On the Annoying Gap Between God and Man

If I am not mistaken -- it's been awhile since Brain Anatomy 101 -- our neurons don't actually touch. Despite the fact that our skull is packed with some 100 billion of them, there is still enough space for a tiny space between each one, called the synaptic gap (or cleft). Neurons actually communicate with each other by spitting a chemical into the synapse -- called a neurotransmitter -- while the neuron on the other end sucks it up.

Now, aren't you glad human beings don't communicate that way?

I suppose we sometimes do, as with pheromones. For example, they say that baby pheromones have a powerful effect on maternal behavior.

Ants apparently do something similar. I don't imagine there is much information in the signal -- maybe "picnic over there" or "check out the asshole with the garden hose." (About eight years ago I wrote a long-forgotten post on the similarities between ant and liberal communication.)

But then, neurons don't pass along much information either. There aren't all that many neurotransmitters, and besides, like digital code, they only have two possible messages: excite or inhibit, i.e., fire or don't fire.

How this results in consciousness is anyone's guess. Mine is that it doesn't. That is to say, brain activity -- and even brains -- is ultimately an effect of intelligence, not its cause. Similarly, a computer can't program itself, and if we leave it alone, it's not as if it will eventually grow hands and blunder itself into self-consciousness.

This is all by way of prelude, waiting for the coffee to squeeze some adrenaline into my synaptic gaps. While we listen for that sucking sound in my axons, let's reflect upon a famous image, and see if it has anything to do with this post:

As you can see, despite the fact that God is by definition "everywhere," there is nevertheless a visible synaptic gap between God and man. What goes on within that gap?

Well, religion, for starters. There is also a gap between the world and the senses, and science is what takes place within this gap. For that matter, there is a gap between persons, and this gap is filled with anything from love to knowledge to touch to whatever.

So, gaps are everywhere. For example, history fills the gap between past and present. Likewise, one of my primary hobbies is filling the gap between ear and atmosphere with arresting sound vibrations, AKA music.

Back to the religious gap. That this gap exists is beyond dispute. One doesn't necessarily have to fill it with religion per se, but one must fill it with something. By way of analogy, it needn't necessarily be truth, but everyone has something in his head, even if it is unalloyed BS.

Viewed in a purely abstract manner, the religious gap is a result of the distinction between relative and Absolute. Therefore, the gap is essentially necessary, in that we know we are relative, i.e., contingent, and relative implies Absolute just as contingency implies necessity.

Now that I think about it, this same gap accounts for our free will -- it is the space in which freedom occurs -- which is why the question of freedom is intrinsically bound up with the question of God. At Grandma's birthday party this weekend, I attempted to explain this principle to a couple of relatives, to no avail. Indeed, despite the fact that they are Jewish, they could not appreciate the remarkable parallel between Exodus and the Gap. For what is wandering in the bewilderness but life in the divine-human gap?

In this little book of flaming homilies on the subject of creation, Ratzinger writes of how the biblical account of cosmogenesis makes it impossible to think of the world as a closed and self-sufficient system. Rather, it has a source beyond itself. As a result, the Most Important Things can't be understood without reference to this Source.

This is, of course, a binary question: either the cosmos is created or it is not created, and therefore dependent or independent, closed or open, static or evolving. There is no "in between." (Come to think of it, I also tried to explain to the same two individuals why evolution, i.e., to higher states, is impossible in a materialistic cosmos, but no luck.)

The following passage by Ratzinger is relevant: "The Bible is thus the story of God's struggle with human beings to make himself understandable to them over the course of time."

This implies that the gap cannot be filled -- or at least was not filled -- in an all-at-once manner. Indeed, if it could be so filled, then it wouldn't be a gap at all. The existence of the gap implies the need for both space and time -- an evolutionary space, as it were -- to fill it.

On a macro level, God can't very well make himself understood by pre-human animals. And once human beings are here, he can't very well make himself known by, say, a book, since they first have to learn how to read. And write.

So there is God's side of the gap; there is also the human side, for which reason the Bible "is also the story of their struggle to seize hold of God over the course of time."

The most abstract possible way to depict this gap is like so: (⇅). If Michelangelo had had access to the ancient Raccoon wisdom, he would have painted little arrows between the index fingers of God and Adam. Oh well, nobody's perfect.

Therefore, the story of creation is not just a once-upon-a-time deal, but rather, is ongoing. You might say that man is the creature that carries on the creation. Thus, human existence is a gift that keeps giving. But only if we open God's presence in the gap.

The Hebrew Bible tracks the journey of God's people through time and history: "indeed, the whole Old Testament is a journeying with the word of God." It is a step-by-step process, at first quite concretely so, e.g., "go to the land I will show you."

Where we depart from our Jewish friends is in seeing a continuation of this journey toward a Person. As Ratzinger describes it, scripture reveals, "in its totality, an advance toward Christ."

Thus, like any narrative, the meaning of everything that has come before is only revealed at the end: "every individual part derives its meaning from the whole, and the whole derives its meaning from the end -- from Christ."

The preliminary bottom line this morning is that by definition, the Gap cannot be filled from our side, no matter how much (↑) we pour into it -- or how much (k) we flood the zone with.

But it seems that the same goes for God. No matter how much (↓) he pours in, it is never enough, especially if we are to retain our free will. This is why no amount of knowledge, no matter how sublime, turns us into God (i.e., the Gnostic temptation), for we are always limited by our relativity.

"Perhaps there's another way," said God to himselves. "One of us ought to go down there and actually embody the Gap."

"It's crazy," said the Holy Spirit, "but it might just work."

"Any volunteers?"

Pictures of God, Man, and Everything

Very often, like yesterday, I start off writing a post, and it takes me down a completely unintended path. I never have any real idea what's going to come out, but I usually at least start with the seed of an idea. But then it's as if the seed grows into a different plant.

Which again makes me think that the mind must conform to some sort of higher organizing principle, so long as we abandon ourselves to it. In a certain sense this is a banality, but I don't think I mean it in the banal sense.

In other words, we're not just talking about familiar concepts such as "human nature," or "archetypes," or the old idea of "humours." Those are all too static and repetitive, whereas this is a creative process that ceaselessly generates patterned novelty. Who or what exerts the pattern on our random vertical walk? What makes it all cohere around a center?

These patterns aren't like those, say, of a cherished rug that pulls the room together, or the logocentric designs cranked out by the Mohammedans. Check some of those out; many could be stunning representations of O, such as:

The other day I yoinked a bunch of arresting fractal could-be images of O for future use, such as the one below:

I feel like the Richard Dreyfus character in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Except this would be close encounters with a kind of threeness, i.e., the Center, the Periphery, and the crackling Radius, AKA Father-Son-Holy Spirit chasing itsoph. The radius is where the (⇅) occurs. You can see how God writes straight with those crooked lines converging on the center.

But of all the images I swiped, my favorite -- the one to which I am most attracted -- might be the one depicted below:

I don't mean aesthetically attracted, but intellectually attracted, for it looks to me like a representation of the human situation.

There are the vertical spaces above and below, with us situated in the middle. Or, you could say heaven above and hell below, with Middle Earth in between. Whatever the case may be, there is a supra-conscious and an un- or infraconscious. Or better, infrahuman.

Except it's not static but dynamic and flowing. The center area is the place of metabolism, with energies flowing up and down. We're always receiving promptings from the unconscious. But we're also always receiving murmurandoms from above. It is for us to weave these together for a full and fruitful incarnation.

Some have suggested that this is the esoteric meaning of space voyager Genesis 1, where the great imagineer divides the waters above from the waters below. If he hadn't done this, then the water would simply seek its own level, and there would be no vertical flow, just the absurcular dog-paddling of the tenured.

Below is another suitable image of what I like to call the Great Attractor, O, drawing us up into its ether orbit:

Or how about the oversized one below, which might be the view from within the attractor beam -- perhaps of the Dark Night of the Soul and the Light at the end of the funnel of love:

I think Wanda is actually referring to that other centripetal funnel -- you know, the funnel of lust:

Well, I'd better complete some work-work before the day is truncated by the birthday party for Grandma.

Credulity and Faith in God and Man

So, if we are on the right track, a properly exercised faith is not any kind of denial of reality, but rather, the opposite: the quintessential acceptance of the Real and all it entails. Nor is it necessarily any kind of superficial joyrood, for we cannot know ahead of time what we are consenting to.

This is like most anything else. For example, when one says Yes to marriage in the presence of God and man, one cannot possibly know what one is signing up for. Rather, faith, both horizontal and vertical, spouse and vow, is an intrinsic part of the deal. I suppose that's why they call it being faithful.

It is the same with regard to choosing a career or pursuing a discipline. More generally, there would be no reason to get out of bed in the morning in the absence of faith.

In this regard, it seems that faith is phenomenologically related to hope. Therefore, faithlessness would apparently correspond to a kind of total cynicism: nothing to trust and no reason to trust it. Except, of course, for a total faith in the power of one's own corrosive cynicism.

As we have said before, the typical leftist somehow combines a childlike credulousness with an omniscient cynicism. It is specifically this combination of traits that made possible President Malevolent Cipher. The same ruthless cynicism that couldn't stop itself from preposterous attacks on George Bush turned into its seeming opposite, an innocent and childish faith in his successor.

