Freedom and Mystery: Rewordgitations of Perennial Grasping

Today is the first day of the new Friday format I just thought of. As you may or may not know, we have now passed the ten year mark in the blog's existence, and more to the point, there are almost 3,000 posts and probably millions of unexhumined words down there. So, I thought I'd exhume some of them and look at them in a new context.

The plan is to type a phrase or a few words into the search engine, see what pops up, and then skim the cream off the top. It reminds me of Schuon's Echoes of Perennial Wisdom, which extracts crystalline nuggets from his entire ouvre for our consideration. That little book is almost as aphoristic as Don Colacho. For example, here is the first echo: The worth of man lies in his consciousness of the Absolute... ute... ute... ute....

Boom! I believe that idea will come back to haunt us in some of the passages below. Of course I can't be as concise as those two luminaries; rather, I am somewhere between and beyond ecognomical and prolux, i.e. too little and too much.

So, here we go.

Either human existence is real or illusory. If real, then so too is our freedom real. In fact, as our Unknown Friend writes, freedom "is none other than the real and complete existence of a being created by God." In other words, to be "free" and "real" are synonymous terms from the spiritual point of view. For if you are not free, then you are determined by something else -- even just an extension of some other entity that is real, whether genes or class or God, it doesn't matter.

But what is freedom? Freedom implies a kind of (relatively) absolute wholeness, or center, which is a mirror of the Creator. Therefore, to illegitimately constrain or eliminate freedom is to do away with God. Again, no wonder the religiously irreligious zealots of the left are so adamantly opposed to freedom, and imagine that government can somehow create or "restore" it, when it can only respect or rescind it. --2008

Freedom must in some sense be synonymous with "real." The necessary cannot come into existence, because coming into existence is a transition from not existing to existing. Thus, the purely necessary doesn't really (or essentially) change at all, because it is always itself in a deterministic manner. Ice may look different, but it's really just frozen water. Furthermore, it doesn't have any choice in the matter so long as the temperature dips below 32˚.

But there are degrees of freedom and therefore of reality. Looked at this way, God would be the only completely real reality, as only God is not caused or conditioned by something else. But when he breathed a living spirit into Man, he exwholed a bit of his own unnarcissary being into us. Which is why we both partake of God's reality and can know of it.

If God were actually the direct cause of everything, that would again be just another way of saying that nothing really exists except for God. And predestination doesn't work for me, unless it is understood as our final, not efficient cause. In this sense we can understand the paradox that our purpose in life is to become what we "already" are; and how it is that in all of creation, humans, and only humans, can fail to accomplish this task (at least in this life).

Bolton points out that if God were the actual cause of our illusory acts of free will, "this would mean that God did not delegate any causal power to created beings. In this case, God would be the only real agent in existence, such that when wood, for instance, appeared to be burned by fire, it would really be burned by God, under the guise or veil of visible fire." Isn't this the position of the Mohammedans? Among other things, it completely obliterates the space of moral freedom and responsibility, does it not? For whatever happens, you can just plead that it was "God's will." Kill a Jew? "Wasn't me. The knife did it."

The point is, if we oversimplify God and see him as only transcendent or only immanent, various absurdities, or "intrinsic heresies," follow. Now, an intrinsic heresy is anything that I don't agree with. --2009

God or no God, Absolute or absolutely relative, O or Ø -- either way, man is uniquely privileged to speak of the highest things. The only question is: how high can One go?

Or, more to the point: how Lo does O go? For it makes no sense to affirm that God doesn't exist. Rather, a more honest statement would be that if God doesn't exist, humans could never know it, because man would have no reason to believe in any absolute, including absolute negation. With no Absolute, all is relative. Period.

By definition there can be only one Absolute, which, in my opinion, is the "sponsor," so to speak, of all the relative absolutes we use to negotiate our way through life.

It is similar to the idea that all numbers are simply multiples of one. Until one has the idea of "oneness" -- and note that it is a quality before it is a quantity -- one cannot proceed mathematically. Bion felt that the "discovery" of oneness was the single greatest leap of mankind, i.e., the idea that, for example, five rocks and five sticks share the abstract principle of fiveness.

But because there is only one Absolute it is not possible to map it, because as soon as one tries, one has created two. It is analogous to attempting to map, say, "music." On the one hand we have an abstract system of musical notation, and yet, all of the millions of melodies added together don't come close to exhausting the realm of music, which might as well be infinite. At best, we can dip into this realm of musical potential and channel its infinite possibilities in ways that are deep, interesting, and beautiful.

Might we say the same of God -- or, let us just say O, for to say "God" is already to project a lot of implicit preconceptions? In other words, what if religion, like music, is a way to translate what is otherwise unthinkable into something deep, interesting, and beautiful? Here is how Schuon describes it:

"Metaphysical Truth is both expressible and inexpressible." In fact, I would say that this is what distinguishes the exoterist from the esoterist, or the normotic personality from the transnormal Raccoon: the implicit belief on the part of the former that his particular expression fully expresses the inexpressible -- that his relativity is somehow absolute (which, of course, makes him God). --2011

Not the mystery "of" man, mind you, but the mystery that man is.

For the intrinsic relation between man and mystery is not "prepositional" but essential. This relation is deeper than language, as language too is predicated upon it. If there were no mystery, then there would be absolutely nothing to talk about and no one to hear it. You know the type.

The ultimate Mystery is customarily called God, but referred to here as O in order to preserve the Mystery.

As Rahner points out, the experience of this Mystery "is more primary than reflection and cannot be captured by reflection."

Indeed, man himself is the mirrorculous reflection of this prior Mystery, and the mysterious experience of oneself is also obviously deeper than reflection. It is the unfathomable Ocean upon which we float, AKA the Great Sea of the unThought Known.

Man is always Oriented to the Absolute Mystery. Here again you may need to respectfully forget about your seenill grammar and gravidad, because this is like no other familyar relation. "For we do not have an experience of God as we have of a tree, another person and other external realities," all of which "appear within the realm of our experience at a definite point in time and space" (Rahner).

Rahner makes the provocative point that it is impossible to imagine a future in which the human race could exist without the word "God."

As such, our atheist friends, by incessantly using the word for what they haven't experienced, halfunwittingly keep the experience alive.

The only alternative for the sincere atheist is to not just feebly hope the word will someday disappear from the human vocabulary, but "to contribute to its disappearance by keeping dead silence about it himself and not declaring himself an atheist." You know, don't just stand there saying something, but siddown and shaddup.

In order to pursue their impossible end, the atheists would need to be more like their fellow liberals, who are always trying to ban words in order to pretend that the unpleasant realities to which the words attach do not exist. But banishing the word "retard" doesn't mean you aren't one, only that you're the last to know.

So: "The mere fact that this word exists is worth thinking about," to put it mildly. For starters, as alluded to above, it's not like any other word, and yet, we still understand it, if "understand" isn't too misleading a term.

Which it no doubt is, because to understand God would be to be God. In other words, if God doesn't exist, only he knows it. And if he does exist, only man couldn't know it.

Even if we deicide that God is dead, we still need to reserve the name for what has died. But as soon as we do that, some mischievous rascal is going to start nosing around and redeuscover the empty tomb where the body is supposed to be buried. Game over. Or resumed, rather.

Nevertheless, if man were to effectively banish the word God from his Ocabulary, he would obviously still be immersed in mystery, except the mystery would "rot," so to speak, being deprived of all light and oxygen.

"The absolute death of the word 'God,'" writes Rahner, "would be the signal, no longer heard, by anyone, that man himself had died." Call it a signull. --2012

The trinocular Raccoon simply begins with God Is, or O. The rest is our problem. Unlike some of our competitors, we do not deploy reason to explore the mysteries of faith, but gnosis or intellection to explore the mysteries of Reason. --2010

If God Doesn't Exist, Only He Knows It

Now, this is a refreshing blast from academia:

"In this paper, I take the position that a large portion of contemporary academic work is an appalling waste of human intelligence that cannot be justified under any mainstream normative ethics."

No. Really?

Our intelligentsia is like a huge drag on reality: think how rapidly we would progress without their dead weight.

True, the author's thesis is self-evident, but as Justice Holmes said, "It seems to me that at this time we need education in the obvious more than exploration of the obscure." That was then. In our time the situation is only worse. Think of it: intellectuals were already losing their grip on reality when he made that comment over a hundred years ago.

And when I say "intellectuals," I don't mean physicians, engineers, mathematicians, businessmen, etc., who all deal with a reality outside their own heads.

In contrast, intellectuals deal with ideas, and ever since Descartes came up with the idea that ideas about existence precede existence, intellectuals have been under the temptation to invert the cosmos and live in the comfort and safety of their own delusions. It is why they can have such difficulty learning, since they refuse to submit to, and be corrected by, that annoying other, the Real.

Obama is our first president totally devoted to this assbackwards metaphysic. It explains everything that has gone hideously sideways over the past 6.5 years, e.g., the economy, crime, foreign relations, the federal debt, healthcare, race relations, etc.

