Seeing the Light
“I wish, that I could really tell you,
All the things that happened to me
And all that I have seen,
A world full of people their hearts full of joy,
Cities of light with no fear of war,
And thousands of creatures with happier lives,
And dreams of a future with meaning and no need to lie,
No need to hate,
No need to hide.”
“Keep it Dark” is a song from the prog rock/pop band Genesis. I’m a huge fan of the band up to 1978’s “And Then There Were Three.” From then on, pop took over and the Peter Gabriel and Steve Hackett days became an increasingly distant memory. The band became less musically and lyrically interesting as they became more pop. But they became more popular and attracted a huge new audience, who enjoyed themselves immensely. Good luck to them, I say. I can appreciate both sides of the divide so much that the divide ceases to exist. There are still interesting moments in the later incarnation of the band, if you look for them. I enjoyed 1980's "Duke" very much, I have to say. I’ve been revisiting the music I associate with the years 1983-1984. This was the year I caught up with “Abacab” from 1982. This was when Genesis became explicitly pop. On this album is this very catchy song, “Keep it Dark.” I thought it musically slight at the time, but it had a repetitive hook that stayed with me. Listening back, though, I paid more attention to the lyrics than I had the first time round. As a sometime Platonist and all-time Dantista, I couldn’t help be struck by parallels with Plato and Dante, telling of a journey and a vision of a possible better life that couldn't be told in such a way as to be believable. The pilgrim journey, we should know, has to be undertaken in person, its vision apprehended first-hand as experiential truth. But tales like Dante’s Comedy encourage us to undertake the journey in the first place, taking us from the dark in which we are submerged and into the light (and yes, I know that life is both dark and light and all shades, and that the compost of life serves a purpose. I also know that the light is better).
“Keep it Dark” is a soft-rock song that tells us about possibilities for the fulfilled and happy life that we are supposed to lead, but some would have us not know about. The question is: who do we believe? It’s up to us to answer that question in the end. If the world is, as those adhering to a disenchanting science tell us, objectively meaningless, purposeless, and valueless, then any meaning, purpose, and value life has is a matter of existential choice and nothing more. If I choose to see the world as objectively meaningful, purposeful, and valuable, then that is my choice, and those who insist that life is nothing but existential choice cannot say that I am wrong. By their own subjectivist criteria, they cannot deny me my choice to affirm the existence of an objectively good and valuable world. The fact that they do – the insistence that there is no God, no immortal soul, no Heaven above and no Hell below – reveals them to be breaking their own existential premise. And holding that there is some objective truth of some kind after all. What is it? Entirely physical? Moral? Affirming the world to be objectively good, and holding human beings to be a part of this good world, my choice is not arbitrary, in the way that the choices of those destined to choose, impose, and project value and meaning in a meaningless, purposeless, and valueless world are; such choosers can only make choices that are arbitrary and that are therefore ultimately empty and unsatisfying. They know it. They are the ones down, depressed, and disturbed by the burden of seeking wholeness amidst emptiness, not I. To whom and to what do you cry? To whom and to what do you address your complaints? ‘Nature’ does not care. According to a disenchanting science, there is no inherent point or purpose to nature. There is no design. The only point to the game of life is to stay in the game. This is like playing football without goalposts at either end and hence without goals to be scored. Sooner or later those rushing around chasing the ball will stop and ask why they are running, only to receive the answer there is no reason. They will then gradually slow down and stop in exhaustion before the sheer pointlessness of it all. I make this argument to underline the impossibilities of living on a destinationless journey.
When asked if he believed in God, Einstein replied: “I believe in Spinoza's god, who reveals Himself in the lawful harmony of the world, not in a god who concerns himself with the fate and the doings of mankind.” Philosopher Bertrand Russell described Spinoza as ‘ethically supreme.' I wrote a 100 page text on Spinoza as part of my PhD research into ‘rational freedom.’ I was very much an adherent of Spinoza. But I always felt that there was something missing. There was. What Spinoza described, and what Einstein affirmed – this God/Nature as the universe unfolding harmoniously in indifference to human beings – was only half a God, and the easy half to boot. This was the God of the physical universe, the natural laws and processes studied by scientists. The tougher half is the human half. Human beings are messy things, with views of their own, and actions of a relatively autonomous species that can work with or against nature, physical nature, one’s own nature, the nature of other humans and of other beings and bodies. Physical nature may well be indifferent to all of that, but human beings never are and never can be without becoming submerged in an utterly unliveable and inhuman existence. Unfortunately, I do detect a strong inhumanism in the views of people who seek to model affairs in the human social world on the ‘laws of nature.’ Should that ever occur, then the indifference of nature will be reproduced as an interpersonal indifference in human society. Civilised life will not last long should that occur. I therefore affirm the God of Love, the God of personal relationships and care and attention and thoroughly reject indifference and impersonalism as a wholly false philosophy when extended from things to persons.
To return to “Keep it Dark,” the song’s lyrics describe a man who has been to the future and has seen a bright and happy world where everyone is filled with joy, where cities are filled with light, where there is no fear of war, all exploitation has ceased, and all creatures live happy lives.
So what’s wrong with that?
Nothing as far as I can tell. So why do people find it unbelievable? More to the point, why are people so fearful and neurotic as to believe the worst first and most of all and the best last and least of all? I am currently writing a book on the peerless poet-philosopher Dante Alighieri, hoping to publish in time for the 700th anniversary of his death in 2021. It has to be significant that the Inferno receives by far and away the most attention, the Paradiso hardly any. Many consider the Paradiso boring. They can see themselves easily in the Inferno, but not at all in the Paradiso. Dante portrayed an overwhelming vision in the Paradiso, but many never make it out of the Inferno. Dante’s genius is to have made the frankly unbelievable incredibly believable, rendering a fulfilled and happy future the object of our willing. But you have to make the journey, by personal moral effort. The lesson is that people cannot simply be told the truth – any truth – they have to become truth-seekers in the first and experience the truth on their journey. They have to be ‘turned’ to and by truth in precisely the way that Dante describes being 'turned' at the end of the Paradiso. Keep that truth passive and you may as well ‘keep it dark,’ inert, lifeless, a dead letter. The truth of physical things is not the whole truth, and not even true in itself, seeing as it has lost its relation to the vital truth of meaning, purpose, and value. In that severance, truth becomes a distortion, even a perversion, a denial of inherent goodness. What we are being given here is not the truth about nature but ‘nature’ reified through the voice of those claiming special insight. Such people are the most blinkered of all.
“Keep it Dark” is the old tale of breaking free from the chains of illusion to see the life outside of Plato’s cave, the life lived in the light of the Sun. That, in turn, may symbolize many things. Descartes argued that we need to train the cognitive faculties so as to achieve intellectual illumination through the use of the ‘light of nature’. Spinoza reasoned some such thing, too. I once believed in that very thing, but now see its insufficiency. I hold truth-seeking to be a theological concept. Without God, human beings have a natural tendency to deceive others and to deceive themselves. Man without God is not the rational animal but the rationalizing animal. It is God that draws being outwards to others and to the world, to something greater than the asserting, choosing, imposing ego. Without God, human beings curve in on themselves. So I see living life in light of the Sun in Dante’s sense of the eternal life promised by the Paradiso. That doesn’t entail a passive waiting for a greater life to come but living under the aspect of eternity in the here and now. This fulfils every requirement of those who enjoin us to ‘seize the day’ and enjoy life whilst we may but with this important difference – it can supply cogent substantive reasons so to do, which is something that those asserting existential choice in a meaningless and valueless universe cannot do. The existential choice of the former – choose life, love, and light – is based on something substantive in a way that the existential choice of the latter most decidedly is not.
Once the man returns in the song, he feels the need to lie about his journey and his vision of a better life and to “keep it dark." People wouldn’t believe it, and in their neurotic condition, wouldn’t want to believe it. It would also upset the authorities and the neurotic order they impose and are concerned to reproduce. The easiest way to reproduce such an order is to have people themselves become active agents of their own repression, inhibition, and suppression. Having lived a joyless life for so long in divided societies structured around the exploitation of life, labour, and nature, people are indeed inclined to believe the worst of life and people and to disbelieve and actively reject the best that life could be. The man in the song understands this and so claims that he was kidnapped by thieves who wanted to take his money. It’s a tawdry little lie, but one that is eminently believable. People will take the most pitiable of lies to be the one and only truth, closing their eyes and ears to the greatest truth of all. The cover of the single depicts the three wise monkeys. But the man didn’t need to lie. Tell the truth and people in their wretched state wouldn’t believe it anyway. The powers-that-be know that the best way to suppress the people is to have them do it to themselves. And they do. In the name of ‘realism.’ They are ‘happy’ enough to be back home and making do with so little, eagerly embracing a normalcy that is all wrong and brings about their wretched condition.
“It seems strange to have to lie,
About a world so bright.
And tell instead a made-up story,
From the world of night.”
Still, it doesn’t do to give people ideas. The authorities would do all the silencing they need to do with their big lies. So we have this general complicity with the view that life is hard and meaningless, a competitive pursuit of power over against others, and then you die. Each individual member of the species serves the species and then dies. And then the species itself dies, like 99% of all species that have ever existed. There is no God, no meaning and no purpose; there is no Hell and no Heaven, and no objective moral standard by which to guide actions and evaluate competing claims. One accumulates power or gets accumulated. And all go to oblivion. And none of it matters.
All that there is in this view is a valueless, purposeless, and meaningless world upon which each imposes their will and projects their fantasy, to no end other than the ego and its own.
And that view is empty and profoundly unsatisfying. It doesn’t ring true to human beings still on nodding terms with their soul for the very reason it isn’t true. The people who present this disenchanted view as being in line with the scientific approach to the world are mystified as to why it produces Hell on Earth. It reproduces the indifference and impersonalism of a ‘Nature’ reified by the all-too-human voice of science – a particular understanding of science at a particular time and place – as the model for life and society. That is the mechanisation of the mind that prepares the way for the mechanisation of life that William Blake warned of with his ‘dark Satanic mills.’
Human beings are not only social beings; they are spiritual beings. That is fact, that is truth, that is reality. Imposure of meaning by way of wilful choice and will doesn’t bringer order to the chaos of “Earth’s mess” at all, merely creates further mess and disorder in the competition of human wills. Without an objective standard, the rival claims of truth and meaning of human beings are without peaceful, rational, moral evaluation and resolution. Such a view describes a sophist world of rival gods. Each is able to choose the good as he or she sees fit, but without an objective standard of evaluation these rival gods may as well be devils – there is no way of telling them apart. The good has fractured and become subjective.
I am thinking here of Grayson Perry’s “Recipe for Humanity,” a ‘contemporary’ embroidery which features a poem by Perry which sites his four givens of existence:
“You will die, you are alone,
There is no god upon his throne,
Impose thy will upon earth’s mess,
Else your life is meaningless,
No hell below, no heaven above,
Live life now and act with love.”
Many find this poem sane and sober. They also find it truthful. I find it tired and empty, delivering the now long worn-out ‘truth’ that the only meaning to life is one individuals impose on the Earth. There is no great insight here. We have been there and being doing it for a long time now. How’s that going? The problem with a statement like this is that people who agree with it tend to presume that reasoning is symmetrical and that everyone will choose a good they would choose, and act with love accordingly. People don’t. There are other huge problems with the sentiment, too. Love doesn’t sanction and validate in this way. Dante’s Inferno is full of people who loved the wrong things or who loved the right things too little or too much. Love needs to be properly ordered to true ends. A view which leaves everything to individual subjective will and choice lacks any sense of true ends; it has no final cause in Aristotle’s sense. It has no God. For want of that plan of justice, individuals will be led by their own untutored natural inclinations not to happiness but to the Inferno.
Hence I work in the virtue tradition. Alasdair MacIntyre has written well here:
“Virtues are dispositions not only to act in particular ways, but also to feel in particular ways. To act virtuously is not, as Kant was later to think, to act against inclination. It is to act from inclination formed by the cultivation of the virtues.”
There are moral virtues and intellectual virtues. The creation of the happy habitus in which the virtues can be known, learned, practised, and exercised would, I would suggest, create a disposition in which individuals would be inclined the believe - and strive to become - the best that they could be and the best that life could be, shunning the worst and not being happy to settle for the wretched and the mediocre, no matter how normalized.
If there is no God, then choosing a subjective good and imposing it as a matter of will – checked only in the competition with other wills – is all that human beings could ever do. This view is riddled with anomalies. To take the first and easiest, if there is no God then there has never been any God, so there is no big sea-change involved in accepting this view of ethical subjectivism. Nothing changes. The only thing is that some are now feeling free to tell those who continue to believe in God and affirm an objective morality and truth that they have no grounds. So what? If morality and truth are simply ‘made-up,’ conventional, then the same criticism applies to any views they choose to hold. The only logical position here is a consistent and ruthless nihilism. That, I would suggest, deteriorates in short order into a solipsism in which communication and exchange cease. An excommunication, then. Such a world is untenable.
In the absence of an authoritative moral referent and standard, individuals don’t have to “act with love.” There is little point in issuing that imperative, it is morally meaningless in these terms. It is merely a pious wish, lacking the qualities of an imperative. That last line is plainly added to make people feel better, offering up something that we can all agree with. But acting with love is nowhere near as easy as it seems. The love of money is the root of all evil. We can love idols, we can love the wrong things, we can love the wrong way. Love has to be properly ordered to its true end. That’s the lesson delivered by Dante’s Comedy.
How do you compel individuals to make the right choices? How can you determine 'right choices' if there are no objective standards? How, in the absence of an objective standard, can you even differentiate between right and wrong choices and actions in the first place? Individuals in a sophist world are free to choose the good as they like. In such a world, ethics dissolves into subjective will and preference and all the facts and figures in the world that you may cite are powerless to dissuade those who have chosen their own god. The problem is that in relativizing the Absolute, human beings have come to absolutize their myriad competing relative goods and brook no opposition to them. When taken into the political world – a world of disagreement and dissensus – this theologizing of the assertive egoistic will leads to a religious war between the righteous and the damned. The demonization of the other brings about not the universal peace and brotherhood and sisterhood contained in the promise of humans taking morality into their own hands. Human beings come in many shapes and size. Within asymmetrical power relations, the strong prevail over the weak. This is a recipe not for universal brotherhood but for universal hatred.
The song “Keep it Dark” came from the 1982 album “Abacab.” In the DVD interview accompanying the 2007 re-release of the album, writer Tony Banks explained that
"the idea was that this character had to pretend that he'd just been robbed by people and that's why he'd disappeared for a few weeks, and in fact what had happened [was] he'd been to the future and gone to this fantastic world where everything was wonderful and beautiful and everything... but he couldn't tell anybody that, because no one would believe him and the powers that be kept him silent."
I am not inclined to remain silent on the better world that is possible, nor on the conditions of attaining that better world. I don’t keep it dark. I have received quite a lot of kick-back for the views expressed above. Individuals are, of course, free to believe whatever they like. Neurotics will believe the worst and some may even cling to the (fading) hope that something good to come of it. They don’t act like they believe it, though, hence the shrill tone of their voices.
Different 'rulers,' the same mad, meaningless mechanarchy, the same problems, the same solutions, the same road to nowhere. But the difference in personnel makes enough people happy as to ignore the fundamental sameness. That pretence sedates people as they go to an inevitable end clinging to a normalcy that doesn't work as it ought.
We need to be careful in politics not to be so busy blaming and abusing the monster so as to miss what its actions reveal about the monstrosity of the system it serves.
Of course, that’s all life could ever be in an objectively meaningless, valueless, and purposeless world in which you are enjoined to impose your will and choice and project egoistic fantasies and indulge transitory pleasures. Of course, if that's all that there is, it is all arbitrary and empty, and cautions to ‘act with love’ are really a farewell note. Love is out of fashion when solipsism holds all the trump cards. And I am sure everyone likes to believe that they act with love whenever they choose the good as they see fit. Whether they do or not depends upon what standard - if any - we recognize as greater than the will.