Here is part one, part two, part three
Paul Tyson, in his account of Platonism in his superb book Returning to Reality, writes on how our modern atheism is really a Christian heresy the Elites push to gain control,
“Politically, the evolution of the idea of the discretely supernatural, as a realm fully separate from the natural realm, has deep roots in late medieval theology and philosophy. Modernity is still thoroughly medieval to the extent that this astonishing innovation is accepted largely without question by modern people, be they religious or not. Thus was the tangible cosmos ontologically disenchanted, and a new approach to political and technological power and to religious authority follows naturally on that development.
All the seventeenth-century fathers of modernity do is put these late medieval ideas into practice in such a way that the structure of the high medieval way of life can no longer support it. So modernity is actually the life form that fits the theology of the late medieval theological innovators whose ideas we have briefly sketched. That is, the reality assumptions and operational givens of the modern way of life rest on our collective belief in late medieval theology.
Our modern worldview typically assumes that the physical cosmos is a self-contained and entirely material reality, sealed off from the discretely supernatural realm of the spiritual .Functionally, within modernity, there is no practical difference between the assumed realisms of a materialist non-Christian and a “supernaturalist” Christian—to both the here-and-now world operates within an entirely natural, entirely non-spiritual realm as known by objective science. In contrast, Jesus, Paul, John, and Plato all consider the material world to be fundamentally dependent on eternal meaning (Logos) and value (the Goodness of God); for them it is simply inconceivable to consider it as a discretely and self-contained material reality.”
This eventually led to modern atheism, Tyson says,
“These operational norms and the assumptions about the nature of reality that go with them are at least partly shaped by the vested power interests of those who govern us. Thus shared reality beliefs are intimately enmeshed in the necessary power structures, with all their vested interests, in which we live. ….it may well be that those power structures are as interested in promoting zones of illusion that hide oppression within our assumed understanding of reality as they are in facilitating the true flourishing, freedom, and dignity of our lives. Those who never question the realities with which they are presented are easily controlled by those who set up the power structures and wield influence in any given society.
“Increasingly a deep cultural unknowing regarding what the point and meaning of our wondrous objective knowledge and manipulative power might be is now a pervasive background feature of our cultural life form. This leaves us at the mercy of the brazen manipulative irrealism and the morally unconstrained instrumentalism of consumer culture. The vested power interests native to pragmatic consumerism delight in playing with our subjective beliefs and molding our objective behaviors to suit its merely instrumental ends. Market realism and the mass media age thrives on generating seductive ready-made consumer identities saturated in powerful illusions that prime our fantasies of desire and manipulate our inchoate fears, and all for the meaningless “point” of getting us to spend money.
Once we are out of touch with thinking about moral and spiritual reality it does not take long for us to get out of touch with material reality as well (think of speculative trading and the non-material bubble worlds possible within cyberspace). The escapism, narcissism, and virtual brilliance of our powerful entertainment industry, and a flagrant disregard for the physical environment on which our very lives depend, is also characteristic of our times. ”
For now we have power without wisdom or piety, existence without nobility, lives without any transcendently referenced point, birth and death without intrinsic meaning, time and seasons without liturgical reference, holidays without the holy. (Though, of course, we do have very fancy and cheap flat screen TVs.) Now the West has unleashed enormous instrumental and military forces on the globe and has built a set of global structures that facilitate unprecedented economic and material exploitation; but all this power is directed to no common good, to no intrinsically valuable end. Under this situation, if we have no sense of accountability to any moral truth or any sacred meaning in how we govern the world, then we may drag the whole world down into the West’s spiritual bog and visit unprecedented destruction on the entire globe in the process.
What these different discourses of power consider as real and knowable, and what they do not perceive and thus label as unreal and unknowable, has enormous importance on how we actually live. Disciplines of desire and character formation are naturally aligned with the tacit collective goals of any given life form, and these goals are only visible within shared frames of belief, and those shared frames of belief have deep leverage on our way of life because they are richly, imaginatively, and allegorically constructed.
