The Index of Forbidden Ideas

The Church used to have an Index of Forbidden Books, when what we really need is a more compact Index of Forbidden Ideas (or Principles). For Chesterton there was only one forbidden idea, the "thought that stops all thought. That is the only thought that ought to be stopped." In an old post, we asked

What thought might this be? It is any thought that renders the world unintelligible and therefore the thinker an incurable idiot: relativism, subjectivism, deconstruction, idealism, rationalism, materialism, scientism, atheism, CRT, BLM, DEI, Marxism, Son of Marxism, Bride of Marxism, etc.

Regarding the latter, you will have noticed that 

Marxism turns the intelligence it touches into stone.

This being because it reduces essence to existence, and tenure takes care of the rest.

Of course, many of the forbidden ideas referenced above don't so much render the world unintelligible as intelligible in only a highly (and arbitrarily) proscribed manner, as in the scientism that reduces everything to measurable quantities, or the identity politics that reduces the individual to accidental traits such as skin color.

In another post we characterized the forbidden idea as "the thoroughly irrational thought that our thoughts bear no relationship to reality and that truth is therefore inaccessible to human beings." For Chesterton,

in the act of destroying the idea of Divine authority we have largely destroyed the idea of that human authority by which we do a long-division sum. With a long and sustained tug we have attempted to pull the mitre off pontifical man; and his head has come off with it.

Chesterton has just described how math can become racist in the absence of a higher authority that is the very source of math and reason, AKA the Logos that permeates things.  

Interestingly, the original Index was partly in response to the printing press, which facilitated the propagation of so much fake news and even faker philosophies. Now we have the internet, such that anyone can easily inhabit a silo of approved ideas that are in reality forbidden.

Forbidden by whom? 

By everyone, which is to say, human nature. Of course, one of the forbidden ideas in our proposed Index is that there is no such thing as human nature. But human nature includes the possibility of denying its own existence. Dogs can't deny their canine nature.

The animal cannot leave his state, whereas man can; strictly speaking, only he who is fully man can leave the closed system of the individuality....There lies the mystery of the human vocation: what man “can,” he “must” (Schuon).

In other words, man's vocation is to transcend himself, meaning that there is an Ought built into our nature, denial of which (i.e., of natural law and objective morality) makes our list. Even something as elementary as good manners is a form of transcendence. 

The noble man is one who masters himself and loves to master himself; the base man is one who does not master himself and shrinks in horror from mastering himself (ibid.).

It seems to me that one can interpret Genesis 3 -- AKA the fall of man -- as an allegory about the denial of human nature. Outwardly it seems to involve the denial of God, but God and man are complementary, such that to say man is to say God. And one of the shocking implications of the Incarnation is that to say God is now to say man (or human nature, precisely).

Schuon agrees that "The very word 'man' implies 'God,'” just as "the very word 'relative' implies 'Absolute.'" For which reason we can say that relativism is certainly on our Index of Forbidden Ideas:

Once man makes of himself a measure, while refusing to be measured in turn, or once he makes definitions while refusing to be defined by what transcends him and gives him all his meaning, all human reference points disappear; cut off from the Divine, the human collapses.

Thus, relativism is forbidden because it destroys man in its wake (or woke). Absent God, then

Man is an animal that imagines itself to be Man.

For example, metaphysical Darwinism is the explicit denial of human exceptionalism, such that the distance between human and subhuman is a mere quantitative one. This can even be calculated, in that we share share about 97% of our DNA with orangutans, so we're 3% different. Of course, we share 50-60% of our DNA with bananas, but does this mean that a banana is half a man?

Of man it may also be said that he is essentially capable of knowing the True, whether it be absolute or relative; he is capable of willing the Good, whether it be essential or secondary, and of loving the Beautiful, whether it be interior or exterior. In other words: the human being is substantially capable of knowing, willing and loving the Sovereign Good (Schuon). 

Being that man is free to will the Good, then determinism also makes our list, because it encloses man in horizontal causes. Conveniently,

Determinism is the ideology of human perversion

In reality,

Man, like the Universe, is a fabric of determination and indetermination; the latter stemming from the Infinite, and the former from the Absolute (Schuon). 

Egalitarianism, AKA equity, also makes the list, for freedom is the right to be different, whereas equity is the denial of differences and therefore a ban on individuality. 

Subjectivism -- or the denial of objectivity -- is certainly high on the list, for 

man’s prerogative is the capacity for objectivity.... Strictly speaking, a man is he who “knows how to think”; whoever does not know how to think, whatever his gifts may be, is not authentically a man; that is, he is not a man in the ideal sense of the term. 

Too many men display intelligence as long as their thought runs in the grooves of their desires, interests and prejudices; but the moment the truth is contrary to what pleases them, their faculty of thought becomes blurred or vanishes; which is at once inhuman and “all too human” (ibid.). 

Subjectivism is closely allied to relativism, which 

sets out to reduce every element of absoluteness to a relativity, while making a quite illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself. In effect, relativism consists in declaring it to be true that there is no such thing as truth, or in declaring it to be absolutely true that nothing but the relatively true exists; one might just as well say that language does not exist, or write that there is no such thing as writing (ibid.). 

It seems to me that many of our forbidden ideas can be reduced to the denial of verticality, which is to say its collapse into horizontality -- or inwardness to outwardness, quality to quantity, and intellect to the reason that is only its tool:

The spiritual man is one who transcends himself and loves to transcend himself; the worldly man remains horizontal and detests the vertical dimension (ibid,).  

To enclose man in reason is to sophicate him in a nul de slack of tautology. In other words, the intellect always transcends that which it reasons about, for no rational operation can furnish the premises upon which reason operates. One might even say that 

There are a thousand truths and only one error.  

This one error being the denial of verticality and man's openness to, and participation in, it. Which we will further explore in the next installment. 

I'm not sure how Gemini came up with this image for the post, but perhaps the tracks symbolize what Schuon says about "the grooves" of mans "desires, interests and prejudices":