The open air of human nature

My Project 2025

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins

New year’s greetings from a not-so-sunny South Africa!

On Christmas Day, I attended church with my parents and brother. After the service, my mother told me about the family sitting two pews behind us: the woman is blind, her husband suffers from multiple sclerosis; they have a small child. Thinking about how difficult their lives must be, I was filled with shame about how ungrateful I can be when life fails to live up to my self-aggrandising expectations, but also with a familiar, pointless rage at the idea of a benevolent Creator.¹

On the plane over, I started listening to David Bentley Hart’s All Things Are Full of Gods: The Mysteries of Mind and Life, an argument for absolute idealism written in the form of a Platonic dialogue. Despite my notorious insistence on grappling with the material limitations of human life, I find panpsychism to be as good an explanation as any for the hard problem of consciousness. This leaves the door wide open for God, or gods, but it doesn’t solve any of the problems of theodicy.

Whatever one’s explanation for the existence of evil and suffering, the question remains what to do about it. I am reminded of the following observation by Oliver Burkeman in a review of everyone’s favourite Jungian acolyte’s previous book:

The confused public conversation about Peterson arises, if you ask me, from the fact that there are two main kinds of suffering. There is the kind that results from power disparities between groups: racism, sexism, economic inequality. Then there is the universal kind that comes with being a finite human, faced with a limited lifespan, the inevitability of death, the unavoidability of grief and regret, the inability to control the present or predict the future and the impossibility of ever fully knowing even those to whom we’re closest. Modern progressives rightly focus much energy on the first kind of suffering. But we increasingly talk as if the second kind barely counts, or doesn’t even exist – as if everything that truly matters were ultimately political. Peterson, by contrast, takes the second sort of suffering very seriously indeed.

Let me hasten to add that it is not only modern progressives who engage in such political scapegoating. Whether the target is capitalism, statism or modern technology, it is worth remembering that all these Faustian bargains were made in response to the fragility of human existence.

The case of Peterson is a cautionary tale of the perils of taking the inevitability of suffering very seriously (especially in a culture which is hell-bent on denying it). These dangers also lurk in the more traditionally religious responses to suffering, as Murdoch observes in Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (which will be a key text in my reflections this year):

Religion is about reconciliation and forgiveness and renewal of life and salvation from sin and despair. It lives between cosy sentiment and magic at one end of the scale and at the other a kind of austerity which can scarcely be expected from human beings. As an institution, religion may covertly recognise that the highest teaching is for the few only. A subtle form of sentimentality is sadomasochism, whereby popular religion is infected by bad tragedy; a degeneration to which Christianity is particularly subject. The idea of redemptive suffering is difficult and ambiguous: a cult of redemptive suffering may become a cult of suffering.

As hopes for political salvation dwindle for all but the most hardened ideologues (unfortunately not an insignificant number), the intellectual vibeshift away from materialism continues apace. Cynically or not, The Free Press wants to assure their readers that they are totally cool with Jesus, although other Jewish intellectuals insist on drawing a line in the sand. There are prophesies of a Gnostic revival, while tech-gnostic pop princess Grimes turns towards Christianity to stop vaping.

I’m all for metaphysical exploration, but wherever one lands in one’s beliefs, one would still be at odds with the majority of the world. Since we all — Jews and Christians, Hindus and Muslims, Dawkinsians and WitchTokkers alike — have to share this planet, it remains a philosophical priority to find some common moral ground. The concept of Judeao-Christian values is often deployed in bad faith and is conspicuous in what it leaves out, but it still represents a vital improvement on millennia of enmity and should serve as an inspiration for further expanding the circle of mutual understanding.

I’m not suggesting that we can take the best bits of every religion, glom them together and achieve world peace (indeed, an attempt to establish the religion to end all religions sounds like the premise for a story where things quickly go horribly wrong). But I suspect there is much we can learn from any sincere attempt at answering life’s thorniest questions, if our approach is one of sceptical curiosity rather than either credulity or scorn.

In an exchange with

Gnocchic Apocryphon

on whether or not “a spiritual need, a metaphysical void in the modern human condition” is a particularly Western affliction,

William Lambert

helpfully pointed me to Kitaro Nishida’s An Inquiry into the Good as an Eastern attempt at integrating Western and Eastern philosophy.²

Nishida draws heavily on the work of William James, whose pragmatism and “radical empiricism” can offer a much-needed corrective to both the dryness of contemporary academic philosophy and the theory-inspired doctrines that have wrecked havoc on our ability to understand others — and ourselves. What James writes in A Pluralistic Universe is true not just of Germany:

In a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with the open air of human nature, and to think in terms of shop-tradition only. In Germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book, however distorted and eccentric, has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the subject like a fly in amber.

As I could never be one of those Substackers able to write about the seven thousand books that I have read this year, I will attempt, through the reading and writing that I am able to do, to find pathways back into the open air.

There is every reason to believe that successive versions of the Internet will, like previous advances in communication technology, serve mainly to propagate religious fundamentalism, political polarisation and increasingly varied forms of pornography. The task of those of us who feel compelled to rise above this is the same as it ever was: to keep the candle burning.³

In the meantime, please enjoy some pictures I took on this trip which support Houellebecq’s contention that it is much easier to believe in God in the countryside than in the city.

1. Apologies for starting off the new year on such a morbid note, but regular readers have probably come to expect this kind of thing from the M.J.E. experience.

2. Together with the age-old problems of parochialism, prejudice and the difficulties of cross-cultural understanding, many Western thinkers now appear to be so weary of Orientalism that they opt for a lazy universalism rather than grappling with substantial differences in worldviews. Colonial guilt probably plays an even bigger role in preventing an open-minded, but critical, investigation into the traditions of the global South.

3. Happy Hanukkah to my Jewish and Jewish heretical readers alike!