A Nonfiction Book
Must we all become like the Child who sat in Christ’s lap?
As we begin to approach the end of our essay, I think it would be appropriate to restate our main question: “How do we belong again?” Where might we “rest?” Must we all become like the Child who sat in Christ’s lap?
To incorporate thinking from How (Not) to Be Secular by James K.A. Smith, we live in an age of ‘contested meaning,’ which is to say our world is a ‘cross-pressured, haunted world,’ versus one ‘sanitized of faith and transcendence, flattened to the empirical.’¹ ² ‘The difference between our modern, ‘secular’ age and past ages is not necessarily the catalogue of available beliefs but rather the default assumptions about what is believable.’³ What has changed is ‘what [is] taken for granted,’ and unlike in the past, today ‘religious belief or belief in God is understood to be one option among others, and thus contestable.’⁴ ⁵ ‘It’s as if the cathedrals are still standing, but their footings have been eroded.’⁶
And yet in this world where belief in God isn’t “given,” it hasn’t been the case that disbelief in God has become “given” instead: both Atheism and Theism (both those who believe a given X is ultimately an x or X) find themselves in the same “givenless” boat. ‘While exclusive humanism becomes a live option, it doesn’t immediately capture everyone’s imagination,’ and ‘almost as soon as unbelief becomes an option, unbelievers begin to have doubts.’⁷ ‘[T]he ghosts of self-awareness won’t let [us] go (they are Legion)’: our ‘brush with transcendence is not an escape, and certainly not a solution, but neither is it unthinkable,’ nor is it a ‘solution to rule out transcendence either.’⁸ We find ourselves sensing X but unable to be sure that X isn’t actually an x, and yet we cannot escape our sense of X: we find ourselves unable to take God’s existence for granted and unable to take God’s nonexistence for granted either. We have reached a point in history where no X feels “given” like an X, nor does it feel like any x can assure that x is all there is, that it is “given” that there is no X.
Today there is talk both by Liberals and Conservatives on how they are particularly rejected by the society, and yet that feeling might just be a result of the existential condition of Secularism itself. The feeling is universal, as is the desire for everyone to make their beliefs “given” and “existentially stabilizing.” Everyone might be after something which was possible in the past but no longer possible today, mainly “rest,” which is the feeling of “belonging.” For all the right reasons and moral evolution, the “givens” are gone, and with stability goes our “rest” and sense of belonging, and this ‘loss creates a pressure.’⁹ So pressured, we seek a solution to the loss of “givens” and the loss of certainty that X is in fact a X, and a way we do that is by creating another X, of which when it fails to function as a “given” to us, we hence create another X and try again, on and on, bringing about Taylor’s “Nova Effect.” That or we try to deal with Pluralistic pressures and instabilities by convincing ourselves that x is all there is, but though we might be right, we cannot know we are right. Everyone is emotionally caught with one foot in X and another in x, a Colossus of Rhodes, living in two worlds that cannot be unified while necessarily trying to make them one, unable to “rest.” We are skeptical of both X and x, as we are skeptical of anyone who would dare offer us an answer to our condition.
We are all many things now — Keynesians, diplomats, existentialists — and we are all Hamlets, standing in two worlds, trying to do the right thing when “the right thing” relative to one world is exactly the opposite of “the right thing” relative to the other. In the Pagan world, taking revenge was honorable, while in the Christian world forgiveness is noble, and Hamlet is a Pagan Christian, as all of us today are (A)theists. It was not “given” to Hamlet if Paganism or Christianity was the right paradigm by which he should organize action, and like us, this is why Hamlet spends so much time thinking existentially; in some ways, he was the first Pluralist (as usual, Shakespeare saw our future first). As we find ourselves cross-pollinated by worldviews, Hamlet found himself believing things from both worlds, not wanting to kill his Uncle out of revenge while his Uncle prayed to assure his Uncle didn’t ascend to heaven (this scene that is often viewed as a cheap excuse to keep the play going is actually one of the most important). Hamlet believed in Heaven, yet believed less in Christ’s words to “turn the other cheek” than he did the virtues of Achilles to seek vengeance. Hamlet was a Christian Achilles, a contradiction like the Christendom which horrified Kierkegaard. Are we all such horrors now?
How does Hamlet attempt to psychologically stabilize himself, faced with being torn in two? The same way many do: inaction, even boredom. Can boredom give us “rest” and help us “belong again?” It seems that way: after all, isn’t having “nothing to do” a form of “rest?” A fair question, but actually “boredom” is the opposite of “rest” — we have made a mistake to see “work” and “rest” as opposites. True “rest” requires a “work” (though not “toil”), and today we simply don’t know how to work or what to work at (we are paralyzed like Hamlet). Also, to clarify, to be “bored” isn’t to have nothing to do so much as it to see no significance in anything that we could do, while “rest” is precisely a state of feeling “fitted” in the right place and confident in the rightness of that “fitting” (we “rest” in feeling ourselves where we should be). Where X is gone and CCE feels weak, perhaps we cannot hope for “rest” and so settle for what seems close enough, boredom, which ironically is the opposite of the “rest” with which we equate it.
