An Owl Among the Ruins

On learning to see in the dark.

And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.

--Matthew Arnold. On Dover Beach.

In a dark time, the eye begins to see.

—Theodore Roethke. In a Dark Time.

the dark beyond dark 
the door to all beginnings.

--Tao Te Ching. Chapter 1. Red Pine Translation.

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We live in dark times. By that, I mean that ours is a great age of rhetoric, we endure, often gleefully, the unending torrents of information and opinion. Never before in human history has the average human being been so inundated with what everybody else thinks.¹ ²

There isn’t an end to it, in fact, nor can there be—that is, if my opinion should be made known on the matter—at least if we stay our present course. And no sooner than when we seek to make our view—no mere opinion, of course—prevail than the whole conversation transforms into a meta-conversation (and eventually a meta-meta-conversation). It is almost as if there is some perverse correlation between our insistence on making our view prevail and the tendency for the whole conversation to at once jump to a whole new level of dizzying abstraction and at the same time get bogged down in the confusion of minute details. It is a formula ripe for the cultivation of an obsessive and reductively categorical mind if not downright lunacy.

What, if anything, is gained from this? What at least when our situation is taken as a whole? Yes, of course, there are many great advantages to living on the Internet. I do not doubt that at all. There is no need to list such here. But again, taken as a whole, what have we actually gained? This is often less clear to me. But I do have a somewhat clearer idea of what we have lost.

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Happily, one of those things we should gleefully surrender is the notion that if only one had more information we could discover the truth, formulate a system of propositions, and that the obvious superiority of this truth would eventually prevail against all comers. This does not seem to be where we have arrived and certainly not the way things are headed. Rather, the more ‘information’ we have the more confusing the whole situation gets and the more hopelessly at odds we all seem to be with one another. And since the channels and streams of our own tailored information sources are effectively infinite—at least in the sense that no one person can exhaust it all³—not only does our worldview diverge wildly from our neighbor, but we can no longer imagine how he could have it quite so wrong.

And with surely ever more wonderous iterations of information technology waiting for us in the immediate future, is there any good reason to think that this trend will do other than further metastasize? And what makes me so sure, skeptic though I pretend to be, that I won’t just get sucked in—that I won’t dive in, really—to the new situation and then complain about that!

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When I was a teenager and when my father would hear me gripe about some situation or other he would often tell me that, ‘God’s help is no farther than the door.’ At the time, his advice baffled me if for no other reason than my father never seemed all that much of a religious man—a fact about him that remains and may always remain unclear to me. But be that as it may, he had a point, and a pretty good one at that.⁴ Here I am making a critique of the epistemological and sociological confusion of the information age by and on the very means I criticize. If the medium is the message—and the medium/message is one of inevitable Babelian confusion —then simply walk away. It is just that easy…and just that difficult.

So clearly I am the confused one and maybe I just need to start there and leave it at that. I could easily slip away from the internet and it would be noticed with barely a ripple. Who am I kidding? I could exit with not even a ripple.

And yet I don’t. Which is curious.⁵

One dark night
fired with love's urgent longings
--ah, the sheer grace--
I went out unseen
my house now being all stilled.

--St. John of the Cross. The Dark Night.

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Silence is the only phenomenon today that is “useless”. It does not fit into the world of profit and utility; it simply is. It seems to have no purpose; it cannot be exploited.

All the other great phenomenon have been appropriated by the world of profit and utility. Even the space between the heavan and earth has become a mere cavity for aeroplanes to travel through. Water and fire have been absorbed by the world of profit; they are only noticed in so far as they are parts of this world; they have lost their independent existence.⁶

Silence, however, stands outside the world of profit and utility; it cannot be exploited for profit; you cannot get anything out of it. It is “unproductive'“. Therefore it is regarded as valueless.

