Radical Enlightenment

Have you read Counterculture Through the Ages: From Abraham to Acid House by Ken Goffman (a.k.a. R. U. Sirius)? Great fun in telling the story of the culturally verboten and politically incorrect! (For example, Goffman sees the insurrectionist Boston Tea Party as the epitome of playful outrageousness–the kind, however, that gets the American revolutionary spirit through to the political mind of the populace.)

While I liked Susan Jacoby’s The Age of American Unreason, her Freethinkers: A History of American Secularism better celebrates the most cherished and legitimately historical Enlightenment tradition in the U.S. republic which has been challenged from the beginning by Counter-Enlightenment cultural “pushbacks” of various kinds–religiously/culturally antidemocratic (socially hierarchical) at base and narrowly opportunistic in their effects on social and economic development.

Last month over about a week’s time, I read Jonathan I. Israel’s (tome) Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670-1752. First, it makes the case that revolutionary ideas in elites’ and peoples’ heads matter more than a mere marxian-like ripeness of socioeconomic dysfunctions in whether or not people act to overthrow ancien regimes and assume popular sovereignty. Also, Israel argues cogently that what actually is the contention between two Enlightenment traditions, one Radical, the other moderate–not their contention (as though they were seemingly one) against a persistent Counter-Enlightenment–is key to understanding modernity. Those who find their philosophical/moral roots in Spinoza and Bayle (monist radicals who welcome today’s “embodied” philosophers like Lakeoff and Rorty and the overwhelming majority of today’s neuroscientists) continue to contend with moderate dualists who find Leibniz, Newton, Locke, Voltaire, and others who are quite comfortable with Descartes’ accommodating split of the natural and the supernatural. Perhaps my favorite book on this contention between the radically and the moderately enlightened is Matthew Stewart’s The Courtier and Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World. Stewart has written several great reads about modernity, but this one tops them all in cutting to the heart of what’s at issue in democratically re-forming our minds, moral direction, and political-cultural world. (Besides, it’s half about Baruch de Spinoza, whom I consider the most misunderstood, underestimated, and important thinker of all time. But then, that’s my opinion, not gospel.)

The Inner Lives of Children

Krista Tippett’s interview of Robert Cole is a gem.

I’ve often found kids to be prophetic in their take on happenings in the lives we share with them. Their curious natures are attuned to the questioning and storytelling at the heart of the great spiritual traditions. Their courage to express what they see truthfully and justly, even when others may try to teach them it’s best to look at things conformingly, is the spiritual fount not only for religious exploration and the growth of philosophical awareness, but also for scientific exploration and the growth in knowledge of natural phenomena.

There is personal power to be gained and effectively shared when kids and the humblest of “kids” within adults appreciate the mystery of, if not the answers to, the biggest of questions we can ask. We adults are often embarrassed by and seek to avoid mysteries we can’t explain; kids celebrate mysteries as wonderful companions for their curiosity. Even more than we adults do, they understand the world best through stories, not logical explanations–stories that have meaningful happenings in them–that dramatically tell the loss, hope, and recovery they experience themselves or see others experience.

Despite misfortunes which may happen to them or those close to them, when their vitality and good humor are supported by us in caring for them, kids learn to lead their own lives in ways that allow them to emotionally connect with others that are more fateful to their success in being productive and happy than the material means conventionally assumed to be indispensable to it. We need to give much more attention to kids’ “spontaneity and particularity,” as Robert Cole counsels, and to listen responsively to the big questions they ask. These are key to engaging them in learning who to be and what to do and why.

metaphors for naturally occurring god-awareness

Neither the sketchy historical figure of Jesus of Nazareth, nor the abstract theological construction of him which has buttressed the cultural supernaturalism of Western Christianity over its history despite its thousands of contentious parochialisms, is as potentially foundational for a twenty-first century spirituality worthy of meeting human needs as is the metaphor for a shift in (god-)consciousness presented by Deepak Chopra in his 2008 book titled The Third Jesus: The Christ We Cannot Ignore.

The “spirituality” that moves me personally (one of several “inspirited” mind states quite altered from everyday concerns) is rooted in natural evolutionary and personal developments in the histories of real, not other-worldly beings, and flowers in human propensities for awe of a wondrous ecology in which we are all interrelated and beautiful from the scale of galaxies to that of viruses. The awakening–the discovery by persons individually and in common–of a deeply personal and original awareness of connectedness and resonance between their inwardness/mindfulness/self-interest and the naturally nested physical and human cosmoses in which they exist is for me the “educational” foundation upon which a materially sustainable, culturally enjoyable, and commonly just global community of located communities of learners and collaborators is possible.

What intrigues me is how much today’s findings in various neurosciences and in social sciences, which are being re-formed by these findings, support longstanding traditions in authentic, essentially non-creedal, inherently human spiritual endeavoring.

I intend in time to add additional insightful writing and other media which have the remarkable property of merging a naturally human spiritedness which motivates exploratory and creative ventures into mysteries of being with the interdisciplinary sciences which attempt to understand that motivation in neurological/psychological and social/cultural terms of falsifiable evidence.

A sage insight from old India (i.e., “The measure of enlightenment is how comfortable you feel with your own contradictions.”) is even more applicable to living successfully with the complex and wonderful resources available to dynamically in-form/re-form each of us personally in our twenty-first century lifetimes.