Fragment 203, word count: 2,365.

Tags: literacy, violence, humanism, progress, ideality, time, writing, power, aristocracy, empiricism, voice, value, culture, Rene Descartes, John Locke.

It is no accomplishment to damage or wreck the established dystopia if in doing so a worse dystopia is left in its place. When undertaking to change the dystopia, which obviously has an urgent need for changes that reduce it as a dystopia, it is of the utmost importance to avoid making a worse dystopia. Any method of altering the dystopia which involves violence is certain to result in something worse. A culture of violence is a crucial part of dystopian societies. Violence, and the authoritarianism that is inseparable from it, is a great temptation to some visionaries of change because it seems to promise quick and decisive alteration in the dystopia, but the result is always worse. Violence doesn’t get anywhere near threatening the core of dystopia. The idea of progress is crucial here. Sometimes, within a dystopia, conditions can be made better for some people, and even in dystopia there are factions which are comfortable, pleased with themselves and their situation, and oblivious to dystopian reality. The idea of progress stands at the core of political debate because the very idea of progress carries a muted recognition that current societies, as devised by the ancestors, have always been disastrously flawed. People who merge their personal identities with the specific cultural forms of their society find this insulting. Reverence for ancestors and for the particular cultural forms they created dictates that this society must be the best, or nearly so. Nothing much better is considered possible because dystopian culture claims knowledge that individual human existence itself is innately miserable as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers, often desperate and vicious, and that the arrangements of society merely exhibit those flaws along with measures possible to regulate them and limit the damage. However, progress is not a simple matter of material circumstances but also touches conceptions of the self, judgments of the self, considered independently of the culture of an ambient society.

Legacy Culture

From a tender age, everyone is confronted by some vast edifice of knowledge and supposition embedded into culture, language, and institutions all around. The edifice is authoritative and fetishistic. Prior to development of mathematical/ materialist science at around the time of (and partly through the agency of) Rene Descartes (1596-1650), the various edifices of knowledge were structured around religious certainties, fleshed out with selections from ancient philosophy. In Christendom those core ideas included original sin and pervasive supernatural surveillance for the purpose of supernatural moral ledger-keeping on everyone’s every thought and deed, all leading toward an inescapable, generally merciless, and eternally binding reckoning at the time of an individual’s death. Of course, this made the ever-present prospect of death terrifying. The new mechanistic system of conceiving the human situation, asserted by mathematical/ materialist science, gradually disrupted and made progress in discrediting and replacing that incessant religious blame-game as the authoritative core of knowledge in Euro-American culture, at the cost of diminishing or cancelling the idea of individual freedom and originality. Perhaps because of that cost, the popular acceptance of the new knowledge, as extensive as it has been, has been uneven and shallow. The religious edifice is still asserting itself aggressively, and has always influenced crucial conceptions in the scientific framework. Overall, however, the scientific vision of the human situation did replace the vaguely imagined possible rewards of a life-after-death (earned by difficult moral accomplishments, especially obedience to authority) by embracing the pre-existing aristocratic culture of earthly rewards, mainly clustered around competitions for scarce and exclusive wealth, trophy possessions, and coercive power.

A core culture of violence is a crucial element of aristocracy. This separates aristocracy from bourgeois culture, which aspires to achieve the same luxuries, prestige, and level of prosperity without the overt use of violence. The aristocratic culture of violence is still an active presence in the modern world, even in the most democratic polities. Crime families and criminal organizations generally cling to the culture of violence as an indispensable instrument for achieving their goals, and so do the political forces in the right-wing or conservative tradition, which is clear from the importance of guns to the political right-wing.

Empiricism

In the cultural transition to the scientific mythos, philosophers around the time of John Locke (1632-1704) were obsessed with acquiring knowledge of an objective external reality, what they were coming to conceive as the only genuinely important knowledge. This attitude was a novel development and a repudiation of the longstanding Christian mythos that the objective material world lacked fundamental importance (reality) since it is merely the staging and backdrop for the central drama of all existence: the moral journey of the human spirit. In the new scientific mythos the two foci changed places in a certain way. The human sense of self-existence (along with its drama) was reduced to a derivative product of larger natural systems, and those natural systems, conceived as entirely independent of human experience, were newly considered fundamental Reality and so the focus of any serious pursuit of ultimate knowledge. The resulting empiricist emphasis on the passive receptivity of a perceiver receiving impressions from outside itself complements the conception of human existence as a consuming vortex of unrelenting hungers grasping for external gratifiers.

