Progressivism: Come for the Vanity, Stay for the Profits

Few things are as consequential as our necessary ignorance, the awareness of which flowing from our prior acknowledgement of Necessary Being. To acknowledge the latter is to simultaneously affirm our own contingency, and ultimately nothingness -- or rather, a nothingness that could only remedied if we could somehow be "grafted" to Necessary Being -- like branches on a vine or something.

You wouldn't think such metaphysical considerations would echo all the way down to economics, but human beings clearly struggle with their status as a contingent ciphers, so, in the words of the Aphorist, Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God.

On the one hand Man believes that his impotence is the measure of things, but on the other, Man calls “absurd” what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence. This results in impotence and absurdity masquerading as meaning and mastery -- for example, in the Soviet Union, where the presumed omniscience and omnipotence redounded to utter ruin -- both to the nation and countless souls.

There's a lesson in there, but man never stops ignoring it -- in particular, ignoring his own necessary ignorance. 

But again, our necessary ignorance is the shadow of Necessity itself, the latter being the source of both our knowledge and our ignorance. Knowledge is a wonderful thing, but I suppose we could say that knowledge without ignorance results in that Pride which goeth before a fall.

Or, we could say that knowledge without wisdom can just as easily lead us straight into the abyss. Wisdom is the material object of philosophy, for which reason the Aphorist says... many things, but let's try to limit ourselves to three big ones:

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know.

Check. 

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

Check. 

In philosophy a single naïve question is sometimes enough to make an entire system come tumbling down.

Checkmate. 

Bob, why are you always plagiarizing Dávila? Several reasons: first, he is plagiarizing me, in that he expresses what I already believe and know with the minimum of words and maximum impact, like a needle with a great deal of force behind it, such that it goes straight through me.

But more generally, what Nasr says about Schuon equally applies to Dávila: his writings "are characterized by essentiality, universality and comprehensiveness." Essentiality:

they always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with.... reaching the very core of the subject....

To read his works is to be transplanted from the shell to the kernel, to be carried on a journey that is at once intellectual and spiritual from the circumference to the Center.  

Universal:  

he does not confine himself solely to a particular world, period or region. His perspective is truly universal in the sense of embracing all orders of reality from the Divine to the human...

In this regard, note the function of appearances, which (as alluded to at the top) are both ignorance and knowledge, depending: "the particular at once veils and manifests the Universal as form hides and reveals the Essence."

Comprehensive: they range from the

metaphysical peak which touches on the infinite expanse of the heavens to particular fields such as formal theology, anthropology and psychology....

From the foothills below to the clouds that veil the toppermost beyond. There are differences, to be sure, but that's a different post, which, like this one, hasn't yet been written.

Back to our subject, which is... a kind of anti-subject as important as any subject per se, AKA our necessary ignorance. 

Not to re-belabor the point, but "the basic order of the Great Society cannot rest entirely on design," and cannot "aim at particular foreseeable results." Imagine, for example, trying to "aim the climate" at a particular temperature 100 years hence!

Who would ever attempt such a thing? The presumption is off the charts, and makes the builders of Babel seem sober in comparison. 

Nevertheless, that's the progressive left in a nutshell, which we might say is the institutionalization of the fall of man. Which I do mean literally -- or essentially, universally, and comprehensively. This institution

is based on conceptions which are demonstrably false, yet are so pleasing to human vanity that they have gained great influence and are constantly employed even by people who know that they rest on a fiction...

Come for the vanity, stay for the profits.