Okay, Just Link to this Post Already!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yes, but "The deluded are wordy."

Touché.

Encircling the Adversary in Metavangelism

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reality: Pay Me Now or Pay Me Later

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God: 'I Am the Imaginator'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anonypalooza

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

Flying into Reality on Wings of Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude:

Reimagineering the World

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Interlude:

Militarizing the Space of Imagination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nice Dreams. Wrong Father.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The One Minute Raccoon

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

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

Cosmic Leveling and the Animalization of Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why I Am Right and Everyone Else is Wrong

Continuing with yesterday's post, we were talking about the Science of the Real, or of the highest Metacosmic Truths accessible to common sense.

Which, by the way, I think is an interesting and exciting subject. I don't really understand why everybody else isn't interested, because one would think it would be the first thing on the human agenda, i.e., exactly WTF is going on down here?!

True, there are philosophers, but they constitute a tiny minority, plus they are almost all ridiculously wrong -- just philodoxers in disguise, in love with their own blather.

That's a pretty bold statement, Bob. What, you're smarter than all those luminaries?

Well, in our day and age, we have been trained to believe that truth is inaccessible to man, and that the best we can do is come up with clever and complicated systems of conjecture, which are always contradicted by the guesswork of some other tenured ape.

Thus, if you take a university philosophy course, you will be treated to a survey of the considered opinions of all the usual suspects, from the pre-Socratics to the postmoderns, leaving you in a dispirited, disillusioned, and defeated muddle. For without truth there is no hope, not even hope for hope.

As always, humans hunger for truth. We are epistemophilic to the ground, and yet, we are told before we even begin the human adventure that no object corresponds to this drive.

Imagine if we were all tormented by a sex drive, with no corresponding object. Imagine a world in which half the population consists of normal males, the other half clones of Sandra Fluke. If such were the case, we would have every right to call God a sadist and existence absurd.

And make no mistake: existence is either a reflection of truth, or it is absurd. God or nihilism. There is no other rational choice, and the sooner one admits it, the better. Either you are living in a fantasy for believing man may know Truth; or you are living in a fantasy for not so believing.

How have we arrived at this parched world of hollow men? Two ways, one vertical, the other horizontal. The first is simple rejection of transcendence, or the blind reenactment of Genesis 3. The second -- the horizontal -- consists mostly of crude repetition and violent pressure to conform.

This repetition is both verbal and nonverbal, and the latter is the more dangerous because it is implicit and pervasive in the culture. It goes to Breitbart's Axiom that politics is downstream from culture. It is as if everything about the culture is designed to not even confuse you, but to inculcate passive acceptance of pneumatic disorder as normative.

It reminds me of Evan Sayek's famous lecture on how the left first undermines judgment and discrimination, which results in an inverted world in which these become identified with moral turpitude. In the world of the left, judgment is judgmentally condemned, which results in a disconnect between the soul and truth. The disconnect is then enforced via political correctness, which someone called a War on Noticing. For example, if you notice the banality that it is impossible for two men to marry, you are a HATER.

So, someone is wrong on this question of whether man may know Truth. And if we want to be strictly logical about it, to insist there is no truth is to of course posit the truth of that statement. Yes, but is it a trivial truth? I don't see how, because to know any truth is to enter a transcendence in need of explanation.

Every secular humanist, every materialist, every leftist, every postmodernist, is just wrong, wrong, wrong, irrespective of how brilliant they and their disciples think they are. For the human longing for truth does have an object, which we call O. Which we will now proceed to explore, if not occupy.

As alluded to in yesterday's post, there is Truth and there are the diverse ways of expressing it. It seems that people become confused by this diversity, as if it implies that truth itself is "diverse."

Not so. For example, put ten people in a room, and each one will have a different view. We do not conclude from this that there exist ten different rooms; rather, there is just the one room seen from different perspectives.

Let's also stipulate that the ten people are diverse: there are men and women, intelligent and stupid, different languages and cultures, different developmental stages, etc. Doesn't matter. It's still one room.

