Is there anything else we can say about common sense? It reminds me of Tolstoy's famous crack that "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way."
Likewise, people with common sense are more or less alike, in that they at least occupy the same reality. In contrast, folks lacking in common sense are as diverse as are the varieties of ideology, ignorance, mental illness, and tenure.
Enemies of the Permanent Things.
How did you know? That is exactly the book I'm reading at the moment, by Russell Kirk, common sense being the quintessential example of what is common to all, which is to say, universal in scope and timeless in cogency.
Kirk defines “the permanent things” (a phrase borrowed from T. S. Eliot) as the unchanging norms of human nature.... Focusing on literature as well as on politics, Kirk sets forth and defends those inalterable truths of human life.
If common sense doesn't embody unchanging norms and inalterable truths, I don't know what else does, for again, each ideology that lacks common sense lacks it in its own way.
I guess that makes your blog an enemy of the impermanent things: the frivolous, the ephemeral, the tenured.
Well, that was exactly the program I proposed in my very first post, now deleted.
Too frivolous?
No, maybe too pretentious. I don't remember.
Wait: I think I deleted it because I republished it later -- something to do with complementing the news of the day, i.e., journalism, with the eternals of the deity, AKA the Permanent Things. Let me search "the eternals" and see what pops up.
Here's something from 2009: supposing the post touched on the eternal, it should be valid 16 years later, and I can take the rest of the day off:
When we began this blog, you might recall that a major part of our mission was not necessarily to avoid the news, but to look at it in light of eternal truth, i.e., to illuminate it with timeless principles.
And really, this is the only way one can understand the news, just as the only way one may understand the physical world is in light of certain unvarying laws and mathematical constants. If the laws changed every day, it would be ridiculous to say that we "understand" the world. Rather, without this timeless foundation, it would be unintelligible
Sounds about right. Do continue.
One of the major purposes of "news" -- and I am speaking here of the moonstream media, or MSMistry of Truth -- is to obscure the rules of reality, precisely, so that the impossible may seem possible, e.g., that it is possible for a man to marry a man, or that climate cultists can predict the weather 100 years hence (but not next week), or that high taxes are good for the economy, or that providing more of something at a lower cost will cause people to consume less of it, or that arresting a common criminal for being one is an instance of "racism," etc., etc., etc.
As Walter Cronkite might have said if he had had an ounce of irony or self-awareness, And that's not the way it is. Not at all. Not even close. Rather, this is just the current Liberal Truth, a cognitive pacifier for the spiritually dead, a fount of elite conventional wisdom for over- and undereducated rubes, which is to say no wisdom at all. Good night clowns.
Here's another one from 2009:
I remember when I started this blog, it was with the idea of turning the cosmos upside down and inside out (back to its proper orientation), and then publishing "All the Eternity That Fits."
"The news" -- at least in its present configuration -- would have to represent the polar opposite of "the eternals."
But just as the body has a soul (or rather, vice versa), the "news" is a function of eternity (for the converse could never be true). And if we ignore the eternity pole of the dialectic, news turns into what it has become, a kind of "reverse mysticism," a hypnotic fascination with the transient and trivial, so you end up leaving the frontier of O, the wild godhead, for the disjointed necropolis of Ø. Good luck with that.
Of course, it is always possible to sift through the news for its eternal patterns and lessons, but how often does this occur? I think of James Joyce, who demonstrated in Ulysses the temporal resonance that occurs on a moment to moment basis, as the otherwise banal events of daily life resonate with our metamythological and transtemporal substrate. This is always occurring, but it takes activated cʘʘnvision to see it.
I believe I touched on this in the new testavus -- something about how the modern world and its nihilocracy of urgent nonsense forces us to dance to its jagged rhythms instead of abiding within the dudely hammock of eternity.
For let's face it: to recall one of Petey's parables, "only the rug of eternity can pull your temporal room together."
Think about it. To the extent that you cannot do this, I think you'll find that it is because you've likely internalized "the world," which in turn displaces vertical reality.
The bottom lyin' is that if you live at the periphery instead of the center, the finest area rug in the world cannot redeem time and coordinate it with eternity. It has never happened, and never will happen with any manmade philosophy. Only God can do that, through us. You might even say that we are God's cosmic area rug, in that only human beings have the unique capacity to span all of creation...
Speaking of which, can Darwinism do this -- pull the cosmos together? Darwinism tries to coordinate the world by making the rug all black. So yes, it does "pull the room together," but at the cost of making it a colorless, two-dimensional room that is no longer fit for human habitation.
For the metaphysical Darwinist forgets that the human subject requires a human environment in order to thrive and evolve. Or, to turn it around: fail to raise humans in their proper soul-environment, and they will internally sophicate.... Or, to put it another way, they will die to eternity and therefore chuck their very reason for being.We didn't have AI in 2009, so I wonder what Gemini makes of my pretensions?
Here is a symbolic image for your post, contrasting the richness of a life grounded in eternal truths with the emptiness of a purely materialistic worldview.
The left half represents your vision of a life grounded in common sense and eternal truth.
The Cosmic Rug: This is the most direct symbol from your post, representing eternity and the "permanent things." Its intricate, cosmic patterns and celestial motifs signify that timeless, universal truths are the foundation upon which everything else is built.
The Human Weaver: The woman weaving the rug represents humanity's unique role as the being that connects the temporal to the eternal. Her act of weaving is an active, conscious process of integrating eternal principles into the fabric of daily life.
The Vibrant Room: The room itself, filled with classic symbols of human endeavor and culture (books, a globe, a clock, musical instruments), represents "the temporal room" of human life. It's rendered in warm, rich colors to show that when grounded in the eternal, time is meaningful and full of life.
The right half represents the alternative worldview you critique: one disconnected from eternal principles.
The Black-and-White Room: The monochromatic, two-dimensional rendering of the same room symbolizes a world devoid of the "color" and depth that eternity provides. It is the "colorless, two-dimensional room" of metaphysical Darwinism you described.
The Broken Objects: The scattered, broken objects -- a shattered hourglass, a deflated money bag, a cracked mirror -- represent the transient and trivial. They are the fleeting "news" and materialistic symbols that have no lasting value when divorced from the permanent things.
The Empty Loom: The empty loom signifies that without a connection to eternity, the project of integrating meaning into life is abandoned. The lack of a human figure shows that in such a world, humanity's unique purpose is lost.
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