Patty Popp

January 22nd, 2018

HONORS 394 A

On Wednesday, January 3rd, I walked into Paccar Hall for the very first time. My mind
was racing with hypotheses on what I would be in for over the coming ten weeks. As I scoured
the floors of Paccar in an attempt to find the classroom, I felt like everyone could sense that I
was a computer science major and that I did not truly belong. I was overwhelmed with great
relief (and mild embarrassment) when I discovered that the first classroom that I had passed
ended up being the room in which I would be taking HONORS 394 A for the rest of the quarter.
When I sat down, I glanced down at the syllabus laid out before me. “Disenchantment of the
West: From Shakespeare to the Coen Brothers”. What did I sign up for? I don’t even like the
Coen Brothers’ films! Little did I know that this class, the one that I had so many insecurities and
qualms about, would end up being the class that would unlock new insights into our society’s
history and unearth aspects of everyday life that I always thought to be true, but never felt
confident in my knowing to be true.

This course aspires to be more than a history of ideas – but rather an interdisciplinary
experiment in understanding our current imagination of the “Real” and how it came to be what it
is (via the medium of philosophy, religion, and history). In order for one to understand this
moment, he or she must understand it in the context of the history of thought and imagination
that got us here. The notion that the past is a different country particularly resonated with me
because if I look back at the person I was ten years ago, or the world that my parents and
grandparents grew up in, it is as if we, human beings, have not only transcended time, but also
transcended space. The world that we live in now is an entirely different beast than that of the
Ancient Greek philosophers or the first homo sapiens, but at the same time, it is all very much
interconnected.

In the words of C.S. Lewis in The Allegory of Love, “Humanity does not pass through
phases as a train passes through stations: being alive, it has the privilege of always moving yet
never leaving anything behind. Whatever we have been, in some sort we are still…” C.S. Lewis
argued that in reconstructing the state of mind of our past, we are better equipped to understand
our present, and perhaps even our future. Sebastian Junger’s Tribe and Niki Caro’s Whale Rider
provide the perfect means of grappling with the interconnectedness of the archaic and the
modern. Through disruption of the modern at the hands of the mythic and archaic, the modern is
constantly being shaped and molded into what shows up at any given moment. Almost like the
ocean, the two find balance in their steady ebb and flow, both comprising two halves of a larger
whole. The archaic pulls in the modern, only for the modern to later thrust forward, just to be
pulled back in, and the dance continues. A true thing of beauty and ordered chaos.

Although tempting, we are in no position to look down on our benighted ancestors as

irrational or deluded, as we are really an extension of them. One does not exist without the other
and as stated before, the past is a different country with different rules and different ways of
being. Just as I am not going to judge my past self for wearing bell-bottom jeans in elementary
school, I am not going to judge our ancestors for believing that human sacrifice would appease
the gods. They lived in an enchanted world full of spirits, angels, goddesses, and the like, while
we have since separated ourselves from that narrative. As a society, we have become particularly
good at understanding the mechanics of things, but we lack in our ability to intuit the basic
mystery of Being. Any member of modern society can explain to you how a smartphone works,
but if you were to ask them why we act in certain ways in specific social situations, you might be
met with blank stares. This closely ties into the title of the course – the movement from an
enchanted world to a disenchanted world is about “forgetting being”, about embodying a
buffered self rather than a porous self.

One might argue that, over time, we have lost touch with “aletheia” – that which is un-
hidden and discloses itself to us as true, once we give voice to it. Great poetry and works of art
are true in this sense as they bring that which is below the line into the foreground for the world
to see. The notion of truth, in this sense, can either be accepted naively or through a leap of faith,
but we all, nevertheless, operate with provisional models to map out our own small area of
reality which ultimately is dwarfed by what we do not know. Much like how our planet is just an
infinitesimally small fraction of the broad universe that we are a part of. How we navigate our
“map” is found in our social imaginaries, which I will touch on later. Piecing together the past is
all about connecting the dots in a way that makes sense, in a way that most fully discloses the
truth in a way we can feasibly believe.

