The Immortality Key: The Secret History of the Religion With No Name by Brian C. Muraresku

 

The Da Vinci Code grows up (without the murders or gorgeous sidekick)

Before reading this book I’d listened to a podcast interview between the author, Brian Muraresku, and Jaime Wheal (whose most recent book is on my playlist). In remarking on Muraresku’s book, I recall Wheal describing it as “Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code grown-up” (or words to that effect). And I must say that the comparison is apt. In this book, Muraresku provides an engaging narrative about a bit of an obsession that in 2007 from a chancing upon a magazine article that triggered his recollection of an obscure academic work he’d read during his prior life as a budding young classicist. In short, Muraresku combines an (intellectual) adventure tale—including hints of intrigue— with a travelogue around the Mediterranean and through time.


The secret— or rather secrets— that Muraresku pursues are those of ancient beverages. He and colleagues and their predecessors in this search believe that some of those beverages— beers and wines— may have been spiked with psychedelic or other psychoactive substances. And were not talking just alcohol, either. As Muraresku notes, we’re not sure which was the first human “biotechnology,” but the prize either goes to beer or bread. Both came from grains first gathered and then cultivated around 10-13 thousand years ago by humans at the dawn of civilization (agriculture and cities). But regardless of which came first, beer (or fermented grains of some sort) has been around a long time. And beer was used at one of the most famous sites of antiquity, the temple at Eleusis that hosted the Elysian mysteries, which Muraresku described as the “first spiritual capital of the West.” And what are the Elysian mysteries? What went on during this ancient Greek rite remains one of the best-kept secrets of antiquity. We really don’t know what was said or done during these rites except that these rites revolved around the Greek goddesses Demeter and her daughter Persephone. Suffice it to say that until the rites were shut down in 392 A.D. by nervous Roman authorities then ruling Greece, this place and the secret rites that occurred there had been a major phenomenon in the Greek-speaking world for about 1900 years. Among those who experienced the rite of the mysteries were Plato, Cicero, and Marcus Aurelius, to name but three, who, between them, opined about a great many topics, but they never shared what they experienced there. And in a theme that will continue throughout the book and its investigation into other rites that may have included the use of psychoactive substances, the rites were controlled by and conducted by women.


After exploring the evidence surrounding the Elysian mysteries, off-shoots of which can be seen as far as Spain, Muraresku turns his attention to the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine (and “drugs”) whose cult came into prominence with the development of viticulture in the Greek-speaking world. Again, he pursues trails linguistic and scientific to determine whether the cult of Dionysus didn’t influence the early Christian cult of Jesus. Muraresku focuses on the Gospel of John and makes a compelling argument that John’s narrative was aimed at the Greek-speaking populations in the western Mediterranean, where the cult of Dionysus flourished. Could the wine that Jesus shared at the Last Supper have been spiked? And did subsequent celebrations of that Last Supper, which became Communion in the later tradition, also feature spiked wine? In investigating these possibilities, Muraresku travels to archeological sites in southern Italy, which included long-established colonies of Greeks and Phoenicians. He looks at a well-preserved farm near Mt. Vesuvius that that included residues of the beverages that were preserved courtesy of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius that buried (and preserved) Pompeii in 79 C.E. Scientists found intriguing residues that suggested that the wine wasn’t just wine.


And in Da Vinci Code style, Muraresku, with his confederate, a Franciscan priest, gained access to the Vatican archives and the catacombs in a sort of behind-enemy-lines motif. Muraresku describes himself as a “good Catholic boy” who attended a Jesuit high school and a Jesuit law school (Georgetown). But he realizes that his hypothesis— that the wine of Jesus and “paleo-Christians” may have been spiked— would not sit well with the Vatican. As Muraresku notes, there are two things that the Catholic hierarchy has never been fond of: drugs and women in positions of power. Nevertheless, he gained access to some fascinating documents and viewed some fascinating frescoes in the catacombs under St. Peter’s Basilica that add intriguing pieces of evidence to his attempt to prove his hypothesis.


The final portion of the book touches on several related topics, including the late medieval to early modern infatuation by the Church with “witchcraft” and what eventually became the European witch craze of the 1500s on into the 1600s (and that spread to the Americas); the suppression of drug use by the indigenous peoples of the Americas (for instance, psilocybin); and that most intriguing of early modern personages, Giordano Bruno. Bruno was a proto-scientist, magician, and precursor of Galileo. (Galileo learned about how the Vatican reacted to unwanted theories by knowing of Bruno’s demise at the stake in 1600.) We learn that Bruno haled from Campania, the area around Naples that included the ancient Greek-speaking colonies dating from the time of Parmenides and that later gained notoriety for its “witches,” and their brews that were so feared and persecuted by the Church.


Muraresku opens his narrative and gives a brief apologia for his quest by relating the experience of a cancer patient, “Dinah,” who participates in a study undertaken by NYU researchers about the efficacy of psilocybin for providing relief for someone dealing with a life-threatening disease. For Dinah, a self-described atheist, her experience with the hallucinogen was life-altering. She has beaten the odds for survival after her cancer diagnosis, but she still lives, in a sense, under a death sentence (as do we all). But she reports that her outlook on life and death has changed because of her experience with the drug. And her experience is not unique. Continuing research at NYU, Johns Hopkins, and other institutions, as well as research (mostly surreptitious) outside the sanction of the academy, have produced similar results. Muraresku posits that these experiences allow individuals to “die before that die,” the counsel of the ancient Greeks who practiced rituals to gain this advantage, an advantage sought by Christians as well. Based on these researches and influential individual experimenters that were prominent before the War on Drugs was declared, such as Aldous Huxley, Alan Watts, and Gordon Wasson (the ethnobotanist who reported on his use of psilocybin in a 1957 Life magazine article), Muraresku suggests that the use of psychedelics could prove a boon to those with psychological injuries and to further spiritual explorations. And here’s where I need to raise some concerns and questions.


Testimonials from users are useful and important, no question. But current subjects of medically guided experiments are tightly monitored, and (I assume) steps are taken to avoid a bad trip. Perhaps it's a trick of an aging memory or the result of anti-drug propaganda, but I recall that some folks suffered bad trips, some even fatal. How can we— or can we at all— avoid bad trips by users who escape any guidance? Or to put it more bluntly— and to risk the ire of one of the gods of contemporary culture— should these drugs be available to the uninitiated, or should these drugs be limited to those who have undertaken the requisite physical, learning, and ethical preparation that would make these drug trips safe for the user and the user’s society; i.e., an elite? We don’t want to foster a new class of lotus-eaters or a new herd of Circe’s pigs. I don’t know the answer to these questions, but I think it crucial to ask them. Muraresku, who choose to avoid any use of substances during the twelve years he spent in pursuit of his quest, suggests steps can and should be taken to make “the God pill” available and valuable to a potential user. He writes:

There are real-world benefits to all this supernatural mumbo jumbo. That “science of awe” with its increase in “pro-social behaviors such as kindness, self-sacrifice, co-operation and resource-sharing.” [Quoting Alan Watts.] After all, it’s not about altered states, but altered traits, as Huston Smith once summarized the value of psychedelics. If we took the God Pill, would we really all become better people? Would we love more and hate less? Would it make any difference? Only to the extent that the initial experience was sacred. And stayed sacred. Stayed meaningful. The Mysteries had a way of ritually ensuring the odds of that transformation from the mortal to the immortal: various stages of initiation, intense psychological preparation, a community of mentors, integration back into everyday life.

