At the Same Time and On Another Level

Yesterday was of course a melancholy day, so sleep was a welcome reprieve. Fell in at 9:30 but awoke at 3:30, and when we say that Ben is in our thoughts, we mean this literally. But one thought provokes another, especially when one is in that half-dreaming state.

Half-dreaming state... Aren't we always more or less in one? And if not, why not? What's wrong with you? No imagination? What's the alternative? Living inside a math book?

Sure, why not? Renowned infertile egghead Richard "Vanilla Thunder" Dawkins sez We Shouldn't Read Fairy Tales to Children, As That Encourages Them to Believe in the Supernatural and Therefore God, and that is a form of straight-up child abuse to nurture a child's imagination.

Now, one of us is way wrong here, but not on the surface. I think we can all agree with Dawk when he makes the brilliant observation that "There's a very interesting reason why a prince could not turn into a frog -- it's statistically too improbable."

Except that it's not interesting, it's banal. It's a truth, but a trivial one. It's also a form of naive category error, in that he applies one form of logic to a statement that clearly entails another. Since we all know that frogs do not transform to princes, we need to dig a little deeper to comprehend how the story can be true on another level.

Which reminds me of the title of a book, But at the Same Time and On Another Level. So yes, frogs don't turn into princes, but at the same time and on another level... And terrestrial life may end in biological death, but at the same time and on another level...

Speaking of titles, I often think that if I could only find it, then I could instantly produce the next crockbluster, since it would organize the 3,000 posts contained herein. Candidates are jotted down everywhere. Here's one: Just Wondering. Right? Because that's what it is, just nine years of quietly wondering out loud.

Here's another: Food for Meta-Thought.

Hmm, here's a joke I've never been able to work into a post: "Chas Bono spent his early life abroad." Which reminds me of one from yesterday that I'll probably never use. Did you hear that Michelle Obama wants to run for the Senate? Just a misunderstanding. What she said was she'd love to have Barack's seat. Must we politicize everything? She was talking about anatomy.

Man in the Cosmos and the Cosmos in Man. Learning Through Cosmosis. Pneumatic Trialogues in the Wild Godhead. Slack: Flying on Wings of Leisure. The Encephalization of the Cosmos.

A note to myself: what is the cognitive opposite of discovery? An important question, since the left is so adept at undiscovering settled truths.

An unused pun: the unquantifiable is what counts.

Back to Dawkins for a moment. The problem is, there's no I in science. Literally, since physics, biology, or neurology can in no way account for this mysterious interior stranger. Talk about statistically unlikely! If dead matter can transform into a living I, then I don't see a problem with frogs evolving into princes.

Why is this post so frivolous? As mentioned, I woke up thinking of Ben. My mind went to the only two significant losses in my life, my father in 1984 and my sister-in-law in 2002. I am then reminded that my father was 58. Hey, I'm 58. Patti was 57. Once you hit your 50s, then you should know that death can happen at any time. If the median is 78 or whatever, it means that half will die before that.

My father wasn't in good shape, I am. Yes, I have diabetes, but I'll bet my blood pressure, cholesterol, and even blood sugar are lower than yours. Doesn't matter. They say that for something like a third of the cases, the first symptom of heart disease is sudden death, no matter what we do to try to prevent it. That's what you call sobering.

As I said yesterday, there is ample reason for despair, and seemingly no rational reason for happiness, contentment, and joy. I know that in my case, I've always been preoccupied with death. It started when I was about 13, and it's never been far from my mind.

You'd think this would be a recipe for a morbid personality, but despite living in this vale of tears, I've always been susceptible to episodes of completely unreasonable joy or contentment or mild bliss. It's rare to go a day without these superfluous consolations. And they are wholly vertical, in the sense that they are completely unrelated to horizontal circumstances -- although I should add that I've never been tested in the way Ben is being at this moment. Indeed, it isn't difficult for me to imagine circumstances in which the world would be enveloped in unrelieved darkness, and the joy would be lost forever.

Nevertheless: the light will return precisely because it is unreasonable. It is a divine gift, because there is no earthly reason to have it, especially now. Yes, this qualifies as a banality, but at the same time and on another level...

Posting in the Face of Futility

Can't really say I feel like posting anything. Just learned that our longtime, much beloved reader Ben's wife, Patti, died in her sleep yesterday morning at age 57. I wish we could offer more than our thoughts and prayers, and I wish words didn't always fail me under these circumstances. Maybe it's because I rely too much on words -- expecting them to do too much -- but there is always that point that they just bounce off the target, Death being the worst offender of all.

Is there anything one can say beyond expressions of sympathy and support? Not to minimize the latter, but all of us want to know: WTF?! At times like this, life seems almost calculated to break our hearts, and the more we invest in it -- the more we love, care, and treasure -- the worse the heartbreak. Is this any way to run a cosmos?

They say that one of the biggest differences between men and women is that women will tend to just empathize and "be there" for someone in emotional pain, whereas men try to find practical solutions. To which I'm sure Ben can testify! A fellow might think he's come up with the Perfect Solution, and the next thing he knows, he's having the conversation with the flying plates (metaphorically speaking. At times).

I've mentioned before that in graduate school, students had to be involved in mandatory group psychotherapy. A female student was going on and on about some sort of problem with her marriage. I chimed in with what I thought was some choice advice, to which she responded with words to the effect of, "no, jackass, I don't need advice. I just need to express myself and feel understood."

Right. Got it.

Even so, the first thing I want to do is Consult the Elders and try to wrap my mind around it. In short, I can't help being me, jackass or no jackass.

I pull down a volume of Josef Pieper, and open to a couple of chapters called The Art of Not Yielding to Despair, and "Eternal Life" (quotation marks in original). The former touches on the persistence of Hope in the face of the End.

We all know the end is coming one way or the other, so by all rights we should always be in a state of despair, for it implies that "everything we do in this corporeal existence is deprived of value by the fact that in the end we all must die." Thus, "the ability not to yield to despair when confronted by the fact of death... is a matter of great practical concern to us all."

So there it is: we have every rational reason to feel hopeless and bereft of meaning.

But that is not what life is like. Indeed, life itself is a kind of audacious expression of hope, is it not? I say this because by definition it is always reaching beyond itself to an unknown future state, in defiance of all reason.

But it is the same with our spiritual life. Like life, our souls have a "not-yet" structure that points to a fulfillment that cannot occur on this plane, in any "here" or any "now" this side of death. It is very much as if our spiritual life points through and beyond death, to another reality, despite the evidence of our senses. For this reason, despair is the exception, not the rule.

So, our spiritual life is oriented to a future life, which we would say is the real object of our hope. In other words, the "not-yet" alluded to above is precisely the object of spiritual hope. We are attracted to it, just as we feel its pull. "Hope" is just the name we give to this process -- again knowing that the Hope cannot possibly be fulfilled on this side of death. Thus,

"the man who truly hopes, like the man who prays, must remain open to a fulfillment of which he knows neither in what hour nor in what form it will finally come."

In another chapter, Pieper cites the last canto of an obscure and somewhat awkwardly translated early 19th century poem that reads,

When my eyes their final tears have shed / You beckon, call me to divinity. / A man, a pilgrim, lays down his weary head, / A god begins his passage instantly.

Which I take to mean a new life in the orbit of the object that had previously been only darkly known via faith and hope.

And please forgive any unhelpful jackassery.

Obama the Blightbringer

About the satan business alluded to in yesterday's post: I don't care what anyone says, but there is without question an anti-divine force or energy in the world. You can personify it if you like in the form of Satan, but that's not strictly necessary.

Analogously, long before Newton came along, people had had abundant experience with the force of gravity, even if they were way off about how it actually worked.

Indeed, even now we can only pretend to know how it really works, but this detracts not one bit from the fact that we all have first hand experience of it.

I like Schuon's distinction between the satanic and the luciferic: the latter is more passively dark while the former is actively and aggressively anti-light. Thus, most typical liberals are merely luciferic (and usually with no conscious intention of wanting to be), while doctrinaire leftists are actively demonic, hostile to the light.

I don't often read David Horowitz because he's too glum and depressing -- the temperamental opposite of the Happy Warrior -- but his Black Books of the American Left and of Progressivism are state of the art indictments of the dark political magic of the Nemesis or of the Hostile Forces, whichever you prefer.

The conservative temperament -- irrespective of particular beliefs -- tends to identify the locus of control within, while leftists overwhelmingly externalize control, which is to say, feel powerless over their lives. They then make the delusion come true by empowering the state to diminish our liberty and personal autonomy. In other words, they force external reality to comport to their feelings of helplessness, powerlessness, and dependency, thereby normalizing what is humanly abnormal.

Which is why, to reiterate what was said in yesterday's post, the Hostile Forces are like a kind of gravitational attraction that pulls our "most central faculties into the outer part of the soul," with the result that they are imprisoned "in attachment to the counterfeit objects which he [the Evil One] has forged for their perception."

