I like this (and thanks for the link.) Let me offer a thought that ties up both of our insights. What I called, for the sake of argument, Progress, Moloch, the Machine etc has another name in the Christian tradition: the adversary, the enemy, Satan. The great force that opposes the will of God and which enlists us in his work. The smaller demons which tempt us daily through our vices are his various legions. Both big and small forces are worth attending to.
Regarding your final paragraph, Orthodox elders have warned for two millennia that demons will repeatedly appear as angels to trap the unwary. Satan himself will often appear as an angel of light: as will Antichrist. We are quite easily fooled.
As you say, talking too widely about this will get you labelled as a nutter, but that is probably a badge of honour at this point.
Thanks! I did consider whether Moloch and Satan should be identified with one another; but decided to leave it open, both because this isn't a specifically Christian appeal for demonology and because I'm just not sure. It's interesting that you do readily identify them. I wondered whether different Christians would come to different conclusions on that question.
I would agree we should never entirely ignore the Machine though. I hope I didn't word that penultimate paragraph too strongly.
I know very little about Orthodoxy, but the suspicion with which the Catholic church tends to treat heavenly visions did occur to me with that last paragraph. Mostly, I was just applying being a dour northerner to even supernatural questions, though.
Well, it's probably an apocalyptic exaggeration to say 'the Machine is Satan!', not to mention a simplistic one. Still, I think we are dealing in the same energy, from a beyond-human source. That seems to be what you're getting at here: the possibility/likelihood that such sources do exist, which the world as a whole can't accept at all. In one sense, the names are beside the point. The point is whether we're in control or whether we're pawns of something/s else. That was really what I was trying to get at by tying the word 'progress' - the great abstract of modernity - to a much older understanding of spiritual warfare.
I think you were successful in doing so, and probably in a more generally palatable manner than I have done here! The question of 'whether or not we are in control' seems to link directly pride, perhaps in a distinctly modern form.
I have an essay coming up either today or tomorrow that parallels this, as I've been thinking particularly about the terms "ideological capture," the much-ignored fact that psychology means study of the soul, and the animist understanding of thoughts as spirits themselves. I'll definitely mention your really great piece in it.
It reminds me of Gabriel Marcel, e.g., "As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction”
Marcel saw his entire philosophy as an, “obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction”. I know I am surely captured by many unbeneficent abstractions. But I nonetheless, and because of being so captured, join in the battle against the abstractions which imprison us.
Marcel is one of those authors I have never quite got around to reading. There are so many! Glancing over the Stanford page, though, I see many parallels with Kierkegaard, and that makes me think I should really make the effort. Thanks.
I have read Marcel and struggled with him for a while now. I think he was among those who saw clearly long ago the trajectory of our disaster.
But yes, there is so much. I see the irony in how I spend so much time thinking about the catastrophe, reading about it, talking about it, commenting online and yet...it just keeps growing. I am groping towards something more than that. I don't fully know yet what that is...
It just occurred to me the reason why I struggled so long to understand Marcel. It is related to your post. I was long caught up in seeking a clear definition of "the problem" (aka our current meta-crisis) and an equally clear "solution". Then being more or less rational creatures we would just do it. I still get caught up in this way of thinking.
Marcel is anything but this. I think his way is far more human than the crypto-ideological way I have proceeded. The way we are encouraged to proceed. The legacy of the Enlightenment, perhaps? Or does it go deeper back than that?
Though at the same time I was (and am) drawn towards Taoism, Zen, Aikido and now Orthodoxy. I am still working on resolving this split. Iain McGilchrist goes a long way to resolving it, at least in theory (which is its own kind of imbalance). So when I see the need to "grope" as if in the dark, towards something else, that is what I mean. In reading Marcel I am confronted with the blockages that keep me entranced by abstraction and ideology.
It is a kind of drug I think, the intellectual contemplation of things. I've spent so many hours reading old daoist books that tell me that reading them will not help! It is a special kind of obstinacy perhaps.
Goodness me. This piece landed just as I’m having negative thoughts about Cartesian reason as the great benefit to humanity we assume it to be. Sorry if this sounds incoherent.
'Someone might ask ‘if demons, then why not angels?'
- Indeed. I've read about cases of demonic possession where the sufferer demonstrated superhuman strength. Perhaps 'hysterical strength' comes from angels? You know those cases you occasionally read about where an ordinary person somehow finds the strength to lift a car off someone who's been crushed beneath it? Maybe the source of that power is angelic?
