President Wormwood and Professor Screwtape

If, as implied in The Screwtape Letters, "demons themselves are teachers," then teachers are -- or can be -- demonic.

I mean, someone is teaching this shit. So let's give course credit where it's due: Obama is our first president to have been the unalloyed creature of an insular educational system created and staffed almost wholly by leftists, devoid of meaningful diversity. Thus, we should not be surprised that his administration has produced no winners. Except for Jimmy Carter, who has plunged to a secure #2 on the list of all-time worst presidents.

A creature of the system. Now, we are all creatures, and we all exist in horizontal and vertical systems of dependence and interdependence. But it is not without reason that Mr. Screwtape is especially proud of his particular system and of the students it has tempted and molded. A coronerstone of this malefic system, according to Jacobs, is "the Historical Point of View" (although familiar with it, I haven't actually read the whole of Screwtape, only passages, so all quotes are from or in Jacobs).

Screwtape assures his pupil, Wormwood, that while "only the learned read old books" -- to be exact, books published prior to the establishment of the Oprah Winfrey Show -- they are nevertheless, thanks to the System, "of all men the least likely to acquire wisdom while doing so."

How does this System work its dark magic? "We have done this by inculcating the Historical Point of View," which, "put briefly, means that when a learned man is presented with any statement in an ancient author, the one question he never asks is whether it is true."

Rather, the modern denizen of the looniversity bin will place the source in its historical context, and if he's really successful, explain it with reference to the author's class, or gender, or sexual orientation. But by no means will he regard the author

"as a possible source of knowledge -- to anticipate that what he said could possibly modify your thoughts or behavior -- this would be rejected as unutterably simple-minded."

Oh Gagdad, will you ever give up the cheap polemics? Well, let's consider our presidential product of this demonic System. Not only is he a Wormwoodian student, he's a Screwtapian Master, a Constitutional Scholar, no less. What sort of wisdom did he acquire from contact with our learned and venerable founders?

First, he dismisses the quaint idea that there is wisdom to be had, for these privileged heteronormative aristocrats forged only "a charter of negative liberties,” which places severe constraints on what the state can do to us.

Seriously, it's almost as if these white dudes were frightened of state power, as if the state, of all things, can endanger our natural rights!

Our Scholar-President went on to observe that our founding document “says what the states can’t do to you (and) what the Federal government can’t do to you, but doesn’t say what the Federal government or State government must do on your behalf.”

Hmm. Are we reading the same document? I'm pretty sure there's something in there about ensuring domestic tranquility and securing the blessings of liberty to our posterior. In other words, the Constitution is supposed to have our backs. Its very reason for being is to secure and promote the natural rights alluded to in the Declaration and specified in various amendments, e.g., life, liberty, property, self defense, speech, assembly, worship, etc.

A man who is tired of those things is tired of life. And he seriously needs to get one, instead of devoting his annoying existence to eroding ours.

But that is not what well-trained demons do. Let's face it: they love to fuck with people, because without that perverse joy, they are reduced to absolute boredom. If you want to picture a black hole, imagine a Clinton without politics.

Another adultolescent genius, Ezra Klein, has checked into this Constitution business and assures us that the whole thing is "confusing because it was written more than 100 years ago and what people believe it says differs from person to person and differs depending on what they want to get done."

Klein's equally brilliant interlocutor muses that Republicans sure give this antiquated document -- over a hundred years old! -- "a whole lot of lip service." I wonder why? It's almost as if they are products of a different teacher from a different system.

Look at how Klein views the Law of the Land: it not only confuses but frustrates him, because it interferes with what he and our tykeminded progressives want to "get done."

But that is such a passive way to put it! For it is a truism that in order for the state to do something for you, it must first be given the power to do something to you (like fine you for not buying its crappy health insurance). But the state tends to have a selective institutional memory, and is prone to forget all about the first part of the bargain, so we end up paying an awful lot of money for the privilege of our own subjugation. After all, the business end of the state is the IRS, which is all do-to and no do-for.

Back to the contours of the Demonic System. "The Historical Point of View is one of the chief means by which we insulate ourselves from the possible wisdom of our ancestors," but not the only means. Another is what Lewis calls "Bulverism" -- or what the left calls Diversity and Multiculturalism and which the Raccoon calls the Absurdity of Absolute Relativism.

If you have attended a Screwtape-sponsored college, one of the first things you will have learned is how to Bulverize an author or text. It requires no skill at all, and yet, magically elevates one above the author who is being Bulverized. It is an intoxicating temptation because it renders the inferior soul superior to his superiors, and as we saw from the examples above (Professors Klein, Obama, and O'Donnell), it is difficult for the temporo-centric soul to resist.

Dávila has a perfectly apt aphorism to describe Bulverism: "Reducing another's thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it." For example, just recently Harry Reid attacked a Supreme Court decision on the grounds that it was decided by "five white men." Even leaving the Bulverizing absurdity aside, it is an empirical fact that Harry Reid is whiter than Clarence Thomas's eyeballs.

But it doesn't matter. The Wormwoodian apprentice will have heard the dog whistle, and that is sufficient to settle the matter. Same with Citizens United. Turns out the Constitution does empower the state to limit free speech so long as a "corporation" is engaging in it, such as the New York Times, the L.A. Times, the Washington Post, ABC, NBC, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, and Hollywood, not to mention colleges and universities, which are big businesses too.

Screwtape assures his students of "the great truth [!] that refutation is no necessary part of argument."

Rather "Assume that your opponent is wrong, and then explain his error." President Obama has mastered this method to perfection. He would never condescend to prove he is right or his adversaries wrong. Rather, they just be hatin' on him! Stop hatin' all the time!

"That is how Bulver became one of the makers of the Twentieth Century." His "diabolical purpose" is "to remove questions of truth and falsehood from the mind's life." The well-trained student does not think of doctrines as true or false, but rather, "'academic' or 'practical,' 'outworn or contemporary,' 'conventional or ruthless.'" "Don't waste time" trying to convince with argument, rather, with jargon, shame, superiority, etc., such as "we are on the right side of history." In short, believe "not because it is true, but for some other reason. That's the game."

Once lured into the game, then "people can find themselves unable to recognize the difference [between truth and falsehood] even when it is put before them plainly: they come to possess invincible ignorance."

And what we call invincible ignorance is what products of Screwtape's system call the Smartest President Ever!

Laughing Our Way to the Brink

"With good humor and pessimism it is possible to be neither wrong nor bored" (Dávila). Which explains why the earnest do-gooders of the left are not just wrong but tedious.

Even to God, who "tried to survive in the Newtonian universe as a bloodless specter cornered in a remote heaven," but "died of boredom."

In reality, "God is the term with which we notify the universe that it is not everything."

Indeed, God is the term without which the universe is nothing, precisely. Is that too nebulous for you? Well, "Any straight line leads straight to hell," so thank God for the crookward paths without which existence would be a machine instead of an adventure.

Ever notice how the scientistic worker bee combines "the most refined ideas about pieces of the universe" with "the most abject cliches about the universe itself"?

Which speaks to a kind of nearsightedness at one end and systematic blindness -- or cardiomyopia -- at the other. All trees and no forest means no happy or funny campers, just a bunch of sober, tree-counting arborists. Such an expert "believes he is a superior being because he knows what, by definition, anyone can learn."

But you know, "There is evidence that disappears along with those who deserve to perceive it." My Great Dane likes to play a fighting game in which he spins around and thinks he has disappeared. But I see him just the same -- just as God sees the atheist.

And wisdom? Forget about it. "The wisdom of this age comes down to observing the world through the bitter and dirty eyes of a depraved adolescent." Or maybe you've never looked into Obama's eyes.

I tell ya', reactionaries get no respect. Turning our backs on progressive hope? As if we aren't turning our face toward the light!

I don't blame them for thinking of us as terrorists, for "The imagination quietly piles up its dynamite under the dogmas that naturalisms rest upon."

Imagine actually being stuck in the progressive prison of the left, or if they could successfully seal up the windows and block the exits! Of course they want to, but nothing short of totalitarianism can accomplish this, which is why leftism is inherently pulled in that soul-killing direction.

Thus it is no surprise that "Contemporary literature seems like a cacophony of eunuchs in heat," or that "The modern citizens' libertarian demands are limited to claiming the right to copulate freely in the slave prison in which they are held." Leftism is a dungeon with conjugal rights. But "mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison."

For the left, it takes real courage to break through doors that are wide open or to defy a norm they are not equipped to understand. But "The fool imagines that the delight in breaking rules grows indefinitely after having abolished rules altogether." Or in other words, without us, the reactionaries of the left would have no fun at all, for where's the sport in overrunning "fortresses without defenders"?

DON'T TEAR DOWN THIS WALL, MR. CONSERVATIVE, BECAUSE THE ADOLESCENTS WILL HAVE NOTHING TO REBEL AGAINST, AND NONE OF US KNOWS NOW HOW TO BUILD ANYTHING!

As we have said before, argument is fruitless with these ideological zombies. They cannot be convinced, only converted -- or un-converted rather, since the descent into leftism is the consequence of a prior conversion.

All minimally alert humans know that "man has in the back of his soul a crouching animal" and that "a just society needs to be protected from human perversity." The leftist brings this crouching animal to the forefront of the soul and shields it from justice -- from what it both needs and deserves.

And justice? "[L]abeling a sealed package 'Justice' has made it easy to introduce any contraband." Like in St. Louis: no justice no peace, or in other words, give the crouching and snarling animal what it wants!

Imagine trying to convince such an animal! At best you can enunciate clearly that there is neither peace nor justice without order, perhaps with some added emphasis from the business end of a billy club. But that wouldn't be progressive, which "finally comes down to stealing from man what ennobles him, in order to sell to him at a cheap price what debases him."

Well, not quite. With dependence on the state at an all time high, the debasement is free. As if there is no cost, neither material nor moral.

(All aphorisms by Nicolás Gómez Dávila)

One of These Things is Not Like the Others: Divine Comedy, Stand-Up Cosmology, Suicide

What is the nature of that little by which we may know much?

We'll let that one percolate awhile in the nonconscious and come back to it later, or maybe answer it in a roundabout way. But surely this is part of the answer: "He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary" (Dávila).

Alternatively, one may bar extreme seekers from these black diamond spiritual trails by banishing the vocabulary. Perhaps even easier is what I have called "dimensional defense mechanisms," whereby a person essentially amputates higher realities -- the vertical -- from his soul and from his experience.

This is the approach of positivists, historicists, Darwinists, and the rest of the usual academic rabble. Let's say I don't like spaces, or I'm afraid of them -- you know, agoraphobic. One may defend oneself from the attendant anxiety by clinging to the second dimension -- the plane -- and pretending the third -- space -- doesn't exist. Just as Flatland is a defense against Sphereworld, atheism is a defense against spirit.

Yes, it happens. There is a kind of autism that is not genetic but acquired. It's been awhile, but there was a particular theorist, Frances Tustin, who wrote a number of interesting books on this subject. Another term for it is "encapsulation," which evokes the idea of being cut off from some part of reality and being enclosed in one's private Idaho.

Importantly, this private Idaho need not be something we would normally associate with mental illness. Or, think of it this way: as there is tailored clothing that fits us perfectly, there is also readymade clothing we may purchase off the rack.

It is no exaggeration to say that an ideology is a readymade neurosis (and sometimes psychosis), which has a number of advantages over a custom mental illness: first, it will be collective, and there is safety -- or faux sanity -- in numbers.

Analogously, if everyone is wearing wide-flared bell bottoms -- or platform shoes, or rings in one's nose -- then one doesn't look like such an ass wearing them.

Second, a well made retail ideology will cover most of the bases of human experience, the difference being that instead of being that wise little by which one may know much, it will be that ideological little by which one may know even less.

Example.

There are frankly too many to chronicle, and besides, it isn't difficult for you to draw the connections. Darwinism is an obvious one (by which I mean Darwinism "without remainder," as if it is a sufficient explanation of man's capacities); for Voegelin, it generally comes down to positivism and scientism, which are perfectly fitting suits for an adolescent McDullard.

The adolescent, of course, will continue to grow, and if he is normal, outgrow the garment and toss it aside. In other cases he may, to his surprise, burst through the seams. But some people -- we call them the tenured -- wear an adolescent suit made of iron. Imagine a teenage knight growing out of his armor. I wonder what that would look like? It's kind of repulsive to think about, but so too is academia, and for the same reason.

Speaking of autism and encapsulation, I ran into this article on Why Funny People Kill Themselves. I personally found you-know-who more irritating than funny, but the question is, was his humorous persona a kind of autistic prison?

First, I don't know if it's true that funny people are any more vulnerable to depression and suicide than anyone else. While I have heard that creative people in general are more prone to mood disorders, I wonder if this is simply because we hear so much more from creative individuals? They are more able to articulate their subjective states, whereas the average boob may be frightfully unable to do so. A lot of people have no earthly idea they are depressed, and their depression mainly manifests by making others feel depressed in their presence.

I mean, what wideawake person would not be a little depressed about the world and about the terms of existence? You might say that in order to not be depressed, you have to be worse than depressed, which is to say, out of touch with reality.

Indeed, In Freud's classic formulation, humor is the highest and most developed defense mechanism. All others are second best or lower.

Having said that, I think it partly depends upon the person. If we pull out old Bion's grid (never mind if you don't know what that is), humor will lay on a spectrum of maturity from, say, Adam Sandler to P.G. Wodehouse, or Jerry Lewis to Samuel Johnson. For me, Robin Williams always had that manic quality which is... well, it's manic, which is to say, a more primitive defense mechanism than humor per se. It is as if the humor is piggybacking on the mania, especially because he seemed unable to turn it off.

The author of the above-linked piece posits four stages whereby the funnyman may end up a deadman by his own hand. Now interestingly, a defense mechanism is always a kind of aggression turned toward the self. Thus, suicide is obviously the ultimate defense mechanism, and yet, it is just the initial death writ large.

One can see this by considering the author's first step; indeed it is rather transparent: "At an early age, you start hating yourself."

True enough, except that the majority of people who who hate themselves are not funny. Intentionally, anyway. Wong would no doubt respond that this is because they don't have the comedy gene, which has some truth to it. People who are not funny should never attempt to be, because they are just annoying.

Step two is the discovery that one may provoke laughter in others. Now, I enjoy making people laugh, but I do not connect it to step one (self-loathing), nor do relate it to a need to control others. To the extent that humor is deployed for these reasons, we have again entered a dimension that has nothing to do with humor per se. After all, the dour Obama is not a humorous person, but he sure loves to control people, and one certainly gets the impression that he exists in an autistic bubble.

Speaking of which, number three, "You soon learned that being funny builds a perfect, impenetrable wall around you -- a buffer that keeps anyone from getting too close and realizing how much you suck."

Really? I hope not. I actually try to do the opposite, that is, use divine comedy and stand-up cosmology to provoke the guffah-HA! experience -- to foster vertical escape, not to fortify the prison.

Number four, "In your formative years, you wind up creating a second, false you..."

Again, true enough, but this "false self" is very much related to the neurotic "autistic self" referenced above. It is a shell, an exoskeleton, a defensive structure that prevents vulnerability and intimacy. The more "open" you are as a person, the more you can sense the closed-ness in others, who generally have no idea how closed they are, because it is an unconscious defense mechanism.

And also, while the false self is an exceedingly common phenomenon, most false selves are not funny. The false self can revolve around anything from politics to entertainment to academics to wealth to sports to fitness to looks...

I hate to break up the party, but the laughter is over. Time to put on my false face and get serious.

In Order to Know Much, You Must Know Little

To paraphrase something Richard Weaver said, in order to know much, we must know little.

This indeed is the purpose of a liberal education, i.e., the assimilation of timeless principles that allow us to accurately interpret the world and to order our lives accordingly. All science is grounded in this same principle, of the reduction of multiplicity to unity -- or particular to universal, local to nonlocal, and finally (in the larger scheme of things), knowledge to wisdom.

Human consciousness exists in a kind of bi-directional dialectical space, "down" into facts, details, and particulars; and "up" into ideas, theories, and principles. Ultimately, one might say that God and Fact define the limits of this space, but the one can never be understood in the absence of the other (even though God is obviously ontologically prior; immanence is a consequence of transcendence, not vice versa).

In one sense, the downworld of facts and particulars becomes increasingly expansive as we descend into it, but not really. In reality, it can lead to specialization, specialization to shrinkage, shrinkage to provincialism, provincialism to deformity, and deformity to tenure.

This constricted way of looking at things tends toward what Voegelin calls a pneumapathological rejection of reality, or a "counterexistential dream world." The modern ideologue collapses this divine-human space because he refuses to live in the unresolvable tension of its complementarity.

Indeed the malignant dream of the left is that if we only create a more powerful and intrusive state, our existential tension will be eliminated. Or else! Liberalism is an experiment that never ends, because the state never learns -- or learns one thing only, how to expand based upon empty promises of deferred human happiness. But if you're still waiting for the state to make you happy, then you'll never be embarrassed by that Obama sticker on your Prius.

For human reality exists only in that space of vertical energies (or attractions), "between the material world and the pneumatic pull from a palpable spiritual source" (McAllister). As such, our first and last temptation -- and this is precisely the lesson of the Genesis 3 space mission -- "is to believe in a symbolic expression of a deformed but fully intelligible reality" (ibid.). In other words, make God and nature conform to man rather than vice versa.

Clearly, in our secular world, the most "educated" person is going to be the most vulnerable to this temptation, due not only to opportunity and access, but to the spiritual pathology that has become normalized in this inverted age. Clever mediocrities are the quickest to conform and the easiest to indoctrinate, therefore Academia.

To plunge into matter is to take flight from spirit (even though, ironically, it is an imaginary flight). However, the loss of spirit is compensated for by a growth -- or better, metastasis -- of pride and vanity. Or, as God shrinks, narcissism expands. And yes, we are looking at you, Obama. You are the end state of the oldest cosmic disease.

To paraphrase (or possibly quote) Weaver again, total immersion in matter makes a man unfit to deal with the problems of matter. Is this not axiomatic? Who does a materialist call when matter is broken? Remember, the materialist cannot stand outside or above matter, any more than the residents of Flatland can perceive their world from the third dimension.

Speaking of which, just as every picture tells a story, every story may be reduced to a picture. This is because man's default mode of thinking is an analogue of the eyes. But to paraphrase Samuel Johnson, the deepest things must be seeingly felt or feelingly seen. Or in other words, despite its temptation to detached abstraction, seeing is really just an extension of the sense of touch -- as is true of all the senses. Sight is what it feels like when photons are striking the retina.

Likewise, spiritual in-sight is what it feels like when Spirit touches the intellect. Spiritual wisdom is no less a matter of touching and being touched by God, otherwise it would have no explanation. Indeed, Johnson once wrote a prayer that comes very close to the morning Raccoon prayer, i.e., to the way Toots Mondello taught us to pray: "Almighty God, without whose grace all wisdom is folly, grant [that] thy Holy Spirit not be withheld from me, that I may promote thy glory, and the Salvation both of myself and others."

Or in other words, Save me this day and this post from idiocy and its propagation!

Johnson was not an orthodox Christian, and yet, there really was no category then for what he was. As such, he was more than a little troubled, or at least unsettled, in his faith. Along these lines, he made many timeless observation on our recent subject of imagination, in both its healthy and pathological aspects.

In general, I suppose one could say that a pathological imagination is one that plunges headwrong into the lower vertical.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the lower vertical, mind you. It's just that you need to be accompanied there by an adult. In the absence of adult supervision, it redounds to hell. It will "grow claws and start to tunnel" downward, breathing life into envy, resentment, auto-victimization, entitlement, and illegitimate violence.

This is why the well-ordered soul must be prior to the order of the state, while a principal task of the state is to promote order in the soul -- or at least not its opposite, which is precisely what the left not only encourages but often mandates: you will photograph homosexuals! You will pay for men to cut of their wangs! You will be racist!

Johnson made a subtle observation to the effect that "so few of the hours of life are filled up with objects adequate to the mind of man." This is because, in my view, our mind is ultimately an adequation to God. God -- or the Absolute -- is the only thing fully adequate to our intelligence and understanding. It is not that we should ignore the lower vertical, but rather, see it in the light of the upper vertical. It's simple, really: see the relative in light of the absolute, or time from eternity, or individuality in terms of transcendent communion and love.

If we opt out of this dynamic space, then we may plunge into mischievous uses of the imagination, "to past and future supplemental satisfactions," such that "recollection and anticipation fill up almost all our moments." This is done to escape from "the vacuities of life," which are mostly vacuities in the soul. For Johnson, it is critical that imagination be regulated or disciplined by reality, otherwise it may become an instrument of torment.

Difficult? Maybe. That's why they call it a spiritual practice. In contrast, living from hope to imaginary hope is one way to go hungry, since it is a refusal of our daily bread. We see how the "future bread" of Obamaism works -- that is, give me your bread, and I promise this time to spend it on more bakeries.

I say, teach a man to bake. And prior to that, to separate the good seed from the bad, to plant, grow, harvest, and eat. But I suppose that's unconstitutional.

Meta-Cosmic Ignorance and the Left Wing Ignorantsia

This single aphorism is almost too packed with implications to explicate in the brief time available this morning: "The tacit presuppositions of any science are more important than its teachings" And "Only what a science ignores about itself defines what it says" (Dávila).

This makes one want to grab the nearest Darwinian or Leftist and say to him: "Sounds interesting, but what are the tacit presuppositions underlying your theory, i.e., the worldview that precedes it?"

The typical Darwinian will proceed straight to what are in reality his conclusions, or to the logical entailments to which the theory gives rise, e.g., materialism, or determinism, or reductionism, etc.

But that's not what we asked for. Rather, we want to know his assumptions, his presuppositions about the world (which he pretends he doesn't have). These assumptions 1) are not rooted in the theory, but prior to it; and 2) are highly suspect, to say the least, if the theory is true. In other words, why should we care about what some accidental concatenation of selfish genes assumes about the world? I know I don't.

What I mean to say is that the Darwinian dresses his assumptions as conclusions in order to give them some respectability, but they are assumptions just the same. And you know what they say about that: GITO, or garbage in, tenure out.

Part two of the aphorism suggests that what the Darwinian fundamentalist ignores about himself turns out to define what he says. In other words, a subject of random evolution is constrained by its ignorance, the Darwinian included.

Now, we are all constrained by our ignorance. No shame in that, for we can only be ignorant to the extent that Truth exists. But the Darwinian goes even one step further, and denies his ignorance, thus making him ignorant of his cosmic ignorance, which is thus elevated to his most important implicit teaching: that he is a cosmic ignoramus, or that man's stupidity is absolute.

Which is only true of some men.

Ultimately this goes back to Gödel, liberally interpreted (in other words, one of my acknowledged cosmic presuppositions is that the incompleteness theorems apply to any human thought-system, not just to strictly logical or mathematical ones).

In other words, the theorems are logical because they are true, not vice versa (which really is the whole point, i.e., that humans may securely know truths that are beyond the reach of logic). Therefore, to the extent that Darwinism is consistent, it is incomplete -- radically so in the case of humans. Or, if it is complete, then it must be riddled with inconsistencies. Which it is.

Of course, this poses no problem for the Raccoon, who keeps everything in perspective and avails himself of any truth in order to serve the one Truth. Darwinism is neither consistent nor complete, but that hardly means we can't use it.

So, why this beastly arrogance, this intolerant "all or none" attitude of the Darwinians? Why on this subject do they behave like territorial apes instead of human beings who are uniquely oriented to that which always surpasses them (hence the ground of our humanness)?

Why do they start flinging poo against the walls, just when things are getting interesting? You'd think they were a bunch of animals or something, or that Darwinism is sufficient to explain them.

And if I had had a little more time, I could have tightened up any loose s*it contained above. As it stands, you folks will have sort it out, because I'm late.

Thank God for Accidental Things!

Dávila (Don Colacho) has many aphorisms that go to the idea that genuine happiness is something that cannot be planned. Rather, a key element is surprise.

Thus, "The gods do not punish the pursuit of happiness but the ambition to forge it with our own hands." Clearly there is a danger in the implicit assumption that we are the source of our own happiness. Therefore, "the only licit desire is for something that does not depend on us at all."

This is one of the things that contributes to my own feverish lack of ambition. Succeeding on my terms would be no success at all! Besides, virtually everything worthwhile in my life came as a surprise, not a plan. I didn't plan my wife, my career, my child, my new friend. Not even the internet. Those things just came to me while I wasn't paying attention.

Ambition combined with education -- or indoctrination -- is responsible for most human ills, at least in the modern west. Therefore, "After seeing work exploit and demolish the world, laziness seems like the mother of the virtues." How much more *progress* can we take before the ambitious eggheads of the left succeed in destroying civilization?

Two symmetrical aphorisms: "The only man who should speak of wealth or power is the one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach." I don't know that it was ever in reach, but let's just say I've kept my hands to mysoph. And "To learn that the most valuable goods are the least rare requires a long apprenticeship." Quite true. It took me half (I hope!) my life.

Taken to its logical extreme, "God is the name of the sole enigma that, if it were deciphered, would not be a disappointment." Which is to say, everything short of God is going to be a little disappointing. Or maybe not, so long as we don't try to wring more out of it than there is in it. A little perspective goes a long way, and a sense of Cosmic Irony is not a bad thing.

You often see parents -- especially where I live -- essentially rob children of their childhood because of an insane ambition, which, if fulfilled, would result in the children being as happy as those reflexively ambitious parents. Which is to say, not very happy at all -- in fact, so unfulfilled that they have to project it into the child, and then imagine that they will finally be fulfilled if only their child achieves an arbitrary level of success defined by someone else! In short, they simply punt their spiritual emptiness to the next generation.

I had an insight into this dynamic long ago, on the occasion of snatching my BA degree. My parents were quite thrilled, no doubt partly due to the element of surprise at the unexpected accomplishment of a wayward child. Me? Couldn't care less, except that it was one less hoop to jump through.

One of the happiest days of my life -- I still get chills thinking about it -- was my last day of high school. Because of the accomplishment? Please. It was all about having the conspiracy off my back after thirteen years of torture enhanced indoctrination!

Back to my shattering insight upon becoming a confirmed bachelor: while it was obvious that my parents were far more excited than I was, this went to a more general principle that the success of our children means much more to us than does our own success (at least if we aren't pathological narcissists). First word, first step, first sleepover, first chapter book, whatever. My own firsts are matters of complete indifference to me, whereas my son's firsts never fail to bang the naches button.

Ah, here is the exact aphorism I was looking for: "Only the unexpected fully satisfies. Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes." This is why I so enjoy this medium of expression. If someone were to offer me money to write a commentary on Don Colacho's Aphorisms, I would be miserable. Blogging is only fulfilling -- and it is, very -- because there is absolutely No Plan. Every morning, I can't wait to wake up and accomplish nothing, only maybe a little more deeply this time!

Here is another: "The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space or time." This I wholeheartedly and wholeheadedly believe. I have never been under any delusion that I will be fulfilled after X. Rather, to the extent that fulfillment is possible, it is only possible now. Everything else is a dodge, a mortgage you will never pay off. ¡"There are only instants"!

Has your team ever won the World Series or Super Bowl? Talk about a letdown! The whole point is to live in the tension of that impossible future. Should it actually arrive, the only way to top it is to burn down the city.

As to the surprise-myself blogging, this also goes to why I would never want to be considered an "expert," because that would mean game over. Let others bear the burden of expertise! It's too much fun being an absolute beginner.

Besides, "The prophet is not God's confidante, but a rag blown by sacred squalls." And "There is no spiritual victory that need not be won anew each day" -- or each post. Got another game tomorrow, and the season never ends. Yes, we may dream of winning the World Series, but God forbid we should ever make it there!

For "whoever celebrates future harmonies sells himself to the devil." Rather, "One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time." Live now and for (and in) eternity, not the future, and certainly not the past!

Because "religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper" -- into the now and therefore eternal. Don't wait until you are sick or old to appreciate your poverty and dependence! For "Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done." And "True talent consists in not making oneself independent from God."

Hey, sorry about all the exclamation marks! It just happened. I'm not trying to go all breathy adolescent on you.

Myth, Science, Scientific Myth, and Myths of Science

Myth can be thought of as a medium of the imagination; for Don Colacho, it is "not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language." It "intuits the transcendent in the sensory," so it is analogous to how we perceive beauty in the material world. Just as beauty is of Beauty, truths are of Truth, irrespective of the medium of transmission.

Science, in contrast to myth, consists of a heterogeneous list of propositions that cannot be falsified -- today. Thus, progress in science -- in particular, major leaps or paradigm shifts -- "usually comes from the care with which we study the trivial exception to the rule."

As it pertains to climate science, for example, anyone who approaches it with an open mind is struck by the many exceptions that refute its central claim. So many black swans! It will not progress until those black swans can be reconciled with the white, and yet, proponents try to pretend the former don't even exist.

In this regard, climate science is more like neurosis than science, since it operates via repression, rationalization, compartmentalization, wishful thinking, projection, etc.

It's no different with the sciences of human intelligence, of race, of homosexuality, or of sexual differences. Liberals don't even bother disagreeing with the science, but deny its existence altogether -- which is more of a psychotic than neurotic defense mechanism. It seems to be working so far, but there's going to be hell to pay once reality rears its beautiful head.

As Kevin Williamson writes (National Review, July 7, 2014), the great majority of citizens are not intellectually equipped "to understand even modestly sophisticated scientific problems."

All humans, however, "are able to understand prestige, and the uses to which prestige may be put." When at a gathering of liberal relatives -- well, first of all, I never bring up politics. But they inevitably do. And I suppose what is most troubling is that they do not bow before my great prestige. Rather, they seem to think there are others more prestigious than I!

Oh well. A prophet among his own, and all that.

I read somewhere that Cat Stevens managed to convert his entire extended family to Islam. One suspects this has more to do with the material than spiritual rewards of being a Friend of Cat. No such material rewards attach to my prestige.

The thought just occurred to me that I once held Ken Wilber in high regard. But his prestige was deflated the moment Bill Clinton began citing him and Al Gore was seen with one of his books. For "he who sees that his ideas propagate must suspect that they betray him." Or worse, that the ideas were a betrayal to begin with -- thus the appeal to the base, the treacherous, the lowdown.

Truly, it should be the other way around: if you are praised by the likes of a Bill Clinton or Al Gore, this should be an occasion for the deepest soul-searching. For it is written: "Enraging the typically modern man is the sure sign of being right" (DC).

Metaphysical ideas are not susceptible to scientific falsification. But they are subject to constant true-ification in light of who despises them -- by trollification. Thus sayeth the Master: the world will hate you for My sake.

What we merely know can never exhaust what Really Is. This is because Being is inexhaustible, and knowledge flows therefrom. Indeed, as we have mentioned before, ignorance by definition grows with the accumulation of factual and empirical knowledge because of the expansion of the surface area of our illuminated sphere.

Even so, man has a cosmic right to know (roughly) what the hell is going on in and beyond this sphere, no matter how large or small its dimensions, hence the purpose of revelation, of myth, of higher imagination, which embody truths that will remain true no matter how fervently an Al Gore or Bill Clinton believes them. They can be spoiled by no man's prestige, from Popes to professors to politicians.

Meanwhile, the "settled science" will be the prejudice existing at the moment man becomes extinct (paraphrasing Don Colacho).

Cosmic Shrinkage: From Wisdom to Knowledge to Facts to Stupidity to Liberalism

Here is an elementary cosmic bifurcation, expressed with maximum concision: "The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods" (Don Colacho). The rest of this post will no doubt be a wordy exegesis of that. Yes, it is original, bearing in mind that "Originality is the plagiarizing of a genius" (DC).

Now, if you don't know exactly what the first aphorism means -- for example, if you attended graduate school or have been otherwise warped by the spirit of the times -- you are directed to Richard Weaver's CoonClassic Ideas Have Consequences, because that is its theme.

After reading the latter, I typed up and printed out a handy summary of the contents. For example, "Without imagination, the world is reduced to a brute fact -- there is nothing to 'spiritualize' it, to give it depth. And when matter is placed above spirit, quantity displaces quality. But QUALITY IS NOT JUST ANOTHER QUANTITY, DUMMY!"

Indeed, "What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly" (DC).

But this is one of the Original Metaphysical Sins of the left, and we see it everywhere, i.e., reality being reduced to statistics (which are themselves conditioned and selected by the left's dysfunctional organizing principles). Especially "in the social sciences, one generally weighs, counts and measures in order to avoid having to think."

After all, science is by definition what anyone can know. It is radically egalitarian, and therefore (if elevated to a metaphysic) anti-individual. In that perverse sense, progressives -- shudder -- do indeed "believe in science" -- and that's a threat!

Which is why "Nothing is as alarming as science in the hands of an ignoramus." But then "everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools" (DC).

The good news: progressives also fervently believe in man. The bad news: "The worship of humanity is celebrated with Human sacrifices" -- abortion mills being only one facet of this.

A real system, if that is what you want to call it, does not proceed in a linear manner from conclusion to conclusion. Rather, it grows from the center out, so the first task is to locate the Center -- both His and ours, since the two are as mirrors held to one another.

Where fact becomes our only criterion, knowledge -- let alone wisdom -- is rendered unattainable. The vertical roads that lead upward are barricaded. Which is why every attack on religion is an attack on mind -- and on man. A humanism without God is just a kind of absurdly narcissistic animalism.

The word was made flesh, not vice versa. Flesh can only pretend to become word, let alone the last word! But as we ourselves have said in so many ways, the left is less an "ideological strategy" than "a lexicographical tactic" (ibid.).

So beware: "Whoever accepts the lexicon of the enemy surrenders without knowing it." Leftism Revisited is all over that problem, beginning with the preposterous misnaming of leftists "liberal," a contradiction in terms.

We should hasten to add that in our incarnotional metaphysic, we have the deepest respect for the human animal. And it goes without saying that we respect the other end, the unique individual soul.

But we have no patience for, or interest in, the vast "middle zone of an animal with opinions," where the tenured spend their lives trying to confine us in their verbal prisons. But the human-animal is a beautiful thing, for as Elder Don says, "the sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible," i.e., the word or idea or spirit in the flesh.

Facts do not speak for themselves. At the very least, they require a principle of selection that no fact can provide. This principle is "out of this world," i.e., not in the world of facts. But to reduce semantics to syntax -- or meaning to structure -- is to deny language its ontological referent.

In other words, in a properly right side up cosmos, the purpose of syntactical structure is to converge upon and reveal meaning -- and meaning lives among the gods, not the facts. One cannot live a human life among facts only without asphyxiating or freezing or being compressed to stone.

Bottom line: the liberal gulag has walls, but can have no ceiling that prevents vertical escape, since they don't even know about that dimension.

Don't worry: he's not looking out but looking in with a combination of curiosity and pity:

(photo: Leslie Godwin)

Full Faith and Credit in the First Bank of Reality (or, Never Take an Intellectual Check from a Liberal)

Notice how Don Colacho's aphorisms alternate between the highest reaches of spirit and the lowest circle of politics, or between reality and appearance. I suppose that's one more reason why I so relate. I don't find the juxtaposition odd or jarring at all. Rather, each is an entailment of the same principles. Indeed, somewhere he has an aphorism that goes to this.

Here it is: "Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man." It is common sense, common decency, and a common inheritance of the Permanent Things.

But it's not all bad news for the left, because at least we conservatives "provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers."

Notice how our daring and avant-garde -- and confident and clueless -- president takes abundant advantage of this service we provide. And what thanks do we get?

Oh well. Raccoons don't care about manmode honors and encomia. Conservatives understand that "man is a problem without a human solution," much less a political one. Obama is trying to heal his own wounded soul via politics, but he splits and then projects the wound into others -- into the victims of the left and the sadists of the right, making himself savior to the one and martyr of the other.

Or in other words, Obama is a classic Christian pervert (or inverted Christian), something to bear in mind for folks who still cling to the idea that he is a closet Muslim.

No, for starters, a real Muslim wouldn't project the sadism, but act on it (use of the IRS to persecute political enemies notwithstanding). Nor would he give a fig about so-called victims. It's just not a part of their culture -- except when politically expedient to propagandize the useful Jew-hating idiots of the international left.

For "In the end we only defend and attack religious positions with zeal." Think about that one. I'll wait.

You could even say that it is possible to implicitly know a man's religion by paying attention to what gets his zeal up. For example, is there a commenter more zealous, more on fire for his incoherent cause, than our anonymous troll? Clearly, something is eating him, but you will also have noticed that he is unable to articulate it in terms of principles. It's all just lashing out at projected ghosts. Here is a hint: since 2005, One Cosmos been providing idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

But here is a timeless avant which no garde can surpass: "The greatest political puerility is to attribute to certain social structures the vices inherent in the human condition." We can argue about whether Obama is the most far left president we've ever had, but he is without question the most puerile. I know this because I believed the same crap when I was but a puer boy, caught up in the cultural peter pandemic.

Back to Imagination, which is why we're here. "Without an alert imagination intelligence runs aground." I love this one, because it implies that intelligence is a ship with a destination. But it is navigating over a kind of dark sea, or at least a nonlocal sea that is full of potential dangers. Tradition, of course, provides nautical maps, but each person must nevertheless set sail, and in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face -- or until they are caught in a hurricane.

I believe I have spoken before of how this nonlocal ocean feels to me. It is filled with subtle forces and attractors that one must "feel" one's way into and through. When one is in the right spot, one will feel the flow of spirit along one's keel, so to speak. Likewise there are doldrums, storms, and, as implied by the aphorism, rocks and icebergs.

So, "Imagination is the capacity to perceive, through the senses, the attributes of the object which the senses do not perceive." Analogously, this would apply even to something as prosaic as a baseball game. Two people can watch the identical game, but someone who knows nothing about baseball will not have access to 95% of what is going on. Same with religion, only without the designated hitter.

This one is so poetic that I almost hate to spoil it: "Nothing important is is reached simply by walking. But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings."

We can talk about why later, but it has not pleased God that man should be saved by walking or by jumping, but by flying. Walking is either the purely intellectual approach or the completely voluntaristic (i.e., will-based); each embodies the pelagian heresy, which essentially means that (↑) is completely sufficient without (↓). (In the cosmically correct formulation, the former is generally necessary but the latter is sufficient.)

Now, what is (↓) but the wings God provides for vertical flight (↑)? Not only is walking a little stupid, but it is also a refusal of the gift of wings. While you're at it, might as well refuse the gifts of reason, language, and truth. Or in other words, become a postmodern leftist who has convinced himself that "his impotence is the measure of things." Which, in a way, it is for the cognitively impotent man (i.e., the infertile egghead) or for the barren ovary tower feminist.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how ideas need to be backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. But the postmodernist has abolished the bank and issues counterfeit notes from his own printer. This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass -- excuse me! Dupree did that while I was taking a leak -- when you pretend that words do not refer to things but only to other words. There has never been a president who lies as casually as Obama, but only because he has assimilated the greatest Lie of all.

So I know just what Brother Colacho means when he says: "Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment." For the last six years, President Obama has been confidently presenting his bankrupt ideas for payment.

What a time to find out he has nothing but funny money and rubber checks! No wonder the Fed keeps cranking it out. Gotta keep the dream alive for another two years. But the rest of us will be paying off his college loans forever.

Stay Thirsty My, Friends. Better Yet, Just Stay on Fire and the Thirst will Take Care of Itself.

"The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him" (by the way, this is one of the places from which I compiled my own list of favorites). This aphorism may be taken the wrong way, of course, but it is nevertheless true that the Bible is obviously not God, but rather, a compilation of living encounters with the living God, reduced to written form.

Early Christians -- obviously -- did not have a "New Testament" except insofar as it consisted of new beliefs, new oral traditions, and a new liturgy. I read somewhere that under the best of circumstances, even someone like Augustine might have had some of the individual books in codex form, but I don't believe he would had the single book we know of as The Bible, all right there between two covers.

Remember too that each chapter is its own imaginative "book," and that it requires a work of collective meta-imagination to apprehend their inner unity and to bring them all together. Just because the book is a solid material object in space, it doesn't mean you have perceived its interior meta-unity! I mean, who has?

I think this is an important consideration, because the real action doesn't occur "in" scripture, but rather, in the imaginative space of the one who encounters and dwells in it. Unlike routine secular knowledge, it cannot be a one-way vector from book to head. Rather, it is always relational, transactional, intersubjective, alive.

This goes to the next aphorism that metaphorically leaps out at me, "Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others."

I have discussed this idea in a number of posts, and it is indeed one of those things that earthlings simply take for granted, believer and infidel alike. How is it, say, that we can affirm -- accurately, I might add -- that the universe is a tree with its roots aloft, its branches down below?

This is a metaphor, but only because everything contains or refers to everything else; and the latter is true because of a trinitarian Godhead in whom persons are both distinct and yet interior to one another. It is why communication of any kind is possible, including metaphor (and really, virtually all communication is metaphorical, in the sense that one thing must stand for another).

The following aphorism also goes to the present discussion: "Serious books do not instruct, but interrogate." This relates to what was said above about the relationality of the Bible, and also about metaphor. A serious book doesn't literally interrogate us. But it might as well.

Another metaphorical truth: "We only dig the channels for a momentary torrent." It is up to us to clean out the rain gutters and flood channels for the orderly flow of (↓). Similarly, "We call abstract truths the dry channels through which the waters of any rain flow." The abstract truth is empty in order to be filled by experience, as we were discussing a few weeks back.

Note also that the point is not so much to be a lake or reservoir as a river. The flow never stops, so we can never be "filled" in this life. I mean, if self-emptying is good enough for God...

So, if there is no end to the flow, then "One philosophy surpasses others only when it defines more precisely the same insoluble mystery."

Normally we think of "precision" and "mystery" as being at opposite extremes, but in point of fact they are a dialectic -- perhaps the dialectic, to which I have assigned the "ultimate" abstraction of O <--> (¶). I don't see how there can be anything "beyond" this dialectic in this life, short of becoming God, which is not going to happen. But we can perpetually dig those channels and clean those gutters for the Flow.

The above dialectic could be encapsulated: "The soul is the task of man."

And -- if you're not careful -- "Thirst runs out before the water does." So stay thirsty, my friends.

Now, this I like: "Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems but a new dimension of the universe." This is precisely what I believe: you might say that it is to psychology or neurology what biology is to physics. Biology is not just statistically unlikely physics, but rather, an entirely new dimension of existence irreducible to physics, the biosphere. It is at a right angle, so to speak, to everything that came before.

So too is revelation, bearing in mind that I count no less than four Revelations, or dimensions of Revelation, 1) the miracle of creation, 2) the miracle of intelligibility, 3) the miracle of the human subject, and 4) the miracle of the divine murmurandoms known as revelation proper. Each of these can only be understood in reference to the verticality that is woven into the nature of things: reality is always pointing beyond itself in a bidirectional manner, toward its inspiraling goround and its perichoretic deustiny.

And speaking of trees and branches, "Religion is the tremor that the shaking of our roots transmits to our branches." Maybe we can't see the root, but we can certainly tell when the branches are atremble.

Now, assuming our roots are aloft, this makes absolutely perfect nonsense. It's a metaphor, but a realmetaphor -- just as the early fathers saw Jesus as the "true myth," or the primordial myth -- dimly apprehended or pre-viewed by earlier generations -- incarnate.

Because "'Intuition' is the perception of the invisible, just as 'perception' is the intuition of the visible." And "When imagination and perception coincide, the soul is burned."

Ouch!

(yoinked from the bowels of Happy Acres)

The Cold Hard Facts of Music

1. Only in the last few years have I discovered the quirky greatness of Porter Wagoner. He had a syndicated TV show when I was a kid, but he might as well have been from another planet.

A perfectly crafted lyric, with a great little twist there at the end. Note also where he refers to the noises getting "louder from within." Is he referring to the naughty activity inside the house, or to the command hallucinations in his head? In three minutes the narrator goes from clueless innocence ("gosh, I'll sure surprise my wife!") to a hard-bitten cynicism in which he one-ups the worldly stranger.