Both of those legacy knowledge cultures maintain the falsehood that the most fulfilling peak experiences are few and rarely accessible, competitively exclusive and remote from ordinary life. This gives these cultures a narrow and exclusionary conception of a life well-lived, with the profoundly dystopian effect of de-valuing the lives of the majority of people.

Literacy

A fascinating stream of cultural development with ancient beginnings, crucial to both religious and scientific institutions of knowledge, is the technology of graphically recorded language, the practices of literacy, including its physical crafts, how it is taught, and arrangements for its preservation and distribution, for maintaining and expanding its use from generation to generation. Until quite recently, it was only a small minority of scribes in any society that was comfortably literate. If a society’s intelligentsia is that portion which has advanced scribal skills, with fluent literacy and broad education in the texts carrying a record of human thinking, then Christendom’s intelligentsia was mainly the personnel of the Church hierarchy, until universities sent enough of their graduates into secular activities to enable a Republic of Letters. With graphically recorded language anyone might put in the time and effort it takes to construct utterances without having an available listener or interlocutor who would be interested, patient, and indulgent enough to follow the threads of thought being expressed. This makes it possible to have, explore, develop and preserve threads of thought that don’t fit into an available set of conversational relationships, threads of thought that can be especially personal, original, and contrary to what may be considered acceptable, orthodox, or realistic in the cultural moment. Thought can become untethered from the common discourse. Written utterances can join a conversation with people long dead or with imagined future people. A writer can develop a persona and voice quite separate from any that are familiar to contemporary contacts. This is a gateway to experiences of surprisingly big fun, and launches thinking as a force capable of outperforming and discrediting violence and its trophies. On this basis, the culture of reading and writing inspired so many institutions, such as universities, such monumental products, and so many innovative personal initiatives that it took on a developmental momentum all its own, beyond the control of any pre-existing authorities. It was literacy as spread by Church institutions in Christendom which created the matrix from which fundamentals of mathematical and scientific knowledge could explode beyond the cloistered sub-culture of scribes. Only in the society in which universal literacy became an urgent project of religious piety, as it was in Protestantism, could a fundamentally new public sense of reality itself be imagined. The new reality, totally impersonal nature as pre-determined by discernible laws, came into focus through the lens of mathematical/ empirical science, but there was not just one scientific vision of this reality. Marxism, for example, was a new vision of reality based on science, a science which discerned in nature laws of socio-economic development that entirely pre-determined the past and future course of human history. Like many other new visions of reality, it turned out to be pseudo-science, and incidentally it was comfortable with using violence, so doubly dystopian. It illustrates that there are disagreements about what is self-evident, that what is recognized as self-evident involves creative (spiritual) input from a perceiver in addition to purely objective conditions. Reality is mutable.

Humanism

Literacy, book culture, and literary crafts produced such a profound framework of orientation, opening vast new realms of freedom and creativity for thinking, that they also engendered or became a movement with a different focus of caring and a different sense of what is importantly self-evident from that of mathematical science, yet still cultivating an alternative to ascribing all real value to a feared but unknowable life-after-death, as was typical with religion. This movement, known as Humanism, celebrates and studies the power of human freedom and creative originality. It began as a specifically literary cultivation but gradually expanded to embrace the whole high culture of the more privileged and propertied strata of society, with an emphasis on the culturally exceptional and difficult examples of decorative and performance arts as well as especially expensive luxuries and hedonistic pleasures. It celebrates the human capacity to enjoy the pre-death world, on the quiet assumption that this is the one that matters. As with science, many versions of Humanism have been conceived, and some are as exclusive and elitist in their way as the parade of saints, the elect, or the enlightened is in religion. By embracing the high culture of the privileged and propertied strata of society, Humanism, like science, embraces the hunger games of dystopia as the default  and eternal human condition.

Living: Neither Being nor Becoming (instead Creating)

The only existence of the past is in individual ideality. Memory is ideality, individual recollection built into the sense of personal location and direction in an arc of activity, agency, some of which remains to be created by specifically targeted effort. There is no ‘the past’ otherwise. Similarly for futurity. It only exists in the orientation and bearing sensed by individual people, in the sense a person has of enacting intentions, of doing something in particular, going somewhere, having a purpose. Time, therefore, as commonly understood, is a creation of spirit, a definitive phenomenon of spiritual creativity. Spirit is anomalous existence in that, without exception, embodied spirit is radically unfinished. Being unfinished involves the individual ideation of time as an opening for personally purposive acts of intervention into surroundings, ideation of time as containment for everything that went before including a stable enough, enduring, framework or grounding for personal action. Time is conceived as world-containment, open in such a way as to be containing without enclosing.

