if xie lian and chung myung were in the same property you could NOT pay me to stfu about their cinematic parallels. two figures, one loathed by history and one loved by history. one the sweetest man you'll ever meet the other the most rat bastard man you'll ever meet. both failing to save their people and realizing the futility of individual power. one who ends up trying to dismantle his own/broad systems of power in response and the other enabling community empowerment (and also dismantling broader systems of power) in response. one who has people who understand him but resent him, the other with people who admire/loathe him but can't understand him. both meathead aspec martial arts nerds who ran into cultivation/taoism to avoid having to fuck.

"From the start, this process has involved a certain impulse of the soul away from its first organic, local shelters and toward more abstract citadels of certitude. With this, inevitably, has come a certain estrangement from life. Hence this impulse has often expressed itself as the pursuit of a wisdom that transcends the world, a quest for release or moksha, a contemptus mundi that frequently becomes a neurotically fastidious fear of being touched. The impulse reaches an extreme expression in those virtuosos of despair whom the developed religions regard as holy or wise or uniquely illumined. These are souls for whom the absolute exaltation of a single incorruptible principle of spiritual “truth” is a call to unremitting remorse, a measureless psychic labor of repentance, a search for ultimate release only in a realm beyond the triviality of common humanity. The mystic in a state of fused contemplation has returned to something like that aboriginal, intra-uterine state of “floating”—but now in the “womb” of the One God, which is the most impregnable sphere of immunity imaginable.

(...)

The Christian story brings this history to one of its epochal watersheds. In the Gospel there is a radical assault upon all the mediating structures of patriarchal authority—all the religious and social institutions, all the established offices of pedigree and privilege, all the nested stations of kin, people, kingdom, empire, and priesthood—by the individual soul’s claim of an immediate filiation to the One God. For Sloterdijk, Christ is “God’s bastard,” the Father’s natural child, as it were, conceived and born outside all legitimate lines of inheritance and all licit structures of authority. And his anti-patriarchal revolt became in time a license granted to every soul: now each of us, in our individual humanity, liberated by this social and spiritual apostasy, can become God’s bastard too, someone in whom God directly dwells as Father. At the same time, and by the same logic, a new order of social and political desire was implanted in human nature: that of “infinite egalitarianism,” a passage from the psycho-politics of command and obedience to one of equal self-determination, the transformation of vertical into horizontal difference.

Here again Sloterdijk’s favored image is exorcism, which should be understood, he believes, as a kind of purification of a sacred space, a cleansing of the Temple. The soul was once conceived “neither as a theater nor as a factory, as is typical of the modern age, but rather as a sanctuary in which no image was allowed to be on display except that of the god-man—whose image, in turn, had to represent an indescribable God.” In driving out the more elemental spiritual forces that once reigned with such capriciousness in nature, society, and the soul, the One transcendent principle of the Axial Age also became the source of a sovereign selfhood. This is because the expulsion of evil spirits from the soul had to be completed by the subsequent “entrance of a bright principle, which, as warden of the purified soul, became its new monitor and source of inspiration.” The soul thus underwent a change of possession: now it was the Spirit of God himself that was at work within it.

This purification of the self’s inner precincts may have been a thoroughly religious experience, but it was also a crucial episode in the history of Enlightenment, and thus of secularization. For, when that most elevated of sheltering spheres finally shattered—as it had to do—the sovereign self became the sole remaining sanctuary of whatever mysteries might be left. All the other possibilities of shelter had been successively exhausted, and had then been assumed into that ultimate transcendence, and had finally disappeared with it.

(...)

In any case, the old pieties and enchantments are irretrievable. With no God to watch us, there really is no sin to be resolved before his gaze, and so no power that can reconcile us to, or rescue us from, indecipherable fate. The modern human being wants not to obey a higher power but to be that power. As soon as God and the soul had been liquidated, we were left with only the world as a brute event. In this “hyper-immanent” space, a purposeless energy idly unfolds around us, with no fingerposts to guide us across the featureless terrain. The world has truly become a monster to us, and we, far from finding shelter in any redoubtable spheres of co-immunity, discover only that the controlled exodus toward final freedom that was promised to us by the myth of Enlightenment has proved instead to be a precipitate slide toward social and ecological disintegration, psychic vagrancy, and what Sloterdijk calls an unsheltered “heteromobility.”

(...)

Sloterdijk identifies three kinds of immune system that he regards as necessary for human existence: the biological (naturally), the social (which consists of solidarity and shared support), and the symbolic or ritual (which grants human beings power from higher sources whenever they feel themselves to be powerless). The third of these has been weakened irreparably by secularization and individualism, while the second has been subjected to continuous dilutions and dissolutions. We still have not discovered any efficient system of co-immunity for the global society that is now emerging, or devised any new shelters against the monstrosity of a world of empty fate.

(...)

Rather than an attempted retreat into an irrecuperable past, what Sloterdijk believes we really require is a new sphere of solidarity that can encompass all life, a shelter strong enough to create a robust co-immunity for the defenseless whole: global society, animal and vegetal life, nature, the earth itself. Religion has been irretrievably lost as a binding system of values, so we need a new piety devoted to, and sustained by, the oneness of the earth that we inhabit, share, and depend on. As far as Sloterdijk is concerned, moreover, the history of revelation—if one may use that word—has continued to the present day, and there are many things we have learned on the way to modernity, such as the nobility of the individual soul’s “proud” search for a system of personal freedom. These are lessons we must not forsake or let ourselves forget if we are to create a habitable future. For him, they constitute a “Newer Testament.”

(...)

What might Christians make of any of this story? Why should they care? Well, to begin with, they should acknowledge that Sloterdijk, in confirming Nietzsche’s diagnosis of God’s death in the developed world, is doing nothing more than stating an evident fact of history. The disappearance of that transcendent horizon of meaning and hope within whose commodious embrace just about all persons and cultures once subsisted is simply a fait accompli. The frantic extremism of the fundamentalisms and religious nationalisms and crypto-fascist integralisms of our current moment poignantly attests to the inconceivability for late modern culture of a God who is anything other than the construct of either the will to power or a desperate emotional need. None of them is a true sign of a revival of faith; all of them are only the hideous contractions of a deepening rigor mortis. And inasmuch as the genuinely living Christianity of the past was the vital wellspring of “Enlightenment” in the Western world, the departure of that Christianity from Western culture has carried away all those earlier possibilities of “co-immunity” that it had summed up in itself.

Epochs of the spirit are not reversible, or even susceptible of recapitulation. This is an Hegelian insight that no one should doubt: great historical and cultural transitions are not merely ruptures, but also moments of critique. The rationality of history lies in the ceaseless triumph of experience over mere theory, and so in the impossibility of any simple return to pre-critical naïvetés. Sooner or later, just about every cultural economy is defeated by its own inner contradictions, barring interruption of this natural process by a sudden foreign conquest. And the new order that succeeds it is probably no freer from contradictions of its own, which will be exposed in their turn. More to the point, every cultural order’s collapse is also the exhaustion of the synthesis that that culture embodied. Innocence yields to disenchantment, and disenchantment cannot revert to innocence.

Certainly this has proved so in the case of Christendom and its sequel, secularization. The Christendom of the empire or the nation state, being an alloy of two ultimately irreconcilable principles, inevitably subverted itself. It persisted for as long as it did by virtue of a genuinely organic cultic devotion with a durable practical and theoretical infrastructure. But its inherent contradictions ultimately destroyed that basis. The language and principles of the Gospel frequently illuminated the society that cherished them; the offices and powers of the state consistently sheltered, preserved, and advanced the religion that legitimated them. But the alliance was a suicide pact. The most devastating solvent of Christendom, in the end, was the ineradicable presence of Christianity within it. The corrosive force most destructive of Christianity as a credible source of social order was in the end the crushing burden of Christendom upon it.

(...)

As for the liberal secular order that succeeded Christendom, its own inner stresses and volatilities are all too obvious. In the economic realm, it has created prodigies of material production and destruction, as well as forms of power and oppression on a scale formerly unimaginable. In the social realm, it has created ceaseless struggles among incompatible visions of the good while providing no clear transcendent index of values for adjudicating their conflicts. For better or worse, it has eliminated or marginalized almost all mediating or subsidiary forms of social agency and reduced meaningful social order to the interdependent but necessarily antagonistic claims of the state, capital, and the sovereign individual. And Sloterdijk is quite right: under such conditions, we have little defense against the ecological and social calamities that we have created for ourselves. So, again, given these realities, what ought Christians to do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase."