On the Deep Structure of the Progressive-Terror Industrial Complex

There is no shortage of opinion on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but they mostly touch on the symptoms and not the cause -- the surface and not deep structure. What I wonder about is the deeper structure that accounts for the agreement between, say, Hamas and BLM. What does beheading Jewish children have to do with exploiting white guilt to finance a real estate empire? What's the connection?

Some events are like a sword slicing through history and dividing one side from the other. For example, Pearl Harbor was such an event. Prior to it there was still a lot isolationist sentiment, but after the sword fell, most everyone found themselves on the same side. Certainly one would have been hard-pressed to find pro-Japanese sentiments, let alone demonstrations and "days of rage" against American colonizers.

But in this case, the moral revulsion didn't last 24 hours before the usual suspects were making excuses, adding "context," and blaming the victim. 

This week we have been witness to the greatest atrocities and mass slaughter perpetrated against Jews since the Holocaust. Sickeningly, on many of your campuses, events are being held to support those who carried out this savagery and to blame the victims, innocent Israelis.

VDH  describes the sword of (a)morality cutting through history:

In a strange way, this reign of death has become a touchstone, an acid test of sorts that has revealed the utter amorality of enemies abroad and quite dangerous people at home.

For example, 

the overt support for Hamas killers by the diversity, equity, and inclusion crowd on a lot of campuses exposes to Americans the real moral and intellectual rot in higher education.

So, diversity, equity, inclusion, and... genocide. We could say that this nexus us just a coincidence, or again, search for some deeper structure that renders the connection perfectly intelligible.   

For example, this guy says

The war in Gaza is part of a global war between an alliance of militant Islam and communists on one side [of the Sword], and Judeo-Christian Western civilization on the other.

This one agrees that 

None of the horrors you are witnessing this week -- not the massacre of Jews, not the betrayal by public figures and popular activist movements, not the moral insanity of our universities and cultural spaces -- happened by accident.

Rather, there's that deep structure again:

Every time we pressed on one of the newly mass-embraced policy proposals or narratives -- intersectionality, decolonization studies, the Iran nuclear deal, Russiagate, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, critical race theory, COVID lockdowns -- a weird thing would happen: The idea itself fell apart at the seams within seconds of contact with reality....

The more we listened to freshly minted universal experts, the more we were struck by the increasing lunacy of their pronouncements on every topic under the sun, always backed by “studies” and “science”

But what unites the lunatics? Is there an order to it, or just an axis of bad or stupid actors wanting to cause chaos and suffering? 

There's also decolonization, the outcome of which 

is barbarism. For Hamas, it means murdering women, children, and the elderly, executing innocent people on the street, and mutilating infants in their homes. For the radical academics..., it means destroying our best institutions, obliterating academic standards, and elevating witchcraft, voodoo, and pseudo-science into positions of prestige. The philosopher Leo Strauss once defined nihilism as opposition to civilization as such—and this is precisely what the decolonizing academics have done....

Americans need to understand that the massacre in Gaza is not only a foreign outrage. The same ethno-radicals who cheer Hamas’s destruction of civilization abroad also want to commit civilizational suicide here at home.

So, is nihilism the answer to the question of deep structure? But nihilism is no structure at all. The following may be crazy, but it insists on its own necessary logical structure:

"Academics in the area of border studies: you cannot teach about displacement, dispossession, suffering, resistance, decolonization, and abolition without Palestine. You can’t be for Abolish ICE, anti-border violence, or anti-carceral without supporting freedom for Palestinians.” 

”When I say ‘no walls, no prisons, no cages’ this is what I mean," Martinez posted on X earlier this week above a picture of the Hamas terrorists storming into Israel on their way to rape women, slaughter babies, and take elderly Holocaust survivors prisoner.  

So, in a way, we don't have to look hard for the deep structure, since they never shut-up about the intrinsic relationship between diversity, equity, inclusion, decolonization, open borders, freeing violent criminals, Jew-hatred, CRT, White Privilege, the destruction of western institutions and intellectual standards, and outright genocide. 

What's the first step one needs to take in order to find oneself on the lunatic side of the Sword? It's easier to describe what things look like from our side of it:

To be a conservative is to understand that man is a problem without a human solution.

Freedom is the right to be different; equality is a ban on being different.

Man is an animal that can be educated, provided he does not fall into the hands of progressive pedagogues.

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

Let us say frankly to our opponent that we do not share his ideas because we understand them and that he does not share our ideas because he does not understand them.

If the leftist is not persecuting, he feels persecuted.

The cult of Humanity is celebrated with human sacrifices.

The political platforms of the left are gradually transformed into scaffolds.

Specific advice for Gazans:

Educating the soul consists in teaching it to transform its envy into admiration.

But unfortunately,

It is customary to proclaim rights in order to violate duties.

Annotations To An Implicit Text About Western Intellectuals and Islamist Barbarism

Just combing through the Aphorisms for oblique references to the barbarism and depravity of the day. Those with ears, yada yada.

Religious pathology is the key to history.

No one is more respectful of “others’ beliefs” than the devil.

Unlimited tolerance is nothing more than a hypocritical way of giving up.

Our civilization is a baroque palace invaded by a disheveled mob.

The partisans of a cause are often the best arguments against it. 

The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates.

The forces that will ruin a civilization collaborate from its birth with the forces that construct it.

The left does not condemn violence until it hears it pounding on its door.

The leftism of the majority of leftists is perfectly explicable, but the intelligent man who has left-wing ideas must severely examine his conscience.

“Racism” has made its enemies say as many stupid things as its partisans.

The comments of the liberal about any war reveal the type of mentality that makes the next war inevitable.

The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own.

The leftist screams that freedom perishes when his victims refuse to finance their own murder.

Every “liberator” finally passes on the bill.

Having promulgated the dogma of original innocence, democracy concludes that the man guilty of the crime is not the envious murderer but the victim who aroused his envy.

In this century, compassion is an ideological weapon.

In order to corrupt the individual it is enough to teach him to call his personal desires rights and the rights of others abuses.

One must learn to handle the weapons of the adversary, but with appropriate disgust.

Mere Ignorance and Learned Ignorance

Feel free to stop bloviating on the ins & outs of unchecked aggression and the what-have-yous of geopolitics, and stick to what you know best, Bob, which is nothing. 

Point well taken. As a multi-undisciplinary vertical slacker, I like to think I know a little nothing about everything. Which is just knowing that the best conceivable map is never the territory -- certainly including theological maps. Eckhart, for example, speaks of God and the soul as mutual abysses of infinitude, and 

taught a form of negative mystical anthropology in which God and soul are ultimately one because both are radically unknowable.

So, "striving to know God... is a constant pursuit of what is by definition unattainable," but this "unknown-knowing keeps the soul constant and still on the hunt." 

