The Leftist Circle of Death

Blogging will return to normal next week. Meanwhile, Roger Simon speaks for me. The paleomedia

"may be in the tank for Obama, but much more than that they are in the tank for themselves -- a whole lifestyle and world view that has been going on for decades, moral narcissism distilled to its purest essence....

"This world view, promulgating supposedly altruistic values, but actually stemming from a profound need to be thought of as good for their beliefs irrespective of results of those beliefs, is in a precarious position as never before. The disintegration of a politician or a political party is bad enough. Far worse is the disintegration of a personality, the disintegration of the self. That is intolerable....

Thus, as in any other mental patient, truth cannot be acknowledged because "they would be revealed as fools who believed the most banal tripe imaginable. It would also mean admitting Barack Obama never really existed, that they invented him. He was their projection. Barack Obama is the creation of the New York Times, et al. Without them he would never have happened and they know it.

"So the media are left in an untenable position. If you say Barack Obama is a mistake, then you yourself are a mistake."

We also agree with Thomas Sowell that Obama is not a lame duck but an infectious, plague-carrying rodent.

No, I take that back. He's the parasite that rides the rodent. Wait. He's the bacillus inside the rodent-riding flea. The federal government is the rodent, liberals are the parasitic fleas, and Obama is the bacterium, while the rest of us simply hope to avoid the resultant intellectual-econo-socio-politico-pneumatic Black Death.

And "Far from seeing his power diminish in his last years," the lawless Obama -- like a political retrovirus -- "can extend his power even beyond the end of his administration by appointing federal judges who share his disregard of the Constitution and can enact his far-left agenda into law from the bench, when it can’t be enacted into law by the Congress.

"Federal judges with lifetime tenure can make irreversible decisions binding future presidents and future Congresses."

Just in case a future cure for the plague of statism is discovered.

Lately we've had an idiot -- either that or a pioneering genius -- commenter who denies the baleful effects of absent fatherhood. In the new Hillsdale Imprimus, Dr. Dalrymple takes issue with our ideologue savant:

"In the course of my duties, I would often go to patients’ homes. Everyone lived in households with a shifting cast of members, rather than in families. If there was an adult male resident, he was generally a bird of passage with a residence of his own somewhere else. He came and went as his fancy took him. To ask a child who his father was had become an almost indelicate question. Sometimes the child would reply, 'Do you mean my father at the moment?' Others would simply shake their heads, being unwilling to talk about the monster who had begot them and whom they wished at all costs to forget.

"I should mention a rather startling fact: By the time they are 15 or 16, twice as many children in Britain have a television as have a biological father living at home. The child may be father to the man, but the television is father to the child."

Thus, millions of children are raised by the same sort of mediated reptilian humanoids that brought us Obama (as in the first link above). It's the Matrix brought to life.

And I see that in England they keep unemployment down by the same fraudulent means as the Obama administration, by encouraging and enabling disability fraud. That is, they

"lessen the official rate of unemployment by the simple expedient of shifting people from the ranks of the unemployed to the ranks of the sick. This happened on such a huge scale that, by 2006 -- a year of economic boom, remember -- the British welfare state had achieved the remarkable feat of producing more invalids than the First World War.

"But it is known that the majority of those invalids had no real disease. This feat, then, could have been achieved only by the willing corruption of the unemployed themselves -- relieved from the necessity to seek work.... And the government was only too happy, for propaganda purposes, to connive at such large-scale fraud."

And what about those low IQ hordes Obama has encouraged to storm our southern border? Why do we import illegal Democrats "to do unskilled work while maintaining large numbers of unemployed people"?

Well, someone's gotta work in order to support those spiritually eviscerated parasites, devoid of any father principle but raised on mass culture and supported by the state.

It's beautiful, in a demonic way: the leftist circle of death!

"By destroying traditional social habits of the people, by dissolving their natural collective consciousness into individual constituents, by licensing the opinions of the most foolish, by substituting instruction for education, by encouraging cleverness rather than wisdom, the upstart rather than the qualified, by fostering a notion of getting on to which the alternative is a hopeless apathy, Liberalism can prepare the way for that which is its own negation: the artificial, mechanised or brutalised control which is a desperate remedy for its chaos" (TS by way of HA).

Hell is Other Americans

We have a problem here. Way too much to say, at the same time that conditions are hostile to saying it. Can't even organize my thoughts with the whirlwind of remodeling around me. Look for a suspension of blogging activities in the forthcoming week, or at least patchy moonshine.

To be conservative is, among other things, to follow the evidence where it leads. It should be the very opposite of ideological pneumapathologies, which superimpose secondary realities on the first and expect reality to fall into line. But reality always has the last word, which is why leftism is bound to fail.

To be American is to love freedom (including free markets), limited constitutional government, and rule of law; and to respect the individual, private property, and natural law more generally.

How about the purpose of education, especially in the context of the principles outlined above? In order to be capable of self-rule, one must be capable of ruling oneself. In other words, before you presume to dominate others, might you not want to be capable of dominating yourself? Just a thought.

Only such a minimally mature person is in a position to influence "the public toward responsible freedom and limited government by the state" (Moore). Conversely, people who are incapable of self rule are precisely those who will support an ever-expanding (and anti-American) state to control and dominate them.

This is seen in its extreme form in the African American demographic, which is responsible for such a disproportionate percentage of crime, while at the same time, provide such disproportional support for the criminal enterprise known as government (in its un- and anti-American forms).

Why does this happen? One obvious reason is the absence of fathers. The father is a necessary source of order in the male soul, so we shouldn't be surprised by the cultural disorder that results from their widespread absence. One cannot simply wish away the father principle just because the father is physically absent, any more than one can wish away God, aggression, or sexuality. Rather, they simply return in disguised and transformed ways.

Thus, the void created by the absence of black fathers is filled by the prison system. The welfare state is overall a form of feminine fascism, but the prison system is its masculine consort. One hand swaddles, indulges, and forgives, while the other hand persecutes and punishes.

The IRS is not a proper masculine entity, since it is so sneaky, unprincipled, and arbitrary. Rather, it is more like the female enforcer. It is either Big Mama Lois Lerner or this creepy pervert. Whatever it is, it has no honor, no courage, no virtue. Imagine putting citizens through such hell, but scurrying for the nearest rathole at the first hint of accountability.

I don't really like the term "self-domination." True, success in life is predicated on an element of will directed toward the self, especially in the early phases of growth (which is true of any endeavor, from sport to music to writing). However, this should be preparatory to integration, otherwise one is at permanent war with oneself.

Which one is, or at least one must always have a strong military presence so as to pacify mind parasites and other internal saboteurs and pneumatic troublemakers. Weakness is provocative, whether in geopolitics, national governance, or intra-personal harmony.

Obama is a curious combination of weakness before enemies and hostility toward decent Americans, with predictable consequences. On the political plane he is repeating the pattern of a weak or absent father and a domineering, flaky, arbitrary, and crazy-making mother, with no appeal to reason or law or consistency. I suppose he wants to inflict his hellish childhood on the rest of us -- a hell that was papered over by the indulgence of racial preference and low expectations in general.

Back to integration. One thing we want to integrate is the mother and father principle, but that is difficult to do if you never experienced them. We also want to integrate adult and child, knowledge and wisdom, body and soul, and other complementarities. Moore writes of the "integrated person, in whom the head, heart, and spirit, the rational, affective and spiritual, are educated and developed."

Which is precisely what public schools do not do, because integrated citizens would be fatal to the leftist project.

Rather, statism simultaneously relies upon and creates the atomized, shriveled, and disordered souls who are its primary constituents and clients. There is no defensible or articulate "idea" at the heart of leftism, which is why it cannot be defeated on the cognitive plane. Reagan knew this about communism. Why argue with a communist? Rather, just kick him in the nuts.

Can you imagine tying to have a rational conversation with Harry Reid? The problem there is that you can't kick a eunuch in the nuts. Nor can you shame a leftist, since they are always shielded by their intrinsic moral superiority.

As we have suggested before, leftism is a conspiracy between the overeducated and the uneducable, the policies of the former driving the latter into such hopeless dysfunction that then becomes the pretext for ever-expanding and intrusive rule by the overeducated.

Who are these overeducated? Probably 75% of the people who have attended college, since colleges have had to so drastically reduce their standards so as to accommodate those hordes of uneducable. As a result, getting a PhD in the liberal arts is easier than it used to be to graduate high school. But since these people are credentialed beyond their intellectual station and have no real-world skills, they really have only two career options to exercise their uselessness: education or government. Or maybe journalism, which combines the worst of each.

Which is how we end up being ruled by ungovernable savages and educated by indoctrinated mediocrities.

"The problem in our Progressive (not Libertarian) Age is this: those at the center of the Pew scatterplots are not a class of temperate philosophers. Rather, they’re the politically disengaged and ideologically inconsistent. This is perhaps the part of the American citizenry least suited for popular government—one that acts politically, if and when it acts politically, primarily from impulse and passion. Ideational ignorance and material need are its calling cards, often mixed with a bit of sanctimony for being above the political fray. This combination makes it the group most susceptible to the demagogue and the one least willing to do the hard work (thinking) necessary to cast a responsible vote."

Another Crappy Day in Paradise

So: I think we can stipulate that postmodernism does the work of the devil (see yesterday's antepenultimate paragraph). But that's too passive -- like the classic "mistakes were made." For it must mean that postmodernists are the devil's slavish cabana boys and girls.

And don't worry for the moment about whether Satan exists, for if he didn't, then liberals would have to invent him. Which they have, so it's a moot point. Nor does it matter if the satanism is unwitting, for that's exactly how Satan would have it, right? Duh!

Just lately I've been thinking about how much more simple and elegant it is to just believe in the existence of Satan, and leave it at that. No need to overthink it. No one disbelieves in wind just because they can't see it. Rather, we see the effects, and that's sufficient.

But if postmodernism = satanism, I suppose we should define our terms. For example, postmodern presumes something called "modern," but is postmodernism merely an extension of this -- an intensification and prolongation of its assumptions -- or is it really something new and unprecedented?

It comes down to identifying exactly when man took the wrong ontological turn in that fork in the historical road, but you could trace that all the way back to Genesis if you want. Indeed, some Gnostics trace it to the emergence of life, which you could say is a kind of cancer on matter. Or hey, why not the Big Bang, which is a noisy interlude in serene landscape of eternity!

If I understand God correctly, then the wrong turn isn't in history, but literally initiates history. The Fall is ontologically prior to time and history, so it's naturally everywhere and everywhen. You know, pervertical.

Which, like belief in satan, isn't such a bad working assumption. At the very least you will be immune to surprise when man fucks up, which he is bound to do. It is how, with our activated CoonVision, we could foresee endstate Obamaism in all its horror way back in 2008, before he was even president.

Well then, what's the point of history, if it's all one big clusterfark? We'll return to that one in a moment. Let's get back to modernity.

As they say, the past is a foreign land, and since we are all inhabitants of the Land of Modernity, we can't see the latter so well either, because it is That through which we do the looking. It is the map with which we are attempting to view the Map, so you see the problem. It's why, for example, Richard Dawkins' ultimate truth looks suspiciously like Richard Dawkins.

What are some of the features of modernity? As it so happens, this is discussed in this other book I'm synchronistically working on, Revolt Against Modernity. Yes, postmodernism is always revolting, but he's talking about the verb, not the adjective.

Because of the left's unrelenting logophobia, it can be difficult to nail down definitions. For example, what is an American conservative? Someone who wants to conserve liberalism. And what is a liberal? Someone who wants to eliminate liberalism and revert to statism.

Likewise, there are many premodern elements in postmodernity. Indeed, in a relativistic cosmos this is inevitable. Since in reality truth cannot be surpassed, the relativist can only go backward or in circles. Which is precisely why the "progress" of the progressive is so regressive -- as if paganism, or the cult of the body, or hedonism, or irrationalism, or materialism, are new ideas!

Also, it is important to point out that contemporary conservatism didn't become "conscious" until there was a pressing need to conserve what was being newly threatened by the left.

Before Woodrow Wilson and FDR, there was little need to defend the obvious. A conservative movement only occurs when "cherished notions, folkways, beliefs and norms appear threatened." Thus, conservatism is like an immune system, which doesn't have much to do until faced with a threat.

Which means that so-called (contemporary) liberalism is -- you guessed it -- a cultural and political autoimmune disorder. When Obama promised fundamental change, that's the Big Tumor speaking. Any serious disease causes fundamental change. So what?

The absurdity at the heart of contemporary liberalism is the belief that we can have freedom 1) with no ontological foundation for it, and 2) imposed from on high by positive law, instead of being a natural, bottom-up right.

Another heteroparadox: "If one understands the modern world to have its conception in a lust for power through knowledge, then in its old age [post]modernity is the struggle for power without the presumption of something knowable."

This is the Machiavellian turn, i.e., political power without the Good, accompanied by knowledge without the True and art without the Beautiful. And "diversity" without unity, the One.

Simultaneous with this is a radical demystification of the cosmos, which is either a primitive defense mechanism or a clever dodge, but either way it "represents the enduring human aspiration to become gods." So we're backagain to the future in Eden, as usual.

Iraq WMD Discovered in Oval Office

Well, at least Obama has finally settled the argument of whether we should have invaded Iraq. If only Bush had known in 2003 that our enemies possess an unsurpassed weapon of mass destruction: liberals. Is there anything they can't destroy? Military victory, hard drives, veterans, marriage, race relations, education, the Constitution, healthcare, borders, the economy...

Which is a thread -- and threat -- that runs through The Common Mind. That is, just as on the biological level, there are forces of integration and dis-integration on the psychic and cultural planes (or what Wilber would call the interior-individual and interior-collective dimensions; each is more verb than noun).

In order for something to be alive, it must engage in a continuous process of catabolism and anabolism, i.e., building up and breaking down. It's why we chew our food preparatory to assimilating it, or why we digest ideas so as to integrate them into our existing world view.

You need to take this quite literally. There is a whole school of psychoanalysis -- the correct one -- that essentially analogizes the mind to the digestive tract.

Where they get it wrong, in my opinion, is in reducing the mind to this, whereas it's really other way around: the digestive tract is the way it is because the psyche is the way it is, and ultimately because God is the way he is/are.

That is, a trinitarian view maintains that God IS a continuous process of giving and of assimilation. There is nothing "beneath" or "above" or "behind" this process. Rather, it is the Ultimate Reality. Therefore, every created thing will be a more or less distant fractal of the same process -- so long as it is Alive.

You could say that Death is the failure or prevention of this living process. Which is why one can detect Grim Death at work on the psychological, spiritual, political, and cultural levels no less than the biological.

BTW, this also explains why it is a Fundamental Error to elevate physics to our paradigmatic science, since this represents the complete inversion of the cosmos. You can't actually get from physics to biology -- much less psychology and theology. But it works fine the other way around. Relativity always implies the Absolute.

As we look around, it isn't difficult to notice the forces of disintegration. Indeed, things are always falling apart. And as they are doing so -- at least at first -- this can feel quite liberating.

Imagine if the law of gravity were suddenly suspended. What a thrill to float above the landscape below! But wait a minute... It's getting a little cold up here... and can someone open a window? Can't catch my bre... The end.

So, dis-order is always a temptation and a seduction. Remember the French revolution? Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, / But to be young was very heaven!

No doubt. But you might want to wait a couple of weeks before you write that one down. You never know. Events may overtake that sentiment. Naive enthusiasm can be nice, but don't lose your head.

Remember the Obama revolution? Bliss was it in that dawn to be a LoFo journalist, / But to be tenured was very heaven!

Yes, you could say that conservatism represents the anabolic process, liberalism the catabolic. Thus, a "pathological conservatism" would overemphasize order to the exclusion of change, while a pathological liberalism would do the opposite.

Which is one reason why I prefer the term "classical liberal," since it balances and harmonizes both trends. Our founders were classical liberals, in that they wished to conserve the very principles that facilitate ordered liberty (order without liberty and liberty without order being the ineradicable pests of history).

The healthy society -- like the healthy mind and body -- is "stable yet possesses the the means of change in the light of experience and circumstances." A truism, right?

No, not for the postmodern idiot who has no stable psychic ground except maybe resentment, and who has convinced himself that all order is just a Mask of Power.

Except when it's inconvenient to believe such BS. For example, the IRS only screwed up because it's underfunded! It had nothing to do with the violent machinery of state power preemptively persecuting those who would limit it.

This whole question of metabolism presupposes something to eat. And not just anything. Here again, there is appropriate and inappropriate nutrition at every level, things we should eat and things we should avoid entirely, otherwise Genesis would be just a diet book.

Which it is. It's like the old schoolyard joke: wanna lose ten pound of ugly fat in hurry? Cut off your head!

I suppose it will take the rest of my life to lose all the ugly fat I acquired as a result of my postgraduate diet of junk metaphysics, fast foolishness, and comfort reading.

Which is what these morning verticalisthencis, gymgnostics, and O-robics are all about: not just building the muscle, but tearing down the flab.

Today's bottom line: "Christian humanism is in a radical tension with the spirit of" postmodernism, "which in deconstructing texts finds an abyss at the heart of them. In the sense in which the postmodernist does the work of the devil, it is at the farthest remove from the creative function of literature."

And of everything else.

Now drop and give me twenty!

Free Speech Zone

No time for anything but an open thread. However, Anonymous Commenting has been enabled, so you can finally say what you really think. Let a thousand flamers bloom!

It All Starts with Dictionary Abuse

Everyone is in favor of common sense, right?

No. In fact, I think this is another one of those questions that distinguishes left from right. You could say that conservatism is simply the conservation of common sense, of time-rested general agreement about the Way Things Are and how to order our lives around that (in other words, the world, AKA reality, comes first, not our ideas, dreams, and fantasies).

The leftist would respond, "maybe, but a great deal of oppression and stupidity also get imported along with the good, so there is no intrinsic reason to defer to the past. We can always do better."

People don't generally think too deeply about common sense, which is one reason why it can be difficult to defend when challenged, as in "who are you to say that marriage must be limited to members of the opposite sex?"

That's not an honest question; rather, it is simply the aggressive abandonment of common sense. We know this, because one might just as well ask, "why limit marriage to just two people, or to human beings, or to living things? Why do you arbitrarily exclude robots, or sheep, or inflatable partners?" Once you go down that path, you've abandoned common sense, so there's no end to it.

This book I'm working on, The Common Mind, goes to this question of common sense. It's actually a collection of essays, each devoted to a thinker who championed the common sense of Christian humanism in the face of the hostile and regressive forces that are always arrayed against it, in every age.

Yeah, it's always been this way, and always will be. There are always miserable souls such as Obama who want to fundamentally transform the world, and in so doing conduct a frontal assault on common sense. It's kind of hopeless, but no more hopeless than life itself. In the words of Samuel Johnson,

"It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated." At best we may give "longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be eternal." Which implies that the left will ultimately succeed in destroying the United States, just as death will succeed in taking us all, but so what? It remains for us to do the right thing for its own sake, not for some secondary gain.

It's the same with language. One of the bases of the left is its relentless attack on language, which is the vehicle of common sense. It is as if there is a conserving and integrating force in language, to go along with a dis-integrating and catabolic force. In reality, both are needed -- conservation and change -- in order to progress.

But progress does not and cannot occur by destroying the mechanism of conservation, by undermining the plain meaning of words. Thus, one could say that there is nothing quite as conservative as a dictionary; likewise, on the political plane one could say that there is nothing as conservative as the Constitution (which naturally allows for constitutional change, just as language allows for new words like duhhh!).

But this simple common sense will not do for the left. For example, the Constitution plainly forbids discrimination on the basis of race, so the left (to paraphrase Justice Scalia) is in the position of arguing that the 14th amendment actually requires what it expressly forbids. In order to accept the argument, one must simply abandon common sense.

In the chapter on Chesterton, I was reminded of his comment to the effect that most all philosophy since Aquinas requires us to accept one insane premise. Once we have done so, the rest of the insanity follows with ineluctable logic. It makes it easy, because one doesn't have the burden of remembering dozens of lies. Rather, so long as one assimilates the first, the rest flows along from entailment to entailment. Which Adam learned the hard way.

"Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality" (Chesterton). Which is interesting right there, because why not? If there is a common reality and a common human nature, then why can't we all agree on a common philosophy?

One reason why Aquinas' philosophy is so attractive is that it comports with common sense. It is "the philosophy of sanity since it is integrative, universal, sensible, and reiterative of the common understanding of experience rooted in the senses and refined by reason." And what is sanity? It is simply the registration of objective reality, "the universal wholeness that connects man and God, matter and mind, heart and soul."

But again, most modern philosophies begin with "a particular point of view demanding the sacrifice" of sanity. In short, a man must "believe something that no normal man would believe," if it were expressed in a simple and straightforward manner. Which is precisely why leftism must always lie about itself, and why it must so relentlessly abuse the poor dictionary.

Thus, modern philosophies reflect and assist "the breakdown of reality, the disintegration of belief and the fragmentation of society."

So yes, liberalism is liberating, but for whom? For the abnormal, the insane, the lacking in common sense, the envious, the angry, the auto-victimized, the sexually confused, the tenured. For the rest of us it is mental slavery, slavery being a symptom of the absence of the rule of natural reason, and denial of any appeal to the court of common sense.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but abuse of words can really cause an owie to the soul.

The Monday Morning Idiot's Guide to Cosmic Christianity

Because we've been quickly moving around from book to book and subject to subject, we've got some Loose Ends.

I'm just going to jot some of them down in the hope that they might spontaneously tie themselves up or turn themselves into a unified post. If not, then so what? It's only Monday. We should be able to achieve total consciousness by the end of the week, so we have that going for us.

Beginning with the generally not raccommended (because of the turgid tenurespeak) Metaphyics, there is a coonworthy quote by Solovyov to the effect that "All nature strove and gravitated towards humanity, while the whole of history was moving toward Divine humanity."

We've discussed Solovyov in the past, only we spelled it Soloviev. Since I no longer remember exactly what we said -- it's been over five years -- let's remind ourselves.

Ah ha. Speaking of tying up loose ends, Balthasar claims that "Soloviev's skill in the technique of integrating all partial truths in one vision" is such that he is "perhaps second only to Thomas Aquinas as the greatest artist of order and organization in the history of thought."

So it seems that Soloviev is just the man we need to consult if we're feeling at loose ends, looking for that nonlocal area rug to pull the whole cosmos together. Balthasar adds that "There is no system that fails to furnish [Soloviev] with substantial building material, once he has stripped and emptied it of the poison of its negative aspects" -- including Darwin and evolutionism.

To which I say: welcome to the cult! Because isn't that pretty much what we've been doing here the past ten years? And yet, no calls ours

"the most universal intellectual construction of modern times" or "the most profound vindication and the most comprehensive philosophical statement of Christian totality in modern times."

Oh well. In any event,

"The theme and content of Soloviev's aesthetic is nothing less than this: the progressive eschatological embodiment of the Divine Idea in worldly reality."

I'm going to just keep quoting the previous post until it gets stale:

On the one hand, "the Divine Spirit is indeed in and for itself the highest reality, while the material being of the world is in itself no more than indeterminacy, an eternal pressure toward and yearning after the form" (↑).

In turn, "the impress of the limitless fulness and determinacy of God [acts] upon the abyss of cosmic potentiality" (↓). The human state is the conscious meeting place of this metacosmic (↑) and (↓), but only because O has assumed human form and now dwells in human nature.

So we live in a kind of spiritual whirlpool or dynamic process-structure created by the vertical energies of (↑↓), which in turn have a "purifying" effect, somewhat like the rinse cycle in your washing machine, which baptizes the garments in clean water and spins out the entropic impurities.

Soloviev refers to the "conquest" of the nondivine, through which God can "manifest his plenitude and totality and cause it to prevail even in what is opposed to it -- in what is finite, separated, egotistically divided, evil." In other words, the (↑↓) process lifts us out of the closed system of our finite state, while simultaneously "cleansing" us of various personal and cultural parasites.

Conversely, materialism is like trying to wash clothes in the drier. In that case, the impurities are simply baked in, as in the case of tenure.

Soloviev also makes room for the divinization (as opposed to obliteration) of the individual personality, which, of course, is of great interest to a Raccoon, especially me.

Specifically, Soloviev's thought integrates "all partial points of view and forms of actualization into an organic totality that annuls and uplifts all things in a manner that preserves that which is transcended," i.e., you and I. What is specifically preserved -- and this is a very Coonish sentiment -- is

"the eternal, ideal kernel of every person in so far as it has been integrated into the entirety of the cosmic body of God.... There is no ultimate absorption of all things into an absolute spiritual subject."

