Against Heideggerian Philosophy

On my new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries, I discuss how Heidegger has led modern philosophy into a sophistical morass of timid "everydayness":

Heidegger's Philosophy as "Idle Talk": A Challenge

Twenty-Five Centuries

I've started a new blog, Twenty-Five Centuries. Here's the "About" blurb:

Since the birth of Greek philosophy twenty-five centuries ago, along with Cyrus the Great’s introduction of religious toleration in Persia and his rebuilding of Jerusalem, the Western world has been engaged in a vast dialogue, across both space and time. Some call this the Great Conversation, and when it touches on eternal themes, it is called Philosophy.

For anyone who has read and been personally touched by the classics, modern ignorance of this conversation is heart-breaking to behold.

I write this blog in the hope that I can contribute, in some small way, to the revival and continuance of this twenty-five-century-old conversation. 

Do not expect a dry survey of the history of philosophy here. I mean to do philosophy. I mean to carry on the conversation. I mean to challenge the way we think, the way we live. 

Modern Western civilization, far from being the peak of enlightenment it pretends to be, has declined into ideological barbarity. Scientism. Progressivism. Materialism. But also: Populism. Anti-intellectualism. Reactionism. 

We know this well. Satirists, cultural critics, and angry pedants abound, all attacking our failing culture. But unless we can do something positive to contribute to its health, even the truest, most relevant criticism is futile. 

The Great Conversation is Western culture. To forget it is to destroy our identity. So our first and most important task is: to remember. 

Each essay will attempt to reconstruct a portion of this Conversation stretching back to Socrates, and to bit-by-bit help us to remember who we are, and why.

My first post is about the civilizing effect of Homer on Greece: How HOMER'S EPICS Will Teach You Valor.

Littleton - A Parable

There was once a town called Littleton where no one lived much more than two or two-and-a-half months. The people of Littleton grew to adulthood in 21 days, and they even managed to learn to talk by this point, though theirs was a simple language. Most of them raised their families during weeks 4-6 of their lives, and declined into old age in the third month, seldom living past 80 days.

You might think that the people of Littleton were more reconciled to their own mortality the we longer-lived folk. That perhaps, with death so near, they would be forced to come to terms with it in a more profound way than the rest of us. And actually, for the first few decades of Littleton's existence, this was true. Though the people of Littleton had less time for study, this only made them study deeper, and they were apt to understand the deepest, simplest facts of life: death, love, taxes, and family. With these concepts firmly and concisely in grasp, theirs was a happy existence for a time, despite its unusual shortness.

They soon came to realize, however, that certain things were lacking from their lives. Because they had so little time, lawyers and doctors, for example, were very rare in Littleton. Though they were swift learners, two or three months is simply not enough time to learn all the facts necessary for a law degree or an MD. The most prestigious careers available were things like construction or auto mechanics. Littleton had access to a few instruction manuals in such things, and your most well-respected jobs involved meticulous following of directions written down by someone from another town or era.

Over the decades a new career began to emerge, their most prestigious yet: architect. What happened was this. Since all their most clever students went into construction, these exceptional intellects were able to find flaws in the classic manuals being used. So they began to add annotations. In some generations these manuals grew bloated with commentary, and in others they were cut back, summarized, and made more concise than ever. As a result Littleton began to develop a discipline of architecture that was superior even to that of the outside, longer-lived world.

Littleton had never had the skill or patience to build itself a town hall and truly put itself on the map where small cities go. But now it did. The skill had been built up--not in any one person's head--but in the collection of manuals being passed down and improved from generation to generation. Patience had been cultivated by this same process, by seeing how many generations had to pass away for the manuals to grow. And now it seemed that the year or two it would take to build a town hall wasn't as long a time as it might seem, though it would be something like twenty generations.

But of course, even just drawing up the plans for the town hall was a challenging process. No one architect, no matter how brilliant, had the time to learn both all the principles of architecture AND understand every detail of the new building. But by their deep and simple wisdom they knew that they needed SOME kind of overview of the building, if it was going to hang together and be a unified work of architecture.

The most visionary of their architects, then, were designated as "Eagles" -- those with wide, if incomplete, vision of the whole. They were not expected to understand how specific bricks were to be fitted together, nor even all the mathematical principles behind the Littleton theory of architecture. Rather, they were expected to know very basic, broad, ideas, such as (1) What is a Town Hall for? Why are we building it? (2) What sort of aesthetic qualities does it need? Should it appear massive and intimidating, or warm and welcoming? (3) Where should it be placed in the town? What buildings should it be next to? (4) What is the relationship among all the other specialties needed to build this building? For example there should be specialists in roofing, finish work, foundations, etc. What should be built first? How should this all be organized?

Such questions are more than enough for one Littleton lifetime, and bit by bit an Eagle Manual began to grow and establish itself as the basic guide to running the project. Other manuals grew as well, one for each specialty, as mentioned above.

After just a year the project began to take shape. It started to look like it was going to work. The Eagles, in particular, felt it was all very feasible, and might even be done within another year. Great trust was placed in their abilities, and rightly so--for a time.

In the meantime, Littleton had become famous for its small-scale architecture. The project of building a town hall had led to a flourishing of sorts. Extremely beautiful and quaint cottages had sprung up all over town, and people came from miles around to see these uniquely distinctive homes, built according to a theory that had developed entirely independently of the outside world. For outsiders, it was like seeing something from another continent.

Littleton became rich. And now its troubles began.

More specifically, it was the Eagle named Tommy McShort that began to derail the project. It wasn't that he didn't care enough about the town hall. It was that in his pride in his Eagleship -- the discipline that put Littleton on the map -- he believed he could discover the principles need to build the town hall bigger, more beautiful, and faster than they had previously imagined.

On the face it, his theory was perhaps only a little more daring than most. Usually, this wouldn't be a problem. Later generations would catch the mistakes and cross them out. But when an Eagle makes a mistake, it can create special problems. Previously, Eagles had understood the sacredness of their task, and knew that it was very easy to lose past insights if you didn't read the manuals carefully enough.

But this was the very chapter McShort had neglected to read over! The Eagle Manual had grown very long indeed, and McShort had been, as I've said, just a little less careful than most, and he'd missed the first chapters, thinking he would skip to the "good part". And now there was a problem. Because McShort was telling his apprentices to skip the first part of the book too, for he had done fine without it. (So he thought!) And thus each generation after McShort grew a little more flippant and ignorant of what had come before. They were losing their respect for the past. Meanwhile, they were growing rich on their fame as the Master Architects of Littleton, and so didn't spend much time worrying about it.

Within a few generations things were very bad, but only the Eagles even suspected that something was wrong. Each generation argumentation broke out among the apprentices about what was the best approach to learning Eagleship, and many questioned if reading the Manual was even that useful at all. After all it was very long and took several weeks to read over, and perhaps that time could be better spent on more practical questions. Master Eagles had a harder and harder time answering these questions because they hadn't bothered to read much of the first few chapters of the Manual, which was the part that explained the answers in most detail. More and more confused fluff was added to the end of the Manual -- and this was what most new apprentices now seemed to prefer to read.

Meanwhile, specialist architects, without the firm guidance of the Eagles, were also beginning to veer off track. Littleton Stonemasons, in particular, had begun to develop a pride to rival that of their masters.  While the Eagles quibbled over seemingly unanswerable questions like "What is a Town Hall for?" and "How big is too big for a Town Hall?" at least the Stonemasons had been discovering practical principles useful in constructing ever-more-quaint cottages and stone lodges for the tourists to gawk at. Stonemasons began to add comments to the front of their own manual saying, "Most important!" or "This is what it really means to 'hang together!'"

Though they had largely forgotten why, the Eagles were still skimming through other manuals, trying to get an idea of their contents. It was while doing this that Johnny Quickson decided that these pithy self-promotions of the Stonemasons were really much more profound than they seemed. He put forward a new fundamental principle of Eagleship: "The Mortar Principle." It said, basically, that as long as each tiny part of the Town Hall was mortared to its neighboring parts, everything would hang together even if no one could quite grasp the whole. Things like "aesthetic beauty" and "purpose" and so on were useless concepts that the craftsman who physically built the townhall wouldn't need anyway.

Now, these ideas might sound exceptionally stupid, especially coming from the inhabitant of a town whose fame was derived from the aesthetic beauty of its dwellings. You might think that the cottage-builders would come to the rescue and put these Eagle in their place. But it must be remembered that all the inhabitants of Littleton (except the Eagles, that is) still believed in paying respect to the old manuals. And all the old manuals said that the Eagles were the smartest and in charge.

So rather than putting the Eagles in their place, the cottage-builders themselves began to take on this new aesthetic-free, purpose-free style of architecture. And thus began the "Post-Quaint" era of Littleton, when the merit of a new cottage was measured merely in how many aesthetic rules it broke and old traditions it disrespected. Freedom to innovate began to trump all else. Unfortunately for Littleton, more tourists were pouring in than ever, providing them with even more money to be spent on still more extravagantly weird little dwellings.

And in this way, the Eagles' own disregard of the Manuals began to infect the rest of Littleton. Rare indeed was the individual who attempted to get any kind of overview of what a single Manual, let alone all the Manuals, had to say. Without the leadership of the Eagles, this had become all but impossible. The Town Hall project fell to ruin. And now, only a rare few in Littleton have the courage (or the time) to figure out what went wrong and how their Golden Age had come to end. But as long as a few inhabitants still read the old manuals for pleasure, especially the earliest chapters, perhaps some few of them will eventually come along with the know-how to start putting the pieces back together.

Introduction to “Thoughts of a Recovered Philosopher” for Liberals

1

This is an introduction for those who already understand that what humans are doing to the environment is a problem. That big corporations with big money unleashing big propaganda is a problem. That poverty is not just an inconvenience but a genuine and serious problem. That rationality and objective truth-seeking is a good thing and that Darwin’s theory of evolution is generally correct. That there are problems with traditional institutions and religions, specifically with organized religions, which have a tendency to decay. This is for those who understand, in short, that things are changing and some kind of adaptation is necessary.

Technically, my philosophy falls somewhat to the right on the political spectrum. Some of my views, in fact, are radically conservative. But I don't really believe in the "political spectrum." And here's why. You might think that on all of the issues I just mentioned--the environment, big corporations, Darwin's theory, and our need for change--I am going to argue that they are not all that important, that you should just compromise on them and be less liberal about them. But quite the opposite is true. Your typical liberal, in fact, should be far, far more radical about the environment, fighting poverty, and promoting reason and change. As I see it, the biggest problem with modern liberalism is that it is not liberal enough.

The same, incidentally, is true about modern conservatism on my view--it is not conservative enough.

Modern political thinking has become far, far too milquetoast.  It lacks vitality, vim, verve, vigor. It is too careful. We never take up arms anymore to defend our freedoms. Instead we whine on Facebook. As impossible as an anarchist utopia would be, better a bloody overthrow of the government and a return to primitive feudalism then all this aggrandized, infantilizing media drama. Yeah, Trump is Hitler. Sure he is. Next thing you'll tell me Obama is Moses and Mickey Mouse is the most profound idea since Buddhism.

2

Take the environment for example. You tell me global warming is THE issue of today. Millions will die, economies will collapse, and so on. Fine. Then why in the name of everything holy are you driving a car to work every day? "Oh, well you know I have to work and feed my--" Millions will die! Ride a bike!

Until you eliminate fossil fuels from your life it is hypocritical to utter the slightest complaint about global warming. Who are you complaining to? God? Are you asking the government to make your car illegal? Because short of that I don't see what the government can do about it. This is why I'm sick of the global warming "debate."

And what I really don't understand is why we stop with global warming. There's some disagreement over whether global warming is caused by fossil fuels or is all that serious, but it doesn't really matter because there's a dozen other unsustainable aspects of our civilization that will almost certainly cause its collapse:

-It would take five planet earths to supply the resources for everyone in the world to live with an American standard of living. This means that our extravagant lifestyle is literally blocking the rest of the world from development. In other words we are hypocrites, holding ourselves up as the most "equal" people on earth while in actuality constituting a sharply distinct and exploitative aristocratic class over everyone else. In essence, the scheme to lift everyone up to the Western standard of living is a pyramid scheme. All pyramid schemes (a.k.a. empires) collapse.

-We are in the midst of a huge extinction event, losing species faster than at any time since the extinction of the dinosaurs.