There is the obvious truth of the world that we see when we wake up in the morning – the
fact that my bed sheets are light blue, and my thermostat is set to 70 degrees – and the truths that
are hidden which might yet disclose themselves to us (if we adopt the right mindset, that is). This
ties back to the notion of remembering our ancestors. Granted, we know more now than they did,
but they knew things that we have since forgotten and need to remember. Together, we can find
balance in the concerns of the material and spiritual world and begin to not only answer the
“how?”, but also the “why?”. This confusing, postmodern world that we inhabit serves as a
transition state until we have a clearer picture about what comes next. As a society, we have lost
touch with our inner selves which in turn, lead to shocking election results and general societal
apathy. It is our duty to adapt to the current times, mold our new story, and find out where we fit
on the journey of our species – will we choose to be the passive bystanders of our own demise or
the valiant saviors?

Much of our world view is shaped by our social imaginary, and in order to better
understand it, we must reflect on the past. Charles Taylor defined social imaginary as “the ways
in which [people] imagine their social existence, how [people] fit together with others, how
things go on between [people] and their fellows, the expectations which are normally met, and
the deeper normative notions and images which underlie these expectations.” This implicit
“map” of social space can be seen at work in Junger’s Tribe. In The Men and the Dogs, Junger
explored the reasoning behind the apparent rejection of Western society as people emigrated
from the civilized to the tribal. The intensely communal nature of an Indian tribe held an appeal
that the material benefits of Western civilization could not compete with – for those that joined
the tribe, they much preferred this “new map” over the one in which they were acculturated. The
sense of egalitarianism was compelling and liberating, as they tasted freedom from day-to-day
obligations for the first time.

On a material level, Western society was clearly more comfortable and protected from
the hardships of the natural world, but required more time and commitment by the individual
(this tradeoff will also be seen in the Matrix, which I will get to later). The way of the tribe
challenged the long-standing ideas that modern society created a surplus of leisure time, when in
actuality, it created a desperate cycle of work and financial obligations. The juxtaposition of the
different social imaginaries can also be seen in the fact that that the rates of depression and
suicide went up as affluence and urbanization rose. In losing touch with the intrinsic values of
competence, authenticity, and connectedness and putting an unnecessary large emphasis on
extrinsic values, modern society has since become a sprawling and anonymous mess in which
people no longer have the means to feel truly content or fulfilled.

As Junger goes on to describe in Calling Home from Mars, he claims that “there are
many costs to modern society, starting with its toll on the global ecosystem and working one’s
way down to its toll on the human psyche, but the most dangerous loss may be to community”.
What set early humans apart from the rest of the animal kingdom was the systematic sharing of
food and altruistic group defense, but we have since lost that sense of tribe. We are no longer
collectively acting towards the betterment of a whole, but rather we are acting as selfish
individuals. Junger offers littering as the perfect example of an everyday symbol of disunity in
society – there is no shared ethos of trying to protect something shared; it is the embodiment of
every man for himself. We are all pawns in a broken cooperative game in which everyone is
trying to defeat the pawn adjacent to them. As a result, an even greater divide is cast between
individuals as we all throw our hands up in the air and say, “Not my problem”, but it is our
problem – we are all players in the big game.

Although not as extreme, I found close ties between the arguments made by Junger and
the narrative arc outlined in Whale Rider. At the beginning of the film, Koro and the rest of the
tribe were in a state of darkness, ignorance, and hardheartedness which prevented them from
seeing the truth. Koro, especially, was too blind and caught up in his old ways to recognize the
truth that was fighting to reveal itself. In this way, Whale Rider very much followed the classic
comedic structure. Through the trials and tribulations of Pai, including her rebirth, things that
were previously not recognized had come to light, and as a result, perceptions around the
community had dramatically changed, especially pertaining to the intertwined nature of the role
of women and tradition/convention.

It was by Pai and the ancestors’ doing that the community was reborn and that coveted
sense of spiritual unity was achieved once again. It took a new perspective to bring the seeds of
life and truth found below the line into the light, and bring the archaic and the modern halves of
the world together once again. The confusion which precedes this recognition can thus be seen as
a kind of twilight, marked by the fact that people are insufficiently aware of each other’s and
their own true identity. One of the key points in the film is that disorder in the upper world
cannot be amended without some crucial activity taking place beyond the consciousness of the
upper world characters who are in the grip of their life-denying state. It is only from the lower
level that the tribe’s sense of community could be regenerated and brought back to the upper
world again, therefore we must not take our past for granted.

Over the last 500 years, we have all but lost the sense of “sacred” from our public life.
Nothing is sacred anymore in the secular society that we currently inhabit, and thus, we live in a
profane world. The buffered selves that most of us embody nowadays filter out the terror that
came with the sacred, but also filter out the grandeur. This ties back to the notion of a social
imaginary – the interface between the individual and the background invisible reality. The
imaginary has to align itself with what is happening under-the-line, because if we get out of
alignment, like the tribe in Whale Rider, we get a collective sense of anxiety or ontological
dizziness. A lot of what makes the age we live in known as the “Age of Anxiety” has to do with
the fact that the foreground and background are strongly disconnected, and we are having
difficulty adapting to this ungrounded state. If a tree lacks roots, then it stops growing – one
needs a place to build from in order to continue forward. If a group fails to adapt to the changing
world around them, then the social imaginary ceases to provide an effective map or model to
help them navigate in the world. Wisdom begins with acknowledging our ignorance when it
comes to these things and it is our duty to make strides towards overcoming that ignorance.

William Barrett echoed this sentiment in the Irrational Man when he said that we are still
pretty much in ignorance, and most of the contemporary world is caught up in an unconscious
and gigantic conspiracy to run away from these facts. Every major step forward by mankind
entails some loss, the sacrifice of an older security and the creation and heightening of new
tensions. The more specialized a vision the sharper its focus; but also, the more nearly total the
blind spot towards all things that lie on the periphery of this focus. For a lot of us, this blind spot
has to do with that which is below the line. With an expanded focal view, we start to lose that
which is behind us. Thinking itself, Barrett found, is only the halting and fumbling effort of a
thoroughly biological creature to cope with his or her environment. Barrett goes on to say that
the modern man seems even further from understanding himself than when he first began to
question his own identity, which goes to show our out-of-touchedness with our older selves.

Returning back to Charles Taylor, he finds this all to be a part of the larger process of
disenchantment. As buffered selves, we live with a much firmer sense of the boundary between
self and other and have thus experienced a change in sensibility as we have lost a way in which
people used to experience the world. It is through Axiality that our older understanding of human
flourishing in embedded societies is disrupted. Embedded societies tended to have three different
dimensions: an enmeshment with society, an enmeshment with the cosmos, and an enmeshment
with the spiritual world. Ordinary human flourishing in the immanent frame had to do with long
life, many children, bountiful crops, plentiful game, victory over one’s enemies, etc. – the kind
of flourishing that was of central concern for Junger and in Whale Rider. But the Axial Turn
initiated a break in at least one of the dimensions of embeddedness, as a new idea emerged: from
a perspective that lies outside the “immanent frame” even with all its enchanted sprites and
spiritual forces, there is a “transcendent” dimension of reality that is unambiguously true,
beautiful, and good.

It is precisely the “normal reality” within the immanent frame from which we need to be
liberated. Instead of striving to get this god or that goddess on your side to promote your interests
in this world, the new goal is to have one’s life aligned in some way with the transcendent good
– the unchanging, eternal realm beyond the fixed stars. In this way, the transcendent renders the
immanent irrelevant, and thus has a disembedding effect. The post-axial spiritual elites reorient
themselves toward this transcendent Real, and everybody else continues to live circumscribed by
the concerns of ordinary human flourishing within the immanent frame. These spiritual strata
that form lead to a strong divide between that which is sacred and that which is secular. It is
through a process of “waking up” that one ultimately becomes liberated.

Much like Plato’s Allegory of the Cave, whatever people thought was good and beautiful
within the immanent frame was just a shadow of what was truly good and beautiful. What is
required is a leap of faith to venture beyond the cave and embrace the true real in the fullest
sense. However, with this in mind, it is important to recognize that the sacred only works in
dyadic tension with the profane. Reformers, in their attempt to sanctify ordinary life, ultimately
prompted the loss of the sacred, as it all collapsed into the profane, thus causing everything to be
ordinary.

This is especially interesting to consider after having watched The Matrix. The film did a
particularly good job of showcasing the fact that our sense of the real world is a provisional
model of the real, and not “The Real” which lies behind it out of sight. In the case of Neo, he had
his eyes closed to the truth for much of the film and it was only at the end when he was able to
fully break free from the naïve consciousness and fully transcend the Matrix. Everyone in the
Matrix, according to Morpheus, was “born into bondage, kept inside a prison that [they] cannot
smell, taste, or touch. A prison for [their] mind.” Everyone in the Matrix had accepted the world
they lived in to be true, when in actuality, it was nothing more than a grand, neural-interactive
simulation, much like the immanent frame and how it dwarfs in comparison to the transcendent
Real.

