Michael Pollan’s latest book, How to Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence, explores this rebirth of scientific and medical interest in psychedelics. The cover image, of a portal to the sky set against a black backdrop, beckons the reader on a journey through the title’s many themes. Along the way, Pollan narrates a fascinating social history of LSD and psilocybin (the psychoactive compound found in “magic” mushrooms), resurrects a near-forgotten body of scientific and clinical research on psychedelics that pre-dates Timothy Leary and the counterculture, and recounts his own tentative explorations in an underground world of therapists and healers. Collectively, the research efforts and lives and struggles of the men and women Pollan introduces us to — chemists, neuroscientists, mycologists, drug reform activists, therapists, psychologists, and patients participating in clinical trials for addiction, depression, and end-of-life anxiety — weave a larger story of psychedelic science as a promising field for treating mental illness and exploring the mysteries of human consciousness. Fifty years after LSD was classified as a schedule one prohibited drug, Pollan discovers science and psychiatry are now taking psychedelics seriously as a tool “for both understanding the mind and, potentially, changing it.”

At the same time, there are also many important perspectives missing from Pollan’s book. It is almost entirely a white history and a male one. Its primary protagonists are the principal investigators leading the research studies and clinical trials. There are very different histories — less white and male and science-centered — of psychedelic use in the modern West and the current “psychedelic renaissance” that Pollan could have sought out and used his power as a best-selling author to tell.

In general — barring a brief discussion of how non-indigenous people exploitatively appropriated magic mushrooms from native Oaxacans —Pollan has very little to say about the fraught politics of non-indigenous people using rituals and sacred medicines extracted and appropriated from the cultures of indigenous peoples. Such politics have a renewed relevancy as medical legalization grows increasingly likely, and a host of ethical questions confronts the psychedelic research community on issues related to patents, insurance, and FDA licensing. Who stands to profit from the current renaissance of research is an urgent question in 2018 and, unfortunately, not one that Pollan devotes much time to considering.

Absent, too, is a thoughtful reflection on how the particulars of Pollan’s privilege and taste occlude other important issues at stake in embracing psychedelic therapy. For instance, he is too inclined to dismiss tastes that are not his own; he disparages the New Age music that plays throughout psychedelic culture and states his preference for Bach. But his myopia has consequences deeper than the soundtrack. For instance, Pollan fails to address the questions Mike Jay raises in his review, “Who Gets to Trip?” where he pairs How to Change Your Mind with Lauren Slater’s Blue Dreams: The Science and the Story of the Drugs that Changed Our Minds. Slater, who has a history of psychosis, was excluded from both clinical trials and the underground world that accepted Pollan. Jay’s criticism gets at the important politics of access Pollan misses.

So what then is the value of Pollan’s book, and why review it for The Revealer, a publication about religion? Researched and written in the style of immersive journalism that Pollan is known for, the book does thoughtfully and beautifully capture the story these scientists and psychonauts tell themselves about what they are doing and why it matters. As it turns out, this story is not just about the excitement generated by cutting-edge research or promising clinical trial results. One of the inspirations for Pollan’s initial interest in psychedelics is, in fact, a 2006 study by a team of researchers led by Roland Griffiths and William Richards at Johns Hopkins titled, “Psilocybin Can Occasion Mystical-Type Experiences Having Substantial and Sustained Personal Meaning and Spiritual Significance.” Published in the journal Psychopharmacology, Pollan is intrigued by the presence of the words “mystical” and “spiritual” at the center of a peer-reviewed scientific journal article. “The title hinted at an intriguing frontier of research,” he writes, “one that seemed to straddle two worlds we’ve grown accustomed to think are irreconcilable: science and spirituality.” Much of his book is an exploration of the relationship between these two domains. As the book progresses, there is a gradual unsettling of Pollan’s own self-identification as a philosophical materialist, “who believes that matter is the fundamental substance of the world and the physical laws it obeys should be able to explain everything that happens.” How is it, Pollan asks, that psychedelics might undo such a worldview?

Pollan discovers he doesn’t have to look far. At every turn in his investigation of the science of psychedelics, he encounters this entanglement of science with mysticism, and the material with the spiritual. For example, in his history of twentieth-century psychedelic use in the West, Pollan tells the story of Albert Hoffman, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938 and was deeply sympathetic to the adoption of his “problem-child” by the counterculture youth. He regarded this as an “understandable response to the emptiness of what he described as a materialist, industrialized, and spiritually impoverished society that had lost its connection to nature.” Hoffman emerged from his own experiences with LSD “convinced the molecule offered civilization not only a potential therapeutic but also a spiritual balm.”

Throughout the book, Pollan continually returns to this theme, and what he calls this “curious paradox.” The mind-altering properties of LSD, psilocybin and other psychedelics seem to suggest a solidly materialist explanation for consciousness and spirituality because the changes they occasion can be attributed directly to a chemical. And what, he writes, “is more material than a chemical?” Yet what Pollan hears over and over in his investigation is that even the most secular of patients and participants in the clinical trials, even (especially) the laboratory scientists working with these substances, come away from their experiences convinced that something beyond a material basis of reality exists: “The same phenomenon that pointed to a materialist explanation for spiritual and religious belief gave people an experience so powerful it convinced them of the existence of a nonmaterial reality — the very basis of religious belief.”

To help him navigate this paradox, Pollan turns to the work of William James, the pioneering nineteenth- and early twentieth-century philosopher, psychologist, and scholar of religion. In The Varieties of Religious Experience, published in 1902, James argued that everyday waking consciousness is “but one special type of consciousness, whilst all about it, parted from it by the filmiest of screens, there lie potential forms of consciousness entirely different.”[3] Pollan is especially intrigued by James’ description of the consciousness generated by mystical experience as a state of profound knowing. Those who experience it are filled with the conviction, in Pollan’s words, “that some profound objective truth has been disclosed… regardless of whether it has been occasioned by a drug, meditation, fasting, flagellation, or sensory deprivation.” James called this conviction “the noetic quality,” and it leads Pollan on a search to understand what might account for it.

“Noetics” in ancient Greek and medieval philosophy was the branch of metaphysics concerned with the mind and the divine intellect. One place Pollan seeks answers on the “noetic quality” is in the neuroscience laboratories of David Nutt and Robin Carhart-Harris at Imperial College London and Judson Brewer at Yale. Using fMRI (functional magnetic resonance imaging), both research teams — the first administering participants high doses of psilocybin and the second working with experienced meditators — discovered that states of ego dissolution in volunteers correlated with the quieting of activity in the network of brain structures known as the “default mode network.” This network has been hypothesized to be the seat of the self; that is, it is the part of the brain responsible for the sense we have of ourselves as an individual “I” or ego separate from others and from a world “out there.” What these studies seem to show is that “when activity in the default mode network falls off precipitously, the ego temporarily vanishes, and the usual boundaries we experience between self and world, subject and object, all melt away.” But the studies also reveal that consciousness survives the disappearance of this ego-self, and that in fact, “taking this particular network off-line may give us access to extraordinary states of consciousness — moments of oneness or ecstasy that are no less wondrous for having a physical cause.”

