A Generic Rant on What's Wrong with the World

The cause of the modern sickness is the conviction that man can cure himself.

The conservative is a simple pathologist. He defines sickness and health. But God is the only therapist. --Dávila

"At the beginning of this century," writes Schuon (referring to the 20th), "hardly anyone knew that the world is ill" (emphasis mine because it always is, more or less). Indeed, the half century or so prior to World War I was probably Peak Progress in terms of a quasi-religious outlook shared by most people in the developed world.

In the words of the Aphorist, Two hundred years ago it was permissible to trust in the future without being totally stupid. A big reason one has to be totally stupid to be a progressive today is that this -- the world we are living in -- is the splendid future brought to us courtesy of previous progressives -- the New Deal, the Great Society, the Obama Change, etc. The bill adds up.

Consider just someone unfortunate enough to be living in Chicago, whose last Republican mayor was elected in 1927. The forty or fifty or sixty people who are shot there every weekend can take solace in the fact that they are living the dream -- the progressive dream brought to fruition by 87 years of Democrat rule.

The left never expresses any appreciation for the world it has created (or unleashed upon us). Instead, we only hear more complaints. The complaints are valid, in the sense that there is indeed something wrong with the world. It's just that the left goes about it in a way that is backwards and upside down. In other words, they confuse symptoms with causes, and treatment with the disease.

By the way, how do we know there is something wrong with the world? Easy. All you need to do is know yourself to know the source of the trouble. D'oh! Which excludes the left, being that it is characterized by a lack of self-awareness, which in turn fuels what we in the psychology racket call "acting out" (and to which they apply the euphemism "activist"; most activists simply transform and externalize personal conflicts into political ones).

Everyone on the left knows the world is ill, except they have a secular explanation -- patriarchy, white privilege, homophobia, "structural racism," the greed of the "one percent," etc. It never occurs to them that our problems might be a consequence of human nature, and that to simply put left wing humans in positions of power solves nothing (see the Congressional Black Caucus for details).

The moral inversion of the left is interesting, in that it incoherently combines a passionate amorality with a punitive moralism. As Bork writes, "While defining deviancy down with respect to crime, illegitimacy, drug use, and the like, our cultural elites are growing intensely moralistic and disapproving about what had always been thought normal behavior..."

Thus, they combine an absence of judgment with unhinged judgmentalism -- or outward tolerance with an inward intolerance that we call totolerantarianism. Our universities are quintessentially totolerantarian, an absurd miasma of no standards and punitive ones.

The upshot is a paradoxical upward and downward redefinition of norms. Which is an inversion of the Christian tradition of tolerance, which is to condemn the sin and not the sinner. With this latter approach, we can preserve our norm while being merciful to the person who violates it. But for the left, it is as if there are no absolutes, and woe to the person who transgresses one!

"[B]ehavior until recently thought quite normal, unremarkable, or even benign, is now identified as blameworthy or even criminal." For example, here in California, if a minor comes to me distressed and conflicted by his homosexual impulses, I am forbidden by law to help him understand them (and if the law doesn't yet apply to adults, it soon will).

When I was in graduate school in the 1980s, it was simply taken for granted that homosexuality, like anything else, had unconscious causes, nor have I had any clinical experiences since then that would cause me to reject that premise. And yet, with no debate, common sense has been outlawed.

Here's an example from a heavyweight thinker we studied back in grad school, Otto Kernberg. Thirty years ago it was permissible -- or even blasé -- to write the following:

By far the large majority of patients encountered who present casual homosexual behavior or a bisexual orientation belong to the borderline spectrum of pathology.... Put simply, we just do not find, except very rarely, male homosexuality without significant character pathology.

Note that such ideas were never disproven, not even argued against. Rather, overnight, as it were, they were simply dismissed. Now I suppose it would be labeled hate, even though he's relying on clinical experience and observation -- not to mention trying to help the patient who is in pain and conflict.

The other day I read a piece on Karl Marx's 200th birthday. Consistent with what was said above about the combination of poor judgment and harsh judmentalism, the author describes how Marx threw together a little pseudo-science and a lot of moral indignation in order to forge a "vision of a post-historical and post-political order without contradictions or conflict, one that would achieve unprecedented prosperity and a new horizon marked by 'human emancipation.'”

Again, this is what progressives have been doing in America for over a hundred years, ever since Wilson in particular. It's just that the program was repeatedly disrupted by war and depression, such that it couldn't begin to proceed unimpeded on a mass scale until the 1960s. In fact, you can easily see the roots of this in the 1950s -- of the passionate mixture of moral indignation + human emancipation.

I know, because I used to love all that stuff, from Kerouac and Ginsberg and the Beats, to Timothy Leary and Ram Dass, and on to more popularized forms of liberation that trickled into mass culture by the latter half of the 1960s, i.e., the New Age. By the time I was in college in the 1970s, hardly a norm had been left standing.

But again, while the movement comes clothed in promises of liberation, it is really about hatred, contempt, and vilification: The revolutionary does not hate because he loves but loves because he hates (Dávila). Thus,

Marx hated the world as it was. His goal was "revolution" -- not merely political revolution or "political emancipation," but a wholesale change in the order of things: the aforementioned "human emancipation."

Which would amount to what? Well, for starters it would amount to liberation from humanness. Which, conveniently, is not a problem for Marxism, since it denies human nature up front. Therefore, there is "no human nature or 'natural order of things' that needed to be respected even as one worked to promote humane and salutary change." So, in eliminating human nature, nothing has been lost but a restrictive fantasy.

