As infants in school; we sometimes used to make a gang by the simple expedient of going around the playground and asking other boys if they wanted to be in our gang. Most would say yes, simply because they wanted to be inside the new gang; not outside.
The standard threat to some other boy who displeased was to say 'I'm going to get a gang on you'. Typically nothing was done; but the idea was that the threatener would form a gang against the threatened. It could be done, quite easily, because plenty of kids could be found to go along with it - on the side of any random kid who asked, and against any other random kid... at least for a while.
And a great deal of adult life depends upon the innate desire to join gangs and to avoid being ganged-up-on. This is the primary social basis of tribal society and probably of our ancestors.
Yet this gang-forming propensity is very weak among modern Westerners. In a sense, we want to be gang members a lot more than we want actually to be In a gang. We want protection and a share in the power of a gang; but will not, we cannot accept the necessary group standards of behaviour, leadership, loyalty.
The key thing is 'cannot'. Modern Man just-is an individualist. He cannot form groups.
This is just a fact - but the problem is that he is a weak individualist. He is enough of an individualist not be be able to form groups, even when he wants to. But he is not enough of an individualist to take responsibility for his beliefs, for his thinking.
Indeed, modern Man does not take his individuality seriously enough to find out what it is. He accepts what he is told about his real nature, his true self. He expects to find his real true self outside himself, in the culture! So nearly everybody simply goes-along-with making a choice of self, a selection from prevalent mainstream notions of how 'we' are - all of which happen to be false, incoherent, and demotivating.
In effect: Modern culture gives us a finite, approved, checklist of characteristics; and we are invited to tick-off which apply. The uniqueness of that selection is supposed to be our individuality. The checklist's limitation is what makes us 'belong'.
Genuine individuality of thinking is a glorious and optimistic thing; but the individualism of the large majority of modern Men is a pathetic and grovelling sham; with most of the disadvantages of group membership and very few of the advantages.
If modern man is regarded as being stuck in spiritual adolescence; then we can see that the problem of adolescence is that it is a transitional state between child and adulthood. When what should be a transition becomes permanent, then we get our situation.
The adolescent is individualist enough to be rebellious against parents and tradition; but groupish-enough that he is slavishly conformist to the fashion driven whims of peers - and these adolescent fashions are imposed top-down and with an exploitative and corrupting agenda. That is the permanent state of modern Man.
In sum the adolescent is primarily negative: knowing what he does not want, but unsure and labile; changeable about what he does want. And that is precisely the nature of the mainstream, modern, secular, Leftist socio-politics. It is essentially negative, defined by what it opposes (here and now) - but without any stable or coherent notion of what it wants and aims-for in the future.
It is understandable that the solution for the self-destructiveness of modern Man is seen in a restoration of traditional forms of groupishness - ie. individual conformity to churches. Traditional groupishness is vastly superior to the arrested-half-rebellion of modernity. If that was the choice, the choice would be straightforward.
But it is not the choice. It is not possible. Once adolescence has been reached we cannot return to spiritual childhood, not genuinely nor honestly. Childhood is not an option. Our actual choice is between arrested adolescence and growing up.
In spiritual Christian, and cultural, terms: we began as individuals subordinated and loyal to the group-church of our environment. We entered a semi-individualist adolescent phase of rejecting the church; and ideologically self-subordinating to the partial, expedient individualism of a rebellious teen gang mentality. We need to continue through adolescence, and out the other side, to become fully individual.
As spiritually grown-up individuals, we may choose to work with traditional groups, with churches - but the relationship is then conscious, voluntary, and contingent upon the behaviour of the church. Since we have become adult individuals, we no longer regard loyalty to the church as the primary value.
Much of the desire for a strong church; and to be in a church, of a church - is an unrealistic and impossible yearning for that lost playground security of being 'in a gang'; and not having the gang set against you. Modern Man finds he is not, and cannot be, truly in a gang; yet the fact scares him - it scares him at an existential level, a pervasive and intolerable angst - from which he escapes into distraction and intoxication and Not Thinking.
