The scientific universal validity of modern consciousness is the…validity of a narrow and impoverished spirit; it is a breaking of spiritual communion… a surface phenomenon [like] the relationships in the sphere of law. …Everything has been reduced to this scientific and legalistic (& algorithmic?) communion – so spiritually estranged are men from one another.                                                                                           

–Nicolai Berdyaev, The Meaning of the Creative Act (1913)

The philosopher’s intuition must remain at its high level and there justify itself, no matter how he may suffer from lack of communion with others and from refusal to recognize the universal value of his creativeness, a refusal which grows out of this lack of common ground.

–Ibid.

When did goodness cease to be a deed and become a spectacle?                      

–Yoanna Koleva, Hollow Temples, in Hedgehog Review, fall 2025

Saturday night at the jazz concert at The Other Side I announced the December concert, calling it  “A Jazzy Christmas,” forgetting (oops!) the “wokish” fact Christmas is a “Holiday” now.  Another case of liberal ethics to the rescue, saving all of us from intolerance or whatever it indicates to speak – innocently or not –  from cultural assumptions.  The bottomline argument of course is against our calling ourselves, thinking of ourselves, or being a “Christian Nation,” instead of a large political  entity that respects all religious rights which is to say, tolerates them all and stands for none.

In this case, wokishness seems to me like one big petulant shrug against paternalistic ordering, or, as it turns out, against any kind of hierarchical ordering upon a different set of governing principles than the founding, rather “unchristian” ones as stated by James Madison: “The primary function of government is to protect the minority of the opulent from the majority of the poor.”      

What phony balonies we liberals are!  As if we’d actually escaped Christianity when we’ve been so thoroughly shaped by 2000 years of it!  When we witness the energized power of dogmatic Christian fundamentalism intent on restoring theocracy, does anyone wonder from whence they got all that energy to push such a revolution of reaction?  Grievance-motivated, power-motivated, fear-motivated as they may be, we are witnessing backlash to a great experiment – that of separating human consciousness from its larger context in perfectly real and valid “spiritual communion.” This separation does not alone afflict the political right, but they are the ones projecting a political agenda that would  (in a terrifying way) re-establish the religious/metaphysical  foundation for society. However, the separation affects everyone and, less recognized,  underlies the current social/political crisis for the feckless left.  

In shared liberal reality, locked into the logic of the marketplace, the sole standard for knowledge is what philosopher/theologian/mystic Nikolai Berdyaev termed “scientific universal validity.” It is not “badmouthing” science to make the claim that lost spiritual communion, which cannot be science-validated, leaves liberal champions of freedom  incapable of qualities necessary for resisting Christian fascism, the resistance pushed back by every decision that places material well-being over soul’s need for creativity, new life.  Few can be saints.  But still, it could make a difference to know that with every such normal decision to adapt,  the qualities lost are passion and intensity for the good.  Writer Yoanna Koleva, commenting on the proliferation on social media of scenes of “goodness,” such as the fleet of ships aiming to break through the blockade of Gaza, with iconic Greta Thunberg standing on deck, writes, “We no longer seek goodness.  We indulge in its performance.”   

This (to me) horrifying fact gets hidden under the show of woke, benevolent “tolerance and respect” for others’ differentnesses.   With the changes in consciousness brought on by “meta-modernity,” its unstable reality now based in algorithmically determined knowledge, it’s clearer than ever: the only resistance possible is in that which is rooted in that make-believe faculty, the human soul.   

Yesterday on the playground after school watching our grandchildren at play, the out-of-town Grandma,  before any other words were spoken, announced “ICE has come to South Carolina.”  Both my son and I, who’d been shivering in the November cold, neither of us habituees of Facebook, thought she meant the other kind of ice!  Deplorable fact? Yes.  Evidence for shared moral convictions that explain why our grandchildren attend a multi-racial inner city school? Yes.  Grounds for social connection?  Not really.  But as good as any we have these days.

The “breaking of spiritual communion” – once maintained through the Church, and now, to the liberal mind,  a nice but old-fashioned sounding chimera  is the loss from which we’re not recovering; it’s craziness to leave the conservative Christians the only ones infuriated!  Not, in our case,  furious over loss of religion (which comes down to an individual matter), but by the coverup of the loss.  (Hey, how come nobody I trusted told me God – Spirit – is a real thing?) All people who feel it’s just good riddance, need to look again: for what’s been lost is imaginative reality.  With no access to the imaginative real,  liberals expend all their energy on adapting – some superlatively, some less so – to the given world.  Incapable of insisting upon the experiences that value spiritual communion over consumerism, screens and travel, we’ve no choice but to commit to adapting to divisive, exploitative, mean-as-hell capitalist reality.  

Further, because it exists in an imaginative vacuum,  “scientific validity” cannot defend  the way of living in communities and families, in mutuality, stable over time, that maintains a safe, nurturing environment in which to raise social (rather than sociopathic, or socially anxious) human beings.   Liberalism’s endorsement of a very weak notion of freedom relativizes not only relationships in family and community, but the spiritual rock of interdependence.  Rather than being furious about having lost the foundations for healthy childhood, even with no conditions of war, natural disaster, or famine to blame for it, we adapt to “the big chill.” We soldier on building a society out of relative good and traumatized hearts.  To the extent that the grievances of the Christian right are valid, we could do worse than agree that the weakening of family ties and relationships in community is unsustainable, the inevitable outcome not “self reliance” (Emerson) and solidarity, but conformity and isolation.  And, to be clear, to reclaim in-common life does not mean stepping back into the bad old days, restoring patriarchy, etc; rather, it is love-informed, positive humanization against the otherwise inevitability of conforming machinehood, and spiritual death. You know, what Jesus taught. 

+++

For many years  my writing has had an instrumental – as well as simply creative – purpose,  gained through a personal experience that was profound enough I felt I could not keep it to myself.  But mine was not just a personal spiritual experience that, I thought, might be helpful to others.  It was necessarily connected with  the social world as well.  The world I was born into and raised in, middle class, “normal,” and non-abusive as it was,  had left me traumatized, my identity negative, an outsider for no reason, a suffering that, having no justification, must be denied.  

Unquestionably, creativity’s magic makes the not-real real, gives the voiceless voice.   Art can heal sundered humanity beginning in myself.  But purely promoting art-making – “following ones’ bliss” for personal spiritual benefit –  must be left for another kind of writer.    Because liberal reality remains indifferent to my suffering, allowing it to be accepted as personal flaw, I’m weakened at the level of being.  Thus my work, like that of the thinkers, poets, mystics whose legacy I draw from,  includes denunciation of the world that benefits from meaninglessness.  While providing a level of material well-being for many, and the freedom to pursue wealth for ones’ own benefit regardless of others,  this established world commits atrocities as its stock-in-trade,  deadliest among which is the atrocity of meaninglessness. 

The spiritual  problem is moral and it is political.  And because it was spiritual insight that had brought me this realization, it must be religious as well. For surely,  the ignorance of any larger spiritual reality – ignorance supported and maintained in one’s social context –  keeps one deprived of one’s natural strength, to the benefit of ongoing and oppressive  power arrangements.  In the American case, this means being bound to belief in salvation by electoral politics and loyalty to one’s party – either one you choose, obedient to capitalist priorities (see James Madison above).  

(Of course, in their own way, the school prayer and pro-life people saw the “meaning” problem as political too.  But for people like me the return to biblical fundamentalism was not going to answer the problem of meaninglessness!)      

Even though the darkness of unrelieved material reality is the human condition since “the fall,”  the trap is made more secure under liberal domination.  The way out of liberal quagmire is creativity with its direct line to spirit.  Berdyaev, unlike liberal westerners, did not fool himself by egoically and self-deceptively imagining the religious past could be tossed aside as an ego-centered child might do. He announced the emerging stage of Christianity to be the “creative epoch.”  In doing so he preceded the popular proclamation of “the Age of Aquarius” by 50 years!   No disconnect with the past, but a transformation completely in line with the purpose and meaning of the previous stages of Christian history.  Even for us “post-Christian,” post-religious people,  spiritual stages exist in “racial memory,” entered earlier into the DNA, present at birth;  they can only be denied in ignorance. 

