The metaphorical nature of religion w⧸ Layman Pascal- Voices with Vervaeke (Q7Q7WxfqF8U)

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Welcome to Voices with Raveki. I’m joined once again with my good friend and colleague Laman Pascal and we’re going to continue on what’s turning out to be a series on sort of post metaphysical spirituality or metamodern takes on spirituality, however you want to think about it. And so welcome again, Laman. Delightful to be with you as always, John. So how would you like to start today? Well, last time when we finished off with politics, we kind of said we might talk about meta politics and how that relates to religion. Yes, I’d like to do that. But I have a kind of query for you and I want to get your take on the notion of reach. And let me set the stage for this question, which is, as I usually do, I was trying to investigate primitive examples of my integration surplus model. Right. And in this case, I was doing an experiment with I’m tracking the sensation inside my left little finger and I’m tracking my emotional response to the concept of God. And my goal is to track them both simultaneously in equal amounts. Right. Right. So at first I’m losing one and grabbing the other back and forth. I get the full task and I try to grab it again. But by persistence over a period of time, you get to a point where you suddenly feel like you’ve grabbed both in the same moment in equal amounts. And it not only gives you both of them, it gives you this other feeling of generalized empowerment and beingness. Yeah. And I thought in that moment, there’s very there’s a phenomenology subjectively of reaching to make that grasp. I could imaginatively think of it as something came from the place where my attention is and tried to do that grasping. Or I could think of it as an effect of the synchronization of these two attention points created an effect which retroactively describe itself to me as an intentional grasping. Right. But I thought it was interesting to think about reach in terms of your notions of grip. Right. Because it seems like in ordinary thinking, reach would have to precede grip. I have to I have to put my hand out into the glove before I can grab something with that glove. Right. Yes. I just wondered what your take on reach was in regards to grip. Yeah, very much. So I have put thought into that. And so that’s where I try to integrate two people who actually used, I think, independently from each other. The same example of the blind man tapping the floor with a cane kind of thing. The first thing I think I mentioned is Marleau-Ponty famous in the phenomenology of perception. But the other is Michael Polanyi. I can’t remember if it’s in the tacit dimension or not that he does that. Might be in meaning. And so Michael Polanyi, sorry, Marleau-Ponty is where, you know, that’s optimal grip. But Polanyi has this idea. And in other places, I talk about it like in the transparency, opacity, shifting and things like that. So what Polanyi talks about that precedes the optimal gripping is exactly that place in which you go from a bunch of features that you’re looking at until. And then there is something. And I think that a functional level, it’s a kind of data compression. We might talk about that in a minute. What happens is, let’s do it with a concrete example. You have the magic eye painting with and all you’re seeing are all the little color blobs and you’re just looking at them and there’s colored blobs and you keep doing this and all of a sudden, you know, you get a three dimensional pop out of a dolphin jumping out of the water and you’re no longer looking at the colors, the colored pixels. You’re looking through them to see the dolphin. And so Polanyi talks about this idea, like, for example, when I’m holding my phone, I’m not actually aware of the sensations in my finger. And you had your little sensation in your finger while you were doing God. Right. I’m not aware of them. But it’s not like I have it’s not like I’m phenomenologically numb. Like, I’m aware through my sensations of the phone. And so I’m taking think about each sensation of touch, like one of those pixels in the magic eye picture. And somehow what my brain does is it takes those sensations and I don’t look at my sensations. I look through them at I look through them at the phone. Does that make sense as a phenomenological? Sure. And the language you can already hear is you see through. Right. And it’s this through motion. And it seems to be a motion in which and Polanyi argued and this picks up on your idea about attention that attention always has a from to structure that it’s always from or I would say through your subsidiaries into your focal awareness. And that’s the reach. And the idea is and this is work that Leo Ferraro and I published on mindfulness that Marla Ponte and others often talk about optimal grip only in terms of what I often call like this vertical dimension of the gestalt relative to the features, like the parts of the phone, the whole too many details, not enough, that sort of thing. Right. Yeah. But there is another aspect of optimal grip, which you could call this this reaching dimension. Right. Because I can I can there’s no there’s no final place at which I can stop that. So you did it. Like I can look at my sensations or right. I can look through my sensations to my hand. I can look through my hand to the phone or I can tap through the phone and pick up the table. There’s you see there’s there’s a continuum and you can move in and out the degree to which you’re doing what Polanyi calls integration. And I think that optimal gripping has multiple dimensions to it. It’s not just that the stolt feature. It’s also when I get the right reach and there’s probably optimal gripping. And I think there’s another one. I think there’s also a see or seen thing. This is prospect and refuge theory. So we want to see as much as possible while being as invisible as possible. Because that when I can see, I can see predators and food. But if I’m not seeing, I don’t become food and my prey doesn’t see me. Right. So I’m always trying to get sort of an optimal grip that way. That’s why people like, you know, certain kinds of vistas, even than the rover scientists, when they’re when they’re preparing the public photos for they try to find a place where there’s a vista. But the rover looks like it’s in a fairly safe place because people like those kind of pictures the best. They feel sort of most at home. So I think there’s there is there’s a there’s a moving this way, which isn’t it doesn’t really reach out. Reaching this is the stolt feature. There’s a moving this way, which is that integration, the subsidiary and the focal. And then there’s also a position. Positioning of ourselves. And I think optimal grip is some intersection point of optimality between at least those dimensions, perhaps some others as well. So you’re thinking of at least an X, Y, Z access access optimal grip. Well, I think there’s probably a fourth one. Yeah, at least at least three dimensions. But and who knows how many we might just have some more in the future. And that attention itself in its primitive structure has something like a to from aspect to it and a distal feature aspect. Your attention is doing that. And your attention is also it’s all it’s also it’s also proprioceptive and kinesthetic this way, while also being prospective that way, because you’re all when you’re you’re always attending both ways. Right. So yeah. So attention has this really dynamic, tense, tensive structure to it, which is specific, pitting something that has tension tending in it, right. Tending it. That makes me curious about the shift that occurs in that event, because I’ve already got my attention. So we got these features I already have to some degree. I don’t want to say a minimum. I have my normal to from that I’m sitting. Yeah. And then I have these objects of perception that I’m working with. And then at some moment, there’s a more or less successful coordination and data compression of a number of perceptual stimuli as if they’re one thing. And now that’s something I can extend my through into. Yes, exactly. What is it? What is it in that shift that accounts for the intensification of the experience of the attention? Because I wasn’t previously noticing the to from of my attention, even though it was perhaps minimally there. Now, it seems like it really confronts me. It seems like the volume has been turned up on that structure of attention by passing through that data compressed set. Well, there’s a couple of things. So one thing is if it is a form of compression, it’s it’s probably you’re getting something like a fluency spike. Here’s why. Generally, when I can compress, that means the function like think like one of my standard examples, I do data compression on my scatter plot and I get my line of best fit, which is appropriate term. And then what that does allow me to do, it allows me to extrapolate and interpolate. And so I get both an internal into the data and external generalization of the function. And that’s a huge empowerment. And what it means is so I can get many more cognitive effects for a much less cognitive effort, Alice sort of Sperber and Wilson. And so that’s like a fluency burst. That’s like a ha. Right. It has almost it has some of the phenomenological qualities of like of an insight. And because I think the generalization function can go in both ways, extrapolation and interpolation, it’s both an outward directed awareness and a more inward reflective increase in awareness. So you get power that then can be applied to a greater scope of awareness. All right. Let’s see if we can segue from there to religion. And thanks for that. That’s a very interesting way to put it. I like that. I guess the interesting thing for me in many respects is the analogy between religion and spirituality as a collective or intersubjective phenomenon versus a personal subjective phenomenon. Personally, it’s very easy to tell myself a story where I’m the doer of the process, as if I already exist. Yeah. Collectively, it’s much more difficult. What would the subsystems be? You know, I have some guesses about that, but who is the doer? Who organizes that? And is that really a question? Because maybe that doer is illusory in myself. Yeah. In that case, the analogy is much tighter because I don’t have to account for that differential between myself and the collective. Yes. But when I think about the individual, there’s a very tidy correspondence with neurological partitioning. Right. I could say, what are the subsystems that would be integrated in the individual to produce spiritual effects? Well, we’ve got a head brain and a torso brain. I’ve got contractive and expansive aspects of the autonomic nervous system. I’ve got a left and a right brain. I’ve got an old brain and a new brain. There’s these easy partitions that I could say, well, these are perhaps the psychological subsystems that I would work with. Socially, it’s a little more peculiar. And I end up saying something like genres of social