The Past: An Interesting Place to Visit, But I Wouldn't Want to Live There

Let's race through the last 100 pages of Inventing the Individual in order to mine any final insights.

Insights into what? Into how something as utterly strange and unlikely as "you" or "I" came to exist. There are so many necessary conditions for I AM to appear in time that it bobbles the Bob.

Which raises the question: would different conditions have caused another "subjective entity" to emerge, something so different from our familiar selves that we can scarcely imagine it?

This is similar to asking if it is possible for a different form of life to exist, something not based on carbon. What would it be like? Who knows? Likewise, what would a universe with different laws be like? It is unimaginable, because for one thing, imagination is only a feature of this universe. It is very unlikely to exist in other universes.

It's the same with the desire to discover "intelligent life" elsewhere. The necessary conditions for life to emerge on this planet are so insanely specific, that I can't imagine they are found anyplace else. You may find one, or ten, or a hundred of these variables, but they all need to be proportioned to one another. For example, earth has a much larger planetary wingman, Jupiter, to attract all the cosmic debris, so it won't plow into us and destroy our little floating biology lab.

Even knowing as much as we know about antiquity, or about the Middle Ages, our ability to project ourselves into these periods hits a kind of wall that we cannot venture past, for the same reason we cannot imagine what it is like to be a bat or a cow. The reason why we can't break through the wall is that we have to jettison a part -- the central part -- of ourselves that wouldn't have existed at the time, or would have only existed in a weak or nascent form. This probably sounds more controversial than it is, but it strikes me as self-evident.

For example, we all know that it makes no scientific sense to ask what came "before" the Big Bang, because time is supposedly a function of the Big Bang. Therefore, there is no before, so ignore that man behind the curtain of tenure and stop asking childish questions.

What is actually going on is that the scientific model simply breaks down at that point. It is similar to what happens at the quantum level: anomalies and conundrums arise because our common sense models simply don't apply. Thus, with no model, there is no way to imagine what is going on down there. We can invent purely mathematical models to try to tie up the anomalies -- which is what string theory is all about -- but these are more like pre-Copernican speculation about planetary epicycles. In other words, the 26 (or whatever it is) dimensions of string theory "save the appearances," as did epicycles for geocentrism.

We're getting a little far afield, aren't we? The point is that naively projecting ourselves into the past is more problematic than we may realize. For me, reading history often provokes WTF?! moments of stark incomprehension.

I'll give you a little example. I'm reading in Berman what pre-Christian law was like. While I understand the words, I find it impossible to actually put myself in the mind of a person for whom the following form of justice would have made perfect sense:

In pagan Germanic society there were two types of ordeal to determine innocence or guilt, trial by water or trial by fire -- fire for elites and big shots, water for the rest of us. "Originally these were invocations of the gods of fire and water.... Those tried by fire were passed blindfolded or barefooted over hot glowing plowshares, or they carried burning irons in their hands."

Exactly what does this have to do with justice? What, it's not obvious? "If their burns healed properly they were exonerated."

The other type of ordeal involved either freezing or boiling water. "In cold water, the suspect was adjudged guilty if his body was borne up by the water contrary to the course of nature, showing the water did not accept him." Excuse me, but WTF? Accept him?

"In hot water he was adjudged innocent if after putting his bare arms and legs into scalding water he came out unhurt." Again I respectfully ask: WTF?

Yes, this form of justice is "one way of looking at things." But is there any part of you that can really look at it this way and agree that it makes perfect sense? Nevertheless, the folks were content with it. Even with the influence of Christianity, "there was considerable resistance to the abolition of ordeals in the thirteenth century." You know, why mess with a system that is perfectly adequate?

That is just one teeny tiny example of how the past is a very different country. I could easily find more extreme examples, but you get the point: we can only pretend to understand much of the past.

"It is difficult for us to re-enter a social world where so little was shared." In other words, not only are these people different from us, but they were all different from each other. There was no "universality," because "In the twelfth century each group -- whether of feudatories, serfs, or townspeople -- was a world unto itself. People did not locate themselves in a world of commonality."

This has direct contemporary relevance, because, for example, we do not live in the same world as the Islamists. Here again, we can only pretend to understand people who torture children, burn Christians alive, and decapitate journalists. Well, maybe we kind of get the last one, but the point is that they are "missing" something we take for granted. Liberals pretend the terrorists simply want what we have, or are angry at us for something we did 500 years ago, but they are actually motivated by an entirely different mentality. The terrorists too.

Speaking of the moral insanity of the left, look at how they equate Chris Kyle -- the Sniper -- with Nazis and terrorists, as if he shares the mentality of our enemies and is motivated by the same ends! For Michael Moore, the imaginary sniper who murdered his make believe uncle is no different from a real sniper who kills evil people who want to destroy civilization and every person in it.

It is no different than equating trial by fire to trial by jury. But if you are a multiculturalist, that's what you do. We are "invaders," "occupiers," and "torturers," just like ISIS.

So, that's about the size of it. We'll end this series with a quote by Siedentop:

[T]he defining characteristic of Christianity was its universalism. It aimed to create a single human society, a society composed, that is, of individuals rather than tribes, clans, or castes.... Hence the deep individualism of Christianity was simply the reverse side of its universalism. The Christian conception of God becomes the means of creating a brotherhood of man, of bringing to self-consciousness the human species, by leading each of its members to see him- or herself as having, at least potentially, a relationship with the deepest reality -- viz., God -- that both required and justified the equal moral standing of all humans.

You say you want a revolution? That is a revolution, the most consequential ever. And it is ongoing, because there are reactionaries everywhere.

The Great Disentangling

I'd like to wrap up Inventing the Individual before moving on. One theme that emerges from the book is that while it took centuries for the individual to be disentangled from the group, it has been the work of less than a century for the left to re-entangle us.

For both Siedentop and Berman, 1075 is a truly revolutionary, world-historical turning point, for that is when Pope Gregory insists on the independence of the church from secular authorities. As a consequence, the king, at least in theory, is demoted to a mere layperson instead of combining spiritual and temporal power in his person. Indeed, he can't do that, because only Jesus does.

As always, timelessness takes time: "Gregory's vision of a social order founded on individual morality" instead of "brute force and mere deference, had taken centuries to prepare" (Siedentop). You know, like the way a person goes bankrupt: very gradually and then all of a sudden.

So, suddenly "relations of equality and reciprocity are now understood as antecedent to both positive and customary law." Thus, law is disentangled from custom, and seen more abstractly as a universal category. This constitutes a "reversal of assumptions," such that "instead of traditional social inequalities being deemed natural... an underlying moral equality was now deemed natural."

This Great Disentangling "freed the human mind, giving a far wider scope and a more critical edge to the role of analysis. It made possible what might be called the 'take off' of the Western mind" (emphasis mine), vaulting mother Europe "along a road which no human society had previously followed." Vertical liftoff!

Here we can see how the left's retarded project involves a Great Re-entangling: again, it took thousands of years for "individuals rather than established social categories or classes" to become "the focus of legal jurisdiction." But now, thanks to the left, the individual is subsumed into race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and we're back to where we started: post-Christian necessarily redounds to the pre-Christian.

"The papal claim of sovereignty" furthered the transition to the "meta-role" of the individual "shared equally by all persons." Seen this way, the self is the essence, while social roles become mere accidents instead of being in the nature of things.

It seems to me that this idea of disentanglement is key; it reminds me of how the fertilized egg first divides into two, then four, eight, sixteen, etc., becoming more complex and specialized along the way. There is still unity, of course, but it is a deeper form of organic unity because the diversity is unified on a higher level.

Just so, once the secular-spiritual cell divides in two, this initiates further divisions and distinctions. For example, philosophy becomes distinct from theology, and more generally, "logical studies" develop "with astonishing rapidity during the twelfth century."

Likewise, a new distinction is seen between the moral and physical elements of crime. Because of the new interiority, the concept of "intent" or motive comes into play: "intentions had scarcely been distinguished from actions in 'barbarian' justice." "Degrees of guilt" are perceived, and punishment becomes distinct from mere retaliation.

Marriage changes too, as measures are adopted to ensure that it is "based on consent rather than coercion." Politics too: instead of authority flowing in one direction only, from the top down, "The authority of superiors thus became a delegated authority. Authority is again understood as flowing upwards."

If we stand back and look at the overall arc, we see that "under way was nothing less than a reconstruction of the self, along lines more consistent with Christian moral intuitions." This ushers in "a new transparency in social relations," for now we relate to another person, not just his role. Conversely, "in societies resting on the assumption of natural inequality," this interpersonal transparency is obscured.

Another major development is the distinction between free will and fate, choice and necessity. If human beings are personally accountable to God, then this emphasizes not only our moral freedom, but the need for political freedom so that we are free to exercise moral choice. In other words, nothing less than eternity is at stake, so the freedom to do good becomes a matter of urgent necessity; for what is free will but "a certain ability by which man is able to discern between good and evil"?

Note that if people are fundamentally unequal, then we can make no generalizations about them: there is one law for the sheep, another for the wolf; or one law for us, another law for Obama.

With this new self, there is a kind of interiorizing of the logos: instead of the logos being only a sort of exterior reason that controls events, it is "understood as an attribute of individuals who are equally moral agents." Here again, in the post-Christian world we see a regression to determinism, for example, the idea that we are controlled by genes, or neurology, or poverty, or race.

The empirical becomes distinct from the general, induction from deduction: "The Christian preoccupation with 'innerness' and human agency," or "between the will and the senses," leads to "a growing distrust of the coercive potential of general terms or concepts, if an extra-mental reality is attributed to them."

Conversely, leftism is always rooted in the projection of an abstraction onto the world, thus giving it the illusion of an "extra-mental reality" or self-evident fact. Scientism, materialism, metaphysical Darwinism -- each elevates an uncritical naïveté to the highest wisdom.

Come to think of it, this is one of the major themes of The Great Debate: conservatives begin with the world as it is, whereas the left begins with the world as they wish it were. We'll be hearing a lot about this tonight, but it all comes down to an atavistic desire on the part of the left to undo the work of centuries and re-entangle mind and world, individual and group, state and citizen, time and eternity, freedom and compulsion, messiah and politician, executive and legislature, class and guilt, etc.

We All Worship the Same God, We Just Agree Different

I award this post the Raccoon Squeal of Approval, and declare it to be nihil bobstat, that is, vaguely plausible and free of anything Bob wouldn't say, and probably containing some things he wishes he had.

We all know that contemporary liberalism is a secular religion -- only the most successful one ever -- and that man, as homo religiosus, cannot not be religious, but rather, only pretend not to be. Kristor implicitly argues that this is because we come into the world with certain universal archetypes that shape our experience:

"Not only is there always a state religion, but there is always a king of some sort, a father of the country. Likewise there is always a class of priests and judges, always a class of warrior nobles, always a class of merchants, always monastics and hermits, a market, a language, families, patriarchs, prophets, sex roles, etc. These things are built into man. They can be suppressed for a while, or injured, but not permanently eliminated from the constitution of human society. You can’t get rid of them, any more than you can get rid of the pancreas or the spleen. The functions they mediate must be mediated, and one way or another they will be mediated."

Actually, you can get rid of the spleen. But no sane person asks for it to be removed. Rather, it usually follows some terrible accident. Likewise, there are some archetypes we can dispense with, but this usually results from a terrible developmental accident of some kind, say, sexual abuse.

First of all, what is an archetype? I would say that they are to the vertical what instincts are to the horizontal. Our minds are not "blank slates," any more than our bodies are. Rather, our bodies have built in needs, expectations, and abilities. Similarly, we come into the world expecting, say, a mother and father. Thus, we are also entitled to a mother and father, just as infants are entitled to milk and not bourbon.

You could also say that an archetype is an "empty category" awaiting experience to fill it out. While it has a general outline, it has no specific content until we encounter it in life. It is the blueprint (or clueprint), not the building materials or finished project. Therefore, it is a kind of final cause. Archetypes operate as attractors in the subjective phase space of the interior world. Kristor alludes to several: father, judge, warrior, hermit, prophet, sex roles, etc.

In a subsequent series of posts I hope to discuss the classic Law and Revolution: The Formation of the Western Legal Tradition. While doing a little research on the author, I came across an interview in which he speaks of how the Law is built into us. Yes, we are all little lawyers:

"Belief in law comes from early childhood," he said. "A child says, 'It's my toy.' That's property law. A child says, 'You promised me.' That's contract law. A child says, 'He hit me first.' That's criminal law. A child says, 'Daddy said I could.' That's constitutional law."

From the same piece: "Berman's main contention is that law is a foundational principle of Western society that derives its moral and religious dimension from God as the first lawgiver." Thus, any law must be grounded in the Law, just as any truth is a reflection of the One Truth.

So, because there is Law, there are promises, contracts, private property, justice, injustice, and a supreme court, or a final court of appeal.

And in fact, although we appeal to this court in this life, our real hope is that it is still very much in session in the next life -- in other words, that in the end, justice will prevail and the scales will be balanced.

I suppose we could say that social justice warriors imagine that the scales can be balanced in this life. Like all leftists, they immanentize the eschaton, in this case eschatological justice. This results in the "divine judgment" taking place right here and now, only promiscuously mixed with the demon-haunted wrath of the social warrior. This is why, when the radicals succeed, life looks like a vision of Hieronymus Bosch, as in the French, Communist, and Nazi revolutions.

Just as truth implies a truth-giver, law implies a law-giver. Kristor points out that language is only a kind of prolongation of this primordial Truth. Language cannot not speak of truth, because its substance is truth. It reminds me of a current in the ocean: the current is distinct from the ocean, and yet, nothing more than the substance of the ocean. Likewise, a word is distinct from the truth while being composed of it. Language converges on truth; or, truth is its alpha and omega.

Back to our religious nature. Since the leftist denies his religiosity, it naturally expresses itself in a covert and subconscious manner. For us their religiosity is transparent, whereas for the leftist it is hidden, because it must be denied by the person who regards himself as superior to religion. In other words, the leftist has a hypertrophied vertical defense mechanism deployed to repress spirit.

Today's holiday is only peripherally about the human being named Martin Luther King. Rather, he has been swallowed by his projected archetype, just as other leftist icons have been eclipsed by theirs -- FDR, JFK, Nelson Mandela, etc. So thick is the ideological penumbra surrounding these icons, that the actual person can't be seen at all. And if you try to point to the man beneath the projection, the left's reaction bears an uncanny resemblance to how Muslims react to cartoons of Muhammad.

Liberal Distinctions and Leftist Conflations

One thing that comes through in Inventing the Individual is how the so-called middle ages ushered in so many vital cognitive distinctions that we take for granted. But man didn't always have these distinctions, nor do all men have them even today. To put it mildly.

In fact, Fried says much the same thing, although neither author devotes a separate section to the subject. Rather, the evidence is scattered throughout both books, so I'll attempt to pull some of it together here.

This probably sounds like a slightly dryasdust subject, but it definitely isn't, because it goes directly to our vision of the world. Without the proper tools, that vision can only be so deep, complex, and comprehensive.

Consider what happens when we chuck religious tools from our cognitive bag of tricks. It is not as if a hammer can replace the work of a wrench or screwdriver. But if that's all you have, you'll end up trying to pound religious screws into place with a hammer, which makes for an ugly and probably dysfunctional end product, like a half-assed home repair done by me.

A big one is the distinction between secular and spiritual authority. Prior to this distinction there is only authority -- or power -- period.

But there is more to it than just keeping these two domains apart, because for one thing, they cannot be kept apart. That is to say, they are complementary, not "opposite." To imagine the latter is be a leftist.

But the leftist only pretends to deny spiritual authority while actually usurping it. In short, he regresses to a state of mind in which the two are still fused, and then subsumes the religious into the secular, thus ending up with either the omnipotent state or the cult of personality (or both, as in Castro or Kim). Put another way, he denies a primordial complementarity and then subsumes one side into the other.

As Hartshorne has explained, this is a common strategy for all kinds of tenured foolishness. You might say that pre-Christian neo-Platonists tended to default to the spirit side, while post-Christian sophists default to the material side. But how can one even begin to describe reality without including both?

And while it is possible to regard one side of a complementarity as the more fundamental, these folks always choose the wrong side, as, for example, Marx did to Hegel; a pox on both, but at least Hegel gives spirit its props, since it can theoretically account for matter while the converse is impossible without millions of corpses.

Again, once there is a distinction between the secular and religious realms, that is not the end of their interaction. We are still left with the question of what constitutes legitimate authority, and that is a question that cannot be answered by mere power, i.e., the secular arm.

Rather, that is always a spiritual question, for which reason the American founding is thoroughly grounded in, and legitimized by, spiritual principles, i.e., nature and nature's God. While there is of course secular authority, if it should become divorced from spiritual authority, the founders say that this invokes the natural (i.e., God-given) right of rebellion.

The purpose of government is to secure our God-given rights. And if government becomes "destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them." Again, secular power is not self-justifying; rather, power is grounded in transcendent truth.

While we (conservative liberals) take this for granted, it took a very long time for mankind to draw these distinctions and to work out the political implications. As Fried writes, as of 1000 AD, "lords did not think in 'political' categories," for "the habit of thinking in categories was still only in its infancy then."

Thus, "There were no conceptions of 'domestic' or 'foreign policy,' or of 'politics' and 'the state.'" Indeed, "nobody would have understood them as templates for interpreting the world or for acting in a particular way, nor could anyone have associated a particular attitude with them or have advocated such a mind-set." Among other things, man had yet to recognize a clear distinction between mind and reality, or God and world.

As such, rulers looked to the world for signs and augurs; these "were everywhere to be seen for those who knew how to read them"; think of them as the pundits of the premodern world. Like our pundits, they all had opinions, usually wrong and immediately forgotten. They looked "to the sun, moon, and stars in the sky, in the natural world and among people, and even animals." The wrong decision might bring on the object lesson of a natural disaster, which "skillful interpreters could always be relied upon to proclaim their import with hindsight."

As man slowly individuates from the womb of nature, language undergoes a profound change, "engendering whole new sets of differentiating terminology, and bringing about advances in perception and an increase in the sum total of cognitive capacity." A new mode of thought emerges; you could say that this mode is capable of being critical because of the critical distance between subject and object.

Now, this critical distance between subject and object is a kind of "space" through which "new perspectives on and approaches to the complexity of the world and cosmos opened up." "[T]hings that had never even been imagined came into peoples' purview, while familiar things were seen in a new light" and "placed in a new relation to one another" (Fried).

From our privileged perspective, this space is "everything." Eliminate it and what's left, obedience to the state, or adherence to some state-funded ideolatry? Or perhaps a pre-political life of simply obeying one's impulses.

One implicit point made by both Fried and Siedentop is that freedom tends to emerge and flourish in the interstices between competing powers. It is almost as if these powers, because they are so preoccupied with one another, overlook little pockets here and there where people are left the fuck alone.

But it took until the American founding to make this principle explicit and put it the fuck in writing. That is, the framers recognized that freedom is only safe when power is dispersed among competing interests. Collapse these interests and powers, and we end with a freedom-usurping Obama. "The bigger the state, the smaller the citizen," as Dennis Prager says.

Which is precisely why the left sells us chains it relabels "freedom," as in "you're not really free if you don't have health insurance, therefore the state has a right to your body." To which we respond: why can't we have health and freedom? Why revert to a time when there was no space between ruler and ruled? Why deprive us of our God-given slack?

If You're Charlie Hebdo, How Come You're Not Rupert Murdoch?

New principles lead to new uprisings (to deploy one of the left's favorite buzzwords). This is because the mind must first rise up to a new vertical principle before awareness of it provokes a horizontal uprising -- or better, a down- and out-flowing, i.e., a clamoring to see the principle instantiated in the world.

For example, people have to first intuit that all men are created equal before regarding inequality as problematic instead of just being in the nature of things. Legal equality is a discovery, not a given. And once discovered it needs to be real-ized in the world, for which reason the Constitution follows the Declaration as effect to cause.

The moral intuitions prompted by Christian beliefs provided just such a basis "for an appeal against injustice that had not been available in the ancient world" (Siedentop). Thus, "the universalism of Christian aspiration had a subversive potential" unknown to that time, and still at work in the world today.

You could say that the universal subverts the particular, just as in science, whereby a more general theory subsumes disparate phenomena: ice and clouds, for example, are just different states of water.

Against this progressive approach is the modern superstition of multiculturalism, whereby the particular subverts the universal: for the left there is no objective or universal good except for the conviction that there isn't. Except when there is. I know. It's a form of Gödel's theorems: you can get consistency or completeness from a leftist, but don't expect both.

Regarding the invention of progress, "The idea of a more 'open' future was a symptom of Christian moral beliefs affecting the population at large." This was accompanied by "the rejection of fate and advent of hope," but this cuts two ways, since the new uncertainty brings with it new anxieties.

As someone once said, if you have no alternatives then you have no problems. But the dawn of an open future that can be shaped by the individual brings with it a new burden of responsibility which some people, understandably, don't want to bear. Nowadays we call them liberals.

Today we talk about "upward mobility," but this was preceded by awareness of a new inward mobility. As Siedentop writes, people began realizing "that salvation did not depend upon social status," which contributed to a new "kind of imagined mobility, a moral standing that could be achieved rather than inherited."

Now, here's an ironic one: a critically important factor in the development of a common European identity was the contrast with a violent and expansionist Islam. The presence of a common enemy can cause people to appreciate a shared identity.

For example, leftists everywhere are proclaiming that "I am Charlie Hebdo." But it shouldn't take a mass murder for leftists to realize that they too are nihilistic peddlers of pornography, only more craven.

A better example is their universal hatred of Fox News, which is the only major media outlet that actually does critique Islam, only in a far more informative and measured way than Charlie Hebdo.

But you will never see hypocritical leftists proclaiming I AM RUPERT MURDOCH!, because their identity depends upon this shared hatred of conservative heresy. They will shout I AM ISIS! before admitting any common values with conservative liberalism (as Jane Fonda might just as well have announced I AM HO CHI MINH!, or Jimmy Carter I AM YASSER ARAFAT!)

Back when religious leaders weren't appeasement-mongering invertebrates, "The appeal by Pope Urban II for volunteers to halt the expansion of Islam... created in Europe a new consciousness of itself." Prior to this, "Europe had never been excited by one sentiment, or acted in one cause; there was no Europe. The crusades revealed Christian Europe."

No wonder leftists can't forgive the crusades and Muslims can't forget them.

Once again Islamic terrorists are trying their best to bring about a unified response, but leaders such as Obama refuse to even name the enemy, for it would engender the wrong kind of unity, i.e., a patriotic love for our way of life.

Rather, Obama's leftist worldview revolves around despising our way of life, so in that sense he's implicitly in agreement with the terrorists. This is a guy who spent two decades in a toxic mosque church that taught exactly this doctrine, i.e., GOD DAMN AMERICA! and all the rest. Terror is just leftism by other means.

So, "The crusades were truly a universal event, involving all strata of the population," revealing "'a people' with a shared identity."

Again, this is very much in contrast to the reigning dogma of multiculturalism, whereby the only thing that unites us is our differences (along with an unacknowledged, implicit unity derived from hatred of universalist conservatives).

If Islamists had wanted to invent a divide-and-conquer strategy, they couldn't possibly have come up with something more effective than this principled divisiveness of the left.

Journeying Down and In with God

It is possible that this post will come to an abrupt end, depending upon whether or not I have to go into the office, which is yet to be determined. So, we'll have one eye on the post and another ear on the phone.

You'd think this would deustracting, but ever since the Boy arrived I've mastered the ability to maintain my concentration under the most extreme forms of nuisance: the maestro is a sensitive subgenius no more!

I remember -- must have been around eight years ago -- posting while being double-teamed by a three month old Great Dane puppy above the waist and a two year old below, so this is nothing. Although I do believe I've lost some brain cells since then, so there's that.

Just yesterday I read something that goes to this question of interior con-centration. Without looking it up, it appears to me that con must mean "with," while centration has to do with gathering one's consciousness into a central point in order to increase the intensity -- somewhat like a magnifying glass can gather the sun's rays into a fiery point.

Now, man has always had this ability, for it is a form of volition applied to the mind as opposed to the body. However, it seems to me that he mastered the exterior focus long before the interior.

In other wor(l)ds, man was able to, say, master the concentration necessary to track and kill a wild animal before he could turn that focus inward and explore the subjective horizon. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, many scholars regard Augustine's Confessions as the first sustained written effort in that direction, although it is probably more accurate to say that he is the most visible representative of a more general trend.

Oddly enough, Sowell touches on this in Knowledge and Decisions. One of the ideas we've been discussing is that man was very different in the past, but part of this is due to the exterior focus. It's not so much that his "nature" was different. Rather, he had to adapt to a radically different environment, plus this environment did not include such things as books or written language, both of which being a cause and effect of the interior journey.

Long story short, Sowell makes the point that man has always known a great deal, and that there is no reason to believe that an individual's life today is any less "complicated" than it was 50,000 years ago. While today we benefit from great complexity, the complexity is systemic, not the possession of any single individual. Indeed, as the old economic truism goes, no single man possesses even the know-how to make a pencil, which requires detailed knowledge of mining, metallurgy, forestry, rubber, etc.

Today we have much more complexity due to the division of labor. But back in the day -- 50,000 years ago -- since the only division of labor was between man and woman, a man had to know everything (or half) there is to know about how to survive.

A contemporary man in the archaic environment would essentially be a worthless know-nothing. Put us in those conditions, and very few of us would last a week, for lack of general knowledge of how to survive. So give primitive man his props. If he hadn't figured out a way to master the exterior world, we wouldn't be here exploring the interior.

While Inventing the Individual depicts the broad sweep of this subjective turn, The Middle Ages fills in a lot of the details. It is more dry and pedantic, so not really recommended if you're looking for a gay and lighthearted romp through middle earth.

The author does show, however, that it is hardly as if progress and history somehow slowed to a crawl between 500 and 1500, or between antiquity and Renaissance, or however you cut the historical sausage. Nor is the progress linear or universal. Rather, little springs of interiority appear here and there, only later becoming more of a collective pool or stream (and sometimes sewer).

