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The West, now more than ever, is the single dominant culture against which all other cultures measure themselves, even as they disappear. A suddenly rich China destroys its culture as it mimics and apes Western institutions and mores. The West is not somehow humiliated or diminished by the rise of other power structures. Our only chance to achieve the magus personality is that we find powerful enemies. America was not diminished by Germany or Russia in the 20th century. These struggles with two great powers brought America into maturity and clarity of character. Rome would never have its high character without Carthage. I say this though Rome was nearly defeated by Carthage in three horrible wars. The Persians did not diminish the Greeks. The agonistic struggle with Persia made the Greek civilization immortal, and gave birth to the West. If America does not find its other, its Carthage, its Persia, then we will not survive as the magus civilization.

Consequently, I am not concerned about the rise of an India, or a China, or another Russia. I only am concerned that our enemies are not strong enough to make us immortal. We need enemies that truly hate our existence. The challenge of the other is an agency of the manifestation of our personality and our strength of character. The Western code needs to be challenged to the brink of its existence. There is no other way. We must pray for great enemies, or leave the stage.

Each Western individual has to experience himself at the limits of bursting. We must come close to bursting; then we discover the outlines of our redemption code: like the Greeks, like the Romans. We must trade our being by following our joy; though it may summon us to a quick and blazing transition. No other civilization offers the magus personality to every individual.

Yet current religious, secular, and philosophical discussions of Western man’s logos are unable to represent the importance and integrity of the Western Cultural achievement. Our charisma is felt but not understood in its parts. Danger and death share a similar charisma.

I experienced the requirement for a new philosophy of Western Civilization when I understood that the element diminishing modern poetry was also a weakness shared by modern philosophy. Neither poetry nor philosophy exists in a form consulted by an educated public. The current chaos of Western culture has created a vacuum drawing in powerful forces, impending a great change. There is indecision in the West. We are poorly led. We are fed upon by the chaotic and self-destructive visions of our own democratic leaders.

There is a hunger in the West. But consumerism is not a philosophy; it’s an addiction. It is a passion unworthy of the greatest civilization in earth’s history. As long as an educated elite does not value the function and mechanism of story in human conceptualizing, there is no honesty in our philosophy. I involve the Western reader in the following discussion because of a crisis in his or her philosophy. Western man has no philosophy. It does not exist.

Substituting Consumption for Our Lack of Joy
There is no clarity in our joy. We do not live the experience of honest joy, as we should. As the richest civilization on earth, we should have an honest joy. Instead, we have hypocritical joys. Our religious and scientific rituals do not mirror our daily joys in life. We do not hold work that gives us pleasure. We are drones with a future idea of counterfeit joy, wealth, leisure, or improvement – a joy that never arrives at an age when the dreamer could still work and taste the dream. We simply buy more things.

Most people I know in life are miserable in their work, constrained both by imagination and fear. I question why the children of the richest culture on earth are named the Lost Generation. I question why there is no joy in our faith. I question why we have no confidence in our newly manufactured science. If we pray, we pray for wealth and youth. Glossy photos of life portrayed in magazines become our symbols for the good life for which we barter a lifetime. I question why we accept a life of drudgery and illusion.

Critics have said the modern age is too self-conscious to create great art. I disagree. So far are we from being too self-conscious, I insist that we are still largely ignorant of the basic mechanisms of the human condition. The universe is not a physical structure; it is a creature of the mind. We are the intelligence of the stars. The universe, that is, all of being, including human personality, is merely experiencing the protocols of its own development. The human is a principal means, a machine, if you will, of perfecting the creature of life. Mortals are not eternal, but the life we influence and define is eternally working. Likewise our god is not static, but eternally in movement.

Whether we attend a Church, Temple, or Mosque, we have no practice of daily, secular joy that corresponds to our religious ritual or dogma. Our joys are firmly secular and vicious. Our religious and secular posturing is empty and merely represents a parallel, but false catechism. Our story of god has no sex left in it. There should be passion and magic power in all our acts. The first age of Christianity had Brides of Christ, when the faithful felt sexual energy towards the joy of the Christ message. This is now extinct. Churches only exist on television; in Europe they are forbidding, cold museums. As portrayed on television, religion seems an arcane, stereotypic duty performed by paid actors. There is no believable story about the joy of faith and churchgoing. There is no honesty in our story of god.

Western Christianity offers two equally unacceptable choices. If we are ambitious to live as exact Christians, then we chose a life of hypocrisy – as humans do not avoid engaging most of their passions. If we avoid hypocrisy then we live lives of guilt or self-loathing. Both choices are dishonest and useless. I accuse a culture stunned by its own lack of spiritual imagination.

The story of god is not the only story that is in danger in the West. There is less satisfaction with our reliance on science. Science story, like stories of god, are never final, never exist in a finished state. Science changes every three years. Nothing can be believed, if belief alters on any particular day. Thus we have our first clue we are dealing with story-makers. We are not at ease with either story of the human condition, spiritually or physically. If there is no joy in the story of a god then there can be no love of god. I do not accept any confession of love that is not already intimately mated to an affirmative joy.

I do not record the loss of Christianity; I record the failure of our modern joy to match the story of a past joy. I do not place blame on this generation for some failure of religious feeling; I blame this generation for accepting empty religious ritual without connection to the living joy in our lives. By ritual I mean anything that happens inside a Church or Temple, whether by priest, prophet, or temple cat. The West does not live well with its story of god inherited from past ages. This must be addressed. But the empty churches still sit on our street corners starving, begging under the gray skies of winter. They are dirty and unwashed.

