Athens and Jerusalem vs. Mecca and Manhattan

In place of Manhattan we could have used the less alliterate Ockham (William of, and his anti-realist nominalism), Königsberg (Kant), Prussia (Nietzsche and Marx), Frankfurt (School), Paris (Derrida). Whatever the case, the point is that the intellectual barbarians are inside the gates and institutions of Western civilization, and are doing their utmost to let in the literal kind. 

Vertical barbarism is prior to the horizontal kind, or in other words, ideas have consequences. 

One could say that Athens and Jerusalem represent the left and right brains, respectively, or immanence and transcendence, with Homo sapiens being the monkey in the middle. But again, we're not so much between these two as a dynamic synthesis of them. 

Now, many people have commented on what appears to be a surge of anti-Semitism in the world and on the progressive left in general. 

Actually, these over-educated youngsters are too stupid to be anti-Semitic per se; rather, the Jew-hatred is just an inevitable consequence of their ideological indoctrination: if Israelis are white (even though the majority are Mizrahi or Sephardic) and affluent (instead of intelligent and industrious), then they are colonizers, oppressors, and beneficiaries of illicit privilege. The indoctrination is like a cognitive web that indiscriminately catches Jews, that's all -- even Ethiopian ones, homosexual ones, and pro-Palestinian ones. 

I was thinking about the Athens/Jerusalem cliche on my walk yesterday, which is usually taken to mean the synthesis of "faith and reason" at the foundation of western civilization, but if yesterday's post was on the right track, then it's more significant than that, going to an ineluctably closed mental horizon vs. one that is open to transcendental memos and vertical murmurandoms. Yes, the content of the latter is important, but the phenomenon itself is equally important, especially on an individual basis.

For example, anyone can be given the content of revelation, but unless we are open to what it points to and from, it will likely just fall on rocky soil. After all, I myself learned the rudiments of Christianity as a child, more than enough to reject it on grounds of being frankly religulous. My being was not open to what was on offer, which was first and foremost a "relationship."  

A relationship to what? Yes, to the vast and unseen worlds comprising the realm of the metabob. I would, of course, eventually find out about the infrabob, but the one implies the other because there can be no down without an up, nor is mere "natural" Bobness self-explanatory. No one can be their own efficient or final cause. 

Thus, the openness must be prior to the content. Analogously, unless you're good at hallucinating, you have to have an internet connection before the content can arrive on your screen. Likewise, you need some sort of interior connection to Celestial Central in order to be in the proper disposition to receive the in-formation.

Which, of course, is what prayer, contemplation, and meditation are all about; likewise the sacraments, each being a conduit of grace. And again, it is our choice as to whether the conduit is allowed to flow or is short-circuited. 

I just said "our choice," but they say the seeking is already a function of the finding, which I suppose means that it's already a grace to seek it. In fact, "prevenient grace" is available to one and all, in contrast to the sanctifying grace available after conversion.

Back to the question above: a relationship to what? In a way, you could say "just that: a relationship." In other words, to relate is to be in between, so it's more relevant to ask "in between what?" 

Really, it's rather like life, which is always a dance between order and chaos. You'll know when the dance is over because you'll be dead. Life Itself is an open structure that imports matter, information, and energy while dissipating entropy.

Which makes me think that "mind" is like Life Itself in a higher key: it too is an open system, but open to what? What does it import and metabolize? 

Well, let's see. Truth, obviously. But prior to this must be the love we import as infants, which is thoroughly entangled with the development of our neurology. I heard a talk by Rob Henderson yesterday in which he cited the dismal outcomes of children caught up in the foster system. Something like half of them end up in the judicial system. Moreover, their outcomes are exponentially worse than children who suffer mere material poverty.  

My point is that the child is an open system that is certainly entitled to certain things such as love, stability, a mother and father, etc., in order to attain its telos. You might say that denied a healthy relationship with parents, they develop an unhealthy one with the surrogate parent we call the Law.

I'm out of time, but how did we get here? What does this have to do with the title of the post?

I'm thinking. And what I'm thinking is, don't ask me, ask them -- for example, ask the quintessentially progressive BLM, whose stated goal was to "disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure."

And from whom did they get that nonsense? From a couple of dead white males, Marx and Engels:

“The bourgeois family will vanish as a matter of course when its complement vanishes, and both will vanish with the vanishing of capital.... The bourgeois clap-trap about the family and education, about the hallowed co-relation of parents and child, becomes all the more disgusting, the more, by the action of Modern Industry, all the family ties among the proletarians are torn asunder, and their children transformed into simple articles of commerce and instruments of labour.”

“The modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom, since from the beginning it is related to agricultural services,” Engels wrote in  The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, quoting Marx. “It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.” 

I see that we never really got to the Mecca connection, but we will.