Source: Brownstone.org
Every so often it is a good idea to revisit our foundational concepts — that is, those important words and definitions that are commonplace in everyday discourse, which we take for granted and we think we have pinned down.
This is especially true during times of crisis and upheaval, when the clashes between different social factions — driven by conflicting values and priorities — often violently break through into the foreground of our consciousness.
During these historically charged moments, when the quantum “probability wave” of social power has yet to collapse into a distinguishable and rigid form, suddenly, the old words that we thought we knew seem to possess indistinct and malleable meanings.
It is a good idea to ask some questions: was it our old, decaying, or vaguely delineated definitions of our most important notions that contributed to the collapse in the first place? Is there some important aspect of life that, due to the imprecise nature of language, we forgot to include in these definitions and, as a result, ceased to pay attention to? Or is it simply that the solid definitions that we once possessed, that have always served us well and provably historically, have fallen by the wayside, and need a good, old-fashioned resurrection?
Words that refer to abstract concepts such as “truth,” “honor,” “integrity,” “courage,” “love,” “morality,” — etcetera — must be reexamined as we feel ourselves viscerally and intuitively confronted with their opposites.
What, exactly, do and should these words refer to? How do we recognize instances of them when we see them? What are they, and what are they not? On what foundations do we build our notions of them, and how do we prove to ourselves and to potentially hostile others that those foundations actually have solidity? Whose word or reasoning do we trust to guide us on these themes, and why? And what do these often abstract philosophical ideas actually look like, in a concrete sense, when we encounter them or try to recreate them in a changing world?
We can think of words as something like file cabinets or boxes, and the attempt to define concepts as like trying to organize a room. We walk into the room, take stock of what we see, and try to “file” each thing away under its appropriate category or box. Our word-boxes contain collections of ideas and associations, which we are constantly adapting and changing, taking out and using, replacing or refiling somewhere else.
We engage in this exercise collectively, at various levels of society, but also on an individual level as well; and the result is that — just as different individuals might have many of the same items in their home, but choose to arrange them very differently — no two people are likely to possess the exact same definition of a word.
To make things more complicated, the “room” that we walk into — that is, the actual world that we inhabit — is always shifting and changing; the items we encounter change, their uses and associations change, and as our social structures and goals change with them, our attention shifts to different salient aspects of ideas.
Sometimes, it becomes necessary to redefine a concept in order to draw attention to functions or phenomena that we have ceased to be aware of, but that suddenly have reasserted their urgent importance in our lives; other times, it is that we have stumbled upon new information, or ways of thinking about and interacting with the world, that cause(s) us to go back and question what we previously took for granted.
We like to think that when we try to chart out definitions for our words, we are motivated by a desire to pin down some objective and unchanging truth. But the reality is, while we may be genuinely seeking truths about the ideas we are working with, our definitions are usually more likely to be influenced by the current demands of our social and cognitive landscapes, and the goals we are trying to accomplish within those landscapes at the time.
We shouldn’t necessarily think of this as a bad thing, however — or as somehow less “real” or “authentic.” Rather, we can see words and their definitions as a set of tools that allow us to coax out and highlight different aspects of a fluid, and ever-shifting, reality as needed.
To be clear: that doesn’t mean that there is no such thing as objective truth or eternally valid wisdom. It simply means that, at different times in our lives and in our history, we need to highlight different aspects of that truth in order to maintain our balance in a volatile world, and to draw attention to our values and priorities in an effective manner.
Today I want to try this exercise with a particular, and very fundamental, word: the word “life.” Since the imposition of the Covidian biomilitary regime in February-March of 2020, many commentators have characterized this regime — along with the new technocratic social order it represents — as being, at its essence, anti-social, anti-human, anti-nature; we could summarize by saying: anti-life. ¹
Most of us would probably not oppose such characterizations, and we could probably corroborate them relatively easily with readily available examples from memory. We would have no problem indicating why we could apply these labels to what we have witnessed over the past few years, and — in many circumstances, unfortunately — continue to witness.
We have observed the literal deaths of friends and loved ones due to negligent medical policies, vaccine injuries, suicide, and the suppression of effective treatments for Covid-19 and other illnesses; we have witnessed the deeply unnatural imposition onto human beings of behavioral mandates that go against our deepest biological and social instincts; we have seen the disruption of our ambient infrastructure, habits, and routines, leading to feelings of discomfort and instability that are detrimental to mental health and well-being; our access to parks, wilderness areas, and other avenues for connecting with the restorative beauty of the natural world have been restricted; our food supply is under assault — and I’m sure my readers can supply myriad further examples from the libraries of their own experience.
Even if we choose to accept the stated goals of the Covidian regime at face value, and imagine that its policies genuinely did attempt to, or succeed in, “save/ing lives,” it is clear that the sort of “life” it valued would amount to little more than what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben calls “bare life” — the basic fact of life which the ancient Greeks knew by the name of “zoē.”
By contrast, what the Greeks called “bios” — that is, according to Agamben, the way that life is lived, with all its possibilities and potentialities — was overtly deprioritized and sacrificed.
In our discourse, we have likely come across the framing of our current crisis as a continuation of a timeless struggle between two opposing worldviews: between a “Promethean,” civilized worldview, on the one hand, which paints the natural order as fundamentally dangerous and evil, and which sees man’s role in the universe as being to neutralize this evil and to “correct” or “improve upon” nature’s flaws; — and between a more “Edenic” worldview, on the other, which paints the natural order as fundamentally good and harmonic, and man as having “fallen” from a more pristine and innocent “original” state.²
There are many variations in the way that our philosophers and allies choose to portray this value-conflict. We might describe it in cosmo-dramatic terms, as a “battle between good and evil,” with the “good” symbolized by a natural order (perhaps set down by God), and the “evil” symbolized by man’s hubris and deception.
Or, we might portray it as a historic war between nature and culture, between civilization on the one hand and Edenic primitivism on the other. We might phrase it as a struggle between fascistic, utilitarian, or military forces, scientific or technocratic engineers, and those who seek to preserve the best traits of the human soul, the things that make life beautiful or worth living, or more generally, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.
Or, we might think in terms of clashes between traditionalists and between modern priests of “progress,” between materialists and those who value the transcendent, or between a class of self-appointed urban social elites and “experts” and between the common or pastoral man.
But it is clear that underlying all this discourse and the many ways of viewing and engaging with it, runs the common theme of our approach to natural life. Is nature fundamentally good, evil, or perhaps a mix of both? Is it man’s role to change it or to try to “improve” it, either way? Should we preserve our “natural” inclinations or traditions, or should we try to manage and engineer them consciously? Should we find spiritual, poetic, or transcendent ways to deal with life’s inevitable struggles and hardships, and to eliminate our fears, or should we try to use technology to “outrun” them? And do we have a moral duty to do, or to refrain from doing, any of these things? And if so, to what extent, and where should we draw lines…?