Cosmic Plumbing and The Flow of Presence

Why do ideologues cling to their ideology despite its proven failures? For the same reason mental illness persists despite the fact that it doesn't make the mentally ill person happy:

[S]ometimes we wonder about an ideologue's resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of his dream is death in the hell of his banality (Voegelin).

Again, ideology elevates an otherwise banal life into an intense, readymade psychodrama. This explains how and why for people who already practice a genuine religion, political religions hold no allure.

Ideology and religion should be at vertical antipodes, but, just as ideology is a political religion, there's a great deal of dysfunctional religiosity that is more ideological than religious in the proper sense of the term (political Islam being only the loudest example).

Human existence necessarily takes place in the presence -- no, it is this Presence -- of a luminous, flowing, and expanding cruciform space between immanence and transcendence.

So long as you live, this is where you are, no matter how much you may deny it. We are only humanly alive in the Truth of this Presence (and Presence of Truth), and this Presence has a distinct structure. It's not just a blank epiphenomenon of the laws of physics, but the place where physics literally comes to light in the unending quest to explore and discover reality.

Nevertheless, the ideologue "tries to pull the timeless into identity with the time of his existence" via "the dream act of forcing the two poles into oneness" (ibid.).

For example -- speaking of physics -- note how scientism is but the perverse use of scientific findings to deny the possibility of the scientific knower, up to an including Intellect itsoph. Science become ideology is called scientism, which is just another dysfunctional religion, no more genuine than Nancy Pelosi's "Catholicism" or Joe Biden's... you know, the thing.

The flow of Presence mentioned above isn't time, nor is it in time (or time alone). If it were solely in time, then we could never know it, because to know it is to transcend it.

It's difficult to speak of these things without sounding cutely paradoxical, but I'm actually trying to be as literal as I can be. I'm in the space right now (as are you, uncomprehending trolls excepted), simply describing what's going on experientally within the contours of this pleasantly lit space. And suffice it to say that Voegelin is never being cute:

I shall use the term presence to denote the point of intersection in man's existence; and the term flow of presence to denote the dimension of existence that is, and is not, time.

Correct: the ideologue is in need of a cosmological plumber in order to unblock and open up the vertical pipe that connects him to O. This is the legendary "golden pipe" that Toots Mondello would speak of when he'd had a few too many. It also reminds us of an Aphorism which we will allow to speak for its elf, since we have only ten minutes left this morning:

The sewers of history sometimes overflow, as in our time.

But while looking up that aphorism, I was reminded of these:

History is the series of universes present to the consciousness of successive subjects.

Precisely. Which, by the way, goes to the depraved and dysfunctional historical understanding of our contemporary iconoclasts.

History is not cleared of its miasmas except in the brief periods in which Christian winds blow.

A slight exaggeration, unless you recognous with the Fathers that the Logos is and has always been here (albeit not necessarily in the flesh), and is the source of all truth of any kind.

That's all the time we have left for the Presence. Tomorrow we won't be as ontologically squeezed.

The Road to Hell is Paved by Saintly Ideologues

Time enough for a short post consisting of MORE STUFF I CAN USE!

We ended in the midst of a discussion on the intrinsic impossibility of honest debate with ideologues who inhabit second realities impervious to reason. As they say, you can't reason a person out of something he was never reasoned into. It is why leftists respond to rational argument with irrational slander, every time. Math, physics, merit, standards, the National Anthem, anti-racism: all racist.

As we know, no amount of logic, evidence, or personal behavior can impact a leftist's delusions about race. The delusions are rock solid, and they are rock solid for a reason: because they serve purposes having nothing to do with race. I know, Captain Obvious, but perhaps we can dig a little deeper.

For example, what's really happening when a typical race-obsessed leftist calls a racially colorblind person a racist? First of all, you will notice that there is an immediate shift of planes -- or modes, rather -- from the logical to the moral. In other words, instead of addressing the argument in the mode of reason, the person is attacked from a childishly Manichaean standpoint of good vs. evil.

Childish arguments are appropriate for children. But how and why do they persist in adults? That is the subject of a future post, as it is elaborated in a book called Worldview and Mind. While I can't recommend it, it nevertheless contains some STUFF I CAN USE!

"Dogmatic propositions," writes Voegelin, "survive socially, even when their fallacious character has been thoroughly analyzed and exhibited to public view." As such, there again must be something -- for there is no effect without a cause -- "engendering them and sustaining their life."

I know: the leftist reveals the whole plot when he shifts modes from the rational to the moral; for every time he accuses you of being evil (a racist, a sexist, a homophobe), the real point is that he is elevating himself to membership in the Righteous, and Righteous people transcend any need to be logical. Sanctity is its own argument.

Al Sharpton or Barack Obama or Cornell West, for example, don't need to make sense, because the fulgurant light of their holiness radiates from them so profoundly. Only racists aren't blinded by its power.

Here's a compact truthbomb that has been thought and said and understood by countless normal people, but is still worth mentioning because it is so fundamental and so irrefutable (by intelligence, anyway):

a universe which contains intelligent beings cannot originate with a prima causa that is less than intelligent.

As we know, the universe is a vertical hierarchy deployed in time (i.e., horizontally). As we also know, there is no hierarchy that isn't conditioned from the top down, i.e., teleologically. Having said that, I guess I don't have to repeat what Voegelin says about it.

In short, the telos of thought is O: "the knowledge of something that 'exists' beyond existence is inherent to the noetic structure of existence." Sounds paradoxical but it isn't, because thinking has a Point, and the Point is located nowhere in existence. If you believe otherwise you're well on the way to ideology, whether scientistic, political, or spiritual.

Can you say more about that? Sure. Let's begin with "experience." Where in existence is this thing called experience? Correct. It is nowhere, inasmuch as anything to which we can point must presume it. You can pretend to make it go away, as do materialists, but that's just the thinking of a preoperational child: "out of sight, out of mind."

Would it be correct to say that experience doesn't exist, or that it partakes of a real mode of non-existence? Yes, paradoxical as it sounds,

existence is not a fact. If anything, existence is the nonfact of a disturbing movement in the In-Between of ignorance and knowledge, of time and timelessness, of imperfection and perfection, of hope and fulfillment, and ultimately of life and death.

And "if man's existence were not a movement but a fact, it not only would have no meaning but the question of meaning could not even arise."

Another quickie: consciousness is "the point of intersection of the timeless with time." The Cross roads, so to speak. How wide is your intersection? That's really the question.

Ideologues, for example, reduce the intersection to a oneway horizontal road. Then they insist we must arrive at the destination now. All we have to do to forge this intersectional paradise is to hand over ultimate power to the state and joint the utopian in his imaginary intellectual prison. For those who resist in preference to reality, there are gulags and concentration camps that actually do exist.

This goes back to the appeal of ideology and its "resistance to rational argument. The alternative to life in the paradise of [the activist's] dream is death in the hell of his banality."

In other words, ideology -- which is to say, political religion -- is a way for the leftist to transform his banal life into a world-historical drama of good vs. evil, starring himself.

In this dream of self-salvation, man assumes the role of God and redeems himself by his own grace

It's past 10:00. Work to do. To be continued.

How Not to be an Idiot

As mentioned in the previous post, this volume of essays by Voegelin is brimming with allusions and references to my Unwritten but unKnown text.

True, my text doesn't explicitly exist, but this doesn't mean it isn't floating around somewhere in the implicate order -- you know, in the vertical Cloud. It seems to me that E & I are peeking at the same ur-text from different spacetime locations, such that when he makes a point that resonates in me, it is because we must be viewing the same transcendent object through the pneumatic haze.

I'll cite various examples in no particular order. Then we'll circle back and try to assemble the puzzle pieces into a pattern and see if we can make out what they insinuate about the implicate text.

Oh, c'mon -- it'll be fun! Just remember to keep an open mind and "listen with the third ear," which is what we psychologists do when listening to a patient babble on about their problems. I may react to some of them as we proceed, but we still need to maintain an open stance toward the totality, i.e., to the hyperspatial pattern that emerges when seen together.

It is forgotten that Christ came not to Christians but to man.

Right. Of course. Elsewhere Voegelin makes the provocative point -- seemingly out of the blue, and with no elaboration -- that "Christ takes form in current events." That sounds suspiciously correct, but we'll have to figure out why later. (Come to think of it, we are seeing an awful lot of Crucifixion of the Logos going on, AKA logocide...)

By spirit we understand the openness of man to the divine ground of his existence: by estrangement from the spirit, the closure and revolt against the ground. Through spirit man actualizes his potential to partake of the divine. He rises thereby to the imago Dei which it is his destiny to be.

In the openness of the common spirit there develops the public life of society. He, however, who closes himself against what is common, or revolts against it, removes himself from the public life of human community. He becomes thereby a private man, or in the language of Heraclitus, an idiotes.

In the language of Cousin Dupree, an idiot. We can choose to be one, or we can choose to actualize our divine clueprint. Of all the choices we make in this life, this is no doubt the most consequential.

Language and fact have somehow separated from one another, and thought has correspondingly become estranged from reality.

Hoo boy. One of our pet peeves. But it's much more than a peeve, it's truly a primordial cosmic catastrophe, one that opens us to all the others and transforms us into idiots and eventually leftists. We'll just leave it at that, otherwise the post will autofill with the usual harangue. Besides, passages such as the following make my point:

We enter here upon a realm of spirit-like non-spirit or anti-spirit, which finds its representation on the plane of politics in the ideological mass movements.

For example, in, oh, Portland, Chicago, Minneapolis, Atlanta, or just about any other idiot-run Demopolis:

When the refusal to apperceive becomes radical, it leads to the phenomenon of total self- and world-annihilation...

Of course, reality doesn't actually disappear just because we fail to recognize it. Indeed, reality is that which persists despite our dreams, wishes, and political delusions.

And although expressed via politics, this is nevertheless a form of mental illness simply displaced to another plane. Think of how crazy one must be to not perceive the craziness of Antifa, or BLM, or AOC, or the DNC. Yes, there are people who don't see that Joe Biden is demented. There's a clinical term for that: negative hallucination.

"With the destruction of reality the public language is destroyed," ending in "the syndrome of illiteracy which is the result of the destruction of the language." Please note that he isn't talking about mere illiteracy, which poses a problem to the illiterate person but not the society at large.

Rather, he's referring to the hordes of college-educated illiterates that compose our Elite political, academic, and media classes who, unfortunately, don't know nothing, but rather, are post-literate in a parallel looniverse of anti-truth, anti-sprit, and anti-philosophy: unadulterated Ø.

Our great Silent but Deadly Majority can plainly detect it. Progressives, of course, can't smell it -- even though they dealt it -- for it is the polluted water in which they swim. Others have a chance to sniff it out, but

The nature of problem will perhaps not be immediately apparent, for life in the insane asylum of our time has become such a habit for many that they no longer react in a sensitive manner to the grotesque events on the public scene.

In fact, one of the functions of political correctness is to prevent the average person from not only seeing and proclaiming the emperor has no clothes, but that he is hideous, monstrous, grotesque. A beast from the abyss.

How to even begin to debate such a person? We're not talking about different opinions, rather, different realities:

we all have discovered on such occasions that no agreement, or even honest disagreement, could be reached, because the exchange of argument was disturbed by a profound difference of attitude with regard to all fundamental questions of human existence....

Rational argument could not prevail because the partner to the discussion did not accept as binding for himself the matrix of reality in which all specific questions concerning our existence as human beings are ultimately rooted; he has overlaid the reality of existence with another mode of existence... the Second Reality.

Therefore, beneath what may superficially resemble rational "debate" lurks "the difference of two modes of existence, of existence in truth and existence in untruth. The universe of rational discourse collapses... when the common ground of existence in reality has disappeared."

I was amused by a trivial but typical example over the weekend. Media in 2012: Obama is so great he could join Washington and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore! Media in 2020: Trump is so evil he could join Washington and Lincoln on Mount Rushmore!

I really must get some work done today that I've been putting off, so we won't be able to discern the contours of the implicate text. In the meantime, just keep an open mind, and we'll continue our investigation in the next post.

Oh, and if you see something, don't hesitate to say something. The implicate order is so rich that no single person could ever begin to exhaust it, so all Coons on deck.

Your Choice: Unique Persons or Leftist Ants

If the left doesn't believe in universally valid truths -- including of course the very concept of a universally binding morality -- then why are they canceling everyone and everything based on them?

Imagine if the founders had behaved like this. A quantitative analysis of their writings counts exactly 3,154 citations, with over a third of them to the Bible, followed by Montesquieu, Blackstone, Locke, Hume, and Plutarch (Novak). Now, these sources are all Deeply Problematic. The writings of Plutarch, for example, mention nothing about transgender bathrooms.

Which comes first, the rights or the person who possesses them? Obviously the person comes first, because only persons can have rights. Which highlights the absurdity of various Supreme Court decisions, from Dred Scott v. Sandford, to Roe v. Wade, to the recent Gorsuch v. Biology. In each case, rights are invented and conferred while undercutting the basis for their inherence in persons.

For example, if a woman has a right to infanticide, this right can't inhere in persons, because it grants the right to destroy persons, precisely. Likewise, if a person has the right to own a person, then a person has no right to property in himself, which is the basis of personhood. Etc.

Now, if everyone is the same, then killing someone isn't morally problematic. This is why, for example, no one thinks twice about stepping on an ant or eating a chicken, because there are billions just like the deceased, and nature will never stop cranking out more identical copies.

But I know for a fact that there is no one like me. Gagdaditude, whatever it is, inheres in me -- I, rather -- alone. I have a monopoly on it, nor do I predict we will ever see my likes again. Or anyone else's likes.

The discovery of personhood is one of the blessings of Western civilization, AKA Christendom. It is why it would be a racist slur for one of us to claim, for example, that "Chinese all look alike," whereas in China they have no compunction whatsoever about murdering and oppressing Chinese by the millions.

Those damn communists are all alike, in that they insist, at the point of a gun, that persons are all alike. For them, people are just gears -- or sand -- in the Machine. It doesn't matter how many they kill, because they'll just make more, the only limit being the one child law.

It can scarcely be sufficiently emphasized that the metaphysics of the left not only denies personhood but renders it impossible in principle. You could say that this is the ground source of the left's pneumopathology.

And no, we are not exaggerating: either unique persons or interchangeable collective ants. And show your work: don't pretend personhood is real while holding an ideology that denies its very possibility, e.g., Marxism, scientism, Darwinism, etc.

Crosby highlights the fact that to be an individual means to be incommunicable. Yes, we can communicate with one another, but our actual selfhood is known only to ourselves. No one will ever know what it's actually like to be you or I. If our personhood were fully communicable, then it would be just a general concept rather than a unique particularity. Truly, Homo sapiens is a kind of paradox or contradiction in terms, since it is a species of individual instances.

This leads straight up and into another key question, which is to say, by virtue of what principle is the principle of unique human personhood possible? Correct: the utter uniqueness, unrepeatability, and incommunicability of the Divine Person. To understand that we are in the image of the Creator is to see that human persons (because they are persons) share these divine qualities.

Does this imply that God does not or cannot communicate? Of course not. We are ceaseless recipients of vertical murmurandoms. We have only to amble to the shore -- the shore between immanence and transcendence -- and find another message in a bottle tossed from the other side. Yes, revelation as such is just that -- a message in a bottle -- but so too is the intellect itself.

Of course, this is not to imply that your body is a bottle and your soul the message inside. Rather, your body is an important aspect of the message, or the Incarnation is utterly superfluous. Rather, a book or pamphlet would be sufficient to convey the message.

STUFF I CAN USE

That was going to be the original title of this post, before it was immediately hijacked by other considerations. The title has to do with a certain well-known (to me) phenomenon whereby things literally jump from the page and yell out THIS IS SOMETHING YOU CAN USE! For what? Often I don't even know, but the knowing of it is a vital aspect of knowing what it might be referring to.

It reminds me of the title of one of Dávila's books of aphorisms: Footnotes to an Implicit Text. I am constantly being bobarded with footnotes. Where is the text? Well, I'm in the process of discovering it by paying attention to the constant clues as to what it's about.

For example, yesterday I was rereading a plump Volume of Voegelin, and various passages screamed out YOU CAN USE THIS! When this happens, I highlight the passage, but I have various ways of highlighting, depending upon how loudly the passage is screaming at me.

Here are just a couple of particularly loud examples:

[P]alpably one and the same reality is illuminated in philosophy and in Scripture, the one more heavily accenting questing reason, the other responsive faith.

The old (↑↓) dynamic, which applies to deep knowing of any kind.

"Reason [or the intellect, AKA nous] is itself a revelation," as the Logos "is no less the rational Ground for apostles than for philosophers." It is only for us to see -- or to experience, rather -- the connection. The connection is lived more than known; to the extent that it is only known, then it isn't truly known at all (going to the distinction between mere [k] and [n]).

Or the following passage, so relevant amidst the contemporary soul sickness of BLM and other diseased forms of identity politics: "Against the stifling secularism," the "collectivist tendencies," the "brutal authoritarians" of our age, abides the Person:

Such a man, whenever and wherever we find him, diagnoses the existential maladies that deform reality, and resists as best he can the disorders by invoking higher truth, perhaps only vaguely known.

I only mention this because sometimes there's a man -- I won't say hero, because what's a hero? -- but sometimes there's a person, and that's enough to trigger the left and make them want to cancel him.

A couple of random thoughts, or lucends:

If ignorance of history is collective amnesia, then the left has given itself an auto-lobotomy.

But they'll never know it, for an irony curtain has descended on the left.

The Alliance of People of Color & Karens of Pallor

Every morning I receive an email briefing from the NY Times. It informs me of their ludicrously tendentious distortion of the news of the day -- AKA the Narrative -- which the Times both defines and enforces for the sake of rest of the mimetic journalistic hacks of the left.

Today's briefing speaks perfectly to yesterday's point about the nature of personhood: henceforth the Times will capitalize "Black" on the unapologetically racist presumption that such persons share an identity. Conversely, "white" shall not be capitalized, since whites don't necessarily have anything in common.

In short, Blacks are subsumed into a racial category, thus effacing their individual identity: race first, person second, if at all. Stereotype for thee, uniqueness for me. Assuming that Karens of Pallor came up with this policy, which probably isn't the case.

Rather, the black Timesmen no doubt insist on being reduced to a racial category because of the obvious privileges attached to the designation. One assumes that most of them could not be hired on the basis of journalistic or intellectual merit (Charles Blow?). But then none of the white journalists are, either (Thomas Friedman?). On what basis are the latter hired, anyway? It's not race and it's not merit. Nor can it be privilege, or half of them would be white conservatives.

