The Mystics of Progress (2023)
isaacyoung.substack.com
isaacyoung.substack.com
This is a typical viewpoint from self-described "rational people" (which is always a red flag, side note) and is more of a consequence of historical ideas, ironically many of which have their roots in the religious beliefs the rationalists are supposedly escaping from.
As a quick example: this viewpoint often says something like, "Human civilization and the individual human being are insignificant because we are so small compared to the vast universe, and live for such short periods of time compared to the age of the universe."
But there are two very human biases on display here: the idea that occupying large amounts of physical space is indicative of "importance"; and that things which exist for long durations of time are inherently more valuable. These are human biases and there any many examples in nature of the exact opposite being true.
These biases are better explained by human corporeality ("big empire = more powerful") and the human desire for an unlimited lifespan (which has a long history in religious thought.)
It's my opinion that one of the most difficult problems facing Western/global civilization is the construction of a belief system that understands this flaw of nihilism and presents a strong argument for the alternative, factoring in scientific knowledge that has shaken up society since the 1600s.
Do you have any suggestions for this future belief system?
Where I would start, though, is by trying to “re-center” humanity in the universe in a way that is logically and scientifically justifiable, against the widespread belief that we’re just lost in space. If you could do that, you’d have a strong step toward making the life of an average person have a kind of cosmic significance that was more prevent in older religious times.
Nietzsche is good reading for this, as I think he correctly diagnoses the issue. His solutions are a bit vague or too personal and not systematic enough though.
> Stories need heroes and villains, otherwise you have no story at all.
This is completely untrue and speaks volumes towards the cultural failures of today's storytellers to offer a true alternative to Judeo-Christian frames. What stories need is conflict, not to collect all virtues into one character and all vices into that character's antagonist. And there are plenty of modern screenplays that feature non-heroic and non-villainous primary characters. The main one I'm thinking of is Billions. And stories where there are no heroes at all, I count Ozark in this category.
It could well be argued that a true alternative to religious determination could never be found in the morality play, which was invented in medieval Europe specifically to teach Christian values. It's taken over modern storytelling and only repackages Christian morals, nothing about science fiction, space opera or that other descendent of the morality play, fantasy, could ever escape the strictures of the form. By forcing heroes into a hero's journey in order to tackle a great evil, you're just telling old stories with new faces.
I would argue that if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
Of course, you'd need postmodern analytical skills in order to get anything out of postmodern explorations, and that just might be too much to ask today's audience with it's rapidly vanishing liberal arts skills.
> What if your life could be a video game?
Stephenson played with the theme, poorly. In both books where this was a thing, the video game was mostly treated as an afterthought while all the real plot action happened irl. The true exploration of this concept happened in Ready Player One where the video game really did truly take over society. What did this do to the plot and narrative? Nothing meaningful. It doesn't seem to matter at all what setting human conflict takes place in.
Banks toyed with this concept as well but the most fleshed out version simply imagined a galaxy-wide holy war that was fought in the virtual world by the folks truly interested in either maintaining the status quo or obliterating VR worlds whose purpose was the eternal torture of living beings. Nothing post-Christian about that.
What you describe better fits a dualistic Manichean view of the world than a Christian one. In an authentically Christian world view, which presupposes a natural law view knowable by unaided reason and one which predates Christianity, evil is the privation of the good, not something in its own right. When there is conflict between good and evil, it is not a conflict between two equal adversaries. Satan is not the evil God opposed to the good God. There is but one God, which is synonymous with Goodness itself; to be anti-God, anti-Christ is to be anti-Being, and one's own greatest enemy. Satan (and the other fallen angels) is rather a finite creature, more similar to Man than he is to God, who, out of his pride and disgust with the idea that God would become incarnate and suffer and die for the sake of His creation out of perfect love, that a human—which is to say, a spiritual animal—would become Queen of Heaven, that he, a superior angelic intellect and vastly more powerful being than any Man, would need to bow before such an animal exalted by God to better manifest His own divinity through them, chose to reject the meaning of his own being, his own purpose, rather than serve. "Non serviam!" Pride made one of the brightest creatures one of the most foolish by a free act, for there is nothing more stupid than refusing to submit to the truth because it goes against your own inflated self-importance.