Sociological theories love excluding human actions and purposes from the so-called serious explanations. Meanwhile, they're happy to postulate their own intangible ghosts, and attribute them powers to move human wills and bodies, while demons and fae are "superstitions".
It's always struck me as a dodgy move. But that is where we are.
Try explaining this to one of today's lay positivists and they'll accuse you of... witchcraft.
Charles Taylor has written some fascinating papers on this flaw in historical explanations and their widespread use in social sciences, as they try to do too much explaining with too little recognition of the obvious.
I don't think we're so far from the ancient Greeks as we'd like to think. We're still speaking of gods and daimons and all manner of spirits. Maybe we don't give them the metaphysical weight (consciously and explicitly) that our ancestors did, but at a psychological level it's hard to argue their influence on us.
Being an old relic of the atheist/materialist/rationalist world, part of me still wants to resist the idea of actual demons. These days, I just don't know anymore. It seems as believable as anything if not more -- at least there's precedent in old wisdom.
If you want even more synchronicity, notice the URL on my Substack domain.
It's interesting to me that the Greeks didn't invest the 'daimon' with the moral qualities that came later. I wonder what changed, or if anything changed.
The greed/capitalism point is reminiscent of The Pardoner's Tale, and the usually mis-quoted verse from 1 Timothy 6:10 "The love of money is the root of all evil". People seem to find it easier to remember and share the meme "money is the root of all evil", passing the blame away from themselves and humanity. In the Chaucer story, the money does nothing, it simply sits beneath a tree existing - the reactions of those that discover it are what leads to mayhem.
Still, worth remembering that the Pardoner's motivation may well have been "Don't get so hung up on money...give it to me".
I've been on a bit of a journey about the sacred position of "Science". (I've also learnt to be mindful about cultures where religion and magic are still being used for control of ideas, instead of the Modern reverence for Science.)
A lot of religion appears to have started in meaningful observations related to personal mental health, but become lost in placing these sacred ideas as external entities rather than names to provide common language descriptions. I think this transformation has largely occurred in translation between languages - this comes to mind with Zen - the famous idea of "searching for the mind" - I put the Chinese for this into Google translate mind becomes heart, which gives a totally different interpretation of the meaning.
Eternal damnation is just supposed to be about mental and social health in your current life, kick the talk about God and Satan out, their usefulness has been lost by changes in meaning. Sin is akin to regret, things that you've done in your past that dominate your present. God isn't the one damning you, unless you call yourself God.
I mean to write something on longer on this someday, but I hope this was coherent.
Perfectly coherent, although I disagree. I would say that a lot of religion started in meaningful observation of external entities, but that it unfortunately degenerated into therapy-language when elite cultures lost the ability to see how small a part of even the mental world is within our ability to understand and control. Mind is big, but our minds are not.
I'm afraid my knowledge of Chinese is not good and only of very old forms, but if modern Chinese uses a version of the Classical xīn (心), then there is an interesting story there. In Classical times, at least, this meant both the mental and emotional parts of the person (and is linked to the heart visually). The reason this is interesting is that in English up to about Shakespeare's time, the word 'heart' meant the same: it meant the mental and emotional parts of the person in their entirety. In English, the idea that 'heart' (the emotional and spiritual) and 'mind' (the logical and intellectual) are separate is fairly recent change to the language.
This change in English is part of that psychologising shift that I mentioned: it invites us to see the mental as a separate entity, above the emotional and bodily, rather than as part of the unity of the human animal.
It amuses me that Google translate would have been more accurate one thousand years ago than it is today! Thanks for the interesting comment.
I suppose that is really a question of where one places the limit of internal and external to one's self.
I suppose I meant external to one's personal experience.
But I suppose I also meant in the abstract of believing that one does not have the potential to control external entity - and in doing so, possibly abandoning the idea that they're able to control how such an entity affects them.
That is an interesting framing. I think, for example, describing the anger the spreads through the internet as demonic is useful because it draws the lines around what can be controlled more accurately than describing it as psychological.
If you call it demonic, you will think that the best way to deal with it is to stay away from the online places that drive you to irrational anger. You might be able to go to them and get the better of it; but the anger is big and scary and separate to you, so you might lose the battle. If you call it psychological, the tendency is to think that the problem is 'in your head' and that you can still go to the anger-causing places so long as you have some 'coping strategies' in place.
For me, the more psychological approach overestimates human agency, particularly agency in the face of contrary social forces; and by doing that it actually risks your real agency because you it stops you realising the drastic steps you must take to preserve it.