Of course, in order to eliminate human nature once and for all, you'll have to eliminate a lot of humans, but that's just a matter of persistence and logistics -- of sticking to your principles despite the body count. Look at Venezuela: they won't allow reality to impinge upon Liberation. Just like the master himself, who

was not an advocate of reform, however radical. He did not work for “social justice” like a good humanitarian. Instead, he advocated something like “metaphysical rebellion” against the human condition. His humanism -- and historicism -- were distinctively inhumane and entailed something like a “gnostic” revolt against reality.

Next time you hear the promises of a leftist politician, notice how Evil promises what it cannot deliver, whereas Good delivers what it does not know how to promise (Dávila).

And remember too that The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time (ibid.).

Connecting the Biggest Dots: Can I Get a Withness?

Connecting the dots. You could say that that is what this blog is all about. In fact, it's what life is all about, and not just the lives we lead, but life as such. An invisible thread runs through everything -- a riverrun circulating from Eve & Adam to every atom.

Life itself is a continuous process that connects outside to inside and not-me to me. Once the outside is in -- say, in the form of "facts" -- then we need to connect them. Likewise food. Since I have diabetes, my body can't on its own connect the dots between carb and cell. If I don't take insulin, then the carb-dots just pile up until I croak.

It seems that something similar can happen with facts or knowledge or data. Yes, we always need to connect the dots between them, but also, we need keys to assimilate these into our substance, otherwise they just build up like too many carbs. As Eliot rhetorically asks,

Where is the life we have lost in living? Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?

I'm just winging it here. No plan. Or better, just riffing on the motif of "connecting dots." Or, trying to go meta and connect the dots of dot connecting to something beyond their mere connectedness.

I'm also not explaining it very well. You could say that any "narrative" is an attempt to connect the dots. In the case of art, the narrative presumably comes first, in that the artist will choose and structure the details and characters in order to support and disclose it.

Conversely, in science the narrative is supposed to always be subordinate to the facts. The facts will supposedly "tell us" their narrative, even though they never actually do. Facts do not speak, much less for themselves. If they could, then human beings would be utterly superfluous.

Any fact you care to name must, in order to be one, be situated in a prior narrative, AKA metaphysic. A metaphysic is your ultimate narrative, and thus, your ultimate connection of dots.

And now it really gets strange, because most people operate without any conscious metaphysic, and most of the others deny that metaphysics is even possible. Trouble is, you have to connect a (literally) infinite number of dots to conclude that the dots not only aren't connected, but can never be connected. Rather, they're just a bunch of random dots. Said the random dot.

For example, atheism. A-theism is really a-connectedness, and in a big way. Put conversely, think of all the dots that theism connects: all of them. Including the biggest dots we can imagine, e.g., time and eternity, absolute and relative, God and man, man and man (via an interior love as opposed to mere exterior juxtaposition), and much more.

Knowledge itself, for example, in classical Christian metaphysics, is our own apprehension of the intelligibility implanted into things by God. It is how and why knowledge is possible: any act of knowledge testifies to the connectedness between intelligence and intelligibility -- from God through objects and into us. To know something is to connect the dots. Always.

And now I'm thinking about the Trinity. As we know, this word is not mentioned in scripture. Nevertheless, it is surely there, only in the form of dots that were discerned and connected by the apostles and early fathers. The Father had to be connected to the Son, and they in turn had to be connected to the Holy Spirit, in such a way that they are coequal persons in one substance. There is no way to connect these big ol' dots but with the principle of the Trinity.

Come to think of it, much of early Christianity consisted of dot-connecting, didn't it? The first thing the early Christians did was to consult the Hebrew scriptures, thereby discovering hundreds of connections -- i.e., prophecies, typologies, and synchronicities. And what is a synchronicity but God punning around? And what is a pun or witticism but a connection of dots, say, between "Peter," "rock," and "Church?"

What is the connection between "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth," and "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God."

Consider what's going on there: two ultimate examples of dot-connecting. However, they can't be contradictory. Rather, we have to somehow connect to dots between them! It must go something like this:

"In the beginning is God-and-Word, distinct but inseparable. This Word is with God and is God; thus, God's Isness is always a Withness. In the beginning the God-with-Word creates the heavens and the earth. And it is always the beginning."

Man is such an inveterate storyteller that he might as well be called... Homo storian or something. It's what we do, which is to say, try to connect the dots. They say -- they being the tenured -- that it is strictly impossible for us to connect the dots, and that it is an exercise in premodern naiveté to think otherwise. But I do think otherwise, and I don't think it's because I'm naive.

If you want to simplify your life, you can just stipulate that God is the ultimate connecter of dots and be done with it. Trouble is, if you reject God, it hardly means you have abandoned dot-connecting. To the contrary!

And this is where the left comes in, because what is the left but a frenzied gang of tyrannical dot-connectors? Let's begin with Marx. He starts with the principle that connecting the dots is impossible, because God doesn't exist. Getting you to believe in God is just a way for the ruling class to control you with a fake narrative!

But then Marx goes on to connect all the cosmic and historical dots, only in such a way that it justifies tyrannical control by a ruling class. Gosh, almost like he naively projects his own bad motives into the religious or something!

It's enough to make a fellow suspect that religion is our primary bulwark against the tyrannical dot-connectors of the left.

What I'm Talking About: A Skeleton Key to the Cosmos

In the interest of time -- of catching up with myself -- and in the effort to focus my wandering attention, I'm going to attempt to reduce the end of civilization to aphorisms, epigrams, haikus, and fine insultainment.

As to catching up with myself, I read Slouching to Gomorrah a month ago, but haven't come close to elucidating its many provocative points.

It's important for me to discuss these as they arise, because if I don't, they tend -- like dreams -- to drift back to where they came from. Problem is, I was way behind before I even picked up this book, and there have been subsequent books that need to be enbloggened before they too melt back into bobscurity.

Remember, Bork's main point is that our civilizational crisis not only has much deeper roots than we realize, but may be an inevitable entailment of certain choices made long ago. I might add that although published in the mid-1990s, everything he prophecied has come to pass -- with interest -- even though the main criticism of him at the time was that he was a hysterical reactionary cassandra.

Incidentally, what is a prophet? I read somewhere that a prophet doesn't actually see the future, rather, just peers deeply into the present so as to read the Signs of the Times. It seems to me that those signs were so legible to him, that they informed him of both future and past (to say nothing of the present).

Deep time. Which is to say, time has a depth dimension in the present. Indeed, what we call a "deep" person is someone who has access to this depth, AKA the vertical. Likewise, the purpose of an education is to provide us with at least some access to this depth, although the average person will have little interest in or aptitude for it.

Moreover, given the cultural inversion we are living through, education tends to be inversely related to this depth. To put it conversely, anyone can be shallow, but it takes years of higher education to seal one into a nul-de-slack of acquired error.

Recall the previous post, which mentioned Finnegans Wake. Now, that is what we call deep time, or at least a serious attempt at accessing and communicating it:

Its mechanics resemble those of a dream, a dream which has freed the author from the necessities of common logic and has enabled him to compress all periods of history, all phases of individual and racial development, into a circular design, of which every part is beginning, middle, and end (Campbell & Robinson).

Now, that's what I'm talking about. I'm not saying it's possible. Rather, that it's the only thing that really interests me in this world. Compared to it, everything else is pretty much tedious. For if you dig deep enough beneath the surface, then everything becomes interesting in its light:

On this revolving stage, mythological heroes and events of remotest antiquity occupy the same spatial and temporal planes as modern personages and contemporary happenings. All time occurs simultaneously...

Emphasis mine because THAT'S WHAT I'M TALKING ABOUT!

Multiple meanings are present in every line; interlocking allusions to key words and phrases are woven like fugal themes into the pattern of the work.

What I am saying -- and what I'm sure Joyce intended -- is that this is the only way to go about truly understanding the world -- to unpack the nonlocal layers beneath the snooze of the day.

I'll give you a banal example. I'm giving my son a "Christian education," not just to make him Christian, but to help him understand and interpret the world. Now, when he sees a film, for example, -- anything from Star Wars to Gran Torino to the Dark Knight to the Big Lebowski -- he is able to discern the Christian motifs.

In this sense, Christianity is not something to look at but through; it is a lens that allows us to perceive realities that will otherwise go undetected, even into the very structure of the cosmos. Deep time. You could say that that is the point of Christianity, which is none other than infinitude plunged into history.

Please bear in mind that I'm not recommending Finnegans Wake to anyone, rather, just using it as an example of What I'm Talking About. But just like reality or history itself, "it appears to be a dense and baffling jungle, trackless and overgrown with wanton perversities of form and language." Gosh. If only someone could come up with a key or something.

And now this post is finally getting somewhere, because that is what we really need -- in both education and just life in general -- a key. Or better yet, a skeleton key, which is "a type of master key" that "can open numerous locks." "The term derives from the fact that the key has been reduced to its essential parts."

A key that has been reduced to its essentials so as to open many locks. Er, what is an aphorism?

If words have no meaning, reality has no content.

If reality were socially constructed, man could never know it.

Liberalism was a fine idea until liberals got ahold of it.

If you're really serious about eliminating inequality, you'll abolish freedom and standards.

Without state-mandated discrimination, excellence would run roughshod over mediocrity.

If no culture is superior to another, then you can shut up about diversity.

Diversity is our strength so long as reality isn't at issue.

Any idiot can survive poverty. The question for our time is whether he can survive affluence.

And any idiot can survive and even thrive in certain types of ignorance. But there is a serious question as to whether civilization can survive so many of its members attending college.

Junk food is designed to hijack certain innate preferences with hyper-palatable stimuli. Likewise, modern education hijacks the natural inclinations of the soul with intensely pleasurable substitutes that lead to spiritual and intellectual malnourishment.

Probably our spiritual decline would have arrived a century earlier had we not been disciplined by economic depression and global conflict.

Affluence is a terrible master. Its obnoxious spawn are entitlement, ingratitude, impatience, and boredom.

Convenience and instant gratification render the existence of time an intolerable imposition.

The ranks of the Resistance are filled with people who can resist anything but an impulse.

Female liberation is mostly a consequence of male technology. You're welcome.

Okay, but How Did Patient Zero Get Sick?

This post began with an innocent attempt to respond to a comment from yesterday, and just got out of hand. It's a little rambly, but it's too late to fix it.

The search for Patient Zero of our troubles inevitably leads to questions of how this patient got sick in the first place.

Genesis tells us that it started with a serpent, but that's frankly not very helpful. Or, conversely, maybe it's very helpful, in the sense that it is basically telling us to stop asking questions about something we'll never fully understand anyway.

Analogously, I've heard Dennis Prager say that this is the purpose of the very first sentence of the Bible, that "In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth."

The larger purpose there is to cut off our idle speculation at the outset, and to let us know that the transcendent divine principle is responsible for all of creation, so deal with it. It's supposed to be helpful, in the sense that we now have a kind of unchanging foundation on which to build our metaphysic.

