Wisdom, Maturity, Common Sense

More common sense from five years ago. If it was commonsensical then, it should still be today, no? In other words, if common sense exists, one of its characteristics would be that it never goes out of style. What's the word? Yes, perennial. The perennial wisdom.

Speaking of which, Dennis Prager's latest column explains how good intentions in the absence wisdom redounds to evil. Does wisdom equate to common sense? Not exactly. It seems to me that wisdom is distilled from common sense -- that no one lacking in common sense can be called wise, but wisdom is more refined and articulated.

Another important element in any discussion of common sense is "maturity." People lacking in common sense are immature, but in a literal way, in the sense that maturity implies a telos to psychological development. Failure to mature is the sine qua non of character pathology, in that the personality, either in whole or in part, has failed to attain its proper end (no different from any other organ). Davila has a number of aphorisms that go to maturity, common sense, and wisdom, such as

--The young mature when the old no longer seems automatically bad and the new no longer seems automatically good.

--To mature is to discover that every object desired is only the metaphor for the transcendent object of our desire.

--To mature is to transform an increasing number of commonplaces into authentic spiritual experience.

--To mature is to see the increase of the number of things about which it seems grotesque to give an opinion for or against.

--The independence of which every youth boasts is no more than submission to the new prevailing fashion.

--Young people believe that youth is a destination, when it is merely a provincial bus stop.

Wisdom, according to Schuon, "is simple, inasmuch as its expressions converge on That which alone is, and wisdom has the gift of simplifying; but it also comprises, for that very reason, all the sanctifying riches which the human soul, so diverse in its nature, may need during its pilgrimage towards the Immutable."

And where we are situated on the Pilgrimage Towards the Immutable must be a measure of our degree of maturity, eh?

On to the old post:

Is there such a thing as common sense, or has it been successfully eradicated by the Big Education of the state? If it does exist, what is it, and how does it work? Is it something a person has by virtue of his personhood, or is it something only acquired through experience? And if the latter, is it through personal experience, or the collective experience of generations who have had to face the same existential conditions? And where does one acquire such collective wisdom? From the family? Culture? Education? The state?

What if the most important things not only can't be taught, but can't even be clearly articulated? Rather, they can only be lived and maybe symbolized, but not with language per se. A passage lifted from Happy Acres resonates:

The challenge for each new generation is figuring out what’s worth keeping and what worth tinkering with. The progressive attitude is that everything is eligible not just for tinkering, but wholesale replacement. The people who lived yesterday were idiots, but we are geniuses!

Which goes to something Schuon said on a number of occasions: that if people prior to us were such idiots, it is impossible to explain how we could be so brilliant, given the crooked and even diseased timber from which we are made. It's almost as if progressives posit a kind of cognitive original sin that strangled the mentality of every man until this angelic breed suddenly and inexplicably arrived on the scene with their immaculate and sinless intellects. As if they are literally the ones we've been waiting for.

But "The conservative attitude is to assume that our parents and grandparents weren’t fools and that they did some things for good reasons." However, as alluded to above, it is possible that these reasons were never consciously thought out or articulated. Rather, perhaps "some things our forebears bequeathed us are good for no 'reason' at all."

This is consistent with Hayek, who "argued that many of our institutions and customs emerged from 'spontaneous order' -- that is, they weren’t designed on a piece of paper, they emerged, authorless, to fulfill human needs through lived experience, just as our genetic 'wisdom' is acquired through trial and error. Paths in the forest aren’t necessarily carved out on purpose. Rather they emerge over years of foot traffic."

Which reminds me of something I read in Lawrence in Arabia. It is impossible to imagine the vastness of the desert, which is like a featureless ocean of sand and rocks. However, the Bedouins don't simply wander around blindly. Rather, the sandscape is dotted with the occasional well, so if we were to map the human phase space of the desert, we would actually see well worn (but invisible) paths from well to well.

Well, it's the same with the human mindscape. One of the fondest principles of progressives is that the mind is indeed a trackless desert -- a blank slate -- and therefore infinitely malleable. Absent that dubious principle, then progressive schemes cannot get off the ground, because people are going to persist in being people, and there's not a damn thing the state can do about it.

This explains why progressive schemes often get a few inches off the ground, only to promptly crash and burn. Which then requires another progressive scheme to put out the fire and clean up the mess. Repeat ad infinitum.

Continuing with the Happy Acres passage,

In the parable of the fence, Chesterton says you must know why the fence was built before you can tear it down. But Burke and Hayek get at something even deeper: what if no one built the fence?... Or what if everyone built the fence without realizing it? What if we are surrounded by fences that were never consciously built or planned but were instead the natural consequence of lived experience?

Do you think beavers wonder about how to defend their tradition of dam building, or that spiders worry about the environmental impact of their webs? Similarly, "So much of what makes civilization civilized is intangible, spontaneous, and mysterious. An unknowable number of our greatest laws are hidden, our greatest wisdom is authorless, and our most valuable treasures are in our hearts. This should foster enormous humility about how to out-think humanity."

I think this explains how and why the people who try to outthink humanity are always lacking in common sense, even if they are otherwise "geniuses." For example, Albert Einstein: genius at physics. Immature boob at politics. Noam Chomsky: they say he's a savant at linguistics, but this hardly prevents him from being an idiot at everything else.

Bion said something about the limitations of language, to the effect that we run into trouble when we try to use this device designed to negotiate the physical world to map the psychic -- let alone spiritual -- world. Obviously, in order to accomplish the latter, we will have to use language in a different way, if we can accomplish it at all.

To cite one particularly obvious example, if you want to be perfectly literal, then there can be no name, no word, for God. As soon as you confer a name, you have placed a boundary around the boundless and signified the unsignifiable.

But there are many things of this nature -- even the most important things in life. I would say that there is a kind of permanent dialectic between knowledge and mystery -- (k) and O -- and that to pretend to have transcended or eliminated the latter is to drain life of all its romance, charm, and adventure. Think about this the next time you imagine you could do a better job at creating a cosmos: how to make one that is simultaneously infinitely knowable and yet infinitely mysterious?

In my opinion, this can only be because the cosmos is personal and from the hand of a person, since a person is the quintessential case of something infinitely knowable and yet utterly mysterious and "other."

You could say that we are talking literally about embodied -- or incarnated -- truth(s).

Fine observation by Eliot, also lifted from Happy Acres, about "the decline of religious sensibility." Sensibility is not sense per se, but sensation in a higher key, so to speak -- like good taste in music or poetry.

So,

The trouble of the modern age is not merely the inability to believe certain things about God and man which our forefathers believed, but the inability to feel towards God and man as they did. A belief in which you no longer believe is something which to some extent you can still understand; but when religious feeling disappears, the words in which men have struggled to express it become meaningless (emphasis mine).

Thus, there are any number of things in which human beings believe because they understand them, even without being able to explain how or why. This goes back to Paul's crack about faith being the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not (yet) seen. This "substance" is the ground of being, while the evidence is its end; or, just say origin and destiny, which is where we always are, because we are in (created and personal and meaningful) being.

When we talk about the "social issues" at the root of the culture war, the problem is that we are mostly talking about pre- or trans-articulated, embodied knowledge, or common sense. In his latest Jonah Goldberg writes of how these are also connected to

the role and authority of the family. Arguments about abortion, gay marriage, obscenity, sex ed, etc. all connect to the family directly or indirectly. Even gun rights have a lot to do with the family, and not just because 'gun culture' is primarily learned in the home. Guns fit neatly into the conception of the autonomous family and the role of parents as primary protectors of their children.

Furthermore,

no institution transmits culture more effectively than the family. We learn language, dialect, and accents in the home.... We get most of our religion and morality at home. We learn from our parents how citizens behave in a society and what they should expect from society and government. It's important to keep in mind that while parents teach their kids by telling them things, the real learning comes from watching what parents do — or don't do. Kids are wired to emulate their parents (emphasis mine).

Here again, we're talking about incarnated and largely unarticulated knowledge, i.e., how to "be" (i.e., the "unthought known"). Which is in turn "why progressives of all labels have had their eye on the family. It is the state's greatest competition."

Or to paraphrase Woodrow Wilson -- now, there was an honest and honestly nasty progressive! -- said, "the primary mission of the educator is to make children as unlike their parents as possible."

Which is ultimately to make them as unlike human beings as possible. Well done.

Common Sense, Common Core, Common Crap

Here's a tasty repost that's even older than yesterday's exotic repast. Again, in preparation for diving into Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, we're taking a trip down into the moldy hull of the arkive in order to see what we've already written on the subject of common sense.

Which you might be tempted to think is boring or trivial. Quite the opposite, especially in our mentally and spiritually retarded day and age, in which common sense is under assault from all sides. The question is, why? You wouldn't teach a child to stare at the sun or play with matches. Why then would you teach him that people have no gender until they decide what it is?

By the way, these old posts are extensively edited and revised, so there's no excuse to avoid reading them unless you just don't feel like it.

We've been exploring the controversial (!) notion that knowledge exists and that it is a real and efficacious adequation to reality -- i.e., that man may know the truth of existence.

Before going any further, I would say that if common sense exists, it can only be rooted in this principle: that knowledge does exist and that (therefore) it is a real and efficacious adequation to reality. Schematically it looks like this: reality --> knowledge; knowledge exists because there is a reality, but equally important, we know reality exists because we have knowledge of it.

