The Beginning of the Beginning

Every beginning is an image of the Beginning; every end is an image of the End. --Dávila

It's been one thing after another during the last week, so not only have I had no time to post, I don't even remember what we were talking about. Among other nuisances, it's that time of year when I have to complete all of my continuing education units.

Looks like we're on the subject of Where Philosophy Begins, which is not a small matter. Indeed, where one begins might well determine where one ends, so be careful! And I do mean this quite literally. For example, in the words of the Aphorist,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

Note that there is not, nor can there ever be, any scientific explanation for why one chooses a scientific explanation. Or in other words, scientism can never be reduced to science. Rather, it is just another epistemologically dead-on-arrival ideology, no different than any other, from Marxism to feminism to radical environmentalism.

While looking for that aphorism, I found a number of others that bear on our subject, for example, What is capable of being measured is minor.

Of course, he means this in the philosophical, or ultimate, sense, but the main point to remember is that quality can never be reduced to quantity. You can try, but supposing you have understood the meaning of the quantity in question, you can only do so from the perspective of Qualityland, so you're right back where you started. In the Beginning.

Or in other words: Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything. Right? How can an intelligent person not know that?

Partly because we don't look at intelligence the right way. For example, it is a truism (or so we are told by the wise tenured) that two intelligent men -- say, Hayek and Obama -- can believe opposite things. Well, if that's the case, then what good is intelligence?

More problematically, how do we arbitrate between the two, if we cannot do so with intelligence? Do we need a being who is more intelligent than Hayek or Obama to resolve the dispute?

Nah brah. That makes no sense at all. Not only can we know some things with certitude, but we are entitled to know them. Just as there are "civil rights," there are cosmic rights without which man is not man.

Here again, I mean this quite literally: to deny these rights is to remove man from the cosmos, when the whole point of man's existence is to know the cosmos. We are the truth-bearing being, the one who knows oneness, or the Principle behind the manifestation, the Truth behind the appearances.

Now, maybe you don't believe man is the truth-bearing being. One question: is that true? You do the rest.

Have you ever wondered why an intelligent person can believe such stupidities? Or are you like me, and never stop wondering? One reason, I think, is conveyed in the following aphorism: The great imbecilic explanations of human behavior adequately explain the one who adopts them.

Now, most "philosophies" are really autobiographies in disguise. They don't really explain the world, but they do explain the person for whom the explanation is adequate. I first realized this back when I was an intern at Camarillo State Mental Hospital. I was about to say that it no longer exists, but it is now the home of a California State University campus, so it is the same place with a different name.

Okay, my mind is being blown at the moment, because I'm thinking about the truth of that little joke. Seriously, things made more sense in that lunatic asylum than they do today -- 30 years later -- on a typical liberal university campus. At least the hospital treated the lunatics. Now the lunatics run the asylum, with the purpose of cranking out more lunatics every year.

And if you really want to freak yourself out, please read Heather MacDonald's new book, The Diversity Delusion -- and she doesn't use the word "delusion" loosely. Delusional ideation is one of the principle symptoms of psychosis, and a mental hospital is where you find psychotic people.

Example. If you are like me, you will find the following statistic most distressing; it will make you feel sick and it will make you feel helpless, the recipe for existential nausea:

From 2013 to 2016, medical schools nationally admitted 57 percent of black applicants with with low MCATs [Medical College Admission Test scores] of 24 to 26 but only 8 percent of whites and 6 percent of Asians with those same low scores.

If true -- and this was reported in the NY Times -- this means that if you have the choice between a black or white doctor, it is irrational to choose the former (assuming you know nothing else about them). This is horrible, and it is not because the person who prefers a white physician is racist! To the contrary, this whole ugly scenario is a direct consequence of the left's ugly policies.

At any rate, the book is filled with similarly nauseating information, and is highly raccoomended. As is her previous The War on Cops: How the New Attack on Law and Order Makes Everyone Less Safe. She is one of those National Treasures.

Where were we? Oh yes, the Beginning. So, where do we begin? Hayek's Law, Legislation and Liberty, Volume 1: Rules and Order (which we've been discussing) begins with an observation by Montesquieu, that

Intelligent beings may have some laws of their own making; but they also have some which they never made.

Now clearly, if we are to have a proper beginning, we want to begin with those things -- those laws or principles -- that we never made. If these are manmade, then we are trapped in our own recursive absurcularity. Recall that this is precisely where Descartes begins -- "I think therefore I am" -- such that, once inserted, it is impossible for him to pull his head out of his own aseity and touch the objective world that precedes him.

Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest. Descarte's is one of them, ha ha.

