Ahriman visits Elle's Utopia
Whereupon a malicious spell is cast over the land by an ancient evil
All that comes from old differences of family, race, tribe, peoples, is used by Ahriman to create confusion. "Freedom for every nation, even the smallest . . ." These were fine-sounding words. But the powers hostile to man always use fine words in order to bring confusion and in order to attain the things that Ahriman wishes to attain for his incarnation.
Rudolf Steiner, "The Ahrimanic Deception"
Substack’s most cheerful optimist
has high hopes for a nostalgic return to something called “the Enlightenment”.
I kid with the mock quotes, but it is a most serious kidding.
The story goes like this:
One day for no reason at all, after the renaissance but before 1914, some clever dudes in France and Germany and Scotland decided to use their brains, as no one else in history had ever done. They used those brains to write a bunch of books, send letters to each other, and meet up in cafes to talk about ideas nobody had ever thought about before. Then everyone agreed that liberal democracy was the best way to live, and they invented electricity and The Science and everything was happily ever after.
Close enough if you don't eyeball it too hard. This story is what we call propaganda. It’s benign propaganda, but then propaganda also renamed itself as public relations.
The details of the story are true enough. The historical age of enlightenment straddled the 18th century in northern Europe. And some of the ideas cooked up in that burst of creativity did conjure up an idea of enlightenment, which has no historical date.
It's the one-sided starry-eyed apologia that ought to get your radar twerking.
Everyone was stupid until bored and disaffected aristocrats decided to think. This is not exactly a convincing tale of historical triumph. It sounds suspiciously like the founding myth of a religion. More on this shortly.
The trouble with the enlightenment story is that it wasn’t ever that enlightened. Consider the following bullet points of doom:
Even at the time, there was serious and powerful resistance to the agenda of Pure Reason. You don’t hear this in the whitewash (such as the uninformed eye-rolling polemics of Steven Pinker) but traditionalists, reactionaries, counter-enlightenment philosophers, and the Romantic movement all protested against what they saw as cold, sterile, bloodless, and inhuman doctrines.
They turned out to be dead right when those big bold new ideas got their hooks into France in 1789. The revolution brought the ideals of Reason into practice, aiming to realize a rational society whereupon mankind takes upon himself to live by his own lights rather than external authority. This concluded in a party involving many guillotines and one of the bloodiest massacres ever. And then Napoleon.
The enlightenment as a movement had fairly well wrapped up by the dawn of the 19th century, mostly due to the many guillotines lining the streets of Paris. What happened then in the world of ideas was altogether darker, more pessimistic and cynical. This is the age of Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and a whole host of "dark romantic" poets, novelists, and painters departing from the ecstatic hopes found at the turn of that century. The birth of the unconscious mind, the theory of natural selection, and Marx’s sociological materialism came along with leaps and bounds in science, math, logic, and industrialization.
Enlightenment isn’t quite dead. But it isn’t quite alive. And hopes for rewinding to the undead culture of lost 18th century Europe are premature.
If today's world is not a time of thinking or a time of hope (which may be the same thing), this is not because the enlightenment's ideals failed but because they were too successful.
The social unrest that peaked during the French Revolution never really let up in Europe.
It’s always tricky to assign causality to ideas (and you Marxists reading this are begging me to talk about the industrial revolution and the false consciousness of capitalism). But there is a strong case to make for the spread of the ideal of self-guidance by reason as making its own contribution to the revolutionary era.
What the heck is enlightenment anyway?
Immanuel Kant, quite possibly the most rational of all Germans, once described enlightenment in a famous essay as the "use one’s own understanding without the guidance of another". Take one part autonomy, one part thinking, and one part rebellion, and you’ve got the rough sketch.
The core question of enlightenment is "Why should I do that?"
Any reply not produced by the individual, through its own powers of thinking, is illegitimate. The pronoun “it” is deliberate here. The attributes of the living body, subject to time and change, are also irrational sources of authority and thus objects of rational choice.
An ethos based in personal use of one’s reason and experience is an ethos based in criticism.
If you're living under an ossified feudal system, living by your own understanding and rejecting outward authority might sound like a good bargain. But consider the other side.
Criticism never created anything on its own.
Reason can wash away the throne and the altar easily enough. But with the masses fired up into ecstatic revolution, what's going to replace the old order? If your social system is based on the disintegration of all authority, good luck finding a new order to replace it. Any candidate system will be torn apart by the revolution.1
Max Weber, writing at the opening of the 20th century, called process disenchantment. The word comes from the German Entzauberung, literally the "end of magic". Our growing reliance on rationality led us back into an ossified system of inflexible rules which were no better than the old authorities we wanted to escape.
With no little irony, our disenchanted world also led us back into a new form of pagan idol-worship.
It's understandable that a sane person would look around at this psychotic world of ours and believe that we need more reason.
We need more people spending time in salons and cafes and drawing rooms, imagining new ways of living and existing.
I see things differently. We already have that. We have it to a degree that would stun and delight any 18th century philosopher. We haven't forgotten the enlightenment. We're living in it. This civilization of ours is the logical end-game of reason elevated to the highest principle.
If you take a look around you and don't see much reason, congratulations, you've discovered the punchline: reason unto itself becomes irrational.
We have a word for the end result of a society of bodiless, emotionless atoms choosing their goals and courses of action according to their own self-determining understanding:
Chaos.
The enlightenment hasn't failed, reader. It's been successful beyond the wildest dreams of its greatest defenders. The reason we aren't seeing the revolutionary energy and spirit any more is because our history has absorbed these ideas, processed them, and come out the other side.
We’ve digested imagination. That energy is bleeding off into books no one reads, Substack newsletters that nobody reads, Facebook posts that nobody reads, newspapers that don’t exist anymore…
What's missing is the widespread belief that the use intellect and knowledge alone can bring about an improvement in the human condition.
But that belief is impossible now. We can't agree on anything because the only thing we agree on is that we must choose for ourselves.
Max Weber called this condition the "iron cage" of modernity.
As rationality creeps into all forms of life, automating and robotizing, we lose our sense of mystery and meaning. Freedom vanishes under the thumb of the manager and the rule-book. And yet this petrification of life by reason, bizarrely, accompanies an explosion of subjective values.
Why is this? Because, said Weber, we organize society around rationality, and we look to science for our values.
But rationality cannot create, it can only destroy. And science (in its ideal form) is the ultimate expression of reason’s criticism. Every new finding and theory practically begs for its own refutation.
Science has no meaning; it’s as empty of value as reason.
“I Effing ❤ Science!” doesn’t vibe right once you see this.
Read more on this:
We wanted reason and science to answer “Why?” for us.
All we got in response was a fanged question mark spitting venom in our faces, laughing like a sadistic clown.
There can be no more unifying world-views. Everyone’s left to their own reason to figure this out. But that can only leave you with more questions. A never-ending chain of “why?” Like being stuck in a room with a five-year-old forever.
This is the deception of Ahriman playing out before your eyes.
What’s an Ahriman?
Founder of Anthroposophy, spiritual guru, and philosopher Rudolf Steiner borrowed the figure of Ahriman from ancient Persian religion to describe a certain spiritual impulse in human beings.
The quote up in the epigraph of this very article suggests the first principle of Ahriman’s deception, which is false one-sided thinking.
Wherever you find people convinced that they, and only they, are right and everyone else is wrong, you see the work of Ahriman. It’s us against them, me against you, all against all… for the good cause of freedom, equality, and recognition, you understand.
The emotional furor of these disagreements is not entirely open to a materialistic interpretation, in Steiner’s view. You may or may not entertain the supernatural, reader, but I invite you to consider the mass madness around you and ask yourself what if?
If there were a spiritual force leading us into fragmentation and emotional disagreement, how would it be different?
The second element of Ahrimanic deception is the transformation of science into superstition.
Today man gazes from his earth up to the star-world and to him it is filled with fixed stars, suns, planets, comets, and so on. But with what means does he examine all that looks down to him out of cosmic space? He examines it with mathematics, with the science of mechanics. What lies around the earth is robbed of spirit, robbed of soul, even of life. It is a great mechanism, in fact, only to be grasped by the aid of mathematical, mechanistic laws. With the help of these mathematical, mechanistic laws we grasp it magnificently!