As I wrote once upon a post, "contemporary philosophy does not begin with a sense of wonder, nor does it attempt to cultivate it. Rather, it begins with the capacity to doubt, and then aggravates it, eventually turning a good servant into a tyrannical master, for there is nothing that cannot be doubted by doubt. It takes no wisdom or skill at all. Any buffoon with a capacity to doubt is already pre-approved for tenure."

Josef Pieper writes of the orthoparadox that "Man is true to himself only when he is stretching forth -- in hope -- toward a fulfillment that cannot be reached in his bodily existence.” This paradox essentially revolves around the complementarity of being and becoming: or of Is and Ought, potential and fulfillment, time and eternity.

Life Itself is an audacious act of hope in the teeth of cosmic hopelessness. We might have well asked that first bit of matter that wrapped around itself and decided to go on being: just what are you hoping to accomplish here?

It seems that we have no right to horizontal hope -- or hope in history -- in the absence of a vertical hope for real fulfillment and genuine wholeness. Indeed, a purely horizontal hope is the very basis of the world-historical nightmares of the previous enlightened century. I don't think it is possible to place more hope in history than did the communist or national socialist, nor is it possible to bring about more radical change than they did.

Why hope? On what basis? Again, returning to the idea of life-as-hope, what is it hoping to accomplish? Is there an end game, an exist strategy, or is it just making things up as it grows along?

So long as one limits oneself to the horizontal perspective, there can be no purpose whatsoever in life. Someone like Jacques Monod was ruthlessly but refreshingly candid about this. "His thesis," writes Ratzinger, "is that the entire ensemble of nature has arisen out of errors and dissonances." Except that one.

Here is the purest possible example of the impossible doctrine of absolute relativity, i.e., the random error called Jacques Monod somehow having the ability to know ultimate truth. How it is possible for absolute contingency to pronounce on absolute necessity is wisely left unsaid. But if Monod's belief were true, it couldn't be known.

Interestingly, Monod (according to Ratzinger) rejects a priori any question to which the answer would be "God." Turning it around, this would also mean that the very idea of God can answer no legitimate questions. If it does, then there is something wrong with the question or questioner.

I don't know. That's an awful lot of faith to place in a meaningless cosmic accident. Could man really live in this kind of negative faith? Not if Life Itself is a hope for something transcending it, for how much more is the soul intrinsically oriented to that which surpasses it?

Among other arbitrary metaphysical errors, Monod is committed a priori to a monadic view of reality. But reality is not fundamentally a monad, Monod. Rather, it is fundamentally a relationship. There is nothing beyond, nothing more elemental, than Relation.

Our verticality makes this especially clear, since verticality is intrinsically oriented to the Great Beyond, O. Thus, man is man because he has an intrinsic relation to O. Yes, we are also oriented to the empirical world, but no man stays down there, except someone with severe autism or some tragic graduate school degree.

To quote Ratzinger, "God means, first of all, that human beings cannot be closed in on themselves." However, I believe this can be turned around to say: because human beings are not closed in on themselves, therefore God. In other words, God is the very possibility of our self-evident transcendence, both its origin and it destiny.

"God implies relationality," says Ratzinger. "It is the dynamic that sets the human being in motion toward the totally Other. Hence it means the capacity for relationship.... Human beings are, as a consequence, most profoundly human when they step out of themselves..."

To put in another why, God is indeed the only possible answer to the question, "how is it that human beings live in this vertical space of transcendent truth?"

Contrary to Monod, there is no serious question of this nature to which the answer could possibly be "natural selection," or "physics," or "biology." And in any event, the vertical questioner always transcends the horizontal answer.

This means that in him alone appears the complete answer to the question about what the human being is.... human persons are beings en route, beings characterized by transition. They are not yet themselves; they must ultimately become themselves.... They are oriented toward their future, and only it permits who they really are to appear completely. --Josef (then) Cardinal Ratzinger

Common Corpus or Common Corpse

We've been exploring the controversial notion that "knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation" to reality -- i.e., that man may know the truth of existence.

There are any number of alternatives to this soph-evident truth, but they all necessarily redound to the elevation of cosmic stupidity to first principle. It would mean that the only thing man may know with certainty is that he doesn't truly know anything at all. This stance could be encrapsulated in a kind of inverse (Cartesian) cogito: I cannot know, therefore nothing is.

And this "nothing," of course, includes the self who is putting forth the cogito, for as any tenured neurologist can tell you, there is no such thing as a self.

Speaking of which, a couple of days ago the WSJ had a review of a book called Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Now, right away I see problems with that title, because there can be no "science" of the "self," and because science deals only with the How, not the Why. A better title might be something like "Why Science Cannot Tell Us Anything Important About the Self," but it would be a blank book.

The author evidently searches for herself in all the wrong places, including her genes, brainscans, personality tests, and more. But as the reviewer correctly points out, "even if we could measure every atom in a brain, we would need creativity and ingenuity to add a layer of interpretation to the data, and complete comprehension would still remain beyond us."

Thus, even the most complete possible science is infinitely distant from the "object" it is attempting to comprehend. (Recall what we said yesterday about jettisoning subjectivity at the outset, and never being able to recover it.)

This isn't at all surprising, because a scientific approach to the self is like counting the digital bits in a CD to try to understand the performance it encodes. The performance by definition not only transcends the bits, but is their sufficient reason. In other words, the bits exist for the sake of the performance, not vice versa.

In her final chapter, the author suggests that self-perception may be a fiction -- a conclusion that will shock anyone who is completely bereft of personal insight. But self-deception only exists because there is a self to be deceived.

The author confesses that, in her quest for a scientific explanation of the self, she veered "dangerously close at times to the precipice of philosophy."

Oh dear! Speaking of people who are bereft of insight, how can someone fail to understand that science becomes a philosophy -- a naive philosophy called scientism -- when it tries to transform a method into a doctrine?

The self partakes of both universality and particularity. In other words, we are all unique individuals, and yet, there exist self-evident truths available to all functioning adults. Much of this has to do with our embodied-ness, that is, our common corpus. We all have the same five senses, the same brain structure, the same developmental sequence.

Which raises some interesting questions about the possibility of a "common core." This subject has become controversial, because the left wants to impose its common crap on the nation's children, even while insisting there is no common human nature. Therefore, when they say "common core," what they really mean is indoctrination -- not what all humans can know, but what all humans must know in order to be compliant subjects of the State (the one Great Body we really have in common).

A recent Hillsdale Imprimus touches on this subject. In it, Larry Arnn writes that a "true core" would have a "unifying principle, such as the idea that there is a right way to live that one can come to know."

But the leftist common core has precisely the opposite purpose: multiculturalism, for example, is founded upon the principle that all cultures are equally beautiful except ours, which is uniquely racist, misogynistic, imperialist, and homophobic.

Aren't you being a little polemical, Bob? Well, Arnn cites a passage from the Teacher's Guide for Advanced Placement, which tells us that such antiquated terms as "objectivity" and "factuality" have "lost their preeminence." Rather, instruction is "less a matter of transmittal of an objective and culturally sanctioned body of knowledge, and more a matter of helping individuals learn to construct their own realities."

Oh. Who knew we had to be taught how to live in our own realities? And who knew, for that matter, that reality had a plural? Indeed, if it has a plural form, doesn't that violate its own definition? In short, if "perception is reality," then neither of these terms exist, because in equating them they lose all meaning. In other words, perception must be of reality, and reality is what is perceived.

So, if we are going to have a "common core," I propose that it shouldn't exclude reality. Rather, I suspect that this thing called "reality" is what human beings have most in common.

This is because man is a kind of membrain between intelligence and reality. Ultimately, man is the point of contact between two spheres or dimensions.

In reading this short book on the apostle Paul, we are reminded that -- speaking of our cultural heritage -- "the lid covering the Ark of the Covenant... was considered the point of contact between God and man." Later, a sect of deviant Jews would come to regard Jesus as this point of contact, in whom we could participate in the Absolute reality. Interestingly, this is truly a "common corpus," AKA Corpus Christi.

This point of contact is actually a kind of abyss. In the absence of God, then it is the abyss of nothingness, with no possibility of a common core.

But in reality, this is an "abyss of divine goodness," and by plunging into it we are drawn up into the Great Attractor which we all share in common. In this sense, faith is a kind of conformity to reality, a cosmic Yes, whereas the faithlessness of the left is a cosmic NO! to God, to Man, and to the fertile reality in between.

Half a Truth is No Better than None

We ended yesterday's post wondering about That to which intelligence must be an adequation. The only adequate answer can be to truth, to reality, to being. Otherwise, what we call intelligence is an inexplicable cosmic indulgence of no significance at all, maybe even a dirty genetic trick. Whitehead had a good line about that... let's see if I can find it.

By the way, for a guy who wrote the unwieldy Process and Reality, Whitehead sure came up with a lot of memorable wisecracks. Would it really have been asking too much for him to write his magnum opus in the same pithy manner?

Not ignorance, but ignorance of ignorance is the death of knowledge.

It requires a very unusual mind to undertake the analysis of the obvious.

The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.

We think in generalities, but we live in details.

The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order.

Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them.

Religion is the vision of something which stands beyond, behind, and within, the passing flux of immediate things; something which is real, and yet waiting to be realized; something which is a remote possibility, and yet the greatest of present facts; something that gives meaning to all that passes, and yet eludes apprehension; something whose possession is the final good, and yet is beyond all reach; something which is the ultimate ideal, and the hopeless quest.

