Everything has Changed. Nothing has Changed.

We should not be frightened: what we admire does not die. Nor be delighted: neither does what we detest. --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I awoke this morning thinking about this curiously airy state of mind since last Tuesday's election. It's too important merely to enjoy. Rather, we need to stand back from it and observe it -- be in it but not of it, you might say. Let us not mimic the unseemly emotional incontinence of the left when their savior healed the planet back in 2008.

Now that I'm pondering this, it seems I've always been this way -- that is, holding a part of myself in reserve from events around me. You know, the Witness. Or Ironist, anyway. For example, I attended a lot of rock concerts in my adultolescence, especially between about 17 and 25. You remember the drill: you get totally wasted beforehand, and hope to peak when the band comes on stage.

Nevertheless, even under those chemically fortified conditions, I was never able to "lose myself" completely. Let's say I'm at the Inglewood Forum, with 18,000 people who are singing and moving in unison in a kind of group trance. Now I find the whole idea creepy, but even then I was on the outside. I was inside the music, to be sure, but not inside, or at one with, the crowd. A part of me noticed what a bunch of undignified animals they were.

I could never figure out if this Witness was a good thing or a bad thing. Was it just a neurotic and excessive "self-consciousness," something I needed to annihilate? That was actually the idea behind a lot of psychotherapy models back then -- to completely break through all defenses and inhibitions, behind or underneath which we would find our radiant and unsullied True Self.

I actually started reading psychology before I ever dreamed of -- or was consigned to -- being a psychologist. I've mentioned before that I was caught by total surprise when my brain unexpectedly clicked on at around age 25, at which point I began reading everything in sight. Prior to that, I may have read one book on a voluntary basis -- Ball Four, by Jim Bouton. But being an autodidact meant being unguided by any coherent tradition or narrative; instead of approaching something from the center out, I just began nibbling randomly at the periphery.

Anyway, most of the psychology books I read back then were of the Strip Away All Inhibitions! variety. I'll bet I still have a few of them tucked away in my closet... Let us rummage...

Not sure why I haven't inflicted these upon the library. I suppose I was waiting for just this moment. Don't worry. I won't spend a great deal of time on this self-indulgence. Let's begin with R.D. Laing, who was quite big back then. His basic point in The Divided Self is that normality is madness and madness normality. In short, western civilization is insane, largely due to its pervasive repression. I'm sure he blames Christians for that. So let's all take our clothes off and engage in a cathartic primal scream.

There's an Aphorism for that: To educate man is to impede the 'free expression of his personality.' One wants to post a sign in public places: Thank You For Repressing Yourself. Or, No Shame, No Service. In fact, shame was a big thing we needed to do away with according to the New Psychology.

Time out for another Aphorism: Modern man imagines it is sufficient to open the windows in order to cure the soul's infection, that it is not necessary to clear out the trash.

I read somewhere that a mob of progressive snowflakes -- must have been in San Francisco -- actually engaged in a group primal scream to discharge their trauma over the election. And since they think in these terms, they imagine that the people who supported Trump were engaging in their own primal scream by electing him. It can't be the ideas. Rather, just a howling mob. (What would the left do without projection?)

I can see that if we proceed down this path, this post will rapidly spiral out of control. Back to matters at hand: this curious state of mind.

I am of course relieved, not so much because Trump won but because the left has been thwarted. But has my life actually changed? Unlike liberals who abuse their children with horror stories about the monster Trump, I assured mine that our lives wouldn't change much if at all under a Clinton administration. Indeed, I told him that if we didn't own a television set, we might very well notice nothing at all. I told him I was worried about the future of the nation, but reassured him that I would probably be dead by then.

Politics is like flypaper for irrational exuberance. I remember writing posts in the wake of the 2008 and 2012 elections, counseling readers -- or myself, anyway -- to not get caught up in the negativity, that Obama would surely crash and burn once he underwent the formality of actually existing, instead of being only a projection of infra-religious liberal fantasies.

So we certainly don't want to mirror the left by projecting our conservative fantasies onto Trump! And even if he accomplishes everything he sets out to do, it won't alter our existential circumstances. I mean, we're still going to die.

Nor will the struggle ever end. Look at the Reagan years, a "golden age" of conservatism. Some even imagined we had arrived at the End of History. But human nature emerged intact, such that we find ourselves battling for the same ideals -- indeed, the same ideals enunciated by the founders 240 years ago.

Now, progressives are by nature more prone to this illusion, because they literally believe history has sides and that they are on the right one. It makes no sense to them that history could suddenly veer off course three days ago. They have no theory to explain this. Well, no theory except, racism, sexism, homophobia, and Islamophobia: the "whitelash," as Van Jones put it.

People think this election was unusual in offering such flawed candidates. But elections usually come down to the lesser of two evils, because it's much easier for human beings to know what to hate than what to love. Politics, as they say, is the organization of hatreds. In my case, for example, I can say without reservation that I despise the left (not necessarily the individuals, mind you, but the ideology). But can I say without reservation that I love any politician, let alone Trump?

I've been thinking of another ironic aphorism to the effect that one can only embrace without reservation lost causes. Why is this? Well, prior to Tuesday I assumed Clinton was a sure thing, which made it easy for me to express my hostility toward the left with no ambivalence or restraint.

But now Republicans are in charge, and once your beautiful ideas are mingled with actual human beings -- or even just with reality -- you are bound to be disappointed. I'm thinking again of when Reagan became president -- or Thatcher prime minister. In both cases it took a couple of years for the improvement to manifest.

In Reagan's case, there was a sharp downturn in the economy before it began its unprecedented growth. For the past eight years the Matrix Media has given Obama a pass on the weak economy. I will be surprised if they give Trump a month. And if the positive results aren't immediately seen -- which is impossible -- there will be War.

Which means there will be War. The next four years -- starting this very moment -- will be relentless War. There will be no honeymoon, no slack, no courtesy, no forbearance. Scott Adams has suggested that the de-Hitlerization of Trump will take a little time, but that it will happen. I'd like to believe that, but I am skeptical. Reagan was never de-Hitlerized, and the media are only more ideological today than they were then.

My point is that it's a long season. Don't get too upset after a loss or too exultant after a victory. The first thing they ask when you win the Super Bowl or World Series is "do you think you can repeat next year?!" Because in reality there is no victory, only struggling toward it.

Furthermore, it is vital to struggle on behalf of the good, while leaving the rest to providence. Do the right thing for its own sake, not because you expect a certain result. The celestial goal is fixed, but the terrestrial route is always circuitous.

Man matures when he stops believing that politics solves his problems (NGD).

And no man can solve politics, because there is no human solution to the problem of Man.

Oh, and if you want to see what voters rejected last Tuesday, just look at the unrepressed expressions on the faces of the howling and demented mobs. They remind us of what we despise.

Pig Wrestling and Spiritual Warfare

If nothing else, this election shows that in order to defeat the inveterate (for it is in their nature) bullies of the left, one must bully right back. Genteel conservatives such as George Will and Charles Krauthammer win every argument but lose the war.

But is bullying a bully actually bullying? One of the most common cinematic themes is the bully getting his just desert, often at the hands of another bully. Many films come to mind, but True Grit is typical. Recall that Mattie, whose father has been murdered, is unable to find justice through official channels, so she hires Rooster Cogburn to get the job done.

Toward the beginning of the film, Mattie inquires about apprehending her father's murderer:

-- Why aren't you out looking for him [her father's murderer]?

-- I've no authority in the Indian Nation. He's now the business of the US Marshal.

-- Who's the best marshal they have?

-- I would have to weigh that... William Waters is the best tracker. He is half Comanche and it is something to see him cut for sign. The meanest is Rooster Cogburn. He is a pitiless man, double tough and fear don't enter into his thinking. He loves to pull a cork. The best is probably L.T. Quinn, he brings his prisoners in alive. Now he may let one get by now and again but he believes even the worst of men is entitled to a fair shake.

-- Where would I find this Rooster?

-- At the Federal Court this afternoon.

Later they show Rooster on the witness stand, being cross-examined by a defense attorney who shows that he likely murdered a couple of suspects in his custody:

-- How long have you been a Deputy Marshal, Mr Cogburn?

-- Four years, come March.

-- How many men have you shot in that time?

-- The prosecution objects!

-- Overruled!

-- How many men have you shot since becoming a marshal?

-- I never shot nobody I didn't have to!

-- That's not the question. How many?

-- Shot or killed?

-- Let's restrict it to killed, a more manageable figure!

-- Well, twelve to fifteen, stopping men in flight and defending myself et cetera.

-- Twelve to fifteen? So many you can't keep a specific count. I have examined the records. A more accurate figure is available. Come now, how many?

-- Counting them two Whartons, twenty-three.

-- I felt you'd come to it with a little effort. Twenty-three dead men in four years. That makes about six men a year!

-- It's a dangerous business.

-- How much more for those you arrest!

I remember seeing that film when I was 13 or so. I wonder: was there anyone in the audience who didn't identify with Rooster over the condescending and smooth talking criminal lawyer who may know the law but not the human heart? But that was a different age.

One can well imagine a similar courtroom scene with Donald Trump on the stand and some sleazy and pretentious media figure cross-examining him. In fact, we scarcely have to imagine it, because we saw it in the debates. The left's entire campaign -- involving a conspiracy between the DNC and the Matrix Media -- revolved around this sort of shaming strategy.