Okay, smart guy. Quit stalling. Where do you begin?

Well, for starters, I begin with not knowing. Obvious, right? But you'd be amazed at the number of people who not only don't know what whey don't know, but don't want to know it. But the older I get, the less I know; or, the more I unKnow.

For example, I knew much more back when I was in grad school. By the time I graduated, I had a theory to explain everything. But now? Aphorisms:

To mature is to comprehend that we do not comprehend what we had thought we comprehended.

And That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of the intelligence.

It sounds paradoxical, but truly, the more you really know, the less you know.

I have to stop, because I'm behind with my work-work... We'll pick up the thread on Friday.

Get Your Own Cosmos!

The problem is, philosophy begins waaay before we think it does.

For example, a philosopher may wonder to himself, "just what is reality?" I suppose that's more or less how it happened with me. So you then go about trying to figure it all out, tacitly ignoring all the things that are given to us well before we begin to consciously -- or explicitly -- think about them.

It's a cliché, but truly, every newborn baby is a philosopher. I think we need to take that literally, and examine just what babies do as they encounter the world, because that's real philosophy.

You can't pretend to begin philosophizing from scratch at age 20 or 30. Rather, it starts at age zero, or minus zero, really. Indeed, perhaps the most important philosophizing is complete before we even begin to consciously think about it. Maybe a philosopher is a baby that never grows up. This implies that a bad philosopher is a grown-up who forgets that he was once a baby.

It reminds me of the old joke about the argument between the scientist and God about creation. The scientist says something to the effect of, “Listen God, we’ve decided we don’t need you anymore. These days we can clone people, transplant organs, and do all sorts of things that used to be considered miraculous.”

God replies, “Oh? Care to make it interesting? I'll bet you can't make a human being."

"No problem!" The scientist gathers a handful of dirt, and just as he's about to begin working with it, God says "Whoa! Not so fast. Get your own dirt.”

Jaki makes a similar point, that "the radical primacy of registering objects" allows us to inquire into what they are. In other words, not only is thatness prior to whatness, but the latter cannot be brought in retroactively to explain the former.

If that's not clear, just say that being is prior to knowing. And if we presume to undertake the task of knowing about being... well, that's a big presumption. Who said that's possible? I say it's possible because I believe in the doctrine of creation, whereby intelligibility and intelligence are mirrors of one another, built into the nature of things.

But how is philosophy possible for someone who doesn't believe in the doctrine of creation? The moment the secular philosopher says anything he claims to be true of reality, you need to say, "Whoa! Get your own dirt."

Or, to be precise, "get your own intelligible objects." In short, how and why are you assuming the universe is intelligible -- that it is not only speaking to you, but speaking truth?

As we all know, Descartes thought long and hard about this problem, and felt he'd cracked it. I'm not sure how the obvious eluded him, but he ended up turning the question -- and the cosmos with it -- upside down, with I think, therefore I am. Based only upon what we've discussed thus far in this post, I'm sure you can see how problematic this little formula is. For starters, get your own I!

If I'm Descartes back in November 1619... no, if I'm Descartes at any time or any place, and I'm trying to think myself down to the rock bottom foundation of things, I say to myself.... objects are. I only think about them, but the objects are quite obviously prior to my thinking about them.

René, you had one job! Again, he reverses the whole ontology (and with it, epistemology) by putting René first!

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single first principle: I think. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist.... Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing.

Note the next howler, because it goes to the whole subject of this post, if we ever get around to it:

Descartes defines "thought" as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it." Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which the person is immediately conscious (emphases mine).

Again, philosophy surely begins before we are conscious (i.e., explicitly self-conscious), insofar as we were ever babies. But Descartes ignores this truism, and "proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable, and instead, admitting only deduction as a method."

As if babies "deduce" the reality with which they interact and through which their minds are built!

Common sense: "The registering of objects alone makes possible the improvement of one's knowledge." Only in this way "can the process of improvement start and be continued" (Jaki).

Speaking of which, if you really want to create hell on earth, it's not that difficult. Rather, just do precisely as Descartes advises: ignore everything but the reality of your own thoughts, and then construct a logico-deductive system to explain every object we encounter, AKA the real world.

And if you understand this, then you understand the left. No, literally. I've been reading about just this subject in Hayek's triptych on Law, Legislation and Liberty. It's so rich and dense -- not to mention, convoluted -- that I scarcely know where to begin.

Let's begin with Hayek's observations about Descartes: Descartes thinks, therefore Hayek smacks him down. And I'm sure Descartes was a nice guy and all, but he is in desperate need of a smackdown.

