End Times by Kenneth Smith   

14. In the Ocean of Ideas

Aristocratic Greek culture kept itself constantly alert to the responsibilities of living in a manmade medium, the matrix of judgments and policies they called "politeia," "demokratia" and "philosophia" and cultivated by relentlessly challenging one another's preconceptions, searching for the best and most apt axiomatic bases for thinking and rethinking. To their agonistic minds, attuned to the utter naturalness and essentiality of struggle, strife, and contest, this mutual searching and testing was the healthiest and most rational way of living, devoted to the self-cultivative and therapeutic activity they called praxis, honing one another's thinking in athletic exercises of disputation and revelation; but it was also indispensable for sustaining their mastery over the sociopolitical conditions they were forever spinning out for themselves to live under. Nothing was more decisive to them than the quality of seeing and thinking. The Greeks' common sense ⁠— not just their aristocratic culture ⁠— was rife with the realization of how differently nature acted and organized, in contrast with human convention or custom (physis/nomos). Ultimately the liability of their ethos and cultural politics lay just in the facility these opened to canny and self-interested minds who were only superficially philosophical and rational, the sophists who made themselves and their students past masters of the art of rhetoric, the manipulation of other minds through the feebleness of their grasp on language and ideas. Even the Greeks' civilizationally mortal vices, the sophists' corruption of both nomos and physis, were perverse expressions of the virtues of a philosophical culture.

What is an idea, what moreover is culture? In part these must be taken critically as effects of a system of nomos, the brainchildren of a customary way of thinking and its language, literature and other precedents that format how we see and express ourselves. In part, and in varying degrees of success, they are also exceptional or aristocratic attempts to rupture the envelope of what is taken for granted, to penetrate to the more profound and complex actuality of what is truly the case. Culture like human opinion is for the most part a dreamstate-function, the elaboration of unperceived axioms which are in their core mythlike fantasies. Aristocratic culture set itself a self-conscious task of transcending the subjective self-indulgences of belief and dogma (doxai considered as forms of idia or idiotia) in which most peoples wallow. This historically innovative culture wanted to form itself into a critical or rational culture, truly a connoisseurial way of thinking and living in which the art of discriminating what was better from what was worse (proairesis, Aristotle called it) would be carried out without surcease. To be of an aristic mind or spirit or personality meant to have a free and distanced relation to ideas, to accept or believe nothing that one could not defend ⁠— and not just from a limited or favorable point of view, but from any perspective that someone might choose to criticize it.

We are impressed by the precocious sophistication and articulateness of Greek writings, by the utter contemporaneity of their quality of insight and thinking: two and a half millennia have not dulled the acuity of their praxis. We must not forget that this aristic order of the mind was achieved not least by repelling from itself all the slavish or doulic tendencies conducive to pathetic and obtuse attitudes toward ideas and culture. Nietzsche wrote of the pathos of distance which the Greeks felt toward more banal mentalities, the imperative to hold as far off as possible the unseeing and undiscriminating ways of mind that simply acceded to what "most people" (the Many) took on blind faith. To be merely another child in the nursery of a culture, merely a myopic fish obedient to the currents and laws of the ocean, was to live a heteronomous or slavish existence, an utterly forgettable life that made one just one more generic Mede or Persian or Spartan among others. To be an Athenian however meant to live and think as nakedly as possible, directly exposed to the truth of how the world of nature and the human order actually worked: to cast off the facade of mindless custom and the infantilist illusionism and passivity it induced in most people.

The Christian era was inaugurated out of revolutionary insights into the metaphysics of human originality, the novel theological sources of man's self-responsibility for shaping his own ways of living, both outer and inner living. Human beings were the uniquely spiritual creatures formed by God in His own image as a purely active principle, overflowing with the power to bring order into existence out of nothing whatsoever. In its origins Christianity was conceived to trump the Hellenic ethos, to demand of humans that they adhere to an even more radical or profound form of self-accountability. It sought to set aside all ancient culture, even aristocratic ethos, as mere human conventionalism, the psychological and moral diseases in which man had everywhere immired himself. Instead of that aristocentric culture Christianity proposed for all alike a way of living directly in the truth of divine spirituality, replacing the hard intellectual and political work of philosoplural prattein (searching, arguing, criticizing, convincing, persuading) with the radiance of God's simplicities of love and community, which cured ancient vices of materialism and egocentrism all at one blow (the conversion or "rebirth"). All the invidious distinctions that aristic culture was impelled to make between higher and lower types of human mentality, between what was naturally and philosophically more healthy and rational and what was less, were swept aside: in the new ethos of spirituality human beings were equal, equally liable to sin, equally far from the absolute perfections of God, and equal in their fraternity as children of the Creator.

In its founding Christianity was contemptuous of the entire order of human culture and politics, even though its revolutionary geniuses (Paul, Augustine, etc.) were educated and brought to articulateness in that Hellenistic intellectualism that they now despised. In order to evolve forms of organization and a modus vivendi for its believers, Christianity had to fashion its own system of education as a way of inculcating new virtues: as Werner Jaeger has presented in Early Christianity and Greek Paideia, this system was naturally enough drawn from the pre-existing forms of education the Greeks had elaborated (which Jaeger had already portrayed in his masterwork Paideia). From being an unprecedented and revolutionary revelation irrupting into the human order, Christianity was gradually becoming normalized, indeed over the course of centuries it grew entirely mundane by these means. The exceptional or contraintuitive aspects of Christian belief so obliterated the naturalism and aristocratism that preceded it, that — inevitably — Christianity came to seem utterly ordinary and indisputable, even common-sensical. This transformation owed not a little to its methods of indoctrination, which enclosed its pupils within a world of dogmas and more and more stringently interdefined ideas, a circuitous argument that aborted any prospect of independent perspectives or questions. From the standpoint of philosophy and culture, the Christian centuries had been indeed Dark Ages, the systematic eclipse of the arts and methods by which human beings made themselves competent by natural means for their own human enlightenment.

If the Greeks had erected an ethos or culture contrarian against human nature itself — a negation of all that was lower and inertial in human tendencies ⁠— the Christian ethos was indeed a double negation, a triumph over the kind of audacity and pride (excellence or aristeuein now having mutated into the sin of superbia) that had been determined to hold slavish and pathetic forces in check within the soul and the social order. In the process of recasting its insights and beliefs into a new culture, into a new organismic form for the human collective, Christianity catered more and more to the pathos and irrationalism of the Many. The few who were characterologically and morally driven to think and question ⁠— the aristoi who now had no culture to defend their way of seeing the world and evaluating how life ought to be lived, much less to link them together with their fellow contrarians — were marked as heretics, corruptors of the "holy simplicity" of the faithful. In Greek culture to be a principled anomaly was a declaration of genius, of superior originality, profundity and penetration; in the Christian orthodoxy, it was inherently a sin against the theocratic regime through which God vicariously ruled His children on earth. In its negation of aristocracy's negation, Christianity had restored the very rule of blind irrationalism that had marked the lot of mankind almost universally before the advent of Greek philosophia, demokratia andpoliteia. Under the new order, humans childishly capitulated to let a monarch, a priest, il Papa, define the terms under which they would be obliged to think and live. Christianity that arose in the discovery of a new fundamental freedom of soul became a empire rank with worldly, all-too-worldly oppressiveness: its mission was indeed to universalize slavishness, to insure that humans (understandingly if possible, but by coercion if not) would simply believe what was dispensed to them. The authority of the Church was not ultimately about spirituality but about power, the worldly dominion that Jesus refused as a temptation from Satan but the Church had all too eagerly accepted, as Dostoevsky insisted in his powerful document The Grand Inquisitor.

Today conventional Christians are often shocked at the gullibility and unspeakable puerility of cult-members; there should be no surprise, for these soulishly manipulable patients are merely more perfectly fideist and more intellectually desolate Christians than is ordinary. In Christianity's triumphalism lies the defeat of its own classical virtues and values, no less than those of ancient Hellenism. Christian congregations today have become purified sheepfolds of reflex-orthodoxy, the ideal culture-media for predatory televangelists, cultists and unscrupulous political sophists to wrench lucre and mass-votes out of (the cultists are different in wanting the whole person as well). In those fideistic reservations huddle souls that have been conditioned to shrink from any contact with naked human and historical realities: the enlightenment which is normal human maturation, the awakening from idiocentric illusions which philosophy and culture are meant to be, is to most congregants merely another nightmarish aspect of the environing barbarism that threatens to enclose them in a tide of sin, nihilism and despair. In all too many homes no books or periodicals are to be found today save the tendentious and self-congratulatory tracts — the incestuous litter — of their preferred Mother Church, its onetime medieval monopoly now broken up like Ma Bell into eccentric variants.

