A current theme among the commentariat is that political movements like MAGA are illiberal, tapping into old ideological currents like fascism and religious totalitarianism. And, according to Yuval Noah Harari, the fictions that drive movements like these pose a unique problem for liberalism because it does not, in turn, have nourishing narratives that provide the utopian clarity of religious or ideological fables. For the communist, utopia comes from class purification. For the fascist, Xanadu arrives from ethnic and racial purity. For the religious, there is only God’s will. But for liberalism, we accept there is no perfection, only problems, checks and balances, eternal struggle, and a simmering gradualism that emerges from squabbling interests. No one is happy. No one can be happy with a narrative that is the worst of all possible systems except all the others. The reality is grinding, truth is grinding, and the vague struggle in an unrelenting system makes for a blurry tale with no focus, corrupt heroes, and complexity rather than epic arcs of resolution.
I am an optimist about the project of liberalism, nonetheless, and think we see its progress throughout the world. There are astonishing statistics like the reduction in poverty rates in the world even while supporting massive populations. These achievements came about despite the chaos arising with the end of colonialism and the structured Cold War alliances of the mid-20th Century. The stories are simple enough that they are easily forgotten, like the Green Revolution and the spread of health care. The stories are often contested, as well, like the rise of social insurance and welfare policies, where extreme corners of the liberal worldview take exception to the the costs imposed by this kind of organization. But these are the stories of the conquest of chaos itself, by invention and structure, not that of the conquest of others by will and power.
Can we improve the fictional landscape for liberalism? Can these murky little achievements that are ultimately impactful be given more of a heroic feeling? We keep finding individual heroes are flawed and corrupt, which is what liberalism is built around in terms of using systems to counter our baser urges, but can the systems and the meta-program itself be honored?
I embarked on a program to do something like that by turning the struggle against chaos into a religious-like abstraction in my efforts at a new religion. In this system, the individual is challenged to discover the ley lines that connect systems of justice, organization, economics, and personal engagement. They are physical, evolutionary, natural, governmental, interconnected and diverse. Another taste:
First
How can it be that I am alone on the coast again? I struggle to find the way down through the brambles. The trail is uncertain, with suggestive trampled paths radiating as each descent bottoms between crags or along amber dunes. I persevere and emerge onto the moist beach as the choppy surf pushes up and briefly rushes in around black lava. It retracts into the distance and the grainy wall of sound retreats as well, leaving only the shivers of grasses holding against the dunes.
There is an angular diamond of light coming from the rocks. Specular motes fold into the bursts of spray, then disappear. The light saturates the beach for just a moment. I slide to my right and crouch as I track it through a rainbow. It shutters against unseen obstructions and dissipates into a quartz veil.
With the slam of the wave the light is gone too, but then it reappears in the mumbling clarity of the outrush and I can see it easily now. It is rotating like a miniature solar system, hovering above a tidal pool.
I slide to my left now trying to decrypt the scene. There are no wires, no supports. The thing expands in radiance, then contracts, then is lost in the spray again. I lose it after that as it slides into the infinite sparkle of the ocean. Where has it gone? I move towards the rock, wary of the rogue waves building and piling upon one another and crashing the rocks. The salt is on my lips, heavy, and my shoes are loading with moisture and sand in the treads.
I pause and let my gaze wander out through the flecks of whitecaps sprawling into the distance until merging into the maroon of deeper waters stretched out below grays that converge into a brush of pea as the marine layer hovers over the vast curve of the sea.
And then it flashes again, further out, to the left, and the water is iridescence below it in quick flashes. What does it want? What does it foretell? I can’t proceed further, can’t capture it. If it is luring me towards the water like a siren it is obscure in its intent. If it is natural, it is indecipherable in origin or cause. I wander along the beach, watching the rivulets shift the granular matrix, exposing microcosms of flickering sand that shift as I rotate my gaze. I look back to the water and can see the gleam wobble along a coastal hill further along. I ignore it and watch a tidal pond with lolling micro-forests of algae and moss. Minnows dart from sunbeam to sunbeam. Again the glint, again the rhythm.
I rise to my feet and it is gone. I climb a ridge of slippery rock and find my way towards the hill. I slip along an edge projecting between the beach and a slough, thick with mossy logs and a pointillistic face of luminescent verdancy. The path becomes narrow and I descend, forced to scramble over branches and low shrubs. I climb again, edging along a steep plunge to the riot of crashing ocean below me. As I rise the incessant cold wind increases in tempo and I break through brush bent along the hill. I think I see the light again but then it is washed into the distant speckle. Was it ever real?
There is a man perched on a rock. His hair is long and gray, like driftwood in its complexity of edges and ridges. He is dressed in a tan jacket of canvas with leather piping. A brown book with a ribbon slid a quarter through the pages peaks from a side pocket. His pants are faded jeans, creased and baggy. Leather workman boots are haphazardly tied with mismatched black and brown laces.
“I come here to watch the endless motion,” he tells me as one fog eyebrow rises at my presence in his peripheral vision. “I come here to reflect on what I do not know.”
I bundle my jacket against the persistent wind, asking, “What do you not know?”
“Most everything, despite decades of study and an almost three quarters of a century of thought, I know very little,” he replies.
“What have you learned that is so useless?” I inquire.
“No, no, completely wrong. It is not useless. Nothing is useless. What I don’t know is a reflection of what I do understand, like halves of a puzzle that fit together. I am at peace against the struggle to always know more, to unravel the frontier of what can be discovered and expand my place along that edge. What is unknowable is the greatest reflection of the evolution of the universe through conscious eyes.”
I might have laughed at him if I had met him in a city park or a coffee shop. Such grizzled intensity. Such pretense. To begin spewing philosophy at a passerby, to charge into such depths without even a casual introduction, somehow did not seem outlandish here at the edge of the continent, or, especially, when spoken by a wizened figure who at moments merged into the distant layerings of atmosphere. I turned away briefly and thought he might not be there when I turned back; he would dissipate along with the shimmering.
“May I ask what you do know well enough to give you this foundation for understanding your limitations?” I asked as I rotated back towards him. Was his jacket different now? Was there red stitching I had not noticed before?
“I know that the wise men and women of long ago were wrong. They established ideas to hold the chaos of their limitations at bay. They imagined and found purchase and, in turn, were revered and feted and worshipped. This itself is a failure. Knowledge should not be a tool of power, to colonize or usurp resources and land and mating rights. So it was with mythologies sung by bards, with litanies preached by clerics, with sciences of war and conquest. Knowledge is that which arrives freely and can be interrogated by our intellects. When it is something handed down by mere authority it becomes a lesser thing. The ancient mind was in greater struggle against the chaos—Enkaos—and lacked the wisdom of our contemporary age. But do not deceive yourself that we have overcome this urge to manipulate and persuade. We have only arrived, finally, at a place where we can begin to unravel the consequences of how we once thought and strived.”
I interjected, “You said a word there, a foreign term, something to do with chaos?”
“Ah, yes, Enkaos. It is a signpost term for a concept that needs many words to fully explain. In the awakenings these become sacraments, their meanings lead the Kognote towards Enkinema. Enkaos is chaos at the edge of the knowable, and it is also the process that congeals those chaotic clouds into new forms, shadowy realizations at first, false gods and spirits, bad explanations and terminology. Enkaos is not an enemy but a resistant power within ourselves that the Kognote takes seriously as a barrier to the future.”
“Why invent terms for these ideas?” I asked.
“We can be more efficient in our communications. But, also, all terms are potent in another manner. When new words are imported, new translations and cognates arrive in a language, there is a stretching of our understanding to fit the word into the puzzle of our beliefs, our range of expression. This is the Path to Enkinema, whether for the child beholding the miracle of seeing the difference between a cat and a dog, or a teenager reflecting on the meaning of the words justice and freedom, Enkinema is a merging of the networks from before—the learned—with the differences inherent in the new. New words bring difference and a totemic girth to the ideas that we wish to convey. A yet third reason for these conceptual renderings is to build a community of shared understanding. In olden times—the eras that are testimony to overcoming Enkaos—the meanings of religious terminology were the shared edifice that made collective action possible, and warmed us as the social beings that we are. The idea that faith is powerful or that a religious figure represents a metaphorical light, or that we contain our humanity in compact souls—all of these combined together to create the community that was sustained by shared understanding and shared terminology.”
“So the terms are a new form of sacrament?” I asked in response. Woven patches of light were etched on the distant water, with lineal probes flashing through the layered wool above—sometimes gray, occasionally a cobalt that merged into raw, milky emerald.
“Yes, just so, and just as they always were. Only the mad and the hopeful saw the gods. No one felt a divine presence. People felt the power of these ideas through a constellation of the words that defined them. They were new and magisterial, from animal spirits spinning morality tales to virgin births and resurrections. These were the fantasies that animated the tales and formed the flesh of the mind against the Enkaos. People build against these metaphors and images. They build communities. They build families. They order their lives as reflections of the concepts that arrive to them. Even now, in this postmodern world are we at work in creating the language of binding and motion and transformation. We talk of quarks and gluons. We charge that our friends and foes are narcissistic or prescient. We manage processes and litigate outcomes. All of these words are perfecting, incrementally, how we strain and rub against the fundamentals of survival and social interactions, how we convert the Enkaos frontier into Enkinema.”
“But what of this Enkinema?” I asked. “It sounds like both a process and an end goal of enlightenment to me? The end of chaos and unknowability? The complete conversion of Enkaos into perfection?”
“No, always towards Enkinema, never reaching it. This realization is that there is no perfection, no perfectibility, just a continuous striving. All is in motion; we rage against chaos and our blundering selves and collective pasts. The motion is constructive at its best, though is often stochastic in its early manifestations. The Kognote feels that edge and embraces it. To start, to wander, to doubt, to back away from early conclusions, to study and adapt—these are the motions towards Enkinema. But we never arrive, for we never can arrive. We always struggle with the imperfections of our knowledge, our concentration, and our limitations.”
I pondered the man’s special language. Did it aid the goals that he was articulating? Was his idea of learning and a nexus of individual and societal transformation not what had always been at hand, and he was restating the obvious? But that, I realized, was the missing part. Few, if any, concerned themselves with these basic observations and conclusions. They looked too far afield at the magical claims of the religious, or buried themselves in the political intrigues of the moment. This appreciation and codification of the elemental human experience as one of unfolding truths trapped within chaos was missing from our everyday lives. We are inured to the majesty of our own triumphs of education, pushed forth from our mothers’ wombs, and even more of the grand enlightenment that stands before us when we watch a skyscraper open to the public, or fly across oceans in great contraptions, or speak with a lover from the other side of the planet.
Lost in reverie, I didn’t notice the man was paused, unassumingly allowing me to drift in thought before him. He had closed his eyes, I noticed, and his breathing was slowed. I looked away to the rise and fall of the surf below us, and when I looked back his face seemed less lined, his hair darker, his visage younger.
“I was thinking about the Enkinema and how it combines ‘sentience’ and ‘essence’ together,” I said, feeling a sudden calm washing over me.
“Yes, together,” he responded, his voice deeper now. “We feel and sense and understand that which is essential in the world, leaving the chaotic bubbling of our unknowing, primitive selves behind. It was always this way. Yahweh, Baal, El, smashing the heads of sea monsters, Yam and Tiamat, Leviathan, and Tannin—these are just some of the mythos that illustrate our ancient pursuit of order and the arrangement of a positive engagement with novelty within ourselves.”
“Why do so few speak of these things? We struggle in our lives, against our anxious ignorance, coming of age and aligned with strict expectations—trajectories—that define us: school, adolescence, love, work, child-rearing, jobs, careers, retirement. And no one tells us that this is all part of a grander scheme?”
“Yes, the grandest scheme imaginable. I am here to tell you now. More will come to understand and there will be more Kognotes as the Awakenings spread. The scheme is encoded in the universe itself. First, in the chiral emergence of ordering that cooled out of the earliest essences of our universe, so vast and empty, yet teaming with the potentiality that leads to our very minds reflecting on our roles, our relations, our building of these trajectories that encompass our daily existence. We can stop ourselves from time to time, we can embrace this new reflective awareness, and in the Awakenings we can find strategies for enhancing our intimacy with Enkinema. This is the transcendent reality that overlays everything and, especially, that which has not arrived yet, in the creativity of the universe and ourselves, where we break the patterns of Enkaos, where we embrace Enkinema.”
He continued, his voice having drifted mildly in pitch, slipping through the hiss of the wind along the grasses clinging to the oceanside bluff, “There are methodologies that we know are key to Enkinema, from rationality to empiricism, from creative expression to channeled wonder. What was once encapsulated by a prayer, by a chant, by a rite, or by a meditation, can be better achieved by Modians, or modes of engagement. Through the Modians we realign ourself to the goal of Enkinema, for it is a constant battle to remain focused on the goal. It is easy to drift away, like the floating wood spun by the surf and carried over the sea.”
“What is an example of a Modian?” I asked, uncertain if I had heard the novel term correctly.
“To learn their true nature in depth requires a course of study. It is an Awakening. If you wish to pursue the Awakenings deeply, you must make a commitment to become a Kognote and realign your mind and life to this path of learning and being. But I can reveal the surface details of the simplest of Modians. It is just a focused chant of sorts that communicates between worlds of being. To use it is to reveal the Enkinema that interconnects those worlds, and by repeating it at regular intervals, as stressors arrive and everyday events collide together, the Kognote can interrogate the hidden timbers of the worlds, the scaffolding that transects between these mystic experiential gates and shows the Kognote the hows and whys of the universe and the self within it.”
“And what is the chant?” I asked.
“With time and study you will learn it, Kognote, but for now meditate on the idea that a phrase can break down barriers to learning. Say, for example, I repeated something as simple as ‘reflect on causes’ to myself. And I took the recommendation embedded in the phrase to heart and did, always, reflect on the causes of things. There are almost always causes to events, attitudes, beliefs, speculation, and so forth, but we too often appreciate those causes in the shallowest of ways. With Awakening, the Kognote is reminded to appreciate the causes as a deep, foundational assessment of self and the engagement of being with others and the world. So I give you ‘reflect on causes’ as a pre-Modian, but one that reflects the kind of interrogative methodology that the Modian provides. The Kognote is always engaged with Enkinema until the nervous noise of our souls is replaced with a pervasive, enlightened vision of the whole of existence, through time and space, and even outside it, and from our earliest memories to our most fanciful designs for the future. This is what it is to be a Kognote.”
I turned to the sea again as his voice trailed across the final word and there was the infinity implied by the horizon, but I knew that the world curved behind and beneath it, and that the sea was powered by the pull of the moon above us, like a deflating orb, and that there were lands and ships there in that vastness, filled with a steady thrum of daily normality—to eat, to love, to create and trade—and as I reflected on the causes of these things and how there was always more to know and explain, and on all my limits in trying to reach those explanations, I realized I had perhaps had an awakening of sorts, one that had always been hinted at in the bland language of everyday striving, of learning and studying, of contemplation and thought. I turned to the man again but there was no one there. I was alone on the bluff, watching the tremors of whitecaps split and divide below me.