Mission San Juan Capistrano in Southern California
“You only get a culture war when you no longer have a culture.” - Paul Kingsnorth
The theme of this essay (and the next) is boundaries or limits (I know, I’ve touched on this topic before, but this is a much deeper dive into the issue) - the supportive framework that underpins our morality; particularly the usufulness of limits and whether or not boundaries serve a purpose and are a necessary feature of our life here on Earth. We can see in so many of our cultural and societal problems that the lack of boundaries is so very destructive, from gender to bodily sovereignty to our relationships with others to the use of language, etc. Boundaries guide how we enact our morals (our personal compass) in the world - what I would define as our ethics (how we translate our morals into actions; how we treat others).
The Big Metaphysical Questions (I guess all metaphysical questions are big)
“The problem with reality is that it is a kind of authority, and for centuries the West has been in the grip of a “liberationist” determination to do away with the concept of authority. This takes various forms: attacks on tradition, on God, on the concept of nature, on the figure of the father, on the givens of the body and the existence of insuperable limits such as mortality.” - Matthew B Crawford
Recently I read a Substack article that really got me thinking about the necessity for boundaries in society and how we make our morals and ethics congruent.
In the essay Thoughts on Today’s Upheaval and It’s Implications, N.S. Lyons discusses this problem of wanting to address social issues but again and again having to return to a metaphysical framework, an analysis of that which underpins our reality, before being able to deal with the more superficial issues (not to say though that these are not extremenly important, but they take a back seat) of our existence:
Something unexpected happened in the course of this, however. In trying to trace back the roots of the present madness, of our various ideological and cultural maladies, I found that each kept running to a level much deeper than I expected. To be honest in my investigation, I soon found it wasn’t enough to blame Foucault, or Marxism, or liberalism, or whatever; these ideas and ideologies were only responses to the same patterns stemming from human nature. Deep atomization and alienation. A rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality. Boundless ego of the self. A void of higher meaning. Unmitigated fear of suffering and death. Existential anxiety. Nihilism. Anger at life, anger at all of creation. A desperate, limitless thirst for technological control as a reaction. Deluded hopes for utopia on earth and the end of all suffering. Relentlessly, every issue I was investigating began to converge on our modern society’s lack of ready answers to the same uncomfortably metaphysical questions: Why are we here? What is truth? What is real? How do we explain suffering? How do we justify existence? How do we live in the world? And so on.
We thought we had resolved or at least successfully set aside these questions in our modern, secular age. But it turns out this neutrality was always impossible; they are unavoidable and have to be answered. If they aren’t, something else will inevitably rush in to fill the void, no matter how crude, ill-considered, disordered, or dangerous that something is.
Lyons is right, if you do not answer these metaphysical questions for yourself, the choice will be made for you, in that you will just be swept up in the current of the Machine.
Some fundamental meaphysical questions that I have grappled with over the years and currently:
Are we humans Machine or something more? Are we, at our core, Spiritual Beings? Made in the image of a Higher Power, a Creator, God? Are we inately ‘good’ or ‘bad/evil’? Do we answer to something Higher than ourselves or are we free to manipulate reality to suite our desires/wants? Do boundaries actually exist; are they self-imposed or are they dictated by God?
Limits
“Ideologies mainly just function as crude replacements for religion.” - NS Lyons
It would seem that no matter the cultural, societal, political issue we encounter, we must first have a metaphysical explanation for our existence in order to have perspective on said issue(s). That is to say, we must first have a set of beliefs (our morals) which dictate how we act in the world (our ethics). Those morals will inherently have set boundaries within them to hold our ethics in a prescribed framework, i.e. limits.
A “rejection of higher authority, any authority, even the authority of reality” brings us to a place of nothingness, a void. At first appearance you might think this is a good thing - a blank slate, on which we can project our own, subjective beliefs. We can create our own framework.
It doesn’t work like that, though…
In the big epistemological picture that got established during the Enlightenment, we are said to encounter the world only through our mental representations of it. Life then imitates theory: ours is now a highly mediated existence in which, sure enough, we increasingly encounter the world through representations, often on a screen. But these are manufactured for us. Human experience has become a highly engineered and therefore manipulable thing….
The problem with reality is that it is a kind of authority, and for centuries the West has been in the grip of a “liberationist” determination to do away with the concept of authority. This takes various forms: attacks on tradition, on God, on the concept of nature, on the figure of the father, on the givens of the body and the existence of insuperable limits such as mortality.
The problem with being cut loose from the tradition is that, left to our own devices, we have no ground to stand on against the kind of tyranny that seeks to make us acquiescent by manipulating our sense of reality. This isn’t done out of malevolence. Rather, the problem is idealism, or ideological politics -- a system of abstractions that coheres beautifully and claims to have a complete grasp of reality. Recalcitrant elements of existence that don’t fit the system are regarded as morally evil and must be either reformed or destroyed. Short of that, it can be made illegal to notice them. They can also be covered over with virtuous lies, for the sake of bringing the ideal to reality.
The grand modern project of liberation, which is ultimately liberation from an authoritative reality independent of the will, combines with a materialist view that subsumes man himself to the realm of natural causation. Together, these twin movements of modernity lead to a condition opposite of the one dreamed of: total domination of some men by other men, a form of tyranny working at a deeper level of the human person than any dreamt of by despots of the past.
Is there a way out? I have come around to the intuition that grounds (C.S.) Lewis’s thought. There is a created order, which we are not the authors of. Crucially, this order is good. That it because its author is good, and he made it out of love. If you are fortunate enough to be hit with this experience (it comes as a surprise gift), it is like dropping acid. Under its influence, you feel like you have gained perceptual access to the most fundamental layer, which was always there waiting to be noticed.
Matthew B Crawford seems to have come to the same conclusions as N.S. Lyons - that we must answer the metaphysical questions first, before trying to make sense of the world around us. We must understand the framework/rules/boundaries/limits that govern us. Crawford goes onto say that we were created by something Higher than ourselves and when we realise that fact we can then see the underlying scafolding that supports our existence. We can then understand reality. He also points out that because we were created in the image of God we are essentially ‘good’.
We are essentially good! This stands in stark contrast to what the Machine would have you think. The Machine keeps telling us we are the problem, we are a blemish on the earth, we are at our core bad….evil.
Mission San Juan Capistrano
Post-Truth Era
“We are following the path of the snake rather than the path of the creator.” - Paul Kingsnorth
According to Paul Kingsnorth no culture has survived without ‘the sacred at its core’…
Every culture is built around a sacred core. When it begins to rot, as all cultures do, it is because that core has been neglected. Usually its people have taken their eyes off the sacred centre and directed them somewhere else; towards false gods, golden calves, or their own dolled-up image in the mirror.
…the religious impulse is manifesting in material form, primarily through the use of technology to promote the human will. This phenomenon, which I like to call the Machine, is a material manifestation of the human desire for liberation through technology, in which all forms are dissolved in favour of the final and only sovereign: the independent rational individual, freed from obligations of history, community and nature.
Humanity was made in the image of the creator, and even though we endlessly fail to live up to this responsibility, it gives us a clear point of reference. We know what humans are, and what the world is for. Once that story goes, what is the still point of the turning world? Nobody can agree. The only reference point in the post-Christian, post-liberal West is whatever we happen to want or feel, (therefore) reality itself becomes open to endless redefinition. Who’s to say what’s right or wrong or real?…Once you reject God, you are fated to try to replace him.
We seek to become gods….We are consciously making ourselves post-human, even as we strive to make the world post-natural and post-wild. If the age you live in is starting to take on the flavour of a war over the very meaning of reality itself - which is to say a religious war - well, that’s because it is…our challenge now is to choose our religion. Try to avoid the challenge and your faith will be chosen for you: you will be absorbed by default into the new creed of the new age: the quest to build the digital Tower of Babel. The attempt to ‘build god’ and replace nature through technology. The path of the snake.
I often stop to assess what I see around me and I see, as Kingsnorth does, The Tower of Babel - noone is speaking the same language anymore, and I mean this literally because we cannot agree on definitions or semantics. We are now actually speaking different languages and eventually we will not be able to communicate with each other for the lack of understanding, the lack of commonality, the lack of common framework. Maybe, cultures inevitably come to this point once the scafodling of society starts to break down which is why throughout history humans have come to this point again and agian (just before collapse).
Objectivism vs Subjectivism
“Wherever the people do not believe in something beyond the world, they will worship the world.” - G.K. Chesterton
What I see now is that we are in a place of ‘void’, in a space of nothingness, because we have no firm ground to stand on, we have no objective reality…so we flounder, trying to catch hold of flotsam and jetsam as it floats past. We have no anchor to hold us in place, to make us feel grounded and safe. Reality has become completely subjective, therefore, we can succumb to every whim or desire with no consequesnce to our Soul. We can define reality in any way we choose because there are no guidelines, no boundaries, no limits. I previously wrote about our need for limits and our need to reconnect with the Earth (in contrast to the human world which is of our creating, not a Divine thing).
The human world could also be called The Machine. I am wondering if when humans create the world around us via technologies, as we have throughout history, we are actually creating a false idol. When we create the ‘world’ (the Machine) to usurp the Earth we are actually creating a whole false idol to live inside, like the matrix.
Let me explain this another way…..when humans, in their hubris, try to re-create the systems of the Earth, for example creating the internet to transpose real life, face-to-face, human connection - by which I mean trying to improve on what Nature/God/The Creator has given us, we create an entirely false reality, one in which is created by Humans, not God. When this happens the abutments are not secure, they will not last, they will not support us because they are just an abstraction. This scaffolding is not real, but an approximation of the Original framework given us by the Creator.
Whatever had got us here, it was clear where we were going: into a world in which industrial humanity has ravaged much of the wild earth, tamed the rest, and shaped all nature to its ends. The rebellion against God manifested itself in a rebellion against creation, against all nature, human and wild. We would remake Earth, down to the last nanoparticle, to suit our desires, which we now called “needs.” Our new world would be globalized, uniform, interconnected, digitized, hyper-real, monitored, always-on. We were building a machine to replace God.
Early Green thinkers, people like Leopold Kohr or E. F. Schumacher, who were themselves inspired by the likes of Gandhi and Tolstoy, had taught us that the ecological crisis was above all a crisis of limits, or lack of them.
Following the rabbit hole down, I realized that a crisis of limits is a crisis of culture, and a crisis of culture is a crisis of spirit. Every living culture in history, from the smallest tribe to the largest civilization, has been built around a spiritual core: a central claim about the relationship between human culture, nonhuman nature, and divinity. Every culture that lasts, I suspect, understands that living within limits—limits set by natural law, by cultural tradition, by ecological boundaries—is a cultural necessity and a spiritual imperative. There seems to be only one culture in history that has held none of this to be true, and it happens to be the one we’re living in.
Paul Kingsnorth always says so beautifully what I am feeling! We are bound by the limits of natural law because Nature was created by God. C.S. Lewis also wrote about The Law of Human Nature in the first chapter of Mere Christianity:
The idea was that, just as all bodies are governed by the law of gravitation, and organisms by biological laws, so the creature called man also had his law - with this great difference, that a body could not choose whether it obeyed the law of gravitation or not, but a man could choose either to obey The Law of Human Nature or to disobey it.
Lewis points out that we are free to follow the Law of Human Nature or not - that is what is meant by Free Will; and to Kingsnorth’s point above the fundamental crisis of today’s Western culture is that we have largely removed from our lives the framework of The Law of Human Nature. We are no longer governed by a Higher Power, but by our individual desires, individual ‘needs’, our ego….The Cult of the Individual. No longer are we a Community together, cohesive, bound by commonality through The Law of Human Nature, we are boundless individuals, without natural, cultural or ecological limits. We believe we are free to pursue our own ambitions….but at what cost? The destruction of the Sacred Core.
This ends Part 1. It’s a lot to digest and consider.
In Part 2, I will continue on with The Cult of the Individual, Fear and Mysticism….
Please let me know your thoughts on these topics in the comments; and please pass this essay onto anyone you think would benefit from it (all articles are open for anyone to read and comment on) - N x
Wonderful essay. My wife and I happened to be talking about some of these ideas this morning as it happens. I too raised the point that our culture, even in the rural south, now has a generation that's been and is being raised by people who've mostly done away with the faith. If not explicitly, certainly implicitly. And I suggested that this was a source of this age where "you can be whatever you want." It's a lie and we all know it.
The bit on many of us not speaking the same language was pointed as well. I too pointed this out in a recent post: https://open.substack.com/pub/derekjpetty/p/love-love?r=5z5dg&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web
I'm very happy to see someone else jumping in to expand on their thoughts on this. We need all the discussion we can on these issues. Very much looking forward to part two!
Great piece, and good to see another writer writing on the importance and necessity of limits - it is a theme that, like yourself, I am coming back to again and again. My first-ever essay was on the theme in terms of farming: https://overthefield.substack.com/p/the-good-farmer-and-his-limits
What I keep coming back to on this theme of limits is how within the boundaries of our limits we flourish. When we try to transgress them either from a sense of pride or fear, we make ourselves vulnerable to collapse (think burnout, ecological degradation etc). The analogy I use is one of a plant. If a plant never stopped growing upwards eventually its roots couldn't support it anymore and it will be blown over by the wind. By ceasing to grow, the plant isn't depriving itself, instead, it is making itself more secure and able to flourish for the long term. The Makers instructions and bounds are always necessary. He knows best - no matter how many times humanity tries to convince itself otherwise.
Also, I thought this was a great point with much food for thought: "The human world could also be called The Machine. I am wondering if when humans create the world around us via technologies, as we have throughout history, we are actually creating a false idol. When we create the ‘world’ (the Machine) to usurp the Earth we are actually creating a whole false idol to live inside, like the matrix."
- no wonder so many modern urban environments feel so hostile to human flourishing. They are (by and large) environments made in the image of (fallen) trying-to-be-limitless man.