Anchored in a Cloud and Soaring Toward A Dream

Another rambling post. What can one do? It's a jungle in here, and some days the best you can do is hack away.

Instability. It is our lot. On this side of life we're always in critical condition. But don't worry -- you'll be stable when you're dead.

Well, not really, if you believe, as I do, in purgatory. But the point is that this instability isn't a bug but a feature having to do with the very essence of man.

Note that in the case of God, his existence and essence are one; or, his essence is to exist. That's real oneness, baby!

Conversely, man has to be the most irritatingly paradoxical creature in all of creation, being that our essence is to change. Or, to express it in terms of perfect nonsense, the point of life is to become oneself. We are condemned to transcendence, and the man who doesn't surpass himself sinks beneath himself, yada yada. You are a child of God, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

As to the reasons for the instability, "the human being is a kind of bridge between the physical world and the spiritual world" (White). The bridge is solid at both ends but spans over an abyss, such that the middle part has a great deal of sway; think of a suspension bridge made of flexible materials over deep ravine.

That's you, on the bridge. There is security at either end, but of very different orders. Both are rock, you might say, one physical, the other metaphysical. Both are solid-as. Only one is dumb-as.

"[M]an can tend upward -- ordering all things to the creator -- or downward into the exclusive pursuit and domination of visible, created things."

So in reality it is a vertical bridge, one end grounded in the Absolute, the other end grounded in... Actually, the other end isn't grounded per se. Rather, I would say that the Absolute radiates toward infinity, so the only thing holding the bridge up at the far end is the linear momentum of the Divine Plenitude tending outward toward nothingness; like an airplane, it only stays up because it's moving.

Think of a ray of light extending out from the sun -- or better, the Big Bang, which is of course still banging. From what? Or, more mysteriously, into what? No one has any idea. What is the leading edge of the bang? Can it really be exploding into, and surrounded by, "nothing"?

That is a different question, and it is unanswerable. As the politicians like to say when they are dodging a question, Let's talk about what we know.

What we know is that irrespective of whether the cosmos is "eternal" or had a beginning, it must have a vertical cause that is always present. It is this cause that extends down and out "forever," or has a tendency toward Nothingness without ever arriving there. It is like numbers; each number is a multiple of one (absoluteness), but they go on forever (infinitude).

In any event, for our purposes, the "tension inscribed within humans marks us with a deep spiritual restlessness and instability, since we cannot live rightly either as angels or mere nonrational animals" (emphasis mine). One can of course tend toward nonrational animality, but no one short a Stalin or Mao becomes a perfect leftist.

The absoluteness of God seems to be mirrored in the black velvet nescience of Death: "Human beings are marked simultaneously both by immortal longings and by the certainty of death."

Now, a total cosmic inversion results in Death being the only certainty, "God" being the illusory byproduct of our fear, uncertainty, instability, etc. In this regard, Nietzsche is "absolutely" correct, which is why he will always be the favorite philosopher of bright adolescent counter-revolutionaries of all ages. He was certainly mine!

Let me drag out my dogeared copy of Thus Spoke Zarathustra and recall what appealed to me back when I was a 30 year-old teen -- back when God spoiled everything, and I enjoyed the cheap omniscience of the dimestore atheist.

Can't find it. It isn't amongst the usual suspects. However, I looked up some quotes, and it is interesting how he is such a perfect mirror image, or inversion, of the truth, even using the identical language and images in some cases:

Become who you are!

Man is something that shall be overcome. Man is a rope, tied between beast and overman -- a rope over an abyss. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end.

But it is the same with man as with the tree. The more he seeks to rise into the height and light, the more vigorously do his roots struggle earthword, downword, into the dark, the deep -- into evil.

Bravo! He is Satan's Aphorist -- which, in a way, makes him second best. Heresy and orthoparadoxy aren't strangers but cousins. Or twins, even. To err is human. But to invert reality and call it truth is diabolical. Some beliefs must exist, even though they have no right to. This is the true meaning of "tolerance."

BTW, Schuon writes that "Of course, a mature man ought to be 'adult,' but he can be so otherwise than by plunging into forbidden abysses..." Granted, Friedrich is a genius. But just because he jumps off the cosmic bridge, does that mean you should?

Anyway, those two rocks -- our "immortal longings" and the "certainty of death" -- "form a crossroads between God and the whole material creation." There are attractors at each end -- O and Ø -- such that "the devil, in his revolt against the wisdom of God, seeks to wrestle humanity away from God..."

The image comes to mind of a tightrope walker, or maybe just a bicycle rider. In either case you are stable so long as you are moving, but unstable when at rest.

Interesting paradox there, in that complete stability results in utter instability. Oh well. That's life. No, literally: what is life but change-in-service-of-conservation? Speaking of which, what is conservatism but the proper recipe for collective life? "The art of progress," wrote Whitehead, "is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order."

Now we have to switch gears on our bike for a slightly different view of the same phenomena. Let's say God goes to the trouble of incarnating as man.

This changes (?!) everything, in that it now means the Center -- the Unmoved Mover -- is here among us. It is available in a way it never was before: indeed, they will call him Immanuel, which means "God with us" -- and withinus -- no longer just without us. The transcendent becomes immanent that the immanent my become transcendent; or, God becomes bridge that the bridge may actually get somewhere.

Reality and appearances. It seems that our bridge is somehow suspended between these, even though it isn't really possible to anchor anything in illusion. Nevertheless, the tenured have been explicitly attempting to do this ever since Kant, who suspends us, as it were, between the illusory and the unknowable, or between a dream at one end and a crowd of witlessness at the other.

My apologies for this post getting nowhere. We'll leave off with a Whiteheadism:

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

On the Depth and Direction of the Cosmos

As promised, we're going to drill down a little deeper into Ultimate Reality. In order to accompany us on the journey, you will need an ontological drill (AKA language); some quality timelessness with yourself; access to the source of all being; an ordinary deck of playing cards, jokers included; a 4 oz bottle of Elmer's glue (larger is fine); an X-acto knife or sharp scissors; and a sincere heart purified of all egotism, self-deception, and conspiracy indoctrination.

Let's begin!

Um, where?

In the beginning!

Of what?

Oh, let's just say intelligence, since it is obviously the alpha and omega of this entire enterprise. After all, if we aren't first intelligent, we can't even ask from whence intelligence comes. And if it comes from stupidity... well, at least that explains the left.

"Christianity," says White, "affirms that the human person is created in the 'image' and 'likeness' of God,"; or better, "toward the image and likeness."

In or toward; the choice of prepositions makes all the difference. Obviously, "toward" is the more dynamic, connoting telos and finality, or journey and destination.

However, there is really a complementarity between the two: "First, the human being is made in the image of God in a stable way due to his or her nature, as a rational person, having a spiritual soul with incorporeal powers of intelligence and free will."

Intelligence and free will. Here you must recognize that these are two seeds of the same coon: the purpose of free will is to utilize our intelligence to discover truth. If there is no free will, then we are not free to discover truth; and if there is no truth, then freedom is a kind of sick joke that reduces to nothing, AKA limitless stupidity.

If these are two s. of the same c., then the source of our being is not just intelligence but freedom. Or, as it says in 2 Corinthians, "the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty." And where there is liberty, there is truth; flip a few pages back, and we read in John that "you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Oh, and Jesus then says something rather provocative to his listeners: "you seek to kill Me, because My word has no place in you." Even more provocative, "You do the deeds of your father." Who is? "He was a murderer from the beginning... there is no truth in him. When he speaks a lie, he speaks from his own resources, for he is a liar and the father of it."

That is a somewhat mythopoetic way of expressing a metaphysical truth, but clearly, if you are not open to, and grounded in, the source of being-intelligence, then in what are you grounded? For in the words of the Aphorist, Myth is not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language.

Please take out your bottle of Elmer's glue, and affix your soul to this proper ground. If you have to detach yourself from the false ground, use the X-acto knife.

You will have noticed that when you are attached to the false ground, you are two things rather than one. You are in an imaginary world of paradoxical dualism instead of the real world of orthoparadoxical complementarity:

"The human animal is not two things: a spiritual substance of soul and an animal body, related to one another." No, "there is one composite person who is both body and soul." From where does this most mysterious oneness arise?

Where else? From the upper vertical. The other direction is a non-starter, because there you will find only fragmentation, dispersion, and surfaces with no depth. The featureless homogeneity of Flatland. This is the shadow of God, just as cold is only the absence of heat.

Because there is depth, there is man. It is not the other way around. If it were, then all the depth we experience would be completely illusory. In a way, intelligence is a measure of depth, isn't it? A smart person sees more deeply into the unity of things, just as a genuine artist conveys greater depth than the mediocre one. Likewise a saint and sanctity. Thus,

[T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God....

[T]he human being was created "in the beginning" to be relational in its own way. The person is made first and foremost to be in relational communion with God....

Man is a combination of melody and harmony, the former going to our uniqueness, the latter to our sameness. Harmony is vertical, whereas a melody (in western music) is a horizontal adventure through the chordal structure.

For our purposes, this chordal structure is "human nature," or universal essences and archetypes. This structure is quintessentially spatial, whereas the melody necessarily plays out in time. For which reason we say that timelessness takes time.

The melody is your Life. But it is also history, which is equally constrained by certain archetypes, for which reason we say that it "repeats." Of course it doesn't literally repeat itself, but it certainly meanders through the same archetypes. It is "going somewhere," or at least supposed to be going there.

The problem -- and this is plainly specified in the owner's manual in Genesis 3 -- is that man tries to dissolve the divine-human partnership and get there on his own -- as if one can enjoy celestial living in the sublunary world without the aid of Heaven! This always fails, because it fails before it even begins.

In other words, it eliminates the ground and measure of success, which is proximity to the absolute. A progressive in the vulgar sense is someone who has obliterated the very ground of progress. His subjective desires become the measure of success, and it's Genesis 3 All Over Again. Cosmic inversion complete.

So: "the human being is precariously located between the visible [horizontal, local] and invisible [vertical, nonlocal] worlds." The whole innerprize falls apart "without a right orientation toward [our] true homeland and a genuine knowledge of God."

Now, remove your deck of cards. Pick a card, any card. The deck is you, the card your particular action. Was the action free, or was it determined? Yes and no, for in the words of the Aphorist, sin shuffles the deck.

Matter + Math ≠ Reality

Yesterday I didn't get enough sleep because of staying up so late for the World Series on Sunday night. This morning I caught up with my sleep, but now it's too late to post.

Furthermore, being that the Gagdad constitution is a finicky contraption, I don't respond well to deviations in my rut. So, while I theoretically slept enough, I can't say I'm in shape to get behind the wheel of the cosmic bus. And yet, if I don't, then I feel as if the course of cosmic evolution will have been stalled for another 24 hours. Sad!

We were talking about exactly when man became (or becomes) Man -- or rather, examining that border between animal and person. As soon as you think about it, you realize there can't be a border, or that the border is a wall: there are animals and there are men, with no species in between. [Insert Hollywood sexual predator joke here.]

Yes, yes, there is continuity. But there is simply no common measure between animal and human minds. And when I say no common measure, I mean that absolutely literally: that certain human capacities not only surpass animality, but transcend matter altogether.

It's analogous to Flatland, in which two-dimensional beings have no way to comprehend three-dimensional ones. Nor, for that matter, will all the two-dimensional landscapes in the world add up to three dimensions. More generally, quality cannot be reduced to quantity (nor -- and for the same reason! -- subject to object).

This reminds me of the argument from causation: just as no amount of proximate or even ultimate causes adds up to the First Cause, no amount of planes adds up to a 3D space. Likewise, all the animal intelligence in the world doesn't add up to what a child spontaneously knows (i.e., essences).

There is something in the human being that absolutely transcends his material and animal antecedents. What is this something?

Our shorthand way of talking about it is with reference to a soul. Although a perfectly adequate word, it has gradually become saturated with various colloquial or agenda-driven connotations, such that it no longer means what it is supposed to mean, i.e., the form of the body. In other words, a once technical term has devolved to a kind of folk expression, similar to what has happened to the words "marriage," "man," "woman," "liberal," etc.

Jumping ahead a bit, White argues that "the ultimate foundation of reality is both personal and interrelational." And "if this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists." That's a bold statement. Can we prove it? (Yes, but in the next post.)

Recall what was said above about the first cause. The first cause of three-dimensional space cannot be the line or point, even if space is constituted by an infinite number of these.

Analogously, the first cause of the person cannot in principle be anything impersonal. The materialist will no doubt argue that this is because there is really no such thing as persons -- that what we call persons are just animals with a few more tricks. Perhaps. [Insert Frederica Wilson joke here.]

Although tempting -- the prospect of fine insultainment always is -- I'm in no mood to get into an argument with a materialist this morning. Besides, animals don't argue, and certainly not over the truth of reality. They bite, or mark territory, or fling poo, or become journalists (but I repeat myself), or run for congress, or whatever.

"Here then we can see a fundamental truth of the cosmos: there is a relational character to the hierarchy of being. The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things." Emphasis mine. Why? Because I want to emphasize 1) the verticality of it all, and 2) that this verticality cannot under any stretch of the imagination be explained in a bottom-up manner.

In other words, no amount of tenure adds up to even a particle of truth -- just as no amount of MSM reporting can ever exit the libubble narrative. Seriously. That's a joke, but a grievous one that, if you get it, should make you laugh and weep and vomit simultaneously -- assuming you haven't abandoned your soul, or your soul hasn't already departed in disgust.

Oh, it happen. It do happen.

The human being who "turns in on itself in pride and rejection of God" is vulnerable to becoming a "spiritually empty image," i.e., a container with no content. An empty barrel, you might say.

But in a properly bright-side up world, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," thus instantiating "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty" (White).

We'll try to drill down a little deeper into all of this in the next post...

The Throbbing Novelty of the Cosmos Hurtling Toward a New Post

Back when I was writing the book, I remember pondering the question of when man first appeared -- or appears, since it must recur in eachuvus -- in creation. But only for about five years or so. I read everything I could find that addressed it from an evolutionary, or anthropological, or genetic perspective, but still, there is an inevitable gap.

And when I say "inevitable," that is not a God-of-the-gaps dodge. Rather, it is true in principle, because man is something utterly sui generis, or unique, in all of creation. Although some antecedents can help account for man in retrospect, absolutely nothing could have predicted him. For how can one predict the radically novel? If one could, it wouldn't be novel.

To back up a bit, the same principle applies to existence-as-such (Existence) and to life-as-such (Life), in that both are necessarily presumed by science, not explained by it. Again, this is not a dodge: to ask why there is something instead of nothing is not a scientific question.

Although a more controversial assertion, it is also not (ultimately) a scientific question to ask about the origins of Life. Even if we could pinpoint the time and circumstances coinciding with its emergence, this still wouldn't account for the nature of Life, which is again entirely novel.

Indeed, one might say it is novelty itself. With Life we now have sensation, awareness, perception, interiority, presence, subject, each beyond the reach of even the most subtle materialism. A "science of the interior?" Yes, there is one, but it has nothing to do with science as we know it, but rather, with metaphysics.

Whitehead was all over this, so he was a big help. He thought about these ultimate issues in the Correct way, more or less. He suggests that Life "is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the Universe."

Life, you might say, is the life of the cosmic party. Instead of just going around in circles, it always aims beyond itself and thus has a circular pattern: "the aim is always beyond the attained fact. The goal is some type of perfected things," whereas "inorganic nature is characterized by its acceptance of matter of fact." Borr-rring.

Do you see the revolution? With Life, there is now a wedge between fact-as-fact and fact-as-aim, or process. All of a sudden Time takes on primary importance. By which I do not mean mere chronological duration, i.e., One Damn Thing After Another, but events tied together by an inner coherence from present --> future. For a living system is an anticipatory system, and what is that?! In other words, the now is now oriented toward the great not-yet. Here is where that thing called Hope first elbows its way into creation.

"In nature, the soil rests, while the root of the plant pursues the sources of its refreshment" (Whitehead). That is a typical example of Whitehead's epigramatical pithiness, but it makes me think of how the same image applies to the mind or spirit. Obviously, the mind does not seek its refreshment in matter, unless you are seriously autistic. Rather, it grows upward and inward, ultimately seeking its refreshment in... you geist it!

We'll come back to that later.

What I really want to say is right here in a marvelous marginalia I must have written over 30 years ago, possibly a direct quote of AWN: the creativity of the world is the throbbing emotion of the past hurtling itself into a new transcendent fact.

Whitehead goes on to say that higher animals seem to be "personal," in the sense that they are organized around a kind of inner center: "Thus in one sense a dog is a 'person,' and in another sense he is a non-personal society." Conversely, lower animals "seem to lack the dominance of [a] personal society," such that a tree, for example, "is a democracy."

I don't know about that. A tree must nevertheless cohere around some nonlocal essence, or it would dissolve into its constituents, as it does upon death. What really sets man apart from the trees -- some men, anyway -- is a conscious hierarchy, or better, hierarchy-become-conscious. Each of us is the king of his own castle, master of his domain.

Or ought to be, anyway. A sick person -- say, Dirty Harvey -- is indeed a democracy, in which the lowest impulse has the same rights as the noblest ideal. (If he has any ideals left -- in other words, if the bottom-up revolution hasn't been complete.)

By the way, you will have noticed how the Founders applied this same principle to politics, such that our system is neither a top-down aristocracy nor a bottom-up democracy. If it were the latter, we could vote for slavery, or for socialized medicine, or for limits on free speech.

D'oh!

We're getting awfully far afield this morning, for which I apologize. But this is the New Regime, and you might even say that it is more democratic than the old one, in that I'm simply allowing all the voices in my head a chance to speak. So there won't be as much coherence, or at least posts may not wrap themselves up as tidily as before.

Let me just get back to what started this post to begin with, which is a passage in White about the origins of man. He speaks of how "there is a kind of historical continuity between non-living things and living things, but also a differentiation and progression from one kind of reality to another, up the scale of perfection." (Recall the continuous/discontinuous chapters within the bʘʘk, and indeed of the b↻↺k itself.)

