Our Laddie of Reality

Anthony Esolen calls upon Our Lady of Reality to have mercy on the "common madness underlying all our troubles. We think that a thing changes because we assign it one name rather than another. A man is a woman if he says he is. Or we refuse to acknowledge that a thing has a nature at all. A man is not a man, because there is no such thing, really."

It's a nice sentiment, but I don't like to trouble the transnatural with things that are wholly in our control, and in this case it is our willful misuse of the gift of language, our logopathic way with words, that causes the trouble. Language, unfortunately, cuts both ways: into truth and falsehood. As someone once cracked, language was given to man in order to disguise his thoughts.

This is certainly why it was given to Obama, or at least the spirit in which he takes the gift. But this just goes to the more fundamentally troubled relationship with language which forms the basis of leftism. Particular illnesses such as deconstruction and diversity are just the final common pathway, the end state of the disease -- similar to how poorly controlled diabetes can lead to blindness, or amputation, or kidney disease, but it's the same underlying derangement of blood sugar.

Likewise, end-stage leftism can manifest in a variety of ways, but beneath them all it's the same spiritual illness.

Take deconstruction, which promulgates the notion that language is a closed system, such that words refer only to other words. It pretends to be a philosophy -- a rational conclusion -- but is really a diseased premise, principle, or axiom. This irrational principle destroys the supernatural power of language right up front, so it's really just a case of garbage in, tenure out.

Likewise any form of relativism such as "diversity," homosexualism, illegal alienism, feminism, etc. Each begins with an unsupportable, magical conclusion, no different than how, say, communism begins with the theory of "surplus value" or National Socialism with the theory of eugenics applied to Jewish DNA.

But as Bertie Russell said in one of our favorite wise cracks, "The worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise."

Yesterday I saw an activist on TV object to the term "illegal alien" because "there's no such thing as an illegal person." This is a particularly clumsy attempt to use language to deny a simple reality, but no more clumsy than insisting that it is possible for two men to live in a state of matrimony, or to increase a man's value by paying him more than he's worth.

"[V]erbal cleverness, unless its limitations are clearly and continuously seen by its possessors, is an unbeatable way of blurring reality until nothing can be seen at all" (C. James, in Conquest). You could say that language comes with a universal temptation; or better, the universal temptation, which is idolatry. If our divine hunch is correct, then behind every logopathology will be an instance of idolatry.

Note how Christianity has a built-in defense against this idolization of language, in that at the center is not a book but a person from which the book is a response and prolongation. The earliest Christians, of course, had no book, for which we can thank God. (The Bible was not canonized until around 400.) The Aphorist has a number of brainslappers to this effect:

When he died, Christ did not leave behind documents, but disciples. Thus, Only loyalty to a person frees us from all self-complacency. But In the hands of the progressive clergy, the Gospels degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings (Don Colacho).

Just so, western style political liberalism (the freedom that ultimately comes from God) was incarnated long before it was thought about in an abstract manner: "British principles did not arise out of nothing or from abstract philosophy," but "emerged gradually in practice."

In contrast, "it was the theorists and emotionalists who triumphed mentally" in the French Revolution and its moony descendants down to the present day. These descendants include the hyperacademic logobabblers of the looniversity bin who deploy language to destroy itself, like a linguistic autoimmune disorder.

Politics must serve reality. This would qualify as a banality were it not for the liberal activists for whom it is the other way around, such that reality must serve ideology: "All of the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania." In order for the political maniac to achieve his ends, huge swaths of reality must be denied, excluded, and sealed off (and damaged in the process).

Thus, there is no left wing ideocracy without some form of intellectual and spiritual tyranny: it goes with the terrortory. The left must pretend that things forced upon us by the state are better than the things we would have freely chosen, or in other words, that real liberty is coercion.

The coronerstone of Marxism, according to its own definition, "is the mass, the liberation of which is the main condition for the liberation of the individual." Or in other words, no man is free until all are enslaved.

If our logocentric roots don't grow upword then they sink downworld. Thus, we are faced with "an increasingly irrational conformism, often no longer open to, or even cognizant of, argument.... The new antis [anti-realists] seem to have sunk to an alarmingly lower mental level."

You don't say.

No, really: don't say that. There are no illegal persons but there are criminal thoughts!