2016/12/31: A New Years Letter to the World
Apologies for my prolonged absence. I've been dealing over the last few weeks with my somewhat shaky current health. It seems probable that I can use arrest if I had the opportunity, and I knew how I should probably be having a rest right now. But be that as it may, I have prepared this letter presumptuously to the world, or at least to that corner of it with which I can communicate here at the dawn of the new year in these perilous times.
Although I usually speak extemporaneously, that takes a level of capacity that I cannot quite currently manifest, so I'm going to read instead. It's also a careful argument. I hope, and it required the editing for which only the written word can suffice.
Dear World,
On January sixteenth, I'm going to talk with Sam Harris on his podcast, Waking Up with Sam Harris. Dr. Harris is one of the so-called new atheists, of which there are four, like the other three: Christopher Hitchens, Dan Dennett, and Richard Dawkins, who by the way, I always wanted particularly to debate. Dr. Harris is a smart guy, and I'm certainly not complaining that I will encounter him instead of Dawkins.
So I'm preparing my arguments carefully, although I have been doing so for years. The specific ideas I'm going to share with you today were obsessing me from the moment I woke up somewhat fitfully this morning. So I dictated them to my son and then edited them with his help.
The central problem of human beings isn't religion, as the new atheists insist; it's tribalism. We know this in part because chimps, our closest biological cousins, go to war, and they're not religious, although they are tribal. Tribalism also has a central problem, and it's not competition. Despite the tendency of competition to produce at least temporary early winners and losers, the problem of tribalism is cooperation.
Because cooperation is what allows us to exist, a bounded group, by definition, is a collective cooperatively aiming at something. It can't be aimed at nothing, because nothing cannot unite; it only divides. Thus, attacks on collective purpose, because of its tendency to produce tribalism, merely divide. The politics of identity, which emerged when the central purpose is criticized destructively, inevitably produce the situation described in the story of the Tower of Babel.
Everyone fragments into primitive tribes and speaks their own mutually incomprehensible language. One alternative to fragmentation is, of course, union under a banner, a collective ideal, cause, or purpose. The problem with uniting under a banner, as the postmodernists who push identity politics rightly point out, is that to value something means simultaneously to devalue other things. And thus, to value is an exclusionary process.
But the alternative is valuelessness, which is equivalent to nihilism. Nihilism does not produce freedom from exclusion; it just makes everyone excluded, and that's an intolerable state—directionless, uncertain, chaotic, and angst-ridden. When such uncertainty reaches a critical level, the counter-response appears first the unconscious and then the collectively expressed demand for a leader possessed by the spirit of totalitarian certainty who promises, above all, to restore order.
The society without a unifying principle oscillates on a wire between nihilism and totalitarianism. Human beings have been wrestling with this problem since the beginning of civilization. In our capacity to form large groups, for all its advantages, it also started to pose a new threat—that of the hyper-domination of the state. Collective purpose, but without the state, there's just fragmentation into smaller groups.
The group itself cannot be done away with, because for better or worse, human beings are social animals, not loners like sharks or tigers. We're team players. But being on one team means not being on others. This means that any given team sidelines, marginalizes, and alienates those who cannot play their game, as well as conflicting with other teams.
In the West, starting in the Middle East thousands of years ago, a new idea began to emerge—evolved is not too strong a word—in the collective imagination. You might, following Dawkins, consider this a meme, although this is far too weak a word. This idea, whose development can be traced back through Egypt to Mesopotamia before disappearing into unwritten history, is that of the divine individual.
This eons-old work of the imagination is a dramatic presentation of an emergent idea, which is the solution to how to organize social being without falling prey to nihilistic divisiveness or deceitful totalitarian certainty. The group must unite, but under the banner of the individual. The individual is the source of the new wisdom that updates the antiquated nihilistic or totalitarian tests and glory of the past—for better or for worse.
That idea reaches its apogee in Christianity. The divine individual is masculine because the feminine is not individual. The divine feminine is instead mother and child. However, it is a hallmark of Christian supposition that the redemption of both men and women comes through the masculine, and that's because the masculine is the individual.
The central realization expressed dramatically and symbolically is that the subordination of the group to the ideal of the divine individual is the answer to the paradox of nihilism and totalitarianism. The divine individual is the man that every man admires and a man who all women want their men to be. The divine individual is the ideal from which deviations are punished by the group with contempt and disgrace, and finality to which is rewarded by the group with attention and honor.
The divine individual is not the winner of any individual game, but the player who plays fairly and is therefore continually invited to play. The divine individual is the builder, maintainer, and expander of the state. He who boldly goes where no man has gone before, and someone who eternally watches over the windows and the children. His power of direct and honest communication is that which identifies, discusses, and then resolves the continuum of urgent problems of human existence.
It is for this reason that he is regarded as the savior of the world. The primary image for women is not the divine individual because of the heavy burden they bear for reproduction. It is instead the divine mother and child. This is not to say that man is the divine individual and woman is not, although such confusion is understandable given the complexity of the problem.
Man, like women, has the divine mother and child as an element of their personality. In man, however, it's in the background, so to speak, as the divine individuals in the background of the psyche. For women, men, by necessity, play less primary roles in the care of children. This frees them to act as individuals in a manner that up to now has been nearly impossible for women.
Identification with these images is belief in the belief. It is not the statement of agreement with a set of facts, but the willingness to act something out, to become something, to stake your life on something. For men and women alike, this means voluntary adoption of responsibility: responsibility for oneself, family, and state.
