Between Cynicism and Faith

Because science is science, it can never be settled. Nor can it have any absolute content per se. That is, it is a relentlessly skeptical enterprise that progresses by doubting what we think we know.

For example, if no one had doubted the commonsense geocentric model of the solar system, we wouldn't have the counterintuitive heliocentric. If no one had questioned the crystal clear Newtonian paradigm, we wouldn't have the transparently obscure quantum-relativistic.

So science has content, but it is by definition preliminary and tentative because falsifiable, at least in principle. No matter how many white swans we see, there is always the possibility of a black one, especially if the DOJ gets involved.

However, human beings cannot live in a world of pure doubt. Or, adequation to the world cannot consist of unalloyed doubt, or it would imply that ultimate reality is the purely dubious. But in reality, there must be a reality prior to our doubt. Analogously, an optical illusion is not a hallucination.

A good working definition of scientism is the metaphysic that transforms science from concrete method to abstract doctrine.

AGW would be a quintessential example, because its advocates insist that it is somehow unscientific to doubt the theory, when doubt is precisely what makes the scientific world go 'round. So, who's being unscientific?

Although natural selection has its place in the scheme of things, I seriously doubt that it can account for everything unique and important about man. To believe that it can is another instance of scientism. Likewise the belief that mind may be reduced to brain, or that homosexuality is "genetic."

Chagnon came up against precisely this perversion of science when he publicized his findings. As far as Big Anthropology was concerned, the science was settled: human behavior is a consequence of culture, not genes, and human conflict is caused by scarcity of material resources -- i.e., primitive Income Inequality -- not anything intrinsic to man.

You will no doubt have noticed that this perversion of thought may begin in the mountain rivers of academia, but it doesn't stay there. Rather, it flows into the creeks and sewers of the left, all the way down into the stagnant, disease-ridden ponds of journalism and public education.

Thus, for example, the left cannot comprehend Islamic terrorism, because they think it must be caused by something we did to, or took from, the terrorists. Palestinian culture can't just be evil. Rather, they just want their dirt, or rocks, or olive trees back. Likewise, Putin is not a nasty SOB. He just wants stuff. If we give it to him, he'll go away quietly.

Learning a discipline begins with an implicit internalization of what is considered important, what is settled, and what must not be questioned.

For example, in the last 40 years, the origins of homosexuality has gone from a fascinating question to an insistent and belligerent answer, with nothing in between. It is as if all the previous research just doesn't exist, because the questions can no longer be asked.

One of my favorite aphorisms of Don Colacho is I have seen philosophy gradually fade away between my skepticism and my faith. Religiosity is not typically seen to be an exercise in skepticism, but it certainly is for me.

I suppose one normally thinks of faith and skepticism as being at polar extremes, but I see them as complementary, almost like catabolism (tearing down) and anabolism (building up).

Now science, as alluded to above, is relentlessly catabolic. It is nearly omnipotent in its ability to tear down even our most precious illusions. Love? Just a trick of the nature to induce us to reproduce. Children? Just the survival of our genes. Religion? Just fear of the unknown (or scientifically pre-known).

The problem with science is not the catabolism, but rather, the absence of proper anabolism. Because it cannot legitimately accomplish the latter (in any final way), scientism simply elevates its own substitutes to the teleological ends of science, where everything is settled and the idolatrous soul finds its rest.

Yes, but I am a cynical lad. I see through these idols, and can see how these tremulous scientists, so fearful of ambiguity, cling to them in the dark night of tenure.

But I am not only cynical. Rather, like the scientistic believer, I too have faith. Except my faith conforms to the Absolute Real and not the absolutely dubious.

What's the Big Idea?

One more post on the Noble Savages and ignoble ones. I wanted to say savage Nobelists, but no anthropologist has ever been awarded one. Plenty of savages, of course.

We've been discussing the unfair, intellectually dishonest, and ideologically motivated savaging of Chagnon's work. What about honest and disinterested criticism? When the most vocal critics are such depraved bullies, it's easy to instinctively support the victim, but sometimes, as in the war between Iran and Iraq, one wishes both sides could lose.

President Bush's critics, for example, were so detached from reality, that many conservatives defended him despite the fact that he was never a conservative (i.e., he had some more or less conservative positions, but was never part of the movement).

According to Isaiah Berlin, every important thinker is ultimately motivated by One Big Thing. If you can find the Big Thing, then you have discovered the key that unlocks their work. I certainly wouldn't call Chagnon an important thinker (few thinkers are), but he is clearly organized around a Big Thing, that thing being sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.

These are synonymous terms for (what should be) the uncontroversial idea that human beings are (at least in part) products of their evolutionary environment. The idea was quite controversial when he began using it, but why?

Again, his critics were not religious fundamentalists, but secular crypto-Marxists. As Chagnon puts it, he was considered "a heretic, a misanthrope, and the object of condemnation by politically correct colleagues, especially those who identify themselves as 'activists' on behalf of native peoples because I describe the Yanomamö as I found them."

One problem, I think, is that the idea of genetic determinism has obviously been misused in the past (always by progressives, mind you) to justify evils such as racism. Therefore, better to close off that avenue of thought entirely. Think of academia as a ski resort with groomed slopes. Venture off them at your own peril.

Charles Murray, for example, got a taste of this with his book The Bell Curve. If I remember correctly, it shows that different ethnic groups have different collective IQs. I suppose it's acceptable to point out that Asian Americans or Ashkenazi Jews are a standard deviation (15 points) above the average (100). However, as in Lake Woebegone, everyone must be above average. If some groups are below average, then we had better be quiet about it.

This is another fine example of the vociferously anti-science attitude of the left. I mean, as Thomas Sowell has often said, it should be a banality to point out that some groups are better at certain things than other groups. For this very reason, it is not at all historically uncommon for certain ethnic groups to dominate certain trades or activities.

I'm sure it is unacceptable to say this, but I don't think the dominance of blacks in the NBA can be attributed to physical factors only, e.g., height. Rather, I suspect a certain form of intelligence must required, similar in a way to the form of intelligence needed to be a (perhaps not coincidentally) jazz master. This intelligence combines spontaneous pattern recognition within a complex flow of information.

When I played basketball as a kid, I had no problem playing one on one, or making baskets. Still have no problem. However, when I attempted to play organized basketball in high school, I immediately found myself overwhelmed by the amount and intensity of information. Everything was happening all at once -- very much unlike, say, baseball. If one attempts to impose linearity on the chaos of basketball, one is immediately overwhelmed. So, I'm not cut out for basketball. Does that make me a racist?

Anyway, back to Chagnon. The general Raccoon position is that man has both horizontality and verticality, and that genes are necessary but insufficient to account for the ladder. I mean, it's just a banal scientific fact that human beings are genetically distinct from all other species. However, irrespective of how genetically "close" we are to any other species, we are vertically quite distant. On the vertical scale, all other species are number two or lower. Much lower.

So, it seems to me that Chagnon's critics are basically criticizing him for taking Darwinism seriously. However, what is odd is that his adversaries have no theory at all as to what makes us human. That is to say, they want to pretend that there is a purely vertical ideological world, untethered to bodies and genes. It is as if they are pure idealists, even though, at the same time, they are pure materialists. Thus, their One Big Idea is One Big Contradiction.

Speaking of which, Isaiah Berlin says that the One Big Reason leftism doesn't work is that there can never be One Big Scheme that applies to everyone. That is to say, we are all different, for which reason the only just political system must maximize liberty.

Or in other words, leftism too is One Big Contradiction, in that it pretends it is possible to reconcile two opposing values, i.e., liberty and egalitarianism. You can't do that, for the same reason it would be tyrannical to impose racial quotas whereby, say, no NBA team could have more than 15% blacks, or 2% of rodeo clowns must be Jews.