Christ's moral precepts, like the acuities of the Greeks about human nature, have never lost their edge over centuries, indeed they cut more keenly today than ever before; but "Christendom" (as Kierkegaard vilified this utterly worldly counterfeit) has produced its most vicious effect of all: its corpus of believers absolutely cannot give themselves permission to consider that the world might possibly be otherwise than it is authoritarianly "supposed to be." In the guise of currying the innocuous simplicity of true believers, the Church has installed profound inhibitions against rising to philosophical acuity and rational maturity. Under the color of divine authority the Church has truly mutilated the souls of human beings, aborting — as Kierkegaard luminously saw — the formations of spirit that can only realize themselves as a higher or second immediacy, the agonistic faith that asserts itself after having done battle with the historically evolved actualities of the world and soul. From presenting a novel ordination of truth to mankind, Christendom — and it has come to ally itself everywhere in the world with the utmost reactionary forces because of this — has imbedded itself deeper and deeper in untruth and bad faith, sacrificing and suppressing whatever it must in personalities, values and intelligence to deter its own questionableness from being seen and recognized for what it is. "Faith means not wanting to know what is true," wrote Nietzsche. "By lie I mean: wishing not to see something one does see; wishing not to see something as one does see it." A complex and compounded system of institutions and theology designed to preclude any further, more penetrating revelations, is not arguably a religion any longer but a fraternal conspiracy against the public good (as Shaw said of doctors).

The abysmal modern obliviousness to the domain of ideas, principles and values of course did not suddenly precipitate like acidified rain. "religion is the masterpiece of animal training," said Schopenhauer, "for it trains people as to how they shall think." It was the work of a millennium of official Christianity to associate the most visceral and inchoate fears — damnation, eternal suffering, the divine Father spurning forever His rebel miscreant — with any temptation to exercise the natural impulse to wonder and question. If moderns today "behave themselves" ideologically for the most part like the sweet lapdogs of their overlords — as I write this, the totally choreographed charade of the Republican National Convention is being broadcast — such servility and shriveled minds are not a lesson facilely learned but an inhibition underscored over centuries. It was this vicious and dementing parochialism of which Joyce wrote in Ulysses: "History... is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake." And Nietzsche in Thus Spake Zarathustra: "Not only the reason of millennia, but their madness too breaks out in us. It is dangerous to be an heir." The distinctive modern narrowness, the "pragmatic" and "functionalist" mentality that wants merely to be businesslike and utilitarian or scientific and scholarly, and knows no other way to do this than by suppressing all inklings of higher, more encompassing and explosive questions, is the beneficiary of two thousand years of authoritarian culturing, a counterrevolution against the Greek clarity and audacity.

Human beings are of course by nature myopic and narcissist, now as ever the idiotes the Greeks loathed as self-delusionary imbeciles. But an organized and ubiquitous artificial climate, the product of moronizing educational systems no less than of media of "mass distraction," today enforces a tacit totalitarian conspiracy against the elevation and sharpening of intelligence. What the English historian Trevelyan wrote grows more notoriously true the longer modern culture works on its patients: "Education...has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading" (English Social History). Of intellect modernity has use only in the form of mechanistic mentality, the engineer, programmer, inventor, profiteer, accountant, attorney, psychologist, researcher, or professor — and all other former arts now reduced to the operation of technicians. All culture in modernity tilts toward the form of value-neutral and idea-deprived information, that is, finitely useful and nonprovocative "facts." In the vast majority of the population the power of conception or creation has been trained utterly out of their minds; slavery, which two millennia ago was taken as a misfortunate natural fate society had to deal with somehow, has become the whole scientized and systematic object of our vast experiment in controlled dyseducation, the carefully measured and scrupulously narrowed competencies among us that long ago ceased to merit the name of education. All that is necessary to make this program of systematic incapacitation work is the assurance that the individual student's delusions of materialist gratification and arbitrary freedom are not ruptured in the process.

The most prodigious accomplishment of the epoch of Christendom is that it has utterly routinized and secularized orthodoxy: moderns in their hundreds of millions today are subliminally or ideologically coordinated with one another in ways that never arouse their sense of critical or conscientious suspicion. The slavish impulse to conform is so heightened in them by modern order that they eagerly get in line, devoutly desiring to believe whatever is current whether they can comprehend it or not. Not just in the form of "political correctness" are modern orientations controlled and curried: all our professionals, whether medical or legal or political or educational or scientific, are aligned in a nice mutuality of interest and "respect" for one another's peccadillos and venalities. Orwell saw this herd-morality perspicuously, the archetypally modern conformity-craving mentality of Newthink and Newspeak that so desperately needs to jettison all unfashionable ways of seeing and describing human reality. Modern articulateness, no matter how well developed, has been channeled into a culturally monochromatic sense of what is real, what is good and right, what is ultimately true. This culture insures virtually from birth that its experimental subjects learn to take ideological dictation well; the gulf between fresh young minds and what our system of institutions and means of livelihood eventually do to most personalities is evident to any circumspect educator or thinker. That is our legacy, the deadening of intuitive and cultural energies, the promulgation of a universal regime of ordinariness that is everywhere taken for ultimate reality.

The patrimony of Christian values is as much talked about as it is little implemented. But that faith's truly formidable bequest to moderns is not these distinctive and noble virtues but rather the inadvertent or collateral effects it has had upon mass cultural psychology, the overwhelmingly unthought-about ways it has helped make human herds even more organizable than any preceding culture ever thought possible. Christianity's everyday asceticism or otherworldliness, that is, its abstraction or alienation from cultural as well as natural concerns, the peculiar deferment of gratifications and contempt for this-worldliness it demands; its extrinsicalized and authoritarian scheme of rewards in an afterlife, which override one's natural or intuitive sense of what is good in its own right; and of course its unprecedented idea of spirit taken as radically originative or creative will, which Christian indoctrination gives with the one hand but takes back with the other — all these, mutatis mutandis, are vital ingredients in what makes the modern secular world secular. And systematic.

This tacit legacy shaped the modern order in subliminal ways that skewed — toned or tuned — how the modern innovations would be grasped and shaped. Abstraction fed the unheard of isolation of modern ego, its remoteness from the concrete world of nature and its own feeling-life and sensibility. The Church's amoralization or acceptance of an inherently spiritless political and economic world of course inspired Hobbes and Machiavelli to architect deliberate schemes to scientize politics, purging it of any encumbering values or moral controls; and the same with Adam Smith and other apologists for the morally "freed" or neutralized market, whose mechanisms were now lubricated to run at their own preferred speed (maximal, as it happened). Its extrinsicalized rewards — obliging all things to be done for some reason that lies strictly outside or beyond them — proved excellent training for a form or mode of economy that would spin out a science, an entire universe or totalitarian system of mere means (and its means of all means, money). And its remarkable notion of spirit able to bring order into existence out of nothing was indispensable to Pico's revolutionary proclamation of arbitrary will, elevated above the natural or psychological condition of ingrained or hereditary forces and teleological factors (predilections, directions) that formerly helped define for us and guide us toward what we want. In the modern universe this task is taken over by the programmed commercialism of the media and our ideologized peers. Moderns live under regimes — capitalism, materialism, plutocracy, totalitarianism, amoralism, nihilism — they not only may not pass judgment on but hardly dare to call by their right names. The Greeks were never so squeamish or craven as to have to wonder by what flattering term a tyrant would prefer to be called, which is to say, under what operative and dominant delusion of rhetoric he would like his subjects to place themselves.

In modernity's "new order of the ages" humans will be conditioned by a culture that severs them in concept from the principles and influences of nature; from moral encumbrances such as tradition, culture, authority; from their own inward natural and self-conceived interests; as well as from any competence to evaluate this new order critically with their own philosophically cultured resources. The very genius of this new Logos or civilizational logic lies in those decisive divorces from human nature, the human condition, tradition, and critical intelligence: altogether it is a culture whose keynote is indeed abstraction, the cutting or dissolving of natural, cultural, spiritual links. The strategy of this logic is everywhere to reduce or concentrate human beings to atoms; the ancient Roman imperialist wisdom, Divide and conquer, is indeed the in hoc signo vincet of modern order. The inconsiderableness of modern "individuals," their pitiful human-all-too-humanness, is certainly not a historically universal plight that Homo sapiens has always been afflicted with. It is the deliberate effect of modernity's one-sided rule of techne, its minimalization of all that was traditionally and recognizably human. But as we shall see, this is a remarkably ironic reversal, a peripeteia of what modernity once so grandly promised as a technological salvation from inhuman conditions.