Breaking News From Eternity!

I don't think I want to plunge fully back into O -- i.e., excogitate something completely new -- until the liberatoreum has been reconstituted.

I spared you all from the true extent of the horror, but every item -- I mean every last item -- had to be removed from my slacktuary so the abatement guys in hazmat suits could remove the old flooring, which apparently has an infinitesimal amount of asbestos in it. California. Bazooka vs. mosquito. 'Nuff said.

So with my environment all scrambled, it's a little like having alzheimer's, only outside my skull instead of inside.

But I always enjoy revisiting old posts, first, because they are not meant to age. In other words, nothing here is supposed to have an expiration date (except some of the gags). In fact, -- and I probably mentioned this in my very first post -- one of the original purposes -- or at least excuses -- for the blog was to bring to readers whatever it is that is the opposite of news. The "olds"? The stale? The rewordgitated?

No, these don't work, because if one thinks archetypally, the news is almost always old before it's written, just the recycling of a handful of myths and more superficial patterns. To mix a metaphor of Jim Morrison, the journalist simply takes a mask from the ancient gallery and serves it to us for breakfast. Conversely, truth is always fresh, and always provokes intrapsychic adventures beyond the subjective horizon.

I mean, c'mon. "Middle East in Chaos." No. Really? "Muslims Behaving Barbarously." You don't say. "57 Churches Burned So Far, Christians Terrorized." Breaking news from 630!

"Systemic Corruption in Clinton Foundation." What, you mean Clinton and his cronies became wealthy through philanthropy? Is there some other way for liberals to get rich?

"Obamacare in Chaos." Wait. Socialism doesn't work? I thought we won the cold war. Besides, isn't the era of big government over? I guess it depends on the meaning of isn't.

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for George Gilder's Knowledge and Power to arrive in the mail. From the reviews, it sounds right up our alley. For example, the August 19 National Review sent a tingle up our thigh when it observed that

"it's because the authorities lack knowledge that they use power to try to impose artificial order. This ruins systems that need to adapt and change, and that need information about the real world to do so.... The imposition of control by power instead of knowledge suppresses these streams of information, and the results are not pretty, or even sane" (emphasis mine). In fact, they're pretty insane.

But for the left, politics is about power, which is why they cannot help generating chaos -- and why, conversely, the truth not only sets us free, but is obviously the prerequisite of meaningful freedom (for if there is no truth, then freedom simply equates to nihilism).

In reality, "the capitalist economy is a giant information system that provides feedback and knowledge to entrepreneurs about productive investment and creative opportunity," so "the more the government tries to fine-tune" the channels of information, "the more noise it inserts into the system."

Obamacare, for example, with its 2200 pages of "laws" is a recipe for chaos, a decimation of the order necessary to have a rationally ordered healthcare system. And I place "law" in scare quotes, since the law is whatever Obama wants it to be. Nancy Pelosi promised us that if we passed the bill, we could find out what's in it. Turns out they had to pass the bill so Obama could decide what's in it. Naked, lawless power. That's the left for you.

Yeah, yeah. Breaking news from Genesis 3.

Some people wonder why I have to mix politics and religion. This is one big reason: "In the end, the most important message carried by Knowledge and Power is that capitalism is a profoundly spiritual system. It allows and encourages people to be the best they can be, not only in serving their own interests and exercising their own talents, but in meeting the needs of others."

This dovetails nicely with a review of another book I haven't yet gotten to, Kevin Williamson's The End is Near, in the June 17 NR. The State -- as opposed to the limited government of our Founders -- is not an instrument of truth -- breaking news from 1789! -- but "an instrument of will. It seeks to tell people how to live. Worse, it uses force to do so. Worst of all, its paramount purpose is not answering the question 'What's best for the people?' -- that is at most a secondary consideration -- but 'What is good for the State?'"

And consistent with Gilder's thesis, "The problem with politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong." That wise crack should be posted above every polling booth.

For example, "Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use.... Resistance to innovation is part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business -- despite flooding the market with dangerous and defective products, mistreating its customers," and engaging in a level of fiscal fraud that dwarfs anything in the private economy. (See Reckless Endangerment for details.)

Why the built-in, systematic stupidity? Because "The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem." I mean, Obama is about as likely to realize this as Paul Krugman is to seek psychiatric help.

Thus, "if a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place." But as always, government failure simply becomes the pretext for the next appropriation of more power. Obamacare fails? Then we need single payer!

Bottom line: "Individual liberty yields the iPhone. Politics protects the Post Office."

Huh. I guess this turned into something like a post after all.

Dear Prudence, Won't You Change Your Name?

No time for a new post, and barely enough time for this repost of a post that originally appeared out of gnowhere -- which is where all the posts come from -- six years ago. Things should start settling down around here and returning to normal later in the week.

So, I'm reading a book on the virtues -- the four horizontal ones dealing with intra-mundane and intra-human relations, and the three vertical ones dealing with divine diplomacy. And I'm thinking to myself: didn't I already blog about this? And if so, is it possible that I made the subject more interesting than this guy? Because this guy is pretty boring.

Let's me find out:

Prudence is such a lousy name for the Virtue of virtues, it's no wonder no one talks about it anymore. For one thing, it's too close to "prudish," which is a great sin for those who don't believe in sin. And if we can judge by Social Security statistics on the most popular baby names, Prudence doesn't even make the top 1,000.

In contrast, Sophia -- which amounts to the same thing as prudence -- comes in at #4. And since it split the vote with Sofia, who knows, it might actually be the Cardinal Sign on girls.

Pieper deals with this linguistic obstacle at the outset, noting that the word has become too saturated and associated with such qualities as timorousness or small-mindedness.

To which I would add cautious, risk-averse, unadventurous, tentative, and possibly even "pragmatic" in that calculating and sociopathic Clintonian way. In other words, the connotations can range from wimpy, to vaguely neutral, to crassly political.

A much better word would be wisdom, in-sight, or better yet, sapientia, since the latter has a nice mystical ring to it. Furthermore, it resonates with what a human being fundamentally is, which is to say, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this post, we'll stick with prudence, which Pieper calls "the mold and 'mother' of the other cardinal virtues, of justice, fortitude, and temperence." In other words, "since none but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good insofar as he is prudent.... All virtue is necessarily prudent."

We must imagine a vertical hierarchy, with prudence located at the top. This is one more reason why Darwinism or any other form of materialism is so incoherent, because one simply cannot get from matter to wisdom, and it is morbidly imprudent (not so mention impudent) to think otherwise.

Rather, the world itself is an emanation -- or involution -- of its Principle, which is why reality is continuous from the top down, but discontinuous from the bottom up. Only by starting at the top does the cosmos make sense in its integral totality, which is to say, high and low, interior and exterior.

Therefore, Pieper is absolutely correct in saying that prudence "is the [vertical] cause of the other virtues' being virtues at all."

Here it might be useful to remember the wisdom books of the Bible -- which again, with a less skilled marketing department, might have been called the "prudence books." For example, Proverbs repeatedly praises the centrality of wisdom, which is at the origin of all things.

Furthermore, there are obvious parallels between wisdom and the Word, which is both alpha and omega, beginning (of creation) and end (of the human adventure). To say that "no one comes to the Father but through me," is another way of saying that no one comes to the Principle save through the eternal wisdom that is its first fruit. The two -- Reality and Wisdom -- are related as intimately as Father and Son.

Now prudence means on the one hand "the perfected ability to make right decisions" and choices. But what is this ability founded upon?

This, I think, is the key point: that we can only make right decisions if we are 1) open to reality, 2) in conformity to reality, and 3) act in a manner consistent with that conformity. Thus, for St. Thomas, truth is "nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both of natural [i.e., horizontal] and supernatural [vertical] reality."

In short, "the pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality" -- which explains why there is so little wisdom on the left, since they attack the very notion of objective truth, and substitute for it such retrograde idols as multiculturalism, "diversity," moral relativism, and ultimately just power, which is what the world devolves to in the absence of a truth-based human order.

To employ the symbols used in the Book of the Same Name (as the blog), we see that one of the prerequisites of prudence is (o), or "the receptiveness of the human spirit," the latter of which must be in-formed by the Real.

In other words, we must be humbly instructed by reality, or we will surely sooner or later be righteously bitch-slapped by her. As well we should. Mama don't play!

Furthermore, (---) comes into use as well, for as Pieper notes, prudent cognition "includes above all the ability to be still in order to attain objective perception of reality."

Elsewhere he writes of cultivating "the attitude of 'silent' contemplation of reality: this is the key prerequisite for the perfection of prudence as cognition," since it is what makes (↓) possible, the "ingression of grace," or of vertical murmurandoms.

To put it bluntly: sit down, shut up, and know that I AM.

All Politics is Nonlocal

I'm guessing Tip O'Neill -- Chris Matthews' mentor, proving that the road apple doesn't fall far from the horse's ass -- must have been drunk when he let the secret of liberal electoral strategy out of the bag -- that "all politics is local."

First of all, what does this even mean? I was about to say it means nothing to us, for whom all politics is nonlocal. When politics becomes local -- when government is in our face, our pocketbook, and our healthcare choices -- it's more or less a nuisance.

