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“…this situation is highly volatile, because those in the periphery are increasingly aware that the prosperity of the core is purchased at their expense. ”
Morris Berman (Twilight of American Culture)

“What is the use of free expression to people so frightened of the future that they prefer the comforts of the authoritative lie? ”
Lewis H. Lapham. (Age of Folly).

“Hence the disappearance of the maxim and the proverb, which were the guise in which experience stood as authority. The slogan, which has replaced them, is the proverb of humankind to whom experience is lost.”
Giorgio Agamben (Infancy and History)

“It is the loss of control of the self over the self-object that leads to the fragmentation…and, in further development, to the ascendancy and entrenchment of chronic narcissistic rage.”
Heinz Kohut (The Restoration of the Self)

One could with some justification cite the mid 1970s as the sort of watershed for Imperial decline in the West. Certainly that is a justifiable guess if speaking of the U.S. It was what John Cassidy called the end of “picket fence America…”. The picket fence was replaced with something else, something closer to what Cassidy calls a “a small staircase”. Morris Berman cites several factors that indicate decline and civilizational collapse, and one of the factors is a spiritual collapse. And it is that which I think worth exploring.

The disappearance of jobs, the widening of income inequality, and the precipitous increase in anxiety and fear in the population is almost now a given. Nobody hides this information anymore, not even the Wall St. Journal.

“When the past no longer illuminates the future, the spirit walks in darkness.”
Alexis de Tocqueville

“The pursuit of silence, likewise, is dissimilar from most other pursuits in that it generally begins with a surrender of the chase, the abandonment of efforts to impose our will and vision on the world. ”
George Prochnik (In Pursuit of Silence).

The loss of the spiritual (a word in need of defining, and more on that below) is best exemplified today by the assaults of sound, or noise. Neuroscientists point less toward loud construction sounds or jet aircraft than they do about the relentless noise of electronic gadgetry. And it was not single jolts of noise but rather exposure to the duration of noises produced by nearly everything in daily use in advanced Western societies. In Prochnik’s book he quotes a Trappist monk…“Monks live in the desert,” Alberic told me, after we’d driven back to the monastery and had a chance to sit down together. “These giant, snow-covered fields are the desert. It’s where monks have always been drawn. We come for a radical confrontation with ourselves.” The Brother adds a bit later that he felt the troops of the first Gulf War had waited in the desert for what was, for them, an unusually long time …that they had faced the front edges of something that caused them deep unease. “Americans don’t sit in a quiet, solitary place and flourish. They were starting to have a monastic experience. And that doesn’t jibe well with the military’s goals.”

The Desert Fathers, those early 4th century A.D. christian hermits who wandered or lived in small enclaves, in what is today Egypt, Palestine (sic), Saudi Arabia and Jordan, even to Iran, were the first monastics, really. And it is worth a short reexamination of these men, for they were practising something like what we think of today as a simple life of shared work, personal reflection, and a search for spiritual revelation. And two things strike one about the Desert Fathers; the first is the desert played an enormous foundational role in their sense of religious mystery, and second, the importance of silence. And additionally, that these were essentially anarcho-socialist groups. The Abbots (which at time meant only one who had reached purity of heart…and nobody voted on this or anything. It was more, oh, well, yeah, everyone knows Aleric is pure) helped the novices and brethren — those on the path but still young or lacking experience — and answered questions. The hermits did not shy away from visitors but neither did they encourage them. And all of them distrusted verbal communication. Their idea of the spiritual was bound up with the practical, with making life easy and not difficult. Part of purity was learning that.

I also have always felt a clear and deep connection between the Hermitage and the artwork. All great painting –on some level — takes place or expresses somehow , the desert. And the hermitage.. All great writing does, too, but that is more complicated (see below). So whether it is Rothko or Agnes Martin, or Jan Van Eyck or El Greco — work is inspired by and in some dialectical fashion is expressing our personal deserts, if not also, or instead of, the real desert. All monks, Buddhist or Jain or Zen — all have monastic traditions. Some are more corrupted, more and earlier (I think much Tibetan buddhism is such a case). There is no real difficulty in seeing the corrupted from the uncorrupted. The point is that revelation or awakening is revealed in expanse. Moby Dick is a book of the desert. It is a book of expansion, both personal and interior, as well as political and historical. Shakespeare is the same. The Tempest is about expansion and the costs of contraction.

