Meta-Cosmic Ignorance and the Left Wing Ignorantsia

This single aphorism is almost too packed with implications to explicate in the brief time available this morning: "The tacit presuppositions of any science are more important than its teachings" And "Only what a science ignores about itself defines what it says" (Dávila).

This makes one want to grab the nearest Darwinian or Leftist and say to him: "Sounds interesting, but what are the tacit presuppositions underlying your theory, i.e., the worldview that precedes it?"

The typical Darwinian will proceed straight to what are in reality his conclusions, or to the logical entailments to which the theory gives rise, e.g., materialism, or determinism, or reductionism, etc.

But that's not what we asked for. Rather, we want to know his assumptions, his presuppositions about the world (which he pretends he doesn't have). These assumptions 1) are not rooted in the theory, but prior to it; and 2) are highly suspect, to say the least, if the theory is true. In other words, why should we care about what some accidental concatenation of selfish genes assumes about the world? I know I don't.

What I mean to say is that the Darwinian dresses his assumptions as conclusions in order to give them some respectability, but they are assumptions just the same. And you know what they say about that: GITO, or garbage in, tenure out.

Part two of the aphorism suggests that what the Darwinian fundamentalist ignores about himself turns out to define what he says. In other words, a subject of random evolution is constrained by its ignorance, the Darwinian included.

Now, we are all constrained by our ignorance. No shame in that, for we can only be ignorant to the extent that Truth exists. But the Darwinian goes even one step further, and denies his ignorance, thus making him ignorant of his cosmic ignorance, which is thus elevated to his most important implicit teaching: that he is a cosmic ignoramus, or that man's stupidity is absolute.

Which is only true of some men.

Ultimately this goes back to Gödel, liberally interpreted (in other words, one of my acknowledged cosmic presuppositions is that the incompleteness theorems apply to any human thought-system, not just to strictly logical or mathematical ones).

In other words, the theorems are logical because they are true, not vice versa (which really is the whole point, i.e., that humans may securely know truths that are beyond the reach of logic). Therefore, to the extent that Darwinism is consistent, it is incomplete -- radically so in the case of humans. Or, if it is complete, then it must be riddled with inconsistencies. Which it is.

Of course, this poses no problem for the Raccoon, who keeps everything in perspective and avails himself of any truth in order to serve the one Truth. Darwinism is neither consistent nor complete, but that hardly means we can't use it.

So, why this beastly arrogance, this intolerant "all or none" attitude of the Darwinians? Why on this subject do they behave like territorial apes instead of human beings who are uniquely oriented to that which always surpasses them (hence the ground of our humanness)?

Why do they start flinging poo against the walls, just when things are getting interesting? You'd think they were a bunch of animals or something, or that Darwinism is sufficient to explain them.

And if I had had a little more time, I could have tightened up any loose s*it contained above. As it stands, you folks will have sort it out, because I'm late.

Thank God for Accidental Things!

Dávila (Don Colacho) has many aphorisms that go to the idea that genuine happiness is something that cannot be planned. Rather, a key element is surprise.

Thus, "The gods do not punish the pursuit of happiness but the ambition to forge it with our own hands." Clearly there is a danger in the implicit assumption that we are the source of our own happiness. Therefore, "the only licit desire is for something that does not depend on us at all."

This is one of the things that contributes to my own feverish lack of ambition. Succeeding on my terms would be no success at all! Besides, virtually everything worthwhile in my life came as a surprise, not a plan. I didn't plan my wife, my career, my child, my new friend. Not even the internet. Those things just came to me while I wasn't paying attention.

Ambition combined with education -- or indoctrination -- is responsible for most human ills, at least in the modern west. Therefore, "After seeing work exploit and demolish the world, laziness seems like the mother of the virtues." How much more *progress* can we take before the ambitious eggheads of the left succeed in destroying civilization?

Two symmetrical aphorisms: "The only man who should speak of wealth or power is the one who did not extend his hand when they were within his reach." I don't know that it was ever in reach, but let's just say I've kept my hands to mysoph. And "To learn that the most valuable goods are the least rare requires a long apprenticeship." Quite true. It took me half (I hope!) my life.

Taken to its logical extreme, "God is the name of the sole enigma that, if it were deciphered, would not be a disappointment." Which is to say, everything short of God is going to be a little disappointing. Or maybe not, so long as we don't try to wring more out of it than there is in it. A little perspective goes a long way, and a sense of Cosmic Irony is not a bad thing.

You often see parents -- especially where I live -- essentially rob children of their childhood because of an insane ambition, which, if fulfilled, would result in the children being as happy as those reflexively ambitious parents. Which is to say, not very happy at all -- in fact, so unfulfilled that they have to project it into the child, and then imagine that they will finally be fulfilled if only their child achieves an arbitrary level of success defined by someone else! In short, they simply punt their spiritual emptiness to the next generation.

I had an insight into this dynamic long ago, on the occasion of snatching my BA degree. My parents were quite thrilled, no doubt partly due to the element of surprise at the unexpected accomplishment of a wayward child. Me? Couldn't care less, except that it was one less hoop to jump through.

One of the happiest days of my life -- I still get chills thinking about it -- was my last day of high school. Because of the accomplishment? Please. It was all about having the conspiracy off my back after thirteen years of torture enhanced indoctrination!

Back to my shattering insight upon becoming a confirmed bachelor: while it was obvious that my parents were far more excited than I was, this went to a more general principle that the success of our children means much more to us than does our own success (at least if we aren't pathological narcissists). First word, first step, first sleepover, first chapter book, whatever. My own firsts are matters of complete indifference to me, whereas my son's firsts never fail to bang the naches button.

Ah, here is the exact aphorism I was looking for: "Only the unexpected fully satisfies. Nothing that satisfies our expectations fulfills our hopes." This is why I so enjoy this medium of expression. If someone were to offer me money to write a commentary on Don Colacho's Aphorisms, I would be miserable. Blogging is only fulfilling -- and it is, very -- because there is absolutely No Plan. Every morning, I can't wait to wake up and accomplish nothing, only maybe a little more deeply this time!

Here is another: "The man who wants to avoid grotesque collapses should not look for anything to fulfill him in space or time." This I wholeheartedly and wholeheadedly believe. I have never been under any delusion that I will be fulfilled after X. Rather, to the extent that fulfillment is possible, it is only possible now. Everything else is a dodge, a mortgage you will never pay off. ¡"There are only instants"!

Has your team ever won the World Series or Super Bowl? Talk about a letdown! The whole point is to live in the tension of that impossible future. Should it actually arrive, the only way to top it is to burn down the city.

As to the surprise-myself blogging, this also goes to why I would never want to be considered an "expert," because that would mean game over. Let others bear the burden of expertise! It's too much fun being an absolute beginner.

Besides, "The prophet is not God's confidante, but a rag blown by sacred squalls." And "There is no spiritual victory that need not be won anew each day" -- or each post. Got another game tomorrow, and the season never ends. Yes, we may dream of winning the World Series, but God forbid we should ever make it there!

For "whoever celebrates future harmonies sells himself to the devil." Rather, "One must live for the moment and for eternity. Not for the disloyalty of time." Live now and for (and in) eternity, not the future, and certainly not the past!

Because "religious thought does not go forward, like scientific thought, but rather goes deeper" -- into the now and therefore eternal. Don't wait until you are sick or old to appreciate your poverty and dependence! For "Wisdom comes down to not showing God how things should be done." And "True talent consists in not making oneself independent from God."

Hey, sorry about all the exclamation marks! It just happened. I'm not trying to go all breathy adolescent on you.

Myth, Science, Scientific Myth, and Myths of Science

Myth can be thought of as a medium of the imagination; for Don Colacho, it is "not a premature science of the universe, but a specific dimension of language." It "intuits the transcendent in the sensory," so it is analogous to how we perceive beauty in the material world. Just as beauty is of Beauty, truths are of Truth, irrespective of the medium of transmission.

Science, in contrast to myth, consists of a heterogeneous list of propositions that cannot be falsified -- today. Thus, progress in science -- in particular, major leaps or paradigm shifts -- "usually comes from the care with which we study the trivial exception to the rule."

As it pertains to climate science, for example, anyone who approaches it with an open mind is struck by the many exceptions that refute its central claim. So many black swans! It will not progress until those black swans can be reconciled with the white, and yet, proponents try to pretend the former don't even exist.

In this regard, climate science is more like neurosis than science, since it operates via repression, rationalization, compartmentalization, wishful thinking, projection, etc.

It's no different with the sciences of human intelligence, of race, of homosexuality, or of sexual differences. Liberals don't even bother disagreeing with the science, but deny its existence altogether -- which is more of a psychotic than neurotic defense mechanism. It seems to be working so far, but there's going to be hell to pay once reality rears its beautiful head.

As Kevin Williamson writes (National Review, July 7, 2014), the great majority of citizens are not intellectually equipped "to understand even modestly sophisticated scientific problems."

All humans, however, "are able to understand prestige, and the uses to which prestige may be put." When at a gathering of liberal relatives -- well, first of all, I never bring up politics. But they inevitably do. And I suppose what is most troubling is that they do not bow before my great prestige. Rather, they seem to think there are others more prestigious than I!

Oh well. A prophet among his own, and all that.

I read somewhere that Cat Stevens managed to convert his entire extended family to Islam. One suspects this has more to do with the material than spiritual rewards of being a Friend of Cat. No such material rewards attach to my prestige.

The thought just occurred to me that I once held Ken Wilber in high regard. But his prestige was deflated the moment Bill Clinton began citing him and Al Gore was seen with one of his books. For "he who sees that his ideas propagate must suspect that they betray him." Or worse, that the ideas were a betrayal to begin with -- thus the appeal to the base, the treacherous, the lowdown.

Truly, it should be the other way around: if you are praised by the likes of a Bill Clinton or Al Gore, this should be an occasion for the deepest soul-searching. For it is written: "Enraging the typically modern man is the sure sign of being right" (DC).

Metaphysical ideas are not susceptible to scientific falsification. But they are subject to constant true-ification in light of who despises them -- by trollification. Thus sayeth the Master: the world will hate you for My sake.

What we merely know can never exhaust what Really Is. This is because Being is inexhaustible, and knowledge flows therefrom. Indeed, as we have mentioned before, ignorance by definition grows with the accumulation of factual and empirical knowledge because of the expansion of the surface area of our illuminated sphere.

Even so, man has a cosmic right to know (roughly) what the hell is going on in and beyond this sphere, no matter how large or small its dimensions, hence the purpose of revelation, of myth, of higher imagination, which embody truths that will remain true no matter how fervently an Al Gore or Bill Clinton believes them. They can be spoiled by no man's prestige, from Popes to professors to politicians.

Meanwhile, the "settled science" will be the prejudice existing at the moment man becomes extinct (paraphrasing Don Colacho).

Cosmic Shrinkage: From Wisdom to Knowledge to Facts to Stupidity to Liberalism

Here is an elementary cosmic bifurcation, expressed with maximum concision: "The nominalist lives among facts. The realist lives among gods" (Don Colacho). The rest of this post will no doubt be a wordy exegesis of that. Yes, it is original, bearing in mind that "Originality is the plagiarizing of a genius" (DC).

Now, if you don't know exactly what the first aphorism means -- for example, if you attended graduate school or have been otherwise warped by the spirit of the times -- you are directed to Richard Weaver's CoonClassic Ideas Have Consequences, because that is its theme.

After reading the latter, I typed up and printed out a handy summary of the contents. For example, "Without imagination, the world is reduced to a brute fact -- there is nothing to 'spiritualize' it, to give it depth. And when matter is placed above spirit, quantity displaces quality. But QUALITY IS NOT JUST ANOTHER QUANTITY, DUMMY!"

Indeed, "What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly" (DC).

But this is one of the Original Metaphysical Sins of the left, and we see it everywhere, i.e., reality being reduced to statistics (which are themselves conditioned and selected by the left's dysfunctional organizing principles). Especially "in the social sciences, one generally weighs, counts and measures in order to avoid having to think."

After all, science is by definition what anyone can know. It is radically egalitarian, and therefore (if elevated to a metaphysic) anti-individual. In that perverse sense, progressives -- shudder -- do indeed "believe in science" -- and that's a threat!

Which is why "Nothing is as alarming as science in the hands of an ignoramus." But then "everything that can be reduced to a system ends up in the hands of fools" (DC).

The good news: progressives also fervently believe in man. The bad news: "The worship of humanity is celebrated with Human sacrifices" -- abortion mills being only one facet of this.

A real system, if that is what you want to call it, does not proceed in a linear manner from conclusion to conclusion. Rather, it grows from the center out, so the first task is to locate the Center -- both His and ours, since the two are as mirrors held to one another.

Where fact becomes our only criterion, knowledge -- let alone wisdom -- is rendered unattainable. The vertical roads that lead upward are barricaded. Which is why every attack on religion is an attack on mind -- and on man. A humanism without God is just a kind of absurdly narcissistic animalism.

The word was made flesh, not vice versa. Flesh can only pretend to become word, let alone the last word! But as we ourselves have said in so many ways, the left is less an "ideological strategy" than "a lexicographical tactic" (ibid.).

So beware: "Whoever accepts the lexicon of the enemy surrenders without knowing it." Leftism Revisited is all over that problem, beginning with the preposterous misnaming of leftists "liberal," a contradiction in terms.

We should hasten to add that in our incarnotional metaphysic, we have the deepest respect for the human animal. And it goes without saying that we respect the other end, the unique individual soul.

But we have no patience for, or interest in, the vast "middle zone of an animal with opinions," where the tenured spend their lives trying to confine us in their verbal prisons. But the human-animal is a beautiful thing, for as Elder Don says, "the sensual is the presence of a value in the sensible," i.e., the word or idea or spirit in the flesh.

Facts do not speak for themselves. At the very least, they require a principle of selection that no fact can provide. This principle is "out of this world," i.e., not in the world of facts. But to reduce semantics to syntax -- or meaning to structure -- is to deny language its ontological referent.

In other words, in a properly right side up cosmos, the purpose of syntactical structure is to converge upon and reveal meaning -- and meaning lives among the gods, not the facts. One cannot live a human life among facts only without asphyxiating or freezing or being compressed to stone.

Bottom line: the liberal gulag has walls, but can have no ceiling that prevents vertical escape, since they don't even know about that dimension.

Don't worry: he's not looking out but looking in with a combination of curiosity and pity:

(photo: Leslie Godwin)

Full Faith and Credit in the First Bank of Reality (or, Never Take an Intellectual Check from a Liberal)

Notice how Don Colacho's aphorisms alternate between the highest reaches of spirit and the lowest circle of politics, or between reality and appearance. I suppose that's one more reason why I so relate. I don't find the juxtaposition odd or jarring at all. Rather, each is an entailment of the same principles. Indeed, somewhere he has an aphorism that goes to this.

Here it is: "Conservatism should not be a party but the normal attitude of every decent man." It is common sense, common decency, and a common inheritance of the Permanent Things.

But it's not all bad news for the left, because at least we conservatives "provide idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers."

Notice how our daring and avant-garde -- and confident and clueless -- president takes abundant advantage of this service we provide. And what thanks do we get?

Oh well. Raccoons don't care about manmode honors and encomia. Conservatives understand that "man is a problem without a human solution," much less a political one. Obama is trying to heal his own wounded soul via politics, but he splits and then projects the wound into others -- into the victims of the left and the sadists of the right, making himself savior to the one and martyr of the other.

Or in other words, Obama is a classic Christian pervert (or inverted Christian), something to bear in mind for folks who still cling to the idea that he is a closet Muslim.

No, for starters, a real Muslim wouldn't project the sadism, but act on it (use of the IRS to persecute political enemies notwithstanding). Nor would he give a fig about so-called victims. It's just not a part of their culture -- except when politically expedient to propagandize the useful Jew-hating idiots of the international left.

For "In the end we only defend and attack religious positions with zeal." Think about that one. I'll wait.

You could even say that it is possible to implicitly know a man's religion by paying attention to what gets his zeal up. For example, is there a commenter more zealous, more on fire for his incoherent cause, than our anonymous troll? Clearly, something is eating him, but you will also have noticed that he is unable to articulate it in terms of principles. It's all just lashing out at projected ghosts. Here is a hint: since 2005, One Cosmos been providing idiots the pleasure of feeling like daring avant-garde thinkers.

But here is a timeless avant which no garde can surpass: "The greatest political puerility is to attribute to certain social structures the vices inherent in the human condition." We can argue about whether Obama is the most far left president we've ever had, but he is without question the most puerile. I know this because I believed the same crap when I was but a puer boy, caught up in the cultural peter pandemic.

Back to Imagination, which is why we're here. "Without an alert imagination intelligence runs aground." I love this one, because it implies that intelligence is a ship with a destination. But it is navigating over a kind of dark sea, or at least a nonlocal sea that is full of potential dangers. Tradition, of course, provides nautical maps, but each person must nevertheless set sail, and in the words of Mike Tyson, everyone has a plan until they get punched in the face -- or until they are caught in a hurricane.

I believe I have spoken before of how this nonlocal ocean feels to me. It is filled with subtle forces and attractors that one must "feel" one's way into and through. When one is in the right spot, one will feel the flow of spirit along one's keel, so to speak. Likewise there are doldrums, storms, and, as implied by the aphorism, rocks and icebergs.

So, "Imagination is the capacity to perceive, through the senses, the attributes of the object which the senses do not perceive." Analogously, this would apply even to something as prosaic as a baseball game. Two people can watch the identical game, but someone who knows nothing about baseball will not have access to 95% of what is going on. Same with religion, only without the designated hitter.

This one is so poetic that I almost hate to spoil it: "Nothing important is is reached simply by walking. But jumping is not enough to cross the abyss; one must have wings."

We can talk about why later, but it has not pleased God that man should be saved by walking or by jumping, but by flying. Walking is either the purely intellectual approach or the completely voluntaristic (i.e., will-based); each embodies the pelagian heresy, which essentially means that (↑) is completely sufficient without (↓). (In the cosmically correct formulation, the former is generally necessary but the latter is sufficient.)

Now, what is (↓) but the wings God provides for vertical flight (↑)? Not only is walking a little stupid, but it is also a refusal of the gift of wings. While you're at it, might as well refuse the gifts of reason, language, and truth. Or in other words, become a postmodern leftist who has convinced himself that "his impotence is the measure of things." Which, in a way, it is for the cognitively impotent man (i.e., the infertile egghead) or for the barren ovary tower feminist.

Just yesterday I was thinking about how ideas need to be backed by the full faith and credit of the First Bank of Reality. But the postmodernist has abolished the bank and issues counterfeit notes from his own printer. This is what happens when you fuck a stranger in the ass -- excuse me! Dupree did that while I was taking a leak -- when you pretend that words do not refer to things but only to other words. There has never been a president who lies as casually as Obama, but only because he has assimilated the greatest Lie of all.

So I know just what Brother Colacho means when he says: "Nearly every idea is an overdrawn check that circulates until it is presented for payment." For the last six years, President Obama has been confidently presenting his bankrupt ideas for payment.

What a time to find out he has nothing but funny money and rubber checks! No wonder the Fed keeps cranking it out. Gotta keep the dream alive for another two years. But the rest of us will be paying off his college loans forever.

Stay Thirsty My, Friends. Better Yet, Just Stay on Fire and the Thirst will Take Care of Itself.

"The Bible is not the voice of God but that of the man who encounters him" (by the way, this is one of the places from which I compiled my own list of favorites). This aphorism may be taken the wrong way, of course, but it is nevertheless true that the Bible is obviously not God, but rather, a compilation of living encounters with the living God, reduced to written form.

Early Christians -- obviously -- did not have a "New Testament" except insofar as it consisted of new beliefs, new oral traditions, and a new liturgy. I read somewhere that under the best of circumstances, even someone like Augustine might have had some of the individual books in codex form, but I don't believe he would had the single book we know of as The Bible, all right there between two covers.

Remember too that each chapter is its own imaginative "book," and that it requires a work of collective meta-imagination to apprehend their inner unity and to bring them all together. Just because the book is a solid material object in space, it doesn't mean you have perceived its interior meta-unity! I mean, who has?

I think this is an important consideration, because the real action doesn't occur "in" scripture, but rather, in the imaginative space of the one who encounters and dwells in it. Unlike routine secular knowledge, it cannot be a one-way vector from book to head. Rather, it is always relational, transactional, intersubjective, alive.

This goes to the next aphorism that metaphorically leaps out at me, "Metaphor supposes a universe in which each object mysteriously contains the others."

I have discussed this idea in a number of posts, and it is indeed one of those things that earthlings simply take for granted, believer and infidel alike. How is it, say, that we can affirm -- accurately, I might add -- that the universe is a tree with its roots aloft, its branches down below?

This is a metaphor, but only because everything contains or refers to everything else; and the latter is true because of a trinitarian Godhead in whom persons are both distinct and yet interior to one another. It is why communication of any kind is possible, including metaphor (and really, virtually all communication is metaphorical, in the sense that one thing must stand for another).

The following aphorism also goes to the present discussion: "Serious books do not instruct, but interrogate." This relates to what was said above about the relationality of the Bible, and also about metaphor. A serious book doesn't literally interrogate us. But it might as well.

Another metaphorical truth: "We only dig the channels for a momentary torrent." It is up to us to clean out the rain gutters and flood channels for the orderly flow of (↓). Similarly, "We call abstract truths the dry channels through which the waters of any rain flow." The abstract truth is empty in order to be filled by experience, as we were discussing a few weeks back.

Note also that the point is not so much to be a lake or reservoir as a river. The flow never stops, so we can never be "filled" in this life. I mean, if self-emptying is good enough for God...

So, if there is no end to the flow, then "One philosophy surpasses others only when it defines more precisely the same insoluble mystery."

Normally we think of "precision" and "mystery" as being at opposite extremes, but in point of fact they are a dialectic -- perhaps the dialectic, to which I have assigned the "ultimate" abstraction of O <--> (¶). I don't see how there can be anything "beyond" this dialectic in this life, short of becoming God, which is not going to happen. But we can perpetually dig those channels and clean those gutters for the Flow.

The above dialectic could be encapsulated: "The soul is the task of man."

And -- if you're not careful -- "Thirst runs out before the water does." So stay thirsty, my friends.

Now, this I like: "Religion is not a set of solutions to known problems but a new dimension of the universe." This is precisely what I believe: you might say that it is to psychology or neurology what biology is to physics. Biology is not just statistically unlikely physics, but rather, an entirely new dimension of existence irreducible to physics, the biosphere. It is at a right angle, so to speak, to everything that came before.

So too is revelation, bearing in mind that I count no less than four Revelations, or dimensions of Revelation, 1) the miracle of creation, 2) the miracle of intelligibility, 3) the miracle of the human subject, and 4) the miracle of the divine murmurandoms known as revelation proper. Each of these can only be understood in reference to the verticality that is woven into the nature of things: reality is always pointing beyond itself in a bidirectional manner, toward its inspiraling goround and its perichoretic deustiny.

And speaking of trees and branches, "Religion is the tremor that the shaking of our roots transmits to our branches." Maybe we can't see the root, but we can certainly tell when the branches are atremble.

Now, assuming our roots are aloft, this makes absolutely perfect nonsense. It's a metaphor, but a realmetaphor -- just as the early fathers saw Jesus as the "true myth," or the primordial myth -- dimly apprehended or pre-viewed by earlier generations -- incarnate.

Because "'Intuition' is the perception of the invisible, just as 'perception' is the intuition of the visible." And "When imagination and perception coincide, the soul is burned."

Ouch!

(yoinked from the bowels of Happy Acres)

The Cold Hard Facts of Music

1. Only in the last few years have I discovered the quirky greatness of Porter Wagoner. He had a syndicated TV show when I was a kid, but he might as well have been from another planet.

A perfectly crafted lyric, with a great little twist there at the end. Note also where he refers to the noises getting "louder from within." Is he referring to the naughty activity inside the house, or to the command hallucinations in his head? In three minutes the narrator goes from clueless innocence ("gosh, I'll sure surprise my wife!") to a hard-bitten cynicism in which he one-ups the worldly stranger.

It's fun to think that during the Summer of Love, when Wagoner would have appeared so out of touch to my 11 year old mind, he was actually singing of the Permanent Things, i.e., the Cold Hard Brutal Unchanging Facts of Life.

Wagoner specialized in a whole sub-genre of tortured and darkly troubled souls, 29 of which are collected in The Rubber Room. And of course, his duets with Dolly Parton define the art.

Here's a little song about another mixed race sociopath for whom things don't turn out well:

2. The Pixies: last truly great rock group? If not, who am overlooking?

3. The greatest live rock album just got greater: The Complete 1971 Fillmore East Concerts by the Allman Brothers Band. Speaking of the Permanent Things, solid audio proof of at least three of the four transcendentals, truth, beauty, and unity (although the latter was no doubt aided by performance enhancing drugs).

For you young 'uns, in this famous track, In Memory of Elizabeth Reed, there are two guitar solos. The first one is by Dickie Betts, at about 3:10, and it's great: thoughtful, exploratory, and then passionate at the end. But then, after the organ interlude, comes Duane's solo at 7:48. Notice how it slowly builds to such a peak of intensity (starting at about 10:10), calms down momentarily, and then soars even higher at 11:40. There are lots of virtuosos, but few with that kind of pacing and narrative drive:

4. Fuggin' hippies in the line of fire. Classic!

Okay, Just Link to this Post Already!

Sometimes I *almost* think it's the convoluted titles that drive people away: "Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism." Wha? Click. I should stop trying to be so clever and cute, and just get straight to the point: pay attention to me!

Usually the title just comes to me. But if I have to think about it, we often end up with a cumbersome one like that. Probably the same with posts in general. If I try to be more than the stenographer, I become an agenda-driven scribe unfaithful to the text.

That won't be a problem with this post, being that we're just playgiarizing with another man's aphoristic meditations. Interesting that Don Colacho's aphorisms are the compact distillation of a lifetime of contemplation, and here we are, reversing the process by unpacking them for all they're worth. Is there any excuse for this? We'll come back to that question later. Right now we have some thievery to do.

To remind the reader, we have been engaging in the verticalisthenic exercise of reimagineering tradition: reimagineering because higher truths must be nourished in the imagination; tradition because without its authority, we are just deepaking the chopra, or enlisting fantasy to rebel against reality.

Ah, beautiful: "To convince one who holds his own opinions is easy, but no one can convince one who harbors the opinions of others."

This is again why it is so fruitless to argue with a liberal, since most of their opinions are only backed by the Authority of the Now, i.e., they are utterly conventional -- not conventional wisdom but conventional ignorance, as in Dear Leader.

It would be difficult to arrive at a more pinpoint encrapsulation of Obama and his LoFo whackolytes: No one clings more to his views than the one who is only an echo of his era.