And because all human beings are morally compromised and mixed, and the thin line between good and evil runs down the middle of every human heart, the Christian narrative can become arbitrarily complex, without falling into relativism and nihilism. We can tell stories with very clearly defined heroes and villains, yes, and these serve a purpose. But we can also entertain arbitrarily complex characters whose narrative gravitas depends on tragic flaws juxtaposed with flickers of virtue and demonstrations of moral progress and virtue. Man cannot save himself, and dies a sinner and a fool, but within his crippled state, yes, we can see his capacity choose good over evil, to make moral greatness with divine assistance. This is one of the most inspiring elements, and it resonates very deeply for a reason. Take a look at the Divine Comedy. Is Dante presented as a hero opposed to some great villain? No! Rather, the story begins with the Inferno, where Dante himself can be seen as the villain, the prodigal son. It is the story of repentance, the moral journey of recognizing one's own moral failings, one's own sinfulness, and turning away from it toward the good. And the journey, symbolically, is not an easy one. He must pass through Hell and Purgatory before he can arrive in Heaven. It is the story of the villain making his way back to the light, which is compounded. The ultimate villain in the Christian view is one's own sin. It is the pagan world that was wracked and obsessed with scapegoating the other to appease the guilty conscience. It was the Crucifixion that took that scapegoating impulse and transfigured it. It is the figure of Christ that achieves what all the scapegoating sought in vain through the only possible perfect sacrifice, and through it, an eternal life of participation in the inexhaustible divine nature, what is known as the Beatific Vision.
Man, born into sin, is reconciled with his Creator. The evil of creatures is permitted by God to manifest still greater good.
I mean, from a narrative perspective, you cannot do better that that. Denying it denies the human spirit, and produces a sickly and bland anthropology that inspires no one. Hence, the banality of modern attempts to construct all sorts of silly myths, all of which lead to death. To riff on Zygmunt Bauman, Nazism and Bolshevism were not aberrations, but where modernity leads. And to borrow a Voegelinian phrase, they attempt to immanentize the eschaton, because that is what modernity is forced to do, futile as it is, lest it collapse into frank and unvarnished nihilism. An honest, world-weary, postmodernist cynic could at least admit that the only way this deep and intrinsic human telos ordered toward divinity, toward deification, can be sublimated is through Christ. The only other alternative is to accept the absurdity of human nature, the futility and pointlessness of our existence, a road that ends only in death and despair.
So that's why, as the residual and imperfect hold of Christianity fades from the Western imagination, storytelling will become increasingly boring. No great works await us. Without telos, there is no story, only absurdity.
> if you really want to imagine post-Christian storytelling, you need to get away from heroes and villains entirely, and reframe the conflict in terms that aren't good and evil-focused. When I look that up in the encyclopedia in my head, it lands on romance. The conflict here forces both main characters to develop positive character traits, and gets completely away from good and evil.
"Positive traits" is just another way of saying "good qualities and virtues", and therefore a matter of morality again. You cannot escape morality. Every decision, no matter how trivial, is by its very nature a moral act. You can choose what you see as the objectively good, or you can choose something other than what you know you should. And the virtues are the habits that allow us to choose better and to do so consistently.
Six of one, half a dozen of the other. The morality play was invented by Christians, by the time that happened, Manichaeism was long gone. Personifying evil had long been in the imagination of the peoples of the near-East and it shouldn't be so surprising that it would crop back up in culture.
> Denying it denies the human spirit, and produces a sickly and bland anthropology that inspires no one.
I would argue that the constant drumbeat of Christ-like figures in fiction inspires more eye rolls than attempts to incorporate non-Western moral frameworks into stories. Black Panther is probably the most interesting MCU franchise as a result. Precisely because it reimagines an African nation on technological and economic parity with the West, we get an opportunity to re-examine morality that isn't Christian.
> No great works await us.
I think this is unnecessarily pessimistic and overstates the importance of the divine sacrifice to fiction. If you've just landed on one set of works as the only works to bother trying to enjoy, all you're really accomplishing is snobbishness. The story of Jesus' sacrifice is indeed a great one, and it's mined for fictive influence all the time, but you know what else gets the same treatment? Job. Most of these imaginings of evil God doesn't ultimately stem from gnostic cosmology, but rather from Job. The difference is that in the end, all the adversary's scheming and machinations result in elevating and improving the protagonist.
> You cannot escape morality.
Sure, but you make a worse mistake when you attribute all of it to Christianity. Ethical monotheism is a useful theology, but where it can lead is to justification of slavery and oppression, the antithesis to Jesus' objective.
I enjoy romance anime, and it's very refreshing to observe other cultures' moral imaginings. There's a different storytelling language at play, stemming from Japan's unique blend of natural religion, its own philosophical tradition, and the Christianity that merely influences Japanese thought, it doesn't swim in savior narrative like the West's cultural canon.
And it's pretty far from being "increasingly boring".
Really? I see Japanese works with as much if not more savior narrative than western’s.
Maybe you don’t see it due to you mostly consuming romance anime, have you also tried western romance?
It’s well-written and sincerely felt. But like a lot of conservative tracts, for me, it only makes sense if you already feel as the author does. If you have a deep longing to be a soldier obeying divine commands it’s obvious, obvious, that Star Trek is hopelessly inadequate. If you imagine that once upon a time, the universe was well-ordered and filled with light, then of course the grey present is disappointing.
I had a look at other works by this author. He is particularly ticked off by how “wokeism” infects everything now, especially his beloved sci-fi/game universes. For him, the loss of transcendent meaning in culture is intimately bound up with the traitorous inclusion of women in some aspect of Warhammer that I honestly can’t be bothered to investigate.
On a personal note, I too was raised in a very Catholic environment. I do not understand the nostalgia. The worship of science may have produced gods that failed. The gods of religions like Catholicism not only failed, but were never there at all.
The thing that this author apparently cherishes the most - a childhood with exciting visions of the future - is itself a product of modernity. There was no sheltered childhood, no books and stories made particularly for the imaginative adolescent, before the modern period. In the bleak husbandry of Christian religions, women, children, and lesser peoples were property.
TLDR if the Catholic Church was able to run things the way they truly want, you wouldn’t have Warhammer or video games at all. They’d have slapped you upside the head, given you a book of the lives of the saints, and told you to say thirty Our Fathers in penance for wanting anything more.
So the argument against games because social media is bad seemed to me invalid or very weak. It's true there are predatory practices in the digital world and including games very significantly. So there are predatory practices anywhere you look, including in beautiful beaches and paradisaical places -- and we have to remain watchful against them. I think that would be throwing the baby with the bathwater to discredit this entirely. The digital world does afford adventures and I think that's a distinct advantage of it (and adventures that don't require us killing ourselves, stealing from each other or from other people, suffering terribly on occasion, etc.). I think this is a point only younger generations which got to know the extent to which digital worlds can be compelling first hand get. Again, there are compelling things to do IRL also[1], and spending too much time doing anything unsustainable is again a bad idea. But as we have more material resources available, that seems in the direction of a good future of adventure we dreamed, but adventures consistent with peace and sustainability, and adventures intrinsically well designed with the principles of meaning, fun, joy, etc..
I honestly understand there may be an allure to the assumption that you have to "bear torture and suffer IRL" for life to have meaning (that kind of evokes being an Idea Of The Devil :P regardless of being religious or not). Which for me just obviously isn't true; my most cherished moments were peaceful, moments of awe, wonder, occasionally exciting and engaging, never intense suffering struck me as particularly meaningful for my life (if occasionally unfortunately necessary).
I think we can have adventures that isn't just la-la land, because challenges are intrinsically interesting, but also where we design things carefully so that adventures, both IRL (which include things we might have to/should do, like work, community management, political activity) and importantly the ones we design, don't have just meaningless suffering but are really meaningful, engaging (a challenge compatible[2] with our capabilities), beautiful, etc..
[1] I particularly defend getting to know nature, and having safe adventures in nature. I don't even think you have to go very far, to appreciate local flora and animals. But there are limitations (including damaging where you visit, if everyone decided to visit a certain region) and logistical difficulties. I don't think any exclusionary attitude is warranted -- let's see how each thing we can do is and how it aligns with our principles and fundamental principles of a good life.
[2] I think the term compatibility is very applicable, designing activities that are compatible with our cognitive characteristics and features of our cognition.
Yes, that's correct.
> There was no justice in the world, and mercy was just the delusion of fools.
You're allowed to be as just and/or merciful as you like. In fact it's encouraged. Just don't expect it from inanimate objects.
> Man was a small being in a cold universe.
OK, and?