Counter-Liberation: How People Without a Culture Might Get One Back

The right kind of warrior takes on his own internal demons before he sails out to take on those of others….most of all, he works to clear out his own inner junkyard so that he can go searching for truth—and recognize it when he finds it….what he is fighting for is the love he so often fails at.  His most effective weapon is sacrifice.

– Kingsnorth,  Ibid.

Among my female social acquaintances in the “aging” category, where I too reside, it seems many of us are caring for a disabled husband. My friend Rachel reports to me that another friend,  Maria, more acquaintance than close friend, whom she ran into at a social gathering last week, unexpectedly blurted out her exasperation:  “I did not sign up for this!”

Of course, this is exactly what she did sign up for.  But, wedding vows being one of those things that is “part of what we used to be and are no longer,”  she, not being a trad-wife,  suffers those feelings of deep frustration as she hangs in, alone, unthanked, way less picturesquely than a back-to-the-lander churning butter or heating with wood fire, sacrificing, and for what?    For many years I have pondered the seeming incommensurability of such traditions of staying,  of rootedness in a culture, with that something else that tells us we’re free not to.  In truth, this certainty, that one ought not have to put up with absurdly confining circumstances comes as if naturally; it makes defending old ways something a liberal does not do.   That something else, so difficult to limn, I’ve long called liberal reality.  But I’m still working on what liberalism does that makes cultural rootedness something that used to be, something our ancestors had, that indigenous people have, but we do not.

This lack wouldn’t be so bad if I were happy without it, but I’m not.  So, this is what happens when a white middle-class educated person takes her unhappiness seriously – that something really is wrong, and it might not be her!  It might be what was given to her without her asking, the culture substitute, the non-sugar sweetener for the brutalization that cultural erasure is.  I will still call it by its blander name, liberalism, but liberalism is the smooth-talking agent of the Machine.

Paul Kingsnorth’s book,  Against the Machine, has provided me with much help with the discernment of  this darkening of civilization.  Like Kingsnorth,  since childhood I’ve had the persistent feeling that “something always felt bent out of shape. As if there was some hidden wound beneath it all.”  All my writings have been to shape ideas that could help me remove the blame from myself for this wrongness, my servile ego telling me the problem is you.  These ideas of returning to the limiting circumstances that make culture, and therefore humanity – not to mention a future for creatures, not machines –  possible, are non-romantic.  I know that in my writing about this return to living within limitations,  I use the word “suffering” frequently.  It is not bliss.  Maybe the better goal is the one Freud suggested for mental health: “ordinary unhappiness.” For in achieving liberation from neuroses, one is freed sufficiently to “work and to love,” no small freedom!

That the “internal demons must be taken on first”  is another point upon which Kingsnorth and I agree.  However, as one who enthusiastically absorbed mythologist Joseph Campbell’s adage to “Follow your bliss,” and who has promoted the path of the artist as the way of defiance of the Machine open to all, I really do want it both ways!  Though Campbell is seen by some Christian critics as advocating bliss-without-pain, that is a one-sided view.  To the contrary, in encouraging people to take on the risky mythic journey of one’s own life’s  “adventure,”  Campbell was, exactly, pointing to the way of sacrifice that leads to revivifying a moribund culture. That is, ‘bliss’ may not be a strictly personal goal.   Admittedly, even though “sacrifice” was a major part of his message, Campbell tended to minimize the role of suffering.  But he knew,  as I do,  mythic truth is the creative outcome of human embodiment.  Myth’s imaginative meaning is derived from biological “determinism” and its realm of suffering that’s now optional.

Thanks to modern-day transpersonal psychological practices derived from the Freudian heritage, I have experienced the “mythic journey,” (a journey that does not have an endpoint before death).  Since then, I’ve believed my lifeway choices should be in obedience to the truth of the completely interdependent reality that journey had connected me with.   In my soul I knew endless growth (progress) is incompatible with spiritual reality.  God’s truth, that is,  is one that comes with limits.  

The “downscale,” traditional choices Orin and I made previously which I have listed many times and do not wish to bore readers with again,  admirable in the eyes of some, coalesced in the creation of our popular, beloved Cafe in Uptown Utica – in its public representation of the metaphysical reality of “all-connected.. That is, we began our small business with blissful enthusiasm, trusting that (enough) “money would follow,” but fully aware of the terrifying risk we took in leaping without a safety net.  For 22 years, the Cafe, in its full-hearted affirmation of the purely human,  provided us with what felt like a cultural base.

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One more important contributor to the “downscale,” self-limiting lifeway choices that prepared the way for the Cafe,   though implied in the taking on of the Campbellian mythic journey, must be explicitly mentioned.  It is that taking on of “internal demons.”(see epigraph)  The choices Orin and I made to self-limit came from two souls that had been deeply wounded.  That did not make the choices, thogh coming from alienation,  bad or questionable.  Limiting as they were, stranding us socially as outsiders, our opinions on practically every item on the liberal agenda not agreeing with our liberal friends, the choices weren’t wrong, only impossible to defend inside liberal reality.  Underlying trauma gave us the key to finding a perspective that could approve our illiberal choices.  That is, because trauma wounds to the soul are and must be denied in liberal reality, they serve as the inward colonizer.  Trauma is the all-powerful driver of the severe limitation on the larger self that everyone in liberal reality is subject to, known as neurosis.  Thus trauma, as it turns out, offers not only the potential for living life within limitations, but the very evidence that the limiting framework is humanly necessary.  Trauma-made-conscious makes it possible for uncomfortable alienation to be understood as inside of a larger truer reality, beyond liberalism.

That is, few of us white liberals, given our conditioning,   are prepared for the particular distress of taking upon oneself lifestyle limitations. To some of these limitations a level of admiration still accrues ( i.e., limited use of digital technology, subsistence farming, staying in the inner city neighborhood and schools).  Others are the kind that are just no longer necessary, that have been roundly renounced as outmoded freedom restrictions, and no longer trouble anyone any more, such as commitments to home, family and place as duties of the heart. The connection between the two kinds of moral decision-making – socially/environmentally conscious (admirable) and rootedness in place and family (unnecessarily restrictive,  value-relative) –  is no longer seen.  Most who defend the old ways –  Catholics or other kinds of conservatives or traditionalists –  have their beliefs to fall back on.  For liberals, however,  the cry- let’s call it agonized, for it could be – “I never signed on for this!” –  is sign of crisis, the consequence of the fact that limitations of traditional roles and obligations go against the entire liberal liberationist meaning.  For liberals,  there’s no metaphysical foundation to fall back on, no way to confirm meaning in this kind of completely “optional” suffering, no way, anymore, of reasonably accepting that there’s no solution.

Of course, the larger free-market meaning of liberalism is our true shared foundation of meaning, whether liberal or conservative (in money we trust).  But the confirmed liberal, having abandoned traditional belief, theoretically open to “reason,” possibly attracted to Campbell’s follow your bliss message but not to its inward, downward dimension – is in a spiritually desperate position whether she knows it or not.  That is, her unhappiness – as long as addictions/distractions do not become a detour, as they do for most   – is the means to find meaning precisely in the apparent meaningless suffering of the limitations liberalism has made obsolete.  For this reason,  in liberalism, both the reality of trauma and of imagination-based, metaphysical truth are denied.   This is no accident!

The crisis one experiences in facing the excruciating unacceptability of limitation is legitimate.  I do not know the details of Maria’s frustration, but having lived for several years now with Orin’s severe PTSD,  I can readily imagine her details are real!  Not one thing in our training in liberal reality prepares us – despite the words of the wedding vows about loving and cherishing – for the for worse.  Without a story that could give one a single reason to stick, to settle, to stay, rather than to escape, what then?

