End Times by Kenneth Smith   

18. Slavish New World: Ego's Olympian Games

From dramatist to mythopoeist to philosopher, thinkers in the ancient world realized the significance of human action: when we act, we express who we are, making explicit the forces in us that bespeak our utmost qualities of character, the ruling principles of our identity and our fate. "Men always act to obtain what appears good to them," opens Aristotle in his Politics. Thereby men are lured by their own natures to leave their thread of character through the labyrinth of life. To the connoisseur of human motives and interests, actions as a whole betray the basal orientations of an individual's type of personality, the range of understanding and moral perspective, the inner cosmos.

We reveal what drives us even when we try to conceal it; we manifest it in our peculiar word-choices, our gestures of distraction, the least controlled elements in our artful lying. From infancy we are pregnant with potential needs, distinctive tendencies, colorful biases and perspectives: these constitute our "own" resources, our idia, the autograph of our soul such as ancient myth anatomized for each type of human and divine character. We leave our scent, our soulprint, on everything we touch and do. Our innermost metabolism is the chemistry of the roiling purposes that own and use us, that percolate only in a limited degree into our consciousness. Our lives carry out or complete — "perfect" — the logic of the fated premises naturally designed to be our self-evolving characterological order. By means of our acts we express a raw necessitation intrinsic to how we are inwardly determined to be, to want to see, and to think: "Character will tell," as a pregnancy must eventually "show." The fact that most humans are characterologically determined to be unwilling or unable to look their essential self-necessity in the face does not of course refute it; on the contrary, that confirms its very power over them and conversely, their pathos before it.

Moderns, alas, comprehend rationality as little as they do values or virtues. The modern stance assumes one can disprove the validity or actuality of something from one's ability to ignore it, that is, from one's subjective self-manipulability or self-deception (argumentum ab ignorantia, from ignorance as well as to it, ad ignorantiam). But argument or proof must be carried out from a position of strength or competence, from the mastery of what is axiomatic, not from a position of pathos which fears the truth of something too awful to consider. Understanding and reasoning, and most of all, subordinating one's own self to what may be understood and reasoned, requires a stringent aristocratic virtue of self-discipline unlikely to be comprehended by squeamish, illusion-loving moderns. Those whose emotions or other psychological forces are stronger than the need to reason are inherently enthralled by irrational controls, i.e., are slavish and self-obscure, to wit, "subjectivist." Like servile mentalities throughout the ages, most moderns have formed themselves as much by design as by inadvertence to be susceptible to the rhetoric and ideological campaigns of others. Needless to say, the Christian epoch of "faith" conditioned believers in their millions to suppose that reality could be bent to assuage their pathos: long before modern subjectivism emerged in its naked self-stupefaction, precursor-forms of collective self-indulgence and self-delusion grown self-righteous were training aristocratic virtues of self-discipline and moral rigor out of whole populations. Without cultivated aristoi, truth has no champions among human beings, no individuals willing to be punished for seeing in an exceptional way, no self-disinterested psyches insisting on what offends the appetites of the craven Many.

