Its not just liberalism that may or may not have failed but Western culture altogether. It could be said that the in-your-face "living" proof of this is the appearance of the religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump who is enthusiastically supported by many right-thinking back-to-the-past Christian "traditionalist". Never mind that he does have even one teensy-weensy religious molecule in his heart - does he even have a heart?
Speaking of the heart as the centre of our existence-being please check out a book by Joseph Chilton Pearce titled The Heart-Mind Matrix How the Heart can Teach the mind New Ways to Think (and be).
He cites many references including these two - the first ones features Joseph's work and that of the second reference too
I actually came to liberalism/progressivism through feeling opposed to the conservative, Reaganite atmosphere I grew up in as an adolescent in the 80s in Texas.
What's been interesting to me lately is how people from so many different ideological camps are coming to similar conclusions as to what we are up against. I like your new paradigm, although I know there are many others who think traditional religion is the answer.
Excellent and accurate analysis - I love especially the “you can’t tell fish about water because that’s all they know.”
One physicist said, “We take in the idea of the universe as meaningless, pointless, non conscious, non intelligent and non directional with our mother’s milk,” and despite thousands of conversations on this, I still don’ t know any foolproof way even to invite people to reconsider their stubborn belief in what is not in the least bit supported by science but is rather a stubborn, purely faith based belief.
People will admit they can’t point to any foolproof detail that would tell them they’re dreaming or awake. Materialists will admit they really haven’t any logical objects to the idea that the world exists solely in Consiousness. People don’t seem to mind (especially the rational old fashioned liberal sort) that their belief in the faith of scientism requires them to believe:
* nobody can be held responsible for anything because the concept of free will makes absolutely no sense if all our intentions are conditioned reactions produced by purely physiological mechanisms
* no common notions of beauty, ethics, value or purpose can be defended in any purely logical way
* all of our feelings of love, compassion, caring, passion, fear, anger, sadness, etc are merely bubbling of a variety of hormones, neurochemicals, neurotransmitters, etc in the body-brain
*the entire panorama of a world filled with solid substances, colors, sounds, tastes, etc does not exist apart from the construction of our brains; there is nothing but invisible, intangible, inaudible, tasteless matter/energy/physical stuff.
I can’t imagine anything more irrational or horrific, yet well educated people cling to these superstitions and worse, believe they’re justified by science.
For over a century, prophets such as Jean Gebser and Aurobindo Ghose saw the end of the era of what Jean Gebser categorized as “the deficient aspect of the mental structure of consciousness,’ a structure born some 2500 years ago.
Yet we all keep thinking we’ve just discovered the end of history, the end of an era.
Iain McGilchrist has been writing about a neurological correlate of this radical shift of consciousness, yet who is listening? He says, along with Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart (Perhaps one of the most intelligent humans alive), we are at the end of a 2500 year long era, Robert Thurman speaks of the potential of a Global Renaissance which will far outshine the original Renaissance - if we get this transition right.
It’s so interesting to see - what do you want to give up? Ideas we grew up with 40-50 years ago? The belief in modern liberalism (the classical kind or post FDR kind?)
What if we give up in the idea that mind - logic and reason - as we know it now can ever solve ANY problems? Whole civilizations (much of Asia) saw this thousands of years ago - when nothing else is working and everything is falling apart, maybe we have to give up an awful lot more than a half century old idea.
If we’re in the Matrix, we can redo and redo and paste over everything, but we’re not going to solve anything until we know how to get out of the Matrix.
And we can’t even begi to know how to get out if we aren’t willing to consider the possibility that we are living in Maya, Avidya, subject to Mara (the original meaning of “sin”) and recognize in fact, we are living in the Matrix.
If you want to "restore and sustain the health of our human and environmental ecologies in interdependent, synergistic ways", then join a rural ecovillage, where people who have come to the same conclusions are helping to restore the sustainable rural economy. Talking the talk is one thing. People ready to walk the walk are what's needed.
In my opinion Paul does (naively and unconsciously) belong in that bucket.
In one way or another he gives the aura of his now popular authority as a presumed prophetic voice to the kind of applied politics promoted by the 72 or so deep-pocket outfits promoting the outfit in the reference below. An outfit, which if it gains the necessary political power to do so intends to reshape every aspect of America's culture - religious, cultural, political, and environmental too. It has a very detailed manifesto/planet describing what it intends to do. The election of Donald Trump will give them the almost unlimited power so to do.
Many/most of these outfits are in one way or another closely connected to or associated with First Things. Paul is lined up to give their next prestigious Erasmus Lecture.
Thank you for the post. I always enjoy reading your thoughts. Interesting that you cite Lasch as an inspiration for your critique of Progress. I was a grad student of his while he was writing "A True and Only Heaven." Unfortunately, he died just a couple of weeks before I was going be his TA for a class on the "History of Love." I still wonder what he would have covered in that class ...
TBH, however, I wasn't convinced by his thesis in True and Only Heaven. I wrote about some of the people that discussed in that book (Henry George for example) and I think that he got some things wrong. But it has been a long time. Maybe, I need to go back and reread Lasch from a post-2016 perspective.
I also doubt that I can follow you into Ecohumanism. A couple of objections that occurred to me:
1. I don't think that you need to abandon Liberalism to get some of the values that you are looking for in ecohumanism. Amongst some historians, there has been an interesting re-evaluation of Liberalism in response to the crisis that you describe -- their idea is that our post-WWII version of Liberalism is a impoverished form of it, and that its history offers richer resources for responding to critiques from people like Deneen. A couple of books to consider: "Lost History of Liberalism" by Rosenblatt or "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times" by Moyn.
2. Maybe this is a bigger disagreement between us, but as part of my re-evaluation of my liberal politics after 2016, I have become more skeptical of the doom and gloom view our our relationship to nature offered by the environmental movement. I think that part of our political crisis may actually be due to less to a misplaced faith in Progress than to the pessimism (bordering on fatalism) engendered by environmentalism. A book I recommend is "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" by Hans Rosling. You probably will be put off by the fact Bill Gates is plugging it on Amazon (I was too ...) But it really did make me re-think a lot of things ...
Another interesting piece that is somewhat related:
https://www.firstthings.com/article/2024/05/dark-enchantment?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Its not just liberalism that may or may not have failed but Western culture altogether. It could be said that the in-your-face "living" proof of this is the appearance of the religiously and culturally illiterate nihilistic barbarian Donald Trump who is enthusiastically supported by many right-thinking back-to-the-past Christian "traditionalist". Never mind that he does have even one teensy-weensy religious molecule in his heart - does he even have a heart?
Speaking of the heart as the centre of our existence-being please check out a book by Joseph Chilton Pearce titled The Heart-Mind Matrix How the Heart can Teach the mind New Ways to Think (and be).
He cites many references including these two - the first ones features Joseph's work and that of the second reference too
http://www.ttfuture.org Touch the Future
http://www.wombecology.org Womb Ecology
I actually came to liberalism/progressivism through feeling opposed to the conservative, Reaganite atmosphere I grew up in as an adolescent in the 80s in Texas.
What's been interesting to me lately is how people from so many different ideological camps are coming to similar conclusions as to what we are up against. I like your new paradigm, although I know there are many others who think traditional religion is the answer.
As for transhumanism, I found many similar echoes and concerns in this podcast on the history of cybernetics. https://soundcloud.com/subliminaljihad/127-the-purpose-of-a-911-is-what-it-does-a-subliminal-history-of-cybernetics-pt-2-w-jay
Excellent and accurate analysis - I love especially the “you can’t tell fish about water because that’s all they know.”
One physicist said, “We take in the idea of the universe as meaningless, pointless, non conscious, non intelligent and non directional with our mother’s milk,” and despite thousands of conversations on this, I still don’ t know any foolproof way even to invite people to reconsider their stubborn belief in what is not in the least bit supported by science but is rather a stubborn, purely faith based belief.
People will admit they can’t point to any foolproof detail that would tell them they’re dreaming or awake. Materialists will admit they really haven’t any logical objects to the idea that the world exists solely in Consiousness. People don’t seem to mind (especially the rational old fashioned liberal sort) that their belief in the faith of scientism requires them to believe:
* nobody can be held responsible for anything because the concept of free will makes absolutely no sense if all our intentions are conditioned reactions produced by purely physiological mechanisms
* no common notions of beauty, ethics, value or purpose can be defended in any purely logical way
* all of our feelings of love, compassion, caring, passion, fear, anger, sadness, etc are merely bubbling of a variety of hormones, neurochemicals, neurotransmitters, etc in the body-brain
*the entire panorama of a world filled with solid substances, colors, sounds, tastes, etc does not exist apart from the construction of our brains; there is nothing but invisible, intangible, inaudible, tasteless matter/energy/physical stuff.
I can’t imagine anything more irrational or horrific, yet well educated people cling to these superstitions and worse, believe they’re justified by science.
For over a century, prophets such as Jean Gebser and Aurobindo Ghose saw the end of the era of what Jean Gebser categorized as “the deficient aspect of the mental structure of consciousness,’ a structure born some 2500 years ago.
Yet we all keep thinking we’ve just discovered the end of history, the end of an era.
Iain McGilchrist has been writing about a neurological correlate of this radical shift of consciousness, yet who is listening? He says, along with Orthodox Christian theologian David Bentley Hart (Perhaps one of the most intelligent humans alive), we are at the end of a 2500 year long era, Robert Thurman speaks of the potential of a Global Renaissance which will far outshine the original Renaissance - if we get this transition right.
It’s so interesting to see - what do you want to give up? Ideas we grew up with 40-50 years ago? The belief in modern liberalism (the classical kind or post FDR kind?)
What if we give up in the idea that mind - logic and reason - as we know it now can ever solve ANY problems? Whole civilizations (much of Asia) saw this thousands of years ago - when nothing else is working and everything is falling apart, maybe we have to give up an awful lot more than a half century old idea.
If we’re in the Matrix, we can redo and redo and paste over everything, but we’re not going to solve anything until we know how to get out of the Matrix.
And we can’t even begi to know how to get out if we aren’t willing to consider the possibility that we are living in Maya, Avidya, subject to Mara (the original meaning of “sin”) and recognize in fact, we are living in the Matrix.
If you want to "restore and sustain the health of our human and environmental ecologies in interdependent, synergistic ways", then join a rural ecovillage, where people who have come to the same conclusions are helping to restore the sustainable rural economy. Talking the talk is one thing. People ready to walk the walk are what's needed.
Here's one example, there are others: https://www.dancingrabbit.org
In my opinion Paul does (naively and unconsciously) belong in that bucket.
In one way or another he gives the aura of his now popular authority as a presumed prophetic voice to the kind of applied politics promoted by the 72 or so deep-pocket outfits promoting the outfit in the reference below. An outfit, which if it gains the necessary political power to do so intends to reshape every aspect of America's culture - religious, cultural, political, and environmental too. It has a very detailed manifesto/planet describing what it intends to do. The election of Donald Trump will give them the almost unlimited power so to do.
Many/most of these outfits are in one way or another closely connected to or associated with First Things. Paul is lined up to give their next prestigious Erasmus Lecture.
http://www.project2025.org
Thank you for the post. I always enjoy reading your thoughts. Interesting that you cite Lasch as an inspiration for your critique of Progress. I was a grad student of his while he was writing "A True and Only Heaven." Unfortunately, he died just a couple of weeks before I was going be his TA for a class on the "History of Love." I still wonder what he would have covered in that class ...
TBH, however, I wasn't convinced by his thesis in True and Only Heaven. I wrote about some of the people that discussed in that book (Henry George for example) and I think that he got some things wrong. But it has been a long time. Maybe, I need to go back and reread Lasch from a post-2016 perspective.
I also doubt that I can follow you into Ecohumanism. A couple of objections that occurred to me:
1. I don't think that you need to abandon Liberalism to get some of the values that you are looking for in ecohumanism. Amongst some historians, there has been an interesting re-evaluation of Liberalism in response to the crisis that you describe -- their idea is that our post-WWII version of Liberalism is a impoverished form of it, and that its history offers richer resources for responding to critiques from people like Deneen. A couple of books to consider: "Lost History of Liberalism" by Rosenblatt or "Liberalism Against Itself: Cold War Intellectuals and the Making of Our Times" by Moyn.
2. Maybe this is a bigger disagreement between us, but as part of my re-evaluation of my liberal politics after 2016, I have become more skeptical of the doom and gloom view our our relationship to nature offered by the environmental movement. I think that part of our political crisis may actually be due to less to a misplaced faith in Progress than to the pessimism (bordering on fatalism) engendered by environmentalism. A book I recommend is "Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World--and Why Things Are Better Than You Think" by Hans Rosling. You probably will be put off by the fact Bill Gates is plugging it on Amazon (I was too ...) But it really did make me re-think a lot of things ...