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In Dante's The Divine Comedy, the virtuous pagans - whose ranks include figures such as Homer, Plato, Aristotle, Ovid, and Virgil - are confined to the first circle of Hell:
Those who inhabit this circle of the Inferno committed no extraordinary sins, over and above the sins that are committed in the course of any human life, that would merit damnation. Many of them were quite exemplary in their conduct and in their virtue. Few men in the middle ages commanded as much respect as Aristotle, whose influence on the development of scholastic philosophy was unrivaled. But they nevertheless had the misfortune of being born before Christ. They were deprived of the one and only way to the Father; thus they cannot be saved. There can be no exceptions. An obligation unfulfilled through no fault of one's own, an obligation that was in fact impossible to fulfill, remains an obligation unfulfilled.
This is a theological issue on which the Church has softened over the centuries. Even relatively conservative Catholics today get squeamish when the issue of Hell is raised. They will say that we "cannot know" who is in Hell and who is not; that this is a matter for God and God alone. It is not our place to pass judgement. But Dante had no such qualms. He was not wracked with inner anxiety, asking himself whether he had the "right" to think such thoughts, as he drew up his precise and detailed classification of all the damned; nor did he live in a culture of religious pluralism that needed to be placated with niceties and assurances. Dante simply knew. This fundamental conviction in what must be, the will to adhere to a vision, to one singular vision, is something that is now quite foreign to us; indeed it is something that is now viewed as rude and suspicious.
This image of the universe as a cosmic lottery with infinite stakes, this idea that one could be consigned to eternal damnation simply for having the bad luck to be born in the wrong century is, of course, psychotic. There is no sense in which it could be considered fair or rational. But all genuine responsibility is psychotic; that is the wager you accept when you choose to be a human instead of a mere appendage of the earth. Kant was well aware of this. Whence the sublime insanity of the categorical imperative, in spite of his utmost and repeated insistence that he was only discharging his duties as the faithful servant of Reason: you can never tell a lie, even to save another's life, even to save your own life. The moment you decide to perform or abandon your duty based on a consideration of the consequences is the moment at which it is no longer a duty for you; the logic of utilitarian calculation has become dominant, rather than the logic of obligation.
I need not persuade you that we suffer from a lack of responsibility today; it is a common enough opinion. We are told that young men are refusing to "grow up": they aren't getting jobs, they aren't getting wives, they aren't becoming stable and productive members of society. Birth rates are cratering because couples feel no obligation to produce children. The right complains that people feel no responsibility to their race, the left complains that people feel no responsibility to the workers' revolution. Despite some assurances that we have entered a post-postmodern era of revitalized sincerity, the idea of being committed to any cause that is not directly related to one's own immediate material benefit remains passé and incomprehensible. The abdication of responsibility, the default of all promises, reaches its apotheosis in the advance of technology, and in particular in the advance of artificial intelligence. The feeling is that one should have no obligations to anyone or anything, one should not be constrained in any way whatsoever, one should become a god unto oneself.
Is there anything we can recover from Dante's notion of cosmic responsibility, which has now become so alien to us? Is there any way that this idea, or even any remnant of it, can again become a living idea, can find root in this foreign soil? Perhaps not necessarily its Christian content, but the form of it, at any rate: the form of a responsibility that is not directed at any of the old and traditional obligations, but may indeed be directed at new and strange things that we can as of yet scarcely imagine.
Plainly we are beyond the domain of "rational" argumentation, or at least any such argumentation that would be accepted in the prevailing Enlightenment-scientific framework. We live in the age of the orthogonality thesis, of the incommensurability of values. In an important sense though we should remember that we are not entirely unique in this condition; the groundlessness of all values is not solely due to the fact that God has fled. There would have been an important open question here for the medieval Christians as well. Such questions date back as far as Plato's Euthyphro: are things Good because they are loved by the gods, or do the gods love Good things because they are Good? Are we truly responsible, in an ontological sense, for following Christ and abstaining from sin, or are we only contingently compelled to do so because of the cosmic gun that God is holding up against all of our heads? It has always been possible to ask this question in any age.
At certain times, the production of new values is a task that has been assigned to artists. Perhaps a poet, if he sings pleasingly enough, could attune people to a new way of feeling and perceiving. But it has never been at all clear to me whether art was really capable of affecting this sort of change or not. I view it as an open question whether any "work" itself (in this I include not only art, but also all the products of philosophical reflection) has ever or could ever affect change at a societal level, or whether all such works are really just the epiphenomena of deeper forces. There is a great deal of research to be done in this area.
There is a certain ontological fracture at the heart of the cultural situation today, a certain paradoxical two-sidedness: from one perspective, centers of power are more emboldened than ever before, able to transmit edicts and commands to millions of people simultaneously and compel their assent; we saw this with Covid. From another perspective, social reality has never been more fragmented, with all traditional centers of social organization (churches, obviously, but also the nightly news, Hollywood, universities) disintegrating in the face of the universal solvent that is the internet, leading to an endless proliferation of individual voices and sub-subcultures. In either case, it is hard to find an opening for authentic change. It is impossible to imagine Luther nailing his theses to the door today, or Lenin storming the Winter Palace. This type of radical fragmentation, when the narrative of no-narrative asserts itself so strongly as the dominant narrative that no escape seems possible, is what Derrida celebrated in Of Grammatology as "the death of the Book, and the beginning of writing" - writing here being the infinite profusion of signs, the infinite freeplay of identities, infinite exchange and infinite velocity, and, in my view - even though Derrida would refuse to characterize it in these terms - infinite stasis.
It's fascinating that Derrida had the foresight in the 1960s, when computing was in its infancy and the internet and LLMs were undreamed of, to say the following about "cybernetics":
(The affinities between the Rationalist ethos and the so-called "irrational postmodern obscurantists" are fascinating, and the subject deserves its own top-level post. @HlynkaCG has been intimating at something real here with his posts on the matter, even though I don't agree with him on all the details. Deleuze would have been delighted at the sight of Bay Area poly orgies - a fitting expression of the larval subject, the desiring machine.)
It's hard to be very optimistic. The best I can offer in the way of advice is to look for small seeds of something good, and cultivate them wherever you find them:
By the way, this notion of growing up and being a man who knows the stakes and plays his part etc. etc. has become a topic of some contention among the homoerotic sim cluster of the online right (BAPists). I found it interesting in how it clashes with the view prevalent here, espoused e.g. by Hlynka, FC and others. Says BAP:
Also quoting the Samurai.
His follower cites from The Podcast a rant which contains one extremely clear-headed take:
Clarifies another:
I think they're correct in their dunks, to the point no coherent rebuttal can be made (the value of the actually fascistic outlook of BAPists, and its pitfalls, is a topic for another discussion; I, for one, take great issue with their propensity for delusions and dreams of violence, and complete inability and lack of interest in building stuff).
But this familyman ideal is much more authentic and normal than the whole mannerbund LARP – particularly for Europeans with their notion of romantic love and history of pronounced selection by mate preference. It is also more conductive for maintaining order – if at minor scale. And, as with cleaning your room before taking on the world, being a good bourgeois is a deceptively low bar that not everyone can adequately clear.
But that's still a brand of seriousness that's akin to searching for your keys under the lamppost.
But regarding your point.
You might consider that the camel is only the first metamorphosis of the spirit.
Yes, I was almost hesitant to include this example in the OP, because I knew it would be misunderstood. I considered elaborating on this point further, but the post was already at the character limit anyway.
I don't think that men should slavishly adhere to this particular life track - get a wife, get a house, get an office job and climb the corporate ladder - merely because it is the currently fashionable view of what it means to "be a man". I don't want people to live lives of meaningless hedonism, but I don't want them to be rubes either. You first have to ask yourself if the woman is worth loving, if the society is worth serving (in this particular way).
If someone says they have no time to build a family because they have to go be a great artist or whatever, then that's fine by me. He'll probably fail of course, but this is no great catastrophe to himself or anyone else; the social organism can easily tolerate a small number of losses of this type.
For the great majority of men who don't have anything else going on, building a family is probably the most meaningful way they can spend their time.
There's a fuckton of selfishness hiding under that bushel, though; for every one guy who does become a star (or even manages to become a professional who can earn a living from their art), there's twenty who are just indulging themselves and will continue to be 'in a band' or whatever for years and never get anywhere.
I'm probably prejudiced, though, by the case I encountered in social housing of the guy who left his small kids to his elderly mother to take care of, because he had to go 'be an artist' (he was a musician). Of course he never made it as a career, but it was sure handy for him to be able to dump his responsibilities on his family and go off to live the way he wanted.
Well, there certainly might be. Or there might not be. It always depends on the specifics of the situation in question. It's certainly possible to use ostensibly noble goals as an excuse for laziness, hedonism, and all the rest; but sometimes a noble commitment really is just a noble commitment with no ulterior motives.
I agree with you that there's very unlikely to be anything praiseworthy about a man abandoning his children. He should have thought about the consequences before he had children, and he should have to live with those consequences even if he feels them to be a burden.
Yeah, my view is "You're single and don't have any committments? Go do what you like". But once you have dependents or committments, then man (or woman, this applies to the ladies too) up and do your duty.
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