In a strange but philosophically potent story told in the Hebrew Bible, God gives his prophet Hosea some rather odd instructions. Those in favour of something resembling polyamory may initially be very pleased by God’s apparent progressiveness in the tale but their pleasure is unlikely to last long as they read on. God commands Hosea to take for himself a wife of “whoredom” and to raise “children of whoredom” (Hosea 1:2). Hosea will be committed to a focused point of attention. He will be a symbol of the monogamy that loves and cherishes one woman no matter what. But his wife Gomer will remain promiscuous and inattentive. Because she will always look elsewhere for companionship, she will never love very deeply and she will struggle perpetually to receive love.
To be clear, the story is not, as literalists may initially assume, about sexual ethics. It is not primarily a contest of two approaches to marriage, although we won’t struggle to find lessons on that subject in the story. Rather, it is mainly a story about worship. It symbolises the way meaning is made manifest depending on how we attend to reality. In a sense, attention is reality. What we worship determines what sort of meaning we’ll find.
Clearly, Hosea must brace himself for the consequences of his doomed marriage to a loose woman. He knows at the outset what he’s getting himself into but that doesn’t make it any easier. Gomer will abandon him to go after other lovers. She will do so on the false assumption that those men provide for her, even though it is her husband who remains the source of shelter (2:5-8). Hosea will have to constantly seek her out and bring her home. Gomer will constantly betray him. She will regard his attention as something to resent and not trust. His loyalty will be to her as disposable as her own capacity for love. Moreover, the paternity of Hosea’s children will always be questionable; he will have to raise offspring that may or may not be his.
As I’ve already hinted, Hosea’s life is an allegory and it is in this that we find its philosophical depth. His personal drama reflects a much larger story, the implications of which are universal. Hosea, as husband and father, is a symbol of God—the origin point of the real, the reason for the intelligibility of all things, and the highest principle and ideal of existence. Gomer is a symbol of the nation of Israel, the people of God, who in this story are cast as rebels against the real. They stand against the intrinsic intelligibility of things. For the promiscuous mind, intelligibility is always stitched together out of bits and pieces; it must, apparently, be (mainly) posited or imposed on what is found. To the promiscuous mind, inattentive as it is to the whole and to wholeness, intelligibility seems accidental to being rather than its main feature.
The children born to Gomer, out of her dissolute actions, are given strange names to indicate what sort of misery people-against-intelligibility inflict on themselves, names reflecting punishment, the absence of mercy, and a state of fatherlessness that we might know more commonly in our time as alienation. The children of unrestrained libido, endorsers and continuers of a promiscuous minding of being, manifest an increasing fracturing of the real. How will they cope with this? Will they see their attentional errors and return to reality? Sadly, this is unlikely. Instead, they will engage in activities—various forms of pleasure-seeking and drug-taking, distractions à la mode—that perpetuate their own incapacity to understand. Hosea writes of the inattentive: “They will eat but they will never have enough; they’ll be lustful but will not flourish because they have deserted the Lord to give themselves to prostitution; what they consume, whether old or new, will take away their understanding” (4:10).
Even as we resist reading this through the literalistic eyes of puritans, it’s not as if we need too many examples of how this mindset plays out today. Still, perhaps one of the funniest—and potentially most horrifying—examples in our time is the recent phenomenon of so-called “bimbofication.” A TikTok video has been trending in which several rules for “bimbofication” are supplied by someone who self-identifies as a bimbo. The rules—there are ten of them as if to parody the ten commandments—are written along the lines of maintaining superficiality at every turn. Apparently, the self-described bimbo should never bother to research anything to figure out what is true, should never engage with the discourse, and should never use anything resembling critical thinking. “Only focus on u and ur looks all the time,” is rule 3. “Stop observing and perceiving,” is rule 9. And rule 10 is: “No thoughts … just vibes.”