Likewise, it is One Cosmos. Here again, we all implicitly recognize this, or we wouldn't even bother to try to communicate. Indeed, if multiplicity were the ground of existence, then communication itself would be strictly impossible, because there would be no common, implicit substratum of meaning and reality. Frankly, to say "cosmos" is to say God, but let's take it nice and easy and enjoy some stops along the way, shall we?

Where do we start? It seems that we have two pairs of possibility: we can begin with multiplicity or unity; and we can begin with the subject or the object.

Don't fall for his trick! For it is always both: multiplicity implies unity, just as unity implies multiplicity. Likewise, there can be no object without a subject who apprehends it, nor any subject without objects to apprehend. In a word: complementarity, or, if you prefer, orthoparadox.

Schuon writes that "In metaphysics, it is necessary to start from the idea that the Supreme Reality is absolute." This is the Principle of principles, but you don't have to accept it. Again, you can affirm the opposite -- that the supreme reality is relativistic. But then you can stop, because the game is over. Congratulations, you've lost! But only forever.

I do have some slight disagreements with Schuon at this juncture, again, because of the Advaita Vedanta vs. Trinity thing, but we can agree that the Absolute must also by definition be Infinite. There are different ways to conceptualize or visualize the absolute. It is, as Schuon describes, "reflected in space by the point or the center; in time by the moment or the present," "in form, by the sphere," and "in number, by unity" (in other words, all numbers are multiples of one).

Think about this for a moment: each of these is a profound mystery, i.e., center, moment, unity. Each needs to be explained, not simply assumed. How is it, for example, that every human being is a unified subjective center of the cosmos, in each and every moment? Because we are the image and likeness of the Absolute, that's why. Our center is His Center (although His Center is not our center, if you catch my drift).

Many of Meister Eckhart's juiciest comments go to this reality. Let's see if I can dig one out.

--Every single creature is full of God, and is a book about God.

--The eye with which I see God is the same eye with which God sees me.

--Wherever I am, there is God.

--Being is God's circle, and in this circle all creatures exist.

--It is a joy to God to have poured out the divine nature and being into us, who are divine images.

--Outside of God there is nothing but nothing, and The divine one is a negation of negations.

--For you ask me: Who is God? What is God? I reply: Isness. Isness is God. Where there is isness, there God is. Creation is the giving of isness by God.

Those will do. As for me, it's the end of isness and the start of business. To be continued.

Common Nonsense: This is Heaven, but Heaven is Not This

So, is common sense rooted in principles, or do principles flow from common sense? And is common sense universal, or does it change from epoch to epoch, culture to culture, cable network to cable network?

First, we had better define the term. Before looking it up, I would say that it must have to do with knowledge accessible to every normal man by virtue of being one. It is preconceptual, or archetypal if you are Jung at heart -- not quite knowledge, but ready to become so: pre-knowledge.

In Bion's scheme, a preconception mates with experience in order to become a conception, and a conception goes on to become a grownup concept. But there can also be *bastard* concepts that are not the product of this proper union. Although this no doubt sounds abstract, it brings us right back to the left, for so many of their miscegenational ideas are infertile precisely because of this cognitive mismating.

"Homosexual marriage" would be as good an example as any, because this cannot be a preconception anchored in the nature of things, only a bastard of a concept imposed from above. And it surely cannot flow from common sense, unless every human until a few years ago lacked common sense. Among other things, the left is a war on common sense. And common decency. And our common heritage.

In the excellent Book of Absolutes, Gairdner has academically incorrect and therefore instructive chapters on the universals of human life and culture, the constants of nature, the universals of human sex and biology, the universals of language, and the universals of law. I am tempted to just say Read the Book, because that's an awful lot to cover in the spacetime of a post, especially because it's been five years since I read it.

Oh, and Gairdner has a new book coming out next year called The Great Divide: Why Liberals and Conservatives Will Never, Ever Agree. This second book is no doubt a logical extension of the first, for what is leftism but the political implications of relativism and rejection of absolutes, i.e., a deeply principled political stupidity at war with Reason?

I'm going to try to skim that book later today and maybe get back to it tomorrow. Meanwhile, another book we haven't discussed but which I can heartily endorse is Frithjof Schuon and the Perennial Philosophy, which is an introductory guide to his trans-thinking.

It is especially recommended to those of you who are a little intimidated by the master, but hey, who would be intimidated by this easygoing and nonjudgmental visage?:

Chapter five condenses his system to the very essence of what we might call Metacosmic Common Sense -- although he would hasten to add that this is no more "his system" than the sun can be private property. Rather, it shines equally upon the good and evil, the intelligent and stupid, the gifted and the tenured.

I realize this is controversial, but I am highly attracted to the idea that truth is anterior to revelation, or in other words, that we do not necessarily need the supplement of revelation to fill in the lacunae that result from our being mere creatures, or middling relativities of the Father.

On the other hand, revelation is sufficient to put us in contact with these necessary metacosmic truths, which is why, for example, a simple person of faith can be so much wiser than a brilliant scientist when it pertains to essential human truths beyond the scope of science -- and why we would prefer to be governed by the first 500 people in the Boston phonebook than the Harvard faculty.

Well, maybe not Boston...

I would also add that the metacosmic truths we are about to discuss are highly abstract, and that in the absence of revelation they are like forms with no content or a soul with no body. Also, revelation adds many details that cannot be captured in the abstract, nor can one have an intimate personal relationship with an abstraction.

Here is an example of a first principle that seems to me unassailable, that "God is ineffable," such that "nothing can describe Him or enclose Him in words." What mischief results from believing otherwise!

For it is not as if we are faced with a binary choice between a conceptual absolute posited by the mind and a paltry relativism that implicitly elevates man to God. Rather, we simultaneously posit the existence of the Absolute and our inability to contain it/him; or, if you can contain it, it is not God. (We could say that an "it" can be contained by the mind, whereas a person can never be.)

Before starting this post, the thought popped into my head: any valid knowledge of God is obviously already God and must come from God. However, the converse is not true: God is not that knowledge.

A map is not the territory, but nor is it other than the territory, in the sense that it provides points of reference on a human scale. Just so, metaphysics and revelation provide us with humanly realizable points of reference that permit us, say, to orient ourselves to eternity via time, or heaven via earth, or the celestial via the terrestrial, etc.

Indeed you could say that earth is heaven, but that of course heaven is not earth. Thus, Jesus can rightly affirm in the Gospel of Thomas that the kingdom "is spread out upon the earth, and men do not see it" (#113). Some men, anyway. But we couldn't even know of paradise if we didn't sometimes catch glimpses of it herebelow.

For Schuon, "metaphysical doctrine is nothing other than the science of Reality and illusion." The postmodern secular leftist type will usually say that we can only know appearances and not reality, but we respond that we can know appearances precisely because they are appearances of a reality anterior to them; optical illusions only exist because of optical realities.

Now, the same doctrine "might be articulated in a number of ways, from a variety of viewpoints," for the same reason a truth can be expressed in different languages. You could say that a valid religion is a richly symbolic "metaphysical vocabulary" -- or that, conversely, a religion that fails to embody and communicate these truths is no religion at all.

I suppose where I differ from Schuon is that his preferred vocabulary is ultimately Advaita Vedanta, whereas I believe this fails to adequately convey certain fine points that are better expressed in the language of Christianity (although Ramanuja's interpretation of Vedanta gets the job done where Shankara fails, and is easily assimilated to Christianity).

It's getting late, isn't it? To be continued...

"Oy, what is it with these anonymous bonehead trolls?"

The Thuggery, Buggery, and Skulduggery of the Left, or Welcome to Our New Underlords

Perhaps the last paragraph of yesterday's post was obscure. In plain English, Obama ultimately wants to reconstitute the American electorate into a permanent LoFo Democrat majority. He knows that if we fail to implement effective border security now, we will never do so. Thus, for the left this is not a human catastrophe but an anti-human opportunity.

Ironically, given their predictable voting patterns, the malleable LoFos invading Texas, California, Arizona and elsewhere will transform America into exactly the type of nation from which they are fleeing: an authoritarian state in bed with its capitalist cronies and clients. Forgive them, for they know not what they are doing, nor will they ever know so long as the left controls public education. For the left this is a perfect shitstorm of power and ignorance, up there with the New Deal and Great Society: the New Society.