This is a difficult subject. Even in the case of demons, we tend to abstract them, or make them cartoonish. Anyone who has encountered the presence, or activity, of a real demon (without any lovely disguise) knows the unique terror of that experience and does not want to experience it again. It’s like discovering the person you love and utterly admire is a psychopath, manipulating you at the most intimate levels.
Even taken seriously, it’s hard to discuss in a concrete way, given so many unknowns. How does spiritual reality (demonic or otherwise) influence our own? I think we need abstractions for heuristic reasons, but at bottom your thoughts bring me back to the idea that reality is underpinned not just by forces and energies, but beings, intentions, and purposes, that are as complex and idiosyncratic as the physical people around us.
It does seem crazy. I have left open here that the demons might not be an intrinsic feature of reality so much as a feature of our strange, incredibly sociable, human minds. That wouldn't make them any less real. Language is also a product of human minds, and both it and presumably the demons have some underlying basis in neurology and behaviour.
I don't know, so I left it open; but that interpretation would be slightly less 'crazy' to most ears I think. Still pretty out there though.
The question of how demons or a spiritual being would intersect with our minds, in the hard neurological sense, is very interesting. Eric Hoel (on his Intrinsic Perspective substack) was recently speculating on why there has been very little progress in consciousness research. The possibility that one conscious mind could occupy another, as in possession, or experience directly the content of another mind, might move the field forward a little. Not that many people would want to participate in such an experiment. Let them test it on AI.
I like this (and thanks for the link.) Let me offer a thought that ties up both of our insights. What I called, for the sake of argument, Progress, Moloch, the Machine etc has another name in the Christian tradition: the adversary, the enemy, Satan. The great force that opposes the will of God and which enlists us in his work. The smaller demons which tempt us daily through our vices are his various legions. Both big and small forces are worth attending to.
Regarding your final paragraph, Orthodox elders have warned for two millennia that demons will repeatedly appear as angels to trap the unwary. Satan himself will often appear as an angel of light: as will Antichrist. We are quite easily fooled.
As you say, talking too widely about this will get you labelled as a nutter, but that is probably a badge of honour at this point.
Thanks! I did consider whether Moloch and Satan should be identified with one another; but decided to leave it open, both because this isn't a specifically Christian appeal for demonology and because I'm just not sure. It's interesting that you do readily identify them. I wondered whether different Christians would come to different conclusions on that question.
I would agree we should never entirely ignore the Machine though. I hope I didn't word that penultimate paragraph too strongly.
I know very little about Orthodoxy, but the suspicion with which the Catholic church tends to treat heavenly visions did occur to me with that last paragraph. Mostly, I was just applying being a dour northerner to even supernatural questions, though.
Well, it's probably an apocalyptic exaggeration to say 'the Machine is Satan!', not to mention a simplistic one. Still, I think we are dealing in the same energy, from a beyond-human source. That seems to be what you're getting at here: the possibility/likelihood that such sources do exist, which the world as a whole can't accept at all. In one sense, the names are beside the point. The point is whether we're in control or whether we're pawns of something/s else. That was really what I was trying to get at by tying the word 'progress' - the great abstract of modernity - to a much older understanding of spiritual warfare.
I think you were successful in doing so, and probably in a more generally palatable manner than I have done here! The question of 'whether or not we are in control' seems to link directly pride, perhaps in a distinctly modern form.
Palatable is not always good. Sometimes strong medicine is needed ...
Is it not obvious that “control” is Not the outcome and strong medicine is a daily dose of humble pie.
I have an essay coming up either today or tomorrow that parallels this, as I've been thinking particularly about the terms "ideological capture," the much-ignored fact that psychology means study of the soul, and the animist understanding of thoughts as spirits themselves. I'll definitely mention your really great piece in it.
Thanks! I'll really look forward to what you have to say on this subject, especially coming from the obviously relevant perspective of Druidism.
Amen to this. All of it.
It reminds me of Gabriel Marcel, e.g., "As soon as we accord to any category, isolated from all other categories, an arbitrary primacy, we are victims of the spirit of abstraction”
Marcel saw his entire philosophy as an, “obstinate and untiring battle against the spirit of abstraction”. I know I am surely captured by many unbeneficent abstractions. But I nonetheless, and because of being so captured, join in the battle against the abstractions which imprison us.