Muraresku, Brian C. The Immortality Key (p. 390). St. Martin's Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

Muraresku’s plan for making the “God pill” a social benefit strikes the right note, but it doesn’t seem plausible in practice. How many persons are willing to undertake any spiritual or practical discipline? Few indeed. This potential shortcut to spiritual enlightenment is certainly more attractive than years of meditation and other more traditional (and arduous) forms of spiritual initiation But if these drugs can be abused, and what drugs can’t be— and aren’t— abused— then we have a tough choice to make. No one will want to leave such as a decision to any government bureaucracy, ecclesiastical hierarchy, or any other authority not recognized in advance by the individual as rightfully holding such awesome power. A tough sell. Thus, we are damned if we do and damned if we don’t regulate access to something as potent as “the God pill.” And consider that any spiritual technology that has the potential to bring us closer to the angels will almost certainly have the power to bring us closer to the devil.


Another issue that Muraresku doesn’t address: what is the ontological status of drug-induced revelations? The same could be asked of any other technique that induces visions (or hallucinations, if you prefer— the choice of terms anticipates the answer). How do we, if at all, separate the wheat from the chaff? Does the relief and insight that Muraresku reports that the NYU test subject “Dinah” experienced only the reality of a pleasant dream, or is it a genuine insight into ultimate reality? And how would we know? Of course, if better dreams, better fantasies, only bring about better behavior, it’s still worthwhile pursuing such a remedy, just as taking an aspirin for a headache can make us a better companion. (Older readers: remember those television ads for aspirin back in the day?)


One final point of criticism (venial sins of omission and not commission), Muraresku suggests that the use of spiked wine in the paleo-Christian community aided its spread, which was, in fact, no small miracle. But there are many theories, many plausible explanations, about how and why Christianity spread so effectively even before it gained the imprimatur of the state and the power of the sword. Muraresku is certainly aware of these theories, but he doesn’t address them. Jesus is portrayed in John’s Gospel in significantly different ways than he is by the Synoptic Gospels, Paul, and others in the New Testament canon. (The Gnostics, as Muraresku notes, tend to follow the Johannine path and on the whole support Muraresku’s theory. And to be fair, Muraresku would not claim these theories as his own, he serves more as the investigator and advocate than the originator of these claims.) The political-social implications of Jesus’ message and the community bonds that formed around could have been enough to bring about the miracle of the spread and triumph of Christianity.


Although I’m sure that he’s a credit to our profession (law), it’s too bad that Muraresku concluded that a career path as a classicist wouldn’t suit him. And although he reports that his field of practice is “international law” (I’d guess international transactions in particular), he certainly learned how to present a strong case. He has the trappings of a fine advocate in the courtroom if he wants a career change. And because of all this, I’ll pass judgment on his argument according to legal standards. Has he proven his case? Certainly not beyond a reasonable doubt, and not by clear and convincing evidence. But the defense hasn’t put on its case, so one can’t pass any final judgment in any event. Plus, his toughest case will involve the Catholic Church. Good luck getting the Vatican into the courtroom of public opinion. They possess much of the evidence! However, in my role as an imaginary magistrate, I will rule that Muraresku’s case meets that standard of probable cause and that his case should come to a full trial (by academic fire). It’s an intriguing argument well-presented, and despite the qualms I expressed above, it could prove a ground-breaking case that would benefit humankind, which needs as much spiritual insight as it can get in the challenging times we face. I encourage him to pursue it.

Thoughts for the Day: Wednesday 2 December 2020

 

Sir Francis Bacon

Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider. Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few to be chewed and digested; that is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be read, but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and attention. Some books also may be read by deputy, and extracts made of them by others; but that would be only in the less important arguments, and the meaner sort of books, else distilled books are like common distilled waters, flashy things. Reading maketh a full man; conference a ready man; and writing an exact man. And therefore, if a man write little, he had need have a great memory; if he confer little, he had need have a present wit: and if he read little, he had need have much cunning, to seem to know that he doth not.

--Francis Bacon (in 1597) 

The Inevitability of Tragedy

Barry Gewen

HOW HAD “LUCKY AMERICA” managed to avoid the French disaster? To begin with, it was fortunate in the enemy it faced—not the absolute king who dominated France but a constitutional monarch whose powers were already reined in by legal institutions and tradition. The American colonists had grown up with a legacy of rule by law, whereas the French had known only dictatorship, and thinking in each case reflected past political experience.

The Life of the Mind

Hannah Arendt and Mary McCarthy

The true opposite of factual, as distinguished from rational, truth is not error or illusion but the deliberate lie.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

In the Indian yogic tradition, jñ-dna yoga is the yoga of the intellect, the path of philosophy whereby one awakens the embryo of enlightenment and arrives finally at the intellectual intuition of the “hypothesis beyond all hypotheses,” as Plato called it. Plato and the Upanisadic authors analyzed knowledge into similar levels.

How the South Won the Civil War

Heather Cox Richardson

America began with a great paradox: the same men who came up with the radical idea of constructing a nation on the principle of equality also owned slaves, thought Indians were savages, and considered women inferior.

Thoughts of the Day: Saturday 21 November 2020

 

The Master and His Emissary

Iain McGilchrist

So Wordsworth describes at the opening of Book XII of The Prelude how inspiration requires both the effort by which the mind ‘aspires, grasps, struggles, wishes, craves’ and the stillness of the mind which ‘fits him to receive it, when unsought’ – despite the effort, it still only comes unsought.

Compare the above with Hannah Arendt's descriptions of "thinking," such as undertaken by Socrates.

The Shape of Ancient Thought

Thomas McEvilley

Plotinus’s level of Soul is in turn divided into two sublevels, one rapt in upward contemplation, the other dynamically involved below. The tradition of this distinction in Greek philosophy goes back from Plotinus through Middle Platonist and Neopythagorean sources to Aristotle’s distinction between active and passive intellect, and ultimately to Plato’s conception of the World Soul in the Timaeus.

Made to Stick

Chip Heath, Dan Heath

As we pored over hundreds of sticky ideas, we saw, over and over, the same six principles at work. PRINCIPLE 1: SIMPLICITY How do we find the essential core of our ideas? A successful defense lawyer says, “If you argue ten points, even if each is a good point, when they get back to the jury room they won’t remember any.” To strip an idea down to its core, we must be masters of exclusion. We must relentlessly prioritize.

And for a deeper dive today:

The ‘corrupting influence of power’ is a commonplace. Power means the exercise of force; it corrupts by undermining a man’s will and reducing him to the level of his own slaves. [Collingwood is writing in the context of Greco-Roman political thought.] A slave-driver, getting out of the habit of explaining to his slaves what he means them to do, gets out of the habit of formulating his intentions even to himself. He can retain that habit only by discussing them on equal terms with his equals.