As beautiful and practically useful as math and science are, we’ve taken them as a true and exclusive image of reality.
The abstract laws that work so well in creating technology appear to us as the true image and last word on What Is. But this suits Ahriman’s ruse. Science is no more the full story than a snapshot of an oak tree is the full story of the tree. The snapshot is not false, but it only captures one angle of the tree from one point of view. We would be misled if we thought the photograph were the last word on the oak tree. We do the same thing when we take the world-picture of science as our one and only “photograph” of the world.
Both the social discord and the illusion of scientific superstition result from digging into one’s immediate point of view and refusing to budge. I am special and deserve your deference. This theory is true and correct. (You may be interested to know that Steiner was as scathing towards dogmatic Christians as anyone else, for the same reason.)
A brief aside: Yes, reader, I am discussing literal spiritual and cosmic forces at work in our society and the greater sweep of human history. If you think that is humbug and hokum, I won't argue with you. I know how difficult it is to affirm such things in our secular, materialist culture. I do urge you to rethink the certainty of your non-belief in such matters. But if you can't, or for whatever reason won't, then you can take the figure of Ahriman as a metaphor for a natural psychological and social process.
“Matt, you’re being a pessimist again.”
I hear this from my wife or one of my daughters at least once a week. Sleep with Schopenhauer’s collected works on your nightstand and you get what you deserve, I guess.
Let’s end this with a more hopeful message to placate the naysayers.
A true idealism must begin with seeing beyond the false binary that opposes today's postmodern meltdown with a nostalgia for the alleged Enlightenment.
Nostalgia for 18th century European culture is like nostalgia for Rome or ancient Greece. Our world is seen and felt as a decline from a mythic ideal which probably never existed outside of small transient pockets of creativity.
The belief that that history moves in a direction assumes a dystopian fever, and the only prescription is more utopian cowbell. You get one with the other. The story of decline is the equal and opposite of the story of progress.
If we're meant to look forward, blow the dust off the old imagination and have real vision again — and I am all for this, understand — then why are we pining over 18th and 19th century Europe? Or any other past era?
Sure, they had ideas flying around, in some places, but it wasn't exactly a paradise on earth. Which is fine and all. You can still say that they laid the groundwork for a better world. We're standing on their shoulders. But that is exactly what I question.
The realization of the enlightenment's ideals is our lack of imagination.
If we’re going to use our imaginations, then let’s use them for more than recycling last century’s bygone days.
Understand that I have strong, reason-backed feelings on both sides of this argument. I've read Habermas and I've read Kaczynski and I wrote a good portion of my doctoral thesis on Charles Taylor. I get the "pro" side and the "con" side better than most having this sort of argument, and I tell you this:
It ain't easy to be human.
I agree with the basics that Elle Griffin sets out. Let’s have more thinkers, real thinkers, not journalists and “thought leaders” and all those posers recycling platitudes and clickbait on the Twitter.
That will mean getting away from the self-satisfied attitude that possesses so many of over-educated dullards playing intellectual.
Here's what I suggest first.
Forget the dystopia/utopia duality.
That's another product of the Ahrimanic impulse to categorize and polarize. Divide and conquer played with my ideas against your ideas won’t get us anywhere. That’s just another fight; that’s the trap we have to escape.
No eventuality is ever totally ruinous or totally amazing in human affairs. The expectation of achieving total perfection or total loss reflects our tendency to project false binaries from a position of false certitude.
This is woven so deeply into today's shared psyche that it's become its own handicap.
How to get on with the living and creating, without losing everything: there’s a question to cogitate your noggin upon.
If we're going to reach beyond the limits, then let's reach.
-Matt
ps these buttons ⤵
If you're thinking that the American revolution is an outlier, don't be so sure. Thomas Jefferson had notable sympathies to the revolution in France, and his republicanism did inspire some, now mostly mythic, elements of the early US system. But Alexander Hamilton, who wanted a centralized and top-down system organized around finance and industry won that battle. In any event, the revolution in America was a revolution of the elites. They already had a de facto social order in place by 1776. The dispute was over who would rule whom; whereas in France, the revolution ate the elites and then ate itself.