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/marcel/#SpirAbst
Marcel is one of those authors I have never quite got around to reading. There are so many! Glancing over the Stanford page, though, I see many parallels with Kierkegaard, and that makes me think I should really make the effort. Thanks.
I have read Marcel and struggled with him for a while now. I think he was among those who saw clearly long ago the trajectory of our disaster.
But yes, there is so much. I see the irony in how I spend so much time thinking about the catastrophe, reading about it, talking about it, commenting online and yet...it just keeps growing. I am groping towards something more than that. I don't fully know yet what that is...
It just occurred to me the reason why I struggled so long to understand Marcel. It is related to your post. I was long caught up in seeking a clear definition of "the problem" (aka our current meta-crisis) and an equally clear "solution". Then being more or less rational creatures we would just do it. I still get caught up in this way of thinking.
Marcel is anything but this. I think his way is far more human than the crypto-ideological way I have proceeded. The way we are encouraged to proceed. The legacy of the Enlightenment, perhaps? Or does it go deeper back than that?
Though at the same time I was (and am) drawn towards Taoism, Zen, Aikido and now Orthodoxy. I am still working on resolving this split. Iain McGilchrist goes a long way to resolving it, at least in theory (which is its own kind of imbalance). So when I see the need to "grope" as if in the dark, towards something else, that is what I mean. In reading Marcel I am confronted with the blockages that keep me entranced by abstraction and ideology.
It is a kind of drug I think, the intellectual contemplation of things. I've spent so many hours reading old daoist books that tell me that reading them will not help! It is a special kind of obstinacy perhaps.
Better to go and chop wood.
My tiny British friend, aka the poppet once accused me of trying to read, "all the books". She wasn't wrong.
You are reading some deep stuff, Jack! I’m glad you have the landscape and stars and prayers to help offset the abstractions.
Goodness me. This piece landed just as I’m having negative thoughts about Cartesian reason as the great benefit to humanity we assume it to be. Sorry if this sounds incoherent.
Not incoherent, I think I get the relevance.
Timely piece for me. I've been warily considering this topic for some time now.
I subscribe to Yoshi Matsumoto's substack where he delves into this topic from a Christian perspective:
https://matsumoto.substack.com/p/what-is-a-spirit-anyway
https://matsumoto.substack.com/p/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-flashdark
'Someone might ask ‘if demons, then why not angels?'
- Indeed. I've read about cases of demonic possession where the sufferer demonstrated superhuman strength. Perhaps 'hysterical strength' comes from angels? You know those cases you occasionally read about where an ordinary person somehow finds the strength to lift a car off someone who's been crushed beneath it? Maybe the source of that power is angelic?
Interesting substack, thanks for the links!
No prob!
You sold me at Anscombe.
Sociological theories love excluding human actions and purposes from the so-called serious explanations. Meanwhile, they're happy to postulate their own intangible ghosts, and attribute them powers to move human wills and bodies, while demons and fae are "superstitions".
It's always struck me as a dodgy move. But that is where we are.
Try explaining this to one of today's lay positivists and they'll accuse you of... witchcraft.
Charles Taylor has written some fascinating papers on this flaw in historical explanations and their widespread use in social sciences, as they try to do too much explaining with too little recognition of the obvious.
I don't think we're so far from the ancient Greeks as we'd like to think. We're still speaking of gods and daimons and all manner of spirits. Maybe we don't give them the metaphysical weight (consciously and explicitly) that our ancestors did, but at a psychological level it's hard to argue their influence on us.
Being an old relic of the atheist/materialist/rationalist world, part of me still wants to resist the idea of actual demons. These days, I just don't know anymore. It seems as believable as anything if not more -- at least there's precedent in old wisdom.
I have the same hesitance about actual demons, and probably for the same reasons. I paused before writing this one.
The first comment being by 'demonax' feels like some kind of omen, by the way, even if you probably took the name from the philosopher!
If you want even more synchronicity, notice the URL on my Substack domain.
It's interesting to me that the Greeks didn't invest the 'daimon' with the moral qualities that came later. I wonder what changed, or if anything changed.
The greed/capitalism point is reminiscent of The Pardoner's Tale, and the usually mis-quoted verse from 1 Timothy 6:10 "The love of money is the root of all evil". People seem to find it easier to remember and share the meme "money is the root of all evil", passing the blame away from themselves and humanity. In the Chaucer story, the money does nothing, it simply sits beneath a tree existing - the reactions of those that discover it are what leads to mayhem.
Still, worth remembering that the Pardoner's motivation may well have been "Don't get so hung up on money...give it to me".