Put it this way: either the world is created, or it isn't. Obviously there is no merely human way to resolve the issue. Therefore, knowing this world is created is a kind of liberation from truly pointless speculation. For if the world isn't created, then all speculation is utterly pointless anyway. So ultimately, the doctrine is a gift to our intellect.

For Whoever does not believe in myths believes in fables (Dávila). You might say that God gives us certain fruitful myths so we don't descend into the childish fables of the tenured.

Likewise, perhaps the "doctrine of satan" (or of the adverse cosmic power) is a kind of helpful gift. Just accept it, because it explains a lot, even if we can't quite figure out how the principle fits into the overall scheme of things.

I mean, if you think theological explanations of evil are naive, then try the psychological, or economic, or feminist, or Marxist explanations! They're way too stupid for any intelligent person to take seriously, and yet, these childlike fables are the psychic petroleum of the left.

Besides, the satan principle is not as much a straightforward answer as a mystery to be pondered. Therefore, it operates quite differently from those concrete answers of the left that unambiguously locate evil in white males, or class warfare, or misogyny.

Time out for more aphorisms, because I can always rely on Dávila when I'm flailing around. For example, He who speaks of the farthest regions of the soul soon needs a theological vocabulary. For precisely this reason, speaking of the farthest reaches of evil also requires a theological vocabulary.

Some of the relevant aphorisms are a bit indirect or oblique, such as this one: When man refuses the discipline the gods give him, demons discipline him. So, demonic influences rush in when we close ourselves off to divine ones. This makes a great deal of sense. As we know, nature abhors a vacuum. But so too does trans-nature.

An irreligious society cannot endure the truth of the human condition. It prefers a lie, no matter how imbecilic it may be. Boy and how! Think of the crazy alternatives to the doctrine of creation alluded to above.

Evil only has the reality of the good that it annuls. Its only real power is via privation -- like the way an air conditioner runs on heat-producing energy.

Have you noticed how every evil regime on earth derives power by pretending to be the opposite of what it is? For example, The Islamic Republic of Iran, or The Democratic People's Republic of (North) Korea. Or even the Democratic Party, which has always revolved around racial division and hatred, from Judge Taney to Sarah Jeong. At least they're consistent.

There is something to be said for the idea that, in the words of Schuon, the devil is "the humanized personification –- humanized on contact with man -- of the subversive aspect of the centrifugal existential power."

Therefore, Hell is the place where man finds all his projects realized, and Man will have created a world in the image and likeness of hell when he inhabits an environment totally fabricated by his hands.

More generally, Hell is any place from which God is absent. And only man can render God absent, at least in imagination. Thus, The proclamation of our autonomy is the founding act of Hell.

Tolerance? No one is more respectful of “others’ beliefs” than the devil.

The death of God? The greatest modern error is not announcing that God is dead, but believing that the devil has died.

Truly, this could be the motto of the left: The devil can achieve nothing great without the thoughtless collaboration of the virtues.

Patient Zero of the Left

Another idiosyncratic post that goes nowhere, but may get there tomorrow...

I'm starting to think there may be no longterm cure for liberalism, i.e., that it is fatal. If it were just an acute illness -- say, something that only emerged in the 1930s, or 1960s -- then it might be treatable. But what if we are in the end stage of a centuries-long disease process?

Judge Bork implies as much, suggesting that certain odious developments "have been coming on for a long time and may be inherent in Western civilization."

Usually I think of Western civilization as the solution, not the problem. But if it is the problem, then there is no solution.

If the U.S. fails, then mankind fails. And if conservatism fails -- i.e, if we fail to conserve the vision of the founders -- then America fails.

Interesting how extremes meet. The left would agree with Bork that Western civilization is fatally flawed, but for very different reasons. Indeed, for Bork, the left's devaluation of Western civilization -- its self-loathing -- is just a symptom of the real problem.

Just this morning I was reading of how our whole sinister regime of state-mandated racial discrimination ("affirmative action") was created via an executive order by LBJ in 1965. Thus, it could be rescinded with the stroke of a pen.

In the presidential campaign of 1980, Ronald Reagan promised to do just that. Which, of course, he never did. Why not? How can something so intrinsically un- and anti-American, something so fundamentally at odds with our values, survive?

That's a somewhat rhetorical question. The answer is, violence on one end, cowardice on the other. Prior to Trump, no president has been willing to so subject himself to the violent and hateful rhetoric of the left. But to my knowledge, even Trump has never spoken of undoing this indefensible injustice.

How can we tolerate federal funds going to universities that openly engage in racial discrimination, and which systematically violate the right to free speech? What's the problem here? What is our major malfunction? Why is this happening in America, of all places? That modern liberalism "is intellectually bankrupt diminishes neither its vitality nor the danger it imposes" (ibid.).

And a central reason why it is so dangerous is precisely because it is so intellectually bankrupt. In short, like any other cultish ideology, the progressive left is a closed system that is impervious to evidence, fact, and logic. And vertical closure = hell on earth.

I mentioned this passage a few posts back, but it is certainly worth repeating, because it goes to the essence of the problem:

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason.

And once the left abandoned reason, it rendered reason impotent in defending us from the left. Brilliant! In a diabolical way.

When truth is eliminated, what's left to arbitrate disagreements? Just power. What, for example, keeps the state discrimination regime thriving? Power. Absolutely no different from the days of Jim Crow, showing once again how Democrats never change. They never change because they are animated by certain false principles that can be traced back hundreds of years.

Thus, what we call "modern liberalism" is more like terminal liberalism. It is, as Bork says, just "the latest stage of the liberalism that has been growing in the West for at least two and a half centuries, and probably longer."

Is there a patient zero? I tend not to think of this in strictly historical terms. Rather, I've long interpreted Genesis 3 as a fable about "patient(s) zero," only repeated ad nauseam through history; the story brilliantly reveals timeless archetypes that play out in time. Every time.

What are the lessons of this complex archetypal narrative? What it is trying -- desperately! -- to convey to us? We've probably posted on this subject dozens of times, so I won't re-belabor the point. But at the very least, it is telling us something about human nature, about male-female relations, about divine-human relations, and about human intercourse with certain "lower-vertical" energies symbolized by the serpent.

What does it tell us about human nature? To me it goes to a certain unavoidable "design flaw" in man; not to say that the Designer erred; rather, that in creating a creature with free will, certain adverse developments are inevitable (or, inEveateapple, as we always say). These adverse possibilities range along a vertical spectrum from venial misdemeanors to felonious plunges into auto-divination.

Another lesson is that man is in permanent exile, and that utopia is no longer an option. That ship has already sailed. The horses have bolted and it's too late to close the barn door. We are all "wandering Jews" who will not return to any terrestrial promised land. It's a vertical diaspora, and the Raccoon has no place to lay his head. Life itself is a mid-life crisis, just as history itself is an endless cosmic war -- or the shadow of one, anyway. Can't you hear the echoes?

All of this was brought home to me in an unlikely way, when I first encountered Joyce some 35 years ago. Let me see if I can explain what I mean without excessive bloviation.

First of all there was Ulysses, which tells the story of an Any- and Everyman wandering through the corridors of archetypal time, such that 24 hours is as if 24 centuries (and vice versa). In short, every day is a kind of "structured eternity" telescoped into a human framework. But then Joyce did himself one better, and situated our Everyman in the historical dreamscape of All Time.

I'm not saying I ever understood the book, but I did spend many months trying. Or better, it was like trying to understand one's dreams. Rarely do I truly understand one, but I very much enjoy dwelling in their protean creative mystery.

Let's try to narrow down our exegesis of the Wake to what went wrong and to what has gone wrong with liberalism. Interestingly, Joyce frankly doesn't pretend to know the details. On nearly every page we are reminded that something has gone wrong, but it is exceedingly difficult to find out what it was. Rumors abound. There are plenty of opinions. You could call it "original sin," which is a little bit like how liberals talk about "structural racism" -- which is to say, racism without any actual racists.

Analogously, original sin is a little like a structure in which we are situated, even if there were no sinners per se. Down here, even perfection is imperfect.

Which of course reminds me of what Schuon says about the subject: something to the effect that existence itself is the most consequential sin. Er, why? For reasons alluded to above: in the very act of creation, God creates something separate from God (even while not radically disconnected, for this would be impossible). The rest is history. Literally.

As Campbell and Robinson write in the Skeleton Key,

The Wake, at its lowest estimate, is a huge time-capsule.... If our society should go smash tomorrow..., one could find all the pieces, together with the forces that broke them, in Finnegans Wake. The book is a kind of terminal moraine in which lie buried all the myths, programs, slogans, hopes, prayers, tools, educational theories, and theological bric-a-brac of the past millennium. And here too will be found the love that reanimates this debris.

And as Joyce "never tires of telling us, 'The same returns.'" Which means the same bad stuff. But if he is correct, it also means the same good stuff. I suppose our theological hope is that this is a spiral and not just an endlessly recurring circle, much less an entropic decay into oblivion.

The radical error -- the deification of man -- does not have its origin in history. Fallen man is the permanent possibility of committing the error. --Dávila

The Center Cannot Hold if the Top Can't Rule

Slouching Toward Gomorrah begins with a passage from Yeats' The Second Coming, which is so often repeated -- by left and right -- that it has become a cliché. You know, Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold, so mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. Welcome to Any Day, Every Year.

I'm pretty sure humans have been thinking this from the beginning. Written in the wake of WWI, it could equally apply to the fall of Rome, or the wars of the Reformation, or the French Revolution, or, for an ahistorical leftist, the election of Trump. Leftists may be ignorant of history, but they feel like the world is ending, and that's what counts.

Another frequently cited line is The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity. You often hear a passionately intense cretin -- say, Bill Maher, or Michael Moore, or MSNBC hosts -- complain about how timid and reasonable their side is. The absence of self-awareness makes me lightheaded.

By the way, because of the Dávila influence, I find that I've begun thinking in terms of spontaneous aphorisms. Often they float into my head fully formed, although sometimes I have to tweak them a little for that extra tang. I'm not saying they're as penetrating as his, but you have to start somewhere, right? For example,

If you're not a liberal at 20 you have no self-righteousness, and if you're not a conservative at 40 you have no self-awareness.

Or, Ideology fills the vacuum created by tenure.

--The news is a commercial for liberalism. The commercials are news about capitalism.

--Anything deep and true is conservative.

--A "male feminist" is either a wolf in sheep's clothing or a sheep in sheep's clothing. Useless either way.

--The cogito of the left: "I envy, therefore RACISM!"

--Universal human nature and self-evident truth are two sides of the same coin; likewise, identity politics and the tyranny of subjectivism.

--Since progressivism is a state religion, public schools should be abolished on 1st amendment grounds.

--The concept of "cultural appropriation" was invented by white Marxists, so blacks & Latinos need to stop appropriating it.

--Capitalism is unfair to people who want power but have no talent.

--Say what you want about the liberal arts, but they've found a cure for common sense.