Once Life appears, there is a kind of "foundation for the emergence in human beings of specifically rational, spiritual activities of language and complex technology." Again, this emergence of human personhood cannot be reduced to antecedents, but is a Novel Thing that is "inserted," so to speak, in this new space:

At a given time, then, we can postulate that due to a new initiative of God, animals were elevated to a higher level. God began to create spiritual souls in human animals, and so the human adventure begins. There was a passage from the "merely animal" world of homo sapiens to the specifically spiritual world of the human person.

This is the passage where God initiated the new project of humanity, by creating the spiritual soul, and infusing it as the "form of the body" in what constituted the first human beings. (We might hypothesize that this took place around 50,000 years ago, given the evidence of human culture provided by paleontology.)

Agreed! What could go wrong? A note in the margin says Fall situated here. If I know myself, it must mean that if man appears at around noon, 50,000 years ago, then the fall occurs at around 12:01 PM.

The Adult is a Myth of the Child, and Vice Versa

I think that for the time being I'm just going to continue ranting about whatever pops into my mind.

I know: how is this different from the previous 3,000 posts?

Well, sometimes, without even gnosising, I start to put pressure on mysoph to stick with a certain subject or do things in a specific way. Come to think of it, it reminds me of a musician who just loves playing whatever comes into his instrument, but then accidentally has a hit song. Then, for the rest of his life he not only has to play that stupid song, but do so in the same way every night.

This is why I admire, say, Van Morrison. He's had some accidental hits along the way, including Gloria and Moondance. To this day he still plays them in concert, but always with different arrangements, tempos, instrumentation, solos, and styles -- anything from jazz to country & western. What a nightmare to be trapped in a single version! That's not music, it's architecture.

Sour grapes, Bob? I don't think so. My only concern is that there must be a fair number of people who would benefit from the blog but will never know of its existence. If I were more ambitious -- and grandiose -- then maybe I would try reach them.

But then I'd have to deal with the far greater number of people for whom the blog is not intended -- not just trolls, but normals. I can't function with those people in my head. Rather, it only works if I pull out all the stops and let it flow where it will. (For example, over at Instapundit I will occasionally make a religious comment, which only ends up offending the other mostly religious commenters. All good people no doubt, but normals through and through.)

So, today's rant will be about... I have no idea! I have a few notes to myself... let's see. The other day I was looking for a particular Aphorism, and as usual, was arrested by a hundred others I wasn't looking for. For example, The adult is a myth of the child.

Think about that: when you were a child, didn't you think of grown-ups as having all the answers and having everything under control? But how many grown-ups do you know who have all answers and have everything under control?

What an excellent cosmic joke! Look at Hollywood. Are there any adults there at all? It's easy to point to Dirty Harvey as the infant in the room, but that's just a simplistic projection. The whole place is filled with infants, just different kinds. It takes two to enact a psychic dance. Not to blame the victims, but there actually is such a thing a strong woman who would have kicked him so hard in the balls he would have choked on them.

Maybe it's easy for me to say, since I don't have a daughter. But if I did, and she were in that situation, she would hear her father's voice saying Field goal time. Kick him in the balls!

Now, just because the adult is a myth of the child, it doesn't mean there are no adults. Even so, think of how God had to get personally involved and send an actual adult down for our edification. A real man. The real man -- not just in terms of content, but especially in terms of form.

Indeed, that is the big difference: if Christ were only about the content, then he would be similar to any other teacher or prophet with some good ideas to relate. But Christ is relationship as such. Wha?

God, says White, "is a mystery of relational persons.... Thus, the ultimate foundation of all reality is both personal and interrelational. If this is the primary truth that is behind all other truths, then it casts a theological light upon all else that exists," such that "the physical cosmos ultimately exists for spiritual persons and for relational love."

This is to dis-invert the cosmos and put it back right-side up: "The nonliving things exist for or are relative to the living things" (emphasis mine). This is not a myth -- not of a child or anyone else. Rather, the alternatives are, in all their metamythological translunacy.

In a comment to yesterday's post I mentioned that man is a bridge, not a destiny. White agrees that "The human being is the 'bridge' between the spiritual and the physical world in a twofold way." Here we can see how the earliest Christians committed anticipatory plagiarism against me:

In the ascendent [↑] direction, the physical world mounts up toward God, or "returns" to God through human actions of knowledge and love.... In the descending [↓] direction, man is the "place" that the spiritual world is made visible or manifest in the cosmos.

Ultimately, then, "the human being is meant to be a special 'location' of grace in the cosmos, where the spiritual gifts of God descend through human reason and human freedom," into "a human common life based upon truth, moral goodness, and beauty."

And that is no myth, although children of the dark imagine it so.

What Does It Say It Is? Or, Who Do You Say I Am?

Yesterday it occurred to me that a liberal who is truly interested in equality would, more than anyone else, want children to benefit from a religious education, being that a religiously informed soul is one of the great equalizers.

But that is in the ideal world. In the real world, liberals have no interest in equality (envy is another matter), while religion as often as not stultifies the intellect.

Somewhere there is a note dashed off to myself. Here: "absolutism protects the below average & ungifted, allowing them to know and assimilate truths they could never acquire independently."

The sense of "absolutism" used here has nothing directly to do with politics, but rather, metaphysics. I was thinking of Schuon, who said something to the effect that if you must label him, then call him an Absolutist, since his first principle is knowledge of the Absolute and the human consequences flowing therefrom -- moral, social, metaphysical, and mystical.

If you fail to give children a sense of the absolute -- worse yet, take it away! -- then they will spend the rest of their lives searching for it, running from it, or pretending they already have it. Nor is it possible to advance Godward without a theological vocabulary that includes words like grace, atonement, sanctity, demon, logos, etc. It would be like trying to practice science without a vocabulary of concepts such as quantity, measurement, and law.

Marx is undoubtedly the most catastrophic exemplar of someone absolutely secure in his possession of a false absolute. Everything else is commentary, right down to today's headline, whatever it may be. In other words, the contemporary left carries on the tradition of being crocktroops of the false absolute -- or of absolute relativism.

This absolute relativism is the very quintessence of metaphysical impossibility. Unless you understand this literally, then you haven't understood it at all. You must understand that the left is animated by a fantasy of what never was and can never be. Ever. Period.

Coincidentally, a deep awareness of the distinction between Absolute and false absolute (or absolute relativism) is precisely what motivated St. John Paul in his struggle against communism. The outer or surface political struggle was just the side effect of an infinitely deeper and inner metaphysical one. Like secular saint Breitbart, he knew that politics is far downstream from culture, and that it was necessary to penetrate to the deep structure of culture to generate real change and progress. And hope. The proper and permissible kind.

Reality is a person or it is nothing. Scientism, of course, has the virtue of clarity. But even an unclear sense of God (so long as it isn't upside-down, as in the case of Islamists) is superior to clear error.

For JP2, it came down to person or matter. His first principle is the former, while Marx's is the latter. Ultimate reality is a person, or even the very possibility of personhood.

Obviously there is no possibility of personhood in materialism; rather, in this view, persons are simply side effects of matter and may be treated as such. From Lenin to Bernie Sanders, human beings are just bags of wet cement to be arranged this way or that by the state. In this context, a fascist is anyone with rudimentary taste and decency.

Along these lines, another note to myself: every so-called revolution is a counter-revolutution. Specifically, it is a reactionary rejection of Christ (or the meta-cosmic Person, to keep things ecumenical). For truly truly truly (or truly³), there is and can be no progress beyond the recognition of Absolute-as-Person. Who do you say that I AM is always the relevant question.

Another note, this one a little more cryptic: Apartheid of: class, ideology, religion.

If you think South Africa was an apartheid state, try being an absolutist on a liberal campus (or newsroom), where only the false absolute is permitted. What is the Leftopolis but a homeland for mediocrities, misfits, malcontents, and other assorted materialists, all convinced they have the Answer? This tribe does't circumcise. Rather, decapitate.

The liberal unintelligentsia does not represent the disadvantaged, but rather, consists of emissaries from the land of bad ideas; and bad ideas have a disproportionately catastrophic impact on the poor and disadvantaged, whose margin of delusion is much narrower than it is for a wealthy person. No one is crazier, for example, than Lawrence O'Donnell, but he can afford it. As can Bernie Sander, Keith Olbermann, Nancy Pelosi, etc.

You will have noticed that Satan is far too intelligent, let alone subtle, to be a materialist. However, he has no compunction about enlisting them into his service.

ProAM-tip: don't trust people, including me or Petey, who try to convince you of anything. Rather, trust what is self-evident, luminous, and intelligible -- that little truth which lights the way to infinitely more truth. Chase Truth until He catches you, and then keep chasing.

In each moment, each person is capable of possessing the truths that matter. --The Aphorist

Thursday Morning Metaphysical Rant

Hello. This isn't part of the rant. Rather, the rant is now over, and I am now identifying it as one. A Get off my celestial lawn! moment, you might say. Getting stuff off my chest, AKA externalizing the fourth chakra. Venting the nonlocal spleen. Perhaps I should do it more often. After all, it's only how I really feel:

This should not be a controversial statement, but a first principle of any intelligent human being -- or a human being who endeavors to exercise his intelligence to the fullest: "Man by definition is a center, or 'the center' in a given universe" (Schuon).

