What would the 25th century respect?

I. To Bless the Future

What would the 25th century respect?

This is a question that Bryan Johnson asked himself. His answers are interesting, and provoked an immense personal effort towards futuristic technologies and de-aging. Just as interesting are the answers that come to other minds. For me, the immediate answer was writing.

As a teenager, this was something I reflected on a lot. It occurred to me that the things we prize from previous centuries are almost entirely aesthetic. We listen to Beethoven, we adore the Mona Lisa, we keep mimicking Shakespeare. We even engage with ancient philosophy, itself a kind of rarified aesthetic.

This sense of things clarified my interest in music, in writing, in other forms of art. I wrote essays (or as I thought of them, inspired by the cultural peak of magazine publishing, articles) from a young age. But thinking of them as an aesthetic contribution to the future changed my perspective. The artistry of it suddenly mattered more. That meant the process mattered more, or in fact, might be the real and primary thing.

This was the conviction that grew on me during my years of songwriting. The process was essential, and with it, all the implicit and inexplicit dynamics that were playing underneath the surface. As much as my conscious mind might be shaping the content and the aims, my unconscious mind was actually doing the majority of the work. And that work had to be respected. If it told me that a particular word needed to be used in a particular place, I could argue with that choice, but I couldn’t just ignore it.

During this time, my sympathy for a spiritual, even almost superstitious, outlook grew. I was raised in a fairly rationalistic religious tradition, and personally took that to my own extremes. We were cessationists, believing that miracles and prophecy and spirit-possession all belonged to ancient times. Some even went so far as to say that it was wrong to pray for our friends and relatives to get well. I mixed this religious tradition with my own reading in science and philosophy, and ended up with an extremely rationalistic outlook.

But it was hard to maintain such a stance while creating something. The creative process itself is an engagement with profound and transcendent forces, as Elizabeth Gilbert poignantly highlighted in her famous TED talk. It was fine to explain those forces in terms of perfectly rational constructions, such as mental subsystems, agentic memes, and so on. What was not fine was to ignore them.

Even the center of my reality shifted around this axis. If I was becoming superstitious about forces arising from the mental and subconscious worlds—well, didn’t most people live primarily in those worlds anyway? What is it that defines most people’s lives, careers, relationships—if not an imaginative, emotional, intuitive mental landscape created collaboratively with members of a community? My privileging of the scientific-materialist world in everyday conversation was starting to seem pedantic.

Not that I changed anything about my epistemology or my material picture of the world. As I said, you can explain all of these things in rationalist ways; you just can’t ignore them.

One time, when my friends and I were on a kick about synchronicities and psychic powers, I decided to try an experiment to test the psychic abilities I felt like I had been experiencing. I was traveling to another state, and after I arrived, I lay in bed trying to transmit a message to my best friend. I decided I needed to pick something short and simple. I picked “cats”, and just repeated the message in my head over and over as I was falling asleep.

I hadn’t told my friend or anyone else I was doing this. The next day, I called him on the phone, and asked him if he had been having any unusual dreams. “Last night, I had a crazy dream”, he said. “Just cats everywhere. All kinds of cats, big cats, little cats, cats everywhere.”

I’ve occasionally shared this story with people. I once experienced psychic powers, I tell them. That doesn’t mean I believe in them.

II. To Not Murder the Prophets

What would the 25th century respect?

It’s a wild hope to want to be the Da Vinci or Michelangelo of your time. To have your work be something that is universally known, and still referenced and built on centuries later.

But that’s not really the meaning of respect here. In my reading, it seems like the question has more to do with aligning your values with that future, rather than figuring out a way to be famous in that future.

It’s like watching a movie based on a true story. If the true story is far enough in the past, there’s usually some kind of cultural value in the environment that we as the audience all frown upon. Maybe it’s slavery, strict class division, racism, sexism, or something else. We find ourselves hoping that the hero breaks with this background value, and demonstrates a character that elevates them above the crowd.

