E Pluibus Unum: Out of Many, One

So, I’ve been thinking more and more about a comment made the other day on one of my latest posts. The comment was about the possibility of uniting the world through Metaphysical oneness as a way of over-coming our Selfish Individualized Subjectivity to bring about a more equal and just world. Everything in the world is composed of the same building blocks, therefore we are really all connected and our separate Individualities are really just an illusion, or something along those lines. I just wanted to explore this idea a little more and its recurrent manifestations throughout history and what implications it has for the present.

This is not necessarily a new idea. M-Theory may be the latest model of articulation of this concept, but it has been expressed throughout history in all parts of the known world. In Hinduism, which has been around since at least 700-800 BC, this idea is expressed by the word Brahman, in which the multiplicity of the world is really just an illusion and differs only in “name and visible appearance,” but ultimately all is united in this single unifying principle. The Chinese called it the Tao, the “Way” or “Path,” which produced harmony in the Universe. In Ancient Greece, the Pre-Socratics had as many names for it as there were philosophers who thought. Thales said it was “water;” Anaximander called it the “boundless;” and Anaximenes thought the source was “air” or “vapor.” Heraclitus called it “logos”—this “something” that was the essence of everything.

All of these things are just different names for the same thing, which of course is “God.” In the West, after the fall of Greece to Rome and the birth, death and resurrection of Christ, we were united under one of the strictest self-abnegating moral codes that had been imagined yet. We are all formed in God’s image and God is a part of all of us, i.e. we are all Brothers, thus we should “love our Neighbor [Others] as our-Selves” and “treat Others as You would like to be treated”—not that this was necessarily anything new, but the punishment that attended it was. Christ was the idealized model of love and compassion, yet, as Nietzsche put it: “There was only one true Christian, and he died on the cross.” All those that have followed him have paled in comparison and not even the threat of eternal damnation has persuaded us to act otherwise.

Then along came Machiavelli, who looked at the scene before him, saw its evident hypocrisy, and literally dared Men to forget about their Souls, forget about heaven and the afterlife and metaphysical speculation—which had resulted in naught—and to reform the here and now. He spoke admiringly about those who cared more for their Fatherland than for the salvation of their Souls. Since millennia of philosophizing about what the Soul even is had produced no results and those that pretended to know—the Priests—held power and influenced and corrupted politics, what we should therefore do is stop worrying about the things we can’t know and instead focus on those that are actually within our control. Realism over Idealism; Materialism against Idealism.

What was the cause of the Protestant Reformation, if not the corruption of the church and the debasement of the Word of Christ by those who were sworn to protect and advance it? Martin Luther was absolutely shocked by the corruption of the clergy when he visited Rome in 1510. The Pope—God’s highest representative on Earth—was selling licenses for brothels, priests who kept mistresses were simply taxed, and even Pope Alexander VI fathered seven children by at least two different women, despite priests being forbade to have sex. And, worst of all, the sale of Indulgences as a way to get absolution from sin, instead of formal penance. All these men were supposed to be Moral and Spiritual leaders and be beyond reproach, yet they were just as bad as the lowest commoner, it seemed, when it came to Self-control.

So what Machiavelli did was simply to give us—the lowly commoners—equal rights to be just as Selfish as all our supposed leaders. If Man is naturally Selfish, and apparently no amount of exhortations or threats can convince him to be otherwise, let’s re-create Society on this basis and see how that goes. Hobbes and Locke, following in his footsteps, took up this dare and recreated politics on a purely secular basis, which attempted to engage Men through their Reason, instead of through Myth—and the attendant force and fraud that goes along with it—and win Men’s consent through a new set of loyalties. Hobbes said to imagine another man holding a gun to your temple and threatening to shoot you. At that moment one is a real Self, without all the alienating opinions of State, Church, or Public Opinion and then one can really decide what counts.

So, to get back to the main point, whereas Metaphysical oneness may be true and edifying, it doesn’t seem to be effective on the human level where Man interacts on a day to day basis. Man’s mass of conflicting emotions and priorities seem to trump any sort of base interconnectedness that is so self-evidently (due to its recurrent nature throughout history, religion, and science) true and not even the threat of eternal damnation could cause us to act differently.

But where does that leave us—the children living at the End of History, forced to deal with the realization that all alternatives have failed, that there might not be such a thing as “Truth,” and what little there is does not seem very pretty?

I think, if nothing else, we can learn that the highest crime is Hypocrisy. You might be able to “fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time,” and the Truth will prevail! And when it does, the inevitable result is that which you see today: Cynicism and Apathy. You cannot found a country on the basis of Reason and then rule unreasonably—it’s gonna catch up with you eventually.

After having swept away all the other interests that could engage Men’s loyalties, the only thing left for us is to look at the world empirically—through our Senses. And right now we can see a huge disparity between the way Men talk and the way they act, and unless our leaders are willing to dabble in some of the dangerous, failed alternatives to Liberal Democracy, then they are going to have to realize this simple fact: the so-called Machiavellian method of leadership—"the employment of cunning and duplicity in statecraft or in general conduct”—can no longer work. Unless they are willing to take away our Free Press and now the Internet and, not to mention, our power of Reason—which I would hope that we as a People would never submit to—this method of rule, simply can no longer work.

I will leave you with one more quote. A bit unrelated but just some food for thought.

“General apathy [is] the fruit of [radical] Individualism…What is important to combat is therefore much less anarchy [chaos] or despotism [dictatorship] than the apathy that can create the one or the other almost indifferently.”
—Tocqueville: Democracy in America

We Laugh at Danger and Break All the Rules

With the recent, untimely death by his own hands of my friend Jason “Old Boy” Kuzniarski, I felt that it was time to explore a little deeper just what it is I have been talking about in this forum, in order to try and help myself make sense of this event.

What exactly is this so-called “Self” of which I have been speaking?

The Self was one of the many discoveries made in the State of Nature that was brought back from the jungle, in order to be used to re-shape Society. In the State of Nature, Man’s greatest concern is Self-Preservation and his greatest fear is that of Violent Death. By Nature, he is a Solitary Individual, therefore, in order to live naturally, his greatest concern must be Self-Interest.

“Self” is the modern replacement for “Soul.” The idea of Soul went out of fashion after Machiavelli’s exhortations against the possibility of living according to Virtue and the lack of certitude about what exactly the Soul even is, despite 2,000 years of philosophy exploring this topic.

One of the first—if not the first—to have used “Self” in its modern sense was John Locke. He described it in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding in 1690 as, “that conscious thinking thing, whatever substance [it is] made up of…which is sensible or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.” It forms a continuity that “unites existences and actions …in time into the same person: so whatever has the consciousness of present and past actions, is the same person to who they both belong.” The Self is one’s personal identity that is the result of the choices and experiences that occur throughout one’s life. It exists as an immaterial Consciousness or Ego, which acts as a storage unit that holds these life shaping moments, in the face of a very rapidly changing material body that is constant in flux.

But how would this natural way of living work within the confines of Society? It must be changed from pure Self-Interest into, what came to be called, Enlightened Self-Interest or Self-Interest Well Understood.

In Modern Philosophy, there was a sharp turn made (pretty much an “about-face” or 180˚ turn) away from cultivating or perfecting, seemingly impossible, Virtue toward the emancipation of personal Desire as the ordering principle of Society. It was a way to make the goal of Happiness much easier to realize. Instead of setting a person's two components—Body and Soul—against one another as the Ancients had with their demands of Virtue, if the second component Soul—or Self—is allowed to cooperate in the satisfactions of the Body—instead of being trained to restrain them—then the division in Man can be overcome and earthly satisfaction achieved.

This simple solution, however, was exploded by Rousseau in his critique of the new type of Man—The Bourgeois—that is the resultant of this new schema. He was quick to point out that Locke’s Natural Man would hardly be distinguishable from the rest of the Animal Kingdom and would not be industrious or rational, but rather idle and irrational—motivated exclusively by the Passions. Rousseau removed the floor from beneath Man—that Hobbes and Locke needed in order for their very simple plans to work—and helped to found the Modern Psychology of Self, popularized by Freud, which attempts to look at the Sub-conscious “Basement” to see what really lies beneath all our Rationality and Civility.

We keep chasing this Self back further and further into the jungles of the State of Nature, but its essence remains elusive and this understanding, more and more, comes to seem to be its essence. The Self now seems to be this mysterious, ineffable, indefinable, unlimited, creativity—knowable only thru its deeds. It has come to replace God—of which it is the impious mirror image—as the grounding for all motivation, action, and “values.” It’s become the source of all things. It now creates god(s) in its image, not vice-versa, as in the old Biblical stories.

This Self is also the anti-thesis of Nature—not bound by the Laws of Natural Science, it is the only source of Freedom in a mechanically, deterministic world. It’s emanations are now proof of Free Will, but are random swervings really the same thing as making a Free Choice? Our Psychology today posits that the Sub-conscious trumps the Rational Consciousness and, in reality, we are really at the mercy of something even worse than God’s Will: Unconscious Desire. We are simply this uncontrollable ball of emotions that are ready to burst out at any moment, with no mediating force to counter-balance.

In the Ancient conception of Man, the “Soul” was capable of exercising control over the Passions and pointed the lower motivations in Man toward higher goals and achievements. Man had a real Freedom that allowed him to order his world and, although he was still at the mercy of Nature/God, his Reason could aid in an ordering and hierarchy that gave Man power over his life.

Our current language of the "Self" has none of these edifying and inspiring components and the greatest change is that the good man used to be the one who cared for others, whereas now it is the one who cares exclusively for himself. Survivalism has replaced Heroism. Selfishness is now a good thing instead of a Moral Vice.

The word “Soul” expresses very different images and ideas than does the word “Self,” yet we have quietly accepted the substitution and the poverty of our language mirrors the poverty of our realities. We are told that Man is Self, and Self is naturally Selfish (period) whereas, Soul invokes images of divine and lofty goals and enterprises, and requires a Society dedicated to it in which this beauty can flourish. This whole dilemma becomes even more problematic when one of the most beautiful Souls I have ever met was an Atheist.

I wonder where an Atheist’s Soul goes when he dies?

The Party's Over

Loss of Human Dignity? That is a pretty high price to pay. Why did Kant feel that this new system—which he ultimately agreed with—had such a high cost, especially when you think about all the great things that were gained from it: Freedom of Speech, Freedom of Religion, the Right to vote and have a say in the functioning of your Government, and a whole plethora of other Rights to protect the Individual.

To find the answer to that question we must look to the other half of the Modern American dichotomy: Jean-Jacques Rousseau (who I indicated earlier as the basis for the current crop of Liberals today).

Rousseau wrote about 60 years after Locke’s highly influential book Two Treaties on Civil Government, and started off his thought in fundamental agreement with Locke. He agreed with him about the origins of society in the State of Nature and the principles of Freedom and Equality for all Men, but drew very, very different conclusions about how society should be set up to ensure those principles.

Locke (following in the footsteps of Machiavelli) thought—since 2000 years of philosophizing and preaching had been completely ineffectual against Man’s natural desires and the methods that had been created in order to do so led to such great torment (sin, the threat of Hell)—that we may as well act as we naturally are, instead of how we ought to be and that would lead to happiness. Man is naturally Selfish, and his two main concerns are Self-preservation and Self-Interest. But, Locke thought, if Self-Interest could be trained to be Enlightened Self-Interest—where Man has the Right to believe whatever he wants, say whatever he wants, and be whatever he wants, but must also recognize the same Right for everyone else—then Society would be much more peaceful and prosperous and the Individual much more content.

These ideas began to spread throughout Europe like wildfire by men known as the Philosophes—popularizers of Enlightenment thought—and people everywhere began to realize that all the old loyalties—God, heredity, social class, age and even gender—were simply myths used to keep the People down and resigned to be content with their miserable living conditions. Locke and the rest of the Enlighteners rationalized everything till all tradition and convention was left without a leg upon which to stand—till it seemed like anything was possible.

This is the backdrop upon which Rousseau entered on the wings of a scathing critique of Enlightenment thought, in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences, that completely destroyed its confidence right at its grand moment of triumph. His insights were nuanced looks at the Human Condition that peered much more deeply than Locke’s philosophy into the phenomenon known as Man to try and explore the results of this new philosophy of Individualism and what it actually meant for people’s lives: for Politics and Community, Love and Friendship, Morals and Art, and even Human Purpose.

And Kant, following in Rousseau’s footsteps, saw the degradation to human relationships that would result from this over-emphasis of the Individual and attempted to re-shape Enlightenment thought to make up for these supposed deficiencies. Kant was the last great Enlightenment Philosopher and all Movements and Political Programs—ranging from Romanticism to Communism to Fascism—that have come after him have been a result of the perceived failure of Kant, and of the initial Enlighteners, to adequately account for the Human Condition and to give a place to an exclusively Human quality that would separate us from the determinism of Natural phenomenon and the Animal Kingdom.

I will delve more deeply in posts to come into the critique made by Rousseau that has been so persuasive that it has shaped all of Western history since him…