Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe

Continuing with the vision mentioned in the previous post: it revolves around the centrality of the category Father as it pertains to Homo sapiens. 

A moment's reflection reveals something interesting about human beings: that they are the only creatures that grow up with a father. No, not a sperm-donor, which all mammals have; rather, father as transcendent category.

Again, mammals are characterized by having mamas, which puts them a step above reptiles, who have only egg-donors, not proper mothers. Thus, the spiritual category of Mother appears earlier in the biospheric record, for reasons we will explore as we proceed. 

Everyone has a mother, insofar as the mother must, at the very least, carry the child to term. But not every child has a father. Again, everyone has a sperm-donor, but this donor may well have vanished from the scene the very day the donee was conceived.

Let us briefly pull away from the macro and focus on the micro, or better, the meso. Now, we all know what Democrat policies have done to the black family over the past 55 years: destroyed it. How did Dems finally accomplish this after 150 years of trying? 

I remember taking the history of a black patient. I asked him something to the effect of whether he grew up with his father, and he responded, "You know what they say -- mama's baby, papa's maybe." I'd never heard that gag before, but for him it was a matter-of-fact characterization of a rather dysfunctional family.

I will spare you all of the tedious statistics proving the effects -- divorce, bastardy, unemployment, crime, poverty, violence, addiction, prison, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc. Note that this downward spiral has been accompanied and guided by psychopathic Father-Leader substitutes such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barak Obama, et al. Each of them is an enthusiastic supporter of the very policies that have resulted in the destruction of the black family.

Let's return to the essay by Rob Henderson linked in the previous post, on the subject of America's Lost Boys. "Lost" is a tad euphemistic, since the real problem -- for the restavus -- is impulsive, violent, predatory, and criminal boys between the ages of 15 and 25 or so. Take them out of the picture and we'd have the crime rate of Sweden. Before the Muslims got there.

Ferality doesn't just happen; rather, it is the predictable consequence of identifiable causes. More to the point, although ferality is the return to a "state of nature," ironically, this state could never have come about naturally, in that Homo sapiens evolved within the trinitarian matrix of Mother-Father-Child, with each member playing a distinct and vital role for the perpetuation of culture and (hopefully) civilization.

Here again I don't want to review all the tedious details. They are summarized in chapter 3 of The Bʘʘk of the Same Name. 

Jumping ahead a bit, let's put forth the following proposition: remove fathers from the equation and human beings are just like any other animal, only worse. 

Let's bat away one obvious objection: what about all the fatherless children who turn out just fine, not to mention all the children from intact families who become criminals, lunatics, assouls, and Congressional Black Caucus members?  

Put it this way: do not equate proper manhood with the mere physical presence of a father. Nor is spiritual manhood absent just because the physical father is. This question revolves around radiation and assimilation of a spiritual reality. Do not conflate spiritual and material categories, or at least bear in mind that the latter derives its content and significance from the former.

Analogously, Judaism and Christianity are "historical" religions. But don't conflate their historicity and their significance. In an example we've used before, an eyewitness to the Crucifixion itself may well have known nothing about it aside from the fact that it happened -- just like any other crucifixion. So?

The meaning is in the history but not reducible to it. Likewise, the meaning of fatherhood is present in fathers but cannot be reduced to them. If it is, then God is just a projection of human fatherhood rather than vice versa.

Let's briefly zoom down from the meso to the submicro: my own physical father was a good guy, but, with all due respect, if he were my only father, I would be a very different person, and not in a good way. One of the vital roles of good-enough-fathering is to help your child recognize good fathers, and ultimately the Father under whose authority we deputy terrestrial fathers operate. 

I won't always be here. Which is why I help my son recognize that this or that guy -- whether dead or alive -- is also a father. There aren't as many as there should be, but still plenty to go around if you know where to look. 

Not to get sidetracked into female nature, but it is impossible to imagine that feminism could exist if not for Daddy Issues; for what is feminism but the projection of Bad Daddy into "the patriarchy," even while casting the state as the fantasied Good Daddy?

The End for today.

Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe

Continuing with the vision mentioned in the previous post: it revolves around the centrality of the category Father as it pertains to Homo sapiens. 

A moment's reflection reveals something interesting about human beings: that they are the only creatures that grow up with a father. No, not a sperm-donor, which all mammals have; rather, father as transcendent category.

Again, mammals are characterized by having mamas, which puts them a step above reptiles, who have only egg-donors, not proper mothers. Thus, the spiritual category of Mother appears earlier in the biospheric record, for reasons we will explore as we proceed. 

Everyone has a mother, insofar as the mother must, at the very least, carry the child to term. But not every child has a father. Again, everyone has a sperm-donor, but this donor may well have vanished from the scene the very day the donee was conceived.

Let us briefly pull away from the macro and focus on the micro, or better, the meso. Now, we all know what Democrat policies have done to the black family over the past 55 years: destroyed it. How did Dems finally accomplish this after 150 years of trying? 

I remember taking the history of a black patient. I asked him something to the effect of whether he grew up with his father, and he responded, "You know what they say -- mama's baby, papa's maybe." I'd never heard that gag before, but for him it was a matter-of-fact characterization of a rather dysfunctional family.

I will spare you all of the tedious statistics proving the effects -- divorce, bastardy, unemployment, crime, poverty, violence, addiction, prison, the Congressional Black Caucus, etc. Note that this downward spiral has been accompanied and guided by psychopathic Father-Leader substitutes such as Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Barak Obama, et al. Each of them is an enthusiastic supporter of the very policies that have resulted in the destruction of the black family.

Let's return to the essay by Rob Henderson linked in the previous post, on the subject of America's Lost Boys. "Lost" is a tad euphemistic, since the real problem -- for the restavus -- is impulsive, violent, predatory, and criminal boys between the ages of 15 and 25 or so. Take them out of the picture and we'd have the crime rate of Sweden. Before the Muslims got there.

Ferality doesn't just happen; rather, it is the predictable consequence of identifiable causes. More to the point, although ferality is the return to a "state of nature," ironically, this state could never have come about naturally, in that Homo sapiens evolved within the trinitarian matrix of Mother-Father-Child, with each member playing a distinct and vital role for the perpetuation of culture and (hopefully) civilization.

Here again I don't want to review all the tedious details. They are summarized in chapter 3 of The Bʘʘk of the Same Name. 

Jumping ahead a bit, let's put forth the following proposition: remove fathers from the equation and human beings are just like any other animal, only worse. 

Let's bat away one obvious objection: what about all the fatherless children who turn out just fine, not to mention all the children from intact families who become criminals, lunatics, assouls, and Congressional Black Caucus members?  

Put it this way: do not equate proper manhood with the mere physical presence of a father. Nor is spiritual manhood absent just because the physical father is. This question revolves around radiation and assimilation of a spiritual reality. Do not conflate spiritual and material categories, or at least bear in mind that the latter derives its content and significance from the former.

Analogously, Judaism and Christianity are "historical" religions. But don't conflate their historicity and their significance. In an example we've used before, an eyewitness to the Crucifixion itself may well have known nothing about it aside from the fact that it happened -- just like any other crucifixion. So?

The meaning is in the history but not reducible to it. Likewise, the meaning of fatherhood is present in fathers but cannot be reduced to them. If it is, then God is just a projection of human fatherhood rather than vice versa.

Let's briefly zoom down from the meso to the submicro: my own physical father was a good guy, but, with all due respect, if he were my only father, I would be a very different person, and not in a good way. One of the vital roles of good-enough-fathering is to help your child recognize good fathers, and ultimately the Father under whose authority we deputy terrestrial fathers operate. 

I won't always be here. Which is why I help my son recognize that this or that guy -- whether dead or alive -- is also a father. There aren't as many as there should be, but still plenty to go around if you know where to look. 

Not to get sidetracked into female nature, but it is impossible to imagine that feminism could exist if not for Daddy Issues; for what is feminism but the projection of Bad Daddy into "the patriarchy," even while casting the state as the fantasied Good Daddy?

