Liminality — the Real Root of Nihilism

The true cause of the Meaning Crisis

"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." This is one of the great one-liners from Shakespeare's Hamlet and it's a line that's particularly relevant today. Everyone seems to think the world is rotten. This diagnosis of rottenness tends to take on different forms depending on where you stand in the culture.

We can group one bunch together under the banner of individualism. In this corner you'll hear people talking about their existential crisis or a spiritual awakening or about Nihilism and the Meaning Crisis. The solutions they offer are more or less centred on the individual whether that's Existentialism or Stoicism, Buddhism or Jungian archetypes, Positive Thinking or yoni eggs.

Another group we can bunch together under the banner of collectivism. Over here you'll hear talk of wealth inequality, Neo-colonialism, systemic racism and intersectionality. The solutions offered over here tend to be more collectively oriented so we have Leftist movements like Occupy Wall Street and the Social Justice movements.

These buckets see a world gone rotten in two very different ways. Like the two faces of Janus — the one looks backwards to religion and mythology or our prehistoric ancestors while the other camp look forward to a progressive future where the rottenness of the world has been soothed. These opposite-facing directions take the two camps down very different paths with very different models of what is going on in the world and this often brings them into direct conflict.

But beneath the surface these two faces of Janus are attached to the same neck — the same body. Liminality is the soil out of which these two radical movements grow. Liminality can be seen as one way of understanding the rottenness in the state of the world today. It goes to a deeper layer of analysis where we find that individually and culturally we are caught between worlds. We live in an unstable time with infinite potential but incredible danger. We are walking the knife edge of unstructured ritual being acted out collectively as we search the darkness for answers.

These two movements in the culture are usually treated as opponents but they share a common origin — a shared substrate called Liminality. We'll save the liminality of leftism for a future instalment, in this article we're going to focus on the connection between liminality and the rise of the individual-oriented philosophies like Existentialism, Buddhism, Jungian psychology and self-actualisation.

What is Liminality?

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As we explored in the previous article, the term liminality was popularised in the 1960s and 70s by the British anthropologist Victor Turner. In its original anthropological context liminality referred to the middle stage of tribal and traditional rituals. These can be rituals centred on individuals like Ayahuasca ceremonies, 10-day meditation retreats or "rites of passage" rituals. Or they can be collective rites that mark particular points in the crop cycle like Mardi Gras, Halloween or the Ancient Greek Eleusinian Mysteries.

Liminality is the term for the middle phase of these rituals. There is a common way of being that emerges in this liminal stage that is completely different to our regular way of being. This liminal way of being is the opposite of what Turner calls "Structure".

Structure is the world of political, economic and legal institutions and hierarchies of secular life. When we talk about Structure we are talking about the world of Porsches and Rolexs; Prime Ministers and Presidents; parking tickets and Supreme Court rulings. It's the sphere of common sense, discipline and power.

In the liminality of ritual all of this Structure's distinctions of wealth, property and power are dissolved and so there is a flattening of all hierarchies. The liminal initiates have no status, no property, no identity. Everyone is the same; everyone even looks the same — sometimes they wear no clothes, sometimes a uniform and sometimes they are dressed like monsters. Even sex differences and our individuality dissolve — in many such rituals people are stripped of their names and men and women are all addressed by the same term. In short, everything that distinguishes us from each other in rank or status and even identity is dissolved.

And what emerges is something fascinating powerful and transformative. Turner notes how during liminality those undergoing the ritual together:

"tend to develop an intense comradeship and egalitarianism"

and in this space

"A mystical character is assigned to the sentiment of humankindness"

Instead of their relations being structured by their position in society — like their job, wealth or background — the relations between the initiates are spontaneous and unstructured. There is a camaraderie and a love just for the sake of it. There is a deep authenticity to this way of relating.

Among the other traits that Turner associates with Liminality are:

• Disregard for personal appearance

• Simplicity

• Foolishness

• Humility

• Homogeneity

• Silence

• Sacredness and

• Continuous reference to mystical powers

It's a time which can be seen as:

"a period of scrutinization of the central values and axioms of the culture"

If you want to learn more about liminality check out the full article on it where we look at liminality and its cousins marginality and inferiority. For now let's turn our attentions to Nihilism.

Nihilism

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There is an overflowing relevance of all this to our current cultural moment and to the problem of Nihilism.

As we've explored in previous instalments, Nihilism has been a fruit of modern Western culture's scientific development.

For the religious person life has objective meaning whether that's the afterlife of the Abrahamic and other Near Eastern religions or the eternal cycle of birth and rebirth in Buddhism and Hinduism. In all of these systems of belief, humanity has a privileged place in reality.

Inhabiting this sort of religious grand narrative is the common state of humanity. But while this state can last for thousands of years, it does not seem to last forever. In Ancient Greece and Rome we can see the collapse of the old religions which created centuries of a vacuum before ultimately Christianity conquered the culture. We can see a similar story in the Warring States period of Ancient China out of which there emerged the two great Chinese religions/philosophies of Confucianism and Taoism.

Our modern culture seems to be undergoing a similar reorientation. As the Modernist worldview comes to its full fruition in the centuries since the Scientific Revolution, the centrality of religion has been slowly but surely retreating. What started as Deism and Pantheism with the French Enlightenment and Spinoza in the 17th and 18th centuries became, after Darwin in the mid-19th-century a rushing torrent of atheism.

These isolated pockets of religious doubt were so scandalous that the implications of this paradigm-smashing worldview weren't considered. But by the late 19th century atheism was becoming a more commonplace point of view (if still rare and scandalous) and with that the deeper implications of this worldview began to emerge.

This decay becomes fully articulated with Nietzsche's declaration of the death of God in 1883's The Gay Science. As we've talked about in a previous instalment, Nietzsche's declaration of God's death isn't a New Atheist sort of manifesto. It's not a triumphant declaration of Reason or Modernity's success over the short-sighted superstitions of traditional religion. Instead it is a warning about an apocalyptic crisis which this death portends. This crisis is called Nihilism.

With God dead there is no foundation beneath our value system; as Nietzsche writes:

How were we able to drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon? What did we do when we unchained this earth from its sun? Whither is it moving now? Whither are we moving now? Away from all suns? Are we not plunging continually?

In the century and a half since this declaration, the monotheistic value systems have continued to lose their grip on the modern psyche and so belief is dissolving. The past century and a half has seen the rise of scientific materialism and atheism from the status of criminality to an increasing norm. Almost a third of the American population identify as "Not Religious". This trend is only increasing. Compared to the 12% of those in their 70s who identify as Not Religious there are 38% between 18 and 29.

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The death of God is a slow process. As Nietzsche put it, it's like the light of a star which takes time to arrive. God died somewhere in the 19th century but like the adoption of a technological product it takes time to saturate society. The philosophical pioneers are the first to note it but as the crisis sinks deeper and becomes more socially acceptable we see the death of God reaching its tipping point:

The Tipping Point, Sheltongrp

Nihilism and Liminality

This is the Nihilistic diagnosis of the Meaning Crisis that long-time readers of the publication will already be familiar with. But now let's look at this same process through the lens of liminality. There are some fascinating insights that emerge from this perspective and it sheds a completely new light on the Meaning Crisis.

First let's look at the nature of religion through this anthropological lens. In The Ritual Process Turner notes that in large-scale societies liminality becomes institutionalised as religion. A shaman might be enough for a village but when it comes to ministering to the needs of a sprawling civilisation institutionalised Structure is needed. Of course this makes institutionalised religion something of a contradiction. The messaging of religion — to love your neighbour, to orient yourselves towards another world besides the corrupting one of Structure — is anti-structural but the religion itself with its hierarchies, rules, infrastructure and institutions is the embodiment of Structure.

The resolution of this contradiction goes back to the idea that liminality is only possible within a structured space. It takes a delicate choreographed altered state of mind to step outside structure even for the duration of a ritual. Just as the ritualistic space acts as a container for pure liminality so religion acts as a container that can bring the fertilising liminality to a whole civilisation.

So we can think of religion then as the vessel of liminality for large-scale societies. If we stick with the appropriate liminal image of water with its dynamic and ever-changing form then we might think of liminality as a river and religion as a vast irrigation network of canals. When a culture has a religious paradigm it is not devastated by the ebb and flow of liminality. It becomes a nourishing source of growth. Rather than a flood of liminality wreaking havoc on a community it instead becomes an incredible resource enabling a controlled and bountiful patchwork of life.