“To seek a union with God that would imply complete separation, in spirit as well as in body from all the rest of mankind, would be to a Christian saint not only absurd but the very opposite of sanctity. Isolation in the self, inability to go out of oneself to others, would mean incapacity for any form of self-transcendence”
Thomas Merton. (The Wisdom of the Desert.)

The instrumentalization of culture is also the coercion to isolation. The noise of gadgets, the digital screen interface, the artificial urgency of truncated communication, all of this is toward a training in consumerism and a discouragement to actual solitude. But not just solitude, for it also, of course, a means to destroy community. Isolation not solitude. The monastic reflection is a mind set not given to purchasing anything. This was the problem that 20th century film producers and distributors saw, difficult challenging film killed off the desire to buy things as one left the mall.

“I am not afraid to state that to be a child of God is to be a child of silence. “
Cardinal Robert Sarah

“Finally, the proximate end of all this striving was “purity of heart” – a clear unobstructed vision of the true state of affairs, an intuitive grasp of one’s own inner reality as anchored, or rather lost, in God through Christ. The fruit of this was quies: “rest”. Not rest of the body, nor even fixation of the exalted spirit upon some point or summit of light. The Desert Fathers were not, for the most part, ecstatics.”
Thomas Merton.

And the closest contemporary gloss on *quies* is proabably William Burroughs and his DE practice …
( http://mogadonia.tumblr.com/post/44274156/doing-easy-an-essay-by-william-s-burroughs).

The sense of collapse I feel, and many feel, is expressed acutely by the general tenor of unhappiness, even misery, that cuts across all classes in the West today. And the consumerism of each class has started to blur. Well, it began blurring in the 70s I think. I mean by this that while to some degree each class has its own producers of goods, the ascension of irony has resulted in class overlap culturally. Also, the extraordinary erosion of ALL education means that not even those at elite Universities have much — if any — taste.

“The worker is not buying goods because he identifies with the American Way of Life, but because he has enormous anxiety about his self, which he feels possessions might assuage. Consumerism is paradoxically seen as a way out of a system that has damaged him and that he secretly despises; it is a way of trying to keep free from the emotional grip of this system.”
Morris Berman (The Reenchantment of the World)

The consumerism of the 21st century, then, has become blurred, too, but with the therapeutic. Increasingly the affluent classes (at least) are buying perception. And that perception is linked in a fascinating manner, I think, with ideas of self improvement. And self improvement became an imitation of work, and not just work, but alienated toil.

“Designers know that no one wants a car that looks cheap, that screams stripped-down functionality. So they attempt to make economy cars look as much like their expensive corporate relatives as is possible within the cost restraints given them and while maintaining the separate identities of the lines. The quantity of features and embellishments on the various makes in the automobile hierarchy are varied by designers to justify the price differences. But the quality of aesthetics is basically the same across the hierarchy, so the graded models cannot testify to distinct class tastes. More expensive cars offer those with more money to spend not qualitatively different aesthetics to testify to superior tastes but merely more of what everyone has a taste for.”
David Gartman

The hostility to intellect is now acute, of course. There are endless examples. Endless. But one aspect of the anxiety that intellect arouses in the 21st century has to do with this sense of rudeness. I quote Morris Berman again below, but it is (and he does note this) more related, I think, to the dismantling of the psyche altogether. I see the fear of “too much verbiage” as a journalist from the left wrote the other day regarding the Frankfurt School thinkers. And this was a writer I rather liked, but who betrays too often this mock populist sensibility. These two things, a hostility to the intellectually difficult and social incivility are the twin character traits of daily life today.

“One further aspect of our current spiritual collapse is our increasing inability to relate to one another with a minimum of courtesy or even awareness. It has become common now not to respond to any sort of request if the answer is no. Increasingly, if someone applies for a job and fails to get it, they are not notified to that effect; they never hear anything at all. People are also fired indirectly, with companies refusing to let them know why. We have stopped holding doors for one another; don’t bother to answer messages; disappear from each other’s lives without explanation or regret; betray one another and then refuse to discuss it. Rudeness is now acceptable, because I am the only one who inhabits my solipsistic world. (The flip side of this phenomenon is the replacement of civility by corporate politeness: “Have a nice day,” “Thank you for choosing AT&T,” etc.) ”
Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture)

Another very under appreciated aspect of what Berman describes is the cancelling of TV shows in mid season or in the middle of narratives. The producers simply have no concern for those who have watched and followed the narrative. It is simply interrupted. It is a tacit display of absolute contempt. Never mind the quality of the shows is often if not usually bad. The point is that audiences have been conditioned to accept their show being taken from them. Of being unable to complete the narrative. And I suspect this interruption (and I wrote of this before) is reproduced in the individuals own life.

Back in 2013 I wrote this…“There was a nice scene is a small New Zealand film (Tracker) about the British, a Boer veteran (a cynical anti nationalist) and a wrongly accused Maori laborer. Its a perfectly enjoyable small piece of history, a film about colonialism, about the distortions of “home” and about white narrative making. At any rate, there is a scene between the Boer (Ray Winstone) and the Maori (Temuera Morrison), who has been captured and is being returned to the British. Winstone starts to answer a question the Maori asks him, but he stops. He won’t finish it. The Maori says, it is a bad thing to leave a story unfinished. It is a wound on the soul (or to that effect). It is actually a small but memorable brief scene. Because it is true. There is some connection between being put on hold by an automated answering system, and the repeated interruptions to our private narratives. The society presents entertainment narratives on TV all the time, as part of “series”, and more often than not the show is cancelled before the first season even ends. There is no recourse. It is like being disconnected after waiting twenty minutes to speak to customer service. Nothing to be done. No person, no human, no way to tell your story. So our own stories are interrupted, or disconnected, and the stories of others are interrupted or stopped.”

So, here I continue to see the hysterical Western bourgeoisie react in ways that make clear they will always turn toward the fascist and authoritarian. The end of the U.S.S.R. signaled another of those psychic wounds. The current anti-Russia propaganda has been astonishingly well received and embraced by liberal America. For this new hatred of Russia is really just the old anti-communist zealotry being refashioned. America cannot afford a monastic moment. It is psychologically too fragile. And yet, just beneath the surface I suspect many of those we can lump under the label bourgeois are aware of their own addictions and obsessive compulsive tendencies, and their deep well spring of depression. It is the most depressive narcissism one could imagine.

“It was in 1989 that the clear outlines of a very different sort of world from the one that began in 1914 finally emerged. That year saw the beginning of the end of the Soviet Union, and of the (convenient) organization of the world into two opposing camps. This is the centerpiece of what we call globalization. No more a clearly defined world of binary opposition, but a decentralized, fragmented world, in which bitter regional rivalries reemerged and the “enemy” could no longer be unambiguously identified. America thus lost its moral, anti-Communistic, mission, and the vacuum got filled with distractions: a brief, phony “war on drugs,” the Gulf War, and a decade of trivial political scandals masquerading as news. Such developments, however, were only temporary. The really new moral mission was global corporate hegemony, the old doctrine of manifest destiny now imported into the economic realm and mapped onto the entire world.”
Morris Berman (The Twilight of American Culture)

There is a sense one feels, at least that I feel, which describes culture today in terms of execution or murder. Or killing. Culture is being killed and this project is now nearly complete. But it needs to be noted that this has not much to do with the fact that much very remarkable work is being created. It has more to do with the relationship that culture occupies in the societies of the West. Theatre, for example, has been made all but impossible to practice. At least in the U.S. I was told recently of new trends in theatre and one of them was something called *immersive-interactive*. What this means is that there is no text and the actor and a single audience member sit together and chat. It seems the perfect expression of a society that can no longer sit and listen to a complex text. There is the exclusion of the monastic, if you will — keeping with the themes of this post. The audience member gets to feel exclusive and special. The actor doesn’t have to remember any lines.

