For the previous article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part Two

“Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”
~ W.B. Yeats

One of the things I find interesting about our civilization today is the ubiquitous sense of pessimism and nearly continual outrage that has consumed our public and often times even our private life. It was not so very long ago that our culture cloaked itself in the warm optimistic glow of progress.

Even in my own lifetime I can remember a time when most people had a basically positive outlook on the future. Why then this sudden descent into the gloom? Why are our dreams now so dark and hopeless?

The modern, and now post-modern world, has an integrity problem. We usually think of integrity as synonymous with honesty and the keeping of promises, with good reason, but what the word actually means is wholeness. Integrity is the ability to hold together as a unified whole in the face of pressures that tend to tear apart.

The opposite of integrity isn’t dishonesty, though that does lead to a loss of integrity, rather it is fragmentation.

An avalanche occurs when mountain snow packs suffer a fracture and begin to slide. The forces brought to bear upon the snow pack are greater than the cohesive force that holds it together. There is a breaking apart, a total collapse, and the laws of nature take over as the snow races to rock bottom leaving destruction in its wake.

We face an avalanche of problems today because we have lost integrity. We have become fragmented culturally, socially, intellectually, and personally.

The fragmentation of our culture began with the death of classical education. Without the common values and shared ideals that such an education provided, our culture broke apart. We now have only a collection of sub-cultures. Even these are frequently twisted and stunted.

Intellectually we have become fragmented by the process of specialization and the relegation of philosophy to the academic waste bin. If our cultural fragmentation began with the death of classical education, it was intellectual fragmentation that killed classical education.

Our obsession with specialized fields of study has left us with virtually no one who is capable of seeing the bigger picture. In fact, with the advent of post-modernism, we have even begun to deny that there IS a bigger picture. We are like a person who went to study a forest and became so obsessed with studying each individual tree that they no longer believe the forest exists.

We know a great deal about living organisms, but virtually nothing about life. We can talk in detail about geography, geology, and physics, but we can tell you nothing about the nature of the world and reality.

We think that knowledge is found in piling up facts and have forgotten that real knowledge is understanding. We see only isolated facts and are blind to the interconnectedness and relationships that actually make up the world. We learn all manner of subjects, but we don’t learn how to learn.

Our social fragmentation is perhaps the easiest of all to see. We are divided nationally and politically. Our towns and cities can be called communities only in a euphemistic, or perhaps a cynical, sense. In reality they are simply collections of individuals who happen to exist near one another. Even the family, the community upon which all other communities are based, is disintegrating.

We have replaced real organic communities with abstract ideological communities.

The fragmentation of culture, society, and intellect lead inevitably to our own fragmentation as individuals. We are born into families, raised in communities, and imparted ideals by our culture. Our minds are formed by the intellectual life of our society. Cultures without integrity form people who lack integrity.

In increasing numbers we are no longer capable of resisting the stresses brought to bear on us by life and by our crumbling culture. The avalanche is picking up speed.

In Thomistic philosophy there are three qualities of Being known as the “Transcendentals”. These three are Truth, Goodness, and Beauty. Everything that exists, in so far as it is itself, is True, Good, and Beautiful. The opposite qualities, false, evil, and ugliness do not have positive existence. Rather they only describe varying states of lack.

Much like darkness is merely the lack of light, so to say that something is evil means that it lacks the goodness it should have. This means that for anything to become false, evil, or ugly, it must necessarily be becoming less itself. It is losing its very being.

There is a fourth principle of being which is foundational to the three transcendentals, the principle of Unity. In order for a being to exist it must be a unified, integrated, whole.

A being cannot be broken into pieces, or subdivided, for to do so is to destroy it. It is impossible, for example, to have half a person. You either have a whole person or no person at all. The whole may of course be damaged. It may be torn and battered. Pieces of it may be lost. It may be withered and made nearly unrecognizable. It may even be maimed. But if it is to exist, it must be at some level a unified whole.

This means that the process of fragmentation that occurs when integrity fails is a process of losing yourself.