Praise Marx and Pass the Ammo

It seems that Isaiah Berlin, whose first book was a biography of Marx, never got over the experience.

In a good way. He tips his hand in the introduction, with a remark from Bishop Butler that was apparently never far from Berlin's mind: "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?"

That one's for you, Karl.

Well, you can always ignore the question by -- to paraphrase the man himself -- dazzling the useful idiots with a little dialectic, or by simply rejecting the premise. In which case, you are probably a Man of the Left -- assuming you have done so consciously and willingly, as opposed to doing so because of mental illness, coercion, material gain, the lust for tenure, intoxication, or brain damage.

Many people are coerced to see things as they aren't, especially in childhood. However, if you are sensitive, you will be aware of a ubiquitous social pressure to see things in a certain way, to line up like metal filings in a magnetic field. You might say that this is what makes us a "social (or political) animal." We couldn't be a social animal if not for "forces" that are at a right angle, so to speak, to a competing -- or complementary -- force of individuation.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the social force, because without it we wouldn't be human. It's the invisible glue that makes a people indivisible, i.e., "one." But obviously, just as there are pathological individuals, there are pathological groups; it's not so much the force but the content that is problematic.

Again, unless you are a Man of the Left, in which case you reject the premise of a norm or standard for human individuals and groups (or pretend to reject it; more on which below).

It sounds preposterous -- or polemical or exaggerated -- to people hearing this for the first time (especially liberals), which I suppose is why Chagnon was so blindsided when he found himself pulled into the gears of the academic leftwing hate machine. For the wheels of Social Justice may grind precipitously, but they grind mercilessly. Nobody expects the Spurious Inquisition.

"Somewhere along the way," writes Chagnon, "the anthropology profession was hijacked by radicals who constituted the 'Academic Left,'" as discussed in the 1994 book Higher Superstition. In 1994, I myself probably still had one foot in the barackish pond of higher superstition, the other foot cautiously dipping into the mountain spring of Things As They Are.

Was it religion or God or O that finally saved (or ruined) me? In this realm we can only discuss correlations, not mechanistic or linear causation. I can say that in 1995 I made the conscious determination to devote the remainder of my life to the search for God. I suppose that may sound courageous or romantic, but seriously, what else is there for an adult? In any event, afterwards the Changes accelerated.

I suppose the Marxist would say that 1995 is when I plunged into a pernicious addiction to the opium of the masses -- the opium that prevents us from seeing actions and consequences as they are and will be. For what they are is material, and what they will be is determined by class conflict. Thus, I am not seeing things as they are, but how the ruling class wants me to see them. I am a tool.

Chagnon gives no evidence of being a religious tool. Rather, just empirical. Common sense. Plain speaking. Nevertheless, he was treated as a religious heretic. For according to the academic left, the proper role of anthropology is to "focus on the 'crimes' committed by previous anthropologists and what they must now do to provide restitution to the victims of their 'scientific' research."

Which brings to mind our President's crack about "white man's greed running a world in need." I mean, one doesn't pick up such insanity in church!

Oh, wait...

It's such a cliché, but it nevertheless applies: the anthropologist regards all cultures as uniquely beautiful except his own. Again, to ask the question posed at the top: why this desire to be deceived? We are seeing a version of this in the reaction of many prominent leftists to Putin's invasion of the Ukraine: "who are we to lecture him, when we are guilty of the same kind of aggression in invading Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Panama, or Grenada?" Or, to paraphrase a commenter at American Digest, who were we to invade the South and free the slaves?

The first thing one wants to say is: if only you opposed Putin's aggression as vociferously as you did Bush's! At the same time, using their formulation, I should be as enthusiastic about Putin's aggression as I was about America toppling Saddam, because I am simply animated by violence and imperialism. Therefore, I am the hypocrite. (Sounds crazy, but I heard Dennis Kucinich make this argument just yesterday.)