At first, thinking is geared to the immediate environment, since that is all there is. Only after there is some degree of reliable slack does man have the space -- the luxury -- to take a look inside his own head.

After all, the interiority of Christianity had to deal with an existing world in which "people still celebrated bloody sacrifices, indulged in fortune-telling and magic, placed their faith in amulets and soothsayers, sought salvation through spells, and believed in superstition." Each of these represents an exteriorized from of religiosity. Only gradually was "the magical interpretation" of the world "robbed of its allure." And like Moloch or the Golden Calf or AGW or leftism more generally, the temptation to regress is always there.

Even the language of the day is difficult for us to comprehend, or to "think our way into," since its users were so different. As Fried writes, cognition "was rooted in a situational mode of thinking and rarely used abstracts" (in other words, situational as opposed to universal).

Likewise, familiar tools and concepts such as formal logic and cause-and-effect "were largely absent." Sometimes this resulted in failure to differentiate an image from the god: iconography easily descended to idolatry: "Many a simple-minded believer may well have identified the image with the subject depicted."

Again, this doesn't mean our forebears didn't know anything; rather, that they knew a very different world: "Within such a framework, no unity could be identified." Nor was there "any figure of abstraction separating the private from public realms." In this context, one can see the developmental leap required to intuit monotheism, which is another name for the ultimate unity of things, or their single cause.

I've mentioned before how the severely mentally ill person can provide insight into the relatively sane, since their psychic content and defense mechanisms are so visibly hypertrophied and externalized. Just so, we can see how each and every one of these prior modes of thought persist today. We don't so much abandon them as integrate them into a more comprehensive system. I can have an icon of Christ on the wall without confusing it with Christ; we can be religious without conflating it with magic; we can believe in science without confusing it with ultimate reality.

"Individual" and "private" co-arise in history, as they are two sides of the same development. Just as exterior freedom and private property are entirely bound up together, so too are self and privacy.

This lays the foundation for the profound political changes to come, for the unit of subjection becomes the person instead of the family or group. Compare this to, say, the Arab-Muslim world, where the primary identification is still to kin and tribe, while morality is not a private matter but public conformity to sharia law.

The latter is quite different from the Christian view, in which the individual was encouraged to undertake a "strict accounting of himself" (in Siedentop). We must try to look at ourselves as God sees us. Indeed, "moral authority ought to imitate the condescension of God, seeking out and inhabiting the depth of the human condition." God goes all the way down and in, so if it's good enough for him, it should be good enough for the likenesses of us.

Disinventing the Individual: You Have No Right to Reality!

Do we have a right to live in reality? For most of human history, the answer has been no, in the sense that people have been forced to live in someone else's vision or idea of reality.

It reminds me of what Thomas Sowell says about planned economies: every economy is planned. It's just a matter of who does the planning, unaccountable elites or private parties.

It indeed comes down to knowledge and power -- the power to be the decider. For example, Obama and the Democrats have the power to define what constitutes economic knowledge of medical costs. However, as in Heisenberg's uncertainty principle, the more centralized power one exerts over economic realities, the less knowledge one has of them. Total power -- as in totalitarian states -- equates to total ignorance of price signals, and therefore of economic realities of supply, demand, scarcity, etc.

Moreover, the power is only illusory anyway, because there is no way for any human being, or even the most powerful computer, to ever calculate the potential interactions of millions of independent prices. That knowledge is essentially infinite, and therefore requires omniscience to calculate. It is not even calculation, just -- to use the technical term -- bullshitting.

To which Obama responds, "your point being?"

Fantastic book, by the way. Sowell says it's his most important work, and I can see why, as it lays the philosophical groundwork for everything he's written since then (it was originally published in 1980). It is not as reader-friendly as his more recent books, and I'm probably going to reread it before discussing it at length and weaving it into the cosmic narrative. Nor would he ever think of it in those grandiose terms, i.e., "cosmic narrative."

Rather, grandiosity and sweeping generalizations are our department. Which is a quasi-joke, but not really, because if a culture isn't grounded in a kind of grandiose narrative that explains where we came from, where we are, and where we're going -- the Point of it All -- it tends to decay.

The left, of course, has spent the last century or so trying to replace our old cosmic narrative with their new and improved version, but the problem there, as alluded to at the top of this post, is that it is simultaneously -- to reference another of Sowell's books -- "unconstrained" while at the same time being highly constraining because it is forced upon us.

What do we we mean by that? To quote the first reviewer, "This book presents two visions of the world.... The two visions are metaphysical, pre-scientific points of view regarding how the world works. In one view (Unconstrained), people can drive change, intentions matter, and this could improve the world. In the other view (Constrained), people will always be (somewhat) bad, only results and processes matter, and improvements always involve tradeoffs."

Visions of how the world works. That goes to what was said above about who gets to define reality, but more importantly, who gets to define the reality in which we are all forced to live. For example, I live in California, a one party state in which no one has any input except for the unconstrained visionaries who want to control every aspect of our lives.

In California the Democrats even veto God, and insist that we decide what sex we are. So it's really "unconstrained for thee but not for me." The hypocrisy is built in, because it's never "power to the people" but "power to the right people."

The other day I mentioned the obnoxious book on Indians my son is being forced to read. That's because in California it's against the law for a textbook to tell the truth -- or to not speak with a forked tongue -- about any officially sanctioned victim group. Likewise, everything Obama does is to insulate centralized state decision makers from public influence.

That little preamble was provoked by the following passage in Inventing the Individual: "Since the time of Paul, Christian thought has been directed to the status and claims of humans as such, quite apart from any roles they happened to occupy in a particular society." Therefore, "It is hardly too much to say that Paul's conception of deity provided the individual with a freehold in reality" (emphasis mine).

¡Una freeholdia de reality! That is a remarkable observation, for among other things, it "laid a normative foundation for the individual conscience and its claims." Truly, this turned the world upside down -- or brightside up, rather -- because it created limits on the state's power to define reality and force it on the restavus.

Reality has many dimensions, both horizontal and vertical. For example, thanks to the state, we are never even freeholders of our own land, in that (at least in California) we must pay an annual property tax to pretend to call it our own. Nor do children have a right to the truth about, say, American Indians, or Islam, or homosexuals. As such, it is as if the state has a claim on that part of your child's mind.

I'm just about out of time for today, but the thought occurs to me that if we knew in 1900 what we know today, the left could be declared unconstitutional on first amendment grounds. Why? Because the economy is an information system that continuously conveys the facts about economic reality via prices. Therefore, to interfere with the economy in a massive way -- as in ObamaCare -- is equivalent to burning libraries full of books.

Death Wins the Battle, Not the War

Acknowledging at the outset that words fail...

Plus, being an essentially lighthearted blog, we are not well equipped to deal with tragedy and loss.

Rather, being that there is quite enough of those two buzzkillers in the world, we try to emphasize the 99% of life -- quantitatively speaking -- that is not tragic, painful, and seemingly pointless, but rather, all of the spontaneous pleasure, joy, playfulness, and meaning that infuse our moment-to-moment lives if we pay attention to them.

Besides, it's too easy to focus on the negative, and taking the easy way out is just not the Raccoon way. Rather, we practice the Way of Irrational Exuberance and Stubborn Happiness in Spite of it All. Or at least we try.

I know as well as anyone that someday (and some days) life is going to wipe that smile off my face, if death doesn't do it first. But until then -- and who knows, maybe even after -- it's defiance. Sure, Death holds our coat while snickering, but we snicker right back.

Over the years, our cyberlodge has experienced a number of significant losses. Off the top of my head, there was reader Ximese, then Cap'n Ben's wife last year, and now the shock of Mushroom's wife. There have no doubt been others, because when a longtime commenter suddenly stops commenting, it is possible that they have ceased commenting, period. Problem is, a good number of Raccoons seem to be the kind of solitary folks whose absence won't be noticed until the mail is falling out of the overstuffed box and blowing down the street.

Of course, we do not deny that 1% of tragic and awful business. To the contrary. We are all too aware of it, which is the very reason why we try to focus on the other 99%. Death is the great motivator, even if it is eventually the great equalizer. Nothing grabs our attention like awareness of the End of Things. Truly, it puts everything else in context -- a temporal context, because all human time is situated in the context of its eventual end. Life itself is a midlife crisis.

To be consciously aware of this end is to be human, while to deny it is to remain a child. Secularists imagine that religion is a fanciful escape from death, when the reality is 180 degrees from that: an honest confrontation with the naked fact of our own demise. The purpose of religion is not to avoid this confrontation, but to live it. For the Christian, even -- or quintessentially -- God lives death, in the faith that this ultimate living death is death to death.

These two things -- human and death -- absolutely coarise, for which reason Genesis makes the link explicit. Although it does so in a mythopoetic manner, not every truth "happened" in the usual way, nor are things that never happened necessarily untrue. Or rather, some things happen in a different way than the way things happen on the material plane. Some things are true in the sense that they happen to every human, every time, not merely because we can articulate them with symbolic speech.

One of the early fathers, Tertullian, writes that "The word dead signifies merely that something has lost its soul, by which faculty it had formerly lived." Thus, it "applies to a body," not to that which animates the body, for how could such a thing ever be born or die? While it has a "beginning," this beginning is outside space and time, nor does the soul ever forget the traces of its own extra-temporal creation. Paradise is a memoir of the future.

In other words, every human, by virtue of being one, is in the world, but not possibly of the world, and therefore not in the world completely. To be completely in the world is to be an animal, pure and simple, whereas to be human is to exist in a space that transcends the world. Our "hope" is simply that this existence does not perish because it cannot perish -- unless we choose another kind of existence, which also persists (if persist is the right word, being that it may be a kind of suicidal choice).

Another early father, Irenaeus, writes that "souls, as compared to mortal bodies, are incorporeal: for God breathed into the face of man the breath of life, and man became a living soul." To die "is to melt away into those elements from which it had the beginning of substance." This breath of life is incorporeal form, not corporeal substance; it is "not a composite" so it "cannot be decomposed, and is itself the life of those who receive it."

All life is a "living toward." Toward what? Either toward death -- and therefore self-nullifying absurdity -- or toward some sort of fulfillment that cannot occur in this life, but which we nevertheless intuit in such a way that the transcendent object of intuition flows down and back into our present life.

As Pieper writes, "if, until the very moment of his death, man is really a viator or traveler 'on his way' to something," then this life-as-hope is oriented to something beyond the boundary of death, something known through what we call "faith" -- the operative word being known, i.e., the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.

Life is intense. One thing that makes it so uncomfortably intense is the backdrop of death. For Pieper, beatitude, or eternal life "does not simply mean living without end, but the supreme intensification of the state of being alive": life without limits.

So, our thoughts, hopes, and prayers are with Dwaine and his family, that the shock of loss will eventually yield to faith in a greater and more intense victory.

Apologies for any inappropriate pedantry or humor. My only excuse is the Popeye defense.

The Cure for Living in the Comfort of Your Own Delusions

As mentioned yesterday, primitive forms of thought are more concrete and less symbolic. While there are still symbols, they are understood concretely, which very much goes to Commandment #2 against idolatry, idolatry being the quintessence of what is called symbolic equation, that is, conflating the symbol with what it symbolizes, as if "this drawing really is Bob Dobbs."

As an aside, I think it is important to read the Commandments as going against human nature, otherwise why would they be necessary? Their existence seems to imply that there is a default setting in human nature that moves in the opposite direction: toward polytheism, idolatry, theft, murder, envy, etc. What I would say is that we have higher and lower natures (or vertical and horizontal), and that a central purpose of the Commandments is to tease the former from the latter.

I recently had a conversation with a friend about the question of freedom, specifically, whether human beings have an innate desire for it. Like most westerners, his appreciation of freedom is so fundamental that he had difficulty accepting my belief that freedom is not a universal value, for if it were, human history would appear very different than it does.

Rather, God has to first liberate a people and teach them to sanctify their liberty -- to never forget the God who brought them out of slavery. The good news is that roughly 30% of these people still remember, and have not succumbed to the ambient spiritual I-AMnesia.

We have already touched on some of the unappreciated blessings which Christianity brought into the world, but here is where it all starts, with the vertical ingression of the divine freedom on earth. After that it is just a question of widening it out. And obviously the struggle is ongoing. This morning I read that the Islamic slavers are holding people hostage in a Jewish market. What a diabolically appropriate metaphor of human history: the divine freedom vs. demonic slavery.

We have discussed in the past how freedom developed in the west, in particular, in America. The earliest Americans did not have an abstract notion of freedom which they set about applying to human relations. Rather, they first lived it, and only afterwards drew the abstract conclusions from the lived experience. You might say that freedom was first concretely embodied -- you know, incarnated -- before it was mentalized and eventually enshrined in the Declaration.

This is quite the opposite of the French Revolution, which began with the abstract ideology of pinhead philosophes, which it then attempted to force upon the populace in a top-down manner. (This is one of the themes of the excellent The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left.)

We see this same pattern in contemporary America, with tenured pinheads and political sociopaths using various groups as guinea pigs to live out their pet theories. Look what they did, for example, to the black family by interfering with its organic evolution. Although this has resulted in the destruction of millions of lives, the left will never be called to answer for the crime in this life or in this world.

Siedentop goes into how Christianity was first understood in rather concrete terms, at least among pagan peoples for whom there was a greater psychopneumatic developmental leap. For example, he notes that in the 6th century, the Mass "was assimilated to the immemorial habit of offering 'sacred' meals to ancestors." Thus, "Despite their new beliefs, Christians continued to feed the dead."

Which, I think, is preferable to the way of Islamists or tenured revolutionaries who simply hold a gun to your head or sword to your neck and invite you to accept their new abstraction.

Siedentop notes that "Only in the seventh century did the Eucharist -- the Mass -- lose this quality of a 'meal' relayed from the family to the dead." This is a fascinating observation, because it demonstrates how Christianity only gradually cured man of religion -- or of one of the default religions of mankind, ancestor worship.

As the more abstract understanding of the Eucharist is setting in, we see a parallel development, a "profound change" involving "a new fascination with the 'day of judgment,' the fate of the individual soul after death." People -- individuals -- increasingly worried "about sin and its consequences for the individual on that final day of reckoning."

You might say that this is the birth of anxiety as we have come to know it. Or, it is a redirection of whatever it is that preceded anxiety -- just fear of the external world, I guess -- toward the internal world.

So, "little wonder" that scholars such as Peter Brown "identify in this questioning a new depth of self-consciousness -- which is to say, a more individualized picture of the way things are."

And back to my own long cherished Pet Theory, we also see "the beginnings of a clearer separation of moral from physical phenomena," accompanied by an "all-important struggle within the self to create an upright will." In other words, man had to first discover the voluntary in order to perceive the involuntary. Which is maybe why Islamist slaves have no understanding or appreciation of freedom.

This developmental shift has other delightful ramifications, for example, a new distrust of merely deductive argument in favor of a more empirical approach -- you know, actually observing the world instead of simply accepting the axioms, principles, and models of authorities. People at the leading edge of cosmic evolution "began to strip intentionality from the physical world" -- i.e., disentangle world and psyche -- which is a prerequisite of the scientific method.

One has only to argue with a post-Christian liberal to appreciate how impossible it is to reason with people who have no clear distinction between the external world and the projected content of their own minds.

Are Islamic Terrorists Crazy, Evil, or Developmentally Arrested?

I know. Why pick one?

But is there a specific psychological mode or mechanism that provokes a man to murder because the victim drew a picture that offended the murderer? Yes, but psychological causation is complex and systemic, rarely linear, one-way, or fully intentional. When I say "intentional," I mean we often (thankfully!) do things without really knowing why, nor do we (or could we) calculate each and every consequence.

Many people correctly observe that yesterday's terror has something to do with Islam. Certainly the terrorists think so. It is only liberals who deny the connection, in a way that varies with their ignorance of the subject. For example, Howard Dean has obviously never q'racked a Q'ran:

"I stopped calling these people Muslim terrorists. They’re about as Muslim as I am. I mean, they have no respect for anybody else’s life, that’s not what the Koran says.... I think ISIS is a cult. Not an Islamic cult. I think it’s a cult."

Or Ezra Klein: the murders "can only be explained by the madness of the perpetrators, who did something horrible and evil that almost no human beings anywhere ever do, and the condemnation doesn’t need to be any more complex than saying unprovoked mass slaughter is wrong." Could his ignorance of man's bloody history be more complete?

Perhaps you've noticed that leftists either make an issue more simple or more tendentiously convoluted than it actually is. In this case, they take the simplistic path: Islamic terror has nothing to do with Islam. These men are cultists, Donny.

I think we can agree that Islam is not a sufficient cause of the terror, but nor is it a necessary cause. That is, there are obviously Muslims who are not terrorists, and terrorists who are not Muslim. But most terrorists at this time do happen to be Muslim, and the Koran contains ample justification for their crimes. Does that make the Koran a cause, or just a pretext?

Here I think we need to widen our lens and take into consideration the sorts of cultures that have been shaped by Islam. There are what, 49 Muslim majority countries, each one a shithole to varying degrees. Starting with the As, there are Afghanistan, Albania, Algeria, and Azerbaijan, followed by Bangladesh, Brunei, and Burkina Faso. Given the choice, no one would freely choose to live in these places unless they already have no idea what freedom is. In other words, in order to choose those cultures, one has to have already assimilated the repressive culture and its illiberal values.

This subject is very much relevant to our discussion of Inventing the Individual, because the whole point of the book is that something occurred in the Christian west that did not occur anywhere else in the world. We can argue whether it was a good or a bad thing, but we cannot argue that it is a Muslim or Buddhist or American Indian thing. Rather, that is the essence of the nub of the gist: a "clash of civilizations" with entirely different value systems.

But "civilization" is an abstraction that tells us little about the individuals of which it is constituted. And since human beings develop in time, some civilizations are more developed than others. This is an example of a simple truth that the left has attempted to convolute over the past century, to the point that they can no longer see the obvious (or are not permitted to see it).

Howard Dean and Ezra Klein are far from the only ones who are auto-blinded by ideology. Here is a tweet yesterday from a NY Times bureau chief: "Some call for an extreme use of force to respond to Paris attacks, but school shootings in US have killed more and US leaders do nothing." This guy equates the Paris attacks with Jerry Falwell suing Hustler magazine for libel. Yes, those two things would be exactly the same if the terrorists had sued the magazine and Falwell had murdered Larry Flynt.

I have seen some Charlie Hedbo material that has all the refined taste and sparkling wit of Hustler. There's nothing wrong with being offensive, so long as you are actually funny. Otherwise, it's just ignorant and boorish, like this sub-juvenile rendering:

However, it would never occur to anyone in the Christianized west that an absence of taste merits the death penalty. But the post-Christian west is indeed coming back around to the pre-Christian point of view. They don't necessarily murder, but political correctness has destroyed innumerable lives, careers, and reputations.

The world into which Christianity inserted itself was every bit as violent as the one inhabited by contemporary terrorists: after the fall of Rome, "Habits of violence, lack of foresight and the ingrained pleasure of leading an unregulated life meant that betrayal and murder were commonplace in the ruling families of the new kingdoms" (Siedentop). But ever so slowly, "Christian insistence on the equality of souls" began to nurture "a new image of reality."

Interestingly -- and this goes to the question asked in the second paragraph of this post -- it took quite a while for a more abstract understanding of Christianity to emerge from the concrete. This is a critically important idea, because this "entry" into a more abstract world is a stage in human psychological development. Nowadays we take it for granted, but for most of human history man has been more like a child in the concrete operational stage of cognitive development.

I look at it from a slightly different theoretical perspective than Piaget. I've discussed in the past the difference between the paranoid-schizoid and depressive positions, the latter being more mature than the former. Back to the news of the day, what happens if a Muslim person in the paranoid-schizoid (PS) position is confronted with a cartoon that offends him?

First, let's discuss some of the characteristics of the PS position, courtesy psychoanalyst Thomas Ogden. These ideas are quite relevant to the Invention of the Individual; for example, chapter three is called The Depressive Position and the Birth of the Historical Subject.

In short, it seems to me that Ogden is discussing on a personal/individual basis what once occurred on a historical/collective basis. Without a change in the culture, there would have been no network of developmental support -- no matrix -- for the development of the individual. This is an idea I have been unable to eliminate from my head for at least 25 years, but for some reason no one else puts these two together, i.e., the individual and the historical.

Some of this is a little technical, but consider the following: PS "is a phase of development wherein the self exists primarily as object." Such a person is concretely "lived by his experience" in such a way that "thoughts and feelings happen" rather than "being thought or felt."

It's a subtle difference, and no one is entirely free from PS thinking. Rather, in the healthy person there is a dialectic between PS and D, through which we are able to reflect on the content of experience and distance ourselves from it, and thus live in a "freer" space -- free, for example, of simply acting on our impulses or emotions without insight or reflection.

A key point in living this way (in PS) is that it creates historical discontinuity. Or, to be more precise, the attainment of historical continuity is a developmental achievement that is impossible in PS. It is impossible because there is no autonomous "self" (or a very weak one) above the impulses and emotions. What we are really talking about is two different ways of organizing the content of experience, one more passive (which goes to modern victimology as well), the other more active and volitional.

I recall that Theodore Dalyrmple describes the identical pattern in his Life at the Bottom. For the developmentally stunted people he encountered in prisons, experience simply happened to them. It is as if they are bystanders to their own lives, like "I don't know what happened, Doc. The gun just went off and then she had a hole in her chest."

Likewise, Ogden writes of how, in the PS state of being, "things simply happen." Which, when you think about it, goes directly to Muslim theology, doesn't it? For occasionalism is a theory whereby Allah is the direct and unmediated cause of everything, to which we are simply passive witnesses. Which is why Islam means surrender. Might as well, since you have no choice anyway.

And as to why someone would commit murder over a cartoon, consider the following: "In the PS position, the predominant mode of symbolization is one in which the symbol and symbolized are emotionally indistinguishable since there is no interpreting self to mediate between symbol and symbolized. There is no sense that one attributes meaning to one's perception; events are what they are, and interpretation and perception are treated as identical processes."

In such a situation, a person who experiences rage upon exposure to a cartoon is unable to distinguish the rage from the object or its author. And this experience will be equated with "truth." Then, "the present is projected backward and forward, thus creating a static, eternal, nonreflective present." Which might go to why the Islamic world has been in a kind of static and unevolving present for the past 800 years or so. Which only makes them angrier.

Discovering New Worlds within Worlds

"Every set of beliefs," writes Siedentop, "introduces its own logic and its own constraints."

Secular types imagine this doesn't apply to them -- as if it is possible to approach the world without any beliefs, assumptions, or principles whatsoever -- but this is analogous to a computer with no program, or a game with no rules. Furthermore, many of our deepest assumptions are innate and inbuilt, even limiting ourselves to the horizontal. Call it the "wisdom of the species," if you like.

Come to think of it, we have in the past discussed those four annoying limitations or infirmities that constrain every man, every time, here for example:

First, we are "creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle" (Schuon). Second, we are not angels; we are neither at the top nor the bottom of the vertical hierarchy, but somewhere in the middle -- which, of course, goes to the issue of free will, as we are suspended halfway between our better and worse selves, between the saints and the Sharptons. Third, as unique individuals we have essential differences that are not accidental or contingent. This is not a matter of "ego" but of self, i.e., our divine clueprint.

The fourth infirmity touches on what we usually think of as sin, since these are the differences that are accidental or contingent, not essential. More often than not they are a result of mind parasites of varying degrees of virulence, but sometimes they are simply a result of inertia, convenience, dullness, conformity, credulousness, absence of curiosity, or tenure (i.e., all of the above). (More fine insultainment here.)

At any rate, a primary difference between Christians and secularists is that we are candid in announcing our metaphysical assumptions up front, while they either pretend they don't have any, or else lack the cognitive sophistication to understand what they are.

For example, the most dense among them -- e.g., what's his name, the glorified planetarium gift shop manager -- unwittingly deny all of man's intrinsic infirmities, which is why they can be such inappropriately confident yahoos. But even denying infirmity #1 lands us in all sorts of trouble. To quote myself:

"The first is the Biggest, which is why it is enshrined in the First Commandment: sorry, but you are not God. You are 'creature, not Creator, manifestation and not Principle or Being.' In fact, only the godless can be unaware of the fact that they are not God, which is probably the greatest source of their political mischief. As Obama might say, if I had a God, he'd look like me."

Back to the new logic and constraints brought into the world by Christianity. These two are different but equally important.

With regard to logic, Christianity furnishes certain premises which man must work out on his own. With regard to the constraints, certain avenues of thought become either unthinkable or, more to the point, unworthy of thought: they are cognitive nul de slacks. At the same time, certain behaviors are off limits, say, cutting open a live human being in order to see what's going on inside. For now man is aware of "a 'moral' law distinct from custom or human command."

As it so happens, my fourth grade son is being forced to read a nauseatingly politically correct book about the Indians. For the sake of equal time, I pulled out my copy of D'Souza's America, which has a chapter on the Indians. At the beginning he addresses the objection that Columbus couldn't have "discovered" America, being that there were already people here. But this ignores the deeper point, that it was a European who landed in America, not a native American who landed in Europe. There are important reasons why the latter was impossible.

One central reason is that the discovery of this new material world followed on the heals of the prior discovery of another new world: the human interior. I hope I'm not beating a dead hobby horse, but one of the reasons I am so drawn to this book is that Siedentop shares many of my ideas about the emergence -- or discovery -- of this new interior world.

For example, "The sharp edge of the moral sword wielded by churchmen cut through to -- and exposed -- an 'awareness of self'.... in its essentials, the realm the clergy claimed for themselves and sought to defend was unseen. It was within." He quotes one representative churchman, who said that God "resides in us like the soul in our body... Ever must we cling to God, the deep, vast, hidden, lofty and almighty God."

This is one of those notions that now seems second nature to us, but it was a radically new conception at the time. I don't have sufficient time to be systematic here, so I'll just cite some additional examples from Siedentop. He references the historian Guizot, who claims that "If the Christian Church had not existed, the... world must have been abandoned to purely material force." The Church "spread abroad the idea of a rule, of a law superior to all human laws."

Although modern secularists may regard this as some sort of "oppression," it was in fact a liberation, part of the truth that sets us free. And as we have been acknowledging all along, it took many centuries for the message to sink in and change man from the inside out. But change it did. There is a reason why even (most) secular westerners cannot conceive of, say, murdering a writer who pokes fun at the messiah while screaming obamahu ackbar! Rather, they just hack your computer.

The discovery of this new interior world contributes to a growing awareness of the distinction between power and authority, or force and right, or spiritual and temporal power:

"The separation of temporal and spiritual power is based upon the idea that physical force has neither right nor influence over souls, over conviction, over truth. It flows from the distinction established between the world of thought and the world of action, between the world of internal and that of external facts" (ibid., emphasis mine).

Siedentop continues: "Distinguishing spiritual from temporal power rests on the premise of individual conscience," for "there must be a sphere within," a God-given "area of choice, governed by conscience." Or just say horizontal freedom guided by vertical constraint -- constraints which must equally apply to terrestrial rulers (the "rule of law").

Today's bottom line: "Increasingly, acknowledging that subjects had souls was making a difference to the question of what constituted proper governance. It was another step in inventing the individual."

Conservative Progress and Progressive Decay

Yesterday we had just begun discussing how our basic assumptions open or close certain avenues of thought, before being hijacked by that lonely feminist who aspires to be an ex-wife from hell without undergoing the formality of ever being married. She is what we ironically call a "progressive," ironic because progress itself is one of those avenues of thought that is closed off if we begin with progressive assumptions.

Remind us, Bob, how that works.

Well, the self-styled progressive left begins with materialist assumptions, which means that they rule out transcendence from the get go. As a result, they can have no intelligible definition of progress, which requires a transcendent standard. Therefore, progress is tautologically defined as "what progressives want," or even "whatever progressives do," regardless of how retrogressive (see Obama for details).

And since what progressives want is by definition "progressive," then any idea, person, or institution that stands in their way is an enemy of progress. This becomes their "moral" standard, since again, in the absence of transcendence there can be no real moral telos -- i.e., no contact with the world of virtue as such.

For the same reason, truth is off the menu, so rational persuasion is devalued in favor of force, i.e., raw power. When the leftist says that politics is "all about power," believe him.

For these reasons, secular thought, left to its own devices, eventually becomes self-beclowning. Yesterday we saw a beautifully schadenbonerian example of this, with the Harvard faculty learning that ObamaCare would actually apply to them and not just the peasantry.

This is not supposed to happen! Leftist ideas are metaphysical abstractions to be imposed on third parties: they are a result of A and B getting together to forcibly diminish liberty and extract cash from C. They are not supposed to do this to A and B. The outrage!

Or, look at Cuba. If we're nice to them, they'll be nice to us, right? Which is why the spokesditz at the state department can’t explain why Cuba isn’t fulfilling promises made in the Obama deal. It just makes no sense! Consider too the leftist theories of law enforcement playing out in New York. How's that working out?

Anyway, back to actual progress, which is a Judeo-Christian principle, not a pagan or secular neo-pagan one: as Siedentop suggests, we should not be surprised that "a religion which postulated the incarnation -- a God who is 'with us' -- would change the understanding of time itself, holding out a hope that undermined older beliefs in a relentless cycle of growth and decay."

For the ancient mind, there was either stasis or decay. The purpose of religious ritual, for example, was to pull the world back toward its divine archetype and thereby counteract entropy: time is entropic whereas religion is negentropic.

But with the widespread acceptance of Judeo-Christian metaphysics, time becomes negentropic; or, to be precise, time has elements within it of both entropy (decay) and growth. And the growth is again inconceivable in the absence of the divine attractor, proximity to which is the real measure of "progress," both individually and collectively.

In the absence of the divine attractor, time, whether we like it or not, reverts to entropy. This is why it is such a vivid example of the Butterfield Effect to wonder at the paradox of why culture is decaying despite the dominance of the left. Rather, it must decay under the influence of leftist assumptions.

Equally ironic, in light of yesterday's post, is that no force in history has been more liberating of women than Christianity. Here again, writes Siedentop, we should not be surprised to see new "declarations of independence by women" as a consequence of "Christian belief in the equality of souls." In particular, more affluent women began taking "on new roles. They became patronesses, disciples and travelers. They prized associations with leading Christian intellectuals. They used associations with such men to further their education."

Did this take time? Of course! Time is progressive, remember? In particular, it took centuries for the Christian message to undo the programming of culture. The world has always been multicultural, only worse. It is one of the main things from which the universal message of Christianity is supposed to save us. Thus, it would be another instance of the Butterfield Effect to wonder why there is so much more racial tension these days despite all this wonderful multiculturalism.

By way of contrast, even a genius such as Aristotle affirmed that "some are free men and others slaves by nature" (in Siedentop). This is no doubt true if you look at it from a certain angle, e.g., Harvard professors are better than the rest of us, while untenured white men bottom out the scale.

But this is not the angle through which Christianity looks. Rather, from the God's-eye perspective we are equally worthy, at least until we misuse our God-given free will. Then God sorts the wolves from the sheep, the flowers from the weeds, the wheat from the chaff.

Well, that's about it for today. Backed up with my work.

The Feminist Dilemma: How to Find a Wet Noodle in a Stack of Brown Bananas

"Any set of basic assumptions opens up some avenues for thought, while closing down others" (Siedentop). Although Christianity provides just such a set of basic assumptions, it required centuries for the implications of these "to be drawn out and clarified -- and even more time would pass before long-established social practices or institutions were reshaped by these implications."

This was a conservative revolution -- the only kind of revolution that actually succeeds -- because it started with the way the world actually is, instead of imposing an abstract ideal on it, which always ends in violence and regression, since it unleashes the worst in man under the guise of the best. See Islam and leftism for abundant examples.

Those twin malignancies close off the pragmatic past in the name of an impossible future, while Christianity tries to open the present to the influence of a higher mode of being, resulting in change that is both organic and rooted, thus more robust (plus in accord with human nature).

Which is why Obama is always urging us to yield to the FIERCE URGENCY OF THE NOW!, so we don't notice what he's really up to. Or in other words, "Time is running out to do something stupid and irreversible. Act now!" (Williamson).

Yes, “'Now!' is a rhetorical short circuit, a way to preempt anyone’s thinking too deeply about a proposition." It is "is the eternal cry of the infantile -- 'What does baby want? Diaper change! When does baby want it? Now!'" (ibid.).

In contrast, positive change preserves continuity, which is a central point of the Incarnation, since it serves to bridge the otherwise unbridgeable gap between man and God. In short, we get the benefits of heaven with all the conveniences of our own embodiment.

But again, it takes awhile for that to sink in and up.

For example, think of how the Islamists impatiently blew up those ancient Buddhist statues, or how the left has been busy blowing up western civilization for the past 50 years or more.

But Christianity planted itself within the existing paganism, and simply Christianized its sentiments, gods, and rituals. Aligning the birth of Christ with the winter solstice "is only the most obvious example" of appropriating "the advantages both of change and continuity."

Doing so was analogous to plugging an existing wire into a higher source of energy. Once plugged in, the energy began reshaping practices, beliefs, and institutions, nowhere more dramatically than in the family. Frankly, it "destroyed the ancient family as a cult or religious association" (Siedentop).

You might say that before there could be a separation of church and state, there first had to be a separation of church and family, and in particular, God and father. The family was still sanctified, of course, but as an icon of God, not the thing itself. Now the terrestrial father had to answer to a higher image.

As a hopefully brief asnide, I wonder how someone ends up being as deeply confused as this toothache with a vagina, who asks -- or tells -- us How to Find a Feminist Boyfriend.

The first thought that occurs to me is to simply find a toothache without a penis, which shouldn't be hard to do, last time I checked dailykos.

But let's be quasi-serious for a moment: the same energy that causes those Muslims to deface works of art is what motivates the left to blow up our own beautiful traditions, marriage being just one of them.

The difference, however, is that the left has been deeply conditioned by the Christian message, where Muslims haven't. Therefore, we see in the left a perversion of Christian principles, or a neopagan rebarbarism of that from which Christianity is supposed to save us, now promiscuously fertilized by faux-Christian principles.

This is analogous to how Islamists use the highest technology for the lowest ends. In other words, they adopt a technology that they themselves could never gave invented -- because they are so primitive -- for the most primitive purposes.

In the case of the left, they take a morality that they lack the principles to invent (let alone discover) -- say, marriage -- and twist it to their own base ends. Leftists, of course, believe in "homosexual marriage." But why? How did they come up with this notion of marriage? That's right: they just stole it. However, being that they are mixing the Christian higher and pagan-lower, they can have no principled objection to polygamy, or inter-species marriage, or sibling marriage, or any kind of arrangement you like, all pseudo-sanctified by that same purloined word.

"How do you spot a male feminist if he’s not at an abortion rights rally wearing a 'This Is What a Feminist Looks Like' T-shirt?"

He's the one not shuddering at that sentence. He's the one in whom your prose doesn't trigger the gag reflex.

"Few guys will proudly say no when asked if they’re feminists."

True, so true. Only 62% of white males didn't support President Unicorn in the last election, so there's still a very large pool of castrati from which to draw.

And if you can read the next sentence without cringing, you are on the shortlist: "feminist daters -- male or female, gay or straight -- aren’t constrained by gender roles." Who knew Angelina Jolie had so many children?

For the feminist, gender is everything, but for the purpose of being nothing. It is nihilism masquerading as gender, for to be a feminist is to treat femininity with the subtlety of an Islamist art critic.

"A true male feminist is supportive of, interested in and enthusiastic about his partner’s career."

There are not many men whose careers interest me. Why should I care what a women does, unless it's something intrinsically interesting, like raising children? (Show me the man who is attracted to a woman because of her job, and I'll show you a pole dancer. --Cousin Dupree)

Did you know that homosexuals aren't perfect? I've never heard a leftist acknowledge this before. For example, there are "gay couples who are so rigid in their gender division" that "one man doesn’t want his partner to work, wants him to stay home with the kids.”

That makes their other problems sound trivial, like shorter lifespans, higher incidence of mental illness and other diseases, inability to sustain monogamy, increased substance abuse, etc. Well. Those are just because mother nature is a homophobic bitch.

"If you’re a woman who wants a man to grab you and kiss you because that’s what sweeps you off your feet, realistically, a feminist man is not going to do that."

No, a feminist man will require you to fill out a signed affidavit in triplicate in the presence of a notary public. And any sweeping will be done with a proper broom and apron, thank you.

You know, "I might be cool with casual sex, but that doesn’t necessarily make me this ‘cool girl’ who’s detached from emotion."

No, in my experience it makes you a conflicted little girl who is using sex to fulfill other forbidden needs that shall not be named. We used to call them "sluts," because their desperation is so close to the surface and they are so easily manipulated by men who have a complementary sexual agenda.

There is no doubt that throughout history there have been women who, for whatever reason, have been conflicted about being one. But only in the modern world do they have so many options to act out their conflict without insight and therefore without hope of change. That's what you call progress.

Is it any wonder Christian women have better sex lives? It makes things so simple when men aren't women and women aren't this:

Happy New You!

Here is a summary of our progress thus far in reimagineering how we ever invented the individual:

"Christian convictions were submitted to the disciplines of logic and metaphysical speculation, to the requirements of disciplined argument." Importantly, the influence was two-way, in that "Greek philosophy was also transformed." In particular, "traditional assumptions about natural inequality and the motivating power of reason were gradually abandoned" (Siedentop).

The first sentence of this post implies that the individual is something we could have tried to invent, but this is of course not the case, any more than we could have invented life. Rather, it was spontaneously brought about by certain conditions. However, once it began to emerge, it in turn altered the conditions that brought it about: what was an unconscious process was able, through greater self-awareness and -understanding, to become more of a conscious process.

For example, until fairly recently, no one gave much thought to the effect of certain environments and experiences on child development. Rather, children just "grew up," like any other plant or animal. But nowadays we hardly do anything without thinking about the impact on our child's development. We think about their friends, the parents of their friends, the TV programs they watch, etc. We realize that the child is a growing individual who sucks in influences from the world as a plant draws nutrients from the soil.

But you can't go to the other extreme and imagine that your child is something you only invent. Rather, it is very much a case of trying to help him become who he is -- to realize his potential, to recognize his gifts, and to exercise these in the service of God and man. From the start, both my wife and I have been overwhelmed by the impression: Where did this guy come from? No way in the world could we have invented him! There has never been any shock of recognition; rather, the opposite: the shock of an alien in our midst.

So you can't really know what kind of parent you'll be until you meet your child and find out what kind of parent he needs in order to become who he is. But here again, it is obviously not a one-way process.

For example, the other day I read something about crazy Angelina Jolie, who is allowing her children to "choose" their own gender, with absolutely no hint of parental influence or preference. Thus, her eight year old girl Shiloh is pretending to be a boy named John.

To whom is this supposed to be helpful? It can only be to appease some of Jolie's most primitive mind parasites. Even in a sanitized version, here is a person who, at age 14, "aspired to become a funeral director," "wore black clothing, experimented with knife play, and went out moshing with her live-in boyfriend." She "suffered episodes of depression throughout her teens and early twenties," "found it difficult to emotionally connect with other people," and engaged in "self-harm," which is to say "the ritual of having cut myself and feeling the pain, maybe feeling alive, feeling some kind of release."

Apparently the self-cutting wasn't that effective, because she "began using drugs; by age 20, she had tried 'just about every drug possible,' including heroin."

No, we didn't intend this post to veer in a sensational direction. I am no more interested in celebrity gossip than you are. But perhaps we can learn something from this, so let's see where it leads.

"Jolie has had a difficult relationship with her father." No. Really? Didn't see that coming.

Hmm. "She gained a reputation for being difficult to deal with." My guess is that this is because all borderline personalities are difficult to deal with. If you've never had a borderline person in your life, count yourself blessed. Back when I was in graduate school, there was an axiom: never try to have more than one borderline patient at a time in your practice, because they can turn your world upside down. You know, you come home and there's a rabbit boiling on your stove.

Speaking of sexual confusion, Jolie is proudly bisexual: "Of course. If I fell in love with a woman tomorrow, would I feel that it's okay to want to kiss and touch her? If I fell in love with her? Absolutely! Yes!" So, this mind parasite is a gift that keeps giving, in that she is now passing it along to her children.

Here is prima facie evidence of borderline personality structure, which is characterized by extreme impulsivity, essentially because the impulses are coming from different selves that are split off from one another. When one sub-self switches into gear, it displaces the other one: "After a two-month courtship, Jolie married actor Billy Bob Thornton." What took her so long? But then they "abruptly separated." What happened there? "It took me by surprise, too, because overnight, we totally changed. I think one day we had just nothing in common."

Ah, one of those things. Always the last to know. I'm sure you can relate.

One thing about money is that it can insulate you from the effect of your own mind parasites. You can be as crazy as you want to be, with no feedback from the world. And with no corrective feedback, there is no way to learn and grow, so the mind parasites win by default. This is why it so often seems that actors and rock stars all live out the same clichéd pattern. Instead of becoming themselves, they grab a mask from the ancient gallery and live out some predestined pathology (as indeed did Jim Morrison and so many other members of Club 27).

Now, where were we? Let's just say that this new space of potential individuality cuts both ways. Prior to its emergence -- and still in much of the world today -- one doesn't have this space. Rather, as in the ancient world, one's self is defined by culture, by family, by class, by caste, by race, etc. There is very little wiggle room to be anything other than a role that has been pre-selected for you.

Having said that, there are some critical things that have been conveniently pre-selected for us, and of which the accumulated wisdom of tradition is here to remind us: little things like, oh, one's sex. We don't invent everything about the self, for this would equate to nihilism or even blind tenure. Rather, there are some spiritual set-points, just as there are for any species. A newborn calf doesn't have to go through the process of deciding if it prefers meat over grass. That has already been settled.

Now, humans, unlike animals, are not bound by instinct. However, that is not to say that we have no instincts. Rather, for the human being there are certain universal archetypes that are like nonlocal attractors, or "vertical instincts."

Speaking of which, in The Book of Words, Rabbi Kushner writes that we may "exercise more 'freedom' by simply trying to be who we are and, in so doing, become who we are meant to be." "In moments of heightened awareness," we may have the sense of "rising to our destiny" (as opposed to sinking to our fate, which is what mind parasites facilitate). Thus, "We are 'free' to be what Heaven has intended us to be or not, but we are not free to be something else."

Just as there is an intersubjective space of individuation between oneself and other human beings, there is a vertical space between the individual and God. Within this space there is a two-way flow of influences and attractions (yes, even the earth exerts a tiny amount of gravitational attraction on the sun!)

Maybe it's a little orthoparadoxical, but I have no problem with it: "A person's actions thus have a profound effect on bringing the Creation closer to its perfection. These individual acts of free will on the part of a person constitute the 'arousal from below'" (what I symbolize [↑]).

At the same, there is the "arousal from above," or (↓): "At every moment God Godself acts to draw the Creation toward perfection.... Yet ultimately these two levels of free will are not separate. They are both aspects of the same thing. The 'arousal from below' sets in motion processes in the worlds above. Conversely, the power to cause the 'arousal from below' to come about is only in the hands of Godself" (you know -- like some kind of grace or something).

I recommend that you just say yes to this grace, because saying no will land you nowhere, in both this life and the next. Of which this life is a kind of inspiraling shadow-becoming-substance.

Evolve responsibly, and a happy new you!