Nothing Human is Alien to Me, and It Doesn't Get Worse than That

What comes first, ideas or things? Let's consult an eminent and highly influential left wing philosopher:

For Foucault, a gay man who saw AIDS as a social construct rather than a physiological disease, reality did not exist. "Language is all there is" (Siegel, Sidebar).

I know what you're thinking: didn't this deviant lunatic die of AIDS? Indeed he did, but "death" is just a social construct -- just a word that points to another word. We are enclosed in a circle of language from which even death offers no escape: to paraphrase Orwell, imagine the liberal narrative stifling our curiosity forever:

There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life. All competing pleasures will be destroyed. But always... always there will be the intoxication of power, constantly increasing and constantly growing subtler. Always, at every moment, there will be the thrill of victory, the sensation of trampling on an enemy who is helpless. If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

In an unintended sense Foucault is correct: language is all that is; for it is one of the names of God, AKA logos. We could say that God is both source and substance of the Word, without which language is strictly impossible, literally inconceivable. In other words, like everything else, language cannot be without a reason for being. 

For the fatuous Foucault, the sufficient reason of language is power. End of story. Of course, he is half-correct, in that this has always been true of the left (another case of bad philosophy reducing to unwitting autobiography): the common denominator of all left wing policies is the expansion of state power. It's what relieves them of the formalities of fact, logic, principle, and even plausibility. 

For example, what is the principle that unites such disparate items as, say, climate change, COVID hysteria, the redefinition of marriage, state-mandated racial discrimination, transgender rights, and the imaginary wage gap? Correct: each is a pretext for the concentration and extension of state power. For if the state can force us to pretend a man can marry a man, or that men can give birth, there is nothing it can't do.  

Back to the opening question: where do we begin our epistemological ascent, with ideas or things, concepts or objects? We won't re-belabor the point, because even if you have a hard time understanding how traditional realism can be true, we can eliminate the alternative because it leads straight to absurdity. Being that absurdity is ruled out, we are left with the traditional non-absurd principle that knowledge begins in the senses. 

Besides, the notion that words only point to other words is so preposterous that one would have to be mad or even irreversibly tenured to believe it. And we use the word "pre-post-erous" advisedly, because deconstruction reverses the order of pre and post: in reality, words are existentially posterior to things, even though, at the same time(lessness), the Word, AKA logos, is ontologically anterior to things. 

I hope this makes sense: if the world is intelligible to intelligence -- which it self-evidently is -- then there must be a reason. The sufficient reason of each is the logos that pervades and illuminates being. We could say that modernity is merely a rebellion against this principle, while postmodernity is an outright revolution against it.

When did this revolution get underway? Our usual answer is Genesis 3 (All Over Again), which is true as far as it goes. But revelation goes to ontological, vertical, and principial truths, not horizontal, historical, and contingent ones per se. 

Let's ask Fred Siegel, whose latest book, The Crisis of Liberalism: Prelude to Trump, offers a likely story. Which, by the way goes to the definition of history, which is a plausible narrative linking event-objects: a likely story. 

And just because no story is perfectly adequate to the events, it hardly means that some stories aren't more likely than others. The same descent into relativism makes leftists believe that no culture is worse than any other (except for our uniquely bad White European Patriarchal Christian Slave culture).  

By the way, analogous to what was said above about the logos, we could say the same vis-a-vis profane history and salvation history: history is One Big Story, and Christ is -- or so we have heard from the wise -- the key that unlocks it. Notice, for example, how the Apostles used this very key to illuminate the Old Testament. Without the Inkeynation, it's somewhat impenetrable.

Apologies to our Jewish friends, who obviously see things differently. Not to veer off on a tangent, but we're not so different, you and I. This is from one of my favorite little books, Honey from the Rock by Lawrence Kushner:

For the word is very near to you....

It is to begin with, all inside us. But because we are all miniature versions of the universe, it is also found far beyond. And because we are all biologically and spiritually part of the first man, the place preceded us. And because we all carry within us the genotype and vision of the last man, the place is foretold in us.

Very Coonish! Touching on what was said above about Likely Stories, he writes that

The great stories did not happen to the masters of old alone. They happen to us. You and I. This moment. A tale unfolds.

It is only that we have lost the narrative element of our existence. 

True, he can at times be a bit new-agey, but the underlying principle is sound.

Back to Siegel. Like us, he is an old-fashioned liberal, not the malevolent illiberal progressive kind: for his liberalism 

is focused not on addressing postmodern concerns such as transgender rights, recasting American democracy as primarily an instrument of racist oppression, or the need for draconian steps to address climate change and the pandemic (Kotkin).

Rather, he "wants something more prosaic: the opportunity of ordinary, and extraordinary, people to get ahead in life." Same.  So what prevents this? 

Yes, you could say "the left," but in my opinion, this doesn't go far enough, for the real problem is human nature -- especially a metaphysically untutored human nature that is naive and even blind to the nature of human nature. Really, left and right can be distinguished by their antithetical visions of human nature. 

We, of course, believe Man Writ Large is a lousy sonofabitch, even while he is an Image of God. We are inveterate underachievers, to put it mildly, always living beneath ourselves. 

The left implicitly believes the same (even while denying the existence of human nature, much less its Creator), except they project the lousy SOB into America, Toxic Males, deplorable Christians, irredeemable Trumpians, etc. 

The point is, leftism is like human nature only worse, for reasons we'll get into. To cite one especially obvious example, human beings are uniquely susceptible to envy. Envy was socially adaptive in the small bands through which we evolved in prehistory, but nowadays it's as useful as is our appendix. 

Therefore, envy is something that needs to be transcended, not politically nurtured and indulged.  For to indulge it is merely to awaken a barbaric and precivilized primate, or maybe you haven't seen what the left has done to our inner cities. Antifa is just masked envy clad in black and living in mother's basement -- pure destruction of things others have built. 

I'll have to continue this tomorrow or Tuesday. I need to run some errands.