In other words, the reason for the establishment of the federal government -- the very purpose of its existence -- is to secure nonlocal rights enshrined in the Laws of Nature and conferred by Nature's God. You can look it up.

Preservation of these rights is the end -- the telos -- of government, to such an extent that failure to preserve and protect them triggers another natural right: the right of revolution, i.e., "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form..."

But for the left, all politics is indeed selfishly local, and essentially comes down to the state showering the voter with gifts -- ObamaPhones, free birth control, healthcare on someone else's dime, etc. -- in exchange for one's natural rights, most especially, freedom.

And as Toqueville recognized at the dawn of this experiment in self-government, once more than 50% of the voters realize that politics can be made local -- in the sense that they can hijack the state to force the makers to subsidize the takers -- the experiment is mortally threatened. It is one of the most common reasons for the failure of democracy, e.g., Detroit, which of course went bankrupt because the takers eventually sucked the makers dry.

The same thing has occurred in California, where future makers are on the hook for billions in unfunded bribes to pay off state employee pension funds. And of course, Obama has committed the same electoral fraud, only on a more massive scale, raiding the coffers of the surviving unborn to fund his systematic bribery of constituents.

The conservative is obviously at a disadvantage here, which is why there are so few true conservatives in government. Few people can get elected these days by promising voters they will secure their nonlocal rights, but not bribe them with gifts.

We now pause for some timelessly timely aphorisms from someone at antipodes to the vicious and vulgar buffoon Tip O'Neill, Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

"The modern state is the transformation of the apparatus which society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism which exploits it."

Right? Like every institution, it eventually undermines the reason for its existence, in favor of merely pursuing self-preservation and self-interest. Which is why the state never gets smaller or less intrusive.

"Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from ourselves."

The credo of the selfish and myopic man for whom all politics is local. Existence is also local for animals, since they have no conscious access to the nonlocal.

"The modern sensibility, instead of demanding the repression of envy, demands that we suppress the object which arouses it."

Yes, where would the left be if the tenth commandment were understood to be a natural duty, complementing our natural rights?

"Compassion is the best excuse for envy."

And liberalism is the best excuse for idiot compassion.

"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."

That's right: the selfish envier is the noble party, which is why his bullying is always hidden behind a veil of sanctified victimhood.

"Democratic elections decide who may be oppressed legally."

In this case it was decided prior to the election, as the state didn't want to take any chances with nonlocalist Tea Partiers who can't be bribed. Ronald Reagan once characterized Tip O'Neill as "a round thing that gobbles up money." Tea Partiers now well understand that if you pose a threat to the business end of Leviathan, its teeth are very real.

"Liberal ideas are likable. Their consequences ruinous."

Likable for self-centered children, I guess.

"Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man."

Bearing in mind that decency is a bare minimum, not any great virtue. Then again, a world of decent people would represent heaven on earth, so it's way too much to ask for or expect. Better to blame "institutional racism," "the patriarchy," "global warming," "income disparity," etc., than to diagnose the real problem -- which politics cannot cure, and leftist policies only aggravate.

Oh, and happy 26th anniversary to Mrs. G., who must be one of the least envious people around, since she doesn't feel entitled to anyone better than me.

On the Organ of Spiritual Perception

I personally don't have an issue with the distinction between gnosis and Gnosticism, but since the question keeps coming up, perhaps we should settle the matter once and for all by handing down some definitions ex cathedra, i.e., from the front of the bus back.

For starters, one could just say that gnosis is to nous as perception is to the senses, or reason to the rational mind. Gnosis is what the nous "does" or "receives" -- the nous essentially being our organ of spiritual perception and discernment (to paraphrase Aristotle, it is that part of us that is divine, or at least closest to it).

If we didn't have this faculty -- or it us -- there would be no realistic way to discern spirits, to read the signs of the times, to deeply understand scripture, or to even operate this bus, really. In its absence we are spiritually autistic, as it were. And we all know spiritually autistic people. They pretty much run the show, don't they?

A related problem is when the nous is appropriated by lower regions. For example, many self-styled gurus and spiritual hucksters presumably have an activated nous, except it's merged with the ego (or lower), which drags it into the mud. That pattern is similar to, say, a psychoanalyst who has valid knowledge of the unconscious mind, but who lacks insight into his own motivations, and ends up seducing a patient.

But for clarity of thought in this upper atmasphere of the soul, I don't think it's possible to surpass Schuon, so let's see what he has to say. Conveniently, one of his books is called Gnosis, with the subtitle Divine Wisdom. So gnosis is divine wisdom, in contrast to, say worldly knowledge.

And if that is too saturated, you can always just say (n) vs. (k) to distinguish the one from the other. But in some form or fashion one must make this distinction, because if one doesn't, one becomes either an atheist or literalist -- which amount to the same thing, since both apply the wrong category of thought to the spiritual dimension. It's a ubiquitous problem, for "Men tend not to live on anything but the ground floor of their souls" (Nicolás Gómez Dávila).

More from Dávila: To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place of which the poet sang. To put it another way, religion can surely be understood rationally, but not only rationally.

Rather, one also needs an uncorrupted imagination, which "is the capacity to perceive, through the senses, the attributes of the object which the senses do not perceive" (NGD). Thus, "The imagination is not the site where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled" (ibid.).

For "When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less" (ibid.). For example, "The Gospels, in the hands of the progressive clergy, degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings" (ibid.). But in reality, "Faith is not assent to concepts, but a sudden splendor that knocks us down" (ibid).

Back to Schuon. The lone reviewer pretty much says what we just did, that gnosis represents "the highest aspect of the Intellect -- and is not to be confused with the lower faculty of rational thought [while not negating it, I might add]. Gnosis deals with intuitive contact with the higher level of the Self, while mere rational thought deals with the strictly human level/profane intelligence for a profane world."

"Gnosis," according to Schuon, "refers to supra-rational, and thus purely intellective, knowledge of metacosmic realities. Now this knowledge cannot be reduced to the Gnosticism of history," nor can it "be held responsible for every association of ideas or every abuse of terminology." As is true of any religious concept -- or any concept, frankly -- improper abuse does not negate its proper use.

That's right, what Bob said: "the fact that an imposture necessarily imitates a good, since otherwise it could not even exist, does not authorize charging this good with all the sins of the imitation" (Schuon). Might as well condemn religion because of Deepak, for "To claim that all gnosis is false because of Gnosticism, amounts to saying, by analogy, that all prophets are false because there are false prophets" (ibid.).

Nevertheless, "It is a fact that too many authors -- we would almost say: general opinion -- attribute to gnosis what is proper to Gnosticism and to other counterfeits of the sophia perennis, and moreover make no distinction between the latter and the most freakish movements, such as spiritualism, theosophism and the pseudo-esoterisms that saw the light of day in the twentieth century" (ibid.).

So, what is Gnosticism? Pretty much "a fabric of more or less disordered speculations, often of Manichean origin; and it is a mythomania characterized by a dangerous mixture of exoteric and esoteric concepts." I'm sure you're all familiar with the parable of the ice cream and the dog doo.

So, when does gnosis go off the rails? I can think of several pitfalls, pride being foremost among them. There is also the danger alluded to above, of conflation with an unredeemed imagination, or with one's own mind parasites. For this and other reasons, it is always best to channel the of flow gnosis -- or O --> (n) -- between the banks of an institutional or traditional river. It's the difference between, say, a Meister Eckhart vs. a William Blake or Emanuel Swedenborg, the latter two being too much a mixture of dream and reality.

Power Politics vs. Truth Politics: How to Tell a Clenched Fist from an Open Mind

So, why all the Voegeling? Because in recent months I've raced through number of huge volumes of his, and if I don't write about the experience, then it is soon forgotten, covered over with the next layer of mulch.

However, I'll try to liven things up with some parallel aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (NGD), since the two were often on the same page, and he can say in a pointed sentence what Voegelin can in a dull 600 page book. (The ideas aren't dull, of course, but to paraphrase NGD, the writer who doesn't torture his sentences ends up torturing the reader.)

Yesterday we mentioned that it is a scientific fact that man, qua man, forever exists in tension toward the divine ground-attractor. In a letter, Voegelin writes that "the creation of the gods has something to do with true humanity." In fact, "the meaning of humanity was fixed in the process of separating the human from the divine," so "as soon as the meaning of the divine becomes unclear again, the meaning of humanity becomes correspondingly confused."

Voegelin calls the distinction between man and God a movement from compaction to differentiation, which is why the Hebrew discovery of the one God is such an important development.

In other words, prior to that there is no differentiation between the cosmos and the gods (e.g., wind, water, fire, fertility, etc.), with the result (among others) that history cannot be discovered (or created, if you like). History still "happens" of course -- in that time doesn't really stop -- but the ancient Hebrews were the first to see it as playing out in the tension between man and the divine ground, instead of just going around in immanent cosmic circles.

Which is why no form of dogmatic atheism can represent progress, because it expresses the backward movement to a de-differentiation between man and God. God, however, hardly disappears. Rather, he simply reappears in Gnostic man. Dávila:

"The radical negation of religion is the most dogmatic of religious positions." Such atheism "does not dispute the existence of God, but rather His identity." Which is why "He who does not believe in God" generally lacks "the decency of not not believing in himself."