"Moral retardation" is too mild a term for this kind of perversion.

According to Chagnon, the "new anthropology" came down to a forensic search for the Bad Guys. True, but it's not much of a search, since the bad guys are always us. It's a foregone conclusion. One wants to say that this seems a bit intellectually lazy, but laziness alone can't account for an inversion of reality. It takes real work to be that crazy.

"A whole generation of students and teachers became convinced that everything, including scientific inquiry, is inextricably political because knowledge itself was inextricably a social -- i.e., a political -- phenomenon" (Gross, quoted in Chagnon).

And for the left, politics is just war by other means, which means that anything is permitted in order to secure victory. That is, in wartime, one is permitted to commit acts that would be considered crimes during peacetime.

No, not actual murder (at least in the US; for the most part), but certainly murder of the enemy's reputation: "Because your cause [is] moral and theirs [is] not, you [may] use false claims against competitors based on your presumed authority" (Chagnon).

Note the ironic recourse to moral authority, when objective morality is precisely what the new anthropologists deny. Another irony is that this is precisely how Chagnon describes the Yanomamö -- they have no compunction whatsoever about lying, stealing, and deception, not to mention rape, kidnap, infanticide, murder, you name it.

In reading the book, it occurred to me that the Yanomamö happily live in total contravention to every Commandment -- which is fine, since we shouldn't be imposing our own tyrannical and repressive morality on them.

Nor should we expect "humane" or "enlightened" behavior on the part of the left. Rather, we should respect the ways of their tribe, and not pretend to judge them in the light of a higher standard that doesn't exist.

My Time Among the Savages of the Left

Upon returning to 1966 after his seventeen-month time-travel to the Stone Age, a colleague invited Chagnon to lecture her class on his findings.

Yesterday I mentioned that Chagnon seems a little naive about the uncommonly rotten core of academia, but how many people realized what was going on there in 1966? The notion of a left-wing takeover of academia would have been regarded as either 1) paranoid, or 2) about time!

So, Chagnon innocently presented his academically incorrect findings about the violent and girl-crazed Yanomamö. Afterwards, the colleague presented him with an offer he would be ill-advised to refuse: "You shouldn't say things like that. People will get the wrong impression."

Excuse me? I thought this was a university. Aren't we engaged in a search for truth? (Those are my words. Well, almost. What I would really want to say is bitch please. Don't make me go all Yanomamö on you.)

"We shouldn't say that native people have warfare and kill each other. People will get the wrong impression" (Professor I.M. O'Toole).

That's political correctness in a nutshell: it always revolves around a revealed, gnostic, a priori truth that is not to be questioned. One may deduce other truths from it, but one is not permitted to make empirical observations that lead inductively to a conclusion that challenges the alpha dogma at the top. Do that, and you're barking up the wrong tree and consigned to the doghouse, as Chagnon would soon enough find out.

And who are these "people" who are susceptible to the "wrong ideas?" I suppose it is the LoFos who are supposed to believe as told by the academic priesthood. Which is another irony, because this surely resembles what the left always says about, say, the Galileo affair. Let's leave aside the fact that they never discuss what actually happened, but have instead constructed a self-congratulating myth about Speaking Truth to Power.

Using their own (albeit intellectually dishonest) terms, Chagnon is Galileo and Big Anthropology is the medieval church, terrified that its subjects might question its dogmas. I mean, one question tends to lead to another, as in the Global Warming scandal.

Nowadays the left's power is so complete that a Chagnon would simply not be allowed to rise up among the rank and foul. Using an analogy from my field, imagine a naive graduate student who was truly curious about the settled science of homosexuality. Well, first of all, curiosity is precisely what is not permitted by the academically correct, so you'll have to indulge me.

This graduate student decides to do some original fieldwork by living amongst homosexuals in, say, San Francisco or West Hollywood. She has no preconceptions or biases, but is simply there to blend in and record her empirical observations about their attitudes, customs, and behaviors.

