The Wisdom Pattern: Order, Disorder, Reorder

"Yes! I mean, I’m a secular audience. I’m more interested with every passing year in Christian writing, but I’m still a secular audience. This is an adapted reissue of a book that first came out right after 9/11 , though references to Covid have been added in the appropriate places. But essentially it’s an exploration of the idea that in all sorts of mythologies and religious teachings, and in our individual lives, there’s a recurring pattern of leaving a state of orderliness for disorder and confusion, then pushing through until you get to a new order, a new understanding and way of living. I don’t remember whether he talks about Jung, but I’m into Jung, and Jung talks about how the biggest problems in our lives are never really solved, but outgrown. He compares them to being in a storm on a mountainside; you keep climbing up the mountain until you pass through the storm clouds, and then the storm is below you—but it hasn’t gone, it’s that you’ve integrated it into your life. That seems like a useful way of thinking about the uncertainties of the world. Trying to go back to what we remember life was like before is probably not going to be the most resilient approach. He also argues against what we can think of broadly as postmodernism, though I think he has a more nuanced view about this than some commentators. He says that, when everything falls apart, or when our common understandings fall apart, or when science doesn’t seem able to guarantee us meaningful lives, there’s an impulse to conclude that there are no patterns, no grand narratives. It’s a cynical way of thinking—it suggests there’s nothing you can do—but it also puts you in the godlike position of claiming to know that there’s no order to the way human lives or civilisations unfold. Instead we need to be open to the idea that there are patterns and that we might not know exactly what they are. “He compares problems to storm clouds; keep climbing the mountain until you pass through the clouds, and then the storm is below you” This is where something that might seem recognisably Christian speaks to me, I think, without necessarily signing up to a whole bunch of beliefs: just this state of receptivity to the idea that you might not know all there is to know, and opening oneself to the idea of being governed by some kind of higher wisdom—not even the Christian one, necessarily. It’s an attitude of mind that has to do with understanding or accepting your own limitations and imperfections, not trying to escape the situation of being human. And having no narratives is clearly associated with a general sense of loneliness and isolation, and of life being absurd. Someone, somewhere, defined depression as the absence of meaning, which is an interesting thing to consider, whether it’s true or not."