It's in that responsibility, and not in rights, that meaning itself resides—the meaning that makes life bearable. Societies that refuse to honor both of these elements therefore doom their inhabitants to purposelessness, unhappiness, sterility, and the aforementioned dangers of nihilistic divisiveness and deceitful, oppressive totalitarian certainty.
The meaning and responsibility is the necessary meaning in life, which can serve as a counterbalance to its terrible fragility and tenuousness. People must unite under the banner not of their group and not of nothingness, but of the individual. This is a brilliant and intrinsically paradoxical solution to the problems of nihilistic nothingness and too rigid group identity alike.
It's the consciousness of the individual which transforms the chaos of potential into habitable cosmos, as the greatest origin stories repeatedly insist. It is that same consciousness which stands up, rebellious and revelatory, to break down the pathological and too rigid order of that cosmos when it has become old, infirm, willfully blind, and corrupt.
It is that consciousness which is the image of God that dwells within every embodied human form. The fact of its existence is the reason that the law of the land itself must be bound by ultimate respect for the individual, regardless of his or her sins and crimes. It is that consciousness—not the objective material substrate of being—which should be regarded as the ultimate reality.
There's no self-evident reason why dead matter should be given ontological primacy over living spirit, although doing so has produced a massive increase in human technological power. Is left that power in the hands of an increasingly disenchanted populace? And that presents a mortal danger. Such power must be wielded by those who have truly and voluntarily accepted the responsibility of being less to prove fatal.
The West has long been the civilized embodiment of the idea of the divine individual who does exactly that. That's what the voluntary lifting of the cross of suffering symbolically represents. For all its faults, which are manifold, the West has therefore served as a shining beacon of hope to those destined to inhabit places too chaotic or too rigid for the human spirit to tolerate.
But the West is in grave danger of losing its way. The negative consequences of this can hardly be overstated. A close reading of 20th-century history indicates, as nothing else can, the horrors that accompany loss of faith in the idea of the individual. It is only the individual, after all, who suffers. The group does not suffer; only those who compose it.
That's the reality of the individual must be regarded as primary of suffering—it's to be regarded seriously. Without such regard, there can be no motivation to reduce suffering, and therefore no respite. Instead, the production of individuals' suffering can and has, and will be again, rationalized, justified for its supposed benefits for the future and the group.
Effective birth control has emerged as one of the consequences of our powerful technological materialism. This has been accompanied by the rise of states sufficiently civilized so that women who inhabit them can walk the streets unaccompanied in safety. We do not yet know how to balance the opportunities that are provided for expanded female individuality with the eternal necessity for a woman to serve as the mother of the divine individual.
Dividing our civilization into polarized ideological camps of female group identity and male group identity is certainly not the answer. We have to be honest, male and female alike, about what we really want as individuals, and talk it out. We don't dispute the truth: The societies that emancipate their women are more productive and peaceful, and that the relationship is causal. Thus, it's not a matter of if, but how.
But such amounts of emancipation place a dual burden on the now more autonomous woman who is required to balance manifesting the potential of our individual spirit with the necessity of desire to bear and rear the next generation of mankind. To live with free women and gain the advantages of their freedom and sophistication, man must therefore bring their shadows—psychic identification with the divine mother and child—into the light without losing their divine individuality in the process.
They must consciously, voluntarily, deliberately, and strategically accept their responsibility for the relationship between autonomous female companionship, support, love, and the responsibility of producing our next generation. This means rejecting, among other things, the misbegotten idea of casual sexual gratification.
Sex is either the impulsive short-term gratification of a domineering biological instinct or the union of two conscious spirits taking responsibility for what they are doing. The former is simply not commensurate with the demands of an advanced civilization, which requires the adoption of responsibility above all for its preservation, maintenance, and expansion.
It is for this reason that the sexualized interactions between young men and women in universities, for example, are increasingly and inevitably falling under the harsh and tyrannical regulation of the state. In the West, we are as well shuttering our great cathedrals—those marvelous monumental embodiments of the idea of the divine individual, which our civilization is based.
This is no mere practical material matter; it's a symbolic and mediation process whose importance cannot be overstated. Without that central idea, we will dissolve and be lost. It is time for each of us to consciously realize what the great symbolic stories of the past insist upon: that we are all sons and daughters of the divine logos, consciousness itself, bearers of its light, and that we must act in accordance with that great central fact.
Lest all hell break loose, this means, above all, to tell the truth and to care for one another, starting at the level of the individual and proceeding from that out to the broader reaches of society itself. The alternative, as the same stories have always insisted, is the more permanent instantiation of the horror that we already saw manifest in multiple forms in the last bloody terrible century.
We need to wake up—individual man and woman alike, now. We need to do it now. Each of us must take the world on our shoulders, insofar as we're capable of that, and adopt individual responsibility for the horrors and suffering its existence entails. In that, we will find the meaning without which life is merely the suffering that breeds first resentment and then the desire for vengeance and destruction.
We need to take responsibility instead of incessantly insisting on our rights. We need to become adults instead of aging children. We need to tell the truth. We need justice and compassion conjoined, not judgment and pity, which crush and devour.
So in the coming year, plan to make yourself a better person. Fix what you can and would fix. Start now! There's something right in front of you, too, demanding repair, calling out to your conscience if you would only attend to it. For your corrective efforts, however primitive they may yet be, start small.
As you master the process, you can safely and competently expand your reach. You will then be able to fix bigger things instead of making them worse in the arrogance of your ignorance. If you do this, there will be less pointless and unnecessary suffering in the world. For all its shortcomings and faults, it will be a better place. Until we can imagine better than that, that's meaning and purpose enough.
Happy New Year, and best wishes to you all!