Coming to a Theater Near You, Your Life

In a comment, reader Magister suggests that life is analogous to a film, but to what is a film analogous?

Hey, I should know this because back off man, I was a film major. Yes, like the esteemed James Taranto I attended Cal State Northridge, the Harvard of the west San Fernando Valley. Except in my case I bothered to graduate. By which I mean they let me slide with a "gentleman's BA."

Why did I major in film? Because I couldn't think of an easier subject. Except for PE, and even I have more self-respect than that.

Turned out to be more difficult than I had imagined, but it goes to show that some things never change, in this case, my basic temperament. I've just never been able to take the Conspiracy seriously. Things it regards as important are malevolent or silly to me, whereas things I think are important are attacked or devalued -- if noticed at all -- by Big Con.

My whole life, at least from the age of nine or so, has been focussed on outwitting the Conspiracy. I've had some wins and some losses, but overall, I would say I've been able to preserve my sacred eccentricity and thus my Slack. So, open your Encirclopedia to page 261 and let's say it together:

Do the monkey bone, do the shingaling, get your slack back & take a trip, slip, lose your grip, & turn a backover flip and say: not the god of the philosophers, not the god of the scholars!

You know, like Pascal.

Back to the subject at hand: yes, your life is like a film. But what is the film really about? There are characters of course, conflicts, a crazy plot, and also a theme. What's yours? I already told you mine: Slack vs. Conspiracy. Everything else is a subset of that.

We've no doubt discussed this in the past, but I don't recall what I wrote, and besides, readers come and some even go, so it won't be a stale bobservation for one or two of you.

Volume One of Gnosis by slack hustler Boris Mouravieff has some helpful things to say. Indeed! I just opened the book to a random page and out popped this:

"... [S]omeone who has studied esoteric science can and must better understand the comedy of life, in which pretentious blind men lead other more modest blind men towards an abyss which will engulf both" (italics in original).

This is so true it tickles and hurts at the same time -- unless you just can't think of a Pretentious Blind Man who is leading our nation toward an abyss.

Now, the term "esoteric science" is a bit pretentious and bordering on the conspiratorial itself. For our counter-conspiratorial cult, the Cosmic Raccoons, "esoteric science" is just the way things really are. It's "esoteric" in the same sense that Bob is "abnormal" while actually being normal.

In other words, for the Raccoon, the most esoteric thing of all is a little common fucking sense.

Thus the false esoterism of the tenured, which is just more blindness from the pretentious -- systematic myopia masquerading as another -- and superior -- form of vision.

Real vision is of course 20/∞, which really means that the Raccoon can perceive the Infinite from any angle or distance, even its Fine Prince.

You might say that seeing the Infinite Abyss prevents us from falling into all the manmade ones.

Still, we must be cautious, as there are snares everywhere: "He who studies esoteric science must watch, and take care not to return once again to the crowd, nor, 'like everyone else,' to follow that broad way that leads to the abyss" (Mouravieff).

This is reminiscent of that fine prince's remark to the effect that He who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is not fit for service in the Kingdom of Slack.

Blah blah yada yada, time has seven dimensions, the last one being O, which is the Alpha and Omega: "It is not the void. It is the seed and end" of all that exists. It is source and destiny. You can't actually get out of it anyway -- that's a tip-toptical delusion, right? -- so you might as well be in it.

Put it this way. What we call "science" -- I mean the whole existentialada, not just this or that discipline -- tries to account for the whole of reality. You might say that it superimposes its vision over O, and does a pretty decent job of it, or at least metacosmically blind folks fall for it.

Nevertheless, there is always a gap between this and reality, and this gap is infinite. Or better, as Mouravieff terms it, there is a "zone of illusion" between us and reality, AKA O. Grace is here -- among other reasons -- to get us over that hump, i.e., to swim the moat.

In fact, here is where I differ with Mouravieff (and there are many such differences), because no amount of effort on our part can propel us over the void. To believe so is... the last temptation, as it were -- the sort of thing to which Jesus was tempted in the desert.

The Raccoon "takes the easy way out" by following the Law of Attraction instead of the Law of Force. But orthoparadoxically, it obviously takes a lot of effort to give up and trust God, no?

Another important orthoparadox is that what they call "civilization" is really a great wilderness, whereas genuine civilization is always out here in the bewilderness. For it is here where all the inaction -- the evolutionary non-doodling -- takes place. It is in this space of bewilderness -- unplugged from the conspiratorial grid -- that we may float upstream on wings of Slack, AKA grace.

The conspiracy loves its own. Therefore it hates us. But the tool's reproach is a kingly title, is it not?

I might add that the conspirator is in a cage, so he can't even really get at you. He needs you for food, but if you just ignore him he'll starve. Atheists, for example, need us. We don't need them, except maybe to toy with and sharpen our arguments and insultainments.

Ah, here's the part I was looking for: "between the limits drawn by birth and death" is a film representing "the life of each of us, all the beings we have met, and the ensemble of material and moral circumstances which surround us."

We watch -- or experience -- this film through a little slot we call the "present." Now, it seems that this present can't really be a part of the film per se.

Rather, it must somehow be outside or above it, right? Or at least more or less so. We all know people who are so immersed in their film that they are unable to stand back and see where it is going or what is the point of it all.

So, the Present has a kind of breadth and depth, does it not? And isn't the Conspiracy always trying to compress this slot and draw us into the agitation and drownian emotion of its urgent nihilocracy? That's the function of the liberal media, to force us to play roles in its low budget film-narrative.

Note that one is either in or out of this narrative. If you are in it, you are not permitted to be out.

Which is why a liberal, for example, is not permitted to watch Fox News, or not permitted to question global warming, or not permitted to doubt vulgar Darwinism.

But once outside the narrow slot of the Conspiracy, one awakens to the wider world -- the expansive cosmic bewilderness. It's so roomy here, who would want to leave?

To reiterate, the "essential aim" is to broaden "the individual slot that opens directly on the Present" (ibid.). Do that and you can read the Signs of the Times like a lesser man reads the clowns of the Times.

Freedom: Divine, Human, and Anti-human

For Hartshorne, God is still omniscient, in that he knows infallibly all that can be known. It's just that he can't know what can't be known in principle.

In a similar sense, he is obviously free, but not to violate his own nature. Like any other person, he is constrained by who he is!

It really comes down to freedom and creativity -- whether these words really mean what they mean, or are just nice sounding platitudes.

Is there freedom in God? Then God is undetermined to himself. Are we free? Then we are (at least partly, but genuinely) undetermined by and for God.

Thus, "Either we determine the divine knowing, in some degree, or we determine nothing at all.... if we cannot do this, then we have no freedom whatsoever."

Not only does this touch on freedom and creativity, but love and truth, for what is the merit of love if it is determined and therefore compulsory? What is its value if it isn't freely given? Is it even love anymore?

In this context, what does it mean to say God is love, if love operates like an inanimate machine? Again, it is reduced to a kind of meaningless platitude.

In my world, truth is the virtue and light of the intellect. If our beliefs are determined -- if we are not free to discover and devote ourselves to truth -- then what is its merit? Eliminate freedom and we eliminate truth.

So, all of these things -- freedom, love, truth, creativity, relationship, and goodness -- are densely connected in the divine hyperspace; each is a necessary reflection of the others. Not one of them is understandable without its sister transcendentals.

When we say that "God is unchanging," it means that he is unchanging in these necessary attributes. His love, for example, is steadfast, but steadfast is not the same as static, for how can love ever be static?

What happens when the Divine Freedom confronts the human freedom? Yes, the Incarnation, but when God incarnates he does so as man, and not just a man. Or, at the very least, we are free to participate in that ultimate drama of freedom.

I suppose there are millions of self-styled Christians who don't believe in the Trinity. To which I would say, if God isn't Trinity, then to hell with it. Who needs him?

For me, that sort of God is literally equivalent to no God. It's certainly not a God I can relate to, because there would be nothing relative in him.

Does such a vision of God limit his power or glory or supremacy? Well, what is power? Or, what would it mean to exert power but not respond to what is produced or brought about by the power?

Isn't this like a dictator or tyrant, all Who and no Whom? Yes, it's "power," but is it divine power? Which type of leader is more like God, the autocrat or the servant-leader who is intimately related to his subjects?

This touches on a quintessential difference between Christianity, on the one hand, and leftism or Islamism on the other.

For the latter two, God, or ultimate power, comes down to authority and obedience. Freedom -- and therefore truth and love -- doesn't enter into it.

Allah, whatever else he is, isn't especially lovable, as far as I can tell. Seems to me he's more interested in respect than love. And he certainly doesn't care about freedom, for in every nation dominated by Islam, freedom is conspicuously absent.

Freedom is a Christian value. Even the left's perverse version of it could only exist in a Christianized person who has simply severed it from its sister transcendentals (in particular, a prior moral responsibility without which freedom is not only inconceivable but toxic).

God is creative -- it says so in the first sentence of the Bible -- therefore he contains alternatives within himself. The world isn't necessary. He could have created another world.

But I would suggest that he cannot not create, any more than he cannot fail to love.

Again, when we speak of God's "changelessness," I think this is what we are referring to. Creating is necessary. This or that creation are contingent.

As it so happens, all this far-out Christian Duddism we've been discussing lately has profound links to Evolution 2.0, that is, the real evolution, not just the watered down Darwinian variety.

For with the God we have described above, creative evolution becomes necessary instead of an impossible absurdity (which it is for both creationists and atheistic Darwinans).

But that's the subject of a different post, one that will appear "necessarily," even if the contingent details are not worked out at this time.

Hovering in Love Around the Above

In response to yesterday's post, reader Magister suggests that life is analogous to a film, and that "whether the film is already shot is a matter of perspective. To those immersed in time, it can never appear to be already shot," in contrast to God, who is "both in and outside time."

That is precisely the issue, or one of them, anyway. Take only the Incarnation, which is analogous to the director jumping into his own film or the playwright into the play.

Thus, if God is subjecting himself to the full monty of humanness, then surely he is submitting to time, no? For if he isn't, then not only is he excluding one of the most characteristic features of humanness, but he isn't really with us all the way to the end of our cosmic predicament. Not even the beginning, really, since it all begins in time. For humanness, time is surely of the essence.

Magister continues: "The question to me is this: how must we understand the relationship between God’s be-ing and His knowledge? If God's being is infinite, then so too must be His knowledge. Otherwise, it is difficult for me to understand how God could be present to something and not know it. The two must be co-extensive.

"I’m not sure then what to make of a claim that God’s omniscience and his omnipresence can be separated. Jewish thinkers have speculated about a void' (tsimstum?) that God created to put a space between Himself and creation, a space where He is neither present nor, presumably, even aware. I get the metaphor, but have a difficult time seeing the logic in it."

Allow me. Regarding tzimtzum, it is an important Kabbalistic concept meaning God's prior "withdrawal" from being in order to leave a zone of real cosmic and human freedom.

This is a metaphysical concept, so it cannot really be contrasted to the physics of the big bang. I wouldn't take tzimtzum absolutely literally; rather, it's an "as if" story that helps to elucidate the phemomena -- you know, like Darwinism.

But it is as if, instead of expanding outward with a badda-bing, badda BANG!, God first "contracts" to "a point of infinite density" before taking up the work of creation with the resultant void; this void is the Great Nothing out of which and into which God creates. It very much reminds me of the Tao, which says, for example, that we build a house but use the space.

I appreciate this way of looking at things because it is so "existentially near," so to speak. When we say, for example, "Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven," we are acknowledging that God is present in heaven in a way that is different from his presence on earth.

Under celestial conditions he is "fully present," but here on earth he seems to be slightly introverted. He doesn't overwhelm us or suck all the oxygen from the room. He gives us our... space. He is not, in the words of the Book of the Same Name, an "ainsoferable gnosis all."

As to the relationship between God's being and knowledge, yes, in him knowledge -- which is to say truth -- would be entirely wrapped up in his being (as would the other transcendentals, beauty, goodness, and unity). However, it would seem to me that God's ultimate attributes are love and relationship -- AKA Trinity -- such that God's being is always a giving-and-receiving.

I think this goes to Mushroom's later comment to the effect that "There is an eternal 'depth' to time like a spring boiling up from beneath." Now we're plunging into the Eckhart of the matter, because that is precisely how the Meistero describes it. Admittedly we are attempting to describe the indescribable, and yet, I don't think God wants us to be out here with no earthly idea of what goes on in there.

In one of my favorite books, Bernard McGinn writes of "the dynamic reciprocity of the 'flowing forth' of all things from the hidden ground of God, and the 'flowing back,' or 'breaking through,' of the universe into essential identity with this divine source."

Now, I think this flowing-forth and flowing-back result in "change" in God. You could say that with the Incarnation, God includes man in this eternal freeflow of the Trinity. We are cordially invited to participate in this same eternal creation-in-love. How this can be reduced to a static and changeless reality, I have no idea. Who needs a heart that doesn't beat?

Magister writes that "Emotionally, I'm all for freedom, joy, unpredictability, improvisation, and unpredictability. I completely agree with Bob: 'I'd want to create a little realm of unpredictability just to relieve the tedium!'”

Well, what we have outlined above provides an airtight alibi for belief in the divine freedom, unpredictability, and improvisation, AKA the Adventure of Consciousness in which we may participate -- but only by mirroring God's own kenosis, i.e., chucking our illusions of control and predictability and surrendering to the the flow (especially the vertical flow of grace). Conversely, to be drifting downstream in the creek of time without a kenosis is to be sealed up in our own personal hell.

Magister continues that "In the Thomistic view, God is an infinite supernova of creative love. All be-ing is present to Him, the good and the evil, He sees it all elapse, He responds to its elapsing, and He has it all, every bit of it, in His embrace. But here we can only resort to metaphor. God does not experience the sequential thing called 'tedium' because God is not only in time."

Well, yes and no. If he does indeed "respond" -- and he does -- to things that are in time, then he has surrendered at least a part of himself to time. It's just that he always "enlivens" time, and I would go so far as to say that he is the life in the time, which is why in a genuine religious practice, we enjoy the time of our lives.

Again, the Incarnation is necessarily an In-temporalization. And we have heard it from the wise that this temporalization shall continue to the end of the age, during which Christ is "always with us." Being that we are undoubtedly in time, then if God is with us, then he too is in time.

Think of the alternative -- which strikes me as absurd -- in which "God influences all things, nothing influences God" (Hartshorne). What, is God autistic, like Obama, oblivious to the reality he has brought about?

But Genesis tells us that this is not the way God rolls. Rather, each time he creates, he responds to what he has created by declaring it "good." It seems to me that if he just creates but doesn't respond to his own creation, then that is more like the God of deism, in which there is one creation, one time, and then we're on our own.

I won't press the point, but for me, this is a more sublime description of our Ultimate Reality: "He influences us supremely because he is supremely open to our influence. He responds delicately to all things, as we respond delicately to changes in our nerve cells," although "Of course, his delicacy is infinitely greater" (ibid.). And no way would we have this delicate responsiveness if he didn't first.

The point is, the creation is a two-way street, not a one-way nul-de-slack. And in this regard, it again mirrors the interior of the Trinity. Therefore, if becoming is the primary reality, then God's being is only an abstraction from his perpetual becoming-in-Trinity.

Thus, in contrast -- or better, addition -- to Magister's point above about God's being and knowledge being co-extensive, prior to this would be his becoming and his knowing. And this is indeed "infinite delight."

In conclusion, our love of God is a kind of floating on the currents of his eternal trinitarian mystery. Don Colacho even says so:

To love is to hover without rest around the impenetrability of a being. And Religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper.

Hovering in vertical space, drawn ever deeper into the vortex of the Great Attractor. The Raccoon lifestyle.

Cosmic Freedom and Divine Presence

Not much time this morning... Continuing with our theme of divine omniscience, it seems to me that God can either be omniscient (in the traditional sense) or free, but not both. After all, to be free is to be undetermined, but to know everything in advance is to be completely determined.

I feel as if I'm beating a dead horse, but the vast majority of believers would apparently disagree on this point. Rather, God by definition knows everything that has happened, is happening, and will happen. I can go along with the first two, but not the third, because the second -- the present -- includes a space of real freedom and therefore uncertainty. Woo hoo!

We used to have an irreligious reader who would come by and flog his theory that man has no free will, but is totally caused by antecedents. I could never make him realize that if his theory were universally true (and it was probably more or less true of him), then truth itself would be impossible because there would be no point of vantage outside the deterministic system. (I say true "of him," because the theory was likely an autobiography of his sense of being enclosed in and determined by his mind parasites.)

If everything is just an effect of antecedents, then there can be no exception for your little theory. So the theory falls by its own standard: eliminate freedom and you simultaneously abolish truth and creativity. D'oh!

There is existence and there is experience. Perhaps the central mystery of the cosmos is how the former becomes the latter -- how experience gets in here at all, and what is its meaning.

Now, one of the first principles of the ancient Raccoon teachings is that you can't derive experience from existence. There's not even a theory for a theory of how this would be possible on a purely scientific basis, i.e., how an objective universe can become subjective -- how the outside can become inside and then perceive and understand its own outside.

It's difficult enough to comprehend how a single cell can become a human being, but an even deeper issue is how a dead cosmos can come to life without presupposing Life.

Experience can only take place in the present, and indeed, in a certain way, is the present. If that is the case, then "presence" and "experience" co-arise, such that each moment is reality presencing itself.

But if there were no being to experience the presence, then the present wouldn't exist. It seems to me that there would just be a kind of perpetual "pasting," i.e., one damn objective thing after another, each determined by its immediate predecessors. But how can you even say "object" without implicitly positing the Subject?

Is the present a function of the experiencer, or vice versa? I think ultimately the whole existentialada falls apart unless we posit a Divine Experiencer. Remove him from the equation, and I don't see how you get to subjects, to human beings, and to the present (in which freedom and creativity are expressed).

Hartshorne: "To live is to decide, and decide anew, each moment." If each moment is already decided for us, then life is a kind of illusion. We are really dead, or at least there is no fundamental difference between being dead and being alive.

Here we go: "we shall never understand life and the world until we see that the zero of freedom can only be the zero of experiencing, and even of reality" (ibid.). And another Raccoon principle is that it is experiencing all the way down, because the manifested world is really a prolongation of the Divine Experiencer; or, to put it another way, God can create nothing that doesn't reflect his God-ness.

The cosmos is shot through with organicism, or internal relations, which is why every teeny weeny, right down to the last itsy bitsy, "is in some measure free; for experiencing is partly free act. Thus creativity, emergent novelty, is universal" (ibid.).

To see this, one must only look through the correct end of the cosmic telos-scope. Among other benefits, "with the admission of universal creativity, dualism loses its necessity."

Experiences are facts; the only question is, what else is fact? --Charles Hartshorne

If I Were Omniscient, I'd Give it Up for a Moment of Creativity

I'm not sure how anyone, even God, could know the future in every detail. If the future were determined, why would grace need to exist as a kind of separate Godling (or Godding, i.e., a verb) who largely manifests by changing the course of one's life, AKA the future?

So, what is God's relation to this unknowable thing we call the future?

Hartshorne writes that knowledge and prediction of the future aren't merely limited by ignorance, "but by the very meaning of the future," what with our countless "decisions yet unmade, issues not yet settled even by the totality of causes already operating."

In other words, in order to know the future, one must not only know every cause before it becomes an effect, but an infinitude of variables that aren't yet even causes.

It's a big job.

Furthermore, if the world could be known in this way, it would eliminate creativity: "Reality is predictable just in so far as it is not creative, but rather mechanical, automatic, compulsive, habit-ridden" (ibid.).

So yes, much of our world is "uncreative and hence predictable." But who wants to live in such a world? And if we don't want to, why on earth would God? Indeed, if I were an omniscient God, I'd want to create a little realm of unpredictability just to relieve the tedium! Otherwise you reduce God to the last word in obsessive-compulsive disorder. You make him a control freak.

Speaking of having skin in the game, I think this must apply quintessentially to the Incarnation. I'm not one of those people who thinks the whole thing was orchestrated from beginning to end.

Rather, the entire arc of the Incarnation -- the theo-drama -- involves a confrontation between two freedoms, divine and human. This means it plays out creatively, with the only sure thing being that God will somehow find a way to redeem man, no matter how weird the details. And boy, did they turn out weird!

I might add that if the future is known, it makes it absolutely indistinguishable from past and present. In reality, although we call past, present, and future diverse modes of time, this tends to conceal how radically different they are.

What is the difference between "what happened" and "what will happen?" In a mechanical world there is no difference, because the future is in the past (and present) without remainder.

But there is a remainder. What do we call it? For starters, we call it freedom. Also creativity. And from the divine end, grace.

Grace must be accepted in freedom, but when we do, it means that the future is going to be different from what it might have been. If the Father is divine, I don't know, "law," and the Son is logos, then the Holy Spirit is divine surprise.

Boo!

Nicolás Gómez Dávila has some excellent aphorisms that go to this general subject, sometimes even plausibly. For example, "I distrust the system deliberately constructed by thought; I trust in the one that results from the pattern of footprints."

You could say that God is no Hegelian, superimposing some rational idea over the world. Rather, again, it is divine Freedom vs. (or with) human freedom, the result being an unpredictable path of footprints. That's the whole bloody fun of it!

One reason why tenure is the embalming fluid of the left is that, unlike God, they really do pretend to know it all. But "History shows that man's good ideas are accidental and his mistakes methodical." Ho!

At one end we have the subhumanity of scientism ("His serious university training shields the technician against any idea"), at the other end the anti-science proglodytes of the humanities. A machine at one end, an asylum at the other.

Thus, "maturity" for the wanker bee scientist is a kind of vulgar atheism, whereas the developmental telos of the humanities is a state of perpetual immaturity where, to paraphrase Nicolás Gómez, idiocies are not seen as obvious. For "A confused idea attracts a fool like a flame attracts an insect."

Which is why this is the case. And when you mix the two -- science and politics -- out pops the scientistic idiocy of global warming. Note that its adherents are like false Gods that can know the future in every detail, but are ignoramuses about the present and past.

Insufficient time this morning to wrap this all up in a neat package.

The believer is not a possessor of inherited property recorded in a land registry, but an admiral looking upon the shores of an unexplored continent.

And One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.... whoever celebrates future harmonies sells himself to the devil. --NGD

The Axis of Evol... ution

In response to my suggestion that "collective development is analogous to individual development, in that -- obviously -- the further back you go, the more primitive things get," a reader commented that "This begs the question [of] what collective development is like the further forward you go. Is there a collective analogue to the sage or saint? Or does the analogy break down?"

The short answers are "no" and "pretty much yes." First, perhaps I should have specified that I'm using the word "primitive" in the psychological/developmental sense (as in primary, or earlier in developmental time). It might be the first category with which one assesses a new patient, even if implicitly. In short, is this person psychotic, or personality disordered, or neurotic, or (more or less) "normal?"

Each of these categories in turn correlates with different defense mechanisms. More developmentally primitive people rely upon primitive defense mechanisms such as delusion, denial, splitting, and projective identification, while less primitive (and more mature) people rely upon such things as repression, sublimation, intellectualization, and humor.

The quality of one's relationships will likewise vary along the same axis. For more primitive types, their relationships will be clouded and contaminated by primitive needs and agendas.

