There are two laws in history: the law of gravity, and the law of destiny. Left to their own devices, human beings will recapitulate the fall day by day, moment by moment, plummeting further and further from the Origin and Center.
In this sense, the ancients were correct in being suspicious of time. At any given point in history, looked at in a certain way, things always look bleak and seem to be getting bleaker. Therefore, why not stop the whole colliderescape and get off?
If one were to look at the way things stood in the world over the 500 years or so up to 1700, one “would not have been optimistic about the future of mankind." As historian Robert McFarlane notes in his The Riddle of the Modern World, nearly every civilization had reached some sort of "invisible barrier” that prevented further development. "The world and its roughly 500 million inhabitants seemed to have reached the limit to its potential to support human life.... Mankind seemed to be caught on a treadmill."
How did we ever get off that treadmill? It's an important question, because it is at the heart of our current conflict with Islam. They are still on that treadmill, and when one isn't progressing, one generally degenerates. Life is not static. Reduced to stasis, it becomes death. There is no middle ground. You cannot be "a little bit" alive or dead. Any evolving system must maintain disequilibrium by exchanging matter or information with the environment. The deepest problem with the Islamic world is that it is a closed system, both individually and collectively.
Prior to West's discovery of the dynamics of material and intellectual growth, life consisted of unrelenting deprivation for all but a very few. In order to accomplish our breakthrough, “almost all the trends of the last 2000 years had to be reversed. ” Among other things, the monopolization of knowledge had to end, so that knowledge and technology could be shared through widespread education and literacy. Furthermore, this couldn't be just any kind of education. Rather, it had to be a rational education in which one freely discovers universal truths that are not context-bound.
There is a divide between people that is mirrored in the gulf between left and right. There are those who say that what the world really needs is more love, more peace, more mutual understanding, more cuddly blah blah.
Nonsense. Nearly every serious problem in the world may be reduced to an absence of Truth. The pursuit of love and peace is perfectly admirable on a micro level in one's personal life. This is the meaning of “love your enemies," “turn the other cheek," "the meek shall inherit the earth," and all that other mushy stuff.
But the Bible is not a suicide pact. On a macro level, the most important societal value by far is Truth. And not just any kind of Truth, but the Truth of truth and a method for discovering it. It has been said that it wasn't this or that particular invention that distinguished the west. Rather, it was the invention of invention, the discovery of a method of discovery.
In the Islamic world, truth is received, not discovered. And most of what they receive is not only untrue, but cannot possibly be true. But because they have no tradition or means of independent verification, they are immersed in darkness and falsehood, drowning in lies the same way a body eventually consumes itself if deprived of food.
The other day, an acquaintance mentioned the left wing barking point one often hears, that if only the Israelis had settled someplace other than Israel, there would be no problems in the Middle East. Nonsense. Muslims do not object to Israel merely because it exists, but because they believe outrageous lies about Israel. Likewise, for all those leftists who say that America is hated, that may be so, but it is hated because the haters believe things about us that are outrageously untrue, just as the left hates President Bush because they believe lies about him.
By being sensitive to Muslim feelings for decades, we have essentially honored their insane lies. In the spirit of a deeply illiberal multiculturalism, we have allowed these lies to take their place alongside the truth as a coequal partner. Light shall no longer shine in the dark, but shall dialogue with it, imam to man. The Pope let slip a banal truth about the sordid history of Islam, and look what happened. The entitled liars bristled in defense of their primordial lie, a lie which has been further enshrined by that half of the postmodern world that regards truth as relative and arbitrary. In so doing, they have simply allowed these tyrannical hordes to elevate their truth (which is a lie) to an absolute.
For, although they are the benefecesaries of liberal academics who teach the false absolute that truth doesn't exist, they don't believe that for a second. Rather, they simply use the means of leftist relativism to advance their own absolute end of religious totalitarianism. For when truth is denied, raw power fills the vacuum, destroying love and everything else in its wake.
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22 comments:
"For when truth is denied, raw power fills the vacuum, destroying love and everything else in its wake."
A Bobble more valuable than most (most?) gems.
