How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization

What's the most important subject in the world? It is possible that it is human monogamy.

In his Things That Matter, Krauthammer makes a persuasive case that it is politics, since, if you get that one wrong, everything else goes south with it:

"Politics, the crooked timber of our communal lives, dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low and, most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics. You can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures. Get your politics wrong, however, and everything stands to be swept away."

Ah, but what is a humane and successful political system built upon? What is its foundation? Intelligence? No, because all human groups have that. Supposedly. Genes? In fact, Nicholas Wade's new book suggests that we can no longer rule that out a priori, as do liberal creationists.

But genes are not what make us human. First of all, they are necessary but not sufficient to account for our humanness. But also, they are simply an encoded memory of, and plan for, genetic fitness, AKA reproductive success: a memoir of the future.

Besides, there is no such thing as an individual human being, or at least our individuality can only be understood in the context of an irreducible intersubjectivity. Since the I-Thou relation is "built into" our genes, it means that human beings are literally programmed for transcendence (if you want to look at it from a strictly scientific standpoint; obviously there are deeper and higher perspectives).

Consider this highly coonworthy book, Marriage and Civilization. Note in particular the subtitle: How Monogamy Made Us Human. It doesn't get any more Cosmic than that, because we are talking about the conditions that permit humanness to emerge from mere biology.

One could also express it inversely, say, How Homosexual Marriage and Other Deviant and Dysfunctional Attitudes Rendered Us Less Than Human and Destroyed Civilization. That book is yet to be written, nor does Tucker put it that way. Nobody wants to replace Donald Sterling as the sap du jour in the roiling cannibal pot of the proglodyte left.

It is always gratifying when a respectable person confirms some of the multi-undisciplinary speculation of the Coonifesto, in this case the intimate connection between humanness and monogamy. Just the other day I read how this deliriously self-satisfifed idiot thinks it's Time to Ditch Monogamy. Why? Because it's time to jettison civilization, as have the subcultures that have already successfully eliminated the norm of marriage and reverted to barbarism.

Interestingly, this downward-cutting edge view goes back to the cultural Marxism of Marx and Engels, who -- once again turning reality on its head -- suggested that marriage and monogamy are the origins of that curse word property, in that woman becomes the first possession of man: when man "took command in the home," "the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children" (in Tucker).

Yeah, it's just like that around here.

When we talk about civilization, what are we really talking about? For starters, we are talking about the domestication of man. Not woman, mind you. Women are already domesticates, and quite literally so, since the female body is the domicile of the baby, which is to say, the human future. In short, mother-baby is built into nature. The category of Father -- in distinction to sperm donor -- isn't. Father is the first purely cultural category, the one that makes all the others -- politics included -- possible.

How the hell do you civilize a man, of all things? Well, since it happened, we need to examine the circumstances under which it happened, but also the circumstances under which it failed to do so -- at least up to my standards.

Tucker notes that "the adoption of social monogamy by early hominids created something unique in nature -- a society where males cooperate at common tasks with a minimum of sexual competition."

In most other species it is a violent free-for-all to determine Who Gets the Chicks. Males spend the majority of their time competing with other males for access to the holiest of holies. (Recall what Chagnon discovered about those ignoble savages of the Amazon basin, constantly at war over the ladies.)

What we're really looking for is a kind of gap in nature, or a "place" where prehistory verticalizes and becomes transnatural, i.e., jumps into civilization and history. In my opinion, it ultimately -- which is to say, ontologically -- takes place in the infant (I saw it happen with my own eyes!) -- but there are existential conditions that have to prevail in order to give birth to premature and neurologically incomplete babies.

I just noticed that I'm way outta' time here. To be continued....

Compulsory Joy in the Command Economy of Time

The subject of chronopathology seems to have touched a nerve in a few readers, which means that it failed to do so in the rest. Perhaps because it seems like a remote or abstract idea, when it is really as experience-near as experience itself. Because what is experience? Right: conscious awareness of the passage of time, which appears as the perpetual changing of phenomena.

We've discussed in the past how time is all we have, and yet, we never really have it, do we, because it's like Lileks' Uncooperative Rope: this rope travels "through your hands, and you grasp a knot" -- the knot being one of those little moments of temporal density, which only happen all the time.

But they're slipknots, so when they happen, it's as if the rope temporarily slows down. But then it's like when you're livestreaming something and it's slow to load but then hurries to catch up with itself. Similarly, it's as if time can slow down for a moment, but then scurries to return to itself, right through your blistered fingers.

You never know when or which one of these temporal knots will "stick" and become part of the more enduring fabric of your life. I have no patience for people who essentially try to force a moment to become an enduring knot. My wife tells me that her father once turned a European vacation into a pedagogical death march.

Think, for example, of the people who have those huge vulgar weddings, desperate to make the wedding more than it is. It's already plenty, so you can really only make it less than it is.

I guess it's the same reason I detest posed photographs rather than spontaneous ones. At least with the spontaneous ones you have a chance to catch a temporal knot. But you can't force one. At best you can tie a pseudo-knot of someone. Sometimes a whole life can be a stream of pseudo-knots. It's probably that way for celebrities and politicians.

I suppose this oncefamous book on pseudo-events goes to the subject. I've never read it, but it's more relevant than ever, since end-stage journalism has spread to the whole body politic.

Just the other day I was talking with the wife about the things we do to render time qualitative instead of just quantitative. I was thinking in particular of how the Church places mere duration within a higher sacred time, marking the latter with various festivals and celebrations. You could say that salvation history attempts the same vis-a-vis profane history.

But again, it's difficult to manufacture a temporal knot, as they usually sneak up on one unawares. I was reminded of this just yesterday at our baseball practice. It was just a perfect day on our absurdly beautiful field -- way too beautiful for kids, since they don't notice. I had the impulse to tell a kid, "you know, you're going to remember this moment for the rest of your life." But who knows? Maybe he will, but not likely, even though it was a perfect moment to which nothing could be added. Besides, he would have looked at me like I was crazy.

I've noticed that some parents will forcibly remove their kid from a situation in which they are experiencing the spontaneous flow of temporal density, in order to drag them to some attempt at manufactured density. This usually results from a guilt-ridden effort to manufacture "quality time" in order to make up for the absence of quantity time -- like a grim determination to Have Joy on command.

But what if you're already happy? Then being forced to do something else can only make one less happy, no matter how elaborately contrived the pseudoknot.

But in reality, how little is needed to access Life. It seems to me that -- and I discussed this in the Encirclopedia Raccoonica -- people try to make up for a loss of sensitivity by piling on the sensations. But the latter can never make up for the former, because the gross can never replace the subtle. Ten or a hundred or a thousand porno films do not add up to a single moment of actual transphysical intimacy.

What worries me about our pornified culture is that young people may confuse its images with human sexuality and end up knowing nothing of the latter. The gross can completely eclipse the subtle if we don't hone the facility to deepen it.

But perhaps this is just an extension of children raised in daycare who know nothing of real maternal intimacy, which cannot be doled out at the mother's convenience without becoming something else -- something based upon the mother's pleasure (which objectifies the child) as opposed to the child's spontaneous need for, and entitlement to, this constant background of maternal presence.

You can't magically conjure those momentary knots of intimacy. For one thing, they have a rhythm all their own, which you can disrupt but not compel. You cannot fundamentally reject the present and then call it back at your will, expecting it to do your bidding. You can only pretend to do so.

Remember the film Ordinary People? There's a great scene where they're trying to capture the perfect photograph of the family, a Happy Moment:

I definitely remember beautiful moments like that in my ordinary childhood. Maybe that's why I'm so repulsed by them.

Chronopathology and Deferral of the Now

Since the Others endlessly defer the now, I wonder if they literally miss out on life? Or worse, if this makes them inhabit a kind of ambiguous realm that is neither dead nor alive, i.e., undead?

It wouldn't have occurred to anyone to live this way prior to modernity, or before this thing called "progress" became readily discernible. In other words, if today is just like yesterday, and tomorrow will be just like today, there is absolutely no reason to hope for anything better and therefore project oneself out of the Church of What's Happening Now.

I think this attitude of now-deferral forms the essential structure of vulgar politics. Think back to the political ecstasy that accompanied the immaculation of Obama in 2008. Why the ecstasy? Because finally history was going to be righted, and things were going to change for the better: the evildoers had been vanquished and we could undertake the business of enjoying our lives. But do you see any evidence whatsoever of liberal joy over the past six years? No, it's just the same old hatred, bitterness, envy, and libel.

Life is only lived in the now. Or, as they say, it can only be understood backward but must be lived forward. What the so-called political junkie hides from himself is two principle truths, 1) that he is unable to enjoy life on its own terms, and 2) that he finds hated, bitterness, envy, and libel to be unpleasant. Thus, he does enjoy life in his own perverse way, locating the psychic bad in the now and naively projecting it into others, while displacing the good into the future.

Example? Here is something from a book called Obama's Challenge, by Robert Kuttner, published in 2008. Bear in mind that the future he prophesied six years ago is already past for us. We knew then that he "knows nothing," but now we can confirm it. For example, he writes that Obama "unmistakably possesses unusual gifts of character and leadership," and will use "his office to appeal to our best selves to change our economy, our society, and democracy for the better."

Yes, I'll pause a moment while you fetch your airsickness bag.

Obama has "the raw material to be a transformative president," what with his "exceptional skill at appealing to our better angels and a fine capacity to be president-as-teacher. He inspires, as only few presidents have done." Furthermore, he is "almost obsessed with the idea that people are sick of partisan bickering."

The writer cautions us that he himself is a sober, world-weary, and jaded journalist, "not a soft touch" or some kind of love-addled fanboy. Thus, when he looks at Obama in a coldly detached and dispassionate way, what does he see? First, "A capacity to truly move people and shift perceptions as well as bridge differences."

And second, "a principled idealist" whose wisdom is "breathtaking" and even "absurd" in its precocity. Furthermore, -- and the science is settled on this -- Obama has attained a level of moral development that "only a handful of American presidents have possessed." This is the "highest stage of moral development," "guided by near-universal ethical principles of justice..."

I don't know how this journalist could be any more detached and skeptical.

Obama's opportunistic campaign screed, The Audacity of Hope, is not some kind of opportunistic campaign screed, but rather, "subtle, complicated, and elegant." His "fervent desire to transcend difference is sincere." If anything, he's just too reasonable, too willing to be an easy-going centrist, so progressives will have to hold his feet to the fire.

Well, that sidetrack was completely unintended, but it does illustrate the extraordinary naiveté of these passionate progressives. But their credulousness is always accompanied by an equally hypertrophied projection of hatred. I won't bother you with examples from the same book, but suffice it to say that conservatives are the embodiment of all evil, which is why the past six years have been Heaven on Earth. Remember?

Back to the real world. Sugar Candy Mountain is not coming in our lifetime, because it is already here. Contrast Kuttner's now-deferral to Rush Limbaugh's healthy attitude toward his catastrophic deafness:

"I'm not complaining. I'm just trying to explain it. You adapt to it. It's miraculous. The way I look at this is, you look at the timeline of humanity... whatever number of years human beings have been on the earth, make that a 50-foot string, in your mind. And on that 50-foot string is the time we're alive. That's a speck of sand on that 50-foot string, maybe not even that big. And isn't it amazing that the time I happen to be alive on that 50-foot string also coincides with when humanity's brilliance and intelligence, technological achievement has advanced to the point of inventing the cochlear implant?

"If this had happened to me ten years before it did, it would have meant the end of my career and there wouldn't be any of this today. To think of ten years in the whole timeline, it's miraculous. So I'm describing this, not complaining at all. Don't misunderstand."

You could say that this is the opposite of John Edwards suggesting that the paralyzed Christopher Reeve would be able to walk if only you vote Democrat. Well, at least he's out of his wheelchair.

Anyway, the purpose of this post is not to show what asses liberals are, but rather, to highlight this pathological adaptation to time. In fact, Morson has a chapter devoted to temporal diseases, or what we might call chronopathologies. We implicitly think of mental illnesses as inhabiting the "space" of the mind, but what if some illnesses specifically involve distortions of time?

Morson comes at the subject in all sorts of novel ways. One problem, I think, is that the present, although it is indeed all we have, is inherently "incomplete." It is never enough. Thus, there are pathological ways of trying to make it enough, or to wring more out of it than there is in it.

Ultimately the only way to transform the vanishing nothingness of the now into something permanent is via God, an idea to which we will return shortly. But you definitely cannot redeem the now by packing it with all that future political goodness, as Kuttner does above. Nor is it healthy to escape the now into some utopian future. Rather, one has to start by facing the naked now, and acknowledging that it isn't and can never be enough.

In the book Faith Maps, Gallagher writes of the implicit connection between our freedom and our nothingness. Thus, "we come up against the basic fact that what is indispensable for a full life appears inaccessible -- at least if we rely on ourselves alone." The now is the gap in which we are alive, in which we think, in which we experience life. But the gap is by definition a gap, which is why we must "admit that left to our own devices we are incapable of fulfilling our hopes."

However, orthoparadoxically, "a confession of impotence becomes a springboard towards a greater freedom," for it entails "an openness to change... a 'death passing on to life' or 'dying that we must live.'" The chronopath essentially confuses healthy pain with a diseased state from which he must flee -- into the future, if necessary. But in reality, we should accept this "healthy and 'incurable discomfort' with the world."

This I like, and wish I had thought of when writing the Coonifesto: that is, instead of the ʘ symbol, a better pneumaticon would be an O with a smaller o inside -- like a torus or doughnut. Gallagher describes how Maurice Blondell found a similar image "to capture the core of his thought":

"He recalled that the dome of Pantheon in Rome has no keystone to hold it together. Instead there is an opening to the sky, through which light comes into the huge edifice. In similar fashion our spiritual journey reaches up, like an unfinished building, to a [vertical] gap through which divine light can shine.

"Thus the experience of incompleteness becomes positive" because "to become aware of our dissatisfaction with the finite is a pointer toward the infinite" -- and not toward another disappointingly finite and horizontal political future. But I suppose politics is the opiate of the secular masses.

When Ought Becomes Is, Reach for Your Revolver

Yesterday we were discussing how it is that modern ideologies do not conform to man's essential nature, whereas religion is supposed to do just that. This does not mean that it lowers itself to man, but rather, reveals the lower man. It holds a mirror to man in which he can see both positive and negative images.

These two sides are equally important, for if one is unaware of the bad news, it will render the good news inoperative. The bad news, instead of being a helpful diagnosis, will become an invisible stumbling block. Without appreciating the bad, the good can easily become spoiled -- charity can be reduced to indulgence, confidence to pride, courage to rashness, humility to self-loathing, chastity to prudery, etc.

Science cannot provide a satisfactory response to our innate desire to know "what is" and "who we are," the reason being that it simply does not operate on that plane. To ask it to do so is analogous to asking religion to address only one side of the equation: to descend to man without asking man to ascend to God.

Science can handle the descent but knows nothing of the ascent, or in other words, it sees the Is but not the Ought. Thus, it either elevates the Is to the Ought -- the naturalistic fallacy -- or reduces the Ought to the Is -- the citsilarutan fallacy (that's naturalistic backwards).

This latter fallacy pretends that how we would like things to be is how they are -- for example, that homosexuals can exist in a state of matrimony, or that people can choose their gender, or that welfare programs won't foster dependence, etc.

This fellow claims that conservatives are more prone to the naturalistic fallacy, liberals to its opposite. Is this true? Yes, if the liberal is a liberal or the conservative is an idiot. No conservative should conflate Is and Ought, because the first principle of conservatism is a clear distinction between the two. Any conservative who immanentizes the eschaton is not a conservative but a millenarian liberal (but I repeat myself).

But "Since academics, and social scientists in particular, are overwhelmingly left-wing liberals, the moralistic fallacy has been a much greater problem in academic discussions of evolutionary psychology than the naturalistic fallacy." Or in other words, liberals conflate desire and reality, which is vividly described in this distressing book on racial preferences. That they do great harm to their intended beneficiaries is of absolutely no consequence. Rather, the desire to do good is all that matters, and is sufficient to magically transform Ought to Is, or academia to racial Sugar Candy Mountain.

Speaking of witchcraft, isn't this what the Magician in Chief is trying to do with ObamaCare? "The debate is over. Ought is forevermore Is, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it." Obama is trying to convince us that the way ObamaCare is in his dreams is actually the way it Is. In other words, pay no attention to that Is behind the Ought.

You could say that the so-called dispute between science and religion is between Is and Ought, but how can this be? How can, say, our duty to be polite be at odds with science? They can only be at odds if science insists that man is and therefore ought to be a wolf to man, and not pretend to be something better.

Schuon suggests that modern man seems incapable "of grasping a priori the compatibility of the symbolic expressions of tradition with the material observations of science."

I suppose this was part of the challenge I was having in my theological discussion with the boy the other evening. It's naturally difficult for him to shift between the concrete and abstract, for example, vis-a-vis Genesis. Genesis symbolically comports to the nature of man, but if we try to look at it as a scientific account, we commit a category error. Or again, we accept the descent of the message without the corresponding ascent on our part.

The pervasiveness of scientism has resulted in a kind of "materialization" of the mind. Thus, when we say the leftist or secular fundamentalist is dense, we mean this literally. They are especially dense, or opaque, to the Light. As a result, they still have the same hunger for truth, but demand that it be presented to them on the same level as their density. It would be analogous to a child who knows only basic math insisting that calculus be presented to him in simple arithmetic terms.

As Schuon describes it, the modern man wishes his ultimate explanations "to remain as external and easy as scientific phenomena themselves, or in other words, he wants all the answers to be on the level of his own experiences." But these experiences "are purely material," so this attenuated consciousness "closes itself in advance against all that might transcend [these experiences]."

But again, there is still the same hunger for truth, or there would be no demand for explanations. To even ask Why? is to have already transcended the external and material, the mere Is.

Now, this Why is made of truth. This sounds like an odd thing to say, but isn't it true that question and answer always go together? Indeed to paraphrase Don Colacho, there is far more Light in a good question than a stupid answer.

So, the Why is an artifact or echo of the Truth it seeks. The intellect's "own nature," writes Schuon, "does not allow it to resist truth indefinitely." The only way for this to happen is for the will to counteract the intellect, or again, for desire to negate reality. Hunting for truth requires a good will.

*****

Very much related -- David Bentley Hart by way of Vanderleun:

"No meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness."

Testing the Limits of Nonsense

A few weeks before being thrown out of college, I noticed that one of my professors didn't seem to read our class- or homework assignments. One day I decided to test the theory, writing a bunch of nonsense and turning it in. The theory was confirmed and the science settled: sense and nonsense were of equivalent value in this little oasis from reality.

Which, if there's no truth, actually makes sense. However, this was back when I was a business major, before I discovered my gift of being preternaturally ill-equipped to handle my business. In other words, I flunked out. One day I just stopped going. (This would have been in the second semester of my junior year.)

In the business world, unlike the academic world, a BA in BS will only get you so far. In academia, so long as one operates outside the STEM -- science, technology, engineering, and mathematics -- one's ideas need never come into contact with reality. One may relax in the comfort and safety of one's own delusions, even -- or especially -- at the taxpayers' expense.

Speaking of which, there are some harrowing -- but scandalously typical -- tales of academic malfeasance in this eye-opening book on how racial preferences harm their intended beneficiaries. Whatever you think about the anti-science academic left, it's even worse than you think. (Non-STEM) academia is a cancer on truth.

Anyway, I have so few commenters these days, I was wondering if I could just crank out a bunch of nonsense to see if anyone's paying attention? I've dropped out before. Don't think I won't do it again!

"Science," according to Schuon, "is the experience of that which we do see, or at least of that whereof we can have an [at least hypothetically] empirical knowledge." I love science, but science can only take us so far -- really, to the edge of the senses. Everything beyond the senses is up for grabs, except you can't grab it with your hands or any other sense organ. We can grasp it, of course, but with what exactly?

Faith, in contrast to science, is a conscious relationship with and "acceptance of that which we do not see, or rather, of that which transcends the experience of the average man."

Yesterday evening I had one of those long theological hot-tub discussions with my newly minted nine year-old. Here he is sitting in the light on his birthday last Sunday:

He was asking me some really difficult questions, more difficult than you get from the typical adult, and harder to answer in a straight-forward way, with no evasions, dissembling, special pleading, or deepaking the chopra.

He's very much preoccupied with the existence of evil, and why God allows it to persist. In particular, he loves animals, and is quite concerned with animal suffering (I don't even have the heart to tell him what chicken McNuggets are made of).

(I might add that he was tired, and when he's tired he starts to dis-integrate, so a lot of affect-laden stuff which is absent during the day bubbles to the surface. He's normally quite cheerful, but is subject to troubling questions when exhausted.)

In the end, the best I could do is to say that both theism and atheism engender puzzles, but that theism is by far the more satisfactory view, since atheism explains nothing. Of the two theories, there is simply no comparison in their explanatory power, despite the admitted conundrums of religion. Stick with it, I advised. It will make more sense as you continue to "live it" as opposed to merely thinking it.

Also, I told him that he needs to narrow his focus a little, and consider the concrete reality of his life as opposed to the nonlocal abstractions of "suffering" or "evil." He has precisely no direct experience of these, so it's good that he thinks about them, but one cannot do so in a disproportionate manner. Nor can you save the world except one assoul at a time, beginning with oneself. Much if not most of the evil in the world is caused by assouls who presume to save everyone else, Obama being one more nauseating example.

Speaking of whom, it occurred to me that this malevolent being makes no apologies for undercutting our most basic values, i.e., Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness -- not abstractly or theoretically, but concretely and intimately, all the while pretending that he is promoting these same values.

How, you ask? Let's take Obamacare. This monstrosity was promoted with the explicit promises that it would preserve our liberty -- "if you like your doctor/plan, you can keep your doctor/plan"; advance the Pursuit of Happiness (AKA property) -- a savings of $2,500 a year and a general reduction in healthcare costs; and allow Life to flourish -- more people covered, and with better care for all.

In reality, we quite obviously have (or will have) far less freedom, wealth, and health. Now, wouldn't you feel bad if this were the signature accomplishment of your whole worthless life? You know how you think back on something embarrassing in your life, and you inwardly cringe? If I were Obama, I'd never be able to stop cringing. So, how does he do it? How does one miss out on the cringe gene?

Since man existed for 100,000 or so years before this thing called "modernity," I wonder if we aren't really adapted to modernity, or whether the old adaptations persists under the surface? Actually, I don't wonder about it. I'm sure of it. Much of the attraction to religion is due to the fact that religion is proportioned to human beings and human experience, whereas science deals with abstract worlds that no one can or ever will directly experience.

This does not mean that scientific knowledge itself is somehow "bad." It only becomes so when we attempt to superimpose it on man, or attempt to force man to conform to it, because the person always escapes its reach. Thus, Schuon writes that

"many forms of knowledge can be harmful in practice as soon as they cease to correspond to the hereditary experience of man and are imposed on him without his being spiritually prepared to receive them; the human soul finds difficulty in coping with facts that are not offered to its experience in the ordinary course of nature" (emphasis mine).

Thus, for example, man has never before lived without God, so it is truly a radical experiment to try to determine if this is possible on a widespread scale, or whether human happiness and flourishing are possible in his absence. Could be. But I seriously doubt it.

It reminds me of something in Vanderleun's snidebar describing all these pathetic old feminists who were "the first to abandon the way of life of their mothers, which meant they pursued careers, married and had children late, had affairs then got divorced, all in the name of liberation, are now imprisoned in debt, alcohol abuse and loneliness, wishing they could die, and do it soon."

So, how's that non-conformity to divine-human reality working out?

51 Genders and No Men

No time for a real post. Just this freely associated crap.

You sometimes hear people cite that crack in the Bible about there being nothing new under the sun, but is it so? Is it all really the sameold sameold -- or the same underlying reality in a new guise?

And if we do believe it's all just an absurcular exercise in eternal return, does this make us cynical or wise? One could approach a movie or novel in the same jaded manner, but it certainly wouldn't enhance our enjoyment. On the other hand, if a person wiser -- or more cynical -- than us can see the predictable myth we're living out while hoping for a different ending, it would be foolish to ignore him.

For Schuon -- and implicitly for any religious person, or believer in the perennial wisdom -- "there are no such things as 'problems of our time' in the philosophers' sense of the expression."

Perhaps the most immediate -- and annoying -- practical implication of this is in the dismissive liberal attitude toward the Constitution, which for them is just a local expression of its time and place. It has no contemporary relevance, unless it is absolutely convenient. There are just too many new problems that the Founders could not have foreseen -- for example, James Madison had no idea that there are 51 genders but no men -- so we shouldn't allow it to prevent liberals from doing what they know is best for us.

This is not to say there aren't new questions, such as, How did man go for 100,000 years without knowing about the other 49 genders? That doesn't say much for man's perceptiveness, does it? However, once you have the idea of gender as arbitrary cultural construct, it doesn't matter if you have two genders or two hundred, because the deeper foundation of the idea is that All is Relative, a very old idea.

Not only that, but it is an expression of utter cynicism with regard to "given" truth. If we can't agree that there are only two sexes, then it's doubtful we can agree on anything, because there is no mutual foundation at all.

Even a crock is right once or twice in a lifetime. In Keynes case, it was when he remarked without irony that, "starting with a mistake, a remorseless logician can end in Bedlam." And Bedlam is another name for -- yes, Krugman, but also the contemporary looniversity bin, where they don't "put up with research that counters our goals simply in the name of ‘academic freedom.’”

In other words, "academic freedom" is just a transparent pig leaf for White Privilege, so who needs it? Can't we just get on with the Social Justice? After all, Marx said that other philosophers waste their time trying to understand the world, when the point is to change the world. So, as presidents go, Obama has been a pretty effective Marxist philosopher.

Continuing with Schuon's line of thought, he writes that there can be "no thought that one could describe as 'new' in its very foundations." Again, is this true? I'm thinking of Whitehead, who remarked that all of Western philosophy was just a footnote on Plato. What does that make me, a bunion?

I think it is true, in the sense that man is everywhere and everywhen confronted with certain irreducible orthoparadoxes. We've discussed them on many occasions, e.g., time/eternity, form/substance, field/particle, individual/group, part/whole, change/continuity, freedom/constraint, etc. The ONLY way to resolve these is to collapse the complementarity in favor of one side or the other, which is what any "new" philosophy inevitably does.

In fact -- and this is the subject of a different post -- I think it is accurate to say that Christian orthodoxy, on a metaphysical level, is devoted to preserving and balancing these orthoparadoxes. Every heresy I can think of involves the false resolution of one of them, e.g., Christ as God or man instead of God and man.

In any event, Schuon concedes that there can be new questions, even if there can be no radically new problems. One of our most prominent new questions has to do with the breach between science and faith. These two existed side by side for all of human history and prehistory, until just a few hundred years ago, so I guess that's a new problem.

Except that what we call science didn't actually exist prior to modernity. This is addressed from another angle in this mediocre book on Money. Martin suggests that a sort of world-historical Big Bang occurred with the invention of writing, which resulted in "an unprecedented intellectual revolution" revolving around "an emancipation of thought by the new ability to quantify, to record, to reflect, and to criticize what was written." This was nothing less than a clear distinction between the objective and subjective worlds, and with it, "the emergence of abstract rational thought."

However, I think that what occurred with modern science -- or scientism, to be precise -- is a devaluation and eclipse of the subjective pole of that complementarity. Which is why subjectivity covertly returned through the back door in the form of the hyper-irrationalism of the left.

Strange Lifeforms

With our expanded definition of Life Itself, a lot of unsuspected things join us in the club, while many formerly living things -- books, people, ideas -- fall on the inanimate side. I suppose Aristotle is the one who first defined the discipline of biology, and it hasn't changed much since then. Or has it?

We are told that untutored children come equipped with the ability to distinguish animate from inanimate -- just as they are able to distinguish between human and nonhuman or mother and all nonmothers, who are second place or lower.

Which is interesting, because it seems to me that biology must be rooted in this unstated and implicit assumption that we already know what Life is without ever consciously thinking about it. I mentioned in the book that no biologist works inductively or additively, examining the particulars and then concluding that the thing is alive. Rather, it's something we are born knowing.

Which is a shaky foundation for a science if this preconception is not examined, or if it is subtly altered. In other words, you can't start with a preconception that needs no justification, and then arbitrarily change it. I'm trying to think of an analogy. Imagine I have the unexamined preconception that Jews are inferior. I then build an ideology around what to do about them, without ever examining the initial assumption. Not a very good example, but let's move on.

Aristotle, like the human child, has a much more general and expansive definition of Life. He maintains that "From the biological perspective, soul demarcates three sorts of living things: plants, animals, and human beings. In this way soul acts as the [formal and final] cause of a body’s being alive. This amalgamation (soul and body) exhibits itself through the presentation of a particular power that characterizes what it means to be alive for that sort of living thing."

But even this is begging the question, because he begins with an intuitive preconception of life, and then tries to account for it, i.e., it is something with soul (or better, anima, to distinguish it from its purely human connotations):

"The [anima] is the form of a living body thus constituting its first actuality. Together the body and soul form an amalgamation. This is because when we analyze the whole into its component parts the particular power of the amalgamation is lost."

I remember reading in The Phenomenon of Life -- my books are still stored away, so I can't get to it -- that for early man (man in his childhood?), Life was the rule, not the exception. For us it is the other way around; we might say that physics is the rule, life the infinitesimally rare exception, and mind an impossibility.

The secular world would call this "progress," but is it necessarily so? Have we lost anything in coming to regard the cosmos as fundamentally dead as a doornail?

I can't help thinking that this is what motivates those extra-terrestriologists to hope beyond hope that there must be life somewhere else, please!!! For to fulfill this hope would be a roundabout way of reverting to the primordial notion that life must be much more general, not just an inconceivably rare exception. If it pops up everywhere, why then it must be built into the nature of things.

Which I believe it is and must be, regardless. Remember a few posts back, about our right to Truth? I think this is one of those rights: you have the right to know that this is a fundamentally living and breathing cosmos with throbbing arteries running hither & yon and up & down, not just an iron mathcage or oneway physics machine.

In the past -- who knows, maybe even in this context -- I have mentioned the crack that it must not have been difficult for Shakespeare to produce his works, for if it were difficult, it would have been impossible. Get it? No one could have struggled to achieve such transcendent excellence, because no amount of mere struggling would cut it. There had to be something else going on, even if we have no idea what it was.

Well, I would say the same of Life. If Life is completely reducible to physics without remainder, then no amount of material shuffling, whether random or determined, could have resulted in Life: you can't get here from there.

Lifewise, if the mind is reducible to neurology, then it couldn't have happened and is not happening now. Rather, it is ultimately just atoms flying about in a statistically rare manner, nothing more, nothing less.

Yesterday I mentioned how certain texts are more alive than others. How can this be? Is there some mysterious force, an elan vital, animating the living text from the outside? No, I don't think so. It's much weirder, and yet, more plausible than that. Again, if Life is everywhere, in this case it would be a matter of arranging words in such a way that they render latent Life present. Hello, noumenon!

Er, how does one go about doing that? Well, for starters, if it were a struggle, it couldn't be done! Let's examine that quintessentially living text, Genesis. It's been with us for a few thousand years, and yet, folks never tire of it. What's going on?

One of the virtues of this translation is that it tries to answer that question by attempting to approximate the original Hebrew much more closely, as the sound itself -- the rhythms, alliterations, wordplay, echoes and reverberations -- conveys the experience of Life before we even undertake an analysis of its meaning. Much of this is lost in, for example, the stately language of the King James version. The latter conveys, say, majesty, but is often stilted where it should sing or scat.

According to Alter, various translations "have placed readers at a grotesque disadvantage from the distinctive literary experience of the Bible in its original language." He notes that translators have generally been preoccupied with conceptual clarity at the expense of this more direct transmission of meaning. Furthermore, the clarity or closure is often superimposed on what is intended to be mysterious, open, and unsaturated. The Bible

"cultivates certain profound and haunting enigmas, delights in leaving its audience guessing about motives and connections, and above all, loves to set ambiguities of word choice and image against one another in an endless interplay that resists neat resolution." I've mentioned before that if in the beginning is the Word, then Wordplay comes right after.

In short, some things are better lifed nonexplained, which is not to say unexplained, but rather, explained in a more nonlinear, or right-brained, or imagistic, or playful, or musical fashion. The language is not necessarily wideawake and cutandry, but rather, provokes vertical remesmering, or maybe facilitates a trancelight of its preverberation.

How to Tell Your Friends from the Zombies

A little sidetrip from the main road, being that I don't have that much time anyway. Still, a critically important topic, especially if one wants to be happy and adjusted to cosmic reality.

Reader Magister commented that "Feminists seem to be perpetually at war with their own bodies." However, this resentment is projected into men and into babies, as if it's our fault that their bodies are so sexually alluring, or the baby's fault that they have a such nice cozy womb just perfect for perpetuating the species. It's almost as if the female body has a purpose or something.

However, feminists reject the sufficient reason of their body -- for readers living in Rio Linda or laboring under the delusions of gender theory, that means the reason why your body exists. I mean, everything has a reason, right? Can we at least agree on that? Or do feminists now regard logic as an abusive form of mansplaining?

No? I see. It's a form of rape. Besides, that's not funny!

Did you know that 90% of workplace deaths occur to men? So, why isn't everyone freaking out about MORTALITY INEQUALITY!

In my response to Magister's comment, I wrote that, "Speaking of cosmic rights, the baby certainly has a legitimate right to the mother's body, which is why, you know, breasts. (Which are to be distinguished from boobs, which is what breasts look like to a man.)

"More generally, as we've discussed in the past, not only are our minds intrinsically intersubjective, but our bodies are too. Man and woman point beyond themselves and 'refer' to one another. So to say that we 'own' our bodies and that's that is a little simplistic, to say the least, and certainly not humanistic."

The reason it is not humanistic is that a) human beings could not have evolved from such a static situation, and b) no existing human being lives as an isolated body, cut off from the rest of mankind. Rather, a living body is an open system at every level, biologically, emotionally, cognitively, and spiritually. Or supposed to be, rather.

Now, in order for language, or information, or meaning, to exist, one thing must be capable of standing for another thing. This is an extremely simple and basic concept, so simple that everyone has it as a background assumption without ever thinking about how it got here and what it implies. There is no reason to take meaning, because everything is always giving it away.

Of note, this feature is woven into the very fabric of existence, and was here long before human beings hit the cosmic stage. Consider DNA, for example, through which a gene, or combination of genes, stands for -- one might even say "symbolizes" -- this or that trait.

But even prior to that, we know that the world is always susceptible to intelligible abstraction, which is why, for example, we can talk about a "big bang." We can talk about a big bang because of background radiation that encodes information referring to that primordial event -- just as light striking your retina can tell you that a star existed a billion years ago, or however long it took the light to get herenow in spacetime.

This means that at the moment of luminous impact, our present and the star's past, or the star's past and future, are thoroughly entangled in this moment of knowing. When the star gave out that light a billion years ago, little did it know that it would someday arrive at the back of the eye of a lifeform that didn't yet exist. But stars were bigger back then. It's the cosmos that's gotten smaller.

Now, the one Big Idea I have retained from the Christopher Alexander books, and has been haunting me (in a good way) ever since, is that Life Itself is latent or implicate everywhere in the cosmos, but becomes manifest or explicate under certain circumstances.

This is an extremely handy idea for discerning the Living from the Dead at every level of the cosmos. But it is really helpful in sorting between the humans and the zombies, because the language of the latter is dead. There is something wrong with their whole encoding system. They radiate Death from every pore.

Let's see if I can auto-plagiarize some stuff from those old bobservations. "Recognizing this life in things is equivalent to saying, 'The universe is made of person-stuff. I always thought it was made of machine-stuff, but now I see that it is not'" (Christopher Alexander).

Yes, exactly. Person-stuff. Among other things, this means that human beings -- better, Persons -- are not late arrivals to the cosmic manifestivus, but its whole basis; or rather, its quintessential expression, only made explicate and local.

This is why everything makes so much sense, but it also explains when and why it doesn't, because things are supposed to make sense. Absurdity is the exception, not the rule -- just as most things in the world -- unspoiled nature, that is -- are oddly beautiful. Why? What's with all this useless beauty? Indeed, what's with all this useless truth? And Life. More generally, could Absurdity be the ultimate ground and source of all this life, love, logoi, and laughter?

From an old post:

For example, this is why language is even possible, because the person-stuff of the universe is interiorly related and therefore capable of encoding and transmission from one body or region to another. Our ability to see the beauty or apprehend the deep structure of the world represents one cidence of of the same coin-. It is to receive the Memo and be in the Loop.

For this reason, we now understand how and why scientists are guided by feeling and artists by science. In other words, a scientist wouldn't even know what to investigate in the absence of a feeling that reduces the infinite field of phenomena to something 'interesting,' something that attracts his attention.

More good stuff in those old posts on Alexander, but the main principle I have retained is the idea that when something is Living, there is a complex interplay of elements echoing and referring to one another. I would say that this is why Genesis is so "alive" with inexhaustible meaning, just as it is why one senses so much life in one of them big ol' cathedrals. Indeed, the Geometry of Love is anterior to the love of geometry, otherwise the latter couldn't exist.

Back to our original question, which we might formulate as What is the Message of the Human Body? As it so happens, Schuon has an essay on just this subject in one of his best books (most of which go to ten, this one to eleven). But I'm just about out of time, so we'll have to reserve that subject for another sidetrip in the cosmic rambler.

Cosmic Perverts & Your Transnatural Right to Truth

That question I posed at the top of yesterday's post: does man have a right to Truth? -- I'm not sure I answered it in the way I had intended. I didn't just mean this in terms of human institutions and whatnot. Rather, I meant it in cosmic terms, i.e., whether man qua man has this right.

It's actually a much more strange and radical question than implied by the rest of yesterpost, because it wouldn't constitute just a natural right, but a transnatural right to know Just What the Hell is Going On Down Here. Seems like a minimal request to me. But the secular world doesn't even believe in natural rights, let alone transnatural rights. Literally. The google machine has never heard of them.

What, there are transgendered rights but no transnatural rights? What then are transgendered rights grounded in? That's right: just a boot to the face, i.e., judicial bullying. For what else is there when we have no intrinsic, which is to say, cosmic, rights?

There are few things in life to which we are entitled. To say we have rights is not to say the world is fair; rather, vice versa: the purpose of rights is to create the possibility of justice.

One thing to which we are entitled is infantile omnipotence. Mature adults are entitled to little, but the helpless infant is genuinely entitled to everything (one reason why being the mother of an infant requires such superhuman strength). You cannot spoil an infant, and people who think otherwise can end up with a child who spends the rest of his life in search of the Lost Entitlement. Is it any coincidence that the growth of the state mirrors the growth of single and working motherhood, and that the latter are the most reliably Democratic LoFos?

If people thought about this beforehand, they wouldn't bring so many children into the world without being able to fulfill their entitlement.

For among other things, a child has the transnatural right to a loving mother and father in a stable and enduring union, without which he will be psychically handicapped from the very outset. No one could seriously argue that a child has a right to a mother only, or two fathers, or cheap daycare, let alone to be aborted. If abortion were a natural right, then it would be present at conception, and few babies would choose to abort themselves.

Back to our right to Truth. This is truly central to man, because what would man be in the absence of Truth? He would be an inexplicable cosmic freak, an existential birth defect, the hopelessly absurd case of an effect with no cause, that is, a tragically unrequited love of Truth.

Irrespective of whether we are children of the Light or merely sons of the bitch Gaia, man's standard equipment includes this inborn epistemophilia, a cosmo-global positioning system which is ultimately in theosynchronous orbit around the strange attractor that ceaselessly pulls us onward, upward, and inward.

I want to say that this is not debatable, nor is it figurative, but rather, literally true, for it is what is happening -- and why it is happening -- when we pursue Truth.

If not, then what are we doing? Just solipsistically chasing after a mirage, or our neurology, or tenure? This would be like being born with a lust for the opposite sex on a grotesquely asexual planet, like a man -- or worse, woman -- in a feminist studies program.

With rights come responsibilities. We have the transnatural right to Truth. What's the corresponding responsibility? Well, there are obvious things, like valuing it above all else; or, to put it inversely, Truth has its own rights, to such an extent that nothing is more privileged than Truth (although some branches are coequal, being that we live under tripartite cosmic rule).

So, we have every right to demand Truth, but Truth has every right to expect us to cherish it, defer to it, honor it, assimilate it, live it. We can only be in a reciprocal relationship to Truth, and then only because we are ultimately composed of Truth, as intelligence to intelligibility: these are just two sides of the same transcendent coin (just as the human unit, on another plane, is "man-and-woman"). Or, one might say that one side manifests as immanence (world), the other as transcendence (knowledge).

We could no more have an inborn spiritual relationship to falsehood and illusion than we could have an inborn sexual attraction to another species. Yes, that obviously happens, but it is called a perversion, and there are spiritual perversions just as there are sexual ones. Do some people have a textual orientation to the Lie? Ya' think?

Note that in such a case, the same metacosmic attraction is at work, only misdirected. Think, for example, of Obama's comically mendacious blowing smokesman, Jim Carney. If you are remotely normal -- i.e., not a cosmic pervert -- it is simply impossible to imagine doing his job. Can you see yourself casually but insistently peddling damaging and destructive lies to millions of citizens? What comes after irony?

So, Jim Carney earns his keep by denying us our transnatural right to Truth. What an unrelenting assoul.

About some of those epistemophilic perversions, or perverse attractions. Haven't you ever had an unnatural attraction to something other than Truth? What was really going on there? What were you searching after, and how did you come to accept {x} as the answer? And why were you so self-satisfied and belligerent about it?

If there's a problem here, I think it needs to be traced all the way back down to the foundation, the roots, the ground. For there are opportunistic parasites all along the way, just waiting for you to fall to the clayside, when we are always properly situated between the realms of clay and spirit.

Speaking of which, this wonderful translation of Genesis -- AKA The Origins of Everything -- can offer some clues. Let's zoom into Genesis 3. Alter has a footnote to the line about our embarking up the wrong tree, stating that the Hebrew word typically translated as "delight" actually means "that which is intensely desired," "and sometimes specifically lust." Thus, our inappropriate attraction is linked to a kind of intense lust.

Lust for what? Well, the text implies that it is bound up with the desire to be God instead of being in relationship to God. Thus, it is none other than the misplaced omniscience and omnipotence to which we are only entitled in infancy, a kind of grandiose spiritual infanity.

I don't have time to get into details, but I am reminded of how, at the root of a sexual perversion or fetish, is the pathological defense mechanism of omnipotence. In fact, I no longer remember the whole thing myself, but this guy explains it (interesting book, by the way): the "central feature" of sexual perversions is "the degradation of the object to an object under one's omnipotent control," etc.

Just transpose this to the key of Truth, and you have a perverse regime that insistently attempts to control reality with words, narratives, and childish Barrytales instead of being in a loving relationship to the one Truth that unites us.

*****

Speaking of light and children, here is the boy visiting one of his baseball teammates in the hospital, where's being treated for leukemia. Poor guy is all puffy from the chemo, but has a great attitude:

Living in the Penumbra Between Time and History

Does man have a right to the truth? Or Truth rather? If so, then they -- you know who they are -- have no right to deprive man of it. In the name of what is it permissible to deny truth? I mean, besides liberalism?

Now, if we have a right to freedom, then we have a right to truth, since the one is inconceivable in the absence of the other. No wonder the two covary everywhere and everywhen, e.g., the self-evident TRUTH that human beings are created in LIBERTY. Freedom without truth is nihilism, while truth without the freedom to discover it is academia.

Note also the term linking the two: created. This speaks to an unbreakable metaphysical triangle, because both truth and liberty imply creation, being that they can have no natural explanation; each is the very essence of transcendence. Conversely, if freedom and truth are real, then we are created -- whatever that means -- and not a random accident.

This is exactly -- even if implicitly -- what the Church was worried about in the Galileo affair: scientific theories come and go, but the truth to which man is entitled does not and cannot change, unless one redefines truth to mean mere scientific truth, which is then no truth at all (because it is subject to continuous addition, subtraction, extension, and revision).

Something must transcend science, or there's not even the possibility of science. Either man has science or science has man. If the latter, then scientific objectivity is impossible, because man cannot observe the phenomena from an external and disinterested perspective.

I mean, look at this: physicists discover a new particle, and now they have to tear down the whole damn edifice and begin again from the ground up; yesterday the science was settled, today we realize that, er, "we still don't *fully* understand our universe." No. Really?

And physics is easy compared to the complexity and nonlinearity of the earth's climate.

So, what does this mean for all those physicists from the 1930s on who imagined they were living in reality? Turns out they were just living in an imaginary cosmos. But that will always be the case so long as one confuses scientific abstractions with reality, or placeholders with principles, variables with constants.

I was thinking about this yesterday on the drive to work, specifically, about the difference between abstract and concrete historical time. Every educated person has a rough chronograph to organize historical time, e.g., neolithic, paleolithic, ancient, medieval, renaissance, etc. But the more history I read, the more I realize that these abstractions are completely misleading, and basically a cover for ignorance.

Even something as proximate as "World War II" looks quite different if we magnify a small slice of historical time and examine the details. You think you understand something, only to discover that you have simply superimposed a cloud labeled "World War II" over an infinite space.

It seems that many approaches to history resemble the infamous hockey stick of of global warming: examine the details and the stick turns out to be pure fiction; it leads the mind by misleading the mind.

This is one of the recurring themes of Narrative and Freedom, which has basically blown my mind in terms of being able to formulate all of its implications, or reduce them to a manageable swarm. Where to even begin?

Headline you won't be reading, but is nevertheless as true as the one about physics: Obscure Slavic Scholar Proves We Don't Fully Understand History.

I suppose he begins with a trivial truth that nevertheless explodes like a depth charge: that time is open, not closed. But history, in contrast to time, is closed: what happened happened, and that's all there is to it. However, when we write history, we cannot help doing so from the closed perspective, which is fundamentally misleading.

Morson is a literary scholar, not a scientist or historian. Thus, he demonstrates how certain novelists have attempted to depict a more realistic view of time -- much more realistic than any historian can accomplish. In order to do this, the novelist must depict the present as present, not as a mere point inhabiting a closed and linear narrative in the novelist's head. Only in hindsight can we see the narrative, but in the present the future is radically open.

Many times I have watched a movie with the boy, and he will ask why this character had to make that stupid decision, or why this unlikely event happened. The answer is that without the stupid decision or unlikely event, there would be no movie. However, I doubt that any human being, faced with personal calamity, wonders why it happened and thinks to himself, "in order to make the narrative of my life more interesting."

Going back to those vast swaths of time that we cover with names to conceal our ignorance. If this is true of history, how much more true must it be of prehistory -- say, of the 4 billion or so years of prehuman life, or the 9 billion years of prebiological cosmology?

It seems to me, the larger the expanse, the more room for ignorance. If we don't understand World War II, what makes us think we understand something as remote as the "big bang," the emergence of life, or the appearance of human beings? Science can only approach these thingularities in the most abstract manner imaginable, so abstract that they are essentially devoid of content except what the imagination fills in.

Which means that they are essentially myth by another name. And not even good myths. For what is myth, really? I would say that myth operates in the penumbra between prehistory and history, or the known and the unknowable; William Irwin Thompson said something to the effect that at the horizon of history is myth.

Consider Genesis, which addresses all of our most conspicuous existential and ontological edges; it works at the edge of cosmogony, of history, of anthropology, of sexuality, of freedom and responsibility, etc. Please bear in mind that these edges are necessary and inevitable. We will never be rid of them, nor can one be human without thinking about them.

For example, even if physicists totally understood the big bang, it would nevertheless give rise to obvious questions such as "what caused the big bang?" Likewise, even if we knew the precise point that man "entered" history, the period prior to that would still be an ultrabeastly infrahuman dreamspace we'd have to fill with imagination and myth.

So, no matter how long we try to defer it, we eventually confront myth, which is one of the Big Things religion knows but secularism doesn't. As such, the latter thrashes around in those infertile manmade myths instead of floating upstream in the very pregnant God-given ones.

To be continued...

What Time is It?

Well, almost no time again, just enough to quickly proofread this brief blast.

We can't know what abstract time is like, if there is such a thing. Rather, we can only experience time concretely. And even then, we can only experience human time, or what time is like for human beings.

I suppose this is no different than the experience of space. I'm sure an amoeba, an ant, a bat, and an ape all have very different perceptions of space. I'm not sure if it's even possible to truly imagine the space in which the premodern mind existed, with a solid earth floating on the waters below and the closed, dome-shaped firmament above, any more than they could imagine an infinitely open cosmos.

Morson suggests that it may be "misleading to assume a single temporality for all disciplines and all aspects of experience." Rather, we may require different "chronotopes" at different scales.

Again, imagine how the earth rotates on its own axis while revolving around a sun that in turn revolves around a galactic center. Maybe time is like that too: cycles within cycles within cycles.

Think of the different spaces we simultaneously inhabit, from the most intimate, to the private, to various public spaces, and on to the abstract-cosmic. Some people are frightened of the confined spaces -- claustrophobia -- while other are frightened of the expansive -- agoraphobia. (Or think of Pascal's dread of the "eternal silence of the infinite spaces," i.e., agoraphobia on stilts.) Some recoil from the intimate spaces -- e.g., schizoid and narcissistic personalities -- others from the worldly -- raccoons.

What time is it? There is developmental time, biographical time, biological time, historical time(s), etc. Thus, "Just as Galileo maintained that the earth was but one of many planets, so it might be useful to assume that there are always a multiplicity of temporalities to consider."

But of all these various times, there is only one in which this thing called "freedom" comes into play, and may effect the course of time. This is a very mysterious reality, for how could time produce something that transcends time? Or in other words, how can a timebound entity, something produced in time, rise above time?

Some people get around the problem by simply saying it's impossible. While we may feel as if we have free will, this freedom is impossible in principle. It cannot exist because it cannot exist.

I actually appreciate the argument, because at least it is intellectually consistent, following necessarily from first principles. For how does a deterministic world suddenly escape itself and go all indeterministic? How does biology become history? When did this happen? On whose watch? Who goofed?

Speaking of first principles, if the Absolute is Trinity, then it seems to me that God is eternally escaping himself, so to speak. That's what love is like, isn't it? A constant chase with no literal capture, because if you succeed at making the capture, the chase is over. And there are people who are like this, aren't there? Think of the compulsive womanizer who thrills in the pursuit but immediately devalues the conquest.

Thus, it seems to me that transcendence is woven into the cosmic cake, or rather, baked into the cosmic area rug. I read something similar in this book about The Geometry of Love. It is in the context of a discussion of the Eucharist, to the effect that "Eating, before sex, is biological evolution's first step towards transcendence in the animal species because it initiates physical openness to and need for the Other."

But isn't Life Itself already evidence of this cosmic transcendence? In other words, isn't Life, by definition, the transcendence of physics? If it weren't, then physics would be fully sufficient to account for it. When you were sick, instead of going to a doctor, you'd consult with a physicist or mechanic.

But that's not so funny, because there was a 20th century school of psychology called behaviorism which amounted to just that. The human being was reduced to its behavior only, so treatment consisted of rewarding the desired behavior and punishing the undesired.

You will note with the appropriate dread that liberalism attempts the same, only on a massive scale. But at least it is intellectually consistent, since it denies the soul up front. No one with a living soul could be forced at gunpoint to purchase some shoddy state-mandated product.

Back to the question of transcendence. Even before Life Itself, doesn't Physics Itself transcend matter? If not, how do we know physics? In other words, if not for transcendence, then physics would consist of the unreflective sense of touch, if that.

How Wide is Your Spiritual Aperture and What is it Like to be Dead?

It seems to me that the forthcoming post is radically undetermined, and that if I don't write it, it will never be written. It's not as if it will write itself.

Then again, I suppose it will write itself, but not without my participation. It's more like I'll organize what is presented to me, or something.

Yes, but what do you mean by "it"? Is "it" there all at once -- in which case you just transcribe it -- or does it appear serially, partly conditioned by what you've already written?

Yes, it has to be that way, otherwise it would make no sense. There would be no continuity, as each new word would be disconnected from what has just come. So each word has to be connected to the past, and yet, must also converge upon a future which is not yet known.

How do we pull this off? What is the nature of language such that this is even possible?

It seems to me that this nondoodling process must be a microcosm of our-moment-to-moment existence, which is indeed always conditioned by the past and transforming into the future, and yet, only experienceable in this infinitesimal, immeasurable moment of choice, of freedom, in which we can, as it were, tilt the past toward one of many possible futures.

We cannot experience the past, which is gone, nor the future, which isn't yet here, only this momentary moment, which is also never here, since it has already vanished by the time we even notice it.

My wife has seriously taken to her new hobby of photography, and one might think that photography is the quintessential art form for capturing "moments."

For example, she'll take a rapid fire burst of photos of the boy in action in a baseball game, but this captures images so fleeting that they weren't actually experienced -- any more than we experience things at the quantum level, even though they are obviously occurring.

The photo slices up the temporal continuum in such a way that it reminds me of what we said the other day about the length of a coastline being infinite. Analogously, you could say that the faster the lens, the the slower the time. If I understand the concept.

Morson describes a similar literary device used by Dostoyevsky in The Idiot, something he calls "vortex time." Have you ever been in a temporal vortex? When you are, it is as if you are in the gravitational field of a dreadful attractor. As you are drawn closer to it, freedom narrows until there is no choice left except to submit to the attractor. One imagines that death must be like this, even the essence of it. (There are also blissful attractors, but that is the subject of a slightly different post.)

In fact, The Idiot contains "repeated descriptions of the last moments of a person condemned to death." Now, we are all condemned to death, but most of us put off thinking about it until it is visible or palpable.

It is as if we have been dropped from the top of a building. No one knows how tall the building is or was until he hits the ground. The condemned man is in a somewhat unique position, since he has full conscious awareness of exactly how tall his building is: tall enough to reach the SPLAT.

Thus, Dostoyevsky "dwells upon the speeding up of time experienced by the prisoner as executions nears" (ibid).

This is all a bit abstract and theoretical, isn't it Bob? Er, no. In 1849 Dostyevsky was arrested and condemned to death, "but at the last moment a note from Tsar Nicholas I was delivered to the scene of the firing squad, commuting the sentence to four years' hard labour in Siberia."

So the man knows of what he speaks. On the way to the execution "it seems to the prisoner as if he has plenty of time. He imagines that his last half hour has room for an immense number of sensations and thoughts, for his mind now works at an extraordinary rate in order to concentrate the energy of a lifetime into those last moments" (Morson).

So the aperture is wide open, allowing a lifetime of light -- even the dimmest -- to be perceived. Remember: the faster the aperture, the slower the time: "As the time remaining diminishes, the mind speeds up still more, so that ten minutes, and then five, and then one, and then a fraction of one, contain the energy of a lifetime" (ibid).

Like Zeno's paradox, it is as if the distance to the street below is divided and subdivided endlessly: "The agony of knowing that the absolute end is near... increases geometrically, and with ever-increasing rapidity it transforms all thoughts, all stray impressions... into reminders of the imminent horror."

The Attractor is now in full view: "There is one point that can never be forgotten, and one can't faint, and everything moves and turns about it, about that point" (Dostoyevsky). Then, as the prisoner's head is right on the chopping block, "parts of a second shrink, [and] the mind speeds up virtually to infinity" (Morson).

"[T]ime itself has been deformed, intensified, sped up more and more as it is sucked into the vortex. The lifetime's worth of agony that has been concentrated into a tenth and then a hundredth of a second must now be lived through a hundred times if that severed head can remain aware for an entire second" (ibid).

Now, the first thing I think about is Christ's Passion, and how his execution is elevated to nothing less than the cosmic vortex around which all of creation is oriented and into which it is drawn -- as if all of human history is pulled into that vast and inconceivable white hole.

Then I think of Revelation, for example, "Do not be afraid; I am the first and the last. I am He who lives, and was dead, and behold, I am alive forevermore, Amen."

Then, oddly enough, I think of the Cosmobliteration section of the book, in which I try to demonstrate what happens to language as we approach the singularity. Not saying I succeeded, since I'm still alive.

Lost my aperture. Just apophatic nonentity. Cut me down to sighs. Too old, older than Abraham, too young, young as a babe's I AM...

Closing Time in the West

People are always trying to close time. It seems to me that a singular cosmic achievement of man was to enter time, but as soon as he did so, he began searching for ways out.

This is understandable. Indeed, I've plotted a graph into the next 100 years, and if present trends continue, it looks like we'll all be dead by then. Unless we can somehow arrest time.

What is Marxism but a quite literal attempt to close down time? For Marx, "history" is just the side effect of ironclad laws, and the sooner it ends, the better.

One reason the Marxist has no qualms about stealing your slack is that you don't actually have any slack to begin with -- similar to how you didn't know how substandard your health insurance was until Obama took it away.

Morson writes of the fall of the Soviet Union, a nation we might think of as a kind of parentheses within TI(ussr)ME.

In other words, the Soviet Union came into being with the idea that the end of history -- or the beginning of the end -- had been reached. But then, in the blink of an eye, it was all over, and history came crashing back in: "Statues of the man [Lenin] who established the final system," which was "destined to survive forever, were overthrown in a kind of ritual return to 'history'" (Morson).

Of course, history had been taking place all along, just as Michael Jackson was still aging despite the decades-long attempt to freeze his development at age 12.

So, who goofed? Who caused this obnoxious return of history? Ironically, one thing you can't have in Marxism is "responsibility," since responsibility is a consequence of freedom. To affirm that consciousness and behavior are determined by class is to exonerate one of all responsibility. And yet, the Moscow Times reports that Marxist and leftist lawmakers in Russia want to investigate Mikhail Gorbachev "for his role in the 1991 collapse of the USSR."

Indeed, what is a Marxist "lawmaker" anyway? If everything is determined by the laws of scientific materialism, isn't this analogous to investigating the head of the biology department because some animals are so damn ugly?

Ho! "We are still reaping the consequences of the events of 1991.... People in Kiev are dying and will continue to die at the fault of those who many years ago at the Kremlin made a decision to break up the country."

If this is true, then Marxism is untrue. But there is no cognitive dissonance, any more than an American liberal has cognitive dissonance in believing increased energy costs will reduce demand while increasing the minimum wage won't reduce the demand for labor.

Ironically, the Clinton years were called a "holiday from history," when they were quite the opposite. Rather, the fall of the USSR "was a kind of metahistorical act, in this case asserting the openness of time" (Morson) and of history -- just as the murder of the Tsar had been a kind of blood sacrifice to the god Chronos, initiating a system of sacrifice for keeping history at bay.

Mmmm, bourgeois long pig:

So, with the implosion of the USSR, "for good or ill, the future was no longer guaranteed. After decades of certainty, the possibility of possibility was reborn..."

However, the Marxist parasite is embedded deep in the human soul. It is a retrovirus, always waiting for favorable conditions to attack the host. We will never be rid of it, because it is an expression of human nature -- that part of our nature with which it is our task to do battle, this battle being the primary drama of life.

Once one forecloses vertical space -- as do all secular fundamentalists, by definition -- then this battle is over. You might say that eliminating the vertical is to individual development what Marxism is to history. In short order, maturity becomes history, a thing of the past, gone with the tradition that nurtured it.

Our Ten Commandments provide a summary of how we are supposed to carry on the battle with our(lower)selves, especially the latter five that govern human-to-humam relations; in short, honor tradition, and don't lie, steal, envy, and fornicate. Liberalism turns each of these on its head and celebrates the mirror image.

Obamacare, for example -- probably the most steaming pile of liberal legexcretion ever -- is built on a foundation of envy, theft, and the obliteration of tradition, and at this very moment the Supreme Court is deciding whether businesses can be compelled by the state to subsidize sexual license. And if the whole catastrophe works as it is supposed to, then the death panels are coming, AKA rationing of services to eliminate the unworthy.

So the progressive succeeds in stunting history and therefore progress. For the ones who have been waiting for themselves, the wait is over, and closing time -- and therefore freedom -- may proceed apace for the rest of us.

In the Beginning, Now & Forever, Worlds without End

This is the best I could do under the oppressive workumstances. Straight off the top of my head in a very short span of time. Consider it a brief pause or lateral sidetrip in our ongoing discussion...

It all comes down to time, doesn't it? If we could just figure out that one enigma, then the rest might fall like dominoes.

You can understand why no real progress has been made on the subject since Aristotle or Augustine or Aquinas. If you want to get a sense of how little we really know about time, just ask a childlike question such as, is the past real? Where is it then? Does the present emerge from the past or does it come into being from the future? Either way, how can choice exist?

When we arrive at a fruitless paradox, it's probably a sign that we're going about things the wrong way. It's not that the questions are wrong, but that our whole paradigm is off. We need to examine our assumptions at the very foundation of things.

Existence "takes place" in space and time. Or, one could say that we are "contained" in these two. But being contained in space is very different from being contained in time. Schuon writes that space is "static and conserving" while time is "dynamic and transforming."

That's helpful, for it suggests that classical liberal conservatism is woven into the very fabric of existence, i.e., change within conservation.

Must you politicize everything, God?!

YES and NO.

We are subjectively at the center of space, otherwise we could never conceive it. Objectively -- or abstractly -- we can see that space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, but subjectively (or concretely) we experience things from our center to the periphery, the latter extending up and down, forward and back, left and right (paraphrasing Schuon).

Likewise, time has subjective and objective modes. Concretely, time is "the changing of phenomena," whereas abstractly it is simply the "duration" or measurement of the change.

Now, just as abstract space has the three dimensions of height, width, and depth, abstract time has the three dimensions of past, present, and future.

Is time nested in another kind of time -- divine time, say? Think of how the rotation of the earth measures our days. But this takes place in the more expansive time it takes for the earth to circle the sun. And the sun too orbits the center of the Milky Way, one cosmic year taking around 225-250 million years, give or take.

But that's objective time. What about subjective time? Does our time have something analogous to the cycles within cycles? Yes, in the obvious sense that we celebrate birthdays, or the sabbath, or the new year, or bar mitzvahs, or anniversaries, or beer o'clock, etc. Thus, there is the "ordinary time" of mere duration, nested in more concrete markers of slackramental time.

Yes, but are there only these manmode markers, or are there objective, which is to say, God-given ones?

Hmm. Schuon suggests that time is not just abstract duration, but that it has four phases. We may think that our experience of the seasons gives rise to the idea of temporal phases, but Schuon says it is the other way 'round, so that time unfolds as spring, summer, fall, and winter; or morning, day, evening, and night; or childhood, youth, maturity, and old age; etc.

Is it just me, or is it getting a little chilly in here?

What about all of history? This is where I would tremulously disagree with Schuon, for he regards it as essentially cyclical, whereas I can't help seeing it as spiroidal.

In short, we both believe time necessarily has an "origin" or source. But Schuon believes that history is essentially a departure from the source, and therefore a privative and degenerative phenomenon. However, the whole idea of Resurrection seems to me like the hope of an eternal spring coiled inside that last cold winter we endark upon

God's Troubles with the Cosmic Rollout

As I mentioned in a comment the other day, this book on the nature of time, Narrative and Freedom, is quite provocative, so much so that it's provoking more ideas than I can assimilate. It's like each idea is a seed for its own tree. Although not difficult, it is thick, or rich, or dense. Just the kind of book I like.

That is, most books -- even from the nontenured -- contain one or two ideas swathed in reams of self-indulgent verbiage. Cognitively speaking, such books are totally saturated and therefore dead.

The good book is the opposite: it is alive with ideas that are efficiently expressed with a minimum of fuss and pretension. Instead of being self-important, the writing is soph-important, in service to the idea that is its attractor and leading edge. Or in other words, it is transparent, in Polanyi's from-->to sense.

I suppose the problem is that the postmodern rabble doesn't understand that ideas are real, and instead pretends that words are just about other words.

Therefore, not only are we sealed into a closed cosmos (as per scientistic dogma) with no possibility of escape or inscape, but we are equally -- and for the same reason -- enclosed in language. Because transcendence is a priori impossible, throwing out words is no more (but no less) effective than tossing bricks in the sky.

Which all goes to the central theme of this book, which is: is the universe closed, or open? There are two main ways to live as a shut-in within a closed universe, one religious, the other scientistic.

As we've been discussing in recent weeks, if predestination is the case, then this is another way of saying that time is closed. From our standpoint in the now, it certainly looks as if there are any number of potential paths into the future, each path in turn branching off into additional choices.

In other words, from where we stand phenomenologically, the future looks like a tree, with its trunk planted in the now, and its branches and leaves representing possible futures. But then, a new tree extends forward out of each branch and leaf. We can never embrace or embody the tree, which is always up ahead. (One of the difficulties of writing history is appreciating the unknown future -- the tree -- from the perspective of the past; or in other words, we know the future but they don't.)

But now that I'm thinking about this for the first time, it looks to me as if the tree very much has a fractal structure. Which is to say, it has similarity across scale. Examine any point in time, and we see the self-similar tree structure. The question is, is the tree only similar in form, or also similar in content?

It seems to me that both must be true, or the cosmos would degenerate into chaos. This is another way of saying that there exist attractors within the structure of the tree, i.e., forms, archetypes, ideas, what have you.

To cite one obvious example, we are told that "random evolution" has "discovered" the eye on many separate occasions. Or in other words, it is as if so-called "independent" evolutionary branches are guided by the strange attractor of the eye-idea.

This would also apply to personal development. For the existentialist, in each now we are radically free; there is no past that compels us, nor any future that limits us.

But of course, this is not what it feels like, at least in the absence of chemical fortification. Rather, we are always shaped by our past and constrained by both virtues and mind parasites. Both are attractors in vertical space, the former located above and ahead, the latter behind and below. No one is radically free, least of all Jean Paul Sartre!

(Interestingly, a perversion subjectively feels "free" to the pervert; or the pervert feels existentially liberated while engaging in the perversion, which is why movements that celebrate various perversions -- whether sexual, political, or genderoid -- usually have the word "liberation" in their self-designation, just as one can be sure that a country with the word "Democratic" in its name is a tyranny.)

Anyway, the other way to enclose oneself in time is via scientism, but we've debunked that bunk so many times that I don't want to rub it in. Not sporting.

Among the Big Ideas -- or let's say Big Questions -- that have struck me while reading this book is, How far to take this view? I am all for taking it all the way to God, which I know upsets some readers, but I think the converse is much more upsetting if you really think about it. In short, do you really want to live in closed time, in which choice is an illusion, responsibility a mirage, and meaning impossible?

Let's go All the Way Down and Back, to the free launch of Genesis 1. If you approach the text without preconceptions, you will notice something striking. That is, God does not create the universe all at once, in one big abba-kabbalah, but rather, in stages. But if he already knows what's going to come out, what is the point of this?

The way the narrative is structured, it is as if God is surprised -- for why would he be pleased? -- by what is produced. For example, he begins by creating the heavens and earth, but the latter comes out a mess -- a dark and formless void -- so he tweaks it by shedding some light on the situation and dividing light from darkness.

But even then there are some problems with the rollout. No need to reprise the whole thing, but you get the picture: it is very much as if God creates and then stands back to judge what he has created before taking the next step. And this would be completely superfluous if God knows everything ahead of time.

It's just another way of emphasizing that God is really and truly Creator, and that his very own existence is the quintessence of openness and choice. There are always a multitude of possibilities, even -- or especially! -- in God. To me that's a comfort, not a conceit.

Indeed, I would say that the only reason we are open is that God is. Otherwise, an open mind in an open creation is completely inexplicable. It makes no sense at all.

However, I might add that, just as we are constrained and attracted by various transcendentals, e.g., love, truth, beauty, justice, unity, etc., so too is God constrained by his own nature, so to speak.

Which is why prophecy is indeed possible. Prophecy, which is a memoir of the future, is clearly distinct from history. History deals with the past, which is closed; but prophecy is a foreshadowing of the open future, therefore it cannot be as "exact" as history. Rather, it can provide general outlines and shapes of things to come, since it is apparently a vision of various attractors up above and ahead. But it's about the Big Picture, not the infinite and unknowable details.