On the Centrality and Triviality of Politics

Sometimes even I can't help thinking I am degrading the higher things by associating them with the festering sump hole of politics.

However, politics is always a first order concern, on the same rank as family -- family being not only the real unit of politics, but the most important mediating structure between citizen and state. This is why the left is fundamentally at war with the traditional family, because it is in competition with the state for our allegiance (e.g. their archetypal parasite Julia). Eliminate the family and you can have a nice two-tier system of State and subject.

Thus, not only do women vote Democrat because they are single mothers, but they are single mothers because they are Democrat -- or at least because they have assimilated its dysfunctional ethos and "ordered" their disordered lives to it.

This is what Nancy Pelosi means when she says that the triumph of conservatism would spell the end of civilization. Yes, she is engaging in hyperbole by flattering leftist culture with the term "civilization," but she is correct that we pose a threat to their way of death.

In the order of Things That Matter, politics is -- unfortunately -- near the top. As Charles Krauthammer writes in the introduction to his book, politics "dominates everything because, in the end, everything -- high and low, and most especially, high -- lives or dies by politics" (emphasis mine).

Thus, we "can have the most advanced and efflorescent of cultures" -- hey, I'm old enough to remember! -- but "get your politics wrong... and everything stands to be swept away."

While the mind is more important than the body, if we ignore or mistreat the body, it will drag the mind down with it. It's the same with art, science, medicine: in one sense they are obviously higher than politics, but in another, "fundamentally subordinate. In the end, they must bow to the sovereignty of politics."

In short, when politics is rightly ordered it allows the higher things to flourish, but "when malign, to make all around it wither."

Or maybe you haven't noticed.

What is interesting -- or disturbing anyway -- is that conservatism IS the simultaneous recognition of the centrality and triviality of politics. Because our souls are ordered to vertical reality, we do not confuse politics with the Permanent Things which a proper political order permits to flourish.

Not so the liberal, and for several reasons. First, since he lives in the fantasy of a horizontalized world, he is by definition unable to rightly order his life to what is important.

"Importance" is a function of hierarchy and nothing else, so if we eliminate hierarchy, then either nothing matters (nihilism) or everything is of the same consequence (moral relativism, multiculturalism, "diversity," "tolerance," boredom, etc.). But in the end, these two reduce to one another: leftist politics is just slow-motion nihilism.

But man's ontological station, as it were, is at the crossroads between vertical and horizontal. As such, man is infinitely distant from the animals, because any degree of verticality is as one is to zero -- or the third dimension to the second. Animals don't have history for the same reason planes don't have spheres.

At the same time, this explains why history is not accidental to man, but essential. And only the Judeo-Christian stream of metaphysics recognizes this.

Even a benign religion such as Buddhism regards history as so much smoke in a windstorm, while a malign religion such as Islam regards it as nothing more or less than the direct will of Allah, with no human mediation. For them "history" is a chronicle of Allah's inscrutable whims, whereas for us it is the residue of a drama that unfolds between man and God.

History has meaning because it has an origin and a destination, a ground and a telos. And meaning is only possible if there is freedom, otherwise everything ultimately "means" either matter or the Absolute. God gave us freedom so we could discover meaning. There is no other way. Thus, to even discover intrinsic Meaning is to have discovered God, even if your metaphysic doesn't permit you to have this 20/∞ inSight.

"First and above all else," writes Krauthammer, "you must secure life, liberty, and the rights to pursue your own happiness. That's politics done right, hard-earned, often by war." Thus, being awarded a Peace Prize is a pretty clear message that you've gotten your politics dreadfully wrong.

The deeper purpose of politics "is to create the conditions for the cultivation of the finer things," e.g., truth (theology, philosophy, and science), beauty (art), and virtue (human development). But as alluded to above, the "goods" secured by politics are outside and beyond politics. If you secure politics for its own sake -- AKA power -- then you are a leftist.

Returning to the intrinsic pathologies of liberalism, another consequence of its confusion is the unwitting elevation of politics to religion. This liberals do because man cannot eliminate his own verticality, any more than fish can live in trees. Religion involves many imperatives and subcategories such as the sacred, the holy, the pure, salvation, damnation, etc., so these too end up conflated with politics.

Running short on time here, but this piece called The Varieties of Liberal Enthusiasm implicitly goes to many of the themes touched on above.

A Fearless Search for the Ultimate Cause of Our Nausea

Very little time this AM -- so little that I had to abbreviate morning as "AM."

Continuing with Friday's post, it seems axiomatic to me that if humans did not have free will, then they couldn't possibly know it, for there would be nothing separate from necessity, i.e., no space across which to view it.

If we are in the land of necessity, then so too is every thought necessary; and if necessary, then unable to be anything other than it is. Therefore, statements are not true or false, only necessary.

Thus, in a very real way, to say necessity is to say freedom; I believe someone once made the crack that freedom is awareness of necessity. That is the least one can say of freedom: that it is something other than necessity.

But what is it actually? In other words, that minimum definition is like saying that light is awareness of darkness. It lets you know light exists, but doesn't tell you anything about it. Moreover, it is misleading, for it implies that darkness is the substantial reality, light a kind of nebulous absence or privation.

Now, in a certain way, truth is parasitic on error for the same reason that freedom is awareness of necessity. Certainly science proceeds strictly on this basis: it is a continuous exercise in trying to disprove one's current beliefs. It is very much as if science cannot know truth, only chip away at presumed error. Which is not nothing!

But it is not, and cannot be, truth. Nevertheless, as we've been insisting over the past I-don't-know-how-long, man has a RIGHT to truth.

In other words, all men and any man have always had a right to know what the hell is basically going on, i.e., what is the metacosmic truth and how to order ourselves to it. I would say this is definitional of man qua man: that man is the being who is entitled to truth, dammit, thank you very much.

But because he is so entitled, it means that he is entitled to the cosmic conditions that render truth possible.

Thus, first and foremost, man is entitled to freedom, since, as alluded to above, no freedom, no truth: the two are inseparable; it is not possible to think the one without the other. Or, you might say that we "think freedom" so as to "act truth" (and vice versa). Right? Right.

It seems to me that this goes to the Science Before Science; I would say that we are entitled to the science before science, but that we have to work for the science after science, i.e., ordineveryday worker bee type science.

Again, consider the Muslim world, where people aren't entitled to freedom. Therefore, they aren't entitled to truth. Therefore, science cannot develop.

To what then are Muslims entitled? The Koran. What is the Koran? The direct, unmediated, infallible, inerrant word of Allah. Unlike the Bible, it is not to be interpreted, because for one thing, that implies some sort of human freedom engaging with the text.

I guess I don't have to remind the reader that certain strands of modern Christianity are indeed more similar to Islam than to a Christian worldview. Islam means "submission," and that is what it is: submitting to absolute necessity, i.e., cashing in one's freedom.

The whole thing is rather confused, for how is submission possible if everything is necessary? Submission either implies freedom to submit, or else it cannot be meritorious. But let's let them sort out their own incoherence. We're more worried about our own Muslims in Christian clothing.

A mirror image of this pneumapathology is seen in the left's so-called "tolerance," in that it is an indefinable nothing. It is related to the negative definition of freedom in paragraph 2 above: tolerance is just the absence of intolerance, which, if you think it through to the next step, is the active acceptance and embrace of EVERYTHING.

In short, it is the complete abandonment of discrimination, taste, propriety, decency, judgment, maturity, and good breeding. In them it induces pleasant feeling of sanctimony. In us it induces vomiting. So that's the main difference between left and right.

It is not a question of intellectual differences per se, but a question of the gastrointestinal tract. Embodiment, don't you know; to paraphrase Don Colacho, it is an investigation of the causes of what disgusts us. For I don't doubt that we disgust Obama, just as he disgusts us.

God Made Me a Loser!

"What better way to feed subjectivist belief," asks Rizzi, "than to propound that their belief is given by science?"

Thus, for example -- because he is such a reliable example of subjectivist assoulery backed by science -- "Once you throw out the brain as the creator of experience, it's plausible that the mind creates experience." Therefore, "Getting outside the brain is easy once you accept that the mind is running the show."

This would explain Deepak's militant leftism: it works perfectly so long as you disregard objective reality and accept that your thoughts and feelings "run the show." Again: if one begins in the mind, one ends up out of it.

Why not begin in the senses, as does every developing human, since there is no other alternative anyway? Ever see a baby begin with a feminist theory about the degrading role of mothers?

A human being is not a brain-on-a-stick, but an incarnation, or body-and-soul. That primordial idea is how the West was won -- or rather, how the West won. The adoption of its antithesis is why we are losing, or at least frittering away our victory. For to embrace subjectivism is to reject the world. But the world will not go away quietly; nor, as Obama is finding out, does it fit under his bus.

Is Obama really a subjectivist? Yes, and what's worse, like all subjectivists, he implicitly believes that his subjectivism is the last word in objectivity. Or, as he said,

"Implicit... in the very idea of ordered liberty was a rejection of absolute truth, the infallibility of any idea or ideology or theology or 'ism,' any tyrannical consistency that might lock future generations into a single, unalterable course..."

Got it? The slippery truth is forever etched in Jello. Or, our gelatinous principles are spelled out with wet noodles.

Subjectivism necessarily equates to nihilism, and furthermore, renders real community impossible, since each mind is an isolated monad. No longer is it THE truth, only my truth, which is of course no truth at all.

But the very existence of science itself "is a continual refutation of nihilism, because it continually trusts that the world is understandable; even more, that it is understandable by us" (Rizzi).

Thus, the exercise of science rests upon a very naïve, trusting, and childlike metaphysic -- in a good way! For just as we trust that our parents won't screw us, we innocently trust that mother nature will not steer us wrong and let us down. Deep down we know that nature will reveal her secrets. To believe otherwise is to be incapable of science.

Even so, "it appears that science has hatched, or helped hatch, a culture with elements that are potentially destructive of science" (ibid.), almost to the point of suicide. And this suicidal attitude is not coming from the right. You might say that leftists are not necessarily "anti-science" per se. But they are nearly to a man anti-the science-before-science.

Now, this science-before-science implies both a ground and a destination, or origin and end. Or in other words, the ontological assumptions that make science possible carry with them certain entailments that make God necessary.

To pretend to have the one without the other is to cut off one's train of thought before it arrives at its logical destination. But it works both ways, because there are indeed some fundamentalists who obviously believe in God but who reject the scientific -- or terrestrial -- implications.

I don't want to dwell on it, but I actually flipped through a popular evangelical book that shall remain unnamed, and read this arrant nonsense (which is as utterly nonsensical and anti-Christian as anything Deepak could come up with): God

"decided when you would be born and how long you would live. He planned the days of your life in advance, choosing the exact time of your birth and death.... God left no detail to chance. He planned it all for his purpose." There are no accidents or contingencies, just pure necessity, from the Holocaust to his child's suicide -- both are just part of the Big Plan.

This weird philosophy goes by another name: Islam. It is not Christian but Mohammedan. Quoting Allah himself, "No soul will ever die unless it is God's will. The length of each life is predetermined according to the Scriptures" (in Bynum). You're all just little cogs in Allah's big wheel, so don't bother trying to figure out how the cogs work. God only knows, and God is irrational, so science is an exercise in massive presumptuousness, a recapitulation of the Fall.

The Koran suggests that it doesn't matter, say, if you become a suicide bomber or a stay-at-home mullah, because "those of you who were destined to be killed would have died regardless." Absolute predestination breeds unrelenting nihilism and futility. Unless you're a little dense, or a global loser, in which case I suppose it will be some sort of consolation. Indeed, losers will be very much attracted to this philosophy, since it frees them of any responsibility for being one. God made me a loser!

Here we see how Islam and predestination merge with the neo-Marxism of the modern left, in that their first principle is that it's all someone else's fault! The left may not have a God, but they have a whole gallery of convenient demons to choose from in order to explain away their failure: race, class, sex, whatever. With leftism you are only free to choose your demon, while the demon is responsible for all the heavy shirking.

With predestination, whether Marxist, Mohammedan or modern Christian, human agency is eliminated; guilt and responsibility are God's business, not ours. So you can wreck the world and blame a mechanical demon of your own imagination. What deviant child wouldn't love that?

And if that offends you, don't blame me. God made me this way.

The Reality Before Reality and the We Before I

The first principle of the science before science is that "the world exists independent of us and of our understanding." You'd think this wouldn't be controversial, but that's because you're not a genius, like Descartes or Hume or Kant.

Descartes, for example, in looking for a good place to set up a philosophy business, started inside his own head (I-think-therefore-I-am) instead of with the outside world. It's amazing he had any customers at all, since the doors are permanently closed.

Thus begins a tragic bifurcation in the human spirit. It leads straight to Kant, who concludes that we not only begin in the head but can never leave there -- or in other words, all we ever "know" are the forms of our own sensibilities, AKA the ontologically closed nervous system. Epistemology is severed from ontology, and here we are imprisoned in the subjectivist hell of Obamaworld, with no appeal to the higher court of reality. That was fast!

"Subjectivism" means that we cannot consult the world -- objective reality -- to settle our differences.

Rather, perception is reality, and crouching behind perception is a beefy looking man slipping on brass knuckles. "I think therefore I am" soon enough redounds to "I think therefore you aren't."

Seriously, have we ever had a president so hermetically sealed in his own ideology? That he is "narcissistic" is somewhat beside the point, because that pertains only to the interpersonal plane, when he's closed on every level. He can't be reached by reality because his soul is unlisted.

The essence of narcissism is closure of the human subject. It is only a pretend closure, of course, because the narcissist still needs others, only not for their own sake. Rather, the narcissist needs others to serve as mirrors of his own grandiose narcissistic image. In the absence of this mirroring he will begin to experience an emotional depletion, since there is no energy "coming in." Thus, he is covertly an open system, but in an intrinsically pathological way.

Now, I believe that ultimate reality is Trinity, and one might say that Trinity is intrinsic intersubjectivity. Thus, even -- or especially -- God is an "open system." In his case he is open horizontally with himself (so to speak) -- i.e., Father-Son-Holy Spirit -- but also vertically, with the world.

For this reason, every part of the world, no matter how teenytiny, will reflect this fact (a part so ptee does duty for the holos --JJ). Everywhere we look we see an open exchange of matter, energy, or information. It is what makes the world intelligible, for what is knowledge but the precipitate of an open encounter between mind and world? The world is always instructing us in its mysterious allforabit, and how weird is that?

Look above your head at the One Cosmos mysthead, and what does it say? Life is Our School, The Cosmos Our Teacher, Truth the First Principal. In a way, that says it all, for life is our school and the cosmos is our teacher. And Principal Truth pops into class every now and then to make sure order is maintained and everyone is learning.

This is not the way it is in leftworld, where ideology is the school, feelings the teacher, and political correctness the obnoxious principal.

When we say the human being is an open system, we mean -- like God -- both horizontally and vertically. But for us -- in contrast to the Trinity -- verticality is prior, while horizontality must be a prolongation of this. A human, in order to be one, must be open to love, to truth, to beauty, to virtue. These verticalities are known as "transcendentals," so to be open to them is to be vertically open.

Contrast this with the psychological, philosophical, or political narcissist. Descartes, for example. To what is he open? Himself. For which reason he is the quintessential infertile egghead engaging in metaphysical masturbation.

I remember reading in a book by the philosopher of science Stanley Jaki that we begin with the plain fact that objects object. Here again, this seems like a trivial truth, but recall the adage that a tiny mistake at the beginning will lead to monumental mistakes down the road.

Descartes, for example, should have begun with the idiotically plain fact that "Objects object, therefore they exist." That is literally the eureka moment that makes all other eurekas possible.

Conversely, if your eureka moment is "I think therefore I am," you have consigned yourself to a closed system from which you will never legitimately escape. If your first principle is "me," you can never get to the real You.

In contrast, even secular psychoanalysis recognizes the primacy of the You. The I is only discovered in the space of the vibrant and living relationship between mother and infant. I guarantee you that an infant raised without human contact -- assuming it could live -- would never discover the I, let alone the I Think and the I AM. For truly, as the Son might say to the Father: You are, therefore I am. And We are, therefore the Holy Spirit is.

Hey now. Dramatic. That seems like a good place to end.

Well, at risk of deflation, I've got a little more time to make a few more ancillary points. I mentioned this in the book, but have you noticed how the subjectivists begin with normal science, and then twist it around in order to support their subjectivism?

This is especially done with quantum physics and by scoundrels such as Deepak Chopra. We only know about quantum physics because we begin with really existing things like rocks and tables and chairs. We don't begin at the other end of extreme mathematical abstraction, and then try to get from there to the ponderable reality of intelligible objects.

But in a fiendish twist, the pneumapathic Deepaks of the world start with the paradoxes of quantum physics in order to prove that the macro world is pervaded by the same sorts of paradoxes, such as "perception is reality." Thus, they want to have their scientific crock and eat it too: misusing science to support a crazy a priori ideology.

Don't believe that people can be so systematically stupid? Here is one of Deepak's latest garbled mixtures of truth and fantasy. He writes, for example, that Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions "shattered the notion of objective progress in science by arguing that given their starting assumptions, every scientific scheme for explaining Nature -- what he called a paradigm -- is right on its own terms."

Or in other words, we begin with the paradigm, not with the objective world. Does that truth apply to Kuhn's paradigm? No, he gets a special exemption, so his paradigm is true.

"[N]o one has rebutted Kuhn's point that we view Nature through our own paradigm, our worldview, and that the history of science is a constant stream of shifting paradigms, one after another. There is no way to step outside the paradigm you totally believe in."

Er, I think you just stepped out of it, Deepak. Or into it, rather. The rest is just a pool of blather filling in the crater produced by the initial misstep.

Reality is Simple but Not Simplistic

I've been meaning to discuss another book in conjunction with Koestler, that is, The Science Before Science. It's not a very well written book, but it does highlight the scientific fact that there can be no science in the absence of a metaphysic that makes science possible.

And this metaphysic is some version of the Aristotle-Thomist tradition that emerged in the Christian west and nowhere else. The irony is that even the most bigoted anti-religious scientistic loon is, in all likelihood, implicitly operating out of this matrix, which is just Common Sense laid out in a somewhat dry and sometimes tedious manner.

You might say that as soon as the scientist thinks -- coherently, consistently, and deeply -- about what he is doing, he runs into Aristotle and Thomas walking toward him in the distance. They've been there before you. The idea that their approach can be "surpassed" is absurd, because while science itself always changes, the science before science never does. If it did, then no science would be possible. Analogously, the surface structure of language constantly changes, but not the deep structure of grammar. If it did, we couldn't say anything intelligible.

Indeed, this is one of the central reasons why science did not develop in the Muslim world, as it is entirely foreign to their dysfunctional metaphysic. There can be no stable "science behind science," because if there were, it would imply a constraint upon Allah's radical freedom -- one might say whim -- to do as he will. "Occasionalism" is the word for this cognitive pathology, and it is shared by the "everything happens for a reason" crowd.

This latter is nothing less than a rejection and undoing of the very metaphysic that allows us to explore and understand the world, in the confidence that God made it intelligible and us intelligent. I'm all for intellectual humility, within reason. We don't have to go all the way to absolute stupidity to make the point.

Interestingly, sometimes there is a direct connection between theology (not metaphysics per se) and science, as in the case of Kepler, who was convinced that the sun had to be at the center of the solar system for the same reason that God is at the center, period. As Koestler writes, Kepler's answer not only "came before the question" but "was the answer that begot the question." And as we know, there is much more light in a good question than in a dim answer.

However, for the same reason, Kepler had a hard time assimilating the idea that the planets don't run in perfect circles. But although not as beautiful as circles, at least oval orbits "cleared the Augean stables of astronomy of cycles and spirals, and left behind me only a single cartful of dung" (Kepler).

In other words, it would have been an example of bad metaphysics to start with the principle that circles are the perfect form, and deduce from it that planets therefore must run in perfect circles. There's always going to be a bit of dung left over, but perhaps we should think of it as cognitive fertilizer. For example, in modern physics there is quite a large pile due to the fact that special relativity cannot be reconciled with quantum physics, or the macro with the micro, but at least it keeps a lot of fertile minds busy.

I suppose the great discovery was that the same laws apply to both the terrestrial and celestial worlds, so the same force that holds the earth in its orbit causes a stone to fall to the earth. But it seems to me that this should be a direct deduction from, or consequence of, the fact of creation. If this is truly One Cosmos Under God, then it should operate with one set of rules and principles. Otherwise, we're back in Whackistan.

Speaking of which, Rebecca Bynum's Allah is Dead: Why Islam is Not a Religion, is pretty timely, isn't it? That's a bold statement coming from someone who no doubt prefers to have her head attached to the rest of her -- or who rejects the head-body dualism of the Islamists.

All religions are the same? Let's be honest: Islam is nothing like Christianity, and is in many ways the very opposite. The Islamists certainly see this. Why can't we? Who benefits by the conflation?

The left benefits, that's who, because their overriding goal is to discredit religion, so if Islam and Christianity are the same, then Christianity is crazy if not evil. But the Islamists also benefit, because if Islam is just a religion like any other, then what's the problem?

In the pre-PC world, people could be candid about the differences without fear of intellectual violence from the left and physical violence from Islam. For example, just last night I read a crack by Chesterton to the effect that "Everybody knows" -- everybody! -- "that in the very darkest hour of of the Dark Ages a sort of heresy had sprung up in Arabia and become a new religion of a military and nomadic sort, invoking the name of Mahomet. Intrinsically it had a character found in many heresies from the Moslem to the Monist."

Now, when Chesterton uses the word "heresy," he's talking about intrinsic heresies, i.e., modes of thought that are inherently dysfunctional, either because they are self-refuting, or prevent human happiness and flourishing, or render the world unintelligible, etc.

Specifically, it is "an insane simplification of religion, because it simplifies all to a single idea and so loses the breadth and balance of Catholicism." One such simplistic idea is alluded to above, i.e., the notion that everything is directly caused by Allah, with no secondary causes and no human freedom. That's insane, but it is also believed by materialists (minus the Allah part), Marxists, and those Christians who claim to believe in predestination.

Thus, Bynum is correct in noting that "when Islam is analyzed philosophically it reveals itself to be much closer to ideologies such as material determinism, nihilism, and even social Darwinism than it is to either Christianity or Judaism." Why can't we all just agree about this instead of going insane when someone points it out?

Another obvious difference: "In the Western tradition, legality and morality are two different things," whereas "In Islam, they are one and the same." Every Muslim knows this, so how come liberals don't? If only Islamists didn't so hate the West, I suspect that liberals would notice the homophobia, the misogyny, the racism, the inequality, etc. But since leftism is a doctrine of hate, there is a deeper unity on that basis.

Habit-Forming Realities and Mind-Altering Ideologies

Koestler provides numerous examples of the eureka experience, of the joyous discovery of, or insight into, a new reality.

I wonder if it's like that for Obama, as he slowly discovers what everyone else knows -- that ISIS isn't a JV terror organization, or that Iraq isn't so stable and self-reliant, or that al Qaeda isn't on the run, or that Benghazi wasn't caused by a YouTube video, or that dealing with a tyrant isn't as easy as resetting your TV, or that there's more than a smidgeon of corruption in the IRS?

Note that, as with Obama's problems, scientific discoveries are by definition "always there"; they aren't acts of creation but of apprehension. It's not as if E didn't equal MC squared before Einstein noticed that it did. And yet, failure to notice the connection isn't a priori evidence of carelessness or sloppy thinking.

Rather, it required an act of genuine creativity, or in other words, playing around with different frames of reference in order to escape habitual thinking.

In the scientific moment of discovery, "two previously separate matrices" are "fused into one," in Einstein's case, the matrices of mass and energy. Who in their right mind could imagine that mass and energy are forms of the same "thing" -- whatever that thing is?

Not to get too far ahead of ourselves, but it turns out that that pervasive Thinging is much closer to Aristotle's "prime matter" than believed by his modern intellectual superiors who rejected the medieval synthesis without ever truly understanding it, just as a liberal rejects a conservatism that exists only in his own head -- not for the purpose of gaining insight into the world, but for the purpose of elevating himself in his own eyes.

It is simply impossible to understand liberalism without first understanding the sociobiological matrix of chimps and their hierarchy.

Note also that that which is seen is difficult to unsee -- i.e., once fused, it is difficult to de-fuse ideas. For example, only a handful of human beings have ever actually seen that, yes, the world is round. The rest of us take it on various degrees of faith, and yet, we all have the picture in our head, the evidence of our senses to the contrary notwithstanding.

That image is relatively harmless, but what about images of more complex realities, such as cosmogony, biogenesis, evolution, etc.? Supposing you have an image of the "big bang"; if so, you can be certain that it is wildly wrong. Likewise some sort of picture of horizontal evolution, as in those posters with a series of images leading to man.

Such pictures are more or less pure fantasy, but man is in need of an image of reality, no matter how distorted. My nine year-old already knows that the image of Adam and Eve is more strictly accurate than the high school poster, if the latter is taken literally. One image is packed with truth about humans, the other merely with human truth.

Koestler writes of the "visual pun," whereby a single form unites two different functions. For example, Einstein's most famous insight occurred when he imagined himself riding a light beam. But this is really just an extension of man's very first visual pun, which was whatnow?

No one knows, but I imagine we can reimagineer the conditions by observing how a Stone Age infant gradually discovers -- and synthesizes -- human reality. Of course, we can't "observe" what is going on in their minds, but we can appreciate how they are constantly making connections, i.e., new fusions of previously separated experiences.

Science itself is nothing but the formalization of what humans do, which is the serial reduction of multiplicity to unity. And it can only take place because Unity is prior to multiplicity, therefore God. God is always Godding. We just surf the waves toward the divine shore.

That sounds like a joke, but if reality is a process of becoming, then each moment represents the minting of a new synthesis, which is Whitehead's central point.

The problem is, a reality is not only habit forming, but can become addictive. Obama seems to have a particularly addictive personality, because he simply cannot free himself of the mind-altering ideologies he imbibed in his youth. Just about everyone experiments with that shit in college, but most of us move on to the responsible use of ideas, while others fall into the downward spiral of tenure or politics.

But in any event, "discovery often means," writes Koestler, "the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit." Americans are eager to find out tomorrow what Obama has discovered under his nose. Or if he's really kicked the habit of ideology, which seems doubtful, short of an extended in-patient deprogramming followed by lifetime involvement in AA (Apparatchiks Anonymous).

When life presents us with a problem it will be attacked in accordance with the code of rules which enabled us to deal with similar problems in the past.... [R]esponses will become stereotyped, flexible skills will degenerate into rigid patterns, and the person will more and more resemble an automaton, governed by fixed habits, whose actions and ideas move in narrow grooves. -- --Arthur Koestler

Humorous Discoveries and Important Jokes

Sometimes I feel a little self-conscious about our freevangelical pundamentalism -- about being a practicing jehovial witticist -- but Koestler assures us that while the idea "that the Jester should be brother to the Sage may sound like blasphemy, yet our language reflects the close relationship."

