by William K Hugel
1
This is an attempt to speak from above, below, and beyond politics. It is not for the faint of heart. It is not for the simply “historical person,” that is, anyone not willing to step out of the current that is the flow of history. It is for those who wish to climb out of the stream, to hike up river. It is for those who want perspective, who crave it, for those who know nothing can be known without it. It is for those who know that this perspective must contain the whole of history, and prehistory, back to time immemorial. And, even more so, that it must contain the future.
2
This work is for slow readers. For those “who read over and over again.” Readers who read a single page, a single paragraph, a single sentence, then put the book down (for a day, perhaps more) as the words thunder through them, alter them down to their molecules. It is, to be sure, not for clever, quick readers. It is not for anyone that has read a whole book in one day. Any book that can be read in a day is not worth reading. Or, as is often the case, the reader was unworthy of the book.
3
Uneducated people suffer from spatial provincialism. “If no one in my town has the plague it don’t exist.” Educated people suffer from temporal provincialism. “Whatever science says right now about the plague (and everything else in heaven and on earth) must be true.” Uneducated people are lucky. They are solid, their reasoning well-grounded. They are “all of a piece.” Educated people, on the other hand, are fragile, secretly suspecting that their reasoning may be supported by nothing but thin air. To think outside of their moment in time would be their undoing, their shattering. [1]
4
“Everything is political. All is politics.” This is true. Or rather, it became true once we gave up on thinking about everything else. Everything else, well, it was all just a little too slippery. We wanted something we could grasp hold of, no matter how superficial. Now thinkers (and more so academic thinkers) tread on a surface so thin, they have had to become unbearably light, so as not to plunge through.
5
What!? say you, hot with indignation. It is thinking about politics that will make the world a better place, create universal equity, and “bring the kingdom of heaven down to earth.” This is to presuppose many things. One, that anyone that doesn’t already agree with you will ever listen to you. Another, that we are responsible for the conditions of our existence. The first perhaps already haunts you. The second, you probably don’t understand, not because it is difficult, but because most thinkers have not trained their minds to think about anything but politics and science. This is the magic recipe for our not-falling-through-the-ultra-thin-surface.
6
People complain that universities are becoming vehicles for dogmatic indoctrination. This isn’t true. They always have been: first, for spreading the dogma of the church; now, for spreading the dogma of morally righteous politics. We are simply continuing a hallowed tradition. And how, after all, could we do without it? Dogma provides a lens, limiting life’s dimensions. Too many dimensions would be dizzying. How could one learn, and above all teach, under such conditions? Students would be falling from their desks. Professors plunging from their lecterns.
7
All dogma, religious and ideological (that is to say, all Isms) fractures experience, fractures humanity, fractures life, fractures ourselves. In pieces, we move among fragments.
8
Our greatest failing as a culture is that we are not aware of our épistémè. Even though Foucault (a French thinker with a few brilliant ideas and a deplorable writing style) wrote lots of words about this in the late 60s, at a time when all thinking otherwise went to hell, that is to say, became political. Foucault’s thinking also meandered in a diabolical direction, but not without some saving grace along the way. One act of grace, was his discussion of the épistémè: that is, the (almost completely unconscious) epistemological underpinning of an age: that is, the system of beliefs, of which we are blissfully unaware, that determine, at a given point in time, how we think, what we think about, and what we believe to be true. Not only are we unaware of our épistémè, we are unaware that it is growing, evolving like a living thing. An extraordinary creature lurking beneath the ultra-thin surface we tread so lightly upon. To sense the movement of this monster, is to have perspective. To have perspective, is to feel terror. And hope. Terror and hope are inseparable.
9
A few words about the inexhaustible subject of the evolution of our épistémè. Some time ago Kant (and then Wittgenstein) decided that we can’t, conceptually speaking, know about the things that matter most: that is to say, all those things pertaining to meaning. This was at a time when educated people still paid attention to philosophy, and at a time when there was still something in philosophy worth paying attention to. The reaction of rationally-minded people was swift (rationalism was, of course, already the religion of the Western world). Holy circles were convened, and an edict proclaimed: anything that cannot be clearly conceptualized doesn’t matter. This soon became: anything outside the bounds of logic doesn’t exist. Reason was saved. Science and mathematics retained their preeminence. Positivism was born. Now, we are all born Positivists. Without knowing a thing about how we got here. It is the horns on the beast.
10
When Positivism was born, the search for meaning abruptly came to an end. With the birth of Positivism we created a void inside ourselves. First, we fretted over this void (Modernism) then we filled this void with politics (Postmodernism.) Now, we pretend that the void, well-stuffed, doesn’t bother us. That is, as we stuff ourselves with psychotropic drugs, stuff our ears to all unexpected sounds, and only cry for help from the depths of our nightmares.
11
Of course, I am talking about the educated people. The uneducated don’t need political ideology. They are supported by a religion which, fortunately, they don’t care to understand. And, after all, they still have common sense, which clings closer to life than logic, science, or theology.
12
Both religious and political ideology provide, among other things (such as a sense of self-righteousness, a fixed good and evil, and avenues for judgmentalism and guilt) a ceiling. We all need a ceiling to protect us from the infinite. Jean Genet (probably the most poetic novelist who has ever lived, capable of making even shit sublime) said this about religion. I simply extrapolate. There is little pertaining to the essence of Christianity that cannot be extrapolated to better understand the non-religious Left.
13
From Plato to Neoplatonism to Christianity (via St Augustine) to Scientism and Political Ideology. This has all been a change of form without a change of essence.
14
Plato “created a world we could control.” We’ve been living in this world long enough.
15
The importance of hiking upstream is (among other things) that if one wants to leap into the future (as another writer has already said) one can’t do it from a standstill. It requires a running start.
16
The future is women. This isn’t a political statement, it’s a metaphysical one.
17
Activists think they can change the world, rather than that the world is changing them. They think this because they are humanists without knowing that humanism (the wildly exaggerated estimation of the human intellect and its efficacy) started with Christianity (via Erasmus) as he declared the human intellect as great as anything in heaven.
18
Plato invented universals to make life intelligible. The unasked question of astonishing importance: why do we need magic thinking to make life intelligible, to make it mathematical, to make it scientific. This is the ground zero from which we wallow or leap.
19
There is little Nietzsche said about Christianity that can’t be extrapolated to better understand the secular Left.
20
Carl G. Jung was fascinated with, and wrote a very long book about, the central formula of alchemy. This formula, as postulated by Maria Prophetissa, goes as follows: one becomes two, two becomes three, three becomes four, which is the original one. To summarize Jung’s thoughts very briefly: one as original unity (as supported by nearly all world religions and mythologies); two as a division into opposites; three, this division giving birth to reason; four, one revisited, reunification. He believed we were beginning to enter the four. That is to say, something beyond that which can be conceptualized. Something pre-pre-Socratic. This gives me hope.
21
A very good friend of this writer believes that the four may be “the reanimation of the world,” and that the metaevolution described above may be thought of as “the universe wanting to be conscious of itself.” He has not written these things down. How many people have had brilliant thoughts and not written them down?
22
Activism is the opposite of contemplation. The West (so different from the East) has derided contemplation since at least the end of the Middle Ages. Contemplation is not useful. Activism has the veneer of usefulness. This shallow, Western utilitarian thinking eventually infected the arts. All art must now be political.
23
The uneducated are right to distrust experts, or specialists. Specialization requires the narrowing of perspective, a déformation professionnelle. The greater the expertise, the narrower the view, and the farther one is from seeing “the whole of life.” Many brilliant people have pointed out this problem of specialization. The educated don’t know this, the uneducated don’t need to know it.
24
Science and mathematics are very useful, and excellent for making predictions, preventing diseases etc. They are so useful that people have come to believe that they must have an ontological value, that is, that they can tell us what things are. Chaldeans (the people of Chaldea, an ancient kingdom in Mesopotamia) around 3000 BC created an early system of astronomy in which planets were gods and stars demigods. They were able to use this mathematical model to predict astrological events with tremendous accuracy.
25
Political-mindedness breeds paranoia. Most of us have just enough intuition to sense that there are larger, unseen forces at work. But as our etiology is limited to scientific and political causes, the Right leap to absurd communist/satanic conspiracies and plots, the Left to absurd capitalist/consumerist (and of course consumerism is the devil) conspiracies and plots. This leaping, left and right, is done in approximately equal measure. In this sense, we are all much more the same than we think.
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Notes
[1] This is an elaboration of an idea originally expressed by A.N. Whitehead