The Re-formation 2.0
Giving Thanksgiving a chance
When you join a groaning Thanksgiving table this year, are you inclined to ‘give thanks’ for the bounty of food before you or do you feel that considering the ongoing devastation of the continuing ‘pandemic years’, there’s not a lot to be thankful for and we should really talk about what to do about this fraught moment in history. Perhaps we need to engage in a deep dive into why we should be grateful and to whom. That we urgently need a fundamental Re-formation because the primary evil afflicting us is deep corruption in high places. Whatever your inclination, this essay is about the massive malaise that makes being grateful such a hard slog. And what to do about it.
I have done this before, and I always end up in the same place: a search for a new spiritual foundation. One that can wrest us away from the edge of the existential cliff upon which we are prancing, like The Fool in the Tarot deck
This spiritual train keeps coming at me and sorry, no serious writer can ignore it. It is not just spiritual faith alone; there are others, like faith in markets, the essential goodness of mankind or indeed all Western Civilization. We are in a crisis of ‘faith’ on all those fronts. And when a society loses faith in itself, it is generally regarded by historians as done. Kaput. Over.
Furthermore, the serious voices in the public sphere have already concluded that only the complete and utter collapse of the West will save it. This is an example of what the great scientist/poet/philosopher Iain McGilchrist calls the coincidence of opposites.
McGilchrist echoes Substack writer and author, Paul Kingsnorth, a British thinker and disenchanted environmentalist making the talk show rounds explaining why, after a harrowing personal crisis as a writer in which he literally could no longer find the words to describe the world, he has come to the conclusion that ‘the West must die’ in order to be reborn as something better, saner and above all, more spiritual. For both McGilchrist and Kingsnorth, the massive malaise afflicting us is primarily spiritual; a collapse so profound that it takes spiritual balls to even talk about it. Kingsnorth sums it up nicely:
This is a time of deep spiritual upheaval, and it is going on in a society which barely has the words to even describe what this means. I am keen to try and find the words. Other things can always seem more urgent - the politics, the arguments, the culture war froth - but ultimately, they function as distractions. They tear your eyes away from the reality beyond the veil. That reality, for me, is the only thing worth writing about now. More than that, it seems to be the only thing I am currently capable of writing about.
In addition, the first research paper published by The ARC, a global enterprise of worried elites based in Britain that includes former prime ministers and other worthies but also counts Jordan Peterson among its members, was recently released. Peterson appears to be the odd man out, being a rather beleaguered public figure though clearly another thinker who believes that our troubles are of a spiritual nature.
In ‘Our Civilizational Moment’ Os Guinness makes a powerful plea for a return to Christianity, a spiritual tradition we have long abandoned. He also blames the globalists for pretty much all our troubles:
The decline of the West, the most powerful of the many carriers of globalisation in history, carries titanic implications for the entire world and for the future of humanity.
…what is certain is that the West now faces a critical moment and contest. It will either experience a genuine and profound renewal of its ideas and ideals, it will replace those ideas and ideals with different but equally powerful ones, or it will decline beyond hope of recovery and take its place as the latest entrant in the select circle of history’s former great civilisations.
Until now, I had not heard of Guinness, associating that name with the preferred brew of dedicated beer drinkers, especially in Britain. (Os counts the founder among his distant forbears but is the son of Missionaries). Despite my initial skepticism, I must admit, the man can write
Image credit: Heather Bozman
“A cut flower civilization” is a brilliant metaphor for a people that has deliberately cut its roots and is now rotting in the vase. (interestingly, Hitler hated cut flowers) Guinness’ argument is that Christianity itself is what made the West the greatest civilization known in history. You may vehemently disagree, but let’s be civil and give the man his moment:
Was the sudden rise due to Europe’s armies, its political order, its economy, or the rule of law? No, it was Europe’s religion that fuelled the political, cultural, scientific, and technological development that facilitated its remarkable ascent. To be more precise, Western religion, the Christian faith, was not European in origin, but Jewish, and therefore Middle Eastern. But it had grown to be the official faith of Rome, declared so by the Emperor Theodosius in 380 AD. The conversion of the barbarian kingdoms over the next centuries created Christendom and brought the Christian faith to the whole of Europe. But for all the influence of its fearless explorers, sailors, traders, and missionaries, Christian Europe had never dominated the world up until the 16th century. What happened then was the revolutionary burst of the Christian faith known as the Protestant Reformation.
He then goes on a precise summary of western history right up to the present globalized moment. Highly critical of the globalist agendas currently afflicting us, he correctly identifies them as left-brain dominant, power mad control freaks who, if left unchallenged, will destroy what is left of our cherished freedoms.
There can be little doubt that for the Global Resetters, the name of the game is control. The logic is clear and grim. The chaos and conflicts of the world must be brought to order, or else. The world must be brought to heel towards hell.
He has a couple of solutions that are purely political though undergirded by a spiritual tradition that values each human being as unique and worthy.
In response to the civilizational moment, the West should affirm two key values: freedom—the vital liberal freedom for humans as individual persons to be fully themselves, and to think freely, speak freely, and live together freely. And sovereignty—so that human responsibility is balanced between personal sovereignty, local sovereignty, national sovereignty, and global sovereignty. Sovereignty is an important bulwark against overly centralised power that can act against human freedom and national interests. (my bolding)
His thoughts on exactly what kind of faith we need and where to find it is, alas, fuzzy. He doesn’t want us to go back to The Church, but he does think that faith in something or somebody transcendental is the path out of this dark wood, leaving it up to us to figure out what we want to believe in. As long as we believe in a vision of human flourishing that goes beyond dialectical materialism and a naïve view of The Science, all will be well.
