I try to wear my archdruid’s hat lightly in these essays,
but every so often I field questions that touch directly on the issues of
ultimate meaning that our culture, however clumsily, classifies as “religious.”
Two comments in response to the
post here two weeks ago raised such issues, in a way that’s relevant
enough to this series of posts and important enough to the broader project of
this blog to demand a response.
One of them—tip of the aforementioned archdruid’s hat to
Repent—asked, “As a Druid, what are your thoughts about divine purpose,
reincarnation, and our purpose in the eyes of God? What do you think future
‘ecotechnic’ societies have yet to achieve that will be worthwhile to pursue,
that our descendants should suffer through the dark age towards?” The other—tip
of the hat to Yupped—asked, “What do you do if you see the big picture of
what’s happening around you? How did those early adopters of decline in other
collapsing societies maintain their sanity when they knew what was coming? I
don’t think I have the mind or the temperament to tell myself stories about the
transcendent meaning of suffering in an age of social collapse.”
Those are serious questions, and questions like them are
being raised more and more often these days, on this blog and in a great many
other places as well. People are beginning to come to grips with the fact that
they can no longer count on faith in limitless technological progress to give
them an easy answer to the enduring questions of human existence. As they do that, they’re also having to
confront those questions all over again, and finding out in the process that
the solution that modern industrial civilization claimed to offer for those
same questions was never actually a solution at all.
Psychologists have a concept they call “provisional living.”
That’s the insistence, so often heard from people whose lives are stuck on a
dysfunctional merry-go-round of self-inflicted crisis, that everything they
don’t like about their lives will change just as soon as something else
happens: as soon as they lose twenty pounds, get a divorce, quit their lousy
job, or what have you. Of course the weight never goes away, the divorce papers
never get filed, and so on, because the point of the exercise is to allow
daydreams of an imaginary life in which they get everything they think they
want take the place of the hard work and hard choices inseparable from personal
change in the real world. What provisional living offers the individual
neurotic, in turn, faith in the inevitability and beneficence of progress
offers industrial society as a whole—or, more precisely, faith in progress used
to offer that, back when the promises made in its name didn’t yet look quite so
threadbare as they do today.
There was always a massive political subtext in those
promises. The poor were encouraged to
believe that technological progress will someday generate so much wealth that
their children and grandchildren will be rich; the sick and dying, to dream
about a future where medical progress will make every disease curable; the
oppressed, to hope for a day when social progress will grant everyone the fair
treatment they can’t reliably get here and now, and so on. Meanwhile, and
crucially, members of the privileged classes who became uncomfortable the
mismatch between industrial civilization’s glittering rhetoric and its tawdry
reality were encouraged to see that mismatch as a passing phase that will be
swept away by progress at some undefined point in the future, and thus to limit
their efforts to change the system to the sort of well-meaning gestures that
don’t seriously inconvenience the status quo.
As real as the political subtext was, it’s a mistake to see
the myth of progress purely as a matter of propaganda. During the heyday of
industrialism, that myth was devoutly believed by a great many people, at all
points along the social spectrum, many of whom saw it as the best chance they had
for positive change. Faith in progress was a social fact of vast importance,
one that shaped the lives of individuals, communities, and nations. The hope of
upward mobility that inspired the poor to tolerate the often grueling
conditions of their lives, the dream of better living through technology that
kept the middle classes laboring at the treadmill, the visions of human destiny
that channeled creative minds into the service of existing institutions—these were real and
powerful forces in their day, and drew on high hopes and noble ideals as well
as less exalted motives.
The problem that we face now is precisely that those hopes
and dreams and visions have passed their pull date. With each passing year,
more people have noticed the widening gap between the future we were supposed
to get and the one that’s actually been delivered to our doorstep; with each
passing year, the voices raised in defense of the old rhetoric of perpetual
progress get more defensive, and the once-sparkling imagery they offer for our
contemplation looks more and more shopworn. One by one, we are waking up in a
cold and unfamiliar place, and the gray light of morning does not bring us good
news.
It would be hard enough to face the difficult future ahead
of us if we came to the present moment out of an era of sober realism and close
attention to the hard facts of the human condition. It’s far harder to find
ourselves where we are when that forces us to own up to the hard fact that
we’ve been lying to ourselves for three hundred years. Disillusionment is a
bitter pill at the best of times. When
the illusion that’s just been shattered has been telling us that the future is
obliged to conform to our fondest fantasies, whatever those happen to be, it’s
no wonder that it’s as unwelcome as it is.
Bitter though the pill may be, though, it’s got to be choked
down, and like the bitter medicines of an earlier day, it has a tonic effect.
Come to terms with the fact that faith in progress was always destined to be
disappointed, that the law of diminishing returns and the hard limits of
thermodynamics made the dream of endless guaranteed betterment a delusion—an
appealing delusion, but a delusion all the same—and after the shock wears off,
you’ll find yourself standing on common ground shared with the rest of your
species, asking questions that they asked and answered in their time.
