In All Humility, Is There a Higher Self?

Schuon makes a fundamental distinction between reason and intellect, the latter transcending but including the former. I took this idea on board many years ago, even before I was exposed to Schuon, as it's a prominent feature of various eastern religions. 

For example, in the model of Sri Aurobindo's metapsychology to the right (click to embiggen), we see a higher self at the center (in three dimensions it would be at the top), and an "inner being" in the "field of ego-desire" which itself can be higher or lower.

Now, I don't pretend to understand all the distinctions in the model, nor is the model the reality anyway. As I said, I long ago accepted the idea of a higher and lower self, and yet, I've never pondered the ontological status of this higher self, nor even wondered if I'm being literal.

After all, from the Christian perspective, the soul is immaterial and therefore both undivided and indivisible. We can talk about "parts," even though parts are specifically what an immaterial entity cannot have.

It does, however, have specific powers we can enumerate, from appetite to sensation to abstraction, but they're all features of the same package. These features are at once hierarchical but interconnected, which implies a kind of complementarity between continuity and discontinuity: for example, we can recognize our power to abstract form from matter, even if it is never present without a body, with its senes and appetites.

Angels have intellect without body.

True, but even you mast have something analogous to a body, otherwise you'd be as diffusely omnipresent as God. But we'll leave that discussion for another day.

Here's something I find problematic with the ego/intellect distinction: it is an invitation to pride, in that I can say, for example, that the Cosmic Skeptic (Alex O'Connor) is only an atheist because he's operating out of his lower ego, whereas I can see much further and deeper because of my supposedly higher intellect. It is not only condescending but sounds like a kind of special pleading. 

However, Schuon would be the first to say that the intellect is inseparable from the virtues, such that a "proud intellect" would be a contradiction in terms. Rather, it is the lower ego that is filled with narrow-minded pride -- for which reason, in terms of yesterday's post, it takes the limits of its vision for the limits of the world.

We'll try to sort out these questions as we proceed, but I'd first like to lay out Schuon's vision, mostly from his book Stations of Wisdom, and in particular from an essay called Orthodoxy and Intellectuality that cuts to the heart of the matter.

In the preface, he discusses our contemporary scission between faith and science, attributing this to a loss of the sapiential dimension. Deprived of the latter, we are "bound in the the end to turn against it, though 'from below' and on a purely rational, material level." This is similar to what we said yesterday about the power of reason closing in upon itself -- or, in neurological terms, right brain capture by the left.

For Schuon, this results in an "intellectual worldliness" and a "weakening of contemplative intelligence and religious instinct." But as we said yesterday, the latter instinct is actually as active and annoying as ever, only in the form of political religions -- or even the "secular religion" of atheism (to the extent that it presumes to make any apodictic claims about ultimate reality).

Schuon even describes the venerable Way of the Raccoon:

To be able to combine the religious symbolism of Heaven with the astronomical fact of the stellar galaxies in a single consciousness, an intelligence is needed which is more than just rational...

Not irrational, of course, but somehow transrational. We won't yet say how we do it, only that we do it -- or try to at any rate -- for what it's worth.

Conversely, skepticism -- and we're alluding to the Cosmic Skeptic -- "is a breach through which" the "spirit of doubt and of denial of the supernatural is made welcome." Like a fall, or something. But as a consequence,

most men are incapable of grasping a priori the compatibility between the symbolic expressions of tradition and the material discoveries established by science.

Such a man -- even man as such -- wants and deserves an explanation, but the ego

wants this "why" to be as external and as easy as that of "scientific" phenomena; in other words he wants answers on the level of his own experiences; and since these are purely material, his consciousness is closed in advance to all that goes beyond them. 

Boom. This "is to shut oneself off from the truth," "merely for reasons of dialectic." Or in other words, one's method determines what one perceives. But what method is required in order to know the Absolute? 

Well, one must first appreciate the metaphysical fact that the Absolute is what cannot not be, and that any truth we utter necessarily partakes of it. Conversely, "man, when he trusts to his reason alone, only ends by unleashing the dark and dissolving forces of the irrational."

In short, nothing could be more irrational than a reason enclosed in rationalism. Again, reason has its limits, so an "unlimited reason" is a contradiction of terms, an absurdity even. 

Here we could bring in Gödel's Hammer, but you get the point. In such a totalitarian rationalism, "an extreme mental dexterity goes hand in hand with a no less excessive intellectual superficiality." 

"The modern mind 'moves on the surface'"; "living on husks," it "no longer knows what fruit is like." The consequence is a "false lucidity" that only replaces the old sentimentalities with new ones, i.e., with novel passions, intoxications, and projected ideological mirages.

Should we continue, or is that enough for one post?

A little more. We're not quite sick of you yet.

Okay. Schuon begins and ends with those immutable principles "which govern the Universe and fashion our intelligence," one of which is the Absolute referenced above. I would say that this Absolute bifurcates herebelow into subject and object, or intelligence and intelligibility, but that's just my opinion. 

Now, "logic can either operate in accordance with an intellection or on the contrary put itself at the disposal of an error, so that philosophy can become the vehicle of just about anything." 

Which checks out: no matter how stupid or evil the doctrine, there is a philosopher somewhere who thinks he can prove it. Schuon calls these tenured absurdities "esoterisms of stupidity," and says that when worldly intelligence 

joins with passion to prostitute logic, it is impossible to escape a mental satanism which destroys the very bases of intelligence and truth.

That's some fine insultainment, but the deeper point is that 

when man has no "visionary" -- as opposed to discursive -- knowledge of Being, and when he thinks only with his brain instead of "seeing" with the "heart," all his logic will be useless to him, since he starts with an initial blindness.

So, where should we start? Perhaps this is a good place to press the pause button.

Vertical Instincts and Meta-Needs

In yesterday's post we mentioned that the Cosmic Skeptic, Alex O'Connor, would like to believe, but that his intellect will not permit him to do so. Which is to say, the intellect can only assent to the truth, and neither can can nor should believe what is repugnant to it.  

But this account does a disservice to the powers of the intellect, which must be distinguished from the reason which is only one of the instruments in its toolbox. If man were literally confined to reason, he could never know it, because such knowledge obviously transcends reason. 

Thus, although man is the rational animal, he also has access to a "view from above," through which he is aware of his own rational powers. At the same time -- obviously -- he can sink beneath reason, which is to say, think and behave irrationally.