Let's leave other hypothetical universes to the side, and restrict ourselves to this one. In this cosmos man is central, which is to say, Pontifex Maximus: not so much the Bridge Builder as the bridge itself.

Which we must simultaneously build. Irreducible orthoparadox, you see. How to put it... We are the bridge we construct in order to get from here to there. Not a horizontal there but a vertical one. In short, man is a vertical bridge, or a bridge of verticality to the father shore.

Better yet, just look at the caption of the icon in the sidebar: Your life is a path for the Spirit to pass from periphery to center. Thoughts and choices -- truth and virtue -- are the paving stones. To which I would add beauty, each integrated with and reflecting the others.

Anticipating objections, if man is not central, who or what is? Is there a greater being we might consult, one who "contains" us or puts us in context?

Well, yes and no. Of course there are men who are greater than we are, but they are men nevertheless. To the extent that they are greater, it is because they are more central, more integrated, more actualized. They do not belong to a different species, although it sometimes seems that way. They are like men, only better. Others are like men, only worse. There are always two possible perspectives on the worstovus: subhuman? Or all too human?

Which highlights the verticality of it all. In the absence of verticality there is no better or worse, just the multicultural relativistic mush of the left. I don't mind that they don't believe in superior people and civilizations, only that they want to outlaw them (even while privileging the worst).

We're getting a little far afield, but verticality and centrality are two sides of the same reality. In a purely horizontal universe, it would of course be absurd to suggest that man -- or anything else -- is central. Therefore, the materialist is correct that there is no center in the context of materialism. But once the materialist makes such a universal statement, he has actually left materialism behind and has placed himself at the center of creation in spite of himsoph (or sophistry, to be exact).

Now we see that verticality and centrality have something to do with universality. I'm just going to throw all my cards on the table and say that these three in turn relate to eternity, infinitude, personhood, and the Absolute Subject, AKA God. None of these categories can stand alone -- which is why it is strictly impossible to be a consistent atheist, but that is a slightly different argument. Let's stay focused on this scattershot rant.

The Absolute Subject is the only conceivable principle that ties the cosmos together. Put conversely, remove or deny the A.S. and everything falls apart: we are well and truly banished to the periphery. Not even the periphery, because that presumes a center. Unending alienation in an abyss of blind nothingness -- like being stuck in a liberal university forever, with no possibility of graduation. Or an eternal waiting room with CNN droning in the background. There are no words. Only a bone-rattling cry of existential pain from abdomen to larynx to void:

But there are words, and here again, words not only connect us to the center, but are its emanation. Not for nothing does man get to name the animals. Why? Well, for starters because they are relative to us, as periphery is to center. Note that (maybe) the most degrading effect of metaphysical Darwinism is to invert this reality, and to render man relative to the beasts! Which simply cannot be.

Think about it, genius: to even say the word "Darwinism" is to have transcended Darwinism. In so doing, you have placed yourself at the center of creation, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it, short of giving yourself a lobotomy and eating your neighbor. If you're an agglomeration of selfish genes, start acting like it, hypocrite! Don't partake of the detritus of Christian civilization while pretending your withered soul can subsist on the holy communion of sacred matter.

It's like the cult of Global Warming: I'll believe it when beachfront property is worth as much as a mobile home in Death Valley. Likewise, I'll believe in metaphysical Darwinism when liberals start behaving like uncivilized beasts.

Right. Let me put that in a different way.

Obviously the barbarians of the left place themselves at the center, but in the manner of the infant, who is also the center of the universe. Most of my readers probably have children, or at least were once children themselves. It is right and proper that we nourish the delusions of His Majesty the Baby, and treat him as the center of the world. We do this so he can eventually outgrow the delusion, and see that each person is a representative of the same center.

Two errors: deny him this delusion, or indulge it to excess, and the baby will spend the rest of his life in search of the Lost Entitlement. You will have created a monster. In other words, a liberal.

Bottom line for today:

"God became man that man might become God": the absolute Subject, perfect in Itself, descended into contingency so that contingency could be reintegrated into the perfection of the absolute Subject. "I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life": Christ identifies himself with the divine Subjectivity, which "is incarnated" in the world of contingency, in conformity with the saving tendency of the Sovereign Good....

God is intrinsically "I"; He is "He" only extrinsically and from man's vantage point.... God is the only and perfect Subject and His intent is to reintegrate the multiple and imperfect subjects...

Metaphysical Dunning-Kruger & the Elephant in the Cosmos

The other day I saw a headline on Drudge to the effect that American children are more anxious than ever. I have no idea if this is true, but I believe it. But first we have to define our terms.

Now, anxiety as such is prima facie evidence of an un- or even disintegrated mind. However, one must first determine whether the lack of integration is a cause or an effect.

For example, one may have a hormonal disturbance that causes a lack of psychic integration, which then causes anxiety. Or, think of someone with incipient Alzheimer's disease: as the mind begins to unravel, the person will start to experience anxiety, persecution, and even paranoia.

This is quite different from a primary diagnosis of anxiety. Which is also very different from normal and even necessary anxiety. Frankly, most people aren't nearly anxious enough. Or, they are anxious about the wrong things. Think of the anti-Trump hysterics. They are certainly anxious and definitely in need of treatment. But not for the Trump hysteria. Rather, they need to find out what the Trump hysteria is concealing.

We've all had that One Great Teacher, right? My own esteemed Professor Worthwhile once said... I actually have my old lecture notes hidden away somewhere, so I bet I could find the exact reference.

In any event, he said that with an anxious patient, always assume (once purely biochemical causes are ruled out) there is something in their life they're Not Paying Attention To. The anxiety is a consequence of the Elephant in the Room which they are ignoring, avoiding, repressing, or otherwise pretending doesn't exist. It is the Thing that isn't integrated but needs to be.

Some of the biggest things can't be integrated, so they require the most pretending. For example, Death. Wait. Is this true? That Death can't be integrated? Just this morning, while randomly bumping around the internet, I was reading of Lou Reed's death:

I have never seen an expression as full of wonder as Lou's as he died. His hands were doing the water-flowing 21-form of tai chi. His eyes were wide open. I was holding in my arms the person I loved the most in the world, and talking to him as he died. His heart stopped. He wasn't afraid. I had gotten to walk with him to the end of the world. Life -- so beautiful, painful and dazzling -- does not get better than that. And death? I believe that the purpose of death is the release of love.

For Christians, Jesus is meant to be the final cure for death anxiety, such that death is swallowed by life instead of vice versa. We'll return to this idea -- or real-idea -- later.

For the moment, let's play with this notion that anxiety and integration are inversely related. A rock, for example, is completely integrated and therefore has no anxiety. But it's easy to be integrated if you're a rock, for what is there to integrate? The reason why man is the most anxious critter in all of creation is that he has the most to integrate. Loose ends everywhere!

Indeed, man's very reason for being is the integration of everything. It's our privilege and our burden. That's what you call a Tall Order, but it is nevertheless the case, and everyone knows it, even if most pretend otherwise. Despite the pretense, it is the Prime Directive (or at least one dimension of it).

Alert readers will have noticed a zinger by Thomas Aquinas at the top of the comment box: Since a soul can know all things, in a way it is all things, and thus it is possible for the completeness of the universe to exist in one thing.

This is just another way of saying that man is in the image of the Creator, who is the Complete Person. Absent the Complete Person, no completeness of any kind would be conceivable, much less attainable, on our end. The very idea of the cosmic area rug would be a childish dream.

That's the good news. The bad news is that we are driven by a kind of anxiety until we fulfill our reason for being. Which can be accomplished in various ways, but not without God's help. For one thing, just imagine the futility of pretending a perfect integration that excludes God. Talk about ignoring the elephant in the cosmos!

Revelation is here to assure that every soul can attain this integration, regardless of various terrestrial contingencies -- existential, cultural, historical, etc. Nevertheless, unlike God, we are always trailed by shadows of the nothingness from which we were gratuitously plucked. That would be the ultimate source of our anxiety. IMO.

White makes this very point in The Light of Christ:

[T]he human being is created toward or unto the image of God because this image is not only static but ultimately dynamic.... [T]he human being remains the summit of the visible creation and can become more profoundly so only if he develops a more dynamic, perfect relationship toward God.

However. I want to say: insert Fall here. In other words, all the Trouble is located right here, in the literally infinite space between man and God. Call it what you will, but there is room here aplenty for every kind of mischief. Or just say History.

Gosh. It's one of those mornings that I have much more to say than the ability to say it. I'm trying to wrap my mind around something that is quite obviously larger than myself, but you can't swallow an elephant in one bite. Perhaps if I had all day. In this circumstance I have but one option.

Help, Mr. Schuon, help!

"Knowledge is total or integral to the extent that its object is the most essential and thus the most real" (emphasis mine).

This most essential and real object is none other than the Elephant in -- and beyond -- the Cosmos. When we say "everything is relative," what we mean is that everything is relative to this Elephant, without which there would be no relativity at all, just a kind of absolute mush. A left with no right.