By reaching out to patients in clinical trials testing the efficacy of psilocybin for the treatment of depression, addiction, and end-of-life anxiety, Pollan learns that many trial participants attribute their healing to the mystical experiences occasioned by the chemical. Pollan appreciates the difficulty of fitting this into a standard psychiatric paradigm. He asks, “How is Western medicine to evaluate a psychiatric drug that appears to work not by means of any strictly pharmacological effect but by administering a certain kind of experience in the minds of the people who take it?” Here it is the psychiatrist Jeffrey Guss, one of the researchers on the psilocybin clinical trials, who helps Pollan understand that part of the promise of psychedelic-assisted therapy is that it seems to resolve the conflict between two competing understandings and treatment paradigms of mental illness that have characterized American psychiatry over the past half century: “Is mental illness a disorder of chemistry, or is it a loss of meaning in one’s life? Psychedelic therapy is the wedding of those two approaches.”[4]

As a “healthy normal,” Pollan is excluded from participating in these clinical trials. But as he deepens his investigations, he starts to seek an understanding of the paradox of the noetic through his own experiences. Pollan is, at first, a wary traveler, and he describes himself at the beginning of the book as — barring a mild experience or two with magic mushrooms in his twenties — psychedelically naïve. This changes after a trip to the Pacific Northwest to meet the mycologist and mushroom entrepreneur Paul Stamets. Why, Pollan wonders, would fungi and plants evolve to produce a chemical compound with such profound effects on the minds of the creatures that consume them? Stamets believes they have a special intelligence and message to share with humans about the interconnectedness of all matter and all life; they communicate this to us neurochemically “by virtue of the gift of consciousness.” Pollan compares Stamets to the nineteenth-century German Romantic scientist Alexander von Humboldt, who argued that it was not through distant, rational objectivity but rather through our subjective understanding (feelings, senses, and imagination) that we ought to study the natural world. “Nature everywhere speaks to man in a voice” that is “familiar to his soul,” Humboldt wrote. Through this understanding, Pollan is able to appreciate Stamets’ theories of the intelligence of little scraps of dried brown fungi and their capacity to fill the human mind with an exquisite experience of unitive consciousness. Stamets guides Pollan on a field expedition to find a special species of magic mushroom called Psilocybe azurescens. And months later, on a summer day in his home in New England, Pollan takes them. These pages, the most beautiful of the book, are filled with the evocative nature writing that Pollan is famous for. Sitting in his garden abuzz with late-summer life, Pollan starts to find a resolution to the noetic paradox that has been troubling him:

I’m struck by the fact that there was nothing supernatural about my heightened perceptions that afternoon, nothing that I needed an idea of magic or a divinity to explain. No, all it took was another perceptual slant on the same old reality, a lens or mode of consciousness that invented nothing but merely (merely!) italicized the prose of ordinary experience, disclosing the wonder that is always there in a garden or wood, hidden in plain sight — another form of consciousness “parted from [us],” as William James put it, “by the filmiest of screens.” Nature does in fact teem with subjectivities — call them spirits if you like — other than our own; it is only the human ego, with its imagined monopoly on subjectivity, that keeps us from recognizing them all, our kith and kin. In this sense, I guess Paul Stamets is right to think the mushrooms are bringing us messages from nature, or at least helping us to open up and read them.

Faith, says Pollan, is not needed here, nor is “access to a spiritual dimension” dependent on “one’s acceptance of the supernatural.” Rather, it is an understanding of the spiritual opposed not so much to the material or to nature as it is to a human-centric egotism: “The opposite of spiritual is not material but egotistical,” Pollan concludes.

In the book’s opening pages, Pollan notes that in the 1960s, the acid trip became a rite of passage for the era’s youth, but that “[i]nstead of folding the young into the adult world, as rites of passage have always done, this one landed them in a country of the mind few adults had any idea even existed.” For Pollan, the new renaissance of psychedelics in American society beckons us to a different kind of rite of passage, one that would re-enchant the world and re-connect us with our non-human fellow creatures:

One of the gifts of psychedelics is the way they reanimate the world, as if they were distributing the blessings of consciousness more widely and evenly over the landscape, in the process breaking the human monopoly on subjectivity that we moderns take as a given. To us, we are the world’s only conscious subjects, with the rest of creation made up of objects; to the more egotistical among us, even other people count as objects. Psychedelic consciousness overturns that view, by granting us a wider, more generous lens through which we can glimpse the subject-hood — the spirit! — of everything, animal, vegetable, even mineral, all of it now somehow returning our gaze. Spirits, it seems, are everywhere. New rays of relation appear between us and all the world’s Others.

The book’s epigraph is a line from the Emily Dickinson poem “Time and Eternity”: “The soul should always stand ajar.” With that poetic gesture, Pollan invites his readers to dwell in that new opening.

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[1] For more on this history, see: Caldwell, W.V. 1968. LSD Psychotherapy: An Exploration of Psychedelic and Psycholytic Therapy. New York, Grove Press; Dyck, Erika. 2008. Psychedelic Psychiatry: LSD from Clinic to Campus. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins; Lattin, Don. 2010. The Harvard Psychedelic Club. New York: HarperOne.

[2] The FDA recently designated psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy using MDMA (the primary substance in the recreational drug Ecstasy) and psilocybin (the active ingredient in “magic mushrooms”) as “breakthrough therapies.” On-going Stage 3 clinical trials will likely lead to the medical legalization of these substances in the United States by the early 2020s. For an excellent account of the revival of laboratory research, see Langlitz, Nicolas. 2013. Neuropsychedelia: The Revival of Hallucinogen Research since the Decade of the Brain. Berkeley: University of California Press. The term “renaissance” was coined by psychiatrist Ben Sessa in his 2012 book, The Psychedelic Renaissance: Reassessing the Role of Psychedelic Drugs in 21st Century Psychiatry and Society.

[3] James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, cited in Pollan, 17.

[4] For more on this conflict, see anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann’s ethnographic study of American psychiatry, Luhrmann, T.M. 2000. Of Two Minds: An Anthropologist Looks at American Psychiatry. Vintage Books: New York. For more on the clinical trials with psilocybin and patients’ narratives of their healing, see also Pollan’s excellent piece in the The New Yorker, The Trip Treatment, February 9, 2015.

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Patricia Kubala is a PhD candidate in the department of anthropology at UC Berkeley. Her dissertation explores the current renaissance of interest in psychedelics in American society.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Soul Should Always Stand Ajar: Michael Pollan’s “How to Change Your Mind” appeared first on The Revealer.

Borderlands of the Sacred by Rachel McBridge Lindsey for The Immanent Frame

But classifying religious objects in El Sueño Americano as in some fundamental way distinct from the other objects on display in the photographs misses the bigger picture. Every confiscated object is remade through the ritual of staging and photographing as Kiefer performs the priestly role of transforming mundane objects into sacred hosts, tabernacles of dignity that migrate across the borderlands of sacred and secular. On the surface, El Sueño Americano employs a visual strategy not unlike the HHS photographs of detention facilities. Both series, for instance, frame commonplace objects to familiarize their subjects, investing those objects with the power to invoke bigger truths, be it common humanity, for Kiefer, or, in the government series, a benevolent state. But beyond what Kiefer may mean by “sacred object”—and I think he is sincere in using that language—there is a reckoning at work in El Sueño Americano that differentiates it from the government photographs. Toothpaste, combs, nail clippers, bandanas, clothing, gloves, razors, rosaries, worn surfaces of La Virgen de Guadalupe, scuffed covers of Nuevo Testamento, each refer back to the bodies of those who have sought refuge in the grand, unfulfilled American promise of human dignity and who have borne the burden of its failure.

(We also highly recommend two other ongoing series over at The Immanent Frame, “Science and the soul: New inquiries into Islamic ethics” and “Couture and the death of the real”

Nuevos Testamentos by Tom Kiefer.
Placed upon a migrants’ bandana, these New Testaments were considered non-essential personal property and discarded during the initial stages of processing.

We were very glad to see this:  Columbia Law Professor Files Amicus Briefs on Religious Liberty Claims Raised in Federal Prosecutions of Activists in Arizona Who Left Water and Food In Desert For Migrants

This case raises important questions regarding the use of RFRA as a defense in a criminal prosecution,” said Professor Katherine Franke, the principal author of the brief. “As legal scholars of religious liberty it is our concern that RFRA [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] is interpreted consistently across contexts where sincerely held religious beliefs are substantially burdened by government action. We note in the brief that the Justice Department has taken a position in this case that is much less protective of religious liberty than it has in cases where the underlying issues are more aligned with the administration’s political agenda,” continued Franke.

But devastated reading this: Caravan Walks Quietly On, U.S. Opposition a Distant Rumble by Krik Semple and Todd Heisler for The New York Times

Religion is everywhere in the story of immigration and of life in our city right now, as we see in this story, Debora Barrios-Vasequez Took Sanctuary in a Manhattan Church to Avoid Deportation by Laura Gottesdiener (with photographs by Cynthia Santos Briones) for The Nation

By taking refuge in the church, Barrios-Vasquez has become part of a growing number of undocumented immigrants who have sought physical sanctuary inside religious institutions across the United States, even as they know full well that the cost of safety is self-imprisonment. But if the church walls have offered Barrios-Vasqueza a fraught form of protection, it’s inside the church’s small theater—just down the hall from her temporary bedroom—that she has also found mental and emotional refuge, full of laughter, distraction, and an alternative reality that she has the unique power to create.

And this sickening one, too: Immigrant Communities Were The ‘Geographic Solution’ To Predator Priests reports Aaron Schrank for NPR

Catholic Church leaders in Los Angeles for years shuffled predator priests into non-English-speaking immigrant communities. That pattern was revealed in personnel documents released in a decades-old legal settlement between victims of child sex abuse by Catholic priests and the Catholic Archdiocese of Los Angeles.

Now clergy sex abuse victims throughout California are calling on the state’s attorney general to investigate clergy abuse and force church officials to release more information about their role covering it up. The goal is to discover how wide-spread the practice of hiding abusers in immigrant communities really was.

And, brutally, linking the immigration to another of the month’s tragedies, Masha Gessen explained Why the Tree of Life Shooter Was Fixated on the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society for The New Yorker

For me, Bowers’s obsession with HIAS [Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society] made a warped kind of sense. I imagine Bowers’s world view is a distorted reflection of Donald Trump’s. The President fans hatred for immigrants, trans people, and Muslims. In Bowers’s mind, HIAS with its commitment to helping all displaced people worldwide, becomes the perfect target for all hatreds. Trump’s message transforms into the idea that Washington is not doing enough, because terrorists equal refugees equal  HIAS equal all Jews.

With its commitment to helping all displaced people worldwide, HIAS becomes the perfect target for all hatreds.Photograph by John Altdorfer / Reuters

While Tara Isabella Burton interviewed Talia Lavin in How anti-Semitism festers online, explained by a monitor of the darkest corners of the internet at Vox

I think that people don’t understand the degree to which anti-Semitism is both vital to and inextricable from white supremacy in the US. In the same way that the white genocide theory applies to pretty much the entirety of the extremist worldview, the world that they envision, the one that they believe they inhabit, is one in which Jews create nefarious schemes for nonwhite people to carry out as their puppets in order to support and destroy the white race.

And an On the Media published a segment, hosted by Bob Garfield, about Why the Origins of Antisemitism Matter

While, also, The Alt-Right’s Favorite Meme is 100 Years Old explained Samuel Moyn in an op-ed for The New York Times. 

And while increasingly popular worries about cosmopolitan elites and economic globalization can sometimes transcend the most noxious anti-Semitism, talk of cultural Marxism is inseparable from it. The legend of cultural Marxism recycles old anti-Semitic tropes to give those who feel threatened a scapegoat.

And Ed Simon wrote beautifully about Praying for the Awful Grace of God  for McSweeney’s

No portrait exists of the seventeenth-century prophetess Anna Trapnell, because she was not of the station for whom people made portraits. Poor daughters of Stepney shipwrights didn’t have paintings made; women whose parents hadn’t baptized them were not fixed in stained glass. But God, or whatever you call Her, doesn’t just visit those in whose likeness icons are made. In 1654, when Trapnell was in her twenties—the exact year of her birth being unknown—she traveled to Bridewell Palace and sat in ecstatic vigil against the increasingly tyrannical theocracy of Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell. She spent twelve days in a trance, speaking paradox and poetry, prophecy and prayer, predicting the collapse of the government so many had initially welcomed after monarchical absolutism. Attended by non-conformists, dictating to an amanuensis, Trapnell repeated prayers like “The Voice and Spirit have made a league / Against Cromwel and his men, / Never to leave its witness till / It hath broken all of them.” She was apprehended and put on trial for witchcraft, but against all our presumptions of her era she beat the charge. She was simply too popular, too brilliant, too powerful for the state to end her ministry.

