Metarevolutionary Manifesto: Serialized (Part 9 of 50)

[This is Part 9 of a series of posts which serialize my book, A Metarevolutionary Manifesto. Read Part 8 here.]

This brings us to a challenge. Our metarevolution has no particular deity, nor desire to create a new one. We need something else which fits our uniquely metamodern era. In that sense, neither traditional religion nor antireligion are the answers. What we need is the Good, not God. But we also need to make the case for the Good to a largely unreceptive (or even hostile) crowd. How can the Good re-enter a land flattened and annihilated by Power? There is a way forward, and it starts with challenging basic assumptions built into present-day worldviews. We have already begun to do this in discussing Value and meaning. Later on, we will explore Power and Freedom, for the important reason that these ideas (albeit in a distorted form) are the central, foundational ideas in nihilism. If optimists can reach nihilists at that level, then we have a chance at resolving our meaning crisis and profoundly changing the overall state of our metacrisis.

As suggested above, the Good must now take up its proper place—not as a new God, but what so many past gods have partially represented.

Iris Murdoch: “This ‘Good’ is not the old God in disguise, but rather what the old God symbolized.”

Religious societies have traditionally been obedient to God, which is to say their worldviews reinforced the symbol of God as transcendent perfection, or pure love, beauty, and light. And by placing these values or ideals within the God symbol (or split between the Holy Trinity), people’s will, although free, is directed by seeming necessity towards it. All centers of actions, such as human souls, have the properties of perception and appetite (which respectively involve the discrimination of difference, and hierarchical arrangement of values as conditioned by attention). Obedience, properly understood, converges with absolute freedom, because both require the progressive illumination of one’s essential self. Optimism is obedience to the natural law implied by the Good; nihilism is obedience to Power.

Now we can see the role of the Good in a world that has experienced the collapse of meaning attached to the death of the Christian God (who was resurrected as the ultra-narcissistic Übermensch). Our meaning crisis stems from our hiding, repressing, or otherwise dismissing religion—which is the human aspiration to love the sacred. The Good is the only non-nihilistic object of love—to which we are obedient, and thereby ascend to freedom.

Crucial to what follows in this book, our relationship to the Good is not obedience or necessity in any pejorative sense of limiting freedom. Rather, we are identifying the Good as something beautiful enough to spontaneously, freely pay attention to, because we can think of no better way to live. Value is real and we are morally obligated to actualize it. Perfect participation in the actualization of perfection is the true freedom, which is why it can be understood as absolute obedience to what is most absolute. 

Further, our continual practice of attention is what constitutes a great deal of our conscious, self-determined choices, which is often termed “free will”. Personhood is co-created in actuality through our discovery of ourselves in possibility. A worldview (and world composed of unique centers of action forming a unity-in-multiplicity) which directs attention to the Good is therefore necessary for true freedom. Any distraction is a step towards nihilism. This recovery of freedom, meaning, and the Good as first principle of everything will be handled in the second half of this book as a necessary component of transformation, which is the basic movement into or out of a meaning crisis. 

Remember that we can’t shut off our desire (the appetite of souls), but we are free to direct our attention, and our attention (or perception) changes our desires. We are most free when we most fully become ourselves, and we become our whole selves by giving our attention to the Good, and coming to be an image of its perfected freedom, love, beauty, and wisdom. 

Obedience to the Good is the minimization of inferior mimetic idols. Loving the Good is freedom, because its magnetism draws actuality towards perfection. Freedom is not a moment, not an isolated choice—it is a practice that involves ongoing attention and love. 

Iris Murdoch: “If we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over. This does not imply that we are not free, certainly not. But it implies that the exercise of our freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time and not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments… What happens in between such choices is indeed what is crucial. I would like on the whole to use the word ‘attention’ as a good word and use some more general term like ‘looking’ as the neutral word… Will cannot run very far ahead of knowledge, and attention is our daily bread.”

Thus, our metacrisis (and meaning crisis especially) is determined in large part by a deficit of attention to the Good, which is simultaneously the cause of our diminishing freedom—because both meaning and freedom are ontological principles informed by the sovereign Good. Attention to the Good and the moral actions we take in necessity of its beauty are requisite conditions for a free, meaningful, and loving society. The zombie apocalypse, we’ve seen, is the mythological expression of disconnection from the Good—of worldview vacancy, antireligion, mimetic crises, and therefore “antimorality”. 