And then, when they do this, we find ourselves hoping that it was real. That the real historical person really did rise above the crowd, and that this wasn’t just a Hollywood patch-up job.

What would it take to be that historical character in real life?

What would it take to rise above the background choices of your culture, and express a set of values that is worthy of respect in the 25th century movie version of your life?

This too, is something I’ve thought about a lot. Reflecting on past wars and turmoil, I’ve wondered what it would take to have lived through those moments, and to have chosen the side of goodness and light. Christians often reflect in a similar way on the crucifixion of Christ: Would I have shouted ‘crucify him’?

Any answer that is too quick to place yourself on the side of good, is almost certainly a sign that you would have supported evil. Jesus made a similar point to his hearers:

You say: ‘If we had lived in the days of our fathers, we would not have taken part with them in shedding the blood of the prophets.’ Thus you witness against yourselves that you are sons of those who murdered the prophets.¹

This is a sort of slam-poetry-style burn. But Jesus isn’t just making a play on words. He’s pointing out that the arrogance that convinced these people they were on the side of good, was the very dynamic driving them into the arms of evil. Every generation thinks they would not have murdered the prophets, and so every generation arrogantly rushes into doing so.

And yet, some precious few people do manage to rise above their context, stand for a higher vision of goodness and virtue, and earn undying respect. How do they do it? How do they know which way to go?

I think the answer is hidden tantalizingly in this story. In declaring they would not have participated in the sins of previous generations, the people Jesus was criticizing were cutting themselves off from those prior generations, shortening their temporal depth of vision. In their arrogance, they were cutting themselves off from humility, the only true path of learning.

The opposite of those things would be to embrace humility and a long time horizon, both towards the past and the future.

What does that look like?

I think Jesus himself suggested an answer to this question. If you want to enter the kingdom of heaven, he said, You must become like little children.²

III. To Reach the Transcendent

What would the 25th century respect?

“Mere seriousness does not get down to the roots of things. There is a sacred secret in play which is the hope for another form of life. All play arises from the human longing for the vision of the divine.” — Hugo Rahner³

There is something about play which gets at the fundamental nature of the creative process. In doing so, it gets at the fundamental nature of human and divine life—at the fundamental nature of creation itself.

Most clearly, play reveals itself as a process. Its truest form is not within a fixed game, but in the larger process of devising, molding, and reworking the games one is playing with. James Carse describes this as a contrast between finite and infinite games, between games you play to win, and games you play to keep playing. The finite game can never contain or create the actual playful dynamic; it is only a conduit for a form of play which already exists beyond it. The infinite game, on the other hand, is really only a description of the process which is most clearly known in the construction and deconstruction of other games.

This is how young children play. One minute, they are playing house, the next, they are dogs and firefighters and wizards, all at the same time. The fluidity of their narratives is a picture of creation at work, a revelation of the true genius underlying all human civilization.

Contrary to what we might expect, their play is as creatively disruptive as it is futuristic. They are not living in the moment in a reductive sense, content to imagine their lives continuing forever as children. Rather, they imagine themselves as adults, playing out narratives they may one day expect to inhabit; or even as profoundly different creatures, playing out ways life might be were they to reconstruct the entire universe.

Everything that childhood touches is tinged with this kind of eschatological vision. Children’s books depict herbivores and carnivores living together as friends, in a vision so radical it has only been matched by ancient Jewish prophets. Childhood humanizes the wildest creatures, and rewilds the most cultured human. Teddy bears reimagine one of nature’s most fearsome creatures as something you might snuggle up with when you are scared of the dark.

There is a secret in this. The wildest visions, the longest horizons, the largest sense of space and time—is all inhabited most concretely by those who are most humble. In their humility, in their lack of pretension, lies the secret of creation, the secret of the creative process, the secret of play.

IIII. To Touch the Divine

What would the 25th century respect?

Isn’t this what religion must be in a sense? We know this from the bad versions of religion out there, from all the unhealthy forms of religious thinking and practice. What happens when religion goes wrong? What are the most common critiques of religion we raise?

Isn’t it that religion becomes too locked into unchanging tradition, too moored in the past? Or alternatively, that religion becomes too apocalyptic, too radical, too detached from present realities and too attached to some imagined disruptive future?

And when religion becomes toxic, isn’t that toxicity centered around the way in which its humility spills over into humiliation?

Aren’t these the failure modes of religion?

These failure modes, by showing us what goes wrong, highlight within them what is actually right. This is the real substance within religious traditions, and the reason they are so resilient, robust, and pervasive in human culture. When working well, they extend the scope of human vision, allowing people to orient themselves towards the future in ways that would be difficult to manage otherwise. They preserve the past, not for its own sake, but for its ability to help us understand historical time, and thus steer towards the future. When working well, they cultivate a kind of healthy humility, that allows us to navigate the world in a free and joyful manner.

When working well, they help us to become like little children.

When working well, they help us play. They help us to move beyond life as a set of fixed rules, and into life as a process of creation and recreation.

V. To Learn to Play

What would the 25th century respect?

In my estimation, the attempt to raise ourselves to the standards of the 25th century by intellect alone has very little chance of success. Maybe we will achieve that kind of transcendence; more likely, we will be snagged in the ropes of our own cultural context, and lack sufficient humility to ever realize it.

What characterizes the people who did rise above their context?

I think, as absurd as it might sound, that they were playful. As serious as they were, fighting against slavery or oppression or whatever kind of wrong, they found some aspect of it that was like play.

Put differently, I think they embraced a process that was rooted in humility, that expanded their vision to a much broader plane, and that engaged them in a deeper process of creation. And I suspect, in embracing that process, that the intuitive and inexplicit aspects of that dynamic came to the fore, that the unconscious mind became something to grapple with, that profound and transcendent forces became part of their experience. And that what we would call a spiritual world began to dominate their vision.

I don’t mean, of course, that they lost touch with reality, or gave up materialism or anything else. I mean that their vision became less about the way the world was constructed, and more about the process underlying the creation of worlds.

I mean that they became artists.

They weren’t trying to live in the most efficient way within the world as it existed. They were committed to pursuing the process underlying the worlds. They released their grip on the ways things seemed to be, and dove head-first into becoming an aesthetic gift to the future.

This is, after all, what persists. We care about Beethoven, the Mona Lisa, and Shakespeare; just as we care about the heroes and martyrs of the past. What they reflect is essentially the same: the artistic devotion of their lives; the playfulness of serious creation.

VI. To Become Like a Little Child

What would the 25th century respect?

There is a quality which seems to rise above particular moments in history, and become transcendent. That quality is sometimes seen in aesthetic artifacts, pieces of artwork and music that reach beyond their place of origin, beyond their particular place and time. That quality is sometimes seen in people who, quietly or not-so-quietly, stand for a higher set of values than is embodied in the world around them. Sometimes they become beloved heroes and martyrs; sometimes they are quiet heroes whose work and choices take ages to come to light.

This mysterious quality, shared by both artists and martyrs, has the same aesthetic quality at root. It is a result of glimpsing profound beauty; it is a mark left on history by someone who saw through the mists to something transcendent.

That quality arises, not by abstract intellectualizing, nor by legalistic moralizing, but in and with the spirit of play. Play is a dynamic process, unpredictable and uncontrolled, in which everything is constantly being created and recreated. Past, present, future, all are drawn into the creative process of the one who plays.

Thus play requires…demands…hungers for…vast horizons. It revels in the long vision of dark past and deep future. It relishes other worlds.

And in its creation and recreation, it wrestles with, leans into, grasps at, embraces, the divine. Such a grip threatens to make you serious; such a grip can only be held by the one who is infinitely humble.

You must become like little children.

In play, we touch divinity, and in play, we keep our fingers to the ground. In play, we become transcendent, and in play, we become humble enough to bear our transcendence into the world.

VII. To Play God

What would the 25th century respect?

