With Anti-Intellectualism, Anything is Possible!

It's true, or I wouldn't say it.

Perhaps the major reason why most people reject reality is that it places so many annoying constraints on what we can do or think or want. 

For example, people want more money (or more votes, to be perfectly accurate), so they pass a "minimum wage" law in order to make it illegal to pay someone what his labor is worth. The entirely predictable result is that unemployment increases and businesses close. But the politician feels good about himself, and that's what matters. 

Policies such as the minimum wage, rent control, racial quotas, et al, can't work in reality. But they do in theory, and that's enough for the anti-intellectual.

In reality men and women are quite different, and thank God and natural selection, in that order. But here again, for some reason this bothers a lot of women (of both sexes), so it isn't just rejected but attacked -- as if reality is the problem!

Well, reality is the problem. But it is also the solution, and indeed, the only solution to the problems intrinsic to reality. 

In this regard, it is no different than nature as such.  Nature causes a lot of problems -- little things like, oh, disease, death, accidents, etc. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just magically wish these away, or bribe nature to leave us alone and take the next guy, or perhaps conduct a human sacrifice to appease and get her off our backs?

Maybe, but nature provides a means to her own mastery and transcendence. How? By being rational, or subordinate to reason. This is why prescientific approaches such as alchemy, astrology, and haruspicy didn't actually help us, but gave only the illusion of help. They made the anxiety go away, at least momentarily.

Similar to progressive polices, although not as destructive on such a catastrophic scale.

There's an old gag... it's on the tip of my Tongan... can't find it, but while looking for it found this by Claude Bernard: "Science increases our power in proportion as it lowers our pride."  "Proud scientist" should be as oxymoronic as "humble ideologue."  If only.

Anyway, I recently read an outstanding book by Fulton Sheen called God and Intelligence in Modern Philosophy, originally published 90 years ago but as true today as it was then and always will be. Yes, always, for 

It is only accidentally that St. Thomas belongs to the 13th century. His thought is no more confined to that period of human history than is the multiplication table.  

Supposing we are to be born at all, we have to be born sometime and somewhere. For Thomas it just happened to be Sicily in 1225.  Only a parochial bigot or tenured ape would hold it against him. 

This dovetails nicely with one of our obsessive preavocations, which is the discovery and elucidation of principles, axioms, and perennial truths to which we are entitled by virtue of being human. Yes, being a man has its share of inevitable burdens. God knows this, and for this reason provides certain compensations and consolations. 

What would a human life be in the absence of universal truth?  Well, for starters it wouldn't be human, just another chapter in the pointless story of animals.

Since the crock is running down, I'm just going repeat some important passages with or without comment:

If a progressive universe is a contemporary ideal, then the philosophy of St. Thomas is its greatest realization.

Our self-styled "progressives" hold an implicit metaphysic that renders progress both unintelligible and impossible. 

The modern God was born the day the "beast intellectualism" was killed. The day the intelligence is reborn, the modern God will die. They cannot exist together; for one is the annihilation of the other.

Which certainly goes to the depth and intensity of our current political divide. Truly, the two sides are absolutely and permanently irreconcilable. The difference is, our side must be understood, while theirs can only be imposed; hence their barbaric hatred of free thought and expression. 

Here is a lifelike pneumagraph of One Cosmos:

The intellect, then, is the perfection of the universe because it can sum up all creation within itself. In doing this, it becomes the articulate spokesman of the universe and the great bond between brute matter and Infinite Spirit.

"What happens, then, when a philosophy rejects the intellect?" Same thing as when a political ideology does: it "knocks the world into an unintelligible pluralism."  These relativistic anti-humanists "are suffering from the fever of violent emotion, and so they make a philosophy of it."

Or misosophy.  Being that Sophia is the primordial feminine, this is truly the last ugly word in misogyny.  

St. Thomas is not "premodern," because this makes the elementary error of trying to discern truth by clock or calendar. These latter measure time, but even then, not really; rather, just space. But truth transcends both.  It is neither ancient nor modern, and most certainly not dumb-as-a-post modern:  

It is ultra-modern, because it is spiritual and is not subject to decrepitude and death. "By its universality, it overflows infinitely, in the past as in the future, the limits of the present moment; it does not oppose itself to modern systems, as the past to that which is actually given, but as something perennial to something momentary. Anti-modern against the errors of the present time, it is ultra-modern for all truths enveloped in the time to come (Maritain)."

Oh, and speaking of pleasures we share with neither animal nor Antifa (but I repeat myself), "The intelligence is life and the greatest thing there is in life."  

But "The spirit of modern thought, whatever else it may be, is anti-intellectual." How so, exactly? Well, "To begin with, there is a confusion of the intellect and reason."  

The Intelligence does not explain; it does not reason; it grasps. It sees an intelligible object as the eye sees a sensible object. Reason, on the contrary, is related to the intelligence as movement is related to rest; as acquiring a thing is related to having a thing.

Having said this, while they are distinct they cannot be separate, which is why things aren't true because they are rational, but rather, rational because true. Do not make the crudimental error of confining truth to reason, or you'll be waiting for Gödel forever.  

I guess that's it for today.