Why Us?

In yesterday's post we reviewed Norris Clarke's Person as Being, and let's extract a few bullet points:

--Ultimate Reality is neither substance nor relation, but an irreducible complementarity of the two. 

--There is an "indissoluble complementarity" with regard to an "in-itself dimension of being" and a "towards-others aspect." 

--The higher the form of existence, the more developed becomes the relatedness to reality, also the more profound and comprehensive becomes the sphere of this relatedness.

--The human mind is an open system, and most states of pathology can be traced to the question of how open or closed the system is.

These are all metaphysical statements, but how do they apply on the ground, i.e., in the contingent realms of culture and historical flux? I'm reading a book that implicitly touches on this, called Remaking the World: How 1776 Created the Post-Christian West. Superficially the book has nothing to do with Bob's airy abstractions, but looked at another way, it confirms them. 

I say this because if our notion of person is correct, then the most functional and successful civilization will be the one that most conforms to what it means to be a person. 

To cite some obvious counter-examples, the Marxist notion of personhood has had catastrophic results wherever it has been implemented, from the USSR to North Korea to the American university. It seems that bad anthropology results in bad everything else.

The same could be said for the Islamic notion of personhood, which is why Muslim countries bottom out the scale in terms of human flourishing. 

The founding principle of our own nation is that all men are created equal and endowed with certain unalienable rights. The left is systematically opposed to this metaphysic, and if we were to hold a constitutional convention today -- the horror -- they would come up with something more like the following:

We hold these truths to be historically conditioned.... [that we] derive rights that are alienable and transferable depending on the larger question of needs.... that whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, the people will refrain from appealing to self-evident truths, there being no original self to which truth must be true....

We submit a list of grievances knowing full well that our dispute... may only be a matter of language and communication.... To prove this let all our opinions, our deeply felt sentiments and emotions, be submitted to a candid world not in the form of a declaration but a message whose meaning will require interpretation by historians of future generations....

Whereas the very identity of Americans lies in their symbol-forming, language-using nature, whereas we the colonists have no recourse to God, nature, or history to guide our actions, and whereas, therefore, we must rest our case on language and its context...

Not a joke! For we are living through the most left-wing government in modern American history, a grotesque experiment in which 

For the first time in their lives, a truly radical socialist program would supposedly fundamentally transform the way America dealt with the border, immigration, the economy, race relations, foreign policy, energy, law enforcement, crime, education, and social questions such as religion, gender, abortion, and schooling.

In a sense, we were all to be lab rats of sorts, to be experimented on by the radical left and their various critical theories. Now in the last year of the Biden term, we can see the results of that experiment -- and the unfortunate disasters that followed.

Again, these are not just different policies, but they presume -- and enforce -- a different anthropology.  Hence the civil war. We are close to Orwell's prophecy that "History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right."

One of the recurring themes of the book is just how we became so much WEIRDER than the rest, which is to say, Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic, Ex-Christian, and Romantic. 

I am happy to be WEIRD, but I find the -ER to be problematic. The progressive left in particular is not only aggressively -ER, but has appropriated the EI, what with the florid pathologies of academia and woke capitalism. 

I'm old enough to remember when literacy and education didn't serve politics, but rather, we learned "things simply because they interest us and expand our horizons." 

We once saw "learning for its own sake as integral to human flourishing" instead of integral to envy, grievance, auto-victimization, and identity politics. That this has happened in the span of a generation is head-spinning, but there were warning signs along the way, and this book documents them.

Think of how in psychology there is no longer a place for psychologists, hence Canada trying to yank Jordan Peterson's license. I can relate. Wilson writes of how

Society was individualized; the individual was psychologized; psychology was sexualized; sexuality was politicized.

And here we are, with Transgender Visibility Day displacing the most consequential event in all of history (irrespective of whether or not one is a believer).

Back to the -ER, to say "ex-Christian" is not to say "un-Christian," because the former borrows liberally from Christianity. For example,

Ideologically, it draws heavily from the Christian moral imperative to exalt the humble and humble the exalted, as reflected in Christ's teachings... 

Such a stance would be incomprehensible in a pre- or truly anti-Christian civilization. It's just that

The diffusion of a few drops of Christianity into a leftist mind transforms the idiot into a perfect idiot.

And

In the Christianity of the leftist Christian, one of the two elements sooner or later eliminates the other.

Moreover, 

The Christ of the Gospels is not concerned with the economic situation of the poor, but with the moral condition of the rich. 

And it is this warped form of post-Christianity that

reflects deeply Romantic convictions -- channeled and reinterpreted through Marx and Freud in particular -- about innocence, pity, freedom, and the corrupting effects of society.

To be continued, depending on the level of interest, beginning with mine.