Crucially, it must be seen that the person expressing those spirited and sympathy-inspiring words, “I did not sign up for this,” is also coming from untreated trauma.  That is, no one existing in modern secular reality, in the absence of a sacred order,  can escape trauma wounds.  Women, who tend to live longer, must more often have the frustration of the spouse’s infirmity, but the wall of desperation they run up against is of liberal making!  Not because the truth is they must bend to God’s will – not exactly, anyway. I have no silver bullet to offer that removes suffering (though I’m not fool enough to deny money helps!). However,  this imprisoning wall is built upon the false liberal gospel of freedom. That is, in a certain way, despite liberal progressive expectations – suffering is our lot.  But it comes with its “antidote.” For those who will feel their authentic, unresolvable pain, bringing it out from under denial, the gift of imagination is again possible.  Imagination is the way,  God-given, of transforming/transcending the suffering of life lived humanly, within natural limitations.  As Freud knew, neuroses and creativity spring from the same soil (the soul).

This is not to say don’t give yourself the relief of in-home care for the disabled husband if you can afford it. Nor is it to say one must stick when there is threat of physical or mental harm.  But in a way, what I’m saying is it’s better when what you face can be seen as having no solution.  No escape.  Liberal faith is embedded in airiness as well as in misplaced trust in technology, faith in a solution that will, in turn, allow one to escape this intolerable reality I didn’t sign up for.  When you think about it, what better way could there be for a liberal to learn that being right is not always right?  Aren’t we now being faced with realizing that the conviction (i.e., that Trump is evil) doesn’t help with the reality of the destructive trajectory of globalization?  If there is help, being right isn’t it.  Knowing – and resenting – what is wrong with the other isn’t it.

The ways of avoiding finality are countless.  Even parenthood has its available – and non-controversial –  loopholes, from reversible vasectomies to in vitro fertilization, from formula milk to babysitting by screen.  Our good-byes, nowadays,  can always be penultimate. There is not one thing about opposition to the Machine – that is, to defending our humanity – that is easy or simple, any more than uprooting and moving out to the Midwest plains in 1850 was simple or easy.  It’s counter-intuitive, counter-reasonable, counter-liberation!   It is that process of settling the West, but now in reverse.  It is staying.  We adapt in a thousand ways to the given Machine reality, in part because to do otherwise is so effortful, so weird, so lonely, so completely unnecessary from the everyday point of view, but also because its goods are so unequivocally, unarguably good.  They make us happy, or as happy as we can be in a context of dissolving social bonds.   Refuse to adapt, in a condition in which we are already fully assimilated?  This is the incredible, perhaps insurmountable challenge of refusing Machinehood.

Thus it is not possible or feasible to spend my breath trying to convince people to do what I do!  My anti-liberation slant cannot possibly be extolled or made inspiring to others. I don’t even know what I’m doing, so how could I persuade others!  But, still, inspired by Kingsnorth’s warrior spirit (and the others whose shoulders he stands on), I can help to delineate the Machine so that others, who want more than anything to see, to understand what is happening in this reality which we cannot see or touch, but can feel.  Perhaps those of us, “woke” but still blind in liberal reality,  can begin to grasp what is happening to us, why everything is getting worse, something sensed but for which we as yet lack words. We try to name what we ardently oppose – patriarchy, hierarchy, capitalism, globalism, neoliberalism, fascism, Trumpism etc., but the words do not quite hit the mark.

Many poets, prophets and committed religious visionaries have hit this mark.  The problem is metaphysical, not purely political, economic, or social, not even purely “spiritual.”  People who have freed themselves from religion, from a sacred order, cannot have a clue except insofar as they relinquish their power to deny the disorder in their souls, the tendency to neurosis and self-preoccupation, infinitely deniable in liberal reality, and except they take the longing in their hearts as the direction to follow, leading back to a culture and the commitments that make a culture, whether or not we arrive there.