Without the Esoteric, the West Reaches a Dead End

Western countries and religion feel dead and trite, at worse, and contentious and personal, at best. People on both the left and right try to recast their societies in new ways, seeking to find meaning in a story that nobody can really follow anymore. We are seeing people even expand the scope of their political and social theories, blowing them up to the point where they now take the place of religion itself. 

But still, it's in religion -- religion which convincingly makes contact with the mystical -- that we will find what can actually be the driving force for something that is not just adequate for the lives of individuals, the society, and a generation, but which can be the basis of multiple civilizations and countless humans over millennia. 

Cue Dugin & Dzhemal.

In the aftermath of the dissolution of the USSR, Iran was one of Russia’s few remaining partners in the Middle East, and both Dzhemal and Dugin provide spiritual legitimacy for this strategic partnership. For Dugin, Orthodox Christianity is close to Shia Islam since both managed to preserve their esoteric nature, while Western Churches and Sunni Islam degenerated and became “purely social” religions (Dugin 1995, sections 3 and 4).

 Between Salafism & Eurasianism: Geidar Dzhemal and the Global islamic Revolution in Russia

Aleksandr Dugin

They are talking about religion as a fundamental organ for the anatomy of civilization. Other religions have become purely social, but these two are in touch with the spiritual world above. 

When I first read this, I tried to understand this as Orthodox (and Shi'a, but I can't actually comment on Shi'a well) having just a fundamentally different philosophical & sociopolitical approach because they are still esoteric, and not "social." But it was falling short in my head. I think the conclusion is more radical... Bear with me.

The Orthodox have an impenetrable and inscrutable monastic tradition that lends itself to mysticism & is very esoteric. It cannot be digested by anything secular, and stands above conventional politics, and even the scandals of the Church. 

It's vital that this is inaccessible (unlike the Vatican). If you ain't on Athos, you ain't nothin. Nobody cares what any joinalist says about this. What matters is what Br. Nektarios said after his trip to the Holy Mountain. It could be a strange prophecy of a war between Turkey & Russia, or just a talk about how everyone should hang a cross on their door. It is also thought that there are endless mysteries happening on the Mountain that we will never have access to, and these are completely real. 

St. Poprhyrios wrote that, during evening prayers, there are spiritual earthquakes happening all over Mt. Athos; you can feel it. The whole mountain opens up. You can find beliefs about the mysterious nature and spiritual power that extend to other monastic communities in Orthodoxy, and pay attention to other great events, like the Holy Fire in the Holy Sepulchre. 

Because of this, there is a link between the laypeople struggling in the modern world and the Divine, and this comes purely from the ascetics, and is unfiltered by media or modernity. Mysticism is strong, and legends grow around it.  The ultimate reality about God is accessible, and the mundane is being constantly overshadowed by this. 

I would insist that this is also happening in Catholicism and in Protestantism, but that these are the exceptions to the religious body, and not the rule. More importantly, it's spotty. Unlike Orthodoxy, the whole (or close to the whole) of the Church is not animated by this relationship, and it only exists on the fringes and actually can be embarrassing to the more mainstream. What Protestants do you know that are proud of speaking in tongues and handling snakes? What Catholics do you know that talk extensively about spiritual warfare with the demonic and the meaning of Marian apparitions? 

The meaning seems to likely be that Orthodoxy (and presumbaly Shi'a Islam) maintain the spiritual élan vital, which ultimately can give us a political & civilization force that is above any contemporary Western (or Sunni) model. 

Because the Orthodox community has access to the mystical and truly believes in a spiritual world that is strong, it's capable of a different kind of civilization. Its structure is not limited to secular power and culture, its not defined solely by history, literature, and a political state. It is able to be united through the chalice across time & space; it is bound together by God. Its ultimate authority are found in the mystical and the esoteric, a force that is greater than the Bishops of the church and their stuffy letters, and is surely far greater than the concept of the political state or some cultural icon of a writer or painter. 

Orthodoxy has within it access to the divine. Even if you do not accept that, like presumably Dzhemal himself does not, you can acknowledge that what is happening within Orthodox communities is greater than what can happen in the countries whose religions have been downgraded to mere social statuses: it is esoteric, mystical, uncontrollable, lived in addition to learned. 

Because it occupies a higher and greater space, it is capable of taking up a greater place in the life of the people and the nation. Orthodoxy is not just able to be some common social reference point, it is capable of being the truth and foundation of a civilization. 

