Cincinnati And Our Civilization's FutureAt What Point Will We Take This Kind Of Thing Seriously? Before It's Too Late?
Heavy stuff today. Back in Budapest after a week in Transylvania, and I had some depressing conversations with some fellow foreigners at the end. I almost didnât want to bring this up, because itâs just so awful to contemplate. But to turn away is morally irresponsible, and eventually weâre going to have to deal with it all anyway. These are the stories of our times. If you want to skip today, no harm, no foul. I feel like Iâm being dragged to conclusions that I find hateful, but increasingly unavoidable. Iâm going to begin with a story I became aware of this weekend. But it touches exactly on the topic of an intense conversation with a young American conservative I met at the festival down there â a Christian who seemed to be as concerned about this stuff as I was, though less visibly shocked, because heâs been living in it. The photo above is of a white woman in Cincinnati, the hometown of J.D. Vance when heâs not in Washington. On Friday night, she and a white male companion were assaulted by a mob of blacks at the Cincinnati Jazz Festival. Here is a link to a video of the assault, in which both black men and women participated in the pile-on. The white woman prone on the ground is shown on the video being punched in the face by a black man. The reason we have this video is a black onlooker (you can tell by his off-camera accent) filmed it with pleasure. He didnât try to help. He just observed. It went viral over the weekend online. The Cincy police chief condemned the attack on Saturday. Have you heard about this racist assault anywhere but online? Probably not.
The black conservative media personality Jason Whitlock linked to a video of one of the attacks, and said:
God bless Jason Whitlock! But of course our national media prefer us not to notice. Noticing is bad. If a white mob had done this to a black couple, it would still be making headlines, and our media would have been calling for a National Conversation. We all know this. We all know that we live under a double standard. Speaking of, did you hear back in 2020, the Year of St. Floyd, about the black folks in Georgia who bought land to create a blacks-only enclave, to be safe from whites? CNN was among the many media orgs that covered it:
From the story:
Personally, I donât care if black folks want to do that. Itâs a free country, and as long as people who arenât black are not forbidden by law from settling there, Iâll defend this kind of thing in principle. People wanting to live around people like themselves is natural. Itâs why political scientist Robert Putnam found, to his great distress as a liberal, that the more diverse a community is, the less social trust there is. It has to do with human nature, and, if you like, evolution. We are hard-wired to be more trusting when our neighbors are like us. Itâs not just a race thing. If I were Muslim, I would be more at ease living in a Muslim neighborhood than in one in which I was a religious minority (and thatâs why I am not bothered by news of Muslims in Texas doing this, as long as there is no evidence of criminal activity, e.g., terrorism, going on there). Heck, I would feel more at ease living in a middle-class neighborhood in which I, as a white man, was a minority, than I would living in an all-white neighborhood that was poor and violent. Be honest: so would you. The point Iâm making here is that when blacks sought to build a racially exclusive enclave, it was a cause of celebration in the media. Now, though, a group of whites who have established a whites-only community in Arkansas have become the target of a state AG investigation. Story here, from MSNBC. Quote:
Now, if these people are white supremacists, then I think they are wicked, and should repent of their race hatred. And if there is any potential criminal activity going on there, hell yeah the state should investigate. These do not sound like the kind of people I would want to live around. But tell me, what is the philosophical difference between black folks wanting to build a private community to live around other black folks, for the sake of their own safety and comfort, and whites doing the same? This tweet:
I donât know how much you American readers see of whatâs going on in the UK (probably not much, unless you read X), but British authorities are actually harassing white English people for expressing pride in being English, no matter how innocent (e.g., flying the St. Georgeâs flag, the standard of the English nation). Hereâs a tweet from a patriotic British Sikh who holds the St. George flag high outside a migrant hotel, to stand up for England, which he believes is being betrayed by UK authorities letting in so many migrants. Britain is a sick, sick society, led by elites who hate it. Why do I bring all this up today? Because at the festival, I found myself in conversation with a fellow American visitor, a conservative in his early thirties. I asked him if he followed the work of David Betz, the UK war studies professor who has been sounding the alarm all year over the mounting prospects for civil war in the West. I asked him if he had seen the latest interview Betz did with Harrison Pitt of the European Conservative. He had not, but he said he agrees with the things I quoted Betz as saying. In this segment of the interview, Betz points out that the older elites â even Nigel Farage who (falsely, in Betzâs view) appears to be a counter-elitist â really donât understand whatâs going on at âthe thwarted younger elite level, who have become effectively anti-status quo.â Betz explains that the young feel that the things they have a right to expect from society are being denied to them. This is called the âexpectation gap,â and the literature of civil war and unrest identifies this as key to revolutions and suchlike. (This is true; revolutionaries tend not to come from the poor, but from elites who are sick of the expectation gap. For example, the Bolshevik revolutionary leaders were not from the poor, but from educated classes. The poor were passive supporters.) And in this clip, Betz observes that the mainstream conservative political and media figures find themselves tongue-tied when it comes to standing up for their own people. He says he doesnât know them personally, but he suspects that this has to do with their fear of losing status within the system by appearing to be ânativistâ. This, says Betz, is why the young donât listen to them. They find them to be cowardly about facing the world as it is in Britain today, and speaking truth, and having âthe conversations we need to have.â Talking about the UK situation, Betz says that the countryâs elites have created this situation over the years. Now both sides âwant to fight.