Here we see an interesting dynamic: is it possible -- or does it make sense, at any rate -- to be shamed by the shameless? One of the outstanding characteristics of the left is that they are indeed shameless. They are routinely caught doing and saying things -- think only of Hillary or Obama -- which would cause you or I to be mortified. And yet, they have this superhuman -- or infrahuman -- ability to utterly deflect it.

A good example is dirty Donna Brazile, who was caught funneling debate questions to Clinton. Not only is she not ashamed, she is defiant -- even going so far as to claim she is being persecuted for being a Christian woman! Now, that brings shamelessness to a metaphysical level.

Or think of John Podesta, or the rest of the DNC cretins and MSM propagandists (but I repeat myself) revealed as duplicitous hacks. No shame.

Cut to the secret tape of Billy Bush and Donald Trump. A typical Republican -- the good trackers who follow the letter of the law and bring them back alive -- would have been sunk. John McCain refused to get into the mud with Obama and the left, as did Mitch Romney. The criminals got away.

They say it is pointless to wrestle with a pig, because you both just end up dirty, and besides, the pig likes it. But what if the winner of the pig wrestling match gets to be president? The odious "never-Trumpers" not only imagine it possible to defeat pigs without getting muddy, but to engage in the process while maintaining one's honor, dignity, and savior faire intact -- without so much as a single hair out of place.

The first instinct of a normal human being in our victorious situation -- in other words, a conservative -- is to be magnanimous, to seek unity, to reach across the aisle, and all that. Ignore this instinct! This is spiritual warfare, not cricket.

To extend the metaphor, it is more like a deadly mud-wrestling match with a pig, in which only one party comes out alive. In such situations one does not have the luxury of being kosher.

Even so, I recommend firmness, not cruelty. As Churchill said, if you have to kill a man, it costs you nothing to be polite.

-- I still think you showed poor judgment in this affair, but you're not the scoundrel I took you for. You have my thanks and, with certain reservations, my respect.

-- How nice! How is sis?

-- Gravely ill, I'm afraid, but still able to direct her affairs. She commissioned me to pay you the balance of the moneys due. You will find that it also covers an additional sum... for saving her life.

What if I Told You that Democrats Want You Back in the Matrix?

I suppose the theme of The Matrix has been beaten to death. Yes, it's a cliché, but perhaps not yet a completely worn out one, or at least I can squeeze out one last dollop of truthpaste.

As Mohammad and José will soon be the most popular names of Democrat children, perhaps a generation from now Neo will be a common name among children of conservatives. I know that I am raising a Red Pill child -- a red diaper baby -- from the ground up. At 11 he already has more politico-economic sense than I did at 40. Of note, I don't force anything down his throat. That would be the way of the blue pillheads.

Rather, I ask him to explain from first principles or economic logic what is wrong with this or that Democrat promise -- for example, raising the minimum wage, or raising taxes, or a federal law forcing "gender pay equality." Each of these has an emotional appeal -- and only an emotional appeal -- but is easily demolished via an understanding of first principles (such as supply and demand) and the incentives being put in place.

This goes to why I transitioned from left to right. Did I already mention this? I'm forgetting, because I detailed it in a lengthy comment while attending a seminar a couple of weeks ago, but then the comment was lost due to malfunctioning hotel wifi.

You could say that it had to do with accidentally stumbling upon a number of what I thought to be "universal truths" to which any intellectually honest person would be forced to assent, irrespective of whether one calls oneself liberal or conservative. Truth is truth, obviously.

Actually, that tautology goes to one of the things I discovered after realizing that Truth is true: that for the left, this is not the case. Rather, what they say is true. But this simply follows from the principle that truth is relative -- or, as it is more commonly expressed, that no one can know the truth, such that all opinions are equally valid.

We have seen this principle ruthlessly applied during the Obama era. For example, it is at the very heart of all the racial healing Obama has brought about over these past eight years. We don't need to rehearse the whole disgusting record, but on numerous occasions I have seen liberal apologists on TV being confronted with the facts of the Michael Brown case (among others), only to respond that the facts were in the eye of the beholder, and besides, it illustrated a much greater problem -- for example, of police brutality toward minorities, or discrepant rates of incarceration.

But when shown that those are equally bogus, the blacktivists simply retreat into deeper swamps of bogosity. There is simply no reaching them with fact or logic. While I have the highest admiration for scholars such as Heather MacDonald who dispassionately lay out the facts, she is coming from one level, while the left is coming from another.

Or, back to our original theme, she is coming from outside the Matrix, while her detractors are coming from deep within it, such that it would require a muscular proctologist to pry them out.

Let's pause for a moment. This is not a political disagreement per se, because that would presume two sides operating from the same level. For example, let's say I am having a mathematical argument with someone holding a baseball bat. I suggest that 2+2=4, and he expresses his disagreement by fracturing my skull. Has he actually prevailed? Well, yes. But has truth been vanquished? No. Truth remains true, regardless.

The structure of that little absurd scenario is identical in form to most any argument with a liberal. For example, I say: labor, like anything else, doesn't escape the principle of supply and demand -- increase its cost and you will have less of it, AKA more unemployment. The liberal responds with his verbal brickbat: YOU HATE POOR PEOPLE YOU ARE A TOOL OF CORPORATE GREED YADA YADA!

Different levels, you see.

Here's a principle we can surely agree upon, right? After all, we're all Americans. Freedom of speech. Why do we have free speech, anyway? A typical liberal might suggest that it is gift of the government, but that is not what the founders had in mind.

Rather, it is a natural right that comes from the Creator; or in other words, it is in the nature of things. If you understand what a human being is, then you understand why he is entitled to freedom of thought, speech, and association -- why he requires these things in order to be human.

Which is why there are no speech codes on the right. Taste, yes. Decorum too. But on what possible divine-human principle can one ground governmental restrictions on speech? (And they are of course governmental so long as universities are propped up by federal and state funding.) To deny speech is to deny man; more insidiously, it is to prevent man, i.e., man in his principial fullness.

Or, as the Aphorist says: "All truths converge on the one truth, but the routes have been barricaded." Conversely, "God is the impediment to modern man."

In other words, the road to God is assiduously blocked by the left, for the very reason that God is the left's biggest roadblock. Discover God, and the left's principles disintegrate. This is precisely why "The left's theses are trains of thought that are carefully stopped before they reach the argument that demolishes them" (NGD).

Now, the only way out of the Matrix is via God. And I mean this quite literally, for any escape from the Matrix is categorically impossible without divine aid.

What I mean is that absent the transcendent Absolute, we truly are consigned to Kant's phenomenal Matrix. Of course we cannot know reality, rather, only the appearances given us by our neurology. We are in a closed circle from which we can never escape. End of story. Relativism reigns supreme, in which case it is indeed just as valid to say that Michael Brown was a Gentle Giant as it is to say he was a vicious thug too stupid to anticipate what happens when you charge a policeman and try to separate him from his gun.

I know I mention him a lot, but if you don't believe me, then believe Gödel. For our purposes, what Gödel proved with epic finality is that every Matrix has a hole. It brings to mind Leonard Cohen's great line that There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That's how the light gets in.

Ponder that one for a moment, for it extends vertically all the way back to our implicit memories of Eden, for what exactly happened there? We could say that man, faced with a primordial choice, chose the blue pill. For which reason we have the second commandment reminding us not to worship our own manmade idols, or to take up residence in our blue pill hallucinations.

Come to think of it, that is also why we have the second amendment to defend ourselves from blue pill poppers who want to force their barbarous idols upon us.

The left long ago lost the debate of ideas. Which is why their most effective idea is to just flood the zone with blue bodies:

How Do We Get Outta Here?!

This post was written yesterday (Sunday), not today. As I wrote it, it had a different vibe from weekday posts. I'm not sure why. Maybe because it is more detached from time constraints, and even from any audience. It feels more like just... thoughts bubbling up from the ground. More so than usual, at any rate.

Programming note: early appointment tomorrow Wednesday, so no post. As to the election: I'm not falling for it this time, as I did in 2012, so Clinton wins easily. With a liberal-industrial complex that subsumes the media clones, the cultural zone, the feminist crones, the low IQ drones, and their wealthy padrones, she just has too many shortcuts to 270. So this world -- at least the plane they operate on -- belongs to the wicked one. What else is new? Just more grist for the cosmic mill.

So: God is simultaneously the source of our greatness and of our nothingness. Remove God from the equation, and we are certainly not great and not even nothing; rather, just an absurdity. All life becomes a kind of brownian motion writ large.

But in reality we are always situated between these two poles, from which our freedom arises. In other words, if there is only God, then we are not free, rather, only prolongations of his omnipotence; and if there is no God, then freedom is either illusory or meaningless. In other words, we are either determined, or we have "freedom" with no telos, which equates again to absurdity.

Suppose you awakened one morning in a desert or a dense forest, with no map or compass. How would you find your way out? Well, that is approximately our situation down here, isn't it? Here we are. How do we orient ourselves? Is there a north star, a fixed reference to guide us?

For most of human history, religion has served this purpose -- more specifically, religion understood as communication from beyond the world system. Within the world we have things like math, or logic, or induction, or empirical observation, but none of these can transcend themselves. Ultimately they are closed circles. They are like dry bones with no animating spirit.

