Humanity's Divine Nature: Why Value is Real, Eternal, and Evolving

I was responding to a view videos in this podcast, including:

* Marc Gafni criticizing Yuval Harari on Aubrey Marcus’ podcast.

* Brendan Graham Dempsey and Layman Pascal discussing the metamodern meaning of naturalism: Thinking ‘Nature’

The video conversations above are in varying ways about the relationship between human beings and nature—both external nature, as modern science has conceived of it, and internal nature, as modern art, literature, psychology, and spirituality have conceived of it. These videos include Marc Gafni on Aubrey Marcus’s podcast, engaging in a mock debate with Yuval Harari and attempting to refute Harari’s basic claim that value is fictional. In Harari’s view, concepts including human rights, money, corporations, God—all of these are made-up stories. All our political ideologies, whether communist or capitalist, are likewise just made-up stories. Harari seems to be foisting a relativistic, nihilistic, anti-philosophy upon the common mind. He is very popular: his books have sold millions of copies, he speaks at the World Economic Forum every year, and he appears to be taken up very easily by the zeitgeist, by the popular intellectual culture of our times.

Gafni, a philosopher and spiritual practitioner, delivers a rebuttal to Harari’s claim that value is unreal. Gafni reaffirms that we have no scientific or religious reason—no philosophical reason—to deny the reality of value, and in fact the weight of the whole history of human reflection on these questions, for the majority of our history, has always been to affirm the ontological status of value. Gafni will admit that there have been attempts to defend the objectivity of value that became justifications for violence and even the extermination of those who denied or did not uphold that value. He emphasizes the need for a shift from a monotheistic conception of value to a pluralistic conception, where we are always relating within a field of values. This field is evolving; it is an eternal field that is evolving with us because we are participants in its creation. Yet there would not even be an “us” unless that eternal value existed in us—unless it inspired our learning, our deepening relationality, our pursuit of intimacy. We are inspired by the eternal field of value to enrich the eternal. The eternal would not be freeing us into time unless there was something to be achieved here and now, again and again, always different. Eternity is in love with the productions of time, as Blake put it.

Another conversation I watched featured Brendan Graham Dempsey and Layman Pascal discussing metamodern conceptions of nature. They spoke about romanticism and how it characteristically reaches for a more integral sense of the connection between mind and nature. This made me think of Wordsworth—of his famous poem “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.”

I visited Tintern Abbey when I traveled through the UK in 2010. I was a kind of eco-poetic tourist visiting this site because I was inspired by reading Wordsworth’s poem and also by paintings of Tintern Abbey (especially J. M. W. Turner’s) from hundreds of years ago, when it still had all this ivy growing on it. The Park Service (or whatever organization oversees such sites in Britain) removed all that ivy at some point in the early 20th century, around 1914. Wordsworth, Coleridge, and other Romantic artists, painters, and poets who traveled to this site remarked that the ivy’s presence, draping the ruins, was especially enchanting.

But the thing is, already by 1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge were already eco-poetic tourists. Romanticism always had this self-reflexive irony built into it. There was a long tradition, going back to the beginning of the 18th century and even earlier, of people traveling to this ruin to take in its aesthetic romance. The abbey was built in the 12th century for the Cistercian order, but it was shut down under the reign of Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries. The lord who was given control of that land sold off the lead from the roof and let the building decay. By the 18th century, people visited it to experience the beauty of this mixture of nature and human architecture—this sacred cathedral crumbling away, overgrown by plants, ivy, swallowed back into the earth in a sense, but still standing strong and clearly bearing the marks of intelligence on Earth, rendered in stone as a response to the real dome—the heavenly dome—above, with its sharply defined constellations of meaning.

There is value radiating down from the sky, and the cathedrals we have built all over the planet—temples, mosques, other forms of sacred architecture—are a response to that value radiating to Earth. It is a response of the human I to radiate back, not just a reflection of that value but a true re-creation of it. We enjoy what we are given by the gods, and then we re-create and become as the gods are. In fact, the human being is both natural and divine (for me, these words are interchangeable, so I guess Spinoza is right), and we must come back into touch with the cosmos—our own nature is integral with external nature, cosmos and psyche are not two. Then we may intuit and participate in the world-soul. We will do this by partaking in the call-and-response of creation and the incarnational way the divine creates such that we see how we, living beings with physical and etheric and astral bodies, are made in the image of a Divine One. Nature is the image of God; nature is the body of God as well. “Incarnational” means that God is in theorganism, and theorganism is an evolving process, forever enriching both God’s eternal vision and God’s evolving world-soul. God does not only see; God feels, responds to, and becomes passive before the creative onrush of our self-differentiating pluriverse.

Wordsworth was clearly having an experience of communion with nature and with himself, with his own memory of being in nature. The Harmony of the harmonies was sounding through his, what I would call, “auto-cosmological relationship” to the ground of being. This term “auto-cosmology” comes out of the work of Brian Swimme and Carolyn Cooke at the California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS), where I teach. Auto-cosmology is what Wordsworth is doing in his nature poetry; it is what Dante does in The Divine Comedy; it is what Augustine does in the Confessions. It is the human being trying to relate themselves to the cosmos as the cosmos.

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One paradox I found in the Aubrey Marcus podcast is the way in which Gafni is rightly critical of Harari for denying that human beings have any agency or freedom—Harari argues that we are basically just machines determined by various forces and embedded in memetic networks, overpowered by all the fictions we invent to bind our civilizations together. Gafni wants to refute Harari’s scientific materialism and nihilistic relativism, which I think is an important task. Harari’s ideas, in my view, are quite damaging. But it is not just that materialism is false; it makes itself true. I have to credit Rudolf Steiner for opening my eyes to this. It would be bad enough if all we had to do was theoretically refute materialism, but the problem is that once people take it seriously—once they believe nature is a machine and the human is a machine—they begin to surround themselves with machines that treat us like input-output machines. Then we become, in effect, conditioned through the “Skinner box” logic of social media algorithms on the internet.

If we do not recognize a real field of value, then we cannot help but descend to the level of machines. This is what Gafni worries about in terms of the technosphere, social media algorithms, and how easily (despite our potential for freedom and creative agency!) humans can be manipulated by machine learning algorithms. There is a “value alignment” problem with AI: we have to give AI some sense of what is important—of ultimate significance. But if Harari is right and everything is relative, then there is no solution to the alignment problem. Human beings will become pets of the superintelligent machines or of the elites who control that superintelligence.

Gafni insists that we are free, that human beings possess genuine agency and want to express it so as to enter into ever more intimate relationships with others. It is always agency and communion; always autonomy and communion. The law is never fixed. The self-law-giving, self-legislating being that we are as autonomous organisms is always in relationship to and embedded in a network of agreements with others. When we believe in materialism and try to build a civilization on it, we make it true by creating and surrounding ourselves with machines that degrade us to a machine level. It would be simpler if we only had to theoretically refute materialism; instead, we must also ethically and practically show it to be untrue—by exemplifying the power of spiritual ideals that recognize death is not the end (in every sense of end), and that human existence is meaningful because we have an important role to play in cosmogenesis and the process of creation.

Harari would deny all of that as mere fiction. He’s not wrong: there are ways in which we truly are creatures of symbol and story, with the capacity imaginatively to construct alternative realities or simulations. Such constructions can sometimes distract us from the True, the Good, and the Beautiful. We must proceed with caution. Still, saying that value is real means that it is part of our perception; it inheres in nature and in our bodies. Value is not merely a human cultural construct. Human culture itself is an emergent product of the values that we inherit from the cosmos.

Materialism poses a danger to our mental and ecological health because it attempts to make itself true. When people believe there are no cosmic values, no real field of values, then we become brain-bound capitalists and reduce the entire world to a competitive market economy, a mere struggle for existence among separate, selfish individuals. We forget that to be an individual is already to be in relationship, to be undivided from others. That relationality undermines any sense of selfishness even being possible.

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