Hope, Change, and Superiority

Continuing with the previous post, we were discussing the Moldbuggian concept of the Cathedral, which we call the progressive Matrix https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-week-a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral-by-curtis-yarvin-aka-moldbug/#more-27032. But first, an embarrassing confession.

Even back when I was a liberal I was always looking for systemic unity and conceptual integration -- in other words, I wanted to understand how facts and ideas that appear unrelated on a lower level are unified at a higher and deeper level. 

Nothing wrong with that, because it's simply what thinking is and does, whether in science or the humanities -- or in pseudoscience and the subhumanities. As always, the question isn't whether the mind seeks unity and integration, but whether the integration is true -- whether it conforms to the Permanent Real.

Pick any entree from the progressive kookbook and you will immediately notice that it offers a kind of unity -- a pseudo-unity to be sure, but unity just the same. For again: all humans, by virtue of being human, seek unity, and the very progress of human thought can be seen as a ceaseless struggle between good and functional unity -- AKA progress -- and regressive and dysfunctional unity. 

It's not a matter of left and right, but rather, up and down. Truth, or necessary being, is up, its entailments and contingencies down. Unless you are a postmodern progressive, in which case contingency is at the top and bottom. Which reduces to power.

An allied problem is that in the contemporary west there are waaaaay too many thinkers, or people who presume to think. These latter are indeed presumptuous, and with good reason, for to say intellectual is to say pride. The self-regard of these mediocretins is off the charts, but Humility knows what comes next. 

Just as there is the true guffah-HA! experience, there are any number of counterfeit ones. How to tell the difference? The false version excludes in order to unify; as such, it functions more to eliminate the ambiguity of reality than to unify the psyche at a higher level. At the same time, it takes no notice of anomalies. In short, it is not bothered by the cognitive dissonance that troubles a normal person.

For example, in response to the shock of the 2016 election, Democrats identified a unified theory that explained everything: President Trump is a Russian agent! It is no coincidence that these same people have embraced the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. 

More generally, you will have noticed that the conspiracy-prone can easily flit from one theory to another. The form scarcely matters, because it's the function that counts, and the function is to organize an otherwise disordered, chaotic, and anxiety-ridden mind. For it is not the healthy who need a doctorate in gender studies or queer theory, but the sick. 

Take a feminist. Please. Back in my day, such women would enter psychotherapy in order to figure out why they were so miserable. Before that they would just get married and have children. Problem solved. 

But feminism -- or any ideology for that matter -- allows one to politicize the human condition, and why not? Promise a facile solution to an insoluble problem, and you've got a lifetime Democrat.

Life is hard -- full of pain, loss, conflict, compromise. Adopting an ideology accomplishes two things: it 1) locates an easy enemy to explain one's unhappiness, while 2) offering hope that the unhappiness will be eliminated in the future once the enemy is vanquished. In short, it allows one to externalize pain in the present while promising a cure in the future.

Hope and Change. Give the prophet Obama credit: he abstracted the deeper form of any and all ideology and promised it to his supporters, who consisted of -- not coincidentally -- the over- and undereducated, AKA Lowfo and Nofo voters, those most susceptible to promises of false Slack. Just like today's promise, it will pay for itself!

Anyway, the embarrassing part is that, back when I was a liberal, I wanted to figure out the "real reason" why conservatives could believe such clearly stupid and even evil nonsense.  

Looking back on it, I realize that my liberal beliefs were completely unexamined, in part because they existed not on an epistemological plane, but rather, on a moral one. In other words, they were all about virtue signaling: I am better than you, for I care about women, children, immigrants, native Americans, blacks, gays, labor unions, trannies, you name it. I care. I am smarter than you, and I have an advanced degree to prove it.

Mother was right: I am a good man. 

Hope, Change, and Superiority

Continuing with the previous post, we were discussing the Moldbuggian concept of the Cathedral, which we call the progressive Matrix https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-week-a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral-by-curtis-yarvin-aka-moldbug/#more-27032. But first, an embarrassing confession.

Even back when I was a liberal I was always looking for systemic unity and conceptual integration -- in other words, I wanted to understand how facts and ideas that appear unrelated on a lower level are unified at a higher and deeper level. 

Nothing wrong with that, because it's simply what thinking is and does, whether in science or the humanities -- or in pseudoscience and the subhumanities. As always, the question isn't whether the mind seeks unity and integration, but whether the integration is true -- whether it conforms to the Permanent Real.

Pick any entree from the progressive kookbook and you will immediately notice that it offers a kind of unity -- a pseudo-unity to be sure, but unity just the same. For again: all humans, by virtue of being human, seek unity, and the very progress of human thought can be seen as a ceaseless struggle between good and functional unity -- AKA progress -- and regressive and dysfunctional unity. 

It's not a matter of left and right, but rather, up and down. Truth, or necessary being, is up, its entailments and contingencies down. Unless you are a postmodern progressive, in which case contingency is at the top and bottom. Which reduces to power.

An allied problem is that in the contemporary west there are waaaaay too many thinkers, or people who presume to think. These latter are indeed presumptuous, and with good reason, for to say intellectual is to say pride. The self-regard of these mediocretins is off the charts, but Humility knows what comes next. 

Just as there is the true guffah-HA! experience, there are any number of counterfeit ones. How to tell the difference? The false version excludes in order to unify; as such, it functions more to eliminate the ambiguity of reality than to unify the psyche at a higher level. At the same time, it takes no notice of anomalies. In short, it is not bothered by the cognitive dissonance that troubles a normal person.

For example, in response to the shock of the 2016 election, Democrats identified a unified theory that explained everything: President Trump is a Russian agent! It is no coincidence that these same people have embraced the conspiracy theory that Joe Biden legitimately won the 2020 election. 

More generally, you will have noticed that the conspiracy-prone can easily flit from one theory to another. The form scarcely matters, because it's the function that counts, and the function is to organize an otherwise disordered, chaotic, and anxiety-ridden mind. For it is not the healthy who need a doctorate in gender studies or queer theory, but the sick. 

Take a feminist. Please. Back in my day, such women would enter psychotherapy in order to figure out why they were so miserable. Before that they would just get married and have children. Problem solved. 

But feminism -- or any ideology for that matter -- allows one to politicize the human condition, and why not? Promise a facile solution to an insoluble problem, and you've got a lifetime Democrat.

Life is hard -- full of pain, loss, conflict, compromise. Adopting an ideology accomplishes two things: it 1) locates an easy enemy to explain one's unhappiness, while 2) offering hope that the unhappiness will be eliminated in the future once the enemy is vanquished. In short, it allows one to externalize pain in the present while promising a cure in the future.