Speaking of Obama, History's Greatest Orator, "Not being an orator amounts to not being able to speak about anything except what one knows about" (NGD).

Oh, and Obamacare? Don't worry, "With the generosity of the program does the democrat console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces" (ibid.).

In the end, "as long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock" (ibid.). To turn it around, this is why it is impossible to talk to liberal rockheads, because they express religious emotion in the absence of religious insight, due to the de-differentiation of spheres alluded to above.

About that de-differentiation: when the terrestrial and celestial are re-fused and the vertical thus de-faced, then "doctrinaire totalitarianism is justified." Indeed, "the Gnostic is a born revolutionary" -- the serpent being the archetype of this downward movement -- "because total rejection is the perfect proclamation of his divine autonomy."

Reader ge has suggested that Voegelin can't be right, because too many disciplines and movements fall under the heading of "Gnosticism." I don't necessarily see this as problematic, because it's just a consequence of the deeper principle of collapsing the vertical.

Thus, Gnostic systems "develop without exception in opposition to the creator-God... and transform him into the evil power over against which the new man-made god is is placed in the position of savior." The Obamensch is just the latest iteration of this pattern, but it is a universal temptation of fallen man.

A critical point is that when reality is collapsed in this manner, politics indeed devolves along with it to a crude struggle for power (since the true and good have been excluded).

This is "in radical opposition to the classic conception of Aristotle," whereby politics is rooted in common access to, and participation in, the nous. In the absence of the Logos-Nous dialectic, then man is indeed reduced from the political animal -- the animal with Reason in pursuit of the common Good -- to an animal who engages in politics in order to obtain power over others. (The rejection of the common Nous-Logos is also the hateway to multiculturalism, bogus "diversity," ideological feminism, and all the rest.)

The problem for the normal man is that, just because he is not interested in power over others, it doesn't mean others don't want power over him. It doesn't matter whether it's leftists or Islamists, they just don't want to leave us alone.

Which of course goes to the disconnect between liberals and conservatives, since the former are by definition engaging in horizontal power politics, while we are attempting to conserve at least a remnant of the vertical. But this is a little like trying to play chess with a barbarian, who elevates

"the repudiation of reason into a principle. The common world of the Logos is destroyed," which soon enough descends "to the level of violence and brutality which, in the sphere of action, reduces all questions to the one question: who will draw the revolver first."

No wonder they hate the second amendment.

The High Cost of Divorce from Reality

A post or two ago we mentioned Plato's allegory of the cave. It seems to me that Voegelin is one of the few contemporary scholars who fully accepts the allegory as descriptive of reality. For which reason he maintains that turning away from the light, the divine ground -- O -- constitutes the essence of pneumopathology, with devastating consequences.

Like all such myths, it isn't just describing something that happened once upon a time, but what happens every time. As such, it cannot be "surpassed," let alone disproved. Rather, either you get it or you don't, for we don't judge it; rather, it judges us. In other words, it sheds light on the space in which human beings have always lived and always will live (for existence in this space -- the "sensorium of transcendence" -- is what characterizes humanness).

This is just another way of saying that man isn't the measure of truth, but vice versa. If this is not true, then the world is indeed an absolute relativity, and we are reduced to the civilized barbarism of the tenured, where the only appeal is to power, not truth, and the world is divided into victims and the political supermen who will save them. Oh, and the evil conservatives whose "holy grail," in the words of Obama, is to increase human suffering.

Reader ge left a comment to the effect that the state of scholarship has "advanced" since Voegelin's time -- which is no doubt true, in the same sense that politics has advanced between Reagan and Obama, or science between Neils Bohr and Al Gore, or philosophy between Aquinas and Richard Dawkins.

Perhaps I should add that I am not a "Voegelinian," if there is such a thing. Rather, I simply take what strikes me as expressive of truth, and leave the rest. If it doesn't bang the interior Gong, then I consign it to the absurcular wastebin. Like you, I read in order to understand, not imitate.

The following strikes me as unsurpassable truth: "philosophical existence is existence in awareness of man's humanity as constituted by his tension toward the divine ground." For Voegelin, this is a scientific statement, in the original, uncontracted sense of the word.

And if this is the case, then "alienation is the turning away from the ground toward a self that is imagined to be human without being constituted by its relation to the divine presence" (emphasis mine). Indeed, this is the repetition of another of man's permanent mythological possibilities, i.e., the fall into auto-divinization.

Here again, this is either way true or way off. I don't see any other alternative, for as Eckhart might say, you can't be a little bit pregnant with God.

Thus, "Turning toward, and turning away from, the ground become the fundamental categories descriptive of the states of order and disorder in human existence."

This is not an abstract statement. For example, America's founders, in anchoring our very political existence in unalienable rights conferred by the Creator, explicitly turned toward the ground of order. Conversely, Marx -- and all ideologies flowing from him -- explicitly reject this order.

Voegelin calls this "willful turning away from the fundamental experience of reality" a "disease of the mind."

Once again, how could it not be a disease if man is rooted in a real order that the mind has rejected? Any disease of any kind is always a dis-order, a failure to achieve a certain end. And if there is no objective norm for human beings, then there is no such thing as psycho- or pneumopathology. Rather, there is only adaptation to transient conditions, which is precisely what Marx believed.

Turning again to the American revolution, Voegelin says that it is distinguished from, say, the French, or Russian, or National Socialist revolutions in light of the fact that it "was able to create an open society" -- not in the desiccated sense of Popper, but in the vertical sense of being open to the divine ground.

And the culture war -- or red state / blue state divide, or whatever name you want to assign our polarization -- is largely because our intellectuals are so strongly influenced by the European type of revolutionary, anti-Christian intellectualism. Indeed, Obama is our first president totally steeped in this crock, with predictable results all around.

Thus, "what really has happened is an inconsiderate, and partly illiterate intellectual movement," a "massive force of aggressive intellectual dishonesty" that "has polarized itself out of the American social reality," and into a "willful divorce from reality and violent aggressiveness in the pursuit of utopian dreams."

And "Since this intellectual disease is not confined to journalists and television reporters but has penetrated deeply into the academic world, and through the academic world into the education of the younger generation, one must recognize in these trends a danger to democratic government which, after all, has to rely on contact with reality in the population at large."

Hmm. I can't imagine why the tenured would turn away from Voegelin.

(All of the above quoted material taken from Autobiographical Reflections.)

Leftism: An Autoimmune Disorder of Language

The goal of education should be... reality, right? If not that, then what? Fantasy? Obedience? Wish fulfillment? Power?

In his Autobiographical Reflections, Voegelin remembers his first teaching jobs in America, which were at some elite eastern universities such as Harvard. He found the job impossible, because "the ideological corruption of the East Coast" had already "affected the student mind profoundly."

And this was only in the 1940s! Nevertheless, he was prescient enough to recognize that these students -- proto-Obamas -- were already manifesting "the behavioral characteristics of totalitarian aggressiveness" that has become so commonplace today.

Voegelin goes on to describe how these celebrators of tolerance "simply will not tolerate information that is not in agreement with their ideological prejudices." He adds, however, that even they were not as bad as their European counterparts, whose "picture of reality" was "so badly distorted" that they "simply start shouting and rioting if any serious attempt is made to bring into discussion facts that are incompatible with their preconceptions." So I guess community organizing started in Germany.

Seventy five years ago it was still possible to reach at least some of the leftist students by "swamping them with mountains of information." They apparently retained a kernel of common sense, allowing them to recognize "that their picture of reality is badly distorted." It's never easy to turn one of them around and get them to take a look at the wide world outside Plato's Cave, but "at least they begin to have second thoughts."

The key, of course is to retain an open mind -- not just to information, but to transcendence. No amount of information can compensate for loss of the latter, for the same reason that all the quantity in the world doesn't add up to a single quality (just as an infinite number of genetic copying errors doesn't arrive at a single truth, including the self-refuting "truth" of Darwinian fundamentalism).

Meanwhile, the rejection of reality in favor of ideological "second realities" has hardened into institutional form. Thus, the primary job of the academic-media complex is to assure compliance with the needs of political power. As such, to assimilate the ideology is the exact opposite of a liberal education. To make matters worse, since the 1960s, academia has "become dominated by mediocre people who cannot properly resist radical students in debate."

Nevertheless, pneumopathology is easily confused with freedom, for the simple reason that the contemporary truth-seeker must swim against the tide of our debased culture, so freedom appears as labor. Which it is. No one said liberty is easy! If it were, it wouldn't be so historically rare and recent. In any event, "Recapturing reality in opposition to contemporary deformation requires a considerable amount of work."

Another important consideration in the conflation of freedom and bondage is that the ideologue is freed from the persecution of not knowing. But not knowing is the human condition -- and the prerequisite of any form of knowledge -- so to forget our ignorance is to jettison reality.

All nontroll readers of this blog will understand the fundamental lie of the left that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom: "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind" will find "himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language -- meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts..." They pretend to be concepts, but if one attempts to define them, one quickly discovers that they have no fixed content at all, e.g., "social justice," "peace," "tolerance," "diversity," "income disparity," etc."

