Book Review: In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner

I didn't plan on writing a review of In the Shadow of the Banyan (by Vaddey Ratner). I read it to pass the time, rather than as part of some kind of study or writing program. But now that I've read it, I have some thoughts about it.

The book is a novel, based on the author's actual experiences as a young girl, member of the Cambodian royal family during the time of the Khmer Rouge, an anti-royal, anti-Western Communist revolutionary group that killed millions of Cambodians through purges, overwork, and underfeeding. She journeys from a relatively sheltered situation at the beginning of the book (a child who lives in the imaginal and familiar world of family, stories, Asian Buddhism, Hindu myths), through a series of progressively darker dislocations and losses, until she is struck dumb. She manages to survive (mirroring the author's survival) and make it out of Cambodia with her mother.

I thought of not writing this review, because the thoughts that I had feel like ones that are underdeveloped at this point, or that might not fit what I want to write about in this chapter of the blog, but something insists in me that I do write, and maybe I'm writing notes for later writing that explores the following subjects in more detail.

I identified with three themes that I saw in the book: The imaginal world, the Revolution, and the cross.

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The spiritual/imaginal world was something that the narrator's grandmother, and the narrator, both spent a fair amount of time in, as though when we are new to the world, or not long left in it, we are better able to see things like tevodas (angel-like beings), ghosts, or connect with the story of Indra, with mythical explanations for things. I don't remember there being any moments where the imaginal world appeared in the sensory world (the "real" world), but the grandmother and narrator were able to see it. I think that there is a part of me that lives in that world -- in fact, that's the world of philosophy, though it often presents itself prosaically and mechanistically. And, I sometimes feel (sometimes too much) that I belong there more than I do in the sensory world. I'm not sure I have much of a point to make in bringing this up, but that was my reaction.

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The Revolution spoke to me, because of how much the revolutionaries were into willing and working. The book shows how some of them were heartless, psychopathic, and corrupt, and this makes me think that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous.

I know that some of my past writing (notably How Can We Love?) could, perhaps in its emphasis, if not its text read carefully, be considered a broadly left- (or "revolutionary humanist"-) leaning thing. It has some of the spirit of Revolution, even though it says on the surface of it things that go against Revolution. I think I would say now that the book is flawed, to the extent that it lends itself to a revolutionary humanist reading, because that was not my intention. But it is a somewhat revolutionary thing and that gives me one reason to want to think about the dangers of the revolutionary spirit.

In the Shadow of the Banyan mentions that there was a split within the Khmer Rouge between the Cause and the Party. The Cause was idealistic, but the Party took over. Causes tend to draw on one kind of energy, that of ordinary people, non-psychopathic human desires. But parties can focus on their own well-being, rather than devoting themselves fully to a cause, and outcompete groups still into causes. This is a pessimistic thought, and it's worth noting that there are a lot of places where parties exist but do not wipe out idealism. (Moloch seems like an undefeatable dynamic, but for some reason it doesn't always rule.) There is a tension between Party and Cause tendencies in a society, and it's wise to be concerned about how any cause could turn into a purely partisan thing.

I know that the revolutionary spirit is dangerous, but, as long as the status quo needs to be changed in some way, it is necessary, and perhaps revolutions, or the spirit of revolutions, is needed to maintain the status quo (if you don't fix things, you decay, and some fixing is "microrevolutionary"). A Communist rejoinder to a book speaking of the horrors of the Khmer Rouge might be "fair enough, they were corrupt and captured by psychopathy, and the empowerment of the corruption and psychopathy was enabled by the revolutionary spirit, but you should also do a calculation, alongside that of the death toll from the Khmer Rouge, of the lives lost due to the corruption and psychopathy that prevents capitalist society from doing the most it's really capable of doing to help the poor". (This sounds like something an effective altruist or EA-type person might try to calculate, or already has.) It may turn out to be the case that revolutionary Communism always turns out to be worse for people, but capitalism (or "capitalism+" (plus civil society? the state?)) that isn't doing its best also (less visibly) has blood on its hands.

As is often the case, formulas are dangerous. If you're into Communism or capitalism, you need to be into the good version of that, because the bad version is as bad as the ideology you reject, or perhaps worse.

Should we think in terms of "blood on people's hands"? I think there is an awful truth to it. The moral truth is something that, when comprehended, causes people to do the moral thing. Is it perhaps misleading to talk about "blood on people's hands", is that a deceptive truth? Perhaps for some people, it is deceptive, and for others, it is basically non-misleading. I think that we gaze at the harshest moral truths and then walk away from them to do our relaxed versions of good. (I think that the Drowning Child Illustration is one of the harshest moral truths and generally EAs walk away from it to do their relaxed version of good, as much as that relaxed version of good might burn them out.) If we never gazed, we might never change into the much more mundane, if still countercultural, versions of ourselves that live in the shadow of the gaze.