-The world's energy consumption is doubling roughly every 35 years, and this is primarily due to economic growth in China, India, and the West. Exponential growth cannot last forever--it always reaches a limit. In the news they talk about economic growth as a good thing. When we reach this limit we will be forced to face some harder realities.

-90% of our transportation is powered by petroleum, and 75% of our products contain petroleum products, mostly plastics. We have less than a century of oil and natural gas, even if our energy consumption stopped growing. But it is growing so we really only have a few decades at best. Coal may last a century at current growth rates, but mining it is not a pretty process and it burns dirty.

-Food production is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Without them, it's been estimated that our agriculture could support only about one or two billion people.

-Renewable energy sources have limits too. It takes certain rare metals to make solar panels. And if wind power provided all our energy and our energy consumption keeps doubling, its wind-dampening effects would start to have climactic effects on par with global warming. (See K. Marvel, et al., “Geophysical Limits to Wind Power.”)

-There are over a dozen important minerals that won't be profitably minable after a few more decades. (See A.M. Diederen, “Metal Minerals Scarcity and the Elements of Hope,” NIDV, The Hague).

-We are destroying topsoil, forests, and fresh water resources faster than they can be replenished.

-Technological innovation is slowing (See Joseph Tainter, “Complexity and the Productivity of Innovation.”)

You may be thinking, okay, but maybe we are introducing enough new regulations and technologies to mitigate these trends. It may seem bad now but perhaps it's getting better. I'm sorry, but this is wishful thinking. It is essential to keep this fact firmly in mind: every trend I just described is only getting worse because overall consumption of every resource I mentioned is increasing exponentially. It doesn't matter how many new mines or oil fields are discovered, this only feeds the growth. And you just can't beat exponential growth. Not even with government regulation.

"Ah, but, you know, people have been freaking out about this stuff for decades and it really hasn't turned out to be a big deal." Maybe you've never heard the parable of the lily pond, or if you have you may need a refresher. Please Google it.

"All right, so then you're saying it's all hopeless?" Not at all. Resource limitations are a natural part of life. Here's the real kicker. Here's what most people these days have a difficult time understanding.

What's weird is not that resources are becoming scarce. What's weird is that we live in one of those extremely rare time periods when things aren't scarce. For millions of years, our main resources were things like wild deer and wild fruits and nuts. These things were generally hard to find and most people failed to survive and reproduce. If the population of humans grew, these things became even harder to find. If food resources grew, we'd consume them and they would return to normal.

Then we discovered farming. Now we just needed good land. The population exploded and before we knew it good land was scarce and we were back to equilibrium. Farming became hard again and not everyone made it. Natural selection quickly re-entered the picture.

Recently we discovered fossil fuels and now we have cars and tractors and trucks and fertilizer. It's made things easier for a time. All I'm saying is soon we will return to the hard way of things, where there aren't enough resources for everyone. European civilization persisted for 2000 years in such a state of equilibrium. It's a tough life but it's not fatal to society or learning.

My point is the last century or two has spoiled us.

And here we see, following ecological thinking out to its ultimate limit, why modern environmentalism is not nearly radical enough. Not even close. What we need to be doing is figuring out local sustainability, as we did in the "good" old days. I mean the "less-stupidly-easy" old days. Learn to farm sustainably. Or just raise a garden and a few chickens. Learn woodworking. Learn to build sheds and barns and homes. Be prepared. Take the basic idea of global warming, follow it out to its ultimate conclusion, and this is what you can begin to see.

3

Let's move on to wealth inequality. As a liberal you probably see it as a problem. And you should. But already, while discussing the environment, we've seen how popular thinking on this is way, way too milquetoast. We've got a pyramid scheme on a global scale. We're using resources so greedily we are making it literally impossible for other nations to catch up. We've got a form of hypocrisy as silly here as the whole global warming thing. You really want to help Africa? Stop driving your car and burning so much of the oil they need. Stop heating your home through the winter and using up all the natural gas they need. Stop buying cheap plastic goods made by the 12-year-old wage slaves we hired over there.

Hypocrisy, hypocrisy, and more hypocrisy. The inequalities we see in America are virtually zero compared with the inequalities between nations. Don't tell me about the "hungry" in America. The only hungry we have are those who are too lazy to apply for welfare or even just stand on the street and stick out their hand. Take a little trip to Mexico and see what I mean.

Yeah, those 1% oppressing us all, sure. If you and I are making more than $34,000 a year we are the 1%.

We won't be on top forever. Learn traditional knowledge and skills. Get out of the city and learn agriculture. I know it's not the cool thing to do now, but in the future it will be so cool.

4

And now we come to my favorite topic of all, evolution. Many liberals enjoy the fact that religious types are in denial of the strong scientific support behind Darwin's theory. They also enjoy the fact that evolution tells us just how brutal things used to be before humans started to adapt using science instead of natural selection.

Actually, we should find neither of these facts enjoyable. There are plenty of people who believe in a personal God (myself included) that find nothing objectionable about evolution. We need to stop assuming that God and evolution are somehow incompatible. The more atheists use evolution as a weapon to challenge theism, the harder it becomes for theists to accept evolution as a fact of life, much less as a grand and beautiful part of God's design.

But this whole topic is basically moot, because you are a liberal and so you probably already accept evolution as fact. What is more interesting to me is the common view that evolution is something modern humans have "overcome."

The book I'm publishing this year, Progress Debunked, is essentially one long argument for why evolution applies just as strictly to human DNA and ideas as it does to all other organisms. And here we have an interesting place where radical "liberalism" may become radical conservatism. Because, historically speaking, those who believe that the principle of Survival of the Fittest can be applied to humans have been far-right reactionaries. This automatically makes it very un-PC, along with the idea that competition is a natural part of life, some are born with a higher IQ, and so on.

But these controversies are neither here nor there. The main reason I find it interesting and important to apply evolution to humans is that we can see, at a more fundamental level, why the whole idea of a modern world that has overcome natural selection is bunk. If you understand evolution deeply enough, you will see that it is essential to life itself. And you will see that liberal values like compassion and cooperation were actually shaped by natural selection (what some call "group selection"), which can in fact operate on entire ecosystems--even on the entire biosphere.