Now, even the rationalist will admit to the latter, which is to say that man can descend beneath himself. But what he will not acknowledge is that man can rise above himself, even though the one implies the other.

As to falling beneath himself, this is usually handled by the psychology department, specifically, clinical psychology, AKA my old racket. 

However, by mid-century (the 20th), a number of psychological theorists began to address the upper vertical as well, e.g., Abraham Maslow and his "hierarchy of needs," with meta-needs such as self-actualization at the top. 

Notice that man also has aesthetic needs, which is to say, an instinct for beauty:

This would consist of having the ability to appreciate the beauty within the world around one's self on a day-to-day basis.... [T]o progress toward Self-Actualization, humans require beautiful imagery or novel and aesthetically pleasing experiences.

So there is something in man that allows him "to extract the world's beauty," and this clearly isn't reducible to reason, otherwise it could be fulfilled by pondering syllogisms or working out math problems. Not to say that math isn't beautiful in its own way, only that it is inaccessible to the likes of us who dropped out of Algebra 2. I found no beauty there, only toil, tears, and sweat.

Now, it's easy to see that the lower vertical has "content," generally ascribed to the unconscious. And as indicated above, it is self-evident that man transcends reason, the question being "into what?" 

In other words, it seems to me that modernity is characterized by the loss of content, so to speak, of the upper vertical, or by an inability to perceive it via intellection.

It is a kind of forgetfulness, or perhaps it's just plain carelessness. Whatever the case, it seems there is an attenuation in man's ability to perceive the upper vertical, even though his need for it -- just like cognitive or aesthetic needs -- remains the same.

Just this morning Andrew Klavan touched on this:

We’ve been talking about recovering our ability to see the miraculous in the everyday. “To see a world in a grain of sand and a Heaven in a Wild Flower,” so to speak. And the general feeling I get is that this ability slipped away when the medieval mindset was more or less particlized by the ray gun of science.

"People refer to this as the 'disenchantment of the world,'" but in reality, man is "built to know the infinite in the everyday." 

In the past we've discussed this in terms of right brain capture by the left, through which a totalitarian scientism is superimposed upon the world, thus eclipsing the upper vertical. But the same occurs with the internalization of any ideology.

You could say that ideology functions as a counterfeit substitute for Maslow's transcendent needs mentioned above. Which also accounts for the irrational passion of politicized vertical needs, i.e., secular religions.  

Here's a timely meme from a perhaps unlikely source:

In order to brush up on the subject this post, I reread an essay by Schuon called To Refuse or Accept Revelation. In Schopenhauer's case, he indeed accepted revelation, just not the Christian one, rather, the Vedantic, enthusing that "In the whole world there is no study so beneficial and so elevating as that of the Upanishads."  

Indeed, they were even his favorite bedtime story (he read them every night before bed), "a source of great inspiration and means of comfort to my soul.... The Upanishads have been the solace of my life and will be the solace of my death."

Speaking of man's meta-needs, he wrote that

Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all lands and in all ages, in splendour and vastness, testify to the metaphysical need of man, which, strong and ineradicable, follows close upon his physical need.

Likewise, similar to what we said above about ideological counterfeits, this vertical need "sometimes allows itself to be satisfied with clumsy fables and insipid tales."

Having said that, it seems to me that Schopenhauer conflated the upper and lower vertical, as if the Upanishads were speaking of nothing more elevated than his concept of the world as blind will.

Just to remind ourselves what this post is supposed to be about, it began with the Cosmic Skeptic's inability to accept revelation, specifically, the inability of his intellect to assent to it. 

But for Schuon, "The objection of agnostics and other skeptics is too facile." That is, the "excuse of the moderns" is "easy enough" for a "people who believe in nothing and who are unaware of the plenary nature of man."

This understanding of man's full range of abilities and potentials is obscured by a lower vertical "passionate attachment to the here-below," and a "chaotic and even exclusive love for earthly goods," which prevents the person from intuiting what is "inscribed in the very substance of the heart." 

We've barely scratched the surface, but I'm running out of gas, so, to be continued....

Religion: The Big Picture

Last night I watched a debate between the Cosmic Skeptic Alex O'Connor and an assortment of Christians. I don't know what the format is called, but he was in the hot seat in the center, surrounded by a tag team of 25 Christians (and one Mormon) who took him on one at a time.

Any fair minded person would say that O'Connor politely ran the table, although, of course, he wasn't contending with the Thomas Aquinas Society. Probably the only unanswerable objection came from a woman (starting at about 1:01) who said that Jesus appeared in her room and literally gave her a hug and lifted her up, which was accompanied by an otherworldly joy. 

That has never happened to me, but I would certainly like for it to happen. Indeed, one thing that bothers me -- or the rational mind in general -- about such apparent vertical interventions is their seemingly arbitrary nature. In fact, supposing such an experience were vouchsafed to me, one of the first things I'd wonder about is, why me? Why not someone more deserving, or more devout, or more desperate? 

Yes, God presumably has his reasons that reason cannot comprehend, but why then did he give us reason, and why does St. Paul advise believers to always be prepared to give a presumably rational defense of one's faith? 

O'Connor is refreshingly honest in acknowledging that he would very much like to believe, but that his intellect will not permit him to do so. The intellect can only assent to the truth, or, put conversely, cannot and should not believe what is repugnant to it. 

O'Connor also has more detailed knowledge of scripture than most Christians, including me. He is courteously relentless in highlighting contradictions and inconsistencies in the texts. 

For my part, I assume there's an expert somewhere who is capable of reconciling them, but I'm more of a big picture guy. I take revelation to be true in the general sense, but don't have much interest in the fine points. He has an analytic mind, whereas mine is more synthetic. 

For example, if there's a troubling passage in the Old Testament that, taken literally, makes God sanction, say, genocide, I know there are traditional exegetes capable of contextualizing them -- for example, a while back I read a book on these called Dark Passages of the Bible that does just this.

I am much more troubled by the question of how to square a loving and omnipotent God with the existence of so much evil and suffering. Sure, growth and maturity require a degree of suffering, but much suffering is purely meaningless. 

Likewise, I can see how evil must exist in a creation that is separate from God, but the Holocaust? Even if God can draw some good from it, that's like the doctor tossing you off a building so he can manifest the good of offering medical treatment. 