I've been on a bit of a journey about the sacred position of "Science". (I've also learnt to be mindful about cultures where religion and magic are still being used for control of ideas, instead of the Modern reverence for Science.)
A lot of religion appears to have started in meaningful observations related to personal mental health, but become lost in placing these sacred ideas as external entities rather than names to provide common language descriptions. I think this transformation has largely occurred in translation between languages - this comes to mind with Zen - the famous idea of "searching for the mind" - I put the Chinese for this into Google translate mind becomes heart, which gives a totally different interpretation of the meaning.
Eternal damnation is just supposed to be about mental and social health in your current life, kick the talk about God and Satan out, their usefulness has been lost by changes in meaning. Sin is akin to regret, things that you've done in your past that dominate your present. God isn't the one damning you, unless you call yourself God.
I mean to write something on longer on this someday, but I hope this was coherent.
Perfectly coherent, although I disagree. I would say that a lot of religion started in meaningful observation of external entities, but that it unfortunately degenerated into therapy-language when elite cultures lost the ability to see how small a part of even the mental world is within our ability to understand and control. Mind is big, but our minds are not.
I'm afraid my knowledge of Chinese is not good and only of very old forms, but if modern Chinese uses a version of the Classical xīn (心), then there is an interesting story there. In Classical times, at least, this meant both the mental and emotional parts of the person (and is linked to the heart visually). The reason this is interesting is that in English up to about Shakespeare's time, the word 'heart' meant the same: it meant the mental and emotional parts of the person in their entirety. In English, the idea that 'heart' (the emotional and spiritual) and 'mind' (the logical and intellectual) are separate is fairly recent change to the language.
This change in English is part of that psychologising shift that I mentioned: it invites us to see the mental as a separate entity, above the emotional and bodily, rather than as part of the unity of the human animal.
It amuses me that Google translate would have been more accurate one thousand years ago than it is today! Thanks for the interesting comment.
I suppose that is really a question of where one places the limit of internal and external to one's self.
I suppose I meant external to one's personal experience.
But I suppose I also meant in the abstract of believing that one does not have the potential to control external entity - and in doing so, possibly abandoning the idea that they're able to control how such an entity affects them.
That is an interesting framing. I think, for example, describing the anger the spreads through the internet as demonic is useful because it draws the lines around what can be controlled more accurately than describing it as psychological.
If you call it demonic, you will think that the best way to deal with it is to stay away from the online places that drive you to irrational anger. You might be able to go to them and get the better of it; but the anger is big and scary and separate to you, so you might lose the battle. If you call it psychological, the tendency is to think that the problem is 'in your head' and that you can still go to the anger-causing places so long as you have some 'coping strategies' in place.
For me, the more psychological approach overestimates human agency, particularly agency in the face of contrary social forces; and by doing that it actually risks your real agency because you it stops you realising the drastic steps you must take to preserve it.
Of course, there are many shades of grey here :)
This is a difficult subject. Even in the case of demons, we tend to abstract them, or make them cartoonish. Anyone who has encountered the presence, or activity, of a real demon (without any lovely disguise) knows the unique terror of that experience and does not want to experience it again. It’s like discovering the person you love and utterly admire is a psychopath, manipulating you at the most intimate levels.
Even taken seriously, it’s hard to discuss in a concrete way, given so many unknowns. How does spiritual reality (demonic or otherwise) influence our own? I think we need abstractions for heuristic reasons, but at bottom your thoughts bring me back to the idea that reality is underpinned not just by forces and energies, but beings, intentions, and purposes, that are as complex and idiosyncratic as the physical people around us.
And it all sounds so crazy.
It does seem crazy. I have left open here that the demons might not be an intrinsic feature of reality so much as a feature of our strange, incredibly sociable, human minds. That wouldn't make them any less real. Language is also a product of human minds, and both it and presumably the demons have some underlying basis in neurology and behaviour.
I don't know, so I left it open; but that interpretation would be slightly less 'crazy' to most ears I think. Still pretty out there though.
The question of how demons or a spiritual being would intersect with our minds, in the hard neurological sense, is very interesting. Eric Hoel (on his Intrinsic Perspective substack) was recently speculating on why there has been very little progress in consciousness research. The possibility that one conscious mind could occupy another, as in possession, or experience directly the content of another mind, might move the field forward a little. Not that many people would want to participate in such an experiment. Let them test it on AI.
That does sound like the premise of a horror film!