Perhaps taking on a life of “detachment” would help us avoid “being Hamlet” and boredom in favor of “rest?” This is a general take on Eastern thought (though please note Buddhism, Hinduism, and the like are far deeper than this notion), and perhaps the Detached (as I’ll refer to them) would transcend the problem of Secularism and Hamlet entirely. If the Detached transcend Secularism, is this not freedom and “rest?” Perhaps, but this might be a form of “brainwashing,” and furthermore I find it doubtful that the majority could maintain Detachment without being isolated from the society and falling into atomization (which is a real option, please note). I have no doubt that some can (I favor many options, as suggested by “Monotheorism”), but it comes back yet again to the problem we keep orbiting: “Can the majority?” It will not prove optimal to address the widespread social problems explored in Belonging Again with an answer that is not widespread — unless that is no other kind of answer is possible (which might be the case).
We have spoken throughout this paper on the necessity of “plausibility structures,” and an advantage of Detachment and isolationism is that “we are our own plausibility structure,” per se, which runs the risk of “brainwashing,” yes, but it also helps us not feel like Hamlet. To move back into some structure of society, “plausibility structures” will have to be reintroduced, which is very difficult in our Secular Age (like “givens,” as Wittgenstein put it, restoring them seems like trying to reassemble a spider web with our bare hands). On the topic:
‘Any religious system remains plausible only as people articulate it in their conversation and dramatize it in their social interaction. The conversation and interaction that maintains religion, then, becomes its plausibility structure. For many, participation in religious institutions such as churches or synagogues serves as the plausibility structure for their religion. Kinship, friendship, networks, and local communities may also serve the same purpose.’¹⁰
Religion is perhaps humanity’s greatest invention in being such an effective “psychotechnology,” and it is through religion that people encounter (in a manner that is psychologically stabilizing) “highest reality,” which if encountered “unfiltered,” could uproot a person’s entire life and make it unbearable. ‘Funerals, weddings, and other religiously orchestrated rites of passage […] maintain the stability of everyday life by providing occasions on which the non-ordinary can be experienced,’ but with these religious activities no longer backed by “givens,” their capacity to stabilize.¹¹ Some may ‘charge that the idea of plausibility structures opens the door for a type of sociological reductionism which explains away the reality of religion by attributing it to social conditions,’ but it doesn’t necessarily follow that the fact religion “existentially stabilizes” doesn’t mean that it is necessarily false; in fact, it’s “stabilizing” capacity could be evidence that humans were made by a God precisely to be religious.¹²
Could there be “a middle way” between isolationism and total social immersion? Is that the best condition in which we could find “rest?” This should be considered, and the proposal suggests “smaller social arrangements,” where decentralization and self-governance might be emphasized. Smaller, more-decentralized societies can perhaps be seen in the university system — is that an option to address our concerns? Perhaps: according to Rieff, ‘[t]he university, not the state or any church, is the last bastion in defense of culture.’¹³ Sounding like Julien Benda, Rieff warned that ‘[w]hen the temple of intellect is destroyed, or converted to use for political change or as a therapy center, then truly nothing will be sacred; everything will be alterable.’¹⁴ And certainly universities can help provide “belonging” but are they, currently? Or are most universities at the center of the effort to deconstruct “givens” and main supporters of the EAF? I fear it is the later, which is a widespread critique from Conservatives, but additionally I will note that I think universities today tend to worsen existential anxiety precisely because they are “hyperreal” (to use a term from Baudrillard).
Many claim their years in college were the best years of their lives, and that’s the problem: after college, many of us feel we have lost Eden. Often, we never feel we can regain a “hyperreality” which compares with the marvel of university life: it is incredibly rare to find a place where there is that high of a concentration of friends, likeminded, and captivating people, all so close, in the midst of constant access to quality culture — it’s incredible. During university, in the midst of this “hyperreality,” perhaps it is possible for people of this generation to feel like they “belong again” (I won’t deny that possibility), for college does feel like it is “practically part” of something greater than itself (a “practical X”). But unfortunately for the high majority, this period is temporary, and the memory of it can perhaps create more existential anxiety in addition to the tension already inherit with our Secular Age. And for those who stay in university for as long as they can, it is possible that the feeling of “rest” gradually fades away, consumed in the incredible amount of work graduate students have to complete and professors have to fulfill, all while a feeling of “failing to move on” sets in. I don’t know, though I hope for those who have dedicated their lives to academia that the “belonging” it can provide is greater than the anxieties of secularism and Pluralism. Unfortunately, my point is that even if universities address our concerns, I do not think it is a solution overall: there is simply not the resources needed for everyone to stay in a university all the time.