Every morning we try to bring back a little nothing from from this hunt for the unknown, starting from nowhere, for "There must be stillness and silence for the Word to make itself heard." 

Nevertheless,

Though it may be called an unknowing, an uncomprehending, it still has more within it than in all knowing and comprehending outside it, for this unknowing lures and draws you from all that is known, and also from yourself.

It lures us so long as we establish diplomatic relations with the Divine Attractor. Or rather, vice versa, for "the eternal birth of the Word from the Father is actually 'now born in time, in human nature.'" 

We must distinguish between two forms of ignorance, or between "mere ignorance" and "learned ignorance." What we know is always dwarfed by what we don't, so "from knowing one must come into unknowing":

Then, we will become knowing with divine knowing and then our unknowing will be ennobled and clothed with supernatural knowing.

It's as simple as making a space of unknowing for the reception of the higher unknown -- or of making a space of darkness for the reception of light. You don't light a match to look for the sun. 

We all have a key to the door that opens to the luminous and noble peace of the desert.

Speaking of which, "one must become as empty and bare as the desert," maybe even be the desert. 

Or, from a Jewish perspective, we are always on-the-way in the desert bewilderness:

The wilderness is not just a desert through which we wandered for forty years. It is a way of being. Even if just for a moment every now and then each day. For it is the only way to begin.

And that must surely be why He brought us out there. For there and only there might we be able to encounter the mystery.

Oh, and if "The first mystery is simply that there is a mystery" the second mystery must be that we are open to it, and that "Spiritual awareness is born of encounters with the mystery."

Which sounds similar to Eckhart's path of no path:

Leave place, leave time, / Avoid even image! / Go forth without a way / On the narrow path, / Then you will find the desert track.

"'God is a God of the present." And to go back to Jewish mysticism, 

Entrances to holiness are everywhere. / The possibility of ascent is all the time. / Even at unlikely times and through unlikely places. / There is no place on earth without the Presence (Kushner).

So, give us this day our daily... what then? Does this post have any practical purpose or advice? Well, every day I spend half an hour trying to follow the wayless way of the pilgrim, in a kind of radical openness to come-what-may. I just try to show up and let God take care of the rest. Or, to paraphrase the Aphorist, the only sensible thing to do is to keep pestering God with our prayers. I don't know what else to do, much less not-do.

(Unless otherwise indicated, all quotes are from The Mystical Thought of Meister Eckhart: The Man from Whom God Hid Nothing.)

Justice for Palestine?

Not much in the way of inspiration in recent days, even predating recent world-historical intrusions. Yesterday I pulled out a volume of Jewish mysticism from the shelf, and I considered writing a post on its similarity to Eckhart. But there's a time for medieval mysticism and a time for getting medieval, period:

Is this the time? If not, when is the time? Is there some objective standard for when to break out the pliers and blowtorches? True, there is "just war doctrine," but I don't see anything in there about justice per se. 

Therefore, I consulted Josef Pieper for a little more guidance on the subject -- in particular, the question of what sort of justice is owed a genocidal terror group with no universal standard of justice. No doubt they believe they delivered justice on October 7 -- as do our own progressive neobarbarians and Islamist apologists -- whereas the civilized world is unanimous in condemning their actions as unjust, to put it mildly. Who's right?

As Pieper says, "evil and suffering in our world have many names, but primarily that of 'injustice.'" Now, justice "is the notion that each man is to be given what is his due," but this definition presupposes the possibility of a universal definition discoverable by man qua man. 

What if the people in question have no such definition -- rather, only a particular one revolving around their own perceived benefit, whether attained justly or unjustly? Do Gazans have a universal definition of justice? Obviously not, because they have a completely different standard as to what constitutes justice for Jews: what they call justice, we recognize as intrinsically unjust.

Which shows the ridiculousness of Hamas concealing their genocidal ambitions behind other universals such as "freedom for Palestine," for in no way do they mean freedom as we define it. Any Arab living in Israel is already more free than anyone condemned to live in an Islamic state (criminal elites notwithstanding), so if they really wanted to be free, Hamas would organize a state along Israeli lines, where Arabs even serve in parliament. 

If we apply a universal standard of justice to, say, Iran, we would say that the Iranian people have the right not to be ruled by an Islamist theocracy, just as Gazans have the right not to be ruled by Hamas. But the latter voted for Hamas, and surveys indicate that the support for Hamas continues. What sort of justice is owed to people who actually don't want what is due to them by natural right, and want to inflict maximum injustice on others?

What is the basis for the moral obligation to give a man his due? Here in the United States it is in virtue of being endowed by our creator with certain unalienable rights, so that to deny these rights without due process is intrinsically unjust:

"It is through creation that the created being first comes to have his rights." By virtue of creation first arises the possibility of saying: "Something is my due."

We could say this same something is due Islamists, except they don't want it, nor do they want anyone else to have it. One could inform the Islamist that "I have my rights!," but for them the dar al-harb has no intrinsic rights the dar al-Islam is bound to respect. Clearly, rights of non-Muslims are not -- nor could they be -- an inalienable possession.

Therefore, by our universal standards, Islamism is intrinsically unjust, for any appeal to "natural right" would be an unforgivable usurpation of our only real right, which is to submit to Allah. 

The anthropology of Christendom is quite different, in which our inalienable rights -- and obligations -- are grounded in human nature. But in the Age of Equity and two-tiered justice, we are back to a pre-Christian and non-universal standard of justice (which, properly speaking, is no longer justice except in the particularistic tribal sense).

Perhaps when all the consequences of a false presupposition suddenly become a direct threat, men in their great terror will suddenly become aware that it is no longer possible to call back... a truth they have allowed to become remote...

Nor is it "completely fantastic to think that a day may come"

when not the executioners alone will deny the existence of inalienable rights of men, but when even the victims will not be able to say why it is that they are suffering injustice.

Actually, it's completely fantastic to believe we're not already well on the way there. There were no pro-Japanese demonstrations in the U.S. after Pearl Harbor, nor any pro-Nazi rallies, let alone Nazi supporters in congress and the media. But today our own Democrats support the so-called Palestinians over Israel by 49% to 38%. Which means they support injustice for everyone. 

Breaking News and the Breakthrough of Eternity

Well, I wasted yesterday watching sports and news out of Israel. I could write about the latter, but one of the original purposes of the blog was to turn the cosmos upside down and report on the "eternals" instead of the news (or to interpret the news in light of the eternal). Instead of covering "breaking news," the idea was to report on eternity breaking into time. 

Come to think of it, there are moments in history when the two -- time and eternity -- converge, quintessentially so in the Incarnation. This is just an image, but I'm imagining time as a wave-like function that can be closer to, or more distant from, eternity (even though, properly speaking, eternity must be equidistant to all times). 

