Why and Because

Another mundane post that flapped and flapped its wings but never got off the ground...

We all want to know Why? It seems that this question is bound up with humanness, because not only are human beings the only creatures capable of asking the question, we never stop doing so. We are homo curiosus from the moment we're born to the day we die. Then, after our biological activity has ceased, those around us will ask: where did he go?

Another way of saying it is that we are born philosophers. Knowledge -- in order to be knowledge -- is knowledge of causes, and we want to know all there is to know about all there is.

A true philosopher is someone who doesn't stop asking Why at some provincial truck stop on the road to knowledge, but recognizes the unrestricted nature of the human subject and its conformity to the unbound object; each pole of this ultimate complementarity partakes of infinitude in terms of depth, height, and breadth; and there is an endlessly fruitful reciprocity or dialectic between these.

For us, God is revealed in the space between these ultimates -- not as God-in-himself, but as our own Godward journey. In other words, our own quest for God is already evidence that we are being pulled into the divine attractor.

Lewis describes an important distinction between two very different forms of because. Let's say I am a conservative because I want what is best for human beings. The leftist responds by saying that the "real reason" I am conservative is because I want to harm people -- especially blacks, women, immigrants, homosexuals, cross dressers, etc.

But let's leave me out of it. Leftists apply the same rule to themselves (AKA "the revolution eats its own). For example, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Kirsten Gillibrand actually failed because of the deeply racist and sexist double standards of Democrat voters. Note that this explanation -- this Because -- means they don't have to examine the other types of Because, e.g., that they were rejected because of their daft policies and unpleasant personalities.

So, one type of because can be used to preserve another type from scrutiny. Not only are conservatives wearily familiar with the imputation of a fake Because, rarely are our arguments addressed on the plane from which they arise. If we support Trump, it is really because we are racists. If we oppose the redefinition of marriage, it is because we hate homosexuals. If we believe a man isn't a woman, we are "transphobic." If we point out that a model that fails to predict empirical measurements is simply wrong, we are called climate change deniers. Etc.

As Lewis writes -- and this was back in 1947 --

the most popular way of discrediting a person's opinions is to explain them causally -- 'You say that because (Cause and Effect) you are a capitalist, or a hypochondriac, or a mere man, or only a woman.' The implication is that if causes fully account for a belief, then since causes work inevitably, the belief would have to arise whether it had grounds or not. We need not, it is felt, consider grounds for something which can be fully explained without them.

But look at the double standards applied by the left: we often hear them say, for example, that crime is "caused" by poverty, so the criminal isn't really guilty of the crime. But if our beliefs are caused by extrinsic factors of which we are unaware, why aren't we equally blameless? Why do they hate us if we have no more control over our thoughts than a machine has over its actions?

And more importantly, is this post going anywhere? Does it have a deeper point, which is to say, is there a deeper Why and and a more satisfying Because to the above phenomena? Or is it Just Politics, a ubiquitous feature of the world's second oldest profession? We can't yet say. We can only hope.

"Acts of thinking," writes Lewis, "are 'about' something other than themselves and can be true or false." If the act of thinking "were totally explicable from other sources it would cease to be knowledge," just as, say, tinnitus isn't caused by extrinsic air vibrations, but rather, some intrinsic pathology in the organism. "Hearing" the ringing in one's ears is like seeing hallucinations; which is to say, these aren't really hearing or seeing at all, because they aren't caused by their proper objects (air and light vibrations, respectively).

The same must be true of thought, which is either an adequation or it is nothing. For example, a Democrat will say that if I can't see that President Trump is is a racist, my perception is indadequate. But what if Trump isn't racist? In this case, our critics must be hallucinating.

Bion symbolizes the hallucination (-K), which, as it so happens, often "substitutes morality for scientific thought. There will be no function in this approach for discriminating between true and false, between thing-in-itself and representation."

Ah, now we might be getting somewhere. The (-K) delusion may resemble abstract thought, but is really motivated -- caused -- by morality. However, a better term might be primitive morality, or moralism.

Now, what is primitive morality? Well, it is entirely preoccupied with guilt and punishment: something has gone wrong, and someone must pay. It is an animistic outlook that anthropomorphizes impersonal cause and effect.

For example, I remember reading in a book on the history of law, that it took some time for human beings to recognize that if a person is pushed out of a window, the falling person isn't to blame for injuring the fellow he lands on. It wasn't his fault, because there was no intent. For similar reasons, there were apparently instances of putting animals on trial for actions of which they obviously had no control.

But in an animistic world there is no such thing has bad luck. Malevolent forces -- malign wills -- are everywhere. In fact, you could say that this is the entire basis of the SJW outlook, in that it persistently attributes inequality to malevolent design (e.g., "white privilege" or the "patriarchy") when in reality it is the inevitable result of freedom + rules, i.e., fairness.

Back to primitive morality. It is primarily animated by envy and hatred. And envy is entirely bound up with the perception of inequality, and, more to the point, the inability to tolerate it.

Here is another deeper point about the attribution of ulterior causes to our beliefs. Perhaps it isn't surprising that the left is so vulnerable to this fallacy, because their whole worldview is predicated upon it. For materialism is an account of mental behavior which "leaves no room for the acts of knowing or insight on which the whole value of our thinking, as a means to truth, depends."

It "is really a theory that there is no reasoning," because reason "must have come into existence by a historical process" which by definition wasn't "designed to produce a mental behavior that can find truth."

So if you really want to go down the path of "real reasons," you must go all the way, and conclude that there is no real reason for any belief; or that if there are real reasons, we could never know them.