Coping with the Unnamable Present

How does an individual deal with the massive complexity of day-to-day life in our times? Not only are there acts of random brutal violence and shocking upheavals of the past, but many of us face these extreme events without recourse to greater powers or clear explanations, in a secular world. While some argue that secular humanism is robust enough to replace traditional religious views, in this essay I will discuss whether it has the capacity to fulfill the same emotional needs.

What are the ways in which religion, and belief in general, aid us to cope with the state of the world around us? Philosopher Stephen Asma claims that the psychological significance of human vulnerability is ultimately the impetus for religious practices and that, furthermore, its therapeutic mission is to manage the emotional life of the individual. Asma explains a wide range of empirical examples of religious behaviors in terms of the philosophical claim that indicative beliefs are derived from imperative emotional social experiences. Distinguishing his approach from polemical and reductionist accounts like those of the ‘new atheists’ who do not adequately consider the epistemic power of belief to our values and emotions, Asma offers a functionalist approach to the social uses of religious behavior that does not diminish the meaningful elements of the religious imagination.

But what about those of us who, rather than being raised into a particular belief system that cannot be doubted, feel independently responsible for constructing systems of meaning by which we may understand our context and subsequent actions outside of traditional religious dogma. We are engaged in the treacherous task of creating meaning in our lives and then living through these self-defined categories and motivations. Not only that, but the meaning we put into the world can seem to be instantly siphoned off. For example, deep sentiments and aspirations are parroted back to us in marketing mantras and greeting cards. Additionally, we are told, mainly by psychologists, that there is no room in Nature for magic and the various enchantments of cosmic meaning. Philosopher John Gray goes so far as to say that even the notions of self, humanity, and society (or at least, social progress) are nothing but delusions of the vain primate.

A world without meaning would seem to lack emotional bonds and motivations, it would seem a rejection of our very attachment to living itself. We are meaning-creating animals. In the words of philosopher and psychoanalyst Jonathan Lear, “humans make more meaning than they grasp” (p.32). We are drawn through the world by some emotional compulsion; according to philosopher Robert Pippin’s reading of Friedrich Nietzsche, we have an erotic attachment to the world which compels us to act.

Into this morass steps the brilliant Italian writer and publisher Roberto Calasso with his new book, The Unnamable Present. In this unique triptych of essays, we encounter a reckoning with secularism itself. Calasso declares that secularism is an unnatural state, that secular man (homo saecularis) is akin to an anthropologist in the land of native humans, namely believers. Calasso is convinced that secularism does not allow for value outside its ambit, thus shrinking the possibilities of meaning-construction. Further, he argues that secularism entails a total divestment of an individual’s bonds with the world – it makes us rootless. Even democracy, that apotheosis of secularism, seems to Calasso to be simply a set of procedures with no meaning and no end beyond its own structures of processes.

The paradigmatic case of the rootless human for Calasso is the tourist, he who seeks a second life, a virtual life with no links, skimming over a world with roots and culturally inherited meaning purely in pursuit of pleasure. The tourist industry with its not-to-be-missed sights, restaurants, hotels, and shift workers who commute daily into the tourist wonderland thus whittles reality to purely formal components for the purpose of pure distraction. Any local color or decoration of the formal elements is beside the point. Calasso likens such a process of reducing meaning to internet pornography where sexual life is cut down to the most basic representation. (In fact, he provides several illuminating insights concerning the relation between the spread of pornography and contemporary instances of violent sacrificial acts by terrorist organizations, which I will not discuss here.)

I believe Calasso’s characterization of homo saecularis as an existential tourist reveals something essential about how we cope with this unnamable and unstable present. It provides a psychological frame to consider our purposes and actions which is in some ways richer than the frames put forward in contemporary experimental psychology because it directly confronts the confusions wrought by the cultural shift to modernity. The great philosopher of modernity Friedrich Nietzsche argued that the value of freedom is precisely what it costs us to acquire it. In this light, it appears that the freedom of secularism costs modern man the price of stable meaning. When taken out of its local context, the great diversity displayed in the parade of life becomes unnamable, and the existential tourist in a bout of decadence must stifle the instinct to belong and to name the world in a familiar language.

Roberto Calasso argues that the horrific random killings committed by terrorists are a desperate form of sacrificial ritual used to create meaning in response to the disenchantment of the world that results from secularism. Clearly, ideological terrorism is an ugly, warped response to a complicated world lacking in clear sign posts. In fact, it seems to be a perverted manipulation of the psychological function of religious motivation that reflects a religious imagination under siege and in revolt. In the next post I will discuss other avenues for assessing our situation in this unnamable moment of the 21st century.