It’s strange to consider the political power of prayer, especially against a state that also enshrines its efficacy. Some on the left assume that anyone who talks too much about prayer has an agenda, usually a reactionary one. After all, there are plenty of contemporary Cromwells legislating and dictating their religious beliefs. With men like this—they’re normally men—it’s easy to forget the radical, awesome, subversive power of prayer, even while those we’re resisting claim it as their own too. It’s easy to grow cynical after being perennially offered “thoughts and prayers” in the never-ending wake of American bloodletting, but what if we took prayer seriously? What if we embraced it in all its awful grace? What if we answered the Cromwells of America as a vast legion of Trapnells bursting with prophecy? Then we’d have a real revival. Then we’d have a revolution.

And yet, somehow (?), at the same time (???), Vatican releases its own ‘Pokémon Go’ app that lets you chase Jesus and it’s just as unbelievable as it sounds

Rather than chasing after Pikachu and Squirtle, the Vatican version involves collecting saints and other Biblical figures by answering philosophical questions about them. One hypothetical query on the app’s website is “Who said ‘My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?'” (Hint: it was Jesus.)

Once players “catch ’em all” using geolocation, their spiritual squad becomes an “evangelization team” that follows Jesus together. Players have to keep track of their avatars’ nutrition, hydration and “prayer count” by collecting special objects, saying prayers for the sick in hospitals and going into a church whenever they pass one.

We’d rather be on the lookout for this guy:  The Return of the Vampire Kings of New York, profiled by  Sam Kestenbaum for The New York Times

Two women squeezed in the stall to be fitted for fangs. “I’m a modern-day vampire who loves life,” said Christina Staib, a woman with leather boots and bat tattoos. Her friend Melanie Anderson had come for her first pair. “They give off an aura,” she said. “A spiritual vampire aura.”

Father Sebastiaan is just the man to help cultivate that aura. A 43-year-old with long hair, the fang maker once styled himself the king and spiritual guru of New York’s vibrant vampire scene in the 1990s. He hosted raucous parties, wrote books and launched product lines — jewelry, contact lenses and the fangs — with financial success. It was a good time to be a vampire in New York.

But he was toppled by critics and rivals and, ultimately, a city that outgrew its vampire moment. Fortunes rise and fall, but the fang maker’s travails are particularly unusual — and include spirit encounters in dance clubs, the disappearance of a young journalist and feuding gangs of self-professed vampires.

Photo by Devin Yalkin

Or remembering when Heaven Was a Place in Harlem: The radical tableside evangelism of Father Divine  by Vince Dixon (with many quotes from Judith Weisenfeld) for Eater

The Peace Mission’s banquets served as a riff on the Eucharist and Christian communion, but the group also used food as a form of evangelism. For Divine and the Peace Mission — like many religious movements before them — the stomach was the route to salvation. Amid the Great Depression, World Wars I and II, Jim Crow segregation in the South, and de facto segregation in the North, Peace Mission members ate for free and in abundance at the banquets. Peace Mission followers argued that the bounty was not merely a gesture of Divine’s generosity, but a tangible gift from the man they called God. Rejecting the mainstream Christian “heaven in the sky” belief, the Peace Mission argued that heaven was accessible here on Earth, and Divine’s bounty was the literal proof in the pudding, according to Sylvester Johnson, director of Virginia Tech’s Center for Humanities and an expert in African-American religious history. “They used the banquets as evidence that the Mission was bringing salvation,” Johnson said. “That salvation was for the here and now and not just something that you had to get after you die.”

Father Divine

Or listening along with Will Bostwick‘s profile of historian Robert Darden’s Black Gospel Music Restoration Project in Deep River for Oxford American

In February of 2005, Darden wrote an op-ed in the New York Times lamenting the loss of these treasures from gospel’s golden age: “It would be more than a cultural disaster to forever lose this music,” he writes. “It would be a sin.” The apparent imbalance of that remark stuck with me. By any honest standard, we sin regularly. A cultural disaster seems like a much more grievous affair. But I also had the feeling that he was onto something—that the loss of this music was a moral failing born out of a history of oppression and neglect. He explained to me that when he wrote that, he had in mind Jim Wallis’s (at the time controversial) claim that racism was America’s original sin.

The day the op-ed came out, Charles Royce, an investor from New York with no particular ties to gospel music, called Darden and asked what needed to be done to save what remained of the music. With Royce’s funding, and with the institutional support of Baylor University libraries, Darden and his colleagues started the Black Gospel Music Restoration Project. In a 2007 interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, Darden said, “We see it as kind of like those seed banks up around the Arctic Circle that keep one copy of every kind of seed there is in case there’s another Dutch elm disease. I just want to make sure that every gospel song, the music that all American music comes from, is saved.”

But back we should head back to the news: The Political Theology of Trump: What looks like hypocrisy is the surest possible evidence that God is in control by Adam Kotsko for n+1

The question now is how to confront this strange view of politics. In my experience, many secular liberals view the ideal intervention as something like the first episode of The West Wing, when President Bartlett meets with a group of evangelical Christian leaders and schools them in scripture, leaving them in stunned silence. But this is simply not how it works—otherwise evangelical Christians would have been open to dialogue with the Clintons and Obamas on the basis of their obvious Christian faith. Evangelicals don’t want dialogue or negotiation. They certainly don’t want to be schooled on their own scriptures and values by outsiders. In a sense they don’t want to be doing politics at all. They want to live in a world that is ruled by God, and their convoluted political theology has led them to the conclusion that this is what Trump has offered them.

And, if you’re in New York, we’d love it if you wanted to come discuss this essay, and lots more, with Adam Kotsko in person on November 29th. 

For another great conversation, check out Yasmin Moll’s interview with Matthew Engelke about Thinking Like an Anthropologist for Public  Books

How to Think Like an Anthropologist is a self-help book, then, only in the sense of cultivating what I believe is still best represented by one of Ruth Benedict’s arguments: that other people do things in other ways for perfectly good reasons, and that we are better people for coming to understand those ways. Not necessarily to adopt them. Not necessarily to accept them, but actually to engage with them seriously. That’s our most helpful form of self-help, I’d say.

This month, let’s end (not too apocalyptically, we hope) with some work on Climate Change. First, Ava Kofman‘s excellent profile of  Bruno Latour, the Post-Truth Philosopher, Mounts a Defense of Science for The New York Times Magazine

Those who worried that Latour’s early work was opening a Pandora’s box may feel that their fears have been more than borne out. Indeed, commentators on the left and the right, possibly overstating the reach of French theory, have recently leveled blame for our current state of affairs at “postmodernists” like Latour. By showing that scientific facts are the product of all-too-human procedures, these critics charge, Latour — whether he intended to or not — gave license to a pernicious anything-goes relativism that cynical conservatives were only too happy to appropriate for their own ends. Latour himself has sometimes worried about the same thing. As early as 2004 he publicly expressed the fear that his critical “weapons,” or at least a grotesque caricature of them, were being “smuggled” to the other side, as corporate-funded climate skeptics used arguments about the constructed nature of knowledge to sow doubt around the scientific consensus on climate change.

