Geist der Zeiten:
or, what is wrong with the world and how to fix it
Our Present Age (Vol 4, No. 1)
Geist der Zeiten: or, what is wrong with the world and how to fix it
By Jacob Patrick Collins
Schwarzenborn, Germany
08 September 2023
Point me out a time when the desire
for equality has made [men] happier.
No, no. You can’t.
—E. M. Forster[1]
What on earth is going on?
The world reasons from plight to solution: “The problem with our age,” it says, “is systemic injustice,” or “inequitable healthcare,” or whatever particular issue it may choose to identify in that particular moment. Technological advancement presents a new crisis of its own, for how often do we look for a technical, or a medical, or a political problem to a crisis which is in fact our spiritual malaise? The world can identify its problems, but it cannot identify its solution precisely because it has misidentified what its problem truly is.
Is it better to reason from solution to plight, then? The utopia projects attempt this, insofar as they are able; they imagine the world that they wish to inhabit and then create it. The problem for ideal utopias is that they remain in the mind and do not exist in reality; the problem for actual utopias became their existential crisis (for how many remain today?). It seems, then, that realizing the Ideal is far more difficult than imagining it, for what dreams we have that lay untouched!
So is there a third way? Is there a way in which we can perceive the issues of our world and then identify a solution which can encompass them all? I argue that there is, and I’ll explain what it is in just a moment, but first we need to set the groundwork in a subject called cultural literacy. If we say that there is a problem in the world, what signs are we reading to tell us that there is such a problem? The signs which we choose to read must shape what we identify the problem as, and therefore we must be fairly adept at identifying which signs can be read and which signs ought to be read.
Cultural literacy is, in many senses, a question about anthropology, for it seeks to take that which we create and inhabit and understand it. Not that this is entirely possible, of course, since we cannot understand the totality of anything, much less something we are actively in. Instead, we attempt to interpret the signs which we are capable of reading and ask them, either directly or through those with more skill to read them, the meaning to which they are pointing. Travel, or going on a journey, can be a particularly valuable method for seeing our signs in a slightly different way and maybe for the first time learning to interpret them aright, as Eliot says in “Little Gidding,”[2]
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
And so going to a different place can show us the gaps in our understanding of the world and help us begin to see, albeit through a dark mirror, how we can begin to make our house into a home.
The idea of a home is that it is ultimately someplace in which you can belong. The question remains: is “belonging” the kind of thing I can create or only aspire to? And in belonging, do I become? In our society, which German philosopher Byung-Chul Han has called “the Society of the Spectacle,” we are always on the move because we are always only looking at things. And because I never take the time to become, I can never truly belong anywhere. And since I belong nowhere, how can I feel anything but volatile, uncertain, complex, ambiguous—angry at faceless corporations for killing me and my community but doing nothing to repair whatever shreds of humanity might still remain in whatever community in which I am situated?
The triumph of the Society of the Spectacle began in part when we abandoned the natural law, an understanding that certain actions require a certain and particular response. What it means to be human is not biological but the awareness of this law and the obligation (and, for the most human of us, desire) to follow this law. In short, it is the Word which makes us particularly human. These are not the laws which we create and impose upon one another; rules like this exist only to judge. Instead, God gives us particular commands in order to protect us, and therefore we know the way in which we ought to go.
Cultural literacy is a question about anthropology precisely because it seeks to identify the current spiritual or cultural malaise and then attempts to determine what could be causing such an issue while looking out for a possible remedy. It is an attempt to take the stories we tell ourselves, with both their faithful contours and their feckless lies, into a unified whole so that we can fit our story into a broader cultural story. In other words, we are desperate to belong because then we can finally have someone or something also telling us that we are, and that therefore we matter.
There is a great absurdity in any sort of ideological posturing, precisely because once you find yourself positioned somewhere, then you feel a quiet urging, that always grows louder if your heart is not too calloused over, that this is not quite the right place to be.[3] In other words, we find ourselves once again Looking by participating in yet another society attempting to belong so that we can be without feeling out of place. Instead, we find just another makeshift raft in what Paul Kingsnorth calls “the great swirling ocean of bullshit we have surrounded ourselves with in lieu of life, in lieu of living.”[4]
The answer to this problem is, of course, the gospel, with its crucified Lord and incarnate God. But that answer feels trite to a secular age because it has given up on the idea of Spirit altogether; they say, “our problem is a material one and therefore demands a material solution,” but this gets the whole equation backwards. They seek being in a place which cannot offer it because it can offer no true sense of belonging. Those without that sense of belonging are relegated to the realm of always looking in at the family enjoying Christmas dinner together while they stand in the snow in a threadbare coat. Outsiders stand around and think, “If only that family would come out then we could all be truly miserable together.” Of course they are never so honest as to say they are miserable, but that they can see the world for what it truly is. Of course, such a scientific view reduces all reality to the mechanistic and so is unable to see the things which truly are because their whole world has become disenchanted.
The key to living, and our answer to the Problem of our culture, is neither with the (il)liberal agenda and the Great Lie of equity, nor with the pseudo-neo-Nietzschean idea of the Vitalists who emulate the pre-Christian Viking, but with the weakness of the cross and so thereby becoming truly human—“for when I am weak, then I am strong.” It is this I, which secular cultural “analysts” are looking at, by designing technical solutions to a spiritual problem. Rather, we look at the I which has now been united to Christ: “It is not I who lives, but Christ who lives in me.” By becoming not-I, by crucifying myself with Christ, I find a sense of belonging with the only not-I who can truly define and create a full I, and therefore I fully am. This, then, is Life—giving up myself and then and only then receiving a true and new self.
Cultural literacy is an effort to learn how to communicate this message to a world unwilling to hear it. It is offering a more compelling story to the world, a story which allows us to align with the way things are meant to be and so finally come to be. The problem with both Perverse Vitalists and with Psychopathic Leftists is that they want a political and social solution to a problem which is ultimately spiritual. Inequality is a crisis solved only by God, who alone can raise the dead.
We are cast out upon a “swirling ocean”; the solution is to find a ship which can sail us to the other side of Jordan's Stormy Bank. Not find, of course, but inherit. Peter could not navigate the waves of Galilee on his own; he depended upon the King of Glory to grasp his hand when he was all but sure to drown. Peter tried to walk on the ocean but found it an impossible task. Impossible for everyone except the one who calms the swirling ocean and promises us “abundant life.” If Christ is life then having abundant life means the fullness of life in Christ, which is the only source of meaning for this life: “Mankind are cast upon a stormy and tempestuous sea, and that the church is the ship of safety to bear them to the haven of peace.”[5] We go out into the world, “to love and serve as faithful witnesses of Christ our Lord,” but this task is incredibly difficult and arduous. Only in the safe bosom of Christ’s church can we receive the strength needed to even go about serving faithfully “in our several callings.”
People object, saying that the church has failed in its responsibility to fulfill its sacred mission and therefore no answer can be found in the institutional church. Our answer is this: our ship of safety can sink only when we are faithless to the mission to which we are called: to be the servants and witnesses of the gospel and the God who first loved us (“When we are faithless, he is faithful”). The ship of safety does not guarantee a particularly comfortable life; the answer to the crisis of our present age is not in shows of strength but in weakness; for, “when I am weak, then I am strong.”
This does not mean we take everything the world casts at us lying down, nor does it mean we disavow our institutions and hand them over to those intent on destroying them. We’ve published plenty to demonstrate that is certainly not what we believe. It does mean, however, that our security, and our safety, is not found in economic, social, or political institutions; our ship of safety is the gospel and the church which is faithful to proclaim it. Churches which abrogate this responsibility, like many of the mainline churches across the world, are no ship of safety and are no comfort in the midst of suffering.[6] If the gospel is the ultimate consolation for troubled consciences, then how can a church which does not preach the gospel be a place for wounded and troubled souls? More than that: it means that our (il)liberal push for equality has resulted in gross inequality; for the desire for equality cannot make us happy since it is not our appointed end. And we are happy only when our bow is pointed in the direction in which it ought to go.
When our ship of safety seems adrift, it is either because we are not the faithful passengers which we ought to be, or our pilot has steered us wrongly. And the further a ship goes astray the more difficult it is to return to the way it ought to go. The way it ought to go is plain, as Eliot says:[7]
We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.
God, who is the Absolute and who is Love, does not abandon the souls of those who walk through suffering. For the one who walks through suffering is assured that he shall again ascend and see his suffering from God’s point of view. At the end of exploration to life’s questions, the explorer finds himself back where he began (that is, he finds himself once again in God). But it is only this time that he knows God as he truly is: “Now this is eternal life: that they know you, the only true God, and Jesus Christ, whom you have sent.”
Our desires for equality, as Forster points out, can never make us happy. Our concern to prop up “marginalized” voices from the “Queer” or the Latinx or the Black community will never bring lasting happiness, either to us or to anyone in that community because it fundamentally misdiagnoses the problem and so cannot provide a solution. It is a form of cultural illiteracy, of misreading our cultural signs.
In this sense, I know already the answers to life’s woes, and only because of that can I identify rightly what our woes truly are. This is backwards from the way we often think, but it is the only way we can think. The solution to the crisis of our present age is not by the sword but by faith in the crucified and risen son of God. We reason from solution to plight, not from plight to solution; for we know what the answer to our problem is: our world’s problem is that it has misidentified its plight and so cannot hear the solution to its far more insidious plight.
[1] E. M. Forster, Howard’s End (1910; New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2003), 179.
[2] T. S. Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets, ed. T. S. Eliot (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1971), 59
[3] Paul Kingsnorth, Savage Gods (West Dorset: Little Toller Books, 2019), 76
[4] Kingsnorth, Savage Gods, 49.
[5] Convers Francis, An Historical Sketch of Watertown, in Massachusetts, from the First Settlement of the Town to the Close of Its Second Century (Cambridge: E. W. Metcalf & Company, 1830), 3.57.
[6] For example, https://www.ekd.de/EKD-Ehe-fuer-alle-Abstimmung-Bundestag-24425.htm. This is not a problem unique to Germany, of course.
[7] Eliot, “Little Gidding,” in Four Quartets, ed. Eliot, 59