When an Irresistible Truck Meets an Immovable Tower

I don't even remember how we ended up on the subject of Babel, but let's knock it down and wrap it up.

Noting the abrupt transition from the one to the other, Kass asks whether "the election of Abram and his openness to the call, have something to do with the story of Babel?" Specifically, "Is there a logical and moral connection, not necessarily an empirical one?" 

At the conclusion of Babel, the story of Abram begins with his genealogy, which is traced back to a fellow named Shem. The rest of the chapter describes various begettings and begottens, along with some impressive lifespans. 

For example, the text deadpans that Shem lived 500 years. Afterwards, I notice that the lifespans are shorter and shorter.

Now, not only is Shem one of the main characters in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, he is Joyce himself (Shem the Penman). 

I wondered why, but soon realized this was a rabbit hole from which we might never return. I managed to climb out, but it did end up delaying this post for 24 hours.

Shem is short for Shemus [she-muse] as Jem [Jim / James] is joky for Jacob [grandson of Shem, who plays a practical joke on Isaac to get his blessing?]. A few roughnecks [stiffneck Jews] are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming [the genealogy of Genesis 11:10-32]... Trop Blogg [tower of Babel?] was among his most distant connections.... Ever read of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders, Baaboo [Babel?]...

With regard Abraham's respectable stemming, Kass writes that 

The name of the head of the line, Shem, means "name," the same as the word used in the Babel story, "to make us a name." 

This culminates in God giving Abram his new name of Abraham, who "completes the rejection of Babel and heads off to found God's new way."

Kass ends the chapter with a coda on modern city life -- the new tower of Babel -- and it is again interesting to note that our vast urban centers are the greatest concentrations of secular progressivism. Which is why they want to end the electoral college, because it's our last line of defense -- a thin red line -- against their totalitarian dreams and wishes.

Kass asks a series of rhetorical questions;

"Can our new Babel succeed?" 

Yes, but its success is a failure.

"And can it escape -- has it escaped? -- the failings of success of its ancient prototype?" 

No, because myth is what happens every time. Every Democrat run city is deteriorating before our eyes.  

"What, for example, will it revere?" 

I don't know, scientism, celebrity, credentialism, mental illness, sexual aberration, state power. 

"Will its makers and its beneficiaries be hospitable to procreation and child rearing?" 

Well, in San Francisco there are more drug addicts than children, and in New York there are more black abortions than black babies. 

"Can it find genuine principles of justice?" 

No, only social justice.

"Will it be self-critical?" 

Kass owes me a new keyboard because I just spit out my coffee.

"Can it really overcome our estrangement, alienation, and despair?"

Make that two keyboards.

Way back when we started this series of posts on Babel, we consulted Prager's book on Genesis. He says  the story serves as a warning against our hubris and "against the often-immoral nature of cities." 

I suppose I haven't been in the city (meaning Los Angeles) since the pandemic started, and before that I tried my best to avoid it. I never understood how a normal person would choose to live in L.A., until I realized that the city is indeed a giant community of abnormals -- obviously not 100%, since many people have no choice but to live there. But it has to be a majority. 

Likewise, I haven't been to New York in almost 20 years. I can't even imagine the mentality of a place that would choose Bill de Blasio -- speaking of towers of babbling idiocy -- not just once, but twice. Again, thank God for the electoral college.

It is not surprising that so many of Israel's great prophets were shepherds, the most rural of folk. Moses, too, was a shepherd (Prager).

Shepherds. To which we might add carpenters, fishermen, truckers, etc. 

When an Irresistible Truck Meets an Immovable Tower

I don't even remember how we ended up on the subject of Babel, but let's knock it down and wrap it up.

Noting the abrupt transition from the one to the other, Kass asks whether "the election of Abram and his openness to the call, have something to do with the story of Babel?" Specifically, "Is there a logical and moral connection, not necessarily an empirical one?" 

At the conclusion of Babel, the story of Abram begins with his genealogy, which is traced back to a fellow named Shem. The rest of the chapter describes various begettings and begottens, along with some impressive lifespans. 

For example, the text deadpans that Shem lived 500 years. Afterwards, I notice that the lifespans are shorter and shorter.

Now, not only is Shem one of the main characters in Joyce's Finnegans Wake, he is Joyce himself (Shem the Penman). 

I wondered why, but soon realized this was a rabbit hole from which we might never return. I managed to climb out, but it did end up delaying this post for 24 hours.

Shem is short for Shemus [she-muse] as Jem [Jim / James] is joky for Jacob [grandson of Shem, who plays a practical joke on Isaac to get his blessing?]. A few roughnecks [stiffneck Jews] are still getatable who pretend that aboriginally he was of respectable stemming [the genealogy of Genesis 11:10-32]... Trop Blogg [tower of Babel?] was among his most distant connections.... Ever read of that greatgrand landfather of our visionbuilders, Baaboo [Babel?]...

With regard Abraham's respectable stemming, Kass writes that 

The name of the head of the line, Shem, means "name," the same as the word used in the Babel story, "to make us a name." 

This culminates in God giving Abram his new name of Abraham, who "completes the rejection of Babel and heads off to found God's new way."

Kass ends the chapter with a coda on modern city life -- the new tower of Babel -- and it is again interesting to note that our vast urban centers are the greatest concentrations of secular progressivism. Which is why they want to end the electoral college, because it's our last line of defense -- a thin red line -- against their totalitarian dreams and wishes.

Kass asks a series of rhetorical questions;

"Can our new Babel succeed?" 

Yes, but its success is a failure.

"And can it escape -- has it escaped? -- the failings of success of its ancient prototype?" 

No, because myth is what happens every time. Every Democrat run city is deteriorating before our eyes.  

"What, for example, will it revere?" 

I don't know, scientism, celebrity, credentialism, mental illness, sexual aberration, state power. 

"Will its makers and its beneficiaries be hospitable to procreation and child rearing?" 

Well, in San Francisco there are more drug addicts than children, and in New York there are more black abortions than black babies. 

"Can it find genuine principles of justice?" 

No, only social justice.

"Will it be self-critical?" 

Kass owes me a new keyboard because I just spit out my coffee.

"Can it really overcome our estrangement, alienation, and despair?"

Make that two keyboards.

Way back when we started this series of posts on Babel, we consulted Prager's book on Genesis. He says  the story serves as a warning against our hubris and "against the often-immoral nature of cities." 

I suppose I haven't been in the city (meaning Los Angeles) since the pandemic started, and before that I tried my best to avoid it. I never understood how a normal person would choose to live in L.A., until I realized that the city is indeed a giant community of abnormals -- obviously not 100%, since many people have no choice but to live there. But it has to be a majority. 

Likewise, I haven't been to New York in almost 20 years. I can't even imagine the mentality of a place that would choose Bill de Blasio -- speaking of towers of babbling idiocy -- not just once, but twice. Again, thank God for the electoral college.