In a footnote he elaborates on that etymological relationship, suggesting that "wit" is ultimately related to videre and to the Sanskrit veda, which is knowledge, big time -- you know, not just any knowledge, but the ultimate metacosmic gag.

Well, first of all, that's Too Good to Check. But it makes me think that maybe the jester is really the geister, the purveyor of spirit.

Speaking of spirits, you are being lied to about the benefits of grog. Fact is, we need to face some cold hard truths about drinking, no matter how pleasant they are: reduced mortality, cognitive benefits, fewer heart attacks and strokes, etc. Nor should you take any chances, because too little is worse than too much.

Could the pathologies of Islam be related to the misuse of alcohol? After all, their prophet, sage, and geister -- actually, this is Allah talkin'-- sezeth: O you who believe! Intoxicants, gambling, and [divination] are an abomination of Satan's handiwork. So avoid them in order that you may be successful.

That's a pretty stark contradistnc... conradidest... counterdis... difference: either beer exists because, as Ben Franklin said, God loves us and wants us to be happy; or because Satan despises us and wants us to be miserable and unsuccessful.

Granted, wise use of alcohol is predicated upon a level of personal autonomy and responsibility that may be absent, or even actively suppressed, in Islam.

But wouldn't it be better for those crazy adolescent jihadis to blow off a little steam by getting bombed at a kegger instead of blowing off limbs with a bomb from Qatar?

Koestler writes of "a continuous series" that stretches "from the pun through the play of words to the play of ideas." This is one thing I try to impart to my son when he sees me reading (or writing): I'm not reading, I'm playing. And that's not beer, it's medicine.

Not to devalue the latter, but "Reading is the unsurpassable drug, because more than just the mediocrity of our lives, it allows us to escape the mediocrity of our souls."

Yes, "True reading is an escape. The other type is an occupation." Nor does a book "educate someone who reads it to become educated"(Dávila). Which is one way the secret protects itself from the eager clutches of the tenured.

So, it seems that "getting the joke" is very much related to "solving the problem." I suppose you could say that a joke is an infra-discovery, just as a discovery is an ultra-joke.

One difference, according to Koestler, is that the joke generally involves a collision of matrices, wheres a discovery will result from their fusion. Thus, a really important discovery will involve a "permanent fusion of matrices of thought previously believed to be incompatible."

In contrast, the really, really important joke...

That was a joke!

Or maybe not. Could there be such a thing as an important joke? No, Joe Biden doesn't count.

The first thing that occurs to me is how, in the Soviet Union, it was only possible to discuss certain important truths in the form of generally mordant humor, e.g., "We pretend to work and they pretend to pay us."

And now that I'm thinking about it, the same would be true of certain vital truths that are not to be discussed or even noticed under a logophobic regime of political correctness.

Note also that "the history of science abounds with examples of discoveries greeted with howls of laughter," only later to be confirmed. You know, they all laughed at Christopher Columbus when he said the world was round, just as they snickered at Marconi that wireless was a phony. Same with Whitney and his gin, Fulton and his boat, and Hershey and his bar. But who's got the last laugh now?

With no global warming for 17 years, I'm not sure we can wring any more humor out of that joke.

This post was interrupted by a commute to school so the wife could sleep in. I've told her in the past that every time this happens, it sets back the progress of cosmic theology 24 hours, but she just rolls her eyes. I guess she's heard that joke too many times.

The Ultimate Situation Comedy: The Bisection of Time and Eternity

A good aphorism is a kind of joke, isn't it? If so, no one is funnier than Don Colacho.

And if brevity is the soul of wit, then an aphorism is its very essence. Most of brother Colacho's bon mots would easily fit into the space of a tweet. Which means, when you think about it, that if you are very skilled, you can squeeze eternity into 140 characters with room to spare.

Example?

"We call origins the limits of science."

In reality, the Origin not only has nothing to do with science, but can have nothing to do with it. It is a category error, but easy to make if one pretends that science is the only category. So the aphorism embodies a clash of matrices, as science comes up against the impenetrable wall of metaphysics (recall the figures in yesterday's post, with the two planes of meaning).

"We do not pretend to be correct. We are content with intelligent error."

Here again, at least as it pertains to the world, man is essentially condemned to intelligent error -- with one conceivable exception: divine revelation. But scientism is the ideology that pretends to be (or that it is possible to be) comprehensively true, for which reason it beclowns itself in unintelligent error.

By the way, "intelligent error" is nothing to be devalued or scoffed at. Man's errors are only possible because truth exists -- just as an optical illusion is only possible because of visual reality. You might say that our margin of error is simply the distance between man and God. This margin can never be absolutely foreclosed, but it can certainly be healed -- or treated, anyway -- with a lifeline from God.

And guess what? "Intelligence knows no barriers, but it has stairs." That's right -- there exists a circular -- or spiroid -- staircase that resembles a strand of DNA. Nor is it just hanging there from the sky, unattached to anything. How would that even be possible?

For which reason, if you really think about it, the "ultimate joke" would have to be the bisection of time by eternity, right?

Furthermore, this makes man the last word in wit, because what is man but a temporal peepwhole on eternity? You could say that man is a particularly witty response "to the challenges of the environment" (Koestler) -- which, since we're getting pretty far afield here, is on every page of Finnegans Wake.

The bad news: Hahahaha, Mister Funn, you're going to be fined again! The good news: Hohohoho, Mister Finn, you're going to be Mister Finnagain! Life takes place between the fines and the fun.

But "Ideologies were invented so that men who do not think can give opinions" (Dávila). It is fair to say that ideology is the Full Employment Policy for the iron triangle of journalism, academia, and government. Imagine those fields without it! Yeah, I know I'm a dreamer, but I can't be the only one.

Seriously, what would most blacks major in if it weren't for ideology? The higher dysfunction of liberal ideology takes any number of forms: sociology, social work, African-American history, critical legal theory, education, mass media, "family and consumer science," whatever.

Black college graduates are twice as likely to be unemployed because they are twice as likely to major in worthless or made up ideological subjects -- made up, of course, for their benefit. Thanks, white liberals! You gave us the degree, now why don't you hire us?

Not gonna happen. But liberals will do this for you: use the state to force a third party to pay you more than you're worth for working at McDonalds. Deal?

Alternatively, we can grow the state and then use it to hand out jobs to the unemployable, which is what they do here in California. California is running out of other people's money because those other people with money are running out of the state.

Speaking of which, "Political activity is the pretext with which the intelligence avoids its debts." Even more daringly, "The left ekes out a living dodging genetics."

Which is getting increasingly difficult to do when even some of their own are starting to embrace science.

Interesting, because what if the satan of inequality is a consequence of their god of diversity? What on earth would the left do if genetics were true?

Actually, I think they're already doing it.

Following up with yesterday's post on cognitive matrices, "All coherent thinking is equivalent to playing a game according to a set of rules" (Koestler). Thus, comedy requires rules, otherwise there can be no clash of matrices, i.e., of two matrices with different rules.

Here is an example of a violent clash of matrices, in this case, Al Sharpton with the English language:

Choose the Happy Pill and Escape the Matrix

It's odd enough that life should suddenly arise in a lifeless universe, but what about laughter? "On the evolutionary level where laughter arises," notes Koestler, "an element of frivolity seems to creep into a humorless universe governed by the laws of thermodynamics and the survival of the fittest."

Which leads to the question: is humor essential to man's nature, or an accident? Put conversely, is an intelligent being without this thing called "humor" conceivable? If Koestler is correct, it would appear not, since it is so bound up with the logic and structure of scientific discovery and artistic creation, and certainly the latter two are essential to man. But is humor just an unintended side effect of those -- a mere spandrel?

If so, the spandrel must have arisen quite early, being that it is so woven into the nervous system. As Koestler writes, "Humor is the only domain of creative activity where a stimulus on a high level of complexity produces a massive and sharply defined response on the level of physiological reflexes (italics his). This makes me think of the Law of Inverse analogy, whereby the highest is reflected in the lowest -- as in how, in the reflection of a tree at the far end of a lake, the top will appear closest to us.

The following visual aid depicts the "structure" of humor:

That little explosion at the center is where the two planes (M1 and M2) unexpectedly meet. It is the guffaw, but it is closely related to the aha! moment (or eureka effect) of scientific discovery, and to the guffah-HA! experience of spiritual awakening. The latter two might look more like this:

The squiggly line on the horizontal plane represents what we call wandering in the bewilderness or blundering in the wonderness while remaining open to the Answer. In a way it is the crookward path of Faith, since it is a kind of implicit foreknowledge of an as yet undiscovered reality. And yet, we "know" it's there somewhere, otherwise we wouldn't be wandering around like that.

Now that I think about it, it's the same with humor. Let's say I'm looking for material for one of my devastatingly clever tweets. Sometimes you look at a news story and know that there's no point trying, because you'll never wring any humor out it. Other times you just know the joke is buried in there somewhere. Which is why I am so envious of Iowahawk, because his comedic genius is able to mine humor from situations where I would have closed up shop and said "nothing funny in there."

