When progressives talk about "progress," they cannot mean the same thing we do, for objective progress is precisely what is rendered impossible in their metaphysic. Rather, progress for the progressive always involves compelling others to the yield to the opinions and desires of the progressive. But real progress can never result from bypassing freedom and truth (i.e., truth freely accepted).
One can approach this from various angles, but the result is always the same, for a determined stupidity at the start of a journey assures stupidity at the end -- like insisting that if only one travels far enough, one can prove that parallel lines meet. Sleep with a premise, wake up with its conclusions.
Since there is no "fixed point" in leftism, it can claim no truth and hence no measure of progress. Schuon hits the troll on the head in his usual pithy style: "To claim that knowledge as such could only be relative amounts to saying that human ignorance is absolute."
Either that thought will appeal to you, and be used as a stepping stone to higher things, or you will literally find it "repulsive," in that it will repel you onto a relative and therefore subjective, idiosyncratic, and ultimately arbitrary path. You will go back to sleep, which is not quite as effective suicide, but a pretty good defense mechanism against transcendent truth.
Once on that false path, no matter how rigorously one otherwise applies reason, one will be in a world that is fundamentally unreal. Therefore, one will be apportioning clouds, nailing Jello, sowing wind, spanking the monkey, etc. That is the bad kind of cosmic circle, i.e., self-enclosed circularity.
The cosmos is, of course, "structured," so to speak, as a circle, but it is a benignly inspiraling one, not a viciously repetitive one, i.e. an eternal return (as feared by Nietzsche). When I first realized this, I thought I had hit on something kind of original. Now I wish I had compiled all of the statements I've subsequently stumbled upon that affirm the same thing.
For example, this one, by Schuon: "There are basically but three miracles: existence, life, intelligence; with intelligence, the curve springing from God closes on itself like a ring which in reality has never parted from the Infinite."
In fact, even prior to the establishment of the first Raccoon lodge on March 4, 1355, Thomas Aquinas had used exactly this organizational structure for the Summa -- a chain of interior and exterior certitudes forming a Great Circle of Being:
In the emergence of creatures from their first source is revealed a kind of circular movement, in which all things return, as to their end, back to the very place from which they had their origin in the first place.
There is a two-way journey; one can call it out and back, or down and up, or many and one, or conspiracy and slack, or fall and redemption, or just ø and O.
In any -- and every -- event, there is a
Journey away from Home, where creatures actively unfold their diverse dynamic natures as finite participations in the divine perfection and as centers of self-expressive and self-communicating action and interaction with each other, thus forming a universe, that is, a system of many real beings joined together by their interaction to form the community of all existents -- the ultimate of all communities. This part of the journey was called the exitus (journey out) (Clarke).
This is accompanied by the journey back toward the Great Attractor, O, whereby creation is "drawn by this same Source through the pull of the Good built in to the very nature of every being through the mediation of final causation," or what Bob calls the the personal telovator or cosmic eschalator.
The upshot is that this "ultimate One now appears as both the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and End, at once the Source and the Goal of the restless dynamism of all nature, of all finite beings."
It's just that in human beings, this restless longing, this passion for wholeness, has become conscious, and this consciousness, you might say, is the initial "spark" that occurs when two tingles intermingle and spark in the dark, i.e., the Divine and human:
There is religious conversion which is 'being grasped by ultimate concern. It is an other-worldly falling in love....' The outcome of such conversion is that the Holy Spirit and the human spirit encounter profoundly (Norris).
Love at first Light.
5 comments:
Once on that false path, no matter how rigorously one otherwise applies reason, one will be in a world that is fundamentally unreal.
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You will go back to sleep, which is not quite as effective suicide, but a pretty good defense mechanism against transcendent truth.
For some reason, I'm reminded of Occasional Cortex's dire pronouncements about the environment, and her absolutely insane ideas to remedy the situation. For all the laughter and mockery she received, she still persists in trying to push her ideas forward - and a not-insignificant number of people seem to believe in what she endorses. Most people are still asleep to some degree or another; some, willfully so. Transcendent truth has a way of being completely impervious to all our ideas about what we want and how things ought to be.
That said,
It's just that in human beings, this restless longing, this passion for wholeness, has become conscious, and this consciousness, you might say, is the initial "spark" that occurs when two tingles intermingle and spark in the dark, i.e., the Divine and human:
Indeed, and how delightful when it happens.
"Cousin Dupree: Alphabet spill in aisle three."
Hello Panel:
The Vietnamese comment is an ad for a translation service....but how does this tie in with the post? It does not.
But perhaps there is something to be learned from this. People want money. From that starting point, much about the world snaps into focus.
For instance, progressives. What is their tie in with the money? They want money. You can work your way backwards from this goal to understand progressive philosophy and religion; it is designed to generate lucre.
Conservatives, on the other hand, usually put lucre on the back burner and focus more on social justice and the general well-being of the populace. Hence their involvement in environmental activism and so forth.
There is also an odd correlation between bass-fishing and conservatism. Progressives will only fish for trout. And why, when a progressive drinks Scotch Whisky, does she start sounding like a conservative? Why does a conservative start talking progressive claptrap after a few puffs of ganja?
So many mysteries surround the whole dichotomy.
This is not ‘Nam, this is blogging. There are rules.
I remember back when most Chinese carried buckets of mud on their backs to build dams with, dams which sometimes failed with catastrophic results. But at least they all wore matching little green suits. American dams were well... just f*cking awesome. (pardon the asterisk)
Today the Chinese dress in all kinds of western ways. And they don’t use very many American dam experts (my neighbor is one), having lots of their own. Apparently mixed economies can yield results. And I suppose, so does happily accepting technologies created in a once great America when Rule of Law was something to be honestly debated, respected, and enforced, and not rationalized and feared.
What’s puzzling me, is that very few of today’s Chinese are Christian. Apparently Jesus had very little to do with China’s economic miracle.
Maybe I'm defining progressivism wrong. It may not be communal attempts to divine solutions in a world where technology and population ever increase into uncharted territory, but is instead, an abandonment of praying that those things will magically happen.
Would you be happier if progressives were Christian? This didn't seem necessary for the Chinese, but this seems critical for Americans. It worked before.
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