No Brain, No Problem

Some fascinating material in this book on How Judaism Became a Religion.

Interestingly, it seems that all of the main strands of Judaism -- Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform -- emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, and each can be seen as a reaction to modernity (somewhat similar to how Christian fundamentalism is a thoroughly modern ideology).

Reconstructionist Judaism is more of a 20th century North American phenomenon. I haven't yet gotten up to that chapter, but my limited understanding is that it is like a Jewish version of Unitarianism, i.e., they believe in no more than one God.

I found the discussion of the differences between Orthodoxy and Hasidism to be especially interesting. I trust that Gandalin will let us know if this is a simplistic caricature, but you could say that the Orthodox are analogous to scholastic philosophers poring over scripture and creatively engaging God's living law. Hasidism emerged as a kind of reaction to this, and is throughly mystical, experiential, ecstatic, and individualistic (i.e., not so much focused on the community).

The reason I find this interesting is that one finds this same complementarity in eastern and western forms of Christianity, i.e., Catholicism and Orthodoxy. And indeed, Hasidism emerged in eastern Europe whereas Orthodox Judaism reflects its highly intellectual and more "civilized" German culture.

Many German Jews apparently looked down on their eastern brethren as more than a little uncouth, uneducated, and superstitious; ironically -- considering what happened later -- many of them would have related more to their fellow non-Jewish Germans than to Polish or Russian Jews.

Anyway, the parallel to eastern and western forms of Christianity is intriguing. Eastern Christianity, unlike Catholicism, has never, to my knowledge, developed any systematic theology a la Thomas Aquinas. You might say they missed that boat entirely, and never made any attempt to reconcile revelation with modernity or science or rational philosophy.

Rather, like the Hasidim, they focus on the mystical and experiential. In fact, I would simply define mysticism as the experiential -- as opposed to intellectual or behavioral or (merely) emotional -- aspect of religion. It can never really be absent -- for example, the most intellectualized truth nevertheless must be experienced.

It's somewhat analogous to the distinction between light and heat. Intellectual light generates its own warmth, just as mystical heat radiates its own light. Or, just say mind and heart. Every human is equipped with each. At the start.

Imagine a giant global brain with western/left and eastern/right brain cerebral hemispheres.

Wait -- before you go any further -- can I buy some pot from you?

Anyway, come for the light, stay for the warmth. Or vice versa. A full service religion will feature both.

Back to The Tao of Christ. Speaking of experience, the author cautions us that mere knowledge (k) of revelation is useless; for it "cannot be separated from life," but rather, calls "for a radical transformation of our whole being."

In order to cover all the bases, we need to superimpose a cross over the brain. Thus, in addition to the left and right hemispheres, there is literally a higher and lower brain(s) -- there is the neocortex, under and behind which are the mammalian and reptilian brains, so to speak. And at the top of the spine there is the primitive brainstem of the simple Democrat. It assures respiration, a beating heart, and the ability to apply for food stamps, but little else.

Now, where is the source of our problems? Yes, life is problems. If you are dead, you have no problems. But where in the brain are our problems coming from? Well, I suppose it depends.

They say -- they being developmental neurologists steeped in attachment theory -- that they are stored away in the preverbal right cerebral hemisphere, which is why they are so difficult to detect and eradicate. They are beneath the reach of language, so to... not speak.

But there is a more general, universal, unavoidable problem associated with the human condition, and it is this upper and lower storey business. Freud supposedly thought he had discovered something new with his distinction between the primitive id and the civilized ego, but really, how could one fail to notice?

I remember, for example, when I was a bachelor living in Hermosa Beach. I would torture myself by riding my bike on the path along the beach. Suffice it to say, I did not have to think about scantily clad bodies in the sand. Rather, the thoughts bombarded me, entirely outside my will.

Phone rings. Unexpectedly called into work. On this perfect day for staying indoors, the first rainy day in over a year. Oh well. Life is problems.

Immanuel Transmission vs. Automatic Salvation

In yesterday's post I neglected to include a juicy comment by Moshe Idel, a renowned schola' of the kabbala' (cited in Boyarin), about the two "main vectors" of Jewish mysticism, what he calls the apotheotic and the theophanic streams.

Idel writes that the apotheotic "represents the impulses of a few elite individuals to transcend the human mortal situation through a process of theosis, by ascending on high, to be transformed into a more lasting entity..." This is precisely what I have in mind with the pneumaticon of the circle containing the upward arrow, minus the elite part, which sounds too (upper case) Gnostic (unless we're talking about genuine saints).

"In contrast to this upward aspiration is the theophanic vector, which stands for the revelation of the divine in a direct manner or via mediating hierarchies." This would obviously represent the circle with the downward -- or downWord -- arrow.

I then suggested that perhaps Jesus embodies both arrows. Yes, he is Word-made-flesh, i.e., the Personal Absolute, the descending arrow. However, if he is also "fully man," then we might also regard him as the quintessence of man's ascending energies. Or in other words, he is lost and searching for God, just like the rest of us. In fact, this is hinted at in Matthew 1:23, where it says they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, 'God with us.'

In other words, not just God in or above us, but with us. Which can be quite consoling. Yes, he may be the harbor, but he's in the same boat with the rest of us (perhaps most dramatically in the garden at Gethsemane).

This suggests that we need a third pneumaticon that might look something like this:

It seems to me that certain theologies exclude one movement at the expense of the other. For example, certain strands of Protestantism insist that there can be no ascent from our side -- that we are so corrupted by sin that we cannot help ourselves. Rather, God's descent is both the necessary and sufficient cause of our salvation, and there's not a thing we can do or not do about it.

Granted, the universal church has always been mindful of the heresy of Pelagianism, which pretends that man can save himself without divine aid -- that he can ascend to the toppermost of the poppermost without God meeting him more than halfway.

Now, all heresies contain an element of truth, only overemphasized or out of proportion to the totality of revelation. Thus, in point of fact, Pelagianism is no more or less heretical than its polar opposite, predestination.

At the end of yesterday's post, I alluded to Schuon's comment to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and our icon of God. If that is the case, then this icon must always include both arrows, the ascending and descending, since they are both (quintessentially) present in Jesus.

In the West, we know all about the descending arrow. But in Eastern Orthodoxy, I find that they give equal emphasis to the ascending arrow, to the apotheotic stream. You might say that they consider Jesus from the perspective of savior, but also from the angle of -- gulp -- guru. So to speak. They would no doubt prefer the term starets, a person who

"functions as a venerated adviser and teacher. Elders or spiritual fathers are charismatic spiritual leaders whose wisdom stems from God as obtained from ascetic experience." [Why, for example, do we read of Jesus' asectic experience during those forty days in the desert?]

"It is believed that through ascetic struggle, prayer and Hesychasm (seclusion or withdrawal), the Holy Spirit bestows special gifts onto the elder including the ability to heal, prophesy, and most importantly, give effective spiritual guidance and direction. Elders are looked upon as being an inspiration to believers and an example of saintly virtue, steadfast faith, and spiritual peace."

(This would be consistent with Jesus' question and comment -- I'm paraphrasing -- "why do you call me good? There is no one good but God.")

Note that in the Gospels, this is how the disciples most frequently approach Jesus. In other words, they don't usually approach him as God, but as rabbi, teacher. Indeed, he shared all sorts of practical spiritual and ethical advice, things that would be utterly useless to us if predestination were the case. I mean, why pray, why evangelize, why obey the Commandments, if it makes no difference to our salvation?

Boyarin suggests that in Mark -- the earliest Gospel -- we can see most clearly the two trends, as if they hadn't quite yet been harmonized: "It is almost as if two stories have been brought together into one plot: one story of a God who became man, came down to earth, and returned home, and a second story of a man who became God and then ascended on high."

And why not? If Jesus represents a new category of being (both arrows), then naturally it will take awhile for human beings to work it all out.: "ahh, right: God and man. Man and God." It actually took centuries to nail down the right balance.

So, Jesus saves. But Jesus also teaches us how to be saved. Like how? One memorable book that touches on this is Christ the Eternal Tao. Since I don't remember those memorable details, let's dig it out and find out what it says. However, I can tell you ahead of time that it contains some of the same information presented in chapter four of my book. No, I didn't plagiarize anything, aside from plundering it for all it is worth.

Here it is, chapter three, Watchfulness. Hieromonk Damascene reminds us that we always "carry within ourselves the inclination and habit to return to our former condition," and that "if we do not preserve, guard and cultivate the seed of Grace given to us, we will be deprived of its vivifying power."

Or in other words -- or symbols -- no (↑), no (↓). But it should go without saying that no (↓), no (↑), either. Two sides of the same movement. Thus, "In order to preserve the Grace and not return to our former delusions, we must continuously, day by day, minute by minute, unite ourselves with the Way in metanoia."

I'm way behind in my work. To be continued...

Fleshlights & I-AMmissaries

Boyarin writes that in the first few centuries AD, "Jews and Christians were much more mixed up with each other," but over time congealed into mutually exclusive systems. More generally, nowadays we think of religions as more or less "fixed sets of convictions with well-defined boundaries," even if they didn't start out that way.