This brings up an interesting question, however: What does it mean to be free? For those
that are in the Matrix, they are enslaved in the simulation, but living in a dream world, while
those that are out of the Matrix find themselves liberated, but in the wilderness, that takes its
form as the Desert of the Real. Transcendence is nicely illustrated in the film after Neo comes
back from the dead. Having been “reborn”, much like Pai in Whale Rider, he has achieved a
level of existence that allows him to realize his destiny as the One, transcend the rules of the
matrix, and have the power to subvert it. By no longer operating according to the rules
established within the Matrix, Neo was able to undermine the conventional “social imaginary” in
ways that helped him destroy the agents. The social imaginary can be thought of as a cultural
linguistic download, and the “code” – the streaming patterns of ones and zeroes that create the
simulation – is a metaphor for the linguistic coding that gives us the imaginary that shapes all of
our experiences, except if we find a way to step outside of it by going out into the desert or
wilderness (much like Morpheus and the people on his ship).

For reasons that are never made clear, Neo is able to transcend the code and the
rules/natural laws which govern the matrix simulation. He is able to realize that the spoon is not
actually a spoon and thus can be bent in ways that a spoon in the real world could not. He is able
to put aside the imaginary which organized his perceptions and determined what “showed up”
and did not, and create a new one through the process of waking from his “dream”. It was
through training and practice that Neo was able to break free from the prison of his mind and
truly open his eyes for the first time. Unlike the porous selves who remained in the matrix,
deeply embedded in the false reality in which they were acculturated, Neo had become
disenchanted – a primarily left-brain function.

While the right brain concerns itself with the concrete, synthetic, intuitive/inductive,
vigilant, inarticulate, and open, the left brain concerns itself with the abstract, analytic,
logical/deductive, hyper focused, scrutinizing, and verbal. In this way, the more left-brain
emphatic a society, the more “buffered” the people in it. The modern imaginary has little to no
room for enchantment and so, no matter how left-brain emphatic a society we become, we will
always have a tension between the immanent and the transcendent, but I believe it is important to
not lose touch with our enchanted past. Entire societies and civilizations were built based on the
visions of artists, philosophers, and prophets – all of whom were possessed by a kind of divine
madness that allowed them to be in touch with the eternal. They knew things that we have since
forgotten, so it is our responsibility to make sure that we do not lose where we come from.

Throughout our history, there is frequently a duality to be found: whether it be faith and
reason, good and evil, archaic and modern, essence and existence, etc., and we must not lose
them, as together, the two halves form a harmony – much like yin and yang. Similarly, Barrett
goes on to describe man as a centaur – a being divided between the natural and theological
orders. According to Pascal, “Man thus occupies a middle position in the universe between the
infinitesimal and the infinite: he is an All in relation to Nothingness, a Nothingness in relation to
the All”. Shakespeare is a unique character who had the ability to straddle both worlds – the
enchanted and the modern – and find balance between the left and the right. As we continue to
watch plays by him, I am curious to see what thought experiments he will continue to play on us.

After watching the Tempest, I was able to draw some similarities to The Matrix, namely
with the “desert of the Real” and Prospero’s Island. Both exist outside of the conventional
world’s social imaginary and its limitations and both Prospero and Neo were able to transcend
the rules that govern the “matrix” that determines the experience and perceptions of others.
Similarly, I was able to recognize notes of ordinary human flourishing on Prospero’s island
alongside intervention from various sprites, monsters, and goddesses. Prospero’s ultimate
decision to distance himself from the spirited world goes to show the gradual disembeddedment
of society through Shakespeare’s eyes. There is a twilight of the gods feeling about the end of the
play, in the sense that Prospero (and Shakespeare, for that matter) seem to recognize that he was
at the end of an era, the era of enchantment, and moving into the era of disenchantment. As the
lively spirits that were once so plentiful and all-encompassing fade away, it is as if they give way
to another way of being in the world – one that has no memory of them or any feeling of their
loss or of needing them.

Full disclosure: I would have wished to include more about the Romance of the Rose in this
diary, but none of the material really clicked with me, per se. Perhaps it was the flowery writing,
or just how crazy the protagonist’s “dream” all seemed, but I could not conjure anything up of
note that would not sound out-of-place. I would be curious to chat with you more about how the
story ties into the other topics we have been discussing, because perhaps I am failing to make a
connection. Thanks for taking the time to read this!