Lead Us Not into Tenure, But Deliver Us from Stupidity

One of my favorite passages by Schuon touches on the miracle of consciousness:

The first ascertainment which should impose itself upon man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of that miracle that is intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- and consequently the incommensurability between these and material objects, be it a question of a grain of sand or of the sun, or of any creature whatever as an object of the senses.

Done. I have ascertained that intelligence is indeed a miracle -- especially for me in particular, in that there was no sign of it until I was 24 or so, and even then I was a liberal for another two decades. Don't tell me evolution is just a theory!

The principle of original sin obviously extents to the intellect, in which case we should call it "original stupidity," with the understanding that truth is to the intellect as virtue is to the will. (In point of fact, nothing can actually damage the Intellect as such, although we can betray and fail to live up to it, for which reason there are so many intelligent people -- certainly more intelligent than I am -- who are so wrong.) 

I also see that nothing in existence escapes the purview of the intellect, and that every material thing put together can never add up to even a single digit of IQ. I hate to admit it, but even the stupidest troll is smarter than an inert lump of coal. However, in defense of the lump of coal, it may not know truth, but nor does it defend error or perversion; then again, it is possible it voted for Biden.  

Viewed from the bottom up, the radical discontinuity of a transcendent intelligence is quite evidently impossible. Thus, having ruled out the impossible, what's left?

No sh*t, Sherlock. Interiority and intelligence must be continuous with the toppermost of the poppermost of the cosmos, i.e., its ground, source, and Principle. 

Now, this is not to say that it is

our personal thought which preceded the world, but it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is precisely a distant reflection (ibid.).

Precisely. How precise? Precise enough to say, for example, that In the beginning the Creator creates the the heavens and the earth, AKA the vertical and the horizontal. It took some 2,500 years for science to catch up with the truth that our cosmos has an absolute transcendent beginning, and 47 years later there still exist physicists who are trying with all their intellect (!) to find some way to wiggle out of this theistic checkmate.

But as things stand, there is no way out: we just have to accept the truth, no matter how pleasant. No, our universe is not a bouncy house with infinite iterations. We can rule that one out based on entropy, plus, all existing signs point to the cosmos expanding forever. The idea that it will eventually collapse in on itself is just that: not only an idea, but an idea born of antitheistic passion: intelligent stupidity.   

And if the cosmos were to somehow collapse in on itself, the idea that it would then bloom into another impossibly information-rich cosmos is just begging the question of how all this finely-tuned information got here to begin with. If someone tries to sell you that BS, sock 'em with Occam, I say. 

So, we agree -- and can't help agreeing -- with Schuon, that our own consciousness reminds and proves to us 

that in the beginning was the Spirit. Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be.

Concur: not only inconceivable, but the most inconceivable. Is he exaggerating? 

Please. Schuon never exaggerates. You may or may not agree with him, but he always writes with precision, so much so that he actually switched languages from German to French because he thought the latter facilitated increased metaphysical precision over the former. That's commitment! Also proof that thought is prior to language, not merely a product of it: he couldn't precisely say what he needed to say in German. (Towards the end of his life he returned to his mother tongue in order to write poetry.)

Where does this leave us English speaking yahoos? No worries. If it's a good word, we'll just steal it and insert it into our lingo. We are the world's most accomplished linguistic appropriators, and I suppose Finnegans Wake is the last word on that score. Joyce "could not repose contentedly within the bounds of experience and expression delimited by the Anglo-Saxon tongue," and "seized all language for his province" (Campbell & Robinson).

Did he succeed? Don't ask me. I was a Radio-TV-Film major. I'm just impressed that someone would try to combine English, Latin, Greek, Sanskrit, Gaelic, Russian, Italian, French, German, Finnish, Arabic, Malay, Persian, Hindustani, Samoyad, and more. 

Could there exist, say, a Chinese Joyce, appropriating every other language in order to make its universal point(s)? Indeed, could even pp. 10-17 of my bʘʘk be translated into Chinese? Doubtful. I would ask my literary agent if he's fielded any requests from Chinese publishers, but I haven't heard from him in over 15 years, and I'm pretty sure he must be dead by now.  

Anyway, what happens when we -- as a former civilization -- deny Spirit and replace it with matter? Well, first, we don't know, and second, we're in the process of finding out, good and hard, aren't we? We don't know what a post-Truth, post-freedom, post-Christian civilization looks like, do we?

Speak for yourself, because I don't think it's all that difficult to read the Signs of the Times. I say the gift of prophecy is given by the Holy Spirit to most Raccoons, at least to a certain extent. We can all see around temporal corners because intelligence as such puts us in contact with the essential, the universal, and the timeless. It's just another way of saying that what can't continue won't continue, even if the transition is a tad catastrophic. In any event,

With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored (Dávila).