Most of the people who have ever lived, it bears
remembering, had no expectation that the future would be any better than the
world that they saw around them. The majority of them assumed as a matter of
course that the future would be much like the present, while quite a few of
them believed instead that it would be worse.
Down through the generations, they faced the normal human condition of
poverty, sickness, toil, grief, injustice, and the inevitability of their own
deaths, and still found life sufficiently worth living to meet the challenges
of making a living, raising families, and facing each day as it came.
That’s normal for our species. Buying into a fantasy that insists that the
universe is under an obligation to fulfill your daydreams is not. Get past that
fantasy, and past the shock of disillusionment that follows its departure, and
it’s not actually that difficult to make sense of a world that doesn’t progress
and shows no interest in remaking itself to fit an overdeveloped sense of human
entitlement. The downside is that you have to give up any attempt to smuggle
the same fantasy back into your mind under some other name or form, and when
some such belief system has been central to the worldview of your culture for
the last three centuries or so, it’s always tempting to find some way to
retrieve the fantasy. Still, falling in with that temptation just lands you back where you were, waiting
for a future the universe is serenely unwilling to provide.
It’s probably worth noting that you also have to give up the
equal and opposite fantasy that claims that the universe is under an obligation
to fulfill a different set of daydreams, the kind that involves the
annihilation of everything you don’t like in the universe, whether or not that
includes yourself. That’s simply another way of playing the game of provisional
living: “I don’t have to do anything because X is supposed to happen (and it
won’t)” amounts in practice to the same thing as “I won’t do anything until X
happens (and it won’t)”—that is to say, it’s just one more comfortable evasion
of responsibility.
There are more constructive ways to deal with the decidedly
mixed bag that human existence hands us. If I may risk a significant
oversimplification, there are broadly speaking three ways that work. It so
happens that the ancient Greeks, who grappled just as incisively with these
issues as they did with so much else, evolved three schools of philosophy, each
of which took one of these three ways as its central theme. They weren’t the
only ones to do that in a thoughtful fashion; those of my readers who know
their way around the history of ideas will be able to name any number of
examples from other societies and other ages.
I propose to use Greek examples here simply because they’re the schools
with which I’m most familiar. As Charles Fort said, one traces a circle
beginning anywhere.
The first of the three approaches I have in mind starts with
the realization that for most of us, all things considered, being alive beats
the stuffing out of the alternative. While life contains plenty of sources of
misery, it also contains no shortage of delights, even when today’s absurdly
complex technostructure isn’t there to provide them; furthermore, the mind that
pays close attention to its own experiences will soon notice that a fairly
large percentage of its miseries are self-inflicted, born of pointless worrying
about future troubles or vain brooding over past regrets. Unlearn those habits,
stop insisting that life is horrible because it isn’t perfect, and it’s
generally not too hard to learn to enjoy the very real pleasures that life has
to offer and to tolerate its less pleasant features with reasonable grace.
That’s the approach taught by Epicurus, the founder of the
Epicurean school of philosophy in ancient Greece. It’s also the foundation of
what William James called the healthy-minded way of thinking, the sort of calm
realism you so often see in people who’ve been through hard times and come out
the other side in one piece. Just now, it’s a very difficult philosophy for
many people in the world’s industrial nations to take up, precisely because
most of us haven’t been through hard times; we’ve been through an age of
extravagance and excess, and like most people in that position, we’re finding
the letdown at the party’s end far more difficult to deal with than any actual
suffering we might be facing. Get past that common reaction, and the Epicurean
way has much to offer.
If it has a weakness, it’s that attending to the good things
in life can be very hard work when those good things are in short supply.
That’s when the second approach comes into its own. It starts from the realization that whether life is good or not,
here we are, and we each have to choose how we’re going to respond to that
stark fact. The same unlearning that shows the Epicurean to avoid
self-inflicted misery is a first step, a clearing of the decks that makes room
for the decisions that matter, but once this is taken care of, the next step is
to face up to the fact that there are plenty of things in the world that could
and should be changed, if only someone were willing to get up off the sofa and
make the effort required. The second approach thus becomes a philosophy of
action, and when action requires risking one’s life—and in really hard times,
it very often does—those who embrace the second approach very often find
themselves saying, “Well, what of it? I’m going to die sooner or later anyway.”
That’s the approach taught by Zeno, the founder of the Stoic
school of philosophy in ancient Greece. It’s among the most common ways of
thought in dark ages, sometimes worked out as a philosophy, sometimes expressed
in pure action: the ethos of the Spartans and the samurai. That way of thinking
about life is taken to its logical extreme in the literature of the pagan
Teutonic peoples: you will die, says the Elder Edda, the world will die, even
the gods will die, and none of that matters. All that
matters is doing the right thing, because it’s the right thing, and because
you’ve learned to embrace the certainty of your death and so don’t have to
worry about anything but doing the right thing.
Now of course the same choice can express itself in less
stark forms. Every one of my readers who’s had the experience of doing
something inconvenient or unpleasant just because it’s the right thing to do
has some sense of how that works, and why.
In a civilization on the downward arc, there are many inconvenient or
unpleasant things that very badly need to be done, and choosing one of them and
doing it is a remarkably effective response to the feelings of meaninglessness
and helplessness that afflict so many people just now. Those who argue that you don’t know whether
or not your actions will have any results in the long run are missing the
point, because from the perspective I’ve just sketched out, the consequences
don’t matter either. Fiat
iustitia, ruat caelum, as the Roman Stoics liked to say: let justice be done, even if it brings the
sky crashing down.
So those, broadly speaking, are the first two ways that
people have dealt constructively with the human condition: in simplest terms,
either learn to live with what life brings you, or decide to do something about
it. The first choice may seem a little simplistic and the second one may seem a
little stark, but both work—that is, both are psychologically healthy responses
that often yield good results, which is more than can be said for habits of
thought that require the universe to either cater to our fantasies of
entitlement or destroy itself to satisfy our pique. Both also mesh fairly well
with the habitual material-mindedness of contemporary culture, the assumption
that the only things that really matter are those you can hit with a stick,
which is common to most civilizations toward the end of their history.
The third option I have in mind also works, but it doesn’t
mesh at all with the assumption just noted. Current confusions about the
alternatives to that assumption run deep enough that some care will be needed
in explaining just what I mean.
The third option starts with the sense that the world as we
normally perceive it is not quite real—not illusory, strictly speaking, but derivative.
It depends on something else, something that stands outside the world of our
ordinary experience and differs from that world not just in detail but in
kind. Since this “something else” is
apart from the things we normally use language to describe, it’s remarkably
difficult to define or describe in any straightforward way, though something of
its nature can be shared with other people through the more roundabout means of
metaphor and symbol. Elusive as it is, it can’t simply be ignored, because it
shapes the world of our ordinary experience, not according to some human agenda
but according to a pattern of its own.
I’d encourage my readers to notice with some care what’s not
being said here. The reality that stands behind the world of our ordinary
experience is not subject to human manipulation; it isn’t answerable to our
fantasies or to our fears. The viewpoint
I’m suggesting is just about as far as you can get from the fashionable notion
that human beings create their own reality—which, by the way, is just one more
way our overdeveloped sense of entitlement shapes our habits of thinking. As objects of our own and other’s
perceptions, we belong to the world of the not quite real. Under certain
circumstances, though, human beings can move into modes of nonordinary
perception in which the presence of the underlying reality stops being a theory
and becomes an experience, and when this happens a great many of the puzzles
and perplexities of human existence suddenly start making sense.
There’s a certain irony in the fact that in ancient Greek
culture, the philosophical movement that came to embody this approach to the
world took its name from a man named Aristocles, whose very broad shoulders
gave him the nickname Plato. That’s ironic because Plato was a transitional
figure; behind him stood a long line of Orphic and Pythagorean mystics, whose
insights he tried to put into rational form, not always successfully; after him
came an even longer line of thinkers, the Neoplatonists, who completed the job
he started and worked out a coherent philosophy that relates the world of
reality to the world of appearance through the lens of human consciousness.
The Platonist answer isn’t limited to Platonism, of course,
any more than the Stoic or Epicurean answer is found only in those two Greek
philosophical schools. Implicitly or explicitly, it’s present in most religious
traditions that grapple with philosophical issues and manage not to fall prey
to the easy answers of apocalyptic fantasy. In the language of mainstream
Western religion, we can say that there’s a divine reality, and then there’s a
created world and created beings—for example, the author and readers of this
blog—which depend for their existence on the divine reality, however this is
described. Still, that’s far from the only language in which this way of
thinking about the world can be framed.
The Epicurean and Stoic approaches to face an imperfect and
challenging world, as already discussed, take that world as it is, and propose
ways to deal with it. That’s a wholly reasonable approach from within the sort
of worldview that those traditions generally embrace. The Platonic approach, by
contrast, proposes that the imperfect and challenging world we encounter is
only part of the picture, and that certain disciplines of consciousness allow
us to take the rest of the picture into account, not as a policy of blind
trust, but as an object of personal experience.
As already suggested, it’s difficult to communicate in ordinary language
just what that experience has to say about the reality behind such phrases as
“divine purpose,” which is why those who pursue such experiences tend to focus
on teaching other people how to do it, and let them make their own discoveries
as they do the work.
Knowing the rest of the picture, for that matter, doesn’t
make the imperfections and challenges go away.
There are many situations in which either an Epicurean or a Stoic tactic
is the best bet even from within a Platonic view of the cosmos—it’s a matter of
historical fact that much of the best of the Epicurean and Stoic traditions
were absorbed into the classical Neoplatonic synthesis for exactly this reason.
The difference is simply that to glimpse something of the whole picture, and to
pursue those disciplines that bring such glimpses within reach, provide a
perspective that makes sense of the texture of everyday experience as it is,
without expecting it to act out human fears and fantasies. That approach isn’t
for everyone, but it’s an option, and it’s the one that I tend to trust.
