A fellow writer here on substack (link here)
has as his most recent publication a critical analysis of an author pushing the kind of vacuous plastic-traditional schtick I’ve been increasingly encountering coming out from the hub of empire in this time of imperial retreat. I call it ‘identity-crisis politics’, but it’s not really that. It’s a fabrication of the ruling class to basically save it’s own backside by popularising pseudo- traditional cultural woo which inevitably leads to the re-affirming of the established order. It’s been done many times before, sometimes with truly horrific consequences to the majority of ordinary people. I’ve talked about it before, so I just thought I’d republish an edited version of an essay that does point at the (often intentional) confusion between authentic and sincere engagement with both traditional and modern forms of philosophy and the kind of political-agenda driven posery so prevalent (and well funded) of late.
HISTORY, MARX, JUNG, ZEN, AND TU WEIMING
I have written about certain correspondences between Marx’s understanding of the historical dialectic process and the Yogacara Buddhist concept of the Storehouse-Consciousness (alaya vijnana). Both acknowledge a ground of stored memory/activity/’knowledge’(in very broad terms). The one, Marx’s concept, can be seen as the ground for social progressive change. The other appears/opens up through the personal entry point of the ordinary mind, and understanding it can lead to the attaining of liberation from the suffering of ignorance
With regards to issues of culture and society, I would like to make a further comparison, this time between the notion of a collective cultural unconscious presented by Carl Jung (but also to be found in Edmund Burke and his ideas about tradition) and the Zen teaching presented by the great Japanese master and philosopher, Hisamatsu Shin’ichi.
The two men met in Zurich in 1958. Hisamatsu was surprised that Jung claimed the unconscious to be both profoundly powerful in shaping the behaviour of people and individual persons, and yet as being an unknowable other. This goes against the practice of Zen which claims that liberation necessitates realisation of the nature of both consciousness and the unconscious as being empty (of independent substance/ as containing only the illusion of essential distinction and identity) and inseparable from the world process itself.
While Jung’s unconscious, in being such an unknowable other, allows for charlatans, opportunists, and political woo-merchants (regardless of what Jung intended) to impute to a traditional or collective ‘consciousness/subconsciousness’ all sorts of fantasies, fabrications, and irrationalities in general, Hisamatsu and the Zen understanding demands that these be seen through as so many further delusions in the way of realising the nature of reality itself. While Jung ploughs a field for all sorts of noisome pseudo-conservative nightshades, Hisamatsu offers the well of the clear water of insight into what really is.
I think a valuable lesson for Marxists is to be found here; the distinction between the quagmire of Jung, from which any and every sort of quasi-traditional, murky cultural bibble-babble can be drawn to garnish theory and practice with appealing aesthetics, and Hisamatsu’s clear portal to and anchor in living reality. Tradition must be changing to be a living tradition. Dredging up the ossified artefacts of past cultural expression to drape modern praxis with a garb of solemnity or venerability is not really ‘traditional’. It’s Hollywood.
The Confucian philosopher Tu Weiming has developed a concept of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’. This appears to me to be the only honest, authentic attitude to be aspired to by modern, post-information age people. As in, anybody who reads this. This does not entail the abandonment of tradition. Not at all.
Rather it understands us (all) to be rooted already in the ‘primordial ties' of family, society, culture etc. They are givens; the conditions of our emergence as people. But it recognises our outward orientation from these ‘enabling constraints’ in ever-increasingly wide circles of reciprocal relationship.
Briefly: I serve my family by being a good member of the society, I serve my society by looking towards it’s position in the international situation, I serve humanity by recognising it’s dependency on other life, I serve life by recognising it’s dependency on Earth, on nature. Only by becoming a good citizen, can I do my family justice, only by transcending nationalism can I be truly patriotic, only by transcending humano-centrism can I be a good human, only by transcending the view of sentient life can I really take care of life. Ultimately the view leads to an embrace of existence itself, what Tu calls “anthropocosmism”.
Taking material conditions and acknowledging the cultural context as it stands is meant to be the point of departure for marxists. Certainly it should be the point of departure for honest engagement in politics. There is an understandable aversion to an image of modernity prevalent in some circles.
Yes, I say understandable. Western society is cruel and increasingly feudal. The owners of the capitalist system parade empty, hypocritical poses before the public even as they make life increasingly expensive, increasingly painful, increasingly precarious and decreasingly even manageable for us. They prance about on plush forums on variety of media (which they own or fund) or blast off into space on un-ironically phallicly shaped craft. They virtue signal, appropriating/coopting the struggles of minorities or laying plans to assure their continued hegemony under impending climate collapse.
All true.
But the otherside, the side of rejecting modernity outright, is equally dark if not darker, more malign, and doubly hypocritical. I see it. I know it for what it is. That’s why I say it. Don't ‘reject modernity'. It is, strictly speaking, impossible. It's also unwise to go down that path politically.
A prescient essay indeed.
In terms of modernity, we have a movement that involves all regularly recognized aspects of life, from food to heath, and from education to politics and beyond.
Modernity is really nothing more than a single destructive agenda aggressively reinterpreted for all walks of life, therefore we really cannot be surprised when it makes every attempt to invade the territory of the deep self.
In terms of Jung, he was forever caught in the jaws of a profession that to this day is first a seeker of power, and only somewhere down the road interested in the mystery of this life. However, it is a valid criticism to point out that a discipline of knowledge and awareness fails when it enshrines what it deems unknowable.
Much of the invasion of modernity, and the reaction to it lies within the deep self, so as we can conclude, even Jung, who was probably the best we ever got won't, can't help us now.