Clearing My Throat
“Quite honestly, they seem to have been quite a different breed of men. In those days people seem to have been animated by one idea, but now they are much more nervous, more developed, more sensitive – they seem to be animated by two or three ideas at a time – modern man is more diffuse and, I assure you, it is this that prevents him from being such a complete human being” (Dostoyevsky, The Idiot 500-501).
[Author’s Note: This piece is intentionally under-edited. The pieces that will follow in the new (liturgical) year next month will follow suit. One thing I’m trying to move away from is perfectionism and pruning-to-procrastinate type writing. There’s something soulless about a piece of writing that has been so heavily edited that it’s as if you’re reading a redacted government document.
What I enjoyed about doing stand-up, before too many ears told me how to take it seriously, was a raw sensibility of just taking a shotgun on-stage and seeing what happened. Throwing a grenade into the audience was scary, but it was the only way to test your mettle. Besides, I’m fairly frustrated with the way the internet is becoming sanitized and made up of AI-content. A good way to disrupt that is to stop trying to refine or measure engagement. Just write like no one is looking—because, frankly, no one is.]
I got covid, again, back at the end of June and have only recently begun to feel better; symptoms like cough, sneezing, etc. long passed but the post-viral fatigue has been a depressive agent for the past month and a half. I could not even put two thoughts together which, if you’re like me (neurotic), basically feels like death. However, during this period of entombment I have been working through Dostoevsky’s “Great Pentateuch”, that is, his five most ambitious novels: Crime and Punishment, Demons, The Idiot, The Adolescent, and The Brothers Karamazov.
I only recently found out they were written as a sort of marathon, one after the other, and would have read them that way had I known earlier. Regardless, I started reading Demons just a few days ago which leaves The Adolescent as the last of his Great Five Books. Reading these novels has been reinvigorating on a deep level in my soul and has breathed new life into my path forward in terms of writing and so on.
Not only that but reading Dostoevsky as an adult has also reminded me of my misspent youth reading his Notes from Underground and taking away, completely, the wrong message of the book which, of course, led to a spiraling of nihilistic thought and embodiment of cultural pessimism shored up by writers like Camus and Sartre.
It was my misapprehension of Dostoevsky’s philosophy that deepened my study of Western philosophy that, providentially, led to an embrace of both Taoist philosophy, Native American cosmology, and esoteric Christianity in my late teen years. This only emboldened my cultural pessimism and crypto-nihilism, seeing modernity as a corporate wasteland producing and promoting nothing past post-Enlightenment rationalism, which has become the death knell on the Western intellect.
So, in a way, reading Dostoevsky has reminded me of my youthful turn away from the modern world that, unfortunately, did not lead to God but merely a God-shaped hole that was filled by strangers’ laughs in comedy clubs and nicotine. However, now, it would seem that his work has a solid infrastructure to grab hold of within myself, by God’s grace, therefore I am, in a word, becoming as a child again, seeing the world that we inhabit, again, as a corporate and political wasteland where even revolution has become commodified and packaged as something that one must buy in order to live a better life.
That is to say, the world that we live in offers utopian ideals and consumable salvation that do nothing to change our lives, really, but only further entrench us in temporal things.
While the world has become captured by The Machine, that is, generative language models, technocratic oligarchy, and the project of modernity to replace nature with technology, making us gods (to outright steal from Paul Kingsnorth), the anti-establishment rhetoric of the early 2000s doesn’t have a place in our current age. Politics have been conflated into identity, so political cynicism is no longer a valid position, because to be apolitical is to stand firm against the tides of the populace that, arguably, has taken the blue pill and leveraged political movements as its own branding.
All the while, these same movements do not unify but divide us, fracturing humanity into small pockets of easily manipulated consumers. Seriously, we no longer simply buy things we don’t need (we’re well past the point of calling that out) we now face a more existential issue of buying ideas that we don’t need, buying ideologies that only fragment our souls and communities. We are, to put it in Dostoevskyian terms, living in a post-Ivan Fyodorovich Karamazovian world.
Ivan Fyodorovich is one of the three (or four?) brothers in The Brothers Karamazov, a young man of the changing times, he supports the new atheism and scientific rationalism of the Westernizing Russian intelligentsia. Without getting into spoilers of how that worked out for him internally, his character is a reminder of how dangerous it is to put our trust, our faith, in earthly things. In status, in wealth, in our own intellect, understanding, and reasoning; and in our desire to create a world without sin.
A utopia.
He illustrates how, when we lose sight of God we do not simply risk becoming our own gods (that is a given), but we end up projecting our idea of God onto an external God thus complicating, and providing nuance, to our idolatry. Of course, we now live in a time where our society has become so individualistic that many people outright think of themselves as gods. We are in control of our salvation; and conveniently, that our purchases, our interests, and our conflation of identity often embolden with ideals and popularity.
Ivan’s philosophy, a sort of extreme Westernizing ideal, and the Slavophilism movement that sought to, in a way, rediscover the treasure of Russian Orthodoxy underneath their feet resembles the current struggle in America, and the West at large. There has been a growing anti-American, anti-Western perspective amongst our people with a decreasing religiosity and increasing political attachment, so much so that politics in the West have replaced religion entirely. Remarkably, our modern times reflect the Russian soul of the 19th century.
The overly-political nature of our modern society isn’t merely a mirror to this period of Russia. The Machine goes further, offering a world without liturgy. We are moving ever distant from one another with each passing day, as if we are building C.S. Lewis’ vision of Hell from The Great Divorce.