â Listening to this, I thought about how the Democratic Party in the US, and the liberal elites (media, academic, corporate), have for a very long time driven racial and ethnic resentment, and have depended (successfully!) on the deep reticence of whites, outside of the social fringes, to object. That has begun to change with Trump â who, letâs be clear, does not talk in parallel terms about privileging whites as the way the Left has talked about privileging non-whites, but rather speaks of a return to basic fairness. This, I think, is why he draws support from a significant number of non-whites. (Before I get to my main point, I want to tell you that Betz says that if things kick off in the UK, the British Army is too small to quell the violence â and that the loyalty of the army to the stateâs orders to suppress Britons fighting a system they find unjust is very much at issue. This is extraordinary! Betz says that the history of these conflicts show that if an army loses faith that the civilian elites are âcompetentâ and trustworthy, then they are likely to fail to defend that elite and the order it has created.) So, what does this have to do with the conversation I had with the young American? He told me that my generation of conservatives (Gen X), the Boomers, and many Millennials are mostly or even entirely out of touch with whatâs actually happening among the young. He told me that white right-wing educated people are giving up entirely on the idea that we can rescue the old classically liberal order. What he was talking about is a recovery of the old MLK âcontent of your characterâ standard, on which I was raise, and in which I still believe. His argument â and to be clear, I donât know to what extent this young man was describing the world, and to what extent heâs endorsing it â is that they no longer believe it works, or that it can work anymore. I told him that in the 1970s, I was of a generation of Americans acculturated to the MLK standard â and that I celebrate that, in particular because I come from a part of America where white supremacy reigned. White supremacy is un-American, and certainly un-Christian. Kingâs victory was a great moral victory for the entire nation. But starting around the 1990s, the Left began to give up on Kingâs vision, despite lying about it. The Left, which controls and has controlled all the cultural institutions, has spent almost a generation dismantling loyalty to Kingâs classically liberal, deeply Christian principles, and instead embracing frankly wicked racialist rhetoric that cannot do anything but divide and create racial hatred. And the establishment Right has been largely ineffective in resisting it â probably, as Betz says of the UK Right, because they are too afraid of losing status within the establishment by opening themselves to being called bigots. (Same thing on LGBT issues, by the way.) But hereâs the painful thing for me, that I realized sharply in this discussion: I too have lost faith in the King vision â not in principle, but as an ideal that America is capable of living by. And itâs not merely a matter of elite rhetoric. It has more to do with crime and culture. Let me explain. I told the young man that right-minded people of the Boomer generation, and mine, generally believed that the reason for black poverty and crime was chiefly racist laws. Remove those laws, and things would normalize for black Americans. We have had fifty years to test this theory. The results are mostly negative â I say âmostlyâ because there has developed a robust black middle class. But far too many American blacks live in a separate America â and I think at this point, it is primarily a matter of deep culture. In the US, blacks are 13 percent of the overall population. Yet from year to year, they account for just over half of the arrests for murder; the numbers are similarly disproportionate for other violent crimes. You can find out more on the FBIâs crime data site. For example, hereâs robbery for 2023:
Again, blacks are only 13 percent of the population, and whites almost 60 percent. Yet blacks, though almost five times fewer in number than whites, commit twice the robberies. Why? Here are the FBI numbers for aggravated assault:
Again, the black 13 percent of the population commits roughly the same number of aggravated assaults as the white 60 percent. Why? These are not new questions, obviously, though they have become a lot more ârealâ with the spread of smartphone cameras and the Internet. We can see every day things like blacks shoplifting; this new one shows a little black kid being caught shoplifting, and when the clerk asks the kidâs mother to bring him back to pay for the thing heâs walking out with, she gets hostile and profane. Most white people avoid confrontation. You never know when it might get violent. They just endure it. Yeah, I know: the algorithm promotes this kind of thing. But you know, thereâs a reason now you canât go to the drugstore in many parts of the US and buy things like razors without having to ask a clerk to unlock the bin. And, as Iâve mentioned here recently, back in 2012, when naive me asked a supermarket chain executive how he could justify the âfood desertsâ in poor black neighborhoods, he told me that the shoplifting is so bad in those places that they canât afford to keep supermarkets (a low-margin business) open there. To be clear, I donât think this is a matter of âblack skin makes you a criminalâ. You want to see a white Appalachian family whose familial culture is criminal and self-destructive? I present to you the fascinating documentary about the White family (seriously) of West Virginia, who are known to their county as violent white trash â and the documentary shows why. I think this is a matter of a defective culture. But â and this is the point â I am weary of trying to figure this out. I just want to live in peace. And Iâm tired of being gaslit about this stuff by our media and politicians. Well, the young conservative festivalgoer I met said that in his generation, conservatives are openly embracing racist-tribalist views. They unashamedly â at least among themselves â talk of avoiding black people, because they donât want the hassle of risking crime and all the rest. They look at older folks like me, with our MLK ideals (as attenuated as mine may be by this point), and consider us suckers. His discourse reminded me of the conversation I had in New York City earlier this year with a young woman â Iâd say late twenties â who told me she had been a super-woke activist, until she was violently assaulted by a black man who lived in the projects near her University of Chicago dorm. She said that trauma drove her briefly into the racist far right, until she recovered her moral balance. The point she was making to me was that many in her generation have lost the willingness to defer to the kinds of ideals my generation, and the Boomers, embraced. Thatâs what the festivalgoer I talked with was saying too, and trying to get me to see. And you know, I think a lot of it is the âexpectations gapâ that David Betz is talking about. They have grown up in a culture in which they cannot expect to achieve the level of material success of their parentsâ generation. This is because of a variety of reasons, including structural-economic and technological, but it is what it is. And in this era of diminished expectations, they are sick of being told that they have to accept less solely because of their race or sex, because justice requires it. Mind you, this was a friendly conversation. My interlocutor was calmly trying to tell me why his generation of educated people on the Right â tomorrowâs elites â is a lot more radical than my generation can comprehend, and why. He told me that the âcivil warâ thesis is not even controversial among his generation. They expect it, in America. Later, at the airport in Tirgu Mares, I ran into a young French scholar who had also been at the festival. I asked him about whether he expected civil war, in the Betz sense, in France. He didnât flinch: âYes,â he said, âand it might be better to get this over with sooner rather than later.