Plato knew this. He has left us a psychological study of the political slave-driver (in Greek ‘tyrant’) and a psychological study of the slave, the ‘tyrant’s’ subject. The results are the same. The lack of free will, the inability to resist the pressure of emotional forces, which makes the slave a slave, is also what makes the ‘tyrant’ a ‘tyrant’.

To narrate the genesis and career of the ‘tyrant’ (for us to-day, as it was for Plato or the Hellenistic period, an absorbing task) is not exactly the business of political science, because the field of activity in which the ‘tyrant’ distinguishes himself is not, strictly speaking, political. For the time being, let us call it pseudo-political. Collingwood, R. G.. The New Leviathan. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Apologies to the Grandchildren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences by William (Patrick) Ophuls

 

                                                                Published in 2018

 

Civilization is, by its very nature, a long-running Ponzi scheme. It lives by robbing nature and borrowing from the future, exploiting its hinterland until there is nothing left to exploit, after which it implodes. While it still lives, it generates a temporary and fictitious surplus that it uses to enrich and empower the few and to dispossess and dominate the many. Industrial civilization is the apotheosis and quintessence of this fatal course. A fortunate minority gains luxuries and freedoms galore, but only by slaughtering, poisoning, and exhausting creation. So we bequeath you a ruined planet that dooms you to a hardscrabble existence, or perhaps none at all.  

Ophuls, William. Apologies to the Grandchldren: Reflections on Our Ecological Predicament, Its Deeper Causes, and Its Political Consequences (p. 1). Kindle Edition.

I first read this book in March 2019, as soon as I became aware of it. It only took me a couple of days to read it. This fast reading was the result of several factors: first, it's relatively short (140 pages); second, I'd read several other books by Ophuls, and this book is more a less a summary of his work; and third, it was compelling. I gave it five-star ratings on Amazon and Goodreads. However, because of some travel and other commitments, I didn't get around to reviewing it then. But now I've been prompted to return to it and do it full justice. This short book is indeed a summary of Ophuls's work in the field of politics, ecological scarcity, and their effects on human life and well-being. Also, another prompt was my recent reading of Thomas Homer-Dixon's most just-published book, Commanding Hope: The Power We Have to Renew a World in Peril (link to my review).  Indeed, I will consider Ophuls's book by comparing and contrasting his outlook and work with that of Homer-Dixon. Between the two of them, I believe we have two of the savviest and most worthwhile thinkers about the economic, social, and political consequences of our ecological predicament. (I.e., it's greater than "just" climate change.) I'll start with some brief biography of these two scholars.

The following is a brief biography of Ophuls taken from a book he wrote under his given name, Patrick Ophuls, Buddha Takes No Prisoners: A Meditator's Survival Guide (2012) (link to my review):

Patrick Ophuls graduated in 1955 from Princeton University with a degree in Near Eastern area studies and obtained a PhD from Yale in political science in 1973. He joined the U.S. Foreign Service in 1959, was a political analyst on the Afghanistan desk at the State Department, and was also posted to American embassies in Abidjan, Ivory Coast, and Tokyo, Japan, as a personal aide to two ambassadors. Leaving the Foreign Service in 1967, he became a professor of political science at Northwestern University. Patrick Ophuls has practiced insight meditation intensively for over 30 years. He began sitting with the Thai teacher Dhiravamsa in 1974, graduating from his teacher training program in 1977 and going on to assist him during several retreats in 1978. He began studying with Insight Meditation Society founders Jack Kornfield, Joseph Goldstein and Sharon Salzberg in the late seventies, an association that continues to this day.

Ophuls (b. 1934) is a generation older than Homer-Dixon (b. 1956). Ophuls, after completing college in 1955 spent time in both the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.S. Foreign Service before attending Yale to receive a Ph.D. in political science in 1973. But after this, Ophuls served only a brief stint in academia before becoming what he describes as an independent scholar. By the early 1970s, Ophuls was publishing works about environmental issues, and he's continued writing about this topic--and especially its implications for economic and political life--ever since then. Of course, there are a lot of questions that arise from this brief biography, such as the influences that his experiences in the Coast Guard and the Foreign Service had on his outlook about the environment, political life, and his interest in Buddhist meditation practice. Also, I wonder about the reasons for his relatively brief tenure in academia while nevertheless writing some very learned and provocative books aimed at readers with a high level of sophistication. And, does Ophuls have grandchildren?

Homer-Dixon's biography is a bit more conventional, at least in the field of academic life. But part of the charm of Homer-Dixon's works, which are aimed at a general but sophisticated audience, arises from his sharing bits of his personal biography along the way. Born and raised in British Columbia (western Canada), he had a lot of exposure to nature, as his father was a forester. Time in nature and knowledge about nature came early to Homer-Dixon. He traveled as a young man, and he worked in the Canadian oilfields for a while. Since completing his doctoral work at MIT in political science in 1989, he's held academic positions in Canada. He began his career focusing on issues of international conflict arising from environmental scarcity, and he then expanded his research into a variety of other areas concerned with environmental issues, complexity theory, and related topics. In reading Commanding Hope and Homer-Dixon's two prior works intended for the general public, I find Homer-Dixon relying a great deal on social scientific research to guide his thoughts about political and economic issues and--especially in Commanding Hope--thinking about how to persuade the general populace about the need for a new economic-political paradigm. Ophuls, on the other hand, while acknowledging social scientific research, chooses to base his arguments and perspectives on the classics of political thought (in addition to his emphasis on the basics of natural science that underlies ecological thinking). Plato, Rousseau, Jefferson, and Thoreau figure most prominently in Ophuls thinking, along with many others counted among the classics of political thought. He also acknowledges the importance to his outlook from 20th-century thinkers like Jung, Lippmann, Niebuhr, and Arendt, to name but a few of those he acknowledges in his excellent bibliographical essays. But now let me turn to what may be the most interesting contrast between these two thinkers about our future. And here I refer to the issue of "hope," which both thinkers address in the most recent books.

The second chapter of Ophuls's work is entitled "What Can Give Us Hope?" and it begins with this sentence: "Industrial civilization is in a hopeless position, an impasse from which there is no visible avenue of escape." Id., p.25. Not an encouraging thought, I must say. He goes on to argue that industrial civilization can't stand still (stop growing) because this would halt "progress," the religion upon which the last two-hundred-plus years have been based. Such a change would "crush morale" and destroy the "American dream" (and the Chinese Dream and all of the other variants of dreams of material wealth in the world today). Ophuls rejects both the hope that "renewable energy" will allow industrial civilization to continue on course, and he rejects technological miracles such as "the Singularity." Ophuls comes to this conclusion about any attempt to maintain the status quo:

We face a stark choice. We can expend our waning stocks of fossil fuels, our scarce capital, and our limited political will in a vain attempt to maintain industrial civilization as it exists, or we can use those same resources to effect a necessary transition to a radically different type of civilization. But we cannot do both, and we must choose reasonably soon. For if we follow the line of least political and societal resistance and wager everything on an attempt to preserve our energy-intensive, mass-consumptive way of life, we will go bankrupt energetically. Without the resources to make the transition, deep collapse will become inescapable. Id., p. 30.

