Why is politics so emotionally fraught? Why this seemingly endless, pointless war of attrition between Left and Right? Why do we hate each other so much? Jonathan Haidt has developed a very elegant and persuasive theory addressing this perennial question in his excellent book, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion, where he makes the case that people’s political orientations are primarily the expression of deep-seated moral values.

Haidt identifies six moral foundations: “Care”, “Fairness”, “Loyalty”, “Authority”, “Sanctity” and “Liberty”, which  he derives in a bottom-up approach from quite plausible speculations about the survival strategies of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. I won’t go into the details here, but will just give you the main finding of the book (spoiler alert!) which is that left-wing liberals are currently almost exclusively interested in the “Care” dimension (with a dash of “Fairness”) , whereas social conservatives have more evenly spread moral commitments across all six foundations.

This is an excellent model for thinking about morality and politics. However, I would like here to propose another, even simpler analysis of the relationship between morality and politics, with reference to the infinitely versatile “Wheel of Samsara” (Tibetan Wheel of Life) model. From this vantage point,  politics is not only an expression of what we value, but also of what we reject; it’s not so much about what we recognize as moral as what we recognize as immoral. Because it manifests in a disgust response, it is closely associated with Haidt’s “Sanctity” moral foundation.

The Tibetan Wheel of Life can be understood as a depiction of the sins of fallen humanity, a graphic Buddhist alternative to the traditional Aristotelian or Judeo-Christian lists, such as the Seven Deadly Sins. In Repentance and Faith, I lay out the characteristic sins associated with each of the six positions on the Wheel, as I understand them.

My version, which I call the “Wheel of Samsara”, describes six sins (or vices) associated with six ego states – three intellectual and three emotional. The three intellectual states are represented by the muggle, diva and muppet archetypes, associated with the sins of Ignorance, Pride and Delusion respectively. The three emotional states are represented by the addict, demon and victim archetypes, with their corresponding sins, Greed, Hate and Fearfulness.

So how does this model shed light on our moral responses to the political landscape?

Well, let’s start with the supposed immorality of the president of the United States, Donald Trump. He is variously portrayed as a sexist, a racist, a crook, a philanderer, a narcissist, a fool, a dunce, a fascist, a bully, an evil mastermind and, of course, a greedy capitalist pig. One or several of these accusations may very well be true for all I know – I remain agnostic on the content of his character (as opposed to the colour of his hair).

What I am really interested in is the moral psychology behind the image. Who is this monster so vilified by TDS (Trump Derangement Syndrome) enthusiasts?  It seems to have elements of the addict (greedy, lascivious, hedonistic) but also of the muggle (ignorant, simple-minded, materialistic). But it also has lashings of the  demon and the diva: not only is he Greedy and Ignorant, he is also Evil and Full of Himself.

The same image seems to stick to our very own “British Trump”, Boris Johnson. It’s not just the hair and the eccentricity he holds in common with Trump (let alone the politics), it’s the monster image: Boris is also portrayed as a monster by his political enemies (or, as I heard a nice well-spoken middle class mother assure her twelve year old daughter on Hampstead Heath the day after his election as Prime Minister, “a prick”).

People on the left side of the political aisle look down on muggles. They call them “hicks”, “red-necks”, “deplorables”, “trailer trash” and “racists” in the US. In Britain they are called “twats”. But worse than mere muggle simpletons, who are just plain Ignorant, are muggle-addicts, who are both Ignorant and Greedy (and probably sexual predators to boot). And worse than muggle-addicts are muggle-addict-demons who are secretly driven by malevolence and evil. Worst of all are the muggle-addict-demon-divas who are not only Ignorant, Greedy and full of Hatred and Evil, but Proud and Arrogant and all too often unconscionably Rich and Famous.

There is a kind of puritanism underlying all this moral outrage. We’ve been here before. Remember Cromwell? Remember Danton and Robespierre? Remember Lenin, Stalin, Mao and Hitler? Remember the Der Stürmer anti-semitic propaganda cartoons? The Nazis held up the moral depravity of decadent money-grabbing monsters for all to see. And hate.

Clearly, it’s much easier to kill monsters than people. Which is why painting people as monsters should ring some warning bells. A muggle-addict-demon-diva is a monstrous creation which can be destroyed without compunction. But so is its political rival, the muppet-victim-diva-demon. This is the monster held up for ridicule and attack by Right-wingers. In the US they call them “liberals”, “radicals”, “commies”, “hippies” or “social justice warriors”. In the UK they’re called “twats”.

Worse than mere muppets, who can be pitied and patronised (they’re usually too young to know any better) are the muppet-victims, who play into the whole “victimology” narrative of Identity Politics and Intersectionality. Not only are they Deluded, they are also Paranoid and Pathetic. Right-wing pundits refer to this kind of social activism as the “Oppression Olympics”, where those regarded as the most socially marginalised and victimised enjoy the greatest standing in the muppet social economy.

This is not traditional left-wing politics of course. It is “neo-progressivism” or “progressive liberationism”, a kind of “applied post-modernism”. The basic premise is that everything of value in life is socially constructed, so everything can be deconstructed. With enough political will (ie. force) humanity can re-create itself as a blank slate (everyone equalised and neutralised).

The Right experience this kind of thing with intense moral disgust. The most prominent and vocal exponents of muppet ideology then come to be seen not only as muppet-victims but as muppet-victim-demons, whose activism is fueled by intense self-loathing and hatred, with their sole aim the destruction of the family and Western civilisation. Worst of all are the self-congratulatory, virtue-signalling Proud and Arrogant leaders, the muppet-victim-demon divas, on whom the Right can vent all their spleen and outrage.

Just as the Left project all the sins of the muggle and addict (Ignorance and Greed) onto the Right, and then pump the monster up with extra diva-demonic steroids, so the Right projects all the sins of the muppet and victim (Delusion and Fearfulness) onto the Left and pump their monster up with the same diva-demonic cocktail of hubristic evil.

The Left find Donald Trump and Boris Johnson disgusting because they epitomize the heinous sins of “Capitalism” and the Right find Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Jeremy Corbyn disgusting because they epitomize the mortal sin of “Socialism”. But it’s got nothing to do with politics really: it’s all about moral disgust for contrasting negative human archetypes. Trump is the archetypal muggle-addict-demon-diva in the eyes of the Left and AOC as the classic muppet-victim-demon-diva in the eyes of the Right.

The moral of the story? “Neither a muggle nor a muppet be”. If you spend your time shouting down muggles, you’re probably a bit of a muppet and if you get off on shouting down muppets, you’re probably something of a muggle. Of course it’s important that we call out the errors and excesses of both sides, but please, please, please, not out of hatred and disgust. Mild distaste is fine. Because if we carry on like this, we shouldn’t be surprised if it’s us that turn out to be the monsters.

 

You should have a pretty clear idea by now of what I mean by muggles, muppets, divas, addicts, victims and demons. They are really just updated terms for the denizens of the six realms in the ancient Tibetan Wheel of Life: humans, titans, devas, hungry ghosts, animals and demons.

I am using these archetypes as personifications of ego states, not as literal entities. The Wheel of Life can be understood as a psychological map as well as a cosmological one, and that’s what I am interested in here: how and when we are possessed by these ego states, and what their psychological effects are (bearing in mind that by “psychological effects” I mean physical, emotional, mental, spiritual and social effects).

The chief features of muggles and muppets are Ignorance and Delusion respectively. The ignorance of muggles comes as a result of ignoring the “signs and wonders” of the world as revealed to us in a state of openness and innocence. They ignore anything that doesn’t fit into their pre-defined model of the universe and only see what they already know.

The delusion of muppets comes as a result of valuing a particular model of reality above reality itself. Prior commitment to a certain belief system leads them to overlook or discount the evidence of their own senses and the dictates of reason. The belief system is almost always shared by a community of believers who collectively confirm each other’s beliefs, thus creating an “in-group” and an “out-group”. Of course there is nothing wrong with belief systems and communities of believers as such; it is only when they deviate from observed reality and common sense that they produce muppets.

The chief feature of divas is Pride. Divas are basically “Top Dogs”, more precisely “Top Muggles” or “Top Muppets”. They have achieved a significant measure of success in their own eyes and in the eyes of their community, whether in the wider muggle population or in a specific muppet population. Their success confirms for them the validity of their values and belief, thus consolidating their Ignorance and Delusion.

These three (muggles, muppets and divas) are the more visible of the six ego states, since they are the most socially acceptable. They are the three faces or personas that we show to the world. The other three, on the lower half of the Wheel (in the “underworld”), are usually hidden from view (in functional people) and can only be indirectly inferred or occasionally glimpsed in moments of stress or weakness.

The chief feature of addicts is Greed. The chief feature of victims is Fear. The chief feature of demons is Hate. These negative emotions (or vices) are managed in different ways and usually colour the three higher personality structures rather than dominating them. However, if they become too pronounced, they will take over the personality, which will become visibly that of an addict, a victim or a demon.

The following diagram summarises the archetypes and their chief features:

DIVA

Pride

MUGGLE                                     MUPPET

Ignorance                                   Delusion

ADDICT                                      VICTIM

Greed                                        Fear

DEMON

Hate

This is obviously a generalised, low resolution description, which has the value of comprehensiveness at the expense of concreteness and specificity. So let me flesh it out a little bit more (“drugs” refers to all substances, including food and drink and “rock and roll” to all kinds of music or entertainment designed to excite the sympathetic nervous system).

DIVA

Power

Fame

Fortune

MUGGLE                                                        MUPPET

Comfort                                                             Zealotry

Acceptance                                                   Dogmatism

Security                                           Self-Righteousness

ADDICT                                                         VICTIM

Sex                                                                Worry

Drugs                                                           Anxiety

Rock and Roll                                       Depression

DEMON

Anger

Hatred

Violence

The essence of Christianity, and arguably of all true religion, is beautifully simple. It boils down to two movements: “metanoia” and “pistis”, Repentance and Faith. If you can turn away from Pride, Ignorance, Delusion, Greed, Hate and Fear, and resist the lure of Power, Fame, Fortune, Comfort, (Social) Acceptance, Security, Zealotry, Dogmatism, Self-Righteousness, (Excessive) Sex, Drugs, Rock and Roll, Worry, Anxiety, Depression, Anger, Hatred and Violence, “yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it” (to quote a famous Victorian sage). “And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Which is to say, “you’ll be a Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King (or Mystic Shaman Warrior Nun Philosopher Queen), my son! (or daughter!)”

These are the six positive archetypes opposed to the six negative ones in the Wheel of Samsara, which epitomise the contrary qualities: The humility of the mystic counteracts the pride of the diva; the wisdom of the philosopher dispels the delusion of the muppet; the Self-realisation of the king expels the ignorance of the muggle; the courage of the warrior overcomes the fear of the victim; the self-restraint of the monk defuses the greed of the addict and the vital energy of the shaman dissolves the hatred in the heart of the demon.

Repent of the negative and believe in the positive. If you are a Christian, repent of your sins and believe in Christ (the archetypal embodiment of the perfect “God-Man”, the perfect “Mystic Shaman Warrior Monk Philosopher King”). Participation in the death and resurrection of Christ points to this basic underlying movement of “metanoia” and “pistis”, Repentance and Faith.

Christianity provides us with a powerful central image in the person of the risen Christ, but the move from darkness to light, from bondage to freedom can be found at the core of all the major world religions.

“Repent and Believe”: herein lies the whole of religion.

 

Human beings exist within one of two systems: the “Muggle System” and the “Mystic System”. In the Muggle System, we transmigrate between six archetypes: muggles, muppets, divas, demons, victims and addicts. Each archetype is characterised by a dominant vice: muggles by sloth, muppets by anger, divas by pride, demons by violence, victims by jealousy and addicts by greed. Different people in the Muggle System have different centres of gravity, although most are muggles by default. Provoke a muggle and they may turn into a muppet. Shower them with praise and they might turn into a diva. Upwardly mobile muggles will gradually become more diva-like, whereas downwardly mobile muggles will gravitate to one of the lower realms: through victimhood, addiction or demonology.

The most stable positions in the Muggle System are muggles and addicts. If life is ticking along smoothly, you will strengthen your muggle status and you will receive the benefits of muggleness: a good job, financial security, creature comforts and the emotional support of friends and family. If things start to go wrong and you let yourself go, you will probably end up settling down in the addict realm with forays into the victim, muppet and demon realms. Where muggles are attached to a sense of order, addicts have an underlying attachment to chaos.

Most people live in the Muggle System. The successful ones are muggles and divas. The unsuccessful ones are victims and addicts. The muppets and demons are there just to annoy and torture everyone. There’s plenty to do and plenty to keep us all interested and entertained. We can envy the more fortunate and pity the less fortunate; agree with the agreeable and fight the misguided; criticise the conceited and excorciate the irredeemably evil.

Most people seem tolerably happy in the Muggle System. However, some feel that there must be more to life. Surely there must be a way out, or a way beyond the endless merry-go-round, this eternal return of the same? Religion seems to point beyond. The beginning of the Buddhist spiritual path is the realisation of the First Noble Truth: “dukkha” or “unsatisfactoriness”. The ordinary human world, characterised by the Muggle System, is unsatisfactory. It doesn’t satisfy the deeper longings of the human heart.

But where does this deeper longing come from? And does everyone have it? For Buddhists this longing is described as “bodhichitta”, the “thought of Enlightenment”. If you have a clear enough idea of the possibility of a more Enlightened state, then the longing for this state naturally follows. From the longing then flows the motivation to take the necessary steps to realise this more Enlightened state.

In the Abrahamic faiths, the language is different, but the orientation is the same. For Jews, Christians and Muslims it’s the thought of God that draws the soul towards something beyond the Muggle System. However, without a deep longing or a deep experience of this “something beyond”, the thought of God is just one more thought floating around the Muggle System.

The “thought of Enlightenment” or the “thought of God” must produce enough longing for Enlightenment or God to produce a “turning about in the seat of consciousness”, what the Ancient Greeks called “metanoia”. Christians usually translate this as “repentance”, which gives it a particularly moral feel. If you want to think in moral terms, the Muggle System is a state of separation from God and therefore a state of sin (literally “missing the mark”), so that turning away from it is “repentance”.

There is a big gap (more like a Deep Chasm or a Yawning Gulf) between the Muggle System and the Mystic System. The bridge is faith. But I could equally have said “the bridge is grace”. Or “the bridge is gnosis (direct experiential spiritual knowledge)”. Or “the bridge is prayer” or “the bridge is meditation”.

There are clearly many bridges across the Ravine of Infinite Space between the Muggle System and the Mystic System. Any muggle can amble across a bridge (even a psychedelic one) but without a true metanoia of the soul, they will always return a muggle. To actually reach the other shore and step foot on its mystical sands requires faith, grace, gnosis, prayer, meditation, vision, surrender, hope and love. And maybe a bit of luck.

When you cross over you are an “initiate”. Whichever bridge however crossed, this is your initiation into the mysteries of the Mystic System. A new archetype has been born in you: the mystic. You have tasted something of the riches and glory of the spiritual realm and have established a crossing from one world to the other. Now you have a whole new world to discover and explore.

In the Mystic System the stable positions are the mystic and the king (or queen). Mystics are initiates, neophytes, seekers, beginners. Kings and queens are fully established and integrated spiritual beings. They are the “anointed ones” or “bearers of Christ”. Between these two types are the shaman, the warrior, the monk (or nun) and the philosopher. The Mystic must become a shaman by drawing the spirit down into the body. The shaman must then become a warrior and a monk in order to defend and protect the embodied spirit. However, this spirituality cannot remain purely energetic or corporeal and must be passed back through the intellect to the philosopher king if it is to be fully integrated.

None of this makes any sense to muggles, let alone the other denizens of the Muggle System. Unless they are pretending, of course. Or have an over-active imagination. Churches, synagogues, mosques and temples are full of muggles (and addicts) pretending to be mystics. Esoteric schools tend to have a higher proportion of mystics and other members of the Mystic System, but even there many if not most are actually muggles. Kings and queens are extraordinarily rare wherever you look.

In the Soto Zen tradition, the daily liturgy admonishes the monks and nuns: “Do not waste time”. In the Christian Gospel, Jesus admonishes his disciples: “Do not cast your pearls before swine”. Spiritual teachings are wasted on muggles and the other denizens of the Muggle System, except as a distant wake up call. Only true mystics can make proper spiritual use of them. Buddha recognises Buddha.

Look to yourself. Practice the virtues. Practice meditation. Cultivate the positive archetypes of the Mystic System and resist the lures of the Muggle System. If you meet a mystic, encourage and help each other. Teach and learn. If you meet a muggle, be an example to them. Be a witness to another way of being. But don’t try to convert anyone to anything. Don’t waste your time.

 

Western civilization is tilting ever further towards left hemisphere dominance. The signs are everywhere: in popular as well as high culture; in the madness of modernism and post-modernism; in scientism; in mushrooming bureaucratization; in the reification and virtualization of information technology; in political polarization and extremism; in mental illness; in dissociation from the body, nature, art and religion.

Enough is enough. We need a return to the right hemisphere. We must stop trying to make the world in our own image (the image of the left hemisphere) and rediscover the right relationship between the two hemispheres and in so doing, with the world.

If you don’t know what I’m talking about, you need to read Iain McGilchrist’s magnum opus, The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World. I really can’t recommend it highly enough.

Left hemisphere dominated materialists, atheists, bureaucrats, capitalists, scientists, technocrats and computer programmers are all “muggles”. Their pathology manifests itself somewhere on the autism spectrum. Left hemisphere dominated artists, thinkers, journalists, professors, activists and religious fundamentalists are “muppets”. Theirs manifests as schizotypal. Muggles are involved in science and technology, business and administration whereas muppets are involved in the arts and humanities, politics and religion. Both types suffer from left hemisphere dominance.

If Western civilization is to survive and not degenerate into dystopian totalitarianism, we must resist the advances of both muggles and muppets. We need only to glance at Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union to see what nightmares erupt when muppets and muggles take over.

The way out of this left hemisphere nightmare is through those things that it cannot encapsulate or colonize: nature and the body, and the genuine products of the right hemisphere: art and religion. But the left hemisphere has attempted to colonize all of these and block all the exits from its self-referential world. So we must be vigilant, and learn to discriminate, especially in relation to those disciplines that most closely speak to us and define us, namely psychology, philosophy, morality, science, history, art and religion. Although the left hemisphere has a part to play in all of these, it must not be allowed to get the upper hand and betray its master.

 

The best and clearest way to understand the Integration Meditation model is as a depiction of the divided brain. There are two basic models: the “Samsara” system (Diva-Demon, Victim-Addict, Muppet-Muggle) and the “Nirvana” system (Mystic-Shaman, Warrior-Monk, Philosopher-King). The point of the meditation is to move away from the former towards the latter. So what exactly are we moving from and towards?

While reading Iain McGilchrist’s wonderful book, The Master and his Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World, the scales fell from my eyes. It’s all about the brain hemispheres. “Samsara” is what happens when the hemispheres are out of whack and “Nirvana” is what you get when they’re in good working order.

The differences between the two hemispheres are probably not quite what you think they are, since there are a lot of popular misconceptions floating about. It’s not exactly that the left hemisphere is about language and reason while the right is about imagination and emotion, although that does approximate somewhat.

They do provide crucially different ways of experiencing and interpreting the world, but it’s more complicated than a simple division of labour. It’s not so much about “what” they do, as it is about “how” they do it. The left is all about grasping, focused attention and building up a picture of reality from constituent parts whereas the right is about holism, global vision, wide attention and exploration.

According to McGilchrist, the underlying problem of the modern West is that the culture has come to privilege the left hemisphere, and that people are suffering from a lop-sided, left-hemisphere dominant view of the world. This is because of the great success of the left hemisphere in manipulating and controlling the environment, most evidently in the staggering advances in science and technology over the last couple of centuries.

So how does this left hemisphere dominance manifest itself? It seems that people are becoming increasingly dissociated and alienated from their bodies and from their feelings (which are  mediated primarily by the right hemisphere), and from nature, art, music and religion. As a species, we seem to be getting ever more geeky, as though we were sliding along an autism spectrum. One piece of evidence in support of this is the (admittedly anecdotal) fact that in the past few years nursery school teachers have had to start explicitly teaching some children how to make sense of facial expressions.

The negative archetypes from the Integration Meditation model can be fruitfully applied here. Muggles, muppets, addicts and victims are precisely what you would expect from a hemispheric imbalance, especially one tilted to the left.

A muggle is someone who is seemingly immune from the magic of reality. They lack any sense of wonder or awe, since they experience the world as a kind of system, rather than a mystery or miracle. They live predominantly in their left hemisphere.

A muppet is someone who prioritises their left hemisphere model of reality over reality itself. They are “ideologically possessed” and will defend their (usually extremely illogical) position in the face of almost any evidence or reasons that contradict it.

Addiction is the result of “muggleness” taken to the extreme. It is simply the intensification of habit. The narrow world of the muggle narrows ever further as it finds its orbit around some object of desire. A sense of victimhood is the result of “puppetry” taken to the extreme. Radical delusional beliefs usually degenerate into conspiracy theories and then further into persecution complexes.

The best way to reverse this process is not by challenging the entrenched habits and assumptions of the left hemisphere dominated ego. You can’t escape your mental prison by debating the prison guards. Forget about your inner muggle, muppet, addict and victim. None of them can pull themselves up by their own bootstraps.

The best (perhaps only) way out of this samsaric trap is to put the left hemisphere to sleep and awaken the right. First of all, you need to learn how to inhibit the “default mode network” (which is left hemisphere dominated). This de-activation or “self-emptying” of the default mode network is traditionally called “kenosis”.