The End for today.

Mammals & Pappals

There are thousands of mammal species on this planet, but only one pappal: Homo sapiens. 

"Mammal," of course, is etymologically related to yo' mama. Unlike reptiles or insects, yo' mama don't just lay eggs, wish them luck, and skedaddle. Rather, mammals are characterized by an extrauterine relationship of varying lengths between mother and child.  

Here's a dictionary definition: a mammal is

a warm-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that is distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of the young, and (typically) the birth of live young.

Thus we see that Pete Buttigieg, for example, is excluded from this definition as a result of being an invertebrate.

Here's my problem, and it's not your problem, but here it is anyway: I've already seen this post in its entirety. It was a "vision," so to speak, and it was accompanied by the usual metacosmic certitude. 

Therefore, all that remains for me is to sketch it out. The sketching isn't for my benefit; again, I've already seen the end of this movie, so it's not as if I need to convince myself of its intrinsic truth.

So, is it for your benefit? No, I would never go that far. I just put it out there, mainly to keep the mind limber and the trolls piqued. 

Come to think of it, that's the same reason why I leave comments on this or that blog. The comments are always in the form of a joke or gag or aphorism, because these forms force the mind to create a little something out of nothing. An unexpected guffah-HA out of nowhere. More generally, any post that fails to provoke at least one guffah-HA is a failed post.

It's a spiritual exercise, really. A man who is tired of ridiculing the left is tired of life. 

But a man of the left isn't even a man, and of course I mean this literally, certainly not as an insult. There are degrees, of course, but I will repeat that a full blown man of the left -- from Stalin to Hitler to Mao -- is missing something vital, and we call this thing real manhood. 

To turn it around, who among us would call Castro a proper man except the improper men -- the genderless freaks -- of the left?

I apologize for the crack about being "genderless." For just as often it is not a matter of being genderless but of having too many genders, of being genderful.

Back to my problem. Although the end is certain, there are any number of pathways to get there, and writing a post means hacking a pathway through the jungle, or maybe finding one's way across a featureless desert. Where to begin?

I know: I'll begin at the end, with what triggered the vision to begin with. It was while reading an essay by the brilliant Rob Henderson about his own fatherless -- to say the least -- childhood. Calling him fatherless is like calling mentally ill and drug addicted street people "homeless" -- as if a home is the only thing lacking in their lives.

Except it's sort of the opposite of that: for what if Henderson, in spite of all the challenges, had had a strong, stable, and virtuous father protecting him the whole time? 

Let me begin with a couple of extracts, starting with a dramatic hook:

My earliest memory is of me gripping my mother, in the dark, burying my face so deeply into her stomach I can’t breathe. It’s dark. I come up for air and see two police officers looming over us. They want to take her away. I’m scared. I don’t want to let her go. I fasten myself to her as hard as I can. Suddenly, I’m in a long white hallway. I’m sitting on a bench next to my mother drinking chocolate milk. My three-year-old legs dangle above the floor. I sneeze and spill my milk. I look to my mom for help, but she can’t move her arms. She’s wearing handcuffs. I start to cry.

That year, I entered the Los Angeles County foster care system. I never saw my mother again (Link: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-boys-and-me).

Not an auspicious start for a pappalian mammal.

From the time I was born until I was 17 years old, nearly everything in my life was propelling me to a life as one of America’s lost boys -- the young men who fail to mature, do poorly in school, live on the economic margins, and become absentee fathers or fail to form stable families of their own. 

Who fail to become men, precisely. Obviously we're not talking about mere biological manhood, which can only be prevented by transgenderist quacks armed with puberty blockers and parricidal hormones. 

Henderson goes on to highlight the fact that

one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s. Meantime, over the past half-century, the number of men behind bars has more than quadrupled.

These are but symptoms of something more essential that is missing: manhood. 

As an asnide, we've all heard the jokes about Mayor Pete taking two months off of his do-nothing job for "paternity leave," meaning that he is fundamentally confused -- big surprise! -- as to what paternity is. For a real man doesn't take the occasion of the birth of his child to slack off, except maybe for a few days.

Rather, this is precisely when a real man begins to double-down on his career, in order to be able to provide the resources necessary for his wife and child to thrive. Paternity leave is not a thing, except when a man leaves work at the end of the day to spend time with the family. Maternity leave, however, is a thing. A 24/7 x 18+ years-or-so thing. A quintessentially human mammal thing.

To say that mothers have very different roles and functions from fathers has become "controversial." But even feminists know they can't sprout a johnson, therefore the need for these bitter nihilists to castrate men for the sake of equity. 

Henderson is presently in graduate school at Cambridge, where he is studying social psychology. I, of course, used to be a psychologist, but have in the meantime been kicked upstairs to full-time cosmic pneumatologist. Thus, we will be examining this subject from the standpoint of the perennial philosophy, psychology, and religion, not from the perspective of mere academic psychology, much less the "culture war" between civilization and barbarism (although the latter is an effect of what we'll be discussing).

Mammals & Pappals

There are thousands of mammal species on this planet, but only one pappal: Homo sapiens. 

"Mammal," of course, is etymologically related to yo' mama. Unlike reptiles or insects, yo' mama don't just lay eggs, wish them luck, and skedaddle. Rather, mammals are characterized by an extrauterine relationship of varying lengths between mother and child.  

Here's a dictionary definition: a mammal is

a warm-blooded vertebrate animal of a class that is distinguished by the possession of hair or fur, the secretion of milk by females for the nourishment of the young, and (typically) the birth of live young.

Thus we see that Pete Buttigieg, for example, is excluded from this definition as a result of being an invertebrate.

Here's my problem, and it's not your problem, but here it is anyway: I've already seen this post in its entirety. It was a "vision," so to speak, and it was accompanied by the usual metacosmic certitude. 

Therefore, all that remains for me is to sketch it out. The sketching isn't for my benefit; again, I've already seen the end of this movie, so it's not as if I need to convince myself of its intrinsic truth.

So, is it for your benefit? No, I would never go that far. I just put it out there, mainly to keep the mind limber and the trolls piqued. 

Come to think of it, that's the same reason why I leave comments on this or that blog. The comments are always in the form of a joke or gag or aphorism, because these forms force the mind to create a little something out of nothing. An unexpected guffah-HA out of nowhere. More generally, any post that fails to provoke at least one guffah-HA is a failed post.

It's a spiritual exercise, really. A man who is tired of ridiculing the left is tired of life. 

But a man of the left isn't even a man, and of course I mean this literally, certainly not as an insult. There are degrees, of course, but I will repeat that a full blown man of the left -- from Stalin to Hitler to Mao -- is missing something vital, and we call this thing real manhood. 

To turn it around, who among us would call Castro a proper man except the improper men -- the genderless freaks -- of the left?

I apologize for the crack about being "genderless." For just as often it is not a matter of being genderless but of having too many genders, of being genderful.

Back to my problem. Although the end is certain, there are any number of pathways to get there, and writing a post means hacking a pathway through the jungle, or maybe finding one's way across a featureless desert. Where to begin?

I know: I'll begin at the end, with what triggered the vision to begin with. It was while reading an essay by the brilliant Rob Henderson about his own fatherless -- to say the least -- childhood. Calling him fatherless is like calling mentally ill and drug addicted street people "homeless" -- as if a home is the only thing lacking in their lives.

Except it's sort of the opposite of that: for what if Henderson, in spite of all the challenges, had had a strong, stable, and virtuous father protecting him the whole time? 

Let me begin with a couple of extracts, starting with a dramatic hook:

My earliest memory is of me gripping my mother, in the dark, burying my face so deeply into her stomach I can’t breathe. It’s dark. I come up for air and see two police officers looming over us. They want to take her away. I’m scared. I don’t want to let her go. I fasten myself to her as hard as I can. Suddenly, I’m in a long white hallway. I’m sitting on a bench next to my mother drinking chocolate milk. My three-year-old legs dangle above the floor. I sneeze and spill my milk. I look to my mom for help, but she can’t move her arms. She’s wearing handcuffs. I start to cry.