Which leaves the main question of HOW this is going to happen unanswered. Maybe total collapse will indeed panic us so much that we will, as a desperate last resort, turn to a God whom we no longer worship.
It is well understood that ‘there are no atheists in foxholes’. To me, that has always meant that when forced to face our mortality, we suddenly remember the God whom we mostly try to forget during our ordinary life. He is just a divine security blanket, after all. And we are way too grown up for that, are we not? Smart, highly educated creators of machines now capable of outthinking us and maybe getting ready to rule us. Wait. That doesn’t sound so smart after all. Why would we totally smart people invent a thing like this? Unless it’s a way of finding something to worship that we can control. A new and improved AI Golden Calf. But finding that we can’t—the entire AI enterprise is already totally out of control, with the likes of Musk opining in all seriousness that it should be ‘regulated’ via some high-level bureaucracy. I have written about the dangerous naiveté of such an idea before and keep wondering how we got here. To a society riven by hubris as well as bottomless anxiety and endless verbal wars about well, everything. A society that is so confused and frightened that some of its political ‘leaders’ cannot answer ‘what is a woman?’ without turning themselves into intellectual pretzels.
To my now rather tired mind, it’s always about whether we still have freedom or if you prefer, liberty. I believe that ship has already sailed though we can still see it on our collective horizon steaming away from us, diminishing every time we look.
The Titanic makes another excellent metaphor
A society as deeply committed to ‘security’ as ours is has already abandoned freedom, along with spirituality, community, and ethics. Because only a free people is able to choose its ethics or its fundamental direction. The catastrophic pandemic has revealed a kind of cultural flesh-eating disease, devouring our well-being, our connections to our fellow humans, our institutions, and most importantly, our offspring.
We know the kids are not alright. The stats on depression, anxiety, suicide and overdoses are the red flag we cannot ignore. By not talking to them about the very idea of God, or the necessity of a spiritual life, we have utterly failed them. I have failed my own sons in this matter as well. I believed I was doing them a favour. Because I could only see the shadow side of religion. The sixties and seventies was also an unusually progressive period during which I spent most of my adulthood. None of us living our lives between 1960 to 1980 was in any kind of foxhole. Our backs were not against the wall; we were lucky. And of course, we didn’t know it. We had a lot to be grateful for in those days and it was relatively safe to be a rebel.
I left the Church at the age of sixteen in 1956, and until now, have had no regrets. I was never lost: I had something else to put into the place of religion: Art. For about 24 years I was ‘helpmeet’ and ‘muse’ to a deeply committed and multitalented artist, my husband Peter Paul Ochs. It didn’t occur to me that I might have artistic talents of my own until I was nearly eighty. Call me a late-late bloomer. In other words, after nearly forty years of leading a rather chaotic but adventurous life doing many different things, I have returned to base. To Art. To Artists. It is my spiritual practice and saved my sanity during the last three years.
I believe that doing anything creative with deep commitment is a spiritual act. Because when you create, you are at one with the Creator, however you conceive of Him/Her/It. (This is one of the few instances where being able to ‘choose your pronouns’ might be a good thing). It’s a state of grace the scientific community calls ‘flow’, a well understood concept. Anyone who has ever painted, sculpted, composed, written or designed something is familiar with this state and hopes that it happens. Sometimes it does. And then truly original and surprising works come to light. Sometimes it doesn’t; and then everything you attempt goes to sh…t.
All this is by way of saying that the crisis we are facing goes beyond the environment, beyond politics, and beyond the digital screens that we have turned us into addicts. I agree with the great talking gurus that to save ourselves we may have to simply walk away and begin again. We may have to abandon our cherished computer networks, for starters. The shadow side of the digitized world has ushered in a fearful age of diminishing technical and cultural returns. And while we sort out this difficult Renaissance/Re-formatio2.0, the realization that we cannot exist without the unifying bonds of a transcendent faith is beginning to hit and hit hard. It doesn’t matter whether you embrace a sort of neo-Christian outlook a la Peterson, or a pantheist/panentheist or even Buddhist viewpoint, what matters is that the transcendent becomes, once again, part of ‘the conversation’ in the West.
Of course, the all too human desire to simply ignore everything and live life as if nothing has changed is overwhelming. But if we want to have any kind of human future, one in which we can give thanks for the gift of a good life, we must first acknowledge how bankrupt we are.
The Fool is prancing on the precipice. The flowers in the vase are half dead. The ship is disappearing from the horizon. Grace be with you.
Happy Thanksgiving.
Hmmm, I spent the day demolishing a piano and schlepping it to the dump, an act of musical profanity but a sign of the times: pianos are big, heavy and need constant tuning, which is expensive. That's why you literally can't give them away. A sign of how our society has changed, and not for the better. In the 'olden days' every family had someone who could play the piano, and thus entertain the rest at gatherings such as Thanksgiving. Now we are taught that families are irrelevant or redundant, and all these pianos are winding up in the landfill. A sad metaphor for our times.