â Waiting for the delayed flight, I reflected, as I often do, on historian Edward Wattsâs great book The Final Pagan Generation. As you might recall, itâs a book about pagan elites in fourth-century Rome, and how so few of them actually understood what was happening around them, with the Christian revolution. Based on their writings, Watts demonstrates that they were aware that these people called Christians had come into existence, and were growing in numbers within the Empire, but they had no real awareness that the Empire was moving to Christianity. As elites, they lived in a social bubble. They thought that because Rome had always been pagan, it always would be. Were the temples not open? Were we not still celebrating the pagan festivals? They did not see it coming. But, Watts points out, their young did. The children of the Roman pagan elites â a generation that came of age in the 360s and 370s â were not willing to embrace their parentsâ values. And they understood â as the pagan elite faithful of their generation also understood â that the peace could not hold. There was going to be a fight. David Betz, quoting that vile NSFW Bob Vylan song that caused such a stir at Glastonbury, says that the UK today is divided between those who say âI want my country backâ and those who say âshut the fâk up.â So it was, to some degree, between the younger Christians and pagans of Rome in the mid-fourth century. Watts writes:
I think that the 21st century of comfortable older conservatives and liberals like me is equally real. But it is becoming less so. We are headed, to quote the title of Tom Wolfeâs final novel, âback to blood.â As is crystal-clear in the UK, France, and Germany (and no doubt elsewhere in western Europe, but I donât know as much about those places), the elites of both Left and Right are making it worse. In that Harrison Pitt interview, Betz says the violent clashes are moving toward us at great speed. Again, I remind you that Betz is in no way saying he wants this to happen! Heâs a middle-aged family man. But heâs reading the signs of the times in light of what his academic training as a specialist in civil war-type conflicts has taught him, and heâs sounding the alarm. I havenât lived in the US for four years, so Iâm somewhat out of touch. Anecdotally, I notice that even many of my middle-class white Christian conservative friends, people who genuinely hate racism, have quietly given up. They believe, even if they canât fully admit it to themselves, that the noble King experiment has failed. Itâs not because Kingâs moral principles were wrong; itâs because American society, for various reasons, has failed them. And, to put a fine point on it, the culture of lower-class black Americans has failed most of all. I told my interlocutor in Romania the story about the old white Christian man I knew back in Baton Rouge, who lived all his life in a neighborhood that had once been working-class white, but switched to black after the white flight of the 1970s and 1980s. He stayed, but finally left in 2020, when it became too dangerous. He told me that his friends were other black folks of his generation (he was in his seventies), and that they were the only ones left there who had any memory of what it was like to have an intact family. That matters! The late, great Wick Allison, founder and publisher of D Magazine, the city magazine of Dallas, once wrote an essay there (I canât find it online), talking about how when segregation ended in the city, there was a massive flight of black people out of black neighborhoods â black people who held what we call âmiddle-class values,â and who wanted to get away from the dysfunctional culture of the black poor. But we donât talk about that. It complicates the Narrative. Sir Kenneth Clark, author of the 1970s bestseller Civilisation, once said, âIt is lack of confidence, more than anything else, that kills a civilisation.â This is where we are today. Do you have confidence in our civilization today? I donât. Here in Europe, the ruling classes are doing everything they possibly can to suppress native populations from noticing the deleterious changes mass migration are having on their countries. Itâs not going to work. I have more hope for the US, because we have the space and (for now) the liberty to move, to get away from the forces of destruction. But doing so implies, inescapably, a loss of faith in the American pluralist experiment. All I know is that I am tired of pretending that things like that white woman knocked out cold by the punch of a black man on the street of Cincinnati doesnât really matter, that itâs something we should not notice because that might comfort white racists. Last point. After I got back to Budapest last night, I went to dinner at a friendâs house. One of the guests was a woman from a continental European country which I wonât name, to protect her identity. She told me two weeks ago, a friend in her home country was at a party held in a restaurant held in a small city there. They pushed the tables aside, and everyone was dancing to Latin music, and having a great time. Suddenly, a Muslim man came into the restaurant, unplugged the sound system, and began ranting at the crowd. He told them they were all âpigs,â and that the day is coming when they would have their throats cut. On and on he went like this. All the white natives stood in silence, afraid of confronting him because he might have a knife, like so many Muslim migrant men do in that country. Finally, one of the white men found the courage to attack the Muslim, and throw him out. The party resumed. âThis kind of thing happens all the time in my country,â the woman said. The party will resume. Until it doesnât. Then, the deluge. The Boomers, my generation, and the left-wing activists wonât see it coming. History teaches us that. An older friend told me he once shared a drink in New York with Alexander Kerensky, the exiled Russian social-democratic leader whose government was overthrown by the Bolsheviks. He asked Kerensky why he didnât just shoot Lenin and that lot. Kerensky replied, âBecause we didnât take them seriously.â |
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Voltaire's birthday 11-21-1694 - A brief essay by Steve Weidenkopf
Today marks the three hundred and thirtieth birthday of the Frenchman François-Marie Arouet, better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire (1694-1778).
Born into a bourgeois family during the reign of Louis XIV, the âSun Kingâ (r. 1643-1715), Voltaire suffered tragedy at a young age when his mother died. Never close with his father or brother, Voltaire exhibited a rebellious attitude toward authority from his youth. His brilliant mind was fostered in the care of the Society of Jesus, who introduced him to the joys of literature and theater. Despite his later criticisms against the Church, Voltaire, throughout his life, fondly recalled his dedicated Jesuit teachers.
Although he spent time as a civil servant in the French embassy to the Hague, Voltaireâs main love was writingâan endeavor where he excelled in various genres, including poetry, which led to his appointment as the royal court poet for King Louis XV. Widely recognized as one of the greatest French writers, and even hyperbolically referred to by ...
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Cincinnati - Crickets in the news
John Vervaeke and the meaning crisis.