Speaking of which, it's also odd that they choose not to capitalize "white" in light to the incessant reference to "white privilege." If whites share no common history or identity, how can they share the attribute of privilege?

These are all reasonable questions, and we all know it is wholly unreasonable to expect reasonable answers from the left. You get the point. In the ideological vehicle, the car always drives the man, so it's pointless to ask the man where he's going. Let's move on.

Interestingly, there's a kind of ontological Dunning-Krugery going on here, in that people who are still subsumed in a tribal identity cannot know about individual identity, any more than people inhabiting Flatland can know anything about the sphere. Children don't understand adulthood until they become adults. Barbarians don't know anything about civilization except how to destroy it. Likewise Antifa and BLM mobs.

Yesterday I was rereading a collection of essays by Voegelin. In the introduction, Sandoz makes the point that

The man who plays his role in existence in cooperation with God is the true man, and all humans are called by natural inclination [↑] as well as the pull of divine Being [↓] to be true men. In short, true human existence is self-consciously lived in collaborative partnership by every man in his own unique measure with God.

Anything that interferes with this process -- including ideology -- renders us less than the true men we are intended to be. To reduce oneself to a racial category or tribal identity is the quintessence of ontological derailment into a nebulous world of non-being.

And here is the subtle point: this derailment into an ontological netherworld will necessarily result in feelings of estrangement and alienation.

This alienation can be symbolized in terms of race, but the left, via identity politics, provides a whole menu of identities from which to choose: gender, sexual preference, religion (so long as it's an anti-American one), et al. It doesn't matter which group identity one chooses, so long as one subsumes one's actual identity into it, and then uses it to symbolize the very alienation produced by being a self-styled victim.

Of course they are victims. And deciding to identify as a victim gives them the added pleasure of participating in their own subjection. The imaginary victimizer is but the projected image they conceal in themselves. The bully is real, they just pretend they aren't it. This is a key dynamic, and you see it all day long in academia, journalism, and unsupervised playgrounds.

The superimposition of ideology over reality results in the destruction of whole realms of knowledge -- whole academic departments. At the same time, it paradoxically results in new departments of "false knowledge" such as feminism, queer studies, critical race theory, and all the rest, all dedicated to the systematic pursuit and construction of systems of non-knowledge, AKA credentialed stupidity.

Ultimately this pneumo-cognitive rebellion and regression "obscures the reality of man" and "destroys the sciences of man." There is a loss of "insights into the nature of reality," or maybe you haven't recently attended college.

But if you have, then you know the elaborate indoctrination "is not education to openness of the spirit; it is rather, a work of closure against the spirit." It "seals off its victims"

against the life of spirit; it successfully maintains its estrangement in a position of social dominance; and hinders the public of the spirit from establishing itself in the society at large.

Yes, "the public of the spirit" is the silent majority, and the only thing standing between us and the regressive social and political dominance of illiterate and destructive crybullies is President Trump.

The Who & Whom of Persons & Racial Categories

The subject of race is so vapid and unedifying, no wonder the left never shuts up about it, for it ensures that they always have something vacuous to scream about, i.e., a non-problem with no political solution (or better, pretend solutions that aggravate the pseudo-problem, which calls for ever more pretend solutions, especially in an election year).

Yes, there is a solution, but the race hustlers of the left would never consider it, because it would put them out of business overnight.

To paraphrase someone, you can't expect the tenured to understand something when their whole livelihood depends on not understanding it -- in this case, a rudimentary grasp of the Golden Rule: I don't want to be reduced to a racial stereotype, therefore I don't depersonalize others in that manner.

Persons are persons, not races. They are, however, male or female. Note that, as usual, the left has it precisely backward and upside-down: they want us to pretend race is of critical importance while denying the cosmic significance of sexual differences. Indeed, the Supreme Court reads this twisted ideology into the Constitution.

Let's stipulate the formerly liberal (and always conservative) principle that a person is an individual and not a racial category. But what is a person?

Conveniently, I just finished a book on this very subject, The Selfhood of the Human Person. It started off very strong, but got a little tedious about midway through. It could have been half the length if the author had fully digested the subject instead of thinking out loud the whole time.

But I suppose that's the way it is with phenomenology. It can get more than a little.... flabby, since it is the opposite of abstract, reductive, aphoristic, etc. It gives you the whole existentialada, literally.

We prefer to look at things through the opposite end of the telescope, which is to say, principial, metaphysical, integral, and synthetic, while never ignoring the universal experience of any- and everyman in every time and place, AKA human nature. I suggest we flip through the book with this in mind, and try to subsume the raw phenomenology into our half-baked noumenology. Whatever that means.

Crosby follows the personalist tradition of John Paul II, which vindicates "that which makes man irreducible to the world." Obviously this flies in the face of all modern forms of scientistic reductionism, but also the postmodern pathologies that so cluelessly deny human nature and essence. You could say that modernism and postmodernism are just two sides of the same worthless metaphysical coin.

Which is not to say there is nothing worthwhile in science, only that it renders itself stupid when it elevates itself to a metaphysic. There is, however, nothing worthwhile in postmodernism, as it is in its essence a doctrine of idiocy when it isn't Satan's own worldview (yes, literally).

This post may be a little random. Or rather, continue to be random. Besides, I'm feeling a little fuzzy this morning, which makes it more challenging to slice through this like the proverbial hammer.

Some things are better seen and recognized when we are deprived of them. Who notices oxygen until we can't breath? Who could begin to understand time if we weren't constantly threatened by finitude?

Similarly, perhaps personhood comes better into focus when we are deprived of it. Why is life in Saudi Arabia or China or Iran or leftist campuses so awful? Because real personhood is not permitted. More ominously, why is our country lurching in this very direction, away from individual freedom and personhood toward leftist conformity, collectivism, and groupthink?

America is founded on the principle that a person is a Who and not a What -- an I and never an It. Lenin and Stalin were correct in reducing politics to the question of Who and Whom. The question is, who qets to be Who, and who is to be treated as a mere Whom, i.e., an object or means to an end? (Hint: all leftists think they will be a Who, and are always surprised when the mob comes for them.)

Note, for example, that rioters and looters are treated with great respect by the left as dignified Whos, while people who wish to protect themselves from rioters and looters -- e.g., the McCloskeys -- are Whoms to be destroyed by the media-state complex.

Am I reducing the mob to a Whom by calling them rioters and looters? Not at all, since I hold them fully responsible as persons for the rioting, looting, thuggery. Damn right they're persons! Now, treat them like it, good and hard. You'll find they won't like it.

Rather, they'll want to hide behind a Whom and say something to the effect that "race made me do it" (or variants such as "structural racism," "white privilege," etc.). I can't help it! I have no agency or free will! I'm depraved on account'a I'm deprived!

Good question: "what do we understand about persons when we understand the moral immaturity of those periods in history in which slavery was taken for granted? What do we understand about persons when we see slavery as radically depersonalizing?"

So easy to tear down statues of our founders, but why is slavery wrong? What are we recognizing when we recognize it as such?

No, we are not recognizing "the equality of races." Suppose science continues to mount evidence for the inequality of races -- for example, that Asian Americans and Ashkenazi Jews on average have higher IQs than Euro- or African-Amercans. Would this justify slavery?

No, because we are persons before we are statistical categories of general intelligence. Slavery is wrong because it is in the nature of a person to have property in himself. A person is his own end, and must never be treated as an object who only exists for the sake of another. Yes, China wants to enslave us, but it would be wrong no matter how many math and engineering majors they produce.

Nor is a person a mere part of a whole, whether it is a race, state, or tribe. Not to belabor the point, but this is why the disgusting ideology of identity politics is at antipodes to the American ideal:

there is no totality that can encompass a person in such a way as to relativize the totality that he or she is. Persons stand in themselves in such a way as to be absolute, that is, unsurpassable, unrelativizable totalities.

In short, a person can never be contained by anything lower than personhood. I'll buy that. But by virtue of what principle? Or relative to whom?

Correct: the divine person, more on whom tomorrow.

Radical Anti-Racism

Perhaps you haven't heard, but slavery is wrong. So too is racism. But why they wrong? By virtue of what principle(s)?

I know why they're wrong: ultimately because all men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with... you know, the thing.

So what. The founders believed the same nonsense but some of them owned slaves.

Yes, but that was wrong, and they knew it was wrong. Democrats didn't invent the positive good defense of slavery until a generation or two after the founding.

The positive good defense is rooted in very different principles from the founding, and these principles have guided the Democrat party ever since, from Jim Crow to racial quotas to the war on cops.

The latter, for example, insists that different standards should be applied to policing blacks just because blacks commit a vastly disproportionate amount of crime. This is analogous to applying different college entry standards to Asian Americans just because they commit a vastly disproportionate amount of scholarship. Which Democrats also do: different races, different standards.

Blacks lives matter. No doubt, but why? By virtue of what principle?

I know -- because ALL lives matter!

Wrong. That makes you a racist.

Hmm. I don't have a second guess. I give up. What's the right answer?

No, I really do give up. What is the Politically Correct answer? Be right back. I'm gonna go to the source.

Perfect: What We Believe. The mission: "to build local power and to intervene when violence [is] inflicted on Black communities by the state and vigilantes." Vigilantes? I have good news for BLM: 86% of unorganized, non-state interracial violence is committed by Blacks, despite Blacks comprising only 13% of the population.