Again, evolution; it is not as if the Kingdom of God crashes down into history once and for all. Rather, the Kingdom "must necessarily grow into maturity just as much from within," like any other organismic entity.

True, Christ drops into history at a certain point, but it is not as if the human soil didn't have to be prepared for thousands of years, nor does it mean that we don't have to nurture and gradually assimilate this divine explosion as it ramifies through history. Again, timelessness takes time.

As Soloviev explains, this ultimate divine descent becomes a kind of fixed foundation planted within the middle of change, as opposed to being the principle of change. What is therefore sought "is a humanity to answer to this Divinity," that is, "a humanity capable of uniting itself" with this object. Evolution no longer implies an absurd, open-ended nihilism with no ground or goal, but the very basis of hominization and its fulfillment in Homo noeticus.

This then becomes "the active principle of history, the principle of motion and progress," as man evolves toward what he already is in essence, thanks to the grand-me-down of the Son, or our adopted brother. "The outcome must be man divinized, that is, the humanity that has taken the Divine into itself." And vice versa, so that the world becomes "the vessel and the vehicle of absolute being."

Which is nice.

So, is the creation ascending toward the divine, or is the divine coondescending toward the creation? I would suggest that they are ultimately the same movement looked at from different angles. God kenotically pours himself into creation, while we pour ourselves back into God, in a mutual surrender. But only if we are already partially divinized can we surrender at all.

Again, that is just one of the startling innovations of Christianity -- the idea that God "surrenders" to manhood, in the hope of raising us up again. Our task is to surrender to the surrender, so to speak. As Balthasar describes it, "the divine and integral wholeness is answered from the side of created reality by a progressive integration into that integral wholeness," but not before the "glorious descent of Agape," which makes "humanity the object of God's quest." In contrast to the blues musicians of old, we have a heavenhound on our trail.

Nevertheless, it seems that the later Soloviev was considerably more pessimystic than the early, more optimystic Soloviev, which is a good thing. While he never abandoned his Christocentric cosmic evolutionism, as he matured, he developed a much greater appreciation of the Hostile Forces that oppose the evolution, both individually and collectively. Balthasar feels this makes him a much deeper thinker than Teilhard, who had a fair amount of new-age fuzziness and happy talk about him. Teilhard definitely failed to appreciate the Dark Side.

In the case of the left -- and we see this in an astonishingly immature form in the Obama cult -- people really believed that the election of this cunning and transparently mendacious politician would lead to some kind of "transformation of consciousness," or Deepak's "quantum leap in awareness." Please. Leftism can only create a heap of rapacious ants, not any true interior unity.

Here again, this emphasizes the importance of demythologizing the spiritual space, because if you don't, you will simply fill it with your own retrograde fantasies, as does the left.

One would hope that no true conservative is foolish enough to believe that the evil in man can be transformed by electing this or that politician. If anything, a noble man such as Ronald Reagan only makes them hate all the more fervently. The left despises nobility in all its forms, and nobility is one of the first fruits of Spirit. In reducing man to matter, they rob him of his nobility and try to make up for the loss with stolen goodies, thus plunging him further into the abyss.

We have some further application to the News of the Day, being that what was soph-evident in 2009 is now undeniable to all but the permanently insane 30%:

There is "no possibility of reconciliation" between left and right, "because our first principles are completely and irrevocably at odds with theirs, and one doesn't compromise on first principles":

"divisions in the country are as sharp as ever -- as sharp as the difference between the children of earth and the children of Light. Which Soloviev would probably say is the whole point, for "the ways of history do not lead directly upwards to the Kingdom of God," but "pass by way of the final unveiling of the Antichrist, who conceals himself under the last mask to be stripped away, the mask of what is good and what is Christian."

The other day I was thinking of how Obama is not only our first un-Christian president, but our first anti-Christian president. I know we're not supposed to try to read a person's heart, but I don't buy for one moment that he's any kind of normative Christian, which is certainly borne out by his longtime membership in Rev. Wright's inverted church of Christian Marxism.

But Obama is truly the incarnation of impersonal cosmic and cultural forces that vastly transcend him. If you applaud those forces, then you support Obama. But if you see these forces as intrinsically dis-integrating, retrograde, and anti-evolutionary, then you don't. No need to get personal about it.

Express Your Uniqueness. Everybody's Doing It!

We are all forced to adapt to a world we didn't make. However, what would a world we did make look like?

No matter who you are and how much you know, your world would be an impoverished and piss-poor substitute for this one. A man without an inherited culture is not even an animal. Which is why we cringe when we see a human being behaving like one.

This is one of those foundational truths inverted by the left, beginning with Rousseau, who thought that man needs civilization like a Raccoon needs a tuxedo. In other words, he thought that man minus civilization was the real deal, or that man plus civilization is something false and meretricious.

You can follow this theme right on up through, I don't know, Nancy Pelosi's loony belief that Obamacare will free millions of Americans to be painters and poets. For the left, it's just a matter of unleashing man's inner goodness, either by removing societal impediments or handing out cash and other valuable prizes. Never mind that we already have way too many books, poems, and paintings.

This is a really dangerous and delusional idea, but that doesn't prevent one from earning a Ph.D. in Dangerous Delusions. I nearly did so myself, when I was studying psychology. I began doing so on my own, in my usual multi-undisciplinary way, starting with Freud. Freud was a "scientist" -- a trained neurologist -- and yet, was as insanely romantic as Rousseau in his belief that the secret of life was to liberate the pre-civilized man from the constraints of civilization.

"The primary friction" of life, Freud thought, stems "from the individual's quest for instinctual freedom and civilization's contrary demand for conformity and instinctual repression." As a result, "our possibilities of happiness are restricted by the law."

"Happiness?" What's that? Mostly an illusion, but I suppose we get a glimpse of it when discharging an instinct -- for example, raping, or killing, or gorging: "Many of humankind's primitive instincts (for example, the desire to kill and the insatiable craving for sexual gratification) are clearly harmful to the well-being of a human community. As a result, civilization creates laws that prohibit killing, rape, and adultery, and it implements severe punishments if such rules are broken. This process, argues Freud, is an inherent quality of civilization that instills perpetual feelings of discontent in its citizens."

There are many errors in Freud's analysis, beginning with the artificial dualisms between man and culture, man and man, and man and himself. Other than that, he's spot on.

