Well, I just flipped through Alexander's The Phenomenon of Life, but I don't really feel like blogging about it. You get the point: Life starts at the top. So what am I gonna do now?
Hmm. Maybe get back to our chronological survey of philosophical nonstarters, which went off the rails when we were discussing Augustine -- going from time to part-whole relations to persons to the open cosmos to temporal holofractality to truth & presence and to Life Itself.
We'll skip over Thomas, since we're always talking about him, to the next section on The Beginnings of Modern Science, because that revealed a definitive fork in the philosophical road that in turn iterated into any number of snide streets, bland alleys, and nul de slacks, and here we are: so many philosophies, and yet, truth remains the same One it was prior to the scientific revolution.
Or better, what began as a rebellion led to a revolution, all revolutions leading to an upside-down and inside-out cosmos.
For science itself could have easily been integrated into a more holistic and integrated weltanschauung. There was absolutely no need for us to be weltanschlonged by our own knowledge.
Revolutionary theories violate history without impregnating it.
A "revolutionary" today means an individual for whom modern vulgarity is not triumphing quickly enough.
The ideas of the left beget revolutions; revolutions beget the ideas of the right.
So, let's impregnate history and beget some ideas that might slow down the vulgarity.
I used to think -- this being a couple weeks ago -- that the misnamed American revolution was just a rebellion aimed at restoring our natural political rights. Now I wonder, because it was actually part of a much wider revolutionary project that affected everything, this being the so-called "Enlightenment," which ended up shedding less Light than it yoinked.
I'm still thinking about it, but the thought was provoked while reading a provocative book called Puritan's Empire: A Catholic Perspective on American History. You could say that it is revisionist history, or perhaps de-visionist, as it is harshly critical of the Enlightenment vision that inspired the founders. They meant well, but there's a reason why the left is and always will be the Good Intentions Paving Company.
More generally, even before reading the book, I had been wondering how we got here -- how it all led to the current madness. Was there some identifiable flaw at the very founding of the United States, some sort of latent virus responsible for the shocking devolution from George Washington to Joe Biden? Clearly, something went wrong, but was it located in historical contingency or built into the constitutional cake?
For example, people speculate that we took a wrong turn with Thomas Jefferson, or Justice Marshall, or Andrew Jackson, or Lincoln, or Woodrow Wilson, or FDR, but perhaps it was inevitable, man being man. You can hardly manproof a manmade document.
I'm no Nikki Haley fan, but she did have a point in trying to widen our perspective on the causes of the Civil War, which some people say goes back to the struggle between Roundheads and Cavaliers in England, which in America took the form of the puritanical assholes of the north and the free-living denizens of the south.
Looked at this way, our current puritanical wokeholes are the same intrusive busybodies in a pestilent new form. Come to think of it, David Hackett Fischer says as much in his Albion's Seed: Four British Folkways in America. There's a reason why Massachusetts is still Massachusetts and Texas still Texas (and why they want to use illegal immigration to turn the latter into the former).
Cain and Abel.
Maybe, in that some people say this deadly kerfuffle marks the beginning of the age-old urban-rural conflict: Cain was from red Massachusetts, Abel from blue Texas. Too bad he left his gun at home.
If we really want to widen our perspective, it's also a right-brain/left brain thing, which is to say, reality and ideology, respectively.
But for our purposes, we want to talk about science and scientism. However, we slept late and will have to get to it in the next post.
4 comments:
The urban/rural divide and health outcomes.
Abel's shortened life notwithstanding.
Makes me wonder again about just how badly kids were psychologically affected during the lockdown. We knew a few who lived in apartments, didn't get to play outside, and interacted with almost nobody but immediate family for most of that year; the physical effects were obvious (baseball kids, they all came back pudgy and pretty out of shape for being pre-teen boys). The mental ones less so, but still real.
"...Now I wonder, because it was actually part of a much wider revolutionary project that affected everything, this being the so-called "Enlightenment," which ended up shedding less Light than it yoinked...."
Ya know, when our Founders began founding us, they were less interested in establishing something revolutionarily new, than in reaffirming what was good and old. Hebrew was considered a vital classical language and was taught in our colleges, and they were still worth going to in pursuit of wisdom. But as the calendar advanced, that oldest of revolutionary ideas began to make its presence known... as I found that this professor worriedly noted in his brief look back on the last century, from his perch at Princeton in 1805, he saw a new view emerging of
"... what schools are for, and of who we are and should be, and whatever good intentions had initially unleashed it, would be undermined and undone by it, the more they 'succeeded' in applying it. One clear eyed professor at Princeton, Samuel Miller(1769-1850), hit the nail on the head in sounding an early warning of this in 1805, in his "A brief retrospect of the eighteenth century",
"...This doctrine of the omnipotence of education, and the perfectibility of man, seems liable, among many others, to the following strong objections : — First. It is contrary to the nature and condition of man...."
Spot on.
Well I didn't quite make it back to the future, but I did mostly make it up to the present, which is pretty great. I think.
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