Let There be Verticality!, or How High Does Your Lo Go? (12.15.10)

Picking up where we laughed off jesterdeity, it is now Day Two. What's on the divine agenda? Oh, not much, just a little vertical plumbing job. Rig up a starry firmament to divide the waters above from the waters below. Call the firmament heaven. Knock off early. Sounds good.

Today is the day of verticality. First there was only chaos, so the first order of business was the business of order, i.e., creating a little light with which to Work. Can't work without the old photons. But there is "seeing" and there is "vision." The good vibrations of physical light allows us to see horizontally, but that isn't what makes us human. Rather, what truly distinguishes us from the beasts and the tenured is the vision made possible by virtue of the verticality of the cosmos. Wisdom and gnosis only exist because they represent human modalities that are adequations to the reality of the vertical. To turn it around, in the absence of verticality -- waters above and waters below -- wisdom is impossible, as proven by wackademia, where there are plenty of intelligent people but little wisdom and and plenty of cognitive nOnanism.

Now, in God's plumbing job, "heaven" is the nexus, or connecting link, between the upper and lower waters. Water is a reflective medium, so let us imagine that there is a "double reflection" of heaven in the waters above and below. Above is the realm of ideas, while below is the realm of material things. As Tomberg points out, knowledge involves "the process of relating the real to the ideal corresponding to it." To "understand" is bring into relation "the reflection above, the ideal, with the reflection below, the real." This is another way of saying that the light of the logos is reflected in both directions as "ideas" and "realities"; or it is reflected in us as substance and intellection.

Science is a deeply mystical enterprise, for it presumes the absolute unity of existence, a unity that is mirrored in the mind capable of reliably apprehending that unity. Because there is a uni-verse, there are universal truths, which is to say truth. Obviously, if the universe were not a true universe -- a relativistic multiverse with no underlying unity -- then truth would not be possible, nor would the truth-bearer, for that matter. So truth is ultimately guaranteed by the One without which science cannot function.

Interestingly, just this morning a McCoon named Alan sent me a link to a piece at the Belmont club on what is called "post-normal science," which could also be called "abnormal" and therefore pathological science, a cognitive disease that most definitely exists and even pervades the leftist looniversity bin. For example, hysterical environmentalism of the type promulgated by Algore is quintessentially post-normal, by Gore's own acknowledgment (in numerous interviews he has admitted that the main point of his impropaganda film was to frighten people into action, not to dispassionately inform them).

In Bion's terms, Gore's film represents the projection of unmetabolized "beta elements" of primitive thought into other minds. The idea is not to promote thought, but to spur action, or more specifically, acting out, or political wacktivism, to be precise.

Belmont Club quotes the wikipedia entry on post-normal science, which states that it comes into play when "facts are uncertain, values in dispute, stakes high and decisions urgent.... In such circumstances, we have an inversion of the traditional distinction between hard, objective scientific facts, and soft subjective values. Now we have value-driven policy decisions that are 'hard' in various ways, for which the scientific inputs are irremediably 'soft'."

Just as there is always a moral inversion at the heart of leftism, there is a cognitive inversion as well. Their pathological epistemology is actually an inevitable consequence of their luciferian ontology, which denies the vertical up front -- and therefore the possibility of unity and truth. Instead of unity and truth, they substitute solidarity and commitment, which is to say exterior or "top-down" order and coercive action, for the lie is always coercive whereas the truth "attracts."

What is so objectionable about Gore's film is that, like all post-normal science, its intention is to coerce one into action before one even knows the truth -- not just any action, but probably the most massive and cataclysmic economanical actions ever undertaken by mankind, actions that will kill and/or ruin the lives of millions. There are undoubtedly "accuracies" in any post-normal science, including Gore's film, but the accuracies are not there to serve truth but to spur action. It is science for the limbic system -- the emotional center of the brain -- not the cerebrum, which is capable of disinterested objectivity, which is the foundation of the human capacity for truth.

It is always puzzling to me when people suggest that it is the right that is somehow "anti-science" when leftism itself is pervaded by an anti-science attitude -- not just in this or that particular policy, but by its very nature. The catalogue of instances of the leftist agenda -- or action -- taking priority over truth is endless, and Gore's weather hysteria is just the latest case. The people who are on the global warming bandwagon are the same ones who warned about global cooling, and who successfully undermined the construction of more nuclear power plants in the 1980's. Remember the China Syndrome? Silkwood? Between them they received nine Oscar nominations, so Gore's film stands in an undistinguished line of recipients for awards in Oscary and hysterical science.

Now in the sixth miracle recorded in John, Jesus restores sight to a man who had been blind from birth. But this is a rather special form of blindness, for it prevents the works of God from being revealed in him (John 9:3). Jesus then makes a curious remark about the need to work while it is day -- since the night is coming, when it will be beer o'clock and no man can work -- but that "As long as I am in the world, I am the light of the world."

The light of the world. Tomberg notes that the Logos "is not only the intelligence of the world, that is, the connection of the ideal with the real, but also the perception of the ideal and the real. For it is he who mirrors himself by way of ideas and by way of the facts of existence." In other words, there is no knowledge, let alone truth, at the level of the senses, which in itself is sufficient to undermine any purely horizontal materialistic philosophy, including, of course, any and all forms of leftism. For once you "understand" materialism you have left materialism behind, for matter cannot understand anything.

Even the most bare act of human perception involves the union of the ideal and the real. Sensory experience does not interpret itself. In fact, only a severely autistic individual (I am not speaking of all the modern pseudo- forms) reduces the world to naked sensory experience, and it would not be going too far to say that materialism itself is metaphysically "autistic" and therefore a priori incapable of "seeing the works of God."

The immanent logos -- i.e., the heavenly firmament reflected in the human intellect -- is that which confers our vertical orientation upon us, and allows us to be the reflecting medium -- the only one in all of creation -- capable of unifying the waters above (the ideal) and the waters below (the real). Conversely, the absence (or rejection) of this logos is what makes leftist deconstructionists such textual deviates. They cannot reflect upon reality because they do not reflect the Real.

There is more, but I don't think I have time to get into it -- the upper water provocatively represented by Jesus' saliva, the mixing of it with earth (i.e., the infusion of the word into substance) -- but you get the picture. After all, you have been bobtized by the upper waters, thereby opening the third eye of your Coon vision. Many of you have testified to the miracle of the "spittle on the computer screen" which makes me "present" to your most laughty self.

For the rest of you, feel free to renounce the sight which is blind to the revelations of the Divine and wait for the miracle of reinstatement of the true, original faculty of beholding which sees all things visible as 'works of God revealed' (Tomberg). You have nothing to lose but your blindness and cynicism, for your fidelity to the horizontal cannot help but make you unfit for human assumption. To put it another way, in your present state, your telovator doesn't go to the top floor.