Even God Can't be a Little Bit Pregnant

As we've discussed in the past, we are confronted with a number of irreducible complementarities -- we call them orthoparadoxes, but that term is probably getting stale -- such as time/eternity, form/substance/, male/female, wave/particle, individual/collective, subject/object, part/whole, I/thou, etc.

We can attempt to think beyond these by choosing one side over the other, but doing so always comes at the expense of sneaking in properties of the excluded term through the backdoor.

For example, if you really choose object over subject, then the conversation must stop then and there, because objects don't think or speak. Thus, to even acknowledge the bare existence of material objects is to simultaneously acknowledge the existence of subjects. Call it the Law of the Excluded... sibling or something.

Now, one of these complementarities has to be Absolute/Relative. As with the others, we can try to think beyond this orthoparadox, but doing so will simply generate paradox -- the bad kind.

I call a bad paradox any idea that negates itself or simply generates unthinkable absurdity.

Take, for example, determinacy/indeterminacy. To affirm the former over the latter is to affirm nothing, because the affirmed is simply the necessary. Only if there is contingency can we know the necessary. Likewise, if predestination is true, then we couldn't know it. (For similar reasons, if natural selection is the sufficient cause of man, man couldn't know it.)

Hartshorne asks a naughty theo-logical question, that is, "What is the basic logic of the assumption that relativity is primary, not absoluteness?"

Yes, there are passages in scripture suggesting the primacy of absoluteness, but there are also passages implying otherwise. Besides, Hartshorne is inquiring into the "basic logic," and perhaps the logic is necessary in order to sort out conflicting passages in scripture.

For example, if there is a passage suggesting the sun revolves around the earth, we can safely (and appropriately) ignore it, because it conflicts with observation and reason.

In a more general sense, is it helpful to conceptualize a Creator who gives us the precious gift of intelligence, only to ignore it in transmitting his most important communication to us? Why then do we have the intelligence, if it only gets in the way? Or, to what is the revelation addressed? To stupidity? Credulity? Fantasy?

Could be. But this places intelligent people in a bind, because then they are forced to choose between intellect and God.

Let's begin with some definitions of relative: "considered in relation or in proportion to something else"; "a being or object posited by virtue of its relations"; "having mutual relation with each other."

Now, do we arrive at relativity via absoluteness? Or rather, do we posit absoluteness based upon our familiarity and intimacy with relativity?

For Hartshorne -- and for me, for what it's worth -- it is clearly the latter: "The concept of the non-relative is parasitic on that of the relative. Given the concept of relatedness, we can then by negation (itself an example of relativity) arrive at that of non-relatedness."

In other words, in everyday life, we confront nothing but a concrete (not abstract) web of relations. To the extent that things can exist apart from the web, this is always an abstraction. There is "absolutely" nothing that is radically separate from anything else, which is why it should have come as no metaphysical surprise -- the surprise of physicists notwithstanding -- that the quantum realm should reveal itself to be a field, a web, a network, and not a world of externally related parts.

True, there is the famous wave/particle complementarity, but of the two, which must be primary? (And please note, to say "primary" is not to exclude the complementary term, for there is still relation.)

I would suggest that the field must be primary, just as, say, our body is primary over the cells of which it is constituted, even though both are necessary. A bunch of cells does not equal a body, nor is the cosmos a pile of atoms.

Now, being relative means that what something is -- i.e., its identity -- "depends for being what it is upon some relation to another."

I don't know about you, but I find it fascinating that Christianity posits a God of "absolute relation." In other words, there is no God "beyond" the mutual indwelling and roundabout relations of F↔S↔HS. What a strange idea!

And yet, in my opinion, it accords with basic logic in a way that "absolute absoluteness," so to speak, cannot. Rather, in my opinion, absolute-absoluteness (AA for short) -- in which all relativity is bleached out -- is absurd and paradoxical.

An AA God, in whom relativity is denied, would, of course, be a changeless God. Thus, such a God would be neutral as to all alternatives and differences.

Interestingly, the radically un-judgmental God of the New Agers often approaches this ideal; for example, who are you to claim that God has an issue with homosexual marriage? Differences between the sexes are just human constructs, but in God there are no such distinctions, just absolute gooey oneness!

From all eternity God lies on a maternity bed giving birth. The essence of God is birthing. --Meister Eckhart

Well, that's about it for today. To be continued...

Shhh! The Liberals are Sleeping!

Must every post be important?

You know, in the old days, I had the occasional post consisting of unalloyed frivolousness and bleating heart gliberalism. Like this one.

Because. What a loaded word! X happened because Y. Very few events are that simple, and yet, our implicit collective metaphysic is founded on the idea that they are.

In other words, we pretend that everything has an unambiguous, linear explanation, when in reality few things do. Again, that kind of simple cause-and-effect is the exception, not the rule.

Okay. What is the rule, then? Anyone can say what it isn't.

I think it was Aristotle who defined philosophy as the search for ultimate causes. How do we know when we've reached an adequate, let alone ultimate, explanation? I suppose adequate explanations are sufficient to get us through the day, but if you're at all introspective, you'll very quickly see through the absurdity and even insanity of most of these.

The other evening I jotted down a murmurandom to myself. Let me go fetch it.

Don't get excited. It's no major epiphany or theophany or hahafunny. Says, and I quote, 'never had existential dream v. ontic dreams.' I can tell by the dashed off quality that it made sense at the time. I think I heard some sort of TV commercial in the background, talking about achieving your dreams.

It occurred to me that I never really had the dreams that seem to motivate so many people. And if you don't participate in the collective dream, then you are going to be marked out as an oddball. It only takes one person outside the dream to make all the dreamers feel awkward, uncomfortable, and self-conscious.

I wish I could remember the book -- I think it was the Coon Classic Violence Unveiled -- in which the author writes of how the presence of a neutral observer made savages feel very uncomfortable when they were about to enact one of their collective dreams, such as human sacrifice. "Must you stare at me like that when I'm about to plunge the blade into his throat? It's creepy."

It's as if the presence of the outsider makes the group aware of their dream-trance, when the whole point of the dream is to not realize it is one.

I remember a similar feeling on one of my first internships, which must have been in around 1987 or so. I didn't know much of anything, and being that I was still a liberal, I actually knew less than that. I was still naive about the ways of the world. Anyway, this internship was at an AIDS hospice in West Hollywood. I guess I was supposed to help people with their feelings or something, but the whole thing was rather ill-defined. I could only handle two afternoons.

Anyway, when I got there, I felt like an orthodox Jew at communion. You know how it is. Everyone stops talking. Sort of like Blazing Saddles: No, I said the shrink isn't a qu... GONG!

This is ridiculous. I'm just trying to entertain you, aren't I, to conceal the fact that this post isn't going anywhere?

Let's start over.

Everyone's got one. A BECAUSE, I mean. It seems to me that a group, in order to be one, must share the same Because, or inhabit the same social trance.

A trivial example, but my son's Little League team is the Cardinals. One of the dads is a lifetime Cubs fan who grew up in Chicago, so he absolutely cannot bring himself to wear a Cards hat. I told him I empathized, because if my son were unfortunate enough to be on the Giants, under no circumstances would I soil my dome with their skeevy merchandise.

Weird? Yes. But only because you don't dream Dodger blue. Any longtime Dodger fan shares the dream, and would know exactly how I feel. I mean, c'mon. This was during my first year as a fan, and I don't forget that easy:

Liberals and conservatives don't just differ on this or that policy, but inhabit different dreamworlds. Likewise Islamists. Or Paul Krugman, as discussed in yesterday's post, recklessly swinging those racist bats in his belfry. That he feels so free to spew such craziness means not only that there are plenty of people who share his dream, but that he seems to have never met anyone who doesn't. He's like the medieval peasant who has never actually seen a Jew, but only knows they have horns and cloven feet, as do Giants fans.

David Mamet uses the term "recognition symbols." You might think of these as outward cues about the dream a person inhabits: they are "the slang terms, jokes, and archetypes that minority groups employ to signal their understanding of and belonging with each other."

A contemporary liberal education -- especially at our finest universities -- consists essentially of "Nothing. Students learn five recognition symbols that make them comfortable in conversation with other people who know nothing."

Or in other words, they internalize the rudiments of the dream, so as to function without friction in the totalitarian dreamworld of the left.

There is friction of course, but only when they hear rumors of one of those conservatives with the horns and cloven feet. I mean, have you taken a good look at Megyn Kelly? I hear she's a monster!

The Insanely Powerful Intellect of Paul Krugman

Almost no time this morning...

Speaking of infinite variables, complex systems, nonlinear behavior, and human freedom, there is a relevant essay by Isaiah Berlin called The Concept of Scientific History. I haven't actually finished it, but he begins with a discussion of past attempts to treat history as a natural science, an enterprise which can succeed neither in practice nor in principle. Why is that?

Well, history deals with what we call "facts," but there are no historical laws from which these facts can be deduced, nor any strict inductive method for putting them together.

It seems that imagination is required at both ends, both in identifying and in synthesizing the historical facts into "history." But we all know that imagination easily veers into fantasy, or hordes of tenured revisionists would be out of business.

It is as if there is a kind of rupture in epistemology above physics and biology. Physics, of course, is the paradigmatic science, in that it advances not just by observation but by deductions which extend the reach of its powerful and coherent system. The whole existentialada is governed by a few laws with staggering implications.

But no one can do this with history except for Marxists and other progressives. Paul Krugman, for example, has it all figured out. As with physics, he has a powerful logico-deductive system that provides immediate answers to any historo-political question. In fact, Krugman's system is insanely powerful.

For example, why do conservatives believe what they believe? Because they -- we -- are racist. Political science is so easy, even a Nobel laureate can do it!

Krugman begins with the principle of racism, from which "facts" on the ground are then deduced. Unlike a sane person, he does not begin with the facts, i.e., with any actual racist. Indeed, he even says "there’s no evidence that Mr. Ryan is personally a racist," but that doesn't matter. There was also no evidence of, say, the theory of relativity. Rather, it was initially deduced and only observed some two decades later.

Krugman implies that Charles Murray is a racist for simply writing of the well documented differences in IQ among different racial groups. If Murray is a racist, then so too is his own employer (two newspapers in one!). Which, in all fairness -- the leftist kind -- makes Krugman a vile racist as well. Hey, he makes the rules.

Krugman acknowledges that he is working from deduction in claiming that "race is the Rosetta Stone that makes sense of many otherwise incomprehensible aspects of U.S. politics."

Or in other words, any time Krugman is confronted with an idea he doesn't understand, he submits it to his logico-deductive racial system, which promptly and dispassionately announces "Mystery solved." Simple as. Like Chris Matthews, minus the spittle.

By the way, it is not Krugman who is being simplistic and reductionist. Rather, it is those of us with different ideas. His system assures him that people with different policy preferences only hold them because racism is "all that [they've] got." We are intellectually and spiritually impoverished, not Krugman.

History is complex and change is hard. Is it any wonder that progressives such as Krugman cling so bitterly to simplicity, stasis, and slander? That's pretty much all they've got.

****

UPDATE:

Kind of like Obama, who constantly confuses "the ideas in his head with reality. It is not clear if he knows the difference." True, but at least he's in good company with fellow Nobelists such as Krugman, Carter, Arafat, and Gore.

Nevertheless, "ultimately, fantasy must yield to reality, falsehood to truth, superstition to science" (the Derb).

The Thou of Physics

What must physics be like in order for something as queer as an "I" to exist? And what must metaphysics be like in order for physics to go that way? (Not that there's anything wrong with it.)

Or, what must God be like? Mighty queer, I suppose. For He is indeed the Light in us loafers and shoegazers. Unless existence -- including its most striking feature -- tells us nothing about ultimate reality, however we conceptualize it.

Well, let's think about this. Is physics alone sufficient to account for the human subject? The official line from Big Academia is that nothing occurs in the cosmos -- or even can occur -- that violates the laws of physics. Oh sure, strange and unexpected things can and do happen. But there is always a purely naturalistic explanation.

This type of explanation always looks backward in a naive way that would embarrass a historian. A trained historian is supposed to have the Historian's Fallacy trained out of him, which is the tendency to view the past in light of how events turned out. At the time the events were occurring, no one, of course, had the historian's advantage of knowing exactly how they are going to play out. Hindsight can make you look much more clever than you actually are.

But not always. Leftists prove that it is just as possible to be afflicted with backward looking myopia despite the advantages of living in the present -- for example, in condemning Truman for nuking Japan, or ridiculing Ronald Reagan for his advocacy of the "Star Wars" missile defense, or vilifying people who correctly warned us about communist infiltration of the federal government.

We saw a typically childish version of this with the Iraq war, in which many of its most vocal supporters concluded that "Bush lied" only after things turned out badly. They pretended that perfect knowledge of the future had been available in the past. Which it never is, at least not for mortals, and perhaps not even for God.

But I think leftism in general is rooted in this fallacy. It is present in most everything they do. Even their current euphemism, "progressivism," presumes to know not just the content and direction of history, but the means to get there. Thus, Clinton sold us a "bridge to the 21st century," while Obama presumes to be "on the right side of history."

That last one is especially nefarious, because it is just a thinly veiled Marxist historicism, in which the future is known and it is the task of the Vanguard to get us there irrespective of fact, logic, or dissent.

Global warming is the same way: we know the future, so people who disagree with us need to be imprisoned. That means, what, more than half the population needs to be sent to the gulag? Whatever. Eggs & omelettes.

Now, only the simplest scientific system can predict the future. This can only occur when the variables are few and known, and operate in a linear manner, as in the solar system. The theoretical biologist Robert Rosen was the first of whom I am aware who argued that this type of system is the exception, not the rule, in the cosmos.

If Rosen is correct -- which I believe he is -- it would represent another one of those Copernican Revolutions. It would mean that our whole way of looking at the world is backward and upside down, because we are elevating a rare exception to our unifying principle. Metaphysically speaking, it doesn't get much worse than that.

I know what you're thinking: Bob, where are you going with this? Have you lost control of the bus? Or does it just appear so, based upon our imperfect knowledge of the future? And is the bus actually moving into the future, or is the future just flowing into the bus? Are you really driving, or is this thing like a monorail, with only one way to go?

The question is: do we determine reality -- even if just an itsy bitsy -- or does it determine us, right down to our last teensy weensy? And it doesn't matter whether we are determined by matter or God, because it amounts to the same thing: the primordial soup nazi barking no slack for you!

Now, according to Big Theology, God is Pure Being, with not so much as a jot or tittle of Becoming. For them, the gnosis is settled.

Well, we say: like anyone can know that, Napoleon.

Let's say it is true: God is pure Being. Let's lay out the implications. "If God is sheer being, devoid of becoming, then all becoming is external to Him, and yet He knows it" (Hartshorne).

But "Can the perfectly known be external to the knowing?" In other words, if total reality consists -- which it must -- of "the divine being and the worldly becoming," then it as if we are positing God as a part of the total reality -- the unchanging part. Does this make any sense?

A doctrine of Pure Being has implications for the Method of realizing its truth (again, all religiosity consists of Doctrine + Method). It would imply that nondual approaches such as Buddhism and Vedanta are correct, and that "the way to find God is to 'leave the world behind,' to turn from becoming altogether."

But the Judeo-Christian tradition assumes the opposite: that the world is the very field of our adventure in redemption. It is not some cosmic mistake or accident, any more than the baseball diamond is extrinsic to the game.

Would you believe me if I told you I am a better player than Babe Ruth because I have transcended hitting? Then why believe some light-hitting guru when he claims that never budging from home plate is the same as a homerun, because you end up in the same place?

I believe the human praying field is the dynamic space between I and Thou, or let's say O ↔ •, on the one hand, and • ↔ •, on the other (vertical and horizontal, respectively).

Considering the first, if we are rightly oriented, our becoming takes place in God, or, to be precise, in the living space between I and the metacosmic I AM. And predictions are all well and good, but you can't know the outcome until you play the game. "Upsets" happen all the time in sports and in life, and they violate neither physics nor God. And they certainly make life more interesting. Or as someone (Chesterton?) said: I don't believe in miracles. I only rely on them.

Adventures in God

Although Buber (as mentioned two posts back) denies the implications of his own theology, he writes in his most famous work, I and Thou, that "we know unshakably in our hearts that there is a becoming of the God that is" (quoted by Harthsorne).

If there is becoming, then there is change. But Buber doesn't like the sound of that, so he stops well short of pursuing his own common sense -- or common experience -- to its theo-logical deustiny.

But for Hartshorne, Buber's words are just plain logic, "neither less nor more," so theologians (including Buber!) who balk at their implications are being "wonderfully illogical."

Some say that to affirm change in God is to deny omniscience, because if God is omniscient then he can by no means be "surprised" by change. In this view, God is the last jaded word in Been There/Done That.

That is, what looks like change to us must be as one big spatiotemporal block to God, where everything -- past, present and future -- is taken in at once. Or in other words, for God, time is not temporal, but rather, spatial.

To which one can only respond with a shrug of the shoulders and the old "that's one way of looking at it."

But that way has never appealed to me, neither emotionally nor intellectually, not to mention spiritually. Rather, I like the idea of adventure, including Adventure in God. What if God is the quintessential adventurer and creation is the ultimate E-ticket adventure?

To which one may well respond with a shrug of the shoulders and the old "that's one way of looking at it."

I mean, far be it from me to start an argument if you prefer to be a religious couch potato resting in the comfort and safety of your own delusions.

I want to briefly skip ahead to the contribution by a Nahum Glatzer, professor of Judaic Studies at Brandeis. It seems to me that he absolutely Nails It in observing that the prophets teach "the freedom of choice."

Now, "Israel is in the hand of God like the clay to a potter's hand." However, this does not mean the future is settled and that our freedom is an illusion.

For on the one (potter's) hand, "God plans the destiny of nations and of men." Bueno. I think we can all agree on that.

However! "In choosing the good," it is as if man "causes" God to renounce his plan for what would have occurred had man turned away from the good. Or, in choosing evil, man "causes" God to adjust his plans accordingly.

Thus -- common sense again -- "Because there is a covenantal relationship between God and man, man has the power of turning to the good or the evil, and thus also the power of turning the tide of events."

Therefore, what happens to man is "the divine answer to his choice." This is no "mechanical relationship of cause and effect," but rather, "a dialogical correspondence between God and man."