Having a developed sense of self-consciousness - being rooted in this; we cannot help but evaluate and judge the 'external' church against our personal standards. Internal standards, personal intuition, is the only evidence we will accept - yet modernity undercuts all personal intuition as arbitrary, epiphenomenal, self-deceptive, lacking any objective validity.
This is why we need, more than anything else perhaps, to understand how and when intuition has objective validity; to develop confidence in genuine intuition - as being a form of direct knowledge of the divine: the divine within that makes us Sons of God, and the divine without: the Holy Ghost, which is the living Jesus Christ.
I sometimes wonder if this is what Nietszche meant by the 'death of God' - the death of what might be called the 'institutional' God, the God of the gangs, as it were, rather than God ceasing to exist or being shown never to have existed at all. Nietszche belie the onus to be in us now to create new values and new conceptions of the Divine, which fits, I feel, with Barfieldian notions of 'full participation' - where we are called to be once we have finally worked through our perpetual adolescence.
ReplyDeleteI very much go along with this line of thought. 'Without a vision the people perish', etc. Except to say fresh religious understandings don't appear out of a vacuum. On the contrary. We need to reconnect with the depths of our religious tradition and build on that, while at the same time keeping our eye on the far future, on what lies beyond the boundary and limit of the current political, economic and religious set-up. And this far future will link up the ancient past in a new vision of wholeness.. 'Archaeo-Futurism', some call it. Or a 'memory of the future', as the Greek theologian, John Zizioulas refers to the Eucharist . In the words of Christ Himself, 'Behold, I make all things new',
Romantic Christianity seems well placed in this respect. A propos, I'm currently doing a lot of thinking and research into the vision of Logres set forth in 'That Hideous Strength' and Charles Williams' Arthurian poems - not so much seeing them as creative responses to the 1930s/40s but as prophecies of times to come.
@John - I think you are correct in suggesting that Nietzsche was acutely conscious of the death of that God, and the reasons for it; although my judgment is that he himself then got stuck in a stridently negativistic adolescence, and became demented before he could think his way out of it - which he might well have done.
ReplyDeleteIn a sense, perhaps Rudolf Steiner finished Nietzsche's work, with his almost ignored Opus 5: https://www.rsarchive.org/Books/GA005/
Steiner worked diligently on the Nietzsche archive, and was devoted to N's nasty sister until becoming a victim of her machinations - three years after writing Nietzsche: fighter for freedom, Steiner published Christianity as Mystical Fact.
I'm glad you are focusing on Lewis and William's as genuine prophets. Prophecy is in their work, although perhaps they themselves were not aware of, and would have denied, it; because their prophecies (I think) go beyond their creeds.
I have found nourishment and encouragement from doing similar work on Tolkien, Barfield - and just today Blake, for whom Geoffrey Ashe was the pioneer.
I believe that the recently-available books of Valentin Tomberg, particularly “Christ and Sophia” and “Essays on Russian Spirituality”, would be of interest in these discussions. They interpret Rudolf Steiner with depth,warmth, and independence of mind.
ReplyDeleteDilys in the US
"Modern Man just-is an individualist. He cannot form groups."
ReplyDeleteObservers of modern marriage will note that modern man (and woman) cannot form groups of two - he or she cannot be persistently loyal even to one other person. The Left has taken energetic steps to undermine this form of "traditional groupishness", and has in particular indoctrinated women to believe that subordination and loyalty to a man is hateful and oppressive.
@Dexter - Marriage is a microcosm of this. Traditional forms have lost support, and are too stereotyped and insufficiently individual; what has replaced them is much worse - indeed explicitly evil. A good modern marriage exists despite society, not because of it; it must therefore be based upon mutual love (see today's other post on the family) - although this is very difficult to create and maintain without wavering for mere mortals like us.
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