Intelligence gives rise to "the awareness of our superiority in relation to those who do not know how to discern" (discernment between the real and unreal being the function of intelligence).

However, one of the first fruits of this intelligence is awareness of the relativity of our superiority, in that it is either relative to the Elephant, or it is Nothing at All (except for maybe the anxiety of being permanently sealed in total ignorance and futility).

And of course, many people are far too stupid or ignorant to understand how stupid or ignorant they are. Metaphysical Dunning Kruger is a real thing.

Here is our omega for today, which will be tomorrow's alpha: "The human vocation is to realize that which is man's reason for being: a projection of God, and therefore a bridge between earth and Heaven."

There is degree of anxiety so long as we are suspended on this rickety bridge called life.

Dirty Harvey and the Image of God

We are in the midst of a discussion of the human telos, which, if I am not mistaken, has something to do with Harvey Weinstein.

Why Dirty Harvey? Because even liberals seem to understand that he is a poor example of humanness. That being the case, something must have gone wrong in his development; something must have prevented him from being the Harvey God intended him to be.

Again, the two operative words are integration and actualization. And as usual, as soon as I start thinking about a subject, books fall into my hands that relate to the same subject. I wonder about that: is it just because my preoccupations are so vague and universal that everything speaks to them? In that case, what looks like synchronicity is just inevitability in disguise.

I don't know. We can never see beneath the veil on this side of the rug. But I just started reading a seemingly unrelated book that has an awful lot about integration -- specifically, the metacosmic integration made possible by Christ. Indeed, if Christ is who believers say he is, then he is in principle the last word in both integration and actualization. Or first and last, which is to say, archetype and fulfillment.

Now, man must love and will the good; indeed, willing the good is a function of loving it, which "completes or perfects the human being teleologically." We must also love truth, such that real knowledge is another form of teleological completion or perfection.

In any event, we can see that what we "must do" -- i.e., what is necessary for man -- is very much a function of our purpose. Because there are things that we cannot not be, there are things we should not fail to know and do.

The "Catholic intellectual vocation," says White, calls its practitioners "to be people of a holistic integrity." Off the top of my head, this may be what most distinguishes us from the animals: they too should be integrated, but they can never attain a holistic integration.

A dog, for example, may achieve a perfect integration with its archetype, and thus be honored by the Westminster Kennel Club. But a dog is nevertheless enclosed in its archetype. There is nothing holistic about it, in the sense of being ordered to, and integrated with, the Whole.

Not so with man. Why? Because our archetype is ultimately the Godman, being that we were created in the Image and Likeness of the Absolute.

In this context, "microcosmos" is too confining a word. "Micro-theos" is more like it, so long as we don't misunderstand the implications. Dirty Harvey, for example, certainly pretended to be a "micro-god." Big difference. Still, we need to know why it is so different, and why his approach is intrinsically deviant, i.e., what one mustn't do.

"Every facet of our life needs to come progressively into the light of Christ," so that "we may live in a more truly human and divine way," the one being a reflection of the other:

When human beings are integrated morally, intellectually, and spiritually, their intellectual concerns and their moral patterns of life cohere. Their artistic sense and their capacity for self-giving are united. Their forms of recreation and rest are in harmony with their sense of worship and commitment. Their relationships of human love are deeply related to their aspiration to divine love (emphases mine).

What this really amounts to is an integration that is both vertical and horizontal; or better, horizontality integrated with verticality. Horizontality inevitably involves an element of contingency. Indeed, if there were no verticality then man would be condemned to either a pure horizontal contingency or an unyielding determinism. Only our verticality lifts us from these twin hells. Transcendence is always there amidst our immanence.

But it is not enough for man to merely be free; rather, freedom in the absence of a telos is just nihilism by another name. Dirty Harvey's worldly power made him "free" to engage in all sorts of intrinsic transgressions. And don't think for one moment that thousands of other reptilian Hollywood denizens don't want to be just like Harvey! They just don't want to get caught, that's all.

For example, in this morning's jolt, Jim Geraghty writes that

For decades, the stars and powerful players of Hollywood instructed us about which political candidates deserved election. They told us which causes were worthy of support and which ones needed to be opposed. In their works and in their speeches, they told us how to be a better person.

(!)

That's the key: our moral superiors in Hollywood don't just tell us whom to vote for and what policies to support, but how to be better human beings. And you cannot presume to know what is better without an implicit standard of what is best, i.e., without a telos. What -- or who -- is their telos? They don't really ever say, but it's usually someone who is Really Brave, by which they mean someone who Stands Up to Republicans and all they represent. In short, someone like Dirty Harvey, who is a bully for the left, which absolves the rest of his bullying. Or did, until a week ago.

But real integration -- and therefore integrity -- is "rare in the world today, where we are constantly confronted with stories about morally divided lives.... De-Christianization leads to re-paganization. We begin to serve multiple gods and suffer the division [read: dis-integration] of our selves. Without the grace of Christ, the integration of the human person is made more difficult, and even on many levels impossible" (emphasis mine).

I think you can look at this in two ways: yes, without the grace of Christ, integration on many levels is impossible. But you can turn it around, such that "integration of many levels" is the grace of Christ, precisely. That such integration is even possible, let alone actualized, is nothing less than the Trinity in action, call it what you will.

For In the Beginning are the uncreated Persons of the Trinity. It is that ultimate harmony of which we are the image and likeness.

I don't mean to leave you hanging, but that's as far as I've gotten in the book. However, I'm also rereading Schuon's Roots of the Human Condition, which not only complements the above, but provides an even deeper... integration.

The title provides a hint, doesn't it? Roots of the human condition. You might say that our task herebelow is to trace the latter up into the former, i.e., to scamper up that venerable Tree with Roots Aloft and Branches Down Below.

Example. Okay,

To know, to will, to love: this is man's whole nature and consequently it is his whole vocation and duty. To know totally, to will freely, to love nobly; or in other words: to know the Absolute..., to will what is demanded of us by virtue of this knowledge; and to love both the true and the good, and that which maintains them here below; thus to love the beautiful which leads to them.

That's a tall order, but is it really? Eh, I don't think so. Seems like the bare minimum. Indeed, it should "come naturally" (or supernaturally naturally, to be precise) to us, just as eating grass comes naturally to an herbivore. In order for it to not come naturally, something must get in the way. What could that be? Who or what is trying to prevent us from being ourselves, i.e., from actualization of our archetype and integration with our telos? More on that later. Because we're outta time.

Let's just say that Reality -- ultimate Reality -- is not actually that complicated. Rather, we are. Also the world, what with its crosscurrents of turbulence, contingency, karma, fluctuation, relativity, finitude, and other people. The Conspiracy.

Nevertheless.

"Intelligence is the perception of a reality," which is ultimately rooted in "the perception of the Real as such" (emphasis mine). Because we can know, Reality Is; but this still doesn't go far enough. For Being Is, and Being is a communion of Persons characterized by love, truth, and beauty. And we are not other than That.

The Intelligent Stupidity and Well Adjusted Insanity of the Left

The infrequency of posting over the past week isn't due to an absence of ideas or inspiration -- AKA coonstipation -- just lack of time.

The irregularity does, however, make the continuity of logorrhea more of a challenge -- like going back to sleep and trying to resume the dream one was having. I can do that sometimes. Just not after a week.

What was the dream? Something about how to tell if conservative liberals are no better than illiberal leftists who use politics as a way to manage their psyche (mainly by projecting hatred and other impulses and emotions into conservatives). Although it's always best to deal with left wing arguments on the merits (in a face-to-face setting), this doesn't mean we can't afterwards examine leftism on a deeper level and laugh behind their backs.

As we've discussed in the past, leftism is a collective psychological defense rooted in primitive mechanisms such as denial, splitting, projection, delusion, fantasy, acting out, and even hallucination (what else to call it when someone looks at our president and sincerely "sees" a racist, or Russian spy, or anti-Semite?).

What I mean is that, if I'm having a conversation with a leftist, I don't just tell him to his face that he's crazy, or a retard, or needs to grow up. That would be rude. Nor do I like to play the Psychologist Card, because that is one of the tricks of the left. However, it doesn't mean that privately I don't regard the ineducable leftist as more in need of psychotherapy than dialectic.

In this regard, we want to do the opposite of the left, in that they dismiss conservative arguments by simply attacking our motives -- for example, we are opposed to affirmative action because we are White Supremacists, or don't accept AGW hysteria because we Hate Science. Much progress could be made in "healing our divisions" if the left would simply deal with our arguments on the merits instead of habitually accusing us of that which they are unconsciously guilty.

People who condemn imaginary motives may or may not be correct on this or that policy, but they are certainly immature, and immaturity is never the answer (and soon becomes the problem).

For example, a group of emotionally stunted liberals may "believe in free speech" as much as you or I. But this doesn't for one moment prevent them from violently prohibiting opinions they don't like, because of the nature of splitting. Splitting is a defense mechanism that allows one to simultaneously believe two opposite theses without any cognitive dissonance, or even any real awareness that one is being illogical.