I think we can sense when eternity breaks through, or when we are somehow closer to it. Certainly we know this individually, but it happens collectively as well. When something real occurs, it temporarily wipes away all the lies, silliness, and distractions we typically call "news": "eternity is the measure of permanence, time the measure of change." 

The return of eternity can feel like a big change, but it has always been here, only more or less ignored. I suppose you could say that ignorance of it is the largest conceivable "intelligence failure," since it is the failure of intelligence as such -- a failure to bear eternal principles in mind.

Eckhart often uses the word "breakthrough" to describe God's relation to the soul, e.g., "just as he breaks through into me, so I break through in turn into him." 

What would be at antipodes to the bad breaking news of the day? I guess it would the good of eternity breaking into the nous, or something. This latter, AKA the intellective soul, is "untouched by time and corporality." It is the primordial Light referenced in John, only reflected in the mirror of the intellect.

There is nothing that the divine Intellect does not know actually, nor the human intellect potentially.

This appears to be the deepest possible interpretation of being made in the image of God -- only it's an inverse image, being that God is overflowing fullness, whereas we are relative emptiness and impoverishment. It is also why 

Our natural "intellectual desire," or unlimited will to know, "is never quieted until we know the first Principle, not from its reflection but directly by its very essence.... the ultimate end of rational creatures is immediate knowledge of the essence of God."

This is what Eckhart calls the birth of the Word in the very ground of the soul: "the eternal birth which God the Father effects unceasingly in eternity is the same birth he effected here in time, in human nature.... What is all-important is that it should happen in me."

Which would be good news indeed -- news from, in, and back to eternity. Conversely, at the other (temporal) end, 

The idea that social or political change can satisfy man's intellectual or spiritual needs is perhaps the "greatest deception" to which man is susceptible. 

The author is quick to add that "This in no sense means that society is to be ignored," rather that

Whatever social good is ever accomplished can only be the result of men and women who, in their intellectual ground, understand that there is something far more important to be actualized than just trying to save this world. 

After all, the world can no more be for its own sake than it can be the cause of itself. Rather, it both flows from and returns to its Principle, apart from which there is "strictly nothing." 

And "strict nothing" means contradiction, nonpossibility, the total absence of actual or possible being.

In a word, absurdity. In other words, manifestation minus its principle is like smoke without fire or a reflection of a reflection of a reflection, with no original image. Which is why "The world of manifestation must be inverted, for it, including ourselves in manifestation, is already 'upside down.'" 

Oaky, break through is over. Back on your heads. 

Theology for God

In the previous post, we wondered what Christianity says about reality -- both what it explicitly asserts and what it implicitly presumes. 

In pursuit of this question I innocently picked up a book about Meister Eckhart and ended up getting turned turned upside down and inside out. The book is so relentlessly paradoxical that I can't say I recommend it. It did give me something to think about, though. Or unthink about, rather.  

When I say "turned upside down and inside out," what I mean is this: while I was hoping to find some insights into reality, what I had been calling reality turned out to be nothing but appearances, or even the appearance of nothing: Eckhart's perspective 

is constituted as it were from within God in his Godhead and not externally in terms of approach toward God.... the doctrine he expounds must always be considered from that in divinas standpoint.  

In other words, from inside the Godhead out, not from the outside in. Is this even possible? How can we think about God except insofar as being in relation to, or in terms of, us and of creation more generally? What is God without us?

Well, with us out of the way, "the doctrine [Eckhart] expounds will never cease to be contemporary and always accessible to those who, naturally unsatisfied with mere living, desire to know how to live, regardless of time or place." 

It seems that the one knowledge that will always be true leaves us out of the loop. Or at least "It is meant, rather, for those who are dissatisfied with any teaching restricted by the mental horizon of mere human thought," and for those "who are disturbed by the closed systematizations" of various off-the-shelf human theologies. 

Theology for God?

I don't know, but whatever it is, it is "an abiding ground beneath the quicksand of relative values." Absolute absolutism, I guess.

The problem with theology from and for man is that it is external to the object it is supposed to be about; it "is at best only an approximation to unconditioned Godhead." We are always reflections of this principial reality, but is there some way to get inside the looking glass? Absent a heroic dose of LSD?

Speaking of which, I can see why Eckhart made a big comeback in the '60s and was popular among the hippie crowd. But this goes way beyond such new age diversions. Rather, this is really, really irritating. It is not inside you or me or anyone else, but "supraindividual, supranature, beyond distinctions, and situated as it were within the all-inclusive Principle." 

It transcends "all experience, all abstractions or conceptual graspings of the mind and, indeed, all individual manifestation.... it can in no way be enclosed in any experience, mystical or otherwise, or in any system whatsoever."

Well what then? It seems Eckhart is trying to provide a "springboard primarily designed to facilitate an openness to the uncreated grace requisite for a sustained insight into the unmanifested and unrestricted knowledge which God is."

In the book I just called it O → (n), and let the reader fill in the experiential blanks. 

None of this sounds very orthodox to me, and yet, the very next paragraph claims that "this precisely is the significance of the Word considered as God's unique communication to man." 

Moreover, the Gospel of John "ranks as supreme" because "it pre-eminently sets forth in direct manner the very Divine Knowledge with which Eckhart is above all concerned." It "constitutes, in figures of speech and thought, pure knowledge in principle," and "beyond all humanistic dimensions." 

Again, it is not man that enters God, but rather, "God intervenes in time, the infinite shatters the finite whereby the Word becomes known to man.... the unique possibility is granted man to understand all things in principle from the standpoint as it were of the unconditioned Godhead." 

So again, we apparently have things upside down, since this isn't our testimony of God but God's testimony of himself. And "no person can attain it save by his own unlimited will to know effected and sustained by the grace of the Word" -- or something like (↑) and (↓), only on steroids or something.

Not to be continued. I think I'll move on to something a little more accessible.

If Christ is the Answer, What is the Question?

What does Christianity say about reality: what does it presume, and what does it add that we couldn't have just as well figured out on our own? 

As to the former, I think it presumes a philosophy of common sense realism; after all, Christianity is a non-starter if, for example, existentialism is case, existentialism being for Sartre the attempt to draw out the implications of a strict atheism.

Nor can Christianity be reconciled with positivism, materialism, rationalism, idealism, Marxism, hedonism, nominalism, and so many more. If these are true, then Christianity is not only false but cannot possibly be true.

Let's see, going down the list, there's absurdism, atomism, advaita Vedanta, analytic philosophy, Averroism, academic skepticism... and that's just some of the A's. 

I'm not sure if anything on the list short of Thomism -- or let us say the perennial philosophy more generally -- is capacious enough to do the job. Admittedly, I have no familiarity with some of those schools of thought, but surely they would have crossed my desk by now if they had something to them. In any case, my mind is always open. 

Clearly Christianity presumes a number of things about reality that have become controverted over the past half millennium or so -- for example, that a text means what it says, that there is such a thing as objectivity, that the universe is intelligible, that man possesses free will, that there is a reality transcending nature, etc. 

In our view, denial of any of these assumptions results in a self-refuting reductio absurdum -- for example, to say that objectivity is impossible is an objective statement. Likewise, to say that ultimate reality is material is the denial of spirit by spirit. If there is no free will, we could never know it, for truth is transcendent. And if a text has no fixed meaning, then nor does deconstruction -- it just becomes self-canceling nonsense.

Yesterday we spoke of how, for early Christian thinkers, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth." Voegelin goes on to say that for these men, Christianity was "not an alternative to philosophy," but "philosophy itself in its state of perfection." Okay, like how?

The Logos has been operative in the world from its creation; all men who have lived according to reason... have in a sense been Christians.

This is in accord with what Augustine said:  

That which is known as the Christian religion existed among the ancients, and never did not exist; from the beginning of the human race until the time when Christ came in the flesh, at which time the true religion, which already existed began to be called Christianity.

The Logos is eternal, but "the history of the Logos comes to its fulfillment through the incarnation of the Word in Christ" (Voegelin, emphasis mine). It seems that the Logos is in history in a general way before becoming particularized in Christ. It's a strange idea, but once you accept the existence of the Logos, why not? 

For what exactly is the Logos? Reason, rationality, intelligible structure, intelligent beings. Who says the fullness of the Logos couldn't dwell in a single person? This is essentially the metaphysical claim in the prologue to John -- that the Light that gives light to man qua man becomes flesh and dwells among us, not just then but now. Indeed, it must always be now as a consequence of infinitude assuming finitude.

 Anyway, Voegelin suggests that

a believer who is unable to explain how his faith is an answer to the enigma of existence may be a "good Christian" but is a questionable man.

Ouch. I wouldn't go that far -- not everyone is cut out for philosophy -- but what is the question to which the Incarnation is the answer, and how does this event (and person) answer it?

There is no conflict "between gospel and philosophy," only "between the gospel and its uninquiring possession as doctrine." In other words, the latter is an unphilosophical attitude because it reduces the mystery to some explicit formulation, essentially conflating the words and the reality to which they point.

Instead of simply memorizing cutandry answers, "a sensible first step toward regaining for the gospel the reality it has lost through doctrinal hardening" is "to restore the inquiring mind to the position that is his due." 

Because "question and answer are intimately related one toward the other," the Answer "will not help the man who has lost the question." The life of reason involves

This luminous search in which the finding of the true answer depends on asking the true question, and the asking of the true question on the spiritual apprehension of the true answer. 

So, between question and answer is the luminous search; but man "can also deform his humanity by refusing to ask the questions, or by loading them with premises devised to make the search impossible."

No luminosity for you! (A reminder that the light shines in the darkness but that the willfully dark cannot comprehend it.) 

Even prior to Christ, there is always the divine pull accompanied by man's restless seeking, both taking place in the tension of the in-between. For Voegelin these are reducible to a single movement: "In the one movement there is experienced a seeking from the human, [and] a being drawn from the divine pole." Put another way, God is "the mover who attracts or draws man to himself."

And Christ incarnates this very movement, from and to the Father-Source?

That was a question. It says in John that Christ will "draw all men to himself." And

This drawing power of Christ is identified with the pull exerted by God.

Was that the answer? If so, could you elaborate?

To follow Christ means to continue the event of divine presence in society and history.... of God's pull becoming effective in the world through Christ...

I don't know what else to say, so we'll end with this passage by Josef Pieper: there is a

rounding out of the circle in which the beginning and the end, the primal Origin of the creation and the ultimate Consummation of the creative process, meet and touch in Christ. 

And

we have no alternative but to conceive of this Incarnation as something which is still present and which will remain present for all future time. 

Supposing you're asking the right question. Right?

What Is It All About?

There's no reason to follow a religion unless one not only believes it is true, but conveys the ultimate truth(s). But in what manner does it do this? Literally? Symbolically? Experientially? Explicitly? Implicitly? And by what standard, and compared to what? In other words, how do we judge its truth? 

Yesterday's post set me off into an unplanned exploration of these and related questions, and now I'm going to share some of my preliminary findings, for example, 

every philosophical interpretation of the world and human existence relies, at least subconsciously, on certain general assumptions, which are not so much "knowledge" as rather "belief."

And Christian doctrine in particular, although its primary focus is salvation,

implies as well certain fundamental teachings on specifically philosophical matters -- the world and existence as such (Pieper).   

After all, it's not falsehood that sets one free. And to engage in philosophy as such "means to reflect on the totality of things we encounter, in view of their ultimate reasons," so there is an unavoidable convergence of philosophy and religion, unless one begins by placing arbitrary limits on one's philosophizing. No, "philosophy consists in the simple question, 'What is it all about?'"

And who is it that knows what it's all about? If we're reflecting on the totality of things, "the subject as well as the object is part of the totality encountered," and "true philosophy deals with everything given, within as well as without." 

Yesterday we touched on the ever-present distinction between reality and appearances. Now, no one ever says "ultimate appearances," since this would be an oxymoron; rather an appearance is always of a "deeper" reality (i.e, toward synthesis and unity). And

Precisely this dimension constitutes the aim of the philosopher's question. He investigates the ultimate, the "real" meaning -- not of this or that but of all that is.

Conversely, "Each science formulates one particular aspect" of the totality, and "studies only one tiny slice of reality but does so with extreme precision."

Which reminds me of an aphorism: 

Properly speaking, the social sciences are not inexact sciences, but sciences of the inexact.

Likewise, we are proposing a view of religion that considers it to be the ultimate science of the inexact, for "exactitude" and "infinitude" are at antipodes. Thus,

there exists a certain dimension the philosopher is concentrating on, about which the empirical sciences have little or nothing to say.

I think we need both, although philosophy must be subordinate -- or ordered -- to something transcending philosophy per se. Pieper suggests "the image of a polyphonic counterpoint," and why not? After all, as Balhasar says, truth is symphonic, thus implying a vertical harmony of voices within a horizontal melodic development:

In such a composition, independent melodies correlate with each other, accentuate, challenge, perhaps even disturb each other in such a way as to create a fresh, rich and captivating harmony that can no longer be explained by merely adding together its individual components (Pieper).

Yes. Sounds like the cosmic symphony to which I alluded on pp. 22-23 of The Book. Let's glance at it, and hope it's not too embarrassing:

The universe is like a holographic, multidimensional score that must be read, understood, and performed. Like the score of a symphony, it is full of information that can be rendered in different ways.

A little fruity for current tastes, but the point is well taken.

Today's little symphony will attempt to harmonize Pieper and Voegelin, although we won't have time to finish. In an essay called The Gospel and Culture, Voegelin asks why early Christianity attracted "an intellectual elite who restated the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy and, by this procedure, created a Christian doctrine?"

Come to think of it, that's precisely what this post is trying to be about: restating the meaning of the gospel in terms of philosophy.  

If the community of the gospel had not entered the culture of the time by entering its life of reason, it would have remained an obscure sect and probably disappeared from history...

Which I'm afraid it will do if it fails to reenter the culture of our time. It's too late to enter it's life of reason, since there isn't one. But perhaps it's not too late to resuscitate that life of reason, if not collectively, at least one assoul at a time. But in any event, consider the fact that once upon a time, "the gospel appeared to offer the answer to the philosopher's search for truth" (emphasis mine).

That would be total truth, or the truth of the totality, but how does it do this? To be continued...

Religiology and Ultimate Reality

At the end of yesterday's post the following sentence popped unthinkingly from my fingertips, and now we have to figure out of it's true, true-ish, or what: 

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns.

Well, it is symbolic, since it is conveyed to us via language. And it is more or less systematic; certainly Catholic doctrine is highly systematic, while other denominations are less so -- for example, Quakerism, which, from what little I know, is grounded in immediate experience:

Unprogrammed worship is based on silence and inward listening to the Spirit, from which any participant may share a message. In unprogrammed meetings for worship, someone speaks when that person feels that God/Spirit/the universe has given them a message for others. After anyone speaks, several minutes are allowed to pass before anyone else speaks, to allow the message to be considered carefully. Friends do not answer or argue about others' messages during meeting for worship.

So, the religion the almighty & them works out betwixt 'em. Silent head & open heart. 

Then there's Zen, which is also refreshingly dogma-free and grounded in experience. Taoism too is pretty uncluttered. 

But let's get back to the claim: a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality. Our first witness will be Schuon, even though, like a bad lawyer, I'm not certain how he will answer the question.

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral.

That seems to track with our thesis: a system to help us discern between reality and appearances. Elsewhere he writes that religion  

is an integral whole comparable to a living organism that develops according to necessary and exact laws; one might therefore call it a spiritual organism, or a social one in its most outward aspect. 

In any case, it is an organism and not a construction of arbitrary conventions; one cannot therefore legitimately consider the constituent elements of a religion independently of their inward unity, as if one were concerned with a mere collection of facts.

Ah ha. That's helpful, for it implies that the system we're talking about is not static, but rather, a holistic or organismic "process structure" with interior relations. 

Analogously, a single part of a biological organism cannot be understood outside the whole. Certainly Catholic theology looks at revelation in this way: for example, it exercises the old hermeneutic circle vis-a-vis scriptural interpretation, in which the whole is in the part and vice versa. I guess you could say that Christ vivifies each part. 

Next witness: our Aphorist, of course, and again, I'm not sure of his testimony, but this first one is a favorite:

He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary.

True, but this presumes the existence of the soul to which religion speaks. Just how does it speak to the soul?

The soul is fed from what is mysterious in things.

And

Even in the immensity of space we feel caged. Mystery is the only infinity that does not seem like a prison.

Conversely, 

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be.

Instant karma:

The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment. 

Back to our thesis. To put it another way, religion is a symbolic system to help us navigate the farthest reaches of the soul.

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

Depending on how you look at it, it is a dimension of height or depth, but in any case, 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does, but rather goes deeper.

 Moreover,

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

 This is partly because

The natural and supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads.

So, to lose one is is to lose the ability to make sense of the the other. Returning full circle to religiology and ultimate reality,  

As long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded on rock.

And speaking of the whole vivifying the parts, 

The voice of God passes through the sacred text as a wind storm through the leaves of the forest trees.

Beautiful simile. To be continued...

Appearances, Reality, and Applied Ignorance

Let's begin with what we don't know and can't know.

If only the people in charge would live by Petey's axiom! But the reason people typically want to be in charge is because they begin with what they think they know about the unknowable.

There is the known; the unknown; and the unknowable. But to know that something is unknowable is no small thing, for it is at the foundation of what Hayek calls the Great Society, by which he means the large-scale spontaneous order, or self-organizing system, that is a result of human actions but not human design.

Indeed, such a system could never be constructed by the human mind, since it is energized by a virtually infinite amount of knowledge and information dispersed throughout, and present in each individual. 

Now, I am a big fan of the human intellect, which can know everything knowable, which is to say, being. But the future doesn't exist. Of course, we can make accurate predictions in deterministic system, but the free society

constantly adapts itself, and functions through adapting itself, to millions of facts which in their entirety are not known to anybody.

Only in "small groups of primitive society can collaboration between the members rest largely on" facts and circumstances known more or less by everyone. Which is why central planning is such an atavistic temptation. Toss in the deliberate provocation of vices such as envy, and you've really got something!

But in a complex order, our little bit of knowledge is dwarfed by the knowledge dispersed throughout the system, and which allows us to benefit from the expertise of others. Thus,

a 'civilized' individual may be very ignorant, more ignorant than many a savage, and yet greatly benefit from the civilization in which he lives. 

In short, "We all benefit from knowledge which we do not possess." Ironically, a complex society allows people to know close to nothing, leaving the details to others. In fact, our post-reality civilization is so affluent that its elites can afford to know less than nothing and still pretend it's knowledge.

At the moment there are a couple of Russian guys in my kitchen repairing the freezer. Left to my own devices... let's just say I envy people who really know something about something, whatever it is, from cardiology to refrigerator repair. 

What if we didn't have money, and the only way I could reimburse them would be to exchange my knowledge for theirs? For truly truly, I have only useless knowledge to give, in that it's not for the sake of anything else.

The civilized soul is the one who is interested in unusable truths.

Even old Aristotle knew that

It is the mark of an educated man to look for precision in each class of things just so far as the nature of the subject admits; it is evidently equally foolish to accept probable reasoning from a mathematician and to demand from a rhetorician demonstrative proofs.

The cosmos is a complex system. Is there any way we can dumb it down and make it intelligible? Is it reducible to something we can wrap our minds around -- even with our invincible ignorance of all the ins out outs, for example, of the nature of dark matter, or of how quantum and relativity theories relate?

Those aren't things I'll ever figure out, but I do have any number of physicists working on it.  

So, what's a guy like me supposed to do? Well, I hereby reaffirm that 

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

Beginning with the truth of Being, which you might say is the Ultimate Quality. And indeed,

What ceases to be thought as qualitative in order to be thought as quantitative ceases to be thought as significant.

Which is to say, of ultimate significance. Just how do all these qualities get in here? Are they really reducible to quantity? Or perhaps it's the other way around -- that quantity is a vehicle for qualities, as appearances are the veil of reality.

Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said.

If that's the case, let's try to say something from the highest and deepest level, and see where it leads, for

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Therefore, "significance" lies in that gap between appearances and reality. Only man can say that "things are not what they appear to be," i.e., that things appear one way, but in reality are another way. Which in turn is rooted in a kind of applied ignorance, similar to what Hayek said above. 

In other words, we don't take things at face value, but inquire into deeper causes -- even the cause of being and of causation. We are perpetually curious, which is to say, open to being. But most people have neither the time nor inclination to sit around all day thinking about being. Which is where religion comes in, from genuine ones to the crude political religions of the left.

For whatever else a religion is, it is a symbolic framework for thinking about ultimate reality, or the absolute, or one's deepest concerns, and that's about it for now....   

Social Justice and Progressive Tyranny

We left off with Pieper's claim that "Whoever rejects truth, whether natural or supernatural, is really 'wicked' and beyond conversion." 

Now, just because one doesn't reject truth, it doesn't mean one possesses it. Rather, we are philosophers, AKA lovers of wisdom, not owners; it's a dynamic and open relationship. 

Pieper says that for Aquinas, reason is

nothing other than "regard for openness to reality," and "acceptance of reality." And "truth" is to him nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both natural and supernatural reality.

So, you could say that prior to truth is our openness to it: unlike other animals, we are open to being itself. Or not, in which case Genesis 3 All Over Again. 

Reason "perfected in the cognition of truth" is therefore the receptivity of the human spirit, to which the revelation of reality, both natural and supernatural reality, has given substance. 

Truth of Being = Revelation + Receptivity. Or, one could just say Intelligibility + Intelligence, respectively. The intelligibility of being is a kind of ceaseless revelation, while our intellection is openness to it. And prudence is grounded in conformity between the two:

The pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality. He alone can do good who knows what things are like and what their situation is. 

Now, I suppose everyone believes, or at least convinces himself, that he's in touch with reality. But in our day, common conceptions of reality are so radically different that it forces us to conclude that one side is dwelling in unreality. Which accounts for the hostility, because not getting your way is one thing, but not getting your reality -- and being forced to acknowledge unreality -- is a bit more alarming.  

If you want to do good, good intentions aren't enough; rather,

Realization of the good presupposes that our actions are appropriate to the real situation, that is to the concrete realities which form the "environment" of a concrete human action; and that we therefore take this concrete reality seriously, with clear-eyed objectivity. 

Hmm. What if what we need to know in order to achieve some specific outcome is literally unknowable? If so, then presuming to know the unknowable is not going to end well. As it so happens, I'm also rereading the Hayek's Koon Klassic Law, Legislation and Liberty, in particular, the volume on The Mirage of Social Justice. 

You probably just read my mind, because if social justice is a mirage -- literally a kind of collective delusion -- then we might just have identified the essential disconnect between right and left, and left and reality. And you would be hard-pressed to find a progressive who doesn't enthusiastically believe in "social justice," even if they can never precisely define what it means.

It's a big subject, so one is tempted to say just read the book. Let's see if I can extract some of the most juicy insultainment. 

As Petey often says, let's begin with what we can't know, with "the impossibility for anyone of knowing all the particular facts" of a complex spontaneous order (Hayek). It's why we have rules: because the of our ineradicable ignorance of the future:

Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends.

Which is why it is so repugnant to our reason to change the outcome of a rule-based system, for example, vis-a-vis student loan forgiveness, college racial discrimination against Asians, or climate scammers tweaking their models in order to arrive at the preferred results.

Speaking of affirmative action, diversity, inclusiveness, and all the other progressive buzz words,

The idea that government can determine the opportunities for all, and especially that it can ensure that they are the same for all, is therefore in conflict with the whole rationale of a free society.

When people say "social justice" they really mean "government coercion." Certainly they (at least secular types) do not mean that "society" will bring about the desired outcome, rather, a tyrannical entity that has the power to change the outcomes of a complex system.

But this much is obvious. Let's dig a little deeper to see where Hayek converges with Pieper on the subject of prudence. For Hayek, belief in "social justice" is not only imprudent, it is downright primitive: it is 

a direct consequence of that anthropomorphism or personification by which naive thinking tries to account for all self-ordering processes. It is a sign of the immaturity of our minds that we have not yet outgrown these primitive concepts and still demand from an impersonal process which brings about a greater satisfaction of human desires than any deliberate human organization could achieve, that it conform to the moral precepts men have evolved for the guidance of their individual actions.

So, we still must have rules, including rules of morality that inform our actions. But 

the demand for 'social justice' is addressed not to the individual but to society -- yet society, in the strict sense in which it must be distinguished from the apparatus of government, is incapable of acting for a specific purpose.... 

It is because of belief in the mirage of social justice "that people have placed in the hands of government powers" 

to satisfy the claims of the ever-increasing number of special interests who have learnt to employ the open sesame of 'social justice'. 

Or, in the words of the Aphorist, 

Social justice is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

But in reality,

No social class has exploited the others more brazenly than the one that today calls itself "the State." 

Pathocracy and Oughtocracy

Is it normal to spend all day pondering the meaning of normality? Probably not, so I'm not the best person to ask. Truly truly, I've never felt "normal," and I suspect that this is what prompted my interest in psychology to begin with. 

First, there's the problem of normal vs. average; again, the average cannibal is presumably not normal, but compared to what? What and where is the human telos? We are what we are, but what are we supposed to be? I had to get a Ph.D. only to find out that no one can give me a straight answer.

It seems to me that a fruitful avenue is to examine this gap between Is and Ought, for it is also the gap between immanence and transcendence. If the Ought is not here, where is it? Let's say I want to become a "better person." The sentiment is here and now, but where is it coming from? What is its cause?

Off the top of my head I don't know, but I know who might know: Josef Pieper in his Four Cardinal Virtues. 

After all, what is a virtue? It's a built-in tendency toward a telos such as courage, moderation, justice, etc. A virtue is something we ought to cultivate and achieve, and failure to do so renders us, if not frankly "abnormal," at least dis-ordered. And recall that this all started with a meditation on the nature of personality dis-orders, both individual and collective (to the extent that the latter exists).

Pieper begins by pointing out that the quest for the proper human order has been going on for a long time:

contemporaries of Socrates already took for granted these traditional categories [of virtue] sprung from the earliest speculative thinking.

So, ever since man donned the thinking cap and began wondering WTF?! it's all about:

They took for granted not only the idea of virtue, which signifies human rightness, but also the attempt to define it in that fourfold spectrum [prudence, justice, fortitude, temperance].

Has there ever been a society that celebrated weak and cowardly men? I mean before ours? Or that invented "social justice" as a way to avoid the obligation to behave justly? Or that promulgated the morality of moral relativism? 

The 'doctrine of virtue' was one of the great discoveries in the history of man's self-understanding.

Discovery. Not "invention," "opinion," or "imposition." Rather, something universal -- implying a universal obligation (or ought): a proper order. 

This is different from a list of extrinsic obligations such as the Ten Commandments. In fact, let's leave God out of the discussion for now, and focus on nature -- specifically, the intrinsic nature of man. Even the village atheist has a conscience, that is, a sense of what he ought to do and believe: we all ought to be atheists.

But the doctrine of virtue speaks to persons qua persons:

both of the kind of being which is his when he enters the world, as a consequence of his createdness, and the kind of being he ought to strive toward and attain to...

Again, immanence and transcendence, horizontal and vertical, Is and Ought. The four classic virtues "can enable man to attain the furthest potentialities of his nature."

What about the fall?

We'll get to that later, but suffice it to say that the virtues may attain a supernatural perfection via the infusion of grace. Which is what sanctity, sanctification, and theosis are all about. This is the realm of "better than normal."

Oughtocracy. I just googled it, and the first thing that comes up is the autocrat Trump, so apparently I am the first to use this word. 

When I think of what it might mean, it is the opposite of what we've recently seen, say, in the streets of Philadelphia. In an oughtocracy everyone would do what he ought without being asked, whereas in the pathocracy of Philadelphia (or any other progressive city) we see mobs of people doing what they ought never do.

I suppose we've never had a perfect oughtocracy since Eden. But even Eden didn't become Philadelphia -- the city of brotherly love -- overnight. 

My favorite chapter of this book is the one on prudence, which is the virtue of virtues; without it, would-be virtues can become vicious. For example, courage without judgment would characterize a Nazi willing to die for the cause, or an Islamic terrorist.

In other words, none but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good in so far as he is prudent. 

It almost looks like courage, justice, and temperance are the "content" of prudence (AKA judgment). But what is prudence itself, and how is it -- again, objectively -- possible?

Well, it goes back to classic realist philosophy that begins with Being: Being precedes the truth to which the latter is ordered, and truth precedes the good (i.e., the "doing good" of prudence). 

Long story short, we must first know the truth of things before we can act prudently. At the other extreme (i.e., of postmodern relativism), there is no reality, nor can we know it, which conveniently eliminates the Prime Directive of prudence. But "Classical Christian ethics"

maintains that man can be prudent and good only simultaneously...., that there is no sort of justice and fortitude which runs counter to the virtue of prudence; and that the unjust man has been imprudent before and is imprudent at the moment he is unjust.

Above I made a passing wisecrack about the injustice of social justice, but prior to this must be a deep disconnect between mind and reality (or Being), if only because of systematic stupidity or aggravated tenure. We shall return to this subject in due course. Suffice it to say that it is a doctrine in which no one ought to believe.

Speaking of which, our contemporaries -- this brood of vipers -- "will often call lies and cowardice prudent, truthfulness and courageous sacrifice imprudent." "Pragmatism" or "utilitarianism" displace prudence, which reduces to an expedient moral nihilism.

We'll end with this, which is also a good -- no, the best -- beginning:

Truth, then, is the prerequisite of justice. Whoever rejects truth, whether natural or supernatural, is really "wicked" and beyond conversion (Pieper).

"All laws and rules of conduct may ultimately be reduced to a single one: to truth" (Aquinas).

Pathocracy and Normocracy

We're still pondering Christopher Rufo's The Cluster B Society. First, some context is needed for the designation "Cluster B," which refers to a group of personality disorders revolving around emotional or erratic traits, i.e., the narcissistic, borderline, histrionic, and antisocial personalities.  

Which leads to the definition of personality disorder: last I checked,  any personality disorder involves enduring and inflexible patterns of behavior or emotion leading to significant subjective distress or objective impairment. This impairment can be in relationships, in work, or in adaptation more generally. 

Untreated, a personality disorder is essentially a lifelong condition, in contrast to presumably time-limited ones such as major depression, and also to even more serious lifelong conditions such as schizophrenia. On the spectrum of severity, personality disorders are somewhere between everyday neurosis and severely compromised reality testing, e.g., delusions and hallucinations. 

It's easy enough to apply psychological categories to a collective, but is this a valid exercise? Take an extreme case such as Nazi Germany. Is it helpful to say that Germany was a Cluster A and B society, with paranoid and antisocial traits? What was the cause of this, and what is the cure?

A somewhat random google search suggests that only 1.5% of the population suffers from a Cluster B personality disorder. If that's the case, how can half of the U.S. be in the grip of a collective personality disorder? 

Well, something is wrong with these people, and we aim to find out what it is. We could say that they're pathological, but by what standard? What is normality? Is there a universal standard for how a human being ought to be? If there are personality disorders, what is a properly ordered personality? 

What if these folks just want to fit in, or are imitating high status people, or were effectively indoctrinated in college? What might look like a personality disorder could be just weakness, stupidity, conformity, status seeking, and other character defects. Just bad breeding, as they used to say.

Rufo correctly notes that

scenes of American public life increasingly resemble a Cluster B psychodrama: victimhood replaces accomplishment as the standard of merit; accusation replaces disagreement as the means of settling disputes; false compassion becomes the primary method of manipulating citizens into compliance; and the whole scheme is enforced with the threat of violence: obey, or suffer the consequences.

But again, if everybody is just imitating everyone else, where do we locate the pathology? By virtue of what standard? In other words, if there is an unhealthy and wrong way to be, this implies a healthy and correct way.  

I apologize for the rambling, but I'm pondering this in real time.

As a result of my psychoanalytic training, I used to think that personality disorders were environmental as opposed to organic or genetic. But now I'm inclined to the view that they are more genetic, although there is always an interaction between genes and environment. 

Take, for example, a woman with borderline personality disorder. Usually we will discover a chaotic childhood with unstable caretakers, but what if this is because one or both of the parents has a personality disorder that is rooted in genetics? In general, mental illness runs in families, but genetic research suggests that the resultant chaos is at least equally cause and (genetic) effect.

Let me just jump to my bottom line take: psychologists began noticing an increase in personality disorders in the 1970s, but the genome hasn't changed since then. What has changed? 

One of the biggest changes has been a loosening of cultural standards, one consequence of which is that mental illness that had been previously repressed is allowed to openly express itself. It very much reminds me of the Ferguson Effect that has led to the spike in crime. 

True, there is more criminality, but this is because of the new absence of constraints and consequences. Criminal tendencies that had previously been "repressed" by law enforcement are now openly expressed. (And criminality itself is heavily genetically loaded.)

You get more of what you tolerate, and our culture has become so tolerant that we're surrounded by the intolerable. If you have no standards, people will meet them.  

It's the same with the alarming spike in sexual pathology and confusion. Ideas and behaviors that had previously been repressed and channeled into healthier avenues are openly expressed.    

 

By definition, everyone starts off immature. It only becomes pathological if the maturational process is arrested. But "maturational process" implies a telos, so one way of normalizing immaturity is to eliminate or ignore the telos of development. In a society of cannibals it is normal to be a cannibal. Indeed, objection to cannibalism might land you on the menu.

So, what is normal? How would we go about defining it in a way that isn't culturally relative? What things ought to be repressed and not tolerated? Rufo writes that 

American college students find themselves in the midst of an unprecedented mental-health crisis. According to the University of Michigan’s Healthy Minds study, more than 60 percent of college students meet the criteria for at least one mental-health problem -- a nearly 50 percent increase since 2013. 

But again, by what standard of normality? And what if much of this is due the psychological Ferguson Effect mentioned above?

That's a Big Question, and this post has already gone on too long, but a couple of days ago I read a post called Truth and Politics that provides some preliminary clues:

In our era, truth is under systematic assault from moralistic fanatics who are at the same time thoroughgoing relativists and dyed-in-the wool subjectivists. The Catholic journalist Karlo Broussard put it well in his recently published booklet, The New Relativism: “The agents of relativism are still out there, seeking to fit the world to their own desires and likes rather than discover and understand the world in order to better conform to it.

It seems there is something intrinsically pathological about relativism, especially when it becomes a new absolute: 

The fervid intensity of the woke absolutists, their endless anger and excoriation, should not be mistaken for a commitment to truth and truth-seeking. Their indignation, their aim to “cancel” -- to morally obliterate -- those they cannot abide is a consequence of the fact that they have left the world of objective truth and measured moral judgment behind.

Speaking of systems and what they tolerate or suppress, this new system permits the unleashing of primitive sadistic impulses on acceptable targets: 

these vehement enemies of Truth with a capital T do not hesitate to accuse their opponents of departing from the only acceptable narratives regarding ubiquitous white racism, the self-evidence of gender theory, the grave threat to democracy posed by conservative populists and moral traditionalists, and the unquestionable need to genuflect before the authority of “Science” as redefined by politically correct elites.

In this upside-down system, the normal are punished: there are widespread "efforts to silence those who still affirm that 'freedom is ordered to the truth and is fulfilled in man’s quest for truth and in man’s living in the truth'”:

Ideological fanaticism is the inevitable consequence of a nihilistic denial of an order of things, of a natural moral order available to human beings through reason and experience.

The new Absolute Relativists

have slowly transformed our institutions into what psychologist Andrzej Łobaczewski calls a “pathocracy,” or rule by psychological dysfunction....

In a Cluster B society, psychological disorders are job qualifications rather than problems to be solved; ideology replaces competence as a marker of distinction....

 We'll end here, even though we're just getting started.

Progressivism is the Disease it Pretends to Cure

Yesterday's post asked the eternal question, how do you heal a progressive? For one thing, if they don't recognize that they have a problem -- and that the real problem doesn't have a political solution -- they're not going to seek treatment. 

Generally speaking, the worse the mental illness, the more the denial. Imagine getting a Keith Olbermann to acknowledge that he might have a little problem. Achieving such a stable breakthrough with a personality disorder might take months of therapy.

I say "stable breakthrough" because people with personality disorders are, like anyone else, capable of insight. But because of a certain developmental arrest, they are subject to primitive defense mechanisms such as denial, splitting, and projection, so as to nullify the insight. In order to become stable, the insight must essentially develop from a temporary state to an enduring trait. 

This is the maturational process, and it proceeds at its own pace. Children don't become adults overnight. It only took me four or five decades, and I'm still working on it. Looking back on it, I guess I missed a few developmental milestones along the way due to PTSD -- Partying Til the Shadows of Dawn.   

Youth is an infirmity that old age does not always cure.

I heard that.

Yesterday we began a discussion of Christopher Rufo's Cluster B Society, and he's definitely onto something. Recall what Voegelin says about the impossibility of debating ideologues, and how the effort to do so becomes "medical in character" because it must "diagnose the syndromes of untrue existence" so as to initiate "a healing process."

Certainly I know what he means, but I don't think a medical model is the best way to frame the problem. For example, in medicine it is important that the physician recognize the problem, but in psychology it is important that the patient do so as well. In both cases there is "pain," but especially in personality disorders, the pain is denied, split off, projected, externalized, and acted out in relationships.

Analogously, if you go to your doctor with a broken leg, he doesn't have to first help you come around to the view that your pain is a consequence of the broken leg. Nor would doing so have anything to do with the "cure" for a broken leg, whereas in psychotherapy accurate recognition of the source of the psychic pain is very much part of the "cure."

But cure is a bad way to frame it, because there isn't one. "Cure" shouldn't even be in the vocabulary of a psychologist, for it is written:   

Anything that fully solves problems has no relation to them.

The authentic problem does not demand that we solve it but rather that we try to live it.

We only know how to solve the problems that do not matter.   

Indeed, 

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

This is another reason not to conflate medicine and psychology, because imagine having to first convince the patient that he can't cure his own illness, before proceeding with the cure. 

In reality, everywhere and anytime,

The soul is the task of man.

And  

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

Which implies that progressives will always be with us, because there is always a fresh generation with skulls full of mush who externalize their problems and imagine there's a cure for human nature. Good times, good times... til the shadows of dawn. 

Seriously, it's a relief to imagine that someone or something else is responsible for your pain. Moreover, tolerating emotional pain is a central part of maturity.

Here's an important one that goes to the heart of personality disorders:  

Today the individual rebels against inalterable human nature in order to refrain from amending his own correctable nature.

In a Substack article, Rufo shares some perceptive reader comments on The Cluster B Society:

I think perhaps the greatest degenerative element of our Western social psychology over the last 60 years has been the displacement of a mentality of “we are all sinners” by a narcissistic mentality of maximal “self-esteem.” 

Once you are encouraged to view yourself as axiomatically personally blameless, the next step is to look for someone or something else to blame for each and every one of your discontents. Re-cast your wonderful self as “victim” and then ask: Who needs to be cancelled?

There it is: like institutionalized character pathology, or a personality disorder writ large. On the one hand,

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man.

Among which is that    

Self-satisfaction is pathetic proof of lowliness. 

Another reader points out how

Many organizations purporting to be about justice and positive goals are in reality led by highly disordered individuals and stirred by a mentality infected with disordered patterns of reasoning and emotion. These people gravitate toward positions of power and influence . . . they push unhinged agendas behind the scenes, without accountability. 

The wider public needs to get wiser and understand this dynamic. Just because someone claims to be fighting for justice, human rights, or charitable causes doesn’t mean that this is what’s actually happening.

That is so true that I have nothing else to say, but I'll say it in the next installment.