The Fractured Republic and the Big Sort

We left off Friday with the idea that a purportedly horizontal multiculturalism may obscure a hierarchical and vertical multi-worldism. Indeed, this is one reason why it is such an historical anachronism to uncritically accuse our distant forebears as "racist," when, first of all, the concept didn't exist, and second, they were simply being empirical, not ideological. In other words, they observed the undeniable differences in cultural attainment, and concluded accordingly. There was no one there to tell them to ignore their lying eyes, and that all cultures are equally worthwhile and beautiful.

Speaking of worlds and cultures, I just finished reading Yuval Levin's new book, The Fractured Republic: Renewing America’s Social Contract in the Age of Individualism. I was looking forward to it, because I really enjoyed his previous book, The Great Debate: Edmund Burke, Thomas Paine, and the Birth of Right and Left. That's a book I never got around to blogging about, despite the fact that it does an excellent job of tracing the genealogy of left and right, all the way down to the roots.

This will probably be a series of posts. This first one is just from memory, so I'll no doubt pass over a lot of detail and not do the book justice. This is just my first overall stream-of-consciousness impression, based upon what I remember.

The Great Debate really shows how left and right inhabit different worldspaces, with very different assumptions about reality and about human nature, and therefore about the role of the state.

Politics, of course, applies to human beings and only human beings. Therefore, if you get your anthropology wrong, then your political philosophy will be even more wrong. This hardly stops people from trying to apply the defective model, but this only causes more problems. It's analogous to running a zoo but knowing nothing about zoology.

For the left, this results in an inevitable vicious cycle of 1) misunderstanding human nature, 2) trying to fix it with the wrong approach, 3) which results in further human wreckage, and 4) which then requires the state to remedy. This formula is a guarantee that the state will always grow in power over the citizen.

Note that, among other things, our founders were explicitly trying to extricate man from this cycle by placing sharp limits on the scope of state power. This was rooted in a specific conception of human nature, whereby the state is not permitted to violate our natural, God-given rights; rather, it is there to respect and protect them -- especially from itself!

Anyway, the first half of The Fractured Republic does an excellent job of diagnosing our historical situation. However, I found that the second half, which proposes the remedies, is way too optimistic, and a little naive -- which is something a conservative should never be.

One reason it is naive is that it ignores the scientific Elephant in the Room, which is to say, the heritability of IQ, more on which below. What I would say is that if the science of IQ is correct, then none of the current solutions proposed by the left or right will help. Indeed, they will only make matters worse. (Remember what was said above about getting your anthropology wrong: if you believe intelligence isn't limited by the genes, then you are in for a rude awakening).

For Levin, both the left and right are blinded by nostalgia. In short, they assume as a norm economic circumstances that were quite unique. Leftists such as Paul Krugman hearken back to the 1950s, when we had a greatly expanding economy, full employment, much more "income equality," and a marginal tax rate of 90%.

But that period of time was hardly normative, and certainly not repeatable. For one thing, in the wake of World War II we were Masters of the Universe, with no competition anywhere in the world. We were by far the largest manufacturer and consumer, to such an extent that it would have taken a real genius like Obama to mess things up.

A key point is that we essentially controlled the global economy from top to bottom. As such, there were plentiful jobs available for everyone along the IQ spectrum, from low to middle to high. And with no global competition for labor, everyone was relatively well paid.

Levin points out that back then, we were a labor-driven economy, such that business could afford the economic inefficiency of overpaying their employees. But in the meantime we have become a much more efficient consumer-driven economy, with people expecting high quality at the lowest possible price. In order to achieve that, something has to give, i.e., high wages for low-value work.

Precisely because that unusual situation was taken as normative, liberals assumed it would continue forever. Thus the vast expansion of government in the mid 1960s, with all the Great Society programs that continue haunting us to this day. It didn't take long for the economy to crash in the 1970s, only to be resuscitated by Reaganomics.

Thus, conservatives tend to hearken back to the 1980s as normative, but there too we were in a specific historical situation that cannot be repeated. For example, Reagan brought the marginal tax rate down from 70% to 28%, whereas now the parties fight over a mere percentage or two. I don't see any future tax cut that will unleash the economy as the Reagan tax cuts did.

One other major change has been the relentless globalization of the economy. Oddly, this is something lamented by left and right -- or at least Sanders and Trump -- but it is not going away, and there is no way to reverse the trend. Again, because consumers expect high quality at low prices, they are not going to buy an American made phone for $2,000 when they can get a Chinese-made one for $500.

Yes, through tariffs we can force Americans to purchase the more expensive phones. But you can't fool Mother Economics, such that it accomplishes nothing to protect mid- or low-wage jobs if everything costs more.

Another important point made by Levin is that the middle class hasn't so much "disappeared" as moved up. In short, we now have a bifurcated economy with a crater in the middle. Why the middle? Well, those are the jobs that are most ripe for exportation due to the consumer-driven demand for economic efficiency. But you can't export low-wage service jobs such as janitor, housekeeper, gardener, etc. Those jobs can't be done from China, so we will always have them.

Increasing the minimum wage is simply the left's acknowledgment that they have no idea how to foster economic conditions that will create high-wage jobs, so they will simply outlaw low-wage ones. Which inevitably leads to higher prices and fewer jobs. But more Democrat voters, and that's the important point.

This leads directly to the problem of the Big Sort. Recall that in the 1950s and 196s there was a decent paying job for most everyone, from low to to high IQ. But now, more than ever, we have a "knowledge-based" economy with a cratered middle and mostly low wage service jobs at the bottom. This means that the economy is efficiently -- ruthlessly -- sorting people by intelligence, with predictable results.

Now, how do you solve that problem, especially if the problem isn't permitted to be named? Levin doesn't name it, so all of his solutions are somewhat beside the point. He mainly argues that we have to make a commitment to rebuilding mid-level institutions that mediate between the state and the citizen, because our economic bifurcation has led to a situation in which we have the isolated individual at one end and the state at the other, with nothing in between.

We know, for example, that the poor have much higher divorce rates, if they marry at all. But this might well be conflating a consequence with its cause. For example, divorce rates for college-educated women are quite low. Do they not get divorced because they are college-educated, or are both education and divorce rate controlled by something else, i.e., native intelligence?

It reminds me of the canard that kids raised in a house full of books grow up more intelligent -- as if the mere presence of books is the causal factor! In reality, intelligent people tend to read books, and pass on their intelligence to their children. If you take a person with an IQ of 85, and fill his house with books, it won't make any difference in the long run. This is to confuse a marker of intelligence with its attainment -- like making college "free" for everyone, including those of below-average intelligence.

Likewise, if two people with IQs of 125 have a stable marriage, economic prosperity, and successful children, can we extrapolate from this to say that people with IQs of 85 can and should expect the same? I mean, I believe in the institution of marriage for entirely different reasons. I'm all for it. But again, conservatives tend to conflate cause and consequences. I don't see how it will do much of anything to reverse the Big Sort.

I have no idea what the solution might be.

As I said, those are just my first impressions. I'll need to dig into more detail to do the book justice. Maybe Wednesday, because tomorrow will be tight.

The Devil's Catechesis

We're talking about minds and worlds, i.e., the access to the latter given by the former. For example, animals know nothing about aesthetic worlds, i.e., beauty. While they are no doubt "attracted" to certain patterns or colors or shapes, they do not reflect upon it. Likewise, they do not wonder about truth, nor do they nurse regret over what they ought to have done.

So, the human world is a specifically human world, containing categories found nowhere else in nature: experientially "negative" qualities such as guilt, shame, and envy, as well as a host of positively transcendent ones such as love, exaltation, laughter, awe, reverence, etc. It is as if there is a human "form," not just externally, i.e., the body, but internally, i.e., the soul.

Or just say "human nature," which is precisely what the left denies, always and everywhere. Indeed, in order for leftism to work, it must not only deny human nature, but abolish it. Yes, there is a contradiction at the core of leftism, to wit, "there is no such thing as the soul, and we will gleefully annihilate it!"

Example. In this enjoyable book on Bearing False Witness: Debunking Centuries of Anti-Catholic History, Stark references Engels, who wrote in 1844: "We want to sweep away everything that claims to be supernatural and superhuman.... For that reason, we have once and for all declared war on religion and religious ideas..."

Likewise, in 1911, the Socialist Party of Great Britain proclaimed that "Socialism is the natural enemy of religion.... No man can consistently be both a socialist and a Christian.... Socialism, both as philosophy and as a form of society, is the antithesis of religion."

True then, true today: socialism is at war with the very transcendence that defines our humanness. Which is why the DNC wanted to paint Bernie Sanders as a secret atheist in order to fool some of those deplorably dim Democrats who still insist upon calling themselves Christian. How can a Christian be so stupid as to not realize his whole philosophy and way of life are under attack? By a lifetime of the Devil's Catechesis, I suppose.

Speaking of the Devil's Catechesis, out here in California, the indoctrination begins early, with seven year olds being forced to learn about "LGBT History." The California State Board of Education voted unanimously to shove this pernicious twaddle down the throats of our children. They want to ensure that the most vulnerable among us grow up irreparably warped. It is child abuse, pure and simple.

(Related: Obama to Name Navy Ship After Notorious Child Molester. Why not? No more perverse than having the mothers of would-be cop killers speak at their convention.)

Back to minds and worlds, if we ever left. There is the world and there is our description of the world, and the two are often conflated. For example, if I recall correctly, only 17% or whatever believe the country to be "on the right track," whatever that would be. I would interpret the statistic to mean that people are feeling a lot of existential anxiety that is not being "contained" by "the system"

One of the key functions of this so-called system is to contain our anxiety; sometimes a dysfunctional and self-defeating system such as the New Deal successfully contains group anxiety, whereas a functional one unleashes it -- as in how inner city blacks only began rioting in the 1960s with the passage of the Civil and Voting Rights Acts, in the context of low unemployment and a greatly expanding economy. Clearly, Democrat rhetoric is successful in containing black anger, frustration, and anxiety, despite the damage and destruction done to them and their communities by Democrat policies.

I well remember the anxiety unleashed on the left in the midst of the incredible success of Reaganomics in the 1980s. Indeed, I probably have my REAGAN HATES ME! t-shirt stored away somewhere.

Perhaps you will have noticed that the whole noxious spectacle of the DNC convention was to convince us not to believe our own lying eyes. But it goes deeper than mere empirical reality, rather, to an existential and even ontological level -- to more primitive levels of existence and being. Very hard to paper over those. When these levels are "uncontained," it is like trying to tell someone in the midst of a panic attack to just calm the fuck down. It doesn't help.

America is -- or at least was -- a unique place, in that it was founded upon the idea of sharply constraining the realm of politics, such that we could claim our own existence without placing the blame on (or giving credit to) the state. In other words, liberty. Never forget that liberty is a terrible thing, for while it connotes the joy of freedom it also implies the terror of nothingness -- of life without a net. Humans are not accustomed to this, and in most places and for most of history they have utterly rejected it in favor of collective security.

It is not so much that collectivism is designed to prevent anxiety. Rather, it is our default state. Human beings were social animals long before they became individuals, such that the progression into individuality is always accompanied by a degree of anxiety. You can't have one without the other.

This is precisely why psychotherapy was invented in the west and nowhere else. Over the years I have had the opportunity to conduct psychological evaluations of people from third-world and non-western cultures, and it is often so ridiculous as to be comical. Here I am, deploying concepts and techniques designed for modern, self-aware, neurotically conflicted westerners, on people who don't even know they have a mind.

I remember evaluating a recent immigrant from the deepest interior of China. He grew up a peasant in conditions hardly different from 500 or a 1000 years ago. No offense, but his worldspace was so narrow that he simply had no words for concepts we take for granted. Offering such a person "psychotherapy" was as bizarre and beside the point as giving acupuncture to your car. Rather, he needed a shaman or witch doctor or spirit visitation or something. Short of a blow to the head, I couldn't imagine his world, and he certainly knew nothing of mine.

There's a lot more of that going on than we realize. In other words, much of what passes for horizontal multiculturalism is really a vertical and hierarchical multi-worldism. It's why you can't argue with a liberal -- unless they have an unusually open mind and a deep regard for the truth that is prior to them.

My World and Welcome to It

So, -- continuing with yesterday's line of thought -- evolution doesn't involve only changes "of" the world, but into worlds. Oddly, the first thing that occurs to me is the Dunning-Kruger effect, whereby half the people are too stupid to understand what the other half knows, while half are too intelligent to understand how little the other half knows.

Actually, it can't be a fifty-fifty proposition, because an IQ of 100 doesn't get you too far. But are there worlds intelligible to the intelligent that are foreclosed to the less gifted? I don't see any way to avoid that conclusion.

However, there are other factors at play, because high intelligence, while it may give access to other worlds, hardly guarantees that said world is real. I keep hearing how Trump's core supporters are white working class males without college degrees. The implication is that they are too stupid to know they ought to be voting for Hillary. Conversely, you will never hear them suggest that the self-defeating blacks who inevitably support the Democratic party are too stupid to know better.

But just as reliable as the black vote is the tenured vote, who no doubt have higher than average IQs but lower than average contact with reality. Indeed, it is precisely their intelligence that facilitates the unreal abstractions they inhabit. So, IQ surely cannot be the last word in wisdom and prudence. Consider the left's ubiquitous support for tyranny. What if we had listened to all those smart people? What if we elected some clever and smooth-talking Marxist community organizer?

How do we know if an alternate world is a higher one? The question, although it may sound a little odd or irrelevant, really goes to the core of the matter. Consider Jesus, whose public career began with the announcement of another world -- the Kingdom of Heaven -- in the presence of this one. Is this world higher? Lower? Parallel? Real? An abstract fantasy no better than the tenured visions of Bernieland?

The other day, when I caught a bit of that Bill Maher interview on MSNBC, he made the comment that what unifies Republican concerns is that none of them involve reality. For example, our belief that biology rather than neo-Marxian sociology determines our gender, places us in an unreal world. Pay no attention to those visibly complementary genitalia that serve an actual biological purpose. No, the reality is that biology is whatever we want it to be.

Who's living in the fantasy world? And why only genitals? Why not say that hands are for walking and feet for grasping? Why impose our oppressive, binary conception of limbs upon the growing child?

Another point comes to mind, and that is the question of personality style. I mentioned the other day that I gave my son the Myers-Briggs Test, and his personality is quite different from mine, even "opposite" in many ways. Whereas he is clearly a thrill-seeking and adventurous ESTP, I am an eccentric and inward INTP. The point is, we inhabit quite different worlds.

For starters, he is more attuned to the exterior world, whereas I prefer to explore the interior. We are both adventurous, only in different dimensions. He would be miserable if forced to live like me, whereas I would be bored stiff in his world. I mentioned that he resonates with Trump, and it turns out that they share the same ESTP style.

Conversely, my type, the INTP, would never get into politics to begin with. Here is a little bit about how we roll:

They may appear to drift about in an unending daydream, but INTPs' thought process is unceasing, and their minds buzz with ideas from the moment they wake up. This constant thinking can have the effect of making them look pensive and detached, as they are often conducting full-fledged debates in their own heads, but really INTPs are quite relaxed and friendly when they are with people they know, or who share their interests. However, this can be replaced by overwhelming shyness when INTP personalities are among unfamiliar faces, and friendly banter can quickly become combative if they believe their logical conclusions or theories are being criticized.

I've mastered the combative part. Now I am either bemused, silently horrified, or prone to a cold fury that I keep to myself. I don't get rattled, and I no longer bother arguing with them. For this, I credit the influence of Dennis Prager.

When INTPs are particularly excited, the conversation can border on incoherence as they try to explain the daisy-chain of logical conclusions that led to the formation of their latest idea. Oftentimes, INTPs will opt to simply move on from a topic before it's ever understood what they were trying to say, rather than try to lay things out in plain terms.

Right. I'm sure I've never done that.

As for career paths, politics would pretty much come in last:

INTPs are solitary, eccentric, and independent.... INTPs duly struggle in finding careers that meet their needs.... INTPs live primarily in their own heads, and have little interest in social distractions like chitchat and motivational speeches.

And our purported weaknesses would not be conducive to a public career, in that we are supposedly Very Private and Withdrawn, and vulnerable to insensitivity, absent-mindedness, condescension, and loathing of rules and guidelines.

Not me at all.

Liberal Emotiology: I Feel, Therefore I Am (and You Must, Or Else)

It is clearly not possible to even begin to think about the world in the absence of the category "transcendence." The moment one thinks, one has already transcended the world, or rather, realized that the world consists of more than its physical constituents. Although science is literally inconceivable without transcendence, it can never account for it. Rather, transcendence is a necessary condition for the practice of science. Ultimately, no God no science, but that's the subject for a different post.

"For example," writes Spitzer, "the laws of physics described by standard equations... cannot be identified by direct observation or standard scientific instruments or tests." So, where are they? We know them by their effects, but we can never perceive the thing itself.

I suppose the strangest and most surprising thing of all is that these transcendent laws are intelligible to our own transcendent consciousness, *almost* as if they were made for each other. Einstein famously observed that the most incomprehensible thing about the universe was its comprehensibility.

We can compare this to how our senses work. Obviously our senses are proportioned to the environment they sense. To paraphrase Einstein, we might say that the most non-sensical thing about the world is that it can be sensed. Nevertheless, our senses interiorize a world that is exterior to us, as does our consciousness. Just as our senses are made for the physical world, our consciousness is made for a transcendent one (without excluding the physical).

I suppose I first encountered these ideas in Ken Wilber's Eye to Eye back in the early '80s. Humans have three "eyes," the eye of the senses, the eye of reason, and the eye of spirit. Even the tenured are forced to recognize the first two in some form or fashion, but seem to know nothing of the third.

But consistent with what we said yesterday, just because we ignore the third eye, it doesn't mean it stops "seeing." By way of analogy, there are certain people who are physically blind, and yet, will flinch if you take a swing at them. Something in them still "sees," except that the seeing isn't conscious. One of the purposes -- or outcomes at any rate -- of the spiritual life is to train the third eye, so that it can become familiar and comfortable in the spirit-realm. Notice, for example, how the spiritually untutored -- Bill Maher comes to mind -- simply ridicule what they cannot perceive. How easy is that?