But what is Nihilism in this metaphor? One way of thinking about it is to see the crisis of Nihilism as the river changing direction and this leading to draught in the irrigated system downstream. Remember that Structure is the institutionalised infrastructure of society while liminality is the animating principle of emotion, spirit and soul that is the human yin to Structure's yang.

So if you want to know what happens when you have all yang — all Structure — and no yin — no liminality — the answer is meaninglessness. Structure needs Liminality — without it the entire system seems hollow, inauthentic and false. The meaning has gone out of the life; the riverbed is dry.

In his Existentialist/Absurdist classic The Myth of Sisyphus French philosopher Albert Camus talks about the Ancient Greek hero Sisyphus who is sentenced by the gods to roll a rock up a hill, watch it roll back down and then roll it right back up again until the end of time. This image captures perfectly the repetitive hollowness of Structure without meaning — of life without meaning; or, to use the language of Turner — of Structure without liminality. Everything becomes a pointless repetition — a going through the motions.

Progressivism and the Dangers of Liminality

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But as we've said Liminality is a force of nature and so the river doesn't just disappear into thin air. So one thing you can do is to just look around you and ask where is life most animated? Where is culture most alive and creative? And this is where the Leftist element comes in. It's quickly becoming a trope for Wokeism to be called a religion in the echo chambers further right. In a previous article we looked at the religious apocalyptic fervour to be found in the rhetoric around the Climate Crisis. And if we look at the value system of Leftism what we find is an almost exact match with the values of liminality.

And if you listen to the reaction to Leftism you can hear the fear of liminality. You can hear Conservative commentators like Jordan Peterson warning about the dangers of Progressivism. What we hear is that if you try to change too many things you destabilise the system. But the liminality that animates the Leftist movement replies with the words of Martin Luther King Jnr that this "is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquillizing drug of gradualism".

Of course Peterson has a point. Among tribal peoples liminality is treated like a pathological virus. There are stages at either side of liminality in the ritualistic setting that act like decontamination chambers separating pure liminality from Structure. The ideal and the natural balance is for society's institutions to match culture's values but a river's banks do not form overnight. And meanwhile this is not the only place that we find liminality in the culture — even if it is the most powerful.

Curing the Meaning Crisis

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In the circles where we find Nihilism being talked about we find a different quest for liminality. These individuals, like Nietzsche, start with the problem of the dried-up riverbed. Starting there you have two options. You can follow the river backwards upstream. This is the reactionary's response; it is the path of religious fundamentalism and reactionary politics. It is looking backwards to times which appear greater when seen through the archetypal lens.

Alternatively you can dig a deep hole where you stand and tap into the universal lifeforce at the water table of the collective unconscious. This is the approach of Jungian psychology, Fascism, plant medicine and spirituality. The idea here is to dig deep enough that we hit the water table and the liminal waters of life come bubbling up. At that point we nurture the stream and build our homes around it.

However we approach it and however we frame it the result is the same: after centuries of good harvests, the Christian value system is no longer irrigating the culture as it once did. It is no longer the container of liminality that it once was and now a new relationship with liminality is required. The old Structure is inadequate. As Jesus puts it in the Gospel of Mark:

“no one pours new wine into old wineskins. Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins, and both the wine and the wineskins will be ruined. No, they pour new wine into new wineskins.”

If nothing else, the language of liminality offers us a compass we can orient ourselves by: we have left the old Structure behind but we cannot stay in our current state forever; what we are searching for is solid ground — for the rebirth of Structure. Our culture is going through an initiation which can bring us out of Liminality and into the light of Structure once again.

Despite the allergy to systems and institutions among many parties out there — notably many Leftists and Existentialists like Sartre and Camus — liminality needs a container. In tribal rituals liminality is bookended by Structure. The Chaos of liminality is unsustainable. Even Anarchist societies have their own form of Structure.

What is required is a living relationship between Chaos and Order between liminality and Structure. The crisis of Nihilism is the death of the Christian Structure. Both Nietzsche and Jung understood this and looked towards a new tablet of values. Maybe the next millennia-enduring value structure will emerge from the Leftist camp and maybe it will emerge from the individualist self-actualising camp but whatever the case a new Structure must be found and this haphazard collective initiation ritual must find its natural conclusion.