Hope and Change. Give the prophet Obama credit: he abstracted the deeper form of any and all ideology and promised it to his supporters, who consisted of -- not coincidentally -- the over- and undereducated, AKA Lowfo and Nofo voters, those most susceptible to promises of false Slack. Just like today's promise, it will pay for itself!

Anyway, the embarrassing part is that, back when I was a liberal, I wanted to figure out the "real reason" why conservatives could believe such clearly stupid and even evil nonsense.  

Looking back on it, I realize that my liberal beliefs were completely unexamined, in part because they existed not on an epistemological plane, but rather, on a moral one. In other words, they were all about virtue signaling: I am better than you, for I care about women, children, immigrants, native Americans, blacks, gays, labor unions, trannies, you name it. I care. I am smarter than you, and I have an advanced degree to prove it.

Mother was right: I am a good man. 

The Ivory Tower of Babbling Idiots

Another quick one while waiting for the school bell to ring.

Over at American Digest is an essay by Mr. Yarvin Moldbug on his concept of the "Cathedral." Although an intellectual brother shamus, he's a smarter feller than myself and draws a lot of water in dissident conservative circles. In short, he's not exactly a lightweight -- unlike me, whose career has slowed down a little. 

(https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-week-a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral-by-curtis-yarvin-aka-moldbug/#more-27032) and (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral)

In our nomenclature we call it the Matrix, but we're describing the same private residence. The deeper question is, what is the actual cause of the Cathedral-Matrix? What is its deeper structure -- that which unifies its diverse strands and what-have-yous? 

First of all, the Matrix clearly exists, although it can only be clearly seen from outside and above; from the inside it just looks like "the world," nor do its unhappitants even notice the sentient Agents that prevent them from leaving the Matrix.

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure (emphasis mine).

This, I think, begs the question, because a central organizational connection is precisely what must exist in order to explain the diverse phenomena. 

Consider science as such, which always involves the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Prior to Einstein, for example, physicists looked at the world and saw no connection between, say, gravity and time. Rather, these were totally unrelated concepts. But with deeper conceptual insight we are able appreciate the connection between them.

Analogously, what is the connection between such diverse phenomena as totalitarian wokeness, economically absurd socialism, wicked tribalism, vicious race war, biology-hating genital mutilation, special rights for cross-dressers, climate magic, feminist witchcraft, and anti-Western barbarism in general? 

How could someone embrace such a range of florid lunacies unless they are but surface features of some deeper structure? And why these features in particular?  It's such a grab bag of insanity that perhaps we need to look at the bag instead of the content. 

While we can detect no obvious organizational connection between them, they are highly correlated. And they retain these correlations even as they move across long periods of time. 

Consider the fact that "In 1951, Harvard, Yale, the Times, and the Post were on the same page," just as they are today. However, the Yale of today is is so different from the Yale of '51 that they might as well be different planets: "If you could teleport either Yale into the other’s time zone, they would see each other as a den of intellectual criminals." 

Literally, at least with respect to how they regard us. AG Garlic Merman, for example, wants the FBI to hunt down those of us who are not on board with teaching our children the ins and outs of race-based nihilism.  

Likewise, I regard them as criminal, but not merely in a legalistic sense, rather, in ethical and metaphysical terms. For the first duty of the intellect is to discern between the Real and the unreal or the less real. One who fails to do so is unqualified to teach, for what is he teaching if not truth? Like, just his opinions? 

I'm starting to run out of time because school is about to begin. But let me jump waaay ahead to the distant past, and suggest that the Matrix-Cathedral has a nonlocal typological structure, and that the blueprint of this structure describes a certain tower.

Put it this way: once upin a timeless some status seeking narcissists decided to make a name for themselves by building a private residence so high that it reached the heavens -- up there where the Ultimate Principle dwells, above the clouds discussed in the previous post. A Swiss fuckin' watch, if I understand correctly.

But doing so went against the very Principle the people presumed to reach. As a result, these babbling idiots were scattered and the tower left unfinished. Ever thus to deadbeats.

Let's check out Dennis Prager's exegesis of the scandal: "The sin of the builders of Babel" was "wanting to do so solely to make a name for themselves, to bring glory to themselves. As God is completely absent, they recognize nothing higher than themselves." But ironically, the tower "is so far from the heavens that God must come down to see it."

Of course.  

Not all towers are bad, but there are rules for building one. For example, later in Psalms there is reference to how God has been a shelter for me / And a strong tower from the enemy. Later again we read of my fortress / My high tower and my deliverer / My shield and the One in whom I take my refuge. 

It seems that the problem lies in attempting to build a tower without the proper cornerstone, in which case you are entering a world of pain. Am I wrong? 

We'll have to resume this discussion in the next post, in which we will endeavor to prove that the progressive tower contravenes any number of metacosmic bylaws.

The Ivory Tower of Babbling Idiots

Another quick one while waiting for the school bell to ring.

Over at American Digest is an essay by Mr. Yarvin Moldbug on his concept of the "Cathedral." Although an intellectual brother shamus, he's a smarter feller than myself and draws a lot of water in dissident conservative circles. In short, he's not exactly a lightweight -- unlike me, whose career has slowed down a little. 

(https://americandigest.org/long-read-of-the-week-a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral-by-curtis-yarvin-aka-moldbug/#more-27032) and (https://graymirror.substack.com/p/a-brief-explanation-of-the-cathedral)

In our nomenclature we call it the Matrix, but we're describing the same private residence. The deeper question is, what is the actual cause of the Cathedral-Matrix? What is its deeper structure -- that which unifies its diverse strands and what-have-yous? 

First of all, the Matrix clearly exists, although it can only be clearly seen from outside and above; from the inside it just looks like "the world," nor do its unhappitants even notice the sentient Agents that prevent them from leaving the Matrix.

The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure (emphasis mine).

This, I think, begs the question, because a central organizational connection is precisely what must exist in order to explain the diverse phenomena. 

Consider science as such, which always involves the reduction of multiplicity to unity. Prior to Einstein, for example, physicists looked at the world and saw no connection between, say, gravity and time. Rather, these were totally unrelated concepts. But with deeper conceptual insight we are able appreciate the connection between them.

Analogously, what is the connection between such diverse phenomena as totalitarian wokeness, economically absurd socialism, wicked tribalism, vicious race war, biology-hating genital mutilation, special rights for cross-dressers, climate magic, feminist witchcraft, and anti-Western barbarism in general? 

How could someone embrace such a range of florid lunacies unless they are but surface features of some deeper structure? And why these features in particular?  It's such a grab bag of insanity that perhaps we need to look at the bag instead of the content. 

While we can detect no obvious organizational connection between them, they are highly correlated. And they retain these correlations even as they move across long periods of time. 

Consider the fact that "In 1951, Harvard, Yale, the Times, and the Post were on the same page," just as they are today. However, the Yale of today is is so different from the Yale of '51 that they might as well be different planets: "If you could teleport either Yale into the other’s time zone, they would see each other as a den of intellectual criminals." 

Literally, at least with respect to how they regard us. AG Garlic Merman, for example, wants the FBI to hunt down those of us who are not on board with teaching our children the ins and outs of race-based nihilism.  

Likewise, I regard them as criminal, but not merely in a legalistic sense, rather, in ethical and metaphysical terms. For the first duty of the intellect is to discern between the Real and the unreal or the less real. One who fails to do so is unqualified to teach, for what is he teaching if not truth? Like, just his opinions? 

I'm starting to run out of time because school is about to begin. But let me jump waaay ahead to the distant past, and suggest that the Matrix-Cathedral has a nonlocal typological structure, and that the blueprint of this structure describes a certain tower.

Put it this way: once upin a timeless some status seeking narcissists decided to make a name for themselves by building a private residence so high that it reached the heavens -- up there where the Ultimate Principle dwells, above the clouds discussed in the previous post. A Swiss fuckin' watch, if I understand correctly.

But doing so went against the very Principle the people presumed to reach. As a result, these babbling idiots were scattered and the tower left unfinished. Ever thus to deadbeats.

Let's check out Dennis Prager's exegesis of the scandal: "The sin of the builders of Babel" was "wanting to do so solely to make a name for themselves, to bring glory to themselves. As God is completely absent, they recognize nothing higher than themselves." But ironically, the tower "is so far from the heavens that God must come down to see it."

Of course.  

Not all towers are bad, but there are rules for building one. For example, later in Psalms there is reference to how God has been a shelter for me / And a strong tower from the enemy. Later again we read of my fortress / My high tower and my deliverer / My shield and the One in whom I take my refuge. 

It seems that the problem lies in attempting to build a tower without the proper cornerstone, in which case you are entering a world of pain. Am I wrong? 

We'll have to resume this discussion in the next post, in which we will endeavor to prove that the progressive tower contravenes any number of metacosmic bylaws.

Calculating God: Foggy with a Chance of Insight

Just a brief post that will continue until the school bell rings, i.e., until the student wakes up.

By way of context, the fact that we are living through such radically crazy times has prompted me to reexamine the Ultimate Ground of things. 

On the one hand, O is the apophatic godhead beyond-being, and there's nothing we can say about it without having to immediately unsay it on pain of misleading the public. In other words, O is beyond time, language, specification, and understanding, since these latter would place limits on the Limitless. Like quantum physics, if you can understand it, it's not God. 

This is why genuine theo-logy entails the mastery of unglish obliterature. 

That said, from our perspective -- i.e., the perspective of the maninfestation -- O manifests an implicit nonlocal order, or vertical hierarchy. You could say that this is the "first fruit" engendeered by and from O. 

At the top of this more "visible" goround plan is the Outward Face of God -- the great "AM," so to speak -- if anyone asks -- above and beyond which is the mysterious "I" of pure subjectivity hiding in or above that Cloud of Unknowing. 

This is why we can look up and see the cloud, but even the bestavus can see no further: "Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain."

Later, the same meteorological language is used when "a bright cloud overshadowed them, and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud." One may fish many similar examples, and not only from the Judeo-Christian stream. 

Looked at one way, a cloud is just something that blocks the sun. But looked at from both sides now, and you realize it's but the end product of a nonlinear process involving everything from Hayward breezes to butterfly sneezes, Climbing to tranquility / Far above the cloud / Conceiving the heavens / Clear of misty shroud. So don't be so quick to dismiss our eyewitless foggus!  

As mentioned in the previous post, when things get crazy -- whether in individuals or groups -- it allows us a clearer understanding of sanity. Indeed, we needn't even think about sanity until there is insanity. Likewise, we don't think about virtue until there are criminals, nor truth until there are liars, journalists, and tenure. Nor I suppose do we think about paradise in the afternoon until it's lost by eve.

So, you may have noticed from the sidebar that I've been reading a lot of radical literature, since it makes more sense in the context of these radically insane times. 

For example, I recently reread the biography of Father Seraphim Rose. I want to say that he was a "radical" Christian, but this overlooks the fact that nothing by definition can ever be more radical than Christianity -- of Infinitude clothed in finitude for our convenience. There's nothing beyond that, except for finitude to return to infinitude and complete the circle.

I've also been reading radical libertarian economists such as Rothbard, von Mises, and Hoppe. In normal times, such thinkers appear a tad extreme. But in crazy times, they start to make more sense.

Oops! That was the school bell. Let me conclude with one last thought, which goes to a surprising coonfluence of economics and theology.

I'm not going to have time enough to flesh it out, but one of the most appealing aspects of Austrian economics is its epistemological humility and its appreciation not just of the known Unknown, but of the unknowable Unknown.

Then I read the following passage by a very libertarian and Hayekian-sounding theologian named Ratzinger: 

But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love, then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom.

That's the libertarian part. Here's the explicitly Hayekian part:

this leads to the conclusion that freedom is [orthoparadoxically!] the necessary structure of the world, as it were, and this again means that one can only comprehend the world as incomprehensible, that it must be incomprehensibility.... 

[T]ogether with freedom the incalculability implicit in it is an essential part of the world. Incalculability is an implication of freedom; the world can never -- if this is the position -- be completely reduced to mathematical logic

Halt, who Gödels there!    

Calculating God: Foggy with a Chance of Insight

Just a brief post that will continue until the school bell rings, i.e., until the student wakes up.

By way of context, the fact that we are living through such radically crazy times has prompted me to reexamine the Ultimate Ground of things. 

On the one hand, O is the apophatic godhead beyond-being, and there's nothing we can say about it without having to immediately unsay it on pain of misleading the public. In other words, O is beyond time, language, specification, and understanding, since these latter would place limits on the Limitless. Like quantum physics, if you can understand it, it's not God. 

This is why genuine theo-logy entails the mastery of unglish obliterature. 

That said, from our perspective -- i.e., the perspective of the maninfestation -- O manifests an implicit nonlocal order, or vertical hierarchy. You could say that this is the "first fruit" engendeered by and from O. 

At the top of this more "visible" goround plan is the Outward Face of God -- the great "AM," so to speak -- if anyone asks -- above and beyond which is the mysterious "I" of pure subjectivity hiding in or above that Cloud of Unknowing. 