Lest one believe that we can change course simply by sounding a clarion call to reason and rationality, Ophuls reminds us that

It is abundantly clear that scientific evidence and rational arguments, no matter how weighty or well formulated, are not enough to overcome sheer inertia, vested interests, ideological blinders, the shortcomings of the human mind, or the extent to which we are all increasingly entangled in the trappings of modern life. Thus industrial civilization seems destined to continue on its current trajectory until one or more of the limits bites so deeply as to precipitate collapse. Id., pp.30-31.

He continues:

As industrial civilization begins to implode, we will witness an upsurge of prophecy of all kinds—fantastic, salvational, millenarian, apocalyptic, and reactionary. Id., p. 31.

According to Ophuls, fantasies about "the Singularity" are simply a new variation on the more traditional reactions he lists above. Silicon Valley won't be our salvation. At this point, the reader is approaching the end of the chapter and is probably wondering, as I did, where is the hope? And in the closing lines of this chapter Ophuls provides us with this tantalizing observation:

But the prophetic madness attending the death throes of industrial civilization will also contain a small but significant ray of hope: out of the welter of false prophets there may arise one whose message will effect the metanoia that is the only real way out of the impasse. For only by transcending our obsession with material power and progress and recovering a deep empathic connection to the planet and the life it bears can we hope to reconstruct civilization to be sane, humane, and ecological. Id, p. 32.

 "Metanoia." It's a term that I used in my review of Homer-Dixon's Commanding Hope, although Homer-Dixon didn't use this term. Ophuls refers to it as a "change of heart" as in a religious conversion, while I defined it in my review of Commanding Hope as a change of the "heart-mind," but this is a quibble. "Metanoia" is the term used in the New Testament about the effect of Jesus' teachings that has been translated also as "conversion," "finding salvation," and such. Later in this book, Ophuls suggests that this is his "hope":

Thus I would expect (or hope) that a future religion would transcend tribalism and take a more cosmic stance, expounding a universalist teaching that offers abundant spiritual succor and moral support without having recourse to the Grand Inquisitor’s miracle, mystery, and authority. An inkling of such a teaching is perhaps to be found in the Upanishads or the Tao Te Ching. All this is to take a very long view, but living sub specie aeternitatis is exactly what is needed now. Crises tend to rob us of everything except ego’s immediate fears and needs and to create a climate of desperation. That is why the shadow flourishes during a time of troubles. Only the long view will save us. For twenty years a Japanese Zen master tirelessly taught retreats, ordained priests, and established centers, not only in the U. S. but also in other parts of the world. Yet when asked how Buddhism was faring in the West, he replied, “Ask me in 500 years.” Id., p. 104.

 If you've received the impression that Ophuls doesn't promote hope liberally, you'd be correct. The attitude of Ophuls seems to be "yeah, maybe," without much encouragement beyond that. Again, to compare Ophuls's take with that of Homer-Dixon, Homer-Dixon takes a great deal more time and effort in Commanding Hope to make hope both legitimate and yet grounded in the face of the same ecological perils that both writers identify. Perhaps some of the difference is that Homer-Dixon writes about (and for) his children (ages 15 and 12 at the time of his writing), while Ophuls, a generation older, is writing to "the grandchildren."

Another point to know about Ophuls is that his analysis spares no one perspective. He not only critiques contemporary industrial-consumer capitalism, but also democracy, liberalism, tribalism, the media, elites, libertarianism,  and modernity. In short, he pulls no punches. Whether you're a liberal, conservative, reactionary, a leftist--whatever--you can find something that Ophuls has written that challenges your fundamental assumptions. Homer-Dixon, despite his "Dr. Doom" nickname, remains within academia and wants (I surmise) to remain restrained enough not to become totally foreclosed from the public (political) conversation. Thus, Homer-Dixon goes easy on the political particulars of policy prescriptions. Homer-Dixon argues in a more rhetorically restrained mode, while Ophuls uses a much blunter, more prophetic rhetoric. Both rhetorical voices are valid and useful, and I'd deploy one or the other depending on the audience and occasion, although at my point in life--just three years older than Homer-Dixon but with adult children and therefore grandparent-eligible, I tend to favor the more prophetic mode. But, again, given a particular audience, I might soften the blows.

Apologies to the Grandchildren provides a summary of the project that Ophuls has pursued since the 1970s. It's not the book that I'd recommend if one was just beginning to read Ophuls. I'd nominate Plato's Revenge (2011)  (link to my review) for most readers. Nor is it his most comprehensive work (Requiem for Modern Politics: The Tragedy of the Enlightenment and the Challenge of the New Millennium (1997) (link to my review) would be my choice for a top-to-bottom view. But if you want to start with an executive summary (of sorts) that entails a minimum of any doubt or hesitation, you can begin with this work of prophecy. And note well, prophecy isn't about predicting the future, it's about the consequences of choices that we make that create our future. In my book, Ophuls is a true prophet. And I wouldn't mind at all if, in the passage of time and with luck, he's proven even just a bit wrong!

P.S. Here's the blurb that Thomas Homer-Dixon provided for Ophuls's Plato's Revenge: 

For decades, William Ophuls has been among the world's most original thinkers about the implications of our global ecological crisis for freedom, democracy, and political order. In Plato's Revenge, he goes to the essence of this crisis: the deep, tacit, and widespread beliefs that nature and society are nothing more than machines, that the state should play no role in cultivating citizens' virtue, and that self-interested individuals should rely solely on reason to guide their lives. Ophuls weaves together the ideas of some of history's greatest thinkers to argue that humankind's future lies in small, simple republics that cultivate their citizens' virtue through natural law. In doing so, he shreds conventional wisdom and invigorates our conversation about the kind of world we intend our grandchildren to inherit.

Thomas Homer-Dixon

University of Waterloo, author of The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity, and the Renewal of Civilization

 

An Essay on Metaphysics by R.G. Collingwood

I wimped out in my review of Collingwood's An Essay on Philosophical Method, claiming that I could only "appreciate" it. I thought that this work would prove as intimidating, but I'm feeling more ambitious, so I'll call this a review, albeit an awed and tentative one. Let's dive in!

If the business of metaphysics is to reveal the absolute presuppositions that are involved in any given piece of thinking, the general class of study to which metaphysics belongs is clearly the study of thought. 

Collingwood, R. G.. An Essay on Metaphysics. Read Books Ltd.. Kindle Edition.

Collingwood set forth a plan for writing about history, art, and metaphysics in the 1930s. His declining health (a series of strokes from uncontrolled high blood pressure) prevented him from completing his project, but he remained immensely productive to near the end of his life in 1943. He published the Essay in 1940, and it was his next-to-the-last publication before his death, with only his The New Leviathan to follow the Essay. The Essay (hereinafter EM) is composed of complex yet fluid and lucid prose. In it, Collingwood sets forth the need for metaphysics and it's history (which is an intimate relation). The account begins with Aristotle, addresses Kant, and does battle with the logical positivists of his day, who wanted (in essence) to abolish metaphysics.