On first viewing, I thought the video was too brazenly dimwitted to be anything but satire—it made me laugh heartily because it reflects so brilliantly the way our anti-culture revels in shallowness. But it turns out there’s some sincerity behind the nonsense. Certainly, as further proof that we are living in Clownworld, many people are taking it seriously. Apparently, bimbofication is not ‘unintelligent’ despite its avid commitment to refusing to think. Rather, it simply rejects so-called ‘patriarchal’ notions of intelligence. As one writer puts it, “The modern-day bimbo is a fresh approach to intersectional feminism. There is, actually, careful thought behind bimbology, and it could be a way to reach true liberation.” That much-abused word liberation is a clue to the fact that the movement has close ties with various other strains of contagious fashionable nonsense.
But this so-called “fresh approach” sounds an awful lot like the world’s oldest profession. This narcissistic aloofness, and especially its concern with just being mindlessly devoid of curiosity while endlessly distracting oneself from the world, loudly echoes the life of Gomer. I find this significant. Again, taking Gomer as a symbol, we find that a rejection of the real implies a loss of understanding but also damage to the very capacity to seek understanding (Hosea 4:6-14). Ignorance is not so easily cured because it adores itself as ignorance and will fight insight and wisdom the way antibodies fight a virus.
What sort of world does this entrenching of ignorance create? Does it make the world a better place to live? Hosea sees and lives the consequences of this. He has no postmodern luxury Gnosticism to protect him from the real, and so he faces the consequences with his eyes wide open. The results are far from pleasant. Throughout the book of Hosea, we have indications of a world in decay (a terribly familiar theme), with fertility decreasing (9:14-17), and with silliness (7:11) and arrogance (5:5; 7:10) abounding. “Lawsuits break out like poisonous weeds” (10:4), anxieties abound (10:5), and anger is as common as injustice. “People without discernment are doomed” (4:14) but that won’t stop them from willfully opting against discernment.
A crucial symbolic dimension of this state of calamity is the rejection of the father—Hosea and God; symbolically, this means rejecting the principle of order, the source of the intelligibility of all things. To be able to reject the highest good, ignorance is required; the first step is to set up a caricature of the father who archetypally represents that good. It is not Hosea who is rejected but Hosea as imagined by Gomer. It is not God who is rejected but the caricature of God. To use bimboism as an example again, the so-called patriarchy is not a real father or even a real collective of men, despite its etymology, but an abstraction concocted by minds incapable of attending to the whole. For any broken attention span, a false villain first has to be created before it can be actively opposed, along with the true vision that it supposedly represents. Ignorance is in charge. As an old proverb says, one might find oneself holding in contempt something that is worth much more than one believes. At the very least, this is a possibility that must be kept in mind.
But, of course, bimboism (I still can’t believe this is a thing) is just one contemporary manifestation of this very ancient decision to manufacture a caricature and then reject what is authentic in the name of that caricature. The same mindset that gives rise to this extreme shallowness and unworlding is evident everywhere in our world. Cultural ADHD is normal now. This tragic refusal to nurture anything like inwardness is evident even in the way that literature is studied in universities, not, say, in terms of the direct and powerful experience of the depth of a work of literature but through various reductions of literature to specific modes of ideological analysis. This problem of devaluing being and experience is even evident in the modern and postmodern splitting up of everything into fragments, such that science and statistics are commonly interpreted without any proper context. The search for meaning becomes an entirely egocentric fool’s errand.
If God is dead then, as Nietzsche suggests in his famous parable of the madman, no one can properly discern up from down and left from right. If God is dead, reality manifests as essentially incoherent and violent. Being becomes injustice. In other words, reality manifests as a lie. Reality, as in the story of creation in Genesis, is the harmonious and complex interplay of various complementarities: night and day, land and sea, fauna and flora, male and female. Unreality, which manifests after the fall, renders all categories confused and even at odds with each other and with themselves. The given is rejected in the name of the imagined. Being is no longer regarded as a gift but as an annoying hindrance to self-actualisation.
So Hosea’s story, as should already be evident, offers a few clues into the distinction between the real and the fake, between genuine love and commitment and its poor substitute and imitation. The idea of the fake is notoriously tricky because it seems to be a merely negative term. It is, apparently, the mere opposite of the real. When considering the fake, we are likely to have in mind certain visual metaphors, like the distinction between the photographic image of a person and the person that the photograph represents. The former is fake, the latter, real. Or we might think of the difference between real money and counterfeit money, or between forgeries of paintings and original paintings. These examples suggest an opposition between plagiarism and authenticity. By implication, the difference between the fake and the real has to do with some purely objective quality. If this metaphor holds, the difference between the fake and the real should be easy to figure out.
But the reality is not so simple. Remember that Gomer is both married and unfaithful. Hosea is a father to specific children but whether those children are his or not is undecided and undecidable. The fake and the real are intertwined. We’re not dealing with something as simple as throwing away the photographic image for the sake of the person who was photographed or burning the forgery for the sake of the real thing. As that marvellous old Radiohead song goes, the fake “looks like the real thing”. Maybe the “love” in question is “fake plastic love” but how can we really know? What if one day we’ll just be able to take a pill to cheat our minds into monogamy? Won’t that be real, too? Hosea’s tale is not the tale of what is “just” reality and what is “just” a copy. It points to a deeper interwoven complexity that we would do well not to overlook. I know that this is a philosophical issue too big to solve in a small space but the story of Hosea and Gomer offers a significant contribution to help us to figure some of it out. In general, as I’ve already suggested, it gets to the fact that the difference between the fake and the real is fundamentally in how we attend to the world. With this in mind, three aspects of Hosea’s tale are worth highlighting.
First, Hosea (and his attentive monogamy) represents the real—the context, the Gestalt, the desire to always live in fidelity to wholeness in spite of brokenness. The real is not merely some detached epistemological category, nor is it naive about the problems of life. Still, it participates in the world to gather up fragments, to consider how best to manifest togetherness despite the obvious presence of disjunctions and shards of the real. The real is a principle of unity, the ontological prioritising of peace over violence. Yes, there are still fragments. Gomer is a mess, the kids have more issues than we can name, and Hosea himself is a broken man. But he pays attention to the unity that already is and yet which could be better. By contrast, the unreal is by nature the fragment of the real that has been set up against wholeness. The unreal coaxes further fractures and breakages into being and manifests a movement towards even more discord. It prioritises violence over peace. Instead of sticking around to fight for the marriage, for instance, Gomer keeps leaving. This is a manifestation of a promiscuous minding of being. Instead of standing with what unity there is for the sake of the greater unity, Gomer allows her attention to be forever wandering. No thought; just vibes.
Secondly, Hosea’s story articulates the real less as a static image than as the entire way one engages with everything. The shift from the real to the fake pertains to a refusal to be real and not just a refusal to accept some propositions about reality. Pinocchio is a pertinent symbol here. He remains a wooden puppet—a puppet to his desires and the whims of others—by living lies. However, he becomes real by living the truth. Reality is not just a matter of belief, but a matter of virtue. Note that there are, as the story of Hosea shows us, patterns of being that have agency of their own even above and beyond the agency of individuals. Hosea accepts and lives out the pattern of the loving prophet. His attention is on the whole itself and what the whole demands of him. Gomer accepts and lives out the pattern of the prostitute. What happens after their initial decision to attend to the world in their respective ways is almost not up to them. An everyday example for us would be choosing to engage with a particular item of technology or not. After, say, picking up the cellphone and using it, what that cellphone does to your brain and mind and attention is not really up to you. You will be affected by it as anyone would be. The “pattern of using a cellphone” has a mind of its own. To point this out is not to deny people agency—far from it. My point is that it matters immensely which story we live out and how we attend to the world.