experience. I have to take that in a very broad sense because in one way, it’s a categorization of people, right? That it’s classes and races and genders and things like that. In another way, it’s domains, methodological and epistemological domains, right? We say, well, math, poetry, mystical experience, politics, all these things need to be woven together to create a meta political effect, which gives the people in a cultural field a sense of their own surplus meaningfulness, which they might regard as the divinity of their culture, which is useful to them in terms of clarifying and empowering and mobilizing them. That’s my overtake on this. So first of all, I wonder if there is a segue between what we were talking about in this, because I think that one of the things that mediates between those two areas that you’ve been talking about, which often label the transjective or something along those lines, is exactly the way in which the relevance of things is being determined. One of the things spirituality does is it alters consciousness by moving around the set point in that multidimensional space. So the subsidiary focal, the distal feature, the unfamiliar, the unfamiliar, the prospect refuge, all of these things get manipulated and you get some altered state of consciousness. And what that does profoundly is, and that’s why it feels like often like an insight experience, is it can often empower us to get access to new patterns of salience and relevance so that we can notice patterns in the world and in ourselves and in the world around us. So that we can notice patterns in the world and in ourselves that we otherwise couldn’t. And so that’s to my mind, how I’m trying to give some underlying cognitive functionality to what you often call the overflow effect. That that’s my way of trying to say, at least partially, that’s what I think is going on in that sense of overflow. And then what that says to me is that we tend to, I think we tend to locate consciousness incorrectly in the note, and you sort of alluded to it, in sort of a monopolar self-enclosed thing we call the self. And I am suspicious of the idea of it being a self-constituting, self-enclosed entity. First of all, little kids don’t have one, they have to grow it. And they only grow it when they’re in successful, uh, uh, infiltration and communication, uh, with other persons. Um, and we know that the, the ideas we have about our constancy are very questionable because the constancy is based on the extremely questionable proposition that our memories are stable things rather than what they are. Our memories are not like computer files. They’re more like compost heaps. The things on the top are distinct, but as you go further in the past, they mush and they merge and they re and they, they chemically reorganize themselves into new compounds, um, and you know, all the work. So most of our sense of the continuity of our sense of self is also to be challenged, um, the sense of it being isolated and self-sustaining. Uh, we’re both using English. I didn’t make English. You didn’t make English, right? Uh, my ability to reflect on my own cognition is dependent on the fact that I have other people who take a perspective on me and I’m socially bound to them. And so I, I had to track them tracking me and all of that stuff. Uh, and so I think that if we see that consciousness is not only housed in a body, but that the self is, if you’ll allow me this, like housed in a society, it’s a, it’s at most a, it’s at most a relevance attractor within certain kinds of processing rather than there’s nothing beyond, there’s nothing to the self beyond a very complex pattern of self organization is what I’m saying. And that self organization is not, is not isolated in here. So I think what I, what I wanted to say is, I’m not so sure of that. The functions that you point to in the brain actually are isolated just to the brain, I think they correspond to patterns of interactions between people. Um, so you’re nodding right now, uh, because lower areas in your brain are syncing up to visual processing. And that’s how somehow also being coordinated with the semantic stuff. Right. And so the older brain and the neocortex, it’s not only the vertical within me, it’s also the horizontal between us. Um, you see what I’m saying? I’m seeing, I’m suggesting to you, I’m not putting aside the disciplinary divisions, but I’m saying, wouldn’t it also be useful to extend that notion? Like that you had internal to the brain actually out into patterns within distributed cognition itself. And then. Absolutely. It’s, I mean, like I said, it’s very tidy to use neural partitioning and you can get a lot of support from people who are looking at it through a material lens. Right. You could definitely expand the notion of what those subsystems are, right? You could expand them in the traditional spiritual sense of adding in chakras and energies, you could expand them in the sense of extended mind, various functions between people and also between people and the systems and objects that they’re operating with. I think one of the crossovers for me there is, um, my experience of the self and my experience of the other, right? I’m framing that as my experience, right? So then I’m putting it on the side of spirituality for the sake of convenience. Right. But I’m, I’m one of me is one of the parts that’s been partitioned in that scenario. So I think you’re right. And the line definitely blurs. If we take an extended notion of the self, and also if we look at the very primitive level of how swarm behavior and multiplicities might be involved in the most basic forms of cognition, then there’s not so much of a gap between that and social phenomenon that might be analogous to consciousness. Exactly. So I’m thinking of, you know, the way in distributed cognition, you could, you can have something analogous, very primitive function in a mob, which, which is something maybe is different than how people are moving together in music, which is different from what people are doing in the logos. You see what I’m saying is instead of cutting it up in terms of the topics, you could cut it out. You can see social, social cognition also is having various forms of configuration that map onto these kinds of processing divisions we have correspondingly within the brain. That’s what I’m suggesting to you. Right. So what would we look at that would be those categories? Because I think it’s very, it’s very convenient to think of the normal categorizations that we use socially to describe types of people. And it’s also very convenient to think in terms of ancient classical thematic categorizations, which I think we find in the, the Mandala of paganism, so to speak, right, there’s the war deity and the love deity and the muses, right? So those are basically the same thematic social categorizations we still use today. So there’s a naturalistic continuity there to some degree, but, you know, do you, you have suggestions about where else we might look? Yeah, that’s what I’m trying to do. I’m not, let’s be careful here. I’m not trying to undermine or overturn or reduce the way all those other categorizations, but proposing another way of thinking about it. I’ll tell you what I’m working towards. I’m working towards this idea, which I think a quote I once heard, and I’ve been mulling this over and I think it has an even, I think it’s profound, but it has an even more profound meaning than the person who uttered it. And I can’t remember who said it. It might be young. I’m not sure. I think it’s young. Let’s say it is young. It sounds like young at least, you know, that a dream is a private myth and a myth is a public dream. And the idea is that, that, that there’s a shared kind of functionality there. And that, and what, what I think, what, if it was young, I think they were talking about sort of the content, but it struck me, but wait, maybe the processing is what it’s the processing similarity. Like my, my brain has to dream in order to do these kinds of learning functions. And maybe cultures have learning functions, social, distributed cognition. And, and, and the myth is a way in which they do something functionally analogous, the way they reset the system and reconnect in a way that our brain does. And so that there’s actually a deep continuity. And so what I was, what I would propose then is say, well, why don’t you look at the criteria by which we evaluate functionality? And you can see that, for example, like something like Plato, and he’s doing this in the Republic when he’s going between the psyche and the classes in the city. Right. And it’s like, well, one function seems to have very limited cognitive scope. It’s really stimulus bound and it works in terms of urgency. And then there seems to be forms of distributed cognition that have that same functional description. And then there is a form of processing that’s much more sort of socially culturally oriented, right. And it works in according to a different normativity and it’s sort of medium range in its cognitive scope. Right. And then, and then you see, see what I’m suggesting you. So what you look at is you look at, well, people, distributed cognition configures in certain ways. But what’s the functionality in terms of, you know, what’s, what’s its scope? Treat it as a cognitive agent. It’s a problem solving agent and many people call it distributed cognition for a reason. So what’s the, what’s its cognitive scope? What, what kind of information does it process? Is it stimulus bound? Is it more abstract? Is it extremely abstract, et cetera? What’s its temporal scope? Is it urgent? Can it pursue long-term things? How self-corrective is it? And that would be ways of analyzing social groupings in terms of their functionality, which then could very readily map onto the normal way. Cause that’s the, that’s the divisions we’re making in the brain. They’re functional divisions, right. According to those criteria. And Plato argues in the Republic that you can see, of course, you can see a corresponding taxonomy between the two and then realizing that can actually afford a deeper integration, even continuity between the two. And so if spirituality is some kind of aligning, like you were trying to do with your, your, your finger and God, but aligning between all of these functions within the brain. And we’ve already said, we’re willing to blur that, those boundaries. There may be religion is correspondingly a way in which we align these functionalities so that they’re, they are appropriately disposed to function in an appropriate fashion. So just like I get that the inner justice, the optimality within, I get the optimality without, and I just like, I would need dreaming within, I would need myth without, et cetera. That that’s what I’m proposing to you. So at the very minimum, it sounds like, population segments and thematic divisions could stand to be supplemented by something like scale distinctions. Yeah. Yep. Yeah. Well, scope, you, you could ask questions about scope. You could ask questions about motivation and you could ask questions