I am of two -- or maybe three -- minds about this. One part of me wants to agree with Schuon that each revelation is uniquely designed for a specific people and a certain purpose, so that to blend them (or to pretend to switch cultures) is a bad idea. It is not for us to do this, since it introduces a human element into the God-given.

Another part of me wants to regard religion-as-such as one vast body of knowledge, data, and experience. Why limit oneself to just one pool? We like Chinese and Italian food. Why not Asian and Roman religion?

In the past, people had no choice in the matter, since they were simply born into the local cult and had no knowledge of other religious cuisines. But each religion tends to emphasize certain elements of Religion, so that one religion can helpfully amplify or spice up parts that another neglects or underemphasizes.

Still another part of me wants to look at religion in a very abstract way, shorn of local coloring and sentimental attachments. This is almost a scientific approach, in that it considers the data in terms of the deeper principles that makes it possible.

In other words, just as the scientist searches for the underlying law or principle that unifies the observed data, I want to understand how, say, it is even possible for a man to know God. What a priori principles are necessary for this to be a possibility?

One such principle -- or assumption or axiom -- is that man is in the image of the Creator. If we weren't, then no real knowledge of God would be possible. Rather, we could only know ourselves. As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, you can give a Bible to a cow, but the cow won't know what to do with it, because a cow is not in the image of God.

Human beings, although obviously limited by our form, can nevertheless transcend it and thus know truth. We are the form that escapes our form -- or the genome that transcends our supposedly "selfish" genes. Thus, if Richard Dawkins' thesis is true, it is self-negating, since the generous truth transcends his selfish DNA.

In the book, I attempted to outline some of these abstract religious principles -- or principles that make religiosity possible. For example, I am quite convinced of the existence of (↓) and (). Without them, nothing about religious experience makes any sense.

Boyarin points out that when Jesus used the curious term "Son of Man," no one had to ask what it meant. Rather, it seems that his listeners must have been familiar with it. This is all the more likely when we read of how his audience didn't hesitate to express bewilderment when they didn't understand him, for example, in John 6:60, when many of the disciples grumble that "this is a hard saying; who can understand it?"

Well, it might be easier to understand if we could understand the principle that makes it possible. Otherwise, we are being asked to do something that is impossible and makes no sense to us. I don't think the Creator wants that.

In the book there are a couple of other symbols that look like these:

I haven't written much about them, but the upward arrow refers to a person who has experienced mystical union with God, whereas the downward arrow refers to an -- or the -- Incarnation, i.e., God in human form. For Christians this is a unique occurrence, whereas in Hinduism, for example, it is an expression of the avatar principle. But even if we think of it as a unique occurrence, nevertheless, in order for it to occur, it must be possible for it to occur, so we are back to the principle that makes it possible.

Now interestingly, Boyarin points out there were some Jews who had been expecting their Redeemer "to be a human exalted to the state of divinity" -- in other words, the upward arrow. However, "others were expecting a divinity to come down to earth and take on human form" -- the downward arrow.

And indeed, early IsraeliteChristian hybrids struggled with just this issue: is Jesus from the downside up or the upside down? "[S]ome believers in Jesus believed the Christ had been born as an ordinary human and then exalted to divine status, while others believed him to have been a divinity who came down to earth."

To this day there are Christians who hold to the former, e.g., adoptionism, whereby Jesus is adopted by God because of his sinlessness and devotion.

I wonder if the whole point is that he is both? I think Schuon said something to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and our icon of God.

PS I'm Ambivalent About You

Well, I don't know if there's much more to say about The Jewish Gospels. It seems to be one of those one-idea-and-keep-hammering-it books, as if he didn't nail it the first time -- the idea being that Christianity is not a break, but a continuation, of Judaism.

This could be controversial for some or maybe even most Jews, whereas it cannot by definition be controversial for Christians. Then again, Christians will no doubt balk at the notion that Christianity brought no new ideas into the world.

Of course, we must bear in mind that that Judaism is a river with many upstream tributaries and downstream branches, streams, and eddies. In the case of Christianity, one of the branches broke off and became its own river.

Evidently, there is no "normative" Judaism. The moment someone claims to represent it, someone else will contradict him. Two rabbis, three opinions, etc.

I recently read a biography of Maimonides, who some consider to be the Greatest Genius of Judaism. Of course, others will argue with that characterization. In any event, he assembled a list of thirteen principles of the faith; number one is the existence of Number One, the Creator.

I suppose we can look at the thirteen principles as a kind of flow chart -- the flow of the above referenced river; a river of light, as it were. So we're all together at the headwaters, the source, the cosmic spring.

Number two: his unity. Oops! Here the river seems to branch in two, because Maimonides would maintain that a trinitarian God contradicts his unity.

However, I think we have to give the early Christians -- being that they were Jews -- credit for appreciating the dilemma. Of all people, they would be aware of the difficulty of squaring this circle, which took centuries to officially resolve, or to congeal into a principle, i.e., a trimorphic God with distinctions but no separation. (This primordial Three must be considered a quality, not quantity.)

But according to Boyarin, not only is such an idea kosher, but similar ideas were being discussed in Jesus' day, and indeed, centuries before. He introduces some fascinating research showing how mono-theism emerged from poly-theism, but not always in a smooth, harmonious, and seamless way. That is to say, one can at times detect unassimilated godlings hovering around the one God. (Not to mention the ongoing temptation to revert to out-and-out paganism.)

To back up a bit, the reason I find this fascinating is that it mirrors the development of the mind, which moves from fragmentation to synthesis. One can look at this quite abstractly as the basic metabolism of cognition. For reasons we won't get into, Bion symbolized the fragmentation PS, the synthesis D. Thus, one of the ground floor operations of the mind is PS↔D. Note the bi-directionality of the arrow, as things are always falling apart and reconstituting.

Aren't they? Hope it's not just me.

You could say that a "nervous breakdown" is a descent into unremitting PS. These fragments of PS are persecutory and predatory, especially as they become more primitive. Even "curiosity" is a kind of "pain," i.e., the pain of not-knowing. However, we must tolerate the pain of PS in order to await the coherence of D. Which then becomes a new pain in the PS.

So, long story short, this is how I regard the historical discovery of the one God. It is literally a discovery, because prior to that, reality is too occluded by psychic fragmentation to apprehend him. Thus, polytheism is really the residue of psychic fragmentation, the inability to intuit the whole. One-ness cannot be revealed to scatterbrains.

Interestingly, looked at this way, the trinitarian God is a kind of eternally dynamic PS↔D. I don't mean to vulgarize the deity, or contaminate him with our own limited ideas.

However, think of the idea of kenosis, i.e., the self-emptying of God. With the Incarnation, God essentially tosses his unity into our world of fragmentation and multiplicity, culminating with the Cross. Looked at this way, the Resurrection is the recovery, the re-synthesis and re-integration. Thus, in a way, Jesus' passion is the last Word in PS→D. Just when the apostles think the world is hopelessly disintegrated and flying off its hinges, it reintegrates at a higher level than they could have possibly imagined. "Transfiguration," you might say, is a very high-level D.

However, Judaism has its own version of primordial PS↔D; in fact, several versions. For example, Steinsaltz, in his Coon Classic, The Thirteen Petalled Rose, writes that "Creation itself, and the creation of man," is "a descent for the sake of ascent." Even the Sabbath can be seen as a day devoted to D after six days of frazzled PS. It is a return to the One, a reset, a reJewvenation. (Note also that the Sabbath is the telos, or purpose, of creation; or, at the very least, the opportunity to re-orient oneself to that transcendent unity.)

There is also the "shattered vessels" principle. (I just googled it and this is the first thing that comes up, so there are no doubt better explanations.) If I am not mistaken, the basic idea is that the world is shattered, scattered, battered and tattered, and that it is our task and privilege to help put it back together. Which is what we attempt here at *One* Cosmos. Yeah, someone's gotta do it.

Back to Maimonides' list: number three, denial of God's corporality. Here is another one Boyarin would dispute, or at least there were some ancient streams that thought otherwise. The question is, were those just pagan streams holding on to atavistic dreams of the godman? Or is it a legitimate principle?

Boyarin claims that Jesus is new, but the idea is very old. The only thing new is that this particular individual is the Son of Man, but Jesus did not invent the concept. Rather, again, it is in Daniel, and it is also present in the more recently discovered book of Enoch, which is roughly contemporary with the earliest Gospels. No, it is not scripture, but it does prove that the expectation of the Son of Man -- the divine in human form -- was in circulation.

Gotta go. Argue away!

Jews for Jesus for Jews

The Jewish Gospels puts forth the outrageous idea that Jesus and all of his followers were -- wait for it -- Jews!

Actually, it's not as simple as that, because the words "Christian" and "Jew" have very different meanings today than they did in antiquity.

In fact, Christians were Jews, albeit a specific kind. However, there have always been different kinds of Judaism; or, to put it conversely, there has never been one way to be Jewish.

Indeed, there are even atheist Jews, and not just secular ones -- just google atheist rabbi. I'm not sure how they manage that, but in practical terms, the majority of (ethnic) Jews can't be (religious) Jews, or they wouldn't support the Democratic Party. The majority of seriously religious Jews naturally tend to be conservative, and are aware of the fact that liberalism has become a substitute religion for their irreligious fellows. Which only violates the first two Commandments. Not to mention the the sixth through tenth.