That year, I entered the Los Angeles County foster care system. I never saw my mother again (Link: https://bariweiss.substack.com/p/americas-lost-boys-and-me).

Not an auspicious start for a pappalian mammal.

From the time I was born until I was 17 years old, nearly everything in my life was propelling me to a life as one of America’s lost boys -- the young men who fail to mature, do poorly in school, live on the economic margins, and become absentee fathers or fail to form stable families of their own. 

Who fail to become men, precisely. Obviously we're not talking about mere biological manhood, which can only be prevented by transgenderist quacks armed with puberty blockers and parricidal hormones. 

Henderson goes on to highlight the fact that

one in six American men between the ages of 25 and 54 are unemployed or out of the workforce altogether: about 10 million men. This number has more than doubled since the 1970s. Meantime, over the past half-century, the number of men behind bars has more than quadrupled.

These are but symptoms of something more essential that is missing: manhood. 

As an asnide, we've all heard the jokes about Mayor Pete taking two months off of his do-nothing job for "paternity leave," meaning that he is fundamentally confused -- big surprise! -- as to what paternity is. For a real man doesn't take the occasion of the birth of his child to slack off, except maybe for a few days.

Rather, this is precisely when a real man begins to double-down on his career, in order to be able to provide the resources necessary for his wife and child to thrive. Paternity leave is not a thing, except when a man leaves work at the end of the day to spend time with the family. Maternity leave, however, is a thing. A 24/7 x 18+ years-or-so thing. A quintessentially human mammal thing.

To say that mothers have very different roles and functions from fathers has become "controversial." But even feminists know they can't sprout a johnson, therefore the need for these bitter nihilists to castrate men for the sake of equity. 

Henderson is presently in graduate school at Cambridge, where he is studying social psychology. I, of course, used to be a psychologist, but have in the meantime been kicked upstairs to full-time cosmic pneumatologist. Thus, we will be examining this subject from the standpoint of the perennial philosophy, psychology, and religion, not from the perspective of mere academic psychology, much less the "culture war" between civilization and barbarism (although the latter is an effect of what we'll be discussing).

Engender Studies & Transnatural Law

Man cannot violate the laws of nature, or they wouldn't be laws. But he can steer them, and in so doing transcend them. He can similarly steer his own nature, which means he has free will. Our nature itself can't be absolutely free -- i.e., without the limitation of form -- otherwise there would be nothing to steer and nowhere to go anyway.  

In short, form is always a constraint on possibility, even while the existence of so many forms is a consequence of the all-possibility of God, which is to say, his inexhaustible creativity. For what is creativity, exactly? It must be an orthoparadoxical combination of form and formlessness; or, to be precisely precise, it is the essence in existence, or substance in form, or perhaps "bounded freedom." 

Come to think of it, Schuon describes art in exactly this way: its essential function 

is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance. 

This explains why man is compelled to create art on the one hand and attracted to it on the other, and indeed why it is so central to what man is. For art

transposes Being to the world of existence... it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations. 

As to the complementarity of creation-exteriorization and attraction-interiorization, Schuon points out that this function  

is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.” 

The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype. 

I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of art. The bottom line is that man is a form; the top line is that this form is an image of the Creator, and the Creator is -- obviously -- beyond form. 

Therefore, if you're following me, man, alone among creatures, is an orthoparadoxical -- no joke! I always mean this term literally -- complementarity of form and formlessness. Which is why we can -- and must -- grow and develop. We are created for purposes of transcendence or even transfiguration, AKA theosis.   

All of this no doubt sounds more than a bit abstract, and it is, and yet, the consequences could scarcely be more concrete. If they're not, then to hell with it. 

"Man," writes Schuon "is as if suspended between animality and divinity." As Life Itself clamors up the biological teloscape from veggies to insects to reptiles to mammals, there's more wiggle room at the top, but not much. Only in man is there a real breakthrough of form into the Great Wide Open of the formless, and vice versa.   

I was thinking about this ladder just yesterday. Every science has its proper object, and an object is -- duh -- a form, otherwise we'd be unable to study it. Now, what is the form of theology? Correct: it is God. And God is? Correct: beyond form. Therefore, theology is the formal study of the formless. 

Now, one reason, and maybe even the biggest reason, God is formless is that he's a person. In other words, there is an irreducible complementarity in persons qua personhood between form and formlessness, and now we're getting somewhere, because this again goes to the Trinity, since the Son is the engendered form of the "non-engendered" but engendering Father. 

We'll no doubt return to this principle as we proceed, but to en-gender is to give form, AKA to in-form. That being the case, a little gratitude is in order: thanks for the information! 

But I'm running short on time this morning, so TBC. 

Engender Studies & Transnatural Law

Man cannot violate the laws of nature, or they wouldn't be laws. But he can steer them, and in so doing transcend them. He can similarly steer his own nature, which means he has free will. Our nature itself can't be absolutely free -- i.e., without the limitation of form -- otherwise there would be nothing to steer and nowhere to go anyway.  

In short, form is always a constraint on possibility, even while the existence of so many forms is a consequence of the all-possibility of God, which is to say, his inexhaustible creativity. For what is creativity, exactly? It must be an orthoparadoxical combination of form and formlessness; or, to be precisely precise, it is the essence in existence, or substance in form, or perhaps "bounded freedom." 

Come to think of it, Schuon describes art in exactly this way: its essential function 

is to transfer Substance, which is both one and inexhaustible, into the world of accident and to bring the accidental consciousness back to Substance. 

This explains why man is compelled to create art on the one hand and attracted to it on the other, and indeed why it is so central to what man is. For art

transposes Being to the world of existence... it transposes in a certain way the Infinite to the world of the finite, or Essence to the world of forms; it thereby suggests a continuity proceeding from the one to the other, a way starting from appearance or accident and opening onto Substance or its celestial reverberations. 

As to the complementarity of creation-exteriorization and attraction-interiorization, Schuon points out that this function  

is both magical and spiritual: magical, it renders present principles, powers and also things that it attracts by virtue of a “sympathetic magic”; spiritual, it exteriorizes truths and beauties in view of our interiorization, of our return to the “kingdom of God that is within you.” 

The Principle becomes manifestation so that manifestation might rebecome the Principle, or so that the “I” might return to the Self; or simply, so that the human soul might, through given phenomena, make contact with the heavenly archetypes, and thereby with its own archetype. 

I don't want to get sidetracked into a discussion of art. The bottom line is that man is a form; the top line is that this form is an image of the Creator, and the Creator is -- obviously -- beyond form. 

Therefore, if you're following me, man, alone among creatures, is an orthoparadoxical -- no joke! I always mean this term literally -- complementarity of form and formlessness. Which is why we can -- and must -- grow and develop. We are created for purposes of transcendence or even transfiguration, AKA theosis.   

All of this no doubt sounds more than a bit abstract, and it is, and yet, the consequences could scarcely be more concrete. If they're not, then to hell with it. 

"Man," writes Schuon "is as if suspended between animality and divinity." As Life Itself clamors up the biological teloscape from veggies to insects to reptiles to mammals, there's more wiggle room at the top, but not much. Only in man is there a real breakthrough of form into the Great Wide Open of the formless, and vice versa.   

I was thinking about this ladder just yesterday. Every science has its proper object, and an object is -- duh -- a form, otherwise we'd be unable to study it. Now, what is the form of theology? Correct: it is God. And God is? Correct: beyond form. Therefore, theology is the formal study of the formless. 

Now, one reason, and maybe even the biggest reason, God is formless is that he's a person. In other words, there is an irreducible complementarity in persons qua personhood between form and formlessness, and now we're getting somewhere, because this again goes to the Trinity, since the Son is the engendered form of the "non-engendered" but engendering Father. 

We'll no doubt return to this principle as we proceed, but to en-gender is to give form, AKA to in-form. That being the case, a little gratitude is in order: thanks for the information! 

But I'm running short on time this morning, so TBC.