Actually, let's start with the here and now, and work backward to Descartes. For all practical purposes we have two competing philosophies, conservative classical liberalism, and leftism. Both are rational, but in entirely different ways; Hayek calls them evolutionary or critical rationalism, on the one hand; and naive or constructive rationalism, on the other. The latter may be traced to Descartes, at least as far as Hayek is concerned.

For me, that itself is a little naively constructivist -- as if our problems can be laid at the feet of an historically identifiable suspect.

Rather, I trace the whole catastrophe back to Genesis 3. You know who first said "You think, therefore you are?" The serpent, that's who. Indeed, that is the whole point of the story -- "you shall be as gods, knowing good and evil." It all starts with you, not with the world of creation, AKA objects that object to your dreams and schemes.

The devil comprehends everything, but is not able to create anything (Dávila). Likewise the constructive rationalism of the left.

But Hayek tells Descartes to get his own dirt:

The "radical doubt" which made him refuse to accept anything as true which could not be logically derived from explicit premises that were "clear and distinct," and therefore beyond possible doubt, deprived of validity all those rules of conduct which could not be justified in this manner (emphasis mine).

Again, if you superimpose an ideology -- a manmade system of thought -- over the world, and deduce reality from it, then you're going to have problems, whether you are a feminist, global warmest, critical race theorist, Russia conspiracist, Keynesian economist, whatever.

What we call "tradition," the ideologues of the left will dismiss as myth or superstition, since so much of it may not be susceptible to clear and distinct logical deductions. Yes, they're only time-tested forms and customs that exist because they are compatible with survival and/or thriving. Imagine taking the same approach to biology, dismissing any trait that cannot be logically deduced from first principles! (And this is indeed how premodern medicine functioned -- for example, deducing illness from humoral principles.)

But for Descartes -- and for your village atheist MENSA member -- "rational action" equates to "only such action as [is] determined entirely to be known and demonstrable truth." Which, it turns out, is mighty few things.

It immediately brings to mind an aphorism, and explains why the aphorism is true: None of the high eras of history have been planned (Dávila).

Or this one: The natural sciences, where the process of falsification prevails, take only errors out of circulation; the social sciences, where fashion prevails, also take their achievements out of circulation. And few fashions have negated more achievements than constructive rationalism.

Oh well. Modern man treats the universe like a lunatic treats an idiot (Dávila).

A Common Sense Approach to World-Head Relations

There is The World Beyond Our Head. And there is the world in our head. In many ways, philosophy comes down to the possible relations between these two worlds.

For example, the Catholic tradition comes down firmly on the priority of the external world in the world-head relation. Being that I am Highly Educated, I didn't even realize this was a "thing" until I was well into my 40s -- in other words, that you really need to think through this primordial relation before you set foot into philosophy, because this is the very foundation of your philosophy, setting all kinds of limits and entailing all kinds of predetermined conclusions.

So, what is the world? What is the mind? And how do they relate?

So many wrong answers! And only one correct one. So be careful.

I still remember reading Stanley Jaki's Means to Message when it was published in 1999. I had never heard of Jaki, nor is he the kind of thinker I would have encountered in the course of my education. By then I had read plenty of philosophy of science, but I had surely never read a Catholic philosopher of science. Indeed, why would I? In my mind, the term would have been oxymoronic, "science" and "Catholic" being at epistemological antipodes.

Did I mention my extensive education?

Now, because of this education, I didn't realize I was a lot of things -- a lot of things that naturally go together and mutually support one another, including relativist, subjectivist, and liberal.

Likewise, as I gradually became conservative... Even that is putting it too strongly -- or putting the cart before the horse -- because that's not how it felt at the time. Sure, I was questioning some of the assumptions underpinning my liberalism, but that doesn't mean I would ever find common cause with those backward racist misogynist homophobic Christianists. Please. I just wanted to become a better and more informed liberal, not a conservative.

Nevertheless, I had begun subscribing to National Review in the late 1990s, just to see what these cretins were up to. Not only were they far less cretinous than I had been led to believe, but I began to check out authors praised by their book reviewers, one of whom was Jaki. So that's how he came to my attention. Otherwise, my education had involved a total embargo on anything so tainted by Catholic influence.

Anyway, the first chapter -- appropriately -- is called Objects. Turns out that everything hinges on this. You can begin with objects or you can begin with subjects, but you have to begin somewhere. Liberalism -- or rather, leftism -- begins with the latter. It is, for example, precisely the source of their KDS (Kavanaugh Derangement Syndrome), since he begins with an object called the Constitution, thereby preventing the untethered legal adventuring the left would like for us to embark upon.

Here is how Jaki begins the chapter:

A book with the subtitle, 'a treatise on truth,' must, from its inception on, convey the author's resolve to face up to the question: What is truth?

There are hundreds if not thousands of possibilities, and the more educated you are, the more possibilities there are.

In fact, if you want to be logically consistent in your liberalism, you will have to concede that there are billions of possibilities, one for each human. This is the reductio ad expandum of leftism, which is to say, unadulterated relativism (out of many, even more, you might say). Buzzwords such as diversity and multiculturalism are just the vulgar residue of this prior relativism, which soon enough devolves to nihilism.

And say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, Dude, at least it's an ethos.

Conversely, you will have noticed that contemporary leftism is a kind of shapeshifting pile of steaming expedience, which can change on a dime, without any awareness of having done so. It has no logical consistency, because no logical consistency is possible (or necessary) once you have rejected the world outside your head.

For example, once you have pretended to jettison biology, then there are no longer two sexes but an endless list. You can say LGB, LGBT, LGBTQ, LGBTTQQIAAP... Farcebook is up to 71 genders, but you know as well as I that this benighted and narrow-minded list is totally fascist for numbers 72 on.

Ultimately -- going back to first principles -- you will have to have one gender for each person, just as a consistent relativism demands billions of truths, one per customer.

Wait a minute -- not so fast! Why only one per customer? Who said I can't believe whatever I want to believe when I believe it?

Dude, we're already there. Or maybe you don't check out MSNBC or CNN once in a while. And you only have to check in very briefly to get the gist. Don't concern yourself with the content, rather, the containers. Hell, just look into the eyes of Cory Booker or Ocasio-Cortez or Rachel Maddow or Maxine Waters or David Hogg or on and on.

Anyway, back to sanity, which is to say, Jaki. He correctly points out that Thomas Aquinas' commonsensical definition of truth has not, nor can it ever be, surpassed:

Adaequatio rei et intellect.

Or, in plain English, "the intellect (of the knower) must be adequate to the thing (known)."

Again, because of my extensive education, I didn't discover the shocking truth about the world of objects -- the objective world -- until I was into my 40s.

And now we're out of time... to be continued....

Socialism vs. the Extra-Cranial World

The World Beyond Your Head. First of all, what a great title, even though the book itself is a bit diffuse and half-digested. Like a ruminant, the author should have chewed the material a bit longer before asking us to swallow it. Problem is, now it's up to me to digest it all, and I'm not feeling especially focussed myself this morning.

Still, the theme of the book is sound -- that, largely because of technology, human beings are increasingly exiled from the real world and trapped inside their own heads. And "unexpectedly," the more they pursue this faux-individuality, the more they end up the same, only worse. It's why the left can un-ironically celebrate "diversity" while manifesting such a distinct lack thereof: the proverbial herd of independent minds.

You'd think a situation in which everyone is living inside abstractions within their own heads would lead to mass eccentricity -- a herd of cats -- but instead, we have a compliant and predictable sheepocracy of tenured, media, and entertainment drones. The key, it seems to me, is that ignoring feedback from the actual world is what allows everyone on the left to be the same.

Consider how, for example, since 2016, the left has been unified in their obsessional loathing of Trump. It's all they talk or think about. And yet, the world -- the one outside their heads -- not only keeps turning, but is thriving in every measurable way.

This morning, for example, the headlines on Drudge include

--AUGUST JOBS: +201K ECONOMY ON FIRE

--GREAT AGAIN: Construction Worker Wages Rise

--BLACK UNEMPLOYMENT NEAR RECORD LOW

--120 Utilities Have Lowered Rates Thanks to Tax Cuts.

It's like this every day: it must be exquisitely painful for the left to have to deal with a such a constant stream of good news.

Just below the good news is a link to an article on Michael Moore's new anti-Trump film. I wonder what he has to complain about? I mean, outside his own head? Okay, I'll bite. What's going on in there?

"Filmmaker Michael Moore compares U.S. President Donald Trump to Adolf Hitler in his provocative new documentary, 'Fahrenheit 11/9.'" Yes, provocative. Not insane.

But what is insanity? It is loss of contact with the real world, precisely. I mean, if Hitler was Trump, then WWII was just a big misunderstanding.

"The documentary examines the forces Moore believes contributed to Trump’s election victory in November 2016, drawing parallels with the rise of Hitler in 1930s Germany."

Being that I am a strong supporter of Trump, I can only assume this means that I am a Nazi. Now, in reality, being that I exist outside Moore's head, only I am in a position to know whether I am in fact a Nazi or maybe even the opposite of a Nazi -- which is to say, a small government constitutional conservative, or classical liberal.