Rod Dreher's Substack
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John Vervaeke & The Meaning Crisis
What I'm Learning From Engaging The Thought Of The Cognitive Scientist
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Iâm in Germany at a conference. On the plane here, I started reading a terrific book, Awakening From The Meaning Crisis, by John Vervaeke and Christopher Mastropietro. Iâve been wanting for a long time to get into Vervaeke (pron. âver-VAY-keeâ), a University of Toronto cognitive scientist who is part of Jordan Peterson World, but I just donât have time to listen to podcasts, which is how he presents most of his public work.
If you do, hereâs a treasure trove:Â a link to video presentations of Vervaekeâs lectures on the Meaning Crisis. The book I bought seems to be a distillation of the first twenty-five episodes (a second volume is coming). Vervaeke is not a Christian, by the way. He is interested in Buddhism, not as a religion, it seems, but as an approach to cognition. His work is filled with useful insights â so much so that I donât think Iâll be able to wait for the final book, presenting his Meaning Crisis lectures in written form (the form in which I best learn). Looks like I have my next thing to listen to on my daily walks. Hereâs what Iâm getting from the book so far:
The Meaning Crisis, in Vervaekeâs view, amounts to this:
⊠the decentering of human life from its cosmic significance, a decline in our sense of purpose, and a sensation of having lost the soul that gave earlier human societies their adaptiveness and vitality. It seems we are left with a feeling of having lost our place in the world along with a sense of who we are and what we ought to do with ourselves.
People today â those without dead souls â are grasping for meaning, trying to find their way out of the dark wood of despair.
There is a pattern to all of these efforts, a certain hunger in the human spirit, a depth of need that has not been fully understood. When we begin to recognize this need as a feature of our spiritual condition, we can begin to piece together a unifying account for why all of this is happening. Each of these movements is responding to a crisis of meaning, a disorienting sense that we have forgotten some essential dimension to reality and lost our relationship to what is good, true, and beautiful. This crisis has deprived us of something essential at the center of our lives. It has been described in many ways by many thoughtful people across time, but we might think of it quite simply as a famine of the spirit, an existential illness that has taken shape in the human brain, body, culture, and soul.
Vervaeke describes the search for meaning as the search for wisdom:
Wisdom is ultimately about how to generate and enhance this meaning. Wisdom is about realizing. This means that cultivating wisdom generates realization in both senses of the word: becoming aware and making real. Wisdom is about realizing meaning in life in a profound way.
Now, hereâs where it gets interesting for me. My next book is (broadly) going to be about pilgrimage as a journey for meaning â specifically, a journey to recover God, and, in the narrative I plan, a way of seeing our civilizational inheritance as a material bearer and mediator of meaning and divinity. (Note: not divinity itself â that would be idol-worship â but as a mediator of Godâs presence.) Vervaeke:
It may sound high-minded and mystical, but self-transcendence is an essential need for human beings. It performs core functions for our cognition. For instance, deep connections exist between meaning, wisdom and altered states of consciousness (ASC). Throughout our history, human beings have consistently sought ways to alter the quality of our conscious experience by manipulating our physiology and behavior.
Prayer, then â and not just petitions to God, but deeper, more mystical ways of prayer, like the Jesus Prayer in the Orthodox tradition. And pilgrimage: those 20,000 young people walking for sixty miles across the plains of Beauce to Chartres this past June were âpraying with their bodiesâ â seeking to know the Lord through participation in Him.
Vervaeke says a true mystical experience is transformative. After youâve had one â and you accept it as real â you know you canât be the same person.
These are awakening experiences, wherein people return from the mystical experience feeling it was somehow more real than reality. They feel a compelling need to change their world and themselves to fit that new reality.
⊠When people use this word âmeaning,â it is a metaphor. They mean that the way life becomes significant is somehow analogous to the way a sentence has semantic meaning. The pieces fit together in some way that impacts our cognition and connects us to the real world.
He goes on:
When words become a sentence, we no longer see the words, but see through them. They become transparent and give us access to participate in reality, allowing us a chance to grasp it, to have contact with it. We have to unpack this metaphor. Why do we use it, and what does it reveal when we talk about the meaning of our lives? How is it that some of the most meaningful experiences people have are precisely the ones that are completely ineffable to them, that they cannot put into words?
For Christians, the material manifestations of the experience of Christ â liturgies, prayers, hymns, church buildings, pilgrimages, and so forth â are metaphors, of a sort. A âmetaphorâ is an analogy, a kind of bridge. It comes from the Greek word meaning âtransference.â The culture we create from our common experience of God serves as a bridge that allows us to have access, however imperfectly, to the âreal worldâ of the divine. It is what allows transcendence â again, imperfectly â to be immanent. Vervaeke says that âmetaphor is a way of reaching into the world so it seems to reach back.â
For the cognitive scientist Vervaeke, culture is necessary for knowing:
Your cognition is very participatory; you partake in large, distributed networks of cognition. Before the internet networked computers together, culture networked brains together to provide some of our most powerful problem-solving abilities. This is how human beings responded to an impossible predicament. They formed a social network. These networks were managed with a form of pattern-oriented activity that became so fundamental to human culture that its influence pervades nearly all of our behavior. We call it ritual.
Ritual is guiding your interaction without you noticing. It is the groundwater beneath these cultural forms. If you dig into your own behavior, social or otherwise, you will find it. Even when our interactions seem empty, they continue to conveyâand convey us throughâthese patterns of meaning. In the minutest of gestures, in the smallest of small talk, ancient rituals are at work.
⊠Ritual trains your ability to regulate your emotion and to undertake a process called decentering: adopting a non-egoic perspective by redirecting your attention to something real outside of you.
It all began in the distant past, with shamans as the bridge between the transcendent and the immanent.