You know the old gag that all happy families are alike, while each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way? Well, it's not true of families, but it is true of common sense. We might say that all people with common sense are alike, while every person without it is stupid in his own way. It's why (by definition) there can only be one true philosophy but an infinite number of false ones.

A false or partial philosophy results from the elevation of cosmic stupidity to first principle. But stupidity in, garbage out, no matter how one tries to spin it. Conversely if truth comes out of your philosophy, something must go in in order to make it possible. By extension, you can't say "chemistry in, soul out," or "chaos in, information out," and leave it at that. That's just magic.

Speaking of which, a couple of days ago the WSJ had a review of a book called Me, Myself, and Why: Searching for the Science of Self. Now, right away I see problems with that title, because there can be no "science" of the "self," because science deals only with the How, not the Why. A better title might be something like "Why Science Cannot Tell Us Anything Important About the Self," but it would be a blank book.

Aphorisms:

--The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

--To believe that science is enough is the most naïve of superstitions.

--Science, when it finishes explaining everything, but being unable to explain the consciousness that creates it, will not have explained anything (NGD).

The author evidently searches for herself in all the wrong places, including her genes, brainscans, personality tests, and more. But as the reviewer correctly points out, "even if we could measure every atom in a brain, we would need creativity and ingenuity to add a layer of interpretation to the data, and complete comprehension would still remain beyond us."

Thus, as it pertains to persons, even the most complete possible science is infinitely distant from the "object" it is attempting to comprehend. Instead of being an adeqation to reality, it is an inadequation to unreality. Or, to put it colloquially, science is inadequate to the task of comprehending subjective reality.

This isn't at all surprising, because a scientific approach to the self is like counting the digital bits in a CD to try to understand the performance it encodes. The performance by definition not only transcends the bits, but is their sufficient reason. In other words, the bits exist for the sake of the performance, not vice versa.

In her final chapter, the author suggests that self-perception may be a fiction -- a conclusion that will make perfect sense to anyone who is totally bereft of personal insight. But self-deception only exists because there is a self to be deceived.

The author confesses that, in her quest for a scientific explanation of the self, she veered "dangerously close at times to the precipice of philosophy."

Oh dear! Speaking of people who are bereft of insight, how can someone fail to understand that science becomes a philosophy -- a naive philosophy called scientism -- when it tries to transform a method into a doctrine?

--Those who reject all metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest (NGD).

The self partakes of both universality and particularity. In other words, we are all unique individuals, and yet, there exist self-evident truths available to all functioning adults. Much of this has to do with our embodied-ness, that is, our common corpus. We all have the same five senses, the same brain structure, the same developmental sequence.

Which raises some interesting questions about the possibility of a "common core." This subject has become controversial, because the left wants to impose its common crap on the nation's children, even while insisting there is no common human nature. Therefore, when they say "common core," what they really mean is indoctrination -- not what all humans can know, but what all humans had better know, or else, in order to be compliant subjects of the State (the one Great Body we really have in common).

A recent Hillsdale Imprimus touches on this subject. In it, Larry Arnn writes that a "true core" would have a "unifying principle, such as the idea that there is a right way to live that one can come to know."

But the leftist common core has precisely the opposite purpose: multiculturalism, for example, is founded upon the principle that all cultures are equally beautiful except ours, which is uniquely racist, misogynistic, imperialist, and homophobic.

Aren't you being a little polemical, Bob? Well, Arnn cites a passage from the Teacher's Guide for Advanced Placement, which tells us that such antiquated terms as "objectivity" and "factuality" have "lost their preeminence." Rather, instruction is "less a matter of transmittal of an objective and culturally sanctioned body of knowledge, and more a matter of helping individuals learn to construct their own realities."

Oh. Who knew we had to be taught how to live in our own realities? And who knew, for that matter, that reality had a plural? Indeed, if it has a plural form, doesn't that violate its own definition? In short, if "perception is reality," then neither of these terms exist, because in equating them they lose all meaning. In other words, perception must be of reality, and reality is what is perceived.

So, if we are going to have a "common core," I propose that it shouldn't exclude reality. Rather, I suspect that this thing called "reality" is what human beings have most in common.

This is because man is a kind of membrain between intelligence and reality. Ultimately, man is the point of contact between two spheres or dimensions.

In reading this short book on the apostle Paul, we are reminded that -- speaking of our cultural heritage -- "the lid covering the Ark of the Covenant... was considered the point of contact between God and man." Later, a sect of deviant Jews would come to regard Jesus as this point of contact, in whom we could participate in the Absolute reality. Interestingly, this is truly a "common corpus," AKA Corpus Christi.

This point of contact is actually a kind of abyss. In the absence of God, then it is the abyss of nothingness, with no possibility of a common core.

But in reality, this is an "abyss of divine goodness," and by plunging into it we are drawn up into the Great Attractor which we all share in common. In this sense, faith is a kind of conformity to reality, a cosmic Yes, whereas the faithlessness of the left is a cosmic NO! to God, to Man, and to the fertile reality in between.

Common sense is the father’s house to which philosophy returns, every so often, feeble and emaciated. --Dávila

Logocide, Soul Murder, and the Death of Common Sense

Some of you may recall a book we discussed a couple years ago, called Common Sense Nation: Unlocking the Forgotten Power of the American Idea, by Robert Curry. Well, Curry has written a sequel, Reclaiming Common Sense: Finding Truth in a Post-Truth World, due out later this month. He was kind enough to send me a copy, so now I have something new to write about.

But before doing so, I want to review what I've already written about common sense, beginning with this post from five years ago, originally titled It All Starts with Dictionary Abuse -- which it surely does, "It" meaning the uncommon sense -- or rather, common nonsense -- of the left. For as Dávila says in one of his most important aphorisms about the left, it is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy. Meaning that always and everywhere, the left begins by torturing the plain meaning of words -- words such as "freedom," or "rights," or "equity," or "justice."

In the counter-cosmos of the left, In the beginning was the word, and the word was redefined. The left knows as well as anyone that language has magical properties. The difference between us and them is that they co-opt the magic in order to seize and expand their own power. Which transforms it to black magic, precisely. It is a kind of demonic transubstantiation in which the form remains but the substance changes (e.g., "homosexual marriage").

Ultimately the left breaks the sacred covenant between word and thing, such that language is only about more language (as in deconstruction, the precise opposite of the metaphysical realism of orthodox Christianity). This effectively blocks the way to transcendence, thus enclosing us in a manmade immanent logosphere. This is what totalitarianism does, every time: the means of our escape is transformed into the means of our enslavement. A number of aphorisms go to this diabolical process, such as

In certain eras the intelligence has to devote itself merely to restoring definitions.

Marxism turns the intelligence that it touches to stone.

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas (NGD).

In other words -- and you must understand this literally -- the leftist lives in an ontologically closed world whereby verticality is denied in favor of an absurcular horizontality in which unavoidable ignorance is transformed to smug certitude.

Or maybe you didn't catch any of the seven-hour climate scarathon on CNN the other night, in which the candidates promised to outlaw everything from cheeseburgers to plastic straws on the grounds that they will end Life On Earth. Worst weather report ever. Notice how their cheap omniscience -- after all, it didn't cost them a thing, not even their private jets -- is transformed into a very costly denial of our freedom. They know. We pay.

Anyway, on to the old post:

Everyone is in favor of common sense, right?

No. In fact, I think this is another one of those questions that distinguishes left from right. You could say that conservatism is simply the conservation of common sense -- of time-rested general agreement about the Way Things Are and how to order our lives around these truths (in other words, the world, AKA reality, comes first, not our ideas, dreams, and fantasies).

The leftist would respond, "maybe, but a great deal of oppression and stupidity also get imported along with the good, so there is no intrinsic reason to defer to the past. We can always do better."

People don't generally think too deeply about common sense, which is one reason why it can be difficult to defend when challenged, as in "who are you to say that marriage must be limited to members of the opposite sex?"

That's not an honest question; rather, it is simply the aggressive abandonment of common sense. We know this, because one might just as well ask, "why limit marriage to just two people, or to human beings, or to living things? Why do you arbitrarily exclude robots, or sheep, or inflatable partners?" Once you go down that path, you've abandoned common sense, so there's no end to it.

A book I'm reading at the moment, The Common Mind, goes to this question of common sense. It's actually a collection of essays, each devoted to a thinker who championed the common sense of Christian humanism in the face of the hostile and regressive forces that are always arrayed against it, in every age. It seems that this is what fallen man does, by virtue of his fallenness. It reminds me of Russell Kirk's brief definition of conservatism, which is to say: the negation of ideology.

Yeah, it's always been this way, and always will be. There are always omnnisicent asssouls such as Obama who want to fundamentally transform the world, and in so doing conduct a frontal assault on common sense. In the words of Samuel Johnson,

It remains that we retard what we cannot repel, that we palliate what we cannot cure. Life may be lengthened by care, though death cannot be ultimately defeated.

At best we may give "longevity to that which its own nature forbids to be eternal." Which implies that the left will ultimately succeed in destroying the United States, just as death will succeed in taking us all, but so what? It remains for us to do the right thing for its own sake, not for some secondary gain.

