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The original impetus and format for this was a talk I gave at an Emergent Ventures Unconference. I’ve since made a few small changes. This material is very much mid-flow, and I'm asking others to join in the flow. I reserve the right to continue to make small changes. Do not expect watertight facts or fully explored or explained conclusions. The purpose of this document is to raise more questions and make provocations versus seeking to have the last word on anything.
The philosophy of progress
If we had the ability to wave a magic wand and replace our culture's philosophy, with all the history of the past 200 years and proposing something that fits 2020, what would we replace it with and how should we think about that?
What are the main features we would want in such a system? We want a system that contains violence and chaos and spurs on peaceful progress in technology and wealth. It seems tautological, but we want a system that minimizes bad things and maximizes good things. Such a system is definitely not the system we have seen on display in the news these past 6 months.
Today I want to present the formings of a new way to think about all this. One such better path forward. It is not modernism, nor critical theory, nor is it a direct attempt at synthesis. I just go back to the basic questions and try to answer them as honestly as I can.
The first thing you want to do is start with a theory of man that is holistic and accurate. Specifically in contrast to modernity, that told the lie that man is inherently peaceful, rational, original, and atheistic, man, at his birth, is actually violent, irrational, mimetic, and religious. I think you’d want to form a theory of being and of man: his essence, “who is he?”, and his energies, “why is he here?”
There are many questions:
Can we admit the power of mimetic social society, while still hoping for man to escape it?
Can we no longer worship reason, letting man have a full life and taking suffering seriously, while not abandoning logic and language altogether?
Can we have our minds and our bodies? If modernism sees our bodies as walking vessels for our minds, then postmodernism seems our minds as simply slaves to the urges of the body. There has to be a third way.
Can we integrate knowledge and action? Can we give up universities full of idea laundering, while still seeking truth? Can we create a culture of action and techne and making and elevate that above the desire to have the last word?
Can we emphasize the process of history and avoid any schemes to end history? While still maintaining the hope that even if we do not live to see the fruit of our lives, it will have been worth it.
Can we embrace a materialist understanding, while avoiding the Pantheon of the academic journal? We can and should embrace strange knowledge, conspiracy theories, alchemy, and UFOs.
I believe the answer to these questions is yes. And they compose a set of beliefs and practices that has yet-to-be-named and maybe should never be named. (But neohumanism might not be a bad name for it)
As an exercise, my primary question here has been: what would Rene Girard's political philosophy be? Girard is fascinating in that he is: a Christian, solidly post-enlightenment, but not postmodern. (Girard refused to give up language when all of his French peers did)
For a political philosophy to be complete, it must address core 3 topics:
What are individuals?
What is the group?
What are individuals and the group to do? And how?
For each topic, I will contrast them to modernity and postmodernity, and also try to predict what good things we may have to give up. Nothing is without sacrifice.
Each topic deserves volumes on it. What’s here is just meant to get the wheels turning. It is unabashedly incomplete.
(1) Individuals: An integrated and pragmatic view of man. Be hopeful of all he can be, but wary of all that he is.
We must rebuild what modernity said was foolish: a view of what man is, and how he thrives. That view must integrate that man is: mimetic, violent, and religious. Modernity told the lie that man was a prime mover, inherently peaceful, and atheist. Postmodernity tells the lie that man is good except for all the oppressive cultural forces on him.
This reacts to modernism in that it actually has a full and honest view of man and regains authenticity. Modernity killed God, but now God is raised from the dead.
This reacts to postmodernism in that it is willing to adopt a meta-narrative and is willing to view this meta-narrative as not oppressive but as valuable constraints.
For both: It is willing to value the individual instead of just viewing him as a piece in the machine, the former technological/financial, the latter cultural hegemonies and power struggles.
What good we may have to give up: we may have to give up the Ayn Randian prime mover myth of modernism, as well as attempts to root out Foucauldian power-knowledges and discourses of postmodernism.
(2) Groups: Mimetic Localism: enable a plurality of knowledges and heterogeneity on all other issues
We should value small mimetic groups over the individual or broad cultural systems like “race”. Small tight knit group of family, friends and role models gain primacy over things like systemic racism as these mimetic groups are the true formative force in humans. We should study this intimately and care deeply about it. As a result, we are also forced to value local hegemony over local or global diversity. We care first and foremost about, “Who are the 4 most influential people in this person’s life? And are they good?”
This reacts to modernism in that it values localism over globalism.
This reacts to postmodernism in that it values local homogeneity over diversity.
What good we may have to give up: we may deal with local inefficiencies that modernism disdains and deal with local moral differences that postmodernism disdains. We may have to give up the pantheon of knowledge of modernism.
(3) Action: Poiesis and Techne: the future is through the process of making. Openness to the future, action
I think postmodern science actually may have a lot to give us towards the goal of more progress and should be explored.
The postmodern technological impulse is distinct from the technological impulse of modernity that was a soulless push to “end history” and instead is humanistic and is about techne and the process and delight of making. The spread of new technologies is best understood as the desire to “do good works” rather than an imperial domination of culture. Postmodern technology enables us to view technology not as separate, but as cyborg. Which enables the flourishing of biological technology because we no longer fear it. Raise the status of the experimentalist. Lower the status of the theoretician? Postmodern science emphasizes events over facts.
Modernity failed with its focus on having the final world on science and technology that leads to idea laundering, p-hacking, and outright fraud. The desire and demand to have the last word, means that most great projects never get started.
This reacts to modernism and postmodernism in that it does not propose an end-of-history.
What good we may have to give up: we give up the view of science as a Civ-5 technology tree (modernism), we were generally bad at that anyway. I’m not sure yet what of postmodernism we may have to give up.
In summary
We preserve the best parts of modernism: a passion for individual freedom and dignity but not will not praise self-destructive hedonism. In our realist and pragmatic view of man, we do not consider him an island but also do not see him simply at the whims of the forces of language.
We have a dedication to technological progress with a consciousness of its ill effects.
We maintain an openness to a future and the process of its revealing - helping us to avoid the totalitarian attempts to immanentize the eschaton. Attempts to “have the last word” are blasphemous, just attempts to be God.
We keep an ability to discuss the fullness of the human condition and experience in violent and religious forms giving humanity a richer experience and a more solid grounding that avoids terrifying movements that give a aimless population something that approximates an aim, while also building in a soberness about humanity that gives us some epistemic humility.
After the great plague of 2020, perhaps we have a chance to restart a positive, pragmatic and realistic postmodernism, rooted in humanism.
Neohumanism.
What will we become?
This concludes this talk I gave. I probably attempted something foolish, which is try to pack all of human history and philosophy into 45 minutes. Then again, nobody attempts this and so I think it is worthy of attempt. I am conscious that many questions are left unanswered, many statements left unsubstantiated or defended. For the original format, I just didn’t have the time. It also wasn’t the point. More than making converts, I want to awake people from their slumber. I want people to ask the big questions and dare to give big answers.
The message I want to leave you with is one of hope. Our postmodern time has the potential to be good, really good. As in most times in history - it just requires small communities of earnest individuals seeking goodness.
I’ll write more on these topics on this blog/newsletter/publication-thing. I’d really like to know what questions, critiques and ideas came to you.
Thinkers to go deeper here: Girard, Heideggger, Shestov, Pannenberg, Whitehead
What I’m reading next:
- We have never been modern - Bruno Latour
- Beyond secular order - John Millbank
- For the life of the world - Alexander Schmemann
- Religion and Rationality - Jurgen Habermas
- Politics and Apocalypse - Girard, Thiel, and others
- your recommendation? jeffchuber@gmail.com