From I Have a Dream to A Dream Has Me!

We left off with an interesting observation by Hartshorne and a cryptic one by me. Hartshorne pointed out how billions and probably trillions of influences contribute to the experience of you and of the moment.

This is an example of an extremely weird phenomenon that is so ubiquitous that we take it for granted. For without this experience of unity -- or unitary experience -- we wouldn't be having any experiences or any discussions to begin with. Rather, our "experience" would reflect an infinitely heterogeneous world with no center. Experience would be dispersed instead of integrated.

Now, the latter does sometimes happen to human beings. We call it psychosis. A useful way to think about the psychotic person is that he has no center, no spontaneous organization of his many parts. Thus, you could say that the psychotic mind is a kind of rolling catastrophe that never resolves itself into unity -- except perhaps the faux unity of terror, or persecution, or hatred, or dread.

By the way, this does, or at least will -- I think -- touch on my cryptic comment claiming that "the so-called quantum world below is actually outside us, while the starry expanse is inside." Give me a moment. It will come to me. It's right on the tip of my temporal lobe.

In a colorful passage about the world of the psychotic, Bion speaks of a dread-full "sense of imprisonment" that "is intensified by the menacing presence of the expelled fragments within whose planetary movements he is contained." In other words, the psychotic mind is contained by what it should properly contain; it orbits around what ought to orbit it.

As an aside, I want you to assume that psychosis is not only on a continuum, but that we are all possessed of a psychotic mind (or a psychotic part of the mind, to be precise). For some of us it is integrated -- it is often implicated in creativity, for example, -- while for others it is un-integrated, untamed, unmastered.

You could even say that healthy "mental metabolism," so to speak, involves a dialectic or complementarity of psychotic <-> nonpsychotic, or what Bion calls PS <-> D for short.

And in a way, you could say that PS <-> D is very much similar to Hartshorne's description of the trillions of influences that contribute to the simple and unitary experience -- the simplest experience conceivable! -- of I AM in every moment.

BTW, I think this is what They mean when They talk about God being "simple." Not simple as in an undifferentiated blob, but simple like us despite our infinite complexity. Only in God's case, it is amplified by orders of magnitude. In other words, think of what must go into God being able to declare that I indeed AM!

Here is another important observation about the psychotic side: "Each particle is felt to consist of a real external object which is incapsulated in a piece of personality that has engulfed it" (Bion).

Here it seems we are venturing very far from the everyday map, but this is precisely in order to examine the everyday. For Bion is describing something very basic, very concrete, very experiential, i.e., that it is possible for us to inhabit a world -- a psychic space or sensorium -- that consists of persecutory objects that are vivified by the bits of our personality engulfed by them. If not for this process, then the world would just appear "dead" to the psychotic, but it is very much alive, in a monstrous and menacing way.

I would suggest and perhaps insist that something similar must be the motive force of our psychopathic Islamist monsters. For what do they see when they see us, or Paris, or Jews? Do they see them at all?

And it's not just Islamists. For we could ask the same question of the fascist snowflakes of the Campus Crybully movement, or the auto-persecutory slaves of the Black Lives Matter sickness. When the latter looks at a white person, what does he see? He sees a projected bit of his own psychic enslavement.

So, why does this Black Life project his enslavement into the external world, where it contains and persecutes him? The question answers itself, because it is a dreadful thing to be enslaved by one's own thoughts, perceptions, and passions. Yes, our first property is the self, but only if we make it so, i.e., by ruling and mastering ourselves.

You could say that the persecuted Black Life would actually prefer to be mastered by white people than to undergo the painful process of mastering himself, the only true liberation. Which is the real reason why there are so many blacks in prison -- as if you can vote for a huge government to do only pleasant things for you, and not expect it to do unpleasant things to your unmastered ass!

What Happens Next? I mean, once you inhabit a world consisting of unmetabolized and projected bits of your own personality?

"The patient now moves, not in a world of dreams, but in a world of objects which are ordinarily the furniture of dreams." These objects of psychic furniture are "primitive yet complex," and partake of various qualities which are integrated into the healthy personality, say, anger.

This really explains how and why the liberal sees us as he does. When a liberal describes a conservative, we naturally say, "Dude, that's crazy. You sound like you've never actually spoken with a conservative."

In this regard, the village liberal is like the medieval peasant who never met a Jew, but knows only that they have horns and cloven feet.

You could say that for the liberal, his intestine is where his brain should be. Thus, it is strictly inaccurate to say they have shit for brains. Rather, shit for thoughts.

It also explains why they cannot "swallow" -- which is to say, assimilate -- a thing we say. That's just not what an intestine does. Not only that, but the effort to put an object in there will naturally be experienced as an aggression, a "violent intrusion." It's why liberals are always buttsore about some microaggression.

What is the solution for this madness? A little thing called thinking: "An attempt to think involves bringing back to control, and therefore to his personality, the expelled particles and their accretions" (Bion). In so doing, the projections must be translated into words, so it can be a long and painful process.

From a very different angle, Schuon describes these same phenomena in To Have a Center. He writes of how "To be normal is to be homogeneous and to be homogeneous is to have a center."

Thus, a normal homo has his diverse sapiens (thinking) in a row: "if not altogether univocal," he is "at least concordant." He isn't fundamentally fractured and dispersed like an Islamist or campus snowflake. "Such a soul is a priori a 'house divided against itself,' and thus destined to fall, eschatologically speaking" -- which is a nice way of saying destined for hell.

Schuon even speaks of the psychopath, who, "not knowing how to master himself, has to be mastered by others." Such a man "finds his center only outside himself."

Almost all activists are of this nature, from the global warmists to Islamists to Black Lives Matter. Their only psychic continuity is an artificial narrative that they impose on the world, and they are personally threatened by any threat to the narrative -- which is what makes these snowflakes so flaky to begin with.

Let's get back to our koan about the stars being inside us and the quantum world outside. Does it have a solution?

Consider how, when light from a distant star is registered on our retina, we not only see the past, but use this information-containing light to construct the cosmos, such that the cosmos is a kind of re-projection of what we have assimilated. This is literal photo[light]synthesis.

As for the quantum world, here again, this is just a projection of the mathematics we already have inside of us.

There's more, but we're out of time for today.

Matter is the Ultimate Abstraction, Mind the Ultimate Concretion

Back to Ultimate Reality and how it gets that way. First, I think we can stipulate that it is either changeless or changing. For Plato, change and truth were essentially antithetical, which is why he sought reality outside the transient appearances of the world.

Inside his cave, all is shadow and movement, but outside the cave are the pure and unchanging forms. These forms can be trusted because they are always the same, whereas the world keeps changing on us. Thus, in the Platonic view, science deals only with the circumstances of the cave, while philosophy addresses what goes on outside.

Now, what is metaphysics? At least in the Whitehead/Hartshorne tradition, it is the study of those principles that simply Cannot Not Be True. Therefore, everything we perceive and experience (for there is no a priori reason to place "matter" above "experience") will be a special case of these more general principles.

Some people believe it is possible to think coherently without metaphysics, but they are asses. They are so naive and lacking in self-awareness that there is no reason to waste a moment arguing with them. For in fact, any statement about reality betrays any number of hidden assumptions. Thus, to deny metaphysics is to affirm it.

I was thinking about this the other day in reading Ridley's Evolution of Everything. Here he is, at once insisting that free will is an illusion, and yet, trying to convince us that this is the case. So which is it: are we free to assent to truth, or not?

Although free will is self-evident -- for it reveals itself to be so in any meaningful communication -- it is also easy to prove (onto)logically. Yes, things have causes. However, there are so many causes that go into being human -- literally millions of them -- that this equates to being undetermined by them.

What I mean is that the causes are many -- even infinitely many, considering our billions (or is it trillions?) of neural interconnections, not to mention whatever is going on at the quantum level.

And yet we -- assuming we are healthy, AKA whole -- are one. Now, how does that even happen? In other words, how do the trillions of causes harmoniously resolve themselves into one effect, if that effect isn't its own (at least partial) cause of those effects?

I always remember something Whitehead wrote back in 1925, and I've never heard it refuted: that

"an electron within a living body is different from an electron outside it, by reason of the plan of the body. The electron blindly runs either within or without the body; but it runs within the body in accordance with its character within the body; that is to say, in accordance with the general plan of the body, and this plan includes its mental state" (emphasis mine).

Therefore, biology (or organism) by definition transcends physics: you can't get to the former solely by way of the latter.

A reductionist such as Ridley pretends that we are only a consequence of lower causes such as chemicals and genes and instincts, when there is actually a two-way causation, from the bottom up and top down. This ubiquitous dual causation is another cosmic complementarity.

But I ask you: of the two forms of causation, which must be primary? Is it even intellectually conceivable that those trillions of causes could result in the simplest and most unitary experience of them all, I AM? Indeed, without this latter, it is not even possible to entertain the idea of causality.

Ultimately, we would say that, just as being is an abstraction from becoming, part is an abstraction from whole, and material and efficient causation are abstractions from formal and final causation.

Indeed, matter itself is an abstraction from something that is always flowing and always interiorly related. There is no such thing as an unambiguous bit of exterior matter, right here and right now, unrelated to everything else.

This only highlights how any form of ideology -- whether political or religious or scientistic -- is really an idolatry, or an elevation of some abstraction to the concrete reality.

This is precisely the burden Obama's little mind labors under, such that he can no longer even perceive concrete reality. In other words, he is trapped inside an ideological abstraction that forces concrete facts to comport with it.

And people say the second commandment is irrelevant!

Again: matter itself is an abstraction. Therefore, what is actually concrete?

What is concrete and undeniable is organism. To paraphrase Whitehead, biology is the study of large organisms, while physics is the study of small ones. Indeed, thanks to relativity and quantum physics, we now understand that cosmology is the study of the largest organism (excluding God, i.e., the metacosmic organism of the Trinity).

Where were we?

I'll just close off with a relevant quote by Hartshorne:

[T]he stimuli moulding an experience are many.... but all this multiplicity of influences is to produce a single unitary experience, yours or mine right now, let us say.

The effect is one; the causes, however, are many, literally hundreds of thousands, billions even, considering the cells in our brains, for example. This vast multitude of factors must flow together to produce a single new entity, the experience of the moment.

I also wanted to say something about how the so-called quantum world below is actually outside us, while the starry expanse is inside, but maybe we'll get to that tomorrow, when I regather my many thoughts into another one post.

Constitutional Law is What You Can Get Away With

In response to people who aren't so sure it's a good idea to import thousands of Muslims into the country at this particular time, President Obama said that failure to do so would represent a "betrayal of our values."

He didn't specify which ones, but he was probably referring to well-known liberal value of being so broadminded as to refuse to take one's own side in a war. Indeed, the left has effectively been fighting for the Islamists since 9-11, so it would be hypocritical to stop now.

Being that this country -- love it or hate it -- was explicitly founded upon Judeo-Christian principles, it is a little difficult to understand why giving priority to Christian refugees would betray those values. Christians throughout the Middle East are being murdered by Muslims.

By way of analogy, "in the 1930s and 40s it should have been permissible for American officials to view Jewish refugees from Nazi-occupied territory differently from those of, say, non-Jewish Germans who sought to flee Europe..."

It is actually a betrayal of our values not to let these persecuted Christians jump to the head of the line.

Even -- or especially -- Muslims should be able to acknowledge that our values are not Muslim values. Consider the plight of the so-called Palestinians, who only exist because no Arab-Muslim state will absorb these pathetic refugees.

In actual practice, "Muslim values" dictate that the Palestinians remain a permanently stateless people so as to pose a mortal threat to Israel. That is why they exist. There is no Judeo-Christian analogue to weaponizing a people for the purposes of promoting genocide.

Islamic values dictate that man exists to surrender to God, and by extension, to the state. Thus, there is nothing un-Islamic per se about the Islamic state. Indeed, every Arab constitution is rooted in Sharia law, which is as it should be (if one is to embrace Muslim values).

Our values hold that government exists for us, not we for it. Prior to the separation of church and state is the separation of society and government. Our culture was a spontaneous outgrowth of our Judeo-Christian values, and the purpose of government is to protect this sphere of liberty and personal responsibility, i.e., self-governance.

Why do we have a constitution? For one reason, which bifurcates into two. That is, it is to protect us from tyranny. But tyranny comes in two forms, from the tyrant and the mob. Note that if we were actually a democracy, then no constitution would be necessary, since law would be reduced to the tyranny of the majority.

Now, does the federal government have the power to compel the states to accept foreign refugees they don't want? The question answers itself, for no one would have signed the constitution if they were signing away such a power.

As Madison wrote, "The powers delegated by the proposed Constitution to the federal government are few and defined. Those which are to remain in the state governments are numerous and indefinite" (in Charles, emphasis mine).

And the latter "extend to all the objects which, in the ordinary course of affairs, concern the lives, liberties, and properties of the people, and the internal order, improvement, and prosperity of the state." It seems to me that the forced importation of potential terrorists touches on the latter three.

Jefferson, commenting on the above, wrote that "To take a single step beyond the boundaries" of the enumerated powers "is to take possession of a boundless field of power, no longer susceptible to definition."

Unfortunately, that horse has long since left the barn. For example, if the federal government can force us to purchase a particular kind of health insurance, what can't it force us to do? What is the principle that protects one from the reach of the state, if it can already reach into our bodies -- if our "first property" isn't even our own?

Now, what does this all have to do with ultimate reality?

Well, one's vision of ultimate reality is necessarily the source of one's values, is it not? The real issue is that for a nihilist such as Obama, his only value is power.

And being that Professor Obama is a liberal Constitutional Scholar, he knows as well as anyone that constitutional law is defined by what you can get away with, precisely. Time and again throughout his presidency he has proven that this is a nation of law, and that the law is what he wants it to be.

But if this value of his is truly universal, it means that we too are the source of our own truth, law, and reality, so we are free to ignore this dimwitted pest.

Ultimate Reality: I Think it Moved

It happens. Flat out of inspiration at the moment. It always comes back eventually, but one doesn't want to have a sense of entitlement. If you have any ideas for subjects, feel free to share.

If only for my own benefit, I would like to take time to review why I think God not only changes, but must be the very essence of change.

As we've discussed before, changelessness tends to get a free ride -- and change an unfair reputation -- because of the ancient Greeks. In turn, the early fathers, because they wanted to show that Christianity could be reconciled with the most prestigious philosophy of the time, identified the Judeo-Christian God with the Greek/Neoplatonic One.

But if we simply take the Bible as it is, and develop a metaphysic from that, then I don't see how anyone could affirm that God in no way changes.

And yet, this is still the Official View. Through the application of pure reason, contemporary Thomists affirm that because things obviously change, this necessitates the existence of an unchanged; or, because things move, there must be an unmoved mover, otherwise we end in an absurd infinite regress in which we have effects with no cause.

But I think God goes to all the trouble of revealing himself as Trinity for a reason. If the Trinity is the foundation of existence, then surely this must imply some kind of ceaselessly creative change, no? In other words, the first cause is not a substance or a thing, but a process -- not a noun but a verb.

Verb, of course, is cognate to word. Just sayin'.

Hartshorne covers this topic in his Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method (which I do not recommend -- too turgid and diffuse). He points out that "Prior to the twentieth century, scarcely any philosopher... saw in the idea of creativity a fundamental principle, a category applicable to all reality."

It wasn't really until Whitehead, and I suppose Bergson before, that process, creativity, and evolution began to be appreciated in their own right.

Now, the moment I encountered Whitehead, I concluded that what he was saying Must Be True. Not all of it -- I am not a Whiteheadian -- but at least the broad outlines. I'm trying to think back on when I first bumped into him... must have been in the early 1980s, and he has been an implicit touchstone ever since (as has Polanyi).

I don't know, maybe I'm a little effed up in the head, but someone needs to explain to me how God can "create" without undergoing change. It seems to me that there is no way to squeeze creativity out of a changeless entity, unless you just play word games.

Let's look at it in a purely logical manner: the world isn't necessary, but rather, contingent. We can all agree on that. It didn't have to come into being. Rather, God had a choice.

Or, maybe you are suggesting that God had the choice of whether or not to be creative, and that if he had chosen not to create, then there would be no such thing as creativity? Nevertheless, this implies the possibility of creating, i.e., potential (which, in the traditional view, God is not supposed to have; rather, he is all act and no potency).

I just remembered my key takeaway from reading Whitehead: it is that ultimate reality is subject rather than object. This goes to the discussion in the last post, and to my rejection of Matt Ridley's vision of cosmic evolution: for him, it is as if it is objects all the way down, whereas for Whitehead, it is subjects all the way down.

To be precise, subject-object is one of our primordial cosmic complementarities. However, as with all cosmic complementarities, one must be prior, and in this case it is the subject, because you cannot get a subject out of an object, but you can get objects from the subject.

Now, to say that ultimate reality is subjective is but a step away from saying it is Person. Looking at the Trinity, we can say that it is one process with three "objects" (in a manner of speaking). Or better, there is this subject-object vector at the very heart of reality. When a person relates to another person, it is in the form of both subject and object.

Back to the divine creativity: "a free agent must create something in himself, even if he decides not to create anything else; for the decision, if free, is itself a creation."