This is why we can look up and see the cloud, but even the bestavus can see no further: "Moses went up into the mountain, and a cloud covered the mountain."

Later, the same meteorological language is used when "a bright cloud overshadowed them, and suddenly a voice came out of the cloud." One may fish many similar examples, and not only from the Judeo-Christian stream. 

Looked at one way, a cloud is just something that blocks the sun. But looked at from both sides now, and you realize it's but the end product of a nonlinear process involving everything from Hayward breezes to butterfly sneezes, Climbing to tranquility / Far above the cloud / Conceiving the heavens / Clear of misty shroud. So don't be so quick to dismiss our eyewitless foggus!  

As mentioned in the previous post, when things get crazy -- whether in individuals or groups -- it allows us a clearer understanding of sanity. Indeed, we needn't even think about sanity until there is insanity. Likewise, we don't think about virtue until there are criminals, nor truth until there are liars, journalists, and tenure. Nor I suppose do we think about paradise in the afternoon until it's lost by eve.

So, you may have noticed from the sidebar that I've been reading a lot of radical literature, since it makes more sense in the context of these radically insane times. 

For example, I recently reread the biography of Father Seraphim Rose. I want to say that he was a "radical" Christian, but this overlooks the fact that nothing by definition can ever be more radical than Christianity -- of Infinitude clothed in finitude for our convenience. There's nothing beyond that, except for finitude to return to infinitude and complete the circle.

I've also been reading radical libertarian economists such as Rothbard, von Mises, and Hoppe. In normal times, such thinkers appear a tad extreme. But in crazy times, they start to make more sense.

Oops! That was the school bell. Let me conclude with one last thought, which goes to a surprising coonfluence of economics and theology.

I'm not going to have time enough to flesh it out, but one of the most appealing aspects of Austrian economics is its epistemological humility and its appreciation not just of the known Unknown, but of the unknowable Unknown.

Then I read the following passage by a very libertarian and Hayekian-sounding theologian named Ratzinger: 

But if the logos of all being, the being that upholds and encompasses everything, is consciousness, freedom, and love, then it follows automatically that the supreme factor in the world is not cosmic necessity but freedom.

That's the libertarian part. Here's the explicitly Hayekian part:

this leads to the conclusion that freedom is [orthoparadoxically!] the necessary structure of the world, as it were, and this again means that one can only comprehend the world as incomprehensible, that it must be incomprehensibility.... 

[T]ogether with freedom the incalculability implicit in it is an essential part of the world. Incalculability is an implication of freedom; the world can never -- if this is the position -- be completely reduced to mathematical logic

Halt, who Gödels there!    

Being, Becoming, and Beclowning

Possibly no more posts this week, since I'll be back in the classroom. Yes, the wife is off to visit her mother in Del Boca Vista, and I've been appointed substitute teacher.  

You will recall that we've been reexamining the Ultimate Ground of reality from various angles. Why have we been doing this? Because the country has become so unhinged from reality, that perhaps the reality from which it has become unhinged will be easier to see. 

It reminds me of how, say, medical science made such strides during our previous Civil War because doctors were able to see what was going on inside all the maimed and mangled bodies. It's the same now, except in Civil War II most of the maiming and mangling is on the inside. It is admittedly hard to look at this festering sinkhole of disease and filth, but we must overcome our squeamishness and bear in mind that the prospect of a cure for these unfortunate souls hangs in the balance.  

The current era is indeed a boon to psychology, even if we mourn the loss of so many fellow citizens to the spiritual plague of progressivism. So let us highly resolve that these undead shall not have been triggered, traumatized, and feminized in vain -- rather, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Trumpism on steroids, and that a government of the sane, by the sane, for the sane, shall not perish from this earth.

As we know, the word radical is related to root. However, this has nothing in common with progressive cliches about "root causes," since those are always about horizontal or lateral distractions, never the depth. They're forever searching for the "root causes" of things, but the real purpose of this is to obscure the actual causes. For example, the real cause of crime is people doing bad things. The solution is to put them in jail.  

Lately they've been looking for the root causes of illegal immigration, when everyone knows it results from sh**hole countries happily turning their problems into our problems. For the left, this will persist until our country is transformed into a sh**hole and no one will want to come here. Problem solved!

But when we refer to root causes, we're speaking of vertical ones. Just as we can track causality backward from proximate to proximate cause, we can trace them upward from level to level. At the top, of course, is the First or Uncaused Cause without which causality has no ground or metaphysical basis. But thankfully God exists, so causes are everywhere. Which is another way of saying that being is intelligible.

This argument goes back a long way, even to the twilit roots of tenure in the ancient world. In one corner we have Parmenides, who denies becoming, and with it, multiplicity, in favor of immutable Being. Change is impossible, since Being is Being, and nothing comes from non-being.

In the other corner we have Heraclitus, who denies Being in favor of becoming -- or in other words, All is Change. You can never step into the same universe twice, and anything we say about it is just an abstraction from the ceaseless and total flow, not really real. 

Including the truth of that statement? 

Shut up!

Here's how Garrigou-Lagrange describes the stalemate:

If something becomes, this comes from being or from non-being; there is no middle. But both hypotheses are impossible: indeed, nothing can come from being... because being is already that which is, whereas that which becomes, before becoming, is not. On the other hand, nothing comes from nothing.... Therefore, becoming [too] is contradictory (emphasis mine). 

Blah blah yada yada, then Aristotle comes along and separates these two quarreling cousins with the principles of potency and act, thereby reconciling being and becoming and rendering both intelligible. We might say that the "root cause" of change is the reduction of potency to act. Potency itself is neither Being nor nothing, but something that abides between. 

Orthoparadoxically, potency is a kind of "non-being that is" (ibid). This is not a contradiction, because while potency is non-being in relation to act, it is nevertheless being in relation to nothingness. 

Just like us, come to think of it. Relative to God, creatures are nothing, but in relation to nothing they're everything. But human beings inhabit a third world whereby we become who we are in relation to God: change and changelessness are thereby reconciled, and some people say man as such is the cosmic link between the two, but that's a somewhat different subject...  

Does this make Parmenides the first conservative and Heraclitus the first progressive? A qualified NO to the first but a definite YES to the second, e.g., Hegel, Marx, Bergson, etc. We say NO to the first because conservatism is (or should be) a reflection of the third position that creates a stable but free context for orderly change -- for example, in the "radical conservatism" or "conservative radicalism" of the Founders. 

To quote Chesterton,

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. 

It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote-- “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

 "Yeah, well hold my artisanal gluten-free beer," says the Eternal Progressive.

Being, Becoming, and Beclowning

Possibly no more posts this week, since I'll be back in the classroom. Yes, the wife is off to visit her mother in Del Boca Vista, and I've been appointed substitute teacher.  

You will recall that we've been reexamining the Ultimate Ground of reality from various angles. Why have we been doing this? Because the country has become so unhinged from reality, that perhaps the reality from which it has become unhinged will be easier to see. 

It reminds me of how, say, medical science made such strides during our previous Civil War because doctors were able to see what was going on inside all the maimed and mangled bodies. It's the same now, except in Civil War II most of the maiming and mangling is on the inside. It is admittedly hard to look at this festering sinkhole of disease and filth, but we must overcome our squeamishness and bear in mind that the prospect of a cure for these unfortunate souls hangs in the balance.  

The current era is indeed a boon to psychology, even if we mourn the loss of so many fellow citizens to the spiritual plague of progressivism. So let us highly resolve that these undead shall not have been triggered, traumatized, and feminized in vain -- rather, that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of Trumpism on steroids, and that a government of the sane, by the sane, for the sane, shall not perish from this earth.

As we know, the word radical is related to root. However, this has nothing in common with progressive cliches about "root causes," since those are always about horizontal or lateral distractions, never the depth. They're forever searching for the "root causes" of things, but the real purpose of this is to obscure the actual causes. For example, the real cause of crime is people doing bad things. The solution is to put them in jail.  

Lately they've been looking for the root causes of illegal immigration, when everyone knows it results from sh**hole countries happily turning their problems into our problems. For the left, this will persist until our country is transformed into a sh**hole and no one will want to come here. Problem solved!

But when we refer to root causes, we're speaking of vertical ones. Just as we can track causality backward from proximate to proximate cause, we can trace them upward from level to level. At the top, of course, is the First or Uncaused Cause without which causality has no ground or metaphysical basis. But thankfully God exists, so causes are everywhere. Which is another way of saying that being is intelligible.

This argument goes back a long way, even to the twilit roots of tenure in the ancient world. In one corner we have Parmenides, who denies becoming, and with it, multiplicity, in favor of immutable Being. Change is impossible, since Being is Being, and nothing comes from non-being.

In the other corner we have Heraclitus, who denies Being in favor of becoming -- or in other words, All is Change. You can never step into the same universe twice, and anything we say about it is just an abstraction from the ceaseless and total flow, not really real. 

Including the truth of that statement? 

Shut up!

Here's how Garrigou-Lagrange describes the stalemate:

If something becomes, this comes from being or from non-being; there is no middle. But both hypotheses are impossible: indeed, nothing can come from being... because being is already that which is, whereas that which becomes, before becoming, is not. On the other hand, nothing comes from nothing.... Therefore, becoming [too] is contradictory (emphasis mine). 

Blah blah yada yada, then Aristotle comes along and separates these two quarreling cousins with the principles of potency and act, thereby reconciling being and becoming and rendering both intelligible. We might say that the "root cause" of change is the reduction of potency to act. Potency itself is neither Being nor nothing, but something that abides between. 

Orthoparadoxically, potency is a kind of "non-being that is" (ibid). This is not a contradiction, because while potency is non-being in relation to act, it is nevertheless being in relation to nothingness. 

Just like us, come to think of it. Relative to God, creatures are nothing, but in relation to nothing they're everything. But human beings inhabit a third world whereby we become who we are in relation to God: change and changelessness are thereby reconciled, and some people say man as such is the cosmic link between the two, but that's a somewhat different subject...  

Does this make Parmenides the first conservative and Heraclitus the first progressive? A qualified NO to the first but a definite YES to the second, e.g., Hegel, Marx, Bergson, etc. We say NO to the first because conservatism is (or should be) a reflection of the third position that creates a stable but free context for orderly change -- for example, in the "radical conservatism" or "conservative radicalism" of the Founders. 

To quote Chesterton,

It is true that a man (a silly man) might make change itself his object or ideal. But as an ideal, change itself becomes unchangeable. If the change-worshipper wishes to estimate his own progress, he must be sternly loyal to the ideal of change; he must not begin to flirt gaily with the ideal of monotony. Progress itself cannot progress. 

It is worth remark, in passing, that when Tennyson, in a wild and rather weak manner, welcomed the idea of infinite alteration in society, he instinctively took a metaphor which suggests an imprisoned tedium. He wrote-- “Let the great world spin for ever down the ringing grooves of change.” He thought of change itself as an unchangeable groove; and so it is. Change is about the narrowest and hardest groove that a man can get into.

 "Yeah, well hold my artisanal gluten-free beer," says the Eternal Progressive.

You Load Umpteen Puns, And Whaddya Get?

An author way older and deeper in... Dude.

Because our new, post-retirement lifestyle is so formless and enslackened, we're thinking of changing our approach to posting, so it's even more multi-undisciplinary. 

We're on the cusp of 16 years of blah-blah-blogging, which sounds like a lot, but it's all just one timeless pneumagraph: the shutter opens with birth -- the second one in particular -- and closes with death. For some, anyway. 

Back when I was a timebound clockjockey, I had to work around the structure of my servitude to the conspiracy, which necessitated writing first thing in the morning. But now there's no structure except for the natural rhythms of baseball season, the beer o'clock call to prayer, the daily hajj to the mailbox, etc. 

As result, there's been a reversal of figure and ground, such that structure is the exception, abiding the rule. There's a lot more gazing out the window of time and onto the landscape of archetypal mischief and celestial goings-on. Sometimes it's a party. Other times a war. Or rather, it's always both. But it's never boring.  

The point is, the membrane between here and there -- or this 'n THAT! -- has become much more permeable, so quiet murmurandoms wash ashore all day long. But they also float back out unless I take the time to pick them up out of the sand.

Is this all a bit circumnebulous? I guess what I'm saying is I need to strike when the irony's hot, and there's no longer any pattern to when that might happen. And if I don't do so at the moment, it's hard to reheat the vertical souffle. Even if I technically remember the content, it's difficult to recreate the melody.

Be assured that although we are pulling out of what you earthlings call "the world," we retain over-the-subjective-horizon culpabilities that allow us to drone on as usual. 

Example.  

Yesterday I was reading a book called We Hold These Truths, by John Courtney Murray. Some of it is dated -- it was published in 1960 -- but much of it is as timeless as.... as those timelessly self-evident truths referenced in the title. 

Truth by definition is timeless, at least "at the top," so to speak. On contact with time, truths become relativized (and multiple), but nevertheless, any truth is grounded in the transtemporal Truth from which it derives its authority and demands our assent. A person of good will spontaneously assents to the truth. The bad guys make it up as they go along but still appeal to the very Truth they deny.  

But the first duty of the intellect is to acknowledge and respect the Truth which transcends us. Which is why the adversary is described as "a liar from the beginning." Truth has no beginning, again, because it participates in the timeless. Only lies have a beginning. Truly truly, truth is anterior to time; it is with God.

This, I think, sheds light on our primordial catastrophe. Note that the "fall" is coeval with the Lie. The rest is commentary. For if the cosmos does not conform to the pattern of being< --> truth <--> intellect, then we are well and truly sealed in our own permanent stupidity: there is no exit from genebound animality and lifetime tenure.

Severed from being, the intellect is inoperative and even inconceivable. In other words, all knowledge, is -- wait for it -- of something. Moreover, our knowledge must be determined by this something. Our intellect is a passive power relative to being. If it isn't, then to hell with it. 

Or, look at it this way: some people say modernity begins with the idea that I think, therefore I am. But a real principle, among other things, presupposes no prior truth or principle, and Descarte's principle presupposes a number of things, for example, logic and the capacity of thought -- which for him comes first -- to arrive at being -- which is second. How is this even possible?

It is not possible, because all the thinking in the world can't lead us to reality unless reality is there first. You can pretend thought is able to escape itself into reality, but it's really the other way around: reality flows into us, such that we are able to reflect upon it via thinking.

To assert that our thinking comes first is to steal God's thunder, but with no subsequent (en)lightning: it is to shut ourselves

in a solipsism from which nothing will enable us to escape. Modern subjectivism is, in the intellectual order, analogous to what the sin of the angel was in the moral order. The angel placed its ultimate end in itself... 

Likewise, Descartes places "the terminus of the intellect within man" and thereby definitively closes "off the only route that leads to God. Descartes and Kant, the founders of idealism, are great, fallen intellects." Which is why their errors are so perennially popular: because they appeal to destructive nihilists, power-mad egomaniacs, and intellectual narcissists. Eight year olds, dude. 

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded. --Dávila

You Load Umpteen Puns, And Whaddya Get?

An author way older and deeper in... Dude.

Because our new, post-retirement lifestyle is so formless and enslackened, we're thinking of changing our approach to posting, so it's even more multi-undisciplinary. 

We're on the cusp of 16 years of blah-blah-blogging, which sounds like a lot, but it's all just one timeless pneumagraph: the shutter opens with birth -- the second one in particular -- and closes with death. For some, anyway. 

Back when I was a timebound clockjockey, I had to work around the structure of my servitude to the conspiracy, which necessitated writing first thing in the morning. But now there's no structure except for the natural rhythms of baseball season, the beer o'clock call to prayer, the daily hajj to the mailbox, etc. 

As result, there's been a reversal of figure and ground, such that structure is the exception, abiding the rule. There's a lot more gazing out the window of time and onto the landscape of archetypal mischief and celestial goings-on. Sometimes it's a party. Other times a war. Or rather, it's always both. But it's never boring.  

The point is, the membrane between here and there -- or this 'n THAT! -- has become much more permeable, so quiet murmurandoms wash ashore all day long. But they also float back out unless I take the time to pick them up out of the sand.

Is this all a bit circumnebulous? I guess what I'm saying is I need to strike when the irony's hot, and there's no longer any pattern to when that might happen. And if I don't do so at the moment, it's hard to reheat the vertical souffle. Even if I technically remember the content, it's difficult to recreate the melody.

Be assured that although we are pulling out of what you earthlings call "the world," we retain over-the-subjective-horizon culpabilities that allow us to drone on as usual. 

Example.  

Yesterday I was reading a book called We Hold These Truths, by John Courtney Murray. Some of it is dated -- it was published in 1960 -- but much of it is as timeless as.... as those timelessly self-evident truths referenced in the title. 

Truth by definition is timeless, at least "at the top," so to speak. On contact with time, truths become relativized (and multiple), but nevertheless, any truth is grounded in the transtemporal Truth from which it derives its authority and demands our assent. A person of good will spontaneously assents to the truth. The bad guys make it up as they go along but still appeal to the very Truth they deny.  

But the first duty of the intellect is to acknowledge and respect the Truth which transcends us. Which is why the adversary is described as "a liar from the beginning." Truth has no beginning, again, because it participates in the timeless. Only lies have a beginning. Truly truly, truth is anterior to time; it is with God.

This, I think, sheds light on our primordial catastrophe. Note that the "fall" is coeval with the Lie. The rest is commentary. For if the cosmos does not conform to the pattern of being< --> truth <--> intellect, then we are well and truly sealed in our own permanent stupidity: there is no exit from genebound animality and lifetime tenure.

Severed from being, the intellect is inoperative and even inconceivable. In other words, all knowledge, is -- wait for it -- of something. Moreover, our knowledge must be determined by this something. Our intellect is a passive power relative to being. If it isn't, then to hell with it. 

Or, look at it this way: some people say modernity begins with the idea that I think, therefore I am. But a real principle, among other things, presupposes no prior truth or principle, and Descarte's principle presupposes a number of things, for example, logic and the capacity of thought -- which for him comes first -- to arrive at being -- which is second. How is this even possible?

It is not possible, because all the thinking in the world can't lead us to reality unless reality is there first. You can pretend thought is able to escape itself into reality, but it's really the other way around: reality flows into us, such that we are able to reflect upon it via thinking.

To assert that our thinking comes first is to steal God's thunder, but with no subsequent (en)lightning: it is to shut ourselves

in a solipsism from which nothing will enable us to escape. Modern subjectivism is, in the intellectual order, analogous to what the sin of the angel was in the moral order. The angel placed its ultimate end in itself... 

Likewise, Descartes places "the terminus of the intellect within man" and thereby definitively closes "off the only route that leads to God. Descartes and Kant, the founders of idealism, are great, fallen intellects." Which is why their errors are so perennially popular: because they appeal to destructive nihilists, power-mad egomaniacs, and intellectual narcissists. Eight year olds, dude. 

All truths converge upon one truth, but the routes have been barricaded. --Dávila

Take Me to Your Leader, So I Can Laugh in His Face

With this morning's post I do not bring peace, but a sword! Same as always.

All cutting asnide, what did Jesus mean by this remark? A helpful footnote explains that 

the existence of evil necessitates spiritual warfare. The earth to which Christ came was under the authority of Satan. It is therefore essential that Christ wage war against the leader of vice with the weapons of virtue.

That's a timely observation, because I've been pondering just this question: the question of exactly who is in charge of this mess, AKA the world. Supposing this hostile entity called "Satan" is in charge, then this immediately makes sense of a range of phenomena -- to put it mildly. Problem is, this is not a satisfactory explanation to the modern mentality -- to put it mildly.

But let's try to approach this with an open mind and a skeptical eye -- you know, like a scientist: seek simplicity, but don't trust it.

While googling the exact wording of that last gag, I found some more good ones by Richard Feynman:

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Done! 

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Ditto!  

Of course, he also said a lot of dumb things. After all, he was a genius. Most of us aren't nearly intelligent enough to believe such nonsense. For example, what's the difference between knowing the name of God and knowing God?

Oh, and it was Whitehead who said Seek simplicity and distrust it.

The world. Somewhere.... Ah, here it is, from this new translation of John: 

But me it hates, because I testify against it -- that its works are evil.

Later in the Bible he's even more emphatic:

If the world hates you, you know it hated Me before it hated you.

If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

The question is, what in the world is "the world," and what does it have against me? The concord points us to 1 John 4, where it says that worldly worldlings "speak as of the world, and the world hears them." If so, how to explain the low ratings of CNN?

The other day I read an interview of Michal Anton, in which he touches on some of the same issues we've been shoveling in our exhumination of the cosmic ground. I'll cite a few relevant passages: for the founders, there had to be 

at least a bedrock of rational principles that all normal citizens can agree on. It seems that if the ancient teaching is simply that no level of rationality in politics is ever possible, then not merely the US but all of modernity is doomed. 

Which goes to why I've lately been preoccupied with this question: the left has become so deranged that it seems there is no longer a single principle on which we can agree. Speaking of rationality, check out this statement by Sandy Cortez at Powerline:

The damage of this careless process created very real spillover effects into our community. It created a real sense of panic and horror among those in our community who otherwise engage thoughtfully in these discussions, and fueled the discussion to devolve to a point where it became clear that this vote would risk a severe devolution of the good faith community fabric that allows us to responsibly join in a struggle for human rights and dignity everywhere – from Palestine [sic] to The Bronx and Queens.

I'm not of the world, so I couldn't digest a single leaf of that word salad.

Are we doomed? Well, if

no level of rationality in politics is even possible, then not merely the US but all of modernity is doomed. 

Yeah, we're doomed. 

Wait -- maybe not:

when I’m feeling optimistic, I think no, some of that spirit is still there, and we may see it emerge and push back against some of the craziness that’s going on today.... I don’t think we’re going to get the answer until there’s a real test, which we may be hurtling toward. As bad as things are now, my sense is that they’re still not yet bad enough for ordinary people... to fully admit to themselves that the country that they grew up in and that they believed in is lost. But it could get there. And when it does, then that’s when we’re going to find out if any of that spirit that animated 1776 is still in the American character.

That's my sense. For backup, I call on the gentleman from Colombia: Only spectacular collapses shake progressive brains. It's not a matter of if, just when and how spectacular.

What about our side?

the entire ‘conservative establishment’ is dull, uninteresting, repetitive, conventional, predictable, and have nothing to say. 

Worldlings. These herbivorous men -- let alone progressive church ladies --  

could not found the United States of America, nor any other state. You must have the heroic virtues of courage and self-sacrifice and strength in order to do the great things that they wanted to do. And these virtues...are not merely necessary for founding but for the preservation and perpetuation of the state. 

When the left says "patriarchy," I just hear STEM, indoor plumbing, and self-defense.

Is Satan the ruler of this world, or do we just have "a hard core of the population in grip of bad ideas"?

I know: Power of And. 

The woke are probably out of our reach. But can we win over others? I think that’s possible, and that will have to be done through a combination of arguments, memes, art, jokes, ridicule, you name it. Spiritual warfare is vast and varied, and we’re probably just getting started. Conservatives are not really engaged in the culture.

Spiritual warfare. That reminds me of... paragraph 3. 

Take Me to Your Leader, So I Can Laugh in His Face

With this morning's post I do not bring peace, but a sword! Same as always.

All cutting asnide, what did Jesus mean by this remark? A helpful footnote explains that 

the existence of evil necessitates spiritual warfare. The earth to which Christ came was under the authority of Satan. It is therefore essential that Christ wage war against the leader of vice with the weapons of virtue.

That's a timely observation, because I've been pondering just this question: the question of exactly who is in charge of this mess, AKA the world. Supposing this hostile entity called "Satan" is in charge, then this immediately makes sense of a range of phenomena -- to put it mildly. Problem is, this is not a satisfactory explanation to the modern mentality -- to put it mildly.

But let's try to approach this with an open mind and a skeptical eye -- you know, like a scientist: seek simplicity, but don't trust it.

While googling the exact wording of that last gag, I found some more good ones by Richard Feynman:

Study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent and original manner possible.

Done! 

I learned very early the difference between knowing the name of something and knowing something.

Ditto!  

Of course, he also said a lot of dumb things. After all, he was a genius. Most of us aren't nearly intelligent enough to believe such nonsense. For example, what's the difference between knowing the name of God and knowing God?

Oh, and it was Whitehead who said Seek simplicity and distrust it.

The world. Somewhere.... Ah, here it is, from this new translation of John: 

But me it hates, because I testify against it -- that its works are evil.

Later in the Bible he's even more emphatic:

If the world hates you, you know it hated Me before it hated you.

If you were of the world, the world would love its own. Yet because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates you.

The question is, what in the world is "the world," and what does it have against me? The concord points us to 1 John 4, where it says that worldly worldlings "speak as of the world, and the world hears them." If so, how to explain the low ratings of CNN?

The other day I read an interview of Michal Anton, in which he touches on some of the same issues we've been shoveling in our exhumination of the cosmic ground. I'll cite a few relevant passages: for the founders, there had to be 

at least a bedrock of rational principles that all normal citizens can agree on. It seems that if the ancient teaching is simply that no level of rationality in politics is ever possible, then not merely the US but all of modernity is doomed. 

Which goes to why I've lately been preoccupied with this question: the left has become so deranged that it seems there is no longer a single principle on which we can agree. Speaking of rationality, check out this statement by Sandy Cortez at Powerline:

The damage of this careless process created very real spillover effects into our community. It created a real sense of panic and horror among those in our community who otherwise engage thoughtfully in these discussions, and fueled the discussion to devolve to a point where it became clear that this vote would risk a severe devolution of the good faith community fabric that allows us to responsibly join in a struggle for human rights and dignity everywhere – from Palestine [sic] to The Bronx and Queens.

I'm not of the world, so I couldn't digest a single leaf of that word salad.

Are we doomed? Well, if

no level of rationality in politics is even possible, then not merely the US but all of modernity is doomed. 