Turns out I am indeed the latter, so Moore has made a rather fundamental error, only multiplied times 50 or 60 million. As in: "I imagined you were Hitler, when you turned out to be James Madison. My bad."

Of course, Moore might have asked one of us how we feel about Nazism, but that would have required too much travel outside his head.

Anyway, since the book is so diffuse, maybe an amazon reviewer can boil it down for us. Let's see.

The overall theme of “The World Beyond Your Head” has to do with seeking out authentic individuality in a social context and culture that is awash in a flattened-out democratic autonomy.... the author sees that presently there “is a crisis of self-ownership: our attention isn’t simply ours to direct where we will...

The book explains

why the modern human is not progressing at all, but is actually regressing in many ways, because of technology. We are becoming dumber, more narcissistic..., and we are unaware that all of this is happening.... The lie that "individualism" and "freedom" is the great savior is the biggest con job ever perpetrated on a people.

Example: If you want to be good at Judo, you have to show up, humble yourself, and learn from the Sensei and from the tradition. This could be said for so many things in life.

Yes. The point is, genuine freedom and meaningful individuality require a long apprenticeship to reality, AKA the world outside your head.

In a note to myself, I wrote "Since few of us are intellectuals or scholars, academia had to invent whole disciplines for the stupid, the lazy, the shallow." Moreover, it has had to change the very nature of disciplines such as psychology, which is no longer tethered to objective reality -- say, the biological reality of two sexes -- but anchored in fantasies and preferences.

In this regard, the less you know, the more you think you know, until you attain a kind of cheap omniscience, whether it comes from scientism, feminism, deconstruction, whatever. Each of these exhaustively explains the world outside your head, without entailing the trouble of actually having to leave your head.

This also results in a pseudo-freedom, because now the person is enslaved in a false understanding, but confuses it with the real thing. Who understands less about women than feminists? Who understands less about economics than a socialist? For whom do black lives matter less than Black Lives Matter?

The author comes from a similar angle and argues that only by engaging with the real world can we truly become individuals. He also says that paradoxically we can only achieve true freedom by submitting to something external -- for example, by submitting to the rules of musicianship within a particular style, you gradually achieve freedom to improvise endlessly within that style.

Another reviewer says that the cogito of this book could be "I do, therefore I am." Or, you could say, "I screw up, therefore I am," for in order to screw up, you need a world outside your head. And now you know why the left is never wrong and can never learn. It is why socialism will always be with us.

Transformations of Religious Invariants, Part 1

It is not so much that men change their ideas, as that the ideas change their disguises. In the discourse of the centuries, the same voices are in dialogue. --Dávila

It seems to me that there are certain religious principles and archetypes that are not only timeless and universal, but that man cannot avoid using in order to think and make his way through the world. After all, man is man, and for 99.9% of his existence he has been Homo religiosus, not Homo pomo.

You might say that our being is saturated with these things, such that we can no more rid ourselves of them than a fish could live on dry land. They are essential, not accidental, meaning that they go to what we are. Remove them and we are not -- not human beings, anyway. Then what are we? What do we become? Good question. (Hint: it involves nothing.)

Raccoons are familiar with the distinction between essence and accident, so I'll be brief: the essence of, say, a ball, is to be spherical. You can paint it red, white, or blue, but those are accidents. So long is it remains round, then it is still a ball. Shape it into a square, however, and it has lost its essence and is now something else.

So, what is man, essentially? What are those attributes without which he isn't one? Of course, in the postmodern world this is a pointless question; or rather, there are no essences, precisely. Therefore, to ask about the essence of man is analogous to asking about the sound of geometry or shape of justice.

At any rate, we're particularly interested in certain unavoidable religious motifs that are as universal as principles of logic, such as identity and non-contradiction. Off the top of my head I'm thinking of such things as grace, fallenness, purity, sacrifice, center, origin, faith, sin, redemption, salvation, evil, and paradise. I'm sure there are others.

No matter how "materialistic" we pretend to be, our minds are nevertheless woven of transcendence and immanence: everything is a tapestry of matter and spirit. The Aphorist, as usual, puts it best: The natural and the supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

Let's take, for example, Marx. I'm hardly the first to point out that his whole program is just Christianity turned upside-down and inside-out. Muravchik writes of how Marxism's "claim of inevitability was not an intellectual weapon but a religious one" that may be traced to "Engels' boyhood faith of Pietism, which embodied a doctrine of predestination."

Nor was this the only way that socialism echoed revelation. It linked mankind's salvation to a downtrodden class, combining the Old Testament's notion of a chosen people with the New Testament's prophecy that the meek shall inherit the earth. Like the Bible, its historical narrative was a tale of redemption that divided time into three epochs: a distant past of primitive contentment, a present of suffering and struggle, and a future of harmony and bliss.

Let's be honest: there is no intellectual content to communism or socialism. So, what's the attraction? In a way, you have only to listen to most anything that comes out of the mouth of, say, St. Alexandria of the Occluded Cortex. If it were as easy and as wonderful as she describes, who wouldn't be attracted?

Not many people became socialists because they were persuaded by the correctness of Marxist economics or supposed the movement served their "class interests." They became socialists because they were moved to fervor by the call to brotherhood and sisterhood; because the world seemed aglow with the vision of a time in which humanity might live in justice and peace (ibid.).

So, that's the appeal, and it's not insignificant. This is a problem with politics in general, especially in a democracy; or, in a poorly catechized democracy in which citizens... Put it this way: at least half of Americans are poorly catechized in both religion and in our constitutional republic, and are therefore extremely vulnerable to conflating politics and religion.

After all, what was Obama? You couldn't have invented a more perfect example of what I'm talking about. He is intellectually negligible, but this has nothing to do with the power he wielded over his voter-ies.

The other day I made the mistake of dismissing Obama's intelligence in the course of a conversation with a liberal friend, and he immediately accused me of racism! I don't know why I added the "!", because that makes it sound unusual or unpredictable, when it is an expectable reaction to heresy, blasphemy, and sacrilege. Again, the reaction has nothing to do with insulting Obama's intelligence, but with desecrating a religious icon.

So, most of what we regard as "political" revolves around transformations of religious ideas. I'm reminded of a book by Bion called Transformations. It must have popped into my head for a reason, so let's drag it down and find out if it has anything to add to our discussion.

Ah! Good news from one of the amazon reviewers: "I have assiduously worked through a large part of Bion's work. There is genius behind apparent madness in his thinking." I can only hope to earn such an extravagant encomium for my toils on this blog!

I probably haven't cracked this book in 30 years. I'm blowing the dust off the top, just like in the movies. There are some urgent notes to myself that I don't quite understand, but I do recall this passage:

Suppose a painter sees a path through a field sown with poppies and paints it: at one end of the chain of events is the field of poppies, at the other a canvas with pigment disposed on its surface. We can recognize that the latter represents the former, so I shall suppose that despite the differences between a field of poppies and a piece of canvas, despite the transformation that the artist has effected in what he saw to make it take the form of a picture, something has remained unaltered and on this something recognition depends. The elements that go to make up the unaltered aspect of the transformation I shall call invariants.

Small idea, big implications. Think of the example of Marx above. In his "painting" of socialism, it is easy to see the transformations of Judeo-Christian invariants. And more to the point of this post -- which is rapidly running out of time -- there are certain religious invariants that man simply cannot avoid, such that we see their transformations everywhere.

We'll conclude with this observation by Muravchik: "Thus, part of the power of Marxism was its ability to feed religious hunger while flattering the sense of being wiser than those who gave themselves over to unearthly faiths."

Come for the covert religiosity, stay for the superiority!

A Generic Rant on What's Wrong with the World

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

The conservative is a simple pathologist. He defines sickness and health. But God is the only therapist. --Dávila

"At the beginning of this century," writes Schuon (referring to the 20th), "hardly anyone knew that the world is ill" (emphasis mine because it always is, more or less). Indeed, the half century or so prior to World War I was probably Peak Progress in terms of a quasi-religious outlook shared by most people in the developed world.

In the words of the Aphorist, Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid. A big reason one has to be totally stupid to be a progressive today is that this -- the world we are living in -- is the splendid future brought to us courtesy of previous progressives -- the New Deal, the Great Society, the Obama Change, etc. The bill adds up.

Consider just someone unfortunate enough to be living in Chicago, whose last Republican mayor was elected in 1927. The forty or fifty or sixty people who are shot there every weekend can take solace in the fact that they are living the dream -- the progressive dream brought to fruition by 87 years of Democrat rule.

The left never expresses any appreciation for the world it has created (or unleashed upon us). Instead, we only hear more complaints. The complaints are valid, in the sense that there is indeed something wrong with the world. It's just that the left goes about it in a way that is backwards and upside down. In other words, they confuse symptoms with causes, and treatment with the disease.