This is one of the things that divides left and right: the great majority of intellectuals are on the left, if only because of their dominance of (soft) academia. (Remember, "intellectual" is a neutral term, not a term of endearment; whether it is good or bad depends on the quality of the ideas. After all, even Paul Krugman and Noam Chomsky are intellectuals.)

While looking up that quote I found another relevant one: "The great act of faith is when man decides that he is not God."

Not that Holmes had all his intellectual ducks in a row. Far from it; he seems to be a good example of a brilliant man without the true center of God. And without that nonlocal attractor, thought can deviate all over the place. He was definitely suspicious of the Absolute, apparently failing to see that it is the necessary condition for any talk whatsoever of truth. Any truth is always an echo of God.

Thus, for example, he said that certitude is "generally an illusion" and (certainly?) "not the test of certainty." True, but that doesn't mean there is no valid certainty.

But then he comes close to the Truth when he says that through an understanding of "general aspects of the law" you may "connect your subject with the universe and catch an echo of the infinite, a glimpse of its unfathomable process, a hint of universal law." In other words, a deep insight into terrestrial law can provide a glimpse of the Celestial Law of which it is a penumbra. Oddly, he was not a believer in natural law, and yet, he covertly acknowledges it.

The Celestial Law? That is impossible to unambiguously express in human terms, but it is the perfect complementarity of divine Justice and Mercy.

It looks to me like Holmes was blundermind by his own brilliance. We've talked about this idea before -- that given a certain level of intelligence, there is no proposition you can't disprove to your own (dis)satisfaction, beginning with the existence of God. Thus, the good news: "the chief end of man is to frame general propositions." The bad news: "no general proposition is worth a damn." In the end, "we aim at the infinite and when our arrow falls to earth it is in flames."

That's the conclusion of a lifetime of reflection. This is a brilliant man, mind you. But it shows you what human brilliance can purchase with its own powers: it isn't worth a damn.

And that is a fact: without God, man isn't even worth a damn. How could he be? Unless we are related to the Absolute Value, then we are absolutely worthless. Holmes said so himself, that... can't find the exact quote, but something to the effect that it scarcely matters if the whole shithouse goes up in flames.

The real problem is that Holmes failed to follow through on his first heroic insight. Toward the end of his long life he wrote in a letter, "Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered I was not God."

BingO! That is is a rock-bottom certitude, but you need to follow it all the way up. You don't petulantly conclude that "I am not God, therefore he doesn't exist," because this literally equates to "There is no God and I am He." In other words, you are stealing some of God's thundermind -- certitude -- in order to deny his enlightning -- truth.

There is a difference between thinking and truth. The purpose of thinking -- I know, who would have guessed? -- is to arrive at truth. Once you have seen the truth, then you can stop; or at least your thinking establishes a different vector: instead of going "forward" it drills down (or up).

Don Colacho has a number of relevant aphorisms, for example, The only pretension I have is that of not having written a linear book, but a concentric book.

In other words, he's always communicating from the top down or inside out. He is definitely not "searching" for truth; it is like the person who has found his beloved. Loving that person is not the same as searching for him or her, although one obviously doesn't possess the person. There is still a deepening of the relation.

In a related aphorism, he writes that Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything. This applies to the vulgar atheist, but to the left more generally, due to their blind respect for "intellectuals." But Man believes he is lost among facts, when he is only caught in a web of his own definitions. And boy, are liberals caught. Like this clown.

The atheist devotes himself less to proving that God does not exist than forbidding him to exist. The atheist -- and Holmes was an atheist -- is certain that God doesn't exist, but he promptly forgets about the source of certainty.

But as the Don says, man has two poles, and we needn't respect that muddled in between zone of "an animal with opinions" -- Darwinism, for example, which is the sine qua non of an animal with opinions. Granted, it is one step above gross materialism, which is a loudmouthed rock. But enough about Joe Biden.

One more aphorism: We believe in many things in which we do not believe we believe. Divine certitude, for example.

In Part I(B), I assess various theories of "the role of the intellectual," concluding that the only role for the intellectual is for the intellectual to cease to exist. In Part I(C), I assess the contemporary state of the academy, showing that, contrary to the theory advanced in Part I(B), many intellectuals insist on continuing to exist. In Part I(D), I propose a new path forward, whereby present-day intellectuals take on a useful social function by spreading truths that help to alleviate the crisis of suffering outlined in Part I(A).

I don't know what he concludes in Part I(D), but a good start would be for these useless intellectuals to learn from reality instead of projecting their visions onto it.

All Wet this Morning

Then God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear'...

It seems that in the metaphysics of Genesis there are four quadrants, or realms, as it were: there is first the division of the upper (above the firmament) from the lower waters (below the firmament); only then are the lower waters gathered together such that the dry land appears. Since God calls the firmament Heaven, we have, in descending order: upper waters, heaven, lower waters (the seas), and dry land.

What could waters "above" heaven refer to? At first, before their division into upper and lower, God is hovering over them; they are dark and they are formless.

The creation of light goes to the first condition (darkness), the division into upper and lower to the second (formlessness). With light we have the possibility of vision ("the light of the body is the eye"), and with di-vision intelligibility (in other words, formlessness is the essence of unintelligibility).

The lower three worlds are spiritual, psychic, and material; or soul, mind and body; or nous, psyche and soma, respectively. What is the first, the "above heaven?" That must be the great beyond-being, i.e., the apophatic God we've heard so little about.

Now, we're just winging it here, but I see that Benoist identifies these three with verbum, lux, and vita, which, if my Latin is correct, are Word, Light, and Life.

Benoist goes on to say that the soul mediates between spirit and body; it is "the mediator between the higher and lower states of our being."

These three also sponsor three distinct forms of knowing, which are (starting with the lower), empirical-sensory, rational-imaginative, and noetic-intellection. The first two are relative, while the third approaches the absolute in an asymptotic way, i.e., always on the way without ever arriving.

Symbols -- such as the symbol of water -- act "as a bridge between the corporeal and the mental," giving us access to realities that are intelligible but immaterial: with them, it is as if we can have empirical knowledge of spiritual realities. Or just say the word can become enfleshed or the light in-formed.

One reason why these primordial symbols work is that nature is a reflection of heaven, rather than vice versa. In other words, oceans and light really do tell us something about the divine reality, since they are its reflections herebelow. Looked at this way, man is privileged to be the most adequate reflection of the divine person -- at least in potential.

In his Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Schuon breaks it all down for us in non-mythopoetic language. In my view, the creation story of Genesis is a symbolic expression of these same truths. Thus, In the beginning,

"[I]t is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite."

Or in other words, in the beginning is God, the Absolute-Infinite. He is All Possibility, such that with God we can literally say that "all things are possible." In other words, for anything to undergo the formality of existing it must first be possible for it to exist: a thing's principle is prior to its actuality.

What is the Principle of God? I would say creativity, which entails a love of communicating it. Think of a genuine artist: why does he create? It must be for the pure joy of communicating d'light. As it pertains to God,

"[I]t is in the nature of the Good to wish to communicate itself: to say Good is to say radiation, projection, unfolding, gift of self." There is Principle and manifestation, or God and world, absolute and relative, heaven and earth, image and reflection, etc.

Now, consistent with what was said above about the upper and lower waters, "the celestial order includes... two 'degrees' of the Principle itself," which I identify as the apophatic and cataphatic God; the first is the "God beyond God," i.e., the Eckhartian God of whom Nothing can be said.

How to understand this important orthoparadox? I see it as analogous to man's own situation, in which our consciousness floats on an infinitely more vast ocean of trans- or supra-consciousness. You might say we are two-thirds water.

In reality, the two (solid ego and watery ground) are one, such that what we call the self is the residue of a process of the infinite-implicate order congealing into a local-explicate order -- the way in which the ocean throws its waves upon the shore, or the nonlocal sea of quantum energy tosses local particles out of its womb. It is actually a circular motion, such that

"In my flowing-out I entered creation" and "in my Breakthrough I re-enter God.... Just as God breaks through me, so do I break through God in return." And God is this "great underground river that no one can dam up and no one can stop" (Eckhart).

On the Third Day

We've been discussing the Ten Commandments of the left. Unlike the left, we don't like to reduce opposing ideas and opinions to motivations -- whether conscious or unconscious -- that would be denied by the person who holds them.

But just this morning I was thinking about some of the idiotic things I used to believe when I was a liberal, and wondering why I thought them. It couldn't have been because they were rational or factual. So, why did I believe them? What was the driving -- or organizing -- force?

Note that "driving" and "organizing" imply different vectors, the former a material or efficient cause, the latter a formal or final one. For example, a homosexual activist who is in denial of his own heterosexual trauma and conflict is in the "driven" category. Likewise the feminist who hates her femininity or the black liberal who denies feeling inferior about himself and blames white people.

What would be examples of formal or final organization? Here I think Sowell's "vision of the anointed" applies, because a vision is a top-down, future-to-present phenomenon. But visions can be functional -- say, the Empire of Liberty of the founders -- or dysfunctional -- e.g., Marxists, Islamists, MSNBseers, Obamyopics, and others along the blindness spectrum.