Thirdly, the primary symbol of reality is ultimately not located in Hosea alone but in the family itself and in the world beyond it. That is, it is found in the total relational reality of the people in this particular drama. It is by no means coincidental that the most malicious of ideologies has always sought to abolish the family as a structure because it is the primary means through which each of us first comes into contact with reality. The family presupposes the ontological priority of unity over fragmentation. It presupposes that the world is always mediated for us and never something we can encounter in some neutered, value-neutral form. What rings out most clearly in Hosea is how the family embodies the above two principles (of perceptual wholeness and lived participation) and then takes them further: family is supposed to be honoured as the origin of life. Any antagonism to this most ancient of institutions will produce barrenness and decay in society—as we well know.
This last point is seen even in something like creativity. Creativity involves mixing differences, combining complementarities. But this combination is severely hampered by a loss of attention to the whole (the formal cause) or to the aim (or final cause) of any creative project. Beyond a certain point, not so easy to discern in a world of fragments, the blending of different elements is akin to mixing too many colours together in a haphazard way. What may initially have resulted in a vivid new colour ends up being something muddy and murky and far from vivid.
So then, reality is not just, as commonly understood, that which persists apart from our awareness. It is not just, as Philip K. Dick defines it, “that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away.” This is a fair place to start to understand the real but there is a danger even in this way of defining reality. It places reality and perception at odds (for starters) and also assumes that reality might be reduced to bare facts. As I’ve said, this danger stems from considering reality and the fake through the dualism of a visual metaphor. The visual metaphor implies recovering the real world by throwing away the fake. In other words, you get rid of mediation. But the truth is this: the real is recovered precisely in embracing mediation as its central feature. What happens between things, in their relationships is what matters; how we relate to the real through our attention is what matters. The real is not just a thing, then, but a principle: it renders being intelligible as being. It imposes nothing but uncovers everything. As Hosea’s story more than implies, the real is the total pattern of existence, as lived out in the midst of others. The patterns of the real are discernable. We see them distilled especially in the old stories: in myths and legends and fairytales. Of course, many who read the story of Hosea now will jump up and down in a fit as they realise how it doesn’t fit into their ideological box. They’ll claim that Gomer is really emancipated, an exemplar of ‘true liberation’; that the kids are fine without a sense that their world is coherent; and that Hosea is just an old fuddy-duddy who refuses to let Gomer have her freedom. But then, when we drop the ideological posturing and just watch, we’ll see: the pattern is in charge. The reality principle still functions even if we can’t always see it.
Jean Baudrillard explains that real things will still happen when the simulacrum has taken over the show; however, the principle of reality ceases to hold sway for those who have replaced the given with the simulacrum. In this way, a promiscuous minding of being favours ignorance over understanding, and deepens ignorance even when it seems to pursue understanding. We may debate our understanding of the reality principle — and, of course, we must if we earnestly want to pursue the flourishing of human beings in a complex world. However, at the very minimum, the idea implies being true to the principles implied by Hosea: the principle of the unity of the whole, the principle of the dynamic pattern of interactions with the whole, and the principle of love and mediation embodied in the family.
"Reality, as in the story of creation in Genesis, is the harmonious and complex interplay of various complementarities: night and day, land and sea, fauna and flora, male and female. Unreality, which manifests after the fall, renders all categories confused and even at odds with each other and with themselves."
This is the critical reading — differentiation finds unity in the ultimate ground of reality, God. The myriad things are each a gift and created good. The fall introduces non-being, which we know to be evil itself.
Self-actualization is evil, because it is the insistence upon an individual's "I Am" rather than the only "I Am" there is — God. We are all contingent. Only God is necessary.
Great piece, thanks for writing! Another song lyric which comes to mind is U2's "you're even better than the real thing" from Achtung Baby. Gomer, the prostitute, is a professional purveyor of an experience which, to her clients, is "even better than the real thing" of committed monogamous marriage. They consider it "better" because it can be controlled in a way that actual reality cannot - Gomer is an object, paid to do her client's desires, but she can be dismissed after those desires are met. Real marriage, on the other hand, doesn't go away on the morning after - and therein lies its value. The real is just as existent as we are.
I'm curious: have you read the book by Francine Rivers, "Redeeming Love", which takes the Hosea / Gomer story and transplants it to the California gold rush? It was made into a movie recently which I have not yet seen.