By the way, how do we know there is something wrong with the world? Easy. All you need to do is know yourself to know the source of the trouble. D'oh! Which excludes the left, being that it is characterized by a lack of self-awareness, which in turn fuels what we in the psychology racket call "acting out" (and to which they apply the euphemism "activist"; most activists simply transform and externalize personal conflicts into political ones).

Everyone on the left knows the world is ill, except they have a secular explanation -- patriarchy, white privilege, homophobia, "structural racism," the greed of the "one percent," etc. It never occurs to them that our problems might be a consequence of human nature, and that to simply put left wing humans in positions of power solves nothing (see the Congressional Black Caucus for details).

The moral inversion of the left is interesting, in that it incoherently combines a passionate amorality with a punitive moralism. As Bork writes, "While defining deviancy down with respect to crime, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like, our cultural elites are growing intensely moralistic and disapproving about what had always been thought normal behavior..."

Thus, they combine an absence of judgment with unhinged judgmentalism -- or outward tolerance with an inward intolerance that we call totolerantarianism. Our universities are quintessentially totolerantarian, an absurd miasma of no standards and punitive ones.

The upshot is a paradoxical upward and downward redefinition of norms. Which is an inversion of the Christian tradition of tolerance, which is to condemn the sin and not the sinner. With this latter approach, we can preserve our norm while being merciful to the person who violates it. But for the left, it is as if there are no absolutes, and woe to the person who transgresses one!

"[B]ehavior until recently thought quite normal, unremarkable, or even benign, is now identified as blameworthy or even criminal." For example, here in California, if a minor comes to me distressed and conflicted by his homosexual impulses, I am forbidden by law to help him understand them (and if the law doesn't yet apply to adults, it soon will).

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, it was simply taken for granted that homosexuality, like anything else, had unconscious causes, nor have I had any clinical experiences since then that would cause me to reject that premise. And yet, with no debate, common sense has been outlawed.

Here's an example from a heavyweight thinker we studied back in grad school, Otto Kernberg. Thirty years ago it was permissible -- or even blasé -- to write the following:

By far the large majority of patients encountered who present casual homosexual behavior or a bisexual orientation belong to the borderline spectrum of pathology.... Put simply, we just do not find, except very rarely, male homosexuality without significant character pathology.

Note that such ideas were never disproven, not even argued against. Rather, overnight, as it were, they were simply dismissed. Now I suppose it would be labeled hate, even though he's relying on clinical experience and observation -- not to mention trying to help the patient who is in pain and conflict.

The other day I read a piece on Karl Marx's 200th birthday. Consistent with what was said above about the combination of poor judgment and harsh judmentalism, the author describes how Marx threw together a little pseudo-science and a lot of moral indignation in order to forge a "vision of a post-historical and post-political order without contradictions or conflict, one that would achieve unprecedented prosperity and a new horizon marked by 'human emancipation.'”

Again, this is what progressives have been doing in America for over a hundred years, ever since Wilson in particular. It's just that the program was repeatedly disrupted by war and depression, such that it couldn't begin to proceed unimpeded on a mass scale until the 1960s. In fact, you can easily see the roots of this in the 1950s -- of the passionate mixture of moral indignation + human emancipation.

I know, because I used to love all that stuff, from Kerouac and Ginsberg and the Beats, to Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, and on to more popularized forms of liberation that trickled into mass culture by the latter half of the 1960s, i.e., the New Age. By the time I was in college in the 1970s, hardly a norm had been left standing.

But again, while the movement comes clothed in promises of liberation, it is really about hatred, contempt, and vilification: The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates (Dávila). Thus,

Marx hated the world as it was. His goal was "revolution" -- not merely political revolution or "political emancipation," but a wholesale change in the order of things: the aforementioned "human emancipation."

Which would amount to what? Well, for starters it would amount to liberation from humanness. Which, conveniently, is not a problem for Marxism, since it denies human nature up front. Therefore, there is "no human nature or 'natural order of things' that needed to be respected even as one worked to promote humane and salutary change." So, in eliminating human nature, nothing has been lost but a restrictive fantasy.

Of course, in order to eliminate human nature once and for all, you'll have to eliminate a lot of humans, but that's just a matter of persistence and logistics -- of sticking to your principles despite the body count. Look at Venezuela: they won't allow reality to impinge upon Liberation. Just like the master himself, who

was not an advocate of reform, however radical. He did not work for “social justice” like a good humanitarian. Instead, he advocated something like “metaphysical rebellion” against the human condition. His humanism -- and historicism -- were distinctively inhumane and entailed something like a “gnostic” revolt against reality.

Next time you hear the promises of a leftist politician, notice how Evil promises what it cannot deliver, whereas Good delivers what it does not know how to promise (Dávila).