This is indeed one of the Critical Principles upon which your whole life hinges: will you turn down and out, toward the world, or up and in, toward the Light? This is the fork in the ontological road confronting us at each and every moment, allowing us to reenact or resist the Fall, depending.

Again, think of gravity, or of two massive objects pulling us in different directions. To extend the analogy, one is a bright star, the other a black hole.

This also answers the perennial question of why man -- mankind -- is such an assoul. It is specifically because man is the highest of all creatures. But because his lofty faculties can be pulled one way or the other, it means they can be captured and corrupted. As alluded to in yesterday's post -- and this is another important principle -- the corruption of best is the worst.

Example? Too numerous. But just consider how the left infiltrates every good and decent institution or tradition and corrupts it from within, from marriage, to the Boy Scouts, to higher and lower education, to the Constitution, to the military, you name it, they deploy their higher faculties in the service of darkness.

As Lings expresses it, "just as man who was the highest of all earthly things becomes in his degeneration the lowest," so the "faculties which were the most precious elements in his soul become the source of all its subsequent disorder..." Intelligence gone bad is the problem of Our Time.

Let us reluctantly stupulate that Obama is a really smart guy instead of the affirmative action mediocrity he is. Just what has he done with this brilliant intellect? Before he became president, thankfully, nothing. But once he gained real power, he was able to transition from mere darkness to real hostility to the Light. "Lightbringer" indeed. More like blightbringer.

In order to further our understanding of this process, we need to bring in the Horizontal and the Vertical. Religion has to do with vertical remembrance, not just of doctrine per se, but of verticality as such.

In other words, doctrine doesn't just resonate with inner truth, but also serves to strengthen and vivify the "rememberer" -- which is why we call it verticalisthenics. For me, blogging is my daily verticalisthenic exercise. And it is aerobic as well, since this involves breathing in the spirit, or pneuma.

This vertical remembrance also tends to pull us away from the "world," not in its created reality, but in its delusional collective appearance. The world is still big. It's the people that got smaller.

As Lings reminds us, "the least particle of certainty that can be had about the next world must necessarily have come down from above..." It is through this that we are drawn "from the outer part of the soul to its centre, where the vertical is to be found in all its fullness..."

At the very least, this vertical dimension has four main divisions; let us call them the worldly/terrestrial/material; second, the psychic/intellectual/rational; third, the celestial/heavenly; and fourth, the unmanifest, the ground, the ultimate source of Slack.

And remember, this hierarchy can in no way be understood from the bottom up, a la the absaridity of desiccated scientism. Rather, it is a projection from the top down, which is precisely why each level has traces or "memories" of the one immediately above.

"This dimension is in the nature of things: like a star that falls from the sky, every Revelation leaves behind it a luminous trail of higher truths."

Now, the world, being created, is a nonstop revelator ride. In order to prove this to yourself, just look at all those luminous trails -- trails of truth and beauty -- leading up and out.

Instinct is to Animal as Intellect is to Man

A few weeks ago I was bobbling on about how man is entitled to ultimate truth.

Think about that for a moment: a human being without truth to orient and guide him would be like an animal deprived of instinct. Take away the animal's instinct, and what does it do? I suppose it would just blunder around for awhile before dying of stupidity. It wouldn't know what was important, what was dangerous, what to ignore, whom to mate with.

In short, such an animal would be no better than the average college student.

Truth and certainty are related, in the sense that truth is what is certain.

However, the relation is not symmetrical, in that certainty does not necessarily equate to truth. But certainty always borrows from truth, in that there is no reason to be certain about anything unless one implicitly believes it to be true. Thus, certainty is -- or should be -- a kind of reflection of the inwardly perceived light of truth.

Which it often isn't. For example, people who believe in the redefinition of marriage are conspicuous in the moral certitude that theirs is the only possible correct stance. No one doubts their certitude, but do they have the truth? Likewise, no one doubts Michael Mann's certitude about manmade global warming. But if he's so certain, why does he have to lie about it?

But let's get back to the truth to which man is entitled. To say man is entitled to it is to say that he doesn't have to seek it out and acquire it in the usual sense, just as each generation of birds doesn't have to learn anew why it might be a good idea to winter in Florida. You might say that the bird is entitled to such knowledge by virtue of being a bird.

We've discussed in the past how the human infant has a number of genuine cosmic entitlements, such as a loving and committed mother and father, secure bonding and attachment, ministration to his needs, mental stimulation, etc. But do our entitlements end at the age of five? Or might there be a new set of entitlements?

Even public school advocates pretend to believe a child is entitled to an education, which is another way of saying that the child is entitled to truth. Mrs. G informs me that she heard Dinesh D'Souza yesterday on Dennis Prager, discussing his new book on what a world without America would be like. In the interview he mentioned that victims of public school indoctrination are not only deprived of truthful history, but are systematically abused by inculcating them with crudely false histories, or deeply flawed maps of reality.

To return to our animal analogy, this would be like teaching birds to fly north for the winter, which I'm sure is against the law in liberal states. To answer D'Souza's question, a world without America would be a world with far less light and truth, or at least truth and light will have lost their main protector. Truth would have to go completely underground, as it does in Islamic nations or elite universities.

The above thoughtlets have been inspired by The Book of Certainty, even though I would not recommend the book unless you have a specific interest in Sufism. There's a lot I didn't relate to at all, but a few useful nuggets here and there.

For example, Lings writes of how in all parts of the world there exist traditions that speak of a time when man lived in paradise. Thus, it seems that this is again analogous to animal instinct, since it is an archetypal idea which man seems to be born with. But what is an archetype? I would say that it is for humans what instinct is for animals. Instinct, of course, takes place on the terrestrial plane. As such, an archetype might be called a "psychic instinct," of which there are many.

For a psychic instinct to be worthwhile, it must conform to truth -- just as the animal instinct must obviously be in conformity to the physical environment in which the animal lives.

However, the demonic relativists who rule the educational establishment deny that man is conformed to truth, which is to say, the Absolute. In William Gairdner's excellent Book of Absolutes, he shows what absolute nonsense this is. In it he has chapters on the many universals of human life, the constants of nature, universals of moral and natural law, and our seemingly "hardwired" human instinct-intuitions.

The question is, exactly what are these archetypal stories of paradise intending to convey? Or, what is the principle they transmit?

Lings suggests that, at the very least, they imply two very different spiritual stations that conform to different degrees of certainty. Within paradise there is the Truth of Certainty (see yesterday's post), whereas outside paradise we usually begin with the Lore of Certainty -- or what might be called rumors of God.

I'm guessing that religion isn't strictly necessary in paradise. Rather, it comes into being after exile from paradise, what with its Lore of Certainty.

Now, if man is the microcosm, it must mean that this paradise is a state of mind, or better, a station. "The kingdom of heaven is within," and all that. We do not say it is a mere state of mind, because this implies something subjective and fleeting. It is more like telling the bird: "the kingdom of Florida is within. Just pay attention to your instinct, and you will find it." It does not mean: "just imagine you're in Florida, and you're there."

There is paradise, and there is the fall. What is this latter all about, and why does it keep happening? How does this corruption enter paradise? Lings suggests that a man with the Truth of Certainty cannot be deceived. I suppose it's like the old saying that you can't cheat an honest man.

Only a person who is already drifting from the Truth of Certainty can be seduced with likely stories, false promises, counterfeit truths, fairy tales of the tenured, ontological forgeries, and extended warranties.

So, let's just agree that man is susceptible to shiny and attractive lies. That being the case, just as in a market economy, Satan comes forward to fill a genuine need. Seriously, he's only responding to the constant demand for comforting or exalting Lies, so he is is without question the most merciful humanitarian. He -- whoever he is --

"ceaselessly promises to show man the Tree of Immortality," and in so doing gradually erodes "the highest and most central faculties into the outer part of the soul so that he may imprison them there in attachment to the counterfeit objects which he has forged for their perception."

Furthermore, "It is the presence here of these perverted faculties, either in discontent in that they can never find real satisfaction or finally in a state of atrophy in that they are never put to their proper use, which causes all the disorder and obstruction in the soul of the fallen man."

Which goes to the old crack that "the best when corrupted becomes the worst." Thus, fallen man is a beast at times and a wuss at times.

If there were no devil, we would have to invent the DNC. Or the ACLU. Or Marxism. Or radical feminism. Or Islamism. For there is only one way to stand, many ways to fall.

Studying God in the University of the Cosmos

Read a certain book over the weekend with the intriguing title, The Book of Certainty. Yes, it is by a Sufi, but Sufis have a quite universalist perspective, and this book goes precisely to the universal principles that underlie religion per se.

First of all: is that even true? Most thoughtful people will probably agree that, say, moral codes exemplify universal principles that are accessible to man's reason, i.e., natural law.

But what about revelation? Does revelation exemplify or instantiate or conform to higher and more general principles, or is it utterly sui generis, a thing in itself that can't be related to anything else?

If so, then the vertical ingression will be literally impossible to understand, and will have to be taken on faith alone. It will be like a fact completely isolated from all other facts, and therefore unsusceptible to systemization or contextualization.

