Kate, Carl and the Culture Wars

Paul Kingsnorth, whose Against The Machine has just been published, is right: the West continues to put civilization ahead of an authentic Christianity, one that honours the words and deeds of its founder.

What is more, using politics, money and power to try to save what has been built, will surely fail. As he points out in First Things, Jesus does not "fight wars other than those that go on in the heart". We already have our orders. Love your neighbour. Love your enemy. Love God. Do not resist evil. Rule by serving.

Of course, an array of politicians, billionaires and podcasting pundits continue with more of the same, it never occurring to them that the culture war could be about their refusal to face this difficult reality. They go on assuming that what man most wishes to know – be that about God, truth, beauty or goodness – is within the grasp of his preferred way of understanding.

For here's the thing: the "inversion" role played by destructive progressivist politics in this "strange, dissolving, increasingly nihilistic moment we are living through" is something Jesus would approve of.

The founders of Western rationalism knew that reason, or logos, isn't able to go "all the way". Socrates was the smartest man in Athens because he embraced his own ignorance. Similarly, sections of his dialogues, notes historian Richard Tarnas, indicate that Plato believed "the imaginative faculty, both poetic and religious, was as useful in the quest for attaining knowledge" as logic or empiricism. Hence his use of the Allegory of the Cave to convey the essence of his influential Theory of Forms.

Love is the same. I could attempt to account for why a particular woman – let's call her Kate – is the one. Her beautiful alabaster skin and delicate hands. The no-fuss, otherworldly elegance. Her kindness. That look she gives me, the one no one else gets to see. When all is said and done, however, a complete explanation eludes me, the mystery only serving to confirm what I already know.

None of this is intended to disparage knowledge or organized progress. It concerns human limits and the enigmatic relationship between interdependent counterparts, a subject dear to the ancient Greeks and touched on by Nick Cave in Faith, Hope and Carnage.

It's not like you have any real control over the creative process. In fact, it's almost the opposite: you have to surrender in a way and really just let yourself be led by the secret demands of the song. In a sense, it's the not-knowing and not being totally in control that is so invigorating.

Now, that said, for that magic thing to happen, there has to be certain things in place. It can't just be a couple of guys who don't know what they are doing, sitting around bashing shit out.

Life is a balancing act. Order and chaos. Head and heart. Logos and mythos.

"Render to Caesar the things that are Caesar's," says Jesus in Mark 12:17, "and to God the things that are God's."

Carl Jung had a keen interest in our contra-sexual inner personalities. He referred to the feminine aspect in men as anima. Representing qualities like intuition, emotion and nurturing, it provides a bridge to the unconscious, giving a man the emotional resilience needed for healthy relationships. The Swiss psychologist named the masculine principle in women animus, associating it with conventional male attributes such as critical reasoning, assertiveness and ambition.

Integrating the feminine is difficult for us men, not least because it means accommodating mythical and subjective understandings of life and love that can't really be argued with. Our categorising mind, naturally fond of its either-or dialectic, must leave space for contemplation, a state of not-knowing that allows us to receive direct, spiritual insight. If not, we can lose touch with truth, beauty and goodness, Plato's archetypes that order physical reality yet also stand beyond it.