To back up a bit, you might say that mature defense mechanisms are rooted in a horizontal division between the conscious and unconscious mind, whereas primitive defense mechanisms are a result of vertical splits that extend from the conscious into the unconscious. We've all heard of "multiple personality disorder," which is simply an extreme case of vertical splitting, in which the sub-personalities are autonomous and split off from one another.

But this is simply an extreme case of a much more common and mundane phenomenon. It's what humans do. Think, for example, of all the Hollywood feminists who, until a few days ago, loved Harvey Weinstein (HT American Digest). Now, if your mind is whole and integrated, then it is impossible to simultaneously "respect women" and "love Harvey." But with splitting, all things are possible!

Think of it: how can you detest Christopher Columbus, even while your public detestation is an outgrowth of the European values he brought to this erstwhile bleeding-edge world of Stone Age barbarism? Or, how can Black Lives matter to you, when your movement will result in thousands more blacks being murdered by other blacks?

Indeed, how can you protest the very flag that symbolizes the sacred right to petition government for the redress of grievances? Go ahead! Petition away! But why do so in a way that severs the limb you're protesting on? Granted, these protesters may well be borderline retarded. But that is no excuse for being crazy. Plenty of people with IQs lower than 85 are capable of understanding principles. Children certainly are (emotionally healthy children, I mean).

The other day it occurred to me that there are two main kinds of liberal: there are those who are susceptible to correction (as indeed was I), and those who are absolutely fixed in their beliefs -- who cannot benefit from any amount of fact, logic, information, or experience, no matter how brutal the mugging.

So, what explains the difference? It is certainly not a function of intelligence, or there would be no intelligent leftists such as Noam Chomsky, nor the stampeding herd of tenured lemmings more generally. Chomsky may be a genius for all I know, but this does nothing to prevent him from being a malignant retard. How is this possible?

Well, if the concept of vertical splitting didn't exist, then we'd have to invent something like it to explain someone like Chomsky. In a well-worn analogy, think of the mind as a wristwatch. We can observe the movement of the hands and changing of the date, but we have no idea why the actions are taking place. The best we can do is propose a theory that explains the phenomena. But we can never actually observe the causes beneath the phenomena, for subjectivity by definition cannot be objectified.

In this context, the concept of splitting is a way to imagine how a person can harbor mutually contradictory ideas. How, for example, is it possible for a Catholic to be a leftist? In (mere) reality it isn't possible, but that hardly prevents it from happening. Examples abound: Nancy Pelosi. Ted Kennedy. Joe Biden. Pope Francis.

You may argue that these people aren't mentally ill. Okay. But how exactly do you define mental illness? Mental illness, in my opinion, cannot be defined socially: for example, a well-adjusted, conflict-free Nazi or native American cannibal who fits in well with all the other Nazis and cannibals is nevertheless sick. But by what standard?

Ironically, psychology cannot answer the question, because it long ago drained the multicultural Koolaid to the dregs, so Who Are We To Judge? In this inverted world, judgment and discrimination based upon objective and universal standards is evil, such that the healthy person is rendered sick. Nice trick!

There is a bill in California that will make it against the law -- punishable even by prison -- to Misgender someone. In other words (to paraphrase Ace of Spades) it will be a crime for us to properly gender someone who misgenders himself.

As we've discussed before, there is rebellion and there is inversion, the latter far more pernicious than the former. The modern left has gone all-in for inversion -- for things that cannot be and mustn't be, the former going to ontology, the latter to morality; and if your ontology is wrong, then your conscience will follow.

Now, back to our definition of mental health. I dwelled on this question in the bʘʘK, but only after about two seconds of cogitation. In other words, the answer just popped into my head, but even so, I've never come up with a better one since then.

Two words: integration. And actualization. Despite the brevity, these are full of implications. Take the first, for example: the cure for the splitting described above is integration. And what is the cure for immaturity more generally? Well, immaturity presupposes maturity, maturity presupposes a developmental telos, and a telos presupposes an objective end of humanness, AKA actualization of an archetype.

So, what is this objective end? Note that the left would dismiss the question as either meaningless or pernicious. We'll pick up the thread tomorrow. If I wake up early enough. If not, then Friday.

Help Wanted: External Enemy, Must be Existential Threat

We'll start with some arresting passages from Who Are We?, until one engages my blogging gear and we take off from there. Maybe we can even find their hidden unity and wrap them all together.

National interests derive from national identity. We have to know who we are before we can know what our interests are.

Historically, the emergence of nation states in Europe was the result of several centuries of recurring wars.... [But] in one estimate only seven of one hundred and ten wars between 1989 and 1999 were not civil wars. War is now more often the breaker of states than the maker of states.

The notions of nation, national identity, and national interest may be losing relevance and usefulness. If this is the case, the question becomes: What, if anything, will replace them and what does that mean for the United States?

Historical experience and sociological analysis show that the absence of an external "other" is likely to undermine unity and breed divisions within a society.

"You" and "I" become a "we" when "they" appears...

To define themselves, people need an other. Do they also need an enemy? Some people clearly do. "Oh, how wonderful it is to hate," said Joseph Goebbels.

Humans, Freud argued, have only two types of instincts, "those which seek to preserve and unite... and those which seek to destroy and kill." Both are essential and they operate in conjunction with each other. Hence, "there is no use in trying to get rid of men's aggressive inclinations."

"A part of being human," as a committee of psychiatrists put it, "has always been the search for an enemy to embody temporarily or permanently disavowed aspects of ourselves."

BING! This I think goes to the essence of the left: they simply cannot exist without projecting disavowed aspects of themselves into conservatives. We aren't the violent ones, obviously. We don't riot when we don't get our way. We don't burn down our cities. We don't use violence to suppress contrary opinions on college campuses.

The other day I read that fifty percent of the crime (or maybe it was the shootings) in this country occurs in two percent of the counties -- and you can be sure they aren't red counties. Without looking, I would bet they are Democrat strongholds that have been run by Democrats for decades.

Let's be honest. In other words, let's indulge in a thoughtcrime, which is to say, unvarnished truth. We don't need gun control. Rather, we need to prevent people who cannot even control themselves from controlling guns. Who might these people be? Who and where are these people who are incapable of governing themselves? They are not evenly distributed. Not remotely. If not for certain violence-prone subgroups, America would have the crime rate of Tonga.

In any event, you always know what a leftist is thinking, because it consists of what he accuses conservatives of thinking. In short, his imputations and accusations are just his own impulses and emotions experienced by proxy.

Think of, say, Keith Olbermann. It is difficult to imagine a person more unhinged with fascist-level rage. But we are the fascists. Right. Isn't it obvious that he is simply managing the content of his own disturbed mind via imaginary others? What is MSNBC but a kind of mental therapy for liberals in need of projected enemies? Lawrence O'Donnell? I've never been close to that angry in my life, over anything. What would be the point? It doesn't help solve the problem.

It all comes back to, as Bion put it, the problem of thoughts and what to do with them. Yes, they're a problem, and our whole life consists of managing them. I am reminded of the man who, on his death bed, lamented that his life had been full of troubles, the great majority of which never happened.

Think of the SJW. Whether male or female, her life is FULL of troubles: racism, sexism, homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, patriarchy, white privilege, etc. There can be no peace of mind in such a psyche, ever. Rather, her life takes place amidst a swarm of imaginary threats and enemies.

But don't even try to relieve her of this burden, because without it, she will be left to her own buzzing hive of envy, hatred, and persecution. A paranoid deprived of enemies is literally reduced to psychosis; in order to heal, the person must own these psychic fragments and rebuild a coherent sense of self without projecting them into others.

In developmental terms, it is called transitioning from the paranoid-schizoid to the depressive position. It is very difficult to achieve this with a single patient. Impossible when dealing with millions of them, especially when their delusions are reinforced and rewarded by the dominant cultural establishment. And when sanity is positively punished.

Which it always is: for you will be persecuted for my sake. If you are not being persecuted, then you're doing it wrong. Ah ha! How then is this different from the way the leftist feels persecuted by his imaginary demons? That's a very good question. I'll come back to it.

In any event, for all practical purposes, the best one can hope is to manage what amounts to a psychotic core in such a way that it doesn't cause too much destruction. Not for nothing is politics called the organization of hatreds.

Like anyone short of a saint, I have a Greedy and Acquisitive side that cannot be satisfied. I don't try to completely stifle it, nor do I project it into my ideological enemies. But I don't let it wreck my life, or detract from my Infinite Satisfaction for the Gift of the Moment.

Rather, I let it blow off a little steam by, for example, collecting CDs. Or, I let my aggression out by hating the San Francisco Giants. Or, this weekend it will be the Arizona Dirtbags. Who knows, maybe John McCain will be in the stands, so I can double my enmity. But it's all harmless. Like the way dogs play by enacting their aggressive instincts. Except I really do detest John McCain. But I don't want him dead. I just want him to go away.

Which is one of the main sociological purposes of sport: I HATE YOUR GUTS HA HA HA! Which is why it is so distressing -- and depressing -- for the genuine haters of the left to inject their unmanageable rage into our fantasy space. The point is to pretend we're at war, not to actually foment civil strife.

Back to the question of how to tell if you are no different from an SJW who uses the political space to manage her psyche. It's too vast a subject to cover in the remaining time. It's really another way of asking, What are the characteristics of objective psychological maturity? I'll try to tackle this tomorrow....

