I was an Outsider more than thirty years before I became a Christian - having read Colin Wilson's book in 1978. Wilson himself never became a Christian, despite getting very close to it in his first two books (The Outsider of 1956 and Religion and the Rebel the year after).
Why should this be? - why should the inner-motivated Man, who regards himself as set-apart (for good, or more often for ill), perhaps having an unusual destiny, the 'existentialist'... why should such a person fail to recognise that his only satisfactory terminus lies in the truth of Christianity?
I think the reason is partly to do with the Outsider wishing to hold-onto his favourite vices (drink, drugs, promiscuous extra-marital sex and the like) but it is also the fault of Christianity - which has become identified exclusively with specific churches (with, quite often, each one stating that it uniquely holds the keys of salvation).
The Outsider sees Christianity as a choice of churches only. Now some Outsiders - such as GK Chesterton or TS Eliot - do find a home inside one of the established Christian churches (the Roman Catholic church being a favourite in the early 20th century). But they are clearly a minority.
There is insufficient awareness of the possibility of being Christian outside of any specific church. And/ or of becoming a Christian before, or without ever, joining a church.
For instance William Blake is an Outsider hero, and Blake was an absolutely devout and explicit and focused Christian in his Life and all-through his work. And (not 'but') Blake was a non-church Christian who was extremely unconventional/ heterodox/ heretical. Since Blake regarded himself as a solid and inspired and proselytising Christian outwith any church and with an unique set of convictions and practices; so too can any Outsider.
Furthermore, many churches conflate (link-inextricably-together) the possibility of believing in God, Christ and the immanence of God-in-all-things including ourselves (such as The Holy Ghost).
As that great non-church and heterodox Christian Rudolf Steiner said: to disbelieve in God is to be, in a real sense, insane; in other words, it is to disbelieve any possibility of coherence, meaning and purpose - which is to regard all of life as a delusion.
The reality and significance Christ is the only source of hope and ultimate happiness - all other religions are - if true, at their best and by their own account - miserable by comparison with Christianity.
And to deny God within us and the world is to live earthly life in a state of detachment - since we can only observe and never actually participate in reality: we can never know.
For an Outsider everything must, sooner or later, be tested by intuition in its widest and deepest sense; there must be a solid sense of personal conviction and relevance. With a church orientated Christianity, this is applied only to the question of whether a particular church is the one path to truth, reality and salvation.
Clearly, most Outsiders have the intuition that such claims are untrue, and therefore cannot and do not even wish to join a church for which they do not feel any such conviction.
But if existential conviction is the truest test, then it ought to be applied to sub-parts, and not merely to 'the whole package' as put forward by a specific church. Thus, an Outsider may be intuitively sure that there is a God who is creator.
He may additionally be sure that (in some vital sense) Jesus Christ is the Son of God and our saviour and central to our ultimate happiness (even though the exact meaning of the key terms is something he will need to strive to elucidate).
And the Outsider may also realise that his knowledge depends on there being something like the Holy Ghost - a divine spirit inside himself, and everybody else, and every-thing else - which makes possible true understanding and knowledge; and works over time to guide us to a more divine salvation.
Any Outsider who becomes a Christian is highly-likely to be heterodox, or regarded as heretical by many or most church members - but he ought not to be put-off by this: he should still become a Christian, simply because it is true (true in a real sense, albeit a sense that needs working-on).
Without Christianity, the Outsider is doomed to be merely a psychologist - since the most he can say in favour of anything is that it tends to make people happier... or at least to suffer less.
If the Outsider is to be able to use the concept of 'ought' then he needs to be a theist; and if he is to be someone who regards mortal life as important he needs to be Christian; and if he is to regard his own freedom and creativity as important, he needs to believe in the possibility of direct, unmediated contact with the divine.
What the Outsider gets from this kind of direct apprehension of the truth of Christianity; is great assistance in finding, sustaining and growing his true self - and then in discovering and pursuing his destiny.
He may well also become happier, more motivated and more confident in Life - but these are side-effects and never the primary aim.
In sum - the core reason for becoming a Christian is to convert an Outsider from being merely a Psychologist to becoming a real Prophet.
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query the outsider. Sort by date Show all posts
Showing posts sorted by relevance for query the outsider. Sort by date Show all posts
Thursday 15 June 2017
Thursday 5 March 2015
Religion and the Rebel by Colin Wilson (1957) - an Outsider Mormon perspective
*
I have just had a careful re-read of Colin Wilson's follow-up to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel - and found it thoroughly worthwhile and stimulating.
Wilson self-consciously takes up the baton from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918) which is given a fairly extended analysis, supplemented by consideration of some other rather analogous 'big picture' historians such as Toynbee.
Wilson accepts the conviction, dating especially from the early twentieth century, that the West needs 'a new religion'. The perspective of 1957 therefore works on the assumption that Christianity has failed, in its mainstream aspects anyway. Events since have, of course, confirmed this - at least in a broad-brush socio-political sense.
*
In Religion and the Rebel, Wilson gives biographical summaries and analytic interpretations of numerous representative figures from the existentialist tradition - some secular, but mostly Christian. These include mystics such as Boehme, Anglican monastic revivalists such as Farrer, Law and the early JH Newman - and the book culminates with the philosopher AN Whitehead who is regarded as the most important modern figure.
Wilson's other analytic frame is The Outsider - who is regarded as a type of socially-rejecting-social-reject proto-genius that is generated by end-phase civilization in an attempt to reverse the decline and revitalize the civilization. Most of the figures discussed fall into the Outsider category in some way - for instance, Wittgenstein is an Outsider having an Insider philosophy, while AN Whitehead is the opposite.
As often happens in my reading, I found myself broadly agreeing with the diagnosis, but not the prescription. In particular, I feel that 1956-ish was a time, perhaps the last time' when the Western civilization was 'meant' to re-evaluate and re-structure its goals and move into a new phase. This didn't happen, and we instead opted for 'more of the same' - and plunged into the still dominant and fluctuating combination of hedonic consumerist materialism with self-hating and self-destroying Leftism.
*
What of the 'new religion'? How did that idea fare?
I was brought-up on this idea from the work of Bernard Shaw - which is given considerable emphasis in religion and the Rebel - Shaw's choice was Creative Evolution, as outlined in my favourite of his plays Man and Superman, and the later dull, clunky and unperformable Back to Methuselah. This idea was dead-in-the-water, in terms of being a socially-viable and effectively motivating religion, but distracted and stimulated a few people for a while - the philosopher CEM Joad and the mystical nature writer John Stewart Collis (both teenage favourites of mine) for example.
The New Age movement is the most obvious New Religion - but this has proven itself to be merely a semi-effective way of individual coping-with the consumerist materialism of modernity. New Age discourse is conducted in an eclectic, semi-serious tone of ironic detachment ('if it works for you...', take it or leave it) - and the really serious and motivating ideology in New Ageis secular Leftism; radical politics is the only subject that New Agers really get 'passionate' about. So New Age is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
*
From my personal stance as a believer in Mormonism, what always strikes me about these overviews is that from 1830 there was a New Religion of exactly the kind that Colin Wilson hoped-for - that is, something Christian, real and motivating, that was also a fresh start, and which left-behind those aspects of Christian metaphysics and philosophy which seemed to have become ineffectual or counter-productive.
Of course, Mormonism was tiny in the years leading up to 1957, and even now the profoundly original and transformative metaphysical and philosophical aspects of Mormonism are hardly appreciated, even among Mormons - the 'new religion' is seen as (and in general functions as) a way of life, rather than an astonishingly transformative set of ideas.
But Mormonism pretty much has done, and does, what Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler and Colin Wilson wanted from a new religion. On the other hand, Mormonism stands at the furthest pole from the kind of bohemian existentialist life exemplified and practised by Colin Wilson in 1957.
Yet, in principle, there is no reason why there should not be existentialist bohemian intellectuals who regard those who practise Mormonism and who administer the LDS church as being an elite 'priesthood' who are regarded as an authoritative source of guidance.
*
Accepting that not every Man can live the highest path, and that the path of an active Mormon is too strait and narrow ever to become universal, there is scope for a wider form of non-practising Mormonism - which humbly and explicitly accepts itself as a lower calling, but from this situation tries to be supportive of the higher calling, and tries to make the kind of contribution which is difficult for the high status people.
I am thinking of a situation much the same as lay Roman Catholics who accept that they are operating at a lower level than priests, and non-monastic Eastern Orthodox (including priests) who accept that they are operating at a lower level than ascetic monks.
*
In terms of Wilson's terminology, I tend to regard Mormonism is the New Religion he hoped for - and a religion of socially-minded Insiders - because Mormonism has continued to grow and thrive as the West declined. However, it has not had a visible positive impact on Western civilisation in general - its benefits have been mostly restricted to Insiders.
But there is, I believe, also room for Outsider Mormons of one sort and another (inside the church and outside it too), who support the Insiders, and accept the reality and validity of the framework they provide.
It is Insiders - with their ability to organise and cooperate - who may change the world and save (some of) the West. But Outsiders may also be necessary - or at least useful.
*
Outsiders, by their nature, cannot themselves live inside the communal and disciplined structure of society, of the priesthood - yet, so long as they are loyal to the goals, Outsiders may legitimately aspire to make a positive (albeit rightly low status) religious contribution.
Organised Religion is substantially (but not entirely and not as its core) about social cohesion. Outsiders are those who live psychologically out-with social cohesion (being an outsider is primarily a state of mind: e.g. Wittgenstein mostly lived physically inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge); they are loners not joiners.
But loners need not undermine society, it is possible that loners are functionally (albeit intermittently) necessary to society - rather as the shaman or the hermit has apparently been necessary to past societies.
Indeed, Outsiders are by their nature and location in a position to do things that cannot necessarily be done by Insiders. And so Outsiders may perhaps turn-out to be necessary to Mormonism in the long run - and via Mormonism to The West - as they have seemed to be necessary to Philosophy, Literature, Art and Science.
*
I have just had a careful re-read of Colin Wilson's follow-up to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel - and found it thoroughly worthwhile and stimulating.
Wilson self-consciously takes up the baton from Oswald Spengler's The Decline of the West (1918) which is given a fairly extended analysis, supplemented by consideration of some other rather analogous 'big picture' historians such as Toynbee.
Wilson accepts the conviction, dating especially from the early twentieth century, that the West needs 'a new religion'. The perspective of 1957 therefore works on the assumption that Christianity has failed, in its mainstream aspects anyway. Events since have, of course, confirmed this - at least in a broad-brush socio-political sense.
*
In Religion and the Rebel, Wilson gives biographical summaries and analytic interpretations of numerous representative figures from the existentialist tradition - some secular, but mostly Christian. These include mystics such as Boehme, Anglican monastic revivalists such as Farrer, Law and the early JH Newman - and the book culminates with the philosopher AN Whitehead who is regarded as the most important modern figure.
Wilson's other analytic frame is The Outsider - who is regarded as a type of socially-rejecting-social-reject proto-genius that is generated by end-phase civilization in an attempt to reverse the decline and revitalize the civilization. Most of the figures discussed fall into the Outsider category in some way - for instance, Wittgenstein is an Outsider having an Insider philosophy, while AN Whitehead is the opposite.
As often happens in my reading, I found myself broadly agreeing with the diagnosis, but not the prescription. In particular, I feel that 1956-ish was a time, perhaps the last time' when the Western civilization was 'meant' to re-evaluate and re-structure its goals and move into a new phase. This didn't happen, and we instead opted for 'more of the same' - and plunged into the still dominant and fluctuating combination of hedonic consumerist materialism with self-hating and self-destroying Leftism.
*
What of the 'new religion'? How did that idea fare?
I was brought-up on this idea from the work of Bernard Shaw - which is given considerable emphasis in religion and the Rebel - Shaw's choice was Creative Evolution, as outlined in my favourite of his plays Man and Superman, and the later dull, clunky and unperformable Back to Methuselah. This idea was dead-in-the-water, in terms of being a socially-viable and effectively motivating religion, but distracted and stimulated a few people for a while - the philosopher CEM Joad and the mystical nature writer John Stewart Collis (both teenage favourites of mine) for example.
The New Age movement is the most obvious New Religion - but this has proven itself to be merely a semi-effective way of individual coping-with the consumerist materialism of modernity. New Age discourse is conducted in an eclectic, semi-serious tone of ironic detachment ('if it works for you...', take it or leave it) - and the really serious and motivating ideology in New Ageis secular Leftism; radical politics is the only subject that New Agers really get 'passionate' about. So New Age is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
*
From my personal stance as a believer in Mormonism, what always strikes me about these overviews is that from 1830 there was a New Religion of exactly the kind that Colin Wilson hoped-for - that is, something Christian, real and motivating, that was also a fresh start, and which left-behind those aspects of Christian metaphysics and philosophy which seemed to have become ineffectual or counter-productive.
Of course, Mormonism was tiny in the years leading up to 1957, and even now the profoundly original and transformative metaphysical and philosophical aspects of Mormonism are hardly appreciated, even among Mormons - the 'new religion' is seen as (and in general functions as) a way of life, rather than an astonishingly transformative set of ideas.
But Mormonism pretty much has done, and does, what Bernard Shaw, Oswald Spengler and Colin Wilson wanted from a new religion. On the other hand, Mormonism stands at the furthest pole from the kind of bohemian existentialist life exemplified and practised by Colin Wilson in 1957.
Yet, in principle, there is no reason why there should not be existentialist bohemian intellectuals who regard those who practise Mormonism and who administer the LDS church as being an elite 'priesthood' who are regarded as an authoritative source of guidance.
*
Accepting that not every Man can live the highest path, and that the path of an active Mormon is too strait and narrow ever to become universal, there is scope for a wider form of non-practising Mormonism - which humbly and explicitly accepts itself as a lower calling, but from this situation tries to be supportive of the higher calling, and tries to make the kind of contribution which is difficult for the high status people.
I am thinking of a situation much the same as lay Roman Catholics who accept that they are operating at a lower level than priests, and non-monastic Eastern Orthodox (including priests) who accept that they are operating at a lower level than ascetic monks.
*
In terms of Wilson's terminology, I tend to regard Mormonism is the New Religion he hoped for - and a religion of socially-minded Insiders - because Mormonism has continued to grow and thrive as the West declined. However, it has not had a visible positive impact on Western civilisation in general - its benefits have been mostly restricted to Insiders.
But there is, I believe, also room for Outsider Mormons of one sort and another (inside the church and outside it too), who support the Insiders, and accept the reality and validity of the framework they provide.
It is Insiders - with their ability to organise and cooperate - who may change the world and save (some of) the West. But Outsiders may also be necessary - or at least useful.
*
Outsiders, by their nature, cannot themselves live inside the communal and disciplined structure of society, of the priesthood - yet, so long as they are loyal to the goals, Outsiders may legitimately aspire to make a positive (albeit rightly low status) religious contribution.
Organised Religion is substantially (but not entirely and not as its core) about social cohesion. Outsiders are those who live psychologically out-with social cohesion (being an outsider is primarily a state of mind: e.g. Wittgenstein mostly lived physically inside the walls of Trinity College, Cambridge); they are loners not joiners.
But loners need not undermine society, it is possible that loners are functionally (albeit intermittently) necessary to society - rather as the shaman or the hermit has apparently been necessary to past societies.
Indeed, Outsiders are by their nature and location in a position to do things that cannot necessarily be done by Insiders. And so Outsiders may perhaps turn-out to be necessary to Mormonism in the long run - and via Mormonism to The West - as they have seemed to be necessary to Philosophy, Literature, Art and Science.
*
Sunday 4 June 2017
Review of The Outsider by Colin Wilson (1956)
It was in the summer of 1978 that I first read Colin Wilson's The Outsider, borrowed from the Edinburgh City Library; and for only the second time I came across a book which addressed my condition directly and exactly (the first such book was Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert M Pirsig, which I had read two years earlier).
I was, and am, one of those Outsiders which Wilson defined and (for a while) brought into popular parlance. His method is by following the argument through themed biographies, summaries and excerpts of those with what was then termed an existential relationship to the world.
(There are many such figures - e.g. TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Sartre, Camus, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Lawrence of Arabia, Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Kierkegaard and many others.)
Since then I have read literally dozens of Colin Wilson's books, and browsed The Outsider frequently, but have not read it through. And indeed when I decided to re-read it a couple of weeks ago, I could not find my old Picador Paperback copy. Presumably I must have lent or given it... anyway I bought a new copy and set-to.
I was amazed at how good it was! Really superb! I would say that The Outsider is as good as anything CW ever wrote, and as good as any non-fiction I have ever read. It has a real strength and seriousness about it; a youthful vitality and incisive urgency. So much is there.
It is rather strange to realise that if I had been able or willing to give The Outsider serious consideration forty years ago, my life might have been different and better; because although it does not take the reader all the way to where I am now - it did take me to within shouting distance. Surely I could have filled in a few gaps and extrapolated where needed?
Well, I didn't - and the reason was mostly my impatience with those more religious sections of the book, which I think I skimmed over; certainly I did not given them genuine thought. Yet in The Outsider and its equally fine sequel Religion and the Rebel, Wilson was more genuinely religious than later in his life; and was especially attuned to the visionary mind, including William Blake.
As I approached the last few pages of The Outsider, I was feeling that it was a near-perfect literary-philosophical achievement; but for the last few pages and conclusion - specifically the section on the work of TE Hulme - the argument becomes convoluted and very difficult to follow; indeed Wilson does not make clear why Hulme is being included, since his expounded views seem to add nothing substantive, and instead thwart the books powerful momentum.
Perhaps it was the memory of this rather stumbling ending (after some 250 pages with hardly a mis-step) that had unjustly somewhat diminished the book in my memory?
Anyway, I would give Colin Wilson's first book the highest recommendation for anyone who feels himself to be an 'outsider'.
I was, and am, one of those Outsiders which Wilson defined and (for a while) brought into popular parlance. His method is by following the argument through themed biographies, summaries and excerpts of those with what was then termed an existential relationship to the world.
(There are many such figures - e.g. TS Eliot, WB Yeats, Sartre, Camus, Van Gogh, Nijinsky, Lawrence of Arabia, Tolstoy, Dostoievski, Kierkegaard and many others.)
Since then I have read literally dozens of Colin Wilson's books, and browsed The Outsider frequently, but have not read it through. And indeed when I decided to re-read it a couple of weeks ago, I could not find my old Picador Paperback copy. Presumably I must have lent or given it... anyway I bought a new copy and set-to.
I was amazed at how good it was! Really superb! I would say that The Outsider is as good as anything CW ever wrote, and as good as any non-fiction I have ever read. It has a real strength and seriousness about it; a youthful vitality and incisive urgency. So much is there.
It is rather strange to realise that if I had been able or willing to give The Outsider serious consideration forty years ago, my life might have been different and better; because although it does not take the reader all the way to where I am now - it did take me to within shouting distance. Surely I could have filled in a few gaps and extrapolated where needed?
Well, I didn't - and the reason was mostly my impatience with those more religious sections of the book, which I think I skimmed over; certainly I did not given them genuine thought. Yet in The Outsider and its equally fine sequel Religion and the Rebel, Wilson was more genuinely religious than later in his life; and was especially attuned to the visionary mind, including William Blake.
As I approached the last few pages of The Outsider, I was feeling that it was a near-perfect literary-philosophical achievement; but for the last few pages and conclusion - specifically the section on the work of TE Hulme - the argument becomes convoluted and very difficult to follow; indeed Wilson does not make clear why Hulme is being included, since his expounded views seem to add nothing substantive, and instead thwart the books powerful momentum.
Perhaps it was the memory of this rather stumbling ending (after some 250 pages with hardly a mis-step) that had unjustly somewhat diminished the book in my memory?
Anyway, I would give Colin Wilson's first book the highest recommendation for anyone who feels himself to be an 'outsider'.
Sunday 17 September 2017
Where did all The Outsiders go?
Wilson gave a name to something everybody knew, something that (under various terms) had been a feature of The West since the dawn of Romanticism (in the late 1700s); and he provided numerous examples of more-or-less famous and accomplished Outsiders - analysis of what had been tried as solutions, and suggestions of what might be done in future...
But here-and-now, Outsiders are not merely socially invisible; but also people don't feel like Outsiders anymore: these are no longer the difficulties people express - the Romantic Outsider has disappeared.
Has the species gone extinct, has the Outsider somehow been 'cured' - is he now integrated into society? Of course not! Everything which caused the Outsider's alienation is now 100... no 10,000 times worse than it was in 1956...
He is still present, he has neither been cured nor integrated; but nowadays he no longer realises he is an Outsider, he no longer feels existential pain, he is outcast but indifferent; because the Outsider is now so rapidly, pervasively and persistently doped and distracted by the pervasive mass media as to be a person who never thinks consecutively for long enough to recognise his situation - never mind to raise objection or do anything effective.
The slightest glimmering degree of becoming existentially alienated, bored or aware; is now almost-instantly extinguished in one or another virtual-reality before it can have any effect.
The Outsider now has zero time to think or feel 'outside' of anything - or inside for that matter.
The cause of the Outsider was human consciousness; the cure would have been a development of consciousness - but what has instead-happened has been the all-but obliteration of consciousness.
Tuesday 18 July 2017
We, here and now, are the ultimate Outsiders - embrace your fate!
In the sixty years since Colin Wilson published The Outsider - describing the state of sociological, psychological and spiritual alienation characteristic of the past couple of centuries - the situation has changed.
In 1956 it was possible to regard the Outsider as being rescued from his predicament by external change - but now he can only rescue himself. The current Outsider has only one place to look for help: within himself.
Thus - in politics and sociology there are no utopias, and all large institutions are thoroughly corrupted including the main churches. The intellectual elites are dishonest and incompetent. Science in 1956 was overwhelmingly successful - but has become a careerist bureaucracy. The universities seemed like a haven of privilege and leisure; but they are now the habitus of petty officials, dishonest spinners and box tickers.
We have no leaders - only middle managers and psychopaths - therefore, we must rely on ourselves. There is nobody else to turn-to. We must find what we need in our-selves - because it will not be supplied by any person or institution.
We, here and now, are the ultimate Outsiders because we have nowhere to turn - indeed, there are very few other people even to talk with about such matters. We are fortunate indeed if we have a marriage and family to sustain us - because these too have been destroyed over the past 60 years.
We are forced either to seek oblivion in distraction and intoxication or suicide - to escape alienation by escaping consciousness; or else to look within. We we cannot trust anybody, we must trust ourselves.
But looking within is the answer! It always was - if only the Outsider had allowed himself to acknowledge the reality of God!
When we look within, and begin to dismantle the false selves and automatic thinking, we find God.
The old Outsiders such as Nietzsche regarded the God-within (the Self) as an alternative to God; but we know that the God within is God. Since we are God's children we ourselves are divine, which means we have 'inherited' divinity. God is within us as well as without - the external God is denied us but God within is undeniable.
We can, should and will find Christianity within us - we can find Christianity despite being denied true and valid scriptures, tradition, legitimate religious teaching, rituals... we can find Christianity within us with total confidence because we know our loving God who created and sustains reality would not leave us unprovided for.
If within is the only place left to us; then within will suffice - we will find there everything we need.
We will find faith, courage, and motivation; we will find love.
We are in a situation where - if we honestly seek to answer the condition of alienation, nihilism and despair - there is no alternative to doing what we should anyway be doing: looking within - to find not only our true selves, but God and all the necessities that only God can provide.
We have the possibility of a degree of spiritual agency, freedom and autonomy seldom seen in the history of the world. And everything is channelling us towards exactly that.
We are fated to be the Ultimate Outsiders - like it or not. But we can solve the problem of alienation by willingly becoming the Ultimate Outsiders indeed! By embracing, rather than avoiding, reality - we can become free, true and live from our divinity (albeit partially, with frequent errors and sins - but that is enough).
We cannot be made to make the right choice - we might instead contiue to choose oblivion and the destruction of consciousness... drugs, social media, transgressive sex - even the destruction of our own persons by transhumanist technologies.
However, that choice is becoming clearer and clearer, more and more conscious - to the point of being unavoidable.
Yes indeed, things are 'coming to a point'...
Note: The crux of my point is that God (as Christians understand God: creator, loving, and a personal God - concerned by every individual) would not leave anybody, at any time or in any place, bereft of spiritual necessities. The world, as we experience it, is adeqaute. Indeed, since life is not a random accident; in some vital sense you and I personally (and everybody else) have been placed into mortal life in a time and at a place suited to our individual needs for experiencing and learning.
In 1956 it was possible to regard the Outsider as being rescued from his predicament by external change - but now he can only rescue himself. The current Outsider has only one place to look for help: within himself.
Thus - in politics and sociology there are no utopias, and all large institutions are thoroughly corrupted including the main churches. The intellectual elites are dishonest and incompetent. Science in 1956 was overwhelmingly successful - but has become a careerist bureaucracy. The universities seemed like a haven of privilege and leisure; but they are now the habitus of petty officials, dishonest spinners and box tickers.
We have no leaders - only middle managers and psychopaths - therefore, we must rely on ourselves. There is nobody else to turn-to. We must find what we need in our-selves - because it will not be supplied by any person or institution.
We, here and now, are the ultimate Outsiders because we have nowhere to turn - indeed, there are very few other people even to talk with about such matters. We are fortunate indeed if we have a marriage and family to sustain us - because these too have been destroyed over the past 60 years.
We are forced either to seek oblivion in distraction and intoxication or suicide - to escape alienation by escaping consciousness; or else to look within. We we cannot trust anybody, we must trust ourselves.
But looking within is the answer! It always was - if only the Outsider had allowed himself to acknowledge the reality of God!
When we look within, and begin to dismantle the false selves and automatic thinking, we find God.
The old Outsiders such as Nietzsche regarded the God-within (the Self) as an alternative to God; but we know that the God within is God. Since we are God's children we ourselves are divine, which means we have 'inherited' divinity. God is within us as well as without - the external God is denied us but God within is undeniable.
We can, should and will find Christianity within us - we can find Christianity despite being denied true and valid scriptures, tradition, legitimate religious teaching, rituals... we can find Christianity within us with total confidence because we know our loving God who created and sustains reality would not leave us unprovided for.
If within is the only place left to us; then within will suffice - we will find there everything we need.
We will find faith, courage, and motivation; we will find love.
We are in a situation where - if we honestly seek to answer the condition of alienation, nihilism and despair - there is no alternative to doing what we should anyway be doing: looking within - to find not only our true selves, but God and all the necessities that only God can provide.
We have the possibility of a degree of spiritual agency, freedom and autonomy seldom seen in the history of the world. And everything is channelling us towards exactly that.
We are fated to be the Ultimate Outsiders - like it or not. But we can solve the problem of alienation by willingly becoming the Ultimate Outsiders indeed! By embracing, rather than avoiding, reality - we can become free, true and live from our divinity (albeit partially, with frequent errors and sins - but that is enough).
We cannot be made to make the right choice - we might instead contiue to choose oblivion and the destruction of consciousness... drugs, social media, transgressive sex - even the destruction of our own persons by transhumanist technologies.
However, that choice is becoming clearer and clearer, more and more conscious - to the point of being unavoidable.
Yes indeed, things are 'coming to a point'...
Note: The crux of my point is that God (as Christians understand God: creator, loving, and a personal God - concerned by every individual) would not leave anybody, at any time or in any place, bereft of spiritual necessities. The world, as we experience it, is adeqaute. Indeed, since life is not a random accident; in some vital sense you and I personally (and everybody else) have been placed into mortal life in a time and at a place suited to our individual needs for experiencing and learning.
Wednesday 2 July 2014
The Rolf Harris Affair compared with Jimmy Savile - relevance to understanding the real nature of the modern Mass Media
*
**
Here is a relevant excerpt from my new mini-book Bruce G Charlton. Addicted to Distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media. University of Buckingham Press, 2014.
The Savile affair constitutes, in my opinion, in its totality; one of the most horrifying – and horrifically-revealing – events in the history of England. And as a nation, the English have hardly yet begun to digest the implications – that is, assuming we are capable of doing-so, in such a nihilistic, shallow and distractible society as we have become.
The intense interest of this case is that Savile was, for several decades but especially in the 1970s and 80s, massively promoted by the UK Mass Media as nothing short of a lay saint, mostly due to his raising lots of money ‘for charity’ and his work in ‘helping people’.
Jimmy Savile was essentially a creation of the BBC – which is the British Broadcasting Corporation, the state-funded radio and television network and focus of the UK Mass Media. Initially Savile was promoted as a teen idol, as radio DJ and also presenter of the TV flagship Top of the Pops.
Later Savile was promoted in connection with young children; and was, for instance, featured visiting children’s hospitals on Christmas day. Later still, the BBC created a long-running Saturday evening prime time family TV series called Jim’ll Fix It (1975-1994) for Savile’s glorification as a patron of boys and girls, the sick, the crippled and the handicapped - all of which categories are noted among Savile’s known sexual victims. The purported aim of the series was to arrange for a stream of young people to come to the studios and have their daydreams fulfilled by Savile and his ‘team’. In practice, it seems that – all too often – the opposite actually occurred.
Jimmy Savile was, indeed, one of the earliest people to recognize the vast career possibilities of becoming personally very rich, famous, powerful and protected from prosecution by well-publicized charitable ‘giving’. The more Savile gave, the wealthier and more prestigious he became. Until finally ‘Sir Jimmy’ was, apparently, everybody’s friend or favourite Uncle; and his depredations were unstoppable: he was, and openly boasted of being, a-law-unto-himself.
The media, and especially the BBC, thus made Savile into the leading British representative of what it was to be a ‘good’ person, held-up as an example to others.
And not just the media. Savile was awarded a Papal knighthood to go with his British knighthood (Savile was one of the best-known Roman Catholics in public life – despite, as we discovered, openly practising assembly-line sex in the BBC studio dressing rooms with under-age-looking girls); he was also apparently a close personal friend and guest of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; and also of the Queen and Royal Family. In other words Savile was (so far as the masses could see) unanimously endorsed by the establishment at the highest possible level.
Despite being aware of his behind-the-scenes reputation, these establishment idiots nonetheless invited Savile into their own homes to meet their own families; because now we discover that many of these establishment figures had heard multiple reports and complaints, and persistent and plausible rumours of his activities; and did nothing, did not investigate, took no precautions; or else denied, and in sum certainly covered-up what was really going-on. It seems that the Establishment did not even use their insider knowledge to safeguard their own loved ones!
(It is typical of the insanity of modernity that the politically correct elite believe their own lies – even when contradicted by personal knowledge and their own experience.)
And yet, to the unbiased eye Savile was very obviously a cold-eyed, self-promoting, self-enriching, egotistical weirdo – with an embarrassingly inept persona; a man who never conversed but spoke entirely in cliches, and deflected enquiries with strange stereotypical noises and displacement activities.
The only people whom I know who had actually met Savile disliked him intensely; one knew him from their schooldays as being a nasty teenager; a woman friend reported that on meeting Savile he made an immediate, crude and sexually aggressive approach (i.e. groping) – as if it was his habit and right to do so.
A very obviously untrustworthy person.
So, on the one hand there was one’s own instinctive reaction backed by personal contacts, which said Savile was nasty; and on the other hand the Mass Media, especially the BBC, the government, the Royal Family, numerous hospitals and prison services, and (for goodness sake!) the Vatican – all united in telling us that Sir Jimmy was the nearest British equivalent to Mother Teresa (and I am not exaggerating this in the slightest).
Add to this people in the police, the legal system health service officials, educational officials who seemed to endorse Savile despite (as we have heard) numerous reports, complaints, incidents...
An outsider might ask if there was any major group that was not involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in covering-up and thereby promoting Saviles crimes?
And there we have it, in a nutshell. The necessary relationship between Media reality and real reality is not just zero, but potentially negative: the worse the reality, the more the ‘establishment’ ruling elite, promoted it. The ‘lack of discernment’ displayed by the Queen, the politicians, the Media moguls and the Pope could not have been more extreme.
This is a perverse perfection of inversion: one of the most (covertly) evil people that could be imagined, yet aggressively promoted as being one of the best. And this situation continuing for decade after decade; as the number of his victims accumulated through Savile’s long and active life...
As I said, Sir Jimmy Savile was a creature created and sustained by the Mass Media, and most specifically the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation which was the primary source.
From the late 1960s, therefore, the premier UK Mass Media organization was the origin, focus, energy, defender of the phenomenon of Savile – which can be taken as merely the most egregious example currently known of a general inversion of moral (and also aesthetic) values. The BBC, the Mass Media, took this grotesquely-unpromising raw material, and made him into the prime national moral hero, and kept this going, on-and-on, despite all they suspected, heard, had seen and knew.
So we now know (we no longer merely suspect the fact) that the Mass Media will take a truly evil person (or it could be an evil organization, or an evil set of ideas) and make him admired, dominant and invulnerable.
It has always been said, in excusing Savile (both before and after the revelations) for his boring, inept and embarrassing persona that he ‘gave’ millions of pounds to charity – some say forty million.
We now see that this charitable contribution was more in the nature of a bribe than a gift; money paid to ensure sexual access to the vulnerable children he preyed upon, and protection money to prevent him being prosecuted (just one of the hundreds of instances that have emerged would have meant Savile’s ruin and probably jail time).
If we divide forty million pounds by the constantly expanding number of probable sexual assaults over several decades; the charitable contributions may eventually work-out to be something like a few hundred pounds per sexual attack.
In other words, Savile’s charitable ‘giving’ functioned as a pay-off for Establishment status, a high salary, and political protection; also sometimes as a kind of entrance fee to get access to establishments where (as a patron) he could molest with impunity. It is likely that Savile regarded this exchange as being good value for money…
Such ‘charity’ – rewarded by depraved and criminal sexual gratification, personal wealth, and lavish official prestige is revealed as licensed evil on the cheap.
But why did this happen. Why was this all this done for somebody so wicked and dangerous as Savile? Why was so much done to enable and facilitate vice on such a vast scale? What reason could the Mass Media establishment have for doing this apparently arbitrary thing? – what did they stand to gain from it – why not be more cautious?
The immediate cause of Savile’s licence to abuse seems to have been the probable fact that in the BBC (and presumably elsewhere in the Mass Media) with respect to sexual license almost everybody was at it, to a greater or lesser extent; too many people had something to hide – and, quite likely, it was calculated that bringing down Savile would be to bring down the whole house of cards of Establishment sexual corruption.
Because, following the Jimmy Saville affair and a series of prominent prosecutions, convictions and confessions, it has become apparent that there was what would be considered by religious traditionalists a varied and widespread culture of endemic sexual transgression at the BBC.
The once exemplary British Broadcasting Corporation in London had, from about the mid-1960s, seemingly become a moral cesspool, and at times a criminal environment; involving not just the most obviously strange and sinister Savile, but also other media personalities who were more generally popular, and seemed to me and many others as if they were decent characters.
The fact that the most influential centre of UK Mass Media was quite widely known (among those in the know) as a dangerous place for children, implies that this had been an accepted fact; indeed it looks as if sexual access is likely to have been, maybe still is, a major motivational factor in those who work there.
I assume the same applies to other major media institutions, who have at least tolerated – perhaps approved of this; since otherwise the whistle would have been blown long, long ago.
The lessons I have learned from the Savile affair are that:
1. We are unable to judge the moral worth of people in public life from what we see on our screens. We think we can judge this, but we cannot. Our instincts tell us we can, but we cannot. And this applies even, or perhaps especially, to those put forward as moral exemplars. We must therefore resist reassurances that things are alright, simply because we – the public – have not been allowed to learn how bad they are. We now know things may be horrifically bad, and we are allowed to know nothing about it.
2. The moral worth of people in public life is much, much lower than we had previously supposed. Think again of all the major Establishment figures and institutions who were complicit in endorsing and protecting Savile… They knew, but did nothing.
But those who do not want to learn from the Savile Affair – including the many who were complicit – will not learn from it. And they do not want the public to learn, either.
Already I detect that the whole business is going down the memory hole – because in the modern world it is only the Mass Media that keeps an issue alive, and the Mass Media has no interest in allowing the implications and ramifications of the Savile Affair to be worked-through and kept in mind.
But there are lessons; and we ought to learn them. We should acknowledge the profound foolishness and danger of immersing ourselves in the multiple influences from those depraved individuals in the Mass Media and the Establishment who control and sustain public discourse.
And, having reflected, we must each of us resolve to change our attitudes and practices in relation to the Mass Media.
To encourage such reflection, and toughen such resolution, has been the main purpose of this book.
*
The extremely popular, (apparently) very likeable, and multi-talented veteran entertainer Rolf Harris has been convicted of a series of sexual crimes (see coverage elsewhere) - and the reports attached to this make clear that he was for decades a crudely aggressive sexual predator.
For me, this is a very big deal indeed - the implications of which ramify into many areas of life.
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Harris's behaviour is at a lower level of severity and scale than the horrific behaviour of Sir Jimmy Savile - yet in many ways the I find the revelations about Rolf Harris much more disturbing.
Savile was very obviously a nasty piece of work - and I always found it very hard to understand why people tolerated his presence on TV, Radio and at public events. Rolf Harris - in complete contrast - was very genial, avuncular, and seemed to me like a completely trustworthy and decent man.
*
(However, one item of coverage was that Savile 'arranged' for Harris to visit a women's 'special hospital' for the criminally insane, where they both watched the inmates stripping naked to be searched before bedtime. This suggests that Savile's immunity from exposure and prosecution may have been related to him fixing-up such experiences for others in his media circle - it seems Savile functioned as a kind of pimp, but that his 'payment' was to be allowed to continue his horrific long-term lifestyle of serial rapes and molestations.)
*
Rolf Harris was very much a part of my childhood, and someone I had a soft spot for and who I had seen over a period of several decades without experiencing the slightest glimmer of suspicion that he habitually groped and tried to kiss women and even young girls; and did this kind of thing at times in public situations, including TV studios and location TV work. (As well as various other even more wicked and sinister things that I will leave readers to research for themselves).
*
The Rolf Harris (and Savile) affair tells us a great deal about what sort of behaviour is tolerated and condoned in Mass Media circles.
It tells us that the real aristocrats of modern life, the people who can get away with sexual behaviour that would be severely punished in others (and can do this for decades - when 'everybody' knows all about it) are the popular mass entertainers.
This fits with my thesis that the Mass Media are the rulers of modern society - the Media is the centre of real power.
*
It tells us that Savile and Harris are the tip of an iceberg - because they could only have functioned in a world where this kind of grossly exploitative and aggressive sexual behaviour was normal, tolerated, condoned - indeed approved.
Presumably everybody who had power and authority was 'at it' (or benefited from it) to a greater or lesser extent.
*
The Rolf Harris affair also means that there is zero-correlation between what appears on our screen and what is really happening. It means we have no idea what the people in the mass media are really like. It means that our personality evaluation systems are rendered absolutely useless by the Mass Media - we have no idea at all whether someone on screen is good, trustworthy, kind - or evil, lying, exploitative.
*
Our instincts may be telling us one thing - loud and clear - but in these circumstances our instincts are worthless.
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In sum, the Rolf Harris affair demonstrates that we have to assume the worst about media celebrities - unless or until proven otherwise.
The onus of proof lies with them - the lesson I have learned is that media celebrities are guilty of sexual misconduct until demonstrated to be innocent.
Here is a relevant excerpt from my new mini-book Bruce G Charlton. Addicted to Distraction: Psychological consequences of the modern Mass Media. University of Buckingham Press, 2014.
Postscript: the Jimmy Savile affair
A significant stimulus to write this book came from the explosive revelations of the Jimmy Savile affair during 2012 and after – and my developing understanding of the implications.
The Savile affair reveals the leading controllers of the Mass Media in particular, and public leaders in general, as being disgustingly corrupt in terms of what they tolerate and excuse.
Thus, I regard as a
major national event the un-masking of the late Sir Jimmy Savile
(1926-2011) as a chronic, serial, wholesale, aggressively-predatory
sexual aggressor, abuser and rapist of boys and girls, men and women
(including mentally handicapped, disabled, ill and hospitalized
juveniles) over a timescale of more than half a century, and in
reported numbers running into many hundreds (with actual numbers in
all likelihood being in thousands, since many victims were incapable
of understanding and reporting incidents).
The Savile affair constitutes, in my opinion, in its totality; one of the most horrifying – and horrifically-revealing – events in the history of England. And as a nation, the English have hardly yet begun to digest the implications – that is, assuming we are capable of doing-so, in such a nihilistic, shallow and distractible society as we have become.
The intense interest of this case is that Savile was, for several decades but especially in the 1970s and 80s, massively promoted by the UK Mass Media as nothing short of a lay saint, mostly due to his raising lots of money ‘for charity’ and his work in ‘helping people’.
Jimmy Savile was essentially a creation of the BBC – which is the British Broadcasting Corporation, the state-funded radio and television network and focus of the UK Mass Media. Initially Savile was promoted as a teen idol, as radio DJ and also presenter of the TV flagship Top of the Pops.
Later Savile was promoted in connection with young children; and was, for instance, featured visiting children’s hospitals on Christmas day. Later still, the BBC created a long-running Saturday evening prime time family TV series called Jim’ll Fix It (1975-1994) for Savile’s glorification as a patron of boys and girls, the sick, the crippled and the handicapped - all of which categories are noted among Savile’s known sexual victims. The purported aim of the series was to arrange for a stream of young people to come to the studios and have their daydreams fulfilled by Savile and his ‘team’. In practice, it seems that – all too often – the opposite actually occurred.
Jimmy Savile was, indeed, one of the earliest people to recognize the vast career possibilities of becoming personally very rich, famous, powerful and protected from prosecution by well-publicized charitable ‘giving’. The more Savile gave, the wealthier and more prestigious he became. Until finally ‘Sir Jimmy’ was, apparently, everybody’s friend or favourite Uncle; and his depredations were unstoppable: he was, and openly boasted of being, a-law-unto-himself.
The media, and especially the BBC, thus made Savile into the leading British representative of what it was to be a ‘good’ person, held-up as an example to others.
And not just the media. Savile was awarded a Papal knighthood to go with his British knighthood (Savile was one of the best-known Roman Catholics in public life – despite, as we discovered, openly practising assembly-line sex in the BBC studio dressing rooms with under-age-looking girls); he was also apparently a close personal friend and guest of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher; and also of the Queen and Royal Family. In other words Savile was (so far as the masses could see) unanimously endorsed by the establishment at the highest possible level.
Despite being aware of his behind-the-scenes reputation, these establishment idiots nonetheless invited Savile into their own homes to meet their own families; because now we discover that many of these establishment figures had heard multiple reports and complaints, and persistent and plausible rumours of his activities; and did nothing, did not investigate, took no precautions; or else denied, and in sum certainly covered-up what was really going-on. It seems that the Establishment did not even use their insider knowledge to safeguard their own loved ones!
(It is typical of the insanity of modernity that the politically correct elite believe their own lies – even when contradicted by personal knowledge and their own experience.)
And yet, to the unbiased eye Savile was very obviously a cold-eyed, self-promoting, self-enriching, egotistical weirdo – with an embarrassingly inept persona; a man who never conversed but spoke entirely in cliches, and deflected enquiries with strange stereotypical noises and displacement activities.
The only people whom I know who had actually met Savile disliked him intensely; one knew him from their schooldays as being a nasty teenager; a woman friend reported that on meeting Savile he made an immediate, crude and sexually aggressive approach (i.e. groping) – as if it was his habit and right to do so.
A very obviously untrustworthy person.
So, on the one hand there was one’s own instinctive reaction backed by personal contacts, which said Savile was nasty; and on the other hand the Mass Media, especially the BBC, the government, the Royal Family, numerous hospitals and prison services, and (for goodness sake!) the Vatican – all united in telling us that Sir Jimmy was the nearest British equivalent to Mother Teresa (and I am not exaggerating this in the slightest).
Add to this people in the police, the legal system health service officials, educational officials who seemed to endorse Savile despite (as we have heard) numerous reports, complaints, incidents...
An outsider might ask if there was any major group that was not involved, to a greater or lesser extent, in covering-up and thereby promoting Saviles crimes?
And there we have it, in a nutshell. The necessary relationship between Media reality and real reality is not just zero, but potentially negative: the worse the reality, the more the ‘establishment’ ruling elite, promoted it. The ‘lack of discernment’ displayed by the Queen, the politicians, the Media moguls and the Pope could not have been more extreme.
This is a perverse perfection of inversion: one of the most (covertly) evil people that could be imagined, yet aggressively promoted as being one of the best. And this situation continuing for decade after decade; as the number of his victims accumulated through Savile’s long and active life...
As I said, Sir Jimmy Savile was a creature created and sustained by the Mass Media, and most specifically the state funded British Broadcasting Corporation which was the primary source.
From the late 1960s, therefore, the premier UK Mass Media organization was the origin, focus, energy, defender of the phenomenon of Savile – which can be taken as merely the most egregious example currently known of a general inversion of moral (and also aesthetic) values. The BBC, the Mass Media, took this grotesquely-unpromising raw material, and made him into the prime national moral hero, and kept this going, on-and-on, despite all they suspected, heard, had seen and knew.
So we now know (we no longer merely suspect the fact) that the Mass Media will take a truly evil person (or it could be an evil organization, or an evil set of ideas) and make him admired, dominant and invulnerable.
It has always been said, in excusing Savile (both before and after the revelations) for his boring, inept and embarrassing persona that he ‘gave’ millions of pounds to charity – some say forty million.
We now see that this charitable contribution was more in the nature of a bribe than a gift; money paid to ensure sexual access to the vulnerable children he preyed upon, and protection money to prevent him being prosecuted (just one of the hundreds of instances that have emerged would have meant Savile’s ruin and probably jail time).
If we divide forty million pounds by the constantly expanding number of probable sexual assaults over several decades; the charitable contributions may eventually work-out to be something like a few hundred pounds per sexual attack.
In other words, Savile’s charitable ‘giving’ functioned as a pay-off for Establishment status, a high salary, and political protection; also sometimes as a kind of entrance fee to get access to establishments where (as a patron) he could molest with impunity. It is likely that Savile regarded this exchange as being good value for money…
Such ‘charity’ – rewarded by depraved and criminal sexual gratification, personal wealth, and lavish official prestige is revealed as licensed evil on the cheap.
But why did this happen. Why was this all this done for somebody so wicked and dangerous as Savile? Why was so much done to enable and facilitate vice on such a vast scale? What reason could the Mass Media establishment have for doing this apparently arbitrary thing? – what did they stand to gain from it – why not be more cautious?
The immediate cause of Savile’s licence to abuse seems to have been the probable fact that in the BBC (and presumably elsewhere in the Mass Media) with respect to sexual license almost everybody was at it, to a greater or lesser extent; too many people had something to hide – and, quite likely, it was calculated that bringing down Savile would be to bring down the whole house of cards of Establishment sexual corruption.
Because, following the Jimmy Saville affair and a series of prominent prosecutions, convictions and confessions, it has become apparent that there was what would be considered by religious traditionalists a varied and widespread culture of endemic sexual transgression at the BBC.
The once exemplary British Broadcasting Corporation in London had, from about the mid-1960s, seemingly become a moral cesspool, and at times a criminal environment; involving not just the most obviously strange and sinister Savile, but also other media personalities who were more generally popular, and seemed to me and many others as if they were decent characters.
The fact that the most influential centre of UK Mass Media was quite widely known (among those in the know) as a dangerous place for children, implies that this had been an accepted fact; indeed it looks as if sexual access is likely to have been, maybe still is, a major motivational factor in those who work there.
I assume the same applies to other major media institutions, who have at least tolerated – perhaps approved of this; since otherwise the whistle would have been blown long, long ago.
The lessons I have learned from the Savile affair are that:
1. We are unable to judge the moral worth of people in public life from what we see on our screens. We think we can judge this, but we cannot. Our instincts tell us we can, but we cannot. And this applies even, or perhaps especially, to those put forward as moral exemplars. We must therefore resist reassurances that things are alright, simply because we – the public – have not been allowed to learn how bad they are. We now know things may be horrifically bad, and we are allowed to know nothing about it.
2. The moral worth of people in public life is much, much lower than we had previously supposed. Think again of all the major Establishment figures and institutions who were complicit in endorsing and protecting Savile… They knew, but did nothing.
We must therefore
assume the worst of many, or most, people in public life –
unless specifically proven otherwise.
3. The evils consequent upon the sexual revolution have been systematically-hidden, excused on multiple grounds, indulged, even applauded. There must surely be a lot of the same kind of things we do not know about in many other people, circumstances and institutions; especially those most subject to the changes in ethos dictated by the enforcement of the sexual revolution. It is reasonable – indeed prudent – to assume the worst until proven otherwise.
3. The evils consequent upon the sexual revolution have been systematically-hidden, excused on multiple grounds, indulged, even applauded. There must surely be a lot of the same kind of things we do not know about in many other people, circumstances and institutions; especially those most subject to the changes in ethos dictated by the enforcement of the sexual revolution. It is reasonable – indeed prudent – to assume the worst until proven otherwise.
But those who do not want to learn from the Savile Affair – including the many who were complicit – will not learn from it. And they do not want the public to learn, either.
Already I detect that the whole business is going down the memory hole – because in the modern world it is only the Mass Media that keeps an issue alive, and the Mass Media has no interest in allowing the implications and ramifications of the Savile Affair to be worked-through and kept in mind.
But there are lessons; and we ought to learn them. We should acknowledge the profound foolishness and danger of immersing ourselves in the multiple influences from those depraved individuals in the Mass Media and the Establishment who control and sustain public discourse.