It is not surprising that so many of Israel's great prophets were shepherds, the most rural of folk. Moses, too, was a shepherd (Prager).

Shepherds. To which we might add carpenters, fishermen, truckers, etc. 

Divergence Among the Sages is a Blessing

On the other hand, unanimity among the tenured is more than a curse, it's a downright NUISANCE. For there is no right to be wrong unless there is an obligation to be right. Thus, a progressive relativist is truly obligated to be wrong, which can't be right. 

Now, just as there is no one Good but God, nor is there anyone True (or Beautiful). Does this condemn man to subjectivism, relativism, falsehood -- not to mention evil and ugliness? 

NO, it just means that truth is a direction, or vector, or tension, so to speak. The moment we imagine we can possess it is the moment we exile ourselves from the garden of WHATEVER and literally sophicate in it.

In short, truth is always an encounter with the (O)THER. To imagine we could ever contain this ALTER EGO (minus the ego) is to imagine we are God: this is megalomania and diabolical narcissism, i.e., an episteaming pile of closure.

Which, it seems, is precisely what the tower builders were attempting to do. Thus, while the consequent scattering may seem like a punishment, it's actually -- like everything else that comes from above -- a gift:

Only in discovering the distance between ourselves and the Eternal... can human beings orient themselves toward that which is genuinely highest.

And guess wut? 

The dispersion of the nations is the political analogue to the creation of woman: instituting otherness and opposition, it is the necessary condition for national self-awareness and the possibility of a politics that will hear and hearken to the voice of what is eternal, true, and good (Kass).

This all sounds rather Voegelinish to me. Here are some definitions to help you orient yourselves in our new post-Babel space (taken from the excellent Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, by Eugene Webb (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/029599438X?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=029599438X):

THE BEYOND: That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding. The proportionate goal of the fundamental tension of existence.

TENSION: A condition of tending toward a goal... the "tension of existence"... [is] the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond. 

Conversely, CLOSED EXISTENCE is 

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."

Which is 

the mode of existence in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence. 

Yes, there is still One Cosmos, but it is of the utmost importance to understand that it encompasses both the immanent and transcendent worlds and the tension between them:

COSMOS: the whole of ordered reality, including animate and inanimate nature. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the astrophysical universe.) Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground."

The D. of C.? This

especially refers to the development of a sense of the distinction between transcendent and immanent, between truth as such and particular truths...

By the way, what is the QUESTION? It is "Voegelin's term"

for the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such. 

There are various pathological deformations of healthy consciousness, and now that I'm thinking about it, the story of Babel certainly conveys one of them, or maybe even all of them. File under GNOSTICISM:

A type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. 

This pathology can take idealistic (transcendental) or immanentizing forms, such as neo-Marxist progressivism.

But you? You are a RACCOON, which means that you live a vertically OPEN EXISTENCE

in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.

AKA the metaxy, which is

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being."

Which, as it so happens, is the only participation trophy worth having. No joke, because Being shades off into love, truth, beauty, and all those other transcendentals that can be endlessly known in an ever-deepening spiral, but never possessed.

The end. Until we meet again in the metaxy. 

Divergence Among the Sages is a Blessing

On the other hand, unanimity among the tenured is more than a curse, it's a downright NUISANCE. For there is no right to be wrong unless there is an obligation to be right. Thus, a progressive relativist is truly obligated to be wrong, which can't be right. 

Now, just as there is no one Good but God, nor is there anyone True (or Beautiful). Does this condemn man to subjectivism, relativism, falsehood -- not to mention evil and ugliness? 

NO, it just means that truth is a direction, or vector, or tension, so to speak. The moment we imagine we can possess it is the moment we exile ourselves from the garden of WHATEVER and literally sophicate in it.

In short, truth is always an encounter with the (O)THER. To imagine we could ever contain this ALTER EGO (minus the ego) is to imagine we are God: this is megalomania and diabolical narcissism, i.e., an episteaming pile of closure.

Which, it seems, is precisely what the tower builders were attempting to do. Thus, while the consequent scattering may seem like a punishment, it's actually -- like everything else that comes from above -- a gift:

Only in discovering the distance between ourselves and the Eternal... can human beings orient themselves toward that which is genuinely highest.

And guess wut? 

The dispersion of the nations is the political analogue to the creation of woman: instituting otherness and opposition, it is the necessary condition for national self-awareness and the possibility of a politics that will hear and hearken to the voice of what is eternal, true, and good (Kass).

This all sounds rather Voegelinish to me. Here are some definitions to help you orient yourselves in our new post-Babel space (taken from the excellent Eric Voegelin: Philosopher of History, by Eugene Webb (https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/029599438X?ie=UTF8&tag=onecos-20&camp=1789&linkCode=xm2&creativeASIN=029599438X):

THE BEYOND: That which is ultimate and is itself indefinable because it surpasses all categories of understanding. The proportionate goal of the fundamental tension of existence.

TENSION: A condition of tending toward a goal... the "tension of existence"... [is] the fundamental experience of longing for transcendental fulfillment, the Beyond. 

Conversely, CLOSED EXISTENCE is 

the mode of existence in which there are internal impediments to a free flow of truth into consciousness and to the pull of the transcendental. Contrasts with "open existence."

Which is 

the mode of existence in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence. 

Yes, there is still One Cosmos, but it is of the utmost importance to understand that it encompasses both the immanent and transcendent worlds and the tension between them:

COSMOS: the whole of ordered reality, including animate and inanimate nature. (Not to be confused with the modern conception of "cosmos" as the astrophysical universe.) Encompasses all of reality, including the full range of the tension of existence toward the transcendental. Noetic and pneumatic differentiations of consciousness separate this cosmos into the immanent "world" and the transcendent "divine ground."

The D. of C.? This

especially refers to the development of a sense of the distinction between transcendent and immanent, between truth as such and particular truths...

By the way, what is the QUESTION? It is "Voegelin's term"

for the tension of existence in its aspect as a questioning unrest seeking not simply particular truth, but still more the transcendental pole of truth as such. 

There are various pathological deformations of healthy consciousness, and now that I'm thinking about it, the story of Babel certainly conveys one of them, or maybe even all of them. File under GNOSTICISM:

A type of thinking that claims absolute cognitive mastery of reality. 

This pathology can take idealistic (transcendental) or immanentizing forms, such as neo-Marxist progressivism.

But you? You are a RACCOON, which means that you live a vertically OPEN EXISTENCE

in which consciousness is consistently and unreservedly oriented toward truth and toward the transcendental pole of the tension of existence.

AKA the metaxy, which is

the experience of human existence as "between" lower and upper poles: man and the divine, imperfection and perfection, ignorance and knowledge, and so on. Equivalent to the symbol of "participation of being."

Which, as it so happens, is the only participation trophy worth having. No joke, because Being shades off into love, truth, beauty, and all those other transcendentals that can be endlessly known in an ever-deepening spiral, but never possessed.

The end. Until we meet again in the metaxy. 

Rip van Winkle in Reverse

Continuing our meditation on the tower of Babel, Kass writes that just as "awareness of the multiplicity of human ways" is a "precondition for the active search for the better or best way," so too is "opposition"

the key to the discovery of the distinction between error and truth, appearance and reality, convention and nature -- between that which appears to be and that which truly is.

Moreover, "Contesting a 'human truth' invites the quest for a truth beyond human making."

So at least we can all agree on the natural right to free speech. Whether left or right, there are certain principles that are settled for all time, and which all Americans will defend to the death! 

Rip van Winkle, said the voice in Bob's head.

I didn't pay much any attention in school, so I didn't remember know that the story was a satire on the vast and unintended politico-cultural changes that took place in America between the founding and the early 19th century. In short, if you had fallen asleep in 1788 and awakened in 1818, you would scarcely have recognized the place. 

Now, what if someone had fallen asleep in 1992 or so and awakened in 2022? 

I remember the first time I heard conspiratorial rumblings about the left's supposed plan to restrict and dismantle free speech, although I no longer remember the year. Must have been during the Obama administration, although it's possible it was in the latter days of Bush the Even Worse than His Father.

In any event, my first thought was literal incredulity: c'mon, man! Such fevered, paranoid characterizations of Democrats just play into their hands and make us look nuts. Say what you want about the left, but remember that the ACLU's defense of free speech is absolute, to the point of defending Nazis.

One of my wronger takes. That and defending Bush the Even Worse. And not being among the first wave to climb on board the Trump Train.  

In our new version of Rip van Winkle, the political movement would be in the opposite direction -- away from freedom and toward tyranny. In the original, "The very village was altered," and "idleness, except among the aged, was no longer tolerated." "Even the language was strange -- 'rights of citizens,'" elections, liberty, etc. 

beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that 'everything's changed.' In a few short decades American's had experienced a remarkable transformation in their society and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened and who they really were (Gordon Wood).

Likewise, in a few short decades we too have witnessed a transformation -- transmogrification is more like it -- in our society and culture. 

Someone who had fallen asleep a mere two decades ago wouldn't know what to make of cancel culture, homosexual marriage, tranny generals, mask mandates, open borders, the assault on election integrity, the utter corruption of journalism, state approved late night comedy, the diabolical union of Big Tech and Big Government... How did we end up on the wrong side of history?  

No one twenty years ago would have known what to make of the following email from Alex Berenson that just popped up in my in-box -- he sounds hysterical and paranoid, like some kind of leftist loon!

EXTREMELY URGENT: The Biden Administration says I'm a terrorist threat. 

That headline sounds like a joke. It’s not.

The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

How else to read the “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” the Department of Homeland Security issued on Tuesday? Its first sentence:

SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... 

The government now says “misleading narratives” are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. 

A federal agency says that to “undermine public trust in government institutions” is now considered terrorism. Speech doesn’t even have to encourage rebellion or violence generally, much less against anyone specific. It just has to “potentially inspire” violence.

Potentially.

Later, the bulletin explains exactly what speech the government now considers a terrorist danger:

Widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

There’s that word misleading again. Who’s defining “misleading”? Misleading to whom? Misleading how?

I have no doubt whatsoever that I fit as a terrorist threat under these guidelines.

So does Joe Rogan. And Tucker Carlson. After all, we’ve “undermine[d] public trust in government institutions” about Covid and the mRNA shots (I try not to call them vaccines anymore).

This bulletin marks an extraordinary escalation of the war on speech and the First Amendment.

Now, imagine falling asleep today and waking up in twenty or thirty years. If current trends continue, you'll either wake up behind bars or dead. 

My apologies. We'll have to get back to Babel in the next post. 

Rip van Winkle in Reverse

Continuing our meditation on the tower of Babel, Kass writes that just as "awareness of the multiplicity of human ways" is a "precondition for the active search for the better or best way," so too is "opposition"

the key to the discovery of the distinction between error and truth, appearance and reality, convention and nature -- between that which appears to be and that which truly is.

Moreover, "Contesting a 'human truth' invites the quest for a truth beyond human making."

So at least we can all agree on the natural right to free speech. Whether left or right, there are certain principles that are settled for all time, and which all Americans will defend to the death! 

Rip van Winkle, said the voice in Bob's head.

I didn't pay much any attention in school, so I didn't remember know that the story was a satire on the vast and unintended politico-cultural changes that took place in America between the founding and the early 19th century. In short, if you had fallen asleep in 1788 and awakened in 1818, you would scarcely have recognized the place. 

Now, what if someone had fallen asleep in 1992 or so and awakened in 2022? 

I remember the first time I heard conspiratorial rumblings about the left's supposed plan to restrict and dismantle free speech, although I no longer remember the year. Must have been during the Obama administration, although it's possible it was in the latter days of Bush the Even Worse than His Father.

In any event, my first thought was literal incredulity: c'mon, man! Such fevered, paranoid characterizations of Democrats just play into their hands and make us look nuts. Say what you want about the left, but remember that the ACLU's defense of free speech is absolute, to the point of defending Nazis.

One of my wronger takes. That and defending Bush the Even Worse. And not being among the first wave to climb on board the Trump Train.  

In our new version of Rip van Winkle, the political movement would be in the opposite direction -- away from freedom and toward tyranny. In the original, "The very village was altered," and "idleness, except among the aged, was no longer tolerated." "Even the language was strange -- 'rights of citizens,'" elections, liberty, etc. 

beneath the surface Rip, like most Americans, knew that 'everything's changed.' In a few short decades American's had experienced a remarkable transformation in their society and culture, and, like Rip and his creator, many wondered what had happened and who they really were (Gordon Wood).

Likewise, in a few short decades we too have witnessed a transformation -- transmogrification is more like it -- in our society and culture. 

Someone who had fallen asleep a mere two decades ago wouldn't know what to make of cancel culture, homosexual marriage, tranny generals, mask mandates, open borders, the assault on election integrity, the utter corruption of journalism, state approved late night comedy, the diabolical union of Big Tech and Big Government... How did we end up on the wrong side of history?  

No one twenty years ago would have known what to make of the following email from Alex Berenson that just popped up in my in-box -- he sounds hysterical and paranoid, like some kind of leftist loon!

EXTREMELY URGENT: The Biden Administration says I'm a terrorist threat. 

That headline sounds like a joke. It’s not.

The White House has begun an extraordinary assault on free speech in America. It is no longer content merely to force social media companies to suppress dissenting views. It appears to be setting the stage to use federal police powers.

How else to read the “National Terrorism Advisory System Bulletin” the Department of Homeland Security issued on Tuesday? Its first sentence:

SUMMARY OF THE TERRORISM THREAT TO THE UNITED STATES: The United States remains in a heightened threat environment fueled by several factors, including an online environment filled with false or misleading narratives and conspiracy theories... 

