This is an example of something that is simultaneously radical and obvious. However, in our Age of Stupidity any number of self-evident truths have become radical, e.g., men can't menstruate, America isn't a racist country, socialism is a recipe for poverty and tyranny, etc.
Thus, the idea that being and value are intertwined is very much at odds with the Official View, which holds that Is is all there is, and that it is purely quantitative and material; in short, Is is fully reducible to It, with no remainder.
Another way of saying the same thing is that anything that can't be reduced to math and quantity isn't real. Of course, this means that this statement isn't real, much less true, but we'll let it pass. The point is, nearly everything that we regard as real, and which gives substance and meaning to the human journey, consists of secondary qualities that are supposedly no more real or enduring than a rainbow.
Whitehead hammered this untruism so far out of the park that they're still looking for the ball 100 years later:
Clear-sighted men, of the sort who are clearly wrong, now proclaimed that the secrets of the physical universe were finally disclosed. If only you ignored everything which refused to come into line, your powers of explanation were unlimited.
Omniscience on the cheap. Whitehead calls it the fallacy of misplaced concreteness, through which you can ruin philosophy in three easy steps: 1. start with concrete reality (as indeed we must), 2. translate it into mathematical abstractions, 3. conflate your abstractions with reality. Voila! You simultaneously know everything and nothing.
For which reason Dávila rubs it in with this radical but obvious truth: What is capable of being measured is minor. In particular, when compared to the measurer.
Nevertheless, the sophisticated person ought to worship at the altar of scientism, even though the Ought (let alone the Person who Ought) is impermissible in a cosmos stripped of essential qualities. Or rather, it's just your opinion, man, since there can be no appeal to anything transcending its own absurcularity. Dávila reminds us of another shockingly obvious truth:
If good and evil, ugliness and beauty, are not the substance of things, science is reduced to a brief statement: what is, is.
Therefore,
The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.
No quantity adds up to a single quality, not even the quality of bigness, since the latter requires a judgment and a judge.
Returning to the theme of the good, "the central tragic flaw in every human life and all of human history" is that,
blinded by too narrowly self-centered egocentric drives, or even by simple ignorance, we are bewitched by the quest for goods that are either illusory or destructive from a long-range holistic point of view (Clarke).
This is where the virtue of prudence comes in, as it is our vertical steering wheel toward objective goodness.
Analogously, the intellect aims at truth, or what good is it? Truth is the virtue of the intellect. If not, then our world is reduced to Will and the Power to enforce it: a joyless leftoid world unfit for human consummation. But in reality, in the words of Meister Eckhart, "God enjoys himself, and wants us to enjoy Him" (in Clarke).
Our sixth category, person, is the most important, and I'm not just saying this because I'm a person. Rather, personhood is the most consequential fact in all of existence, and it demands a reason -- a cause -- sufficient to its nature and scope.
Yes, one can easily explain away the person (for example, with the cheap omniscience of materialism), but in so doing one eliminates one's whole reason for being. Why would one want to do this? I know why, but let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Okay, a hint: once upon a time, and every time since, there were two trees.
5 comments:
The per capita GDP in Venequela is a third the average of South American nations. Yet Venezuela is also 90% Christian, overwhelmingly catholic.
The per capita GDP in ‘socialized’ European companies is much higher then that of freer economies. These nations are also highly secularized.
Go figure.
The economies of reasonably Christianized Russia and the Ukraine basically suck, while atheist China excels. There are real reasons for all this. And they do not involve atheism or Steven Pinker. I’d venture that outright socialism, and the democratic-forcing of government to solve major social and economic problems, are two mutually exclusive things. And there’s a difference between self-serving corrupt oligarchies and competent elites who have to earn their eliteness with merit.
My own wife demonstrates truthful reality in that most women are wired to have babies and feather their nests. It’s her demonstrated unconscious impulse regardless of whatever else she says. Sadly, she’s had to obtain and maintain her corporate job because of truthful reality as well. Most urban families in America have to be double income just to keep up. I’d think this is a problem which should be addressed. When we ignore all that we get things like men who want to menstruate and a media which loves to talk about it.
File under obvious but radical: America's Poor Still Live Better Than Most Of The Rest Of Humanity. Moreover, most poverty in America is overwhelmingly behavioral not structural. For example, I myself could have been pretty affluent if I weren't so fucking lazy. Or if coach had put me in the the fourth quarter.
Re. poverty, exactly. You can't force people to make better choices. Except in China, and we can see how well that seems to be working for them...
Nevertheless, the sophisticated person ought to worship at the altar of scientism, even though the Ought (let alone the Person who Ought) is impermissible in a cosmos stripped of essential qualities.
Along those lines, I was just reading this morning that Richard Dawkins recently made the observation that eugenics would totally work for humans, since it works for cows, horses and pigs. But "heaven [!] forbid that we should do it.” Because that would be bad for some reason.
I mean, I do agree that a eugenics program for humans is an evil thing. I just don't know on what grounds he makes that assertion.
Dupree, not just lazy. One needs to have a fair amount of predatory instinct as well. But we do still try hoping the sheeple will appreciate things which are good for them now, don't we?
Eugenics to eliminate psychopathy might be a good thing. Or greed that's turned addictive-pathological. But it'd require a concentration of power. And we all know how that always turns out.
Everybody who watched the Korean Winter Olympics noticed the North Korean cheerleading squad. Most people knew they didn’t happily volunteer and try out but were conscripted and had to perform lest there be real trouble for their families back home.
But what I noticed was that nobody was making racist jokes about the way people did in racist pollock joke days. The worst derogatory was “army of beauties”, and not 'piepan faced commie gooks' or anything like that.
People were appreciating the show while simultaneously empathizing with their situation. Nobody automatically hated their guts just for being born into that situation. Nobody who would be taken seriously that is.
That’s a cultural shift if I’ve ever seen one.
Post a Comment