And remember too that The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time (ibid.).

Connecting the Biggest Dots: Can I Get a Withness?

Connecting the dots. You could say that that is what this blog is all about. In fact, it's what life is all about, and not just the lives we lead, but life as such. An invisible thread runs through everything -- a riverrun circulating from Eve & Adam to every atom.

Life itself is a continuous process that connects outside to inside and not-me to me. Once the outside is in -- say, in the form of "facts" -- then we need to connect them. Likewise food. Since I have diabetes, my body can't on its own connect the dots between carb and cell. If I don't take insulin, then the carb-dots just pile up until I croak.

It seems that something similar can happen with facts or knowledge or data. Yes, we always need to connect the dots between them, but also, we need keys to assimilate these into our substance, otherwise they just build up like too many carbs. As Eliot rhetorically asks,

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I'm just winging it here. No plan. Or better, just riffing on the motif of "connecting dots." Or, trying to go meta and connect the dots of dot connecting to something beyond their mere connectedness.

I'm also not explaining it very well. You could say that any "narrative" is an attempt to connect the dots. In the case of art, the narrative presumably comes first, in that the artist will choose and structure the details and characters in order to support and disclose it.

Conversely, in science the narrative is supposed to always be subordinate to the facts. The facts will supposedly "tell us" their narrative, even though they never actually do. Facts do not speak, much less for themselves. If they could, then human beings would be utterly superfluous.

Any fact you care to name must, in order to be one, be situated in a prior narrative, AKA metaphysic. A metaphysic is your ultimate narrative, and thus, your ultimate connection of dots.

And now it really gets strange, because most people operate without any conscious metaphysic, and most of the others deny that metaphysics is even possible. Trouble is, you have to connect a (literally) infinite number of dots to conclude that the dots not only aren't connected, but can never be connected. Rather, they're just a bunch of random dots. Said the random dot.

For example, atheism. A-theism is really a-connectedness, and in a big way. Put conversely, think of all the dots that theism connects: all of them. Including the biggest dots we can imagine, e.g., time and eternity, absolute and relative, God and man, man and man (via an interior love as opposed to mere exterior juxtaposition), and much more.

Knowledge itself, for example, in classical Christian metaphysics, is our own apprehension of the intelligibility implanted into things by God. It is how and why knowledge is possible: any act of knowledge testifies to the connectedness between intelligence and intelligibility -- from God through objects and into us. To know something is to connect the dots. Always.

And now I'm thinking about the Trinity. As we know, this word is not mentioned in scripture. Nevertheless, it is surely there, only in the form of dots that were discerned and connected by the apostles and early fathers. The Father had to be connected to the Son, and they in turn had to be connected to the Holy Spirit, in such a way that they are coequal persons in one substance. There is no way to connect these big ol' dots but with the principle of the Trinity.

Come to think of it, much of early Christianity consisted of dot-connecting, didn't it? The first thing the early Christians did was to consult the Hebrew scriptures, thereby discovering hundreds of connections -- i.e., prophecies, typologies, and synchronicities. And what is a synchronicity but God punning around? And what is a pun or witticism but a connection of dots, say, between "Peter," "rock," and "Church?"

What is the connection between "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

Consider what's going on there: two ultimate examples of dot-connecting. However, they can't be contradictory. Rather, we have to somehow connect to dots between them! It must go something like this:

"In the beginning is God-and-Word, distinct but inseparable. This Word is with God and is God; thus, God's Isness is always a Withness. In the beginning the God-with-Word creates the heavens and the earth. And it is always the beginning."

Man is such an inveterate storyteller that he might as well be called... Homo storian or something. It's what we do, which is to say, try to connect the dots. They say -- they being the tenured -- that it is strictly impossible for us to connect the dots, and that it is an exercise in premodern naiveté to think otherwise. But I do think otherwise, and I don't think it's because I'm naive.

If you want to simplify your life, you can just stipulate that God is the ultimate connecter of dots and be done with it. Trouble is, if you reject God, it hardly means you have abandoned dot-connecting. To the contrary!

And this is where the left comes in, because what is the left but a frenzied gang of tyrannical dot-connectors? Let's begin with Marx. He starts with the principle that connecting the dots is impossible, because God doesn't exist. Getting you to believe in God is just a way for the ruling class to control you with a fake narrative!

But then Marx goes on to connect all the cosmic and historical dots, only in such a way that it justifies tyrannical control by a ruling class. Gosh, almost like he naively projects his own bad motives into the religious or something!

It's enough to make a fellow suspect that religion is our primary bulwark against the tyrannical dot-connectors of the left.