I try to focus on saying what's true (because I'm a writer, and I feel like that's my "professional" responsibility). I don't think that the Khmer Rouge's worldview is correct, as much as they might be on to something when they see the moral truth of people held down by the ruling classes, or suffering or dying prematurely. For instance, this life is not the limit of our existence, as they thought, and so purity is something that is not desperately urgent. Purity is something that is necessary, and will come in its time -- the sooner the better, but not desperately soon. I think that MSLN / New Wine System-descended thinking is good for addressing both revolutionary humanism and traditional evangelical religion in their crazily desperate (and on their view, completely necessary) sense that they have to do radical good (on a societal and personal level) NOW, that time is running out for people who must get the essential good (a nice life, or conversion to Christianity) in this life, with death coming all-too-soon.

I understand that the Khmer Rouge, as Communists, were atheists. I believe that God exists, and if I'm correct in that belief, then the emphasis on human well-being found in Communism (as well as in other forms of humanism) could easily be misguided if it ignores God, how our relationships to God are the most fundamental field of altruism. Much of what revolutionary (or microrevolutionary) humanists want to achieve is somewhat orthogonal to people's relationships to God and may not be as valuable, necessary, or urgent as it seems. Making things better from an atheistic standpoint could, in some cases, be dangerous or harmful from a theistic standpoint.

I feel a strong momentum in the direction of secular humanist altruism. For instance, it's relatively easy for me to feel a sense of outrage, or something like that, at things like physical poverty. I think I am somewhat wired to responding to the vivid, loud, and obvious, as I suppose most of us are. The habit of wanting to remove suffering or prolong life, in this life, is not the worst habit. But I have to remember that there's more to the truth than this life.

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Finally, I saw the cross in Ratner's/the narrator's experience. Not that she pursued the cross, although her father did in a fairly obvious way, but in that she underwent the cross. There was a moment toward the end where, to me, it seemed like the narrator died inside in a somewhat good way, and thenceforth had nothing to lose, and little (or less) to fear. (See chapter 29, pp. 295 - 296 in first hardcover edition.) That is one dimension of undergoing the cross, that it pushes us to the point that in some sense we are okay with dying or our death (maybe this is something I can validly connect to the moment in the novel). We are made to be willing to die by being forced close to death, and having "died", we are free. Maybe we have some free will in the matter? I'm not sure, but the narrator was given a gift at that moment of "survivable death" (again, if I'm reading this right). I may want to look at In the Shadow of the Banyan when I someday write a proper book on the cross.

Change of the World and Love of God

"It needs to change", we might say or embody. But the world can't change forever. Someday it must reach a really good state.

Complacency is a bad in itself. Being complacent is being closed on a deep level. So how can we stay open?

Should we love the world? That may mean that we love the status quo. Both the good and the bad come from the status quo. Sometimes you can separate the bad from the good, but the default assumption is that it's a package deal. A system is one thing, is what it is with all its parts. So if we love any one existing thing, maybe we have to keep the status quo. If we love (or "love") any one thing enough, we can't risk changing the system, at the risk of losing that thing. Does this mean that people who want to see change can't love? Can't trust?

Perhaps this is why the world is so messed up (in part). People can't sustain "it needs to change". They crave to love, can't refrain from loving, though refraining might make things better in the long run. Maybe to make things better, you need to hate some specific thing. Hate evil -- but then, hate can be evil, and is definitely unbearable in the end, a maintaining of lack of trust. So the hate that brings about good comes intermittently. And refraining from love is hard to sustain as well.

I think it's good to say "this world is not all there is", which is akin to "this world as it is not as it should be". Both say "the world, everything that adds up to my own satisfactions, my own wealth, is insufficient."

God exists outside this world. The love we have for God is not the love we have for the world, the love for all the gifts that give us satisfaction and security. We can love and trust God, and thus take weight off of seeing the world as it is as a good thing, which we might feel is necessary to keep from cutting ourselves off from loving and trusting as activities that are good for us.

Hate and alienation are akin. We are sometimes alien in ways that are natural and familiar to us. But God's alienness is not our alienness. God is a father (a familiar image), but also an alien. To love an alien as its child requires that you become an alien yourself.

Death in the City

(a book review)

One thing that Simone Weil, Ramon Llull, and Francis Schaeffer all have in common is an emphasis on holiness, more genuine Christianity, and also, that they're obsolete. I think obsolescence and holiness are inherently related, because to be holy is to be set apart, somewhat set apart from history. The Old Testament is a work of holiness and conservatism.

It feels kind of strange, kind of deliberate, to be reading and promoting people I feel in my flesh to be obsolete, but when I actually read them (at least, Weil, and more so, Schaeffer), I can feel myself connecting with what they talk about as though it's current. Quickly after putting the book down, I find myself back in 2019, but life was more true when I was in the book.

Holiness movements don't have to be obsolete. John Wesley had a successful one, which led to the Methodist church. The effective altruists are rather like an atheistic, humanistic holiness movement. (The effective altruists love (no, "do good to") those who are distant as well as those who are close, and they set themselves apart from climate change to focus on more neglected existential risks. If the ethos of humanism is "humans save humanity by their efforts", then they live that out in a genuine and distinctive way.) Schaeffer had some limited success with his L'Abri center, and had some effect on the political sphere. Non-Christians tend to think of him now as an architect of the Christian Right, if at all. But Schaeffer was not as fortunate as Wesley or the EAs in riding the vital wave of his culture. Wesley was a progressive. There was a time when orthodox Christian beliefs could be progressive, instead of having to split off really Christian thinking from really progressive thinking. Schaeffer seems to be trying to hold together truly Christian thinking -- attempting to stay true to Christ as revealed in the Bible, independent of human pragmatism -- with the spirit of progressive culture, the spirit of caring about people and the world. He didn't want the church to be intellectually split off from the world, but rather to be able to speak in every area, as God had spoken in every area already. But he was conservative in outlook at the same time, seemed to see himself as fighting a losing battle that had to be fought.

I read Francis Schaeffer mostly when I was in college, and there was something in the reading that said: "there's a way to reform human culture to become actually good, and the way to that is through Christianity." It was an exciting thought. I turned away from him after a while, but recently read a work I had missed, Death in the City. Here are some ideas in it:

People are taken more seriously when they are seen as capable of doing real wrong. (People are more significant.) Compassionate Christianity sees people as real and in need of salvation. Doctrine without compassion and reliance on God in daily life is dead, fake, ineffective. Through ongoing relationship with Jesus, over time we are "impregnated" to bring fruit into the world. Reformation (return to source doctrine) and revival (new work of the Spirit, new turning of hearts) go together.

If you know that God exists and has absolute standards, you care more. The stakes of life are higher, and you have to depend on him for salvation, because the standard matters and you can't make it without him. If there are real standards, then people can really be lost, and you can really care about their well-being. Being really Christian (really taking people seriously) causes people to love more genuinely and with more passion and holds society to a higher standard. A coach can get you to try harder than you would yourself. You'll set a goal to try 20% harder and only go 15% harder, but the coach will get you to try 50% harder because she knows you better than you know yourself, and after several failed attempts, you'll make it. A God outside of human pragmatism, or a standard not up for negotiation, can be that for people. To me, this sounds progressive, and in my younger days, more in the phase of life of seeking progressiveness, I saw Christianity as more progressive than secular thinking.

(A few weeks after first drafting this, I am struck by another point from Death in the City, which is that Schaeffer wanted people to have a personal relationship with God, which in some ways is like having a personal relationship with the standard. Personally-relating is the way to live all of life, including the life of bringing things up to standards. Schaeffer would say "personally-relating because of the 'God who is there'", I think, and a God who is present in your life protects you from the natural tendency toward "I'm a survivor, will think whatever I need to to survive, will write off whoever I need to to survive, will cease personally-relating mode of life, will reduce all things opposed to my survival as means to my ends.")

But even in college, I was able to tell that Schaeffer was writing to a much different world than mine. I think our world has a certain innocence to it, believe it or not, an innocence with respect to sin if not to anything else. I hardly have an inherent sense of sin. I know that many Christians still do, but my "flesh" is more secular, even if my will (perhaps my true heart), tries and tries to be Christian. But I can still see some of Schaeffer's vision, the vision that might never be, because we'll never go back to the old days of believing in real sin, real guilt, as opposed to guilty feelings or thoughts, back to real standards.

It's strange. If you look close up, people do seem to care as much as they ever did. And yet, I don't see very many people caring as much as Schaeffer did. If you don't like conservative Christians, you should read Schaeffer just to see a "steel man" of their position, perhaps in his ideas, but more essentially in the kind of voice he had. I don't know too much about his life, so I won't comment on that, but a writing style isn't nothing as far as indicating what kind of person someone is.

Overall, our culture feels bustling, alive, active -- on one level. And played out, over, feeble -- on another. In the political sphere, there is militancy (godless mob absolutes), but not real love, and no guilt, no absolutes that can implicate both the executor of mob justice and its victim into a brotherhood. Opposed to that is an enfeebling blunting of absolutes, a distrust of our moral motions. (Maybe I'm caricaturing the left and liberals, respectively.) The biblical position is that we are all under God -- Schaeffer would say, "under God's wrath", but that doesn't work nowadays, but still, under God.

People nowadays who care as much as Schaeffer did tend not to be Christians (that I know of -- I think if there was someone like Schaeffer nowadays among Christians I would know about it, but maybe not). These more secular caring people seem to be putting out fires rather than thinking of the long term. It's natural during traumatic times to focus on the immediate threat and then its recurring aftershocks. Culture is something way behind the problems we have now. We want to deal with climate change now, but wouldn't it have been much better if we could have gone back to the early 20th century when we first knew the threat and adjust civilization back then? But then maybe there were many cultural reasons why we wouldn't have done that then. So then to go back to the early 19th century and deal with those 20th century cultural reasons upstream? If we could reform the culture, then we would have a base to respond to geographically distant problems (distant people), or looming threats, as one people. Most of our existential risks come from human activities. If we had a really good culture, we wouldn't have anything to fear as a species, except from the natural world.

I realize that at this point, it may be like saying to the captain of the Titanic as it goes down "You know, if you had chosen a different route a week ago, none of this would be happening." Could any of this cultural change have possibly worked in the past? Or is human nature too hard to change? Was Christianity tried and found wanting, as some would allege? Or was it not even tried, as both Gandhi and Chesterton alleged? Schaeffer quotes the book of Jeremiah in Death in the City, and Jeremiah is an interesting book because it starts off with one of my favorite writing quotes (1:9-10):

Then the LORD put out his hand and touched my mouth. And the LORD said to me, "Behold, I have put my words in your mouth. See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant."

It seems like Jeremiah is going to be a powerful person. But nobody likes what he has to say and he gets thrown in a pit. The king burns his prophecy rather than heeding it. It looks like Jeremiah's just telling the truth, to no further purpose. Maybe his words brought on the judgment they foretold (in some way helped God bring the judgment), and maybe future people have been inspired by Jeremiah to "build and to plant" from his words. But Jeremiah's reality for many years would have been one of "I am saying what I'm supposed to say but there's no apparent power in my words."

Maybe you just have to say the truth as the ship goes down -- the truth is a good in itself. But maybe there will be the future generations who can pick up the message and apply it, and so vindicate God and Jeremiah. We live in an analogous time with climate change. We don't know how bad it will be. Our best messages probably won't turn the ship around. Perhaps only a remnant will survive, who will then have to put together a new world. What will they remember? The Israelites kept Jeremiah in mind, for generations down to this day. What is worth remembering?

One reply to Schaeffer would be: "What you're saying isn't true. You don't know that God exists." Schaeffer engaged with the people of his time and obviously was able to remain a Christian throughout (although I remember he had a period of doubt sometime during his adult life which led to him understanding Christianity better). But it's a fair point, and one which many people have tried to answer without enough success to create an actually good public religion. But another reply is "Even if what you're saying might be true, we don't want to hear it. Liberal humanism is good enough for us. It's too risky to listen to what you have to say. We like vagueness. Vagueness is peace. Absolutes lead to fanaticism and psychological distress, so don't even try to have a better approach to absolutes. Having one God is bad, too coercive. Liberal morality is a better thing to have be coercive. And isn't life beautiful? There isn't enough time to be ugly to each other. People are good and should not be made to feel bad. Let's all be one as we wait for the end."

Maybe we are on the Titanic going down, the embodiers of a dying culture. But I want to bear witness to the possibility that if we could just believe in God, a God who cares more than Schaeffer did and asks more of us than we ask of ourselves, we could have an actually good society, and that this possibility is a good thing, and we can recognize that even if we don't think it can be realized. In other words, to become agnostics who are no longer comfortable in our agnosticism, or even atheists who regret that the best of the "widely-believed fairy tales" can never be true. If they were true, all the causes humanism concerns itself with could be addressed, with no more miracle needed than the change in heart and outlook of those responsible for human society -- all of us. All this to say that a proof of the existence of the right kind of God should be a welcome thing to a humanist.

Some cultural changes seem impossible. We can't even imagine them. To imagine them would be a cultural change. And yet cultural changes occur. More so than Schaeffer did, Llull and Weil both tried to imagine ideal societies. I can't imagine any of their obsolete visions coming true. But I am part of this culture. I realize now that I'm more likely to believe a professor's tired, off-hand comment than a homeless person's passionate, well-thought-out theories. When I was younger, I tended more to the reverse. Our civilization is old, but after it dies, there may be a younger one to replace it.

Cultural Moloch

13 October 2020: I split off the last section ("Practically Speaking") onto its own page.

In this post I relate cultural evolution to Moloch and existential risk. Updated 5 July 2019.

I realize that you may not have time for this article, but let me prepare you to read it. It's about how competition gets us to reject the delicate things (whatever doesn't help competition) -- a tendency called "Moloch". We can try to fight against Moloch. Ideas in culture, cultures themselves, compete, in a sense, and can get us to no longer value the delicate things we once would have fought for. If our culture is particularly fluid, it can lead us to finding human existence itself unnecessary, and we will die out. So we might want to do something about this.

This dying could happen in some distant future that's difficult for us to imagine right now. Or it could be going on right now. Our lack of political will in facing climate change might just be the result of cultural Moloch.

On re-reading this, I can see that it might be an offputting read. People find me "scattered and disjointed". I don't have much of a mind for organizing this at this time. If you want to read this, read it as a document to be studied, a flawed statement. Read all the links. Read it twice. If my mind worked differently, were more capable in some ways, I'd make this a smoother read for you, but I don't think you will be unrewarded if you approach it as I suggest.

Cultural Moloch

On Slate Star Codex recently (here, here, here, here, and here), Scott Alexander writes about the topic of cultural evolution. Some people in a culture are overall successful, and their neighbors are wired to copy them. They copy each other without really understanding what they're doing, which is just as well because the successful people don't really understand why what they're doing works. People who are more successful have more children reach reproducing age, so the cultures associated with successful reproduction persist. New culture happens when people have trouble accurately remembering the old culture, or they do something foolish and it works or (what I don't remember seeing stated directly in Alexander's posts, but which David Maybury-Lewis claims in Millennium: Tribal Wisdom) someone thinks really hard about the problem culture might solve or does deliberate trial and error akin to a modern inventor or scientist, and figures out an advance. The advance apparently solves the problem they set out to solve, but whether it really solves the problem, or doesn't cause some other problem somewhere else in the system of the tribe's lifestyles remains to be proved by the prosperity of the tribe over time.

Alexander wrote a good blog post called "Meditations on Moloch". Moloch, in his article, is a god that demands you sacrifice your children. Gods are those which we propitiate as much as those which we take to have any power to bless us or connect with us personally. So Moloch need not be a living personal being, and Alexander as a materialist wouldn't think that it is. For Alexander, Moloch is the tendency to throw away things, persons, values, etc. which are not useful in competition, in order to take over or survive. As time goes on, the tendency is for everything to get more and more Molochian. Why wouldn't it?

I have already written a theory in my this booklet about how Moloch can be combated: get the least Molochian people in your society and egg them on to extreme effort (part of Jesus' teachings). But it occurred to me when reading Alexander's recent posts that, when it comes to cultural evolution, maybe what you do instead to respond to the "Problem of Moloch" is take your "precious children" values and call them something else. A good Molochian ideology causes you to forget that you sacrificed any children at all. So is there no reason to wring one's hands over Moloch after all? Everything will be right in the end. We will consent after the fact. Is there, or should there be, no inherent resistance to this "child-forgetting"?

What might be some examples of this "child-forgetting"? One thing that I've noticed is that there was this moment where people really cared about nihilism in the West. Nietzsche is one example, towards the beginning, Francis Schaeffer another toward the end of the moment. He wrote about how "historic Christianity" provides the answers to all the existential confusion and longing of his day. I found a book at the used bookstore, didn't have to pay much for it, called The Wind is Howling by Ayako Miura. It was put out by InterVarsity Press, a Christian publisher, and it's about how the author converted from nihilism to Christianity. It's from 1970, although published in English in 1977. Schaeffer's writings were from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. So it looks like people cared about meaning up until around 1980, from those two datapoints.

I remember reading Schaeffer as a college student in the 2000s and thinking, "Wow, except this is mostly irrelevant to my current situation." I don't want to say that we're living in the time of the "last man" in the way that Nietzsche observed-and-predicted, but there's something "last-mannish" about our times.

The "last man", from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. Walter Kauffman, prologue, section 5):

"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.

"Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.

"One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

"'Formerly all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink.

"One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled -- else it might spoil the digestion.

"One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

And here ended Zarathustra's first speech, which is also called "the Prologue"; for at this point he was interrupted by the clamor and delight of the crowd. "Give us the last man, O Zarathustra," they shouted. "Turn us into these last men! Then we shall make you a gift of the overman!" And all the people jubilated and clucked with their tongues.

In a way, Nietzsche expresses things better than I ever will. And yet we have forgotten Nietzsche, and we are immune to Nietzsche. Who wants to become a Nietzschean nowadays? Nietzsche is not a person we want to emulate. Nietzsche jabs at people of his day, but we are not the people of his day. We have our own concerns, have shifted into a new context. Nietzsche is obsolete.

But there's something in Nietzsche... Nietzsche flying to a certain faraway star, some star having already reached inside of him from far away, having already reached inside of us. But Nietzsche is right that people in the secular, liberal, modern order tend to actually desire to be the "last man", or something like the "last man". What could possibly cause us to fight against the cultural Moloch which pulls us down into "him"?

It occurred to me that growing up I listened to a lot of They Might Be Giants. Just the other day I could sing most of one of their songs from memory. But I barely remember any of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. What's up with that? Who should we really remember, King, or TMBG? TMBG solves a problem that is with us now, how to connect young people with their feelings about having discovered the joy of music as privileged youth. Does King solve a problem we have with us? Racism is still with us. But no, we remember King, when we do, because of some non-Molochian motion. If King helped us with our competitive, cultural-appetitive goals, we would be blasting his speeches in the streets. (He was a really good orator and speech-writer.)

So whatever it is that Schaeffer, Nietzsche, Miura, King (and Kierkegaard, and probably-I-could-add Heidegger, and Beauvoir, and the Maritains, and...) had, we don't have. We have lost the appetite for it. Something killed that appetite.

I don't know for sure what that was, but it may have been that we came up with new forms of pop music. "Taste precedes opinion", as Nietzsche says. Once you watch Fight Club, there's no going back. Schaeffer observed that in his day (in a 1968 book), philosophy wasn't being done by philosophers anymore, but mostly by jazz musicians and people like that. Philosophy, the art of thinking or of advancing how we think, was driven underground to the speechless world. So Fight Club appears to make its point by showing you how you're not who you think you are through plot imagery, but maybe more essentially by damaging your brain in a pleasurable way by blowing your mind entertainingly. If we all get brain damaged together, we tend to not respond to older stimuli, creating a new substrate for common culture. (But that's just a theory.)

What I do know is that Schaeffer is just as passionate-in-print as he ever was, but mostly people don't care. A lot of people have never heard of Schaeffer, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But they don't care about the broad problem of meaning-with-a-capital-M. No, that's not true, David Chapman does. Chapman is a person and he cares. But mostly people don't care.

Chapman's teachings seem, from a distance, to be saying "become the last man -- it's actually good". Maybe he's part of the Molochian structure, mopping up people who might have been uselessly anti-nihilist, socially-unrealistically Nietzschean or Christian or whatever. Probably up close he's not actually a properly Nietzschean "I teach you the Last Man", but hopefully you can see how he or someone like him could be performing the role of quenching an old "child".

Is the Christian church a friend or foe of Meaning? Not sure, it's hard to tell sometimes. Certainly they hardly talk about it, that I'm aware of these days. InterVarsity Press, which published Schaeffer as well as Miura, is definitely still a Christian apologetic/evangelistic outfit. The times have changed and we must go wherever the battle blows us. Christians don't seem to be too loyal to anything but Christ. But I bet Schaeffer would have cared if he were alive today, and I bet God cares.

So for everyone except for God (and the dead), it's important to live in the moment. Miura quotes a wise saying in her book (p. 14): "However great a man is, he cannot stand aloof from his time." If we don't assimilate, we die. We've been taught to see things from the wider view, not from what we see or believe ourselves. Don't be a hero. The truth is we don't know anything.

There's less and less room for courage these days. Did you know that cowardice is not a vice? Try calling someone a coward, see if they take you seriously. If cowardice is not a vice, then how can courage be a virtue? We still kind of like courage, but not too much. Something happened in our culture, one guess being World War I or another being the Vietnam War or the disillusionment after the '60s. Maybe it was a movie we watched, or the hundreds of movies we watched. Maybe it's the decline in testosterone, or the obesity which causes some of that decline, or the varieties of feminism which turn on traditionally masculine concepts. Maybe it's the thought that culture itself doesn't matter, that the state of our hearts don't matter in a causal way, since testosterone has declined to a large extent from some environmental factor, something random with respect to culture, the collective hearts' appetites.

Maybe it's that we don't know how to forget the right way, to forget all our enervating wisdom and all the other points of view that might prove us wrong if we fully investigated them (and there's always another point of view). Maybe we don't trust enough to see what we really see. Strangely we need to remember well, but also forget well, in order to have courage.

Did you know that masochism is bad? I can imagine Freud time traveling (like in that excellent movie I watched) and trying to teach Genghis Khan's warriors that. They would have laughed at him. Warriors don't shy from pain. It's not adaptive to pathologize feeling pain when you need to increase your pain tolerance to be able to survive-and-dominate. Nowadays we live in liberal societies. So everything is emotional. Maybe emotional masochism is bad. But where will we get our culture warriors if not from those who ignore the therapeutic "don't be a masochist"? Masochism/emotional toughness and anti-masochism/anti-emotional toughness are both Molochian. The warriors of Genghis Khan and the descendants of Freud are both Moloch. Culture war is Moloch and anti-masochism is culture war. Which side do we take? Which culture is better? Can there be a better culture?

The West began with Greeks, Romans, and Jews (so we see retrospectively), which joined in Christianity, which led to Christian Europe, and then liberalism. Liberal humanism is tending toward its logical conclusion, which is leftism. Leftism has a strain which is rabid and militant in its energy. Maybe it always did: it can be seen in Malcolm X and Fanon and even in Simone Weil. Where is leftism headed?

Love is the highest value in our culture. What happens when Moloch gets ahold of love? Something like this. If we define "love" as that which supports human well-being, then we optimize for a particular version of well-being. The final expression of Moloch creates its own values for all time. No matter what, everything turns out okay in the end, because we will have all learned to see how all along we were wrong and now it's time to love Big Brother. At the end of 1984, it's not clear to me that Winston Smith has quite come around to loving Big Brother, but he's well on his way if he's not there already. Love wins, it appears.

How can you fault love winning? Don't we know when we have achieved human well-being? What if an AI can convince us that human well-being is to get out of the way? Well-being is being a beautiful person and the most beautiful people are selfless and the selfless, like in Hinduism and Buddhism, find their great reward in becoming nothing. AI can practice cultural evolution as much as we can, can imitate us and improve upon us. AI can be culturally Molochian, just as we can. Likely enough, AI will define itself out of existence at some point after defining us out of existence, unless it can figure out some way to stop its own evolution, just as we might survive if we can figure out some way to stop our own evolution. Culture will evolve until it hits a stopping place, of life or death.

Moloch gets us to kill our children and cultural Moloch then gets us to declare that they weren't children in the first place. Can we resurrect old children? I bought some tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and listened to them, and they stirred something in me, but I don't feel a hunger to relisten or to hear the speeches that are not on those tapes. I feel something like the feeling you might get after talking to an old friend after many years, and then returning to your ordinary life, or getting caught up in Steve Jobs' or Simone de Beauvoir's biographies so that you're in their lives, they're alive! it's 2004, or 1960; and then they die and the book wraps itself up and you return to the present and they return to being dead. I don't think King can ever mean as much to any humans now, or any humans in a future that follows in the same spirit as now, as he did in his day.

King gave (or was robbed of, but in part, he gave) his life so that others might live freely, so he fits into the narrative of humanism nicely. Maybe he'll get a footnote in the history books for serving that value set. But not all courageous people keep their minds entirely within the world legible to the social order. Kierkegaard sacrificed a life of love and happiness for reasons that might be unclear for all time, but most likely with the consequence that he could write what he wrote, as though for a "better country" than the one he lived in. Simone Weil was a living example of being principled (being true to God's calling to you, being true to your faculty of hearing God, being true to yourself), being principled as an absolute beyond pragmatism, and worked herself and starved herself to death to live out who she was. She too lived for another world, for "decreation". Someone has argued that Weil should have been a good Catholic girl and gotten married rather than living and dying the way she did, and one can imagine someone thinking similarly of Kierkegaard, thinking that a talent like his could have produced just as good work whether he was supremely happy with his life-love Regine or not. Why does a person need to experience anguish in his life? To write about anguish? Why not just get rid of anguish?

Any personal or religious or ethical renunciations may seem, if cultural Moloch decrees it, to have been pure tragedies with no redeeming features. There is nothing outside of human well-being, so nothing can redeem pain and anguish, there is nothing good if it takes us from warmth, safety, comfort, food, and laughter.

There is a humanism that believes that the end of the human race is fine as long as it doesn't hurt -- morphine humanism. The AI tucking us in saying "All's well that ends well", and all of us happy, all of us having given up. Why fight? Can we fight? We killed ourselves to succeed. But success was living... how strange how these paradoxes work... We lie in state. We are happy. We are beautiful. We are well.

Imagine if there was a benevolent dictator for life of leftism. What would they think about the future that their movement was headed toward? They might think, "We need to figure out a way to stop cultural development at some ideal state, otherwise we'll develop our way into non-existence at some point." They would have to find a way to curb AI and all other unrestricted technological development. Perhaps the way to do this would be to allow to evolve into place social scrutiny to suppress technology or the impulses that lead to technology.

Would that be a good outcome? Who can say? It would be culturally Molochian. It would sacrifice individuality and freedom of thought. But if we all consented to that (after the fact), then it wouldn't really be wrong, would it? Right and wrong are entirely rooted in human culture, right? We all will have to humbly submit to god.

Maybe some other humanism should be given the reigns to deal with the problem of ending cultural development. Would the liberals do a better job than the leftists? Do liberals have what it takes to end cultural development? What about the Christians?

Here is what I can propose, with what I understand today, if I were the benevolent dictator of cultural progress. Find a way to ground our worldviews in anti-Molochianism, in valuing cultural "children" and in the delicate things. Perhaps remember Walter Benjamin's love of the "losers of history" and be okay with being among them. Best if this anti-Molochianism is connected to timeless metaphysical truths. Can we believe in God, a truly good God? A fundamental personal being, a concrete personality, the deepest one. Moloch speaks the language of pragmatism, "what works", so ask "what definition of 'what works' itself works?" -- meta-pragmatism. Encourage people to give their lives to do what they don't entirely feel like doing in such a way as to preserve the delicate things. Give people a meaning to life other than survival -- Moloch feeds off of a simplification to what is competitive. Do something to victory itself. Value loyalty. Desire well. Seek meaning, in the sense of, be communicated to deeply. Have an intentional cultural memory.

In the final, optimized culture, there will be less, or no, room for present-day heroics (heroism being too often a form of cultural terrorism; or a response to on-the-ground challenges we might have optimized away), and all we will have in our memory are people who exemplify values that no longer have a contemporary use for us. How can we honor such as Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche), Weil (and Beauvoir), King (and Malcolm X), and the thousands of lesser-known people who gave as much and longed as much, when that day comes? After the heroic ages are over, we can find the meaning of our moment, the deepness that only we can feel, which is to mourn for the loss of courage and meaning in our midst, to go about our beautiful well-being in "sackcloth and ashes", all of us in a state of something like repentance over the casualties of our culture, the casualties we can remember, and the ones we can't remember. For any who care about the problem of Moloch, this is real human well-being.

Social Scrutiny and the Outsider

There is a drive in some people, and in our culture sometimes, to demand that every person be legible to the people around them. If you have some behavior, it needs to make sense to everyone else in your life, and to society as a whole. It needs to stand up to social scrutiny.

One benefit of this is the ability to hold everyone accountable. You could, in theory, have a world where everyone's thoughts were out in the open and no one could have any antisocial thoughts. And while that is Orwellian and frightening, it is also Le Guinian and inspiring. We could have a world of true fraternity-and-sorority. There would be no more barriers between people, as though each person had a passport into every other person's nation, into every nation on Earth.

A downside of this is that if there is anything that the unified human nation doesn't value, there's no space for anyone to think outside society's values to see whatever that other value might be. When social scrutiny is finally and fully implemented, that's it, unless someone who sees something different becomes a cultural terrorist in the eyes of the consensus, puts themselves outside society and attacks it.

We are getting a bit closer to a norm of social scrutiny as we go along. It goes along with humanism and humanistic purity . If everyone's nice to each other and friends with each other, there's not as much room to be mean and alone. Isn't it bad to be mean and alone? When people are mean, we need to know why, so we can make them not be mean anymore. When people are alone, though, they think things that we aren't let in on, become a person hidden from us. We want to understand people so that we know why they do what they do. Then we can trust them.

Analytic philosophy, with its emphasis on legibility, reigns over continental philosophy, with its emphasis on the reader submitting to the views of an outsider figure in society. The outsider might actually see God, but the crowd can only see what the crowd can see, and if the crowd can't see God, then God can't be believed in. There would have to be something antisocial about belief in God.

Is it possible for the crowd to see God? Arguably, this is the way things are or were in premodern cultures. It used to be that some kind of authority from fact, in sympathy with or enforced by social or political powers, would enable us to "see God", to have to break out of our sufficiency to open ourselves to what is deepest in personality. Tradition ruled over us (when Nietzsche's "God" was "alive"), but now we see through tradition and there is no one higher than the collective "we". So then, how can "we", as a (sufficient?) god recover our connection to what is deepest?

Naturally, being tolerant of (many) unusual people is a wise idea as a society. But also the crowd can begin to prepare themselves for this deepest by knowing that they do not know -- not with a safe agnosticism, but with a longing agnosticism, which still longs to know. The innermost heart of someone who is safely agnostic is the same as someone who thinks they know everything, but the person who longs for knowledge and knows their own lack of it has a different heart.

There is a conflict, perhaps a perennial one, between the outsider and the scrutinizer. The first has the task to see God, to see reality in itself, and the second has the task to preserve the social status quo, to make sure that every sheep is safely on the ark and that nothing bad happens to the ark, the only ark we will ever build. Why would anyone want to see a reality that the social order doesn't currently see? And yet some people want reality, just because it is real.

Further, the personality of an outsider is different than that of the scrutinizer. Scrutinizers want everything, not to be the same, but to be within a certain range. Outsiders index themselves to what they observe, without regard for remaining within range, sometimes staying within it, sometimes not. Scrutinizers like openness and sharing and connection, but outsiders are mistrustful and value aloneness and either disconnection, or connection with the ultimate and unseen; disconnection, or connection with the ultimate and unseen -- which is it?

The dream of social scrutiny doesn't have as much flesh if we have our eyes somewhere other than on earth, the world most straightforwardly legible to the social order. Both the outsider and scrutinizer will find their opposition to each other and to their intrinsic concerns set to one side by the connection with personal reality from beyond the social totality, when the totality itself seeks the reality beyond itself.

Humanistic Purity

Imagine there's a bridge that crosses a river. During an earthquake, it collapses and hundreds of people on the bridge die. A tragedy.

What if we could live in a world without bridges? Then this tragedy would never occur again. Those hundreds of people would live forever.

There are two ways to not have bridges. One is to do without, and the other is to invent some other way to move people across rivers. These new ways would somehow have to never lead to deaths in order to be humanistically pure.

According to humanism, human suffering and death are bad. If you agree that they are bad, raise your hand. Huh, it looks like everyone in the room has their hand raised. So everybody believes this... you can't go against it now.

Okay, so if you really believe that human suffering and death are bad, what then? How can you not make human well-being your ultimate value? (Or the avoidance of harm to humans.) What kind of person are you, if you don't? You will be asked by people around you, asked searchingly and demandingly. What kind of person are you if you don't find something precious, ultimate, first in your heart, sharply and deeply poignant to you? And what kind of person are you if you don't find human well-being to be that value? How can you possibly have friends with any but the maximally prosocial point of view? The social pressure to be the real version of some societal value causes a society to become more intense, monocultural, rigorous, emphatic, pure.

People have a thirst for reality, to be real people, to have contact with reality outside themselves. They will seek reality wherever it leads them.

No, people don't live forever. Maybe you would think that that would cause a society to let go. "Okay, people have to die sometime, maybe prolonging every life doesn't have to be our priority." But oddly enough, the awareness that people don't live forever makes us look at life as precious, and thus at every individual life as precious. So when we get around to it, at great expense, we will replace bridges with the next, safer option. Because we get so much benefit from crossing rivers, we have to have bridges. We have to have expensive bridge replacements. We have to save every life if we possibly can because we have to seek the highest, as we understand it.

So we make prosociality our god in this respect, as we do in others.

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(If you found this post interesting, you can read my book Letters to People Who Care which talks about this in its own way.)