Disjunction of Spheres
Modern Western anthropology, illness manifest :: dis-integrated man, Ted Kaczynski
Thought Bubbles
At a young age humans in the West are trained to think about operating within different discrete realms. This indoctrination is provided as a means to reduce and understand interactions and concepts at the level of the nation-state, within society itself, and right on through to the individual person. We have the Monroe Doctrine which says that the United States’ duty and involvement on the international stage is primarily concerned with the western hemisphere and everyone else should stay out of our business, and we often hear talk about spheres of influence in which key players jockey or dominate their area. Of course, we have seen the gross expansion of United States’ influence in post-WW2 to extend to the totality of our terrestrial sphere such that there can be no other, and one of the curious aspects is that we aren’t only pushing military control, but an entire faux-culture designed to bring everyone and everything into the purview of current US elite belief. The key thing here, somehow, someway, the sphere didn’t remain limited - the limiting principle was pushback from other nations and when no one can push back the sphere becomes all-enveloping.
Within society we are all familiar with that famous line from one of Thomas Jefferson’s letters, used as part of a propaganda campaign starting in the post-War 40s1. The ol’ Separation of Church and State line - enshrined nowhere except the hearts of men these days, per their indoctrination: whose original meaning as an extension of American Protestantism was to prevent the establishment of a State Church and thereby separate some spheres. We can argue about whether or not the barring of an official church state is good and simultaneously note that we have a state religion, blasphemy laws, and all the rest. We see and experience that we are expected to show fealty at a moment’s notice, and to at least cow ourselves and give lip service to how good such things are even at work which is ostensibly semi-private. These days, we behold flags alongside the Stars and Bars and know that we aren’t expected to feel pride in the United States of America; or cling to civic nationalism as our binding social identity; but rather the other flags and what they represent should be more prominent on our tongues, in our thoughts, and dwelling in our hearts.
As individuals we receive these beliefs, internalize them, apply them to our own lives and how we talk about them. This consists of a number of forms - “I let my language be salty at work, but not when I’m at home in front of the kids”, “What drugs I do in the privacy of my own home doesn’t affect anyone else”, “She’s a freak in the sheets and a lady on the streets”, or “Politics and religion are things I don’t talk about at work and I’m running late for a mandatory DEI training.” We think of ourselves in the West during the modern day as detached intellects floating around in meat machines. A discrete CPU driving hardware which we can load different programs into on the fly in order to produce what we desire on the outside.
We know from experience that maintaining the separation of spheres requires action to keep it from swelling to engulf as much as it can manage or it will overrun and control everything. We begin to understand why when we consider the above forms of the individual and how human nature works.
The Tripartite and Warped Soul
A premise broadly accepted across the history of humanity and which bears repeating in this day and age: man is a creature who consists of body and soul - or perhaps we say man is embodied spirit. This ancient notion that we are more than matter is where we begin. Christianity holds that both the body and the soul of man were damaged from their intended state, and that the material body of man was blessed to die. The nature of the soul2, in Christian thought3, is that of a three parts consisting of reason, the nous, and senses. Reason maps to what we tend to think of the intellect or mind; the nous is our soul’s eye or our heart; and the senses should go without explanation but are necessary for us to interact and live in the material (material) world4.
If these things are corrupted or damaged in some way, as is the rest of man, what might be some effects? What are the effects of a soul in a state of imbalance? All eyes turn to Theodore Kaczynski for the example of reason run amok and the dangers that it can pose. The infamous Harvard graduate in mathematics with an established and tested g factor putting him firmly on the right hand of the bell curve worked his way through the problems that he saw of modernity and reached the only reasonable conclusion that his intellect alone could deliver. His thinking about these problems of how much external control man is under, the totalizing nature of the modern industrial world, and his being informed by Jacques Ellul’s writings5 all lead to his belief that the system must be torn down. Given that we live in an age of propaganda the question became how to alert and conscript enough people that such a thing could become a possibility. Ted decided on sending bombs through the mail which sounds like the actions of a maniac, and were decidedly much more of a cold calculation. Sociopaths aren’t maniacal and they will believe that a few lives now are worth the cost down the road for humanity. Good thing no one near the levers of power could possibly think the same way or we might be in trouble.
Thankfully, modern society favors not sociopathy and total rule-by-intellect for the everyman, but instead pushes the other two aspects of the soul forth for primacy. We are constantly assailed by advertisements, plied to view pornography, and driven to partake of that which is pleasing of the senses. When this begins to dominate the soul, and thus the man, we experience it and know it as addiction6. The pornography addict is always seeking the next thing to make him feel as he did before that same hit even though he knows it will leave him empty and unfulfilled. Perhaps that emptiness can be filled if he just finds the right starlet to jack it to: the next thing which can make him feel good for the moment. Ever down the rabbit hole in pursuit of pleasure that is never enough.
The third piece is the simple soothing of the blind heart which cannot distinguish or discern between what is True and Good for the self and the world and what feels good to itself. We understand this when we see it manifest in other people in grotesque ways: “Yeeted another set of teets” and feeling proud about the mutilation of the body in an attempt to placate a pair of souls - one’s own and another misguided one. All manner of horror can be elevated to a realm wherein the person performing the horror feels not only justified but righteous in the doing.
In every case the tendencies of the sick soul come to overwhelm the man and lead them down the path to destruction. This reveals to us something else about the nature of man. All our actions, every moment that we choose, all of our strivings, are constantly shaping the entirety of the being. Do we choose to shape ourselves as an intellectual and cut ourselves off from our hearts and disdain what our senses tell us? Or put our heart first and do what feels right and good even if it means we hurt our fellow man and our relationships with them? Perhaps we choose the easiest path and sedate our souls with pleasure after pleasure?
A Blessing - the Hope of Integration
We often speak of the Church as a place to heal the sick. In our liturgy we proclaim that we partake of the Eucharist in order for the healing of soul and body, and to save sinners, of whom I am the first. When dismissed we are called to go out into the world and transform it, as we are called to bring ourselves into harmonic resonance with God’s energies filling us so we are to fill the earth.
In Christianity there is no separation of the spheres. There is not an area of one’s life that should be lived cut off from everything else, and today we are trained to believe and act otherwise. Seek ye first the Kingdom of God is a calling to us to re-orient our lives at every moment. The question that faces us is how to take the first step on the path after we exit liturgy and re-enter the world. How do we keep ourselves from false compartmentalizing - remembering that all our actions shape the entire being all the time either toward God or toward further destruction?
My humble proposal: we perform the Sign of the Cross. This is simultaneously a blessing, marking, prayer, and invitation. It is an act which is performed with the whole of body and soul. We command our body, our reason gives way, the heart is called to attention, and the senses are filled with our motion. The Sign of the Cross is formed, usually, over our heart which is the center of our being7. I am a person given to letting my reason drive me, and who struggles to have compassion and love such that I am able to understand and relate to my fellow man in the manner which is most beneficial to them. I have taken especially to making the Sign of the Cross over my forehead for this reason (hah, hahahaha). At work I must stop myself and perform the action before firing off a terse, if technically correct, reply to someone because I forget that my goal in all of life is the same even though work itself would prefer I believe otherwise. Indeed, society would prefer I keep my life and belief about man and what we ought to be doing confined to my house, to my private worship, and lean upon the notion that we are to be in the world but not of the world in the same corrupt manner that we are to maintain the separation of Church and State.
The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was making you think actions in one aspect of your life were distinct from another.
If we believe the account recorded in Libido Dominandi this was an effort to thwart Roman Catholics, but we know that it was an effective wedge to dissociate the ideas that Christianity should have a role in our society and that it persists to this day
Or spirit, or whichever term you want for that which is embodied and motivates us in our moments of existence
This is going to be basic more out of my lack of reading and not out of the lack of the Church Fathers’ writings
As material girls, of course
Ellul is cited with some regularity
Not meaning physical dependency as in the manner in which I am physically addicted to caffeine and suffer withdrawals/become more unbearable to be around than usual
Which is easy to forget given that in the modern day we think of the center of our being as reason even when most of the time our actions give that the lie