Of the frequently clueless Stanley Baldwin, Churchill remarked that
Occasionally he stumbled over the truth, but hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Seems to me that this pattern has been going on since Genesis 3. For on the one hand,
In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter (Dávila).
However, man prefers the shiny new lie to the unvarnished truth. Indeed, if this weren't the case, psychologists would have nothing to do.
Back in my day, psychotherapy involved patiently digging beneath the comforting lies to get at the truth, whereas nowadays it involves burying it under a steaming pile of wokeness. Nevertheless, both approaches go to this elementary distinction between lies that distract, distort, and disguise, and the Truths that Matter.
Speaking of woke lies, I wonder what's the latest with my old tribe, the American Psychological Association? Seems that it's the Hidden Epidemic of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome:
as many as 1 in 20 children may be affected by prenatal alcohol exposure, which can cause growth problems and wide-ranging neurocognitive disabilities in addition to problems with learning and behavior.
Well, good. Does this mean the APA somehow stumbled on to the truth that the fetus is human being with a right not to be harmed? Nah: APA Decries SCOTUS Decision on Abortion:
We are alarmed that the justices would nullify Roe despite decades of scientific research demonstrating that people who are denied abortions are more likely to experience higher levels of anxiety, lower life satisfaction and lower self-esteem compared with those who are able to obtain abortions.
The science is settled: babies have a right not to be harmed in the womb. Except for killing them.
I have evidence that being aborted causes the baby to have lower life satisfaction than babies who are born, but it's just anecdotal.
I read another fine example this morning from the NY Times, this one on the subject of stuttering, conveyed with its usual studied obliviousness. As you know, extremist insurrectionist MAGA fascists think Brandon is just senile, when it's actually a stutter. A cynical and hard-bitten Timesman tried to interview Brandon about it, but
Whenever I asked Biden about what appeared to be his present-day stuttering, the notably verbose candidate became clipped, or said he didn’t remember, or spun off to somewhere new.
Hmm. Almost like he's demented or something, and the stuttering is just a subterfuge invented by his handlers. Nevertheless, the reporter hastily picked himself up and hurried on as if nothing had happened.
Now, Cosmic Orthodoxy maintains that the human intellect is capable of truth -- especially the Truths that Matter -- and therefore Truth as such. Thomas noticed this truth, nor did he just pick himself up and hurry on as if nothing had happened. Rather, he drew out the implications of a truth-bearing being:
Every changeable is reduced to a first unmoved being; hence each particular knowledge is derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error.
Moreover,
Every rational being knows God implicitly in every act of knowledge.... nothing is knowable except through its likeness to first truth.
But capable does not mean actual; rather, it is analogous to potential. I am capable of washing my car, but that doesn't mean it's going to happen.
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride, and if intellect were will, then I'd ride in a clean car. But these two are not necessarily aligned, which again returns us to the goround zero of Genesis 3: pay no attention to the divine intellect behind the screen of appearances!
File under Change My Mind: man is Homo pontifex, i.e.,
the bridge between form and essence, or between “flesh” and “spirit” (Schuon).
Schuon notes that "the whole mystery of the human pontifex" lies in the complementarity between our deiformity and our humility, and I would say that this is quintessentially expressed in the kenosis -- self-emptying -- of Christ.
But Genesis 3 implies that man prefers a grandiose lie to the humble truth:
Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses (Schuon).
Note that a mere animal
cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality, through participation in the one and universal Selfhood.
But why merely participate in God when you can be him? Modern man -- whose very modernity, I suppose, is a measure of the distance from primordial truth --
is spiritually soft and ineffective and intellectually ready to commit every possible betrayal, which will seem to him as summits of intelligence, whereas in reality these betrayals are far more absurd than the excesses of simplicity and emotivity of ancient man.
.... the best proof of this is that the only “dynamism” of which he is still capable is that which tends downwards, and which is no more than a passivity taking advantage of cosmic gravity; it is the agitation of a man who lets himself be carried away by a torrent and who imagines that he is creating this torrent himself by his agitation.
Downward. Have we hit bottom yet? Or will the majority of our citizens continue to confuse flying with falling (and dementia with stuttering), which can feel the same until the moment they don't?
In any event, the majority of our most gifted and expert pilots assure us that we're in the best of hands.
It is only too evident that mental effort does not automatically give rise to the perception of the real; the most capable mind may be the vehicle of the grossest error. The paradoxical phenomenon of even a “brilliant” intelligence being the vehicle of error is explained first of all by the possibility of a mental operation that is exclusively “horizontal,” hence lacking all awareness of “vertical” relationships (ibid.).
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