And yet, they do perceive it. Or better, the perceptual apparatus is still there, but not seeing what it should. We all perceive higher values. Where did Bill Maher get his? From reason? No, because again, reason cannot furnish its own materials. Probably he derives them from his feelings, which is not generally a good idea. I mean, feelings should be consulted, or at least not ignored, but they should never be dispositive.

This is one of the main characteristics of the left, that they replace thinking with feeling. To the extent that they deploy their third eye, it simply ratifies what they feel about this or that, conferring upon it the familiar arrogance and self-righteousness. This is a kind of master key to understanding the preoccupations of the left, and how they transform the subrational to the transnational. Then their own feelings acquire a kind of omnipotent authority to which they are in no way entitled.

Think, for example, of their attitude toward the redefinition of marriage, or envy of the rich, or global warming. Because they consult only their feelings, and their feelings are imbued with a kind of bogus omnipotence via an absence of higher reflection, mere sentiment is transformed into a categorical imperative. Then, the person who denies the imperative -- that would be us -- is rendered evil. Yes, it is evil to transgress genuine moral imperatives. The left just substitutes the real ones with their feelings.

Back to how the higher fields of transcendence might operate. Spitzer writes that "they could exist in the same way as physical laws and constants -- as determinative information in the universe as a whole." This information "is not a thing, but rather, a controlling influence on things" and their relations.

In the past, I have used the example of how language works (probably borrowed from Polanyi). There are 26 letter of the alphabet which may be combined in certain ways to create words. The purpose of letters cannot be found in themselves; rather, they can only be understood with regard to what they converge upon, i.e., words.

The same relation applies to words and sentences, sentences and paragraphs, paragraphs and blog post, blog post and ... well, it depends. In most cases, the post is converging upon O. We are trying to aim language at higher realities -- not realities disclosed by the senses or by mere reason, but those realities disclosed by a proper awakening and discipline of the third eye.

The really shocking thing is that from the moment of the Big Bang, the universe is implicate with innumerable information fields that will only be explicated much later.

For example, the laws of physics were (are) buried in there, as was mathematics, life, mind, all of it. This is why I came up with the idea -- at least I think I did, because I've never really heard anyone else explain it quite this way -- that when merely biological homos became human, they specifically entered a "human space," so to speak, that pre-exists us. Life is the exploration and colonization of this space.

Think of Jesus' ungrammatical crack that "Before Abraham was, I AM." There is definitely something similar going on with all humans, which is why Plato was correct that the most important things involve vertical recollection, or what he calls anamnesis. Much of scripture is understood in this way, as in, "oh yeah, I remember paradise!" Or. "I remember escaping from slavery," or "I remember driving in that nail at the Crucifixion," etc.

Religion in the Raw at the DNC Convention

"The hard problem of consciousness," writes Spitzer, "really begins with the hard problem of living systems."

In other words, the mysteries of life and of consciousness are really two iterations of the same mystery. In neither case can the phenomenon be reduced to its physical constituents without eliminating the higher principle that animates, defines, and illuminates it.

Life is transcendence, because "in living systems, physical processes are oriented toward objectives that lie beyond them..." In short, organisms are oriented toward their own future. In Robert Rosen's expensive terminology, they are anticipatory systems.

And "if a living system cannot be reduced to physical processes, then how much more irreducible will be consciousness in animals and self-consciousness in humans?" (Spitzer). Animals have their ends and we have ours. But ours are infinitely remote from other animals, whose aims, while transcendent, are nevertheless quite "close" to the body and its immediate needs. Animals always orbit closely to their own biology.

Conversely, man's transcendence can -- and should -- go all the way up, and to all points in between. Actually "should" is not quite the correct word. In reality, our consciousness always proceeds to God; or better from God, who is its sufficient reason. As daylight is to the central sun, consciousness is to God, simultaneously distinct and yet "not-two."

So much becomes clear if we simply dis-invert the cosmos and see things from the top down instead of bottom up! Then, instead of the impossible leap from matter to consciousness -- the infinite journey from existence to experience -- we see a kind of smooth transition from Creator to creation: from supra consciousness to consciousness, from mind to life, and from life to matter.

In another book that I almost understood, Rosen argued that it was simply metaphysical prejudice to assume that the simple, linear, and unambiguous physical systems described (and describable!) by physics were the cosmic norm.

What Rosen really accomplishes is to provide a scientific alibi for accepting Whitehead's conceptualization of reality: that everything is process and that all processes have a degree of life and of consciousness, however attenuated. Then you don't have to somehow magically shoehorn them in later. The cosmos is an organism that converges on God; cosmic evolution is simply the mirror image of a prior involution. For this roundtrip back to God, we must unpack what is involved in us (as potential) in order to realize it in time. Woo hoo!

At the remote end of our consciousness is the necessary being we call God or O. Between man and God is a whole hierarchy of transcendental values that are easily discernible as Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and Unity. Without these transcendentals, nothing makes sense down here. Man is always oriented toward his own transcendence, no matter how hard he tries to deny it.

This explains how and why man is necessarily, always and everywhere, homo religiosus. I say, if you don't believe in God and religion, try watching a few minutes of the DNC convention. There you will see religion "in the raw," that is, the religious impulse untethered from and unbound by any divinely authorized channel. This is why it so resembles madness, because both madness and transcendence are "unmoored," so to speak, from physical reality, only in opposite directions.

Looking at the convention the way I have described will help you to avoid throwing up. And if the spectacle does not induce vomiting, then you are ontologically insensate to what is going down.

Our way turns a pagan ceremony, rife with hatred, scapegoating, and magical manipulation of reality, into an interesting cosmo-anthropological study. They are always trying to bait you, to drag you down from your peaceful transcendent perspective. But you must remain detached and alert: wise as the serpents on stage but innocent as doves.

You're really looking at a lower form -- or better, mode -- of humanity, and I mean that literally. Not only do they violate every commandment of God -- each being a signpost to transcendence -- but they incorporate the violation into their platform: idolatry, murder, theft, envy, deceit, etc. Truly, it is a "plunge into darkness." Which is why they project their own darkness into Donald Trump. This remarkable crockstep unity is either an example of DNC-MSM coordination, or of instantaneous nonlocal quantum coherence on the lower vertical plane.

Soul and Consciousness, Tool and Brain

In Spitzer's The Soul's Upward Yearning: Clues to Our Transcendent Nature from Experience and Reason, there is a chapter on The Soul and Its Brain, which I've been meaning to discuss. Not much time this morning, but at least we can lay a foundation or something.

First of all, no one knows what the relationship is between soul and brain. It is a Total Mystery that is not susceptible to any merely rational explanation, the reason being that your reason will still have to explain the Reasoner.

Besides, who said you could rely upon reason to arrive at the answer? That's a very unGödelian sassumption that can never be proven, plus, reason can only operate on premises supplied from outside the chain of reasoning. Thus, reason is founded upon non-reason (or trans-reason, if our Raccoon fathers are correct).

You might say that not a soul knows the answer. Then again, you might say that not a brain knows, which illustrates the dilemma. Spitzer tips his hand in the title, implying that the soul contains the brain, rather then vice versa. Any properly indoctrinated, post-sensible biped knows that the flow of causation is the other way around -- that the brain contains the soul, which, by the way, doesn't exist.

Hey, that's what I learned in graduate school. And also the opposite of what I learned. That is, I had to take the usual physicalist courses in neuroanatomy, psychobiology, neurobiological development, etc. But none of that exterior paraphernalia had much practical application. Rather, the real action was in the software, the programming, the Great Interior. They didn't call it the soul, despite the fact that psych-ology is its study.

I remember a helpful book by a Buddhist fellow named B. Alan Wallace, called The Taboo of Subjectivity: Toward a New Science of Consciousness. Sounds chopraesque, but it isn't, at least as far as I can recall. He states in the Introduction that "Strictly speaking, at present there is no scientific evidence even for the existence of consciousness!" Rather, "All the direct evidence we have consists of nonscientific, first-person accounts of being conscious."

And the "first-person" perspective can never be scientific. Rather, science is always from a third-person, I-it, perspective. And even then, how did this mysterious "I" sneak into the equation? Ideally, science would be an it-it relation, i.e., purely quantitative. The I, to the extent that it exists, would simply serve as a link between quantities, like an equal sign.

But we all know how subjectivity "infects" science, most notoriously with regard to "climate science," but also gender, IQ, and other sensitive subjects. In other words, there are subjects -- souls -- so sensitive that they cannot bear the truth of certain subjects.

Last night, because of the DNC hacking brouhaha, I checked into the Crazy Liberal station to see how they were coping. Instead, it was Chris Matthews interblowing Bill Maher. Republican denial of AGW came up, and they chuckled over how the absence of snow on Kilimanjaro is all the proof we need that GLOBAL WARMING IS REAL AND WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!! I hadn't heard that one, but a quick search revealed that this was one of the feary tales peddled in Al Gore's Oscar-winning science fiction thriller, and that it has no basis in fact.

I see that Wallace begins his introduction with a quote by the always pithy A.N. Whitehead, to the effect that When we consider what religion is for mankind, and what science is, it is no exaggeration to say that the future course of history depends upon the decision of this generation as to the relations between them.

Which I would modify to say every generation, since each generation must face anew the primordial and irreducible conundrum of a world and a world-sensorium -- AKA subjects and objects, interior and exterior, perception and perceived -- and the relations between them.

So don't pretend to know the answer! Without first consulting a Senior Raccoon. For "Modern science does not know any better than Augustine how or why consciousness originates, nor does it have any way of directly detecting the presence or absence of consciousness in a human fetus or even a human adult" (ibid.). Wallace quotes from The Dictionary of Psychology that "it is impossible to specify what [consciousness] does, or why it evolved. Nothing worth reading has been written about it."

Until today.

One thing you will have noticed is that there is a political bifurcation that mirrors the complementarity of Inside and Outside. That is, the left is the party of the Exterior, while conservatives are the party of the Interior. For the left, all problems are located outside the individual. We call those individuals victims, and without these passive amoeboids the left would have no political traction whatsoever.

Because the left is running out of victims, they have invented the term "microaggression" to create more of them. Black Lives Matter -- and the Professional Negro Industry in general -- is in the victim business, as are the open border enthusiasts. In other words, they have no enthusiasm for importing high IQ people from first world countries who won't serve as liberal victim fodder.

Look at their first instinct in the DNC scandal: "We are victims of Putin's hackers!" The left specializes in transforming bullies into victims, which is why the mother of notorious bully Michael Brown will be speaking at their convention. Their whole war on cops is rooted in this inversion. It's why they want to outlaw bullying, for if we legislate against bullying, only legislators will bully.

Just as it takes a Constitutional Scholar like Obama to lose more Supreme Court cases than any previous president, it takes a true genius such as Stephen Hawking to come up with the following: "it seems that we are no more than biological machines and that free will is just an illusion." Nothing demonstrates more the limitations of genius than when they step outside their narrow speciality. As if the soul can be contained by matter!

This ramble will continue tomorrow, when I will have more time to penetrate beneath the surface and hurl some real insults.

God Becomes Asymmetric So that Man Might Become Symmetric

Again: it is not the unrestricted power and infinite nature of God that becomes man, because that would be impossible; the former would overwhelm if not annihilate the latter.

Rather, it is the second Person of the Trinity who does so. It is this Person who makes "unconditional use of the one unrestricted power and nature," and who enters "into a finite human nature."

This reminds me of something I heard Bill Buckley say many years ago, before I knew much of anything about Islam or Christianity. He pointed out that Islam has a simplistic and rather primitive theology, compared to the richness and sophistication of Christianity. Under the assumption that all western religions were equally products of magical thinking, I thought to myself, "what's the point of bragging about a more convoluted fantasy?"

Suffice it to say that I have since then understood his point. Islam begins and ends with the tautology that "there is no God but God." True enough, but it's like reducing science to the statement that "there is no matter but matter." Thanks for the tip! In orthodox Islam (we're not talking about Sufism, a la Schuon) there is no way to "enter" God, only to slavishly follow his external dictates.

But Christianity -- among other things -- invites us to enter into, and participate in, God's very interior reality. Instead of rendering us slaves, we can actually become children and brothers of God. Perhaps I'm being unfair to Islam, but it seems to me that there is a considerably lower level of divine intimacy. And of course, the Koran specifically denies that God could in any way be "three," (unsophisticatedly) confusing the Trinity with polytheism.

Thus, ironically, in the Muslim mind the Koran serves as a correction and progression from a more primitive and error-prone Christian polytheism. But in reverting from the intersubjective God of Christianity to an interobjective one (in which we are reduced to mere objects of God), I think it's the other way around.

I might add that the two metaphysical conceptions have obviously led to very different forms of civilization. Many ideas that underpin western civilization are unthinkable in the Islamic world, e.g., political liberty, freedom of conscience, and separation of secular and religious law.

At any rate, in the same appendix we've been discussing, Spitzer has a brief section called Making Sense of the Incarnation. Is that even possible? Well, it ought to be, since they say that nothing in Christianity should run counter to the highest gift God has given us, our reason.

Why would God's highest revelation violate his most precious gift? If it did, then God would be analogous to the "crazy-making" parent who places the child in a double-bind from which there is no escape.

Of the Incarnation, Spitzer notes that "if self-consciousness inheres (makes use of) a finite nature," then "it will be subject to the limitations of that nature." On the other hand, if it inheres in "an unrestricted power and nature, then there is no limit to the power of its understanding, creativity, freedom, and will."

So, with the Incarnation of the Son in the man Jesus, there are two vectors, as it were, one unrestricted and the other restricted.

I'm trying to come up with a useful analogy. Probably not a good one, but I'm thinking of how, as a psychologist, one must empathically "enter" the restricted world of the patient, even while another part transcends the limitation. Just as the second Person of the Trinity will really and truly know what it is like to be a man -- with all its limitations, conflicts, and suffering -- another "part" has unrestricted access to the divine relationship that transcends the finite. And he wants us to participate in the same power, which is none other than being fully in the world without being of it.

Spitzer: "Christianity holds that the second Person (self-consciousness) did not stop using the divine nature when He took on the limitations of human nature, but rather continued operating through His divine nature so that the one self-consciousness had the perspective, understanding, and will of both an unrestricted nature and a finite nature" (Spitzer).

Ah ha! This sounds a little like the bi-logic discussed a couple of posts back. Indeed, in searching for an (admittedly disanalogous) analogy, Spitzer suggests that our own dream state might illuminate "how a single self-consciousness could have two such different perspectives." (Again, it is not the dream state that illuminates Jesus's consciousness so much as vice versa.)

Note that in the dream, it is as if our consciousness is bifurcated into the "unrestricted" power of the Dreamer and the restricted power that we have as subjects in our own dream. I wonder if Bomford discusses this in The Symmetry of God? Let's have a look.

Yup: "The doctrines of the Trinity and Incarnation, particularly, are dominated by symmetric logic and become virtual expressions of its laws." "In terms of bi-logic every effort seems to be made to make it rational and consonant with asymmetric logic: yet, at its heart, is irresoluble paradox " -- i.e., the co-presence of two forms of logic, and of a self-consciousness inflected through each.

To cite just one conspicuous example of symmetric logic, we could say that "because God has become human, humanity has become divine." "Symmetric logic makes unities out of things apparently different.... Many of the historic controversies of Christianity may be resolved by accepting the necessity of expressing them through paradox and myth, by recognizing the symmetric logic implicit in all talk of God."

I -Thou and We-Thou

A relatively short post that is also unusual for having only one Big Idea instead of the usual scattershot of fully half-baked ones...

Continuing our plunge into the heart of the Trinity, Spitzer writes that the first two of its Persons, Father and Son, "form a unity of interpersonal love through the one unrestricted power" (which we have compared to "beyond-being").

In turn, the Holy Spirit is "not simply the beloved of either the Father or the Son," but rather, the "beloved of the union between Father and Son."

That won't be clear until we flesh it out a bit. If the relation between Father and Son is that of "I-Thou," then you might say that the Spirit introduces a kind of "We-Thou" relation, with the We being the Father-Son "couple" -- as in how the child is welcomed into the marital-we (which goes to the intrinsic ontological defect of willed single parenthood, divorce, and newly invented caricatures of marriage; or in other words it is the denial of the gift of a healthy and natural We to the child).

As Spitzer describes it, love "need not be only an outpouring of self," but "can also be an outpouring of an us" -- that is, a gift of the union of the two; or, it is the two welcoming a third into its union of love. We fall in love with another person, but the love we give a child isn't only of a dyadic nature, especially from the child's point of view.

Is this a subtle point, or is it obvious? I'll just speak from my own experience. My parents rarely got along. Either it was a cold war or they were bickering about God-knows-what. I remember this lack of harmony causing a kind of familiar but nameless pain in me.

However, there were moments of harmony, in which they were kind and affectionate to one another, and for me, it was as if a light from above were penetrating the darkness below. There was a great sense of relief, and everything felt "right" in that moment. I remember one time in particular, when they were walking ahead of me, holding hands. The feeling of peace was very distinct -- as if all was right with the world -- but obviously different from merely being loved by one's individual parent.

To the contrary, I never doubted that my mother and father loved me. But that is in the I-Thou realm. The problem was in the We-Thou realm. I knew they would never divorce, but nevertheless, it was a rocky we they bequeathed to me.

I think this is why, to this day, I can't stand any kind of Disturbance in the Force in my house. I have a peculiar need to avoid interpersonal stress and conflict around here. As a result, my son is having a very different experience of the We than I had. Rather, his background environment is one of a harmonious and loving We, and the effect on him is obvious. He has to visit other homes in order to get the sense of a distressed and unhappy We.

The point is, just as we can trace the love between persons back to the Trinity, so too can we trace the love between two persons and a third: just as there is a loving space between the I and Thou, there is a new loving space between the We and Thou.

Here is how Spitzer describes it: "This occurs in marriage where a couple can give its 'us' (its collective self) to another person by welcoming that person into the relationship. One can generally tell when a couple has this loving quality as a relational whole because their invitation is harmonious and welcoming."

Of note, it's not just children who are so welcomed, but anyone else who enters the relational orbit. We have a couple of married friends who are passionately devoted to one another, but at the same time, extremely extroverted, such that to be around them is to enter a... I hate to sound corny, but it is a very palpable We of love.

Conversely, according to Spitzer, "If this quality of the 'us' is not there, or if there is a problem causing a disruption in the relationship, it is immediately discernible." As in the case of my parents. Or, think of the uniquely dysfunctional nature of the We between Bill and Hillary Clinton. I use the word "unique" advisedly, because I've never seen anything like it -- a seemingly loveless political crime family rooted in a cunning will to power. What a perverse We!

In any event, "when Christians say that God is love, they do not mean only that the attribute of love belongs to the one infinite nature of God." Rather, "that there is real interpersonal love (gift of self and gift of the 'us') taking place through three perfect acts of self-consciousness..."

Patterned Transrationality

We've been discussing how the one unrestricted power can be the single source of the three Persons. This is consistent with the very nature of consciousness, which routinely violates aristotelian logic by being in two "places" at once.

This is especially true vis-a-vis dream consciousness, in which we are the Subject who dreams and yet a subject in the dream we dream. In fact, we are all of the subjects in our dreams, which means that our own consciousness is appearing in the form of other persons. It's like quantum entanglement or something, a single field with multiple particles of subjectivity: the parts are a function of the whole.

Which we have discussed in the past in the context of a unique (as far as I know) and helpful book called The Symmetry of God. From the description on the amazon page: "Why does the age-long quest for the eternal express itself always in paradox? Eternity is both an attribute of God and a characteristic of the Freudian unconscious. Recent developments in psychoanalytic theory have discovered an irrational logic at work in the unconscious process.

"This symmetric logic (in the mathematical sense of symmetry) produces paradoxes incomprehensible to asymmetric classic logic. The path of the mystic is an approach to an aspect of God analogous to the human unconscious, and is expressed through paradoxes of symmetric logic; whereas the god who reveals himself in history is a god who, by the same analogy, also exercises consciousness and is, at least partially, subject to classical logic.

"Christian faith holds to both the concept of an eternal god beyond time and of a god who acts in time. This involves both logics, and explains the paradoxical, symbolic and mythical nature of theological propositions. It also throws light on the conflict between realist and non-realist views of God and allows an understanding of orthodox Christianity which transcends both."

The key here is the distinction between asymmetric logic, which is our normal, everyday, commonsense, wideawake, cutandry, linear and left-brain approach, and symmetric logic, which violates most of the things Aristotle says logic cannot do. Superficially, symmetric logic may be dismissed as "illogic," but it simply has a logic of its own. I don't agree with everything Bomford says about it -- he seems to be on the liberal side of the theological continuum -- but I give him credit for being the only person saying it.

I don't remember him discussing the Trinity in the book, but I'll bet you anything a bi-logical approach to it will be a verticalisthenic exercise worth engaging in. Because I'm pressed for time this morning, I will borrow from some past posts in order to avoid having to rethink everything from the ground up:

Bomford is an Anglican priest who is a student of the psychoanalyst Ignacio Matte Blanco, who himself is not well known but had some brilliant ideas about the logic of the unconscious mind. Bomford has applied Matte Blanco's ideas to the relationship between God and consciousness, and how we may meaningfully communicate about something that vastly exceeds the limits of language.

One of the purposes of the book is to navigate between the shoals of a softheaded fundamentalism and a hardhearted modernism. It is aimed at the reader who "neither clings rigidly to the literal truth of every word of the Bible, nor on the other hand reduces the faith by rejecting most of what the past has believed to be central."

With regard to the potential dangers of mixing psychoanalytic metapsychology and religion, Bomford makes the important point that "from the beginning the church has borrowed philosophies from the world as handmaids to faith, and has expressed its faith through them. This has not only been to communicate with those outside, but also so that faith may understand itself."

Bomford begins with what amounts to a truism, that our conscious self -- or ego -- is situated in a much larger area of consciousness as such, much of which goes by the name "unconscious." This is a misleading term, since the unconscious is not unconscious, just more or less unavailable to the conscious ego. The unconscious is obviously quite active and aware, only "below," "behind," or "above" the ego.

Traditionally, psychoanlaysts have imagined a sort of horizontal line, with the ego above and the unconscious below. But a more accurate mental image would be an island surrounded by water on all sides, like a point within a sphere [ʘ] (the sphere itself being hyperdimensional).

I would also argue that consciousness is not linear but holographically structured, so that the unconscious is not spatially above or below, but within consciousness (somewhat analogous to God, who is both immanent and transcendent, the deepest within and the furthest beyond of any "thing" that partakes of Being).

One of the most important points to bear in mind is that we might believe a person to be illogical, when they are in fact obeying a different form of logic: symmetrical logic. Indeed, this was one of Freud's central insights, that the sick person was actually logical in his own way. One of purposes of therapy is to expose the unconscious logic that is causing conscious pain or dysfunction.

But it is also important not to automatically "pathologize" all symmetrical logic, for without it we wouldn't be human. Rather, we would be hyper-rational Vulcans with no "emotional intelligence," no interior understanding of things, no ability to comprehend God, religion or art, and no ability to love or create.

With everyday aristotelian logic, if something is in it can't be out; or if it is up, it can't be down. Or in other words, things can't be in two places at once. But if God is up he is simultaneously down, and if he is out he is always in. And vice versa. For God, it is not a problem to be two "places" at once, since there are no places to begin with, only everyplace.

Is this way of talking merely nonsense? Undoubtedly. But it is perfect nonsense, or what I would call patterned transrationality. It describes something that is surely real, but not in the same limited sense as material reality and its interior cousin, the empirical ego.

The difficulty arises in attempting to express the infinite through the finite, or the transcendent through the immanent, which can only be accomplished with paradox, myth, symbolism, and a number of other literary deivoices we will discuss in more detail below. Religious language -- whatever else it is -- is without question a way to memorialize, instantiate, extend, deepen, and meditate upon that which transcends ordinary language.

... God has an outer aspect, which we call being, and an interior aspect that is beyond being. In Orthodox Christianity, the difference is conceptualized in terms of God's energies (which may be known by us) and his essence, which we can only unKnow. I suspect that the dialectic between them is the source of God's creativity, or his eternal surprise and delight at his endless productions.

Now, it is not actually possible for us to experience or know the eternal. Or, to be precise, we can only experience it if we no longer exist, because to identify with it would be to disappear from time, and thought and existence require time ("no one sees my face and lives"). As Boethius wrote, "An unchanging thing displays no before and after, nor does it begin or end." Rather, eternity is "the instantaneously whole and complete possession of endless life."

But there are a number of ways we can experience the eternal and think the otherwise unthinkable in the herebelow. As Bomford explains, "among temporal things, the everlasting most nearly expresses the eternal. It provides the closest image of the timeless within time." This is why our souls are stirred in the presence of the very old and ancient -- the Pyramids, Yosemite Valley, a European cathedral, Barbara Walters, etc.

But interestingly, another penultimate form of eternity -- the symmetrical opposite of the everlasting, so to speak -- is the momentary, for such a thing is also "instantaneously whole and unchanging -- it has no time in which to change. It is not there -- it is there in its fullness -- and it is gone again" -- like a shooting star, or giving your daughter's hand in marriage, or one of Obama's campaign promises.

I don't think we got very far this morning, and now I'm out of time. I'll do better tomorrow.

Collaborating with the Handicapped God

Continuing with yesterday's post, we left off with the idea that persons are subjects of consciousness and freedom. Person "signifies self-consciousness," such that the three persons of the Trinity "may be seen as 'distinct acts of self-consciousness making use of that one unrestricted power.'"

Now, "Self-consciousness is awareness of one's awareness" or "consciousness of one's consciousness" (Spitzer). Thus, "this remarkable power seems to defy physical explanation, because it can be in two relative positions with respect to itself simultaneously." In other words, it is as if the inner universe of consciousness may double back "on itself at an infinite velocity, so that it can be 'inside' itself..."

That is not as clear as it could be. I would say that with self-consciousness we are simultaneously conscious (in consciousness) and somehow above or "outside" it. But this can't be the case. There can't be any strict line between consciousness and self-consciousness, because the latter must ultimately be a mode of the former. Even so, they are quite distinct, and the distinction lies at the foundation of our humanness.

It very much reminds me of the distinction in psychoanalysis between the conscious and unconscious minds. We can talk about the two as if they are separate, but they can't be. Rather, it is more like the yin-yang symbol of the Tao, in which there is unconsciousness in every act of consciousness, and vice versa.

Or, it is like the wave/particle distinction in quantum physics: a particular thought is the precipitate of a wavelike flow of consciousness, in which our conscious mind is analogous to the "shore." We're just children at play along the infinite shore where the waves of eternity break upon the sands time.

We all attempt to use what we know to understand what we don't. In the past, I have mentioned my suspicion that there is something analogous to the conscious/unconscious distinction in God. However, this expresses it backwards. That is to say, it is we who are in the image of God; therefore, our conscious/unconscious structure must be a distant echo of what goes on in God. We are the way we are because God is the way He is.

And remember, when we say "unconscious," we certainly don't mean ignorant, or undirected, or sub-conscious. Rather, it is more like a supra- or hyperconsciousness -- like the total implicate field as opposed to the particulate point of selfhood. As the psychoanalyst James Grotstein expressed it in this decade old post, what we call the unconscious is in actuality

"a sort of alter-ego, or 'stranger within' that shadows our existence in a most intimate, creative, and mysterious way. Far from being 'primitive and impersonal,' it is 'subjective and ultra-personal,' a 'mystical, preternatural, numinous second self' characterized by 'a loftiness, sophistication, versatility, profundity, virtuosity, and brilliance that utterly dwarf the conscious aspects of the ego.'"

From the same post:

Grotstein sees the unconscious as a sort of “handicapped” god who needs a partner in order to accomplish its mission. The goal of psychotherapy is not merely knowledge of, or insight into, the unconscious, but something far greater. Rather, it is to establish a sort of dynamic collaboration between the phenomenal ego -- our conscious self -- and the “ineffable subject of being” upon which the ego floats, and into which it infinitely extends (for the boat is paradoxically made of the same water upon which it floats).

Through a creative resonance between these two aspects of ourselves, we are much more spontaneously alive, creative, and “present.” It is like adding another dimension (or two or three) of depth to our being, through which we become something that has never actually been, but is somehow more real than what we presently are. A new entity emerges, a “transcendent subject” that lives harmoniously in the dialectical space between our “foreground self” and this mysterious “background subject” that surrounds and vivifies it.

You might say that we help God come into being, or to transition from the implicate to explicate order. Could it be that something similar occurs within the Godhead?

This is what I mean by applying the Being/Beyond-Being distinction to God. Again, it is all just one flowing movement.

And now that I think about it, it is as if there exist vertical and horizontal in God; the distinction between Godhead and Trinity would be on the "vertical" plane, while the distinctions between the persons of the Trinity would be "horizontal." The Father is not "above" the Son or Spirit, but on the same level. But the infinite Divine Nature must be "above" them, in a manner of speaking.

Spitzer: "[T]here can be only one unrestricted power, but Christian revelation holds that there are three Persons in this one power.... This is not contradictory because [as explained above] an unrestricted power can accommodate multiple acts of self-consciousness.... The one unrestricted power acts as a single 'power source' for the three distinct acts of self-consciousness."

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

Up and Down in Divine Space

I don't think I'll continue with the discussion of Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops. I try not to duplicate what is widely available elsewhere on the internet, and there is so much solid information out there about the deadly lies of the left (e.g., here), that it's just piling on. Whether it is "racial profiling," "disparities in the criminal justice system," "hands up don't shoot," or police disproportionately targeting black people, it is all malicious flapdoodle.

Besides, more interesting -- and important -- is the machinery of the whole phenomenon. How does one manufacture a class of dupes to passionately believe easily disproved lies? And why? First and foremost, it doesn't begin with blacks, but with white liberals. They are the ones with the power to either propagate the lies or correct them at the root. They are the transmission belt of culpable ignorance and stupidity.

Do they know they are lying? And do they care? Is it really just a cynical attempt to agitate blacks to turn out to vote in November? Or do they actually convince themselves that the lie is true?

It's very hard if not impossible for someone who loves truth to relate to the latter. I would never knowingly propagate falsehood on this blog, and I want to be corrected when I am wrong. But leftists think you are lying to them when you simply tell them the truth. You will have noticed that whenever the left accuses conservatives of something, it is always a projection -- an unconscious revelation of what they actually believe.

For example, they accuse us of racism, when they are the ones who want to discriminate on the basis of race; they accuse us of being "anti-science," when they are the ones who pretend that climate science is settled, or that IQ has nothing to do with genetics, or that an unborn baby is just a random clump of cells, or that the minimum wage doesn't harm the most economically vulnerable, or that homosexuality isn't dangerous to one's health, both physical and psychological, or that the sexes aren't fundamentally different, etc. The list is endless.

So, we'll change subjects. To what? To whatever strikes my fancy, as usual. In this case, it is an appendix to Spitzer's God So Loved the World: Clues to Our Transcendent Destiny from the Revelation of Jesus, called Making Sense of the Trinity and Incarnation. I haven't yet thought it through -- that's the purpose of writing about it -- but while reading it, it triggered many psychic depth charges. When this occurs, it is a clue that there is more here than meets the I. In other words, it is fraught with implicate meaning.

Best of all, Spitzer seems to understand the Trinity in the same way I do, although coming at it from a different angle. Of which there must be countless, since it is analogous to coming at a three-dimensional space with two-dimemsionsl arrows.

Two questions: "How can God be three in one, and how can the Son of God become human?" The early councils were extremely careful in explicating the answers, since it is very easy to fall into misconceptions in attempting to resolve the mystery. Many heresies are simply false solutions to these conundrums, e.g., that Jesus is all God, or all man, or a spirit being, or an enlightened sage, etc.

I am reminded of a Jewish relative who says she could never accept Christianity due to the strict monotheism of Judaism. Does she have a point? Yes! Spitzer: "How can Jesus be divine in human form? Isn't that a contradiction? It would be if the early Church had claimed that Jesus' Incarnation was 'divinity becoming human,' or 'the divine taking human form,' or 'the Infinite taking finite form.'"

Being that they were mostly good Jews, they knew as well as anyone that God is one -- hence the development of the Trinity as the solution to a metaphysical problem of the first rank. The Church "declared early on that it was not 'the infinite God' who became 'man,' but the 'Son of God'" who did. It did not claim God's infinite nature became finite, because this "would have been an obvious contradiction."

This leads to the distinction between "nature" and "person." The divine nature is completely unrestricted: it "would have to be unique (one and only one), because two unrestricted acting powers is a contradiction." If there are two, then one has something the other lacks, and is therefore not unrestricted. And if there is no difference, then they are the same, i.e., one.

So, the divine nature is still one. In reality it is "beyond" or "before" or "above" one, for we are not talking about any mere quantitative one. This whole line of thought rang a bell in me, because it reminds me of Schuon's fundamental distinction between Being and Beyond-Being. To jump ahead a bit, the Divine Nature must be Beyond-Being, while the Divine Persons are Being (not our being, but rather, the being-ness "within" the Godhead -- in divinas, as the Latins say.

Schuon explains this quite clearly in chapter one of Survey of Metaphysics and Esoterism, Summary of Integral Metaphysics. There he begins in the beginning -- or before the beginning, to be precise -- with the idea that "In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute, and that being absolute it is infinite." This Supreme Reality could never be incarnated without instantaneously shattering the world.

It is "at once solely itself and totally itself"; it "is not determined by any limiting factor and therefore does not end at any boundary..." And skin is bounded, so there you are. It cannot "contain" the one divine nature.

But again, within Divinity itself there is a kind of qualitative "distinction" that results from its own nature. For Schuon, there is a "pure Absolute" and a "relative Absolute," and although he doesn't say so, I would assign the Trinity to the latter.

Please bear in mind that we are deploying human categories to try to peer into the transhuman. In reality it is the other way around: relativity exists in the human plane as a kind of distant echo of what occurs in divinas, between Being and Beyond-Being. You might say that God manifests to himsoph as Trinity.

I can see that this is going to require a great deal of caution in order to say all of this correctly. In other words, it is probably easy to misunderstand what I'm saying, but be sure that I am doing my best to play within the boundaries of orthodoxy.

About Beyond-Being manifesting to itself as Being. Schuon notes that the Divine Principle "not only possesses 'dimensions' and 'modes,' it also has 'degrees,' by virtue of its very Infinitude which projects the Principles into Relativity..." Again, this is in God; you might say that creation partakes of the same extension, only "outside" God, i.e., ex divinas.

Back to Spitzer. Again, the early councils "were well aware that there could be only one unrestricted power, and therefore one nature in God, and so they knew that they would have to clarify how there could be three 'Persons' in that one unrestricted power and nature."

But since God cannot have "parts" per se, how are we to understand this? Well, what is a person? Spitzer suggests (following Jean Galot) that it is "the subject of consciousness and freedom." Person "signifies self-consciousness," such that the three persons "may be seen as 'distinct acts of self-consciousness making use of that one unrestricted power.'"

To be continued...

Black Lives Martyred

Martyred to the breathtaking lies of the left, that is.

There is so much useful information in Heather MacDonald's The War on Cops that it's hard for this old brain to remember it all. Yes, Black Lives Matter is a total fraud, founded upon easily disproved lies and distortions, but what are the actual statistics? As an aid to myself and a friendly service to readers, I thought I might thumb through the book and pluck and out some of the more salient ones.

By the way, this is one of the most simultaneously exhilarating and depressing books I'ver ever read. Exhilarating because the truth always is. Depressing because it demonstrates how aggressively the left denies reality when its agenda is at stake. As the old gag goes, the first thing a man will do for his ideology is lie.

Which reminds me of Russell Kirk's axiom that one definition of conservatism is the absence of ideology. Unlike the left, we do not superimpose a secondary reality over the first, but rather, allow ourselves to be in-formed by reality. Or in other words, we stick with what is and what works.

The book is also depressing because we have a real problem on our hands, with no solution in sight. In an unprecedented historical experiment, the the left has destroyed the black family, and I have no idea what or how long it will take to put it back together, or if it's even possible.

The left's approach to the problem is to generate all heat and no light, in order to keep their most loyal voting bloc angry, dependent, and in the dark. They also ensure that if anyone talks about the real problems they will be banished as racist, thus sealing themselves in ignorance with weaponized PC rhetoric.

So, cheer up! Things are not as bad as they are going to be.

First the "Ferguson Effect": homicides in the nation's 50 largest cities increased 17 percent last year. This of course is after a fifty percent decline in crime since the mid-1990s. I won't get into all of the reasons for the decline, but suffice it to say that all of these truly progressive methods are under attack by the left, with predictable consequences, including thousands more black deaths.

In 2015 258 blacks were shot and killed by police, compared to 6,095 total black homicide victims in 2014 (the most recent year available), and the vast majority of the latter were murdered by other blacks. Of the 258 killed by police, most were in self defense, as in the Michael Brown case in Ferguson.

"[Y]oung black commit homicide at nearly ten times the rate of white and Hispanic males combined." Why on earth would a police officer not be a little more attentive to the activities of young black males? And why would the potential black victims of black predators not want the police to pay a little more attention to them?

It is precisely because of astronomical levels of black crime that police are in their neighborhoods. Police do not deploy their forces on a statistical basis based upon population, but rather, based upon crime. It has nothing per se to do with race, but with behavior. But when an inevitable statistical disparity in policing shows up, the left takes this as evidence of racism. Madness!

Conversely, Asians "barely show up in police-shooting data because their crime rates are so low." Thus, whites should organize a White Lives Matter group to protest this blatant discrimination against us in favor of Asians. Fight yellow privilege!

In New York City, "blacks are only 23 percent of the population but commit over 75 percent of all shootings.... whites commit under 2 percent of all shootings" despite constituting a third of the population. "Blacks and Hispanic shootings together account for 98 percent of all illegal gunfire."

Thus, it is no joke: the left wants to take our guns away, when the main reason we need them is to protect ourselves from their constituents. Or in other words, if we could just prevent guns from getting into the hands of Democrats, we would have murder rates (by shooting) comparable to Sweden.

Eh, I'll have to complete this tomorrow. It's a little crazy around here, being that today is the day the wife gets the new hip installed...

Is Liberalism Preventable?

What with leftism ending in what leftism always ends in — hatred, division, poverty, oppression, political violence, etc. — I was wondering over the weekend if there is any surefire way to prevent it. No, not via some form of censorship or reverse-indoctrination, but rather, to make sure it never plants its tentacles and takes hold of the soul to begin with.

I use the word “soul” advisedly, because I am convinced that leftism is first and foremost a spiritual disorder. Yes, leftism is irrational, but it’s more than that; it is anti-rational. Being that the mind is composed of reason and made for the purpose of exercising it, it takes great effort to subvert the natural process of seeking and loving truth.

Yes, leftism is fraught with daddy issues. Indeed, Black Lives Matter is unimaginable without these subspiritual and more banal psychological influences. If black lives mattered to their fathers, there would be no need to project the resultant abandonment and resentment onto white people, or police, or “structural racism.” But urban black children by and large don’t matter to their fathers, with predictable psycho-political consequences, i.e., various forms of acting out.

But here again, it takes real effort to not see the connection. This is what I mean by its being a spiritual disorder, in that there is a prior attack on truth before the mind even sets itself to the task of thinking.

In the past I have written about Bion’s concept of “attacks on linking.” Knowing an abstract truth requires a linkage of various ideas, concepts, and preconceptual archetypes and categories. If the mind can pre-emptively dismantle the supporting links that lead to a truth, this will be much more effective than having to deny each unwanted truth on an ad hoc basis. Cognitively speaking, it is the difference between a handgun and a nuclear bomb.

It takes great mental effort to believe the lies upon which Black Lives Matter is based. Or does it? Like Obama, its devotees certainly don’t appear to exercise much in the way of mental effort, so there must be something that makes it “easy” for them to arrive at such absurd and unsupported conclusions.

You might say that Satan’s yoke is easy but that his words endarken.

But how do minds become so easily yoked in this fashion? And is there any way to inoculate a person against such motivated stupidity? Satan never compels; rather, he only tempts and seduces. What is it about leftism that makes something so fundamentally ugly appear so attractive? Consider the fact that in one generation we have gone from “winning” the cold war to nearly nominating a socialist, mostly thanks to the young and stupid.

But are they only young and stupid? That can only account for so much. I think about my 11 year old, for example. He is already a bleeding-brain conservative, and I don’t foresee any possibility that he will be seduced by leftism as he gets older. You know the old gag, that if you're not a liberal when you're 25 you have no heart, and if you're not a conservative by the time you're 35 you have no brain. However, in my son’s case, it is precisely because he has such a big heart that he could never embrace leftism.

For example, his heart informs him that good and evil are objective realities, that there is a vital difference between them, and that life is an unending struggle between the two. Likewise, he knows that truth exists and that the purpose of the mind is to know it.

You’d think everyone would know these things, which again only goes to the left's success at inverting the psyche before it even begins to think. It is analogous to a fighting force that softens the battlefield via airpower before sending in the troops. I would say that public education — supplemented by the media and culture in general — softens the battlefield of the mind until the university troops go in and finish the job. Then the mind becomes occupied territory, usually for the remainder of one’s life.

Why else would Bernie Sanders want “free college” for everyone?

Here is a typical piece plucked from somewhere this morning, Universities’ War Against Truth. Just think about the perversity of that title! We all know it’s happening, as is the “artistic war on beauty” and the “ethical war on morality.” Again, this is why I am forced to conclude that a hostile spiritual power is at work, because how do you explain how an institution designed for the very purpose of pursuing and exalting truth has become precisely the opposite? Give the Evil One credit. That is an amazing accomplishment.

"Young people today are very reluctant to assume that anything is certain…” But why, and how? How can one not know that there are certain absolute truths without which thinking isn’t even possible?

"Whence came this ubiquitous hesitation? As I understand the matter, it has much to do with the new ideology of non-discrimination. Modern education aims to be ‘inclusive’, and that means not sounding too certain about anything in case you make people who don’t share your beliefs feel uncomfortable.”

Of course, this fails to convey the obnoxiousness with which the bogus conviction of having no convictions is held. Thus,

"Speaking or thinking in the wrong way does not mean disagreeing with the beliefs of the students — for they have no beliefs. It means thinking as though there really is something to think — as though there really is a truth that we are trying to reach, and that it is right, having reached it, to speak with certainty. What we might have taken to be open-mindedness turns out to be no-mindedness: the absence of beliefs, and a negative reaction to all those who have them.”

To paraphrase Chesterton, there is one thought that should be declared off limits, and that is the thought that stops thinking. For the left, the Forbidden Thought isn’t a bug but a feature. It is their foundation, their self-evident truth.

Last week I read a relevant comment at Happy Acres, that “To find out what is destroying your culture, discover which ideas are considered beyond criticism.”

That is the real purpose of the regime of political correctness: it is all about forbidding the very thoughts that facilitate thinking about -- and conforming ourselves to -- transcendent reality.

Big Win in Dallas for the Father of Lies

Since the vicious and willfully obtuse anti-police rhetoric of the left is based upon easily refuted statistics -- cf. the indispensable work of Heather McDonald (see also here) -- the events of last night must be counted as a big win for the Father of Lies. Five officers are dead because their murderer believed lies about "racist police."

In order to facilitate any great evil, lies are necessary. People act upon their assessment of what is true. If they believe a lie is the truth, then they will act on the lie and adjust their lives accordingly. Palestinians are steeped in lies about Jews, as were Nazis. When lies are accepted as true, it transforms evil actions into "moral" ones.

Human beings cannot help believing truth and behaving morally; our minds are epistemophilic (oriented to the True) as our behaviors are oriented to the Good. Therefore, in order to subvert man, it is necessary only for him to assimilate the Lie in order to converge upon the bad or evil.

Obama and the left don't want to know the truth, because they don't want the truth to be true. Therefore, they shun it in order to nurture their lower vertical impulses of envy and resentment, perpetual grievance and blessed victimhood.

The same was true of southern slaveholders vis-a-vis Christianity. Before slavery had become morally problematic, no one needed a rationale for it, religious or otherwise. Just as Obama and Black Lives Matter activists cherrypick out-of-context statistics to support what they want to believe, slaveholders tried to find biblical support for their own immoral interests.

If you can get someone to believe a lie is true, you have done Satan's heavy lifting. The rest takes care of itself. Distance from the truth doesn't matter; rather, it's that first step that counts, in that it literally places one in a parallel universe, being that the universe is made of truth: what exists is true, and vice versa. Lies are always parasitic on truth -- they have no real being -- so believing one results in a kind of ontological erosion of the soul, of real personhood.

To believe the lie is to be in the universe without being of it. It is a precise inversion of the proper state of affairs, in that it fosters a reverse transcendence into the -- or a -- lower world. Instead of using the world as a ladder or stepping stone for the purpose of climbing to higher realms, the lie places a hole in the center of existence, through which we may drop down into unreality. Remember?

"The ego becomes a hole that 'fulfills' itself by devouring other selves, leaving behind a trail... like remnant bones on a beach" (Rutler). "[T]he Mocker turns to the men and women of this age endowed with more intelligence than judgment: 'Come down from the Cross! Give me your intellect!' And we do: we do each time we call truths lies and lies truths." Same snake. Same fall. Same result.

It has always been thus, "except for one aneurysm that has paralyzed the life of the mind in our day, a convulsion imperceptible along the way so that it is hard to locate in any one philosopher" (ibid.). Derrida? Nietzsche? Kant? Descartes? How long ago did we go off course? More to the point, when did we conclude that there was no course, or that all courses were of equal value?

When the student of old attended school, he "was told to prepare for truth." Certainly he assimilated untruths along the way, but "at least he was told there was such a thing as truth" (ibid.).

But the postmodern tyranny of relativism transmitted by the perpetual adultolescents of Big Education would have us believe "that there are two sides to truth, your truth and my truth." These intellectual abusers have "betrayed childhood by robbing it of a sense of the interior life of the soul, making it unfit" for the acknowledgement and reception of any higher reality.

Instead, the victims of this intellectual con are indoctrinated to believe things that specifically block the path toward truth. This results in an "intellect that appropriates information for private ends" and thus renders inoperative its submission "to the truth for truth's sake" (ibid.).

Progressivism is really a post-civilizational neobarbarism -- just as Obama is what "comes after" the United States of America, both its ideal and its reality. (Nothing can come "after" self-evident truths except for something worse, based upon lies of various magnitude.)

Along these lines, Rutler quotes a prophetic passage by Giambattista Vico (who, by the way, was a big influence on Joyce, specifically, with regard to the circular structure of Finnegans Wake -- its "commodius vicus of recirculation" -- in which the the Same Returns throughout history, like the theme in a symphony):

Such peoples, like so many beasts, have fallen into the custom of each man thinking only of his own private interests and have reached the extreme of delicacy, or better of pride, in which they bristle and lash out at the slightest displeasure.

So, microaggression has a long genealogy.

They shall turn their cities into forests and the forests into dens and lairs of men. In this way, through long centuries of barbarism, rust will consume the misbegotten subtleties of malicious wits that have turned them into beasts made more inhuman by the barbarism of reflection...

Which is why the new barbarism of the left is even worse than the old.

Building the Cosmic Infrastructure

We left off yesterday with the idea that history is a kind of race down from the trees of west Africa, to the wide open spaces of temporal change and development, and back up the nonlocal tree whose roots are aloft and branches down below. Is this a Christian idea, or just something I made up?

Yesterday I was reading Spitzer's God So Loved the World, in which he points out that Jesus brought "not only an entryway into the future Kingdom of Heaven, but a passageway that connected the present Kingdom to the future Kingdom."

In other words, he builds a path, a road, a bridge, from horizontal here to vertical there. The gift of the Spirit helps us complete the project of building this cosmic infrastructure, this "conduit between earth and Heaven." However, it's a project that not only takes time but keeps going over budget, given the nature of human contractors.

The Spirit is "the power of God" experienced on our end as a personal presence. "This 'presence of God' is more than merely 'the power of God' viewed as blind supernatural force; it has a subjective (indeed, intersubjective) quality." It is the more-than-human flowing through the merely human in various ways, i.e., charisms.

So the Kingdom of God is where we are headed, and the Spirit is what helps guide us there. It must also be where history is headed, indeed, the very purpose of history: "The "Kingdom of God' is the most synthetic concept in the Gospels. It is the reality that is thought to be the way, the means, and the end of humanity.... It is also identified with the divine life, and therefore, with the perfect, eternal condition of God to which all humanity is called."

Thus, word-made-flesh also ushers in the future-made-now, end-made-middle, and top-made-down; it "causes a dynamic force (the goodness of God) to enter into the world here and now."

In the past we have called the left the Good Intentions Paving Company, for we know where their projects always lead. Why is this? Because they are a repetition and prolongation of the Fall, i.e., the attempt to accomplish something without God that can only be achieved with God. Thus, the left never stops building towers of Babel and the roads between them.

Jesus advises us that we must look for the Kingdom "amid many distractions" in the world, "as well as choose it and remain faithful to it. If we do choose and remain faithful to the Kingdom, its power will affect us, making us 'Kingdom builders.'" Here again we encounter the orthoparadoxical idea that the Kingdom is the road we both build and and travel upon in order to help get us there; thus it is both path and destiny.

This is quintessentially true of Jesus, who "not only speaks of the Kingdom" but "acts it out..." As such, to the extent that he is Word, this Word is a verb, an "action word."

McKenna speaks of history as a kind of backwash from the eternal; history is a wave -- a timewave. "What we are moving toward in three dimensions is the passing of this wave of understanding into a higher dimension, the realm of the atemporal." And "the real Anti-Christ is history's distorted reflection of the Christ at the end of time." It is precisely this that causes the left to never stop immanentizing the eschaton with their good intentions.

About that atemporal reality to which we are (hope-fully) headed. Spitzer suggests that it "brings not only the satisfaction of intellectual curiosity, but the satisfaction of being immersed in tremendous beauty, the beauty of complete intelligibility, perfect symmetry, perfect creativity, perfect mind, and the perfect love behind it all." In this vision, "truth is beauty and beauty is truth; love and goodness are truth and beauty; and truth and beauty are love and goodness" beheld "in the midst of real interpersonal love" and joy.

So, the Kingdom of Heaven is really a "grace-filled adventure" toward its own fulfillment. Otherwise I just don't see the point.

Psychedelic Christianity

I have a little unexpected timelessness this morning to ponder the imponderable...

Back when I was in graduate school, I happily toiled as a retail clerk, often on the graveyard shift. The tranquility and silence of an empty supermarket afforded me much facetime with myself; this forced contact between me and my own dreadful abyss helps explain why, to this very day, I am able to live with myself. Or at least tolerate the bastard.

But that gets old after awhile, so I started listening to a portable radio. This was before the days of widespread talk radio, plus I was a lefty back then, so I would frequently tune into the barking lefthound side of the dial, i.e., public- and listener-supported radio. If you think what goes on there during the day is crazy, you should listen in at 3:00 AM, when no one's listening.

For many years I was devoted to a program on Pacifica Radio called Something's Happening. It was on Sunday through Friday mornings, like midnight to 6:00 AM, and featured all kinds of counter-cultural metaphysical, mystical, scientific, political, and religious sense and nonsense. (Looks like it is still on to this day.) For example, once a week it featured lectures by Alan Watts and Krishnamurti. I also remember frequent talks by Timothy Leary, Ram Dass, Noam Chomsky, Joseph Campbell, David Bohm, and various Buddhists, Jungian psychologists, astrologers, and sundry healers and holy men.

But the guest who made the biggest impression on me was the "ethnobotanist" Terence McKenna. Many if not most readers will have heard of him. He was one of the most mesmerizing speakers I had ever heard, able to somehow combine science with the psychedelic experience in such away that he made the weirdness of it all seem plausible. At least at 3:00 AM, when the world was soundasleep but the right brain was wideawake.

Although I reject a lot of his details, he definitely helped open me to the transdimensional nature of reality. Through him I was introduced to Whitehead, Joyce, mystical Christianity, and other enduring themes and interests. Ultimately I think it's because of him that I wanted to write a Really Weird Book. In fact, one of my problems with Christianity was that it wasn't weird enough. In reality it's plenty weird, but the weirdness tends to get worn away as the shocking message tumbles down the centuries.

Anyway, I was recently thumbing through a volume of his works and was reminded of how I am still attracted to the idea of a psychedelic Christianity, minus the psychedelics.

In the preface to the book, he (humbly) speaks of how he "had apparently evolved into a sort of mouthpiece for the incarnate Logos," based upon the startled reaction of his listeners: "I could talk to small groups of people with what appeared to be electrifying effect about the peculiarly transcendental matters that you will read about in these pages."

I well remember the electrifying effect, although I don't know that it would occur today, some thirty or more years later. But I know what he means when he writes that "It was as though my ordinary, rather humdrum personality had simply been turned off and speaking through me was the voice of another, a voice that was steady, unhesitating, and articulate -- a voice seeking to inform others about the power and promise" of other dimensions.

Now, religion as such is obviously about the power and promise of these other dimensions, and about revealing the hidden vertical continuity between Here and There. Back when I was conceiving the book, I concluded that, just as animals presumably evolved into a specifically human consciousness, human consciousness was evolving further into a spiritual dimension; or rather, animal neurology evolved to the point that it could enter the human space (or they could sponsor the ingression of a soul), and it is the task of human beings to further explore and acclimate themselves to a spiritual space that is prior to them. "Civilization" is its terrestrial residue.

McKenna speaks of consciousness as a "hyper-organ" that gives access "to the doorway" through which "the dead pass daily." What I would say is that mind is the first nonlocal organ, not bound by space and time but able to rise above and beyond it into realms of truth, beauty, goodness and unity. But we need to develop it in order "to navigate in hyperspace" and get to know the area.

McKenna helped me to connect everyday language to the Logos, and to show their necessary relationship. The trick is "to describe the phenomenon as accurately as possible. My task is compounded by the fact that the phenomenon I must try to describe has itself to do with the very tools of description; i.e., language.... since the phenomenon begins at the edge of language, where the concept-forming faculty gropes but finds no words, I must be careful to avoid not distinguishing between mere language-symbol-metaphor and the reality I am attempting to apply it to."

This is precisely what I attempted to do in the prologue and epilogue of the book. I'm not saying I succeeded, only that I was toying or playing with the idea of deploying language to make present the reality to which it is pointing. Or as McKenna describes it, it is a making visible of "the normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together." Hey, someone's gotta do it.

McKenna also helped me make sense of Christian eschatology, the idea that history aims at its own fulfillment beyond history; history is "the shock wave of the final actualization of the potential of the human psyche." Thus, the thing we call history is a kind of race down from the trees of west Africa, to the wide open spaces of temporal change and development, and back up the nonlocal tree whose roots are aloft and branches down below.

To be continued...