Importantly, either one can involve violence. For example, we violently imposed liberty on Japan and Germany, and that worked out pretty well. We also succeeded in Iraq, at least until Obama's superior vision got in the way.

Note how in the space of a year or so, Iraq turned from one of the "great success stories of the Obama administration" to a great failure of the Bush administration. It's hard to believe that this isn't a conscious and cynical manipulation on the part of Obama, but never doubt the power of visions. I see no evidence that Obama's vision is being altered one iota by all of the feedback telling him that the great global play date isn't going so well with no adults around.

"The first thing a man will do for his ideal is" -- get this -- "lie" (Schumpeter, in Sowell). But you -- by which I mean you, the Raccoon -- are not permitted to lie, not to others, and most especially to yourself. Therefore, you are under much more serious constraints than is the leftist, whose vision does not include the eighth or any other commandment, really, because if you are permitted to lie, then all commandments are negotiable or even meaningless, right?

Put conversely, if your first commandment is that there is no objective truth, then all things are permitted because there are no commandments.

This is not to say that a Raccoon never lies to himself, only that he doesn't boast about it, much less elevate it to a metaphysic. For it is written -- on p. 242 -- that man is a habitual liar who uses the left brain "to superficially 'patch up' discontinuities in being." As a result, "language is quick to explain way" the psychic holes and tears in our cosmic area rug, "creating factitious wholes and spinning a false continuity."

For just as in the quantum world, the psyche has continuous (right brain) and discontinuous (left brain) aspects. Psycho-pneumatic growth is the result of a harmonious relationship between the two. Our narrative is always being destabilized, but our task is to unify it at a higher level via psychic metabolism.

Think of how our Cosmic Mentor accomplished this in a quintessential manner. To all outward appearances his narrative was torn asunder that Friday. If he were honest with himself, any witness that day or the next would have had to say to himself: well, that didn't work out so well.

But on the Third Day, Jesus weaves the broken narrative into a higher unity, to put it mildly. Thus, the same honest witness who said that didn't work out so well now says, wo, didn't see that coming. He didn't see it coming because that was not his vision. His vision was shattered, and he was honest enough to recognize it, so when the new vision came along, he was able to see it.

But what if he were like Obama? First of all, Obama would have shared the vision of the Romans -- AKA the sufficiency of worldly power -- so the Crucifixion would have been the end of it: problem solved. No doubt he would have been awarded a Peace Prize for eliminating the menace. He certainly couldn't have foreseen the dissolution of the Roman Empire four centuries later, while the other little vision prevailed.

In any event, -- returning briefly to the Coonifesto -- "One cannot overestimate the importance of constructing a true autobiography, in which we are unified and balanced, not just in psychic space but in developmental time." For example, to the extent that the unconscious past is not remembered and integrated, "we will be haunted, rebuked, vexed, thwarted, and enticed by its its split off, subterranean promptings."

This is precisely how those Marxist dreams from Obama's worthless father have become the many nightmares for us, Obama's worthless subjects. If Obama could only have insight into his past, it would save us from his acting it out on the world stage -- call it a World Historical defense mechanism. Nor would he be the first megalomaniac to act out his petty conflicts on such a grand stage.

"We all begin the spiritual path with an abundance of alibis, self-flattery, justification, psychic holes and envelopes, temporal discontinuities, and spatial disconnections. In order to become one with reality we must first become one with ourselves," said a prior Bob.

But just to show you how a fellow can grow and adjust his own vision, I would now express it a little differently, and say that the person must become three with himselves.

Then God said, 'Let the waters under the heavens be gathered together into one place, and let the dry land appear'...

And if that reference is too obscure, here's a little hint: land is discontinuous while water is continuous. And the world is two thirds water...

A Real God Can Handle the Truth, or There are No Speech Codes in Heaven

Liberals like to use the phrase "the wrong side of history." It makes no sense, not even in a Marxist context, because for a strict Marxist the dialectic of history is going to produce what it does, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

Since that theory is not even wrong, later Marxists came up with the idea of the vanguard of the proletariat to help nudge history -- okay, to violently force it -- over to the right side of itself.

Nor is that theory even wrong, because it really comes down to a rationalization of the same diabolical combination of desire + force that has always haunted history.

So when contemporary progressives make their crass appeals to the right side of history, we know they're making an even crasser appeal to the naked violence which will come your way if you are on the wrong side of the state -- the state embodying the mystical Will of the People.

To put it another way, the state always does what you would do if you were intelligent and virtuous enough to be on the right side of history.

Now obviously there can be no right or wrong side of history. Rather, right and wrong apply only to 1) truth, and 2) by extension, virtue.

In other words, truth is what we ought to think, while virtue is what we ought to do. Of the two, the first is primary, because we won't know what to do unless we know what to think: human action is a prolongation of thought (whereas animal action is simply a prolongation of instinct).

Note that this is always the case, even for, say, as thoughtless a person as Obama. His actions naturally follow his thoughts, except that his thoughts are alternatively vapid, naive, sinister, self-aggrandizing, or all of the above. They are childish in a bad way.

Obama's demand that we get on board the right side of history is a reflection of the primitive defense mechanism of infantile omnipotence, in which reality becomes an extension of the mind instead of vice versa:

"the child lives in a sort of megalomania for a long period... the 'fiction of omnipotence.' At birth 'the baby is everything as far as he knows -- all powerful'... every step he takes towards establishing his own limits and boundaries will be painful because he'll have to lose this original godlike feeling of omnipotence."

In a neurotic person, the defense mechanism of omnipotence is "a relic of the old megalomania of infancy." But in a narcissistic personality disorder -- which is more pathological than a mere neurosis -- the infantile omnipotence will become the go-to defense mechanism, i.e., pervasive instead of merely episodic.

That's not as clear as it could be. What it means is that we all have an unconscious reservoir of infantile omnipotence. However, importantly, this is not intrinsically pathological. Rather, it only becomes pathological to the extent that the person experiences a developmental fixation at, or regression to, that stage, such that it isn't harmoniously integrated with the rest of the personality.

For example, without that reservoir of omnipotence, it would be impossible to conceive of or intuit God. Think of it as a right-brain phenomenon in which we are in touch with the boundless God-beyond-God. Now, imagine suffering trauma, neglect, or abuse at that stage, such that the self becomes identified with this Boundless All.

Yes, imagine:

I mean in a way Obama’s standing above the country, above -- above the world, he’s sort of God. --Evan Thomas.

Note that in Thomas' case, he -- like millions of other Americans -- projected his own infantile omnipotence into Obama. Thomas still unconsciously believes in omnipotence, but simply locates it in another. And he imagines the rest of us are as immature as he is:

"The question now is whether the President we elected and [who] spoke for us so grandly [read: omnipotently] yesterday can carry out the great vision he gave [to] us and to the world." Gave, literally like parent to child:

"He's all about 'let us reason together'... He's the teacher. He is going to say, ‘now, children, stop fighting and quarreling with each other.’ And he has a kind of a moral authority that he -- he can -- he can do that."

I know what you're thinking, because I'm thinking the same thing: I just threw up in my mouth a little.

To get a sense of the madness of this, imagine Putin, or the Mullahs, or ISIS, thinking to themselves: this man has such a grand vision, such godlike moral authority, such magnificent wisdom, that we must stop quarreling with the infidels -- who knows, perhaps even stop murdering them for the sake of our own omnipotent vision. Obama's omnipotence is better than ours!

The wiki article alludes to the healthy and normal aspect of omnipotence with that comment at the end about Winnicott. Now, there was a great man with a grand vision. He was perhaps the most playfully orthoparadoxical of developmental theorists, but that's the subject for a different post.

Let's just say that because the baby can't help thinking he's All That, you've got to let him down easy. Let him realize it in doses, rather than having the realization come crashing down on him all at once. This is what he means by "good enough mothering," which is contrasted not only with bad mothering, but (hypothetically) perfect mothering.

Put colloquially, the latter involves spoiling the child to such an extent that his omnipotence is retained. In short, there is insufficient reality testing to show the child that he isn't in fact Obama.

Note that the parenting style of the left promotes the retention of omnipotence in a thousand ways: the self-esteem movement, choosing one's own gender, everyone gets a trophy, all cultures are equally beautiful, speech codes, trigger warnings, etc. Each of these serves to keep the child a child.

Note that the child retains his omnipotence, but that it takes on a brittle quality. If you could consciously express what is going on in the mind of a typical liberal college student, it would be something like this: I know everything, and you'd better not tell me I don't, or I'll report you to the dean!

In other words, the liberal college student is on the right side of history, or else! But truth doesn't need to resort to brittle threats of violence.

The problem with omnipotence is that it is not subject to what is called reality testing; or in other words, it isn't falsifiable. Therefore it is a prescientific worldview, except it isn't a WORLDview but a worldVIEW -- the emphasis is on the viewing, not the world, the subject, not the object.

I recently read the new edition of Sowell's Intellectuals and Society, and although he uses different language, he describes the identical phenomenon (in his terms, infantile omnipotence = "the vision of the anointed").