about the regulating norm normativity. So, and I think what we often do is we compress those and perhaps sometimes confound them or conflate them when we use something like primitive, like primitive may mean that it’s the normativity is a very basic normativity, pleasure and pain. And, or it might mean that it has a very limited problem solving scope. And, or it might mean that, you know, it can only, too short term rather than long term growth and, or it might mean that it only picks up on superficial rather than deeper aspects of the environment. But if we took terms like primitive, which are a little bit pejorative anyways, and, and analyze them out into these functional matrices, I think we could get a more fine grained analysis. Yeah. And that’s, that’s all on one side of looking at what the metabolic situation of religion is, which is trying to build up from a look at what the basic variables might be that could be integrated and combined. The other way to look at it would be to try to survey history and look at times where it seemed like what we would accept as religiosity was being increased in, in social pools. Yes. Try to see what those things might have in common. I, I agree. As you know, one of my methodological principles is always to try to integrate a structural analysis with a historical analysis. So totally, I’m totally on board with that proposal. And that’s tricky because there’s a, you never know how accurate you’re being when you try to get a read on what was a Renaissance, so to speak, where was collective spirituality building up? We can make a plausible argument that the generation of Christianity out of the Greek and Roman situation was an interesting shift. Yeah. A lot of that’s still with us. Obviously we associate Renaissance with late 1500s Mediterranean culture. I think we might look at post-war United States as having an interesting little period there where they had a number of factors in their favor in terms of global control and economy, but they’d also done a number of things through the war that might’ve created this spirit that people look back on as if it was glowing in the collective imaginary of the culture. The great generation. Yeah. And that runs from right, like the conservatives will look back at the early part of that and think, make America great again, like it was in the fifties. Right. All right. And then there’s a left tendency to look at the latter part is if that process had continued into the sixties and created this amazing blossoming that then started to falter toward the end of the sixties. Yes. They both look back at a process of increased spirit in the United States after the war. And so one of the things that intrigues me about that one is it’s close enough for me to reasonably have a look at. There’s a lot of things I can’t be sure of about the Renaissance or about the birth of Christianity or even further back. But I can look at some of the factors that were involved in, let’s say the war, which was a large event. It was collective. It gave people a polarized purpose. Yeah. I think importantly, it took people out of their normal life patterns and mixed them with other people from their same society that they normally mix with racially, gender wise, economically. Put them in very different environments too, right? Made their experience of life and death more vivid. Yep. Put them in those environments where they would gain new skills and gave them a lot of experience of teamwork. And then the survivors were able to go back to society with all of that extra. And I often get, when I think about it in those terms, I get this sense of my metaphor is a chemical solution that’s electrically conductive. And if you’re not mixing it, the fluids will naturally separate and then it won’t be electrically conductive and that those fluids are the different sections within the society. And as long as people continue to mostly go to lunch with people who dress like themselves and belong to the same socioeconomic class, so to speak, you’re going to have a failure to produce a collective spirit in that national field or whatever we want to call that arena. Okay. So I think this is what you’re doing. This, I think this is really insightful. So a couple of things that are coming to mind as you’re saying that is when you were describing what’s happening after the war, I wasn’t thinking of it mostly as groups mixing. I was thinking about it in terms of, again, problem solving. And so what’s happened is people have been put individually and collectively into situations in which much more cognitive flexibility is demanded and much more that sense of connectedness to the world mattering, making a difference to something to something beyond themselves is also enhanced. And the problem solving is made super salient because life and death really ramp up the salience of the problems that have to be solved. And so what I saw happening is something analogous to the actual revolution that perhaps in Christianity, where you’re getting maybe not full blown psychotechnologies, but you’re at least getting new emergent cognitive style that overall enhanced cognitive flexibility, enhanced, enhanced connectivity and cognitive flexibility. And then this empowers people’s capacity for dealing with the world. Well, also at the same time, reducing to some degree their proclivity to sort of collapsing inward in a kind of reciprocal narrowing. So there was there’s enough sort of out to counterbalance that. And then in that out, in that more out into the world, there’s much more cognitive flexibility. And so the reason why I like your mixing metaphor is it’s similar to the permeation metaphor. So if you remember the series I argued, you know, you get alphabetic literacy and it comes on for very prosaic reasons. And all the reasons for the in the war are very prosaic in a lot of ways. Right. Well, we just need we need to cooperate more. We’re going to die. Right. And we were in Europe. So we can’t act the way we are when we’re back at home in Kansas. Right. All that very prosaic stuff. But then but then the literacy sort of permeates. Right. Your cognition gets internalized and then your problem solving abilities are dramatically altered. And then you have to reinterpret how you’re how what’s salient to you has been so dramatically altered by that new functionality. And I saw I see religion as often. And that’s how I present the actual revolution as an attempt to start to make sense of the fact that these changes in cognitive processing are permeating beyond their prosaic origins into a much more comprehensive because they’re turning out to be powerful ways, powerfully generalizable. And that goes back to what we were talking about earlier. They turn out to be powerfully generalizable ways of thinking and problem solving. Yeah, I like you bringing the aspect of problem solving in. I think, you know, Jordan Hall and I were talking about this yesterday about how the spirit of fellowship is amplified by successful projects, which in terms of the pond, you know, constraining the design space so that there’s something you can actually work on and you can all tell that you’re working on it properly. And it’s simple enough. It’s obvious enough whether it’s succeeding or not, that you can harness a lot of your unconscious machinery to get involved. Yes. And that’s what the war gives you to some degree is a lot of people working on a lot of little projects where it’s pretty obvious whether they’re succeeding or not. Yes. Have to work as a team in a very instinctive sense, but also they frequently succeed, which is the other part of it. Right. So they more and more come to experience the flavor of what it’s like when a number of different perspectives or functions cooperate successfully into some kind of creative integration. I think that’s partly a Buddhist take, which is you you learn the flavor of the experience that you wish to cultivate and then you practice cultivating the positive emotions, so to speak. But those are the positive emotions are in coordination and coherence states. Yes. And so I think I think that’s right. And I think that’s at least a significant component of the phenomenology of what you call overflow. But here’s a thing. Right. Let’s say let’s let’s say that the the styles turn out to not be localized. Right. Note it. Compare the difference with people coming back from World War One and World War Two. People come back from World War One, especially the England. And what disseminates to the society is not an overflow. It’s the opposite because they hadn’t learned strategies that generalized well. In fact, that’s the whole point of that war. It was just insanity all the way through. Right. Until the last literally hundred days. Right. Which is not enough to turn people’s cognition around significantly. So but suppose what happened or saying about World War Two is different. People come back and they have these new functionalities that start to permeate because they just generalize. They transfer naturally and effectively into how you interact with people in many different domains. What could happen then is your project. And I’m thinking of Carson’s work here. Your project can go from being a finite game to an infinite game where the success is not in any goal state of achievement. But the success is can we keep this going? Can we keep this growing? Right. So the success is how much we make this, whatever it is, grow. And I put to you that when you get that shift, which is analogous to what I see, I think, in the acts of revolution in Christianity, when you get when you get the shift from the group project being a finite game oriented on some, you know, prosaic, even really important prosaic end state. And people catch the sense of the overflow and say, hey, let’s play the game of promoting and growing the overflow. I think that’s when you start to get something analogous to religion. And this is, of course, Durkheim’s idea, right, about the social effervescence becoming salient for its own sake. Yeah. The people gain insight consciously or instinctively into the meta game or the project that’s going on. You know, wherever these skills that succeed in teamwork and project success are generalizable, then they’re generalizable both in terms of potentially linking together these many different social subdivisions in the future, but also in playing that game at a more abstract level where you, let’s say, rejoice more in the pure production of the numinous. So I would I would put to you that what happens, I suggest, is you come back from the war and you already have the New Deal mentality, right, which is we’re going to play the we’re going to play the bigger game differently and we’re going to try and share it and we’re going to try and make it a better society. And I think those two things, right, because, you know, and Roosevelt’s the president for both the New Deal and the war. And that carries in with with with with Truman, of course. I mean, Eisenhower sort of damps it down a bit. But you know what I’m talking about. And so I think that why you