It's the willfully blind that can't enjoy Heaven even when in it. It's the irrational Left in our own heavenly country that can't recognize the Good all around them, enjoy the feast, and export that gift out into the rest of the world. Their false humility and manufactured guilt has blood and famine on its hands.
I've worked in "have-not" countries. Their citizens have attained that glorious equalization...of misery. They're hungry for food and truth. How often those two lacks go together.
Bob, I think you would have liked Richard Rose. He said the following:
"There is but one Truth. To equivocate for the sake of social compatibility is to sell our spiritual nature for cowardly bargaining with the herd, when the bargaining is not necessary. For ages the wise men have served notice that we must remain inconspicuous, and this silence will help avert the teeth of the herd. But unless someone occasionally speaks up, the sincere will have no encouragement."
"When I say that we are either right or wrong, I am speaking of relative truth-seeking. In the absolute state, things may well be neither right or wrong, or both. And while we aspire to an absolute state, and to absolute Truth, it remains doubtful if we will ever attain the absolute Truth if we compromise relative truth, or shut our eyes to reality."
"Somewhere there’s an enormous gap between this idea of everybody wanting the truth and so very few people looking for it. And there’s a still smaller percentage of people looking for let’s say the final truth. Some people, when they get to looking for it, stop at that which they like to hear, and they label that the truth."
"Truth may well be absolute in nature, but to bicameral man with the necessary bipolar survey of all things -- a definition of absolute or abstract things or states may be readily seized and accepted in relative form, that is, with relative and possibly equivocal words."
"Absolute Truth is not absolutely inaccessible to us, and relative truth is definitely accessible. We must desire the Truth, and have a capacity for it, else we could not receive it even if it came to us by accident."
Well said, priestess. Give us this day our daily psychospiritual bread, and breakfast will take care of itself.
Bob, comment moderation really sucks.
Stu--
Excellent. I would only add that the entire notion of absolutely relative anything is metaphysically absurd.
Stu--
Agreed about the comment moderation. It is only temporary. Just trying prevent He Who Has No Life from lowjacking the thread with his disunderstanding and starting an inane argument. For one who professes to love all mankind, he sure gets a kick out of annoying us.
"For one who professes to love all mankind, he sure gets a kick out of annoying us. "
I don't profess to "love all mankind." I realize that by suggesting that you've misrepresented me, you will likely accuse me of being "argumentative." If that's the price that must be paid for speaking the "truth" that you say you value above all else, so be it.
Another truth that needs to be spoken is that I don't "annoy" you. You annoy yourself in reaction to my perfectly legitimate comments.
God bless.
Start with 100 kids (age 12-16) stuck on an island with enough food and water to last a year. First assume a pre-disposition to seek control (or the illusion thereof) of future circumstances via the attainment of power, either directly or through favored relationships with those who wield it. Next, assume that within the group there are various "histories" that diminish the likelihood of true cooperation. The greater the disposition to seek power, and the more contentious the histories, the more rules will be required to organize the 100 in ways that enable their living together.
Now, as an adult, assume an opportunity to instruct the 100 kids for a month. Your instruction may include your own behavioral example, your belief system, organizational rules, do's & donts (laws), etc. After a month, you have to leave, and while you will be allowed to return with other adults after one year, neither you nor any of the kids know this. As far as they are concerned they may was well be stuck on the island together forever. And yes, while your central instruction will to be surrender their lives to love, not just try to practice it, they will ignore it.
"Left to their own devices, human beings will recapitulate the fall day by day, moment by moment, plummeting further and further from the Origin and Center."
Beautiful.
Importantly, the further the kids fall away from the spirit of your (the adult on the island) instructions, the more they ignore your message of surrender, the more contentious and challenging the circumstances will become. As fears of experiences of the worst circumstances, the game will take an ugly turn, a turn away from cooperative efforts and toward a power grab, one that results in two populations, the privileged and the disadvantaged. The island's powers, in collusion with the privilege, will then begin conveying "harder" interpretations of the instructions and beliefs that you left behind. They will do this to preserve their power and privilege and to introduce fears (of God) and restrictions that are actually necessary to maintain any semblance of cohesion as the lesser thans, "left to their own devices", continue in their slide.
Now, when you return a year later, you will no doubt be greeted by the "powers", powers who will point to all the troubles being experienced beyond their walls. You may reckon, too, that these powers will implore you to speak to the unruly ones, to turn them back from the walls, to remind them of the instructions you left behind. And what will you say to such powers? And what do you expect their reaction to be when you remind them that no, you did not merely instruct them to love, for one cannot do that which IS if they are not. To the contrary, you conveyed the experience of surrendering to that which IS love, and made clear that their own hopes rested on their making this same choice.
Then, as you stand with the powers, looking at the mess beyond their walls, what and whose "choices" (or lack thereof) will you attribute the unruliness to?
"Ralph looked at him dumbly. For a moment he had a fleeting picture of the strange glamour that had once invested the beaches. But the island was scorched up like dead wood - Simon was dead - and Jack had... The tears began to flow and sobs shook him. He gave himself up to them now for the first time on the island; great, shuddering spasms of grief that seemed to wrench his whole body. His voice rose under the black smoke before the burning wreckage of the island; and infected by that emotion, the other little boys began to shake and sob too. And in the middle of them, with filthy body, matted hair, and unwiped nose, Ralph wept for the end of innocence, the darkness of man's heart, and the fall through the air of the true, wise friend called Piggy."
"By being sensitive to Muslim feelings for decades, we have essentially honored their insane lies. In the spirit of a deeply illiberal multiculturalism, we have allowed these lies to take their place alongside the truth as a coequal partner."
Hmmm. In other words, a real world application of moral equivalence (or relativeism, or whatever label you place on such an amoral view).
>>Muslims do not object to Israel because it exists, but because they believe outrageous lies about Israel.<<
And because of their infernally prickly pride, a compensating mechanism that follows what must be their initial recognition of the truth - which is that theirs is a failed civilization. Pride gives life to the lie.
Same with pride, the oversensitivity to being "dissed", of street gangs and mafia dons. Underneath the strutting and posturing must be a deep streak of fear and perhaps even shame, a truth which must be suppressed.
My head hurts...I think my brain gets bigger every time I read a post. Must. Return. To. Watching. Court. TV...
Bob, I was wondering if you'd spend a little time roasting right-wing hate groups like Sons of the Confederacy, The Aryan Nation, David Duke and Don Black, and the KKK and their ilk. The conservative movement gets dirt on it from these movements and so perhaps you could discuss their similarities with the Islamofascists and your readers will understand that these groups, supposedly 'ultra-right wing' are really something other than 'convervative.'
Grant,
Let me just be the first to say, Duh! You are really underestimating Bob and his regular readers if you think anyone here endorses right wing extremists. Does it really take an entire post? Why don't You just write something on your own blog? Isn't it obvious that the problems we are having all over the globe have one common theme, namely Islamic? Use your head for a change. To think with, that is, not just to bang against the wall of obvious!
Grant--
That's a nonsensical request, because the groups you named have no place in the conservative movement, much less any influence. They are entirely shunned and marginalized, whereas the haters of dailiykos and huffington post are the heart of the Democratic party. That's why they picked Howard Dean as their chairman, because he is a voice for their lunatic core.
It just shows how mainstream the conservative movement is that you have to name those lunatic fringe groups to try to tar it. The Bull Who Begs to Be Milked has attempted to make the same silly point by repeatedly suggesting that Fred Phelps has anything to do with the conservative intellectual movement. Please. It is the mainstream left that lionizes paranoid Marxist creeps such as Noam Chomsky. I'm afraid you are seriously in need of a clue.
David Duke?
Now there's a major player.
The KKK?
Oh yeah, Republican kingmakers, all six of 'em.
Have even heard of CAIR? The ACLU? The American Trial Lawyers Association? The NAACP? PETA? And dozens of other influential radical lefist groups whose agenda is to undermine the character of this country as we know it? You may agree with the radical changes, but you cannot deny they are radical.
Grant,
I'll humor your request.
Right wing fanatics believe lies. Left wing fanatics lie about believing lies.
The radical right is very straight forward with their hate. They hate Jews because the Jews are conspiring against them. They hate blacks because blacks are inferior...
Left wing radicals conceal their hate a bit better. Their Jew hate is cloaked in their anti-Zionism. Their belief in the inferiority of blacks is hidden within affirmative action...
The right wing radicals are completely marginalized because any idiot can recognize the illigitimacy of their hate.
The leftist hate, on the other hand, is easily missed by the average non-thinker.
Grant, I would assume that everyone here realizes that the right wing fanatics are not "conservative" purveyors of liberal enlightenment values.
Ummmm I guess you didnt know/forgot/chose not to remember that Robert Byrd (D) was some sort of grandpoobah of the KKK. I dont beleve the Republicans have any current or fomer members of the KKK in congress.
Nice try though... NOT
"The Bull Who Begs to Be Milked has attempted to make the same silly point by repeatedly suggesting that Fred Phelps has anything to do with the conservative intellectual movement."
Just to be fair, TBWBTBM has mentioned Fred Phelps only one time that he recalls and not as an example of a typical conservative, but as a painful illustration of the extreme and humorless hatefulness that can result from taking religious fundamentalism to its illogically logical limit.
On the other hand, some "religious" people of the conservative persuasion express their self-righteous hatred of all things "Islamofacist" and "Leftist" with a great deal of self-described "humor" and intellectual subtlety and brilliance, and they undeniably uplift our souls and vanquish their hated enemies by doing so.
Is it possible for something to be "illogically logical," as TBWBTBM assertss?
Discuss.
"Is it possible for something to be "illogically logical," as TBWBTBM assertss? Discuss."
Do you really WANT to? Do you think the powers-that-be would want us to "lowjack the thread" with such "inanity"? :-)
My short but I hope sufficient answer is that it IS possible for something to be "illogically logical" if you use "illogical" in more than one sense.
God bless.
Grant,
In asking for Bob's comments on radical racists in the U.S., I get the feeling you were more asking for an explanation of how these people are not actually the radical right at all, but are in truth leftists.
To be honest, I really don't know what their political philosophies are beyond blaming Jews, blacks, and/or anyone else they can scapegoat, for all the ills of the planet. That being a prima facia invalid starting point, I have never found much reason to look more deeply. However, assuming that these white supremacists are indeed the political progeny of Nazism, you don't need a drawn out metaphysical explanation.
Nazism and fascism are in fact leftist political and economic schools of thought, not right-wing or conservative at all. First of all, take a look at the name of the Nazi Party. National Socialist German Workers' Party. How many conservative movements call themselves socialists?
This misnomer was a gift given to us by Uncle Joe Stalin. Since Nazism is to the right of Soviet Communism, but almost nothing else, Stalin is the party credited for classifying Nazis as “right-wing.” Nazism is in fact about the last stop you can take on the left end of the political spectrum before the abolition of private property rights. There were tight controls of industry by government, ultra-confiscatory taxation, massive public works projects, vast public programs to care for the poor, the old, and the young. (Remember the Lebensborn babies & The Hitler Youth? Just like Hillary, Hitler also knew that it takes a village. Read village: “Unobstructed & unlimited state intrusion into the lives of its citizens.”) Of course, in addition to the wholesale attempt at the elimination of Jews, Slavs, Gypsies, homosexuals, etc., there was also, for the good of society, the elimination of babies who were imperfect, euthanasia of the infirm, the mentally ill, those with mental disabilities, and I am sure anyone diagnosed in a permanent vegetative state. In all honesty, in which of the two major American political parties is a politician espousing such values more likely to find a home?
Calling Nazis, or fascists, or white supremacists, right-wing, or conservative-extremists, or anything having to do with conservatism is just another lie told by the left, to help perpetuate (what Bob calls) their primordial Lie.
That is why these people don't have a home (or even a guest room) within the Republican Party. It is not just the fact that racism is abhorrent to reason, but because their underlying philosophy is NOT a rational (or even an irrational) extension of conservative thought, but is actually antithetical to conservative thought.
Deconstructing this lie, in and of itself, I think would go a long way to helping a great many people, in this country anyway, see the light.
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