Cosmopathology

I keep changing the title, but Cosmopathology will have to do...

Even in summary form I still don't understand half of what Voegelin is trying to say, but the other half has me wondering about whether, just as there are medical and psychiatric conditions, can there can be anthropological, political, and even cosmic pathologies? A DSM of metapolitics? 

In a certain sense we can all agree that, say, the political system of the Soviet Union was intrinsically pathological compared to the U.S. But can we dig down to the level of principles and establish an objectively comprehensible diagnostic system? Who knows, but we can have some fun trying.

The political system of the USSR, like ours (used to be, anyway), was indeed rooted in immutable principles, although it was a mutable immutability based upon the needs of the state at any given moment. 

The order of the Soviet state was "in harmony with the truth of history" (of dialectical materialism) and its explicit purpose was "the establishment of the realm of freedom and peace." Opponents who ran 

counter to the truth of history [would] be defeated in the end; nobody [could] be at war with the Soviet Union legitimately but must be a representative of untruth in history, or, in contemporary language, an aggressor; and the victims are not conquered but liberated from their oppressors and therewith from the untruth of their existence.

Get your white ass on the right side of history, bigot! 

Yes, that creepy feeling you get on exposure to the news (i.e., the journalistic agents of the narratrix) is the feeling that we are beyond the point of something merely "analogous" happening in our own culture; rather, it is the very same underlying pathology, only with some novel expressions such as the hysterical transgender social contagion (hysteria by its nature taking many forms, a subject to which Bailie devotes a couple of chapters).

I'll begin with the editor's introduction and review what got me to thinking along these lines. You may have to link some of the passages and fill in some of the blanks, but Raccoons will not find it difficult to intuit what Bob is thinking.

On what basis should we order our lives and society?

Good question, and in many ways the first question.

Like Hayek, Voegelin recognized the underlying commonality of so called right- and leftwing expressions of the same underlying cosmic pathology, and tried to "understand the rising influence of ideological fanaticisms," and how "they involve substituting world-immanent objects, such as the race or nation, for divine reality." 

Thus, in grasping the underlying principles, one can "equally diagnose the 'disease' of contemporary totalitarian movements."

Voegelin has been gone since 1985, but sometimes it takes a dead man to know the bobvious: Silvio, I gotta go / Find out something only dead men know (Dylan).

What else does Voegelin know? Oh, for example, that human consciousness is "a meeting place or interpenetration of time and timelessness, of the world and the divine 'beyond.'" Which now reminds me of Mose Allison: Meet me at no special place / And I'll be there at no particular time. 

Postmodernity in a notshall. Conversely, Voegelin "identifies a dimension of reality beyond the rhythmic play of forces in the spatiotemporal universe," which is "both the invisible 'ground' of finite reality and the invisibly 'inward' essence of human beings":

Through this discovery the whole of reality -- the cosmos -- 'differentiates' into a finite world and a divine Beyond, while human consciousness stratifies into worldly and transcendent dimensions.

"Modern political thought" is "distorted by unrealistic and misleading portrayals of the human condition." In other words, diseased. Dis-ordered. De-formed. Rachel Levine, and then some, for he is only a symptom of something even more disturbing,

based on a denial of transcendence of the "ground" of reality, and on the conviction that immanent reality alone is real -- and perfectible.

In short, immanence <---> transcendence constitute an irreducible and complementary duo,

the two notions having entered human thought only as paired symbols in the context of experiences wherein the one cosmos is differentiated into finite things and the non-finite origin or ground of those things. Modern dreams of worldly perfectibility, therefore... are based on a category error.

A BIG error, some say the BIGGEST error, because "it reflects, and sustains, 'existential closure' to the transcendent ground, a closure that pervades... much of modern thought and social life."

Raccoons call this big error vertical closure, and it encompasses "modern political movements such as progressive liberalism, Marxism, Communism and National Socialism," each exemplifying "to a greater or lesser degree, a 'secular' gnostic attitude" promising "the transfiguration of this world..." 

So, postmodernity is modernity saying can I buy some steroids from you? It results in an "eclipse of transcendent meaning," and with it, "personal and political disorientation on an unprecedented scale."

Going back to that creepy feeling you get on exposure to these sick volkers. Put it this way: "nothing can expel a religion except another religion" (Bailie), or, to put it another way, religions are too powerful to be displaced by anything short of another one. And in this new political religion, we are the devils. 

I'm going to pause now and pick up the thread tomorrow...