Kent Myers
Skip to the section titled “Gnostic Experience and Symbolism” at the link below and you will find a quick explanation of how Voegelin linked ancient Gnosticism to modern varieties that are a “derailment” from reality. Voegelin took Whitehead’s course at Harvard and continued to agree with him on important points, such as the primacy of experience, though he never wrote extensively on Whitehead. I had to drop out of the Voegelin discussion group because it was taken over by Trumpy people trying to dress up their disgust with philosophy. Voegelin himself was always amused that ideologists of every stripe either though he was on their side or against, and he was none of it. In Germany he got on a list to be fired. That happened because he was recognized as smarter than everybody, so they assumed he must be Jewish.
Voegelin on Gnosticism, Modernity, and the Balance of Consciousness
Dennis,
For my paper, I included a brief nod to indigenous thinking as a source for civilizational renewal. I think Herman’s book makes a good case. He mentions your Australian societies but spends more time on the San. I needed to make quick work of him in my short paper, but there’s quite a bit worth reading. If you could use another source that specifically argues for recovery of this way of thinking for the new civilization, you might take a look. Here’s an excerpt from my paper:
“… Louis G. Herman, Future Primal: How Our Wilderness Origins Show Us the Way Forward (2013). Herman goes all the way back to the roots of organized society. While he is careful to state all the caveats about how one cannot know how pre-historic people lived, he finds that the San people are a good enough model of what it must have been like, and he finds their worldview and spiritual practices to be a good model to emulated in a new civilization. It is somewhat ironic that he quotes at length Voegelin’s condemnation of modernity yet does not appear to accept Voegelin’s greatest theme, that cosmological consciousness of the kind that Herman is describing, while never invalidated, has been thoroughly superseded by “differentiated” consciousness as brought on by both Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian faith. Once exposed to the new order, going back is simply not credible. While this one-way change in consciousness occurs on an even greater scale than civilizational change, the change was also the occasion for shifts in civilization, ushering in the Ecumenic Age during which civilizations first aspired to spread over the whole known world, an unfortunate presumption we continue to live with. The generally shamanistic practices that Herman recommends may not be the vehicle for delivering what can be thought of as the smaller germ within the civilizational seed, which are practices of transcendence that reveal and foster reverence for wider reality….. Herman’s recommendation is even more severe. He finds that eco-villages with a spiritual edge are the best approximation to full immersion in an archaic wilderness and a livelihood of hunting and gathering. He holds up the kibbutz movement as a proof of principle and a place to begin, but he is also honest about the rapid failure of this movement. Small intentional communities keep trying, yet many lack spiritual depth and cohesion, and few approach that of the San. Herman seems to rely on the horrors of modern urban civilization to drive his solution, more than its plausibility or attractiveness.”[To Richard: Did you know that if you are in the middle of a message, and want to open an attachment, that it wipes out your message? I was expecting a new tab. Now I have to reconstruction a message!]
Dennis,
I caution you against “root cause.” I don’t think that’s part of CLA, though I haven’t brushed up on the CLA explanation. It looks to me like a systems approach which agrees with “root cause” only on the point that the cause is rarely the obvious “proximate” cause. The cause is often quite distant from the immediate circumstances of an event. But the systems approach says there is rarely any “root”, meaning a particular glitch that, when ‘fixed’, will eliminate similar results. There are usually multiple causes at each level, and the levels are interacting and sustaining themselves as well, and they won’t always be in complete harmony. For instance, why did the woman fail the test? She didn’t study (proximate cause that says too little), or she didn’t get a good primary education because girls aren’t allowed (societal), or women are not by nature to know such things (myths). Just the fact that she is taking the test shows that the pattern is cracking, but the pattern is still holding her back. There’s no root that avails a fix.I don’t diminish the injustice inflicted on the indigenous, but I also don’t want to ignore the lesser environmental injustice that the oppressor peoples have meted out on themselves. If the people in charge were to change their ways, everybody would benefit in some measure. That’s the thing about the environment, it’s hard to make one bad environment on the reservation and another good environment outside the reservation. All the poison flows down the Missippi and nobody gets any fish. Some people die first but others die later. I guess the billionaires in their survival outposts will be the last to go, but they are not immune.
WIllful blindness is probably what everybody does, in any system, to bypass the parts that aren’t right. It’s just that sometimes the problem is so large that we can no longer afford to do it. An in our situation of technological civilization, the problem is somewhat technical, not in our face. Plus the solution is so daunting. There’s a good article in a recent New Yorker about the scientists at 3M who knew something was wrong with the ‘forever chemicals’ they were churing out, but nobody either knew the whole story, or it wasn’t in their job description to say that it was a risk and a poison, only whether it worked or not for the applications. Very interesting how about five of them regret now that they were part of it and knew something, but they didn’t think it through, or if they did they realized that they would be fired, and, after all, they had to support their family and didn’t have any other job. Except, oddly, some of them dropped their science work and took up something else altogether. So their blindness was not total, nor was it entirely willful. They just lived in a haze. It reminds us of Sgt Schultz, “I know nothing!” But it’s more subtle than that, a vague awareness that something is wrong, but also a feeling that they can’t avoid being compromised. I guess for myself, I say that all institutions are corrupt, and the ones I work for are often less corrupt, and I try to improve them. But I’m compromised, admit it, and still need the job. I’m not a yeoman farmer.
I was just imagining a national program of retreat from the east coast and making it one long park with restored dunes and wetlands. Eliminate flood insurance subsidy and interest deduction on coastal housing making it possible only for the super rich. But create new towns with advanced infrastructure with lots of subsidized reimagined housing for those who can do work locally including what we used to call truck gardening or farming. We do have to retreat and the normal ways of doing it are terrible. Make it an opportunity for speeding up a different way to settle that works in the new climate.
Loneliness and lack of community is a way of not being heard. That can leave you anxious. Here in Dublin there’s no such thing as a lonely pub. But there’s still that background awareness that things are inevitably getting worse. No matter how engaged and happy you are the shadow remains. So the only other way to relieve it would be to trust in a greater reality. I was just wondering whether that’s a consequence that we would see as a trend. I guess not. I’ll have a Guinness and enjoy the beauty.
Right, nobody has “heard of Descartes,” but I think the point is that there are ideas that we live by, regardless of whether we realize it, and that those ideas were crystalized at some point by specific thinkers. I think Descartes is a member of what Toynbee calls the creative minority that appears at the upswing of a civilization. The majority imitates them. He uses some phrasing about “mimetic”, perhaps emphasizing that we may not be doing this consciously. It’s just a pattern that people begin to follow, and it becomes canalized. It is the way things are, a set of assumptions, a “worldview” that is lodged before you even begin thinking. You are only dimly aware that there was any choice in the matter. You may rail against it consciously but still practice it because your civilization requires it. We need to argue about thinkers, surely, but to dislodge a worldview we also need to work at different levels. I think that’s why we are addressing Whitehead’s “experience” which comes prior to “ideas”.
I’ve been trying to think of persons would would qualify as a new creative minority who will come to be admired and set a mimetic pattern. We are nominating Whitehead, plus Cobb as his spokesman who unexpectedly found followers in China. It really doesn’t matter whether members of the majority actually read these two. I think we can safely anticipate that Whitehead will not be forgotten among those who continue to study the creative minority, if indeed an ecological civilization does come to pass. He won’t necessarily be one of the biggest names, however, not like Descartes who happened upon patterns taken up in science as we know it. But who else do we put up against the seminal figures of Modern civilization? We do need such figures. No civilization is without them.“Practical men who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influence, are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back”
― John Maynard KeynesRyan, I sympathize with your concern for whether process and Presbyterianism are compatible. I worry about it less than I probably should. I figure that, as a Presbyterian, I am encouraged to learn, and even to reform, and that I am allowed to invoke a “scruple” if there’s something I must disagree with. (As the character in The River Runs Through It quips, Presbyterians read books, implying that the others don’t.) This writer succinctly lays out the reasons for incompatibility: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/rogereolson/2013/12/why-i-am-not-a-process-theologian/ He admits that it solves the theodicy problem, “but at too high a price.” For me, theodicy is a bit like your dinosaur problem. Drop omnipotence (or add evolution to account for dinosaurs) and I’m set. There are plenty of other mysteries that I can’t explain and don’t feel compelled to explain. I am also not troubled by dropping certain whoppers — a sort of high-grade fundamentalism — that I consider inessential to the “saving story.”
Calvin also wrote some other things to consider. These other writing were once known, such as by Puritans, who were pretty lusty it turns out:
“He [Calvin] enjoyed the natural world as a theater of God’s glory, saying we ought to be “ravished with wonder at the beauteous fabric of the universe.” The earth for him was a theater of desire (biologically and spiritually), where the display of God’s hunger for relationship is met by the thunderous applause (and yearning) of creation. He went on to describe nature as a book, second only to scripture. To mistreat creation, he insisted, is to “burn the book of nature” that God has given humankind.” https://www.huffpost.com/entry/christian-environmentalism_b_861747
Belden C. Lane has written quite a lot about spiritual landscapes, and he spent years getting to know a particular tree. As a practitioner of the Reformed faith he taught Buddhism at a Catholic college. Passionate, I think, not Pollyanna. I think he is still around, but I didn’t get a response when I wrote to him a while back. He would be a good person to invite to the Cobb Institute weekly discussion.Having let all this marinate a bit, I have a new approach to my final paper. I was missing something, and against all expectation I will incorporate my course #3 paper that didn’t quite come into focus. Creativity always seems to come as a rush after having put down the paper and done something else entirely, sometimes sleepting. Not sure what Whitehead has to say about that. Does it come from somewhere else, but only if you are prepared?
Now I recognize who you are talking about. It has often been remarked that people in this situation can be very warm and social to those who are included in their circle. These are the people who don’t bowl alone. On the other hand, they can be awfully unkind to outsiders. Alienated city folk can want that kind of community but have a hard time finding it, or possibly could, but don’t put in the effort. So both are individualistic, but in different ways, and both socially minded, but in different ways. But both of them, perhaps, will be wary of a worker’s cooperative. If that’s such a great way to live, how is it that so few people end up doing it, even if such a cooperative is available for new members? Do we have to be forced to do it, and then learn to be satisfied? Are we actually forced to sit in an office, and really don’t like it, even though we have deluded ourselves into thinking it’s OK, and we are happy enough as long as the pay is OK? That’s a real question. Maybe no social order is necessarily a happy one, and we are lucky if we can find one we can learn to live with and gives us a glimmer of meaning and satisfaction.
Rolla, I’m curious about the hyper-individualists you mention, the ones who approve of but don’t actually participate in “local community, mutual aid, farmers’ markets, worker owned businesses.” Are they the urban professionals who take drives in the country to visit the cute little towns on the weekend and mingle with the people who seem as if they might be doing these things (yet whose lifeline is tourists and retirees from the city)? We have several of those towns beyond the exurbs of Washington. From time to time the Post runs stories about people who have moved to the country, to herd sheep (they all died in a flood), to grow shiitake (the price collapsed), or live on a mountaintop (and die of poverty and boredom). These folks seem to have made a go of it. (https://www.meanwhilebackonthefarm.com/pages/our-story) They lay it on thick…for the benefit of city folk who want a piece of their lifestyle in the form of a handbag! I’m not sure the people you mention hang back because they are hyper-individualists. They just like their salary and don’t want the fuss. Better to watch others do it.
“overriding or denying the self-determination of others”
Please understand that I’m trying to work this out in Whitehead’s terms, without making any appeal to conventional ethics. I’m sure Whitehead comes out right, but I want to see why. (I’ve also had a strong quaff of St. Patrick’s day cheer at work — nice place to work! — so this message might be a bit off.)
According to theory, EVERYTHING is remembered by God, synthesized, and affects what is offered. The egotists are included. (ChatGPT is an interesting analogue worth comparing.)
I think we are saying here that, in addition to taking that longer circuit, human egotists are oppressing people directly (and not necessarily intentionally). They just want more, which can be good in some situations(?), but they end up “overriding” the self-determination of others. This override could be via domination or persuasion. If domination of a victim is illegitimate, are we to conclude that the relationship between a masochist and a dominator must cease, even though consensual? Are we saying that persuasion is always OK, even though many people are clearly deluded, consciously or not, into overriding their self-determination?
We can simplify these matters by saying, “be good to others”, but I don’t quite see how Whitehead gets us there from the starting point of creativity. (A creative person could say, “I know what’s good for my self-determination and, by the way, I can pay my minions to enhance my self-dtermination!”) Maybe it is only God’s lure that resolves these relationship issues. Listen to God and you will know. Many don’t listen, however, and the development of human awareness doesn’t occur fast enough to save us from ecological disaster.“The actual entity’s innate impetus to express creative power, to “actively impose” (Nobo’s and Henning’s description) itself in other actual entities can misfire…”
If we accept that all creative power is an “imposition,” egotism can be characterized as too much imposition. Reducing imposition to zero implies elimination of the agent. We sometimes accept that as the appropriate remedy, such as when we squish a picnic ant. But for the typical human, can we describe, in principle, a proper level of personal imposition? Or is the level of imposition irrelevant, and it is only the direction of creative power that matters? If an exceedingly wise, just, and selfless master gains power over me to help him conduct good works under his direction, is that acceptable imposition of creative power, or has it misfired? Or is there a ‘takes two to tango’ rule, where I have to want to be his slave, and then the imposition is fine? Or if I impose, must I succumb to an equal amount countervailing imposition? A human can’t avoid imposition. I’m just wondering how to calculate one’s quota.