Volk Lives Matter

The moment we're living through seems more consequential than can be discerned from the usual media hysteria.

Come to think of it, being that the media is always hysterical, it is impossible to determine the importance of an historical event based upon how Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or the New York Times react to things. Besides, is girlish hysteria ever the appropriate response to anything?

More generally, it is difficult if not impossible to gauge the cosmo- or world-historical importance of this or that present moment. Some people magnify the moment out of all proportion, while others can sleepwalk through the most significant events in history. (As to the latter, one must only notice how the MSM is ignoring what is by far the greatest political scandal in American history.)

So, we're attempting to use our pure Coon Vision to drill down to the ground of this moment, in order to discern what's really going on. As mentioned in yesterday's post, we insist that it is possible to do this via the Pure Thought described therein, i.e., to read the Signs of the Times.

And again, this does not mean it can be exhaustively described in an apodictic, systematic way, because this would constitute ideological Gnosticism and not open engagement with the ground; it would reduce to the wrong answer, whereas a Raccoon is always in search of the right questions in the correct order.

All we're asking for is a little peek outside Plato's Cave or beneath Jeffrey's Rug, and we are absolutely convinced that this is possible, otherwise there would be no need to put the honest prophets to death.

Now, this hardly means we cannot read the signs incorrectly. We all know this happened once, and we've already apologized for it. No prophet bats 1.000, not even Petey. We admit when we are wrong, even if a part of us still believes the Monkees will some day enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Let's begin with an analogy. Let's say the historical moment is like an ocean. Certain qualities of the ocean are apparent -- waves, tides, wind currents -- while others are hidden, for example, large scale circulation and depth. Who could tell by looking at the ocean that certain currents have been stably flowing for thousands of years?

Indeed, Prof. Wiki claims that some currents have "a transit time of about 1000 years" and that current velocities can range "from fractions of centimeters per second" to sometimes more than a meter per second.

This makes the analogy even more useful than I had hoped, because history also flows at different rates of speed in ways that are impossible to discern by looking at the surface, AKA journalistically.

To take only the most obvious example, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection continue to reVerberate and flow through history, usually in an imperceptibly slow way, occasionally in dramatic fashion (for example, in the American revolution, which was at once rooted in a generation-long spiritual awakening which was in turn nested in a much longer arc of salvation and evolution, AKA salvolution).

We're in danger of running out of time before we ever get to the bloody point. Perhaps I should just jump ahead to the point, and flesh it out out as we proceed.

Much of what I'm about to say has been provoked by another providential collision with a timely book, this one called The Selfhood of the Human Person. It is so dense with implications that it's a slow read, even though the material itself isn't beyond the abilities of the average Christian Subgenius.

Concur with this reviewer:

This is a brilliant essay on the human person following the personalist/phenomonological line of thought (a philosophical approach taken by our beloved pope John Paul II).

To do this book justice, a single reading does not suffice; it needs several readings, not because it is hard to follow -- not at all! Crosby is very readable -- I found it very comprehensible and I am not trained in philosophy.

No, it is simply because there is so much in this book; such as the role of immanence and transcendence in the human person -- what does it mean to say that persons possess a kind of incommunicability?

What I want to focus on is the critical distinction between the group/collective and the individual/person, and how the Present Moment is showing us a very different conception of this from the traditional American and Christian view (the former current thoroughly embedded in the latter, as per the above).

For us -- i.e., for both Christians and Americans -- the individual is not only sacred, but a kind of intra-historical telos. You could say that the achievement of the Mature Man is the point of this whole cosmo-historical flow, and that it took a very long time to get here (only 50,000 years or so of human development).

But now we are faced with a very different historical movement (to be precise, it is an anti-historical movement, a turning back from maturity) that wants to efface individuality and plunge us back into the tribe, the race, the volk.

And just look at the intellectual and emotional maturity of the human specimens producing and produced by this movement! You can't reason with them, any more than you could teach algebra to a pig or economics to AOC.

Identity politics is a lack thereof, i.e., of proper identity and personhood; or, it is collective identity effacing personal identity rooted in trinitarian intersubjectivity.

To be continued....