Questions.
We live in an age awash in stupid answers to even stupider questions. As we’ve been saying, the attainment of insight is a function of the tension produced by questioning.
If you don’t ask questions, you’ll have no insights, and you ask stupid questions, then it is as if all reality becomes Karine Jean Pierre, responding with impossibly stupid pseudo-answers. Instead of discovering what is the case, you’ll only find out what is not and cannot be the case.
More generally, there is a distinction between information and insight; the former is a passive reception, the latter an active achievement.
In order to reach these incurious idiots, the idiots will have to somehow discover their idiocy, but that’s painful, while such defensive postures as smugness, superiority, contempt, and disdain are fun (even if never funny, as proven by the likes of Colbert, Kimmel, Oliver, Fallon, et al).
An essay called The Hard Labor of Christian Apologetics (https://www.thecatholicthing.org/2022/10/19/the-hard-labor-of-Christian-apologetics/?mc_cid=b797eb8e37&mc_eid=c604663a22), relates how “our activist, victim culture of outrage”
lacks even the bare minimum of common ground necessary for rational engagement -- namely, respect for rational engagement itself.
The elite mob is "increasingly so deeply defined by disordered passions that it is incapable of reasoning, which is in large part what apologetics is all about.” As a result, progress is reduced to a one-way descent into pre-Christian barbarism.
Which reminds us of Chesterton’s description of the suicide of thought, and of the one thought that ought to be stopped -- that is, the thought that stops thought. But nowadays entire academic departments are devoted to stopping this thought and plunging us into the credentialed stupidity of relativism and sophistry.
While America is at the leading edge of this progressive eclipse of reality, wokeness is now our leading export, so the rest of anti-Christendom is catching up fast. The progressive left doesn’t mind our cultural imperialism so long as it ends in the conquest of intelligence and colonization of reality. Nor do they mind cultural appropriation, so long as it is their own insanity that is being appropriated.
What to do and where to begin? For "even the most air-tight, logically persuasive arguments... will have little, if any effect on people who have been catechized to believe their emotions, not their intellects.”
But perhaps this is nothing new, rather, the same old same old that’s been going on since the beginning, only painted a new color. Consider Orthodoxy, which was published in 1908 but will never get old:
Thoroughly worldly people never understand even the world; they rely altogether on a few cynical maxims which are not true.
Instead of insight, our age is characterized by a systematic anti-insight that amounts to an officially approved conspiracy theory. In fact, not only is it approved, it is mandatory, enforced by the state-media-academic-big tech industrial complex.
Chesterton describes what anti-insight looks like and how it functions: its
most sinister quality is a horrible clarity of detail; a connecting of one thing with another in a map more elaborate than a maze.
One of the names for this clear but conspiratorial connecting of dots is intersectionality. For example, it is the work of a moment to connect an imaginary “climate crisis” to an equally imaginary class of its victims.
Thus, our vice president easily discerned the connection of hurricane Ian to global warming, then telling us the state must dole out relief to the Communities of Color who are disparately impacted by the imaginary intersection of Climate Change and Black and Brown Bodies or something.
Which is perfectly reasonable, bearing in mind that “The madman is not the man who has lost his reason” but “the man who has lost everything but his reason.” For anyone can fall victim to reasoning with false premises, but it takes a real genius to do so with premises that aren’t even false.
Thus, “The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory.” Any questions?
Chesterton is really on to something when he explains how such minds move “in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a larger circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but not so large."
Turns out the metaphysician can do a lot with a circle, even everything to a certain extent. Schuon often writes of how the circle may provide a visual aid to the metaphysical conception of reality.
We begin with two circles, even though these are actually but two views of the same circle. One of them consists of concentric circles around an infinite point at the center, the other consisting of radii emanating from this central point toward infinitude.
The first thing to notice is that the concentric circles get smaller as we approach the center, even though the reality they symbolize is bigger (e.g., intellect is closer to the center than matter, but obviously the more encompassing).
At the center is, of course, God himself -- even the God-beyond-God, if you like, which is to say, the infinite apophatic ground and source of everything.
Running short on time. To be continued...
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