Or, the content is the opposite of what the term implies, for what could be less diverse and more drearily monochromatic than leftist diversity? What could be more provocative to our enemies and more conducive to global disorder than military weakness?

To paraphrase Don Colacho, the left in whatever form is first and foremost a lexical strategy. They begin by attacking language, so it is no longer possible to even talk about reality. This makes it exceedingly difficult for the conservative, because when he critiques the left, it will appear to the leftist that he is coming from a place of "unreality."

Perhaps we may take solace in the fact that this is not the first time this has occurred, and that it is a constant struggle to find the words and concepts adequate to illuminate reality: "More than once in history, language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it no longer can be used for expressing the truth of existence."

This occurs when language becomes an idol, a tendency which seems to be a permanent temptation to humans -- far more dangerous and subtle than the old tendency to elevate objects to idols.

This has frankly been going on ever since man learned how to speak and write. For example, Socratic philosophy specifically emerged in a climate of sophistry, whereby the clever and cynical Sophist engaged "in misconstructions of reality for the purpose of gaining social ascendence and material profits" (not to mention young boys).

Yesterday we spoke of one of the main tactics of the left, which is to close off certain avenues of thought, i.e., the tyranny of political correctness. This is how the ideologue makes "his state of alienation compulsory for everyone." You know -- everybody's a racist, or we are persecuted by "the rich," or there is a war on women. People have to believe these fantasies in order for the ideologue to wield political power.

As Voegelin has said, ideology is always rooted in a rejection of the first and tenth commandments, or in the promotion of idolatry and envy. The left would be out of business if it couldn't transform words to idols and promote envy as a virtue instead of a sin and a punishment (since, unlike most sins, envy gives the envier no real pleasure).

Out of time. The remodelers are messing with my office again.

What has Two Legs and Slithers on its Ideology?

Better yet, what do you call a tenured hack chained to the bottom of the sea?

A good start.

That dark yoke is in reference to yesterday's aphorism, that "No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny."

Which prompted commenter Rick to wonder if this might be "carved into a millstone somewhere" -- recalling Jesus's suggestion that people who spend their lives twisting the minds of children ought to have millstones hung around their necks and be cast into the sea. Which he didn't mean literally, but rather, to emphasize the seriousness of the crime of soul murder, which is analogous to postnatal abortion.

It is ironic that the left conceals the impulse to commit soul murder behind the principle of "academic freedom," when denial of freedom -- which is either spiritual, or it is nothing -- is their explicit goal. For example, my child attends a Catholic school, where he learned by the age of five or so that he always has a choice between alternatives, between good and bad actions.

But for decades, liberals have been seducing children into the opposite view, that behavior is a consequence of circumstances, and that evil (which is relative anyway) choices are simply a reflection of the environment. Conversely, good consists in embracing the correct ideology, irrespective of personal faults.

This is simply Marxism writ small -- the idea that man is a function of his class and nothing more. Again, it is just an attack on the vertical -- on man's intrinsic transcendence -- via ideology.

And it is difficult to defend ourselves from the attacks, for the same reason it can be difficult to defend ourselves from infection by airborne virus: the whole drama is taking place on a scale that is invisible to us.

To take one example, last year conservatives were systematically accused by the media and its political arm, the DNC, of waging a "war on women." Never mind that there is no such war, and that we have no earthly idea what they're even talking about. We still must rouse our defense mechanism -- our immune system, as it were -- and fend off the ridiculous attack.

But defending oneself against a risible attack -- "when did you stop beating Sandra Fluke?" -- risks making oneself appear ridiculous. As Don Colacho says, "The inferior man is always right in an argument, because the superior man has condescended to argue." Thus, in a perverse way, "Defeating a fool humiliates us." On a more subtle level, "Even in opposition to the intellectual language of a time, one cannot help but write in it" (ibid.).

So conservatives are always playing defense, often reduced to using the terms and even the narrative of the left. And since leftism may be expressed with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so -- so long as it is expressed with the appropriate sanctimony, outrage, and hysteria -- it's like trying to be a parent in a world in which children are on the identical level as the grown-ups. This is a world in which reasoned opinion is forced to operate on the same plane as the collective tantrum (e.g., the George Zimmerman show trial).

In other words, the world is drained of legitimate authority, leaving only a vacuum for power to fill. The final common pathway is government by the ungovernable, i.e., people who cannot master themselves presuming to master others (i.e., takers ruling makers). That's pretty much the tipping point, the very eventuality our founders worked so hard to avoid by shielding us from direct democracy, AKA mob rule.

Leftists may be childish, but they are not childlike, the latter connoting openness to the broad spectrum of reality, genuine curiosity, and innocence. It is this that Jesus warns us about messing with. But leftism cannot operate in an open system, which is the real motive behind the attack on religion (i.e., the vertical).

Voegelin has analyzed the "prohibition of questions" that forms the walls around any ideology. Certain conclusions are forbidden, so entire lines of questioning are cut off. We all know how children are forever asking why?, and if we are honest with ourselves, we soon realize that we really don't know -- in other words, children remind us of the mystery that adults can only pretend to have solved.

But after four or five such questions, we soon enough reach the alphOmega point aphorized by Don Colacho: "Everything in the world ultimately rests on its own final just because.” Or in other words, "Metaphysical problems do not haunt man so that he will solve them, but so that he will live them." Indeed, even God adopted this strategy to show us how it's done: in-carnation, not in-doctrination.

Some people predict it will all be over by 2041, when atheism replaces religion. If so, Don Colacho will have been right again, for "There are times approaching in which only one who crawls will be able to survive."

Sounds grim, doesn't it? Not to worry: "The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody -- a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost" (Voegelin).

Trained Beasts and the Modern Multiversity

When I think of the tenured, I think of pomposity and vacuity; or pretentiousness and absurdity. Nor am I alone in so thinking. For example, Nicolás Gómez Dávila -- AKA Don Colacho -- aphirms that "There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures."

Worse yet, -- think of our Dear Leader, or of the left more generally -- "Formal instruction does not cure foolishness; it arms it."

Yesterday we spoke of the precipitous dumbing down of academia in order to achieve the dubious goal of mass college education (dubious because there can be no such thing as mass excellence). Before World War II, relatively few Americans attended college, and most of those didn't do so in order to secure a job, but simply to obtain a liberal education, or because they were wealthy twits with nothing better to do.

Afterwards a confluence of factors fueled the expansion and influence of the college racket, including the discovery, extension, and exploitation of adolescence, the banning of IQ tests as a condition of employment, and the need to siphon off a flood of workers into the labor pool after WWII (via the GI bill).

Nowadays college is practically a civil right; and like most newly discovered rights, it is really an obligation (of taxpayers) in disguise, nor is it necessarily healthy for the right-bearer. There are obviously forms of education that are healthy, but it is just as likely that one will be harmed by college; at the very least, "for some, college is the beginning of problems with drugs, or drinking, or sex that will cloud their adulthood for years, or even a lifetime."

And the damage to the soul might be worse for the person who doesn't spend four years partying, and who actually assimilates what he has been taught: "if you are a parent who does not hold [leftist] positions, you are not merely wasting an enormous sum of money; you are paying an enormous sum of money to have a college inculcate views and values that are counter to your most precious values and ideals."

In this ponderous book I'm plowing through, there is a section devoted to education. In it, Niemeyer describes five different forms of education, only one of which is truly liberal, i.e., liberating, humanistic, and spiritually expansive.

I don't have time to detail each of them, but the only one that doesn't end up contracting and damaging the soul is the "Socratic," which opens the youth to a sense of wonder, and induces him "to 'turn around,' away from his self-seeking passions, toward the quest for truth and love of the good."

This approach -- without any indoctrination whatsoever, mind you -- "brings the young man to rational examination of the movements that he can experience in the depth of his soul, and thereby to an awareness of a public order congruous with the order of being itself," i.e., of a political order that mirrors the order of the soul, instead of being at war with it.

This is the only order that can be worthy of man (although it can take diverse forms), so to deny it is to not only oppress man, but in a way, to render man impossible. All ideologies, in one way or another, make manhood impermissible. The reign of political correctness is just the latest version, and the "education" responsible for it is at antipodes to the Socratic one just outlined.

Most people who attend college will -- either explicitly or implicitly -- assimilate a political education (or perhaps politicized would be a better word), which is no education at all, because it is rooted in the needs of the state, not in the nature of man.

Elsewhere Niemeyer describes how the western university was an extension of the universality of Catholicism (which of course means "universal"). Thus, the western university "was from the beginning embedded in a universal pursuit of truth, in knowledge as a universal whole." Nothing can be further from this pattern than the contemporary "multiversity" that indoctrinates students into the tyranny of relativism and the formal stupidity of multiculturalism.

Tolerance? Please "The man who says he is respectful of all ideas is admitting that he is ready to surrender." And "Tolerating should not consist of forgetting that the tolerated only deserve tolerance."

Liberation? "To educate man is to impede the 'free expression of his personality,'” not unleash it on an unsuspecting world.

Logic? "The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them."

Science? "Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession."

Proof? "If we could demonstrate the existence of God, everything would eventually be subjected to the sovereignty of man."

Secular materialism? "Only the souls that are made fertile by a divine pollen bloom."

Funny? "It is enough to state a truth in order to make the fool laugh."

Conservative? "Everything of value in the world is out of step with it."

Metaphysics? "Those who reject all metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest."

Activism? "To one who anxiously asks what is to be done today, let us honestly answer that today all that is possible is an impotent lucidity."

Social justice? "'Social justice' is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right."

Faith? "There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap."

Absurd? "Man calls 'absurd' what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence."

What about The Children? "No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny."

Your god, the state? "The modern state is a teacher who never grants his students a degree." And "The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent state."

(All of those pungent aphorisms courtesy Nicolás Gómez Dávila.)

TV and College: Shielding the Soul from Reality for 60 Years

What went wrong with America, whereby we could end up with such an anti-American president -- by which I mean someone who clearly doesn't accept the principles upon which the nation was founded, but who uses the legitimate institutions of power for illegitimate ends?

A president as far left as Obama would have been impossible fifty years ago (by today's standards JFK would be called conservative), so we have to ask ourselves what has changed in that period of time in order to make an Obama possible -- or worse, inevitable.

Dennis Prager has cited television and college (i.e., unprecedented numbers being indoctrinated in leftist seminaries) as the main factors, and it is interesting that Voegelin noticed the same trend -- only 60 years ago. For example, nailing Obama's type in 1954, Voegelin describes the students

"who are too dopey ever to find out, by their own powers, that something is wrong. Once they have gone through the process of college and graduate school, they are sufficiently brainwashed and morally debased to hold their positions with sincerity, and for the rest of their lives will never have a critical doubt."

In short, Obama is our first president who wasn't only immersed in the nutty ideologies of the left, but who actually believed and assimilated them -- hack, loon, & sphincter. Somewhere in his development an irony curtain descended on his mind, and the resultant absence of critical distance becomes the gateway to authoritarianism. For the leftist, the closure to reality always provokes the totalitarian temptation. In other words, they know the truth. It's just a matter of forcing others to accept it.

Of the mass media that made -- and makes -- Obama possible, Voegelin wrote in 1956 of "communication as intoxicant": "The spread of media mass communication... can be used as an essential indicator of the destruction of the personality. For only people whose personality is already deeply corroded will use these media as regular intoxicants....

"For me, the worst damage of mass media is not the impairment of 'morality' but the destruction of personality through intellectual confusion and vulgarization. The solution would seem to lie, not in the improvement of mass media, but in the development of alternative occupation for people who nowadays have so much time on their hands."

That's a good point, because the average American fritters away, what, 34 hours per week plugged into the matrix? This means 1) that Americans have an astonishing amount of slack, but 2) that they have no earthly idea of what to do with it. Hooked as they are to the ideological matrix, they simply become the LoFo rabble, the Mass Man who ratifies his own spiritual death via politics.

As a member of the most (over)educated generation in history, I am astonished at the utter absence of skepticism about college exhibited by my fellow boomer parents. If anyone should be cynical about the benefits of college, it should be someone who was warped by it, but again, it seems that the vast majority of these dopes have never stopped to even wonder about it.

But not only is it possible to obtain a liberal education outside the walls of academia, it has pretty much become the only way. As Voegelin wrote in 1956, "Obviously Plato and Shakespeare are clearer and more comprehensive in the understanding of man than is Dr. Jones of Cow College." And certainly Dr. Krugman of an ivy league college and a bull newspaper.

"Hence, the study of the classics is the principal instrument of self-education; and if one studies them with loving care..., one all of a sudden discovers that one's understanding of a great work increases... for the good reason that the student has increased through the process of study -- and that after all is the purpose of the enterprise. (At least it is my purpose in spending the time of my life in the study of prophets, philosophers, and saints.)" Amen to that!

In other words, the purpose of a liberal education is liberation, not in the modern sense of being liberated from human nature, from standards of decency, and from reality more generally, but in the sense that the truth sets us free, i.e., expands our subjective horizons instead of contracting them via ideology. And all ideologies contract this space, from feminism to scientism to Darwinism.

We cannot know reality exhaustively. Rather, we can only participate in it, within the luminous space of the subjective horizon. "And participation is impossible without growth in stature toward the rank of the best; and that growth is impossible unless one recognizes authority and surrenders to it."

Or in other words, if you are not constantly seeking out and surrendering to someone better than you, what are you doing here?

Well, you're probably some tenured hack who believes that all knowledge is historically conditioned. For who profits by such shameful idiolatry?

"The answer is obvious: the spiteful mediocrity which hates excellence. The argument of historical relativism is the defense of the little man against recognition of greatness."

Obama, for example, can criticize the founders for not being Marxists, so "the discomfort of discovering and admitting one's own smallness before the great is averted; and above all, the obligations arising through confrontation with greatness have disappeared."

And behind this dynamic of "personal viciousness that puts social strength" -- or political power -- "into historical relativism, there lies the much larger issue of the revolt against God and the escape into gnosticism."

TV and college: shielding the soul from reality for 60 years.

Obama's Credo: If You Can't Denounce Reality, What Can You Denounce?

Yesterday we spoke of our existential prison, in which we are seemingly bound by relativity, hierarchy, identity, and contingency: in short, we are not God, we float between the terrestrial and celestial, and we are who we are unless we are (more or less) someone else.

Of course, not everyone regards our cosmic home as a prison. There are other metaphors one could employ, for example, the Jewish idea of "exodus" (from slavery to freedom) or the closely related Christian idea of a "journey" (from man to God). There is also the Hindu/Buddhist idea of liberation from ignorance or awakening from illusion, or the SubGenius principle of increasing one's Slack.

Only the Gnostic -- in whatever form -- sees the world as a hopeless prison. Premodern gnostics attempted to escape the prison via radical transcendence, whereas modern politico-religious ones do it via radical immanence.

Looked at this way, one can appreciate the formal identity of, say, the ancient cult of Manichaeism and the modern one of Anthropocentric Global Warming.

In both cases, the cultist leaves his human limitations behind -- for he cannot tolerate the tension of living in the ambiguous transitional space of consciousness and history -- and imposes a definitive form on reality. For him, "The Beginning was a mistake to begin with and the end of the gnostic story will bring it to its End" (Voegelin).

Look how Obama, for example, keeps denouncing the very conditions he has aggravated -- e.g., unemployment, "income disparity," race relations, etc. He does this because he doesn't know any other way to engage the world except to attack it. Critique and denounce, critique and denounce, even if he is implicitly denouncing himself.

Remember a few of weeks ago, when Clinton denounced the Defense of Marriage Act that he had signed into law? Same deal. He also denounced the era of big government before he helped expand it to unprecedented size and intrusiveness by supporting Obama. Doesn't matter. He'll denounce it again when Hillary runs for president and needs to attack the future reality she helped bring into being.

Remember, it's not really the problem they attack, but reality. Who, for example, is naive enough to believe the left actually cares about racial discrimination, or education, or unemployment, or healthcare, or women?

In truth, there is always "ample reason to be dissatisfied with the order of existence" (Voegelin). We all want to improve things, but the Gnostic's "resistance to disorder transforms itself into a revolt against the very process of reality and its structure...."

And "at the extreme end of the revolt in consciousness, 'reality' and the 'Beyond' become two separate entities, two 'things,' to be magically manipulated by suffering man for the purpose of either abolishing 'reality' altogether and escaping into the 'Beyond,' or of forcing the order of the 'Beyond' into 'reality'" (ibid.).

The latter is the preferred method of modern political gnostics, and is their motive for the ceaseless critique of reality, even -- or especially -- when they are responsible for it. For example, the War on Poverty began in what, 1965? During a senate hearing, President Johnson's point man in the war, Sargent Shriver, was asked how long he thought the War would need to go on before eradicating poverty: oh, about ten years.

Instead, they have set up an ineradicable infrastructure for generating and perpetuating poverty, and with it, the assurance that they will always have that reality to attack.

It's the same with racial grievance: as soon as one differentiates group outcomes via statistics, one is assured another permanent reality to attack, for groups will always differ in outcomes.

Likewise, in a free society -- or in the absence of a totalitarian state -- income disparity will be inevitable, and so long as nature has a say in the matter, men and women will differ in fundamental ways.

Speaking of impossible realities, the remodeling pests are here again. I gotta get outta' here. To the park!

On the Nature of Our Prison

Man is obviously imprisoned, or chained to certain necessities, but people differ as to their nature. For example, in an ironic comment, Schuon said something to the effect that man is condemned to transcendence. Ho!

But for the materialist, this is utterly untrue. Rather, he is condemned to immanence -- i.e., to a completely intramundane existence -- and has no access to transcendence at all.

Which is funny, because if man really has no access to transcendence, he wouldn't even have a name for it. One might say -- no, one must say, in order to be consistent -- that if transcendence doesn't exist, man cannot know it. For to know it is to touch the very transcendence one denies.

Nevertheless, it is this question of transcendence that fundamentally divides left and right, or conservative liberals and illiberal leftists.

The question of transcendence is closely related to that of language -- or to symbolism more generally. When we were more animal than human -- remember? -- it was quite frustrating to be unable to symbolize our subjective states and communicate them to those around us.

But gradually we were inducted and plugged into our culture's symbolic matrix, which was a huge relief. No longer were we reduced to shrieking and throwing tantrums in order to get attention. In short, we were no longer leftists.

However, some people confuse this liberation with a new kind of prison. We call them "deconstructionists." True, language is a kind of prison, if you choose to look at it that way. It is clearly a limitation, just as musical scales are a limitation on sound. But if we deconstruct the scales in favor of producing random noises, is this a liberation? Or is a return to the anarchic prison from whence we came?

Just so with language. Or logic, for that matter. One can deny aristotelean logic, as does the postmodern rabble, but this only ends up creating a cognitive hell from which escape is impossible.

So yes, we are imprisoned. We have already stipulated that. I think Schuon has provided the most succinct description of the outlines of our cosmic prison. In fact, I posted on this subject about four years ago, and since I'm squeezed for time again, I think I'll just playgiarize with myself for awhile:

Schuon goes into what he calls four essential limitations or "infirmities" of the soul. The first is the Biggest, which is why it is enshrined in the First Commandment: sorry, but you are not God. You are "creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle or Being."

In fact, only the godless can be unaware of the fact that they are not God, which is probably the greatest source of their political mischief. As Obama might say, "if I had a God, he'd look like me."

Two, we are not angels. We are not celestial beings but mid-terrestrial ones. We are not at the top of the vertical hierarchy, nor are we at the bottom (unless we choose to fall even further than where we begin).

Rather, we are somewhere in the middle -- which, of course, goes to the issue of free will, as we are suspended halfway between our better and worse selves. A saint is a man who has more or less succeeded in elevating himself to the border between middle and top, or time and eternity. Thus, he is like an angel on earth.

Third, I am me and you are you. We are different. Thank God! And I mean this literally, for our individual differences -- at least for the Christian -- are not accidental or purely contingent.

Rather, our differences are essential; paradoxically, our contingency is a kind of absolute in miniature. For those of you with more than one child, this is obvious. The differences are a blessing, not a curse. Every face is unique, and yet, a member of the human family. God has counted every hair on your head. We're all different to him (which is the ultimate source of our differences, in that we are different ideas of God). And yet mankind is one.

Fourth are the differences that are not essential but contingent. These include mind parasites, which mostly result from the scars of misbegotten relationships and assimilations along the way. They are "accidental infirmities" that cause a man to either sink beneath himself or become someone else entirely. The problem with a mind parasite is that it's not you, only pretending to be. It is a difference that is peripheral, i.e., from earth (or lower), not from celestial central, i.e., the principial realm.

Now, anyone can see the bloody mayhem that results if we don't keep these categories straight. The leftist -- because he turns the cosmos upside down and inside out -- begins with #4, the wholly relative, accidental, and contingent, and then elevates it to the highest reality.

Again, this is why the Democratic party is the party of cranks, weirdos, freaks, perverts, misfits, losers, reactionary rebels, rebellious conformists, tyrannical punks, and the generally barbarous. (It also attracts -- let's be fair -- a great many basically decent but just LoFo and easily manipulated folks).

If you've followed me this far, then you will understand what Schuon means when he says that "Relativism engenders a spirit of rebellion and is at the same time its fruit. The spirit of rebellion, unlike holy anger, is not a passing state, nor is it directed at some worldly abuse; on the contrary it is a chronic malady directed toward Heaven and against everything that represents Heaven or is a reminder of it."

Tell me about it! The leftist is either in rebellion against God, and therefore human nature, or against human nature, and therefore God. Either way, he always confuses a prison break with solitary confinement for eternity. But why oh why does he want to force the rest of us to join him?

[T]he primordial and normative attitude is this: to think only in reference to what surpasses us and to live for the sake of surpassing ourselves.... Not to acknowledge what surpasses us and not to wish to surpass ourselves: this is... the very definition of Lucifer. --F. Schuon

On WTF?! is Wrong with Man: Hx, Sx, Dx, Rx, Tx

Or History, Symptoms, Diagnosis, Prescription, and Treatment. But what if the doctor is a cultural pathologist and the disease is mankind?

We begin with the perennial question asked by every person of soundmind, just WTF is wrong with man?!!!

The Bible -- i.e., Genesis -- has its answer, and it's a serviceable one as far as it goes. However, rabbis are still arguing over exactly what man did to incur his existential guilt. In fact, this is one of the pervasive themes of Finnegans Wake, popping up every few pages without ever specifying exactly what HCE is guilty of. He's guilty -- or at least guilt-ridden -- to be sure, but of what?

The whole book is an absurcular "dreamlike saga of guilt-stained... humanity," freely conflating "Lucifer's fall, Adam's fall, the setting sun that will rise again, the fall of Rome, a Wall Street crash. It is Humpty Dumpty's fall, and the fall of Newton's apple.... And it is every man's daily recurring fall from grace" (Campbell).

In these diverse examples, the one common term is fall, which is a simile borrowed from the world of three-dimensional space. In the natural world there exists gravity, which pulls objects downward. Just so, there is something clearly analogous at work in vertical space -- a kind of psychopneumatic gravity which fuels our fall. Or at least that is our preluminary hypotheosis.

Then again, modern physics has revealed that gravity is actually an effect of the curvature of space. I wonder if there is an analogous curvature in vertical space?

I know of at least one enigmatic pneumanaut who says there is, Boris Mouravieff. Can't track down the exact reference, since my books are scattered hither and yon due to the remodel. But he says something to the effect that there is a kind of entropy at work in human affairs, and that in the absence of regular jolts from the booster rocket of grace, we will find ourselves right back where we started -- as if vertical space is indeed curved.

We'll come back to this idea as soon as we get there, but pay attention to the fact that human spiritual growth can only occur in an open system -- in a system open to transcendence, precisely.

So, I wonder if it is helpful to think of the Fall as an effect of the curvature of pneumatic space? This would account for the obscure source of our guilt. In the case of HCE (a symbol of mankind, i.e., Here Comes Everybody),

"he committed an indecorous impropriety which now dogs him to the end of his life-nightmare." At times "he is said to suffer from an obscure disease, suspiciously venereal, a physiological counterpart to his pyschological taint" (bearing in mind that "venereal" is related to venus, or love; HCE seems to be guilty of loving the wrong thing[s]; could it be that his love is oriented in the wrong direction vertically?).

"Unquestionably his predicament is of the nature of Original Sin: he shares the shadowy guilt that Adam experienced after eating the apple. It is akin also to the bewilderment and confusion that paralyze Hamlet, and it is cognate with the neurotic misease of modern times" (ibid).

Ah, now we're getting somewhere, i.e., how this vertical fall manifests in contemporary dis- and misease. Campbell says that HCE "is torn between shame and aggressive self-satisfaction, conscious of himself both as bug and as man.... He is a living, aching arena of cosmic dissonance, tortured by all the cuts and thrusts of guilt and conscience." But enough about Anthony Weiner.

A recurring tribunal accuses HCE of something, but "in the last analysis, the universal judgment against HCE is but a reflection of his own obsessive guilt; and conversely, the sin which others condemn in him is but a conspicuous public example of the general, universally human, original sin, privately effective within themselves."

One is reminded of Chris Matthews' recent magninnymous apology for racism on behalf of All White People. I mean, what's this guy hiding (and not very effectively)?

But let's not lose sight of our target, the maninfestation of spiritual pathology. I mean, we're all on a spiritual path, aren't we? It's just that in some cases the path leads down into a brimrose primstone lane of pathology. Apparently this latter path is wide and broad, while the other is small and narrow.

I think Voegelin was, above all else, a kind of historical, cultural, political, and anthropological pathologist. He recognized that "it is a matter of life and death for all of us to understand the phenomenon" of this pathology, "and to find remedies against it before it destroys us" (Voegelin).

In our day, the pneumopathology -- the vertical fall away from the transcendent order -- primarily appears in the from of ideology:

"Ideology is existence in rebellion against God and man." Conversely, philosophy -- or mental and spiritual health -- "is the love of being through the love of divine Being as the source of its order. The Logos of being is the object proper of philosophical inquiry; and the search for truth concerning the order of being cannot be conducted without diagnosing the modes of existence in untruth" (emphasis mine).

Why the emphasis, Bob? Because "the movement toward truth starts from man's awareness of his existence in untruth" -- one might say awareness of his fallen existence. But in any event, "the diagnostic [Dx] and therapeutic [Tx] functions are inseparable..."

To put it another way, just about any comprehensive history book on most any subject will inform the would-be pathologist that the patient, man, is sick. And the sickness always involves untruth, say, the systematic untruths of Marxism, or fascism, or National Socialism, or scientism, or positivism, or leftism, or Islamism (the latter with some modifications due to its foe-religious trappings).

The symptoms of this illness include distrust, envy, alienation, ingratitude, rage, entitlement, oppression, auto-victimization, and denial of nature, man, and God (these latter three forming a naturally supernatural trinity -- i.e., man is a kind of middle term who is always dialectically related to nature and God).

And the treatment for each of these involves turning around and facing up and out (toward the transcendent order) instead of down and in (to a world of pure -- and therefore meaningless -- immanence).

To be continued...

I Am Obama, Destroyer of Slack!

Squeezed for time.

What does that even mean?

It means first of all that man has free will, because insight into necessity proves it. And as necessity crowds out freedom, time is transformed into something merely to be endured. At best it is neutral duration; at worst it is dread.

However, most people seem to experience dread at the other end of the temporal spectrum, when they have too much time and therefore freedom -- one might also say being. No, I can't relate to these types, but I do understand them, because there is no question that doing is one of man's primary defenses against being.

But the latter can't really be being, can it? I say this because we are assured that being is good. Only a true Gnostic believes otherwise, but if such a person has the experience of maleficent being, the maleficence must be in the self, not in being.

No wonder then that these types habitually try to escape the self via doing, or that a substantial number of them become ideologists, activists, and other existential pests. Activism is to ideology as non-doodling is to being. The activist is forever trying to put us out of his misery. It is what the left does.

Obama for example, has made a fortune from his warped version of "public service," to such an extent that he need never -- in his private life -- be compelled to do anything he doesn't choose to. In other words, for him, there are no external constraints on his freedom (barring physical threats from his bitchier half). Why then is he so interested -- obsessed -- with limiting ours? Exactly what is going in in the heart of such a disordered person?

Obama doesn't have to worry about the cost of his own healthcare. But because of him, I am robbed of freedom -- i.e., I have to work more -- because I have to earn more money to pay for the type of insurance he compels me to have.

It reminds me of the classic essay by William Graham Sumner, On the Case of a Certain Man Who Is Never Thought Of:

"The type and formula of most schemes of philanthropy or humanitarianism is this: A and B put their heads together to decide what C shall be made to do for D."

In other words, be-badding liberal do-gooders get together in order to decide what I must be forced to do in order to appease their conscience and make them feel good about themselves. Or, they want to eliminate a portion of my slack in order to give it to people who have no idea what to do with it.

In this context, remember what was said above about the maleficent being of these individuals, who attempt through "activism" to transform their own inner darkness into light.

No, it never works. I mean, imagine Anthony Weiner, or Eliot Spitzer, or Bill Clinton -- men who have failed the rudimentary step of governing themselves -- presuming to govern the rest of us! Just on a common sense level, does anyone doubt that Weiner isn't so much running for something as running away from himself? Wouldn't you?

Sumner: "The radical vice of these schemes... is that C is not allowed a voice in the matter, and his position, character, and interests... are entirely overlooked. I call C the Forgotten Man" (which is of course where Shlaes got the title for her excellent book).

This has the perverse effect of slowly transforming the United States from the land of the free to the land of the compelled. But freedom is simply not a value of the left. Rather, equality -- which is at antipodes to freedom -- is. Obviously, equality -- i.e., equal outcomes -- can only be imposed. The left's central delusion is that everything should be equally distributed, whereas in reality, nothing is.

Back to time and being, necessity and freedom. Voegelin observes that such terms will be reduced to nonsense if we forget that they "explicate a tension of existence, and are not concepts denoting objects."

He goes on to say that "There is no such thing as a 'man' who participates in 'being' as if it were some enterprise that he could as well leave alone..." True, we can have more or less being, but the limiting factor is on the side of man, since being is always being.

We are familiar with the apophatic idea that everything we can positively affirm of God must be wrong, so that the least inaccurate approach is to say what God is not.

But in a sense, the same thing applies to man, for "At the center of his existence man is unknown to himself and must remain so, for the part of being that calls itself man could be known fully only if the community of being and its drama in time were known as a whole" (i.e., at the "end" of history, when time has exhaustively disclosed itself).

But "man's partnership in being is the essence of his existence, and this essence depends on the whole [O], of which existence is a part." And "knowledge of the whole" is obviously precluded, for we are not God -- even if we cannot avoid being in permanent dynamic tension with God.

So, this is all by way of saying that I'm squeezed for time and therefore don't have enough freedom to radiate a post from being central.

(A related essay by on the slack shortage created by the left.)

Compulsory Utopia and the Lunar Eclipse of Reality

About the "inverse esoterism" of the left. In the real world, vertical space is characterized by the descending and ascending energies we call (↓) and (↑) -- or just say grace and effort, if you want to keep the arrows out of it.

But the purpose of the arrow symbols is to avoid saturating the space with concepts, so as to keep it clear for the acquisition of experience. In other words, the concept of "grace" is based upon an experience that billions of human beings have had. But if one concretizes the word, then one's preconceptions can actually interfere with, or eclipse, the experience.

More generally, everything about religion was originally rooted in experience. Or, put conversely, nothing about it should be inaccessible in principle to experience -- at least someone's experience.

For example, I am not personally a saint. But I am utterly convinced that some people are -- that they have undergone the process of sanctification to its further reaches. And even leaving the existence of the saints aside, we can all have the experience of the sacred -- or of purity, or of holiness -- so we have only to imagine what it would be like to more or less be in that space all the time.

Reality is what persists even if one doesn't believe it. Therefore, if the vertical dynamism of (↓↑) is real, it cannot disappear just because some ideologue refuses to acknowledge it. Thus, in the words of Niemeyer -- an acolyte of Voegelin who some say understood Voegelin better than Voegelin --

"Ideological activism, then, presupposes certain intellectual and spiritual movements which can be seen as two, going in opposite directions."

Fascinating. Tell me more.

"Ontologically, the first of these movements denies reality to the given world of experience and proclaims the reality of a phantasmal realm."

This is what we might call "false ↑," in that it is formally quite similar to the religious person's recognition that there is something wrong with the world, and by extension, himself. Thus, it sponsors the urge to transcend both self and world -- or to be in the world but not of it.

But the leftist reverses things: he is still proudly of the world, but no longer in it. Rather, he is now -- without realizing it, of course -- in philosophical fairyland, relaxing in the comfort and safety of his own ideological delusions.

Now, if he would only stay there, he wouldn't be such a pest. But just as comedians secretly long to do drama, tenured activists -- or the media-politico-academic industrial complex -- aren't content to orally gratify one another, but want to screw around with the rest of us.

In short, there is the matter of that second arrow, (↓). What happens to it? Niemeyer: "the second movement pulls norms pertaining to the phantasmal realm and its present unreality into the world of experience and orients activities by them."

D'oh!

It's the difference between evangelizing and compelling, or between religious freedom and tyranny. Say what you want about my jehovial witticisms, but when I knock on your door -- or rather, you on mine -- I don't drag you in and force you at gunpoint to accept my worldview.

Not so the meddling ↓deologue, who wants to rearrange your world -- and your head -- down to the last detail. Every hair on your head is counted -- and that's a threat!

You see, the leftist's (↑) has given him a special insight into the nature of reality and the destination of history, so it would be cruel and uncompassionate for him to deny us the benefit -- the grace (↓) -- of his vision.

Note that the leftist's orientation is the precise opposite of philosophy. True philosophy involves a love of both reality and truth, i.e., it is "philo-ontic" even prior to being philo-sophic.

But ideology is miso-ontic and therefore miso-sophic -- always involving hatred of the existing world and possession of its secret truth. And if you do not know the secret -- which you obviously don't, or you wouldn't understand this blog -- it is only because you have been brainwashed by -- by whatever is expedient, e.g., the patriarchy, white privilege, heteronormativity, imperialism, Christianism, etc.

In other words, the leftist -- as always! -- accuses others of precisely what he engages in, which is to say, eclipsing reality by escaping into ideology.

In the western tradition, politics is "a matter of action within a world which [man] knows not to have made himself" (ibid.). But the ideologue "fancies himself engaged in making a world that so far has not had any being. Teleologically speaking, political practice is switched from the time dimension of the present" toward "the making of a preknown future."

Therefore, from the warped perspective of these pestilent Emissaries of the Future, "the present is something to be removed" in favor of "the phantasmal future whose origin is in the maker" -- the human maker.

You can't say Obama didn't warn us: on the eve of the 2008 election he told us to prepare ourselves for a fundamental transformation of the United States.

Bottom line: we hold very different truths to be self-evident, i.e., those of the founders at the beginning vs. those of the gnostics at the end of history. For the gnostics, the founders are just old (and white and male and European and rich) and in the way.

As a last asnide, the idea that human beings may gang together in the form of a state and redeem history on their own might be the most impressively pathological one in man's cognitive toolbox. It has certainly been the most deadly.

Related: "There is a puzzle before us. We are at the beginning. What are the steps to re-instill an aspirational and moral culture to all our people?... And how do we keep the vandals from ever-scrambling our efforts?

".... [P]erhaps we will have to teeter at the abyss before there can be an American Awakening.... A rejection of the addiction of dependency. An embrace that all your neighbors and countrymen are at Liberty to pursue their own happiness without your interference...."

Bob's Famous "I Have a Reality" Speech

I am always struck by the inverse parallels between leftism and legitimate religion. Man's nature is to be religious, and he cannot rid himself of this orientation, any more than a fish can rid himself of water and still presume to swim. We've all got it in us, but it just comes out in perverse ways in those obnoxious, irreligious weiners.

To quote Schuon, just as "the wings of birds prove the existence of air," man's religious response "proves the existence of its content" (in a proportionate way, of course, conforming to the intrinsic nature of the Mystery; we are not suggesting that religion poses no challenges at all!).

For a normal person, the shadow of a cat will spontaneously "prove the presence of the real cat" -- even if the cat is not seen -- so the crank who demands proof is frankly a little off. He's missing something that is beyond obvious for the vast majority of human beings. But if he wants to spend his life trying to prove cats don't exist, go right ahead. After all, the creator gave us free will.

For example, who is more moralistic than the leftist scold who pretends all morality is relative? In Between Nothingness and Paradise, Niemeyer quotes Lenin, who wrote that for the communist, "morality is entirely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle," and defined by "that which serves to destroy the old exploiting society..."

With these irreligious religious principles in mind, we can understand the inverted morality of the left, for example, vis-a-vis the George Zimmerman case.

For the leftist, morality is deduced from the class struggle -- or, in more contemporary terms, from the distinction between victims and white privilege. As such, the logic of deduction demands that the victim -- Zimmerman -- be transformed into an intrinsically guilty "white" person, and that the thuggressor -- Martin -- be transformed into an innocent child.

This is obviously a perversion of universal principles of morality, which apply to particular acts, not to universal groups. In other words, the left sneaks the principle of universality -- and absoluteness -- into the group (which doesn't even exist in any concrete or homogeneous way). I don't exonerate Zimmerman because he is a "white Hispanic," but because there can be no natural law more natural than defending oneself from a vicious human animal pounding one's skull into the pavement.

In the real world, the most dangerous place for a black child is in his mother's womb, and the second most dangerous place is among other black (male) children and young men. But these are empirical and statistical observations that cannot be deduced from leftist principles. Indeed, they are hatefacts (I believe coined by Greg Gutfeld), so to notice them is to expose oneself as a hater. It's so easy to be a leftist!

But this is what the ideologist does more generally: that is, deduce reality from his principles, instead of actually experiencing reality. This is a constant danger to human beings, because we are indeed situated in the space between the empirical world and general principles. It is easy to default in one direction or the other, but to succeed in doing so is to eclipse experience.

This applies not just to the left per se, but to all ideologies, say, Darwinism. Anyone can see the partial truth of natural selection, but what spiritually normal person can take the vast leap of faith required to elevate Darwinism to a total explanation and thereby contract the horizons of subjectivity to a virtual nothing? By comparison, faith in the Incarnation is just a step away, requiring no great leap over chasms of contradictory data and experience.

I was thinking too of how the left inverts the great Nothing at the heart of the cosmos. What this means is that the left doesn't just mimic the exoteric aspects of religion, but even -- or perhaps especially -- the esoteric.

In fact, one might say that genuine religion is esoteric by implication, whereas leftism is esoteric in principle, deriving its exoterism -- i.e., activism -- by deduction. This goes along with Voegelin's (among many others) observation that ideologies are modern forms of Gnosticism that always vouchsoph a hidden knowledge about the secret order of the world.

The progressive, for example, presumes to know the direction of history (even though his materialism forbids the existence of any transcendent goal or purpose). At any rate, the idea that one may tell truth from a calendar is so 19th century! Nevertheless, it doesn't stop the left from, for example, redefining marriage based upon their special insight into the direction of history.

Note also that the left, because it overvalues a narrow kind of surface cognition, relies upon the "ignorance" of realities so deep that it is difficult to put them into words. For example, until the last couple of decades, no one thought it necessary to explain why marriage is limited to members of the opposite sex.

If every cultural institution needs to be exhaustively explained and defended, then nothing can be so explained and defended -- certainly not "homosexual marriage"! But that is another hatefact, because leftist moral deduction again demands that existing structures of exploitation -- AKA the real world -- be abolished.

About that great Nothing alluded to above. Oscar Milosz had the proper sense of it, writing of how modern man has repudiated this transcendent No-thing, the "only intelligible container of a universe which is as free and as pure as God's thought, the Nothing superior to any notion of finite and infinite" (quoted in Caldecott).

For the apophatheads the left, the real being of the world is located in the future they wish to bring about. Meanwhile, there is just non-being and alienation from that blissful state -- e.g., the "black alienation" described by Obama in last week's infantile discourse on race (no offense to infants).

This sets up the present world as a kind of bad nothing, for which reason, say, Michelle Obama could honestly affirm that her very first experience of being proud of America occurred with her husband's political success in 2008. Prior to that? Nothing.

But this is what happens when one rejects existing reality for possible ones. Martin Luther King had a dream. But he also had a reality.

For Marx, man is labor. This is a rather startling and nightmarish inversion of the Raccoon view that man is ultimately slack, which is at antipodes to labor. Rather, it is an end in itself, and therefore a means to nothing.

For the Raccoon, the most useful things are the most useless -- like this post -- having no purpose or utility but to perhaps dilate the present moment and open out into the great wide Nothing-Everything. I mean, if you can't enjoy the now, then what -- and when -- can you enjoy?

Which reminds me. They used to say the aristocracy lives for the past, the bourgeois for the future, and the lower classes for the now. But contemporary leftwing success depends upon alienating everyone from the now, and instead living for the impossible Sugar Candy Mountain of the future. Like Obamacare, the dream must be deferred, on pain of revealing itself for the nightmare it is in the present.

Oases of Slack in the Ideological Desert

I find myself in that neutral blandscape between what I had been blogging about and what I will be or could be blogging about, but with no impulsion to proceed one way or the other.

In fact, "impulsion" is the wrong word, because it only works when it is an attraction. Trying to push one's way in is like trying to press Jello through a small hole -- a hole called the present. I long ago gave up trying to do that. Much easier to be sucked up and in through the hole.

Also, we're still being plagued by the Great Remodeling. Might seem like a small thing to you, but I can't even enter my own liberatoreum today because the hazmat pests are removing the cottage cheese ceiling (which apparently contains an infinitesimal amount of asbestos). Had to remove every last object from the Divine Orifice -- the sacred omphalos of Upper Tonga -- which is beyond overkill, but this is California. I'm sure it's more dangerous walking to the mailbox and exposing oneself to the sun.

So I'm sitting here in utterly unfamiliar blogging territory, at the dining room table, and it's just not the same.

I know. First World Problems.

Every day I have to start all over, but at least there's a trace of continuity. Then again, this condition of wandering in the bewilderness is a permanent feature of human existence in tension toward the divine ground, as Voegelin puts it. I read his Autobiographical Reflections over the weekend, and he says that the essential task of philosophy -- real, literal philosophy -- is to live in the erotic tension toward transcendent wisdom:

"The center of consciousness I found to be the experience of participation, meaning thereby the reality of being in contact with reality outside myself." Thus, human consciousness "is neither in the subject nor in the world of objects but In-Between, and that means In-Between the poles of man and the reality that he experiences."

This obviously cannot be explained by -- or reduced to -- biology, because this mysterious "place" is nowhere to be found in the physical world. Rather, it is specifically in between a physical world and a world of pure transcendence at the other end. Thus the soul is the loving "sensorium of transcendence" (i.e., a love directed toward the transcendent ground).

In the past I have referred to this as the "transitional space" (coined by the psychoanalyst D. W. Winnicott), and it is the discovery, colonization, and expansion of this space that characterizes our human journey -- or exodeus -- through the bewilderness.

The bewilderness -- the desert, if you like -- is this very space, and one cannot collapse this space without cashing in one's humanness to one degree or another. It is always "dehumanizing" to do so, but that hardly stops humans from doing it.

And in our day, the principle way to do it is via ideology, e.g., positivism, scientism, leftism, Darwinism, or any other dogma that freezes us at one end or the other of this Great Divide where all the light gets in.

One cannot turn this space into an object or system, as much as man tries to do so. Rather, it is "a flow of participatory reality in which reality becomes luminous to itself" (Voegelin). Nowhere else but here can the light be seen -- or participated in, to be precise.

What is so shocking is that this mysterious space is ordered. Why should it be ordered? I would say for the same reason we discover order at the levels of physics and biology. "By order," writes Voegelin, "is meant the structure of reality as experienced as well as the attunement of man to an order that is not of his making, i.e., the cosmic order."

To exist outside this order is to exist in a state of alienation, and the purpose of ideology is to "cure" this alienation in a way that only perpetuates itself (which is why, for example, leftism can never work, especially to the extent that it works). Alienation from the divine ground -- or logos -- is not only a "withdrawal from oneself" but "from reason in existence," so no manmade system can put the truthpaste back into the tube.

One who tries to do so must inevitably "arrive at the death of God, not because God is dead but because divine reason has been rejected in the egophanic revolt" -- the latter defined as "defiant self assertion claiming independence from a transcendent ground."

Which would be fine, if the ideologues would simply leave us alone. But "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind" can see that we are "hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language..."

And one "cannot deal with the users of ideological language as partners in a discussion" -- i.e., you can't reason with a liberal. Rather, one can only "make them the object of investigation" (and insultainment, I might add).

We may take comfort in the fact that this is hardly the first time in history that "language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it can no longer be used for expressing the truth of existence" (ibid). Moreover, "there are always enclaves" where one may continue the journey despite "the intellectual terrorism of institutions such as the mass media, university departments, foundations, and commercial publishing houses."

To paraphrase Voegelin, no one -- at least in the west -- is obligated to participate in the aberrations, disorders, deformities, and perversions of his day. But it's a constant struggle against the hostile, infrahuman forces that would compel us to do so.