Religion Never Sleeps

Or something. To repeat our thesis: politics is downstream from culture, which is downstream from “God” or "the absolute" or “religion” or “spirit.” 

The reason I put these in quotes is because by definition the One is one, so things that are downstream from it are existentially diverse but never ontological contradictions. 

Rather, for example, it is because God is one that mankind is one -- that all men are brothers. Therefore, to simultaneously affirm God while embracing Marxism or identity politics (but I repeat myself) is one of those performative contradictions brother Nicolas is always joking about: 

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

Ever notice how 

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot.

Never gets old. But

The liberal mentality is an angelic visitor impervious to earthly experiences.

Earthly experiences, like, oh, crime, inflation, invasion, censorship, a demented president, etc. Failing schools, politicization of justice, climate models that perfectly predict increased income but not temperature.

A lexicon of ten words is sufficient for the Marxist to explain history.

I can do it in nine: What’s yours is mine and what’s mine’s me own. Or four: You have. I want. Or one: envy.

It’s funny because it’s true: 

Within Marxist categories not even Marxism is explicable.

Readers already get the point, but let’s belabor it just a little more. In a way, Marxism is the last word in Protestantism, by which I don’t mean the Christian kind, but rather, the ontological kind -- as in a total revolt and rejection of reality or nature or intelligence.

You could say that Marxism literally reduces reality to total intelligibility while denying intelligence. This is because your consciousness is totally false if you reject Marx's Scientific Socialism, which is nothing like the old religious kind.

Pretty neat trick, but Marx is far from the only pig at that trough. For example, I was trained in psychoanalysis, which shows how everything is derived from unconscious conflict except for psychoanalysis itself, and we hold the keys to the unconscious kingdom: what we loose there will be loosed in the ego, but it’s gonna take a few years and cost a fortune.

One of the perennial contenders for Best Performative Contradiction in a Supporting Role goes to Darwinism, which gives itself an exemption to the rule that everything is in flux: nothing is permanent except tenured primates.

Which now reminds me of that old post of which a reader reminded me, the one about Darwin Man, Destroyer of Worlds. 

I said I would eventually pull all the threads together, and I might even have meant it! Here's a suddenly relevant extract:

if you bother trying to adapt your mind to the latest findings of science, you know in advance that you are building your mind on sand. In short, you know ahead of time that the theory is ultimately wrong (or wrong in the ultimate sense), and will eventually be overturned or transcended. So why go to all of the trouble of adapting one's being to it, as opposed to merely using it as a temporary probe to investigate the material world?

This is of the utmost urgency, because what if you adapt your mind to the latest scientific fad and end up, say, cutting off your johnson? And once you’ve done so, what are the chances you’ll return to the reality that says it wasn’t such a good idea to cut off your johnson after all? Oopsie.

You know the old gag: It’s difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it. And it’s even more difficult to get a man to understand he's a man when he just cut off his johnson.

 

More from that old post:

the left pulled off the ultimate fraud by equating belief in absolutes with authoritarianism, and the acceptance of radical relativism with "liberation." 

Yes, it is a sort of liberation -- into nihilism on the one hand and the omnipotent state on the other. For if there is nothing but change -- "permanent change" -- this is just another way of saying "absolute relativism" and pure subjectivity, which is a self-refuting metaphysic that elevates Will over Truth. Truth becomes a function of raw power and eventually pure, unremitting tenure.

Under Darwinism, there can be nothing special about human beings, no vertical intersection with the eternal. Rather, all is horizontal. The ontological divide that separates human and animal is completely effaced, as is the bright line between matter and life. Ultimately this reduces to Atoms in the Void, just as Whitehead said some eighty years ago. Or Adams in the Void, as Petey said just a few seconds ago.

That post ended with a quote by Hayek, and so will this one: 

The most dangerous stage in the growth of civilization may well be that in which man has come to regard all these beliefs as superstitions and refuses to accept or submit to anything which he does not rationally understand. The rationalist whose reason is not sufficient to teach him those limitations of the power of conscious reason, and who despises all the institutions and customs which have not been consciously designed, would thus become the destroyer of the civilization built upon them.