JG, This is a powerful and impressive recounting of your early intellectual journey, starting at a young age. I found myself time and again relating to points you made and writers and thinkers you mentioned as having g influenced you.
I certainly wasn’t as politically oriented and socially conscious as you in middle school and high school, but although I was only vaguely aware of Marx, for example, I became by high school, and then on through my 20s and 30s, a staunch environmentalist. I am a person with strong liberal and humanistic values and ideas, who as an English major who went into journalism after college, always had a strong social conscience and belief in the value and usefulness of studying the humanities..
By way of this brief introduction to myself, I want to let you know how thought-provoking this letter to Sam is as part of your dialog with her. I have been commenting back and forth with Sam about this series on the spiritual journey.
You have given me so much to think about, central to this being Hannah Arendt’s writing about authoritarianism and dictatorships, and how we in the era of Trumpism, extremism, racist hatred back in the open, and extreme social and political volatility, are revisiting many of the mistakes of the past that led to the chaos and destruction of the two world wars of the last century. I plan to go back and renew my acquaintance with Arendt’s work.
I will comment on several passage from your letter.
Thank you John! I'm really glad to hear this was a thought-provoking discussion for you, and I'm grateful to your acknowledgement of all the specific interesting threads that this brought up. If the only concrete outcome of this letter exchange was to bring you to renew your acquaintance with Arendt's work, I'd consider it a job well done. I'm excited to dig into your next comment.
JG, I hardly think, and certainly hope it won’t be the case, that “renewing my acquaintance” with Hannah Arendt’s work will be the “only concrete outcome of this exchange.” :) it has been a pleasure to get to know you briefly thus far.
I definitely want to read “Origins of Totalitarianism.” In fact, the other day I just received the copy I bought online.
I have started Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom.” As you may know, he is now the go-to historian for those on the Left to understand more fully the cross currents swirling dangerously in our fragile democracy, particularly since 2016. His book “On Tyranny” started the bandwagon rolling. It will be interesting to see how his ideas do or do not mesh with Arendt’s now that almost 75 years have passed since the publication of her seminal work.
Here is an example of why I mention Snyder. He can come across as a bit arrogant, but I am reserving judgment until I read more of his work. .
Another book which I now feel compelled to read is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
I look forward to commenting on your replies, and to delving into the final letter in your correspondence with Sam. Any comments on my own lengthy Substack essay on the spiritual path, would be welcome.
I enjoyed reading this letter, JG. I find it very interesting that, instead of pointing you away from spirituality as is so often the case, studying those philosophers and social thinkers confirmed to you that there is something more. I happen to be reading a book that traces how the ideas of many of these thinkers influenced the modern idea of the self—an outcome that is almost the polar opposite of your own conclusions.
Strange to think we're about to embark on the final two letters in this series! It is indeed a rich conversation with a lot of history, and I look forward to sharing how God has shaped my path in the last ~12 years since my baptism. :)
I love this back and forth series between Sam and you, JG. Your stories contain fascinating differences and yet enough commonality to see you walking a shared path. Really beautiful.
I have chosen some sections of your letter to briefly comment on:
JG 1. “…A road always stretches into some further horizon, its terminus unseen, or perhaps eternally deferred, eternally stretching ever further on. So, too, my intellectual understanding of spirituality never comes to a stable, final conclusion, but keeps journeying on further.”
John: I understand this thought well and in the past I, too, struggled with it. But not so much anymore as I have come to see that as we live in the present moment, time itself becomes a construct of human minds and the journey itself “is the destination.” Our intellects will never come to a final conclusion or understanding of spirituality because our human powers have limitations. Our souls have none. The final conclusion of our sojourn along the spiritual road is union with God, however that is realized.
JG: 2. “And to draw the connection to spirituality more directly, this socialist teleology is where I first got in touch with a sense of purpose, destiny, and the fate not just of my own individual self, but of humankind. I got in touch with a fundamental sense of history. This sense of history allowed me to see us working towards something together, not just toiling purely for ourselves, as the capitalist mythos of the invisible hand and homo economicus would have it.”
John: Yes, capitalism is a personalistic and self-referencing worldview which ultimately involves human atomization and glorification of the triumphs of the self and individual over the collective good of humankind.
JG: 3. “This vein of thought clued me in to the pernicious depths of capitalism’s effects not just on some abstract and anachronistic “proletariat” but also on the psychological and spiritual health of all we moderns—those of us who feel deeply out of touch with the purpose and meaning of our 9-5 jobs; those of us who find our attentions zapped and sapped by endless bombardments of notifications and advertising and TikTok videos and headlines and the endless stream of endless content; those of us who constantly look in the mirror and wonder if we’re measuring up enough, if we’re “successes”, if we’re not secretly considered a failure by the whole society around us.”
John: The Internet attention society we live in now has shaped much of the time we once used for quiet meditation. Back in my time, simply not doing anything much turned out to be good for our mental health, overall. Now I cannot even conceive of being “bored.” There are endless distractions on our phones, providing every imaginable kind of entertainment, knowledge, enlightenment, but also time-sucking amusements and wayward off-ramps that seem to create almost manic split personalities as we dart in one direction or another. This is quite insidious because if we don’t control this melee of distractions, we will gradually lose touch with our quiet, inner selves.
JG: 4. “And while I was done paling around with penny ante socialist orgs on campus, I retained a deep commitment to the underdog from my socialist roots, a commitment to the downtrodden and the oppressed, as so beautifully expressed by the labor activist and socialist candidate for president Eugene V Debs: “Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth... While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free..." Spirituality, for me, has always involved a deep dimension of human responsibility, and this is where that connection was first drawn for me: I better myself spiritually so I can relieve the suffering and the oppression of others. I am not acting spiritually if I am not ultimately acting for others as much, or much more so, than I am acting for myself.”
John: These are such very wise words that express immortal truths about the human condition. What Eugene V. Debs said struck me as the truth we often don’t want to hear because it joins us all together when we are accustomed to seeing our society and our individual lives fragmented along the lines of race, class, gender, intellect, economic standing, and the like.
JG 5. “…the poetry of John Berryman, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Lowell offering me mirrors to my own emotional soul's experience; the deeply pregnant weight of history present in the novels of Thomas Pynchon; the stories and plays of Samuel Beckett, through whom I was first introduced to Zen, Buddhism, and meditation—the list goes on and on.”
Thank you for these insights and references.
JG: 6. “Our putatively “social” media has only deepened that sense of alienation, pushing us ever further into our phones, hooking us ever more into following the lives of people we’ll never meet on TikTok and Instagram, instead of orienting ourselves to the world around us, to the communities that need rebuilding, reimagining, revitalization.”
John: Social media have indeed led to many of us around the world to withdraw into the virtual worlds of the Internet, what we once quaintly referred to as cyberspace. This allows us to feel connected with others, and in many ways we are, and I am truly thankful for that, but at the same time, it can paradoxically enhance our feelings of loneliness and alienation, both of which social media are expressly designed to abolish.
JG, many thanks for sharing these aspects of your spiritual journey, and your search for transcendence.
A few things I'd love to highlight and reecho in your response:
'time itself becomes a construct of human minds and the journey itself “is the destination.”' - I come ever more to not just see this, but also intuit it, and I agree just how meaningful this awareness is, much as it might elude our conscious understanding. It's a journey to keep in touch with this truth consistently.
'This is quite insidious because if we don’t control this melee of distractions, we will gradually lose touch with our quiet, inner selves.' - This is absolutely so. I emphasize community and the loss thereof as it's a clearer dynamic in our society, but you are right to note that we have also become increasingly alienated from our own selves and our inner lives. Ironically we increasingly both lose touch with others, and lose touch with ourselves.
"joins us all together when we are accustomed to seeing our society and our individual lives fragmented" - totally, society has a kind of 'divide and conquer' strategy over us in this respect.
"This allows us to feel connected with others, and in many ways we are, and I am truly thankful for that, but at the same time, it can paradoxically enhance our feelings of loneliness and alienation, both of which social media are expressly designed to abolish." - this touches on one of the most tricky aspects of this kind of critique. Of course, so many technologies that have come into our lives have brought immense possibility and empowerment. But we also have to have ways of seeing just how much we lose with certain technologies, too. This is by no means an "everything has its downside" kind of fatalism, as certain technologies have clearly worse downstream effects than others (climate change from fossil fuels, for example).
John, thank you for your reflections and for this great dialogue 🙏🏼
JG, This is a powerful and impressive recounting of your early intellectual journey, starting at a young age. I found myself time and again relating to points you made and writers and thinkers you mentioned as having g influenced you.
I certainly wasn’t as politically oriented and socially conscious as you in middle school and high school, but although I was only vaguely aware of Marx, for example, I became by high school, and then on through my 20s and 30s, a staunch environmentalist. I am a person with strong liberal and humanistic values and ideas, who as an English major who went into journalism after college, always had a strong social conscience and belief in the value and usefulness of studying the humanities..
By way of this brief introduction to myself, I want to let you know how thought-provoking this letter to Sam is as part of your dialog with her. I have been commenting back and forth with Sam about this series on the spiritual journey.
You have given me so much to think about, central to this being Hannah Arendt’s writing about authoritarianism and dictatorships, and how we in the era of Trumpism, extremism, racist hatred back in the open, and extreme social and political volatility, are revisiting many of the mistakes of the past that led to the chaos and destruction of the two world wars of the last century. I plan to go back and renew my acquaintance with Arendt’s work.
I will comment on several passage from your letter.
Thank you John! I'm really glad to hear this was a thought-provoking discussion for you, and I'm grateful to your acknowledgement of all the specific interesting threads that this brought up. If the only concrete outcome of this letter exchange was to bring you to renew your acquaintance with Arendt's work, I'd consider it a job well done. I'm excited to dig into your next comment.
JG, I hardly think, and certainly hope it won’t be the case, that “renewing my acquaintance” with Hannah Arendt’s work will be the “only concrete outcome of this exchange.” :) it has been a pleasure to get to know you briefly thus far.
I definitely want to read “Origins of Totalitarianism.” In fact, the other day I just received the copy I bought online.
I have started Timothy Snyder’s “The Road to Unfreedom.” As you may know, he is now the go-to historian for those on the Left to understand more fully the cross currents swirling dangerously in our fragile democracy, particularly since 2016. His book “On Tyranny” started the bandwagon rolling. It will be interesting to see how his ideas do or do not mesh with Arendt’s now that almost 75 years have passed since the publication of her seminal work.
Here is an example of why I mention Snyder. He can come across as a bit arrogant, but I am reserving judgment until I read more of his work. .
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/mar/30/how-timothy-snyder-became-the-leading-interpreter-of-our-dark-times-putin-trump-ukraine?utm_source=pocket_reader
Another book which I now feel compelled to read is Viktor Frankl’s “Man’s Search for Meaning.”
I look forward to commenting on your replies, and to delving into the final letter in your correspondence with Sam. Any comments on my own lengthy Substack essay on the spiritual path, would be welcome.
I enjoyed reading this letter, JG. I find it very interesting that, instead of pointing you away from spirituality as is so often the case, studying those philosophers and social thinkers confirmed to you that there is something more. I happen to be reading a book that traces how the ideas of many of these thinkers influenced the modern idea of the self—an outcome that is almost the polar opposite of your own conclusions.
Strange to think we're about to embark on the final two letters in this series! It is indeed a rich conversation with a lot of history, and I look forward to sharing how God has shaped my path in the last ~12 years since my baptism. :)
I love this back and forth series between Sam and you, JG. Your stories contain fascinating differences and yet enough commonality to see you walking a shared path. Really beautiful.
I have chosen some sections of your letter to briefly comment on:
JG 1. “…A road always stretches into some further horizon, its terminus unseen, or perhaps eternally deferred, eternally stretching ever further on. So, too, my intellectual understanding of spirituality never comes to a stable, final conclusion, but keeps journeying on further.”
John: I understand this thought well and in the past I, too, struggled with it. But not so much anymore as I have come to see that as we live in the present moment, time itself becomes a construct of human minds and the journey itself “is the destination.” Our intellects will never come to a final conclusion or understanding of spirituality because our human powers have limitations. Our souls have none. The final conclusion of our sojourn along the spiritual road is union with God, however that is realized.
JG: 2. “And to draw the connection to spirituality more directly, this socialist teleology is where I first got in touch with a sense of purpose, destiny, and the fate not just of my own individual self, but of humankind. I got in touch with a fundamental sense of history. This sense of history allowed me to see us working towards something together, not just toiling purely for ourselves, as the capitalist mythos of the invisible hand and homo economicus would have it.”
John: Yes, capitalism is a personalistic and self-referencing worldview which ultimately involves human atomization and glorification of the triumphs of the self and individual over the collective good of humankind.
JG: 3. “This vein of thought clued me in to the pernicious depths of capitalism’s effects not just on some abstract and anachronistic “proletariat” but also on the psychological and spiritual health of all we moderns—those of us who feel deeply out of touch with the purpose and meaning of our 9-5 jobs; those of us who find our attentions zapped and sapped by endless bombardments of notifications and advertising and TikTok videos and headlines and the endless stream of endless content; those of us who constantly look in the mirror and wonder if we’re measuring up enough, if we’re “successes”, if we’re not secretly considered a failure by the whole society around us.”
John: The Internet attention society we live in now has shaped much of the time we once used for quiet meditation. Back in my time, simply not doing anything much turned out to be good for our mental health, overall. Now I cannot even conceive of being “bored.” There are endless distractions on our phones, providing every imaginable kind of entertainment, knowledge, enlightenment, but also time-sucking amusements and wayward off-ramps that seem to create almost manic split personalities as we dart in one direction or another. This is quite insidious because if we don’t control this melee of distractions, we will gradually lose touch with our quiet, inner selves.
JG: 4. “And while I was done paling around with penny ante socialist orgs on campus, I retained a deep commitment to the underdog from my socialist roots, a commitment to the downtrodden and the oppressed, as so beautifully expressed by the labor activist and socialist candidate for president Eugene V Debs: “Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living things, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth... While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free..." Spirituality, for me, has always involved a deep dimension of human responsibility, and this is where that connection was first drawn for me: I better myself spiritually so I can relieve the suffering and the oppression of others. I am not acting spiritually if I am not ultimately acting for others as much, or much more so, than I am acting for myself.”
John: These are such very wise words that express immortal truths about the human condition. What Eugene V. Debs said struck me as the truth we often don’t want to hear because it joins us all together when we are accustomed to seeing our society and our individual lives fragmented along the lines of race, class, gender, intellect, economic standing, and the like.
JG 5. “…the poetry of John Berryman, Frank O'Hara, and Robert Lowell offering me mirrors to my own emotional soul's experience; the deeply pregnant weight of history present in the novels of Thomas Pynchon; the stories and plays of Samuel Beckett, through whom I was first introduced to Zen, Buddhism, and meditation—the list goes on and on.”
Thank you for these insights and references.
JG: 6. “Our putatively “social” media has only deepened that sense of alienation, pushing us ever further into our phones, hooking us ever more into following the lives of people we’ll never meet on TikTok and Instagram, instead of orienting ourselves to the world around us, to the communities that need rebuilding, reimagining, revitalization.”
John: Social media have indeed led to many of us around the world to withdraw into the virtual worlds of the Internet, what we once quaintly referred to as cyberspace. This allows us to feel connected with others, and in many ways we are, and I am truly thankful for that, but at the same time, it can paradoxically enhance our feelings of loneliness and alienation, both of which social media are expressly designed to abolish.
JG, many thanks for sharing these aspects of your spiritual journey, and your search for transcendence.
A few things I'd love to highlight and reecho in your response:
'time itself becomes a construct of human minds and the journey itself “is the destination.”' - I come ever more to not just see this, but also intuit it, and I agree just how meaningful this awareness is, much as it might elude our conscious understanding. It's a journey to keep in touch with this truth consistently.
'This is quite insidious because if we don’t control this melee of distractions, we will gradually lose touch with our quiet, inner selves.' - This is absolutely so. I emphasize community and the loss thereof as it's a clearer dynamic in our society, but you are right to note that we have also become increasingly alienated from our own selves and our inner lives. Ironically we increasingly both lose touch with others, and lose touch with ourselves.
"joins us all together when we are accustomed to seeing our society and our individual lives fragmented" - totally, society has a kind of 'divide and conquer' strategy over us in this respect.
"This allows us to feel connected with others, and in many ways we are, and I am truly thankful for that, but at the same time, it can paradoxically enhance our feelings of loneliness and alienation, both of which social media are expressly designed to abolish." - this touches on one of the most tricky aspects of this kind of critique. Of course, so many technologies that have come into our lives have brought immense possibility and empowerment. But we also have to have ways of seeing just how much we lose with certain technologies, too. This is by no means an "everything has its downside" kind of fatalism, as certain technologies have clearly worse downstream effects than others (climate change from fossil fuels, for example).
John, thank you for your reflections and for this great dialogue 🙏🏼