A Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 8 of 50)

[This is Part 8 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 7 here.]

It is inescapable, then, that discussion of the meaning crisis within our metacrisis would lead to Value itself and the possibility of perfection. The Good is the first principle of everything; its displacement from our attention, its subversion into “idolatry” (as in nihilistic ontologies which place Power prior to Value, and thus flatten Value into Power’s relative expression), or its death when it is mythologically embodied in some specific god, is what in the deepest sense drives actuality away from the possibility of perfection and towards the total collapse of meaning.

Somehow, we need a unity (or tensegrity) of opposites: To grasp the Good in our worldviews in a way that is not overly relativistic or absolutistic, or, similarly, individualistic or collectivist. To mediate between the tendencies towards these opposing extremes, and to redirect the energies of paradox from destruction towards creation, is to understand the new world that can be shaped by metamodern worldviews. 

The Good, rediscovered in our metamodern era, is not static; it is not purely absolute or entirely transcendent, and does not relate to our world as a “second” world. We are active participants in its actualization and transformation. It is also not entirely immanent—thus it is not entirely relative or personal, and so it requires discovery of something absolute. Following this general structure of a generative unity of opposites, we could say, in a sentence, that the Good is both immanent and transcendent, and that the goal of our metarevolution is an actual world which is continually transformed by its possibility of perfection. 

Iris Murdoch: “The Forms are magnetic, not just passively stared at, they enliven the energy of Eros in the soul and participate in the world, they are both transcendent and immanent.”

The hope of this book is nothing else but to take on our metacrisis with a metarevolution, and to demonstrate metarevolutionary principles which will be applicable to any future metacrisis. In the second half, when we shift from crisis to action, metacrisis to metarevolution, it will become clear why we need the Good as a metaphysical “energy source”—as a light to guide our actions. The various aspects of our metacrisis we have yet to explore will challenge us to create a metarevolution based on these principles of endless transformation in the illumination of the Good. Our narratives and myths and symbols must not teach a utopian arrival at absolute Good, nor the banishment of all Evil. They must convey the need for the ongoing rituals which author and revise the Good in its present actuality, and perennially close the door which leads to nihilism or the usurpation of the Good by Power.

Stanley Rosen: “Nihilism, to repeat, is a perennial human danger: it cannot be ‘solved’ without the dissolution of human nature. But one can surely offer suggestions for mitigating the otherwise fatal results of this perennial pestilence. Since the disease is perennial but takes different forms at different historical epochs, protective inoculation must take into account both the permanent structures and the local infections of these structures. Such is the task of philosophical medicine.”

Action will be a main focus in the second half, because it is the endless transformation of value-in-action which can potentially lead into or out of a meaning crisis.

The epoch of metamodernism still includes the two human orientations of nihilism and optimism—we hold the keys to both these doors. This makes it clear that metamodern worldviews need to address urgent and perennial concerns, such as grand (not personal) narratives about the Good and other values. It will not look like early, utopian attempts at an absolutistic Good; nor will it look like the postmodern turn towards an overly relativistic view. Our optimistic pathway includes moral realism and natural law: Value is real in a way that is independent of our judgment of what is valuable; morality is the actualization of this value; and because consciousness allows us to comprehend these facts, we are gifted with a duty to the Good. Anyone who doubts that such a duty could be a gift need only be reminded that the alternative is a state of meaninglessness and lovelessness in a hollowed-out world.

This is why it is so crucial that before we go any further in exploring our metacrisis and metarevolution, we must ask and attempt to answer: What is (or where is) the Good? Being both immanent and transcendent (relative and absolute) means that, although a dogmatically-absolute view of the Good has provided plausible justification for committing some of the worst atrocities in history, the Good undeniably has some shared, absolute, transcendent component. What our zombie apocalypse makes clear mythologically is that rejection of either the relative or absolute aspects of the Good leads inexorably to some form of meaning crisis. 

Our present meaning crisis, fitting in the epochal handoff between postmodernism and metamodernism, is a chasm of detachment from any compelling worldviews, but also an aversion to metaphysics and metanarratives, per se. Postmodernism, largely, is colored by this view: Values can be personally “ranked”, but concepts like the Good, or God, must be discarded because they claim there is an absolute hierarchy. In other words, the postmodern view is that any idea of an absolute is akin to violence—for if there is no absolute Good, what else could a value hierarchy be but the wielding of personal power? 

Keith Ansell-Pearson: “Morality, Nietzsche holds, is a surface phenomenon that requires meta-level interpretation in accordance with a different, superior set of extra-moral values ‘beyond good and evil’… All religions are at bottom systems of cruelty, Nietzsche contends; blood and horror lies at the basis of all ‘good things’.”

If “Good” does not refer to anything real, then the only nonviolent approach to life is a dogmatically relative, egalitarian pluralism: Seemingly a monument to equality in an age of global human community, these views are truly the crypto-nihilistic fuel of our meaning crisis. So, to state our optimistic view yet again in contrast to this postmodern nihilism: Value is pervasive and real (and not an invention or an expression of power); it is intrinsic to our experience of life within a divine milieu or spiritual plenum (both of which may be interpreted naturalistically as the presence of absolute Value in our relative midst); this underlying condition means that the Good can be actualized from a state of possibility; and that it thus carries an ethical demand—that it should and must be actualized. 

Emer de Vattel: “A free action is good or right when it has its justification in the essence and attributes of the being that produces it, that is to say, when a reason or explanation can be given through the essence and attributes of this being as to why his action has had to be so and not otherwise. This recalls what we have said about the match or mismatch of actions with the essence of the nature of man and of things, which creates the foundation of natural law and the source of the laws that compose it.”

Severance from natural law can be recognized by the symptoms of disorientation and depersonalization, just as it can be recognized in the symbolism of the zombie apocalypse. The loss of this moral direction—or, more exactly, the loss of the Good in its absoluteness—is what we call nihilism; it might also be called “antireligion”.

Valentin Turchin: “The credo of antireligion goes as follows: The goals a person sets for himself are his own business, and to meddle in them is unethical—tantamount to physical coercion. The establishment by society of a hierarchy of goals is not to be tolerated, and a socially defined concept of a supreme goal is even less to be tolerated.”

Antireligion is the tyranny of relativism. And it is certainly recognizable in today’s world in practice if not in name. This is why at the outset of the present discussion we said that many people today hold nihilistic worldviews, yet would be quite confused if you confronted them with this assertion. How could an equality-loving, pluralistic person be accused of “nothingism”? Because, at the core of their good intentions, we now know there is an emptiness stemming from the metaphysical denial of the Good. 

Coming into an era of metamodernism, we’ve said we need worldviews which both include and transcend the past. This means creating a new synthesis which includes (in some cases) that which was previously left behind, such as the mythological-symbolic way of seeing/being; or the true and powerful kind of imagination which places us in contact with that Otherworld. Many have left behind religion in its formal sense, but do not succeed in “killing” God—only moving God around to superheroes, themselves, their governments, or even the planet as a semi-benevolent Mother Earth. 

As we saw through a look at our present meaning crisis, we can’t kill the Good, either. We can only replace or displace it—usually with Power, and its corresponding worldview of nihilism (or “Flatlandism”). Sometimes Love or Freedom or other ideas contend for the supreme and sovereign position, but they all implicitly contain notions of Value, and of the Good. Only the Good is sovereign, and is in some important way transcendent to other Forms. 

Iris Murdoch: “Plato knew that Good was not only real but supremely so, a certainty less apparently simple than belief in God. He knew that morality, an orientation between good and evil, was in a unique sense fundamental and ubiquitous in human life… Good is unique, it is ‘above being’, it fosters our sense of reality as the sun fosters life on earth. The virtues, the other moral Forms, are aspects of this central idea, increasingly understood as interconnected parts of it.”

Metamodern worldviews are certainly going to need the Good, because all of the alternatives feed what we’ve termed the zombie apocalypse or meaning crisis. We need something religion-like to counteract the culture of despair which antireligion produces. And the exoteric and esoteric sides of the soul’s spiritual-developmental drive must not be at war—and we will see in the second half of the book how this relates to a new unity of opposites composed of previously warring elements. The religious drive has a tendency of ideological absolutism, and the so-called “occult” or esoteric practices have a tendency of ideological relativism; and neither of these extremes result in stable and thriving societies. 

Antireligion, as dogmatic relativism, can’t accomplish what religion has long accomplished in its function of self-transcendence. But religion has so often failed to cultivate a dynamic balance of relative and absolute (or self-assertiveness and self-transcendence). The high-soaring, Icarus-like spiritual drive must ground itself with a self-immersion deep in the valleys of soul. 

Stanton Marlan: “Of all things connected with the body, the wing has the greatest affinity with the divine. Similar themes are confirmed in art, folklore, classical mythology, sculpture, and poetry. The movement up and out seems to have a universal quality. In the Feast of Icarus, Sam Hazo writes: ‘The poet imitates Icarus. He is inspired to dare impossibility even if this means that he might and possibly will fail in the attempt. His fate is to try to find silence’s tongue, to say what is beyond saying, to mint from the air he breathes an alphabet that captivates like music. His victory, if it comes at all, must of necessity be a victory of the instant, a lyric split second of triumph, quick as a kiss.’ Hazo’s study of Icarus values the necessity of flight—if a soul is to have a vibrant and creative life… Like a moth drawn to a flame, our Icarian souls are in peril when in our aspirations we forget our bodies on Earth and the call to an integrated life. When the link to the Earth is not honored, grounding may emerge unconsciously and harshly.”

