A Meta-Metaphysical Model of Reality?

My apologies for the length. It just happened.

Now that I'm explicitly thinking about models of reality, I'm seeing them everywhere. Indeed, what is history but a clash of models? Certainly this applies to intellectual history, which is one long argument, but politics as well, not to mention religion. And I myself have spent the last two decades elaborating and fine-tuning my own model of reality.

For example, last summer we reviewed a volume of Eric Voegelin's Late Meditations and Essays, one of which being about the rise of Nazism in the 1930s. Now, say what you want about the tenets of National Socialism, at least it's a model. But what prior conditions made this diabolical model seem plausible?

This has immediate relevance, because what prior conditions made last night's anti-Semitic horror possible? A left-wing Islamist terrorist murdered two people because of a morally depraved model of reality that turns evil into good and vice versa:

This didn’t happen in a vacuum. It’s the inevitable result of more than a year of anti-Israel and antisemitic hatred that has been tolerated and even encouraged in our institutions. From college campuses to the halls of Congress, this hatred has been allowed to fester unchecked.

The question is, how does an ideology hijack human consciousness and plunge it into a second reality? For the terrorist surely acted on an internalized model that makes it acceptable to murder innocent people who are actually living in the real reality.  

Unreality hates reality. Especially ultimate reality.

This comes back to the question of models of ultimate reality vs. models of ultimacy. Voegelin gives us a model of ultimacy, in that man is ultimately situated between immanence and transcendence, which is essentially an evolving space between appearances and reality. 

Modernity is a failed model, and postmodernity is but a response to this failure, but somehow it is even more dysfunctional than the model it displaced. This is discussed in another book I'm reading, called Enchanted by Eternity: Recapturing the Wonder of the Catholic Worldview. 

A worldview is but a model by a different name: it is

the eyes through which we see all of reality -- the deeply embedded patterns of thinking that we apply not now and then but constantly in daily living. A worldview is the stable, all-encompassing way a society or an individual not only looks at reality but feels reality (Slattery). 

The reason why our politics is so contentious is that, truly truly, it involves a clash of models and a war of worldviews. It is essentially a religious war because models of ultimate reality are essentially religious, even if they pretend to be secular. 

It was Polanyi who first alerted me to the fact that secular ideologies have all the defects of religion with none of the benefits, for they are full of moral passion unhinged from moral judgment, like last night's terrorist. 

A worldview or a model "is the set of givens, assumptions, and presuppositions through which you view the world. It colors what you mean by God, universe, and human. It answers all the basic questions," including who we are, where we came from, and where we're going: "Thus it is the ground of thought and behavior and therefore lifestyle." It

separates true and false, right and wrong, the beautiful and the ugly, the important and the banal, in order to make decisions. Accordingly, worldview [model] functions like a software that has been silently downloaded into the brain (ibid.).

It's not difficult to imagine model in which Luigi Mangioni, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, and now Elias Rodriguez, are heroes. Or perhaps you didn't attend college. But even if you didn't, you know all about the elites who attended our finest universities and interpret everything in light of the dysfunctional postmodern / neo-Marxist / progressive / relativistic model they internalized there.

This model absolutely prevents one from seeing what is there for all to see, for example, Biden's dementia, or that a man cannot be a woman. It also causes one to see things that aren't there, for example, Russia Collusion, the Climate Apocalypse, Systemic Racism, the Patriarchy, et al.

So, models are pretty, pretty powerful. And it seems we are "between models," having left the premodern religious model for the model of modern rationalism, materialism, and scientism, which has been running on fumes since the beginning of the 20th century. To the extent that it's still here, it's like a train that hit the brakes years ago, but is still moving along the tracks from sheer momentum. 

So, we need a new model, paradigm, and worldview. Slattery is pretty optimistic in arguing that what he calls an ultramodern Catholicism could furnish this worldview, but let's hear him out. For example, he is in full agreement with Raccoon orthodoxy that one "must begin with a correct understanding of the universe and of man." Get these two wrong, and your model is doomed.

Only "After tackling why the universe exists and who man is," can one "lay out strategies for what to do and how to do it." In other words, "Reality before action," and who could disagree?

Well, Marx, for example, who famously wrote that "The philosophers have only interpreted the world, in various ways; the point, however, is to change it." 

Now, changing the world without understanding the world is the credo of the left. It's an interesting question: why would a child imagine he was born into the wrong body? Never mind, just cut off his Johnson! Or, why are all models of global warning wrong? Never mind, just cut off your fossil fuels!

Back to models, Slattery argues that "we need to stop being modern and start becoming ultramodern," by which he doesn't mean more intensely or extremely so (e.g., "hypermodern"), rather, in the sense of "beyond," or "outside the limits of," or "exceeding the range of." 

Frankly, it's kind of a pataphysical approach (I believe Van der Leun once accused -- or complemented -- me along these lines, of practicing 'pataphysics without a license).

'Pataphysics is the science of that which is superinduced upon metaphysics, whether within or beyond the latter's limitations, extending as far beyond metaphysics as the latter extends beyond physics. 

'Pataphysics is, of course, a serious joke, like the Church of the Subgenius. Nevertheless, the idea of a meta-metaphysical model appeals to me.