I'm saying that both liberals and conservatives have taken a far-too-shallow view of the significance of evolution. From the point of view of cultural evolution, the oldest religions and philosophies are the most profound, because they have survived and flourished through the natural selection of the harshest and most diverse ages and societies. I have heard Christianity called a "fossil species." As a matter of fact it is still one of the fastest growing belief systems. Atheism and secularism (which are in fact older ideas than Christianity) are shrinking because they tend to foster lower birthrates.

In the end, evolution and religion converge in what they are saying. This is true of all great ideas. To see this you must dive deeply into both. Why did God create evil? Evolution is one way to answer this question. What value system has the greatest evolutionary fitness? God is one way to describe the answer to this.

We could go much deeper, but this is only supposed to serve as an introduction to the sort of philosophical questions I think we most desperately need to face.

5

Liberals tend to have a problem with organized religion. And I would tend to agree that there is a problem here. This is a place where what I have to say to you is the same whether you are a conservative or a liberal or something else. As I wrote in my Introduction for Non-Liberals:

It isn’t just that people are forgetting religion and missing the point of it. It’s also that our religious institutions themselves are in a state of decay and corruption. Many people would rather not hear this. And in fact they have no reason to listen to me—-a humble philosopher, however recovered from his wayward ruminations-—on why their religion has a problem. In fact I am likely to be wrong in my diagnosis, being neither a profound theologian nor expert on the founding or leadership of spiritual institutions. I’d prefer to let someone infinitely wiser than me make the point:

“Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

None of this is to say we should go out and burn our Bibles. Quite to the contrary, we need to read them more diligently than ever, to make sure we lose nothing from this fittest of all books. We must pay at least this much respect to our ancestors, that we thoroughly understand what they believed before judging it. G.K. Chesterton called tradition the democracy of dead. I would take this two steps further. Tradition is not only the most powerful form of democracy, but the most powerful form of authority, period. It is the voice of natural selection, of God, thundering down to us from the depths of history. Those who ignore it, do so at their own peril.

For further thoughts on this, see my essay, Through Nihilism.

6

I hope this was a useful primer. Everything I've said here I've also said elsewhere, scattered about. You should be ready, at this point, to dip into my blog anywhere and more or less understand where I'm coming from.

I've criticized the hypocrisy of a number of modern notions here, and you may be wondering how I apply these ideas to my own life.

Now I don't claim to be perfect or live entirely free of contradiction. But I do humbly attempt to practice what I preach in four basic ways. (1) I study both ancient and modern classics diligently, and try to pay respect to the Great Conversation in what I write. (2) I strive to write philosophy, as Nietzsche asks, with blood. I don't split hairs but I do put logic above rhetoric. What I say comes from the heart and is meant to touch hearts and improve the way we live. (3) I devote even more time to my wife and children than I do to my writing, and I do everything I can to teach my children well. (4) I do garden as sustainably as I can. Though I don't know much farming I try to learn more every year and make progress toward establishing a homestead.

Introduction to “Thoughts of a Recovered Philosopher” – for Non-Liberals

1

This is for those who already understand that modern culture has gone fatally awry, that progress is a pernicious god, that there is much essential wisdom from the past that we are losing. Who understand, moreover, that the greatest danger to our culture at present is a willful despising of tradition and love of –for lack of better terminology—pop values. I’m speaking to those who get that the most subversive of these new values are found especially in your most innocent-seeming family film. Or Kindergarten classroom.

Most who know this, know it because they are part of a religion. Or perhaps they have read ancient philosophy, or a great deal of classic literature, or have some other exposure to traditional knowledge or old, pre-modern wisdom. Because the warnings were there, and they have been there for a very long time. How so many people have come to forget them at first seems unclear. Many have been tempted to blame it all on some new false religion—“liberalism,” or “neo-Gnosticism” or something like that. But the truth is that it’s simple ignorance, bred of wealth. Like a spoiled child who has never been told “no,” ours is a spoiled civilization that has succeeded mightily at everything we have tried simply because we have smart technicians who’ve been able to harness for us the power of fossil fuels.

For millennia religions have demeaned and discouraged wealth. We knew it was a corrupting force. But where today does the power of persuasion lie? With those who have, for whatever reason, forgotten this lesson. Those who have grabbed for themselves the biggest share of these new riches.

The power of mass propaganda lies in the hands of those who value fame and wealth above all. Why? Because those who have been willing to sacrifice everything else—duty, tradition, family, etc.—have done best in the rat race to get heard. Victory by exhaustion, victory by fanaticism. And so those who write the modern stories we read and watch are those who most want attention – the most spoiled of  brats. And those who select what stories get produced and published are those who most want money and career success.

And so we look around us now and see the masses, the product of this propaganda, all striving for attention in the rat-race of career. Two parents working outside the home, 50-70 hours a week each, no time for children, no real desire for family closeness or bonding, no more true love of nature or growing things. Or romantic poetry or old musty books. Because there’s no money or fame or career-building in any of these. They are not “practical.”

But of course you understand all this, right? But in the mass-noise of modern life, it is easy to forget. We need reminders.

And it is easy to grow tired of it. It is easy to become jaded, cynical in a way. It is easy to become resentful, hateful even. Of these emotions, hate is the least festering and most healthy, because it is active. To bury this hate only makes it rot and mutate, to tie itself in knots and build in explosive power. But what we must do is transform this hate into something loving. We must combine it with love to make: anger.

And here we might learn something even from Nietzsche, the most fame-hungry of decadents, who wrote, “We must get truly angry for once, for things to get better.” And another place: “Of all that is written I love only what a man has written with his blood. Write with blood, and you will experience that blood is spirit.”

Just as the medieval Christian kings could learn something from the military talents of the pagan Julius Caesar, we might learn something from the decadent Nietzsche about how to defend what is Good.

Nietzsche, like us, was pent-up. He had a new value system, and he saw the deep flaws in the value system around him, but he could not directly express such idiosyncratic thoughts. He spoke in indirect stutters—aphorisms—and gradually they began to cohere. Surrounded, outnumbered, somehow he held his own. There is something to be learned here about strength.

Again: “We philosophers … are no thinking frogs, no objectifying and registering devices with frozen innards – we must constantly give birth to our thoughts out of pain and maternally endow them with all that we have of blood, heart, fire, pleasure, passion, agony, conscience, fate, and disaster.”