Yet ironically—as Nietzsche himself understood—any view of reality that is only defined within the order of the tangibly apparent, the empirical realm, is just as much imaginatively constructed and a shared frame of belief as are outlooks situated within a metaphysically three-dimensional frame of belief.
Formation in any collective belief alignment is deeply mytho-poetic and happens below the conscious and “adult radar of our stated metaphysical convictions. The metaphysical formation that we absorb from the stories and ideas of our culture’s collective imagination become the background cultural wallpaper of any given way of life.
Thus, typically unknown to us, it is the distinctive narratives and particular imaginative landscapes of our culture that shape our sympathies, our apathies, and our social norms.
These deep narratives discipline our desires and motivate our actions. Thus, the visibilities and invisibilities thrown up by a culture’s mythopoetic outlook shape its most basic moral and political framework.”
“Yet this dynamic of the normalization of exploitation via the techniques of skillfully-crafted marketing illusions and production invisibilities. . . almost any tradeable commodity—is tied to a deep cultural belief that makes the modern Western consumer way of life work. The belief that makes it all work is that public facts and material things are objective and have no inherent value or meaning, for values and meanings are matters of personal preference and are thus up to individuals to select for themselves. And that belief is a function of a one-dimensional metaphysical outlook where only objects that you can see and touch are really real.”
“ it is the functional assumption that meanings and values are not part of objective reality but are rather essentially personal and cultural constructions that means that financial and objective “realism” trumps personal and cultural values and meanings, without us even noticing that there is a contest.”
…this way of seeing and acting easily makes abstract fantasies (such as money) into real objects, and embodied normative realities (such as human dignity) into abstract fantasies. But if there is only one dimension to reality then both money and human dignity are equally artifices of manipulation, and there is no meaningful way of saying why one of them is more intrinsically important than the other.”
According to David Hart, part of the therapeutic appeal of naturalism is its current set of addictive infatuations: scientism, capitalism, and, above all, consumerism.
Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can.
Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice.
God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.
So it really was only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of academe and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form.
It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops and would be enthusiastically fêted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices. In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue.
It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.
Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.
It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions
Hart says,
“What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.”
All of this, however, is really of only secondary importance. The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief.
But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead.
The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth.”
Paul Tyson, in his account of Platonism in his superb book Returning to Reality, writes on how our modern atheism is really a Christian heresy the Elites push to gain control,
“Politically, the evolution of the idea of the discretely supernatural, as a realm fully separate from the natural realm, has deep roots in late medieval theology and philosophy. Modernity is still thoroughly medieval to the extent that this astonishing innovation is accepted largely without question by modern people, be they religious or not. Thus was the tangible cosmos ontologically disenchanted, and a new approach to political and technological power and to religious authority follows naturally on that development.
All the seventeenth-century fathers of modernity do is put these late medieval ideas into practice in such a way that the structure of the high medieval way of life can no longer support it. So modernity is actually the life form that fits the theology of the late medieval theological innovators whose ideas we have briefly sketched. That is, the reality assumptions and operational givens of the modern way of life rest on our collective belief in late medieval theology.
Our modern worldview typically assumes that the physical cosmos is a self-contained and entirely material reality, sealed off from the discretely supernatural realm of the spiritual .Functionally, within modernity, there is no practical difference between the assumed realisms of a materialist non-Christian and a “supernaturalist” Christian—to both the here-and-now world operates within an entirely natural, entirely non-spiritual realm as known by objective science. In contrast, Jesus, Paul, John, and Plato all consider the material world to be fundamentally dependent on eternal meaning (Logos) and value (the Goodness of God); for them it is simply inconceivable to consider it as a discretely and self-contained material reality.”