You Had One Job, Assoul

Man has one job. Or three, rather: know truth. Cultivate virtue, AKA do good. Create and love beauty (or at least refrain from making the culture even uglier).

Each of these is related, so it's really a one-in-three situation. The rightly ordered soul loves truth, wants to do good, and is repelled by ugliness. Or, truth is the virtue of the intellect, virtue the beauty of action, and beauty the truth of creativity.

Before we proceed any further, let me say that this is an off-the-cuff meditation on evil -- the sort of evil carried out in Las Vegas three days ago. My only promise is that it will be a completely inadequate exercise in futility.

Everyone wants to know "why" he did it. Usually we "know" why right away: he was an Islamist, or a Bernie Bro, or a cop-hater, or whatever. As if that is a sufficient explanation! We could say that Stephen Paddock did it because he wanted to kill a lot of people. Obviously.

But even if we eventually discover that he was motivated by an ideology or religion, that doesn't really answer the deeper question, which is, Why do people want to murder innocent people? How and why does this thought ever enter their minds? In no other species does this occur. If not a function of humanness, it is certainly a feature. Why is someone attracted to a murderous ideology to begin with?

Thinking about this yesterday, I was reminded of Freud's theory of the death instinct, which few people ever took seriously. Nevertheless, that doesn't mean the phenomena the theory tries to explain don't exist and aren't in need of explanation.

For example, I've had a number of leaks in my tires lately. Let's say I have a theory that my liberal neighbor is sneaking into my garage at night and pounding nails into them. Even if this theory doesn't pan out -- and I'm working on it -- that doesn't mean the leaks aren't real. Much less does it mean that I shouldn't sneak into his garage and flatten his tires for being such an irritating moonbat.

What exactly was Freud trying to explain with the theory? Let's find out! Prof. Wiki writes that "the death drive (German: Todestrieb) is the drive towards death and self-destruction":

The death drive opposes Eros, the tendency toward survival, propagation, sex, and other creative, life-producing drives. The death drive is sometimes referred to as "Thanatos" in post-Freudian thought, complementing "Eros"...

It's very much as if we exist in the crosscurrents of two arrows, one ascending upward into love and unity, the other downward toward the inanimate state. Instead of a one-way movement from the inanimate to the animate, it is more like a complementarity between the two: Freud "found it ultimately 'an urge in organic life to restore an earlier state of things' -- the inorganic state from which life originally emerged."

There are people who hate themselves -- who are self-defeating, intro-punitive, guilt-ridden, and prone to shame. Freud would say that this is the death instinct turned inward. Others turn it outward, AKA externalize it. And again, even if we reject the death instinct explanation, there is no doubt whatsoever that such people -- millions and billions of them -- engage in this defense mechanism.

This subject is very much tied in with the problem of aggression. Man is an aggressive animal, or at least potentially so. To back up a bit, all animals are either predator or prey. Wolves and sheep. Man is both, but this isn't the source of his flaw. One man -- our police, or military -- uses aggression to protect the sheep. Another uses it to slaughter them.

I'm sure you are aware of how many people -- especially liberals -- see aggression as the problem, as opposed to the uses to which it is put. Nuke imperial Japan to end World War 2? Good. Nuke Japan because you're a crazy and paranoid dictator? Not good. "Enhanced interrogation" because you're dealing with a known terrorist and are trying to save lives? Good. Torture people for the thrill of it? Death instinct. Or something.

So, yesterday I was wondering if there might be some way to update the death instinct.

By the way, I think there is something like this operating in certain types of addicts. A heroin addict such as Tom Petty or a barbiturate addict such as Kurt Cobain have very peculiar motivation, as if they want to return to the blissful oceanic oneness of the womb -- before there was all this duality, tension, asymmetry, and frustration. It is one surefire way to make the torture stop in the tortured soul. It's like a living death. Or, life without the hassle of being alive.

(I know the feeling well from my two post-colonoscopy experiences with fentanyl. Paradise is guarded, but there are ways to slip past the cherubim.)

Now I am reminded of Dracula, which I watched the other night. You know, the undead. Note that in order to maintain his undead status, he needs the living blood of victims. That is of course a myth, which is to say, entirely true. The left puts the bite on various victim groups, draining them of their living individuality in order to go on being as a viable political entity. Can you imagine a more vampirish woman than Hillary Clinton? I can, but we're running out of time.

Anyway, I pulled some of my old psychology books from the closet to see if I could find a way to update this thanatos business. Back in the day, one of my main influences was Ignacio Matte Blanco. He has this to say about the death instinct: the study of biology is embedded in standard, classical logic, but "there is some evidence of bi-logic also in biology." That is, in order to be, "life requires death, and in a way both are co-extensive."

To be or not to be is not the question. Rather, how to negotiate their complementarity. It's the difference between a living death and a life-in-death.

Random Thoughts on Randomness

I wasn't planning to post. In the wake of yesterday's horror story, I am reluctant to say anything, because most anything one says will sound trite, vicious, stupid, or agenda-driven. I suppose that's the point of a trauma: it shatters one's usual categories for interpreting and understanding reality, and we are left to reassemble the pieces of our narrative in more or less defective ways.

Leading up to the trauma (any trauma), Everything Makes Sense. Of course, it -- meaning life -- never really makes sense. Rather, we simply superimpose a grid of logic and predictability, which most of the time works. But trauma comes along and reminds us that our narrative grid is just a fairy tale.

On a more micro level, think of Tom Petty. I was reading this morning of how he was a tortured soul who struggled with an abusive childhood, insecurity, severe depression, a miserable marriage, heroin addiction, and alienation from his children.

Nevertheless, he apparently came through it all, and then BOOM! The worst sting of all, just when you least suspect it. Indeed, if Petty were conscious, he might well have said something like, "What's this?! This can't be! I battled my demons for decades and came out the other side of hell! You know, resurrected!"

That same cosmic BOOM is awaiting us all, no matter how many comforting stories we tell ourselves. And perhaps more often than not, it will be a Total Surprise, as it was for the victims in Las Vegas. Were they ready for it? What a stupid question! How many people have the luxury to meditate on their death every day, to keep it front and center, such that it is the Constant Companion? And even then.

People understandably don't like to ponder the randomness of it all. If our personal fairy tales are there to deny the power of chance, our collective ones attempt to do so in a more systematic way.

As to the latter, you might say that this approach tries to situate the random element in a higher order -- similar to how Thelonious Monk could take the sour note and integrate it into a deeper harmonic structure. That requires a large musical mind. The smaller mind will just hear the wrong note and not know what to do with it. It's just a mistake instead of an uppertunity.

I think it takes a wide and capacious soul to acknowledge the power of chance, which amounts to conceding our permanent and insurmountable ignorance.

Churchill for example, observes that "The longer one lives, the more one realizes that everything depends upon chance," and that "Chance, Fortune, Luck, Destiny, Fate, Providence" are but "different ways of expressing the same thing, to wit, that a man's own contribution to his life story is continually dominated by an external superior power":

If anyone will look back over the course of even ten years' experience, he will see that many incidents, utterly unimportant in themselves, have in fact governed the whole of his fortunes and career.

Especially in war, "Chance casts aside all veils and disguises and presents herself nakedly from moment to moment as the direct arbiter of all persons and events."

Churchill knows of what he writes. Examples from his life abound, but on one occasion during WWI, when stationed at the front, he was called to a pointless meeting that was ultimately canceled anyway. Five minutes after he grudgingly took off for it, a bomb landed in his trench.

What is one to think in the wake of such a near miss? Yes, "I was spared." But why? And by Whom? And why not the others? Etc. Churchill was aware of a "strong sensation that a hand had been stretched out to move me in the nick of time from a fatal spot." But he doesn't pretend to understand the nature of the Hand.

Can we control the Hand? No, of course not. The best we can hope to do is tip the scales. There is no 100%. I would compare it to the casino, where the odds are always tipped in favor of the house.

Indeed, the house -- Death -- always wins in the end. But perhaps we can do things to delay his triumph. I, for example, have type 1 diabetes. That's a big tilt in favor of the house. Therefore, I do everything I can to nudge it back in my direction, for example, taking medications to keep my blood pressure and cholesterol even lower than they already are, working out every day, avoiding stress, sleeping well, getting enough alcohol, etc.

But we can never actually see the state of the playing field. I'm trying to tip it in my favor, but there is no controlled experiment. You can do everything right, but things nevertheless can and will turn out wrong.

Perhaps in the end, the best we can do is place the randomness in a higher order, a la Monk. Is this an intellectual dodge? I don't think so; chance presumes predictability; randomness must be parasitic on order. Indeed, the only reason we can perceive chance is because of order. Otherwise the two would be indistinguishable.

Robert Spitzer writes that "Death and loss are intensely negative moments within an ultimately loving eternity."

In this context, our brief lives are "a time for choosing who we are and who we will become." Thus, "Death is significant for only one major reason -- to compel us to make the fundamental decisions that will define our eternal character."

We know when things go wrong. But we will never know how many times the angel of death has passed us by. No one can hear or see the countless bullets flying past as we navigate from one horizon to the other. There is one with our name on it, but that should only serve to keep our souls concentrated on that distant shore.

The Globalist-Barbarian Axis

Back to who we are. Or were, rather; I'm afraid that train has left the station, and that now we're just dealing with the consequences of national we-lessness, AKA tribalism.

In the foreword, Huntington outlines the American Creed, that "crucial defining element" of our identity, our national We. However, each of its constituents is disputed if not under systematic attack from within:

Key elements of that culture include: the English language; Christianity; religious commitment; English concepts of the rule of law, the responsibility of rulers, and the rights of individuals; and dissenting Protestant values of individualism, the work ethic, and the belief that humans have the ability and the duty to create a heaven on earth, a "city on a hill."

That last one needs to be qualified, because I don't think our Puritan forbears conflated the C on an H with heaven. Ironically, this is the left's project; ironically², this makes them more Puritan than the Puritans they ridicule. Which in turn lines up with Polanyi's principle that the left combines unhinged moral passion with an absence of religious constraints. They specialize in creating moral monsters over which they inevitably lose control, as did Dr. Frankenstein.

Example. Okay, the dimwitted football players protesting the Anthem (a formerly uncontroversial symbol of unity, which is to say, our transcendent We-ness).

Where do these idiots get their ideas? Not from themselves, because they don't have any. Rather, from the white liberal elites responsible for the Narrative (AKA ideology for dummies).

Not only is the Narrative 180˚ from the truth, it is murderously hostile to the interests of blacks and other majorities. Thousands of blacks have already died as a result of the Narrative, and more will die as a result of the protesters (although it is intrinsically impossible to quantify how many):

While poorly educated athletes, egged on by leftist commentators, indulge in Black Lives Matter based protests against their country, evidence pours in that black-on-black crime is the real threat to black lives and that attacks on policing are causing an increase in such crime.

[Heather McDonald] points out that nearly 900 additional blacks were killed in 2016 compared with 2015, bringing the black homicide-victim total to 7,881.... The increase in black homicide deaths last year comes on top of a previous 900-victim increase between 2014 and 2015.

Who is killing these blacks? Not whites.... among all homicide suspects whose race was known, white killers of blacks numbered only 243.

Does it not go without saying that black lives matter? No Christian would ever suggest or even imagine otherwise. But leftists are not Christians. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, mixing leftism with Christianity turns the idiot into a perfect idiot. Any idiots who support BLM are perfect idiots indeed:

In 2016, the police fatally shot 233 blacks, the vast majority armed and dangerous, according to the Washington Post. The Post categorized only 16 black male victims of police shootings as “unarmed,” [which in turn] masks assaults against officers and violent resistance to arrest.

Contrary to the Black Lives Matter narrative, the police have much more to fear from black males than black males have to fear from the police. In 2015, a police officer was 18.5 times more likely to be killed by a black male than an unarmed black male was to be killed by a police officer. Black males have made up 42 percent of all cop-killers over the last decade, though they are only 6 percent of the population. That 18.5 ratio undoubtedly worsened in 2016, in light of the 53 percent increase in gun murders of officers -- committed vastly and disproportionately by black males.

Out of, say, 10,000 white liberals who are informed of the truth, how many will say, "Oh. Sorry. Didn't know that." Who knows? One? I was one of them. Was I really that stupid? I can't be sure, because liberals weren't as crazy back then. Today, for example, Bill Clinton would be a mainstream Republican and JFK would be an out-and-out Reaganesque conservative.

Huntington mentions that after September 11, 2001, companies that manufacture American flags had to step up production to as much as five times normal. A note to myself in the margin says "autoimmune response."

What is the immune system -- I mean on a more abstract level? Clearly it is a function of identity: of self and not-self. And whether fortunately or unfortunately, collective identity in particular is often forged in war. We know who we are because we know who we aren't.

Indeed, what is the anthem but a call to, or vertical recollection of, unity in the face of danger? -- our blood-spattered banner illuminated by the glorious spectacle of bombs blasting and rockets reaming the defeated enemy.

Huntington suggests that "the proportion of people in America" who are loyal to and identify with other countries is "quite possibly higher than at any time since the American Revolution." Back then it was roughly one third for independence, one third neutral, and one third as pro-American as is our Media-Tenure industrial complex today.

Our contemporary situation is complicated by multiculturalism below and transnationalism above. Ironically, the left consists of an alliance between trans- and multiculturalists, even though these are polar opposites.

This is another example of leftist elites creating a monster -- multiculturalism -- that they cannot control. What does a transnational corporation such as Google have in common with, say, a racist organization such as La Raza, or a hate group such as the Southern Poverty Law Center? The only thing that unifies them is their mutual enemy: America.

Trump and the Americanism he champions are rejected by both wealthy globalists and multicultural barbarians. Antifa and BLM are merely tools of the elite, just as the guillotine was merely a tool of the Revolution.

To be continued....

God Has No Baby Mamas

Well. There was no time for a proper post. But I thought there might be time to lay a foundation and get some preluminaries out of the way. However, I didn't get very far before timelessness ran out. (By the way, this is the second post written while donning the sacred dude sweater. I think it's helping.)

In one of those strange but typical cosmic coincidences, I've been reading a book that perfectly complements Who Are We?, called The Immortal in You: How Human Nature Is More Than Science Can Say. The former goes to our collective identity --- the We -- while the latter goes to the deepest source of our personal identity -- the I.

We all have an I, hopefully no more than one. But all I's also belong to a We. In fact, more than one We. For example, my We may refer to my marriage, my family, my occupation, my country, my species, my nonlocal brothers-under-the-pelt, and more.

There are any number of potential disturbances in our personal and collective identities. Some -- well, many -- people, for example, do not develop a stable identity, such that there is more than one center of subjectivity in the psyche. I call them Mind Parasites, because it is very much as if these yousurpers live off our own subjectivity in order to maintain themselves. They are like hungry (or greedy, or envious, or angry, etc.) ghosts made out of our own mindstuff.

Now that I think about it, there are also positive mind parasites, analogous to the healthy bacteria that live inside our gut. Indeed, some people even take parasite pills (probiotics) in order to cultivate these friendly invaders.

So there are propsychotics as well. Like what? I don't want to get completely sidetracked into developmental psychology and attachment theory, but human maturity is very much a function of internalization, and we mainly internalize what are called "object relations."

For example, assuming what is called "good enough mothering," the infant internalizes what amounts to Mom, such that he is gradually able to sooth himself without her actual presence, or by using symbols of her presence, which are called transitional objects (like a favorite stuffed animal, or, later in life, a cigarette or government program).

Professor Wiki has an adequate description of how Bion explains it:

Bion took for granted that the infant requires a mind to help it tolerate and organize experience. For Bion, thoughts exist prior to the development of an apparatus for thinking. The apparatus for thinking, the capacity to have thoughts "has to be called into existence to cope with thoughts." Thoughts exist prior to their realization. Thinking, the capacity to think the thoughts which already exist, develops through another mind providing alpha-function -- through the "container" role of maternal reverie.

As to "reverie," this is a term of art referring to "the capacity to sense (and make sense of) what is going on inside the infant," equivalent to maternal attunement and preoccupation.

Yesterday, for example, my son reminded me that his mother always knew what he was talking about when he was blabbering on in his own language, which we called Tristonian. To me he sounded like a stroke victim, but Mom was bilingual and able to understand what he was going on about.

There are other ways of looking at the same phenomenon. For example, Jung would say we come into the world with a maternal archetype that is like an "empty form" waiting to be actualized by experience. Think of it as a universal pre-conception. What we call "human nature" consists of various archetypes that are filled in by particular experiences that correspond to them.

For example, there is clearly a God archetype. If there weren't, then we wouldn't have this in-built readiness to experience him. God is in the particular experience, but the particular experience is not God -- similar to how I am in my big toe, but my big toe is not me.

We're getting too far afield. The point is, I Am not myself allone. Or rather, in order to be ourselves, we need help from others. There is always an I-We complementarity.

This apparently applies all the way up into the Godhead, where God too is an irreducible I-We complementarity. There are hints of this all through the Bible -- for example, "Let Us make make man in Our image, according to Our likeness." Even -- or especially -- in God, I and We coarise. There the relationship is of Father and Son instead of Mother and Child, but still.

Why Father instead of Mother? That is by no means a stupid or irrelevant question. In fact, I just read something about that. But where? Ah yes, here, in an appendix to Edward Feser's Five Proofs of God that asks Is God Male? No, not exactly. "Nevertheless, the traditional practice has been to characterize God in masculine terms." Yeah, but why?

"God's relationship to the world is much more like a paternal relationship than it is like a maternal relationship." For example, "there is no change to a father's physiology as a consequence of impregnation, whereas there is a radical change in the mother's physiology."

Analogously, God cranks out worlds with no apparent change to himself. Similarly, there is "a literal physiological connection between the child and its mother," but not between child and father.

One wonders how many NFL crybullies have no relationship with the children of their baby mamas, which will in turn help create the next generation of fatherless victims with daddy issues projected into police, "white privilege," and authority more generally.

I'm not sure what the title of the post means, but there it is.