Gooba Gobble, One of Us

In the movie Freaks, there's a riotous banquet scene in which the bizarre carnie folk induct a normal person into their fraternity by chanting gooba gabba gooba gobble, we accept her one of us! Later The Ramones would incorporate the chant into their song Pinhead. 

A man has strange thoughts when alone, and that strange thought occurred to me while reading an essay by Thomas White called On True Enlightenment. In it he discusses how God indeed decides to become one of us -- how

he who incomprehensibly transcends all creation took the initiative of condescension to live in solidarity with us who are the frailest of spiritual beings.

To condescend to become one us freaks, as it were. And by any measure, we are by far the freakiest things in all of existence. All others are number two, or lower.

Indeed, we are so freaky that we don't even know -- or cannot agree, at any rate -- what we are or what we're doing here. The whole thing is a mess, and I am reminded of this as my son makes his way through the history of philosophy. Yesterday it was David Hume. Famous though he is, his skeptical and irreverent philosophical system is a total nonstarter. 

For example, the man thought that something as self-evident as causality wasn't even justified. Rather, all we can know is that one thing follows another, but there's no reason to believe, and no way of proving, that the one caused the other. 

Experience cannot establish a necessary connection between cause and effect, because we can imagine without contradiction a case where the cause does not produce its usual effect... the reason why we mistakenly infer that there is something in the cause that necessarily produces its effect is because our past experiences have habituated us to think in this way.

That's not philosophy, it's intellectual suicide. Doubt all you want, but 

If the normal functioning of the intelligence has to be subjected to a critique, then the criticizing consciousness has to be subjected to a critique in its turn by asking, “what is it that thinks?” and so forth... (Schuon).

Such anti-philosophy 

is properly an acephalous logic: it labels what is intellectually evident as “prejudice”; seeking to free itself from the servitudes of the mind, it falls into infra-logic; closing itself, above, to the light of the intellect, it opens itself, below, to the darkness of the subconscious.

Man becomes one of them -- a demon or something.

White agrees that "The human being lives out an existence marked by confusion and ignorance," thus "the purpose of revelation of God in Christ," which "is to deliver men from this situation." 

In other words, God says gooba gobble, one of us. But the feeling isn't mutual: he's not one of us, so crucify this freak!

Now, when God says one of us, he is of course referring to the Trinity. It even says so in Genesis: Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And "What happens when we take away the reference point of God"?

Surely, the post-modern fracturing of the distinct scientific discourses in contemporary academic culture is in part related to this noteworthy philosophical absence (White).

In other words, deny the unity at the start, and there is no conceivable way to recover it; the world shatters into a jumble of unrelated pieces, such that we can't even know that you are you. For example, Hume would say that 

The self is nothing but a bundle of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle.

So, to repeat what was said in yesterday's post, life is reduced to a random walk through time, of nobody to nowhere. Nor is anything really knowable, since we can always doubt it. Take away certitude -- which begins with acknowledgement of the Absolute -- and we are certainly submerged in doubt:

Doubt is nothing else but the void left by absent certainty and this void readily makes way for the false plenitude of error (Schuon). 

Of what can we be certain? That being is intelligible to the intellect, which is to say that the mind is in principle conformable to the real. 

It is illogical to seek to contest this certainty, and even the first certainty, which is likewise infallible, by setting against it elements of certainty of a phenomenal or passional order; it is as if the “accidents” wanted to take issue with “substance,” or as if drops of water wanted to teach water itself what their being consists of. The certainty of the Intellect comes from the fact that it knows; no one can add anything whatsoever to its essence, or take away from it the minutest particle. 

Gooba gooble, one of us: "What is most profoundly and authentically human rejoins the Divine by definition" (Schuon). In other words, 

the “human miracle” must have a reason for being that is proportionate to its nature, and it is this that predestines -- or “condemns” -- man to surpass himself.... 

Quite paradoxically, it is only in transcending himself that man reaches his proper level; and no less paradoxically, by refusing to transcend himself he sinks below the animals.... in a certain respect, a noble animal is superior to a vile man.

But our contemporary religion of no religion

consists essentially in being unaware of three things: firstly, of what God is, because it does not grant primacy to Him; secondly, of what man is, because it puts him in the place of God; thirdly, of what the meaning of life is, because this culture limits itself to playing with evanescent things and to plunging into them with criminal unconscious.

We are not God, but we have godlike abilities that are incomprehensible when severed from their source. This 

decapitates man: wishing to make of him an animal which is perfect, it succeeds in turning him into a perfect animal; not all at once..., but in the long run, since it inevitably ends by “re-barbarizing” society, while “dehumanizing” it ipso facto in depth. 

And here we are.

Where does this leave us? If God is one of us, then it permits us to be at one with him. At the same time, we can reject the offer and remain in our private club of terrestrial freaks.

I'm not sure if this post got off the ground. Gemini?

In essence, you've woven together seemingly disparate elements -- a cult film, philosophical arguments, and theological concepts -- to create a powerful reflection on the human condition. The "gooba gabba" chant, in its strangeness and unexpectedness, becomes a surprisingly effective symbol for the complex and often paradoxical relationship between humanity and the divine.