Finding the real in a post-truth world

Transcript

Transcribed by machine from the recording.

Scott Chris, letter number 26, or map number 26, rather, map number 26 is entitled, Finding the Real in a Post-Truth World, or What Stephen Hawking Saw. So you were skiing in the Alps, traipsing around Europe and you read this big dense book and you're thinking about consciousness and what is really real. So what is really real and does it include professional wrestling?

Chris That must be a rhetorical question because, of course, it does.

Scott The Macho Man, Randy Savage. That was my favorite, that guy's voice. I just loved his voice. I grew up on Hulk Hogan. My God. Hulk Hogan was amazing.

Chris He was amazing. And, you know, I was at an age where I didn't quite know what was real, right? Surely wrestling was real. And nobody would do that just for, you know, my entertainment, right? They must actually have... Deep, deep angers and rivalries. Why else would you hit somebody over the head with a chair? But yeah. These are deep thoughts.

Scott Yeah, Professor Wessling, man. And then look, who would have ever thought Andre the Giant would be in The Princess Bride?

Chris Oh, he was good in that role. He was good in that role.

Scott So, basically, this book is, you call it, you mentioned it's like an autopsy of the mind or consciousness. This book is called The Ever-Present Origin.

Chris Yeah, some light reading while I was skiing in the Alps. That's, you know, in hindsight, yeah. I should have found the Kindle version because when you're traveling heavy books, like anything over 600 pages, get the Kindle edition, I think, if you're traveling, if you're traveling. Although, you know, this was also one of those books where, you know, sometimes you're dealing with an author who has very complicated, like big mental constructs and you almost need the pen and the highlighter and the kind of random access that the physical book gives you just because, you know, you kind of... These big ideas, you got to kind of flip back and forth until you can sort of make your own sense of it. So I actually burned through two highlighters reading this book. That was a first.

Scott I often highlight with a ruler or underline with a ruler. Okay. That's one of the few things that's like, I probably do not look like that sort of person.

Chris After this is done, I'm going to give you the phone number for my counselor, my therapist here in London. She's really good.

Scott You quote this passage, it says, the present is defined by an increase in technological power inversely proportional to our sense of responsibility. If we do not overcome this crisis, it will overcome us. Either we will be disintegrated and dispersed, or we must find a new way to come together. This is the stuff of which dystopic serial dramas are made of, right?

Chris Yeah, we need to put some kind of like spooky music voiceover there. Yeah, Gebster, I mean, I hadn't heard of him either, but, you know, that's because I'm not very edumacated. But he was, I mean, for those who study postmodernism, he was kind of one of the architects of postmodern thought. And I mean, he wrote in his life exclusively in German. So, you know, anything that sort of made it into my world, it had to first eventually be translated by the community of postmodernists. And he wrote this book in the 1950s, right? And so this was very much, you know, Germany after World War II and in the early years of the Cold War where, you know, the fear of sort of nuclear holocaust was an impending thing. And the notion that we've developed technological powers far beyond our ethics and our sense of responsibility for how do we use this stuff safely.

It's kind of the same debate, right? We're similarly really, really struggling with have we unleashed technologies that we just can't cope with and so are going to somehow, you know, tear society apart. And so it was remarkable to read this book that was written, you know, I really think in the shadow of That speaks so piercingly to all the kind of deep questions that we're struggling with right now.

Scott Yeah, it's interesting. Neil Postman's book, Technopoly, which he just died this year, last year, I think. But he says, you know, basically tools and technology, you know, are created to serve the culture. And when he calls it Technopoly is when the culture serves the tools, like the tools drive the culture rather than the tools being employed to serve the culture. And I think that's, I mean, that has the sense of what... Thank you very much.

Chris And I think that what Gebser does is, you know, rather than talk about it in terms of technology, he talks about it in terms of sort of modes of consciousness. And so he says, like, right now, society is kind of in a hyper-rational, in a mental mode. And everything that we're doing is sort of serving our rationality. At the expense of other realities, what he calls mythical truths, magical truths. And I mean, I think that, you know, he looked at World War II, he looked at, you know, the US's arguments for dropping the bomb as, you know, rational arguments that nonetheless led us to some irrational place. And what he was saying is that it's not about sort of figuring out how to sort of take control of technology. Instead, it's about figuring out how to recover other aspects of our consciousness, the magical, the mythical, these other dimensions of reality,

and bring them into our rational world so that, I guess, going forward, sort of we, you know, society is... is just a richer, more integrated humanity that just couldn't imagine the sort of irrational things that were beginning to happen.

Scott Yeah, yeah, I think that's right. And it's interesting because you talk about how in the sort of post-truth world, you know, these kind of things like facts, people say fake news. It's almost magical, right? There are these incantations. And you say, well, this is the fact, but then, you know, somebody dismisses it. And there is a kind of an employing of that magical kind of technique. And I think what you're arguing, right, is that... I've heard you argue here and elsewhere that the way you combat that is not by getting more rationalistic, but by making a better incantation, by actually getting more mythical or more into that aspect of reality, to sort of have a counter-incantation or to tell a better story.

Chris And I think that, you know, this is all very uncomfortable territory for the modern mind, right? I mean, the notion that magic is somehow real or that myths are somehow real. And so as soon as we even hear anything that, you know, has a whiff of that kind of argument, you know, we're very quick, I think, to run away from it or to shut it down. And what was, I thought, what was...

Scott Right. And it's a stress relief or a thing, but we don't take it as seriously as premoderns would take myths and traditions. We just kind of flirt with it on the edges. And so it winds up being, you know, either flaky or a kind of rigid kind of fundamentalism or something like that. Like it winds up being very thin.

Chris Yeah, and we get something from it, but we can't quite explain rationally, you know, how we do and we don't try, right? It's sort of, you know, something that we've got. I think that's right. But so what was so, I mean, what was really mind-blowing about Gebser's book was, you know, he argues, and I think pretty persuasively, Whether we recognize it or not, the magic and the mythical, these earlier, older modes of consciousness, are still very much part of how we experience reality. And, you know, basically we've got a choice. We can either refuse to recognize them, and so we are left with just the rational, which is sort of one-third of reality, or we can try to become more aware of how and why these other ways of being in the world impact us. And, you know, for me, the clearest examples he gives of how we work with this stuff without realizing it is when you kind of dissect our language. So this guy, Gebzer, he was also a linguist. And so a lot of what he does is show how, look, I mean, we learned language, we developed language at far earlier times when we looked at the world through a magical lens or when we looked at the world through a mythic lens. And so we're still using in our everyday language Ways of seeing the world that were shaped back then. Maybe I'll just give one example to illustrate the point.

And he says, so, you know, in the mythic, in sort of the mythic moment, you know, a metaphor for how we saw the world was a circle, right? There was day and night, there was yin and yang, there was sun and moon. I mean, the universe seemed to speak to us in a kind of polarity and a balance. And that was sort of the... So you can take two words like light and lie. And, you know, conceptually, these are sort of opposite words, right? Light, brightness and clarity and truth. And a lie is conceptually, you know, sort of the darkening of truth. So why is it that they have the same word root, the same semantic root, this lie? And his analysis, it's because that language goes back to an earlier time in human history when we understood everything in terms of balance and duality. You know, why clam means to shut like a clam and clamor means to shout a loud noise. Again, it's because so many of our concepts that we use to speak about the world So why do we drive on the parkway and park in the driveway?

To me, those arguments are really persuasive. You know, language is this tool that we're always using to frame our experiences most of the time without really thinking about how the tool itself sort of shapes the world that we live in.

Scott This is like T.I. Selye, you know, in the early 20th century when everybody's arguing about whether it's like logical positivism. People are arguing whether... Language's meaning is internal to the language itself or external to the world in its referential powers or just a language game internal to the grammar itself. The famous sentence that they would use in these analytic philosophy classes was, you know, the present, is this sentence meaningful? The present king of France is bald. And of course, you know, there is no king of France, right, at the time. So T.S. Eliot's response to this was, my God, there is a king in France and he's bald. His point there was even illusions have a kind of reality, illusory reality. So just using that sentence as an example reifies it and makes it into something. It's meant to be nonsensical on one level, and yet it's vivified by everybody using it.

Chris And we do that all the time, right? I mean, I think, you know, take a religious example. You know, we speak of God or whatever the creator force is in our lives, hearing our prayer. We don't talk about God seeing our prayer. Or reading our prayer. And it's because this notion that we have a relationship with a higher power, it far predates the development of written language. And so, even today, when we think about how we conceptualize that relationship, we're drawing upon a much earlier time when we lived in this magical moment rather than a rational moment. And so all of that, I think, is just to say that when we fast forward to today, And we're struggling with, you know, a lot of people, I think, are struggling with a sense of kind of atomization, you know, a sense of sort of the busyness of life, of the stress of never having enough time,

of trying to restore a sense of balance with, you know, Headspace or whatever the app might be, that, you know, we kind of try to step back and recognize That this, at a deep level, what we're trying to do is to create, sort of reconnect with just other ways of seeing, of hearing, of being in the world that in our sort of mental mode that is dominant today, we don't accept as valid.

Scott Yeah, I think this is the appeal of somebody like Jordan Peterson right now. I think the reason he is the rage right now... I think he's often misread as kind of more conservative than he is because he's such a nuanced thinker. It's easier to caricature than characterize. He's one of those kinds of people. But he wrote this great piece... And he's someone I take as sort of like, I think he probably believes in God, maybe not. I mean, he's very agnostic about, he likes Christianity in the Jungian sense. He has a kind of ambivalent relationship with, you know, would I subscribe to the Nicene Creed or anything? But he sees the cultural power in it. He says this, it's just so good. He says, to progress both psychologically and spiritually, you must eternally let go. You must abandon those things and people who impede your progress, whoever close there to your heart. When you're wrong, when you miss the mark, you must let that part of you that is wrong die.

Only then can you have the new spirit within to spring to life. That new spirit, that's a living union of the terrible information contained in the error you committed with the structures you originally employed to frame the situation. It's a manifestation as well of the potential within you that has not yet been called forth by the previous travails of your life. Christ is symbolically the way and the truth of life, and no one comes to the Father except through him embracing the process of voluntary death and rebirth. This is the psychological essence of Christianity, of Christian ritual and belief. We must identify with a part of ourselves that is always stretching beyond what we currently know and has the faith to let go of old certainties. I just think that is so brilliant. You know, he's getting, I think at what you're talking about, he's getting this kind of deep Jungian sort of mythical drama that is, you know, in these events and why they're ritualistically still significant and still have the power to compel. And that to me is an example of the kind of serious mythical thinking you're talking about. I mean, myth is even a tough word because when people hear myth, they think something false and, you know, Odin and Thor and her because Thor is making a big comeback with the Avengers. But myths are these things that are eternally true. I mean, these deep archetypal stories. And I think what you're identifying is our need for more of that.

Late modernity doesn't dispel the need for that. This is Nietzsche's fear, right? The God is dead kind of thesis. He fears that we won't have a spirituality to replace the gap that the technological and scientific advance has left.

Chris In the history of consciousness that Gebster writes about in his book, one of the things that I found fascinating is he talks about how sort of each mode reaches a kind of fatigue. And one of the ways that we see that fatigue is when, you know, the The totems of it that were powerful lose their authority. You know, so in the magic mode, spells were powerful, curses were real, but then eventually they degraded into sort of witchcraft and superstition, and finally they were just superstitions, right? Myth, you know, these powerful stories by which we sort of governed our lives devolved into, you know, just being interesting stories to tell to kids around a fireplace. And it's interesting that he frames it that way, because then I think about, well, if we are in sort of the next mental mode where, you know, facts are meant to be sort of the... And I agree completely with the quote you gave about Easter. And maybe the one difference, at least, that Gebster would give, or maybe would disagree with, is that, you know, maybe it's... So, yes, it's about reintegrating, and that is the project we have today. But is it about discovering new parts of ourselves, or is it about sort of reconnecting with older parts of ourselves that we have... Thank you very much.

And that was really his testament to say that what we need, whether it is to stave off thermonuclear war or whether it is to figure out how do we sort of come back together in a fragmenting world in 2018. This is about a project of reintegrating things that are already inside us and we need to find, because we are so rational, we need to find a kind of meta-rational way to reopen ourselves to the significance of a serious mythology and a serious magic.

Scott Yeah, I completely agree. I mean, I think it's interesting. I had this guy from the National Review on my Give and Take interview podcast, David French. Great guy. And he and Michael Gerson had both written stuff. Gerson had written something in The Atlantic about American evangelicals, sort of this sin of sort of David French was responding, you know, sympathetically but critically. And he and I were talking about this and I said, you know, what's interesting is evangelicals want to be so influential and yet all this stuff is put into the culture war, which is turning people away. Thanks for having me. Adamization and things that actually would bring about a sort of redemptive influence in culture. So it's interesting because there's a kind of hyper-rationalism to those evangelicals. It's all technique-y sort of, you know, let's try to get cultural influence and stuff. And I think they're kind of asleep on the watch as some of the stuff you're talking about is looming on the horizon.

Chris Well, one of the things that I think that, so while reading this long book and it's, I mean, I can't recommend it because it's just such a long and dense book, but there was, while I read it, I began to appreciate why it needed to be a long and dense book. Because what I discovered through the course of reading it is that if I stand in the rational now and try to open to the earlier mythic and the magical, it's very hard to do and even take myself seriously. I'm like, dude, that's just, you know. But if you begin at the beginning and read about and reflect upon what was consciousness before we had a sense of ourselves as separate from nature? What was our awareness of time before we had a sense that time was measurable and divisible and work forward to the present? Then, you know, the magic mode feels natural and the mythic feels like a natural extension of the magic. And then we can see how we got to the rational place we have today but still somehow hold on to the memory.

The best moments when I thought Gebser did this was in talking about how the modern mind learned to conquer space and time. And so he talks in the European Renaissance, for example, about the critical importance of the development of linear perspective, which Leonardo da Vinci perfected, which was the ability to... To represent space, a three-dimensional space in two dimensions. And before we had that capability, that very basic technology of sort of not just drawing but drafting, it was impossible to say, you know, draw the human anatomy in a way that someone who looked at the picture could then do an operation on or draw how a tower was constructed in a way that somebody could then look at it and say, okay, I could build that too. But once we had that drafting skill, then as Leonardo da Vinci proved, we could take machines that he imagined 500 years ago and today we can still reproduce them exactly as he intended them to work. And so once we developed that, then sort of the whole of Western civilization went out and conquered space. We drew maps that were more accurate of how the world actually works.

We drew maps inside our bodies. We drew maps of animals. And space was no longer something that controlled us. Instead, we controlled it. But in doing that, we also separated ourselves from far earlier intuitions that space is all one piece and space is all connected.

Scott This is like Heidegger saying, right? Basically, there's a big difference between a Bavarian woodsman with an axe and his relationship to a tree and somebody in South America working for a huge logging company with just this massive machine and they're just tearing down a forest. Your relationship to that tree, you're both cutting a tree down. Your relationship to that tree is completely different.

Chris Yeah, and I mean, for us nowadays, you know, I guess the analogy is kind of like our calendars, right? I mean, we have so industrialized time, right? I mean, we lack time, we're short on time. We try to fill time because empty time is sort of wasted opportunity, right? And all of that sort of reveals how we have taken our awareness so far away from, again, a much earlier intuition. Don't really matter. There's something, there's some deeper relationship that is there. And I guess the question is, can we find a way to reintegrate that awareness into our lives and rebalance a bit so that we're not so fragmented in our experience?

Scott Yeah, and that's sort of, you conclude the letter with, you know, three takeaways. A, like trust our magical and mythical impulses more. Second, it's time to get past gawking at the inconsistency and ignorance of the Donald Trumps of the world. We need to understand them and integrate some of the truths that they're getting at. What are they appealing to? And lastly, again, this awareness that in history, periods of general confusion and anxiety ultimately arrived at new clarity and certainty. So we can go with some hope that things will get better.

Chris Because of some deeper intuition. If we can focus on that and develop that, then we're going some way towards reintegrating.

Scott Yeah, G.K. Chesterton says that, you know, a pre-modern man would have rather taken two truths in tension than exchange it for a half-truth. And I think that that's sort of living in that mysterious tension. Well, Chris, I look forward to more maps being made in the future and talking about them with you here.

Chris Map maker, map maker, make me a map.