Living existence, ideality, conceives itself within an opening at an active edge where there is a meeting between a completed and fully occupied world and an empty extension of that world waiting for the creation of what will fill it, and at that edge living existence is exerting itself to create personally crucial parts of what occupies the ever-emerging emptiness. Continuous loss and the continuous possibility of surprise make the emptiness dramatically and unrelentingly problematic. The emptiness is a relentless opening-up that brings loss and an ever-renewing possibility of surprise.

This anomalous existence of spirit within time is a constant activity which is generative, fountaining, giving, putting outward. Caring is a feature of the radical incompleteness of spiritual existence, a spiritual power. Projecting interest and curiosity is a spiritual projection of power. Part of this activity reaches for and takes hold of impressions of a not-self surroundings. An individual’s decisions, questionings, curiosity-powered searches, eureka! breakthrough recognitions and expressive acts are present to that individual as self-assertions and exertions of personal power to create, as outgoing interventions, projections of spontaneous will and the dramatic and context-rich intentions that are the focus of living.

And So

Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual self-experiencing human as crucially derivative: in religion, as the creature of a vastly greater willing and purposeful force, and in science as derived from larger impersonally natural processes. Both religious and scientific hoards of knowledge conceive the individual human as the mainly passive receiver of a flow upon it from beyond itself, sometimes reacting to the impact of that flow. Contrary to that, it should be recognized that the flow that most characterizes spiritual existence is outward from personal creativity, creating the world both conceptually and practically. Peak experiences of value and gratification derive from that personally expressive outward flow of creative power, rather than being rare hidden treasures that need to be hunted down in the mountains. Recognition of human existence as ongoing world creation, as the cosmically anomalous fountain of ongoing creativity, changes the possibilities for human self-judgment, shakes it free of cultural determinism, and the only effective way to undertake changing the dystopia is to launch revisions to the dominant edifices of knowledge, at the level of the fundamental vision of reality.

Humanism fails through being too ready to celebrate all culture as the ultimate human achievement. In fact, culture is often oppressive and injurious to individuals. There is an individual spiritual fountain of activity which operates separately from culture, although, from a love of the pleasures of sociability, easily influenced by culture. A humanism worth the name would clarify that profound experiences are embedded in the very existence of living persons, that they fountain from that anomalous existence, and that, far from being exceptional, they are co-extensive with living persons. A humanism worth the name would repudiate the vanities and inhumanities of the trophy-merit reward economy of the aristo-bourgeois culture bubbles. There is an authentic spiritual alternative inherent in the lived experience of any person, through self-acquaintance with the transcendence of embodied spirituality.

Links:

Fragment 122, January 26, 2018, Ethics in the Philosophy Project (word count: 1,483)

Fragment 125, March 21, 2018, The Left is Dead. Long Live the Left! (Word count: 1,799)

Fragment 140, January 25, 2019, The Most Important Event in History (word count: 1,077)

Fragment 145, April 4, 2019, Desperately Seeking Reality: Scenes From History (word count: 2,189)

Fragment 148, May 22, 2019, The Birth of the Left (word count: 628)

Fragment 153, September 28, 2019, De-Culturing (word count: 458)

Fragment 167, August 28, 2020, Contesting the External Almighty (word count: 3,104)

On Literacy and Humanism

Papyrus: the Invention of Books in the Ancient World, written by Irene Vallejo, translated from Spanish by Charlotte Whittle, Published by Knopf (2022). ISBN 978-0593318898. See especially section 55, The Religion of Culture, pp.126-128.

Medieval Horizons: Why the Middle Ages Matter, written by Ian Mortimer, published by The Bodley Head (2023), The Bodley Head, an imprint of Vintage, is part of the Penguin Random House group. ISBN 978-1-84792-744-6.  See Chapter 6, Literacy, pp. 145-169.

Byzantine & Renaissance Philosophy, written by Peter Adamson, published by Oxford University Press (2022), ISBN 978-0-19-285641-8. (see p. 130).

Humanly Possible: Seven Hundred Years of Humanist Freethinking, Inquiry, and Hope, written by Sarah Bakewell, published by Alfred A. Knopf (2023). Alfred A. Knopf Canada is a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited. ISBN 978-0-7352-7430-3.

Copyright © 2023 Sandy MacDonald.