And the state? The top 20 urban areas that feature the most Black-on-Black violence are all run by Democrats, often for decades (or maybe it's 19 out of 20).

I'll cut to the chase: I don't see any principles here. There is (in their words) rage, commitment, desire, fighting, catalyzing, healing, struggling. There's a lot of talk about "Black people," but no attention to actual persons.

There'a a lot of sub-literate nonsense such as

We intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not depleting.

Does that make any sense to you?

We are unapologetically Black in our positioning.

That's neither here nor there. I am unapologetically white. I'm also unapologetically male, Homo sapiens, mortal, married, a father, a baseball fan, a beer lover, a record collector... I'm not proud of any of these, just not apologetic. Why would I be? It won't help. I do, however, apologize for being a psychologist. That was never my intention. It just turned out that way.

We see ourselves as part of the global Black family, and we are aware of the different ways we are impacted or privileged as Black people who exist in different parts of the world.

Ah ha. I think I've identified the essential flaw in their anthropological reasoning, and which makes for a smooth segue into our next subject, which is very nature of the human subject, AKA The Selfhood of the Human Person.

Our approach will demonstrate not only why Black lives matter, but why they are of literally infinite value. Note that this statement cannot be true if the belief animating BLM is true, that "to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a prerequisite for wanting the same for others."

This has it precisely backward and upside down. For in reality, human rights are prior to their instantiation in a racial (or any) group.

In short, these rights inhere in individuals, never in groups, races, tribes, classes, genders, political parties, etc. You possess them because you are a person, never because you are a black or white person. To believe otherwise is a truly grotesque and dangerous regression to an earlier understanding of personhood (because it is, as we shall see, a denial and defacement of personhood).

Let's begin with a question. Let's say you know nothing about me except I am Black. Knowing I am Black, do you know anything of substance about me?

That is correct: you know nothing (except that I am a person, with all this entails, which is a great deal). If you believe otherwise, there's a name for that: racist. Even if one believes different racial groups may on average do better or worse in this or that endeavor, this tells you nothing about the individual.

Perhaps you assume that because I'm, say, Asian American, I must excel at math. Maybe, but you won't know until you actually meet and get to know me. Or, maybe you think someone is "privileged" because he's white. If so, you're just another racist.

This is all so elementary, it's distressing it even has to be said. But this is the progressive Age of Stupidity we've been born into. As a psychologist, I deal with every race under the sun, but I never make any assumptions -- good or bad -- going into an interview. Why would I? I'm not evaluating a group but a person.

But what is a person? And what makes them so special? I learned in biology that human beings are just randomly evolved animals, no better than any other. I learned in ecology that humans are like any other animal only worse, and I learned in neurology that there's not even any such thing as a human self, just neural activity.

Back to our question: what is a person, anyway?

Almost every answer to this question begins in a certain independence in being and acting.... a person is never a mere part in any whole but a whole of its own... (Crosby).

Since a person is never a mere part in a whole, a person can never be reduced to his race. Indeed, no person is even a "member" of a race, certainly not in any meaningful sense, since it again tells us nothing about the actual person.

Does this mean community is of no importance? No, of course not. But it does mean a community must be of and for persons, not reduce person to group or engulf the individual in the collective:

personal selfhood provides the only possible basis for all deeper forms of community.... the defenders of community and the common good should beware of certain proposals of restoration, such as those that reject the idea of the person as subject of rights. There is a core of personalist truth in the individualism of rights, and this has to be preserved in all attempts at renewing the bonds of social solidarity (ibid.).

Any person matters because all persons matter, period. But today, radical anti-racism such as that discussed here is considered a form of racism by the racists of the left, the great majority of whom are, as usual, white Democrats, not black.

Volk Lives Matter

The moment we're living through seems more consequential than can be discerned from the usual media hysteria.

Come to think of it, being that the media is always hysterical, it is impossible to determine the importance of an historical event based upon how Don Lemon or Chris Cuomo or the New York Times react to things. Besides, is girlish hysteria ever the appropriate response to anything?

More generally, it is difficult if not impossible to gauge the cosmo- or world-historical importance of this or that present moment. Some people magnify the moment out of all proportion, while others can sleepwalk through the most significant events in history. (As to the latter, one must only notice how the MSM is ignoring what is by far the greatest political scandal in American history.)

So, we're attempting to use our pure Coon Vision to drill down to the ground of this moment, in order to discern what's really going on. As mentioned in yesterday's post, we insist that it is possible to do this via the Pure Thought described therein, i.e., to read the Signs of the Times.

And again, this does not mean it can be exhaustively described in an apodictic, systematic way, because this would constitute ideological Gnosticism and not open engagement with the ground; it would reduce to the wrong answer, whereas a Raccoon is always in search of the right questions in the correct order.

All we're asking for is a little peek outside Plato's Cave or beneath Jeffrey's Rug, and we are absolutely convinced that this is possible, otherwise there would be no need to put the honest prophets to death.

Now, this hardly means we cannot read the signs incorrectly. We all know this happened once, and we've already apologized for it. No prophet bats 1.000, not even Petey. We admit when we are wrong, even if a part of us still believes the Monkees will some day enter the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame.

Let's begin with an analogy. Let's say the historical moment is like an ocean. Certain qualities of the ocean are apparent -- waves, tides, wind currents -- while others are hidden, for example, large scale circulation and depth. Who could tell by looking at the ocean that certain currents have been stably flowing for thousands of years?

Indeed, Prof. Wiki claims that some currents have "a transit time of about 1000 years" and that current velocities can range "from fractions of centimeters per second" to sometimes more than a meter per second.

This makes the analogy even more useful than I had hoped, because history also flows at different rates of speed in ways that are impossible to discern by looking at the surface, AKA journalistically.

To take only the most obvious example, the Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection continue to reVerberate and flow through history, usually in an imperceptibly slow way, occasionally in dramatic fashion (for example, in the American revolution, which was at once rooted in a generation-long spiritual awakening which was in turn nested in a much longer arc of salvation and evolution, AKA salvolution).

We're in danger of running out of time before we ever get to the bloody point. Perhaps I should just jump ahead to the point, and flesh it out out as we proceed.

Much of what I'm about to say has been provoked by another providential collision with a timely book, this one called The Selfhood of the Human Person. It is so dense with implications that it's a slow read, even though the material itself isn't beyond the abilities of the average Christian Subgenius.

Concur with this reviewer:

This is a brilliant essay on the human person following the personalist/phenomonological line of thought (a philosophical approach taken by our beloved pope John Paul II).

To do this book justice, a single reading does not suffice; it needs several readings, not because it is hard to follow -- not at all! Crosby is very readable -- I found it very comprehensible and I am not trained in philosophy.

No, it is simply because there is so much in this book; such as the role of immanence and transcendence in the human person -- what does it mean to say that persons possess a kind of incommunicability?

What I want to focus on is the critical distinction between the group/collective and the individual/person, and how the Present Moment is showing us a very different conception of this from the traditional American and Christian view (the former current thoroughly embedded in the latter, as per the above).

For us -- i.e., for both Christians and Americans -- the individual is not only sacred, but a kind of intra-historical telos. You could say that the achievement of the Mature Man is the point of this whole cosmo-historical flow, and that it took a very long time to get here (only 50,000 years or so of human development).

But now we are faced with a very different historical movement (to be precise, it is an anti-historical movement, a turning back from maturity) that wants to efface individuality and plunge us back into the tribe, the race, the volk.

And just look at the intellectual and emotional maturity of the human specimens producing and produced by this movement! You can't reason with them, any more than you could teach algebra to a pig or economics to AOC.

Identity politics is a lack thereof, i.e., of proper identity and personhood; or, it is collective identity effacing personal identity rooted in trinitarian intersubjectivity.

To be continued....

The De-Nazification of the Left

We've had two days to meditate on, or stew in, Eliot's advice that the only proper philosophical method is to be very intelligent. Well, what if the person who disagrees with you is also very intelligent? Easy: you have to be very, very intelligent.

Let's see if that chapter has any other helpful tips. Here's one:

One must never forget that all classic philosophy is built on common sense, while no ideology is built on common sense.... Realizing that is a great breakthrough (Voegelin, in Sandoz).

That is a very good point. You will have noticed....

I often say that, don't I? You will have noticed. When I do, it's probably because I'm directing your attention to something plainly commonsensical. It's a kind of compliment, because I'm assuming my readers are gifted with a fully functional common sense with which to perceive the bleeding obvious. To put another way, every troll is missing something, if not everything.

But this also means that someone who disagrees on the point at hand isn't necessarily stupid, just lacking in common sense. You will have noticed that a person can be quite intelligent, and yet, be utterly lacking in common sense. Many intelligent people, for example, believe Black Lives Matter has something to do with Black Lives instead of being just the latest iteration of totalitarian leftist ideology (but I threepeat myself).

Indeed, the observation that intelligent people can believe idiotic things qualifies as a banality, but why is it true? I'm sure we've discussed this in the past, so I won't spend a great deal of time on it. Taking myself as a prime example, I'm as intelligent as I was when I was younger (if anything, less intelligent), and yet, like any liberal, I believed all sorts of nonsensical things. Why? What was going on?

Gosh. So many things. As I said, I don't want this tangent to hijack the post. Is it possible to cut through the archetypal Jungle and identify one or two principles that explain my former idiocy? Think, Bob, think....

Okay, that phrase right there: think, Bob, think. It reveals one of my principles, i.e., that a type of pure thought can disclose the nature of reality. However, the operative word is pure, which goes to the moral requisites alluded to in yesterday's post. Does this imply a moral oneupmanship on my part? As in, "I know better than you because I am better than you."

No, I don't think so. Rather, the opposite, because we're talking about reverence and humility in the presence of Truth, which form the essence of intellectual honesty. As Voegelin emphasizes time and again, philosophy is not a body of knowledge, rather, a whole way of life.

Yes, it sounds pretentious to say I am a philosopher. That's for others to decide. But I can say I practice philo-sophy as a way of life, and that the practice of it requires several things, including love of wisdom and truth, perpetual openness to the transcendent, and lots of drugs. (I apologize. Some jokes insist on writing themselves despite one's best efforts to make a serious point.)

Back to the principle of Pure Thought. There are several wrong ways of engaging in it that we must rule out straight away, for example, any form rationalism. That's just a nonstarter for any number of reasons, but let's just say Gödel and move on.

In a way, we could place all forms of endeadening Wrongthink into one huge casket of deplorables called ideology. We might say that the way of ideology is at antipodes to the way of philosophy, largely because it reduces philosophy to a specific content and thereby closes off the divine ground, AKA reality.

Various profane dogmas, doctrines, and ideologies are indeed secondary realties that eclipse first reality (and there can be only one). These are "deadening to the living spirit of faith no less than to the living tension of the philosopher's contemplative (noetic) quest" (Sandoz).

Which reminds me of another critical point: living. Just as there exist biological life and death (the latter only intelligible in the context of the former), there are intellectual and spiritual Life. If you are lucky, then somewhere along the way you had exposure to, and were drawn into the attractor of, a Living Man who initiated you into the life of mind and spirit. If not, then you'll have a hard time understanding what we're talking about.

At the moment, we are enduring a tsunami of spiritually demented ideology washing over what remains of our civilization. It is quite obviously dead, deadening, and deadly, both spiritually and intellectually. Ironic, is it not, that its standard bearer is literally a dead man walking, Joe Biden?

No, not ironic. Inevitable.

How to combat this zombie apocalypse, or anti-political night of the living dead? Has anyone seen the movie Shutter Island? I saw it just the other night, but it's difficult to discuss without being a spoiler.

Let's just say that you can't just push back against a delusion, for the deluded person will simply incorporate you into their delusion -- like when Adam Schiff accused Tucker Carlson on live TV of being an agent of Putin for questioning the Russia hoax. Likewise, the surest way to be called a racist is to point out the intrinsic racism of the identity politics of the left.

The crisis of consciousness that has propelled alienated intellectuals' assault on all that our most venerable traditions hold dear and true cannot be met merely by reasserting dogmas even more loudly than before (ibid.).

You can't just yell back at the screamers, hate the haters, or resurrect the soul dead. "Rather, something more is needed."

The rightness of what has always been right must not only be reaffirmed but also recaptured in the hearts of men and as the living truth of a science of human affairs...

Yes, there are short-term mitigations, but let's be honest: the de-Nazification of the left is a multi-generational project, nor can it happen without divine intervention -- or better, without widespread openness to the divine ground. Which is why we agree with the Aphorist that

In history it is sensible to hope for miracles and absurd to trust in plans.

Never did get to my original point. I'll get straight to it in the next post.

Qualifications of Intelligence

A short list of the evils to which man is inevitably heir would include -- off the top of my head --

--pain, whether physical, psychological, or spiritual

--death

--organic disease

--mental illness

--immorality and evil

--envy

--want (because it is infinite and therefore insatiable)

--aging

--loss

--status anxiety and the desire for distinction

--loneliness

--war

--criminality

--lies

--boredom

--oppression

--fatherlessness

--ignorance

--meaninglessness

--time (to the extent that it is limited)

--the necessity of labor

--unjust violence

--ignorance

--stupidity

--annoying people

--hair loss

None of these can be eliminated by politics, although it can ameliorate some of them at the margins. On the other hand, politics can serve as a fine distraction from them. Say what you want about the imbeciles going on about "white privilege," at least they don't wonder about the meaning of life, nor how to solve life's problems. It's easy: eliminate white people.

No wonder the left refuses to relinquish this seductive delusion, considering how it shields them from the distressing reality of genuine evils, privations, and existential nuisances. How tempting it must be to ensconce oneself in the comfort and safety of a collective hysteria over race!

What's the real solution? Ultimately there can be only one; or perhaps two or three that are ultimately reducible to one.

In The Politics of Truth, Sandoz alludes to a remark by T.S. Eliot on the character of proper philosophizing, to the effect that the only method is to be -- wait for it -- very intelligent.

Well now wait just a minute. Our political discourse -- and every other kind of discourse for that matter -- is crawling with mild-to-moderately intelligent people with idiotic opinions. Their intelligence, such as it is, does nothing to shield them from error, prejudice, wishful thinking, delusion, Trump derangement, or hateful ideology in general.

Let's try to track down the source of Eliot's comment. Surely he knew plenty of intelligent idiots, being that he worked in the publishing industry.

No luck. I do, however, have some aphoristic back-up from a man who was obviously well aware of the dangers of intelligent stupidity, but who could nevertheless affirm that

The intelligent man quickly reaches conservative conclusions (Dávila).

Yes, but what about the intelligent man who doesn't reach conservative conclusions? What happened? What has caused his intelligence to turn on itself, or to negate its own efficacy?

Well, one can obviously be quite intelligent, a genius even, and lack wisdom. There is also general intelligence and partial intelligence, or intelligence in this or that field as opposed to the Pure Intelligence that radiates through certain people.

It reminds me of "pure musicians," in contrast to a trained musician who may well be a virtuoso but will never attain the pure musical genius of even certain "primitive" and unschooled musicians out of whom musical genius flows freely. Some people make music. Others are music. Analogously,

There are men who visit their intelligence, and others who dwell in theirs.

Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I want to mention something I'll expand upon later. It is the principle that real intelligence has moral prerequisites, for example -- and this is only the most obvious one -- intellectual honesty.

You will have noticed that it is strictly impossible to dialogue with the intellectually dishonest person, since the two of you are not converging upon truth; or, you don't share a passionate love for the truth that transcends the two of you. Certainly you can debate such a person, but this is a worthless exercise if it only involves defending a position as opposed to advancing together toward truth.

By the way, we're not talking about the legions of credentialed idiots who attended college, learned the right things, and have never had a creative thought in their lives -- an Obama, Cornell West, Chris Cuomo, Rachel Maddow, and thousands of others. Of these it may be truly said that

There is an illiteracy of the soul that no diploma cures.

And that

The learned fool has a wider field to practice his folly.

Rather, we're talking about the seeming paradox of intelligent stupidity, not middlebrow convention and conformity. By itself, A high I.Q. is indicative of distinguished mediocrity.

As to the moral qualifications needed in order for the intelligence to be perfected, Dávila reminds us that Intelligence by itself possesses nothing but rebellious slaves.

Boy howdy, has this proved true over the past several weeks! A reminder that

He who jumps, growls, and barks has an invisible collar and an invisible chain.

And the chain wasn't put there by us. Rather, it was placed there by white liberals and their designated "black leaders."

Almost out of time. We'll leave off with this, and explain how it can be true in the next post:

Agreement is eventually possible between intelligent men because intelligence is a conviction they share.

The Purpose of It All (or Best Alibi Ever)

The penultimate chapter of The Politics of Truth addresses the question of whether Eric Voegelin is (was) a conservative. He was one of those caviling types who was paranoid about being pigeonholed -- like Hayek and Polanyi, who also denied being conservative per se.

But "conservative" has very different connotations in Europe, having to do with the conservation of throne and altar, and all that mystagogic nonsense that justifies the rule of the ruling class. In Europe conservatism often conserves self-serving magic, whereas in the US it mainly conserves commonsense.

And some people are so preoccupied with being perceived as an individual that they make it difficult to appreciate the universality of their message. In denying being part of any larger movement, they only assure their own practical irrelevance. I'm sure this is one of the reasons Voegelin never gained, and never will gain, any widespread acceptance beyond his fervent little cult.

As Sandoz correctly points out, "the unique is baffling." Yes, every human being is unique. However, the uniqueness can only be comprehended in the context of a universal human nature. Then again, human nature is complex and multifaceted.

To simplify, let's say human nature is comprised of 100 different facets. We put them into a tumbler, shake them up, roll them out onto the existential plane, and a new and unique individual is born, each having a different proportion, so to speak, of human elements.

Voegelin actually addresses this in his book on Plato and Aristotle. He doesn't just come out and say whether he approves of Aristotle's stance on the ultimate purpose of a political order, but I have no hesitation in saying that I agree with it 100%. But then, I'm not a scholar, just a blogger. At any rate, Aristotle is in agreement with what I just said about various admixtures of human elements:

All human beings have, indeed, the same structure of the soul, but differentiated according to the predominance of one or the other parts.... All must partake of them, but not in the same manner (Voegelin).

The best political order is simply the one which allows "the fullest actualization of human nature" and "the maximal actualization of human excellence." But if you believe in the existence of human nature and of objective human excellence, you are certainly not a leftist Democrat, rather, quite the opposite, whatever you wish to call it.