Hmm. Is there perhaps something that unifies those modalities just mentioned? Yes: intelligence. Could the existence of intelligence itself lead the way out? For how did intelligence get in here, if it doesn't somehow already inhere in here?

First of all, what is intelligence? There are different ways of looking at it. There is human intelligence, but there is also the intelligence of a single cell, compared to which matter is utterly stupid. But how does intelligence arise from utter stupidity?

No, supposing that intelligence exists, we must trace it all the way down, prior to the emergence of life. It must somehow be in the nature of things.

We are accustomed to scientism denying final causation, AKA teleology. But here they also deny causation at the other end. Thus, we are to believe that intelligence simply emerges with no formal or final causation; or that an actuality exists with no prior potential to have become actual. It must therefore be an uncaused cause. Which is another name for God.

One of Aquinas's proofs of God is that every effect has a cause, and that a cause cannot give to the effect something it does not have.

By way of analogy, imagine a chandelier hanging by a chain. We may follow each link upward to try to discover what is causing it to hang suspended in mid-air. You can try to avoid the problem by suggesting that the chain just goes on forever, but this simply defers explanation of how the chandelier is hanging there in the first place. No link can explain that, no matter how many we posit.

Note that we begin with an empirical observation: a light suspended in mid-air. However, with pure metaphysics -- even if we cannot see it -- we know that there must be something like a "ceiling" to which the chain is affixed. Ultimately the power of each link derives from that -- again, even if we have no way of seeing the first.

Could intelligence be similar to the chandelier? Does it go all the way up? And down? Note that it is strictly impossible for it to go all the way up unless, like the chandelier, it is hanging from something. It can only go up if it has first come down, otherwise you are just positing a form of the "endless links" theory.

"How is it possible," wondered Einstein, "that mathematics, a product of human thought that is independent of experience, fits so excellently the objects of physical reality?"

Note that he assumes a couple of premises: that mathematics is "a product of human thought"; and that it is "independent of experience." First of all, those two seem contradictory: if mathematics is independent of experience, then it cannot be a product of human thought; and human thought is an experience, in which case mathematics would be dependent upon it.

Most if not all of these problems vanish if we do not start by severing being and knowing. Note that Einstein tries to have it both ways: if math is a product of human thought, then it is on the knowing side; but if it is independent of it, then it is on the being side.

Even prior to Kant we have Descartes inverting the cosmos with his "I think, therefore I am" gag. In other words, he tries to derive being from thinking, which no doubt seemed like a good idea at the time, but completely fails at providing any kind of self-sufficient guiding star (remember, we are lost in the desert bewilderness, trying to find a way out).

How about starting where we always start, with Being Is? The real miracle is that Being Is, therefore I Think. For me, that would be our ground floor -- or rather, the ceiling to which the Lamp of Intelligence is affixed.

Schuon expresses it in as concise and lucid a manner as is possible:

"The first thing that should strike a man when he reflects on the nature of the Universe is the primacy of the miracle of intelligence -- or consciousness or subjectivity -- whence the incommensurability between it and material objects, whether a grain of sand or the sun, or any creature whatever as an object of the senses."

Not that "I think"; rather, that "thinking is." Or better, intelligence is. In fact, we can cut out the middleman altogether and just say: I AM. This presumes that existence is personal -- or rather, that Being is a Person, with all this implies. You might say that persons dangle from Personhood, as does intelligence from Truth.

"[C]ertainly, it is not our personal thought that preceded the world, it was -- or is -- absolute Consciousness, of which our thought is a distant reflection precisely -- our thought which reminds us, and proves to us, that in the beginning was the Spirit."

For "Nothing is more absurd than to have intelligence derive from matter, hence the greater from the lesser; the evolutionary leap from matter to intelligence is from every point of view the most inconceivable thing that could be."

Absurd and inconceivable, perhaps, but this has never stopped our Ministry of Truth from propagating it.

"The miracle of the appropriateness of the language of mathematics for the formulation of the laws of physics is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve" (Eugene Wigner).

Except that we do understand it if we get our bearings right. And we even deserve it by virtue of our God-given intelligence, for intelligence without truth is an absurd cruelty.

Humble Brag and Grandiose Humility

Ah yes, the relationship between being and knowledge. Who cares, anyway? Put another way, why do I care so much? Who bothers with such nonsense? Don't you have more important things to do?

Sure there are more important things. But "Thinking that only important things are important hints of barbarism" (NGD).

Besides, "I do not speak of God in order to convert anyone," writes the Aphorist, "but because it is the only subject worth speaking of."

I guess I'm just built this way. It's in my nature. I am my own argument against Darwinism, because where's the utility in selecting for traits that have nothing whatsoever to do with survival? And my most conspicuous traits are absolutely good for nothing. Just ask my in-laws!

I suppose artists feel the same way about their non-utility. Or should, anyway. But more often than not, their art is mingled with their narcissism, resulting in more, not less, self-importance. Toss stupidity into the mix, and you have an incurable liberal: the triple threat of uselessness, self-importantance, and stupidity.

"No one is important for a long time without becoming a fool" (NGD). And no one can be a celebrity for even a short time without becoming a jackass. Conversely, "Even if humility did not save us from hell, in any case it saves us from ridicule."

The temptation is always there to diminish God and elevate oneself. But some circumstances make it easier to do that -- fame, power, money, intelligence, any gift, really. For some people it isn't grand enough to be in the image and likeness of God. Rather, they want to be God.

That's got to be the ultimate humble brag, right? Not the Creator of the universe, only the image and likeness. And yet, between these two is an infinite abyss that prevents it from being a boast, for anything not-God is by comparison nothing.

Now, what is the relationship between being and God? "Being is ‘ambiguous,’" writes Schuon, "because it is at the same time absolute and relative, or because it is absolute while being situated in relativity, or again, to express ourselves more boldly though perhaps all the more suggestive, because it is the ‘relative Absolute.’"

Being is ultimately the object of thought. Again, Kant severed this link, such that our knowledge is no longer "about" anything but itself. Being is rendered noumenal, completely beyond any human knowledge.

Like anyone could know that! Again, Kant is committing the error we discussed in last Friday's post -- that in order to limit thought, one must think both sides of the limit.

You have two alternatives as to where to begin your cognitive adventure: to begin in being, or to begin in thought. But if you begin in the latter, then the adventure is over. Or at least it is guaranteed to go nowhere, since it can never recover the being you have cut off at the outset.

One of the ironies of modernity -- or whatever you call this era through which we are living -- is that people simultaneously accept the Kantian rupture (e.g., "perception is reality") while implicitly holding to a scientistic paradigm that presumes to know all (at least in principle).

So, is science about being? Or just about itself? The deconstructionist must regard scientism as naive (i.e., pre-critical), while the scientist must regard the deconstructionist as an intellectual buffoon (as if quantum theory, for example, is just words about words).

Well, they're both wrong in their own ways, and deserve one another. Scientism is naive; and postmodernism is pernicious buffoonery.

Being that I am the twisted product of an extensive modern education, I didn't completely sort this out for myself until... let's see... until 1999, when I read philosopher of science Stanley Jaki's Means to Message: A Treatise on Truth. And even then, it didn't completely sink in, because that was before I would have been able to connect it to the whole western -- which is to say, Christian -- tradition.

What was once plain common sense is now a revolutionary statement: that objects are prior to the subject. Jaki: "A book with the subtitle, 'a treatise on truth,' must... convey its author's resolve to face up to the question: 'What is truth?'"

And by truth he does not mean opinion. But nor does he mean "dogma." It's more like what I was saying the other day about 1) man being entitled to truth, and 2) Bob not wising to get into arguments with people over the nature of truth. Rather, there is only one logical path -- or one that doesn't end in implosion, absurdity, or self-refutation -- and this is it. To be sure, there are any number of alternative paths, but they necessarily end nowhere.

Our first step -- whether we admit it to ourselves or not -- is "the registering of objects." If not, then "the philosopher will be guilty of a sleight of hand, however sophisticated." For "he will have to bring in through the back door the very objects the use of which his starting point has failed to justify." The man with the umlaut strikes again!

Recall the crack about any radical dualism ending with a bit of one side on the other: "If objects are not presented as a primary datum, some other factors will expropriate that role.... For objects will not cease claiming their rights to be recognized for what they are: objects and not their disembodied conceptual factors."

There is no way out of this truth except via deception, self- or otherwise: "This truth cannot be evaded, let alone refuted, because the refutation itself is an act of communication, an implicit" appeal to an objective means whereby other subjects may be be reached.

This goes to the reality of communication. In this post, for example, I am communicating to you via objects called words. Therefore, even before anything else I say, I must implicitly believe that my readers will register these objects and decode their meaning.

Which, as it so happens, mirrors the structure of reality: intelligible objects transmitting their meaning to intelligent subjects.

To express it baseballically, "The pitcher is the philosopher, the ball he throws is the book in which his treatise on truth is literally embodied. And since he throws that book... at his fellow philosophers, his treatise on truth must be such as to assure rigorously the reality of that book or ball."

Pathetic

"When we get right down to it," wrote Bob yesterday, "the ultimate question is the relationship between epistemology and ontology, of knowing and being."

