In an article on the Drag Queen of Beers, the author properly and dispassionately characterizes the whole QWERTY+ movement as "an ideology built around a mental illness." One look at their cringey spokesfreak, Dylan Mulvaney, confirms the diagnosis. Nevertheless.
What does it all mean? Not vis-a-vis the stupid daily news cycle, but in the context of total reality, and for all time? That's why I'm here: to answer such questions, or at least circumnavelgaze them and bleat around the Busch. Let others describe the surface phenomena. We want to drill down to the noumenal center of this madness.
Now, to even call it madness presupposes normality, and with this we're off to the erasure of reality. For to say normality is to say form, or standard, prototype, norm, and ideal; it is a kind of "absolutism," since it posits an absolute telos to which the human being at once strives for and by which it may be measured. Failure exists, and it is failure to actualize the latent form.
Which we all fail to do as a condition of existence. You could call it sin, or you could call it "not being God." Prior to postmodern madness, pretty much everyone could agree that "there's an Absolute, and I'm not it."
And it is madness -- literally -- because to remove the standard isn't just a passive negation, but rather, an active affirmation of.... anything and everything: no standard means no standard.
Except that everywhere and everywhen, man is man, so there is always a standard. Thus, for example, for the mentally ill, the mentally ill Dylan Mulvaney is an in-your-face standard of mental wellbeing. Not only is the image meant to flatter the abnormal (and perhaps more importantly, to signal virtue and status to the image makers), it's intended to insult the normal.
Message received.
Standards are also enforced, and people are penalized or punished for failing to adhere to them.
Message received.
But again, let's widen this out and connect it with modern philosophy as such -- to Socrates' Children. We can't cover all the children, since there are 28 of them, and a handful are even normal, such as Norris Clarke and G.K. Chesterton.
A few are just pernicious fools -- Comte and Dewey come to mind -- but five in particular stand out as truly malevolent. Indeed to call them merely mentally ill is to give them a kind of pass on their malevolence, as if they couldn't help being such assouls.
Nietzsche is patient zero of postmodernity, but he is at least entertaining, plus he took seriously the implications of the death of God. Killing the Absolute is not only a Big Deal, it's the biggest possible deal.
Our small-minded contemporary atheists such as Dawkins and Harris imagine they're courageous truth-tellers, forgetting that they spout their nonsense from within a Christian civilization that still -- albeit barely -- values courage and truth. They're living on the fumes of Christian metaphysics but don't know it.
But if you do manage to kill God, where does this leave you? Again, credit to Nietzsche for not drawing back from the abyss, and for having the courage of his lack of convictions. For as Kreeft implies, it's a bit like imagining what the solar system is like after the sun goes dark. What solar system? What light? What imagination?
A big part of the problem is the historical detachment of theology from philosophy, and philosophy from science.
In reality, we live in a hierarchical cosmos that descends from Principle above to manifestation below, but the Protestant revolution shattered this unity, clearing the field for the reduction of intelligence to horizontal scientism. For the doctrine of total depravity equally means total stupidity, which is why this view of the world is much closer to retail Islam than it is to wholesoul Aquinas.
Granted, most evangelicals deny the principles on which it is founded, and who could blame them? Free will exists, the world is intelligible to our reason, and we can grow toward -- or flee from -- the spiritual archetype alluded to above, AKA metacosmic normality.
It seems to me that Neitzsche is just the shadow of a Calvin, for both are equally absurd. In eliminating God, Neitzsche jettisons the logos, which is
no less than "the nature of things" or "the order of being." Really, for Nietzsche, there is no being. There is only becoming. And there is no truth. There is only lying. Language and reason are inherently self-deceptive. Words are hypocritical masks painted on the face of the Will to Power.
Again, credit to Fred for following his convictions all the way to the insane asylum. Of course, today he'd be offered an endorsement deal for Budweiser, but here again, he would have had utter contempt for such an effort to co-opt and market the terrible truth that God is dead and that we have killed him.
Short morning, so to be continued...
16 comments:
Whatever happened to playing the gland you're dealt.
Regarding the "historical detachment of theology from philosophy", I found Kreeft's diagram of the division (showing the split from the medieval synthesis into the Renaissance and Reformation paths) very illuminating.
I only have Volume IV, and I don't think the diagram is in there. But I'm working on an updated synthesis.
Didn't have anything intelligent to add today, but in Ace's quick hits today, there's a video featuring the Busch Slayer and his friend waxing rhapsodic about "girlhood" while sporting 5 o'clock shadows. Their affect is worse than nails on a chalkboard. I am unsure whether I want to vomit, punch them both in the face, or just send up a fervent prayer for SMOD to make an appearance.
Is trans the leprosy of our time? I remember when it used to be. If Jesus was around today, would he have still healed the tranny after all the mass media popularization? Now, I’m not saying that Benny Hinn could slap the boy-to-girl tranny on the head and suddenly boys clothes pop on, but why can't we go that way?
It's hard enough being a boy or girl without being compelled by the state to decide if you are one.
The diagram of the split between medieval and modern philosophy is in Volume III. Will be interested to read your synthesis. To this point there is a philosopher on Twitter named Eve Keneinan who simplifies matters into a choice between Team Plato vs Team Nietzsche, aka Team Truth vs Team No-truth.
Indeed Dupree. Now imagine a modern-day Joseph Mengele having a say.
Clearly, if I was Kid Rock I’d just march into a mental hospital and mow em all down. Maybe he, like I, had a bad experience at the hands of a tranny once. But I’m trying to overcome the resultant prejudice and use a more peaceful Christian methodology. Lucky for me I found out that Bob was once a shrink and so badda bing, here I am. Google is a wonderful thing. Maybe Bob and the OneCosmos gang can embark on a new mission, to heal the tranny?
I mean if I was a struggling tranny, all grimacing and gesticulating wildly while telling myself to DO NOT PUT GIRLS CLOTHES ON AGAIN, yet desperately wanting to do it, to then rationalize wildly while stumbling haltingly towards that evil closet (did I mean summer haltertop?)… an impartial observer would certainly know that a part of me desperately wants help. Maybe that’s our mission here. Maybe we can help. Besides the usual insultainment that is. I suspect trannies are pretty used to that.
Randy: I don't think I'll be reading Vol. III. I experience such a marked narrowing of my psychic aperture when I expose myself to these thinkers, that it's distressing. It reminds me of that eye disease that progressively shrinks the field of vision until the person sees only through a pinhole.
Fully agree on the distress experienced when reading the moderns, so it is wise to pace yourself. Nevertheless, there is joy to be had as you understand more fully that the ancients were right all along. As Aquinas has observed, it is "part of the infinite goodness of God, that He should allow evil to exist, and out of it produce good."
I know what you mean -- as Davila says, "It is easy to convert to a doctrine when we hear a defender of the opposite."
Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.
Nothing is more dangerous for faith than to frequent the company of believers. The unbeliever restores our faith.
At first I saw the truth in this. But then I started getting the niggling feeling this might be a satanic trick. To get us to attend drag shows. And to put our kids back into marxist public schools. Please advise.
"And it is madness -- literally -- because to remove the standard isn't just a passive negation, but rather, an active affirmation of.... anything and everything: no standard means no standard."
As noted by jester G.K. Chesterton: 'When men choose not to believe in God, they do not thereafter believe in nothing, they then become capable of believing in anything.', which Bill Clinton pragmatically employed with "it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is', is'. And the real capital of the pro-regressive economy, is That depends upon whatever you can use activism to force public opinion to repeat on command.
Drag queen of beers. Heh.
Randy said "...a choice between Team Plato vs Team Nietzsche, aka Team Truth vs Team No-truth..."
When going through the roster of the opposing team, there's Descartes who firmly put de cart before the horse-sense, and of course Rousseau, Hume, and Kant, but it's important to not overlook the original Power couple, Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes, without whom the depth of understanding in modernity would not have as easily become so nasty, brutish, and short.
Hey Ben.
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