Universities considered, is there another structure of “smaller society” that might be possible? To allude to a Christian work that’s logic could apply more widely (discussed also in “The Postchristian Church” by O.G. Rose), The Benedict Option by Rod Dreher has been criticized as an example of Christian isolationism, and though it is clear in his book that this isn’t at all what Dreher has in mind, I do think it is difficult for this not to be to some degree the practical outcome of putting “the benedict option” into practice. Likewise, I don’t think Buddhists intend to be isolated but rather, in part, to achieve transcendence of say Secular “cross-pressures,” yet to accomplish this degrees of isolationism would seem unavoidable. But I think it should be noted that even if Christians did isolate themselves, I’m not sure that they could reverse the ways they have been shaped by Pluralism. As Elizabeth Bruenig argues and Rick Yoder notes, we have been forever shaped by our present age.
Dreher was inspired by the thinking of Alasdair McIntyre, who warned that ‘continued full participation in mainstream society [is] not possible for those who [want] to live a life of traditional virtue.’¹⁵ Dreher does not want Christians to all become monks: he wants Christians to engage in a ‘limited retreat from the world.’¹⁶ But if the retreat is not total, who decides what constitutes “too much retreat” versus “too little” (and does not “retreat” risk an “us versus them”-dynamic)? Personally, I don’t see how anything but a full on retreat could help Christians escape the tensions of our Secular Age, unless that is there was “retreat enough” to allow Christian “plausibility structures” to be restored (for the possibility of an X feeling justified and stable), but I would wager figuring out this balance would be difficult. From my understanding of Dreher’s project, his focus seems ultimately upon the development of Christian character, and I do not deny his project might work. Indeed, restoring the possibility of “belonging” does seem to involve some decentralized structure…
Counter to Dreher, Charles Matthews argues that engaging with Pluralism strengthens Christians (and anyone of any worldview, for that matter), and those who engage in escapism from Pluralism are weak Christians indeed. For Matthews, Christians are better Christians who engage in a Pluralistic world. Loving Hindu neighbors can help a Christian be more Christian than loving Christians neighbors, for as Christ taught that it takes nothing special to love people we like (“even the Pharisees do that”), so it takes nothing particularly special to love people more like we than not. Alright, fair enough, but is this a challenge the majority can handle? If so, it will require the majority to see diversity and difference as opportunities, which brings us back to a question: “Can the majority be the Children of Nietzsche?”
The loss of X doesn’t only mean the loss of what supports religion, but also the loss of support for everything. Where X doesn’t feel plausible and isn’t “given,” X cannot “glimmer through” and “illuminate” any given x (rather that x be sports, college, art, love, etc.). Everything becomes less possible as fulfilling and “rest”-providing without X, not only because X helps people unify and transcend accidental conditions, but also because X helps individuals fight against existential anxiety (as most acute in Pluralism). When people feel anxiety, they will feel anxiety “toward” any x, robbing that x of its capacity to fulfill the individual “toward” it. To lose X is to lose how everything is illuminated; it is like losing the sun (to suggest C.S. Lewis). Does that mean I can’t use a flashlight? No, but it does mean that what I illuminate will be much smaller in scope and that my light will only last until I run out of batteries. But perhaps my metaphor is wrong: perhaps the loss of X is the flickering out of the fire in Plato’s Cave, causing the shadows on the walls to vanish, which may inspire those chained up in the cave to venture outside and enjoy the real world? Perhaps indeed, but so far I’m afraid the chains have not fallen away with the light. There are no shadows, true, but there is still darkness. In the dark, we sit, unsure how to move and uncertain if something lurks nearby — paralyzed.
The loss of X and its illumination is a reason why we are struggling to find “rest,” and as Charles Taylor rightly argued, we will never restore X to what it once was to us. So far, it would seem the best hope we’ve been able to find for “rest” is a Buddhist-approach of transcending the question altogether, but this surrenders society, which means we need something small and decentralized. Perhaps like “the benedict option,” but that might be too withdrawn. Still, it’s critical to note that whatever this “decentralized system” might be (as will have to be elaborated on in Belonging Again, Part II), it will likely not work if it does not incubate “Children of Absolute Knowing,” those for whom diversity, difference, and uncertainty are joys and opportunities. Decentralization doesn’t alone solve the problems explored in “Belonging Again,” even if it is a necessary design and characteristic of the space in which Children might have a higher probability of being born.
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Notes
¹Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 12.
²Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 17.
³Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 19.
⁴Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 27.
⁵Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 21.
⁶Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 12.
⁷Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 61.
⁸Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 15.
⁹Smith, James K.A. How (Not) to Be Secular. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 2014: 69.
¹⁰Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. Religion as Sacred Canopy by Robert Wuthnow. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 129.
¹¹Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. Religion as Sacred Canopy by Robert Wuthnow. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 128.
¹²Making Sense of Modern Times. Edited by James Davison Hunter and Stephen C. Ainlay. Religion as Sacred Canopy by Robert Wuthnow. New York, NY: Routledge & Kegan Paul Inc., 1986: 136.
¹³Rieff, Philip. Charisma. New York, NY: First Vintage Books Edition, 2008: 165.
¹⁴Rieff, Philip. Charisma. New York, NY: First Vintage Books Edition, 2008: 181.
¹⁵Allusion found in “The Christian Retreat From Public Life” by Emma Green:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
¹⁶Allusion to “The Christian Retreat From Public Life” by Emma Green, as can be found here:
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/02/benedict-option/517290/
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