This makes Obama -- and we have made this point before -- the very incarnation of the pneumapathology of the times. He is everything that is wrong with education (degrees in higher bullshit), with religion (membership in the Church of Eternal Resentment), the economy (becoming wealthy and poweful for accomplishing precisely nothing), and with politics (post-constitutional liberal fascism). Obama is -- unfortunately -- a mirror held up to contemporary America, precisely what his skeevy supporters deserve.

"When handling today's events, the future historian will have to wear gloves." Or in the case of this toxic administration, a hazmat suit.

I don't mind Obama having his opinions. To each his own grandiosity. But the fact that he cannot disagree without distorting the views and condemning the motives of his opponents tells you everything you need to know about him, not to mention the indefensibility of his brittle arguments.

Yes, liberals are no doubt on the Right Side Of History, for "Political cowardice baptizes itself: 'I respect the sense of history.'" Progressives are the only people who try to tell truth by the calendar.

Not to re-belabor the point, but "Modern man does not imagine an end higher than service to the anonymous cravings of his fellow citizens." How could he? For the Darwinian fundamentalist, what is man but a high-maintenance ape, the genetic mutation from hell?

No, it's worse than that: "The human has the significance of a swarm of of insects if it is merely human." Or, to paraphrase Schuon, modern man is either merely human or all too human, which amount to the same thing, a big nothing-butthead.

Here is a subtle one: "Paganism is the Old Testament of the Church." This is true in the obvious sense, but we can also see how the modern pagans of the left are just Christian heretics, or else people who have failed for whatever reason to ascend to their properly divine-human station. Progressives are the Old Testavus for the restavus, i.e., what we must transcend, not what we should sink to.

I suppose one reason I love these aphorisms is that they effectively boil down what I've been bobbling on about for the past 2,500 posts, for example, "In the beginning was nothing and it believed nothing was god, and was made man, and dwelt on earth, and by man all things were made nothing."

Although this may sound like a parody, it is nothing more than an explicit expression of the ultimate principles of secular (sub)humanism: if materialism is "true," then of course everything is meaningless, of no possible significance. Man is the Evangelist of Nothing. You know, like MSNBC.

This begs the question of why he evangelizes, and, for that matter, why our trolls cannot stop themselves from commenting here. That's weird, isn't it? Is the troll's nihilism an adequate explanation for the compulsion? I don't see how. There is something else going on, almost like a misguided search for truth or something. As if he'll find it here!

"The stone is right, wherever it falls." Only man can be wrong, depending upon how far he has fallen.

Or in other words, "whoever speaks of error" speaks of freedom. Which means that freedom and truth are absolutely covalent, the one impossible in the absence of the other.

I might add that because freedom IS, truth IS, and therefore God IS. Likewise, to affirm that the truth sets one free is to affirm that freedom sets one on the path to truth. Otherwise life is just an endless night of bupkis, i.e., existence lost in the eternal bewilderness of being, a blandscape of many roads leading from nothing to nowhere.

It is also why "The freer a man believes himself to be, the easier it is to indoctrinate him." In other words, the cosmic heresy of freedom without truth results only in opinions, just tenured primates clamoring for attention and status with the latest and most fashionable nonsense.

What was this post supposed to be about? Imagination? "The redemption of reality is the function of the imagination."

Yes, but "The deluded are wordy."

Touché.

Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism

To remind the reader where our head has been lately, it has been exploring the question of reimagineering tradition in general and Christianity in particular for the present age, without in any way fundamentally altering or diminishing the message. And before I was carried down some interesting byway, I was consulting with Elder Colacho, raiding his fridge for any tasty morsels on the role of imagination.

Of course, as soon as I do this, I am distracted by aphorisms covering other subjects, such as: "The world is explicable from man; but man is not explicable from the world."

This is precisely what I mean when I say, for example, that man explains Darwinism, and that therefore Darwinism cannot (fully) explain man. This is a simple truism that most anyone who hasn't attended graduate school should be able to grasp, and yet, profound in its consequences. Borrowing a geometrical analogy, either we contain Darwinism, or vice versa; either we can wrap our minds around it, or it encloses (literally) our minds.

The mind-altering conclusion, according to Elder Don, is that "Man is a given reality; the world is a hypothesis we invent."

No, this is not permission to go stark raving Deepak! But it does go to our reimagineering project, because the world we hypothesize today is quite different from the world hypothesized by our predecessors. The science is never settled, even if the principles animating science are.

Thus, beautiful though it may have been, none of us are able to enter the grand synthesis of the medieval mind and actually live there. Yes, we can visit it, like a museum or cathedral, but it simply isn't the world we inhabit.

As such, we need religion to address this here world, the world of big bangs and cosmic evolution and psychobiology and history and other religions and all the rest. It can be done. It must be done. It IS being done. Thy will be done.

Here is another Critical Idea, expressed with maximum concision -- meaning that the pounds-per-square inch it places on your head is quite high, like a diamond stylus in a record groove: "Homogeneity drives out God. Secondary characteristics are Jacob's ladder."

This is a hierarchical cosmos, with many vertical degrees. It is not just God and man, as, say, Muslims and certain modern Christian fundamentalists believe; nor is it matter and motion, as materialists believe; nor, for that matter, is it state and subject, as the left believes.

Another aphorism reads, "Although a hierarchical society does not necessarily educate, the egalitarian society can never educate."

Example? Here in California -- a failed state misruled by one party government -- it is the Law of the Bland that all textbooks must give equal time and treatment to blacks, homosexuals, women, Muslims, people who cut off their dicks, and any other self-styled victim group.

Thus, knowledge is not a function of truth situated in a vertical hierarchy. Rather, it is horizontalized and made the function of a perverse egalitarianism. Therefore, we end up with my truth and your truth, black truth and gay truth, penile truth and vaginal truth. Oh, except penile truth is an oppressive lie of the patriarchy. Castrate it from the textbook!

If there is a hierarchy -- which there is -- then it is conditioned from the top. In other words, exclude the top and you destroy the hierarchy, as you have descended into relativism. The Absolute is the only thing that saves us from the tyranny of relativism. Which is why it is so hated by the left. Our success is predicated on their freedom, whereas their success is predicated on denying ours. Not exactly a symmetrical war!

Remember: the egalitarian society cannot educate. Which is why the most educated (or indoctrinated) people in our society are the most foolish. Just ask yourself: what can Obama the Egalitarian teach us? That is correct: nothing. Or nothing but pompous and self-refuting lies -- lies like "Muslims helped build the very fabric (sic) of our country." Really? When was this? I know that Jefferson read the Koran, but only because he wanted to understand the mindset of our enemies. I myself purchased one on 9-12-2001 for similar Jeffersonian reasons.

Another aphoristic corollary: that the most important ontological category is person. At one end of reality is person; at the other is nothing. In the book, we symbolize this O and Ø. However, there is hierarchy in between, i.e., degrees of being trailing off into nothingness as they increase in distance from the source.

But orthoparadoxically, no matter how far from the source, the source still surrounds and interpenetrates us. The nothing-world of the existential left is just a hypothesized world taken to its absurd extreme. For God is not the "compensation for lost reality," but rather, "the horizon surrounding the summits of conquered reality."

God is ALWAYS the God of the gaps, because God is the immanent reality who unifies them -- or in whom they are unified. The One and many are complementary, although the One is ontologically prior -- just as the Father is "prior" to the Son, even though the Son has never not existed. I would say the same of world and God. It's what a creator does, i.e., create. With God there is always a world, a creation, a hierarchy. Just not necessarily this one.

"Hell is a place identifiable only from Paradise." Which is why leftists cannot see the hell they are creating, precisely. It is also why they see and are even persecuted by paradise. The leftist lives in hell, therefore his life is organized around the attempt to transform this to heaven, which he believes he can do because of his prior flattening of the cosmos (due to the rejection of hierarchy). Remember the wise words of our Dear Leader: the white man's greed runs a world in need. Thus, get rid of these white European pests and voila, heaven!

Yes, like the pageant of heaven at our southern border, or in the Arab world, or in Africa, or in Detroit. See my egalitarian parade passing!

"Faith is what allows us to wander into any idea without losing our way back." And not only! Rather, it is what allows us to both see and situate a truth in the cosmic hierarchy. Without faith there is no truth at all, just opinions. Nor is any opinion higher than another, as in a California textbook.

Yuck: revolution isn't what it used to be. Alert humans will have noticed that it has been reduced to "an intoxication of the soul invaded by one's feces." Strong language, to be sure, but have you ever smelled the fragrant comments of our anonymous troll? Proof that in a farting contest there are only losers.

To paraphrase another aphorism, dying societies accumulate laws like a dying man does remedies. When even the Washington Post notices the lawlessness of our law-loving Washington pest... I'll let you complete that sentence.

But that's what leftism does: it is the never-ending attempt to "institutionalize what is uninstitutionalizable." This goes to the aphorism above about trying to contain the uncontainable, who is ultimately the Metacosmic Person and his reflections herebelow.

Which reminds me of a tossed off thoughtlet by the Happy Acres guy, to the effect that, in the face of liberal arguments, his mind instantly goes "meta" and starts running circles around them.

You know the feeling, right? It occurs for a number of reasons, first, because liberals have assimilated so may false first principles; second, because these principles are unexamined; third, because they fervently argue the implications of these crazy principles; fourth, because they have ready-to-hand revisionist bullshit to support the principles; fifth, because we rejected those things so long ago that we have forgotten how to be so stupid; sixth, because they have systematically closed their eyes to that reality which transcends, infuses, orients, and grounds us.

What I want to say is that a Raccoon should be a metavangelist of the divine imagination.

Reality: Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later

"The challenge to Christians in any age," writes Moore, "is to reinterpret the common mind in new circumstances, and to apply the model of an integrated vision... in times that always seem 'unpropitious.'"

His use of the term "common mind" follows Chesterton, who says that it refers to the "integrating tendency in human tradition." It is that upon which the minds -- the minds of the great -- converge:

"Commonness and the common mind are now generally spoken of as meaning inferiority and the inferior mind, the mind of the mere mob. But the common mind means the mind of all the artists and heroes; or else it would not be common" (Chesterton). Thus, he is referring to "a principle of integration, and integrity, in the nature of the human person, and in the nature of human society."

Come to think of it, Obama must be our first president who is completely outside the common mind. Due in part to an elite provincial education that seems to have successfully sheltered him from reality -- including the reality of his own mediocrity -- he either has no familiarity with our traditions or has undisguised contempt for them.

Obama's heroes are not our heroes, as seen most recently in his treatment of Israel. He obviously doesn't revere the founders, much less the unalienable rights they enshrined. He peevishly sent Churchill's bust packing. He has named two idiots to the Supreme Court whose minds who could hardly have less in common with ours, to put it charitably. His spiritual mentor is a man from whom a morally serious person would shield his children. And his son -- his image and likeness -- is any pot-smoking adolescent sociopath who resembles Trayvon Martin.

The common mind goes to a common reality. But multiculturalism boldly assaults our common reality head on, without apologies. And "when a society departs from sane norms, a heavy reckoning will have to be made before it is returned to them" (Moore). So, put on your seatbelts. We've got a ways to go before the Big Correction.

As to the left's thuggish assault on reality, Chesterton famously observed that every modern philosophy begins with the sacrifice of "a sane point of view," or the acceptance of "something that no normal man would believe."

These sacrificial insanities and inanities are everywhere, and you might say that political correctness is their liturgy. Here is a seemingly minor and yet thoroughly typical example of an otherwise decent reporter cluelessly passing along Hamas propaganda. Ho hum. The beauty of the left is that it permits people to embrace and support objective evil without even trying. The devil could accomplish little without enlisting good intentions.

Disintegration of the common mind is both "the cause and consequence of a fragmented society." How could it be otherwise? The question again is how to recover that common mind -- to reinterpret and reapply it in these novel human circumstances, to the "spirit of the age."

A more subtle point is that integration and self-rule are really two sides of the same reality, whether individually or collectively. One reason "communism" works in the family is that the family is the quintessence of integrated unity: I and my wife and my child are truly one.

But I am not one with Al Sharpton or Eric Holder or Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid or Rachel Maddow or Lois Lerner. Rather, they simply want to impose an impoverished oneness from on high, which is not unity but tyranny. You can't be one with people who have completely different values, let alone people who make you want to vomit.

Note also the critical point that the integrated oneness of the common mind extends into time, thus leading to the corollary that we live in a "democracy of the dead." Yes, we are disenfranchised in this world, but more importantly, so too are our illustrious ancestors who fought for and transmitted the common mind for us to pass along to future generations. High crimes and misdemeanors? Those are trivial things compared to Obama's treatment of certain dead white -- or black or Jewish or whatever -- males who surpass him in every way.

Thus we have infinitely more in common with the saints, heroes, martyrs, and geniuses of the past than we do with these idiots of the present. My heroes are not Obama's heroes because my first principles are not his first principles. Nor do I want to be One with him. Rather, I just want him to leave me alone. Is that too much to ask?

Yes, for a leftist it is too much to ask, because their first political principle is the state, not the individual. "The process of secularization in modernity," writes Moore, "involves the growth of state responsibility for, or control of, those areas of life which once belonged to individuals, or religions, or educational institutions or voluntary associations, or other bodies that are separate from the Government."

But all of this follows ineluctably from first principles, or from the initial insanity, if you will: truth is relative = there is no truth = man cannot know truth = there is no reality = there is only power. Obama is our first truly Machiavellian president -- I mean to his empty core -- for as Leo Strauss observed, the United States is the only country "founded in explicit opposition to Machiavellian principles."

Which are whatnow? A lot of things, but this will do for now: "Machiavellians are not motivated or even responsive to aspirations that posit universal justice, a social, political, and individual good." These latter but serve "to obfuscate the real issues about power and collective self-interest" (McAllister). Thus, you could say the Machiavellian runs in precisely the opposite direction of the common mind.

And it is a direction, not a static thing. McAllister writes that it runs counter to "partnership with what is common to all men, that is, with the divine nous or reason that transcends them all. Through participation in what is common, men become a community" (emphasis mine).

Thus, the first crime of the left -- and the one that makes all the others possible -- is the rejection of what transcends and therefore unifies us. That is why they hate God, because God blocks the way down.

Or, to quote an aphorism of Don Colacho, "All truths converge upon the one truth, but the routes have been barred."

But you can't bar every path, any more than the Berlin wall could stand forever, for "anything which sets itself up" in opposition to "God and created nature cannot endure long, since it separates itself from the universal source of life. So in the end, the state that relies more on power, the ability to coerce, will become an evacuated thing..." (Moore).

Let us hope and pray that this end is near and that we survive the Great Adjustment.

God: 'I Am the Imaginator'

While we're on the subject of imagination, I thought I'd consult some of the elders, beginning with Webster. There is a very long entry for imagination, even longer if we include its many cognates, e.g., imago, imaginal, imaginator, and others. Interestingly, right before image is ilysiidae, a genus of burrowing snakes. After imago comes imam, and it's all downhill from there.

The first definition of imagination is the most useful: an act or process of forming a conscious idea or mental image of something never before wholly perceived in reality by the imaginer; or the ability or gift of forming such conscious ideas or mental images for the purposes of artistic or intellectual creation.

Mr. W. adds that it is "freer of derogatory connotations" than similar words such as fantasy, and also more "comprehensive," going as it does to "the power of creating." In contrast, fantasy "suggests the power of unrestrained, often extravagant or delusive, fancy." Thus it is not so much a power as a weakness.

In my view, "creation from nothing" is something of a pleonasm, since creation -- if it is truly creative -- is always from nothing, even if it is just a little bit of nothing.

You might say that the more creative the person, the greater the nothing. Thus, when we say of God that he creates ex nihilo, it is a matter of degree, not kind. Nor do I think for one moment that this detracts from the divine majesty of the Big Nothing, since everything ultimately arises from this ancient groundmother.

Speaking of whom, imagination is "the power to conceive." You parents out there will relate, because I couldn't possibly have conceived or imagined my son. An individual person never existed before and will never exist again.

The imagination is the fertile ground (or womb) into which religious imagery falls and takes root. If it fails to do so, either there is something deficient in the imagery or in your imagination. But I'd check the latter first.

As we have said before, only because of God is anything and everything intelligible; but only because of God is nothing totally intelligible, except to the creative intelligence of God. Follow anything back up or down (it doesn't matter which) to its end, and you reach the threshold of nothing. Thus man understands, but he can never understand even the simplest thing completely. Everything is inexhaustibly intelligible because it partakes of the Divine Nothing.

Imagination goes not only to things nonexistent or never seen, but to "things perfected or idealized"; and if the things do exist and are seen, there is still "the genuine artist's gift of perceiving more deeply or essentially and creating the interestingly and the significantly new and vital."

Thus, imagination isn't only central to creation but to the magic of renewal; it is why we do not die of boredom, or why some people aren't compelled to become political activists, conceptual artists, or community organizers.

It is also bound up with childhood, or rooted in a quintessentially childlike mode of cognition. The entry has a passage from H.G. Wells, who observed that "all youth lives much in reverie; thereby the stronger minds anticipate and rehearse themselves for life in a thousand imaginations."

There is another useful crack by F.A. Pottle, that imagination "gets at relationships that are true at the deepest level of experience," and one by Roy Pascal that it is "a means of deepest insight and sympathy." It allows us to grasp "a deeper, more organic reality" (G.D. Brown).

Yes, yes, and yes: imagination gets at deep experiential truth, which is experienced in the body as in-sight and sym-pathy. Insights are sights inseen, while sympathy is feeling infelt. Each relies upon a kind of intersubjective resonance from person to person; it is what allows you to think what I'm thinking and for me to feel what that patient or baby o' mine is feeling. And both operate vertically and horizontally (or horizontally because vertically), or with God and man.

The adjectival form, imaginative, means "created, inspired, guided, or drawn from the imagination and not from known facts or sources." And an Imaginator is A Person Who Creates.

Well, I hope that wasn't too beastly pedantic. But I wouldn't have gone on anon if I hadn't found it helpful; or, I would have stopped if it had ceased being provocative and informative. For what immediately occurs to me -- and I imagine you as well -- is that God must be imagined as Imaginator in Chief.

Over the centuries, God has acquired a lot of useless and misleading baggage. All of this baggage, of course, comes from man. It originates in fantasy, or fancy, or thought, or feelings, and is then projected onto God, who may or may not comport with the mental product. Some of it sticks while some of it falls away, but it seems that even the best of it may be contaminated with a bit too much from the human side.

This, I imagine, is part of what God has in mind with the Incarnation: no, no, no, you've got it all wrong again. Here, let me come down and show how it's done. Thus, Jesus is God's imaginative icon of man and man's imaginative icon of God, so we may meet in the middle.

The next elder I would like to consult is Don Colacho, whose pithy aphorisms are the quintessence of imaginative resonance (≈). Here, this one goes to the antiseptic and soul-killing ideals of secular fundamentalism: "When things appear to us to be just what they seem, they soon seem to be even less." And "History exceeds what merely happened." How much more does it exceed what liberals think happened!

"The devil comprehends everything, but is not able to create anything." With which you could have a Butterfield day with the following headline: Smartest President Ever Hasn't Created a Damn Thing.

"Genuine atheism is to the reason of man what the ten-thousand-sided polygon is to his imagination." For as we have said before, it is impossible to imagine atheism (it is more a passive fantasy); and with a fully functioning imagination one is unlikely to be an atheist.

"Creation is the nexus between eternity and history." Oh My Yes. Or between vertical and horizontal. It is irreducible to anything else, for it is where the cosmic arteries of nothing and everything converge in the heart of the imagination.

That's about it for today. I got nothing.

Anonypalooza

I can see by the unforgiving clock on the wall that a new post is not in the offing. So, the best we can manage is a tweet or two. Meanwhile, an open thread, the difference being that ONLY anonymous commenters may participate. Everyone is free to chime in, so long as we don't know your identity -- you know, like a masquerade ball.

Flying into Reality on Wings of Imagination

A purely "scientific" philosophy ends by denying what we know to be true... --Eliot

Cardinal Newman spoke of the illative sense, which is, according to Prof. Wiki, "the faculty of the human mind that closes the logic-gap," "thus allowing for assent" to translogical truth.

It seems to me that it is related to the higher imagination; or at least that it allows us to imagine and apprehend higher truths. It is, writes Moore, "a means of perception beyond the merely ratiocinative faculty," and although not rationalistic, "far from irrational in its workings and conclusions."

Kirk writes (in Moore) that it includes "impressions that are borne in upon us, from a source deeper than our conscious or formal reason. It is the combined product of intuition, instinct, imagination, and long and intricate experience." Thus, it is very much incarnotional, that is, embodied gnotions of enlived truth.

It is not that the illative sense necessarily discloses truth, any more than does logic. It will be irrational if a man's nature is either too irrational or too rational. The illative sense can always assent to a false proposition. Which is why it must be disciplined and guided by tradition. If your illative sense informs you of truths with which none of the luminaries of the past agree, then you are probably a mere ec-centric, or just somejerk outside the Circle.

You will have noticed that an education that is merely "useful" or pragmatic or utilitarian will not engage, much less develop, the illative sense. Might this be one source of the irrational dreams and schemes of the left, with its alternatively withered or perverse fantasies? "The problem with rule by the specialist is not so much that he knows more about something than other people, but rather that he sees everything through that one thing which he knows, however well" (Moore).

Conversely, the Raccoon tries to see any-thing through the lens of Everything.

We all must think and act on the basis of truths that cannot be demonstrated in the usual way. Reason #72B for why it is so fruitless to argue with a leftist is that they habitually try to deploy reason to prove things into which they themselves were never reasoned. Obama -- and liberals in general -- should stop pretending to anchor what he wants to do in the constitution or in the rule of law, since he's going to do it anyway. Just be honest about your dishonesty! That's all we ask.

One such trivial but typical example occurred in our comment section just yesterday, where our wisely anonymous visitor took us to task for affirming the truism that dependent and ineffectual people will tend to support the state which renders them comfortable in their condition of dependence and dysfunction. Or in other words, we should not be surprised when the drug addict votes for the dealer.

Our visitor attempted to prove with corrupt "data" that the people who are actually most dependent on the state are independent-minded conservatives. His error was in trying to prove his crankish illative truth with empirical data at all.

Note that the contradictory data will in no way alter his leftist convictions, because again, he was never reasoned into them to begin with. His particular views are informed by a much grander, unconstrained vision of mankind (not the actual men, mind you, for whom he has such contempt; think of Obama, who loves immigration but must hate the illegal immigrants who suffer under his policies).

All such philosophies are founded upon "something no normal man would believe, if it were suddenly propounded to his simplicity" (Chesterton, in Moore). Such disordered thinking ultimately redounds to a "cleverness actively deployed in the cause of Nothing" (Lewis, ibid.).

Along these lines, it is always useful to remember Gödel, who logically proved to the eternal satisfaction of the metaphysically adequate that man has access to a whole realm of truths that cannot be proved with mere logic. Yes, you are freed from the chains of logic that bind you to the terrestrial! If you want to be.

As alluded to above, the illative sense is bound up with various experiential modes that are only present in a body, or better, a person. Therefore, if our ultimate truth does not converge upon Personhood, let alone Life, then we can be sure we're on the wrong and even tenure track.

Moore speaks of "the utilitarian university," where "knowledge has become disintegrated" and therefore produces "unintegrated people." Nor can human beings create life, not in the laboratory, much less in the soul; they can never put all the dead fragments of the universe back together again. Ironic that they conquer nature only to be conquered by her. D'oh!

In reality -- in the Cosmic Uni-versity -- we are images of Truth, but if truth is presented to us as so many isolated and atomistic fragments, then our interior will reflect this mindless and lifeless fragmentation. Your soul will look cubist rather than toroidal.

But as we ʘnce put it, we are not meant to be "a scattered, fragmented multiplicity in futile pursuit of an ever-receding unity, but a Unity that comprehends and transcends the multiplicity of the cosmos."

Only with the illative sense are we, in the sometime, sometimeless words of Petey "Back upin a timeless with the wonderfully weird Light with which everything was made, a Light no longer dispersed and refracted through so many banged-up and thunder-sundered images of the One."

Indicted by time, we are reprieved by eternity. Which is why I'd rather be a living slave in the vertical than a lifeless tyrant in the horizontal.

I am not writing for scholars, but for people like myself.... [W]hat one must be guided by, scholar or no, is not particularized knowledge but one's total harvest of thinking, feeling, living and observing human beings. --Eliot

Interlude:

Reimagineering the World

So, I think we might have stumbled upon what is perhaps the key to it all: the imagination. Unfortunately, that word has the wrong connotations for most people -- like the word "myth" to which it is related, people imagine that imagination is cognate to fantasy or daydreaming or to the academic onanism of infertile eggheads.

But in point of fact, if we remove imagination from the equation, we end up with... an equation -- a cutandryasdust quantitative world devoid of real qualities. Really. Physics is the paradigmatic science for the reductioneers of modernity and below, which means that anything that can't be quantified isn't really real; the world, in the words of Whitehead, is reduced to "a dull affair, soundless, scentless, colourless; merely the hurrying of material, endless and meaningless.”

Imagine that! That's right: you can't, unless you're spiritually autistic.

In the article referenced in yesterday's post, Bellow writes of how the left not only has a stranglehold on the cultural imagination, but also keeps out competitors with its "reactionary humorlessness, its bullying tone, and its impulse to dictate what people may and may not say." Taken to the extreme -- as in 1984 -- people are deprived even of the means "to express dissenting views, or even to formulate thoughts that might inform such intellectual resistance."

Not too long ago it was nearly impossible for conservative ideas to get a hearing in the liberal barkingplace of dogma. Here again, the left had so successfully reduced the scope of reality that reality itself was excluded. Thanks to talk radio, the internet, and a thriving market for serious books, this is no longer the case.

However, as Bellow says, "The real problem is that we may have reached the limit of what facts and reasoned argument can do." That is, it doesn't seem to matter that the left "cannot win the argument on its merits" so long as it prevails on the cultural front. We simply cannot "debate and argue this incipient totalitarian movement out of existence."

That made sense to me when I first read it, but now I'm not so sure, for what are we to do about the millions of people who have lost the argument but don't know it? We are all familiar with the "density" of the liberal mind, how impervious it is to fact and reason. Those people are not going to be converted through a soul-stirring book or film.

Indeed, there was a recent kerfuffle over an airhead at MSNBC who claimed that Animal Farm is really a fable about capitalist greed! This demonstrates how you can lead a liberal to imaginative intellectual water but cannot make her think.

Likewise the massive electoral base of the left, the dependent and ineffectual LoFo hordes living in the philistinian territories. I am slowly coming to the realization that the problem here is not Low Information but Low IQ. In other words, we are dealing with a pearl-swine issue. The swine don't know much, but they do know they can vote themselves more Free Pearls, and I don't see how this can be reversed with the swords of imagination or information.

Our constitution was designed to protect us from two things: from the state and from the mob. But the mob now has the state (and vice versa), so it seems to me that in the long run we might be *fucked*. Look at how the domestic mob is encouraging the foreign mob at the border. Who benefits? The transnational mob.

Until quite recently, I believed that human beings actually wanted freedom. Indeed, a big part of my support for the Iraq war was due to the mistaken belief that liberty is a universal value, and that as soon as Muslims tasted it, well, the tyrants would eventually fall like demonoes. Mea maxima stupida.

What is again a little odd -- or at least in need of explanation -- is how my generation somehow went from freewheeling libertarianism to the cramped statism of the illiberal left. Then again, this assumes some special virtue in my generation, as if it was not heir to all the usual ego trips and fallies of man. Once it gained a taste of power, the rest followed mechanically.

As Bellow observes, "The original counterculture -- that is, before it was hijacked and turned into a vehicle for progressive politics -- was actually libertarian in spirit." "[W]hat made it work was its antic humor," and "its willingness to flout the sacred cows" of the establishment.

But "nothing like that has been seen in this country for decades, precisely because the culture is now dominated by sanctimonious liberals who have lost the capacity to laugh at themselves." Which is why we have to laugh twice as hard at them in order to make up the difference.

Bellow speaks of the need for a new rebellion from outside and from "below." Yes, but the problem there is that these two must be unified in a rebellion from above. To rebel from below is to rebel for its own sake, or for the usual base human motives of envy, greed, favor, and libido dominandi. But the American revolution -- the neverending vertical revolution -- is a revolution from above. This is the real target of the counter-revolutionaries of the left, and we see it in a multitude of ways.

For example, the creation of an oxymoronic "living constitution" is the quickest way to kill the constitution. Likewise, as we saw with the recent decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals, if the ObamaCare law doesn't mean what it says, then it means both nothing and anything, depending upon the needs of the state. In other words, power determines truth, which is the essence of the pneumapathology of the left.

So, how does imagination displace power? Seems to me that this is part of the story of Christianity, as the imaginative wisdom of the yeast works its way through the undifferentiated lump of worldly power.

Interlude:

Militarizing the Space of Imagination

Back when Bob was a carefree bachelor, he had this roommate who was an epic stoner. We lived on the beach in a three bedroom condo, and both of us worked in the food industry. In other words, in the supermarket.

Well, the friend was eventually busted by store security and fired for smoking pot on the graveyard shift. This led to a few seconds of panic about how he would pay the rent, before it dawned on him that he could convert our condo into a pot farm. After all, it was just the two of us in a three bedroom condo, so there was that unused room.

So he bought a couple of tarps, obtained some 20 gallon containers and potting soil from the nursery, and got down to business. Oh, and he also purchased a 1000 watt bulb that he dangled from the ceiling and left on 24/7. Quite effective though, because in a matter of weeks it was a jungle in there.

Problem was, when the sun went down, it looked as if it had slipped into our condo, or maybe like we were hiding a nuclear reactor: our hothouse was also a lighthouse. So he threw a heavy blanket over the curtain rod, but even so, it still gave off an eery glow around the edges.

In addition to the glow, our little plantation gave off a distinct smell. The window was always open, so you couldn't miss it if you were in the vicinity. What was I thinking, living with this lawless Johnny Addleseed? Like I said, "carefree." In other words, I made up for in recklessness what I lacked in judgment.

I still remember when we received our first post-Midnight Sun electricity bill. I don't recall the exact figures, but in one month it went from something like $20 to $200. Nor did I know that this is one of the ways The Man can tell when someone is up to no good. But somehow we survived scrutiny, and not too long thereafter I moved out, because Port Hueneme was too long a drive to Pepperdine, where I had enrolled in grad school.

But none of this matters now. Or ever, really. I was just warming up my fingers. What really matters is some of the insights my schwaggrarian friend derived from being stoned around the clock. I should add that I no longer even partoke by that time. Among other things, thanks to ingenious sons of the soil, the THC content had become exponentially more concentrated over the years, to the point that it had become a major league mind-altering substance. I can only imagine what's happened since then.

One of my friend's oracular cannabis-fueled insights was that soon No One Would Know How To Do Anything. In other words -- and this was in the technologically paleolithic early '80s -- the complexity of society was growing beyond the means of people to keep up with it. More and more people were attending college, but they weren't really learning anything useful, i.e., the kind of practical knowledge needed to keep the whole shithouse from going up in flames or collapsing in on itself.

Well, first of all: can I buy some pot from you?

Secondly, is there any truth to this? There is an adage to the effect that every institution or program begins with some lofty or practical goal, but that the goal is eventually displaced by self-preservation and self-interest. We see this most vividly in the government and in education, where the Prime Directive is simply to increase in size, power, and influence. Any worthy goals -- e.g., helping children grow in wisdom and virtue -- are lost in the sentimental mists of once good intentions. As we have heard it said, the left is the Good Intentions Paving Company. And yet, their roads always somehow lead to hell. Ironic.

Believe it or not, I still haven't gotten to the main point. Don't you hate it when writers waste your time like this? My point is this: forget about the loss of practical knowhow and the flood of useless people with pointless college degrees in queer theory, feminist studies, climate *science*, political *science* (our worthless Dear Leader's major), leisure and recreation, Afro-American self-soothing delusions, and all the rest. The real problems lay in the metaphysical imagination, such that our culture has severed itself at its own roots. But like topping a dead marijuana plant, you can only do that for so long before you run out of leaves.

Analogously, imagine if people had thrown out all science prior to, say, 1960, in the desire to reinvent it from the ground up. Insane, right? But why is it any different to do this with tradition, which is precisely what the left has succeeded in doing over the past half-century? We have dropped the Object, the point and purpose of it all.

Borrowing Ken Wilber's four-quadrant map of human reality, there are the interior and exterior collectives, and the interior and exterior individual. Science is the spontaneous order produced by the exterior collective, i.e., a map of the exterior world. Culture, on the other hand, is a collective map of the human interior, and includes religion, art, manners, morals, etc.

Since the 1960s the exterior collective -- science and technology -- has proceeded apace, and yet, we've made no concomitant progress in moral excellence, let alone wisdom. Indeed, we have witnessed an obvious collective regression in those areas, and one of the main reasons for this is the soul-amputation that occurred then the left decided to throw out the collective wisdom of mankind and to use the power of the state to remake man from the ground up. You could say that the left is a movement that has forgotten more truth than it will ever relearn in this life.

As mentioned in a comment yesterday, there is an interesting article by Adam Bellow in the July 7 National Review, called Let Your Right Brain Run Free: Why Conservative Fiction is the Next Front in the Culture War. While I agree with the first part of the title, I reject the second. (His website is here.)

That is, "conservative fiction" per se will never be a front in the culture war; rather, as always, the front of the war is located where fiction -- or anything else -- conserves, extends, and converges upon truth, beauty, wisdom, virtue, etc. It is a truism that these things are always "conservative," because they are what we wish to conserve, precisely. We are under no similar imperative to conserve falsehood, ugliness, stupidity, barbarism, etc.

Being that the left controls the culture, conservatives are by definition the "counter culture." Except that the left has so debased the culture that it is more accurate to say that they are the reactionary anti-culture, whereas we simply stand for culture. I think this is where Bellow errs, because cultural excellence and conservatism are simply two sides of the same coin. There need be no specific content -- let alone political content -- to the excellence. Rather, the attainment of timeless excellence alone is more than enough to be worthy of conservation.

The left, by tossing out or devaluing historical excellence, has succeeded in undermining conservatism at the root -- the root of imagination. And we won't recover that root by writing new novels with conservative themes, although that won't hurt, so long as these works stand on their own as examples of excellence. But you will inevitably become conservative if you familiarize yourself with, as Matthew Arnold put it, "the best which has been thought and said in the world."

The Marxist idea is that if you control language, you control reality; and that he who controls the present controls the past, and therefore future.

But the present is always an imaginative engagement with reality; it can be profound or shallow; it can be ahistorical or extend into deep history and beyond the horizon of myth; it can be an isolated point or an endless line that unites us in community with the dead and unborn. It all depends upon the size and scope, the depth and luminosity, of the Imagination.

Nice Dreams. Wrong Father.

One important point about reality that rationalists overlook is that it is a function of imagination; or, in the absence of the imaginative element, the wider (or deeper) world is foreclosed and one is excluded from the Real.

This thought occurred to me during a walk yesterday evening, around sunset. I don't intend to go all mushy on you, but it was one of those evenings that, to paraphrase Bertie Wooster, almost make a chap feel as if he's got a soul-thingy or something. How to communicate this feeling? Perhaps more importantly, how is it communicated to us in such a direct and unmediated (by discursive ideas) fashion?

I suppose we could communicate it via poetry or painting, or maybe even music, none of which can be reduced to, or contained in, mere instrumental reason.

More generally, man always has two methods at his disposal, the analytic and the synthetic. It is this latter that cannot take place in the absence of imagination -- although it also comes into play in determining what to analyze. But analysis in general is something a computer can handle, whereas putting it all together in a creative synthesis is something only the soul can accomplish.

Now all humans, whether they acknowledge it or not, are on a quest for reintegration. Moore writes of "two modes of thought," one of which corresponding to what he calls "the common mind," the other, "the disintegrative mind."

The skeptic, for example, has a hypertrophied disintegrative mind that is not so much wrong as partial: it simply cannot join together what it has ruthlessly put asunder, neither in space nor in time (i.e., tradition and the priceless wisdom of the Living Dead), since it is mechanical and not organic (or organismic).

If everyone were afflicted with this psychic imbalance, civil society would be quite impossible, because there would be no shared metaphysical dream. Of course, one cannot really abolish metaphysics (or dreaming), so what we would really share is the soul-stifling materialism of the left, a metaphysical nightmare in which the only thing that unites us is the state. But that is not unity -- unity implying diversity -- but a mere unicity or "totalism" that sacrifices individuality for coerced order. You're still living the dream. Just not yours.

"Without the imagination," writes Moore, "man is shut up in himself, in the present time, in the material world, and in his logical processes." Furthermore, without the imagination, he is apt "to shut up others, too, in his clean and tidy prison."

Have you ever been shut up in someone else's clean and tidy prison? If the answer is No, then you haven't been paying attention, and certainly not to your government.

But it actually happens much earlier than that, when the only govern-ment we know is family and school. Both institutions, when they are dysfunctional -- which they usually are -- place great pressure on the individual to unconsciously assimilate a metaphysical dream that strangles the imagination in the crib.

This can be done with "the best of intentions." I know that my parents, for example, had nothing against me per se. They just didn't have a clue as to what I was about. Same with school. My teachers no doubt didn't want me to be bored and unable to see the point of it all.

I am grateful, however, that neither institution forced the issue, which at least left in escrow an unoccupied space, a hidie whole for later development. After all, an empty lot is far preferable to a crater filled with BS, or to an ugly office building. Yeah, my soil was pretty barren, but at least it wasn't overrun with weeds and parasites. Reminds me of a sign I saw on the road to Happy Acres:

Yes, it is true that in school I didn't learn much. Thank God! My idea for educational reform is to confer a Ph.D. on every infant at birth, so one can get on with the serious business of properly unlearning all the stupidities of the tenured.

Above I alluded to the organismic nature of reality. If reality is organismic, it is because it is everywhere latently "alive." In other words, life is not a function of biology, but rather, the converse: biology is a function of Life. If this were not the case, then Life would be strictly impossible.

Moore writes that "rationalism is the imposition of a predetermined, mechanical form of reasoning that does not correspond to the spirit of nature"; it is, in the words of Coleridge, "a blind copying of effects instead of a true imitation of essential principles."

One might say it is an exterior copy as opposed to an interior prehension -- for example, as muzak is to jazz. What distinguishes these two?

One is ALIVE! and life-giving, the other dead and endeadening. The same with the gifted or banal writer: one transmits Life, the other something less. (Image courtesy Rick.)

There are obvious political implications, for example, say, in the distinction between the organically developed common law of Great Britain vs. the philosophical abstractions imposed in the French Revolution (and every revolution since). Revolutions do not lack their imagineers -- far from it -- but their visions are parasitic on their abstractions, as we have seen in Obama.

What is Obamaism but a fantasy of how the world ought to work? Nice dreams. Wrong world. And wrong Father.

The IMAGINATION then, I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM...

FANCY, on the contrary, has no other counters to play with but fixities and definites. The Fancy is indeed no other than a mode of Memory emancipated from the order of space and time..."

I was going to end with that, but Moore goes on to explain that Coleridge is speaking of "a way of seeing the world as a whole, like a living organic being, rather than a sum of working parts, like a machine" -- and of "two fundamentally different ways of looking at the world" -- of the head isolated from the heart vs. head and heart rejoined to gather in wholly matterimany.

So, to imagine there's no religion is to imagine there is no imagination. But it isn't hard to do. Just imagine the left is right, and gravity and decay will take care of the rest.

The One Minute Raccoon

No, one cannot become a Raccoon in one minute. Rather, less than a minute, since Raccoons are born, not made.

What I mean is that I have only a minute this morning. Time enough to announce the dawn of a new thread, now open for isness.

Cosmic Leveling and the Animalization of Man

Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order. --Aphorisms of Don Colacho

As mentioned a few posts back, one of the general tenets or principles of conservative thought is the recognition and preservation of vertical hierarchy. When "natural distinctions are effaced among men," writes Kirk, "oligarchs fill the vacuum." (Like nature, trans-nature abhors those vacuous nothings.)

Thus, the story of leftism does not have a happy ending, i.e., a carefree proletariat living on Sugar Candy Mountain. It doesn't end in a classless society but a two-tiered one, e.g., wards of the state and administrators of the state, bureaucrats and cronies, power and its clients.

It is why the "income inequality" liberals pretend to care about has become so much more pronounced under Obama, why labor participation is at a historic low, and why blacks are falling further behind (one reason, anyway). The cure? More of the same!

Here's how it works: "Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from ourselves" (Don Colacho). Or in other words, little by little we transfer our power to the state, until the state does all the demanding and we do all the obeying.

"Hierarchies are heavenly. In hell all are equal" (ibid.). Indeed, "if men were born equal, they would invent inequality to kill the boredom." But since they are born unequal (or better, un-equivalent) -- in talents, in intelligence, in interests -- the left has invented a soul-sapping, boredom-inducing culture to stifle the recognition. Mind-numbing bread and mediated circuses to keep the LoFos either amused or riled up.

Another aphorism: "In society just as in the soul, when hierarchies abdicate, the appetites rule." Why? Because in a two-tiered system there can be nothing higher than carnal appetite and endless desire. The state has the overwhelming advantage here, since conservatives must rely on arguments, whereas the left has only to bribe with other people's property. Thus, "elections decide who may be oppressed legally." And "social justice"? That's the term they invented "to claim anything to which we do not have a right" (ibid.).

Ah, Obama's epitaph: "Revolutions have as their function the destruction of the illusions that cause them." True enough, but he's also causing an awful lot of collateral damage to reality while he's at it.

I could playgiarize with Don Colacho all day. Let's move on to the nature of this vertical hierarchy.

I suppose the first thing a spiritually bereft leftist will say is, "what about 'all men are created equal?'" Do we really have to remind him that this refers to equality before God and therefore before the law? This mediocre book on Original Sin makes the point that the doctrine of our primeval calamity assures that all men are equal in another sense, of ineradicable guilt for unavoidable sin. Thus, the doctrine can be "curiously liberating," in that it implies that we are "all in the same boat" and in need of a vertical intervention, the prince no less than the pauper.

For Schuon there are no fewer than five vertical degrees which we could boil down to corporeal/material, soul/psychic, spirit/intellect, formal (cataphatic) God, and formless (apophatic) God. Being that this is a hierarchy, it can only be understood from the top down. Thus, each level is a kind of downward projection of the one immediately above.

As we have discussed and even belabored, the essential error of modernity was to invert this hierarchy, such that the bottom -- matter -- became the top. But this led to insoluble absurdities such as how life can emerge from dead matter, or how the soul can emerge from biology. As a patient of mine once put it, "you can only get so much blood from a turnip." Likewise, you can only get so much wisdom from a rock.

In a properly oriented cosmos, we see the hierarchy of Beyond Being → Being → Spirit → Soul → Body; or Godhead → Personal God → Celestial/Logospheric Realm (which is mirrored in the Intellect) → Psychic → Corporeal (encompassing space, time, matter-energy, etc.)

Now, what would happen if we were to collapse this hierarchy? Or rather, what has happened? Let's start at the top: what happens when level 1 is merged into 2? A fascistic theocracy such as Islamism, which merges God and religion and denies the divine freedom of the Godhead.

How about when 2 blends into 3? I would say an impotent and disembodied idealism. 3 into 4? The desiccated, wisdom-free mind of the tenured. 4 into 5? The successful animalization of man, i.e., nihilism and barbarism.

For example, Schuon draws a distinction between "intellective intuition" (level 3) and "a merely cerebral 'intelligence'" (level 4). "The cult of intelligence... distances man from truth: intelligence narrows as soon as man puts his trust in it alone," for the level 3 intellect is precisely that faculty "which perceives the transcendent," or level 2.

And importantly, this intellect is "a receptive faculty and not a power which produces: it does not 'create': it receives and transmits; it is a mirror" of what transcends it, just as the level 3 psyche, when properly functioning, should be a mirror of "the world."

Another valid point, although one that will be easier for eastern Christians to appreciate: that the intellect is not fallen per se; or rather, one might think of it as the divine spark which survives the fall, even if it is only an ember. But the real fall is from level to level, especially from intellect to ego and then on down to the infrahuman (which is technically lower than the innocent animal, which only does what comes naturally; but when man becomes an animal, he sinks beneath himself and exists in a kind of unreal, non-space).

But if we understand the hierarchy rightly, there is nothing whatsoever "wrong" with any of the levels, so long as the hierarchy is maintained. I am thinking, for example, of Pope JP2's "theology of the body," whereby the body (and sexuality) is divinized by energies and graces emanating from above. (Indeed, the whole doctrine of Incarnation could hardly be more clear about this.)

Likewise, there is nothing wrong with the tenure-mind, so long as it is informed by the spirit, and doesn't become detached from vertical reality; or negate what surpasses it, up to and including its very source and ground.