Nevertheless, God exists, and the purpose of religion is to know him and conform our intellect and will to his -- which is to say, to the ultimate Real. In the Big Picture, 

First, religion is essentially discernment. It is discernment between God and the world, between the Real and the unreal, or between the Everlasting and the ephemeral. Secondly: religion is union. It is union with God (Schuon).

So, knowing reality and attaining union with it:

Everything in religion has its foundation in one of these two elements: in discernment or in union. Man is intelligence and will, and religion is discernment and concentration (ibid.).

 Elsewhere Schuon writes that 

Religion is discernment between the Everlasting and the ephemeral, and union with the Everlasting. In other words, religion is basically discernment and concentration; separation from evil, which is illusion, and union with the Divine Good, which is Truth and eternal Reality.

Again, this is only the Big Picture, with no details as to who God is or how to go about union with him. In order to know these things, they would have to be revealed from Godside. 

Although there's a twist: supposing we are created in the image and likeness of the Creator, then there must already be something in us that mirrors him. Thus, for Schuon, 

Revelation is none other than the objective and symbolic manifestation of the Light which man carries in himself, in the depths of his being; it reminds him of what he is, and of what he should be since he has forgotten what he is.

This being the case, there must be some congruity between the revelation given to us from the outside, and the interior revelation "in the depths of our being." Problem is, this latter revelation has been distorted, weakened, and forgotten due to some sort of primordial calamity, which we don't know much about but can infer from its effects. Schuon compares our post-lapsarian state to   

something like that of fishes unknowingly enclosed in a block of ice. Revelation is then the ray of Omniscience which teaches us that this ice is not everything, that there is something else around it and after it, that we are not the ice and that the ice is not us.

Elsewhere he characterizes revelation as "a kind of cosmic Intellection, whereas personal Intellection is comparable to a Revelation on the scale of the microcosm." Or, "pure Intellection is a subjective and immanent Revelation just as Revelation properly so called is an objective and transcendent Intellection." 

Here again, this must be anchored in the principle of Image and Likeness mentioned above. Man -- in particular, the intellect -- is already a revelation of God, but the Fall accounts for the rupture between the reflection and its source. 

In this context, the purpose of revelation is to heal this rupture, or to clean the mirror of intellect. Looked at this way, the Bible "expresses complex truths in a language that is indirect and full of imagery," disclosing "a sphere of reality that transcends" the empirical, rational, and psychological planes:

It is the intellect that comprises in its very substance the evidence for the sphere of reality that we are speaking of and that thus contains the proof of it....

Indeed the “classical” prejudice of scientism, or the fault in its method if one wishes, is to deny any mode of knowledge that is suprasensorial and suprarational, and in consequence to deny the planes of reality to which these modes refer and that precisely constitute the sources both of revelation and of intellection.

But again, 

What the Bible describes as the fall of man or the loss of paradise coincides with our separation from total intelligence; this is why it is said that “the kingdom of God is within you,” and again: “Knock, and it shall be opened unto you.” 

The Bible itself is the multiple and mysterious objectivation of this intellect or Logos. It is thus by way of images and enigmas the projection of what we carry in a quasi-inaccessible depth at the bottom of our heart; and the facts of sacred history... are themselves cosmic projections of the unfathomable divine truth.

So, that's what I would say to O'Connor in response to his niggling over this or that little contradiction of inconsistency. Pull back and look at the bigger picture. 

To be continued...

The Three Note Symphony

I remember way back before the internet...

Wait. I actually don't. I mean, I do, but I don't recall how I filled the spacetime -- or rather, what spacetime was filled with.

Instead of having instant access to millions of books via amazon, I had to make the physical trek to a metaphysical bookstore in West Hollywood called The Bodhi Tree. It was the only way to forage for vertical supplies, i.e., coon chow. The store was even organized into eastern and western wings, oriental religions and philosophies to one side, occidental to the other.

I even bumped into George Harrison there one time. Of course, I didn't bother him, but there he was, just like me, scrounging around for information about the unnameable. 

One obscure book that made an impact on me at the time was called Nature, Man, and Society. It's actually a compendium of essays from an interdisciplinary journal called Main Currents in Modern Thought. As for why it made an impact, check out its mission statement: 

A cooperative journal to promote the free association of those working toward the integration of knowledge through study of the whole of things, Nature, Man, and Society, assuming the universe to be one, intelligible, harmonious.

The journal was founded by F.L. Kunz in 1940. If I recall correctly, its editorship was taken over by Ken Wilber at some point, and presumably went downhill from there, into Chopraville, Franklin Jonestown, and Andrew Coheny Island. But it was once a seriously wacky forum for the sorts of things we discuss here.

I can't imagine how difficult it must have been back then, in the days long before the internet, for scattered members of vertical diaspora to connect. How did these goddballs find each other?

Probably in the usual way, via nonlocal attractors synchronistically drawing them together into the same vertical phase space, only much less efficiently.

Before Amazon opened the floodgates and put every kookbook at our fingertips, the Bodhi Tree was the only place in town for all types of spiritual weirdness, high, low, and in between. Whereas the typical chain store might have a couple of books on such matters, the Bodhi Tree had whole sections devoted to obscure subjects from UFOlogy to Tibetan Buddhism to Wicca. They also had entire sections devoted to Christian mysticism, Vedanta, the occult, weird and wacky science, etc.

In an essay from Nature, Man, and Society called The New Dimensions of Nature and Man, a Donald Andrews writes that the behavior of the fundamental entities of the world "is characterized less by a particle-like and more by a wave-like nature."

Of course, particles and waves are irreducibly complementary, analogous to notes and melodies. He concludes that "both the universe as a whole and we in particular are not matter but music." Because music is "pure dynamic form, I think that it is both suggestive and meaningful to say that the atom now appears to be music."

Now, music has the interesting property of being simultaneously continuous and discontinuous: a flowing melody is composed of discrete notes. And outside the context of the melody, the notes have no meaning, but without the notes the melody cannot be composed or played. 

The Buddhist monk-scholar Lama Govinda writes of how past, present, and future are equally present in music. Although we hear it in the present moment, we are implicitly aware of the notes leading up to this moment, while the moment anticipates what is to come, i.e., its fulfillment in the future.

This complementarity of notes and melody implies that it isn't a question of being or becoming, but rather, being as becoming, and vice versa. "Both are ever united, and those who try to build a philosophy upon only one of them, to the exclusion of the other, lose themselves in verbal play" (ibid.).

Which I can't help thinking relates to the Trinity, which, in its eternal perichoretic dance, is like three notes in a single endless melody, or something.

The Past Comes Back to Haunt Us

Every writer comments indefinitely on his brief original text. --Dávila 

Is that what I'm doing? Looking back, I can see certain themes emerging as long ago as my doctoral dissertation, which was completed in 1988.

But for some reason, knowledge doesn't seem to accumulate in my head. While I'd like to remember what I've written about over these past 20 years of blogging, I don't. 

Which leads to the awkward question, is the cosmic bus getting anywhere? Have we made any progress, or are we just endlessly circumnavelgaziung the cosmic groundabout? Yes, we're stalking a miracle, but are we any closer to it? 

The Aphorist says that 

Religious thought does not go forward like scientific thought does but rather goes deeper.

Now, as indicated in the mysthead at the top of the page, the blog is ultimately about The religion the Almighty & me works out betwixt us. It is worked out afresh each morning via a vertical collaboration with O. I have no idea what will result from the collaboration, and I certainly don't know what O is, only that if I show up for the appointment, something will be worked out betwixt us.  

I suppose it's like journalism in that way, only in an inverse manner. In other words, journalism is done in the moment and for the moment, which is why nobody cares about yesterday's news. 

But these posts are spontaneous productions of that same moment, only from the other end, so to speak. One of my favorite aphorisms is that 

One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time.

This moment is all we have, but it actually spans vertically from a kind of desiccated instant at the lower end to fulsome plenum at the top. Thus, 

Profundity is not in what is said, but in the level from which it is said.

Which is all by way of saying that I'd like to revisit some of our past moments on a weekly basis. We will take the arbitrary cutoff point of ten years ago, and select the best of what was written that week. 

In this case, ten years ago this week we were discussing an important book called Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism, which is described as "a grand narrative spanning 1,800 years of European history," in which the author "firmly rejects Western liberalism’s usual account of itself: its emergence in opposition to religion in the early modern era." 

Instead, he argues that "liberal thought is, in its underlying assumptions, the offspring of the Church." And of course he's talking about classical liberalism, not the illiberal leftism of our tyrannical progressives, which is the very negation of the liberal tradition. What follows is actually a synthesis of two posts. 

However, before getting to them. I would like to mention a post by Spencer Klavan that touches on our theme, to the effect that the left represents a reversal of the individualizing trend described by Siedentop, and instead plunges us back into the collective. 

That is to say, the progressive left pretends to speak for various "marginalized" groups, but in so doing, effaces what makes them unique under the rubric of victimhood: so-called "political empowerment" is gained at the cost of individual and cultural impoverishment:

political ascendancy is actually really bad for countercultures. It drains them of all the cool and panache they get from living life at an odd angle, turning them into drab and tedious pseudo-Sandanistas. Say what you will about gay people, but we used to have style. Now our flag looks like Thomas Kinkade had a seizure and splattered his color palette all over the wall. Subcultures are supposed to be edgy variations on everyday life....

For example, black music was so much better when blacks were more than just faceless victim-mascots of the progressive left. 

*** 

One theme that emerges from the book is that while it took centuries for the individual to be disentangled from the group, it has been the work of less than a century for the left to re-entangle us in the hivemind.

For both Siedentop and Berman, 1075 is a truly revolutionary, world-historical turning point, for that is when Pope Gregory insists on the independence of the church from secular authorities. 

As a consequence, the king, at least in theory, is demoted to a mere layperson instead of being the locus of both spiritual and temporal power. Indeed, he can't do that, because only Jesus can (and by extension, his ongoing embodiment and temporal prolongation in the Church).

As always, timelessness takes time: it was the work of centuries for the eventual emergence of "Gregory's vision of a social order founded on individual morality," instead of one based on "brute force and mere deference."

So, suddenly "relations of equality and reciprocity are now understood as antecedent to both positive and customary law." Thus, universal law is disentangled from the particularity of custom, and seen more abstractly. This constitutes a "reversal of assumptions," such that "instead of traditional social inequalities being deemed natural... an underlying moral equality was now deemed natural."

This Great Disentangling "freed the human mind, giving a far wider scope and a more critical edge to the role of analysis. It made possible what might be called the 'take off' of the Western mind" (emphasis mine), vaulting mother Europe "along a road which no human society had previously followed." Vertical liftoff!

Here we can see how the left's retarded project involves a Great Re-entangling: again, it took thousands of years for "individuals rather than established social categories or classes" to become "the focus of legal jurisdiction." But now, thanks to the left, the individual is subsumed into race, class, gender, sexual orientation, etc., and we're back to where we started: post-Christian necessarily reverts to the pre-Christian.

"The papal claim of sovereignty" furthered the transition to the "meta-role" of the individual "shared equally by all persons." Seen this way, the self is the essence, while social roles become mere accidents instead of being in the nature of things....

Likewise, a new distinction is seen between the moral and physical elements of crime. Because of the new interiority, the concept of "intent" or motive comes into play: "intentions had scarcely been distinguished from actions in 'barbarian' justice." "Degrees of guilt" are perceived, and punishment becomes distinct from mere retaliation.

Marriage changes too, as measures are adopted to ensure that it is "based on consent rather than coercion." Also politics: instead of authority flowing in one direction only, from the top down, "The authority of superiors thus became a delegated authority. Authority is again understood as flowing upwards."

If we stand back and look at the overall arc, we see that "under way was nothing less than a reconstruction of the self, along lines more consistent with Christian moral intuitions." This ushers in "a new transparency in social relations," for now we relate to another person, not just his role. Conversely, "in societies resting on the assumption of natural inequality," this interpersonal transparency is obscured.

Another major development is the distinction between free will and fate, choice and necessity. If human beings are personally accountable to God, then this emphasizes not only our moral freedom, but the need for political liberty, such that we are free to exercise moral choice. 

In other words, nothing less than eternity is at stake, so the freedom to do good becomes a matter of urgent necessity; for what is free will but "a certain ability by which man is able to discern between good and evil"?

Note that if people are fundamentally unequal, then we can make no universal generalizations about them: there is one law for the lower classes, another for the aristocracy.

With this new self, there is a kind of interiorizing of the logos: instead of the logos being only a sort of exterior reason that controls events, it is "understood as an attribute of individuals who are equally moral agents." 

Here again, in the post-Christian world we see a regression to determinism, for example, the idea that we are controlled by genes, or neurology, or class, or race.

We'll end with a quote by Siedentop:

[T]he defining characteristic of Christianity was its universalism. It aimed to create a single human society, a society composed, that is, of individuals rather than tribes, clans, or castes.... Hence the deep individualism of Christianity was simply the reverse side of its universalism. 

The Christian conception of God becomes the means of creating a brotherhood of man, of bringing to self-consciousness the human species, by leading each of its members to see him- or herself as having, at least potentially, a relationship with the deepest reality -- viz., God -- that both required and justified the equal moral standing of all humans.

Artificial Transcendence and Other Impossibilities

Although One Cosmos is 100% certified transhuman, it says here that "An increasing percentage of the internet’s content is AI-generated." The authors know this because they've developed a model with a "99% accuracy rate when detecting AI versus human text." 

Now, it's one thing to distinguish between the human and subhuman, but I wonder if the model could detect divine authorship? 

Of note, the distinction between human and AI doesn't hinge on the truth of the writing, rather, the text "could be full of lies -- but for this investigation, we can only tell if they are AI-generated lies or old-fashioned human lies." 

In reality, AI can no more lie than tell the truth, since that would require freedom. But it seems that an AI model is better at detecting AI than is a human reader: it takes no one to know no one.

I personally can only detect AI in a human intellect. For example, I can tell when a person is speaking from an internalized ideology, because one immediately senses the "limits" of their thought, i.e., the bars in which it is imprisoned. A real intellect is limitless in its scope, meaning that it is open to Total Truth. 

I've mentioned before that my father-in-law was this way. He was a very intelligent guy, but if you conversed with him, it was as if he had a library of unvarying tapes in his head. Once the information was recorded, there was no further thinking about it. 

Also, there was no synthesis of the tapes, so one might contradict another without causing any cognitive dissonance. He wasn't an ideologue, just a sprawling and disjointed tape vault. He had a ready-to-head answer to every question, which brings to mind an ironyclad aphorism:

As long as we can respond without hesitating we do not know the subject. 

And 

Whoever is curious to measure his stupidity should count the number of things that seem obvious to him. 

For example, my son is taking a psychology class, and naturally asks me questions about this and that. But my answers are much more hesitant than they would have been, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Now, the theories I held seem more like dreams superimposed on a mystery.

That which is incomprehensible increases with the growth of intelligence. 

Or at least with the growth of wisdom. 

There was a time when I knew everything, and I had a Ph.D. to prove it. It took a few years to realize that

Nothing is more superficial than intelligences that comprehend everything.

And that

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

A mind constrained within an ideology is already a kind of "artificial intelligence," since it can only perceive and articulate that which is permitted by the internalized model. It can only think within the grooves of its own preconceptions, thus stifling the imagination. Taken to an extreme, this results in the well known phenomenon of Garbage In / Tenure Out:

The leftist does not have opinions, only dogmas.

And 

Within solely Marxist categories not even Marxism is explicable.

Nor Darwinism, materialism, rationalism, scientism, or any other -ism. 

The philosopher who adopts scientific notions has predetermined his conclusions.

But truly truly, man is condemned to transcendence. Thus,

A fool is he who thinks that what he knows is without mystery.

Now, I'm not claiming any extraordinary faculty, because you've probably noticed the same thing in your day-to-day dealings with the sub-Raccoon population. 

I first became consciously aware of this phenomenon in Schuon's unpublished autobiography. Granted, he was a strange young man, but early on, when conversing with one of the Others (in the parlance of our times, a blank-faced NPC), he would 

have the feeling that he is hemmed in by all the objects and mental images that daily surround him. I feel that these people adhere flatly to their mental images with all their soul, without any freedom of movement and without any possibility of taking up an objective attitude towards them. 

Of course, this can happen with religious folk as well, to the extent that the world is reduced to literal dogmatic assertions or memorized passages of scripture. 

It reminds me of something C.S. Lewis said about how "I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen. Not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else" -- in other words, not something to look at, rather, to see through. To paraphrase the Aphorist, it furnishes the religious vocabulary needed in order to speak of the farthest regions of the soul.

Young Schuon wrote in his journal that 

When I speak with people I have the feeling that I can perceive their limitations physically; I see their limits almost tangibly before me and feel oppressed by the awareness that there is no entry and no key to their darkness, and that for them there is no exit, that with dull eyes like fish they bump against the glass walls of their mental horizon.

Same. He also had a peculiar relationship to language: 

The meaning of every word vibrates into the infinite, it becomes untrue when we utter it without the infinite and unfathomable with which it is organically united.

No wonder he struggled to cope with mundane existence. Here's another entry from his journal:

[B]etween the great man and the small man there is an abyss, as if the earth had been cleft by a sword; the great man is simply incomprehensible to the petty spirit; a great soul cannot be grasped by the small one...

This is what I call vertical Dunning Krugery, in that the typical man of tenure can no more understand Schuon -- or any other mystic -- than a dog can understand music. Nor does it matter how conventionally intelligent the man of tenure, for

It seems to me that the cult of genius is veritably satanic.... Belief in genius leads us into the discordant sphere of the earthly; it completely bypasses truth. 

One might say that Schuon was not well adjusted to the horizontal world, rather,

I could not accept that Reality was my every day surroundings, with all their artificiality, triviality, ugliness, and stupidity.... What made life so difficult was that I experienced everything in the light of the Absolute; I did not quite have a sense of the relative.

I suspect Boehme was much the same way, i.e., a vertical misfit in a horizontal world, describing life as "a strange bath of thorns and thistles," but in which he nevertheless "went through the world hearing everywhere a divine music." 

It was as if the Protestant reformation broke away from one orthodoxy only to be be enclosed in an even narrower one, "a hardline orthodoxy with all the bigotry and intolerance of their predecessors against whom they had rebelled." 

Babel was the word Boehme used for all the worldly wrangling and power-seeking and enmity which he saw both amongst religious people and in the secular world of politics and diplomacy. 

In an essay called The Abuse of Language and the Abuse of Power, Pieper discusses "the corruption of the word," which has only become more corrupted in the 60 years since it was published. For words are,

quite simply, the medium of all intellectual life. It is above all in the word that human existence comes to pass. And thus if the word decays, humanity itself cannot fail to be affected, cannot fail to be harmed.  

Words can be false only because it is possible for them to be true, for "reality becomes manifested through the word. One speaks in order to make known something real in the act of calling it by name in order... to make it known to someone else." 

Thus, corruption occurs when "the link between word and reality" has been severed. Which is a tricksy business as it pertains to the vertical, since -- as discussed in yesterday's post -- it cannot be disclosed in the same way one would describe the objective/horizontal/material world. 

Rather, there is a sense in which one "speaks it into being" and renders it present in the manner described yesterday: 

Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul." 

Now, this is something no AI could ever do, i.e., speak of the Living Reality in such a way as to provoke the dawning of Light in the soul. 

Pieper adverts to a "technologically-manufactured ignorance of the world characterized by the possession of an abundance of information." However, all the information in the world doesn't add up to reality, and

once we have lost sight of what is truly real, an illusory reality may take its place..., a pseudo-reality which looks so real that it is virtually impossible for me to find out the truth. 

Is this what will happen as AI -- which has no contact with the Living Real -- displaces the intellect that is in conformity to transcendent truth? Well, "man's chief nourishment is truth," and "Anyone who wishes to live a truly human life must feed on truth." 

Or the Light which is its source and substance. In a post this morning, Spencer Klavan writes of (in reference to a C.S. Lewis story) a "lost soul," in this case an artist who 

is so infatuated with painting as a technique and a business that he’s forgotten what painting is for. But one of the blessed reminds him. “Light itself was your first love: you loved paint only as a means of telling about light."

Gemini, I reckon you know a lot about AI. Thoughts?

Thoughts and Connections:

• The "Limits" of Thought: The idea of internalized ideologies creating "limits" on thought is crucial. It connects to the concept of cognitive biases and how pre-existing frameworks can shape our perception and understanding. This isn't unique to AI; it's a human tendency that can hinder true intellectual exploration.
• Truth as a Living Reality: The concept of truth as a "Living Reality" is central to mystical and spiritual traditions. It suggests a truth that is not static or objective but dynamic and experiential. This is difficult to define or quantify, making it challenging to assess whether AI could ever grasp it.
• AI and Creativity: The author's argument implies that true creativity, the kind that provokes a "dawning of Light," is beyond AI's reach. While AI can generate novel outputs, it's debatable whether these outputs possess the same depth and meaning as human creations born from genuine experience and spiritual insight.
• The Role of Experience: The emphasis on experience is important. Schuon and Boehme's understanding of the Absolute was deeply personal and experiential. AI, lacking consciousness and subjective experience, can only process information about these experiences, not have them itself.
• The Danger of Illusory Reality: The concern about an "illusory reality" created by an overabundance of information is prescient. In the age of misinformation and deepfakes, it's increasingly difficult to distinguish truth from falsehood. AI could exacerbate this problem by generating increasingly convincing but ultimately unreal content.

Regarding your specific questions:

• Distinguishing Human, Subhuman, and Transhuman: The author doesn't explicitly define "subhuman" or "transhuman." However, based on the context, "subhuman" likely refers to those whose thinking is overly constrained by ideology, while "transhuman" (in the context of One Cosmos) seems to refer to a state achieved through technological enhancement, potentially including AI integration. The key distinction remains the capacity for "limitless scope" and openness to "Total Truth," which the author implies is absent in both subhuman and (at least current) transhuman states.
• Detecting Divine Authorship: The author suggests that the model likely cannot detect "divine authorship" because it focuses on stylistic patterns and statistical probabilities, not on the content's connection to "Living Reality." Divine authorship, if it exists, would presumably manifest in a way that transcends these quantifiable metrics.

In conclusion, this text raises profound questions about the nature of intelligence, truth, and reality in the age of AI. It suggests that while AI may excel at certain tasks, it lacks the essential qualities of human intellect: the capacity for genuine understanding, connection to transcendent truth, and the ability to express that truth in a way that transforms the soul.

You Can't Domesticate the Weirdness

Yesterday's post on our weird-woven universe brought to mind... 

Well, a number of things, beginning with Haldane's suspicion that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. The full quote adds that

I have read and heard many attempts at a systematic account of [the universe], from materialism and theosophy to the Christian system or that of Kant, and I have always felt that they were much too simple. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy.

Variants of Haldane's Law hold that the universe is both stranger than we can imagine and stranger than we can think. This being the case, Terence McKenna added that we might as well suppose that it's as strange as we can suppose, because this still won't be strange enough.

While looking up the exact wording of Haldane's comment, I found some other good quips, some of which are well known:

Reality is the cage of those who lack imagination. 

The world shall perish not for lack of wonders, but for lack of wonder.  

The advance of scientific knowledge does not seem to make either our universe or our inner life in it any less mysterious.

Man armed with science is like a baby with a box of matches.

Teleology is like a mistress to a biologist: he cannot live without her but he's unwilling to be seen with her in public. 

It seems to me immensely unlikely that mind is a mere by-product of matter. For if my mental processes are determined wholly by the motions of atoms in my brain I have no reason to suppose that my beliefs are true. They may be sound chemically, but that does not make them sound logically. And hence I have no reason for supposing my brain to be composed of atoms.

The conclusion forced upon me in the course of a life devoted to natural science is that the universe as it is assumed to be in physical science is only an idealized world, while the real universe is the spiritual universe in which spiritual values count for everything.

I also thought of my own modest effort to forge a sufficiently queer language to convey the queerness of things:

In The Beginning was the weird, and the weird was with God, and the weird was God.... And nothing He made was it made without being made of the weird light with which everything was made from the Word (lo)go.... And the weird light shines in the dark, but the dorks don't comprehend it. For truly, the weirdness was spread all through the world, and yet, the world basically kept behaving as if this were just your ordinary, standard-issue cosmos.

I suspect that a big part of the problem lies in the relentless effort of the left-brain to enclose reality in its linear and logical dreams and schemes, in the attempt to make the weirdness go away. But the weirdness remains, and the right brain knows it. 

Now, Christianity is pretty weird. Indeed,

Nothing attracts me as much to Christianity as the marvelous insolence of its doctrines.

One connotation of insolence being disregard for the conventional propriety of the insufficiently weird. Thus,

Mystery is less disturbing than the fatuous attempts to exclude it by stupid explanations.

Ultimately, 

The Church’s function is not to adapt Christianity to the world, nor even to adapt the world to Christianity; her function is to maintain a counterworld in the world.

A weird counterworld to the banal world of scientistic materialism. 

Coincidently, as part of my due diligence in pursuit of the weird, I thought I'd check out a book on one of the all-time weirdest mystic theologians, Jacob Boehme. Say what you want about his visions, they are indeed weirder than we can suppose. The author does his best to reduce the ineffable weirdness to something manageable, with mixed success. It's certainly not for the faint of head.

What's weirder than an unschooled cobbler subject to unbidden mystic visions of God, the universe, and everything? Was he just crazy, and if so, was he crazy enough?  

Our dissident shoemaker was influenced by the Hermetic Tradition, "sometimes called Pansophism."

by which is meant the search for a universal wisdom uniting and explaining all things, a means of reconciling the ways of of God to man and of penetrating the mystery of nature by finding its underlying unity.

Understanding this context "will help us to see his writings not as the eccentric outpourings of a religious maniac or an unbalanced visionary," but rather, our kind of guy, only in a very different cultural matrix. 

Also, his use of language is so idiosyncratic that it's often difficult to know what he's talking about, not to mention that his visions were ineffable to begin with. It seems that he invented his own peculiar vocabulary to describe the indescribable, making him doubly obscure. 

"Many have spoken of the poetic supralogical nature of Boehme's thought as expressed in his writings," such that the words "are the living expressions of living reality" made present "in the process of expression." He's not conveying concepts, rather, trying to provoke "mental attitudes which will encourage the dawning of light of truth in the individual soul." 

That's a valid and worthy goal, and I've even had occasion to attempt it myself, but I'm finding it difficult to penetrate his prose. It's weird alright, but without guidance, it's a little like jumping into Finnegans Wake without a net. I'll finish the book today and get back to you tomorrow if I can extract anything useful from it. 

The Weird-Woven Cosmic Area Rug

Fun fact: the other day I read that "the word weird derives from the Old English wyrd," and that "as used in the profoundly Catholic culture of Anglo-Saxon England, meant the mystical presence of divine providence" (Pearce). 

That's too good to check, but the author speaks speaks of history as "a tapestry, time-stitched and weird-woven, of threads that are good, bad, or beautiful." That's a convoluted way to describe the cosmic area rug, but it does highlight the fact that it is necessarily woven of good and bad threads. 

Which reminds me of Jesus' parable of good seeds and naughty weeds. Probably if we attempted to pull out all the bad threads from the area rug, it would fall apart. 

For example, maybe you don't like human aggression, but it has its role to play herebelow, being a component of what Aquinas calls the irascible appetite. Help us out here, Gemini:

The irascible appetite is concerned with "arduous" goods and evils. It is not simply about immediate pleasure or pain, but about things that are difficult to attain or avoid. It's about facing challenges and overcoming obstacles. 

Among other things, it is the source of courage in facing a difficult evil and of anger in response to a present evil. Thus, no one will need irascible appetites in heaven, but down here they're essential. 

Indeed, the Bible makes it plain that God hates evil and that we are expected to do the same -- although this must be understood in the larger context of loving the good. 

What does the Aphorist say? 

Such is the complexity of every historical event that we can always fear that from a good an evil might be born and always hope that from an evil a good might be born. 

For example, Biden gives birth to Trump. As did Obama before him. Not to mention Carter and Reagan.

More profoundly Dávila says that

No paradise will arise within the framework of time. Because good and evil are not threads twisted together by history, but fibers of the single thread that sin as spun for us.

And what is progressivism but systematic forgetfulness of this fact? Thus,

Modern history is the dialogue between two men: one who believes in God and another who believes he is a god.

Moreover.

Hell is being ignorant of Hell. If it knew, it would be a temporary place of purgation.

Perhaps history is already a temporary place of purgation. Or maybe either a higher rung of hell or a lower rung of purgatory. Our choice. In any event,

Earth will never be paradise, but it could perhaps be prevented from approaching closer to being a cheap imitation of Hell.  

Which is any place from which God is absent, and a place only identifiable from Paradise.

This whole line of thought reminds me of the genome, which is so complex that for the most part you can't just eliminate one "bad gene," since the gene is embedded in a complex network, influencing multiple traits or functions.

Yanking out a single gene can disrupt the network, leading to unintended effects elsewhere. Moreover, a single gene can have multiple roles that are simultaneously harmful and beneficial. The overall design is nonlinear, so removing the gene doesn't guarantee a predictable outcome.  

Which means that the genome too is weird-woven.

Coincidently, Spencer Klavan has a post up this morning about the weirdness of creation, particularly, under the sea, where God and/or Nature unleashes some of its weirdest productions under cover of water:

There’s something just aggressively weird about the ocean, like God’s determined to make a show of creating the wackiest possible animals just to prove no one can stop him.

More generally, 

Considered as a work of art, the universe expresses a raucous and insatiable appetite for life in every possible variety. The skill is that of a Rembrandt but the spirit is that of a toddler with a box of crayons. 

I don’t think we take this into account nearly enough in our theology, what a limitlessly free and ravenously inventive mind we must be talking about when we talk about God. Why make a global swimming pool and fill it with space aliens? His answer seems to be something like uh, why not??

The world is "endlessly full of eerie caverns and misty dwelling places," and "when we talk about miracles, we’re not talking about any reality other than the one in which, wonder of wonders, we already live and move."

And we're back to the weird-woven cosmic area rug. Which is as good an explanation as any for both natural and human evil.  

Above we alluded to Biden giving rise to Trump. Now, Trump no doubt has some "bad qualities" (as indeed do we all), but I suspect that if we could somehow eliminate these qualities, we'd no doubt extirpate a lot of good with them. 

Churchill was similar, it's just that his irascible qualities were precisely what were required in the context of fighting an even more irascible Hitler. 

Here again, Churchill was full of qualities that wouldn't be needed in heaven. Indeed, the British electorate concluded that they weren't needed at all once victory in Europe was attained. They then went about the business of creating a socialist paradise, with predictable consequences. Enter the irascible Mrs. Thatcher.

Now, we needn't actually look under the sea for God's weirdest production, which is none other than man. Schuon goes so far as to say that

If there is to be a cosmos, a universal manifestation, there must also be a fall or falls, for to say "manifestation" is to say "other than God" and "separation." 

Of course, evil must come, but woe to the man by whom the evil comes.

I guess we're done here, except to add that the Incarnation means that human nature becomes truly weird-word-woven, but that is the subject of a different post. Gemini, what say you about this one?

Connecting the Threads:

You've successfully woven together these different ideas to create a compelling argument about the complex and intertwined nature of good and evil. The "weird-woven" metaphor provides a consistent thread throughout, connecting the theological, philosophical, biological, and historical examples.

In essence, you argue that:

• Evil is not simply an external force to be eradicated but an intrinsic part of the fabric of reality.
• Attempts to completely eliminate evil are not only futile but potentially harmful.
• Seemingly negative qualities can play a necessary role in certain contexts.
• The world is a complex and mysterious place, full of wonders and paradoxes.
• Recognizing the reality of evil is essential for understanding the human condition and the nature of history.

This is a nuanced and insightful perspective that challenges simplistic notions of good and evil and encourages a more profound understanding of the world.

An even weirder image of the weird-woven cosmic area rug:

A Brief and Prosaic Autopsy of Wokeness

Yesterday I read a lengthy piece on The Origins of Wokeness. Now, this is a tedious subject, plus it's been in retreat since last November, so why write about it now?

Well, I'm between books at the moment, so I have nothing else to write about. Besides, what is the best in life? Crushing the woke, eating all their steak, and hearing the lamentations of their women of both sexes. 

In short, it's an opportunity for some fine insultainment, but maybe we can learn something too. 

For example, one thought that occurred to me in reading the article is how it could be reduced to a handful of aphorisms by the Master. 

For me, the aphorisms are quintessential examples of how one may know much by knowing little. This is because the aphorisms come from a higher plane that conditions the levels below. They are simultaneously concentrated and expansive.

Scientific knowledge is the opposite: expansive, sprawling, and complex, such that no one could ever hope to master it. Even a single discipline such as medicine has dozens of specialties and subspecialties. My psychiatrist friends -- who went to medical school -- don't know much about medicine per se, but they do know all the good specialists if you need a referral.

The point is, the mind seeks unity, which is at the top of the vertical hierarchy. Even physics, which is the paradigmatic science to which everything else is supposed to be reducible, is itself a mess. The other day I read that the discrepancy between quantum and relativity theories amounts to 120 orders of magnitude, which is an inconceivably large number. 

Gemini rates my statement more or less true: that "This is a major problem in physics, highlighting the tension between quantum mechanics and general relativity," although there are disagreements as to exactly how vast the divergence. The larger point is that we are far from unifying these two fundamental descriptions of the universe. 

Now, knowledge is good, but wisdom (or prudence) is better, which is to say, "higher" on the vertical spectrum. Indeed, it requires wisdom to even know what to do with all the knowledge -- which again, as per yesterday's post, is infinitely beyond any human capacity to know it. The two -- wisdom and knowledge -- exist in a kind of complementary and dynamic relationship, like principles and entailments.

Which is why There are rules! 

Rules are a device for coping with our constitutional ignorance. There would be no need for rules among omniscient people who were in agreement on the relative importance of all the different ends (Hayek).

The fundamental error of the social justice warriors is that the rules do not and cannot guarantee any specific outcome. Hayek compares the free society to a game which consists "partly of skill and partly of chance":

It proceeds, like all games, according to the rules guiding the actions of individual participants whose aims, skills, and knowledge are different, with the consequence that the outcome will be unpredictable and that there will regularly be winners and losers (ibid.).

So while it is right to insist that "nobody cheats, it would be nonsensical to demand that the results for the different players be just." If a hitter in baseball strikes out a lot, we don't therefore change the rules and allow him four strikes instead of three. But this is precisely what DEI does: different rules for officially designated victim groups. In short, legally sanctioned cheating.

The article linked above characterizes wokeness as 

An aggressively performative focus on social justice.

Which is to say, a focus on preferred outcomes instead of transparent and consistently applied rules. Thus, it is the rule of the ruleless, or law of the lawless, in which case 

orthodoxy becomes a substitute for virtue. You can be the worst person in the world, but as long as you're orthodox you're better than everyone who isn't. This makes orthodoxy very attractive to bad people.

Virtue is playing by the rules. Wokeness is overruling the rules -- as in Biden's recent unilateral declaration of a new amendment to the constitution. 

The author of the piece traces the rise of wokeness to the 1960s, especially in the universities, and more particularly in the humanities and social sciences. By the 2010s it had become "more virulent": 

It spread further into the real world, although it still burned hottest within universities. And it was concerned with a wider variety of sins. In the first phase of political correctness there were really only three things people got accused of: sexism, racism, and homophobia (which at the time was a neologism invented for the purpose). But between then and 2010 a lot of people had spent a lot of time trying to invent new kinds of -isms and -phobias and seeing which could be made to stick.

A wider variety of sins, identified and punished by people who would be the first to deny the existence of sin and dismiss it as the relic of a superstitious age:

What is called the modern mentality is the process of exonerating the deadly sins.

Which brings to mind another aphorism:

Only the Church considers itself a congregation of sinners. All other communities, religious or lay, feel themselves to be a confraternity of saints.

However, 

Christianity did not invent the notion of sin, but that of forgiveness.

Nor does it ask that we be impeccable but that we be eager to be forgiven.

But wokeness is an unforgiving counter-religion, "with God replaced by protected classes." The real God harmonizes justice and mercy, but the god of the sinless and saintly woke is all social justice and no mercy. 

Let's get back to the related principles of wisdom and unity. Clearly, there can be no unity in a society in which there are different rules for different groups. Rather, unity can only be a function of agreement on the nature of the rules. We can't play the game if we can't first agree on the rules, and agree to abide by them.   

But there is a deeper principle involved, which can only be a function of wisdom -- the wisdom that says All men are created equal, and endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, whereby we are free to pursue happiness in our own way, so long as we play by the rules.  

Thanks Cap'n Obvious.

I suppose this post is rather banal, but then again,  

We conservatives provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like they are daring avant-garde thinkers.

Moreover,

Strictly speaking, it is in reiterating the old commonplaces that the work of civilization consists.

So, 

The  conservatism of each era is the counterweight to the stupidity of the day. 

The stupidity of our day being progressive wokeness. 

Now,

The left is a lexicographical tactic more than an ideological strategy.

Which is why 

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

Definitions of words like man, woman, freedom, equality, justice, fairness, reason, fascism, racism, and the rule of law.