The government now says “misleading narratives” are the most dangerous contributor to terrorism against the United States.

These threat actors seek to exacerbate societal friction to sow discord and undermine public trust in government institutions to encourage unrest, which could potentially inspire acts of violence. 

A federal agency says that to “undermine public trust in government institutions” is now considered terrorism. Speech doesn’t even have to encourage rebellion or violence generally, much less against anyone specific. It just has to “potentially inspire” violence.

Potentially.

Later, the bulletin explains exactly what speech the government now considers a terrorist danger:

Widespread online proliferation of false or misleading narratives regarding unsubstantiated widespread election fraud and COVID-19.

There’s that word misleading again. Who’s defining “misleading”? Misleading to whom? Misleading how?

I have no doubt whatsoever that I fit as a terrorist threat under these guidelines.

So does Joe Rogan. And Tucker Carlson. After all, we’ve “undermine[d] public trust in government institutions” about Covid and the mRNA shots (I try not to call them vaccines anymore).

This bulletin marks an extraordinary escalation of the war on speech and the First Amendment.

Now, imagine falling asleep today and waking up in twenty or thirty years. If current trends continue, you'll either wake up behind bars or dead. 

My apologies. We'll have to get back to Babel in the next post. 

The Babble of Tenure & The Last Idiot

Recall that the tower of Babel is the last episode of the universal story of mankind, before the spotlight turns to the call of Abram. It reminds me of the "intertestamental period" between the old and new testaments. Let's shut up and learn something:

The intertestamental period (Protestant) or deuterocanonical period (Catholic & Eastern Orthodox) is the period of time between the events of the protocanonical books and the New Testament. Traditionally, it is considered to cover roughly four hundred years, spanning the ministry of Malachi (c. 420 BC) to the appearance of John the Baptist in the early 1st century AD. It is roughly contiguous with the Second Temple period (516 BC-70 AD) and encompasses the age of Hellenistic Judaism.

It is known by some members of the Protestant community as the "400 Silent Years" because it was a span where no new prophets were raised and God revealed nothing new to the Jewish people (Prof. Wiki).

There's a similar period of silence between Babel and Abram, but who knows how long it was? In any event, I can't be the first to have noticed another parallel: that while the builders of the tower of Babel wanted to "make a name for themselves," it is God himself who wants to make a name for Abram.

This goes to the fact that you can't just make a name for yourself. Well, you can, but that's called narcissism. 

So apparently, the juxtaposition of these stories goes to the distinction between celebrity and significance, or narcissism and true calling; for as Dennis Prager says, the famous are rarely significant and the significant rarely famous. The famous come and go, but only... x is forever.

Now, what is x? 

X is what I am attempting to do now, and have been attempting for the past 16+ years of blogging. Am I trying to make a name for myself? God forbid! Am I trying to find out what God calls me? Yeah, that's more like it: for that is equivalent to finding our calling, our voc-ation. 

Is this really my calling? I guess so. Unless you have a better idea.

Let's regain our focus: language. Recall what God says of the situation:

Behold, it is one people, and they have one language... now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

What is it, exactly, that is problematic about all of mankind speaking a single language? It sure sounds like God is an early adopter of diversity, so much so that he facilitates it by confusing their language ("so they will not understand each other”) and scattering them all over the place. 

Well, this makes perfect sense if we recall the true meaning and purpose of diversity (not the left's totalitarian version), which is always in the service of a higher unity and synthesis, AKA e pluribus unum and all that. 

Imagine if there really were only one language. We'd so take it for granted that we would be like fish who spend their lives in water while knowing nothing about it. Language 

becomes, when taken for granted, a hermetically sealed shadow world cut off from what is real.... 

[S]peech can no longer be used for inquiry, for genuine thought, for seeking after what is. When the units of intelligibility conveyed in speech have no independent being, when words have no power to reveal the things that truly are, then speech becomes only self-referential, and finally unintelligible. Even the name one makes for oneself means nothing (Kass).

Hmm. Speech becomes self-referential. Of whom and what does this remind us... 

Ah yes: those "radical Foucault-like agendas and New Left goals that are antithetical to real historical understanding." Postmodernists

suggest that the search for truth is itself the prime Western illusion. Truth, they believe, is invented, not discovered....

It denies that there is a reality in the past beyond that described by language, and this barrier of language forever prevents historians from telling any truth about the past (G. Wood).

Wouldn't it be great if God could come down again and scatter the builders of this grotesque ivory tower of babble far and wide?

Come to think of it...

As we said at the outset, myth didn't just happen once upon a time, but happens every time. If Big Incoctrination were in the midst of being broken up and scattered, how would we know it until it was over? It wasn't as if the tower-builders of Genesis 11 knew right away what was happening to them: "Hey! What's with all this linguistic confusion and tribal scattering?!" 

Again, there's that silent intermythic period between the Scattering and the Calling, between making a name for ourselves and God calling and naming us.

So now I shall put on my prophet cap and pronounce -- at risk of looking foolish in 100 years -- that college as we have come to know it over the past half century is indeed dead. The bubble has burst. And just as with market bubbles, when the last idiot gets in, it's time for the prudent man to get out.

That's it for today.

The Babble of Tenure & The Last Idiot

Recall that the tower of Babel is the last episode of the universal story of mankind, before the spotlight turns to the call of Abram. It reminds me of the "intertestamental period" between the old and new testaments. Let's shut up and learn something:

The intertestamental period (Protestant) or deuterocanonical period (Catholic & Eastern Orthodox) is the period of time between the events of the protocanonical books and the New Testament. Traditionally, it is considered to cover roughly four hundred years, spanning the ministry of Malachi (c. 420 BC) to the appearance of John the Baptist in the early 1st century AD. It is roughly contiguous with the Second Temple period (516 BC-70 AD) and encompasses the age of Hellenistic Judaism.

It is known by some members of the Protestant community as the "400 Silent Years" because it was a span where no new prophets were raised and God revealed nothing new to the Jewish people (Prof. Wiki).

There's a similar period of silence between Babel and Abram, but who knows how long it was? In any event, I can't be the first to have noticed another parallel: that while the builders of the tower of Babel wanted to "make a name for themselves," it is God himself who wants to make a name for Abram.

This goes to the fact that you can't just make a name for yourself. Well, you can, but that's called narcissism. 

So apparently, the juxtaposition of these stories goes to the distinction between celebrity and significance, or narcissism and true calling; for as Dennis Prager says, the famous are rarely significant and the significant rarely famous. The famous come and go, but only... x is forever.

Now, what is x? 

X is what I am attempting to do now, and have been attempting for the past 16+ years of blogging. Am I trying to make a name for myself? God forbid! Am I trying to find out what God calls me? Yeah, that's more like it: for that is equivalent to finding our calling, our voc-ation. 

Is this really my calling? I guess so. Unless you have a better idea.

Let's regain our focus: language. Recall what God says of the situation:

Behold, it is one people, and they have one language... now nothing will be restrained from them which they have imagined to do.

What is it, exactly, that is problematic about all of mankind speaking a single language? It sure sounds like God is an early adopter of diversity, so much so that he facilitates it by confusing their language ("so they will not understand each other”) and scattering them all over the place. 

Well, this makes perfect sense if we recall the true meaning and purpose of diversity (not the left's totalitarian version), which is always in the service of a higher unity and synthesis, AKA e pluribus unum and all that. 

Imagine if there really were only one language. We'd so take it for granted that we would be like fish who spend their lives in water while knowing nothing about it. Language 

becomes, when taken for granted, a hermetically sealed shadow world cut off from what is real.... 

[S]peech can no longer be used for inquiry, for genuine thought, for seeking after what is. When the units of intelligibility conveyed in speech have no independent being, when words have no power to reveal the things that truly are, then speech becomes only self-referential, and finally unintelligible. Even the name one makes for oneself means nothing (Kass).

Hmm. Speech becomes self-referential. Of whom and what does this remind us... 

Ah yes: those "radical Foucault-like agendas and New Left goals that are antithetical to real historical understanding." Postmodernists

suggest that the search for truth is itself the prime Western illusion. Truth, they believe, is invented, not discovered....

It denies that there is a reality in the past beyond that described by language, and this barrier of language forever prevents historians from telling any truth about the past (G. Wood).

Wouldn't it be great if God could come down again and scatter the builders of this grotesque ivory tower of babble far and wide?

Come to think of it...

As we said at the outset, myth didn't just happen once upon a time, but happens every time. If Big Incoctrination were in the midst of being broken up and scattered, how would we know it until it was over? It wasn't as if the tower-builders of Genesis 11 knew right away what was happening to them: "Hey! What's with all this linguistic confusion and tribal scattering?!" 

Again, there's that silent intermythic period between the Scattering and the Calling, between making a name for ourselves and God calling and naming us.

So now I shall put on my prophet cap and pronounce -- at risk of looking foolish in 100 years -- that college as we have come to know it over the past half century is indeed dead. The bubble has burst. And just as with market bubbles, when the last idiot gets in, it's time for the prudent man to get out.

That's it for today.

A Universal Story About Universals

Picking up where we left off, I consulted a few sources to the confirm the tower of Babel story, and it checks out. 

When I say it "checks out," what I mean is that I rate it a True Myth, which means that it is 1) timeless, 2) universal, and 3) happening now. In short, it can't not happen, so long as man is man. It isn't so much that it is part of man's essence, but rather, a proximate consequence of other factors.

Leon Kass, in his comprehensive analysis of Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom, makes the intriguing point that Babel "is the last episode in the biblical narrative prior to God's call to Abraham." 

Thus, it represents the climax of "the universal human story," before the focus narrows to God's dealings with one man and his descendants -- right down to you and I, right now. As such, it is "something of a completion," while marking a transition from universal to particular (even though, from another angle, the story of the ancient Hebrews becomes a new universal).

Therefore, Babel is an end, or it is a link, but only if you want it to be, since you can of course reject the Call and dismiss Abraham: he's not my daddy! 

Does this imply a kind of choice between Babel and Abraham? If so, what does this even mean -- again, here and now, for you and I and Here Comes Everybody? (I will resist the temptation to consult Finnegans Wake for obscure references to Babel.)

Well, for Kass, "this tale of the universal city completes the account of the universal human story, with human beings living largely on their own and without divine instruction." It "exposes fully the core of civilization," i.e., man's attempt at auto-civilization without divine tutelage. Again, the latter takes place in the immediate sequel, with Abram.

Big cities. It's tempting to jump straight to these Democrat hellholes of violence and perversion as examples of contemporary Babel. That would be insultaining but facile. Or at least premature. There will be plenty of time to bash the left. But the red/blue divide is obviously a rural/urban divide. Is it also a Babel/Abraham divide? 

Babel, the universal city, is the fulfillment of a recurrent human dream, a dream of humankind united, living together in peace and freedom...

How's that working out? And will more social workers help?

For some reason, God objects to the project, probably because he sees where it's headed and would prefer to Make America Great Again:

He apparently does not approve of the prospect of unrestrained human powers, exercised in support of unlimited imaginings and desires. He seems to be worried... about man's boundless capacity to dream up grand projects.... in short, the implied wish to be as gods, with comparable creative power.

A ha! Genesis 3 all over again, only this time collectively.  

Kass also sees in the story a subtle commentary on the nature of logos, being that "Speech and language, reason and the arts, are at the heart of the story."

Oddly enough, I was thinking about this just the other day, before revisiting Kass. It was in the context of Genesis 2, where God confers on man the power -- or ability or faculty -- to name. 

This is really worth pausing over, because it isn't only full of Mythtery, but in many ways marks the miraculous divide between man and animal, a divide which science cannot explain and will never be able to explain, since it must be presupposed in order for science (and scientists) to exist.

We're taking about universals, for the power to name is a function of the ability to apprehend universals or essences. If I see a "tree" it is because I intuit the nonlocal essence of "treeness." This ability to apprehend universals represents a -- or maybe the -- radical discontinuity between animal and man. 

But guess what? This ability is precisely what is denied by modern and postmodern philosophies, which are nominalistic and grounded in the rejection of the transcendent. And once on the nominalist path, it inevitably ends in deconstruction, for which language is fully detached from the things it is supposed to name, and becomes only about itself: words apply only to other words, not to the external -- AKA real -- world.

Time out for a bit of insultainment: it would be interesting to survey how many deconstructionists reside in Red State America. I would estimate that it is about equal to the number of Latinos who insist on being called Latinx.

I need to stop. Errands to run...

A Universal Story About Universals

Picking up where we left off, I consulted a few sources to the confirm the tower of Babel story, and it checks out. 

When I say it "checks out," what I mean is that I rate it a True Myth, which means that it is 1) timeless, 2) universal, and 3) happening now. In short, it can't not happen, so long as man is man. It isn't so much that it is part of man's essence, but rather, a proximate consequence of other factors.

Leon Kass, in his comprehensive analysis of Genesis, The Beginning of Wisdom, makes the intriguing point that Babel "is the last episode in the biblical narrative prior to God's call to Abraham." 

Thus, it represents the climax of "the universal human story," before the focus narrows to God's dealings with one man and his descendants -- right down to you and I, right now. As such, it is "something of a completion," while marking a transition from universal to particular (even though, from another angle, the story of the ancient Hebrews becomes a new universal).

Therefore, Babel is an end, or it is a link, but only if you want it to be, since you can of course reject the Call and dismiss Abraham: he's not my daddy! 

Does this imply a kind of choice between Babel and Abraham? If so, what does this even mean -- again, here and now, for you and I and Here Comes Everybody? (I will resist the temptation to consult Finnegans Wake for obscure references to Babel.)

Well, for Kass, "this tale of the universal city completes the account of the universal human story, with human beings living largely on their own and without divine instruction." It "exposes fully the core of civilization," i.e., man's attempt at auto-civilization without divine tutelage. Again, the latter takes place in the immediate sequel, with Abram.

Big cities. It's tempting to jump straight to these Democrat hellholes of violence and perversion as examples of contemporary Babel. That would be insultaining but facile. Or at least premature. There will be plenty of time to bash the left. But the red/blue divide is obviously a rural/urban divide. Is it also a Babel/Abraham divide? 

Babel, the universal city, is the fulfillment of a recurrent human dream, a dream of humankind united, living together in peace and freedom...

How's that working out? And will more social workers help?

For some reason, God objects to the project, probably because he sees where it's headed and would prefer to Make America Great Again:

He apparently does not approve of the prospect of unrestrained human powers, exercised in support of unlimited imaginings and desires. He seems to be worried... about man's boundless capacity to dream up grand projects.... in short, the implied wish to be as gods, with comparable creative power.

A ha! Genesis 3 all over again, only this time collectively.  

Kass also sees in the story a subtle commentary on the nature of logos, being that "Speech and language, reason and the arts, are at the heart of the story."

Oddly enough, I was thinking about this just the other day, before revisiting Kass. It was in the context of Genesis 2, where God confers on man the power -- or ability or faculty -- to name. 

This is really worth pausing over, because it isn't only full of Mythtery, but in many ways marks the miraculous divide between man and animal, a divide which science cannot explain and will never be able to explain, since it must be presupposed in order for science (and scientists) to exist.

We're taking about universals, for the power to name is a function of the ability to apprehend universals or essences. If I see a "tree" it is because I intuit the nonlocal essence of "treeness." This ability to apprehend universals represents a -- or maybe the -- radical discontinuity between animal and man. 

But guess what? This ability is precisely what is denied by modern and postmodern philosophies, which are nominalistic and grounded in the rejection of the transcendent. And once on the nominalist path, it inevitably ends in deconstruction, for which language is fully detached from the things it is supposed to name, and becomes only about itself: words apply only to other words, not to the external -- AKA real -- world.

Time out for a bit of insultainment: it would be interesting to survey how many deconstructionists reside in Red State America. I would estimate that it is about equal to the number of Latinos who insist on being called Latinx.

I need to stop. Errands to run...

Once Upon Every Time

The previous post wondered into the question of whether man, upon becoming man, was somehow given the operating instructions or just left to his own devices to make sense of himself, his faculties, and his purpose in being here. 

In one sense the question is idiotic but typical of the low and lurid standards of this blog. But in another sense it invites us to imaginatively drill down to the bottom of the psyche and see what we can see there. Is it really a blank slate shaped by the ups and downs, strikes and gutters, of environmental contingency? 

Ah, no. We know that much. We're not historicists. Man isn't born a nobody to be shaped any which way by external influences, but is a definite somebody -- a particular person -- right out of the gate. 

Well then, is it full of Jungian archetypes and other woowoo-ery that determine identity, behavior, and culture?

Ah, no. We're not Platonists, idealists, or rationalists.

Well, what then? An operating manual presupposes some kind of nonlocal constraint on human potential. 

Be patient. We'll get there.   

More generally, just because our answers may be idiotic, it doesn't mean the questions are, and there are three questions to which every man at every time would like the answers, please: 1) where did we come from, 2) what are we doing here, and 3) where are we going; in other words, origin, being, and destiny. 

You can pretend you don't wonder about these things, but they're nevertheless implicitly present in everything we think and do. They're in the very structure of time itself. Unless you are psychotic, a cause and consequence of which is a kind of violent dismemberment of time. 

Come to think of it, even garden variety neuroses do damage to time's flow; for example, a compulsion creates a kind of temporal eddy, while impulsivity short circuits the path to the future, and trauma freezes one in the past. 

There is actually a "wrong side of history," e.g., presentism, anachronism, progressivism, etc. 

In fact, I was just reading about these historical fallacies in a book of essays by Gordon Wood called The Purpose of the Past. I wasn't planning on blogging about it, but perhaps it has a point or two we can misuse for our own lurid purposes. He's especially hard on our postmodern deconstructionists, and although he's far too polite to call them frankly psychotic, the diagnostic shoe fits:

If historians began doubting that there was an objective past reality that they were trying to recover and began thinking that what they did was simply make up the past and write something that was akin to fiction, then... they were actually undermining the ground for any sort of historical reconstruction at all.

The result is that history "has become fragmented -- all pieces, all flashes of experience, no wholes." They "cannot see the forest for the trees" because "there are no forests." 

Yes, crazy. But this is the underlying philosophy of Critical Race Theory and all those other epistemological diseases. And as mentioned above, they surely do violence to time, for they are "tantamount to using a nuclear weapon that could be subsequently used against" themselves.  

I was thinking about this yesterday, when I heard a story about the editors of the UCSB student newspaper, who have vowed to censor any story that might hurt, trigger, or alienate a single snowflake. Well, hold on a second: since I am an enthusiastic proponent of the first amendment, what if I am triggered by their assault on free speech? 

Anyway, the purpose of the past isn't to ransack it in order to find something useful to one's present political wishes. Rather, 

To understand the past in all its complexity is to acquire historical wisdom and humility and indeed a tragic sense of life. A tragic sense does not mean a sad or pessimistic sense of life; it means a sense of the limitations of life.... 

[H]istory tends to inculcate skepticism about our ability to manipulate purposefully our destinies.

Well, no wonder the left hates it! But guess what, he whispered creepily: doesn't Genesis 3 convey this same pessimessage, only implicitly, via myth? To understand history -- and the Fall of man -- is to know that "few things work out the way we intend."

But in order for a progressive to get things done, he needs to forget the past entirely, which is why Brandon is their ideal leader.

So, let's go back, way back, to "Eden" and suppose our man in nirvana was handed the One True Philosophy upon crossing the threshold from biology to prehistory some 100,000 years ago. Indeed, this seems only sporting, considering what we were up against: the elements, other animals, and especially other people, for it seems there were assouls from the start, or within moments of it, anyway. 

With regard to the missing operating manual, Maritain asks whether it was "possible that this knowledge, together with the primitive religion in which it was incorporated, could be transmitted in its integrity by the human race?"

Recall that the edge of history is myth, and that myth didn't just happen once upon a time, but happens every time. Here's one: 

Once upon a timeless the world had one language, one philosophy, and one religion. But people will be people, and it can't get worse than that, so they decided to build an ivory tower that reached up to the heavens in order to make tenure for themselves. 

In his commentary on Genesis 11, Dennis Prager notes a couple of ironies, but I gotta transport my son to a class, so to be continued...

Once Upon Every Time

The previous post wondered into the question of whether man, upon becoming man, was somehow given the operating instructions or just left to his own devices to make sense of himself, his faculties, and his purpose in being here. 