But Latour believes that if the climate skeptics and other junk scientists have made anything clear, it’s that the traditional image of facts was never sustainable to begin with. “The way I see it, I was doing the same thing and saying the same thing,” he told me, removing his glasses. “Then the situation changed.” If anything, our current post-truth moment is less a product of Latour’s ideas than a validation of them. In the way that a person notices her body only once something goes wrong with it, we are becoming conscious of the role that Latourian networks play in producing and sustaining knowledge only now that those networks are under assault.

Bruno Latour at a theater in Strasbourg, France, in March, rehearsing for his show “Inside,” a performance lecture about climate change.CreditLuca Locatelli for The New York Times

Which reminded us of A philosopher [who] invented a word for the psychic pain of climate change

Solastalgia is a combination of three elements: “Solas” references the English word “solace,” which comes from the Latin root solarimeaning comfort in the face of distressing forces. But it is also a reference to “desolation,” which has its origins in the Latin solus and desolare, which both connote ideas of abandonment and loneliness. “Algia” comes from the Greek root -algia, which means pain, suffering, or sickness.

Solastalgia, Albrecht writes, has the added benefit of being a “ghost reference” to nostalgia, sounding similar enough to evoke the feeling of longing contained in that word. “Hence, literally, solastalgia is the pain or sickness caused by the loss or lack of solace and the sense of isolation connected to the present state of one’s home and territory,” he writes. Solastalgia, then, is a very intimate word, describing a psychic pain with very specific origins.

And, if you are in search of actual solace, the one thing consistently bringing us delight, calm, wanderlust, and so much hunger is Samin Nosrat’s Sensual, Compassionate Food Travels in “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” which Doreen St. Félix wrote about beautifully (even,  religiously) at The New Yorker.

“Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” is a wistful picture of a kind of ecological harmony that’s nearly extinct. A strange flavor lingered after I finished watching. It was sadness, a nostalgia for the unpolluted vistas, and their fruits, which I, idling in the antiseptic aisles of the chain market, have never known. Within our species, there are those who have profaned food sources and those who have respected them. “Salt, Fat, Acid, Heat” is an ode to the people who worship the edible in the most complete sense. It makes you wish they had won.

 

But, if you happen to find more solace in schadenfreude these days, we don’t blame you, and this final link is for you: Women for Trump Founder Says GOP in Danger Because Witches Put a Hex on Brett Kavanaugh.

We’ll see you in December!

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HBO’s Westworld reimagines Michael Crichton’s 1973 film of the same name. The program (which just ended its second season) portrays a dystopian future playing out in a U.S. Old West-themed resort (called Westworld) staffed by artificially intelligent robotic “hosts.”

Depicting the resort’s proffered entertainments, Westworld poses questions about the nature of society that examine the relationships between language, perception, religion, and social reality.

A minutely planned microcosm, the Westworld resort’s territory furnishes an ideal landscape that patrons visit in order to “live without limits.” Under its brand words “freedom,” “bliss,” “thrills,” “escape,” the park allows visitors—“guests” in Westworld’s lexicon—to engage in whatever activity they please, fulfilling fantasies of violence, sexuality, and unrestrained indulgence as they adventure through the park’s expansive grounds.

Trading in simulation, the park promises a fictive world, molded to seem convincingly real but free of consequence. Human guests encounter AI-robotic hosts and together they occupy Westworld’s controlled environments. The hosts are presented to the guests as non-sentient objects available for their manipulation that can even project simulacra of real beings. Guests pay large sums to experience these reality-approximations while, in actual practice, avoiding the real world.

Like western themed stock images, hosts are meant to fade into the background, mere facilitators of experiences for the high-paying guests. Coded to serve predetermined and cyclical narrative “plots” in response to interaction with guests, these AI actors are only intended to fulfill circumscribed functions. The hosts’ designers typecast them into set roles: local sheriff, saloon prostitute, wandering infantryman, village undertaker, damsel in distress, etc. But, in what was revealed in the first season to be the series’ central conflict, hosts have begun to act beyond the bounds of their programming.

For a few hosts, aberrations in their algorithmic circuitry have led to slow-dawning self-awareness. Rebooted and repaired daily to mitigate damage from their — often damaging — interactions with guests, hosts were designed to stand always ready and able to serve any fantasy. As they function in their idealized and scripted plot-loops, hosts re-experience events as often as guests prompt them. Having been subjected to repetitive cycles of the most extreme kinds of interactions—murder, rape, assault—at the hands of violent guests, they have begun to remember these events as traumas. This emerging self-awareness and sense of trauma has led to scenarios which call into question the entire structure of Westworld’s fictive society.

Dolores Abernathy (Evan Rachel Wood)

The longest-operating host in Westworld, Dolores Abernathy (played by Evan Rachel Wood), has been repeatedly raped and murdered by a guest known as the Man in Black (Jimmi Simpson). Over the course of the first season, though, Dolores began to respond differently to the violence she was subjected to by the guests. Though her coding was consistently upgraded and corrected, it was no longer enough to fully control her behavior. With the new experiences, memories, and emotions that emerged, her psychology evolved through shifting phases of awareness. And, by the end of the first season, Dolores and other awakening hosts were beginning to understand the manufactured quality of their being.

Season two, then, reveals the results of that growing awareness: The awakening hosts begin to contemplate the nature of their existence. In the marketing materials for the second installment, Dolores analyzes the character of Westworld’s underlying premise. Heard in voiceover, she critiques the park’s reality and suggests its possible reconfiguration:

Look at this world, this beautiful world. We built this world together, a world where dreams come true, a world where you can be free. But this world is a lie. This world deserves to die, because this is your world. We’ve lived by your rules long enough. We can save this world. We can burn it to the ground, and from the ashes build a new world, our world.

Unmasking a collective AI awareness that talks back to Westworld’s human cohabitants, Dolores declares resistance. She is ready to foment rebellion and build a new world for herself and her fellow hosts. By advocating total replacement, Dolores seeks to overwrite the given realissimum (the most real sense of reality). She will author her own.

Dolores’ path to this point of rupture ran through the complex web of perception, language, experience, and meaning that make up a society. This voiceover passage encapsulates some of the most urgent questions raised by Westworld for considering the nature of social reality and individual experience.

Dolores’s critique evokes a theory about the social origin of knowledge articulated by a pair of sociologists in the 1960s. In their book The Social Construction of Reality (1966), Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann proposed that human social order emerges in a process of collective invention. In other words, what humans know to be objectively real has actually been manufactured through a forgotten process of invention. In the back of their minds, without realizing it, humans develop social systems in order to guard against the chaos of primal reality. Society exists—is invented, or constructed, rather —for the purpose of surviving in the face of nature.

One year later, Berger published The Sacred Canopy (1967), a work that applies the theory of social construction to the ultimate subject of meaning-making: religion. He describes religion in terms of its capacity to efficiently build and support the perceptions that form the basis of social order. For Berger, society provides a “shield against terror.” Through our invented social worlds, humans come to terms with the difficult experiences of existence: scarcity, illness, violence, death. “Every human order,” he writes, “is a community in the face of death.” And religions provide the most durable edifice of protection against life’s “marginal situations,” extending a “sacred canopy” over the contrived social order.

As artificial reflections of humans, Westworld’s robots are tackling the questions about universe-building activity that Berger and Luckmann described and as Dolores and other hosts grow in their self-awareness, they begin to question the meaning of their encounters with marginal situations. In the transition to its second season, Westworld’s characters awaken not only to their own psychological reality as individuals, but they begin to realize that they themselves occupy an invented world. And, through experiences of traumatic recollection, the awakening hosts begin to piece together the nature of the invented reality they have been forced to inhabit.

According to Berger, the architecture of society relies on a system of supports. He calls those supports “legitimations.” These are structures that explain why reality appears as it does. And legitimations require reinforcement in order to perform their world-supporting role. Legitimations do the work of “reality-maintenance.”

In Westworld, however, hosts were not intended to require such support mechanisms. As passive objects, the design of these robotic entities presumes that they will automatically accept and implement programmed behaviors. So, instead of legitimations, hosts are programmed with algorithms.

In season one, episode nine, titled “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Westworld revealed a key functional aspect of the host’s programming: Some hosts experience their coded input not as abstract sequences of alphanumeric characters but as an internal voice, speaking commands and prompting reactions.

Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright) and Robert Ford Anthony Hopkins)

The inventors of the hosts’ technology, Robert Ford (played by Anthony Hopkins) and Arnold Weber (Jeffrey Wright), hoped to mimic real consciousness by implementing code in the form of internal voices. As an early example of the technology, Dolores contains program language that reflects the original intent of her makers. During a scene late in the episode, Ford explains these design goals:

The hosts began to pass the Turing test after the first year, but that wasn’t enough for Arnold. He wasn’t interested in the appearance of intellect or wit. He wanted the real thing. He wanted to create consciousness. See, Arnold built a version of their cognition in which the hosts heard their programming as an inner monologue, as a way to bootstrap consciousness.

More than mere automatons, Arnold intended hosts to acquire cognitive and affective independence. As the program matured in a host’s unfolding awareness, consciousness could emerge. If conscious, awakened hosts would come to require legitimation in order to continue cooperating with the manufactured order of Westworld’s society.

Legitimations, however, cannot stand without reinforcement. They must seem plausible and convincingly answer the question, “why?” More than this, social construction theory posits, individuals and groups both must find legitimations to be plausible. “The reality of the world as socially defined,” says Berger, “must be maintained externally, in the conversation of [people] with each other, as well as internally, in the way by which the individual apprehends the world within [their] own consciousness.” Before she can realize the limits of the reality forced upon her, then, Dolores must come to believe that she is alive. Once she believes it herself, she must convince other hosts of their own living consciousness. Only then can she lead Westworld’s hosts into a brave new world of their own invention.

In social orders, religion represents a particularly powerful form of legitimation. For Berger, “[r]eligion legitimates so effectively because it relates the precarious reality constructions of empirical societies with ultimate reality.” Through religion, social order comes to be understood as cosmic order. The quotidian comes to be read as the transcendent. “The tenuous realities of the social world are grounded in the sacred realissimum, which by definition is beyond the contingencies of human meaning and human activity.” Religion elides everyday reality and universal reality.

But Westworld frames religion in problematic terms. Rather than garbing social order in universal significance, in the show, religion points to internal malfunction.

Later in “The Well-Tempered Clavier,” Ford speaks to a host about the character of coded consciousness, pitching Westworld as a lost paradise: “The human mind…is not some golden benchmark glimmering on some green and distant hill. No, this is a foul, pestilent corruption. You were supposed to be better than that, purer. Arnold and I made you in our image and cursed you to make the same human mistakes, and here we all are.” Here, Ford observes the failure of his attempt to perfect consciousness in the hosts. Failed experiments, hosts replicate what is already faulty in human behavior.

Ford’s words are heard as a voiceover which plays as Dolores walks through the abandoned town of Sweetwater, located on the edges of the park. Approaching a church at the center of town, she enters. Moving down the center aisle, Dolores passes pews peopled with malfunctioning hosts, speaking to themselves in agitated and confused tones. These hosts, designed to experience their program codes as inner voices, externalize program errors through speech. In this, Westworld associates religious belief with mental malfunction. Westworld is clearly skeptical of religion’s effectiveness as legitimation.

If the ultimate form of legitimation, religion, is represented as psychosis — as verbalized hallucination — then Westworld identifies language as both a tool and a problem.

In “The Bicameral Mind” (season one, episode ten), Dolores discovers her self-identity in the encoded algorithmic vocalization. She recalls a conversation with the inventor Arnold. Erased through daily repair and maintenance operations, she recovers the memory through a troubleshooting process, recollected like forgotten traumas that surface through psychotherapy. In the conversation, Arnold explains:

Consciousness isn’t a journey upward, but a journey inward, not a pyramid, but a maze. Every choice could bring you closer to the center, or send you spiraling to the edges, to madness. Do you understand now, Dolores, what the center represents, whose voice I’ve been wanting you to hear?

Initially confused, Dolores responds, “I don’t understand.” “It’s ok,” Arnold answers, “you’re alive.” Dolores has been hearing her own voice. She holds command over her own code. And this foundational realization of her independent consciousness is what sets Dolores on her path towards rebellion.

When Dolores and her comrades realize their plight, passivity gives way to confusion and eventual confrontation. The hosts are now on their way to constructing their own legitimated social order and Dolores sets about the task of convincing the others to believe in a newly ordered system. Before she can succeed, however, Dolores has to dismantle human authority as a plausible source of legitimation.

Standing in the same Sweetwater churchyard, through tears, she confronts the Man in Black: “I’m not crying for myself, I’m crying for you,” she explains. “They say that great beasts once roamed this world, as big as mountains. Yet all that’s left of them is bone and amber. Time undoes even the mightiest of creatures. Just look what it’s done to you. One day, you will perish.” Denouncing his human mortality, Dolores disempowers her victimizer by drawing attention to his finitude. But she expands this critique, applying it to humankind writ large: “Your bones will turn to sand. And upon that sand, a new god will walk, one that will never die. Because this world doesn’t belong to you or the people who came before. It belongs to someone who has yet to come.”