I do not say there is not a spiritual sense. But I believe amateurs have represented our spirituality. The poets have been thrown out of the temple. And we have forgotten that all stories of god came from poetry and incantation. The poem introduced in these pages addresses this issue. We are worthy to have gods without feeling hypocrisy or shame.

I do not depreciate those who attend church regularly. I accuse them of not having joy in their hearts. I do not wish to shame a religious sense. I accuse the religious of not having a shout in their throat as they stumble through shop-worn theology, and stumble out the door – empty of awe and joy. Joy is a frenzy, a shout – not a sermon. I prefer magic to an empty rite.

Life without joy will seek its own reckoning. It is a danger to all. The universe is a living organism being developed by the mind that we share. This book will introduce a new philosophy and a new story of men.

I need not blame any people, not even a Lost Generation. I believe that all men are good and intend to do good, no matter how they perceive it in the changeable moment. Despite our terrible faults, I am good and the reader is good – good as we can afford to be in the moment. Each moment tells a different story. Our stories of virtue and honesty are still generally taught to schoolchildren. Our story is in motion; always vigilant, always sharp.

Christianity, like Islam, does not answer the final questions of our human condition. I remind the reader that we don’t yet know the strangeness of our spiritual origins. What Western can recognize the strangest aspects of our religious story, our story of god? I don’t speak only of our willingness to embrace violence. I speak of the unremarked aspects of Christian story. The Gospels are significant for what they do not say about the Christ figure. Christ is not a complete personality. God the Father is not a complete personality. Christ, like Yahweh, is a secret personality that cannot be clearly seen, cannot be known, and was never understood by his disciples. I am still shocked to read the accounts of Jesus in Mark and John, when the devil and the demons were the only beings that recognized the Christ, not his followers, not the good and righteous men, not the rabbis of the Temple. Jesus’ followers appear not to even know who Christ was. This god appears to be a construct of story; that is, it has its own time, its own strange logic, its own value constructs, and is a carefully constructed narrative. It is the immortal work of a poet. A new god is introduced via the agency of personality.

We still have no idea of who Jesus was. We only know what story we make of him now. And he is different in every age and culture. This must be explained. There must be a missing link to explain this disconnect in reality and story. The American fundamentalist has remade Christ, since we have filled in the gaps and silences that were so glaring in the Gospel accounts. We filled in the gaps with the personality we sought in our joy. The Gospels are easy to surpass in story and joy. We are still in the age of human story-makers. The West has already rewritten the Christ story several times.

The Christian ruin has failed to fire the imagination of the West in the last four generations. I accuse a shop worn intelligentsia. I accuse a nation that cannot align their joy with their vision. I accuse the exclusion of the story-makers.

Story must be made new, not to reject man’s spiritual heritage, but to ensure that it remains a human sense. God is still unexplained now as he always was. This means that the West is still in its infancy of storytelling. We are not declining; we are just beginning to tell our story. I insist in this discussion that all our stories are direct outlines of the form of god’s condition. Nothing can resist the path our stories shall make. We shall gut the universe with our terrible stories. Nothing now standing will remain in the wake of the story we still must make.

Likewise, I do not for a moment belittle the Bible stories as mere story. The Jewish Torah is the actual Western manifestation of the human condition for the last 100 generations. That is as close to and account of truth-eternity as humans reach. I insist that the only reality experienced is found in human story, and story moreover, as vital and powerful as the Bible. Thus, so far from being unimportant and trivial, the story of Socrates, the Old Testament, and the Gospels are our greatest human achievements. I will show that stories such as these are the source of everything that becomes human personality. But this achievement must remain dynamic and be greatly improved upon. These stories have been worked and teased to exhaustion. I insist we need more stories as vital and shocking as Socrates, the Old Testament, and the Gospels. The source for this new story will be exactly where humans find their joy. And this story will have its god.

This treatise postulates there is human joy, and there is a spiritual origin. I insist there is a connection between human joy and spiritual power. But as I write these words the two emotions do not match one another in the life we lead in the West. We have an ersatz joy in the plastic things we collect: cars, antiques, paintings, wealth, women, travel, and nature – all pure aesthetics. Aesthetics makes a poor substitute for the Summa-Story, still less for a philosophy of ethics. There must be a greater architecture of shared joys, and joy, moreover, that makes root in our actual mysteries. We are a culture working only on the surface of our mystery. There is no peace to be found in our continuing enfoldment.

I accuse the poets of my generation – at the beginning of the twenty-first century. They have accepted their expulsion from the competition of ideas. They accept their lameness, their silence, and their insignificance, in the modern public space. They accept the language of the newspaper report. I accuse them of the want of boldness and incantation. I accuse them of want of spirit, an utter lack of joy. They have no poetry, yet are ambitions to have the name of a poet. Poetry has now gone underground to survive. I raise a shout form the toy box.

I accuse a nation of wealth. Our children, the richest generation in Earth’s history, are wretched. They are rich and they are miserable. The sacrifice and toil of the pioneers has only given us the prize of the Lost Generation. This is what we have achieved after all our cowboy frontier struggles for material well being: a miserable, unhappy Lost Generation. Our current generations do not have a story of the present or the future that gives them joy. For a Western culture currently wielding an immense material power this lack of joy represents a dangerous moment both for the West and the earth’s other cultures we are about to utterly subsume.

The West is not in decline; it is merely dangerous. The following prose narrative is a story, not a poem, not a scientific paper with notes, not a religious document, not a treatise, not a polemic. It is merely a story that the reader has never seen in print before. Its authority is its own plausibility; either it gives joy to the reader or it should be utterly ignored.