This eventually led to modern atheism, Tyson says,
“These operational norms and the assumptions about the nature of reality that go with them are at least partly shaped by the vested power interests of those who govern us. Thus shared reality beliefs are intimately enmeshed in the necessary power structures, with all their vested interests, in which we live. ….it may well be that those power structures are as interested in promoting zones of illusion that hide oppression within our assumed understanding of reality as they are in facilitating the true flourishing, freedom, and dignity of our lives. Those who never question the realities with which they are presented are easily controlled by those who set up the power structures and wield influence in any given society.
“Increasingly a deep cultural unknowing regarding what the point and meaning of our wondrous objective knowledge and manipulative power might be is now a pervasive background feature of our cultural life form. This leaves us at the mercy of the brazen manipulative irrealism and the morally unconstrained instrumentalism of consumer culture. The vested power interests native to pragmatic consumerism delight in playing with our subjective beliefs and molding our objective behaviors to suit its merely instrumental ends. Market realism and the mass media age thrives on generating seductive ready-made consumer identities saturated in powerful illusions that prime our fantasies of desire and manipulate our inchoate fears, and all for the meaningless “point” of getting us to spend money.
Once we are out of touch with thinking about moral and spiritual reality it does not take long for us to get out of touch with material reality as well (think of speculative trading and the non-material bubble worlds possible within cyberspace). The escapism, narcissism, and virtual brilliance of our powerful entertainment industry, and a flagrant disregard for the physical environment on which our very lives depend, is also characteristic of our times. ”
For now we have power without wisdom or piety, existence without nobility, lives without any transcendently referenced point, birth and death without intrinsic meaning, time and seasons without liturgical reference, holidays without the holy. (Though, of course, we do have very fancy and cheap flat screen TVs.) Now the West has unleashed enormous instrumental and military forces on the globe and has built a set of global structures that facilitate unprecedented economic and material exploitation; but all this power is directed to no common good, to no intrinsically valuable end. Under this situation, if we have no sense of accountability to any moral truth or any sacred meaning in how we govern the world, then we may drag the whole world down into the West’s spiritual bog and visit unprecedented destruction on the entire globe in the process.
What these different discourses of power consider as real and knowable, and what they do not perceive and thus label as unreal and unknowable, has enormous importance on how we actually live. Disciplines of desire and character formation are naturally aligned with the tacit collective goals of any given life form, and these goals are only visible within shared frames of belief, and those shared frames of belief have deep leverage on our way of life because they are richly, imaginatively, and allegorically constructed.
Yet ironically—as Nietzsche himself understood—any view of reality that is only defined within the order of the tangibly apparent, the empirical realm, is just as much imaginatively constructed and a shared frame of belief as are outlooks situated within a metaphysically three-dimensional frame of belief.
Formation in any collective belief alignment is deeply mytho-poetic and happens below the conscious and “adult radar of our stated metaphysical convictions. The metaphysical formation that we absorb from the stories and ideas of our culture’s collective imagination become the background cultural wallpaper of any given way of life.
Thus, typically unknown to us, it is the distinctive narratives and particular imaginative landscapes of our culture that shape our sympathies, our apathies, and our social norms.
These deep narratives discipline our desires and motivate our actions. Thus, the visibilities and invisibilities thrown up by a culture’s mythopoetic outlook shape its most basic moral and political framework.”
“Yet this dynamic of the normalization of exploitation via the techniques of skillfully-crafted marketing illusions and production invisibilities. . . almost any tradeable commodity—is tied to a deep cultural belief that makes the modern Western consumer way of life work. The belief that makes it all work is that public facts and material things are objective and have no inherent value or meaning, for values and meanings are matters of personal preference and are thus up to individuals to select for themselves. And that belief is a function of a one-dimensional metaphysical outlook where only objects that you can see and touch are really real.”
“ it is the functional assumption that meanings and values are not part of objective reality but are rather essentially personal and cultural constructions that means that financial and objective “realism” trumps personal and cultural values and meanings, without us even noticing that there is a contest.”
…this way of seeing and acting easily makes abstract fantasies (such as money) into real objects, and embodied normative realities (such as human dignity) into abstract fantasies. But if there is only one dimension to reality then both money and human dignity are equally artifices of manipulation, and there is no meaningful way of saying why one of them is more intrinsically important than the other.”
According to David Hart, part of the therapeutic appeal of naturalism is its current set of addictive infatuations: scientism, capitalism, and, above all, consumerism.
Late modern society is principally concerned with purchasing things, in ever greater abundance and variety, and so has to strive to fabricate an ever greater number of desires to gratify, and to abolish as many limits and prohibitions upon desire as it can.
Such a society is already implicitly atheist and so must slowly but relentlessly apply itself to the dissolution of transcendent values. It cannot allow ultimate goods to distract us from proximate goods. Our sacred writ is advertising, our piety is shopping, our highest devotion is private choice.
God and the soul too often hinder the purely acquisitive longings upon which the market depends, and confront us with values that stand in stark rivalry to the only truly substantial value at the center of the social universe: the price tag.
So it really was only a matter of time before atheism slipped out of the enclosed gardens of academe and down from the vertiginous eyries of high cosmopolitan fashion and began expressing itself in crassly vulgar form.
It was equally inevitable that, rather than boldly challenging the orthodoxies of its age, it would prove to be just one more anodyne item on sale in the shops and would be enthusiastically fêted by a vapid media culture not especially averse to the idea that there are no ultimate values, but only final prices. In a sense, the triviality of the movement is its chief virtue.
It is a diverting alternative to thinking deeply. It is a narcotic. In our time, to strike a lapidary phrase, irreligion is the opiate of the bourgeoisie, the sigh of the oppressed ego, the heart of a world filled with tantalizing toys.
Hart's “governing conviction” is that what our new atheists regard as modern progress in the direction of rational liberation is itself a reactionary superstition. The modern Enlightenment has actually been a rebellion against the whole truth about our natures, about who we are, and about the true source of our freedom and dignity. And that rebellion has been not so much radical as selective and self-indulgent. By compassionately privileging personal freedom and human rights over what they believe they know through science, the new atheists remain parasitic on the key Christian insight about who we are. Their attachment to the humane virtues makes no sense outside the Christian claim for the unique and irreplaceable dignity of every human person. That claim is completely unsupported by either ancient (Aristotelian) or modern (Darwinian) science. The sentimental preferences of our atheists are really those of a Christianity without Christ.
It was Nietzsche who prophesied that our fading, subjective experiences of dignity, freedom, and love have a very limited future as merely beneficial illusions
Hart says,
“What I find most mystifying in the arguments of the authors I have mentioned, and of others like them, is the strange presupposition that a truly secular society would of its nature be more tolerant and less prone to violence than any society shaped by any form of faith. Given that the modern age of secular governance has been the most savagely and sublimely violent period in human history, by a factor (or body count) of incalculable magnitude, it is hard to identify the grounds for their confidence.”
All of this, however, is really of only secondary importance. The modern period has never been especially devoted to reason as such; the notion that it ever was is merely one of its “originary” myths. The true essence of modernity is a particular conception of what it is to be free, as I have said; and the Enlightenment language of an “age of reason” was always really just a way of placing a frame around that idea of freedom, so as to portray it as the rational autonomy and moral independence that lay beyond the intellectual infancy of “irrational” belief.
But we are anything but rationalists now, so we no longer need cling to the pretense that reason was ever our paramount concern; we are today more likely to be committed to “my truth” than to any notion of truth in general, no matter where that might lead.
The myth of “enlightenment” served well to liberate us from any antique notions of divine or natural law that might place unwelcome constraints upon our wills; but it has discharged its part and lingers on now only as a kind of habit of rhetoric. And now that the rationalist moment has largely passed, the modern faith in human liberation has become, if anything, more robust and more militant. Freedom for us today is something transcendent even of reason, and we no longer really feel that we must justify our liberties by recourse to some prior standard of responsible rationality. Freedom—conceived as the perfect, unconstrained spontaneity of individual will—is its own justification, its own highest standard, its own unquestionable truth.”
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