Kate Carl and the Culture of War
Paul Kingsnorth, whose new book Against The Machine is due out in late-September, is right: the West continues to put civilization ahead of an authentic Christianity, one that honors the teachings of its founder. What is more, attempts to save our civilization through politics, wealth and power, will definitely fail. Writing in First Things, he argues Jesus does not “fight wars other than those that go on in the heart.” We already have our orders. Love your neighbor. Love your enemy. Love God. Do not resist evil. Rule by serving.
It’s also true that this “strange, dissolving, increasingly nihilistic moment we are living through” is bringing about an “inversion.” That said, conservatives and classical liberals would do well to avoid jumping to conclusions about the role of progressivist politics in the upheaval. Having a symbolic purpose, the left’s role in the culture war is something Jesus would likely approve of.
Of the numerous politicians, billionaires and podcasting pundits who set out to fix things, very few ask if the plight of Western civilization concerns our refusal to acknowledge human limits. It doesn’t occur to these well-meaning men that history is calling on them to finally admit that what man most wishes to know – be that about God, truth, beauty or goodness – lies beyond his preferred way of relating to the world.
The founders of Western rationalism knew that reason, or logos, isn’t able to go “all the way.” Socrates was the smartest man in Athens because he embraced his own ignorance. Similarly, sections of his dialogues, notes historian Richard Tarnas, indicate that Plato believed “the imaginative faculty, both poetic and religious, was as useful in the quest for attaining knowledge” as logic or empiricism. Hence his use of the Allegory of the Cave to convey the essence of his influential Theory of Forms, the notion there exists an ultimate reality more real and consequential than that revealed to the senses.
Love is the same. I could attempt to account for why a particular woman – let’s call her Kate – is the one for me. Her beautiful alabaster skin and delicate hands. Her no-fuss, otherworldly elegance. Her kindness. That look she gives me, the one no one else gets to see. When all is said and done, however, a complete explanation eludes me, the mystery only serving to strengthen the belief we are meant to be.
“That which needs to be proved cannot be worth much,” quipped Nietzsche in Twilight of the Idols.
None of this is intended to deny the importance of human knowledge or the gains of organized progress. It concerns the enigmatic relationship between interdependent counterparts, a subject dear to the ancient Greeks and touched on by musician and compatriot Nick Cave in Faith, Hope and Carnage, a series of transcribed conversations with Irish journalist Seán O’Hagan about love, grief, loss and religion.
It’s not like you have any real control over the creative process. In fact, it’s almost the opposite: you have to surrender in a way and really just let yourself be led by the secret demands of the song. In a sense, it’s the not-knowing and not being totally in control that is so invigorating.
Now, that said, for that magic thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can’t just be a couple of guys who don’t know what they are doing, sitting around bashing shit out.
Life is a balancing act. Matter and spirit. Order and chaos. Head and heart. Logos and mythos.
“Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” said Jesus in Mark 12:17, “and to God the things that are God’s.”
Carl Jung had a keen interest in our contra-sexual inner personalities. He referred to the feminine aspect in men as anima. Representing qualities like intuition, emotion and nurturing, it provides a bridge to the unconscious, giving a man the emotional resilience needed for healthy relationships. If undeveloped, he is likely to be moody or sentimental. The Swiss psychologist named the masculine principle in women animus, associating it with conventional male attributes such as critical reasoning, assertiveness and ambition.
Integrating the feminine is difficult for us men, not least because it means accommodating mythical and subjective understandings of life and love that can’t really be argued with. Our categorizing mind, naturally fond of its either-or dialectic, must leave space for contemplation, or theoria, a state of not-knowing that allows us to receive direct, spiritual insight. If not, accumulated thoughts and sense perceptions from the world of appearances crowd out our deeply felt connection to truth, beauty and goodness, Plato’s archetypes that order physical reality yet also stand beyond it.
The logical repercussions of this are significant.
If he wants to be whole, Western man is obliged, after securing a solid foundation of objective knowledge and material comfort, to let go of the need to know and allow opposing parts to come together in gestalt. Moreover, should he not affirm this both-and equilibrium, which is achieved, in effect, by doing as Jesus suggested and putting heart before head, he can expect to be tested, both intellectually and spiritually. Hence the culture war. I’ve also experienced it personally. Though painful and often disorienting, I can nevertheless attest that the ordeal is for our very own good.
On an otherwise dull Tuesday in January 2019, Kate told me, after 11 years together, three of them married, that she was leaving.
To be sure, our situation had been less than ideal for a while, but there was nothing in the sackable offense category, such as adultery. An awful falling out with my family had left me in a serious rut that then spiraled into acute financial distress at a time when Kate was laboring under the merciless demands of postgraduate study. Others were equally shocked by her decision, especially after she declined to defend it or give me a chance to change her mind. Though conflict and sadness were at times evident, Kate packed up her possessions, handed me the spare keys to our rented townhouse and drove off in her black Toyota hatchback.
I went and stayed with my friend, Dave. We stood around in his kitchen for hours, analyzing events, trying to piece together a rational basis for how an incredibly smart woman, who had loved me so completely for so long, could make such a rough choice. The late-evening discussions solved nothing, while my texts and calls to Kate went unanswered. Following months of confusion, anger and heartache, I left Australia and took a job offer in New Zealand.
An old Hollywood movie was instrumental in helping me get to the other side of my dark night of the soul.
In An Affair to Remember, Terry (Deborah Kerr) and Nickie (Cary Grant), both in so-so relationships, fall in love on the return leg of a Mediterranean cruise. They agree to rendezvous atop the Empire State Building, “the closest thing to heaven” in New York city. If they’re both there on July 1st, Nickie will propose.
Nickie immediately breaks it off with his rich fiancé and works to establish himself as an artist. After six months apart, rushing from her taxi to meet him, a still-smitten Terry is involved in an accident and taken to hospital. Potentially crippled, she decides not to contact Nickie and explain her no-show.
Though hurt and bewildered, Nickie manages to keep his injured ego in check. The former playboy retains his sense of humor, never giving into the impulse to sulk, lash out or renew ties with women who asked very little of his manly soul. He continues to trust in the dream, unwilling to let reason subvert the feeling that Terry and him have something that can’t be proved.
A further six months on and Nickie bumps into Terry at the theatre, wrongly concluding she is back with her old flame. Distraught, he turns up at her apartment, unannounced, before a planned move overseas. Stretched out on a sofa with her legs covered by a blanket, it’s not obvious that Terry can’t walk. Nickie begins to pace the room.
TERRY: I’ve often wondered about you, and how you were.
NICKIE (with sarcasm): Did you really?
TERRY: I remember we said that: “If we could make it, we’d be there. And if one of us didn’t show up, it would be for a darn good reason.”
NICKIE: Did we say that?
TERRY: That’s exactly what we said. So, there will be no more questions asked … I hope.
Conditioned to believe not-knowing is anathema, the modern male mind is likely to assume, here, that Cary Grant has been treated poorly. Why the prolonged drama and suffering? Why doesn’t this woman relent and spell things out?
In the 1930s, Jung described the psychological changes that occur in midlife. Early on, men incline toward the external, wanting to master their surroundings, both material and social. The emphasis then shifts away from power, prowess and dialectical reasoning. This is when the feminine side comes into play, offering the imaginative faculty an opportunity to explore human spirituality, creativeness and the emotional truth revealed through art, myth and narrative.
The “first half of life is devoted to forming a healthy ego,” wrote Jung, “the second half is going inward and letting go of it.”
Western man is amidst a severe midlife crisis. Unbridled masculinity – dedicated to building civilization rather than matching the example of Jesus – has enabled much in the way of orderly progress. But the hubris and one-sidedness of our head-before-heart Promethean advance has come at great cost, to both him and others. Forgetful of the original Greek caveat regarding our limits, he refuses to concede, as Cave does, that “the rational, the verifiable, is not the only game in town.” Without such an admission, our culture remains captive to immense either-or inertia. Evolved in the West to mean “theory,” theoria now sustains the bizarre conviction that anything man wishes to know can be contained in a system of human thought.
This is a failure of the imagination. There is more to the suggestion from Kingsnorth that, “after centuries of global hegemony, it is our turn to experience the fear of loss, the fear of decline and fragmentation,” than meets the eye. What appear to be antagonistic elements have been left with no choice but to leverage the trappings of modern civilization for the cause of true Christianity. The culture war is a call for Western man to finally muster the courage, now the basics are in place, to be truly vulnerable, to rule by serving, to relinquish control and be led by the secret demands of life and love.
In Under Saturn’s Shadow, Jungian psychologist James Hollis refers to the “necessary wound” incurred by men, a traumatic occurrence that compels us “to move out of the old dispensation into new life.”
Intentionally provocative, #MeToo, Diversity Equity and Inclusion programs and general wokeism are designed to bring the anima story to its climax. These feminine forces don’t want men to disavow, per se, traditional masculinity, reason, progress or hierarchy. Nor do they wish for the anarchy of a society governed solely by raw emotion. This is about the both-and, and the related truth that rules-based institutions, along with science and Artificial Intelligence, can’t ever render to God the wondrous things that are God’s.
This cultural moment is about Western man finally inverting opposites, taking up the radical spiritual challenge laid down by Jesus two millennia ago: “Whoever seeks to save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life will preserve it.”
In an address just before leaving Fox News, Tucker Carlson opined on the culture war and the woke mind virus. Not that long ago, he said, it was reasonable to make the “very Anglo-American assumption” that the purpose of public debate is to resolve how society should accomplish agreed goals. We all want America, for instance, to be prosperous and free. With such an objective in mind, the ruling class develops specific policies, discussions are held and then, hopefully, after an open exchange of ideas, the preferred option is actioned.
I don’t think that is what we are watching now at all. I don’t think we are watching a debate about how to get to the best outcome. … As an observer of what is going on, there is no way to assess, say, the transgenderist movement with that mindset. Policy papers don’t account for it, at all.
You don’t say, Sherlock.
What is being put to Western man is the dream and the belief that really matters to us, what centres and binds a community, transcends the back and forth of modern politics. This moment of reckoning isn’t dialectical. There are no options. Just break or break through to a manifest destiny.
That all this goes unsaid is part of the test, a reluctance to spell things out intended to highlight that the activism is not based on a right-wrong argument. It is pointing beyond itself, beyond the empty promises of power and politics to an ultimate reality, to something greater than the self, mere facts and what can be proved. The final act in the story of Western exceptionalism is grounded in mythos, not logos. Wounded man is being asked to lay down his arms and let the magic happen. Tarnas concludes The Passion of the Western Mind with a nod to Nietzsche:
Today we are experiencing something that looks very much like the death of modern man, indeed that looks very much like the death of Western man. Perhaps the end of ‘man’ himself is at hand. But man is not a goal. Man is something that must be overcome – and fulfilled, in the embrace of the feminine.
Able to unify his thinking with what he feels, Nickie Ferrante shows himself, in the end, to be worthy of his suffering. By finally sensing what Terry won’t put into words, he locks in their Hollywood ending.
It took me somewhat longer to read between the lines.
March 2020 was the last time I saw or spoke with Kate. I got over emotional after our two hours together in a café above the Queen Street mall. I pestered her to join me in New Zealand, which wasn’t what she wanted or needed. I’ve since sent the occasional email telling her how much I miss her, but no reply. I let her know when I’m visiting Australia, proposing a time and location to meet. She’s yet to turn up. Dave and my mates think I’m delusional, that I’ve been forsaken, that I should move on and find myself a nice Kiwi lass.
That’s not going to happen. She still loves me. I know it in my heart, even more so now I’ve let go of the drama and strife.
Kate had a darn good reason for walking out apart from self-preservation. For as long as most people who know me can remember, I have been threatening to write “my book”. My lone journey to another country has provided me the chance to get it done and, with that, the possibility of putting in place certain things for a new life with Kate. Though not quite as rousing as the Odyssey, or as theistic as Paul Kingsnorth’s conversion, I hope that what I have learnt these years by doing without her grace and wisdom, can contribute something towards man’s self-understanding.
I can see now that I hadn’t – though I thought I had – surrendered to Kate my need to know. When put under pressure, I demanded external answers when I should have looked within. Though gut-wrenching in its severity, her withdrawal, followed by utter silence, brought into relief the implications of unconditional love – Jesus’ most fundamental instruction – which then compelled me to trust in what is eternal between us. This unexpected chapter in our story has made me a better, more balanced man in the process.
No more faithlessness. No more attempts to rationalize what is more real than real. These days, I am singularly focused on the writing, in the heart-felt belief that each completed page gets me a little closer to my girl.
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