Thursday, August 07, 2014

Myth, Science, Scientific Myth, and Myths of Science

Myth can be thought of as a medium of the imagination; for Don Colacho, it is "not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language." It "intuits the transcendent in the sensory," so it is analogous to how we perceive beauty in the material world. Just as beauty is of Beauty, truths are of Truth, irrespective of the medium of transmission.

Science, in contrast to myth, consists of a heterogeneous list of propositions that cannot be falsified -- today. Thus, progress in science -- in particular, major leaps or paradigm shifts -- "usually comes from the care with which we study the trivial exception to the rule."

As it pertains to climate science, for example, anyone who approaches it with an open mind is struck by the many exceptions that refute its central claim. So many black swans! It will not progress until those black swans can be reconciled with the white, and yet, proponents try to pretend the former don't even exist.

In this regard, climate science is more like neurosis than science, since it operates via repression, rationalization, compartmentalization, wishful thinking, projection, etc.

It's no different with the sciences of human intelligence, of race, of homosexuality, or of sexual differences. Liberals don't even bother disagreeing with the science, but deny its existence altogether -- which is more of a psychotic than neurotic defense mechanism. It seems to be working so far, but there's going to be hell to pay once reality rears its beautiful head.

As Kevin Williamson writes (National Review, July 7, 2014), the great majority of citizens are not intellectually equipped "to understand even modestly sophisticated scientific problems."

All humans, however, "are able to understand prestige, and the uses to which prestige may be put." When at a gathering of liberal relatives -- well, first of all, I never bring up politics. But they inevitably do. And I suppose what is most troubling is that they do not bow before my great prestige. Rather, they seem to think there are others more prestigious than I!

Oh well. A prophet among his own, and all that.

I read somewhere that Cat Stevens managed to convert his entire extended family to Islam. One suspects this has more to do with the material than spiritual rewards of being a Friend of Cat. No such material rewards attach to my prestige.

The thought just occurred to me that I once held Ken Wilber in high regard. But his prestige was deflated the moment Bill Clinton began citing him and Al Gore was seen with one of his books. For "he who sees that his ideas propagate must suspect that they betray him." Or worse, that the ideas were a betrayal to begin with -- thus the appeal to the base, the treacherous, the lowdown.

Truly, it should be the other way around: if you are praised by the likes of a Bill Clinton or Al Gore, this should be an occasion for the deepest soul-searching. For it is written: "Enraging the typically modern man is the sure sign of being right" (DC).

Metaphysical ideas are not susceptible to scientific falsification. But they are subject to constant true-ification in light of who despises them -- by trollification. Thus sayeth the Master: the world will hate you for My sake.

What we merely know can never exhaust what Really Is. This is because Being is inexhaustible, and knowledge flows therefrom. Indeed, as we have mentioned before, ignorance by definition grows with the accumulation of factual and empirical knowledge because of the expansion of the surface area of our illuminated sphere.

Even so, man has a cosmic right to know (roughly) what the hell is going on in and beyond this sphere, no matter how large or small its dimensions, hence the purpose of revelation, of myth, of higher imagination, which embody truths that will remain true no matter how fervently an Al Gore or Bill Clinton believes them. They can be spoiled by no man's prestige, from Popes to professors to politicians.

Meanwhile, the "settled science" will be the prejudice existing at the moment man becomes extinct (paraphrasing Don Colacho).

Wednesday, August 06, 2014

Cosmic Shrinkage: From Wisdom to Knowledge to Facts to Stupidity to Liberalism

Here is an elementary cosmic bifurcation, expressed with maximum concision: "The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods" (Don Colacho). The rest of this post will no doubt be a wordy exegesis of that. Yes, it is original, bearing in mind that "Originality is the plagiarizing of a genius" (DC).

Now, if you don't know exactly what the first aphorism means -- for example, if you attended graduate school or have been otherwise warped by the spirit of the times -- you are directed to Richard Weaver's CoonClassic Ideas Have Consequences, because that is its theme.

After reading the latter, I typed up and printed out a handy summary of the contents. For example, "Without imagination, the world is reduced to a brute fact -- there is nothing to 'spiritualize' it, to give it depth. And when matter is placed above spirit, quantity displaces quality. But QUALITY IS NOT JUST ANOTHER QUANTITY, DUMMY!"

Indeed, "What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly" (DC).

But this is one of the Original Metaphysical Sins of the left, and we see it everywhere, i.e., reality being reduced to statistics (which are themselves conditioned and selected by the left's dysfunctional organizing principles). Especially "in the social sciences, one generally weighs, counts and measures in order to avoid having to think."

After all, science is by definition what anyone can know. It is radically egalitarian, and therefore (if elevated to a metaphysic) anti-individual. In that perverse sense, progressives -- shudder -- do indeed "believe in science" -- and that's a threat!

Which is why "Nothing is as alarming as science in the hands of an ignoramus." But then "everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools" (DC).

The good news: progressives also fervently believe in man. The bad news: "The worship of humanity is celebrated with Human sacrifices" -- abortion mills being only one facet of this.

A real system, if that is what you want to call it, does not proceed in a linear manner from conclusion to conclusion. Rather, it grows from the center out, so the first task is to locate the Center -- both His and ours, since the two are as mirrors held to one another.

Where fact becomes our only criterion, knowledge -- let alone wisdom -- is rendered unattainable. The vertical roads that lead upward are barricaded. Which is why every attack on religion is an attack on mind -- and on man. A humanism without God is just a kind of absurdly narcissistic animalism.

The word was made flesh, not vice versa. Flesh can only pretend to become word, let alone the last word! But as we ourselves have said in so many ways, the left is less an "ideological strategy" than "a lexicographical tactic" (ibid.).

So beware: "Whoever accepts the lexicon of the enemy surrenders without knowing it." Leftism Revisited is all over that problem, beginning with the preposterous misnaming of leftists "liberal," a contradiction in terms.

We should hasten to add that in our incarnotional metaphysic, we have the deepest respect for the human animal. And it goes without saying that we respect the other end, the unique individual soul.

But we have no patience for, or interest in, the vast "middle zone of an animal with opinions," where the tenured spend their lives trying to confine us in their verbal prisons. But the human-animal is a beautiful thing, for as Elder Don says, "the sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible," i.e., the word or idea or spirit in the flesh.

Facts do not speak for themselves. At the very least, they require a principle of selection that no fact can provide. This principle is "out of this world," i.e., not in the world of facts. But to reduce semantics to syntax -- or meaning to structure -- is to deny language its ontological referent.

In other words, in a properly right side up cosmos, the purpose of syntactical structure is to converge upon and reveal meaning -- and meaning lives among the gods, not the facts. One cannot live a human life among facts only without asphyxiating or freezing or being compressed to stone.

Bottom line: the liberal gulag has walls, but can have no ceiling that prevents vertical escape, since they don't even know about that dimension.

Don't worry: he's not looking out but looking in with a combination of curiosity and pity:

(photo: Leslie Godwin)

Tuesday, August 05, 2014

Full Faith and Credit in the First Bank of Reality (or, Never Take an Intellectual Check from a Liberal)

Notice how Don Colacho's aphorisms alternate between the highest reaches of spirit and the lowest circle of politics, or between reality and appearance. I suppose that's one more reason why I so relate. I don't find the juxtaposition odd or jarring at all. Rather, each is an entailment of the same principles. Indeed, somewhere he has an aphorism that goes to this.

Here it is: "Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man." It is common sense, common decency, and a common inheritance of the Permanent Things.

But it's not all bad news for the left, because at least we conservatives "provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers."

Notice how our daring and avant-garde -- and confident and clueless -- president takes abundant advantage of this service we provide. And what thanks do we get?

Oh well. Raccoons don't care about manmode honors and encomia. Conservatives understand that "man is a problem without a human solution," much less a political one. Obama is trying to heal his own wounded soul via politics, but he splits and then projects the wound into others -- into the victims of the left and the sadists of the right, making himself savior to the one and martyr of the other.

Or in other words, Obama is a classic Christian pervert (or inverted Christian), something to bear in mind for folks who still cling to the idea that he is a closet Muslim.

No, for starters, a real Muslim wouldn't project the sadism, but act on it (use of the IRS to persecute political enemies notwithstanding). Nor would he give a fig about so-called victims. It's just not a part of their culture -- except when politically expedient to propagandize the useful Jew-hating idiots of the international left.

For "In the end we only defend and attack religious positions with zeal." Think about that one. I'll wait.

You could even say that it is possible to implicitly know a man's religion by paying attention to what gets his zeal up. For example, is there a commenter more zealous, more on fire for his incoherent cause, than our anonymous troll? Clearly, something is eating him, but you will also have noticed that he is unable to articulate it in terms of principles. It's all just lashing out at projected ghosts. Here is a hint: since 2005, One Cosmos been providing idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

But here is a timeless avant which no garde can surpass: "The greatest political puerility is to attribute to certain social structures the vices inherent in the human condition." We can argue about whether Obama is the most far left president we've ever had, but he is without question the most puerile. I know this because I believed the same crap when I was but a puer boy, caught up in the cultural peter pandemic.

Back to Imagination, which is why we're here. "Without an alert imagination intelligence runs aground." I love this one, because it implies that intelligence is a ship with a destination. But it is navigating over a kind of dark sea, or at least a nonlocal sea that is full of potential dangers. Tradition, of course, provides nautical maps, but each person must nevertheless set sail, and in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face -- or until they are caught in a hurricane.

I believe I have spoken before of how this nonlocal ocean feels to me. It is filled with subtle forces and attractors that one must "feel" one's way into and through. When one is in the right spot, one will feel the flow of spirit along one's keel, so to speak. Likewise there are doldrums, storms, and, as implied by the aphorism, rocks and icebergs.

So, "Imagination is the capacity to perceive, through the senses, the attributes of the object which the senses do not perceive." Analogously, this would apply even to something as prosaic as a baseball game. Two people can watch the identical game, but someone who knows nothing about baseball will not have access to 95% of what is going on. Same with religion, only without the designated hitter.

This one is so poetic that I almost hate to spoil it: "Nothing important is is reached simply by walking. But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings."

We can talk about why later, but it has not pleased God that man should be saved by walking or by jumping, but by flying. Walking is either the purely intellectual approach or the completely voluntaristic (i.e., will-based); each embodies the pelagian heresy, which essentially means that (↑) is completely sufficient without (↓). (In the cosmically correct formulation, the former is generally necessary but the latter is sufficient.)

Now, what is (↓) but the wings God provides for vertical flight (↑)? Not only is walking a little stupid, but it is also a refusal of the gift of wings. While you're at it, might as well refuse the gifts of reason, language, and truth. Or in other words, become a postmodern leftist who has convinced himself that "his impotence is the measure of things." Which, in a way, it is for the cognitively impotent man (i.e., the infertile egghead) or for the barren ovary tower feminist.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how ideas need to be backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. But the postmodernist has abolished the bank and issues counterfeit notes from his own printer. This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass -- excuse me! Dupree did that while I was taking a leak -- when you pretend that words do not refer to things but only to other words. There has never been a president who lies as casually as Obama, but only because he has assimilated the greatest Lie of all.

So I know just what Brother Colacho means when he says: "Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment." For the last six years, President Obama has been confidently presenting his bankrupt ideas for payment.

What a time to find out he has nothing but funny money and rubber checks! No wonder the Fed keeps cranking it out. Gotta keep the dream alive for another two years. But the rest of us will be paying off his college loans forever.

Monday, August 04, 2014

Stay Thirsty My, Friends. Better Yet, Just Stay on Fire and the Thirst will Take Care of Itself.

"The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him" (by the way, this is one of the places from which I compiled my own list of favorites). This aphorism may be taken the wrong way, of course, but it is nevertheless true that the Bible is obviously not God, but rather, a compilation of living encounters with the living God, reduced to written form.

Early Christians -- obviously -- did not have a "New Testament" except insofar as it consisted of new beliefs, new oral traditions, and a new liturgy. I read somewhere that under the best of circumstances, even someone like Augustine might have had some of the individual books in codex form, but I don't believe he would had the single book we know of as The Bible, all right there between two covers.

Remember too that each chapter is its own imaginative "book," and that it requires a work of collective meta-imagination to apprehend their inner unity and to bring them all together. Just because the book is a solid material object in space, it doesn't mean you have perceived its interior meta-unity! I mean, who has?

I think this is an important consideration, because the real action doesn't occur "in" scripture, but rather, in the imaginative space of the one who encounters and dwells in it. Unlike routine secular knowledge, it cannot be a one-way vector from book to head. Rather, it is always relational, transactional, intersubjective, alive.

This goes to the next aphorism that metaphorically leaps out at me, "Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others."

I have discussed this idea in a number of posts, and it is indeed one of those things that earthlings simply take for granted, believer and infidel alike. How is it, say, that we can affirm -- accurately, I might add -- that the universe is a tree with its roots aloft, its branches down below?

This is a metaphor, but only because everything contains or refers to everything else; and the latter is true because of a trinitarian Godhead in whom persons are both distinct and yet interior to one another. It is why communication of any kind is possible, including metaphor (and really, virtually all communication is metaphorical, in the sense that one thing must stand for another).

The following aphorism also goes to the present discussion: "Serious books do not instruct, but interrogate." This relates to what was said above about the relationality of the Bible, and also about metaphor. A serious book doesn't literally interrogate us. But it might as well.

Another metaphorical truth: "We only dig the channels for a momentary torrent." It is up to us to clean out the rain gutters and flood channels for the orderly flow of (↓). Similarly, "We call abstract truths the dry channels through which the waters of any rain flow." The abstract truth is empty in order to be filled by experience, as we were discussing a few weeks back.

Note also that the point is not so much to be a lake or reservoir as a river. The flow never stops, so we can never be "filled" in this life. I mean, if self-emptying is good enough for God...

So, if there is no end to the flow, then "One philosophy surpasses others only when it defines more precisely the same insoluble mystery."

Normally we think of "precision" and "mystery" as being at opposite extremes, but in point of fact they are a dialectic -- perhaps the dialectic, to which I have assigned the "ultimate" abstraction of O <--> (¶). I don't see how there can be anything "beyond" this dialectic in this life, short of becoming God, which is not going to happen. But we can perpetually dig those channels and clean those gutters for the Flow.

The above dialectic could be encapsulated: "The soul is the task of man."

And -- if you're not careful -- "Thirst runs out before the water does." So stay thirsty, my friends.

Now, this I like: "Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems but a new dimension of the universe." This is precisely what I believe: you might say that it is to psychology or neurology what biology is to physics. Biology is not just statistically unlikely physics, but rather, an entirely new dimension of existence irreducible to physics, the biosphere. It is at a right angle, so to speak, to everything that came before.

So too is revelation, bearing in mind that I count no less than four Revelations, or dimensions of Revelation, 1) the miracle of creation, 2) the miracle of intelligibility, 3) the miracle of the human subject, and 4) the miracle of the divine murmurandoms known as revelation proper. Each of these can only be understood in reference to the verticality that is woven into the nature of things: reality is always pointing beyond itself in a bidirectional manner, toward its inspiraling goround and its perichoretic deustiny.

And speaking of trees and branches, "Religion is the tremor that the shaking of our roots transmits to our branches." Maybe we can't see the root, but we can certainly tell when the branches are atremble.

Now, assuming our roots are aloft, this makes absolutely perfect nonsense. It's a metaphor, but a realmetaphor -- just as the early fathers saw Jesus as the "true myth," or the primordial myth -- dimly apprehended or pre-viewed by earlier generations -- incarnate.

Because "'Intuition' is the perception of the invisible, just as 'perception' is the intuition of the visible." And "When imagination and perception coincide, the soul is burned."

Ouch!

(yoinked from the bowels of Happy Acres)

Sunday, August 03, 2014

The Cold Hard Facts of Music

1. Only in the last few years have I discovered the quirky greatness of Porter Wagoner. He had a syndicated TV show when I was a kid, but he might as well have been from another planet.

A perfectly crafted lyric, with a great little twist there at the end. Note also where he refers to the noises getting "louder from within." Is he referring to the naughty activity inside the house, or to the command hallucinations in his head? In three minutes the narrator goes from clueless innocence ("gosh, I'll sure surprise my wife!") to a hard-bitten cynicism in which he one-ups the worldly stranger.

It's fun to think that during the Summer of Love, when Wagoner would have appeared so out of touch to my 11 year old mind, he was actually singing of the Permanent Things, i.e., the Cold Hard Brutal Unchanging Facts of Life.

Wagoner specialized in a whole sub-genre of tortured and darkly troubled souls, 29 of which are collected in The Rubber Room. And of course, his duets with Dolly Parton define the art.

Here's a little song about another mixed race sociopath for whom things don't turn out well:

2. The Pixies: last truly great rock group? If not, who am overlooking?

3. The greatest live rock album just got greater: The Complete 1971 Fillmore East Concerts by the Allman Brothers Band. Speaking of the Permanent Things, solid audio proof of at least three of the four transcendentals, truth, beauty, and unity (although the latter was no doubt aided by performance enhancing drugs).

For you young 'uns, in this famous track, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, there are two guitar solos. The first one is by Dickie Betts, at about 3:10, and it's great: thoughtful, exploratory, and then passionate at the end. But then, after the organ interlude, comes Duane's solo at 7:48. Notice how it slowly builds to such a peak of intensity (starting at about 10:10), calms down momentarily, and then soars even higher at 11:40. There are lots of virtuosos, but few with that kind of pacing and narrative drive:

4. Fuggin' hippies in the line of fire. Classic!

Friday, August 01, 2014

Okay, Just Link to this Post Already!

Sometimes I *almost* think it's the convoluted titles that drive people away: "Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism." Wha? Click. I should stop trying to be so clever and cute, and just get straight to the point: pay attention to me!

Usually the title just comes to me. But if I have to think about it, we often end up with a cumbersome one like that. Probably the same with posts in general. If I try to be more than the stenographer, I become an agenda-driven scribe unfaithful to the text.

That won't be a problem with this post, being that we're just playgiarizing with another man's aphoristic meditations. Interesting that Don Colacho's aphorisms are the compact distillation of a lifetime of contemplation, and here we are, reversing the process by unpacking them for all they're worth. Is there any excuse for this? We'll come back to that question later. Right now we have some thievery to do.

To remind the reader, we have been engaging in the verticalisthenic exercise of reimagineering tradition: reimagineering because higher truths must be nourished in the imagination; tradition because without its authority, we are just deepaking the chopra, or enlisting fantasy to rebel against reality.

Ah, beautiful: "To convince one who holds his own opinions is easy, but no one can convince one who harbors the opinions of others."

This is again why it is so fruitless to argue with a liberal, since most of their opinions are only backed by the Authority of the Now, i.e., they are utterly conventional -- not conventional wisdom but conventional ignorance, as in Dear Leader.

It would be difficult to arrive at a more pinpoint encrapsulation of Obama and his LoFo whackolytes: No one clings more to his views than the one who is only an echo of his era.

This makes Obama -- and we have made this point before -- the very incarnation of the pneumapathology of the times. He is everything that is wrong with education (degrees in higher bullshit), with religion (membership in the Church of Eternal Resentment), the economy (becoming wealthy and poweful for accomplishing precisely nothing), and with politics (post-constitutional liberal fascism). Obama is -- unfortunately -- a mirror held up to contemporary America, precisely what his skeevy supporters deserve.

"When handling today's events, the future historian will have to wear gloves." Or in the case of this toxic administration, a hazmat suit.

I don't mind Obama having his opinions. To each his own grandiosity. But the fact that he cannot disagree without distorting the views and condemning the motives of his opponents tells you everything you need to know about him, not to mention the indefensibility of his brittle arguments.

Yes, liberals are no doubt on the Right Side Of History, for "Political cowardice baptizes itself: 'I respect the sense of history.'" Progressives are the only people who try to tell truth by the calendar.

Not to re-belabor the point, but "Modern man does not imagine an end higher than service to the anonymous cravings of his fellow citizens." How could he? For the Darwinian fundamentalist, what is man but a high-maintenance ape, the genetic mutation from hell?

No, it's worse than that: "The human has the significance of a swarm of of insects if it is merely human." Or, to paraphrase Schuon, modern man is either merely human or all too human, which amount to the same thing, a big nothing-butthead.

Here is a subtle one: "Paganism is the Old Testament of the Church." This is true in the obvious sense, but we can also see how the modern pagans of the left are just Christian heretics, or else people who have failed for whatever reason to ascend to their properly divine-human station. Progressives are the Old Testavus for the restavus, i.e., what we must transcend, not what we should sink to.

I suppose one reason I love these aphorisms is that they effectively boil down what I've been bobbling on about for the past 2,500 posts, for example, "In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing."

Although this may sound like a parody, it is nothing more than an explicit expression of the ultimate principles of secular (sub)humanism: if materialism is "true," then of course everything is meaningless, of no possible significance. Man is the Evangelist of Nothing. You know, like MSNBC.

This begs the question of why he evangelizes, and, for that matter, why our trolls cannot stop themselves from commenting here. That's weird, isn't it? Is the troll's nihilism an adequate explanation for the compulsion? I don't see how. There is something else going on, almost like a misguided search for truth or something. As if he'll find it here!

"The stone is right, wherever it falls." Only man can be wrong, depending upon how far he has fallen.

Or in other words, "whoever speaks of error" speaks of freedom. Which means that freedom and truth are absolutely covalent, the one impossible in the absence of the other.

I might add that because freedom IS, truth IS, and therefore God IS. Likewise, to affirm that the truth sets one free is to affirm that freedom sets one on the path to truth. Otherwise life is just an endless night of bupkis, i.e., existence lost in the eternal bewilderness of being, a blandscape of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere.

It is also why "The freer a man believes himself to be, the easier it is to indoctrinate him." In other words, the cosmic heresy of freedom without truth results only in opinions, just tenured primates clamoring for attention and status with the latest and most fashionable nonsense.

What was this post supposed to be about? Imagination? "The redemption of reality is the function of the imagination."

Yes, but "The deluded are wordy."

Touché.

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