For Hartshorne, the implication is that "freedom is self-creation," or in other words, freedom means not being determined by outside agents. To the extent one is determined, one is not free. So God is either changeless or he is free.

It seems to me that to be made in the image of God is to be invited to participate in God's trinitarian nature.

Or, let's turn it around and suppose that the God of whom we are the image and likeness is the unmoved mover. In this view, "God influences all things, nothing influences God. For him there are no 'stimuli'..." Is this how God wants us to be? An unchangeable absolute? How can something that is admirable in God be sociopathic for humans?

I read somewhere over the weekend that the Father is God beyond us, the Son God with us, and the Spirit God in us. How in particular can God be with us without being truly open to us?

Hartshorne completely inverts the traditional view in a way that I find quite appealing. That is, instead of being the distant and absolute unmoved mover, God is the most relative thing conceivable, as in relationship. He is related to everything and everyone, most intensely to human persons.

And although Hartshorne nowhere mentions the Trinity, God's relatedness must be because he is intensely related even -- or quintessentially -- to himself: ultimate reality is pure relationship and therefore "relativity." It moves.

A Cosmic Ramble Between the Many and the One

I wonder if it's a coincidence that our totalitarian college students are laboring under the same deficiency as our president: a congenital inability to join in with the rest of us and laugh at themselves.

One quick way to limit the "problem" of racial insensitivity on college campuses would be to end racial discrimination, AKA affirmative action. One suspects that the students who have been affirmatively acted upon are the most acutely aware of an unconscious inferiority that needs to be denied and projected into others.

People who excessively project are never funny, because what they are projecting is always a matter of fierce urgency -- which is why they are projecting it to begin with.

When I see students who looks like this,

I immediately assume they have no business being in an institute of higher learning, but that they have been inserted there for reasons of "diversity." Is this insensitive? Well, then end the racial discrimination to which I am sensitive. I don't have the same perception when I see an Asian student wandering around the engineering department. I have never wondered how on earth Thomas Sowell or Walter Williams or Shelby Steele managed to earn their PhDs.

Back to the subject of how these cosmic assouls get that way. Yesterday we spoke of how the revolution of 1776 wasn't a revolution at all, but a restatement and a recovery. There was, however, a revolution prior to it, but it was an interior revolution. In the words of John Adams,

"The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people; a change in their religious sentiments of their duties and obligations.... This radical change in the principles, obligations, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people was the real American Revolution" (in Charles).

In turn, I would say that this revolution was actually an evolution, or a psycho-pneumatic development. This is what renders it cosmically universal instead of being just an idiosyncratic feature of our particular culture. To put it another way, the principles upon which the interior revolution was founded were discovered, not invented, much less imposed in a top-down manner.

Liberty, truth, creativity, and virtue are all intimately related, such that none can be detached from the others without losing its meaning. This is the great error of a truly awful book I'm slogging through called The Evolution of Everything, by Matt Ridley. I hardly know where to begin.

Yes, most everything is evolving, but the fact that we can say this means that at least one thing isn't evolving. That would be a little thing called truth. Unless you believe nothing is true, in which case your theory of evolution falls by its own standard.

Another book I do not recommend but which contains far more truth about cosmic evolution is Charles Hartshorne's Creative Synthesis & Philosophic Method, for at least he is a philosopher, and therefore understands the religious and metaphysical implications of an evolutionary cosmos. Unlike Ridley, he is not a boneheaded materialist.

If Everything is Evolving, it means that becoming takes precedence over being, and with this axiom we have no disagreement. But just because you have eliminated the abstract and static Greek God of Pure Being, it hardly means you have dispensed with God. It just means you have dispatched a certain image or projection of God. An idol.

But what if Creativity is our first principle? Then it should come as no surprise that Everything is Evolving; plus there is the added benefit of understanding how it can be that things evolve toward higher and deeper and more comprehensive unities. Then you are not reduced to positing almighty Chance as your ultimate category, which is another way of saying that you have no explanation, or that the Answer is "just becuz."

For Hartshorne, "To be is to create." What this means is that being is actually an abstraction of becoming, not vice versa. Once you recognize this, then it all falls together. Creativity always involves the attainment of a kind of higher unity, of -- to paraphrase Whitehead -- the many becoming one and increasing by one.

The many → one vector is not deterministic. Thus, in the creative act between many and one is our freedom.

Now, that might sound a little abstract, but I assure you it isn't. Recall what was said a few posts back about our political liberty:

"In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power" (Charles). But in America it is precisely the converse: here "charters of power" are "granted by liberty.... [T]he American people were telling the government of their own creation what its powers were, not being told by that government what their liberties were."

It's quite a striking contrast: for the left, liberty is granted by power. But for us, power is granted by liberty. And liberty is completely intertwined with truth, and before that, the divine love. In other words, while the source of liberty is not in the state, it still has a source. That source is and must be God (as made explicit in the Declaration).

To be is to create, and we cannot create if we aren't free. Therefore, the highest form of freedom is really a creative becoming. Which, in my opinion, also happens to be the terrestrial icon of God, for God is free, he creates, and he is relationship, and therefore undergoes a kind of endless trinitarian "becoming." Otherwise he'd be bored stiff, and we'd be too. God is an adventure -- with us, obviously, but also in himself.

As for Ridley, who has overstepped the boundaries of his matter-mind and is trying to operate way above his evolutionary paygrade:

If anything is unscientific, it is the denial of aspects of existence because they seem inconvenient for our methods.... Science has enough to do if it seeks to trace out the mechanisms which underlie and limit creativity. The creative as such is perhaps outside the sphere of science.... philosophy and religion exist to restore the total perspective, taking all legitimate interests of man into account. --Hartshorne

Who Wants to Help Me Get this Gagdad Person Out of this Post? I Need Some Muscle Over Here!

Continuing with yesterday's theme, what would America's founders say if they could witness the emergence of fascism on our university campuses and see that It Has Come To This -- this being precisely what they most fretted about in founding our republic?

In order to flesh out our theme, I will be playgiarizing with Yuval Levin's The Great Debate and Joshua Charles' Liberty's Secrets, both of which contain a wealth of timely observations by the founders, by thinkers who preceded and/or influenced them (such as Burke and Locke), and by people they influenced in return (such as Tocqueville).

The point is that our liberal universities have managed to completely invert the vision of the founders, such that they must be the most un-American places in America.

Here is Burke: "Men must have a certain fund of natural moderation to qualify them for freedom, else it becomes noxious to themselves and a perfect nuisance to everybody else."

Oh really? Hey, who wants to help me get this dead white male out of this post? I need some muscle over here!

Speaking of witch, Burke, commenting in a letter on the latest news from France, wrote that "the elements which compose human society seem all to be dissolved, and a world of monsters to be produced in the place of it."

I can't imagine being threatened by Halloween monsters, but I can imagine being frightened by the specter of this barbaric kookie monsteress on campus->

Ah, here is a perfect encrapsulation of what should really frighten us: "the combination of philosophical pretensions and applied savagery," of "mob rule making its case in metaphysical abstractions" (Levin).

Philosophical pretensions? Metaphysical abstractions? Surely you can't mean the esteemed Professor Click, whose gold-plated resume of left wing tenurebabble is as broad as it is deep -- everything from The commodification of femininity, affluence and whiteness in the Martha Stewart phenomenon to Lady Gaga, fan identification, and social media.

If only she would have followed her own sage advice in responding to the hegemonic masculinity of that poor journalist: Let's Hug It Out, Bitch.

Little known fact: that is exactly what Madison said to Hamilton upon passage of the Great Compromise of 1787.

I need some muscle over here. That is indeed the credo of the left, being that they worship power and not truth. Therefore, Professor Click and her ilk are hardly doctors of philosophy, but rather, enforcers of heterodoxy, i.e., Correct Opinion. If they have a doctorate, it is in kinesiology, which involves the correct movement of muscle groups.

A university degree in anything other than science, math, or engineering is the equivalent of a Participation Trophy, and worth just as much.

One of the founding fatwas of the left is the Declaration of the Rights of Man of the French Revolution. Of this abstract and unworkable crockument, Burke wrote that it was "filled with a foolish 'abuse of elementary principles as would have disgraced a schoolboy,'" and was "a sort of institute and digest of anarchy" (in Levin).

The great difference between the American and French Revolutions is that ours was never a revolution to begin with. Rather, it was a reaffirmation and reestablishment of settled rights that Americans had been living with for over a century. Being that we lived under conditions of liberty, it meant that we were mature enough to handle liberty.

In order for liberty to exist, human beings must be capable of self-rule. Note that this has nothing to do with the self-rule of democracy. Rather, this is rule of oneself, and it must be prior to the state. In establishing the democratic state, we will only be loaning a bit of our own self-rule to it. Our liberty is neither created nor conferred by the state.

Now, what happens if we try to have a democracy composed of immature and irresponsible human beings who are incapable of self-rule?

Bingo! The the ascent of Obama, of Black Lives Matter, of liberal university unrest, of borderless EUnuchs, of knife-wielding Palestinians, etc.

A question from John Adams to our boneheaded students and the feckless people who run our universities. In response to the magnificent gift of liberty bequeathed by the founders, he asked if it is really possible that we can have so many "young American[s] indolent and incurious, surrendered up to dissipation and frivolity, vain of imitating the loosest manners of countries which can never be made much better or much worse?"

Yes. We. Can!

America's Founders Apologize for Our University Fascists

Continuing with yesterday's inquiry into the deep structure of cosmic assoulery, as we have said many times, if one begins with an inaccurate assessment of human nature, then one's politics will be accordingly messed up.

Before beginning a consideration of political arrangements, one simply must understand what man is. Failing that, man will bite you every time.

You will have noticed that for the left, the question doesn't come up, since they pretend not to believe in human nature. However, they are never consistent about this, and will hide behind it when it is expedient to do so.

For example, they simultaneously tell us that gender is a social construct but that homosexuality is genetically fixed. Or that women are the same as men, but that we need to lower standards for women.

The left argues that all cultures are equally valuable, but any culture is only valuable to the extent that it promotes human flourishing, or the actualization of human potential.

However, if we fail to respect human nature, it is difficult to actualize human potential. In this regard, it is useful to think of human nature as a fixed variable, human potential as the dependent variable. Quash or maim human nature, and human potential will be stillborn -- as, for example, in the Arab Muslim world.

"Politics ought to be adjusted not to human reasonings but to human nature, of which reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part" (Burke, in Levin). Burke made this comment in the context of explaining how the American colonists "had over time developed robust habits of freedom and an independent spirit," such that "some reasonable effort must be made to accommodate their character."

In other words, reason had to bow before our wholly unreasonable love of freedom!

Which sounds odd, but we are clearly having the same argument today, with the Obama administration constantly undermining our "useless" freedom in the name of some "reasonable" goal, such as socialized medicine. It doesn't matter to Obama -- and to the left -- that his proposals go against our nature. What is the point of freedom, when we are in a crisis! And for the left, we are always in a crisis, so there is always a good reason to revoke our freedoms.

For example, the left manufactured a "healthcare crisis" in order to ram through Obamacare. Likewise, the government-caused mortgage crisis was the pretext to give us Porkulus.

You may not remember the "homeless crisis" during the Reagan years, because it magically disappeared once he left office. Then there was the "energy crisis" of the Carter years. To see just how silly that one was, this is all you need to know: the more oil we use, the more we find. It's like the free market works or something.

Before that was the Poverty Crisis of the 1960s, which is still with us today despite (or because of) trillions of dollars thrown at it.

And the Mother of All Crises was the Great Depression. That is indeed the archetype, because it was caused and prolonged by the very government interventions that were supposed to have ameliorated it. The left is still dining out on the myth of FDR saving capitalism from itself.

At the moment we have the Immigration Crisis and the Global Warming Crisis.

This is another fine example of the intellectual incoherence of the left, because -- using their logic -- the more immigrants that come to America, the worse the global warming, because these immigrants will leave a much larger carbon footprint here than in Central America. If there is really a Global Warming Crisis, then we must turn away immigrants for their own good and for the sake of the planet.

In Liberty's Secrets, Charles provides numerous examples of how the Founders first meditated deeply on human nature before going on to the secondary task of constructing a political system. Because they put things in their proper order, they were under no delusion that the purpose of politics was to change human nature. Rather, they took human beings as they found them, with all their greed, vanity, laziness, selfishness, lust for power, and desire for unfair advantage.

They also looked closely at history, being that history is just the prolongation of human nature. To put it another way, if you want to know what human beings are like, consider what they do. If you are honest, you will strain to produce even a tie between man's good and bad qualities and attainments. I remember Charles Murray addressing this in his Human Accomplishment:

What "can Homo sapiens brag about -- not as individuals, but as a species?... Military accomplishment is out -- putting 'Defeated Hitler' on the human resume is too much like putting 'beat my drug habit' on a personal one."

Likewise, governance and commerce "are akin to paying the rent and putting food on the table..." On the whole, "We human beings are in many ways a sorry lot, prone to every manner of vanity and error. The human march forward has been filled with wrong turns, backsliding, and horrible crimes."

And the most horrible atrocities have been committed by secular utopians who deny human nature and insist that humans are infinitely malleable products of their environment or class.

"So what was the secret of the Founders' insights?... The answer is very simple: they understood human nature and history. That is it" (Charles).

"[I]t was not as if we could evolve or mold human nature into whatever pleasing image we sought to achieve. It is what it is, but even amid the sobering reality of its excesses and imperfections, it was capable of rising above them to achieve great things, though never on a permanent basis. The 'dark side' always had to be kept in check through constant and unceasing vigilance" (ibid.).

There are many priceless quotes in Liberty's Secrets, but I think my favorite is this, from John Adams. Imagine if he could see the fascists on our university campuses today!

Posterity! You will never know how much it cost the present generation to preserve your freedom! I hope you make good use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in heaven that I ever took half the pains to preserve it.

*****

Bad news/good news -- they'll never actualize their potential, but at least they'll destroy our culture: "These people will produce nothing. They will create no great art, write no symphonies, conjure no novels that speak across the decades, sculpt nothing of beauty. The world outside the bubble is irredeemable. It cannot, of course, be remade all at once, but tomorrow's a new day. Rome wasn't wrecked in a day" (Lileks).

In Search of the Deep Structure of Cosmic Assoulery

A couple weeks ago someone at PowerLine made the point that the rift in the Republican party is not so much between conservatives and RINOs, establishment and Tea Party, but between those who think our disagreements with the left are just politics as usual, and those who believe (I would say "recognize") the left is pure evil.

He didn't use the term "pure evil," but the point is that these are not normal political times, and that we cannot deal with the left as if we simply have routine policy disputes that can be settled via compromise. Or maybe you like a little feces in your ice cream.

What is the deepest of deep structures that explains the surface differences between left and right? What are the First Principles that account for all the secondary differences? You could say "ignorance," but ignorance per se has no structure. It's just nothing, so there must be some deeper reason why the LoFos trend leftard.

There are of course LoFo conservatives, but usually they are able to draw upon some deeper well of wisdom, such as religion. Which is why a LoFo conservative may well be a HiWis, whereas a HiFo liberal -- e.g., the tenured -- may be appallingly low in wisdom.

As we've discussed in the past, one of the benefits of religion is that, from a purely evolutionary standpoint, it discourages humans from trying things that centuries of collective experience have discovered to be harmful. I mean, you can hardly go wrong if you obey the Ten Commandments, even if you aren't a believer.

Yuval Levin's The Great Debate attempts to drill down to the deep structure of our politics, using Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine as archetypes. If he is implying that the differences originate in these two writers (and I'm not sure that he does), then he's wrong. Rather, these two figures are already representatives of a deeper archetypal reality.

This same archetypal difference accounts for the very different assumptions and consequences of the American and French revolutions. The latter, for example, "launched in earnest the modern quest for social progress through unyielding political action guided by philosophical principle" (Levin). And every evil revolution since then has attempted the same thing, from the Soviets to the Mullahs.

This flight into abstraction and idealism is very much in contrast to the empiricism and moderation of the Anglo-American tradition. In Europe, Marxists wield real power, whereas in America we mostly confine them to the looniversity bin of academia. Or at least this was the case until about 40 years ago, since which time the left has completely taken over the Democratic party.

Note that nothing else in nature works in the abstract, top-down manner of the left. Rather, everything in nature is organic, systemic, and complex.

Furthermore, evolution is intrinsically conservative, in that it preserves "what works" and eliminates what doesn't. Obviously the key to life -- or going-on-living -- is to preserve what allows it to flourish and avoid what doesn't.

This has direct implications for our well-being. For example, researchers "have identified increases in suicide and drug and alcohol related deaths among high school educated white Americas as the cause for a remarkable spike in the overall death rate for middle-aged white Americans. Various experts express surprise, shock, and sadness. I can understand the sadness, but not the surprise."

Exactly. What do you expect when millions of people don't just vote left, but actually incarnate its demonic principles?:

"For the last few decades, cultural leaders have been waging a war on the weak. Their goal is to dismantle traditional norms and rules for family life. They push to dismantle gender roles and other foundational categories that ordinary people use to orient themselves and make sense out of their lives....

"The upshot: reliable guides toward a normal life are removed, and potentially destructive behaviors that rich people either avoid or discretely manage are normalized. The most vulnerable pay the cost."

So, yes, the left helps the little guy. To ruin his life and even kill himself.