This is because "God wants man to come to Him in perfect freedom"(emphasis mine and God's). This being the case, the future "cannot be a result of pre-determination," for "the spirit of God assumes the attitude of 'waiting' for man to fulfill the intention of Creation."

But predetermination always creeps back in like the worship of Ba'al, for any ideology that denies man's freedom and claims that the future is written is an iteration of the same old gnostic ba'algame, from Hegel and Marx on down to our own contemporary progressive clownocracy.

If Hollywood has taught us anything, it is that "Truly, for some men nothing is written unless THEY write it" (Lawrence of Arabia).

Of course, God is always the cowriter, and he has a contingency plan for every eventuality, but that does not equate to omniscience in the sense usually understood.

Rather, for Hartshorne -- common sense again -- omniscience is "limited" to what can be known. And what can be conceivably known is EVERYTHING that has happened and is happening. But unless we deny all distinctions between past, present and future, then "knowledge" of the future must be a different sort of thing.

For some reason, religious people are generally uncomfortable with this idea, but I am profoundly uncomfortable with its alternative, for there would be no reason to get up in the morning if it weren't for the opportunity to participate in a new adventure in and with God. I mean, is he just faking the interest?

I Can Get You a TOE by 9 O'clock this Morning

Let's play a theological game of SPOT the FALLACY (or EXPOSE the THEO-ILLOGIC). Hartshorne's essay in The Philosophy of Martin Buber serves as a fine example of his overall approach and a good summary of his metaphysical and theological preoccupations. I personally don't see any flaws in his theo-logic, but I bring with me no preconceptions that might get in the way.

Hartshorne's best book, in my opinion, is Philosophers Speak of God (cowritten with William Reese), in which he -- almost in scholastic fashion -- presents the best arguments of virtually every great thinker in history, and methodically pokes holes in each one.

His targets range from the pre-Socratics to the postmoderns. However, since the book was published in 1953, prior to the pandemic of postmodernism, it only touches the hem of that soiled garment, e.g., Freud and Nietzsche, who are as cognitive HIV to the full blown psychopneumatic AIDS of a Derrida, Foucault or Edward Said.

Having said that, I suspect that I might be missing something, because it all seems too easy. I mean, if I can fully understand it, there must be something wrong with it, right?

It's like Giuliani's highly useful definition of art: If I can do it, then it isn't art. For example, I couldn't have painted the Sistine Chapel or carved the Pieta. But I could, say, smear some sheets with blood from a severed toe. How? Oh, I could get a toe, believe me. That's the easy part. There are ways. Hell, I can get you a toe by 3 o'clock this afternoon. With nail polish. These fucking amateur artists...

Speaking of which, I can get you a T.O.E. -- Theory Of Everything -- by 9:12 this morning. Let us proceed by getting back to our special geist, and just hope he's not as unholy as some people seem to think.

Hartshorne begins with the following: "First, the supreme principle is not absoluteness or self-sufficiency, but relativity."

I admit to swallowing this fishy principle, hook, line and sinker. Perhaps you don't. If so, then you're off the hook. You are free to pursue the implications of a fully self-sufficient and changeless whale of an absolute.

But if you pursue these implications and entailments to the belly of the beast, your head will soon be swimming with the fishes. Don't stop halfway at a comfortable or convenient why station. Don't just throw out the little questions, but keep asking the big ones that always get away.

As Dennis Prager always says, it is one thing to vaunt the strengths of one's position, another to acknowledge its weaknesses, trade-offs, and unintended consequences. Leftists in particular never admit to the latter, and we certainly don't want to imitate that chronically intellectually dishonest rabble.

Being that relation is absolute, "This primacy of relatedness is not to be denied even of God." Although this may sound shocking to some, it shouldn't shock the Christian, since the ontological Trinity "speaks of the interior life of the Trinity, the reciprocal relationships of Father, Son, and Spirit to each other without reference to God's relationship with creation."

To me -- and I could be way wrong about this -- the whole point of the Incarnation is to widen out, so to speak, the ontological Trinity, so as to potentially include man within its loving embrace.

Thus, "God, the inclusive Thou, is relative to us, as well as we to Him." This is because Jesus as man is made fully inclusive within the dynamic Trinity, as Son to Father. In other words, the ontological Trinity widens out to include (the man) Jesus, who, as God and man, is (therefore) both economic and ontological Trinity.

This would explain how, "in an incomprehensible way," we may have "an effect upon God." For me, this also explains the paradox of a suffering God who is supposedly changeless. Clearly, to suffer is to be subject to change. Via the Incarnation, God participates quintessentially in the suffering of man.

Steadfast is not necessarily synonymous with changelessness. Rather, one might say that it is what we place our faith in despite all the changes. I mean, we hope God is steadfast, but we also hope he is moved by our suffering, don't we?

Hartshorne acknowledges that "To very many, these are strange, puzzling, or even odious and blasphemous words." However, I believe this blasphemy is intrinsic to Christianity, not extrinsic. It is why "the world will hate you" and "you will be persecuted in My name." In short, it is as blasphemous to suggest that God changes as it is revolutionary to suggest that the earth isn't the center of the physical solar system.

Indeed, Hartshorne characterizes the transition from God-as-substance to God-as-relation as a Copernican Revolution of the spirit.

Much of this debate revolves around the question of freedom, for freedom and relation are inextricably intertwined. In short, "if freedom is denied to man, then it cannot be rationally attributed to God," because "if we experienced no freedom in ourselves, no power of resolving indetermination, we could not even have the idea" of freedom. In a way, we would be God, because with no freedom, nothing in us would be distinguishable from him.

Or, one could say that the denial of human freedom renders us either God or object, for only an unconscious object has zero freedom, so to insist that only God is free is to render man an object, an It. Either way, it is impossible for a being with zero freedom to attribute complete freedom to another.

And isn't freedom inseparable from change? For Hartshorne, it is not a matter of all change bad, pure changelessness good. Rather, if we admit change into the Godhead, then it must be "supreme or ideal" in comparison to our "inferior or deficient" use of freedom.

Or, to put it concretely, we might say that Jesus makes perfect use of his freedom. It is not that he is subject to no change, but rather, participates in perfect change.

But again, I'm sure I'm missing something.

I AM, IRS, and You are IT

I would like to expand upon some of the ideas discussed in yesterday's post, including the conflict between theo-logic and theology, or revealed vs. manmode intellection.

First of all, I would say that there is both objective and subjective revelation. Objective revelation consists of, for example, scripture.

But scripture must not only come from a subject, but be addressed to one. Therefore, the subject is both anterior and posterior to the divine message. And we can only decode the divine message on our end because of our similarity to the messenger.

Therefore, I think subjectivity itself is a cosmic revelation -- which shouldn't come as a shock, being that God identifies himself as I AM. In all of existence, there are only two beings who can say I AM: God and man.

In this briefest of sentences, I goes to Ontology (or Being), AM to Existence. Thus, to say I AM is to say that the Subject really exists. It is not just some ideal abstraction, nor just a sum total of local behaviors. It is real, even the ultimate real, i.e., God.

You could also say that I and AM go to transcendence and immanence, respectively. As we all know from personal experience, our I endures regardless of the experiences it encounters. Yet, the I only exists via these experiences. Just as form and substance can be separated only in the imagination, it seems that the same applies to I and AM: you never see one without the other.

Which is again why I find Buber's theology so coongenial, what with his belief that the I-THOU relation constitutes the irreducible essence of reality. What this really represents is an I to I relation, or I AM and YOU ARE. But as a result of the relation, an ontic third is introduced: WE ARE.

And what is the glue that holds the cosmic WE together? In Christian metaphysics it is called love. Thus, love is the concrete expression of a more abstract principle of unity, or mutuality, or intersubjectivity.

Conversely, hate, for example, would represent a denial of the YOU ARE. When we hate someone, it entitles us, so to speak, to treat them as an object, not a subject.

I should add that the other link between I AM and YOU ARE is knowledge or truth. Therefore, another form of denial of the link would be the Lie. The Lie always erodes human community, one more reason to detest the left, which is both the cause and consequence of vicious and foolish lies.

The other day, I heard Dennis Prager say that the older he has gotten, the more he has come to believe that truth is the most important societal value. I agree entirely. If you consider any collective human evil, up to and including genocide, it is always founded upon Lies that permit human beings to commit the evil. Nazism was, of course, evil. But prior to that it was a monstrous Lie. Likewise communism or any other ideology that commits evil in its name.

This makes it a matter of some urgency to understand the Truth of Things. Why, for example, has the United States not only been a benign influence in the world, but repeatedly saved its ass?

Because it comes the closest to being organized around permanent truths of man, truths grounded in the spiritual freedom of the sacred human subject; which is to say, the freedom of the I to determine its own AM, and not be treated like an IT.

Which is precisely what the state must do, since it is an IT, not an I. Millions of Americans, for example, are furious that ObamaCare is treating them like a worthless IT, an object, an insect. Well, what did you expect?

Likewise, how do you expect the IRS to behave? If there is one government agency that excels at treating humans as contemptible objects, it is the IRS.

But this relation is not reversible. That is to say, now that Lois Lerner has been busted for treating conservatives even worse than other cITizens, she takes refuge in the permanent truth of the inviolable I AM that must be protected from the invasive reach of the IT-state.

Ironic? Yeah, like Kim Jong Un getting 100% of the vote in the North Korean election. Who would have guessed?

Theology, Theologic, and Theomena

Excuse me? Theomena?

That would be the best word I can think of at the moment for spiritual facts and divine data (a variation on phenomena and noumena). Irrespective of whether one is a believer or not, these facts surely exist. Indeed, man is not man without them, for in every time and place, man has experienced and known them.

Theology (as I am using the term) begins at the other end and works deductively.

That is, it begins with an organized revelation from above, a vertical memo from God to man. To engage in theology is to dwell in the message, to work out its implications, and to demonstrate how it is relevant to man within a total system encompassing cosmic origins, the proper conduct of one's life, and our post-biological destiny.

Theo-Logic is the title of Balthasar's trilogy, but I mean the term in a different way, basically similar to ordinary logic, only applied to spiritual facts, i.e., theomena.

Thus, theologic starts by working inductively from the facts, which in turn generate models from which new facts may be deduced. In a way this would represent "natural theology," only not in so restricted a definition, since it would include, for example, mystical facts and not just, say, the metaphysical transparency and intelligibility of nature.

Over the weekend I came across an interesting example of how theology and theologic can be at odds. But this is actually a common occurrence, which makes me wonder: is revelation a kind of preconscious or collective attempt at a more systematic theologic, only expressed to the multitude in mythico-cultural terms? (Short answer: sometimes and sometomes.)

Or, is theologic a kind of promethean effort to deny the authority of revelation by trying to make it conform to human terms? In other words, is the latter an attempt to cut God down to human size by insisting that he fit into our logical categories?

For most of human history this wasn't a problem, for each culture knew only its own (even if primitive) theology, in the light of which theomena were understood and interpreted.

Our Yanomamö friends, for example, had their own way of dealing with death, by placing the remains of a cremated tribesman into their banana soup and consuming them. It seems that the instinct of communion is a theomena that goes all the way up and down the vertical food chain.

Over the weekend I was reading a volume of the Library of Living Philosophers devoted to the great Jewish theologian Martin Buber. But right there we have a potential conflict, since Buber would no doubt characterize himself as a theologian first, with philosophy per se coming in a distant second. Thus, to apply theologic to his theology may be problematic.

Which it proves to be right out the gate, with the annoying Professor Hartshorne popping into the proceedings in chapter two. We've discussed this noodge in the recent past, and he naturally generated some controversy, since (among other heresies) he maintains with ironclad and invincible theologic that God is not only subject to change, but that he is perfect change.

Thus, he inverts the traditional idea that change is intrinsically bad by elevating God to the quintessence of change, and suggesting that a changeless God would actually be a monstrosity -- certainly nothing to whom we could relate (or could relate to us, because to relate is to be relative, QED -- QED being Latin for 'nuff said or in yo' face!).

Now, the main reason I am intrigued by Buber's theology is his delineation of the I-Thou relation as the ultimate ontological category.

I am in complete agreement with Buber, and would place this principle at the center of my own humble theologic: that God is not defined by substance, but rather, by relation. The relation is intrinsic, not somehow "added," which, in my opinion, goes to the principle of a trinitarian Godhead.

Buber, of course, does not go there. But at the same time, he seems to pull back from the full implications of his own theologic, even within a Jewish framework. When these implications are drawn out by Hartshorne, he rejects them entirely. At the end of the volume, Buber is given the opportunity to reply to his critics and interlocutors, and his response to Hartshorne is pretty blunt:

"The metaphysics he presents as my own I cannot acknowledge.... Because I say of God, that He enters into a relationship to the human person, God shall be not absolute but relative!" Not on my watch!

But that is not exactly what Hartshorne is saying. I too used to believe that "absolutely relative" is a contradiction in terms, but think about it.

Think, for example, of the Trinity. Wouldn't it be accurate to say that the Father is absolutely relative to the Son, and vice versa? In other words, there is no God that can be conceptualized as "separate" from his Son (and therefore us). Thus his relativity is absolute. (Which is why I invented the term abbasolute to combine the two.)

Again, I believe something similar is implied in Buber's description of the I-Thou relation to God. Clearly, we relate to the Thou of God. What, God doesn't relate to us in return? What do the facts -- the theomena -- say?

In the brief autobubergraphical section at the beginning of the book, he speaks of his early experience of "a dialogical relationship between man and God, thus of a free partnership of man in a conversation between heaven and earth..." (Sounds like [↓↑], the old One-Two.)

Elsewhere he speaks of how man cannot be a "self-enclosed unity of the spirit." Rather, "only through opening out, through entering into openness, does the spirit that has descended into the human realm" become coherent and enduring. This represents a "genuine reciprocity," opposed to which is any metaphysic that encloses man within himself.

Indeed, this self-enclosure is a "sin against the holy spirit." Furthermore, it is the perennial "opponent of mankind," a sentiment with which I am in one hundred percent agreement; for me, vertical and/or horizontal closure are the original sin.

But why? Well, if we take seriously the idea that we are in the image of the Creator, and the Creator is perfect relationship, then that is called a divine clueprint. And we need to get one.

To be continued...

Between Cynicism and Faith

Because science is science, it can never be settled. Nor can it have any absolute content per se. That is, it is a relentlessly skeptical enterprise that progresses by doubting what we think we know.

For example, if no one had doubted the commonsense geocentric model of the solar system, we wouldn't have the counterintuitive heliocentric. If no one had questioned the crystal clear Newtonian paradigm, we wouldn't have the transparently obscure quantum-relativistic.

So science has content, but it is by definition preliminary and tentative because falsifiable, at least in principle. No matter how many white swans we see, there is always the possibility of a black one, especially if the DOJ gets involved.

However, human beings cannot live in a world of pure doubt. Or, adequation to the world cannot consist of unalloyed doubt, or it would imply that ultimate reality is the purely dubious. But in reality, there must be a reality prior to our doubt. Analogously, an optical illusion is not a hallucination.

A good working definition of scientism is the metaphysic that transforms science from concrete method to abstract doctrine.

AGW would be a quintessential example, because its advocates insist that it is somehow unscientific to doubt the theory, when doubt is precisely what makes the scientific world go 'round. So, who's being unscientific?

Although natural selection has its place in the scheme of things, I seriously doubt that it can account for everything unique and important about man. To believe that it can is another instance of scientism. Likewise the belief that mind may be reduced to brain, or that homosexuality is "genetic."

Chagnon came up against precisely this perversion of science when he publicized his findings. As far as Big Anthropology was concerned, the science was settled: human behavior is a consequence of culture, not genes, and human conflict is caused by scarcity of material resources -- i.e., primitive Income Inequality -- not anything intrinsic to man.

You will no doubt have noticed that this perversion of thought may begin in the mountain rivers of academia, but it doesn't stay there. Rather, it flows into the creeks and sewers of the left, all the way down into the stagnant, disease-ridden ponds of journalism and public education.

Thus, for example, the left cannot comprehend Islamic terrorism, because they think it must be caused by something we did to, or took from, the terrorists. Palestinian culture can't just be evil. Rather, they just want their dirt, or rocks, or olive trees back. Likewise, Putin is not a nasty SOB. He just wants stuff. If we give it to him, he'll go away quietly.

Learning a discipline begins with an implicit internalization of what is considered important, what is settled, and what must not be questioned.

For example, in the last 40 years, the origins of homosexuality has gone from a fascinating question to an insistent and belligerent answer, with nothing in between. It is as if all the previous research just doesn't exist, because the questions can no longer be asked.

One of my favorite aphorisms of Don Colacho is I have seen philosophy gradually fade away between my skepticism and my faith. Religiosity is not typically seen to be an exercise in skepticism, but it certainly is for me.

I suppose one normally thinks of faith and skepticism as being at polar extremes, but I see them as complementary, almost like catabolism (tearing down) and anabolism (building up).

Now science, as alluded to above, is relentlessly catabolic. It is nearly omnipotent in its ability to tear down even our most precious illusions. Love? Just a trick of the nature to induce us to reproduce. Children? Just the survival of our genes. Religion? Just fear of the unknown (or scientifically pre-known).

The problem with science is not the catabolism, but rather, the absence of proper anabolism. Because it cannot legitimately accomplish the latter (in any final way), scientism simply elevates its own substitutes to the teleological ends of science, where everything is settled and the idolatrous soul finds its rest.

Yes, but I am a cynical lad. I see through these idols, and can see how these tremulous scientists, so fearful of ambiguity, cling to them in the dark night of tenure.

But I am not only cynical. Rather, like the scientistic believer, I too have faith. Except my faith conforms to the Absolute Real and not the absolutely dubious.

What's the Big Idea?

One more post on the Noble Savages and ignoble ones. I wanted to say savage Nobelists, but no anthropologist has ever been awarded one. Plenty of savages, of course.

We've been discussing the unfair, intellectually dishonest, and ideologically motivated savaging of Chagnon's work. What about honest and disinterested criticism? When the most vocal critics are such depraved bullies, it's easy to instinctively support the victim, but sometimes, as in the war between Iran and Iraq, one wishes both sides could lose.

President Bush's critics, for example, were so detached from reality, that many conservatives defended him despite the fact that he was never a conservative (i.e., he had some more or less conservative positions, but was never part of the movement).

According to Isaiah Berlin, every important thinker is ultimately motivated by One Big Thing. If you can find the Big Thing, then you have discovered the key that unlocks their work. I certainly wouldn't call Chagnon an important thinker (few thinkers are), but he is clearly organized around a Big Thing, that thing being sociobiology or evolutionary psychology.

These are synonymous terms for (what should be) the uncontroversial idea that human beings are (at least in part) products of their evolutionary environment. The idea was quite controversial when he began using it, but why?

Again, his critics were not religious fundamentalists, but secular crypto-Marxists. As Chagnon puts it, he was considered "a heretic, a misanthrope, and the object of condemnation by politically correct colleagues, especially those who identify themselves as 'activists' on behalf of native peoples because I describe the Yanomamö as I found them."

One problem, I think, is that the idea of genetic determinism has obviously been misused in the past (always by progressives, mind you) to justify evils such as racism. Therefore, better to close off that avenue of thought entirely. Think of academia as a ski resort with groomed slopes. Venture off them at your own peril.

Charles Murray, for example, got a taste of this with his book The Bell Curve. If I remember correctly, it shows that different ethnic groups have different collective IQs. I suppose it's acceptable to point out that Asian Americans or Ashkenazi Jews are a standard deviation (15 points) above the average (100). However, as in Lake Woebegone, everyone must be above average. If some groups are below average, then we had better be quiet about it.

This is another fine example of the vociferously anti-science attitude of the left. I mean, as Thomas Sowell has often said, it should be a banality to point out that some groups are better at certain things than other groups. For this very reason, it is not at all historically uncommon for certain ethnic groups to dominate certain trades or activities.

I'm sure it is unacceptable to say this, but I don't think the dominance of blacks in the NBA can be attributed to physical factors only, e.g., height. Rather, I suspect a certain form of intelligence must required, similar in a way to the form of intelligence needed to be a (perhaps not coincidentally) jazz master. This intelligence combines spontaneous pattern recognition within a complex flow of information.

When I played basketball as a kid, I had no problem playing one on one, or making baskets. Still have no problem. However, when I attempted to play organized basketball in high school, I immediately found myself overwhelmed by the amount and intensity of information. Everything was happening all at once -- very much unlike, say, baseball. If one attempts to impose linearity on the chaos of basketball, one is immediately overwhelmed. So, I'm not cut out for basketball. Does that make me a racist?

Anyway, back to Chagnon. The general Raccoon position is that man has both horizontality and verticality, and that genes are necessary but insufficient to account for the ladder. I mean, it's just a banal scientific fact that human beings are genetically distinct from all other species. However, irrespective of how genetically "close" we are to any other species, we are vertically quite distant. On the vertical scale, all other species are number two or lower. Much lower.

So, it seems to me that Chagnon's critics are basically criticizing him for taking Darwinism seriously. However, what is odd is that his adversaries have no theory at all as to what makes us human. That is to say, they want to pretend that there is a purely vertical ideological world, untethered to bodies and genes. It is as if they are pure idealists, even though, at the same time, they are pure materialists. Thus, their One Big Idea is One Big Contradiction.

Speaking of which, Isaiah Berlin says that the One Big Reason leftism doesn't work is that there can never be One Big Scheme that applies to everyone. That is to say, we are all different, for which reason the only just political system must maximize liberty.

Or in other words, leftism too is One Big Contradiction, in that it pretends it is possible to reconcile two opposing values, i.e., liberty and egalitarianism. You can't do that, for the same reason it would be tyrannical to impose racial quotas whereby, say, no NBA team could have more than 15% blacks, or 2% of rodeo clowns must be Jews.

Praise Marx and Pass the Ammo

It seems that Isaiah Berlin, whose first book was a biography of Marx, never got over the experience.

In a good way. He tips his hand in the introduction, with a remark from Bishop Butler that was apparently never far from Berlin's mind: "Things and actions are what they are, and the consequences of them will be what they will be: why then should we desire to be deceived?"

That one's for you, Karl.

Well, you can always ignore the question by -- to paraphrase the man himself -- dazzling the useful idiots with a little dialectic, or by simply rejecting the premise. In which case, you are probably a Man of the Left -- assuming you have done so consciously and willingly, as opposed to doing so because of mental illness, coercion, material gain, the lust for tenure, intoxication, or brain damage.

Many people are coerced to see things as they aren't, especially in childhood. However, if you are sensitive, you will be aware of a ubiquitous social pressure to see things in a certain way, to line up like metal filings in a magnetic field. You might say that this is what makes us a "social (or political) animal." We couldn't be a social animal if not for "forces" that are at a right angle, so to speak, to a competing -- or complementary -- force of individuation.

There's nothing intrinsically wrong with the social force, because without it we wouldn't be human. It's the invisible glue that makes a people indivisible, i.e., "one." But obviously, just as there are pathological individuals, there are pathological groups; it's not so much the force but the content that is problematic.

Again, unless you are a Man of the Left, in which case you reject the premise of a norm or standard for human individuals and groups (or pretend to reject it; more on which below).

It sounds preposterous -- or polemical or exaggerated -- to people hearing this for the first time (especially liberals), which I suppose is why Chagnon was so blindsided when he found himself pulled into the gears of the academic leftwing hate machine. For the wheels of Social Justice may grind precipitously, but they grind mercilessly. Nobody expects the Spurious Inquisition.

"Somewhere along the way," writes Chagnon, "the anthropology profession was hijacked by radicals who constituted the 'Academic Left,'" as discussed in the 1994 book Higher Superstition. In 1994, I myself probably still had one foot in the barackish pond of higher superstition, the other foot cautiously dipping into the mountain spring of Things As They Are.

Was it religion or God or O that finally saved (or ruined) me? In this realm we can only discuss correlations, not mechanistic or linear causation. I can say that in 1995 I made the conscious determination to devote the remainder of my life to the search for God. I suppose that may sound courageous or romantic, but seriously, what else is there for an adult? In any event, afterwards the Changes accelerated.

I suppose the Marxist would say that 1995 is when I plunged into a pernicious addiction to the opium of the masses -- the opium that prevents us from seeing actions and consequences as they are and will be. For what they are is material, and what they will be is determined by class conflict. Thus, I am not seeing things as they are, but how the ruling class wants me to see them. I am a tool.

Chagnon gives no evidence of being a religious tool. Rather, just empirical. Common sense. Plain speaking. Nevertheless, he was treated as a religious heretic. For according to the academic left, the proper role of anthropology is to "focus on the 'crimes' committed by previous anthropologists and what they must now do to provide restitution to the victims of their 'scientific' research."

Which brings to mind our President's crack about "white man's greed running a world in need." I mean, one doesn't pick up such insanity in church!

Oh, wait...

It's such a cliché, but it nevertheless applies: the anthropologist regards all cultures as uniquely beautiful except his own. Again, to ask the question posed at the top: why this desire to be deceived? We are seeing a version of this in the reaction of many prominent leftists to Putin's invasion of the Ukraine: "who are we to lecture him, when we are guilty of the same kind of aggression in invading Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Panama, or Grenada?" Or, to paraphrase a commenter at American Digest, who were we to invade the South and free the slaves?

The first thing one wants to say is: if only you opposed Putin's aggression as vociferously as you did Bush's! At the same time, using their formulation, I should be as enthusiastic about Putin's aggression as I was about America toppling Saddam, because I am simply animated by violence and imperialism. Therefore, I am the hypocrite. (Sounds crazy, but I heard Dennis Kucinich make this argument just yesterday.)

"Moral retardation" is too mild a term for this kind of perversion.

According to Chagnon, the "new anthropology" came down to a forensic search for the Bad Guys. True, but it's not much of a search, since the bad guys are always us. It's a foregone conclusion. One wants to say that this seems a bit intellectually lazy, but laziness alone can't account for an inversion of reality. It takes real work to be that crazy.

"A whole generation of students and teachers became convinced that everything, including scientific inquiry, is inextricably political because knowledge itself was inextricably a social -- i.e., a political -- phenomenon" (Gross, quoted in Chagnon).

And for the left, politics is just war by other means, which means that anything is permitted in order to secure victory. That is, in wartime, one is permitted to commit acts that would be considered crimes during peacetime.

No, not actual murder (at least in the US; for the most part), but certainly murder of the enemy's reputation: "Because your cause [is] moral and theirs [is] not, you [may] use false claims against competitors based on your presumed authority" (Chagnon).

Note the ironic recourse to moral authority, when objective morality is precisely what the new anthropologists deny. Another irony is that this is precisely how Chagnon describes the Yanomamö -- they have no compunction whatsoever about lying, stealing, and deception, not to mention rape, kidnap, infanticide, murder, you name it.

In reading the book, it occurred to me that the Yanomamö happily live in total contravention to every Commandment -- which is fine, since we shouldn't be imposing our own tyrannical and repressive morality on them.

Nor should we expect "humane" or "enlightened" behavior on the part of the left. Rather, we should respect the ways of their tribe, and not pretend to judge them in the light of a higher standard that doesn't exist.

My Time Among the Savages of the Left

Upon returning to 1966 after his seventeen-month time-travel to the Stone Age, a colleague invited Chagnon to lecture her class on his findings.

Yesterday I mentioned that Chagnon seems a little naive about the uncommonly rotten core of academia, but how many people realized what was going on there in 1966? The notion of a left-wing takeover of academia would have been regarded as either 1) paranoid, or 2) about time!

So, Chagnon innocently presented his academically incorrect findings about the violent and girl-crazed Yanomamö. Afterwards, the colleague presented him with an offer he would be ill-advised to refuse: "You shouldn't say things like that. People will get the wrong impression."

Excuse me? I thought this was a university. Aren't we engaged in a search for truth? (Those are my words. Well, almost. What I would really want to say is bitch please. Don't make me go all Yanomamö on you.)

"We shouldn't say that native people have warfare and kill each other. People will get the wrong impression" (Professor I.M. O'Toole).

That's political correctness in a nutshell: it always revolves around a revealed, gnostic, a priori truth that is not to be questioned. One may deduce other truths from it, but one is not permitted to make empirical observations that lead inductively to a conclusion that challenges the alpha dogma at the top. Do that, and you're barking up the wrong tree and consigned to the doghouse, as Chagnon would soon enough find out.

And who are these "people" who are susceptible to the "wrong ideas?" I suppose it is the LoFos who are supposed to believe as told by the academic priesthood. Which is another irony, because this surely resembles what the left always says about, say, the Galileo affair. Let's leave aside the fact that they never discuss what actually happened, but have instead constructed a self-congratulating myth about Speaking Truth to Power.

Using their own (albeit intellectually dishonest) terms, Chagnon is Galileo and Big Anthropology is the medieval church, terrified that its subjects might question its dogmas. I mean, one question tends to lead to another, as in the Global Warming scandal.

Nowadays the left's power is so complete that a Chagnon would simply not be allowed to rise up among the rank and foul. Using an analogy from my field, imagine a naive graduate student who was truly curious about the settled science of homosexuality. Well, first of all, curiosity is precisely what is not permitted by the academically correct, so you'll have to indulge me.

This graduate student decides to do some original fieldwork by living amongst homosexuals in, say, San Francisco or West Hollywood. She has no preconceptions or biases, but is simply there to blend in and record her empirical observations about their attitudes, customs, and behaviors.

Upon her return, she is asked to give a lecture on her findings before an introductory psychology class. Maybe she even has careful and extensive photographic documentation of her subjects, like the estimable Ms. Zombie.

It's difficult to imagine her receiving a comment as gentle as "You shouldn't show things like that. People will get the wrong impression." Rather, she'd probably have to be escorted off campus through a gauntlet of rock-throwing primitives.

The lesson here is that the evidence of your eyes might contradict the dogma of the Church of Liberalism, and if your eyes offend us, then you'd better pluck them out before we do.

There's so much I want to say about this subject, but one of the supreme ironies here is that the academic left is exactly in the position of another of their mythological demons, the dreaded Creationists.

As with the Galileo incident, the left has systematically distorted the Scopes "Monkey Trial" in order to forge another foundational, self-serving myth. For in point of fact, as explained, for example, in Siegel's excellent Revolt Against the Masses, this was by no means a simplistic debate between Enlightened Science and religious yahoos.

The whole thing was a contrivance from the start, but if anything, the lawyer chosen to represent the prosecution, William Jennings Bryan, was a populist man of the left who was deeply concerned about the cultural, economic, and political implications of a doctrine that reduced man to an animal and revolved around "a merciless law by which the strong crowd out the weak." For him, naked Darwinism, shorn of any higher ethic, represented "a license for unbridled capitalism."

So, "the irony of the Scopes trial," writes Siegal, is "that it led liberals to tag Bryan, who was in many ways a proto-New Dealer, as a 'right wing authoritarian.'"

Conversely, an A.L. Mencken -- "the rabidly anti-democratic and sometimes anti-Semitic supporter of eugenics who admired both the Kaiser and 1930s Germany" -- would be regarded as a champion of liberalism for his passionate support of iconoclastic Darwinism -- that is to say, not Darwinism as science, but Darwinism as general philosophy (which it obviously can never be, except for Nazis and other Progressives).

Now fast-forward to the 1980s and '90s. One of the main issues that made Chagnon a demon of the left is the suggestion that man isn't an infinitely malleable blank slate, able to be bent, crushed, or mutilated into any form by the state.

Rather, there are these things called genes and this thing called human nature. Thus, he came face to farce with the "widespread biophobia built into cultural anthropological theory, which results in deep suspicion and contempt for biological ideas."

Now, if man is what he is, then there's not much the state can do about it (well, maybe abortion and other forms of eugenics). Thus, apologists for statism must attack any idea suggesting that man has a nature. Therefore, they accuse their adversaries of being apologists "for almost everything hateful in the history of Homo sapiens: wars, fascism, racism, colonialism, capitalism, eugenics, elitism, genocide, etc."

Or in other words, like Bryan in the Scopes trial, they can't object to the science, but rather, the ideological implications of the science. Ironically, natural selection is under attack from two equally misinformed sides, the Christian fundamentalists and the cultural Marxism of institutional anthropology.

Conversely, the Catholic Church, for example, has no issue with natural selection, so long as it is kept in perspective and integrated into the totality of human knowledge. I mean, all truth comes -- must come -- from God, so the more the merrier. Let it all in. The religious, of all people, shouldn't be afraid of the Light -- including any light that natural selection may shed on the human condition.

One more irony. A cultural Marxist is obviously a materialist. But wait -- isn't a metaphysical Darwinian also a materialist? So, why are the materialists at each others' throats? Well, it seems that the materialism of the anthropologists is a "biology free" materialism. Which is a strange materialism, being that man is composed of biological material. Not to mention psycho-pneumatic material.

But their materialism is refracted through the prism of postmodernism, whereby "'truth' and 'facts' are merely subjective categories, ideological constructs, inventions of the subjective observer. Science and the scientific method are viewed by these cultural anthropologists with skepticism, suspicion, and even disdain."

Indeed, even "the very notion that the external world had an existence independent of its observer was challenged." In this ideological darklight, science becomes an exploitive ideology "designed to keep the poor, the disenfranchised, ethnic minorities, and women in subordinate social positions" (Chagnon).

So it wasn't that Chagnon's science was wrong. As in the Scopes trial, that is utterly beside the point. Rather, if you contradict the truth of the left, then you are denounced as a "racist, sexist, biological determinist" (ibid). Denunciation and slander displace reason and evidence.

Which anyone who has spent time among the savages of the left already knows.

Part Two.

Ignoble Savages and Tenured Apes

I have barely any time this morning, so I can only lay a foundation for the insultainment to follow.

Noble Savages provides fascinating insight into the Stone Age savagery out of which civilization evolved, and the tenured savagery to which it has devolved.

I'm not sure which type of sadistic violence is more harrowing, that which takes place among the higher -- which is to say, pre-Chávez -- primates of Venezuela, or in the ivy-covered jungles of academia.

"When Napoleon Chagnon arrived in Venezuela’s Amazon region in 1964 to study the Yanomamö Indians, one of the last large tribal groups still living in isolation, he expected to find Rousseau’s 'noble savages,' so-called primitive people living contentedly in a pristine state of nature."

But "instead he discovered a remarkably violent society. Men who killed others had the most wives and offspring, their violence possibly giving them an evolutionary advantage.

"The prime reasons for their violence, Chagnon found, were to avenge deaths and, if possible, abduct women. He spent years living among the Yanomamö, observing their often tyrannical headmen, learning to survive under primitive and dangerous conditions" (Professor Backflap).

But in the archaic environment of academically correct cultural anthropology -- a malignant leftist fantasy world of crude neo-Marxism, soul-destroying deconstruction, tenured superstition, and hostility to science -- such observations, let alone conclusions, are Impermissible. Thus,

"When he published his observations, a firestorm of controversy swept through anthropology departments. Chagnon was vilified by other anthropologists, condemned by his professional association (which subsequently rescinded its reprimand), and ultimately forced to give up his fieldwork."

The one thing I can criticize Chagnon for is being more than a little naive about academia. You see, those tenured barbarians obviously evolved from the Stone Age ones. In fact, this is true of all of us. We all carry the prehistory of man, not just in our genes, but in our psyche (one way of looking at "original sin"). The more one is aware of this, the less likely is it to overwhelm us, either covertly exerting a malign influence or hijacking the ego altogether.

But the first thing that occurred to me in reading the chapters about the ordeal with his fellow anthropologists was that the latter were behaving exactly as the savages he had studied in the physical jungle: they were paranoid, vengeful, sadistic, and homicidal. They were out to kill -- no, not his body, but without question his ideas and his career.

Instead of doing anything -- up to and including murder -- to ensure the survival of their genes into the next generation, his credentialed assassins were willing to destroy a man -- to symbolically murder him -- so as to ensure the survival of their memes -- their precious ideas -- into the next generation of idiot college children. Same tune in a different key.

In fact, Chagnon became quite ill amidst the controversy, due to the stress of fending off these barbarians. I'm sure he would say that the incredible struggle of living in the jungle -- one time for 17 straight months -- was a cakewalk in comparison to having to deal with the violent barrage of tenured kooktalk.

For me, the more interesting question is why the left behaves in this way. Again, it is a truism in psychoanalysis that -- to express it as simply as possible -- we are composed of higher and lower selves, and that the lower can never be eliminated (because it's really one self that gets split in two for a variety of reasons). Rather, the task before us is to integrate it, hence the commonality I see between religiosity (especially the Judeo-Christian stream) and psychological development.

Indeed, for me, the Incarnation implies that Jesus truly embodies and integrates the complete human spectrum, from the lowest to the highest -- hence, for example, his easy interaction with prostitutes and even the IRS, not to mention the full post-Crucifixion descent into hell. Take the latter literally or figuratively, but the principle is the same: Jesus is a bridge spanning all degrees of human existence, rejecting none.

But we should never be surprised to find someone who pretends to be living on one of the higher rungs secretly living on a lower one. Take a Bill Clinton, who pretends to be adept at policy wonkery when he's really in it for the phallus wankery. Like the Yanomamö, it all comes down to accumulating women and avenging slights. If you should cross the Clintons, one way or another you will end up f*cked.

Sorry to leave you with that crude image, but this barbarian has to pretend to be civilized and get ready for work.

No Brain, No Problem

Some fascinating material in this book on How Judaism Became a Religion.

Interestingly, it seems that all of the main strands of Judaism -- Orthodox, Conservative, and Reform -- emerged in the 18th and 19th centuries, and each can be seen as a reaction to modernity (somewhat similar to how Christian fundamentalism is a thoroughly modern ideology).

Reconstructionist Judaism is more of a 20th century North American phenomenon. I haven't yet gotten up to that chapter, but my limited understanding is that it is like a Jewish version of Unitarianism, i.e., they believe in no more than one God.

I found the discussion of the differences between Orthodoxy and Hasidism to be especially interesting. I trust that Gandalin will let us know if this is a simplistic caricature, but you could say that the Orthodox are analogous to scholastic philosophers poring over scripture and creatively engaging God's living law. Hasidism emerged as a kind of reaction to this, and is throughly mystical, experiential, ecstatic, and individualistic (i.e., not so much focused on the community).

The reason I find this interesting is that one finds this same complementarity in eastern and western forms of Christianity, i.e., Catholicism and Orthodoxy. And indeed, Hasidism emerged in eastern Europe whereas Orthodox Judaism reflects its highly intellectual and more "civilized" German culture.

Many German Jews apparently looked down on their eastern brethren as more than a little uncouth, uneducated, and superstitious; ironically -- considering what happened later -- many of them would have related more to their fellow non-Jewish Germans than to Polish or Russian Jews.

Anyway, the parallel to eastern and western forms of Christianity is intriguing. Eastern Christianity, unlike Catholicism, has never, to my knowledge, developed any systematic theology a la Thomas Aquinas. You might say they missed that boat entirely, and never made any attempt to reconcile revelation with modernity or science or rational philosophy.

Rather, like the Hasidim, they focus on the mystical and experiential. In fact, I would simply define mysticism as the experiential -- as opposed to intellectual or behavioral or (merely) emotional -- aspect of religion. It can never really be absent -- for example, the most intellectualized truth nevertheless must be experienced.

It's somewhat analogous to the distinction between light and heat. Intellectual light generates its own warmth, just as mystical heat radiates its own light. Or, just say mind and heart. Every human is equipped with each. At the start.

Imagine a giant global brain with western/left and eastern/right brain cerebral hemispheres.

Wait -- before you go any further -- can I buy some pot from you?

Anyway, come for the light, stay for the warmth. Or vice versa. A full service religion will feature both.

Back to The Tao of Christ. Speaking of experience, the author cautions us that mere knowledge (k) of revelation is useless; for it "cannot be separated from life," but rather, calls "for a radical transformation of our whole being."

In order to cover all the bases, we need to superimpose a cross over the brain. Thus, in addition to the left and right hemispheres, there is literally a higher and lower brain(s) -- there is the neocortex, under and behind which are the mammalian and reptilian brains, so to speak. And at the top of the spine there is the primitive brainstem of the simple Democrat. It assures respiration, a beating heart, and the ability to apply for food stamps, but little else.

Now, where is the source of our problems? Yes, life is problems. If you are dead, you have no problems. But where in the brain are our problems coming from? Well, I suppose it depends.

They say -- they being developmental neurologists steeped in attachment theory -- that they are stored away in the preverbal right cerebral hemisphere, which is why they are so difficult to detect and eradicate. They are beneath the reach of language, so to... not speak.

But there is a more general, universal, unavoidable problem associated with the human condition, and it is this upper and lower storey business. Freud supposedly thought he had discovered something new with his distinction between the primitive id and the civilized ego, but really, how could one fail to notice?

I remember, for example, when I was a bachelor living in Hermosa Beach. I would torture myself by riding my bike on the path along the beach. Suffice it to say, I did not have to think about scantily clad bodies in the sand. Rather, the thoughts bombarded me, entirely outside my will.

Phone rings. Unexpectedly called into work. On this perfect day for staying indoors, the first rainy day in over a year. Oh well. Life is problems.

Immanuel Transmission vs. Automatic Salvation

In yesterday's post I neglected to include a juicy comment by Moshe Idel, a renowned schola' of the kabbala' (cited in Boyarin), about the two "main vectors" of Jewish mysticism, what he calls the apotheotic and the theophanic streams.

Idel writes that the apotheotic "represents the impulses of a few elite individuals to transcend the human mortal situation through a process of theosis, by ascending on high, to be transformed into a more lasting entity..." This is precisely what I have in mind with the pneumaticon of the circle containing the upward arrow, minus the elite part, which sounds too (upper case) Gnostic (unless we're talking about genuine saints).

"In contrast to this upward aspiration is the theophanic vector, which stands for the revelation of the divine in a direct manner or via mediating hierarchies." This would obviously represent the circle with the downward -- or downWord -- arrow.

I then suggested that perhaps Jesus embodies both arrows. Yes, he is Word-made-flesh, i.e., the Personal Absolute, the descending arrow. However, if he is also "fully man," then we might also regard him as the quintessence of man's ascending energies. Or in other words, he is lost and searching for God, just like the rest of us. In fact, this is hinted at in Matthew 1:23, where it says they shall call His name Immanuel, which is translated, 'God with us.'

In other words, not just God in or above us, but with us. Which can be quite consoling. Yes, he may be the harbor, but he's in the same boat with the rest of us (perhaps most dramatically in the garden at Gethsemane).

This suggests that we need a third pneumaticon that might look something like this:

It seems to me that certain theologies exclude one movement at the expense of the other. For example, certain strands of Protestantism insist that there can be no ascent from our side -- that we are so corrupted by sin that we cannot help ourselves. Rather, God's descent is both the necessary and sufficient cause of our salvation, and there's not a thing we can do or not do about it.

Granted, the universal church has always been mindful of the heresy of Pelagianism, which pretends that man can save himself without divine aid -- that he can ascend to the toppermost of the poppermost without God meeting him more than halfway.

Now, all heresies contain an element of truth, only overemphasized or out of proportion to the totality of revelation. Thus, in point of fact, Pelagianism is no more or less heretical than its polar opposite, predestination.

At the end of yesterday's post, I alluded to Schuon's comment to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and our icon of God. If that is the case, then this icon must always include both arrows, the ascending and descending, since they are both (quintessentially) present in Jesus.

In the West, we know all about the descending arrow. But in Eastern Orthodoxy, I find that they give equal emphasis to the ascending arrow, to the apotheotic stream. You might say that they consider Jesus from the perspective of savior, but also from the angle of -- gulp -- guru. So to speak. They would no doubt prefer the term starets, a person who

"functions as a venerated adviser and teacher. Elders or spiritual fathers are charismatic spiritual leaders whose wisdom stems from God as obtained from ascetic experience." [Why, for example, do we read of Jesus' asectic experience during those forty days in the desert?]

"It is believed that through ascetic struggle, prayer and Hesychasm (seclusion or withdrawal), the Holy Spirit bestows special gifts onto the elder including the ability to heal, prophesy, and most importantly, give effective spiritual guidance and direction. Elders are looked upon as being an inspiration to believers and an example of saintly virtue, steadfast faith, and spiritual peace."

(This would be consistent with Jesus' question and comment -- I'm paraphrasing -- "why do you call me good? There is no one good but God.")

Note that in the Gospels, this is how the disciples most frequently approach Jesus. In other words, they don't usually approach him as God, but as rabbi, teacher. Indeed, he shared all sorts of practical spiritual and ethical advice, things that would be utterly useless to us if predestination were the case. I mean, why pray, why evangelize, why obey the Commandments, if it makes no difference to our salvation?

Boyarin suggests that in Mark -- the earliest Gospel -- we can see most clearly the two trends, as if they hadn't quite yet been harmonized: "It is almost as if two stories have been brought together into one plot: one story of a God who became man, came down to earth, and returned home, and a second story of a man who became God and then ascended on high."

And why not? If Jesus represents a new category of being (both arrows), then naturally it will take awhile for human beings to work it all out.: "ahh, right: God and man. Man and God." It actually took centuries to nail down the right balance.

So, Jesus saves. But Jesus also teaches us how to be saved. Like how? One memorable book that touches on this is Christ the Eternal Tao. Since I don't remember those memorable details, let's dig it out and find out what it says. However, I can tell you ahead of time that it contains some of the same information presented in chapter four of my book. No, I didn't plagiarize anything, aside from plundering it for all it is worth.

Here it is, chapter three, Watchfulness. Hieromonk Damascene reminds us that we always "carry within ourselves the inclination and habit to return to our former condition," and that "if we do not preserve, guard and cultivate the seed of Grace given to us, we will be deprived of its vivifying power."

Or in other words -- or symbols -- no (↑), no (↓). But it should go without saying that no (↓), no (↑), either. Two sides of the same movement. Thus, "In order to preserve the Grace and not return to our former delusions, we must continuously, day by day, minute by minute, unite ourselves with the Way in metanoia."

I'm way behind in my work. To be continued...

Fleshlights & I-AMmissaries

Boyarin writes that in the first few centuries AD, "Jews and Christians were much more mixed up with each other," but over time congealed into mutually exclusive systems. More generally, nowadays we think of religions as more or less "fixed sets of convictions with well-defined boundaries," even if they didn't start out that way.

I am of two -- or maybe three -- minds about this. One part of me wants to agree with Schuon that each revelation is uniquely designed for a specific people and a certain purpose, so that to blend them (or to pretend to switch cultures) is a bad idea. It is not for us to do this, since it introduces a human element into the God-given.

Another part of me wants to regard religion-as-such as one vast body of knowledge, data, and experience. Why limit oneself to just one pool? We like Chinese and Italian food. Why not Asian and Roman religion?

In the past, people had no choice in the matter, since they were simply born into the local cult and had no knowledge of other religious cuisines. But each religion tends to emphasize certain elements of Religion, so that one religion can helpfully amplify or spice up parts that another neglects or underemphasizes.

Still another part of me wants to look at religion in a very abstract way, shorn of local coloring and sentimental attachments. This is almost a scientific approach, in that it considers the data in terms of the deeper principles that makes it possible.

In other words, just as the scientist searches for the underlying law or principle that unifies the observed data, I want to understand how, say, it is even possible for a man to know God. What a priori principles are necessary for this to be a possibility?

One such principle -- or assumption or axiom -- is that man is in the image of the Creator. If we weren't, then no real knowledge of God would be possible. Rather, we could only know ourselves. As I mentioned in a comment yesterday, you can give a Bible to a cow, but the cow won't know what to do with it, because a cow is not in the image of God.

Human beings, although obviously limited by our form, can nevertheless transcend it and thus know truth. We are the form that escapes our form -- or the genome that transcends our supposedly "selfish" genes. Thus, if Richard Dawkins' thesis is true, it is self-negating, since the generous truth transcends his selfish DNA.

In the book, I attempted to outline some of these abstract religious principles -- or principles that make religiosity possible. For example, I am quite convinced of the existence of (↓) and (). Without them, nothing about religious experience makes any sense.

Boyarin points out that when Jesus used the curious term "Son of Man," no one had to ask what it meant. Rather, it seems that his listeners must have been familiar with it. This is all the more likely when we read of how his audience didn't hesitate to express bewilderment when they didn't understand him, for example, in John 6:60, when many of the disciples grumble that "this is a hard saying; who can understand it?"

Well, it might be easier to understand if we could understand the principle that makes it possible. Otherwise, we are being asked to do something that is impossible and makes no sense to us. I don't think the Creator wants that.

In the book there are a couple of other symbols that look like these:

I haven't written much about them, but the upward arrow refers to a person who has experienced mystical union with God, whereas the downward arrow refers to an -- or the -- Incarnation, i.e., God in human form. For Christians this is a unique occurrence, whereas in Hinduism, for example, it is an expression of the avatar principle. But even if we think of it as a unique occurrence, nevertheless, in order for it to occur, it must be possible for it to occur, so we are back to the principle that makes it possible.

Now interestingly, Boyarin points out there were some Jews who had been expecting their Redeemer "to be a human exalted to the state of divinity" -- in other words, the upward arrow. However, "others were expecting a divinity to come down to earth and take on human form" -- the downward arrow.

And indeed, early IsraeliteChristian hybrids struggled with just this issue: is Jesus from the downside up or the upside down? "[S]ome believers in Jesus believed the Christ had been born as an ordinary human and then exalted to divine status, while others believed him to have been a divinity who came down to earth."

To this day there are Christians who hold to the former, e.g., adoptionism, whereby Jesus is adopted by God because of his sinlessness and devotion.

I wonder if the whole point is that he is both? I think Schuon said something to the effect that Jesus is simultaneously God's icon of man and our icon of God.

PS I'm Ambivalent About You

Well, I don't know if there's much more to say about The Jewish Gospels. It seems to be one of those one-idea-and-keep-hammering-it books, as if he didn't nail it the first time -- the idea being that Christianity is not a break, but a continuation, of Judaism.

This could be controversial for some or maybe even most Jews, whereas it cannot by definition be controversial for Christians. Then again, Christians will no doubt balk at the notion that Christianity brought no new ideas into the world.

Of course, we must bear in mind that that Judaism is a river with many upstream tributaries and downstream branches, streams, and eddies. In the case of Christianity, one of the branches broke off and became its own river.

Evidently, there is no "normative" Judaism. The moment someone claims to represent it, someone else will contradict him. Two rabbis, three opinions, etc.

I recently read a biography of Maimonides, who some consider to be the Greatest Genius of Judaism. Of course, others will argue with that characterization. In any event, he assembled a list of thirteen principles of the faith; number one is the existence of Number One, the Creator.

I suppose we can look at the thirteen principles as a kind of flow chart -- the flow of the above referenced river; a river of light, as it were. So we're all together at the headwaters, the source, the cosmic spring.

Number two: his unity. Oops! Here the river seems to branch in two, because Maimonides would maintain that a trinitarian God contradicts his unity.

However, I think we have to give the early Christians -- being that they were Jews -- credit for appreciating the dilemma. Of all people, they would be aware of the difficulty of squaring this circle, which took centuries to officially resolve, or to congeal into a principle, i.e., a trimorphic God with distinctions but no separation. (This primordial Three must be considered a quality, not quantity.)

But according to Boyarin, not only is such an idea kosher, but similar ideas were being discussed in Jesus' day, and indeed, centuries before. He introduces some fascinating research showing how mono-theism emerged from poly-theism, but not always in a smooth, harmonious, and seamless way. That is to say, one can at times detect unassimilated godlings hovering around the one God. (Not to mention the ongoing temptation to revert to out-and-out paganism.)

To back up a bit, the reason I find this fascinating is that it mirrors the development of the mind, which moves from fragmentation to synthesis. One can look at this quite abstractly as the basic metabolism of cognition. For reasons we won't get into, Bion symbolized the fragmentation PS, the synthesis D. Thus, one of the ground floor operations of the mind is PS↔D. Note the bi-directionality of the arrow, as things are always falling apart and reconstituting.

Aren't they? Hope it's not just me.

You could say that a "nervous breakdown" is a descent into unremitting PS. These fragments of PS are persecutory and predatory, especially as they become more primitive. Even "curiosity" is a kind of "pain," i.e., the pain of not-knowing. However, we must tolerate the pain of PS in order to await the coherence of D. Which then becomes a new pain in the PS.

So, long story short, this is how I regard the historical discovery of the one God. It is literally a discovery, because prior to that, reality is too occluded by psychic fragmentation to apprehend him. Thus, polytheism is really the residue of psychic fragmentation, the inability to intuit the whole. One-ness cannot be revealed to scatterbrains.

Interestingly, looked at this way, the trinitarian God is a kind of eternally dynamic PS↔D. I don't mean to vulgarize the deity, or contaminate him with our own limited ideas.

However, think of the idea of kenosis, i.e., the self-emptying of God. With the Incarnation, God essentially tosses his unity into our world of fragmentation and multiplicity, culminating with the Cross. Looked at this way, the Resurrection is the recovery, the re-synthesis and re-integration. Thus, in a way, Jesus' passion is the last Word in PS→D. Just when the apostles think the world is hopelessly disintegrated and flying off its hinges, it reintegrates at a higher level than they could have possibly imagined. "Transfiguration," you might say, is a very high-level D.

However, Judaism has its own version of primordial PS↔D; in fact, several versions. For example, Steinsaltz, in his Coon Classic, The Thirteen Petalled Rose, writes that "Creation itself, and the creation of man," is "a descent for the sake of ascent." Even the Sabbath can be seen as a day devoted to D after six days of frazzled PS. It is a return to the One, a reset, a reJewvenation. (Note also that the Sabbath is the telos, or purpose, of creation; or, at the very least, the opportunity to re-orient oneself to that transcendent unity.)

There is also the "shattered vessels" principle. (I just googled it and this is the first thing that comes up, so there are no doubt better explanations.) If I am not mistaken, the basic idea is that the world is shattered, scattered, battered and tattered, and that it is our task and privilege to help put it back together. Which is what we attempt here at *One* Cosmos. Yeah, someone's gotta do it.

Back to Maimonides' list: number three, denial of God's corporality. Here is another one Boyarin would dispute, or at least there were some ancient streams that thought otherwise. The question is, were those just pagan streams holding on to atavistic dreams of the godman? Or is it a legitimate principle?

Boyarin claims that Jesus is new, but the idea is very old. The only thing new is that this particular individual is the Son of Man, but Jesus did not invent the concept. Rather, again, it is in Daniel, and it is also present in the more recently discovered book of Enoch, which is roughly contemporary with the earliest Gospels. No, it is not scripture, but it does prove that the expectation of the Son of Man -- the divine in human form -- was in circulation.

Gotta go. Argue away!