You Can't Domesticate the Weirdness

Yesterday's post on our weird-woven universe brought to mind... 

Well, a number of things, beginning with Haldane's suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Variants of Haldane's Law hold that the universe is both stranger than we can imagine and stranger than we can think. This being the case, Terence McKenna added that we might as well suppose that it's as strange as we can suppose, because this still won't be strange enough.

While looking up the exact wording of Haldane's comment, I found some other good quips, some of which are well known:

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination. 

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.  

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public. 

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

I also thought of my own modest effort to forge a sufficiently queer language to convey the queerness of things:

In The Beginning was the weird, and the weird was with God, and the weird was God.... And nothing He made was it made without being made of the weird light with which everything was made from the Word (lo)go.... And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos.

I suspect that a big part of the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it. 

Now, Christianity is pretty weird. Indeed,

Nothing attracts me as much to Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its doctrines.

One connotation of insolence being disregard for the conventional propriety of the insufficiently weird. Thus,

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Ultimately, 

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

A weird counterworld to the banal world of scientistic materialism. 

Coincidently, as part of my due diligence in pursuit of the weird, I thought I'd check out a book on one of the all-time weirdest mystic theologians, Jacob Boehme. Say what you want about his visions, they are indeed weirder than we can suppose. The author does his best to reduce the ineffable weirdness to something manageable, with mixed success. It's certainly not for the faint of head.

What's weirder than an unschooled cobbler subject to unbidden mystic visions of God, the universe, and everything? Was he just crazy, and if so, was he crazy enough?  

Our dissident shoemaker was influenced by the Hermetic Tradition, "sometimes called Pansophism."

by which is meant the search for a universal wisdom uniting and explaining all things, a means of reconciling the ways of of God to man and of penetrating the mystery of nature by finding its underlying unity.

Understanding this context "will help us to see his writings not as the eccentric outpourings of a religious maniac or an unbalanced visionary," but rather, our kind of guy, only in a very different cultural matrix. 

Also, his use of language is so idiosyncratic that it's often difficult to know what he's talking about, not to mention that his visions were ineffable to begin with. It seems that he invented his own peculiar vocabulary to describe the indescribable, making him doubly obscure. 

"Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul." 

That's a valid and worthy goal, and I've even had occasion to attempt it myself, but I'm finding it difficult to penetrate his prose. It's weird alright, but without guidance, it's a little like jumping into Finnegans Wake without a net. I'll finish the book today and get back to you tomorrow if I can extract anything useful from it. 

The Weird-Woven Cosmic Area Rug

Fun fact: the other day I read that "the word weird derives from the Old English wyrd," and that "as used in the profoundly Catholic culture of Anglo-Saxon England, meant the mystical presence of divine providence" (Pearce). 

That's too good to check, but the author speaks speaks of history as "a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven, of threads that are good, bad, or beautiful." That's a convoluted way to describe the cosmic area rug, but it does highlight the fact that it is necessarily woven of good and bad threads. 

Which reminds me of Jesus' parable of good seeds and naughty weeds. Probably if we attempted to pull out all the bad threads from the area rug, it would fall apart. 

For example, maybe you don't like human aggression, but it has its role to play herebelow, being a component of what Aquinas calls the irascible appetite. Help us out here, Gemini:

The irascible appetite is concerned with "arduous" goods and evils. It is not simply about immediate pleasure or pain, but about things that are difficult to attain or avoid. It's about facing challenges and overcoming obstacles. 

Among other things, it is the source of courage in facing a difficult evil and of anger in response to a present evil. Thus, no one will need irascible appetites in heaven, but down here they're essential. 

Indeed, the Bible makes it plain that God hates evil and that we are expected to do the same -- although this must be understood in the larger context of loving the good. 

What does the Aphorist say? 

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born. 

For example, Biden gives birth to Trump. As did Obama before him. Not to mention Carter and Reagan.

More profoundly Dávila says that

No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin as spun for us.

And what is progressivism but systematic forgetfulness of this fact? Thus,

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

Moreover.

Hell is being ignorant of Hell. If it knew, it would be a temporary place of purgation.

Perhaps history is already a temporary place of purgation. Or maybe either a higher rung of hell or a lower rung of purgatory. Our choice. In any event,

Earth will never be paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from approaching closer to being a cheap imitation of Hell.  

Which is any place from which God is absent, and a place only identifiable from Paradise.

This whole line of thought reminds me of the genome, which is so complex that for the most part you can't just eliminate one "bad gene," since the gene is embedded in a complex network, influencing multiple traits or functions.

Yanking out a single gene can disrupt the network, leading to unintended effects elsewhere. Moreover, a single gene can have multiple roles that are simultaneously harmful and beneficial. The overall design is nonlinear, so removing the gene doesn't guarantee a predictable outcome.  

Which means that the genome too is weird-woven.

Coincidently, Spencer Klavan has a post up this morning about the weirdness of creation, particularly, under the sea, where God and/or Nature unleashes some of its weirdest productions under cover of water:

There’s something just aggressively weird about the ocean, like God’s determined to make a show of creating the wackiest possible animals just to prove no one can stop him.

More generally, 

Considered as a work of art, the universe expresses a raucous and insatiable appetite for life in every possible variety. The skill is that of a Rembrandt but the spirit is that of a toddler with a box of crayons. 

I don’t think we take this into account nearly enough in our theology, what a limitlessly free and ravenously inventive mind we must be talking about when we talk about God. Why make a global swimming pool and fill it with space aliens? His answer seems to be something like uh, why not??

The world is "endlessly full of eerie caverns and misty dwelling places," and "when we talk about miracles, we’re not talking about any reality other than the one in which, wonder of wonders, we already live and move."

And we're back to the weird-woven cosmic area rug. Which is as good an explanation as any for both natural and human evil.  

Above we alluded to Biden giving rise to Trump. Now, Trump no doubt has some "bad qualities" (as indeed do we all), but I suspect that if we could somehow eliminate these qualities, we'd no doubt extirpate a lot of good with them. 

Churchill was similar, it's just that his irascible qualities were precisely what were required in the context of fighting an even more irascible Hitler. 

Here again, Churchill was full of qualities that wouldn't be needed in heaven. Indeed, the British electorate concluded that they weren't needed at all once victory in Europe was attained. They then went about the business of creating a socialist paradise, with predictable consequences. Enter the irascible Mrs. Thatcher.

Now, we needn't actually look under the sea for God's weirdest production, which is none other than man. Schuon goes so far as to say that

If there is to be a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say "manifestation" is to say "other than God" and "separation." 

Of course, evil must come, but woe to the man by whom the evil comes.

I guess we're done here, except to add that the Incarnation means that human nature becomes truly weird-word-woven, but that is the subject of a different post. Gemini, what say you about this one?

Connecting the Threads:

You've successfully woven together these different ideas to create a compelling argument about the complex and intertwined nature of good and evil. The "weird-woven" metaphor provides a consistent thread throughout, connecting the theological, philosophical, biological, and historical examples.

In essence, you argue that:

• Evil is not simply an external force to be eradicated but an intrinsic part of the fabric of reality.
• Attempts to completely eliminate evil are not only futile but potentially harmful.
• Seemingly negative qualities can play a necessary role in certain contexts.
• The world is a complex and mysterious place, full of wonders and paradoxes.
• Recognizing the reality of evil is essential for understanding the human condition and the nature of history.

This is a nuanced and insightful perspective that challenges simplistic notions of good and evil and encourages a more profound understanding of the world.

An even weirder image of the weird-woven cosmic area rug:

A Brief and Prosaic Autopsy of Wokeness

Yesterday I read a lengthy piece on The Origins of Wokeness. Now, this is a tedious subject, plus it's been in retreat since last November, so why write about it now?

Well, I'm between books at the moment, so I have nothing else to write about. Besides, what is the best in life? Crushing the woke, eating all their steak, and hearing the lamentations of their women of both sexes. 

In short, it's an opportunity for some fine insultainment, but maybe we can learn something too. 

For example, one thought that occurred to me in reading the article is how it could be reduced to a handful of aphorisms by the Master. 

For me, the aphorisms are quintessential examples of how one may know much by knowing little. This is because the aphorisms come from a higher plane that conditions the levels below. They are simultaneously concentrated and expansive.

Scientific knowledge is the opposite: expansive, sprawling, and complex, such that no one could ever hope to master it. Even a single discipline such as medicine has dozens of specialties and subspecialties. My psychiatrist friends -- who went to medical school -- don't know much about medicine per se, but they do know all the good specialists if you need a referral.

The point is, the mind seeks unity, which is at the top of the vertical hierarchy. Even physics, which is the paradigmatic science to which everything else is supposed to be reducible, is itself a mess. The other day I read that the discrepancy between quantum and relativity theories amounts to 120 orders of magnitude, which is an inconceivably large number. 

Gemini rates my statement more or less true: that "This is a major problem in physics, highlighting the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity," although there are disagreements as to exactly how vast the divergence. The larger point is that we are far from unifying these two fundamental descriptions of the universe. 

Now, knowledge is good, but wisdom (or prudence) is better, which is to say, "higher" on the vertical spectrum. Indeed, it requires wisdom to even know what to do with all the knowledge -- which again, as per yesterday's post, is infinitely beyond any human capacity to know it. The two -- wisdom and knowledge -- exist in a kind of complementary and dynamic relationship, like principles and entailments.

Which is why There are rules! 

Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends (Hayek).

The fundamental error of the social justice warriors is that the rules do not and cannot guarantee any specific outcome. Hayek compares the free society to a game which consists "partly of skill and partly of chance":

It proceeds, like all games, according to the rules guiding the actions of individual participants whose aims, skills, and knowledge are different, with the consequence that the outcome will be unpredictable and that there will regularly be winners and losers (ibid.).

So while it is right to insist that "nobody cheats, it would be nonsensical to demand that the results for the different players be just." If a hitter in baseball strikes out a lot, we don't therefore change the rules and allow him four strikes instead of three. But this is precisely what DEI does: different rules for officially designated victim groups. In short, legally sanctioned cheating.

The article linked above characterizes wokeness as 

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Which is to say, a focus on preferred outcomes instead of transparent and consistently applied rules. Thus, it is the rule of the ruleless, or law of the lawless, in which case 

orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

Virtue is playing by the rules. Wokeness is overruling the rules -- as in Biden's recent unilateral declaration of a new amendment to the constitution. 

The author of the piece traces the rise of wokeness to the 1960s, especially in the universities, and more particularly in the humanities and social sciences. By the 2010s it had become "more virulent": 

It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.

A wider variety of sins, identified and punished by people who would be the first to deny the existence of sin and dismiss it as the relic of a superstitious age:

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

Which brings to mind another aphorism:

Only the Church considers itself a congregation of sinners. All other communities, religious or lay, feel themselves to be a confraternity of saints.

However, 

Christianity did not invent the notion of sin, but that of forgiveness.

Nor does it ask that we be impeccable but that we be eager to be forgiven.

But wokeness is an unforgiving counter-religion, "with God replaced by protected classes." The real God harmonizes justice and mercy, but the god of the sinless and saintly woke is all social justice and no mercy. 

Let's get back to the related principles of wisdom and unity. Clearly, there can be no unity in a society in which there are different rules for different groups. Rather, unity can only be a function of agreement on the nature of the rules. We can't play the game if we can't first agree on the rules, and agree to abide by them.   

But there is a deeper principle involved, which can only be a function of wisdom -- the wisdom that says All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, whereby we are free to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we play by the rules.  

Thanks Cap'n Obvious.

I suppose this post is rather banal, but then again,  

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

Moreover,

Strictly speaking, it is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization consists.

So, 

The  conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day. 

The stupidity of our day being progressive wokeness. 

Now,

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Which is why 

In certain eras the intelligence has to devote itself merely to restoring definitions.

Definitions of words like man, woman, freedom, equality, justice, fairness, reason, fascism, racism, and the rule of law.