Nordic Ideology

by Hanzi Freinacht

  Doesn’t the future of life and civilization depend upon what wants and hopes guide human activity? Jeremy Rifkin has made a similar case in his 2010 work The Empathic Civiliza­tion . I feel Rifkin is on to an important trail, but he doesn’t quite see the distinct features of Gemein­schaft Politics and Exist­en­tial Politics. He misses the mark: an exist­ential civilization.

  Is and Is Not

  Existential Politics is the practice of making the foundational existent­ial relationship that all of us have to reality itself into a political quest­ion, into an issue that can be openly discuss­ed, so that measures can be taken to develop it. To develop the subjective states of human experien­ce, to clear the depths of the human soul.

  This in­visible depth is always-already there in all of us. We relate to our “self”, and the self is always defined in terms set by society. Existential Politics is about cre­ating a framework, and a language, for tackling these issues.

  Before I go on to explore this topic, I’d like to point out what Existen­tial Politics is not . It isn’t reading “existentialists” as in philosophers com­monly considered representatives of the “existentialist school” (from Kier­ke­gaard to Schopenhauer to Heidegger and Sartre) and to somehow try to base one’s political ideology on these. That would be silly, and not very pro­ductive.

  Nor is Existential Politics the practice of being “deep and existential” when talking about political issues. It’s not about turning politicians into quietly smiling Buddha statues. It’s not about “being profound” while en­gaging in politics. It’s not about making all of politics about spirituality or New Age stuff. Please note the negation, dear reader.

  The point is that the politics of the future must grasp greater complex­ity and depth. If we are to rise as an existentially mature civilization, we must find ways of engaging the inner depths of human beings.

  Existential Politics is about creating better structures to support pe­o­ple in the long, treacherous inner journey that is life. In the last instan­ce, we are all alone on this path and we have to make our own choices; we have to relate to ourselves and to “what is”, to existence itself. But some ways of relating may be less productive and beneficial to our­selves and so­ciety than others—and hence nothing is more political than your inner­most rel­ation to existence.

  Supporting Inner Growth

  Yes, we are all alone.

  If you remember the discussion about inner subjective states from Book One, we noted that each self-organizing conscious being is always in some kind of inner state or subjective experience. I am, I feel. Existence.

  These inner states constitute some kind of unity-of-experience, some kind of integrated whole that is the experience horizon of each creat­ure, and this vast inner landscape is never entirely indifferent; it flows, soars and falls, rejoices and suffers.

  In this inner world, we are alone. If there is a terrible infection eating away at our nervous system in a manner that causes sheer madness and hell, no amount of happ­iness of others will console us. This subjective world, this universe of mine, is still pure anguish and pain. My experience and all I know is still an un­fathomably great darkness and terror. It’s just me, all alone, with what appears to be inescapable and never-ending suf­fering itself.

  This predicament creates an irreducible fundamental relation in reality: the relationship of the self to the self . Or if we dig deeper yet: the relation between the universe experiencing itself and the quality or content of that same experience viewed as an entirety. Being relating to being itself in 1st person.

  The eye of the I.

  No matter how thoroughly we kill off “the individual” as a political idea, and no matter how well we recognize the co-created nature of reali­ty—the transpersonal nature of all of society’s ail­ments—reality always splices off into a multiplicity of singular experien­ces, into you and me and every­one else.

  It is true, that my experience this moment may have more in comm­on—more connections and more ways of inter­acting and shar­ing experi­ences—with yours, than it does with my own four-year-old former self. But unless we find a way of physically connecting our nervous systems, we are still sep­­arate. If I truly suffer, no expanse of heavenly bliss in your world will help me.

  And yet—it is also true that these inner horizons are structured by soci­ety, by circumstance, by nature itself. Society can create preconditions for strong, healthy psyches that can deal with the adversities of life, who can act with wisdom [91] and composure in confusing and pressing life situati­ons. It can work to create bodies and minds that ring with harmony, with mat­urity and contentment of old age. Or it can churn out armies of woun­d­ed, stunted and confused souls who lack the support to make it through diffi­cult transitions—bent out of shape from society’s pliers.

  Society can be designed so as to support what Joseph Campbell famou­sly called “the hero’s journey”, the trans­itions between life phases; the dif­ficult times we all know are com­ing for us. Structures, norms and institu­tions can help us grow and turn our painful misfortunes into mean­ingful lessons learned and an awakened awareness of the suffering of the world, and they can help us rise to a capacity to act upon such a sense of tragedy. Or society can be designed with so many trapdoors and impos­sible para­doxes that life itself seems to turn into a cruel joke at our expense.

  In the last instance, we are all alone in this mysterious journey. We are the sole seers with these eyes, the sole feelers of these worlds of emotions, the sole cosmic address of this inner spaciousness within which thoughts flow and all things arise. In the last instance, life is up to “me”. I am here alone, writing a book. I will never read it with your eyes, never hear your thoughts—my work is necessarily cast across time, space and per­spec­tive, intersecting another universe.