And many fundamentalists and evangelicals embrace just such a view, e.g., "God said it, I believe it, and that settles it." Don't bother asking how or why, just accept it. Which is fine for them. But people are different, with different needs.

Sui generis means, of course, one of a kind; it is a class of one (and therefore not a class), utterly unique and irreducible to anything else. One of the universal principles that animates the Christian West in general and the United States in particular is that human beings are sui generis, each a unique and irreplaceable unit of humanity.

Even so, a human being as such obviously isn't a radical novelty. Rather, he is the unique expression or mixture of certain universal elements such as intellect, will, and emotion. He may be unique, but he is still human.

But although we use the word "God," God is not really a member of the class of gods -- at least if one adheres to monotheism. If this is indeed the case, then God is radically incomprehensible, for there is nothing whatsoever to compare him to.

To which I say: YesBut God must still have a nature to which he himself conforms, unless he is either complete chaos on the one hand, or arbitrary and unpredictable willfulness on the other, a la allah.

In fact, if one sticks to this antirational logic, it is unclear how we could know of or even entertain the idea of such a unique entity. This would ultimately amount to saying that intellect is the problem, and this makes Bob uncomfortable because Bob cannot understand why our most precious gift would turn out to be a curse when it turns to the higher and highest realities. Bob wants to ask: what is the principle that explains why intelligence should ultimately be rooted in stupidity?

I will admit that my mind is always on a mission to detect ideas beneath appearances, or the principle beneath the manifestation. This is how both science and reason proceed (not to mention psychology), each under the assumption that events exemplify principles.

It is admittedly difficult for me to chuck my whole self -- which is, after all, a sui generis gift from God -- in attempting to comprehend the giver of the gift. The question is, is this trait of mine a stumbling block or a foothold, a promethean problem or the humble solution?

Along these lines, Stark suggests that theology really only developed in the Judeo-Christian world because of certain principles, including the principles that God is reason and man is in the image of God. With these two extremely generative principles, just look at what results!

Stark writes that "The most fundamental key to the rise of Western civilization has been the dedication of so many of its most brilliant minds to the pursuit of knowledge." Well, isn't that what brilliant minds do?

No, not at all. The minds Stark has in mind did not devote themselves to illumination, to moksha, to nirvana, to enlightenment or even to wisdom but to empirical facts on the ground, so to speak. "And the basis for this commitment to knowledge was the Christian commitment to theology."

Er, how is that? Well, theology -- for example, the sort of theology we routinely discuss here -- "has little in common with most religious thinking, being a sophisticated, highly rational discipline that has roots in Judaism and Greek philosophy..."

It "consists of formal reasoning about God," with an emphasis "on discovering God's nature, intentions, and demands, and on understanding how these define the relationship between human beings and God." This presumes "an image of God (one God, not many gods) as a conscious, rational, supernatural being of unlimited power and scope."

So, God is not limited by our principles, but that doesn't mean he cannot be illuminated by them. Contrast this with mainstream Islam, which "rejected science as heretical" because it implies that Allah is limited by natural law.

Back to this book on certainty. First of all, there are levels of divine certainty, just as there are with the terrestrial world. The author uses the example of fire: there are people who have heard about fire, and there are those who have seen it. Then there are those who have been warmed and even consumed by it. You could say that to be consumed by fire is to be annihilated and reborn in the living presence of God, but we're getting ahead of oursufis.

Analogously, we could say that there is the lore of divine certainty (scripture), the eye of certainty (gnosis), and the truth of certainty (illumination or union). You could say that the first involves hearing the divine message and feeling it "click" inside. It sounds "right," even though you have no conscious idea of why this should be the case.

But as we progress, that initial click begins to be be filled out by knowledge. It is like a seed that sends out shoots in all directions, and begins reorganizing the psyche in new ways.

This is followed by the truth of certainty, which is reserved for the genuine saints and sages who sing the song supreme because they have been singed by the flames.

Such a "universal man" eternally realizes "the Truth that he is nothing and yet that He is everything" -- which kind of exemplifies the principle that the poor in spirit are blessed because theirs is the kingdom of heaven, or that the most humble is the most exalted, etc.

As it so happens, this can be geometrically depicted with a cross, "which is another symbol of the Universal Man in that the horizontal line represents the fullness of his earthly nature, whereas the vertical line represents the heavenly exaltation..."

To be continued...

Pushing Back the Vertical Frontier of Cosmic Slack

Not quite finished with The Age of Abundance, so I don't yet know what the author is ultimately driving at. Although I'm enjoying the book, since he's a libertarian, he doesn't understand "abundance" in the same way I do. For me, it equates to surplus, leisure, slack, vertical opportunity, and inward mobility, in that order.

To put it conversely, if there is no surplus, then all our time is spent attending to our most basic and primitive needs. No matter how much spiritual or intellectual potential you possess, you need protein and fat to maintain the brain and glucose to run it. Therefore, the realm of biological necessity is in one sense at odds with the realm of slack, but in another sense, the foundation or boundary condition for its emergence.

Analogously, an automobile relies on necessity in order to facilitate freedom. The engine, steering, and brakes all work because of the laws of physics, which we then transcend by using the car to take us where we want to go. Obviously, our free choices are not conditioned in the same manner as the internal workings of the automobile.

But as we've discussed in the past, that mysterious space between the laws of nature and the interior world of man is everything. Without it, there is no space of contemplation, no distance between impulse and expression, no possibility of introspection. So naturally -- or so it seems to me -- as that space becomes more expansive or available to more people, it's going to have profound consequences, both individually and collectively.

Again, the post-World War II generation -- the boomers -- were born into a world of unprecedented slack. This may sound exaggerated or maybe even funny, but it is absolutely true. There is simply no comparison between, say, my father's childhood and my own. He grew up on a small farm in rural England with no indoor plumbing or central heating, and had an 8th grade education before he was expected to join the anonymous ranks of hard labor.

His own father no doubt had even less slack, in that he worked for the British railway, which I'm guessing involved six days a week, twelve hours a day, until they hand you the watch and you have your heart attack.

But the unique economic circumstances of the post World War II US economy opened up a huge vein of cosmic slack. It is precisely because so many people were no longer tied down to the world of necessity that we see the sudden appearance of various countercultural movements that have culminated in a truly worthless person such as Obama making it to the top of the heap.

He is worthless because instead of using his slack in spiritually, intellectually or economically productive ways, he has used it to attack the very conditions that made it possible, while pursuing every policy that will directly diminish our slack-freedom. In short, he has used his slack to diminish the slack of others, which is an unforgivable cosmic crime for which he will have to answer in the postbiological world.

What is slack? Slack is what I am doing right now: just relaxing in the comfort of my own mental space, with no interior or exterior persecutors telling me what to do. It is Nothing, and yet Everything, depending upon what you do with it.

Lindsey suggests that the Fall of Man was a "descent into necessity." And this is indeed one way to look at it, since in our prelapsarian state we lived off whatever nature provided, but afterwards had to toil by the sweat of our brow to earn our bread. It says that this situation will prevail until we "return to the ground," which I suppose can be taken in two ways: until we are dead and buried, or until we return to Eckhart's primordial ground of slack.

This morning, while driving the boy to school, he asked how much money one has to have in order to be rich. I said that it all depends on the person, which means that wealth is a quality, even a state of mind, not a mere quantity. For a person with few needs, it isn't hard to be wealthy, but the more desires one has, the more money one requires in order to satisfy them.

I added that there are people who spend their lives trying to become wealthy, under the assumption that it wall make them happy. But since they spent their lives in the pursuit of wealth instead of cultivating the habit of happiness, it ends up backfiring.

Even a middle class person in America lives "on the far side of a great fault line, in what prior ages would have considered a dreamscape of miraculous extravagance" (Lindsey). Accompanying this shift was the change "from a scarcity-based mentality of self-restraint to an abundance-based mentality of self-expression."

Lindsey relates this to Maslow's famous hierarchy of needs, which ranges from basic physiological needs at the bottom to things like creativity and spontaneity at the top. However, the pyramid has a number of flaws that I would revise. The first thing I'd do is turn it the other way around to form a V-shape, in order to emphasize that as we ascend, the space becomes wider and more expansive. In other words, slack increases as we push back the vertical horizon.

Also, you will no doubt have noticed that many if not most people use their abundance not to ascend, but in order to try to widen out the narrow base of the pyramid. In other words, imagine someone who merely uses their wealth to satisfy more elaborate physiological needs. But there's nothing one can really do to make that world any roomier.

I mean, you can push back the margins a little, but the best way to do this is via discipline and physical fitness vs. mere indulgence. If one is physically fit, one feels "well" or "content" in that psychophysiological space, and can then use it as a more effective vertical launch pad.

You will also have noticed that when this space opened up in the 1950s, there was indeed a kind of bifurcation in horizontal and vertical directions. Horizontally we had the "sexual revolution," various liberation movements, public defecation masquerading as art, etc. But there was also a legitimate unleashing of spiritual energies.

For example, I have no doubt that this blog can be traced back to those liberating energies. Although there have been detours along the way, the overall thrust of my life has been using this extraordinarily rare gift of slack for vertical exploration and colonization. If you have slack you should try to give it back, not waste it, let alone steal it from others.

Tear Down this Digital and Cultural Brick Wall!

This may or may not expand into a post, but the other day I was thinking about how something analogous to digital clipping and compression can be applied to language, to the detriment of its users, i.e., Everybody & Soul.

Audio engineers routinely boost the volume of a CD by clipping away the top and bottom frequencies. As a result, the disc or file or radio broadcast is much louder, but at the expense of a loss of subtle but vital information at the top and bottom ends.

For example, below is an image of Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit, before and after compression:

This is a visual representation of what these barbarous sound engineers are doing to your ears. It results in obvious audible changes, such as less difference between the loud and soft passages, between hello, hello, hello and WITH THE LIGHTS OUT.

However, there are also many subtle losses that one may not even consciously notice, but will affect one on the soul level. Compression can make a track sound superficially good to the ears, but it will have a hard-to-define fatiguing quality, like eating ice cream three times a day, or like a colorized black-and-white film. Such music either sounds (superficially) better than it actually is, or else fails to sound as (deeply) good as it really is.

If you read the wiki article about the loudness war, you can see that something analogous has happened in mass culture vis-a-vis our tediously transgressive pop stars. Loud and crass as it was, whatever tawdry thing Madonna was doing in 1985 no longer shocks the sensibilities (which it probably never did, since it was old and decayed before it even came out of her piehole), which is why Miley Cyrus has to be that much louder and cruder.

You might say that she clipped Madonna of all *subtlety* and compressed the monotonous sexual message to soul-shattering amplitude. Just as louder CDs result in the image of the digital brickwall above, the range of human reality of a Miley Cyrus is extraordinarily narrow but shrill and in your face. The only way she can continue her courageous artistic development is to embrace straight-up pornography.

Below is the charming image of an impenetrable cultural brick wall:

This line of thought was provoked while listening to the news about the Santa Barbara mass murderer, and the banality popped into my head, there are no words. I then thought of how there is a range of human experience, and how difficult it is for language to reach the top and bottom.

For example, there are no words that reach as deep as the loss of a child. Language simply doesn't go down that far, which makes it a kind of dreadful mystery that only those who have gone through it can know. The rest of us can only pretend, but to even get near that space is profoundly upsetting, so we try to avoid it.

But even short of such extremes, there is a whole range of extra-linguistic experience that is precisely what makes us feel "alive." Analogously, it is same thing that makes an uncompressed CD or good vinyl recording have more "life."

Very difficult to put into words, but it is definitely something one can feel sub- or extra-linguistically. Indeed, a good subwoofer, for example (which extends the lower range of a recording), allows one to hear, say, cello and bass guitar in the core of one's body, not just in the ears. The same sort of thing is used in movie theaters so as to facilitate more "involvement" in the film.

Back when I was studying psychoanalysis, it occurred to me that it is not so much that its various theories are literally true, but rather, that it provides a language with which to reach down into unconscious and preverbal material and clothe it in words.

But what I really wanted to discuss is how There Are No Words for regions above and beyond the ego, and how if we forget this, we may unwittingly reduce these to mere word-worlds. Then you turn the kingdom of heaven into a kind of brick wall instead of a door or window.

Distressing though it may be, it is possible for the supra-conscious realm to be subject to the same dreadful fate as, say, the Sinatra-->Elvis-->Madonna-->Cyrus regression, i.e., decreasing subtlety and increasing density.

Lately I've been reading a biography of Ira Gershwin, who was the lyric-writing half of the immortal Gershwin brothers. This was after picking up an irresistibly cheap used copy of Reading Lyrics, a compendium of some of the finest lyrics of our greatest popular composers.

Yes, 90% of the songs are about love, and it is interesting in itself to trace the evolution of how it is described and conveyed (the collection proceeds chronologically).

Now, love is the quintessence of one of those high-frequency states beyond the reach of language, which I suppose is precisely why there are so many songs about it. You can't write a song about 2 + 2 = 4, because that's it. There's nothing more to say. But there is always something more to say about love, which, when you think about it, is odd.

A very distinct increase in subtlety -- or dynamic range, you might say -- occurs with the lyrics of Cole Porter. This is because Sex per se is allowed in the door, obviously not in the hamhanded manner of a Madonna or Cyrus, but in a sly, playful and witty way that always complements and intensifies the Love. Let's see if I can dig out an example. Here is the very first one, All of You:

After watching your appeal from ev'ry angle, / There's a big romantic deal I've got to wangle, / For I've fallen for a certain luscious lass, / And it's not a passing fancy or a fancy pass.

I love the looks of you, the lure of you, / I'd love to make a tour of you, / The eyes, the arms, the mouth of you, / The east, west, north, and the south of you.

You could say that prudery and pornography are two sides of the same brick wall. But Porter's lyrics cover a much wider range of what it means to be human, body and soul.

Discuss.

The Adolescent Crisis of Scientism

Stark makes the entirely valid point that once science was up and running, it no longer needed the original religious and metaphysical assumptions that had nurtured it.

Come to think of it, this was one of the themes of my doctoral dissertation way back when, which only goes to show that obsessions can be quite stable and enduring. I guess I've been tilling the same field ever since.

Full portentous title of this 1988 epic: Psychoanalysis, Postmodern Physics, and the Emerging Paradigm of Evolution: Toward a Rapprochement of Mind and Nature.

"Rapprochement" is a double entendre, in that it is a psychoanalytic term of art having to do with the "human developmental milestone usually occurring between 15 to 24 months," when "the child moves away from and then returns to the mother for reassurance." In its customary sense, it connotes a "bringing together," the "re-establishment of cordial relations," or a convergence of diverse factions and interests.

Therefore, what I implicitly meant by the title -- but which I seriously doubt that anyone appreciated -- is that it is as if mind and mother nature start out as one, just like mother and baby. Gradually the baby individuates from mother and is able to tolerate emotional distance and spatiotemporal separation. At this point it is safe to reunite with mother, without fear of maternal re-engulfment and loss of identity.

Yeah, it happens. But I don't want to get sidetracked into clinical examples. My point was that primitive man is more or less merged with nature, so there is no distinct separation between subject and object, or will and nature. Thus the ubiquitous existence of primitive magic, which is founded on the assumption that mind and nature are entangled in such a way that the former can have a direct effect on the latter, e.g., with human sacrifice, rain dances, the Keynesian multiplier, etc.

If you don't think this psychic layer of magical fusion persists, then you're not paying attention, because it pretty much explains everything about the left, if not in content per se, then in terms of the underlying cognitive process (hence the chronically intelligent stupidity or stupid intelligence of the tenured).

In other words, it is possible to think about the world in a cognitively sophisticated manner, even while being rooted in pure magic. Indeed, most revolutionary movements are created and led by magic-mongering intellectuals, from Marxism to radical Muhammadism.

Ask the average person what he knows about global warming, and you will be lucky to get one factual or logically coherent sentence. The rest is magic. The same with economics, foreign policy, homosexuality, socialized medicine, etc. If the person is not guided by fact and logic, then something else is guiding him, and that thing is magic -- which is not illogical per se, but rather, simply follows the assumptions of a different form of logic.

For example, I'll bet you five dollars... Here, look at Deepak. He is in a feud with scientists, not because he wants a mature rapprochement between science and religion, but rather, because he insists upon a reversion to pre-religious magic.

"He has written that his practices can extend the human lifespan and treat chronic disease, a position criticized by scientists, who say his treatments rely on the placebo effect, that he misuses terms and ideas from quantum physics (quantum mysticism), and that he provides people with false hope that may deny them effective medical treatment."

In other words, if I read Professor Wiki rightly, Deepak is a dangerous quack and destructive fraud.

"... [T]he popularity of Chopra's views is associated with increasing anti-scientific attitudes in society.... such popularity represents an assault on the objectivity of science.... Michael Shermer [who I am sure is no bargain either], founder of The Skeptics Society, has said that Chopra is 'the very definition of what we mean by pseudoscience.'"

A little further down we read that Chopra is symptomatic of the inability "to distinguish between real scientists and those who peddle theories in the guise of science." His "nonsensical references to quantum physics are placed in a lineage of American religious pseudoscience, extending back through Scientology to Christian Science."

I guess we're late to this party: Deepakism "exemplifies the need of human beings for 'MAGIC' in their lives," such that "the sophistries of Chopra" sit "alongside the emotivism of Oprah Winfrey, the special effects and logic of Star Trek, and the MAGIC of Harry Potter."

Suffice it to say that this is not the rapprochement I have in mind. Rather, as in developmental rapprochement, we want to maintain the individuality of the constituents, whether mother and child or religion and science. In short, we do not want regression or fusion, but rather, progression and synthesis. How is such a thing possible?

