With Good Reason The Dualisms of our Age

Feb 3, 2009

More than any one thing President Obama said during his inauguration speech (it certainly was not a speech to be remembered), what sticks in my mind two weeks later were those sweeping pan shots of the crowds, the two million or so who stood on the National Mall, braving the bitter cold of winter, to "experience" that "moment."

 

As I contemplated them, the thought did occur to me that, yes, we continue to be more than ever a divided country, not withstanding Obama's proclamation of January 20 as a national day of "renewal and reconciliation."

 

I know: the "divided country" thing is a well worn cliché by now.  But it remains an in-your-face truth:  We are divided on the issues that count most to us, top on the list being abortion; the nature of traditional marriage and its associated privileges; sexuality; the role of religious expression in public life. 

 

But as I looked upon those crowds, what began to dominate my reflections were not the divisions along the conservative-liberal fault lines. My sudden sense of concern was not about the divisions between persons, but those within them. They run deep and wide. Anyone -- no matter what their politics, religion or perspective on social issues -- could have succumbed to them just by being born in the 20th century.

 

We are all children of the Enlightenment. It's in our blood.  It's in our culture and in our education. It's been there since the earliest settlements were established on our eastern shores.

 

The problem is that very recent cultural phenomena exacerbate the lingering after-effects of the Enlightenment worldview that has percolated into the most fundamental ethos of our western way of life.

 

Now, I am not one to denounce the Enlightenment wholesale.  Many good things emerged from this period and from those whose intellects were forged and informed with the tenets of that age. Not least among them are the Declaration of Independence and more energized conceptions of universal human rights and human dignity (although the Enlightenment can't claim absolute authorship of either, as they are of fundamentally Christian origin). 

 

But the Enlightenment has been the root source of much of our cultural darkness as well.  Ideas, indeed, have consequences.  The philosophical and cultural aftermath of the worst of Enlightenment thought has played this truth out rather extensively. 

 

It was during this period that the classical notion of the ordered and meaning-drenched kosmos or natural universe (of which we were an intimate part) was reduced to our modern notion of "nature," as that vast whole of objects that surrounds me -- the autonomous "self."

 

In the modern conception, this autonomous-detached, third-person-observer self exists in a kind of metaphysical distance and independence from "nature." This sets the stage for the rise of thinkers -- principally Francis Bacon and, with greater refinement, René Descartes -- who will prophetically announce a new age in which these detached selves will tame and control nature.

 

Descartes of course, with his dualistic conception of the human person as an immaterial self which simply uses a body, is the point of origin for the painful dualisms which have had such a pervasive and devastating impact on modernity.  Whether we like it or not, even four centuries removed, we all are born into this world as Cartesians. And it is only with great mental effort that some of us are able to free ourselves from the matrix of Cartesian-like dualisms that have informed our deepest self-understanding in the West.

 

So this is the fear that gripped me as I contemplated the crowds on inauguration day:  I was looking out onto a sea of closet Cartesians, of self-body dualists, who, unbeknownst to them, hold convictions, define moral tenets, and set their values in allegiance to philosophical dictums they've soaked up since Kindergarten.

  

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What am I getting at?

 

The thing that's Cartesian in most Westerners is how they understand themselves as, primarily, a conscious self -- an ego-self that exists in many subtle ways detached from any kind of a meaningful whole. The ego -- lived and understood in this way as this detached, third-person observer of reality -- readily becomes the autonomous arbiter of what-there-is, and over time the very creator of "values," "morals," and or "reality" itself.

 

Richard Weaver, the man who, in fact, coined the expression "ideas have consequences" when he used it as the title of his now famous 1948 book, could not have been more prescient when he wrote in his introduction to that work:

 

Yet the real trouble is found to lie deeper than this. It is the appalling problem... of getting men to distinguish between better and worse... So few are those who care to examine their lives, or to accept the rebuke which comes of admitting that our present state may be a fallen state, that one questions whether people now understand what is meant by the superiority of an ideal. One might expect abstract reasoning to be lost upon them; but what is [one] to think when attestations of the most concrete kind are set before them, and they are still powerless to make a difference or to draw a lesson? For four centuries every man has been not only his own priest but his own professor of ethics, and the consequence is an anarchy which threatens even that minimum consensus of value necessary to the political state.

 

 

And it was to the Cartesian self, this absolute point of all reference, that Supreme Court Justice Anthony Kennedy once penned a hymn of admiration, and a declaration of its omnipotence, when he wrote in the majority opinion in the Court's 1992 ruling in Planned Parenthood vs. Casey: "At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life."

 

At the heart, that is, of the Cartesian ego-self.

 

Such is the legacy of Cartesian dualism. And in multiple ways our self-understanding has succumbed to multiple dualisms; mind/body or self/others dualism is only the beginning.  Dualisms come about through erroneous convictions about our existence -- which often never even rise to the level of philosophically held convictions -- leading us to live as if certain dimensions of our being were somehow set asunder, separated one from the other as if substantially distinct.

 

In this regard, Descartes's philosophical insistence on the separation (understood as separateness) of mind from body is the proverbial mouth of the Mississippi and mother of all dualisms which afflict our culture. To point out just a few that follow from self-body dualism we might consider:

 

The separation of self from choices and actions: the disconnect our culture has introduced between personal free choice and who we are and who we become ("If no one gets hurt by my choice, why is it wrong?"

 

The separation of self from relationships: the capacity culture has engendered in us to be "in" relationships while never corresponding to the other participant in that relationship with a full and unconditional giving of ourselves.  

 

The separation of self from community: the utter isolationism in which far too many Westerners live; the understanding of "community" as that conglomerate of isolated selves who simply work together to assure mutual and easy access to one's inner world of personal preferences while simply maintaining boundaries, policies, laws and regulations designed primarily to facilitate the latter.

 

The separation of self from sex: the frighteningly common experience of persons for whom recreational sex has now become unnaturally separated from the intense personal involvement it is meant to engender, and which is lived as if it were some passing amusement meant to leave no more impression on oneself than any other passing thrill. This has led tragically to further devastating psychological bifurcations:  the separation of sex from marriage, the separation of procreation from sex, and the separation of sex from its emotional consequences.

 

I hope to be writing about each of these in greater detail in coming weeks.

 

Admittedly, not everyone in attendance on January 20 fits this description. But far too many of them do. The dualisms of our age are a philosophical illness that crosses red-blue, liberal-conservative lines.  And as the after-glow of that hot and heavy messianic aura of Barack Obama's presidential campaign now meets the fire-hose of reality, we can be sure there is one thing that politics alone is not going to fix: the deeper divisions of our country, the dualistic internal divisions which so painfully define who most of us are.