There is no more place in our society for political disagreement. For instance, to disagree with another’s politics is akin to attacking their character, so embroiled are we in our political fervency. The black mirrors we carry in our pockets do not connect us but offer a false connectivity all the while they are re-likening us in a Satanized image, that is, an atomized and tribal one. We have become hostile to a reality that doesn’t adhere to the one we have constructed in our minds, the foundation of which lies in our technological disconnection and anti-liturgical existence.
The paradox of our modern age is that we both get a fragmented, yet homogenized, culture. This is, thank God, what this recent collapse into covid-induced despair has helped clarify for me. Illuminated by the eponymous Prince Myshkin from The Idiot, who I will look at in more depth later.
Everyone is the same.
The same matrix has captured us and, because of our own (post-Enlightenment) homogenized rationalism, think that we are above the very corporate-sponsored ideological loyalties. Much like the false connectivity that our phones provide, our current age offers a false pluralism that is shallow and commodified. This struck me during my time in the liturgical Protestant world because, for all of its explicit Christian symbolism, much of the rhetoric underneath was just the same type of political talking points one could get at a leftist rally. In the process, Christ is stripped of His divinity and recast as a moralizing wisdom teacher, safe for public consumption. This happens because religious freedom, despite being a constitutional right, does not safeguard religion from corporate capture, where the same political speeches can be offered with the Cross instead of an explicitly Marxist-type hammer and sickle insignia.
Politics, religion, sports, social media, network news, etc., etc. have been subsumed into the same Machine. Forgive me for putting too fine a point on it, but no matter what institution one may believe they are a part of, many of these aesthetically pluralistic ecosystems have been influenced by secular humanism building the Tower of Babel through its own nexus of implicit power.
Basically, the political sphere in our modern world is downstream of economics, meaning that culture is downstream of both; thus, culture has become a conglomerate of surface-level symbolism and merch that divides us into smaller and smaller camps, where our individual voices are drowned out by the discourse leaving us to, intuitively, understand the only way we can be heard is branding. What we consume, that is, our “trusted sources” –becomes a fixture of political posturing and, by extension, a part of our identity. The Machine does not value a unity of distinction, people coming together in appreciation of their uniqueness; what it values is profit and cultural absorption. In other words, the algorithm is agitprop in that it impassions, or agitates, us into an easily-manageable hyperactive distress. This form of internal unrest is in a perpetual state of succumbing to consumption.
An issue I take with this modern form of conspicuous consumption is that we all know that one, consumption of goods is unnecessary and two, we do it anyway. Not only that, but we opt-in to a mode of being where we consume and complain about what we’ve consumed. YouTube, for example, platforms a plethora of seemingly distinct voices decrying the latest cheaply produced good, whether material or idea, and whips their audience into a state of agitation, leading them to continue clicking on more videos that echo the same disturbance.
As a personal aside, most of the “communists” I’ve encountered, mostly in stand-up circles, have been the most conspicuous of consumers on the market; they’re brand being a revolutionary seeking to overturn capitalism while also being obsessed with shoes, or chains, or even just money, generally. This is part of the reason I don’t take self-professed “socialists” seriously, as it was one of the first places I began seeing cultural performativity that has since spread to every aspect of our mostly technologically strangled lives. Not to mention how Ivan Fyodorovich—socialist, atheist, and cultural critic extraordinaire—is a prototype of this form of carefully cultivated rebellion-as-aesthetic that is painfully subservient to the very system that it acts as if it is abolishing. All while being ironically individualistic. Go figure.
At any rate, the modern culture of political discourse serves only to pacify voices that would otherwise, perhaps, do something about corporate capture and technocratic control. Unfortunately, the way to combat these systems is to, well, unplug.
At least the risk is that, by using the tools of The Machine, we deepen our entrenchment into thinking the way that The Machine wants us to think (part of the reason, besides being incoherently fatigued, why I haven’t been interested in posting much as of late). The above performativity that I mention is because The Machine does not simply offer political ideologies that might lead us to make a change in our lives and in our communities but dampens the impact of any true revolutionary action by selling us ourselves.
By allowing us to participate safely online and facilitating the kind of engagement that hits our dopamine receptors we become pacified by the worship of self. And because we have reduced our standard to simply the self, the fallenness of this world severely limits our capacity to take responsibility for our lives and work toward genuine perfection, righteousness, and holiness.
This is why The Machine is so dangerous.
Not because it is consuming the world and subsuming all our personalities into it, creating a surface pluralism masking a deep cultural homogeny. The problem is that it absorbs that which is higher and flattens it to make us more comfortable. This is why everybody in The Idiot treated Prince Myshkin with disorienting love and disdain, because to be confronted by Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is to either be changed by it or to reduce what has confronted you to be something it is not, for your own consolation. That’s one reason why the Jewish leaders persecuted and, eventually, killed Christ.
We have become acclimated to a false reality, one where Goodness has been reduced to self-righteous moralizing; Beauty has been diminished to mean sensual pleasure; Truth has become relative; and Unity has been mistaken for engagement.
This is not the world I want to live in anymore, because it’s not real. To abandon this world isn’t to lose anything substantial but to leave behind what is spurious and incompatible with Truth, Goodness, and Beauty.
Nothing that is sold to us is salvation. Temporal things that market themselves as liberation only bind us evermore to the things of this world. Only Christ has overcome the world, and by His grace we can, too.
Witness, NM 