What I have chiefly tried to do in it is neither to expound my own metaphysical ideas, nor to criticize the metaphysical ideas of other people; but to explain what metaphysics is, why it is necessary to the well-being and advancement of knowledge, and how it is to be pursued.

The most significant aspect of this work arises from his contention that metaphysics must always begin with "absolute presuppositions" and not "propositions." A proposition or relative presupposition may be either true or false, but not so an absolute presupposition, which is neither true nor false. (Collingwood distinguishes "relative presuppositions" from "absolute presuppositions" on this point.) An absolute presupposition is a starting point that is neither true nor false but is a given, somewhat like an axiom in geometry. Presuppositions are--like all knowledge--embedded in history. Thus, the presuppositions of Aristotle differ from those of Descartes because of changing attitudes and beliefs about natural science and mathematics in their respective cultural milieus. What Collingwood's ideas about "presuppositions" ground metaphysics in history and recognizes the impossibility of avoiding a sense of the given in constructing any metaphysics. Although he doesn't reference it, it strikes me that what Collingwood has done for metaphysics is like the role of Godel's theorem for math and logic; it "proves" that one must begin with a given, an arbitrary starting point. (N.B. Don't trust my understanding of Godel. I'm not qualified to judge his work, and I'm not sure that I have even an accurate layman's understanding, but what I've said here is the impression I've gotten over the years having encountered discussions of it here and there--such as in Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid that I read many years ago. Or make the same point via the popular fable "it's turtles all the way down."

Absolute presuppositions are not verifiable. This does not mean that we should like to verify them but are not able to; it means that the idea of verification is an idea which does not apply to them, because, as I have already said, to speak of verifying a presupposition involves supposing that it is a relative presupposition. If anybody says ‘Then they can’t be of much use in science’, the answer is that their use in science is their logical efficacy, and that the logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend on its being verifiable, because it does not depend on its being true: it depends only on its being supposed (prop. 3).


The logical efficacy of a supposition does not depend upon the truth of what is supposed, or even on its being thought true, but only on its being supposed.

Of course, all of this means that there will be--and have been--grounds for changing the presuppositions of metaphysics throughout history. Based on this, many analytic or logical positivist philosophers of Collingwood's day (Ayer, for instance) take the position that metaphysics is all poppycock because we can't prove its "absolute presuppositions" true or false. To the logical positivists, everything is a true-false test. Collingwood fights this simplistic attitude via a careful review of the history of metaphysics.

If anybody says that metaphysics, as the name of a science, means according to those who expound it simply ontology [the study of "pure being"], and that ontology, according to the view put forward in the preceding chapter, is a chimera; and if he goes on to infer that whatever is expounded under the name of metaphysics is erroneous or nonsensical, all he is doing is to demonstrate that he cannot or will not distinguish between what people are actually doing and what they think they are doing. This may be mere stupidity on his part; but it may also, like many sophistical arguments, involve a certain disingenuousness.

Collingwood also expounds what he calls (not as such in this work) his "logic of question and answer." Louis Mink, in his study of Collingwood, makes the important point that Collingwood is not propounding a new "logic" in any formal sense, but what might be better described as a mode of inquiry. The logic of question and answer is best known through Collingwood's works on history. For Collingwood, the logic of question and answer must guide what he calls "scientific history." He argues that the same principle applies to metaphysics and that any question must "suppose" an answer.

All metaphysical questions are historical questions, and all metaphysical propositions are historical propositions. Every metaphysical question either is simply the question what absolute presuppositions were made on a certain occasion, or is capable of being resolved into a number of such questions together with a further question or further questions arising out of these.

Metaphysics is about a certain class of historical facts, namely absolute presuppositions. The problems of metaphysics are historical problems; its methods are historical methods. We must have no more nonsense about its being meritorious to inhabit a fog.

But lest one think that Collingwood is one of those philosophers with his head in a cloud (a tiresome stereotype), he always brings metaphysics back to natural science. The point of metaphysics, as Collingwood describes it, is to provide a foundation upon which science can work. Collingwood argues at length that metaphysics is not a "deductive science" but a historical enterprise. And because history involves change, so too, the absolute presuppositions of metaphysics will change. Scientists, as he notes, don't always like this reality. Collingwood notes:

In my own experience I have found that when natural scientists express hatred of ‘metaphysics’ they are usually expressing this dislike of having their absolute presuppositions touched. I respect it, and admire them for it; though I do not expect scientists who give way to it to rise very high in the scientific world.

Collingwood turns his attention to "psychology," which he finds a pernicious influence upon metaphysics. Collingwood wants to draw a strict line between the thinking process involved in metaphysics and the claims made by psychology as an academic discipline. After setting forth a critique of metaphysics by an imaginary psychologist, Collingwood begins his reply with his typical aplomb:

If psychology is really the science which tells us how we think, it is beyond doubt that what I have called metaphysics falls within its province. And there I would gladly leave it if once I could satisfy myself that this phrase, even if not a complete account of psychology, is a correct one so far as it goes. But on this point I ask to be fully satisfied. The work of metaphysics is too important, too intimately bound up with the welfare of science and civilization (for civilization is only our name for systematic and orderly thinking about what are called ‘practical’ questions), to be handed over to any claimant on the strength of his own unsupported assertion that he is its rightful owner.

And then psychology takes a drubbing, at least to the extent that Collingwood perceives it as encroaching upon the activities of the mind as the thinking process. He starts by examining the history of psychology and psychological thinking. And as is his custom, he's prepared to go back to the ancient Greeks to ground his inquiry. Of them, he writes,

What they [the ancient Greeks] regarded as peculiar to mind was not having ends but being aware of this and having opinions, in some cases knowledge, as to what its own ends were. If a mind is something which has opinions as to what it is trying to do, its possession of these opinions will in certain ways complicate its behaviour. An organism unconsciously seeking its own preservation will simply on any given occasion either score another success or score for the first and last time a failure. A mind aiming at the discovery of a truth or the planning of a course of conduct will not only score a success or a failure, it will also think of itself as scoring a success or a failure; and since a thought may be either true or false its thought on this subject will not necessarily coincide with the facts. Any piece of thinking, theoretical or practical, includes as an integral part of itself the thought of a standard or criterion by reference to which it is judged a successful or unsuccessful piece of thinking. Unlike any kind of bodily or physiological physiological functioning, thought is a self-criticizing activity. The body passes no judgement upon itself. Judgement is passed upon it by its environment, which continues to support it and promote its well-being when it pursues its ends successfully and injures or destroys it when it pursues them otherwise. The mind judges itself, though not always justly. Not content with the simple pursuit of its ends, it also pursues the further end of discovering for itself whether it has pursued them successfully.