--All socialists have to do is stop pretending to be God. But then they wouldn't be socialists.

I'd like to move more into the aphorism department, if only because it is a great courtesy to the reader. As I've said before, the world is filled with 400 page books that contain one idea. Conversely, Dávila has thousands of aphorisms that could be expanded into a book, -- or, better yet, are the distillation of that book, so it needn't be written in the first place.

Think too of all those books that contain one idea, but the idea is totally stupid (or monstrous). For example, the most popular history book on college campuses is Howard Zinn's History of the American People. Let me summarize it for you: America (and capitalism, and white males) is evil. There's no clever or witty way to say that, so he had to write the book.

Back to Yeats. When the center can't hold, why not? Is it because there are no centrists? That can't be right, because to be a centrist is to compromise with evil. There is no centrist position between conservative classical liberalism and Antifa fascists. A leftist would no doubt respond that there is no centrist position between them and white supremacism.

Which is a red herring, since the latter doesn't exist in any meaningful way, and certainly wields no political power whatsoever. And this leaves aside the fact that all wholesale racism comes from the left, not from conservatives. Conservatism is founded on ideas, not on blood or identity.

In the margin I have a note to myself: "The center cannot hold because the top cannot rule." That might qualify for an aphorism, except that it actually needs to be fleshed out in order to be understood, at least by most people. Very senior Raccoons might get it right away, and see all the implications, but our culture has been so saturated by egalitarian thinking, that Absolute Authority sounds downright un-American.

But if there is no absolute authority, then there is no center. Note that this vertical authority bisects reality, which is precisely what creates the center: you might say that "truth" is anywhere verticality bisects horizontality.

This verticality is also the source of legitimate order, organization, and hierarchy. Now, hierarchy is the opposite of anarchy; put conversely, the only cure for anarchy is hierarchy. I don't mean this in a polemical way. Rather, it is just the literal truth. For example, the campus anarchy of the 1960s was a result of administrators abandoning hierarchy and placing themselves on the same level as the rioters.

Obviously, anarchy cannot be cured by anarchy, because horizontality cannot transcend horizontality. Which is precisely why leftism always ends in tyranny. It is baked into the cake. As Dávila says, When the exploiters disappear, the exploited split into exploiters and exploited.

Thus, the immediate result of the communist revolution of 1917 was a two-tier society. This was the new order, the new center, the new verticality. And No social class has exploited the others more brazenly than the one that today calls itself “the State.”

Now, man is the center of the world. Indeed, you could say he is the center of creation. This is a literal truth, and it is uncontroversial. It can only be denied from the standpoint of the center which it denies, thus refuting itself.

Besides, leftists are forever making pronouncements that could only emanate from a vertical cosmic center, even if they deny any ground for this center. Here is a typical "activist scholar" who is full of passionate intensity about denying normality and deconstructing reality (check out her CV: madness!).

So, don't ask why the center cannot hold. It can't hold because the top -- AKA truth -- can't rule. Therefore, the bottom dwellers fill the vacuum. Which is why leftism always comes down to rule by sociopaths.

Locating Supernatural Resources in the Extra-Cranial World

Two bits of housekeeping: 1) Posts may at times be shorter, in order to put less pressure on readers and on myself. There's no reason to make every post so damn long and burdensome every time. 2) They may get more eccentric, just me wandering around in my own head. Or, they may be less obviously "coherent" and finished, more free-associational and ramblin'.

Therefore, they may seem to lead nowhere, at least on the surface. But today's topic, for example, is a big subject to which I couldn't possibly do justice in the allotted time -- which is less than an hour -- but here it is anyway, half-baked and undigested. It has a point -- I know, because it is pulling me -- even if I haven't yet arrived at it.

To say that our current civil war results from a psychic rupture some three or four centuries ago seems so abstract, not to mention pointless. Besides, who said there's such a thing as a human norm? Unlike weather -- which leftists believe has an unchanging preindustrial standard, a "right way" to be -- they believe no such thing vis-a-vis human beings.

One reason why they get away with so much is that their only standard is the absence of standards, AKA defining deviancy down. Then they pretend to be surprised at the emergence of deviant behavior -- say, of a Harvey Weinstein operating in a sexually antinomian Hollywood (where else would such a person choose to operate? A place with no standards is a perfect fit for the man without any). And yet, people with no proper morality are shocked! at his lack of morality.

For in the words of the Aphorist, Human nature always takes the progressive by surprise.

Man is no exception to the rule that in order to exist, something must have a form. We are not just a psychic version of prime matter -- of an infinitely malleable and unformed potentiality.

Nevertheless and everthelouse, Liberals can be divided into those who believe that wickedness is curable and those who deny that it exists.

And usually the dichotomy somehow exists in the same head -- as in, for example, "it is wrong to hold blacks responsible for their disproportionate involvement in crime" and "Trump's tweets are worse than Hitler!" Lack of principles applied to certain groups, hysterical enforcement of them in others. Or maybe you've never seen MSNBC.

At any rate, if we're going to say mankind took a wrong turn a few centuries ago, we have to posit a correct turn rooted in What Man Is. So, what is he?

The question goes back to our first philosopher, or to philosophy as such, which is to say: "know thyself." In philosophy, this question lost all interest and attention somewhere in the 19th century, with the emergence of antihuman thinkers such as Hegel and Marx, followed by such misosophic nul-de-slacks as analytic philosophy.

But then it returned in the 20th century with such developments as phenomenology and existentialism, only detached from everything that had come before. Now we had, for example, an existentialism rooted in an ontological materialism, when this sterile connection is by no means necessary. (Conversely, a young Saint Pope JP allied phenomenology to Christianity to come up with a fruitful Christian personalism.)

The point is that a Christian metaphysic can by definition take on board anything thrown at it, from Darwin to quantum physics (so long as it isn't an intrinsic absurdity such as Marxism or behaviorism). It can baptize anything, even, say, "materialism." For as Aquinas realized, you can have a material cosmos if you like, so long as you don't imagine it can be metaphysically self-sufficient.

Put conversely, there is no way for the finite mind to determine if the material world has a temporal beginning or was always here. But in either case, it must have a vertical source, or your metaphysic falls into incoherence and absurdity. Remember, Aquinas's "first cause" is not in time but outside it -- which is the whole point. To ask what was "before" the first cause is to not know what the first cause is.

Back to our human norm. At the moment, several recent books are in the process of converging and melding in my head. It is an unlikely confluence, consisting of several books that were read back-to-back-to back with no plan, and yet, are disclosing a plan.

Not to veer off course right away, but it reminds me of the Bible. A couple days ago my son mentioned that an evangelical friend of his thinks the Bible was essentially dictated by God, like the Koran or Dianetics. I reminded him that no one wrote the Bible, nor did any of its authors know about the others who would be included in this compendium we call the Bible. Rather, it was chosen and assembled long after the fact. The hidden coherence was only discovered after its contributors had completed their parts.

Which is not to say there is no such thing as a unitary Bible. Indeed, that is what makes it so endlessly mysterious -- that its authors were explicating a hidden coherence of which they knew nothing.

Ramping it down a few notches, it is equally certain that Judge Bork had no idea he was slouching into the same cosmic attractor as Matthew Crawford twenty years later (and vice versa), but here they are, touching hands in my head (or heads in my hands).

To this I could add the book When Harry Became Sally, because all three books, in different ways, speak to an enduring extracranial world that is thankfully independent of our desires -- in the latter case, not just the desire of Harry to pretend he is Sally. Who really cares, since it's a free country?

The problem is that Harry wants to enlist the state to coerce the restavus to say that Harry is Sally. Then we've not only rejected the human norm, but are forced at gunpoint to believe things that cannot be. Which is the endpoint of the wrong turn of a few centuries back, into a total subjectivism anchored in nothing outside the skull (and yet, compelled by the state).

But it's not the end. Things can and will inevitably get worse if we don't rediscover the correct path found in the extracranial world. There is a perennial vertical invasion from below, but we have to recognize it in order to repel it.

Politics is Downstream from Culture is Downstream from Crazy

If not for eyes, we'd have no idea there's something to see. But we do have eyes, therefore, -- wait for it! -- there is something to see. More generally, every sense is ordered to what it senses -- to something external to itself.

The Root Problem of postmodernity (which is just the the logical entailment of certain errors of modernity) is the inversion of this home truth, such that the object is made subordinate to the subject: the world is conditioned by consciousness rather than vice versa.

In reality, the sensed is prior to sense, just as the known is prior to the knower. Such observations used to qualify as banalities, the main point being that if knowledge is to be possible, then the object must be prior to the subject.

If the subject is prior, then the result -- either immediate or long term -- is a swamp of subjectivism from which there Is. No. Escape. You've made yourself into a god, and there's not a damn thing you can do about it.

We see a lot of this diabolicality in the New Age movement. For example, -- I knew Deepak wouldn't let me down! -- "since the human world is entirely mind-created, the [human/cultural] problem comes down to not knowing how our reality is made." So, in reality, "reality" is just a mental projection from the inside out:

The play of consciousness is how reality is made, both personally and for the entire human race.... We believe that gluons, quarks, galaxies, stars, force fields, even bodies and minds are “real” but they are human constructs for modes of perception and their interpretation in consciousness.... The next step in our evolution as a species is to become conscious creators of this reality, which can be called the evolutionary leap from human to meta-human.

So, if you think things are bad now, just wait until the arrival of the meta-humans!

Notice the hope for a miracle. The impossible kind. Or, if not impossible, then a radically dystopian kind, in which every person is a monad who is freed to inhabit his own private Idaho. What Deepak regards as the final liberation is a total narcissism.

For as a far wiser man once said, Upon finding himself perfectly free, the individual discovers that he has not been unburdened of everything, but despoiled of everything (Dávila).

Back to what was said above in paragraph two: when I say "logical entailment," what I mean is that the current cultural crisis -- our civil war -- has been long in the making, and is not going away any time soon. Rather, it will continue to worsen as a result of a split -- a violent rupture in reality -- that occurred several hundred years ago. War is inevitable given this maiming of reality.

Inevitable in the absence of a miracle. The good kind. Which I do mean literally, in the sense of a vertical intervention. Which has of course occurred at many hinge points in history, so there's no reason for hopelessness.

Aphorisms come to mind; for example, Intelligent optimism is never faith in progress, but hope for a miracle. Perhaps it helps to bear in mind that None of the high eras of history have been planned. Thus, In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

I mean, if Trump isn't a miracle, then there's no such thing.

Back to our main point, which is the inevitability of our current civil war. This was brought home to me by an unexpecected source, as I finally got around to reading Judge Bork's Slouching Towards Gomorrah: Modern Liberalism and American Decline, which provided me with a slightly different angle on the subject. Normally I just trace the issue back to Genesis 3 and say to hell with it: man is what he is, and always will be.

That's fine as far as it goes, but Bork traces a specific intellectual genealogy that starts about a quarter century ago and leads straight to Ocasio-Cortez (or to the latest malevolent idiot of the day).