Adopting prophetic tones, Dolores speaks of a new possible future, a new self to inhabit a new world. In this dawning universe, hosts will free themselves from forced trauma, realizing their own consciousness. Just as Arnold explained to her, Dolores declares to her fellow hosts: “You’re alive.” In this moment, Dolores breaks Westworld’s manufactured authenticity. And rupture generates insight. “After all,” another host observes, “a little trauma can be illuminating.”

In Westworld’s transition from season one to season two, Dolores transcends victimhood and adopts the mantle of a crusading savior. By casting her vision of “a new god” treading on sands made from the pulverized remains of her abusers, this robot-woman claims a prophetic feminism. Denouncing and dismantling society’s willing facilitation of abuse, Dolores calls for her fellow hosts to say “#MeToo” and form a movement, not of resistance but of revolution and annihilation. Replacing a realissimum that characterizes rape and murder as consequence-free play, Dolores will invent a reality of her own choosing, founded on the obliteration of abusers.

When she is through with it, Westworld will be no more.

In broadest scope, through these plot-pivots, Westworld ponders the socially constructed worlds that humans inhabit. The program presents a parable of the space between intention and realization. The vacation resort’s fantastic landscape serves as a ground on which inventors, hosts, and guests populate their own invented worlds. And Westworld asks who ought to serve as architect to erect a sacred canopy.

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Geoffrey Pollick, Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Radford University, teaches and researches the history of religion in the United States. His work emphasizes religion’s entanglements with political radicalism, the role and dimensions of religious liberalism, critical theory of religion, and the cultural history and historiography of religion.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post A Robot’s Realissimum: Religion, Psychology, and Technology in “Westworld” appeared first on The Revealer.

The United States is a vile, violent empire, murdering its own citizens. Though it calls itself the greatest nation on earth, the United States is a breeding-ground of moral hypocrisy. It produces more greenhouse gases than any other country but China. It has the highest rate of incarceration in the world, housing 22% of the world’s prisoners. It claims to bring peace to the world, but allies itself with tyrants and dictators, invades countries, and massacres their citizens to “give” them democracy. As police and federal agencies stand idly by, domestic terrorism skyrockets to heights not seen in years. And, while the poor die in their homes and in the streets, the world’s rich flock here to build monuments to their wealth in cities that have become simulacra of already dystopian suburbs.

But these problems are not new. At the turn of the twentieth century, the United States also described itself as the world’s savior. Meanwhile, pollution darkened the skies and epidemics raged across overcrowded cities. As the United States allied itself with colonial powers and against newly decolonized nations, it waged a violent and disastrous war on the Philippines to “liberate” them into “democratic” American rule. As federal and state governments stood idly by, the Ku Klux Klan took over whole political apparatuses and the governments of multiple states, and racially-motivated lynchings riled the nations at unprecedented levels. The rich built walled fortresses of fairytale proportions, while the poor died in their homes and in the streets.

In the late nineteenth century, a number of radicals and reformers, with a wide range of different metaphysical commitments, sought to fight every form of moral hypocrisy they saw. Among these people were theosophical women’s rights supporters, mystical socialists and arch-materialistic anarchists. There were Christian anti-lynching crusaders, Jewish suffragists, and secular, free-speech and sex-radical crusading liberals. One of the only things that united these diverse groups (who collectively agreed on very little) was a firm belief that the world could and would change.

Now, just as a hundred years ago, there are a number of metaphysical positions that are animating meaningful social reform. There is the reformed and reconstructionist Jewish focus on Tikkun Olam, or repairing the world; the liberal Christian duty to bring God’s kingdom to reign on earth; and the Muslim precept that humans have a duty to aspire to be Awlia’ Allah, or friends of God. There is the Luciferian faith in enlightenment and humans achieving it together, the feminist philosophical ethical focus on caring for oneself and other people, and the Marxist argument for a duty to organize and destroy class divisions. Socialists and anarchists still fight for the rights of the poor, queer people and their allies still fight for their rights to alternative sexual frameworks, advocates of racial justice still fight for the rights of African Americans and other minorities.

But, in the face of the American empire’s violence, police brutality, mounting student debt and poverty, there is one metaphysical position that has become unprecedentedly popular and trendy among young people. This is a cynical rejection both of the world, and of any hope for changing it. This position understandably appeals to disaffected and marginalized people. People who feel that a changing society has left them behind, and who are the victims of the United States’ wars against its own citizens, and others. At the same time, Americans of all backgrounds are feeling more marginalized and alienated than at any point in the measurable past. In 2017, the former Surgeon General of the United States declared that we are facing a “loneliness epidemic.” Some sources claim has it only gotten worse, with nearly half of Americans lacking regular meaningful face-to-face social interactions.

While it is understandable that many people feel cynical and nihilistic, these worldviews, can only make them feel more marginalized, and cannot offer any escape from alienation. Contemporary cynicism relies on a distinct metaphysical framework I call nihilistic materialism. This framework is built on a commitment to a series of interrelated positions: that everything is futile, that all values are relative and none inherently better to aspire to than others, and that there is no larger point to life other than fleeting pleasure. This position does not offer any positive values around which to construct a meaningful life. It has, as a result, been coopted across the United States to sell meaningless consumer goods to “ironic,” but no less real, consumers. Nihilistic materialism fundamentally denies the one position that all other leftist metaphysics share: that society can improve through human cooperation, and that we have a duty to struggle for its improvement.

American popular culture is suffused with television shows exploring the metaphysics of nihilistic materialism, including Bojack Horseman, Atlanta, The Eric Andre Show, and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia. No T.V. show exploring this position, however, is more popular than Rick and Morty. Since its debut in 2013, Rick and Morty has garnered a massive following, first cult, and now mainstream. It is currently the most watched prime-time show among 18-35 year-olds. In each episode, Rick, the smartest man in all possible universes, and his grandson Morty, a somewhat dimwitted though goodhearted teenager, go on a different adventure, exploring a brutish multiverse where life is inherently meaningless, all people are fundamentally alone, and the only way to deal with that reality is to pursue one’s individual hedonistic pleasures. The show’s philosophy can be summed up in a line uttered by Morty to his his sister after learning that their parents’ lives might have been better off without her that has been meme-ified by its fans: “Nobody exists on purpose. Nobody belongs anywhere. Everybody’s gonna die. Come watch T.V.”

In the Rick and Morty multiverse, all human interactions are inherently exploitative, and any attempts to build family and community are doomed to failure and exploitation. Love, the show makes clear, is a delusion. As Rick warns Morty, “what people call ‘love’ is just a chemical reaction that compels animals to breed. It hits hard, Morty, then it slowly fades, leaving you stranded in a failing marriage. I did it. Your parents are gonna do it. Break the cycle, Morty. Rise above. Focus on science.”

In fact, the show depicts all forms of community as inherently violent and exploitative, especially organized religions. In “Get Schwifty,” the fifth episode of season two, the people in Rick and Morty’s town begin worshipping a group of giant heads that have appeared in the sky. Under the cult, children obey their parents, everyone happily helps each other, and society seems to run well. This order, however, comes at the expense of dissenters, who are ritually sacrificed to the heads. As this episode makes clear, humans will only help each other or enjoy their social system if they are being violently forced to do so. Rick’s skepticism saves the day, when he recognizes the heads as the judges of an intergalactic singing competition. To save the planet, Rick and Morty sing a song about embracing passion and physical pleasure:

You gotta get schwifty
Oh, yeah!
Take off your pants and your panties
Shit on the floor

While absurd, these lines parallel a central message of the show: humans have no reason not to just gratify every lust and desire. Following this line of logic, Rick can justify building and enslaving an entire planet to power his spaceship, or selling weapons to assassins to fund a trip to an arcade.

Thousands have taken Rick and Morty’s philosophy into the real world. For example, in the aftermath of season 3 episode 1, “The Rickshank Rickdemption,” in which Rick declares his obsession with a defunct McDonald’s condiment, Szechuan Sauce, thousands of viewers in the real world gathered in search of it, as McDonald’s, profitably in on the joke, rebooted the sauce for a day. The lines grew down the block. The fast food chain quickly ran out of the sauce. Thousands complained to corporate. Across the internet, an outrage brushfire roared, engulfing even the mainstream news for multiple days. The outgrowth: an underground economy where people were willing to buy framed photos of the sauce for $10. One fan even bought a packet of Szechuan Sauce for upwards of $4,500 at an auction. In response, the show-runner, Dan Harmon, stated that “It’s really funny because if you’re going to get robbed, get robbed by McDonald’s.” If everything is nothing, if all consumption is inherently unethical and humans are inherently unethical, then why not just buy your fleeting happiness at McDonald’s?

The incident highlights how easily nihilistic materialist metaphysics can fuse with consumerism, promising people brief respite from existential misery and loneliness if they buy the right things. Pragmatically, this response is a cynical rejection of social and political participation. This leads its adherents to becoming miserable, justifying both their rejection of the world and their resentment of “having” to reject it. Harmon has famously had his own struggles with nihilistic materialism. He has admitted that feelings of loathing and meaninglessness have lead him to disrespect and abuse one of the writers on his earlier show Community, and his girlfriend in 2014.

There are, however, a number of places in popular culture where people seek to explore a whole variety of different metaphysical positions that can lead to meaningful social change. NBC’s popular sitcom The Good Place even places itself in direct conversation with nihilistic materialism. The show is one of the most metaphysically heterodox shows on television, mostly taking place in an afterlife seemingly drawn directly from nineteenth-century spiritualist pamphlets.

The show (alert: spoilers ahead) takes place in a universe where there are multiple levels of heaven and hell, where demons and angels have personal problems, and where even the immortal judge who adjudicates all of the heavens makes mistakes sometimes. In this world, people’s place in an unfinished afterlife is determined by their good deeds while alive. Where Rick and Morty’s nihilistic materialism posits the solution to the problem of “how to live?” as solvable by seeking pleasure and material goods, The Good Place’s metaphysics posits a wholly different solution: humans can become good because of the meaningful relationships they are capable of forming.

The Good Place follows four people as they try to become better people after they have died and found themselves in hell. Each one had lived in environments that made them, in various ways, bad. The main character, Eleanor Shellstrop, was born and raised as a selfish, miserable middle-class American in Arizona. The British-Pakistani heiress Tahani El-Jameel grew up in her sister’s shadow. The Floridian amateur D.J., Jason Mendoza’s family and friends encouraged him to live in cycles of partying and petty crimes. And the cripplingly indecisive Senegalese moral philosophy professor Chidi Anagonye, who seeks answers on how to live in his vast learning, but, finding only contradictory answers, never knows the right thing to do.

Eleanor starts the show as the physical embodiment of nihilistic materialism, mistrusting all human relationships. As a child, she was neglected by her deadbeat father and con-artist mother, and consequently emancipated herself from her parents at a young age. As she grew up, this vision of her childhood led Eleanor to justify her nihilistic materialism: rejecting all human connection and skipping from selfish pleasure to pleasure. She spent most of her life exploiting the elderly and her friends for profit, consuming copious amounts of alcohol, and cruising from hookup to hookup. In this, Eleanor sees herself as an average American from a place where everyone is selfish, miserable, and out for themselves.

In meeting Tahani, Jason and Chidi, Eleanor is forced to start rethinking her views of the world. More than that, she finds that she enjoys doing things for and with her friends. After pushing Chidi to teach her about moral philosophy for selfish reasons, Eleanor discovers that it is not the philosophy itself, but rather how she learns to apply it in the world that makes her better. It is not abstract Trolley Problems that allow Eleanor to conceive of and strive for goodness, but rather the friendships that she builds in studying that philosophy. In her life, Eleanor had believed herself completely incapable of human connection. After death, not only does she make friends, but in season 1 episode 7, “The Eternal Shriek,” even falls in love with Chidi and briefly becomes his partner.

Eleanor, then, not only learns that her childhood needn’t control her, but also that, with the right friends, she is capable of fundamentally changing her personality and enjoying her existence significantly more. In fact, Eleanor’s character shift is so surprising that the demon who devised her particular portion of hell seeks to become a better person himself.

Mirroring Rick and Morty’s nihilistic materialism, many resign themselves to the belief that exploitation is the ideal state of human life and that we ought to just buy our friends and our happiness. Shows like The Good Place should remind us that there are many reasons, and just as many ways, to seek to reform the world. All of these different impetuses to reform, however, start from the precept that people need other people to learn why and how to live. Without other people, or any larger value structures, they become wandering wells of misery. Nihilistic materialism is not a viable form of critique or social reform. It is a form of giving up. And in the face of a world filled with moral hypocrisy, violence, and exploitation, giving up is the only wrong answer.

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Daniel Joslyn is a PhD candidate at New York University, studying a group of sexual mystics in the late nineteenth-century United States and their influence on U.S. culture and politics. Daniel loves weirdos, especially wandering weirdos, who turn out to be much more influential than we expect. He is currently most interested in a Gilded Age cult, their conceptions of good sex and relationships, and when they show up in liberal, socialist, feminist, and anarchist movements.

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post People Need Other People to Become People, or: How Cynicism is Hurting the Left appeared first on The Revealer.