Likewise, in Ever Wonder Why? he writes of how so many foolish policies are a result of "trying to make the real world match the picture inside someone's head." There is simply no way to accomplish this without cracking more than a few heads.

Idolatry, Ingratitude, Pride, and Other Left Wing Virtues

As usual, the next book, even though usually plucked at random, provides a preternatural commentary on the previous one -- in this case, Sowell's Ever Wonder Why?, a compendium of his editorials. I began reading it yesterday, and it was as if it were aware of the post that preceded it that morning.

The post, if you will recall, was about the Ten Commandments of the left, which are -- and this was just off the top of my head, so it may need some tweaking -- Relativism, Idolatry, Ingratitude, Theft, Vanity (or Pride), Patricide, Lies, Adultery, Murder, and anti-Slack (which will require some explanation, but it has to do with the opposite of sabbath-think; it is why leftists can never stop their dreadful activism, why they can only do and never be, and most problematically, why they can't stop doing it to us, the persecuted minority of Cosmic Slacktivists).

The first section of the book is called Culture Wars, and consists of twenty essays, nearly every one going to what is for the left a commandment, and for us a sin.

Example.

Well, the book begins with a quote by Eliot to the effect that half the harm that is done in this world is due to people who want to feel important. Bam! Pride. But why pride? Pride must be a reaction to some counter-trend in the soul, AKA shame or low self-esteem or emptiness or separation from God.

The Poet continues: "They don't mean to do harm -- but the harm does not interest them. Or they do not see it, or they justify it because they are absorbed in the endless struggle to think well of themselves (emphasis mine).

Next to that passage I put a little note to myself, "bho." That is my customary shorthand for Barack Hussein. There will be many more as we proceed.

In the preface, Sowell, with characteristic understatement, talks about one of the most important distinctions between left and right, having to do with one's locus of control. For the left, the locus of control -- at least for authorized victim groups -- is always outside the self, i.e., "various external circumstances" that compel them "to do this or that."

Note that this never applies to non-victims, white males being the uncaused cause of all victimization and therefore the only people with free will. No liberal has ever searched for the root causes of, say, "corporate greed." No, in that case, it's just greed, pure and simple.

Thus, "one of the most overlooked explanations is that various internal drives" motivate victims to do what they do. This is why the left won't acknowledge the simple fact that blacks have more encounters with the police because they engage in a disproportionate amount of criminal activity.

For the same reason, Asian Americans have fewer encounters with the police. Are the police racist against whites in favor of Asians? The question is absurd. As absurd as the left, precisely. Imagine going through life imaging that Asians hate and control you just because you're Caucasian.

One commenter yesterday suggested that Pride is the Master Commandment, the one that conditions the rest. Sowell provides support for this view:

"The desire of individuals and groups to puff themselves up by imposing their vision on other people is a recurring theme in the culture wars.... Such attempts at self-aggrandizement in the name of noble-sounding crusades are too often called 'idealism' rather than the narrow ego trip it is."

You guessed it: bho.

As we have discussed in many posts, without envy and ingratitude the left would be out of business. The very first essay touches on this, in that "Nothing is easier than to take for granted what we are used to, and to imagine that it is more or less natural, so that it requires no explanation."

But America is the great exception, as reflected in our prosperity, our freedom, and our ideals. Other crappy nations and cultures require no explanation, because they are what always happens. Syria? Iran? Cuba? That's just humans doing what they do. It's the default position.

Likewise, the left always imagines that poverty is the condition that requires explanation, when it is the universal. They think that wealth somehow just happens, and that it is simply a matter of divvying it up. They have no earthly idea that doing so destroys the very incentives that made the wealth possible.

Sowell shows again and again how the Sacred Vision of the left trumps reality. But "a casual glance around the world today, or back through history, would dispel any notion that good things just happen naturally, much less inevitably."

Therefore, "Once we realize that America is an exception, we might even have a sense of *gratitude* for having been born here.... At the very least, we might develop some concern for seeing that whatever has made this country better off is not lost or discarded -- or eroded away, bit by bit, until it is gone."

Not if you're bho. He's better than America!

Indeed -- and this was written BC, before the Great Change we are living through -- "To be for generic 'change' is to say that what we have is so bad that any change is likely to be for the better" (emphasis mine). Think about that one, for that is bho's implicit assumption.

In reality, change is inevitable, but in a healthy organism, we change in order to continue living. The only complete change is the radical discontinuity of Death. When an organism dies, you know that the Revolution succeeded.

The fact that something exists proves that it was at least possible in reality. But the idealists of the left imagine that just because something is possible in the imagination, it can exist. This is why they cannot learn from reality (as in the case of the unteachable bho.)

Left wing revisionists spend so much time denouncing the Crusades that you'd think they were against crusades as a matter of principle. Wrong. "Many crusades of the political left have been misunderstood by people who do not realize that these crusades are about establishing the identity and the superiority of the crusaders."

Thus, we're touching on something even deeper than pride, i.e., identity. Now man, in the absence of God, is precisely nothing. At least existentialists have thought this through and realize that this must be the case.

But leftists don't think anything through, much less something this deep and fundamental. As a result, they engage in the existential defense mechanism of idolatry, i.e., substituting something relative for the Absolute and then worshiping it. The cult of global warming is just the most recent example.

This is why it is naive to ask a warmist to give up his idol, because his entire existence is structured around it. You are taking away his meaning, his identity, and his moral superiority.

It's the same with bho vis-a-vis Iran. You can't ask him to see that he's dealing with untrustworthy genocidal monsters, because that would detract from his morally superior idealism. Forget your lying eyes. The reason why peace is breaking out all over the world is because of the Change brought about by bho. Besides, he's got that Peace Prize to prove it.

True, the left "loves" peace. But they deeply resent any good, including peace, that isn't achieved through their methods. Thus, they love Obama-style "peace," just as they hated the real thing brought about by Reagan.

The Left in Ten Words

As mentioned yesterday, while The Devil's Pleasure Palace tries to dig down to the diabolical foundation of the left, it does so in an unnecessarily muddled and desultory way. Just not my style. Rather than hovering around a subject from the outside in and pouring language over it, I prefer to go straight for the throat and then chuck rocks from the inside out.

Or as Don Colacho, the pinnacle of pith, says, Phrases are pebbles the writer tosses into the reader's soul. The rest is on you, because The diameter of the concentric waves they displace depends on the dimensions of the soul. From my end the rocks may feel like boulders, but for those of you with especially capacious souls, I suppose they may feel like a spray of pea gravel.

In any event, Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas. Note, for example, the enviable economy of the left, in that A vocabulary of ten words is enough for a Marxist to explain history. That being the case, it shouldn't take more than ten words for us to explain the ideas -- or even Idea -- of the left.

These ten words are: relativism, idolatry, ingratitude, theft, vanity, patricide, lies, adultery, murder, and anti-slack. Each is related to the others, but is there a master Idea that conditions the rest? I would suggest there is, but we'll heave that rock when we get to it.

Speaking of economy of expression, these would of course represent the inverse of the Ten Commandments. Think about that: ten rules are all we need in order to have "earth as it is in heaven." I haven't read Prager's The Ten Commandments: Still the Best Moral Code, but I'm guessing he says the same thing, more or less:

"The most important words ever written are the Ten Commandments. These words changed the world when they were first presented at Mt. Sinai to Israelites, and they are changing it now. They are the foundation stones of Western Civilization."

So, "Given their staggering importance, you would think that all societies, and certainly our educational and religious institutions, would be intent on studying them closely."

Yeah, right. He suggests that our schools "take them for granted," when that is clearly untrue. Rather, they take them quite seriously, in that they go to great lengths to teach precisely the opposite.

(He discusses each one in a video at Prager University. I haven't yet viewed them, but I guess I should. I'll start with the first.)

Recall the crack above about tossing pebbles from the inside out. Well, in this case it is God hurling foundation stones from the inside-out and top-down (which amount to the same thing). They land down and out (or rather, one might say that down and out are their shadows), and are the stones upon which we are to rebuild up and in to Celestial Central.

Here again, the story of the Tower of Babel encrapsulates the contradictory approach, in which tenured man fashions his own bricks in the effort to construct an edifice superior to God's.

Let's take #1, which I just reviewed at Prager U. He makes the point that it sets up a kind of exchange between God and man: that I, God, brought you out of slavery, so you, man, ought to see fit to obey my commandments.

I would widen out the mythopoetic narrative of Exodus, and say that at bottom it goes to the mysterious presence of freedom as such -- of free will. If man is not free then he is in bondage, and to the extent that freedom exists, it can only come from God. There is not, nor can there ever be, any scientific explanation of the mystery of free will. Freedom is as beyond the scientific horizon as what came "before" the Big Bang.

If freedom is a gift from God, then it should provoke awareness of gratitude. Thus, where the left doesn't deny or devalue freedom, it certainly never expresses gratitude for it. In fact, I would say that the ingratitude leads directly to the devaluation.

Thomas Sowell, for example, writes of a time when blacks were aware of the awesome gift of freedom. But since the 1960s, self-styled "civil rights leaders" have dismissed genuine freedom in favor of an embittered life on the white liberal plantation, meanwhile watching groups who do cherish freedom pass them by.

Instead of teaching freedom and gratitude, the left teaches victimhood (in which one is merely an object of the free instead of a subject of freedom) and bitterness (in which the gift of freedom is transformed into the curse of responsibility).

What is the Left's Bottom Lyin'?

We left off yesterday with an incomprehensible crack about left wing speech recapitulating the Incident in the Garden, i.e., man's fall. I ask you: does that make any sense at all, or is it just another gratuitous insult? Does it advance the debate, or are we just conveniently dismissing a priori anyone with whom we disagree?

Could be. But I recently read a book that makes the identical argument, The Devil's Pleasure Palace: The Cult of Critical Theory and the Subversion of the West, by Michael Walsh. I don't recommend it -- too much pompous and unfocussed gasbaggery for my taste -- but one finds back-up where one can. The whole book could have been reduced to a chapter, or maybe just this post.

When will writers learn that we don't have all the time in the world? As it stands, there are more required books on the cosmic syllaBus than we can ever drive to in one lifetime. If you're going to add another to the pile, you'd better have a damn good excuse. And make it brief. We don't have all day. Well, sometimes we do, but we don't want to waste that on an elective.

We've heard this argument before -- that the Frankfurt School of Marxist-inspired critical theorists ruined everybody's lives and ate all our steak. I see that the wiki article has a section that dates this conspiracy theory to 1992:

"Although it became more widespread in the late 1990s and 2000s, the theory originated with Michael Minnicino's 1992 essay New Dark Age: Frankfurt School and 'Political Correctness', published by the Schiller Institute. The Schiller Institute, a branch of the LaRouche movement, further promoted the idea in 1994. The Minnicino article charges that the Frankfurt School promoted Modernism in the arts as a form of Cultural pessimism, and played a role in shaping the 1960s counterculture."

Later it says that "The message is numbingly simplistic: all the ills of modern American culture, from feminism, affirmative action, sexual liberation and gay rights to the decay of traditional education and even environmentalism are ultimately attributable to the insidious influence of the members of the Institute for Social Research who came to America in the 1930's."

When you put it that way, it does sound kind of stupid, doesn't it?

I do not place the blame on any movement, or system, or ideology, or even Uncle Rico. Rather, each of these rides piggyback on something much deeper. First, when ideology is in the saddle, it rides on man. But what is it in man that permits him to be so easily saddled?

This is something we're always thinkin' about. The other day my site meter alerted me to an old series of posts from 2009 on the subject (in the context of a review of Bradley Watson's Living Constitution, Dying Faith: Progressivism and the New Science of Jurisprudence ). Let's linger over some of our greatest hits from six years ago (and I apologize for the length; it's just that I kept finding interesting little nuggets. You'll have to extend a little slack my way, because when I read an old post, it's like reading it for the first time.)

--What if the "truth" of natural selection were known at the time of America's founding? Suppose that instead of being sophisticated Christian thinkers and biblical exegetes, the founders believed the simplistic notion that man is nothing more than an accident of the genes, just an animal with no conceivable claim on truth, justice, or liberty.

--Obviously, our founding creed would have been equally inconceivable, i.e., that all men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights.... Clearly, unless you are very stupid, you must realize that Darwinism does not permit the existence of permanent truths or natural law accessible to man's reason. The very idea is absurd, and the Darwinist should come right out and admit it.

--Make no mistake: in order for progressivism to even be "legal" -- that is, constitutional -- it must first carry out an attack on the existing Constitution. Most of what progressives have done and wish to do cannot be done unless they first reframe the Constitution in Darwinian terms as an evolving document.

--[I]t never occurred to America's founders that they were simply affirming convenient or time-bound principles subject to later revocation by pettifogging mediocrities with law degrees, who are more "evolved" than they. Rather, their "understanding of law was structured around the idea of a knowable, unchanging moral order, to which human law and the Constitution -- and therefore constitutional interpretation -- were subservient." They would have fully endorsed the Socratic/Platonic principle that "law aims to be a discovery of what is," and that human law "cannot contradict the natural law that reflects the divine reason" (Watson).

Note that the founders were implicitly aware of the contradictory metaphysic, such that the weenies of the Frankfurt School couldn't have been the foist to foist it upon us. Again, they just exploited a timeless mytho-logical reality, or tendency, in man. Note that the myth of Genesis takes place outside time; or, time is structured by it, rather than vice versa. The divine clueprint of "Genesis time" becomes human time, as a building to blueprint.

--In other words, the metaphysics of the Founders is precisely the opposite of the contemporary Darwinist, in that the former starts at the top of the cosmos, with the One, the Absolute, the Divine Reason, not the bottom, i.e., matter and the random accidents of nature. A political philosophy derived from the latter is going to look quite different, and will be irreconcilable with America's.

--To cite one obvious example, if one realizes that there are permanent truths or moral absolutes that are not strictly time-bound, and that they are accessible to man's intellect, then one cannot possibly believe in reductionistic Darwinism, irrespective of what the science does or doesn't show. It's like when scientists try to tell us that free will doesn't exist. Right. Whatever. They are simply wrong, because they are wrong in principle, a principle that is a priori true and cannot not be true on pain of the very abolition of truth. (In other words, only a free being may know or deny truth.)

Obviously, the lesson of Darwin came before the Frankfurt school. And

--progressivism takes its cue from Darwinism, in that it "is characterized by a set of ideas that have at their core a marked historicism -- which is to say, a belief that truth is always and everywhere relative to its time and place" (Watson). Under Darwinism, the intellect cannot be a faculty that adequates itself to truth and therefore reality, but rather, is merely "a method of dealing with adaptation and change." In such a myopic view, our "minds" are adapted to the environment, not to truth. And "truth" would simply be a good fit between mind and environment. And a good fit means that it promotes survival and reproduction, or babes and power.

So, here is the sort of constitution a Darwinian -- limited to his Darwinism -- might come up with:

We hold these tautologies to be self-evident. That all men are intrinsically unequal; and that they are endowed by nature with very different gifts and abilities; that among these are strength, intelligence, and the will to dominate; that to nurture these gifts, governments are are instituted by the vanguard of evolution, deriving their just powers from nature's iron will and from the New York Times editorial board; that whenever any government, constitution, or religion undermines these powers, it is the right of nature's elites to alter, abolish, or deconstruct it, and to institute a new government rooted in a Living Constitution, as to them shall seem most likely to effect the perpetual rule of the better sort.

But in reality,

--"there are certain fixed principles beyond which progress is impossible." Think about that for a moment, for it says everything you need to know about what man is, and how dramatically he stands out from the rest of creation.

Therefore -- and this again goes to the timelessness of the question --

--the real debate is between absolutism and relativism. And it is a debate that the relativists of the left cannot win unless they first undermine the plain meaning of our founding documents. Instead of embodying the fixed principles toward which our task is to evolve, the founding documents must become an elastic and mutable organism that itself evolves, a la Darwinism, in which all is change and nothing is fixed. Everything is back on the table -- life, liberty, property, slack.

Not only are we back at mythogenetic ground zero, but the left is taking the side of the serpent -- which is precisely what the Gnostics did wayback when, i.e., revere the serpent of salvation. So, maybe that wasn't a snake in the garden. Rather, a Frankfurter.

Now, there is a good and bad -- or appropriate and inappropriate -- omniscience. There is an absolute knowledge to which we are freaking entitled by virtue of being human:

--Lincoln advocated the good kind of omniscience, which provides the rock upon which our nation was built. Like a "secular revelation," these petrine principles were "handed down by the Founding Fathers for later generations to preserve," not to squander like a bunch of irresponsible and good-for-nothing trust fund babies.

--"progressivism" is grounded in a combination of Darwinism and philosophical pragmatism, which render the whole notion of timeless truth null and void. The elimination of timeless truth is both the origin and goal of progressive thought, just as timeless truth is the origin and goal of our liberal Founders (and which again makes genuine evolution possible).

--with a single stroke, these anti-intellectual mediocrities such as John Dewey and Woodrow Wilson were able to elevate themselves above the Founders, and affirm that "there are no fixed or eternal principles that govern, or ought to govern, the politics of a decent regime." Rather, all truth was situated in a strict historicism, meaning that "truth" was simply what was believed to be true at the time, and nothing more. With the passage of time, we'll arrive at better truths, just as natural selection has produced better eyes and more clever apes. But there is no truth that is true for all time -- no annoying natural rights to interfere with the prerogatives of the state. Again, this view begins and ends in change as opposed to permanence.

We have rearrived at the left's bottom lyin':

--From this false premise the left pulled off the ultimate fraud, by identifying the liberating belief in absolutes with authoritarianism, and the acceptance of radical relativism with "liberation." Yes, it is a sort of liberation -- into nihilism on the one hand, and the omnipotent state on the other. For if there is nothing but change -- "permanent change" -- this is just another way of saying "absolute relativism" and pure subjectivity, which is a self-refuting metaphysic that elevates Will over Truth. Truth becomes a function of raw power, and we are reduced to obedient Adams in the void.

Or just say Hell.

A Word from Jehovah's Withness

Time only for a brief blast.

Is it possible to speak if you haven't first been spoken to? Babies who are not immersed in language during the critical developmental window never learn how to speak, at least not properly.

You know the old crack about how ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny? Well, there first has to be a phylogeny -- a course of evolutionary development -- to recapitulate. Obviously the origin of language cannot be an infinite regress. It had to start somewhere.

Among other things, Genesis recaps the genesis of language. Brueggemann points out that "of all the creatures of God's eight creative acts, God speaks only to human creatures. The others have no speech directed toward them at all."

This implies that we learned how to speak from God himselves. For example, early on he twice addresses us (man-and-woman) directly as "you."

Thus, man is a You to God's I AM; he "has a different, intimate relation with the creator." He walks and talks with God, whereas other creatures cannot be "with" in the intersubjective sense of oneness-in-twoness. "With" implies relation, or a unity beneath division.

"God has made a peculiarly intense commitment" to this freaking speakish creature; at once he gives him the capacity to speak-with, but at the same time, the freedom to end the con-versation (flowing together) by growing his own separate way.

Note the ways in which the theme of language reappears later in the Bible; I count at least three major ways, and they must be related to the great theme(s) enunciated in Genesis.

First there is the Tower of Babel, which is just a collective recapitulation of the theme of appropriating language for ourselves and forgetting where it came from, such that we all fall downagain.

Then there is the fresh take on the Word of God in John 1: instead of speaking with man, this very speech becomes man and is thereby with him in a new way. This implies that in being "with" Jesus, man is with the same with-ness that was available to Adam in the Garden.

I want to say that Jesus is Jehovah's withness.

And I suppose Matthew 1:23 expresses this idea quite literally: 'and they shall call His name Immanuel,' which is translated, 'God with us.'

In the passage immediately thereafter, Joseph is awakened from his sleep and once again God is speaking; he is in-formed about some vital in-formation carried by Mary.

Later, we read of how John the Baptist was a voice crying in the wilderness, implying that not a lot of people were listening, or at least not hearing. He is not in the temple or the town square, but in the middle of nowhere. Few people are getting with the far-out things he has to say.

If Babel is the fragmentation of the divine gift of language due to misuse, then Pentecost represents the healing of this fracture.

And one way -- I would say the way -- language recovers its wholeness is via the Spirit of the Word-Jesus.

In author's word, God -- as if to emphasize the point -- has given a "last word" whom it is much more difficult to mis- and disunderstand, although it obviously isn't impossible. We still have our freedom, the same freedom Adam had to imagine he invented language.

There are many ways to look at the incident in the Garden, but in the present context I would say that when Adam eats of the forbidden fruit, he is granted ontological tenure. He is now a professor of deconstruction, in that language loses its transcendent reference (and source) and devolves to a self-referential tool of power instead of truth.

This is also the birth of the left. Whenever a liberal speaks, ontogeny is recrapitulating an unfortunate phylogeny.

Creator Creates Creation

Whitehead can sometimes be difficult to understand, but at least he is trying to describe what is going on beneath what we all experience, as opposed to those pseudo-profound postmodernists who painfully and pretentiously describe what no sane person has ever experienced.

I can only hope I don't sound like the latter, but I can well imagine a stranger to these parts thinking my blah-blah-blogging is no different from theirs -- as if I am trying to imitate the tenured rather than distinguish mysoph therefrom.

Yesterday I linked to a bleat in which Lileks serves up some examples of postmodern pneumababble (scroll down past the first break). The writer in question "elucidates the slippery, gendered in-betweenness of everyday ritual in a manner reminiscent of Derrida’s disquisition on the chora -- that most mysterious and mundane of spaces, not unlike the anonymous corridor of a hotel."

You can't just say that staying in a hotel is different from being at home. No, that would be too banal. Rather, "The hotel becomes a kind of disorienting counterfeit to the authentic shelter of the home, which is the dominant space of traditional Western values because it’s a place of permanent or rooted dwelling -- in the Heideggerian sense of the word."

Then again, "Homes have a lot of blank spaces. It’s easy to get lost there," so you're Heideggered if you do, Heideggered if you don't. Which I think is the point: verbal mystagoguery masquerding as intellectual depth.

The good news? "If we could shift our traditional notions of 'placeness' from the home to the hotel, we could find a new way of considering modern space."

Notice what a trivial project this is compared to a Christian metaphysic in which we shift the space of the entire cosmos. Nor is doing so a matter of will ("if we could shift..."), because whatever we merely will will merely be more whatever. Rather, the opposite movement is required, surrender to, and cooperation with, a power that transcends and contains us.

Anyway, my point is that Whitehead can at times sound like he is depaking the chopra with the worst of them (especially in Process and Reality), but he's really just trying to say something new and difficult with the limited arsenal of existing language. Sometimes you have to invent new terms -- that's my excuse, and I'm sticking to it -- or use the old ones in a novel way in order to shock or annoy the reader out of the familiar.

We've discussed this many times over the past decade, the problem of saturation. A word or concept becomes saturated when it can no longer... how to put it... attract the unknown. This is especially problematic in religion, where we can imagine we know what we're talking about merely because we have a word for it.

Even (or especially) "God" -- literally the most unsaturate-able word imaginable -- routinely loses its depthless unKnowability in the mouths of fundamentalists -- both the religious and atheistic kinds, who speak of a God in whom I cannot believe.

The first and surest thing we can say of God is that while he is nameable, he is not knowable. Thus, we can name the mystery, but that is hardly the same as knowing the mystery. I have a name for Alaska, but it doesn't mean I've ever been there or know much about it.

Indeed, the more I learn about it, the more I will realize there is to know. Often when we know little, we assume that's all there is to know. But the little we know is superimposed on vast stretches of ignorance. But enough about Obama.

If the postmodern bullshit artist cited above (above Obama) really wants to rock her own crock, she should try unsaturating what she thinks she knows. This will plunge her into a very different space -- the space of reality -- irrespective of whether she is at home or in a hotel.

Regarding early Christians, Whitehead writes that "A gracious, simple mode of life, combined with fortunate ignorance, endowed mankind with its most precious instrument of progress -- the impracticable ethics of Christianity."

A better word would be "non-utilitarian" ethics, or one always converging upon the absolute instead of the everyday; or better, the everyday seen through the prism of the absolute. Lileks for example, is a connoisseur of the everyday. What is the bleat but the mundane under the aspect of a jehovial witness?

I think the unknowability of God goes to the creative novelty of the world; they are two ways of approaching the same reality. I agree with Hartshorne that God couldn't "wish not to go on experiencing novel content," if only because "his ideals are incapable of final exhaustive realization." Again, God is the ultimate instance -- the very source -- of unsaturatability.

The divine inexhaustibility goes to "the intrinsic nature of his own primordial essence," which is to say, ceaseless creativity. This is reconciled with his changelessness in that creation is "his eternal and unchangeable purpose."

Think about it: God's creativity must be his alphOmega, for how could creativity ever be created without a creative act?

So, creativity is prior to, or at least coequal with, any other branch of the Ultimate Principle. Love, truth, beauty, freedom, and oneness are all bound up with it. Each of these must also be uncreated, in that how could one create freedom if not in freedom? How could one honestly speak truth without it? How could the many ever become one without oneness? Etc.

Again: In The Beginning, Creator Creates Creation. These three are one, and the one is always now. But not in the Heideggerian sense.

Good & Bad Newness

Since we've spontaneously veered into the mode of Whitehead, let's continue down that cosmic limb and see what we can shake from it.

Here's a bold statement: "Apart from God, there could be no relevant novelty. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things" (in Sherburne). You might say that creativity is necessary, but never this or that particular creation.

This is another way of saying that we live in the sort of cosmos in which anything might happen. You just never know.

For example, after 10 billion years, it might suddenly come alive. Or, it might start thinking. It might be capable of knowing and relating to its own source -- i.e., the very source of creative novelty.

Novelty is obviously "newness." And while what is new may not be creative, what is creative is always new, i.e., something that hasn't existed before.

As we have pointed out many times, the very first thing the Bible tells us about God is that he likes to create. Therefore, he is not so much mathematician as novel-ist.

And it is remarkable how much the Bible novelgazes on the subject of newness. Indeed, the Gospels are good news; now that I think about it, since bad + new = destruction, good + new must = creation.

"Behold," he says in Isaiah 43:19, "I will do a new thing" -- for example, make roads in the bewilderness and rivers in the desert. Later, in 65:17, he advises us to "be glad and rejoice forever in what I create." Revelation 21:1 implies that the creativity continues forever, and I say, why not? Why should God ever stop creating? "And I saw a new heaven and a new earth, for the first heaven and earth had passed away." Indeed, with Christ we "walk in the newness of life" (Rom 6:4).

That is remarkably strange language, but let's try to tie it in with a modern conception. Whitehead is about as modern as one can get without passing over the peak and proceeding down the windword slide into dumb-as-a-postmodernism and other psychopneumatic pathologies.

Or, since he was ahead of his time, we might say that metathinkers such as Whitehead and Polanyi are the post-critical antidopes to the tenured sophists who erode and desiccate man.

To paraphrase Schuon, these latter either freeze us under a thick sheet of ice or dissipate us into incoherent fragments. The latter in particular can be misperceived as creativity, since it is certainly "new." New, like a tumor.

Another good one: "God is not to be treated as an exception to all metaphysical principles," but "is their chief exemplification" (in Sherburne).

Thus, "apart from the intervention of God, there could be nothing new in the world, and no order in the world. The course of the world would be a dead level of ineffectiveness," with any progress cancelled out by horizontal crosscurrents. Death would be the rule instead of the exception.

Bottom line: "The universe is thus a creative advance into novelty." But what does this mean to you, the coonsumer? "[O]f course, there is no meaning to 'creativity' apart from its 'creatures,' and no meaning to 'God' apart from the creativity and the 'temporal creatures,' and no meaning to the temporal creatures apart from 'creativity' and 'God'" (ibid.).

Therefore, if you are as far out on the limb as I am, you could go so far as to say that God is the meaning of man -- no shock there -- but that man is the "meaning" (in a manner of speaking) of God -- big or small shock there, depending upon where you sit.

Then again, not such a big shock if you read some of the early fathers, who, if I remember rightly, made this point quite explicitly: that in Jesus we simultaneously have man's icon of God and God's icon of man.

An icon is something through which we see into the beyond which the icon instantiates. Its meaning is not itself -- for that would be idolatry -- but beyond itself.

Whitehead also talks about the "novel togetherness" of each temporal occasion, in which the many become one. You don't have to understand what I just said in order to see how this relates to a trinitarian metaphysic, which is whatnow?

I'm not saying this is correct, but in my mind I see a continuous relationship of "novel togetherness," meaning ever new, ever creative, and ever one-ing; it reminds me of a kaleidoscope, in which new patterns of oneness are constantly coming into being as a result of the shifting parts.

Thus, "the ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to conjunction" -- a more perfect union, to coin a phrase. "The world expands through recurrent unifications of itself," such that "the many become one and are increased by one." This is the literal meaning of One Cosmos Under God.

Think of birth: at first, the baby and mother are literally one in the womb. Then the mother gives birth, and the task of motherhood is to prolong the oneness into a psychic union. As the child develops, he is able to break away from this oneness, only to rediscover it anew in a mature love relation.

The point is that this follows the metacosmic trinitarian pattern of loving within higher and deeper unions of novelty.

It may indeed be said that this is one of the first philosophies which has any intellectual right to speak of divine personality. For personality, as any psychologist knows, is a sort of cluster of habits and purposes and ideas... --Hartshorne

Adventures in Blogging: Let There Be a Post!

Continuing with yesterday's theme, note that in Genesis it specifically states -- over and over -- that the Creator creates by simply allowing things to be, as in let there be light. That's a curious way to express it, and yet, there is an analogue to our own creativity, which also cannot be forced, cajoled, or willed.

Like right now: I would like for a post to happen, but it's more a matter of Let there be a post. I suppose that's why I enjoy the process: it's nothing like, say, school, where you are forced to write something on demand. None of my teachers ever said, let there be an essay on the Civil War; rather, write what is expected or suffer the consequences.

Again, "the command is not authoritarian. It is, rather, 'let it be.' God gives permission for creation to be. The appearance of creation is a glad act of embrace of this permit" (Brueggemann).

Yes, God wants the creation to be; but back off, man, he's an artist, not a mechanic.

Note also that this cosmic artwork isn't just situated in space, but in time. It is a ceaseless outflow of creativity, such that time itself a mode of creativity in the Whiteheadean sense: "Cut away the future, and the present collapses, emptied of its proper content. Immediate existence requires the insertion of the future in the crannies of the present" (Adventures of Ideas).

He's not talking about weeks or years or decades, but seconds or even fractions of seconds; the present is immediately entangled with its own future, and vice versa, otherwise it could never arrive. There are no gaps, and God is in them.

It is in this transitional space from present-to-future where all the novelty gets in. Novelty is what hasn't happened before, and thus, creativity: "The intermediate stage in this transition is constituted by the acquisition of novel content..." You could say that the future is implicate in each moment, and that time renders it explicate via the creative attractor, the cosmic telovator. It's an overall movement, like waves endlessly crashing on the shore of the now.

Each moment is a janus-faced occasion looking toward its own past and future. "In between there lies the teleology of the universe." In this sense we are hurtling toward our own destiny, but again, not in a deterministic way. Some aspects of the present are indeed dominated by the past, and each moment has more or less slack, or Cosmic Wiggle Room.

One reason, I think, why we so value art (both the creating and consuming), is that it is the residue, as it were, of this cosmic ingression of novelty, to a maximum degree. Creativity is always present -- it cannot not be -- but there are degrees.

But so too is necessity always present; we could say that in each moment it is as if there is a dial that goes from extreme necessity at one end to complete freedom at the other. Obviously, existence is woven of freedom and necessity, as is creativity.

However, orthoparadoxically, real freedom can never be free of a degree of necessity; as Whitehead says, "It is the reconciliation of freedom with the compulsion of the truth," the latter being identified with "the indwelling persuasion towards the harmony which is the height of existence." (This is how and why the truth sets us free.)

I'm just flipping through the book in search of some additional nuggets, and I see this: "The creation of the world... is the victory of persuasion over force" -- which places Pope Francis in a rather bad light, being that leftism represents the victory of force over persuasion.

And "the worth of men consists in their liability to persuasion," which is why with leftism we are not permitted to be good or to love truth for its own sake. Rather, we are forced by third parties to imitate their version of the good. This they call "social justice," a system so perfect that no one is free to do bad -- or good.

Whitehead well describes the opposite of social justice: "reverence for that power in virtue of which nature harbours ideal ends, and produces individual beings capable of conscious discrimination of such ends. This reverence is the foundation of the respect for man as man. It thereby secures that liberty of thought and action required for the upward adventure of life on this Earth."

Captain Beefheart said something to the effect that art is the organization of accidents. And I say: if accidents are good enough for man, they ought to be good enough for God! People seem to recoil from the idea that there are "accidents in God," but we have to think of accident in a non-pejorative way, because if there were no accidents there would be no fun. And no creativity. Again: God lets, he doesn't force. He is not a control freak. He is not a leftist.

Hartshorne quotes Schelling, who wrote that "It is necessary that accidents happen [in God], though not necessary just which accidents." Again: creativity.

Later Hartshorne observes that "Divine power is an ability to deal with free beings, not an ability to suppress or avoid their existence or to manipulate them so thoroughly that they would not be free." If God is in total control, then we can't properly exist -- be -- at all. But the reverse is equally true: if we are in total control, then God cannot be. Thus, as God lets us be, we must let God be. God suffers our freedom; it is only fair that we suffer his.

The last word in God's creativity is the Nothing, or nihil-O, from which creation emerges:

"We start, then, with nothing, pure zero. But this is not the nothing of negation.... this pure nothing is the nothing of not having been born.... It is the germinal nothing, in which the whole universe is involved or foreshadowed. As such, it is absolutely undefined and unlimited possibility -- boundless possibility. There is no compulsion and no law. It is boundless freedom" (ibid.).

And we are spirals within that vast creative arc.

Ben Carson and the God of Slack

We left off with the passionate interiority which characterizes our vertical openness to the infinite. This vibrantly intersubjective space extends from the deepest within -- our part so ptee -- to the highest beyond -- the toppermost of the poppermost.

Thus, within and beyond -- or depth and height, or immanence and transcendence -- are the immeasurable measures of the soul. These dimensions explain why it is so roomy in here -- but also, why some people feel so cramped and confined within themselves -- but more problematically, toward others upon whom they attempt to impose their own strangled sense of self.

For example, Hitler infamously sought lebensraum, or living space, but why? There's more than enough room for everyone, at present about 2.3 acres of inhabitable land for every person on earth. Clearly, there wasn't enough space in Hitler's head, which he projected outward.

Some on the left imply that there isn't enough space in Trump's head, but he's talking about a very different phenomenon. It is not so much that we don't have the physical space, but rather, the psychic space. Since so many immigrants refuse psycho-cultural integration (or are prevented from it by the left), this does represent an aggressive invasion of our psychic space. With enough of them, it will no longer be our cultural space at all (whereas in Germany, Jews were completely assimilated and even proud to call themselves German).

Indeed, in California, where I live, it has already happened. Thanks to illegals, we have one-party rule. There are a few pockets of conservatism left, but they have no influence on the overall cultural-political atmosphere (the space of freedom), which has gotten progressively smaller in my lifetime. How small? This small.

Speaking of space, one of the important characteristics of the Christian God is that he leaves us plenty of it. Or in other words, our God is a God of slack. You might think this is funny on the one hand, or just irrelevant on the other, but you would be wrong. In Christian metaphysics, slack is of the essence. It is the infinite space in which we live, such that no seelor can circumnavelgaze the soul, whereas for he whose soul is flat -- the sky / Will cave in on him by and by (Millay).

This is one of the organizing themes in Barron's explorations. For example, he writes that "In almost all the mythic and philosophical accounts of the God-world relationship, something like a zero-sum game obtains: the more one attributes to God, the less one can attribute to the universe and vice versa."

This is how it is in Islam, where there is literally no room for man's freedom. At present Ben Carson is undergoing his Ritual Humiliation by the left for adverting to this elementary truth.

It is the same with any form of predestination. Predestination is not only wrong, but anti-Christian to the core, because it leaves no space for human freedom. Indeed, to affirm predestination is to say that there is no distinction between Creator and creature. It is literally as if there is no creation, since the creation is just an extension of God.

But "the Christian tradition holds just the opposite." This is how Jesus can be man and God, without the one overwhelming or displacing the other. Somehow there's room for both! Which is a wild idea: in the same space there is room for the ultimate-universal and for the individual-particular.

"A second implication is that God can give and give and in no way be exhausted, for the world cannot take away from the infinity of the divine being." Indeed, "the divine life increases in the measure that it is given away," such that we may participate in this soul-expanding "self-forgetting generosity."

I can't help thinking of poor Pope Francis, who seems to have a rather narrow and cramped view of God's creation -- as if there isn't enough of it for everyone! Our immortal Sowell touches on this today, asking "which has a better track record of helping the less fortunate -- fighting for a bigger slice of the economic pie, or producing a bigger pie?"

Or in other words, when smallminded souls enviously fight over their piece of the flaming pie, we all lose. Not too long ago a million people a month were being lifted out of poverty in China thanks to Pope Francis's dreaded capitalism. Has there ever been a leftist program that accomplished a tiny fraction of this?

Want to know how to make a leftist miserable? Just double everyone's income. Everyone will be more affluent, but "income inequality" will be twice as wide, so envy will eat away any joy.

Now, God-world, or Creator-creation, is a relationship. Unlike in ancient metaphysics, the world is not an emanation, or mere prolongation, of God. In many ways, creation is the key to biblical metaphysics; or better, as Brueggemann suggests, the irreducible trinity of creator/creates/creation (or creatures), for a creator by definition creates, and creatures are what he creates.

Thus, the intellectual tradition animating Genesis is concerned with "the large issue of the relation of creator and 'creature'" (emphasis mine). Here again, we cannot have a relation to God if predestination is the case. A relationship can only exist in the space of freedom, and we could even say that freedom is literally a kind of higher dimensional phase space of potential choices.

And as alluded to by Barron, this represents a sharp break with both the ancients and the recents, in that the "'mythological' perception of reality... assumes that all the real action is with the gods and creation in and of itself has no significant value." For example, in Greek mythology, the gods just fuck with us for the sport of it, like Obama.

For the same reason, this latter metaphysic cannot support science, since science assumes an autonomous space that is free of God's direct meddling, so to speak. In other words, he allows us to figure stuff out instead of, say, putting it all down in a book from which we are not permitted to deviate. There is a reason why science did not develop in the Muslim world, and why it is under assault by the authoritarian left.

In short, "the world has been positively valued by God for itself," and "must be valued by the creatures to whom it has been provisionally entrusted." Like science, environmentalism -- the sane kind -- is a thoroughly Christian phenomenon.

Unlike that irascible nonlocal y'oql known as Allah, "the purposes of the [Judeo-Christian] creator are not implemented in a coercive way nor imposed as a tyrant might. The creator loves and respects the creation. The freedom of creation is taken seriously by the creator" (emphasis mine).

Thus, the Judeo-Christian God "authors life, but there is no hint of authoritarianism" in the text. Rather, gnoetry of Genesis valorizes a "movement towards a unity of harmony, trust, and gratitude."

In short, "the creature whom [God] has caused to be, he now lets be." That's cosmic slack, baby, and without it, life is scarcely worth creating.

Why Believe in God when You Can Undergo Him?

Continuing with yesterday's line of thought, "discovery is not a matter simply of accurate sense perception." Countless people saw apples falling from trees before one of them apocryphally perceived gravity. A human being is someone who is (at least in potential) conscious of consciousness. But in the case of discovery, it is as if we perceive perception and thereby extend it.

I wonder if every discipline follows this bimodal pattern? For example, in psychotherapy the therapist monitors his own subjective flow of impressions: he listens to the patient while simultaneously listening to his reactions to the patient.

Or history: a mere chronicle of the past reduces to antiquarianism. Rather, the exploration of the past must be guided by some implicit vision. Of course, this vision can be on a higher or lower dimension (e.g., the meta-cosmic Arc of Salvation vs. Marxism and its retarded cousins of tenure).

Consider "Bullshit Bernie" Sanders, who looks at the American founding -- surely one of the most miraculous divine ingressions in history -- and literally sees a nation founded on racist principles. Well,

"Bullshit. The United States was founded on egalitarian principles which took a while to fully effectuate because the country was born in a world where slavery was common. (It still is, in many places where Anglo-American rule does not govern.) We fought a great civil war to validate the principles of our Constitution, whose promises of freedom had nothing to do with race, as Lincoln insisted. Granted, the Democratic Party fought a spirited rear-guard action on behalf of racism that lasted for more than a century. Bernie is an inheritor of that disgraceful history."

Not only that, but "racism" didn't even exist at the time of the founding. It was later invented by Democrats to legitimize the existence of slavery once the institution was under serious threat. Slavery existed always and everywhere, and no one needed to justify it with theories of racial superiority prior to the 19th century. True, coastal Africans assumed they were superior to the less developed interior Africans they captured and sold, but this obviously wasn't a matter of race.

Recall too that racial differences were and are a matter of empirical observation. No theory was required to see them. Rather, a theory was required in order to not see them ("all men are created equal") -- just as a theory is required to counter the empirical observation that the sun revolves around the earth.

The emergence of modern science did not involve coming to our senses, but coming from and through them into deeper and more integral dimensions. Science is a new way of seeing sight or perceiving perception that transforms the particulars into new meanings. (This is the whole basis of Raccoon Emeritus Michael Polanyi's philosophy.)

It is not a matter of looking carefully. Indeed, doing so can function to reify the misapprehension. Anyone can see that the earth is flat. Yet everyone knows it isn't. This is what we mean when we say that liberals are flat-earthers: that they are always trapped in their unexamined prejudices. Cultural Marxism is simply a catchall way to keep them gorounded in absurcularities of race, class, gender, sexual preference, Power Relations, etc.

"An observational discovery is a cognitive process, and not an instantaneous point-event." In addition to "the sensory aspect, there is also a nonsensory factor in cognitive perception" (Bortoft). A discovery involves a fusion or coalescence of the two, of sense and nonsense. It is analogous to a match striking the abrasive surface and producing fire. Either one alone keeps you in the dark.

If we naively begin with the fire, we will miss the components that go into it. Consciousness has always been analogized to fire and light, and it too involves one thing striking another to produce the flame.

As we have written many times and in many ways, the human person is not located in the head, but rather, in the space between persons (i.e., person is relation). You know the gag: there is no such thing as an infant, but rather, the transitional space between infant and mother. This space is where it all goes down -- and up. But it is also the space where nothing can happen, a kind of persecutory anti-space.

I've been thinking lately about what distinguishes the one from the other, and have come to the conclusion that it involves love and passion. Remove these and the space collapses into a dead zone of boredom, restlessness, ingratitude, anhedonia, envy, etc. But when they are present, then the space is full to the point of overflowing.

If you have the "one thing needful" (or it has you, rather), then various other things are added. But if you try to elevate the secondary things to the necessary one, you end up hollowing yourself out from the inside. So, I think Christianity is correct that it comes down to the metaphysics of love.

In keeping with what was said above vis-a-vis perception and vision, religion is obviously a way of seeing and organizing and relating to the phenomena.

Now, some things are only known via an orthoparadoxical absence. To cite an obvious example, in order to see that the world is round, you have to "void" your senses so as to open up the space of theoretical vision. You have to unknow what you know in order to make a little womb for the developing seed-idea.

Obviously this absence is not nothing. I read somewhere that there are two kinds of empty. There is the empty like the inside of a basketball, and there is the empty like the inside of your stomach. Your head should be empty like your stomach (or better, a womb).

We'll leave off with some observations by David Schindler that might help pull this womb together:

"The term 'life,' rightly understood, indicates more than bare physical existence.... [I]t signifies an ordered power that comes from within, a power bearing interiority and hence depth.... Human life, whose interiority takes a spiritual form, manifests the fullest richness and intensity of life among the beings of the world....

"It is passion and interior power, then, that enable human life and action to be truly dramatic. But what is it, concretely, that gives passion and interior power their substantive content?

"To be a creature is... to bear a relation to God that presupposes a 'space' inside what is deepest and most original in the creature, one that reaches from within the roots of the creature outward.... toward the highest heights, infinitely beyond us....

"Passion and interiority, in short, disclose the deepest truths of what characterizes our creaturely openness to the infinite. They indicate the human receptive capacity for relation to God."

The point is, you don't believe in God, you undergo God. You know, like an experiment.