Monogamy and Monosophy, Counterculture and Counter-Cosmic

Now that I think about it, I guess I've spent my whole (numerically) adult life being part of the so-called counterculture.

That is, just as the left was transitioning from a supposedly freewheeling counterculture to today's dreary, repressive, intolerant, and conformist dictatorship of virtue, I personally transitioned from the ambient bonehead illiberal leftism of my protracted adultolescence to the bohemian classical liberal neo-traditional orthodox hoodooism of our Founders.

Which means that I have never known what it is like to have folks like me in charge. Wait, I take that back. Jerry Brown, who was our governor from 1975 to 1983, is also our current governor. Thus, I suppose he once mirrored my own insanity. I was a moonbat under Moonbeam.

In fact, right now, the biggest issue confronting our failed state is whether Brown will sign a bill mandating that on birth certificates, men can be listed as mothers and women as fathers.

In other words, the question is whether the state can supersede biology and determine for itself who is a mother and who is a father. I don't see why not, since this is simply a corollary of the premise that sex has nothing to do with marriage. To paraphrase Dennis Prager, if sex is irrelevant to marriage, then it is surely irrelevant, period. Everyone is whatever sex they wish to be, which means that our only order is disorder.

It also means that the will has triumphed over reality, or power over truth.

Please note that disorder is not the same as chaos, which would disclose itself as outward or apparent randomness. Rather, this is the imposition of a disordered order, which is something else entirely, for if a woman can be a father, it means that you and I are no longer fathers or mothers (since the new definition vacates the plain meaning of father- and motherhood).

Remember, with rights come responsibilities -- or rather, vice versa, since rights flow from intrinsic cosmic responsibilities. Freedom without responsibility equates to unalloyed nihilism, just as responsibility without freedom equates to the purest tyranny.

But in the upside down and inverted world of the left, parents (or at least those with wombs) have rights with no responsibilities, whereas infants have responsibilities with no rights. What are the infant's responsibilities? Well, first of all, to not be conceived if it should inconvenience the one who has the right to bear it.

Failing this, the child has the duty -- both cosmic and constitutional -- to die for the sake of his mother's sacred right to convenience. Greater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for the comfort and ease of one's indisposed and/or irresponsible parent.

Likewise, the infant no longer has the right to a mother and father, even if such things existed. But the adult, perversely, has the right to be a mother or father, even if this is clearly an impossibility, any more than my aunt can be a trolley car. You might say that with the left's abiding hostility to language -- or aggravated logophobia -- all things are possible.

The human race is and has always been a race between those who believe in the Absolute and those who want to be the Absolute. At the moment the latter have taken a commanding lead, but I wonder if this hasn't always been the case? If the good guys have ever been ahead, it wasn't for long.

In the Bible, according to Ratzinger, "the cosmos and man are not two clearly separable quantities, with the cosmos forming the fortuitous scene of human existence, which in itself could be parted from the cosmos and allowed to accomplish itself without a world."

Rather, cosmos and man are one (or not two), in that they share an underlying order. This is obvious in the case of science -- e.g., physics, math, and logic -- but it is equally true of ethics, which is grounded in the order of natural law.

Conversely, if our rights are grounded in man, then we have no rights, because what is man in the absence of the Absolute? That's right: nothing. Or, nothing but Obama, i.e., the arbitrary and lawless rule of man.

Thanks to the tenured boobs of multiculturalism, we now have multiple histories -- feminist history, black history, queer history, Chicano history, etc. But even supposing such inanities exist, they can only be understood in light of a universal History. In the absence of an Arc of Salvation -- i.e., cosmic progressivism -- such silly pseudo-histories can have no meaning whatsoever. Which is why the neo-Marxian statism of an Obama is just upside down Christian millennialism.

We say: one mankind, one morality, one truth, one history, and one cosmos because One Cosmos. Or, in an eccentric formulation that occurred to me the other day, monosophy and monogamy -- one wisdom and one woman -- are intimately related, and it might even be that in the absence of monogamy, the cosmos -- discovery of the one transcendent order -- would be impossible.

Bob, why would you say such a strange thing? Well, for starters, in order for there to be a cosmos, there must be human beings. Animals know nothing of any extra-terrestrial, transnatural cosmic order. So, what are the conditions necessary to discover this deep unity?

It seems to me that this cannot be an exterior, outward, or simple monism. This is a lower oneness for which we have no use. If reality were this simple, it would be too simple to account for us.

Rather, this reality must be -- how to say it? -- the simultaneous discovery and co-creation of a dynamic and living unity woven from the diverse -- at once complementary and/or polar -- threads of multiplicity. How is this possible?

Let us suppose that male and female are the (or an) instantiation of one-as-two. This is -- or was -- the assumption of our western his & heritage, i.e., male-and-female He created them. In short, the "unit" of mankind appears as two-knit, or as two becoming one flesh via the living third. To notice that homosexual (or any other form of) non-marriage cannot achieve such higher unity is to be cognizant of the vast realm of Beyond Obvious.

There is much more to say about this, but I'm backed up in my work, and besides, Tucker says it well enough.

(And RS, if you're out there slacking off at work again, don't worry, your book will soon be on the way. I'm just a little behind in my correspondence and everything else.)

Six Years with a Rotten Unicorn? Cheer Up, the Worst is Yet to Come!

Let's discretely change the subject and get back to what this blog does so well, which is what now?

In these latter days of totalitarian triumphalism, it's easy not to be our usual optimystic selves. And I mean this literally. Dennis Prager talks about how unhappiness is the cheap and easy path. It is the way of the Weak Man. Happiness, however, is a Serious Problem, and if nothing else, Raccoons are dead serious about their utter frivolousness.

Prager makes the excellent point that happiness is a moral imperative. Why? Because being around miserable people makes one miserable. Therefore, it is your cosmic duty to be happy, or at least confine your unhappiness behind closed doors, because seriously, you're bumming everyone out.

As they say in China, a fish rots from the head down. But as Iowahawk says, a unicorn rots from the horn down. Thus, it is an extra challenge to be happy with this rotten unicorn in office.

Why should this unicorn be so grim? After all, his wife has everything a man could possibly want: broad shoulders, muscled arms, a strong jaw, a 34 inch waist...

Not unlike Ronald Reagan. Now, there was a happy man, and his infectious happiness seemed to flow to the rest of the citizenry -- trickle down euthymia.

But it had the opposite effect on the permanently aggrieved, AKA the flightless wing of the left. They weren't happy under Reagan, and they are just as unhappy under his pneumagraphic negative. I detect a pattern, or at least an independent variable. One senses that the left won't be happy until everyone is as miserable as they are.

In contrast to President Buzzkill, Reagan didn't mope around like some misunderstood adolescent. But then, Obama's only qualification for office was having written a juvenile autobiography revolving around the psychic hole where his alcoholic and polygamous father should be. I guess that makes him our first alienated teen president.

Does anyone else find it ironic that an enthusiastic pothead should be such a morbid buzzkill? Maybe he just got high in order to flee from his depressed self. I would too. No, that's not true. I'd drink more.

Depressed characters can also be drawn to depressing ideologies and people, because it normalizes their depression. Or in other words, if you're married to Michelle Obama, you have a ready explanation for your depression. And an ideology like morbid neo-Marxism is both a cause and consequence of depression. Like Hitler, Marx was anything but a happy kampfer.

One thing I often tell patients is that a clinical depression is very much like a viral illness. Once it takes hold of the psyche, it's analogous to the virus that infiltrates the nucleus of the cell and starts making copies of itself.

In the case of depression, it starts producing depressed, morbid, and worrisome thoughts and feelings. At a certain point you have to tell the patient -- or yourself -- "Knock it off already! That is your depression speaking. It is no longer you speaking."

This is especially true in cases where medication is indicated, because then it really is an absurcular psycho-biological phenomenon. Such individuals pour out a steady stream of negativistic thoughts and feelings that easily affect the people around them.

Politics got you down? Feeling a little like this lately?:

Well, get used to it. This is how it's going to be for the rest of your life. These demon possessed political vampires are not going to go away, and they will never give up until everyone is as miserable as they are. You're just going to have to learn to be happy in spite of them, and in fact, just to spite them. If you are unhappy, then you've allowed these psychic terrorists to win.

I was looking for a quote by Ratzinger to the effect that Christianity will shrink to something analogous to what it was during its first three centuries. He is the temporal pessimyst to Pope John Paul's eternal optimyst. I didn't find the exact passage, but this is even more to the point. He sounds like a new testavus for the restavus prophet:

"The church will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning.... As the number of her adherents diminishes... she will lose many of her social privileges... As a small society, [the Church] will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members....

"It will be hard-going for the Church.... The process will be long and wearisome as was the road from the false progressivism on the eve of the French Revolution -- when a bishop might be thought smart if he made fun of dogmas and even insinuated that the existence of God was by no means certain....

"Men in a totally planned world will find themselves unspeakably lonely. If they have completely lost sight of God, they will feel the whole horror of their poverty. Then they will discover the little flock of believers as something wholly new. They will discover it as a hope that is meant for them, an answer for which they have always been searching in secret.

"And so it seems certain to me that the Church is facing very hard times. The real crisis has scarcely begun. We will have to count on terrific upheavals. But I am equally certain about what will remain at the end: not the Church of the political cult, which is dead already, but the Church of faith. She may well no longer be the dominant social power to the extent that she was until recently; but she will enjoy a fresh blossoming and be seen as man’s home, where he will find life and hope beyond death."

Just don't count on it. That way you won't be disappointed. The Wee Church of Perpetual Slack is for the few. If it starts attracting the rabble, then we're doing something wrong. Just thank God reality is never what it is, but is always pointing above and beyond itself to our true home, which this world can't be. If it is, then the rancid unicorn has a point.

Unnatural is the New Natural

I'd like to write about something else, but it's difficult to think pleasant thoughts when the left is provoking so many unpleasant ones.

In fact, the left isn't satisfied with compelling disordered thought, but must also punish ordered thought -- such as the spontaneous reaction of that Miami Dolphins player to the KISS. That poor heterophile is in a World of Pain for his mundane normalcy, and re-education camp is only the beginning. He could cheat his way through college, beat his wife, have eight children out of wedlock, or try to injure other players, but be uncomfortable with two men kissing in public? The Ludovico medical facility for you!

"Choice! The boy has not a real choice, has he? Self-interest, the fear of physical pain drove him to that grotesque act of self-abasement. The insincerity was clear to be seen. He ceases to be a wrongdoer. He ceases also to be a creature capable of moral choice."

They want us to believe that Michael Sam is Gandhi, Rosa Parks, and Cesar Chavez rolled into one big victim. No doubt we'll soon be treated to heartrending scenes of him being led into the locker room by NFL officials (calling all photoshoppers):

This represents the complete inversion of reality by the left, since racism is wholly unnatural, while heterosexuality -- AKA sexuality -- is the most natural possible thing in all of nature.

Of course, science cannot pronounce on "norms" per se, but all of biology is oriented around the Prime Directive to reproduce. It is as close as science comes to admitting that the world is incoherent in the absence of teleology.

Thus, sex does not explain reproduction; rather, reproduction -- the end -- explains sex. Take away reproduction, and sex obviously makes no sense. It would be like ears in the absence of sound or eyes in the absence of light.

The difference between racism and so-called homophobia is that the former must be learned. Children are not born racist. Rather, they have to be taught to be racist, either by parents or by the culture.

My son, for example, has friends of all races, and if it weren't for the grown-ups talking about it, he would scarcely notice. He just doesn't care. He judges others purely by the content of their play, not the color of their toys.

Which, for the left, won't do. Rather, he will have to be indoctrinated to believe that he is secretly racist, that he is the beneficiary of "white privilege," and that everyone who doesn't look like him is his victim. As Obama would say, his greed rules a world in need.

Conversely, so-called "homophobia" is not learned, but rather, spontaneous. No normal parent wants their child to be exposed to the image of two men kissing on the lips, but if mine were, he would regard it as weird or creepy or maybe a puzzling attempt at humor, with no one ever having to tell him so. In any case, I wouldn't confuse him by trying to convince him that his natural reaction is immoral and that he must learn to deny his own feelings. Rather, I would downplay it and say something like, "yeah, it's weird, but some people are like that."

Please note that there is nothing whatsoever here that smacks of violence or aggression (let alone justifies it). Indeed, violence toward homosexuals, like racism, must also be learned. On those few occasions (that I know of) that gay men have come onto me, I was either a little discoonbobulated or maybe even flattered, but nowhere in me was there an impulse to physically lash out.

I have no idea where such an impulse would come from, but I suppose it might well be rooted in something that could legitimately be called homophobia, i.e., insecurity with one's own sexual identity, or unconscious homosexual urges that must be projected and violently punished.

Thinking back on my own boyhood, everyone was "homophobic" in the nonviolent sense. In fact, it never really occurred to me that something called a homosexual actually existed, only that masculine virtues were honored and enforced by the group. If someone were called a fag or a homo, it had nothing whatsoever to do with actual homosexuals, but rather, just enforcing the Code.

Now those words are forbidden, but you can't eliminate the underlying reality, so you see the same thing at play when someone is called a wimp or a wuss. The purpose is not to insult homosexuals, but rather, to encourage the guy to Man the hell Up.

Since I help coach little league baseball, I frequently must deal with failure to Man Up, but not only are there no permissible words to describe it, there is also pressure to deny that it is even occurring. So there are courageous players and wimpy players, but no vocabulary with which to talk about it.

Seriously, you can't even joke that there is No Crying in Baseball. My son knows that, but at least half the players don't, which is not just unseemly but frankly self-indulgent and narcissistic. I mean, if sport can't at least teach you to cope with adversity and failure like a man, what good is it?

On a couple of occasions I have mumbled that someone was throwing like a girl, but that was a pretty rash and reckless thing to do. It was as if they had never heard the expression before, or I had said something like FEEL FREE TO GROW SOME TESTICLES, BITCH!

Most of the kids -- even those with fathers -- have already been so indoctrinated with political correctness that you can't even point out that some guy on the other team is a bad player. And not in an insulting or mocking way, just as a neutral fact. If there are good players, then it stands to reason that there are bad ones. It doesn't mean they're bad people or that this permits you to ridicule them.

For example, it is an ancient adage in baseball that you don't throw a change-up to a bad hitter. A bad hitter won't be able to catch up with your fastball, so if you throw him an off speed pitch, you're doing him a favor.

Well, one of our kids was experimenting with a change-up. I told him, "just make sure you don't throw it to a bad hitter," and he was momentary nonplussed. He understood the principle, but reframed it as not throwing a change to a player who is "er, not a, er, really great hitter," or something like that. Political correctness forbids one to call things what they are, to feel one's feelings, and to see what is before one's eyes.

CreekOfConsciousness

Once again I have little time for a post. So, why bother? Just a habit, I suppose. I've been doing this for almost ten years now, and old school Raccoons will recall that it used to be every day. I used to occasionally mix in the odd repost, which I haven't done lately. Why not? I don't know. I have the idea of a ceasefire at the ten year mark in order to finally look down there, see what we have, and maybe try to organize it into book form. Of course, it would have to be multiple books. Should I do it by year? By subject? Or -- my preference -- to somehow intuit the nonlocal organizing principle behind the whole thing and then put it together around that? However, suppose we find the center. Then what? Is it a spatial center? A temporal one? Must be both. In fact, we have to begin with the principle that the cosmic center is God, or O. Or better, the metacosmic -- or macrocosmic -- center is God, while the intracosmic -- or microcosmic -- center is man. Which reminds me. One of the most foolish cliches of the left is that modernity somehow displaced man from the center of things. You know the drill: first heliocentrism. OH NO! Then geology: the HORROR! Then Darwin: MAKE IT STOP! But do you know anyone who is freaked out by these things? Yes, the sun doesn't revolve around the world, earth isn't 6,000 years old, and animals are subject to natural selection. This is a purely quantitative view of reality, so it presupposes what it would attempt to prove, which is the usual cosmic nothingbuttery, as in, existence, history, and man are NOTHING BUT whatever. However, religion, if it is about anything, is about qualities, and no amount of quantity adds up to a single quanlity, not even "lots," because that adjective would require the comparison of one quantity to another. So, what is the nature of this presumptuous speck of tenure who pronounces on the nature of ultimate reality? Isn't the statement I AM NOT THE CENTER a little like the statement ALL CRETANS ARE LIARS? In other words, in order to characterize the nature of reality, one must haver a commanding view of everything, and such a view is only possible from the center out and top down. Otherwise, one is just looking at things from the terminal point of a two-dimensional line, or from the end back. To rise above that line is to be at the center of a new perspective. Animals cannot do this. Imagine a frog at the bottom of a well. He will assure us that reality is a little bright disc surrounded by darkness which alternatively appears and disappears. If man is nothing but a contingent animal produced by accidental forces and pressures, then he is no more able than a frog to characterize the nature of reality. God is the name we give to ultimate reality, and not even the smartest frog knows anything about God, so take that, Descartes.

You Ought to be Ashamed!

If man evolved and/or is created to be monogamous, then wha' happen? For 99% of our existence we practiced monogamy, so we should have gotten pretty good at it. But then something changed.

Note that during that very long period of time, things were pretty "equal" for everybody, gender-specific specialities notwithstanding.

That is to say, everyone was equally poor, although no one knew it, because it turns out that the hunter-gatherer lifestyle was characterized by a surplus of slack, working "short hours" and exploiting "abundant food resources" (Tucker). You might be astoneaged to learn that early humans lived "relatively relaxed lives" and that it was possible to get by "on two to four hours of subsistence effort per day."

One more way that I am a dyed-in-the-wool caveman.

I wonder if this is the blessedly enslackened situation Genesis describes, prior to the Temptation and Fall? That is, it seems there is plenty of low-hanging food of which we may "freely eat"; a girl for every boy; and the nuclear family ("a man shall leave his father and mother...") It's all good. Like the 1950s, but without the beatniks.

But then something unexpected happens. The text is frustratingly vague as to exactly what it is, but it is possible that it is conflating or reversing cause and effect.

That is, it may simply be describing an effect -- our all too obvious exile from paradise or the 1950s -- and then reading a cause back into time. Since what happened is "bad," then perhaps we must have done something bad to deserve it.

I've always been partial to Joyce's approach (in Finnegans Wake), which acknowledges the Fall -- the effect -- without trying to be too precise about what we did to cause it.

Look at it this way: we all have guilt and we all have shame -- Harry Reid being the exception that proves the rule -- but why?

Interestingly, the Bible acknowledges the existence of shame even in our prelapsarian state -- in fact, it is the Last Word ("ashamed") prior to Genesis 3, The Temptation and Fall of Man.

It also seems to implicitly acknowledge a capacity for guilt, in that there is an injunction -- don't eat of that tree -- and a potential punishment -- you shall die. There would be no point in communicating such a cause-and-effect formula to a creature incapable of freedom and responsibility, and therefore, guilt.

As we've discussed in the past, shame and guilt are quite distinct, the former having to do with ontology, the latter with existence. That is, shame has to do with being, whereas guilt has more to do with actions.

Shame also has to do with the other, with being seen (or busted). Thus, a truly shameless person -- Miley Cyrus, say, or Bill Clinton -- is so deeply disordered that it goes well beyond what any psychologist can deal with.

To put it inversely, to not feel shame is to not be human, and only humans can benefit from psychotherapy.

Sociopaths do not feel shame, nor do they feel guilt. In both cases, they are detached from the human family, in that they cannot empathize with the other, or see the other's point of view. Therefore, they can treat human beings as objects without being persecuted by a guilty conscience.

How would you feel if you had not only destroyed a young woman's life, but pretended she was the guilty party? A normal person would be deeply troubled for the rest of his life, but a normal person would also try to make amends (so long as the crime didn't involve murder, in which case no earthly reconciliation is possible).

So man, if he is man, must have a capacity for guilt and for shame. Modern man doesn't like this idea, so what does he do about it? Note that one cannot actually rid oneself of these (and remain human), any more than one can eliminate other quintessentially human characteristics.

Yes, but there is still a way: all one has to do is make the wrong right and the right wrong, and voila! The restoration of wholly unholy innocence! To be in-nocent means to be free of knowledge, and people who don't know any better -- children and animals -- are indeed innocent.

Furthermore, any person who would hold innocent children and animals to a higher standard would be an assoul. Therefore, you are an assoul for expecting humane, decent, and virtuous behavior of liberals!

There is another ontological perversion that infiltrates the liberal mind, and it is the equation of resentment and victimhood, accompanied by the equation of victimhood and innocence.

Therefore, instead of feeling shame about, say, being so envious and resentful, one not only feels innocent, but is proud about it (pride being another occasion for a normal person to feel humbled if not a little guilty).

I can summarize the lesson of this post in two words: Gay. Pride.

Which is a good thing, because I don't have time for one more word.

The War on Women is a Cat Fight

Time only for a short but I'd like to think important post.

I suppose to even suggest that females have a nature is to declare war on them.

Well, we are at war. But only against the women who deny their own nature -- and Nature in general (the one entails the other).

Democrats know this: they know that one of their most reliable clients is this large and growing pool of humanoid misfits. They are the polar opposite of whatever it is Pajama Boy represents.

Normally there is a sexual polarity that results from the complementarity of male and female. But who or what is the complement of Pajama Boy? A domineering mother, I suppose.

Likewise, what could be the complement to those pathetic "Julias" of the liberal imagination? The only thing I can think of is the State, so this is one of those rare occasions that I agree with liberals.

If marriage were still the norm, we'd have a permanent conservative majority. Consider: in 2012, married people favored Romney by a margin of 14 percentage points. Single women, however, supported Obama by a whopping 68 to 30 (cited in Tucker).

Who are those 30%, anyway? Right. The attractive ones. Or at least the ones who aren't repellant.

No woman is an island, which is why the State simply displaces the role of husband. As they say, a woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle. However, she needs the government like a woman needs a man.

And the feeling is mutual, since the state needs single mothers like a man needs a wife. It's just patriarchy by another name.

In the past I have written of how the premature, neurologically incomplete, and helpless baby is the hinge of evolution. After all, if the babies don't survive and thrive, then the game is over.

However, in reality, like their Creator, humans are irreducibly intersubjective and tri-complementary. Therefore, you can't change one member of the subcelestial trinity without changing all the rest.

Thus, for example, when women no longer need men, we end up with Pajama Boy on the one hand and Hoodie Boy (e.g., Trayvon Martin) on the other: with wimps and barbarians.

So it is fair to say that each of the three is a hinge of evolution and of civilization: Man, Woman, and Baby. Each has certain responsibilities and certain entitlements.

But not just in terms of their biological categories. That means nothing. Here again, we're not talking about nature, but about NATURE, and a merely natural man sinks beneath himself into infrahuman Rousseauian hell.

Because we need to placate the angry and/or hysterical sub-female mob -- the ovary tower -- we are not permitted to talk about female responsibilities, only female "rights," such as the right to a dead baby and free birth control from Daddy.

Not so with boys, who are made aware of their responsibilities from the get-go, mainly to curb their aggression, impulsivity, competitiveness, enthusiasm, spirit, and life force. In short, they are to imitate female nature, even though there's no such thing.

And what is the primary cosmic responsibility of females? Interestingly, it is to help civilize male nature, but not in the way of the tenured or with the heavy hand of the state, as in the paragraph above.

Rather, Tucker discusses the centrality of female virtue, which is as critical to civilizational advance as are infantile helplessness and male strength and aggressiveness. You don't even need to look at it from a moralistic angle. Rather, just consider the results.

Tucker traces the roots of monogamy back to the spirited virtuous woman who refuses the seductions of powerful high-status males in favor of genuine passionate love.

This is a pattern we see "time and again in Western history -- high status aristocrats trying to make concubines and morganatic wives out of lower-status women, and the women, often peasant girls, standing up to them and refusing to comply. If there is one individual who is the lynchpin of a monogamous society, it is the Virtuous Woman." (Monica Lewinskys of the world, take note.)

Just consider the cascade of consequences that occurs when the woman fails in her duty to consecrate the booty. Ultimately we're talking about the failure of monogamy, and when that happens, all hell breaks loose for everybody, men, women, and children:

"[N]ormative monogamy reduces crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery and fraud, as well as decreasing personal abuses.... By shifting male efforts from seeking wives to paternal investment, normative monogamy increases savings, child investment and economic productivity...." (Tucker).

So yeah, there is a war on woman. Primarily by other women. Cat fight!

Nature is Supernatural

Men and women are faced with different Temptations. One difference is that men typically use power to obtain sex (e.g., Bill), while women use sex to obtain power (e.g., Hillary, riding the coattails of a powerful man). This truism is apparently rooted in different evolutionary strategies, but if this is the case, it doesn't negate free will. Rather, it's more like astrology: the stars incline but do not compel.

For the vast majority of human existence we have been hunter-gatherers -- 99% of that existence, according to Tucker. Therefore, if we want to know something about the ground floor of the psyche -- why man is the way he is -- it might be worthwhile to take a look at the ways and whys of our most venerable furbears.

More generally, if the evolutionary psychologists are correct, then we are definitely in the Wrong Place -- this is not my beautiful cave! -- and there's not much we can do about it. We have made our procrustean bed and now we have to live a lie in it. It is very much as if we have a nature designed for certain specific conditions, but those conditions are nowhere to be found -- like the old zoos that simply tossed the animals in cages without trying to replicate their environment.

But our environment is changing all the time, and since we adapt to it so quickly, it might lead one to believe that man has no nature. This is discussed in the excellent Making Gay Okay, which, based on the reviews, is making gays insane.

What is interesting is that traditionalists believe in an enduring human nature, and that this belief is in conformity with evolutionary science. So it is ironic in the extreme for leftists to call anyone else "anti-science," being that these scientifically correct mythtics are the worst offenders. They don't just deny the science, but try to block the scientific paths. One is not permitted to even think in certain directions, for fear of stumbling upon a Forbidden Truth.

Leftists believe in nature but not in NATURE, the latter of which transcends nature. NATURE is what the Founders were referring to with the crack about our rights being rooted in "the Laws of Nature and Nature's God." They surely didn't mean lowercase nature -- as if our natural rights are founded upon physics or biology or natural selection. If they were, then politics would be founded on the principle of kill or be killed, which is what nature teaches us.

By NATURE, the founders mean "in the nature of things," or just the way things ARE and reality IS. No rational person says "realities are," which is one more reason why leftists are intrinsically irrational, for to say that there are realities is to deny Reality, precisely.

Our "point of departure," writes Reilly, "must be that Nature is what is, regardless of what anyone desires or abhors." Thus, this places reality outside the domains of will and desire. As we've Schuonsplained on many occasions, the human being is composed of intellect, sentiment, and will, and if the latter two are detached from the former, we are soon enough in leftist Hell, where there is lots of hysteria and bullying but no truth.

Speaking of modern science, one thing we know conclusively about man is that Aristotle was correct: man is the political animal, which does not refer to vulgar politics, but rather, to the fact that man's nature is to be involved with others in order to create a society in which it is possible to pursue the Good.

We cannot do this if we are fundamentally atomistic monads, in which case community would just interfere with our nature. It would mean that any community is a kind of falsehood, and astonishingly, this is precisely what the uber-leftist Rousseau argued:

"The Rousseauian anthropology claims that man is not a rational, political animal and that society in any form is fundamentally alien, and alienating to individuals. In his origins, man was isolated and essentially complete on his own and in himself" (Reilly).

We can see how this primordial craziness is present in both leftism and libertarianism. In fact, it is the reason why leftism is confused with liberalism, because it posits a kind of radical freedom that is equivalent to nihilism.

But in reality, there can be no such thing as radical or pure freedom. Rather, as with all ultimate ontological categories, freedom only exists in a complementary relationship, in this case, to responsibility. And although the two necessarily coarise, responsibility must be ontologically prior, otherwise it would have no explanation. In other words, you cannot get from freedom to responsibility, whereas responsibility automatically implies freedom.

Also, freedom is purely abstract, with no positive meaning, whereas responsibility is concrete. It's like a woman's so-called "freedom to choose." Choose what? Anything? No, of course not. That kind of purely abstract freedom refers to nothing.

Rather, let's be honest: it is the freedom to kill her baby. Such freedom is of course completely divorced from responsibility, but also cannot possibly be rooted in nature. If it is in nature, then it is obviously present in female babies, so only male babies could be aborted in "good" conscience.

Thus, this so-called freedom can only be a positive freedom, but is there such a thing? I don't see how, without freedom becoming something it is not.

That is, natural freedom does not impinge on anyone else's freedom, and everyone is equally free (and responsible). But the positive right to abortion obviously impinges on the rights of others, including the father, the baby, and society in general.

Now, among other things, nature is objective, for which reason we are "subject" to it. It took a very long time for man to recognize this, apparently not until the ancient Greeks: "Before this discovery, ancient man was immersed in mythological portrayals of the world, the gods, and himself" (Tucker).

To put it another way, nature had been subject to man, not in reality -- as if rain dances or human sacrifice were successful in influencing nature -- but in the imagination, where man lived. Like Marx, man tried to change nature before understanding nature. But only by bowing to nature's laws are we able to use them as the boundary conditions for further exploration and evolution.

Once man "discovered" the objective world, it permitted us to inquire into its rational structure. Thus, interestingly, the discovery of objective reality proved that NATURE is supernatural, i.e., infused with a transcendent truth intelligible to man's intelligence. As such, you might say that the world became objective on one level, but subjective on a higher level, i.e., the divine plane (in that it had to be grounded in a deeper, wider, and higher intelligence, ultimately a Person).

Oh my. Way out of time. Why didn't someone tell me? As always, to be continued...

TOTAL CLARITY and PERFECT NONSENSE

Yesterday I had insufficient time to express what I was trying to say with TOTAL CLARITY. For me, the achievement of TOTAL CLARITY means that no honest, intellectually adequate, and sincere person could possibly disagree with me.

I am always trying to paint the reader -- beginning with myself -- into an airtight corner from which there is no escape but inscape. Or there is no way out but up. This we call UPWORLD MOBILITY.

There is a lucid mechanical determinism that inspires futility and an organic entelechial deiterminism that nourishes HOPE.

Or in other words, one must know what IS in order to know what CAN BE. It is how ultimate reality can be always THE SAME and yet EVER NEW, instead of an ABSURCULAR repetitititititititition populated by a bunch of UNCLE AUTOMOTONS.

Revelation is both CLOSED and OPEN, or an open and shut case, because it is composed of TRUTH and FREEDOM, so it is dyna-static or olden pneumagain. This is the cosmic edge where all the RAZORACTION occurs.

I am always aiming for TOTAL CLARITY except for when TOTAL CLARITY only obscures the issue, for example, in defining God. To achieve TOTAL CLARITY in that arena would result in a total lack of clarity, i.e., absurdity. Any discussion of God requires the judicious use of orthoparadox, which cannot attain TOTAL CLARITY, but rather, transclarity, or PERFECT NONSENSE.

This is how and why O can be "incomprehensible and yet the meaning of everything," and why knowledge of it "does no more than render the mystery immediate and inescapable" (Ware).

This does not mean we should get an apophathead or veer off into irrationalism. Rather, there is an irreducible and endless play of apophatic and cataphatic, or knowledge and mystery, (n) and O.

This yeoman's work -- or play rather -- is NEVER DONE. The best we can do is to never stop aiming at that which transcends and defines us, the goal we can perceive but never see. Or we see through things toward that to which they point or converge upon.

And how do we perceive it? Two ways. We can look back and see its unmistakable fruit tracks, or turn forward and feel its attraction and its nourishment: it simultaneously PULLS on our emptiness and GIVES of its riches.

This dynamic force "attracts creation into the eschatological condition," which means that history is the interval or gap during which progress towards its own fillfullment occurs. For the AWAKE or even ALERT, time itself is the KNOWA's ARK of salvation.

"To the extent that one ascends in the knowledge of God, he ascends at the same time in the understanding of the mystery of God as that which is not to be understood. 'This is the true knowledge of what is sought; this is the seeing that consists in not seeing, because that which is sought transcends all knowledge, being separated on all sides by incomprehensibility as by a kind of darkness'" (Staniloae). We are always rising above meanings toward MEANING itself via the DARKLIGHT of faith.

God is like any other name. Just because I know your name, or have a name for you, it does not mean that I fully know you, much less contain you.

You could say that being born again from above is the EIGHTH DAY of creation, i.e., VERTICAL LIFTOFF. Since the liftoff never ends, we could symbolize it [8∞] GUFFAW-HA! If it ever ends, it will mean that time has become eternal, or finally caught up with itsoph. History will have healed the wounds it inflicted, and hopefully JUDGMENT will wound the heels history inflicted upon the restavus.

So there will be a final endless COMM-UNION of orthoparadoxes such as flesh and spirit. Or not, because the other direction ends "in isolation within one's own emptiness" (ibid). In between is the exodus in the bewilderness of time, Israel on one side, Egypt on the other, Life or Death. Endless novelty or endless monotony.

Once upon a time we spoke of A influences and B influences, as described by Mouravieff. You could say that these are horizontal and vertical -- or terrestrial and celestial -- influences, respectively. No real happiness can result from A influences only. These bring transient pleasures, to be sure, but no quantity of horizontal pleasure adds up to one qualitative vertical bealtitude.

In order to be happy, man must have a goal "that transcends the domain of 'A' influences," or is "beyond the mental horizon" of mere horizontaloids. In the world of pure A, "nothing lasts, everything breaks, and everything tires." So you end up OLD, BORED, and JADED, or full to the brim with emptiness.

Will you knock it off with the capitalizing already?

Besides, what was it you were unclear about yesterday?

Well, it had to do with that penultimate crack to the effect that "homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality."

Reilly expresses it more clearly, writing of how nature "is teleologically ordered to ends that inhere in their essence and make them what they are." In short, there is a truth and a reality that we do not invent and to which we graciously defer.

Conversely, the first principle of the homosexual activists is that "things are nothing in themselves, but are only what we make them to be according to our wills and desires" (emphasis mine). Here we see how one man's metaphysical trash is another man's libidinous pleasure, the pleasure of dominating reality with the will to POWER.

Marriage Equality and World Destruction

Barely no time today, and so much to fill it with. Maybe you should just read the book, because there are important ideas on every page.

And when I say important, I only mean like "world saving" (or world-shattering, depending on where you stand). Dennis Prager is the only other person I know of -- although I'm sure there are others -- who realizes that the attack on marriage is an attack on the very foundation of our humanness and therefore of civilization itself.

But when you affirm this, you of course sound crazy. It reminds me of the left's thus far successful attempt to controversialize Benghazi.

That is, the first step in turning the world upside down is to make right side-up "controversial," as if there is some legitimate doubt about it.

It's amazing how rapidly the left has been able to accomplish this with regard to the redefinition of marriage. The Obama who assumed the presidency in 2009 would now be unqualified due to his then hateful support of traditional marriage. He would have to be mozilla'ed.

It's not just marriage and homosexuality. Consider all the other things the left has successfully controversialized: the military, school prayer, sexual identity, motherhood, fatherhood, bastardy, the english language, illegal voting, illegal immigration, free speech, the Constitution...

Just the fact that we have to argue over these things makes us a little crazy too, because it's crazy to argue with a crazy person. Normally I would have no interest in doing so, but in this case we have no choice, because these crazys want to control our lives.

The very idea that the left, of all things, suddenly cares about monogamy and sexual commitment is absurd on its face. On what basis? In other words, on what principle of leftism is marriage founded?

Whatever it is, it is not the same as ours, so we're necessarily talking about apples and oranges -- or rather, the compulsory belief, backed by state violence, that apples and oranges are identical.

To believe otherwise is a thoughtcrime. It is to place oneself outside the margins of civilized society, which is again ironic in the extreme, since monogamous marriage and civilization are two sides of the same coin, as compellingly demonstrated by Tucker.

Thus, anyone who cares about civilization should be on our side, but these fools and tools have no earthly idea what is at stake. For upon what principle do they found their deviant notion of marriage? As far as I can tell, it is either "equality" or "freedom," as in "marriage equality" or "the freedom to love who we want."

Now, to be sure, equality and freedom are genuine principles. However each refers to the other; not only do they oppose one another, but each has its own irreducible complement. The complement of freedom is responsibility, while the complement of equality is hierarchy.

Freedom can have absolutely no meaning in the absence of responsibility, while equality in the absence of hierarchy is just nihilism. (I might add that in these complementarities, responsibility is prior to freedom, just as hierarchy must be posterior to equality.)

And bringing about the monstrous equality of the left always requires great violence and coercion, while its version of freedom simply equates to irresponsibility. Or rather, there is no personal responsibility, only collective responsibility.

Thus, individuals are incentivized to be more personally irresponsible, which results in the need for a larger and more intrusive state to be responsible for all these irresponsible losers.

But beneath the left's misunderstanding freedom and equality is an even deeper principle: pleasure. To put it inversely, real marriage is not based upon pleasure. Rather, it is based upon reality, specifically, the reality of sexual polarity and the recognition that monogamous marriage channels this in prosocial ways, in the direction of civilization.

As Tucker emphasizes, there is nothing wholly "natural" about monogamy. Rather, although rooted in nature -- the nature of things -- it is an institution that transcends nature.

But homosexuality is rooted in the concrete pseudo-principle of selfish pleasure, which is then converted into the abstractions of freedom and equality. Conversely, marriage is rooted in the abstract cosmic principle of sexual polarity, which is concretized in the form of marriage.

But I'm out of time. To be contined....

How Liberal Policies Promote Cosmic Inequality

Think about that the implications of that one: monogamy made us human. If that is the case, then what the excuse me fuck are we doing? Trying to undo civilization and progress?

Well, yes. But only for the undesirables. Doing so maintains the power of the powerful because it preemptively diminishes the competition.

It is similar to how racial preferences shrink the pool of qualified or gifted Asians, Jews, and white males. It's a fantastic scam for white elites. If excellence is your competitor, well, just make it more difficult for the excellent to compete. Better yet, make it against the law, as per the Wise Latina.

Likewise, why else would black elites -- i.e., poverty pimps, race hustlers, liberal house negroes, and tenured bullshit artists with PhDs in Historical Fantasy -- so adamantly oppose school choice? Because it is a direct threat to their gig. If more blacks do well, then the parasites who feed on failure and resentment would have to do something productive. But not one of them is qualified to sharpen Thomas Sowell's pencil.

In Charles Murray's Coming Apart, he points out how liberal elites preach one thing but practice quite another. That is, in the lower classes, "welfare dependence and single motherhood are rapidly becoming the norm."

To illustrate the point, in 1960, 85% of the adults ages 30 to 49 in his apocryphal Fishtown "were living as married couples. Now the figure is 48 percent. In 1960, 81 percent of households had someone working full time in the workforce. Today it is only 53 percent." And most disastrously, "Divorce rates have climbed from 5 percent to 35 percent, and children living in broken homes or with single mothers rose from 2 percent to 23 percent" (in Tucker).

Or in other words, mission accomplished. We don't have to worry about these children becoming our competitors. Predators, yes. But so long as we confine them to certain areas, or the predators mostly prey on each another, then it's cool. Liberal polices promote and celebrate nothing less than psycho-cultural genocide.

Again, what is most striking about this is the hypocrisy of the anointed, who insist that these underclass boobs should not imitate what they do, but rather, do as they say. That is, "although many of the attitudes that denigrate the importance of marriage originate among the intelligentsia and the upper middle class, that stratum of society has so far managed to keep its families intact" (ibid).

The result is that we are truly facing a crisis of inequality, but income is an effect, a marker, a measure, of something more fundamental.

That is, the vast majority of people living in poverty are single mothers and fatherless children. Factor out these two categories and poverty almost disappears. But this material analysis does not and cannot measure the soul damage, nor does it even recognize such a thing. Rather, the left starts by materializing man, so it is a case of animal in/infrahuman beast out.

So, the gap in marriage equality results in "a yawning gulf of economic inequality," so much so that marriage is "the fault line dividing the American classes" (Murray, in Tucker). No one can deny that "those who form traditional families succeed; those who don't fail" (Tucker). Nor would any leftist ever acknowledge that monogamous marriage is the telos of human sexuality, i.e., its proper end. Which is just one more reason why leftism is the quintessential doctrine of failure, a recipe for cultural decline.

To zoom out to the Cosmic perspective, one thing which which I failed to entirely think through in the Coonifesto is why, if human beings evolved or are created to be monogamous, there is so much polygamy? All human cultures regulate sexuality and recognize marriage, but, as Tucker notes, "the practice of polygamy was almost universal outside the Christian West."

Long story short, if you want to look at it in a purely scientific way, human beings were definitely selected for monogamy, in that hunter-gatherer (HG) tribes practice monogamy, and something like 99% of our evolution occurred within, and was shaped by, this cultural matrix.

It seems that polygamy doesn't appear until the emergence of agriculture and herding. The HG lifestyle can only support a group of limited size, and it is vital that everyone in the group -- especially the males -- get along and cooperate. Therefore, the one-to-a-customer rule prevents a war of Each against All for access to Feminine Charms.

The transition to monogamy happened so early in our development that it is completely entangled with what it means to be human: "In other words, we never would have become human if we hadn't adopted monogamy." One thing to which Tucker fails, in my opinion, to give sufficient emphasis, is the role of the Helpless Baby in all this. After all, it is the baby, not the adult, who will carry the genes, the evolutionary memo, into the future. Thus, the baby becomes the hinge of civilizational advance and of Cosmic Evolution. Be as children is no joke.

Tucker does briefly touch on this, noting that upright walking was accompanied by a narrowing of the pelvis, just when our brains were getting so oversized. Ouch!

Note that in Genesis, our exodus into time and history is accompanied by the "in pain you shall bring forth children" business. No pain, no brain. Or Cane.

At any rate, only one thing makes this possible, and it is a very weird solution, the real key to our humanness: all of us "are born prematurely.... This means we arrive in a more helpless state, requiring constant care and attention" (Tucker) for a lengthy period of time. It is in this period of development that we forge the intersubjective foundation of our psyche, and "only a pair-bonded couple could offer" the protection needed to nurture this space.

What Tucker fails to emphasize is that -- well, I suppose this is just my opinion -- the kind of uniquely intense intimacy characterized by human pair-bonding rests on that foundation of infantile attachment. In other words, the helpless baby brings about the familial circumstances necessary for its own survival. Only because we were neurologically incomplete infants intensely attached to the mother can we form the later intense attachment with an opposite adult of the complementary sex.

Another key development was the loss of estrus, thus making the human female sexually available all year 'round. This prompted men to buzz close to the hive instead of polynoodling with all the other honeys in the annual whambam and scram.

But then the Agricultural Revolution occurred, changing everything.

To be continued...

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.