The Political Oedipus Complex: Dreams From My Father's Murder

I have never had a feeling, politically, that did not spring from the sentiments embodied in the Declaration of Independence.... I would rather be assassinated on this spot than surrender it. --Abraham Lincoln

Talk about a non-Darwinian sentiment! First, the absurd proposition -- indefensible on any scientific basis -- that all men are created equal (or even created). And then, the vow that he would prefer biological death -- indefensible on any Darwinian basis -- to abandoning this spiritual principle. But only because of a relative handful such great souls -- often mysteriously appearing in the right place at the right time -- has the nation survived in the form it has. Call it transnatural election.

It's hard to believe that there are actually mature adults who say they would prefer to live in a nation governed by Darwinian rather than Judeo-Christian principles. But one inevitable problem among the irreligious is that in rejecting religion, they detach themselves from the accumulated wisdom of so many generations. Wisdom, unlike scientific knowledge, is not subject to change, since it is very likely that the proposed change has already been tried and found wanting.

After all, this is how wisdom is won in the first place: through painful experience. But sometimes people just need to feel the sting themselves before acquiring the wisdom. Which in turn is why, no matter how much you warn them, each generation of young adolts with skulls full of mush will be attracted to leftism. For many it will be a mere flirtation, while for others it becomes a developmental arrest -- just a lifelong adolescent rebellion against reality and common sense.

America's founders were not just intelligent, but wise. Thankfully, they didn't just possess "scientific" knowledge, but had genuine insight into human nature. There is no contemporary psychology class they could have taken to acquire such wisdom. Rather, as touched on yesterday, this wisdom was founded upon a fruitful encounter between political philosophy and Judeo-Christian theology. The attempt to reconcile such seemingly different domains creates a kind of arc, or synaptic gap, where the creative insight occurs.

A real scientist will be animated by a similar tension of one sort or another. But the middlebrow, worker-bee type scientific mind is often devoid of this type of dynamic tension. This is the reason for the intellectual deadness of our trolls, or of Charles the Queeg at LGF. If science explains everything, then it also explains the explainer, and renders him a kind of banal automaton. Here you can see how an ideology can become a mind parasite -- or more likely, appropriated by a mind parasite that already exists inside and is looking for a cloak. The whole process forecloses genuine thought and creativity.

In other words, scientism or metaphysical Darwinism are "ready made" or predigested ideologies for certain types of mind parasites. One can cheaply purchase -- for it requires no struggle with intellection -- each of these cultural attitudes "off the rack," hence the dreary conformity of Charles and his soulless army of robotic clones. Not to mention the palpable vacuity of his "art." Not all great artists are theists; however, any thoughtful person capable of creating artistic beauty will have difficulty reconciling it with any form of atheism. When the spirit comes through you, you know it. If you wish to remain an atheist thereafter, it will have to be in spite of yourself -- similar to being highly intelligent but not believing in truth, or being highly moral but not believing in virtue.

In Living Constitution, Dying Faith, Watson devotes a chapter to the philosophy of the Founders, which provides the starkest contrast imaginable to contemporary left-statism. The former is grounded in timeless and absolute spiritual principles, while the latter is ultimately rooted the soiled soil of vulgar Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism, in which truth is simply "what works" (what works for the leftist's ambitions, I might add).

Here again, these ideas were both debated and resolved by the wisdom of the founders. We shouldn't be having to do it all over again with Obama, but the deterioration of our educational system has resulted in people being systematically brainwashed into denying America's spiritual provenance.

In fact, thanks to liberals, it is against the law to even discuss it in a publicly funded school. For the extremists of the ACLU, the Declaration of Independence must be unconstitutional. Let's just note in passing that dullards such as Queeg are hysterical about the possibility of "intelligent design" being discussed in the classroom, which only misses the essential point by about as wide a margin as possible. America is in danger, but not from religious Americans.

The idea that truth was contingent or time-bound would have been rejected out of hand by the Founders. Nevertheless, "job one" of the left is to subvert truth in order to ultimately replace it with power (for it is either one or the other). As Watson explains, the Founders "had a principled understanding of natural rights, which were not to be culturally determined or time-bound or subject to infinite incremental growth, but applicable to all men everywhere and final."

Please note that for the Founders, no further evolution is possible, the reason being that in arriving at his own freedom, man has arrived at the absolute. What you do with it is up to you.

Nevertheless, the Founders hardly denied the role of evolution in another sense, that of historical and personal movement toward this timeless ideal. Thus, they saw American history as a "working out of principles that pointed toward the ultimate, trans-historical truth." These men were full-blooded, dues-paying Raccoons, in that "Historical change was not understood by the Founders to be an unending series of evolutionary improvements to principles, institutions, or modes of political life, but as a series of movements toward the principles of constitutional liberty that, once worked out, would fix the ends and constrain the means of government."

This is precisely how I view evolution as applied to the human plane, as a "working out of principles pointing toward the ultimate trans-historical truth" and "a series of movements toward the principle of liberty." Of course, this is liberty understood in its most glorious and fully realized form, which is none other than conformity to the Principle itself, whether it be in the mode of the saint, sage, genius, warrior, or true artist of sound, image, or word. The end is fixed; but the modes of reaching and expressing it are diverse, like white light refracted through a prism.

Being that the Founders were both Christian and Christianized men, they were fully aware of the fact that we inhabit a logoistic cosmos in which the word is embodied in flesh, form in matter. As a result, the universal is only found in the particular. In practical terms, it means that America has "a 'creedal' or universal side, and a 'cultural' or particular side, but the two sides [are] expressions of the same truth" (Watson).

And this is why it is absurd to think that America could ever be a fully secular nation, because if that were to take place, it would undercut the very universal principles that undergird and animate it.

For a radical secularist or Darwinian fundamentalist, there can ultimately be nothing universal except for blind nothingness. I realize this may sound polemical to some, but it's actually a banality. Just try asking a Darwinist why slavery is wrong, with recourse only to Darwinian principles. Does this mean that Darwinists are pro-slavery? Hardly. It just means that they have no universal and timelessly true argument against it -- just as they have no argument against infanticide, or government theft, or racial quotas, or death panels, or euthanasia, or the designated hitter, or anything else that is plainly wrong.

The philosophy of the Founders prevailed through the 19th century, but began to be undermined by the left by the early 20th. Slowly, as described by Watson, it was displaced by "the dogma of historical progress on which rested the combined forces of social Darwinism, pragmatism, twentieth-century progressivism, and modern liberalism." I'm not sure that we need to go into all of the gory details, since most of you already know them so well. The noxious doctrine of multiculturalism must be the absolute nadir of this line of thought -- the idea that truth and morality are completely time- and culture-bound.

No. "The Founders rarely doubted the centrality of the Christian religion and Christian morality to the success of the American experiment. [Cue trolls to present us with the tiresome list of exceptions.] They believed that reason and revelation were true guides to human affairs, and that they pointed in the same direction on questions of natural rights and moral conduct" (Watson).

Suffice it to say that they did not point to Obama, except as a deplorable counter-example. You might say that his reationary ideology is one of those historically recurring patricidal Dreams of Murdering Our Fathers.

To be continued....