Paul Tillich: “An antimoral act is not the transgression of one or several precisely circumscribed commands, but an act that contradicts the self-realization of the person as a person and drives towards disintegration.”

Zombies are former (and possibly future) people. They are undead rather than alive, strictly speaking, because they are the end point of moral abdication. They were recipients of natural law’s ethical demand, and totally neglected it—starved it to death. Thus, there is a transformation that bridges Man and Zombie, and it is an expression of value-in-action; which is to say that everything actual is an energy transformation expressing the imagination (representation) of the absolute Good. The Good, or the possibility of perfected value, is the most fundamental and basic feature of reality; becoming human is therefore realization and personalization—the immanent and relative embodiment of something absolute—just as becoming a zombie is derealization and depersonalization. Humanness and zombieness span a spectrum of moral action—one approaching perfect love and the other approaching love’s entombment.

A good society must have a philosophy of goodness (which involves value-ontology rather than power-ontology). And we must understand that philosophy contains the dual movement out of the cave and the return to it; the leap from Flatland to Spaceland and back to Flatland; “up the mountain” and “down to the city”. 

Pema Chödrön: “Spiritual awakening is frequently described as a journey to the top of a mountain. We leave our attachments and our worldliness behind and slowly make our way to the top. At the peak we have transcended all pain. The only problem with this metaphor is that we leave all others behind. Their suffering continues, unrelieved by our personal escape. On the journey of the warrior-bodhisattva, the path goes down, not up, as if the mountain pointed toward the earth instead of the sky. Instead of transcending the suffering of all creatures, we move toward turbulence and doubt however we can.” 

Up the mountain means spiritual development, meditation, contemplation, imagination, and metaphysical theorizing. Down to the city means returning from those heights (or returning to the cave in Plato’s myth); it means integrating the sacred gifts of absolute possibility into a contextually appropriate actuality. And this “city” is a metaphor for the possibility of rational (reasonable) order. This means that Reason, as the intelligible aspect of the Good, is the supreme governing principle. The philosopher-king (and Socrates especially) is Plato’s symbol for this connection.

D.C. Schindler: “The transcendence of goodness demands both the movement out of the cave and the return to it… To put it another way, to reach the Good as absolute requires both an ascent to it and a descent from it… Plato means to present Socrates himself as the effective image of the Good.”

The Republic, then, is about how any complex system (including human minds and human cities) can and should be ordered around the union of Reason and Justice, which respectively name the actions which discover and distribute the Good.

Alexandre Koyré: “The human soul, as we well know, is a counterpart, or an exact image of, the city.”

Mark Haeffner: “Man [is] the microcosm, the lesser world, with inner heavens within his psychic constitution.”

Alexandre Koyré: “[As such,] justice consists specifically of order, harmony, the natural hierarchy, and the division of labor founded on it which rules, organizes, and unites the whole city… The reign of justice in the soul consists, then, of hierarchic order and the subordination of its parts one to the other, a subordination that assures the harmony and perfection of the whole… That is why it is also the soul’s health; not only in the figurative sense in which we speak of moral health but also in the strictest and most literal sense of the word. Conversely, injustice, which consists of the disorder and perversion of the natural hierarchy, is the soul’s malady.”

Walt Whitman: “Nothing out of its place is good, nothing in its place is bad.”

Alexandre Koyré: “[So] the perfect city is the one in which, in the State, as in man, Reason governs, and through it the Good, which it contemplates.”

D.C. Schindler: “[And because] the city is made, as Plato puts it, ‘from the beginning by Reason’…the most direct enemies of this city would be the enemies of Reason. The philosopher’s task would be to defend the life of Reason against whatever forces threaten it.”

Alexandre Koyré: “[The philosophers], then, having seen the Good itself…will in turn use it as a model in ruling the city, individuals, and themselves for the rest of their lives… And we have automatically, as it were, brought about the order of perfection and justice in the structure of our city, where by that very fact a just hierarchy reigns, founded on the nature of things.”

Through the Good, and the true optimism which we have said is belief in its sovereignty as absolute first principle, we may free ourselves from the tyranny of meaninglessness. Even Love and Freedom do not, and can not, hold the same status as the Good—both are hierarchically dependent on value per se (or the absolute possibility of perfection). For example, we can apply love harmfully, or at the wrong time, and we can apply freedom in a way which diminishes freedom. True love and freedom are, then, contingent on the high and sovereign ontological status of (and attention to) the Good. Goodness, we contend, is a necessity worthy of our devotion, and our present meaning crisis has to do with a breakdown in the “small piecemeal business” of freedom. We have essentialized freedom as the moment of action, rather than the continual attention and obedience to the object of love which informs action. The Good is the perfect love-object, and, at the same time, the love-object which perfects everything in its light.

Iris Murdoch: “It is real, it is out there, but very distant. It gives light and energy and enables us to know truth. In its light we see the things of the world in their true relationships. Looking at it itself is supremely difficult and is unlike looking at the things in its light. It is a different kind of thing from what it illuminates.”

Devoted attention to goodness makes value more visible; it informs the moral action which we assert is the co-creation of souls, the completion of personhood, and the progressive perfection of everything. That is, what we are obedient to transforms us as centers of action.

This is why, in Plato’s myth, freedom involves both the escape from and return to the cave. Freedom begins when we step out of the cave and see things as they truly are in the “sunlight” of the Good, but is not completed or perfected unless it is shared with the entire world, which means going down to the cave once more. 

And if our metacrisis is defined, in part, by an absence of either God or Good as a discoverable, objective, absolute possibility (what is found outside the cave), then our metarevolution can’t succeed without the illuminating quality of at least one of these; nor can it succeed without the philosophers who “go down”, or return to the cave. 

D.C. Schindler: “When [Plato’s] Socrates…says that remaining above and beyond the cave and enjoying the Forms is deficient, we cannot help but be surprised… The vision of the Forms, which were previously the apparent goal, is suddenly transformed into a penultimate stage in the soul’s development; the real end or the real good pursued, it turns out, lies even beyond the Forms—and this ‘beyond the Forms’ turns out to lie, quite surprisingly, back in the cave. What could this mean philosophically?… Our thesis is that the sovereignty of the Good makes the ‘return’ to images not a fall from a better place but a movement of internal completion… We see once again that the twofold nature of the good requires both the ascent and the descent… And if this ‘going down’ is a result of the absoluteness of the good, then the philosopher who knowingly goes down (the convergence of form and content), becomes an immediate presentation of goodness itself. Socrates simultaneously explains and enacts a meaning; he is the embodiment of the truth he communicates. In this respect, then, he represents a real image of the Good… His return is, so to speak, the entry of the infinite into the finite, the insertion of the ‘beyond’ into the ‘here and now’… Socrates not only transcends the allegory, he also breaks into it ‘from above’ and becomes present within it. The simultaneity of being ‘above’ and ‘in’ is a reflection of the twofold nature of the Good… This, in Plato’s eyes, is the very movement of philosophy.”

This dual movement of philosophy is what allows our mimetic desire to be shaped by something absolute. We may choose imitatio christi or imitatio bonum; the superseding challenge to either is the individualistic, egoistic, antireligious worldview which says that imitation, or unoriginality, is the chief sin next to physical violence and the moral “coercion” that is believed to accompany any claim that there is a real absolute. If mimesis only happens within the cave, then we never move beyond the cave, and thus we fail to become ourselves. 

Wolfgang Palaver: “One of the difficulties facing the mimetic theory in contemporary society lies in the…rejection of imitation. We live in a world in which imitation is frowned upon, because most human beings strive to be unique and original. Any person caught imitating or following the herd almost automatically attracts our complete scorn. It is thus certainly no surprise why most reactions to Girard’s mimetic theory have been negative, for it attempts to argue that all human beings are determined by imitation—a scandalous claim in our world that so highly praises originality… Girard postulates that human desire is not based on the spontaneity of the subject’s desire, but rather the desires that surround the subject. He argues that humans do not themselves know what to desire; as a result, they imitate the desires of others… Girard’s emphasis on imitation must not be understood in the superficial sense of the term, however. His theory is not an anthropological caricature of human beings, portraying them as a merely imitative species, but rather a description of the fundamental—if not extreme—openness of humans to others. The mimetic theory describes man as a social being that is dependent on relations to others. No human being, in other words, is intrinsically complete.”

A metamodern and metarevolutionary worldview, then, must be a response to the mimetic crisis which is so closely related to our meaning crisis and loss of soul. We can, to some degree, direct our imitative (appetitive) attention, but we can’t shut that drive off completely. This is why we need symbols, myths, and heroes as a complementary piece of our philosophical movement out of and back into the cave. The developmental individuation of heroes in the mythic domain influences real revolutionaries; and real revolutionaries drive the evolution of new myths and new heroes. The two domains create each other like Escher’s depiction of two hands, one drawing the other. 

Jordan Peterson: “Heroic behavior compels imitation—a hero, by definition, serves as a model for emulation. The behavior of the culture-bearer, the archetypal hero, constitutes embodiment of an elaborate procedural code. This code is the end result of an evolutionary process, consisting of the establishment of creative behaviors, in the course of heroic endeavor, their subsequent communication in imitation and its abstract forms, and their integration, over time, into a consistent pattern of behavior.”

Anthony Stevens: “The hero’s biological antecedents are very ancient indeed. The responsibility assumed by the hero to seek a priceless item, find the Holy Grail, kill the monster, rescue the captive damsel, realize special powers, are all mythic elaborations of biologically essential patterns of behavior—the quest for food, for territory, for status, for a mate. In practically every fundamental, the hazards encountered by the hero in folk tales and myths have been experienced by animals for the last three hundred million years. It is little wonder, therefore, that the hero continues to exercise a powerful symbolic influence in our inner and outer lives… Heroes are the products of archetypal propensities and historical events… Legendary achievements are attributed to them, which, through repetition from generation to generation, become inflated to suprahuman dimensions.”

J.E. Cirlot: “These myths enshrined the moral principles, the natural laws, the great contrasts and the transformations which determine the course of cosmic and human life.”

Jordan Peterson: “Mythic drama, which plays out the exploits of exceptional individuals, appears devoted toward explication of a generally applicable pattern of adaptation. This archetypal model serves to aid in the generation of all situation-specific individual behaviors. Myth evolves toward declarable description of a procedural schema capable of underlying construction of all complex culturally determined hierarchies of specific behavior. This schematic pattern matches the innate, instinctual, neuropsychologically predicated individual potential for creative exploratory behavior—indeed, has been constructed in the course of historical observation of that potential in action. The expression of this potential throughout history provides for the creation of specific environmentally appropriate social contexts, procedural and episodic, which promote development of the innate capacities of the individual, protect from danger, offer hope, and inhibit existential fear.”

Holding a worldview in which the Good has a sovereign ontological place is itself an act of hope, morality, and true optimism in the time of zombie apocalypse. It means, to some extent, denouncing the purely-immanent man-god or Übermensch within us, the purely-transcendent God beyond us, and understanding that the Good has both an immanent and transcendent dimension between which we must mediate. It is our hypothesis that our metacrisis will be a prolonged and unmitigated catastrophe without new worldviews which emerge from a collective shift of attention towards the Good as the absolute first principle of everything possible and actual. Reality is composed of the Good, which most directly makes itself known through Value, Action, and the love between them.

Worldviews play a crucial role in the creation, maintenance, and transformation of our world, just as the world reciprocally shapes our worldviews. We can disagree on the details, but not whether we need these complexes of ideas, values, and practices. The doctrine of antireligion, at first glance, can seem to exemplify love and freedom by not claiming any hierarchy of values which could be unilaterally imposed on the individual. But, as we’ve seen, the absence of either God or Good as potential objects of attention (or allowing imbalance or total separation between their immanent and transcendent components), or as sources of meaning and transformative, self-transcending experiences, means that we have committed ourselves to cowering in a dark cave—quite possibly from zombies. 

Lack of attention to the Good means not being able to see clearly what is most important—and that leaves us unable to build worldviews which orient us towards (and aid us in) becoming more perfect versions of ourselves. Really, it is only through our attention (and obedience) to the Good that we can overcome our meaning crisis and metacrisis in general. And, as such, our metarevolution is the beginning of a world centered around the Good instead of God, guns, or gold.

This concludes our entry into understanding our crisis of meaning, which looms large as a very deep crisis-which-generates-crises. It is also an instructive example of a complex crisis requiring an equal or greater complexity of action for its resolution. A metacrisis is a complex system (or metasystem) of crises; a metarevolution is similarly a complex system of revolutions, or a metasystem of heroes (to use mythological language) who might also be called philosophers, revolutionaries, artists, saints, or (surprisingly) politicians. 

Now we must turn the discussion towards complexity in general, and the common patterns of all complex systems. Developing this perspective will allow readers to appreciate the differences between the political, revolutionary, and metarevolutionary.

Only the latter meets a metacrisis eye-to-eye, at a level of complexity capable of transforming our actuality into an increasingly-perfect image of the Good.