The shamanic integration of flow with altered states of consciousness (ASC), the insight and refinement of intuition, the capacity for metaphorical thoughtâall of these expanded human cognition by making it much more creative, capable of reading patterns and generating connections between different scales and categories of the world. This allowed our ancestors to gather the world together and unite different parts of experience to create working models of reality as well as the structures that seemed to exist beneath us, around us, and within us. These symbolic unities, or mythologies, gave us a new kind of agency in the world and an idea of who we were within it. This was the beginning of what we would later call a worldview.
You can see where heâs going with this â and where I, the Christian writer with a newfound, post-Chartres interest in the power of Christian culture, am going with this.
âMyth,â as Vervaeke uses it, is not something untrue, but rather a story, a metaphor that allows us to grasp transcendent realities, and order our lives according to those truths. Tolkien famously told C.S. Lewis that Christianity is âthe myth that is true.â I believe that, certainly â but the point to take is that myths themselves, even if not true in the most literal sense, are crucial to human cognition and the forming of culture. Without building a sacred canopy (the term is Peter Bergerâs) over ourselves and our societies, a canopy woven from myth, we are lost.
The Axial Age (from the 8th to the 3rd centuries, BC) was a period of profound shift in human consciousness, across many different civilizations. It was the period of the Greek philosophers, the Hebrew prophets, and the advent in the Far East of Buddha, Confucius, Lao-tzu, and Zarathustra. This caused what Vervaeke calls the âgreat disembedding,â in which humanity became conscious of itself as somehow separate from the cosmos. He became aware of a transcendent world beyond this one.
In the great disembedding, one world became two. The everyday world was that of the untrained mind, a world beset by self-deception, self-destruction, illusion, violence, and chaos. To live in this world was to be out of touch with reality. The real world lay behind this world of illusion. This was how the trained mind, the wise mind, saw the world.
In the two-worlds mythology, wisdom is not the acquisition of power or prosperity. It is the emancipation from a lesser reality. The axial hero did not want to conquer the everyday world. He wanted to be transformed out of it.
In the two-worlds mythology, meaning was not just about connectedness as it was in the continuous cosmos but specifically connectedness to the real world. This also changed the idea of the self. In the continuous cosmos, you were defined largely by how you fit into the world. In the two-worlds mythology, you were defined more by self-transcendence, how you transformed and grew as a person.
More:
The two-worlds Mythology is a mythological form of thinking that allows us to articulate and train the psychotechnologies of the Axial Revolution, the projects of self-transcendence and wisdom. It took the meaning-making of the shaman and refined it into a more precise way of cultivating human cognition. However, this mythology is failing us now. The scientific worldview, with its materialist and physicalist metaphysics, is gradually eroding the Axial project.
This is one of the great problems of the Meaning Crisis. Since the shaman, human beings have depended on mythology for meaning-making. It has become inseparable from humanness itself. The Axial worldview still holds up our idea of the sovereign person, the individual who has agency, freedom, and responsibility. However, a mythology must be livable in order to perform its function.
The scientific-materialist worldview makes it impossible for the Axial Age way of thinking â obviously, Christianity is part of this â to be sustained. This, says Vervaeke, is why we are having a Meaning Crisis: being human, as we have understood it for over 2,000 years, requires living by myths that connect us to a world of transcendence that we intuit is really there. The Axial Age way of thinking is deeply embedded in our psyches. But the modern way of thinking denies flat-out that there is anything transcending this world.
In 2015, the formerly Christian writer Damon Linker wrote a powerful essay challenging the complacent optimism of the New Atheists, saying that Nietzsche understood better than them the terror implied by the death of God. Linker wrote:
If atheism is true, it is far from being good news. Learning that we're alone in the universe, that no one hears or answers our prayers, that humanity is entirely the product of random events, that we have no more intrinsic dignity than non-human and even non-animate clumps of matter, that we face certain annihilation in death, that our sufferings are ultimately pointless, that our lives and loves do not at all matter in a larger sense, that those who commit horrific evils and elude human punishment get away with their crimes scot free â all of this (and much more) is utterly tragic.
Back to Vervaeke:
The meaning of a mythology is like an atmosphere, and it gives oxygen to our idea of humanness. This atmospheric property of meaningâsymbolized by the shamanâs soulfightârefers to human âspirit,â the idea that something about human beings is not confined to body and world but also extends beyond it.
When this symbolic reality begins to decline, it is like the thinning or pollution of that atmosphere. Our meaning-making is asphyxiated, and we are barred from accessing the spirit of soulflight. Human beings become homeless in the universe, as though the soil from which we have grown meaning, and grown ourselves, is no longer fertile.
As Nietzsche famously observed, if we live only for the next world, and the next world is taken from us, precious little is left for the project of meaning, and the consequences are nihilism and profound self-destructionâ . We do not want to lose all that we gained through the great disembedding, but how do we live with this legacy when we can no longer inhabit its worldview? To begin answering this question, we must gain a fuller understanding of what this world bequeathed us.
(My next book is going to take up in part that highlighted line.)
Vervaeke continues:
To retrace the steps of the Axial Revolution, I will begin in ancient Israel. It is difficult for many modern people to fathom the scope of influence of the Bibleânot just for practicing Jews and Christians but for all who grew up and live in the West. Biblical illiteracy has been steadily rising in tandem with our secularization, and this a thwarting problem for our cultureânot because people should be Christians or Jews but because failure to grasp the grammar of the Bible is also the failure to grasp the grammar of your own cognition.
You may well profess to be an atheist and disbelieve the doctrines of these traditions. However, this kind of beliefâin other words, the propositional beliefâis irrelevant in this context. I am not referring to what you profess but how you think and behave. Defining belief only by creed and proposition is analogous to defining the democratic sensibility by whether or not you cast a ballot on voting day; you still participate, however unconsciously, in the ethics, rituals and institutions that structure this form of society.
⊠The mythology of the Judeo-Christian heritage, for instance, has become an invisible architecture for our thinking, a meaning we live in, furnish, and refurnish over time. One of the psychotechnological inventions that undergirds this architecture appears so obvious that we do not stop to consider its novelty: the understanding of time as a cosmic narrative, as a story. All cultures tell stories, and we will unpack the cognitive science of story in later chapters.
