Spheresville, DaddiO

Man today does not live in space and in time. But in geometry and chronometers. --Dávila

Quality is reduced to quantity, placing man behind bars of math and physics. Then, like a frog at the bottom of a dark well of tenure, we can never perceive where we are actually situated in the wider context of things.

One popular way to discover where we are in the world -- meaning existence itself -- is to consult our desire. It's far from the best way, but at least you know where you stand: relative to what you want.

In our consumer culture, it seems that many people unreflectively order their lives in this way. I probably sound like a 50s beatnik, but it's true that this kind of shallow materialism gets you nowhere, since it involves one relativity in relation to another, and then one acquisition followed by another until death do you depart. Squaresville.

However, not always. Desire is situated on a vertical scale, and some desires are closer to the absolute than others -- for example, a desire for aesthetic beauty. As Schuon describes it, "Human will is, virtually and vocationally, the tendency toward the absolute Good." And "secondary goods, whether they be necessary or simply useful, are determined indirectly by the choice of the supreme Good." It's a matter of putting things in order.

The will cannot determine the good, only pursue what the intellect and/or sentiment have placed before it. Whereas the intellect is ordered to (ultimately) absolute truth, the sentiment is ultimately "love of the Sovereign Beauty and of its reverberations in the world and in ourselves."

Now we begin to see how the soul is oriented in the immaterial spacetime mentioned in yesterday's post: in this space, truth and beauty are vertical dimensions.

In the novella Flatland, its citizens inhabit a two dimensional world, such that the third dimension becomes a source of mystery and wonder for some, irritation and threat for others -- for example, seeing a point transform into a circle, then back to a point before disappearing. This must mean that something like a sphere exists and moves in a higher dimensional space, even though inhabitants don't have direct access to this space per se.

It's the same here in our world, only constantly. That is, we are routinely visited by angelic presences and specters from nonlocal dimensions. Like a Flatlander who denies the existence of spheres, we can always insist that this world alone is a sufficient explanation for everything that goes on in it. What is a materialist but a man who claims there's no such place as Spheresville? And what is a mystic but a man who has been there?

Once returned to Flatland, the [mystical] Square cannot convince anyone of Spaceland's existence, especially after official decrees are announced that anyone preaching the existence of three dimensions will be imprisoned (or executed, depending on caste).

Eventually the Square himself is imprisoned for just this reason, with only occasional contact with his brother who is imprisoned in the same facility. He does not manage to convince his brother, even after all they have both seen. Seven years after being imprisoned, A Square writes out the book Flatland in the form of a memoir, hoping to keep it as posterity for a future generation that can see beyond their two-dimensional existence (Prof. Wiki).

Huh. A prophet is without honor in his own dimension.

Continuing for the moment with Schuon, he mentions that piety "is essentially the sense of the sacred, of the transcendent, of profundity." In other words, the sense of piety is a real sense that senses real things, only in vertical space. This is what the Square would say about Spaceland: no, it is not some kind of an illusion or escape from reality, but an actual place.

Reducing Spaceland to Flatland is exactly like reducing transcendence to immanence; and with it, absolute to relative, truth to opinion, beauty to accident, mind to matter. It is to put a lid on the spirit, so as to bar it from contact with its own source and sufficient reason. In other words, in this scenario, the soul is not permitted to know where it came from and where it is going, i.e., its origin and destiny, ground and telos.

"My kingdom is not of this world." To the gallows!

A little threatened?

All wars are about territory. Our present culture war is no exception, except that it involves vertical territory. True, you could say it involves horizontal territory in the sense that, for example, the left wants to overrun the country by an invasion of illegal immigrants.

But this is not really the case, or the underlying motivation. The left doesn't care about illegal immigrants -- or any other human beings, for that matter -- except insofar as they are illegal Democrats. They would have built a wall long ago if our shores were being invaded by illegal conservatives.

The point is, the illegals are just a proxy for the conquest of a vertical psycho-political, cultural space. Otherwise immigrants are as useless to the left as anyone else.

As piety is a spontaneous sense of transcendence -- of height, depth, and sanctity -- humility is spontaneous awareness "of our metaphysical nothingness." Not nothingness relative to itself, which would simply be nihilism. Rather, nothingness relative to God.

In other words, to sense God is to be aware of our own relative nothingness. Who wouldn't be humble in the face of such a perception? It's really just another name for sanity. What's the alternative?

There are alternatives, and not just a crude denial of Spheresville. You don't have to just become the village ideologue or materialist. For example, as the Aphorist says, Man inflates his emptiness in order to challenge God. Like how an animal can make itself look larger in the face of a threat.

However, notice that when the animal does this, it is because it perceives a real potential threat. Likewise the atheist. Which is why Eckhart cracked that he who blasphemes praises God. Just so, what more proof do you need of God than the existence of atheists?

As to our sense of Spheresville, a few aphorisms (emphases mine):

Faith is not an irrational assent to a proposition; it is a perception of a special order of realities.

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says.

The thirst for the great, the noble and the beautiful is an appetite for God that is ignored.

Nevertheless, the Creator made us free, and there's not a damn thing we can do about it. Thus,

Each one sees in the world only what he deserves to see.

Losing Our Religion and Finding Our Antichrist

I want to go back to the question of exactly -- exactly! -- where we are. In order to answer the question, we have to posit an immaterial space and an atemporal time. This is because there can be no merely scientific answer to the question. To be sure, science can answer the question in a multitude of ways, but any answer it furnishes will only satisfy the incurious, the credulous, the tenured.

The best science can do is to say that we exist in relation to a primordial event that occurred 13.7 billions years ago, AKA the Big Bang. For science, this must be the absolute, the origin, the center, the source of all existence.

But it's really just a vastly diminished placeholder for God. It is unthinkingly given all the attributes of God, in that from it springs everything from life to mind to truth, beauty, love -- the whole existentialada.

I can't even get this fable past my son. Or perhaps I should say "especially" my son, because a child's mind will not be as easily pacified by such totally implausible answers.

For example, if the truth of the Big Bang is relative to the Big Bang, then it can't really be true. Rather, if it is true, then it somehow transcends the Big Bang, since truth is not a material thing. The Big Bang is supposed to be our ultimate container. If so, it cannot be contained by anything else. And yet, we contain it in our abstract conception of it. As the old gag goes, the soul is not in the cosmos, but vice versa. It's how knowledge is possible.

No, there is can be no purely material explanation for man. Yes, we are surely relative to something absolute, but it can't be the Big Bang. It can't be the laws of physics, or natural selection, or, for that matter, race, class, gender, or any other political pseudo-absolute.

In his Book of Absolutes, Gairdener writes of how

citizens of the Western world have been uncritically subjected in the media, the public square, and the classroom to the disturbing idea that there is no permanent truth in human life or in the material world and that the meaning of something can therefore be found only relative to something else. For most of us, this has become the only indisputable truth of modern times, and we announce it from a higher moral ground as a badge of our open-mindedness.

Even though this must be the last word in closed-mindedness. It is the ultimate foreclosure, since it forecloses the Ultimate. "Ironically" -- I would say "inevitably" -- "relativism has become our only absolute." But "absolute relativity" is strictly impossible; it simply cannot be. It is a self-negating contradiction in terms.

According to the perennial philosophy -- or my version of it, anyway -- a thing only exists to the extent that it participates in Being. Every existent has a thatness and a whatness, the former going to substance, the latter to essence. As mentioned the other day, there are things that have essence but no existence, say, a unicorn, or a successful socialist country. Just as to exist is to partake of being, I would say that to be relative is to partake of absoluteness.

Again, we have to imagine another type of spacetime that is actually much more fundamental than the spacetime of mere physics. Indeed, I would say that the latter is a kind of shadow or echo of the former -- which is one reason why it is so silly to maintain that time only begins with the Big Bang.

As existence is rooted in being, time is rooted in the atemporal -- which is not timelessness per se, but a different order of time. There is still time in heaven, but it is more analogous to dream time; it is a more fulsome and multifarious time, the "hypertime" from which time is a declension. Herebelow, time cannot give without taking away. In the next (vertically adjacent) world, it only gives, since there can be no privation in God.

I think this goes to the question of "paradise" and of the fall and exile therefrom. Apparently there was -- is -- no privation in Eden. Rather, privation results from a kind of descent. Obviously this descent is not in physical space, but it is nevertheless a kind of vertical plunge. But how? From what? Into what? And can we stop it? Or is resistance to the resistance futile?

This descent must somehow be "away from" the source, the real Absolute. Now, man is always condemned to transcendence, which is another way of saying he is vertically free. Problem is, he is repeatedly seduced by what amounts to a transcendence from below (the sssnake being a perfectly adequate sssymbol of horizontality and below-ness).

Call it sss-sin if you like, but this is a much more systematic plunge than just this or that naughty choice. Leftism, with its iconoclastic destruction of standards and absolutes, is a perpetual transcendence from below, which is why yesterday's liberal is today's fascist.

Secularism in all its forms is an attempt at liberation and wholeness from below. Which of course is impossible. It can never be more than a pseudo-compensation on a lower plane for the loss of the higher. Schuon describes the situation:

Once Heaven was closed and man in effect installed in God's place, the objective measures of things were lost, virtually or actually; they have been replaced by subjective measures, purely human and conjectural pseudo-measures, and thus man has become involved in a movement that cannot be halted, since in the absence of celestial and stable measures there is no longer any reason for it to be halted, so that in the end a stage is reached at which human measures are replaced by infra-human measures until the very idea of truth is abolished.

Aaaand here we are. As mentioned a few posts back, the plague of "fake news" is just a symptom of a much more systematic fakery. For you can't really eliminate God; rather, you just replace him with a fake, and the most destructive faker of all is man. Don't believe me. Believe Dávila:

Not only is humanity the only totally false god, but The Antichrist is probably Man.

So, He who does not believe in God can at least have the decency of not believing in himself.

The Crisis of High Self-Esteem

Hmm. I suppose the problem with so few comments is that I no longer have a sense of my audience. Or perhaps even "audience." The absence of feedback breeds a sense of isolation. Or, one can't help interpreting the seeming indifference as a form of feedback. As in silence, the deafening kind.

Suppose you're on stage and pour your heart into a performance. You stare out into the darkness and can't hear any reaction. No one cheers. No one boos. Rather, just silence. One such experience would be a little strange, but repeated ones would start to get eery. And why is this guy up on stage? Is he delusional? Or just pathetic?

I can picture a Twilight Zone episode along these lines. The houselights dim at the commencement of the performance. After increasingly desperate attempts to get a reaction from the audience, our protagonist runs over to the control panel and frantically switches on the lights. He looks out and sees... an audience full of grinning skeletons. The joke's on him.

Am I complaining? Nah. Just wondering. Just typing the first thing that pops into the head, like any other morning.

An added concern is the uniqueness of the blog. Out of the millions of other blogs out there, I feel I am justified in suspecting that there is no other like it. But uniqueness cuts both ways, especially for someone who isn't particularly self-confident. If we are different from the crowd and people don't respond, the default human reaction is to ask What's wrong with me?

In fact, one thing that persistently amazes me about this world is the number of people with far more self-confidence than I will ever have, but with so little reason. Let me be clear: I'm not complaining about low-self esteem. Rather, I think my estimation of myself is pretty objective. What I don't understand is why most everyone in public life seems so lacking in this objectivity.

One could cite thousands of examples from politics, the media, entertainment, and academia, but why, for example, is this Ocasio-Cortez person so preternaturally confident? Why is she not dying of shame? I wouldn't be able to leave the house.

Really, it's just another example of our national crisis of self-esteem. There is waaaaay too much of it. Which is by no means an argument for low self-esteem. Rather, for accurate, which is to say, objective self-esteem. Everyone is precious, but few are special.

Let's say you are a musician, of which there are millions in the world. How many of these are actually special? Certainly fewer than one percent.

Everyone and every skill is distributed along a Bell Curve. If I remember my statistics class correctly, in a normally distributed Bell Curve -- say, vis-a-vis IQ -- 68% of the population will fall one standard deviation above or below the mean, and 95% will be within two standard deviations. 2% are significantly above average (three deviations), while only .1% are waaaay above average (four).

If you are in that .1%, you are entitled to call yourself special. But only in the particular skill being measured! For example, Einstein was no doubt among the .1% in math and physics. What about politics? In that case, he is among the 99.9%.

Labron James? .1% in basketball. Everything else? 99.99.

As you may have noticed from the sidebar, I read a lot of books about musicians and the music industry. I love reading about .1% musicians and their creative process.

But I am also struck at how there seems to be a kind of cosmic compensation at work, such that these musical geniuses and visionaries are not only average in other areas, but often totally dysfunctional. If they weren't great musicians, most would be dead or in prison. It's hard to imagine, for example, Miles Davis, functioning in any other context but music.

We've blogged about this subject in the past. The so-called "self-esteem movement" got underway in the 1970s, and was one of the first signs of the rot that would eventually pervade the discipline of psychology. Note that this movement is an exact inverted image not only of our venerable "wisdom tradition," but every wisdom tradition since man has been man.

"Humility" is not just a spiritual imperative, but a quality of sanity -- of objectivity toward oneself. In other words, if one is honest with oneself, one will naturally be humble. After all, you know all your secrets, so you, more than anyone else, have reason to be humble.

We have a right to feel good about ourselves, so long as we aren't fooling ourselves. But man has no right to ever-estimate himself, because this is a doorway to horror. Our bloodiest century -- that would be #20 -- resulted from the absurdly high self-esteem of a handful of people -- Hitler, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, et al.

My son has lately developed an interest in World War II, so the other night I re-watched Saving Private Ryan with him. One comes away from the film with a sense of humility and gratitude toward those who sacrificed for a country that has given us so much. At the end, the elderly Ryan speaks for us when he says to his wife, "tell me I've lived a good life... Tell me I'm a good man!"

Conversely, imagine an Obama -- a malignant narcissist with delusional self-esteem -- who wonders instead why the country doesn't measure up to him.

Well, what have we learned this morning? I don't know. I suppose that with so little feedback, this blog will become more of an idiosyncratic, circumnavelgazing diary. I'm still on stage, performing as usual. But with just me in the audience. Boooooooooo!

When Reality is Against the Law

If reality is outlawed, then only outlaws will be in touch with it. Sounds like a gag, but that thought occurred to me repeatedly while reading the excellent When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. In general I try to fight my nature and be as pessimistic as possible, but this book shows that I have room for improvement on that score.

Let's begin with a wide angle view: if we don't inhabit a common reality, then... then what? It seems to me that both a culture and a nation are rooted in the idea of a common reality -- especially the former, which is prior to the nation. Ideally a nation should share a common culture, but this is obviously not always the case.

Prior to the emergence of the modern nation state, we had empires. Empires ruled over a multitude of peoples with different conceptions of reality. They didn't particularly care what one believed, so long as one didn't threaten the authority of the state. Think of the Jews vis-a-vis the Roman Empire. They were given fairly wide latitude to live in their own reality so long as that reality was subordinate to the reality of Rome.

"Ironic" that the Author of history is a victim of history for precisely violating this principle -- for "stirring up the people" with talk of a kingdom beyond the authority of Caesar. As a result, Reality was essentially crucified by appearances. But you can't get rid of reality that easily. On the one hand,

As long as they do not take him seriously, the man who speaks the truth can live for a while in a democracy. Then, the hemlock.

But lucky for us,

The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain.

More to the point, The truth does not share the defeat of its defenders. Woo hoo!

Here we see that Truth is in history, but history is not truth (Dávila x 4). Again, history crucifies Truth. Repeatedly. But Truth somehow survives. Like a resurrection or something.

Anyway, back to the main thread: most nation states are historical contingencies sprinkled with a bit of necessity. The United States was founded along opposite lines: it is expressly rooted in metaphysical necessity, AKA self-evident truths. While the US obviously has a history, its history should be a kind of temporal unfolding of its timeless first principles: an expanding empire of liberty.

For example, the civil rights movement -- back when it actually promoted civil rights -- was animated by those first principles lodged in the Declaration of Independence. Today it is rooted in the explicit denial of those same principles. How did -- does -- this happen?

It essentially happens because of complacency. For example, if crime were eliminated for a few generations, people would eventually stop locking their doors and arming themselves. Before long, criminals would thrive, and people would wonder and debate about the reasons why.

Back in 1972, President Nixon signed into law an innocuous piece of legislation called Title IX. All it said was that no US citizen "shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal assistance." Nothing in there violates our first principles, because there's nothing in the Constitution suggesting that the federal government should privilege one sex over the other.

But that was back when sex meant sex, and there were two of them. In the meantime, activists have decided that sex means gender, and there are 56 (and counting) of them. Those of us who live in the real world of the plain meaning of the law are now outlaws. Literally.

Everything changed in 2016, when the Obama administration arbitrarily decided that "sex" actually meant "gender." Therefore, Title IX entailed new crimes and regulations that no one had envisioned in 1972 -- back in pre-post-biological days, when there were two sexes.

Based upon the Obama administration's redefinition of sex -- and it's only logical, once you accept the insane premise -- health insurance polices were naturally forced to cover sex-change procedures, from hormone supplementation to body dismemberment. The military too was forced to submit to unreality. Likewise Medicare, sex-specific emergency centers, school bathrooms. "We are collaborating with madness," said psychiatrist Dr. Paul McHugh, "rather than trying to study, cure, and ultimately prevent it."

Well, it depends on what one means by "madness." Isn't one man's madness just another man's preference? In a way, yes. That is, on a purely political basis, if one is a libertarian, then it costs us nothing if our neighbor wishes to mutilate himself at his own expense. But the idea that I should be forced at gunpoint to pay for the mutilation is another matter entirely.

And on a psychological basis, there actually is -- or used to be -- such a thing as madness. As recently as the 1980s, when I was in graduate school, craziness was still a thing. But that was before the crazies took over the discipline. Now, "As of May 2017, eight states had enacted laws" that bar health-care professionals "from employing practices aimed at changing the sexual orientation or gender identity of minors..."

Now interestingly, the way I was trained, you never try to change anyone per se, whether the patient thinks he's a martian or a member of the opposite sex. Rather, you try to help the patient understand the reasons why he imagines something to be the case. Note that you don't need to search for reasons why someone believes something that is the case.

For example, no one needs to undergo psychoanalysis to uncover the "real" reason why he believes in gravity, or the law of non-contradiction, or that his gender just so happens to match his sex.

But "why" is the most dangerous and subversive -- but liberating -- question humans can ask, so no wonder the left always and everywhere tries to restrict or ban it. To be continued....

When I Wish Becomes It Is

The question before the house is Where are we? Yes, we live in relativity, but relativity can only be understood in light of the Absolute.

However, things get complicated, or at least ambiguous, because we can never know the Absolute, even though we can't do without it. Rather, it exists for us like an implicit placeholder for wholeness and totality. It is like the cognitive sun around which we orbit, except it is a sun we can't literally see. Still, it's always there.

I am reminded of a book conveniently called The Book of Absolutes: A Critique of Relativism and a Defence of Universals. One anthropologist has identified 311 human universals, which are defined as "observable cultural features, practices, behaviors, or beliefs that appear in all human societies in history."

But we're actually talking about something deeper -- something that serves as the prior condition or deep structure of these surface universals, analogous to the "universal grammar" said to underlie all human languages.

Off the top of my head, I would say that these surface universals are to the Absolute as existence is to Being. A thing only exists because it partakes of a Being that is prior to it. Being is necessary, while contingent existents not only partake of Being, but only exist to the extent that they do.

I am at a crossroads. This subject is so full of implications that it could go in a dozen different directions. Let's briefly touch on our civil war. Why are we amidst one? Well, it really comes down to a war between absolutists and relativists. Except with a twist, since the relativists give a pass to their own relativism, and elevate it to a pseudo-absolute.

To repeat an aphorism from yesterday, The progressive believes that everything soon turns obsolete except his ideas. For The relativist rarely relativizes himself.

Really, there can no such thing as an honest relativist, because if there is no truth there can be neither honesty nor dishonesty. So, never ask why this or that leftist politician is "dishonest," for in their universe this is irrelevant. For them, a statement can be expedient, or convenient, or "empowering," but its truth is literally beside (or outside) the point.

So, To scandalize the leftist, just speak the truth. Literally.

Example.

Okay, here is one from When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment. Anderson notes that this movement "promotes a radical subjectivity in which individuals should be free to do whatever they wish and to define the truth as they choose" -- BUT -- at the same time call for "enforced conformity of belief in transgender dogma."

Not only is the totalitarian nature of the left clothed in relativism, but relativism is always a prelude to totalitarianism, because with no appeal to truth, power rushes in to fill the vacuum. It's really a heaven-and-hell situation, because hell is any place where truth is not only irrelevant and impotent, but caricatured as a kind of monstrous authoritarianism.

In this inverted cosmos, someone like a Justice Scalia is the authoritarian monster, instead of the bullying anti-intellectual mob of Ginsberg-Kagan-Breyer-Sotomayer.

People say "metaphysics is dead." What they should say is that it is deadly. Anderson correctly notes that

We live in a postmodern age that promotes an alternative metaphysics. At the heart of the transgender moment are radical ideas about the human person -- in particular, that people are what they claim to be, regardless of contrary evidence. A transgender boy is a boy, mot merely a girl who identifies as a boy.

Thus, their rhetoric "drips with ontological assertions: people are the gender they prefer to be." Think for a moment about the implications of a metaphysic in which "I wish" is utterly conflated with "It is." This is a radical subjectivism, but again, opponents -- people who live in the objective world -- are not accorded the same privilege of elevating our wishes to reality.

Now, in reality, I Want must always be parasitic on It Is. For example, perhaps I want a pet unicorn. Well, unicorns Are Not, so my I Want is utterly beside the point. It is just an impotent wish.

I'm also thinking of how the Absolute-Relative complementarity bears on the Appearance-Reality axis. For these same activists transform the reality -- one's biological sex -- into a mere appearance, and the appearance -- what I imagine I am -- into the reality.

It also reminds me of the first principle of economics, which is scarcity, meaning that there is always going to be a tension between I Want and It Is, or desire and desirable. In other words, there is never enough of the latter to satisfy the former.

Think of Venezuela, where they literally can't print enough paper money to satisfy the most simple want. Inflation is verging on "a million percent," but that's just an abstraction rooted in the insane belief that government can satisfy infinite desire. In order to do so, it must itself become absolute, AKA totalitarian.

Socialism can drive away It Is -- including human nature -- with a pitchfork, but it always returns.

Stop the Cosmos and Let Me Off!

I'm still on this question of Where Are We?, which means that it must not have been sufficiently beaten to death yesterday. I have the image in mind of two objects. If one of the objects is moving, there is no way of knowing which one it is.

It reminds me of a fews occasions when I parked my car but forgot to pull the brake. It slowly rolled backward, but out of the corner of my eye it looked as if the car next to me were pulling forward. Then I looked up and saw the wider context, and snapped out of my optical illusion before hitting something behind me.

Well, in the absence of an ontological parking brake, we are unavoidably trapped in an existential illusion from which there is no escape. Absoluteness must be somewhere, or thinking itself is impossible. For if knowledge isn't certain, then it isn't knowledge.

It's analogous to the solar system. It too has a center around which things turn. And just like the car analogy, it looks as if earth has a parking brake and the sun is rolling forward.

Recall the pneumagraph of the cosmos in yesterday's post, with us at the center. As we've discussed in the past, you have to actually imagine a cone like shape, such that the center is also at the top.

This is true both literally and figuratively, as we are simultaneously at the center of existence and uniquely able to regard it from the outside or top. The unthinking cliché that heliocentrism and Darwinism somehow ousted man from the center of the universe is just... an unthinking cliché. To the extent that it is true, it can only be said by a creature situated at the top and center. It can only be said by someone with access to a cognitive parking brake.

Let's be precise here. It's not that the human subject is the center, but it is a center because it is a prolongation or projection of Celestial Central. We are anchored in absoluteness, or in the orbit of O. It is why we can know things with certainty. To say certitude is to say God. Which is why it is NO JOKE to say that if God doesn't exist, only He knows it.

Granted, there is Certitude and there is "certitude." One fallout from the fall is that man is obnoxiously certain about certain things that are only anchored in illusion. You could say that with the Fall, man lost his parking brake and therefore his certitude. With no parking brake, there are only opinions.

It reminds me of our Constitution, which is supposed to be our political parking brake. If the Constitution starts to move, then there is literally no brake on the power of the state. Then absoluteness is transferred from the people to the state, and our experiment in liberty is effectively over. Which is precisely how the left has wanted it to be, beginning with Woodrow Wilson:

“If you want to understand the real Declaration of Independence, do not repeat the preface.” Equality, natural rights, consent of the governed -- these are not the fundamental principles that inform the purpose of government....

The Founders held that the purpose and form of government was inextricably tied to a fixed and imperfect human nature. Wilson, on the other hand, argued that government must evolve because human nature itself is changeable, and has progressed beyond the limitations that the Founders identified.

Far from fearing man’s capacity to form majority factions and trample on the rights of others, Wilson held that human beings, now enlightened by the passage of time, could be entrusted with power without abusing it.

In short, the Constitution, what with its stupid parking brake, "hinders the achievements of true justice." That would be social justice, which is the pretext for a power both omniscient and omnipotent, because only such a power could restore man to primordial justice -- good and hard. It's another name for Hell, and it's as simple as 1-2-3:

1: The proclamation of our autonomy is the founding act of Hell.

2: The progressive believes that everything soon turns obsolete except his ideas.

3: Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized.

Or put it this way:

Here begins the gospel of Hell: In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing (Dávila x 4).

Where Are We Really?

Picking up the previous thread, the first freedom -- or at least its precondition -- is freedom from oneself, i.e., self-transcendence. This introduces a seeming paradox into the cosmos, which is to say, a Who and Whom in the same being. Just Who is free from Whom? Who is the who and who is the whom? And how?

Freedom necessarily leads all the way to the top: to say freedom is to say God. Conversely, to deny God is to eliminate even the possibility of freedom and of thinking (and therefore of man). Some people will say, problem solved! But Stanley Jaki speaks for me:

What is needed is merely an intimation that freedom or rather free will belies mere material existence.... For, in the final analysis, the elemental registering of free will almost exhausts whatever can be said about its reality.

Some things are irreducible: they cannot be reduced to anything but themselves. Freedom is one of these irreducibles. It is like a rope suspended from the source of being to the center of the soul. If it weren't there, then there would be no escape or inscape. We would be sealed under an impenetrable sheet of rock, or buried alive in our own neurology, or enclosed in absolute tenure.

Not to abruptly change the subject, but all weekend I was haunted (in a good way) by the question, Where are we? In the absence of God, it is impossible to answer this question in a non-relativistic way. You could say we are on earth, but earth is relative to the sun, the sun to the Milky Way, the Milky Way to some galactic cluster, etc., all the way up to a cognitive placeholder we call the "cosmos."

Below is a pneumagraph of the situation, with you at the center:

Says wiki, it depicts the "observable universe with the Solar System at the center, inner and outer planets, Kuiper belt, Oort cloud, Alpha Centauri, Perseus Arm, Milky Way galaxy, Andromeda galaxy, nearby galaxies, Cosmic Web, Cosmic microwave radiation and the Big Bang's invisible plasma on the edge."

As far as we know, there is no freedom anywhere in this image except at the very center, where you and I dwell at the moment. But freedom itself is a kind of center; you might say that wherever freedom is, there is a subjective center. To a large extent, these two are synonymous: to say subjective center is to say space-of-freedom.

Back to the question of Where we are. Obviously, if this is a relativistic cosmos, then we are nowhere, precisely. You could say that we are relative to the cosmos, but then you've snuck an absolute in through the back door. Again, no one has ever seen the cosmos, and no one ever will. It is an abstract placeholder for a presumed unity of existence. And this presumed unity is just a horizontal shadow of the missing God. As if a shadow can exist without an object and light!

There is no question that we are relative. But relative to what? If we are relative to relativity, this equates to the absolute nothingness of the existentialists. The only other possibility is that we are relative to the Absolute, AKA God. Thus, in answer to the question of where we are, we are either nowhere or in the orbit of God. There are no other possibilities, so at least be honest with yourself.

But what does it mean to be honest with oneself? Now we've introduced a third term to the Who and Whom mentioned in the first paragraph: now we have Who, Whom, and Honesty. We could even say that the Who transcends the Whom in Truth.

Does this make any sense? Another way of outlining the terms is Subject, Object, Adequatuon. Indeed, this is the very structure of science. But it is also the structure of any inquiry of any kind. And the whole thing must circulate in Freedom, or it's just a pointless machine.

Where are we? Good question. Recall that it is the first thing God asks Adam upon his auto-exile: Where are you? It's a rhetorical question, of course. Up to this point Adam is in the orbit of God, i.e., relative to the Absolute. But Adam chooses to be his own pseudo-absolute, and is therefore plunged into the cold and dark of absolute relativity. No wonder he's naked and afraid!

If this post has been a little wooly, here is Schuon explaining it in a more straight upward way:

Human intelligence is, virtually and vocationally, the certitude of the Absolute. The idea of the Absolute implies on the one hand that of the relative and on the other that of the relationship between the two, namely the prefiguration of the relative in the Absolute and the projection of the Absolute in the relative.

Now, go back up to the pneumagraph above. Again, that's you at the center. But you are a projection of the Absolute, which is precisely the difference between being nowhere and somewhere, and even everywhere.

For this is the old circle whose center is everywhere and circumference nowhere. The only alternative is a scientistic/materialistic/atheistic circle whose center is nowhere and periphery everywhere. And if that were our situation, we could never know it. For we are at once in and out of the cosmos; in knowing it we transcend it in freedom and truth, like so:

The First Freedom

In the previous post we were discussing the abilities that not only elevate man over animal, but truly define him, those being an intelligence that discerns between reality and appearance; a will that chooses between good and evil; and sentiment capable of disinterest -- "of looking at itself from without, just as it can put itself in another's place" (Schuon).

Note that these three are necessarily entangled with one another -- distinct but never radically separate, like... like a great a jazz trio or something.

For example, if we cannot distinguish reality from appearances, then it will be difficult to discern good from evil. Instead of choosing the actual good, we might be attracted to what looks or sounds good. In other words, we might be seduced by leftism, which, you might say, is the Doctrine of Good Intentions. But intentions are situated in a temporal chain of cause and effect, and if you champion the cause then you own the effect.

For it is written:

Liberal ideas are congenial. Their consequences are disastrous.

Because The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them (Dávila).

So, if you think the left has ever solved a problem, just wait. Progressives deal only in appearances and therefore symptoms, such that the real problem always returns.

For example, Chicago has some of the strictest gun control laws in the world. So, what's the real problem? Likewise, New York and San Francisco have the most stringent rent control laws in the country, and are two of the most unaffordable places to live. What happened? Or, cities such as Seattle and Portland mandate that employers pay employees more than they're worth, which leads to businesses closing and increased unemployment. I wonder why? Are there laws of economics or something?

More generally, we see that freedom, although one of our most precious birthrights, can become worthless or harmful if detached from its telos in the true and good. If freedom is just freedom, then to hell with it. It is then indistinguishable from nihilism, or even the last word in nothingness. And if you don't understand this literally, then you're not paying attention. You've missed a step somewhere.

More ineluctable truth from the Aphorist:

Freedom is not an end, but a means. Whoever sees it as an end in itself does not know what to do with it when he gets it.

Freedom is not the goal of history but the material that it works with.

The price of absolute freedom would be a vulgarity without limits.

I know, Alex! What is Hollywood?

It get's worse, because freedom misunderstood and misused transforms into a kind of Nameless Dread -- or to what Sartre rightly called existential nausea: total freedom = comprehensive meaninglessness. Which is ironic, because denial of freedom also = comprehensive meaninglessness. Why? Because, although they appear opposite, they are unified in their rejection of our divine-human telos.

I don't mean to lean so hard on the Aphorist this morning, but when you're right you're right, and who else can be so right with so few words?

Whoever is liberated from everything that oppresses him soon discovers that he is also liberated from what protects him.

And if you want to understand this principle all the way down -- or up -- you have to understand it in terms of following in the footsteps of our first father, Adam. His kind of willful "bad liberation" liberates us from what protects us, precisely.

Liberation. One could veer off into a whole new post with the misuse of that word alone! "Women's liberation." "Black liberation." "Gay liberation." "Palestinian liberation." And other traps:

Today what is called “intellectual liberation” is a change of prisons.

Total liberation is the process that constructs the perfect prison.

What is our "first freedom?" -- the freedom that renders man possible? Or, without which no other freedoms can be actualized? I'll let you think about your answer, while I think about mine.

Freedom of speech? Property? Association? Self-defense?

Nah, I don't think those drill all the way down. The first freedom must be... from oneself! This goes back to what Schuon says above about the ability to adopt a disinterested perspective, to look at oneself as if from the outside, and to put ourselves in the place of the other.

This puts a whole new spin on Jesus's reduction of the Law to the love of God and of neighbor, both of which require and perfect self-transcendence. A man who cannot transcend himself is not only not worthy of freedom, but can't really exercise it in its real sense.

For true charity -- AKA caritas -- "consists in abolishing the egocentric distinction between 'me' and the 'other'"; it "implies seeing ourselves in the other and the other in ourselves; the scission between ego and alter must be overcome, that the cleavage between Heaven and earth may be healed" (Schuon).

So, the first freedom and the first charity involve the elimination of an assoul -- a self-centered assoul called I.

The first act of charity is to rid the soul of illusions and passions and thus rid the world of a maleficent being; it is to make a void so that God may fill it and, by this fullness, give Himself. A saint is a void open for the passage of God (Schuon).

Essential Truth & the God of Gaplessness

The end came abruptly this morning, so let's hurry! Not you. Just me. You are free to read as slowly as usual.

Schuon has a way of reducing complex realities to their essence, but this essence then rebounds and causes its own explosion(s), expanding outward (and inward), as it were.

I suppose it's not dissimilar to scientific theories -- for example, the theory of natural selection, which reduces the entire biosphere to a simple formula, which then leads to explosive insights -- to seeing the world in a new way.

I studied a great many psychological theories back in the day, but none were as pithy -- nor as essential -- as this: that man is intelligence, will, and sentiment, and that's about it. Actually, that's only a partial description, because any mammal has intelligence, will, and emotion/sentiment. What then sets apart and defines man?

Let's begin with the first, intelligence -- after all, we are the sapiential homo, i.e., the wise ape. What makes us wise, at least in potential?

One could characterize human intelligence in several ways: it is objective, i.e., capable of detachment and disinterest; it is transcendent, i.e., immaterial, or distinct from the matter it considers; and it is total, i.e., capable of comprehending anything susceptible to comprehension, from the empirical below to the rational, mathematical, and principial above.

These capabilities are -- literally in this case -- a quantum leap above the animal domain. Problem, is, orthodox biology does not permit of leaps, so there must (for it) be a continuum between ape and man, and therefore (to take just one example) embodied intelligence and transcendent, disembodied intelligence.

But that's a tough argument to make. As we've said before, devotees of scientism like to ridicule the "God of the gaps," but a much more serious problem is their primitive god of gaplessness.

Why? Because the gaps are ineluctably real, and you can't make them go away by a simple wave of the tongue. Some of the more important gaps are between necessary being and contingent existence, matter and life, and life and consciousness.

It reminds me of what Justice Scalia said about people who argue for a constitutional "middle path," say, between a Gorsuch and a Ginsburg. What, to paraphrase Scalia's rhetorical question, is the compromise between what the Constitution says and what liberals want it to say?

It would have to be a modest wish or a slight fantasy or a mild delusion. This doesn't actually eliminate the gap between Is and Want, or Truth and Desire, but just papers it over with what Bion calls hallucinosis:

In other words, the patient... has to deny the existence of an external reality that restricts, oppresses and threatens him with the pain of frustration. Therefore, the only "reality" in which he "believes" is the "reality" generated by himself through the method of hallucinosis.

Indeed, this is why Bion maintained that only the Lie requires a thinker, whereas Truth simply is. This idea made perfect sense to me when I first encountered it some three decades ago, and now I know why. For The truth does not need the adherence of man in order to be certain (Dávila).

Man, for example, is endowed by his Creator with certain unalienable rights. This will always be true, even should the left stack the Supreme Court with enough Ginsburgs to deny it.

Other aphorisms come at the same truth from different angles:

Truth is never a definitive conquest. It is always a position that has to be defended. This is our vocation and our lot. On the positive side, they say a defensive war is always easier than an offensive war.

The truth does not share the defeat of its defenders. This is why the left must be tirelessly hyperactive, even in "victory." See how quickly the redefinition of marriage morphed into the transgender nonsense.

Man goes out hunting less for truths than for loopholes. Again, this requires a thinker, or even worse -- a constitutional scholar!

Truths are whatever any imbecile refutes. As you no doubt know from speaking with liberals, A few lines are enough to demonstrate a truth. Not even a library is enough to refute an error.

Truly, you can't win, unless you are dealing with a person who loves truth for its own sake, but then you're getting into the third human trait mentioned above, disinterested sentiment. For It is the truth of an idea in which we must rejoice, not in its victory. Because no victory lasts.

To be continued...

Fake Nous

The world of fake news encompasses an area far more vast and problematic than just the idiots of the MSM. For really, it goes to the essential dilemma facing man, i.e., the discernment between reality and appearances. The sufficient reason of the intellect (nous) is to know truth. If not, then it -- and man -- is a superfluous absurdity.

The Bible rightly traces the issue back to the very (vertical) beginning: the serpent delivers fake news to Eve, who in turn passes it on to Adam. God then asks Adam "what's new?," and Adam proceeds to lie to God. What else is new?

Now, God is the very source and possibility of truth. Lying to him is like... oh, exiling oneself from paradise. Lies not only fail to attract heaven, but actively repel it. The heavenly presence flees before journalism and tenure. Every bit of fakery retraces the fall.

But the problem goes much deeper than mere bad information, because we live in an age in which "truth" has been subjectivized and is therefore no longer true, precisely. In order to understand this, we need to go back about, oh, 500 years, when it was understood that what we call truth involves adequation of the subject to an object. There is really no other alternative, at least if you want to preserve the category of truth (instead of mere "truth").

For if truth isn't adequation to an objective reality, then it really is just opinion -- which immediately devolves to a situation in which the opinion with the most muscle wins, AKA power prevails over truth.

The left, of course, likes to pretend it "speaks truth to power," but in reality it always speaks opinion backed by power. What is the left but a medley of policies so attractive that we are compelled to assent to them under the threat of state violence?

Truth isn't like that. Rather, truth attracts before it compels. To the extent that it compels, it is like math: if we say two plus two must equal four, that's not a coercion, much less a threat, but a liberating realization.

Likewise, on another plane, if we say there are two and only two genders, that's not slavery but liberation. The whole of science -- or technology, rather -- is based on the idea that bowing to nature on one level leads to mastery of nature on another. You can prefer magic to science, but it will get you nowhere.

The bottom line is that, as Schuon says, "truth comes in a sense from the outside, presenting itself to the subject who may or may not accept it." We are "free" to reject truth, at least in the short term. But truth will always have its vengeance.

Indeed, what is "the fall" but truth avenged? Sure, the contingent can usurp the role of the Absolute, the finite the infinite, man God. For awhile. The cosmos is either a spiraling message from God to himself -- from Alpha to Omega -- or it is a closed and meaningless tautology that man fashions from his own delusions.

Ideology -- which is a substitute for truth -- always devolves to ideolatry. This is because man is always homo religiosus, which is why he instinctively reveres truth, even when it is a lie. Yes, many leftists (especially at the top) are cynical manipulators, but the really dangerous ones are those who are sincerely passionate in defense of their delusion, i.e., in their ideolatry.

Again, the "transition from objectivism to subjectivism reflects and renews in its own way the fall of Adam and the loss of Paradise" (Schuon). Where did paradise go? It was swallowed by the Lie. For the Light still shines in the darkness -- the Truth in the false, the reality in the appearances -- but men neither see nor comprehend it.

Therefore, the celestial world, the Kingdom of Heaven, "is shut off from above without our noticing the fact," but this is compensated for by the (or a) world -- as in the old gag about losing one's soul but gaining the world. Or, you could say, gaining the horizontal at the expense of the vertical, but it is only the latter that gives meaning to the former. In the absence of verticality, man and world are nothing, just a brief swarm of insects.

Yes, the world becomes like a giant roach motel: attractive and enticing, but not the least bit liberating. You check in at birth, but in so doing, you check into a prison. With postmodernity, we reach a stage in which "human measures are replaced by infra-human measures until the very idea of truth is abolished" (ibid.).

Mission accompliced, in that Satan could never achieve such a grand finale without his favorite accomplice -- i.e., without man's tireless cooperation.

But not to worry. The truth does not share the defeat of its defenders (Dávila). And I AM -- the ultimate truth, or Truth of truth -- has overcome the world.

A World of Language and the Grammar of Being

Continuing with the previous post... yes, it was an idiosyncratic one, but what am I supposed to do? Refuse it before it comes down? Mark it "return to sender"? Tell it to find another stenographer? You can't do that, because you don't know what you have until you have it. Yes, but prepositions? Do they really have anything to do with anything, let alone everything?

My first impulse would be to say "nah," but the more I think about it, the more central they are -- beginning with the more general idea that this is not just a logocentric cosmos but a grammatical one, because words are of limited use if they aren't ordered. My dogs, for example, know a few words, but they don't know any sentences.

Now I'm in the wayback machine, remembering when I used to work the graveyard shift in a supermarket. While stocking the shelves I'd listen to an esoteric radio program that was on from midnight to 5:00 AM, that broadcasted lectures by a spectrum of eminent spiritual, psychological, philosophical, and scientific cranks and geniuses. One of my favorites was Terence McKenna, and he used to go on about how the universe was not made of atoms, electrons, or quarks, but of language. It seemed daring and revolutionary at the time, but now strikes me as duh!

Let me see if I can find an exact quote. Speaking of downloading posts, McKenna writes of his own experience, "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..."

Indeed, sometimes I understand something only because of a kind of "unhesitating authority" with which I say it. In other words, the authority doesn't come from me. Rather, I myself assent to this authority, whatever or whoever this "Petey" is. I'm sure I'm not the only one. Often you don't know what you really believe until you blurt it out. When you do, it is as if it comes from your center, and vanquishes -- at least temporarily -- all doubt.

[T]he normally invisible syntactical web that holds both language and the world together can condense or change its ontological status and become visible. Indeed, there seems to be a parallel mental dimension in which everything is made of the stuff of visible language... (McKenna).

A syntactical web that holds both language and the world together. Before you ask yourself if there could be such a thing, ask yourself how there couldn't be. Moreover, being that the grammar is universal, "organisms have enfolded" in their structure "a message about the structure of the larger universe" (ibid.).

In a very real sense, this is completely uncontroversial, for if the human intellect can accurately describe the nature of reality, it means that this nature is in us. Animals certainly can't do anything remotely similar. It brings to mind the words of Schuon:

Being total, the intelligence takes cognizance of all that is, in the world of principles [vertically] as well as in that of phenomena [horizontally].... Every man can do so in principle, whereas animals cannot.... To say that man is endowed with a sentiment capable of objectivity means that he possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open unto others and unto Heaven...

These are such key ideas that we could spend the rest of the post unpacking them. Perhaps the Key of keys, however, is that while all living beings have a subjectivity, ours is not -- or should not be -- closed in on itself. To the extent that is closed, then it is or becomes dead -- either horizontally or vertically.

This is the deeper principle to which "free speech" appeals. Both freedom and language are nothing if they do not converge on something higher, and they cannot do so unless they are open. Which reminds me of some good news I saw at Ace of Spades this morning:

Indeed, if you went to commit cognitive, spiritual, and civilizational suicide, just ignore this important study. In Civilization: The West and the Rest, Ferguson writes of how this befell both Asia and the Islamic world, and not just "in a manner of speaking," but quite literally, for they deliberately chose vertical and horizontal closure.

China, for example, by 1500 "became willfully hostile to other people's innovations," thereby condemning itself to centuries of stagnation and shrinkage. Likewise, so fearful were the Ottomans of opposing points of view that in 1515 Sultan Salim "threatened with death anyone found using the printing press." Ultimately, the willful "failure to reconcile Islam with scientific progress was to prove disastrous."

"Horizontally," writes Schuon, "the Truth concerns the cosmic, hence phenomenal order," while vertically "it concerns the metaphysical, hence principial order." The world is a tapestry -- a vast area rug -- of principles and phenomena. This is true for believer or unbeliever, clued in duddhist or dead-end clueless alike; it's just that the latter either reduces the vertical to horizontal, or elevates the horizontal to vertical. Both approaches generate incoherence and absurdity. Immediately, if you're paying attention.

Put conversely, the only way to pull this off is to not pay attention to what you're doing: to pull the wool over your own eyes, or to pull the rabbit out of your own head. To what, for example, is the leftist appealing by the desire to shut down free speech? Free speech? No, that can't be. Likewise, to what does the left appeal in its objection to a SCOTUS judge who pledges to be constrained by the plain meaning of Constitution? The Constitution? No, can't be either.

Speaking of witch, to what principle does the "democratic socialist" appeal, democracy or socialism? That's easy: "free stuff" (AKA bribery) before the witch has fifty percent, "democracy" afterwards. Then democracy can be deployed to deny and overturn our liberal order, i.e., private property, the rule of law, and unalienable rights.

It has also occurred to me that the free market economy, a la Hayek, is actually a giant information processing system. Everything we need to know about this system is encoded in the price mechanism, which tells us in an instant about supply, demand, scarcity, availability, etc. Therefore, perhaps the biggest reason why we should object to socialism is on free speech grounds, since it absolutely prevents the economy from transmitting accurate information about supply and demand.

Consider the three areas of the economy most distorted by socialist policies: medicine, college, and housing. Why is a house, of all things, so freaking expensive in California? Because the Democratic socialists who run the state will not allow the economy to speak freely about the subject.

Here is the quote I was looking for, but now we're out of time:

I don't believe that the world is made of quarks or electromagnetic waves, or stars, or planets or any of these things. I believe the world is made of language (McKenna).

The Cosmos: A Dream in the Space Between Prepositions

I have no idea where this post came from. Truly -- for good or ill -- I just started typing, and it wrote itself. It must have been triggered by those prepositions in the title of the previous post, In, Of, and Out.

How is it that prepositions even exist? There are said to be 80 to 100 of these mysterious little words in the English language, including from, to, in, out, under, behind, beneath, above, within, beside, between, etc. The way I learned it back in grade school, a preposition is anything we can say in relation to a house: you can be on it, in it, under it, etc.

You'd think that grammar doesn't reveal anything about the nature of reality, or that there's no particular relationship between it and metaphysics, but then, you'd be wrong, if only because we need language to embody and convey metaphysics. But according to primordial metaphysics, there is something magical per se about language itself, and there is no language without a grammar. Semantics may not be reducible to syntax, but we still need one to express onesoph, let alone three.

Here again, just the fact that revelation can be adequately expressed via language makes language a rather special activity. God can presumably express himself any way he likes -- and he does express himself in diverse modes -- and yet, we all understand that language is privileged, perhaps because it is at once so expansive, precise, and creative. It is infinite, and yet, bound. Or better, infinitude is somehow "in" it.

Note that a universe of prepositions presumes a universe of subjects. Put conversely, in a monadic universe -- whether scientistic or religious -- there can be no prepositions, because nothing can be in relation to anything else. This is the problem with determinism -- again, whether scientistic or religious -- because it eliminates all spatial and temporal relations: if determinism (or predeterminsim) is the case, then if "I" do something, it's really God (or material causes) doing it.

Not to belabor the point, but I find it interesting that prepositions can actually be traced all the way up and into the Godhead: to say that the latter is an irreducible relation of three is to say that God has prepositions.

Think, for example, of the prepositional words of Jesus: "I am in the Father and the Father is in Me," or "you are in Me, and I am in you." On the surface these appear paradoxical, because normally if you are in something, than that thing is outside you. For example, I am now in my coon den, and my coon den is around me. It can't be in me.

Having said that, the classical view holds that knowledge of any kind is only possible because of a kind of inside-to-inside transmission. In order to apprehend an object of any kind, one must first recognize it as an object, which involves an instantaneous recognition of its essence.

For example, when I look outside and see a tree, or bird, or rock, I have unproblematically categorized them by a transcendent essence. If we couldn't do this then we couldn't think, because everything would be a particular case or unique instance. There would be no generalizations.

Getting back to the primordial nature of prepositions, the prologue to John provides some clues: the Word was with God, and yet was God. Big time orthoparadox there: herebelow, where Aristotle rules the day, if A is with A, then A cannot be A. Not so with the nighttime logic that prevails in the Godhead.

Along these lines, I have long felt that the logic of the dream is not peripheral or irrelevant, but is here to tell us a thing or two about reality. For example: I am in my dreams. But wait -- aren't my dreams in me, i.e., in my head? Who's dreaming whom?

Not to go all woo woo on you, but this can lead to some fruitful cogitations. For a Sufi might tell you that "So-called 'reality,' the sensible world that surrounds us and which we are accustomed to regard as 'reality,'" is "but a dream." But a dream is not just anything! For example, only dream logic can explain how knowledge is possible: how it gets from "inside" the object to "inside" us. Are we in the object? Or is it in us? Again, both must be true in order for knowledge to be possible.

So when a Sufi says something like "the whole world of existence is imagination within imagination," that's not just nonsense, but perfect nonsense. For "imagination" doesn't imply "something valueless or false; it simply means 'being a symbolic reflection of something truly real.'"

Recall Dávila's gag that the universe is important or meaningful only if it is an appearance -- a dream, you might say. If it is the reality, then it is as insignificant as a swarm of insects.

Significance itself is a kind of dream, isn't it? But dreams need to be interpreted, and some interpretations are better than others. There are, as Izutsu puts it, "veridical dreams," for there are prophets and visionaries who see them: "Thus, a prophet who lives his life in such an unusual spiritual state may be said to be in a dream all through his life. 'The whole of his life is nothing but a dream within a dream'" (emphases mine, to highlight the prepositions).

Now, the question is, how does all of this get off the goround? In other words, how do humans get this way? How do we leave the mere (material) oneness below and enter the (human) world of threeness above?

People talk about "intelligence" as if it's just a matter of information going from here to there, but the whole process is predicated on a prepositional cosmos and prepositional humans, the latter impossible if the former isn't the case.

What do I mean? I'm not sure I have sufficient time to lay it all out, but it's something that dawned on me back in graduate school, in my study of what is called "object relations," or human development in the context of modern attachment theory.

Where to begin such a large subject? Really, it's laid out in Book Three of the Coonifesto, but that was before I tied it all together into the Trinity. Now I understand that infancy is the way it is because the Godhead is the way it is. You might say that to be human is for humanness to be in us, and that the link between these is love. I'll explain tomorrow... But note that Christ himself is impossible if the cosmos isn't structured in this way... Or, to put it conversely, it helps explain how God can be in human nature and vice versa....

In, Of, and Out of the Cosmos

Lately I've been thinking of shuttering the blog. Are we just going around in circles? Am I just shouting at myself? Maybe I should review the sprawling 3,199 and try to synthesize them into One, before things get any more out of hand...

Here's an important point: human intelligence "is either separative or unitive," depending upon "whether it is applied to the Absolute or the contingent," the latter two reducing to -- in the ultimate sense -- "the Real or the illusory" (Schuon).

This is why in the past I have called religion the science of the ultimate subject (or Real), and science the religion of the ultimate object (the contingent or illusory).

It is also why folks like Thomas Aquinas call theology the "queen of the sciences," because it deals with a more fundamental, enduring, and unchanging reality than does mere science; indeed, profane science, in order to even be itself, must be situated in a more unitive "meta-science." Science analyzes, but only because there is first something to be analyzed: the whole is obviously prior to the parts.

This is not in any sense to devalue science. Rather, there is a reason why science developed in the Christian west and no place else: because we situated it in the correct metaphysic (from which it flows).

Speaking of which, yesterday an elliptical thought occurred to me while on the elliptical. For man there are exactly four possibilities: 1) in the world and of the world; 2) of the world but not in it; 3) neither of nor in the world; and 4) in the world but not of the world.

#4 is of course the Christian way: very much in, but definitely not of.

#1 would be the materialist/atheist way, involving a total denial of transcendence: solely of the world and inescapably in it.

#2 would be like Buddhism, at least for the awakened person who is of this absurd world but has found the escape hatch and is liberated from it.

#3 -- neither of nor in -- is the neoplatonist or Gnostic (in the naughty sense) for whom the world is just a big mistake, so get out now! Or rather, eliminate the illusions of "in" and "of," and you're free. Minus you.

The world is surely an illusion but it is not a mistake. We know it is an illusion because otherwise we wouldn't need science. To take an everyday example, it looks like the sun revolves around the earth, but science reveals this to be an illusion. One could obviously cite thousands of similar cases, but the point again is that an illusion is not a mistake, often just a matter of perspective.

Back to our original point of departure: unitive knowledge (to paraphrase Schuon) assimilates while separative knowledge eliminates. This relationship between separation and assimilation forms a continuous, dynamic complementarity. You could even say that it is the deep structure of the metabolism of thinking, or even the metabolism of being.

Gosh. I would go even further and suggest that it reveals something of what goes on inside the Godhead -- in other words, that this complementary relation is an analogue of the eternal Divine Activity.

Otherwise, why go to all the trouble of positing a dynamic Trinity as the source and ground of all reality? If it's just an impenetrable mystery that teaches us nothing fundamental, then who needs it? For my money, Norris Clarke is the most clear and compelling on this subject, e.g., in Person and Being or The One and the Many.

In the former, for example, he writes that the Trinity is "the very inner nature of the Supreme Being itself -- even before its overflow into creation." It "is an ecstatic process... of self-communicating love." The only distinction between Father and Son "is the distinction of two complementary but opposed relations, Giver and Receiver." Surely this means something. We're not supposed to believe it Just Because.

As Clarke alludes to, this self-communicative love subsequently -- in the vertical sense -- "flows over freely in the finite self-communication that is creation." So "no wonder, then, that self-communication is written into the very heart of all things." In short, no wonder the world is such a wonder!

This goes precisely to what was said in the previous post. To quote ourselves,

finitude proclaims infinitude. But the converse is also true (and ontologically prior): infinitude proclaims finitude, via none other than the Logos. Creation, you might say, is the proclamation of finitude (by infinitude).

And only in such a world -- in a world suchly understood -- is science possible. For example, go back to #1 above, of a being who is both in and of the world. This would be a world of pure immanence, devoid of transcendence (as if these two aren't eternal complementarities). Knowledge and personhood would be strictly impossible:

There would be no way for anything else to know that it exists; it would make no difference at all to the rest of reality; practically speaking, it might just as well not be at all -- it would in fact be indistinguishable from non-being.

Do you see why? Each being "would be locked off in total isolation from every other. There would not be a connected universe..."

For any universe is a connected universe, but "where" is this connectedness? It cannot be seen, only assumed. To be clear: no one has ever seen the universe, and no one ever will. Rather, it is a metaphysical assumption, but not just any old assumption. It can only be understood if we are in the cosmos but not of the cosmos. If we were strictly of the cosmos, we could never know it. And if we are fundamentally out of it, then knowledge of it is superfluous and science is a big waste of time.

One could cite many aphorisms, but I'll leave you with these to ponder:

The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality.

Appearance is not the veil, but the vehicle, of reality.

We are saved from daily tedium only by the impalpable, the invisible, and the ineffable.

Science cannot do more than draw up the inventory of our prison (Dávila).

Progressive Usurpations of Divine Prerogatives

Continuing with the theme of the previous post, David Solway -- whose posts I always enjoy -- gets to the root of the matter in an essay called Why Socialism Is Doomed To Fail. The title may sound polemical, but it's not; rather, it identifies the principle that explains why socialism never works because it cannot work. And yet, it also explains the ineradicable appeal of socialism, and why it will always be with us.

Solway hints at the principle in the first paragraph, with Boethius' observation that "comparisons can be drawn between finite things, but not between finite and infinite."

Precisely. This is one of those things we cannot not know, at least if we understand the nature and limits of thought. Thus, the principle "is perennially valid, whether with respect to philosophical and theological speculation, mathematical equations involving infinities, or ideological aspects of political thought" (Solway).

So, the inevitable failure of socialism has something to do with the dialectic between finite and infinite; we might also say absolute and relative, one and many, Creator and creation (this latter providing a hint as to the anti-religious religious appeal of socialism, more on which below).

Socialism's "adventures in social perfectibility flow from the refusal to ground a vision of the future in historical and political reality." True, but I would go beyond this, and situate the refusal in metaphysical reality, i.e., the reality than which there can be no realer (on this side of the veil).

"In order to achieve the possible, it is necessary to acknowledge the real, that is, the limits set by the actual parameters of historical existence and the constraints of human nature" (emphases mine). To you this may sound obvious, but it is actually a revolutionary idea, with socialism embodying an atavistic, counter-revolutionary regression to what amounts to Primordial Error -- indeed, all the way down and back to Genesis 3 All Over Again.

You will forgive me if this post takes a while to settle in. The principles we're discussing have so many implications that it's difficult to render them in linear form. Rather, each one is a vertical depth charge with delayed explosions. Also, it's not as if I've thought this through ahead of time. No, this is being worked out as I write and you read. Otherwise it wouldn't be fun.

Humans think. It's what we do. Many if not most experts believe human thinking must resemble "animal thinking," but that's just stupid. No animal -- obviously -- can conceive of the absolute or infinite, and human thinking is rooted in this conception, whether explicitly or (more likely) implicitly.

I first realized this in, oh, around the turn of the millennium, before I even read Schuon (who later confirmed the principle for me in metaphysical granite). Thanks to amazon, I stumbled upon an apparently obscure philosopher named Errol Harris. For example, in his book Revelation through Reason, he writes that "The divine totality is, like its analogue the biological organism, implicit in every one of its parts and phases.... Because of this implicit presence in every finite being, every finite being proclaims the existence of God."

In short, finitude proclaims infinitude. But the converse is also true (and ontologically prior): infinitude proclaims finitude, via none other than the Logos. Creation, you might say, is the proclamation of finitude (by infinitude).

Now, what happens if we remove one of these terms, or collapse one into the other? Well, socialism for one. It is rooted in a complete cosmic inversion whereby the Infinite is denied up front but sneaks back in via its utopian pretensions which could only manifest in a non-finite world, AKA heaven. This really goes back to Voegelin's gag about immanentizing the eschaton. Just stop doing it, okay?

For Voegelin, the "gnostic personality" "seeks to end history in some everlasting realm here on earth in an attempt to perfect man. Whether the gnostic achieves that goal is of no consequence." Rather, "it is the effort and the intention alone to achieve a worthy outcome that is of importance to the gnostic."

Thus, what looks like classic self-defeating behavior on the part of the socialist is actually the whole point -- identical in form to the jihadist who has no realistic hope of destroying western civilization (we're quite capable of achieving that on our own, thank you) but who is nevertheless nourished by the dream of doing so. It is theological hope turned upside down and inside out, thus rendered pathological.

For Voegelin, the immamentization of transcendent hope is a cognitive fallacy: "any attempt to create a utopian heaven on earth through the instrument of some politician and/or political means is an effort in futility." Its very impossibly evokes the totalitarian regime, since total power is required in order to make the impossible possible. Which is of course impossible nonetheless, but they never stop trying.

Back to Solway:

One cannot validly compare the imperfect social and political structures of the past and present with a utopian construction that has never come to pass and which exists only in myth, dream and mere desire.... To strive, for example, to build an ideal society in which “equality of results” or “outcomes” -- what is called “social justice” -- is guaranteed can only produce a levelled-down caricature of human struggle and accomplishment.

Now, all of this reverts back to our original subject, i.e., the Prerogatives of the Human State. For the left, these prerogatives are never enough. Rather, presumptuous progressives prefer the prerogatives of the divine state, which is to say, they wish to be as gods.

Unlike animals, humans can know the Absolute. They just can't be the Absolute. It's like what we frequently hear of the left: all they have to do is not be crazy, and they can't manage that. Likewise, all they have to do is not pretend to be God. But then they wouldn't be socialists.

Aphorisms:

“The Kingdom of God” is not the Christian name for a futuristic paradise.

Even if he managed to make his most audacious utopias a reality, man would continue to yearn for otherworldly destinies.

An “ideal society” would be the graveyard of human greatness.

In every utopian sleeps a police sergeant (Dávila).

You're Gonna Need a Bigger Lie

Continuing with yesterday's post, it's not just a matter of positing vertical reality, nor even interacting with it in an outward way -- e.g., through ritual, dogma, and rules of morality -- but of maintaining an open system.

It's no different than, say, biology. You might correctly posit a theory of how biological organisms are far from equilibrium systems that exchange energy and information with the environment in order to maintain their dynamic wholeness.

But put one of these organisms on the moon -- or even at the north pole -- and the words mean nothing. Rather, the reality is what counts; no matter how many words one uses, the reality exceeds the description. Human language cannot create life, but is already a prolongation of the divine life.

It's the same with man. It's fine to posit God, but if you're not in an open relationship with the divine reality -- O -- then you are "dying inside," so to speak. Vertically speaking you're on the moon or some other uninhabitable place. At the very least you are drying up, or asphyxiating, or starving, or shrinking. This is why scripture has so many analogies to shining light, flowing water, eating food, and breathing air.

Indeed, upon completing the horizontal creation, God provides the finishing touch by breathing the breath of life into man, thus making him a living being.

To be precise, he is already biologically -- or horizontally -- alive, but now he is a vertically living being. And as with the lungs, it is not as if we can just inhale once and be done with it. Rather, respiration is ongoing until we breathe our last. Not for nothing are pneuma and spirit cognate.

Likewise, man doesn't live on bread alone -- i.e., bio-horizontally -- but on every word that comes from the mouth of God -- pneuma-vertically. Vertical nourishment is real. In fact, no one -- regardless of what they say -- can live without it. Even the atheist will simply call it by another name, e.g., art, or culture, or truth, or compassion. Again, to deny these things is to live on the moon. Where no man can live.

Having said that, if you place an organism on the moon, it will decompose into its component parts. The parts themselves don't disappear. Likewise, place the spiritual being in, say, the Soviet Union or the New York Times, and the biological organism remains. This is the ambiguous world of zombies, of the living dead, of spiritually vacated pod-people -- MSM journalists, political activists, the tenured, etc.

Of such pseudo-peoploids, it is written:

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be (Dávila).

Why does the left believe such foolish things? This is why: God is a rather largish thing to try to replace. You're gonna need a bigger lie.

Not to pick on the hapless and vapid Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but her enthusiasts certainly don't see her as hapless and vapid. Rather, it is as if they nourish themselves on her nonsense. And when I say "nonsense," I mean a certain specialized kind of nonsense that is essentially "God talk" without God, or spirituality without being ordered to the spiritual object, or O.

Example. Okay, I'll just check her Twitter feed. Heh: feed.

--What we have built is permanent. No. Matter. What.

Heaven and earth shall pass away, but my words shall not pass away.

--I have touched the hands of people who have felt ignored and invisible for a long, long time. And they felt seen.

She came up behind him and touched the edge of his cloak, and immediately her bleeding stopped.

--We will fight, we will vote, and we will run until hate is dismantled.

I am with you always, even unto the end of the world.

Remember such cosmic BS next time you hear a liberal ridicule Jesus.

More aphorisms that apply to our zombie friends:

He avoids announcing to man his divinity, but proposes goals that only a god could reach, or rather proclaims that the essence of man has rights that assume he is divine.

After conversing with some “thoroughly modern” people, we see that humanity escaped the “centuries of faith” only to get stuck in those of credulity.

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems.

But Only the honest prophets are lynched. So Cortez is quite safe inside her basilica of imbecilic lies.

The Real Intersectionality (of Vertical and Horizontal)

What does the subject under discussion -- prerogatives of the human state -- have to do with the news of the day? In a way, we are always asking this question, because there are principles and there is the world, and our life -- or "historical time" -- consists of their intersection, i.e., inner and outer, vertical and horizontal, absolute and relative, music and geometry.

Vis-a-vis our political system, there are horizontal aspects such as democracy and rule of law, and vertical aspects such as freedom of thought and speech, the sanctity of human life, and the spiritual telos of human actualization (AKA "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness").

Now, the ultimate purpose of the horizontal aspects is to preserve the vertical; the horizontal must converge upon the vertical, or it is neutral at best. And neutrality inevitably sinks beneath itself, as we see in the EU, where a purely enclosed horizontality has successfully eliminated all verticality. Which is what makes the Muslim conquest so easy. They cannot be bribed with horizontal promises, but will gladly use horizontal means for their own (lower) vertical ends.

I remember when then defense secretary Rumsfeld was condemned by the usual suspects for the banal observation (about the rebuilding of Iraq) that democracy was overrated, and not nearly as important as civil rights and the rule of law -- i.e., a stable liberal order.

It should be obvious to any properly catechized American that (for example) a monarchy with robust civil rights would be far preferable to a democracy in which our rights may come and go, depending upon the whim of the majority. After all, Venezuela is a democracy, just as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her election fair and square.

It would be nice if Cortez came packaged with the following consumer warning: In democratic elections it is decided who it is licit to legally oppress (Dávila).

Speaking of solid gold irony clad aphorisms, the following is so simple that even a journalist or political scientist might be able understand it: Either the man has rights, or the people are sovereign.

Either man has certain vertical prerogatives, or the hominid hive is sovereign. Man or antman.

And what is a socialist but someone who will use the vertical to destroy the vertical with vague and seductive appeals such as "the dignity of man," or "justice for working families," or "helping our neighbors"? In short, the progressive will use freedom to deny freedom, when the whole point of the system (in its horizontal aspect) is to preserve human prerogatives such as liberty.

What really disappoints me is that a bartender could be so stupid, but maybe standards have fallen since the days I frequented such establishments. But anyone whose livelihood depends on exploiting drunks should know that When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

How did Bernie Sanders go from living in a tree to being a multi-millionaire, with no actual job in between? Why, the same way Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will go from bartender to baron in a few short years if not weeks (book deal in 3-2-1). Never mind that

The only man who should speak of wealth or power is one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach. But don't wait for Bernie or Alexandria to discontinue the ire and brimstone sermons on wealth and power. They're too damn lucrative. Liberals have principles, but no leftist allows these to interfere with making a living off the rubes and exploiting envy for cash and other valuable prizes.

Before returning the Prerogatives, a few more Aphorisms, because they're just too good, even though we've mentioned many of them before:

“Social justice” is the term for claiming anything to which we do not have a right.

Here again, it is a faux-vertical appeal that permits one to steal in good conscience. Indeed, what is socialism but the philosophy of the guilt of others? Once someone's guilt is established, then it's only a matter of determining the punishment. For example, progressive racists proclaim us guilty of White Privilege. We sit here in limbo, awaiting our sentence.

Perez is what, 28 years old? I remember when I was 28. It might be the last time I was stupid enough to know how to solve the nation's problems, although some symptoms persisted for a number of years thereafter. But certainty in the service of ignorance isn't just a Real Thing, but the usual thing. Who is humble enough to proudly proclaim his ignorance? Therefore,

Each day I less expect to meet someone who does not nurse the certainty of knowing how the world’s ills could be cured. You will have noticed that such individuals are barred from ever appearing on television, where only certitude is permitted.

And yet As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. For example, the absolute apex of my knowledge of human psychology was when I was handed my Ph.D. in 1988. No hesitation at all! But now I scarcely know where to begin.

There's a picture of Maxine Waters next to this aphorism:

When one does not concede to the leftist all that he demands, he proclaims himself the victim of an institutional violence that is licit to repel with physical violence.

And this one goes precisely to the left's collective meltdown about the Supreme Court:

For the left the constitution is a shameful attack on the sovereignty of the people.

In other words, it is a vertical constraint on blind horizontality.

By the way, how is a progressive idea like suicide? Both are permanent solutions to temporary problems.

I was about to say "back to our prerogatives" but we're out of time. We'll leave off with this observation by Schuon, that man "possesses a subjectivity not closed in on itself, but open onto others and unto Heaven." This is the "religious instinct," or you could just call it vertical openness. And again, Job One of the left is to shut this down, barricade the roads, and enclose us in horizontality.

The Secret of Existence is Just Under the...

Continuing with our discussion of the Prerogatives of the Human State, I should say first of all that I am decades past the point of wondering whether there are any such prerogatives.

Rather, humanness entails certain rights and privileges, and that's all there is to it. Moreover, once you acknowledge these, then God is their necessary corollary: in short, no God, no conceivable privileges (except those man usurps for himself by the exercise of superior strength).

The Founders clearly recognized this entailment, for which reason they explicitly anchored our rights in Nature (i.e., in the nature of things, not in mere physics or biology) and Nature's God. For as the blind squirrel Jean Paul Sartre once remarked, if there is no God, then there is no human nature. And if there is no human nature, then there are no conceivable prerogatives.

Which -- you will have noticed -- is the main reason why the left ceaselessly attacks God, because God is the biggest impediment to their tyrannical follies. Eliminate Nature's God and they can do whatever they want to us, from mere theft and oppression to genocide. God is the barrier between the roiling id of the left and civilization.

Exaggeration? Again, once you have determined that someone is a Nazi, then it becomes a question of how to stop him. If he won't stop his Nazi-ing, then he has to be stopped by force. Call Maxine Waters what you want, but she is logical enough to make the correct deduction. Yes, the premise is insane, but this only reveals the limits of logic, since there is no logical operation to ensure true premises.

Prerogative: an exclusive right or privilege held by a person or group, especially a hereditary or official right.

In this case it is held by a group, or better, a nature, i.e., human nature. These prerogatives inhere in human nature, flowing from there to the individual. Note that for the materialist, there is no vocabulary to even describe this reality. He doesn't have to account for it, because he makes it disappear via linguistic deception or auto-woolpullery.

But as we have said on many occasions, you can split off and deny a portion of reality, but it always returns, usually with a vengeance. This has so much practical application that it could easily send us down a rabbit hole of a sidepost, but suffice it to say that human nature will have the last word(s) -- including those prerogatives alluded to above.

How so? Okay, this is an obvious example: if you are a strict Darwinian, then there is no reason to take seriously the radically contingent thoughts of a randomly evolved primate. And yet, you affirm the theory just as if truth exists and man can know it -- in other words, as if truth about his origins is one of the prerogatives of the human state!

Which it is. On that we agree. Only my metaphysic explains how this is possible, whereas yours renders it strictly impossible, in principle and in fact. Notice how you denied this principle up front, but how it snuck up from behind and bit you right in your assumption.

Now, having said all this, "the effects of the 'the Fall' weaken the prerogatives of human nature, but they cannot abolish them without abolishing man himself" (Schuon).

And this "Fall" is whatnow? Well, unfortunately, part of being fallen involves a degree of obscurity and ambiguity surrounding this question. As it so happens, just last night I was reading the very book Thomas Aquinas was working on when he left this world, Light of Faith: The Compendium of Theology. Yes, he died in mid-sentence, or mid-thought anyway:

"Secondly, an evident example shows that attainment of the kingdom is possible."

D'oh! "The treasure is buried right under the..."

Anyway, he sheds some interesting light on the question of the Fall. I'll paraphrase, but he essentially says it is a consequence of a kind of breaking of the vertical link that unifies all of creation.

Imagine an organismic hierarchy, say, the human person. You can sever something at the "bottom" or periphery, say, a kidney or toe, without affecting the hierarchy or damaging the essence. But perform a lobotomy or sever the spinal cord, and everything below is affected.

It's a matter of telos, since an organismic system is organized and governed from the top down. Eliminate the top -- in this case, God -- and what happens to the whole?

Prior to the Fall, man "referred all things to God as to his last end, and in this his justice and innocence consisted." The resultant harmony "came from a higher power, the power of God." Reason was subservient to God -- which goes to the question raised above about one's premises holding water (or Waters, as the case may be). Remove God, and one can prove anything. Put another way, if you are credulous enough to believe God doesn't exist, then what won't you believe?

So, "The state enjoyed by man" -- that of primordial slack -- "depended on the submission of the human will to God." Yes, Adam had one job. Now we have Ten Commandments, but once upin a timeless there was only one. The precise opposite of this one commandment is: Ye shall be as gods. The rest is history, over and over and over again until you want to vomit.

The harmonious integrity of the original state depended entirely on the submission of man's will to God. Consequently, as soon as the human will threw off the yoke of subjection to God, the perfect subjection of the lower powers to reason and of the body to the soul likewise disintegrated.

As in dis-integrated. And we've been searching for the missing integration ever since. Every ideology is nothing more than a faux integration, from Marxism to feminism to environmentalism to queer theory to scientism and on and on. In each case, you can't get there from here, for "when a cause is removed, the effect cannot follow." God is both first and last cause. Remove him and there is no beginning, no source, no ground; and no end, i.e., no meaning, no purpose, no reason for existence.

That's the bad news. The good news ("gospel") is that there is a way to re-integrate, to reconnect with the source. Yes, attainment of the kingdom is possible...

To be continued. Unlike Aquinas.