Philosophy begins in wonder. And at the end when philosophic thought has done its best the wonder remains.

The foundation of reverence is this perception, that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence, backwards and forwards, that whole amplitude of time, which is eternity.

Nobody has a right to speak more clearly than he thinks.

There are no whole truths; all truths are half-truths. It is trying to treat them as whole truths that plays the devil.

The man was an Aphorism Machine. Any one of these pungent specimens could be expanded into a fully bloviated post... which I guess would defeat their purpose. That last crack is especially near 'n dear to my heart, as failure to adhere to it is responsible for virtually every philosophical, religious, and political nul de slack.

Most thinkers start by tossing out one side of an irreducible complementarity, and then taking it from there. But once they make that initial error, they can never recover the half they threw out. The idealist can never recover the empirical, and the empiricist can never account for the ideal. To pretend to transcend the subject-object complementarity is to... to pretend, that's what.

In fact, most of those aphorisms convey a hint of complementarity, for example, the need to preserve order amidst change and change amidst order; likewise generalities/details, philosophy/wonder, time/eternity, ignorance/knowledge, obvious/subtle, independence/dependence, conscious/unconscious, etc. Toss out one side of these and you have excused yourself from reality.

What about the aphorism I was looking for? Something about the world being reduced to an absurdity at one end and a dream at the other. In other words, if there is no knowledge of reality, then what we call reality is just an impenetrable cloud of absurdity, and what we call knowledge is just the idle dreaming of a featherless biped.

Clearly, most heresies arise from the sundering of an orthoparadox, e.g., faith/works, human/divine, omnipotence/freedom, creativity/determinacy, scripture/tradition, slack/duty, etc.

No other animal can rebel against its nature. Indeed, it is its nature. Man too has a nature, but he is uniquely free to violate it.

This itself is another orthopardox, in the sense that man is the creature whose nature includes the freedom to go against his own nature. But the postmodernist interprets the same phenomena to mean that man has no nature. In other words, man's failure to comport to his own nature is interpreted to mean he doesn't have one, and then gravity takes care of the rest.

I think Genesis attempts to convey this orthoparadox via the parable of the Fall. For clearly, if man is created, then he must have a nature. But because this nature includes freedom -- a freedom which is simply inexplicable if he is not created -- he is free to rebel against it, and then the Supreme Court takes care of the rest.

This question of "human nature" is an important one, because if we get that wrong, then there is little chance that we'll get anything else right. For to say that man has no nature is precisely equivalent to nihilism and therefore absurdity. If one is honest, there is simply no other possible conclusion.

However, if there are, for example, "self-evident truths," then this is because man has a nature, and this nature is a mode of the universal. It is universal because truth is always true, and thus a reflection of absoluteness.

This, I think, is where the infinite can play havoc, because there is always the Many, and it is possible to isolate one strand of the many to the exclusion of the One.

Or, to reiterate what Whitehead says above, we forget that we think in generalities but live in details; and that the present holds within itself the complete sum of existence.

That is all. A little chaotic around here, with mother-in-law arriving tomorrow and other deviations from my sacred rutine.

Simpleminded Complexity as a Defense Against Simple Truth

Things can get complicated....

Which is precisely what they -- the Conspiracy -- want you to think. Because if things are complicated, then there are always Mitigating Circumstances. At worst, you are Guilty With Explanation, the explanation being it's complicated, or things aren't that simple, or hey, the modern world 'n stuff.

Complexity leads directly to the possibility of rationalization. It also leads directly to the left, since our problems are obviously too complex for us to solve or even understand. We need experts for that, experts like Obama or Pelosi, who have devoted their lives to understanding us and our problems.

Look at Obama, or Clinton. Those guys could have become personally wealthy, but instead are just lowly public servants, which is just a notch above slave, which shows you how humble they are.

Well, not everything is complex. For example, if you are a woman, then there is a war on you, so your personal failings are completely understandable and even inevitable, therefore forgivable.

Likewise if you're black, all your problems are a result of white conservatives, even if the latter have no power over you, as here in California.

But not everyone's problems are susceptible to a simple evasion. Consider, for example, homosexuals. They are more prone to mental illness, suicide, promiscuity, venereal disease, hepatitis, anal cancer, drug abuse, alcoholism, bipolar disorder, serial murder. And why are a third of molested children boys, if homosexual men are only a tiny fraction of the population?

Hey, what are you, a homophobe? It's complicated!

Except when it's simple, e.g., "homosexuality is a genetic condition."

Okay. What about rape? What, haven't you been to college? Simple: patriarchy. Misogyny. Gendered oppression.

But isn't maleness genetic too? So, aren't patriarchy and rape and female oppression just in the nature of things?

No, simpleton. It's complicated.

Hmmm... I'm starting to think this "appeal to complexity" is a new logical fallacy, just an expedient. One can well understand its appeal, since, with a little education, one can make the most simple thing in the world -- say, marriage -- fraught with ambiguity.

More generally, through the use of this fallacy, one's own positions are shielded behind a veil of bogus complexity, while countervailing opinions are too simple to even take seriously, say, "abstinence," or the plain meaning of the Constitution, or reducing the size and scope of government in order to stimulate the economy. Who ever heard of such crazy-simple ideas?!

Anyway, to return to our main subject, is it possible that the truth of man is actually quite simple, and that we have lost this truth behind a fog of modern and postmodern complexity?

For example, Schuon writes that "we believe that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation." Here, two simple claims are being put forth: that there is a reality and that man may know this reality.

The alternatives to this stance are all very complicated, but no amount of complexity can get one back to the simple truth one has abandoned at the outset. It is as if complexity is put forth as a substitute for truth, which it can never be. It reminds me of an incident yesterday, when I was questioning my son about an evident misdemeanor which he was obscuring behind a fog of mystamumblery. First came the complicated explanations before he gave up and said, "okay, here's what happened."

Why is there human intelligence? I mean, we know why there is animal intelligence, in the sense that the intelligence of this or that beast is an adequation to its external environment for the purposes of personal survival and genetic propagation. Simple, really.

Okay, let's apply that same simple principle to man. To what is his intelligence an adequation?

In order to be intellectually consistent, the strict Darwinian would have to provide the same answer, and at least a Richard Dawkins does just that. There is no special exemption for human intelligence, which is just a side effect of selfish genes.

But we suspect that it is both more simple and complex than that. And when I say "we," I mean Schuon and I. He speaks for me when he says that what distinguishes human from animal intelligence is "its objectivity and its totality."

This is a simple statement, in the sense that it is obvious, even self-evident. These categories -- objectivity and totality -- are not present in any other species, so we need to inquire as to how they got here.

First, perhaps we should define these two. "Objectivity" means the capacity for detachment and disinterest. It means the ability to stand apart from one's own subjectivity, and not just see things through the lens of self-interest. Our whole capacity for morality is predicated on this ability, as is our access to truth -- for if truth and morality are just varieties of self-interest, then they are not worthy of the names.

"Totality" means the capacity to see beyond one's narrow experiential horizon, to the universal, the eternal, the transcendent. Man, upon becoming man, theorizes about the whole, first in mythopoetic, eventually in scientific, terms. But man always has an implicit map of the totality in order to situate himself in a deeper or higher reality.

For Schuon, "objectivity" is a mode of the Absolute, while "totality" is a mode of the Infinite. Please think about that one for a moment, because it is another example of a simple, foundational human truth. Truth always partakes of the Absolute, because it Is what it Is, and there is -- fortunately! -- not a damn thing we can do about it. Thus, the truth is as "disinterested" as we must be in order to conform to it.

Totality is more complicated, since it is not absolutely specified, but rather, is... how to put it... a kind of radiation or prolongation of absoluteness, as if from the Center out. I believe Schuon would say it is a reflection of "all possibility," or of the infinitude implicit in absoluteness.

This would explain why, despite the fact that we live in this relative world, the relative is everywhere imbued with absoluteness. Or in other words, no matter where we look, there is always intelligibility and therefore truth. Thus, within the infinite creativity of the creation, we find the stamp of the Creator.

Which brings us back to the question of that to which man's intelligence is an adequation. "The reason for the existence of intelligence," writes Schuon, "is its adequation to the real."

And the Real is what now?

That's a little too simple to answer in the remaining time. To be continued.

Where to Begin: Clarity, Simplicity, and Truth

According to Occam's razor, the simplest theory that accounts for the phenomena is the most likely to be true. It is "a principle of parsimony, economy, or succinctness used in problem-solving," such that "among competing hypotheses, the hypothesis with the fewest assumptions should be selected."

Assumptions are embedded in any hypothesis, theory, or metaphysic. Thanks to Gödel, we know that these assumption cannot be justified by the theory. Which is why they are called "assumptions."

The assumption is where we begin our thought adventure. However, such unexamined assumptions often entail their own conclusions -- or chase their own entailments -- for which reason many metaphysics end up being tautologous, for example, gross materialism, naive Darwinism, or crapto-Marxian leftism.

Simplicity brings with it clarity, and often it is necessary to forego Truth in favor of a fruitful clarity.

For example, we know that Newtonian physics is not literally "true" -- quantum physics having surpassed it -- and yet, it is more than sufficient for our day-to-day dealings with the world. In fact, in an exception to the rule, it is more simple and clear than the paradigm that transcends it -- although many physicists believe they will eventually discover a simpler theory that unifies quantum theory and general relativity, e.g., string theory.

Where does religion begin, i.e., with what assumptions? And are these assumptions any better or worse than those with which, say, a materialist begins?

First and foremost, religion begins with religiosity. This may seem like a trivial point, but if man didn't first have an in-built receptivity to the divine, then we wouldn't be having this conversation.

By way of analogy, imagine a conversation with a bat, of all people. Thanks to echolocation, the bat is able to perceive the worldspace in which it lives, moves, and flies. The bat says to you, "Wow! Did you see that sound! Looks like a big fluttering moth wing! Yummy!"

"Er, no. I see only darkness."

"I don't mean with your eyes, idiot. Look with your ears!"

"?"

Now, imagine a similar conversation with a materialist about the fluttering of an angel wing.

One of my favorite books by Schuon is From the Divine to the Human. I've already read it several times, and now I'm slowly making it through this new translation. There's no hurry, since he truly writes from the standpoint of eternity, so that even when one reaches the end of the book, it isn't really the end.

Rather, one might as well proceed right back to the beginning for another inspiraling goround (which is essentially true of all his books). This is because he is not writing from the outside in, so to speak, but from the inside out. I picture him sitting at the center of the Cosmic Circle, his words radiating out to the periphery like concentric ripples on a pond.

Thus, there are numerous lines extending from the center out, striking us in various ways, depending upon where we sit at the periphery. Or, an equally good analogy would be a kind of center-to-center contact: not from Schuon's center, but from the Cosmic Center itself -- or from the Divine to the Human, to coin a phrase.

In the brief foreword to the book, Schuon notes that his writing "tends to a maximum of clarity and even of simplicity." True, some people find him difficult, but to the extent that "difficulties remain, they are to be found in the subject and consequently in the nature of things."

Here again, this reminds me of quantum physics, in which there are most certainly some remaining conceptual difficulties, e.g., is it a wave or a particle? But that latter question cannot be clearly answered, since the ambiguity seems to be "in the nature of things" -- or in the things of nature.

For Neils Bohr, such fuzzy complementarity is the last word, beyond which there is no further clarity to be had. *Oddly*, there is an unsurpassable mystery at the heart of things.

But every discipline, if it is honest with itself, eventually reaches a similar mystery, e.g., cosmology with respect to existence, biology to life, and psychology to mind -- again, unless one naively discovers one's own implicit assumptions at the end of the line, in which case it is just garbage in/tenure out.

How is this for a challenging First Assumption that immediately separates the men from the trousered beasts: "we believe that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation" to the world.

What say you?

If you say "no," then you are excused, for there is neither truth nor the reality it reflects. Truly, all is vain, for there is nothing to know and no way to know it.

Then again, to know we don't know is actually a kind of grand achievement, since this is something no animal could ever know. But we'll leave that orthoparadox to the supposedly truthless materialist to koancentrate on. If you're stupid and you know it clap one hand!

So, our first assumption is that the world is intelligible and that man's intelligence is its complementary reflection; or, just say the eternal marriage of intelligence and intelligibility, 'til death do they part. And they do indeed part for many people, which is either the cause or effect of a soul death -- or murder -- precisely.

In other words, if intelligence is divorced from intelligibility, we end up with -- yes, tenure of course -- but more generally, an inexplicable human intelligence untethered to any prior reality, just muttering nonsense to itself and calling it philosophy, or literature, or the New York Times.

Or, if intelligibility is divorced from intelligence, then we end up with a blind materialism that cannot account for the materialist who believes this crap.

We can distinguish these two ways of manumental casuistry, the first one being more in a literary/humanities/social science mode, the latter in the empirical/mathematical/quantitative mode. And these two camps are often at each other's throats.

For example, a real scientist is not going to be happy about some lit-twit deconstructionist who claims that all truth is relative and just a mask for power. Likewise, no proper postmodernist is going to be pleased with the notion that reality is unambiguously tied down to the power structures implicit in phallocentric science.

I say, a pockmark on both their ugly farces, but especially the postmodernists, because they are not only useless, but dangerous, whereas science at least results in technology, medical breakthroughs, and other cool forms of gendered oppression. Just don't ask them about God, because they're completely clear on that subject.

Rabble Without a Clue

About the spiritually sightless ophthalmologist of yesterpost, he is a symbol of many who suffer the same malady, that is, the inability to "see God."

But maybe that wording is part of the problem: see God. We've discussed in the past how someone who otherwise thinks quite abstractly -- say, a scientist -- suddenly goes all concrete when discussing or hearing about religion. Such a person might say something like, okay, show me. Come down here and perform a miracle, and then I'll believe.

A nuclear physicist, say, is fully aware of the fact that the models he employs and the language he uses to describe the subatomic realm cannot be considered "literal." Atoms aren't like little solar systems, creation didn't literally begin with a bang, and gravity isn't an "attraction." Nor, for that matter, can genes be "selfish."

In each case, language provides "points of reference" from one realm to another. The only realm we really know in a concrete way is the concrete realm to which language originally applies, and from which it draws its analogies. We can only understand another realm by way of analogy, which always introduces ambiguities and paradoxes if pushed too far.

Most famously, the analogies of "wave" and "particle" as applied to the quantum world are only so useful before skirting the boundary of paradox. One could say the same of genes and organism, each being "real" in its own way unless pushed too far.

So religious language -- like any language that transcends the concrete -- provides a frame of reference to a world beyond itself. It is perhaps most easy to be confused about this vis-a-vis the Hebrew Bible, which frequently deploys -- how to put it? -- "narrative-as-wisdom," or "myth-as-metaphysics," or "law-as-principle." The easiest thing in the world to do is to reduce the abstract to the concrete, and then ridicule the latter.

Doing so is about as intelligent as, say, a 19th century physician taking offense at someone who tells him he should wash his hands because there are millions of little creatures crawling all over him: who are you calling dirty? Such a person is confusing realms and turning an abstract scientific truth into a concrete insult from the world of "manners."

According to the Catechism -- which is in its own right a fascinating document, since it embodies 2,000 years of collective meditation on the abstractions implicit in concrete revelation -- the atheist is not to be thought of as some sort of "adversary," that is, unless he chooses to become the aggressor for unrelated reasons, e.g., the God-hating and Man-controlling left.

Rather, it says here that many of our contemporaries simply fail to perceive the "intimate and vital bond of man to God." Those who "do not perceive" may be completely blameless, or at least virtually so, given our debased cultural ambiance.

You can't blame a child raised by wolves for behaving like one, for that's all he has ever known. Likewise so many liberals who live in their friction-free ideological bubbles and second realities, never encountering opposition unless it is by way of ridiculous straw men, projected demons, or alternatively vicious or risible caricatures.

Aaaaaand, we're back. Had to drive the boy to school.

On the way back, it occurred to me that our modern, space age au-go-go society is characterized by a strange combination of cynicism and irony with naiveté and childish innocence -- say, Jon Stewart, or MSNBC, or anyone who sees through everything except their own silly liberalism.

The problem with the cynic or ironist is that he does indeed see through most everything, but not to anything. This is because cynicism and irony are perversions of a proper and unique function of the human mind -- that is, seeing through appearances -- except with no reality on the other side.

For example, in order to read, we "see through" the words on the page, toward the invisible truth they are trying to convey. It is as if the cynic reverses the process, and says, "I see through your little game. Those are just arbitrary marks on a page. There's no reality behind them, just something you invented."

And before you dismiss such a person as an irrelevant crank, this is precisely what postmodernism in general and deconstruction in particular do: render a text meaningless by systematically refusing to look at what it is referring to. One can do this with scripture just as easily as one can do it with the Constitution. In Obama's case he does it with both, i.e., "black theology" and the "living Constitution," neither of which has anything to do with the laws of the Cosmos or of the Land, respectively (except when for the sake of Higher Expediency).

Referring again to the Catechism, it says that the term "atheism" applies to "many different phenomena," which makes sense, since the Absolute is by definition One, so deviations from it are going to be quite diverse. How to pick, when there are so many ways to be wrong! Well, I suppose that's what college is for: to grow up and settle down with one particular error.

The Catechism mentions a "practical materialism" which confines man behind immanent bars of mundane space and time. Likewise, "atheistic humanism," instead of properly seeing through and beyond man, toward his transcendental source, "falsely considers man to be 'an end to himself.'"

Here is another fine example of the left's naiveté and/or self-deception, because to make man his own end renders him either a beast or a god. Practically speaking, it results in a bipolar world with auto-idolatrous gods at the top and infrahuman beasts at the bottom. Talk about your "one percent"! Imagine the naiveté of someone who wonders why "income equality" is so much worse under Obama, or why so much obscene wealth encircles Washington DC!

Yet "another form contemporary atheism takes is for the liberation of man through economic and social liberation." It maintains "that religion, of its very nature, thwarts such emancipation by raising man's hope in a future life, thus both deceiving him and discouraging him" from participating in the glorious revolution -- you know, Obama's hope for dopes and change for chumps.

This cynical and manipulative stance is always on offer by the left, but it's really just the same perennial temptation to turn stones into bread. With every election cycle, every speech, every program, the left promises that this time the stones will finally turn into bread, but they never do, for the left is as unhappy as ever. They even (even?) invent reasons to feel miserable, such as the "war on women," or hatred of homosexuals, or insufficient spending on education, or a "broken" healthcare system which they proceed to break in every possible way. In order to peddle their hopium, they must first hook you on hopelessness.

Memo to the left: there is always a reason to feel miserable. The trick is how to feel joyous, given the existential constraints we are all operating under, e.g., death, loss, toil, frustrated ambitions, and the impossibility of ever actualizing our full potential. There is no political solution to any of these. Nor any scientific or economic solutions -- at least nothing that can be managed by the statist one percent.

Being miserable or envious or bored or selfish or resentful is the easiest and most natural thing in the world, which is why the left is always a "downhill" attractor or basin. Anyone who hasn't nailed themselves to a higher reality ends up with the clueless rabble down there, not realizing their dependence upon higher energies in order to be "happy" in this vale of tears. Absent a living exchange with that world, one can only manage an "animal happiness" which doesn't actually exist anyway. To the extent that an animal is happy, it is only because it doesn't know what all humans -- all grown-up humans -- know.

And it's partly, or even largely, our fault. Yes, I blame religion for making itself look stupid, and therefore easy to dismiss. That's a nasty little secret the Catechism lets out of the bag, that "Believers can have more than a little to do with the rise of atheism."

So, be careful what you say and how you tie your shoes in the presence of infidels. Like children, they will see through your pretenses but not beyond them.

Turning a Blind Eye Doctor

As mentioned yesterday, I want to leave politics aside, and return to our usual fare. Which is what now? Never mind that. But it can be a challenge to leave politics alone when politics won't leave us alone, no? As we've often said, the right can never match the left in political energy, since political mania is their demonic religion. Which is another reason why they despise actual religion, because it is a competitor.

I don't know about you, but whenever I want to get back to basics, I turn to... Actually, I do know about you, because I'm sure you don't do what I am about to say I do, which is have a little chitchat, or vertical summit meeting, with Schuon. This is not to say I am any kind of formal disciple, and I don't want to pretend I am. It's just that I find him so provocative, that virtually every paragraph sends me flying into four or five different dimension.

I think this is because he is essential, by which I mean he cuts through appearances like so much smoke, and gets right to the essence, to the beating heart of reality. In fact, this is precisely what Nasr says in his introduction to The Essential Frithjof Schuon. In describing the virtues of his writings, he begins with their essentiality, their universality, and their comprehensiveness.

Or, one might say their depth, their height, and their breadth, respectively. I would love to be able to accomplish the same sort of effect, because to do this would be to write things that will always be true, because they touch the eternal. And when you think about it, what would be the point of writing anything less than this? Seriously. There are not only WAY too many books, there are too many blogs, too many magazines, too many paragraphs, too many sentences. Will someone please shut-up already?!

As to Schuon's essentiality, Nasr notes that his writings "always go to the heart and are concerned with the essence of whatever they deal with." Which is to say, he "possesses the gift of reaching the very core of the subject he is treating, of going beyond forms to the essential formless Center of forms whether they be religious, artistic or related to certain features and traits of the cosmic or human orders."

The question I have is, why isn't everyone hungry for this type of intellectual -- or pneuma-cognitive -- nourishment? I think Schuon would say they are, by virtue of being human. To paraphrase the man himsoph, human beings are condemned to transcendence, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it.

That is, the intellect is ordered to the absolute, which is its proper, or ultimate, object. In fact, to know any truth is to be ordered to this object, otherwise it wouldn't be truth. It wouldn't even be false, just nothing, since falsehood is the shadow of truth. You can't be wrong if you can't be right. Right?

Nasr describes exactly how it is for me: "To read [Schuon's] works is to be transplanted from the shell to the kernel, to be carried on a journey that is at once intellectual and spiritual from the circumference to the Center."

The Center would have to be the place -- the only possible place -- where essence, universality, and comprehensiveness collide. And when they do collide, one sees stars. Or sparks. At least I do.

You know the old crack about how Christianity is not a religion, but the cure for religion? I think it is the same with Schuon's intellectuality, i.e., a cure for secular or rationalistic intellectualism.

And we are in need of a cure for the latter, because when reason becomes the master instead of the slave, it is as if a corrosive mind parasite has hijacked the soul. It doesn't so much metabolize truth as it does erode the foundation, as do termites to a house. And once you've destroyed the foundation, you can't build anything on it. Logic wins, but the soul perishes. Or, the operation is a success, although the patient is dead.

I had a free-wheeling discussion about this with our vertically attuned contractor yesterday. He mentioned a distressing conversation with his hyper-rationalistic ophthalmologist, a man who can deploy reason to disprove anything, but which leaves him in a cold and barren world deprived of spiritual light and cosmic meaning.

He sounds like a reasonably intelligent person, which I'm sure he is. One generally can't be an idiot and get through medical school. However, in the Darwinian sense, the environment of medical school "selects" people with certain personality traits, and then aggravates those traits over the subsequent six or seven or more years. Is it any wonder that reason can become hypertrophied while the spiritual imagination withers? And when the latter shrivels up, the realm to which it gives access naturally "disappears." It's like me and my pancreas. Ask it about insulin, and it will say insawhut?

A brilliant physician has access to other tacit worlds that the layman cannot perceive. And these worlds can certainly be essential to physical wellbeing, but an exclusive focus on them can occlude other realities. One reason I like to blog first thing in the morning is that it helps ground me in the essential before I must venture forth and make my way in that other annoying world. It helps me be in it but not of it.

A person whose (lower case r) reason is running amuck needs to get back to the Essence, the Universal, the Comprehensive, and away from the surface, the particular, and the local. The rub, of course, is that I don't really want my surgeon living in the latter world, any more than I want my accountant to be floating in a happy rainbow land of tangerine taxes, marmalade math, and marshmallow IRS agents.

Anyway, for the eye doctor with the hypertrophied rationalism, Dr. Bob might prescribe a little Schuon to break through the layers of ice and rock that have formed above his mind. I know what it's like to be encrapsulated in an omniscient little ego, and it is not a pleasant feeling. There are ways out, of course, but many of them involve bypassing the intellect, which is precisely what the intellectual will have difficulty doing.

Therefore, he is in need of some intellectual keys that dwarf his puny reason, restore his epistemological humility, and show logic for what it is: a limited tool for exploring certain realities, but certainly not a key to the truth that necessarily transcends it.

It's a little like martial arts, whereby the power of the mind is used against itself. When properly used, the intellect should arrive at the mystery which it cannot solve, because it is a reflection of it. This is where the intellect can finally find its rest, and stop thrashing about, looking for, or pretending to have, answers that surpass it.

Speaking of eyes and physicians, we all know about the "three eyes" of the soul. There is the physical eye that discloses the empirical world, just as there is the rational eye with which we perceive invisible mathematical and logical truths.

But there is also the spiritual eye with which we "see" spiritual truths and realities that precede us -- just as the physical world obviously must precede the physical eye. The world doesn't proceed from the eye, any more than God proceeds from the human spirit.

We can take the analogy further, in the sense that even perception is never just perception. Take the example of two people watching a baseball game, one who played the game and knows all its subtle rules and strategies, the other attending his first game. Although they will "see" the exact same thing, they will perceive very different realities. The more one understands the game, the more one sees, to the point of inexhaustibility.

Now, if we transpose this idea to the spiritual realm, the same truth applies. Religion, you might say, provides the rules of the game: common landmarks, points of reference, warnings, tips, hints, etc. And as one immerses oneself in this world and gazes into the clear-view mirror, sure enough, it begins coming into view. One starts to perceive the contours of this world, to which all the points of reference are referring.

And then one can describe this world in a more direct way, without necessarily having to use the existing points of reference -- although it is generally best to use them, for the same reason it is best to speak truth in an existing language instead of inventing a new one that no one understands.

It is as if one touches the substance, but the substance still needs a form in order to be both intelligible and communicable. For example, Christianity obviously provides such forms. But if they are only understood dogmatically as forms, then I think one has missed half a loaf on the boat to nowhere.

Rather, I think the whole point must be to embody the form, which is to say, prolong the vertical into the horizontal -- which, if I am not mistaken, is kind of the whole point of the Incarnation. It is what the Word is trying to tell us, if only we know how to listen with the third ear, or correct for our cardiomyopia.

Don't Worry, the State of the State is Bigger and More Powerful than Ever!

Is there anything left for Obama to tell us tonight about his decadent, end stage liberalism? Is there anyone left to buy? Are there any groups he has forgotten to pander to, any real or straw men he has forgotten to slander, threaten, or bully?

If only the speech could be delivered Richard Sherman gangster-style, instead of in Obama's soporific, robo-preacher manner, we'd get a better feel for its thuggish content.

We all know the state of the State is strong. Stronger than ever. Ginormous. All-seeing. All-powerful. Intrusive. Coercive. Punitive. But rewarding for cronies, victims, and political insiders.

Er, what about the union?

Oh, that. Weak. Divisive. Fractured. Politically controlled but morally deregulated. The way it should be in order to create the conditions for leviathan. Multiculturalism evokes monocracy -- or rather, vice versa. It's one of those perma-truths, i.e., divide and conquer.

Human beings, apparently by virtue of being human, keep discovering the same truths but call them by different names. They do, however, discover new falsehoods all the time. For a person bitterly clinging to a falsehood, everything is taken as its proof, while nothing is proof of its falsehood, e.g., global warming, Keynesian economics, or hey, two mothers are just as good as a married mother and father, probably even better, because, you know, patriarchy & stuff.

About calling things by the wrong name. The left likes to say that Obama is a "constitutional scholar," by which they really mean that he thoroughly cased the joint before taking office. He studied the Constitution the way a counterfeiter studies money.

Speaking of the rediscovery of old ideas, while reading Betrayal of the Masses I had a flashing insight into existential guilt and original sin. How can we be born guilty?

I once read somewhere that it's not so much that we are born that way, but that we are born into a thoroughly corrupt system. In order to survive, we are all compromised by having to adapt to this human nutwork of greed, passion, envy, self-interest, etc. Thus, we all have dirty hands, which in time dirties our souls, especially if we completely abandon ourselves to its lures, seductions, and temptations.

Ironic, isn't it, that it is the left that is most shrill about the original sin of this corrupt world system? The problem isn't so much pointing out the corruption -- since it is ineveateapple -- but imagining that 1) we can eliminate it, and 2) that the best way to accomplish this is through an intrusive and coercive state, i.e., liberal tyranny.

But the problem -- another one of those universal truths -- is that the same corrupt human beings will be in charge of the state. D'oh!

To put it another way, the reason why government is corrupt is because it is peopled by people. The bigger the government, the more possible it is for politicians to act in self-interest, and the more possible it is to gain power in exchange for cash and other valuable prizes.

The limited government created by the framers offered few opportunities for such widescale patronage and cronyism -- maybe ambassadors, the Postmaster General, and a few other baubles. Limited government offers few ways for resentment and envy to be fungible to political power, since there is little surplus power to redistribute, only the powers specifically enumerated in the Constitution. And those are no fun for a political opportunist on a satanic mission.

One useful idea I pulled from Tyranny is the distinction between primordial despots and transcendental ones. The primordial despot is motivated by the usual human weaknesses, e.g., greed, lust, gluttony, etc. Think of a Charlie Rangel or any other government-fattened pig.

The transcendental despot is far more dangerous, because he is always on a religious crusade masquerading as politics. Siegel implicitly points this out by quoting any number of prominent liberal authors who sound more like deranged prophets than political pundits. They condemn the world -- actually, the United States -- in the most strident and bitter tones, and essentially urge us to repent by giving ourselves over to the latest leftwing savior.

When a liberal talks about "the system," he's really talking about original sin from which we cannot escape by virtue of being in the system.

For example, all people of colorlessness are racist, no exceptions. "Structural racism" is built into the system, so you are guilty no matter what you do. You are guilty if you treat blacks unequally, and you are most certainly guilty if you treat them equally. Engage in the latter and you will face federal charges due to "under-representation" or "disparate impact."

Here the left is adept at reframing offense as defense. In short, they characterize attacks as grievances as a way to legitimize their aggression. Scratch any state-sanctioned victim and you will find a bully. They pretend to be helpless on the outside in order to be vicious on the inside.

Time to move on from politics, before I throw up. Back to the usual fare.

Religion is a map. A map provides orientation and direction, but one is under no compulsion to go anywhere with it. It lets you know YOU ARE HERE and GOD IS THERE. The rest is between you and him.

Or, more generally, religion maps the landscape of the human interior. But in the words of Schuon, "to know the nature of subjectivity is to know the structure of the world."

Thus, the unexamined life is not worth living because it goes absolutely nowhere -- and so fast! The opposite of nowhere is somewhere, probably even here, while a synonym for life is growth, specifically, of differentiation-in-unity (or unity-in-differentiation). Thus, religion ultimately provides the map for growing up. No wonder the left hates it.

To be continued....

Liberal Patronage and Fugitive Slaves

I'm not quite ready to leave The Betrayal of the Masses behind. There's just too much fine insultainment to let pass, such as the crack that liberalism is the doctrine that dedicates itself "to preserving the problems for which it presents itself as the solution."

For example, there are some major cities that have had uninterrupted Democrat rule since, I don't know, World War II, or even World War I. A quick search reveals that most of the poorest cities in the country -- i.e., those with the highest poverty rates -- have been controlled by Democrats for over fifty years. This has to be the ultimate instance of the Butterfield Fallacy: Urban Poverty Soars Despite Liberal Governance. Ironic, no?

Consider the spiritual home of our Dear Leader, Chicago. Let's call in Mr. Butterfield again: Leading the Nation in Murdered Blacks Despite Powerful Black Political Establishment. But for the left, politics is a patronage machine dressed up in an ideology. There is no ideology per se, in the sense that Democrats must cobble together electoral groups based upon the gift of victimization, not the truth of ideas.

To put it another way, the only way to unify such disparate groups is through the vehicle of oppression-entitlement. Otherwise, an ovary tower feminist, say, has little in common with the Central Park thug who would just as soon mug her for her jewelry.

According to Siegel, the largest employers in Chicago are the federal government, its abysmal school system, the city government, the CTA, the Cook County government, and the Chicago Park District. And you can be sure that the machine hires only the very best and brightest parasites!

It's the same in my failed state, California. Yesterday we spoke of the iron triangle of Big Government, Big Media, and Big Stupid. Regarding the latter, Siegel notes that in the Cal State University system, there is a ratio of one administrator per one professor. And we all know their political affiliation. That is what you call grotesque and in-your-face patronage.

In fact, every couple of years we see student demonstrations over the high cost of tuition. Ironically -- ironically? -- they always direct their ire at the greedy citizens who don't want to waste more money on public education, instead of toward a corrupt system of political patronage that stocks our universities with mid-level hacks and free-riders.

Back in 1981, when I graduated from Cal State Northridge -- the Harvard of the west San Fernando Valley, the same venerable institution from which the great James Taranto nearly graduated -- tuition was like $105 a semester. Now it is $5,472 per year, which I believe represents a what -- 2,600% increase? Did I do that right? I should know this, since I received a Gentleman Loafer's C in Business Math at CSUN, which means I was definitely breathing in class.

At any rate, liberal governance is an expensive proposition, and not just because of taxes. Those parasites don't suck themselves, you know.

Speaking of irony and fine insultainment, Ann Coulter, in cataloging the wondrous deeds of feminist icon Wendy Davis, notes how very ironic it is that she left her sugar daddy-husband the very same day he made the last payment on her Harvard Law School loan. Iconic and ironic! -- as in It's ironic -- my car stopped running right after I ran out of gas.... It's ironic -- my house was broken into, and the next thing I knew all my valuables were missing.... It's ironic -- I was punched in the face right before my nose broke.

Ironic, isn't it, that a feminist hero should get to the top the old fashioned way, by sleeping with a wealthy or influential man? That's how Hillary did it, except for the sleeping part.

When we consider the list of Failed 20th Century Ideologies, only liberalism has survived. Why is this? Again, it must be because of its most excellent system of patronage, not because of the ideology, because when Americans hear the ideology in its naked form, without a fogleaf of pandering, bogus compassion, or intellectual dishonesty, they don't like it.

Thus, without the constant payoffs, liberalism might have gone the way of its cousins, fascism, socialism, and communism. The problem with those latter three is that they didn't involve enough people in the scam; or, to be precise, they didn't allow enough pigs at the trough.

Now, we all know liberalism is a status-centered belief system rooted in snobbery, moral superiority, and intellectual one-upsmanship. But again, in America, that just won't sell. And from the elite side of things, it is understood that not everyone can be an elite. Besides, if everyone can be one, then the elitism has no status value.

What to do? This is one of the themes of the Betrayal of the Masses, that in contemporary liberalism we see this otherwise inexplicable alliance of wealthy status seekers and overeducated mediocrities at one end, and various victim groups at the other. The latter have no personal identity, only a group identity. Only the people at the top are permitted to be pseudo-individuals, whereas the rabble is only permitted to go along with the elites. (Rush touched on this very theme in yesterday's program.)

As such, the greatest threat to the left is rampant individualism in the boobeoisie, because then they are not subject to top-down control by elites. This is why uppity blacks who stray from the liberal plantation are treated so cruelly, in an intellectual version of the old Fugitive Slave Laws. If you find one hiding somewhere, by all means turn him in! The same goes for fugitive women, fugitive homosexuals, fugitive journalists... and fugitive filmmakers, for revenge is a Dinesh pest served a cold indictment.

Then again, I suppose D'Souza could be just another victim of liberal irony. Nevertheless, it does resemble one of those Libyan film reviews we've heard so much about.

*****

Via Maggie's Farm, we are number two in soft tyranny. All others are number three or lower (click to embiggen):

Looks like the first seven are perma-blue states. Ironic!

Obama: The Three They've Been Waiting For

A few more thoughts on The Betrayal of the Masses before we return to whatever it was we were talking about.

One thing that occurs to me is that there must be a sort of political deep structure that shapes people's outward beliefs. In other words, politics can only be thought about in so many ways, so the same patterns recur from antiquity to the present. I know, Big Whoop, since no reader of Aristotle's Politics will be surprised to discover this truth.

I noticed the same thing in a book I recently read on The Rise of American Democracy from the time of the founding until Lincoln. Jefferson, for example, hated the Federalists, based upon his belief that they were just trying to create a new aristocracy.

Thus, like the liberals of today, Jefferson engaged in (small-d) democratic demagoguery in order to attain power. But once in power, he had little use for true democracy. Rather, he just wanted a new kind of aristocracy: his kind. The dispute between Washington/Hamilton and Jefferson/Madison was between elites, not the rubes, for no one believes 2+2=5 just because the mob says it is. But an aristocracy of men is quite different from an aristocracy of truth.

The bottom line is that aristocracy is a permanent temptation for the human being. As is its mirror image, democracy, AKA mob rule. Since these represent permanent possibilities, the founders built them into the system, with the executive branch being an expression of royalist tendencies, the senate for the contemplative and slow-to-change aristocratic trend, and the house for the hotheaded and mercurial rabble.

None of these, it should go without saying, is the locus of "political truth." Rather, they are only centers of power, and power is at a right angle to truth. Therefore, a man without truth on his side may appeal to the demos. Conversely, if he doesn't have the demos on his side, then he may appeal to royal decree. We see how Obama engages in both, depending upon the needs of the day.

(Obama reminds me of what Carson Wells said about Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men: "No no. No. You don't understand. You can't make a deal with him. Even if you gave him the money he'd still kill you. He's a peculiar man. You could even say that he has principles. Principles that transcend money or drugs or anything like that. He's not like you. He's not even like me.")

Or, as Siegel points out, the history of liberalism shows that liberals are principled, loudmouthed authoritarians, or principled, loudmouthed anti-authoritarians, depending upon who is in charge. When it was Bush, they were reactionary anti-authoritarians. Now they are reactionary authoritarians (with a few principled exceptions).

This janus-faced attitude toward state power should not be surprising for a doctrine that rejects truth a priori, as does Obama i.e., "we hold this truth to be self-evident, that our nation is founded upon a rejection of absolute truth." In this context the adjective "absolute" is just an evasion, since truth is by definition absolute (or a reflection of the Absolute).

But leftists just want to tar truth with "absolutism," to imply that anyone who affirms it is some sort of extremist. Such extremists do exist, of course, but the problem is that they insist upon absolute lies, on things that cannot possibly be true. And leftism revolves around a number of such "impossible truths" such as multiculturalism, moral relativism, homosexual marriage, and all the rest.

Allied with this is the left's insistence upon equality unless equal treatment results in inequality, in which case they are all for unequal treatment. Not enough female firemen or marines? Okay, let 'em take the test. Oops! Even a strapping hulk like Michelle Obama can't pass it. Therefore, the law must treat men and women differently. Likewise, not enough blacks in law school? Easy. Just systematically treat them as inferiors.

The point is, just as the left is authoritarian or rebellious, depending upon whether they are in or out of power, they are egalitarian or discriminatory, depending upon how it effects one of their client groups, i.e., how it redounds to their power. Which is why they have no concerns about under-representation of groups that do not contribute to their power, say, Asians or Cubans or Raccoons.

Again, at the time the Constitution was written, the founders were mindful of the different ways of ordering power, i.e., royalty, aristocracy, and democracy. For the most part, the story of the left is the story of a new aristocracy/priesthood pretending to be an expression of the demos. This aristocracy is composed of groups that didn't exist at the time of the founding, i.e., Big Media, Big Government (especially the cancerous public sector unions), and Big Stupid (i.e., academia).

This is the iron triangle of the left, replacing the triangle intended by the framers. Looked at in this way, academia is the priesthood/church, the state is royalty, and old media is the elite/aristocracy.

Which is why Obama was so tough to defeat, what with (to paraphrase Siegel) his TV looks, his radio voice, his phony preacher's cadences, and his pseudo-intellectualism. He is the total package, three frauds in One. Thus, he is the three they've been waiting for since JFK, who also had the media looks, the royalist glow, and the superfical, liberal-approved intellectualism.

Unrealpolitik: Power is the New Truth

The Betrayal of the Masses is so rich with insights and provokes so many thoughtstreams that it may surpass my ability to blog about it.

I see that many of my obscure notes to myself would serve as decent titles, such as:

Escape From Human Nature

Intellectual Fraudevillians

The First Law of Liberal Thermodynamics: The Conservation of Failure

How to Boost Self-Esteem by Sucking Dignity from Your Constituents

The Way of the Superior Mediocrity

Daddy, What Did You Tax in the War on Poverty?

Amnesty and Electoral Success: The Juans We've Been Waiting For

The New Indulgence System: Purchasing White Redemption by Giving to the Church of Racial Grievance

One theme that emerges from the book is just how wrong, and even deranged, various liberal luminaries have always been, e.g., Herbert Croly, H.G. Wells, Aldous Huxley, Malcolm Cowley, G.B. Shaw, Sinclair Lewis, and all the Frankfurt School weenies, e.g. Adorno, Marcuse, Norman Brown, and many others.

As I said, Siegel has a much better mastery of their own literature than they do. Rather, contemporary liberals simply project into the past and cherry-pick absurdly self-flattering items. They are, of course, the originators of self-esteem via revisionism: unattractive women's history, homosexual history, black history, and all their other agenda-driven intellectual ghettos.

Of the latter, Siegel writes of how liberals found a way out of their own nonsense via deconstruction. Just when reality had caught up with them in the late '70s, they slipped through the linguistic net with postmodern antithinkers and philosophical celebrities such as Foucault, de Man, Derrida, and the rest of that sinister rabble.

Because social science had been such an epic fail for them, they switched over to this new literary "French-influenced romantic irrationalism" featuring "priestly truths much beyond the ken of the general public."

You might say that postmodernism is to thinking what climate change is to global warming -- a way to stay one step ahead of an inconvenient truth via word magic. This is why no conservative embraces deconstruction: because we believe language is a function of reality, not vice versa.

You know the drill, at least if you've been to college: there are "no objective truths," only the "truth-effects created by the workings of power" and the manipulation of language. Since All is Power, there is nothing wrong with seizing it and using the state "to break through the invisible web of coercion spun by everyday fascism."

You are either oppressor or oppressed, and if you are a fan of this blog, then you are the former, you Nazi bastard!

Speaking of intellectual fraudevillians, it's a great gig, because they somehow transform what can only be called "epistemological nihilism" into "political certainty." How do they do that?

For example, how did Obama arrive at the confident but utterly absurd conclusion that our nation is founded upon (in his words), "a rejection of absolute truth" and the dismissal of "any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations [read: ME] into a single, unalterable course..."

In other words, the Constitution is designed to ignore itself, to make way for the Rule of Man. At least the Right Man, i.e., the Divine Lightbringer. But... isn't that what we were fighting against from '76 to '83?

Insolence! As we know, if there is no truth, then power rushes in to fill the vacuum. Like all postmodernists, Obama wants it both ways: "there is no truth, only the truth that there is only power, so I will seize that power, thank you, and use it to impose my truth."

Where on earth did he get such a crazy idea, and why did no one ever correct his misunderstanding?

What a naive question. Such ideas are not subject to correction, but to tenure. He was, after all, an associate professor of constitutional law, so he knows better than anyone else that the law means what he wants it to mean.

Note that in order to harbor such an illusion, Obama must place himself above the Framers, just as he knows better than you do how to run your affairs. Obama must actually believe he never faced failure in life thanks to his own abilities, instead of being wafted to the top via upward political mobility: the right ideology wrapped in the right color. Thus, he is the epitome of illegitimate political power, so I guess he's right about that.

Like their dear leader, today's college students learn "that alternative opinions [are] merely masks for racism, sexism, and homophobia," and that America is "objectively racist, evil, imperialist, sexist (pick your term of opprobrium)."

So, how is the postmodernist exempt from his own sweeping verdict?

Easy: shut up! As we know, there is no place where speech is less free than on a college campus, since the ideas that predominate there cannot withstand scrutiny, and even the tenured know enough to know that.

Speaking of titles, this post could also have been called Feelpolitik, since liberal positions are felt and not thought.

Wanted: One Honest Liberal

Apropos of yesterday's post, Jay Nordlinger has a piece in the latest National Review in which he asks if anyone out there has a "go to" liberal writer or thinker, someone who is actually intellectually serious -- and honest -- and "who will give me the best arguments of the other side," without the usual smugness, comic evasiveness, girlish hysteria, high-minded name-calling, educated ignorance, Timesworthy narrow-mindedness, Koch-headed bigotry, and deep shallowness -- all of it with the best of intentions, of course.

I can't think of any. Perhaps you can. But in order to qualify for the role, one must not only be able to put forth rational and factually supported arguments for one's own positions, but just as important, make the best possible arguments for the opposing position. If one can't do that, then one is not being intellectually honest, but simply engaging in a logical fallacy, i.e., the straw man.

For example, Nordlinger mentions Richard Cohen -- who is a fairly innocuous middlebrow hack, and not even close to being one of the worst offenders -- and yet, he "imagines conservatives who do not exist. He seems unwilling to debate, or consider, conservatives as we truly are. He is a caricaturist..."

As are nearly all of them. MSNBC is really a cartoon network, not a news operation.

One exception who comes to mind is Lanny Davis. I've actually heard him be fair, honest, and self-critical. Still way wrong, but that's okay. Wrong is educable. And he seems to have a conscience, i.e., a capacity for shame which is totally missing in a Clinton, Obama, Pelosi, Reid, and all the rest. The problem is (for I remember it well), snobbery, projection, smearing, superiority, intellectual dishonesty -- these are addictive, and not susceptible to correction, since the person who wants to correct you is an evil racist, or homophobe, or one-percenter, etc.

I am quite sure I can make the pro-abortion case in a dispassionate manner -- well, not the constitutional case, which is impossible -- but simply the argument that abortion should be available to a woman in the early stages of pregnancy. The problem is, they even lie about that, for example, by suggesting that abortion is only legal during the first trimester, when the fact of the matter is that there is no such practical or enforceable limit. There is a huge difference between what liberals say they believe vs. what they actually believe. They only discuss the latter amongst themselves, since they know the average person would be offended if not disgusted.

