Continuing with the previous post, which involved staring into the void -- or plenum, depending on whether there is something or nothing, nonlocal order or just unremitting chaos and tenure.
Looking out the window before me is our cement pond. I was just now idly gazing at it while awaiting my sattvalight linkup, and out of the pattern a face emerged.
On the one hand, this signifies nothing more than man's inveterate tendency to see patterns amidst chaos. On the other, it reminds me of the eternal birth of the Son out of the watery womb of Beyond-Being. So I got that going for me.
We left off with an essay by Mary Eberstadt called The Cross Amid the Crisis, which explicates some of the points made in her book Primal Screams. This latter explores the origins of identity politics, that incredibly destructive -- I'm gonna say satanic -- ideology that pervades the left.
In my view, this truly diabolical doctrine is at antipodes to Christianity, the same Christianity that undergirds western civilization and, quintessentially, the American founding. No wonder the nation is so divided. After all, this is what the Evil One does, precisely (diabolos means to divide and scatter, so fission accompliced).
Nor is it necessary to begin with the satanic principle. Rather, one can approach it like any other science by observing the effects. Then one looks for a unifying hypotheses that accounts for these diverse effects. Let's call this hypothesis (S). And let's call the effects (E).
Obviously there's a whole lot of (E)vil in this world. We can all agree on that, even those postmodern sophisticates who insist that evil doesn't exist, and besides, it's really caused by those theocratic Christianist absolutists who are naive enough to believe in the existence of good and evil!
Here's a progressive koan for you to ponder: regarding the Taliban, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." But Christians are even worse than the Taliban -- just as the violent insurrectionists of 1-6 were more evil than the mostly peaceful someones who did something on 9-11!
No wonder AOC was weeping on the house floor. I'd cry too if the world were that devoid of logic. She dwells in an absurd looniverse that flows out of its own illogicality. Nor is it any wonder that Marx appeals them: sure, his thought is a dumpster fire of narcissism, envy, resentment, and racism, but at least it's a coherent dumpster fire.
I am reminded of a comment by a recently sainted pope to the effect that "only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light." Big claim! However, you can take it as an anthropological axiom or perhaps as a Lincolnesque proposition that
A hundred score and seventy odd years ago, our apostolic Fathers brought forth in this hemisphere a new civilization, conceived in freedom and truth, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created, and that the Incarnation finally makes sense of this otherwise impenetrable mystery.
Eberstadt's essay touches on this theme, in that, if the Incarnation makes sense of anthropology, removing it from from the foundation of anthropology generates nonsense, i.e., disorder, chaos, and aggression:
The rise in mental distress and the decline of organized religion... are not randomly occurring phenomena. Social science confirms that people who have robust social bonds are more likely to thrive than people who don’t. Religious faith confers those bonds. Social science also shows that the fractured family and other forms of isolation increase the risks of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, loneliness, and other vexations. All have been exacerbated by the Western flight from God.
True, but correlation isn't necessarily causation. Is there a better explanation for why, say, the more feminists get what they think they want, the unhappier they are? And the more college-educated, the stupider? (For example, something like two-thirds of men see Joe Biden for the feeble wreck that he is, while his strongest base of support is from college indoctrinated women of both sexes.)
Secularization is also behind today’s family Chaos. In embracing divorce, fatherlessness, and abortion, humanity has inflicted wounds on itself whose measure has only begun to be taken. We are only beginning to grasp that what starts at home doesn’t stay at home. The feral children of family Chaos now pour into the streets, frantically trying to substitute identity politics for the primordial bonds of which they’ve been deprived. Identity politics is a pitiful attempt at emotional alchemy by souls desperate for connection (emphases mine).
The left is actually correct on that score: the personal is indeed the political, and the crazier the former the worse the latter. Back to our anthropological proposition, for which there is abundant negative evidence:
today’s Chaos amounts to inadvertent proof that Christianity, and the Judaism from which it drank, get humanity right.
That's a bingo. For
Our secularizing culture is not just any culture. No, our secularizing culture is an inferior culture. It is small of heart. It defines suffering down. It regards the victims of its social experiments not as victims, but as acceptable collateral damage justified by those experiments.
This is why the victims of leftist policies always become vindictims, except their incontinent anger and bullying aggression are displaced from family to society. Absent fathers, for example, reappear as RACISS POLICE! Or MEN ON HORSES ENFORCING OUR LAWS! Like me they see a face in the pool. The difference is, I'm just enjoying a little benign hypnopompic hallucination, while they're living an a terrifyingly reified and malevolent ideological delusion:
Scholars of tomorrow will look back in astonishment, and perhaps pity, at today’s magical thinking. They will need facts, figures, arguments, and evidence, especially about the human costs of today’s experiment in secularization (Eberstadt).
But the Raccoon is vouchsafed the scholarship of tomorrow today!; or in other words, eternity while you wait!
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