Religion, reflection, self-knowledge and contemplation have—even if they still exist—undeniably taken a back seat in modern society as a whole. Via contemplativa is thought of as something exceptional, something for the few rather than the many. Skyscrapers have dwarfed the once dominant cathedrals in their taller shadows. Skiing resorts, exotic safaris and wet summer fuckfests on Ibiza have replaced pilgrimages and periods of monastic seclusion. People such as myself, who like spending time alone walking in the Alps for no other reason than to contemplate existence, are often seen as eccentric, disconnected or even frivolous.
During the emergence of modernity, this “life-affirming” attitude may very well have made sense: With so much to do, so much to be achieved, and yet no major risks of systemic and civilizational collapse on the horizon, it may be a good thing that people primarily focus on creating worldly things. Useful things. And then you may just as well savor the hedonic, Dionysian richness of what modern life has to offer while you’re at it. After all, what good is staring at a wall (to come to terms with the blissful but terrifying meaninglessness of Emptiness) when you could be out there making sure more kids get polio vaccine, or take part in any other of the seemingly infinite growth potentials of the modern world?
We are, however, now reaching a point in history where our very survival depends upon our collective inner development. In today’s late modern society, in which the potentials of our technologies are so incomprehensively vast, the consumption of one single human so staggeringly impactful, the consequences of our actions so global, the possibility of ecological collapse so present, the acceleration of our changing life conditions so dizzying—we may need to reintroduce the via contemplativa , an updated and recycled version of monastic practices. On a very serious, collective—yet deeply personal—level we may have to stop and think, quiet as the snow.
And breathe. And reflect.
Consider. Reconsider. Doubt.
Rest. Concentrate. Heal. Suffer. Digest. Grow.
Rise.
We may have to take the issue of life as a contemplative path very seriously, meaning that we, as a society, should be prepared to expend considerable time and economic resources on inner growth.
Inner growth. Being with oneself. Introspection. These activities may come off as less manifest, tangible or visible than “going to work”, “playing football” or “winning”. But they are verbs nonetheless: breathe, reflect and so on—they are actions, flows, processes and events. The inner journey is something that really happens , something that counts for something, a difference that makes a difference. Tectonic shifts of our lives may occur, shifts of our perspectives, of our beings, aspirations, motives and life-goals. Such inner shifts of the heart reverberate across the larger patterns of our life-spans, and thus they affect the world in a thousand subtle ways.
This way of thinking is not only counterintuitive to the modern mind. It is downright offensive:
“Should people spend more time in idle solitude? But what about the growth of the economy! What about climate change, an issue that requires action, now ! What about all the social problems! And you want people to meditate and contemplate in the stillness of their minds? And how could we afford such a thing!”
But it is a simple fact—despite the pervading sense that we are busier than ever—that many or most of our daily activities and life goals are quite poorly thought-out, rather shallow, and often quite unnecessary. We pursue shallow life goals, because we get stuck on relatively simple and basic inner needs that still “have us by the balls”. [95] The goals of our actions are themselves “ineffective” (transrationally speaking), our motivations and drives hardly conducive to sustainable human flourishing, development, love and lasting happiness. And in these days of exponentially growing human power, the failure to pursue deeply worthwhile goals in as many people’s lives as possible, can and will be nothing short of catastrophic. And the only way to get many more of us to develop much more global and worthwhile goals is to support our genuine inner development. Global scale calamities are likely to follow pretty soon, unless we start looking inwards.
In other words, it may be a very sound investment—in terms of “the economy of happiness”—to put much, much more of society’s time, effort, resources and attention to people’s inner worlds, to the existential journey of each of us.
Take a moment to consider this: All that really “is” and all that we genuinely care about revolves around the conscious, inner experience of humans—and animals for that matter. What is a theme park without the ability to have fun? What is ice cream without the ability to enjoy? What is music without the bewondered listener? What, indeed, are family and friendship without love? What is even truth and enlightenment without the profound recognition of the observing mind?
The vast inner landscapes of subjective experience are not a fringe issue, not a small detail.
They are everything.
They are all that we will ever have. Inner experience is all that society ultimately produces and all it ultimately relies upon. It’s what all of it ultimately is about.
What madness, then, to build a civilization that does not work actively and seriously with the development of inner experience! Whatever else we change or build or create or develop, it all has zero value without the eye, the mind, the heart and the soul of the observer, of the experiencer, of the participating co-creator. We’re always-already here , cast into being, meeting the universe half-way.
Nothing explains more about what humanity creates than her innermost relatedness to existence. Will we create prisons, conflicts and collapse, or will we manage to respond productively to the great challenges ahead of us—a struggle reborn as play?
Contemporary commentators like to point out that this is an existential question: “Will we fall on our own sword, or rise to the challenge?” What they generally fail to mention, however, is that this existential question itself depends upon how the inner path of each human being is supported and scaffolded—or thwarted and undermined—by the structures of society. They fail to see the political and transpersonal nature of the existential questions, and they fail to offer bids for a renewed via contemplativa .
A metamodern politics would need to reintegrate key aspects of all the former value memes, which means that even some aspects of postfaustian society and its traditional religions should be re-examined and judiciously reinvented. We may need to co-create a more existential civilization, one that values inner growth and earnest spiritual exploration considerably higher than today’s late modern society.
Life Crisis and Development
How, then, could a via contemplativa be properly reintroduced in a metamodern context, in the context of an advanced welfare system we call the “listening society”?
One way to go about this is to endow all citizens with the “right” or “positive freedom” to, once or twice in a lifetime, take a longer time off from work (or whatever they’re doing)—for half a year, maybe a year—in order to go through a supported period of practice, learning, contemplation and self-scrutiny.
It is safe to assume there is much to be won, in a myriad of non-linear ways, if a large part of the population successfully and productively manages to deal with one or more of the different “crises” that pertain to a normal life course: the existential crisis of early adulthood (which has been growing in recent years), the major stress breakdowns many of us suffer during our professionally active years, or the crises of death, illness and bereavement that all of us must face towards the end of our lives. [96]
Add to this the fact that people can have all sorts of other crises that don’t pertain directly to one of the Eriksonian life phase transitions: there are family crises, failures in life, crises due to unemployment and other structural s
hifts in society. Then add the fact that we collectively respond to crises at a societal level in more or less composed and productive (versus reactive and destructive) manners. Each of all these mentioned instances of crisis can either lead to tragic collapse, painful stagnation, or to higher stages of development and flourishing.
We all have such turning points in our lives, and our ability to manage them largely determine our adult personal development, which in turn collectively determines how our leaders govern society and how society collectively responds to challenges.
As things currently stand, most of us respond only so-so to the crises that inevitably show up in our lives. And then we walk on, wounded, hurt, numbed and stunted in our growth as adult human beings. And that shapes all of our lives, the lives of those around us, our children, and society at large.
The word “crisis”—as so many like to point out these days—is both a moment of great difficulty and an opportunity for “purification”, for resolving long-standing issues or tensions, or for transitioning to new stages of development. In scientific terms, crisis only ever shows up in “complex systems”, never in non-complex ones; so you have an “economic crisis” or an “identity crisis”, but never a “crisis of the car engine”. Etymologically, the word goes back to the ancient Greek word for “decision”. The crisis is the moment of decision . It’s when the shit hits the fan—and the whole thing either collapses or pays the painful price to reorganize and grow.
When it comes to existential issues such as handling the deep crises of life, it is common to think in terms of moral purity and innate character. Some people, we like to tell ourselves, are the ones who really have the courage and heart to muddle through, the composure and self-control to see clearly in stormy weather, the faith in our… blah, blah, blah. And then we like to assume that we are those people and people we don’t particularly like or who don’t share our values are weaker and less worthy at the innermost level. We must recognize this line of reasoning for what it is—namely moralism: i.e. the judgmental and self-congratulatory bullshit of our habitual minds.
Truly metamodern Existential Politics departs from a very different starting point: Whether or not a person pulls through during a moment of crisis is not a matter of God-given moral character, but simply a question of behavioral psychology and the extent to which she has the necessary resources available.
So the issue becomes, not to judge or congratulate, but to soberly and effectively strengthen those inner resources and societal support structures available throughout the population.
Just as a society will have a certain GDP growth over a period of years, and just as every society reproduces its murder and suicide rates with frightening precision from year to year—so must every society have a specific number of shattered dreams, a number of broken hearts, a percentage of lifetime spent in subtle self-doubt, a number of crises successfully passed (or not), a number of psychological stage transitions that occur harmoniously or in wrenching agony. Is it unreasonable to ask how each of these numbers can be studied and improved upon?
That’s Existential Politics: reducing the number of shattered minds and broken souls while increasing the number of inner phoenixes rising.
Chapter 14:
THE AWAKENED PUBLIC
“I want to live,
I want to give
I’ve been a miner
For a heart of gold.
It’s these expressions
I never give
That keep me searching
For a heart of gold
And I’m getting old.” [97]
—Neil Young
It is as though civilization itself is getting too old. And with age follows either decay, dementia and despair—or wisdom and self-knowledge. Can then modernity, the present world-system, begin to know itself?
This would be the * meta* -modern mission: to create a deeply self-reflective modernity ; a modernity operating not only upon nature and the environment, but one that reexamines its own perspective, its own choices—if you will—its own soul.
Modernity did peer into the soul of individual human beings, under the auspices of psychiatry. But it never developed a full process for looking into its own existential foundations and to treat the maladies of civilization.
Modern society has, as Foucault famously argued, been profoundly marked by “the birth of the clinic”. Metamodern society and its existential civilization must usher in “the rebirth of the monastery”, echoing and carefully recycling some of the finest aspects of medieval society.
Secular Monasteries
The purpose of metamodern monasteries would be to offer all citizens necessary periods of seclusion (and/or community) and concentrated honing of inner skills, such as healing from trauma, making crucial life decisions or transitions, learning new life philosophies, practicing meditation and taking care of the body, forgiving people who hurt us, sorting out ethical dilemmas, and other transformational practices. We all have a few toys in the attic to deal with.
It would make sense to create a great network of secular monasteries, properly equipped with teachers, coaches, therapists, libraries, gardens, gyms and simple accommodation. People would be trained in one or more wisdom traditions, be supported in making necessary changes of habits, face their traumas and so on. Instead of an authoritative priesthood like in traditional religions, the main agent would be a professional group of “existential social workers”, trained to deal with people’s different life crises and to act as advisors. They should be highly skilled in one or more mindfulness and meditation techniques, in turn scrutinized by scientific studies.
An important aspect of such a neo-monastic societal infrastructure would be to include different kinds of bodywork and “subtle body practices”, refining the skills of dealing with direct bodily experiences and sensations and developing the general wellness of our bodies. Such development is not only of great value for its own sake, but also a necessary tool for strengthening our overall body-mind systems so we can handle the difficulties inherent to life’s crises and the stage transitions of personal development.
So we’re looking at a major project of the listening society, one that is indeed comparable to the construction of the welfare state. You need new facilities, new infrastructure, new groups of professionals, new educational and career paths (which can generate quite a few new and very cool jobs by the way), and new institutions to govern, evaluate and develop the whole endeavor. It’s going to take decades to build and/or cultivate, and yet it will produce few tangible, manifest things. But it will produce a more listening society, and an existentially mature civilization. Millions of people will untie subtle knots in their inner worlds and manage their lives more compassionately and skillfully. If the listening society is to fulfill its promise—a society where everyone is genuinely seen and heard—it must rest upon a foundation of inwards listening.
All of these services should be backed up on a collective level so that people are guaranteed a year off from work and be guaranteed a basic livelihood during the period. Hopefully, it could be possible even for parents of children to attend such periods of seclusion, just switching their day-time work for monastic life.
“What’s the point of all this? And, again, can we afford it? Should we really be sucking our thumbs and navel-gazing when there are so many issues to attend and so much suffering in the world?”
Still not following, modernist mind? Sigh.
The point is that it is only by seriously helping people to get what they really need and want from life—by supporting serious adult development, development of the mind and the personality as a whole—that we can raise the level of behavioral functioning throughout society and the level of mental health throughout all social groups. It is in this manner we can raise the average “effective value m
eme” of the population above the modern stage.
And, just to remind you of the stakes: Without a deep and lasting change towards higher effective value meme, we’re pretty much all going to die in a horrible car crash as we enter this age of super-technologies without a corresponding shift of psychological and cultural development.
So it’s not that we can’t afford to do it, it’s that we can’t afford not to. “Can’t afford” a medicine that will save your life from an aggressive disease? Well, then, too bad, you’ll just have to suffer and die.
Existential Politics isn’t navel-gazing. Things are only navel-gazing if they are not conducive to growth and social change. If something does prevent oceans of human suffering, improves lives in so many ways, and saves society from collapse because it spurs human growth into deeper maturity—then it’s not navel-gazing.
As things stand today, many of those who belong to the social groups I have called the Yoga Bourgeoisie, the Triple-H Population and the Integralists already find ways of getting support for growth during transitional periods: they go to workshops and retreats, do shadow-work (busting your own bullshit with a therapist) and whatnot.
But there are several problems with this privatized and individualized approach of present-day spiritual seeking. One thing is that it’s only really available to these privileged segments of the population. So it’s missing where it’s needed the most. Another problem is that the norms of society aren’t really up to speed: Most people think it’s a waste of time, too idle and boring. Society as a whole should make sure more people see the profound value of prolonged, serious inner work. And a third problem is that there is no concerted effort on society’s behalf to guarantee the quality, reliability and safety of such practices, which enables all kinds of swindlers and quacks to prey upon the Astrology Precariat (chapter 7). Making this a priority of Existential Politics would work to remedy many of these issues.
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