A Conical Caper About Conservative Progressives and the Reactionary Left

Sorry about the abrupt segue, but I'm just dipping into the arkive, and this was the next post, now edited and fortified with extra gagdaddery.

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One nation under God? I don't know if I like that, for it all depends on the meaning of "One." As Coleridge put it, "two very different meanings lurk in the word, one."

In his not-yet-published book, The Pledge of Allegiance & The Star Spangled Banner: A Patriot's Primer on the American Spirit, author John White expresses ideas that are eerily similar to mine. In fact, it's almost as if he read my book or something. While anything is possible, it seems unlikely, since he's my literary agent.

White writes that, like us, the Taliban and the Islamists firmly believe in One Nation Under God. After all they speak of the “nation of Islam,” and are calling for an Islamic theocracy. "What," he asks, "distinguishes the terrorists’ version of nationhood from ours?"

The differences, says White, begin and end with concepts found in the Declaration of Independence, our founding document. There it is affirmed "that God is the source of our liberty, our sovereignty, our rights, our justice and our human dignity," and that "the purpose of government -- which exists legitimately only when it has the consent of the governed -- is to guarantee those blessings are not violated because each individual citizen is sacred and sovereign." In short, "The individual is sovereign because of our spiritual nature; the state may never violate that."

So it doesn't matter whether or not you believe in God, because you benefit from his blessings just the same. All you bitter atheists out there will just have to get over it and resign yourself to living under a theocracy. Except that this "theo" is first situated in, and refracted through, the individual, not the government.

As White expresses it, "America is a theocracy because it is governed by God through the total population of our divinely guided citizenry who are the true heads of state and who are educated in the religio-moral ideals, principles and values of our society." Anyone who denies this truth cannot be a progressive, because "the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule [by] the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction cannot lay claim to progress. They are reactionary."

THE BLACK GOD OF THE LEFT

The difference between conservative progressives and reactionary leftists is that they worship different gods -- or more precisely, they have entirely incompatible understandings of the meaning of One. There is an antinomy between these two Ones: there is a left One and a right One -- or more precisely, a higher One and a lower one.

In Meditations on the Tarot -- which I assume all Raccoons have read and assimilated by now -- you will recall that the author uses a visual image to conceptualize the problem. Imagine two cones placed base to base, one pointing up, the other down. Thus, similar to Miss Anne Elk's important theory of the brontosaurus, this new object has one point at the top, a much thicker "equator" in the middle, and then another point at the bottom. The image is his, it belongs to him, and he owns it. I'm just borrowing it.

Now, get the image of a brontosaurus out of your mind, and imagine this object as a sort of crystal. At the top is the “white point” where pure light -- which is the synthesis of all colors -- enters. As the light moves down toward the equator it becomes more and more differentiated into the various colors of the spectrum, until they reach their maximum degree of separation and intensity at the equator. Moving further down, the colors begin to merge and blend until, at the bottom point, they once again lose all of their distinction. But here they become black, which represents the blending and confusion of all colors. As such, there is one sort of synthesis or Oneness above (the white point) but an entirely different kind of oneness below (the black point): O vs. ø

The white point is analogous to wisdom, for it represents the underlying unity of all the different types of knowledge available at the equator, where all of the individual colors represent various disciplines and sciences. It is where the light of divine love breaks into the maninfestation and where beauty is the splendor of the true. "All that is true, by whosoever spoken, is from the Holy Spirit" (St. Ambrose).

This image symbolically discloses the central purpose of both this blog and my book, both of which are mine and belong to me. Indeed, this is what I was hoping to coonvey in the book's full title: One Cosmos Under God: The Unification of Matter, Life, Mind and Spirit. That is, the synthesis of all our seemingly contradictory truths lies “above,” toward the white light of wisdom, not below, beyond the black point of matter.

If two seemingly contradictory things are true -- say, the Book of Genesis and the theory of evolution -- then their common source of truth must be found above, not below. There is surely a way to resolve the contradiction, but not by finding a compromise between the two at the "equator," much less by simply confusing and blending them together below.

For example, teaching intelligent design as an adjunct or alternative to natural selection is simply adding another color to the equator. Even worse, teaching it as the only truth would take both the Creator and science down to the black point, merging and blending science and theology in an unhealthy way. In fact, this is what is done in the Islamic world. Yes, they have intellectual and spiritual unity there, but it is the bad unity of the black point: One Nation Under God’s Boot Heel, so to speak. The identical thing happens in secular totalitarian states, where diversity is not permitted. What we want is to allow maximum diversity but to synthesize it at higher level, not eliminate it on a lower one: this is the meaning of One Cosmos Under God.

Ironically, the secular left in America regard their fellow religious citizens as an incipient Taliban that wishes to enforce a black-point unity, when the opposite is true.

That is, for the secular left, there is no white point above or black point below. Rather, there is only the equator, where we all live in our beautiful, diverse cultures and subcultures, none better than any other: multiculturalism, moral relativism, no objective or "privileged" truth. And yet, multiculturalism and diversity are enforced from on high, despite the fact that the left supposedly does not recognize the existence of morally superior cultural perspectives. What’s going on, Marvin? You know, we've got to find a way / To bring some lovin' here today.

In reality, the left is enforcing their absolute black point god, but simply denying it. They don't really care what culture you're from, so long as you are committed to diversity itself, and intolerant of any other view. This is nothing less than the unwholly god of the black point flexing its flabby tenured muscle while pretending to be just another beautiful color in the rainbow.

In reality, there is no absolute system at the equator that can synthesize knowledge and explain our existence. There is only diversity and contradiction there, which is as it should be. Otherwise there would be no creation, nothing separate from the Creator. However, it is only the white light above that illuminates and unites everything below. We must maintain an allegiance to the absolute white light that is reflected in all the relative truths at the equator, not to this or that relative or half-truth enforced absolutely by leftist medullards from below. For that is how the beautiful rainbow devolves into a reignbelow.

As the ancient authors put it, there is no knowledge which should not pass into love. There is no knowledge which should not go beyond the mind and reach to the very source of the mind -- the heart -- the "heart" understood in its Indian meaning (which was Pascal's too) as the center of being, the place where God abides. --Dom Henri LeSaux/Swami Abhishiktananda