Progressives: Parasites on Progress

Insufficient time for a fully loaded post, but maybe enough to nibble at the margins of George Gilder's Knowledge and Power, which is again enthusiastically raccoomended to all.

Matters up here are further complicated by what turns out to be a fractured metacarpal. I declined the cast in favor of a brace, but still, I was a primitive hunt 'n pecker to begin with. This is ridiculous. My thoughts are running so far ahead of my available fingers that it's like typing under water.

So I'll just highlight and expand upon some peripheral points without getting into the main core of the argument. For example, Gilder writes of scouring the Harvard catalogue and concluding "that 80 percent of the courses stultified their students."

And they don't just stultify intellectually, which is bad enough, but spiritually; you might say they warp the person both existentially and ontologically, i.e., in both knowing and being.

Thus, a significant majority of courses at this quintessentially "elite" university are "either self-evident or wrong, ideological or tautological, twisted or trivial." No doubt Miley Cyrus will soon be a guest lecturer in their Womyn's Studies department.

Why is it our business if deluded parents want to shell out 200 large to have their children indoctrinated with the latest perverse nonsense?

I see two potential problems: first, some of the children will lack the skepticism, or self-awareness, or independence of mind, or grounding in higher truth, to resist the indoctrination. Second, one of these idiots might become president.

D'oh!

Or as Gilder says, "Now those stultified students are running the country."

Stultified, like how?

Well, if, say, a president has no allegiance to truth but only power, then we have no right to expect intellectual consistency, as truth will be in service to power rather than vice versa. To the extent that consistency is present, it will be in terms of adhering to the needs of power, which change from day to day.

Thus, the Constitutional Scholar assured us when running for president that "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat."

Your point being? That was then. The needs of power were different. Likewise, no one was more outraged than Obama about the IRS's political persecution of taxpayers. Now? Phony scandal.

An associated question is why do the tenured despise the very economic system that makes their frivolous lives possible? This strikes me as a plausible motive:

"Capitalism offers nothing but frustrations and rebuffs to those who, by virtue of their superior intelligence, birth, credentials, or ideals, believe themselves entitled to get without giving, to take without risking, to profit without understanding, and to be exalted without humbling themselves to meet the unruly demands of others in an always perilous and unpredictable life."

The market, for example, can only offer health insurance, and compete with other companies for your patronage -- i.e., in pleasing the consumer. (I should add that this would be the case in a real market, uncontaminated by the abundance of low-entropy noise from the state.)

But Obama didn't even need to please a majority of skeevy politicians, let alone citizens. Rather, through outrageous lies, naked bribery and legislative trickery -- thuggery, humbuggery, and skulduggery -- he was able to force this beast upon 300 million other human beings, who are now significantly less free than they were the day before.

At any rate, "It is not surprising, therefore, that the chief source of misunderstanding of capitalism is the intelligentsia, who disdain bourgeois or 'middle class' values and deny the paramount role of individual enterprise in the progress of the race."

In the deluded minds of progressives, they believe they are the cause of progress rather than its parasites.

Tending to Your Own Isness in the Present Tense

There is only one method: to be intelligent. --Voegelin

Just a few more items to cover in Voegelin's massive missives before moving on to Knowledge and Power.

One reader mentioned that he had some difficulty with Voegelin's use of the word "tension," which is so central to his thinking.

Specifically, it refers to the intrinsic tension of undeformed human existence -- of the fundamental experience of tending to, or longing for, transcendence. Human beings live in the space between appearances and reality, or manifestation and principle, or relative and absolute, or (•) and O. Way it is.

Voegelin addresses this in a letter, noting that "The Latin tensio derives from the verb tendere, which means, just as in English, tend, being stretched or tending in a certain direction toward something."

Hey, no offense, but "I am at a bit of a loss to understand why the philosophical meaning of tension, which stresses the directional factor in the existential tension, should cause such difficulty?"

Rather, "this tension of existence manifests itself concretely in the 'quest,' the 'search, the 'questioning and inquiring' of the thinker in the direction of the ground of his existence that is, at the same time, the 'mover' of the inquiry and the 'drawer' of the soul toward its immortality." (You know the crack -- "God becomes man so that man might become God." In an orthoparadoxical manner of speaking, of course.)

Pretty clear, no? I find it interesting that Voegelin regarded this description as not only an unsurpassable truth, but a literally scientific account of man's ontological situation. And I believe he is correct, because it cannot be explicitly refuted without being implicitly affirmed. We always live in tension toward the Great Attractor, O.

Unless we don't. To rip an example from the LoFo headlines, what do you suppose Miley Cyrus is oriented toward? Where is the tension in her life?

Well, for starters, she appears to believe that all such tension represents a kind of oppression, and that in order to exist in freedom we must, to parableat Lileks, cross every line, push every envelope, and transgress every norm. Until there is nothing creepy and no one left to creep out. She exists in tension toward the bottom -- Ø -- and won't stop until she gets there.

Which reminds me of something Alan Watts once said -- something to the effect that the stripper is sexy until she removes the last veil. As Lileks says of Cyrus (strange to see those two names in the same sentence), she has "no mystery, no allure, no skill, [and] no art." Which, on the one hand, is obvious. But the reason she has none of these is because of the abolition of the Tension.

Tension is good, and coincidentally, it is one of the major themes of Gilder's Knowledge and Power. Briefly -- for we'll get into it in much more detail later -- not just the raving Krugmaniacs, but even sane and sober economists labor under the misplaced metaphor of a Newtonian system to describe the economy.

In short, they see it as a spontaneous order that tends to equilibrium. But in reality, it is a system of information that requires the vertical ingression of entreprenurial creativity to avoid equilibrium. Equilibrium, as in biology, means death.

As we shall see, order is actually the opposite of information; order is low entropy, whereas information is high entropy -- for which reason the top-down approaches of the statists never work, because they try to replace high entropy information with low-entropy power to achieve order.

Never mind the trillions of dollars Obama has removed from the productive economy. Much more dreadful and damaging is the untold information he has destroyed or prevented along with it.

Don't worry. You'll get it. The point is, money doesn't have the same value in different people. For example, it has much more value -- because more information -- in the hands of a Steve Jobs or Jeff Bezos or a Koch brother than it does in the hands of an Obama, a Reid, or a Pelosi.

Welfare and food stamps are about as low entropy as money can get, for you can't make a man more valuable by paying him more than he's worth, nor can you conjure success by simply subsidizing one of its side effects, i.e., "money." Give money to an Israeli and he'll create a high tech company around his new invention. Give it to a Palestinian and he'll buy more rat poison and ball bearings to blow up the inventor.

Hmm. It occurs to me that low entropy envies high entropy as a way to obliterate the Tension. That pretty much explains the left, doesn't it? There was a time when we admired the successful, i.e., tolerated the tension between us and them. The left is all about filling that space with bitterness, envy, resentment, entitlement, and charges of racism, homophobia, gynophobia, and all the rest. All of these words have become low-entropy ciphers in the mouths of the left. They pretty much mean nothing but "gimme."

Conversely, God -- or O -- would have to represent the most intense degree of entropy. And interestingly, a high entropy message can be indistinguishable from a low entropy message, because it will appear random. This dovetails nicely with Voegelin's acknowledgement that "behind the [low entropy] gods of the Myth," exists "the real [high entropy] God about whom one can say nothing" -- since the entropy of this Word is just too maxed out.

So "when somebody says that I am a mystic, I am afraid I cannot deny it. My enterprise of what you call 'de-reification' would not be possible, unless I were a mystic."

To sum up then, a Gnostic -- including of course the political Gnostic -- is low information and low entropy, which is what makes them such crashing borgs. Conversely, the mystic lives in dynamic tension toward the first and last Word in high entropy in-formation, O. Anything short of this implicitly violates the second Commandment, for

No symbolization is adequate to the ineffability of the divine Beyond. Hence, when you are a believer on the level of symbol, you become an "infidel" to the ineffable truth of divine reality...--Voegelin

Reality and its Alternatives, Philosophy and its Apes

If one thinks and lives philosophically -- as in seeking after and loving Wisdom -- then the world -- the human world -- is indeed a strange and spiritually sick place.

There's no getting around this conclusion, but it doesn't make one a Gnostic in the bad sense of the word, any more than noticing physical illness marks one out as a quack.

Think of an extreme case, say, Solzhenitsyn in the USSR. He was able to diagnose the sickness there because of his extreme sobriety, because of his refusal to be seduced by illusions, and because of an overriding and courageous love of truth for its own sake.

In short, he simply practiced philosophy against ideology, or light against darkness, or truth against force.

Voegelin writes of how a good deal of contemporary politics -- because it is dominated by ideology -- "belongs to the class of surrealist phenomena," completely bypassing the "great philosophical initiatives" of the 20th century (he mentions Whitehead and Bergson, to which I would add Gödel and Polanyi, since those two alone obliterate any reductionistic fantasies of scientistic control). Instead, public modes of cognition are "dominated by thought forms widely differing from philosophy" as defined above.

For ideology in general and the left in particular, violence -- or power, which is simply implicit force, i.e., threat -- takes on a central importance. Voegelin suspects that this is because, in the radically secularized mind of the ideologue, "violence has become an instrument of magic, meant to achieve the alchemistic opus of the perfect society."