Upon her return, she is asked to give a lecture on her findings before an introductory psychology class. Maybe she even has careful and extensive photographic documentation of her subjects, like the estimable Ms. Zombie.

It's difficult to imagine her receiving a comment as gentle as "You shouldn't show things like that. People will get the wrong impression." Rather, she'd probably have to be escorted off campus through a gauntlet of rock-throwing primitives.

The lesson here is that the evidence of your eyes might contradict the dogma of the Church of Liberalism, and if your eyes offend us, then you'd better pluck them out before we do.

There's so much I want to say about this subject, but one of the supreme ironies here is that the academic left is exactly in the position of another of their mythological demons, the dreaded Creationists.

As with the Galileo incident, the left has systematically distorted the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in order to forge another foundational, self-serving myth. For in point of fact, as explained, for example, in Siegel's excellent Revolt Against the Masses, this was by no means a simplistic debate between Enlightened Science and religious yahoos.

The whole thing was a contrivance from the start, but if anything, the lawyer chosen to represent the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, was a populist man of the left who was deeply concerned about the cultural, economic, and political implications of a doctrine that reduced man to an animal and revolved around "a merciless law by which the strong crowd out the weak." For him, naked Darwinism, shorn of any higher ethic, represented "a license for unbridled capitalism."

So, "the irony of the Scopes trial," writes Siegal, is "that it led liberals to tag Bryan, who was in many ways a proto-New Dealer, as a 'right wing authoritarian.'"

Conversely, an A.L. Mencken -- "the rabidly anti-democratic and sometimes anti-Semitic supporter of eugenics who admired both the Kaiser and 1930s Germany" -- would be regarded as a champion of liberalism for his passionate support of iconoclastic Darwinism -- that is to say, not Darwinism as science, but Darwinism as general philosophy (which it obviously can never be, except for Nazis and other Progressives).

Now fast-forward to the 1980s and '90s. One of the main issues that made Chagnon a demon of the left is the suggestion that man isn't an infinitely malleable blank slate, able to be bent, crushed, or mutilated into any form by the state.

Rather, there are these things called genes and this thing called human nature. Thus, he came face to farce with the "widespread biophobia built into cultural anthropological theory, which results in deep suspicion and contempt for biological ideas."

Now, if man is what he is, then there's not much the state can do about it (well, maybe abortion and other forms of eugenics). Thus, apologists for statism must attack any idea suggesting that man has a nature. Therefore, they accuse their adversaries of being apologists "for almost everything hateful in the history of Homo sapiens: wars, fascism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, eugenics, elitism, genocide, etc."

Or in other words, like Bryan in the Scopes trial, they can't object to the science, but rather, the ideological implications of the science. Ironically, natural selection is under attack from two equally misinformed sides, the Christian fundamentalists and the cultural Marxism of institutional anthropology.

Conversely, the Catholic Church, for example, has no issue with natural selection, so long as it is kept in perspective and integrated into the totality of human knowledge. I mean, all truth comes -- must come -- from God, so the more the merrier. Let it all in. The religious, of all people, shouldn't be afraid of the Light -- including any light that natural selection may shed on the human condition.

One more irony. A cultural Marxist is obviously a materialist. But wait -- isn't a metaphysical Darwinian also a materialist? So, why are the materialists at each others' throats? Well, it seems that the materialism of the anthropologists is a "biology free" materialism. Which is a strange materialism, being that man is composed of biological material. Not to mention psycho-pneumatic material.

But their materialism is refracted through the prism of postmodernism, whereby "'truth' and 'facts' are merely subjective categories, ideological constructs, inventions of the subjective observer. Science and the scientific method are viewed by these cultural anthropologists with skepticism, suspicion, and even disdain."

Indeed, even "the very notion that the external world had an existence independent of its observer was challenged." In this ideological darklight, science becomes an exploitive ideology "designed to keep the poor, the disenfranchised, ethnic minorities, and women in subordinate social positions" (Chagnon).