In a way, I understand. I would not be overly distressed if we were flooded with illegal Republicans who share our values, from Cuba, eastern Europe, Israel, wherever. I would of course prefer to win on the field of intellectual battle, but that is a battle in which the left will wisely never engage -- and certainly not honestly.

Therefore, their only options for maintaining political viability are extra-democratic ones such as judicial tyranny, administrative law (a permanent administrative state beyond the reach of any democratic check), control of the media and other institutions, racial demagoguery, identity politics, IRS thuggery, public employee unions, and now demographic swamping. Once the latter bears its inevitable fruit, they can then claim to have been the democrats all along. And since media and academic losers write the first and last rough drafts of revisionist history, he's got that angle covered as well.

Yes, it is demonic. Why? Because while the luciferic is simply devoid of or indifferent to the Light, the demonic actively works in opposition to it. America is still the political light of the world -- in his disordered soul, even the liberal must dimly recognize this, for why would all these wretches want to come here? -- but they won't rest until the light is extinguished and we are finally not a smidgen less exceptional than Greece or Mexico or Detroit.

Now, back to our Top Ten Cosmic Principles. As mentioned, I recently read Russell Kirk's memoirs, which prompted me to reopen his classic The Conservative Mind: From Burke to Eliot. In the latter he talks about the often unstated principles that animate conservatives of various stripes.

However he is very cautious about making them too concrete, because this could conceivably become reified into an ideology, when conservatism is, as he says, the rejection of ideology. In other words, it is rooted in experience, in tradition, in the "permanent things," not in the high abstractions that animate -- or better, nihilize -- the leftist mind.

With that in mind, he mentions six broad properties which strike me as reasonable. Since we don't have all day, I will paraphrase them; they include belief in a transcendent order; appreciation of the ineluctable mystery of human existence, such that no manmade system can exhaust it; recognition of order rooted in vertical hierarchy; freedom (which is necessarily related to property, thus creating an inviolate realm of sovereignty beyond the reach of the state); faith in custom, convention, and the accumulated wisdom of mankind; and an appreciation of change as the means of preservation, as opposed to radical change, which damages or destroys what needs to be preserved.

To boil it down further, we could say Transcendence, Mystery, Hierarchy, Liberty, Tradition, and Healthy Change (i.e., that change needed in order to secure and extend the permanent things, e.g., life, liberty, justice, etc.).

Yes, you could say this is pretty low hanging fruit. Who could possibly take issue with such a salubrious and soul-fortifying list?

The left, that's who!

Example?

Well, as the old cliche goes, fascism is violent opposition to transcendence. Thus the left isn't necessarily fascistic, since (at least in America) they mostly practice nonviolent opposition to transcendence.

Then again, so long as they appropriate the levers of state power to deny transcendence, that is implicitly violent, isn't it? For example, if the state wants to force Catholic employers at gunpoint to pay for abortions, what do you call that? I'm not even talking about the violence perpetrated on the baby, but the violence directed at the conscience, which is our most obvious and intimate evidence of transcendence.

The Obama administration is at the center of the two (at least) most consequential scandals in our nation's history, the fraudulent passage of Obamacare (probably the greatest consumer fraud in human history), and the enlistment of the IRS to intimidate and silence private citizens in order to steal an election. In the first, they took aim at our bodies; in the second, at our property. What's left? Yes, the soul, but the soul needs both a body and freedom in order to actualize.

Second, the left is transparently at war with the mystery of life. This comes out in any number of ways. What is scientism, for example, but the radical demystification of life? What is a secular "sex education" but the rebarbarization of man?

In other words, what they call "human sexuality" is quite literally subhuman sexuality; not liberation but servility. What is metaphysical Darwinism but the animalization of man? It cures us of the mystery of the human soul, just as feminism cures women of their divine femininity, and multiculturalism rids us of the delusion that truth exists. (Or as the postmodern leftist says: "There is no truth, and we possess it. Or else.)

