Yesterday's post put forth the shocking proposition that the only cure for stupidity is intelligence, just as the only cure for ignorance is knowledge.
Yes, but there are plenty of intelligent people who are ignorant -- or liars, ideologues, relativists, postmodernists, journalists, grievance studies majors, etc. In short, these people -- like all people -- are deeply involved with truth, but have an ambivalent (at best) relationship to it.
I'm just now reading a book, The Phenomenology of the Human Person, that seems to be on this very subject. I say "seems," because I'm only up to page 4. Even so, it already expresses Raccoon doctrine, affirming that man is "the agent of truth," and that "the human person is defined by being engaged with truth, and human action is based on truth."
Here again, one is free to resist or reject truth, but this is -- obviously -- just another way to be involved with it, and also involving others. In other words, we communicate, the central activity of which is "saying something about something." But we are always free to tell lies about something, which renders the latter nothing, since it isn't real. Lies tell us what isn't, not what is.
In a way, the whole human adventure -- or misadventure -- is one long conversation, and conversation presupposes the Other. Now, this otherness is prior to the conversation, meaning that man is intrinsically intersubjective. Without the latter we could perhaps signal, like other animals, but we could not inhabit the open, intersubjective world of thought exchange.
The principle of this endless exchange is, of course, the Trinity. Sokolowski doesn't say that -- yet -- but there are 300+ pages to go, so he'll probably get there.
Truth and Person. Just try to talk about one without the other. Only persons can be involved with truth, and truth can only be known by a person. This inevitably leads to the question of the Incarnation, i.e., the union of Word and flesh, but we'll leave that to the side for now. Meanwhile, let's ponder some aphorisms:
Thinking is often reduced to inventing reasons to doubt what is evident.
The credo of the journalist class.
The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.
The operative word is "life," which is always an open system.
To think like our contemporaries is the recipe for prosperity and stupidity.
Our ruling managerial class, so prosperous and yet so stupid.
Thought can avoid the problem of God as long as it limits itself to mediating on minor problems.
God is the Major Problem and the solution to it. I'll bet.
Speaking of the Endless Conversation,
To think is to have a nonstop dialogue with dead interlocutors.
Who aren't literally dead -- for they are much more alive than our prosperous but stupid contemporaries -- but that's the subject for a different post.
Common sense. What a breakthrough concept!
One must never forget that all classic philosophy is built on common sense, while no ideology is built on common sense.... Realizing that is a great breakthrough (Voegelin, in Sandoz).
Which implies that our adversaries -- or adversaries of Truth, rather -- aren't necessarily stupid, just lacking in common sense. Indeed, the observation that intelligent people can believe idiotic things qualifies as a banality, but why is it true, or meta-true, to be exact?
Hmm. Let's start with what we know, or rather, who we know best, which is to say, Bob. I'm almost as intelligent as I was when I was younger, and yet, like any leftist, I believed all sorts of nonsensical things.
Why? What was going on? Or, what wasn't going on that should have been? How and why did I sever my relationship to truth, or rather, become involved with it in all the wrong ways? How did My Truth declare independence from Truth?
Genesis 3?
Think, Bob, think...
Okay, that snippet right there: think, Bob, think. It reveals one of my principles, i.e., that a type of pure metaphysical thought can disclose the nature of reality.
However, the operative word is pure, which goes to the moral requisites alluded to in yesterday's post. Does this imply a moral oneupmanship on my part? As in, "I know better than you because I am better than you."
The practice of this perennial philo-sophy is a way of life, and this living Way requires several things, including love of wisdom and truth, perpetual openness to the transcendent, and lots of drugs. Well, caffeine and the occasional Zyn pouch anyway. Nicotine is a nootropic, and I'll take any help I can get.
Back to the principle of Pure Thought. There are several wrong ways of engaging in it that we must rule out straight away, for example, any form of rationalism. That's just a nonstarter for any number of reasons, but let's just say Gödel and move on.
In a way, we could place all forms of endeadening Wrongthink into one huge casket of deplorables called ideology. We might say that the way of ideology is at antipodes to the way of philosophy, largely because it reduces philosophy to a specific content and thereby closes off the divine ground, AKA reality. God is no longer a problem, which is an even bigger problem than God himself.
Various reigning dogmas & catechisms are indeed secondary realties that eclipse First Reality (and there can be only one). These are "deadening to the living spirit of faith no less than to the living tension of the philosopher's contemplative (noetic) quest" (Sandoz).
This is also a superimposition of left cerebral hemisphere abstractions over RCH contact with concrete reality, and see McGilchrist for details.