So it wasn't that Chagnon's science was wrong. As in the Scopes trial, that is utterly beside the point. Rather, if you contradict the truth of the left, then you are denounced as a "racist, sexist, biological determinist" (ibid). Denunciation and slander displace reason and evidence.

Which anyone who has spent time among the savages of the left already knows.

Part Two.

Ignoble Savages and Tenured Apes

I have barely any time this morning, so I can only lay a foundation for the insultainment to follow.

Noble Savages provides fascinating insight into the Stone Age savagery out of which civilization evolved, and the tenured savagery to which it has devolved.

I'm not sure which type of sadistic violence is more harrowing, that which takes place among the higher -- which is to say, pre-Chávez -- primates of Venezuela, or in the ivy-covered jungles of academia.

"When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela’s Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau’s 'noble savages,' so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of nature."

But "instead he discovered a remarkably violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage.

"The prime reasons for their violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible, abduct women. He spent years living among the Yanomamö, observing their often tyrannical headmen, learning to survive under primitive and dangerous conditions" (Professor Backflap).

But in the archaic environment of academically correct cultural anthropology -- a malignant leftist fantasy world of crude neo-Marxism, soul-destroying deconstruction, tenured superstition, and hostility to science -- such observations, let alone conclusions, are Impermissible. Thus,

"When he published his observations, a firestorm of controversy swept through anthropology departments. Chagnon was vilified by other anthropologists, condemned by his professional association (which subsequently rescinded its reprimand), and ultimately forced to give up his fieldwork."

The one thing I can criticize Chagnon for is being more than a little naive about academia. You see, those tenured barbarians obviously evolved from the Stone Age ones. In fact, this is true of all of us. We all carry the prehistory of man, not just in our genes, but in our psyche (one way of looking at "original sin"). The more one is aware of this, the less likely is it to overwhelm us, either covertly exerting a malign influence or hijacking the ego altogether.

But the first thing that occurred to me in reading the chapters about the ordeal with his fellow anthropologists was that the latter were behaving exactly as the savages he had studied in the physical jungle: they were paranoid, vengeful, sadistic, and homicidal. They were out to kill -- no, not his body, but without question his ideas and his career.

Instead of doing anything -- up to and including murder -- to ensure the survival of their genes into the next generation, his credentialed assassins were willing to destroy a man -- to symbolically murder him -- so as to ensure the survival of their memes -- their precious ideas -- into the next generation of idiot college children. Same tune in a different key.

In fact, Chagnon became quite ill amidst the controversy, due to the stress of fending off these barbarians. I'm sure he would say that the incredible struggle of living in the jungle -- one time for 17 straight months -- was a cakewalk in comparison to having to deal with the violent barrage of tenured kooktalk.

For me, the more interesting question is why the left behaves in this way. Again, it is a truism in psychoanalysis that -- to express it as simply as possible -- we are composed of higher and lower selves, and that the lower can never be eliminated (because it's really one self that gets split in two for a variety of reasons). Rather, the task before us is to integrate it, hence the commonality I see between religiosity (especially the Judeo-Christian stream) and psychological development.

Indeed, for me, the Incarnation implies that Jesus truly embodies and integrates the complete human spectrum, from the lowest to the highest -- hence, for example, his easy interaction with prostitutes and even the IRS, not to mention the full post-Crucifixion descent into hell. Take the latter literally or figuratively, but the principle is the same: Jesus is a bridge spanning all degrees of human existence, rejecting none.

But we should never be surprised to find someone who pretends to be living on one of the higher rungs secretly living on a lower one. Take a Bill Clinton, who pretends to be adept at policy wonkery when he's really in it for the phallus wankery. Like the Yanomamö, it all comes down to accumulating women and avenging slights. If you should cross the Clintons, one way or another you will end up f*cked.

Sorry to leave you with that crude image, but this barbarian has to pretend to be civilized and get ready for work.

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.