It's fun to think that during the Summer of Love, when Wagoner would have appeared so out of touch to my 11 year old mind, he was actually singing of the Permanent Things, i.e., the Cold Hard Brutal Unchanging Facts of Life.

Wagoner specialized in a whole sub-genre of tortured and darkly troubled souls, 29 of which are collected in The Rubber Room. And of course, his duets with Dolly Parton define the art.

Here's a little song about another mixed race sociopath for whom things don't turn out well:

2. The Pixies: last truly great rock group? If not, who am overlooking?

3. The greatest live rock album just got greater: The Complete 1971 Fillmore East Concerts by the Allman Brothers Band. Speaking of the Permanent Things, solid audio proof of at least three of the four transcendentals, truth, beauty, and unity (although the latter was no doubt aided by performance enhancing drugs).

For you young 'uns, in this famous track, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, there are two guitar solos. The first one is by Dickie Betts, at about 3:10, and it's great: thoughtful, exploratory, and then passionate at the end. But then, after the organ interlude, comes Duane's solo at 7:48. Notice how it slowly builds to such a peak of intensity (starting at about 10:10), calms down momentarily, and then soars even higher at 11:40. There are lots of virtuosos, but few with that kind of pacing and narrative drive:

4. Fuggin' hippies in the line of fire. Classic!

Okay, Just Link to this Post Already!

Sometimes I *almost* think it's the convoluted titles that drive people away: "Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism." Wha? Click. I should stop trying to be so clever and cute, and just get straight to the point: pay attention to me!

Usually the title just comes to me. But if I have to think about it, we often end up with a cumbersome one like that. Probably the same with posts in general. If I try to be more than the stenographer, I become an agenda-driven scribe unfaithful to the text.

That won't be a problem with this post, being that we're just playgiarizing with another man's aphoristic meditations. Interesting that Don Colacho's aphorisms are the compact distillation of a lifetime of contemplation, and here we are, reversing the process by unpacking them for all they're worth. Is there any excuse for this? We'll come back to that question later. Right now we have some thievery to do.

To remind the reader, we have been engaging in the verticalisthenic exercise of reimagineering tradition: reimagineering because higher truths must be nourished in the imagination; tradition because without its authority, we are just deepaking the chopra, or enlisting fantasy to rebel against reality.

Ah, beautiful: "To convince one who holds his own opinions is easy, but no one can convince one who harbors the opinions of others."

This is again why it is so fruitless to argue with a liberal, since most of their opinions are only backed by the Authority of the Now, i.e., they are utterly conventional -- not conventional wisdom but conventional ignorance, as in Dear Leader.

It would be difficult to arrive at a more pinpoint encrapsulation of Obama and his LoFo whackolytes: No one clings more to his views than the one who is only an echo of his era.

This makes Obama -- and we have made this point before -- the very incarnation of the pneumapathology of the times. He is everything that is wrong with education (degrees in higher bullshit), with religion (membership in the Church of Eternal Resentment), the economy (becoming wealthy and poweful for accomplishing precisely nothing), and with politics (post-constitutional liberal fascism). Obama is -- unfortunately -- a mirror held up to contemporary America, precisely what his skeevy supporters deserve.

"When handling today's events, the future historian will have to wear gloves." Or in the case of this toxic administration, a hazmat suit.

I don't mind Obama having his opinions. To each his own grandiosity. But the fact that he cannot disagree without distorting the views and condemning the motives of his opponents tells you everything you need to know about him, not to mention the indefensibility of his brittle arguments.

Yes, liberals are no doubt on the Right Side Of History, for "Political cowardice baptizes itself: 'I respect the sense of history.'" Progressives are the only people who try to tell truth by the calendar.

Not to re-belabor the point, but "Modern man does not imagine an end higher than service to the anonymous cravings of his fellow citizens." How could he? For the Darwinian fundamentalist, what is man but a high-maintenance ape, the genetic mutation from hell?

No, it's worse than that: "The human has the significance of a swarm of of insects if it is merely human." Or, to paraphrase Schuon, modern man is either merely human or all too human, which amount to the same thing, a big nothing-butthead.

Here is a subtle one: "Paganism is the Old Testament of the Church." This is true in the obvious sense, but we can also see how the modern pagans of the left are just Christian heretics, or else people who have failed for whatever reason to ascend to their properly divine-human station. Progressives are the Old Testavus for the restavus, i.e., what we must transcend, not what we should sink to.

I suppose one reason I love these aphorisms is that they effectively boil down what I've been bobbling on about for the past 2,500 posts, for example, "In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing."

Although this may sound like a parody, it is nothing more than an explicit expression of the ultimate principles of secular (sub)humanism: if materialism is "true," then of course everything is meaningless, of no possible significance. Man is the Evangelist of Nothing. You know, like MSNBC.

This begs the question of why he evangelizes, and, for that matter, why our trolls cannot stop themselves from commenting here. That's weird, isn't it? Is the troll's nihilism an adequate explanation for the compulsion? I don't see how. There is something else going on, almost like a misguided search for truth or something. As if he'll find it here!

"The stone is right, wherever it falls." Only man can be wrong, depending upon how far he has fallen.

Or in other words, "whoever speaks of error" speaks of freedom. Which means that freedom and truth are absolutely covalent, the one impossible in the absence of the other.

I might add that because freedom IS, truth IS, and therefore God IS. Likewise, to affirm that the truth sets one free is to affirm that freedom sets one on the path to truth. Otherwise life is just an endless night of bupkis, i.e., existence lost in the eternal bewilderness of being, a blandscape of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere.

It is also why "The freer a man believes himself to be, the easier it is to indoctrinate him." In other words, the cosmic heresy of freedom without truth results only in opinions, just tenured primates clamoring for attention and status with the latest and most fashionable nonsense.

What was this post supposed to be about? Imagination? "The redemption of reality is the function of the imagination."

Yes, but "The deluded are wordy."

Touché.

Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism

To remind the reader where our head has been lately, it has been exploring the question of reimagineering tradition in general and Christianity in particular for the present age, without in any way fundamentally altering or diminishing the message. And before I was carried down some interesting byway, I was consulting with Elder Colacho, raiding his fridge for any tasty morsels on the role of imagination.

Of course, as soon as I do this, I am distracted by aphorisms covering other subjects, such as: "The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world."

This is precisely what I mean when I say, for example, that man explains Darwinism, and that therefore Darwinism cannot (fully) explain man. This is a simple truism that most anyone who hasn't attended graduate school should be able to grasp, and yet, profound in its consequences. Borrowing a geometrical analogy, either we contain Darwinism, or vice versa; either we can wrap our minds around it, or it encloses (literally) our minds.

The mind-altering conclusion, according to Elder Don, is that "Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent."

No, this is not permission to go stark raving Deepak! But it does go to our reimagineering project, because the world we hypothesize today is quite different from the world hypothesized by our predecessors. The science is never settled, even if the principles animating science are.

Thus, beautiful though it may have been, none of us are able to enter the grand synthesis of the medieval mind and actually live there. Yes, we can visit it, like a museum or cathedral, but it simply isn't the world we inhabit.

As such, we need religion to address this here world, the world of big bangs and cosmic evolution and psychobiology and history and other religions and all the rest. It can be done. It must be done. It IS being done. Thy will be done.

Here is another Critical Idea, expressed with maximum concision -- meaning that the pounds-per-square inch it places on your head is quite high, like a diamond stylus in a record groove: "Homogeneity drives out God. Secondary characteristics are Jacob's ladder."

This is a hierarchical cosmos, with many vertical degrees. It is not just God and man, as, say, Muslims and certain modern Christian fundamentalists believe; nor is it matter and motion, as materialists believe; nor, for that matter, is it state and subject, as the left believes.

Another aphorism reads, "Although a hierarchical society does not necessarily educate, the egalitarian society can never educate."

Example? Here in California -- a failed state misruled by one party government -- it is the Law of the Bland that all textbooks must give equal time and treatment to blacks, homosexuals, women, Muslims, people who cut off their dicks, and any other self-styled victim group.

Thus, knowledge is not a function of truth situated in a vertical hierarchy. Rather, it is horizontalized and made the function of a perverse egalitarianism. Therefore, we end up with my truth and your truth, black truth and gay truth, penile truth and vaginal truth. Oh, except penile truth is an oppressive lie of the patriarchy. Castrate it from the textbook!

If there is a hierarchy -- which there is -- then it is conditioned from the top. In other words, exclude the top and you destroy the hierarchy, as you have descended into relativism. The Absolute is the only thing that saves us from the tyranny of relativism. Which is why it is so hated by the left. Our success is predicated on their freedom, whereas their success is predicated on denying ours. Not exactly a symmetrical war!

Remember: the egalitarian society cannot educate. Which is why the most educated (or indoctrinated) people in our society are the most foolish. Just ask yourself: what can Obama the Egalitarian teach us? That is correct: nothing. Or nothing but pompous and self-refuting lies -- lies like "Muslims helped build the very fabric (sic) of our country." Really? When was this? I know that Jefferson read the Koran, but only because he wanted to understand the mindset of our enemies. I myself purchased one on 9-12-2001 for similar Jeffersonian reasons.

