One of the saddest thing about our times is that those who have power almost universally have feeble imaginations. For reasons that require another post to explain, the economic system that dominates our world and is driving it into the ground seems to reward these types of people handsomely. Now, by imagination, I mean wonder. And by wonder, I mean secular enhancement. By secular, I’m not referring to a long duration (this is how the word is used in economics—as in, “secular stagnation”). I mean, instead, the sense of how cultural critic and theorist Steven Shaviro describes God, as conceived by the early 20th century British philosopher Alfred North Whitehead, as a “secular theology.”
This is simply enchantment without miracles. Soul without sorcery. Geist without a goal. And keep in mind geist (the German word for “spirit,” as in “spirit of the times”—zeitgeist) dubs Germanically with our word for guest and ghost. Life as a ghost, ghost as a guest, God as a visitor, a stranger, a passing through. This is what weak imaginations often fail to feel or hear. The heartbeat of a squirrel.
This squirrel is found in a marvelous passage in Mary Ann Evans’s Middlemarch.
That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of frequency, has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind; and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.
But Evans is too hard on humanity. We are not well wadded with stupidity all of the time. Indeed, the truly great moments in life have no other source than this “roar” from the “other side of silence.” The heart beat of the synanthropic rodent is not so lethal. It mostly makes one wonder all the more.
There is, of course, a politics to secular enchantment. It exposes the fact that this is the one and only magic show. The “sun in the sky,” the breeze driftin’ by,” the “blossom in the tree.” There is no ‘after’ after all of this. Jetztzeit! Now time! It’s that snap from the “homogeneous empty time” that dominates so much of our lives. But there is not a minute when being here is not totally amazing. The bacteria in your teeth are more astonishing than walking on water.