+++

Long ago, desperate to decide on an undergraduate major by which to redeem myself from all the floundering and psychological dissociation I was undergoing during my mid-twenties, I was attracted to philosophy. After 2-3 switches of major, I declared it. By the time I graduated, all I really knew about philosophy was that I was practically incapable of reading philosophers!  I barely passed Logic.  Reading Berdyaev’s take on philosophy as art has made it possible for me to make a radical reinterpretation of my failure. It’s possible that unresolvable despair at the pit of the soul perhaps affects those of us who for whatever reason are particularly afflicted with the spiritual vacuum and the silence around itin modern secular liberal reality.  With the God avenue shut down, for us there’s no sign pointing the way out of the dilemma.  But I’ll go one further: there is no way for anyone out of this dilemma of meaninglessness other than assenting to capitalist supremacy and accepting its lie for truth, its spectacle for meaning. 

Berdyaev’s reclaiming of philosophy from scientific validation gave me means to see my failure made sense.   I had been lured to the field by the dimension of it I could only sense, which never could be validated in the academic setting.  Many people are drawn to mythology the same way, and unless they meet Joseph Campbell, likely fall back against the same roadblock to imagination.  I endured 3 years of seminary under the restriction on imagination that rules in graduate education.  There, in the institution given to “divinity,” I hovered  around the institutional precincts of God, but met up with God only indirectly, through people taking seriously the social gospel  injunction to “love they neighbor.”   For years I thought of myself as an activist but good works left the unnameable famine unsatisfied.   

Today, as I said earlier, I understand that the  project of healing sundered humanity, the answer to existential despair, goes further than art-making; it includes the undertaking of philosophy as creative act.  Practicing philosophy as art consciously affirms being; it  takes one beyond merely adaptive, non-creative, “machinehood” existence and even beyond art practiced for personal satisfaction.  It includes the unsanctioned effortfulness of thinking out  from ones’ deep, voiceless self,  intuitively, of discovering for oneself the truth that energizes a kind of thought both new and familiar, that can explain satisfactorily to oneself the meaning and purpose of one’s life. It replaces the compulsion  to adapt, but adds a different necessity:  one’s life, based in one’s art,  must reflect the truth of all-one, all-connected. (Politically speaking, this is anarchist thinking) 

To be capable of finding the standard for knowledge outside of empirical validity  – is to regain the possibility of being good for goodness’ sake!  For white middle class educated liberals, this means turning attention inward –  something nearly impossible given the demands of living. These days the  fraction of time left for busy people  –  in my observation – seems largely given to engagement with screens.  In contrast to the constantly vivacious life emanating from the screen in one’s hand or the big flatscreen TV, inwardness greets one as a  disturbingly blank screen.  How can there be faith in something when what meets the inward gaze without a “prompt”like the kind one gets in writing workshops ( besides automatic worries, compulsions and obsessions) is emptiness?  When society itself is the spectacle – a substitute for the life in spirit – and we addicts to it,  one faces the problem of every addict – how can I give up the addiction with nothing to replace it? 

+++

Liberal society teaches the lie that we can live comfortably enough with the loss/relativizing of communal, in-common life, its safety and protection for souls.  At the same time the illusory freedom and goodness-as-performance offered via screen life, or the political ideology of wokeness, in effect,  keep people bound to “surface phenomenon” that can neverhave a taproot in being, in the soul’s unity.  While we may repudiate the scripture-sanctioned, guilt-inducing dogmatism of patriarchal ordering, we could stop throwing out baby with bathwater and reach for a creative dogmatism that puts ego-serving “scientific validity” in its proper place, that would subordinate compulsivity to the search for common good. To do so may be as time-consuming and cumbersome as heating with wood or washing clothes by hand – but it will also be fully aligned with a world that can allow love to be the connector. 

The words you read here attempt to express my struggle to affirm my philosopher self, which after the loss of our Cafe, and my lifelong failure to adapt properly in bourgeois reality,  is all I have left to substantiate my life!  It’s not simple to give up existential dodginess, the habit of non-recognition of oneself.  The great ones, like Berdyaev, trusted their non-conformity in the liberal world that has “betrayed nobility.”  Difficult and lonely as it is, such “creative catastrophism,” as Berdyaev calls it,  is the way to a humanly in-common way of life, a total refusal of fascism.

The post To Refuse Fascism Will Take  “Creative Catastrophism” appeared first on CounterPunch.org.

This post was originally published on CounterPunch.org.