We are All of the Stars, But Some of Us are Looking at the Gutter (12.10.10)

Epiblogue:

Last things first. Having inexplicably awakened an hour later -- as if someone monkeyed around with my clock yesterday and stole an hour of my time -- I'm really writing under the gun this morning. I don't think I can do justice to the pivotal fourth day/fourth miracle motif in one post, and in hindsight I can see that the more pressure I felt to move things along, the more I rambled. Therefore, this will have to be part 1. Ironically, this temporal derangement does demonstrate the chaos that ensues when someone trifles with the "greater and lesser lights" that govern our earthly days and nights. But it's one thing for politicians to fool around with clocks, another thing entirely to mess with the stars that define and guide human nature.

*****

If the fifth day of creation involves the descent of ensouled movement into the world, the fourth day must involve the creation of the archetypes, just as the blueprint is prior to the building, genotype to phenotype, or logos (intelligent form) to substance. Tomberg compares it to an orchestra in which no one person has the entire score, but each member has his own instrument and his own part to play, in order to harmonize with the whole musical existentialada.

As such, the fourth day of creation "is that of the coming into being of those principles which direct 'time and tempo'" -- the creation of the sun, the moon, and the stars in order to separate night from day, to provide light to the earth, and to serve generally as cosmic designposts: "signs and seasons, days and years." Tomberg asks, "What are these other than organs of direction, i.e., conductors of time and tempo for the world-orchestra, in accordance with the music-score of the stars?"

Note as well that separation must precede order, something which is very much emphasized in Judaism. We revert to the chaos that preceded the creation if, for example, we ignore the distinction between the sexes -- which is one of the inevitable cosmic horrors of the homosexual agenda (I said agenda) and much of the so-called "sexual revolution" in general.

Looked at another way, the fourth day involves the creation of metaphysics, which is anterior to being in the same way that our personal essence is prior to existence. This is perhaps the central idea that separates the religious from the non-religious and liberal from leftist, for the secular leftist reverses this divine order and maintains that existence is prior to essence. He has no blueprint, but is a cosmic orphan who is reduced to, and determined by, mere chance and superficial causes such as race, class, and gender. This is why leftism is 180 degrees from liberalism, and why leftism is unthinkable in the absence of this inappropriate obsession with horizontal accidents. Once you acknowledge a true self -- which is to say a created self, or a center of personal freedom -- you can no longer call yourself a leftist.

Thus, it is no surprise that we see the New York Times trumpeting the scientifically "sophisticated" but otherwise terribly unsophisticated idea that human beings do not possess free will. For if human beings do possess free will, then nearly the entire ediface of leftism collapses in a heap. The absurdity of the free will deniers becomes clear if expressed explicitly, as it is in this piece at American Thinker:

"We here at The New York Times want to announce a new policy. This is that we will no longer criticize anyone, nor praise anyone. We will, in other words, hold no one responsible for his or her conduct.

"We institute this policy in light of the columns published recently in our pages arguing that human beings have no free will, that they cannot choose their own conduct. If this is so, as we believe it is -- we haven't published anyone arguing the opposite thesis, as you may have noticed -- there can be no choice about what people do. Neither Saddam Hussein, nor George W. Bush, nor Nancy Pelosi nor indeed anyone at all has anything to do with his or her conduct or, as social scientists prefer to call it, behavior."

In short, if there is no free will, then obviously there can be no a priori morality, let alone a legal system, for we are merely condemned to do what we do in a mechanistic way. On the other hand, once you acknowledge that free will is "relatively absolute" (that is, absolute within the inevitable constraints of relative existence) and that we may choose between good and evil (which are absolute, even if we cannot know them absolutely), then you have left any form of leftism behind.

The Times quotes one "expert" who is apparently compelled (for he is not free) to say that free will is merely "a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free," but "the more you scrutinize it, the more you realize you don't have it." (Hmmm.... if we're not free to scrutinize it, how could we ever know that it is true that we don't have free will? Here we see how there is no truth in the absence of free will, which is why the left ends up denying both. To turn it around, if truth exists, so too does free will. Truth is the ultimate guarantor of liberty, and vice versa.)

One of our guiding "stars in the firmament" above is that of justice. This is as good an example as any of a "greater light" that allows us to see by day. That is, human beings possess an innate sense of justice -- not just this or that justice, but absolute justice. What is so ironic is that the leftist too lives by this light, but at the same time denies its reality "above" and therefore its possibility "below." This is why leftist theologies literally turn the cosmos upside down (speaking ontologically) and transmogrify into some version of "social justice" or "liberation" theology. Free will is denied up front, so that everyone becomes a victim of existence.

But if no one is free and nothing is moral, religion merely becomes the will to power, even -- or especially -- when it is dressed up in the language of entitlement and of "human rights" instead of civil liberties. For civil rights are here to protect liberty, whereas so-called "human rights" are here to deny liberty by promoting a top-down leftist agenda -- which always ends up being a great injustice from the standpoint of heaven.

Here is an eloquent "voice from the abyss" at huffingandpissed, Stan Goff. He agrees that reality is not what it appears to be, and that there is a "hidden blueprint," so to speak, ruling over us. Yes, his opinions are obviously "crazy" -- that goes without saying -- but "crazy" does not mean "random." Rather, one of the axioms of psychoanalysis is that craziness is merely order by another name. In other words, in order to heal the craziness, we must help the patient uncover the deep structure -- the implicate "lesser lights" of his night time unconscious -- that underlie the surface disorder:

"Every 'advanced' society exists as a parasite in those less 'advanced,' and that can be proven empirically and decisively. Bush is not responsible for the war in Iraq.... Civilization cannot exist in the absence of war, because civilization is itself inherently exploitative.... that is why we'll have more and more of it, and why it will eventually percolate from the peripheries populated by Dark Others into our suburbs. [How can there be "Dark Others" if war is inherent? -- ed.]

"Everything we have that we list in our catalogue of civilization is forged out of fraud, theft, and murder.... Show me the exception, and I'll take it back. [Since he is not an exception, he is a liar and a thief, so why should we believe, much less trust, him? -- ed.]

"The fine woods and metals and animal guts that make the orchestras, the stones and steel and trees for our libraries..., and the food displayed strategically along our supermarket shelves... they all require war. They are taken from cultures who first refuse to cooperate, then who are forced to cooperate or be depopulated. [All economic liberty is merely illusion; it is actually exploitation -- ed.]

"The expansive and expanding heaps of... of asphalt and glass and plastic and paint and shiny right-angles -- are scraped out of hillsides and coastlines, with the corpses of biomes and simpler cultures left behind as the mizzens of this wretched thing called civilization.... Technology is driven by scarcity, and scarcity by pillage.... This is not a mark of superiority, but the cascading catastrophe of power seeking the enslavement of first women, then slaves and colonies and nature..." [But wouldn't these women and other primitives just enslave and colonize white men if they could? -- ed.]

*****

Oh my. Imagine this fascist being in charge of your homeowners association, much less the wheels of government. At least he doesn't blame Bush.

Here is a quite literal example of "justice gone mad," for when we reject the greater light of divine justice, we are left with mere animal justice, which is no justice at all. I am always surprised at the inherent irony of secular progressives calling themselves "humanists." For one thing, to deny God is to prevent man, pure and simple.

Secondly, have you ever read a more quintessentially anti-human diatribe, at least since yesterday's New York Times idiotorial page? If human beings are what this or any other progressive says they are, then why would we ever trust progressives to set things right? If human beings are monsters of depravity, the last thing we want to do is give them more power over us. If human beings "are what they are," then how can one object to Bushitler and Co. being what they are?

No one is responsible for anything -- not even Bush -- but somehow it's mankind's fault, otherwise this person wouldn't be ranting about his sense of cosmic injustice. But where does he get his sense of injustice, since it doesn't come from "above," and he's a depraved human animal just like everyone else? Seriously, where does it come from if we are only self-interested monkeys who will commit any crime to get what we want? Indeed if we -- that is to say, civilization -- are a crime?

As Polanyi has written, this is the perennial trick of the left: to deny the traditional moral order that is "set in the stars" and to replace it with an unhinged moral impulse that rampages through postmodernity like a wildfire. We see it in the appropriately named "environmental movement," which replaces the moral order of the heavens with the fanciful imperatives of the earth, another way of destroying the possibility of man. (I hope everyone watched this documentary, which has Petey's Good Denkeeping Seal of Approval).

"Private property is public theft." "To each according to his needs." "Living wage." "Income gap." "Poverty causes crime." "Israel causes terror." "Dissent on global warming is Holocaust denial." "A baby is distinct from a woman's body only if she doesn't want to kill it." "Homosexuality is no different from heterosexuality." "Group rights." "Diversity." "Racial quotas." "Moral relativism." "The designated hitter." Each of these luciferian ideas in one way or another denies the human blueprint and overturns the order of the cosmos, especially that last one. "American" League my a**.

And now the wheels of heaven stop
you feel the devil's riding crop
Get ready for the future:
it is murder

There'll be the breaking of the ancient western code
Your private life will suddenly explode....

You'll see a woman hanging upside down
her features covered by her fallen gown
and all the lousy little poets coming round
tryin' to sound like Charlie Manson....

Things are going to slide, slide in all directions
Won't be nothing, nothing you can measure anymore
The blizzard, the blizzard of the world, has crossed the threshold
and it has overturned the order of the soul

When they said REPENT REPENT
I wonder what they meant.... --Leonard Cohen, The Future