Why is this the ultimate question? Because if thinking does not disclose being, then we can know nothing of ultimate reality. If knowing isn't about being, then it's just about... phenomena, or appearances, or more knowing. Knowledge becomes as enclosed in itself as tenure.

This thought occurred to me while reading an article linked at Happy Acres. In it Anthony Esolen naïvely laments the fact that the modern -- or postmodern -- college student prefers to study himself:

"They were angered by my suggestion... that there was something narcissistic in the common insistence that people should study THEMSELVES rather than people who lived long ago and in cultures far removed from ours by any ordinary criterion, and that there was something totalitarian in the impulse of the secular left, to attempt to subject our curriculum to the demands of a current political aim."

I can't even imagine wanting to be a college professor in this climate. It would be analogous to being a physician for people who refuse to be treated, or a police officer in a... Democrat precinct where they would sooner shoot you than allow you to do your job.

Esolen is essentially complaining that students don't want to know what is going on beneath the surface, rather, only to be reinforced about their particular surface. Happy Acres Guy suggests that this may have to do with race and intelligence, but I would prefer to just say intelligence, because I don't need the hate. It is sufficient to say that abstraction varies with intelligence, and that the stupider one is, the more difficult to take on a universalist perspective, or even to see beyond oneself.

This is well understood in developmental psychology, at least the last time I checked. One of the first things you learn about is Piaget's stages of childhood cognitive development. They have been tweaked and adjusted over the years, but there is no gainsaying the fact that children start out with concrete thinking and become more capable of abstraction as they develop.

Some friends were over for dinner the other night, and their 17 year old daughter was doing some calculus homework.

Calculus. Where does that lie on the abstraction spectrum? Certainly it is above my pay grade, mathwise. I took algebra in the 9th grade, which I flunked. I retook it in the tenth grade, but this time paid attention and aced it. I took geometry in the 11th, and received a gentleteen's C, followed by Algebra II in the 12th -- which I think is trigonometry -- but discretely withdrew after one semester and one D. My point, if I have one, is that I never got to calculus.

I also took physics in the 11th grade, but learned precisely nothing. However, since the teacher graded on a curve, somehow nothing didn't translate to an F. Probably something to do with nonlocality.

My parents -- in particular, my mother -- just expected me to take these brainy types of courses, despite the lack of aptitude. It was an unspoken assumption that I would attend college, although I myself literally never gave it a thought. Somehow, I just thought things would work out without my having to work them out -- that Slack would prevail.

Nevertheless, I did go on to college -- the junior kind -- and majored in Business Administration, because I had no earthly idea what else to major in. There I took Business Math, which I actually passed. I squeaked by in Economics and even Accounting, but once I got to a four year university, hit the wall with Money & Banking and some other course with lots of numbers.

What are we talking about here? Right: abstraction. And knowledge. And being. But believe it or not, this pathetic post is over, because I have to get ready for work. We'll continue down this road tomorrow, and try to redeem ourselves. I think I have some ideas for some ideas.

We Hold this Irrational Faith to be Entirely Self-Serving...

Continuing with yesterday's post, we were pointing out how if determinism is the case, then error cannot exist; and that if we are not free, then we wouldn't even have the word. Therefore, it is logically impossible to say that "determinism is true" -- just as it is logically impossible to affirm that "truth doesn't exist."

I suppose it is possible to say that truth doesn't exist, so long as you don't mean it in a logical way; rather, only as an intuition or hunch. But then we're back to faith, and what you're really saying is that faith is a reliable guide to know things we cannot otherwise know.

A paradox enters here, because it would imply that what is determined is not strictly true (since there can be neither truth nor falsehood). What I mean is, imagine a closed system; or better, imagine that the system of logic really were complete and self-sufficient. If that were the case, then everything within the system would be as predetermined as 2 + 2 = 4.

But in reality, no human system is complete, and every system contains assumptions that cannot be proved by the system. Rather, they come from outside the system, via anything from spontaneous hunches, to tacit foreknowledge of an impending solution, to God reaching down vertically via revelation. But ultimately the human circle can only be completed by and with God.

That latter is another Unavoidable Truth. You can of course say that God doesn't exist, but be mindful of what you are implying with that statement.

First of all, if it is true, then it is false, because you have eliminated any ground or basis for truth. But let that pass. What is really happening is that you are truly subjecting yourself to the Ultimate Con, because you are pretending to close a circle that in principle can never be closed by human effort.

In the absence of God, man is like a gaping wound on the surface of being. What I mean is that human beings are uniquely "opened up" to knowledge and experience, but without any reason for being so. Prior to the emergence of man, animals are indeed self-contained within their own neurology and instincts. Animals are not capable of exiting that closed circle, or of even knowing that there is anything outside their immediate experience.

I was attempting to explain this principle to a fellow over at Instapundit the other day. I see from subsequent comments that he is a conservative. But he's obviously not conservative all the way down -- and up. For he was simultaneously insisting that Darwinism is true, and that man may discover his first principles in logic.

I ask you: how can this be the case? Even if you stipulate the Darwinism part, how did randomly evolved animals escape the closed circle of Darwinism in order to know it from the outside? How do definitionally immanent creatures attain transcendence? I attempted to express this in an aphoristic way that was perhaps too aphoristic: "If Darwinism is true, then it is false."

That is not an argument, it's just a logical entailment. It is a necessary conclusion. Conversely, if you are going to affirm that Darwinism is literally true, then you can only do so by stepping outside Darwinism and making an appeal to faith, as per the above. But then you've opened a whole can of cosmic wormholes, such that Darwinism becomes a rather meager thing. It's just one wormhole among many.

When we get right down to it, the ultimate question is the relationship between epistemology and ontology, of knowing and being. As we said the other day, Kant is the one who officially presided over the divorce, ironically, in 1776, when the Critique was published.

I say "ironic" because that was the same year a bunch of dead white guys opened up their political manifesto (after a brief paragraph of throat-clearing) with the line, "We hold these truths to be self-evident..."

We can only thank Providence that Kant wasn't there, because he would have immediately taken issue with the gag about self-evident truths. How would they have expressed it in a manner acceptable to Kant?

"We hold this truth to be self-evident, that truth is unknowable by man. Rather, we can only know forms of our own sensibility. In other words, we have only access to appearances, never reality.

"Having said that, we infer that there must be a noumenal reality behind the phenomenal appearances. It's just that we can't know anything about it.

"Anyhoo, that's the bad news. The good nous (lol!) is that religion is all about the noumemal. I know what you're thinking -- 'so, religion is a lot of nonsense about the unknowable?' Not so fast! It might be true. You never know. That's why religion involves faith.

"Therefore, I propose this rewording: 'We hold this irrational faith to be entirely self-serving...'"

As it is unable to explain that consciousness which creates it, science, when it finishes explaining everything, will not have explained anything. --Nicolás Gómez Dávila

I'm Not Arrogantly Arguing, I'm Humbly Insisting

As we were saying, if science has no limits, it means -- paradoxically -- that man has all the more. It is paradoxical because man, and only man, is capable of science, let alone a limitless one.

What's a good -- or at least bad -- analogy? It is like being a king, only the more power this king has, the smaller his kingdom, to the point that the kingdom vanishes entirely with his absolute power over it.

Likewise, when man possesses limitless science, he causes himself to disappear. He ends with a total explanation of nothing, certainly as it pertains to man. Which of course brings to mind an Aphorism or two:

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

"What ceases to be thought qualitatively so as to be thought quantitatively ceases to be thought significantly."

A world reduced to quantity is Hell. And science deals only with quantity. Not to knock science, because quantity surely exists. It's just that we mustn't allow the tool to become the master.

BTW, I mentioned in a comment that for the last week or so I've been commenting at Instapundit, mostly just one liners and other assorted insultainment.

To back up a bit, that is how I started this blog, by commenting elsewhere, and people then following me here. I thought that perhaps I might reach out to members of the scattered tribe who don't know the tribe has reassembled over here, just a click away. You know -- "be ye fishers of Raccoons," and all that.

Anyway, every once in awhile I toss in a more metaphysical zinger such as the above -- "when man possesses limitless science, he causes himself to disappear" -- but it either clanks or generates an argument.

Now, a zinger like that -- like one of Don Colacho's aphorisms -- is not meant to start an argument. Rather, it's meant to provoke a guffaw-HA experience, a sudden flash of insight, like "how stupid of me not to have thought of that!" At any rate, if my site meter can be trusted, not a single soul has wandered over here from there.

Which is fine. I don't do this for the attention, only the uncritical adulation. But another thing I've noticed is that my ideas are equally offensive to materialist and religionist alike. I'm trying to put myself in their shoes and figure out why.

I would guess that both see my humble self as arrogant, the former as arrogant-stupid, the latter as arrogant-grandiose. Both accuse me of pretending to know things that cannot be known, while the scientism types accuse me not knowing things that everyone knows. Bill Maher to the left of me, Rick Warren or Joel Osteen to the right.

Dávila: "One could object to science that it easily falls into the hands of imbeciles, if religion's case were not just as serious."

Here is an example of an Aphorism that is not an argument. Rather it is just the Truth. One can either recognize or not; one can either assimilate the principle or fall short of it:

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

I was trying to patiently explain this in my own bobnoxious way to a commenter at Instapundit, but he kept insisting that it was possible to ground thought in pure logic. I was only trying to help -- not argue -- but not a single point got through.

Frankly, I don't think we need Gödel to tell us that any logical system contains assumptions that cannot be proved by the system.

Furthermore, this truism is not confining -- it's liberating! It means that man is always free, no matter how much you try to cram him into your secondary ideological reality. Gödel's theorems are simply a more abstract and operational way of saying that man is always conformed -- or condemned, depending on your politics -- to transcendence.

Because man is free and open to transcendence -- which amount to the same thing -- reducing him to any system erodes both his freedom and the vector of his freedom, AKA God. God must be the ground and destiny of our freedom, or else it is as if freedom dangles from the sky, unattached to anything.

So many outstanding Aphorisms on this subject, for example, "If determinism is real, if only that can happen which must happen, error does not exist." Think about that one: we may not know truth, but surely we know error. But we can't know error unless truth exists, so there!

For the same reason, we can only know of necessity because of freedom. Absent freedom, we wouldn't even have the word. And think of the irony -- that a person who is totally cynical of transcendence -- say, a Bill Maher -- is the one they call a "free thinker." But "free" is precisely what he cannot be, if freedom means anything. And only someone as modest as your humble servant could be so sure of the truth.

Limitless Science, Limitless State

"To limit thought you must think both sides of the limit."

I first heard that somewhere else in another form, but I can't remember where. Maybe it was Robert Rosen; he said something to the effect that no matter where you draw the line, there will be some part of one side on the other. My son ran into this dilemma a few weeks ago, when he was trying to imagine "nothing." Obviously, whatever you imagine, it will still be something.

Likewise, no matter where you draw the line between subject and object, there will nevertheless be some of one in the other. How's that? Well, to even call something an object -- to even notice it -- is to abstract some essence from it, so that it stands out from everything else. This is what Aristotle refers to as the "first act of mind," and there is no way around it short of lobotomy or tenure (but I repeat myself).

In fact, this is one of the things Socrates was attempting to explain to Kant yesterpost. More generally, a great many philosophers over the past several hundred years only believe what they do because they have simply dismissed people like Aristotle and Aquinas without bothering to understand them.

But it is written (in more than one Aphorism): To feign knowledge of a subject, it is advisable to adopt its most recent interpretation. And The only man that saves himself from intellectual vulgarity is the man who ignores what it is fashionable to know.

Truth cannot be measured by the calendar. Back when I was a liberal, I did not know this. So, for example, when I undertook the task of studying philosophy, I assumed that I could take a shortcut by ignoring pretty much everything before the 19th century, and just cutting to the chase. Why bother with all the antiquated stuff that's been superseded by better minds?

Therefore, I began at the end, with the existentialists (both philosophical and literary) -- Sartre, Camus, Nietzsche, Kafka, and even "Christian existentialists" such as Kierkegaard and Berdayev (although I was thoroughly unqualified for the latter two).

Back to the paradox of limits. I think I also encountered the concept in various works of the Catholic philosopher of science Stanley Jaki. In fact, one of his books is called The Limits of a Limitless Science. That title popped into my head the other day, because I was thinking of how the tyrannical ideas of a "limitless science" and a "limitless state" are mutually reinforcing.

Think of the founders, who created what was supposed to be a limited government. Why? Well, for one thing, they were very much aware of the limits of man. Because man is morally flawed, self-interested, warped by passion, and subject to error, the last thing they wanted to do is to give this beast more power over the rest of us beasts.

But in the new and improved view of the left, there is no limit to knowledge and virtue -- their infamous Fatal Conceit -- and therefore no justifiable limit to the powers of the state. I don't have time to get into how many progressives have expressed this deeply moronic view, but happily, Jonah Goldberg has performed this service in his Liberal Fascism.

As I have said before, the battle war between left and right is not symmetrical. Let's say I believe leftists are deluded assouls. Conversely, leftists think I am deplorable. Fine. I have no problem with that. The difference is that the deplorables wish to have less power over the assouls, whereas the assouls wish to have more power over me.

But because man is what he is, there will always be more assouls than deplorables. The attack on deplorables is really a form of ethnic cleansing. But that is what the left does: it has no limits. Which is why the state can never be too powerful, taxes can never be too high, speech can never be too regulated, and thought can never be too policed.

Wait a minute. There's a switcheroo in there: how does the left go from having no limits to imposing all sorts of limits on our freedom?

Easy. In fact, there's an Ap... horism for that: As the state grows the individual shrinks. Therefore -- and you can look it up, i.e., crack a history book -- the limitless government of left wing statists inevitably ends in mortifying existential shrinkage.

What does this have to do with a limitless science? Only everything. For if science has no limits, it means that -- paradoxically -- man has all the more.

To back up a bit, the proper name for unlimited science is scientism, and as scientism grows, man necessarily shrinks. For example, if scientism says that man is just an ape with a couple more randomly evolved tricks, this hardly elevates the stature of man.

If only what is measurable is real, then whole dimensions of humanness are violently excised from our being. If free will is an illusion, then it is perfectly appropriate for the state to ignore our God-given liberties. If there is no soul, then abortion can provoke no moral qualms. Indeed, since morality itself is just a social convention, then we can ignore it altogether.

So, why is there no limit to the Clinton's greed, ambition, corruption, and will to power? Because there is no limit to the left's.

One of the severest tests of the scientific mind is to know the limits of the legitimate application of the scientific method. --Clerk Maxwell

Skepticism of Skepticism

Ah, yes, the Total Explanation. I always have to check where we left off in order to begin anew. But this morning we don't have much time, let alone to explain everything. Then again, no amount of time would be sufficient to explain the timeless, so there's that.

In addition to being entitled to a Total Explanation, I also believe it should be accessible to Pure Thought (via the quasi-divine Intellect). I suppose that's why I am so drawn to Schuon: he comes closer than anyone to a Total Explanation via Pure Intellect.

Frankly, this used to be the whole point of philosophy. Then Kant came along and said that there can be no Total Explanation, because all we are really explaining is ourselves. This is said to be a great advance in the progress of philosophy, when in actuality it is just giving up. It is an a priori surrender. Like anyone could know that you can't know it all!

Which sounds like a joke, but it isn't. I remember Peter Kreeft expressing this view in his Socrates Meets Kant. That is, unlike all previous philosophers (although Descartes no doubt -- or dubiously, rather -- paved the way), Kant presumes to begin in epistemology rather than being.

In the words Kreeft puts into his mouth, Kant claims that being "conforms to our knowledge rather than our knowledge conforming to being," such that "in knowing, the known object conforms to the knowing subject rather than vice versa."

Therefore, we don't really know being -- or the world -- at all. Rather, "the form, or intelligible content, of our knowledge comes from us rather than the world."

There you have it: a Total Explanation that explains precisely nothing!

Nice trick. The left has been dining out on it ever since, with the rest of us picking up the bill. For here is where Perception is elevated to Reality -- to the point that one's own mental troubles are conflated with Micro-aggressors everywhere:

"Reason's job [is] not to mirror the nature of things but to construct the nature of things, as an artist constructs his art: not to discover the form in the matter and abstract into universal principles, but to put the form in the matter, to impose the form on the matter as a sculptor imposes shape on marble, or a musician imposes melody on sound."

Kant presumed to critique the efficacy of pure reason. Fair enough. But Socrates-Kreeft turns the tables on him by similarly critiquing the Critique: now who's the more critical, Kant or Coon?

Here is how Socrates picks Kant apart using nothing more than the everyday power of pure thought:

"If Aristotle is wrong about knowledge mirroring reality and you are right about reality mirroring knowledge, it seems that you still have to assume his old notion of truth when you say that your new notion of truth is true, or the way things really are."

Kant: wha? (I'm paraphrasing.)

The point is, if Kant is correct, then it necessarily leads to what I said yesterday about man's stupidity being total and ineradicable:

"We must give up the whole of the task of philosophy as it was so nobly conceived by two thousand years of philosophers before you. We must cease claiming to know truth..." In short, if truth cannot be known, how can Kant's critique be true?

Kreeft-Socrates tosses in a nice gag by Wittgenstein, that "to limit thought you must think both sides of the limit."

Heh. Out of time.

I Demand a Total Explanation!

So: the arc of history bends toward its own fulfillment, its Omega point, which we can aldously see from Here-and-now, boys. Or at least the view is on offer; it is forced on no one.

I was thinking about this yesterday during a walk; I've mentioned this before, but I believe that every man, living in any time or in any place, has the intrinsic right to a Total Explanation, or at least as much of an explanation as he can assimilate. God furnishes this explanation in the form of religion, and religion coevolves with man (for example, polytheism is prior to monotheism, or exterior sacrifice prior to interior).

You may think to yourselves: wha? But for the vast majority of human history, these explanations were indeed adequate. Yesterday while reading Sowell's revised edition of Wealth, Poverty and Politics, I was reminded that 95% of human history took place even before the discovery of agriculture; or in other words, "virtually everything that we today recognize as civilization dates from the beginning of agriculture" during the last 5% of our existence.

We don't know much about what sort of Total Explanation man had for himself during the vast 95%, because written language hadn't been invented. But I'll bet you anything it was adequate. I say this because it has only been in the last 1% or less of our existence -- basically in the last 200 years -- that people have begun to reject our venerable Total Explanations, and even to say that no such explanation is possible -- which means in effect that man's stupidity is total.

Actually, if my math is correct, it's only been in the last .02% of our existence (200 ÷ 100,000). If so, that is a rather tiny blip on the scale. It might well be that we are merely going through a brief period of transition, as the Total Explanation reconstitutes on a higher and more comprehensive scale. Certainly this is what we endeavor to do around here: to preserve the God-given Total Explanation via assimilation of new knowledge and perspectives. Nor do we care where it comes from, so long as it is True.

For example, it was really only in the last century that the various revelations came into full contact with one another. There was some scattered contact in the 19th century -- e.g., Schopenhauer falling in love with his translation of a translation of the Upanishads, or Vivekananda speaking to the Parliament of the World's Religions in Chicago in 1893. I wonder what he said to the curious audience?

Here: "In this speech Vivekananda tried to explain the reason of disagreement between each other and different sects and religions. He told the story of a frog. In the story, a frog used to live in a well. It was born there and brought up there and it used to think his well was the biggest body of water in the world.

"One day, a frog from the sea came to that well. When the frog from the sea told the frog of the well that the sea is much bigger than that well, the frog of the well didn't believe it and drove the frog of the sea away from his well. Vivekananda concluded: 'That has been the difficulty all the while. I am a Hindu. I am sitting in my own little well and thinking that the whole world is my little well. The Christian sits in his little well and thinks the whole world is his well. The Muslim sits in his little well and thinks that is the whole world.'"

Remember, that was just the start. A little over half a century later, Schuon published his first major work, The Transcendent Unity of Religions, in which he attempts to tackle just this problem: the coexistence of diverse Total Explanations. For him, religion was an expression of universal metaphysics. Thus, this solves the problem of diversity -- just as, analogously, the "problem of color" is really an extension of the existence of light. As color issues from light, religion issues from universal metaphysics (and likewise faith from intellect).

I am not critiquing this idea, merely setting it forth. However, bear in mind that there are only four other alternatives upon discovering that other peoples have their own Total Explanations: we can insist that only ours is correct and all the others wrong; dismiss all of them as equally wrong; pick and choose what we like from this or that one; or find some way to harmonize them. Note that the latter need not necessarily be accomplished "horizontally," but rather, can be approached vertically and hierarchically (which is what I attempt to do).

In my view, our Total Explanation can profit a great deal by learning about the other guy's Total Explanation. For Schuon, each "intrinsically orthodox religion" may "serve as a means of expressing all the truths known directly by the eye of the Intellect..." Whereas for a few people these universal truths are directly accessible by the Intellect, for most they are only accessible via faith -- which I think is where the real inter-religion problem arises, because faith tends to particularize the universal, and thus have difficulty appreciating the other guy's view.

If only people could appreciate their religion from the summit and not the foothills! Even Islam would be cleansed of its low-lying troubles -- as is seen in the case of Sufism, which doesn't hurt anybody.

Consider the sixth commandment, Thou shall not murder. I ask you: do you not murder because it's a commandment, or because your higher intellect spontaneously knows this in the form of natural law -- i.e. the law engraved on your heart?

For me -- and probably you -- it is the latter. And yet, it is a commandment. Therefore, we can assume that there was a time when this wasn't so easily recognized, which is precisely why God had to emphasize it. My point is that the sixth commandment is an example of a universal truth, accessible via the intellect, particularized in dogma. Others are easily accessible to the awakened intellect, e.g., don't steal, don't lie, don't envy, don't worship graven images, etc.

This reminds me of another thought that popped into my head yesterday: that the gift of speech obligates one to be honest. Can you see why? First of all, if truth doesn't exist, then speech is ultimately as pointless as the chirping of insects. But "free speech" can only be given to a free being, and responsibility is naturally prior to freedom (freedom is meaningless in the absence of responsibility or duty or obligation). Therefore speech obligates us to the truth. But how many people can work this out on their own? So we just give them the commandment -- which is again a kind of prolongation of intellect into faith. Faith is a kind of light, only it is a reflected light.

Nor can we know everything via the intellect -- or at least I can't. However, once you begin to appreciate how much universal truth the intellect is capable of seeing, then you start to have more faith in faith, as it were. It's like the old crack: I believe in order to understand. You do this in the faith that your faith is a prolongation of the intellect, and that your faith will over time be increasingly illuminated by the intellect from which it proceeds.

This whole post veered into unanticipated byways. We'll leave off with an Aphorism or two:

All truths converge upon one truth, but the roads have been barricaded.

And In order for a multitude of diverse terms to coexist, it is necessary to place them on different levels. A hierarchical ordering is the only one that neither expels nor suppresses them.

The Arc (and Arc) of History

Continuing with the theme of principles of history, it seems that history can have no meaning if it has no end. In this sense, "end" has two connotations, i.e., conclusion and purpose.

Obviously we can't know what something is for until we see what it is. Thus, until we've seen all of history, we can't know what any of it was for.

As Balthasar observes, "until the last of us has lived, the significance of the first cannot finally be clear" (in Dawson). I am reminded of, say, a British soldier who dies during the evacuation of Dunkirk in 1940. In all likelihood he died thinking the Nazis won World War II.

Has anyone seen all of history? Supposedly yes. For example, "Before Abraham was, I am," or "I am Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end, the first and the last." These are statements that can only be made from a perspective beyond history.

Time is an expression of the timeless; or at least the two are in a ceaseless dialectic. Everyone knows there is eternity in time, but I believe there must be something analogous to time in eternity. It is a Greek prejudice that time = ungood and timeless = doubleplus good.

In any event, Dawson writes that "It is through Christianity above all that man first acquired that sense of unity and purpose in history without which the spectacle of... unending change becomes meaningless and oppressive." To be sure, Jews had the idea, but Christians claim to have its fulfillment.

Er, we're just winging it this morning, as usual, hoping that this post -- like history -- will reveal its own point at some point.

Quinn (in Dawson) makes reference to the "Augustinian sense of the past as both timebound and timeless; as action humanly complete yet still striving for greater completion, towards fulfillment beyond time."

Exactly. As Dávila says, "The real history exceeds what merely happened." Thus, -- in a point we've belabored before -- a photograph of Christ on the cross would not better inform us what the event was all about than scripture, and better yet, scripture illuminated by the Spirit.

Note that in one sense there can be no general principles in history, in that every event is unique and unrepeatable. It "cannot be made intelligible unless bound into some larger scheme of order, predictability, recurrence," for "randomness has no meaning" (ibid.).

How do we reconcile the radically individual and the metacosmic universal? Perhaps you have a better idea, but I can't imagine anything other than Incarnation, which is precisely the universal-become-individual. The particular on its own can never become universal; the part cannot be the whole. But the whole can be in the part, and in a sense must be in the part in order for it to be a part and not an atomistic monad.

You might say that Christ is the incarnation of this very principle -- for something cannot happen unless it is possible in principle. Think again of the Jews, who had the principle but not (from the Christian perspective) its instantiation.

Hegelians and Marxists claim to have disclosed the principle of history, which reaches us in its most vulgarized form in the likes of Obama and the progressive left. For example, as Obama likes to say, "the arc of the moral universe bends toward justice."

Well, as Dávila reminds us in his pointed way, "Our last hope is in God's injustice." Obama had better hope he doesn't get what he deserves! Likewise Black Lives Matter and the whole no-justice-no-peace crowd. In a just world, Hillary would be behind bars and the IRS would be shut down.

The progressive merely denies divinity and replaces it with his own pseudo-absolute. He calls it "social justice," which in one sense -- as Hayek has explained -- is not even meaningless, just nonsense. But it's worse than nonsense, for it is "the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right" (Dávila).

Or in other words, "social justice" is founded upon injustice -- just as leftist dreams of "equality" can only be achieved via grotesque inequalities (e.g., state enforced discrimination). In short, the primary cause of inequality is liberty and equality, just as the inequality between two pitchers is due to the equality of the strike zone. The umpire doesn't make the bad pitcher's strike zone bigger in order to equalize the two.

I'll conclude with Quinn's observation that Christ is "Lord of History. He is the moment from which all moments derive their meaning. He is the norm by which all moments derive their meaning. Christ entered History. He enters it still. He is History."

So the arc of history bends toward its Omega point, which we can see always from Here. And if the Cubs should win the World Series, their fans will not see the eschaton through a glass, darkly, but face to face.

In History but Not Of It

Does history reveal a principle? Or does one require a principle -- a kind of master key -- in order to approach and understand it? It reminds me of an Aphorism, that Truth is in history, but history is not the truth.

History is not the truth. But Truth is in history. This aphorism rings a bell, but now that I'm staring directly at it, the meaning eludes me. I'm going to let it stew for awhile in the right brain, and come back to it.

The Christian view would be that history requires a key, and that this key is Christ. Whatever else Christ is, he is the key to history. For example, think of how the early Christians read Christ into their own backstory, the Hebrew Bible. Christ was not only the key that illuminated it, but the telos toward which it had been heading all along.

Which brings to mind another Aphorism, that Everything in history begins before we think it begins, and ends after we think it ends.

Take again the example of Christ. Upon his death -- his "end" -- the disciples discovered that his "beginning" was not merely with his birth; rather, that he was prior to any physical beginning ("In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God"). The same principle allowed them to understand previously mysterious utterances such as "Before Abraham was, I Am."

And of course, his end was only a beginning, and this beginning has been handed off from person to person down to the present day. When does it end? "I am with you always, to the very end of the age." So in reality, he is before the beginning and after the end. No wonder history is not the truth -- for one thing, it is in time -- it is time -- whereas truth is timeless.

So, to say that truth is in history is another way of saying that the eternal is in time, and that this is what we call history. If the eternal is not in time, then history is indeed a tale told by an idiot, signifying nothing more than tenure.

You might say that history is transfigured in and by Christ. Note that the reverse is not true -- that Christ is not transfigured by history.

But what exactly do we mean by transfiguration? It is "a complete change of form or appearance into a more beautiful or spiritual state." Surely history could never accomplish this to anyone, at any time. Nor could Darwin, for that matter -- which is why, for example, The laws of biology alone do not have fingers delicate enough to fashion the beauty of a face.

For what is beauty if not a kind of transfiguration of matter? From whence does this power come? From matter itself? How could that be? You might well say that "Truth is in matter, but matter is not the truth." For in beauty, the wall of matter is turned into a window of spirit, revealing a metaphysical transparency that surely transcends any version of vulgar materialism.

Beauty is here to teach us. Pay attention! For it is one of the primordial links between man and God. It begins before we think it begins -- in spirit -- and ends after we think it ends -- it has no expiration date.

How did we get here? Well, I have a pile of books on my desk which might go to the subject of Cosmic Principles (our recent cooncern), one of which is Christopher Dawson's Dynamics of World History, which I read about twelve years ago. I pulled it down because I thought it might shed some light on this path we've been exploring the last couple of weeks.

Dawson was a great historian, and a Christian historian. This does not mean that he was merely a "historian of Christianity" -- although he was that too -- but that for him, Christianity was the key that opened the whole existentialada; it is the truth of which history is the reflection (not to put words in his mouth; I'm sure he would express it differently).

Here are a few notes I scribbled to mysoph in the back of the book. They must be important, or I wouldn't have bothered plagiarizing with them).

"Every historian has a meta-history; the best ones know it."

"Secularism is religious emotion divorced from religious belief."

"Contempt for religion is a historically conditioned product of a particular historical time and place; worship of rationality is irrational."

"History is not complete; we participate in it. And yet, it is complete. It has an end."

"When contemplating the past, we see something unfolding in time. Or is it a timeless paradigm, an act of imagination in which elements of the past are held together in our imagination?"

That last one brings to mind an Aphorism: Authentic history is the transfiguration of the raw event by intelligence and imagination.

Here is something from the introduction, written by Dermot Quinn: "The fact does not tell the story; the story, as it were, tells the fact.... To see meaning beyond the local is to see it in the local."

And here we are again, seeing truth in the facts, even while facts are not the truth. So I guess my right brain figured it out.

To really round this off, we could agree with the well known gag that "the past is a foreign country." If so, then Christ would be the key to trancelighting it into terms we can understand.

"History and theology are nothing if not meditations on the nature of Time itself. Their shared object of inquiry is human time, sacred time, even that mysterious eternal moment that is Christ Himself" (Quinn).

And "to the Christian the mystery of history is not completely dark, since it is a veil which only partially conceals the creative activity of spiritual forces and the operation of spiritual laws" (Dawson). (All Aphorisms courtesy Nicolás Gómez Dávila.)

Principles of the Unprincipled

We're on the subject of principles, in particular, those cosmic principles that cannot not be true -- for example, that truth exists and man may know it. If it doesn't exist, then you may stop talking -- and thinking -- now. And forever. There would be no point. Except mere animal satisfaction and survival. Which also would have no point.

Speaking of which, why is it that man is subject to distinct joys and pleasures of which the animal can know nothing? Why are there pleasures of the mind and joys of the spirit?

Nicolas?

An intelligent idea produces sensual pleasure.

Very good. I--

I'm not done!

Go on then.

It is impossible to convince the fool that there are pleasures superior to those we share with the rest of the animals.

Like aesthetic pleasure?

Exactly. For To be stupid is to believe it is possible to take a photograph of the place about which a poet sang. And When things appear to us to be only what they appear to be, soon they become even less.

Each of those aphorisms reveals a principle. In fact, what makes the Aphorisms so resonant is that they usually do that -- it is the secret to their power (that and the poetic means of expression). Come to think of it, I can think of few things more powerful than a Cosmic Principle beautifully expressed.

Think of the alternatives: there can be truth expressed in a banal or shabby way, just as there can be falsehood expressed in a beautiful way.

Then again, I'm not so sure about the latter, for awareness of real beauty tends to converge upon truth. We'll leave music and painting to the side, but can a person who loves truth be fooled by a beautiful falsehood masquerading as truth?

You will recall how the media swooned (and still swoons) over Obama's rhetoric, but to me it always betrayed its inner ugliness, its hidden agenda. You can't put lipstick on a pig.

Or, you can. But it's still going to be ugly -- perhaps even more ugly in a way, in the sense that its essence is being distorted. There is such a thing as "ugly cute," as in the case of certain dog breeds. The AKC doesn't downgrade a pug because it doesn't look like a lab.

This morning in a link at Happy Acres I was reminded of what ugly falsehood in puffed-up rhetoric smells like. It is by the professional negro Tavis Smiley, who claims to be frightened that Donald Trump will literally bring back slavery.

Before addressing the aesthetic barbarism, the man is quite obviously hallucinating, in that he is seeing something that does not -- and will never -- exist. Scott Adams discussed this yesterday:

"In nearly every scenario you can imagine, the person experiencing an unlikely addition to their reality is the one hallucinating. If all observers see the same addition to their reality, it might be real. But if even one participant can’t see the phenomenon – no matter how many can – it is almost certainly not real."

To suggest that America under Trump will enslave blacks is, to put it mildly, "an unlikely addition to reality." (Of course, Adams goes too far in suggesting that if a single person doesn't see a phenomenon, it isn't real, for "negative hallucinations" are actually more common than the positive variety, plus it ignores the qualifications necessary for vertical perception; but these are subjects of a different post.)

Here is an example of elaborate falsehood, or a kind of ornate vacuity; note also the pomposity, an important feature of this type of crude persuasion:

"I’m not sure [Trump] and I share an understanding of what makes a nation truly great. For me, it starts with how you treat the children, the poor, the aged and infirmed, how you embrace equality as you labor for equity. Equality means that everyone gets the same in America, whether they need it or not. Equity says we commit to ensuring that all fellow citizens have the basic resources that will give them commensurate opportunities to contribute meaningfully to our society."

Is there a principle in there somewhere? Everyone gets the same in America, whether they need it or not. Okay. My question for Mr. Smiley clown: Are you getting the same as everyone else? Or is Time paying you more than it pays, say, its janitors?

"While I’m not an angry black man, I do have a righteous indignation that burns inside me about the myriad of injustices that result in a daily contestation of people’s humanity."

Translation: you're an angry black man yelling at your hallucinations.

And frightened by them, in that these hallucinations are indeed "hair-raising, bone-chilling, spine-breaking, [and] nerve-wracking."

This illustrates one of the elementary principles of developmental psychology, called "projective identification." It is more primitive than mere projection, such that the person projects unconscious material (e.g., thoughts, desires, emotions, impulses) into the environment, and feels them returning in a (usually) persecutory manner.

A common example would consist of projecting anger into someone else, and then re-experiencing it as fear. In reality, the person is just fearful of his own projected anger. I want to say that this is a particularly transparent case, but the process is ubiquitous on the left. It is the only way to make sense of "trigger warnings," "safe spaces," "dangerous speech," and the like. These people are literally afraid of their own shadows. But then, Jung is wasted on these youths.

I don't want to leave on such an aesthetically depressing note. Let's conclude with some aphorisms that beautifully illuminate the type of intellectual and rhetorical pathology exemplified above:

'Social justice' is the term used to claim anything to which we do not have a right. And 'Social' is the adjective that serves as a pretext for all swindles.

As for how to avoid vacuous bloviating,

The fewer adjectives we waste, the more difficult it is to lie. And Prolixity is not an excess of words but a dearth of ideas (Aphorisms of Don Colacho).

Lord Save Us From the Bullshit!

While idly perusing Instapundit this morning, I was reminded of the great Law of Brandolini: that The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.

The law is self-evidently true, but why? Why is it so difficult -- if not impossible -- to correct people? I no longer even try, at least with most volks. I had never thought about it before, but it must be because I intuitively understand the Law -- that to set them right will require a major commitment of time and energy.

Now that I think about it, when I was a liberal, I was pretty much oblivious to the Law. Indeed, I assumed that people were quite susceptible to correction with the usual simplistic leftist memes. But in reality, calling someone racist, sexist, or homophobic is rarely convincing. It is emotionally satisfying to the liberal, but merely off-putting to most everyone else.

In a way I envy my son, because he will not have to spend half his life refuting the bullshit he spent the other half assimilating. When I look back at the bullshit I once believed, it's appalling. Why did my parents not protect me from the bullshit? No doubt because that was when the culture and educational establishment were just beginning to take on their present outlines of being the primary transmitters of bullshit. Who knew then that our entire reality was being systematically turned upside-down and inside-out by the left?

A few prescient people, but they were on the fringes. But there is no doubt that a number of 20/∞ visionaries began noticing it by the 1950s, which is precisely when the modern conservative movement got off the ground. The movement is indeed reactionary, in the sense that it is a reaction to all the bullshit.

I just read a book -- not recommended -- on this very subject, called First Principles: Self-Governance in an Open Society. The reason it is not recommended is because the primary sources discussed by the author are so much better than the author's own analysis, which is on the banal side. However, he cites all the right people: Hayek, Weaver, von Mises, Kirk, Buckley, Paul Johnson, Hazlitt, Milton Friedman, Gilder, etc., each of whom, in his own way, attempted to cut through the bullshit.

But why does it take so much energy? I was thinking of this yesterday morning on the way to work while listening to Rush. He was discussing the wikileaks material that is so devastating to Clinton, and was, as usual, full of passion (in a positive way; there was no hysteria, anger, or resentment, as with the left).

I thought of the energy it requires to rouse this level of passion day after day, year after year. But as alluded to above, I no longer wish to do that. I want to have a calm and tranquil life. I don't like the tension. I am pleased that lightning rods such as Coulter, Milo, or David Horowitz exist, but I certainly wouldn't want to be them.

The other day in a comment, Rick asked a question about my transition from left to right, but my response was lost in the digital ether. I remembered that back in the 1990s, when writing about politics from a liberal perspective, I came to a number of conclusions that not only contradicted the party line, but pretty much blew up the whole thing -- although I didn't realize it at the time.

Specifically, I remember writing something about the noxiousness of political correctness, about the intellectual incoherence of relativism, about the bizarre conclusions of feminist extremists, and about the left's magical use of language to alter reality. In each case I naively assumed that I was just saying ideologically neutral things with which any reasonable person would agree. I mean, who could support the linguistic tyranny of political correctness, or believe that men and women are identical, or think there is no objective morality?

Right away I was in violation of Brandolini's law, as I had no idea how much energy it takes to refute these things. Indeed, you could literally spend your entire life doing so, to little wholesale effect. For example, I'm thinking of the hundreds of hours it took for Dennis Prager to get through to me. Just to refute the simple bullshit! But I'm not sure that anything short of this would have succeeded in penetrating my thick skull.

Back to the book alluded to above; in fact, back to the thread we were on prior to that, which was "principles of history."

Actually, I am more interested in Principles as such. I often think of putting together a list of simple, straight-forward principles which not only cut through the bullshit, but permanently inoculate the mind against taking it on board to begin with. Any intellectually honest person would be compelled to assent to these principles, on pain of logical incoherence, absurdity, or self-refutation. Merely to utter one would be to slay a spiritually and intellectually destructive dragon -- like holding the Cross before a vampire, or the Enquirer in front of Hillary.

Where and what are these Principles?

As I have mentioned before, the first one is surely that Truth exists and man may know it. What is the alternative? That truth doesn't exist? Or that man cannot know it? Either one is the end of all rational thought, for it is to condemn man to an absolute and irremediable cosmic stupidity.

Now if Religion is true, it seems to me that its very purpose would be to incarnate these Principles without which our minds cannot be saved -- especially from themselves. Or in other words, religion is here to save us from the bullshit, precisely. Or, let us say that a religion is true insofar as it conveys to us the Principles and cuts through the bullshit.

I want to say that Thomas Aquinas did this, but again, think of the energy he expended to get the job done! How many millions of words did he write? You could literally spend your entire life studying him, but is there an easier way, a Raccoon way, a Tao te Slack?

It seems to me that the Ten Commandments would be a fine way to start. The first three, in one form or another, are absolutely essential to mental hygiene, that I am the Lord your God, who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage; that Thou shalt have no other gods before me; and that Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image.

For me, this is all really a way of saying that Truth exists and man may know it: that Truth is what saves us from slavery and sets us free; that we are not It; and that attempts to fashion our own truth separate from the one Truth are doomed to failure.

There is another principle we've often discussed, which happens to be the founding principle of the United States: that we are endowed by our Creator with certain unalienable rights, including the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

Thus, our founding document takes Principle One and Commandments one through three for granted. For example, recall that Jefferson's original idea for the design of the seal of the United States was Moses leading the children of Israel out of Egypt; or Hamilton's crack that the sacred rights -- and I would add principles -- of mankind are written in human nature "by the hand of Divinity itself, and can never be erased by mortal power"; or Jefferson's gag that "the God who gave us life gave us liberty at the same time."

It only makes sense, because truth and freedom must be complementary. That is to say, an unfree being could never discover truth, and if truth doesn't exist, then we are hardly free -- rather, just condemned to meaningless horizontal drift through the cosmic bullshit.

To become cultivated is to understand that a particular class of questions is meaningless.

But

The leftist emulates the devout who continue venerating the relic after the miracle has been proved to be a hoax. --Aphorisms of Don Colacho.

Light Pollution

I've read of certain songwriters who always have their ears open for snippets of conversation they can incorporate into lyrics, or which can sometimes inspire a whole song. Smokey Robinson did that a lot -- he overheard someone say "I second that emotion," and the song wrote itself. Similarly, John Lennon turned a couple of Ringo-isms into songs, "Tomorrow Never Knows" and "A Hard Day's Night."

So, I was at the seminar last Friday when the presenter made an offhand reference to "light pollution." He was talking about how many more stars are visible in the desert, away from all the light pollution of the city. It immediately occurred to me that there is a post hidden in that term -- either that or a hit song.

Our ancient furbears wouldn't have comprehended the idea. For them there was light and darkness, the former an unambiguously good thing, the latter a dangerous -- and even dark! -- quality. You couldn't have too much light. But you could certainly have too much darkness. Remember, before the invention of electric light in the 19th century, darkness was total. Nowadays we rarely encounter anything like it, even, say, while camping. That's only pretend darkness.

It is important to bear this in mind whenever we encounter the symbolism of dark and light in premodern literature -- for example, "the Light shone in the darkness, and the darkness did not comprehend it," or "I am the light of the world." Those were very bold and vivid statements in a world that couldn't just flip a switch to illuminate their space.

From the earliest times, it seems that light and thought have been equated. To prove that claim, I'm looking in the index of my Familiar Quotations, but the references are too numerous. Too much light! Here's a line by Paul from 1 Timothy: "Ye are all the children of light, and the children of day: we are not of the night, nor of the darkness." Here's one from Ecclesiastes: "Wisdom exceeds folly, as far as light exceeds darkness." And from 1 John: "God is light, and in him is no darkness at all."

Interesting. The 18th century poet Thomas Gray writes of the possibility of too much light, or at least more than we can handle: He saw; but blasted with excess of light, / Closed his eyes in endless night. And Matthew Arnold makes reference to Light half-believers of our casual creeds, / Who never deeply felt, nor clearly willed...

Here's a crack by Goethe: Someday perhaps the inner light will shine forth from us, and then we shall need no other light. Ah. Here's a good one from Theodor Roethke: Who rise from flesh to spirit know the fall: / The word outleaps the world, and light is all.

Here is a cosmic -- if somewhat pantheistic sounding -- sentiment expressed by Jean Toomer : Beyond plants are animals, / Beyond animals is man, / Beyond man is the universe, / The Big Light, / Let the Big Light in!

Ooh. This was still the common sentiment when I began attending college: "A university should be a place of light, of liberty, and of learning" (Disraeli). It has since become a place of darkness, thought control, and indoctrination.

There are obviously many more, but let's move on.

I'm thinking of the Upanishads, which often symbolize God as the sun and Light as wisdom or liberation. The Isha Upanishad says Worlds there are without suns, covered up with darkness. To these after death go the ignorant.

Well, not anymore. Now you can just go to college. Progress!

To darkness are they doomed who worship only the body, and to a greater darkness they who worship only the spirit. What is the solution to this conundrum? Incarnation. You know, the Light becomes darkness that the darkness may become Light.

It seems that there was once a recognition that all light was of the Light. For this reason, you wouldn't confuse a candle with the sun, nor would you utilize a flashlight to try to locate it. Which is why you don't go searching after God with just the light of (lower case r) reason. Rather, reason itself is a reflection of the Light you seek.

The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad lays out the Whole Point of it all: Lead me from the unreal to the real, / Lead me from darkness to light / Lead me from death to immortality.

Now, light pollution. What could that be? Think of standing in the middle of the Las Vegas strip. Plenty of light there. But try seeing the stars. There won't be any. Except the living dead ones on stage.

I would say that for human light to be functional, it must be a prolongation of the divine light. Or at least it cannot presume to exist independently without taking on a kind of darkness. In other words, knowledge must be illuminated by wisdom. Scientism, or positivism, or pragmatism, for example, are knowledge without light. And for certain souls, they can become so bright that they obscure the very Light from which they emanate.

But the liberal media are the quintessential case of light pollution. Being in and of that world is analogous to standing on the Vegas strip and seeing nothing beyond it. Academia is only slightly better. Or worse. I can't make up my mind. Consider:

"32 Percent of Millennials Believe George W. Bush Killed More People Than Stalin." Whose fault is this? Is it the fault of the light pollution of the media? Or the propagation of darkness by academia?

I reject this false alternative. It's both.