Thus distinguishing mind and body, Collingwood describes the norms which govern the operation of the mind. (N.B. No mention of "brain" here!) The criteria for judging the mind arise in ethics (governing actions) and logic (governing thought processes). Collingwood notes that these are often referred to as "normative" standards, but he prefers to label them as "criteriological." He goes on to observe that the rise of psychology in the sixteenth-century didn't arise from a dissatisfaction with logic or ethics, but instead it "arose from the recognition (characteristic of the sixteenth century) that what we call feeling is not a kind of thinking, not a self-critical activity, and therefore not the possible subject-matter of a criteriological science." EM. Collingwood continues:

The business of thinking includes the discovery and correction of its own errors. That is no part of the business of seeing, hearing, touching, smelling, tasting, and experiencing the emotions associated with them. These activities were thus not activities of the ‘mind’, if that word refers to the self-critical activities called thinking. But neither were they activities of the ‘body’. To use a Greek word (for the Greeks had already made important contributions to this science of feeling) they were activities of the ‘psyche’, and no better word could have been devised for the study of them than psychology.

But Collingwood describes psychology as going off the rails in the seventeenth and eighteen-centuries by encroaching on what was previously the exclusive purview of logic and ethics. Collingwood describes the change:

In the theory of knowledge the same revolt [against the Aristotilian tradition] was at work. Here it took the form of maintaining that intellectual activities, or operations of thought, were nothing but aggregations and complexes of feelings and thus special cases of sensation and emotion. Theoretical reason or knowledge was only a pattern of sensations; practical reason or will, only a pattern of appetites. Just as the aim of materialistic biology was to wipe out the old biology with its guiding notion of purposive function, so the aim of what I will call ‘materialistic epistemology’ was to wipe out the old sciences of thought, logic and ethics, with their criteriological methods and their guiding notions of truth and error, good and evil. Just as materialistic biology hoped to study organisms by substituting for the old biological methods the modern methods of Newtonian physics, so materialistic epistemology hoped to study the processes of thought, theoretical and practical, by substituting for the old methods of logic and ethics the modern methods of psychology, the science of feeling.

But less one think that Collingwood is a metaphysical and science troglodyte, he continues this line of thought with a concession and a cutting metaphor:

This programme, as the more acute and painstaking thinkers of the eighteenth century especially in its later years were not slow to realize, was foredoomed to failure. It might very well be true that a revolt against the old logic and ethics had been desirable and had proved beneficial; for it might very well be true that people who professed those sciences had misunderstood their normative character, and had claimed a right of censorship over the thoughts and actions of other people; and for the sake of scientific progress such tyranny might very well have to be overthrown. When it is a case of overthrowing tyranny one should not be squeamish about the choice of weapons. But the tyrannicide’s dagger is not the best instrument for governing the people it has liberated. Epistemological materialism, in attacking the criteriological science of logic (for brevity’s sake I shall henceforth say nothing about ethics) and offering to replace it by psychology, deliberately proceeded on the assumption that thought did not possess that power of self-criticism which had in the past been rightly regarded as distinguishing it from feeling. If any one who thinks has before his mind a criterion, the double notion of truth and falsehood, by reference to which he judges his thought, any science of thought which repudiates the character of a criteriological science becomes thereby a pseudo-science of thought.

Collingwood has no tolerance for what he brands a "pseudo-science of thought." Collingwood continues with a brief critique of Freud and some contemporary academic psychology. After his discourse about certain psychologists, Collingwood devotes an entire chapter to "The Propaganda of Irrationalism." This chapter is in some ways out-of-place in the book because it deals with social and political attitudes, and it may give too much weight to what may be an academic (in the multiple senses of the word) dispute that has only limited relevance to the larger society. However, if one could only read one chapter from this book, I'd say read this one because of its contemporary significance. One of the reasons I've become fascinated by Collingwood's work arises from the fact that he was living and writing his most important work in the 1930s and early 1940s as totalitarianism (Soviet Communism and German National Socialism (Nazis)), fascism (Italy & Romania), and authoritarianism (Vichy France, Franco's Spain) were dominating the European landscape. Collingwood responded to these developments viscerally and with thought, and his passionate thought shines through in this chapter. Rather than quote it here, I'll devote a separate blog post to some extended quotations. Suffice it to say, what Collingwood says about the world in this chapter at the time that he wrote EM bears an uncanny and unnerving relevance to now.

I do not wish any reader of these pages to form an impression, or even a suspicion, that I value these achievements at a low rate. The study by psychologists of sensation and emotion, whether in the laboratory or in the consulting-room or in what other conditions soever they think it capable of being pursued, is a most important kind of research and a thing which every friend of science will encourage by every means at his command.

The following chapter (XIV) addresses positivism again, and Collingwood pays his respects before unleashing his criticisms. In short, Collingwood describes the positivists as attempting to have scientific theories without the benefit of history as a form of knowledge, and history as a form of knowledge establishes "facts" that positivism so values. Further, positivists want to believe that science has no need of "absolute presuppositions" (only "propositions"); ergo, no metaphysics upon which to ground the inquiries of science. Collingwood sums up the positivist position

It [positivism] has developed into the following syllogism. ‘Any proposition which cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts is a pseudo-proposition. Metaphysical propositions cannot be verified by appeal to observed facts. Therefore metaphysical propositions are pseudo-propositions, and therefore nonsense.’ The argument has been set forth with admirable conciseness and lucidity by Mr. A. J. Ayer in his book Language Truth and Logic (1936).

The final section of the book deals with three provocative issues in metaphysics: the existence of God, Kant, and causation. While God and Kant have their respective merits as topics, as a lawyer, I found the discussion of causation the most compelling. The concept of causation is crucial in the law, especially in criminal law and torts. In torts, no action, either intentional or negligent, can create liability arising from the person's action (or inaction) unless the act (or inaction) causes harm to another. Much legal ink has been spilled on this topic of causation in the law. Terms like “causation-in-fact,” “legal causation,” and "proximate cause” are among the most dissected concepts in the field of tort law. Civil jury instructions in tort cases instruct jurors to determine whether a defendant's action caused the plaintiff the harm claimed. In other words, the idea of causation is not only a matter of concern to lawyers or philosophers but also to laypeople called to serve on a jury. As an example of a causation instruction, the following is the Iowa Uniform Civil Jury Instruction that defines “causation” in a tort case:

700.3 Cause - Defined. The conduct of a party is a cause of damage when the damage would not have happened except for the conduct.)

To begin his consideration of causation, Collingwood identifies three different senses of the word "cause" in English. Collingwood explores the earliest sense of the word and then the later variations based upon that original sense. In other words, he performs a historical analysis of the uses of the word. (In this, he seems to be adopting a form of inquiry conducted at length by Owen Barfield in his 1926 book, History in English Words.) The original use of the term cause in English according to Collingwood is what he labels “Sense I”:

Sense I. Here that which is ‘caused’ is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it.

This, too, is a familiar use of the word in the law. Lawyers speak of a client having a “cause of action;” for instance, in negligence or libel. In other words, a legal justification for bringing a lawsuit. Rounding out the senses of the term “cause,” are Collinwood’s descriptions of "sense II" and "sense III"

Sense II. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event in nature, and its ‘cause’ is an event or state of things by producing or preventing which we can produce or prevent that whose cause it is said to be.