“The imagination and daydreaming are stimulated by dim light and shadow. In order to think clearly, the sharpness of vision has to be suppressed, for thoughts travel with an absent-minded and unfocused gaze. Homogeneous bright light paralyses the imagination in the same way that homogenisation of space weakens the experience of being, and wipes away the sense of place.”
Juhani Pallasmaa

The expanse of the desert, the silence of deep snow near the arctic circle, or the vast sea — these are all related mythically to shadow. Silence and shadow are linked in their monastic codes. Walter Ong wrote:
“the shift from oral to written speech was essentially a shift from sound to visual space.”

And the ocular hegemony of modern society has meant a loss of silence, for the oral world allowed for silence. A silence *in* space. The tyranny of *picture* or *image* meant that the world was scanned, was read. Adorno said images were now being scanned. The image world was a new written speech in a sense. Silence was only a glyph indicating silence. The Desert Fathers sought, instinctively, a space of expanse, and one that minimized the privileged eye. The hermitage was where one listened. There are no big picture windows in the hermitage (or monastary) for the idea is to look inward not outward.

“The correlation of consciousness with masculinity culminates in the development of science, as an attempt by the masculine spirit to emancipate itself from the power of the unconscious. Wherever science appears it breaks up the original character of the world, which was filled with unconscious projections. Thus, stripped of projection, the world becomes objective, a scientific construction of the mind. In contrast to the original unconscious and the illusory world corresponding to it, this objective world is now viewed as the only reality. In this way, under the continual tutelage of the discriminative, masculine spirit, ever searching for laws and principles, the ‘reality principle’ comes to be represented by men.”
Erich Neumann (The Origins and History of Consciousness)

Science came out of visual space. The optical discovers of the late 19th century coincided with Industrialization. And with colonialism and organized exploitation. Breaking up the world of unconscious projections — the dissolving of Dionysian energy. And of the fatalism of the tragic. There is no tragedy in a world in which one cannot listen without interruption. Tragedy requires quiet.

Michael David Levin quotes Ronald Blythe in his book Akenfield: Portrait of an English Village where Blythe quotes an older villager;

“The old look inward at things we cannot see. The young have a common image.”

That is a very insightful comment. The *common image* is that by which the culture is being suffocated. The misery and discomfort of daily life today is because this common image is not even an image, it is a sort of hieroglyphic or logogram. The scanned image is world texting in a sense. Emoticons standing in for observation, for a trained expertise the kind which old farmers or sailors learn by themselves. Walter Ong observed that a shared reality was something that existed even the time of Heraclitus. The difference is the forced multiplication of these shared or common images. And the technology that came out of a visual science to further our blindness.

“The observer becomes detached from an incarnate relation with the environment through the suppression of the other senses, in particular by means of technological extensions of the eye, and the proliferation of images.”
Juhani Pallasmaa

Old sailors or craftsmen or farmers, they will tend toward a patience with people that many contemporary westerners lack. Patience is tied in with compassion, too, I think. This is obviously not always the case. For today the spread of digital instrumentalized consciousness has infected the entire planet on some level. The photo above of Iran, by William Carter — one is drawn to it because there are no ads. The walls are free of advertising or any info of any kind. And suddenly one feels something akin to the monastic.

“Narcissism is a false subjectivity. It is an illness of subjectivity, an illness whose pathology is related to the dominance of the image. As such, it is an illness whose character cannot be understood apart from its epidemiology, its historical situation: its appearance in our time as a pathology of our time. It is not accidental that narcissistic character disorders began to make their appearance as a psychiatric epidemic only in the conditions of our contemporary world. Such disorders bespeak the suffering which accompanies the ‘triumph’ of subjectivity as will to power; they bear witness to the emptiness we all experience in an age which requires the reduction of Being to representedness and representation; they portend the spreading of nihilism.”
Michael David Levin (The Opening of Vision: Nihilism and the Postmodern Situation)

The current ascension of Capitalism, at least since the fall of the Soviet Union, has crystalized aspects of capital that were at least partly dormant. It is financialized and global. It has made rigid the reified character of human encounter. And it is logical that — certainly in the U.S. — there has been a huge upswell of Christian extremism. Dominionists occupy nearly every cabinet position in the Trump administration.

“A religion may be discerned in capitalism – that is to say, capitalism serves essentially to allay the same anxieties, torments, and disturbances to which the so-called religions offered answers. “
Walter Benjamin

The Christian right in America, the televangelists, and the Christian nationalists, these are the narcissistic personality disorder of religions. The rise of the Christian right has been startling, beginning again in the mid 1970s. This is a religion of nihilistic tendency. And it is one that could only grow in the way that it has because of electronic media.

“The incredible acceleration of speed during the last century has collapsed time into the flat screen of the present, upon which the simultaneity of the world is projected. As time loses its duration, and its echo in the primordial past, man loses his sense of self as a historical being, and is threatened by the ‘terror of time’.”
Juhani Pallasmaa

The loss of historical time results in a kind of consumer vision of redemption. Without history, and more specifically, without a subject linked to history, the spiritual is sought in fashion and innovation. This televangelism was also congruent with the American belief that liberation was, actually, a liberation FROM the past. Morris Berman quotes Richard Sennet (in Dark Ages America ) ..“What is now absent from our lives, he writes, is a sense of narrative coherence.” And this is astoundingly obvious when watching Hollywood film and TV today. Narrative coherence isn’t even desired anymore. Nobody seems to remember what it was, in fact. Films set in some historical period seem particularly incoherent. The past is not only strangely contemporary but it is fetishized presentation of the contemporaneous — it is another form of erasing the past. Make the past the present, and problem solved. Everything, in fact, must be made to be like *I* am right this moment. Children are “little adults”. The “other” is really just me. Except the “other” is also something that cannot be trusted. The narcissist must make it all like *me* but can never believe it really is like me.

“For the individual person, the trouble with basing one’s life on the quest for an essential self [is that] the self, instead of enlarging and deepening its capacities, becomes more and more like itself. . . . If the “real self” I am uncovering progressively becomes the determinant of my behavior, rigidity and sclerosis set in early. My actions become predictable and my perception of alternative modes of life narrows.”
Harvey Cox

It is the withering of the imagination. Peter Fonagy in a study of borderline personalties …

“Our Menninger study of maltreated 5- to 8- year-olds found specific deficits in tasks requiring mentalization, particularly among those referred for sexual or physical abuse. These results suggest that maltreatment may cause children to withdraw from the mental world. Continuing defensively to disrupt their capacity to depict mental states in themselves and in others leaves them operating on inaccurate, schematic impressions of thoughts and feelings.”
(Affect Regulation, Mentalization and the Development of the Self)

The economic strangulation of hope and desire has resulted in not only narrative that does not cohere, but that a in general failure is anticipated. The very idea of success becomes ever more vague. A populace is now adept at a variety of complex psychological coping mechanisms for disappointment. The depressive end of narcissism is fraught with contradiction. The noise of daily life is part of the sheen and surface appeal of gadgets and distractions. People rush to buy the latest version of whatever Apple or Google is selling, even if they cannot begin to afford it. Newness is another form of amnesia. The historical subject is fading and the individual has no story to explain his or her life to themselves.

The fear of envy is also acute. It is both sought after but hidden. There is a calculation that is carried out internally with every purchase. The purchase itself is never in question, only the public perception of it.

“The person terrified of envy – and as we shall see the narcissistic character has generally been subject to massive envy attack – acts very much like this, only a bit worse: he also hides his prize from himself.”
Nathan Swartz Slant

Increasingly childhood is being assaulted with noise, too. I have noticed a sharp uptick in toys that make sounds. Often entire soundtracks accompany something as simple as a toy tractor. The child is deprived of inventing his own soundtrack. This is an obvious example but it also serves as a model for the wider reality of 21st century life in the West. Not only must one endure noise, but now there is an actual soundtrack to things. Not only does everything make a sound, but that computer generated voice is ubiquitous. One is *reminded* to fasten one’s seatbelt, to close the refrigerator door, that your call is important to us — and that a human will talk to you in…..four minutes.

Architecture, too, is, at its best, a vision that seems tied to some sort of expansive vision — and the relationship of building to the hermitage is clear. The idea of sanctuary or retreat is tied to that tradition of the Desert Fathers. Today’s prestige building projects invariably use shiny enamelled metals or glass, and there is a need for reflection often. And the predominance of white. And I wrote before of the implications of white, and others have even more exhaustively — so for here the point is that, as Pallasmaa points out, natural materials such as wood or stone, both have a history connected to origins but also they ‘age’. Patina is not something sought after in contemporary architecture.

“Buildings of this technological era usually deliberately aim at ageless perfection, and they do not incorporate the dimension of time, or the unavoidable and mentally significant processes of aging. This fear of the traces of wear and age is related to our fear of death.”
Juhani Pallasmaa

This is an architecture both of narcissism and morbidity. I mentioned last post the sense I have of people running FROM the future and not toward it. The future is also where we die.

“Just as, if you leave open the door of the public baths the steam escapes and their virtue is lost, so the virtue of the person who talks a lot escapes the open doors of the voice.”
Abbas Diadochus, 5th century AD. Bishop of Photiki (quoted by George Prochnik)

Visual silence is as significant as aural. And there is an aspect to certain texts that suggest both the desert, but many also express a form of silence. For silence is also clarity, a lack of chaos. I will add that I’m losing my hearing. Not completely, certainly, but enough to be a constant irritant to my wife. And I have found it a relief. Of course if it goes totally, I may have another opinion. It is just enough now that I feel it is easy to close off the unwanted sound clutter of everyday life. But I digress.

“One of the most startling paradoxes inherent in writing is its close association with death. This association is suggested in Plato’s charge that writing is inhuman, thing-like, and that it destroys memory. It is also abundantly evident in countless references to writing (and/or print) traceable in printed dictionaries of quotations, from 2 Corinthians 3:6, ‘The letter kills but the spirit gives life’ and Horace’s reference to his three books of Odes as a ‘monument’ (Odes iii.30.1)…( )The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers.”
Walter J. Ong (Orality and Literacy)

Ong (whose book I highly recommend) notes also that the utterances of the Oracle at Delphi were not experienced as the opinions of a stranger or a acquaintance but rather directives from a god. And text itself carries some of this same vatic quality. For it is not only religious books that become *The Book*, but all printed material, published especially, carry an authority. And this authority has to do with the fact that one cannot interrogate the author directly (in the vast majority of cases), but only through yourself writing a text. There is a deadness in this.

The spiraling collapse of capitalist society is in the final stages of propping up a master narrative. But nobody is really fooled. And the loss of narrative faculties has done nothing except hasten the endgame. The populace of the West, especially, certainly, the U.S., has no narrative for itself. Therapy provides no narrative and apparently didn’t think it somehow needed one. The ruling elite and the stenographers of mainstream news outlets are not able to come up with stories for what is going on. There is a crushing overwhelming denial about climate change. And yet, in a sense, that is perhaps the most understandable. I say that because the information provided, as it has been for twenty some years, comes from specialists in fields remote from the daily life of people. Nobody trusts it. And nobody has an actual narrative for it. And in the personal encounters between friends and family there seems (to me anyway) an absence of story. When I was a boy I remember old people telling me stories. My grandmother told me stories. She sang me songs, narrative songs. I don’t sense much storytelling going on today.

“…the detachment of theoretical-instrumental vision from its body of felt experience is finally making itself visible to us as a decisive factor in the historical advent of nihilism. For this detachment of vision from the body of feeling encourages the rise to power of an ego-logical subjectivity whose will to power has lost touch with that primordial ontological attunement we once enjoyed as visionary beings.”
Michael David Levin

The success and effectiveness of scientific medicine, for example (but pick any field you like) also had the effect, overall, of strengthening a particular distancing of vision from the world. And narration became more rational, more detached even as it became more subjective.

“…the absolute eye that cadaverizes life and rediscovers in the corpse the frail nerve of life.”
Michael Foucault

Knowledge is meant to be timeless, to be true before and after, and to correspond to an experience that is the object of that scientific knowledge. This is a paraphrase of an early Walter Benjamin sentence. But we lack the correspondence today. Maybe it was always lacking. Subjectively lacking. And society runs from a future in which the cadaver is the reigning symbol of narrationless world. A world without story and with a shrunken atrophied experience. Running from a future death that is the only inevitable thing. And noise cannot help with this.

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