In addition to liberalism, the other thing that unites secular Jews is their anti-Christian attitude. Given their traumatic history (albeit in Europe, not here), it frankly isn't difficult to understand this, for the same reason it isn't hard to understand why blacks would despise the party of slavery, Jim Crow and segregation, i.e., the Democrats. Oh, wait...

Actually, the cases aren't that dissimilar, for just as a minority of blacks understand that conservatives are their greatest friends, a minority of Jews understand that Christians are their most staunch and devoted allies. Conversely, virtually all of the wholesale anti-Semitism in the world comes from the international left (and from Islam, of course).

Thus, although Boyarin seems to think that his findings will be equally unsettling to Christian and Jew, relatively few Christians will be disturbed to learn they are even more Jewish than they had realized, whereas the only thing many secular Jews know about their religion is that it is not Christianity.

But the opposition between the two only occurred over time. Instead of being two types of Judaism -- i.e., bound by their commonality -- they eventually began to define themselves by their differences. It's analogous to a bunch of chess pieces initially defining themselves as pawns, knights, rooks, et al, but then deciding to define themselves as black or white. The pieces haven't changed, only the self-identification.

Me? I love the idea that what Christians consider unique about the Christian revelation actually has deep roots in Jewish scripture, most controversially, trinity and incarnation. I guess Jews are supposed to get all farklemt or farmisht about these commonalities, but it's right there in their scripture.

Boyarin goes straight to Daniel -- coincidentally (?) the last book of the OT in the Orthodox Study Bible -- where we read of (what else to call it?) two Gods, the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man. The latter is an odd designation, but it is precisely the one Jesus most often applies to himself.

Daniel 7:9 describes a second divine throne, and in 7:14 it speaks of how the Ancient of Days transfers to the Son of Man "dominion, honor, and the kingdom." "His authority is an everlasting authority" and "his kingdom shall not be destroyed."

So there's that interesting little item. I've also always been intrigued by Genesis, where God is quoted as saying "let Us make man in Our image, according to Our likeness"; and to those passages of Proverbs which speak of the eternal pre-existence of wisdom, e.g., 8:27-30, "When He prepared the heavens, I was there, When He drew a circle on the face of the deep.... I was beside him as a master craftsman."

For Boyarin, it is not possible to regard Jesus as some sort of aberration from the mainstream -- or at least one of the main streams -- of Judaism. For example, "many Israelites at the time of Jesus were expecting a Messiah who would be divine and come to earth in the form of a human." Thus, it is no longer possible "to think of some ethical religious teacher who was later promoted to divinity under the influence of alien Greek notions...."

During the first few centuries of "Christianity," there were many people who were unproblematically both "Jewish" and "Christian." However, they would have identified themselves as simply Jewish. That is, they continued to follow Jewish dietary law but also believed in Christ as son of God.

In point of fact, the definitive break didn't come until the fourth century, when Constantine called for the first ecumenical council in order to clarify just what Christianity is. Thus, oddly enough, you could say that the Council of Nicaea simultaneously created both Christians and Jews, for the Council emerged with "the establishment of a Christianity that was completely separated from Judaism."

But before this, "no one... had the authority to tell folks that they were not Jewish or Christian, and many had chosen to be both." Only afterwords were these Christian Jews or Jewish Christians "written right out of Christianity."

It reminds me a little bit of how I am the same liberal I've always been, except that the left has now written classical liberals out of their script(ure). If you're not a leftist, you're somehow illiberal.

Back to the Son of Man business. I've only just started the book, but again, Jesus most often refers to himself by this title, so what does it mean?

Interestingly, Boyarin suggests that we have things backwards -- that Son of Man is a divine title, whereas Son of God is a human one. To support this thesis, he points out that "Son of God" is all through the OT, referring to how earthly Kings such as David were ritually anointed with oil and became "sons of God."

But what could Son of Man refer to? I have always considered it to mean something like Mankind v2.0. In other words, if you believe that humans are descended from apes, you could in a sense say that human beings are Sons of Apes. Analogously, Jesus represents another evolutionary leap, making him the Son of Man.

Boyarin suggests something similar, as if Adam is indeed mankind v1.0 and Jesus is mankind The Sequel. But that's about as far as I've gotten in the book. I'm up to page 40, where Boyarin notes that the two divinities referenced above -- the Ancient of Days and the Son of Man -- "in the course of time, would end up being the first two persons of the Trinity."

So it seems that Christian theology may not be quite as meshuge as many Jews believe. And that those anti-Semitic liberal Christian denominations need to stop boycotting themselves, i.e., Israel.

Liberalism is Downstream from a Toxic Spring

As usual, we want to be completely fair and balanced in our treatment of liberals. Ideally, we don't want to write anything we couldn't say in person.

One of the reasons why the internet tends to heighten polarization -- not that there's anything wrong with it -- is that it's much easier to say nasty things when the person isn't there before you. It works in reverse as well, since it is easy for people to read hostility into a dispassionate comment or analysis.

Such as this dispassionate analysis of the relationship between modern liberalism and the world-class asshole Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Liberalism isn't just bad economics, but bad philosophy, bad anthropology, bad ethics, and bad aesthetics. It's easy enough to trace the crazy economics back to Marx, but before Marx (1818-83) there was Rousseau (1712-78).

As Breitbart always said, politics is downstream from culture. Thus, since politics (whether we like it or not) subsumes economics, we can say that economics is also downstream from culture.

Which explains a lot, because if the psychic battlefield is first softened by aerial bombardment from the wider culture, you can get people to believe anything, e.g., socialized medicine works, government debt = prosperity, increasing the minimum wage won't increase unemployment, people become wealthy by stealing from the poor, etc.

Conversely, it is very difficult to get a fair hearing for classical liberal economic principles, since they don't appeal to the feelings and sensibilities of the herd.

So, Marx and Keynes and Krugman are all downstream from Rousseau. Now, no one who believes in Rousseauian principles will -- or should -- believe Rousseau was a flaming a-hole, just as no one who promulgates Marxian principles should be ashamed of their patrimony.

Rather, they should be proud to be associated with such an illustrious predecessor. I won't deny my link to Burke, or Adam Smith, or the founding fathers -- or to Moses or even the uber-father of us all, Adam. That is, I know where my errors come from: from being human.

Very much unlike liberals, who must first yield to the temptation of omniscience before presuming to lord it over the rest of us. Anyone with a little epistemological humility would be very hesitant to turn peoples lives upside down because he's just sure that this time a government takeover of the healthcare system will work just fine.

There is a chapter devoted to Rousseau and the French revolution in The Cave and the Light. Over and over in my margin notes I wrote n/c, which is my shorthand for NOTHING has CHANGED with these knuckleheads in almost three centuries. So, who's the "conservative?"

Virtually every one of Rousseau's central principles can be seen in the contemporary left. Let us count the ways.

First, he was very much anti-capitalism, as he thought it simply unleashed avarice and corrupted our innate goodness. Like Marx a century later, he "excoriates capitalism as the source of all man's corruption, greed, and mindless materialism and denounces private property as one of the great tragedies of history."

Just recently, Rolling Stone ran a piece on why Americans should fight for an end to private property. But the economic polices of the left are more generally founded on the principle that your property first belongs to the state, not you. This is why the state takes its cut from our paycheck before we ever see it. We get what is left over after the IRS wets its beak.

Rousseau actually believed that war could be avoided if it weren't for private property. In fact, it is the opposite: war starts wherever private property is insecure. But more subtly, envy is unleashed when private property isn't secure. It also works the other way around, which is why the left always fans the flames of envy in order to legitimize the threat to private property (e.g., "income inequality").

As alluded to above, Raccoons trace our dubious lineage all the way back to weak and corrupt old Adam. That being the case, we know full well that any system, no matter how perfect, will be corrupted by the presence of man.

But liberals don't believe this, because they are naive about what man is. This is why they can believe that a man in charge of a corporation is motivated by greed, whereas a man in charge of the state is motivated by only the highest ideals. But they are both just men, and men cannot be perfected.

For the culpably naive Rousseau, "nothing is more peaceable than man in his natural state." Note that this was based on no empirical evidence. Rather, it is an a priori platonic ideal. Thus, it is inherently true despite the evidence. This is certainly what I learned in college, i.e., all cultures are beautiful except ours.

Only after I left the university echo chamber did I discover that the truth is diametrically opposed to this -- that primitive cultures are generally characterized by savagery, violence, infanticide, oppression, and systematic stupidity, i.e., superstition.

Knowing what man is, we can better understand what to do about him. But if we begin with the wrong principle -- i.e., that man is basically good -- then our whole system will be founded upon a lie.

For Rousseau, the noble savage's "ignorance of vice prevents him from doing evil." Thus, he might have been the first moonbat to say that evil is a consequence of society, and that we are only depraved on accounta' being deprived.

Rousseau was also one of the first environmentalists -- not in the common sense conservative manner, but as in the Church of Global Warming type radicalism. And since it is rooted in primitive and unreflective religious impulses, heretics are not just wrong, but evil nazis.

This goes to the cliche that conservatives just think liberals are wrong (or misinformed or stupid), whereas liberals regard us as evil. Their intentions are always pure, whereas we actually intend our ideas and policies to do harm.

This in itself represents a naive psychology, because very few people consciously want to do evil. There is no liberal of my acquaintance whom I believe has malevolent intentions. Rather, it is the consequences of their policies that are bad, not the intentions.

Rousseau also spoke to the insularity of the left. Since he elevates the collective over the individual, truth revolves around what benefits the group. This is why he idealized Sparta over Athens, since the former ruthlessly eliminated self-love and individuality.

To this day the left insists upon a uniformity of thought, hence political correctness and other coercive mechanisms to keep people in line. Intolerance is fundamental to the left. For example, if you only tolerate deviancy instead of celebrating it, you are intolerant. Thus, tolerance is the new intolerance.

But the ultimate way to keep people in line is via compulsory public education (of which Rousseau was a huge advocate, in order to get to them early). Here again, this is why the left is fundamentally threatened by free (liberal!) education, e.g., homeschooling, vouchers, and school choice.

Yes, there is obviously the crude economic interest of the teachers unions, but upstream from that is the need to induct people into the General Will. Thus, children are taught to recycle (because man is poisoning the planet) or instructed in a human sexuality that aggressively excludes the human element. In other words, infrahuman sexuality, AKA barbarism.

The (classical) liberal view of history regards the emergence of human individualism as the great accomplishment. But the left has always found the individual to be problematic, because individuals don't become good collectivists.

Herman suggests that Rousseau's credo might well have been, I feel, therefore I am. Here again, we can see how this same principle animates the contemporary left, for whom ideas are felt and not thought out.

Interestingly, Herman points out that Rousseau had a huge following of females in particular and young adolts more generally. Thus, we can trace to him the notion of encouraging the least wise among us to become politically active, as well as the more recent idea of a "war on women" -- even though he abandoned his own children and was quite insulting toward females.

Like I said, n/c.

Divine Comedy?

Instead of posting, I slacked off and watched an episode of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee with Jay Leno. Then I watched the one with Howard Stern, and now it's pretty much time for work.

I don't believe we've ever explicitly discussed the relationship between comedy and cosmology, humor and metaphysics, despite the fact that nearly every post contains things intended to make you laugh. In fact, I can't imagine the blog without the humor, which makes it what kind of blog exactly?

Among other questions, such as, is it appropriate to the subject? Probably not, since I know of no other stand-up cosmedians. Am I trying to make God laugh, or what? Does God even have a sense of humor? He's got quite a mess on his hands. Am I trying to cheer him up? Am I searching for the ultimate guffah-HA experience?

They say Hebrew is very conducive to puns, and that there have always been funny rabbis. Given the preponderance of Jewish comedians, it makes you wonder if there is something transmitted through the religious DNA. There's also the old joke about how Catholicism is the only religion based on a pun, i.e., Peter/rock...

On Being MisCaste in the Role of a Lifetime

Expert? Know it all? I hardly think so. If I had to blog about what I already know, I'd be bored out of my skull. It would be like writing a hit song and then having to perform it the same way for the rest of your life. I can't imagine why any musician would want to do that. That's not making music. It's being prevented from doing so.

The occasional commenter has suggested that I only ridicule the tenured because I envy them. But it has never occurred to me that teaching some predigested course to a bunch of adolescent mediocrities would suit my temperament. I'm interested in the unknown, not the known.

Once something is known, it quickly becomes tacit knowledge for probing further into the unknown -- like the stick of the blind man we discussed a few posts back. To obsess over the stick is to miss the point of the stick. Rather, its purpose is to reach beyond itself into the unseen, the unknown, the unassimilated. I don't want to practice the servile art of stick making; rather, the quintessential liberal art of inward mobility. I want to be an explorer. A pneumanaut. A vertical adventurer. Doesn't everyone?

Well, no. Apparently it's a caste thingy. There are warriors, priests, merchants, laborers, et al, and it is very difficult if not impossible to oust a person from his caste (any more than a person can fundamentally change his innate temperament). In fact, now that I think about it, most of the problems in the world are due to miscaste people.

Think of all the intellectual lightweights in Washington who fancy themselves geniuses, beginning with the dimwit at the top. Obama should be a salesman. Indeed, he is a salesman, maybe even a brilliant one. Say what you want, but he has become a wealthy man from selling his crap, and it presumably requires more skill to peddle crap than Crayolas.

It also requires a degree of sociopathy, because one must make the sale without feeling guilty about it. For example, I see no evidence that Obama has any qualms about having sold Obamacare to a gullible nation. Perhaps he even believes his own bullshit, which is the pinnacle of salesmanship: autopullwoolery.

About being miscaste. Plato suggested a way around this: that we only cast philosophers as kings. I can't see how that could possibly work, because a lover of wisdom is indifferent to power, plus it just brings a plague of sham philosophers, similar to how widespread access to higher education has caused an epidemic of worthless Ph.D.s and idiot professors.

In his Language of the Self, Schuon has a chapter on The Meaning of Caste. It's a very unAmerican idea, but then again no, because our founders were quite aware of the natural -- not hereditary -- aristocracy, and intended to create a system which would redound to their leadership without having to impose it on anyone. If one must be ruled, who doesn't want to be ruled by the best people -- as opposed to being ruled by people who pretend to be better than us?

For example, George Washington is a better man than I. Barack Obama -- or Joe Biden, or John Kerry, or Harry Reid on down -- only pretends to be.

"In its spiritual sense," writes Schuon, "caste is the 'law' or dharma governing a particular category of men in accord with their qualifications. It is in this sense, and only in this sense, that the Bhagavad-Gita says: 'Better for each one is his own law of action, even if imperfect, than the law of another, even well applied. It is better to perish in one’s own law; it is perilous to follow the law of another.” For example, it is dangerous for Lileks to pretend at home repair. He may fool himself, but he doesn't fool the expert.

Again, think of all the societal problems caused by intellectuals who aren't wise, holy men who aren't holy, military people who aren't warriors, etc. Yes, in America you can be -- or at least pretend to be -- anything you want, but it doesn't mean you should be. Should women be warriors? Should homosexuals? Our society has become so deranged that it is no longer permissible to even ask such questions.

Of the castes, "There is first of all the intellective, speculative, contemplative, sacerdotal type, which tends towards wisdom or holiness; holiness referring more particularly to contemplation, and wisdom to discernment." (Bear in mind that in our upside-down world, an Al Sharpton or Fred Phelps or Jesse Jackson or Deepak Chopra or Jeremiah Wright are all certified holy men.)

"Next there is the warlike and royal type, which tends towards glory and heroism; even in spirituality -- since holiness is for everyone -- this type will readily be active, combative and heroic, hence the ideal of the 'heroicalness of virtue.'" (Typical miscaste knights would be Colin Powell, Wesley Clark, or John Kerry.)

The knightly type possesses "a keen intelligence, but it is an intelligence turned toward action" as opposed to contemplation and speculation. Here I am again reminded of a George Washington, for the strength of this type "lies especially in his character; he makes up for the aggressiveness of his energy by his generosity and for his passionate nature by his nobility, self-control, and greatness of soul." That's GW.

"The third type is the respectable 'average' man: he is essentially industrious, balanced, persevering; his center is love for work that is useful and well done, and carried out with God in mind; he aspires neither to transcendence nor to glory -- although he desires to be both pious and respectable -- but like the sacerdotal type, he loves peace and is not interested in adventures; a tendency which predisposes him to a contemplativeness conformable with his occupations."

The majority of men are of this nature -- happy so long as they are productively employed and able to support their families. My father was like this. There is certainly nothing wrong with it. To the contrary, the whole system would fall apart without such individuals, who are selfless in their own way. Which is another reason why Obama's devaluation of work is so sinister -- as if everyone should be writing poems and novels. This will only result in more bad poetry and literature than we already have.

"Lastly there is the type that has no ideal other than that of pleasure in the more or less coarse sense of the word; this is concupiscent man who, not knowing how to master himself, has to be mastered by others, so that his great virtue will be submission and fidelity."

I think you see the problem. Liberals pander to caste four, those with "no ideal other than that of pleasure," and who either do not or cannot master themselves. These masterless men now presume to be our masters, so the world order is truly inverted.

In fact, I'm afraid it's even worse than that, for the lowest caste -- or out-caste -- is composed of those who are completely outside the human system, so to speak. Perhaps you've never met one, in which case you are either sheltered or lucky. These are human beings who possess no "homogeneous nature," but rather, are chaotic and mercurial. They exhibit "a tendency to realize psychological possibilities that are excluded for others" -- in other words, they engage in things you or I wouldn't dream of. They are prone to "transgression" and find "satisfaction in what others reject."

Maybe I'm just sensitive, but I have always been aware of this type of person, and instinctively stayed away. However, they can be charismatic; think of a Charles Manson, or Adolf Hitler, or any number of celebrities and entertainers. Schuon writes that such individuals are capable "of anything and nothing," and are laws unto themselves. John Lennon was of this nature: if he hadn't been a musician he would have been a criminal or parasite.