Next, you need to learn how to awaken the right hemisphere mode of being, which includes learning the “language” of the right hemisphere: imagination, metaphor, myth and archetype. This is experienced as a direct apprehension of being, traditionally known as “gnosis”.

Then, the contents of the right hemisphere’s “gnosis” need to be unpacked by the system-building left hemisphere to achieve explicit knowledge. This explicit form of knowledge (the left hemisphere “map” of the right hemisphere “territory”) is traditionally called “pistes”.

But now we’re back in the left hemisphere again. If we allow the “emissary” to once again usurp the “master”, we will find ourselves stuck in its simulated re-presentation again. If we want to remain free and connected to reality, we need to empty ourselves again (“kenosis”).

This then opens the possibility of right hemisphere “gnosis” and round we go. In Buddhist Tantra, this is known as the cycle of Purification (“kenosis”), Perception (“gnosis”) and Dalliance (“pistes”).

This is how the hemispheres of the brain should work: cooperatively and collaboratively. It is the pre-requisite for psychosynthesis and individuation. But it points to two related but discrete goals of spiritual practice: integration (the harmonious cycle of knowledge) but also separation.

What is Dharma if not a state of pure left hemisphere explicit knowledge (Pistes-Dalliance)? What is Samadhi if not a state of pure emptiness (Kenosis-Purification)? And what is Satori if not a state of pure right hemisphere non-dual experience (Gnosis-Perception)?

With hindsight, my own enlightenment experience must have been a prolonged inhibition of the left hemisphere accompanied by a full activation of the right hemisphere. I was all Perception and no Dalliance. Emerson describes this state beautifully:

“Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God.”

 

What is “the West”? Is it even a meaningful concept any more? Is it really “the Free World” as American Republicans like to call it? Is it what we used to call “the First World”? Is it “Liberal Democracy”? Is it “Eurocentric Colonialism”? Can we simply define it against “the East”? But then what exactly is “the East”?

If we look for the roots of “the West” in the past, the usual genealogy involves a small handful of civilizations, each following on from the one before. The starting point is somewhat arbitrary, but it usually begins in Athens with Ancient Greece. From there we progress to the Roman Empire, then to Christendom, and finally to Secular Modernity with the Enlightenment. People who defend the foundational values and traditions of “the West” usually point to the Western philosophical tradition stretching back to Plato or further back to the pre-Socratics. Then they point to the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, sometimes conceived as a union of Athens and Jerusalem. Then they point to the Scientific Revolution and the Age of Reason (and empiricism) people call the Enlightenment. You might call these the three pillars of the West. Or you could reduce them to two pillars: Faith and Reason.

If we look at the world today, however, things look a lot more complicated than that. First of all, if we’re talking about faith, it seems that what best characterizes the West is not any one particular faith such as Christianity, but any or no faith. The West has appropriated Eastern religions and imported Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Sikhism, Taoism and more. So the line between “East” and “West” is not so easy to draw any more, not only geographically, but also spiritually and intellectually. Eastern philosophical and religious traditions have had an enormous impact on Western thinkers and the Western philosophical and religious tradition.

The same is true of more “primitivist” religions, loosely based on shamanic practices. Much of the New Age consists of the importation or re-discovery of indigenous shamanism and paganism. But think also of the spread of jazz and blues in North America and salsa and samba in South America and the post-war explosion of popular music based on African and Latin rhythms. Think of the hippies and ravers of the sixties and nineties. And don’t forget the rastas. Music, dance, drugs, (even ayahuasca ceremonies are now par for the course), are all part and parcel of what we mean by “the West”, even when they are in tension with the mainstream.

The secular West has succeeded in including all sorts of religious traditions and experiences from across the globe. Sometimes they are distorted and twisted beyond recognition and “westernized”, as happens all the time with pop music. This is inevitably what happens when you open traditions, even sacred traditions, to the market. People vote with their feet and with their ignorance. The customer is always right, apparently.

As a result, we find ourselves in a curious predicament in the modern West. We have seemingly limitless choice, but no reliable way to chose. Enter the spiritual marketplace and you are instantly bewildered and overwhelmed. How can you tell the charlatans and false prophets from the real stuff?

The same goes for the intellectual marketplace. All these books and ideas and philosophies. But which are true and which are nonsense? And what about all the art? There’s such an endless stream of stuff clamouring for our attention. How do we know if it’s any good?

The West has opened itself up to the world. It has give ultimate responsibility to individual citizens to decide for themselves what to believe, what to do, what to read and what to listen to. It’s a “free country”.

Does that mean it doesn’t matter? If the world doesn’t care what you believe and what you do, why should you care what you believe or do? If it’s just a question of subjective preference, doesn’t that imply that there is no objective standard of truth, goodness or beauty anyway?

In the West, you are free to be a moral relativist and you are free to be a moral absolutist. There is no ultimate authority to pass judgment on anything. But then it can look as though the West is actually relativistic but tolerant of absolutism because of its relativist principles. So it seems to lean towards relativism.

How do human beings judge things? How do we know if a new idea is true or false, if a new behavior is good or bad or if a new work of art is beautiful or ugly? Well, we compare it to what we already know. We process novelty in the right hemisphere of the brain and then move it over to the left hemisphere once we have familiarized ourselves with it. We seem to intuit truth, goodness and beauty directly, but that’s because we are engaging the right hemisphere, which works with estimates and broad comparisons. Just because it feels intuitive doesn’t mean that we aren’t still making comparisons (mainly subconsciously).

We don’t arbitrarily judge things or ideas as true, good or beautiful randomly or arbitrarily. It’s not just capricious whim. Our judgments are always based on prejudice, because we always encounter novelty with a particular set of pre-judged criteria, even if we’re not aware of them (Edmund Burke understood this very well). So our judgment of the truth-value of a proposition depends on how well it fits with the knowledge we have accumulated over a lifetime. And the more exposure we have had, the more experience of “good ideas”, the more likely we will be to judge well.

But that begs the question. How do we know if what we have in our “knowledge store” is good or bad, right or wrong? Maybe we have spent a lifetime collecting bad ideas. Each new bad idea is confirmed as a good idea by our existing store of bad ideas. Who’s to say? We might be completely deluded.

This is where society comes in. Of course, on my own I can’t ever know what is true or even what is real. But, luckily for me, I have never been on my own. I have been socialized and educated by society since I burst into the world. As a child I had to defer to the judgment of my parents about what was worth reading and what wasn’t. At school, I had to defer to my teachers. At university, I had to defer to the course and the reading list (I studied English literature).

At one point in my studies at uni, I became very interested in the idea of a literary canon. I wrote my first year dissertation on a minor decadent poet called Ernest Dowson, a contemporary and friend of Oscar Wilde. Part of the motivation was an attempt to “discover” a neglected or undervalued poet. Just like I wanted to discover a cool new indie band before anyone else did. Another motivation was to do with the shift as I saw it from the musicality and lyricism of the late Romantics to the more prosaic nature of the modernist poets that succeeded them.

Why am I telling you this? Well, in my view at the time, this was an example of how the canon can go wrong. Dowson was considered a minor poet because he was unfashionable. I’m not saying he wasn’t a minor poet (if he hadn’t died so young things might have turned out differently). But I noticed that the change from the musical, auditory element in poetry to a more visual, imagistic conception was not necessarily an objective improvement.

Recent research bears out the theory that music actually preceded speech in early homo sapiens, that song and poetry preceded speech and prose. Music is processed predominantly in the right hemisphere of the brain (see Iain McGilchrist), and the preference for left hemispheric dominance in our culture might determine the poetic canon in a biased and ultimately detrimental way.

Harold Bloom wrote an interesting book on the subject of the Western canon (called “The Western Canon” funnily enough). What is included and excluded in any canon, whether literary or artistic, philosophical or scientific, depends on certain intrinsic criteria, some of which Steiner attempted to define. But a canon is basically self-defining. There is a network of influence and admiration within and across any tradition. For example, I traced a line of influence and admiration from Ernest Dowson to W.B. Yeats to William Blake (who I tried and failed to write my second dissertation on).

It was clear that early twentieth century Anglo-American poetic sensibility was strongly influenced if not defined by T.S Eliot, through his personal connections (with Ezra Pound for example) and his literary criticism. The Romantics defined the prevailing poetic sensibility of their day. They also had a much wider effect on literary taste more generally, also through their essays and literary criticism. They loved Shakespeare, for example, and were largely responsible for renewed interest in his plays and in his elevation to demi-god genius status. And so it goes. The canon is basically a community of minds, a kind of mutual admiration society.

We all carry a canon around with us in our brains. Anything new we come across is judged with reference to the standards and values of our existing canon of knowledge. Is it true? Is it good? Is it beautiful? We let our inner canon decide. But what is our inner canon based on if not an outer canon? Not a replica or facsimile of course, but intricately connected nonetheless.

This brings me back to my opening remarks about what might constitute “the West”. If the cultural heritage of the West really is something like the three pillars of Classics, Christianity and the Enlightenment and the various literary and artistic traditions that weave through and across them, what does that mean in practice? From the outside, it’s purely descriptive. But what if the books stay on the shelf, the paintings in the museum and the music in the concert hall or in somebody else’s record collection?

Plato started the whole “Good, True and Beautiful” thing. What if the whole Western tradition is one massive conversation about what is good, what is true and what is beautiful? Can we honestly say that someone who knows nothing about Plato or Aristotle or the Bible is standing in the “Western tradition”? Or are they just standing in “the West”?

Of course a classical education is not a prerequisite for living in liberal Western societies. But if we’re talking about our capacity to engage with ideas and experiences beyond those of the mundane everyday, isn’t engaging with the “outer canon” the best way to build an inner one? And isn’t the Western canon the best in the West (by definition)?

It’s easy to just say “no”. I don’t need a tradition or a canon, whether outer or inner, to tell me what’s what. I will be the judge of what’s true, good and beautiful. I am a “secret, sacred self”. But that viewpoint almost immediately dissolves into relativism and solipsism. If I am the arbiter of what’s true for me, then so is everyone else the arbiter of what’s true for them. In which case, there is no such thing as objective truth, and there’s no point trying to get better at seeing it.

It also leads inexorably to the thought that the whole canon idea is just the arbitrary imposition of power hungry “dead white males”. If truth is subjective, then it’s simply the ones with the most power that decide what’s true. If you are awake to that basic fact (if you’re “woke”) then the natural response is to resist that imposed “truth”. It’s the mirror opposite of the traditional view, which assumes that something is true or good or beautiful if everyone says it is. If you are a relativist however, if you want to be free of “patriarchal power structures”, whatever the canonical consensus happens to be, you’d be better off doing the opposite.

I would argue (as I just have) that our ability to intuit truth is dependent on an “inner canon” of truth. This inner canon establishes as “umwelt” or worldview. It is the frame with which we experience reality, or the lens through which we see it. No lens is perfect, of course, but some are better than others. If our “basic vocabulary”, as Richard Rorty calls it, if the grammar and syntax of our inner representations, is faulty, then we inevitably pile falsehood onto falsehood as our corrupted view of the world deteriorates. And that way madness lies.

That’s why I worry about all these developments in “identity politics” or “applied postmodernism” or whatever you want to call it. I see a double negative: a distorted view of reality and a self-imposed exile from the Western tradition. It’s setting people up for epistemic failure and psychological breakdown. Where is the Good, the True and the Beautiful in such a negative and self-referential worldview?

But that’s not the only danger confronting us in the modern West. I have identified four key umwelts that distort our view of reality and deepen our delusional consciousness. These are the underlying worldviews of four archetypal ego structures called muggles, muppets, addicts and victims. If any of these delusional structures deteriorate too far, their human hosts may well find themselves playing out their delusional fantasies in a psychiatric institution.

I have just been discussing the muppet worldview. This can be reduced to one of two philosophical positions: relativism or absolutism. Both positions (according to the canonical consensus as I understand it) are objectively wrong. You will end up skewing reality out of shape and causing havoc in both your inner and outer worlds.

Aristotle observed that most virtues are found in the golden mean between two opposed vices. Courage, for example is found midway between cowardice and foolhardiness. Similarly, I would argue, the proper way to view the world is neither through a relativistic lens nor an absolutist one, but through something like Nietzsche’s “perspectivism”. It all depends on your perspective, but some perspectives are wider or higher than others. We can approach the truth, but never fully realize it. In this, he is in accord with Plato (for once).

The victim worldview suffers from another basic delusion, or pair of delusions: nihilism on the one hand and an inferiority or persecution complex on the other. The pendulum swings between “nothing really matters” and “everything is stacked against me”.

The addict worldview suffers from the push and pull of hedonism and masochism. It is predicated on the insatiable logic of the “happiness trap”. Chasing the dragon at the end of the rainbow, the whole dopaminergic reward system gets skewed so you can end up not only chasing pleasure but pain as well.

Finally, the muggle worldview suffers from the twin errors of atheism and nominalism. Whether you believe in God or not, you think that what is at stake is just your declarative opinion. Either way, the world is simply the way it is, which is basically the way it seems to you, which is basically materialistic or dualistic (ie. materialistic but with minds in it). There is no conception of “God” as an actual world transforming reality. There is no conception of a greater reality than the one you currently inhabit.

When the underlying paradigm is wrong, everything is wrong. I have come to the conclusion (provisionally and falsifiably I suppose) that the atheism-nominalism muggle paradigm is wrong, that the relativism-absolutism muppet paradigm is wrong, that the nihilism-persecution victim paradigm is wrong and that the hedonism-masochism addict paradigm is wrong. I have also come to the conclusion that the sooner we get rid of these false foundations, the sooner we will stand on the solid ground of our noble cultural heritage and rebuild a reliable canon of the Good, the True and the Beautiful for our collective future.

 

One serious issue utilitarians have to deal with is the problem of the “happiness pump”. If your morals are based on the principle of the greatest good for the greatest number, then you will be obliged to give up whatever advantages you have for the benefit of those who need it more. And there will always be someone less well off than you, even if that someone is halfway round the world in a Mumbai slum.

The problem is, however much you give to charity to help the needy and alleviate suffering in the world, you could always potentially give more. Was that meal out with your friends really necessary? You could have cooked at home for a fraction of the price and sent the money you saved to a dog home.

Pumps work by seeking equilibrium. Lower pressure on one side of a water pump draws water from the other side, which is at a higher pressure. The same is true of other kinds of pump, including the “happiness pump”. The reason the pump keeps going is because a small decrease in your personal happiness (eating in instead of going out for example) can produce a potentially higher increase in happiness for someone else (the ability to eat at all).

Only when perfect parity is achieved does the pump stop working. So, if you subscribe to this logic, what are your options? Well, you could either give everything away, or you could keep it all anyway, or you could give some of it away. Which one will absolve you of guilt? There’s the rub. None of them.

You will feel horribly guilty if you don’t give anything away. You will feel relatively guilty if you give some of it away (because you know you could give more). But you will also feel guilty if you give everything away, because then you will depend on charity from others to survive, charity that could be better spent on other people. You can’t win.

What if you could subsist on next to nothing without depending on charity? Well, then you are not producing the wealth that could be used to help others and alleviate suffering. So the only possible “solution” to the “happiness pump” problem is to become a successful philanthropist who makes lots of money but instantly gives it away to charity and chooses to live like a pauper.

Is that a realistic aim? The seventeenth century spiritual writer William Law takes this line in chapter 8 if his classic, A Serious Call to a Devout and Holy Life: “How the Wise and Pious Use of an Estate, Naturally Carrieth us to Great Perfection in All the Virtues of the Christian Life; Represented in the Character of Miranda.”

Here we have a perfect example of the “happiness pump” through a Christian lens. The Quakers seem to be particularly prone to the pressure and accompanying guilt of the “happiness pump”. No charity is ever charitable enough.

The only consolation, perhaps, is in comparing oneself with the less virtuous. We may not be perfectly good, but at least we’re better than them. Chapter 7 in William Law’s book is titled, “How the Imprudent Use of an Estate Corrupts all the Tempers of the Mind, and Fills the Heart with Poor and Ridiculous Passions, Through the Whole Course of Life; Represented in the Character of Flavia.”

So Miranda is at least consoled by the fact that she isn’t as bad as her dissolute, theatre-going sister. Quakers should feel consoled that at least they’re better than their less charitable Christian brothers and sisters, not to mention the selfish heathen outside the faith. But the tendency is always to compare oneself with those inside one’s community, where the competition is obviously much stiffer, not with those outside it. So the guilt complex is always there. Even if you are the best “pump” in the world, you will inevitably fall short of the ideal “pump”, Jesus, who always puts you to shame (he gave up his life). On the plus side, Jesus forgives. Otherwise, the whole thing would be unbearable.

At least the Christian “happiness pump” is something worked out between you and your God. In other words, it’s optional. It’s your call. The particular levels of guilt and good works and the relationship between them is a private matter, a matter of personal conscience. God is your judge, and that judgment is passed in the next life, not this one.

What happens when the Communists get hold of the “happiness pump”? They employ the same utilitarian argument: the greatest good for the greatest number. The difference is the Communists lost patience with the niceties of people’s “personal conscience”. People are obviously hypocrites. They spout virtue, but still keep their wealth to themselves. They talk the talk, but don’t walk the walk. So, the “happiness pump” must be enforced by the state. The state has a moral duty to take from the rich and give to the poor, because the rich obviously won’t do it of their own free will.

The unintended consequences, as with the massacre of six million Kulak farmers, is that everyone else starves. It seems that wealth, let alone happiness, is not a zero-sum game. The shocking disaster of Communism powerfully illustrates the underlying fallacy of the utilitarian claim. Happiness is not a good that merely need to be re-distributed more equitably. Not only is happiness not a limited resource, it’s not even a “thing”. Neither is wealth. Parceling it up and giving it away helps nobody in the long run.

I would argue that the same goes for the latest fashion in “happiness pumping”: identity politics and the concept of “privilege”. The logic is the same, but translated from the realm of material capital to social capital. Why should you “check your privilege”? If you have more privilege than someone else (more social advantages and social status), then justice demands that you compensate for that inequality by humbling yourself, and giving priority to the less privileged. This is not so much a “happiness pump”, or a “charity pump”, but a “privilege pump”, or a “platform pump”.

If I have “white privilege” because I live in a predominantly white society, and white people have historically been perceived as superior to non-whites, then I should cede my privilege and defer to the opinion of someone of colour. The same goes for my “male privilege” and my “heterosexual privilege” (cis?). Anything I might have to say about any subject is tainted by my privilege. My opinions are compromised and carry less weight by virtue of my identity. If I subscribe to this logic, I become a “platform pump”, constantly giving the platform to speak to others I consider lower than me in the privilege hierarchy.

This perspective hides a painfully obvious performative contradiction. I am a white cis male (although I’m actually Chilean). In a culture (or sub-culture) where the “privilege pump” is in effect, I will very quickly fall to the bottom of the status hierarchy, because my voice is worth less than everyone else. At that point, the pump should reverse: the pressure has all gone to the other side and now white cis males are undervalued and have no voice.

But that will never happen, if you factor in the weight of history. Because white heterosexual men have been in positions of power and authority for centuries, it will take more than a mere reversal of the status hierarchy in the present to expiate the white heterosexual male guilt. Even if I end up at the bottom of the heap, I have to carry the guilt of my forefathers with me. There is no atonement for me. Just as there was no atonement for the Jews under the Nazis.

“Pumps” are rubbish. They always lead to guilt, confusion and enmity, and sometimes to destruction and genocide. Much better to judge our selves and each other according to our characters, not by our identity, privilege, wealth or even by how much we give to charity. True virtue does not work simply by debasing and devaluing yourself. It is about becoming the best person you can be. Then you might do some real good in the world, but as a person, not a pump.

 

What might the ring in Tolkien’s great mythical saga signify? It confers great power on its wearer but also corrupts and ultimately destroys. It is referred to as “the ring of power”. So does it just symbolize power? It was forged by the Dark Lord, Sauron. So does it symbolize specifically demonic power?

Jonathan Pageau has an excellent analysis on the symbolism of the ring in The Lord of the Rings on his YouTube channel, The Symbolic World. He talks about other famous rings in Western mythology, from the ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic, to the ring of the Niebelung in Wagner’s opera. He talks about the elements of binding, of invisibility, of what he calls “supplements”, technology and ornamentation. It’s a nice exploration, definitely worth watching.

Certain points stood out for me. The obvious association with power, the issue of dependency, which paradoxically leads to weakness as well as strength, and the issue of control. Adding the promise of salvation on the one hand and destruction on the other, I realized that here was a perfect description of the Tibetan Wheel of Life.

In the Lord of the Rings, everyone wants the ring, but often for slightly different reasons. The main reason is power. Who wants power in the Wheel of Life? Muppets (or Titans in the original Tibetan version). Muppets are fundamentally power hungry. They want power at all costs, either to extend and defend the power they already have, or to counter the power of their enemies. Whether top dogs or underdogs, all muppets really want is power.

Muggles are a bit different. They don’t want power as such, because they don’t want to stand out too much or put their heads above the parapet. Power is dangerous, after all. They want control. They want to establish a perfectly regulated and safe world with “no alarms and no surprises”. Control here is about control of the immediate environment and the social milieu, including the way other people perceive you. Hence, the central role of the ring as ornament. For muggles, it’s all about control and social status.

Addicts are dependent on the ring. They can’t live without it, because of the feelings of pleasure, expansion and well-being it provides. Golem is the sorry face of a serious ring addict. He is clearly closely related to those strange subterranean creatures of Buddhist mythology, the hungry ghosts.

The ring both gives power and takes it away. Dependence enfeebles the wearer in the long run, until you end up both a weakling and a victim, closer to a domestic animal than a human being.

These are four ways that “the ring of power” exerts its influence on the corruptible human soul. But there are two others, represented by the diva and the demon. Let’s follow the progression from one state to another, the irresistible road to perdition.

The pure soul desires only the good for itself and the world. It finds the ring. When it sees the extraordinary magical power contained within it, it instantly sees the potential for universal salvation. Used in the right way, the ring could solve all the problems that beset mankind. It must be used with great care, but the pure soul will see that only the purest motives employ its boundless power. Things seem to go well when the divas have the ring.

But either the ring is lost or the diva is corrupted. Now the ring is used in the Human World to keep peace and keep control. When the muggles have the ring, the world still seems to run pretty well. Train run on time. Everyone plays their part and sticks to the script. But there is an underlying oppressive feel to life in Muggle Land, which foments some dissatisfaction and rebellion in certain quarters.

The ring is lost again, or perhaps the muggles in charge are corrupted. Or there is a peasant revolt, or some other uprising from the lower echelons of the muggle hierarchy and the ring is lost in the chaos.

Whichever way it goes, the ring finds itself in possession of the muppets. Now we have tyranny and war. The muppets become drunk on power and blood lust and soon become utterly dependent on the ring to maintain their position and their sanity. But the ring is lost again and … is found by a simple hobbit.

The hobbit gets seriously addicted to the ring’s power, which he uses for his own selfish ends. He lives an unnaturally long time, but becomes deformed and monstrous. The ring’s dark magic begins to eat him up from the inside and he become weaker and weaker, until he becomes a helpless victim, an outcast from society, and then, in the final turn of the screw, a demon.

That’s obviously not exactly how the story of The Lord of the Rings goes. I just wanted to show how the symbolic “ring of power” can cause even the purest soul to degenerate, through several stages, until it finally becomes the soul of pure evil.

Frodo’s job was to destroy the ring once and for all in the fires of Mount Doom in the heart of Mordor. There is no other way. The ring always finds its way to its Lord and Maker, and turns everything bad. And he does it (I’m pretty confident that’s not a spoiler). With the ring gone, the world returns to its natural state, peace returns to the land, and Frodo can finally go home to his hobbit hole in Hobbiton.

Jonathan Pageau connects the ring to science and technology. He talks about our dependence on smart phones and social media and alludes to the ongoing development of AI (artificial intelligence). He ends on the slightly tongue in cheek comment that many of us may already be “ring wraiths” without realizing it.

I share his sentiments. The rapid advances in technology in the past few years have, I think created enormous psychological and social problems across the developed world. I agree with Iain McGilchrist that technology is accelerating the dominance of the left hemisphere over the right in the brain’s perception and construction of reality (read his brilliant book, The Master and his Emissary). The left hemisphere is more about control and focused attention, whereas the right is more open and flexible. So, from a purely neurological point of view, we are becoming increasingly muggle-like.

The endless ongoing slagging match that is the Culture War is one glaring example of how technology, and social media in particular, has produced a climate of increased hostility and intolerance and ever increasing polarization. Ordinary people, driven by algorithms, click bait and echo chambers, construct and maintain online personas that are more and more radical and extreme, spouting a bizarre concoction of inflammatory rhetoric and censorious tribal political correctness. Technology is turning us into muppets.

Both children and adults are spending many hours a day in front of a screen, whether it be a phone, TV or computer. Try banning your teen’s screen time. They would rather die than spend all their time offline. It would be social death anyway, because all their friends are constantly updating stuff that they just have to see. Even the parents are hooked. We are all addicts now.

I would argue that the whole victimology epidemic is the result of technology too. In The Coddling of the American Mind, Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff draw on a whole raft of evidence to show how the “i-gen”, who are now at university age, is exhibiting massive levels of anxiety, depression and increased rates of self-harm and suicide, as a result of a host of factors directly or indirectly related to information technology.

There has been a steady increase in emotional fragility in the last couple of decades, culminating in the bizarre excesses of university campus culture, where students demand “safe spaces” and “trigger warnings” because they can’t cope with challenging or different views to their own.

So, whether or not you choose to throw your mobile phone into the flames, it’s at least worth considering to what degree your engagement with this extraordinarily powerful technology is feeding the diva, muggle, muppet, addict and victim in you. You’re probably nowhere near demon yet, but how will you even know when enough is enough?

 

I have been interested in philosophy and psychology ever since I didn’t study them at university. Recently, I’ve been delving more deeply into moral philosophy, which straddles both disciplines. I reread “After Virtue” by Alasdair Macintyre, a book which greatly impressed me when I first read it over twenty years ago, and was more convinced than ever that his diagnosis of the crisis in morality is right: we took a wrong turn in the Enlightenment when we tried to base morals on a purely rationalist foundation.

Before the Enlightenment, morality was all about virtue, and the key philosopher was Aristotle. But with the advent of Immanuel Kant with his Categorical Imperative and Jeremy Bentham with his Utilitarianism, morality became more a question of rational deliberation than about the development of good character.

The two main modern schools of moral thought are deontology (Kantian ethics of obligation) and consequentialism (utilitarian calculations of utility). Although they differ in their approaches and conclusions, they are both more interested in hypothetical moral problems than in moral qualities. They try to answer the question, “what should one do in such and such a situation?”, by applying a rule or a calculus of maximum benefit and minimum harm. The focus is on the action and its consequences, not on the agent.

Moral thinking has shifted from Aristotelian “character ethics” to “quandary ethics”. It doesn’t matter who is in the quandary. All that matters is that the right course of action is carried out. And the right course of action is ultimately the result of a rational process. So, on this basis, it is conceivable that in the future it would be perfectly possible to invent an app that could calculate the best course of action in any given situation.

I find the reduction of the classical virtues, regardless of the specific list, to a single rational principle a bit disturbing. What was this move in the service of? Efficiency? Logic? Science? I wasn’t entirely surprised to learn that Bentham was probably on the autism spectrum and that Kant might have been as well.

That got me thinking about the logical positivists, who dominated philosophy in the first half of the twentieth century and the behaviourists, who dominated psychology. Were they on the autism spectrum as well? They certainly had a ridiculously narrow and mechanistic view of humanity.

Coupled with the rise and rise of science and technology in the last two hundred years, and the meteoric rise of computer scientists in defining the culture (many of whom are definitely on the spectrum), I couldn’t help wondering if there was a worrying trend in our conception of ourselves and in the direction of our self actualisation as a species.

If we think of ourselves as rational machines, might we not become rational machines? A rational machine has a mind and a body, and an odd admixture of mind and body it calls “feelings”. And that’s basically it. Rational machines make decisions and moral choices according to rational considerations, though usually with a little tug-of-war between “head” and “heart”. But they soon starts to look uncannily like philosophical zombies or robots, once “head” and “heart” are reduced to clever algorithms.

The traditional human being has more psychological options than the modern one. It can think and it can feel, but it can do other things too. It can “believe”, not in an intellectual sense, which is just an act of reason, but as a completely distinct psychological category. “Belief” in this sense is not an act of reason but a leap of faith (or a “leap into faith” as Kierkegaard put it). It is no accident, therefore, that the advent of high modernity was accompanied by the “death of God” and the psychological atrophying and neglect of our capacity for belief.

The same is true of “awareness” or “mindfulness” (which has fortunately been revived in recent decades through its importation from the East), and our capacity for “will-power” and “flow”, which is the ability to enter a state of absorption or trance.

The modern human being has sacrificed these capacities and abilities on the altar of science and technology and has been fooled by modern philosophers and psychologists into thinking that they don’t really exist and that human beings should forget about them and aspire instead to be as close to rational machines as possible.

We have sold our souls and our wills, as well as our minds and hearts. We have forgotten the light of the soul, the strength of the will, and the powers of the mind and heart. We have forgotten the virtues: the virtues of the soul, personified in the king archetype, the virtues of the will, embodied in the warrior archetype, the virtues of the mind exemplified by the philosopher archetype and the virtues of the heart, represented by the monk archetype. We have exchanged virtue ethics for rational ethics, and Virtue itself for Reason.

Nor is there room for the mystic archetype or the shaman archetype in the modern conception of the rational human being. “Belief” and “trance” (or “flow”) are anachronistic and archaic qualities that have no place in a world of rational machines. There is no room for God or Spirit in this world.

So it seems that we have come to a fork in the road of history. We can accept our fate and be absorbed into the monistic rational information system of Dataism, and sacrifice the rest of our humanity to the gods of science and technology. Or we can rediscover and reaffirm our waning humanity and meditate against the machine.

 

“The effectance motive” is “the need or drive to develop competence through interacting with and controlling one’s environment.” It is a basic human drive, which can be observed in other species as well, most visibly in apes and monkeys. It is what drives us to solve problems, learn and make progress.

Without a sense of progress, human beings lose motivation and meaning. What’s the point of going round and round the merry-go-round if you’re not actually getting anywhere?

We need a purpose and we need an aim, and we need to feel that we are moving in the right direction. This is “the progress principle”, which is the fact that “we get more pleasure from making progress toward our goals than we do from achieving them.” This principle has actually been demonstrated neurologically: we get a dopamine hit every time we move closer to our goal.

So how does this play out in our lives? Well, it depends on the goal, obviously. Let’s have a look at the goals of the four central archetypes in the Wheel of Samsara and see where that takes us.

The muggle’s goal is success, in other words, fame and fortune. I feel good if I am moving up a status hierarchy, if I get a promotion or a raise, or if I get recognition from my superiors or peers. I feel good if I manage to acquire status symbols (big house, big car, exotic holidays and attractive partner). And I feel good when I do a good job and further my career.

All this hard work and growing competence makes me happy. It may be that all the material rewards are secondary and that my true satisfaction comes from a sense of progress and effectance. Recognition and renumeration are merely confirmation of my success, which is the primary thing. But either way, the source of my happiness is based on progress in a narrowly defined sphere of activity (“work”).

The muppet’s goal is victory. This is because muppets (who live in the “Titan Realm”) are perpetually at war. Who or what they are at war with doesn’t much matter. They may be at war with their spouse, or sibling, or with a giant abstract entity, such as “the Rich” or “the West” or “Islam” or “Postmodern Neo-Marxism”.

Football hooligans are muppets. Political activists (of all stripes) are muppets. Even if I am fighting a just cause, I am still a muppet, which doesn’t necessarily mean that I’m wrong. I might be completely right in my position and completely justified in my activism. It just means that I am deriving satisfaction (and dopamine) from a sense of victory, or rather, progress towards victory.

I experience every small victory against injustice or oppression or godlessness is ultimately a victory against evil. I feel that I am making progress in an eternal Manichean war between good and evil. And if I am a particularly heroic muppet, I’m not just making the world a better place, I’m actually saving it.

We also get our dopamine hit vicariously. If our children do well, for example, and make good progress relative to their peers, we feel good. If our team does well, or if our opponents suffer a humiliating defeat, we feel positively rosy, even when we had nothing to do with it personally. Sometimes we get a double dose, such as when a friend or family member vanquishes our enemies and is lifted up the status hierarchy of our tribe as a result.

Anyway, the point is that we derive a sense of meaning and happiness from the “effectance motive” and the “progress principle” when we are effective in and make progress in two different but complementary arenas: “the Rat Race” and “the Culture War”.

What about the addict? What’s the addict’s goal? More dope obviously. My goal is to maximize pleasure and minimize pain. But it’s not just the pleasure inherent in the pleasure itself that gives me a sense of continued satisfaction. It’s the success in obtaining it. The “progress principle” is at work here too. When I am making progress in my pleasure seeking behaviour, I feel good, and when I’m not, I feel bad. The absolute level of pleasure is less important than the relative.

And the victim? The goal of the victim is simply to prove how awful the world is. The victim feeds on bad news. When I’m in victim mode, I secretly delight in wars, humanitarian crises and natural disasters. I relish every sign of the imminent collapse of civilization or the relentless destruction of the environment and the looming threat of global climactic meltdown, because it confirms my belief in the essential badness of humankind.

On a personal, psychological level, I feel that I am making progress every time I unearth another trauma or discover another physical, emotional or mental problem. My “effectance motive” is basically to find more and more signs of corruption, decay, abuse, neglect, and evil in myself and in the world. My “progress principle” depends on finding ever new pieces of evidence for my negative view of reality.

The addict and the victim derive their sense of meaning and purpose from the “Hedonic Treadmill” and the “Impending Doom”. There is a built-in sense of progress, just as there is in the “Rat Race” and the “Culture War”, although it is easier, with a little distance, to see that it is progress, but on an endless loop.

There is no end to the “Rat Race”. There is no end to the “Culture War”. There is no end to the “Hedonic Treadmill”. There is no end to “Impending Doom”. We feel that we are making progress on all four fronts: we’re winning the race, we’re winning the war, we’re getting high, and we’re getting ever closer to our inevitable annihilation. But we’ll never actually win the race, win the war, stay high or spontaneously combust, even if we spend a lifetime trying.

Is this an unrealistically bleak view? Let’s be optimistic then. Maybe the personal and/or global apocalypse will actually come in my lifetime and my victim will be vindicated. Maybe I will reach the top of the heap and become President of the United States or CEO of Google and my muggle will be vindicated. Maybe my side of the Culture War will destroy the other side once and for all and my muppet will be vindicated. Maybe I will find the secret to endless bliss without any comedowns and my addict will be vindicated.

Or maybe that’s not the point. (Obviously that’s not the point). After all, it’s about the journey, not the getting there, isn’t it? As long as I feel that I am making progress, I’m happy enough and life is worth living. So who cares if I never actually “make it”?

That’s a perfectly reasonable conclusion, but it’s not very satisfying. Surely there’s more to life that accepting the illusion of progress just to get through the day? As far as I can see, there are three options available to us.

The first is to actually believe in one or more of these areas of “effectance” and throw yourself into it wholeheartedly. Believe in the Rat Race! Believe in the Culture War! Believe in the Hedonic Treadmill! Believe in Impending Doom! I can call you as many names as I want: “Muggle! Muppet! Addict! Victim!” But these are just empty insults, because you know what you’re doing, and I clearly have no idea what I’m talking about.

The second option is to accept that all this time and effort is ultimately futile, but that it doesn’t really matter. That’s just life. Everyone else is doing it. It’s normal. Take the rough with the smooth. Nobody’s perfect. And other rationalisations. Also, it passes the time of day. As long as we have “the effectance motive” and “the progress principle”, it’s all good. Imagine if you weren’t chasing these goals all the time. What on earth would you do all day?

Which brings us to the third option. Stop. Just stop. Stop the war, get off the treadmill, drop out of the race and cancel your subscription to the end of the world. Direct your “effectance motive” and “progress principle” to something real and lasting. Forget all that nonsense. Try the spiritual path instead. Then you might actually get somewhere.