Being Liberal Means Always Having to Say You're Sordid

For this morning's repast of a repost, we have chosen an easy-to-digest morsel from three years back. It will be pure rewordgitation for longtimeless readers, but may be of some assistance to new readers as well as long-time obsessives who, no matter how many posts they read, don't understand where we are coming from. (Some light editing, including use of the royal We, because we think it's somehow funnier that way.)

Alright, let's resolve this thing once and for all. 200,000 years is long enough for anyone to have to live in darkness about his origins. How do we reconcile God and Darwin, Maher and Godwin, Adam and evolution, kings and apes, Elvis and Scatter?

Let us preface this by emphasizing that we are perfectly willing to adopt what science determines to be "true" -- within unbreachable metaphysical limits, of course -- for the same reason we are willing to accept the advice of our doctor that if we do not take insulin, we will surely cash in our chimp.

Put it thisaway. As it so happens, our mother was a Christian Scientist, and we attended Christian Science Sunday school until the age of 10 or so. In fact, one might say that our mother was a devout Christian Scientist, with the exception of the Christian Science part.

That is, when we left the plane of theological abstraction for the world of concrete reality, we took medicine and went to the doctor just like anyone else -- in fact, more so; our mother was a bit of a hypochondriac by proxy. Frankly, there was no attempt whatsoever to reconcile what we heard in Sunday school with what went on the rest of the week, especially if, say, we had a fever of 98.7, in which case it was off to the doctor.

Which undoubtedly played a role in sowing the seeds of religious doubt in our mind, being that we became a vocal atheist by the age of complete ensoulment, or somewhere between the ages of nine or ten.

In our case, the "Christian" indoctrination completely backfired, as it was one of the primary reasons for our rejection of it. Obviously, we are not alone in this regard. The absence of elementary consistency was abundantly evident even to this nine year-old, and a healthy mind seeks unity above all else. It is what the mind does and what it is for. It can also, of course, analyze into parts, but always for the purpose of synthesizing things into a higher and more complex unity. Only a psychotic person prefers to live in a hopelessly sundered world of bizarre and irreconcilable fragments.

The other day, a fellow named Rush Limbaugh made an astute observation, suggesting that the reason Obama is reduced to such a stuttering prick (to quote Tommy DeVito) when off the teleprompter, is that he is a deeply divided person, either consciously or unconsciously (and undoubtedly both, in our opinion). He is the polar opposite of, say, Ronald Reagan, who always knew what he thought and could answer any question, for it was simply a matter of returning to well thought-out first principles and applying them to the problem in question. Very scientific, if you will. (What he could do about these principles was, of course, constrained by certain realities such as a liberal congress dedicated to expansion of the state.)

But one of the intrinsic problems in being a liberal -- as we well remember -- is that one can never reveal one's first principles (at least politicians cannot; those protected by tenure are free to remove the mask), because if one explicitly articulates them, people will be repelled at what a contemptuous, condescending, supercilious, and authoritarian asshat of a control freak one is.

Therefore, one must always couch these principles in terms of "compassion," or "helping the little guy," or "healing the planet," or "unity," or some other such blather. So in this regard, Obama is dealing with a more general problem that is intrinsic to liberalism, which is How to Fool the Idiots. One must be very cautious, because even the idiots are only so stupid. Thus Obama's constant verbal ticks: "uh, uh, uh, let me, uh, say this, uh, uh, I've been completely, uh, consistent about this, aaaaaaaaaand blah blah blah."

Being that liberalism is the political embodiment of multiplicity (or of an oppressive "bad unity" to try to heal it), it should not be surprising that its adherents are so intrinsically inconsistent. It's not so much that they are dishonest, but that the whole ideology is dishonest -- it is a lie from the ground up. Which is also why, the worse one's character (e.g., Ted Kennedy, Anthony Wiener, Bill Clinton, John Edwards, Barney Frank, Chris Dodd) or the less one's intelligence (Barbara Boxer, Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, Joe Biden), the better one will fare as a liberal politician, because one will be able to lie with such great ease as to even fool oneself.

Anyway, in Mr. Limbaugh's analysis, he was pointing out that Obama is running several campaigns simultaneously, and that it is obviously a struggle for him to keep them all straight in his head, thus the great difficulty in being consistent and giving straight answers. Because of this, he is always one gaffe away from an accidental revelation of truth. For example, he's running one campaign for blacks, but an entirely different one for whites. (Here is a partial list of the various irreconcilable positions which Obama must hopelessly try to keep straight in his crooked mind.)

Our point is that in the ultimate sense, science is the reduction of exterior multiplicity to interior or subjective unity. But the only reason this is possible is because the human intellect mirrors the unity of creation. Our mind operates the way it does because we live in a cosmos, which is to say, an ordered totality.

And the cosmos can only be an ordered totality because it exhibits nonlocal internal relations. Because of this, every part of the cosmos embodies and participates in the whole, just as every gene contains the blueprint for the whole body, and everyman is potentially allmen. Again, the cosmos is thoroughly entangled with itself, which is why we may know anything and also why we may know anything knowable. It is how and why Man may be the microcosmos he is to the macrocosmos.

Now, metaphysics is obviously about first principles. Our intention is to have a completely consistent metaphysic, so that, in order to answer any question, we need only return to first principles, and take it from there. In this sense, Darwinism (unleavened with any verticality) is a lie, because it cannot furnish any consistent first principles. In fact, whenever a committed Darwinist tries, he ends up making self-refuting statements right out of the box, just like a liberal politician; one cannot be a champion of human dignity and materialism any more than one can be a partisan of statism and liberty.

"Young earth" creationism makes the same sort of error, in that it contradicts so much evidence that in order to maintain it, one will essentially have to split one's mind in two. One will live in a scientific world with all of its blessings, and yet, a part of oneself will have to reject it, or at least not be able to fully integrate it into one's belief system. We do not believe the Creator wishes us to live this way, with the left brain not knowing what the right brain is up to.

The other day we half-jokingly mentioned that our right brain agrees with Schuon about evolution, while our left brain agrees with Aurobindo (or Teilhard, if you like). One of Bion's adages (which he borrowed from someone else) is that the answer is the disease that kills curiosity. In the case of our bʘʘk, we have posted in the past about how it was essentially the fruit of years spent in the state of higher bewilderness, essentially trying to beat this coonundrum of Adam and evolution. In a sense, it would be easy to just come down on one side or the other, and make it go away.

But for us to do this, we would feel as if we were back to the di-polar life of a doctor-shopping Christian Science hypochondriac. For better or worse and 'til death do us whole, the way our minds are built, they seek an integrated unity, which is a very different thing from "unicity," or bland, flatland uniformity.

In other words, to simply accept an ideology -- whether scientific or religious -- and superimpose it upon the world would be an example of unicity. Such a worldview will be "consistent" but it will not be complete, as it will necessarily have to omit and underlook a lot of details and anomalies, to put it mildly.

Or, we may accept both science and religion, and not worry about the lack of reconciliation. Such a world view will be more complete, but it will then lack consistency.

The Raccoon, however, wishes to have a maximum of completeness and consistency -- at least as much as Gödel will allow. Which is a lot, once one accepts the implications of his theorems, one of which is that truth is prior to our fragmentary logical "proofs" of it.

The point is, there must be a deeper way to harmonize revelation and science. But the only way to arrive at this is to dwell in the bewilderness and actually ratchet up the tension, as opposed to prematurely resolving it. The same thing applies to psychotherapy, at least as Bion envisioned it.

For example, a therapist might have a pretty good idea of what is going on with a patient after the very first session. But it won't do the patient any good to simply provide him the answer, which would essentially foreclose the evolution of O by superimposing mere (k) upon it.

Rather, what one wants to happen is for O to evolve into genuine (k) in the patient; it is the difference between (k)-->Ø and O-->(k). In order to accomplish the latter, one must exercise Yeats, I mean Keats, "negative capability," which is to dwell in "uncertainties, mysteries, and doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason."

If one does this long enough, one will eventually "snap." Now, being that a Raccoon is an extreme seeker and off-road spiritual aspirant, one might say that he wants the ultimate spiritual adventure. Therefore, he will constantly feed his head with inconsistencies and contradictions until it basically implodes in an inverted but even Bigger Bang than the one at the other end.