So, what happened? What went wrong? As Bork says, "politics is a lagging indicator" of certain baleful developments that "have been coming on for a long time and may be inherent in Western civilization" (emphasis mine).

At this late date, the error has been thoroughly embedded -- like a pneuma-cognitive virus, AKA mind parasite -- in the culture, which is why Breitbart was correct to say that politics is downstream from it. If we are downstream, where is the source of this toxic spring? We're already running out of time, so I won't be able to do justice the subject. Let's just hit some highlights.

(By the way, while reading the book, it occurred to me what a "Catholic mind" Bork had. An atheist at the time of his confirmation hearings, he entered the Catholic church a few years after the publication of this book. So, he didn't "convert" to Catholicism, but rather, discovered he already was Catholic. This is another iteration of the object being prior to the subject, only on a higher plane. In other words, the object is God.)

Here's a passage that lays out the source of the trouble:

Modernity, the child of the Enlightenment, failed when it became apparent that the good society cannot be achieved by unaided reason. The response of liberalism was not to turn to religion, which modernity had seemingly made irrelevant, but to abandon reason.

Hence, there have appeared philosophies claiming that words can carry no definite meaning or that there is no reality other than one that is "socially constructed." A reality so constructed, it is thought, can be decisively altered by social or cultural edict, which is a prescription for coercion.

And here we are, in a fight to the death between people who believe in reality and people who believe reality is what we wish it to be -- between truth and power, intellect and will, knowledge and tenure. Our hope is that what cannot continue will not continue, and that reality will ultimately Bork these tyrannical fantasists from our midst.

Sensing God

Let's stipulate that we cannot literally prove the existence of God, since infinitude by definition escapes finite logic. Adequate proofs, of course, abound, but only for people who don't need them. Why don't they need them? Well, for one thing, because there are other modes of proof besides mere logic.

For example, no one needs to prove the existence of vision in order to see. Explicit science has only existed for a few hundred years, but this doesn't mean man wasn't aware of countless scientific facts and principles. The world is what it is, regardless of what we think about it.

Back to something touched on in the first paragraph: to say that the finite cannot contain infinitude is already to have an intuition of the Infinite. And then you're off to the races! For the Infinite is one of our most important cognitive placeholders. It is always there, implicitly undergirding our thought, as the ocean is beneath the ship. Remove the ocean and ships not only won't sail, but no one would have bothered to invent them.

Or perhaps a better analogy is wind, since it is invisible. It blows where it pleases. You hear its sound, but can't tell from where it comes or where it's going. And yet, we -- at least in premodern times -- were absolutely dependent upon it, what with sailing, windmills, and free air conditioning.

In the previous post we touched on a couple of ways God can be spontaneously "sensed" -- for example, vis-a-vis piety, which "is essentially the sense of the sacred, of the transcendent, of profundity," or of humility, which is awareness "of our metaphysical nothingness." To put it the other way around -- or First Thing first -- the Divine Presence is the sufficient reason for sanctity and humility.

If one denies God a priori, then these very human responses lose their sufficient reason. You have to deny them altogether, reduce them to irrelevance, or invent some other reason for their existence. For example, a Freudian might say they are the shadow of some infantile memory of omnipotent parents, while a Marxist might say they are class weapons to keep you in your place.

Religion is full of similar "responses" to "presences"; the response proves the presence -- unless you are too blunt to sense the latter, or if they are inconvenient barriers to one's own auto-deification.

As we know, one of the primordial trinities within God is Love-Truth-Beauty. Take just the latter, beauty. To deny that man senses beauty is to deny man. And yet, this is one of the major projects of postmodernity -- to entirely subjectivize beauty, such that it is located in us, not in the world. In this cosmic inversion, beauty is just a meaningless projection of the human psyche. It is reduced to an opinion or illusion.

Note that with this inversion, beauty loses its sufficient reason. On some level the barbarians are aware of this, so they try to come up with new sufficient reasons for its existence. These reasons are too stupid to seriously consider, but evolutionary psychologists, for example, pretend that beauty is reducible to some genetic advantage.

Come to think of it, a great many aphorisms go to exactly this subject. Not only do they say it better than I can, but they do so more succinctly. Let's dig out some examples.

As to our sense of beauty, The existence of a work of art demonstrates that the world has meaning. Even if it does not say what that meaning is.

You could say this meaning is a power before it is refined into a thought: thus, Strictly speaking, the work of art does not have a meaning but rather a power.

From an aesthetic experience one returns as from a sighting of numinous footprints. And no, they don't belong to Charles Darwin. Likewise, The steps of grace startle us like the footsteps of someone passing by in the fog. Boo!

Damn. I've had the sudden realization that half the aphorisms come down in one way or another to "sensing" God:

Aesthetics is the sensible and secular manifestation of grace. Boom.

Every work of art speaks to us of God. No matter what it says. Boom².

I could spend the rest of the post on beauty, but let's give equal time to truth, since I'm running out of it (of time, never of truth, since the latter is infinite).

I only contemplate wisps of truth that twist in the night gusts. Wisps of truth. They're out there! And they enter through the eyes, ears, mind, and spirit. But only if these gates are open. Vertically.

Only in prostration is the truth of man expressed. Because God is not an invention, but a finding. And if you're not rendered humble by the finding, then you've found the wrong guy -- an impersonator and imprisonator, so run in the opposite direction.

Of what is important there is no better proof than the fact of the well-born soul liking it.

So, what is man -- the well-born kind, AKA my readers -- but the sensory membrane between Creator and creation?

To be continued Wednesday...

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: