Ch. 12: Conclusion
If we could say that the West has a soul, what would it be? For Spengler, it was a longing for infinity, which manifested in mathematics, architecture, and art. A Christian theologian such as Benedict XVI might say that it was a search for truth — and that this search for truth is the most important commonality of both Western civilisation and its Hellenic predecessor. The reach towards infinity epitomised by dizzying Cathedral spires was just a reach for God, for meaning and truth.
The aim upon which I converged in the process of writing this book is to take this element of soul which truly represents the West — this longing for infinity, truth, and meaning — and to give it a new body in the form of a Metasophist Community. A reincarnation of the West, if you will. This task is urgent as our current institutions are exhausted. Universities, political parties, traditional churches, the media — all are failing to fulfil their original roles.
This new Community would seek to discover the meaning of life. Naturally, there will be different ideas on how this can be achieved. For these different mindsets, different chapters will be formed, balancing cohesion with diversity. And even though these chapters will compete against each other for members, it will be the solemn duty of each member of the Community to help others make the contribution to this mission they desire, not matter what chapter they adhere to.
The Community would be united in its goal, while helping the individual pursue their own particular way of contributing to this mission. The individual will find meaning in life by contributing to the mission of the Community: to find the discover of life, no matter how long this takes. To complete this mission, we must be prepared to gather seemingly-infinite amounts of knowledge, and to create a society which must survive for a seemingly-infinite period of time, thereby wedding the search for truth with the longing for infinity.
But the modern West is currently unsuited for this role, as its collective mind is detached from reality. We saw this when we discussed how the conventional wisdom was and is so utterly misguided on topics such as climate change, foreign policy, and China. When discussing the ideas of Toynbee and Spengler, we learned that the root cause of this apparent senility is the renunciation by many of true value and meaning in favour of rigidified ideologies and money. The same mistake that killed past civilisations.
When ideologies become rigid and fail to inspire, guide, and give meaning to the individual, the people will latch onto money as a new form of value. Ironically, the first major victim of the lust for money was probably the Catholic Church. Ironic, because one of the first acts of Christ was to expel the money lenders from the Temple. As soon as his apostolic successors let money back in, the Church was doomed: its lust for indulgences set off the Reformation, which ultimately undermined belief and resulted in the rise of new philosophies such as the various strains of liberalism.
To prevent the Metasophist Community from falling into the same same trap, a new moral system was outlined. Under this system, the morality and worth of an individual is determined by whether they contribute to the mission or not. By focusing on the unique contribution each individual can make, we can hopefully prevent them from becoming infatuated by the accumulation of money or by the actions of others. In addition, we discussed theories of psychological development which should help the individual become more independent and rise above the taboos of the community and the confines of a single ideology. In so doing, we hope to break the spell of groupthink, and evade the trap described by Toynbee.
Thus the individual mind can be strengthened. But we cannot ignore the collective mind and discourse, intensely shaped by the mass media and popular culture, whose narratives are tainted by drive to make profit and sell advertising. An already bad situation has been worsened by collapsing revenues in a world where information is freely available on the Internet. Chapter Seven describes a new system where the different media chapters are formed and funded depending on their forecasting success and the number of chapter adherents.
These new media organisations who would provide news and analysis in a way untainted by the need to make profit or support the government. Moreover, the new discipline of Metasophy will help to pull together the disparate fields of knowledge, so that each chapter will form a view on what is good and bad based on the academic evidence. The various prediction competitions could keep the new discourse within and among the chapters tethered to reality.
Thus the direction of the Community is set. But the true vision must thus be realised at a societal level for two reasons. First, one of the rival ideologies and quasi-religions could try to snuff out what could be a formidable competitor. Second, in order for any society to realise this mission of discovering the meaning of life, it must survive — and this requires a high degree of social cohesion.
Therefore, I formulated the Youth Fellowship to ensure that the excluded — in both a class and ethnic sense — are brought into the system, and are given opportunity. If one engages with people from across society on a common task in which all have a strong interest, common bonds are more likely to develop. Thus, I hope to unify society and eliminate the segregation which has developed over the last number of decades.
But disunity could also arise from inequality, and a lack of prosperity could lead people to seek alternatives to the established order. The Metasophist solution to this is that the Community should actively seek to create new companies by actively forming new Creative Clusters. And in return, the Community would take a shareholding. These shareholding in turn would be distributed to individual citizens, as part of their own Social Equity Account.
Thus we attain balance between capital and labour. But there is another balance to be remedied, that between income and expenditure. There can be no doubt the continuing high level of debt and debt accumulation threatens the financial stability of the West. In order to reduce unnecessary public expenditure, the cost of the services one obtains from the state could be deducted from the Public Equity Account. But once this is depleted, the individual would still continue to benefit from universal access, where that is socially desirable as in the case of healthcare. We would thus create a culture where people learn not to treat the resources of the government as free and unlimited, while also not endangering universal access.
Balance is thus an recurring motif of Metasophism – balance between left and right, between capital and labour, and between the individual and the collective. But the idea that balance is necessary for societal creativity is not a new idea.
In The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche outlines what he considered two conflicting strains in ancient Greek culture: the Apollonian and the Dionysian. For Nietzsche, the Apollonian represented reason, order, and restraint, whereas the Dionysian stood for passion, irrationality, excess, and ecstasy. A typical example of the Apollonian would be an ascetic who has devoted himself to intellectual pursuits, while the Dionysian is when one finds himself drunken in the heady atmosphere of an excited crowd, all sense of individuality forgotten.
According to Nietzsche, when the Apollonian and the Dionysian are imbalanced, art will fail to reach its full potential. If there is an imbalance today, it is likely to be towards the Dionysian, for we live in an age where emotion is eminent, and reason is radical. Perhaps this is the explanation for the growing hedonism in our society, and the increasing emotionality of the public sphere, such as was seen in Britain after the death of Princess Diana. Music festivals are especially Dionysian, and these have spread widely. Beginning with the Woodstock Festival of 1969 that embraced the communal spirit, they now account for over $20 billion in revenues globally.[187]
A similar argument could be made about the growth of spectator sports, which allow one to feel a sense of oneness. And of course we should not forget binge drinking; an unknown term before the 60s, the usage of this term has soared since the 90s.[188] This has continued to rise in the US.[189] While binge drinking has been declining in Europe, it remains the region which consumes the most alcohol per capita.[190]
On the other hand, the growth of bureaucratisation and the feigned technocratism approach of governing elites can be seen as an expressions of Apollonian tendencies. But if so, then it is an unhealthy expression, for there is little emphasis on beauty and a telling absence of a worthwhile end goal.
There is an interesting theory to be postulated here. When the Apollonian order is capable of inspiring people through the creation of beauty or meaning, people are willing to sacrifice their individual interest and sublimate strong internal drives towards maintaining this order. But when it rigidifies and loses its power to form and create, it visibly begins to flounder and fail. It loses its inspirational power, the reign of logic fades, and the primitive instinct, no longer being sublimated, bubbles to the surface. We thus enter the time of the secession of the proletariat according to Toynbee, and the barbarism of reflection postulated by Vico. People begin to search for meaning in more direct ways, which results in hedonism, irrational ideologies, and for the more ambitious, the drive for the accumulation of riches as described by Spengler. Vico, Toynbee, Spengler, and Nietzsche — perhaps they were all simply describing the same process after all.
If the grand balance between the Apollonian and the Dionysian is to be restored, then perhaps Metasophism is the only way forward. But how? The structure of the community, the fact that all are linked by the common mission, can provide some of the need for cosmic unity desired by the Dionysian. But by providing a structured goal — discovering the meaning of life — we may rectify Apollonian tendencies which are currently oriented to misguided goals, such as “utility” maximisation. Thirdly, the transcendental and communal mission of achieving the Imperative could give people the inspiration and strength to sublimate any potentially chaotic Dionysian tendencies. Only by channelling this energy can a formidable and beautiful culture be restored. Fourth, by embedding competition and change within the ideology, we would create a system designed to never flounder or fail, and to thus maintain the balance.
This far-reaching socio-political system is fully in accordance with the tradition of the West: it lies within the liberal tradition by acknowledging the role of the individual and the value of political pluralism.
However, it goes against the secular trend, initiated with Martin Luther, where salvation and meaning are an individual matter. For the Metasophist, salvation is a societal affair: our destinies are linked, and the action of one can determine the fate of all. It thus represents something of a rupture from the current system. But if the current system is headed for ruin, rupture of some kind will be necessary – and far better that it be of a philosophical, considered, and controlled nature, rather than the descent into chaos that submerged past societies.
Undoubtedly there will be those who will condemn these ideas as being on the wrong side of history. But if the reality of history has been the logic of decline, then surely our goal should be to go against history, to master and overcome it, and therefore accomplish that which has never been attained; the vigorous continuation of civilisation. If it can work, Metasophism might then present everyone with a choice. Reject it, and the West will probably fracture and fade. Embrace it, however, and we may finally break the cycle of history which condemns our society to death.
Endnotes
[187] Richard Florida. “The Rise, and Urbanization, of Big Music Festivals”. In: Citylab (Aug. 2019). URL: https://www.citylab.com/life/2019/08/musicfestival-location-cities-coachella-sxsw-lollapalooza/595297/
[188] Usage of the phrase ”binge drinking”. https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=binge+drinking. Accessed: 2020-03-03
[189] Beverly Merz. “Binge drinking continues to rise — particularly among women and seniors”. In: Harvard Health Blog (Apr. 2017). URL: https://www.health.harvard. edu/blog/binge-drinking-continues-to-rise-particularly-among-women-and-seniors-2017041811603
[190] Elena Sánchez Nicolás. “And the world’s heaviest drinkers are ... Europeans”. In: EUObserver (Sept. 2019). URL: https://euobserver.com/social/145854