My most influential teacher back in grad school expressed it well, commenting that in terms of relationships, the primitive person wants to go from a sense of twoness (i.e., of being frightened by separation) to a primitive fusion of oneness, while the mature person wants to go from oneness (a sense of wholeness and unity) to twoness (i.e., a genuine relationship to -- not fusion with -- another person who is equally real).

It was specifically because of these ideas that I rejected multiculturalism even before I admitted to myself that I was a conservative. By way of analogy, let's say that the ideal weight for a 5' 10" man is 160 lbs (or whatever). If the 5' 10" men of another culture weigh 300 lbs, you don't abandon your standards and say that morbid obesity is now the ideal. Rather, the same universal standard should apply regardless of the culture.

Well, it's the same with psychological development. If we find a culture in which delusion is the norm, we don't call it normal. And if you don't believe there are cultures -- and subcultures -- in which delusion is the norm, then you haven't been paying attention. And you certainly haven't attended college.

Consider the relationship vector. For a number of reasons I probably don't have time to get into, mature heterosexual monogamy is the developmental standard and telos. Note that there are any number of alternatives, including immature heterosexual monogamy, immature heterosexual polygamy, and even (relatively) mature homosexual monogamy.

Yes, it is possible for a relatively mature homosexual couple to be more developed than than an immature heterosexual couple (although the typical homosexual couple is going to be more immature; male homosexuals often compulsively seek anonymous sexual encounters, which is as immature as one can get, because there is no real relationship at all).

Note that it is specifically because male and female are so "other" that an enriched relationship becomes possible. Or better, they are similar and other in equal measures, such that relating is more rich and complex. Which is why so much of this beautiful richness is lost in the homosexual relationship (and in a contemporary culture that is simultaneously genderful and genderless).

By the way, anyone who imagines that anything I have said above makes me "homophobic" is in fact delusional, and only proves my point. If you want to see primitive and delusional, see a one of the pictorials at Zombietime. Or, maybe you think we should celebrate those beautiful reflections of multiculturalism. So let's just stipulate that one of us is delusional, without all the name-calling.

Now, I am not one of those infertile eggheads who unduly idealize the so-called Enlightenment. Nevertheless, wouldn't you agree that a scientific culture is going to have advantages over one that revolves around myth?

And before you say "Nazism" or "communism," note that that was their whole problem: that they were (and are) rooted in mythology, not science. While each of them had science, the science was completely in service to the myth -- just as the mullahs are using nuclear science in the service of their Islamist myth (or global warmists use a warped version of climate science to advance their religious agenda).

In the case of, say, Obama, the issue is not whether he is Muslim or Christian, but rather, how mature he is. For there can be mature Muslims, just as there can be immature Christians.

Again, the developmental axis is going to be a relatively independent variable -- although, at the same time, I do believe it is going to converge upon certain universal psycho-political realities such as natural rights, free markets, the rule of law, etc. Does this make me a whig or evolutionist? I don't think so.

When I read history, one of the things that always strikes me about the past is the unimaginable cruelty. I can see killing your enemy and being done with it, but why the extraordinary sadism? Let's say I am a Catholic and you are a Protestant. Can't we agree to disagree without one of us disemboweling the other in the presence of his children?

That's the type of thing that gives religion a bad name, but remember, just as with science, religiosity is going to be situated along that developmental axis.

And I think I'm going to stop with that, because maybe I should leave early for work and try to avoid the holiday traffic.

Time and History, Development and Regression

From time to time we get the traditionalist commenter who suggests that the world of the past was far superior to the world of the present. Like last Friday.

I don't know if I was ever susceptible to that idea... No, check me on that. Now that I think about it, back when I was a liberal, I mindlessly joined in with the pack, imagining, for example, that American Indians lived in a kind of innocent paradise instead of being violent and repressive Stone Age brutes. Their lifestyle has little to recommend to the space-age Raccoon.

It was my study of psychology, and by extension, psychohistory, that cured me of the tendency. You could say that collective development is analogous to individual development, in that -- obviously -- the further back you go, the more primitive things get.

And no, I am not devaluing or dehumanizing our venerable furbears, without whom we wouldn't be here. Rather, the opposite. You may recall that on any number of occasions I have said that I don't regard children as "defective," or partial, or somehow incomplete human beings.

Rather -- for example -- I look at my 10 year old and see him as a perfect 10. The purpose of being 10 is not to be 11, let alone 18, or 21, or 30. I never give him the impression that his life will really begin in the future, and that there is no intrinsic validity and dignity to his current life, just as it is. We never talk about college, as if it is a matter of great importance where or even whether he decides to go. If anything, we let him know that he will have to gird his soul if he decides to explore those endarkened precincts.

Indeed, I assume that in 10 years time, everyone will have seen through the malevolent silliness, the infantile fascism, of college, and the bubble will have burst. The University Snowflake movement is doing everything in its power to move up the timeline.

Well, take that same principle and apply it to history, prehistory, and even pre-prehistory, AKA mythology. People of the past are often rather childlike by our standards, but that doesn't invalidate their lives, any more than our lives are invalid in comparison to the enlightened ones who will be here 1,000 years hence.

In fact, one of the most important functions of religion is to make sure that our current being has full validity in light of future developments.

What I mean is that religion speaks of universal truths, i.e., truths that will always be true regardless of future discoveries and developments. It's just that we must take those developments and inflect them through the prism of timeless truth. Which is what we are always doing around here.

For example, just as our predecessors took Aristotelian or Newtonian physics and examined them in light of religious truth, we do the same thing vis-a-vis quantum physics, or chaos and complexity, or information theory. The truth doesn't change, but our way of conceptualizing and communicating it does.

Among other things, this assures us that our lives will always have the possibility of being "valid," validity presupposing access to a truth that never changes -- in which we can confidently place our faith.

Conversely, let's say you place your faith in science in the vulgar sense. This automatically condemns you to obsolescence, being that science is always changing. For example, what if you placed your faith in Newton in the 19th century? Oops! Einstein just obliterated your faith. It is no different if you place your faith in Darwin today.

Having said that, just as there is a proper way to be a 10 year old -- for example, you don't expect him to act like a five year old -- there is a proper way to be an 18 year old or 30 year old. You still have expectations, it's just that you don't project future ones onto the present. Which is why mature people don't condemn America's founders because some of them owned slaves.

At one time slavery was universal. Indeed, I would guess that there were more white slaves in the world in 1860 than black slaves. I myself am no doubt descended from serfs or worse, but I don't brag about it. I don't try to use it as an invitation to not grow the hell up and to become dependent upon the state. Jews are the most mistreated people in history, but you rarely see one on welfare.

Another critical point -- and one we've discussed in the past -- is that, precisely due to the conditions of modernity, we have so many more ways to be wicked. People of the past were just as vain and greedy and lustful and narcissistic, it's just that they lacked the means to act on their badness (or at least the damage was limited).

But thanks to Obama, we have Genghis Khan with nukes. Historically speaking, he has given to two-year olds what only 40 year-olds are mature enough to handle. Ironically, he has no respect for their culture, which is only running about 700 years behind ours.

Prior to evil modern capitalism there was the predatory state. "What was odd about northwestern Europe in the eighteenth century," writes McCloskey, was "that it escaped from 'predatory tendencies' common to every 'agrarian civilization' since the beginning."

So, to the extent that there are residual predatory tendencies in modern capitalism, it is because the tendencies are in man, not in the system per se. Indeed, the predatory tendencies are only worse with socialism, as we have seen in the Obama regime, which is one gargantuan macroparasite on the economy.

McCloskey reminds us that as a result of the long "European Civil War" of 1914-1989, "capitalism was nearly overwhelmed by nationalism and socialism." It was as if man had reached adolescence and decided to plunge back into childhood (which only happens all the time).

But a child's mind in a man's body is quite different from a man in a man's body. Regression to earlier stages of development is always possible, and indeed, this goes to the deep structure of the culture war between left and right. The left is very much like an immature child who will never get what he needs so long as he is getting what he thinks he wants.

Much to do today. To be continued...

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