Yeah, we're doomed. 

Wait -- maybe not:

when I’m feeling optimistic, I think no, some of that spirit is still there, and we may see it emerge and push back against some of the craziness that’s going on today.... I don’t think we’re going to get the answer until there’s a real test, which we may be hurtling toward. As bad as things are now, my sense is that they’re still not yet bad enough for ordinary people... to fully admit to themselves that the country that they grew up in and that they believed in is lost. But it could get there. And when it does, then that’s when we’re going to find out if any of that spirit that animated 1776 is still in the American character.

That's my sense. For backup, I call on the gentleman from Colombia: Only spectacular collapses shake progressive brains. It's not a matter of if, just when and how spectacular.

What about our side?

the entire ‘conservative establishment’ is dull, uninteresting, repetitive, conventional, predictable, and have nothing to say. 

Worldlings. These herbivorous men -- let alone progressive church ladies --  

could not found the United States of America, nor any other state. You must have the heroic virtues of courage and self-sacrifice and strength in order to do the great things that they wanted to do. And these virtues...are not merely necessary for founding but for the preservation and perpetuation of the state. 

When the left says "patriarchy," I just hear STEM, indoor plumbing, and self-defense.

Is Satan the ruler of this world, or do we just have "a hard core of the population in grip of bad ideas"?

I know: Power of And. 

The woke are probably out of our reach. But can we win over others? I think that’s possible, and that will have to be done through a combination of arguments, memes, art, jokes, ridicule, you name it. Spiritual warfare is vast and varied, and we’re probably just getting started. Conservatives are not really engaged in the culture.

Spiritual warfare. That reminds me of... paragraph 3. 

The Personal is the Political, Even Though We Now Have Medications For That

Continuing with the previous post, which involved staring into the void -- or plenum, depending on whether there is something or nothing, nonlocal order or just unremitting chaos and tenure. 

Looking out the window before me is our cement pond. I was just now idly gazing at it while awaiting my sattvalight linkup, and out of the pattern a face emerged. 

On the one hand, this signifies nothing more than man's inveterate tendency to see patterns amidst chaos. On the other, it reminds me of the eternal birth of the Son out of the watery womb of Beyond-Being. So I got that going for me. 

We left off with an essay by Mary Eberstadt called The Cross Amid the Crisis, which explicates some of the points made in her book Primal Screams. This latter explores the origins of identity politics, that incredibly destructive -- I'm gonna say satanic -- ideology that pervades the left. 

In my view, this truly diabolical doctrine is at antipodes to Christianity, the same Christianity that undergirds western civilization and, quintessentially, the American founding. No wonder the nation is so divided. After all, this is what the Evil One does, precisely (diabolos means to divide and scatter, so fission accompliced).

Nor is it necessary to begin with the satanic principle. Rather, one can approach it like any other science by observing the effects. Then one looks for a unifying hypotheses that accounts for these diverse effects. Let's call this hypothesis (S). And let's call the effects (E). 

Obviously there's a whole lot of (E)vil in this world. We can all agree on that, even those postmodern sophisticates who insist that evil doesn't exist, and besides, it's really caused by those theocratic Christianist absolutists who are naive enough to believe in the existence of good and evil!  

Here's a progressive koan for you to ponder: regarding the Taliban, "one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter." But Christians are even worse than the Taliban -- just as the violent insurrectionists of 1-6 were more evil than the mostly peaceful someones who did something on  9-11!

No wonder AOC was weeping on the house floor. I'd cry too if the world were that devoid of logic. She dwells in an absurd looniverse that flows out of its own illogicality. Nor is it any wonder that Marx appeals them: sure, his thought is a dumpster fire of narcissism, envy, resentment, and racism, but at least it's a coherent dumpster fire. 

I am reminded of a comment by a recently sainted pope to the effect that "only in the mystery of the incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light." Big claim! However, you can take it as an anthropological axiom or perhaps as a Lincolnesque proposition that

A hundred score and seventy odd years ago, our apostolic Fathers brought forth in this hemisphere a new civilization, conceived in freedom and truth, dedicated to the proposition that all men are created, and that the Incarnation finally makes sense of this otherwise impenetrable mystery.

Eberstadt's essay touches on this theme, in that, if the Incarnation makes sense of anthropology, removing it from from the foundation of anthropology generates nonsense, i.e., disorder, chaos, and aggression:

The rise in mental distress and the decline of organized religion... are not randomly occurring phenomena. Social science confirms that people who have robust social bonds are more likely to thrive than people who don’t. Religious faith confers those bonds. Social science also shows that the fractured family and other forms of isolation increase the risks of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, loneliness, and other vexations. All have been exacerbated by the Western flight from God.

True, but correlation isn't necessarily causation. Is there a better explanation for why, say, the more feminists get what they think they want, the unhappier they are? And the more college-educated, the stupider? (For example, something like two-thirds of men see Joe Biden for the feeble wreck that he is, while his strongest base of support is from college indoctrinated women of both sexes.) 

Secularization is also behind today’s family Chaos. In embracing divorce, fatherlessness, and abortion, humanity has inflicted wounds on itself whose measure has only begun to be taken. We are only beginning to grasp that what starts at home doesn’t stay at home. The feral children of family Chaos now pour into the streets, frantically trying to substitute identity politics for the primordial bonds of which they’ve been deprived. Identity politics is a pitiful attempt at emotional alchemy by souls desperate for connection (emphases mine). 

The left is actually correct on that score: the personal is indeed the political, and the crazier the former the worse the latter. Back to our anthropological proposition, for which there is abundant negative evidence:

today’s Chaos amounts to inadvertent proof that Christianity, and the Judaism from which it drank, get humanity right.

That's a bingo. For 

Our secularizing culture is not just any culture. No, our secularizing culture is an inferior culture. It is small of heart. It defines suffering down. It regards the victims of its social experiments not as victims, but as acceptable collateral damage justified by those experiments.

This is why the victims of leftist policies always become vindictims, except their incontinent anger and bullying aggression are displaced from family to society. Absent fathers, for example, reappear as RACISS POLICE! Or MEN ON HORSES ENFORCING OUR LAWS! Like me they see a face in the pool. The difference is, I'm just enjoying a little benign hypnopompic hallucination, while they're living an a terrifyingly reified and malevolent ideological delusion:

Scholars of tomorrow will look back in astonishment, and perhaps pity, at today’s magical thinking. They will need facts, figures, arguments, and evidence, especially about the human costs of today’s experiment in secularization (Eberstadt).

But the Raccoon is vouchsafed the scholarship of tomorrow today!; or in other words, eternity while you wait!