It's not that one must break a few eggs in order to make an omelet. Rather, for the ideologue, the egg-breaking is a magical operation that results in the manifestation of an omelet. And the fact that no omelet appears just makes them try harder. Maybe they just didn't break enough eggs -- which basically describes Keynesian economics, doesn't it?

Again, think of an extreme case such as Nazis, who believed that if they only murdered enough Jews, this would result in the magical transformation of Germany. Recall that many more Jews were killed after the war became clearly unwinnable -- as if killing a sufficient number of Jews and other "contaminants" would please Wotan enough to turn the tide.

This principle is echoed in George Gilder's wonderful Knowledge and Power, about which we will no doubt be blogging at great length. The key error of the left is concise enough to be printed on a bumper snicker: the attempt to replace knowledge with power, or truth with coercion.

It would be difficult to imagine a more perfect example than Obamacare, which starts with the insane conceit that it is possible to understand a system as complex as the healthcare industry, and to impose a top-down replacement for the infinite amount of information -- of personal knowledge -- dispersed throughout the individuals and institutions involved.

It cannot be done. It is impossible in principle -- but only if one thinks philosophically. If one thinks ideologically, it is a different story, for "ideological faith makes all things possible." With one caveat: In. Your. Dreams. (Or maybe the dreams from your Marxist father.)

There is so much good stuff in this book. I'll just cite one example. Gilder points out that public employee unions actually learn more slowly than tapeworms, because at least tapeworms are intelligent enough to usually not devour the host.

Living as I do in California, I know this statement to be not just fine insultainment, but a truism beyond refudiation. I'm sure Detroiters feel the same way, as will all Americans when the fiscal deal finally goes down -- which it must, on pain of revoking the law of gravity.

In fact, for people living in Realville, it is a source of solace to know that what cannot go on will not go on.

Oh, this is good: Gilder uses the term "deteriorating paradigm" to describe one that becomes more complex to account for its lack of explanatory power.

Think of global warming, which adds epicycles to inepticycles within klepticycles to account for the simple fact that the globe ain't warming.

Back to the surrealism of ideology. I'm not sure that is the best word, since sur-real implies above reality, when the problem is its failure to ascend to reality. Therefore, "subreal" would be a more accurate term. "Homosexual marriage," for example, cannot be surreal, appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

Rather, it is subreal, a failure to ascend to the disturbing knowledge of sexual differences -- which the left must deny a priori, since the last thing they want is essence trumping existence; if it does, then people cannot be shoved around like bags of wet cement in order to impose their perfect society.

When philosophy and ideology are conflated, "and man tries to overcome the condition humaine by imagining alternatives to it, then we get into the real trouble of the revolutionary activities" (Voegelin). Nevertheless, "people succumb, again and again, to the magic of ideological intoxication" and the consequent revolt against human nature.

For which reason it is a crime against humanity to intoxicate children with ideology, as is done in our public schools and looniversity bins. For the assouls

"who abet this baleful activity, whatever role they play, and at whatever level, should be reminded of Plato's dictum: 'To corrupt the spirit of young people is to commit a crime that ranks just behind that of murder itself.'"

Sniffing Out God

We're still trying to figure out why religion, which once spoke to everyone in a direct and intimate way, no longer does so, at least in the *advanced* world. But in what ways are we advanced? I'm not someone who denies progress, but it seems that advances in one area are often accompanied by declines in another.

I know. Brilliant observation.

Part of this may have to do with limitations on human bandwidth. For example, our olfactory capabilities, which were once presumably as acute as any other average mammal, have been displaced by other modalities. More generally, it seems that the advanced shoves aside the primitive -- although the pattern can be reversed, as indicated, for example, by sightless people who compensate with touch.

But if psychoanalysis teaches us anything, it shows that man is always one in body and mind, or unconscious and conscious. Should these two become too divided, so that communication between them is stifled, then pathology arises, because the left brain has no idea what the right brain is doing, or the neocortex is out of the limbic loop.

This same wholeness is emphasized in orthodox Christianity, what with the intrinsic unity of body, mind, and soul -- or soma, psyche, and pneuma. To lose contact with any one of these is to live an impoverished life.

We all know about horizontal amputations, but to live without awareness of soul and spirit is to exist in a state of vertical amputation. There are millions of near-people who have been victimized by pneumectomies. They are the legions of walking dead -- of psychic zombies and spiritually autistic flatlanders.

The infrahumans like to flatter themselves with the cliche that Christians despise and reject the soma, but this could never be the orthodox view, unless the Incarnation means nothing to you. Indeed, I think this is why, for example, Catholics have better sex. It makes perfect sense in a context that emphasizes the unity of body, mind, and spirit. You might say there's more to love.

(The inverse mirror of this would be the attempt to elevate sex itself to some sort of liberating spiritual principle, which apparently ends in Miley Cyrus, or maybe I just can't imagine anything lower.)

Marriage itself is a higher spiritual unity, so it is no surprise whatsoever that the left is and always will be anti-marriage and anti-family. First of all, they don't want anything getting between their spiritual eunuchs and the state. The left has always understood that loyalty to other human beings -- both local and nonlocal -- poses a fundamental threat to its power. Thus, Obama's archetypal "Julia" and her lifetime commitment to Mr. Perfect, Leviathan.

Back to our original question, which touches on the inept marketing of religion. For Voegelin, much of the problem revolves around the loss of experience -- or even the loss of capacity for experience, similar to how most of us have lost our ability to smell a wild boar from a mile away.

Thus, in some way, this alienation from oursoph needs to be reversed, so we may recover experience "as against doctrine." Along these lines, Voegelin speaks of the need for a "restoration of mystical experience and its reality."

This modality quintessentially involves participation. There is no mysticism by proxy, no second-hand unity with God. Fundamentally it is no different than the truism that it is impossible to imagine the consciousness of a bat.

Likewise, it is not possible for the atheist to understand a mystic without reducing the experience to something it is not. Me? I mostly just enjoy the crumbs. But I don't deny that there's a cake.

There are many vivid accounts of mystical experience, but some of my favorites are from Henri LeSaux/Abhishiktananda, the priest-swami highbrid. In one of his letters, he observes that:

"It is fantastic, this Light which empties, annihilates, fulfills you; and how true the Upanishads are! But to discover them is a mortal blow, because you only discover them in yourself, on the other side of death!"

So, how is the be-nighted atheist supposed to confirm or refute such a statement about the light of be-ing? He doesn't. He just insists that the bat's -- or b'atman's -- consciousness is no different from his own consciousness, and reveals nothing inaccessible to it.

"The mystery of Christ and of the Father is beyond words, more even than that of the atman, the Spirit. You can only speak of it in parables, and the meaning of the parable is beyond the words used. No word [can give] you the experience of the word of the not-born."

More orthoparadox: "[W]hat is important are these 'flashes,' the lightning, the bursts of light, the break-throughs which open the abyss -- not a gulf which would separate, but the abyss of yourself.... The saving name of Christ is I AM. And the deep confession of faith is no longer the external 'Christ is Lord,' but I am he. The Father in relation to the Son -- to me -- to all.... everything is a mystery of the face-to-face and the within" (emphasis mine).

And "The blazing fire of this experience leaves nothing behind; the awakening is a total explosion."

That would be the fourth big bang, after matter, life, and mind.

Bob's Weekend Acid Trip

In a letter, Voegelin speaks of how "metaphysical concepts are symbols which only make sense as the terminal points of the existential movement of participation in the divine."

For man -- who, as explained in the previous post, is "condemned to transcendence" -- this extraordinary condition is our ordinary condition, a kind of inexhaustible, or perpetually renewable, supernatural re-source. As such, deviations from the pattern -- especially when systematic and not just occasional or accidental -- are intrinsically pneumopathological.

You'll have to excuse me if this comes out more awkwordly than usual, because I'm trying to type with one or perhaps 1.25 hands, due to a little "gardening accident." Short story shorter, I was atop a ladder, trimming some branches that overhang the pool. Need I say more?

In this case, yes, because I believe there are mitigating circumstances. As a largish branch became unmoored and descended toward the pool, I instinctively -- I would say skillfully -- wife would say foolishly -- grabbed the branch with my customary lightning reflexes.

This set in motion a chain of events that, as they say, "all happened so fast" -- way too fast for my life to flash before me (but not too fast for my death to so flash). First of all, the branch was heftier than visual inspection had foreseen, pulling me in the direction of the pool.

Which would have been fine -- fun and games for all, as dad falls into the pool! -- except that on this particular day, the pool happened to be full of acid. Yes, part of the resurfacing process involves putting sufficient acid in the pool to eat away the new surface and expose the colorful aggregate of minerals beneath.

Faced with the choice of a brick nap or an acid bath, I chose the former. Again, it a. h. s. f. The last thing I remember is my foot missing the rung, followed by, "wo, Dad, are you okay? I'll get mom!"

Meanwhile, the ladder was nowhere to be seen. Oh, there it is, at the bottom of the pool! Don't worry, though. We fished it out before it disintegrated.

The main injury is to the left hand and wrist. Near as I can tell, I must have hyperextended the whole area -- wrist, fingers, and thumb -- backwards as I touched down and landed on it. The hand is now swollen to at least twice its original size, but remarkably, I don't think anything's broken. But typing with it is like trying to use Joe Biden's brain to think. Pretty much a blunt instrument.

So, with that out of the way, back to our subject. Using my little arboreal adventure as a cautionary metaphor, man is always on the ladder -- or vertical eschaltor -- between his source and destiny, the beginning and the beyond. And we can fall in two directions, even though we inevitably land in the same place.

The myths of Adam and Prometheus and Kramden (variants of which are sprinkled throughout Finnegans Wake) warn us of what happens if we become so full of ourselves that we fall too high. This was the usual way until about 300 years ago, whence began the collective resistance to theology and metaphysics -- which was initially confined to a handful of infertile eggheads before spreading to the rabble of tenured apes laboring in Blake's dark satanic diploma mills.

Remember, man's proper place is on the ladder between transcendence and immanence, pruning the Upanishadic tree, with its nonlocal roots aloft and local branches herebelow. All the while being mindful of that fulsome acid pit just south of us.

For Voegelin it is more or less a constant struggle to "overcome the devastating effects of this deformation of philosophy." It is devastating collectively, of course, but it first must devastate -- or literally lay waste to -- the individual soul.

With great understatement, he makes reference to "the numerous unfortunates of the 19th and 20th centuries, who were denied" access to "the grace of God" -- grace revolving around the vertical energy flow that can only occur on the ladder, between the beginning and the beyond. If one steps -- or falls -- from the ladder, one is subject to a pervertical counterflow that energizes all forms of modern political Gonosticism.

Not to shift gears too violently, but did you know there is something called an "O machine"? I learned this from Gilder's Knowledge and Power, which I would consider a must-read. He doesn't say much about it, but it sure sounds familiar. It was invented -- or posited -- by the all around genius Alan Turing:

"Turing imagined a deterministic computing machine that made non-deterministic leaps when necessary by consulting 'a kind of oracle, as it were. We shall not go any further into the nature of the oracle apart from saying that it cannot be a machine.'" In other words, let's keep it unsaturated, and not reduce it to one of our logical categories.

This speculative "machine" is "closer to the way real intelligence works," and is a necessary consequence of Gödel's theorems, which of course prove that no logical system can account for the principles and axioms upon which it is based. For Gödel, this did not mean that truth is inaccessible. Rather, the miracle, as it were, is that we can access transcendent truth despite the closed nature of our immanent logico-mathematical systems.

I would suggest that the mind itself is an "O machine," meaning that it is able to construct horizontal systems without becoming enclosed in them, because of our constant engagement with O.

The moral of the story? Don't blame the ladder for your failure to climb on board, for your own fall, or for its failure to reach all the way to heaven. It's just a ladder, not an obstacle and not the oracle.

So that's it for today. Hand is starting to ache a bit.

Man is a Miracle of Evolution (and Evolution is a Miracle of Man)

Humans, in the ironic words of Schuon, are condemned to transcendence, so we can't really escape it short of being comatose.

Indeed, to "escape" presupposes somewhere to escape to, and don't let anyone try to convince you it isn't possible to transcend down. Just look at the NAACP, which used to pursue clowns who slander blacks with racist bullshit, but is now reduced to slandering clowns pursued by racing bulls.

It is because there is no escape from transcendence that atheists and leftists convert their failure to transcend into a transcendent dogma for all. Nietszche, for example expresses the failure so beautifully, that it isn't difficult to appreciate the transcendent something of his prose. I don't want to say "beauty." Irony, maybe. Or sting. Or just fine insultainment.

To paraphrase someone, fascism is violent resistance to transcendence, so it necessarily devolves to power instead of truth (since truth is the Transcendental of transcendentals). This polarity -- truth/reality vs. power/ideology -- is coming up right away in Gilder's Knowledge and Power, which I can't wait to dive into more deeply (only up to page 15).

Gilder begins with an observation by Thomas Sowell, that "While market economies are often thought of as money economies, they are still more so knowledge economies.... Economic transactions are purchases and sales of knowledge."

How's that? Well, cavemen "had the same natural resources at their disposal that we have today," the difference being that we know what to do with them. So, "How could we have gone so wrong" in our thinking about the economy? Easy: "power trumps knowledge."

In short, the caveman beats the possessor of knowledge senseless and steals his property. Or else just votes for Obama. But the underlying principle is the same: power trumping knowledge.

Thus, as Gilder writes, "The war between the centrifuge of knowledge and the centripetal pull of power remains the prime conflict in all economies." By "centripetal," Gilder refers to the manner in which, in a market economy, an infinite amount of knowledge is dispersed throughout the system.

For example, as I look out my window, a gang of skilled laborers is resurfacing my pool with a colorful quartz-based substance. Later I'll be doing some of my own work here, meaning that, in the final analysis, I am exchanging my knowledge of the mind for their knowledge of swimming pools. Neither of us were forced into the exchange, and all of us will be happy with the results. Unlike, say, Obamacare, in which all are forced to participate and no one is happy.

Gilder also hints at what I'm sure will be a central theme, the manner in which knowledge enters the self-organizing system of a free economy. Clearly, it doesn't enter via braindead collectives or committees or bureaucracies. Rather, it enters via a vertical ingression into creative individuals. And in order to maximize creativity, individuals must be free. This is axiomatic.

For example, just imagine the loss of medical creativity that will be brought about by Obamacare. In point of fact, we can't imagine it (I suppose we can impotently fantasize about it), because it is unimaginable until the creative person invents or discovers it. The personal computer didn't come about because millions of people sat around thinking "gee, it sure would be great to have all human knowledge at my fingertips; or to blog -- whatever that means -- my thoughts out to the Coonosphere -- whatever that is."

Rather, creative minds had to invent the personal computer and internet, which shows how supply creates its own demand. Conversely, a caveman's demands basically revolve around bodily needs, since he can't imagine anything else. Until one of them does.

Which reminds me. Every once in awhile we'll hear the argument that, yes, the market economy was a great thing, but it has basically completed its work, and now it's time to divvy up the pie. As always, the left is not about creating wealth but distributing it, and this is just another iteration of that stale argument.

This morning, Ace Of Spades linked to this piece, which asks the questions, "What if everything we’ve come to think of as American is predicated on a freak coincidence of economic history? And what if that coincidence has run its course?" To which I might add: what if we elected a president who did everything possible to make sure it has run its course?

What a stunning lack of imagination! It reminds me of a book I read, which ironically came out on the eve of the tech revolution of the 1990s -- something about the "end of progress." It seems there's one every decade. Which proves that if the left had been successful at any point in history, progress would have been stymied then and there.

For example, FDR's deeply gnostic (in the pneumopathological sense) second bill of rights would have frozen development at 1940s levels. That is the path Great Britain took after WWII, booting out Churchill in favor of a socialist government that proceeded to nationalize most major industries. Not until Thatcher came along was the tide reversed, but I'm afraid the damage is permanent. England is no longer England.

Back to the article. The author notes the economic miracle -- and it is literally a miracle, for reasons we'll get into -- of the past 300 years:

"For all of measurable human history up until the year 1750, nothing happened that mattered. This isn’t to say history was stagnant, or that life was only grim and blank, but the well-being of average people did not perceptibly improve.... In England before the middle of the eighteenth century... the pace of progress was so slow that it took 350 years for a family to double its standard of living.... By the middle of the eighteenth century, the state of technology and the luxury and quality of life afforded the average individual were little better than they had been two millennia earlier, in ancient Rome."

Right. So at any point along the way, an individual would have been justified in saying, "look, some people have too much, while others don't have enough. Not fair. Income inequality, and all that." One such assoul was Karl Marx, who wrote his nasty diatribes right in the middle of all this unprecedented growth.

About that miracle. What is a miracle? I would suggest that a good working definition is a spontaneous vertical ingression. Gilder writes of how most economists, because they think in linear and horizontal terms, underlook "the surprises that arise from free will and human creativity. The miracles forbidden in deterministic physics are not only routine in economics; they constitute the most important economic events" (emphasis mine).

"For a miracle is simply an innovation, a sudden and bountiful addition of information into the system. Newtonian physics does not admit of new information of this kind -- desribe a system and you are done. Describe an economic system and you have described only the circumstances -- favorable or unfavorable -- for future innovation."

So, what is man but a miracle of evolution, a shocking vertical ingression of nonlocal truth and beauty into the biosphere?

Memo to leftists: there's much more to come. Unless you are successful.

There is No God, and He is Obama

First, we bring your attention to a nice rant by Ace of Spades, which relates to all the Voegeling we've been doing around here lately:

"I have long contended that man is a fundamentally religious animal -- and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way -- and that many people who consider themselves above religion are actually quite beneath it...."

"[A]nd, rather than subscribe to a conventional religion in which their desire for transcendence can be more conventionally satisfied, instead channel their religious impulses into areas which are not by nature religious and which by nature must not be religious" (emphases mine, for these passages go to the left's ubiquitous violation of the second commandment, demonstrating that behind ideology is idolatry).

"Our politics now is simply about a god, and I mean the god Obama," AKA "the Unaccomplished One." (To which I might add that he must remain unaccomplished, on pain of becoming particularized in time and stripped of his godhead. You might say that he is our first apophatic president, in that any statement about him cannot possibly reach his transcendence, so we can only say what Obama is not -- and for many on the left, it is sufficient to say that he is not George Bush.)

"Religious hysteria does not require a god. Religious hysteria only requires Dogma & a Devil."

Quite true, and conservatives are in a position to clearly see this, since we are the Devil of the left.

In another sense, you could say that the left has no gods, only demons. The left is not even reactionary, since it never reacts to our actual beliefs, only our suspected -- actually, projected -- motives. And "Reducing another’s thought to its supposed motives prevents us from understanding it" (Don Colacho), thus sealing the left's ignorance. Project and attack, project and attack, in a closed circle. Conservatives simply serve as placemarkers in this absurcular psychodrama.

In another post, Ace says that "Conspiracy theories are the religion of the bitter. It's fundamentally a religious response to confusion, disorder, and disappointment." And since politics is about order, intrapsychic disorder engenders deformed and aberrant politics. (And then the external disorder engenders more psychic disorder, which is how the left keeps its base -- in both senses of the word -- growing.)

About the project-and-attack cycle of the left, PowerLine has a revealing piece called The Dems Rally their Legions of Haters for 2014. I know the credulous LoFos believe this stuff, but is it possible that liberal elites really believe it? I'd like to at least give them credit for being sociopathic manipulators of the LoFos, but who knows? I think Obama might be dumb enough to swallow most of it, but I find it doubtful that Bill Clinton believed his own BS.

In any event, the email demonstrates how our honest wish for clean elections is turned on its head. And no mention at all of the state's real world harassment and suppression of dissent and loyal opposition through the IRS, and the tainted electoral victory the latter helped give to President Asterisk.

Which, by the way, doesn't matter. It's like they say in the Muslim world: if it's true, it's already in the Koran, so why bother with science? Likewise, since god is already in the White House, why bother with honest elections? Either you ratify the divinity, or you're a demon whose vote shouldn't count anyway. Simple as.

Note in the example from PowerLine how the grotesque abuse of language results in the deformation of reality. It's not that words escape them. Rather, words are tortured and summarily executed.

Here is a subtle point by Voegelin, an irony worthy of Eckhart. I don't want to say it's an infallible dogma handed down from the Chair of Petey, but I think most Raccoons will relate.

That is to say, just as leftists are fundamentally religious -- or at least idolatrous -- "Every mystic is in a way 'atheist,' inasmuch as he knows there is a time when symbols" reach a kind of breaking point. For clearly, no container is remotely adequate to contain God, who is by definition uncontainable. The finite cannot circumscribe the infinite, so God is just a name for the nameless, religion a (providential) form for the formless.

I mean, right? This is why, both individually and collectively (i.e., in history), the symbols must be periodically "renewed and recast through recourse to the experiences from which they emerge." To put it in meta-symbolic terms, (n) eventually hardens into (k), at which point one must undergo -- or sopher -- new O --> (n) experiences in order to renew and refresh the exhausted or saturated religious symbology.

As it so happens, I was thinking about this on the way to work yesterday. Clearly there was a time in history when Christian symbolism wasn't remotely problematic for even -- or especially, rather -- the greatest intellects. But one has to be honest, and acknowledge that it clearly doesn't speak in the same direct way to many in the modern world.

Lileks mentioned a typical case the other day, a cranky guy who runs a tech blog but who is a wannabe metaphysician. He inflicted his Deep Thoughts about people who speak in tongues upon his unsuspecting audience of nerds, dweebs, geeks, and schmendricks:

"'We' don’t speak in tongues; religious nutjobs do, and they do it because they believe in superstitious nonsense. I’ll bet my bottom dollar that there is a high correlation between tongue-speakers and climate change deniers and creationist 'science' school curriculum pushers -- people who are doing real and genuine harm to our society and the planet."

Another fine example of the project-and-attack cycle.

I don't think I would be committing the inverse error if I attributed to this genius a radically naive and narrow understanding of science, as it necessarily parallels his n. & n. understanding of religion. As Voegelin writes, "there is nothing wrong with calling physics science, as long as one does not pretend that nothing else is science." The moment one does this, "an ideology has arisen which is called 'scientism.'" And this ideological faux religion requires demons.

Furthermore, the very symbolism of this always-intuited but never empirically provable construct called "universe" is "no more than a demythologized version of the myth of the cosmos." The experience of a cosmos is always something we subjectively participate in, and the experience is not actually containable by any symbol. In other words, you might say that the soul contain the cosmos, not vice versa.

Ideological "Reality" and the Immortalizing Process

Not much time this morning. Just flipping through this volume of correspondence by Voegelin, looking for any nuggets of joy before it undergoes the transition from desk to shelf.

In particular, I was looking for a passage about the unforgivable evil of ideologues warping the minds of children -- which is what Governor Christie will be doing by signing legislation making it a crime for a psychologist to help sexually confused adolescents.

To not know that ideologues and activists have taken over the American Psychological Association -- along with most every other professional group -- is to live in a state of profound naivete. I suppose he also thinks the ACLU is full of people who just really care about the Constitution.

But if the left is really sincere in its objection to "conversion therapy," how about a law forbidding colleges from converting impressionable students into liberal ideologues?

This one's good: "[B]ankers are tough and have common sense; one can discuss with them rationally; it is not like the academic world, where opinions, if wrong, do not cost you any money, so that one can have any opinions that look pleasing."

In fact, at the epicenter of the financial meltdown of 2008 was the state forcing bankers to lend money to unqualified borrowers -- as if the state actually understands such a complex system!

But that's the essence of the problem with both government and the educational establishment, isn't it? To paraphrase Thomas Sowell, politicians are forever making decisions affecting our lives that cost them nothing if they are wrong (and often enrich them, as in the case of Clinton). Thus the built-in moral hazard of liberalism.

The purpose of life? What else could it be than to "immortalize as much as possible"?

I interpret this to mean that man lives in the vertical space between the beginning and the beyond -- or between immanence and transcendence -- and that the immortalizing process, so to speak, involves the metabolism of the latter into the former, or of eternity into time. One might say: God creates time so that time may become eternity.

What is art, for example, but the immortalization of matter, or color, or shape, or sound, or language?

If that is not what's going on down here, then I frankly don't see the point.

This would also explain why "Existences that have been abandoned by God are boring, or burlesque, or dangerous to public safety.... over time, perversity becomes stale." One can hope, anyway.

About the curiously named "progressivism" which is frozen in time when it isn't moving backward. The ideologue exits the vertical space alluded to above, which makes real growth -- which is indistinguishable from the immortalizing process -- impossible. This frequently occurs around college age. The rejection of reality naturally results in (or from, depending) a kind of anxiety, and

"from anxiety is born hatred. From such hatred then may arise an infinite variety of attempts to stop the flux of time -- childish things like the professor for whom science must stop at the point that he has reached... at the time of his Ph.D."

Speaking of Obama, the hatred of reality can result in "terrible things like the political leader who wants to freeze history at some ridiculous point of order that he has picked up somewhere in his youth."

This would explain why, for example, for the left, it is "always Selma" -- even in a high-end handbag boutique in Switzerland. Note that they don't just freeze history, but freeze a delusion about history -- like the global warmists who don't know the warming stopped seventeen years ago.

Again, it begins with an attack on language, on meaning: "an ideological language has the purpose of interrupting the contact with reality, and on the other hand, to admit as 'reality' in quotation marks only the phantasy of the ideology.... Every ideology with its apparatus of taboos is, therefore, a Newspeak in the sense of Orwell."

This distortion of language always results in the deformation of reality, for "in the beginning is the word," whether you believe that or not.

In contrast to the immortalizing process is the immanentizing process of ideologues -- the attempt to force transcendence into immanence. This can only be achieved through an "outburst of cruelty in overcoming resistance" -- a cruelty that must be permanent because the goal of the ideologue can never be reached. It's why the IRS is still harassing Tea Party groups. Why wouldn't they? They may be crazy, but they're also evil.

Thus, where the normal person in vertical space lives in loving attraction to O, the ideologue lives in a spiteful rejection of O, and cruelly takes out the hatred on others.

An Emmanuel Goldstein a day keeps the reality at bay.

Breaking News From Eternity!

I don't think I want to plunge fully back into O -- i.e., excogitate something completely new -- until the liberatoreum has been reconstituted.

I spared you all from the true extent of the horror, but every item -- I mean every last item -- had to be removed from my slacktuary so the abatement guys in hazmat suits could remove the old flooring, which apparently has an infinitesimal amount of asbestos in it. California. Bazooka vs. mosquito. 'Nuff said.

So with my environment all scrambled, it's a little like having alzheimer's, only outside my skull instead of inside.

But I always enjoy revisiting old posts, first, because they are not meant to age. In other words, nothing here is supposed to have an expiration date (except some of the gags). In fact, -- and I probably mentioned this in my very first post -- one of the original purposes -- or at least excuses -- for the blog was to bring to readers whatever it is that is the opposite of news. The "olds"? The stale? The rewordgitated?

No, these don't work, because if one thinks archetypally, the news is almost always old before it's written, just the recycling of a handful of myths and more superficial patterns. To mix a metaphor of Jim Morrison, the journalist simply takes a mask from the ancient gallery and serves it to us for breakfast. Conversely, truth is always fresh, and always provokes intrapsychic adventures beyond the subjective horizon.

I mean, c'mon. "Middle East in Chaos." No. Really? "Muslims Behaving Barbarously." You don't say. "57 Churches Burned So Far, Christians Terrorized." Breaking news from 630!

"Systemic Corruption in Clinton Foundation." What, you mean Clinton and his cronies became wealthy through philanthropy? Is there some other way for liberals to get rich?

"Obamacare in Chaos." Wait. Socialism doesn't work? I thought we won the cold war. Besides, isn't the era of big government over? I guess it depends on the meaning of isn't.

Speaking of which, I'm still waiting for George Gilder's Knowledge and Power to arrive in the mail. From the reviews, it sounds right up our alley. For example, the August 19 National Review sent a tingle up our thigh when it observed that

"it's because the authorities lack knowledge that they use power to try to impose artificial order. This ruins systems that need to adapt and change, and that need information about the real world to do so.... The imposition of control by power instead of knowledge suppresses these streams of information, and the results are not pretty, or even sane" (emphasis mine). In fact, they're pretty insane.

But for the left, politics is about power, which is why they cannot help generating chaos -- and why, conversely, the truth not only sets us free, but is obviously the prerequisite of meaningful freedom (for if there is no truth, then freedom simply equates to nihilism).

In reality, "the capitalist economy is a giant information system that provides feedback and knowledge to entrepreneurs about productive investment and creative opportunity," so "the more the government tries to fine-tune" the channels of information, "the more noise it inserts into the system."

Obamacare, for example, with its 2200 pages of "laws" is a recipe for chaos, a decimation of the order necessary to have a rationally ordered healthcare system. And I place "law" in scare quotes, since the law is whatever Obama wants it to be. Nancy Pelosi promised us that if we passed the bill, we could find out what's in it. Turns out they had to pass the bill so Obama could decide what's in it. Naked, lawless power. That's the left for you.

Yeah, yeah. Breaking news from Genesis 3.

Some people wonder why I have to mix politics and religion. This is one big reason: "In the end, the most important message carried by Knowledge and Power is that capitalism is a profoundly spiritual system. It allows and encourages people to be the best they can be, not only in serving their own interests and exercising their own talents, but in meeting the needs of others."

This dovetails nicely with a review of another book I haven't yet gotten to, Kevin Williamson's The End is Near, in the June 17 NR. The State -- as opposed to the limited government of our Founders -- is not an instrument of truth -- breaking news from 1789! -- but "an instrument of will. It seeks to tell people how to live. Worse, it uses force to do so. Worst of all, its paramount purpose is not answering the question 'What's best for the people?' -- that is at most a secondary consideration -- but 'What is good for the State?'"

And consistent with Gilder's thesis, "The problem with politics is that it does not know how to get less wrong." That wise crack should be posted above every polling booth.

For example, "Other than Social Security, there are very few 1935 vintage products still in use.... Resistance to innovation is part of the deep structure of politics. In that, it is is like any other monopoly. It never goes out of business -- despite flooding the market with dangerous and defective products, mistreating its customers," and engaging in a level of fiscal fraud that dwarfs anything in the private economy. (See Reckless Endangerment for details.)

Why the built-in, systematic stupidity? Because "The people running the State are never sufficiently willing to contemplate that they are the problem." I mean, Obama is about as likely to realize this as Paul Krugman is to seek psychiatric help.

Thus, "if a program dedicated to putting the round pegs of humanity into square holes fails, the bureaucrats running it will conclude that citizens need to be squared off long before it dawns on them that the State should stop treating people like pegs in the first place." But as always, government failure simply becomes the pretext for the next appropriation of more power. Obamacare fails? Then we need single payer!

Bottom line: "Individual liberty yields the iPhone. Politics protects the Post Office."

Huh. I guess this turned into something like a post after all.

Dear Prudence, Won't You Change Your Name?

No time for a new post, and barely enough time for this repost of a post that originally appeared out of gnowhere -- which is where all the posts come from -- six years ago. Things should start settling down around here and returning to normal later in the week.

So, I'm reading a book on the virtues -- the four horizontal ones dealing with intra-mundane and intra-human relations, and the three vertical ones dealing with divine diplomacy. And I'm thinking to myself: didn't I already blog about this? And if so, is it possible that I made the subject more interesting than this guy? Because this guy is pretty boring.

Let's me find out:

Prudence is such a lousy name for the Virtue of virtues, it's no wonder no one talks about it anymore. For one thing, it's too close to "prudish," which is a great sin for those who don't believe in sin. And if we can judge by Social Security statistics on the most popular baby names, Prudence doesn't even make the top 1,000.

In contrast, Sophia -- which amounts to the same thing as prudence -- comes in at #4. And since it split the vote with Sofia, who knows, it might actually be the Cardinal Sign on girls.

Pieper deals with this linguistic obstacle at the outset, noting that the word has become too saturated and associated with such qualities as timorousness or small-mindedness.

To which I would add cautious, risk-averse, unadventurous, tentative, and possibly even "pragmatic" in that calculating and sociopathic Clintonian way. In other words, the connotations can range from wimpy, to vaguely neutral, to crassly political.

A much better word would be wisdom, in-sight, or better yet, sapientia, since the latter has a nice mystical ring to it. Furthermore, it resonates with what a human being fundamentally is, which is to say, Homo sapiens sapiens.

Nevertheless, for the purposes of this post, we'll stick with prudence, which Pieper calls "the mold and 'mother' of the other cardinal virtues, of justice, fortitude, and temperence." In other words, "since none but the prudent man can be just, brave, and temperate, and the good man is good insofar as he is prudent.... All virtue is necessarily prudent."

We must imagine a vertical hierarchy, with prudence located at the top. This is one more reason why Darwinism or any other form of materialism is so incoherent, because one simply cannot get from matter to wisdom, and it is morbidly imprudent (not so mention impudent) to think otherwise.

Rather, the world itself is an emanation -- or involution -- of its Principle, which is why reality is continuous from the top down, but discontinuous from the bottom up. Only by starting at the top does the cosmos make sense in its integral totality, which is to say, high and low, interior and exterior.

Therefore, Pieper is absolutely correct in saying that prudence "is the [vertical] cause of the other virtues' being virtues at all."

Here it might be useful to remember the wisdom books of the Bible -- which again, with a less skilled marketing department, might have been called the "prudence books." For example, Proverbs repeatedly praises the centrality of wisdom, which is at the origin of all things.

Furthermore, there are obvious parallels between wisdom and the Word, which is both alpha and omega, beginning (of creation) and end (of the human adventure). To say that "no one comes to the Father but through me," is another way of saying that no one comes to the Principle save through the eternal wisdom that is its first fruit. The two -- Reality and Wisdom -- are related as intimately as Father and Son.

Now prudence means on the one hand "the perfected ability to make right decisions" and choices. But what is this ability founded upon?

This, I think, is the key point: that we can only make right decisions if we are 1) open to reality, 2) in conformity to reality, and 3) act in a manner consistent with that conformity. Thus, for St. Thomas, truth is "nothing other than the unveiling and revelation of reality, of both of natural [i.e., horizontal] and supernatural [vertical] reality."

In short, "the pre-eminence of prudence means that realization of the good presupposes knowledge of reality" -- which explains why there is so little wisdom on the left, since they attack the very notion of objective truth, and substitute for it such retrograde idols as multiculturalism, "diversity," moral relativism, and ultimately just power, which is what the world devolves to in the absence of a truth-based human order.

To employ the symbols used in the Book of the Same Name (as the blog), we see that one of the prerequisites of prudence is (o), or "the receptiveness of the human spirit," the latter of which must be in-formed by the Real.

In other words, we must be humbly instructed by reality, or we will surely sooner or later be righteously bitch-slapped by her. As well we should. Mama don't play!

Furthermore, (---) comes into use as well, for as Pieper notes, prudent cognition "includes above all the ability to be still in order to attain objective perception of reality."

Elsewhere he writes of cultivating "the attitude of 'silent' contemplation of reality: this is the key prerequisite for the perfection of prudence as cognition," since it is what makes (↓) possible, the "ingression of grace," or of vertical murmurandoms.

To put it bluntly: sit down, shut up, and know that I AM.

All Politics is Nonlocal

I'm guessing Tip O'Neill -- Chris Matthews' mentor, proving that the road apple doesn't fall far from the horse's ass -- must have been drunk when he let the secret of liberal electoral strategy out of the bag -- that "all politics is local."

First of all, what does this even mean? I was about to say it means nothing to us, for whom all politics is nonlocal. When politics becomes local -- when government is in our face, our pocketbook, and our healthcare choices -- it's more or less a nuisance.

In other words, the reason for the establishment of the federal government -- the very purpose of its existence -- is to secure nonlocal rights enshrined in the Laws of Nature and conferred by Nature's God. You can look it up.

Preservation of these rights is the end -- the telos -- of government, to such an extent that failure to preserve and protect them triggers another natural right: the right of revolution, i.e., "to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form..."

But for the left, all politics is indeed selfishly local, and essentially comes down to the state showering the voter with gifts -- ObamaPhones, free birth control, healthcare on someone else's dime, etc. -- in exchange for one's natural rights, most especially, freedom.

And as Toqueville recognized at the dawn of this experiment in self-government, once more than 50% of the voters realize that politics can be made local -- in the sense that they can hijack the state to force the makers to subsidize the takers -- the experiment is mortally threatened. It is one of the most common reasons for the failure of democracy, e.g., Detroit, which of course went bankrupt because the takers eventually sucked the makers dry.

The same thing has occurred in California, where future makers are on the hook for billions in unfunded bribes to pay off state employee pension funds. And of course, Obama has committed the same electoral fraud, only on a more massive scale, raiding the coffers of the surviving unborn to fund his systematic bribery of constituents.

The conservative is obviously at a disadvantage here, which is why there are so few true conservatives in government. Few people can get elected these days by promising voters they will secure their nonlocal rights, but not bribe them with gifts.

We now pause for some timelessly timely aphorisms from someone at antipodes to the vicious and vulgar buffoon Tip O'Neill, Nicolás Gómez Dávila:

"The modern state is the transformation of the apparatus which society developed for its defense into an autonomous organism which exploits it."

Right? Like every institution, it eventually undermines the reason for its existence, in favor of merely pursuing self-preservation and self-interest. Which is why the state never gets smaller or less intrusive.

"Each day we demand more from society so that we can demand less from ourselves."

The credo of the selfish and myopic man for whom all politics is local. Existence is also local for animals, since they have no conscious access to the nonlocal.

"The modern sensibility, instead of demanding the repression of envy, demands that we suppress the object which arouses it."

Yes, where would the left be if the tenth commandment were understood to be a natural duty, complementing our natural rights?

"Compassion is the best excuse for envy."

And liberalism is the best excuse for idiot compassion.

"The left claims that the guilty party in a conflict is not the one who covets another’s goods but the one who defends his own."

That's right: the selfish envier is the noble party, which is why his bullying is always hidden behind a veil of sanctified victimhood.

"Democratic elections decide who may be oppressed legally."

In this case it was decided prior to the election, as the state didn't want to take any chances with nonlocalist Tea Partiers who can't be bribed. Ronald Reagan once characterized Tip O'Neill as "a round thing that gobbles up money." Tea Partiers now well understand that if you pose a threat to the business end of Leviathan, its teeth are very real.

"Liberal ideas are likable. Their consequences ruinous."

Likable for self-centered children, I guess.

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

Bearing in mind that decency is a bare minimum, not any great virtue. Then again, a world of decent people would represent heaven on earth, so it's way too much to ask for or expect. Better to blame "institutional racism," "the patriarchy," "global warming," "income disparity," etc., than to diagnose the real problem -- which politics cannot cure, and leftist policies only aggravate.

Oh, and happy 26th anniversary to Mrs. G., who must be one of the least envious people around, since she doesn't feel entitled to anyone better than me.

On the Organ of Spiritual Perception

I personally don't have an issue with the distinction between gnosis and Gnosticism, but since the question keeps coming up, perhaps we should settle the matter once and for all by handing down some definitions ex cathedra, i.e., from the front of the bus back.

For starters, one could just say that gnosis is to nous as perception is to the senses, or reason to the rational mind. Gnosis is what the nous "does" or "receives" -- the nous essentially being our organ of spiritual perception and discernment (to paraphrase Aristotle, it is that part of us that is divine, or at least closest to it).

If we didn't have this faculty -- or it us -- there would be no realistic way to discern spirits, to read the signs of the times, to deeply understand scripture, or to even operate this bus, really. In its absence we are spiritually autistic, as it were. And we all know spiritually autistic people. They pretty much run the show, don't they?

A related problem is when the nous is appropriated by lower regions. For example, many self-styled gurus and spiritual hucksters presumably have an activated nous, except it's merged with the ego (or lower), which drags it into the mud. That pattern is similar to, say, a psychoanalyst who has valid knowledge of the unconscious mind, but who lacks insight into his own motivations, and ends up seducing a patient.

But for clarity of thought in this upper atmasphere of the soul, I don't think it's possible to surpass Schuon, so let's see what he has to say. Conveniently, one of his books is called Gnosis, with the subtitle Divine Wisdom. So gnosis is divine wisdom, in contrast to, say worldly knowledge.

And if that is too saturated, you can always just say (n) vs. (k) to distinguish the one from the other. But in some form or fashion one must make this distinction, because if one doesn't, one becomes either an atheist or literalist -- which amount to the same thing, since both apply the wrong category of thought to the spiritual dimension. It's a ubiquitous problem, for "Men tend not to live on anything but the ground floor of their souls" (Nicolás Gómez Dávila).

More from Dávila: To be stupid is to believe that it is possible to take a photograph of the place of which the poet sang. To put it another way, religion can surely be understood rationally, but not only rationally.

Rather, one also needs an uncorrupted imagination, which "is the capacity to perceive, through the senses, the attributes of the object which the senses do not perceive" (NGD). Thus, "The imagination is not the site where reality is falsified, but where it is fulfilled" (ibid.).

For "When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they appear to be even less" (ibid.). For example, "The Gospels, in the hands of the progressive clergy, degenerate into a compilation of trivial ethical teachings" (ibid.). But in reality, "Faith is not assent to concepts, but a sudden splendor that knocks us down" (ibid).

Back to Schuon. The lone reviewer pretty much says what we just did, that gnosis represents "the highest aspect of the Intellect -- and is not to be confused with the lower faculty of rational thought [while not negating it, I might add]. Gnosis deals with intuitive contact with the higher level of the Self, while mere rational thought deals with the strictly human level/profane intelligence for a profane world."

"Gnosis," according to Schuon, "refers to supra-rational, and thus purely intellective, knowledge of metacosmic realities. Now this knowledge cannot be reduced to the Gnosticism of history," nor can it "be held responsible for every association of ideas or every abuse of terminology." As is true of any religious concept -- or any concept, frankly -- improper abuse does not negate its proper use.

That's right, what Bob said: "the fact that an imposture necessarily imitates a good, since otherwise it could not even exist, does not authorize charging this good with all the sins of the imitation" (Schuon). Might as well condemn religion because of Deepak, for "To claim that all gnosis is false because of Gnosticism, amounts to saying, by analogy, that all prophets are false because there are false prophets" (ibid.).

Nevertheless, "It is a fact that too many authors -- we would almost say: general opinion -- attribute to gnosis what is proper to Gnosticism and to other counterfeits of the sophia perennis, and moreover make no distinction between the latter and the most freakish movements, such as spiritualism, theosophism and the pseudo-esoterisms that saw the light of day in the twentieth century" (ibid.).

So, what is Gnosticism? Pretty much "a fabric of more or less disordered speculations, often of Manichean origin; and it is a mythomania characterized by a dangerous mixture of exoteric and esoteric concepts." I'm sure you're all familiar with the parable of the ice cream and the dog doo.

So, when does gnosis go off the rails? I can think of several pitfalls, pride being foremost among them. There is also the danger alluded to above, of conflation with an unredeemed imagination, or with one's own mind parasites. For this and other reasons, it is always best to channel the of flow gnosis -- or O --> (n) -- between the banks of an institutional or traditional river. It's the difference between, say, a Meister Eckhart vs. a William Blake or Emanuel Swedenborg, the latter two being too much a mixture of dream and reality.

Power Politics vs. Truth Politics: How to Tell a Clenched Fist from an Open Mind

So, why all the Voegeling? Because in recent months I've raced through number of huge volumes of his, and if I don't write about the experience, then it is soon forgotten, covered over with the next layer of mulch.

However, I'll try to liven things up with some parallel aphorisms of Nicolás Gómez Dávila (NGD), since the two were often on the same page, and he can say in a pointed sentence what Voegelin can in a dull 600 page book. (The ideas aren't dull, of course, but to paraphrase NGD, the writer who doesn't torture his sentences ends up torturing the reader.)

Yesterday we mentioned that it is a scientific fact that man, qua man, forever exists in tension toward the divine ground-attractor. In a letter, Voegelin writes that "the creation of the gods has something to do with true humanity." In fact, "the meaning of humanity was fixed in the process of separating the human from the divine," so "as soon as the meaning of the divine becomes unclear again, the meaning of humanity becomes correspondingly confused."

Voegelin calls the distinction between man and God a movement from compaction to differentiation, which is why the Hebrew discovery of the one God is such an important development.

In other words, prior to that there is no differentiation between the cosmos and the gods (e.g., wind, water, fire, fertility, etc.), with the result (among others) that history cannot be discovered (or created, if you like). History still "happens" of course -- in that time doesn't really stop -- but the ancient Hebrews were the first to see it as playing out in the tension between man and the divine ground, instead of just going around in immanent cosmic circles.

Which is why no form of dogmatic atheism can represent progress, because it expresses the backward movement to a de-differentiation between man and God. God, however, hardly disappears. Rather, he simply reappears in Gnostic man. Dávila:

"The radical negation of religion is the most dogmatic of religious positions." Such atheism "does not dispute the existence of God, but rather His identity." Which is why "He who does not believe in God" generally lacks "the decency of not not believing in himself."

Speaking of Obama, History's Greatest Orator, "Not being an orator amounts to not being able to speak about anything except what one knows about" (NGD).

Oh, and Obamacare? Don't worry, "With the generosity of the program does the democrat console himself for the magnitude of the catastrophes it produces" (ibid.).

In the end, "as long as we do not arrive at religious categories, our explanations are not founded upon rock" (ibid.). To turn it around, this is why it is impossible to talk to liberal rockheads, because they express religious emotion in the absence of religious insight, due to the de-differentiation of spheres alluded to above.

About that de-differentiation: when the terrestrial and celestial are re-fused and the vertical thus de-faced, then "doctrinaire totalitarianism is justified." Indeed, "the Gnostic is a born revolutionary" -- the serpent being the archetype of this downward movement -- "because total rejection is the perfect proclamation of his divine autonomy."

Reader ge has suggested that Voegelin can't be right, because too many disciplines and movements fall under the heading of "Gnosticism." I don't necessarily see this as problematic, because it's just a consequence of the deeper principle of collapsing the vertical.

Thus, Gnostic systems "develop without exception in opposition to the creator-God... and transform him into the evil power over against which the new man-made god is is placed in the position of savior." The Obamensch is just the latest iteration of this pattern, but it is a universal temptation of fallen man.

A critical point is that when reality is collapsed in this manner, politics indeed devolves along with it to a crude struggle for power (since the true and good have been excluded).

This is "in radical opposition to the classic conception of Aristotle," whereby politics is rooted in common access to, and participation in, the nous. In the absence of the Logos-Nous dialectic, then man is indeed reduced from the political animal -- the animal with Reason in pursuit of the common Good -- to an animal who engages in politics in order to obtain power over others. (The rejection of the common Nous-Logos is also the hateway to multiculturalism, bogus "diversity," ideological feminism, and all the rest.)

The problem for the normal man is that, just because he is not interested in power over others, it doesn't mean others don't want power over him. It doesn't matter whether it's leftists or Islamists, they just don't want to leave us alone.

Which of course goes to the disconnect between liberals and conservatives, since the former are by definition engaging in horizontal power politics, while we are attempting to conserve at least a remnant of the vertical. But this is a little like trying to play chess with a barbarian, who elevates

"the repudiation of reason into a principle. The common world of the Logos is destroyed," which soon enough descends "to the level of violence and brutality which, in the sphere of action, reduces all questions to the one question: who will draw the revolver first."

No wonder they hate the second amendment.

The High Cost of Divorce from Reality

A post or two ago we mentioned Plato's allegory of the cave. It seems to me that Voegelin is one of the few contemporary scholars who fully accepts the allegory as descriptive of reality. For which reason he maintains that turning away from the light, the divine ground -- O -- constitutes the essence of pneumopathology, with devastating consequences.

Like all such myths, it isn't just describing something that happened once upon a time, but what happens every time. As such, it cannot be "surpassed," let alone disproved. Rather, either you get it or you don't, for we don't judge it; rather, it judges us. In other words, it sheds light on the space in which human beings have always lived and always will live (for existence in this space -- the "sensorium of transcendence" -- is what characterizes humanness).

This is just another way of saying that man isn't the measure of truth, but vice versa. If this is not true, then the world is indeed an absolute relativity, and we are reduced to the civilized barbarism of the tenured, where the only appeal is to power, not truth, and the world is divided into victims and the political supermen who will save them. Oh, and the evil conservatives whose "holy grail," in the words of Obama, is to increase human suffering.

Reader ge left a comment to the effect that the state of scholarship has "advanced" since Voegelin's time -- which is no doubt true, in the same sense that politics has advanced between Reagan and Obama, or science between Neils Bohr and Al Gore, or philosophy between Aquinas and Richard Dawkins.

Perhaps I should add that I am not a "Voegelinian," if there is such a thing. Rather, I simply take what strikes me as expressive of truth, and leave the rest. If it doesn't bang the interior Gong, then I consign it to the absurcular wastebin. Like you, I read in order to understand, not imitate.

The following strikes me as unsurpassable truth: "philosophical existence is existence in awareness of man's humanity as constituted by his tension toward the divine ground." For Voegelin, this is a scientific statement, in the original, uncontracted sense of the word.

And if this is the case, then "alienation is the turning away from the ground toward a self that is imagined to be human without being constituted by its relation to the divine presence" (emphasis mine). Indeed, this is the repetition of another of man's permanent mythological possibilities, i.e., the fall into auto-divinization.

Here again, this is either way true or way off. I don't see any other alternative, for as Eckhart might say, you can't be a little bit pregnant with God.

Thus, "Turning toward, and turning away from, the ground become the fundamental categories descriptive of the states of order and disorder in human existence."

This is not an abstract statement. For example, America's founders, in anchoring our very political existence in unalienable rights conferred by the Creator, explicitly turned toward the ground of order. Conversely, Marx -- and all ideologies flowing from him -- explicitly reject this order.

Voegelin calls this "willful turning away from the fundamental experience of reality" a "disease of the mind."

Once again, how could it not be a disease if man is rooted in a real order that the mind has rejected? Any disease of any kind is always a dis-order, a failure to achieve a certain end. And if there is no objective norm for human beings, then there is no such thing as psycho- or pneumopathology. Rather, there is only adaptation to transient conditions, which is precisely what Marx believed.

Turning again to the American revolution, Voegelin says that it is distinguished from, say, the French, or Russian, or National Socialist revolutions in light of the fact that it "was able to create an open society" -- not in the desiccated sense of Popper, but in the vertical sense of being open to the divine ground.

And the culture war -- or red state / blue state divide, or whatever name you want to assign our polarization -- is largely because our intellectuals are so strongly influenced by the European type of revolutionary, anti-Christian intellectualism. Indeed, Obama is our first president totally steeped in this crock, with predictable results all around.

Thus, "what really has happened is an inconsiderate, and partly illiterate intellectual movement," a "massive force of aggressive intellectual dishonesty" that "has polarized itself out of the American social reality," and into a "willful divorce from reality and violent aggressiveness in the pursuit of utopian dreams."

And "Since this intellectual disease is not confined to journalists and television reporters but has penetrated deeply into the academic world, and through the academic world into the education of the younger generation, one must recognize in these trends a danger to democratic government which, after all, has to rely on contact with reality in the population at large."

Hmm. I can't imagine why the tenured would turn away from Voegelin.

(All of the above quoted material taken from Autobiographical Reflections.)

Leftism: An Autoimmune Disorder of Language

The goal of education should be... reality, right? If not that, then what? Fantasy? Obedience? Wish fulfillment? Power?

In his Autobiographical Reflections, Voegelin remembers his first teaching jobs in America, which were at some elite eastern universities such as Harvard. He found the job impossible, because "the ideological corruption of the East Coast" had already "affected the student mind profoundly."

And this was only in the 1940s! Nevertheless, he was prescient enough to recognize that these students -- proto-Obamas -- were already manifesting "the behavioral characteristics of totalitarian aggressiveness" that has become so commonplace today.

Voegelin goes on to describe how these celebrators of tolerance "simply will not tolerate information that is not in agreement with their ideological prejudices." He adds, however, that even they were not as bad as their European counterparts, whose "picture of reality" was "so badly distorted" that they "simply start shouting and rioting if any serious attempt is made to bring into discussion facts that are incompatible with their preconceptions." So I guess community organizing started in Germany.

Seventy five years ago it was still possible to reach at least some of the leftist students by "swamping them with mountains of information." They apparently retained a kernel of common sense, allowing them to recognize "that their picture of reality is badly distorted." It's never easy to turn one of them around and get them to take a look at the wide world outside Plato's Cave, but "at least they begin to have second thoughts."

The key, of course is to retain an open mind -- not just to information, but to transcendence. No amount of information can compensate for loss of the latter, for the same reason that all the quantity in the world doesn't add up to a single quality (just as an infinite number of genetic copying errors doesn't arrive at a single truth, including the self-refuting "truth" of Darwinian fundamentalism).

Meanwhile, the rejection of reality in favor of ideological "second realities" has hardened into institutional form. Thus, the primary job of the academic-media complex is to assure compliance with the needs of political power. As such, to assimilate the ideology is the exact opposite of a liberal education. To make matters worse, since the 1960s, academia has "become dominated by mediocre people who cannot properly resist radical students in debate."

Nevertheless, pneumopathology is easily confused with freedom, for the simple reason that the contemporary truth-seeker must swim against the tide of our debased culture, so freedom appears as labor. Which it is. No one said liberty is easy! If it were, it wouldn't be so historically rare and recent. In any event, "Recapturing reality in opposition to contemporary deformation requires a considerable amount of work."

Another important consideration in the conflation of freedom and bondage is that the ideologue is freed from the persecution of not knowing. But not knowing is the human condition -- and the prerequisite of any form of knowledge -- so to forget our ignorance is to jettison reality.

All nontroll readers of this blog will understand the fundamental lie of the left that freedom is slavery and slavery is freedom: "Anybody with an informed and reflective mind" will find "himself hemmed in, if not oppressed, from all sides by a flood of ideological language -- meaning thereby language symbols that pretend to be concepts..." They pretend to be concepts, but if one attempts to define them, one quickly discovers that they have no fixed content at all, e.g., "social justice," "peace," "tolerance," "diversity," "income disparity," etc."

Or, the content is the opposite of what the term implies, for what could be less diverse and more drearily monochromatic than leftist diversity? What could be more provocative to our enemies and more conducive to global disorder than military weakness?

To paraphrase Don Colacho, the left in whatever form is first and foremost a lexical strategy. They begin by attacking language, so it is no longer possible to even talk about reality. This makes it exceedingly difficult for the conservative, because when he critiques the left, it will appear to the leftist that he is coming from a place of "unreality."

Perhaps we may take solace in the fact that this is not the first time this has occurred, and that it is a constant struggle to find the words and concepts adequate to illuminate reality: "More than once in history, language has been degraded and corrupted to such a degree that it no longer can be used for expressing the truth of existence."

This occurs when language becomes an idol, a tendency which seems to be a permanent temptation to humans -- far more dangerous and subtle than the old tendency to elevate objects to idols.

This has frankly been going on ever since man learned how to speak and write. For example, Socratic philosophy specifically emerged in a climate of sophistry, whereby the clever and cynical Sophist engaged "in misconstructions of reality for the purpose of gaining social ascendence and material profits" (not to mention young boys).

Yesterday we spoke of one of the main tactics of the left, which is to close off certain avenues of thought, i.e., the tyranny of political correctness. This is how the ideologue makes "his state of alienation compulsory for everyone." You know -- everybody's a racist, or we are persecuted by "the rich," or there is a war on women. People have to believe these fantasies in order for the ideologue to wield political power.

As Voegelin has said, ideology is always rooted in a rejection of the first and tenth commandments, or in the promotion of idolatry and envy. The left would be out of business if it couldn't transform words to idols and promote envy as a virtue instead of a sin and a punishment (since, unlike most sins, envy gives the envier no real pleasure).

Out of time. The remodelers are messing with my office again.

What has Two Legs and Slithers on its Ideology?

Better yet, what do you call a tenured hack chained to the bottom of the sea?

A good start.

That dark yoke is in reference to yesterday's aphorism, that "No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny."

Which prompted commenter Rick to wonder if this might be "carved into a millstone somewhere" -- recalling Jesus's suggestion that people who spend their lives twisting the minds of children ought to have millstones hung around their necks and be cast into the sea. Which he didn't mean literally, but rather, to emphasize the seriousness of the crime of soul murder, which is analogous to postnatal abortion.

It is ironic that the left conceals the impulse to commit soul murder behind the principle of "academic freedom," when denial of freedom -- which is either spiritual, or it is nothing -- is their explicit goal. For example, my child attends a Catholic school, where he learned by the age of five or so that he always has a choice between alternatives, between good and bad actions.

But for decades, liberals have been seducing children into the opposite view, that behavior is a consequence of circumstances, and that evil (which is relative anyway) choices are simply a reflection of the environment. Conversely, good consists in embracing the correct ideology, irrespective of personal faults.

This is simply Marxism writ small -- the idea that man is a function of his class and nothing more. Again, it is just an attack on the vertical -- on man's intrinsic transcendence -- via ideology.

And it is difficult to defend ourselves from the attacks, for the same reason it can be difficult to defend ourselves from infection by airborne virus: the whole drama is taking place on a scale that is invisible to us.

To take one example, last year conservatives were systematically accused by the media and its political arm, the DNC, of waging a "war on women." Never mind that there is no such war, and that we have no earthly idea what they're even talking about. We still must rouse our defense mechanism -- our immune system, as it were -- and fend off the ridiculous attack.

But defending oneself against a risible attack -- "when did you stop beating Sandra Fluke?" -- risks making oneself appear ridiculous. As Don Colacho says, "The inferior man is always right in an argument, because the superior man has condescended to argue." Thus, in a perverse way, "Defeating a fool humiliates us." On a more subtle level, "Even in opposition to the intellectual language of a time, one cannot help but write in it" (ibid.).

So conservatives are always playing defense, often reduced to using the terms and even the narrative of the left. And since leftism may be expressed with a vocabulary of a dozen words or so -- so long as it is expressed with the appropriate sanctimony, outrage, and hysteria -- it's like trying to be a parent in a world in which children are on the identical level as the grown-ups. This is a world in which reasoned opinion is forced to operate on the same plane as the collective tantrum (e.g., the George Zimmerman show trial).

In other words, the world is drained of legitimate authority, leaving only a vacuum for power to fill. The final common pathway is government by the ungovernable, i.e., people who cannot master themselves presuming to master others (i.e., takers ruling makers). That's pretty much the tipping point, the very eventuality our founders worked so hard to avoid by shielding us from direct democracy, AKA mob rule.

Leftists may be childish, but they are not childlike, the latter connoting openness to the broad spectrum of reality, genuine curiosity, and innocence. It is this that Jesus warns us about messing with. But leftism cannot operate in an open system, which is the real motive behind the attack on religion (i.e., the vertical).

Voegelin has analyzed the "prohibition of questions" that forms the walls around any ideology. Certain conclusions are forbidden, so entire lines of questioning are cut off. We all know how children are forever asking why?, and if we are honest with ourselves, we soon realize that we really don't know -- in other words, children remind us of the mystery that adults can only pretend to have solved.

But after four or five such questions, we soon enough reach the alphOmega point aphorized by Don Colacho: "Everything in the world ultimately rests on its own final just because.” Or in other words, "Metaphysical problems do not haunt man so that he will solve them, but so that he will live them." Indeed, even God adopted this strategy to show us how it's done: in-carnation, not in-doctrination.

Some people predict it will all be over by 2041, when atheism replaces religion. If so, Don Colacho will have been right again, for "There are times approaching in which only one who crawls will be able to survive."

Sounds grim, doesn't it? Not to worry: "The fun consists in gaining a pseudo-identity through asserting one's power, optimally by killing somebody -- a pseudo-identity that serves as a substitute for the human self that has been lost" (Voegelin).

Trained Beasts and the Modern Multiversity

When I think of the tenured, I think of pomposity and vacuity; or pretentiousness and absurdity. Nor am I alone in so thinking. For example, Nicolás Gómez Dávila -- AKA Don Colacho -- aphirms that "There is an illiteracy of the soul which no diploma cures."

Worse yet, -- think of our Dear Leader, or of the left more generally -- "Formal instruction does not cure foolishness; it arms it."

Yesterday we spoke of the precipitous dumbing down of academia in order to achieve the dubious goal of mass college education (dubious because there can be no such thing as mass excellence). Before World War II, relatively few Americans attended college, and most of those didn't do so in order to secure a job, but simply to obtain a liberal education, or because they were wealthy twits with nothing better to do.

Afterwards a confluence of factors fueled the expansion and influence of the college racket, including the discovery, extension, and exploitation of adolescence, the banning of IQ tests as a condition of employment, and the need to siphon off a flood of workers into the labor pool after WWII (via the GI bill).

Nowadays college is practically a civil right; and like most newly discovered rights, it is really an obligation (of taxpayers) in disguise, nor is it necessarily healthy for the right-bearer. There are obviously forms of education that are healthy, but it is just as likely that one will be harmed by college; at the very least, "for some, college is the beginning of problems with drugs, or drinking, or sex that will cloud their adulthood for years, or even a lifetime."

And the damage to the soul might be worse for the person who doesn't spend four years partying, and who actually assimilates what he has been taught: "if you are a parent who does not hold [leftist] positions, you are not merely wasting an enormous sum of money; you are paying an enormous sum of money to have a college inculcate views and values that are counter to your most precious values and ideals."

In this ponderous book I'm plowing through, there is a section devoted to education. In it, Niemeyer describes five different forms of education, only one of which is truly liberal, i.e., liberating, humanistic, and spiritually expansive.

I don't have time to detail each of them, but the only one that doesn't end up contracting and damaging the soul is the "Socratic," which opens the youth to a sense of wonder, and induces him "to 'turn around,' away from his self-seeking passions, toward the quest for truth and love of the good."

This approach -- without any indoctrination whatsoever, mind you -- "brings the young man to rational examination of the movements that he can experience in the depth of his soul, and thereby to an awareness of a public order congruous with the order of being itself," i.e., of a political order that mirrors the order of the soul, instead of being at war with it.

This is the only order that can be worthy of man (although it can take diverse forms), so to deny it is to not only oppress man, but in a way, to render man impossible. All ideologies, in one way or another, make manhood impermissible. The reign of political correctness is just the latest version, and the "education" responsible for it is at antipodes to the Socratic one just outlined.

Most people who attend college will -- either explicitly or implicitly -- assimilate a political education (or perhaps politicized would be a better word), which is no education at all, because it is rooted in the needs of the state, not in the nature of man.

Elsewhere Niemeyer describes how the western university was an extension of the universality of Catholicism (which of course means "universal"). Thus, the western university "was from the beginning embedded in a universal pursuit of truth, in knowledge as a universal whole." Nothing can be further from this pattern than the contemporary "multiversity" that indoctrinates students into the tyranny of relativism and the formal stupidity of multiculturalism.

Tolerance? Please "The man who says he is respectful of all ideas is admitting that he is ready to surrender." And "Tolerating should not consist of forgetting that the tolerated only deserve tolerance."

Liberation? "To educate man is to impede the 'free expression of his personality,'” not unleash it on an unsuspecting world.

Logic? "The theses of the left are rationalizations that are carefully suspended before reaching the argument that dissolves them."

Science? "Nothing makes clearer the limits of science than the scientist’s opinions about any topic that is not strictly related to his profession."

Proof? "If we could demonstrate the existence of God, everything would eventually be subjected to the sovereignty of man."

Secular materialism? "Only the souls that are made fertile by a divine pollen bloom."

Funny? "It is enough to state a truth in order to make the fool laugh."

Conservative? "Everything of value in the world is out of step with it."

Metaphysics? "Those who reject all metaphysics secretly harbor the coarsest."

Activism? "To one who anxiously asks what is to be done today, let us honestly answer that today all that is possible is an impotent lucidity."

Social justice? "'Social justice' is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right."

Faith? "There are arguments of increasing validity, but, in short, no argument in any field spares us the final leap."

Absurd? "Man calls 'absurd' what escapes his secret pretensions to omnipotence."

What about The Children? "No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny."

Your god, the state? "The modern state is a teacher who never grants his students a degree." And "The liberal always discovers too late that the price of equality is the omnipotent state."

(All of those pungent aphorisms courtesy Nicolás Gómez Dávila.)