and they fall away one by one
and an impossible gulf opens between you
and time becomes thick like the air in dark places
and you think you won’t live that long anyway
and the pavement swallows your footsteps
and you lose the damp flavor of memory
and the set lights fade slowly
and you close your eyes and breathe
and you swallow
and tomorrow comes

There are people who I know and have long known who are annoyed by the fact that I can read and entertain, say, Orthodox Christian or Taoist or Buddhist texts but don’t have a lot of patience for religious traditions that are “closer to home.”

They put it down to ego and a kind of aesthetic obscuritanism, i.e. fashion.

“Oh, he went off and got educated and big Ph.D. guy can’t be seen standing next to the faith traditions of the average people he grew up with because it doesn’t look impressive and fancy enough for him. That’s why he reads those other books and chats with those other people, but won’t read our books or talk to us about our spiritual lives.”

— § —

I grew up in Utah. Utah, and the United States in which it sits, are heavily Protestant. I don’t make this point to try to characterize Protestantism definitively, but more to enable a border of a kind to be drawn between spiritual and philosophical universes.

That is to say that I’m doing the same thing here they’re doing when they say “Oh, you’ll engage with and consider all of that other stuff, but not our stuff.” We’re both talking about the same border, I’m just pointing to it from the other direction.

I’m aware that there are other kinds of Protestantism in other places, but I know less about them. I didn’t grow up around them, wasn’t steeped in them.

But American Protestantism I know well. It’s a dominant social, cultural, and political force here, to this day, and even among those who no longer practice it.

And despite denominational differences and what adherents believe to be irreconcilable sectarian differences, to my eye, they’re all the same in one important way.

— § —

Epistemology probably isn’t something I should be blogging about because I’m not a philosopher and whatever formal philosophical training I have comes to me through the “squishy” side of the American social science disciplines, with whom I’m less impressed every day.

But my particular tendencies at a personal level have everything to do with epistemology, so I’m going to have to go there to finally get to the point I’m so long-windedly trying to make.

Here’s the thing.

There is a particular epistemology that I associate closely with American Protestantism that I can’t concede. It goes something like this:

• To believe is to have faith
• To have faith is to know
• To know is to be certain
• To believe is therefore to be certain
• It is Good (capital G) to have faith
• Therefore it is Good to believe
• And it is Good to be certain
• It is a sin not to have faith
• Therefore it is a sin not to believe
• And it is a sin not to be certain

And ultimately:

• I believe that my preferences are Right
• Therefore I am certain that my preferences are Right
• And I have faith that my preferences are Right
• And because faith is good
• My certainty is good

This is all over our culture, from Disney films to national politics to activism in civil society.

To believe is to have faith is to know. To know is to have faith is to believe. And the Bible tells us that faith is everything, and Disney tells us that belief is everything, and therefore it follows that certainty is everything.

Everyone strives to believe. Everyone is proud to achieve and hold faith. And for precisely these reasons everyone operates with certainty—they know.

And all of this is a force for good in the world and is presumed to be be right and moral.

— § —

I can’t be the only one who has spent my life being showered with testimonials from believers, both secular and non-secular, in American life. Whatever the cause, whatever the denomination, whatever the secular or spiritual claim:

• “I absolutely know—I am certain that…”
• “I believe with all my heart that…”

Usually if done in the course of proselytizing, these are prefaced with “I want you to know that…”

• “I want you to know that I absolutely know that…”
• “I want you to know that I believe with all my heart that…”

These are all seen as both fundamentally good claims—unassailable, claims that “you can’t hold against people”—and also as persuasive claims on the part of those who make them.

They tell you these things—how much they know, deep, deep down, how deeply certain is their certainty—that this thing or that one is True.

All these years later, I just can’t join them there. I find these claims of knowledge to be off-putting. More to the point, though I’m not a religious person, I find these claims of certainty to be, in some way, blasphemous.

The more they are made, the less seriously I take them.

— § —

But here’s the thing. I do believe (along with virtually every faith tradition, American Protestant or not) that faith is a fundamental good, for a variety of reasons that I won’t bother to go into here.

So how can this possibly be?

If I see faith as good, how can I be put off by people who believe, or who know?

This question is what I’m getting at with this whole discussion. It points to how the cultures on the two sides of the border differ.

I am able to think and talk about and read certain Orthodox, or Catholic, or Taoist, or Buddhist thinkers with generosity and seriousness because faith is not an epistemic quantity for them.

That is to say that—at least for those that I find interesting and agreeable—faith is not at all the same thing as belief, and neither has much at all to do with knowledge or certainty. Belief is not a way of having faith and faith is not a way of knowing.

• Faith is faith
• Belief is belief
• Knowledge is knowledge
• Certainty is certainty
• These are each different things
• To have faith is good
• To have belief is understandable
• To have knowledge may be useful but is risky
• To have certainty is bad

This road—this is a road that I can travel as a tourist all day long.

Because the older I get, the more it becomes clear to me that I don’t know. I am not certain. They don’t know, despite their certainty. And certainty is not a good thing—and it is not the same as faith.

And when you consider the equivalences that these other traditions draw, they do not overlap with the American Protestant ones.

Not:

• Belief is faith
• Faith is knowledge
• Knowledge is certainty

But rather:

• Belief is human nature
• Faith is hope and trust
• Knowledge is practical
• Certainty is error

Despite the superficial similarities (both being Christianity) between, for example, American Protestantism and, say, Coptic Orthodoxy, at the core of things—at the transcendental level—their universes are very different places.

— § —

Every time someone purports to know, I am put off, particularly if this is expressed with certainty.

I know that there is irony here, that the claims to know are a way of attempting to demonstrate both faith and moral value, the only move they know how to make when it comes to persuasion about things beyond the practical and empirical.

But in the same way that I have little patience (and getting less every day) for the activists who “know” in our social and political life, I have little patience (and getting less every day) for religious folk who “know” in their religious lives.

If you tell me you have deep faith, and leave it at that, I’ll be interested in hearing what you have to say—and talking about it seriously all day long.

The moment you tell me that you know, you’ve lost me. Becuase you don’t know. And more to the point, that’s the claim of the tyrant, and the criminal, and the Pharisee.

In all things, religious or secular, I am unconvinced that it is for us to know.

And every bit of practical wisdom I’ve managed to accumulate over the course of my life (which admittedly isn’t all that much) tells me that people who know are both going to cause conflict and are probably going to make things worse in the end.

— § —

I’m mildly amused imagining how some of my American Protestant compatriots might react to this explication.

“How is it possible to have faith without knowing? Surely if my faith is real, then I know?”

If only we could excise this particular epistemic ethos from our culture, we might be able to have a society again—without all the internecine, zero-sum conflict that we have today.

But we are who we are as a people.

And at a personal level—I’m just not there with you. I haven’t been there with you since I was about ten years old.

Yes, I understand that you are certain that you know, and thus that you also believe and have faith, and that all of these are good because they are the same, because Disney and the Bible and your schoolteachers assure you that faith and/or belief are moral goods, and therefore you must go out and change the world and its people based on what you are certain that you know.

I understand what you feel. I can understand it because I grew up here. I breathed the same air.

But this understanding doesn’t mean you’ll ever fundamentally persuade me—or anyone else—about any one thing. Because persuasion doesn’t have much to do with knowledge, but rather a lot to do with faith. Which is why—and how—faith and knowledge are completely different things.

— § —

So if you want to reach me with an open mind for heart-to-hearts, bring me your faith—but don’t expect me to be impressed by your knowledge, and for God’s sake, spare me your certainty.

Anyone that has studied anything in any of the humanities or social sciences departments of Western systems of higher education knows the standard form of the successful essay:

Text X ostensibly says Y, but in fact a closer analysis reveals that, in fact, it actually secretly says Z, and I will now step through why that is the case, point by point. (Followed by a step back to some meta level and a few dozen steps that inevitably can b traced back to continental philosophy.)

Though at first glance this may seem a bit of a stretch—after all, there are many more things to do in the humanities than analyze a text—in fact, it’s not. Not for a long time now.

You see, for half a century at least we’ve generally “understood” that any social object—that is, anything that at least one human mind experiences—is in fact a “text.” Naturally this includes people and their biographies as well. (Thanks, language and literature departments!)

And for a similar amount of time, we’ve also generally “understood” that all texts secretly carry with them the agency of some power, and are thus in fact exercises of, or themselves exercise power. (Thanks, social science departments!)

And so it is that that in effect, the entire project of the humanities and social sciences for the better part of a century in the West has been to point to just about anything or anyone that can be seen or that anyone cares about—including people and things that were previously considered beautiful, or sacred, or funny, or trivial—and demonstrate how it—or them—is actually a liar out to manipulate you for it—or their—own ends.

— § —

Amazingly, all of this aggravated nonsense falls somehow under the auspices of “making life better.” Usually the claim is that power that’s out to manipulate you ought to be neutered (thus explaining why all art, science, people, and things also have to be neutered, given that they’re all deceptive texts in service of said power), or even more sadly that we are edified when we pursue Truth and thus it is imperative to demonstrate just what a totality of all that is is clearly Lies.

And so it is that we end up in 2024 with the West in collapse and wondering why there are so many conspiracy theories and why so many are so very angry, and of course everyone is marching around trying to “make the world a better place” by pointing their fingers at their fellow citizens, their social and cultural institutions, and all the traditions that have made them who they are, and trying to neuter the lot.

— § —

In fact, anyone who tries to make the world a better place can only make the world a worse place. The meta is a poison. It’s amazing that one of the largest companies on the planet—and by all accounts one of the most poisonous and destructive—is, in fact, called meta.

— § —

What you can not do in any modern humanities or social science department or journal article or even in idle humanities or social science chit-chat over wine with fat heads is naively say that you simply like a work, or simply don’t like it, or that you think it means exactly what it says.

The failure to elevate oneself immediately to the meta level in such situations isn’t just gauche, but is seen as evidence of some form of mental retardation, i.e. you look to be thirty but in fact you’re clearly seven, as you have taken something in life at face value. How embarrassing.

And in fact the most revered amongst us, the people who will make emeritus or who will run the hedge fund, never have to “elevate” themselves to meta because they have achieved a permanent meta state and are admired far and wide for it.

They never see what is in front of them; instead, they see the power that it secretly carries, the message that it secretly conveys, the shapes of the shadows that it casts and that are clearly the actual immanence of the thing in the world.

They never see naively, in other words—they see first, last, and always only the conspiracies that lie behind the toothbrush, the Shakespeare sonnet, the Coca-Cola can, and the waste management engineer.

And of course as they would freely admit, they, too, are a text, and their calling out of these conspiracies is just so much more text, and anyone who fails to regard both they and their statements first and foremost at this level of meta analysis deserves everything they have coming to them.

— § —

In short, our best and our brightest know very well and have known for generations that all of it—the paintings and the people, the novels and the natal, the consumer goods and the calcuations that enable their manufacture—are lies all the way down, conspiracies all the way down, in the service of power.

And they can point to a dozen passages in Derrida or Lacan or Foucault or Lyotard or Saussure or Pierce and so on to make their case—not like the plebes who merely assert it naively. (Naivete, after all, is the enemy of those trying to make the world a better place; all accusations must be made in a state of engaged meta-level blase that borders on trance, but can’t be trance, because of course trance is naive.)

— § —

And then we all sit around and muse about why the public is so suspicious, and so gripped by mistrust, and why we all feel a gaping hole in our hearts where the meaning and truth used to be.

It took me decades to turn myself into one of these monsters, and with luck, by the time I die, I will rediscover naivete and be able to say “gosh I like it because I think it’s pretty” or “gosh I like them because I think they’re nice.”

— § —

When politics invades aesthetics and claims of Truth-capital-‘T’ you know you have a totalitarian culture on your hands. Fascist, communist, whatever. That’s one of the general conclusions drawn after Hitler and Stalin.

Maybe that’s the strong form of the argument, but I think at the very least what we’ve got here is something of a gravity vs. quantum mechanics problem for human being. Both history and experience tell us, if we’ll listen (but we won’t because that would be naive), that art and the analysis of art and the human using scientific methods simply does not work. It seems to work, but in the very moment at which the the Actuality is revealed, the subject instead suddenly vanishes. Analyze them this way and art ceases to be art; people cease to be people, and thus nothing is revealed. To examine anything outside of science using methods broadly drawn from science is to extinguish it. You call it a lie because it is one and it vanishes on you, and you become the liar calling out other liars.

Yet we know that the methods of science broadly work, as they have given us the Amazon Truck and the Smart Coffee Maker.

And so we have a core irreconcilability. It’s the pit that Marx and everyone else fell into on the way to the future. We know how to find Truth. We also know that to seek Truth using Truth methods in the domain of Truth is to extinguish Truth.

Maybe because there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamt of in our philosophy. But of course that can’t be, because it’s naive; that’s clearly saying something else, something that Power wants us to think…

(And here the professional philosophers and epistemologists jump in and begin crafting new chapters of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy at me. They miss the point, but then missing the point is the point, because to not miss the point would be naive. I am calling them out here and now as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power, in the same way that they will be calling me out under their breath as a naive liar who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of my own power, in the same way that the left is calling out Donald Trump as a naive lair who is making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of his own power and the right is calling out Joe Biden and the CDC as naive liars who are making facile, perhaps even nonsensical arguments in the service of their own power…)

— § —

Oh yes, there’s an anti-elite feeling about, and as a former “elite” I want to say—it’s fully justified. There are few things so vile as stealing the general supply of the numinous by way of cynical signs and wonders, then taking it out behind the shed and murdering it in cold blood.

We are going to suffer for our sins in the West. The die is cast.

— § —

P.S. Get off my lawn.