And, having reflected, we must each of us resolve to change our attitudes and practices in relation to the Mass Media.
To encourage such reflection, and toughen such resolution, has been the main purpose of this book.
Sunday 10 August 2014
Review of Addicted to Distraction on Throne, Altar, Liberty blog
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Review of my new book
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
*
This is any authors's 'dream review' - thanks to Gerry T Neal
http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-cave-of-our-own-construction.html
Review of my new book
http://addictedtodistraction.blogspot.co.uk/
*
This is any authors's 'dream review' - thanks to Gerry T Neal
http://thronealtarliberty.blogspot.co.uk/2014/08/a-cave-of-our-own-construction.html
*
SUNDAY, AUGUST 10, 2014
A Cave of Our Own Construction
Addicted to Distraction by Bruce G. Charlton, Buckingham, United Kingdom, University of Buckingham Press, 2014, 163 pp., £10
Among traditionalists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives and the rest of us who comprise what is usually called “the Right” it is customary, when the mass media is discussed, to maintain that it is heavily biased towards the Left. Our progressive opponents deride this claim, pointing to the television news channels, radio talk shows, and printed publications that offer an editorial perspective that is widely thought of as being “conservative”. In response we might point out that such media outlets offer a “neoconservative” perspective which is actually a form of liberalism – it is all about how democracy, capitalism and individualism are the hope and salvation of mankind, to be brought to the uttermost corners of the world by the force of the American military if necessary. A defense of actual conservative ideas and institutions, from a perspective that is critical of the modern assumptions that neoconservatives shared with the progressive and liberal Left is avoided by the media like the plague.
Recently, however, I encountered the following sentence which offers a rather different assessment of the relationship between the mass media and the Left:
Leftism is the Mass Media, and the Mass Media is Leftism, inseparable, the same thing: this of course means that Leftism (in its modern form) depends utterly on the continuation of the Mass Media (depends on itself!), stands or falls with the Mass Media. (bold indicates italics in original)
This remarkable sentence can be found on pages 26 to 27 of a fascinating new book entitled Addicted to Distraction. The author is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton, a physician and psychiatrist who is Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham. He is also a Christian and a prominent blogger in that right-wing sector of the internet known as the “Orthosphere” in the broader sense of the term that includes not just the website by that name but various others with a similar right-wing, traditionalist Christian perspective, including Dr. Charlton’s own site, where the term was originally coined, and this one.
The quoted sentence would elicit from many, probably most, people the response that it confuses the distinction between that which is neutral – in this case the technology of large-scale communication – and that which is charged – the thoughts and words conveyed by that technology. This is a conditioned response, one which is made without much if any thought being put into it, and it raises the question of how valid this distinction actually is. Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, George Grant, did not think it was valid and devoted much of his thought and writing to demonstrating that technology was anything but neutral. It was another Canadian of Grant’s generation, a pioneer in the study of media communications named Marshal McLuhan, who famously remarked that “the medium is the message” and it is from the launching pad of this insight of McLuhan’s that Dr. Charlton’s own reflections on the nature of the mass media take off.
This does not mean that the mass media that he equates with the Left consists merely of communications technology. Dr. Charlton distinguishes between two senses of the expression mass media. There is the technology itself – print, radio, television, internet, etc – and then there is the system into which all this technology is integrated, the “unified network of communications”. It is the latter which is the focus of his discussion.
Another important distinction he makes is between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Marxist Left of the trades unions and socialist parties was revolutionary but it was also utopian and visionary. It sought to overthrow the institutions of the existing order but with the idea that it would replace them with a new order that would be a Paradise on earth. The New Left is the Left of “Permanent Revolution” or “perpetual opposition”, which Dr. Charlton describes as the idea that:
The true revolutionary – such as the avant garde artist or radical intellectual – was intrinsically subversive; and would always be in revolt against whoever was in power, changing sides as necessary to achieve this. (p. 18)
If the New Left is always seeking to subvert, oppose, and to overthrow then its agenda is entirely negative. It seeks nothing but destruction and is essentially nihilistic. This, Dr. Charlton argues, is also the essential nature of the mass media.
He describes several specific techniques by which the mass media subverts the good. For example, when Anders Brevik killed all those kids in Norway a couple of years ago the media initially reported that he was a right-wing Christian. Brevik was not a professing Christian at all but the initial reports that contained the falsehood created a far deeper impression than subsequent retractions. Dr. Charlton calls this “first strike framing”, a technique whereby the media subverts something positive – in this case Christianity – by creating a false association in the first reports of an atrocity from which the lasting visceral response is derived. (pp. 71-75)
The subversiveness of the mass media does not lie merely in certain techniques, however. Nor is it to be found in some cabal of conspirators who pull the levels of the media behind the scenes, Dr. Charlton insists, but in the very nature of the system itself. The mass media, as he describes it, is an integrated network of communications technology that has so permeated society that it envelops and surrounds us. It generates a pseudoreality of image and opinion that distracts us from the real world in which we live. The images and opinions it generates are subject to change at any moment and may completely contradict those that preceded them but are presented to us as absolute truths disagreement with which renders a person a dangerous, crazy, outsider. This combination of short-term absolutism with long-term complete relativism, Dr. Charlton labels “Opinionated Relativism”. By distracting us from the real world, common sense, and personal experience and bombarding us with dogmatic but ever-changing opinions and images it subverts our confidence in that which is true, good, and beautiful. His characterization of it as evil and demonic seems entirely appropriate.
So what do we do about it?
While Dr. Charlton does not proffer a plan as to how the mass media system can be defeated as a whole – he indicates that the system will have to collapse on its own before there can be a large scale return to reality – he offers some helpful suggestions as to how we can deal with it as individuals. We are addicted to the false reality the mass media presents us, he argues, and rather than try to wean ourselves off of it, for those who think that they can pick out what is good from the mass media are the most deceived and deluded, we ought to quit it cold turkey. While the process of “detoxing”, by which we stop seeking out, paying attention to, and believing the media and turn our attention back towards reality is one that will involve failure – for we are immersed in the media in societies where everybody is an addict – there is hope, he says, at least for the Christian, because reality is superior to the falsehoods of the media.
Addicted to Distraction is a short book but one that is packed with insights the surface of which I have only begun to scratch in this review. I heartily recommend it.
Among traditionalists, reactionaries, paleoconservatives and the rest of us who comprise what is usually called “the Right” it is customary, when the mass media is discussed, to maintain that it is heavily biased towards the Left. Our progressive opponents deride this claim, pointing to the television news channels, radio talk shows, and printed publications that offer an editorial perspective that is widely thought of as being “conservative”. In response we might point out that such media outlets offer a “neoconservative” perspective which is actually a form of liberalism – it is all about how democracy, capitalism and individualism are the hope and salvation of mankind, to be brought to the uttermost corners of the world by the force of the American military if necessary. A defense of actual conservative ideas and institutions, from a perspective that is critical of the modern assumptions that neoconservatives shared with the progressive and liberal Left is avoided by the media like the plague.
Recently, however, I encountered the following sentence which offers a rather different assessment of the relationship between the mass media and the Left:
Leftism is the Mass Media, and the Mass Media is Leftism, inseparable, the same thing: this of course means that Leftism (in its modern form) depends utterly on the continuation of the Mass Media (depends on itself!), stands or falls with the Mass Media. (bold indicates italics in original)
This remarkable sentence can be found on pages 26 to 27 of a fascinating new book entitled Addicted to Distraction. The author is Dr. Bruce G. Charlton, a physician and psychiatrist who is Professor of Theoretical Medicine at the University of Buckingham. He is also a Christian and a prominent blogger in that right-wing sector of the internet known as the “Orthosphere” in the broader sense of the term that includes not just the website by that name but various others with a similar right-wing, traditionalist Christian perspective, including Dr. Charlton’s own site, where the term was originally coined, and this one.
The quoted sentence would elicit from many, probably most, people the response that it confuses the distinction between that which is neutral – in this case the technology of large-scale communication – and that which is charged – the thoughts and words conveyed by that technology. This is a conditioned response, one which is made without much if any thought being put into it, and it raises the question of how valid this distinction actually is. Canada’s greatest conservative philosopher, George Grant, did not think it was valid and devoted much of his thought and writing to demonstrating that technology was anything but neutral. It was another Canadian of Grant’s generation, a pioneer in the study of media communications named Marshal McLuhan, who famously remarked that “the medium is the message” and it is from the launching pad of this insight of McLuhan’s that Dr. Charlton’s own reflections on the nature of the mass media take off.
This does not mean that the mass media that he equates with the Left consists merely of communications technology. Dr. Charlton distinguishes between two senses of the expression mass media. There is the technology itself – print, radio, television, internet, etc – and then there is the system into which all this technology is integrated, the “unified network of communications”. It is the latter which is the focus of his discussion.
Another important distinction he makes is between the Old Left and the New Left. The Old Marxist Left of the trades unions and socialist parties was revolutionary but it was also utopian and visionary. It sought to overthrow the institutions of the existing order but with the idea that it would replace them with a new order that would be a Paradise on earth. The New Left is the Left of “Permanent Revolution” or “perpetual opposition”, which Dr. Charlton describes as the idea that:
The true revolutionary – such as the avant garde artist or radical intellectual – was intrinsically subversive; and would always be in revolt against whoever was in power, changing sides as necessary to achieve this. (p. 18)
If the New Left is always seeking to subvert, oppose, and to overthrow then its agenda is entirely negative. It seeks nothing but destruction and is essentially nihilistic. This, Dr. Charlton argues, is also the essential nature of the mass media.
He describes several specific techniques by which the mass media subverts the good. For example, when Anders Brevik killed all those kids in Norway a couple of years ago the media initially reported that he was a right-wing Christian. Brevik was not a professing Christian at all but the initial reports that contained the falsehood created a far deeper impression than subsequent retractions. Dr. Charlton calls this “first strike framing”, a technique whereby the media subverts something positive – in this case Christianity – by creating a false association in the first reports of an atrocity from which the lasting visceral response is derived. (pp. 71-75)
The subversiveness of the mass media does not lie merely in certain techniques, however. Nor is it to be found in some cabal of conspirators who pull the levels of the media behind the scenes, Dr. Charlton insists, but in the very nature of the system itself. The mass media, as he describes it, is an integrated network of communications technology that has so permeated society that it envelops and surrounds us. It generates a pseudoreality of image and opinion that distracts us from the real world in which we live. The images and opinions it generates are subject to change at any moment and may completely contradict those that preceded them but are presented to us as absolute truths disagreement with which renders a person a dangerous, crazy, outsider. This combination of short-term absolutism with long-term complete relativism, Dr. Charlton labels “Opinionated Relativism”. By distracting us from the real world, common sense, and personal experience and bombarding us with dogmatic but ever-changing opinions and images it subverts our confidence in that which is true, good, and beautiful. His characterization of it as evil and demonic seems entirely appropriate.
So what do we do about it?
While Dr. Charlton does not proffer a plan as to how the mass media system can be defeated as a whole – he indicates that the system will have to collapse on its own before there can be a large scale return to reality – he offers some helpful suggestions as to how we can deal with it as individuals. We are addicted to the false reality the mass media presents us, he argues, and rather than try to wean ourselves off of it, for those who think that they can pick out what is good from the mass media are the most deceived and deluded, we ought to quit it cold turkey. While the process of “detoxing”, by which we stop seeking out, paying attention to, and believing the media and turn our attention back towards reality is one that will involve failure – for we are immersed in the media in societies where everybody is an addict – there is hope, he says, at least for the Christian, because reality is superior to the falsehoods of the media.
Addicted to Distraction is a short book but one that is packed with insights the surface of which I have only begun to scratch in this review. I heartily recommend it.
*
Monday 14 November 2022
Ethelred the Unready and the Norman Great-Reset
Yesterday, I watched Michael Wood's excellent 1981 documentary on Anglo-Saxon king Ethelred ("the Unready"; 966-1016); which crystallized a (more-than-) analogy between the imposition of "the Norman Yoke" on England from 1066.
Ethelred was a disastrously bad king. His posthumous and punning epithet "unready" actually translates to something like badly-counseled, with connotations of one who made many foolish, or even wicked, decisions; one of which was to simultaneously impoverish England and strengthen the Danish pirates, by truly enormous payments of Danegeld over many years (rather than organize, and fight the invaders)*.
Ethelred had inherited from illustrious ancestors, such as Alfred and Athelstan, an English Empire (i.e. of the Saxon Kingdoms such as Wessex, Mercia and Northumbria), which Wood describes as the wealthiest and most prestigious Kingship in Europe.
By Ethelred's death, the English nation had been substantially disunited and demoralized by decades of helpless rapine under rule of a spiteful, moody, feckless and cowardly king; and made vulnerable to the Norman conquest a couple of generations later.
Something I did not fully appreciate until relatively recently, was the way in which the Normans not only tyrannized England; but killed a very large proportion of its people (directly and indirectly), and destroyed its wealth. After William I; it took centuries before England was again wealthy, prosperous, and with her own high culture.
As I have written before; the Normans were motivated by an elitist disdain of the Anglo-Saxons, who were treated as pressed soldiers, servants and slaves at best; but were exiled, starved and killed in such numbers as severely to weaken the country.
Much of the North was reduced to depopulated desert, and the rich agricultural lands of the South was converted to semi-wild Forests; exclusively dedicated to the hunting-related recreations of the Norman Masters.
In this respect, as well as in ancestry, the Norman rule resembled the rapacious and destructive piracy of the worst of their Viking ancestors. And resembled too the attitudes and behaviours of the modern alien-cosmopolitan Establishment (many of whom have, and are overweeningly proud of, Norman ancestry).
When these alien pirates became England's kings and aristocrats; their twin priorities were absolute power on the one hand - with a network of garrisoned castles as the symbol; and on the other hand a short-termist, selfish, and pleasure-seeking attitude to the country and its people - which they regarded as booty of war.
Their Norman's 'problem', as usually happens with successful pirates, was squabbling over the loot. So that the country was rapidly and repeatedly riven by civil wars; motivated by the selfish power-seeking of the outsider-Lords; and which kept on killing people and dissipating England's innate economic advantages for generation after generation - for no better reason than the choice of whether to be oppressed by Norman de Tweedledum or Norman de Tweedledee...
The Great-Reset intends a strikingly-analogous economic destruction, depopulation - and conversion of the world (or, as much as possible) to wasteland and recreational territory intended for their exclusive use.
The modern excuses for this evil, selfish and net-destructive power/ pleasure grab are different and dishonest compared with the past: the Normans did not need or bother to justify their deliberate and strategic destruction of farming and industry, with agriculture repurposing to exclusively-accessed wilderness and forests in huge estates which the Establishment own, by anything equivalent to the modern elite's pseudo-environmentalism.
The Normans killed and starved the peasantry because they wanted-to and could, and because they regarded Saxons as inferior beings.
But our modern-Norman's pretend to be promoting 'global' public health, defending 'democracy', and preventing 'climate change' by doing so.
As in Norman times, the problem - but now over most of the world - is an alien and evil-motivated elite; who care nothing for the nations or the people they rule and administer; which they manipulate and torment.
Indeed the modern-Normans loathe all nations and peoples, as obstacles blocking them from their proximate and insatiable desire for ever-more power and loot.
Yet our modern, alien elites are far worse even than the Normans of England - not just in their scale and wealth; but because they are more advanced in their evil - and desire destruction for its own sake, rather than as a means to the ends of power and loot.
Our modern-Normans would make chaos everywhere, and pull-down the whole civilized world around themselves - even if it makes their own lives less pleasurable, and breaks their own structures of power.
But merely in order to demonstrate to themselves their own superiority; to enjoy their own callously-sadistic indifference to the planet and all creatures and plants on it.
Because the modern-Normans do not any more serve their own appetites; but serve a master who is of-spirit and not dependent on the material for survival; and who loathes all of God's creation - including, of course, his gullible and blinkered Norman servants.
*Note: Indeed; it is the many tens of thousands of silver coins with which the Danegeld was paid, time and again; that provides perhaps the most direct evidence of the pre-existing wealth of Etheldred's England.
Monday 19 February 2018
Everything is not enough... The forgotten insight of post-war radicalism
Colin Wilson recreates his summer living in a waterproof sleeping bag on Hampstead Heath, researching and writing The Outsider.
There was (among some people, for some time) a clear recognition that even-if modern society had everything that people aspired-to - abundance of stuff, ideally-distributed, advanced capability... peace, prosperity, comfort and adventure... It would not be enough. It would indeed be entirely, qualitatively inadequate.
This was a spiritual, a religious insight - and the insight and its nature can be seen in Colin Wilson's first two books - The Outsider (1956) and (even better) Religion and the Rebel (1957). Another example was the widely known and influential work of psychologist Abraham Maslow, and his increasing focus on spirituality and religion in later years.
Everybody knew that everything was not enough...
This core insight was not new - since it was essentially the same insight as Romanticism, almost 150 years before - but in the post-war period the insight became widely appreciated because the problem of production had been solved, poverty had been abolished (insofar is it could be), the nature of the situation was being experienced by many people for themselves, played out in their own lives and lives around them.
In the period since, the core insight has been lost and buried. The Left was turned from a concern with poverty mutating to existentialism - over to an envy-fuelled concern with inequality, a resentment-fuelled concern with identity, and an ever-mutating sexual hedonism rationalised by inequality and identity...
The mainstream secular 'Right' (including free marketeers and libertarians) was weaned-off religion and instead focused the on status-fuelled need for ever-more stuff, but stuff of the right kind; and the pride-fuelled need for domination at home and abroad.
The really-religious acted tactically (assuming the problem would be temporary) and doubled-down on the traditional and/or legalistic aspects of their churches - asif the Romantic insight had never happened, asif the existentialist insight into the human condition of modernity wasn't real.
To a truly amazing extent, half-a-century-plus since the existential unsatisfactoriness of modernity became a solid insight in the minds of modern people - the mainstream public official world continues asif the problems were still the same. There is an unreleting focus on poverty, hazards, lack - the world is depicted asif it was the pre-industrial world...
(And, indeed, such conditions are actively 'created' in the minds of people by a combination of dishonesty and active problem creation.)
By means of the ubiquitous mass/social media and the ubiquitous linked-bureaucracy, minds are kept firmly off the real problem - and fake priorities are substituted.
Yet normal Life is more Existentially Desolate then ever - as Thoreau said, but to a far greater extent: the mass of Men continue to lead lives of quiet desperation... But this time (because our metaphysical assumptions absolutely exclude it) with no hope, and no possibility of hope.
All this distraction, displacement, death of soul is no accident; all this was and is being strategically implemented; all this could swiftly be overturned in the minds of millions, If Only...
Saturday 10 February 2018
We (including Christians) need to fix our (implicit) metaphysics
A big problem, perhaps The problem, is that we have an incoherent metaphysics - that is, our basic assumptions are incoherent; or, at least, if all metaphysics is incoherent to some extent, ours is incoherent where metaphysics are most needed, where incoherence does the most damage.
Of course nobody wants to talk about, let alone think about, metaphysics - and especially their own metaphysical assumptions. I know that for a fact, and I don't know what can be done about it - but I need to sort out these matters for myself, and writing helps...
Fundamentally, we think of Things in terms of static categories (like A Being, Love and Creation) - but we ought to think of Things in terms of dynamic 'processes' (like Be-ing, Love-ing and Create-ing). We need a metaphysics that some have called 'polarity' - but this has proved almost impossible to explain, at least I have thus far failed to make it clear - probably due to the tendency to begin the explanation by stating categories...
I agree with Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner (as I interpret them) that a vital aspect of the work of Jesus Christ was, in some poorly understood and ill-defined sense, to divide History between a passive, unconscious mode of being BC, and the advent of (what was intended to be) an active and conscious mode of being AD.
For example, BC the idea of a Good life was strict obedience to external laws, rules, rituals (static categories) - whereas Christ brought the ideal of conscious agency, personal discernment, and and loving - all of which are active, dynamic (or polarities, if you prefer).
But mainstream Christianity made an unfortunate error in trying to assimilate the Christian message - which was one of radical metaphysical change - to the pre-existing systems of Greek and Roman Philosophy; leading to intractable contradictions and confusions, lack of understanding and clarity.
For example, if you understand agency/ free will as a category or Thing done by A Being - they you can't make any sense of it. But if you understanding it as a process done by an entity whose essence is Be-ing... then its importance and nature become clearer (or, would do, if this whole way of thinking was more less alien, familiar).
The problem is that no matter what mainstream 'static' Christianity asserts - in matters such as the reality of agency, or the primacy of Love - its deep structure contradicts. Mainstream Christian metaphysics cannot help but see Love as a static thing, maybe like a force or like a feeling; but working by a sort of attraction between categorical persons - because it envisages a reality that is, in essence and reality, eternal, unchanging, perfectly perfect.
It can be expressed in terms of Time. Mainstream Christianity and the near universal metaphysics of modernity regards Time in a static way as identical with a moment. In the Hindu/ Buddhist version, this means that any moment is exactly like any other moment and a microcosm of eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one who brought this into the Western mainstream explicitly, with this idea of a moment as an epiphany of all; Life being (ideally) known to be a series of such epiphanic moments - each moment equivalent. Strictly, such a moment takes zero time, it 'out-of Time' - so there is an equivalence between eternity and the instant. The ultimate goal is a Nirvana in which all change ceases, bliss reigns, and the only awareness is of this fixed state of bliss.
Well, that is one way of looking at it - but the other, is that we continue living and the epiphanic total-moment gets swept into our past, and the best we can hope for is another such moment, and another... Life then has no direction or goal, it is merely a sequence of instants...
This has been combined with an atheistic utilitarianism (Life conceptualised as being hedonic; about maximising pleasure and minimising suffering) - and descended into the modern West as an implicit (unconscious, unexamined, unacknowledged) metaphysics of Life as a series of atomistic, disconnected moments.
Each Life moment 'ought to be' as gratifying as possible - and each moment is on the one hand infinitely important (like the international firestorm that follows the use of a politically-incorrect taboo word or hate-fact) - yet also each moment is utterly insignificant because it is superseded by other moments, and there is zero continuity between the moments.
This is the modern metaphysic: on the one hand; our life is going nowhere and has no meaning because it is merely a sequence of isolated moments; therefore nothing matters, things don't add up, death is merely a cessation to this arbitrary sequence. On the other hand; nothing can be or is more important than each moment, than This moment - and nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of alleviating momentary suffering or enabling and maximising momentary pleasure.
Most 'mainstream' Christians (in the main denominations) would acknowledge that the modern metaphysics is bad; but would not acknowledge that their own metaphysics shares exactly the same problems and is at-war-with Jesus's teaching and indeed cosmic effect on Man and Reality.
But I see this all the time, in contradictions, complexities and 'mysteries' that Christianity is obliged to introduce to distract from this deep problem. Of course the deep problem - the fundamental contradiction - is not solved; but people are typically sufficiently confused and distracted to assume that it has been solved.
When the problem is simple, yet the supposed answer is complex - people generally assume that the answer is true but they haven't really understood it. Or they may assume that their understanding of the problem was 'simplistic. However such a situation is basically-unsatisfactory and - over time - has been a weak point probed and exploited by those hostile to Christianity.
In sum, the Christian responses to the problems such Free Will the Problem of Pain/ existence of evil, the 'virtuous Pagan' problem - caused by the universality of Christ's message contrasted with the extreme geographical and temporal restriction of the scripture, the church and its personnel, or any specific denomination; the need for developmental-evolutionary change of Men (theosis) - the weakness of the answers strikes the outsider as evasive failures.
Mainstream Christianity has failed metaphysically to reconcile many key aspects of the implicit nature of Jesus's life and teaching with the explicit explanations of it. The resulting dissatisfaction has - overall - led to an incremental 'liberalism' that merely masks apostasy and has gradually subordinated Christianity to prevalent secular norms - which are themselves metaphysically even-less coherent than the flawed understanding of Christianity they presume to replace!
I see all this in terms of the working-out of error through time, in which early errors become every larger and more obvious in their incoherent and false consequences. Looking around the modern Western world at the mainstream secular hedonism and its religious including Christian alternative, I see nothing that gets-right what really needs to be got right at an explicit metaphysical level.
But knowing that there is something seriously wrong does not tell us what is wrong nor how to set it right...
My contention is that the surface wrongness lies very deep in the metaphysical assumptions, and that there is an alternative tradition of Christian metaphysics based in a developmental-evolutionary and dynamic state of assumptions - still lacking a lucid account - which, once habitual, either solves or dissolves these hitherto intractable problems.
This sounds awfully complex itself - but in fact the real Christian metaphysics can be expressed so simply that a child can comprehend it; because is the metaphysics of God's created Reality as composed entirely of living Beings.
(Including parts or components of beings - which is how many mineral entities can be understood; not whole Beings of themselves, but all parts of some living Being. e.g. A mountain may be a Being, a grain of soil probably is not.)