Yet the Continuous Cosmos [of the pre-Axial Age] was not a story. It was a cycle. The story has a beginning, a crucial turning point that forces a crisis and leads the protagonist to act, and a resolution. There is a direction to a story. There is a purpose to it.
Yes. I believe it was MacIntyre who said that we cannot know what to do until we understand what story in which we are a part. The scientific-materialist worldview denies that there is a story at all. Here, according to Vervaeke, is the breakthrough that came to us through Hebraic monotheism:
As with most historical transitions, the cross-fade from continuous cosmos to Axial mythology was gradual rather than immediate. You can detect many aspects of a Bronze Age god in the Old Testament, but He becomes more Axial as He becomes the force of progress, the idea that history, when directed to its proper course, is moving closer to its purpose, gathering together across time, perfecting and refining, becoming more real.
This gathering is happening on a cosmic scale but also on an individual scale, and God becomes the correspondence between these scales, whose revelations collapse togetherâ like the character and the world of a narrativeâwhen the narrative reaches a pivotal turning point. The turning point of the story is called kairos.
In common parlance, kairos refers to a critical or opportune moment, an opening in time that allows us to see, access or intervene in something that was once invisible or obscure. In the two-worlds mythology, kairos is a revelation of the real world from within the mirage.
Kairos requires a shamanic synonymy of knowing and participating. This synonymy is captured in the idea of Daâath, an ancient term for knowing, used in the Bible to refer to sexual intercourse (e.g., Adam knew his wife Eve). Modern Westerners may find this confusing; we do not often use sex as a metaphor for knowledge. Yet many cultures do.
Moses receiving the Law on Sinai was a kairos moment. For Christians, the Incarnation was the kairos moment of all kairos moments.
The sexual metaphor is a rich one, and we should not shrink from it out of prudery. When one has sex â or, I should say, unites with someone one loves, as distinct from merely mating like animals â one opens a bridge in the most intimate way possible with another soul. One ceases to be oneself, but unites with another, knows the other through unsurpassably intimate participation in the other, and is changed by it. One might even produce new life from it.
When the Christian scripture calls Christ the Bridegroom and the Church the Bride, this is the way of knowing implied by that metaphor.
Vervaeke:
The identity relationship between knowing and participating is a fundamental Axial idea, and it is central to understanding the religious nature of the ancients and their symbolic way of experiencing the world. âKnowingâ is not the apprehension of facts, seen dispassionately from the outside. It is nothing you could acquire from a distance. You know something by assuming its identity, by becoming it. Your becoming it somehow changes it, reveals it, makes it real.
When you are making love with someone, you are participating in them, identifying with them, empathizing and resonating with them. You are changing them as they are changing you, and this process of change risesâforgive me the punâto a climax, after a turning point and before the resolution. You may begin to see why, in so many religious traditions, sexuality is a perennial symbol for our sacred union with reality. Daâath describes our participatory knowing in the course of its unfolding.
This idea of knowing is critical for our project because it changes the way we interpret religious ideas of faith and belief. In ancient Israel, faith did not mean having incredible beliefs without evidence. That is a recent, very modern idea. Faith was Daâath. It described this symbolic relationship you had with the world and with your existence. It was your sense of living in this reciprocal realization.
Do you see the Chartres pilgrimage with different eyes now? Do you see all the various manifestations of Christian culture, beginning with the early Church, and extending through history to our own time, in a different way? You should. The idea that faith is about nothing more than assenting to propositions is a modern one, and one that leads to disenchantment.
In the Orthodox Christian faith, âsinâ is understood not as the breaking of the moral law, in a legal sense, but rather more as âmissing the markâ â of living in disharmony with what is Really Real. Vervaeke thinks something similar:
This kind of language returns us to the idea of sin, but our biblical illiteracy inhibits us; we are tempted to understand sin as doing something immoral, committing a particular act of transgression. This is much more a symptom than a definition. Sin is better understood as being in a distorted relationship with reality. It is the misdirection of love and attention.
Recall the archery analogy that sources the termâs meaning; you cannot shoot for where your eye tells you to look. If you do, you will miss the bullâs-eye. The true arrow is guided by Daâath, the kind of knowing that conforms the attention of the archer with the proper target. The archer and her target seem to share the same body, the same identity. Their craft is a movement toward connectedness and participation. When she lands the target, it becomes real to her. She stakes herself in its reality. She is binding herself to the world and the world to herself. One way of understanding sin is as the failure to effect that binding.
In 2022, when I visited the medieval Orthodox monasteries in northern Romania, I noticed at the base of one of the painted churches images of kings. The monk guiding me told me that those are the pre-Christian Greek philosophers who opened the way, conceptually, for Christ.
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Vervaeke writes about them at length, saying at one point, âIf you were to put Western Civilization on two feet, one foot would be the Bible, and the other would be the works of Plato.â Hereâs an excerpt.
Pythagorasâs cosmos anticipated the relationship between beauty, order, and realness that would become essential to the Greek philosophical tradition. When people report awakening experiences, they often rediscover these Pythagorean affinities. They suddenly perceive the world as a cosmos, and their perception of order and coherence is suffused with beauty.
The notion of cosmos created a powerful model for how we understood meaning and wisdomâwhat a self was, how it perceived and grew, how we fit into the universe, and how we made contact with reality. It draws a striking contrast with the modern worldview.
A cosmos is not the same thing as a universe. A cosmos is a universe suffused with order, pattern, and meaning â with logos. I didnât fully understand the meaning of the opening of the Gospel of John (â"In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God... And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us."). What does it mean to say that God was the word, and that Jesus of Nazareth was the incarnate Word? Finally someone explained to me that translating the Greek word âlogos,â which John used, as âwordâ is limiting. Yes, âlogosâ means âword,â but it means far more than that. It means âreason.â It means âordering principle.â To call God the Logos means that one of His properties is that He is the ordering principle of all of reality. To call Jesus the Logos is to say that the ordering principle of all reality manifested as a man.