Like, here's one related to Biden's bizarre rant about the Obama administration following terrorists "to the gates of hell." The rant was sufficiently funny that most would be content to let it speak for itself, like an America's Funniest Home Videos contestant. But Iowahawk says: AND ONCE YOU ARRIVE IN HELL YOU WILL BE READ YOUR RIGHTS IN ACCORDANCE WITH MIRANDA VS ARIZONA AND PROMPTLY GIVEN COUNSEL! It's funny because the overblown rhetoric is suddenly bisected and deflated by the reality of our testosterone-deprived administration.

(My offering: Biden: "We will follow our enemies to the gates of hell until they are brought to justice." No shit. Leave the Tea Party alone!)

But you should probably just insert your own examples, because trying to explain humor gets tedious pretty quickly, and besides, I only do it as a kind of verticalisthenic exercise to try to find a link between distant planes -- you know, like a paranoid psychotic.

About those planes: they may be thought of as "frames of reference," "associative contexts," "types of logic," "codes of behavior," or "universes of discourse." Koestler settles on the term "matrices of thought" -- and right away something tells me this term has comedic potential because of its evocation of The Matrix. Koestler defines a matrix as "any ability, habit, or skill, any pattern of ordered behavior governed by a 'code' or fixed rules."

Think about Neo when he's not just living in A matrix but THE Matrix. You might say that the punchline occurs when he takes the red pill. Or, prior to that, Morpheus essentially asks Neo if he would like to get the joke, which the pill facilitates. One is reminded of how psychedelic drugs may cause a similar awakening to new frames of reference.

For us, the left is indeed living in the Matrix, and now that I think about it, most of our jokes at their expense have to do with this. I will use my own tweets because they are close at hand, not because they are Iowahawk level:

--Obama is on to something: we can defeat ISIS if only we organize the Muslim world, or in other words, get them to cease being Muslim.

--White House attempting to authenticate beheading video before committing to golf game.

--Bush: hit those with links to terror before the threat becomes imminent. Obama: respond to imminent threats of terror by hitting the links.

Each one starts in the left's matrix and suddenly skewers it with a shiv to the ribcage.

Yes, comedy, it seems, is intrinsically aggressive, but we're out of time this morning. To be continued...

Barking Marxists Don't You Know the Gagster Laughs at You?

For Koestler, "all creative activities have a basic pattern in common," such that "certain basic principles operate throughout the whole organic hierarchy," all the way "from the fertilized egg" to the fertile egghead, AKA the creative individual.

Now, as it so happens, my doctoral dissertation was on just this subject, i.e., the patterns that permeate nature, from matter to mind. The Raccoon is born searching for the damn key to the world enigma, i.e., the "unity in the diverse manifestations of human thought and emotion."

Now, this is already funny, because humor, as we shall see, always involves an unforeseen clash of two frames of reference. We will return to this idea shortly.

If not now. Take the last sentence of paragraph one. I won't say that the conjunction of "fertilized egg" and "fertile egghead" is LOL funny, but it is mildly amusing. Why? Because we have the surprising conjunction of biology and human intelligence via the dual meanings of "fertile" and "egg."

And it's even funnier if it hits you that the fertile egghead is and must be ontologically prior to the fertile egg, which reveals how humor is woven into the very fabric of being. You might say that in the absence of verticality -- i.e., different planes of being -- humor would be strictly impossible, since there could be no clash of planes. An old lizard finds nothing amusing, Larry King to the contrary notwithstanding.

In short, in a horizontal world, nothing is funny. And that's a threat! One can't imagine ISIS members, or USSR commissars, or sensitivity trainers, or liberal activists, chuckling at the irony or absurdity of their beliefs. When the higher is dragged down to the lower -- or the lower subsumed into the higher -- laughter is no more.

Which, as we shall see, goes to the Incarnation, or let's just say incarnation, i.e., bodies-in-souls. Oddly enough, you can't laugh without a body, right? Laughter is a physical release. Why physical? What is the body doing when it laughs? After all, bodies don't get jokes. The mind gets the joke, but then somehow shares it with the body, which discharges the guffaw.

The same thing happens with crying: the mind is sad, the body releases. One can imagine this having some sort of Darwinian utility, some marginal survival value, but not so with humor.

In any event, both activities involve a clash of frames of reference. The awful or tragic or traumatic represent a sudden or violent intrusion of one reality into another. Humor can involve almost the same thing, but provokes a very different reaction.

For example, my son was watching the Three Stooges movie the other day, and there's a funny scene were a church bell lands on a nun. The Stooges aren't sure who it is, but her face -- of course -- rings a bell.

And even prior to that, the whole idea of the Stooges growing up in a Catholic orphanage sets the stage for an extreme clash of frames of reference, with piety at one end, slapstick at the other. True, it's lazy humor, but it hits the spot for a nine year-old.

Koestler suggests that "all patterns of creative activity are tri-valent," in that they may "enter the service of humour, discovery, or art." This largely depends upon the "emotional climate," as in the joyfully violent climate of the Three Stooges.

More generally -- referring to the triptych below -- the climate "changes by gradual transitions from aggressive to neutral to sympathetic and identificatory," or from the "absurd through an abstract to a tragic or lyric view of existence":

Remember, the lefthand column belongs to the jester (or wise guy), the center the sage (or wise man), and the right the artist. For example, if Newton were viewing the clip below, he might see evidence of the first Law of Motion. An artist might see a tragic misunderstanding, or perhaps an ironic statement about the dangers of religion:

A Raccoon notices that that's Larry David in a nun's costume, the very idea of which is a laugh, albeit on the cheap.

But just as there are cheap laughs, there must be cheap discoveries and cheap works of art. You will have noticed that this cheapness permeates the low-rent worldview of the typical MENSA atheist. They love nothing more than a cheap laugh at the expense of religion, oblivious to the howls of derision coming from above. But again, since the atheist lives in a horizontal world, he knows nothing of that deeper mine of comedy gold.

You could almost say that the scientistic atheist/materialist engages in a form of reverse punning, whereby bi- or tri-valent terms are reduced to their most concrete expression. It reminds me of the old joke:

Q: How many feminists does it take to screw in a lightbulb?

A: That's not funny!

In other words, the flatlander refuses to participate in the joyful world of multivalent meaning, and cuts you off at the pass if not knees. You don't want to know where Muslims cut you off.

Say, how many atheists does it take to screw in a lightbulb? Hmm. I would say none, since they prefer to curse the darkness.

So: in reality, i.e., here and now, "there are no frontiers where the realm of science ends and that of art begins..." Nor is there any place where the humor begins and ends, or in other words, Creativity is alphåmega.

To be continued...

Is God Laughing At Us or With Us?

Does the Creator have a sense of humor? I don't see how one can avoid the conclusion, or humor would be deprived of its sufficient reason. It certainly has no Darwinian utility.

According to Koestler, there are exactly 29 references to humor -- or at least laughter -- in the Hebrew Bible. Interestingly, only two are "born out of a joyful and merry heart," while thirteen "are linked with scorn, derision, mocking, or contempt" -- with the sarcastic ha ha of Nelson Muntz.

However, I think we need to widen out our definition of humor, because much of what is humorous resides in the Human -- in Homo hoho -- not in the text or the situation per se. Funny things are everywhere, but it takes a funnyman to notice them -- to bring out the implicit connection that tickles the funny bone.

I've been reading Koestler's The Act of Creation, which regards humor as the equal of scientific discovery and artistic creation. You might say that each of these three quintessentially human activities has the identical deep structure.

Many people have noticed, for example, that the theory of anthropocentric global warming is a joke. Problem is, it is a bad joke, because instead of seeing an implicit connection between two frames of reference -- in this case, weather and human activity -- it just makes one up. So the humor is forced, like the severely cramped and restricted humor that is permitted in a politically correct world.

Or sometimes the PC world forbids seeing the real comedic connection, therefore barring certain subjects from ridicule for the purpose of sustaining power. This article, for example, explains why comedians have somehow failed to exploit the comedic goldmine that is Obama:

'We learn this from Jim Downey, the longtime Saturday Night Live specialist in political japery. "If I had to describe Obama as a comedy project, I would say, ‘Degree of difficulty, 10 point 10,’” the writer says in the expanded new edition of the “SNL” oral history book, “Live from New York.”

'“It’s like being a rock climber looking up at a thousand-foot-high face of solid obsidian, polished and oiled,” Downey says. “There’s not a single thing to grab onto — certainly not a flaw or hook that you can caricature."'

Okay. Least funny president ever:

"The charter Choom Ganger, confessed eater of dog and snorter of coke. The doofus who thinks the language spoken by Austrians is 'Austrian,' that you pronounce the p in 'corpsman' and that ATMs are the reason why job growth is sluggish. The egomaniac who gave the queen of England an iPod loaded with his own speeches and said he was better at everything than the people who work for him. The empty suit with so little real-world knowledge that he referred to his brief stint working for an ordinary profit-seeking company as time 'behind enemy lines.' The phony who tells everyone he’s from Chicago, though he didn’t live there until his 20s, and lets you know that he’s talking to people he believes to be stupid by droppin’ his g’s. The world-saving Kal-El from a distant solar system who told us he’d heal the planet and cause the oceans to stop rising. The guy who shared a middle name with one of the most hated dictators on earth."

And that just touches the surface: his Lovely Wife. The Mom Jeans. The intellectual and physical laziness. The pomposity. The corruption. The backwoods liberal insularity. The straw man arguments. The compulsive lying. The thin skin. The media sycophancy. The fascination with celebrity trash. The never ending campaign. The absurdly positive Pravda-esque pronouncements on the economy. The blaming of government as if he's not in charge of it. Not only is Obama an ass, he is a perfect ass.

Anyway, Koestler's book is the only one I know of that gives humor its proper due, and treats it with the metacosmic seriousness it deserves (which itself is kind of funny). In the subsequent week or so, I hope to not only plunder the book for all it's worth, but extend his arguments into some hitherto unexplored corners of cosmic merriment -- or in other words, illuminate the divine sense of humor, which Raccoons know subjectively as the guffah-HA! experience.

In many ways, the latter is what defines us, which is why a Raccoon has merely to read the blog's masthead to know in his bones that he's come to the right place -- that he has found a spiritual home, or at least a halfway decent flophouse.

But today I have only time enough to play a fundation. Let's see how far we can take the joke in our remaining moments.

The frontispiece of the book has a helpful cosmic cartography that looks like this:

What does it mean? How to interpret the pleasure map? First, it reads from left to right; or maybe from the center, with left and right hands. Basically, the left column belongs to the Jester, the center the Sage, and the right the Artist. The center sage has to do with truth, while the right has to do with beauty. With what does the left have to do?

Koestler doesn't exactly say, as he leaves a lot to the imagination. Getting awkwardly personal for a moment, there are a couple of things I might say. There is no post in which I do not attempt to convey truth, beauty, and humor. The latter is especially difficult to judge, since I can't hear the joyous peals of laughter from my precious lambs.

Koestler points out that the person crafting the joke doesn't have the same physical reaction as the one who hears it. How then does one detect the humor? "The person who invents the joke or comic idea seldom laughs in the process." In fact, it just occurred to me that some things are so funny that they are beyond funny. For example, I might react to a Perfect Tweet by Iowahawk not with laughter, but with an envious THAT'S FUCKING BRILLIANT!

However, the converse might occur with a particularly earth-shattering scientific discovery: it might literally provoke laughter, a spontaneous physical release upon perceiving the hitherto hidden connection. So right there we see that jokes can be serious while science can be a hoot.

And not only. I have also noticed that certain aesthetic experiences -- i.e., exposure to beauty -- may provoke laughter. In my case it often occurs with music. I might hear something that provokes a broad smile accompanied a spontaneous confession that this is ridiculous! In fact, it occurred last Sunday morning while listening to some gospel music. Here was one of the tunes:

The same song in a different style also made me grin:

So don't tell me God doesn't laugh.

Crapostolic Regression and the Satanic Magisterium

Any idiot can make history, but it takes a real genius to mess it up to this extent. To quote the maestro, "Those who live in the twilight of history imagine the day is being born, when night is approaching" (Dávila).

In other words, voters imagined it was 6:00 AM when they elected Obama, when it was actually 6:00 PM. D'oh! They thought it was the dawn of a bright new progressive day, and have therefore been taken unawares by the encroaching darkness. (Although an astonishing 40% continue to ignore the evidence of their senses, and insist the sun is rising.)

This makes it sound like we are pagans, and that history is cyclical, like a clock. Well, I say it is cyclical unless we do something about it. In other words, temporal cyclicity is the default state of man. The ancient Israelites accomplished a world-historical leap in being when they discovered linear time, or history proper.

This is probably one more reason why they are hated, for it redounds to a perennial conflict that goes a little like this: "Modern history is a dialogue between two men: one who believes in God, another who believes he is god" (Dávila).

The born again pagan who believes he is god -- in this case, Obama -- has no patience for those of us who believe in God, who believe God is beyond history, and who know that God -- with our cooperation -- lures history in the wake of his Divine Attractor.

Obama has made so many statements conveying the lunatic idea that he is -- with our cooperation, voluntary or otherwise -- Lord of History, that he blows right through tragedy and goes straight to farce. In this view, Republicans are literally Satan, AKA the Adversary who loves nothing more than erecting stumbling blocks that interfere with the felicitous hand of Progress.

But "History shows not the inefficacy of actions but the futility of intentions" (ibid.). Obama has actually been astonishingly effective in actuating his agenda, otherwise he couldn't have accumulated more debt than all past presidents combined. Ask your great grandchildren if Obama was effective. After all, they'll still be paying for it.

And it is true that the Adversary is responsible for that inconvenient disconnect between government actions and progressive intentions, but it's built into the fabric of reality.

After all, how many centuries ago did man discover that the road to hell is paved with good intentions? More to the point, when did he forget it? And when did progressives invert it and embrace the opposite: that the road to paradise is paved with progressive intentions? 2008? 1965? 1932? 1912?

No. Just Genesis 3 again: "ye shall be as gods," yada yada. This is literally the attractor at the other end of cosmic history - the "satanic attractor," as it were.

When we say "lead us not into temptation," this is precisely what we are referring to, because this cosmic lure is experienced subjectively as "temptation" -- just as the divine lure at the other end is experienced as grace, or intoxicating beauty, or the erotic tension toward truth.

Note that this latter requires -- and facilitates -- being "empty of self," whereas the other end requires and engenders being full of it. Obama is particularly full of it, i.e., himself, to the point of toxic overflow.

Which is a recipe for the greatest possible fall one can imagine. After all, if one is close to the ground, a fall hardly hurts at all -- just enough to send a corrective message. But the higher one pretends to be, the further the distance to the ground. One can only imagine the abyss between a self-styled godling and the terrable firma below.

When Obama proclaimed Ye did not build that!, he was again uttering an inverted Christian truth, but also a straight up demonic one.

As to the former, any decent or even polite individual knows that countless human beings have contributed to his success and happiness, beginning with the love of parents, the wisdom of teachers, and the general kindness of strangers along the way. Only a narcissistic dick would deny this.

As to the satanic inversion, it is entirely accurate to say to Obama: you didn't build that! Why? Because Obama would be impossible and unthinkable in the absence of the progressive hands that have borne him aloft his entire life -- not to mention a progressive state to employ an otherwise unemployable man. I mean, would you hire His Weightlessness for anything? Could you even trust him not to lie to your face and rip you off?

A curious paradox of progressives is that they love them some affirmative action, but the moment you point out that someone is a beneficiary of the racial spoils system -- in this case Obama -- they get all defensive, as if it's an insult. Which it is. But that's not my fault. I didn't come up with the idea of state-mandated racial discrimination, or permanent reparations.

Back to that question of when it all started. When we say "Genesis 3," we are of course referring to the vertical, i.e., the Time before time. But even as recently as "two hundred years ago it was possible to trust in the future without being totally stupid" (ibid.).

Why? Because it was inseparable from faith in God and trust in providence. But the distance between, say, 1776 and 1789 is virtually infinite, for the American revolution was as different from the French as Obama is from Washington or Hamilton or Lincoln.

I always try to remember that WE are living in the future promised and created by liberals. We are the splendid future of that terrible past! Yeah, this is it. Whoopee.

But "Falsifying the past is how the left has sought to elaborate the future," so they have to keep making the past worse and worse in order to justify their underperforming present and grease the skids to an even better future. This they do with race, with sex, with economics, with America, with everything, until the past is just a demented ghost that haunts the progressive psyche and runs around academia screaming at itself in the windows.

But there is always night history and day history. Day history is journalism, the cable tempest of the moment, the diversionary two-minute hate. There is also a nightwomb of history, analogous to those paleolithic caves which primitive man thought of as the womb of nature. Because of it, "Everything in history begins before we think it begins, and ends after we think it ends" (ibid.). What is the cause, and what is the effect?

We see, for example, the dreadful effect of Obama. But he is not his own cause. Rather, he is the lefthound embodiment of a kind of perverse apostolic succession reaching beyond the horizon of writehand daytome history, all the way back to that fine morning in the Garden. And to recall the immortal words of Otter: You fucked up, America. You trusted him.

Obama is Not Failing History. History has Failed Obama

Bad news: Obama is failing History 101, and it looks like he won't even be able to pull an affirmative action mascot's D, let alone a gentleman's C.

Did he just not study? Or did he study the wrong historians? Or did he perhaps unconsciously assimilate the latter by virtue of having no contact with anyone else, and then having insufficient curiosity to find out what the revisionists are so busy revising? Or what these tenured apes unknow and why they are so dead set on unknowing it?

I have to be honest and think back, because I too once believed all that revisionist crap. Passionately. I was as passionate about it as I am about truth, because I thought it was true -- not only true, but suppressed and denied by the Powers that Be, so that made me doubly pissed! How dare they deny us the truth! So what if truth doesn't exist! That doesn't permit Big Whitey to patronize us with childish myths!

Not only is Obama failing history, but his fellow treedwellers in California are actually enacting a law to force children to learn about what an important historical figure Obama is! Well, that he is. Not because he is a half-white, but because he is a half-wit.

To put it another way, it will henceforth be against the law in California to tell the simple truth about Obama, or in other words, to desist from mindfucking the children. Children Will Learn, for example, that Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize within moments of being elected because of "his extraordinary efforts to strengthen international diplomacy and cooperation between peoples."

Fastest president ever! No wonder he needs so much down time. Those extraordinary efforts in the first days of his presidency wore him out. He gave us peace. Now let's give him some.

Let's look at some of the ways Obama has failed history: "He exaggerated Muslim contributions to printing and medicine, for example, and was flat-out wrong about the catalysts for the European Renaissance and Enlightenment" (Hanson).

True, but in rebuttal, Obama might point out that VDH is naive about the real purpose of history, which is to boost the self-esteem of various abstract racial, religious, and pervertarian "classes" and groups -- in particular, the privileged historical losers -- and to denigrate the evil winners. And by "winners," we mean western civilization, i.e., Christendom, so it turns out that Obama is in fact rigorously intellectually consistent. Or a consistent anti-intellectual, rather.

Next, Obama "also believes history follows some predetermined course, as if things always get better on their own. Obama often praises those he pronounces to be on the 'right side of history.' He also chastises others for being on the 'wrong side of history' -- as if evil is vanished and the good thrives on autopilot" (VDH).

To which Obama would no doubt respond: a-DOY! As if Hegel and Marx were just some dead white European males! Modern leftist gnosticism is rooted in those two rascals, who wasted barrels of ink proving that history is indeed on dialectical autopilot, and that its outcome is foreordained.

Except when it's not, in which case you have to break a few skulls, or bribe a few senators, or use the IRS to harass the enemies of History. Don't worry, it's all good -- the end, that is. So long as we are serving it, the means scarcely matter.

Let's pause for an aphorism or three, since Dávila saw Obama coming in his vast world-historical rearview mirror: "Reason, Progress and Justice are the three theological virtues of the fool." Which is why the progressive is a priori a fool. All the fool has to do is get out of the way of history and don't do Stupid Shit, because Progress.

Obama often repeats that crack about "the arc of the moral universe bending toward justice," seemingly oblivious to the fact that 1) it's just a poetic metaphor, not a literal truth, 2) it doesn't bend at all except insofar as bent human beings undertake the lifetime task of trying to unbend themselves, one assoul at a time, and 3) "justice" does not simply refer to "what progressives want."

Or in other words, justice is not to be confused with the arousal and appeasement of envy -- the latter being social justice, not Justice. Justice means giving a man his due, not stealing a man's goods to satisfy the envious mob.

However, Obama might respond -- except without irony -- that "It is customary to proclaim rights in order to violate duties" (ibid.).

Indeed, as Dávila points out, "Every day we increase the number of words that signify their antonyms" -- in this case, using the term "social justice" to signify justice, for what is social justice but using the power of the state to unjustly give people what they don't deserve?

Obama despises our kind of course, but he cares deeply about those Others, i.e., the envious mob. Why? Because "Compassion is the best excuse for envy" (Dávila). And "Envy differs from the other vices by the ease with which it disguises itself as virtue" (ibid.). So, get on the right side of history and pay up, sucka'!

"Another of Obama's historical refrains is his frequent sermon about behavior that doesn't belong in the 21st century" -- as if one can distinguish right from wrong by consulting the calendar. Well, if it doesn't belong in the 21st century, then how did it get here? Can't we just synchronize our calendars, and advance Islamist watches forward a dozen centuries or so?

What leftists fail to grasp is that their ideas and behavior not only do not belong in the 7th (or any other) century, but that the Islamist means to do something about it, i.e., kill you.

Besides, telling an Islamist he's living in the 7th century is the sincerest form of flattery. It's like telling a Marxist he's accurately parroting the party line, or correctly propagating the Truth of the Day.

One man's myth is another man's guiding star. I would sooner believe George Washington never told a lie than Obama ever uttered a truth.

I Smell Trouble

More bad news for Obama: "No one should take himself seriously. Only hope to be taken seriously" (Dávila).

Interestingly, Dávila has thousands of cautionary aphorisms that speak directly to an Obama and his ideas, none of them flattering. This means that either Dávila or Obama is a malevolent idiot. I guess we won't be able to make that determination until Obama says something clever or witty or wise or intelligent, so we can make a direct comparison. Maybe he's saving that for his presidential memoirs, i.e., the next auto-fellatiography.

This one surely touches indirectly on the left: "Metaphysics is the olfactory nerve rather than the optical nerve." Schuon often speaks of the fragrance of truth, and Raccoons agree with their SubGenii brethren that each person carries a "soul stench" that may be detected by the Worthy. Not to boast, but I wrote of Obama's ghastly soul stench way back in 2008, before he was elected and the smell became overpowering.

According to this KoonKlassic, "As we know, certain persistent traits set the Raccoon apart from his peers, including a sense of essential Truth, a sense of the sacred, a sense of beauty, a sense of the eternal, a sense of grandeur (or dignity), a sense of mischief, a sense of soul-smell (or stench, depending on the case), a sense of the ridiculous, and a vulnerability to ecstasy (often at inopportune moments).

"Taken in aggregate, these comprise his cʘʘnvision proper, accounting for his fundamentally unserious quasi-infallibility in metaphysical matters ('laughty revelations,' or 'inrisible powers'). But this mystical intuition is balanced by deep humility and charity, to such an extent that many humans don't even realize it when there is an unassuming Raccoon in their midst. Hence the title of the unpublishable cult classic, The 'Coon Next Door."

One recalls that initial meeting between Toots Mondello and Herman Hildebrand, when Toots startled his fellow Raccoon by exclaiming what Herman heard as "eureka!" Toots, a first generation Italian American, was of course saying you reek-a! -- you know, just'a like a Raccoon-a!

As we troll through the archives for more soulfactory adventures, we find the following:

"Dennis Prager has mentioned that one of the things that turned him toward religion was the experience of college. There he encountered, as have most of us, the utter foolishness -- the horror, really -- of secular liberal thought in all its ghastly maninfestations. Thus, to the extent that a modern (not classical) liberal education is useful, it is primarily as a bad example. Which is not nothing. We learn just as much from adverse experiences -- perhaps even more, in a way -- as we do from positive ones....

"I was reminded of this by our recent atheist trolls and the cheesy ideas they propagrate on our nerves, which are at turns stupid, monstrous, or silly. Although we are always ridiculing them, hopefully it is in an instructive and good-natured way (i.e., sacred ridicure)."

But in any event, "you can learn a great deal about God by listening to an atheist -- just as Dennis Prager learned a great deal about God by detouring through the academonic ivory tower of leftist babble."

As to the existence of our transdimensional sniffer, "There really is a 'spiritual perfume' that is emitted by certain particularly lofty souls, just as there is a 'soul stench' given off by the rancid." If my Coon scent doesn't deceive me, I believe Obama's "enjoy by" date was technically in the 19th century, where it is engraved on Marx's tombstone.

I guess the point is, as Dávila suggests in different ways in number of aphorisms, you can learn a lot about reality by what spontaneously disgusts you, so long as your senses of taste and smell are not disordered. (I believe dis-gust comes from the same root as gustatory.)

In another ancient post, we read that "to dis-cern is to sift and separate; according to Webster's it is 'to detect with other senses than vision,' 'to come to know or recognize mentally,' and 'to see or understand the difference.' It is to know by seeing directly, not by discursive logic (which it transcends but does not violate)."

Therefore, "this path surely involves 'seeing the differences,' but not with Darwinian eyes, which see only what the genes want them to see. For example, a frog will starve to death before eating a perfectly good insect that isn't moving, or die of thirst before drinking a California wine. But the way of the Raccoon involves recognizing the differences between truth and error, appearances and reality, beauty and ugliness, virtue and sin, ego and Self, Petey and Deepak. To be objective -- which no mere animal can do -- is to touch the Absolute...."

I would say that all the senses must be activated, only transposed to their analogues in a higher key.

So, remember the above the next time Obama asks, "who you gonna believe, me or your lying nose?"

On the Function of the Negro in the White Liberal Imagination

It's always good to start the day with a breakfast aphorism or two: "Superficiality consists in hatred for the contradictions of life" (Dávila). And "Hierarchy is the principle that saves the contradictions" (ibid.).

Being that leftists pretend to despise hierarchy and inequality, this alone is sufficient to account for their intellectual superficiality. But they just replace a complex hierarchy with a simple duo- or bi-archy, i.e., state (including its clients and cronies) and subjects.

As we've been saying, an orthoparadox is a fruitful and salutary cosmic complementarity. To slightly modify what Dávila says above, the first misstep is in seeing it as a contradiction, the second in trying to make the contradiction go away by either ignoring one side or reducing one to the other. This is done by religious people no less than the scientistic mob. And it is done most flagrantly and explicitly by leftists and Islamists, neither of whom are good at tolerating ambiguity, complementarity, and hierarchy.

About that term, hierarchy: it is not to be confused with tyranny, since tyranny is not only entirely compatible with the elimination of hierarchy, but usually necessitates its attenuation in order to consolidate power. A hierarchy is an articulated, organismic, multi-leveled whole, whereas -- well, Dávila expresses it perfectly: "Leveling is the barbarian's substitute for order." You can try to rid the world of "exploiters," but you will just elevate the self-styled exploited -- or victim -- to the new exploiter. See Ferguson for details: when the left confers victimhood, it christens a bully.

Which reminds me of something I've been meaning to write about: the function of the Negro in the white liberal imagination. Now, the term "Negro" is meant to be offensive: not to blacks, but to the white liberals who reduce the humanity of blacks to their skin color, so as to -- in their imagination -- cleanse or purify themselves of sin, and to render themselves superior. Like, say, Chris Matthews, they turn a man into a Negro in order to feel superior to another white man. The black person is just an anonymous placeholder for a psychic process in the white liberal imagination.

The idea actually occurred to me before the Missouri madness, when reading this biography of Samuel Johnson. What insight Johnson had into the devious ways of the self-justifying conscience!

First, he writes of how man doesn't live in "the world," but "in idea." For example, what is a longing for celebrity but an unacknowledged wish to take up space in the minds of a bunch of anonymous nobodies, the more the better? It's the idea of being an idea in the minds of other idiots who live in ideas: a fantasy at both ends, which results in "a conspiracy for the destruction of paper" -- or film, or bandwidth, or airtime.

Johnson observes that censure is "willingly indulged because it always implies some superiority." This is so much a part of daily life as to be a banality, but one must never forget that there are two ways to censure and condemn, only one of which is healthy.

One must of course recognize, condemn, and fight what is evil, but only if and because it is evil. It is obviously evil to call a good evil, but on a more subtle level it is a kind of moral evil to get a secret thrill from the condemnation, because, as Johnson suggests, it covertly implies a moral or intellectual superiority in the one who indulges it.

So we really shouldn't take pleasure in the condemnation. We can have fun with it, as we do here at One Cosmos, but the moment you begin using it as a tool of superiority, you are rendered inferior. You know, humility: if you don't have an abundance of it, you're just wrong. For "an individual can ease his guilt by magnifying or dwelling on faults that seem different from his own." It's like going to confession, only you're confessing someone else's sin.

Bate writes that "In all this a fundamental motive is the desire to relieve our sense of unfavorable disparity between ourselves and others." We are always jockeying for position in an imaginary hierarchy, at least if we are not careful.

Of course, it is not intrinsically wrong to regard oneself as "higher" than another, so long as the judgment is both objective and disinterested. I am in some senses "higher" than my son, but it is just a banal matter of fact, and does nothing to boost my self-esteem, covert or otherwise. Furthermore, if I am lucky, he will someday surpass me, so there is no personal interest in somehow freezing the superiority in place.

Instead of lowering others in our imagination, we should of course "try to raise ourselves." But "to lessen others" is just far too easy, plus it becomes addictive after awhile. Not to get ahead of ourselves, but I think this goes to the literal compulsiveness with which white liberals deal with race: they simply cannot get past it, because it feels too good to obsess over it.

Truly, you can't get away from it. For example, this weekend I was trying to enjoy the Little League World Series, but the announcers simply wouldn't let you forget that the Chicago team was made up of ALL NEGROES! And they were from the JACKIE ROBINSON Little League. And once upon a time Jackie Robinson couldn't play major league baseball because he was a NEGRO! But look at us! We're white liberals and we LOVE NEGROES! We're not like those old WHITE CONSERVATIVES who hated Negroes, even though they were DEMOCRATIC PROGRESSIVES! Truth and history don't matter, because it's all about using Negroes to feel MORALLY SUPERIOR!

It's all so inappropriate -- as obnoxious as the constant boner pill ads -- but like I said, it's a compulsion.

I would advise you to read the article linked above, for Williamson demolishes the myth that southern Democrats were "conservative." Rather, they "were practically indistinguishable from their non-southern Democrats" on the vast majority of other important issues: "Contrary to the myth of the conservative southern Democrat, the sons of the Confederacy voted en bloc with the GOP on a vanishingly small number of issues." Rather, they supported the progressive agenda 87% of the time.

But that doesn't matter, because the myth feels too good, and the white liberal relies upon it to elevate himself over the rest of us. That his policies are destructive to blacks, both individually and collectively, is of no consequence whatsoever. Nor does he care if he elevates toxic sociopaths such as Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson to the status of "leaders," so long as doing so provokes that tingle of superiority. The latter is the very source of any power wielded by the race hustlers, from Eric Holder on up.

You could say that Chris Matthews' infamous tingle wasn't caused by Obama; rather, vice versa: Obama is the product of millions of such self-deceptive moral tingles.

A Stranger on My Own Home Planet

Yes, remystification is a good thing. It is what the Raccoon strives for. However, this is to be sharply distinguished from mere mystification, which is either a sentimental or profit-driven erosion of distinctions rooted in magical thinking -- deepaking the chopra -- or a kind of cynical blocking of inquiry around a position that cannot be rationally defended -- political correctness.

Or as Chesterton said, "There are two kinds of people in the world, the conscious dogmatists and the unconscious dogmatists. I have always found myself that the unconscious dogmatists were by far the most dogmatic."

Which is why Obama's defenders naturally call him a "pragmatist," of all things, the purpose being to throw a shroud of mystification over his dogmatism -- to blur, not clarify.

Chesterton also observed that "the main problem for philosophers" is how to reconcile -- or tolerate -- the following orthoparadox: how to "contrive to be at once astonished at the world and yet at home in it? How can this world give us at once the fascination of a strange town and the comfort and honor of being our own town?

"We need this life of practical romance; the combination of something that is strange with something that is secure. We need to view the world as to combine an idea of wonder and an idea of welcome. We need to be happy in this wonderland without once being merely comfortable."

On that same fortuitous page we read that "All things grow more paradoxical as we approach the central truth." I know exactly what GK means, but again, mere paradox can be employed in the defense of mystification. In contrast, orthoparadoxy combines the utmost in clarity with the last weird in mystery: wonder and welcome, fascination and comfort, weirdness and security, strangers in our own hometown.

With that in mind, to what does the word God refer? Correct: it is a Mystery. But does this mean we can say nothing about God -- or that talk of God amounts to so much nothing? How then do we even have the word? We are not pneumababbling deconstructionists: we believe that words have referents in reality and that reality is intelligible in the form of words.

The problem, I suppose, is that God is the reality, so it is not possible to stand outside that reality in order to "refer" to it. Good point.

Still, we reject this as needless mystification: all wonder and no welcome. It is simultaneously too weird and not weird enough. Because what would be really weird is if creatures could have genuine insight into their Creator.

I will cut to the chase and say that I am entirely persuaded (with important modifications) by Harshorne's conception of God as not absolute, except insofar as he is absolute relativity. Furthermore, to posit God as absolute-absolute is to drain both God and world of all mystery, except in the annoying sense of "why does He bother?"

Because if God knows exactly how everything is going to play out, then there is no contingency: all is necessity, right down to the most infinitesimal decimal. This post, for example, was written before the foundation of the world. Which I would suggest is abject mystification, or in other words, grandiose cosmic bullshit.

What I don't quite get is how people in the Judeo-Christian stream would go for this conception, for revelation reveals some rather astonishing facts about God. There are many, but some of the critical ones are that he is person; that he is creator; that he is love; and that (for Christians) he is three. But the absolute in the philosophical sense could be none of these things.

What is also interesting is that the Christians most likely to embrace the notion of God as philosophical absolute are fundamentalists who are otherwise extremely wary about philosophical contamination of Christianity. But the idea of an unchanging Absolute is again a Greek import.

One of our teachstones is that man is the image and likeness of the Creator. The orthodox conception is that the image is analogous to the potential, whereas likeness is its actualization, i.e., theosis.

Now, if God is the unchanging absolute, this would imply that the best man would be the one who is likewise immutable, not subject to change or suffering, radically complete, an ainsoferable gnosis-all. First of all, that would be impossible, short of death. But even if possible, would it be admirable?

Besides, what is a person? Is a person without social relations even conceivable? No.

This is not to suggest that God is not absolute, because he is. But one of Hartshorne's excellent orthoparadoxes is not only that his relativity -- his capacity for real relationship -- is absolute, but that relativity both surpasses and includes his absoluteness -- just like any other person!

You might say that God's absoluteness is analogous to "character" in a human being. Character is what doesn't change, what endures over time despite changing circumstances. So to say, for example, that God is "good," or "love," or "creativity," is to refer to absoluteness, except converted into a dynamic verb instead of a static noun, so to speak.

Can love ever be static? Creativity? Knowledge? Speech? Life? I wouldn't even say that God is three so much as perpetually three-ing. And there is no unchanging noun behind or above this verbal dynamism, on pain of God not being a subjective Person-in-relation but an impersonal object.

Strangers on our own wondrous home planet: