The Science of Applied Metaphysics, Part 3

Indeterminacy, ontological flooding, and wayfinding through the Great Unknowing

In Part 1 of this accidental series, I vowed to be done with compulsively explaining why I’m venturing out onto the thin ice of applied metaphysics—writing about stuff like magic and religion as if it’s all real, without the obligatory academic distance that modern people are supposed to use for safety when handling these dangerous topics.

Maybe this is just one last attempt at the “I swear I’m not crazy” social disclaimer. Nevertheless, I think it might be useful to describe the environmental factors that led me to where I am now. I have to believe I’m not alone in this, and naming the why of it might help one or two other people find their way through the confusion a bit quicker than I did.

Unfortunately, this means that I have to break my own rule and Talk About Politics—at least a little bit.

As far as I can recollect, the genesis of this whole strange trip began in 2016. I was still politically active at that point. Still diligently reading the news; still emotionally invested in the fortunes of the Democratic Party; still getting in arguments with strangers on Facebook about What Is To Be Done. All of this was—at the time, in a way that seems quaint to me now—very important to me. It’s amazing to look back and think about how central this was to my life and my identity: I was very much a Politics Guy, once upon a time.

It's not like I was completely naive going into 2016. Throughout my formative political years, during the War on Terror, the government and the media literally got away with murder on a massive scale. There seemed to be no question that the juggernaut would keep rolling right through the 2016 elections. When Bernie Sanders was inevitably sandbagged out of the race, leaving Clinton to face off with Donald Trump, I resigned myself to four more years of familiar disappointment. Clinton was a shoe-in. Everybody knew it.

I look forward to telling my kids someday about what it was like to watch the results come in on Election Night 2016. We’d gone to a party to watch the coverage with a bunch of our lefty friends. Early on, we were spooking each other with “What if Trump wins!” and having a good laugh. Then, as the returns came in, it got deadly quiet. CNN’s electoral map started to bleed red: first in a couple of swing states (“Probably just a fluke, right?”) and then spreading relentlessly. The liquor came out. People started drinking in earnest. We left before the results were finalized. A few of our friends were already crying as we put on our coats and went home.

The next day was surreal. I had been living in one world, and was suddenly thrust into another one. For me, it wasn’t so much the horror of having Donald Trump running the country, as it was for other people. It was the realization that the whole political apparatus I had assumed was invulnerable had gotten it wrong. All the pollsters, all the commentators, all the journalists, all the Democratic Party apparatchiks—everyone had told us that Hillary Clinton’s ascension to the White House was as inevitable as the rising sun. And for the first time in my adult life, they were spectacularly, publicly, unambiguously wrong, in a way they couldn’t spin away or cover up.

It seems silly now. But I was a Politics Guy. This reality took up most of my life. The realization that it was all smoke and mirrors hit hard.

I think that’s where the cracks started to form.

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The term “epistemological crisis” gets thrown around in political circles sometimes. It’s a fancy way of saying that, at a deep level, people don’t know what to believe. Not so much the superficial realization that they’ve been lied to by someone who knows better, but feeling like they can’t even get at the facts to ascertain what reality is.

Most Americans would probably agree that we’re collectively experiencing an epistemological crisis, and that it coincided with Trump’s rise to power. The commentariat blames Trump: it’s his fault that people are losing faith in the media, and politicians, and scientists and academics. If we could just get rid of him, then everybody would shake themselves awake and recognize reality for what it truly is, as faithfully described by the selfless heroes in the political-academic establishment. According to them, all this irrational behavior—conspiracy theories about elites committing secret crimes, covering them up with the help of a complicit media—is symptomatic of the same epistemological crisis. We can go back to the way things were if we just make the right political choices.

They’re halfway correct. The political current that brought Trump to power is just a symptom. But it goes much deeper than that. Although there is an epistemological crisis underlying the Trump phenomenon, he didn’t cause it, and it will far outlast him.

This is a bell that can’t be unrung.

We live in historically uncertain times. Call it the Great Unknowing. There is a widening delta between what we’re theoretically able to understand—with all our education, our data collection, and our analytical tools—and what the average person can directly ascertain for themselves. We’ve been told that we can find our way through this crisis by gathering better information, or at least more of it, and trusting smart people to interpret it for us.

But, as it turns out, there’s a hard limit on how much information an average person can actually make use of. The cognitive dissonance between the whole sum of human knowledge and what we can actually do with it makes people feel crazy. Having more information available to us doesn’t automatically make us feel better.

This is when the Tower starts to collapse.

There’s a very real possibility that the planet will be uninhabitable within my children’s lifetime. Some scientists will tell you that the runaway feedback loop of melting polar ice and the release of methane into the atmosphere will choke out most life on Earth within the next century. Not because of anything we can control: it’s not like the threat of nuclear war, in which we can prevail on our shared humanity to prevent the bombs from being dropped. If it happens, it’ll be because of choices made by people who will die of old age before they can be held accountable.

Is this really what will happen? There’s no way to know. Nobody knows for sure.

Will artificial intelligence turn into a self-aware SkyNet and murder us all before climate change even has a chance? Some people think so.

Will Trump’s reelection be the end of American democracy and the beginning of a civil war? Or will the civil war kick off if Biden wins? Depends on who you believe.

In trying to answer these questions—all of which have real and immediate consequences for not just my life but my kids’ lives—I could start trying to sift through the mountain of data and analysis that I have access to. And I would drive myself absolutely insane long before I came to any meaningful conclusion, because nobody knows for sure. Thousands of people will earnestly tell me that they’ve done the math and produced a certifiable conclusion in one direction or another. The Very Smart People whose job it is to figure this stuff out and explain it to dummies like me will make their pronouncements. But at the end of the day, they don’t agree with each other, and as we’ve seen—sometimes they get it badly wrong, and sometimes they just lie for money. All this was already happening before we set the virtual equivalent of the magic brooms from The Sorcerer’s Apprentice loose on the Internet¹. That well is thoroughly poisoned now, as far as being a safe repository for verifiable human knowledge.

Modernity has developed an epistemological model that supposes the existence of Ultimate Truth: we can use logic and science to get at the true nature of reality, and we can all use the knowledge we’ve gained to make decisions about how to navigate our lives. That might be useful for scientists and philosophers. But most people aren’t academics. Normal people are just trying to get by from one day to the next. The vast majority of the available information has no relevance for them. Ultimate Truth has to travel a long way before it puts food on anyone’s table.

We were told that science would empower us to eradicate irrationality as if it were polio. Thereafter, we’d be living in a utopian society, perfectly managed, without wars or disease or poverty. That’s what drives the epistemological crisis: the idea that if we just get ahold of the right facts, educate ourselves and then everybody else, everything will be okay.

Unfortunately—just like polio itself—irrationality is proving stubbornly resilient.

Even when it’s functioning well, the power of the Academy has a definite limit. As John Michael Greer points out in his recent essay—in an open system (i.e. the real world) there’s a limit to the amount of complexity that technocrats can understand and manage. It looks very much like we’re still stuck in a chaotic, unmanageable world, no matter how many sacrifices we make on the altar of Science.

Meanwhile, the idea that we’re all scientists now—that we can instantaneously pull up all the world’s knowledge on our screens, and somehow use that knowledge to make our lives less precarious, if we identify the right facts—doesn’t seem to be making life better for most of us, despite the advertised claims. It seems to be driving many of us completely psychotic.

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There are three options in responding to this epistemological crisis:

1. Hold the line and keep the faith. This is, ironically, no different than the irrational religious faith that science was meant to save us from: if we trust in the existence of that Ultimate Truth, brothers and sisters, and follow the technocratic priests who commune with it, we’ll eventually make it through this desert of uncertainty and into the Promised Land. This requires us to spend much of our lives reciting the catechisms of modernity, persecuting heretics, and studying the ever-expanding canon of sacred texts, so that we might better understand the natural laws that Science has laid down for the righteous to observe. Only then can we bring the utopian Kingdom of Heaven down to Earth. Amen.

2. Cultivate a Zen-like detachment in the face of uncertainty. Buddhism has a perfectly coherent answer to epistemological crisis: recognize the fundamental unknowability of reality, and the ephemeral nature of all forms. Greet the end of the world and your own existence with equanimity. The challenge with Buddhism is always to balance the transcendence of seeing through reality while continuing to live in a physical body; with practice, it can be done. The detachment that Buddhism offers can be a great relief to the emotional strain of epistemological crisis—but it does have its pitfalls.²

3. Take an epistemological stance that allows for something like what Dr. Jack Hunter refers to as “ontological flooding”: the perspective that many different claims about the nature of reality—beyond the dominant Western ontology of material-reductionism—can be simultaneously valid. This allows us to treat a variety of different possibilities as potentially true, or true enough, and permits the type of applied metaphysics I’ve been describing in this series.

Option 3 is the most dangerous from modernity’s point of view. The pursuit of scientifically verifiable Ultimate Truth requires strict ontological discipline. The reality that science describes must be universally recognizable: for example, gravity works the same no matter where a theoretical person stands in the observable universe. If enough people refuse to uphold the conclusions of the Academy about the nature of reality, then it ceases to be a representation of Ultimate Truth, and becomes one of many possible interpretations. The consensus reality of modernity’s magic circle only holds if everyone recognizes its existence. Ontological flooding therefore represents a squishy relativism, a direct challenge to this hegemony.

It’s true that this might be unsustainable as a way to organize society. (It’s definitely incompatible with administering an imperial project.) People need some baseline consensus around what is real in order to cooperate³. Unverified personal gnosis is the bane of every neopagan study group, when anybody can mount an ontological challenge on the basis of their own supposed revelations. Science is indispensable as a way of understanding the material world—so long as it’s capable of recognizing its limits.

But I’m not worried about you, dear reader, taking any of this and running off to found a country (or a cult). We can leave the big-picture stuff to the professionals. I’m worried about our ability to manage the psychospiritual strain of living through this epistemological crisis. We need more options on the table. As a way to navigate an uncertain future, without trying to drink from the firehose of data that modernity has piped into our lives, the benefits of ontological flooding outweigh the supposed risks.

Deciding to use applied metaphysics means embracing the indeterminacy of an ontologically flooded world. There is no certainty with applied metaphysics. The way these modalities interact with material reality is fundamentally illogical and inconsistent. Does prayer work? Sometimes, but not always. Can divination see around the bend of the future? Sometimes. Can mediums and ceremonial magicians actually summon spirits? Sure, maybe, under the right conditions⁴. Can’t hurt to try.

Modernity is only too happy to declare these things heretical (and maintain its hegemony) because of that inherent indeterminacy. But indeterminacy is part of life in the present world. If we can’t move forward without perfect predictive models of the future, we’re paralyzed. Relying on nothing but verifiable facts in order to live our lives means compulsively researching and endlessly evaluating reliable sources. It drives the epistemological crisis that produces our current state of mass psychosis.

Applied metaphysics is a third path, beyond either relentlessly engaging with the pursuit of certainty or a Zen-like detachment from an ephemeral reality. Indeterminacy is built into applied metaphysics. These things might be real—or real enough. We can continue living in the present world without forcing it into a shape we can control. It’s a way to influence the world without insisting on certainty, to exercise our orenda while still respecting the orenda of the more-than-human world.

It’s a way to move forward.

Again—the question doesn’t always need to be “Is this definitely, verifiably real?” at every step. It can just be, “Where do we go from here?”

Which world do you want to live in?

1. There is a deeply satisfying Hermetic symmetry (“as above, so below”) to the microcosmic universe we’ve created through the Internet. It’s an exact analog for the world recognized by ceremonial magicians: there are now, verifiably, non-corporeal intelligences who will do things for us if we can create the right interface to summon them. Using an A.I.-inhabited Internet has its own applied metaphysics. We’ve already identified some of the Fallen. It won’t be long before the primordial soup of the virtual world births some strange new shapes, indistinctly defined, only recognizable by the gestalt tracework left behind when they’re brought into the scrying-glass of our screens. (Some people say this is already happening.) How long before we’re passing around grimoires for A.I.? “The arrival of Bing is accompanied by devil emojis and Simpsons memes. It is a powerful duke, commanding 200 legions of demons, and can make counterfeit reservations when your favorite restaurant is overbooked."

2. I’ve noticed that Buddhism is particularly susceptible to the denaturing effects of modernity. While I have a lot of respect for Buddhism, and admire its serious practitioners, I find it endlessly annoying when Western culture “translates” (i.e. appropriates) a “belief system” from a phasmatopian culture and strips out anything that challenges universal human dominion. The ghosts that Siddhartha talked about were definitely not allegorical; there are some wild metaphysics recognized within Buddhist lineages that Westerners cast off as “superstition.” What’s left in many Western Buddhist schools is a religion of best intentions. It permits rich, comfortable people to continue being rich and comfortable—untroubled by the orenda of the more-than-human world—so long as they continue attending overpriced retreats, chasing the tortoise of enlightenment, intending to be reborn as bodhisattvas and fixing all the hypocrisies they ignored in this life. (Granted, most of my prejudice might come from one bad experience I had at the local Zen center, where—I swear—the thoroughly Anglo-American abbot was putting on a Yoda/ Mr. Miyagi voice while he was teaching.)

3. Once again—I think there is a scientific approach to applied metaphysics, which recognizes the second-order cybernetics of certain concepts resonating with reality in a way that other concepts don’t. This wouldn’t happen if everything imaginary was equally unreal. Another post for another day.

4. And when they’ve built a livelihood around the practice, for better or worse, not having the right conditions sometimes means faking it for the audience in order to cash another paycheck. This doesn’t mean that the underlying phenomena are false; just that they don’t respond to the expediencies of commerce.