Perhaps this explains the pervasive pessimism and gloom hanging over our civilization. We did not despair when the culture began to fall apart, nor even when our communities slowly disintegrated. The one thing we cannot bear is the loss of our own self.

Just as the fragmentation of the individual is the last step in the process of disintegration, the individual is the first step in restoring integrity. That is to say, it can only begin with you and me.

The downward spiral of fragmented culture and fragmented society leading to fragmented individuals can be turned into an upward spiral. People of integrity can build communities with integrity and those communities can foster a new growth of culture.

Even with a culture or a community integrity requires unity. There must be a unifying principle, or a center, around which the whole is bound together. Without such a unifying principle or if the center does not hold, fragmentation and disintegration are inevitable. The same is true for the individual.

Likewise then, the restoration of integrity must begin by once again finding the center.

How could we hope to know what to place at the center of our communities or our culture if we do not know what is at the center of our own being?

This question is at the heart of philosophy, what is at the center of the Cosmos? Around what does life revolve?

Previously I talked about the importance of purpose. I mentioned the idea of Teleology, that everything in the Cosmos has a perfected identity that it is striving to become. The goal and purpose of everything in the Universe is to become fully and perfectly itself.

Integrity therefore is essential to purpose. How can a thing become fully itself if it is in the process of being torn apart and falling to pieces? These two are so closely aligned that it wouldn’t be far wrong to say the process of restoring integrity IS our purpose.

Both therefore depend upon what we place at the center.

Modern Western Civilization has failed and is currently falling to pieces because we put the wrong thing(s) at the center. The things we put at the center are not capable of withstanding the forces that would tear us apart. Their power to integrate is too weak to face up to the forces of fragmentation. This is why “the center cannot hold…”

The false center has collapsed, but all is not lost.

All is not lost because we may, if we are willing, re-chart our course. Such a change of course can only begin with the individual. It may seem that the disintegration of our culture has reached such irresistible momentum that its course can no longer be altered. Such may even be the case. Yet you can still change your course and I can change mine.

Those of us who are intent on re-charting our course may form communities, and families. Such a revolution may in time transform our culture and build again glory from the ruins. In the final draw, however, what really matters is that people are made whole once again. Cultures, for all their greatness, are temporary. They shall all fade and be forgotten. Souls are everlasting.

Every soul is on a trajectory towards everlasting glory, or everlasting ruin. Charting a new course begins with rediscovering the True Center around which the soul’s habitation may be built.

 

For the next article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part Four

For the previous article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part One

Socrates famously said that ‘the unexamined life is not worth living’. He said this while facing a death sentence. He was on trial because his pursuit of wisdom had begun to upset the sensibilities of the Athenian upper class. The worthies of Athens didn’t really want to put Socrates to death; they simply wanted to stop his philosophical inquiry because it threatened their beliefs and upset the self-made order of their lives. Consequently Socrates was offered the option of exile. He could live, but it would effectively put an end to his philosophical quest. As the opening quote makes clear, Socrates chose the pursuit of wisdom over life itself.

There are several themes or images in history and in fiction that I have always found particularly moving, and attractive. The knights and monks of medieval Europe, the Samurai of Japan, and even the Jedi of Star Wars, they all exemplify the ideas of discipline, the pursuit of excellence, and self-sacrifice. One of the central ideas present in all of these is purpose. They all recognize that life has a purpose.

One of the great problems of the modern world is that most of us tend to live by default. We don’t have a real sense of purpose, we don’t have clear goals, we just sort of meander from day to day, trying as much as possible to avoid pain. It is tempting to think that we also try to maximize pleasure, but I tend to think that our attempts to maximize pleasure have more to do with avoiding the pain of boredom, or other emotional types of pain, than they really do with the pleasures themselves.

Part of the affliction of this problem is that we, ourselves, are so keenly aware of it. The entire self-development industry exists because people know that they are wallowing in mediocrity. They are falling far short of what and who they ought to be.  They crave purpose. The irony of the self-development industry is that, for the most part, we use its products not to actually achieve anything of value, but to fool ourselves into feeling like we have.

This problem is so endemic in our society that many aspects of our culture exist primarily to distract people from their lack of purpose or to feed people a false sense of accomplishment. Drugs, alcohol, social media, TV shows, movies, games, all serve these purposes. It is no coincidence that all of these things are major sources of addiction. It’s not that all these things are bad in and of themselves, most of them aren’t. The problem is that we use them to escape from the reality of our directionless lives.

In my last article I mentioned how J.R.R. Tolkien responded to charges of escapism that were leveled against The Lord of the Rings, but here we see the wrong kind of escapism. Pain is meant to tell us that something is out of order. It is a prompt to put things right. This kind of escapism seeks to distract from, or dull the pain without doing the hard work of putting things back in order. We have been poisoned and the answer of our culture is to choose anesthetic instead of antidote.

We settle for the illusion because it is easier to bear than reality. In the end, this is deadly.

In the ancient school of philosophy that began with Socrates and his student Plato, everything that exists is believed to have an ideal form, known as its “Telos”. The telos of a thing is its ideal self, its end, the goal towards which it strives, in a word, its purpose.

As Socrates’ famous quote elucidates, self-knowledge is essential to purpose. How can you hope to become who you are meant to be if you know neither yourself as you are, nor yourself as you are meant to be? This is why the unexamined life is not worth living. The unexamined life is a life lived by default. A life ignorant of purpose. It is tempting to say that this is a life without meaning, but there is no such thing. All life has meaning. The question is, will you discover it? Will you pursue it? Will you attain it?

Our awareness of this problem is witnessed by the multitude of pop-psychology and self-help books written about knowing yourself and self-actualization.  Despite the mountainous pile of literature on this topic, our efforts have resulted in abject failure for one simple reason. The only thing in the world that you can’t see is yourself.

The Self cannot be objectively known. Personal identity is not a collection of attributes or a list of character traits. It is possible to know all about a person, and still not know that person.  The Self can only be known in relationship.

This profound truth reveals why our modern attempts at self-knowledge have been such miserable failures. We have attempted to turn the world into a series of mirrors in which we look to see ourselves endlessly reflected. You cannot have a relationship with the image in a mirror. The more we seek to see ourselves by imposing our image upon the world around us, the less chance we have of ever truly finding out who we are, and who we are meant to be.

The self can only be known subjectively by another subject. The question, asked by Tom Bombadil, ‘who are you, alone, yourself and nameless?’ is unanswerable. The closest you can ever get is to give your name. What is a name but a call to relationship? A name is that thing by which others know you and only in being known may you know something of yourself.

It is also of vital importance to realize that like your name, your identity, your self, and your very being and existence, are all given to you. They are not self-created. You can as much create your own identity as you can give birth to yourself. Everything you have, even your very self, is a gift.

Knowing yourself as you are is an important step, but it is not the end goal. It is not your purpose. To find our true purpose we must know our Telos, our ideal self. We must know who we are meant to be. Just as we can only find knowledge of ourselves through relationship with other persons, we can only find knowledge of our ideal self through relationship with the Transcendent.

You can gain some knowledge of yourself through honest relationship with the world around you, but most especially you are known through relationship with another person. Only another knower can know you. In the same way you may gain some knowledge of your ideal self through honest relationship with the truths of Transcendent Reality, but most especially your ideal self is known only through relationship with the transcendent Person.

At first glance, to the modern reader, it might seem almost like a contradiction that Socrates could say “The unexamined life is not worth living.” For if you search the Socratic dialogues Socrates spends relatively little time looking at himself. His quest is always outward and upward. He does not go in search of himself, he goes in search of the true nature of Beauty, Justice, Friendship, and so on. His purpose in all his endeavors is to know The Good. By this he does not mean specific goods, or individual goods, but transcendent Goodness itself. The Good from which all specific goods and individual goods receive their goodness.

This is also why Aristotle places the highest value in life on the contemplation of the Divine Mind. This is the path to our purpose. Only here can we discover our Telos. If you seek the self, you will lose yourself utterly. Only in relationship with God can you ever truly find and become yourself.

For the next article in this series – Finding the Ancient Way: Part Three