While moderns try to find meaning, and try to blow up these narratives about discrimination, policing, and ethnic diversity into a common faith to unite the people, there exists that which can actually do it, but due to the pride of people, who wish to only look to themselves as the criterion for everything, it is out of their reach. Because they view humans as the ultimate measure and ultimate end, they are damned to their humanism, and trapped by their narrative. 

But above and beyond them exists a universe to which they are blind, and this is ultimately why their ways of thinking and their systems will not last into the future. They can only build that which is limited to this time. 

Without the esoteric, an organ in the anatomy of civilization is missing. 

Unnecessary Dichotomies & Narrative Thinking

We are sometimes taught to think in the direction of opposites, and that "sadness" is the opposite of "happiness," but isn't it also the case that anger or nausea is just as distant from happiness as sadness? You could say that this is an unnecessary dichotomy -- I think 'false dichotomy' would be too strong since it is not deceptive to make a comparison between the two...It's just not the fact that we have to conceive of sadness as the opposite of happiness.

I think there's actually a lot of unnecessary dichotomies like this -- for instance, Capitalism and Communism are opposing economic visions, but if we were to look at a partially planned economy from the premodern period, we could scarcely say that it is a "mixed economy," nor could we say that it either validates a Capitalist or Communist world view. Thus, while Communist & Capitalist are opposites in a sense, it does not mean that, by necessity, an economy which has property rights/ownership that would be considered "mixed" by somoene from a capitalist/communist perspective is necessarily mixed. 

Just as such, we cannot say "There are atheists who do not believe in heaven or hell, and Muslims that believe in layered heavens and hells, and Buddhists as well who acknowledge near infinite heavens & hells, so a Christian is a moderate, perhaps even closer to an atheist!, since he believes in one heaven, one hell." 

By thinking too much "logically" in a linear, graph-paper sense of the word, we come to unnecessary dichotomies. The sort of thing that school teachers would drum out of us -- the attempt to map everything out and categorize things has actually resulted in all of these unnecessary dichotomies that clutter the mind. 

We can see this as well with the "racist" and "anti-racist" dichotomy. Yes, in a sense, the opposite of someone who believes in the superiority of their race and dislikes other racists is an anti-racist, but this is not a scale that actually has to be applied to everything. It's not useful in every circumstance.  In fact, it may even be the case that it is very much not useful in most circumstances. 

Unnecessary dichotomies is one of the things that hampers any form of debate because it draws people into the practice of trying to define their enemy in unflattering ways -- ways that does not actually amount to how they define themselves. It breeds a sort of dishonesty in discussion that rarely anyone moves beyond. 

 

And this is the stuff of narrative thinking: everything that exists in the world is reuploaded into the context that the partisan thinker wants. So, for instance, gender roles in a Sri Lankan fishing village or 19th century art becomes something that is then looked at through the lens of a 21st century feminist, and the whole world rewards her as an intellectual for translating it all into the biases that she has. 

People think they are doing something objective when they literally take a foreign, independent cluster of references, meanings, and ideas, and then reconstruct them within their own framework of bias in a way that is usually unflattering. 

This isn't philosophy. It's thought terrorism. 

Narrative Thinking

While listening to the Reformed Christian thinker James Whites (somewhere in the second half of this) he mentioned that there are two ways that people interact with ideas...

The first he called narrative thinking, which is characterized by people who just see an event happening -- such as the Coronavirus -- and now all of their thoughts on both things immediately connected to it and more abstract ideas are understood through this lens.

James White

The second he actually just called slow thinking (a blunder but he was perhaps coming up with this off the top of his head), but it really should just be understood as philosophy. We can simply call it philosophy because it focuses on finding the truth independent of the events that are happening and with the big picture in mind.

Narrative thinking is basically a mistake. It's playing with a deck that doesn't have enough cards because it is basically not considering the problem in its totality, but only as it stands in the present. A good example of this that many Westerners learn is the Treaty of Versailles, being regarded as far too damning and punishing to the Germans and thus immediately setting the grounds for another war.

Many politicians also think in terms of narratives -- everything is about the immediate problems that constituents face, and it is never good enough to have a long timeline for success in most circles. Few people want to wait months or years for a benefit, let alone decades, and so people look to the most immediate way to create change, even though these chances may fit poorly into metahistory. 

This is why, in one sense, a crisis is the very worst time for people to begin thinking about what has to be done. They are no longer thinking soberly, but thinking of this specific narrative and nothing else. In a sense, it is not unlike making a decision in a state of duress.

Anyone who thinks about politics or important events through the lens of what is immediately happening, not through the broader picture of what will happen in 100 years and what happened 100 years prior, is a menace to public discourse.