You may not like being called a conservative, but there you are. I too was uncomfortable identifying myself as one at first -- there are stages of acceptance, from non-leftist Democrat, to libertarian, to classical liberal, to Independent, to okay, f**k it, I'm a conservative, to HELL YEAH, I'M A GUN TOTIN', 'MERICA LOVIN', GOD FEARIN' REACTIONARY!

But here's the part I really like, for it is a variation of Jesus' wise crack about how the last-shall-be-first. It elevates slack-loving wise guys such as myself (and, one suspects, Voegelin) to the top of the cosmic heap!

The life in the best polis must be organized in such a manner that the actualization of the man of leisure is achieved.

Well, mission accomplished. I am an unapologetic Man of Leisure, but this must not be confused with the similar looking Lazy Man, or Layabout, or Antifa stoner living in mom's basement. I may be devoid of horizontal ambition, but I am insanely ambitious as it pertains to the vertical, ever striving to make myself utterly useless, especially to my readers. And you are no doubt too kind to tell me I've succeeded.

If education serves the necessary and useful only [read: horizontal]... then the full actualization of human excellence becomes impossible, because men will not know what to do with their free time that is supposed to serve leisure (Voegelin, emphasis mine).

I'll say it again... nah, just read it again, the italicized part, because that's the key to understanding and appreciating the Raccoon lifestyle. It is why the Raccoon is never bored except insofar as he must attend to horizontal obligations and nuisances.

For the average human, the primary escape from horizontality is via some more intense form of horizontality, e.g., skydiving, the once-in-a-lifetime vacation, the Dream House, the Street Demonstration, whatever. It never succeeds beyond the momentary, and like any drug requires an increasingly larger dose: bigger, faster, grander, looting an even larger TV screen, etc.

I am the last to deny the pleasures of the horizontal, but it's so much more interesting and less expensive to explore and homestead in the vertical. Establish a beachhead there, develop your own little plot of real estate, and it will soon surpass the overpriced and underperforming thrills of the horizontal. Moreover, you'll enjoy the horizontal diversions that much more.

For proof, aphorisms:

Men tend not to inhabit any but the ground floor of their souls.

The modern aberration consists in believing that the only thing that is real is what the vulgar soul can perceive.

When their religious depth disappears, things are reduced to a surface without thickness, where nothing shows through.

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

Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems, but a new dimension of the universe. The religious man lives among realities that the secular man ignores (Dávila).

But leisure isn't exactly analogous to playtime:

Play may be necessary after work in order to achieve a state of rest as the precondition of leisure, but it is no occupation for leisure itself.

Real leisure involves the pursuit of things "which serve no further ends and can be pursued for their own sake, as a way of life."

To summarize: "Political society is the field for actualization of human nature"; and vertical recollection must be counted as the highest and most useless actualization of all.

[L]eisured life is the purpose for which we undergo the work of our practical life....

Of such a life we must say that it transcends the merely human level. Man can lead it only in so far as he is more than man, only in so far as something divine is really present in him. Since this divine part in the composite nature of man is nous, the life of the intellect is divine as compared with life on the merely human level of the practical excellences....

It is our duty to make ourselves immortal, as far as that is possible in life, by cultivating the activity of the best part in us which may be called our better or true self (ibid).

Challenge accepted.

Man, the Endangered Species

Alternative title: Science Giveth and Scientism Taketh Away

Just a couple of points this morning. We'll begin with an aphorism:

An education without the humanities prepares one only for menial occupations.

That was true until the left took over the humanities and transformed them into the subhumanities. Now an education in the formerly liberal arts prepares one for neither menial nor intellectual labor, for one not only knows nothing, but literally less than nothing. Which is only possible for a human, so I suppose we could still call them humanities in an ironic sense.

The point is, the ideological transformation of the humanities results not just in nonsense, but nonsense about human nature. Which is surely the worst kind nonsense, since it colors everything else.

Which is why man should be placed at the top of the so-called Endangered Species List. And who is endangering him? Yes, it is "man," but a certain type of man. This type:

The modern man is the man who forgets what man knows about man (Dávila).

And not just "forgotten," but reprogrammed to believe man is something other than what he is (and always will be).

Coming at it from the other (scientistic) end, Voegelin writes of how "the model of positive science destroys the understanding of the myth for the past as well as the present."

This results in two related psycho-pneumatic derailments, first, a kind of obtuse and concrete literalism in approaching the mythopoetic insights of the past, and second, a failure to appreciate that scientism itself partakes of mythology, only in a totally naive and unreflective way:

The symbols of the myth are cut off, through this attitude, from their basis in the unconscious and are required to legitimate themselves as if they were propositions concerning objects. The myth is erroneously supposed to be meant "literally" instead of symbolically, and consequently appears as naive or superstitious.

We've discussed this sort of incomplete person before. It is as if they've undergone a procedure to sever the right brain from the rest of the neocortex, which results in a kind of soulectomy, being that the input and output of the soul -- reception and exteriorization -- require the nonlinear processing, holistic perception, and symmetrical logic of the right cerebral hemisphere.

Illustration: In the beginning God creates the heavens and the earth. Like anybody could know that! That's just a myth. It's not science!

No, moron, it's not science. Rather, it is the metaphysical basis for the very possibility of science. It is precisely why science only developed in the Christian west.

Regarding scientism (i.e., the naive metaphysicalization of science),

The myth has a fundamental function in human existence and myths will be created no matter what anybody thinks about them. We cannot overcome myth, we can only misunderstand it (Voegelin, emphasis mine).

Exactly. For myth communicates an implicit metaphysic, as in the example above, in which Genesis posits a radically transcendent source of cosmic order and human rationality.

So, scientism is a myth like any other, only worse. But what is the myth "really saying"? In other words, what perennial truths about human nature are being obscured by the prestige of "science"?

An obvious case is Marxism, which is just a Christian heresy dressed up as scientific materialism, what with the original innocence of paradise (primordial communism), fall (private property), redemption-revolution, and the heaven/utopia of the Workers' Paradise on earth, AKA dictatorship of the proletariat.

Thus, Voegelin points out that

Such symbols as "reason," "mankind," "proletariat," "race," "communist society," "world peace," and so forth, are supposed to be different in nature from pagan or Christian symbols because their mythical truth is covered and obscured by the superimposition of the additional myth of science.

Whenever you hear a leftist proclaim his devotion to science, you need to translate it to a love of myth. Note, for example, the mythical assumptions packed into such slogans as Black Lives Matter, or "Love is Love," or "No Human is Illegal," or "All Genders are Whole, Holy, and Good, or "Women's Rights are Human Rights" (which they can't be, since men don't have the right to kill their children), or -- without irony -- "Science is Real." Taken literally these are banalities, but they obviously mean something much deeper and more sinister.

Since the myth does not cease to be myth because somebody believes it to be science, the telescoping of myth and science has a peculiar warping effect on the personality of the believers (Voegelin).

I was thinking of how nowadays, when the Supreme Court is in session, it means that another constitutional convention is taking place, albeit without the participation of the People. Rather, this week, for example, a couple of judicial idiots (Roberts and Gorsuch) decided to impose their scientistic myth on the rest of us, i.e., that the Constitution confers certain special rights on people who are confused about their gender.

This is consistent with Voegelin's description of how

the forces of the unconscious will stream into the form, not of the myth, but of theory or science. The symbols of the myth become perverted into intramundane, illusionary objects, "given," as if they were empirical data, to the cognitive and active functions of man.

But here is the real point that intrigued me, that as a result of this process, "man becomes anthropomorphic." What is meant by this cryptic remark? He expands upon it a few pages later, warning of "the anthropomorphic fallacy of forming man in the image of conscious man," "in an age in which the anthropomorphic obsession has destroyed the reality of man."

We usually think of anthropomorphization as the naive attribution of human traits to animals or inanimate objects. But we can also do it to human beings, in particular, when we isolate man from the divine pole, or enclose him in immanence -- in short, when we deny the intrinsic verticality of the human being.

So, if you think the claim that man is the image and likeness of the Creator is a myth, it has nothing on the rank superstition that man is created in the image and likeness of man.

Back to Sandoz. He writes of how contemporary education

does little to restore the understanding of uniquely human reality. Rather, taken alone, it does the very opposite and helps make human beings an endangered species through obfuscation. Both Nazism and Marxism-Leninism evoke natural science as their paradigm....

The problem, of course, isn't science, but

its perversion into scientism and positivism and, thereby, into methodological and other assumptions about knowledge and reality that fallaciously presume to supply sovereign, even the sole, road to truth. Systematic reductionism and deformation of reality inevitably result.

Every time. Scientistic jokers to the left of me, postmodern clowns to the further left.

Resisting the Resistance

There are degrees political sickness, from neurosis to psychosis. I suppose there's also political normality, but it's so rare as to be nearly non-existent. Still, we can't have neurosis or psychosis unless there first exists normalcy. Unless a certain degree of abnormality is inevitable, in which case normality can only exist as an ideal. Crooked timber and all that.

But in any case, in a political order under our present tyranny of relativism, there can be no such thing as normality. Nor can anything be called objectively sick, perverse, or abnormal. And now you understand how the left gets away with it. Just as leftism is a religion with no God but countless demons, it is a political ideology with no truth but an army of enforcers hunting down and punishing deviations from it.

Really, -- and we've seen this playing out on our TV screens over the past several weeks -- the left is just a violent mob with an ideology attached. And it works. The non-crazy and non-evil are always victimized but the crazy and evil.

The first act of violence is always to language, AKA Logos. Being that it is the vehicle of truth, the maiming of language is always of vital importance to the left. Is this torture of the Logos but a simultaneous reenactment and undoing of the Crucifixion? Yes, of course, but we'll come back to that universal metacosmic truth in a subsequent post.

Brief timeout for pedantry. To simplify, there are two types of patient: the neurotic and the psychotic (or relatively mature and immature-to-infantile). The neurotic is plagued by intra-psychic conflict (e.g., insecurity, excessive and irrational worry, impulsive behavior) but is nevertheless in contact with reality, while the psychotic has more or less lost contact with reality.

But it really comes down to a different set of psychological defense mechanisms. You might say the neurotic uses a handgun to deal with his psychic demons and persecutors, while the psychotic goes nuclear every time.

Some of the common neurotic defenses include intellectualization, repression, and reaction formation. The latter has become ubiquitous on the left, what with legions of racists crawling over themselves to signal their innocence of racism to each other.

For that matter, it is why one should never trust a male feminist, because he is simply hiding the fact that he is neither. Likewise, what is a self-proclaimed "ally" of BLM but a fellow racist? People who are innocent of racism couldn't care less about signaling the fact.

Note also how the left doesn't just deploy pathological defenses, but wants to eliminate the mature ones, most conspicuously humor.

The immature defenses are nearly synonymous with the left, especially projection and acting out. But every day we see how the garden variety versions of these have become frankly delusional, e.g., President Trump is a Russian agent, Blacks are victims of genocide at the hands of law enforcement instead of each other, the imaginary campus rape epidemic, etc.

Every day a new delusion, really. By the way, there are also "negative delusions," for example, that Joe Biden is neurologically normal, or that CNN is a news network, or that Al Sharpton is anything other than what he so obviously is.

Here's an extended passage from The Politics of Truth. It has to do with a proper "politics of resistance," which is very much the opposite of the self-styled "resistance" that has been plaguing the country since late in the evening of November 7, 2016. (To be sure, they are resisting, the question being what.)

The reasonable response by the unaffected to perverse education [i.e., indoctrination into ideology] is resistance.... We are obliged to become our own physicians through the therapy of common sense and a steady appeal to the givens of common reality as experienced in the concrete consciousness of everyman and accumulated in the evidentiary treasury of history.

You may know this proper resistance to perversion by its opposite, for example, oh, vandalizing or tearing down statues of George Washington, Winston Churchill, Christopher Columbus, and other icons of our precious civilizational inheritance. (Speaking of logocide, those statues are surely forms of incredibly rich and compact speech.)

However, forgive them, for they know not what they do, for they all attended college. And they are also in denial of the oedipal implications of murdering the father of our country.

Since experience shows that the vanguard of perversion and pneumopathology is the debauchery of language [see paragraph four above], so fashionable now in the forefront of the political-correctness onslaught, it is important to recall the insight of George Orwell in a memorable sentence:

"The purpose of Newspeak," he wrote, "was not only to provide a medium of expression for the world-view and mental habits proper to the devotees of Ingsoc [the English Socialist Party], but to make all other modes of thought impossible" [emphasis mine].

Those who control your language will control your thoughts. The result is to make the asking of questions impossible, socially irrelevant, or ludicrous -- and thus de facto prohibited within the new orthodoxy of closure and deformed souls.

Deformed souls. Ah, but there'a an easy way around that one: not only denying the reality of the soul but rendering its existence impossible, irrelevant, or ludicrous. Which is certainly one of the purposes of state indoctrination, since there one is despoiled of the very means through which to perceive and resist the pathological political system. The polite name for it is soul murder.

To live in truth requires at all times resolute resistance to untruth and tyranny as the first courageous step.

Recalling the words of C.S. Lewis, "Courage is not simply one of the virtues but the form of every virtue at the testing point, which means at the point of highest reality." I'm ashamed to admit I don't have the courage to put up an ALL LIVES MATTER sign in my front yard, because I'm afraid of my house being burned down by my moral superiors.

This was published in 1996, so call it prophecy if you like: "Polarization of American society has proceeded so far through the influences of socialism, Marxism, multiculturalism, and the welfare state's collision with traditional attitudes," that we are in danger of "a slide toward sedition and civil strife on a scale perhaps not seen in America" since the last time Democrats acted out to this extent and created the tyranny of Jim Crow.

How to resist this resistance to reality? Via

intellectual and spiritual resistance to untruth, conducted by reason and persuasion. It is resistance in the name of liberty and truth to revolutionaries who are succeeding in wresting major universities, academic professional associations, and much public discourse to radical control....

The connection with the Murder of God movement as the revolutionaries' common ground must be repeatedly demonstrated as inspiring their onslaughts.

A reminder that useless and idle RINOs are the favored tools of the Devil, who can accomplish nothing without their collaboration.

The Great Awokening, or Satan's Own Spiritual Revival

Let's try to knock another one off the desk, this time The Politics of Truth, a collection of essays that could scarcely be more timely, being that we are currently undergoing a plunge into the Politics of the Lie, the likes of which I've certainly never experienced in my life.

Indeed, I suspect it's no coincidence that Voegelin decided to pay us a visit precisely now, since 1) no other thinker better illuminates the kind of political pathology currently afflicting us, and 2) no other time in our recent history better exemplifies Voegelin's ideas. Compared to what is going on now, Obama was but a sulking, lazy, and ill-educated adolescent, whereas now we're dealing with a sociopathic cohort of spiritually deformed pseudo-adults.

Is there a name for this politico-spiritual disease? No, there are several: "deformation of reality," "gnostic derailment," "dogmatomachy," "ideological pseudo-reality," "secular moonshine," "para-Marxist buffoonery," etc.

As we know -- good and hard, right to the sweetbreads -- we are in the midst of A Great Awokening, which is a perverted -- and inverted -- caricature of the Great Awakenings that have periodically occurred in America. The first one occurred between 1730 and 1740, and this spiritual revolution set the stage for the physical one that would come to fruition a generation or two later. As John Adams famously wrote,

The Revolution was effected before the war commenced. The Revolution was in the minds and hearts of the people.... This radical change in the principles, opinions, sentiments, and affections of the people, was the real American Revolution.

The Second Great Awakening took place between 1790 and 1840. And according to Prof. Wiki there was a third between 1855 and 1930, and even a fourth between 1960 and 1980.

By my calculation, that adds up to 145 years of Awakening out of the 234 years since the Declaration, which is over 60%. And what do we call the periods in between? The Great Slumbers? The Pneumatic Snoozes? And what on earth is happening now? In my opinion, the Great Awokening isn't simply a harmless nap but a perverse caricature of these past Awakenings.

Sandoz points out that in past awakenings, "the church served as a school for politics." But in the case of the Awokening it is the other way around: politics is the school of a new religion. Interestingly, no one who is a member of this new religion realizes he is one. Rather, only non-members even recognize that it is a religion.

That's odd. Then again, perhaps not. We must remember that "religion" is a modern concept. For the great majority of history, people didn't know they "had" a religion. Rather, they were simply immersed in a cosmos -- an order -- that included an uncritical religiosity. Conscious religiosity as a separate modality only emerges with the recognition of other religions.

Extremes meet, such that our postmodern Awokening is rooted in a premodern mentality of uncritical religiosity. Here again, this is soph-evident to non-members but veiled to the Woke.

Real religion involves a human ascent and divine pull into the objective order of the cosmos. What then occurs in the logocidal anti-religion of the Woke? Is there an analogous downward pull, AKA temptation at one end, the old "glamor of evil" at the other? Preliminary indications say Yes, but let's continue to flip.

Now, what can the sudden acquisition of Wokeness! be but a caricature of spiritual conversion? Sandoz describes the latter as

a personal experience of regeneration.... The individual is flooded with a sense of divine presence and intense participation or union with God...

Let's stipulate that the Woke protesters, looters, and crybullies are indeed flooded with something, and that they are most definitely participating in some sort of mock mystical body. Yes, it's a "mob," but what is the interior of a mob? What is the psychic glue that holds it together?

It is at once a Krazy Glue and a Gorilla Glue, since it encourages decompensation, regression, and impulsivity unmediated by discursive thought. Come to think of it, it is also a Super Glue, in that it evokes the Neitzschean superman, or the failure to attain mature manhood masquerading as its transcendence -- the quintessence of which being the Antifa terrorist terrorized by the mother with whom he lives.

Among the chief hindrances to [the] life of true liberty is the oppression of men, who in service to evil deceive with untruth and impose falsehood in its place proclaiming it to be true....

Liberty is most truly exercised by living in accord with truth and is, therefore, the correlate of responsibility (Sandoz).

I suppose this is the first time a Great Awokening has fully unleashed itself on our shores, but certainly not the first in history. It occurred, for example, in the USSR. As Solzhenitsyn described it, "The destruction of souls for three-quarters of a century is the most frightening thing." We're not nearly that far into our own Awokening, but as the Aphorist reminds us,

Everything in history begins before where we think it begins and ends after where we think it ends.

So the Awokening has been with us for awhile, just not this overtly violent, powerful, and oppressive.

a major difficulty lies in the ostensible "neutrality" in the public schools, which in fact often serves to shelter expanding beachheads of safe havens for antireligious ideology and attacks on American society's moral convictions, radical doctrines ranging from political correctness to advocacy of homosexuality, and neo-Marxism parading as dispassionate science....

The Woke have already lost the argument, but they don't know it. Or they do know it, hence the attacks on free speech and the violence to persons and property. Progressives may not know much, but they know violence and intimidation work.

The ideological antipolitics of the nihilistic second realities has been defeated theoretically, politically, economically, and by all the facts of human existence.

Yet unremitting assault continues on the American and generally Western heritage in the name of enlightenment and social progress by the ghosts of the very politics of atrocity whose true monuments are Nazi death camps and the Soviet gulag. Its protagonists, unable to cope with reason and experience, resort to brute force tending toward the lethal.

That was published in 1996. It's no longer "tending." Rather, that toward which it was tending stands revealed.

The Science of Political Religions

Here's another book I think we can knock out in a hurry, A Government of Laws, a collection of Voegelinian essays on subjects ranging from the American founding to the contemporary political religions we've been seeing on our TV screens, with their primitive gods and violent liturgies.

As to the latter, we should never forget that human sacrifice is the default liturgy of the vertically untutored man. How many sacrificial offerings have occurred already at the hands of the BLM/Antifa priesthood? And how many thousands more will result from the defunding of police?

The book has an epigram by Aristotle ending with The law is reason unaffected by desire. Its unstated corollary is that the left is desire unaffected by reason; or it is abstract ideological reason uninformed by, and oblivious to, concrete historical experience.

There may be a shortcut through the book: how about I skip the things we already know, and focus only on the things we don't? And maybe throw in any passages that tell us what we already know, but do so in a clever or incisive way.

Here's an intriguing little fragment of a thoughtlet: that it would "be strange if a man chose not to live his own life but someone else's."

Well, in our opinion this happens every time a man chooses not to live in conformity to truth. So it happens quite often indeed. If the Truth sets one free, the Lie imprisons; and if truth is conformity to the real, then the Lie shackles one to a delusion of one kind or another. One is either inside or outside the cave; or rather, riveted by the shadows on the wall, or open to the light streaming in from outside. But enough about CNN.

Bob, I thought we were going to limit ourselves to what we don't already know?

Look, I'm trying, but it's nice to occasionally hear someone else say it, okay? You're not the only one who gets sick of the sound of my voice.

[W]e seek attunement with truth as far as we can. If we do not attain it with some degree of satisfaction, then there is discord and misery in our own being. We become what is variously represented as evil, unjust, and unhappy men. The higher capacities do not master the lower. Such men may be a walking civil war...

Wait -- are you suggesting that the Walking Civil Wars who imagine they're unhappy because of the existence of statues of Winston Churchill, or Thomas Jefferson, or Christopher Columbus, will not become happy after vandalizing or tearing them down?

No, they'll be delirious for a few minutes -- that's how mob psychology works -- before needing to repeat the experience. As with any other addiction, the progressive mobster keeps chasing the high, from canceling Gandhi to Basil Fawlty to Penny Lane. Pretty soon there's no one left to scapegoat -- no imaginary dragons left to slay -- so they must consume one another. It's one of those ironyclad Laws of the Left.

Why has the left plunged back into a premodern rejection of science? Because the very conception of science depends upon a prior "de-divinization of the world, which results in something we easily call nature; and nature can then be explored by science."

But "when this break is not radical, as it is [was] in the West, then there is trouble in having natural science."

The left -- since it is a pre-reflective political religion -- essentially re-divinizes (or demonizes is more like it) the world, thereby effacing the distinction between transcendence and immanence.

Which is how we end up with such idiotic decisions as yesterday's invention of new rights based upon the idea that sex -- a biological reality -- really refers to religious totems such as "sexual preference," “gender identity,” and cross-dressing.

But of course, they won't pursue the principle to its end, and proclaim that the Constitution protects the person who has a sexual preference for children, or thinks he's a giraffe, or likes to dress up in Klan robes.

Oh well: "Hatred of divine being is the mark of the radical modern, and specifically of Marxian revolt." Come for the hatred, stay for the destruction.

"Dogma supplants reason and science," so the born-again-from-below leftist -- hello, New Man! -- "can successfully usurp his place in a Second Reality of dreamworld imaginings."

For -- again, just turn on the TV -- "the spiritual dimensions of human existence do not vanish simply because men become atheistic and rebellious."

Oh, and never equate "spiritual" with "good." But you knew that already.

I think we're done here.

The Devil, the Apocalypse, and Other Nuisances

By now we're all familiar with the Mondello-Hildebrand Effect, whereby the subject of a post escapes the page and proceeds to comment upon itself after it has been written. In other words, it proclaims its own truth via synchronicities, or meaningful coincidences, or Divine Puns.

A case in point is the previous post, the title of which alludes to a "cartography of spirit." Afterwards the word "map" kept popping up in my reading. When this occurs, it must be for a reason.

The reason is that we have tapped into -- or so we have heard from the wise -- a hidden nonlocal connection, or a particularly rich vein of the cosmos. At the very least we must pay attention to these coincidences, and try to discern whether they truly reveal something of the underside of the cosmic area rug or are just symptoms of a delusional disorder. Example:

Let us not overlook the great secret that a sound map of human nature (as John Adams insisted) uniquely lies at the heart of the Constitution of the United States and its elaborate institutional arrangements (Sandoz, italics in original).

The passage then goes on to describe the events of the day -- no, not of 1787 but of 2020: that "The demos ever tends to become the ochlos [mob]," and therefore

must be restrained artfully by a vast net of adversarial devices if government is to have any chance whatever of prevailing over self-serving human passions while still nurturing the liberty of free men.

This passage adverts to several critical ideas, the most consequential being that if our politics isn't informed by an accurate map of human nature, then our political cosmos will eventually fall apart. Or, as the cliché has it, the center will not hold.

Let's face it: under the best of circumstances man is an ungovernable beast except from within. If he refuses to, or is incapable of, so governing himself, then he will be governed from without. In other words, the raging mob will evoke the force required to put it down, and then have the chutzpah to kvetch about it.

If you find no father in the home, you will probably find him later in the street with a uniform and gun. Disorder in the soul is the raison d'etre of Law and Order. If all men were Raccoons, government itself would be unnecessary.

Then I bumped into this observation by Richard Feynman, going to a life lived in the great In Between, which is the only place to be (or become, to be perfectly accurate):

I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it is much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers that might be wrong. If we will only allow that, as we progress, we remain unsure, we will leave opportunities for alternatives. We will not become enthusiastic for the fact, the knowledge, the absolute truth of the day, but remain always uncertain … In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.

We need maps, but the most accurate map is never the territory. Or, the most accurate map is the territory, AKA reality.

With that out of the away, let's turn to the Political Apocalypse, which has been sitting in my inbox for a couple of weeks.

The apocalypse. It's always something, isn't it?

The book starts off with a bang. However, it's another one of those bangs that's self-evident to the clued in, but eternally beyond the grasp of the progressive mob, for if they knew it, it would cure them of their pathology, including all the infantile acting out:

"The secularization of existence" which "marks the modern age" has taken place "at the expense of common sense in politics and of rationality in philosophy through the disordering infusion of temporality with an ultimacy formerly reserved for the eternal beyond."

Boom. Again, this will convince precisely no one who doesn't already understand it, but this Great Leap Backward has resulted in "the rise of ideological mass movements whose key experiential ingredient is political apocalypse," i.e., of visions that promise "the radical transformation of man and history into the perfect existence of peace, plenty, justice, happiness, and a 'Final Harmony' of one description or another."

Yes, a Final Solution to... to what exactly? For if the problem is human nature, then failure to accurately map it will inevitably result in an aggravation of the primary problem.... as you have no doubt noticed, because what is a leftist but a human being, only worse?

Yes, man is the measure of all things. Except for God, who is the measure of man. Deny this and hell follows. In Democrat controlled cities, anyway.

The cartography of man pops up again:

We must have a systematic understanding of the nature of man if we want to have a systematic political science.... Society can destroy a man's soul because the disorder of society is a disease in the psyche of its members.

But that's an insult to multiculturalism, to the tenured fairy tale that all cultures are equally valuable and precious! Not exactly, for truth is never an insult, but it is always a scandal to the progressive.

As we've discussed in the past, the typical liberal is but a tool of lower forces -- or of demons in high places who manipulate the uncomprehending mob. The devil himself? He is essentially the personification of "the spirit of pure negation whose goal is simply annihilation." Some people just like to see the Wendy's burn.

And it needs to be emphasized that the devil even "loves" mankind in his own fashion. Indeed, he speaks truth, except that it is "my truth." Thus, any time you hear a liberal clown speak of "my truth," know that he is simply aping the Ape of God: "the devil speaks of his truth and of the other truth (about which, he admits, he can know nothing because he is pure negation."

Which is why you can hand a liberal the truth in a silver chalice, but you can't make him drink. This:

The insensibility of the modern apocalyptical gnostic to facts (including phenomenal facts) has been insufficiently noticed. It must be accorded a prominent place in any description of his psycho- or pneumapathology.

For not only is his conception of reality distorted by radical closure against transcendent Being, but he is highly selective and perversely willful with respect to the elements of phenomenal reality accepted as substantial.

One need only observe what happens to public figures who point out that BLM is a fraud rooted in disgusting and depraved lies about police treatment of blacks. Say what you want, but that is not the devil's truth.