God help us when the miscaste and uncaste organize into a voting bloc. Not for nothing does the Obama administration vehemently oppose any reasonable effort to reduce voter fraud, and now proposes to repeal laws that prohibit millions of felons from voting. Naturally they frame it in terms of racial demagoguery, but "Caste takes precedence over race because spirit has priority over form; race is a form while caste is a spirit" (Schuon).

Free at Last, Thank Matter Almighty I'm Free of Freedom!

Is there any escape from subjectivity? In a comment on yesterday's post, reader ge claims (in reference to a certain thinker) that "Once such influential immortality is reached, death is conquered."

I don't know if he meant that literally or ironically, but reader Julie responded that being "remembered by the world" is one thing, whereas "true immortality," i.e., being "remembered by God," is another thing entirely.

Or in other words, the first type of immortality is subjective, in that it resides in other subjects.

But no matter how many subjects there are or how long they remember, they are all mortal as well, so one is obviously just postponing the inevitable, which is total destruction and utter forgetfulness. Once the sun fades and the world freezes, it will be as if even the most famous person never existed. Therefore, subjective immortality is really just a brief stage on the way to objective mortality and total cosmic I-amnesia, so Michelangelo is as forgettable as Miley Cyrus. Or, each was an inexplicable miracle of equivalent incomprehensibility.

The second type of mortality is objective, in that it partakes of absoluteness. This relationship between objectivity and absoluteness may offer a clue as to the purpose of life, in that to participate in absoluteness on this side of death is to engage in a process of "immortalization." Conversely, to plunge into relativity and subjectivity is to fritter away one's life. We'll return to this idea later.

If the postmodern doctrine of relativism is true, then it is absolutely the case that there can be no escape from our subjectivity. Reality is perception and perception is an evanescent fog that burns off with the morning sun. Yes, that fog was your life.

We cannot see clearly through the fog, but not seeing clearly presupposes something there to see. If there were only fog, then no one could see it.

Speaking of fog, I can see that this cloudy metaphor is running out of steam, so let's just cut to Schuon, who forecasts that if there is indeed no escape from the fog of human subjectivity, then "the statement itself possesses no objective value, but falls under its own verdict."

The following sounds like a foggy tautology, but it is not: "It is abundantly evident that man can escape subjectivity, for otherwise he would not be man" (ibid.).

This is actually a sunlit axiom, or first principle: that man qua man is the subject who is capable of transcending his subjectivity. No other terrestrial subject can do this. We won't get into the question of whether God can also transcend himself, but we will someday return to that contentious subject, so near to our Hartshorne.

The question is not whether man is a subject, which he obviously is; rather, the question is whether he is only a subject, which strikes me as impossible.

For again, what defines man is the self-evident fact that he is "able to conceive of both the subjective and the surpassing of the subjective" (ibid.) Or in other words, as Schuon has expressed it elsewhere, it seems that man is "condemned to transcendence."

The phenomenon of man is not essentially a material proposition (or materiality is a necessary but not sufficient condition). Rather, everything that sets man apart first takes place in a higher, immaterial space. To quote Schuon again, our space of subjectivity "would not even be conceivable for a man who was totally enclosed in his subjectivity; an animal lives its subjectivity but does not conceive it, for unlike man it does not possess the gift of objectivity."

Thus, in one sense we have "more" subjectivity than other animals, in that we live in a much more vast interior space. But in another sense we must have less subjectivity, or in other words, the ability to "stand back" from our own subjectivity and view it from an objective standpoint. An animal can change its behavior but it cannot gain personal insight into it. A dog doesn't wonder to itself, "why am I always such an asshole to the mailman? It's like I can't help it or something."

So the question isn't whether we are subjects, but whether we are entirely enclosed in our subjectivity. There was a time, not too long ago, that psychology assumed a kind of closed mental system. I don't want to go into all the historical details, but this was essentially a result of psychologists trying to imitate the 19th century paradigm of classical (pre-relativistic) physics, in which everything in the universe is exterior to everything else, like a cosmic billiards table.

We now know that humans are intrinsically intersubjective. In fact, if we weren't intrinsically intersubjective -- i.e., members of one another -- there would be no way to become so after the fact. It is our own version of an instinct, only on a higher plane. For example, one can try to raise a grizzly bear as a child, but the bear has an unavoidable attraction to its own archetype and will eventually eat you.

There are, however "critical periods" of development, in which the organism must meet with an appropriate response from the environment in order to actualize the archetype (or clueprint). Thus, an infant deprived of maternal love, if he doesn't die outright, will grow up autistic, since his intersubjectivity wasn't engaged and drawn out during the critical period. Such a person will indeed be "enclosed in his subjectivity" (or "condemned to immanence," so to speak).

Since our horizontal openness is no longer up for serious debate, the more important question is whether man is also an open system vertically -- or in other words, whether there isn't just an intersubjective mygration from our own private Idaho, but whether there is also a vertical escape-hatching of the cosmic egg.

Here again, it would appear that this goes to the subject-object complementarity alluded to at the top of this post. For man's unique form of subjectivity includes "the gift of objectivity." Or at least we hope it does. If it doesn't, then there is nothing really to discuss, since we are just arguing over whose fog is better, with no reference to what is behind or above it.

Now, one of the mind parasites that corrupts leftism is the notion that truth is a function of class, or race, or economics, or some other subjective quality that is less than truth -- that "the background determines the thought and takes precedence over truth" (Schuon). If this is true, then it must always be true, so we are again hopelessly enclosed in subjectivity.

Thus, another kind of objectivity comes to the rescue, AKA power and violence. This becomes a literal object, e.g., a gun to the face, a boot on the neck, a tax on existing, etc. It is a truism that any philosophy that denies truth affirms violence. There is no question as to the "legitimacy" of the violence, because that goes to a truth that is humanly unknowable.

To put it another way, to deny objective truth is to give oneself permission to plunge into passion, which again defines leftist man. Machiavelli was apparently the first fellow with balls enough to come right out and say that politics involves only effective truth, which is to affirm the principle that might makes right.

Where would leftists be without this unprincipled principle? They would not only be freed from their own horizontal prison, but would no longer feel compelled to force the rest of us into it.

To be continued...

Atheism and Other Autoimmune Disorders of Language

We are on the topic of Cosmic Fundamentals, trying to dig down to the foundation of existence.

That we are attempting to do so with words must tell us something fundamental. For either language is fundamental or it is not; if it isn't, then we're kind of stuck, since it means that our primary tool of thought isn't up to the task -- like shaving with a hammer or trying to bite a wall.

But if language can get the job done, well then, that bloody well says something special about language, doesn't it? Which is one reason I'm always surprised that the intemperate tools among us can make such sweeping statements that nullify the significance of language.

To cite the most obvious example, to say definitively -- which is to say absolutely -- that there is no God is to implicitly affirm that human language is adequate to ultimate reality. Which is a roundabout way of saying that we in are the image of the Creator. Thus, intelligence makes itself into a god instead of pointing beyond itself to its own source and destiny.

We don't make anything like that grandiose a claim. Rather, for us language can only point toward ultimate truth, not be identical with it. For language comes from the Source, so it can never contain it (one cannot be contained by one's content; well, one can, but that is what we call psycho- or pneumapathology).

Alternatively, if language simply comes "from below," from earth-matter, how could it ever presume to reach beyond itself to the ultimate signified? Besides, how would it know when it had reached it? By what criteria?

Thus, we can all agree that "relativism reduces every element of absoluteness to relativity while making a completely illogical exception in favor of this reduction itself.... [I]ts initial absurdity lies in the implicit claim to be unique in escaping, as if by enchantment, from a relativity that is declared to be the only possibility" (Schuon).

There is always a level of faith and a degree of assent -- i.e., will -- involved in truth. We hear something and say to ourselves, "ah, that's good enough." Truth itself is not sufficient to convince -- or convict -- us. Rather, we must assent to it, and assent comes from the will, which is free. We are always free to reject truth, hence our dignity. Everyone in hell is quite dignified. Or proud, rather.

Schuon expresses it well in Logic and Transcendence, distinguishing between truth and its realization, which amounts to form and substance (or letter and spirit, doctrine and lower-case gnosis). Adequate proofs of God surely exist, but they nevertheless require our assent. If they didn't, then again, we wouldn't be free, so freedom is prior to truth. In the absence of freedom, the thing we call "truth" couldn't exist, since there could be no space between knower and known.

There is no way to prove anything to a person with "omnipotent doubt," so to speak. Since most science is inductive, the sophist can always conceive of exceptions. And where it is deductive, one can always claim that its first principles aren't justified.

For Schuon, a proof on the spiritual plane "is of assistance only to the man who wishes to understand and who, because of this wish, has in some measure understood already." Conversely, "it is of no practical use to one who, deep in his heart, does not want to change his position and whose philosophy merely expresses this desire."

There it is again: will. Instead of conforming the will to truth, such a person conforms it to his desire. Or in other words, reality is the precipitate of how one wishes things to be, not how they are.

As Robert Kennedy put it, "There are those that look at things the way they are, and ask why? I dream of things that never were, and ask why not?" We will never know if he was conscious of plagiarizing the Serpent in G.B. Shaw's Back To Methuselah, but he was expressing the fundamental credo of the left.

Think of how language is corrupted in our postmodern world. Indeed, postmodernism itself is an attack on language by language, hence, a spiritual autoimmune disorder.

And when we say "corrupted," we mean something similar to what happens when when one's hard drive is corrupted. When this happens, it is as if the computer is behaving willfully and simply refuses to cooperate.

It is no different than when a person is corrupted by a mind parasite -- for example, the notion that constitutional conservatives are inherently racist. Once one has assented to such a lie, there is no escape back to reality.

A proof of God is not God, but rather, merely points to him. One still has to look, and not just sniff my finger. For Schuon, it is "a key or symbol, a means of drawing back a veil rather than of giving light. It is not by itself a leap out of ignorance and into knowledge."

Indeed, one might think of it as permission to take the leap. But nothing liberates us from the obligation to leave our bogus certainty below and to plunge into the great unKnown, "for it is impossible to to prove the Absolute outside itself" (ibid.).

The rationalism of a frog living at the bottom of a well is to deny the existence of mountains: perhaps this is 'logic,' but it has nothing to do with reality. --Schuon

Knowledge and Experience

Not sure if a post will emerge from this maelstrom of activity, with simultaneous departures of son to school and mother-in-law to airport. A bit of a scramble. Trying to keep the melon on straight when all about me are losing theirs, and that sort of thing.

Yes, if you want to put it that way, I suppose you could say I'm not normal. Very easily overstimulated, you might say. Or, you could say I'm quite sufficiently stimulated all by myself, thank you. It's always a crowd in here.

I suspect that many Raccoons are of this reclusive nature, with nervous systems that crackle with energy and bristle with social awkwardness. Or in other words, eccentric. This would explain the... exclusive nature of my readership, because with the standard blog, one reader tells his friends, those friends tell their friends, and in a matter of months you have 100,000 readers.

Or maybe Raccoons are just adept at keeping the secret. Yeah, that's it. We tell only our imaginary friends.

Lately we've been discussing the Cosmic Fundamentals. Which brings up an interesting preliminary question, that is, is a priori knowledge possible? This question is central to the somewhat tedious book on Plato and Aristotle, as they answer it in different ways.

Plato is of course all about a priori knowledge, to the exclusion of experience. Similar to the wise guys of the east, he sees the world as ever-changing and therefore useless as a source of truth.

Rather, truth is somewhere to the north of human existence, in the form of transcendent ideas. Herebelow, for example, we only encounter instances of justice, but our task is to ascend to the level at which we can perceive the ideal of justice in all its purity.

The rub is that you can't do that until you're dead, which is why Socrates happily gulped down the hemlock. Although, like Jesus, he was murdered by the state, what a difference between the Passion and his absence thereof! Jesus asked that the cup be passed, while Socrates betrayed no ambivalence at all.

Unlike Plato, Aristotle begins with experience and works up inductively. He agrees that universals exist, but only in particulars. There is no abstract world of universals we can ascend to, and there is no world more "real" than this one.

Well, they're both wrong. Or half right. If I am not mistaken, Aristotle would agree that some knowledge is a priori, for example, the rules of logic, e.g., the principle of exclusion. Without the P of E, thought itself would be impossible, similar to how a rational economy is impossible in the absence of private property. In other words, to the extent that one is "thinking," it is (partly) because a thing is this and not that.

What about the existence of a Cosmos? Are there ideas that cannot not be in order for any cosmos to exist, or in order for there to exist conscious beings?

No, we are not exactly dealing with the Anthropic Cosmological Principle, which is somewhat of a tautology -- that is, that the laws we observe are conditioned by the fact that we exist. In other words, we shouldn't be surprised that things are the way they are, because if they weren't, we wouldn't be here. This principle cuts both ways, proving either that the cosmos is a huge conspiracy or an epic coincidence.

But Schuon takes a different tack. Weaving together both universal logic and our most intimate experience, he shows that the ultimate universal is indeed accessible to the particular, which is another way of saying that man is created in the image of God. Or, the latter expression is a more mythopoeic way of saying that man is conformed to the Absolute.

Let's begin with the Absolute. What is it? Schuon defines it as necessary reality. This implies an immediate corollary, that there exists possible or contingent reality. We know from experience that there is contingent reality -- things don't have to happen the way they do -- from which we may also deduce our own free will, which is a kind of shadow of necessity.

In other words, if we are free, then we can do this or we can do that. We can choose truth or falsehood, good or evil, truth or ugliness. This reminds me of the intimate relationship between truth and ignorance: we can only approach absolute truth because we are ultimately ignorant. Things are intelligible because intelligence is implicit within them, but we can never exhaust this intelligibility. To do so would be to become the Absolute.

Freedom would seem to imply a kind of "nothingness" within the heart of the Absolute, or a nothing-everything complementarity.

Well, I guess I couldn't transcend the maelstrom. We'll start over on Monday.

On Distinguishing God's Aseity from a Hole in the Ground

A riddle: what is without a doubt the biggest gap in all of creation? It's an important question, because evidently even a modest sized gap provokes religiosity.

For example, according to the geniuses at (living on borrowed) Time Magazine, There Are No Atheists at the Grand Canyon. Thus, "all it takes is a little awe to make you feel religious."

Awwwww... isn't that nice?

I yield to no one in my awe at the canyonesque emptyheadedness of the MSM, but it doesn't make me feel especially religious. Rather, vice versa: the wisdom I derive from religious tradition renders me speechless in the face of such numinous cluelessness. Confronted with such a gap between words and reality, I can only remind myself that man is a fallen creature, especially when he doesn't realize it.

I'm almost afraid to read the article, because there is nothing to be gained by shooting down an idiot. Doing so can puff up one's pride, but it doesn't take a genius to run circles around a retard.

And I use the latter term advisedly, since there are spiritual retards, just as there are intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and social retards. Not to prejudge the case, but I'm guessing the author is catastrophically vertically challenged.

"Any fool can feel religious around the holidays."

Spoken like a true fool. Better start by defining "religious." Besides, it sounds like the point of this piece is that any fool can feel religious while looking at the Grand Canyon. Thus, it appears that Kluger literally doesn't know God's aseity from a hole in the ground.

Into which he only digs himself deeper, for "there’s nothing quite like nature -- with its ability to elicit feelings of jaw-dropping awe -- to make you contemplate the idea of a higher power."

Well. Yes and no. Nature has no such "ability."

Rather, it is human beings who are able to see beyond appearances to the underlying reality. Human intelligence is intrinsically (and quite literally) supernatural, in that it is conformed to a reality that is not only beyond nature, but the source of nature. Yes, the world is metaphysically transparent, but not to lower animals and MSM hacks (but I repeat myself).

We interrupt this article for a distracting link to another brainwave, this one on why It’s Social Ties -- Not Religion -- That Makes the Faithful Give to Charity. First of all that is grammatically incorrect: Social Ties make, not makes. Second of all, everyone knows it's the IRS that makes us give to "charity." Religion only encourages us, minus the threat of imprisonment.

"All awe contains a slight element of fear or at least vulnerability, and the sooner we have an explanation for what it is we’re seeing and how it came to be, the more reassured we are."

Hmm. I know all about what the IRS is and how it came to be, but I am not reassured. Rather, I'm still frightened of it.

Kluger's point also makes no sense vis-a-vis the Grand Canyon. I mean, everyone knows the Grand Canyon is a result of erosion. So, why does the awe persist?

And it seems to me that fear is quite distinct from awe. I'd probably be awfully afraid to ride one of those donkeys into the Canyon, but I can't imagine it would be a religious experience.

The author concludes by tossing out the same reductionist garbage he disingenuously inserted at the outset: "couldn’t the awe-inspiring also be explained by the random interplay of chemistry, physics and time -- nature in other words -- rather than a spiritual being?"

Hmm. Are we really in awe of randomness, which is another word for the high entropy absence of information? If so, then the most awe-inspiring thing would be the kind of absolute stupidity reflected in this article. Sometimes a gap is just a gap, i.e., a space full of nothing.

"And if so, couldn’t scenes of space or the Grand Canyon make you seek answers by becoming an astronomer or a geologist, rather than looking to religion?"

Yes, I suppose so, for it scarcely matters what sorts of stories frightened monkeys make up in order to sooth themselves and try to make the awful awe go away.

That was an unanticipated digression. Back to our riddle: what is the biggest gap, the grandest canyon, in all of creation?

Well yes, man obviously. But what accounts for man?

I think it has to do with what is hinted at on page 125 of the book, Nature's Greatest Invention: The Helpless Baby. Specifically, the "premature" birth of the human infant at a neurologically incomplete stage confers a kind of infinite plasticity on the human mind.

No, not literally infinite, in the sense that there are also nonlocal guardrails that guide development and give it form. But the brain itself is the closest thing to infinitude in all of existence. Some people put the number of possible brain connections at 100 trillion, but I think the real figure is incalculable.

So the human infant is without question the most awesome gap there can be, this side of the Creator. I haven't read Benedict's Infancy Narratives, but I'll bet there is some relevant information there, because there is no doubt that the Word could not become man without first becoming an infant, a fetus, an embryo, a blastocyst, all the way down. For the abyss between man and God must be filled at the very foundation in order for the gap to become a bridge.

How perfectly awe-ful!

I Once Was Blind. And Deaf. And Stupid.

We left off yesterday with a quote from Ratzinger, to the effect that freedom, love, and reason are the genuine cosmic powers and necessary conditions for the existence of progress, AKA evolution.

It is quite important to understand -- I suppose for both religious and irreligious persons alike -- that this is not intended in any romantic or sentimental or fruity way, but quite literally.

I used to be one of those people who would hear something like this and just tune it out: "right, all is love, blah blah blah." Oddly, I didn't have the same reservations when uttered by John Lennon. Maybe because he expressed it in such a romantic, sentimental, and fruity manner.

Now that I think about it, the Beatles became my religion right around the same time I declared my atheism at age nine or ten. I remember one of the PowerLine guys saying that he first learned politics at the knee of John Lennon. I did too, but also my theology, sociology, and economics.

Of course, I mean this in a more general way, in the sense that I simply absorbed the sensibilities of 1960s at a very impressionable age. I think it explains why to this day I am such an improvisational orthoparadoxical bohemian classical liberal neo-traditional retrofuturistic freevangelical conservative hippie gentleman slacker. I'm still as weird as ever. It's the others who got all normal and surrendered to the Conspiracy. ge know what I'm talkin' 'bout.

That being the case, something like Catholicism or institutional religion in general would have been at antipodes to my rebellious and free-spirited podes. Naturally I was drawn toward cool nonwestern spiritual traditions that promised low-cost liberation from all problems.

If someone were to ask how I left that world behind and below, I would cite three little factors: 1) empirical reality, 2) common sense, and 3) spiritual discernment. Take away those three, and I'd no doubt be as lost and confused as Obama's mama.

Back to baseball. How, philosophically speaking, do we get to first base? Again, there are no freebies in baseball, nor can one steal first base. Rather, one has to earn one's way there.

There's no hiding in baseball either, no team to anonymously blend into so as to conceal your deficiencies. Rather, it's just you and the pitcher, and he's trying to prevent you from getting to first, so again, no one is going to give it to you. You are naked unto the world, with barely more than the tools God and nature gave you -- just you and a stick. (That reminds me of a tweet by Iowahawk: that figure skating might be interesting if there were more defense.)

But you can do a lot with a stick. I am immediately reminded of Polanyi's analogy of how the blind person uses his stick to probe the space around him. At first he is aware only of sensations in the hand. But eventually the hand-sensations become subsidiary to his focal awareness of the space around him; or, you could say a dialectical and expanding space opens up between unconscious/conscious, implicit/explicit, latent/manifest, etc.

The point is that a three-dimensional sensorium has been opened up via one-dimensional taps on the surface of the skin. The blind man has succeeded in getting to first base with no cheating at all, and certainly no affirmative discrimination to simply plop him on first and pretend he hit a line drive into the gap.

An even better example would be Helen Keller, who could neither see nor hear. How did she ever get on base? How did she transcend a one- or two-dimensional animal or vegetable existence?

It doesn't matter if it's apocryphal -- for it is the story Man -- but there is a moment in the 1962 film when Helen discovers transcendence and thus enters the human Gap. It is also when she discovers the Word, in this case the word for water. Before this, there are a multitude of unconnected experiences of water, but a sudden unity emerges that ties all these experiences together. Ah ha! Water!

(My wife, by the way, plays Helen's baby sister in the film; this must be her:

Me? My only film appearance was in the 1973 made-for-TV classic, The Man Who Could Talk to Kids. I was slacking off with a couple of friends in Malibu, having skipped school, and the director gave us five dollars each to be extras. To get paid for ditching pretty much makes it the Best Day Ever.)

Back into our cold and bracing stream of thought. It turns out that everything is just a variation of the stick in the dark: microscopes, telescopes, language, philosophy, science, scripture, blogging, whatever. Everything takes place in the Gap and widens and deepens the Gap. To discover universals is to have discovered the universe. The deeper person simply has the more encompassing Gap, both in terms of unified content and dimensionality.

Regarding the latter, it is not as if there is only one transcendent dimension we enter when we discover the existence of universals. Rather, the discovery of universals sends us hither and yon, into a wider world of freedom, truth, beauty, virtue.

And yes, love, of all things.

Whoever does not see here is blind. Whoever does not hear here is deaf. And whoever does not begin to adore here and to praise the creating Intelligence is dumb. --Saint Bonaventure

You Say You Want a Revolution? I Prefer a Line.

The idea of the gap, as discussed in yesterday's post, has many applications. For example, our essential political differences have to do with the gap between the individual and the collective, and how it ought to be filled: by the state or by the free and spontaneous activities of civil society.

Tocqueville famously observed that one of America's unique characteristics was the presence of so many voluntary organizations that mediate between man and state. The more the state appropriates these vital functions, the less the individual can do so; or, as Dennis Prager says, the larger the government, the smaller the citizen.

A corollary of this is that we need large and ontologically hefty souls in order to preserve limited constitutional government -- which is why the magnificent universality of a George Washington towers over the small-minded pettiness of an Obama.

It has been said that the American revolution was the only successful one in history. Why is this? In large part because our founders made the correct choice at the outset between liberty and egalitarianism, and between a liberal republic vs. an illiberal democracy. That is, they knew that a pure democracy would eventually consume itself, as citizens vote themselves more goodies from an ever-expanding state; no one can honestly say they didn't warn us about Obama.

Conversely, the French, for example, "tried to create the impossible: a regime of both liberty and of 'patriotic' state power. The history of the revolution is proof that these goals are incompatible" (Krauthammer). And yet, virtually every revolution since then follows the French and not American model.

Which makes one suspect that we are giving the same name to two very different phenomena. For example, even Jefferson or Paine in their most intemperate flights of intemperateness wouldn't agree with Saint-Just that "The Republic consists in the extermination of everything that opposes it."

In point of fact -- and we have discussed this in the past -- our war of independence was the opposite of a revolution. For what is a revolution? Well, for starters, it is a circle, as in how our earth revolves around the sun. You might say that political revolutions pretend to take place at 180˚ but necessarily come 360˚ and thus back to 0˚.

Speaking of whom -- and by now it is a cliche to say so -- Obama's countless broken promises (actually, some folks have attempted to count them) demonstrates how revolutionaries, once in power, become the new conservatives, since they want to conserve and increase their power. Thus, all of Obama's broken promises cohere around the same theme: the power of the state over the citizen.

If America wasn't founded in revolution, then what do we call it? Well, what is the "opposite" of a circle? For our purposes it is a line. As we know, not just liberalism but all primitive mentalities are circular. It was the Jews who discovered linear time, and therefore the very possibility of evolution and progress. For clearly, evolution is an irreversible line, not an absurcular nul de slack.

With a circle, no matter how far one "progresses," one eventually regresses; and in the absence of downsight into the circularity of this phase space, one will march straight ahead into the past, as we see in the case of Obama's retrograde policies. Every single one of his primary constituencies is doing worse today than five years ago, but I suppose that, from the perspective of the circle, it looks as if they are barreling ahead.

Krauthammer quips that the "brutal circularity" of the radical revolutionary should be "properly called not revolution but nihilism." Again, it is nihilistic because it necessarily returns to 0˚. But why?

I would say because of the absence of Truth and Freedom. The child of Truth and Freedom is Creativity, and the latter is the advance of novelty. The advance of novelty -- which is quintessentially linear -- is the opposite of the circularity of the eternal return. The very historical appearance of the United States was a radical departure, so perhaps this newness became conflated with "revolution."

The founders were quite aware of this novelty, i.e., that they were creating a government rooted not just in ideas, but in permanent truths. Obama couldn't possibly be more wrong than to foolishly suggest that the Framers somehow rejected absolute truth. I mean, our founding document couldn't be more clear, with its reference to the self-evident truths from which government derives its purpose and its legitimacy. To deviate from these truths can never result in progress, for the same reason that rejecting any truth is going to impede progress.

Bob, this post is starting to get pretty obvious, isn't it? Could we please have a new rant, or at least a novel way of expressing it?

Okay, back to the Gap, which we will pretentiously capitalize. By its very nature, the Human Situation takes place in the Gap.

Now, this Gap is either nothing or it is everything, and I mean that quite literally. In other words, if the existentialists, materialists, and other flatlanders are correct, then this Gap is a kind of absurd irruption in the middle of nowhere, in which we are condemned to a meaningless freedom with no possible telos, no goal beyond itself. This is what Sartre means when he equates being and nothingness.

But the existentialist -- as do all bad philosophies -- errs in starting at first base without explaining how he got there. This is in violation of the old baseball adage that one cannot steal first base; rather, one must earn one's way there by getting a base hit, or walking, or getting plunked by the pitcher.

In the realm of philosophy, what is Home Plate, i.e., one's first principle? For if one starts with the wrong principle, it is not possible to get to first base. To cite one obvious example, if one is a materialist, one can never leave the batter's box. Rather, one will always be zero-for-zero, which works out to a perfect batting average of .000. However, since it is "perfect," it seems that the materialist imagines he is batting 1.000.

Example. Okay, look at Sartre: he claims with one hundred percent certainty that everything is meaningless, so one hundred x zero (i.e. zero meaning) works out to a philosophical batting average of .000.

Now, no one could possibly bat a thousand or always bowl a perfect game except maybe Jesus.

Prior to God's creative activity, the world is said to be "without form and void." In other words, it is a big Nothing. Which it must be in the absence of God. Man himself has no form -- i.e., no nature -- if he is not created. Is it any wonder that civilization deteriorates and descends back into primordial chaos and barbarism when we disregard these God-given forms? When we do that we are back in the revolutionary circle, where it is impossible to evolve.

And come to think of it, isn't the Serpent the first revolutionary, and his circular doctrine a declaration of independence from God? And for that matter, didn't Obama's mentor, Saul Alinsky, dedicate Rules for Radicals to "the first radical known to man who rebelled against the establishment and did it so effectively that he at least won his own kingdom -- Lucifer”? If Alinsky was trying to be ironic, then he was too ironic by half.

... [O]nly if it is true that the universe comes from freedom, love, and reason, and that these are the real underlying powers, can we trust one another, go forward into the future, and live as human beings.... For this means that freedom and love are not ineffectual ideas but rather that they are sustaining forces of reality. --Josef Ratzinger

On the Annoying Gap Between God and Man

If I am not mistaken -- it's been awhile since Brain Anatomy 101 -- our neurons don't actually touch. Despite the fact that our skull is packed with some 100 billion of them, there is still enough space for a tiny space between each one, called the synaptic gap (or cleft). Neurons actually communicate with each other by spitting a chemical into the synapse -- called a neurotransmitter -- while the neuron on the other end sucks it up.

Now, aren't you glad human beings don't communicate that way?

I suppose we sometimes do, as with pheromones. For example, they say that baby pheromones have a powerful effect on maternal behavior.

Ants apparently do something similar. I don't imagine there is much information in the signal -- maybe "picnic over there" or "check out the asshole with the garden hose." (About eight years ago I wrote a long-forgotten post on the similarities between ant and liberal communication.)

But then, neurons don't pass along much information either. There aren't all that many neurotransmitters, and besides, like digital code, they only have two possible messages: excite or inhibit, i.e., fire or don't fire.

How this results in consciousness is anyone's guess. Mine is that it doesn't. That is to say, brain activity -- and even brains -- is ultimately an effect of intelligence, not its cause. Similarly, a computer can't program itself, and if we leave it alone, it's not as if it will eventually grow hands and blunder itself into self-consciousness.

This is all by way of prelude, waiting for the coffee to squeeze some adrenaline into my synaptic gaps. While we listen for that sucking sound in my axons, let's reflect upon a famous image, and see if it has anything to do with this post:

As you can see, despite the fact that God is by definition "everywhere," there is nevertheless a visible synaptic gap between God and man. What goes on within that gap?

Well, religion, for starters. There is also a gap between the world and the senses, and science is what takes place within this gap. For that matter, there is a gap between persons, and this gap is filled with anything from love to knowledge to touch to whatever.

So, gaps are everywhere. For example, history fills the gap between past and present. Likewise, one of my primary hobbies is filling the gap between ear and atmosphere with arresting sound vibrations, AKA music.

Back to the religious gap. That this gap exists is beyond dispute. One doesn't necessarily have to fill it with religion per se, but one must fill it with something. By way of analogy, it needn't necessarily be truth, but everyone has something in his head, even if it is unalloyed BS.

Viewed in a purely abstract manner, the religious gap is a result of the distinction between relative and Absolute. Therefore, the gap is essentially necessary, in that we know we are relative, i.e., contingent, and relative implies Absolute just as contingency implies necessity.

Now that I think about it, this same gap accounts for our free will -- it is the space in which freedom occurs -- which is why the question of freedom is intrinsically bound up with the question of God. At Grandma's birthday party this weekend, I attempted to explain this principle to a couple of relatives, to no avail. Indeed, despite the fact that they are Jewish, they could not appreciate the remarkable parallel between Exodus and the Gap. For what is wandering in the bewilderness but life in the divine-human gap?

In this little book of flaming homilies on the subject of creation, Ratzinger writes of how the biblical account of cosmogenesis makes it impossible to think of the world as a closed and self-sufficient system. Rather, it has a source beyond itself. As a result, the Most Important Things can't be understood without reference to this Source.

This is, of course, a binary question: either the cosmos is created or it is not created, and therefore dependent or independent, closed or open, static or evolving. There is no "in between." (Come to think of it, I also tried to explain to the same two individuals why evolution, i.e., to higher states, is impossible in a materialistic cosmos, but no luck.)

The following passage by Ratzinger is relevant: "The Bible is thus the story of God's struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time."

This implies that the gap cannot be filled -- or at least was not filled -- in an all-at-once manner. Indeed, if it could be so filled, then it wouldn't be a gap at all. The existence of the gap implies the need for both space and time -- an evolutionary space, as it were -- to fill it.

On a macro level, God can't very well make himself understood by pre-human animals. And once human beings are here, he can't very well make himself known by, say, a book, since they first have to learn how to read. And write.

So there is God's side of the gap; there is also the human side, for which reason the Bible "is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time."

The most abstract possible way to depict this gap is like so: (⇅). If Michelangelo had had access to the ancient Raccoon wisdom, he would have painted little arrows between the index fingers of God and Adam. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

Therefore, the story of creation is not just a once-upon-a-time deal, but rather, is ongoing. You might say that man is the creature that carries on the creation. Thus, human existence is a gift that keeps giving. But only if we open God's presence in the gap.

The Hebrew Bible tracks the journey of God's people through time and history: "indeed, the whole Old Testament is a journeying with the word of God." It is a step-by-step process, at first quite concretely so, e.g., "go to the land I will show you."

Where we depart from our Jewish friends is in seeing a continuation of this journey toward a Person. As Ratzinger describes it, scripture reveals, "in its totality, an advance toward Christ."

Thus, like any narrative, the meaning of everything that has come before is only revealed at the end: "every individual part derives its meaning from the whole, and the whole derives its meaning from the end -- from Christ."

The preliminary bottom line this morning is that by definition, the Gap cannot be filled from our side, no matter how much (↑) we pour into it -- or how much (k) we flood the zone with.

But it seems that the same goes for God. No matter how much (↓) he pours in, it is never enough, especially if we are to retain our free will. This is why no amount of knowledge, no matter how sublime, turns us into God (i.e., the Gnostic temptation), for we are always limited by our relativity.

"Perhaps there's another way," said God to himselves. "One of us ought to go down there and actually embody the Gap."

"It's crazy," said the Holy Spirit, "but it might just work."

"Any volunteers?"

Pictures of God, Man, and Everything

Very often, like yesterday, I start off writing a post, and it takes me down a completely unintended path. I never have any real idea what's going to come out, but I usually at least start with the seed of an idea. But then it's as if the seed grows into a different plant.

Which again makes me think that the mind must conform to some sort of higher organizing principle, so long as we abandon ourselves to it. In a certain sense this is a banality, but I don't think I mean it in the banal sense.

In other words, we're not just talking about familiar concepts such as "human nature," or "archetypes," or the old idea of "humours." Those are all too static and repetitive, whereas this is a creative process that ceaselessly generates patterned novelty. Who or what exerts the pattern on our random vertical walk? What makes it all cohere around a center?

These patterns aren't like those, say, of a cherished rug that pulls the room together, or the logocentric designs cranked out by the Mohammedans. Check some of those out; many could be stunning representations of O, such as:

The other day I yoinked a bunch of arresting fractal could-be images of O for future use, such as the one below:

I feel like the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Except this would be close encounters with a kind of threeness, i.e., the Center, the Periphery, and the crackling Radius, AKA Father-Son-Holy Spirit chasing itsoph. The radius is where the (⇅) occurs. You can see how God writes straight with those crooked lines converging on the center.

But of all the images I swiped, my favorite -- the one to which I am most attracted -- might be the one depicted below:

I don't mean aesthetically attracted, but intellectually attracted, for it looks to me like a representation of the human situation.

There are the vertical spaces above and below, with us situated in the middle. Or, you could say heaven above and hell below, with Middle Earth in between. Whatever the case may be, there is a supra-conscious and an un- or infraconscious. Or better, infrahuman.

Except it's not static but dynamic and flowing. The center area is the place of metabolism, with energies flowing up and down. We're always receiving promptings from the unconscious. But we're also always receiving murmurandoms from above. It is for us to weave these together for a full and fruitful incarnation.

Some have suggested that this is the esoteric meaning of space voyager Genesis 1, where the great imagineer divides the waters above from the waters below. If he hadn't done this, then the water would simply seek its own level, and there would be no vertical flow, just the absurcular dog-paddling of the tenured.

Below is another suitable image of what I like to call the Great Attractor, O, drawing us up into its ether orbit:

Or how about the oversized one below, which might be the view from within the attractor beam -- perhaps of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Light at the end of the funnel of love:

I think Wanda is actually referring to that other centripetal funnel -- you know, the funnel of lust:

Well, I'd better complete some work-work before the day is truncated by the birthday party for Grandma.