In one sense the question is idiotic but typical of the low and lurid standards of this blog. But in another sense it invites us to imaginatively drill down to the bottom of the psyche and see what we can see there. Is it really a blank slate shaped by the ups and downs, strikes and gutters, of environmental contingency? 

Ah, no. We know that much. We're not historicists. Man isn't born a nobody to be shaped any which way by external influences, but is a definite somebody -- a particular person -- right out of the gate. 

Well then, is it full of Jungian archetypes and other woowoo-ery that determine identity, behavior, and culture?

Ah, no. We're not Platonists, idealists, or rationalists.

Well, what then? An operating manual presupposes some kind of nonlocal constraint on human potential. 

Be patient. We'll get there.   

More generally, just because our answers may be idiotic, it doesn't mean the questions are, and there are three questions to which every man at every time would like the answers, please: 1) where did we come from, 2) what are we doing here, and 3) where are we going; in other words, origin, being, and destiny. 

You can pretend you don't wonder about these things, but they're nevertheless implicitly present in everything we think and do. They're in the very structure of time itself. Unless you are psychotic, a cause and consequence of which is a kind of violent dismemberment of time. 

Come to think of it, even garden variety neuroses do damage to time's flow; for example, a compulsion creates a kind of temporal eddy, while impulsivity short circuits the path to the future, and trauma freezes one in the past. 

There is actually a "wrong side of history," e.g., presentism, anachronism, progressivism, etc. 

In fact, I was just reading about these historical fallacies in a book of essays by Gordon Wood called The Purpose of the Past. I wasn't planning on blogging about it, but perhaps it has a point or two we can misuse for our own lurid purposes. He's especially hard on our postmodern deconstructionists, and although he's far too polite to call them frankly psychotic, the diagnostic shoe fits:

If historians began doubting that there was an objective past reality that they were trying to recover and began thinking that what they did was simply make up the past and write something that was akin to fiction, then... they were actually undermining the ground for any sort of historical reconstruction at all.

The result is that history "has become fragmented -- all pieces, all flashes of experience, no wholes." They "cannot see the forest for the trees" because "there are no forests." 

Yes, crazy. But this is the underlying philosophy of Critical Race Theory and all those other epistemological diseases. And as mentioned above, they surely do violence to time, for they are "tantamount to using a nuclear weapon that could be subsequently used against" themselves.  

I was thinking about this yesterday, when I heard a story about the editors of the UCSB student newspaper, who have vowed to censor any story that might hurt, trigger, or alienate a single snowflake. Well, hold on a second: since I am an enthusiastic proponent of the first amendment, what if I am triggered by their assault on free speech? 

Anyway, the purpose of the past isn't to ransack it in order to find something useful to one's present political wishes. Rather, 

To understand the past in all its complexity is to acquire historical wisdom and humility and indeed a tragic sense of life. A tragic sense does not mean a sad or pessimistic sense of life; it means a sense of the limitations of life.... 

[H]istory tends to inculcate skepticism about our ability to manipulate purposefully our destinies.

Well, no wonder the left hates it! But guess what, he whispered creepily: doesn't Genesis 3 convey this same pessimessage, only implicitly, via myth? To understand history -- and the Fall of man -- is to know that "few things work out the way we intend."

But in order for a progressive to get things done, he needs to forget the past entirely, which is why Brandon is their ideal leader.

So, let's go back, way back, to "Eden" and suppose our man in nirvana was handed the One True Philosophy upon crossing the threshold from biology to prehistory some 100,000 years ago. Indeed, this seems only sporting, considering what we were up against: the elements, other animals, and especially other people, for it seems there were assouls from the start, or within moments of it, anyway. 

With regard to the missing operating manual, Maritain asks whether it was "possible that this knowledge, together with the primitive religion in which it was incorporated, could be transmitted in its integrity by the human race?"

Recall that the edge of history is myth, and that myth didn't just happen once upon a time, but happens every time. Here's one: 

Once upon a timeless the world had one language, one philosophy, and one religion. But people will be people, and it can't get worse than that, so they decided to build an ivory tower that reached up to the heavens in order to make tenure for themselves. 

In his commentary on Genesis 11, Dennis Prager notes a couple of ironies, but I gotta transport my son to a class, so to be continued...

Woo Who?!

Lately I've been especially preoccupied with the subject with which I am always preoccupied, which is to say, oneness: is it, what is it, how is it, and especially who is it. 

The previous post went into the who of it all, at least from our end of things. 

But one of our principles is that the unity of the cosmos manifests in the mirror of Who-who; this Who-who structure cannot be accidental, rather, goes to the very essence of things. It's a big hint in itSelf, not just the means of tracking down additional hints and clues about the the how, the why, and the whether. 

Put it this way: if there is no ultimate Who, then there is certainly no ultimate How or Why -- no reason, excuse, or alibi, for none is needed or even possible, really. Rather, there is no meaning at all. For as the Aphorist puts it,  

The gods punish by depriving things of their meaning.

Therefore, 

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

It doesn't mean the theocentric vision is correct, but it does mean that

If God does not exist we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters. Permits become laughable when their significance is canceled.

I like to turn it around and challenge the infidel to have the courage of his casuistry and truly live as if nothing matters. Sophist, cancel thyself! 

If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric.

Moreover,

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously.

Beginning with atheism. 

Back to the Who-who structure of it all.

The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.

Ain't that the truth. 

By the way, in addition to taking any It-I structure off the table, we also rule out a Who-whom structure of reality, which I suppose is the principle reason leftism is so monstrous and ultimately diabolical, for it grounds itself in a total inversion of the Way Things Are: yes, there's a Who at the top, but he is neither a dictator nor a retard. 

Not to get sidetracked, but I recently read a book by Maritain that reinforced my predilection of seeing one cosmos and one philosophy. Seriously, what's the alternative? Many ultimate realities, lots of gods, and a philosophy for every man? That can't be right. 

One point that intrigues me -- impossible to prove or disprove? -- is that philosophy does indeed start out as one but breaks up in the course of prehistory and history, only to be recovered in Christ. Could this be what Genesis 3 adverts to? -- not just a fall into sin, but worse, into blunder. 

Let me track down the passage so I don't misrepresent frère Jacques.

First of all, let's say man -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- is 100,000 years old. For 99% that time there is no philosophy for you! Rather, it

only began to exist at a very late period about the eighth and especially sixth century B.C., and then found the right path to truth by a success which must be regarded as extraordinary when we consider the multitude of wrong roads taken by so many philosophers and philosophic schools (Maritain).

The old axial age promulgated by Karl Jaspers. But even then there are plenty of bad philosophies floating around, and indeed, the seeds and roots of the same sophistries that persist to this day, e.g., relativism, idealism, rationalism, empiricism, etc.  

Nevertheless, 

The most reliable inductions of history combine with the conclusions of theology to prove the existence of a primitive tradition, common to the different branches of the human race and going back to the origins of mankind (emphasis in original).

I find this idea immensely appealing, but where's the evidence? 

even in default of any positive sources of information, it is a very reasonable conjecture that the first man received from God knowledge together with existence... 

No spinning, Jack. How is this primitive tradition reasonable? 

Well, we've said before that it makes no sense to create a being with moral responsibility but no means -- i.e., truth -- to effectuate it. Responsibility is prior to rights, but we must have the latter if we have the former, for God cannot be fundamentally unjust.  

Let's enter the Wayback Machine. I recall the exact passage when I learned of this possibility of a Primordial Revelation. It was in a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality & The Origins of Culture, which I suppose I read around 35 years ago. Perhaps there's a reason why I remember the passage:

The [merely] professional way to begin a study of the origins of human culture is to begin at the beginning with a discussion of hominization.

Anthropogenesis, so to speak: the objective emergence of man. But what about psychogenesis, the subjective analogue?

At "the edge of history is myth," such that "a line of events has a beginning and an end, but the matrix out of which events arise (sic) does not appear to be an event at all." 

Analogously, the tree begins with the seed, but is it accurate to call a seed an "event?" Well, what if the humiverse, so to speak,

is an egg that shatters as it expands to begin its career of unfoldment in time. As an archetypal image of primordial unity, the cosmic egg suggests that there is unity and fragmentation, eternity and time. The Fall into time is not so much an event itself as the conditioning of time-space out of which all events arise.

Yes, this difficult but ridiculous yolk, this big Who-ha!, is what Finnegans Wake attempts to describe, again and again, ad gnosiam. 

But this is all a bit vague, simultaneously too much and too little. We're not looking for a literary approach, rather, a logical and theological one. Man is one. Therefore, there must be one philosophy and one religion, and even one history between the fall of the former and recovery of the latter. 

We've said enough for one post. I don't want to overtax your indulgence. Taxing it is enough.

Woo Who?!

Lately I've been especially preoccupied with the subject with which I am always preoccupied, which is to say, oneness: is it, what is it, how is it, and especially who is it. 

The previous post went into the who of it all, at least from our end of things. 

But one of our principles is that the unity of the cosmos manifests in the mirror of Who-who; this Who-who structure cannot be accidental, rather, goes to the very essence of things. It's a big hint in itSelf, not just the means of tracking down additional hints and clues about the the how, the why, and the whether. 

Put it this way: if there is no ultimate Who, then there is certainly no ultimate How or Why -- no reason, excuse, or alibi, for none is needed or even possible, really. Rather, there is no meaning at all. For as the Aphorist puts it,  

The gods punish by depriving things of their meaning.

Therefore, 

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

It doesn't mean the theocentric vision is correct, but it does mean that

If God does not exist we should not conclude that everything is permissible, but that nothing matters. Permits become laughable when their significance is canceled.

I like to turn it around and challenge the infidel to have the courage of his casuistry and truly live as if nothing matters. Sophist, cancel thyself! 

If one does not believe in God, the only honest alternative is vulgar utilitarianism. The rest is rhetoric.

Moreover,

If it is not of God that we are speaking, it is not sensible to speak of anything seriously.

Beginning with atheism. 

Back to the Who-who structure of it all.

The existence of God is indemonstrable, because with a person the only thing we can do is bump into him.

Ain't that the truth. 

By the way, in addition to taking any It-I structure off the table, we also rule out a Who-whom structure of reality, which I suppose is the principle reason leftism is so monstrous and ultimately diabolical, for it grounds itself in a total inversion of the Way Things Are: yes, there's a Who at the top, but he is neither a dictator nor a retard. 

Not to get sidetracked, but I recently read a book by Maritain that reinforced my predilection of seeing one cosmos and one philosophy. Seriously, what's the alternative? Many ultimate realities, lots of gods, and a philosophy for every man? That can't be right. 

One point that intrigues me -- impossible to prove or disprove? -- is that philosophy does indeed start out as one but breaks up in the course of prehistory and history, only to be recovered in Christ. Could this be what Genesis 3 adverts to? -- not just a fall into sin, but worse, into blunder. 

Let me track down the passage so I don't misrepresent frère Jacques.

First of all, let's say man -- Homo sapiens sapiens -- is 100,000 years old. For 99% that time there is no philosophy for you! Rather, it

only began to exist at a very late period about the eighth and especially sixth century B.C., and then found the right path to truth by a success which must be regarded as extraordinary when we consider the multitude of wrong roads taken by so many philosophers and philosophic schools (Maritain).

The old axial age promulgated by Karl Jaspers. But even then there are plenty of bad philosophies floating around, and indeed, the seeds and roots of the same sophistries that persist to this day, e.g., relativism, idealism, rationalism, empiricism, etc.  

Nevertheless, 

The most reliable inductions of history combine with the conclusions of theology to prove the existence of a primitive tradition, common to the different branches of the human race and going back to the origins of mankind (emphasis in original).

I find this idea immensely appealing, but where's the evidence? 

even in default of any positive sources of information, it is a very reasonable conjecture that the first man received from God knowledge together with existence... 

No spinning, Jack. How is this primitive tradition reasonable? 

Well, we've said before that it makes no sense to create a being with moral responsibility but no means -- i.e., truth -- to effectuate it. Responsibility is prior to rights, but we must have the latter if we have the former, for God cannot be fundamentally unjust.  

Let's enter the Wayback Machine. I recall the exact passage when I learned of this possibility of a Primordial Revelation. It was in a book by William Irwin Thompson called The Time Falling Bodies Take to Light: Mythology, Sexuality & The Origins of Culture, which I suppose I read around 35 years ago. Perhaps there's a reason why I remember the passage:

The [merely] professional way to begin a study of the origins of human culture is to begin at the beginning with a discussion of hominization.

Anthropogenesis, so to speak: the objective emergence of man. But what about psychogenesis, the subjective analogue?

At "the edge of history is myth," such that "a line of events has a beginning and an end, but the matrix out of which events arise (sic) does not appear to be an event at all." 

Analogously, the tree begins with the seed, but is it accurate to call a seed an "event?" Well, what if the humiverse, so to speak,

is an egg that shatters as it expands to begin its career of unfoldment in time. As an archetypal image of primordial unity, the cosmic egg suggests that there is unity and fragmentation, eternity and time. The Fall into time is not so much an event itself as the conditioning of time-space out of which all events arise.

Yes, this difficult but ridiculous yolk, this big Who-ha!, is what Finnegans Wake attempts to describe, again and again, ad gnosiam. 

But this is all a bit vague, simultaneously too much and too little. We're not looking for a literary approach, rather, a logical and theological one. Man is one. Therefore, there must be one philosophy and one religion, and even one history between the fall of the former and recovery of the latter. 

We've said enough for one post. I don't want to overtax your indulgence. Taxing it is enough.