Back to Vervaekeâs discussion of Plato:
Notice the role of participatory knowing in the âvirtuous circleâ above. Contact with reality is dependent on my self-transformation. I am not a passive observer forming true beliefs. I am implicated in my observations. The appearance of the world is a consequence of my framing, and I have to change myself to see the world more clearly. When I do, the world itself seems to change, and it places a demand on me to change myself. As I transform, the world discloses more of itself. This is the dynamic of participatory knowing. It is a reciprocal opening between me and my environment. I am not just changing my mind or knowing with my mind. I am knowing with my whole self, my whole identity, and all the machinery of my cognition.
The related quests for reality, inner harmony, self-knowledge, and transformation are explored deeply in Platoâs Republic. The quest is dramatized in the Myth of the Cave, perhaps the most famous passage in the history of Western philosophy.
Iâm running out of the allotted space in this newsletter, so I wonât retell the Myth of the Cave, which most of you no doubt know â but if not, or if you need a refresher, follow the link. More Vervaeke:
Remember: these myths remain popular because they are not stories from the past. They are dramatic recreations of the perennial patterns we face as human beings, like the disharmony we experience in the parts of our psyche, the problem of being trapped in illusion and being out of touch with reality.
In this vision, reason and spirituality are not opposed. They are inseparably bound together. Plato paired the Socratic project (ordering the psyche to overcome self-deception) with the Pythagorean one (the soulflight of self-transcendence and transformation of consciousness). From this marriage, he discovered a way to depict this radical transformation. His depiction is so entrancing that it became a constant refrain throughout the West.
This is why the truest Christianity is a journey towards what we Orthodox call theosis, or unity with God, in which we achieve perfect harmony with Him, while remaining ourselves. Dante writes about this process in the Paradiso. He invented a word, transumanar, to describe the process â but he very much does not mean what Silicon Valley means by transhuman. He means that we become most fully human by becoming transhuman â that is, gradually changed and perfected by radical, ongoing communion with the Holy Spirit.
Vervaeke on logos:
As I mentioned in previous chapters, this word is among the most translatedâand mistranslatedâwords in all of philosophy. It has to do with the order and arrangement of these real patterns, the concentering formula that fits everything together, integrates it with mind, and makes it intelligible to our comprehension. The research shows that our grasp of logos is intuitive, but not something we can define or express. We know it by conforming to it, by becoming like it, by matching the pattern of our cognition to the pattern of its disclosure, and entering into that reciprocal realization with it.
You see here why in the Christian view, conforming to the Logos â Christ â requires creating patterns of meaning through which the Logos is disclosed. We have to build a Christian culture so that our lifelong journey, both individually and collectively, to theosis can be effected. Rieff said that in the Christian era, Christians knew generally how to live because the answer to âWhat am I to do?â was âDo as the Saviour did.â We created all the structures and artefacts of Christian culture in an effort to order the material world to Christlikeness, and to create for ourselves immanent patterns of cognition that help us flesh-and-blood humans to do as St. Paul commanded: to put on the mind of Christ.
This aligns with Vervaeke here:
Plato provided us with the paradigm-changing insight that a connection exists between our conformity to reality and the necessity of self-transformation. As we track patterns in the world, we can reflectively internalize these patterns to better understand and harmonize ourselves. The inward transformation allows us to refine our grasp on reality, to awaken from illusion, and draw ourselves closer to what is most real.
That is as far as I got in the Vervaeke book yesterday. It is incredibly helpful to me as a plot out my next book (again, I will tell you all about it once I have a publisherâs agreement). But I think you can see where Iâm going with it. Going to that Chartres pilgrimage really changed me. I hope I can publish this book inspired by it. You know, sometimes people ask me how I get ideas for my books. The honest answer is I just wait for them, and they appear. Well, this one appeared in a big way at Chartres, through the young people who walked that walk, and, of course, through the glorious cathedral itself. The second time in my life!
If you like all the stuff in todayâs newsletter, please come to the Midwestuary Conference in Chicago on August 22-24! Vervaeke will be there, as will Jonathan Pageau (his frequent online conversation partner), Paul VanderKlay, and my fine self.
Inaugural Mass homily of Pope Leo the XIV with some commentary by yours truly
Signs of Hope
Good day all,
   My thoughts on the Holy Father's homily in bold print. I see many signs of hopefulness in his homily and I am praying greater clarity and unity from Pope Leo. The world will reject his clarity since it likes spiritual ambiguity and moral relativism, but I am hoping for a less divisive Pope than Francis. - Fr. Tom
Dear Brother Cardinals, Brother Bishops and Priests, Distinguished Authorities and Members of the Diplomatic Corps, and those who traveled here for the Jubilee of Confraternities, Brothers and Sisters:
I greet all of you with a heart full of gratitude at the beginning of the ministry that has been entrusted to me. St. Augustine wrote: âLord, you have made us for yourself, and our heart is restless until it rests in youâ (Confessions, I: 1,1).
In these days, we have experienced intense emotions. The death of Pope Francis filled our hearts with sadness. In those difficult hours, we felt like the crowds that the Gospel says were âlike sheep without a shepherdâ (Matthew 9:36). Yet on Easter Sunday, we received his final blessing and, in the light of the Resurrection, we experienced the days that followed in the certainty that the Lord never abandons his people, but gathers them when they are scattered and guards them âas a shepherd guards his flockâ (Jeremiah 31:10).
In this spirit of faith, the College of Cardinals met for the conclave. Coming from different backgrounds and experiences, we placed in Godâs hands our desire to elect the new Successor of Peter, the Bishop of Rome, a shepherd capable of preserving the rich heritage of the Christian faith and, at the same time, looking to the future, in order to confront the questions, concerns and challenges of todayâs world.  I never got the impression that Pope Francis considered it a rich heritage, but often just an interpretation and exposition of the faith for a given time and culture. I am probably too harsh on the past Pope, but he was not one known for clarity. I am hoping that the use of the word heritage indicates a more positive few of the past as a treasury of faith to be preserved rather than a liability to be dismissed.
Accompanied by your prayers, we could feel the working of the Holy Spirit, who was able to bring us into harmony, like musical instruments, so that our heartstrings could vibrate in a single melody. I was chosen, without any merit of my own, and now, with fear and trembling, I come to you as a brother, who desires to be the servant of your faith and your joy, walking with you on the path of Godâs love, for he wants us all to be united in one family. The Holy Father uses phrase from St. Clement of Rome (Pope #3) and seems to borrow some additional imagery from St. Augustine like he did in his opening remarks.
Love and unity: These are the two dimensions of the mission entrusted to Peter by Jesus. We see this in todayâs Gospel, which takes us to the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus began the mission he received from the Father: to be a âfisherâ of humanity in order to draw it up from the waters of evil and death. Walking along the shore, he had called Peter and the other first disciples to be, like him, âfishers of men.âÂ
Now, after the Resurrection, it is up to them to carry on this mission, to cast their nets again and again, to bring the hope of the Gospel into the âwatersâ of the world, to sail the seas of life so that all may experience Godâs embrace. Pope Benedict used the image of sailing the seas of life at the dawn of the digital age after his election as Pope. I suspect Pope Francis might have as well, but when you stop paying too much attention you miss little details. I prayed for Pope Francis his entire pontificate, but I didnât give him much active attention.
How can Peter carry out this task? The Gospel tells us that it is possible only because his own life was touched by the infinite and unconditional love of God, even in the hour of his failure and denial. For this reason, when Jesus addresses Peter, the Gospel uses the Greek verb agapĂĄo, which refers to the love that God has for us, to the offering of himself without reserve and without calculation. Whereas the verb used in Peterâs response describes the love of friendship that we have for one another.
Consequently, when Jesus asks Peter, âSimon, son of John, do you love me more than these?â (John 21:16), he is referring to the love of the Father. It is as if Jesus said to him, âOnly if you have known and experienced this love of God, which never fails, will you be able to feed my lambs. Only in the love of God the Father will you be able to love your brothers and sisters with that same âmore,â that is, by offering your life for your brothers and sisters.â
Peter is thus entrusted with the task of âloving moreâ and giving his life for the flock. The ministry of Peter is distinguished precisely by this self-sacrificing love, because the Church of Rome presides in charity, and its true authority is the charity of Christ. It is never a question of capturing others by force, by religious propaganda, or by means of power. Instead, it is always and only a question of loving as Jesus did. The 21st chapter of John is so rich. It is one of my favorite passages to reflect upon. It is how God heals us of our sins.  It is both a healing moment and a recommissioning of sorts. Jesus canât have Peter moping through life as a the denier, Jesus is calling him to shepherd the flock.
The Apostle Peter himself tells us that Jesus âis the stone that was rejected by you, the builders, and has become the cornerstoneâ (Acts 4:11). Moreover, if the rock is Christ, Peter must shepherd the flock without ever yielding to the temptation to be an autocrat, lording it over those entrusted to him (cf. 1 Peter 5:3). On the contrary, he is called to serve the faith of his brothers and sisters and to walk alongside them, for all of us are âliving stonesâ (1 Peter 2:5), called through our baptism to build Godâs house in fraternal communion, in the harmony of the Spirit, in the coexistence of diversity. In the words of St. Augustine: âThe Church consists of all those who are in harmony with their
brothers and sisters and who love their neighbourâ (Sermons 359, 9).
Brothers and sisters, I would like that our first great desire be for a united Church, a sign of unity and communion, which becomes a leaven for a reconciled world. In our time, we still see too much discord, too many wounds caused by hatred, violence, prejudice, the fear of difference, and an economic paradigm that exploits the Earthâs resources and marginalizes the poorest.Â
For our part, we want to be a small leaven of unity, communion and fraternity within the world. We want to say to the world, with humility and joy: Look to Christ! Come closer to him! Welcome his word that enlightens and consoles! Listen to his offer of love and become his one family: In the one Christ, we are one. This is the path to follow together, among ourselves, but also with our sister Christian churches, with those who follow other religious paths, with those who are searching for God, with all women and men of goodwill, in order to build a new world where peace reigns! Look to Christ! Pope Leo goes right into the invitation to listen and reflect upon the word of God. The invitation is unity through conversion.
This is the missionary spirit that must animate us; not closing ourselves off in our small groups, nor feeling superior to the world. We are called to offer Godâs love to everyone, in order to achieve that unity that does not cancel out differences but values the personal history of each person and the social and religious culture of every people. The church is always missionary. Conversion to Christ does not annihilate all differences, but rather is a process of refinement, keeping what can be of service to the Gospel and losing what is opposed to it or hinders it. Getting rid of sin is just the beginning, putting on the mind and heart of Christ is the challenge. I pray for our new Holy Father that he may be faithful, courageous and genuinely kind.
Brothers and sisters, this is the hour for love! The heart of the Gospel is the love of God that makes us brothers and sisters. With my predecessor Leo XIII, we can ask ourselves today: If this criterion âwere to prevail in the world, would not every conflict cease and peace return?â (Rerum Novarum, 21).
With the light and the strength of the Holy Spirit, let us build a Church founded on Godâs love, a sign of unity, a missionary Church that opens its arms to the world, proclaims the word, allows itself to be made ârestlessâ by history, and becomes a leaven of harmony for humanity. Together, as one people, as brothers and sisters, let us walk towards God and love one another. Surprisingly short homily, bishops can often go on forever.