Sense III. Here that which is ‘caused’ is an event or state of things, and its ‘cause’ is another event or state of things standing to it in a one-one relation of causal priority: i.e. a relation of such a kind that (a) if the cause happens or exists the effect also must happen or exist, even if no further conditions are fulfilled, (b) the effect cannot happen or exist unless the cause happens or exists, (c) in some sense which remains to be defined, the cause is prior to the effect; for without such priority there would be no telling which is which. If C and E were connected merely by a one-one relation such as is described in the sentences (a) and (b) above, there would be no reason why C should be called the cause of E, and E the effect of C, rather than vice versa. But whether causal priority is temporal priority, or a special case of temporal priority, or priority of some other kind, is another question.

Sense III is the sense of cause that natural scientists adopted and that comes down to us today in many of the natural sciences. Needless to say, given the length of the description Collingwood must use to describe it, this last sense is the one that gives philosophers--and that should give scientists--pause. After laying out the three “senses” of the word “cause” in English (and Collingwood uses the word “senses”), Collingwood describes how the terms are used in the discipline of history. Collingwood writes

In sense I of the word ‘cause’ that which is caused is the free and deliberate act of a conscious and responsible agent, and ‘causing’ him to do it means affording him a motive for doing it. For ‘causing’ we may substitute ‘making’, ‘inducing’, ‘persuading’, ‘urging’, ‘forcing’, ‘compelling’, according to differences in the kind of motive in question.

Collingwood goes on to supplement this understanding:

A cause in sense I is made up of two elements, a causa quod or efficient cause and a causa ut or final cause. The causa quod is a situation or state of things existing; the causa ut is a purpose or state of things to be brought about. Neither of these could be a cause if the other were absent.

It is clear in these quotes (and the intervening text) that Collingwood is emphasizing the human element in “cause;” the fact that human thought responds to a trigger and formulates a purpose or intention for acting—one might say a pull as opposed to a push (i.e., a simple stimulus and response, like Pavlov’s dogs or Skinner’s pigeons). Collingwood some time exploring “sense II” of causation, which I will pass over here, and he moves into “sense III,” which, to start, involves the dispute between the empiricists and the rationalists of the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. This long-established but divergent paths still provide a fertile source for thinking about causation. Collingwood also explores a work by Bertrand (“Earl”) Russell, which he admires and critiques. Out of this discourse, Collingwood observes

Causation in sense III is an anthropomorphic idea. Natural scientists have tried to use it as a weapon for attacking anthropomorphic conceptions of nature; but it has been a treacherous weapon. It has led them unawares to reaffirm the view they were attacking. And that may be why, in Earl Russell’s own words, ‘physics has ceased to look for causes’ (op. cit., p. 180).

He continues:

The idea of compulsion, as applied to events in nature, is derived from our experience of occasions on which we have compelled others to act in certain ways by placing them in situations (or calling their attention to the fact that they are in situations) of such a kind that only by so acting can they realize the intentions we know or rightly assume them to entertain: and conversely, occasions in which we have ourselves been thus compelled. Compulsion is an idea derived from our social experience, and applied in what is called a ‘metaphorical’ way not only to our relations with things in nature (sense II of the word ‘cause’) but also to the relations which these things have among themselves (sense III). Causal propositions in sense III are descriptions of relations between natural events in anthropomorphic terms.

History, the acts of humans, keeps creeping into efforts to abstract the human element from every conception of causation. Also, we have the unintentional but not less real fact that any current thinking comes loaded with conceptions received (or smuggled in) from the past. And "the past" has myriad ways of attempting to understand the world. Collingwood writes

The reason why we are in the habit of using these anthropomorphic terms is, of course, that they are traditional. Inquiry into the history of the tradition shows that it grew up in connexion with the same animistic theory of nature to which I referred in discussing sense II of the word ‘cause’, but that in this case the predominant factor was a theology of Neoplatonic inspiration.

Newton, according to Collingwood, adopts “cause” from this Western cultural heritage and seeks to make it fit with his newer ideas about “force” and “motion.” Then comes Kant, who attempts to gather and refine these existing senses of “cause;" i.e., those from empiricists, like Hume, and rationalists like Leibniz; and those of Bacon and Newton. Kant believed he had shaped these traditions into one coherent conception. But Collingwood argues that Kant wasn't successful. Collingwood sums up his criticism of Kant in this paragraph:

It does not follow that Kant was mistaken in thinking both statements [about logical necessity and temporal sequence] to be true. He was trying to state what people (himself included) meant when they spoke of causes. They meant to express a certain absolute presupposition [Collingwood’s term] which they habitually made in the course of their thinking about nature: the presupposition which is called the idea of causation. This presupposition was itself a constellation of presuppositions; and among the elements that went to compose it, if Kant is right, were these: that a cause and its effect are related by a necessary connexion, and that a cause and its effect are related by way of temporal sequence. The logical incompatibility of these two suppositions does not prove that they were not concurrently made; it only proves that, if they were concurrently made, the structure of the constellation that included them both was subject to severe strain, and that the entire fabric of the science based upon them was in a dangerously unstable condition.

This frame of thought continued through the nineteenth century and up to the time of Einstein. Yet, as Collingwood reveals in a representative sample of his contemporaries, many philosophers and natural scientists have not followed the lead of the physicists but have stuck with Kant’s problematic conception. Collingwood concludes his point

All these writers, it will be seen, attach themselves to some group or society of persons to whom they refer as ‘we’. I have ventured to italicize the word in my quotations. What is this group or society? It is the group or society of persons who accept the Kantian definition of the term ‘cause’. They are not, and do not include, contemporary natural scientists: for these, or at any rate those among them who are physicists, have abandoned the term. Nor do they include such philosophers as have, like Whitehead and Russell, understood and accepted the work which these physicists are doing. They are a group of neo-Kantians whose reverence for the master has induced them to accept not indeed all his doctrines but this particular doctrine. I say this because, the doctrine being a self-contradictory one, it can hardly have commended itself to them by its inherent reasonableness; nor can they have had for accepting it the same reason which I suppose Kant to have had, namely the fact that, self-contradictory or not, it was actually presupposed by contemporary physicists. It has somehow got itself fixed in their minds; presumably from their study of Kant. To quote the bitter words of Earl Russell: ‘The law of causality, I believe, like much that passes muster among philosophers, is a relic of a bygone age, surviving, like the monarchy, only because it is erroneously supposed to do no harm’ (op. cit., p. 180).

Russell, like Collingwood, often displayed a sharp tongue and a gift for metaphor. 

Let me conclude this tour (I now regret the phrase “review;” I’m still not qualified) of Collingwood’s Essay with his concluding words, which address not only the current states of metaphysics and natural science but politics as well.

