The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One

by Hanzi Freinacht

But, and this is a big but, this also means that no king, ruler or wielder of power can have any ultimate authority beyond serving the universal truth. So the saints and prophets are righteous critics and rebels, wishing to align their societies with a deeper, universal order of the cosmos.

Traditional society is born from a radical postfaustian critique of injustice, war, slavery, oppression and degradation—of the arbitrary use and abuse of power. It is here that humanity realizes that the truth will set her free. Still operating within the limits of agricultural, pre-industrial societies, these traditions set out to create disciplined spiritual practices to develop the human soul towards realization of the ultimate truth, towards some form of inner ascension.

But what truth? There is always one true path set for us by the prophets—even in the relatively open-minded faith of Jainism—and the other perspectives are ultimately false. This creates a blind spot of humongous proportions: ethnocentricity, i.e. that you only see the perspective and interests of one ethnic group, culture or civilization. Sure, anybody can be Christian, but what happens if somebody is just not?

If the One Truth is false, it also means that the reality itself that I live in, that the one source of good, love and hope in this harsh world, is nowhere to be found—that the justification for all my morality is false. It means that my soul, which is given to me eternally by God, does not exist. If others can find reasons to defy this faith, perhaps its truth is not universal after all? No, it cannot be so! Let the infidels die and burn in hell—or convert. One becomes prepared to oppress and destroy others in order to resist such challenges to one’s ontology (sense of reality), ideology (sense of what a good society is) and sense of self (the social construction of an ego), to protect and maintain the boundaries of one’s symbolic universe.

In its grasp for universality, this kind of code creates a mindless defense of its own particularity, where the deviant and the stranger are harshly discriminated against and punished.

Symbol-Stage E: Modern But if the “truth” is to be truly universal, said the pioneers of the Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment, shouldn’t it be verifiable by everyone? That is, shouldn’t it be inter-subjectively confirmable (or “falsifiable”, as Blaise Pascal and Karl Popper clarified), so that we make certain that what you see is what I see?

This line of thinking leads us down the path of materialism, reductionism, positivism, determinism and scientism: There is a real reality “out there”, and by means of inter-subjectivity, by verification, by science and the scientific method (induction, deduction and abduction), we can go beyond the shackles of subjective illusion and see the real world for the first time.

The scientific method, and the instruments that go beyond our perceptions, help us “lose our senses”: because our senses betray us. They were only evolved to see and relate to a thin slice of reality, as was our reasoning mind. By disciplining and bending our minds, we are breaking the shackles of illusion. Physics becomes chemistry becomes biochemistry becomes biology becomes psychology becomes sociology.

Initially René Descartes kept “the soul” as a strange ghost in the machine, but soon enough all such ghosts could be exorcized and left was only the machine. The machine—in blind, perpetual, meaningless, mechanical motion—is the ultimate reality, the final truth beyond all truths.

Exit God. Exit Jesus and Mohammed and all the saints and their arbitrary stories, always hinging on subjective opinion and historical contingencies.

But now we are waking up, maturing, and the individual can take responsibility and see for herself, see if it makes sense.

We leave behind the private revelations, the ones found in remote caves after forty days of solitude, and bring forth the public revelation—that which can be confirmed by every human being by virtue of her own senses, reason and rationality.

Have we, the moderns, lost spirituality? No, we are more spiritual than the people of traditional religions ever were. We are enlightened. The traditions speak of God and divine universals, of heaven and the individual soul. But we find the true universals, the SI base units, the reality beyond our senses—and in its dazzling elegance and unfathomable vastness, our universe is far greater, more awe-inspiring, beautiful and mysterious than yours.

It’s objective. Can you taste that beautiful word? Objective science about objective reality, through which we can obtain our societal and personal objectives.

And we also abolished slavery, globally. Toodeloo, Moses. You say that your “god” brings universal order. But all the societies you have created have been full of bizarre contingencies. We create an ordered bureaucracy with rule of law which organizes a highly productive and innovative market which fuels a welfare state.