Caught in God's Web

A couple of posts back we mentioned Voegelin's cryptic remark that history is "a web of meaning with a plurality of nodal points." 

Now, just because something is complex it needn't be cryptic, or one ends up sounding like the very political Gnostics one is attempting to expose and neutralize. To quote Charles Laughton in The Private Life of Henry the VIII, Diplomacy, my foot! I'm an Englishman -- I can't say one thing and mean another. 

Voegelin, of course, was German. 

Shh! Don't mention the War. 

Well, just one mention, then we'll let it go. In this week's weekly email newsletter, Rob Henderson asks why our Best Minds are so susceptible to bullshit. That they are is beyond doubt. But why? By virtue of what principle -- if there can be a "principle of bullshit"?  

William Shirer, the American author of the 1960 book “The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich”, described his experiences as a war correspondent in Nazi Germany.

Shirer wrote:

“Often in a German home or office or sometimes in a casual conversation with a stranger in a restaurant, beer hall, or café, I would meet with outlandish assertions from seemingly educated and intelligent persons. It was obvious they were parroting nonsense they heard on the radio or read in the newspapers. Sometimes one was tempted to say as much, but one was met with such incredulity, as if one had blasphemed the Almighty” [emphasis mine].

I generally don't like to attribute unconscious or sinister motives to people with whom I disagree, except behind their backs. When speaking with them in the flesh, it is enough to clarify differences and defer to logic and principle to demonstrate beyond doubt that they are full of shit.

But why do they believe in such crap -- for example, everything from the battery fairy to an epidemic of fairy battery? (https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2021/01/who-will-tell-the-greens-there-is-no-battery-fairy.php)

Indeed, those same people will suggest that that last silly gag was violent! when it was just a gag, no more violent than ridiculing a smelly, mouth-breathing MAGA troglodyte such as myself. It's when we aren't permitted to needle each other that people on the fringes of sanity will resort to nonverbal means. 

Back to why a seemingly intelligent person such as I can believe such outlandish assertions -- for example, that a man who engages in genital mutilation is a man just the same, or that male and female nature are quite different, or that it is unconstitutional to discriminate on the basis of race.

Like Henderson, I am very much an outsider to world of Smart People with Correct Beliefs. On the one hand, I didn't learn much in school, but for the same reason, it has been less of a struggle to escape the indoctrination. It was more on the surface, not penetrating to the bone. Like him, I was totally naive: 

At that time, I believed that “educated and intelligent persons” were immune to distortions and propaganda. 

I actually believed that joining their ranks as a certified PhD made me similarly immune to BS, when it nearly destroyed my native immune system, AKA common sense. In reality, "social class, measured in terms of education and income," is "positively associated with the desire for social status." And 

Who cares the most about obtaining social status? People who already have it. Affluent members of society are particularly likely to say the right things to either preserve their status or gain more of it.

But there is a higher from of status: not giving a fuck what high status people think. Which hardly means "not caring," for I very much care whether what I write is in conformity to Truth and, to a lesser extent, myself. (And Truth is indeed a person, but that's the subject for a different post.) I want to say what I really think, not pretend I think something for any other reason, including social status. 

Back to the Web of Meaning mentioned in the first paragraph. Now, this web is both horizontal and vertical. In fact, that little detour into social status shows how the intellect may become ensnared in a purely horizontal web of conformity and approval. Not good! 

In reality, man is indeed "caught in a web," so to speak, but this web is woven of laws and principles governing different modes and dimensions. 

For example, we are caught in webs of, say, gravity, entropy, genes, history, family, culture, etc. But there are also "higher webs" such as natural law, metaphysics, and theology. More generally, we are embodied forms, and although we can distinguish material and spiritual webs, there is a higher web that integrates the two.

Let's get to the point: for Voegelin, the real web is woven between, and anchored by, immanence on one end and transcendence on the other. For man, the only proper place to be is in the web. Not just in the web, but constantly building and improving it, making differentiations and connections from this to that and the other. 

Make no mistake: it is the project of a lifetime, for this web has a lotta ins, lotta outs, lotta what-have-you's -- just a whole lotta strands to keep in your head, Man.