001 Maps of Meaning: 1 Monsters of Our Own Making (TVO)

One of the fundamental theses of this course is that in modern literature, and in literature that isn’t so modern, there’s the notion of a human-created monster. Frankenstein, right, springs to mind. At an adequate time, I mean, Frankenstein was a fantasy, an unconscious fantasy, a dream in actuality about the potential dangers of unbridled technological advancement. Right. Why is that? Well, maybe it’s something like this. This is certainly a notion that Jung would agree with: if we don’t develop a moral sense as conscious and as elaborated as our technological sense, the fact that we’re increasingly capable of becoming increasingly powerful will necessarily do us in. Right. The bigger your weapons, the smarter you better be to control them.

So maybe it is something like this. Maybe, and this is a strict Jungian notion, maybe five hundred years ago when we started to ratchet up the rate at which we were developing our technological expertise, and left our mythological and religious presuppositions and conceptions behind as archaic and perhaps as predicated on superstition, maybe we need to spend as much time updating them and bringing them into the domain of clear consciousness and control as we have spent on developing our technological sense.

If you were a medieval Christian or an archaic religious thinker of any sort, your first presupposition was that the world and the cosmos existed exactly as they appeared, which was with you or at least your village or town or country at the center, and certainly with the earth at the center, and with the cosmos as a shield around the earth, and with the earth itself as the domain of man being a fundamental attribute of the cosmos.

So, this is a quotation from Jung, and it’s one I like a lot because I think it adequately and succinctly describes the distinction between the way that modern people think and the way that people think if they’re still ensconced within a traditional belief form. How totally different did the world appear to medieval man? For him, the earth was eternally fixed, and it rested in the center of the universe, encircled by the course of a sun that solicitously bestowed its warmth.

Despite the fact that pre-empirical people had to deal with death and disease on a scale that I think is completely unknown to us, it doesn’t seem unreasonable to presuppose that there was a certain degree of comfort to be found in a worldview of this sort. Right. Because it appeared, at least to the casual observer, that the cosmos was human-centric, and that the notion that human purpose was in some way associated with cosmic significance seemed to be beyond question, at least in part because there were no theories of reality that would compete with that initial preconception.

Men were all children of God unto the loving care of the Most High, who prepared them for eternal blessedness. All knew exactly what they should do and how they should conduct themselves in order to rise from a corruptible world to an incorruptible and joyous existence. Such a life no longer seems real to us, even in our dreams. Natural science has long ago torn this lovely veil to shreds.

How is it that people could think that way given that it was so wrong and still survive? Given that, in large part, we are necessarily creatures of tradition. How is it that we can sever the ties with the manner in which our ancestors thought and suffer no ill consequences in result? People think automatically, and I think for good reasons, that the march of human thought has been an unbroken progress towards increased rationality, increased power, increased clarity.

But it’s certainly the case that as a consequence of the sacrifice of our religious beliefs and our philosophical beliefs, problems of meaning have become more paramount for the modern person. And then you might ask, well, what exactly are the consequences of that? I think initially the best perspective to take is one that’s historical. As we’ve moved away from a classical, mystical, or mythological worldview, a number of dramatic occurrences have unfolded.

We’ve become much more technologically powerful. Right. The application of a strict empirical model designed to abstract out from everyone’s experience those things that are material and constant have enabled us to produce technological implements of extreme power. Right. Both for good, at least in principle with regards to medical advances, and also for ill, in terms of our ability to control weapons of unbelievable destructive force.

So we’re more powerful. Are we any smarter or any wiser? Well, I think a casual glance at the history of the 20th century would suggest that perhaps we’re not. I don’t think there’s any indication whatsoever, although perhaps things have improved in the last fifteen years, that an additional consequence of our capacity to extract ourselves from our religious modes of thought has been a palpable increase in wisdom or tolerance or compassion, or a palpable increase in our ability to understand explicitly what might constitute the basis for a suitable and stable state.

So you might take, for example, the fact that the 20th century has been unbelievably bloody. Right. Literally hundreds of millions of people killed in conflicts of one form or another, both external, say, in the course of World War II or Vietnam, and internal, in the case of Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union, or any of the vast array of countries who subjected their citizens to terrible internal repression in the name of the maintenance of order.

I mentioned that Alexander Solzhenitsyn estimated that sixty million people died in the Soviet Union between 1919 and 1959 as a consequence of internal repression. His estimates were that perhaps twice that many died during the Cultural Revolution in China. Looking back on the 20th century, one thing seems relatively clear. Right. Although humanity as a whole has ceased, or had ceased at least to engage in large-scale religious conflicts, although they seem to have been making a vicious comeback in the last five years, our ability to live together still seems incredibly compromised by our capacity to engage in ideological conflict.

Right. And it doesn’t seem to me ridiculous to presume that the battles between capitalism and communism, say, or between capitalism, communism and fascism, or even the emergent struggle between fundamentalist Islam and the West, can necessarily be regarded as anything but extensions of our tendency towards religious and mythological conflict, even though, in principle, systems like communism and fascism were not predicated on explicitly religious presuppositions.

Well, it seems to me that a logical conclusion from observations of that sort is that even if you eradicate the traditional trappings of the mythological worldview, which seems to be what’s happened as a consequence of our rise in empirical knowledge, that you don’t eradicate the tendency for people to formulate groups and belief systems around conceptions of ways that you should behave that are, at the very least, religious in structure and action, even if they’re not religious in name.

I mean, I think it’s a very peculiar coincidence, for example, that the Soviet Communists erected at Male Trinity Marx, Lenin, and Stalin as an apparent replacement for the masculine trinity that comprised the essential deities of Orthodox, Russian Orthodox Christianity. Why would these forms re-emerge so spontaneously? And what does it mean that people who regard themselves as essentially modern and empirical in their presuppositions seem to be absolutely susceptible in their fundament to ideological claims?

Well, if you look at the Soviet Union, which I think is a very instructive case because the Soviets, the Russians, were really the last European power to fall prey to the conflict between empiricism and science and religion, and they didn’t really fall prey to that until the mid-1800s because Russia was a relatively closed society, relatively illiterate, maintaining a medieval structure far past the time when other European countries had abandoned that.

In the 1850s, a wave of atheism spread across Russia, in some sense as a wave of enlightenment, but also as a plague, and figures as powerful as Tolstoy remembered in his memoirs the very day that he realized that the empirical discoveries of Western Europeans had eradicated his ability to believe in the Russian Orthodox system. You lose something like that, what happens?

Well, if you believe that mythological thinking is nothing but superstitious empiricism and that it’s been replaced entirely by a more appropriate modern view, then nothing happens. Right. It’s all to your benefit to become enlightened. But if you believe that there’s more to the story than that, and that more traditional ethical and moral systems predicated on mythological presuppositions offer you a map of how to behave and what to think and how to regulate your emotions and what to strive for, none of which can be replaced by a scientific perspective, then the eradication of a system like that leaves a vacuum.

And then the question is: what rushes in to fill a vacuum? Well, if you look at the case of the Soviet Union, it seems quite instructive, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s a thirty-year period where there’s tremendous intellectual clash, say between a materialist, an empirical perspective, and the Russian Orthodox perspective.

The Russian Orthodox perspective loses its attractiveness for the reigning intellectual elite, and the presuppositions of communism, which appear rational by contrast, but which, by all evidence, were not, rush in to fill the gap. And I want to read you something that Nietzsche wrote. It’s perhaps the most famous thing he ever said, although it’s almost entirely taken out of context and misquoted. If not misquoted, at least misunderstood because Nietzsche was one of these strange people who was capable of living 50 or even 100 years into the future.

Although he was, is, generally regarded as an enemy of Christianity and superstition, and was certainly an unbelievably outspoken opponent of Christian traditionalism, he also knew that if you let the old Gods die, the probability that blood would flood the land was virtually 100%.

So let me read you what he wrote with respect to precisely this point: "Have you not heard of that madman who lit a lantern in the bright morning hours, ran to the marketplace and cried incessantly, 'I seek God'? As many of those who do not believe in God were standing around just then, he provoked much laughter. 'Why, did he get lost?' said one. 'Did he lose his way like a child?' said another, 'or is he hiding? Is he afraid of us? Is he going on a voyage or emigrated?' Thus they yelled and laughed.

The madman jumped into their midst and pierced them with his glances. 'Wither is God?' he cried. 'I shall tell you. We have killed him, you and I. All of us are his murderers. But how have we done this? How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchanged this earth from its sun? Wither is it moving now? Wither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continuously backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up or down left?

Are we not straying as though through an infinite nothing? Did we not feel the breath of empty space? Has it not become colder? Is not night and more night coming on all the while? Must not lanterns be lit in the morning? Do we not hear anything yet of the noise of the grave diggers who are burying God? Do we not smell anything yet of God’s decomposition? Gods, too, decompose. God is dead, God remains dead, and we have killed him. How shall we, the murderers of all murderers, comfort ourselves? What was holiest and most powerful of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives.

Who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred game shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we not ourselves become God simply to seem worthy of it?"

Well, as you can tell, that’s a much different notion from the casual 'God is dead' quotation that’s most generally associated with Nietzsche. Well, what is he saying? He’s saying something like this: A system like Christianity, or any system that’s oriented a society for thousands and thousands of years, can’t simply be eradicated by a casual gesture without consequences ensuing in its aftermath.

What consequences? Well, Nietzsche says, "We’ll no longer know up from down." What does he mean by that, metaphorically? Well, up, that’s where you’re headed, right? And down, that’s what you want to stay away from. When you eradicate the most fundamental presuppositions of your system of values, then there is no up and there is no down.

And then where are you precisely? Well, it’s not so easy: it’s not so easy to say, having not necessarily ever been in that position. What is your life like when you don’t know up from down? Is it merely neutral? Is there merely no value left? Or could it possibly be the case that if up and down have both been eradicated, the place that you’re left in is something much more akin to a permanent state of suffering?

Because maybe it’s only the case that the constant capacity to strive for up and being an up that you believe in, the constant striving for up, is actually what makes your life normal to you. And if you lost the sense of up and down, the place that you would end up would be not so much neutral as terrible.

Now if you have any belief system at all, you do this. So let’s say you’re an advocate of left-wing politics. You take a pro-environmental stance or an anti-corporate stance, which is a relatively common thing to do among undergraduates. What do you do when you hold that belief system? You view the world as it lays itself out, and you explain the manner in which it manifests itself in terms of the axioms of that belief system.

You may know that you can do it. Right? You can tell a credible story about why the world is the way it is by adopting, say, an anti-corporate perspective, because there are all sorts of terrible things about the world that are a consequence, say, of corporate maneuvering. You might also say that, and Piaget would say this, that it’s a necessary developmental stage to acquire allegiance to a given belief system. Why? Well, any up is better than none. That might be the first observation.

So even if your belief system is relatively insufficient and easily challenged on intellectual grounds and perhaps not very complete anyways, the fact that it does lay out a moral structure and tells you good from evil and right from wrong, that’s a plus. That’s an advantage. Now its relative intellectual weakness and its incoherence, assuming it is incoherent to some degree, that’s a flaw. But that doesn’t mean that the effort to establish a system like that is worthless; it’s because they felt that the order Hitler promised, repressive as it was, was preferable to the chaos that was likely to ensue in its absence.

What is it about chaos that’s so terrifying? Second, Nietzsche said: adopting a belief system of any sort and imposing coherency on the viewing it through the lens of that explicit system disciplines your mind. So, for example, to live in the absence of any stated beliefs is hardly to live at all. To live in the presence of a narrow-minded and extreme belief system is at least to undergo the rigors, both behavioral and intellectual, of coming to terms with the world from some perspective.

Nietzsche said the reason the modern mind, such as it is, was able to free itself from the past at all was because it had first thoroughly as a consequence of that subordination to then break free of it. In all science of morals so far, one thing was lacking, strange as it may sound: the problem of morality itself. What was lacking was any suspicion that there was something problematic here.

Every society, every functioning individual, every functioning family, every social unit has a moral code. But they differ. So what does that mean exactly? What, it’s complicated, isn’t it? Because the fact of the universality of the code, the fact that the code indicates that a code or a code is necessary. By the same token, the fact that there's a multiplicity of codes seems to suggest that the particulars of a given code aren't necessarily relevant.

And so Nietzsche says, brilliantly I think, we’re faced with a problem: "No life without morality - no absolute morality." What do we do? One of the things Jung observed was that if you look at the structure of stories, we thought first there’s a relationship between stories and moral codes. Well, seems relatively straightforward, doesn’t it? You tell a simple story, like a parable; sometimes they’re complex too, like an Aesop’s fable, say.

What do you extract out from the story? A moral. That person does better or worse, and the moral of the story is if you act in this manner, you will do better or worse. Proverbial knowledge. We all tell stories. They have identifiable structures. You can tell that because the movie studio in Hollywood can produce a movie, and people all over the world will watch it. People all over the world tell stories to one another. The plot elements seem similar.

Are the morals similar? That’s a more difficult question, right? We know that the details of morality can vary from culture to culture. Is there anything that doesn’t vary from culture to culture? Why would you want to find that? Well, Alexander Solzhenitsyn thought that one of the most important occurrences of the 20th century were the Nuremberg trials.

The Nuremberg trials brought the perpetrators of the Nazi genocide to justice, and it’s easy to be cynical about that, and perhaps you should be cynical about it. Of course, the losers were going to be tried from the perspective of the winners' moral code. But Solzhenitsyn says, well, wait. You know, there's something more to this story, at least there seems to be, in that many of the events that characterized the Nazi atrocities were so awful, outside of intellectual argumentation, because you can provide an intellectual argument for anything.

They were so awful that the proper visceral embodied response of any observer, regardless of specific moral code, should be repugnant. Period. Such that encoded at least initially in international law, genocide is a crime against humanity. Right. No matter what the particulars of your moral code. So goes the logic. You cannot construct a viable moral code that enables genocide. If not a logical impossibility, and I think it is an ethical impossibility.

And then you have to ask yourself, and this is not precisely an intellectual question, does that seem credible to you? Does it seem credible that there are acts that are so terrible that no one, regardless of their stated position, should ever engage in them? And if the answer is yes, then I would say, well, if you haven't moved towards personal acceptance of an ultimate "up," so to speak, you’ve certainly identified at least one "down" that you don’t want to approach.

And that’s the beginnings of the establishment of some notion of absolute moral authority. So what if we said, hypothetically, something like this: let’s say that morality isn't a philosophy. It’s not something explicit; it’s something implicit. How does it evolve? Well, emotional creatures produce it. You don’t have to produce it in isolation. If you weren't a social animal—if you lived a solitary and nocturnal existence by yourself—there's no need for morality because you don’t have to regulate your behavior with regards to your peers. But you’re social animals, so you’re stuck with everybody else.

But everybody else could be conceived as a grand average. Right? How would you act towards the average person? I would say that very, very stable moral systems tell you exactly that, and they say things like: do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Right? Basic principle of reciprocity. It's who knows is distributed sanity. You don’t have to be that sane as long as you're hanging around other people.

Because as soon as you do something that’s deviant, they're going to raise an eyebrow at you, and then you think, oh well, not that. And as soon as you do something good, then they're going to pay more attention and smile at you. So all of the information about how to regulate yourself is out there in the world, right, the averaged person. How many people do you interact with in a week? 300, say? Maybe it’s not that many, 100. How about in a year? Thousand, 2000, 5000, 10,000. What are they all telling you?

Well, the message is similar across people. How similar? Don’t know exactly how similar, but that’s what stories tell you: how similar.