Quacks in the Foundation of the West

This question of the One and the Many is not an abstract or impractical one, because if you get it wrong, then the very foundation of your worldview will be built on illusion. Either the individual is real, as Christians believe, or it is not, as Buddhists, secular leftists, new age knuckleheads, and Darwinians believe. But just look at the dreadful cultures built by the latter! Would you really prefer to live like a drone in the Chinese anthill, secure in the knowledge that at least your illusory individualism is not permitted to take root?

I didn't originally come at this question from a religious standpoint, but from a psychoanalytic one. Modern psychoanalysis revolves around the question of human psychological development, which occurs within the context of separation and individuation from the primary objects of attachment ("Object Relations"). The problem is, few psychoanalysts are religious, whereas few religious people have much knowledge of psychoanalysis.

One prominent exception is A. Hameed Ali, who writes under the pen name of A.H. Almaas. A lot of what he says is cultish BS, but he did write a couple of good books on object relations and spirituality, The Pearl Beyond Price: Integration of Personality into Being, an Object Relations Approach (1988) and The Point of Existence: Transformations of Narcissism in Self-Realization (1996). It's been a while, but at the time I read these, I remember being very impressed with his synthetic grasp of object relations theory, which he seemed to intuitively understand better than many of my teachers in graduate school. The main problem, in addition to the cultlike features, was a superficial and gimmicky application of the ideas in terms of "treatment." And since then he's gone off the rails entirely, into Deepak land. Thus, feel free to download the books into your melon, but beware of viruses.

But the main point is that the psychologies of the East -- because of their blanket condemnation of the ego -- tend to be naive and mythological at best, perverse and destructive at worst. And not just destructive of of the individual, but of cultural progress as well. As we have discussed in the past, there is a good reason why science, human rights, freedom and democracy developed only in the Christian West. They did not develop elsewhere because they could not develop elsewhere.

And this is precisely where the psychospiritual intersects with the psychopolitical and bifurcates into what I would call "metaphysical conservativatism" and its various gloomy alternatives. Coincidentally, I'm currently reading George Nash's splendid Reappraising the Right: The Past & Future of American Conservatism, which is helping me to appreciate some of the subtleties of this question. For conservatism is rooted in individualism and all it implies. Hayek (quoted in Nash) lamented that "I wish I could make my 'progressive' friends... understand that democracy is possible only under capitalism and that collectivist experiments lead inevitably to fascism of one sort or another" and "to the suppression of freedom." And quite obviously, in the absence of freedom there is no individual, since the individual is "freedom lived," while freedom is "individuality permitted."

Now, one thing individualism implies -- as we shall see -- is God. Therefore, ideologies that promote individualism in the absence of God (and this includes some varieties of conservatism, e.g., Ayn Rand) are not only intellectually bizarre but frankly destructive and disorganizing. Pagan statism and genuine theoliberalism stand at antipodes. But it is equally true -- at least in my opinion -- that certain strands of the so-called "religious right" are not at all conservative, but quite plainly warped products of modernity, since they stand outside the perennial Tradition.

Speaking of which, I think I've finally figured out what a Raccoon is. If anyone asks, just say an "improvisational orthodox bohemian classical liberal neo-traditionalist." That ought to cover it. You could say that -- to borrow a phrase from Nash -- we affirm the "unorthodox defense of orthodoxy." The true dynamic axis of conservatism is "the unity of tradition and liberty," in which we are free to become who we already are, and all that implies; and it surely implies certain cultural and political conditions which make it possible, including private property, limited government, and moral and epistemological absolutes.

Nash makes the very useful observation that one of the main differences between contemporary left liberals and conservative classical liberals is that they embrace divergent forms of modernity. In the case of the left, their "new modernity" revolves around

"relativism, negation, and despair. Where the 'old modernity' [that would be us, not to mention America's founders] asserted that certain truths were self-evident, the new modernity denied that universal truths exist.... Where the old modernity tended to be rationalistic, the new modernity explored the irrational and the absurd. Where the old modernity offered liberation from external constraints -- from the barriers of class, race, national origin, and arbitrary government -- the new modernity preached liberation from inner constraints -- from traditional morality, from artistic convention, from rationality itself."

So we are ultimately dealing with a "clash of modernities," or you could say modernity and postmodernity. For the person in the grip of postmodernity, the modern sounds frankly "old-fashioned" and irrelevant. I know this, because I used to be one of those defective people, the reason being that I spent so many years in the zeitgeistapo of the Postmodernity Indoctrination Center, i.e. graduate school.

Back to Bolton. Let's begin with some definitions. Monism, he writes, "teaches that there is only one real substance, regardless of appearances, whether that substance be understood as spiritual or material, and whether or not it is identified with God." Thus, you can affirm that "all is matter" or "all is spirit," but both are affirmations of monism. Form is obviously discounted and devalued, since form is merely the outward manifestation of something more "real," either "energy" on the one hand, or "consciousness" on the other.

Therefore, strictly speaking, neither version of monism can be supported by logic, since logic is swallowed up in the One, along with everything else. This is why we say that there is not much practical difference between the idiocies of, say, Deepak the Quack and Charles the Queeg. Both men imagine they fly above logic, when they actually fall far beneath it.

To be continued....