  Alone. But only in the last instance. There is hardly a word in this book I have come up with myself. Everything I do rings with something lar­ger, something beyond me. Up until that last instance, up until the hour of death, I am thus not-alone. My existential predicament is set by the gods, yes. But my ability to respond is granted by you and your treatment of me from my first day onwards, by society, by the comfort of this great wood­en chalet, its jacuzzi and the majesty of the mountains—or the relative dep­rivation of such support structures.

  Will I rise to the challenge or will I fold over a thousand times and lace the steel-hard truth with velvet lies and excuses? Will you? Will we retreat into fear and hide in the crowd, turn away from our life’s greatest miss­ion?

  The answers to these questions depend upon our existential strength, health and development. Will society consist of people following profo­und dreams, ideals and moral aspirations—or will it consist of excuses for lives unlived, for creators dead-born?

  These are the fundamental questions of Existential Politics. It seeks to make open what was locked in, to let out what was suffocated, to cross out the taboos, to rid of the shame, to emancipate human beings in all of our gory, messy, beautiful, vulnerable purity.

  We need to support the inner growth of human beings.

  Existential Statistics and a Ministry of Existential Affairs

  I know what you’re thinking, dear modernist mind:

  “Outrageous! Existential and spiritual issues are and must remain purely private concerns. The separation of church and state is a core principle of modern democracy that cannot be compromised lest we are to revert back to the dogmatic narrow-mindedness of the Dark Ages. How can you in all ser­iousness propose that such an unquantifiable and hard-to-define issue as existence should become a societal concern? And have you no sense of pri­vacy!”

  Well, for starters , existential angst or deep-felt alienation is hardly more private than drug abuse or domestic violence. How our fellow citi­zens are feeling deep down concerns us all whether we like it or not. Stun­ted personal growth makes its way into crime statistics and suicide rates; the angry kid who steals your car, your
neighbor’s daughter with a belly full of valium.

  Secondly , let’s have no illusions about the separation of church and state. It’s not that govern­ments suddenly realized it is wrong to meddle in the exist­ential affairs of citizens. Traditional religion was simply abandon­ed in favor of new sacraments that more effectively could shape the spirit of people in the modern age: “the altars of television”, through which the daily sermons of saintly news anchors help us make sense of an otherwise con­fusing world; “the pulpits of university halls”, from where a new clergy of intellectuals preach the gospel of science and liberal democracy; “the cath­edrals of fine art and culture”, in which the prophets of artistic ex­pression seek to expand the boundaries of the human soul; and “the holy church of sports”, whose zealous devotees from various congregati­ons carry out the divine mission of boosting national morale and strengthe­ning the character of school children. All of these sacred institutions of modern­ity have form­ed close ties with the state, and the overall purpose has largely been of an existential nature: to offer a firm foundation of meaning­fulness in people’s lives, credible narratives about reality, some­thing to believe in—faith, in one way or the other.

  That we live in a fully secular society is and has always been a myth. As such, the intelligent question is not whether existential matters should be political concerns or not. They already are. Rather, the question is why we shouldn’t have a more explicit discussion about how the instruments of politics are used to shape our relation to existence, and why we shouldn’t make it a deliberate goal to support the personal growth of as many as possible?

  It would thus make good sense to have a Ministry of Existential Aff­airs whose purpose should be to monitor, understand and affect issues pertaining to the existential foundations of everyday life—in sensitive, res­pect­ful and transparent ways, of course—so that more of us can dev­elop fruitful ways of relating to life.

  Thirdly . Is the spiritual wellbeing of ordinary citizens really so far be­yond the scope of any quantifiable inquiries that we will never be able to make informed decisions about how to improve upon it? I don’t think so. Useful data about how we, as a society, are doing deep down, how we relate to the ultimate issues of life, could be gathered if we began to ask the right questions, such as:

  How many people honestly feel they are following their dreams?

  How many are tormented by the existential crisis that seems epidemic to early adulthood, and how seriously?

  How many and how fundamental lies do we tell one another? To what extent do we live with truths that cannot be told to our nearest and dear­est?

  How large inconsistencies and sources of self-deceit can be detected in our moral reasoning and actions?

  How many of us do things that are counter to our moral intuitions in our professional lives?

  How many of us feel a pervasive lack of meaning?

  How afraid are we of death, and how does this fear shape our lives?

  How many have strong, transformative experiences of a spiritual nature, and how often, and who?

  How many of us feel genuinely identified with the ecosphere, future gen­erations and the animals?

  How many people get stuck in untreated traumas, so that deep wounds are never healed and greater inner depths never fully integrated into our personalities?

  How many live our lives with a nagging sense of anxiety in the background (Book One: subjective states 6 and 7) and how many live with a general sense of safety and basic goodness (subjective state 8)? [92]

  To what extent do we define ourselves, our identities, in terms of material wealth and worldly success versus in terms of inner qual­ities?

  How do we reason about the highest ethical principles and how do we relate to paradoxes and dilemmas?

  How many of us are on serious spiritual paths, or otherwise trained in introspection, meta-cognition, inner self-scrutiny and useful forms of med­itation?

  How accurately and dispassionately are we able to describe our own be­haviors, strengths, weaknesses and vices?

  How many of us have profound regrets on our deathbeds?

  Inquiries like these could be conducted in a sound, scientific manner just like we nowadays routinely survey overall life satisfaction and happi­ness, what people consider most important in life, whether reality meets our expectations, and so on. So in the same way we have national age­ncies to gather and publicize statistics on economic perfor­mance to ensure infor­med decisions are made within the departments of finance, a census bureau of Existential Statistics could be establis­hed to pro­vide the Minis­try of Existential Affairs with much needed data about how we’re doing—how we’re really doing, deep down.

  —

  Truthfulness, bravery, inner self-discipline, spiritual well­being, self-know­ledge, existential ways of relating. These are im­portant things, in and of themselves for each person, and for society as a whole.

  Am I overstretching here? Is this too much to ask of our society, that we together should relate to these questions?

  I don’t think it’s too much. I think it would be profoundly irresponsi­ble for us, as a global civilization, to enter an epoch of such towering com­plex challenges and hitherto unimaginable techno­logical powers to gene­rate suffering and bliss, without properly addressing these issues in a wide-reaching and systematic manner.

  Via Contemplativa

  Existential Politics should organize investments into new support struct­ures for personal growth. I would like to suggest that we reintroduce—on a wide, socie­tal level—the medieval notion of the via contemplativa , the contempla­tive life path.

  The term vita contemplativa (vita , with a “t”) is more comm­only used—most famously in Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition from 1958—and means “the contemplative life ”. But here I’d like to stay with discus­sing the contemplative path and how it could be made part and parcel of day-to-day society and politics. The issue is not that society needs us to become monks and nuns, but that more of us are supported through the inner journeys of life.

  First of all, let’s not get carried away by nostalgia. I am not claiming medieval times were “better” than modern times, or that everyone walked around being super-spiritual back then, concerning themselves with high-minded things like life’s inner journey all the time. And I am not claiming every­thing from early modernity—the Renaissance and its via activa (or vita activa ) which broke off with the medieval scholastic and monastic tradition—and onwards repre­sents a mistake. [93]

  As you probably know from this book and other writings, Hanzi Frei­nacht is a dev­elopmentalist. I don’t think present society has “fallen from grace”, from any primordial state of innocence, wisdom or bliss—but that modern soc­iety directly follows from the principles of traditional soc­iety: Once people have agreed to the idea that one highest principle of truth should guide society (“God” or any other highest prin­ciple in trad­itional or what I call “post­faustian” societies), sooner or later people will also ha­ve to agree that this abso­lute truth must be subject to open inquiry and to inter­subjective veri­fica­tion—which is the essence of modernity. Modern life is born from the dialectics inherent to post­faust­ian society. Develop­ment sometimes runs into dead ends, tying knots on itself, like in Nazi Germany. But it would be a mistake to think that mod­ernity itself is such a dead end.

  And yet, it would be conceited to believe nothing could ever be lear­ned from earlier stages of society, from the rich varieties of historical exper­ience. Even if modernity is an “attractor point” towards which postfaust­ian society ultimately points, we noted in the introduc­tion that there is always a price to be paid for development; there are always “beau­ties lost”.

  The via contemplativa may be such a beauty lost. The medieval system was basic­ally de­signed to produce good monks (and, to a lesser extent, nuns). To be a learn­ed person was to be versed in biblical studies, theo­logy, phil­osophy, con­temp
lative practice and prayer, and some practical skills per­taining to mon­astic life, such as being a good scribe. Theoretical subjects were highly estee­med. In the medieval scholastic system, people entered education and were taught the first three liberal arts, trivium (grammar, logic and rhet­oric), then advancing to the four “higher” liberal arts, quad­rivium (arith­metic, geometry, music and astronomy). Only after versing oneself in these seven arts could one partake in lectures on philo­sophy and theo­logy. This created an impressive pan-European network of Latin-speaking scholars who could converse about the nature of God and reality.

  As the intellectual mission of the late Middle Ages was all about trying to find the highest principle of truth and align society with it, its educati­onal system aimed to produce people who could refine their hearts and minds so as to find God and to serve Him. In short: The system of learn­ing and teaching prepared people for the via con­templativa .

  The Renai­ssance—the period of cultural blossoming that heralded mo­dernity—changed the me­di­eval edu­cat­ional system around considerably. Casting an eye on the proto-modern societies of high antiquity (Hellenic and Rom­an), and building on vital Islamic influences, the few thousand peo­ple who made the Renai­ssance happen re­designed edu­cation to better fit a via activa . It pre­pared people for be­com­ing politicians, merch­ants, mil­itary leaders and—to some extent—artists and engineers. [94] Rhet­orics, politics and history be­came important, and trivium was seen as much more “trivial” (from which we have derived the word “trivial”). Since that time, as mod­ernity has pro­gressed and disclosed its radically trans­form­ative pow­ers, accelera­ting over the centuries, greater portions of the popu­lation have been edu­cat­ed for longer periods of time, and more of us have been offered a via activa as citizens, entrepreneurs, scientists and so forth.