Speaking of traditional categories to help guide us through reality, what could be more empirical -- more of an existential given -- than the differences between the sexes?

Conversely, what could be more insanely abstract than ignoring the message of our bodies, a message that refers to its complementary opposite? Male refers to female, and vice versa. Each by itself has no meaning whatsoever. Rather, they become mere abstractions torn from their context:

"The male-female difference is a fundamental, orienting reality in every culture. Having a sense of oneself as a man or woman gives us a place to stand in the world. The transgender revolution represents that latest, most dramatic stage in today’s efforts to efface the social authority of the male-female difference."

Once again, the LoFo "little guys" the left pretends to care about are hardest hit: "kids and young adults from poorly educated households are deprived of a functional language to talk about what it means to be a man or woman. Without such a language, they can’t see themselves as successfully being men or women. And so they are deprived of a baseline adult achievement that come-of-age rituals in traditional cultures have always celebrated."

So the war on sexual differences goes much deeper than sex, all the way down to ontology. Thus, it is an attack on being, on our most primordial cosmic signposts.

One of the benefits of respect for sexual differences is that it opens up the possibility of cultural spheres that are free of sexual tension. But the left is well on the way to destroying all such sex-free zones.

Consider how quickly we went from homosexuals in the military to the federal government now forcing high school girls to shower with boys who think they're girls. In the name of the Constitution!

So now, the violence of the state is being used to deny the basic reality of sexual differences. Or in other words, diabolical Power is shamelessly tearing truth from our midst by the root.

As someone said, fascism is the violent rejection of transcendence, in this case the transcendent complementarity of male and female. Reminds me of that crack by George Orwell:

If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face -- forever.

(Related.)

Idolaters and How They Get That Way.

This is a continuation of Friday's post, but it is ALL NEW, not a pretread.

If the second commandment is to not worship graven images -- idols -- then the second commandment of nihilism must be to do the opposite: to venerate and bow down before things that are less than God.

One of the unblogged books on my spindle goes to this question, God and the Ways of Knowing. I see that it is heavily highlighted, so it must have had some good points.

First of all, until the arrival of modern man, there were no men who didn't know God; or, more accurately, who didn't know religion. What or who they worshipped was a different matter.

Thus, Danielou's first chapter is called The God of the Religions, for "An aptitude for religion is a human datum." In other words, religiosity is a fact about man. For secularists it is only a fact about man, but they strain to come up with plausible reasons for why man has this instinct for transcendence.

Does man have any other evolved instincts that do not correspond to any external object? For example, eyes are adapted to light, ears to sound, the sex drive to the complementary sex object.

As such, it seems to me that denial of the object-of-worship is the alpha and omega of deconstruction. For example, is it any coincidence that the same people who deny God also deny that sexuality has any proper object? Or that they sever knowledge from the known, thus abolishing truth? Or morals from morality, thus effacing virtue?

Indeed, "God reveals himself not only through the voice of the visible world, but also through that of the moral conscience." We could say that the commandments aren't just commandments but reminders, i.e., that "the divine will is also graven upon the table of the heart by the finger of God, which is the Spirit." If this weren't the case, the commandments would make no sense to us, nor could they be so readily inverted by nihilists.

"If He is always unknown, He is also, paradoxically well-known." There are no atheists, "only men who believe in God, without knowing exactly what they believe."

If man is always intuiting God, then God must always be communicating himself. Thus, "pagan religions are like rays of cosmic revelation, refracted through a humanity spoiled by sin and not yet enlightened by positive revelation." As such "error is always mingled with truth" -- or, for our purposes, idolatry with religion proper.

This, by the way, is why God has to first form a relationship with a people. To have started with a person before there existed a people to nurture and receive him would have made no sense.

Here is one of the weirder attempts I've seen recently of idolaters trying to save their idol, Scientists Say Religion Makes Children More Selfish. First of all, SCIENTISTS SAY is a transparent appeal to idolatry. The whole study is so tendentious. If they were honest, they'd just make the obvious point that being genuinely religious makes one less susceptible to idolatrous substitutes such as liberalism (and science).

"Two thousand years were needed to plant the roots of monotheism deep in a humanity" which is only too prone to raising self-reflecting altars. Note that such a worshipper still sees an "image of God," only it is his own reflected image. "And how difficult it was to uproot this element from human souls!"

The task never ends, for man's development is always on a continuum that preserves the earlier stages. For example, our minds contain recollections of childhood and even infancy that continue to shape and influence us through life. That being the case, somewhere deep down we must all be polytheistic pagans.

Which is why there is always a fertile soil for it under various modern guises -- e.g., the cult of global warming -- and why the second commandment goes to this ubiquitous temptation.

God... speaks to every human soul through the cosmos, the conscience, and the spirit. But, in its quest for God, the pagan soul falls by the wayside. Lacking the support of a positive revelation, it expresses clumsily what it sees; it falters and is deceived.... [This] explains its profound appeal as it rises from the depths of religious manhood towards that light which it will only find in the fullness of Jesus Christ. --Jean Danielou

The Top Ten Commandments of Nihilism

Today is Friday, which is the day we trundle down into the knowa's arkive and see what we can find. Today I tripped over an old box labeled THE TEN COMMANDMENTS OF NIHILISM. Here's the first, with much extraneous pnemuababble edited out for your convenience. Even so, I consider it all rather obvious, and therefore lame by our standards.

.... [T]he first commandment of nihilism is the converse of the actual first commandment. Instead of “I am your God and you shall have no other gods before me,” the parallel looniverse of the secular left begins with the commandment that “There is no Absolute and you shall abase yourselves before all of the sacred relativities we have inserted in its place.”

From this first commandment follow all of implications and ramifications of nihilism. You might say that the subsequent nine commandments are fractals of the first, in that each of them represents the first in miniature -- or shall we say, the first commandment applied to this or that more limited realm -- just as the real first commandment is the basis and foundation of the other nine (i.e., take away the first and the subsequent nine are drained of meaning).

Also, it should be kept in mind that the first five commandments apply to the vertical (i.e., human-to-God relations), the second five to the horizontal (i.e., human-to-human relations). But in the case of the ten commandments of nihilism, there is reversal, such that the vertical commandments become horizontalized, while the horizontal ones become verticalized.

The first commandment of nihilism is that God, the Absolute, does not exist, and that you shall have no gods before this. Therefore, the commandment affirms that the vertical does not exist, and that there is only the horizontal, or relative.

This redounds to the horizontalization of the vertical, which instantaneously creates an absurd universe. Whereas God created the universe ex nihilo -- i.e., something from nothing -- the devout nihilist creates (although it is really an act of destruction) nothing out of something.

One reason why we object to leftism is that it represents the political program of nihilism -- i.e, the horizontal implications of the vertical commandments of nihilism. However, since the nihilist's cosmos is literally upside-down, this means that that the nihilist's political program becomes absolute -- which is to say, totalitarian.

.... Man was made to know and to worship the Absolute. If you eliminate the Absolute, then you will simply insert something else in its place -- a false absolute -- which is what all statist, socialist, and collectivist schemes do.

In this regard, America's founding prophets were the diamatriarchal opposite of Hillary. In contrast to her, their philosophy represents the political program of true vertical insight and understanding. This is why they could say with perfect clarity that we are endowed by our Creator with certain inalienable rights.

This is just another way of saying that the Absolute exists a priori, and that our inalienable rights only exist in light of this fact. Take away the Absolute, and no rights can intrinsically exist.

.... If human beings are really nothing more than Darwinian machines that result from a random shuffling of genetic material, then obviously there can be no absolute rights, only human agreements. By definition, our rights cannot be rooted in anything transcendent or timelessly true.

Again, the only thing we ask of leftists is that they have the courage of their absence of convictions and admit that their first commandment pulls certain inevitable ramifications in its wake, including the absence of any meaning aside from what they make up -- which is the denial of meaning, precisely.

Liberty too can only be derived from the real first commandment -- which is why the first commandment of nihilism always leads to one or another form of slavery....

This is why surrender to God is the way of liberty, while surrender to anything less is the way of slavery. Therefore, St. Paul is simply passing along a metaphysical truism when he says Now the Lord is the Spirit; and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty.

.... A nihilist thinks he is free -- after all, he has replaced God with himself, and is therefore the most exalted thing in the universe. However, there is a big difference between being "lost" and being "free." If I drop you off in the middle of the Sahara desert and set you loose with no means of communication or transportation, you are certainly free.

But one is only free in a meaningful sense if the freedom has a direction, a meaning, an end. Your freedom is only valuable because it is the existential prerequisite to arriving at a meaningful destination.

Secular leftists are not necessarily mentally retarded, but they are spiritually so by their own acknowledgment. Indeed, they are proud of their infirmity. They write books about it, teach classes in it, publish newspapers to propagate it, found political programs upon it. Their nonstop evangelization obviously implies that they want us to be like them -- which is to say, slaves: it's always back to Egypt for you!

On Speaking Truth to Freedom and Freedom to Power

In a diabolical subversion, the left has managed to use the power of the state -- which is founded on certain a priori truths -- to deny the truths upon which it is founded.

This has been done in the name of a "liberalism" that now means precisely the opposite of what it originally did. The result is a subversion --> inversion --> perversion of the very values and virtues that are supposed to define us.

I was reminded of this when viewing this awful video of Latino children cursing at Donald Trump. It is perverse on several levels, but prior to the perversion are subversion and inversion. To the inverted person, it isn't perverse at all to abuse children in such a despicable way. The left doesn't know this is inappropriate, nor do they have any moral basis for seeing it as such.

Yesterday we spoke of the baleful effects of the self-esteem movement. To even place children in this position is to transmit the message to them that their opinions are of some consequence. I didn't know much as a ten year old, but at least I knew enough to know I didn't know shit about politics, and that any adult who imagined otherwise had to be dangerous.

I don't get it. Mexicans have already (by definition) made one country in their image. They flee that country in the millions, and now they -- at least the 67% who vote Democrat -- want to remake this country in their image. But to where will they flee if they succeed? They've already succeeded in making California a failed state under one party authoritarian rule, just like their homeland.

Charles cites a passage by James Madison that perfectly encapsulates what I would call the "political metaphysics" of our nation:

"In Europe, charters of liberty have been granted by power." But in America it is precisely the converse: here "charters of power" are "granted by liberty."

This one is worth emphasizing, because it is the key to the whole existentialada. As Charles writes, "the American people were telling the government of their own creation what its powers were, not being told by that government what their liberties were."

It's quite a striking contrast: for the left, liberty is granted by power. But for us, power is granted by liberty.

In order to truly appreciate this, one must again realize that liberty is not mere absence of coercion. It cannot be defined just negatively (which is where libertarians go off the rails).

Rather, it is completely intertwined (as discussed in the last couple of posts) with truth, and before that, the divine love. In other words, while the source of liberty is not in the state, it still has a source. That source is and must be God (as made explicit in the Declaration).

The other great difference from the left is that liberty -- being that it is grounded in God -- is always relational. An abstract and atomized liberty divorced from relationship -- and therefore responsibility -- is either nihilistic or demonic. For example, liberty divorced from truth is just anarchy. Isolated from virtue it devolves to the will to power.

Schindler describes it thus: "recognition of the right of each self in itself to immunity from coercion by others, rightly conceived, needs to be tied from the beginning to the immanent demand within each self to be responsive toward others."

In other words, "rights are protections of the self from intrusive action by others inside what is an anterior responsibility of each self to serve the others." Again: liberty is prior to (state) power, and prior to liberty (or at least coeval to it) is responsibility.

If freedom isn't ordered by truth and relationship, then to hell with it.

It only makes perfect sense, because how would it be possible to have a system of self-rule composed of irresponsible people? The only way is the way of the left: to have these pathetically dehumanized people dependent upon the state, so that on election day they can be relied upon to lick the hand that feeds them and keep the machine going for another cycle.

Thus, these dependent state drones aren't responsible, but they are predictable and therefore manageable. At least until the money runs out. Then you will see their other side, i.e., the animal nature that you forgot to civilize into western values of self-reliance, delayed gratification, impulse control, monogamous marriage, etc. If you think Black Lives Matter now, just wait until they can't be pacified by white liberal cash and other valuable prizes.

A Presidential Pestavus to the Restavus

Time only for a brief one...

As usual, one book comments on another, in this case the secret of liberty on the order of love.

Yesterday we spoke of how genuine freedom is founded on the love of truth and truth of love. We might say that love bifurcates into freedom and truth.

Charles reminds us that for the founders, the great danger was self-love, AKA pride. They were careful students of human nature and of history, history being human nature prolonged in time. And looked at from one angle -- the angle of the Fall -- history is one disastrous pride-a-thon.

Self-love is a meretricious version of the real thing, which is why it is no coincidence that the left never stops preaching this unholy croctrine ("self esteem") instead of the self-offering of real love.

Along these lines, last week I heard Dennis Prager issue an interesting challenge. First, think of the finest person you know in terms of character. Then ask that person if he or she had "high self esteem" as a child. Prager says he has never met one who did.

This is not to suggest that people of good character have low self esteem or are masochistic, only that they are not prideful and full of themselves. They are secure, but not obnoxious.

Because of pride, human beings long for distinction. The ultimate (and proper) distinction is being known by God, and indeed, God and individual are two sides of the same coin (i.e., without God, we'd all be more or less the same, like other animals; God is the source of our a priori distinction-in-personhood).

But what happens in a secular age when the connection to God is attenuated or lost?

Like any other instinct, the lust for distinction doesn't go away. It is just displaced to the horizontal/human plane (or lower), so that these useless people want to be known and affirmed by lots of other useless people. This is how excellence is displaced by celebrity, and how we end up with a useless President Kardashian.

Anyway, our "founding prophets" (as Charles calls them) were well aware of the phenomenon, which is precisely why they designed the government the way they did.

In other words, it is fair to say that the Constitution was supposed to function as a pre-emptive Obamacide, so that such a self-regarding pestavus couldn't attain power over the rest of us, and diminish our God-given liberty. But no system is perfect.

Shifting over to Schindler, he writes that the (classical) liberal state is "limited precisely because it is subordinate to the truth about man and indeed finally the Creator, or to some transcendent order, as source of that truth."

In other words -- and this should again be self-evident -- both liberty and power must be constrained by a truth that is not defined by the state.

To be clear, our constitution rests on presuppositions which it does not invent or define. If the state starts to define truth -- for example, in the redefinition of marriage, or forcing us to pretend that men are women, or pardoning criminals because they are black -- then that is tyranny, pure and simple.

Again: the purpose of the state is to protect, truth, freedom, and natural rights. If the state becomes their source, then the state can also take them away. Which is precisely what the state has been doing since the left began transforming it into its own ghastly image.

[O]ur main cultural problems stem from a failure to understand that 'freedom possesses an inherently relational dimension' and 'an essential link with the truth'....

[W]hat the modern democratic state, rightly understood, must be about is not the deferral of truth in favor of freedom, but the integration at a basic level of freedom and truth, in such a way that each bears the essential and deepest meaning of the other... --Schindler

Freedom is Founded on the Love of Truth and Truth of Love

Let's begin this morning with an orthoparadox: "First of all," writes Schindler, "we belong to the truth before the truth belongs to us."

For readers who 1) do not believe truth exists, or 2) do not believe it is accessible to man, you are excused.

But to the extent that truth exists, it is obviously anterior to us. I suppose there's one other possibility, the new age choprafication of quantum physics, such that we create reality -- and therefore truth -- by observing it.

Example. "There have been half a dozen different universes conceived of in the human mind." (Really? Only six?) "As each conception changes, so does reality." So, "Remember this the next time you are tempted to pick the universe you live in. There are a lot more choices than you may imagine. Ultimately this is good, because it opens the door to ponder the deep questions of existence..."

If that is enlightenment, then we need much less of it, thank you. Chopra embodies a malign complementarity of smugness and vagueness that simultaneously explains nothing and everything. Liberals should remember this the next time they are tempted to force the rest of us to live in a universe that doesn't exist. Freedom is not liberation from reality.

Back to the real reality. The "truth to which we belong is ultimately a matter of love." In other words, anterior to the truth that is anterior to us is the Divine Love. Therefore, ultimate reality -- God -- "is a Trinitarian circle of divine love."

As a corollary to "we belong to the truth before the truth belongs to us," we could say that the cosmos is in the Trinity before the Trinity is in the cosmos.

I don't find that this requires any great leap of faith, because this universe would be radically different if the Trinity weren't at its heart.

To put it another way, the most astonishing features of this cosmos are inexplicable in the absence of a trinitarian metaphysic. And while there are many astonishing features, they wouldn't matter if there were no one here to be astonished. Therefore, the most astonishing cosmic fact of all is the human being.

We don't always come out and say it, but this is one of our guiding intuitions. It says so on p. 21 of the Encirclopedia, that "human beings, by virtue of their unquestioned existence, are the meeting place of all possible scientific disciplines, the one place in the cosmos where all departments of learning harmoniously coexist in a single, multidimensional youniversity..."

Therefore, "the synthesis of all possible fields of study exists in us as an established fact: we are de facto interdisciplinary subjectobjects, unproblematically defying any reductionistic, single-level explanation."

We span all the degrees of reality from the empirical and below to the psychic and above, and perhaps this makes it appear as if there are "different universes," as per the Enlightened One.

In any event, "we gain a truer perspective of the whole evolutionary process if we study it from its most recent results rather than only from its beginnings" (Charles Birch).

At risk of relaboring the bobvious, we can explain more about matter than matter can explain about us -- unless we stipulate that matter itself is trinitarian as well, which seamlessly explains how and why it is so intelligible to our intelligence. In short, the cosmos has an exterior and an interior, and these two mirroculouly reflect one another in a truth that is prior to both.

Back to Schindler. I think we are now in a position to better understand what he means when he says that "to belong to truth is to belong to a love that, especially as seen in the light of the Incarnation, is simultaneously God-centered and human-centered." In a Word, it means that human beings can fully participate in the divine reality. Yes, we can choose God, but only because he first chooses us.

Thus, only the Creator "can establish values that are grounded in the essence of humankind," and which "are inviolable" (Ratzinger, in Schindler). This can hardly be more at odds with "picking the universe we live in." Superficially the latter sounds like a good deal, but it actually renders man absolutely worthless. It is a Devil's Bargain.

Ratzinger: "The existence of values that cannot be modified by anyone is the true guarantee of our freedom and of human greatness." Our dignity lies not in the ability to invent reality but to bow before it.

To put it conversely, nothing is less dignified than living in your own reality. While it is proper to empathize with such lost souls, we shouldn't elect them president.

Does matter create reason? Does pure chance produce meaning? Or do the intellect, logos, and reason come first, so that reason, freedom, and the good are already part of the principles that construct reality? --Ratzinger

The Great Sin is in NOT Wanting to Be Like God

Adam. Eve. Freedom.

God presumably likes being God. What's wrong with our vertical parents wanting the same for themselves? Doesn't his injunction against their rightful ambitions amount to hypocrisy? Maybe he just doesn't want the competition.

Not exactly. "In a word," writes Shindler, "Adam's sin did not consist in wanting to be like God," for "rightly understood, that is the calling of every human being." Rather, the sin "consisted in his wanting to be like God on his own terms..." (emphasis mine).

As such, Adam is a little like our contemporary atheists, who prove with ironyclad logic the non-existence of a god who has never existed to begin with.

In Adam's case, he wants to be the god who doesn't exist. Therefore, it is not true that Lucifer is the first liberal. Rather, it is Adam himself, who "institutes the original absence of God resulting in the first culture of death."

To put it conversely, there is no real issue with Adam wanting to "be like God," so long as it is God he is wanting to be like. Indeed, that is called theosis, and it is orthodox right down to the ground. As if the Imitation of Christ is a bad thing!

Schindler quotes J Rat in a footnote: "In the account of the Fall one sees what it looks like when one accepts Satan's offer of power. Power appears as the opposite of obedience" while freedom appears "as the opposite of responsibility."

In other words, as we have discussed in the past, in order for freedom to be meaningful instead of absurd or destructive, it must rest upon a prior responsibility. Which is why we don't give freedom to irresponsible people -- babies, mental retards, Palestinians, etc.

For the same reason, we are not supposed to give power to naughty and disobedient adultolescents such as, say, Obama. To be precise, we will grant you the power, but not until you swear before God and man to be faithful -- obedient -- to the Constitution.

How's that working out?

The notion that a liberal will be faithful to anything but his own agenda represents willfully culpable stupidity. You probably deserve to go to hell for that, and if God were a leftist he'd send you there faster than the NAACP will lynch a conservative negro.

But God's cosmic mercy is prior to his social justice, so there's a good chance that you'll get off on some kind of technicality.

J Rat continues with this zinger: "Jesus' entire existence is a translation of power into humility... Obedience is not secondary for Jesus, but forms the core of his being..."

I suspect that in America, "obedience" has troublesome connotations, as it implies conformity, loss of individuality, and erosion of freedom. But every sane person wants to obey truth and wants others to do so as well.

The most obtuse deconstructionist would never tolerate deconstruction from his physician: "You don't have cancer. It's just a local rebellion against the unjust hegemony and imperialism of your body." Or, "It's not an infection, just powerless bacteria unionizing in the face of your oppressive immune system."

Our liberal media has tremendous power, but it is divorced from obedience to truth. Think of the film Truth, a title which could hardly be more appropriate in the Orwellian sense we are discussing. It's really about a rare failure of liberal media power to vanquish the truth.

In other words, as much power as they have, it is still possible for liberals to go too far -- as we saw with the hateful CNBC debate moderators last week.

We call them the "media." So, what are they supposed to mediate?

Well, if they aren't mediating truth, then what are they mediating?

Correct: power.

In order to consolidate and maintain their own power, they must dissipate and scatter yours: they "promote inattentiveness, an incapacity for the patient attentiveness and memory necessary for the self in its integrity to relate to the other in its integrity." Schindler suggests that "one can almost define liberalism as massive Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)."

How does that work, exactly? To paraphrase Schindler, it works through a combination of externalization and dispersal, which redounds to a relentless superficiality, a "bad infinity of endless successive surfaces, as distinct from gathering into the good infinity of depths and heights..."

It's the same fatal choice Adam makes when he wants to be the god that doesn't exist. If Hollywood ever turns man's Fall into a movie, they can call it Truth, the Prequel.

... I am truly myself only when I form relationships.... Worship means [reaching beyond finite goals] into being inwardly at one with him who wished me to exist as a partner in a relationship with him and who has given me freedom precisely in this. --Josef Ratzinger

Our Cosmic Drama: It's Weird, but is it Weird Enough?

The book we're discussing -- Ordering Love -- takes seriously the idea that love is the ultimate order of the cosmos. If God is a relation of love, then what sort of cosmos is necessary in order to reveal his nature?

Along these lines, Schindler quotes J Rat, who says that "the world is created in order to provide a setting for the covenant by which God binds himself to man."

A movie or play needs a backdrop or stage, but the story is not about the scenery. The identical story can be conveyed with a backdrop of the wild west of the 19th century or outer space of the next century. Which I suppose is one more reason why Jesus -- or the Divine Drama -- only has to happen once.

The nature of our divine drama, writes Schindler, "lies in the fruitful tension" between our freedom and our bond to God. It is a bond, but a bond that is orthoparadoxically composed of freedom -- like marriage.

Conversely, in Islam, just as there are arranged marriages into which freedom does not enter, its entire religious structure -- and by extension, culture, politics, and cosmos -- is characterized by compulsion and submission, not freedom and consent.

In Islam no one is permitted to say Yes to God. For if one is forbidden to say No, then Yes doesn't enter the equation.

The same applies to the totalitarian lusting left. If they had their way, no one could say Yes to the left because no one would be permitted to say No -- which is the purpose of college speech codes and the like. Saying No to the left renders you a non-person. I know this because I live in an extremely blue area, and they talk about us as if we don't exist.

Schindler's prose at times verges on the turgidity of the tenured, as in the following: "What we properly term drama, in a word, has its ontological origin in the abiding depth and fruitful tension presupposed in the simultaneous unity-within-duality of subject (self) and object (other) in the free act."

Why not just say that the ultimate drama is between man and God? All drama is a subset of this. Indeed, all history is its reflection and residue.

The tension between man and God is first vertical. But it is prolonged in time, and this is what we call history (or, on an individual basis, development).

Now, here is where things get interesting, because God, who is at the other end of that vertical tension, decides to enter the drama.

First of all, why doesn't this collapse the tension and resolve the drama? In other words, if the drama is a consequence of the polarity, doesn't the Incarnation de-polarize it?

Well, this would go to the importance of keeping our categories straight, as did the early Councils. The fact that Jesus is simultaneously all-God and all-man has the effect of maintaining the cosmic tension. Without this tension we couldn't have the dramatic arc of the Passion.

For example, the heresy of Docetism removes the tension by insisting that Jesus only appears to be human. Or in Monophysitism, the divine and human are collapsed into one nature. Various forms of Gnosticism basically reject the backdrop -- matter -- rendering the Incarnation pointless.

The upshot is that God is able to enter history without destroying the dramatic tension between man and God.

More to the point, he preserves freedom and therefore love. This is the very opposite of what one might expect, in that God does not come down like some totalitarian cosmic dictator, but rather, as an offering of love and relationship.

I have a feeling that I'm not doing justice to the weirdness of it all.

Remember, there is the vertical tension between man and God. God takes on this tension by "entering history himself and staying there all the way through to his suffering and forsakenness on the Cross" (ibid.). The drama appears to end in his death on the cross, but that turns out to be only a brief inter-mission.

In another obscure passage -- and maybe it's impossible to make a mystery this deep any clearer -- Schindler writes of a "passion so deep that it enables giving birth to God and thus as it were giving God himself in response to God." This is the "born again" God to whom we are free to say Yes -- a God fully involved in history, and with us to the end of days.

Mary's Yes allows for the birth of God in history (and in human development). But Jesus must also freely say Yes to his own divinity, right through the cross and beyond. In other words, it is a Yes in the context of a living faith that carries him through even the ultimate impasse of death.

And still the drama continues.

If he does not hide from his own self, he comes to the insight: this is the goal toward which my whole being tends, this is where I want to go.... my ego is the place where I must transcend myself most profoundly, the place where I am touched by my ultimate origin and goal. --Schindler

Man Minus God = Death On Two Legs

More spindle clearing, this time a book by theologian David Schindler called Ordering Love: Liberal Societies and the Memory of God. The post may or may not come together. Not only am I winging it -- which is always the case -- but I'm feeling a little loose in the head.

I suppose we could say that postmodern secular societies are nevertheless haunted by the memory of God, just as a man in prison might be haunted by memories of sex. Both impulses are part of man's standard operating equipment. They can be "ignored or even forgotten or dismissed," but that hardly means they are no longer present.

I have a note to myself in the margin: emptiness is to God as curiosity is to science and wonder to philosophy. In all three cases a dynamic tension is generated. You could even say that these tensions fuel the drama of life; to paraphrase Schindler, they stir the imagination and evoke the passions.

In turn, this is the very same energy that prompts us to explore beyond appearances and into reality. Thus, this passionate energy is a prerequisite for seeing into the dimension of ontological depth.

It is "in contrast to the dull repetition of a machine-like entity, whose movement remains superficial" and is "merely a function of external forces." This is precisely what distinguishes human life from mere biological life: the passionate adventure into the dimension of depth:

"It is passion and interior power, then, that enable human life and action to be truly dramatic." But what is the drama really about?

You could say that the passionate curiosity that animates the scientist is about understanding the material world. But what's that all about? Most scientists never stop to ask, but this goes to the difference between science and philosophy of science. Philosophy is a little higher up the food chain, but what is it really about? It is about truth. And what is truth about?

First of all, in order to have a relation with something, we have to have an interior. Things with no interior cannot be related to one another, since there is no awareness. Perhaps the most revolutionary implication of modern physics is that everything has an interior, such that everything is interiorly related to everything else, from the subatomic to the cosmic.

In man, interior relations reach their highest creaturely expression, as we are in the image of the God who is irreducible relationship. Just as there is no independent particle beneath or behind the wave, there is no "substantial" God behind his relations. God is relationship (or substance-in-relation).

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

We could say that the ultimate constitution of man is this "capacity for God." This is indeed self-evident, being that God is another word for Ultimate, and everybody's got one (even if it is just a shadow or vague memory of the actual Ultimate).

This also explains why "when God is forgotten, the creature itself grows unintelligible." This statement is completely logical -- like saying "when flight is forgotten, wings become unintelligible," or "when breathing is forgotten, the lungs grow unintelligible."

Things have their sufficient reason, and man's sufficient reason is contemplation of, and communion with, God. In other words, it is the One Thing that explains everything else about us; conversely, the mere sum of everything else about us does not add up to our capacity for God.

Certainly it is the One Thing that explains the existence of freedom, or free will. There can be no bottom up explanation of free will, because freedom by definition transcends lower causes.

In other words, if freedom is determined by lower causes, it bloody well isn't freedom, now is it? (And this is not to deny the existence of some causal factors; we are not disembodied angelic beings.) But the good person is still free to do bad, while the bad person is free to do good.

Now, if what we have said above is true, then man is a kind of bridge between dimensions or worlds. It reminds me of a crack by Dead Can Dance: We make a road for the spirit to pass over. The body is "a sign and place of relations with others, with God and with the world" (Schindler). Its purpose is not just "pleasure and efficiency," but rather, contact with others and with God.

How to put it... if you were going to create a being made for contact with God, it would look exactly like a human being. I might add that if you were going to create a planet to host human beings, it would look like this one. Likewise if you wanted to create a cosmos capable of producing stars and planets.

Or we can deny all of these soph-evident truths, in which case we reach the final common disease pathway of postmodern liberalism, AKA the Culture of Death. "The absence of God that correlates with the culture of death... is in the first instance a matter not of moral intention but of ontological depth."

In other words, the death of God becomes a cosmic defense mechanism against the attainment of depth. It is enforced via political correctness, by speech codes, by the liberal noise media, and by the academic unintelligentsia. Oh, and by ideologically undead debate moderators.

The Point of It All

As mentioned a few posts back, I'm just trying to clear my spindle, in this case, Schuon's first and rather more challenging book, Primordial Meditation. What follows may or may not make sense. I'm just interfacing with the book and trying to make sense of it.

In a blatant act of anticipatory plagiarism, Schuon wrote -- somewhere between 1928 and 1932 -- that 0 (zero) is, "in the numerical domain, an image of ultimate, highest, pure Reality, of the completely undeterminable Divine, nameable only inadequately through negation."

Its first determination must be 1, and then from there, everything is just multiples of 0 and 1: "[F]rom the number one a quantitative infinity is generated which is only an unfolding... of the inexhaustibility contained in the number zero..."

As an aside or maybe above, I would say that 0 is to Father as 1 is to Son.

Zero must be a quality, since no quantity can fill it; even an infinite series of ones "stands in no comparable relationship to zero and can only symbolize its awesome void by unlimited quantity, without ever being able to fill it..." It's analogous to pi, which "goes on forever" without quite completing its round trip, 〇.

As one is to zero, so are we. In other words, we are determined, whereas zero -- like God -- is not. Thus, "all existent things are no match for for those which are non-existent" (for God is prior to existence).

Nor can all the things of this world actualize or exhaust its possibilities: 〇 is inexhaustible, but it is the source and ground of everything else.

Therefore, although we are one -- a determination -- it is as if our feet and head are in infinity. We are, as it were, "knots" in the infinite. Or, finitude is a knot made of eternity. Schematically, it must look like this:

〇•〇

That's man in a knotshall.

Symbolically, we could say it is ∞(¶)∞. (¶) -- the psychic being, nous, or divine intellect -- abides between two slabs of eternity. But as it metabolizes the infinite, it starts to look more like ∞ʘ∞. It puts on a little ontological weight and existential heft in between.

Now, when two or more are gathered in Tʘʘts' name, we have ʘʘ, or a Raccʘʘn lodge.

The imponderable journey from zero to one -- or from infinite to determination -- is from potential to actualization. The latter signifies "nothing but a transposition and inversion of the highest Non-Being," now determined by Being.

Here again, from a slightly different angle, I suppose we could say that one is to zero as Being is to Non-Being (or Beyond-Being).

Or, in Eckhart's terms, 1:0 as God:Godhead. To even say "God" is to already reduce his Zero-ness to a kind of One-ness. It's the difference between the cataphatic God -- the God of whom we may speak -- and the apophatic Godhead, about whom we can only unsay and unknow and unblog.

"It is impossible to understand ultimate, absolute, all-surpassing Reality"; rather, "we know of It by knowing nothing, we name It because we must limit It in order to be able to grasp It intellectually." Thus, "comprehensibility and limitation are one and the same to human reason" -- i.e., reducing 0 to 1.

We've discussed in the past how we can only know anything about an object precisely because we cannot know everything about it. In other words, the Everything -- 0 -- must be prior to the Anything it actualizes -- 1.

But man is all about elevating this or that any-thing to the Great Everything. Most men "inhabit only one fragment of the soul," which is in turn "receptive to repercussions from the perceptible world..."

Indeed, this is how a (more or less fallen) world comes into being, and even how a fallen being comes into being. In other words, such a one is a creature of the horizontal environment instead of the vertical.

In the higher sense -- i.e., (¶) -- "man is connected through the Spirit with the Reality that corresponds to It... by actually being a presence of Reality or Being in man..."

What this means is that the higher self must receive its repercussions -- or reVerb-Orations -- from a higher world, such that we literally talk to the beat of a different nonlocal percussionist.

Even the simplest thing is a center which must partake of the Center in order to exist at all. Thus, anything is an echo, however distant, of Celestial Central. You could say that everything and everybody has a point -- • -- unless we reject God and render ourselves pointless.

I think too that the point of the point is that it is actually an axis that spans the worlds, and which man uniquely inhabits. If it weren't for this vertical axis we would be like planets with no sun, just wandering about randomly. But a circular orbit is really defined by the axis between gravitational centers.

There are also false centers, which goes to what was said above about our center being reinforced by an external environment, which is ultimately an exteriorization or crystallization of our own fragmented self.

Such a man is "nourished by delusion" -- instead of O -- until he reaches its limits in, say, an absurd scientism. The latter is a hell precisely because its practitioner has succeeded in containing what can only contain him, and thereby committing cosmic cluelesside.