The same way science itself -- or even Mind -- is possible. Science is again only possible because of certain inbuilt assumptions. You might say that science has parents of whom it is ashamed, very much like the adolescent who starts to be ashamed of his parents, and then goes on to imagine that he creates his own identity. However, once he safely establishes his separate identity, he can gain a new appreciation of the continuity.

So yes, I do believe it was necessary for science to leave home, to say goodbye to mother and father, and to make it on its own. But like the prodigal son, we are happy to welcome it home to the wide embrace of Reality.

Colonizing the New Psychic World

As promised, nine more takeaways from How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. Imagine that: the most important story ever -- at least horizontally speaking -- neglected!

However, "neglected" might not be the most accurate adjective. How about "abused." Or maybe "deconstructed." Or "tragic." Or "imperialistic." Neglect is far too passive a term. At best, the glorious story of our triumph has been abandoned. At the other end is frank condemnation. That's what you call academic diversity!

Note also the equation of "west" and "modernity" in the title. One could equally say: How Modernity Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of the West.

Another irony about the left is that they want their modernity -- at least parts of it -- but don't want to know about or have anything to do with the specific conditions that brought it about.

But there is a parallel stupidity on the "right" -- or whatever you want to call these folks -- in which they appropriately cherish the conditions that brought modernity about, while rejecting much of its dynamism and content (and not just the bad stuff). It is a battle of stupidities with which the Raccoon wants nothing to do, and up with which he will not put.

This cultural heteroparadox is discussed in an unintentionally related book called The Age of Abundance: How Prosperity Transformed America's Politics and Culture. To extend the equation above, to say "west" is to say "modernity," which is to say prosperity and abundance. And you would think that to say the latter would be to say Happy Happy Joy Joy. But the majority of people do not say, let alone feel, this. Or so it seems.

So, what went -- and is going -- wrong? It is a genuine conundrum, because the majority of people in the modern west are living lives that were the literal dreams of past generations.

In fact, if not for those restless dreamers, the dream would never have come to pass. But the fulfillment of the dream hasn't made people happy. However, I disagree with the notion that the dream is actually a nightmare that makes people unhappy (i.e., "alienation," "false consciousness," and all those other diseases of the tenured).

Rather, the enslackened conditions of modernity simply allow people the time and space to indulge their misery, their conflict, their envy, their emptiness, whatever. For most of history, this was quite literally impossible, since it was a struggle just to obtain food to live another day. To the extent that neurosis existed, it was a luxury of the affluent 1% or less.

Because western history entered a quite novel space after World War II, people living through it have been unable to see it -- the fish being the last to know about water. Perhaps it will be more obvious to future generations, but it's really not that hard to see with your activated Coonvision.

As Lindsey writes, "In the years after World War II, America crossed a great historical threshold. In all prior civilizations and social orders, the vast bulk of humanity had been preoccupied with responding to basic material needs.... Concern with physical survival and security was now banished to the periphery of social life."

This "liberation from material necessity marks a fundamental change in the human condition, one that leaves no aspect of social existence unaffected."

In my opinion, this is the One Big Thing that ties together a diverse range of cultural, spiritual, political, and artistic phenomena, both good and bad. The fact is, we are in "uncharted territory," and every modern movement, from scientism to fundamentalism, is an attempt to deal with it.

When we say "uncharted territory," what do we mean? We mean first and foremost that a space has opened up as a result of freedom from necessity, and that mankind simply isn't accustomed to this space. As a result, all sorts of mischief and mayhem ensue from trying to fill the space with ideology, paranoia, acting out, sex, drugs, rock & roll, video games, vulgar politics, whatever.

Most people now have the opportunity to ask questions such as: who am I? Why am I here? What is my purpose? What is the meaning of existence? Such questions are pointless when mere survival cannot be taken for granted, and one must toil all day just to subsist.

This space began opening up with the industrial revolution, but it didn't reach a critical mass until the mid 20th century. Consider: from the reign of Augustus to 1500 or so, "world output per head was essentially unchanged." To the extent that economic growth occurred, it was canceled out by increased population.

And although conditions were dramatically improving by the 19th century, you will be forgiven for failing to notice. "A typical farmhouse in early 19th century America was a cold and dark affair," providing "basic shelter from the elements" but little more. There was an intimate relationship between work and food: if you shirked the former, you missed out on the latter.

But don't despair. It was all over soon. "From 1800 to 1900, life expectancy for males registered almost no gain, inching upward from 45.5 to 46.3." Medical care? In 1900, just a little over a hundred years ago, Americans "spent nearly twice as much on funerals as on medicine." If Obama were around then, he's be campaigning for socialized mortuaries to bend down the cost-curve of death: Embalmacare.

By 1890, only 24% of American homes had running water. Who are you? Who are you? Easy. You're that guy or gal who lugs 9,000 gallons of water to the house, year in, year out. Now, stop asking stupid questions and get to it, so you can think about more important things such as gathering the wood.

Here is an example of a reality that people seemingly fail to appreciate: the first commercial radio broadcast was in 1920. Less than a century later, here we are instantaneously communicating with each other all over the world. It's difficult to even say this without sounding painfully clichéd, but there is something quite cosmically revolutionary beneath the cliché. I hope.

More telling stats: in 1900, "2 percent of Americans took vacations." In 1890, 3.5% of 17 year-olds were high school graduates. By 1950 that number was up to 57.4%.

The upshot is that the sorts of existential questions that were pointless in the past now confront everyone. And I'm not sure that big-box religion has fully kept up with the challenge of dealing with this new space and with these urgent questions. (There are also religious movements that do gear themselves to the new mentality, e.g., the New Age, but they go badly off the rails.)

It's not the content that has to change, but I think one must be able to address people where they're coming from. Whether we like it or not, dogmatic and predigested answers will not satisfy, at least at first. Rather, I think such a person needs to... how to put it... experientially understand the truth of dogma within his own psychic space, and see how these time-tested answers comport to the deepest questions within. Or something like that. It's difficult to say without sounding painfully clichéd, at least this morning for some reason.

However, on a good day, it is one of the things we try to do here at One Cosmos. You know, teach an old dogma with some new tricks.

Adjust Your Calendar, or Ten Takeaways from How the West Was Won

This is a Bonus Post, considering the fact that it's a holiday and all. And I suppose the subject matter isn't inappropriate, since the West wasn't won by a bunch of guilt-ridden tenured pussies who think we prevailed only because everyone else was so peaceful, tolerant, and enlightened.

Rather, we won because of a combination of correct religion and metaphysics, freedom to pursue knowledge and truth, and superior technology in the application of righteous violence, in that order. (Not to mention little things like private property, monogamy, and decentralized power, but these can be seen as entailments of more fundamental truths.)

Just as most people maintain a rough calendar of future activities and commitments, we should be equally concerned about past activities and commitments, not necessarily ours per se, but mankind's.

After all, you can't know where you're going if you don't know where you've been, and this applies both individually and collectively. Stark's How the West Was Won helps us revise our cosmic calendars, for some people more dramatically than others.

To cite the most obvious example, if you fail to understand and appreciate how Christianity was absolutely central to the rise of science, then your old calendar is hopelessly corrupt. In fact, Stark makes a compelling case for the thesis that there was no scientific revolution, and certainly no sudden rejection of religion at its origin. Rather, the idea of a revolution was a retrospective invention of self-glorifying enlightenment literary figures who were not scientists and played no part in its development, e.g., Voltaire.

Interestingly, Stark demonstrates this not just with logic and history, but with empirical evidence. Specifically, he examines the lives of the most important scientists of the so-called revolution, relying on independent sources to come up with the list, and essentially dividing them between the intensely religious, the conventionally religious, and the skeptical.

As to how one can determine whether a person is intensely religious, it isn't all that difficult, really. For example, Isaac Newton would qualify, since he "wrote far more on theology than he did on physics," as would Kepler, who "was deeply interested in mysticism and in biblical questions," devoting "great effort to working out the date of the Creation..."

Long story short, among 52 scientific luminaries, 31 are judged to be devout, 20 conventional, and only one a rank skeptic. That latter would be Edmond Halley, who was "rejected for a professorship at Oxford on grounds of 'atheism.'"

Of course, it is difficult to know what was really in the hearts of the "conventional," since they may have simply been going with the program to avoid attention and controversy. Even so, a solid majority were nevertheless intensely devout, so it is unlikely that the rest would be at the other extreme end of the continuum.

And in any event, this highlights the obvious fact that there is and can be no conflict between science and Christianity, because science came to be in only one time and in one place: in the Christian west.

Frankly, this should not come as a shock or surprise to anyone. Nevertheless, it is something the academic left will never acknowledge, which is itself an intriguing scientific question. That is, how and why does this perverse ideology begin and end in the rejection of reality? More on this later.

Suffice it to say that honorary Raccoon emeritus Alfred North Whitehead made this point almost a century ago, that science developed in the west because of the implicit "faith in the possibility of science" (emphasis mine). It was transparently derived "from medieval theology," which revolved around "insistence on the rationality of God," so that "the search into nature could only result in the vindication of faith in rationality" (quoted in Stark).

Conversely, just as "Christian theology was essential for the rise of science," "non-Christian theologies had stifled the scientific enterprise everywhere else."

We are excluding Judaism only because it had no major impact on the scientific enterprise until the 19th century liberation of the Jews in Europe, at which point they raced to the top. That too is a fascinating historical nugget, because it means that a whole people with the correct view of reality had been actively suppressed from exploring its implications to the benefit of all!

Nor is it any coincidence that so many anti-scientific progressive campus groups lead the charge of Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions on Israel. Hey, if you hate reality, might as well go straight to the source.

Well, this is not a day of slack for me, since I have grubby remunerative work to do. We'll pick up this thread at a later date, since I guess we have ten more aways to take from the book.

Freedom is in Our DNA. Or Not.

So? Why not? Many traits are now known to be heritable, including intelligence, aggression, extroversion, agreeableness, and openness.

This does not mean these traits are absolutely determined by genes. If I understand the concept rightly, heritability is a measure of the observed differences -- the variation -- in a population that can be attributed to genes. Yeah, I could just look it up, but why would I want to yield to an expert?

Okay, "heritability of a trait is the square of the coefficient of G in a linear approximation to the surface GxE to trait." Thanks for the tip!

It's a somewhat slippery concept, since it measures "relative contributions of genetic and non-genetic differences to the total phenotypic [observable] variation in a population," but "is not the same as saying that this fraction of an individual phenotype is caused by genetics." Thus, as Wade points out, "genes don't determine human behavior; they merely create a propensity to behave in a certain way."

So much for homosexuality being caused by genes. Oh well. There's always nurture, i.e., environmental deprivation or trauma.

It brings to mind what one of the early fathers said about astrology: the stars incline, but do not compel.

As to the genes that influence aggression, Wade mentions that -- come a little closer, I'm gonna have to whisper this -- "African Americans are more likely to carry the violence-linked allele of MAO-A promoters than are Caucasians," but this does not -- {gulp} -- imply "that one race is genetically more prone to violence than any other." For one thing, there are no doubt yet-to-be discovered gene sequences that muddy the issue and account for the intrinsic racism of white Europeans.

Besides, as any liberal knows, "people who live in conditions of poverty and unemployment may have more inducements to violence than those who are better off."

O.o

Which is no doubt why white collar crime doesn't exist, and why the wealthy 1% are the Best People in the World.

At any rate, since genes don't determine any human behavior, this implies that we are always free. If we are always free, this implies that we transcend our genetic programming. Thus, to suggest that "freedom is in our DNA" is slightly oxymoronic, for it would be like saying that "freedom is determined." But to the extent that freedom exists, it can only be permitted, not compelled.

Wait, I'm confused. Animals don't have free will. So, how does freedom get into -- or escape from -- the genome? Or, what happened to the genome that permitted freedom to manifest?

Maybe I'm not asking or conceptualizing this in the right way, because it strikes me as Very Weird. Take an ant, for example. Would we not say that roughly 100% of any (minimal) variation we see between two ants is attributable to genes? Or in other words, there is no freedom.

But even the most heritable human trait still leaves us with a margin of freedom. Where did this margin come from?

Well, it comes from God, of course, since we are talking about a vertical margin. I don't see any other way to account for it, especially because this is not a blank or "empty" freedom, but rather, a "structured" freedom. Yes, our freedom is under constraint, but it is not genetic constraint but moral constraint.

These constraints are, on the one hand, given by God (e.g., the Ten Commandments), but on the other, discoverable by our natural reason.

However, it very much appears to me that our natural reason has improved over the millennia, so there was clearly a time that we needed those Ten Commandments handed down from on high, because most men could not discover them with their natural reason.

This is something I've been thinking about while reading Stark's How the West Won. In particular, the sadistic violence of past humans is just so over the top that they might as well be a different species (which implies that our contemporary Islamist sadists are swimming in their own private idahole).

Examples are far too numerous and too gross to chronicle, but just consider how much the Romans loved their inconceivably violent spectacles, as if they had absolutely no capacity for empathy. "Besides being fed to wild animals, people were executed in the arenas in a variety of sadistic ways -- flogging, burning, skinning, impaling, dismemberment, and even crucifixion."

In other words, crucifixion was entertainment, whereas today liberals wet their pants at the thought of some worthless convicted sadist suffering for even a moment. How do we get from the one to the other, and why do liberals, like the Romans, empathize with the sadist and not the victim?

The larger point is that in the not-too-distant past, human beings did not have to struggle with their conscience over, say, torturing animals for fun. There are still people who are like this, but it is one of the hallmarks of sociopathy, of an antisocial personality disorder (which in turn seems to be under heavy genetic influence).

Does this mean that most people in the past had what we now call antisocial personality disorder? Yes and no, since they lived in an environment that normalized such things. In that environment, someone who opposed torture on principle would stand out.

Indeed, Stark says that there is no recorded evidence of any ancient civilization uttering a peep about slavery being problematic. To me, this again implies an absence of empathy. Slaveholders might concede the humanness of the slave, but only in an abstract way. It is as if they could not put themselves in the position of the other and thereby say to themselves, "this is intrinsically wrong."

Oh, by the way. There are still some 30 million slaves in the world, the vast majority in Muslim countries, central Africa, and the Democratic Party. Not that there's anything wrong with it, because Diversity.

To be continued...

How Transcendent Truth Conditions Natural Selection

When we review a book, it is not for the usual purposes of evaluating its merits or ridiculing its author.

Rather, it is to help expand our cosmic horizons (either vertically or horizontally, intensively or extensively) so as to lend support to certain otherwise *speculative* ideas, and to assist us in assimilating its message -- at least the important, world-stretching bits.

I don't really see any point in reading if it doesn't further these ends. I don't read for "pleasure" except for the pleasure of time-dilation, slack retrieval, and pneuma-cosmic expansion.

So it is in this spirit that I am reviewing A Troublesome Inheritance. Sometimes -- if not most of the time -- evolutionary psychology begins and ends by narrowing our cosmic horizon, for which reason religious people rightly recoil from it.

But any science that renders man less than human is for me a non-starter. Personhood cannot be reduced to something less than it is without doing grave and unforgivable damage to humans. Science must always be subordinate to the "humanities," in the sense that it mustn't be used as a pretext to dehumanize man.

This does not mean that we need to limit scientific exploration, only that we need to keep it in perspective and to situate it in a wider context. Science alone cannot provide its own context, only content. It is up to us to place the its content in a wider anthropo-cosmic context. If we don't, then we will end up placing ourselves in a wholly scientistic, which is to say, infrahuman, context.

So, as I said: not only should we not resist any genuine scientific finding, but we should be its most enthusiastic supporters. Natural selection? Bring it on! But reduce man to a random configuration of genetic mutations? Get real. Nothing is that simple and shallow, let alone the most complex, profound, and mysterious subject-object in all of creation.

If such a dank subterrestrial hole of reduction is sufficient to satisfy your own meager curiosity, then gopher it. But just don't imagine the rest of us will dig your tunnel vision, or that such a cramped pneumopathology is normative. If it were, then man would never have embarked upon the scientific adventure to begin with -- this latter being a subset of the grand Adventure of Consciousness.

This adventure is progressive, not just horizontal or lateral, let alone static. Stark discusses this in his thus far enjoyable How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity. Short answer: it was won by progressing.

Ah, but what is the source of progress, or the key that unlocks its activation? Favorable geography? Guns and steel? Greed? Technology? Genes? Racial quotas? Homosexual marriage? Transcendent truth, AKA God and metaphysics?

Ultimately it must be the latter, because if your fundamental picture of reality is wrong, then it is difficult if not impossible to progress further. Stark demonstrates exactly how this works -- or fails to work -- in practice. I don't know if I want to get into details, as this is something we have discussed the past, and you can read all about it in the book.

For example, if you believe that appearances are fundamentally deceptive and that truth is found only in a transcendent world of a priori ideas, then there is no reason to explore the world.

Likewise, if you believe that every event is directly caused by the will of Allah or by Martin Luther's God of predestination (which amount to the same thing), then you will have no interest in the material and efficient causes -- let alone felicitous accidents -- that bring things about. If you believe that time is cyclical or degenerative, then progress itself will be a non-concept, an impossibility. Etc.

Is science -- scientism rather -- bringing about conditions that impede its own progress? Absolutely, and that is one of the purposes of Wade's book: to help science escape from its own self-imposed political agenda. It is not religion that is holding evolutionary science back, but rather, the left. If God works through evolution, who are we to argue?

But so long as time and eternity are distinct, then evolution must be the law of the cosmos, so we are condemned to eternal progress (that is, if we choose to accept God's offer and participate in it -- you can't force a man to be free).

It is clear to me -- although I've never heard anyone put it exactly this way -- that truth directly conditions the genome, somewhat like transcendent yeast in the genetic dough. How? In a number of ways. For example, the acquisition of speech gave man access to a whole new nonlocal realm of truth (and other transcendentals) that in turn fed back into evolution.

Indeed, this is one of the open secrets of Jewish progress and success, in that "as late as 1500, only 10% of the population of most European countries was literate, whereas almost all Jews were" -- including, most importantly, women, who serve as the initial membrane between reality and the neurologically incomplete infant: more literate and intelligent mothers = more abstract and interiorizing children, the hinge of human evolution.

Going back even further, universal male literacy among Pharisees was attained between 200 and 600 AD, and there was an element of sexual selection here, as Jewish fathers were "advised on no account to let their daughters marry the untutored sons" of the rude country folk who devalued education. Smart guys got the babes, and you know the rest.

So in this way, evolution becomes explicitly teleological, with the mind converging on a nonlocal truth that in turn feeds back into the genome via worldly and reproductive success. As man's thinking in general became more literate, more intelligent, and more abstract,

"the social and genetic variance of society was greatly increased," and "a person with social skills and intelligence had a reasonable chance of getting richer, something that was seldom possible in a hunter-gatherer society where there were no disparities and no wealth to speak of" (Wade).

In this way, we can see that the great evil of income inequality is related to cognitive inequality.

In fact, this is precisely Murray's argument in Coming Apart. More than at any previous time in history (or prehistory, so 200,000 years!), our modern economy is ruthlessly sorting people by intelligence, and intelligent people tend to marry each other, making for more intelligent children and so on. This wasn't such an issue in an agricultural or industrial economy, but it certainly is in a knowledge/information economy.

Which is why leftists must practice racial and ethnic discrimination in order to shut Asians and Jews out of higher education. In other words, the anti-science left directly disrupts that which furthers progress. It helps no one to consign some future Neils Bohr, Jonas Salk, or Paul Desmond to some third rate cow college because we need to make space for more mediocrities and dullards, irrespective of their race or gender or ethnicity.

UC Berkeley could be all Asian or Jew for all I care, so long as a few of them are working on a cure for diabetes or on new antibiotics and none of them are wasting their time and our money on gender studies or queer theory or black history.

Then, if you still wanted left wing diversity in your indoctrination, you could always attend a state or junior college, where you would be exposed to every kind of florid idiot instead of allowing elite universities to hog them all. Problem solved.

To be continued...

Remumbling Our Individual and Collective Prehistory

If you don't know human history, then you're like a man with amnesia, right? Or worse, like Obama, which proves that leaders who don't know our history condemn us to relive the bad parts.

But what if you don't know your prehistory? Actually, we all implicitly know our prehistory, since we are evidently -- if evolutionary psychologists are correct -- doomed (or privileged, depending) to repeat it. We know it by way of our "instinctive" actions, inclinations, preferences, institutions, etc.

As alluded to yesterday, it is possible that we are all related to a single tribe of common ancestors that split from Africa 50,000 years ago. And who knows, maybe that tribe included a couple of elders we know of as Adam and Eve.

Whatever the case, their descendants have been wandering in the bewilderness ever since, adapting to novel environments quite different from what they would have encountered in Africa.

A group of hunter-gatherers can only sustain about 100-150 people before it generates another spinoff sitcom: "Those migrating eastward faced new environments" and "would have had to relearn how to survive in each new habitat" (Wade).

The first wave of migration was into more friendly and familiar latitudes, but humans eventually pressed northward into Europe, where "the problems of keeping warm and finding sustenance during the winter months were severe." Note that was before the present period of comfy global warming that began some 10,000 years ago, so environmental pressures would have been exceptionally harsh: like natural selection, only worse.

Interestingly, there was also the matter of confronting the protohumans of a previous wave of migration, e.g., Neanderthals, Home erecti, and other almost-but-not-quite humans. (This brings to mind a comment by Bertie Wooster about a man whose face looked like nature had begun fashioning a human but given up halfway.)

I did not know this, but these primitive subgeniuses were apparently the residue of a group that had split from Africa some 500,000 years before, meaning that they had been evolving independently from the African humans all that while. (I had been under the assumption that Homo erectus was a direct precursor of Homo sapiens sapiens, when they are different lines out of an earlier common ancestor.)

Now that I think about it, it's almost like a premature birth, isn't it? Their timing was just a little bit off -- okay, half a billion years off -- so they weren't quite ready to leave the womb of Mother Africa, not yet fully half-baked humans.

Could the story of Cain and Abel be an archetypal recollection of our genocide of these distant cousins? Whatever the case, the world wasn't big enough for two kinds of humans, so these squatters "disappeared about the time that modern humans entered their territories."

Suspicious, no? Next time some leftist clown blames whites for what happened to the Indians or some other victim group, remind him of what primitive humans did to the Neanderthals. End the occupation! Of the world.

In any event, once these different human groups were situated in their unique environments, "each little population started to accumulate its own set of mutations in addition to those inherited from the common ancestral population."

So, as I wrote in a comment yesterday, it is as if there is that common genetic clay that is further tweaked by unique circumstances. If the human clay didn't have this shape-shifting potential, then we'd all still be in Africa. Anyone who attempted to leave would have simply died out like a palm tree trying to live in Alaska, or like a professor trying to survive outside the artificial hothouse environment of academia.

Which leads to the question: how much of the human genome is shared, how much unique to particular groups/races? That is difficult to assess, but Ward suggests that perhaps 14% of the genome would have been subject to recent selective pressures and local adaptations. He also mentions that an analysis of the genomes of 2,000 African Americans "found that 22% of their DNA came from European ancestors and the rest from African groups..."

This sounds about right, assuming a baseline of 200,000 years ago, 150,000 years of which are shared by all. A very big leap also occurs with the transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to permanent settlements around 15,000 years ago. This required a major rewiring, not so much for exterior circumstances as interior, i.e., psychic, ones.

Living in much more population-dense communities obviously required vastly more subtle and wide-ranging interpersonal skills, diminished aggression, delayed gratification, and a hierarchical instead of purely horizontal group organization. Are we to believe that such dramatic phenotypic changes influenced, and were under the influence of, no genotypic changes?

Indeed, fossil records show that there is a gradual thinning of our bones at this time, implying that we didn't require such heavy skeletal underarmor for the constant head-bashing: "humans shed bone mass because extreme aggressivity no longer carried the same survival advantages."

Those New Guineans mentioned in yesterday's post didn't have to remember their prehistory, because they were still living in prehistory, "using Stone Age technology and embroiled in endemic warfare." If those are the new Guineans, imagine the old ones.

It would be an interesting experiment to adopt one of those New Guinean babies and see how he does in modern society. Would he be under no genetic constraints whatsoever? That would be a rather extreme position, but if true, then Wade's ideas would pretty much be out the window.

In the Coonifesto there is a wise crack by Norbert Elias to the effect that

"It seems as if grown-up people, in thinking about their origins, involuntarily lose sight of the fact that they themselves and all adults came into the world as little children. Over and over again, in the scientific myths of origin no less than religious ones, they feel impelled to imagine: In the beginning was a single human being, who was an adult" (emphasis mine).

Well, Wade has another headslapper by Elias, that "Many people seem to have the unspoken opinion that 'What happened in the twelfth, fifteenth or eighteenth centuries is past -- what has it to do with me?' In reality, though, the contemporary problems of a group are crucially influenced by earlier fortunes, by their beginningless development."

So, it is as if there is a personal prehistory in the form of a preverbal infancy etched into our neurology, and a collective one etched into our genome.

To be continued...

Doing the Australian Crawl in the Far End of the Gene Pool

First off, it's interesting that we've had a string of outwardly unrelated books that seem to be commenting on one another: in the past few weeks we've learned How Monogamy Made Us Human, How Rationalizing Homosexual Behavior Is Ruining Everything, and now how our genes are implicated in Race, Human History, and left wing denial of all the above; well, not just denial, but active promotion of their antitheses.

Come to think of it, our reading streak may also go back to the trinity of Narrative, Freedom, and the oldenpneumagain Genesis. Put them all together and what do we get? Among other things, we get genetically conditioned heterosexuality, monogamy, and intelligence, but how could these not be conditioned by our genes? As far as nature is concerned, there are pretty much only two issues, 1) get those genes into the next generation, and 2) don't be a fucking idiot, AKA don't win yourself a Darwin Award.

A good portion of Wade's book (similar to Goldberg's Liberal Fascism) is spent in full apology mode, assuring the reader that he is not a racist and that it is not racist to consider what he is about to toss out there. File under IT'S COME TO THIS. Yes, in the unlikely event that the book is ever permitted on a university campus, it should come with a warning label. The book is not appropriate for an adultolescent left wing audience hypersensitive to micro-aggressions, mini-traumas, or other delusions of persecution.

Wade commits two thoughtcrimes right out of the gate, first, noticing that some human groups are superior to others, and second, speculating that there may be a genetic explanation for this. (Not a total explanation, mind you; rather, just some contribution from the genes.)

If the leftist could articulate the principles Wade is violating rather than simply calling for his blood, they would be 1) that no culture is better than any other except for the culture that believes this crap; and 2) that humans are not genetically determined but infinitely malleable -- a Blank Slate.

This last principle is necessary to legitimize the overlord state that will mold us into the desired form via entitlements and special rights on the one one hand, and taxes and regulations on the other. With the combination of reward and punishment, the state can make a human being into pretty much anything.

To put it another way, in order for leftism to work, the state must be more powerful and influential than our genes -- or just say human nature. If human nature exists, then surely it is under genetic constraints, no? That's right: NO, YOU PRIVILEGED HETERONORMATIVE PIGDOG!

In The Bʘʘk, I believe I mentioned something to the effect that it is as if mankind set out of Africa 50,000 years ago, eventually spreading out into the various experiments-in-living we call Culture.

Beginning just a few hundred years ago, but especially now, with instantaneous global communication and all, it is as if these humans can finally reunite and compare notes. Indochina, what did you come up with? Africa? Europe? New Guinea?

No, really? Rocks and sticks? That's it?

What the hell happened to New Guinea? And whatever it is, don't imply that genes had anything to do with it! Rather, geography, or global warming, or something. Better yet, just say they're superior to us because Carbon, and leave it at that. Or say they're more evolved than us because Dreamtime or something.

Our little human adventure, "with at least five versions running parallel for much of the time, had a complex outcome. What is clear is that from the same human clay, a wide variety of societies can be molded."

Wade most certainly doesn't intend the reference, but God too works with a kind of clay to fashion human beings. It would make more sense if it were a genetic clay rather than just, you know, dirt. But I'll leave that to the theologians.

Whatever the case, the original human clay -- the clay to make a Homo sapiens sapiens -- appears no earlier than than 200,000 years ago, and we all had the identical genetic clay as recently as 50,000 years ago, when the human group split in half.

Look at it this way: three people walk into a bar, a Chinaman, an African, and a Caucasian. Trace their lineages, and they will be distinct for quite awhile, but the European and Asian reunite at 30,000 years ago, while the (p)resulting Euro-Asian meets up with the African at that 50,000 year mark.

Thus, we can hypothetically use aboriginal Australians as a genetic baseline, because they arrived there soon after leaving Africa, and then managed another 46,000 years with no outside contact or genetic influences until the 17th century; by then

"their way of life had changed little. Australian aborigines still lived in tribal societies without towns or cities. Their technology differed little from that of the Paleolithic hunters who reached Europe at the same time their ancestors arrived in Australia. During the 46,000 years of their isolation, they had invented neither the wheel nor the bow and arrow. They lived in a state of perpetual warfare between neighboring tribes."

It seems that these human beings were perfectly adapted to their environment, nor was there any genetic influence from elsewhom, so there was no evolutionary pressure to change. They "were never forced into the intense process of state formation and empire building that shaped other civilizations."

To back up a bit, it's not that Wade's opponents believe genes are irrelevant. Rather, they just insist that the human genome has been fixed for the last 50,000 years (or whatever the figure) and is no longer subject to evolutionary changes -- in other words, that evolution has made a special exemption for human beings, and stopped.

But it turns out, according to Wade, that human evolution has been "recent, copious, and regional," and that it is "beyond doubt that human evolution is a continuous process that has [not only] proceeded vigorously within the past 30,000 years," but has continued into the historical period.

Ashkenazi Jews might be the most dramatic example, since their average IQ is one standard deviation above average (around 115 as opposed to 100). How can one group be so far ahead of the pack?

Wade has a chapter devoted to the freakish disproportion of Jewish excellence. We've discussed this in the past, and it's pretty stunning; for example, Jews constitute less than two-tenths of a percent of the world's population, and yet, "as of 2007, had won an amazing 32% of Nobel Prizes awarded in the 21st century" -- this despite being the most hassled people in history.

First stupid question: could there possibly be a connection between Jewish intelligence and Jewish success? Second stupid question: is it possible that intelligence is partly genetic?

More slack the rest of the week. To be continued...

Evolution as if Evolution Mattered

Not only is there no conflict between science and religion, there can by definition be no possible conflict, because truth does not contradict truth.

Nor should we merely affirm that science and religion may coexist in peace, as in Stephen Gould's claim that they represent non-overlapping magisteria, which is to say, are irrelevant to one another, like football and baseball, or feminist studies and reality.

The reason why Gould's scheme fails is that science does not ultimately sit beside God, but must be -- like everything else, Gould included -- within God. We cannot visualize the relation as two separate circles, nor can we picture a venn diagram with an area of mutual interpenetration.

Rather, science must be understood as a fractal or microcosm or echo of the primordial reality: a part of the whole. If science seems to contradict the Primordial Religion, or universal metaphysics, then that is probably a good sign that it is on the wrong track.

For example, we can know materialism is false because it fails this test. Materialism isn't a scientific fact or theory anyway, but rather, a faux religion. Same with metaphysical Darwinism, or Marxism, or most any other modern-ism to which people devote themselves.

So, not only are science and religion compatible, but the relations between them are extensive, robust, and mutually illuminating. You can't have one without the other for the same reason you can't have the many without the One (and vice versa). Science is always in the Many but presupposes the One (or on the outside looking in), which is why it is a kind of perpetual reduction of multiplicity to a (tentative and transitional) unity.

It is in this freewheeling Raccoon spirit that I approach Nicholas Wade's latest book, which is irritating the usual irritants, i.e., the anti-scientific left. I don't have to read them to know that most of those one-star reviews are from angry proglodytes (but I repeat myself) who love evolution so long as it can be used as a rude club with which to belt Bible literalists, not as science per se (similar to how wealthy liberals love AGW so long as they don't have to give up their private jets).

Well, let's read a couple anyway. "This book will either make you gag, or make you more racist. However, some of the racism is thought provoking. But it is still racist, and do you really want to mull over the merits of being racist? If so, then this book is for you."

"People who speculate on race without scientific credentials are just racists. He will sell a few books because racism is always popular. Bud [sic] do you want to read a racist book?"

"I can't believe people believe this crap. Embarrassing. Very, very bad. Maybe Hitler will give this book five stars? Hmmmmmmmmm."

Yes, the book is speculative, for the same reason that natural selection is by definition speculative -- or at least has an irreducible element of speculation.

In particular, no one has any idea how genes affect the psyche, and yet, we do have brains, and brains differ. And just like every other part of our bodies, brains have been subject to evolutionary pressures. It would be an odd and arbitrary position indeed to insist that everything about human beings has been subject to natural selection except the one organ that counts.

To spell out my view, I would say that natural selection is one of the necessary conditions for man, but by no means a sufficient condition. The sufficient condition of man cannot be found in nature, or in the horizontal world. Rather, it is in the vertical world, so no amount of random mutations could ever result in the human person. Persons so clearly transcend nature that it is absurd to argue to the contrary.

I've just started reading Roger Scruton's The Soul of the World, where he makes this same unassailable point. As he puts it, "functional explanations of the evolutionary kind have no bearing on the content of our religious beliefs and emotions" (emphasis mine).

I believe this may be concisely expressed via the principle that even the most complete genetic explanation of man would be unable to account for how man may know the truth of this explanation. Or, to know its truth is to be outside and beyond the horizon of its explanation, precisely.

So I don't worry about natural selection taking away my truth, my beauty, my love, or my slack, because these are vertical realities that transcend its strictly limited scope. Again, it can provide clues about necessary conditions for the emergence of man -- after all, it's hard to exist as a human being without a body -- but not sufficient ones.

Or as Scruton puts it, evolutionary explanations "cannot take note of the internal order of our states of mind. Evolution explains the connection between our thoughts and the world, and between our desires and their fulfillment in [only] pragmatic terms."

However, our mental states are not about the same thing natural selection is about. For example, this post is not secretly "about" reproductive strategy. Rather, it is about what it is about, which is to say, the pursuit of truth.

The same is true, by the way, of evolutionary psychology. It would be self-refuting to say it is really all about getting chicks. No, it too is about truth, which proves with ironclad logic that it is insufficient to account for its own truth-value, such as it is.

Continuing this line of thought, Scruton wonders how it is that "our thinking 'latches on' to a realm of necessary truth," and how human beings somehow broke through to this higher reality that has no direct relevance to reproductive success. A human being who lived solely in the natural world wouldn't be a human being, as we live in a space of time, truth, freedom, possibility, language, mathematics, and other modalities that transcend physics and biology.

You might say that orthodox biology looks at genes to see what they are "about." Yes, they can be "about" man, just as they can be about an amoeba, an ant, or an ape. But what is man about? Darwin cannot answer this question except to say that he is about leaving his genes behind. Is that it? Yes, in part, so anything else that man is about is about something transcending nature.

Since you brought it up, Bob, what is man about? Well, for starters, he is surely about everything Darwin says he's about, for again, we do not deny science. If not for the fact of biological reproduction, I know I wouldn't be here. So my parents getting together is without question a necessary if distasteful condition for my existence.

But is it a sufficient condition? C'mon. Would such a meager explanation satisfy anyone?

I guess this has all been preluminary and foundational. To be continued tomorrow...