Which reminds me of another critical point alluded to above: living. Just as there exist biological life and death (the latter only intelligible in the context of the former), there are intellectual and spiritual Life & death (or a paradoxical zombie-like "living death," so to spook).
If you are lucky, then somewhere along the way you had exposure to, and were drawn into the attractor of, a Living Person (again, even if technically dead) who initiated you into the life of mind and spirit. If not, then you'll have a hard time understanding what we're talking about.
At the moment, we are enduring a tsunami of spiritually demented ideology washing over what remains of our civilization. It is quite obviously dead, deadening, and deadly, both spiritually and intellectually, but only to the living.
Ironic, is it not, that its standard bearer is literally a dead man walking, Joe Biden?
No, not ironic. Inevitable.
Now, how to combat this zombie apocalypse, or anti-intellectual night of the living dead? Has anyone seen the movie Shutter Island? I saw it just the other night, but it's difficult to discuss without being a spoiler.
Let's just say that you can't just push back against a delusion, for the deluded person will simply incorporate you into their delusion -- like when Adam Schiff accused Tucker Carlson on live TV of being an agent of Putin for questioning the Russia hoax. Likewise, the surest way to be called a racist is to point out the intrinsic racism of the identity politics of the left.
The crisis of consciousness that has propelled alienated intellectuals' assault on all that our most venerable traditions hold dear and true cannot be met merely by reasserting dogmas even more loudly than before (ibid.).
You can't just yell back at the screamers, hate the haters, or resurrect the souldead. "Rather, something more is needed."
The rightness of what has always been right must not only be reaffirmed but also recaptured in the hearts of men and as the living truth of a science of human affairs...
Yes, there are short-term mitigations, such as elections, but let's be honest: the de-Nazification of the left is a multi-generational project, nor can it happen without divine intervention -- or better, without widespread openness to the divine ground. Which is why we agree with the Aphorist that
In history it is [common] sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.
It depends on what we mean by "miracle," but that's about it for this morning. Let's just say that the human subject is the first and most experience-near miracle, and continue the dialogue tomorrow.
*****
UPDATE -- From the Powerline Week in Pictures:
18 comments:
To think like our contemporaries is the recipe for prosperity and stupidity.
And that's just on our side of the aisle...
Our prosperous never-Trump grifters.
Them, too. I've been noodling around on Substack a lot the past couple of weeks; it's a bit of an intellectual wild west over there. For now, far more entertaining than any other social media platform I've used. There are plenty of grifters, but also plenty of people who are both extremely intelligent and on occasion extremely stupid. Perhaps near-sighted or blinkered is a better descriptor. Anyway, a lot of them seem to be prosperous, since that seems to be the biggest thing that matters to them; or at least that's what they want people to think.
There are some prosperous dummies out there, like the newly Catholic Candace Owens.
Yes, great example.
Your point about Candace Owens is interesting Bob. I watched her new show this week, and I am starting to understand why the Daily Wire may have parted ways with her. While I like some of the points she makes, she really seems to have a lot of blind spots. Needless to say, her Catholicism is just a spiritual warrior justification to fight for her baseless causes.
And if you're wondering whether or not she can afford to make idiotic claims, according to Gemini: "Candace Owens's husband George Farmer has a net worth of $240 million. He earns $39 million annually through real estate and other business ventures. Not many know that Farmer is one of the early investors in Uber and Twitter, which bought him huge returns."
The other day she tweeted a a distasteful meme of the guy from the movie 300 kicking Andrew Klavan -- a Jewish convert to Christianity -- down the abyss while yelling CHRIST IS KING!
An anti-Catholic form of Catholicism, but she's influenced by certain Rad Trads who are equally uncharitable and more than a little anti-Semitic.
She suggests that we nuked Nagasaki because a handful of Japanese Catholics lived there.
Yes, her beef with Klavan is he went on a podcast claiming she made anti-Semitic remarks and used the "Christ is King" remark to prod Jews. She can't call out Shapiro or management at the DW because of a gag order, but apparently Klavan is open fire.
She needs to review what the Catechism says about Jews and about other faiths in general.
She's a good talker, but falls short in doing her homework in order to be "an agent for truth."
She hides behind a disingenuous "just asking questions" dodge.
Just innocently asking whether we really put a man on the moon, whether Macron's wife is a man, and whether Jews are genocidal Christ killers.
It's a bit weird. The conspiratorial mindset can get into all sorts of jams, and lure others in who don't know any better.
We don't need paranoiacs on our side. That's a progressive specialty.
Not to say there's no such thing as the Conspiracy against Slack.
There's no conspiracy, and Satan is behind it.
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