Another aphoristic corollary: that the most important ontological category is person. At one end of reality is person; at the other is nothing. In the book, we symbolize this O and Ø. However, there is hierarchy in between, i.e., degrees of being trailing off into nothingness as they increase in distance from the source.

But orthoparadoxically, no matter how far from the source, the source still surrounds and interpenetrates us. The nothing-world of the existential left is just a hypothesized world taken to its absurd extreme. For God is not the "compensation for lost reality," but rather, "the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality."

God is ALWAYS the God of the gaps, because God is the immanent reality who unifies them -- or in whom they are unified. The One and many are complementary, although the One is ontologically prior -- just as the Father is "prior" to the Son, even though the Son has never not existed. I would say the same of world and God. It's what a creator does, i.e., create. With God there is always a world, a creation, a hierarchy. Just not necessarily this one.

"Hell is a place identifiable only from Paradise." Which is why leftists cannot see the hell they are creating, precisely. It is also why they see and are even persecuted by paradise. The leftist lives in hell, therefore his life is organized around the attempt to transform this to heaven, which he believes he can do because of his prior flattening of the cosmos (due to the rejection of hierarchy). Remember the wise words of our Dear Leader: the white man's greed runs a world in need. Thus, get rid of these white European pests and voila, heaven!

Yes, like the pageant of heaven at our southern border, or in the Arab world, or in Africa, or in Detroit. See my egalitarian parade passing!

"Faith is what allows us to wander into any idea without losing our way back." And not only! Rather, it is what allows us to both see and situate a truth in the cosmic hierarchy. Without faith there is no truth at all, just opinions. Nor is any opinion higher than another, as in a California textbook.

Yuck: revolution isn't what it used to be. Alert humans will have noticed that it has been reduced to "an intoxication of the soul invaded by one's feces." Strong language, to be sure, but have you ever smelled the fragrant comments of our anonymous troll? Proof that in a farting contest there are only losers.

To paraphrase another aphorism, dying societies accumulate laws like a dying man does remedies. When even the Washington Post notices the lawlessness of our law-loving Washington pest... I'll let you complete that sentence.

But that's what leftism does: it is the never-ending attempt to "institutionalize what is uninstitutionalizable." This goes to the aphorism above about trying to contain the uncontainable, who is ultimately the Metacosmic Person and his reflections herebelow.

Which reminds me of a tossed off thoughtlet by the Happy Acres guy, to the effect that, in the face of liberal arguments, his mind instantly goes "meta" and starts running circles around them.

You know the feeling, right? It occurs for a number of reasons, first, because liberals have assimilated so may false first principles; second, because these principles are unexamined; third, because they fervently argue the implications of these crazy principles; fourth, because they have ready-to-hand revisionist bullshit to support the principles; fifth, because we rejected those things so long ago that we have forgotten how to be so stupid; sixth, because they have systematically closed their eyes to that reality which transcends, infuses, orients, and grounds us.

What I want to say is that a Raccoon should be a metavangelist of the divine imagination.

Reality: Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later

"The challenge to Christians in any age," writes Moore, "is to reinterpret the common mind in new circumstances, and to apply the model of an integrated vision... in times that always seem 'unpropitious.'"

His use of the term "common mind" follows Chesterton, who says that it refers to the "integrating tendency in human tradition." It is that upon which the minds -- the minds of the great -- converge:

"Commonness and the common mind are now generally spoken of as meaning inferiority and the inferior mind, the mind of the mere mob. But the common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes; or else it would not be common" (Chesterton). Thus, he is referring to "a principle of integration, and integrity, in the nature of the human person, and in the nature of human society."

Come to think of it, Obama must be our first president who is completely outside the common mind. Due in part to an elite provincial education that seems to have successfully sheltered him from reality -- including the reality of his own mediocrity -- he either has no familiarity with our traditions or has undisguised contempt for them.

Obama's heroes are not our heroes, as seen most recently in his treatment of Israel. He obviously doesn't revere the founders, much less the unalienable rights they enshrined. He peevishly sent Churchill's bust packing. He has named two idiots to the Supreme Court whose minds who could hardly have less in common with ours, to put it charitably. His spiritual mentor is a man from whom a morally serious person would shield his children. And his son -- his image and likeness -- is any pot-smoking adolescent sociopath who resembles Trayvon Martin.

The common mind goes to a common reality. But multiculturalism boldly assaults our common reality head on, without apologies. And "when a society departs from sane norms, a heavy reckoning will have to be made before it is returned to them" (Moore). So, put on your seatbelts. We've got a ways to go before the Big Correction.

As to the left's thuggish assault on reality, Chesterton famously observed that every modern philosophy begins with the sacrifice of "a sane point of view," or the acceptance of "something that no normal man would believe."

These sacrificial insanities and inanities are everywhere, and you might say that political correctness is their liturgy. Here is a seemingly minor and yet thoroughly typical example of an otherwise decent reporter cluelessly passing along Hamas propaganda. Ho hum. The beauty of the left is that it permits people to embrace and support objective evil without even trying. The devil could accomplish little without enlisting good intentions.

Disintegration of the common mind is both "the cause and consequence of a fragmented society." How could it be otherwise? The question again is how to recover that common mind -- to reinterpret and reapply it in these novel human circumstances, to the "spirit of the age."

A more subtle point is that integration and self-rule are really two sides of the same reality, whether individually or collectively. One reason "communism" works in the family is that the family is the quintessence of integrated unity: I and my wife and my child are truly one.

But I am not one with Al Sharpton or Eric Holder or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Rachel Maddow or Lois Lerner. Rather, they simply want to impose an impoverished oneness from on high, which is not unity but tyranny. You can't be one with people who have completely different values, let alone people who make you want to vomit.

Note also the critical point that the integrated oneness of the common mind extends into time, thus leading to the corollary that we live in a "democracy of the dead." Yes, we are disenfranchised in this world, but more importantly, so too are our illustrious ancestors who fought for and transmitted the common mind for us to pass along to future generations. High crimes and misdemeanors? Those are trivial things compared to Obama's treatment of certain dead white -- or black or Jewish or whatever -- males who surpass him in every way.

Thus we have infinitely more in common with the saints, heroes, martyrs, and geniuses of the past than we do with these idiots of the present. My heroes are not Obama's heroes because my first principles are not his first principles. Nor do I want to be One with him. Rather, I just want him to leave me alone. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, for a leftist it is too much to ask, because their first political principle is the state, not the individual. "The process of secularization in modernity," writes Moore, "involves the growth of state responsibility for, or control of, those areas of life which once belonged to individuals, or religions, or educational institutions or voluntary associations, or other bodies that are separate from the Government."

But all of this follows ineluctably from first principles, or from the initial insanity, if you will: truth is relative = there is no truth = man cannot know truth = there is no reality = there is only power. Obama is our first truly Machiavellian president -- I mean to his empty core -- for as Leo Strauss observed, the United States is the only country "founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles."

Which are whatnow? A lot of things, but this will do for now: "Machiavellians are not motivated or even responsive to aspirations that posit universal justice, a social, political, and individual good." These latter but serve "to obfuscate the real issues about power and collective self-interest" (McAllister). Thus, you could say the Machiavellian runs in precisely the opposite direction of the common mind.

And it is a direction, not a static thing. McAllister writes that it runs counter to "partnership with what is common to all men, that is, with the divine nous or reason that transcends them all. Through participation in what is common, men become a community" (emphasis mine).

Thus, the first crime of the left -- and the one that makes all the others possible -- is the rejection of what transcends and therefore unifies us. That is why they hate God, because God blocks the way down.

Or, to quote an aphorism of Don Colacho, "All truths converge upon the one truth, but the routes have been barred."

But you can't bar every path, any more than the Berlin wall could stand forever, for "anything which sets itself up" in opposition to "God and created nature cannot endure long, since it separates itself from the universal source of life. So in the end, the state that relies more on power, the ability to coerce, will become an evacuated thing..." (Moore).

Let us hope and pray that this end is near and that we survive the Great Adjustment.

God: 'I Am the Imaginator'

While we're on the subject of imagination, I thought I'd consult some of the elders, beginning with Webster. There is a very long entry for imagination, even longer if we include its many cognates, e.g., imago, imaginal, imaginator, and others. Interestingly, right before image is ilysiidae, a genus of burrowing snakes. After imago comes imam, and it's all downhill from there.

The first definition of imagination is the most useful: an act or process of forming a conscious idea or mental image of something never before wholly perceived in reality by the imaginer; or the ability or gift of forming such conscious ideas or mental images for the purposes of artistic or intellectual creation.

Mr. W. adds that it is "freer of derogatory connotations" than similar words such as fantasy, and also more "comprehensive," going as it does to "the power of creating." In contrast, fantasy "suggests the power of unrestrained, often extravagant or delusive, fancy." Thus it is not so much a power as a weakness.

In my view, "creation from nothing" is something of a pleonasm, since creation -- if it is truly creative -- is always from nothing, even if it is just a little bit of nothing.

You might say that the more creative the person, the greater the nothing. Thus, when we say of God that he creates ex nihilo, it is a matter of degree, not kind. Nor do I think for one moment that this detracts from the divine majesty of the Big Nothing, since everything ultimately arises from this ancient groundmother.

Speaking of whom, imagination is "the power to conceive." You parents out there will relate, because I couldn't possibly have conceived or imagined my son. An individual person never existed before and will never exist again.

The imagination is the fertile ground (or womb) into which religious imagery falls and takes root. If it fails to do so, either there is something deficient in the imagery or in your imagination. But I'd check the latter first.

As we have said before, only because of God is anything and everything intelligible; but only because of God is nothing totally intelligible, except to the creative intelligence of God. Follow anything back up or down (it doesn't matter which) to its end, and you reach the threshold of nothing. Thus man understands, but he can never understand even the simplest thing completely. Everything is inexhaustibly intelligible because it partakes of the Divine Nothing.

Imagination goes not only to things nonexistent or never seen, but to "things perfected or idealized"; and if the things do exist and are seen, there is still "the genuine artist's gift of perceiving more deeply or essentially and creating the interestingly and the significantly new and vital."

Thus, imagination isn't only central to creation but to the magic of renewal; it is why we do not die of boredom, or why some people aren't compelled to become political activists, conceptual artists, or community organizers.

It is also bound up with childhood, or rooted in a quintessentially childlike mode of cognition. The entry has a passage from H.G. Wells, who observed that "all youth lives much in reverie; thereby the stronger minds anticipate and rehearse themselves for life in a thousand imaginations."

There is another useful crack by F.A. Pottle, that imagination "gets at relationships that are true at the deepest level of experience," and one by Roy Pascal that it is "a means of deepest insight and sympathy." It allows us to grasp "a deeper, more organic reality" (G.D. Brown).

Yes, yes, and yes: imagination gets at deep experiential truth, which is experienced in the body as in-sight and sym-pathy. Insights are sights inseen, while sympathy is feeling infelt. Each relies upon a kind of intersubjective resonance from person to person; it is what allows you to think what I'm thinking and for me to feel what that patient or baby o' mine is feeling. And both operate vertically and horizontally (or horizontally because vertically), or with God and man.

The adjectival form, imaginative, means "created, inspired, guided, or drawn from the imagination and not from known facts or sources." And an Imaginator is A Person Who Creates.

Well, I hope that wasn't too beastly pedantic. But I wouldn't have gone on anon if I hadn't found it helpful; or, I would have stopped if it had ceased being provocative and informative. For what immediately occurs to me -- and I imagine you as well -- is that God must be imagined as Imaginator in Chief.

Over the centuries, God has acquired a lot of useless and misleading baggage. All of this baggage, of course, comes from man. It originates in fantasy, or fancy, or thought, or feelings, and is then projected onto God, who may or may not comport with the mental product. Some of it sticks while some of it falls away, but it seems that even the best of it may be contaminated with a bit too much from the human side.

This, I imagine, is part of what God has in mind with the Incarnation: no, no, no, you've got it all wrong again. Here, let me come down and show how it's done. Thus, Jesus is God's imaginative icon of man and man's imaginative icon of God, so we may meet in the middle.

The next elder I would like to consult is Don Colacho, whose pithy aphorisms are the quintessence of imaginative resonance (≈). Here, this one goes to the antiseptic and soul-killing ideals of secular fundamentalism: "When things appear to us to be just what they seem, they soon seem to be even less." And "History exceeds what merely happened." How much more does it exceed what liberals think happened!

"The devil comprehends everything, but is not able to create anything." With which you could have a Butterfield day with the following headline: Smartest President Ever Hasn't Created a Damn Thing.

"Genuine atheism is to the reason of man what the ten-thousand-sided polygon is to his imagination." For as we have said before, it is impossible to imagine atheism (it is more a passive fantasy); and with a fully functioning imagination one is unlikely to be an atheist.

"Creation is the nexus between eternity and history." Oh My Yes. Or between vertical and horizontal. It is irreducible to anything else, for it is where the cosmic arteries of nothing and everything converge in the heart of the imagination.

That's about it for today. I got nothing.

Anonypalooza

I can see by the unforgiving clock on the wall that a new post is not in the offing. So, the best we can manage is a tweet or two. Meanwhile, an open thread, the difference being that ONLY anonymous commenters may participate. Everyone is free to chime in, so long as we don't know your identity -- you know, like a masquerade ball.

Flying into Reality on Wings of Imagination

A purely "scientific" philosophy ends by denying what we know to be true... --Eliot

Cardinal Newman spoke of the illative sense, which is, according to Prof. Wiki, "the faculty of the human mind that closes the logic-gap," "thus allowing for assent" to translogical truth.

It seems to me that it is related to the higher imagination; or at least that it allows us to imagine and apprehend higher truths. It is, writes Moore, "a means of perception beyond the merely ratiocinative faculty," and although not rationalistic, "far from irrational in its workings and conclusions."

Kirk writes (in Moore) that it includes "impressions that are borne in upon us, from a source deeper than our conscious or formal reason. It is the combined product of intuition, instinct, imagination, and long and intricate experience." Thus, it is very much incarnotional, that is, embodied gnotions of enlived truth.

It is not that the illative sense necessarily discloses truth, any more than does logic. It will be irrational if a man's nature is either too irrational or too rational. The illative sense can always assent to a false proposition. Which is why it must be disciplined and guided by tradition. If your illative sense informs you of truths with which none of the luminaries of the past agree, then you are probably a mere ec-centric, or just somejerk outside the Circle.

You will have noticed that an education that is merely "useful" or pragmatic or utilitarian will not engage, much less develop, the illative sense. Might this be one source of the irrational dreams and schemes of the left, with its alternatively withered or perverse fantasies? "The problem with rule by the specialist is not so much that he knows more about something than other people, but rather that he sees everything through that one thing which he knows, however well" (Moore).

Conversely, the Raccoon tries to see any-thing through the lens of Everything.

We all must think and act on the basis of truths that cannot be demonstrated in the usual way. Reason #72B for why it is so fruitless to argue with a leftist is that they habitually try to deploy reason to prove things into which they themselves were never reasoned. Obama -- and liberals in general -- should stop pretending to anchor what he wants to do in the constitution or in the rule of law, since he's going to do it anyway. Just be honest about your dishonesty! That's all we ask.

One such trivial but typical example occurred in our comment section just yesterday, where our wisely anonymous visitor took us to task for affirming the truism that dependent and ineffectual people will tend to support the state which renders them comfortable in their condition of dependence and dysfunction. Or in other words, we should not be surprised when the drug addict votes for the dealer.

Our visitor attempted to prove with corrupt "data" that the people who are actually most dependent on the state are independent-minded conservatives. His error was in trying to prove his crankish illative truth with empirical data at all.

Note that the contradictory data will in no way alter his leftist convictions, because again, he was never reasoned into them to begin with. His particular views are informed by a much grander, unconstrained vision of mankind (not the actual men, mind you, for whom he has such contempt; think of Obama, who loves immigration but must hate the illegal immigrants who suffer under his policies).

All such philosophies are founded upon "something no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity" (Chesterton, in Moore). Such disordered thinking ultimately redounds to a "cleverness actively deployed in the cause of Nothing" (Lewis, ibid.).

Along these lines, it is always useful to remember Gödel, who logically proved to the eternal satisfaction of the metaphysically adequate that man has access to a whole realm of truths that cannot be proved with mere logic. Yes, you are freed from the chains of logic that bind you to the terrestrial! If you want to be.

As alluded to above, the illative sense is bound up with various experiential modes that are only present in a body, or better, a person. Therefore, if our ultimate truth does not converge upon Personhood, let alone Life, then we can be sure we're on the wrong and even tenure track.

Moore speaks of "the utilitarian university," where "knowledge has become disintegrated" and therefore produces "unintegrated people." Nor can human beings create life, not in the laboratory, much less in the soul; they can never put all the dead fragments of the universe back together again. Ironic that they conquer nature only to be conquered by her. D'oh!

In reality -- in the Cosmic Uni-versity -- we are images of Truth, but if truth is presented to us as so many isolated and atomistic fragments, then our interior will reflect this mindless and lifeless fragmentation. Your soul will look cubist rather than toroidal.

But as we ʘnce put it, we are not meant to be "a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that comprehends and transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos."

Only with the illative sense are we, in the sometime, sometimeless words of Petey "Back upin a timeless with the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made, a Light no longer dispersed and refracted through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One."

Indicted by time, we are reprieved by eternity. Which is why I'd rather be a living slave in the vertical than a lifeless tyrant in the horizontal.

I am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself.... [W]hat one must be guided by, scholar or no, is not particularized knowledge but one's total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and observing human beings. --Eliot

Interlude: