The Left's Reaction to Zarqawi's Death Diminishes Us All

Only humans can fail to become what they are. Yesterday we killed the monster Zarqawi, a ready example of someone who failed to become human. Instead, he became a monster. Only human beings can become monsters, for a vile human being is far lower than a noble animal. No animal but the human being can be unfit for life and unworthy of the cosmos that bearthed and begaialed him from the womb of the eternal voidgin. --Petey

I wish I’d thought of this:

Democrats Vow to Fight On After Zarqawi Loss
by Scott Ott

(2006-06-09) — As Blackberry devices and cell phones on Capitol Hill hummed with news of the death of terrorist leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi yesterday, Congressional Democrats vowed that despite the loss they would fight on in “the war on the war on terror.”

“Zarqawi will be missed because he put a human face on the futility of the illegal U.S. occupation of Iraq,” said one unnamed lawmaker, who assured a reporter that “Democrats are still optimistic. We’re still looking for the silver lining.”

Rep. John Murtha, D-PA, a former Marine and vocal critic of the military occupation of Iraq, immediately denounced “the Zarqawi massacre” and suggested that the F-16 pilot who dropped the bombs had snapped under pressure and murdered the al Qaeda leader “in cold blood.”

Sen. Arlen Specter, R-PA, demanded an explanation of the secret intelligence gathering techniques and surveillance used to find Mr. Zarqawi.

“I want to give the president an opportunity to explain the program to the Congress and to assure the American people that nobody’s civil rights were violated,” said Sen. Specter.

Meanwhile, Democrat National Committee Chairman Howard Dean and former presidential candidate Al Gore observed a moment of silence as they heard of the passing of Mr. Zarqawi, a fellow Internet pioneer.”

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It makes a fellow wonder about the whole nature of meaning when an event of this magnitude has such a different meaning for a good portion of the country. How can something so obviously wonderful, even sacred--for it is a sacred duty to “purge evil from our midst,” as the Bible puts it--be taken by so many on the left as a negative?

I saw Nick Berg’s father on TV last night, promulgating some seriously twisted religious understanding by noting that he equally disapproves of both Zarqawi and Bush and lamenting that “the death of every human being diminishes me." On huffingandpissed, your one-stop shopping place for leftwing moonbattery, there is a morally confused article denouncing such “targeted assassinations” as “unethical.” A Washington Post columnist even praised Zarqawi’s courageous method of killing as “up close and personal,” in contrast to our cold, detached, and unmanly methods.

Some of this is political, but not the majority of it. Rather, I think this is one of those frightening areas that illuminates just how different the leftist mind is from a normal individual, just how wide the chasm is in our cultural war for the soul of America. For it is not a matter of logic, or reason, or intelligence. Rather, there is something sick in the soul of someone who doesn’t have a deep sense of moral satisfaction at the death of someone as purely evil as Zarqawi--or who is so morally retarded that they regard President Bush as evil. Something has gone seriously wrong with the soul of such a moral invert.

When I say that there is something sick in the soul of such an individual, I mean that literally, not as an insult. And I am not speaking as a psychologist. I’m not talking about the mind, but the soul. Very few people actually talk about the soul, even when they use the word. They either confuse it with the ego, which is the conscious, “executive” part of our personality, or they conflate it with the spirit, which is the impersonal essence of the human being.

The soul is what Sri Aurobindo called the “psychic being” or what the Christian fathers called the “nous.” It lies behind and above the ego, and is oriented on a vertical plane. It is the part of us that grows with spiritual growth. All authentic traditions make this sharp distinction between the ego and the psychic being. It is only the latter which is privy to objective truth, objective morality, and objective beauty. The ego deals only in subjective opinion (although the distinction between ego and soul is not absolute, and there are egos that have not entirely lost touch with the higher; rather, the “lostness” of the ego is on a continuum).

The psychic being cannot argue with the ego, it can only instruct it. But the ego knows only argument. Since everything is subjective for it, it can easily come up with arguments against the knowledge of the psychic being. I know in an instant (as do most of our “regulars”) when a commenter is coming at me from the ego, which is why I do not argue with them. Rather, I tell them either to read and learn from the commenters on this blog or go elsewhere.

This entire blog is aimed only at people who have fairly deep acquaintance with the psychic being, whatever their particular tradition calls it. If they haven’t identified the psychic being, then most of what I write will make no sense, especially if they are dealing with a particularly resistant, resentful, or rebellious ego. If you try to argue with such an individual about, say, the sanctity of marriage, they literally won’t know what you’re talking about. In fact, they will reverse the situation and project their ego into you, and accuse you of some base political motivation in merely trying to preserve marriage from the predations of tyrannical and illiberal judges.

There are two kinds of meaning, one imposed, the other discovered. The former is an egoic caricature of the latter, for it involves cutting reality down to the size of the diminished ego and understanding everything in its narrow terms. Various metaphors are used in the Bible to describe this, for example, eating from the tree of knowledge of good and evil vs. eating from the Tree of Life, or building the tower of Babel to surpass God. All liberal and “progressive” forms of spirituality actually drain religion of its spiritual dimension by “containing” it within the ego. The ego shrinks the vastness of Spirit down to something it finds acceptable, so it merely becomes covert auto-worship of the ego itself. Once again it is the ego instructing the soul, instead of vice versa.

Scripture has a “vectorial” character that is designed to lead us beyond the ego to something higher. We do not look “at” scripture, but through and beyond it, to what it is pointing at (and ultimately derived from). We are subsidiarily aware of it in the same way that words are subsidiary to the meaning they are meant to convey. We do not understand a sentence by taking each of the words, looking up their meaning in the dictionary, and then assembling their collective meaning. Rather, we intuit a higher meaning that the words are pointing at while we read. The higher meaning is actually anterior to the words one uses, and is precisely that which organizes the “lower” words.

This is even more true of authentic scripture, which is uses words to convey meanings that are far beyond words. But it is always possible to understand the words in a horizontal way, which is to misunderstand them, precisely. The problem is not so much literalism as lateralism, for both errors involve the incursion and hegemomy of the ego. Only a particularly deluded ego cannot know that God was pleased beyond words upon hearing of Zarqawi’s death, for it makes his work a whole lot easier.

They have no idea about the world and talk like little children.... [This] is a defense of civilization and its highest attained social, cultural and spiritual values and of the whole future of humanity....

You should not think of it as a fight for certain nations against others... It is a struggle for an ideal that has to establish itself on earth in the life of humanity, for a Truth that has yet to realize itself fully and against a darkness and falsehood that are trying to overwhelm the earth and mankind....

It is the forces behind the battle that have to be seen and not this or that superficial circumstance... It is a struggle for the liberty of mankind to develop, for conditions in which men have freedom and room to think and act according to the light in them, and to grow in the Truth, grow in the Spirit.

There cannot be the slightest doubt that if one side wins, there will be an end of all such freedom and hope of light and truth, and the [spiritual] work that has to be done will be subjected to conditions which would make it humanly impossible; there will be a reign of falsehood and darkness, a cruel oppression and degradation for most of the human race such as people in this country do not dream of and cannot yet realize. --Sri Aurobindo