CS Lewis seemed to sense something like what we’ve been discussing:

It is a serious thing to live in a society of possible gods and goddesses, to remember that the dullest and most uninteresting person you talk to may one day be a creature which, if you saw it now, you would be strongly tempted to worship…It is in the light of these overwhelming possibilities…that we should conduct all our dealings with one another, all friendships, all loves, all play, all politics.

There are no ordinary people. You have never talked to a mere mortal. Nations, cultures, arts, civilization—these are mortal, and their life is to ours as the life of a gnat. But it is immortals whom we joke with, work with, marry, snub, and exploit—immortal horrors or everlasting splendors.

This does not mean that we are to be perpetually solemn.

We must play.

It is not enough, for Lewis, that we may become gods or demons. Not enough, even, that we recognize this same quality in our friends and neighbors. Rather, in the very act of recognizing our own future, we must necessarily come up against a temptation to solemnity, and overcoming this temptation, confront it with a spirit of play. Only in doing so are we actually capable of steering that future in the direction of good and not evil, of divinity and not horror.

Interestingly, Lewis has quite a bit more to say about play:

[There is a story] about someone who had to wear a mask; a mask which made him look much nicer than he really was. He had to wear it for years. And when he took it off he found his own face had grown to fit it. He was now really beautiful. What had begun as disguise had become a reality.

…You will probably say the Lord's Prayer. Its very first words are Our Father. Do you now see what those words mean? They mean quite frankly, that you are putting yourself in the place of a Son of God. To put it bluntly, you are dressing up as Christ. If you like, you are pretending. …In a way, this dressing up as Christ is a piece of outrageous cheek. But the odd thing is that He has ordered us to do it.

…Very often the only way to get a quality in reality is to start behaving as if you had it already. That is why children's games are so important. They are always pretending to be grown-ups—playing soldiers, playing shop. But all the time, they are hardening their muscles and sharpening their wits, so that the pretence of being grown-up helps them to grow up in earnest.

Now, the moment you realise "Here I am, dressing up as Christ," it is extremely likely that you will see at once some way in which at that very moment the pretence could be made less of a pretence and more of a reality. …

You see what is happening. The Christ Himself, the Son of God who is man and God, is actually at your side and is already at that moment beginning to turn your pretence into a reality.…He is beginning to turn you into the same kind of thing as Himself.⁴

CS Lewis is telling us to Play God.

In doing so, he promises, we will find a playmate in God himself. We will encounter this playmate most commonly within a community of other people, each also playing God. And as we play this great game together, we will rise to become the thing we are pretending to be.

For Lewis, this is what religion is—a vast and important game, in which we become like little children, and play at being God. As with the Lord’s Prayer, he sees much of our ritual and liturgy as being a great theater within which we “dress up” as something much wilder and more transcendent than what we yet are.

Not that it isn’t real. For Lewis, it’s the realest thing there is. All of our lives are supposed to be this kind of play. And so, although we have a great deal of tradition and structure which shape the way this game is played, it is still ultimately improvisational, “more like painting a portrait than like obeying a set of rules”; engaging our lives and creativity far beyond the walls of organized religion.

Whatever this is, it’s a process. A process with uncertain outcomes, with unpredictable twists and turns. It’s shaped by a long horizon—remembering the distant past, imagining the far future—but what it gains from that horizon is not a rigidity that locks everything into slavish tradition or unfeeling scientism, but a capacity for improvisation that rises above the merely current and touches something transcendent and good. In this process, we meet and wrestle with many of our ancestor’s ancient foes, lurking still in our subconscious. In this process, we bend the notion of what is actually real. In this process, we create artifacts which, if we are lucky, may one day mean something to someone else. In this process, we rise above the dreary confines of current popular imagination, and join the merry band of voyagers from every century, enraptured together in a spectacular kind of play.

This, I think, is something the 25th century could respect. And if not, why would we respect them?

1. Matthew 23:30-31

2. Matthew 18:2-4

3. As summarized by Brian Edgar in The God who Plays.

4. Quotations from CS Lewis, Mere Christianity, lightly edited