Transcendental Flight and Vertical Orientation

Wait, I think the metaphor is still moving -- better club it again!

Yesterday we spoke of the various instruments arrayed on our flight panel, and of which one might be the most important. We decided to go with man’s knowledge of himself, in both its horizontal and vertical dimensions, AKA science and wisdom. 

However, although the two can't actually be separated -- man by definition partaking of both -- a purely horizontal view of man inevitably leads to the slaughterhouse, which is why the 20th was by orders of magnitude the bloodiest in man’s long and lamentable catalogue of crimes against his own kind.

God is probably not the first and certainly not the last to wonder if the creation of man might have been a bit overly optimistic. Man is such a reliable underachiever, and each generation falls for the same old errors painted a new color. No wonder the left wants to lower the voting age, so they can bake in the cosmic stupidity: in the Kingdom of the Retarded, AOC is queen. 

My point is this, and if you don’t believe me, believe Davila: 

Without philosophy the sciences do not know what they know.

As a corollary, with a bad or implicit philosophy, scientism knows a great deal that cannot be true, and knows nothing at all about things that must be true -- including ones that make the practice of science possible. So perhaps you've noticed that

Nothing is more alarming than science in the ignorant.

Like, say, the Incarnation of Science itself, Dr. Fauci.

This systematic amnesia or ideological repression of what man knows about man is a major part of Lonergan’s whole... thing. “Our century [referring to the 20th],” he writes, 

is merely the most recent moment in a cycle of decline in which our self-understanding [read: knowledge of human nature] and our understanding of our common situation have become ever less comprehensible, and our capacity to respond to the challenges posed by this situation has become more and more restricted [not just forgotten but censored and exiled beyond the virtual pale, a la Twitter].

As alluded to a couple of posts back, since we are always situated in the vertical, we can fall into an ever-tightening graveyard spiral, or be drawn upward into the ever-widening gyre of the Divine Attractor.

To be perfectly accurate, the latter is at once both ever-widening but focused around God, which seems paradoxical but not at all, since God is analogous to a dimensionless point, which is therefore Infinitude itself. At any rate, very roomy. 

Since we’re all sailing through the nonlocal ether, how do we know whether we’re pointed up or down? Recall JFK Jr., who wasn't instrument trained and was therefore among the last three to find out the hard way he was probably flying upside down when the flight came to a sudden end. By then he had probably lost all spatial and visual orientation, so flying wasn’t the problem, rather, avoiding obstacles such as, oh, the earth.

Analogously, supposing we’re up in the air of transcendence, how to we maintain our vertical orientation? What are the cues and landmarks we can use to gauge our direction and our progress?

Well, for starters, there is capital-T Tradition, which consists of a body of wisdom resulting from hundreds of generations who have confronted the same situations. You could say that much of it is “unexamined” or “precritical,” but then again, Death, Misery, and Dysfunction are pretty effective means of finding out you probably shouldn't have done that. In the words of Amy Winehouse, I Told You I was Trouble, but she didn't listen.

Anyway, let’s continue with Lonergan’s description of the ins & outs of our death spiral:  

In this cycle of decline our horizons contract, our language is devalued, our questions are brushed aside, and our experiences become a flow of alienating absurdity.

Gosh. That sounds… familiar.  

Moreover, these “facts” about ourselves descend like an iron curtain and cut us off from the realization of our potentialities; they provide ready-made justifications for the views of those who would see us as little more than animals in a [horizontal] habitat…

Lonergan saw very clearly where the plane was headed, since he was instrument trained: "At the root of this crisis is a crisis in our knowledge of ourselves.” 

Which reminds me of what Dennis Prager says about feminism, that the average postmodern toxic female knows far less about human sexuality than did her great-grandmothers. These spiteful mutants are the very image of naivety posing as sophistication.

Having said that, Lonergan is not a reactionary. He knows that the only way out is forward, and that airplanes cannot fly in reverse.

I suppose that’s a good place to pause.