I love this way of speaking because it treats thinking as a living, organic, ecological thing. We maternally give birth to our thoughts. We seek to create living ideas, we philosophers. This gift of creation, shared among all artists, is a god-given, evolution-honed faculty that Coleridge baptized “Imagination.”

The etymology of the term “genius” carries this view: “Latin genius ‘guardian deity or spirit which watches over each person from birth; spirit, incarnation; wit, talent;’ also ‘prophetic skill,’ originally ‘generative power’ (or ‘inborn nature’), from [Proto-Indo-European] *gen(e)-yo-, from root *gene- ‘to produce, give birth, beget’.”

In agriculture and in our daily lives we lack a connection to nature and its generative processes. Our ideal and dream of a good family life now lacks the essential image of the cottage farm or homestead. In our intellectual lives we also lack a connection with our own natural generative faculties. That is, our ideal of intellectual life lacks poetry and philosophy.

As Emerson wrote, “Our hunting of the picturesque is inseparable from our protest against false society.”

Understanding this, I hope you can understand why in my ruminations, recorded in small part on this blog, I seek philosophy and poetry above all else.

And maybe we’re already on the same page about what’s decaying in our culture and what needs to be re-cultivated. But things are still far worse than what I’ve alluded to above.

2

It isn’t just that people are forgetting religion and missing the point of it. It’s also that our religious institutions themselves are in a state of decay and corruption. Many people would rather not hear this. And in fact they have no reason to listen to me—a humble philosopher, however recovered from his wayward ruminations—on why their religion has a problem. In fact I am likely to be wrong in my diagnosis, being neither a profound theologian nor expert on the founding or leadership of spiritual institutions. I’d prefer to let someone infinitely wiser than me make the point:

“Do not call anyone on earth ‘father,’ for you have one Father, and he is in heaven. Nor are you to be called ‘teacher,’ for you have one Teacher, the Christ. The greatest among you will be your servant. For whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You shut the kingdom of heaven in men’s faces. You yourselves do not enter, nor will you let those enter who are trying to.

“Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You travel over land and sea to win a single convert, and when he becomes one, you make him twice as much a son of hell as you are.”

3

Oh, but it is worse still. In ancient Greece, Socrates condemned those who called themselves wise, but today none even wish to be called wise. In ancient Israel, Jesus condemned those who called themselves teacher, but today none even wish to be called by that title.

Today, the best wish to be mere sycophants. That is, in more popular terminology, spokesmen, partisans, reporters, propagandists, writers.

The term “philosopher” was introduced in ancient Greece as a term for one who admired wisdom, yet did not pretend to it. A lover of wisdom. To be contrasted with a “sophist,” that is, a self-proclaimed wise man.

Today, none would call themselves a wise man. Precious few sing praises of wisdom. The highest intellectual aspiration is merely to be a “writer.” At this, it must be a “successful writer.” Who speaks of “wise writers”? It is completely indifferent what words you put on the page, what they signify, or even the ultimate wisdom of your notions—so long as they sell. Money, Mammon, is lord and master.

Before we can truly love wisdom we must learn to even pretend to wisdom. It is sophists that precede philosophers.

And we must pretend to wisdom and love wisdom before we can truly love what is most wise, namely the essence of religion.

And until we have learned to love all these higher things, it will be impossible to find spiritual fulfillment, let alone stand up to those man-made institutions that would sell fulfillment, be they corrupt religions or progressive philosophies.

And this is why I am still a philosopher, albeit a tempered one, trying to recover from the disease of aimless speculation.  And it is why I think we need more genuine philosophers now, more than ever.

Through Nihilism: A Meditation

… the world

lives in the death of speech

and sings there.

— Wendell Berry

Why are you so afraid of silence? Silence is the root of everything. If you spiral into its void, a hundred voices will thunder messages you long to hear.

— Rumi

Silence is God’s first language.

— St. John of the Cross

Leisure is a form of silence, of that silence which is the prerequisite of the apprehension of reality: only the silent hear and those who do not remain silent do not hear.

— Josef Pieper

1

Try telling a self-styled philosopher that you are a complete relativist or nihilist. He’ll probably look at you like you’re a bit crazy. But on the other hand, if you ask him if he is a moral realist or believes in absolute truth he will deny it.

As if we all inhabit a twilight world where there isn’t exactly truth but there sort of is.

Better by far to choose one or other.

One of the most important turning points in my life was when I admitted to myself that I had become a nihilist. It was in the utter silence of this unfathomable doubt that I first realized that there is truth.

You must give yourself silence. You must give yourself space, and time. Long stretches of time, where thought is welcome and non-thought even more welcome.

2

Before nihilism took me I was something of an evolutionist. More accurately, before flirting with nihilism I flirted with a kind of universal Darwinism. Neither is an ideology complete in itself. You can do little more than flirt with an ideology. It takes a fully-fledged religion to command devotion.

You might say we live in an age of ideology, of flirtation, of promiscuity of mind. Much is promised and little is consummated. Many are married but little does it mean because divorce is as common. We’re not supposed to believe in marriage, not really, just as we’re not supposed to believe in religion or even really believe in belief.

You might call modernity Paganism 2.0. A profusion of small gods.

Evolution is a funny set of ideas. It’s sort of philosophy, sort of religion, sort of science. There’s some mathematics, but not much. But what it has is mountains of is evidence. Make no mistake. The earth is billions of years old, and traditional Biblical chronology is literally false. Many take this to mean, as I did for a long time, that the Bible is literally false, as if St. Augustine had never suggested over a millennium and a half ago that the six days of creation in Genesis might have been figurative, and as if no Pope John Paul II had ever admitted that Darwin’s theory is, at least in broad outline, true. There’s a lot of prejudice and doubt tangled up with the idea of evolution, for scientists and theologians alike. Evolution reminds people of eugenics and the Nazis. It reminds people of the absurdity of old myths, and everything that is unbelievable about religion. The whole Struggle for Existence reminds us, in short, that we take peace and comfort for granted.