Yet there is more help and healing in silence than in all the “useful things”. Purposeless, unexploitable silence suddely appears at the side of the all-too-purposeful, and frightens us by its very purposelessness. It interferes with the regular flow of the purposeful. It strengthens the untouchable, it lessens the damage inflicted by exploitation. It makes things whole again, by taking them back from the world of dissipation into the world of wholeness. It gives things something of its own holy uselessness, for that is what silence is: holy uselessness.

—Max Picard. The World of Silence.

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I have long believed that when it came down to it, no matter how crazy things got one could just physically leave. Recently, through means beyond my ken, I managed to do that for a time, or at least after a fashion. But here I am back in the world and often wishing that I was back in the mountains. Let’s face it, I don’t really like the world we have made, and that is putting it mildly. Worse yet, I never really liked it all that much, though I have genuinely tried to live happily within its confines and follow its dictates.⁷ But it is probably because I have so lived that at times I have downright hated it, and yes, alas, still sometimes far less than thrilled.

Worse yet, we are inevitably ruled by sociopaths. This is due, at least in good measure, I think, because the socio-political system we live in, the one we maintain, and consent to, is pathogenic—it makes us all crazy. In short, we are all sociopaths now,⁸ or soon will be. This world that we’ve made, that has made us in turn, will only continue to make us crazier, more depressed, and more anxious. And as time goes on we will all fulfill the half-recognized implications of the way we have chosen to live our lives. We feel it in our bones and watch it unfolding in our lives and on our screens—and, yes read about it online—but maybe we still might hope it isn’t quite true.

Admittedly, I am hardly an optimist by nature or inclination, but the road ahead looks bleak. We long for connection and meaning and yet those are the very things we seem to get less and less of. There is no shortage of proposals and solutions. We are drowning in them. We are probably beyond solutions and proposals at this point, though that is a hard thing to admit. But I know that’s where I find myself. I know also I am not alone in this.⁹

One way or another the future is going to look very different than it does now. The question I ask myself is, given this being true, what is it that I would want those on the other side of a collapse to know? What way of seeing the world, or way of life; what practice, book, or warning on what to avoid would I want to give them, if I could? And once I know what those things are, can I start living those things right now? Can I deepen and strengthen their presence in the quickly passing world? Can I live on the other side of the collapse at this very moment?

Okay, yes, maybe…but then how?

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I am like a owl of the wilderness;
I am like an owl among the ruins.
I lie awake,
And am like a lonely sparrow on the housetop.

--Psalm 102:6-7

I have serious doubts that anything resembling a ‘Benedict Option’¹⁰ will be much more than an online phenomenon. Certainly, some will get the message and, seeing the world for what it is, find a way out. But most of us, myself surely included, who do take the notion seriously, aren’t actually serious. Like it or not, and however sincere an offering, it is, it turns out, little more than a defiant pose struck while in full retreat. We don’t want to give up the benefits of the very system that necessitates a withdrawal (however ‘partial and strategic’) in the first place.¹¹ We see the tyranny of the technopoly best, we think, as we stare into our phones.

Yet another, perhaps more basic difficulty with a communal solution to the dissolution of our age is that so many of us have lost the social virtues that make any communal solution tenable. I mean community is great and all, but does there have to be all those people?! And without any community to nurture the social virtues we seem to be stuck in the futile attempt to cultivate social virtues on our own. Which is probably a highly likely operation, if not purely a contradiction in terms.

The ugly fact of the matter is that the vast majority of us have lost any semblance of community or connection and have replaced it with the networked disconnection of the internet. There is no community, I am sad to report, with which or towards which most of us can flee. We simply turn in an ever-narrowing, empty, hyperactive, and often quite lonely, circle (or gyre, if you will). We now live nearly each as a lonely sparrow on a housetop.¹²

Many of us no longer have the skills or the inclination to live communally,¹³ let alone communally and even partially outside the system.¹⁴ We might like to be social, but that is a very different thing. We may recognize we can only fully thrive in community—we know on some deep level that we truly need each other—but it is often exactly from each other that we flee the most.

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It is a terrible thing to be lonely, to feel isolated. We aren’t made for it. We are, as Aristotle long ago pointed out, social animals. So be it.

But perhaps this is our task: to be utterly lonely in an utterly lonely age.¹⁵ In other words, it is to learn to be an owl among the ruins. An owl is a creature of the night and darkness. An owl is associated with wisdom—which we can all seek.¹⁶ And let’s face it, the ruins are already here and all about us, quickly spreading like a virus. Yes, we live in dark times, and it is long past time to learn how to see in the dark—to learn how to begin to see in the dark. Our eyes have been long blinded by the artificial lights that promised us a new age where darkness would be no more. That has failed. And what will we do when the lights finally go out?

To be fair, the ruins of our civilization are not evenly spread among us. In other words, some of us live in them more fully than do others. Some of us still have it pretty good—and yet may live in the bleakest ruins not despite having it so well, but because we so have it. There are all kinds of ruins and all kinds of ways to live in and among them.¹⁷ The question, as I see it, is not if we will live there but how soon we will do so, and in what sort of desolation?

This much, at least, seems clear: the more we flee from the spreading ruins to the sunny uplands of the virtual, the more quickly we will have to learn to live in the desert of the real.

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There is within each one of us a silent desert. Something inexplicably vast and dimensionless. We didn’t earn it, nor could we do anything to achieve it or bring it about on our own power. It is impossible to rightly speak of it, but once recognized it is unmistakably obvious as if we had known it all along.¹⁸ It can come upon us in an unbidden moment of beauty or desolation, or after years of waiting for we know-not-what in lonely silence and stillness. It is something radically private to the person who undergoes it, but just as radically available to anyone who quiets himself down long enough to begin to hear an inexpressible music dancing silently within his innermost heart. We have all heard this music from a distance, but would almost rather put our hope in anything else before we would fully surrender to it. We want to do anything other than to face ourselves. But this reckoning with the depthless depths in ourselves is also what our heart longs for most of all. It is, in fact, the only thing it truly longs for.

T.S. Eliot:

...you neglect and belittle the desert.
The desert is not remote in the southern tropics,
The desert is not only around the corner,
The desert is squeezed in the tube-train next to you,
The desert is in the heart of your brother.

--Choruses from 'The Rock'

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To be an owl among the ruins is to walk away from the illusions of our dying technological civilization and from the false promise of its artificial light. It requires nothing of us other than to choose to do so, however uncertain we may be at first. We don’t have to organize anything, write a charter, or negotiate fractious social relations. This is a choice one can make for oneself right now. We can choose—even if only for an extended time each day—to walk away and reclaim our sanity. We may live alone, or in a house filled with love and clamor, but we may have also long avoided our own solitude—and maybe, we think, for good reason.

To be an owl among the ruins is to live in a fruitful darkness and a time of seemingly interminable waiting. It is to find ourselves again in that which infinitely exceeds us and just beyond the downward pull of getting and spending. It is to relinquish the futile quest for ever more knowledge, more things, more information, etc., and live in the naked simplicity of unknowing and the profound joy of intellectual darkness.¹⁹

It is to give up on all ideologies and systems that promise to solve the human condition by simply assenting to one particular set of dubious propositions over some other equally dubious set. It is to seek to be free of everything passing and insubstantial and to rest in what remains.

To be an owl among the ruins is the first and inevitable step to finding our way again—by being lost completely.²⁰ We may find in such long stretches of silence and solitude much that is disconcerting. This truly cannot be avoided—it is apparently how we are healed. So we will have to slowly acclimate to it without distracting ourselves from it. To live in the ruins is to learn how to wait with full trust that in due time all that is necessary will be made known to us in our patient unknowing, and in the darkness of faith.

We will, by slowly learning to see in the dark, perhaps begin also to recognize each other there.²¹ And maybe in this darkness, we will find others like ourselves among the ruins, after we have long given up hope of ever doing so. Better still, we might just find each other out beyond the ruins, through this enduring dark night of civilization, in the far wilderness of sanity—past all our false hopes and empty plans and all-too-clever avoidances. And if we so choose this, we will surely need God’s help to find each other out there in the unfathomable wilderness depths of ourselves.

But thankfully, God’s help is no farther than the door.

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As for what profits you to pursue this possibility, to keep yourself empty and bare, just following and tracking this darkness and unknowing without turning back—it contains the chance to gain Him who is all things. And the more barren you are of self and unwitting of all things, the nearer you are to Him. Of this barrenness it is said in Jeremiah, “I will lead my beloved into the wilderness and will speak to her in her heart.”²² The true word of eternity is spoken only in solitude, where a man is a desert and alien to himself and multiplicity. For the desolate self-estrangement the prophet longed, saying, “Who will give me wings of a dove that I may fly away and be at rest?” (Ps. 55:6) Where does one find peace and rest? There, truly, where there is rejection, desolation and estrangement from all creatures. Therefore David says, “I would rather be rejected and spurned in the house of my God than dwell with great honor and wealth in the tavern of sinners” (Ps 84:10).

—Meister Eckhart. Sermon 4. Walshe translation.

1. And so many opinions! Unfortunately, some of them are quite excellent.

2. And if that weren’t enough, those unfortunate enough to linger within the comments sections below the official opinions will be introduced to an entirely new depressing vista of intractable and irreconcilable opinions—opinions about the opinions, and all the opinions that disagree with the opinions about the opinions (and on and on). There doesn’t seem to be an end to it.

3. We can’t exhaust it, but it can surely exhaust us.

4. And he was not making a religious point, either. A fact that should have been evident. Alas, I was something of a dullard as a child.

5. In my defense, my current living arrangements are far less conducive to incessant internet grazing. This has only been for the good. A contemplative life outside of the kingdom of infinite distraction is still possible. For this I am grateful.

6. And we were only just barely getting started in our exploitation of pretty much anything and everything when this quote was published in 1948.

7. You know, more or less.

8. Okay, okay, I don’t really mean that. I know many good people struggling to be better than their circumstances. But man, the circumstances are truly weird and often disturbing.

9. Or rather, I don’t see a way forward. And the sociopaths in charge have ideas about the future that seem, and this is putting it oh-so-gently, somewhat rather less than friendly. We are facing the Abolition of Man in one form or another. The human age, i.e., the ascendancy of the natural, biological human as the singularly dominant species on this planet is coming to an end. I think the transhumanists will fail, but it will be worse if they succeed. They might forestall collapse with some new technological trick, but most likely they will only hasten the very thing they seek to avoid. Otherwise, we are chugging full-throttle toward the abyss.

10. I had my own version which I called the Arsenios Option. See here.

11. My name is Jack Leahy and I am addicted to Technological Civilization.

12. A hundred billion castaways/looking for a home.

13. As Aristotle put it, a man without a city is either a beast or god.

14. We can learn how. Ironically, our technological civilization provides many of the means to escape it. I point I made here in ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’.

15. Never less alone than when alone. Plotinus saw the entire spiritual path as the ‘flight of the alone to the Alone’.

16. ‘The owl of Minerva only spreads its wings at dusk, as Hegel phrased it.

17. I fear we will have to know this more intimately than we do currently before we finally decide to act. I hope I am wrong. The worst of ruins is the unacknowledged one of our own hearts

18. Because we have known it all along.

19. What Nicholas of Cusa called ‘learned ignorance’. Or maybe a ‘wise unknowing’.

20. I hope to say more about what this kind of life looks like.

21. A group of owls is a parliament of owls. More on that, perhaps, in some future post. And many thanks to M and Fr. D for their patience in helping me hash out these muddled thoughts of mine.

22. Actually Hos. 2:14. Eckhart’s sermons were copied down by others from memory, so who knows whose mistake this is. Maybe his.