The fact that one may be too inarticulate and imperceptive to grasp these shaping forces of character in their nascency does not mean they are somehow weak or nonexistent. Their obscurity to anyone does not amount to impotency. In all of us, latent teleologies (however originally indiscernible) draw upon subliminal forces and work themselves out into explicit form via our behavior. All that we do or want or think merely develops tacit natural forces according to their own imperative logic. This is what it means to say that the essence of each human life is a mythos, an internally coherent or organic story-logic whose meaning may be least evident to the individual himself in his fated self-obliviousness. Most people's lives, like their characters, are an obscure affliction ("Nature loves to hide"). By thinking about themselves in unreflective and uncritical ways, most manage not to know themselves but only to deform their self-impressions into something more agreeable to their own biases. If the ancient thinkers thought few indeed — only aristoi — were willing to make the sacrifices that the self-discipline of aseptic truth demands, the modern world would be fully incredible to them: in the utter absence of philosophic culture, moderns wallow in a miasmal universe of anomie, corrupt with unholy mass-fantasies that pass for variant species of sanity in politics, religion, economics and education. When moderns indulge an appetite for narcotics, they are only literalizing or making explicit the bent of the culture as a whole, as a carnival of pathetic, delusional subjectivisms that see no need to apologize for themselves or subordinate thcuemselves to higher purposes or authorities. Most precious of all rights to moderns is the right to be self-deluded, armored with rationalizations against reality. Human guinea pigs for pharmaceutical tests have contempt for their fellows who will take permanently mind-altering drugs for money: "mind sluts" such mercenaries have been called. But the vast majority of moderns prostitute their intelligence, conscience, judgment and culture for the sake of their own marketability and sociability; that is indeed what is most typical of bourgeois culture and its banausic mentality. Most moderns would not dare believe or say anything with adverse repercussions for their careers or reputations. "Mind sluts" well describes the modern temper, that would far rather be unholy and bereft of integrity than unpopular or unprofitable, such is its perfect void of aristic audacity, courage and clarity, its inverted world that everywhere puts vices above virtues.

What is the core of this modern subjectivism? Modernity interweaves concepts of our selves utterly unlike those antiquity had elaborated. The modern order draws an entirely different constellation of factors and relations around each self: it presumes that when we act we do not express but define who we are — we take ourselves in our naturally amorphous state and give this inert raw material such a sculpted form as we like. Modern culture is inordinately infatuated with the notion of human nature as tabula rasa, a "clean slate" or featureless sheet of paper on which only artificial "characters" will be inscribed. Moderns grasp themselves exclusively as self-conscious egos: what "does not count" or seems "negligible" in their self-assessments truly as good as does not exist. In "defining" themselves they reserve the right to define out of existence whatever seems insignificant or offensive. They suppose they have only such qualities and implications as they have stipulated or consented to: they imagine they are playing a wholly deliberately assumed role in life and in society, each player his own author, each citizen his own legislator. Moderns' formative forces are seen as entirely self-derived; conscious and willing determinations are everything and what these draw upon as a pool of naturally existing resources is nothing. Modern identity is thus distinctively invented, not discovered.

Compared with the ancient view of life and action, the view of moderns is simplicity and "clarity" itself: they make themselves be who they are. They live out an entirely self-imposed order, the policy designed by their wills. Moderns bemoan everywhere the "lack of meaning" in the lives they live, but it occurs to none of them that their culture and self-cultivation have crippled their own acuity or percipience for grasping any larger meaning whatsoever (subliminality, philosophy, myth, religion, culture, even ideology or orthodoxy). Over generations, by the coordinated efforts of culture and institutions, modernity has designed a stringently dysorganic or accidentalist order of existence for itself, obsessed with particulars, things and finite kinds of regularity. In one sense — our superficialism — we have created a novel mode of dictatorial simplism that makes it seem inconceivable we might be anything more complex or other than what we "know" ourselves to be; but in another sense — our accidentalism — we prevent ourselves in principle from grasping the whole of who we are in a truly organic way. We have become fragments to ourselves, crumbs, opaque particles with all the coherence, value and significance "lysed" out of them (as chemists call such chelation or leaching). In its full self-development, modernity no longer tolerates forms of literature, drama, journalism, or even education that offer explicit interpretations, that show us or tendentiously tell us the meaning or essence of anything: we will accept only "oblique," allusive or apparently aperspectival writing that permits us to weave our own idiosyncratic renditions of what we read. Modernity thus perfects the monologic or solipsistic mentality of its narcissist egos, enclosing them within castles of their own subjectivist by-products. The authority of the author they read must be entirely submerged, lest his appetitivist readers confront the reality of their own slavish manipulability, their truly unprecedented passivism, their ineptitude at handling concepts beyond their mind's caliber and the offense they take at even having such concepts implied; the skin of their delusory freedom and autonomy must not be breached. This is indeed the genetic earmark of the culture of sophism, telling people only what they are willing to hear, only what curries and reinforces their hidebound delusions.

Where the ancients set up profound and strenuous scruples against accepting the normal and ordinary lies of the Many (the deceptions of "public opinions" or doxai), moderns direct their esteemed powers of doubt toward all that seems alien and untrustworthy ("different" or unconforming), but never toward their own internalized acculturation, all of which bears the birthmark of the Many. What moderns think to criticize may indeed be savagely disputed; but what they think with seems not problematic at all. Everything moderns suppose is actually saturated with a soporific obviousness, the democratist motherlode of "common sense" which is everywhere deferred to and nowhere actually found. (How could it be? "Conventional wisdom," in Galbraith's phrase, is one of the greatest oxymorons in history; as Herb Kelleher says, "If it's conventional it's not wisdom, and if it's wisdom it's not conventional.") The primal self-favoritism in modern thinking is a blind spot as massive as the great red stain on Jupiter. It is this visceral proclivity toward self-unsuspicion that makes moderns unphilosophical, antiphilosophical at their very root. We have grown more and more "sophisticated" and thus more "reflective" in one sense (manipulative, devious, rhetorical, facile in our technicalities); but we remain primevally unreflective in the sense that makes for searching self-comprehension, that is, a determination to challenge our utmost presuppositions and perspectives, to grasp ourselves in our whole (unedited, uncensored) selves and preconceptions.

Modern ego is abstract ego, self-selective ego oblivious to its own specific and concrete character. It "is" to itself only what it imagines or wants to believe that it is, a virtual or dream-self. And in this modern illusionist or delusional "consciousness" there is no sense of the transcendence of issues ("reality," "truth," "actuality," "life," "the world") over against our will's appetitivist preferences. Fitzgerald complained that life was a "fraud" (a "swindle" said Twain, a "bad joke" said Hemingway): as the bad craftsman blames his tools, the inept thinker blames "life" for not being worth living, for "deceiving" him. That is the modern way, vilifying life but never thinking to indict one's own self-besotted naivete. How hard the ancients saw it was for humans to know themselves: as if they had been supercharged before birth with an explosive freshet of seductive lies, facile illusions, intellectually stupefying delusions, humans not only "do not care" to know the truth about themselves but refuse to let the truth of who and what they are be known, by others but most of all by themselves. Know thyself is the simple precept that baffles the vast majority of mankind, that proves its so-called consciousness is actually a narcosis, in modernity an ideologically polluted or self-falsifying consciousness. The power of the irrational over us, ancient aristocratic culture saw, is protean and as insidious as gravity or falling asleep. The "spirit," as Nietzsche observed, lies to itself about the actuality of its "soul," and "mind" may even have invented the fiction of an opaque and disobedient independent "body" to evade having to wrestle self-understanding out of this antiself.

One knows something prodigious must have changed in the tenor of early modern philosophy when Descartes finds it plausible to argue the very converse of the ancient ardures of self-knowledge, namely that nothing is more knowable than our own thinking self, the cogito. The very meaning of knowing, of subjective existing, of self, has been subjectivized for him: what Descartes took for granted as the wholesale truth of conscious ego — that it is to itself (as Sartre much later said) all "luminosity" and "transparency" or perfect "self-apparency" — was enunciated a little later by the audacious Irishman Bishop Berkeley as esse est percipi. "To be is to be perceived." As our contemporary political sophists now rephrase the point, "Perception is reality." What the ancients took as the fever-dream of appearances — the quicksand in which uncritical minds, slavish and unscrupulously subjectivist souls, are immired — modern philosophy takes as the very fount of evidence. The whole cryptic dimension of self-deception, of what our motives are when we claim to want to "know," eludes modern thinkers: we cannot bring ourselves to pass such a critical value-judgment against our own cherished Ego.

When first Kant and then Hegel grasped how profoundly phenomena are colored by the powers of subjectivity that captures and arrays them in its own terms, a brief resurrection of ancient principles followed in the form of Marx, Kierkegaard and Nietzsche: man and his own barely understood subjective potency were recognized in these thinkers' contramodern insights as the principle from which this entire modern world-order has taken its genesis. The modern world — even in, most especially in its pathologies of alienation, nihilism and toxic ideologies — is certain uncomprehended forces of the self-delusive soul writ large. Even this systematically objective and demythologized world is an expression or a symptom of darker strata in the human psyche. An ancient dictum: we can only become what we already are. We have to be laced from birth with the potency to mutate as we do, even though that mutation astounds, baffles and vexes us by seeming to take us further and further from what has become familiar to us. Even the alienated modern world has its roots, its world-tree Yggdrasil. That world in its complexity and toxicity is nonetheless our child, spawn of our ill-comprehending souls. Our great ignorance and darksided self, all the more obscured by the narrow penlight of Ego's little acts of consciousness, have wrought an architecture deeper and more soul-killing than they could ever know.

Let us then ask plainly that question of which modern ego stands in such dread: what is most worth doing with this life whose mastery has been conceded to one's own self? At one end of the scale of values are the minima which are not only not worth doing but not even worth talking about: the trivia, matters that accomplish nothing of any enduring significance, self-indulgences that are even more evanescent than other appetites, banalities not worth anyone's notice, routine matters taken for granted and eminently forgettable — such matters would hardly figure in the human scene if they did not prepossess the petty-minded, who can't see beyond them. At the other end of that scale are the maxima which are such prodigious accomplishments as to be beyond most people's imagination: epochal innovations in the domain of transmissible culture, new ways of consolidating what may be seen and understood about human nature, new disciplines that the most capacious minds need to master in order to recapitulate the best that has been known and said about the human condition. What is most worth doing only the great-souled care about and can see the human necessity for. But then values as such are principles appreciated only by aristoi.

Few people rise above the stream of habituated patterns of life and work to make a searching demand on their own ultimate potential. For most people, life is merely something they throw into the cement mixer of routine, and they count themselves fortunate to have subsisted longer than some. In warfare, soldiers are fastidious, even stingy with the stuff of their lives: unlike flippant civilians, they are unlikely to take those lives in hand and risk them where such a danger is not forced on them by circumstances. But how many in purely moral matters — which make no more of a demand on us than we are willing to allow them to make — are likely in peacetime to gather up the whole time-prospect of their lives and apply it toward what is right and valuable in a sense that far exceeds narrow self-interest? Modernity is the epoch ultimately furthest from a sense of destiny or fatedness, and therefore it must have the feeblest sense of what a vocation or calling must mean: ironically the very cultural developments that have maximized licentiousness in this age have also trivialized its sense of what is valuable, and virtually abolished its sense that there are some values so important as to be worth sacrificing one's self-interest for. Moderns thus have a heightened sense of abstracted freedom but an utterly diminished and darkened sense of what that freedom is worth spending on. Viewed in moral or political terms, very few modern lives are made to count, spent for the sake of principle: this is the ultimate effect of modern anomic and isolationism, that life is whiled away on routines and abstract-numerological games that help to keep the great modern Machine up and running but make no human difference to others at all. Were it not for tiny minorities in teaching, writing, parenting, medicine, law, politics, and other professions, modernity would have utterly snuffed out the very prospect and meaning of the virtues and values of praxis, of cultivating illuminated and expanded intelligence. Modern organized and institutionalized order indeed detests the moral potency of individual appeals conscience-to-conscience: these evince a subversive and uncontrolled contrarian mode of authority (charisma, exemplary and true individualism) for which modernity cannot afford to make a place.

What can it ultimately mean for moderns to "belong utterly to themselves" as proprietary and exclusive Egos if in truth they have no power to take in hand the whole of their lives, in order to captain this vessel toward some destiny? Kafka's dark aphorism — He was permitted to attain the Archimedean standpoint, but only on the condition that he would use it against himself — describes most profoundly the immiserating irony of modern egocentric freedom. Bereft of principles, values, philosophy, religion, culture, and every other classical form of self-integration, moderns have been granted an infinitely extensible freedom over themselves which alas obliges them to granulate or atomize their personalities, to disintegrate once again into that dust of the earth out of which Genesis says they were originally formed. What it means for soul, spirit, will, or personality to be "one" is truly a mystery of the ages, obscured from modern eyes. Moderns have taken the pathos of the Many, the haplessly dissolving and decaying minds of mud, into their inner self. Without values and principles, lives have no form, no wholeness of meaning and direction. Formless lives are inherently derelicts, raw materials for others to employ to their own purposes. Few moderns achieve or even work for true autonomy; most are merely "putting in time" as functionaries, puppets of their circumstances.

This disparity defines modern culture: we suppose in our apotheosis of Self that our will has risen to dominance over all forces arrayed against us, but in actuality the cultivated and difficult power such dominance would require is utterly lacking from our repertory of culture. Modernity is a "culture" whose ultimate premises are mere illusions, views of a nonexistent architecture that happen to look good on paper. It is a culture of imposture, a sophistic facility that like an opportunistic virus takes maximal advantage of a dearth of discerning public intelligence to pass self-interest off for altruism and devotion to principle. Among the vast majority — whether sheep or wolves — who suppose they have resources to think self-consciously, there is only self-duplicity papering over a pathos. Moderns want no more from education than facile techniques, a tool kit for their banausic economic practices. The categories and concepts that are most appropriate for comprehending life, culture, personality, and values are utterly a toothless socket to most. Any mastery that is actual triumph, accomplished control and art, must be distinguished from merely imagined mastery: merely presumed mastery for which the actual work has never been done, or which defers slavishly to someone else's mastery never actually recapitulated or worked through for oneself. Just as Catholics naively suppose their saints and martyrs demonstrate virtues that "somehow" transfer to fellow believers — "inspiring" them with a vicariously validated good conscience, a "proof" of faith that they actually did not have to undergo — so too moderns with the "critical culture" accomplished by great thinkers from Socrates and Plato through Descartes and Kant; this lineage has marvelously liberated moderns from having to think their own way through the perennial issues of philosophy, religion, politics, morality and culture.

A kneejerk-skepticism or subrational cynicism passes today for sophistication, even for intelligence. Moderns believe they have magisterially set aside traditional irrationalisms as no longer binding them; because they hear certain key terms being bandied about as if these had great import and lucid definitions, therefore they suppose themselves entitled to assume these hold potent meanings and exact definitions for them too, by some nebulous fraternal association. This is not a rational use of language but only the mimesis for which most primates are notorious. In actuality, moderns have digested nearly nothing out of the millennial patrimony that was Western civilization: what impresses most moderns is not the structural logic distinctive to modern culture but merely the licentiousness it has somehow opened for them, the chaotizing anomie they imagine must be an unprecedented virtue. Precisely because modern mentality is abstractivist and cannot be troubled to look at the concrete actuality of anything, even its own psyche, conscience or judgment, therefore it cannot distinguish its own empty attitudinizing from cultured philosophical intelligence.

Heidegger has argued that language is the vital structure in which human beings try to reduplicate the comprehensive order of Being: our mastery of language is "the home of Being," our nest within the world. If that is so, moderns are mere apartment-dwellers at best, transients at worst: they live off of verbalisms as they do off of junk-food forms of culture and religion, consuming them perfunctorily, speaking and thinking only ad hoc, as the ancient world knew to be characteristic of slavish mentalities. For ad hoc is a hapless and uncritical reactivity to whatever happens, a mode of action and understanding closest to that of animals and furthest from philosophers.

Election years bring out the pathos and poverty in most moderns' grasp of issues as spoonfed to them by the media. Had they no mass-orchestrated cliches, no hand-me-down casuistic phraseology, certainly they could not express themselves at all: their minds are a goo of emotionalism that may receive a form from some other source but cannot hold it for very long.

It is frightening indeed when political rituals obligate such pseudo-democratic crypto-authoritarians to mimic the forms of culture and mentality of truly political and individual personalities. It is as if we suddenly discovered how many mock-humans with substandard criteria for living and thinking there actually are among us. Indeed "liberalism" — the mentality of individuals competent to think for themselves as free citizens (liberi), acute in judgment and literate in the understanding provided by books (libri) — is patently on the retreat among masses well-trained to revile everything individual.