It reminds us of those Hard Truths that we like to forget. That competition is a part of life. That human knowledge has always been limited. That not everything can be tolerated, not even in principle. That inequality is a natural state. That populations wax and wane and civilization is mortal. That some cruel criterion of selection is necessary for creativity. That weak books and weak minds do not procreate. That there is a hard reality that will break our illusions. That life is essentially the horror of mutation and creativity. That life must have some higher purpose beyond mere reproduction, beyond mere faith in faith, beyond mere being. That somewhere beyond this material rat-race there is a supreme good, a Good worth the Struggle.

A God worth this Devil.

3

Evolution cannot be used to derive a complete set of values for life. If you could predict the future with certainty, all you would have to do—as a devout Evolutionist—is calculate what sequence of actions would leave the most ideological and genetic progeny over the next, oh I don’t know, few millennia, say. Then perform that sequences of actions. But of course we can’t do this. The world is too complex. We don’t know who will win the game of evolution. Fascism believed in evolution and it believed it would win it. It did not. Darwinism is not a perfect formula, nor even a very good one.

And in any case, we don’t have time to sit around and derive a new set of Commandments from Darwin’s theory. There are philosophers trying to do this, of course. But we’ve got to live our lives today. We all know this, or else we’d be hanging on the Darwinists’ every word. (Okay, we don’t all know this.)

Then how do we answer the question of value? Fine, toss religion. It’s superstition. Where to begin? Basic kindness maybe. But maybe not. Why not selfishness? Wasn’t religion a form of control for the masses? So let’s rebel against this tyrannical rule of kindness. (Nietzsche, anyone?) Or maybe not, I don’t know. Seems like we’d be back to Darwinism again.

Fact is, the question of ultimate value is groundless. “What is the meaning of life?” cannot be answered. Not unless you’ve already got some ultimate value you are assuming. For example, you might say, “I choose ... Christianity, because Islam is too militant.” Too militant for what? What standard of militancy are you presupposing here? Maybe it’s just militant enough. Maybe Christianity is too peaceful. You don’t know unless you have a previous set of values. At some point values bottom out. If they don’t, if you are questioning the root of the tree, you are done. This is the abyss. Nihilism. Silence.

It’s tempting to use evolution here. “Which religion is fittest? Which grows fastest? Which will win the Struggle for Existence?” But you’re counting your chickens before they’ve hatched. I mean, maybe you should become a nano-engineer and invent and new kind of tiny self-replicating robot that outbreeds every other living thing on earth, and cover the world in a gray-goo of nano-bots, destroying everything but your invention. Then you win. I mean it, congrats, you win everything: you are the fittest.

No, evolution is not the ultimate meaning of life. You cannot determine the ultimate meaning of life, not on the basis of any fact. Life has meaning, but the question of that meaning, in all its nihilistic presuppositions, is unanswerable.

Nihilism. Silence.

4

Without history, the term we means nothing. All philosophizing, all serious thinking and discussion, presupposes a community, and a community is something alive, it is something that acts. To act is to be, dynamically. To act is to be in time. Time is the translation of future into past. It is the contextualization of the future by the past. All stories presuppose a beginning and an end. All purpose presupposes a present state of lack and a future goal. All learning presupposes a past, a history.

We cannot speak without history. This discussion, the discussion of the meaning of life (is that what we’re doing? really? but isn’t that the opposite of nihilism? oh got it) the question of whether life has a meaning, is impossible—as any discussion is—without memory. Don’t forget Socrates, that’s what I’m saying. He started this discussion (or maybe it was Thales or Thoth or Abraham) and really, he’s the arbiter.

Now I’m pretty sure if Socrates were here now he’d point out that the reason the whole discussion has gotten so confused is that we’ve forgotten how it started. When Socrates catches you in a contradiction this is always how it works: (1) he asks you what you think and you tell him you think X, then (2) he leads you through a dialogue showing you how actually your other beliefs imply that X is false, and (3) he reminds you how you started by saying X was true. This forces you to make a choice. Something has to be given up.

Logical confusion, in other words, is the product of inconsistent belief.

When did our confusion start? In other words, when did nihilism become a thing? When did suddenly everything get thrown in doubt?

There’s the theory of evolution, that’s one thing. But really the whole modern tendency to question started with the Enlightenment in the 1700’s, when Voltaire and Hume and others began, very seriously, to doubt traditional religion. European civilization expanded, encountering other belief systems. It delved deeper into ancient history, encountering very old versions of Christianity and philosophy. And scientists began to make big discoveries, leading to not only evolution but modern chemistry and physics, which don’t seem to leave much room for the spirits we used to believe in.

Socrates would probably chuckle at this point. This is exactly how Greek philosophy started. Athens became an empire, bringing in new ideas from everywhere. It’s science and mathematics made many new discoveries. People started questioning the old gods. In fact, that’s the main reason Socrates was condemned to death, for “searching high into the heavens and deep into the earth” and “introducing new gods” and more generally “corrupting the youth.”

As a result of all this doubt, philosophers in ancient Greece began to debate questions of truth, meaning, value, and purpose. Fundamental, unanswerable questions. Parmenides offered the answer that whatever is thought, is true. (Sounds to me, at base, the same intuition as Descartes’ that whatever thinks, exists.) Others simply concluded that truth is whatever people agree on. Modern Pragmatists, incidentally, still hold to this. Back then they were known as “Sophists” and they made their living as lawyers. Lawyers need no higher test of truth than agreement. Their sole purpose is to convince.

But Socrates argued that this was insufficient. A doctor does not seek merely to convince his patient that he is better, but to repair his body. Likewise, a wiseman should not seek merely to convince people that they are right, but to convince them of what is true. In today’s parlance, Socrates argued that truth is objective, not subjective.

Okay Socrates, that’s great. But you know, this conversation you began took an unexpected turn. Your student, Plato, wrote a series of beautiful books that spread throughout the known world, convincing the most educated of your ideas on truth and virtue. It did them a great deal of good. But it must have been lacking something, because within 1000 years after your death, most became convinced that the Bible contained a more compelling notion of both truth and virtue.

True, many of us now blame the rise of Christianity on the spread of ignorance, superstition, and violent intolerance. But I’m not sure this view is justified.

Violence and intolerance? The rise of Christianity saw the decline of slavery and was in fact accompanied by less religious violence and less human sacrifice than before. Ignorance? It occurred during the most literate period of Roman history. Superstition? This also declined along with Paganism. It is not inaccurate to say that as Christianity rose, Rome became measurably less superstitious, ignorant, and violent. The Dark Ages came later, as the wealth of the empire waned, bureaucracy grew bloated, taxes became burdensome, and the barbarians immigrated.

Until we come to terms with history in its uncomfortable, unfashionable reality, we will never come to terms with our own place in it or with the ability, duty, responsibility, and inevitably of making history as we live. And to be mindful of this is the precise opposite of nihilism. This is the meaning of meaning, the meaning of value, if in broad outline only. The question of our place in history is not to be dismissed as mere subjectivity, something undecidable and avoidable—not if we are going to really live, to live with sincere mindfulness.

5

Our meditation may have historical context, then, but this alone doesn’t answer our question of how to ground our values, nor exactly why we’re in this situation. For the thousand years between the collapse of Rome and the Enlightenment, we were just fine with our traditional beliefs. Here and there, you had a philosopher or heretic with some new idea, but for the most part we were content. Now, a significant percentage of the population counts itself as among the doubtful, uncertain, or simply unbelieving.

Presently I am not stating any of this as a value judgment. We’re taking the nihilistic perspective. We’re talking about interesting facts. And it is a very interesting fact that traditional values have a way of sticking around for many centuries, especially with how fickle, ignorant, and careless humans tend to be. There must be an evolutionary explanation here.

Under normal circumstances, in any traditional society (which constitute the vast majority of societies throughout history), those who doubt what everyone else accepts are shunned. They are avoided and forgotten, shamed and ignored. They do not leave a legacy. They do not start a movement. In evolutionary terms, their ideas are unfit. They are selected against and disappear.

So, from an evolutionary standpoint, the fitter option is to conform, not to question.

This is from the point of view of the individual. From the society’s perspective, there are still more compelling reasons to stick to tradition. To pass on everything your culture has learned over the centuries means making sure people don’t forget. They must be encouraged to remember tradition, to revere tradition, to pass on tradition. Not to neglect it, to care for it. If you do not do this, your society will change in unpredictable ways, and more likely than not succumb to time’s entropy. Your society will mutate, decay, perish. It should be no surprise that the longest-lived traditions held certain core beliefs to be sacred.

All I’m saying at this point is that all this is understandable. Hate tradition or love tradition, this is its nature and justification.

But we’re being nihilists now, right? We don’t really care. Future generations can do what they like, the laws of evolution be hanged. Maybe all that matters is that I live my life in a fulfilling way. Maybe I just want to be happy. Maybe I will leave no descendents, and maybe I will be forgotten by future generations. Maybe I have nothing to contribute to the stream of evolution—so what? Evolution’s purposes are not my purposes, and why should they be?

Heck, you don’t have to be a nihilist to think this way. You want a decent job, a spouse, maybe a kid or two. You want good TV and better movies. You want a good novel, a good philosophical debate. Can’t you then say you’ve led a fulfilling life? What is all this about history and the big picture and future generations?

6

Dear future generations, you give me pause. I can’t help but care about you. It must be buried deep in my instincts, this paternal feeling I cannot shake. No surprise. It carries the favor and blessing of the evolutionary command to survive.

My instincts remain. However much I blaspheme the history of humankind, and call it brutal and unforgiving and cruel and ignorant and blind, I carry this legacy of its millions of years in my blood. I’ve always wanted to marry. I’ve always wanted to learn, and to teach.

I’ve always wanted to care. To do something for humanity. Who doesn’t, when their own needs are met, want to reach out and help others? Make a difference? Do something worthy of remembrance, or at least admiration? These are evolutionary instincts, like it or not, to spread one’s ideas. They are as powerful as the sexual instinct to pass down one’s genes, for ideas evolve too. The worship of fame can only spread itself.

From nihilism, what is there to do, but surrender to instinct?

Tradition is a special kind of instinct, passed down by book and preacher rather than gene. Tradition is the result of evolution, too.

But from nihilism, which tradition? There are hundreds of religions and philosophies and ideologies to choose from, new and old, foreign and domestic.

We are in a unique historical position. Like the ancient Romans, we have access to many distinct belief systems and can study as many as we like. This can be an advantage. But it can also be a disadvantage, because who knows how these hitherto unmixed chemicals might react? Well, it’s too late anyway. What hasn’t been mixed over the last few centuries? What horrible explosiveness haven’t we discovered?

And look, we’ve got a problem. What scientifically-educated person can so easily go back to believing that Moses literally parted the Red Sea, that Noah literally fit two of every animal on the ark, that Elijah was literally carried into heaven in a fiery chariot? It’s not so easy to say, “Okay, tradition was healthier, let’s go back to that.” Tradition asks for faith in absurdities.

So let’s come back to science and practical objectivity. Let’s think about this question from a practical point of view. What we desire is to give rise to healthy future generations. (In other words we want evolutionary fitness, even if we don’t like putting it this way.) But what good is this desire if our children do not share it? If they fall into the hedonistic pleasures of the moment, and themselves forget to care about the future? Hasn’t this already happened generation after generation—flappers, beatniks, hippies, etc.? Urban civilization has always been filled with spiritual dangers. Prostitution, crime, greed, hedonism, drugs. This is where our civilization is. These are our dangers, though it seems we keep forgetting it.

Right?

I’m struggling for eloquence right now.

Maybe you and I still aren’t on the same page at all. I’m sure you’re wondering what I’m getting at. People are free, aren’t they? It’s not like we need to start oppressing them and forcing our beliefs on them, do we? Shouldn’t we live and let live, leave others free to pursue what happiness they may, as long as nobody is hurt?

What I’m having trouble explaining is that I really don’t care what the law is. And I really don’t care what you do with what I’m telling you. Go pursue pleasure for it’s own sake. Pollute the environment, exploit the poor, use plastic inorganic goods. Raise your children on horror movies and pornography. Burn your Bible.

But first, before you light that match, maybe let’s take a peek and see what all the fuss is about. Why not? Let’s open it at random, see what we get.

My son, keep your father’s commands

and do not forsake your mother’s teaching.

Bind them upon your heart forever;

fasten them around your neck.

When you walk, they will guide you;

when you awake, they will speak to you.

For these commands are a lamp,

this teaching is a light,

and the corrections of discipline

are the way to life,

keeping you from the immoral woman,

from the smooth tongue of the wayward wife.

Do not lust in your heart after her beauty

or let her captivate you with her eyes,

for the prostitute reduces you to a loaf of bread,

and the adulteress preys upon your very life.

Can a man scoop fire into his lap

without his clothes being burned?

Can a man walk on hot coals

without his feet being scorched?

So is he who sleeps with another man’s wife;

no one who touches her will go unpunished.

Men do not despise a thief if he steals

to satisfy his hunger when he is starving.

Yet if he is caught, he must pay sevenfold,

though it costs him all the wealth of his house.

But a man who commits adultery lacks judgment;

whoever does so destroys himself.

Blows and disgrace are his lot,

and his shame will never be wiped away;

for jealousy arouses a husband’s fury,

and he will show no mercy when he takes revenge.

He will not accept any compensation;

he will refuse the bribe, however great it is. 

 

(Proverbs 4:20-25, NIV translation)

What are you waiting for? Go ahead, light your match.

Look, why don’t we choose another random one, so you can see just how inferior this silly book is to the much wiser hippie policy of sex with whoever and all old wisdom be damned. Honest, I’ll roll some dice and make sure this one is completely random. I’m sure this time it’ll be something ridiculous about fire and brimstone and angels and devils. (Crossing my fingers ...)

Now what I am commanding you today is not too difficult for you or beyond your reach. It is not up in heaven, so that you have to ask, “Who will ascend into heaven to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” Nor is it beyond the sea, so that you have to ask, “Who will cross the sea to get it and proclaim it to us so we may obey it?” No, the word is very near you; it is in your mouth and in your heart so you may obey it.

See, I set before you today life and prosperity, death and destruction. For I command you today to love the Lord your God, to walk in his ways, and to keep his commands, decrees, and laws; then you will live and increase, and the Lord your God will bless you in the land you are entering to possess.

But if your heart turns away and you are not obedient, and if you are drawn away to bow down to other gods and worship them, I declare to you this day that you will certainly be destroyed. You will not live long in the land you are crossing the Jordan to enter and possess.

This day I call heaven and earth as witnesses against you that I have set before you life and death, blessings and curses. Now choose life, so that you and your children may live and that you may love the Lord your God, listen to his voice, and hold fast to him. For the Lord is your life, and he will give you many years in the land he swore to give to your fathers, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.

(Deuteronomy 30:11-19)

All right, so there’s no fire or brimstone, but there is this pernicious myth of the “Holy Land” and this idea that they all must go forth and multiply and force their tradition on their children and their children’s children, isn’t there? How can this be okay?

I understand your doubts. There is, indeed, something very militant and dogmatic about this passage.

But I’m inclined to get Nietzschean here. I’m inclined to say, good. Our society has become decadent and weak and luxurious. Let’s make a stronger culture, one worthy of the land it inhabits, one that can grow and become evolutionarily strong and fit. Why the hell not? We’re nihilists, remember?

I’m also inclined to get historical. Every promise made in the passage above was fulfilled. To the extent that the Jews followed the commandments laid down, they and their children were prosperous and happy. To the extent that they forgot their tradition (see the later books of the Old Testament for the story) and grew decadent and forgetful, they did perish and were scattered across the earth.

The passages I quoted above, in short, helped shape how the world would become. Those societies that remained true to them grew and left legacies spanning centuries. These were not the ravings of madmen or simple bigots (e.g. Mein Kampf) but very sane analyses of what it takes for an individual and a society to be prosperous and successful. And before you object that America is already prosperous and successful remember that over 80% of its population still believes that the Old Testament is the word of God.

7

We’re not going to turn the clock back to 1700. We’ve got new technologies, a different world, a different social context. But we’ve still got some serious problems, problems analogous to those of ancient Rome. We lack challenges. We are growing weaker and more forgetful. When all of this finally falls apart, we will likely be too weak to survive for long in the coming dark ages. But there was hope for the Romans, and there is hope for us.

What hope? A hope for my personal legacy. A hope for your personal legacy. We’ve seen that the world has unity. Start with Darwin’s theory, and reason brings you to the Old Testament. Start with nihilism, and in the silence purpose and God appear. You may call this revelation if you wish, or not.

Evolutionary success is the problem solved by every traditional society so far. Nietzsche said it was Will to Power that created new religions. I say it is that hand of God we call natural selection. There is no reasoning values. This is nihilism. But out of the nothingness of nihilism springs vibrant life full of passion, will, and power; this happens according to instinct, according to struggle, and trial and test.

Modern utilitarianism—that we must strive for the most comfort for the many, that life is about suppressing suffering and violence forever—this is a weak doctrine and a fragile idol. Rather, life must embrace risk. To love is to risk the loss of what you love. To grow is to struggle, to give is to defend, to honor is to fight for. The worship of pleasure and comfort is the precise danger warned of in the Bible, and it is the reason that the Bible is the holy book of most civilized cultures: precisely because it warns against the dangers of civilization.

I believe that the message of the Bible, and the message of science, converge. Disbelieve if you wish, but as a believer I must simply say: this is true. The meaning of life is to live thus virtuously, mindful of your legacy. To do so brings prosperity for future generations and personal fulfillment.

It’s all right to balk. This is my meditation, not yours. Be warned, however, that you must eventually come to a decision on what is true, or perish. “But absolute truth is impossible.” Is that an absolute truth? The prohibition of truth destroys itself. The prohibition of value as “subjectivity,” the flight to pure objectivity, equally destroys itself. For any prohibition of value is itself a value. And any life not according to value is a life arbitrary and listless. Relativism is self-deceiving nihilism. But honest nihilism is self-annihilating, leaving nothing but virtuous honesty and honest virtue.

(This was in part inspired by this post and subsequent comments.)

The Illogicality of Physicalism

Modern philosophers and scientists like to tell us that consciousness is an illusion. Everything is really just made from physical particles, they say. There is no such thing as mind or soul.

This has become a sort of consensus in academia. It's ruining philosophy, because anyone who suggests otherwise--that values, spirit, truth, beauty, or goodness are worth discussing--is marginalized. Leave it to the neuroscientists, we're told.

I've recently posted an article on Sydney Trads with the logic behind my view that this is a bunch of bologna:

The Illogicality of Physicalism – A Response to Cocks