The DNC: Nowhere Men in a No-Man's Land

In view of the enormities of contemporary liberalism, it seems like a small thing. Yet, expunging the word God from their platform is both the cause and consequence of an agenda that must revolve around eliminating man in order to save him; or to make man as inconsequential as he can be in order to make the state as consequential as it must be.

It is also fitting, because reference to God in such a pneumapathic atmosphere is hypocritical, unseemly, and cowardly. Again: emulate Nietzsche, and accept the consequences of your nihilism. If you strike a king you must kill him! You'll still be an assoul, but at least you'll walk the walk and not just talk the schlock.

To oust God from the cosmos is to eliminate man. To the uninitiated this will sound polemical, but it is such a truism that it amounts to a banality.

Consider the many references to the Absolute in our founding document: God, Nature's God, Creator, Divine Providence, Supreme Judge of the World, etc. This goes to who we are as a people, unless or until we agree on a new Declaration.

"People" is a mere abstraction if severed from transcendent reality, with no interior unity or ontological reality. Again: in the absence of a common Father, brotherhood is just rhetoric of a more or less cynical nature. All tyrannies stress "brotherhood," "fraternity," "comradeship," etc., by way of compensation for the absence of the Father.

But a herd is not a brotherhood; although, in a certain way becomes one when it is being led to the slaughterhouse. People can suddenly discover their common patrimony under such extreme circumstances.

For this reason, I doubt we'll be hearing too many complaints from evangelicals about Mitt Romney's Mormonism. For inverse -- and perverse -- reasons, the left doesn't complain about Obama's deformed brand of Marxist Christianism.

It cannot be overemphasized that to attack God is to diminish man. Man exists in light of the Absolute. It is what defines man, and distinguishes him from the beasts.

Thus, to eliminate God is to render man an animal only. Is it any wonder that the left is the champion of so many modern vulgarities and animalisms? As witnessed yesterday, nothing excites more passion in a leftist than the prospect of diminishing the "right" to late term abortion and even infanticide.

From where does this right emanate, and when does a woman acquire it? In the womb? I don't think so, for few little girls -- and no normal one -- would choose to exercise it on themselves. Thus, it cannot be a right in the American sense. (And it is the last right Darwin's flatland nature would ever accord an organism, who has only an in-built obligation to reproduce and no right not to.)

Now, only human beings have rights. They have rights because they are human beings, and they are human beings because they live in the tension between relative and Absolute (from whom the rights originate, as set forth by our wiser Fathers).

You could say that animals have rights -- which they most certainly do -- but only if these rights are recognized (in both senses of the term) by human beings. The animal itself knows of no such thing, because it has no conception of the Absolute.

Every animal is a consistent Darwinian and nothing more -- an Is with no Ought. But even a man as intellectually impoverished as Moe Howard will still proclaim: why I oughtta!

A comment by reader Van just reminded me of another unappealing corollary of the left's godlessness: that "Government is the only thing we all belong to." Expressed in a grammatically correct manner, the almighty state is that to which we all belong.

This word "belong" troubles me. One can belong to a church, for example. But if one sours on the preacher, one can quit and join another one.

But when the leftist insists that we belong to the state, he is not speaking of a voluntary association but more in the mode of possession: we belong to the state in the same way my child belongs to me.

But even that is a mischaracterization, because I am not my son's owner, just a temporary custodian who is there to help potentiate his eventual self-possession. To the extent that he remains an immature dependent, then I will have failed as a parent. But when the state makes you an immature dependent, it has succeeded. Big difference.

There are certain intrinsic dualities without which it is impossible to understand man's existential situation. We have already spoken of relative <--> absolute, or man <--> God; there is also adult <--> child, male <--> female, husband <--> wife, time <--> eternity, sacred <--> profane, truth <--> falsehood, soul <--> body, and many more. Man always lives in the dialectical tension between the two principles, the most adequate symbol of which being the Tao (because I can't think of an adequate symbol for the Trinity).

Two things are necessary to understand the symbol of the Tao: first is the encompassing circle, which signifies a deeper unity beneath the dynamic terms. For example, in Genesis this is conveyed via the idea that "God created them man-and-woman" (Plato expresses the same idea, albeit not as adequately).

In other words, man-and-woman is the proper unit of man in principle. But in the manifestation -- the herebelow -- we have the dynamic play between man and woman, through which each party perfects him/herself and reascends toward wholeness and unity.

"At the same time and on another level" (to reference the title of a book by Grotstein), there is the adult <--> child dynamism, through which children become adults and adults become children. Why the latter?

For a number of reasons. First, in order to understand the infant one must in a way "become" the infant, and this is only possible to the extent that one understands and tolerates one's own "internal infant." Much child abuse is a direct consequence of inability to tolerate the latter, who is then projected into the exterior baby and neglected, punished, abused, etc.

But more generally, man is characterized by perpetual neoteny, i.e., "permanent immaturity." Interestingly, volume one of the above-referenced work by Grotstein has a chapter entitled "the once-and-forever-evolving-infant of the unconscious." I couldn't have put it better, for man is always on the way to a perfected manhood he can never reach in the absence of fully realized sainthood. But who more than the saint realizes his childlike dependency upon God?

But infants also dream of unrealizable utopias, which is why they need to be in a tutelary relation to adults (both in the interior and exterior senses; in other words, a mature adult lives in a kind of permanent play with his unconscious/supraconsious mind).

Let's round this out with a little Voegelin, because he provides another perspective on the same reality (i.e., the philosophical, on top of the political, theological, and psychoanalytic).

As we know, the word "utopia" was coined by Sir Thomas More, and means literally nowhere. Among other things this implies that the utopian is a Nobody -- or a Nowhere Man -- who wants us all to belong to his nonexistent Nowhere Land. And ♬♭♫ isn't this a bit like D-N-C? ♪♬♩

How does the Nowhere Man acquire his pathological utopianism?

Voegelin concedes that "it is difficult, if not impossible, to determine in the case of an individual activist whether the suspension [of consciousness] is an act of

[1] "intellectual fraud

[2] "or of pervasive self-deception,

[3] "whether it is a case of plain illiteracy

[4] "or of the more sophisticated illiteracy imposed by an educational system,

[5] "or whether it is caused by a degree of spiritual and intellectual insensitivity that comes under the head of stupidity,

[6] "or whether it is due to... the desire to attract public attention and make a career."

There are, of course, other reasons. But just considering the current crop of regulars appearing on the DNC s*itcom, I would assign [1] to the fraudulent Debbie Wasserman Schultz, [2] to the androphobic feminist activists, [3] to the rank-and-foul delegate, [4] to the brains-with-stupidity of President Obama, [5] to the stupidity-without-brains of Joe Biden, and [6] to the sociopathic opportunist and political climber Charlie Crist.

That's quite a coalition.