To paraphrase someone, there is no lost cause because there is no permanently gained one. Rather, there is only the same struggle, as each generation tries to hold the ground gained by the previous one, handing forward the Deposit of Common Sense. (Along these lines, I can't help thinking how my generation -- the Worst Generation ever, the Boomers -- not only failed to hand on this sacred deposit, but arrogantly tossed it overboard in the quest to begin anew, like Adam 2.0: this time we'll get it right, and we will be as gods!)

It's the same with language. One of the perennial tactics of the left is its relentless attack on language, which is the vehicle of common sense. It is as if there is a conserving and integrating force in language, to go along with a dis-integrating and catabolic force. In reality, both are needed -- conservation and change -- in order to progress. As it pertains to Life Itself, change is the very means of conservation, and vice versa.

But progress does not and cannot occur by destroying the very mechanism of conservation, by undermining the plain meaning of words. Thus, one could say that there is nothing quite as conservative as a dictionary; likewise, on the political plane one could say that there is nothing as conservative as the Constitution (which naturally allows for constitutional change, just as language allows for new words; conversely, progress is negated by pretending the Constitution means anything we want it to mean).

But this simple common sense won't do for the left. For example, the Constitution plainly forbids discrimination on the basis of race, so the left (to paraphrase Justice Scalia) is in the position of arguing that the 14th amendment actually requires what it expressly forbids. In order to accept their argument, one must simply abandon common sense.

In the chapter on Chesterton, I was reminded of his comment to the effect that most all philosophy since Aquinas requires us to accept one insane premise. Once we have done so, the rest of the insanity follows with ineluctable logic. It makes it easy, because one doesn't have the burden of remembering dozens of lies. Rather, so long as one assimilates the first, the rest flows along from entailment to entailment. Which Adam learned the hard way.

"Since the modern world began in the sixteenth century, nobody's system of philosophy has really corresponded to everybody's sense of reality" (Chesterton). Which is interesting right there, because why not? If there is a common reality and a common human nature, then why can't we all agree on a common philosophy?

One reason why Aquinas' philosophy is so attractive is that it comports with common sense. It is "the philosophy of sanity since it is integrative, universal, sensible, and reiterative of the common understanding of experience rooted in the senses and refined by reason." And what is sanity? It is simply the registration of objective reality, "the universal wholeness that connects man and God, matter and mind, heart and soul." If there is no common reality knowable by a common human nature, then there is no sanity either. In case you were wondering why the left is insane.

Again, most modern philosophies begin with "a particular point of view demanding the sacrifice" of sanity. In short, a man must "believe something that no normal man would believe," if that something were expressed in a simple and straightforward manner. Which is precisely why leftism must always lie about itself, and why it must so relentlessly abuse the poor dictionary.

Thus, modern philosophies reflect and assist "the breakdown of reality, the disintegration of belief and the fragmentation of society."

So yes, liberalism is liberating, but from what and for whom? From reality, and for the abnormal, the insane, the lacking in common sense, the envious, the angry, the auto-victimized, the sexually confused, the tenured. For the rest of us it is mental slavery, slavery being a symptom of the absence of the rule of natural reason, and denial of any appeal to the court of common sense.

Sticks and stones may break your bones, but abuse of words can destroy a soul.

Face the Facts: No God, No Persons

For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then face to face. Now I know in part, but then I shall know just as I also am known.

In this famous passage, Paul gets to the heart of what it means to be seen and re-cognized, and therefore to have one's being -- one's humanness -- validated and made real. Made real, as in

God exists for me in the same act in which I exist.

And Love is the act that transforms its object from a thing into a person (NGD).

God, love, person, existence, transformation. All are fundamentally related.

In the book I referenced yesterday, Vision and Separation, the author writes that

The "space" of self-consciousness is a secondary development within the field of consciousness. It arises when the subject (the child) becomes aware of the looking of the object. It is the space within which the person looks at himself through the eyes of the other.

I often speak of consciousness as interface, or inter-face. This is to emphasize that both consciousness and self-consciousness, and the symbols that mediate these experiences, only arise between faces, in other words, in an interpersonal setting, within which relations between persons... are formative.

In fact, infant observation studies have been conducted in which mothers maintain a deadpan expression, but otherwise respond normally to their infant in every way. As you might imagine, the infants quickly become visibly distressed. They are literally dis-oriented, since the mother's face is not only the center of their universe, but their primary means of managing their own internal states.

In other words, the child looks to the mother to "know what's going on," both outside and "inside," in the emotional world. Without the mOther, the child is submerged in unintelligible experience, much like a crybullying snowflake college student who lashes out at projected fragments of unmetabolized emotional experience.

Like any other system, the facial recognition system -- in which we feel the need to be recognized by other faces -- can go awry. For example, pathological narcissism essentially revolves around an exaggerated or even bottomless need for human mirroring in order to fill a deficit inside.

The problem here is that the narcissistic mirroring doesn't reach to the level of being, but only touches a superficial "false self" unconsciously constructed by the narcissist. This means that the narcissist is actually in control of the process, and isn't truly "giving" or exposing his true self to the other. That would be too risky.

One can understand why so many narcissists gravitate toward entertainment, politics, and media, since these are an ideal way to submit a false self to a bunch of anonymous faces for validation.

But deep down the narcissist has a well-founded contempt for the loser who would idealize him, of all people, so he has some dim unconscious recognition that he is filling himself with psychic junk food. It tends to become addictive, since you can never get enough of what you don't really need.

I recently read a book called Mimesis and Science, which goes into some of the latest research on the centrality of the Face in human development. One author compares it to a force of attraction, much like gravity, except operating in interior space:

That natural force of cohesion, which alone grants access to the social, to language, to culture, and indeed to humanness itself, is simultaneously mysterious and obvious, hidden in and of itself, but dazzling in its effects -- like gravity and the attraction of corporeal masses in Newtonian space.

If gravity did not exist, life on earth would be impossible. Similarly, if this remarkable force that attracts human beings to one another, that unites them... -- if this force did not exist, there would be no humanity.

Yup. Makes one wonder if the physics of gravity is posterior to the physics of love, a la Dante, who speaks of ultimate reality as the love that moves the sun and other stars.

In the same canto, he describes a barely effable vision of circles, one of which seemed reflected by the second, / as rainbow is by rainbow, and a third, which is like fire breathed equally by those two circles. And then

I searched that strange light: I wished to see / the way in which our human effigy / suited the circle and found a place in it.

Back to Mimesis and Science:

from the very start, psychological actuality is found between individuals.... The self and the other are thus bound together in a fundamental way at the point of origin by a tie that is ontological and existential....

The genesis of the self cannot take place except by the mediation of the other and simultaneously with the other in a process of differentiation that is gradual and reciprocal.

I'm sure this is why For God there are only individuals (DNC); and why, conversely, without God, there could be no individuals.

Anthropo-Cosmology

It turns out that anthropology and cosmology, I and It, are entangled in surprising ways. Recall that the reign of dualism supposedly got underway with Descartes' division of mind and matter. Everyone forgets that even he saw the absurdity of this, for which reason the whole system falls apart without God. The reasoning goes something like this:

"I think, therefore I am."

"Yes, but how do you know that's really true?"

"Er... because God wouldn't deceive us?"

So Descartes sneaks in a -- or The -- first principle at the end, which is pre-posterous (which literally means putting the post- before the pre-). For there is no doubt that the cosmos is intelligible and that man may know it; and that these can only be true because the universe is created. In other words: if the universe is intelligible to us, it was created. If it isn't intelligible, then we cannot know whether or not it was created. And if it isn't created, then we could never know it.

In short, the createdness of things illuminates the intimate relationship between cosmology and anthropology, which are unified in knowledge, or Truth.

Ratzinger:

[O]ur history is advancing to an 'omega' point, at which it will become finally and unmistakably clear that the element of stability that seems to us to be the supporting ground of reality, so to speak, is not mere unconscious matter; that, on the contrary, the real, firm ground is mind.

Mind holds being together, gives it reality, indeed is reality; it is not from below but from above that being receives its capacity to subsist.

There exists a "process of 'complexification' of material being through spirit," through which emerges "a new kind of unity." (I would say "unities," for that is what time -- and evolution -- do: create new and higher -- which is to say, more "dense" and "deep" -- unities.)

We said before that nature and mind form one single history, which advances in such a way that mind emerges more clearly as the all-embracing element and, thus, anthropology and cosmology finally in actual fact coalesce.

And

this assertion of the increasing 'complexification' of the world through mind necessarily implies its unification around a personal center, for the mind is not just an undefined something or other; where it exists in its own specific nature, it subsists individually, as a person (ibid.).

So, the ever-increasing complexification of the cosmos ends -- as far as we can determine -- in the human person. We say this because we cannot imagine something "beyond a person" except for God. We can, however, imagine more of a person, which goes to the sanctification process, i.e., theosis.

There is literally nothing as complex as the human brain-and-nervous-system, what with its 10 billion neurons and 10 to the 14th power synaptic connections. I'm better at myth than math, but if I understand rightly, this means that in this immense social network, each neuron can apparently friend up to 14 others.

That's a lot of synapses, so many that if you were to attempt to compute their possible combinations, it would take longer than this cosmos is going to last. Which is just another way of saying that we'll never run out of melodies, poems, paintings, or jokes. Creativity is forever. Which reminds me:

If God were not a person, He would have died some time ago (NGD).

Now, this cosmoplexification revolves around a personal center, and that's what makes it so interesting (or any other adjective, for that matter, for adjectives can only be relative to persons). Think of all that computing power in the human brain, and yet, it all resolves into the simple, unitary experience of an "I" at the center of the neural storm.

This "I" not only manages to resolve all that micro-neural activity, but it also unifies various macro-brain structures such as left and right cerebral hemispheres, limbic system, language area, etc., plus subjective/vertical structures from the primitive unconscious to the transhuman supraconscious -- all spontaneously and without effort. Rather, it "just happens."

You could say that this is similar to other infinitely complex systems, say, the US economy. For example, at the end of the day, you can hear on the news that the stock market gained or lost this or that amount of wealth.

This latter is presented as a unitary quantity, but of course it's just an abstraction, plus it has no actual center. There is no "I" in the middle of all that economic activity saying to itself "I really cleaned up today!," or "today I really lost my shirt, and it's all Trump's fault!"

A person is the apex of cosmic intelligence, but it turns out -- or so we have heard from the wise -- that the "center" represented by the person actually extends all the way down.

In other words, it is not as if the cosmos evolves to a certain point, and then there appears this inexplicable thing called a person, like the frosting on a cake. Rather, there is a kind of "centration" that is present everywhere and everywhen, only in more or less attenuated forms.

For example, when Jesus says "Before Abraham was, I am," he's expressing our point, albeit more enigmatically. This needs to be understood in the context of other biblical statements such as "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God," "I AM WHO I AM," "When He prepared the heavens I was there," and "When He drew a circle on the face of the deep... I was beside him."

Also, in the extra-biblical but orthoparadoxical Gospel of Thomas, Jesus asks, "Have you found the beginning that you look to the end? Where the end is, is where the beginning is. Blessed is the one who stands at the beginning, for the one who stands at the beginning will know the end"; and even more to the point, "Blessed is the one who comes into being before he came into being."

All of these statements go to the idea of the person being anterior to all phenomena; or of phenomena "extending," so to speak, from the Person. Otherwise there would be no phenomena.

Human beings are of course "social animals," but it is possible to be social without being completely interior to, or inside, one another.

For example, bees and ants exchange information with each other and act as a group, but they don't think about it. You might say that the "center" of a bee hive is dispersed throughout the colony, rather than being present in its totality in each bee.

But in the case of humans, the center is in the individual.

The left attempts to subvert and undo this individual centration by forcing people to identify with race, class, ethnicity, gender, and what have you, but this is the very essence of a regressive barbarism, as it recalls a time in human history prior to the emergence -- the revelation -- of the free and autonomous person.

Personhood, although implicit, can only explicate itself in an interpersonal space, i.e., the space between subjects. An old textbook of mine says that "the self, as a conceivable entity, is formed -- or de-formed, or re-formed -- at that place where the Other's view meets with the felt substance of the person" (Wright). As biology makes matter come alive, intersubjectivity renders neurobiology personal.

By unmasking a truth, one encounters a Christian face (NGD).

Who's on First? And How?

Yesterday on the way to work I had two possibly related thoughtlets that may possibly relate to the post we are about to read, or at least I'll try to relate them. The first was in the form of a question, Man minus God = what? In cosmo-metasymbolic terms, we could represent the equation as ʘ - O = •. Now, what is • without O?

Think about it. You won't have to think too long before coming to the realization that it can only be nothing. Or anything, depending upon how you look at it.

Which very much relates to our second thoughtlet, the innocent sounding affirmation that You have to start somewhere. For where one starts will determine, among other things, where one ends. For example, in the words of the Aphorist,

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

This is quite literally true. Limited to the scientific method, one can't even say that knowledge should be limited to what the scientific method can prove. In other words, to affirm that science = truth is to have left the scientific method far behind and below. One is up in the world of metaphysics, but anchored to what? Science minus metaphysics = what? Nothing. For

Without philosophy, the sciences do not know what they know (NGD).

Would it also be accurate to say that the philosopher who adopts transnatural metaphysical notions has predetermined his conclusions? No, not at all. It's called being curious, and not prematurely filling the space of curiosity with some arbitrary answer just to make one's epistemic anxiety go away. Not only is it okay to not know the answer, it's mandatory!

Speaking of cluelessness, I read this morning that AOC wakes up at 3:30 AM due to anxiety over climate change. Now, since the dawn of history women have been waking up in the middle of the night with anxiety. What distinguishes anxiety from fear is that the latter is a physiological response to a real external threat, whereas anxiety is a physiological response that attaches itself to some external cause in order to explain itself to itself.

Think of the millions of leftists who are afraid that our president is a "white supremacist." Being that he is obviously nothing of the sort, this represents the projection of a spurious cause to explain the effect. But the effect -- the anxiety -- comes first. Which means that "white supremecism" is actually the effect of the anxiety, not vice versa. If you eliminated white supremacism, then the anxiety would simply attach itself to some other phantom, say, Russian collusion, or mental incompetence, or whatever the next one will be.

Likewise, "climate change" is the effect, not the cause, of AOC's anxiety. She mentions being anxious for her potential family, which is closer to the real cause, since all young women are concerned about their present or future children, whether consciously or unconsciously. Motherhood is a real archetype, and you can't get around it by projecting it into the weather, any more than a beta male can get around the father archetype by, say, embracing a purely maternal socialism. In that case, the archetype will just return in monstrous form (as in the case of fatherless children, whose father often reappears in the form of prison).

Where do we begin? In the past, we've batted around Stanley Jaki's idea that most philosophers begin on second or third base without ever explaining how they arrived at first. Indeed, some imagine they have gotten all the way home!

This is no joke. Then again, it is. Think of the modern atheist crowd, i.e., Hitchens-Harris-Dawkins & Dennett. "God doesn't exist." That's what you call an epistemological round-tripper, or home run.

Okay, fine. But if you know anything about baseball, you will have noticed that even if the ball sails out of the park, the hitter must nevertheless touch all the bases, including home plate. If he fails to do so, then the run doesn't count, no matter how far the ball went.

Analogously, to say "God doesn't exist" is to have hit the ball clear out of the cosmic stadium. But this doesn't change the rules: you still have to get to first base. Which is to say, a Darwinian monkey has to know things that no Darwinian monkey could ever know. Or, in order for atheism to be true, a miraculous transformation must occur between the monkey in batter's box and the man on first base.

Now that I think about it, the rules of baseball explain everything. There is a pitcher; there is a batter; and there is a ball. The pitcher is being, or reality; the ball is objects, or intelligible things; and the batter is intelligence, or the human person. You could even say that different bats -- or different ways of hitting the ball -- correspond to different disciplines, e.g., physics, chemistry, biology, etc.

Extending the analogy, physicists in particular imagine they are the cleanup hitter, the one who drives in all the runs. But this can't be true. In reality, they are the leadoff man who simply tries to get on base by any means necessary. Physics is not and cannot be a home run; more like a modest blooper or bunt single. Assuming physics gets on base, you still need metaphysics to drive him home. Here is how Jaki describes it:

Unfortunately, much of philosophy, especially in modern times, has come to resemble more and more a spurious baseball game: there the opposing teams (schools of philosophy) assume without further ado, that one can get to first base without first hitting a real ball...

Indeed, postmodernism in general and deconstruction in particular begin with the assumption that there is no real ball to begin with. Really, it's baseball reduced to Calvinball, such that anybody can get on base any time for any reason. As such, it's no longer a game, just a scramble for power. As in socialism, it's not a game, but there are surely winners and losers.

To be continued...

What's the Point?

What is the point of existing, or worse yet, knowing one exists?

First, we can all agree that existence either has or doesn't have a Point. However, this doesn't necessarily imply that we could ever know -- or not know -- it. Absent an outside perspective, both theism and atheism would be equally pointless.

In other words, existence might have a Point we can never know. Conversely, we could mistakenly believe it hasn't a Point when it actually has one. Or at least has a plausible alibi.

Most people have the intuition that existence has a Point, but can this intuition be trusted, much less verified?

Mere reason is powerless to determine whether or not there is a Point, first, because reason can only draw conclusions from premises provided from elsewhere (often from intuition), and second, because it cannot adopt a stance from outside the total cosmic system, and render judgment on the totality of which it is only a part. The moment you posit a "theory of everything," you've transcended the theory.

In short, if Gödel didn't exist, we'd have to invent him.

More generally, people will deploy reason to prove the truth of this or that intuition, the latter of which can emanate from spheres above or below the realm of reason per se.

The latter is called "rationalization" (i.e., reasoning from below), and is only a caricature of the real thing. The former is called various things, including intellection, infused contemplation, mystical contact, and floating upon the currents of the slackstream.

This just highlights the fact that we have various sources of information -- interior and exterior, subjective and objective, vertical and horizontal, empirical and suprasensible -- that we draw upon and toss into the cognitive hopper in order to come up with the Answer and thereby see the Point.

Here at One Cosmos we never restrict ourselves to just one or two or three sources, but give an honest hearing to all of them.

Revelation is one such source we may draw upon. In fact, it is the only source -- and only possible source -- that is presupposed to emanate from outside the total cosmic system, and therefore the only information that can truly bear upon our opening question about the Point of existence.

You could put it conversely, and affirm that if we can know the Point, then it can only be via revelation in some form or fashion. I would widen this out and say that, to the extent that we can know anything, it is because God knows. If God doesn't know, then neither do we. And if there is no God, then there is no real knowledge and therefore no point.

Or again, to put it conversely, knowledge is always of reality. If we can distinguish appearances from reality -- and we can -- it is only because we transcend appearances. I am reminded of an Aphorism:

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

Or, the universe has a point if it is appearance, but has no point if it is the reality. Which is why the very first sentence of Genesis makes the point that the universe is not the ultimate reality, but rather, has a source that utterly transcends it.

Now, the Point, if it be the real thing, won't just appear at the "end" of the cosmic process. By way of analogy, the point of a novel doesn't just abruptly appear on the last page, disconnected from everything that has preceded it.

Rather, in hindsight it will be seen that the end was there all along, shaping the narrative and infusing it with drive, coherence, meaning, and purpose. Again, there are hints along the way, but only at the end do we acquire the area rug that pulls the whole room together.

Think, for example, of the first generation of Christians who were shocked to discover the abundance of meaning in the Previous Testament which had eluded them before. In this way, the novel events of those three days in particular had the effect of utterly transforming the past, so to speak. Who says you can't change the past? It's what the future does. And the future always begins now.

Now, since the present is always changing, this changes the meaning of the events leading up to it. One can only understand the meaning of something by allowing its effects to play out.

Ratzinger notes that for Christianity, the convergence of person and cosmos -- of anthropology and cosmology -- is the end of "the world." The revelation of the unity of the two reveals that this unity has been the goal all along, precisely:

Cosmos and man, which already belong to each other even though they so often stand opposed to one another, become one through their "complexification" in the larger entity of the love that... goes beyond and encompasses bios....

Thus it becomes evident here once again how very much end-eschatology and the breakthrough represented by Jesus' Resurrection are in reality one and the same thing; it becomes clear once again that the New Testament rightly depicts the Resurrection as the eschatological happening.

In other words: the Resurrection is the unsurpassable end and meaning of existence. It certainly meets the criteria mentioned above, in that it isn't something we could ever know, much less accomplish, on our own, and is indeed an ingression from outside the total cosmic system, one that has the effect of transforming existence and revealing the point of what went before.

Or put it this way: there really is no point if we can't know -- and more to the point -- participate in and even become it.

Christ was in history like a point on a line. But his redemptive act is to history as the center is to the circumference (NGD).

Supernatural Selection: If Darwinism is Right, Atheism is Wrong

In Romans 8:22, Paul famously speaks of a cosmos -- the whole dang existentialada -- formerly plunged into hopelessness and futility, now groaning and laboring with birth pangs; and the Christians to whom he speaks are "the firstfruits of the Spirit" who too "groan within ourselves, eagerly awaiting for the adoption, the redemption of our body."

So, births within births within births. This is an important point, for it seems that there are unforeseen and unforeseeable Easter eggs hidden in the cosmos, and indeed, that the cosmos itself is just such a fertile egg.

What I mean is that no one could have looked at the lifeless cosmos of 10 billion years ago and have predicted that it would suddenly come to life 3.8 billion years ago, nor that one of these life forms would become self-conscious and begin producing art, religion, and culture 50,000 years ago; or that the Creator would reveal himself to these self-conscious beings two or three thousand years ago.

Of that above passage, Balthasar writes that "When Paul refers to an indefinite and tense straining of all nature, it means in the first place that nature unconsciously strives toward man" -- not just the form but the substance, toward the fullness and fulfillment of human nature. Which is why we hope the groans and pangs of labor will end in liberation, redemption, sanctification, etc. You know the old gag: "work out your salvation with fear and trembling."

Of course, if Darwinism in particular and scientism more generally are correct, then "hope" is purely illusory, perhaps even a species-wide defense mechanism to prevent us from appreciating the gravity of the situation and just committing suicide.

If the atheist does not commit suicide he has no right to be thought lucid (NGD).

So, hope is either a genetic hope-a-dope strategy to trick us into keeping the circus going, or it is a kind of persistent "evidence of things unseen," i.e., the temporal shadow cast down and back by the fulfillment we hail from afar.

In the absence of this palpable evidence of things unseen, progress would be impossible because unthinkable. Hope and change always go together, except in the faithless liberal who forgets that beneficial change is only a hope and not a certainty, and certainly not something man can accomplish unaided. For the second part of Paul's crack about working out our salvation with fear and trembling is that "it is God who works in you to will and to act according to his purpose.” So relax and let God do the driving.

If Obama had proclaimed the other two theological virtues -- faith and charity -- his message wouldn't have been as resonant. For his kind of hope isn't evidence of unseen things but of things insane, like throwing away 15 million dollars on a coastal palace that will be under water in ten years:

AOC doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

To back up a bit -- like a hundred thousand years or so -- think of the poor proto-human, sitting around and hoping for things to get better. But in a strictly Darwinian framework, what is he hoping for, besides the next meal?

One thing: a random mutation that doesn't weaken, sicken, or kill his spawn, but somehow results in a beneficial change. Note that even then, the change can't occur in him -- for his genetic destiny is fixed -- but only in his descendents. Strictly speaking, this isn't hope for improvement, only hope for a nonlethal change somewhere down the line; Darwin himself "jotted down as a stern reminder to himself the note 'never use higher and lower'" (in Purcell).

Which is why an intellectually consistent Darwinian would be the last to suggest that a Darwinist is somehow "higher" than a creationist -- unless the former are more successful at getting their genes into the next generation, which is not the case, otherwise secular Europe wouldn't be undergoing slow motion demographic death. Supernatural selection in action!

If reproduction is the point of natural selection, then atheism is wrong by the only conceivable criterion.

Now this business of becoming human, of evolving, of giving birth to ourselves. The thing about it is, unlike any other creature, it cannot just happen on the species level, as if the species does all the dogged, trial-and-error work of evolving, from which we passively benefit.

No other animal has to participate in his own psycho-pneaumatic birth -- to learn how to be that animal, notwithstanding a limited repertoire of tricks the mother might pass along to her brood. And certainly no other animal needs to be born twice in order to undertake post-biological evolution.

But for human beings, each generation needs to fulfill the human journey anew. In the old days, philosophers and metaphysicians spoke of man as the microcosm who mirrors the macrocosm. That's true as far as it goes, but it implies a kind of static view, as if humanness is a once-and-for-all fact instead of an ongoing attainment and acquisition.

Here again, Clarke's idea of reality as "substance in relation" is helpful, for with it we can posit the microcosmology of man in more dynamic terms, as a movement or action, such that evolution itself redounds to the self-revelation of being. Who knows what goodies -- what colorful Easter eggs -- lurk in the heart of being? Even time takes time, to say nothing of eternity. Or, time takes an eternity to get it all out.

Bearing in mind the above, when we say that man is the image and likeness of O, it means, in the words of Clarke, that "all finite beings, which are imperfect images of the Source, bear within their very natures this same divinely originated dynamism of active self-communication to others." In this way, we are simultaneously rich and poor -- or, contra Darwin, high and low, -- in that

every finite being insofar as it is... rich, pours over to share its perfection with others; but insofar as it is poor, deficient in the full plenitude of being, it reaches out to receive enrichments of being from others, sharing in their riches (ibid.).

This is just another way of saying that man is an open system, both vertically and horizontally, and that God, the Absolute, O, the toppermost of the poppermost, must be understood in the same onederful threeway.

For what is the Incarnation but God "making himself poor," in which context we may understand certain paradoxymorons regarding the meek inheriting the earth, the last being first, and the blessedness of holy poverty?

Now, this interior activity of the Godhead, how to describe it?

Sorry, can't do that. That's well above our praygrade. We can, however, undescribe it, which we might symbolize something like (↓ ↔ ↑) to convey the total circulation of metacosmic energies in the perpetual now. And evidently we can participate in God because God participates in us.

If I were to reduce it to plain English, I don't think I could do better than Schuon:

If by "science" we mean a knowledge that is related to real things -- whether or not they can be directly ascertained..., religion will be the science of the total hierarchy, of equilibrium, and of the rhythms of the cosmic scale; it takes account, at one and the same time, of God's outwardly revealing Manifestation and of His inwardly absorbing Attraction, and it is only religion that does this and that can do it a priori and spontaneously (emphasis mine).

Ultra-Science and Infra-Religion

This is a revised and updated post from over seven years ago, but it serves as a useful commentary on the previous post:

Turns out that Darwin wasn't necessarily the vulgar Darwinian his disciples and detractors make him out to be. For example, Purcell quotes a letter from 1870 in which he frankly confessed that "I cannot look at the universe as the result of blind chance." Oopsie. No tenure for you!

To another author who had published a book in 1881 that "defended evolution and theism together," Darwin wrote that it "expressed my inward conviction, though far more vividly and clearly than I could have done, that the universe is not the result of chance." Indeed, for Darwin, "the rationality and moral probity of God underlay the rationality and meaningfulness of science" (Gillespie, in Purcell).

Which only goes to show how fundamentalists and extremists in both camps -- ultra-Darwinists and infra-religionists -- get it wrong.

I attach the prefix "ultra" to the former because it conveys the idea that they over-interpret the theory, and push it beyond its rightful limits. And I apply the prefix "infra" to the latter, because in my opinion they fall short of the deeper meaning of religion by rigidly applying a manmade framework on God, just because God must speak in a certain way in order to make himself known to human beings.