The third is obvious: class warfare, or a belief that justice is a horizontal concept rather than vertical. In reality, a classless society would be the last word in injustice, since it would force uniformity upon everyone, such that life would no longer be worth living (or a truly human life would be unattainable).

In contrast, conservatives cherish the individual, and the individual cannot be shoved into some preordained, abstract category. The left always wants to stick us into categories of race, gender, ethnicity, "sexual orientation," etc., when the individual always transcends these.

The fourth is also easy, liberty and its relationship to property, for where would the left be without envy? Someone else's property is none of our business, and certainly not the business of the state (except to protect it from the acquisitive envy of the left).

Fifth is again easy, for job one of the left is to insist that this is Eden, that we are Adam and Eve (or Steve), and that this time we're gonna get it right by creating a state so powerful and a system so perfect that no one will need to be good (paraphrasing Eliot). Finally, we are the ones we've been waiting for to toss out the priceless wisdom of the species (especially that of dead white males) and start history anew.

In contrast to fundamental transformation... well, in point of fact, conservatives do very much believe in fundamental transformation, only on a personal level, never a collective one. We know it is fanciful to believe that a population of disordered souls can maintain an ordered polis. Rather, personal disorder will only evoke a police state to enforce a top-down order.

Say, how does all this fundamental transformation feel? I don't know abut you, but my butt hurts.

What is it with the left? It's always thuggery, buggery, and skulduggery, 24/7.

The Planet of the Apes, or Welcome to Liberal Paradise!

Reader James asks: "How does Cosmic Orthodoxy relate to common sense? Or to self-evident truths? If you were to start 'The Self-Evident Truth Society: Dedicated to Halting the Abandonment of Common Sense,' what would be your top ten cosmic orthodox principles, or self-evident truths?"

Well, that is precisely what this desultory series of posts has been driving at, going back at least a month. It might have started with Studying God in the University of the Cosmos, but it feels like longer. A number of recent books have synchronistically converged on the issue (e.g., The Common Mind), or maybe I just read them in light of this question of Cosmic Principles.

But if you ask me directly, it's difficult to respond. It's like trying to see a distant star at night: look directly and it disappears. But look away and relax, and it pops into your peripheral vision. Oddly, it's brighter when implicit and unconscious than when explicit and conscious.

Truth is more than a little like this, isn't it? Try to stare it down directly and we are simply not adequate to it. But relax and allow it to seep in, and there it is. Transposing from the empirical to the spiritual eye, you could call this receptive and enslackened mode "faith."

This would also go to how truth may be more adequately embodied in myth, parable, poetry, and other symbolic forms that preverberate in the soul. Some truths "become less evident by endeavors to explain them" (Johnson, in Moore).

My son, for example, is at an age in between the ability to understand revelation concretely and to do so more abstractly -- or between Piaget's concrete and formal operations thinking. Thus, I don't quite know how to respond when he asks a specific question about, say, creation, or Adam & Eve, or the Flood. I try to explain to him that revelation is about man in general and about him in particular, and in this sense is truer than true (i.e., truer than the mere empirical or rationalistic truth which are its prolongations on lower planes).

The typical atheist becomes stuck in concrete operations thought when he must deal with anything above the plane of matter; in other words, there is no fundamentalist more fundamental nor literalist more literal than the bonehead atheist. Somewhere along the lyin' they convinced themselves that they could profitably stare down truth without the vital supplementary (one might say "female") modes of faith, intellection, intuition, higher imagination, etc. This strategy is always tied up with the pride which would be mitigated if they had only understood such cautionary tales as contained in Genesis, e.g., the fall of man, Cain & Abel, the tower of Babel, etc.

In The Common Mind we read of "the attempt to integrate the intellect with the whole personality, and in so doing oppose intellectualism." That would be an example of a Cosmic Principle, but difficult to express in the form of a Top Ten list, for it implies, and is implied by, so many other truths.

Such as?

Such as the principle that man is in the image and likeness of the Creator; that man spans the vertical spectrum from the lowest to the highest planes, for better or worse; that knowledge is em-bodied and in-carnated; or even prior to this, that man is adequate to reality, not with his fragmented and desiccated ego-mind, but with his unified soul-intellect.

Conversely, intellectualism is the way of the tenured, of the infertile egghead who imagines (in the lower sense) that truth can be eagerly grabbed at instead of invited in. Only with higher intellect properly so-called (the nous) do we preserve the essential "otherness" of primordial truth, which is always relational and therefore personal.

Or in other words, if we can grasp it with our shriveled tenureMind, it cannot possibly be true. This is something, by the way, that Darwin -- who was far more intellectually honest than his latter day wackolytes -- understood. One thing that rightly puzzled him was why we have any right to trust the cognitions of a modified ape. For if an ape is capable of knowing truth, this is no mere ape but an entirely novel cosmic category irreducible to random genetic error.

Which is again why even a literalist reading of Genesis is more true than a strict Darwinian approach, because the former is true where it counts, i.e., on the human plane. Indeed, it preserves our humanness where Darwinism necessarily unexplains and eliminates it.

Reason only permits us to proceed from the known to the unknown. Thus rationalism begins with what it needs to explain, that is, the prior human ability to know. Therefore, it seems to me that one of our Top Ten principles must surely be that reality is intelligible and that man may know it. But these are really two sides of the same principle, which is Creation, or Rational Creator.

Therefore, in my view, to even talk about "truth" is to implicitly acknowledge the Creator. The problem with the left -- and with its retarded sister scientism -- is that it neither acknowledges its first principles nor follows them all the way to their inevitable conclusions, which is why they are so free to engage in such sloppy thinking. There is no liberal to whom one cannot say: tighten up that loose shit!

Or, to the extent that their excrement is tight, it is because it is circling around a tightly closed tautology of rationalism and intellectualism: garbage in, tenure out.

In The Common Mind, reason is opposed to common sense, the latter of which "perceives truth, or commands belief, not by progressive argumentation, but by an instantaneous, instinctive, and irresistible impulse; derived neither from education nor from habit, but from nature..."

In other words, transnatural intellection is to the human being what natural instinct is to the animal. Among other things, it is a homing instinct that orients us to the truth -- or source of truth -- that precedes us and of which we are ultimately constituted.

Moore continues: "That which is self-evident can neither be proved nor disproved by reason or logic" -- for example, our self-evidently free will. To deny free will is only to affirm it, since a truth not freely arrived at is no truth at all.

There may be an even more general principle behind the ideas discussed in this post. Perhaps it is this: that reality both Is and is anterior to our knowing it. But in knowing this we know that knowledge is always bound up with this prior reality in which we participate through assimilation.

Correct thinking requires a kind of negation. To paraphrase Russell Kirk, conservatism is the negation of ideology. Leftism is a parody of this, in that it is the negation of principle (or the blind acceptance of unarticulated principles). There is a big difference between a political animal and an animal with politics.

In response to James's question, I think in hindsight we will be able to compile a suitable list, as we leisurely dilate on it via our peripheral but wide open cʘʘnvision.

Oh, one other important implication of the above: "Thus, the 'rights' of slave owners are as meaningless as is the 'right' to abortion," since "Laws cannot be legitimate when they violate the foundation of law itself." One might say the same of Obama's attempt to demographically destroy the incarnational truth of America via open borders.

Cosmic Orthodoxy and How it Affects Your Wallet

A couple of posts back we dropped a casual reference to Cosmic Orthodoxy, which got me to thinking: exactly what did I mean by this term? Was I just joking? Being provocative? Poetic?

No, I meant it literally. Again, ortho-doxy is straight or right thinking; thus, cosmic orthodoxy is the correct view of everything, or rather, of the whole. It doesn't necessarily mean that one is correct with regard to every particular -- the history of any religion or science proves this -- but that one's overarching view is correct, or at least adequate; or even better, not infected at the start with a principle or axiom so fundamentally incorrect as to bar progress, or generate absurdity, or refute itself.

Example?

For example, the first principle of Cosmic Orthodoxy is that there is one. This probably sounds slightly tautological, but it isn't at all, for we know full well that there exists an influential mob of half-educated mediocretins -- we call them the tenured -- who believe otherwise.

These lazy folkers enforce an orthodoxy that insists that there is and can be no orthodoxy at all, only a pluralistic miasma they call "diversity or "multiculturalism" or a government or campus that "looks like America," etc.

In short, they believe in orthodox relativism, or that relativism is the right and proper stance toward reality. Thus they refute themselves right out the gate, but these are not the sharpest bulbs in the knife socket. Which isn't problematic for them, since, in the absence of truth, no one can really be deeper or brighter than anyone else, and besides, so long as you're a ward of the state with a guaranteed gig in the looniversity bin, who cares?

In other words, there can be no vertical measure of proximity to truth, which does wonders for one's self esteem -- or intellectual pride -- until one realizes that any scholarship produced by such heterodorks is equivalent to winning a trophy for showing up: the bland writing for the blind.

It reminds me of 1974, when the Nobel Prize in economics went to two illustrious experts, Freidrich Hayek and Gunnar Myrdal. These two experts could not possibly disagree more on the nature of economic reality, nor is there any way to blend them into some kind of hybrid "middle way," for this would be the middle way of ice cream and excrement or orange juice and arsenic.

Now, the reason why there is economic truth is because there is truth; and the reason why there is truth is because there is reality; and the reason why there is reality is because there is creation; and the reason why there is creation -- including all this ongrowing creativity and novelty -- is because there is a Creator.

But the central point to bear in mind is that economics is not an ad hoc or sui generis discipline unattached to everything else, or something that only emerges at the level of human interaction. Rather, to the extent that it "works," it is because it mirrors certain principles of Cosmic Orthodoxy on its own plane.

Again, the views of these two men, Hayek and Myrdal, could not possibly be more different. To honor them simultaneously is analogous to handing out the Pulitzer Prize in poetry to T.S. Eliot and Maya Angelou, or a Templeton Prize to Thomas Aquinas and Deepak Chopra. It just makes no sense, for starters; it is utterly incoherent. Unless, of course, one is a relativist, in which case it is inevitable that we will conflate shit and Shinola.

"Actions," writes Easterly, "follow from principles and understanding." Although failure to act has its own consequences, "wrong actions are equally a danger," so "it is critical to to get the principles of action right before acting."

Or in other words, Doctrine and Method: the same principle that applies to religion applies equally to to economics, i.e., truth and its application.

The application of Myrdal's truth has directly led to a literally incalculable number of deaths, because it is impossible to calculate the number of deaths that wouldn't have occurred had authoritarian technocrats put Hayak's principles into effect instead of Myrdal's (or rather, if these meddlesome authoritarians hadn't existed to begin with, or had simply obeyed the Law).

It's like asking how many died as a result of Karl Marx. Only God knows. Given the guilt that would result, I suppose it's a sort of perverse mercy that Marxists don't know God. Yet.

"The technocratic illusion is that poverty results from a shortage of expertise, whereas poverty is really about a shortage of rights" (ibid.). Consider America at the time of the founding. The average person at the time was probably poorer, say, than the people flooding our southern border. But they had their sacred rights, and that was enough.

Imagine, however, if, instead of securing our sacred rights, our forebears had burdened us with Authoritarian Experts like Myrdal or Keynes or Krugman. Had that happened, our subsequent development wouldn't have. It is very much like Marx, who railed about the misery of the proletariat when, for the first time in history, masses of people were rising out of subsistence -- not due to Myrdalian principles, but to straight-up cosmically orthodox Hayekian ones of spontaneous order resulting from dispersed and decentrailized knowledge known by individuals and no one else.

And it is the same for poverty in contemporary America, which was actually losing the fight until authoritarian liberal experts decided to declare war in it. There can be no exit strategy from such a fanciful war, for the same reason there is no exit strategy from any delusion. Rather, the delusion is the strategy.

We have Providence to thank for the fact that our founders were firmly rooted in Cosmic Orthodoxy, in nonlocal principles that apply to all men at all times. If they were alive today -- which they still are, by the way -- they would no doubt call King Barry before the tribunal of world history and formally charge him with Plundering Our Wallets, Ravaging Our Economy, and Burning Our Constitution.

(yoinked courtesy Happy Acres)