Zig-Zag Wandering in the Wild Godhead

Religion -- and the truth it embodies -- would be inconceivable in the absence of the prior unity which it is "about."

Every philosophy too is about unity, but often -- especially in the fragmented postmodern world -- a flight from it. You could say that such philosophies are wholly reactionary, without ever acknowledging the unity to which they are reacting and from which they recoil.

This is not to say that such philosophies do not seek unity, but that is the problem. Instead of situating themselves in the nonlocal vector that leads the fragmented soul from illusion to truth and appearances to reality, they work to bring about their own impoverished substitute version of unity -- usually with force, since that is the only way to get people to order themselves to such top-down disorder.

We define the left as the political action wing of this demented metaphysic, e.g., diversity, multiculturalism, and relativism. How, you might ask, can we force disparate groups of human beings to live together -- to be "one" -- without any acknowledgement of the transcendent oneness that unifies them? With multiculturalism each culture is its own atomistic one, upon which we are expected to confer respect and dignity, irrespective of whether or not they are themselves in communion with the One.

Not only does this undermine any living basis for civic life, it gives official sanction to the elevation of systematic falsehood to a form of truth -- which is like claiming illness as another form of health, or blindness as a form of vision.

Which the left also does, of course: transsexuality and other perversions, obesity, promiscuity, envy, dependence, immaturity, Masculinity Deficiency Syndrome, Femininity Devaluation Hysteria, etc. Each of these is considered to be just as valid as its opposite, which is again an implicit assault on the unity of truth.

Our "political scripture" -- e.g., the Declaration and Constitution -- are documents that are supposed to give unified form to our political body. But the left easily makes hash of these, again destroying any possibility of unity except for that imposed by power, by the state. That is never unity, just a totalist fusion.

I suppose it's analogous to a sedimentary rock, which consists of countless disparate and independent granules compressed into an object. Look closely and you can see that the individual parts are quite different, and yet, they cannot escape the pressure of being objectified into anonymous rockhood. You know, like academia.

Speaking of which, a wise goodcrack by Edmund Burke about the tenured, found in this entertaining autobiography of Russell Kirk: paraphrasing, the man who hangs around a college after having been graduated is like a fellow who builds and stocks a ship, only to never leave port and set sail.

The loony idea that everyone should attend college has resulted, of course, in the need for exponentially more professors, way outstripping the supply of intellectual firepower, which is limited by genes, culture, family, the bell curve, and other factors. Thus, we have a permanent and ineradicable idiocracy that funnels the preposterous into the impressionable, resulting in this downward politico-cultural death spiral.

Just glancing at this chapter on Thomas More in The Common Mind. A character in his Utopia observes that "there is no place for philosophers among kings," to which the narrator replies, "Yes there is, but not for that academic philosophy which fits everything into place." Rather, there is "another, more sophisticated philosophy which accommodates itself" to the reality at hand, and "it is this philosophy that you should use."

Obama is just the latest example of government by Beautiful Theory applied to the wrong species. He is also a counter-example of our first duty, which is "to preserve, such a measure of unity, small or great, as the Christendom of their age has been able to inherit." But such unity is at odds with "the pressure of centralizing and absolutist power," with "the use of positive law for coercive purposes at variance with common law and natural law," and with "respectful use of our common language as opposed to the sophistical subversion of meaning."

Thus, as we have discussed in a number of posts, there are the two unities, one of which is invaluable (and the source of value), the other worthless (and the basis of nihilism, whether acknowledged or not). This is elucidated in Letter IX of Meditations on the Tarot, The Hermit, so I won't repeat the lesson.

Suffice it to say that there is a Light that is the prior source of all color, and a Darkness that results from the indiscriminate blending of all colors. The latter is the unity the left has been waiting for, and Obama is giving it to us, good and hard.

"Ignorant enthusiasm," wrote Kirk, "cannot remake the world." But it never stops trying. And just as there are critical truths "which no amount of mental effort could have produced," there are vital lies that no decent person could have imagined or foreseen. But that's our fault, because we need to balance the innocence of doves with the wisdom of snakes.

Interesting too that we are always zig-zag wanderers in our crookward movement toward the Light, whereas it is possible to plunge straight into darkness like an anvil dropped down a well. The Adversary is efficient that way, allowing gravity to do the work.