Analogously, I must speak in a certain way in order to make myself understood by my seven year-old. But it would be an elementary, if understandable, error on his part to assume that I have the mind of a seven year-old who's just bigger than he is. While I don't patronize him, neither do I gratuitously toss in words and concepts he can't possibly understand.

In fact, both types -- the ultra and the infra -- make the error referenced in yesterday's post, of imposing an ideological grid on reality in order to make the mystery go away. Of all people, you'd think that postmodern folks would be aware of the irony of engaging in this futile enterprise. But it seems that one of the properties of ideology is to blind the ideologue to its presence. Or just say that some people have a hard time recognizing their first principles -- especially people without any.

One of the dangers of ideology is that it doesn't just operate like a static map one uses to navigate the world. Rather, it is much more like a mind parasite, in that it actively hijacks the thinking process and thereby restricts the scope of reality.

In his Tyranny of Clichés, Goldberg quotes Orwell's famous essay on Politics and the English Language, in which Orwell highlights "the special connection between politics and the debasement of language."

It's easy to see how parasitical clichés can "construct your sentences for you" and "even think your thoughts for you," while performing "the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself" (Orwell) A political cliché operates "like a pill with a pleasant protective coating" which "conceals a mind-altering substance within" (Goldberg).

Although that might sound like a cliché, it is critical to realize and understand that it is literally true. The human mind cannot function in the absence of an "operating system," of some way to organize reality and convert experience into ideas, the question being "which one?"

For example, I've mentioned in the past that when I first began studying psychoanalysis, it was liberating at first but eventually became restrictive and confining, because, once internalized, I couldn't help interpreting everything in terms of its principles. I lost my perspective, such that the tool started to displace the man. Come to think of it, that's how you become a tool, isn't it -- by seeing everything in terms of a theory or ideology?

This is what ideology does. You might say that it results in damage to, and sometimes annihilation of, the person. I hasten to add that the Christian operating system doesn't (or at least shouldn't) do this, because it is not an ideology, rather, a cure therefrom (a subject worthy of a separate series of posts).

Many important Aphorisms come to mind:

--Ideologies are fictitious nautical charts, but in the end they determine which reef one is shipwrecked upon.

--In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

--The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

--The Christian who is disturbed by the “results” of science does not know what Christianity is or what science is.

Ultimately, The universe is important if it is appearance, and insignificant if it is reality. Boom. It's fine and appropriate to argue over appearances, contingencies, and relativities, which is what science does. Just don't conflate its appearance with its source. Never forget that Truth is a person, or better, the Person, and all this implies.

To the extent that the Raccoon has an "ideology," it would have to be called "Mysterian," in that it holds the human mystery to be the axis around which it revolves. We can never eliminate the mystery, we can only hope to circumscribe it. And A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

The human mystery (or mystery of the human) does not, and cannot, stand alone. Rather, for reasons articulated in yesterday's post (and many previous ones), the "human substance" isn't just some featureless and isolated blob, but has certain distinct properties, the most important ones being relation and sanctity (or potential sanctification, i.e., theosis).

These essential properties are a consequence of our deiformity. By which I mean that the source of our dignity, our wisdom, our freedom, our greatness cannot be from within ourselves. If we do locate the source there, it doesn't turn us into gods, but rather, monsters -- like domesticated animals that revert to ferality in a generation or two. Or, like the secular left, which becomes more feral by the day.

de Lubac writes that "It is not true, as is sometimes said, that man cannot organize the world without God."

Rather, "what is true is that, without God, he can ultimately only organize it against man." In other words, as we have discussed on many occasions, "exclusive humanism is inhuman humanism" (ibid.), because its very first principle rids the world of God in order to claim a greatness that only God can confer, and without whom we are hardly "everything," and not even nothing, really. At which point you can get away with anything.

As Schuon writes, "Respect for the human person must not open the door to a dictatorship of error and baseness, to the crushing of quality by quantity," or to over-valuation "of the crude fact at the expense of the truth."

We are immersed in a world of ceaseless change, so it is natural that we seek reliable landmarks and fixed lighthouses to navigate our journey. Ultimately these landmarks must concern origins (from where we set off); our present situation (where we are); and our course (to where we are going). Thus there are elements of both space and time, the latter of which being especially relevant to "where we are going," which naturally takes time to get there. For in the words of Kerouac, walking on water wasn't built in a day.

But ideologies tend to spatialize time, for the same reason they immanentize the transcendent. Schuon characterizes certain deviant neo-paganisms as "reactions of space against time." This can be seen in the reactionary left, which always.... Put it this way:

--If man is the sole end of man, an inane reciprocity is born from that principle, like the mutual reflection of two empty mirrors.

--“Human” is the adjective used to excuse any infamy.

--“To have faith in man” does not reach the level of blasphemy; it is just one more bit of nonsense.

--To believe in the redemption of man by man is more than an error; it is an idiocy.

Having said all this, it is nonetheless true that, from a certain perspective -- and largely in reaction to the errors and superstitions of the infra-religious -- "it must be admitted that the progressives are not entirely wrong in thinking that there is something in religion which no longer works," and that its "individualistic and sentimental argumentation... has lost almost all its power to pierce consciences."

This is because the "usual religious arguments" often don't probe "sufficiently to the depths of things," since past editions of man, unburdened by ultra-science, didn't really demand such explanations. The whole thing made sense intuitively, and there wasn't even really a framework in place to oppose it, or to understand it in any other way.

Which leads back to our mission and blog-hobby, which is to deploy arguments of a higher order to illuminate the lower, and to make religion once again relevant to the ultras and more efficacious or integral for the infras.

The XYZ Affair

We left off the previous post with an aphorism and a question. The aphorism: Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles. The question: So, what interferes with knowledge of principles?

Being that intelligence is the capacity to discern principles, then failure to discern them would be a consequence of "minus intelligence," AKA stupidity. But that's not quite right, because -- or so we have heard from the wise -- any man has the capacity to understand the Principles That Matter, by virtue of being a man.

We might say that what distinguishes man from the animals is knowledge of the principles that distinguish man from the animals. That might sound like a tautology, but only if we situate these principles on the plane of man, instead of being anchored in the heavens, or in the nature of things.

It reminds me of E.F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed, which I must have read over 30 years ago. Can't find it at the moment, but I'm looking at the sample on Amazon, which has a chapter on the Four Kingdoms, and now I'm wondering if this book had an unconscious influence on my own. That's my alibi, anyway.

Here again, all humans, by virtue of being human, can recognize the four kingdoms: Matter, Life, Consciousness, and Self-awareness. "Life," for example, not only has a mysterious power lacking in matter, but

there is nothing in the laws, concepts, and formulae of physics and chemistry to explain or even describe such powers. X [i.e., life] is something quite new and additional, and the more deeply we contemplate it, the clearer it becomes that we are faced here with what might be called an ontological discontinuity or, more simply, a jump in the Level of Being.

As it so happens, just yesterday I began reading a newish book -- this one by a biologist -- called Purpose and Desire: What Makes Something "Alive" and Why Modern Darwinism Has Failed to Explain It, which makes the same point, more on which below.

Back to Schumacher: if we symbolize matter (m), then life is (m) + some mysterious and inexplicable power we shall call (x). Similarly, animals would be (m) + (x) + (y), while humans are (m) + (x) + (y) + (z). This last variable is defined as the ability to both think and to be aware of thinking; or, one might say, it is thinking about thinking, or self-awareness:

Consciousness and intelligence, as it were, recoil upon themselves.... There is something able to say "I" and to direct consciousness in accordance with its own purposes, a master or controller, a power at a higher level than consciousness itself. This power z, consciousness recoiling upon itself, opens up unlimited possibilities of purposeful learning, investigating, exploring, and of formulating and accumulating knowledge.

We can invent a word to point at (z), but we must remember that it is only a word, not the thing itself. What do they say about philosophy? That it is a way to avoid being bewitched by language? Well, here is a perfect example. We have words for everyday, irreducible mysteries such as being, life, and mind, without having any idea what these actually are.

This is indeed one of Turner's points, that one reason we lack any "Darwinian explanation for the origin of life" is that we lack "a good Darwinian explanation for what life is in the first place" (emphasis mine). For that matter, "Darwinism is also having a rather hard time explaining what an organism is," and before that, what a gene is, or how it could ever be.

I'm only up to page 12, but all of these mysteries presuppose a very specific kind of cosmos in which such mysteries can exist. What kind of cosmos would that be? Well, first of all, a cosmos, which is to say, a total order, or ordered totality.

Back to my possible unconscious plagiarism of Schumacher. He ultimately solves the problem not by positing Life as (m) plus (x), but rather, by turning the cosmos right-side up and starting at the top. We begin with the highest principle, which immediately remedies the fallacy of trying to derive the greater (x, y, and z) from the lesser (m).

So now you know why I start (and end) with O. I do so because there is logically no other place with which to start. Any other position from which you start will redound to absurdity and self-refutation. Just try. I dare you. If you fail to see the contradiction, then you have failed to discern one of the principles alluded to in the first paragraph above. Ironically, you have used your own intelligence to render yourself stupid. And not just temporarily.

No, literally. This is not intended as an insult. For example, Turner references a prominent atheist who unequivocally declares the following (which I will render in poetic form, just for the hell of it):

There are no gods

no purpose, no goal-directed forces of any kind....

There is no ultimate foundation for ethics,

no ultimate meaning to life

and no free will for humans, either.

Yes, exactly:

Actually, someone could know that. For as we've said many times, if God doesn't exist, only he knows it. Conversely, if he does exist, then only man can not know it.

Back to Schumacher:

In a hierarchical structure, the higher does not merely possess powers that are additional to and exceed those possessed by the lower; it has the power to organize the lower and use it for its own purposes.... Are there powers that are higher than self-awareness?

Again, this cannot not be the case. Nothing that essentially defines man can be derived from the bottom, but can only be explained as a prolongation from the top, e.g., freedom, interiority, truth, beauty, unity, goodness, love, etc.

Just about out of time, but I'll leave off with a couple observations by Schuon which I bumped into yesterday:

those who seek to enclose the Universe within their shortsighted logic fail to see, at least in principle, that the sum of possible phenomenal knowledge is inexhaustible and, consequently, that the present "scientific" knowledge represents a total nothingness beside our ignorance....

In this desire to to accumulate knowledge of relative things, the metaphysical dimension -- which alone takes us out of the [vicious circle] of the phenomenal and the absurd -- is expressly put aside; it is as if a man were to be endowed with all possible faculties of perception minus intelligence; or again, it is as if one believed that an animal endowed with sight were more capable than a blind man of understanding the mysteries of the world.

Quite simply, it is as if cosmos minus (x), (y), and (z) explains the cosmos. Then who is speaking? And to whom? For (m) + (m) is just more (m).

Does the Geneva Convention Cover Spiritual Warfare?

That's a rhetorical question. The Geneva Convention presumably treats all war as war, even vertical warfare between immaterial entities.

Which of course allows the demonic forces a foothold on the same plane as the angelic, which is the raison d'être of the U.N. Imagine, for example, Iran on the Human Rights Commission, or Islamic countries condemning Israel as "racist." Demons in high places.

Speaking of demons in high places, we could also veer into the usual diatribe about the media/academic complex. But I want to make a slightly different point -- that we know President Trump is waging effective spiritual warfare in light of the frenzied reaction of our journalistic and tenured demons. The New York Times, or Washington Post, or CNN, don't need an ombudsman. They need an exorcist.

How do we identify demonic activity? And how do we distinguish it from the usual give and take of political conflict?

Yes, Nicolas? To scandalize the leftist, just speak the truth.

Quite the case (and we're talking about leftists here, not liberals). As we know, each leftist is a unique combination of ignorance, low IQ, dishonesty, indoctrination, and/or mental illness. One leftist might be quite intelligent but thoroughly indoctrinated to the point of tenure, while another might be stupid and malleable, yet another envious and resentful. All equally precious in the eyes of Marx!

I used to think the above gag was sufficient to explain the left, but we've seen such an acceleration of the crazy during the last 15 years or so, that some other factor must be involved. Let's first consult MOTT to see if our Unknown Friend can provide any clues.

"There are spirits whose thought and imagination are put to the service, without reserve, of that which is true, beautiful and good..." Which is precisely as it should be. We are all in contact with angelic presences all the time, or we'd be utterly lost in this cosmos. Indeed, couldn't even know that this is a cosmos.

If you have a fine intellect but aren't motivated by the love of truth, then something is deeply wrong with you. Your mind -- or soul, rather, since the soul is our organ of vertical perception -- is being influenced and possibly hijacked by something un- or anti-divine. After all, the intellect is of the same substance as the truth it seeks.

Thus, if you are one of those postmodernist cretins who don't believe in the existence of objective truth, then it follows that you don't believe in the existence of your own mind. Or worse, you willfully insist on its existence with no basis.

There are also "spirits whose will, infatuated with an aim, make use of thought and imagination so as to win others to their cause, so as to sweep them away by the river of their will." That wasn't entirely clear, but I think the main point is the misuse of our God-given freedom for anti-Divine ends.

To back up a bit, man qua man is characterized by intellect, will, and sentiment, which correspond to the true, good, and beautiful, respectively. It cannot be overemphasized that each of these -- intellect, will, and sentiment -- is an adequation; each has a proper object. If this isn't the case, then our highest gifts reduce to nothing.

Yes, literally. For if there is no truth, then of what use is the intellect? If no freedom, then what use the will? Moreover, like the Trinity, these three can be distinguished but never separated, for if we do not possess free will then we cannot know truth, and if we cannot distinguish good from evil then we cannot rightly exert or will. Likewise, if we cannot discern and create beauty, then art is impossible.

In addition to truth, beauty, and goodness converging on their own objects, the three together converge upon the highest object, AKA, God. Here again, if they don't, then there is no explanation for how and why truth is beauty and vice versa. Nor could there be such a thing as a beautiful soul.

Later MOTT speaks of two principles that must be distinguished, a serpentine one involving "opposition from which there proceeds friction which produces energy," and an angelic one involving "concordance from which comes fusion which engenders force." It is said that

"Truth springs from the clash of opinions," but actually it is not the truth which springs forth, but rather combative intellectual energy, for truth is revealed through the fusion of opinions and not through a clash. A clash certainly produces intellectual energy, but hardly ever discloses truth.

At least on the principial plane we are discussing. We're not necessarily speaking of the "prudential plane," so to speak, which is much more ambiguous. Principles are not and should not be ambiguous. It reminds me of a couple of important aphorisms:

Intelligence is the capacity for discerning principles.

And Engaging in dialogue with those who do not share our assumptions [or principles] is nothing more than a stupid way to kill time.

Notice how intelligence is rendered stupid by engaging in such argument. For example, I believe in the Constitution. Others believe in the "living Constitution," which logically reduces to no constitution at all, and its displacement (as per the above) with the will, no longer anchored in anything but force.

Or, I believe a baby is a baby, while another believes the baby is a part of the woman's body. But to even use the word "baby" (or fetus) is to acknowledge the lie. With equivalent logic one could say the mother is simply the baby's body.

Just about out of time, so we'll end with a few more aphorisms. Being that I used to be a liberal, I can certify the following as 100% true:

Let us say frankly to our opponent that we do not share his ideas because we understand them and that he does not share ours because he does not understand them.

If they understood them, then they could explain them without resorting to lies, distortions, and slander.

Two more:

The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions.

Therefore Conservatism should not be a political party but the normal attitude of every decent man.

So, what interferes with knowledge of Principles? Stay tuned.

Political Warfare and Spiritual Warfare

As I recall, MOTT has some helpful things to say about the waging of pneumo-political warfare against the dominions of the left. For the left must ultimately be an instantiation of powers, principalities, and spiritual wickedness transcending -- or rather, subtending -- it. According to no less an authority than yesterday's post, there is apparently a ruler of the darkness, a Cosmocrat of the Dark Aion, a Big Kahuna of the Friggin' Loonies.

If this is so, how can we discern his movements and activities? How do we know when it's him and not just the usual ignorance, stupidity, bad luck, mental illness, genes, higher education, human nature, etc?

This is indeed a complex plane of phenomena, with no purely monocausal explanations. Being that this is a hierarchical cosmos, there is no pure determinism, whether via God or matter.

Indeed, you may have noticed that one mark of the devil is the crude simplification of this plane to a single cause or two. "Climate change" comes to mind, with the reduction of inconceivable complexity to the presence of carbon dioxide. Or Marxism, which reduces history to "class warfare." Any such abstract generalization is false, and leads straight to intellectual perdition if not the real thing. Hell on earth, while you wait!

In reality,

The natural and the supernatural are not overlapping planes, but intertwined threads (NGD).

At the very least, one must hold in mind two opposing theses. There's a reason why we have two eyes: their slightly different vector results in the emergence of a third dimension. Just so, complementarity is a vital principle to bear in mind in thinking about the world.

As always, Señor Dávila says it best. Here are seven aphorisms that I've taken the liberty to arrange stepwise in order to help you float upward on the wings of imagination:

In philosophy nothing is easier than to be consistent.

In reality, Every truth is a tension between contradictory evidences that claim our simultaneous allegiance.

As such, The simplistic ideas in which the unbeliever ends up believing are his punishment.

But Reason is no substitute for faith, just as color is no substitute for sound.

Which is why Philosophy ultimately fails because one has to speak of the whole in the terms of its parts.

And let's face it, The doctrines that explain the higher by means of the lower are appendices of a magician’s rule book.

Pay attention here, for The life of the intelligence is a dialogue between the personalism of spirit and the impersonalism of reason.

I could even toss in some Gödel here, because the reason his theorems are true is because the person always transcends and escapes any attempt to confine him to logic or computation. Or, if our synaptic activity is computational, the computation is in the soul, not vice versa.

Back to MOTT. There may be other chapters that touch on our subject, but I mainly remember Letter XI, The Force. Even the title gives it away, for what is the left but the will displacing freedom and truth?

The wife just now emailed me a typical example from here in the People's Republic of California, where public schools force children to drink leftist koolaid without a straw. In my own school district they force kindergarteners to learn about "gender fluidity" under the banner of preventing bullying of children who don't even know if they're a boy or a girl.

In other words, children are bullied by the state to be as confused about gender as are the parents who bully their children into being as confused about gender as they themselves (the parents) are. The whole point of the diabolical exercise is to confuse the natural law and therefore our natural rights, and to thereby sow chaos into the very ground of being.

Here's a paragraph from MOTT that echoes what was said above about the intertwined threads of vertical complementarity:

The saying "Nature is fundamentally supernatural" is therefore profoundly true. For natural and supernatural life always originate from the same source. The source of all life is religion, conscious or unconscious...

The following goes to the spontaneous order and unity of spirit vs. the chaotic scattering of the diabolos; the latter is what he is and does:

In the world there are therefore two different kinds of arriving at a conviction: one can be illuminated by the serene clarity of contemplation, or one can be swept away by an electrifying flood of passionate arguments aiming at a desired end.

Now pay attention, for this makes sense of the obvious, or explains why things are the way they are:

The faith of the illuminated is full of tolerance, patience and calm steadfastness -- "like crystal"; the faith of those who are swept away is, in contrast, fanatical, agitated and aggressive -- in order to live it needs conquests without end, because it is conquest alone which keeps it alive.

Ah, you might call this "conquest without end" the Satanic Eucharist. It is indeed why the left must reach deeper and deeper into our personal lives and even our souls, in order to conquer and claim them for its disordered appetites (for you can never get enough of what you don't really need, so the hunger is never satisfied). It's why in California it is against the law for me -- a clinical psychologist, AKA "healer of souls" -- to help someone who is fundamentally confused about his sexual identity or the object of his disordered sexual urges.

This is liberal fascism, AKA repressive tolerance, or what Petey calls totolerantarianism. For what is the left but violent intolerance masquerading as a magnanimous (i.e., large souled) and peaceful coexistence?

More on these irreconcilable pneumo-poltical attitudes:

In the world there are therefore two kinds of faith, two kinds of instinctivity, two different ways of seeing the world, two different ways of looking at it. There is the open and innocent look which desires only to reflect the light -- i.e. which wants only to see -- and there is the scrutinizing look, which seeks to find and lay hold of its desired prey.

Which is precisely why they insanely accuse us of racism, white supremacism, genocide, ethnic cleansing, etc. The leftist is intimately familiar with the reality of these subterranean impulses, and they have to be located somewhere. They can't be in the left, because the left is "tolerant." Therefore, they are absurdly projected into us.

Now, how exactly does one do battle against a hallucination?

First of all, you don't, not directly anyway. Speaking as a psychologist, fighting against it actually transfers a kind of power to it. It reminds me of Great Danes. We have two of them, and if you try to push them, they instinctively push back. Lean into them and the lean right back.

Which leads back to the supposed subject of this post, spiritual warfare. But now I'm out of time, so, to be continued....

Fredogate and Spiritual Warfare

This is an all-new post. I apologize in advance for its wooliness and circuitousness, but it is spontaneously unfolding in real time, and maybe I'm out of practice.

It has come to our attention that there are two types of conservative, one that thinks the left is in error, the other viewing it is satanic. No doubt never-Trumpers fall into the first category, and many of them wonder how a conservative Christian could support this president. But if the left is satanic, the question answers itself.

A trivial but illustrative example occurred yesterday, with the Fredogate kerfuffle. A fair number of prominent conservatives defended Fredo and denounced his heckler, on the grounds that conservatives should never behave this way. If we do, then we are no better than the left.

First of all, if only. If Antifa restricted itself to giving clever nicknames to conservatives and requesting selfies with them, we could hardly condemn that. All in good political fun.

I was listening to the radio yesterday morning on the way to work, and while Rush Limbaugh reacted to the incident with merriment, Dennis Prager dismissed the Fredo-baiter as a jackass and a fool, and adopted the view that we should never do this to a public figure. This is one of the rare times I disagree with him, because this was nothing like chasing public figures out of restaurants, or harassing them outside their homes, or in any way encouraging violence. The Fredo-baiter should not be compared to, say, people who camp outside Senator McConnell's home and threaten to stab him in the heart, or who spit on the president's son.

In short, this is spiritual warfare. There are rules.

What's the difference between calling someone a Nazi and suggesting they are diabolical? For if someone is literally a Nazi, then we are wholly justified in stopping them by any means necessary. Not only is it morally acceptable to punch a Nazi, you could even argue that failing to do so is a sin of omission.

But we are not Nazis, to put to put it mildly. I won't go so far as to say I am a good person, but I'm certainly not evil. I don't deserve to be punched or worse, just because I am a Trump supporter. Nevertheless, that's what they say.

Which is a hint into the diabolical nature of the dynamic. But first we need to define our terms, beginning with diabolical, which is to say, relating to the devil, AKA Satan. Let's say the leftist grudgingly concedes I'm not a Nazi. But I'm calling him satanic! Isn't that worse? Besides, isn't that a priori crazy, since Satan doesn't exist, whereas Nazis do?

I would turn it around and say that the very existence of Nazis is a proof of the diabolical. I remember coming to this conclusion at least a couple decades ago, when I was trying to wrap my mind around the Holocaust with the meager tools available to a psychologist, and came up far short. Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but evil of this depth and on this scale requires a proportionate explanation. True, Hitler had an abusive father and deeply painful childhood. But so did Churchill. File under "so what."

I was discussing the question of Satan the other day with my 14 year old. I made the point that the story of, say, Adam & Eve is clearly allegorical, symbolic, archetypal, etc., but the Church does not view Satan in this manner. Rather, he is a person and he is real. It's up to us to figure out how this could be so, but it does explain a great deal, like an unknown variable in physics that ties the cosmos together.

Quick timeout for some aphorisms while I gather my thoughts. Note that each of them would apply to conservative Never-Trumpers, if any still exist:

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

The devil can achieve nothing great without the thoughtless collaboration of the virtues.

He who does not smell sulfur in the modern world has no sense of smell.

Many think that the devil died, but he merely walks around today disguised as a man.

I also find some of Schuon's thoughts on the subject helpful. Somewhere he draws a distinction between the satanic and the luciferic: the latter merely opposes and subverts the good, while the former inverts and thereby renders it evil. And woe unto them who call evil good and good evil, and who turn darkness to light and light to darkness!

What I want to say is that political warfare must have different rules from spiritual warfare.

But first, back to our definitions. I was reading a book the other day that asks Who is the Devil?, and it says he is, among other things, "the Commander-in-chief of the fallen angels."

Angels? Aren't we just digging a deeper epistemological hole? No, because I also snatched up another volume at the church rummage sale called What is an Angel?, and angels -- I'll bottom line it for you -- are simply the spiritual intelligences that fill and complete the hierarchy between man and God. Human beings are ensouled matter, while angels are purely spiritual beings unencumbered by matter (there are other differences, but this will do for now). These beings populate the vertical world both above and below, the latter being the whereabouts of the fallen angels.

There are, by the way "angelic intelligences" (so to speak) among humans, by which I mean an intelligence that is simple, intuitive, and cuts straight through to principles, essences, and primordial causes. I certainly experience Schuon in this way. It is quite distinct from garden-variety human thought, no matter how intelligent or penetrating. Not to imply that Schuon is omniscient or infallible, only to highlight this different form or modality of thought. (And of course, there are also counterfeit versions of this, e.g., Marianne Williamson, Deepak, and all the rest.)

Speaking of the Devil, let's get back to him. A big difference between standard and fallen angels is that the former love, while the latter hate and are motivated by hatred. Which reminds me -- and you will have noticed this -- of how we conservatives hate because we love, whereas leftists love because they hate. For example, they hate the world as it is, they hate human nature, and they hate the constraints of reality in general. Which is why they always offer political solutions to existential problems, as if we can ever be free of the latter. Yes, we can transcend them, but through religion, not politics.

Now, you might say that in positing this vast realm of vertical intelligences, I am confining myself to a world of superstition. However, "confine" isn't quite the right word. Above our world, writes Corte, is "another domain even even richer, more wonderful and diverse," with an "infinite variety of invisible essences":

Let unbelievers enclose themselves within their narrow thoughts and limit their vision to this small world that we can see, to this brief life which is but a preamble to our immortality. They sometimes say religion narrows the mind! We answer them with the grandiose vision that faith unfolds before us....

The earth is so small and the heavens so vast! What could be more natural than to admit that between the human race and God's throne there is a great multitude of pure spirits, of ardent thoughts, with intuition as vivid as lightning and as big as the stars, spirits endowed as we are..., with intelligence, will and liberty...

At the very least, even if you don't want to call them angels, you need to deploy some sort of cognitive placeholder for this mysterious realm, just as, say, physics has a category of "dark matter" without having any idea what it is. But it's there just the same, whatever it is.

Another important principle to bear in mind as we proceed is that the cosmos is one, or it wouldn't be a cosmos. The cosmos isn't just an exterior totality, but an interior unity as well, and this unity obviously encompasses the vertical as well as horizontal. So, there is indeed a lower vertical, the question being how it fits into the unity. (Note that various forms of Gnosticism solve the problem by positing a separate and coequal power of evil, whereas materialists affirm the unity by simply banishing both good and evil to the contingent world of illusion and opinion.)

Returning to the reality of pure spirits. Yes, you could say that's pretty weird, but not as weird as spirits bound up with matter. In other words, human beings are actually weirder and less obviously explicable than angelic beings. And in the words of the Aphorist, The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world.

To be continued, I guess....