World War ∞

If war is the continuation of politics by other means, then the converse is equally true: politics is the continuation of war by other means. And if the latter is true, then it follows that the war -- we call it WW∞ -- is literally endless, because man is -- among other things -- at once Homo politicus and Homo bellicose: a homicidal prostitute, if you like.

Man is the "political animal," but he is also -- among others -- the rational animal, the symbolic animal, the self-aware animal, the moral animal, the artistic animal, the transcendent animal, the comedic animal,  and the wise animal (LOL!).

But each of these is a vertical category, or a modality of the vertical. 

This being the case, it is a sad fact that man is also -- and more often than not -- the irrational animal (Homo pomo), the atheist animal (Homo literalum), the devoid-of-self-awareness animal (Homo progressivus), the immoral animal (Homo cuomo), the sh*t-masquarading-as-art animal (Homo MOMO), the immanentizing-the-eschaton animal (Homo gnosticus), the unfunny animal (Homo wokiens), and the foolish animal (Homo academicus), respectively.

Now, each of these polarities is a battleground and a front in WW∞. For example, when have we not been involved in a struggle between reason and irrationality? Or worse, between the merely weak and irrational and the aggressively insane, AKA Republican vs. Democrat.

Look at the Taliban. Conquering them on the battlefield is one thing, but forcing them to reason is another thing entirely. You can leave them to slaughter but you can't make them think.

Even comedy is a battlefield, for one of the preoccupations of progressive wokism (speaking of the Taliban) is the haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be laughing at them. Not for nothing do they call it the Late Night War, nor is it surprising that General Gutfield is routing these enemies of merriment.  

Similarly, what is the homeschool movement but a battle against the entrenched statist forces of Big Miseducation? 

What is America -- as originally conceived -- but an ongoing revolution against those perennial reactionaries who hate liberty, individualism, and private property?  WW ∞.  

Likewise, we supposedly defeated racism in 1865, or war itself in 1918, or fascism in 1945, or Marxism in 1991, but that's like saying we defeated Stephen Colbert in 2021. If only! For it seems that being born in the human state entitles one only to being a participant in the endless war, even -- or especially -- if it is only a war with onself.

Which my sound trite, but here again this goes to a major distinction between our side and the progressive forces of reaction:  a person incapable of governing himself is unfit for self-government. The left fundamentally agrees, but their solution is to dominate us. I suppose I would have no issue with the left if they only limited their activities to controlling their millions of constituents who are incapable of controlling themselves: Antifa, BLM, Joe Biden, et al. 

Now, back to Garrigou-Lagrange's Thomistic Common Sense, on which we've made no progress for a couple of weeks, having once again fallen from eternity into time. We try our best to minimize the latter, but it happens. At any rate, let's see if we can knock out a chapter.

"Common sense," writes G-L, "is nothing other than spontaneous (or primordial) reason." 

Now, there is, one might say, the intra-rational (logic as such) and the supra-rational, i.e., those foundational principles without which reason is impossible, e.g., the immutable laws of identity, non-contradiction, causality, finality, etc. These are the very laws of intelligible being, laws we cannot avoid and still be logical.

As we've mentioned before, Thomas doesn't so much prescribe as describe: he is simply describing what we are doing when we think rationally; from this follows the prescription, i.e., don't pretend you're thinking when you're doing something less, and certainly don't undermine man's ability to think -- to know intelligible being via the intellect.

In the margin there's a question to myself: in what philosophical universe is this activity we call "common sense" both possible and efficacious?

Big question! Big universe!

True enough, but the universe isn't so big that it can't be tamed with common sense. What I mean is that our universe is fanatically law-abiding, scrupulously adhering to certain fundamental laws such as the speed of light, Planck's constant, gravity, electromagnetism, etc. Without such laws there would be no stability below to permit all of the emergent teleological activity up here. Order comes from order. Disorder and chaos are always parasitic on order. But enough about the left. 

"Philosophy" may be reduced to four main candidates: empiricism, rationalism, idealism, or (moderate) realism. That's off the top of the voice in my head, so perhaps you can think of others. Some partake of two categories, for example, positivism, which pretends to be empirical but is really a narrow rationalism; or materialism, which is really an abstract idealism projected onto matter.

In any event. G-L says that only one of these truly recognizes common sense, and that would be the last, moderate realism. And again, moderate realism isn't really any kind of ism-ideology, but simply a description of what we are doing when we engage in intellection. 

For example, thinking begins with a conceptual abstraction from objects of the senses. You may not like this idea, but it's nevertheless true, for you can't disagree with it without confirming it. The ideology of materialism, for example, is not some bit of matter, but an immaterial abstraction from it, so the materialist is just an inadequate moderate realist.  

I gotta stop. This vertical guerrilla has some other things to do.