The Inversion, Subversion, and Perversion of the Left

I really like Schuon's compact description of the purpose of sacred art: "the return of accidents to Substance."

It's actually a two-way, or circular, process, very much like Creation itself (which is obviously no coincidence, given our theomorphism): "Art expresses this relationship in a movement that is at once descending and ascending, for on the one hand it reveals the Archetype in the form and on the other hand it brings the form or soul back to the Archetype."

Thus, it is a literal (↓↑), like an exteriorization of the interior followed by an interiorization of the exterior. And clearly, the descending or involutionary arrow must be prior in this relationship, one more reason why scientism and metaphysical Darwinism are such absurdities.

If you consider history, it obviously reveals a great deal of accident and contingency, which, of course, it must. This is not heaven.

However, looked at in another way, its most important features are nothing less than exteriorizations of the soul, which are in turn interiorized by those who come later. And when I say "interiorized," I mean that these past exteriorizations are precisely the Archetypes that awaken both the intelligence in general but also its specific contours and forms.

This used to be the grand meaning of a "liberal education": in the words of Matthew Arnold, it was to familiarize oneself with "the best that has been said and thought in the world."

But today, to obtain a liberal education is to familiarize oneself with -- and internalize -- all that is petty, envious, egalitarian, mediocre, bureaucratic, aesthetically toxic and spiritually corrosive, even while elevating oneself for being so destructively cynical toward all that is properly human. Cynicism instantly converts the inferior man to a superior man (in his own mind, of course.) It is a kind of "negative omniscience," like the infantile Power of No!

The pathological combination of cynicism and contempt is the mother's milk of the leftist, which we are now seeing in all its disturbing transparency due to the rabble's rejection of our elite masters.

Narcissists never take rejection well, but this is more than mere rejection. It is a dramatic repudiation of a whole worldview that is upside-down. Leftists don't realize it, but they literally cannot function in a world that is right-side up. To put it mildly, there is no place for a lowlife, thuggish, anti-intellectual, spiritually barren community agitator in the real world, much less as its leader. To put it another way, leftism is an employment program for the unemployable. Imagine Al Sharpton actually having to function somewhere!

And while looking up the exact wording of that quote by Arnold, I found another that equally applies: "Culture is properly described as the love of perfection; it is a study of perfection."

Now, what is perfection? It is something free of defect. In a way, it is to say that every part is necessary to the whole, and not contingent, which is another way of expressing Schuon's formulation above. Thus, to quote Arnold again, "Greatness is a spiritual condition," and creative life is "Waiting for the spark from heaven to fall."

Last week I considered writing a post about the importance of envy and contempt in the psychospiritual economy, but I refrained from doing so because I thought it would be too technical. But it just keeps coming up, as the left deals with its ongoing implosion. Taranto touched on it yesterday, quoting a typically clueless moonbat who cannot even consider the possibility that her leftist worldview is defective. The problem for poor progressives, you see, is that they are "partisans of reason and rational choice" (!).

As always, the problem for the left is Americans; but really, it's human beings, since their metaphysic does not apply to us. Which is why it never works. Especially in practice.

I won't dwell too much on envy and contempt, only to say that they are an important component of what Melanie Klein called the "manic defenses." Basically, you may think of the manic defenses as ways to deny an impending reality.

Let's suppose "4" is a disturbing reality. Therefore, just as you are about to realize that 2+2 = 4, the manic defenses come to the rescue to deny 4. How do they do it? Well, one way is to devalue or destroy 4 through contempt and envy. In colloquial terms, you might think if it as "sour grapes." But unconsciously, the person realizes -- or fears -- that the grapes are not sour at all.

So I am seeing this defense every day, multiple times a day. If the left knew what they were doing -- or had any control over the process -- I don't think they'd do it. Or at least they wouldn't publicly engage in it, because it is so personally unflattering, and so alienates normal Americans -- the very Americans whose lives these elites wish to control! And no wonder they wish to control us, since we are all racist, sexist, homophobic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, and all the rest. How could such monsters be capable of self-government?

Klein writes that the purpose of the manic defenses is to deny a psychic reality, usually as a result of a significant loss of some kind. The loss for the leftist is not just in the exterior "political" world, but more importantly, in the interior world, since for the leftist, his identity is much more bound up with his politics than is the case for the spiritually normative person. The leftist is a "superior person" -- more wise, noble, tolerant, and intelligent than the rest of us -- so that to have his politics repudiated is a personal affront.

I think I'll move on. But this sidebar into politics is not entirely irrelevant to our discussion of art, since, as Schuon points out, "the return of the accidental to the Substance, of the formal to the Essence, amounts to the reintegration of plurality into Unity."

Thus, it is possible to deny this higher unity, which is what the left does a priori, what with its multiculturalism, moral relativism, egalitarianism, "tolerance" of the intolerable, deconstructionism, etc. As we have discussed before, leftism is the doctrine of ontological multiplicity and its implications, so that the only way out is down, into the black night where all is just another kind of one -- the bad and ultimately fascistic kind.

I'm running out of time here, but to say unity-multiplicity is also to say center-periphery. Now, the further from the center we fall, the less of the divine influence there is. At the extreme periphery there is a privation of the Good, but it is possible to crash through even that, and into the realm of cosmic subversion.

You might say that the upcoming election will result in a subversion of all the perversion, except that it will actually represent a supraversion of the left's cosmic inversion -- which is to say, a vertical ingression. God wi↓↑ing.