Even so, I well remember thinking this made sense. After all, there is desire -- what we want -- and various societal impediments -- oh no you don't! -- which results in frustration. That's life.

If we could summarize Freud's -- and the left's -- error, it might fall under the heading of "dis-integration." In this view, there is no hope of integrating instinct and civilization into a higher vertical unity. Indeed, that's just an illusion. After all, there can be no middle ground here: either religion is real or it is a delusion, a fantasy, a drug.

Having said that, there is something trivially commonsensical about Freud's analysis, in a folk psychology sort of way. We all have the occasional urge to do something we shouldn't. It doesn't ruin life. Rather, it is somewhat like the impersonal fuel (the "id") that drives life. But the mind has an engine and a steering wheel, and as with a car, it's pointless to have one without the other. That is to say, they are integrated by or in the person

In beginning with the idea of person, Christian humanism avoids -- or should avoid -- the dis-integrating tendencies alluded to above. This is a theme of the excellent-so-far The Common Mind: Politics, Society and Christian Humanism from Thomas More to Russell Kirk.

I suppose we could say that "innocence" is a primary state of integration, or at least pre-disintegration. We all undergo a fall from this state, hopefully not prematurely, such that it leaves no traces of vertical recollection of unity. I can already sense in some of my son's skeevier friends that the dis-integration has begun. You can see and feel the darkness. Children are supposed to be protected from this, but our culture shamelessly exposes them to it. Who wants to explain to their child what an erection lasting longer than four hours is, and why one needs to seek immediate medical attention should one arise?

Talk about a world one didn't make.

Now, another fallacy of the Freudian-Rousseuian perspective is that freeing people of "repression" will unleash the individual. Rather, the opposite occurs, in that the so-called id is the most anonymous and impersonal feature of our standard equipment.

Thus, as Moore writes, "in the twentieth century, and into the twenty-first, [people] feel an increasing sense of disintegration and separation -- from the past, within individuals and within communities which increasingly seem to hold little in common except the will to be as as different as they please from any sense of the normal."

"Paradoxically" -- I would of course say orthoparadoxically -- this "leads to a dull uniformity of the lowest common denominator."

Yet, it seems this "collective disintegration" is "celebrated by many for its freedom, vitality and novelty, such that we become convinced... of a collective insanity in which we do not share."

In short, I prefer the vertical world not made by man to the horizontal one the left has created so as to feel at home in their spiritually naked barbarity.

On Having a Distant Relationship to Truth

Why do we want to know what we don't know -- and maybe even can't know -- anyway? Why don't we mind our own isness, as do other animals? Dogs don't want to know what it's like on the moon, any more than liberals want to know what it's like to be curious.

Yet, this impulse truly defines the normal human being, doesn't it? It is what perpetually pushes us beyond ourselves to look for the Answer we know we can never fully attain. This is no less true of the (intellectually honest) atheist than it is of the theist, except the latter is fully conscious of the fact that the goal cannot be reached in this life, and he's cool with that.

If he is a little more conscious, he realizes that it is only because it can't be reached that the search can take place at all -- similar to Thomas's idea that it is only because things are not ultimately knowable that they are knowable at all. (In short, the reason things are intelligible is that they are created; the reason they are not ultimately knowable is that we aren't their Creator.)

It has a name: Meno's Paradox. But this is a True Orthoparadox, as true as they come. In other words, in its way, it is an Ultimate Answer, or at least a boundary beyond which the mind cannot venture. It cannot be "resolved" in thought because it is one of the bases of thought.

Here is how Socrates phrases the paradox: "A man cannot search either for what he knows or for what he does not know. He cannot search for what he knows -- since he knows it, there is no need to search -- nor for what he does not know, for he does not know what to look for."

Socrates tries to resolve the paradox via a theory of vertical recollection, which is adequate as far as it goes, but it still doesn't explain our ignorance or our drive to know. Why are we in this cosmic situation?

Pabst agrees with Bob that our "natural desire for the supernatural good discloses the divinely infused self-transcendence of all things." So, first of all, we must begin with the principle that man is the microcosm, or in the image and likeness of the Creator. What does the Creator do?

Well, for starters -- IMHO -- he is in a perpetual state of ecstatic self-emptying, or kenosis. This emptying has its human analog in the form of not-knowing, or of the emptiness that precedes any act of knowing.

It also has its analog in human relations, in that only by giving love do we receive love. The person who is "full of himself" -- the narcissist -- can neither give nor receive love, because he is already "complete" (in a pseudo manner, of course, i.e., a kind of aping of the completeness of God).

"Divine goodness is that which endows us with the natural desire for the supernatural Good in God" (ibid.). Thus, our innate epistemophilia isn't really natural at all. Nor is it unnatural or anti-natural. Rather, it is always supernatural, or to express it with a less loaded term, transnatural.

It is also a prolongation of childhood, or neoteny. Other animals play, but pretty much only as babies. In fact, play for most animals is a kind of rehearsal for adulthood -- for example, in the way kittens practice stalking and attacking one another. Such play has a clear telos, or instinctual end, that is hardwired into the genes (and/or in a nonlocal morphic field).

But human learning-play has no end -- not chronologically, ontologically, developmentally, or epistemologically. Or, it has an end, but again, this is not like an animal end, since it can never be reached. There is no fixed and final form, because we can never stop learning unless something has gone wrong. If a man does reach an end, it is almost by definition a pathological state. You might say that we cannot reach the end because we may search for it (and vice versa).

To reach the end -- whether via ideology or just laziness -- is pathological for reasons alluded to in that little quote in the comment box: "The quest, thus, has no external 'object,' but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable."

We mean this quite literally. Again, the existence of this spiroid movement is itself an answer beyond which there can be no more adequate one, because it represents the actualization or prolongation of intelligibility in concert with the deepening of intelligence.

Thus, reality "reaches out" to us, even as we reach in, which means that reality is intrinsically relational, and it is ultimately relational because God is irreducibly so. There is no atom, no fact, no datum, no theory, no answer answer beneath or beyond eternally orthoparadoxical relationality.

To not be puzzled by such a queer state of affairs is to have a queerly defective puzzler.

Postmodern is the New Premodern

Bearing in mind that other people's dreams are always boring, I'll be brief: I had forgotten where I parked my car, and was looking all over for it in a huge, multilevel parking lot. It then dawned on me that I was doing so while behind the wheel of my car. D'oh!

During the search, I was fretfully thinking to myself that misplacing the car was a Senior Moment of epic proportions. However, the Dreamer must have had something else in mind, since of course he knew all along (very funny!) where the car was. He was just messing with my head, as usual.

Considering the dream in broad daylight, it highlights the paradox of trying to look for reality while ignoring the reality of the looker. You could say that this is what Buddhism is all about, except that neither the car nor the driver really exist. It was all just a dream. Yes, but who dreamt it?

In the west, we believe we can find the car, dammit, even while driving it. This is bound to generate metaphysical paradoxes, but scientists don't waste any time thinking about them. They'll deal with them if they ever actually catch the car. Meanwhile, they're not going to stop chasing it because they can't yet account for the driver.

What makes us think we can discover reality, anyway? The ancient world was fairly unanimous in the belief that we couldn't, at least by confining our search to empirical parking lots.

The western scientific enterprise represents a split from this primordial matrix, what with its exploration of material reality. In turn, what we call postmodernism represents another split from that road, back to the premodern belief that appearances only deceive.

Actually, postmodernism renders man doubly lost, since at least premodern man assumed a reality behind appearances, whereas postmodern man believes only in appearances. Beneath appearances are only more appearances. Life is the search for a car that doesn't exist in a parking lot built by the patriarchy.

A brief answer to the question posed above about what makes us think we can discover reality: what if I told you I had the most inconceivably complex information network in the entire universe, with a gravimetric power density 100,000 times that of the sun?

Never mind what "gravimetric power density" means. It still sounds pretty impressive, no? And with 100 billion neurons, each connecting to a hundred others, that makes for 100 trillion connections in numberless potential configurations. By way of comparison, Bryce writes that the network in our skulls is orders of magnitude more densely packed than the 40 billion pages of this here Web.

So yeah, I think we can do this thing.

Yes but. You know how Darwinians try to drag man down by reminding us that man and chimp are separated by a one percent difference (or whatever it is) in DNA? What this really means is that DNA is obviously insufficient to account for the literally infinite gulf between man and chimp.

Analogously, let's assume that, despite my sr. moments, I still have the average number of marbles, 100 trillion. Another person, say, Charles Blow, has 99 trillion. Clearly, that mere trillion connections is insufficient to account for why he is such a retard, and why he is so hopelessly out of touch with reality.

So this big brain, phenomenal though it may be, is only necessary but not sufficient to find the cosmic car. Where then does the sufficiency come from?

Not to get out in front of our headlights, but the quick answer is "God." However, this is not an answer that will satisfy the ignorant masses and Blow hordes, so it requires some further explication. To say "God" is not to invoke magic so as to end the conversation. Rather, it is only beginning. "God" is like a cognitive placemarker, or algebraic variable that we must fill out with wisdom and experience (which is why I often deploy the unsaturated pneumaticon O).

God doesn't just give us one book to work with. For that matter, nor does science really work from just the one book of material reality. Rather, there are always four books, the book of nature, the book of the human subject, the book of history, and the book of revelation.

Not only is it possible to harmonize these books, they can really only be separated in fantasy, or in the abstract. Specifically, they are (beautifully) harmonized in the irreducible cosmic principle of "person" so that each book is written and read in the gap between persons: between person and person (horizontally) and between person and Person (vertically).

As Pabst properly notes, "there is no dualism opposing the Book of Scripture to the Book of Nature, as both are complementary modes of human cognition and in this sense mutually reinforcing."

Please note that to say they are not dualistic is not to say they aren't two. Rather, it is to say that this twoness is a fruitful dialogue and not a static opposition. It only becomes static for the infertile egghead, a term we mean literally.

That is to say, the early fathers spoke of the logos spermatikos, or "seeds of the Logos" which are "sent down to humanity." Thus, "it is the Word made flesh which acts in us and, analogically speaking, plants the seeds of the divine Logos in our mind."

Although the seeds are free, they often fall on the rocky soil of the infertile egghead, so no conception may take place. In this context, Mary would represent the very archetype of transhuman fertility. Thus, "our natural knowledge of the supernatural good is in is but not of us," so even saying Yes to God is already God saying Yes in us and to us.

Civilization, Humanization, Divinization

If man is just another animal, then most everything about civilization is artificial and unnatural. It cannot in any way be normative; rather, civilizational norms will ultimately be as arbitrary as shaking with the right hand or removing one's hat in a restaurant.

At best such norms might be neutral, but more likely they will simply be Masks of Power. For example, holding a door for a lady will be an instance of misogyny. Besides, there are no ladies. That term was invented by the patriarchy in order to control Dangerous Female Sexuality.

To say there are no civilizational norms is also to say that there is no correct way to be human. Many on the left fervently embrace this idea (which they must do if they are to be intellectually consistent). When my former leftbob first became interested in psychology, he read insopherable authors such as R.D. Laing, who argued that the insane were really sane, and vice versa. Likewise philosophers such as Foucault -- which is quite convenient for someone as insane as Foucault.

If you're going to have a Revolution, then you need to delegitimize the current state of affairs. The left is able to accomplish this in a stroke, since all hierarchies are bad and oppressive.

In practical terms this translates to the obsessions with "income disparity" or "marriage inequality," but it all reduces to the injustice of any delay or discrepancy between What I Want and What I Have, or between desire and reality. (Note the key point that such a system derives its infinite energy from the lower vertical, a subject to which we will return.)

Now, to say civilization is to say order. There is horizontal order and there is vertical order, and no system can have only one and remain a system. Or in other words, there is no system without verticality. An automobile engine, for example, harnesses the horizontal laws of physics for the vertical purpose of -- well, of anything, since purpose as such is intrinsically vertical. It cannot be reduced to physical law.

If we consider Aristotle's four causes -- material, efficient, formal, and final -- the first two are horizontal, the second two vertical. On the human plane, we might say that the body is horizontal and the soul vertical, even though the two can only be separated in the abstract.

However, there is a kind of fractal organization, in that the body itself has any number of vertical hierarchies, just as the soul has its efficient causes.

One thing I've been thinking about lately is how all systems are susceptible to vertical influences, which is what makes the cosmos go. For example, the entirety of human art and invention is a result of mind putting its stamp on matter.

This is a very queer situation when you think about it, because why shouldn't a lawful cosmos simply result in a monotonous, predictable, and eternally recurring series of cycles? Instead, these cycles "jump" to higher levels, as if guided by some nonlocal hierarchy drawing them upward.

This is one of the themes of The Experience of God. For example, "God is not a God who merely preserves the world in a cyclic form, but a God who is at work now, in our time and space, and who calls humanity and creation to the fullness of life."

As a result, nature is structured in such a way that it leaves a space for the interventions of free human decisions that further shape matter -- or where human freedom and divine freedom touch and create yet another something from nothing.

In other words, God is the Cause of vertical causes, the very principle that explains why systems do not simply repeat or dissipate. You can understand this in very practical terms. For example, why don't all marriages end in repetition, boredom, and ennui? That many do, there is no doubt. But what is really missing? In my opinion, it is the continuous renewal that can only occur when there is the vivifying ingression of vertical energy, i.e., grace.

More generally, every system needs something from outside itself in order to keep going. For example, your automobile needs gasoline, just as your body needs food. But what does the soul need? Yes, it absolutely needs God's grace, even if you don't realize it or recognize that that is what is going on.

"Expressed another way," writes Staniloae, "what was created from the beginning was also created by God as capable of receiving the power through which new orders might appear." And "creation does not reach its completion until, in humanity, God has revealed its meaning."

In other words, meaning is revealed to man in man via Incarnation and Resurrection. Thus, "the road to God passes through our humanization" -- the latter being the singular form of the process of civilization.

So "By creating human beings, God has committed himself to lead them to deification," and I am holding him to that commitment.

Christians hold that without spirit the world would be enclosed within the automatic repetition of certain monotonous cycles.... Only the spirit, through the agency of its own freedom, leaves such repetition behind and can cause nature to leave it behind as well. --Dumitru Staniloae

On Translighting English to English

When asked what he thought of western civilization, Mahatma Gandhi -- possibly the world's most overrated man prior to Mahatma 'Bama -- famously responded, "I think it would be a good idea." The story may be apocryphal because Gandhi shows no other evidence of wit, and because he actually thought western civilization was a bad idea, or at least not worth defending.

Arguing for the authenticity of the comment are a number of similarly inane remarks such as "An eye for an eye only ends up making the whole world blind," "Nobody can hurt me without my permission," (which contradicts the first), and "Before the throne of the Almighty, man will be judged not by his acts but by his intentions" -- a sentiment liberals love, because it exonerates them of the evils produced by their imprudent intentions.

"Non-violence is the greatest force at the disposal of mankind. It is mightier than the mightiest weapon of destruction devised by the ingenuity of man." Really? Maybe if you're lucky enough to be dealing with a civilized western nation such as Great Britain.

But then Gandhi advised the Brits to allow Nazi Germany to "take possession of your beautiful island with your many beautiful buildings," addressed Hitler as "friend," and urged the Jews to passively consent to his genocide.

What do I think of Hindu civilization? I think it would be a good idea.

Which sounds snarky, intolerant, and even malevolent, doesn't it? We are permitted to say such things of western civilization, but not of pre-, or un- or anti-civilization. In fact, we are not even permitted to notice that some cultures are more civilized than others, which is only a recipe for rebarbarization.

Which raises the question: what is civilization? Over the weekend I read a not-raccoomended book on the subject, Metaphysics: The Creation of Hierarchy.

Why not raccoomended? Mainly because it is written in the ponderous manner of the tenured. Pabst is one of those Christian thinkers who seems to think that if only he expresses himself as pretentiously as a Heidegger or Hegel, then the right people will take him seriously. But they won't, so why bother?

In his defense, the book is based on his doctoral dissertation, and I do understand why one would want to imitate the style of the academic threshold guardians -- the tenured gargoyles who hold your fate in their grubby hands. It's like physicians who learn in medical school how to write prescriptions in an indecipherable hand, or politicians who learn how to bloviate around a question.

In fact, this mystagogic skill is absolutely essential to the cult of liberalism and to the faux expertise of the experts who presume to rule our lives (where would Obama be without it?).

But there is no humanly important thought that can't be expressed in a straightforward manner. To the extent that difficulties remain, it is in the nature of the subject, but most subjects Aren't Like That.

Rather, the things humans need to know in order to flourish qua humans are widely accessible. One of the perennial problems with liberalism is that if it is expressed in a straightforward manner, normal people recoil from it. Hence the obfuscation, dissembling, and tortured rationalization (except when they are speaking to one another and the mask can come off).

Despite the hamhandededness of its prose, we were nevertheless able to distill a few gnuggets from the book. Or at least we'll try, goddammit, we'll try.

You're welcome.

Pabst says something on page 100 that (almost) perfectly expresses the Raccoon metaphysic: "To discover divine sapentia at the heart of the cosmos and the self is to discover the integral and ecstatic openness and direction of all that is to God."

You see the problem? Why "sapentia"? Why not just divine wisdom? If I were to rewrite it in my own manner, it would go something like this: In discovering the divine wisdom that beats in the heart of the living cosmos and courses through the arteries of the Self, we simultaneously discover the ecstatic openness to God of all that exists, and with it, the integral movement of creation back to Creator.

The book (which is part of a series) has the noble goal of forging a post-postmodern and postliberal metaphysic capable of making total sense of our cosmic situation. The editors of the series begin with an observation by Flannery O'Connor, that "If you live today, you breathe in nihilism." Quite true, and only more so today.

Now, "pneuma" of course means spirit and breath. There is biological re-spiration and there is spiritual re-spiration. And in either case, if the atmosphere is polluted, we will nevertheless keep breathing. What happens to someone who is running out of oxygen in an enclosed space? If we could conduct an autopsy of a person's spirtual lungs, what would we find? Would they be all black, like a smoker's?

Here is another unhelpful comment -- or a helpful one expressed in an unhelpful manner:

"Hierarchy and anagogy describe the ascending movement whose original, reverse movement is kenosis in the divine humanity of Jesus Christ. In this manner, the 'in between' of Christian metaphysics can perhaps be depicted as a spiral paradox whereby individual substances are individuated relationally by participating in the substantive relationality of the triune God."

Yes, perhaps. Why not just say (↓) and (↑)? Our inspiration is God's expiration in the orthoparadoxical spiroid movement of cosmotheosis.

Out of time. To be continued...

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.