This movement [to maintain Kant’s conceptions about causality] may impede the advancement of science (and the advancement of science and the existence of science, I repeat, are not two things but one) in two different ways. Politically, by creating in the body politic a demand that scientific thinking should be put down by force. There are places where this is already happening. Academically, by creating in the specialized organs through which society endeavours to further science and learning a feeling of hostility to that furtherance. This feeling of hostility to science as such may be ‘rationalized’ through an obscurantist philosophy which by sophistical arguments pretends to prove that the advances which are actually being made are in fact no advances. Sophistical, because reactionary: based on the assumption that the superseded views are true, and thence proceeding to argue that the views which have superseded them must be false because they do not agree with the views they have superseded. The partisans of such an obscurantist philosophy are traitors to their academic calling. Within the body of persons ostensibly devoted to the advancement of science and learning they are working, unconsciously perhaps but still working, to obstruct that advancement and weaken the resistance with which that body is bound in honour to confront the onslaughts of irrationalism. . . . . Since metaphysics is an indispensable condition of science an enemy to metaphysics is an enemy to science, and a reactionary anti-metaphysician is an enemy to whatever in science is progressive. Trying with a clumsy hand to put back the clock of scientific progress, he stops it. This is my reason for offering to the public what might seem essentially an academic essay, suitable only for readers who are already, like myself, committed to an interest in metaphysics. The fate of European science and European civilization is at stake. The gravity of the peril lies especially in the fact that so few recognize any peril to exist. When Rome was in danger, it was the cackling of the sacred geese that saved the Capitol. I am only a professorial goose, consecrated with a cap and gown and fed at a college table; but cackling is my job, and cackle I will.

And cackle he has.

Dark Star Rising: Magick & Power in the Age of Trump by Gary Lachman

No collusion here, but revealing comparisons abound

Having become a fan of Gary Lachman’s work a few years ago, I’ve known that he’s had Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump in the works for some time. The time between his announcement of the project and his report that he’d sent the manuscript to the publisher was some months ago, so it’s been a long wait. As time passed my anticipation grew, and upon receiving the book I had to wonder whether the reality would match the level of my anticipation. The answer, I’m happy to report, is a resounding “Yes!”

I’d learned that Lachman would be exploring the complex of ideas that surround Putin’s regime in Russia, a daunting task given Russia’s cultural heritage that’s as tangled and enigmatic as a great Russian novel. Lachman delivers on this end of the story, but to my delight, he also shines his light upon the American side of this time of political turmoil. His consideration of American-as-apple-pie New Thought and its relation to Trump provides a valuable contribution to our understanding. How does one start with a train of thought that can claim greats like Ralph Waldo Emerson and William James—two of the most significant and encouraging of American thinkers—and arrive at Donald Trump?

Also, Lachman provides readers with a new lens through which we can better perceive the Trump phenomena. I’d initially perceived Trump as a clown in the mold of Silviu Berlusconi (Italy’s former PM)—a wealthy philanderer out to massage his own ego and line his pockets while his boorish behavior and grandiose promises distract voters long enough to pick their pockets (which seems all too acceptable in Italy). Later, I came to see Trump as a full-scale demagogue, precisely the type of candidate that political thinkers from Plato to the American Founders (Hamilton and Madison in particular) warned us about and against whom the Founders designed the Constitution. (This blog post addresses both of the first two of my Trump images.)Later, in part as a reaction to Scott Adams’s “Trump is a master persuader and can do no wrong” refrain (my initial response that I now find inadequate). I came to see Trump as a master salesman, a huckster in the classic American mold of hucksters. Only he didn’t sell land in Florida or shares in the Brooklyn Bridge; instead, he sold worthless educational certificates from Trump University and stiffed contractors and investors. A friend of mine captured Trump’s essence by describing him as “a man of low cunning.” More recently, and to use a more contemporary vocabulary, both Max Boot and Tim Egan (and undoubtedly others) have described Trump as a grifter. (Slate has an interesting piece that distinguishes a “grifter” from a “grafter,” but we needn’t quibble.) But while all of these characterizations hold validity, they’re not completely satisfying. While money is a VERY BIG THING for Trump (as it is, less ostentatiously, for Putin, who’s now probably richer than Trump), money alone doesn’t provide a satisfactory explanation for the Trump phenomena. Something more, something deeper is at play, and here’s where Lachman has provided us with a more revealing lens. Drawing on the writings of Colin Wilson that deal with “rogue messiahs” (gurus) and “Right Men” (those who cannot admit errors or flaws), Lachman establishes a strong connection between “gurus” and “demagogues.” When reflecting on the traits of gurus gone bad--most prove human, all too human--and demagogues like Trump or Putin, one discovers very similar traits.  Lachman follows this trail of traits to establish—for me at least—that Trump is not just not a normal politician (compromise, give-and-take, follows established norms), but a guru-demagogue in about every conceivable way. He's intolerant of criticism, lacks friends, prefers mass audiences of adulating fans, holds a simplistic worldview of “us versus them,” and so on. This trope of the bad guru fits as well as any . . . Well, except for one more perspective that Lachman provides us.

A more far-fetched, but most intriguing perspective, is to consider Trump a “tulpa,” (or ‘telly-tulpa”), a thought-form, an apparition (albeit one with some material reality) created by mental processes. Lachman draws the idea of a tulpa from Tibetan and magical lore. Whatever the empirical validity of such an entity, as a metaphor, it fits. From this, I can conjure a great opening for a piece about Trump: “A specter is haunting America, the specter of Donald Trump.” Catchy, don’t you think? Just keep in mind that this specter is not a friendly genie that will do our bidding and fulfill our wishes, but an evil jinn who seeks to entice us into our own imprisonment.

Lachman is a thorough, reliable guide through the under-explored and labyrinthian ways of experiencing the world that lies outside of the modern mainstream. Lachman has developed a solid reputation for exploring these less traveled by-ways, and this work proves no exception. And I must mention that Lachman approximates an ideal teacher. He informs his reader about ideas, events, and persons with a very light, unobtrusive touch. One must read carefully to get a sense of where his preferences and perspectives lie. He tosses off comments and asides that provide clues, but he’s never ponderous or pedantic. Only at the end of the book, as on the last day of class, does Lachman pull back the curtain and provide a direct statement of his perspective about what he’s shared. His peroration merits careful contemplation:

Exactly what guidelines we impose on our imaginations is, of course, a serious question . . . . But the very power involved suggests we should proceed with caution, as anyone of any seriousness would; only children play with matches. This does not mean timidly, but with care and an awareness of the responsibility involved. The future perhaps is not only in our hands, but in our minds, and the reality that awaits us in the time ahead may be germinating there now. Let us hope that when it arrives we will be equal to it and that it will bring clearer skies and brighter stars on the horizon. 

Lachman, Gary. Dark Star Rising: Magick and Power in the Age of Trump (p. 192). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.

 As usual, I find myself mostly agreeing or at least sympathetic with Lachman's arguments, even about points where I’m more skeptical—or perhaps to say cautious—about conclusions and connections. All the points in his case merit careful consideration and invite us to a more in-depth exploration of the issues raised.

For me, a book that promotes—even demands—further explorations of its subjects merits the highest valuation, and this book meets this criterion. I could go on at great length sharing and then riffing on the many issues that Lachman’s book raises: the nature of persuasion; the relation between thoughts, beliefs, actions, and reality; the role of ideas in the material world of politics; the thinning barrier between appearance and reality (or simulacra and simulation); the distinction between “imagination” and “fancy” (or “creativity); critiques of modernity and alternatives to modernity; the illusions and deceptions of postmodernism; the potential for civilizational disruption; and (in my words), why the human herd is so spooked that we have stampeded toward a cliff.

I’ll save exploration of these issues for later blogs, but suffice it to say, I highly recommend reading this book to better understand and investigate the uncertain times in which we now live.