At any rate, you never hear a liberal abortion advocate acknowledge the unassailable principle that animates the pro-life position -- that it is unjust to take the life of an innocent human being. Instead, they will accuse the person of wanting to "control women's bodies," or some other nonsense.

Back to the OUTSTANDING book under review, The Betrayal of the Masses. I'm thinking Siegel must be an ex-liberal, because he is so thoroughly familiar with their literature of the past 100 years. No way would I want to voluntarily enter that swamp, for which reason alone we should thank him for his yeoman sewer service.

Another reason is that the left is deeply ahistorical about itself. If we treat the left as a "collective patient," so to speak, it is very much like a neurotic person in denial about his own past, and thus compelled to make the same mistakes over and over (the "repetition compulsion"), without in-sight. But in all honesty, "neurotic" is too mild a term.

Without getting too pedantic, a neurotic person has intrapsychic conflicts of which he is at least dimly aware, and which cause him pain. At the other extreme of psychopathology are psychotic individuals, who are frankly out of touch with reality, subject to delusions, hallucinations, and the like.

In between are borderline personalities -- not necessarily Borderline Personality Disorder per se -- but rather, people who rely upon more primitive defense mechanisms because of structural deficits in the psyche (generally rooted in early attachment).

Where is Dr. Sanity when you need her? Oh. Here she is. I forgot about the google machine. At any rate, she used to write a lot of good stuff on this very subject.

To simplify, there are neurotic and relatively healthy defense mechanisms such as repression, sublimation, and intellectualization; and intrinsically unhealthy ones such as denial, splitting, and projective identification.

One of the problems with the latter is that, instead of being intrapsychic, they tend to be intersubjective, meaning that they are acted out with other people or with the wider culture. They always induct others into their psychodramas, and cast other people as either villain (e.g., Koch Brothers), or savior (Obama), or some other primitive archetype yoinked from their intrapsychic swamp.

Siegel touches on this in the book, quoting Edmund Wilson, who wrote of how the liberal/progressive has "evolved a psychological mechanism which enables him to turn moral judgments against himself into moral judgments against society."

The liberal converts personal problems into collective ones -- conveniently located outside himself -- so the real problem can never be addressed, which leads to the cycle of repetition compulsion, in which we see the same discredited arguments time and again. For the left, it's always the same old whining in new battles.

Thus, "Liberal social programs to combat poverty and reform the schools, their failures long institutionalized, have produced a government whose grasp far exceeds its competence and whose costs are carried by the private-sector middle class" (Siegel). Nevertheless, "Liberalism, as a search for status, is sufficiently adaptable that even in failure, self-satisfaction trumps self-examination."

That is a perfect example of a primitive defense mechanism analogous to addiction: deny the reality, project the problem into others, and generate dopey good feelings via a dopamine rush -- e.g., sanctimony, self-righteousness, and intellectual superiority, not to mention the high from acquiring and wielding power over the contemptible citizenry -- so we're really dealing with a dual-diagnosis involving addiction and structural (i.e., borderline) deficits in the psyche.

No wonder they hate us.

The Liberal Coalition: Snobbish Robbers & the Slobbering Mob

Well, that's annoying. Lost most of today's post, so this is all we get. I'll have to continue it tomorrow. Never mind. Saved by the belle, Julie, who used some kind of computer magic to recover it.

What an opportune time, on this national day of liberal pandering, to review one of the best books on the spiritual pathology of liberalism I have ever read, The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class.

Wait a minute: "spiritual pathology?" Isn't such bobnoxious language just going to guarantee no liberal takes the book seriously? Well, first of all, those are my words. Thus far, Siegel hasn't used the word "pathology," although he does often touch on the deranged and displaced -- what I would call gno-nothing -- spirituality at the sclerotic heart the liberal project.

But what do you call someone who will accuse me of racism for merely pointing out the elementary truth that liberal elites pander to various interest groups -- they all know it -- in order to garner their support at the ballot box? And at the same time, smear as racist anyone who points out this elementary truth? That's right: deeply sick.

The world created by such pandering slanderers is called hell, for hell is anyplace where truth cannot be uttered, or where one is punished for expressing it. Such hells can appear anywhere from the childhood home to the politico-media-academic complex (although one suspects the latter is rooted in the former, for what kind of living human being would want to cash in his humanness in exchange for membership in a zombie cult of politically correct hell?).

Lately we've been discussing the confluence of high and low, abstract and concrete, psyche and soma, that we see in Catholicism and developmental psychoanalysis. We see something similar in contemporary liberalism, albeit in a perverse way, with the alliance of ideological malefactors of great wealth -- the deserving rich, e.g., entertainers, global warming alarmists, trial lawyers -- at the top, and what used to be called the proletariat, or working class, at the bottom, leaving out the eighty percent of the restavus -- that would be the middle class referred to in the title.

But the left doesn't really bother with the proletariat anymore. Rather, it is simply a coalition of the willing-to-be-victimized, and one needn't be poor to be a member.

Homosexuals, for example, are more affluent than the average, and girls do much better than boys on most measures, e.g., high school graduation, college, health, mortality, mental illness, drug abuse, suicide, imprisonment, etc. Latinos who hit the jackpot by making it to America have to be taught to think of themselves as victims, and what's up with Jews? This book provides some clues to that canaandrum, but I still plan to read Podhoretz's Why Are Jews Liberals?

Likewise, Obamacare actually discriminates against the young-and-poor, regarding them as selfish malefactors of great health, i.e., ATMs for authorized victims.

Siegel's book is short but extremely rich. There is hardly a wasted word, and there are provocative insights on nearly every page. Among other virtues, it provides a real history of 20th century liberalism, to counter the fraudulent, self-flattering one invented by themselves. Remember, most history is written by the winners. Of tenure. The rest is written by the whiners, e.g., feminist history and all the other subhumanities.

Siegel notes that the top-bottom coalition alluded to above didn't start with pre-WWI progressivism -- which was another beast entirely, a coalition of Democrats and Republicans such as TR, mostly rooted in the Christian "social gospel" -- nor did it begin with FDR's extra-constitutional statism.

Rather, the bitter roots of our contemporary liberalism are distinctly smelled "in the wake of the post-World War I disillusionment with American society. In the Twenties, the first writers and thinkers to call themselves liberals adopted the hostility to bourgeois life that had long characterized European intellectuals of both the left and the right."

Very much contrary to their autoerotic self-image, this hostility revolved around an undisguised contempt for those they would presume to rescue via the creation of "an American aristocracy of sorts, to provide the same sense of hierarchy and order long associated with European statism."

So the story of how we have arrived at our liberal aristocracy is a long one, but Obama is its logical endpoint. Note that the aristocrats are by their nature contemptuous of anyone who isn't a member, but they are not permitted to express this toward the voting groups they need in order to retain power. Thus, it seeps from their every pore when discussing any group they don't need, e.g., "bitter clingers," or just white men (accent on both words) in general. White male grown ups supported Romney, just as they did McCain. Such a banality (and inevitability, given male nature) must be converted into a "war on women," or various other smears.

But liberals -- including auto-castrated white males -- can't even use the term without sneering. You will never hear a liberal strategist wondering how to garner more support from men, because not only do they not need it, they need to cling to their dehumanizing caricature in order to fire up one of their key constituencies, i.e., losers with a father complex.

Speaking of aristocracy and contempt, it is interesting to me that we actually see these on both sides of the political spectrum. For example, our good-natured contempt is directed at, say "LoFos," or college students with skulls full of mush, or tenured mediocrities, whereas liberal contempt is directed at white males (and male virtues in general), or Kansas dwellers ("what's the matter with them?"), or conservative blacks, or any woman who likes being one.

As for the aristocracy, the left's is again a combination of high and low, of properly overeducated fools at one end, and sanctified victims at the other. Thus, even a smart cookie as grotesquely undercooked as Rachel Jeantel can join the club, at least for 15 minutes: Oprah for a day!

But just because one is an aristocrat doesn't mean one has to be an affected, contemptuous, sneering snob, right? In fact, when one of these aristos comes off this way, one suspects that something else is going on. If I were a psychologist, I might suspect that the brittle snobbery is a defense mechanism against some sort of insecurity -- for a secure person doesn't need others to see him as special.

There are true aristocrats in this world -- people of Light -- and it has nothing to do with class, money, or education. Rather, one may discern them by the manner in which they tie their shoes. And the way they treat the help.

Can you even imagine liberalism without snobbery? I can't. It seems to be an addiction for them, and I can understand why, since I used to be one. All one has to do is affect the required intellectual posture in order to put down the Other -- something like, "can you believe that in this day and age, there are people who don't believe in global warming?" There is a 99% chance that such a person knows precisely nothing about global warming, and yet, by saying it, he is able to feel a charge of self-righteousness and intellectual superiority. That's a cheap high, and it is difficult to give up.

Likewise, what a thrill to call someone a racist! It's a thrill because one is really boasting of one's own non-racism, but what morally sane person would boast of his rudimentary decency? There's no thrill there, which is why the projection of evil is necessary in order to create that extra frisson, for hatred is more bracing than mere decency.

This ended up not being a review, just a standard-issue rant. I will get more deeply into the book tomorrow, and ratchet up the rant.