basis, even though He too was understood as being a Hebrew. Perhaps this was where the truer tension lay, however, for if He had been Greek, the Jews would have ignored Him, not seen Him as a threat. How could a Greek be ‘King of the Jews’? Ask Jacques Derrida, maybe, for in his terms ‘Greek-Jew is Jew-Greek’. Hmm, what was that again? I take up this obscure quote only to provide a bridge back into the topic at hand, right or left it matters not; the Greek gods were disdainful of their mortals and to the point of outright hatred, while the Jewish god was merely offended by them: ‘Hey, I try to love you guys, but really, what’s in it for me?’ When Nietzsche suggests that a number of these pre-Christian dynamics held such peoples to be in the ‘correct relationship to their God’, he is reminding us of the crucial difference between the divine and the human, the transcendental and the historical and so on: a God, by definition, cannot have a human interest.

            That we also have imagined a different narrative, one in which the divinity actually recasts Himself as a human being, is nothing less than revolutionary. But even now, some two millennia after the facts, we do not own that narrative, preferring to place this new form of being at a similar distance as had been occupied by earlier guises of Godhead. What kind of God, again? And while we do not need to agree, in the least, with any potential implication of Nietzsche’s logically accurate reminder – for one, that the only authentic kind of God would be happiest coming at us from behind, as it were, with all the divine oversight that might be had from such a position – we do need to get a different grip on the one God whose earthly presence shatters the whole edifice of what could constitute divinity at all, West or East. Buddha was a man ascending, Mohammed a prophet divinely inspired, so of the three second-age agrarian world systems, only Jesus was a God who had descended to become one of us, in the flesh. To take a step back even today and contemplate the implications of this version of Godhead gives one pause.

            Or at least it should. For the model of more humane, compassionate, concernful, human relations had thus been written. No allegory, no comedy, no tragedy, no satire of itself or of others, it simply told the truth of things and that truth was not at all a divine one, but human through and through. And yet we, who are human and remain so, have almost entirely ignored it. Clearly, perhaps allegorically speaking once again, we are more comfortable being metaphysically sodomized, which in the ‘end’ can only be a plug, excuse me, for the atheists among us. ‘Thank God, finally some people who want to take responsibility for themselves.’, Yahweh mutters sotto voce. Oh yeah, the vernacular, right; maybe its time that we termini di rapporto anale. Or something to that effect. And in keeping with our other literary temporal benchmarks, high time.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 59 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as (sometimes witty) fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decadent decades.

On Self-Loathing

On Self-Loathing (Despicable Me)

            My parents were from a generation wherein it was the norm to project vicariously upon their children. In my case, each wanted their only son to pursue the vocation they themselves missed out upon, also a commonplace filial trope. For my mother, music was the dream. Her own parents, hailing from the late 19th century, forbid it and, at seventeen, steered her into secretary school. She did emerge much later to sing in a university chorus and study music, as well as teach ESL, but she had been destined for far more. Likewise, my father, who dreamed of becoming an architect. The only thing he shared with Hitler, mind you, he left home at the same age of seventeen and joined the RCN, fighting in the Battle of the Atlantic. But though I showed early promise in both music and architecture, and maintain to this day a love for the one and a fond interest in the latter, my own path took me far from anything either of my parents could ever have imagined. At first, with my mother passed, my father questioned academics, and then for the next two decades fostered an utter disdain for it, and secondarily, if not only by implication, myself within it. It was only in 2009, four years before he himself passed, that he began to see some merit in myself as a thinker, after reading my 2009b Becoming a Modest Society. That was my seventh book and I can now hardly recall its themes. But on his deathbed, he was engrossed in my 2013b, We Other Nazis, leaving it incomplete. I was and remain grateful for his change of heart, even though, perhaps ironically, perhaps equally fittingly, I have of late adopted his own attitude toward the academy and those within its faux ivory tusks.

            Is this a way to repay him for his belated loyalty? Most of us, as children, wish to please our parents, make them proud of us, even to point of sycophancy. And though outright mimicry is only for the young child, it is nevertheless a sign of an enduring sensitivity to the idea that one’s parents must be on one’s side no matter what, and perhaps also vice-versa. But then there is a reactive aspect found in adolescence which is the more profound. Necessary for becoming who we are – that is, not one’s parents after all – youth is a time of tension and experimentation. Passion rules the day, and, if one is lucky enough, the night as well. Yet this incipient individuation is also a delay mechanism. A delay which can solidify itself into a decoy. For adulthood, the developmental precursor to mature being meant in the hermeneutic sense of the phrase, is the proving ground for my newly minted selfhood. Casually, we may to ourselves, ‘do I really have what it takes to do what I want to do with my life?’. This question, however informal, is both pregnant with maturity and perspective but also unanswerable as stated and also due to the timing of when it is asked. Only by living on, certainly for a number of decades, can any response be forthcoming. There are many late bloomers even at the highest of cultural levels. Tom Thomson in painting, Anton Bruckner in music, and even less conspicuous age relative, myself at around the same age as a writer. My first book was published only when I was 37 years old, back in 2003. Fifty-nine books later I still do not have a sure answer to that question of worthiness. But to the related query of worth, at least, I do.

            Or I like to think so. For to be a philosopher in a time of polar unthought, as cold and as oppositional as the Weberian term implies, is at best a lonely job. There will be few readers, almost no recognition. And as we humans are sourced very much in the looking glass self as well as guided, even goaded on by the need for community, the lack thereof promotes a gnawing doubt, one that can easily slide into the despondent pool of self-loathing. True to say that the pilgrim walks on by himself and in our godless and finite world, also for himself. Indeed, the very idea of the pilgrimage has been altered at both beginning and end, since we fall into it without the sense of calling, divine or otherwise, and we also recognize that there is no terminus, no Santiago de Compostela but rather, for some, the effort of becoming part of the sainted compost of the history of ideas. Composing this, then composting it in yet another essay collection, might give some bland zest to the sense that it is force of habit alone which generates reflection and perhaps yet self-reflection. No matter, we tell ourselves, for ‘those who have ears shall hear’.

            This Nietzschean poise, which worked well for his books but not at all as well for he himself, is something of a theatre. A cultured autism, a high-minded affect, a transcendental but still shamanic trickery, the critical essayist, falling as he does within the panorama of philosophical work but taking on a dangerous dilettantism even so, is ever at risk that his reasoned loathing of the social world should turn upon himself, no matter what one’s parents might have thought either way. The critic is himself problematic, the wavering target of Shaw’s sneering snarkery, for instance, for the mere critic is a mere eunuch of course. And even if, contra a related epigram, teaching is also ‘doing’ of a sort, in Shaw’s own time his was a much more apt remark than one hopes it is in ours. Even so, when I made the shift from teaching to writing, which I never thought I would, I began to see something through his narrow glance: I have been fortunate that I have also been able to do, and not merely critique.

            Such doings, however. I try to love my work, though I never go back and read my scholarly titles and only read my fiction with others; victims, perchance. But I do understand if someone were to attempt to read either, they might well imagine on the one hand, that the philosopher is unable to communicate his genius widely enough, and the fiction writer is at best, a sociopath. Does my fiction impinge upon my non-fiction? Is my fiction too realistic to bear because of the opposite influence? Or are both merely the by-product of what could have been? For truth be told, I have wasted so much time chasing girls and flirting with addiction that my output would likely be twice that extant today. And surely, one tells oneself, the author with 120 titles could not be so summarily ignored. I am but the author of my own premature literary grave, its stone bearing the longest epitaph in human history.

            This evaluative sensibility is ancient, though hardly primordial, for human consciousness. In the West, it is Horus who first judges the relative weight of one’s acts versus that of the gifts of one’s soul. The much later Christian incarnation of this same idea has our ethical worth measured by how close we approach the moral ideals of the world system itself. It is interesting to note that though Christianity’s revolutionary ethics on the ground promote the gradual development of the individual as her own person along with the subjectivity that defines the personal, its evaluatory mode suggests the very opposite: that the highest human attainment is the same for all. By contrast, the Egyptian original was individuated in its afterlife, even though the concept of the person, and the ‘much-vaunted’ modernist subjectivity, to nod to Nietzsche once again, was absent in that society. But though we owe much to both belief systems, and from afar, they could be seen as glosses upon one another and not only in historical sequence, Christianity is itself unfairly blamed for the disdain not only of the body, but also for the mind and spirit alike. Our own latter-day evangelists are in the main, anti-intellectual at best, as well as shunning the fuller intimacies of the body, electric or even Electraic, if you will. Their spirits too await their collective freedom, perhaps to be had at the expense of the rest of us in some Armageddon made real. This is clearly not our species destiny in any noble sense, and we might well rise to fight against its inertia. And this, by the way, is a major theme of my fictional work, just in case the casual reader mistakes it for something else.

            But however over-ripe is the evangelical obsession with Pauline anxiety, we ourselves are to blame for having adopted too readily the wider Western neurosis of self-loathing. Pre-dating Christianity by far, the Greeks were convinced that their own age was lesser, part of a devolution of culture, and not its Victorian opposite. Hope was, for them, a resident evil, the only thing that did not escape Pandora’s Box. Yes, one can get one’s hopes up and be disappointed. A hundred casual lines, oft repeated in popular song, attest to this lingering fear of hapless harm; ‘hopes are dashed’, ‘hope goes up in smoke’, and the like. And for the Egyptians, insofar as we can know of their perduringly murky doings – were they really reanimating ex-human drones inside their giant pyramidal Tesla batteries? – it seems one rather blindly walked forward onto the scales of Horus with only then finding out if one’s acts were of equal measure to one’s gifts.

            I feel their pain. The Egyptian in me worries I have not measured up to my potential. But what is my potential? What is anyone’s? The Greek in me mourns the loss of youth, the ‘good old days’ leitmotif that was never true and that of course animates the false faith of the evangelical as well as that of the more benign nostalgia buffs of all stripes and hues. And the Christian in me steps forward with some trepidation, doubting the future itself and for itself, which in turn acts as a mechanism of self-sabotage both for the person and for the culture as a whole. But as a person, no matter how despairingly weighty this combination of dead historical hands might be, I have in modernity a different kind of agency. What should bear down upon me is not so much an archaic world system, but the lack of insight and experience which, over the life course thus far, has led me to make some impoverished choices. At the same time, this very knowing allows me to do differently. Let me then quote from volume one of Queen of Hearts, andhere’s to it:

            The Unpolished edge of futurity will draw our collective blood.

            If it must be spilled then let the one who holds the sword be a visionary,

            and not a reactionary.

            Let her raven eyes be the windows of our collective soul.

            Let her joyous judgment be the compassion of our call to conscience.

            Let her unknowing be but innocence and never ignorance.

            Let her knowing become the working wisdom of light before heat.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 60 books in ethics, education, religion, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Was ist Entzauberung?

Was ist Entzauberung? (What is ‘Disenchantment’?)

            One of Max Weber’s most famous statements declares that modernity’s chief experiential hallmark is its disenchantedness. This is a state of being which differs in essential ways from its predecessors, both historical and prehistorical. The ‘disenchantment of the world’ is a process by which the magical quality of a worldview in itself is transformed, as if the mystical transmutations touted by alchemy had been simply reversed. This reversal is, however, only the surface tension atop the fluids of contrasting discourses, for a mere reversal connotes a retreat, even a reversion. For Weber, the relationship between outlook and worldview is personalized in modernity, most especially in religion. It is Protestantism specifically that carries the vanguard of this personalization, even as the rest of the world around it became more depersonalized. At first, one would imagine that it is this latter effect alone which contributes to disenchantment, but in fact it is both, and in tandem. One the one hand, the world takes on an anonymous hue, while the personal life begins to craft its own enchantedness. From personal fable to even the ‘dreaded hobby’, as Adorno referred to it, in our time it is up to the individual not only to construct his personhood, but to provide herself with meaningfulness.

            Meaning in itself has always been the purview of culture, not person. In premodern social contexts, the argument concerning Entzauberung suggests that there was no other level or form associated with fulfillment, in part because the very concept of the individuated person had not completely gelled. For premoderns, Augustinian subjectivity, known throughout by Godhead and housed in a being shot through with God Himself as imago dei, was perhaps the most radical form of individuation. Ours was a magical vessel set upon the surface of equally magical depths, the ‘ocean of being’, as Peter Gabriel, for one, might image. But meaningfulness was not a distinct character of that being, or possession thereof and therein. To understand something was to know its relation to creation, and although the ‘great chain of being’ proved to be a phrase and a conception portable to modernity – evolution does not obviate creation, but merely makes it more prescient of its outcomes – its premodern caste was made manifest through the divine autograph, in what Foucault has referred to as the ‘prose of the world’.

            Meaning was thus the world in its presence, meaningfulness was the ‘why’ of that world; its purpose and its intent, to be revealed upon the apocalypse. Neither could be said to be remotely personal, and even insofar as one’s character and actions, one’s ‘faith and works’ would determine, if not predetermine, one’s ultimate fate in the revelatory soteriology of a religion of grace, forgiveness and salvation were still to be earned. This edge of the new ethics grew increasingly sharp with the Reformation; from now on, the person as an individual was to be responsible for their own faith. Thus the personalization of religion could proceed apace, while at the same time, the world was relieved of its enchanted quality. No longer could the hand of God be read off that world as signage, symbolic or hermeneutic. Instead, we moderns place a more rational faith in systems of signs themselves, and are skeptical of the symbolic in all of its remaining moments. And whether these residues are remanential only is an open question, for those who read too much into the world could be diagnosed as merely schizo-affective rather than as visionary.

            If we rewind to the point of departure, the context wherein there was instantiated a metaphysical change, definitions of meaning and meaningfulness following along afterward, what can be observed is a conflation between human institution and Godhead, between longevity and infinity, and between luxury and divinity. The Roman church had, over a millennia, taken upon itself the responsibility for grace, while in so doing, granted itself a monopoly upon same. That one would object to this, at least in Western Europe, was generally unimaginable, though ‘folk Catholicisms’ existed long before the era of conquest. We see these phenomena specifically in Scandinavia and in Iberia, and there is yet some question as to how much of the pre-Columbian syncretisms of Catholicism were homegrown in Meso-American and elsewhere, and how much were in fact simply imported directly from the Iberian peninsula having been extant there for some centuries, even if driven into discreet enclaves by the Moorish presence. However this may have been, the model for later personalization does not arrive abruptly in 1517 alone. Even if there was but one God, he had many arrows in His quiver. The expansive sensibilities of the religious manifests of second stage Agrarian metaphysics; Buddhism, Christianity, Islam – the worldviews that introduced ethics to the world and as well, personhood – turned outward only when their once interiors began to foment dissent. It is not an historical coincidence that Europe, for one, sought the rest of the world at the same moment as the schism in belief was made official and became institutional. A religion must have believers in order to survive. Losing half of Europe meant that new franchises needed to be established. A competition between Catholic and Protestant imperialisms thus ensued, and within this, the syncretistic phenomenon were repeated, now on a global scale.

            But there is a deeper reason at work here, and that is: a structural division in any worldview shows not only a loss of faith in the reigning institution of religion, but also a change of heart regarding the source of its beliefs. If the church were part of the world alone, that same world held within it contrasting signatories, human and divine, which thence gives forth the diabolic in their own competing claims. What once was magic might be turned to sorcery. What once was sidereal may in fact be merely real. In religion do we find the first consideration, in science, the second. The church was once the rampart of magic alone, the priest the latter-day magician. This vehicular alchemy was pronounced first by Moses himself, trained in Egyptian magic by the pyramidal priesthood, later outmatching it, providing the grounds for the once Akhenatonites now Hebrews to journey to a new homeland. By the late Middle Ages, however, magic had already given in to the manipulation associated with the sorcerer who, having always been an outsider, sought through his superior use of enchantedness, to gain purchase within official quarters, just as Satan’s mission was to regain Heaven and reorder it to his own less scrupulous affairs. In part, we see the personalization of magic in the troubador’s poetic discourse, the idea of courtly love and personal romance, rather than that merely personified in antique allegorical figures. The ‘love potion’ motif also begins here, and was it not fitting that it was  French fashion revolutionary who resuscitated this ‘scent-sibility’ in Qabalistically numbered alchemical parfums.

            If sorcery could have been seen as the proverbial ‘left hand of God’, His ‘darker materials’, and so on, by definition it could not occupy the lighted space of institutional, or institutionalized, being. Its fuller presence within the interior of grace could only lead to disenchantedness, which today is our common lot. We are very aware of the corruption of political institutions and organizations alike, the success of those who cheat not merely at games but somehow also at life, and the loopholes, legal or otherwise, which inhabit the detailed deviltries of policy and policing, of schools and schooling, of familiality and family as well as others. Some of us have reacted to this present context by instigating nostalgia in lieu of authentic magic, but this is a dead end, as Weber himself recognized. For the fin de siecle thinkers, only art could provide the outlet for a human being, otherwise historical through and through, to generate meaningfulness in the face of the abyssal void. This sense was particularly evident in Freud, and even he was unsure of art’s long-term ability to provide a niche of enchanted existence. If science has conquered much of the discursive territory religion used to rule, it is art that has proven to be a more essential iconoclast, since it has taken up the task of replacing divine grace itself with an aesthetic subjectivity which ‘glimpses the shared soul’.

            This oversoul has itself become humanized, just as our individual participation in it has become personalized. Attending a concert or taking in a gallery showing does not make us a community. Just as politics fails to unite us, modern aesthetics reaches into our consciousness in order to scandalize it in its too-complacent relationship with the normative. In that, it is deserving of all of our efforts, but at the same time, unless this critical stance is itself able to construct something meaningfully novel and generative of community in the face of anonymous and rationalized relationships, however ‘interpersonal’ or even intimate they may be, then we are at an historical loss whose absence of meaning may well be subject to latter-day sorcery. And if politics may be safely divorced from morality, it cannot be so from ethics. Correspondingly, belief may be separated from aesthetics proper, but it cannot lose the quality of enchantedness now primarily associated with art. And while art is still not life as lived, it is nevertheless life in one of its ideal formulations; that which transcends the moment and thus reveals its history.

            So, while Entzauberung has been the default of modern culture for some centuries, it is equally clear that sorcery, the darker magic of manipulation, has survived, and even flourished, the more disenchanted we become. For in Weber’s argument there is a subtext: the world’s loss of magical quality begins with our disenchantedness at its worldly magus; that is, we ourselves. We doubt our ability to make meaningful remaining meanings because we are taught nothing of the hermeneutic in our education. ‘Interpretation’ is rather something to be avoided, we claim, because all it does is foster conflict. Yet since there cannot be, in the work of existence, one true meaning shared by all, a reactionary sectarianism promotes an anti-hermeneutic soteriology. But it is hardly the sole instance of Babel to this regard. Governments self-promote an official truth, the schools a pedagogic one, the family one based on personal loyalty to status-authority alone, and even science may be guilty of overstating its paradigms, noting that while its methods are open-ended and include interpretation, its results, once evidenced, are the less so. Science, as the historically favored child of religion, has never quite been able to rise above its original kinship to this regard.

            Even so, if it is art that engages us with otherwise scandalous, even evil, insights, exposing our moral hypocrisies and our ethical heresies alike, it is science which in turn reveals cosmic wonders seemingly as infinite as was the premodern idea of creation. And even if demographically it is the case that the vast majority of sectarians have been culturally divorced from both art and science and thus have had to cast round for meaning in the fearful undergrowth of human hope and dream, the more noble instantiations of modernity’s self-made freedoms are nevertheless available to all. That one must approach both art and science with the lingering overtones of magic and sorcery respectively, does contain a challenge to each of us as persons. We experience wonder now as an unsure sign of re-enchantment, in art and through science, but we must do so in the absence of a community which can itself agree on what meanings these wonders denote. In our uncertain certainty that we have at all a future, the will to life demands a magic that will overcome human finitude, and receives in turn only a sorcery which distends existence in various ways. To recognize our historical condition as one in which magic is itself effable and sorcery only nostalgic is to begin to separate disenchantment, which is of a world made into ratios and not necessarily understood rationally, and disenchantedness, which is not of the world at all, resting instead in the heart of the overly personalized meaning of an overtly rationalized human life.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 58 books in ethics, aesthetics, education, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Human Nature and Human Person

Human Nature and Human Person (A comment on essence and existence)

            The 1901 Gifford Lectures are arguably the most famous in their august history. In print the next year, William James’ ‘The Varieties of Religious Experience’ went through dozens of imprints in the next decade, cementing his reputation as the foremost American thinker of his time. I taught this text many times over my own professorial career, and for me, it was one of those books where the sub-title was in fact more profound than the title, for James subtitled his work ‘a study in human nature’. Immediately one is arrested by the scope, the depth, that such a phrase implies. The only hedge is that it is one of a possible number of such analyses, ‘a’ study rather than ‘the’ study. Otherwise, the author of such a book has committed himself to the topic of topics, and for many of us, I think we might shy away from such a responsibility. My own large-scale works have never directly approached such a theme of ‘nature’ and those of the future likely never will. At most, I have suggested that our experience of art ‘glimpses the shared soul’ to slightly paraphrase the publisher’s subtitle for my major work in aesthetics. But James was working in a period where leitmotif statements were not only discursively sanctioned, the readership available seemed to expect such grand gambits of their philosophers. It took two world wars and a genocide to perhaps dissuade the European tradition from overdoing it, and postwar one notes a general stepping back from essential narrative, something that the novelist had moved away from after only the first war. So, while the title of the book remains both intriguing and moving, we tend to at first overlook the real meat of the work, its actual purpose, as revealed in the subtitle.

            And that core thing is, in short, that no matter the diversity of religious experience had by humans in their equal diversity, such experiences, even if we do not refer to them as ‘religious’, are part of the essence of what it means to be human. Even if religion is itself one massive projection of the human ego, as James states in this work, it is a necessary aspect of the wider and originally thrown project which each of is. For James, ‘projection’ was not a psychoanalytic term, but rather an expression of the very character of humanity; a representation, in a word, of our shared human nature. Much of his 1902 work is spent cataloguing the very varieties he advertises in his title, simply to demonstrate that in their existence and exigency, nothing is taken away from their pattern. A vision, no matter its specific contents, remains a vision. A conversion, no matter to which credo, is still a conversion. In the one, the visionary is taken outside of the everyday world and given a glimpse of another. In the second, the convert leaves behind the old world and is inducted into the new. The higher otherworld is, if not perfect, far better than the worldly realm, just as is the new world better than the one previous. In this, the visionary and the convert share both the experience of, and also the ability to, transcend their mundane circumstances, and this is part of the essence of the religious experience, as well as the leverage it uses to convince us of its profundity.

James argues that it is only through the possibility of what we can refer to as ‘irruptive’ events or phenomena, that regular life is livable at all. Such experiences may even be partially calculated, as in creative works of art, but their model is the religious undertaking, often seemingly spontaneous, as if the otherworld were a structural neighbor figure, dipping into our mundanity to aid us in crisis, in an unexpected and radical fashion. It is indeed, James suggests, that human life as lived is livable only due to the idea that there exists another life at hand. In some systems, there is no evaluation in store in order that one may pass on to this other, better life, whereas in others, not all will have the opportunity to do so. Even so, these purely cultural distinctions hail from the realm of existence alone; the presence of the otherworldly, the ‘reality of the unseen’, as James puts it, is of the essence. At this deeper and thus ‘more’ real level, several patterns emerge: one, that an otherworld exists and thus this our world is not all there is to being – this is reflected in the discourse of the child of religion, that of science, through its quantum-predicted multiverse – two, that we can pass through or on to this other realm; hence the idea of spirit or soul which, if not immortal, is at least understood as indefinite – this too is expressed by the sense that the cosmos is not infinite but indefinite in both time as a cycle and space as an expansion – three, that even within the mundane sphere we can catch glimpses of the otherworld; implying that its forces or denizens have a human interest or at the very least, interact with the purely human world – this too may be found in science by way of evolution; ‘we are star stuff, contemplating the stars’.

This trinity of essential character underpins the vast variety of religious experiences that human beings have encountered over the course of both historical time and that primordial. Even if, as James the psychologist is wont to point out, all of this rests strictly in the human imagination, it has become essential by transcending what has remained existential. In this, James appears to counter the modern sensibility that consciousness is historical through and through, and that Dasein is itself a being of history and language, though it too has ‘essentialist’ characteristics shared by every human being; anxiety, resoluteness, being-ahead, and care or Sorgeheit, for instance. But this contrast is an appearance only, at least at the level of discourse. For this aspect of human nature has itself developed evolutionarily; it is this chief manner by which we find a reason to live, and thus reproduce ourselves as a species. In Marxian terms, the religious experience is part of our species-essence, and it is an open question as to whether he and Engels considered the religious experience to be merely a part of religion proper, the notorious ‘opiate of the masses’, or whether it was excerpted from this indictment as an aspect of the authentically human character. In terms Heideggerian, James’ patterns would be expressions of the structure of Dasein’s beingness. Such monumental ‘projections’ certainly reflect our existential anxiety – perhaps overdone in Heidegger, though surely not as Schutz flatly suggested of his analysis: ‘phony’ – but as well and at once, our care or concernful being. They aid us in our resoluteness and keep our focus upon the future, assisting our ‘being-aheadedness’. Religious experience, if not itself an aspect of Dasein’s elemental character, could certainly be understood as the outward statement thereof.

 Both cosmology, our understanding of the universe as it is, and cosmogony, how that same universe came to be over time, its origins, are, as the ultimate discourses of the sciences, descended from religious conceptions. In primordial temporality, such ideas were not necessarily understood as religious per se, for only with the advent of agrarianism did major world systems associated with pantheism, ritual, place, priest and pilgrimage are observed historically. Nevertheless, in all known pre-agrarian beliefs, we can easily identify the three crucial elements of otherworld, of spirit, and of vision. They appear to be human universals, and even though human nature is not any one thing, it is mutable and itself takes on a variety of experiences deemed essential, for James, the ongoing presence of these projected tropes points to there being something within which what it means to be human indefinitely rests. In this, and somewhat surreptitiously, James in fact has altered the very definition of human nature through his study.

Our nature is evolved in the structural sense, developed in that personal. To each her own truest nature, as regards the latter, but in each the basic thrownness which includes the happenstance of birth and the inevitability of death. Life is itself an outcome of cosmogony, but one’s person is an accidental correlate of that life. Therefore, origin narratives take account of Being, of there being something rather than nothing, but cosmological systems respond only to beings, of there being me rather than someone else, or humanity rather than some other ‘intelligent species’. Human nature is thence in turn a response to evolution, human person a response to thrownness. On the one hand, time, on the other, history. Cosmic processes are themselves evidence of a kind of otherworld, anonymous in its forces, dispassionate in its absence of intent, ateleological in its lack of any ultimate purpose. But I as a human person am the very opposite of each of these: I am a being which can be known and can know others, I intend almost everything I do, and I have, over the life course, created a purpose to explicate to myself at least my own presence, my accidental existence. Just so, it is of the essence for each human person to accomplish this trinity in light of the essential one of otherworld, spirit and vision. Discourse and knowledge provide the world other to custom and tradition, intent vouchsafes the sense that I have an ongoingness, a psyche or ‘soul’ by which I navigate the day-to-day work of existing, and finally, an overall or general purpose for an individual human life is the vision necessary to string the whole thing together of a piece.

James sets up this kind of interpretation for our present day by responding to the critiques of selfhood and Being characteristic of the nineteenth century. Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, in spite of their radical dismantling of Enlightenment precepts, all reserved their own sense of human nature, as well as the essence of historical or existential Being. James appears to combine all of these insights or even overtake them in an unexpectedly specific manner, by making singular the pattern by which our ‘nature’ is expressed in the world of forms. If history is class conflict, if life is eternal recurrence, if psyche is Eros-Thanatos, then human nature is religious experience lensed by the human person. This essential experience, born of a universal human condition of happenstance and inevitability, is nonetheless borne on the existential vehicle which is my own personal life as lived. And in that life, though meaning is inherited, meaningfulness is made. The ‘religious’ experience, in its widest and deepest sense, that which includes science and art, gift and even love, is a fullest expression of both our nature and our person. This is why it can be referred to as essential and existential at once. It lives but it also needs to live. It is the one joy amongst all sorrows, it is the meaning shadowing all meaninglessness, it is the cosmos within the chaos, the clarity breathing beneath absurdity. It need not be ‘oceanic’, as Freud skeptically disdained, but it is nevertheless the ocean, in all its mystery and power. In recognizing this, James has given us the ability to shrug off specific beliefs precisely in order to hold on to belief itself. And this too can be a talisman for us; that we can endure specific moments and crises in our lives in order to simply continue to live.

G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, religion, health, aesthetics and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Ethics and Personhood

Ethics and Personhood: ‘you can’t have one without the other’

            There is an agentive aspect to making the distinction between a morality and an ethics. Yet just here we are already relativists, for morality was never simply one of many, but rather ‘the’ only game in town. Even the recognizance, found in the Hebrew scriptures, that there are in fact other gods – just don’t worship them – presupposes in an essential manner that one’s own morality is at the very least superior to those of the others. So, to speak of ‘a’ morality, one amongst many, is to engage an historical sensibility utterly absent during the actual epochs when morals themselves were in the ascendancy. Then, morality could command because the one upon whom it made its demands was not a fully individuated person in the contemporary sense. The shalt and shalt not of a moral code impinged not upon agency per se but rather upon one’s sanity, if saneness is thought of in the sociological sense of fully understanding what is customary.

            For the Greeks, the ‘moron’ was the one who resisted custom; mores, traditions, rituals and the like, or was akin to a child who simply did not yet understand them and thus one’s duties towards same. And though it seems somewhat amusing that the one who went against the fates was none other than the ‘hyper-moron’, for our purposes we can borrow from the pithy pop lyricist Neil Peart and reiterate with him that for us today, ‘fate is just the weight of circumstances’. Just so, circumstance for any pre-modern human being could be conceived as fate simply because of the singular presence of morality. Bereft of competition, moral principles could very well give the impression that they were good for all times and places, to the point of convincing the would-be moralist that any sane human being would hold to them. I say ‘would-be’, because though moralizing always seems to be in fashion – demarcating the fine line between righteousness and self-righteousness – to actually be a moralist one requires at least some comparative data.

            It was just this that was missing in premodern social organizations, no matter their ‘level’ of cultural complexity. It is not a coincidence that our first serious stab at ethics occurred in the cosmopolitan settings of the Alexandrian Empire. It is well known that Aristotle’s attempt to disengage ethics from metaphysics didn’t quite work, not due to the person-friendly ideas therein – his conception of friendship is still basically our own; the most noble form of love – but due rather to the lack of persons themselves. Even so, the abruptly multicultural scenes of a relatively impartial imperialism forced upon the customary the customs of the others, unheard of, alien, eye-opening. It was the beginning of perspective in the more radical, experiential sense of the term. And the origin of recognizing that one’s culture was simply one of many also prompted the incipience of imagining the possibility that a single human being might just have a slightly different understanding of ‘his’ customs than did his intimate neighbor.

            Yet this too is an abstraction. While the history of ideas presents a far more choate brevis, the Socratic citizen which gains a worldly consciousness, the Pauline persona for which each step crosses a limen between history and destiny, the Augustinian subject which redeems itself and thus adds a self-consciousness – one is responsible for one’s own past, history is also and suddenly biography – and thence fast-forwarding through Machiavelli, Hobbes and Locke, the process of individuation greatly augmented until the 18th century wherein we first hear of the authentic individual, the Enlightenment’s fabled ‘sovereign selfhood’. It is here, belatedly, that the ‘which’ becomes a ‘who’.

            In literary reflection, the mythic hero which is only begrudgingly human, and then only for a brief period of existence, is gradually transmuted to the person who acts heroically and thence often also dies a human death. Between the hero and the person lies the saint. Between mythology and biography there is hagiography. And while the self-styled heroic author may sometimes engage in autohagiography – Crowley is perhaps an exemplar of self-satire to this regard, though the reader is led both ways there – in general modern literature casts very much human beings into human crises. We have to turn to epic fantasy to attain the echo of the mythic, but in so doing, we also in general cast aside our shared humanity. I resist here the opportunity to provide an alternative to this lot. In any case, it is mortality rather than mere morality that retains its own de profundis in the face of anonymous social relations and mass society.

            The Socratic citizen is lesser in distancing himself from the ‘examined life’. This early Selbstverstandnis has elements of an ethics about it; the idea of virtue, the sense that one should think for oneself over against institutions and customs alike, the weighing of one’s experience in contrast to received wisdom, the questioning of authority. But I feel that it also instrumentalizes youth, seeks the vigor of the question only to enthrall it to the rigor of the argument. Inasmuch as it ‘corrupts’, it also uses youth for its own purposes. In this it feels more like a mission than a mere mission statement. Similarly, the Pauline pilgrim; one is individuated in the face of a transcendental judgment by which the mythic re-enters history through the back door, as it were. The more radical ‘you have heard it said, but…’ is muted by the sense that the objection to history is both final and ahistorical. It vaults the apodeictic into a kind of aphasia, wherein language itself is lost to Logos just as history is lost to Time. That this inability to give voice to one’s own experience is made singular through the redemption or damnation of the soul only underscores the absence of ethics in this kind of liminal spatiality. With Augustine, we are presented with a morality under the guise of an ethics. Self-consciousness is the basis for a redemptive strike; picketing sin in the knowing manner of the one who has sinned but then has broken good, for the good, and for good, in judging the self and finding it wanting. But this is a narrow understanding of the self as its subjectivity is limited to an auto-moralizing; in a word, the subject is subjected to itself.

            In this self-conscious subjection, I appear before myself as a shadow, awaiting the completion and uplifting of secular being through the death of sin. The world is itself the untended garden, its overgrown paths serpentine and thus leading one on but never out. I dwell in this undergrowth as my soul dwelleth only in the shadow of Being. There is no way in which a holistic and authentic selfhood can germinate here. For this, we have to wait for the being-ahead of the will to life to overtake the nostalgic desire for either childhood or death itself. Both are impersonal events, abstracted into Edenic paradise on the one hand, the paradise of the firmament on the other. Only in our own time does our childhood become our own – if only for a moment given the forces of socialization and marketing, schooling and State – and as well do we, if we are resolute, face our ownmost deaths, the ‘death which is mine own’ and can only mean the completion of my being. It is the happenstance of birth, the wonder of the child, the revolution of youth, the Phronesis of mature adulthood, and the singular ownmost of death, which altogether makes the modern individual a person.

            Given this, the history of ethics as a series of truncated attempts to present agency and responsibility over against ritual and duty – and in this, we should never understand Antigone as representing an ethics; her dilemma lies between conflicting duties and customs, not between a morality and an ethics – comes to its own self-understanding in the person-in-the-world. In doing so, it recapitulates its own history but one now lensed through a ‘completed’ ethics; self-reflection seems Socratic, anxiety has its Pauline mood, resoluteness one Augustinian, being-ahead its evolutionary futurism, and its confrontation with tradition its messianic medium. The presence of key moments of the history of ethics geared into our interiority – we use the term ‘conscience’ for this odd amalgamation of quite different, if related, cultural phenomena – allows us to live as if we were historical beings cast in the setting of timeless epic. Though we no longer write myth – at most, the new mythology is demythology – we are yet able to be moved by it, think it larger than life, imagine ourselves as mortal heroes. The formula for this Erlebnis-seeking is pat enough: the rebellious youth takes her show on the road, discovering along the way that some key elements of what she disdained are in fact her tacit allies; trust, faith, and love. In coming of age as a person, our heroine gains for herself an ethics, differing from the received but suffocating morality of the family compact, deferring the perceived but sanctimonious mores of the social contract. If her quest is to reevaluate all values, her destiny is to return to at least a few of them after being otherwise. The new ethics she presents to the world after conquering her own moralizing mountain is simply the action in the world obverse to her own act of being in that selfsame world.

            This is the contemporary myth, our own adventure and not that of our ancestors, however antique. Its heroes are fully human but indeed only demonstrate this by overcoming the dehumanizing effects of anonymity and abstraction the both. In short, today’s epic hero becomes human, and indeed this is her entire mission. Everyone her own messiah? Perhaps not quite that, not yet. For the godhead forced upon the youth, even though not her own, confronts her with the idea that there could be something more to life than what meets the shuttered eye. In its very parochiality, the heroine is made witness to the possibility that her world is but a shadow of the Being-of-the-world itself. It is in this realization that the adventure begins and the young halfling of a person, beset by market personas and upset by parental identities, strikes out with all of her ‘passions unabated’, as well as all of her ‘strength of hatred’, in order to gain the revolution all youth must gain. The very presence of this literary formula in media today at the very least cuts both ways; at once it is a surrogate for the real fight in which youth must engage, and thus presents a decoy and a distraction therefrom, but perhaps it also exemplifies and immortalizes that same fight, inspiring youth to take up its visionary sword and slice through the uncanny knot that shrouds our future being and history alike. If so, then with personhood comes also ethics; an agency in the world that acts as no one has ever acted heretofore. If so, then the most profound wisdom that we can offer our youth is the sensibility that what we are must not, and never, be repeated.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 56 books in ethics, education, aesthetics, health and social theory, as well as metaphysical adventure fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

The Ballot and Bullet Ballet

The Ballot and Bullet Ballet (America’s Danse Macabre)

            I lived in rural Mississippi for three years. The social lines were drawn sharply and there was little room for error. One was either black or white, man or woman. These two dyads generated a four-celled table of values internal to each cohort, and such values which must be honored at all costs. Social distancing was the order of the day, and mixing was possible only in the most clinical or contractual conditions. Marriage was thus an exercise in daily deportment and compact comportment alike. Men and women could never truly be friends, and neither could black and white. Communities contiguous but not convivial, these southernmost southerners coloured in their corners and painted themselves inward.

            By a murky metastasis, Mississippi is no longer an emblem for the most marginal, but rather is to be taken as an ideal, by some, for the nation as a whole. Set apart for so long, the proverbial land that time did not so much forget but rather ignored, the deepest Dixie could carry on unmolested by either history or demographics. A large and diverse country, the United States oft appears as a disunion of fractious factions, entities of enmity that provide for the modern person a Caesar’s Palace simulacra of what conflict might well have looked like in Antiquity. And this partly by design. Just as the revolutionary ethics of Christianity was an answer – even a solution if practiced with humility and by all for all – to the caste societies of the ancient Mediterranean, populated by up to forty percent slaves, a latter-day prophet might seek to embolden a resurrection of some version of these same ethics as an equal solution to the travails of today.

            I think that the unintended consequences of violation come first, the opportunistic politics of violence second. Their combined outcome is fascism, but we are not quite there nationwide. Not the presence of guns, nor the staunch belief in self-defense, not the self-reliant individual, rugged or ragged, nor the Christian soldiers nor even the race warriors, but the simple fact that the vast majority of Americans raise their children with violence, explains the presence of, as well as the apathy about, conflict and even combat in American society. Some eighty to ninety percent of Americans believe in physically punishing their children. The other great socializer, media, punishes them with visions of violence, cartoonish or no, while shying almost completely away from illuminations of affection and intimacy. Sex is taboo, killing is just fine. Compassion for children in crisis only, otherwise strict and stern disciplinary measures are the daily routine, at home, in school, and even in the workplaces wherein youth first get a taste of the lifelong wage slavery to come.

            Speaking of Antiquity then, laboring classes are not naturalized, unlike ethnic-based castes, but they are nonetheless ordered in a lockstep of heritable social traits, sometimes referred to as ‘life-chance’ variables by social scientists. Wealth begets wealth, poverty tends to repeat itself. Political freedom is mistaken for that human, equality under the law used as a guise for social equity. In the eighteenth century, when the United States was born, the true individual was idealized as one thing, the ‘sovereign selfhood’ of the Enlightenment. This citizen was not ‘two-spirited’, was content with his gender assignment at birth, and struck up the repartee of universal humanity through its European lens. As a child of the counter-enlightenment, I myself respect these ideas, as revolutionary then as were Christian ethics in their own time, but I am aware that my ‘sovereignty’ is subverted by class conflict, sometimes sabotaged by the unconscious, but also sublimated by the reaching forward towards the Overman. Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche are the postmodern trinity, replacing that of the ethical agrarian world systems with a new vision so blindingly disconcerting that we are yet some ways from coming to terms with it.

            Nevertheless, with it we have come to grips. And the United States is the proving ground of this world-historical confrontation with tradition. Always the boldest social experiment, the longing for the Great Society as a kind of cultural destiny yet animates the American political consciousness, insofar as it is alive at all. For a nation resettled with religious fanatics and peasants, the United States has come a long way, baby. Women, especially, have benefitted from this evolution which, in its longer-term Gestalt, is indeed revolutionary in its import. So why just now, when one would imagine that such a society is ready to make the next step, perhaps toward a greater freedom and equality combined, does it show such signs of falling over backwards? This is not a battle of the sexes. One third of American women apparently have no interest in equality or equity. This is not a battle of the ‘races’. Black American households are far more violent than those white, blacks far more likely to hold to revealed religion, and this in spite of their historic voting patterns. Latinos similarly, though of late we have also seen such immigration from nations ruled by once-fascist regimes and perhaps now by equally repressive authorities – Cuba is the usual example – that the successors to these refugees have swung hard in the rearward direction. This is also not a battle of the classes. Rural whites are as poor or poorer than urban blacks and yet they hold polar opposite values in the political and social spheres.

            No, the conflict in the Great Society is about differing visions of what that very greatness is, should be, or shall be. Each side is fatally conflicted about its own vision, for it knows that in order to piece together enough votes to wrest or maintain power, as the case may be, it needs ever bed many it would ever fain to wed. The neo-conservatives concoct a fake temporality which sets itself outside of history, the ‘neo-liberals’ construct history as if it were destiny in motion. In the absence of a universally shared religion – for the first time, less than half of Americans say they attend church and those who claim no religion at all are close to a quarter of the population – competing versions of ‘civil religion’ attempt to hold the day. Each ignores the vital interests of the culture as a whole. Both practice authoritarianism in the home, support it in the schools, ignore the blandishments of the relatively unmitigated exploitation of labor, presume upon the two-party system, mock the idea of representative polling, fund their machines through cronyism, and delude their majority franchises with promises unkept while they elude responsible governance with politicians unkempt, apparently unaware of the very idea of public service.

            In the avid abstraction of greatness, we as individuals are apt to forget our fragile mortality and our general historical inevitability. It is a powerful fix, to the point of becoming a fixation, to imagine oneself larger than life. Specific narcissists are certainly present on the political stage, but they are perhaps more representative of the rest of us than we, or even they, might be willing to believe. It is perhaps only because of a steep social stratification that we as well do not strut as they. As long as ethereal images of greatness, destiny, material conditions of violence against children, poverty in general, and incompetence in education remain as the core sources of conflict, any such society will fall upon its own double-edged sword of self-reckoning. It remains to be seen whether or not we are witnessing the culmination of a Rite of Winter ballet, or whether this singular dance of death will in fact carry on with no end, and thus preempt all possible new beginnings.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in ethics, education, social theory, aesthetics, health and more recently, fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

An Artless Society

An Artless Society (the neo-Christian Reich)

            The Third Reich took great pride in its artistic vision. Even the death camps were seen to serve an aesthetic function; the ‘beautification of the world through violence’, as a well-known documentary puts it. And while the Reich narrowed the definition of what could constitute art by rejecting modernism in all its forms, it did preserve one of two basic elements of what art, in its essence, accomplishes; it presents for us an ideal. This ideal is at once one of form and one of content. The form is irreal in that not only does it not exist in reality – it is both an amalgam of historical types and cultural desires – it also exists beyond the real in the presence of an archetype. The content precedence given over to the plastic arts in the Reich spoke to its executives’ penchant for realizing the ‘new man’, a eugenics-inspired pastiche of Victorian cultural levels theory and organismic evolution. Between Spencer, the oft-misrecognized ‘social Darwinist’ and Tylor, the major anthropologist of non-relativistic cultural studies, the stage was set for an anthropometry of art.

            And yet while the National Socialists armed their artists with not only state funding but also a retrogressive vision of the essence of humankind – in it, it was the anatomy of sculpture that was most fascinating; during Hitler’s ‘Dyskabolos’ address he intones with all due caution that we today could not think to consider ourselves a successful race unless and until we achieve or even surpass the form represented in Greek classical art – that favored the physical ‘look’ as an expression of an inner health, we today have taken both their conceptions of health and esthetics as at least commercial ideals for all to strive towards. The ‘mongrel man’ remains with us in the guises of obesity, addiction, laziness, to name a few. And though we are certainly correct to disarm the edge of this once visionary sword while preserving the reach of its therapeutic blade, I wonder if the two can be so easily separated in practice.

            The Nazis understood half of the presence of art in society, the half that validated their own sensibilities. But by far the majority of us today share those same ideals, and this is evidenced by our reaction to any type of art that challenges them, not to mention any other challenge emanating from other cultural spheres, including that of science. Durkheim shrugged off this kind of resistance to science, just as every authentic artist does for art. But the rest of us cannot afford such blitheness. Not the least while there is a powerful political movement afoot whose sole goal is to return to Eden, the ultimate result of a logic that seeks to beautify through violence. And through their critique of other cultural forms, including art, they have a most willing audience in those of us who would never turn their way through religious suasion alone.

            Instead of proselytizing superstition, the advance guard of the neo-Christian alliance attacks aspects of culture that on the face of it, many of us would instantly agree need to be curtailed or even vanquished. Criminality, pornography, drugs, come to mind. But, as riders to these widely agreed upon human failings, the Neo-Christian will smuggle in assaults on art via pornography, addiction as an illness via drugs, poverty and class struggle via criminality. Indeed, one may well suspect that the criticism of ‘non-partisan’ social problems is seen only as a vehicle for this critic to undermine essential aspects not only of a democracy, but of the ethical society itself.

            We are receptive to these more calculated attacks because its seems, once again, on the face of it, that the rationality guiding them should be acceptable to any sane human being. We know that obesity, addiction, or the anti-social or misogynistic aspects of the sex industry are not ideals, either cultural or moral. We tolerate them without full acceptance because they express the wider marginalia of a free society. In attacking them directly, we must redefine what we understand by human freedom, trending it away from its shadowy verges which, when enacted, are always tantamount to the nth degree of having the freedom to immolate oneself upon one’s own desires. We children of the Enlightenment, our parents equally Rousseau and De Sade, embrace the joy of ecstasy with the sorrow of nothingness. Ours is a Dionysian existence made into a commodity fetish.

            To all of this the Christian would cringe with a genuine sorrow, and in this we ourselves can agree to a point. But the neo-Christian rejects this fuller human freedom by editing, moralizing, censoring, erasing. His is the faux sadness of pity, for in vice he does not see the underside of virtue but rather the leverage to promote his own wider vice. ‘If this is humanistic freedom’, he exclaims, ‘better then to be a slave!’. In their slavishness, the place of art is reduced to decoration, for while a fascist welcomes the art of the past, and particularly the forms which evolved within his own cultural antecedents, and while he also understands that art presents an ideal form for humanity to strive towards, the neo-fascist does neither. The new fascism of today, neo-Christian and neo-conservative, has no conception of art whatsoever. The nude is pornographic, just as is nakedness immoral. Puritanical in its genesis, not unique to America but having its hearthstone there, neo-fascism deliberately mistakes prudishness for prudence, neurosis for mere caution. Its desired Reich is yet lower than that previous, shockingly, given what we know. It is lower and less noble because it does not even have the half-understanding of art that the Nazis did. What it presents to the rest of us is a vision of an artless society.

            From this observation we are but one step from as well suggesting that such a society would also have no culture. The anthropological definition, in its origins begrudging and still heavily hierarchized, attains through its Boasian relativism only the sense that humanity expresses its shared essence in a multiplicity of manners and mannerisms alike. The liberating quality of cultural relativism was almost immediately used by the Reich to justify its criminal practices – ‘this is our culture after all, and no two may be judged by one another or even directly compared’ – and thus this logical entailment of relativism is now used to justify unfreedom, often chanting the shallow terms ‘morality’, ‘principle’, ‘standard’. Either way, the individual, conscious of her own potential freedom and yet also self-conscious about expressing it, is left unsupported. On the one side, relativism defeats itself by extending its logic to the death camps, and on the other, it opens itself to external defeat by declaring that its enemies also have the absolute right to their own druthers. The throw-away line ‘well, its all relative’, today represents a fatal error, not in morality per se, but rather in existential authenticity.

            The only way to resist and overcome neo-fascism is through a step-by-step advance through the dueling Herculean pillars of ideal form and adorational desire. Though it may be ironic that the purveyors of the Third Reich would view those of the Fourth as themselves a mongrel ‘race’, it is through this very viewpoint, itself fraught with risk, that we can best defeat the artless society. Once again, this is the case precisely due to the fact that the majority of us understand art the way the Nazis themselves did. This is certainly an indictment upon us – our half-hearted conception of art represents in us a genuine decadence rather than a mere desireful lust which is expressed in the pressing presence of pornography, for instance – but it is the half-step away from neo-fascism that is nevertheless necessary to avoid a sterner collective fate. The fullest comprehending of the presence of art in society is too much of a threat to that very fabric to be taken in a single step. For art does not alone represent an ideal, but rather speaks into being the oversoul of our shared humanity and thus puts the lie to any sensibility that we can remain aloof to our equally shared existential condition. The ‘scandal of art’, as Ricoeur states, balances and confronts the ‘scandal of the false consciousness’. In doing so, it oft comes across as itself not mere scandal but rather as a palpable evil. But to recognize the authentic evil in the aesthetic object would be to but give away another weapon to the neo-fascist, and one that the rest of us, in our headlong flight from our own feared freedom, would be only too willing to wield.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of over 55 books in aesthetics, ethics, religion, social theory and health, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.

Truthful Fiction, Fictional Truth

Truthful Fiction, Fictional Truth

            World Game, the ruling force, blends false and true.

            The ever-eternally fooling force, blends us in, too. – Nietzsche

            A god now made an animal does not suggest forbearance. In our resentment, we thus resent the truth; happenstance and death. But in our enduring creativity, we do not merely suppress this state of affairs, at its most base, the ‘human condition’, but imagine attaining a novel godhead. This striving for a new divinity is the source of not only the historical religious world systems, but of all imaginative works of the human consciousness. Its fictional content belies its truthful form.

            Let us take a famous macrocosmic example, oft repeated in the microcosm of the human relations. In ‘Acts’, it is related that not only has the dialectic of tradition and revolution been uplifted in and into the ‘Holy Spirit’ – a synthetic conception of the thetic ‘old God of morals’ and its antithesis, the ethical God on earth – but that this new force has generalized the original thesis to apply to all human beings. The Gentiles are also saved or at least, savable. For the first time, at Antioch, the term ‘Christian’ is applied to this new community of believers, some few years before Paul’s letters to the Galatians and thus about 15 years after the Crucifixion. Though this is not the first time such a dialectic which blends fantasy and reality appears in the history of religion, it does represent the advent in the West of the utter democracy of divinity and the equally infinite goodness of grace. The fact that this is new is oddly and even ironically underscored by the fiction that it was forecast in the tradition.

            In the bourgeois marriage, the thesis of the man runs headlong into the antithesis of the woman, generating a synthesis in the child. The child is neither and yet is also both. Its fact is its novel existence, brought about by the Aufheben of conjugality. Its fiction is that it ‘belongs’ to the parents, but in all creative work, including the birth and socialization of a child, an equal element of fantasy must be in play. For to only acknowledge the factual conditions of mortality and finiteness, of difference and uniqueness, would be to put the kibosh on trying to do any of that creative work at all. It would place us as species-being back in a pre-Promethean landscape of shadow and even terror. But there is also no lack of danger in the means by which we give a future to ourselves. In both macrocosm and microcosm the same risk thus presents itself: what if the fiction overtakes the truth?

            If so, in the first, we have religion instead of faith, mere belief without enlightenment; and in the second, we conjure only loyalty in place of trust, fear instead of respect. So if it is truly said that humans cannot live by truth alone, neither can we completely abjure it. The material conditions of human life, the ‘bread’, is by itself not sufficient to become fully human. The ‘faith’, imagination, creativity, fantasy, fiction, is what not only fulfills our desires in some analytic sense, but also completes our being in that existential.

            What then is ‘truthful fiction’, or ‘fictional truth’? I don’t think we can entirely make them discrete. Myth is accepted as nothing but fiction, and yet it contains elements of truth, not only about the human character, however hypostasized, but also about the cosmogonical aspects of our shared world. Myth responds to the perduring and sometimes perplexing duet of questions that challenge us through our very presence in the world; how has the world come to be, and how have I come to be in that selfsame world? Mythic fantasy supplies us with an autobiography writ larger than life. It is not to be read as either history or as a ‘mere’ tall tale, but is rather that synthetic form which uplifts and conserves all that is of value in both the thesis of fact and the antithesis of fiction. It is very much then a ‘truthful fiction’, and, looking at ourselves in its refracted but not distorted glass, its function and its form as well come together for us in an almost miraculous mirror.

            Contrast this with the meticulous mirror of nature that is provided human consciousness by science. If myth is our shared ‘truthful fiction’, then I will suggest here that its iconoclastic child, science, is our equally collective ‘fictional truth’. Historically, science was the synthesis of myth and life, of imagination and experience. It too is thus a dialectical form, even a syncretistic one. Its truth is well-known: the only consistent and logical understanding of nature that we humans have at our current disposal. But its fiction is that it has completely vanquished the imagination, not so much from the source of its questions, but rather from its methods, and particularly from its results. It is a myth, for example, that the cosmology of science is not also epic myth. It is a fiction that science overtakes the fictional to maintain its human interest. Like the God that entered history, suspending for all time and for all comers the sense that divinity by definition is a distant and alien thing, the idea that science exits that same history is equally a fantasy. For science, like myth, is a wholly human production and thus relies as much upon our imagination and ingenuity throughout its process, from question through method to result and thence explanation. It is especially evident that in scientific explanation, there is a concerted and historically consistent effort to efface all traces of mythic sense, replacing them with a hard-nosed experiential sensibility. The fact that even evangelical educational rehabilitation centers targeting youth advertise only ‘evidence-based’ therapies – whatever other more dubious practices may be present therein – is but one example of the astonishing success the fiction of science has generated for itself.

            Just so, if it were not for the fact that ‘fictional truth’ is so available for even the non-believer to utilize should remind us of nothing other than the soteriological generalization recounted in ‘Acts’. Authors who have written in the history of science, especially those who speak of its origins and its early development, from the Miletian School to the Copernican Revolution and onwards, are, in part, repeating the act of cosmogony, of Genesis, and within these actions, the process of the dialectic. This is not to say that there is, or can be, nothing new in the world. The synthetic term, the apex of the dialectical triangle, is justifiably seen as a novel form, performing a hybrid function; at once reminding us of reality while providing the means for a being defined by its finiteness to live on in its face.

            Thus we should not regard the sometimes annoying, even disturbing, blend of fiction and truth as an impediment to the greater experience of life or even to the lesser knowledge of that life as experienced. The ‘world game’ is assuredly afoot, its mystery far outstripping any detective adventure born of and thence borne on the imagination alone. That ‘we too’ are part of its yet mysterious mix, its blithe blending of our beings into both a history of acts which are not our own and a biography which very much is, however much we sometimes attempt to avoid its action, is, in the end, the most blessed of gifts that any divine animal could imagine for itself.

            G.V. Loewen is the author of 55 books in ethics, religion, education, aesthetics health and social theory, as well as fiction. He was professor of the interdisciplinary human sciences for over two decades.