An optimistic worldview implies a balance of integration and differentiation, of individual wholeness and planetary wholeness—a tensegrity of opposing forces; transcending of souls toward spirit, and grounding of spirit into souls. The same worldviews which have an integrative, “positive” magnetic pull towards social, planetary wholeness must at the same time have a “negative” magnetic push back towards individual wholeness. We will later return to this idea of wholes-within-wholes and see how to put it into practice.

At this moment, it’s important to understand that our metacrisis is a reflection of the fact that we have created no viable replacement for religious-type self-transcendence, or the antireligious response which leads to quite literal dis-integration of society. The tragedy of antireligion, of course, is that the project of religion carried on as always, except by self-inflated man-gods. This is why it has been said that we need the Good, if not God. These are the kinds of immanent-transcendent beacons of perfection which direct our mimetic desire in a positive direction and put metaphysical distance between the individual and Value—such that the individual does not mistake himself as the originator of Value. Religion, additionally, when viewed as the conscious drive towards perfection, is not one zealous ideology competing with other equally narrow dogmatisms—it is the superindividual accumulation of moral psychotechnologies.

Chris Perez: “When we hear the word ‘technology,’ we think of devices that solve problems. The word is used in cognitive science to describe our mental toolkit. Literacy and numeracy are examples of these tools, known as psychotechnologies… They’re used to achieve insight, self-transcendence, and the cultivation of wisdom.”

John Vervaeke: “Most cultures develop an ecology of psychotechnologies, typically in the form of a religion, for addressing perennial problems. But that set of psychotechnologies has to be fitted into a legitimizing and sustaining worldview. In some sense the psychotechnologies have to be integrated with sacredness. What's of course happening for us is...the historical factors have undermined that possibility for us, undermined the experience of sacredness... Because we do not have a culture within which that project [of meaning] and self-transcendence and cultivation of wisdom, the affordance of higher states of consciousness [is] legitimated or encouraged. So people are forced…to cobble together in a dangerously autodidactic fashion their own personal responses to perennial problems—without traditions, guidance, communities, well-worked out sets of practices... And so that means they are often bereft when they face the perennial problems.”

Religion, in its most general form, is the accumulation of psychotechnologies which the individual may tap into. It is an extension of mind and memory and challenges and failures and successes. The same can be said for the complex of symbols, myths, and rituals which universally accompany the so-called religious drive in humans. Like the contents of symbols and myths, religion is the collective analogue of something personal in morally-attuned animals. Many attempts have been made to fully discover the Good, and those who went on these journeys left notes in the shared medium of religion. 

Following from the indispensable nature of religious-type ecologies of psychotechnologies (which is to say, patterns of moral affordances that exist, adapt, and evolve in a complex environment), we will need to return later to advancing versions of religion (a relationship to the sacred and absolute) which are palatable in a metamodern era. These are the beginnings of a metamodern reconstruction of metaphysics and an ecosystem of coevolving worldviews which support the discovery of meaning and perpetuate the goal of charitable participation in each other’s personhood—i.e. to be guided by love. This would allow us to overcome the self-inflation that accompanies the loss of the Good—a loss which logically implies that we create rather than discover what is moral, ideal, or valuable.

Iris Murdoch: “Kant was especially impressed by the dangers of blind obedience to a person or an institution. But there are…just as many dangers attached to the ambiguous idea of finding the ideal in one’s own bosom.”

The zombie-inhabited Earth has no optimistic worldviews—just the pale, ambulatory remains of the past. It is as life in Plato’s cave, or existence in Flatland. The metamodern era, at the time of writing, is at least partially defined as this experience of, and response to, our meaning crisis—a dark cave where some have falsely concluded that the sun is gone, not worth caring about, or was never real at all.

John Dourley: “They fail to see what Tillich saw so clearly, namely, that when religion is negated as religion its Shadow can return in…political/ideological dress, to wreak an equal or even greater harm on the truncated humanity that turns unconsciously to deity in the secular disguise of ‘quasi-religions’ who then assume the oppressive and ‘demonic elements’ of the religions themselves.”

Ira Progoff: “[And] the great discovery of Freud, which was the starting point for modern depth psychology, was his realization that when thoughts are repressed, they are not destroyed but continue in another form in which they have even greater consequences.”

In other words, our denial of the Good is a repression of what is most valuable, meaningful, and beautiful. This repression leads to an inversion of whatever was submerged. And those contents take shape as an embodied Shadow while hiding in our deepest waters—before ultimately surfacing in symbols, dreams, art, myths, and religion.