get one factor, because there’s another factor we have to talk about. One factor you get is you get a sense of somehow the New Deal has really worked and somehow and then and this overflow plugs back into it. And it just goes, let’s let’s just grow this. And so you can see the Americans trying to almost extend the New Deal to the rest of the world. Like, you know, things like the United Nation and the Marshall Plan and all kinds of things are like, no, no, this is this is the way. Right. Now, I want to suggest that one other thing, though, I think all of this is pertinent. But of course, there’s also, right, the rise of the Soviet Union. Right. And and so a way of also solidifying the differentiation between the United States and the Soviet Union was the uptick in religiosity. So this is when America starts to really think of itself as a God fearing nation as a way of defining itself in opposition to godless communism. And so that’s also a factor. So I think both are right. I think this is internally generated overflow factor is. But religion also has another function, right, which is the right, you know, the homing function, right. That this is where this is us. And here’s where we are. And I think part of why you get that uptick in religion also is precisely as a way of saying really trying to define how we are not the Soviet Union and how we have a way of life different, fundamentally different. That opposition is certainly clarifying. And I think is that one of the traditional ways to establish some kind of cultural homogeneity. Yes. People to get that coherence. When you were saying those things, the notion of world spaces came up for me or, you know, epistemic cultural homogeneity. Cultural operating systems or whatever it is in a couple of different ways. One is, say, modernity, if we take that to be a real thing, has an implied metaphysics of a growth and infinities and things like that that you find in many aspects of it. It’s not just in the market. It’s not just in postwar America. It’s in the math. It’s in the project of science, sorts of things. So one of the things you might find here is when something has worked for a group of people, when they’ve got a little more energy, a little more cohesion, the insight that they come up with as a generalizable program might be a way of seeing more deeply into the epistemic continent that they’re already a part of. So they don’t necessarily come up with something radically different. They see more accurately what the what the functional version is of the thing they’re already committed to in that world space. The other thing that struck me was scales of world space, right? Because the New Deal, for example, or the war, that applies to all of the Americans. Right. And in a way, it can call people up who might otherwise have had a similar religious phenomenon going on in a smaller group, right? A subculture and ethnicity, a historical diaspora group, something like that. And so it could be succeeding at this level, which would look like failing at the next level or succeeding at the next level will sometimes look like an imposition upon that smaller level. But I think that the process could be abstractly generalized for all the levels. At the level of the nation, then you would have other nations like the Soviet Union, which are rivals to you. If it were to occur at the level of the planet, then you can have, say, other planets that were rivals, but it wouldn’t look like some other nation was the rival. Likewise, when you’re young, when the Armenians have it against the Greeks and they both live in Ohio, we see that combining in the American sacred spirit is something that they could share. Right. Right. It seems to me that we need to be able to scale the world spaces, but also to see that we that these creations unpack sometimes the implicit logic that was in the world space already. So I think that’s right. And that scaling is already reminding me of what we were talking about before. Right. That there seems to be something almost like analogous to the moving between the feature level and the gestalt level and how much you’re stepping back and looking at and how much you’re looking through. And again, there’s sort of deep cultural analogs from what we’re talking about in individual cognition. And then I’m wondering if there’s a potential convergence here between the structural analysis and the historical analysis, that religion is something like an overflow into a new optimal grip. For at the cultural level. Certainly what the our stories about the creation of Christianity look like. Yes. Yeah. With an overflow of these different cultural and traditional zones in the Mediterranean to create a new, in a way, new national identity, almost with an overflowing spirit where you say, well, you’re not Greek anymore, you’re not Jewish anymore, you’re not Roman anymore. We’re all part of something that’s operating at a larger scale of this phenomenon. And it could also, but it was also solving problems. That’s what I mean about a new optimal grip. It seems to be a new problem solving machine. It can solve problems. And the way I with the evidence I have for that is it builds a new civilization, a new kind of civilization. So I mean, I’m worried about a bias in our analysis, because we’re looking for pivot points where we can see a spike in religiosity. And that might that might present us to over-define religion in terms of its creative periods, rather than in terms, rather also in terms of its stability periods. Right. Do you see what you see what I’m worried about? Yeah. Yeah. Rama, Vishnu and Shiva are all involved. Yeah. We need a tributary approach to the analysis of the living. Yeah. That’s a, that’s a delicate area because I think we do want to define it in a way that can distinguish my real religion from hollow religion, so to speak. We don’t want to define its decadent phases or its pseudo versions within the main definition. But we do want to be able to define a sense of religion that has a creative phase and a stabilizing phase. Although we might be able to say the stabilizing phase is stabilizing the creativity. Yes, I think so. Creativity looks like an explosion when you had nothing to compare it to before. But once it’s regularly institutionalized, it’s still going on. It’s still like our bodies. It’s constantly generating its form. Well, I was going to say maybe an analogy then, and I think this is exactly what you’re pointing to, is like, let’s say insight is when I get a new optimal grip, right? The way we were talking about earlier and that affords new problem solving. But I have to also go through a process of verifying that my insight is going to work and then I have to stabilize it into more incremental procedures. Because, right? And that’s typically what happens. I have it like I woke up and I had an insight about an argument, but I don’t just, I don’t just, oh, well, that’s it. I then stabilize it. I write it out. I turn it into an argument, right? And it’s no longer, it’s no longer using insight processing, but it stabilizes. And are you suggesting something sort of analogous to that? So that the religion is both the distributed cognitive insight, but also the distributed cognitive verification and stabilization of that insight. Yeah, I think it’s analogous to, you know, the idea of extended mind is included within consciousness, right? If we think of the creative act as involving the subsequent instantiation and verification process. Yes. And then also that, that, you know, when you discover that you can do that, you have a tremendous success, but also a thousand years might go by in which people do a whole bunch of that. And it doesn’t look like a radical shift. That’s right. I just historically look at the phases where people started doing that because they might successfully do it for a long time and it might look very stable to us. Yes. I think we do have to include those other aspects within the definition for sure. I agree. I agree. But what seems to be happening sort of reliably is that the line between individual spirituality and group religion keeps blurring in these analysis. And I’m just wondering if that in itself is maybe just ways of pointing to particular polls on a continuum rather than picking out specific things, specific phenomena. I think we would have to expect a certain degree of that because like we were saying at the beginning that the definition of what constitutes the social and the individual is blurry, right? It’s more reciprocal like a yin yang where a great degree of my personal psychology is socially instantiated. And who knows how much of the social actually consists of individuals or in the leg process. So there’s going to be a blur out. It’s a convenient definition. I think it depends in a way who you’re talking to and where they’re looking from. Right. You looked at the same socio-personal system from the social side. It looks one way. From the personal side, it looks the other way. And when I’m talking to an individual, then I’m sort of, I’m going to skew that speech pattern toward the potential integration of subsystems that they can more immediately recognize in their experience. Whereas if I’m discussing a social phenomenon, I’m going to skew toward phenomenon that might be subsumed under the general heading of the collective. Sure. I, yeah, exactly. It’s practical more than anything. Yeah. But the reason I, the reason I was trying to afford a connection, which I think you also helped, because one of the defining moves in modernity, right, was to try and separate these spheres, like the public and the private, and then initially the, you know, religion was in the public sphere, but Protestantism said, but no, you have your individual. And then, you know, and then we got the religion slowly withdraws. And then we get this phenomena that is totally individual, which is supposed to be spirituality and modernity. One of its defining features, right, is the emphasis on the, you know, the monolithic mind, the Lockean individual, you’re inside your consciousness, Descartes, blah, blah, blah, blah. And could it be that in this analysis, the historical and the structural are pointing to a way in which modernity has really mis-framed this continuum that we’re talking about, this religion, spirituality continuum, because it cuts things up in a way and artificially decodimizes them in a way that really prevents us from understanding either one of these poles very deeply. Because I put to you that if we separate them in a polar, disjunctive fashion, that our capacity for understanding either pole is seriously hamstrung. In a way, I see modernity as an expansion of scope over traditionalism and not fundamentally differ in nature. Just differ in scale and style. So that the differentiation of the value spheres and the social domains that occurs in modernity, I don’t think that’s fundamentally different than what goes on in traditional systems, except in traditional systems, they’re closer together. They’re not fused. They’re just tightly packed. And if you stand back at a distance, it’ll look like that tight packing is a unified thing. Modernity, you go, well, actually we’ll make each of those things a little bigger and we’ll space them out a little bit more. Right. Right. Still got them. They’re still connected. There’s more spaciousness. And if we wanted to integrate them, right, if we wanted the ice to grow between these islands, we’d need more ice. We need more integration to accommodate this bigger spaciousness than the amount of integration we needed to accommodate the tighter proximity in the traditional model. But I think the idea that modernity has of a fundamental shift out of the traditional mode is a bit mistaken. It doesn’t quite see the ways in which it’s using those same things. It’s just added more space. OK. But what I would OK. But what if so are you think that therefore the differences between modernity and pre-modernity are differences of the degree not of time? I think there are differences of degree and style, but not of kind. Right. For example, there’s there’s something very close to a pre-modern science. Right. People did things. They acted practically in the world. They had explanatory stories about how things operated. They even did what they could to verify those things. Right. But they did it in a simplistic way. Modernity adds a level of complexity to each of those approaches. And it adds a degree to those approaches. But I think the underlying pattern is quite similar and more similar than modernity would like to acknowledge. But that similarity gives us the opportunity to think how modernity could match pre-modernity’s degree of integration in the situation modernity is working with. OK, so let’s do that. Proposal is this. So many people argue and I tend to find these arguments persuasive. That modernity is typified by this new this new epistemological normativity, the divide between subjectivity and objectivity that you don’t and a corresponding vision between mind and body that you don’t you don’t see before. You don’t have that kind of you don’t have the it doesn’t occur to people that they are totally sort of inside some subjective illusion that has to be pierced mathematically to get to the world. So, yeah, right. And and we said and that infects what we’re talking about here because people tend to categorize spirituality as a subjective phenomena and science is an objective phenomenon. So that seems to me like a difference in time from what you had before. I see the subjective object of split as one example of the general logic of modernity, which I think involves building structures that combine apparent opposites, whether you’re going to have a bicameral legislature or the prosecutor defense attorney or a cortex y-axis. Yeah. Subjective, objective and mind body are fractal subsets of that basic logic, which is to take two things that looked opposite and build them into one structure. Right. Right. And I think you get a more simplistic version of the same thing in pre-modern senses, right? You might look at, say, St. Paul talking about the flesh and the spirit. Right. It’s not that there weren’t a sense of serious inner divisions or divisions between man and nature and things previously. They just weren’t to the same degree and with the same sophistication and built into a kind of machine that uses those opposites to get some work done. Seems to be the modern element. But the other part of that, I would think, is modernity is younger. If we can say that, then the pre-modern systems, it hasn’t had as long to work it out. So as that operating system comes online, its early forms will be less successful in terms of integration, a little bit hollower, right? So the new modern individual is going to notice that a lot of the things that were previously coordinated are now no longer there. So it feels like there’s a gap between themselves and the social, between themselves and the natural, between themselves and the cosmic. And that might not be evidence of a primary feature of modernity. It might be evidence of modernity not being up to speed yet in terms of its capacity to integrate all those variables in a super meaningful sense that makes people feel participatorily harmonized in that world space. That’s interesting. That’s interesting. So. You don’t, if that argument is going to go forward, that the metamonetist doesn’t seem, doesn’t see post-modernity the way post-modernity sees itself either, because post-modernity of course defines itself by rejecting the, it sees itself as some kind of difference of kind from modernity. That’s, well, that’s how it explicitly understands itself. But if I follow your argument, then post-modern, just like modernity is incorrect in seeing itself as different in kind from pre-modernity, then post-modernity would also be incorrect in seeing itself as different in time from modernity. Is that? Absolutely. And it would have many of the same problems of being very recent, you know, and dealing with the same thing with a new degree and a new level of complexity and trying to establish its identity by pushing off against the previous system. There’s a thing in internal theory that it takes from spiral dynamics and the work of Claire Graves, which is this notion of first tier levels and second tier levels. Basically the fundamental distinction is the second tier levels notice the differences between all these, this first set of worldviews. The first set of worldviews thinks the way to get things done is to join their worldview and all the other ones are insufficient. And we’re doing something fundamentally different that we’ve finally discovered why everyone else was wrong. The meta-modern or second tier approach is to look at all of the people who did that, all of those worldviews, giving the same message about each other and say collectively, what were they working on? How do they relate to each other? What gifts do they have to bring forward? What dangers do they have if they’re out of balance? Right. How do you move the whole team forward? All right. So this now brings an interesting dimension to this whole argument. I’m glad we went down this path because this reminds me of endless debates within developmental psychology and within the philosophy of science. So in developmental psychology, there are ongoing debates between people who think of development as just quantitative change, which is just differences of degree. And then classically, people like Piaget, who talk about qualitative change, where there are stages and the, you know, the 13 year old just has functions and capabilities and can solve problems that the five year old could never solve no matter how much information and time you give the five year old, right? Or the philosophy of science. You have people who are largely sort of traditional, is that the right word? Realists, right? Who talk about the continuity. And then you have classically, classically Kuhn, right? The Kuhnians who talk about paradigms and the paradigms are almost incommensurable from each other. And so you have the structural realists saying, no, there’s continuity. And then you have the Kuhnians saying, no, there’s paradigmatic differences in kind. And I see that there’s the same thing happening here. There’s a tension between what you’re arguing for, right? Which is no, no, there’s a continuity. And then there’s that’s intention with people and people you’re, you’re critiquing who say, no, no, there’s something analogous to the step, the stage wise development of children or the paradigmatic change of science. And so I, my, my issue about that is I’ve often found it hard to understand how we would resolve that, that debate. For example, in child development, what seems to be the growing consensus is somehow both are right. There is clearly evidence for continuous change and there’s clearly evidence for discontinuous change. So what do you think about that as? Yeah. Well, in my, when I think about it, I think about a set of continuous changes that differ in complexity and therefore to some degree style and degree or really sets of these things, because I think there’s a whole bunch of problems within any system that could only be solved in a certain way. Right. Right. It folded into a more complex system in a certain way. But there’s a number of ways that could happen. Right. In terms of paradigms, you get something like a sequential set that actually do have a lot in common, but differing in complexity and scale. But you also get sets of, let’s say, or horizontal paradigms, which is different ways you could go at it at each of those phases. It’s like not everybody goes through those piagetian stages in the same style. Right. Right. But I would look at something like the phylogeny of brain development. You can go to very simple creatures and look at their brains and it’s very much like ours. Right. It doesn’t have that full prefrontal cortical richness that we do, but it’s got roughly the same layout. Right. And you go along all the way through these more and more complicated animal organisms. And you see they’ve got hemispheres, they’ve got layers, it’s got a little brain stem, it’s got a little bit at the front. Right. So there’s a huge amount of continuity in the basic layout, basic types of components, even though the behavioral and qualitative richness that comes with each new level of complexity is very impressive and quite distinct. I think that’s largely right. I mean, and one of the things right now is about the deep continuity between the levels of conscious, the levels of cognition and embodied, you know, biological existence. But I’m also thinking that you do want to, I mean, there you do have to also allow for something like speciation in evolution. You have to allow for exactation. I’m speaking with my tongue and no other organism that has a tongue speaks. And so that seems like a difference in kind as well. It’s hard to say what we mean by words like kind when you get into this territory, right? Because there’s several different ways we could mean that word. I think there’s a qualitative leap and a set of emergent properties that each of those threshold transitions. Sure. All right. And we would expect that even though there’s a tremendous amount of continuity. You have a creature that does, I mean, it has a tongue and makes noises with its tongue sometimes, maybe even does a little bit of signaling like that. And we do an incredibly sophisticated version, like a new infinity of possibilities was added. And yet we have a tongue, we’re using it for the social signaling, we’re using it some of the time, we’re using roughly the same muscles. So there’s a whole bunch of continuity there. Right. I think we always have to have both of those in play because we don’t want to lose either the continuity that places us in that historical evolutionary sequence, nor do we want to lose the value of the things that are newly added to the system. Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m trying to get at. I’m trying to, sorry, I don’t mean to, I hope I’m not seeming difficult. I’m actually trying to sympathically probe this because I’m trying to get at the grammar that ultimately underlies pluralism. Pluralism is, I mean, if we take pluralism seriously, it’s the claim that there are functional differences in kind between certain groups, groups of people, groups of functions, groups of periods in history, et cetera. Right. And I take it that one of the things that’s being emphasized by postmodernism and perhaps also by metamodernism, I don’t know, is exactly the acceptance of pluralism as a real phenomenon. So that it’s taken seriously. And I am wondering if we could get, maybe we can’t do it today, but if we could get deeper into this grammar, I know the terms are slippery, but if we could understand, you know, where we, how, I know this reminds me of Goodman’s problems about similarity, there’s no objective algorithm for it. Right. So what’s the normativity by which we see? So everything is similar to everything else. Logically. That’s, there’s, it’s just a hard and fast argument. And I see things as different if I make certain properties relevant, and I see things as identical if I make other properties relevant. And so what I’m suggesting to you is the decision of continuity, which is basically the same versus discontinuity is, oh, it’s basically different, is that kind of judgment and there’s no algorithm for doing that. So what I’m trying to get at is like, why do we have this emerging consensus around pluralism if it ultimately doesn’t have any kind of deep metaphysical grounding, because if I could, I could take every pluralistic division that’s so sacred now in our discourse and just alter what I consider relevant or disalient, you’ve been doing it with me. And you say, but look, I can also see everything is continuous and one and integrated, do you see what I’m trying to get at here? And so I think there, I, sorry, I didn’t think we, I don’t think we intended to get here, but I’m saying there’s, there’s, there’s now an interesting sort of reflection on pluralism to my mind that is emerging out of the argument that you’re making here. I think there’s an autological and a sociological argument for pluralism, right? And in one sense, pluralism is socially emphasized at the moment because we see cultures in collision through our delocalizing electronic media that we never had before. So now we’re all observing each other and observing each other in our differences and trying to establish identity differences where we feel like our differences are breaking down. So there’s a sense in which that sociological dimension impinges upon the way everybody thinks about these things. And I think a lot of that is the reason pluralism enters the popular conversation, right? But I think there’s some philosophical justification for it as well. Okay. That’s what I want to hear. Apart from the social conversation, I think like, I don’t know if you’ve read Badu’s book, Being an Event, right? But he tries to anchor philosophy. He says, look, the Greeks used the mathematics they had to anchor philosophy. And then we got up to a kind of retro-romantic era where people try to anchor it in poetry and phenomenology. He said, let’s do what the Greeks did, but let’s do it with the math we have now. And he tries to work up from set theory as his fundamental set of axioms. So you begin with a set and where you have one, what you have is one-ification essentially. A one is a grouping of a set. Right. Even if the set contains only emptiness in itself, it’s still a set. You always begin with plurality. There isn’t a fundamental one. So he makes an argument that it’s actually not possible for us to think of unity as fundamental, that even within the structure of the logical syntax of mathematics, the first thought is the thought of a set and therefore plurality is the initial condition. So there’s, right? If that’s the case in logic, then you could say it’s on a logically the case at all levels of reality. Obviously the neo-Platonists are going to say that’s because discursive thought is bound to the subject object. And you have to pass beyond the discursive thought, discursive logic into those states of mind and consciousness that actually get you to the underlying so they don’t think of logic as the ultimate way in which you decide the oncology. No, but we would make the argument that what logic does is reflect the structure of reality because the structure of reality is that upon which logic depends. And so they’re making an argument, right? If you say ultimately there is one, I’m still making that object logically and linguistically. And I’m trying to say that it makes sense at some level of cognitive apprehension that there is an underlying unity. Right. And that it’s distinct from subsequent multiplicity layers of reality. So they are doing that within a logical framework and you can easily do it the way Badiou does, which is with the reversed logical framework. It’s no more logical than what they did. And that your participation in reality is not participation in what we should conceive of as an underlying unity, but what we should conceive of as an undifferentiated multiplicity. Even a pre-unity in a sense. So that’s one argument for it. I would say personally, I’m drawn to the other side, which is that ultimately all conceptual sets are convergent in some kind of paradoxical formulation. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. On structure, right? So that you can’t really have a concept of a many or a one on their own. No. Always dealing with a one many or a many one of that, of some kind. So it’s all, you know, like, yeah, without that structure. There’s a root and there’s branches, but the branches could be the root. So I don’t think we can, I don’t think we have the option of thinking away plurality at any level because you can argue plurality as well as you can argue unity, but you can also argue that you can’t have them apart from each other so that plurality goes all the way down, so to speak, it goes down as far as unity goes because they’re actually a, a meaning pair, not individual meanings opposed to each other. So that would mean then if we, that way we take the argument back upwards that discontinuous development is as real as continuity, so that there have to be real differences in time, not just differences of degree between modernity and pre-modernity. Right. It’s, it’s as real, but it’s only as real. Yes. Yes. You never, you never drop one that there are discontinuous, significant qualitative transitions as there are at any bifurcation in thermodynamics. Yeah. But there’s also a tremendous amount of continuity and neither one of those is an argument against the other one. Yes, exactly. Exactly. So it’s interesting that, and I have the sense that this somehow goes with the thing that I’m trying to use aerogenics for to try and say it’s neither emergence nor emanation. It’s, it’s somehow both in a dialectical fashion. So that’s interesting. It is that take that we’ve come to in this, I think, productively Socratic fashion, is that a way of, because that would be a defo, that would be to my mind, a different mindset that either modernity or post-modernity, because one of the things that both modernity and post-modernity share, if the argument is, if we, if I’m getting the argument correct, is they both see themselves just as differences in kind from what came before. Whereas metamodernism is trying to recognize both the differences in kind and the continuity between them. Is that a fair way of understanding? That’s a fair way. And I think that I would want to add to that, that metamodernity can only do that in so far as it has uploaded capacities from all of those major systemic systems, because it’s fundamentally post-modernity that emphasizes this plurality. Yes. Also always the emphasis of selection and choice. It’s never plurality on its own. It’s plurality and selection. But it brings that forward. It says where modernity saw a single linear time track is actually a whole bunch. There’s a quantum multiplicity. There’s endless numbers of externalities in the economic process and many more social subgroups than you were previously taking seriously. Right. Right. All that. So it brings that forward and yet it kind of stares at it and holds it in opposition to both modernity and pre-modernity and to indigenous models and things like that. Right. But that’s a fundamental piece that you need if you’re going to look at simultaneously continuous and discontinuous pieces. It’s interesting. Even the plurality gives you the capacity to look at those paradigms as a team as well. Right. Yeah. As a potential team they have continuity and integration but they’re also essentially a plurality. That’s a set. Right. As much as population groups and themes and scales are historically embedded worldviews are also some fundamental social options that comprise a pluralistic set that we might want to think of as needing to be integrated in the religiosity of the meta modern world space. Yeah. Yeah. That’s that’s where I wanted to go with that. So I mean what I’m going to say now on both sides is a bit of an oversimplification but it’s a way of trying to draw stuff into a holdable thought. You know modernity seems to privilege some kind of universalization function. Universalization and Kant right. He’s the prototypical figure of this and the universalizability of things is the overwhelming you know that’s his normative criteria and again and again and again. Right. And science about universal laws and even calling what we have a universe. Right. And all that stuff. Right. And then post modernity seems to be emphasizing the differentiation function. Right. Right. And emphasizing no no no look at look at all the differences. And what’s interesting is if you want to make a really good what you see in when people are talking about intelligence both within psychology and with an artificial intelligence you have people in the intelligence field say no no it’s the brains ability to compress and make universal predictions that makes its intelligence and you have other people say no no no it’s the brains ability to differentiate. So that’s how it can distinguish all and get much more cognitive acuity and power and that or and when you look into deep learning what the neural networks people say well it’s actually it’s actually doing both. It goes through cycles of differentiation and then it compresses to try and extract what’s invariant universal and then re-vary and it’s constantly cycling between them. Could metamonetism be something like that sort of if you’ll allow me an analogy to basically see the relationship between modernity and post modernity like the phases of deep learning within a neural net like that what’s going on is that. I think you absolutely could and one of the classic ways I mean the spiral dynamics ways to think about these epistemic modes as sort of alternating right. In terms of individual versus communal focus in these different historical phases kind of self correcting right. So there’s a plurality emphasis and a unity emphasis but I’m a little bit skeptical of that. For the same reason I said that a person might feel not participatory embedded in early modernity they might feel the subject is more separated from the object simply because modernity hasn’t had the time or the opportunity to perform an integration of its newly differentiated value spheres right because that differentiation is a key component of the definition of modernity as much as universalism and individuality are. Plus so that you could say there’s a difference in degree where post modernity comes in and says actually it’s a it’s a lot more differentiated than you thought. Right right. But it would still have to do the same thing which is supplement that with integration make a coherent worldview that can hold all the different virtue functions and human types and make the social changes it would like. So in one way to say that is metamodernity might be the more integrated version of post modernity right. Right. People like that argument. Because I think you do you do get. Convergence and differentiation in functional versions of all of these phases. Right. The dirty wouldn’t operate if it was just doing the one and not the other. But it could be recursive too. I mean because this one also seemed to break at one level of analysis you could see post modernity as differentiation and modernity is a universalization. But when I zoom in within post modernity I see integration and differentiation within the two phases of modernity. I see integration and differentiation within modernity. And then with it like that that’s what the brain does. Right. It’s nested. So at one level this is a differentiating function but it’s made up a process and it’s itself into integrated and differentiated and it’s nested all the way down and all the way up. It is that. Sure. We would then expect to see that because it’s not just modernity and post modernity right. It’s your early and pre modernity and maybe pre modernity and indigenous. And you might expect to say see the recursive the fractal repetition of that at each one of those thresholds. So good. And I mean you were kind of doing that with your with your finger and God. Right. You’re kind of doing that. You were moving into like a really highly differentiated state of mind like very acute very specific and then presumably something very very very comprehensive. So maybe maybe one of the things that religion has done but needs to do more is get that I don’t know what to call it get all of those levels of recursion both within the individual and within the group more optimally aligned so that they’re not fragmenting or working at cross purposes or working as places in which self deception and I mean also social self deception groups can be self deceived too. Yeah that’s I mean that’s ideal going for you know imagining the human future. Yeah. And in many respects you absolutely need that if there’s a parallel between these historically emergent worldviews and something like Piagetti and developmental stages and individuals right. Because you don’t you’re not born a modernist or post. No no. Long time to get to those capacities in any realistic fashion. So even if you had a thoroughly modern or a thoroughly postmodern stabilized civilization people are still coming up into it in ways that would be fundamentally resonant with some of these other worldviews. Yes. So you’ve got to have them cooperative and aligned to some degree which means you’re going to look very much not only at their individual gifts and problems but also at the through line of continuity that they all share. Right. That’s very good point. Yeah. So no matter where you are you’re going to have the scalability issue in which all of these things have to be stacked even if your society has come to some stable point. So I take that argument to be a very good argument and I think it’s convergent with an independent argument which which was which may be aligned with it. I was thinking that the only phenomena that could get that kind of stacking and coordination that human beings seem to have produced is something like religion. And that’s what that’s what I was trying to allude to that we need something like religion to do that for us. Absolutely. But the the something like part is key here. Yes yes. Yeah. Because it’s not the top down propagation of something we currently think of as a religion. Yes exactly. Exactly. It’s the flourishing of the existing phenomenon in such a way that it acquires the degree of intensity we might associate with religion. Yes yes. Because when we were talking because we were talking about these functions it reminded me of our discussion about America because we were talking about the differentiating function and America was differentiating itself from the Soviet Union but we were also talking about the coherent compressive function and we talked about how the United States was becoming more coherent in a powerful way because there was all these joint convergent projects. And so I was thinking oh yeah this is making sense to me that what happens is you have to have these ways that somehow can be like this recursive integrating differentiating right. It’s like you have to have something like that that can work down into you know the brainstem and out to the world like the nation state and beyond in order to do what we need to do right now. And that seems to me like that would have to be something like a religion but also well I’m doing it right now. But also unlike any religion before it because I mean the rate I mean Jordan Hall’s ideas about the speed of complexification and the rate at which information is available and the power of social coordination. And as you yourself mentioned the massive you know nonlinear uptick in our confrontation with others. These are all things that the previous religions really didn’t have to encounter at least to the significant degree that we are in. Yeah and I think that you know if I wanted to emphasize the continuity of religion I would say that there’s a distinction between the healthy vital religious function and the degenerative regressive function. Yes. When religiosity tends to pull back from the world tends to judge the world as a failure tends to look for have a Puritan impulse. Yes. Wants to move back toward a narrower homogeneity where its amount of coherence actually applies to the population that it’s looking at. Yeah. It’s sort of admitting that it doesn’t have the plastic and expansive capacity to perform that same act on the current range of complexity and diversity that’s in the world. But if it was healthy if it felt strong if it had sort of been through the war and was confident in its ability to generalize its problem solving solution sets. Yes. Then it would think well maybe I can do that. Maybe the goal is not to reverse to a homogeneity that can handle this diversity but to take this diversity and build a new level of coherence that will give me the effect of the confidence I get from homogeneity. Right. How do I write if we go well this was an effective religion for an ethnic world space then you want an effective religion for international world space and then maybe a much more rich efforts. You got to weave the biosphere and you’ve got to weave in. Yes. New groups arise in the population and say they want to identify differently in terms of their cultural and stylistic radiation let’s say. Yeah. You have to be able to fold that in. And I think if you do that you get a tremendously powerful let’s say machinery organic machinery of religion which has happened sometimes. There were moments even with the simple example of the Catholic Church where they were able to uptake a lot of things that might have been considered pagan. Yes. What’s going on in the world and now it’s Catholic. Yeah. It’s degenerative phases it’s pulled back and said this is what’s Catholic and we don’t want anything to do with what’s going on in the world. So that’s a it’s a confession of a sense of inadequacy to unfold all of that. But I would say it’s only really doing religion when it’s making that attempt to establish coherence out of the plurality. So we’re back to try to nurture. We have to make sure we pay attention to the creative phases and the creativity can sometimes look be hidden but it’s still there when you’ve got that kind of vital stability that you’re talking about the ability to constantly generalize and incorporate and evolve and adapt. But then the final the degenerative phase Shiva or perhaps is is exactly when you start to see the receding and the loss of flexibility. And it reminds me of the analogy of you know how you can get evolutionary dead ends because organisms can I had to talk anthropomorphically you know that I don’t mean it right. Organisms can over commit to a certain set of strategies that have worked. And but if the changes are too dramatic they get they they then sort of shrink into you know niche they get they get bound to a particular niche and then they they get destroyed. Shiva is an ambiguous God. Yeah. Because he’s transformative as well as destructive. Right. I want to say two choices when you face trauma and shock because you know you don’t necessarily have a choice when a car hits you. But there are there’s a bifurcation in outcomes. Degenerate and transformative traumas and shocks or disruptions to the stabilized system. So then yeah. So that’s that’s well said. So the degenerative religion is one whose primary response to trauma is retreat and some solidification. Right. Whereas a non degenerative religion is one that can take perturbation and have an adaptive response. It can restructure itself in order to accommodate to that that that perturbation. Is that is that a fair. I would say so. And it’s not always the wrong thing to do to regress. Yeah. You might you might get disrupted and roll back to an earlier Piagetian structure in yourself for a moment. And that might be the right thing to do for a moment. Yes. As long as it’s healthy and flexible. And if there’s I mean if you look around your society and you say the society is not for whatever reason establishing a coherent integration that’s sufficiently sacred generating in order to hold all of us. It’s very reasonable that people would start to roll back looking for a simpler version that was successful. Of course. Of course. So we don’t blame them. But the ideal version is to make progress because we know of the earlier more simple versions that they leave out a ton of stuff that’s going to come back to haunt us later if it’s not built in. Exactly. Yeah. There’s a difference between criticizing something and blaming it. Those aren’t those aren’t the same acts. We can criticize something by pointing out how as a problem solving thing it has inadequacies which is not which is not the same thing as putting moral blame on people who adopt those strategies because they might be locally successful. But you know local success is always a problem of the local minima. Right. Right. And you get locked in the local minima and then or the local maximum however you’re trying to grab and then you can’t move to where you actually need to go to. Move is interesting to me. I’ve thought about it several times in this conversation because the metaphor at least of motivating energy is very pertinent here because if the religionization if the making coherence of the diversity in a world space is succeeding people tend to have a sense of faithfulness which is not simply a trust and loyalty in things as they are although it is partly that it sees the extreme or overflowing potential meaningfulness of what it’s embedded in. Yes. But it’s also an energy to do something right to on the one hand troubleshoot which is fix the system when it breaks. It’s a reason to pick that piece of garbage up and put it in the trash can. And on the other hand the motivational energy to perform system upgrades. Yes. Because you need that energy in order to implement either those generalized new types of solutions we were talking about or some kind of positive response to Shiva’s trauma and shock that makes it go the other way than regression. Right. Both those cases people need more motivation than they normally have. And so sometimes that can come from just avoiding a terrible thing. Yeah. But the religious sense is that it should be more than that it should be this overwhelming numinous aspirational quality that makes you feel more aligned and more yourself when you participate with it. But it actually gives you a sense of extra energy and purpose to fix things when they break and implement new ideas. Yeah. Stuck socially is we have a lot of new ideas now. We’ve compiled a ton of great insights over the last hundred years. We haven’t implemented many of them at the level of making our system actually upgrade. We’re largely running the same software as we were 50 or 100 years ago. I think part of that why the motivation issue this goes I don’t know if you’ve read it but Stone’s book the minimalist vision of transcendence. And he says one of two there’s at least two aspects of transcendence is one is a sense of some normative demand on you. You know some should are good. Right. But he also says but correspondingly there’s a sense of the disclosure of motivational resources you feel empowered to try to reach that challenge of the demand. And so I wonder if he put his finger though on the problem which is that we have so problematized the notion of transcendence that perhaps it’s difficult for us to plug back into that machinery in a powerful way. I mean people used to be they used to use the they used to. I don’t know if the advocates are failing me but they’d have a spirit they’d have a spiritual motivation and everybody just sort of understood that and took that. Now when people do that there as often as not they’re challenged or questioned or classified or stigmatized. And so I’m wondering if we’ve created some cultural practices that by stigmatizing transcendence have really truncated people’s access to that motivational machinery. I think so and I think that’s why so many people identify as spiritual but not religious. Right. They know they can get there in some ways in their personal lives. They have a sense of being and purpose they know they can go camping they can pray on their own they can have peak experiences. Yeah. But they don’t have a sense that that’s echoed at the scale of the society. And there’s a strong argument that that’s because it benefits the current market to remove that from us so that we’re plugged into it rather than some other function that might transform its lab. Exactly. But I think just as much we could say it’s the absence of the general social practices and institutions that would form a coherence out of the level of complexity we have. Individuals are encountering a world that they’re sure has more complexity than our setup can handle. It looks like our setup is not able to bring that coherence forward. So we are deeply suspicious of it in those sense. But I think if the setup were to actively incorporate the degree of complexity and richness that people actually see in the world then it’d be a different story. Their mood would shift on that point. I agree. I agree with both of those analyses as to what’s going on. I think they’re both right. I think getting people to shift off the default normativity of the market the way Thomas Bjorklund talks about it but also empowering people with what I call wisdom, the ability to adaptively respond to increasing complexity by complexifying yourself in a manner that keeps you coupled to the world in a way of reliable problem solving. That’s another definition of wisdom I suppose. I think both of those strategies need to be pursued right now together. So I agree with that very strongly. I think a lot of, I mean in a very simple way, there’s not a lot of mixing of the types in our society. Right. You find everything online but even that shift which was probably a very good shift from having the draft to having a professional standing army in the United States, suddenly there’s a huge gap. Most people who aren’t in the military don’t know military families. There isn’t that same mixing. Another United States thing is they used to have the families of the politicians in Washington. Then they moved to a system where you go home on the weekends. So now there isn’t mixing but socially between the parties in the same way. Most people don’t mix outside of their cultural and information cul-de-sacs now. So that’s one problem in terms of creating a generalized spirit but another one is simply health is a big factor. One of the things we have in the last 50 years is just the diets are bad. We aren’t exercising properly. We’re not spending the time in nature. Oh no. That’s definitely it. But I mean the fact that we’re not mixing is again how perhaps there’s an overemphasis on differentiation right now at the expense of universalization, at the expense of compression. But that other point you said about the mixing because that’s what the ecclesia was supposed to be originally. The ecclesia was supposed to be where there was something beyond all the differences that to use your earlier I think we all converge towards something beyond all the differences that afforded it was a constant affordance of the mixing. It made people mix because no one of the groups could claim self-sufficiency. And this is a fascinating piece of the history of Christendom as well as other religions but the medieval peasant is in the same group as the king. All of the people in Christendom, all of the types, they all have the same church, made the same locations, they all have the same statements and utterances. Something is really mixing, blending between all of the things that might otherwise naturally subdivide. Well it’s analogous to Jung’s notion of the transcendent function. And so the thing about the transcendent function and this is a Jungian term is it has to have a sense of transcendence or else it goes from being a transcendent function to being an oppression function. I mean that’s which is also partially what happened. I think this conversation could just go on and on and on. We should probably think about bringing it to an end but I want to be responsible to you. I mean did we cover enough that you think it felt to me like we talked a lot about the meta-political and meta-modernism and the meta-political although we didn’t often specifically name it that way. It felt like this whole conversation was really exploring the space of it. I think we explored a lot of facets of it. I think the one thing we didn’t really get into was sort of the history of how religious machinery has actually operated meta-politically. Right. When you think about the pope relative to the kings of Europe or you think of the role of the Dalai Lama in Tibet. Right. When religion really starts to come forward and feel its capacity in the world it almost immediately starts to straddle the political divisions. Yeah. They’re all nominally under the sway of the theocrat. Right. A bit like that in Iran at the moment. Right. You have the Ayatollah as well as the government. You have the clerics. Yeah. They can break down to just its own rival power group but in principle what they’re aspiring to is the role of the Brahmins exceeds the role of the other castes. Yeah. And that that’s inherent to the definition of what religion is. Right. That it’s the mandala in which all of those other things come together and that’s when the society is really taking off is when all those features are actually coordinating as a team. Right. And it looks in the same way as you were saying there’s a notion of a transcendental apex which is either organizing an opening or it’s closing and imprisoning. Yeah. But some kind of manifestation in the politics of the world that looks similar. You see it in both the domes of Catholic Renaissance Italy but also in the way they imagined that the pope was relative to the kings and the kingdoms and the rest of the Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There’s a sense of the convergence of meta politics in the historical structure of religions when they become very prominent and powerful. Right. Right. Right. Right. I don’t know how much there is to be said for that but that’s something that’s on my mind when I think of religion and meta politics. Well maybe we can pick that up next time though. All right. This has been great. I loved every one of our tangents has added something to my understanding. Yeah me too. And I like I was also playing around a little bit more with the manner of our discourse but you played along very well in which you know I was trying to make it a little bit more argumentative but in the positive sense of the way term right about trying to you know push questions and open things up. But you seem to enjoy that too and it flowed very smoothly I thought. Yeah I think that’s there’s two aspects of doing sense making discussions that are really critical there like Jordan and I were talking yesterday about how the conversation has to be languaging the tip of the tongue. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That’s a feature but also there’s a sense in which like a Hegelian mode where you have to bring up a contradiction or say look these two things are different aren’t they. You pass that to the other one the other one goes here’s how those different things are actually the same and passes it back either way but that you have to constantly produce this antagonism so that it can be demonstrated to be a subdivision of a more complex structure. Well that’s what I try to label with my notion of opponent processing as a way in which you actually make a self organizing system self correcting but it can never degenerate into adversarial winner take all it always has to be Phileas Sophia never Phileas and Ikea. So yeah I like this is a good place to end because I’m very interested in trying to make a you know a short list of the fundamental principles that make higher level sense making discussions operative. Well I’m working on that project too. All right up here next time. I’m so thank you very much. Yeah it’s just always such a pleasure to be with you John.