Saving Tales and Broken Minds

To repeat: The answer will not help the man who has lost the question. And the predicament of the present age is characterized by the loss of the question rather than of the answer.

These are worth some further pondering. First, life is obviously a predicament. Always has been, always will be. And yet, Voegelin implies there is an answer, so long as we remember the question. Thus, a worse predicament than life itself is losing sight of the question, because it results in either no answer or a multitude of bad ones.

Speaking of which, our recent revisiting of Koestler's Creative Act prompted me to check out his biography. His most famous book is Darkness at Noon, an indictment of communism from the perspective of a former True Believer.

But he didn't fall for just communism. Rather, his whole life was a quest for meaning, going from one belief system to another, from communism to parapsychology and everything in between. And yet, nothing stuck.

The author suggests that he suffered a kind of "absolutitis," which sounds about right: as we said the other day, the Absolute always is, and cannot not be. Life is a perpetual engagement with it, failing which we will substitute one ideology or another and thereby foreclose the divine-human space. This is good news / bad news for the radical secularist, because his denial of God results in the abolition of man, whether symbolically or literally.

Koester's flight from one cause to another "was as psychologically important as the causes themselves," motivated by

a deep instinctual urge, powered by personal unhappiness and psychological frustration.... it was the cause of causes lurking behind everything he wrote, emblematic of the twentieth century's own flailing in search of a workable form of utopia. Koestler was bound to fail in the quest, of course, but the quest itself was the point.

Why was the quest bound to fail? He found plenty of answers. Yes, but The answer will not help the man who has lost the question.

In this regard, it is particularly important to avoid collapsing the vertical hierarchy, and thereby formulating answers that are appropriate to one level but wildly inappropriate to another (e.g., materialism). This always results in a form of tyranny -- it is auto-tyranny at best, but becomes collective tyranny when imposed upon others. Ideology is never a victimless crime.

His conversion to communism was literally a religious experience:

something had clicked in my brain which shook me like a mental explosion. To say that one had "seen the light" is a poor description of the mental rapture which only the convert knows. The new light seems to pour across the skull; the whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle assembled by magic at one stroke. There is now an answer to every question, doubts and conflicts are a matter of a tortured past -- a past already remote, when one had lived in dismal ignorance in the tasteless, colorless world of those who don't know.

Born again! With one small catch: for that is not the sound of liberation. Rather, it's the sound of the prison doors closing.

How do we know? The giveaway is the answer to every question and the dismal ignorance of those who don't know. This is a concise description of the political Gnosticism that characterizes modernity. Our struggle is always against those who would enclose us in their ideology by collapsing reality down to the size of their own shrunken heads and shriveled souls.

Koestler had similar quasi-mystical experiences with other creeds, and come to think of it, so did I -- sometimes with his help (back when I was a new-age/integralist type). I distinctly remember it happening with existentialism, psychoanalysis, Jungian psychology, Zen, and others.

Another giveaway of Gnostic ideology is the internal and external inconsistency that can only be resolved by force, for example, the political correctness that has always characterized leftism. Leftism simply cannot be logically maintained, so certain avenues of thought must be forbidden or explained away. It is why their first resort is always to the accusation, the smear, the condemnation. Cancellation is the feature, not the bug. It is of course at antipodes to Christianity, in which forgiveness is the feature.

In fact, if you're a conservative and you haven't been called a racist, a fascist, or a Nazi, you're just not trying.

Another feature of the gnostic revolt is the inevitable attack on language, e.g., more murders and shootings of blacks = black lives matter. Upon Koestler's politico-religious conversion, "My vocabulary, grammar, syntax gradually changed." He "quickly learned an early form of doublethink" which "appeared as natural and justified as the choice of the cause we were championing."

"As a 'closed' system of thought," Marxism "could provide answers to every question in terms of its own theory..." He "was delighted with the dialectical muscles he was able to build, reveling in the competitive advantage they gave him in argument. He knew the 'right' questions and answers 'as though they were the opening variants in a chess game...'"

Here are some recent examples of Marxist dialectic, yoinked from our own comment section. Note that the sweeping condemnation is the argument, and vice versa. Marx himself could have been the author of any of these:

--Any black person stupid enough to support Trump is not going to change their mind over him being slightly more fascist today than he was a year ago.

--Religion is a powerful force for making people act against their own interests.

--The right has a large variety of morons and liars, but the ones who try to link the left and Nazism are really the cream of the crop.

--You are projecting from your shitty, imperialist, fundamentalist religion onto the more honest and humble faiths of the people Christianity aims to conquer

--Your racism is completely obvious. You should own it instead of denying it.

--Everything in conservative culture is basically lifeless, a feeble imitation of actual culture, which is alive and hence leftist by nature.

Well, let's stipulate that mass culture is indeed lifeless and broken, and that vulgar politics is downstream from this. We are

plainly in a period of massive deculturation through the deformation of reason.... the deculturation of the West is an historical phenomenon extending over centuries; the grotesque rubble into which the image of God is broken today is not somebody's wrong opinion about the nature of man but the result of a secular process of destruction....

The question of the search cannot be recovered by stirring around in the rubble; its recovery is not a matter of small repairs, of putting a patch on here or there, of criticizing this or that author whose work is a symptom of deculturation rather than its cause, and so forth (Voegelin).

It's not ideology vs. ideology, but ideology vs. reality:

there is no Saving Tale other than the tale of the divine pull to be followed by man; and there is no cognitive articulation of existence other than the noetic consciousness in which the movement becomes luminous to itself (ibid.).

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There's a new Dane in town. One isn't enough: