Radical Anti-Racism

Perhaps you haven't heard, but slavery is wrong. So too is racism. But why they wrong? By virtue of what principle(s)?

I know why they're wrong: ultimately because all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with... you know, the thing.

So what. The founders believed the same nonsense but some of them owned slaves.

Yes, but that was wrong, and they knew it was wrong. Democrats didn't invent the positive good defense of slavery until a generation or two after the founding.

The positive good defense is rooted in very different principles from the founding, and these principles have guided the Democrat party ever since, from Jim Crow to racial quotas to the war on cops.

The latter, for example, insists that different standards should be applied to policing blacks just because blacks commit a vastly disproportionate amount of crime. This is analogous to applying different college entry standards to Asian Americans just because they commit a vastly disproportionate amount of scholarship. Which Democrats also do: different races, different standards.

Blacks lives matter. No doubt, but why? By virtue of what principle?

I know -- because ALL lives matter!

Wrong. That makes you a racist.

Hmm. I don't have a second guess. I give up. What's the right answer?

No, I really do give up. What is the Politically Correct answer? Be right back. I'm gonna go to the source.

Perfect: What We Believe. The mission: "to build local power and to intervene when violence [is] inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes." Vigilantes? I have good news for BLM: 86% of unorganized, non-state interracial violence is committed by Blacks, despite Blacks comprising only 13% of the population.

And the state? The top 20 urban areas that feature the most Black-on-Black violence are all run by Democrats, often for decades (or maybe it's 19 out of 20).

I'll cut to the chase: I don't see any principles here. There is (in their words) rage, commitment, desire, fighting, catalyzing, healing, struggling. There's a lot of talk about "Black people," but no attention to actual persons.

There'a a lot of sub-literate nonsense such as

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

Does that make any sense to you?

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning.

That's neither here nor there. I am unapologetically white. I'm also unapologetically male, Homo sapiens, mortal, married, a father, a baseball fan, a beer lover, a record collector... I'm not proud of any of these, just not apologetic. Why would I be? It won't help. I do, however, apologize for being a psychologist. That was never my intention. It just turned out that way.

We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.

Ah ha. I think I've identified the essential flaw in their anthropological reasoning, and which makes for a smooth segue into our next subject, which is very nature of the human subject, AKA The Selfhood of the Human Person.

Our approach will demonstrate not only why Black lives matter, but why they are of literally infinite value. Note that this statement cannot be true if the belief animating BLM is true, that "to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others."

This has it precisely backward and upside down. For in reality, human rights are prior to their instantiation in a racial (or any) group.

In short, these rights inhere in individuals, never in groups, races, tribes, classes, genders, political parties, etc. You possess them because you are a person, never because you are a black or white person. To believe otherwise is a truly grotesque and dangerous regression to an earlier understanding of personhood (because it is, as we shall see, a denial and defacement of personhood).

Let's begin with a question. Let's say you know nothing about me except I am Black. Knowing I am Black, do you know anything of substance about me?

That is correct: you know nothing (except that I am a person, with all this entails, which is a great deal). If you believe otherwise, there's a name for that: racist. Even if one believes different racial groups may on average do better or worse in this or that endeavor, this tells you nothing about the individual.

Perhaps you assume that because I'm, say, Asian American, I must excel at math. Maybe, but you won't know until you actually meet and get to know me. Or, maybe you think someone is "privileged" because he's white. If so, you're just another racist.

This is all so elementary, it's distressing it even has to be said. But this is the progressive Age of Stupidity we've been born into. As a psychologist, I deal with every race under the sun, but I never make any assumptions -- good or bad -- going into an interview. Why would I? I'm not evaluating a group but a person.

But what is a person? And what makes them so special? I learned in biology that human beings are just randomly evolved animals, no better than any other. I learned in ecology that humans are like any other animal only worse, and I learned in neurology that there's not even any such thing as a human self, just neural activity.

Back to our question: what is a person, anyway?

Almost every answer to this question begins in a certain independence in being and acting.... a person is never a mere part in any whole but a whole of its own... (Crosby).

Since a person is never a mere part in a whole, a person can never be reduced to his race. Indeed, no person is even a "member" of a race, certainly not in any meaningful sense, since it again tells us nothing about the actual person.

Does this mean community is of no importance? No, of course not. But it does mean a community must be of and for persons, not reduce person to group or engulf the individual in the collective:

personal selfhood provides the only possible basis for all deeper forms of community.... the defenders of community and the common good should beware of certain proposals of restoration, such as those that reject the idea of the person as subject of rights. There is a core of personalist truth in the individualism of rights, and this has to be preserved in all attempts at renewing the bonds of social solidarity (ibid.).

Any person matters because all persons matter, period. But today, radical anti-racism such as that discussed here is considered a form of racism by the racists of the left, the great majority of whom are, as usual, white Democrats, not black.

Volk Lives Matter

The moment we're living through seems more consequential than can be discerned from the usual media hysteria.

Come to think of it, being that the media is always hysterical, it is impossible to determine the importance of an historical event based upon how Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or the New York Times react to things. Besides, is girlish hysteria ever the appropriate response to anything?

More generally, it is difficult if not impossible to gauge the cosmo- or world-historical importance of this or that present moment. Some people magnify the moment out of all proportion, while others can sleepwalk through the most significant events in history. (As to the latter, one must only notice how the MSM is ignoring what is by far the greatest political scandal in American history.)

So, we're attempting to use our pure Coon Vision to drill down to the ground of this moment, in order to discern what's really going on. As mentioned in yesterday's post, we insist that it is possible to do this via the Pure Thought described therein, i.e., to read the Signs of the Times.

And again, this does not mean it can be exhaustively described in an apodictic, systematic way, because this would constitute ideological Gnosticism and not open engagement with the ground; it would reduce to the wrong answer, whereas a Raccoon is always in search of the right questions in the correct order.

All we're asking for is a little peek outside Plato's Cave or beneath Jeffrey's Rug, and we are absolutely convinced that this is possible, otherwise there would be no need to put the honest prophets to death.

Now, this hardly means we cannot read the signs incorrectly. We all know this happened once, and we've already apologized for it. No prophet bats 1.000, not even Petey. We admit when we are wrong, even if a part of us still believes the Monkees will some day enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Let's begin with an analogy. Let's say the historical moment is like an ocean. Certain qualities of the ocean are apparent -- waves, tides, wind currents -- while others are hidden, for example, large scale circulation and depth. Who could tell by looking at the ocean that certain currents have been stably flowing for thousands of years?

Indeed, Prof. Wiki claims that some currents have "a transit time of about 1000 years" and that current velocities can range "from fractions of centimeters per second" to sometimes more than a meter per second.

This makes the analogy even more useful than I had hoped, because history also flows at different rates of speed in ways that are impossible to discern by looking at the surface, AKA journalistically.

To take only the most obvious example, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection continue to reVerberate and flow through history, usually in an imperceptibly slow way, occasionally in dramatic fashion (for example, in the American revolution, which was at once rooted in a generation-long spiritual awakening which was in turn nested in a much longer arc of salvation and evolution, AKA salvolution).

We're in danger of running out of time before we ever get to the bloody point. Perhaps I should just jump ahead to the point, and flesh it out out as we proceed.

Much of what I'm about to say has been provoked by another providential collision with a timely book, this one called The Selfhood of the Human Person. It is so dense with implications that it's a slow read, even though the material itself isn't beyond the abilities of the average Christian Subgenius.

Concur with this reviewer:

This is a brilliant essay on the human person following the personalist/phenomonological line of thought (a philosophical approach taken by our beloved pope John Paul II).

To do this book justice, a single reading does not suffice; it needs several readings, not because it is hard to follow -- not at all! Crosby is very readable -- I found it very comprehensible and I am not trained in philosophy.

No, it is simply because there is so much in this book; such as the role of immanence and transcendence in the human person -- what does it mean to say that persons possess a kind of incommunicability?

What I want to focus on is the critical distinction between the group/collective and the individual/person, and how the Present Moment is showing us a very different conception of this from the traditional American and Christian view (the former current thoroughly embedded in the latter, as per the above).

For us -- i.e., for both Christians and Americans -- the individual is not only sacred, but a kind of intra-historical telos. You could say that the achievement of the Mature Man is the point of this whole cosmo-historical flow, and that it took a very long time to get here (only 50,000 years or so of human development).

But now we are faced with a very different historical movement (to be precise, it is an anti-historical movement, a turning back from maturity) that wants to efface individuality and plunge us back into the tribe, the race, the volk.

And just look at the intellectual and emotional maturity of the human specimens producing and produced by this movement! You can't reason with them, any more than you could teach algebra to a pig or economics to AOC.

Identity politics is a lack thereof, i.e., of proper identity and personhood; or, it is collective identity effacing personal identity rooted in trinitarian intersubjectivity.

To be continued....

The De-Nazification of the Left

We've had two days to meditate on, or stew in, Eliot's advice that the only proper philosophical method is to be very intelligent. Well, what if the person who disagrees with you is also very intelligent? Easy: you have to be very, very intelligent.

Let's see if that chapter has any other helpful tips. Here's one:

One must never forget that all classic philosophy is built on common sense, while no ideology is built on common sense.... Realizing that is a great breakthrough (Voegelin, in Sandoz).

That is a very good point. You will have noticed....

I often say that, don't I? You will have noticed. When I do, it's probably because I'm directing your attention to something plainly commonsensical. It's a kind of compliment, because I'm assuming my readers are gifted with a fully functional common sense with which to perceive the bleeding obvious. To put another way, every troll is missing something, if not everything.

But this also means that someone who disagrees on the point at hand isn't necessarily stupid, just lacking in common sense. You will have noticed that a person can be quite intelligent, and yet, be utterly lacking in common sense. Many intelligent people, for example, believe Black Lives Matter has something to do with Black Lives instead of being just the latest iteration of totalitarian leftist ideology (but I threepeat myself).

Indeed, the observation that intelligent people can believe idiotic things qualifies as a banality, but why is it true? I'm sure we've discussed this in the past, so I won't spend a great deal of time on it. Taking myself as a prime example, I'm as intelligent as I was when I was younger (if anything, less intelligent), and yet, like any liberal, I believed all sorts of nonsensical things. Why? What was going on?

Gosh. So many things. As I said, I don't want this tangent to hijack the post. Is it possible to cut through the archetypal Jungle and identify one or two principles that explain my former idiocy? Think, Bob, think....

Okay, that phrase right there: think, Bob, think. It reveals one of my principles, i.e., that a type of pure thought can disclose the nature of reality. However, the operative word is pure, which goes to the moral requisites alluded to in yesterday's post. Does this imply a moral oneupmanship on my part? As in, "I know better than you because I am better than you."

No, I don't think so. Rather, the opposite, because we're talking about reverence and humility in the presence of Truth, which form the essence of intellectual honesty. As Voegelin emphasizes time and again, philosophy is not a body of knowledge, rather, a whole way of life.

Yes, it sounds pretentious to say I am a philosopher. That's for others to decide. But I can say I practice philo-sophy as a way of life, and that the practice of it requires several things, including love of wisdom and truth, perpetual openness to the transcendent, and lots of drugs. (I apologize. Some jokes insist on writing themselves despite one's best efforts to make a serious point.)

Back to the principle of Pure Thought. There are several wrong ways of engaging in it that we must rule out straight away, for example, any form rationalism. That's just a nonstarter for any number of reasons, but let's just say Gödel and move on.

In a way, we could place all forms of endeadening Wrongthink into one huge casket of deplorables called ideology. We might say that the way of ideology is at antipodes to the way of philosophy, largely because it reduces philosophy to a specific content and thereby closes off the divine ground, AKA reality.

Various profane dogmas, doctrines, and ideologies are indeed secondary realties that eclipse first reality (and there can be only one). These are "deadening to the living spirit of faith no less than to the living tension of the philosopher's contemplative (noetic) quest" (Sandoz).

Which reminds me of another critical point: living. Just as there exist biological life and death (the latter only intelligible in the context of the former), there are intellectual and spiritual Life. If you are lucky, then somewhere along the way you had exposure to, and were drawn into the attractor of, a Living Man who initiated you into the life of mind and spirit. If not, then you'll have a hard time understanding what we're talking about.

At the moment, we are enduring a tsunami of spiritually demented ideology washing over what remains of our civilization. It is quite obviously dead, deadening, and deadly, both spiritually and intellectually. Ironic, is it not, that its standard bearer is literally a dead man walking, Joe Biden?

No, not ironic. Inevitable.

How to combat this zombie apocalypse, or anti-political night of the living dead? Has anyone seen the movie Shutter Island? I saw it just the other night, but it's difficult to discuss without being a spoiler.

Let's just say that you can't just push back against a delusion, for the deluded person will simply incorporate you into their delusion -- like when Adam Schiff accused Tucker Carlson on live TV of being an agent of Putin for questioning the Russia hoax. Likewise, the surest way to be called a racist is to point out the intrinsic racism of the identity politics of the left.

The crisis of consciousness that has propelled alienated intellectuals' assault on all that our most venerable traditions hold dear and true cannot be met merely by reasserting dogmas even more loudly than before (ibid.).

You can't just yell back at the screamers, hate the haters, or resurrect the soul dead. "Rather, something more is needed."

The rightness of what has always been right must not only be reaffirmed but also recaptured in the hearts of men and as the living truth of a science of human affairs...

Yes, there are short-term mitigations, but let's be honest: the de-Nazification of the left is a multi-generational project, nor can it happen without divine intervention -- or better, without widespread openness to the divine ground. Which is why we agree with the Aphorist that

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

Never did get to my original point. I'll get straight to it in the next post.

Qualifications of Intelligence

A short list of the evils to which man is inevitably heir would include -- off the top of my head --

--pain, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual

--death

--organic disease

--mental illness

--immorality and evil

--envy

--want (because it is infinite and therefore insatiable)

--aging

--loss

--status anxiety and the desire for distinction

--loneliness

--war

--criminality

--lies

--boredom

--oppression

--fatherlessness

--ignorance

--meaninglessness

--time (to the extent that it is limited)

--the necessity of labor

--unjust violence

--ignorance

--stupidity

--annoying people

--hair loss

None of these can be eliminated by politics, although it can ameliorate some of them at the margins. On the other hand, politics can serve as a fine distraction from them. Say what you want about the imbeciles going on about "white privilege," at least they don't wonder about the meaning of life, nor how to solve life's problems. It's easy: eliminate white people.

No wonder the left refuses to relinquish this seductive delusion, considering how it shields them from the distressing reality of genuine evils, privations, and existential nuisances. How tempting it must be to ensconce oneself in the comfort and safety of a collective hysteria over race!

What's the real solution? Ultimately there can be only one; or perhaps two or three that are ultimately reducible to one.

In The Politics of Truth, Sandoz alludes to a remark by T.S. Eliot on the character of proper philosophizing, to the effect that the only method is to be -- wait for it -- very intelligent.

Well now wait just a minute. Our political discourse -- and every other kind of discourse for that matter -- is crawling with mild-to-moderately intelligent people with idiotic opinions. Their intelligence, such as it is, does nothing to shield them from error, prejudice, wishful thinking, delusion, Trump derangement, or hateful ideology in general.

Let's try to track down the source of Eliot's comment. Surely he knew plenty of intelligent idiots, being that he worked in the publishing industry.

No luck. I do, however, have some aphoristic back-up from a man who was obviously well aware of the dangers of intelligent stupidity, but who could nevertheless affirm that

The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions (Dávila).

Yes, but what about the intelligent man who doesn't reach conservative conclusions? What happened? What has caused his intelligence to turn on itself, or to negate its own efficacy?

Well, one can obviously be quite intelligent, a genius even, and lack wisdom. There is also general intelligence and partial intelligence, or intelligence in this or that field as opposed to the Pure Intelligence that radiates through certain people.

It reminds me of "pure musicians," in contrast to a trained musician who may well be a virtuoso but will never attain the pure musical genius of even certain "primitive" and unschooled musicians out of whom musical genius flows freely. Some people make music. Others are music. Analogously,

There are men who visit their intelligence, and others who dwell in theirs.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I want to mention something I'll expand upon later. It is the principle that real intelligence has moral prerequisites, for example -- and this is only the most obvious one -- intellectual honesty.

You will have noticed that it is strictly impossible to dialogue with the intellectually dishonest person, since the two of you are not converging upon truth; or, you don't share a passionate love for the truth that transcends the two of you. Certainly you can debate such a person, but this is a worthless exercise if it only involves defending a position as opposed to advancing together toward truth.

By the way, we're not talking about the legions of credentialed idiots who attended college, learned the right things, and have never had a creative thought in their lives -- an Obama, Cornell West, Chris Cuomo, Rachel Maddow, and thousands of others. Of these it may be truly said that

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

And that

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

Rather, we're talking about the seeming paradox of intelligent stupidity, not middlebrow convention and conformity. By itself, A high I.Q. is indicative of distinguished mediocrity.

As to the moral qualifications needed in order for the intelligence to be perfected, Dávila reminds us that Intelligence by itself possesses nothing but rebellious slaves.

Boy howdy, has this proved true over the past several weeks! A reminder that

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

And the chain wasn't put there by us. Rather, it was placed there by white liberals and their designated "black leaders."

Almost out of time. We'll leave off with this, and explain how it can be true in the next post:

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men because intelligence is a conviction they share.

The Purpose of It All (or Best Alibi Ever)

The penultimate chapter of The Politics of Truth addresses the question of whether Eric Voegelin is (was) a conservative. He was one of those caviling types who was paranoid about being pigeonholed -- like Hayek and Polanyi, who also denied being conservative per se.

But "conservative" has very different connotations in Europe, having to do with the conservation of throne and altar, and all that mystagogic nonsense that justifies the rule of the ruling class. In Europe conservatism often conserves self-serving magic, whereas in the US it mainly conserves commonsense.

And some people are so preoccupied with being perceived as an individual that they make it difficult to appreciate the universality of their message. In denying being part of any larger movement, they only assure their own practical irrelevance. I'm sure this is one of the reasons Voegelin never gained, and never will gain, any widespread acceptance beyond his fervent little cult.

As Sandoz correctly points out, "the unique is baffling." Yes, every human being is unique. However, the uniqueness can only be comprehended in the context of a universal human nature. Then again, human nature is complex and multifaceted.

To simplify, let's say human nature is comprised of 100 different facets. We put them into a tumbler, shake them up, roll them out onto the existential plane, and a new and unique individual is born, each having a different proportion, so to speak, of human elements.

Voegelin actually addresses this in his book on Plato and Aristotle. He doesn't just come out and say whether he approves of Aristotle's stance on the ultimate purpose of a political order, but I have no hesitation in saying that I agree with it 100%. But then, I'm not a scholar, just a blogger. At any rate, Aristotle is in agreement with what I just said about various admixtures of human elements:

All human beings have, indeed, the same structure of the soul, but differentiated according to the predominance of one or the other parts.... All must partake of them, but not in the same manner (Voegelin).

The best political order is simply the one which allows "the fullest actualization of human nature" and "the maximal actualization of human excellence." But if you believe in the existence of human nature and of objective human excellence, you are certainly not a leftist Democrat, rather, quite the opposite, whatever you wish to call it.

You may not like being called a conservative, but there you are. I too was uncomfortable identifying myself as one at first -- there are stages of acceptance, from non-leftist Democrat, to libertarian, to classical liberal, to Independent, to okay, f**k it, I'm a conservative, to HELL YEAH, I'M A GUN TOTIN', 'MERICA LOVIN', GOD FEARIN' REACTIONARY!

But here's the part I really like, for it is a variation of Jesus' wise crack about how the last-shall-be-first. It elevates slack-loving wise guys such as myself (and, one suspects, Voegelin) to the top of the cosmic heap!

The life in the best polis must be organized in such a manner that the actualization of the man of leisure is achieved.

Well, mission accomplished. I am an unapologetic Man of Leisure, but this must not be confused with the similar looking Lazy Man, or Layabout, or Antifa stoner living in mom's basement. I may be devoid of horizontal ambition, but I am insanely ambitious as it pertains to the vertical, ever striving to make myself utterly useless, especially to my readers. And you are no doubt too kind to tell me I've succeeded.

If education serves the necessary and useful only [read: horizontal]... then the full actualization of human excellence becomes impossible, because men will not know what to do with their free time that is supposed to serve leisure (Voegelin, emphasis mine).

I'll say it again... nah, just read it again, the italicized part, because that's the key to understanding and appreciating the Raccoon lifestyle. It is why the Raccoon is never bored except insofar as he must attend to horizontal obligations and nuisances.

For the average human, the primary escape from horizontality is via some more intense form of horizontality, e.g., skydiving, the once-in-a-lifetime vacation, the Dream House, the Street Demonstration, whatever. It never succeeds beyond the momentary, and like any drug requires an increasingly larger dose: bigger, faster, grander, looting an even larger TV screen, etc.

I am the last to deny the pleasures of the horizontal, but it's so much more interesting and less expensive to explore and homestead in the vertical. Establish a beachhead there, develop your own little plot of real estate, and it will soon surpass the overpriced and underperforming thrills of the horizontal. Moreover, you'll enjoy the horizontal diversions that much more.

For proof, aphorisms:

Men tend not to inhabit any but the ground floor of their souls.

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores (Dávila).

But leisure isn't exactly analogous to playtime:

Play may be necessary after work in order to achieve a state of rest as the precondition of leisure, but it is no occupation for leisure itself.

Real leisure involves the pursuit of things "which serve no further ends and can be pursued for their own sake, as a way of life."

To summarize: "Political society is the field for actualization of human nature"; and vertical recollection must be counted as the highest and most useless actualization of all.

[L]eisured life is the purpose for which we undergo the work of our practical life....

Of such a life we must say that it transcends the merely human level. Man can lead it only in so far as he is more than man, only in so far as something divine is really present in him. Since this divine part in the composite nature of man is nous, the life of the intellect is divine as compared with life on the merely human level of the practical excellences....

It is our duty to make ourselves immortal, as far as that is possible in life, by cultivating the activity of the best part in us which may be called our better or true self (ibid).

Challenge accepted.

Man, the Endangered Species

Alternative title: Science Giveth and Scientism Taketh Away

Just a couple of points this morning. We'll begin with an aphorism:

An education without the humanities prepares one only for menial occupations.

That was true until the left took over the humanities and transformed them into the subhumanities. Now an education in the formerly liberal arts prepares one for neither menial nor intellectual labor, for one not only knows nothing, but literally less than nothing. Which is only possible for a human, so I suppose we could still call them humanities in an ironic sense.

The point is, the ideological transformation of the humanities results not just in nonsense, but nonsense about human nature. Which is surely the worst kind nonsense, since it colors everything else.

Which is why man should be placed at the top of the so-called Endangered Species List. And who is endangering him? Yes, it is "man," but a certain type of man. This type:

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man (Dávila).

And not just "forgotten," but reprogrammed to believe man is something other than what he is (and always will be).

Coming at it from the other (scientistic) end, Voegelin writes of how "the model of positive science destroys the understanding of the myth for the past as well as the present."

This results in two related psycho-pneumatic derailments, first, a kind of obtuse and concrete literalism in approaching the mythopoetic insights of the past, and second, a failure to appreciate that scientism itself partakes of mythology, only in a totally naive and unreflective way:

The symbols of the myth are cut off, through this attitude, from their basis in the unconscious and are required to legitimate themselves as if they were propositions concerning objects. The myth is erroneously supposed to be meant "literally" instead of symbolically, and consequently appears as naive or superstitious.

We've discussed this sort of incomplete person before. It is as if they've undergone a procedure to sever the right brain from the rest of the neocortex, which results in a kind of soulectomy, being that the input and output of the soul -- reception and exteriorization -- require the nonlinear processing, holistic perception, and symmetrical logic of the right cerebral hemisphere.

Illustration: In the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth. Like anybody could know that! That's just a myth. It's not science!

No, moron, it's not science. Rather, it is the metaphysical basis for the very possibility of science. It is precisely why science only developed in the Christian west.

Regarding scientism (i.e., the naive metaphysicalization of science),

The myth has a fundamental function in human existence and myths will be created no matter what anybody thinks about them. We cannot overcome myth, we can only misunderstand it (Voegelin, emphasis mine).

Exactly. For myth communicates an implicit metaphysic, as in the example above, in which Genesis posits a radically transcendent source of cosmic order and human rationality.

So, scientism is a myth like any other, only worse. But what is the myth "really saying"? In other words, what perennial truths about human nature are being obscured by the prestige of "science"?

An obvious case is Marxism, which is just a Christian heresy dressed up as scientific materialism, what with the original innocence of paradise (primordial communism), fall (private property), redemption-revolution, and the heaven/utopia of the Workers' Paradise on earth, AKA dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thus, Voegelin points out that

Such symbols as "reason," "mankind," "proletariat," "race," "communist society," "world peace," and so forth, are supposed to be different in nature from pagan or Christian symbols because their mythical truth is covered and obscured by the superimposition of the additional myth of science.

Whenever you hear a leftist proclaim his devotion to science, you need to translate it to a love of myth. Note, for example, the mythical assumptions packed into such slogans as Black Lives Matter, or "Love is Love," or "No Human is Illegal," or "All Genders are Whole, Holy, and Good, or "Women's Rights are Human Rights" (which they can't be, since men don't have the right to kill their children), or -- without irony -- "Science is Real." Taken literally these are banalities, but they obviously mean something much deeper and more sinister.

Since the myth does not cease to be myth because somebody believes it to be science, the telescoping of myth and science has a peculiar warping effect on the personality of the believers (Voegelin).

I was thinking of how nowadays, when the Supreme Court is in session, it means that another constitutional convention is taking place, albeit without the participation of the People. Rather, this week, for example, a couple of judicial idiots (Roberts and Gorsuch) decided to impose their scientistic myth on the rest of us, i.e., that the Constitution confers certain special rights on people who are confused about their gender.

This is consistent with Voegelin's description of how

the forces of the unconscious will stream into the form, not of the myth, but of theory or science. The symbols of the myth become perverted into intramundane, illusionary objects, "given," as if they were empirical data, to the cognitive and active functions of man.

But here is the real point that intrigued me, that as a result of this process, "man becomes anthropomorphic." What is meant by this cryptic remark? He expands upon it a few pages later, warning of "the anthropomorphic fallacy of forming man in the image of conscious man," "in an age in which the anthropomorphic obsession has destroyed the reality of man."

We usually think of anthropomorphization as the naive attribution of human traits to animals or inanimate objects. But we can also do it to human beings, in particular, when we isolate man from the divine pole, or enclose him in immanence -- in short, when we deny the intrinsic verticality of the human being.

So, if you think the claim that man is the image and likeness of the Creator is a myth, it has nothing on the rank superstition that man is created in the image and likeness of man.

Back to Sandoz. He writes of how contemporary education

does little to restore the understanding of uniquely human reality. Rather, taken alone, it does the very opposite and helps make human beings an endangered species through obfuscation. Both Nazism and Marxism-Leninism evoke natural science as their paradigm....

The problem, of course, isn't science, but

its perversion into scientism and positivism and, thereby, into methodological and other assumptions about knowledge and reality that fallaciously presume to supply sovereign, even the sole, road to truth. Systematic reductionism and deformation of reality inevitably result.

Every time. Scientistic jokers to the left of me, postmodern clowns to the further left.

Resisting the Resistance

There are degrees political sickness, from neurosis to psychosis. I suppose there's also political normality, but it's so rare as to be nearly non-existent. Still, we can't have neurosis or psychosis unless there first exists normalcy. Unless a certain degree of abnormality is inevitable, in which case normality can only exist as an ideal. Crooked timber and all that.

But in any case, in a political order under our present tyranny of relativism, there can be no such thing as normality. Nor can anything be called objectively sick, perverse, or abnormal. And now you understand how the left gets away with it. Just as leftism is a religion with no God but countless demons, it is a political ideology with no truth but an army of enforcers hunting down and punishing deviations from it.

Really, -- and we've seen this playing out on our TV screens over the past several weeks -- the left is just a violent mob with an ideology attached. And it works. The non-crazy and non-evil are always victimized but the crazy and evil.

The first act of violence is always to language, AKA Logos. Being that it is the vehicle of truth, the maiming of language is always of vital importance to the left. Is this torture of the Logos but a simultaneous reenactment and undoing of the Crucifixion? Yes, of course, but we'll come back to that universal metacosmic truth in a subsequent post.

Brief timeout for pedantry. To simplify, there are two types of patient: the neurotic and the psychotic (or relatively mature and immature-to-infantile). The neurotic is plagued by intra-psychic conflict (e.g., insecurity, excessive and irrational worry, impulsive behavior) but is nevertheless in contact with reality, while the psychotic has more or less lost contact with reality.

But it really comes down to a different set of psychological defense mechanisms. You might say the neurotic uses a handgun to deal with his psychic demons and persecutors, while the psychotic goes nuclear every time.

Some of the common neurotic defenses include intellectualization, repression, and reaction formation. The latter has become ubiquitous on the left, what with legions of racists crawling over themselves to signal their innocence of racism to each other.

For that matter, it is why one should never trust a male feminist, because he is simply hiding the fact that he is neither. Likewise, what is a self-proclaimed "ally" of BLM but a fellow racist? People who are innocent of racism couldn't care less about signaling the fact.

Note also how the left doesn't just deploy pathological defenses, but wants to eliminate the mature ones, most conspicuously humor.

The immature defenses are nearly synonymous with the left, especially projection and acting out. But every day we see how the garden variety versions of these have become frankly delusional, e.g., President Trump is a Russian agent, Blacks are victims of genocide at the hands of law enforcement instead of each other, the imaginary campus rape epidemic, etc.

Every day a new delusion, really. By the way, there are also "negative delusions," for example, that Joe Biden is neurologically normal, or that CNN is a news network, or that Al Sharpton is anything other than what he so obviously is.

Here's an extended passage from The Politics of Truth. It has to do with a proper "politics of resistance," which is very much the opposite of the self-styled "resistance" that has been plaguing the country since late in the evening of November 7, 2016. (To be sure, they are resisting, the question being what.)

The reasonable response by the unaffected to perverse education [i.e., indoctrination into ideology] is resistance.... We are obliged to become our own physicians through the therapy of common sense and a steady appeal to the givens of common reality as experienced in the concrete consciousness of everyman and accumulated in the evidentiary treasury of history.

You may know this proper resistance to perversion by its opposite, for example, oh, vandalizing or tearing down statues of George Washington, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, and other icons of our precious civilizational inheritance. (Speaking of logocide, those statues are surely forms of incredibly rich and compact speech.)

However, forgive them, for they know not what they do, for they all attended college. And they are also in denial of the oedipal implications of murdering the father of our country.

Since experience shows that the vanguard of perversion and pneumopathology is the debauchery of language [see paragraph four above], so fashionable now in the forefront of the political-correctness onslaught, it is important to recall the insight of George Orwell in a memorable sentence:

"The purpose of Newspeak," he wrote, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the English Socialist Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible" [emphasis mine].

Those who control your language will control your thoughts. The result is to make the asking of questions impossible, socially irrelevant, or ludicrous -- and thus de facto prohibited within the new orthodoxy of closure and deformed souls.

Deformed souls. Ah, but there'a an easy way around that one: not only denying the reality of the soul but rendering its existence impossible, irrelevant, or ludicrous. Which is certainly one of the purposes of state indoctrination, since there one is despoiled of the very means through which to perceive and resist the pathological political system. The polite name for it is soul murder.

To live in truth requires at all times resolute resistance to untruth and tyranny as the first courageous step.

Recalling the words of C.S. Lewis, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the courage to put up an ALL LIVES MATTER sign in my front yard, because I'm afraid of my house being burned down by my moral superiors.

This was published in 1996, so call it prophecy if you like: "Polarization of American society has proceeded so far through the influences of socialism, Marxism, multiculturalism, and the welfare state's collision with traditional attitudes," that we are in danger of "a slide toward sedition and civil strife on a scale perhaps not seen in America" since the last time Democrats acted out to this extent and created the tyranny of Jim Crow.

How to resist this resistance to reality? Via

intellectual and spiritual resistance to untruth, conducted by reason and persuasion. It is resistance in the name of liberty and truth to revolutionaries who are succeeding in wresting major universities, academic professional associations, and much public discourse to radical control....

The connection with the Murder of God movement as the revolutionaries' common ground must be repeatedly demonstrated as inspiring their onslaughts.

A reminder that useless and idle RINOs are the favored tools of the Devil, who can accomplish nothing without their collaboration.

The Great Awokening, or Satan's Own Spiritual Revival

Let's try to knock another one off the desk, this time The Politics of Truth, a collection of essays that could scarcely be more timely, being that we are currently undergoing a plunge into the Politics of the Lie, the likes of which I've certainly never experienced in my life.

Indeed, I suspect it's no coincidence that Voegelin decided to pay us a visit precisely now, since 1) no other thinker better illuminates the kind of political pathology currently afflicting us, and 2) no other time in our recent history better exemplifies Voegelin's ideas. Compared to what is going on now, Obama was but a sulking, lazy, and ill-educated adolescent, whereas now we're dealing with a sociopathic cohort of spiritually deformed pseudo-adults.

Is there a name for this politico-spiritual disease? No, there are several: "deformation of reality," "gnostic derailment," "dogmatomachy," "ideological pseudo-reality," "secular moonshine," "para-Marxist buffoonery," etc.

As we know -- good and hard, right to the sweetbreads -- we are in the midst of A Great Awokening, which is a perverted -- and inverted -- caricature of the Great Awakenings that have periodically occurred in America. The first one occurred between 1730 and 1740, and this spiritual revolution set the stage for the physical one that would come to fruition a generation or two later. As John Adams famously wrote,

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

The Second Great Awakening took place between 1790 and 1840. And according to Prof. Wiki there was a third between 1855 and 1930, and even a fourth between 1960 and 1980.

By my calculation, that adds up to 145 years of Awakening out of the 234 years since the Declaration, which is over 60%. And what do we call the periods in between? The Great Slumbers? The Pneumatic Snoozes? And what on earth is happening now? In my opinion, the Great Awokening isn't simply a harmless nap but a perverse caricature of these past Awakenings.

Sandoz points out that in past awakenings, "the church served as a school for politics." But in the case of the Awokening it is the other way around: politics is the school of a new religion. Interestingly, no one who is a member of this new religion realizes he is one. Rather, only non-members even recognize that it is a religion.

That's odd. Then again, perhaps not. We must remember that "religion" is a modern concept. For the great majority of history, people didn't know they "had" a religion. Rather, they were simply immersed in a cosmos -- an order -- that included an uncritical religiosity. Conscious religiosity as a separate modality only emerges with the recognition of other religions.

Extremes meet, such that our postmodern Awokening is rooted in a premodern mentality of uncritical religiosity. Here again, this is soph-evident to non-members but veiled to the Woke.

Real religion involves a human ascent and divine pull into the objective order of the cosmos. What then occurs in the logocidal anti-religion of the Woke? Is there an analogous downward pull, AKA temptation at one end, the old "glamor of evil" at the other? Preliminary indications say Yes, but let's continue to flip.

Now, what can the sudden acquisition of Wokeness! be but a caricature of spiritual conversion? Sandoz describes the latter as

a personal experience of regeneration.... The individual is flooded with a sense of divine presence and intense participation or union with God...

Let's stipulate that the Woke protesters, looters, and crybullies are indeed flooded with something, and that they are most definitely participating in some sort of mock mystical body. Yes, it's a "mob," but what is the interior of a mob? What is the psychic glue that holds it together?

It is at once a Krazy Glue and a Gorilla Glue, since it encourages decompensation, regression, and impulsivity unmediated by discursive thought. Come to think of it, it is also a Super Glue, in that it evokes the Neitzschean superman, or the failure to attain mature manhood masquerading as its transcendence -- the quintessence of which being the Antifa terrorist terrorized by the mother with whom he lives.

Among the chief hindrances to [the] life of true liberty is the oppression of men, who in service to evil deceive with untruth and impose falsehood in its place proclaiming it to be true....

Liberty is most truly exercised by living in accord with truth and is, therefore, the correlate of responsibility (Sandoz).

I suppose this is the first time a Great Awokening has fully unleashed itself on our shores, but certainly not the first in history. It occurred, for example, in the USSR. As Solzhenitsyn described it, "The destruction of souls for three-quarters of a century is the most frightening thing." We're not nearly that far into our own Awokening, but as the Aphorist reminds us,

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and ends after where we think it ends.

So the Awokening has been with us for awhile, just not this overtly violent, powerful, and oppressive.

a major difficulty lies in the ostensible "neutrality" in the public schools, which in fact often serves to shelter expanding beachheads of safe havens for antireligious ideology and attacks on American society's moral convictions, radical doctrines ranging from political correctness to advocacy of homosexuality, and neo-Marxism parading as dispassionate science....

The Woke have already lost the argument, but they don't know it. Or they do know it, hence the attacks on free speech and the violence to persons and property. Progressives may not know much, but they know violence and intimidation work.

The ideological antipolitics of the nihilistic second realities has been defeated theoretically, politically, economically, and by all the facts of human existence.

Yet unremitting assault continues on the American and generally Western heritage in the name of enlightenment and social progress by the ghosts of the very politics of atrocity whose true monuments are Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag. Its protagonists, unable to cope with reason and experience, resort to brute force tending toward the lethal.

That was published in 1996. It's no longer "tending." Rather, that toward which it was tending stands revealed.

The Science of Political Religions

Here's another book I think we can knock out in a hurry, A Government of Laws, a collection of Voegelinian essays on subjects ranging from the American founding to the contemporary political religions we've been seeing on our TV screens, with their primitive gods and violent liturgies.

As to the latter, we should never forget that human sacrifice is the default liturgy of the vertically untutored man. How many sacrificial offerings have occurred already at the hands of the BLM/Antifa priesthood? And how many thousands more will result from the defunding of police?

The book has an epigram by Aristotle ending with The law is reason unaffected by desire. Its unstated corollary is that the left is desire unaffected by reason; or it is abstract ideological reason uninformed by, and oblivious to, concrete historical experience.

There may be a shortcut through the book: how about I skip the things we already know, and focus only on the things we don't? And maybe throw in any passages that tell us what we already know, but do so in a clever or incisive way.

Here's an intriguing little fragment of a thoughtlet: that it would "be strange if a man chose not to live his own life but someone else's."

Well, in our opinion this happens every time a man chooses not to live in conformity to truth. So it happens quite often indeed. If the Truth sets one free, the Lie imprisons; and if truth is conformity to the real, then the Lie shackles one to a delusion of one kind or another. One is either inside or outside the cave; or rather, riveted by the shadows on the wall, or open to the light streaming in from outside. But enough about CNN.

Bob, I thought we were going to limit ourselves to what we don't already know?

Look, I'm trying, but it's nice to occasionally hear someone else say it, okay? You're not the only one who gets sick of the sound of my voice.

[W]e seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war...

Wait -- are you suggesting that the Walking Civil Wars who imagine they're unhappy because of the existence of statues of Winston Churchill, or Thomas Jefferson, or Christopher Columbus, will not become happy after vandalizing or tearing them down?

No, they'll be delirious for a few minutes -- that's how mob psychology works -- before needing to repeat the experience. As with any other addiction, the progressive mobster keeps chasing the high, from canceling Gandhi to Basil Fawlty to Penny Lane. Pretty soon there's no one left to scapegoat -- no imaginary dragons left to slay -- so they must consume one another. It's one of those ironyclad Laws of the Left.

Why has the left plunged back into a premodern rejection of science? Because the very conception of science depends upon a prior "de-divinization of the world, which results in something we easily call nature; and nature can then be explored by science."

But "when this break is not radical, as it is [was] in the West, then there is trouble in having natural science."

The left -- since it is a pre-reflective political religion -- essentially re-divinizes (or demonizes is more like it) the world, thereby effacing the distinction between transcendence and immanence.

Which is how we end up with such idiotic decisions as yesterday's invention of new rights based upon the idea that sex -- a biological reality -- really refers to religious totems such as "sexual preference," “gender identity,” and cross-dressing.

But of course, they won't pursue the principle to its end, and proclaim that the Constitution protects the person who has a sexual preference for children, or thinks he's a giraffe, or likes to dress up in Klan robes.

Oh well: "Hatred of divine being is the mark of the radical modern, and specifically of Marxian revolt." Come for the hatred, stay for the destruction.

"Dogma supplants reason and science," so the born-again-from-below leftist -- hello, New Man! -- "can successfully usurp his place in a Second Reality of dreamworld imaginings."

For -- again, just turn on the TV -- "the spiritual dimensions of human existence do not vanish simply because men become atheistic and rebellious."

Oh, and never equate "spiritual" with "good." But you knew that already.

I think we're done here.

The Devil, the Apocalypse, and Other Nuisances

By now we're all familiar with the Mondello-Hildebrand Effect, whereby the subject of a post escapes the page and proceeds to comment upon itself after it has been written. In other words, it proclaims its own truth via synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, or Divine Puns.

A case in point is the previous post, the title of which alludes to a "cartography of spirit." Afterwards the word "map" kept popping up in my reading. When this occurs, it must be for a reason.

The reason is that we have tapped into -- or so we have heard from the wise -- a hidden nonlocal connection, or a particularly rich vein of the cosmos. At the very least we must pay attention to these coincidences, and try to discern whether they truly reveal something of the underside of the cosmic area rug or are just symptoms of a delusional disorder. Example:

Let us not overlook the great secret that a sound map of human nature (as John Adams insisted) uniquely lies at the heart of the Constitution of the United States and its elaborate institutional arrangements (Sandoz, italics in original).

The passage then goes on to describe the events of the day -- no, not of 1787 but of 2020: that "The demos ever tends to become the ochlos [mob]," and therefore

must be restrained artfully by a vast net of adversarial devices if government is to have any chance whatever of prevailing over self-serving human passions while still nurturing the liberty of free men.

This passage adverts to several critical ideas, the most consequential being that if our politics isn't informed by an accurate map of human nature, then our political cosmos will eventually fall apart. Or, as the cliché has it, the center will not hold.

Let's face it: under the best of circumstances man is an ungovernable beast except from within. If he refuses to, or is incapable of, so governing himself, then he will be governed from without. In other words, the raging mob will evoke the force required to put it down, and then have the chutzpah to kvetch about it.

If you find no father in the home, you will probably find him later in the street with a uniform and gun. Disorder in the soul is the raison d'etre of Law and Order. If all men were Raccoons, government itself would be unnecessary.

Then I bumped into this observation by Richard Feynman, going to a life lived in the great In Between, which is the only place to be (or become, to be perfectly accurate):

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

We need maps, but the most accurate map is never the territory. Or, the most accurate map is the territory, AKA reality.

With that out of the away, let's turn to the Political Apocalypse, which has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks.

The apocalypse. It's always something, isn't it?

The book starts off with a bang. However, it's another one of those bangs that's self-evident to the clued in, but eternally beyond the grasp of the progressive mob, for if they knew it, it would cure them of their pathology, including all the infantile acting out:

"The secularization of existence" which "marks the modern age" has taken place "at the expense of common sense in politics and of rationality in philosophy through the disordering infusion of temporality with an ultimacy formerly reserved for the eternal beyond."

Boom. Again, this will convince precisely no one who doesn't already understand it, but this Great Leap Backward has resulted in "the rise of ideological mass movements whose key experiential ingredient is political apocalypse," i.e., of visions that promise "the radical transformation of man and history into the perfect existence of peace, plenty, justice, happiness, and a 'Final Harmony' of one description or another."

Yes, a Final Solution to... to what exactly? For if the problem is human nature, then failure to accurately map it will inevitably result in an aggravation of the primary problem.... as you have no doubt noticed, because what is a leftist but a human being, only worse?

Yes, man is the measure of all things. Except for God, who is the measure of man. Deny this and hell follows. In Democrat controlled cities, anyway.

The cartography of man pops up again:

We must have a systematic understanding of the nature of man if we want to have a systematic political science.... Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

But that's an insult to multiculturalism, to the tenured fairy tale that all cultures are equally valuable and precious! Not exactly, for truth is never an insult, but it is always a scandal to the progressive.

As we've discussed in the past, the typical liberal is but a tool of lower forces -- or of demons in high places who manipulate the uncomprehending mob. The devil himself? He is essentially the personification of "the spirit of pure negation whose goal is simply annihilation." Some people just like to see the Wendy's burn.

And it needs to be emphasized that the devil even "loves" mankind in his own fashion. Indeed, he speaks truth, except that it is "my truth." Thus, any time you hear a liberal clown speak of "my truth," know that he is simply aping the Ape of God: "the devil speaks of his truth and of the other truth (about which, he admits, he can know nothing because he is pure negation."

Which is why you can hand a liberal the truth in a silver chalice, but you can't make him drink. This:

The insensibility of the modern apocalyptical gnostic to facts (including phenomenal facts) has been insufficiently noticed. It must be accorded a prominent place in any description of his psycho- or pneumapathology.

For not only is his conception of reality distorted by radical closure against transcendent Being, but he is highly selective and perversely willful with respect to the elements of phenomenal reality accepted as substantial.

One need only observe what happens to public figures who point out that BLM is a fraud rooted in disgusting and depraved lies about police treatment of blacks. Say what you want, but that is not the devil's truth.

The Idiot's Guide to Your Head, or A Cartography of Spirit

I've never been this backed up in the brain. Usually there's a rough balance of tirade between input and output, but at present I'm so far behind the tomes that I count no fewer than a dozen of them with which we need to catch up. How did this happen?

Oh, I know. The quarantine. The increased slack resulted not only in a greater quantity of reading, but -- and maybe this was providential -- a much deeper quality of reading, what with the Voegelin binge.

As far as I'm concerned, he takes us as deep into the cosmos as we can go, at least from the noetic (i.e., pneumo-cognitive) side of things. The pneumatic (mystico-experiential) side is another matter. Perhaps we'll veer into that modality when we formally retire, which, with any luck, will be in about six months.

Until the quarantine, I'd been thinking that retirement would solve the enduring problem of the Great Sequel. But now I have to rethink that, because it is by no means self-evident that more free time equates to more containment of the Mystery, or taming of the bucking cosmos. No, it only aggravates the Mystery in an exponential way. I don't want to say that it leaves me more confused, because that's not it at all. More... how to put it?

It's more like, say, one hour of input requires three or four hours of output, so I need to either reduce the former or increase the latter. At the very least, I need to write every day just so as to keep from sinking beneath the waves. I guess I don't mind writing every day, but who on earth wants to read me every day? Isn't that a little tedious?

Whatever. Nothing I can do about that. In any event, let's try to knock one of these books from the pile. It's called Political Apocalypse, which sounds ridiculously timely, no?

I've told you before that when I do a deep dive into this or that thinker's body of work, I often *imagine* they're contacting me directly via the ether or whatever you wish to call it. "Nonlocal operators standing by, ready to assist you," and all that.

Now, if you really appreciate how weird this cosmos is -- and I've tried to tell you -- then this really isn't weird at all. Voegelin wishes desperately to be understood, and nothing about this has changed just because he's no longer with us biologically. (I promise to do the same once I leave earth behind and go looking for Bo Diddley.)

Remember when Jesus says "I am with you to the end of the age"? Not only is this not remotely implausible, he's not the only one. He may be the 800 lb guerrilla, but there are other spiritual warriors hiding in the burning bushes, trees of life, the mycelial network, etc. And look, they're everywhere, okay? True hallucinations. You just have to surrender to the process, and the process will come to you.

No, I'm not just in a queer mood this morning. Here's a passage I read just yesterday from Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History. He's right here, sitting across the table and reminding us that

To the extent that men are actually philosophers in the original sense, they are engaged in an experiential, mystical ascent to luminous participation in existential truth.

Are we not men? Are we not philosophers? Are we not mystically ascending to luminous participation in existential truth? Are we not Coons? YES! WE! ARE! Someone has to do it, and it has come down to us. And it goes like this:

the movement of the soul into luminosity of existence is simultaneously a human seeking [↑] and a divine drawing [O, the Great Attractor].

That's pretty commonplace and experience-near, but here's where it gets a little more interesting:

the breakthrough is not simply a human endeavor; there is also a divine breakthrough or irruption into man, and there is no way that this can be predicted. It takes place where and in whom it will.

So there is the human (↑) into God or O; but this is necessarily complemented by the divine (↓) into man. Why necessarily? That's a largish subject, so at this point let's just posit it as a hypothesis and focus on the notion that God "irrupts" from time to time -- or timelessness to time -- in man. Is this even conceivable?

Wrong question. I would state it conversely: is it even conceivable that the human person isn't a vertically open system that receives and metabolizes divine energies? It only happens all the time (even if it happens quintessentially and fully only in the Incarnation).

Unless one closes oneself off from the divine energies, a pathological condition Voegelin describes in exquisite detail. The problem there is that once you've experienced it you need no further proof, and if you haven't experienced it, then no amount of proof is sufficient.

Here's another quote, selected more or less at random, or via lectio divina flippia:

The substance of philosophy is not to to be found in the philosopher's ideas but in the ascent that he enacts, in response to divine calling and grace.

But again, one can always deny the ascent and/or resist the pull. Free will. Or won't, rather. Closure against reality is always an option, but just know what you're not getting yourself into, okay?

The tension of longing may feel too painful; one may prefer an illusion of certainty to the challenge of epistemic existence in truth.... Where this willingness is lacking, one may avert one's gaze and seek refuge in opinions.

I still want to get to the Political Apocalypse. With any luck we can knock that one off the desk in the next post.

No Amount of Walking Adds Up to a Leap

Have we hit the bottom (line) of the cosmos, or is there further to go? Yes and no. Although the truth of reality isn't subject to change, human beings we are always either approaching or fleeing from this Truth.

In other words, vertically speaking, the cosmos is asymptotic at both ends; recall the image from a few posts back with the horizontal time axis bisected by the ovoid vertical sensorium of human understanding. The larger and more luminous that space, the more of reality you understand (and not just know, which is a poor substitute for integral comprehension). And we do mean this literally, more on which as we proceed.

Actually, it's right there in the comment box, and has been for a number of years. In no sense is it meant metaphorically, poetically, mystagogically, or "in a manner of speaking." Rather, it's the way it is, and always will be in this life:

The quest, thus, has no external "object," but is reality itself becoming luminous for its movement from the ineffable, through the Cosmos, to the ineffable.

I want to say that Truth is eternal while Ignorance, Stupidity, and the Lie are sempiternal, the latter meaning they might as well be endless but are still located in time. Expressed another way, there can be only one Eternal, and it doesn't include fake news, secular idolatry, or tenured babble.

Also, far be it from us to try to convince anyone of our deuscoveries. We leave that drudgery entirely to the Marketing Department. This blog is all about pure R & D, while implications and practical applications are mostly left to others.

Put another way, we write only for... well, first of all for ourselves, and second for readers capable of understanding what we're going on about. But nearly all Bobjections come from people who haven't understood Bob at all, but merely imagine they have because they squeeze Bob into their own procrustean reality tunnel.

Having said that, we are always delighted to hear objections from fellow vertical travelers who do understand our perspective and our process, being that it is improvised on the spot and naturally can't have the finished elegance of a composition or score. Always check with your holy man to see if One Cosmos is right for you. Side effects may include second birth pangs, third eye strain, untimely chakra activation, ontological weight gain, existential bemusement, vicarious embarrassment, guffaw-ha experiences, and more.

Suffice it to say that we do not prescribe our medicine to horizontaloid beings for the same reason the Bible tells us that we shouldn't cast our spheres before circles, or Plato warns the free-range thinker of the consequences of assuming cave dwellers will welcome your insights about the Light from outside their cave narrative.

This no doubt sounds a bit abstract, so I will momentarily remove the coonskin cap and put on my psychologist's hat, and remind you that the human need for extra-biological transhistorical meaning is as intense and pervasive as any physiological drive or instinct.

We might say that while instincts are animal drives, the drive for meaning is the quintessential human instinct. It explains why all humans in every culture have come up with so many idiotic meanings, from human sacrifice to Marxism to BLM (but I repeat myself).

(Brief timeout and apology: I had had a proper subject for a post in mind, but I'm just going to continue with the free & loose associating and see where it goes. Who knows, it may eventually lead back to the subject I'd had in mind.)

Let's pull back and try to see what's going on here. And when I say "pull back," I mean 50,000 years or so. Or better, let's "pull above" and try to discern the patterns that continuously repeat themselves like currents in the oceans. Looked at this way, there is very little true "progress," mostly just a tail-chasing rat race on Sisyphus's own hamster wheel; nevertheless, there are, in Voegelin's terms, occasional "leaps of being" that are truly radical and revolutionary, for they change everything.

Looked at this way, a radical revolutionary such as, say, Marx, or Hitler, or Mao, isn't revolutionary at all, but rather, just the latest iteration of the regressive force that always pulls man and culture back to a more primitive and undifferentiated state.

Conversely, a conservative -- specifically, the American variety who wishes to conserve the radical leap in being expressed by the Declaration and given flesh by the Constitution -- is the counter-cultural radical. What we nowadays call the "radical" is but a reanimated fossil of the past, for he is an emissary of tribalism, relativism, animism and/or materialism (which are but two sides of the same dysfunctional ontology), etc.

From our vertical meta-cosmic perspective we see a number of outstanding leaps in being. In other words, these are "discontinuous," being that there is nothing in their antecedents that can account for or predict their consequences. I know, because I'm one of them. My life makes no sense in linear terms.

At risk of boring the Old-timers, let's briefly run down some of the big leaps. There is, for example, existence itself, which is either created or it isn't. This is the Greatest Leap of All, even the greatest leap conceivable, and we mean this literally, because this is what creatio ex nihilo means.

Ask yourself: is there a greater conceivable leap than that between nothing and something? No, of course not. Compared to nothing, even something as vacuous as the quantum vacuum is of infinite significance.

The alternative metaphysic pretends the cosmos is self-sufficient and that there are no leaps. This view tends to be held in a consistent way by its flatland devotees, such that no subsequent leaps are seen or permitted either.

Nevertheless, to paraphrase Galileo, and yet it leaps. For example, the transition from inanimate matter to life isn't a line but a leap; likewise the leap from biology to intellect. And there's another vitally important leap from mere animal lineage to human history. Animals have a past but they have no history.

So history is indeed a leap, but what kind of leap, and into what? You might say that Voegelin spent his entire life exploring and answering this question. And the answer is quite multifaceted, requiring familiarity with...

Let's just say with everything; and not just what has occurred outside, but even more critically, what happens inside, which, after all, is the only thing of which we have direct and unmediated awareness.

Thus, for example, the transition from cyclical to linear time represents a tremendous leap forward; likewise the leap from polytheism to monotheism, or from collective identity to the individual, or from rule of man to rule of law. And if you personally haven't leapt into the space between immanence and transcendence, you are nowhere, literally. And yet, you are still a nuisance.

Does any of this touch on the news of the day? Yes, of course. But the clock has run out for today...

Upped Jumped the Devil

At risk of captaining the good ship Obvious, let's call this crisis what it is: spiritual warfare, except with only one side fighting. Thrones, dominions, powers, principalities, the whole menagerie of nonlocal cosmic influencers are present and accounted for.

I suppose I've always regarded that passage as more of a poetic inventory, but this website defines principalities quite specifically as "one type of spiritual (metaphysical) being which are now quite hostile to God and human beings" (for hostility to God is always hostility to man, and vice versa).

Well, who but Petey and his ilk can really see the unseen with perfect clarity? We only have privy to the effects, while the exact causes necessarily remain obscure for us.

But that's true of purely human behavior as well. Obviously, no one has direct access to the mind and motivations of another person. Rather, we can only infer or deduce them. Nevertheless, this isn't nothing, and one of the privileges of the human station is the ability to distinguish appearances from reality, even if we can never fully grasp the latter on this side of the area rug.

Indeed, I was discussing this just yesterday with the young master. There are so many mysteries to which we simply assign words, as if this eliminates the mystery, but it only does so for the incurious and easily mollified -- as if anyone really understands the nature of, say, energy, or metabolism, or organism, or consciousness, or even just existence.

Back when I was in grad school and pondering a dissertation subject, one idea that occurred to me was something having to do with The Remystification of the Mind. We typically equate "progress" with demystification, and that is true to a certain extent and up to a point. But we must never forget that any demystification is always in dialectic with Mystery as such, so that to imagine the world has been demystified is a grandiose delusion and even grounds for tenure.

Imagine, for example -- even though it is impossible for readers of this blog -- the mind satisfied with "the selfish gene" as an adequate explanation for human existence and experience. Or dialectical materialism, or scientism, or any other ideology.

You all know the drill, so I won't re-belabor this dead horse. The bottom line is that Mystery isn't some peripheral nuisance to be eliminated at a later date, but The Perennial Fact of the Matter. Literally, because it dwarfs our modest area of illumination. It is a sea that always surrounds and permeates our isle of knowledge.

Which is in no way to celebrate obscurantism or ignorance or irrationalism. Rather, it is to highlight the permanent and ineradicable truth of the human situation, which is again -- as we've been discussing these past several weeks -- always situated in a developing and differentiating space between the mysteries of immanence and transcendence.

I've mentioned before that you can learn a lot about normality by studying insanity, because psychological defense mechanisms that operate more subtly in the normal neurotic become quite vivid and hypertrophied in the borderline or psychotic patient. These defenses don't differ in essence, only in magnitude.

Well, it's the same vis-a-vis spiritual warfare. It's always going on, except sometimes it's so obvious as to be undeniable. But if we lack the vocabulary to describe it, it will probably be ignored, or worse, mischaracterized in deceptive terms that will only make matters worse.

For example, if you are a spiritually normal person, you will have noticed while watching the chaos play out on your TV screen, a very specific and ancient feeling bubbling up from your core (even if you never felt it before, it will still be familiar for vertical reasons related to species memory).

This needs to be given its proper name, and not transformed and renamed into something it isn't. But this is precisely what the left does, which is itself an important strategy in spiritual warfare, i.e., appropriation of the language.

Again, you will have noticed that once the Adversary has successfully seized, defined, and renamed the terms of debate, he has won the battle. Now everyone is talking about "police brutality" instead of brutal criminality. Everyone knows the statistics, for example, that a police officer is 18.5 times more likely to be murdered by a black criminal than the other way around, or that the greatest threat to black lives -- by orders of magnitude -- comes from fellow blacks. Such dangerous statistics are among the first casualties of spiritual warfare.

It reminds me of Pearl Harbor, a daring mission to preemptively decimate the US Navy before it even knew it was at war with Japan. With regard to the present spiritual warfare, it has been going on in its present form for decades, as the left has successfully softened the linguistic battlefield with its ceaseless campaign of logocide, such that merely conveying a banal truth is sufficient to to get oneself "cancelled" --which is to say, to become a spiritual battlefield casualty if not fatality.

Tucker Carlson has been on fire about this subject for the past couple of weeks, but even he can only go so far. Remember Patton after victory in Europe? I don't know if this was just in the movie, but he supposedly wanted to continue rolling right into Moscow and strangle the Beast in his nest. Which was more or less unfeasible even if his heart was in the right place. Turning on our "ally" would have been seen as a betrayal after so much propaganda had successfully transformed Satan himself into benign "Uncle Joe."

When is the last time we truly adopted an unapologetic No Half Measures approach to spiritual warfare? Nothing comes immediately to mind except the denouement of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, when the Manson girl gets it with the flamethrower. Or maybe Inglourious Basterds, when Nazis are reeducated with a Louisville Slugger vigorously applied to the cranium, and conveniently identified by a swastika carved into the forehead.

Does this mean Bob is advocating cruelty and sadism? Hardly. But let's understand whom we're dealing with. A little perspective is in order before we devise strategy and tactics. Going back to what I was saying about the exaggeration of psychological defense mechanisms in severe mental illness, we see a similar distortion in spiritual warfare.

In other words, certain activities we consider immoral under normal circumstances are sanctioned in war, e.g., violence, killing, and destruction. While we try to set limits on these, Satan honors no such limits. We see this in the French Revolution, in National Socialism, in communism, in Islamic terrorism, etc.

And of course we are currently seeing the same pattern play out with Antifa and BLM (which is a Gnostic ideological movement hiding behind race-obsessed white liberal guilt). Their violence has no limits -- which goes to that funny but distinct feeling you had in your tummy last week while watching the barbarian invasion. It's the same feeling St. Augustine had in 430, when Vandal Lives Matter sacked Hippo and looted the place.

Aw, look at me, I'm ramblin' again. I had intended to begin with this timely observation by Schuon, that

It makes no sense to believe in the devil and then each time, when he appears -- most often exploiting a specific situation [!] -- to deny that he is involved.

He also speaks of hypocrites "who secretly harbor grave faults" which break to the surface because they were never properly "dissolved by humility" to begin with, but rather, were simply "gilded with pride."

Which brings us to the very real problem of virtue signaling, which is nothing to snooze at, but rather, like political correctness, can be quite deadly.

A couple of aphorisms come to mind, that

1) The devil can achieve nothing great without the thoughtless collaboration of the virtues (i.e., gold-plated pride and hypocrisy),

and 2) Man does not call a solution the formula that solves problems, but the formula that hides them (which goes to the abuse of language which renders the actual problem unthinkable and unsayable).

But in the current maelstrom of willful ignorance masquerading as deep concern, one does well to remember that

Only the very intelligent man does not possess the solution to current problems.

For permanent existential problems have no political solutions, so pretending to solve them actually makes them worse. Or, if you do have a political solution to greed, lust, gluttony, laziness, anger, envy, pride, hypocrisy, ingratitude, racism, and the rest, let's hear it.

On the Acceleration of Politico-Cultural Insanity

The previous post ended with the question: "how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?"

Exactly which anti-human buffoonery? There's so much of it, the average person is unable to distinguish between the shallow and trivial buffoonery of academia vs. the genuinely important and revolutionary buffoonery that threatens -- or promises -- to undo the cosmic progress of millennia.

In nearby Santa Monica, for example, progressive rioters can destroy in a weekend what had been taking years for progressive politicians to destroy.

And the discernment is only more difficult if one has attended college, since college is precisely where explicit indoctrination into the religion of radical secularism takes place.

Sr. Dávila says something to the effect that for most adults, their intellectual capital consists of a modest inheritance or small lottery won in adolescence. Think of someone like, for example, Obama, who hasn't taken a new cognitive imprint in 40 years, and still thinks and speaks like a stoned college student -- or worse, a sober college professor.

(Did anyone see the Laurel Canyon documentary on Epix? One of the most interesting things about these seedy musical legends is how every single one of them passionately believes the same vaporous cliches at 75 they did at 20!)

An added complication is that in recent times the harmless buffoonery is transitioning to destructive buffoonery at an increasingly rapid clip. In other words, moral and intellectual insanity are redefined as sanctity and political correctitude so quickly, who can keep up? Most people are unable to discern exactly when to denounce themselves, or even to conduct a daily ideological inventory to know what to denounce.

I, for example, still believe in tolerance, merit, and racial colorblindness. But all of a sudden, such beliefs are the quintessence of hatred, oppression, and "white privilege."

Similarly, it took a few years for the redefinition of marriage to go from the lunatic fringe to mandatory acceptance and celebration. Afterwards it took a month or so for the insanity of transgenderism to go from profound irrelevance to The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time. But it has taken only a week for police defunding to go from unthinkable to un-vetoable in Minneapolis.

At any rate, your common sense doesn't deceive you: the madness is accelerating. Indeed, even my 15 year old notices it. He's nostalgic for simpler times, when he was 11, and the politico-cultural insanity seemed a little more treatable if not curable.

For there is no human -- let alone political -- cure for this spiritual malady, in part because the very essence of the disease is the conviction that politics can cure it -- which in turn is the essence of leftism itself.

What I mean to say is that the left specializes in politicizing the existential and even ontological, which is why Progressivism Inc. will never go out of business, because existential and ontological problems will by definition always be with us.

To cite only the most obvious ones, there is and always will be economic scarcity, the infinitude of desire, the unavoidability of sexual differences, the ineluctability of the Bell Curve (e.g., half the population is always of below average intelligence), inequality of outcomes, the terror of freedom, the mystery of existence, the inevitability of death, et al.

Me? I'm not a misanthrope per se. Rather, I just have high standards. Leftism can only succeed if we 1) eliminate all standards, 2) pretend human nature doesn't exist, 3) and empower the state to cure the incurable.

Back in the old days of the blog, puns would spontaneously and intrusively pop into my noggin. I think I mentioned that nowadays -- no doubt because of the influence of brother Dávila -- aphorisms come in unbidden. I'm not saying they're as good as his, but the post has to end somehow.

Just as leftists who love mankind in the abstract hate and mistreat actual people, those who love blacks in general hate blacks in particular and do them great harm.

If there's something more ecstatic than violence rendered legitimate by belief in a lie, Satan kept it for himself.

Thankfully for the left, there is nothing in the Constitution about separation of idols and state.

The left would be far less influential if its ideas were sane.

Look on the bright side: if they defund the police it will be the first time Dems have ever ended a government program.

No Lives Matter

Unless God exists, in which case all lives not only matter but are of infinite value.

Indeed, where do people think this radical idea came from? Karl Marx? Oprah Winfrey? Marx believed the opposite, and rightly so, given his fundamentally anti-theistic principles: "The critique of religion is the presupposition of all critique."

Why might this uber anti-idea be so foundational to the whole project of the left? A number of reasons, but certainly because it undercuts any claims to truth, and thereby clears the field for the exertion of raw power and unapologetic violence, the old libido dominandi (which isn't just the pleasure of physical domination, but the perverse joy of intellectual and spiritual domination, in case you haven't noticed). As Lenin so eloquently expressed it,

Why should we be squeamish about the sacrifices to our righteous cause?... It does not matter if three-fourths of mankind is destroyed; all that counts is that ultimately the last quarter should become communist.... Later centuries will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced us. Then everything will be understood, everything.

So don't ask why BLM doesn't care about murdered black police officers and looted black-owned businesses, not to mention the chronic pandemic of black-on-black crime: the media will justify the cruelties to which circumstances have forced them, nor do we have to wait centuries, rather, seconds. Progress!

We should also point out that in the absence of our God, persons don't matter, being that the discovery and elaboration of personhood itself was one of those differentiations of consciousness discussed a couple of posts ago. It represents a tremendous advance -- a leap in being -- over its atheistic, materialistic, and primitive religious alternatives.

Incidentally, "secularization" for Voegelin is "a polite word for 'deculturation'" (Webb). Deculturation? That's another word for "deformation," an impolite word for the intrinsically pathological "destruction of the order of the soul," which can only be properly formed in and by "the love of transcendental perfection inherent in the fundamental tension of existence," i.e., in vertical openness to the Beyond (what we call O).

To repeat a formula I must have mentioned almost 15 years ago (October will mark 15 years of blogviating -- the "g" is silent), "there is a soul within and a grace above, and this is all we know or need to know."

Yes, it's a slight exaggeration, but not by much, for the soul is that by which God is known, and grace is that through which God reveals himself. For example, "revelation" is one thing, but in the absence of a graced intellect, it is a closed book. As is the world, but forgive the tenured, for they haven't a clue.

To make it even more abstract, just say there is a supra-vertical transmitter and an intra-vertical receiver, and that if there isn't, then nothing can be known about anything, period. There is no truth because there is no intellect to know it. And if you want to take it one step further, both poles -- grace and soul, truth and intellect, intelligence and intelligibility -- are of a single differentiating substance. We'll return to this idea in due course.

Some of the quotes above are from a book I read yesterday called Political Apocalypse (not really recommended because the other books on Voegelin we've been discussing are better). In it Voegelin points out that

the substance of society is psyche. Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

This is in no way an exaggeration, polemic, or distortion. In order to appreciate its literal truth, one must only try to imagine what it would be like to live in the deformed and derailed world of the MSM, with no friction or cognitive dissonance. You can't.

To cite just one out of millions of examples, you can't possibly see Fredo Cuomo equate the barbaric thuggery of Antifa with the liberation of Europe and say to yourself, "yes, exactly!" Give Fredo credit though. He obviously paid attention in history class. It even sounds like he may have majored in history, for in the words of the Aphorist, There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

And yesterday I learned that Dostoevski was "among the first to understand that the modern political movements are secular religions ('irreligions'), aping science, dedicated to the destruction of God and the humanity of man, and at bottom are spiritually and intellectually bankrupt."

In other words, the left is bankrupt in every way except financially, but they're working on it.

You and I understand all this, as does any normal person, albeit intuitively and not necessarily philosophically or metaphysically. Which led me to ask myself: "Bob, this didn't used to be difficult, nor was it reserved for scholars and specialists, let alone fringe bloggers. What happened? Why the eclipse of the obvious? Why is half of America so bereft of common sense?"

I'll go further: Voegelin correctly observed that "the essence of modernity is Gnosticism." But I'll bet if some spiritually obtuse and ideologically deformed egghead were to happen upon this blog, he'd say something to the effect of "what a bunch of occult and grandiose nonsense!"

The question is, how did the obvious become controversial, and how did such anti-human buffoonery become the conventional wisdom of the media-academic complex?

The answer may surprise you! But only if you've forgotten everything man has learned about man over the past 50,000 years or so.

About the title of this post. I'll leave off with some aphorisms that shall never pass away, even if they are forever banned on grounds of constituting racist hate speech:

For God there are only individuals.

Only the theocentric vision does not end up reducing man to absolute insignificance.

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

If the soul is a myth, genocide is a simple problem of effective anesthetics.

Hell is any place from which God is absent. --Dávila

UPDATE -- same attractor, slightly different angle: America in the Aftermath of George Floyd: Between Paganism and Christianity.