Long Live Liberality

A Political Etiquette (§50-56)

(§1-7; §8-14; §15-21; §22-28; §29-35, §36-42; §43-49)

§50. To Compare Mythologies

It is worth remembering that most of us walk around assuming that we are right about everything under the wide blue sky. If we didn’t imagine that our worldviews were correct, then why would we continue to hold them? Every person is an entire self-contained, microcosmic world, and genuine dialogue involves suspending our own certainty and bracketing our own judgment, so that we may stand a chance of meeting the Other in the space between. Via such an etiquette, we can begin to compare mythologies, as the Poet says. Naturally, ideologues and fanatics of all stripes would be cognitively incapable of taking such a posture, too lost in their own psychical waters to zoom out and adopt even some modicum of perspective. A line of demarcation emerges among people, then, based not on “what” they believe, but rather how they believe it. There is fanaticism, and there is liberality of mind; there is ideology, and there is poetry. Only one of these pathways offers the possibility of actual communion, a meeting of hearts, as opposed to the spectral illusion of unity in the groupthink of the herd. And those who seek it might well hold more in common than they do with their alleged compatriots in their own visible tribes.

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§51. The Cold Shoulder

A crucial element of wisdom consists of becoming able to discern what conversations are not worth having, and then acting in accordance. What would be the purpose, exactly, of attempting any sort of dialogue with people who are incapable of comparing mythologies?; of having someone merely talk at us, understanding conversation only in terms of victory and defeat? There isn’t enough sand in the hourglass of any man’s life to get drawn into such utter futility and pointlessness. Those who are too drowned in their own solipsism can’t really be expected to understand that other human beings are real and alive just like them, with their own inner constellations of meaning and experience that inform their mental cartographies of the world. Incapable of seeing the shape of their own waters, they imagine that they perceive reality objectively and in a self-evident manner; and they can’t comprehend why anyone would be so offensive and dense as to not see things in the selfsame obvious way. There is nothing for us to do but let such barbarians vent and then give them a cold and silent shoulder. We should not be tempted by this simulacrum of language to imagine that any actual communication is possible in such a scenario.

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§52. A Positive Achievement

Liberality of mind is a positive achievement, as is the liberal society that can emerge from it. The ethos of “live and let live” is highly unusual and not at all the default condition for our human species; what’s common, instead, is to kill the tribal others and then steal their stuff. There is a false, anemic liberality that emerges simply out of weary indifference, a willingness to tolerate everything because we are drained of the requisite passion to object to anything at all. Such a liberality will be overrun and annihilated in short order, for the tribalists do not likewise suffer from such apathy. What’s needed is a strong, vital, exclusionary liberality that understands itself as a great virtue worthy of defense, and which will not tolerate threats to its own ongoing existence. And thus emerges the paradox that one cannot be liberal with the illiberal, for the latter will use liberality against itself, destroy it from within. Ugly as the truth of it is, liberality and tribalism are mutually exclusive mental and social postures, locked in mortal antagonism with each other. And if the partisans of liberality have no will to defend themselves, then that blood in the water will only serve to make the tribalists all too filled with glee.

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§53. Heirs to the Inheritance

A free society, if we can keep it: that’s how this game works. A baseline level of intelligence and cultivation is needed to sustain a liberal order—for again, liberality is premised on a capacity to take different perspectives, regulate one’s emotions, refrain from the 24/7 pursuit of one’s own impulses to self-assertion and violence. As such, a liberal society cannot possibly tolerate ideologies that seek nothing other than the erasure of this critical and rational space, gnawing away at it like termites at wood. Our world is filled with entire populations and tribes that are not only incapable of liberality, but also perceive it in others as a weakness to be exploited. And for those among us who value freedom, perhaps this capacity itself should be none other than the line we draw to mark off the barbarians from the citizens. We must not be sentimental about such matters. Like all monumental creative achievements, a free society is difficult to build and easy to destroy We may raise a question, then, about what it takes to be worthy of liberality, and what sort of people we must become to serve as its legitimate heirs—which also implies that some, maybe many, should be regarded as bastards with no share in the inheritance.

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§54. Diabolical Inversion

Liberality is a praxis, a matter of the moment-by-moment navigation of life in a way that keeps open the space between us. But poetic praxis can easily morph into spectral ideology, as we have seen all too well by now. People begin to tolerate only those who agree with them, which is not tolerance at all—a concept reserved not for allies and friends, but for people who might otherwise provoke us to violence. Words become mere rhetoric, eviscerated of all semantic content. This bait-and-switch is a diabolical inversion, a demonic parody; it draws the line entirely in the wrong place, turning liberality itself into yet another, particularly vicious tribe unto itself. True liberality is vertical, operating from a higher conceptual ground; its intolerance is reserved not for any ideas in particular, but only for a way of thinking that would render all further thought impossible. The empirical survival of liberality depends on its ability to repel tribalists who hold it in contempt. But then the terms of the dynamic—”liberal,” “tribal”—can become twisted beyond recognition by opportunists who will use emotionally resonant words as skinsuits for their own tribal projects. We need a way to parry this threat.

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§55. Foundation Stone

Liberality can’t defend itself on its own terms, and it can’t survive without an anchor in the Logos, some rooting in the Torah that permeates all of the Creation. The Logos became man as Jesus, of course; but through Him all things were made, and His logic is also dug into the base code of all that is. Some, such as the Sage of the Tao, intuited the Logos almost to perfection before He ever entered our fleshy realm by Mary’s Gate. A liberal society doesn’t depend on the institutional religion called “Christianity” per se, but it does rely utterly upon a people who have some baseline intuition of the Logos, and who allow that intuition to shape their relations with each other and the laws that rule their lands; a people who sense the moral structure within all things and seek to harmonize with its mandate. In a capsule formula, we can say that the preservation of liberality requires the capacity to long for the Gospel, the will to respect the Torah, and the desire to avert the Abyss. The Logos is the foundation stone of all freedom, and among peoples who have disdain for Him, it is inevitable that all will crumble into tribalism, sooner or later, and sooner than they expect.

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§56. The New Evangelism

It is safe to assume that the Great Commission has been fulfilled, and that just about literally everyone on the planet has now heard the name of Jesus: we mark the years of our calendar by the Man, after all. And yet we still are at the impasse where we are. More than that, some Christians are the most spectral and ideological of those among us, the least capable of keeping open the space to compare mythologies. Clearly, something has gone horribly wrong. We’re at a juncture now where we need to develop cross-sectional discernment across tribes, a type of real-time owl sight, peering into the dark beneath the shiny surface labels to identify the structure and not merely the content of any given person’s mind. We affirm that the new evangelism will first of all have to do with the conversion of all the peoples of the earth to a poetic structure of mind, and away from spectral delusion. Somewhat apart from Christianity as an institutional religion, then, the Everlasting Gospel is the anti-religion, the apotheosis and fulfillment of all presence; just as it the final repudiation of all ideology and specter. And we suppose that institutions as we currently know them can choose their allegiance, adapt or decay.