In brief, metaphysically we need to return to something very like the simple transforming animism of early childhood and early Man. Everything that is, is 'alive' and 'conscious' in the sense of being intrinsically dynamic, purposive, growing-destined - and related (by love-ing) to everything else created and to the creator.
On such a basis a Christian life may be led, and understood consciously, and pursued with agency.
Of course, even when metaphysics is coherent where it needs to be, the great challenges of mortal life remain - right metaphysics only gives us the correct starting-point and the understanding necessary to know that we have a purpose and it s nature. It is up to each of us to pursue that purpose, as it affects us each specifically and uniquely.
Of course nobody wants to talk about, let alone think about, metaphysics - and especially their own metaphysical assumptions. I know that for a fact, and I don't know what can be done about it - but I need to sort out these matters for myself, and writing helps...
Fundamentally, we think of Things in terms of static categories (like A Being, Love and Creation) - but we ought to think of Things in terms of dynamic 'processes' (like Be-ing, Love-ing and Create-ing). We need a metaphysics that some have called 'polarity' - but this has proved almost impossible to explain, at least I have thus far failed to make it clear - probably due to the tendency to begin the explanation by stating categories...
I agree with Owen Barfield and Rudolf Steiner (as I interpret them) that a vital aspect of the work of Jesus Christ was, in some poorly understood and ill-defined sense, to divide History between a passive, unconscious mode of being BC, and the advent of (what was intended to be) an active and conscious mode of being AD.
For example, BC the idea of a Good life was strict obedience to external laws, rules, rituals (static categories) - whereas Christ brought the ideal of conscious agency, personal discernment, and and loving - all of which are active, dynamic (or polarities, if you prefer).
But mainstream Christianity made an unfortunate error in trying to assimilate the Christian message - which was one of radical metaphysical change - to the pre-existing systems of Greek and Roman Philosophy; leading to intractable contradictions and confusions, lack of understanding and clarity.
For example, if you understand agency/ free will as a category or Thing done by A Being - they you can't make any sense of it. But if you understanding it as a process done by an entity whose essence is Be-ing... then its importance and nature become clearer (or, would do, if this whole way of thinking was more less alien, familiar).
The problem is that no matter what mainstream 'static' Christianity asserts - in matters such as the reality of agency, or the primacy of Love - its deep structure contradicts. Mainstream Christian metaphysics cannot help but see Love as a static thing, maybe like a force or like a feeling; but working by a sort of attraction between categorical persons - because it envisages a reality that is, in essence and reality, eternal, unchanging, perfectly perfect.
It can be expressed in terms of Time. Mainstream Christianity and the near universal metaphysics of modernity regards Time in a static way as identical with a moment. In the Hindu/ Buddhist version, this means that any moment is exactly like any other moment and a microcosm of eternity.
Ralph Waldo Emerson was one who brought this into the Western mainstream explicitly, with this idea of a moment as an epiphany of all; Life being (ideally) known to be a series of such epiphanic moments - each moment equivalent. Strictly, such a moment takes zero time, it 'out-of Time' - so there is an equivalence between eternity and the instant. The ultimate goal is a Nirvana in which all change ceases, bliss reigns, and the only awareness is of this fixed state of bliss.
Well, that is one way of looking at it - but the other, is that we continue living and the epiphanic total-moment gets swept into our past, and the best we can hope for is another such moment, and another... Life then has no direction or goal, it is merely a sequence of instants...
This has been combined with an atheistic utilitarianism (Life conceptualised as being hedonic; about maximising pleasure and minimising suffering) - and descended into the modern West as an implicit (unconscious, unexamined, unacknowledged) metaphysics of Life as a series of atomistic, disconnected moments.
Each Life moment 'ought to be' as gratifying as possible - and each moment is on the one hand infinitely important (like the international firestorm that follows the use of a politically-incorrect taboo word or hate-fact) - yet also each moment is utterly insignificant because it is superseded by other moments, and there is zero continuity between the moments.
This is the modern metaphysic: on the one hand; our life is going nowhere and has no meaning because it is merely a sequence of isolated moments; therefore nothing matters, things don't add up, death is merely a cessation to this arbitrary sequence. On the other hand; nothing can be or is more important than each moment, than This moment - and nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of alleviating momentary suffering or enabling and maximising momentary pleasure.
Most 'mainstream' Christians (in the main denominations) would acknowledge that the modern metaphysics is bad; but would not acknowledge that their own metaphysics shares exactly the same problems and is at-war-with Jesus's teaching and indeed cosmic effect on Man and Reality.
But I see this all the time, in contradictions, complexities and 'mysteries' that Christianity is obliged to introduce to distract from this deep problem. Of course the deep problem - the fundamental contradiction - is not solved; but people are typically sufficiently confused and distracted to assume that it has been solved.
When the problem is simple, yet the supposed answer is complex - people generally assume that the answer is true but they haven't really understood it. Or they may assume that their understanding of the problem was 'simplistic. However such a situation is basically-unsatisfactory and - over time - has been a weak point probed and exploited by those hostile to Christianity.
In sum, the Christian responses to the problems such Free Will the Problem of Pain/ existence of evil, the 'virtuous Pagan' problem - caused by the universality of Christ's message contrasted with the extreme geographical and temporal restriction of the scripture, the church and its personnel, or any specific denomination; the need for developmental-evolutionary change of Men (theosis) - the weakness of the answers strikes the outsider as evasive failures.
Mainstream Christianity has failed metaphysically to reconcile many key aspects of the implicit nature of Jesus's life and teaching with the explicit explanations of it. The resulting dissatisfaction has - overall - led to an incremental 'liberalism' that merely masks apostasy and has gradually subordinated Christianity to prevalent secular norms - which are themselves metaphysically even-less coherent than the flawed understanding of Christianity they presume to replace!
I see all this in terms of the working-out of error through time, in which early errors become every larger and more obvious in their incoherent and false consequences. Looking around the modern Western world at the mainstream secular hedonism and its religious including Christian alternative, I see nothing that gets-right what really needs to be got right at an explicit metaphysical level.
But knowing that there is something seriously wrong does not tell us what is wrong nor how to set it right...
My contention is that the surface wrongness lies very deep in the metaphysical assumptions, and that there is an alternative tradition of Christian metaphysics based in a developmental-evolutionary and dynamic state of assumptions - still lacking a lucid account - which, once habitual, either solves or dissolves these hitherto intractable problems.
This sounds awfully complex itself - but in fact the real Christian metaphysics can be expressed so simply that a child can comprehend it; because is the metaphysics of God's created Reality as composed entirely of living Beings.
(Including parts or components of beings - which is how many mineral entities can be understood; not whole Beings of themselves, but all parts of some living Being. e.g. A mountain may be a Being, a grain of soil probably is not.)
In brief, metaphysically we need to return to something very like the simple transforming animism of early childhood and early Man. Everything that is, is 'alive' and 'conscious' in the sense of being intrinsically dynamic, purposive, growing-destined - and related (by love-ing) to everything else created and to the creator.
On such a basis a Christian life may be led, and understood consciously, and pursued with agency.
Of course, even when metaphysics is coherent where it needs to be, the great challenges of mortal life remain - right metaphysics only gives us the correct starting-point and the understanding necessary to know that we have a purpose and it s nature. It is up to each of us to pursue that purpose, as it affects us each specifically and uniquely.
Tuesday 23 May 2017
Illiterate, tribal Christianity - The Outsider's utopian hope for society and politics - The Outsider's Handbook and Pocket Companion
Past Outsiders have been blocked and trapped by their assumptions: primarily by their belief that Christianity was superseded. This is an error: the future is Christian; and the only relevant question is Christianity of what kind?
In terms of the desired social changes - Outsiders have lacked ambition and radicalism - hopes have seldom been more than keeping society in its basic nature but wanting to make more niches for Outsiders such as themselves - and, of course, according a higher status to Outsiders...
But a society based upon the creative and self-motivated individual would need to be utterly different from any society since the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago.
Indeed, a society based on the aptitudes and destinies of individuals would need to be a tribal and familial society - in basic form much like those of hunter-gatherers.
Such a society is the only type which can be natural and spontaneous, which can avoid the alienation inextricable from complex social organisation - specialisation, coercion, planning: fitting people into pre-decided roles...
The difference is that the original hunter gatherer type societies are largely un-conscious; lacking in awareness of their knowledge. Such societies are similar to the life of early childhood in the way that tradition is simply accepted, society is accepted, morality is accepted... indeed such things are not consciously known, there is no awareness of 'religion' or 'law' - for example - these are simply how life is done...
But a future society which would fulfil the hope of Outsiders would - inevitably - be aware of its behaviours; including that all behaviours are partly-given and partly-chosen - that is: humans participate in creating the meaning and purpose of Life.
In effect, the future (the intended or destined future) is that we return to the same kind of spontaneous and natural way of living as in the simplest early societies - yet with the enhanced awareness, knowledge and participation of fully agent individuals.
(Children and hunter gatherers are hardly aware of themselves as distinct from their societies - but human destiny is to be conscious agents; so the future is of living in 'tradition' as it happens quite naturally, with full awareness and by choice.)
Such a society is not likely to be literate - nor is it likely to have a priesthood - nor rituals; no churches or temples - and presumably no scriptures.
We need to be able to imagine a Christianity which is orally-transmitted; indeed more than this. We should recall that there are immaterial, non-sensory modes of communication; and Christianity can and should be known by such ways (if or when we lived in a higher state of consciousness).
Christ was a fact, a cosmic fact, a living fact - he changed everything, forever...
Therefore, Christ can be known without scripture, and without us being told about him - he can be known directly, and in a way fully adequate to the needs of a Christian life.
If/ when such a time arrives when Men have developed their consciousness to a level that we can simply perceive reality; we will be able to know Christ (rather than merely know-about him). Such a Christianity might be very simple, in some respects perhaps fluid; yet it could be true in all necessary respects, and of immense personal power, because fully experienced.
The Outsider therefore needs to be able to think, to imagine, beyond beyond complexity, organisation, specialisation, books, plans and fixed institutions... beyond what we take for granted (and which will, indeed, be necessary and beneficial for a long time to come, very probably).
We cannot, therefore, root our ultimate convictions in things that may be contingent upon particular and temporary types of civilisation - when the future may well undo civilisation - as something which has served its purpose; and must give-way to higher and better things.
In terms of the desired social changes - Outsiders have lacked ambition and radicalism - hopes have seldom been more than keeping society in its basic nature but wanting to make more niches for Outsiders such as themselves - and, of course, according a higher status to Outsiders...
But a society based upon the creative and self-motivated individual would need to be utterly different from any society since the agricultural revolution about 12,000 years ago.
Indeed, a society based on the aptitudes and destinies of individuals would need to be a tribal and familial society - in basic form much like those of hunter-gatherers.
Such a society is the only type which can be natural and spontaneous, which can avoid the alienation inextricable from complex social organisation - specialisation, coercion, planning: fitting people into pre-decided roles...
The difference is that the original hunter gatherer type societies are largely un-conscious; lacking in awareness of their knowledge. Such societies are similar to the life of early childhood in the way that tradition is simply accepted, society is accepted, morality is accepted... indeed such things are not consciously known, there is no awareness of 'religion' or 'law' - for example - these are simply how life is done...
But a future society which would fulfil the hope of Outsiders would - inevitably - be aware of its behaviours; including that all behaviours are partly-given and partly-chosen - that is: humans participate in creating the meaning and purpose of Life.
In effect, the future (the intended or destined future) is that we return to the same kind of spontaneous and natural way of living as in the simplest early societies - yet with the enhanced awareness, knowledge and participation of fully agent individuals.
(Children and hunter gatherers are hardly aware of themselves as distinct from their societies - but human destiny is to be conscious agents; so the future is of living in 'tradition' as it happens quite naturally, with full awareness and by choice.)
Such a society is not likely to be literate - nor is it likely to have a priesthood - nor rituals; no churches or temples - and presumably no scriptures.
We need to be able to imagine a Christianity which is orally-transmitted; indeed more than this. We should recall that there are immaterial, non-sensory modes of communication; and Christianity can and should be known by such ways (if or when we lived in a higher state of consciousness).
Christ was a fact, a cosmic fact, a living fact - he changed everything, forever...
Therefore, Christ can be known without scripture, and without us being told about him - he can be known directly, and in a way fully adequate to the needs of a Christian life.
If/ when such a time arrives when Men have developed their consciousness to a level that we can simply perceive reality; we will be able to know Christ (rather than merely know-about him). Such a Christianity might be very simple, in some respects perhaps fluid; yet it could be true in all necessary respects, and of immense personal power, because fully experienced.
The Outsider therefore needs to be able to think, to imagine, beyond beyond complexity, organisation, specialisation, books, plans and fixed institutions... beyond what we take for granted (and which will, indeed, be necessary and beneficial for a long time to come, very probably).
We cannot, therefore, root our ultimate convictions in things that may be contingent upon particular and temporary types of civilisation - when the future may well undo civilisation - as something which has served its purpose; and must give-way to higher and better things.
Monday 14 March 2016
Colin Wilson's existential criticism - its validity and limitations
I came across Colin Wilson's The Outsider (first published 1956) at the age of nineteen, and was astonished and delighted to find for the very first time someone grappling directly with what I found to be the main problem in life.
The Outsider set the pattern for most of Wilson's books in being constructed around multiple biographical summaries, woven about with essayistic passages of criticism, analysis and manifesto. I went on to read many others of Wilson's books of this type.
As I read, I would be in state of excitement, with a feeling of being just about to cross a threshold, achieve understanding, and transform my life for the better - but it never actually happened (indeed, overall, my life was getting worse - my character closing and coarsening).
What usually happens in these Existentialist books of Wilson's is that he will take a writer, artist, philosopher or some such person - and discuss his life and work from the perspective of their understanding of questions such as 'What is life really worth? What can be got out of life by a man with no material worries and no obligations to fulfil?' [Reference is to The Strength to Dream section on HG Wells.]
I still agree that this is among the most fundamental of questions. The revealed preference of mainstream modern people can be seen in what they actually do when in this situation of having no material worries and no obligations to fulfil: they create material worries (by their compulsion to spend so much money) and they create obligations (by keeping themselves 'busy' and boasting about it).
Material sufficiency for almost everyone has been available in The West for more than 60 years; but instead of leading to an increase in existential, spiritual, religious living - it has fuelled a shallowing and trivializing of life by entertainment, distraction and busyness - necessitating a continually increasing surplus beyond sufficiency and driving yet more material worries and obligations.
But having raised such an important question, and having decided to tackle it by a new, and more optimistic, existentialism; Wilson never really came much closer to solving it than in his second 'outsider' book - Religion and the Rebel (1957), where he considered and rejected Christianity.
Wilson had, indeed, created an insoluble puzzle for himself, as can be seen from a comment at the end of Strength To Dream when he calls-for an existential literary criticism. He describes TS Eliot's earlier attempt to create an existential criticism in After Strange Gods as a failure because Eliot refused to discuss the basis of his religious convictions and therefore made his criticisms from the basis of a 'deliberately mystifying dogmatism'.
What Wilson is therefore asking-for is an impossibility - an existential criticism which is also turned-upon-itself. Because all criticism must be from a standpoint or perspective, and if criticism cannot be allowed to proceed until that standpoint or perspective has itself been critiqued, then nothing will ever be accomplished - since no assumptions have been allowed, and any assumption must first be justified - which can only be done by calling on some other assumption/s - which is itself then open to challenge. It is an infinite regress.
This brings me to my understanding of why Wilson never got further with his existentialism than a brilliant diagnosis of the noble failure of other thinkers -- because he denied the reality of a perspective outside of human life. At the bottom line, all deep thinkers are a failure from the perspective of answering 'what is life really worth/' - because they all died.
Mortality - along with the other related problems such as suffering, limited ability, disease, decay - puts an end to all pretensions to have solved Life.
Wilson perceived this to a limited extent, in taking up GB Shaw's fascination with extended human life (eg 300 years) - but more-of-the-same does not solve anything, really - just puts it off. So long as we know we will die and our perspective acknowledges only this mortal life, then we are stuck.
The answer is, of course (as presumably TS Eliot perceived) that we should not be trying to answer the question of the meaning of life from a perspective restricted to mortal life - but from a larger perspective which encompasses mortal life.
In a nutshell, this perspective can only derive from divine revelation - or else we are back inside the infinite regress.
Mortal life can be understood, and its success evaluated, only in light of a perspective which is outside mortal life, which sees it as a whole, and judges it in terms of what lies outside of mortal life. An existential criticism which denies, as a metaphysical assumption, the reality of a wider frame for mortal life, has set itself a formally, necessarily, insoluble problem.
We may term another person's metaphysical assumptions a 'mystifying dogmatism' but that is facile; because it can always be said about any fundamental, bottom-line belief with which we disagree.
The reason that I was never able to get across the line from my excitement with Wilson's defining of the fundamental question, and exploring the possible answers, was that I too (for three decades) shared this 'anything-but-religion' assumption - and saw Christianity as an evasion, a cop-out, a false answer; rather than being the only and necessary answer.
The Outsider set the pattern for most of Wilson's books in being constructed around multiple biographical summaries, woven about with essayistic passages of criticism, analysis and manifesto. I went on to read many others of Wilson's books of this type.
As I read, I would be in state of excitement, with a feeling of being just about to cross a threshold, achieve understanding, and transform my life for the better - but it never actually happened (indeed, overall, my life was getting worse - my character closing and coarsening).
What usually happens in these Existentialist books of Wilson's is that he will take a writer, artist, philosopher or some such person - and discuss his life and work from the perspective of their understanding of questions such as 'What is life really worth? What can be got out of life by a man with no material worries and no obligations to fulfil?' [Reference is to The Strength to Dream section on HG Wells.]
I still agree that this is among the most fundamental of questions. The revealed preference of mainstream modern people can be seen in what they actually do when in this situation of having no material worries and no obligations to fulfil: they create material worries (by their compulsion to spend so much money) and they create obligations (by keeping themselves 'busy' and boasting about it).
Material sufficiency for almost everyone has been available in The West for more than 60 years; but instead of leading to an increase in existential, spiritual, religious living - it has fuelled a shallowing and trivializing of life by entertainment, distraction and busyness - necessitating a continually increasing surplus beyond sufficiency and driving yet more material worries and obligations.
But having raised such an important question, and having decided to tackle it by a new, and more optimistic, existentialism; Wilson never really came much closer to solving it than in his second 'outsider' book - Religion and the Rebel (1957), where he considered and rejected Christianity.
Wilson had, indeed, created an insoluble puzzle for himself, as can be seen from a comment at the end of Strength To Dream when he calls-for an existential literary criticism. He describes TS Eliot's earlier attempt to create an existential criticism in After Strange Gods as a failure because Eliot refused to discuss the basis of his religious convictions and therefore made his criticisms from the basis of a 'deliberately mystifying dogmatism'.
What Wilson is therefore asking-for is an impossibility - an existential criticism which is also turned-upon-itself. Because all criticism must be from a standpoint or perspective, and if criticism cannot be allowed to proceed until that standpoint or perspective has itself been critiqued, then nothing will ever be accomplished - since no assumptions have been allowed, and any assumption must first be justified - which can only be done by calling on some other assumption/s - which is itself then open to challenge. It is an infinite regress.
This brings me to my understanding of why Wilson never got further with his existentialism than a brilliant diagnosis of the noble failure of other thinkers -- because he denied the reality of a perspective outside of human life. At the bottom line, all deep thinkers are a failure from the perspective of answering 'what is life really worth/' - because they all died.
Mortality - along with the other related problems such as suffering, limited ability, disease, decay - puts an end to all pretensions to have solved Life.
Wilson perceived this to a limited extent, in taking up GB Shaw's fascination with extended human life (eg 300 years) - but more-of-the-same does not solve anything, really - just puts it off. So long as we know we will die and our perspective acknowledges only this mortal life, then we are stuck.
The answer is, of course (as presumably TS Eliot perceived) that we should not be trying to answer the question of the meaning of life from a perspective restricted to mortal life - but from a larger perspective which encompasses mortal life.
In a nutshell, this perspective can only derive from divine revelation - or else we are back inside the infinite regress.
Mortal life can be understood, and its success evaluated, only in light of a perspective which is outside mortal life, which sees it as a whole, and judges it in terms of what lies outside of mortal life. An existential criticism which denies, as a metaphysical assumption, the reality of a wider frame for mortal life, has set itself a formally, necessarily, insoluble problem.
We may term another person's metaphysical assumptions a 'mystifying dogmatism' but that is facile; because it can always be said about any fundamental, bottom-line belief with which we disagree.
The reason that I was never able to get across the line from my excitement with Wilson's defining of the fundamental question, and exploring the possible answers, was that I too (for three decades) shared this 'anything-but-religion' assumption - and saw Christianity as an evasion, a cop-out, a false answer; rather than being the only and necessary answer.
Wednesday 9 August 2017
William James (in 1909) on the fundamental problems of mainstream classical Christian theology
In this passage, from A Pluralistic Universe, of 1909, a set of lectures by the most eminent of US philosophers William James, expresses very exactly my own view of what is fundamentally wrong with the normal mainstream Christian philosophy. It is telling that these remarks come from a century ago; and of course such matters have become much clearer and more extreme since then.
On the surface level, it is for such reasons that Western culture will not, indeed cannot, go back to traditional forms of Christianity; but the deeper reason is that Man's consciousness has changed, has developed according to divine destiny; and Christians need to - and eventually they will - attain a basic (metaphysical) understanding which reflects this changed consciousness.
**
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as 'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.
Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view; but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough—for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.
The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'—that is the orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.
From A Pluralistic Universe by William James, 1909 Available at Project Gutenberg.
On the surface level, it is for such reasons that Western culture will not, indeed cannot, go back to traditional forms of Christianity; but the deeper reason is that Man's consciousness has changed, has developed according to divine destiny; and Christians need to - and eventually they will - attain a basic (metaphysical) understanding which reflects this changed consciousness.
**
The generic term spiritualism, which I began by using merely as the opposite of materialism, thus subdivides into two species, the more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic. The dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy, while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism, and sometimes as 'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism. Dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning, whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities, and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised. I have an impression that ever since T.H. Green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at Oxford. It is in the ascendent at my own university of Harvard.
Absolute idealism attains, I said, to the more intimate point of view; but the statement needs some explanation. So far as theism represents the world as God's world, and God as what Matthew Arnold called a magnified non-natural man, it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human, and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough—for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves, and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species. So far, so good, then; and one might consequently ask, What more of intimacy do you require? To which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it, to form one continuous soul and body with it; and that pantheistic idealism, making us entitatively one with God, attains this higher reach of intimacy.
The theistic conception, picturing God and his creation as entities distinct from each other, still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe. God is from eternity complete, it says, and sufficient unto himself; he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance, and he throws off man as a third substance, extraneous to both the world and himself. Between them, God says 'one,' the world says 'two,' and man says 'three,'—that is the orthodox theistic view. And orthodox theism has been so jealous of God's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness. Page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that God is in no sense implicated by his creative act, or involved in his creation. That his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him, carry any consequence, or qualify his being, is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness. I said a moment ago that theism treats us and God as of the same species, but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language. God and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology, they have absolutely nothing in common; nay, it degrades God to attribute to him any generic nature whatever; he can be classed with nothing. There is a sense, then, in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to God, in which, at any rate, his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal. His action can affect us, but he can never be affected by our reaction. Our relation, in short, is not a strictly social relation. Of course in common men's religion the relation is believed to be social, but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology.
This essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences. Man being an outsider and a mere subject to God, not his intimate partner, a character of externality invades the field. God is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason, but our magistrate, rather; and mechanically to obey his commands, however strange they may be, remains our only moral duty. Conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him. Our relations with speculative truth show the same externality. One of our duties is to know truth, and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty. But in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help, complete apart from our knowing; and the most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it, altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to. The situation here again is radically dualistic. It is not as if the world came to know itself, or God came to know himself, partly through us, as pantheistic idealists have maintained, but truth exists per se and absolutely, by God's grace and decree, no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant, and it would continue to exist unaltered, even though we finite knowers were all annihilated.
It has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on Christian thought. Orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons, on the one hand, and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism, on the other, kept producing. God as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception than God as external creator. So conceived, he appeared to unify the world more perfectly, he made it less finite and mechanical, and in comparison with such a God an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy. I have been told by Hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of Christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of creation. It has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even the illiterate natives of India.
Assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with Hinduism in this matter. Those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of intellectual climate, due to innumerable influences, that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men. The theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors, with its finite age of the world, its creation out of nothing, its juridical morality and eschatology, its relish for rewards and punishments, its treatment of God as an external contriver, an 'intelligent and moral governor,' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion.
From A Pluralistic Universe by William James, 1909 Available at Project Gutenberg.
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